The Scandal-Proof Producer

The green text on Oh Min-ji's screen glowed with triumphant finality: [Packet Received. Blueprint_Nightingale.zip. Decrypting…]

A collective, sharp intake of breath was the only sound in the Aura Management conference room. The tension of the last hour snapped, replaced by a new, more profound suspense. They had breached the wall. Their Trojan Horse, carried on the wings of Ahn Da-eun's powerful voice, had slipped past the guards and was now deep inside the enemy's citadel.

Min-ji's face was a grim mask of concentration, her usual teenage apathy burned away by the thrill of the hunt. Her fingers flew across her keyboard, her movements economical and precise. The decryption progress bar filled with agonizing slowness. For a program designed to be tiny, the blueprint it contained was vast.

Finally, a soft chime from her laptop signaled success. A file structure bloomed on the screen, a digital skeleton laid bare. It was a stark, hierarchical tree of folders and subfolders with cryptic, corporate-sanitized names.

"I'm in," Min-ji announced, her voice low and filled with a chilling, professional awe that silenced the room. She began to navigate the files, her eyes scanning the contents, her mind processing the information at a terrifying speed.

"It's not just a music generator," she said after a long moment, her voice barely a whisper. The statement hung in the air, heavy with unspoken implications. "It's bigger than that. It's an entire ecosystem."

She turned her tablet so the whole team could see, pointing to three core folders at the root of the directory. "Project Nightingale isn't a single program. It's a trinity. Three interconnected systems designed to work in concert."

She tapped the first folder, labeled Nightingale_Core_ORPHEUS. "This is what we expected," she said, her voice clinical. "The Composer. It's the AI music generator. The logs show it's constantly analyzing global music charts, social media trends, and streaming data. It identifies popular chord progressions, optimal beats-per-minute for viral dance challenges, and lyrical keywords associated with high user engagement. It's designed to create mathematically 'perfect' pop songs."

Kang Ji-won leaned forward, his expression a mixture of disgust and fascination. It was the antithesis of his entire artistic philosophy.

"But this," Min-ji said, her voice dropping, "is where it gets more sinister." She opened the second folder: Nightingale_Core_EURYDICE. The folder was massive, containing terabytes of what looked like raw, unstructured data. "This is The Muse. It's a database. A library of human emotion." She clicked open a subfolder, and a series of data visualizations appeared—graphs showing heart rate variability mapped to specific musical chords, spectral analyses of human cries and laughter, sentiment analysis of millions of poems and love letters scraped from the internet.

"This is what Thorne was doing," Yoo-jin realized aloud. "This is where his 'research' goes."

"Exactly," Min-ji confirmed. "They're cataloging biometric data, vocal inflections, brainwave patterns from EEG readings… all linked to specific emotional states. Their goal is to give Orpheus's technically perfect music a 'soul' by mapping its compositions to the data signatures of genuine human feeling. They're trying to quantify joy, to reverse-engineer heartbreak."

Go Min-young looked physically ill, pressing a hand to her mouth. It was a profound violation, a desecration of the most sacred parts of the human experience.

"It gets worse," Min-ji said, her tone flat and final. She navigated to the third and final core folder. Nightingale_Core_HERMES.

This was the bombshell. The masterstroke of their monstrous plan. The folder wasn't filled with audio files or data logs. It was filled with schematics, 3D modeling renders, and motion-capture libraries. She pulled up a render, and a face appeared on the screen. It was beautiful. Flawless. Androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, with large, captivating eyes and a perfect, gentle smile. It was also completely artificial.

"The Vessel," Min-ji said, the name landing with the force of a physical blow. "Hyper-realistic, fully digital avatars. Virtual idols. They're building a stable of them." She quickly scrolled through dozens of other faces, each one uniquely beautiful, each one utterly fake.

The full, terrifying scope of the project finally crashed down on them.

"They're not trying to replace songwriters," Da-eun said, her voice a low growl of dawning horror. "They're trying to replace us. All of us."

"No scandals," Yoo-jin added, the pieces clicking into place. "No contract disputes. No messy human emotions. No aging. Just perfect, controllable vessels to perform their perfect, soulless music, 24 hours a day, in every language, forever."

It was the quiet, corporate-approved end of art as they knew it.

A cold silence fell over the team as they contemplated the enemy they were truly facing. It was a force that didn't just want to win the game; it wanted to burn the stadium to the ground and replace it with a simulation.

Then, Yoo-jin's eye caught another folder within the Eurydice directory, this one labeled "Organic Asset Analysis." His heart hammered against his ribs. He asked Min-ji to open it.

Inside were profiles. Not on global superstars, but on smaller, more vulnerable figures. Independent artists, failed trainees, one-hit wonders. And there, near the top of the list, was a file titled P_CHAERIN_ANALYSIS.dat. Beside it was another: A_DAEUN_VOLATILITY_STUDY.dat.

Min-ji opened Chae-rin's file. It was a cold, brutal psychological workup, detailing her history at Stellar, her family situation, her diagnosed anxiety, and her likely imposter syndrome. It painted a picture of the perfect subject for manipulation. Da-eun's was less detailed but focused on her "high-amplitude emotional volatility," theorizing that her passionate performances could provide a rich source of data for modeling "rage" and "defiance."

They realized OmniCorp's strategy wasn't just to study success. It was to prey on struggle, to harvest data from trauma and desperation in order to better simulate it for their digital puppets.

The revelation didn't break them. It forged them.

The fear in the room transmuted into a hard, diamond-like resolve. Their mission was no longer an abstract war against a faceless corporation. It was a deeply personal fight for the very definition of what it meant to be an artist.

"They think they can build a perfect artist in a lab," Da-eun said, her voice shaking with a cold fury. "We have to show the world, right now, how beautifully, powerfully imperfect a real one is."

All eyes turned to Yoo-jin. He felt the weight of their gaze, the trust, the expectation. He made a decision, not as a strategist, but as a producer, as a leader.

"She's right," he declared, his voice ringing with a conviction that cut through the dread. "We're not waiting. We're fast-tracking the release of 'Echo & Roar.' We're not going to let them operate in the shadows. We are going to put this song out as a statement, a public declaration of war."

He looked at his team, his soldiers. "Kang Ji-won, I want the final mix done in 48 hours. I want it to be the most human-sounding thing you have ever produced. Min-young, I want a music video treatment on my desk by tomorrow morning. Something raw, real, that shows their faces, their sweat, their imperfections. Min-ji, I want you to find a crack in their armor, anything we can use. Da-eun, Chae-rin—get ready. We're going on the offensive."

The abstract war had just become a concrete, desperate race against time. They were going to fight the coming of the silent, perfect machines with a single, flawed, human roar.