Finding Alize – Ch1 Ep1-3
Story by Oldboy101 | Written wih the help of ChatGPT
A utility vehicle disguised as a city building inspection van waits in the left-turn lane at an intersection.
On the roof, it carries more antennas and communication modules than an ordinary inspection vehicle would.
Between them, a rectangular equipment case is fixed firmly in place.
From a distance, it looks like nothing more than a box for inspection tools.
Up close, small sensors and tight seams run along each corner.
The vehicle is in AutoDrive, its left signal blinking at even intervals, spilling a faint orange rhythm across the windshield and dashboard.
Park Sanghyun, thirty-six, sits in the driver’s seat with a tablet resting on his lap, organizing notes from the previous site.
His fingers tap the screen a few more times, then stop.
A small yawn escapes him.
He rubs at one eye and lowers his gaze back to the tablet.
In the passenger seat, Oh Seongjoon, forty-one, sits with AR glasses on, his gaze fixed not on the window, but somewhere in the empty air.
Inside the lenses, a map floats in his view.
His finger taps lightly against the armrest, almost in the same rhythm as the turn signal.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
In Seongjoon’s view, two locations are marked on the map.
The place they are currently heading toward.
Blue marker. Fifteen minutes. Left turn.
And another place, slightly closer.
Yellow marker. Nine minutes. Right turn. Opposite direction.
Seongjoon’s finger stops for a moment.
The left-turn signal still has not changed.
The blinker continues its steady pulse.
Tick.
Tick.
Seongjoon’s eyes remain on the yellow marker a little longer.
SEONGJOON
Let’s turn right.
SANGHYUN
Right?
But left is the route.
SEONGJOON
Let’s check the closer one first.
SANGHYUN
Ah… okay.
Sanghyun resets the vehicle navigation through his tablet.
The route recalculates, then recommends a left turn followed by a U-turn.
Sanghyun approves it.
SANGHYUN
But… that goshitel…
wasn’t that a D Team location?
I think we checked it once about two months ago.
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
But… an old case just came to mind.
SANGHYUN
Old case?
Seongjoon lets out a short breath, almost like a laugh.
SEONGJOON
Right.
Back then, I’d only just come over from the police side.
We caught this guy running a troll farm for some cult.
You know where we found him?
SANGHYUN
Don’t tell me…
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
A goshitel right in the middle of the city.
Five minutes on foot from the police station, too.
He was dressed as a woman and hiding there like it was nothing.
No…
He was basically living there.
The light changes beyond the windshield, and the vehicle slowly turns left through the quiet intersection.
SANGHYUN
Wow…
I guess that makes sense.
It’s the kind of place people would assume had already been searched top to bottom at least once.
SEONGJOON
Exactly.
But the thing is…
a detective friend of mine was digging into cyber phishing at the time.
He had a pretty good instinct for that kind of thing.
The phisher he was chasing ran into the goshitel…
and by pure chance, slammed straight into the cult guy.
That’s how the disguise got exposed.
My friend trusted his gut, held him there, and called me.
That’s how we caught him.
Beyond the windshield, the vehicle pauses again.
A few cars pass along the empty road as it waits for a chance to make the U-turn.
SANGHYUN
That’s like a movie…
SEONGJOON
Right?
What we found out after the arrest was…
four days later, he was gonna take a boat and run to Japan.
That just came back to me.
Through the windshield, the vehicle begins its slow U-turn.
SANGHYUN
Well… it is a goshitel.
People come and go all the time.
If we had enough personnel, places like this probably would have been on regular inspection rounds already.
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
And honestly, we all know by now.
The monitoring systems installed at these locations…
they can be breached through on-site hacking.
Beyond the windshield, the vehicle moves along a straight road.
The HUD updates the arrival time.
Goshitel — six minutes.
With light traffic and signal timing factored in, the estimate has moved up by two minutes.
SANGHYUN
Especially these days, Hack-AI service updates are coming out so fast.
My high school nephew is preparing to become a white-hat hacker,
and some of the things he shows me…
wow.
It feels like security database information,
even government-linked data,
keeps leaking out.
SEONGJOON
Of course it does.
No matter how far security systems advance,
they still can’t look inside a human mind.
The most reliable security system…
might be one that can read what people are thinking.
SANGHYUN
I guess so.
A system that can filter out the intent to commit a crime before it happens…
But would that even be possible?
SEONGJOON
Who knows.
Especially an old-style guy like me.
I’d know even less.
SANGHYUN
That reminds me.
These days, there’s a dark web taking root inside NW, too.
NW itself is structured almost like an interactive open world, right?
But it hides inside the world,
disguised as one of the content elements.
There are layers on top of layers…
It keeps reacting to detection scans,
tricking them,
hiding from them.
SEONGJOON
Ugh.
Just hearing that gives me a headache.
Beyond the windshield, the vehicle turns right and enters a narrow road leading into an outer residential district.
SANGHYUN
Right.
And… my nephew said something else.
These days, NW security depends on AI for almost ninety-nine percent of the technical side.
But the funny thing is…
hackers now depend on AI for ninety-nine percent of it, too.
So in the end, the remaining one percent…
that’s what human eyes catch.
Something like the one-percent human trace left behind in hacking code.
SEONGJOON
Was it in a report I saw recently…
There’s been an increase in automated hacks where AI-generated code turns into a hack,
because of an AI misjudgment.
SANGHYUN
Yes, I saw that too.
One reason for it is that AI service companies set the AI’s decision-making authority too high at the beginning.
And most users don’t really pay attention to that…
so they just let AI make more and more decisions on its own.
An alert flashes over the HUD map.
ALERT
The signal has come from the goshitel’s monitoring system.
Building network anomaly detected.
External connection being cut off.
At the same time, the same alert appears on Sanghyun’s tablet and inside Seongjoon’s AR glasses.
Sanghyun takes out his AR glasses and puts them on.
Seongjoon picks up his tablet.
CCTV feeds from inside and around the goshitel begin connecting to the vehicle system.
Beyond the windshield, the vehicle turns left through a cluster of small alleys.
Four minutes to arrival.
SANGHYUN
Network isolation?
Hmm…
but no other team is assigned to this location.
The exterior CCTV feed connects first.
The alley in front of the goshitel.
Two NexLink service vans are visible on the screen.
SEONGJOON
Damn it…
ISP.
Now this is annoying.
SANGHYUN
Should I launch the drone first?
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
But why is the interior CCTV taking so long?
On the roof of the vehicle, the equipment case opens silently.
A reconnaissance drone rises from inside.
A new drone-camera feed appears in one corner of the vehicle HUD.
The drone ascends quickly.
A moment later, it banks sharply to the right and cuts across the alley above the moving vehicle.
Below the feed, the roofs of the outer residential district spread out, narrow alleys tangled between them like a web.
SANGHYUN
Somehow… I think your instinct was right, sir.
SEONGJOON
Who knows.
Could be a dud.
Ever since the update two weeks ago,
the ISP companies have started getting involved again, deep.
But this is the first time we’ve overlapped like this.
Oh…
It’s coming up.
At that moment, the interior CCTV connection indicator appears on the tablet and inside the AR glasses.
Both men turn their eyes to the screen at once.
Corridor camera.
A narrow hallway.
The lights are on, but no one is there.
The corridors on the other floors of the five-story building are the same.
A quiet goshitel in the middle of the day.
No one in the halls.
Without speaking, the two of them move through the feeds.
One camera remains.
The building manager’s office.
Still connecting.
SANGHYUN
The office camera is taking a while.
Since it was two months ago…
there may have been a security update on the office camera.
SEONGJOON
Hmm…Yeah.
If it’s the goshitel office, they probably paid more attention to that side.
SANGHYUN
Drone has arrived.
Should I keep it up in High-Eye for now?
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
We’re almost there.
Hold it there.
The drone stops in the air above the goshitel.
It is positioned to look down on the building entrance and the alley in a single frame.
Beyond the windshield, the vehicle turns right again.
SANGHYUN
Sir…
There.
The goshitel building comes into view beyond the windshield.
One minute to arrival.
SEONGJOON
Let’s take the bags in.
SANGHYUN
Yes, sir.
Sanghyun gets up from his seat and starts toward the equipment compartment in the back.
But Seongjoon rises before him.
He takes off his glasses, sets them on the seat beside his tablet, and steps toward the rear of the van.
SEONGJOON
I’ll do it.
Need to rest my eyes for a second.
Seongjoon pulls a gear bag with a blue stripe from the rear equipment compartment.
He opens the zipper and checks the contents once.
A new warning flashes on the vehicle HUD.
Alert level increased.
Seongjoon lifts his head and looks at the screen.
Cellular connection lost.
The goshitel CCTV feed cuts out at the same time.
Beyond the windshield.
At the end of the alley just ahead,
the goshitel building is visible.
In front of it,
two NexLink service vans are parked.
SANGHYUN
Phone’s dead, too.
Seongjoon checks his own phone.
There is no cellular signal.
A satellite-link transition indicator appears on the vehicle HUD.
SANGHYUN
Should I call it in?
SEONGJOON
Yeah.
Seongjoon closes the blue-striped gear bag.
This time,
he picks up the bag with an orange stripe.
At that moment, above them, the drone holds in the air.
Directly over the goshitel,
its camera looks straight down at the building.
The entrance and the alley sit together in one frame.
The agents’ vehicle rolls in beside the two NexLink service vans and comes to a stop.
Inside and outside the goshitel,
everything is quiet again.
