Frame Drop

1. The Discovery of a Strange Noise Jinwoo is a legendary cybersecurity expert, even on the dark web. While analyzing global network traffic, he discovers a bizarre phenomenon. Every day, just after midnight Greenwich Mean Time, a faint data stream linked to the brainwave patterns of all humanity is being transmitted upward without passing through any known cellular towers or satellite relays. “The uplink speed is in the terabyte range, but there’s no receiver on Earth.” Jinwoo installs an illegally modified satellite antenna on the rooftop of his officetel. His analysis reveals that the data consists of compressed digital signals generated by the human optic and auditory nerves. In other words, someone is using the eyes and ears of all humanity as real-time cameras. 2. Witnessing the Buffering To prove his theory, Jinwoo begins an extreme experiment. He synchronizes an ultra-high-speed computing device, far beyond the human brain’s normal processing capacity, with his optic nerve. That night, he sees something he was never meant to see. At the Gangnam Station intersection, surrounded by thousands of pedestrians, Jinwoo notices reality itself stuttering through his retina. Between people’s walking motions, there is a 0.001-second gap — a missing frame. In that tiny gap, a translucent system message flashes across a black screen. [BUFFERING... 99%] “The world is loading…” A chill runs down his spine. The reality humanity sees is not a purely physical world. It is a high-definition video being streamed onto someone else’s screen. When Jinwoo traces the broadcast coordinates, he finds the destination beyond the Moon, near the outer edge of the solar system — an empty point in space where no planet exists. 3. The Formation of the Dead Zone Jinwoo tries to spread the truth online. But every post he uploads disappears as if deleted by an invisible administrator. The data itself evaporates. Then he understands. The network of this world is also under their control. So he begins gathering people through analog methods. Without using electronic devices, he searches in person for those who share certain traits: people who had lost and recovered part of their sensory organs after accidents, or people capable of controlling their senses through extreme meditation. They call themselves the Dead Zone. It is their declaration that they will create a blind spot outside God’s field of view. 4. The First Attempt at Contact At the end of Episode 1, Jinwoo succeeds in reverse-engineering the format of the outgoing broadcast data. He decides to insert a tiny piece of malicious code into humanity’s visual data. It is nothing more than placing a single small dot on God’s screen. The moment Jinwoo presses Enter, the entire sky freezes. Then, in his ears, he hears a massive auditory hallucination — as if trillions of spectators are cheering at once — followed by a cold mechanical voice. “New interaction detected. Ratings rising.” Jinwoo trembles and mutters: “We were never living beings. We were just… channels.” The episode ends with Jinwoo raising his middle finger toward the sky. At that very moment, a massive cloud shaped like a cursor forms above him, pointing directly at him.