Seungri gaped at Seunghyun, who was still glaring at him. “You…made me? What does that mean?” he whispered, sounding slightly horrified. And he was. The things Seunghyun was saying – they brought with them a nasty sense of foreboding.

“You really want to know, little panda?” Seungri flinched at his childhood pet name. “You sure you can handle what you’re asking me to tell you?” Seunghyun’s expression softened, and his hand flew up to cover Seungri’s. “I don’t want to have everything I’ve painstakingly worked on to suffer decay.”

Seunghyun’s words rung in Seungri’s ears. “What did you mean?” he whispered again, eyes downcast. Seungri’s knees shook and gave out. Seunghyun’s strong arms wrapped around him, supporting him, pulling him into his chest and pulling him back onto the bed.

They were silent for a few minutes, Seunghyun rocking him back and forth gently. Tears pricked his eyes and leaked out the corners, unbidden.

“What do you mean by…everything?” he managed, looking up at Seunghyun, eyes wide.

Seunghyun sighed, and drew his fingers through Seungri’s hair. “Breathe, relax, you’re going to shake to pieces. I’ll tell you, I promise, just relax for a moment.”

It took several minutes more for Seungri to relax enough to please Seunghyun. The elder wrapped himself protectively around Seungri, resting his chin on his head. “I…made you. Created you,” he started. Seungri could feel the vibrations of his voice rattle through his head. “I’ve spent years coding what you see around you. I won’t say it’s an illusion – this is your world, but it isn’t real in the way you think it is.

“The hard truth is that you are a program. A very long, condensed, and complex string of code, lovingly arranged by me. You are my fourth attempt – Jiyong, Taeyang, and Daesung are your predecessors. I’ve been trying for years now to create you. Ji, Tae, and Dae all failed, through really no fault of their own – which is why I created this world for them, and concocted this story of Blinking and Anti-Blinking to give them a purpose, since their original purpose was null and void. The Blinking is just manipulating the code around you and essentially creating a shortcut through the programming and stepping through it. The Anti-Blinkers – those are actually viruses. They’re created by other programmers, they can manifest out of the code themselves – it doesn’t really matter. They give Ji and the others a never-ending purpose, which is a great relief. Despite their labelling as failures, that doesn’t mean I’m not attached to them. I wanted to keep them around – I’m proud of what they become.” Seunghyun did sound proud and very fond of the other three. Seungri knew that nothing Seunghyun was telling him was a lie – he was being as honest as possible.

“Ji, Tae, and Dae were failures because they became too sentient – I lost control of their coding. They began to map their own without realizing what they were doing. I would wake up and find a string of code that branched off one of them that I knew I hadn’t placed there. This time I wanted to be more careful with you – I understand now that allowing you to code a bit of yourself is actually really healthy for you, but it should be also carefully monitored to make sure it doesn’t get out of control. All the time we’ve spent together wasn’t deceitful – I do love you deeply, like a parent loves a child, but more intimately. I know you inside and out, except for a few mysteries that you’ve created yourself. You are my perfect being – well, not exactly perfect, but you’re the closest I’ve gotten, and the closest I intend to get.

“I’ve waited months and months for your programming to develop and to fall into place – in order to bring you here, to train you discretely, to prepare you for bringing you into the real world. I needed you to be strong in your programming ability, and it was best if you didn’t know that’s what you’re doing. You have been set back by the attack on your systems, and Jiyong did save you from that – I didn’t want to try, I was afraid I would screw up, get lost in my emotions and lose you. Jiyong is a fantastic programmer, and his skill of sorting through broken and strained code and piece it back together is unmatched. Jiyong believes all this, by the way,” Seunghyun waved his hand around to indicate the space around them. “He believes his mission, he believes it all. So I let him lead this ragtag group. Like I said before, it gives him a purpose and it makes him happy. So I let him have it. And he gets to have me at times – that’s his basic programming he never overwrote like Tae and Dae did, the piece that you share with him. I can easily modify that piece of coding, erase it or warp it, or give it a new direction, but I’ve never seen the need to, not until you were able to join us. For you, I would rewrite that programming – one of the additions you’ve made to yourself is the feeling of jealously and the desire to have sole possession. You’re the only one that’s managed to code yourself a solely human trait, one that I didn’t give to you.” Seunghyun paused for a moment, and Seungri took this as his chance to speak.

“So…I’m a computer program?” he asked, turning his head to look at Seunghyun. The man sighed. “Essentially yes, but that’s much colder than I would liked to have put it. You are much more to me than that. I built you out of nothing but a jumbled mess of numbers, created a life out of nothing. My intention was to bring you out of that code and into the world.”

“You can do that?”

Seunghyun laughed. “I keep forgetting I had you grow up in a time period where that wasn’t even feasible – the world where you had your childhood took place nearly two-hundred years ago. A very good time period to grow up in, in my opinion, with all the advances in society, both in technology and social issues. I figured it would make you well rounded. The time period I exist in, that you exist in, is a lot less populated. The Third World War took care of what was considered “the space issue”,” he sighed. “The world population is about 1.8, maybe 2 million. Japan is gone – a freak tsunami completely took it under. So is Hawaii. Parts of the coasts on all countries are gone, washed over by the heightened oceans. But that’s old news really. The remaining 2 million of us rely heavily on the technology we have. The incredible things we can do now are probably the sole reason for survival – after the decimation of the population, it was hard to repopulate. Radiation warped a lot of people in bad ways – women with tilted uteruses, or misshaped, eggs with too many DNA strands or with too few. Men with dysfunctions, misplaced glands…there were so many issues, it was hard to find one man and one women that were able to actually produce a child. So, many people turned to technology to help. So far, we’ve managed to have women impregnate other women – a procedure that includes taking the bone marrow of woman and separate out the DNA in order to put it into another woman’s egg. Thus, a baby. The problem with this method is that it only produces female children – there’s no Y chromosome to give the chance of a male child. I guess there’s nothing really wrong with having an all-female world, but the fear is that one day the procedure won’t be able to be done. Another war, a disease,