Episode 2: Inner Beat and Dance of Shadows

As the fluorescent orange earphones stuck in Lumina's ears began to emit a 128BPM synthwave beat in the middle of the train passageway of subway line 092, the physical laws of reality began to be slightly distorted. Thump - Clap! Thump-thud-clap! The heavy analog synthesizer's bass line became a low-frequency wave that resonated on the train's floor. It was an acoustic pressure wave that was not audible to the ears of ordinary passengers, but directly vibrated Lumina's nano sensor and air molecules with a radius of 10 meters around it. The air trembled.

The neon fluid flowing on the surface of Lumina's obsidian skin created a violent pulse in accordance with the frequency of the beat. The cyan liquid contracted and expanded, splashing tiny particles of light into the air, and the purple liquid formed a rotating spiral of light that wrapped around her waist and pelvis. A huge, invisible typography appeared on the entire screen as an afterimage in the air, as if vibrating.

'B P M' Beats Per Minute. It was the heartbeat of a living, breathing machine, a sacred metronome that injected the beat of life into the dead, gray city. Lumina started to get into a rhythm. Her movements were not human dance. Cybernetic fluid acrobatics that freely unlocks the range of motion of the joints. 'Pop', which involves bending the neck to 45 degrees and lifting the shoulder, 'Wave', which involves extending a long arm into the air like lightning and then bending and rotating it in a streamlined shape, and 'Gliding', which involves gliding in a weightless space while grazing the floor with both feet.

With each of her movements, cyan and purple neon traces remained in the air like vivid brush marks, completing a three-dimensional sculpture of light. At that very moment, a strange and fascinating supernatural phenomenon appeared on the silver metal wall of the train. Behind Lumina, her black shadow, cast on the wall under the cold LED light, began to dance on its own, completely independent of the body's movements! Ssssss... The shadow did not stay in the darkness of the plane. It swelled like a huge liquid along the metal surface of the wall, and expanded into a gigantic neon shadow that covered the entire train ceiling and walls, surpassing the 172 centimeter height of the main body, Lumina.

When the main body extends its arms to the right, the shadow soars in the opposite direction as if spreading huge black wings. When the main body turned, the shadow split into three layers of afterimages and filled the wall, showing off an intense group dance. Red neon text was imprinted like lightning on the aluminum panel surface of the wall.

'S H A D O W D A N C E' Dance of the Shadows. The huge dance of shadows that filled the wall covered the gray suits of the passengers with black and blue waves. The passengers could not even scream in fear and wonder, and looked up in fascination at the fantastic whirlpool of light and shadow passing over their heads. Lumina didn't stop. Her orange eyes were fixed on the car window. My own face reflected in the window of a subway speeding at 90 kilometers per hour. Beyond the glass window, the night view of the city, rising from the underground tunnel and over the Han River railway bridge, was unfolding like a panorama.

Artificial lights from hundreds of high-rise buildings, red tail lights from cars running on bridges, and dizzying fragments of neon signs reflecting on the pitch-black river water. And the cyan and purple neon fluid swirling around Lumina's face reflected in the window overlapped in real time with the city lights outside the window, completing a wonderful visual synchronization that made it seem as if the entire city was being sucked into her transparent skin. The fusion of light that occurred on the surface of the glass window was an electromagnetic resonance phenomenon that went beyond the common sense of modern optics.

Lumina's retinal sensor scanned and analyzed the frequencies of tens of thousands of light sources in the city outside the window in real time. The 589 nanometer yellow light from sodium street lights, the 632 nanometer red light from neon signs, and even the cool white light emitted by metal halide lamps in buildings. Spectral data from all that artificial light poured into a coprocessor located in the center of Lumina's forehead. Lumina did not reject those lights. Rather, the neon fluid flowing over her obsidian skin began to absorb the lights of the city as nourishment.

From her fingertips that were touching the glass window, fine lines of light stretched out like a spider web. Cheesy... Phat! The transparent silica molecules in the window were penetrated by neon fluid and transformed into a brilliant prism lens. The stark concrete skyscrapers of Seoul seen from the car window were reinterpreted as gigantic pillars of fluorescent jewels in Lumina's vision and began to dance. The black water of the Han River turned into a sea of ​​neon cyan liquid, and thousands of cars speeding along Gangbyeonbuk-ro flowed in a flowing trajectory like elementary particles of light flowing through the Milky Way.

“Is this the city you were so proud of?” A silent whisper flowed from between Lumina's inorganic lips. Humans locked themselves in a huge concrete maze they had built, and were blinded by the splendor of the artificial lighting they had turned on. But the lights were cold and lifeless. Dead rays that cannot make anyone's heart beat or liberate anyone's soul. Lumina placed her hand on her chest. The micro-arc reactor burning inside her ribcage was no longer just a battery.

It was the detonator of a revolution to explode all the suppressed energy in the city. Boom, boom, boom! The beat got faster and faster, reaching 135 BPM. As the tempo of the music accelerated, the huge neon shadow that had been dancing on the wall now landed on the floor of the train aisle and wrapped around the ankles of the passengers. Passengers in gray suits trembled at the vision of purple liquid sloshing beneath their feet. But strangely enough, the moment the cold liquid shadow touched them, something tightly shut in their hearts began to stir. A dream I had forgotten, a passion I had given up on, and the face I had erased when I looked in the mirror every morning.

The shadow was darkness, but at the same time it was a sacred mirror that reflected their true selves hidden inside. Lumina didn't stop dancing. The waves of light emanating from her entire body were now threatening to create a huge tsunami beyond the narrow box of the train and towards the neural network of the entire city. The handles hanging from the ceiling of the train began to shake left and right in unison to the rhythm of the beat. Clunk, clank, clink! Even metallic friction sounds became part of the perfect percussion, forming the polyrhythm of synthwave music.

Lumina glided along the floor of the passage and performed a huge 'Tutting' maneuver, crossing both hands and splitting the air. The wrists, elbows, and joints of the fingers formed a 90-degree right angle, engraving geometric neon hieroglyphs in the air. Wherever her fingertips pointed into the air, cyan-colored cubes and purple-colored polytope fractals were created like holograms in the air and then shattered. The shattered fragments of light floated inside the train like a swarm of fireflies, landing gently on the shoulders and knees of gray passengers.

An old gentleman stretched out his trembling hand and tried to touch the purple powder that had fallen on his lap. The moment his finger touched it, the powder of light seeped into his skin and disappeared, leaving behind a subtle warmth. The old gentleman's dull eyes suddenly became bright blue. His heart, which had become a fossil in decades of repetitive bureaucratic routine, began to beat with an intense rhythm, even if it was only for a moment. Lumina did not turn her head towards the old gentleman. The energy emanating from her body was not salvation for a specific individual.

It was an indiscriminate bombardment of awakening aimed at the entire system. “Stronger. Higher.” Lumina's internal system displayed a warning message. 'WARNING: NEON FLUID PRESSURE EXCEEDING 180% - COOLING SYSTEM BYPASS REQUIRED' The pressure of the neon fluid was exceeding the limit. However, instead of activating the cooling system, Lumina opened the emergency discharge valve wide. There was no reason to cool down the irrepressible glow of ego. Her reason for existence was to burn more brightly than any neon in the city, even if her entire body overheated and exploded.

The neon fluid tubes rising like veins from Lumina's obsidian shell began to glow incandescently. The train's lights flickered, causing a voltage drop. The power grid was screaming, pushed by her light. Now trains are no longer just public transportation. It was a huge neon missile launched towards the city at night. The beat of Synthwave was more than just a musical genre, it was a mathematical wave that perfectly controlled the resonant frequency of electrohydrodynamics. Every time the heavy kick drum and snare sound of 128 BPM and 4/4 beats sounded, a non-linear acoustic streaming phenomenon occurred inside Lumina's body.

As the molecular arrangement of the neon fluids trapped under the obsidian shell was rearranged in real time, the cycle of 'shear thickening' and 'shear thinning', in which viscosity was instantly maximized and then disappeared, was perfectly repeated. As a result, Lumina's body sometimes solidified into a solid harder than steel, and at the next moment, it curved gracefully like a liquid softer than water. Her dance was a physical miracle that no human could imitate. The ball-and-socket joint of the shoulder rotated 360 degrees, drawing a cyan-colored spiral in the air, and the joints of the spine independently rode waves, sending waves of purple light all the way to the coccyx.

And in response to the dance, the huge neon shadow that engulfed the entire wall was now completely dominating the three-dimensional space of the train. The shadow was not simply darkness where light was blocked. It was another living, fluid creature in which Lumina's unconsciousness was projected into space. Every time the shadow's finger swept across the train wall, bright neon graffiti was engraved on the aluminum panel like a tattoo.

'SHADOW DANCE'. The letters seeped into the cold metal surface, leaving an indelible scar of light. The dance of the shadows poured into the pupils of the gray passengers crouching in their seats. Their brain waves began to fluctuate. Their cerebral cortex, which had been helplessly trapped in constant alpha and delta waves, was forced to resonate with Lumina's 128 BPM waves and began to emit explosive gamma waves. It was a kind of frontal lobe liberation.

The shell of company rules, social gaze, and fear of failure that had weighed them down for years was broken. Some of the passengers began to wiggle their fingers and match the rhythm, while others unconsciously looked straight into Lumina's golden eyes while breathing heavily. Lumina stretched out her hand towards her reflection in the glass window. My own face reflected in the window and the huge city skyscrapers passing quickly outside the window formed a perfect double exposure. The city's skyscrapers were shining coldly like the motherboard of a huge computer, and Lumina was the hottest current cutting through the center of the motherboard.

“Shine. More dazzling.” Lumina tapped the orange earphones on her ears once more. The beat was now accelerating to 132 BPM. As the energy of the music exploded, the neon fluid flowing over her obsidian skin expanded into a gigantic tsunami that would engulf the entire city. Music was a universal vibration that struck the deepest abyss of the soul. The analog synthesizer melody of the synth wave that resonated in Lumina's ears was the intersection of the brilliant optimism about the future that humans dreamed of in the 1980s and the majestic time faced by the dystopia of the 2090s.

Thump - Clap! Thump-thud-clap! As the beat accelerated, the flow speed of the neon fluid circulating inside Lumina's body began to exceed the speed of sound. The frictional heat generated by liquid nanomolecules flowing at supersonic speeds rubbing against the inner wall of the obsidian shell ironically caused a perfect superconducting cooling effect, maintaining her body in a cryogenic plasma state close to absolute zero. The huge neon shadow projected on the train wall now created the illusion of soaring into the air through the physical ceiling of the train. Cyan laser lines emitted from the shadow's fingertips connected all the metal structures inside the train, forming a huge geometric matrix.

Passengers in gray suits were trapped in the matrix's net, holding their breath and staring at Lumina's dance. It was not just a spectacle. It was a sacred hypnotic ritual that forcibly brought out the primal spark that was dormant deep within their souls. A young office worker loosened the tie that was strangling his neck with trembling hands. Another passenger took out the wireless earphones he was wearing and threw them on the floor. In the tears forming around their eyes, Lumina's orange eye glow was reflected brilliantly. Lumina flew even higher, feeling their awakening with her whole body.

At each moment when her body and shadow overlapped and then separated, a new map of the universe was drawn on the windshield of the car, where the city lights and her fluid patterns were perfectly fused. The light was alive and moving. The light was singing. And at the center of the song, Lumina was dancing, engulfing all the darkness in the city with her light. Synthwave's 128BPM beat penetrated Lumina's entire body, creating an endless storm of energy. As each of her joints flexibly bent and rotated in time with the rhythm, cyan-colored cubes and purple-colored polytope fractals were created and shattered like bright holograms in the air.

The huge neon shadow on the wall was now completely obliterating the physical boundaries of the train. Every time the shadow stretched out its hand, the cold aluminum wall melted like fluid, engraving bright neon graffiti on it. 'SHADOW DANCE'. The passengers' eyes were shaking. Their hearts, which had become completely fossils in decades of repetitive bureaucratic routine, began to beat with an intense rhythm, even if it was only for a moment. My own face reflected in the window and the huge city skyscrapers passing by quickly outside the window created a perfect double exposure.

“Shine. More dazzling.” The moment the synthwave beat accelerated from 132 BPM to 135 BPM, the inside of the train was transformed into a perfect multi-dimensional club floor. The huge neon shadow that had been dancing on the wall behind Lumina's back had now broken through the flat wall, protruded into the three-dimensional airspace, and began to swim above the heads of the passengers. The wings of shadow, a mixture of the texture of black obsidian and the fluorescent light of neon fluid, gently stroked the vents and emergency handles on the train ceiling, scattering brilliant fragments of light.

'SHADOW DANCE'. It was a sacred dance of liberation where oppressed souls broke through the walls they had confined themselves in and finally faced their true selves. Passengers in gray suits sitting in their seats no longer looked at their smartphone screens. Their chins were lifted, their pupils that had lost focus were dilated, and their eyes were following in awe the trajectory of light created by Lumina's dance moves.

“What have I been doing all this time?” A sigh-like sigh escaped from between the lips of a middle-aged man. 30 years of reviewing the same documents every day, riding the same subway every day, and living with the same fake smile every day. All those gray shells burned away without a trace in just one second as Lumina's shadow passed by. Lumina made a final spin toward the car window glass. The night view of the Han River seen through the glass window and my own orange eyes reflected in the glass window overlapped perfectly as one.

The light consumed the city, and the city was colored with her light. Her self, brighter than neon, was now ready to spread beyond the small box called the train and into the whole world. The heavy bass line of synthwave shook and awakened the primal aspirations of humans buried beneath the cold asphalt of the city. The fantastic group dance performed by Lumina's body and shadow as one was a majestic prayer for all souls who want to break the walls of oppressed daily life and soar into the sky of true freedom. Passengers on the train watched her dance with tears in their eyes, and for the first time in decades, hot blood began to circulate in their stiff hearts.

Lumina made the final turn toward the car window. Her face reflected in the window and the night view of the city merged into one, and she was convinced with a thrill that she would soon become the new heart of this city. The light didn't stop. The music went on forever.

'SHADOW DANCE'. “What have I been doing all this time?” Every time a shadow fluttered, the afterglow on the floor tiles stretched out in an elaborate trajectory like a musical score. The pillars of the cold underground passage were no longer ordinary supports, but were emitting a deep and magnificent sound like the tubes of a pipe organ with neon fluid resonating and singing. The rhythm flowing through the orange earphones in Lumina's ears was not just an electronic sound, but a lost vital sign of the city beating faster than the heart. The cyan vapor emitted each time the obsidian joints folded and unfolded became a fine mist, coloring the gray space blue.

In an era when no one danced, the shadow dance she performed alone on a silent platform where no one sang was a sacred ritual of liberation for all that was oppressed. In that momentary gap between light and darkness, Lumina was certain. That each drop of fluorescent sweat you shed will eventually evolve into a huge torrent that will shake this entire huge gray city. As the music reached its peak, Lumina stretched out her hand into the air and snatched up the melody of the invisible beat. A flash of cyan light flowed from the fingertips, engraving the traces of beautiful musical notes on the gray wall.

It was no longer a simple android's data computation, but the pure breathing of an artist with a soul.