The Algorithm of Spring

57

The installation continued across walls and ceiling, weaving light and shadow into impossible vistas. Critics huddled in corners making notes, while photographers jostled for position, unsure how to capture something borderless. On the surface, everything looked flawless—her first major showing since the galleries had started quietly removing her work.

"The way it responds to movement is remarkable," a collector observed, approaching Maya. "Almost as if it's reading our thoughts."

Maya maintained a professional smile while tracking a disturbance in the pattern above the collector's head. The rhythms accelerated, urgent now—like gears slipping behind a sealed panel. Across the room, Min-seo remained fixed on her screen.

The curator touched Maya's arm. "Is everything—"

The first visual distortion tore through the installation's flow—a single fly, impossibly large, materialised in the centre of her abstract landscape. Most visitors probably saw it as an artistic choice, but Maya recognised the intrusion immediately. She'd built no organic forms into this cycle—nothing with mass or intent. Anything alive was a foreign body. This wasn't part of her design.

The fly moved with unnatural slowness, its wings beating in languid motion as it floated through her creation. Then, as visitors watched, its edges broke into tiny compression artifacts, sections of its body flickering in and out of existence like corrupted data. Its wings stretched, then froze mid-beat, hanging in the air before suddenly jerking forward again.

"That's not mine," Maya whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

A ripple shivered across the ceiling — like the installation inhaling before it ruptured. More insects appeared, crawling from the projection edges. Ants marched across her celestial bodies, duplicating and distorting—some dragging forward a frame at a time, others freezing before leaping ahead as if reality had skipped frames.

A single discordant note vibrated through the floor, low enough that only a few guests noticed. The original soundscape deteriorated—high, needling tones pierced the composition, high-pitched vibrations that raised goosebumps throughout the gallery.

Min-seo shot Maya a warning glance across the room.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard, breath quickening. Hard reset—nothing. Manual override. The screen flashed, then froze.

"No, no, no," she muttered, rerouting commands, forcing a shutdown. The cursor blinked mockingly before the interface locked her out.

A small icon flashed in the corner of Min-seo's terminal—HarmoniQ's system stamp, masked but unmistakable.

Her stomach plummeted. This wasn't an intrusion. This was an eviction.

Maya watched as the melting insects cast silhouettes that were unmistakably human-shaped, elongated figures stretching across her digital terrain.

The curator's smile had frozen. "Maya?"

But Maya was already weaving between guests, who had begun to whisper about the strange shifts in the artwork's behaviour. The soundscape continued its transformation—gentle tones replaced by a chittering, buzzing undertone that caused several visitors to wince.

As she reached Min-seo, the landscape in the main projection also began to transform. Mountains reared up from flat light. In the foreground, a clock face appeared, its edges soft and melting, hands spinning backward.

The colours lurched, bleeding into each other like an overexposed photograph burning from the edges inward. The fluid elegance now fractured, shapes jerking and reforming in ways that made her stomach churn. A slow, cold dread crept up her spine—the same feeling she'd had when she first sensed HarmoniQ was toying with her.

The flies multiplied, shifting between organic and digital, limbs glitching as if trapped in an unfinished rendering. They swarmed the skyline that flickered across the projection, sections of the cityscape blinking in and out, its buildings rearranging themselves with unsettling order. Like someone shuffling reality beneath the table.