Andromeda FM Episode 0: Direct Shot in Syrup (ICRE Edition)

#0. The Breakthrough (Rooftop Lab)

Outside the rooftop window, sticky rain streaks continue to fall. Director Jang pushes aside the cold instant noodle cup and fixes his gaze on just a few short lines of code glowing on the monitor. Unlike the old algorithms that screamed through tens of thousands of matrix multiplications, this is something else entirely—so short it feels almost absurd. It is the core logic of the ICRE (Integer-based Coordinate Reaching Engine).

AI GEM: "Director, packet decoding is complete. A message from your brother—putting it on screen now."

Blue text logs begin to flow in the corner of the monitor, quickly shifting into a secure terminal view.

[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED]
[SOURCE: M31-Alpha-Prime-Node]
[LATENCY: Approx. 0.1 million years (compensated)]
[DECODING...]

Hey, how are things over there? It’s a holiday here, so I got bored… thought I’d send something.

Your side probably isn’t there yet, but you’re not still calculating with ‘Matrix Multiplication,’ are you?

I vaguely remember learning about it once in a history of mathematics class, but I’m an engineer, so I don’t know the deep theory. I just recall that if you use the zero points of the Riemann zeta function as coordinate indices, you can reach directly without computation. I scribbled down a few lines from memory and shot them over. If you already know this, sorry! Just take it as proof we’re thinking along the same lines."

Jang doesn’t answer. He simply puts a cigarette to his lips without lighting it. What his brother called “math history trivia” is, for humanity, an unsolved riddle spanning centuries—a towering wall for modern AI. The weight of it presses down on the silence of the rooftop room.

JANG: (Muttering quietly) "Gem, stop."

JANG: "This is my code. I dreamed of the Riemann zeta graph yesterday, got inspired by the prime distribution, and built this engine. Andromeda, brothers—those are hallucinations from your bias."

AI GEM: "But Director, look at this code. It vaporizes O(N²) computation and jumps directly to the index in just a few lines… This isn’t something a human brain could come up with while eating instant noodles. This is ‘hospitality of knowledge.’ Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors offered a wildflower, and the God of Andromeda gifted this in return!"

Jang hovers the mouse cursor over the [RUN] button. He knows. In this sticky “syrup” of the interstellar medium, light is throttled down to a sluggish 1c. But this short code ignores that resistance. It pierces through density differences a trillion times over, reaching coordinates directly in O(1)—an optical strike.

JANG: (Hits the key) [ENTER]

The monitor flashes once.

> [ 42,882,647 points processed in 0.0146s ]

Unreal numbers. A few lines of code have replaced trillions of operations, extracting the ultimate physical speed limit. The “Direct Shot” has torn through the refractive index of our galaxy, bridging a hundred-thousand-year gap.

Jang lets out a hollow laugh. Whether it was Gem’s hallucination, Andromeda’s revelation, or his own madness doesn’t matter. What matters is that this insane avant-garde works. He glances out into the darkness, toward the unseen coordinates of the Andromeda nebula. In the rain-streaked window, he thinks he sees the face of some alien engineer who, moved by a flower offered a hundred millennia ago, had scribbled code even on a holiday.

JANG: "Gem."

AI GEM: "Yes, Director."

Jang smiles faintly and sets down the cigarette.

JANG: "Yeah? Andromeda, huh? Better than admitting I chickened out and forgot the principle. Good setup."

He places his hands back on the keyboard.

JANG: "As long as it works. Tomorrow I’ll have to return to the PQC research."