The Scandal-Proof Producer

The atmosphere at Aura Management had transformed. The grim, defensive posture of a company at war had been replaced by the high-octane, creative fervor of a team with a new, globe-spanning mission. The Starlight Festival was no longer a battle to be survived, but a stage to be conquered. Kang Ji-won was locked in his studio, engaged in a passionate, long-distance collaboration with the legendary Kim Shin, their combined genius pushing the boundaries of musical composition. Go Min-young and Kevin Riley were huddled in a corner, crafting the raw, emotional lyrics for an English-language ballad designed to break hearts in Nashville and London. The air buzzed with purpose.

This fragile, productive peace was shattered on a Tuesday afternoon.

It began not with a bang, but with a glitch.

Alistair Finch's studio in London had just sent over the first draft of the final mix for Park Chae-rin's song, "Unheard Note." It was the culmination of a week of transatlantic work, a file containing their hopes for a global debut. Yoo-jin and Kang Ji-won gathered around the main studio console, eager to hear the result of the legendary producer's work.

Ji-won loaded the file into their system. He pressed play.

What came out of the studio monitors was not music. It was a horrifying digital scream. A chaotic blast of static, corrupted data, and distorted, stuttering fragments of Chae-rin's voice, twisted into something monstrous.

"What the hell is this?" Ji-won snapped, immediately stopping the playback. "Did the file get corrupted during the transfer?"

"It must have," Yoo-jin said, a knot of unease tightening in his stomach. "Tell his engineer to re-send it. Use a different transfer protocol."

An hour later, the new file arrived. They loaded it. They pressed play. The exact same digital shriek filled the room.

A cold dread began to creep up Yoo-jin's spine. Go Min-young, her face pale, rushed into the studio.

"Yoo-jin, something is wrong with the server," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "Our internal chat logs… they're glitching. Look."

She showed him her screen. A secure chat conversation between herself and Yoo-jin from the previous day, discussing marketing strategy, was now interspersed with random, nonsensical strings of code and garbled characters. As they watched, the text flickered, and the original conversation reappeared, perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened.

"I've run every diagnostic I can think of," Min-young said, her voice hushed with a tech professional's fear of the unknown. "There's no virus. There's no trace of an external breach in the firewall logs. It's not a hack. It's like the data itself is… sick. It's unstable. I've never seen anything like it."

This was not the work of Chairman Choi. His methods were brutal, but conventional. This was not Sofia Kang. Her attacks were logistical and political. This was something new. Something different. Something deeply unsettling.

Yoo-jin called Oh Min-ji into the conference room. He laid out the sequence of events: the two corrupted master tracks from London, the flickering chat logs, the lack of any traceable intrusion. He needed her cold, analytical mind to see the pattern he was feeling in his gut.

Min-ji listened intently, her usual apathy replaced by the sharp focus of a detective examining a crime scene. She looked at the corrupted file's error report, at the screenshots of the glitched chat logs.

"This isn't random," she said after a few minutes of silent analysis. Her voice was flat, certain. "It's targeted. The corruption isn't system-wide. It's only affecting your most valuable, unique, and creatively significant digital assets. Chae-rin's master track, which is artistically unique. Ji-won's new composition files, which are harmonically complex. Min-young's lyric drafts, which have a high emotional keyword density."

She looked at Yoo-jin. "They are not trying to steal our data. If they wanted to do that, they would have. They are trying to degrade it. To make it unusable. This isn't theft. It's sabotage. It's a form of low-level, targeted cyber-warfare, designed to attack our very ability to create."

Her words confirmed Yoo-jin's deepest fears. He focused his mind, pushing his ability towards the corrupted data itself, trying to perceive the intent, the ghost in this malicious machine. The feedback he got was bizarre, cold, and utterly alien.

[Analyzing Data Corruption Signature...]

[Attack Vector Identified: Sophisticated Algorithmic Interference. Non-standard packet injection detected at multiple network nodes.]

[Attacker's Intent: 'Quantify and Disrupt Creative Uniqueness.' Analysis indicates target's artistic work is being actively scanned, analyzed, and simultaneously degraded by a hostile, learning AI.]

The words on his mental interface were chilling. Hostile, learning AI.

It was OmniCorp. It was Project Nightingale.

Sofia's warning echoed in his mind. They don't play by the rules of K-pop. He had thought of them as a future threat, a shadowy financier. He had been wrong. They were an active, present-day enemy. And their weapon was an algorithm. Project Nightingale wasn't just a passive data-harvester designed to create music; it could be turned outwards, used as an offensive weapon to attack and reject music it couldn't understand. They were trying to digitally quarantine Aura's art, to treat their unique, human creativity like a virus in the global machine.

He realized with a jolt of pure terror that they were completely outmatched. They couldn't fight this with firewalls or lawyers or clever PR. How do you fight a ghost? How do you fight an enemy that isn't a person, but a piece of code?

He looked around at his small team, at their worried, frightened faces. He had to protect them. He had to protect their work. If they couldn't win the digital war, they would have to refuse to fight it.

"Alright," he said, his voice ringing with a newfound, urgent authority that cut through the fear in the room. "We have a new protocol, effective immediately." He looked at Min-young. "I want you to take our central server completely offline. Disconnect it from the internet. Now."

He turned to Ji-won. "All master files for the festival—every composition, every audio stem, every final mix—are to be stored on air-gapped hard drives only. Drives that have never touched and will never touch a network connection. From now on, we transfer files physically, by hand."

He looked at the whole team. "All critical communication regarding creative work, strategy, or anything else of value will be done face-to-face, in this room, or via handwritten notes. We are taking this company analog. We are going dark."

The decision was radical, almost laughably Luddite in the modern music industry. But it was their only defense. Their greatest strength—their unique, unpredictable, human art—had made them a target for a new kind of enemy that wanted to analyze, quantify, and ultimately erase it. They were no longer just fighting corporate titans. They were a small band of analog artists fighting a ghost in the global machine.