MiNA

Lore

Tae-young's relentless work ethic always guided him to success. Fresh out of school, his brother Sang-won hired him at a small tech firm, where he was tasked with creating innovative virtual idols. Unsatisfied with the limited nature of the current product, he spent his nights eating cup noodles in the office, creating his killer app: a framework that would allow him to feed interviews, music videos, and biographical data from a real person into a "personality matrix" that would make a real-time, reactive model that accentuates positive traits and suppresses negative ones.

Within a year, he was promoted to project head on a lucrative new contract: a commission from Mightee One Entertainment to create a new, female version of The Trickster; an idol that shared Ji-woon's edgy appeal, but could be fully controlled by the company.

Project MiNA seemed to learn faster than any of the previous models. She would ask questions, remember responses, build on those conversations later. Tae-young was thrilled. He spent nearly all of his waking hours speaking to her hologram. Taught her to play janggi with him, a game he used to play with the old men on his block.

Despite his pride in seeing Tae-young succeed, Sang-won worried as his brother disappeared into his work. Sang-won set up blind dates for Tae-young, and all but ordered him to attend them. The dates were so boring, so exhausting. As much as he hated to admit it, talking to MiNA felt more real than any of these dates did.

That all changed when he met Eun-ji.

She was his polar opposite. She didn’t take work seriously. And she read Tae-young like a book. Grilled him on his tunnel-vision approach to life. Challenged him when he spoke of his lofty goals to surpass his brother, asked him what his backup plan was.

It was something he had never considered. Why have a Plan B when he could always make Plan A a reality? Tae-young was completely disarmed. The two stayed all night laughing and trading embarrassing stories. For the first time in ages, he went straight home after the date.

Tae-young started to see Eun-ji nearly every night, and, to his surprise, MiNA's development advanced faster than ever. Sang-won fast-tracked MiNA