The Vanished Choice

Taeho did not fold the application in half and slide it toward Doyun. He just set it on the desk. Sliding it over would have meant offering it, and offering it was something a person did when he knew part of the responsibility would come back to him later.

"The scholarship recovery exam is next week. If you apply, I can enter you."

"Entering me isn't the same as passing me." Doyun didn't pick up the paper.

"No, it isn't." Taeho pulled out another sheet. "But if you do this instead, it becomes a reference item in the recovery review. It's an auxiliary assignment."

The paper had an exam number, thirty one, and a name. Kang Jun.

"A tracking assignment?"

"Observation. You'll record what choices this student makes over the next three weeks. Intervention is prohibited." Taeho tapped the clause number.

Doyun wanted to ask about the scope of that word, intervention. Whether it meant only the ability, or words too. If he asked, Taeho would give him an exact answer, and the exact answer would probably be inconvenient for him.

"Why give it to me. I'm the cause of this."

"That's exactly why I'm giving it to you." Taeho set the stopwatch on the desk. "If someone else observes him, the student only hears the results. Someone who only hears results does the same thing next time."

"So I can't take the recovery exam then?"

"There's no time for both. Do you choose one, or should I choose for you?"

Doyun remembered the exact amount his scholarship support had been cut to. Remembering the precise number wasn't an advantage right now. When it wasn't an advantage, his numbers only got more precise.

Doyun couldn't argue against that. He built three sentences to argue with, and all three served himself.

"There's one more thing." Taeho pointed to the bottom of the paper. "This student may not want you as his evaluator. In that case, it's not you who chooses the evaluator. It's him."

"I don't get to choose?"

"If you choose, it stops being observation and becomes supervision." Taeho's voice dropped.

Taeho added one more line in the margin of the paper. This time Doyun could read the handwriting. Subject to evaluator's discretion, error possible.

"You're writing that down too?"

"I am. If my judgment is wrong, this student needs grounds to object." Taeho set down the pen. "It's not yours, and it's not mine. It belongs to that student."

The first line of the observation log stayed blank for two days. Kang Jun didn't come to class, and no one checked the attendance of a student who had withdrawn.

On the third day, Doyun went looking for him. The place he found him was the problem.

Kang Jun was found in the materials corridor on the third floor of the practical training building.

The corridor wasn't meant for students to begin with. It was narrow, cables ran across the floor, and there was a loading hatch open on the right. Below the hatch was a two story drop. Doyun knew that height in his own body. He had lived it as someone else's for eleven seconds.

Kang Jun was walking along the wall on the hatch side, heading the other way. It wasn't that he was hugging the wall. It was a walk that simply didn't factor in the fact that the hatch was there.

Doyun stood on the cables and stopped. If he called out, Kang Jun would startle, and startling could send him half a step to the right.

Instead he pushed a cable reel with his foot. The sound came from the left.

Kang Jun turned his head toward the sound. His body came with it, toward the left.

"Oh. It's you." Kang Jun readjusted his hold on the box.

"This isn't a student area."

"Someone asked me to move some stuff." Kang Jun lifted one of the boxes to show him. "A senior."

"Where's that senior now?"

"He went ahead." Kang Jun said it like it wasn't strange at all.

Doyun saw the shape of the situation. A senior had left cargo in a dangerous corridor, and a kid who couldn't judge danger well had picked it up. The senior didn't know who Kang Jun had been until yesterday. Nobody knew. The record just said withdrawn, and the reason field was blank.

"Give me that box. I'll carry it."

"Why?"

"Because I want to carry it."

"Then what do I do?" Kang Jun didn't let go of the box. "I already said I'd do this."

I already said I'd do this. There was a little pride in that, in having decided something himself. Doyun caught that little bit, and because he caught it, he also understood what he'd be taking away if he took the box.

Doyun's left hand rose halfway. The seal was half undone, and for objects, the limit was ten seconds with a witness present. There was no witness. And Kang Jun wasn't an object.

He lowered his hand.

No intervention. Observation. Doyun understood what those two words meant in this corridor right now. They didn't mean do nothing. They meant don't replace Kang Jun's choice with your own.

So he used a third method.

"Kang Jun. Did you see that hatch is open over there?"

"...I saw it."

"If you fall, it's two floors down. You won't die. But your legs will break."

Kang Jun looked at the hatch. Looked again after that.

"Then I guess it's better not to go that way." He stepped back from the hatch.

"Right. But you were walking against that wall a second ago."

"Was I." Kang Jun looked at the path he'd just walked. He wasn't startled, and he wasn't scared. His expression was that of someone confirming a fact he'd just learned. "I didn't know that."

"From now on, when you come here, stick to the left wall, not the right. Just remember that one thing."

"Left." Kang Jun said the word again. "I can do that."

Doyun wrote that answer down in the log. Remembers one instruction. Doesn't ask why. As he wrote it, he decided not to judge whether this was an improvement or just another face of the damage. If he judged it, he'd end up trying to fix it again next time.

That afternoon Doyun went to the facilities office. He wrote up a request for safety railings at the loading hatch. In the requester field he wrote his own name, and in the reason field he wrote this: A student with impaired risk judgment passes through here.

The staff member asked, "What does impaired mean?"

"I caused it."

"...Should I write that down too?" The staff member's pen stopped.

"Please write it down."

The request went to the bottom of a two day paperwork queue. Doyun went back the next day, and the day after that. On the third visit, the staff member moved it up. Not because Doyun had done anything particularly well, but because dealing with someone who showed up every day was more of a hassle.

He recorded that too. Third line of the observation log. What I did was ask three times.

The railing was installed two days later. Doyun thought it was the first thing he'd done that didn't need to be undone.

So the problem was that he relaxed.

Three days later, Kang Jun came looking for him. He had an objection form in his hand.

"I'm going to file this." Kang Jun held out the document.

"Objection to what?"

"Changing evaluators." He unfolded the form to show him. "I want a different observer."

Doyun looked at the paper. The reason field was filled in. It was Kang Jun's handwriting, one sentence.

This person keeps trying to fix me whenever he sees me.

"The railing wasn't fixing you. That was..."

"The railing was good." Kang Jun said. "But that box thing. I said I'd carry it, and you said you wanted to carry it."

"Is that really such a big deal?"

"It's not a big deal." Kang Jun was precise about it. "But it happened three times."

Doyun tried to count three times. He could only remember two. Whichever one he couldn't remember was probably the one that had felt most natural to do.

"...That was because it was dangerous."

"Then just tell me it's dangerous. I'll decide." Kang Jun folded up the document. "I'm bad at telling what's dangerous now. That's because of you. So I'm grateful when you tell me. But deciding has to be me. Otherwise what am I even left as?"

Doyun searched for a sentence to answer with, and instead of finding one, he noticed what he actually wanted to do right now. He wanted to explain. At length, precisely, until the other person understood.

He didn't explain.

"Who do you want to switch to?"

"Senior Yu Seorin."

"...Why." Doyun's voice came out lower than he expected.

"That senior doesn't do anything to me." Kang Jun said. "She just watches and writes things down. And she writes down the good things you did too. Last week she wrote about the railing."

"How do you know that?"

"She showed me." Kang Jun shrugged slightly. "It's my record, so I have the right to see it, she said."

Doyun hadn't known that. Not that Seorin was watching him, and not that she'd written down the good parts.

"Can you sign this? Apparently it needs the original evaluator's consent."

Doyun took the pen. If he signed, the reference item in the recovery review would disappear. Taeho probably knew that too when he handed him this assignment.

The scholarship support, frozen at half, came to one million two hundred seventy thousand won per semester. That was the price of one signature. Doyun confirmed just how useless it was to know that number exactly right now.

And he noticed one more thing. He was calculating a price right now. He still didn't know which was better, someone who signed after calculating the price, or someone who signed without knowing it.

Signing didn't take long. What took long was what came after.

"Kang Jun. Can I ask you one thing?"

"Sure."

"If I hadn't opened it that time, you'd have died. You know that, right?"

"I know." Kang Jun gathered up his papers. "But that's a different story from this one. You wrote it on two separate sheets too, didn't you?"

Two sheets. The two sheets Doyun had asked Taeho to write up separately on the very first day. Back then he'd thought it was a demand made for his own sake.

After Kang Jun left, Doyun sat at the empty desk. Not the desk at seat number thirteen. His own seat.

Someone passed by outside the window. Yu Seorin was walking toward the administration office with an application in her hand.

Doyun reached to open the window and call out to her, then stopped. If he called her now, there was only one thing he'd ask. Why did you write down my good side too. That wasn't a question about Kang Jun's record. It was a question about his own reputation.

He closed the window and opened the observation log to write the last line.

Today the subject chose his own evaluator. It wasn't me.

Below that he added one more line. This wasn't for the assignment report. It was a line he left for himself.

Not fixing something isn't the same as not doing anything. I still don't quite understand that.