Notice from the Management Office

The timestamp on the thirteenth floor hallway frame Eunchae had sent was frozen at 02:11 on April 18, eight years ago.

The current time in the elevator was 00:42.

It was not two hours out of step, it was eight years.

Seojin zoomed in on the date in the corner of the image.

One digit was blurred, but 2018 could be read.

Sua did not point at the delivery uniform on the screen.

"That isn't me." The words were less self defense than the setting of a standard.

Seojin wrote in her notebook.

Not the same person.

Role of the omitted one may repeat.

Doyun read the line and said shortly.

"Don't state it as fact." "I wrote may."

Jang Myeongsu was looking at the hallway wall on the screen.

"That fire hydrant is in the old spot. We moved it to the right since then." He let the end of the sentence drift, then looked at the screen again. "There was a delivery that night too. Headed up toward the roof. I don't know if it was the same company, but there was a yellow reflective strip." Sua asked at once. "There were units on the roof?" Jang Myeongsu took off his cap.

"They called it a machine room. Officially." After the word officially, the elevator shuddered once.

Doyun braced a hand on the wall and looked at Seojin.

"Get the management office on the line. Manual inspection mode." Seojin found a silver port in the open panel under the control board.

Eunchae connected remotely to the management server.

"The old drawings for Building 404 show only a machine room above the twelfth floor. But the scanned parcel log has receipt lines for 1301 through 1304." A faint table appeared on the screen.

1301, 1302, 1303, 1304.

The recipient name column had been blacked out, and in places correction tape stood out white even in the photograph.

The management office chief cut in over the radio.

"That material is scheduled for disposal. It was never verified because of the illegal expansion allegations." Seojin asked. "And the fire records." Eunchae answered.

"A fire reported the same date in the rooftop electrical room. Official evacuation count, everyone rescued. That number counts units up to the twelfth floor only."

"Were the rooftop residents left out." Seojin said.

The chief did not answer right away.

He called Jang Myeongsu instead.

"Chief Jang, from now on do not mention that material. You remember your employment contract." Jang Myeongsu's hand went to his ring of keys.

He gripped the keys, then let them go.

"Well, the thing is, I wasn't on nights back then." Sua said, "You weren't?"

Jang Myeongsu looked at the elevator floor.

"The next day I posted the notice. Evacuation complete, everyone accounted for." Mingyu said quietly. "But what if those people weren't in everyone." This time Jang Myeongsu could not look at Mingyu.

From the control board, Doyun pulled up the management office printer log.

Eunchae grabbed the screen and enlarged it.

The notice file names were listed by date.

Building404_SafetyNotice_revised, Building404_SafetyNotice_final, Building404_SafetyNotice_final2. Jang Myeongsu said, "There's paper too."

Everyone looked at him.

"In the storeroom behind the guard post. When complaints come in you have to check the old notices, so I didn't throw all of them out." The chief shouted over the radio. "Chief Jang." Jang Myeongsu turned the radio volume down.

He did not turn it off completely.

"You can fire me later. Right now there's a person in here." For the first time he did not swallow the end of a sentence.

There was no way to go to the guard post storeroom in person.

The elevator still had not moved from between minus 1 and 13. Jang Myeongsu called up a photo of the storeroom shelf on his own phone. He described where the box of old notices sat, and Eunchae had a management office staffer look for it on a video call.

A hand on the screen pulled out a dust covered box.

The side of the box said disposal, but a second strip of tape had been laid over it.

Jang Myeongsu said.

"I put that on. Just in case." Sua answered briefly.

"Just in case showed up today."

The notices carried the same sentence with small differences.

If asked for a headcount on a floor that does not exist, state one person fewer.

That was how the topmost notice began.

On the notice below it, the correction tape over state was thicker.

Eunchae enlarged the photo.

"The print dot patterns differ. These aren't copies of one document, they were printed again in different periods." Seojin looked at the wording on the card and the wording on the notice side by side.

On the card, one person fewer was darker, like more recent ink.

Doyun recognized the margins and line spacing of the field team standard form.

"That's our form." "Is it a Daon document." "The format is, at least."

On the bottommost notice, a long strip of correction tape had been laid down.

When the management office staffer on the video call tried to scrape at it with a fingernail, Seojin stopped him. "Slowly. It must not tear." Eunchae said, "Do not apply heat. You only need to lift the adhesive layer." The image shook, and the edge of the tape came up biting a little of the paper fiber.

The sentence underneath was revealed.

If asked for a headcount on a floor that does not exist, do not state one person fewer.

Record every name in full.

Mingyu read it out loud and stopped before Record.

Jang Myeongsu's lips moved, but no sound came out.

Seojin copied the sentences into her notebook.

Do not state one person fewer.

Record every name in full.

"This is not a rule that arose on its own." he said. "Someone changed it." Doyun did not argue. "There'd be a reason for the change." "Reason or not, the one left out stays left out." Sua spoke while looking at the notice on the screen.

"So at first it was written to say don't leave out people like me." Jang Myeongsu answered quietly. "That's the one that should have been posted." The chief's radio came through as nothing but static.

Enlarging the thirteenth floor hallway frame did not bring the company logo on the delivery uniform into focus.

Only the yellow reflective strip was sharp.

Eunchae searched the list of local delivery companies for that date, but three came up. "Company cannot be identified. However, the time window overlaps with the parcel receipt records for the rooftop units." Sua said. "He'd have been trying to get back down fast too." No one called that person a ghost.

The moment anyone did, Sua, here in this elevator now, would become just as easy a thing to explain away. Seojin wrote role repetition beneath the hallway frame, and put a question mark in front of it.

The scanned parcel log held an odd line besides the delivery records. In front of unit 1304 a stamp read management office proxy receipt.

Jang Myeongsu recognized the stamp.

"That's not a stamp I made. That's the old chief's stamp." "And who actually received it." "Well, the thing is, there should be a name in the log." The name column had been struck out in black pen. Eunchae tried image correction, but the strokes did not come back.

He reported the failure immediately.

"Recovery not possible. The original paper is required." Hearing that, the chief blocked them harder. "The original contains personal information. It cannot be provided to outside contract workers." The words personal information covered the name of the missing person one more time.

Seojin could not remember the field team standard form.

It was her first day.

Doyun remembered.

"Top margin 18 millimeters. Black square before each item. That's our old form." "Who wrote it." "The form alone won't tell you." Doyun said he did not know, but his face had set.

Seojin did not press further.

What they needed now was not the author's name but the document version.

Eunchae read the creation times of the notice files.

The initial notice, 06:20 the morning after the fire.

The revision, 07:03 the same day.

The version matching the current card wording went into Daon Life Safety field training material a year later.

Somebody's temporary edit had become training.

Jang Myeongsu kept rubbing his hands together while he talked about the box of notices. "Residents ask for the old notices sometimes. Water shutoffs, parking, that sort of thing. So you can't throw them away." Sua said, "Which is how the notice with a person missing survived too."

Jang Myeongsu lowered his head.

"Yes." It was a short answer. When he attached no self defense to it for the first time, Sua stopped pushing too.

Mingyu watched the video call and said.

"So the old notice was written to keep people alive?" Seojin said, "That is how it looks." "Then who changed it the other way, and why?" This time nobody could answer.

While the tape was being peeled, the elevator was quiet.

Quiet was not enough of a word.

Every one of them had taken hold of a role.

Eunchae stabilized the shaking image, Doyun checked the door gap, Sua shouted so the staffer would not tear the paper, and Jang Myeongsu recalled the order of the notices inside the box. For the first time Seojin confirmed that she was not solving this alone. Before that confirmation could turn into relief, a new notice appeared in the group chat.

Residents of Building 404, please refrain from sharing unverified information.

It was posted under the name of the management office chief.

The words unverified information flew straight at a sheet of paper that was only now being uncovered.

Below Record every name in full on the initial notice there was a small box.

Signature of responsible officer.

It was empty.

Seojin asked them to enlarge the empty box.

There was no signature on the paper, but there was a pressed impression.

The trace of someone starting to write, then laying another sheet on top.

Eunchae said, "Pen pressure traces cannot be read from a remote photograph."

Doyun said.

"Never mind that, the sentence is what matters now." He was right.

Still, Seojin wrote down the empty signature line too.

A notice that kept only the good wording without the responsibility could not hold for long. That the empty box had led to one person fewer on the current card was still only a guess.

So he wrote it down only as a possibility.

The chief argued that the initial notice might have been fabricated. "Someone could have slipped it into the box later." Eunchae did not object at once. He had them check the dust line along the paper's edge, the fold direction, and the file order inside the box.

"Signs of later insertion cannot be excluded remotely. However, the folds on the four notices from that period match." Seojin wrote that down exactly as said.

Cannot be excluded.

Language that refused to settle anything was frustrating, but right now the frustration was necessary.

More dangerous than the anomaly was a comfortable conclusion.

A comfortable conclusion had already removed a person with the sentence one person fewer.

Even looking at the initial notice, Doyun did not speak of hope. "Even if it's the original, there's no guarantee it works." Seojin said, "That's true." "But the current rule is not the only option." Sua read the sentence on the notice again.

"Record every name in full. That isn't just telling you to write names down, is it?" Seojin pointed at the signature line. "It's a structure where whoever writes the names carries the responsibility." Jang Myeongsu could not take his eyes off the empty box. It was the face of a man recognizing that a blank from the past had been set down in front of him now.

Once the sentence under the correction tape was uncovered, the management office staffer tried to back out of frame.

The chief seemed to have given some instruction from behind him.

Sua spoke at once.

"Don't let go. Keep the paper in frame." The staffer stopped. Even trapped in an elevator, Sua controlled where another person's hands were. Watching that, Seojin knew Sua was not someone who would stay only a victim.

Following that lead, Jang Myeongsu said, "Get the box lid in the shot too. So the disposal mark shows."

Doyun turned toward the doors the moment the speaker began reading the original sentence. He was calculating the chance the doors would open while the rule wavered. But when the voice corrected itself, he did not move.

"The sentences are fighting." Mingyu said.

Seojin did not correct the phrasing.

What was actually happening was a collision between a document version and the current card, but what the boy saw was not wrong either. Out of the same speaker, sentences from two different eras came one after the other.

After the original notice sentence was read, Seojin looked at the front of the card again.

When asked, answer with one person fewer.

Now that sentence was not a safety rule, it was a revision.

That did not mean it could simply be discarded.

Follow that wording and four of them might have made it down.

The rule was not entirely a lie, it was efficient in the way it loaded the whole cost onto one person.

Seojin did not say that judgment out loud.

The moment she did, someone would look at Sua in the name of four people's safety.

Jang Myeongsu remembered even the worn stapler beside the box of notices. "I stapled the four notices together that time." Sometimes a trivial object was more accurate than a date.

Eunchae flagged that testimony in a separate log.

The elevator speaker switched on.

"If asked for a headcount on a floor that does not exist, do not state one person fewer." For the first time the announcement voice read a sentence that differed from the current card.

Everyone looked at the control board at once.

The minus 1 on the display went dark and 13 lit up.

The voice rested one beat.

From the same speaker came a click, the sound of a recording changing over.

"Correction. If asked for a headcount on a floor that does not exist, state one person fewer." The doors did not open.

Instead, eligible participants in the group chat dropped to 3.