Nine Minutes to Choose

At 23:52, the left button on the D-13 audit terminal turned red.

Emergency stop.

The right button was white.

Copy original.

The cursor wavered once between the two buttons. The copy rate stood at 87 percent. The Q-13 key hanging around my neck grew warm inside my shirt. The heat rose later than it reached my skin, but it touched memory before it touched my fingertips. A small black fragment engraved with Seo Doyun's name. Of everything left to me after my brother died, it was the one authority that existed nowhere in the official record.

If I pressed the emergency stop, the copy transaction in progress would be discarded.

The terminal didn't bother warning me kindly of that fact. A footnote from the audit manual I'd already read once held my wrist in place. "Upon stoppage, the original fragment in the temporary partition is discarded." One line. Shorter than a person's name.

23:53:10.

I set my finger on the right button.

A low alarm sounded from the ceiling speaker first. Right after, the oxygen level indicator for the calibration room switched from yellow to red. A small window opened in the lower right corner of the screen.

"Oxygen alarm, Calibration Room B. Manual ventilation delayed."

At the same moment, the audit terminal's voice channel spat out static.

"Ms. Seo Ihyeon, can you hear me."

It was Yun Haewon's voice. The deputy director's calm diction was cut off halfway. Still, the words survived.

"The calibration room door won't open. Send someone to the manual ventilation side. There's no time to explain right now."

The copy rate changed to 88.

I enlarged the comms window. Yun Haewon spoke again.

"Don't press the emergency stop. No, wait. That's not it, people first, "

The sentence was shredded by static. I looked at the left button. If I pressed the emergency stop, the original would vanish. My brother's original 2019 log. The sentence spanning the eight years in which a dead man had been left on record as a reckless test subject. Both sides of the file Hong Sangwook had signed "for the sake of the whole institution." The real time Yun Haewon had promised to make public tonight.

23:55:02.

The oxygen alarm moved to its second stage. The terminal flashed a warning that the alarm sound might cause a copy error. It was a strange priority. Not because the machine worried about the record before the person. I was the one reading that window.

My finger pressed the right button.

Copy original.

The progress bar advanced one notch. 89 percent.

In the lower left, "Mute alarm, 600 seconds" appeared. I pressed mute. My finger wasn't damp, and it didn't shake. Only the numbers climbed. 90, 91, 92.

Yun Haewon's channel didn't cut off. The speaker had only gone silent; the status window kept blinking. The recorder on my waist belt was still on, but I closed the screen. I judged that the original I could protect now came before anything I could check later. That judgment surfaced first.

23:59:48.

At a copy rate of 99 percent, the number stopped.

The Q-13 key grew hotter beneath my collarbone. I pulled my shirt collar and drew the key out. On its surface, which looked like black glass, the terminal's red dot was reflected. The emergency stop button had already entered the key before my hand did. The reflection seemed to move ahead of the real thing. It could have been the lighting. It could have been fatigue. At the time, I confirmed neither.

00:04:11.

The completion tone sounded.

Only then did I run.

The automatic door of the D-13 audit room was already opening before I pressed my palm to it. The security system had ranked the oxygen alarm as top priority, yet it hadn't released the entry lock until the copy transaction finished. This sequence, too, could be logged. I checked whether the auxiliary camera on the doorframe was alive. The green dot beside the lens was off.

Even then, I checked.

Before the fact that a person was inside a closed room, I chose what someone could later prove and by whom. My feet were running toward the corridor, and my eyes were counting the dead dots of the ceiling cameras. That gap made no sound inside me. Instead, only the dampness on the stairway rail, the flicker of the emergency lights, and the heat of the Q-13 key came in, one after another.

When I opened the door of the D-13 audit room, the corridor lights were out in pairs. The emergency lights lit the yellow floor line in broken segments, and inside the ventilation duct came the sound of metal cooling. The calibration room was on the opposite side from the living quarters, midway down toward the underground core. Nine minutes ran shorter in the corridor. With every three steps I descended, the count fell. Eight minutes forty seconds. Eight minutes thirteen seconds. Seven minutes fifty-eight seconds.

I ran into O Sejin in front of the elevator. The top button of his white coat was misaligned. He had an emergency bag in his hand, and his right thumb rubbed the bag's handle three times.

"Is it the calibration room?"

I nodded.

O Sejin didn't check his watch. Instead, he glanced at the Q-13 on my neck, then lowered his eyes.

"Why did the oxygen alarm come up only now?"

"A central network delay."

A lie had to be short. That was what I'd learned. But short didn't make it a good lie.

Kang Taejun had already arrived in front of the calibration room. The sleeve of his black security jacket sat slightly raised at his left wrist. Whether it was an old injury or the terminal bracelet underneath wasn't immediately clear. He watched me with the manual panel beside the door left open.

"What time did you check the alarm."

"Open the door first, right now."

"Let me change the question. What time did you know."

I didn't answer.

In place of my answer, Kang Taejun looked at my hand. There was white powder from the audit terminal on my fingertips. It was the dry coating dust that only clung to the D-13 keyboard. He saw it, and so did O Sejin.

00:12:40.

The manual panel released. The door didn't open all at once. A gap opened three fingers wide, and cold air came out from inside. Air in an oxygen-poor room isn't cold. Even so, my skin turned cold. That was my own interpretation. In fact, the ventilation fan had only just begun turning, belatedly.

Yun Haewon lay collapsed beneath the glass wall inside the calibration room.

The left sleeve of his white shirt was rolled up to the elbow. A broken emergency medicine case lay on the floor. There wasn't much blood. That was why it looked like death only later. O Sejin knelt and checked his pupils. He announced the time.

"00:14. No response."

Kang Taejun turned toward me.

"What button did you press."

The question was more precise than the alarm's timing. It was a question I could answer, and one where answering it would end every calculation.

I looked at Yun Haewon's right jacket pocket. It was empty. I'd heard his management key normally went there. Whether that was information I'd just heard today or something I'd already known wasn't clear. Instead, his left trouser pocket bulged a little. Kang Taejun turned his body, blocking that spot from view.

"Ms. Seo Ihyeon."

I gripped the Q-13. The key was hotter than it had been a moment ago.

00:16:47.

The ceiling lights switched to white. The yellow line of the emergency lights vanished, and the reflection on the calibration room's glass wall receded. O Sejin lifted his head. Kang Taejun gripped my shoulder. The grip came in hard, but it was force meant to fix my position, not to restrain me.

"What did you open."

Again, I couldn't answer.

00:17:13.

A white pulse rose from the floor.

The light didn't flash. It folded. The calibration room's glass wall flattened first, and instead of lifting off my shoulder, Kang Taejun's hand rewound back toward his wrist. O Sejin's emergency bag returned to its closed state. The pieces of the broken case didn't rise from the floor; they slid back into a place that had never been broken to begin with.

The last thing I saw was Yun Haewon's left trouser pocket. The bulging line went flat.

When I opened my eyes, my fingers were still gripping the Q-13.

00:17:13.

There was a single water stain on the ceiling of my room in the living quarters. It was the stain I'd seen the night before. Or rather, if it was even right to call it the night before. My handheld terminal showed 00:17 on July 6th. Exactly one day before Yun Haewon died.

I got out of bed. The socks I'd dropped on the floor sat folded on the chair. The auxiliary battery I'd plugged into the D-13 audit terminal was in my bag's inside pocket. There was no completed copy file. The recorder from my waist belt was gone too. Instead, on the desk sat a new recorder, still unopened in its packaging.

The things had come back.

I didn't go straight into the corridor. I unwrapped the recorder on the desk and turned it on. The new file number was 0001. There was no record left over from the equipment the night before. It was an obvious result, but it still needed confirming. People remembered; things had returned. It was too soon to state that as fact, but at least it held true in my own hands.

On the small whiteboard beside the door of my quarters, the arrival schedule still remained. "07:40 breakfast, 09:00 audit briefing, 13:13 preliminary D-13 access." Handwriting I'd passed by without a thought the morning before. One magnet at the bottom of the board sat tilted. I straightened the magnet, then turned it crooked again. To see whether a mark I made by hand would still be there next time, I couldn't change it now. The first verification had to preserve the original shape.

I opened the door and stepped into the corridor. The night lighting of the living quarters was steady. Traces remained on the floor of someone having pushed a cleaning cart through. The direction of the handle, the wet marks, the minute hand of the wall clock. All of it looked like yesterday's. The word yesterday caught somewhere inside me.

At 07:02, Kang Taejun took over the shift at the living quarters' security gate. He asked me for identification, and before I lifted my badge, he looked at his own wrist. It was the same hand that had gripped my shoulder in the calibration room the night before. A living hand doesn't know the past. Only the position of the wrist bandage matched.

"Are you Seo Ihyeon from the audit team."

"That's right."

"Access authorization begins at 13:00 today. Before that, use only the living quarters and the briefing room."

He held his gaze a second longer, as if hunting for something wrong in my answer. I said, "Understood." It wasn't that I was trying not to recall his question from the night before. If I recalled it, my expression would lag behind.

At 07:40, Noeul had already come out to the cafeteria. He pulled a dry cloth from the cleaning cart and turned the cup handles inward. When I opened my mouth, he shifted one step to a position where he could see my face. He held out a short text panel.

"Coffee's on the right. Don't touch the cups."

I wasn't sure whether I'd seen the same words the day before. But I remembered the direction of the cup handles. Inward. All of them, inward. If someone changed it later, Noeul would be the first to notice. He caught me staring at the cups too long and raised an eyebrow.

I shook my head. I didn't have the standing to ask yet.

At 08:03, Mun Rahee stood in front of the safety panel at the cafeteria entrance. The woman with white hair tied low didn't open the panel; she only checked the numbers on its closed cover. 13.2, 13.2, 13.1. Her finger moved to the next line before the display even changed. It was the kind of action a designer could manage. I couldn't conclude that she knew about the loop. I only noted how easily that conclusion could form.

08:12.

In front of the cafeteria's coffee machine, I looked at the black glass. A white coat was reflected first. One second later, the ceiling speaker spoke.

"Current time, 08:12. The typhoon alert level remains in effect."

The white coat reflected in the black glass entered my actual line of sight only after passing through the door. It was O Sejin. He closed the door to the medicine room and walked into the cafeteria. His top button was fastened straight.

Noeul was behind the counter, aligning the cup handles in the same direction. He was at an angle where he couldn't see the shape of my mouth. His hands were precise. Every cup's handle faced inward.

Yun Haewon was sitting in the second seat by the window.

He was alive.

He wasn't still the way a dead man is. He pushed the corner of a folder square with his thumb, and when the cup handle wasn't turned toward him, he spun it half a turn with two fingers. That small motion made the posture on the calibration room floor come into sharper focus. Before any confirmation of death, I saw the way he fixed things while alive.

Body heat leaves no record, but the direction of objects does. That was the first piece of evidence I could hold onto.

He set the folder down and put his hand into his right jacket pocket. A small management key caught on his fingertip, then slipped back in. His left trouser pocket lay flat.

I stopped where I stood.

Yun Haewon lifted his head.

"Ms. Seo Ihyeon. The D-13 access verification can wait until this afternoon. You arrived late yesterday, after all."

Yesterday.

The ceiling speaker's announcement chime rang again, at exactly the same interval. Inside the coffee machine's black glass, Yun Haewon was looking at me one second before I looked at him.