The Body Outside the Locked Room

17:50, Yun Haewon stopped in front of the security room door.

The security room was a good room for protecting someone. No windows, entry logs kept, and even the button that opened it from inside had to pass through Kang Taejun's terminal. It was also a good room for shutting someone in. Yun Haewon was not a man who failed to know the difference.

“The word protection usually asks the person inside for consent late.”

he said. In his right upper pocket was a management key. The unnamed envelope from chapter 6 had gone inside his briefcase. The Q-13 watermark showed only when the paper was turned away from the light, but once seen it stayed even when it could not be seen.

Kang Taejun opened the security room panel.

“After 23:00 today, the deputy director will be separated from the calibration room and the underground section. Reason: possible threat to his person. The record goes under my name.”

“It can go under my name,” Yun Haewon said.

“Under your name, it reads later as your own choice. Under my name, it becomes my action.”

He bound the protection to his own responsibility. That made it more dangerous. The more an action carries Kang Taejun's name, the longer he holds it.

I checked the wall clock inside the security room. Central time. 17:50:42. I had deliberately left my own wristwatch unset. No large discrepancy had shown up yet, but if I was going to distrust the central network, I needed to keep a reference of my own.

Yun Haewon looked at me as he stepped through the door.

“What do you want, Seo Ihyeon: my survival, or the envelope's next reaction?”

“Both.”

“And if I made you pick one.”

I could not answer at once. He saw the delay. The moment when the person who had analyzed a pocket after death ran late in front of a living person's right to choose. Yun Haewon did not miss it.

“Let's set a time limit. One hour after the first authentication at 18:00. If nothing changes by then, I walk out.”

Kang Taejun said,

“I set the conditions for walking out.”

“Then I am not going in.”

The two did not trust each other. Thanks to that distrust, the conditions came out clear. Yun Haewon would stay in the security room until 19:00, Kang Taejun would log every entry and exit, and I would watch the first authentication door at 18:00. Three lines of conditions were better than the word protection.

At 18:00, the call tone sounded first in front of door 4.

That was the first change. In the last loop, Kang Taejun had put his thumb down and an envelope with his name on it had printed. This time a call came in from the infirmary at 17:59:51. `Confirmation needed for emergency equipment removal.` It was O Sejin's terminal.

Kang Taejun was in the security room with Yun Haewon. He tried to leave, and Yun Haewon stopped him.

“The condition is one hour.”

“It is an emergency call.”

“The medical officer in charge can handle it.”

That sentence is what moved O Sejin. It was an input made by Yun Haewon, not by Ihyeon. O Sejin arrived at door 4 with a gray waterproof jacket over his white coat. His right hand held the handle of the emergency bag, and his left hand opened the terminal cover.

“Is it all right to open this without Team Leader Kang's approval?”

“For medical equipment removal, yes,” Kang Taejun said over the security room line.

O Sejin put his thumb down.

Door 4 opened, and an envelope pushed out of the printer behind it.

I saw the front of it before the envelope fell.

Kang Taejun.

O Sejin's hand touched the paper. He saw that it was not his own name and did not let go at once. It was a hand where the reaction to read arrived before the judgment to release. The top of the envelope was slightly parted. It was not fully sealed the way the last one had been.

“Doctor O, put it down.”

Kang Taejun's voice came later than mine. An order routed through the call speaker arrived one second late. In that one second, O Sejin saw the first line inside the envelope.

His right thumb rubbed the corner of the paper twice.

“It is not mine.”

“Then put it down.”

O Sejin set the envelope on top of the printer. But the envelope was already open. If open is too strong a word, then say that one line inside had shown enough to move a person.

I looked at the log. `Door 4 / first authentication / 18:00:07 / user O-SEJIN.` There was no recipient name. Kang Taejun existed only on the paper. The order Yun Haewon had spoken picked a person. More precisely, the gap between the door, the user and the paper pushed a person.

O Sejin said he would wash his hands. He added that he had to check the emergency equipment. Both were plausible. He was the medical officer in charge, and he had just handled an envelope printed with someone else's name. Washing his hands and checking equipment could both look like ordinary motions.

But he did not go toward the sink. He took three steps in the direction of the infirmary, stopped, and looked back at the printer where the envelope lay. The glance was short. He did not reach for it again. Still, it was not the check of a man who had left the paper behind, but of a man who had kept part of the paper on his body.

“Doctor O.” I called him.

“It is not mine.”

He repeated the same sentence. Repetition can be a defense, and it can also be a way of fixing something in memory.

“Then why did you look again.”

“I checked the name.”

“You had already seen the name.”

O Sejin did not answer. His right thumb pressed once against the lower pocket of his coat. I watched that hand. O Sejin knew that I had watched it. He took his hand away and walked more slowly. The calculation that moving in a hurry looks like hiding something. A man who is still calculating has not collapsed yet.

Over the security room line, Yun Haewon spoke low.

“Seo Ihyeon, if you hold him, someone else moves.”

“If I do not hold him, he moves.”

“That is why I made the envelopes.”

It did not sound like an excuse. It was a worse thing to say. It meant he had known that whether a person was held or let go, someone else would move. Yun Haewon admitted that his own design had reduced people to options, and still he had not yet seen which of them those options would kill.

At 20:30, O Sejin was not in the infirmary.

In his place, three patient belongings envelopes were lined up in the lower left compartment. One was empty, and one had its name tag half torn off. The emergency bag sat beside the bed, but the handle faced the wrong way. The trace of something set down in a hurry.

Hong Sanguk's call record was at 20:12. `Query on outer calibration room ventilation check.` O Sejin did not respond. Instead, at 20:17, he looked up the position of the calibration room access door on his own terminal.

“Why would a doctor go to the outer calibration room.”

Kang Taejun did not answer over the security room line right away. He was holding Yun Haewon in the security room, and because of that choice someone else had moved. He knew it too.

“I am not taking the deputy director out. Seo Ihyeon, confirm his current position only. Do not make contact.”

“If I do not make contact, I will be late again.”

“Has making contact ever made you early?”

He did not take up my sentence; he went straight at my record. He was right. Twice now I had seen that the faster I moved one person, the later another one became. Even so, I could not stand still.

I found O Sejin at the end of the infirmary corridor. He was standing in front of the emergency stairs down to the outer calibration room. There was no envelope with Kang Taejun's name. More than absent, it was a posture with both hands deliberately emptied so that he would look like a man not holding one. The lower pocket of the white coat sagged a little.

“Doctor O.”

He turned around.

“There is a patient.”

“Where.”

“It is still hard to call them a patient.”

His sentences got shorter. The careful clinical language did not hold. A man who has seen the envelope cannot keep his own manner of speech for long.

“What was in that envelope.”

“It is not my envelope.”

“I saw that much.”

“Then ask nothing further.”

He went down the stairs. I moved to follow, and Kang Taejun's voice cut in over the security room line.

“Seo Ihyeon, stop.”

I did not stop. If I stopped, Yun Haewon lived and O Sejin died. If I did not stop, a different result could come. Either way, it is an input.

At 23:58, the ventilation passage outside the calibration room was wet.

It was not water leaking in from the rain. Condensation on the wall had drawn a line along the floor of the passage. The ventilation fan was turning, but the sound was not even. Four seconds running, one second cut. The repetition looked like a mechanical fault, and a fault gives somebody time.

Yun Haewon was in the security room. The door was locked, and Kang Taejun stood in front of it. The protection had succeeded.

O Sejin lay collapsed beside the outer calibration room door.

I tried not to write body straight away. But O Sejin's right hand was clutching his own coat pocket instead of the emergency bag. His eyes faced the ceiling, and the smell of dust reached his lips before any smell of medicine. There was no trace of a direct attack. No handprints around the neck. Instead, one screw was missing from the underside of the vent cover.

Kang Taejun arrived late. He came having left Yun Haewon in the security room. That choice carried a cost too.

“Do not approach.”

He blocked my way and knelt. He turned his wrist so the bandage would not touch the wet floor. He felt for O Sejin's pulse and checked the time.

“23:59. No response.”

“It is not 00:14.”

My words came out first. Kang Taejun spoke without looking at me.

“Where did the time you just compared that to come from?”

I did not answer. The time had changed. The victim had changed, the place had changed, and the hour of death had changed too. What had not changed was the envelope.

O Sejin's right hand opened slowly in Kang Taejun's. Inside was a torn scrap of paper. It was soaked and the edges of the letters had bled, but part of it remained.

`Kang Tae`

Part of Kang Taejun's name.

The direction of the tear did not match the perforation on the Kang Taejun envelope I had seen in chapter 6. It was not a scrap from an envelope opened properly, but a scrap torn out from the inside in a hurry. Someone might have been trying to hide the name, or trying to take away some sentence other than the name. Wet paper fibers were caught under O Sejin's fingernails. He had not let go of the paper until the moment before he died.

I looked at the floor under the vent. Another thin white scrap was stuck between the water marks. When I reached for it, Kang Taejun blocked my wrist.

“Preserve the scene.”

“It disappears when the day resets.”

“That is a claim, not evidence.”

He was right. So I drew my hand back. Instead I recited the position out loud. Lower right of the vent cover, two hand spans from the missing screw, at the end of the water mark. The paper can vanish and I can still hold the position. For memory to become evidence, I have to find the thing again later in the same place.

Kang Taejun started to put the scrap into an evidence envelope and stopped. There was no evidence envelope yet. He took out his own handkerchief and wrapped the paper in it. It was the moment a private object became temporary storage. Even a man who follows procedure uses his own things when he has no tools.

“Why is my name in O Sejin's hand.”

“Because of the first authentication at 18:00.”

“That is a sequence, not an explanation.”

“Right now the sequence is the explanation.”

He looked at me. Not because he believed me, but because my words had arrived too fast. I looked at O Sejin's coat pocket. More paper fibers clung to the inside. The trace of a man who tore the envelope and tried to hide part of it. What he had hidden, I could not say yet.

At 00:05, Yun Haewon came out of the security room.

Kang Taejun had not allowed it, but he got the door opened by way of the button inside. More precisely, he requested an emergency medical check from inside the security room, and one of Kang Taejun's subordinates opened it by procedure. Even shut in, Yun Haewon could pick a sentence and make a door open.

When he saw O Sejin, his steps stopped.

“Is this a result of my being alive.”

“The envelope comes first,” I said.

“Do not talk about it with the people left out.”

His words resembled what he had said in chapter 5. The man who told me not to leave out his living self while I talked about a pocket after death. This time he told me not to leave out the man who had died because he himself was alive.

Kang Taejun lifted the paper wrapped in the handkerchief.

“Deputy Director. Shut this envelope system down.”

“If there had been a shutdown button, I would not have made twelve envelopes.”

He was not a man who had foreseen everything. That was the worse fact. A man who made an envelope for each person without being able to foresee. The loss sitting there was larger than good will or justice.

At 00:16:47, the sound of the ventilation fan stopped.

I checked the time. The feeling of the air thinning before a reset cannot be explained, but it comes again and again. Kang Taejun followed my eyes and looked at his wristwatch.

“What are you waiting for now?”

“00:17:13.”

“What happens then?”

Before I answered, I looked at O Sejin's hand. A wet corner of paper showed a little past the handkerchief. The torn scrap of Kang Taejun's name. Objects disappear soon. Only memory stays.

White light began to fold up out of the corridor floor.

00:17:13.

O Sejin's handkerchief went back to being cloth that had never once been folded. The vent screw went back into its place, and Yun Haewon's face was pushed from the front of the security room to somewhere in the residence wing corridor. The hand Kang Taejun had been reaching toward my wrist disappeared too.

I opened my eyes.

00:17:13.

The water stain on the dormitory ceiling was in the same place. The objects had come back. O Sejin would be alive too. There was no scrap in my hand.

I did not open the packaging on the new recorder on the desk. Paper does not stay. Voice does not stay either. Instead I counted out loud.

Door 4. O Sejin. Kang Taejun envelope. 00:07 administrator command.

Whether that last line had been on the back of the scrap, or an inner letter showing through the wet paper, I was not certain. When I am not certain, I have to mark it. I drew three boxes on my wrist. A 4 in the first, an O in the second, a K in the third.

I did not fill the fourth box right away. `Administrator command` looks like a phrase pointing at a person, but in this research institute commands were more often kept as codes than as personal names. The time 00:07 was strange too. Yun Haewon had died in the 23:00 hour, and Kang Taejun had died at 00:14. O Sejin died at 23:59. 00:07 was a time earlier than any of the deaths, and a blank where I had not yet seen an event with my own eyes.

The most dangerous moment is when I want to fill a blank with a person's name. Hong Sanguk, Mun Rahui, Yun Haewon. Any of them could go into that slot. Being able to go in and going in are different. I marked only a small dot on my wrist.

In the fourth box I marked a question mark.

Confirm the 00:07 administrator command.