The Unregistered Card

The door reader scanned Im Seoha's employee badge three times.

All three times, unregistered card.

Inside the door, an Im Seoha who had already entered stood there.

Until yesterday, that hadn't been a contradiction.

The name left on the current electronic roster was a single character: Ha. The employee badge still had all three characters intact, and the paper shift schedule listed Im Seoha alongside employee number 4721. The door didn't trust the paper.

Seoha didn't tap the card a fourth time. She wrote down the times of the first three attempts in the margin of the paper. 12:23:11 a.m., 14, 18.

"I'm not doing a re-registration."

In the security booth, Bak Gitae tapped his key ring against the desk twice. He checked the fire door threshold before he checked the terminal.

"If we make a card that lets in the person who's already inside, we won't know which side is actually coming in. There was a case before where we fixed the numbers outside the door and lost track of the person inside."

His tone stayed polite, but his voice dropped.

"That door in particular."

What he pointed at wasn't the center's front door but the emergency stairwell at the end of the hallway. Seoha didn't follow his gaze. What she needed right now wasn't a building story, it was the entry status.

"Show me the handwritten log. And the CCTV from 12:10 on."

Gitae handed over the log but kept the pen in his own hand. Entry time 11:56 p.m., Im Seoha. The signature was hers too. The CCTV footage showed a figure walking toward desk 4 from behind. The badge, the person, and the handwritten record were all inside the building. Only the access authorization had disappeared.

The security booth printer made a short chirp. Paper came out without Gitae touching it.

"Error correction target: 4721"

"Action: reregister card or have subject exit the building"

The sending account belonged to Quality Audit Manager Oh Hyeonju. Below that was a line: "Temporary restoration possible if subject exits and reenters."

"So it's saying if I go outside and come back in, it's fixed," Gitae said.

"Right now the door doesn't recognize my card as a person. If it just sends me out, there's no way to confirm I'll be let back in."

Seoha didn't sign the correction slip. Instead she asked Gitae to copy the CCTV timestamps and the handwritten log line. Gitae answered by pulling out a sheet of carbon paper from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, its edges worn from long use.

"These days everyone trusts the copier and not the pressed marks. A copier takes orders. Carbon paper only takes the hand that's on top of it."

He slid the carbon paper under the handwritten log and pressed the same line again. The original showed blue ink; the sheet underneath showed the impression marks and purple lettering.

"Today we need the pressed copy too."

The office messenger chimed three times at Yuna's desk. Seoha picked up on the security booth's extension.

"Seoha. My payroll account is gone too. No, not that the contract ended, it's no subject found for query. Honestly that wording is worse."

Yuna was talking faster than usual. She caught a breath, like a correction in parentheses, and kept going.

"What about your pay stub?"

"Last month's is gone, but this month's contract is still in local cache. Oh, and the printer keeps chirping on its own. Even with the paper out, the roller sound's still there."

Now the payroll had dropped her too. If this were a glitch on a single screen, there'd be no reason for a separate access terminal and payroll server to lose the same employee number at the same time. Instead of jumping to a conclusion, Seoha narrowed down what needed confirming. Employee number intact, name missing, entry denied, payroll unqueryable.

"Don't touch the originals, just record the sound first. I'm coming over."

Before she crossed the booth's threshold, Gitae held out a clear plastic bag. Inside was an employee badge he said he'd picked up off the floor. Water had pooled only inside the bag; the outside was dry. The photo had lifted from moisture and the face was unreadable. The ink in the name field had smeared too, but the shift memo on the back of the card still showed today's date and 11:48 p.m. That matched Baek Dowon's dispatch time to the field site.

"Is this Dowon's?"

"Field techs clip theirs to their hard hats, they don't wear a lanyard like this." Gitae tapped his keys once more. "And it's not company property from this building either."

Seoha didn't guess at the unknown name. Moisture, today's date, 11:48 p.m. She wrote only those three things on the outside of the bag. The wet badge went into the security booth's storage locker, and Gitae kept the locker key.

"Just ask Dowon to confirm. Don't lead with a name, describe the card's shape and the time."

Gitae opened the radio channel. After the static came two metallic knocks. Dowon's confirmation signal.

"11:48 p.m. Wet employee badge. Lanyard type," Seoha said. "Do you have anything like that on site?"

After a brief silence, Dowon's voice came through.

"No. This is a dry machine room."

"The photo's lifted, so the owner's unconfirmed."

"Don't put a name to it. Send me what kind of moisture it is first."

It sounded like an order, but it was the right point. Seoha didn't look at the bag again.

"Got it. I'll send the screen records too."

"Don't just send screens."

Seoha held up the carbon copy Gitae had made without folding it. "I'm sending the handwritten log and the card scan times together. The moisture sample gets sealed separately with a swab."

Two metallic tones came back over the radio. A signal that meant their judgment had been trusted at some past scene. Guilt and trust could sit side by side inside the same two tones.

Back at the center, printer 4 was running without paper. Every time the roller turned, the empty plastic tray clicked, clicked. Yuna had set an old work recorder next to the printer instead of her phone.

"If I use my personal phone, the company can win on a personal data leak claim. This one's from the disposal list. Hasn't been disposed of yet."

On the main screen for desk 4, the ticket was still open. After the countdown had stopped at the end of chapter 1, Seoha had flipped the switch and rebooted the unit. Only the external line was still submerged in the paper cup. Countdown 00:03. Handler 4721. With only the employee number left instead of a name, the screen looked, if anything, cleaner.

"Did you see the bottom of the printout?" Yuna asked.

The three sheets from chapter 1 were tucked separately between clear plastic sleeves. Yuna didn't touch them with her fingers, just angled the desk lamp at them. Small text not found in the usual format showed up along the edge of the paper.

"The first reader cannot be removed from the shift until processing is complete."

Seoha didn't just read the sentence as it stood. She checked the order of it. First reader. Before processing is complete. Cannot be removed from shift.

"I opened it, so my employee number got attached, and until it closes, it can't be handed off to another shift."

"Then what about the pop up telling you to leave?"

"It's saying I can't be taken off the shift, but I should be taken out of the building."

Yuna pressed her lips shut. This wasn't a place for jokes. The screen was holding onto a person while the door tried to push the same person out. Whichever they chose, Complete or exit, it pointed toward creating an empty slot.

"It's not a solution," Seoha said. "What we've confirmed so far is just that the reader and the handler share the same employee number, and that while that number is attached, the name and authorization drop out."

"Two channels?"

"The printout, and the entry and payroll records. This time we keep both."

At that moment a new command appeared on the printer's management window.

"Remote queue cleanup: audit office"

The first item in the queue was the 00:17 printout. 15 seconds to deletion. Yuna reached for the printer's power switch, then stopped.

"If I cut power, the memory might go with it."

"Paper first."

Yuna pulled the entire paper tray out. The roller kept turning on empty. The deletion command erased the file name from the printer's memory, but the paper already printed didn't vanish. Seoha read out the sheet's serial number while Yuna spoke the roller sound and the deletion time into the recorder in order.

"I'll make an offline copy."

"A personal storage device means disciplinary action."

Yuna opened the payroll screen with the missing employee number once more. She didn't just photograph it from a distance. She turned off her laptop's network, switched on the built in camera, and captured the full screen, the timestamp in the bottom right, and the queried employee number 4721 all in one shot. The security booth's entry terminal couldn't be moved. While Gitae explained the terminal error screen over the wired extension, Yuna took a mobile training laptop out into the hallway.

Seoha didn't follow her. She had to stay and protect ticket 4 and the printout. Instead, she left the blank spaces in the evidence list open until Yuna came back.

Seven minutes later, Yuna came back with the laptop tucked under her arm, carrying the carbon copy carefully so it wouldn't crease. The camera had captured the unregistered card message, the three scan times at 12:23, and employee number 4721 all together. The file name was different from the payroll screen capture, and the timestamps ran in sequence.

"Yeah. I chose between getting disciplined with evidence on record, or ending up with nothing once my contract's over."

She pulled an old USB drive out of a drawer. Not a personal item with character stickers on it, but a discarded company asset with its number half worn off. She plugged it into the network disconnected training laptop and copied the recordings, the handwritten copy, the printout photos, and the entry and payroll screen captures into separate folders.

The hash looked like a long, meaningless string of characters. Yuna didn't lecture her on it. She just showed Seoha how changing a single character in a file changed the number.

"If this string matches later, even if the company denies it, we can prove the file wasn't altered at this point in time. A screenshot doesn't mean the screen was telling the truth, it's proof that this sentence existed at that time."

"Paper, sound, screen, handwritten time."

"And a record that I'm the one who made this. So nobody can pin it on some genius hacker later."

Yuna wrote down her own employee number and the creation time in a handwritten memo. The lowest ranked contract worker had put her own name on record, disciplinary risk and all. Seoha didn't say she'd take responsibility instead. That would have been another way of taking away the risk Yuna had chosen for herself.

"I'll sign it with you."

"That's good. No solo hero patch allowed."

The two of them signed the same paper with different pens. Even if Seoha's name disappeared from the screen, both their pressed signatures would remain on the paper.

At 12:40 a.m., the phone at desk 4 rang.

The display showed no caller number. The open ticket's countdown still read 3 seconds.

Seoha switched on the speakerphone. Before asking anything, she checked the recorder's timestamp.

"Night Complaints Transfer Center. Please state your address."

From inside the receiver came the sound of the printer roller striking the empty tray.

Click. Click.

"The address is."

The voice answered a beat too late.

"Desk 4."