Two Channels in Conflict

The printer said to hold.

The phone said to complete.

Both used the company logo.

Instead of the logo, Baek Dowon trusted the wire inside the wall.

The number beside Yuna's name dropped to 00:24. The handler transfer bar hadn't passed the halfway mark, but it hadn't stopped either. The break room printer pushed out a sheet of paper. The roller ran longer than usual for a single page.

`Processing status: Hold`

`Completion prohibited before field line verification`

Mijin caught both sides of the output tray without pulling the paper out. If she yanked it, it would tear right there. Seoha looked past the company logo to the print timestamp first.

01:34:06.

The wall clock was also passing 1:34 and 6 seconds. The second hand was moving.

Just then the break room phone rang. The caller ID showed the night transfer center's main number. Seoha turned on the speaker and her own voice came out of it.

"To prevent a change of handler, complete the current ticket. After completion, candidate status will be restored."

The number became 00:19.

Yuna didn't cover her name with her finger. Instead she opened a new document on one side of her laptop screen.

"Phone says complete. Printer says hold. One of them's lying. Or, could be forged."

"Both could be forged," Seoha said.

"Thanks for the hopeful third option."

At the end of the joke, Yuna's hand slipped. A key got pressed twice. Yuna didn't delete it. She added a timestamp next to the typo instead. A record that her own hand had shaken.

Seoha didn't pick up the receiver. "Not now, in order. Where's the printer wired to?"

Dowon crouched under the printer's power cord. The communication line went into the wall molding. He rapped the molding twice with the handle of his wrench.

"Runs through the wiring room to the field network. The phone?"

"It's the main number, so it's an outside line," Mijin answered.

Dowon flipped the phone over. Only the power adapter was there. The LAN port was empty and the phone jack was packed with dust. Seoha checked and there were no fingermarks in the dust.

The phone still spoke in Seoha's voice.

"Completion processing is being delayed."

00:13.

Mijin stood her employee badge up between the receiver and Yuna, as if it were a button someone else could press. "What proof do we have that's actually her voice?"

"None."

Seoha moved the cursor over the complete button on screen, then stopped. She didn't trust the printer paper either. She wrote the two commands into two separate blank fields.

Phone, complete. Physical source unverified.

Printer, hold. Field network connection assumed.

"Two hypotheses. Verify with two different objects."

Dowon grabbed the wiring room key and insulated gloves. Yuna's number read 00:09.

"If I go down there, time runs out."

"Check it anyway," Seoha said. "We're not completing Yuna's ticket on one channel's say."

Yuna asked without looking up from the screen. "This hold is on the side of me staying alive, right?"

"That's what we're going down to find out."

Rather than say it would be fine with no basis for it, Seoha handed Dowon the radio. He pressed the button twice. Seoha answered twice back.

00:06.

Dowon went out the door.

The building's wiring room sat half a floor below the center. Four steps down, the ceiling dropped low, and old cable tags hung layered over newer wiring. Dowon didn't close the steel door. He wedged a chock in so the exit stayed in view.

"Reached the wiring room. Not touching anything yet."

Over the radio, Yuna read the numbers. "Five, four, three."

Dowon didn't pull out cutters. He set a voltage tester, an infrared thermometer, and a palm sized vibration meter on the floor. The wiring diagram labeled the printer's field line as P-17. The actual terminal box marked P-17 carried an old label reading pump station remote alarm line.

"Numbers don't match."

"Which side is wrong?" Seoha asked.

"Diagram says printer. Wall says pump station. Both say 17."

At 00:02 the break room phone rang louder. Yuna couldn't get the number out. Instead she hit her keyboard three times. The radio mic picked up the sound.

Without touching anything, Dowon held the vibration meter to the P-17 cable. Every time the printer stamped a line, the needle moved. Seoha pressed the printer's paper feed button once. The needle in the wiring room jumped once.

"Printer signal confirmed."

"And the phone?"

Dowon touched the voltage tester to the main line terminal. No light. Even while the phone rang, the heat and vibration stayed flat. He switched terminals and checked three times. No signal anywhere on the outside line.

"The phone isn't running on wire."

The number hit 00:00.

Seoha pressed Hold instead of Complete.

The screen flashed white. The orange around Yuna's name peeled away from the edges in. The handler transfer bar stopped between Seoha and Yuna. The name didn't disappear.

For the first time, the voice on the phone that was Seoha's own voice got the words wrong.

"Completion status has been successfully held."

Yuna wrote that sentence down exactly as it came. The moment completion and hold landed in the same sentence. Mijin pulled the phone's plug. It rang once more, then went dead.

Dowon was still in the wiring room. "Did the hold take?"

"Yuna's name stays. The bar's stopped."

"Fine, but there's another vibration coming off P-17."

Dowon moved the vibration meter to the neighboring cable. The three strands labeled pump station remote alarm line trembled in sequence. It wasn't the even vibration of a line in normal use. The spacing was uneven, like someone knocking on a door three times.

The first was short, short.

The second was long, short.

The third paused a while, then went long.

Yuna's laptop chimed with a queue alert three times.

Seoha didn't open the new tickets, just the previews. All three had the same intake address.

`Northwest District Pump Station No. 4`

A facility that had been shut down for six years.

The descriptions differed. The first ticket listed water sounds underground, the second an elevator entrapment, the third a power outage in a night reading room. The pump station had no elevator and no reading room.

Dowon's radio came through the static.

"Fine, three addresses."

"Don't open them yet," Seoha said.

"Haven't. The line came first."

Dowon stepped back from the terminal box. He could have cut the line to match the diagram, but with the actual cable numbers off, cutting it now meant not knowing what would stop where. He put the cutters back in his bag.

Seoha laid the printer's hold slip on top of the paper shift schedule. She wrote the phone's completion demand down beside it. Neither one got labeled as the rule.

Yuna made four columns on the new document.

Hypothesis. Evidence. Counterexample. Cost.

"Hypothesis one. Priority goes to the printer instruction connected to the field network."

"Evidence," Seoha said. "Printer feed and P-17 vibration timestamps match."

"Counterexample. The P-17 label doesn't match the diagram. The printer could get wired to something else at any time too."

Yuna's hand stopped at the last column.

Dowon answered over the radio instead. "Cost. While we waited to verify, three tickets opened on the pump station side."

Mijin pointed beside Yuna's name. The orange was gone, but a gray border remained. "And candidate status hasn't been released. It's only paused."

Yuna started to type "survival," then deleted it. She changed it to "current name retained."

"Not a successful patch. A delayed forced termination."

"Log it in those words," Seoha said.

Seoha reached to fill in the cost column, then stopped her pen. Instead of repeating what she'd already written, she pulled up the pump station's remote status. A water level gauge icon that should have shown gray for a closed facility was filling in blue. 12 percent, 14 percent, 17 percent. There was no way to tell from the screen alone whether real water was actually moving.

Dowon knelt on the wiring room floor and listened. Each time the three cables trembled, metal cooled somewhere behind the wall inside a thick pipe. He held that sound close to the radio mic. Yuna lined up the center screen's water level timestamps against the sound intervals. The first gap was 4 seconds, the next was 3.

"That's not a closed pump running," Dowon said. "That's the sound a backflow flap makes under pressure. Either water's coming, or someone's just faking the signal."

Mijin pulled up the facility's emergency contact list. In place of a number for the No. 4 pump station's duty desk, there was a closure approval document number. When she dialed that number, the cordless phone in the center rang first. Mijin didn't answer the call, just wrote down the time it rang.

Yuna added a new line to the cost column.

`After hold, closed pump station water level display rising. Timing close to pipe sounds in wiring room. Actual water level unverified.`

Only then did Seoha write down the cost of her own choice. Yuna's name had stayed, but the gray candidate border hadn't cleared, and at a pump station with no one on site, signals neither channel could judge yet kept multiplying. Nowhere in any column did it say she'd gotten the right answer.

Dowon checked the chock at the wiring room threshold with his foot. "I'm coming up. Leaving the line as is."

When he stood, black moisture had soaked into the knee of his coveralls. The wiring room floor had been dry when he came in. Dowon didn't wipe it off. He pressed one insulated glove down on the spot instead. A marker to check later whether it kept getting wet after he left. Yuna noted the glove's position and the floor tile number under the cost column.

"Press it twice."

Two confirmation beeps came over the radio. Seoha returned two.

All three lines in the queue updated at once. The address stayed the same. Only the descriptions shifted, each one sliding into the next slot. The underground water sound moved to elevator entrapment, elevator entrapment moved to the reading room power outage.

The change timestamp was identical for all three.

01:43:17.

The wall clock's second hand stopped once at 17 seconds, then moved again.

Yuna counted the letters on screen and said,

"One address. Three descriptions. Which side do we lock down with two channels next?"

Seoha copied the closed pump station's address onto paper. Underneath it, the line still read `Completion prohibited before field line verification.`

"The address first. Not on screen, whether the door actually exists."

Just then all three tickets' handler fields opened at once.

All three were empty.