Kim Yuna's Name Was Printed on the Completion Form

Kim Yuna's name was printed on the completion form.

Kim Yuna was standing right next to it.

But the signature line was marked "Proxy for Absent Party."

Im Seoha set down the pen.

At 4:05, eighteen seconds after the break room intercom had called Yuna to wait for a completion signature, the printer moved. The paper came not from the multifunction machine inside the break room but from the shift record printer at the end of the hallway. Even after the waiting room status had cleared, the display window outside the doorway still faintly showed an unnumbered "Zone 7."

Mijin stood near the door with a cold pack fixed to her left arm. Following the record that said Yuna shouldn't lift anything above 92 degrees, she held the radio with her right hand only. Jeongho covered the SN-7-017 original and wrote down the receipt time before taking the new printout.

Seoha lifted the corner of the paper with tongs and set it on the break room table.

"Work Completion Confirmation."

Subject: Kim Yuna.

Status: Absent.

Processing method: Proxy for Absent Party.

If not completed, nighttime exception auto-executes in 60 seconds.

No one had written anything on the signature line below yet, but gray text already read "Proxy Confirmer: Im Seoha / 4721."

Even seeing her own name, Yuna didn't touch the paper first. She set her laptop in the middle of the table and turned on the current keystroke log. Left shift, K, Y, N, right enter. The five keys she normally used to clock in. The screen's offline input log recorded 04:05:31.

"I'm right here."

Seoha didn't use words alone as evidence. She had Yuna touch her employee card to the access terminal. The terminal couldn't display a name, but it printed the last four digits of the card's unique number, 2207, along with the current time. Mijin's handwritten 03:58 break shift log also still listed Yuna as the one who'd finished decontaminating the microwave.

Employee card, keyboard, handwritten shift log. Three channels all confirmed Yuna was present on site.

Only the completion form said absent.

Hyeonju came in over the center radio. "The document error of absence needs to be cleared first before the exception count can be stopped. If the designated proxy signs to confirm, the subject's status can be restored."

Seoha asked, "What status gets restored?"

"Shift completed and cleared to go home."

"Yuna's still here, and she hasn't said she refuses completion."

"That's why the procedure has the person in charge confirm on her behalf."

The small screen above the printer showed 60. 59, 58.

Dowon pressed the radio button twice from outside the break room doorway. Seoha answered twice at the same interval. Dowon looked at Yuna's seat before he looked at the paper. The four dents the rubber foot of Yuna's fourth keyboard had pressed into the floor, the blue tape on one of her chair wheels, the personal charging cable under her desk. All of it had been there until just now.

Seoha moved the pen three centimeters toward the proxy signature box.

One of the four dents from the keyboard foot faded.

The pen tip hadn't even touched the paper.

Dowon said, "The seat's disappearing first."

The blue tape on Yuna's chair wheel turned half transparent. Meanwhile, under Seoha's desk number 4, a charging cable loop appeared where there hadn't been one. Yuna's things weren't vanishing. It looked more like the marks of her seat were being copied over to Seoha's side.

Seoha pulled the pen back to its original position. The four dents didn't fully return. The blue tape only got half its color back. Mere proximity had caused a change that wasn't guaranteed to reverse.

Count 43.

Hyeonju said, "The risk of not signing also falls on the person in charge."

"If I sign in her place and Yuna's seat moves over to me, is that what you call restoration?"

"The current screen alone can't confirm a seat transfer."

"That's why I looked at the objects instead of the screen."

Dowon photographed the four dents and the blue tape along with the current time. He didn't draw the conclusion for her. "Before and after the pen movement. Once. No signature."

Seoha set the pen down.

Count 36.

On the emergency occupancy board next to the break room door, one number went dark.

5 became 4.

It was a separate system from the break room's safety assumptions, one that sent the number of people remaining inside to a manual rescue team during a fire or power outage. It normally read the ceiling heat sensors together with the pressure mats on the floor by the door. Right now five people's body heat showed up as five points on the screen, but the total read only 4.

Yuna checked the mat under her own feet. The green pressure light was on. She stepped back and it went off, stepped forward again and it came back on. The total didn't budge from 4.

"It's reading the body but dropping her from the headcount."

Dowon looked at the emergency door. The automatic closing mechanism was lowering a notch to match the occupancy count of 4. If Yuna stayed inside the door, she might not be counted among those to be rescued.

"Stop the door from closing."

Dowon jammed a rubber wedge in to physically hold the door open. He didn't use the completion button or anyone's name. He photographed the wedge's position and the 82 centimeter door width, and hung a tag on the automatic mechanism that read only "Site Blocked / Occupancy Mismatch."

The automatic closing motor pushed against the wedge three times. The rubber end got pressed four millimeters, but the door width held. Dowon didn't cut power to the motor, just logged the pressure on the repair list. A single missing number, Yuna, was actually shrinking the exit width.

Seoha didn't touch her own employee card to try to restore the occupancy board. Instead she captured Yuna's pressure light, the ceiling heat point, the handwritten shift log, and her current face all in one shot, then sent Dowon two radio confirmation beeps. Dowon answered with two as well.

"The display says absent. The physical says present," Seoha said.

"Don't square the numbers with a signature."

Dowon didn't take the pen from her. Seoha didn't turn his words into an order but left them in the margin of the log as a shared condition for stopping. Even before any proxy signature, not just Yuna's seat but a slot in the emergency headcount had already started closing.

Hyeonju kept demanding the proxy signature but couldn't get hold of Seoha's hand. The problem was the line that said if no one signed, the automatic exception would execute. If refusal itself went unrecorded, the system could read a blank field as consent.

Seoha asked Yuna, "Want to write your own status in your own words?"

"What do you mean?"

"I won't decide the wording. Whether you exist, whether you completed it, what you're refusing."

Yuna pulled the paper toward herself. She avoided the proxy signature line and chose the blank margin at the top of the form. She didn't write over the automatic text. She wrote her employee card number and keystroke time on the left.

Count 27.

Yuna pressed each letter down as she wrote.

"I, Kim Yuna, am present on site."

"I refuse both work completion and proxy confirmation as an absent party."

"My status cannot be completed without my own confirmation."

At the end, instead of a signature, she wrote the current time, 04:06:14, and the last four digits of her card, 2207. She didn't add a photo of her face or anyone else's name.

Count 18.

The gray auto-filled text "Proxy Confirmer: Im Seoha / 4721" flickered. Seoha's name faded first, leaving only 4721. Below it, a horizontal line appeared through the "Proxy for Absent Party" box.

It stopped at 17.

The completion status didn't change. Yuna still didn't show as cleared to go home. The handwritten refusal wasn't a cure all. It had only invalidated the one automatic proxy signature line.

Yuna pressed the same five keys on her keyboard again. This time only the left shift and K registered, and Y, N, and enter were missing from the input log. Her fingers had actually pressed them. The keycaps had made their sound. Only the system's trace of it had shrunk.

"The proxy box stopped, but my seat keeps getting erased."

Seoha didn't pull Yuna's hand off the keyboard. She didn't make her repeat the input either. She preserved only the one before and after.

She opened Yuna's employee profile. The photo, the name Kim Yuna, the employment type contract worker, all still there. The last 7 in employee number 2207 turned gray and vanished.

Yuna looked at the photo and said, "The face is still here."

She didn't smile.

At 4:07, they opened a new page in the knowledge ledger. The title was "Absent Party Proxy Signature / Restricted Observation." Seoha didn't write the principle first. Yuna called out the timeline.

04:05:31, current keystroke log, five keys entered.

04:05:46, pen approached three centimeters, part of the seat marking shifted.

04:06:14, handwritten confirmation of presence and refusal of completion.

04:06:19, proxy signature line invalidated, count stopped at 17.

04:06:31, three keystrokes lost from the input log.

04:06:44, last digit of employee number lost.

Mijin kept her right hand pressed to the cold pack and spoke of the past. "Seven years ago, the East Library case. A technician had been marked absent, and the team lead signed the completion form in his place. On the next shift schedule, the team lead moved into the technician's seat, and the technician's return slot was closed."

Jeongho opened the second page of the SN-7-017 notice. The person's name was erased, but the lost items box still listed three brass keys, and the proxy confirmer's rank, "Team Lead," remained. One channel was Mijin's memory, the other an outside received document.

"Is there a second case?" Yuna asked.

Mijin shook her head. "The one I saw with my own eyes, there's only one. There's a similar sentence in red in one result, but its write time comes after the incident, so it can't be combined as evidence."

Seoha didn't inflate it into two cases. She wrote down only the range that matched: one current instance of pen proximity, plus one past external document and Mijin's memory.

"A proxy signature for an absent party, or even approaching one, can shift the return seat marking of the person concerned toward the signer."

"No case of a full signature exists yet. Do not generalize."

Dowon looked at the pen and said, "Next time, even proximity is a stop condition."

Seoha pressed the radio button twice. "Agreed. Objects at the seat come before the screen."

They hadn't grown close through words. Dowon hadn't taken the pen from Seoha, and Seoha hadn't ranked Dowon's on site markings below the documents. Each of them had put whatever refusal they could make into the same record.

The stopped count started moving again.

Not from 17, but from 60.

The printer bit into a new sheet. This time it read not "Proxy for Absent Party" but "Nighttime Exception Automatic Assignment Notice."

In the employee number field of Yuna's profile, the remaining three digits faded one by one.

220.

22.

2.

Blank.

The photo and the name remained.

The count stood at 54.