The Empty Employee Number Field Blinked Three Times

The empty employee number field blinked three times.

The return slot spat out a wet card.

It wasn't just one.

At 6:38, seven plastic cards emerged overlapping between the rollers inside the collection bin. The first was a gray lanyard employee badge. The remaining six showed the orange border distinctive to Hanbit Children's Library membership cards.

All the cards were wet. Yet no water had pooled at the bottom of the bin. The liquid sat only in a thin layer between the plastic coating and the card itself.

Before Eunchae could read the child's name, Dowon slid a black cover over it.

"Don't touch it. Cover the name first."

The field team opened only the exterior collection bin of the return slot without entering the building. The staff stairwell door stayed fixed at 8 degrees, the shelf status remained undetermined. Dowon used long tongs to grip only the edges of the cards, angling the number field downward, and placed them one by one on a clear collection tray.

He didn't look at the names or photos on the six membership cards. He read only the last four digits of each card's unique number through a masking window. Eunchae checked only whether those numbers matched the six digits left on the chapter 23 screen, cross referenced against the library's master ledger.

All six numbers matched.

That didn't mean the cards had been inside the library with the children. All twenty seven children's current locations had already been confirmed outside the library through the school contact network.

The front of the gray employee badge was legible even under the wet film.

`Nam Sangho.`

The photo matched Sangho's old employee badge too. The last four digits of the card number also matched the number detected in the sealed S-07 locker back in chapter 17.

Dowon didn't say the name.

"Confirm the original S-07 seal."

Yuna connected a field video call with Gitae. Gitae showed the S-07 locker's seal number and the gap marking to the camera. The seal was unbroken and the door hadn't opened. The old employee badge recorded in the chapter 17 inventory still remained as an item inside the locker.

Gitae also showed the security office storage box on the same screen. The wet employee badge of unconfirmed ownership picked up in chapter 2 was inside a separate envelope. That card's photo and name had bled beyond recognition, and the only thing left on its back was the time, 23:48. There was no basis to merge it with the current return slot card as the same object.

The three items went into three separate slots.

`Nam Sangho's old employee badge inside S-07 locker / original inventory maintained.`

`Wet employee badge in security office storage / owner unconfirmed.`

`Gray card from library return slot / duplicate of Nam Sangho's information.`

None was overwritten as the past or the return of another.

The card that came out of the return slot wasn't the original returning. It was a second card carrying the same number, name, and photo. Whether it was a copy, whether the earlier record was wrong, or whether some status value had generated a new object, no one knew.

The center's presence screen turned on by itself.

`Nam Sangho / returned to the field.`

Dowon didn't press the return confirmation. The card had come first, and there was no person. There was no one to hand things over to properly, and no ordinary work item to pass along with the card either.

"An employee badge isn't a person."

After he said that, his hand paused for a moment. The memory of turning away from the stairwell seven years ago, the one where Sangho vanished, pushed itself in front of his fingers. He set down the tongs and pressed the radio button twice.

"I could run in there right now. That's exactly why I'm doing the collection first."

Seoha answered back twice. Instead of hiding his guilt and opening the door first, Dowon put his expected failure in front of the team before acting.

The time limit on the center screen's return confirmation kept counting down from 30 seconds. At 17 seconds, the green light next to Nam Sangho's name blinked twice. Dowon didn't take that light as a person's answer either.

"Fine, three empty collection containers. Comparison chart, numbers only."

Eunchae labeled the field team's collection containers A, B, and C. She didn't tell Dowon which container held the library residue and which held the badge liquid. Yuna sealed the label correspondence chart at the center, and Jeongho only logged the time the outside copy was received. The order existed to keep anyone from seeing a familiar name and shaping the results around it.

Dowon didn't wipe the scratches and liquid off the card surface all at once. He photographed the scratches on the dry side first under angled lighting, then split the wet side collection between two sterile swabs. One took the clear liquid, the other the dark blue-black film stuck to the corner of the card.

Eunchae unfolded the library's plumbing diagram. "The return slot drainage runs to the underground reservoir. Water's shut off at this hour, so there's only residual liquid. The disinfectant is chlorine based. No oil is used."

The field team separately collected the residual water from the back door faucet, the return slot drain trap, and the condensation under the unmarked wiring cover behind the wall clock. All three samples were colorless and had no dark blue-black film.

The first blank swab went into its bag without touching any card. The second took the liquid between the membership cards' coating, the third took the liquid inside the gray employee badge. Dowon read out the collection times, glove changes, and tong contact surfaces over the radio, and Eunchae wrote them down in the paper inventory.

The return slot roller turned again, but the card was already on the exterior collection tray. The machine only scraped the inside of the empty bin three times. The team noted the observation that the roller had moved without any hand or person touching it, but they didn't interpret that sound as someone trying to reclaim the card.

Dowon didn't judge by smell. He compared the test strip's acidity, chlorine reaction, and the oil film's UV color in order. The moisture on the six membership cards showed a chlorine reaction similar to the library's residual water, but the liquid inside the employee badge was different.

No chlorine reaction.

pH 6.4.

The dark blue-black film formed a violet edge under ultraviolet light.

After Dowon read out the results, Yuna opened the label correspondence chart. A was library residue, B was the membership cards, C was the gray employee badge. A and B showed chlorine reaction, only C didn't. The blank showed no reaction either, but it also had no dark blue-black film. The possibility that the collection tools themselves had picked up grease dropped away.

The sealed grease sample that returned with the wrench in chapter 18 had shown the same violet edge and pH range. That wrench had come with a note from the current shift saying, "Don't close section 7."

The match stopped at the grease trace. The address, floor, and physical location of section 7 remained unknown. No conclusion could be drawn that the employee badge had come from section 7, or that Sangho was alive.

A thin waterproof strip of paper was also stuck between the coatings of the employee badge. Dowon didn't remove the paper before draining the liquid. He photographed only the visible side under the clear plate.

`8/12 06:34.`

`Tools before people.`

It was four minutes before the current shift's clock time, and the same phrase had been on the E18 wrench note. But who could write that same phrase, and how far a record could be copied, hadn't been confirmed. The paper's author, the synchronization of internal and external clocks, and the path by which it had gotten inside the badge were all left undetermined.

Dowon revised the record's title.

He erased "Employee badge returned from section 7,"

and wrote, "Card duplicating Nam Sangho's information / surface reaction matches current E18 grease sample / person's return unconfirmed."

Eunchae looked separately at the six children's membership cards. Separating the moisture on the front from the scratches on the back, a common pattern emerged. All six showed traces of being swiped right to left through the checkout terminal, while today's return slot roller marks ran the opposite direction.

"These weren't scratched here today. This is wear from the children's terminal, from before closing."

That wasn't proof the cards had been returned normally. It only meant real traces of past library use remained on the membership cards. The field team didn't count the six as items returned by the children, and instead entered them into the library's card inventory.

Jeongho opened the copy record of the E18 grease sample from the outside union's storage network. He didn't put the original up on only his own screen. He sent three read-only copies simultaneously to the field team, the center, and Eunchae.

"The original stays in the union's sealed storage. Comparison values go to three places. Let's not funnel everything into one location just because we're looking for a person."

Dowon didn't ask Jeongho to argue for Sangho's return on the team's behalf. Jeongho didn't claim that the union documents guaranteed anyone's identity. Instead of setting him up as an external shield, the team each verified independently that the hashes of the three copies matched.

Jeongho didn't approve the comparison conclusion by himself either. He split it into three separate statements, "grease reaction matches / person's return unconfirmed / cause of card duplication unconfirmed," and posted them on the voting screen. The field team sent a confirmation tone only for the first statement, and the center and Eunchae signed only within that same scope. No field was ever created to ask about Sangho's survival or section 7's location.

After receiving Jeongho's copies, Dowon circulated his own field photos to the same three places. It wasn't the old pattern where the union held the documents and the team demanded an immediate rescue. Jeongho had distributed the original, and the team didn't push the burden of guaranteeing a person's return back onto him using that material.

Jeongho's copy, the E18 center record, and the current field test strip all pointed to the same grease reaction.

On the return desk screen, the words "returned to the field" turned red.

`Select the item to hand over.`

Seven cards, the employee badge and the membership cards, appeared as options on the screen. Dowon pressed none of them. Choosing an object to close out a person's slot wasn't a proper handover.

"When a person actually comes, we ask about the work they did first. We don't let a card answer in their place."

Dowon put the cards into separate envelopes. The six membership cards went with the library moisture samples, and the employee badge was sealed with the dark blue-black film, the E18 comparison chart, and the video of the original S-07 seal.

The waterproof note wasn't peeled off the employee badge. He recorded the position between the coatings with angled photos and rulers from two angles, then sealed the card as is. He didn't count the paper as a recovered item just because he'd read the phrase on it.

Last, he angled a light across the dry back of the employee badge.

Characters scratched with a needle showed through on the plastic.

Instead of a name, Eunchae read it out like a classification number.

`Children's 813.8-Nam52o.`

It was a library call number.

Eunchae entered only the call number into the library's holdings ledger. One result came back. It was a book that had sat on the low shelf next to the C-4 teaching aid cabinet in the children's reading room until the day before closing. She didn't open the borrower's name or the current return status.

The field team's camera never turned toward the yellow box inside the staff stairwell. If they chased down the book beyond the shelf just because one call number had turned up, they'd be abandoning an unconfirmed safety condition for the sake of a single object.

Dowon wrote the call number only on the outside of a separate envelope. "Confirming the book's place. Not a person's place."

Behind the duplicate employee badge bearing Nam Sangho's name, the place of a single children's book had been engraved.