The Sentence I Never Wrote

Even when I covered the sentence on the phone with my hand, the letters didn't disappear. Through the plastic of the evidence bag, the white text still showed, pressed flat. The dead do not create branches. The vein on the back of my hand ran right under that sentence. In this timeline, I had never written it. And yet my hand already knew its weight.

Im Doyun didn't take the phone out of the bag. He set it, bag and all, on the forensic stand and turned on two cameras. One filmed the screen, the other filmed the seal sticker.

"Seal intact. Airplane mode maintained. Text appeared while external network access was blocked."

The technician plugged in a USB blocking adapter. "We're only pulling a read only memory dump. No write commands go through."

Seojin asked, "Can I record that too."

Im Doyun answered. "Within the scope of the evidence procedure notice, yes. But disclosure of the raw data values is restricted."

"The reason for the restriction."

"Risk of duplication."

Seojin nodded but didn't turn off the recorder. A reason meant she could hold off. A prohibition with no reason only pushed her forward.

I had to say where the sentence came from. If I told the whole truth, it would sound unbelievable. If I said nothing, the screen would keep speaking for me, in stranger words.

"That sentence was in the last notebook of the original timeline."

Im Doyun's pen stopped. "The original timeline."

"I can't prove it."

"Then the statement carries little weight."

"I know. But you can confirm that I haven't written it yet in this timeline. My notebook, my phone, Seojin's raw audio, the hospital CCTV. You won't find a record of me saying this sentence anywhere in them."

"Absence isn't proof."

"But right now it's a starting point."

He looked at me. For the first time, his judgment lagged behind his question. Im Doyun hadn't come to believe me. Faced with evidence he couldn't explain, he had only widened the direction of his suspicion a little.

He returned right away to the next question. "Who could have produced this sentence in the current timeline."

"Me."

"Anyone else."

"I don't know right now."

"Ms. Han Seojin."

Seojin shook her head. "I just heard it for the first time. The raw audio had noise of the same length, but no sentence."

"Captain Jang Yura."

Yura, standing outside the door, answered. "I've never heard that sentence."

"Seo Minchae."

Minchae raised her hand. "This is the first I'm seeing it too. And my equipment can't put anything into a phone. There wasn't even any battery in it."

Im Doyun didn't write that he believed these denials. He only wrote, "First acknowledgment, per current statements." That phrasing was more accurate. People can lie. A record shouldn't pretend to erase the possibility of a lie.

"I'll look for existing records first," he said. "Notebook, phone, hospital recordings, rescue radio, CCTV audio."

"There won't be any."

"That too is an assumption."

"Right."

The technician photographed my notebook page by page. Seojin went through the hospital back door's raw audio in chronological order, and Yura's radio log was only requested as a copy from the rescue headquarters server. No one drew a conclusion right away. The fact that the sentence didn't exist anywhere didn't emerge all at once. It slowly took shape, from a few storage locations, from a few empty search results.

When I called up the sentence, the smell of the control room floor came first. Hot plastic, fire suppressant, a pen nib stained with blood. The last notebook had been down by my knee. After writing the word "branch," I tried to draw a line under it, but my hand shook and only tore the paper. After that, the return core screen turned white. That was as far as the memory went. The longer I explained it, the more it would sound like a lie.

"Do you have sensory cues." Im Doyun asked.

"Smell, pen, floor. Three."

"Beyond that."

"If I say more now, I could be making it up."

Seojin looked at me. She knows that the way her brother cuts his words short looks the same whether he's holding back or lying. This time, she wrote down the reason I'd cut mine short.

She slid a blank sheet of paper in front of me. "Don't write it now."

"Why."

"If you write the original sentence fresh just to compare handwriting, it creates a document from this timeline. That'll mess up the sequence later."

Seojin had seen the trap faster than I had. If I wrote the same sentence by hand now, the memory from the future notebook and the current handwriting comparison would blend together. Technically it would produce comparison material, but narratively the evidence would be contaminated. No, not narratively. This was an investigation. My life was finally being called by that word.

Im Doyun took the paper back. "No writing it now. If needed, we'll take a handwriting sample using a separate control sentence only."

"The sentence itself doesn't get written." Seojin added.

He recorded that too. To confirm the sentence I had never written, I first had to not write it now. It was a strange rule, but it was right.

The technician zoomed in on the screen. "The sentence itself is plain text. But the storage location isn't the messaging app. It isn't the normal notification database either. A 41 byte block appeared at the end of user space."

"Forty one bytes." Seojin repeated it right away.

"Is that the same length as the repeating noise."

"The length is the same. The content is different. The noise file is still audio data, and this is a storage block."

Im Doyun didn't cut to a conclusion here either. "Time of creation."

"It looks like just before the screen displayed it. However, the file system record isn't the time of user action, it's the estimated time the block was created."

"Keep the word estimated."

"Yes."

"The process that created the block."

"Not confirmed. It's not in the normal app process list."

"Do you mean it doesn't exist, or that it was erased."

The technician paused for a moment. "It means it isn't confirmed in the current list."

It took several rounds of questioning to get that one sentence. Watching the slow back and forth, I grew frustrated, but that very frustration was necessary. The word "doesn't exist" closes off the world too easily. The words "not confirmed" leave it open, uncomfortably. What we needed right now was that uncomfortable openness.

Minchae was raising her hand in the corridor, asking to be let in. Jang Yura was blocking her at the door, but Minchae held up a clear case. Inside were an offline clock and a small laptop.

"This equipment isn't seized property." Jang Yura said.

Im Doyun thought it over for a moment. "Conditions for observation. Equipment gets photographed separately. Network access blocked."

The moment Minchae came in, she said, "I don't hack. Actually, I can't. I can only check length and checksums."

"I'm recording that statement first." Im Doyun answered.

Minchae turned on the laptop. The screen was old and the battery was at 32 percent. She cut out the repeating section from Seojin's raw audio file, showed its waveform, and placed it side by side with the length of the 41 byte block on the forensic terminal.

She kept her fingers over the keyboard for a while without typing anything. "There are three things I can do. Count the length, mark the repeat positions, and run a simple checksum. I can't do anything like breaking a cipher."

"The reason you can't." Im Doyun asked.

"There's no key, I don't know the original format, and my laptop is offline. And on top of that, the battery's low. If I run it too long it'll shut off."

When she stated her own limits, the expectations in the room dropped. That was a good thing. When expectations drop, false conclusions drop too. Minchae marked the repeating noise sections in Seojin's raw audio file by time. The first section came right before the hospital's oxygen alarm, the second came while checking the condition of the red door, and the third wasn't in the recording from around the time the seized screen lit up.

"In other words, we can't say the raw audio noise converted directly into the phone's sentence." Minchae said.

Seojin asked, "But is there a connection?"

"The lengths match, the repeat units are similar, and both fall on the 41 byte boundary. There's a possible connection. I can't say it's the same data."

Im Doyun underlined "not the same data." Minchae looked a little wronged, but soon nodded. It was an unfair underline, but a necessary one.

"The same length. But we shouldn't call it the same data. One is sound, one is a storage block. Instead, both repeated or were created in 41 byte units."

Seojin asked, "Then it's not simple noise."

"It's hard to call it simple noise. But it's still too early to call it a message either."

Minchae's self correction was quick. Since episode nine, she'd cut back on absolute statements. It was a good change. It was also an uncomfortable one. Watching a kid put the brakes on every sentence after making one mistake wasn't only reassuring.

Im Doyun asked the technician. "External transmission records."

"None. No communication module logs either. No trace of a scheduled message. No trace of user input."

"The possibility of internal generation."

"It's possible. The cause is unknown."

"Write down that it's unknown."

The technician nodded, a little surprised. It wasn't common for an investigator to demand the words "I don't know." That was exactly why the words carried weight.

"No external transmission" wasn't a one line conclusion either. The technician opened, in order, the messaging app database, the scheduled send queue, the notification log, the communication module events, and the nearby sharing records. The word "none" meant something different for each item. The messaging app had no record, the scheduled send queue had no file at all, the communication module had no connection attempt, and the nearby sharing record had no trace of reception.

"Then did it happen internally." Seojin asked.

Before the technician could open his mouth, Im Doyun said, "It means the external route hasn't been confirmed yet."

"Internal generation isn't confirmed either."

"Right."

Seojin repeated the sentence close to the recorder. "External route unconfirmed. Internal generation not confirmed."

Hearing that, I felt strangely relieved. It would have been easier if someone gave an answer. But an answer that comes too fast always ends up betraying someone later. This time, it was better for the answer to be slow.

The block header separated out. The first few bytes looked like a device identifier. Minchae zoomed in, and the technician opened the agency's equipment list. The list included experimental equipment that had only been approved for installation so far.

"ARG-RC-27."

Seojin read it aloud. "Argos Return... Core?"

I felt the inside of my throat go dry. I had seen that name before, at the end of the original timeline. But as of the current date, it should not have been operational yet.

Im Doyun checked the scheduled installation date on the equipment list. The screen showed a date 27 days after today. The approval status read "pre installation." The location was an undisclosed laboratory. The department in charge was Argos Trauma Memory Preservation.

Three more lines were attached to the list. Order approval, scheduled delivery, scheduled network registration. Order approval was already complete, but the scheduled delivery date was blank, and network registration had been pushed to the day after the scheduled installation date. On paper, that device couldn't exist on the network today. But the phrase "on paper" had never sounded as weak as it did these days.

"The source of the equipment list." Seojin asked.

The technician answered. "It's a copy from the agency's asset management system. Not a real time query. A 6 a.m. backup."

"Then is there a chance the current list has changed?"

"There is."

Im Doyun didn't close the screen. He saved the hash of the backup file first. "Equipment list as of 6 a.m. Current real time status unconfirmed."

He didn't hand me a conclusion in my favor. But he also blocked any conclusion against me. It was a fact that a device ID that shouldn't yet be operational had appeared. But that fact didn't necessarily mean a future device had sent the message. Someone might have known the device ID in advance and planted it, the list might have been tampered with, or the device might have been secretly brought in today. Every possibility was uncomfortable, and for the first time, the direction of that discomfort had spread beyond just me.

"Can this device operate today." Im Doyun asked the technician.

"On paper, no."

"Possibility outside the documents."

"That's not something I can answer."

Im Doyun looked over at me. "This isn't grounds for release."

"I know."

"But the scope of the investigation widens."

That was a small crack. Not a statement that he believed me, but a statement that he shouldn't suspect only me.

Seojin put a copy of the raw audio file into an envelope. Minchae pulled the battery from her laptop. Im Doyun photographed the device ID screen from three angles.

Even after the photographing, he didn't release me. The handcuffs in front of me stayed on, and my phone went back into the shielded pouch. Jang Yura, watching the scene from outside the door, spoke up.

"If field accompaniment is needed, someone has to be designated as the one in charge."

"Responsibility for accompanying the suspect is mine." Im Doyun answered.

"Judgment at the rescue site is mine."

"Noted."

The two of them didn't try to take away each other's authority. That was why they could move together. In the gap between them, I could just barely keep up. Not a prophet, but a suspect. Yet not only a suspect either. The most ambiguous position was exactly where I stood now.

The scheduled installation date on the screen was exactly 27 days after today.