The State Buys My Memory

The emergency communication marker covered the wall of the management office. The resident notice board flickered off once, then on, and white text on a black screen appeared.

National Continuity Bureau, priority channel.

Seojin hit the record button. Im Doyun changed the camera angle first, so my face and the screen would fit in one frame. Jang Yura checked the corridor where residents were gathering, then closed the door halfway.

Gwon Taemuk's face appeared on the screen. It wasn't a face I was seeing for the first time. The name I'd seen on the packet deletion approval line, the voice that kept repeating in the official briefings after the disaster, the person who, in the original timeline, never let go of the phrase state function to the very end. But the man in front of me now hadn't yet lived through any of that. His expression wasn't the fatigue of a bureaucrat. It was the look of someone pulling out a ticket he'd prepared long in advance.

"Ms. Han Igyeom." he said. "I won't ask whether you've regressed. What's needed today isn't belief."

I didn't answer. My hand rested on the notebook. The page where I'd folded down the line with Jang Yura's name felt stiff under my fingertips.

Gwon Taemuk brought up a file beside the screen. Not a death count, but a survivor curve broken down by time. On the left was a map of Haeul City, and on the right, cell numbers connected by short lines to floodgates, hospitals, and subway transfer nodes. Borideong was marked as Cell 3. Beneath it was a small code.

7C-CANDIDATE / LOCAL DEVIATION.

Minchae drew in a breath. "That code, it looked like the packet header from earlier..."

"Keep it short." Seojin cut in, low. The recording kept running.

Gwon Taemuk tilted his head slightly, as if he'd been waiting for that reaction. "Two oxygen generators, four portable generators, one satellite relay terminal, temporary approval for outer perimeter passage in Cell 3. And I can hold Ms. Han Igyeom and her companions' on-site interference charges as necessary cooperative acts during a disaster."

"What's the price." Im Doyun asked.

"The original notebook." Gwon Taemuk answered immediately. "The death list, the order of events, the memory reliability markings, and any high confidence timestamps Ms. Han Igyeom hasn't yet disclosed. Not a copy. The original. Including the traces of any corrections."

Jang Yura looked at me. It wasn't a question. It was a stop signal. I was already opening my mouth to refuse.

"No."

My answer came out first. On the screen, Gwon Taemuk didn't move so much as an eyebrow. Seojin's pen stopped, and Im Doyun wrote down my words exactly. Jang Yura let go of the door handle and stood in front of me.

"Without asking the team?"

"If I give that man the original, more people get trapped."

"Then give me the reasoning too."

I closed the notebook. Closed, it looked bigger somehow. What I held wasn't an answer. It was paper that had already laid out people's deaths in advance. And still, the moment someone asked for it, my first instinct was to hide it. That was exactly what Gwon Taemuk wanted. He already knew the difference between someone who believed in the future and someone who wanted to monopolize it.

Gwon Taemuk said, "Captain Jang Yura is right. Everyone involved in a deal should know its terms. Ms. Han Igyeom's memory is already affecting public risk. It can't belong to one person alone."

"But it's fine for the state to monopolize it?" Seojin asked.

"The state takes responsibility afterward."

"That's usually only possible when the person responsible survives."

Gwon Taemuk answered without looking at Seojin. "That's exactly why we need the survivor curve."

He pulled up a second file. One of the curves on the left side of the screen turned red. The time of the Myeongjin Station accident. Almost the same slope as the line that had moved four minutes earlier after I pulled Jang Yura out. Next was the hospital oxygen shutoff. Earlier than the original schedule, but it matched the pressure drop window I'd marked as B in the ledger. Third was the Borideong cell. This morning's early autonomous operation was already there too, in dotted lines, in Gwon Taemuk's file. Next to the dotted line it read: `Pre-confirmation, 7C simulation radius.`

He didn't know everything. In fact, some parts were blank. The name of the rescue worker at Myeongjin Station, the original text of the 41 byte packet inside the hospital, the empty operator slot for the floodgate annex. This file wasn't the future. It was a simulation. But some of it overlapped with my memory. That overlap was more dangerous than a lie. A lie you could discard. Half a truth was what dragged people to the negotiating table.

"Source." Im Doyun said.

"I can't disclose that right now."

"Then it has no evidentiary value."

"This isn't a criminal investigation. It's a proposal of rescue resources." Gwon Taemuk's voice didn't thin out. "3,412 residents in Borideong. Eleven hours and thirty one minutes of autonomous budget left in Cell 3. If water pressure drops another 18 percent from current levels, the high floor evacuation order changes. I can get the generators in before that happens."

Minchae checked the gauge in the management office. "Water pressure... it's close. Not quite 18, but it's already below 16."

Jang Yura's eyes flicked, just briefly. It was the moment a number that could save lives appeared. Whose hand that number came from got pushed to the back. That was Gwon Taemuk's power.

"I can't give you the whole original." I said.

"A partial handover comes too late."

"Your file is partial too."

Gwon Taemuk went quiet for a moment. Behind him on the screen, someone handed him a document, and he waved it away without even looking. "That's true. Which is why I'm suggesting we compare notes."

"And after we compare notes?"

"More people live."

"Who gets left out."

The air in the management office cooled by the smallest degree. Seojin's pen started moving again. Jang Yura wasn't looking at me. She was looking at Gwon Taemuk. This time, Gwon Taemuk delayed his answer.

"Every rescue plan has priorities."

"Do you mean people expected to die."

"We weigh rescue probability together with the probability of preserving state function."

Jang Yura said, low, "Don't change the wording. I'm asking if there are people who get left out."

For the first time, Gwon Taemuk looked at her directly. "There are."

That one sentence was worse than a threat. He didn't hide it. He didn't dress up the cruelty to make it prettier, either. And he didn't smile like a villain would. He simply read out a value he had already calculated. I hated that method. Not only because he was wrong. Because it was too close to what I had been doing with my own notebook.

"Ms. Han Igyeom." Gwon Taemuk addressed me again. "You've already chosen people yourself. You moved one person out first at Myeongjin Station, you changed the oxygen order at the hospital, and you disclosed the power budget in Borideong. The only difference is scale."

"The difference is consent."

Jang Yura picked up my words. "And the ground. Your graph doesn't show the people standing in front of this door holding water containers."

"That's exactly why I'm requesting field data."

"That also means you intend to see the ground only as data."

Gwon Taemuk didn't deny it. Instead, he opened another chart. This time, two lines were blacked out instead of names. The classification level was different, and beside the access permission it read `Undisclosed persons, 2.` He flipped past that line quickly, but the speed made it stand out more. Two undisclosed names. It could be state secrets, it could be witnesses, it could be someone he couldn't bring himself to name. It was information I wasn't supposed to know yet. I tried to look away but I had already seen it.

"Who are those two." Seojin asked.

"Unrelated to the current deal."

"Then why did you show it."

"Because Ms. Han Igyeom needs to understand the scope of what I have."

Scope. He called people scope too. But he didn't name the two people hidden inside that scope himself. There was a weakness in that too. Someone truly all-powerful wouldn't need to hide anything.

Noise grew louder in the outer corridor. The water pump sagged one more time, and residents crowded toward the management office carrying containers. Jang Yura opened the door and gave instructions to one of them. "Don't let the upper floors bring their containers down all at once. It'll clog the stairs. One representative per floor."

She turned back to the screen. "We'll take the resources. Generators, oxygen, the relay terminal. But the original notebook doesn't leave this room. We verify what's needed against field conditions, and we decide the scope of disclosure here."

Gwon Taemuk looked at me. "Is this Ms. Han Igyeom's decision, or Captain Jang Yura's?"

"It's a field decision." Yura said.

I opened the notebook slowly. I didn't hand over every page. Instead, I spread only three pages on the desk, the dotted line where Borideong touched the western seawall, the hospital oxygen page, and the page with the time discrepancy at Myeongjin Station. Seojin photographed them immediately, and Im Doyun logged the scope of the copies. The original stayed under my hand. I'd loosened my grip a little, but I hadn't let go entirely. That was the limit of what I could do right now.

"Do these three pages get the generators in."

"They do." Gwon Taemuk said. "But passage permits will be issued under the supervision of the National Continuity Bureau."

"So you're sending a supervisor."

"There's already one nearby."

Seojin swallowed a small curse. Minchae wrote down her portable clock time next to the network time. Im Doyun logged Gwon Taemuk's words as an official record. The management office had turned into a trading floor. Water was running out, electricity was running out, and people's freedom to choose was running out too.

Before anything else, he locked down the resource delivery route. On one side of the screen, the outer road of Borideong and a temporary checkpoint appeared. The generators couldn't reach the door directly. With the cell's outer gate closed, vehicles could only approach as far as the western drainage inspection entrance, and from there people would have to carry them by hand. The oxygen generators wouldn't come in as a pair. They'd be brought in one at a time, in sequence. The satellite relay terminal would only be opened by the hands of a National Continuity Bureau officer.

"That's a surveillance device." Seojin said.

"It's a misuse prevention device."

"Who decides what counts as misuse."

"That's my authority."

Jang Yura let out a short laugh. It wasn't really a laugh, more like a breath cut off midway. "Then this isn't a deal. It's a rescue on a leash."

Gwon Taemuk didn't deny it. "A rescue without a leash carries no responsibility either."

Im Doyun's pen stopped. "Director, that statement is being recorded as a restriction on field autonomy."

"Record it. Someday someone needs to show who saved people, and under what conditions."

That sentence sounded clean. Which was exactly why I needed to be careful. A record leaves responsibility behind, but it can also become a tool for passing responsibility off onto someone else. Gwon Taemuk knew both. He spoke like a man who already knew which sentences would survive a trial later.

Beneath the three copied pages, I wrote down conditions. `No removal of the original. Item by item copies only. No execution before field verification. Resident disclosure scope decided separately.` My handwriting sped up, and Jang Yura took the pen from me and added a fourth line.

`No violation of a person's right to choose.`

Gwon Taemuk looked at that line and said, "In an evacuation operation, you can't guarantee every individual their right to choose."

"Then tell us first where that guarantee fails." Jang Yura answered. "It's not that people can't choose. It's that they get dragged along without even knowing they weren't given a choice, and that's what breaks them."

"Spending time on that raises the death curve."

"Hiding it raises it too."

Neither of them convinced the other. But it showed, within the team, whose words carried what cost. Gwon Taemuk hated losing time and numbers. Jang Yura hated losing the right to choose. I was holding the notebook between the two of them. What I had been doing so far was closer to Gwon Taemuk's way than I wanted to admit. It took me a while to accept that.

On the outer screen, a vehicle's location appeared. A marker showing one oxygen generator was due to arrive at outer entrance 2 of the cell. Gwon Taemuk's offer was real. And because it was real, it was harder to refuse.

"We'll take the resources." I said. "But the original doesn't leave this room. And the placement decisions inside Borideong are Captain Jang Yura's to make."

"Are you saying you won't take command yourself?"

"What I have are old testimonies. The people in front of this door right now, Yura sees them."

Gwon Taemuk's gaze stopped, just for a moment. What he wanted wasn't only the notebook. It was me. The person holding the death curve, the person who wanted to control it, the person who believed her own words were the fastest. The moment I stepped back, the deal itself wobbled.

Gwon Taemuk pulled up one last file. A comparison table between the current Borideong rescue report and the original model. Most names had been replaced with numbers, but one line was marked in red. `C02-JYR / CURRENT PRESENT / BASELINE ABSENT.`

Jang Yura read that line. She said nothing. Her finger pressed once against the edge of the desk. The pressure turned the skin under her nail white.

I wanted to turn off the screen. But if I turned it off, the question wouldn't disappear. It would only grow bigger.

Gwon Taemuk said, "In the model, one rescue captain does not exist in the Borideong cell during this time window. And yet she is currently confirmed as a core variable in on site decision making."

"So what." Jang Yura's voice dropped low.

Gwon Taemuk, again, didn't ask whether she believed in regression. Instead of belief, he pressed into the blank space.

"Ms. Jang Yura, weren't you originally not supposed to be here today?"