The Draft Article Was Eleven Paragraphs

The draft article was eleven paragraphs. Mirae spread it out on the table in the clinic waiting room and turned it to face Yura.

Fifty four minutes until noon. Oxygen remaining: one hour thirty minutes.

"This is everything I can write right now," he said. "Read it. And if you tell me to cut something, I'll cut it."

Yura read the first paragraph. Her own name appeared in it three times.

Her reading was slow. With the oxygen mask on, the lower part of her vision blurred, and reading one paragraph took forty seconds. He didn't begrudge those forty seconds.

"Yura, should I read it to you?" Mirae asked.

"I have to read it myself to decide."

The second paragraph had her age, her occupation, and the time she entered the eighth floor. The third had a summary of her call with her mother. Mirae hadn't recorded it, but he could write down what he'd overheard.

The fourth paragraph had the three digits of the family emergency code.

Yura's hand stopped there.

"This one."

"Go ahead."

"This is the surveyor's."

Mirae looked at the paragraph again. Seven eight, then three again. He'd written it as the case's key clue, and while writing it, he'd thought about whose code it was. He hadn't thought about who he needed to ask.

"I didn't ask the surveyor," he said.

"Then ask him first."

Mirae stopped. While writing this draft, he'd asked Yura three times and never asked Igyeol once. All he'd seen was that the code was the key to this case. He hadn't looked at whose door that key fit.

Igyeol was standing by the waiting room door. Mirae turned toward him.

"Surveyor. Can I put this code in the article?"

"How far does it go out?"

"Public media. Two online outlets, one print."

Igyeol calculated. If the code went public, whoever used it would be exposed. Two people used it, and he had no idea where one of them was right now.

"No," he said.

The answer came fast. This was the third time this week Igyeol hadn't put off a decision.

"I need to write down the reason."

"There's one more person who can use that code. If it's made public, that person can't use it anymore," Igyeol said. "Next time that person calls me, they'll have to use different words. Then I lose any way to confirm it's really them."

Mirae wrote down the reason. Then he cut the fourth paragraph.

Cutting it halved the article's power. The family code was the only emotional proof that this case wouldn't end as a system error.

Mirae folded the paper with the deleted paragraph and set it aside. He didn't throw it away. It was a place he could paste it back if Yura and Igyeol agreed later.

"The fifth paragraph too," Yura said.

"That's the bracelet registration time. It doesn't have a name in it."

"But my return time is right there with it. If the two are together, you can pin me down. How many people came out of the eighth floor at 4:06 this morning?"

He looked at the paragraph again. Yura was right. With two times, a name wasn't even necessary.

"Then if I cut the time, the fact that registration came before the return won't survive."

"What if I just write that it came before?"

"That can't be verified. Without a number readers can check, I'm just someone making a claim."

"Then what do we do."

The clock on the waiting room wall ticked forward a notch. Forty one minutes until noon.

Mirae set down his pen. What remained in his hand were two things: a verifiable number, and the person that number pointed to. There was still no way to protect both at once.

"Yura," he said. "Let me say what I actually want to do right now. I think that would be more accurate."

"Go ahead."

"I want to publish this today. Once the license results come out at noon, the team becomes a subject of investigation. Once we're under investigation, our materials get seized. If I don't publish today, I won't be able to," he said. "And if this goes out, you'll be in danger. Both sentences are true."

Yura pulled the draft toward herself.

"Give me paper," she said.

Mirae slid a fresh sheet over. Yura pressed the paper down with her left hand and drew lines with her right. One vertical line, then three horizontal lines.

A table.

In the left column she wrote the items: name, age, face, family code, return time, bracelet number, registration time, mother's call, Majun.

In the right column she wrote three categories: public, conditional, forbidden.

"Name is forbidden," she wrote. "Age is public. Face is forbidden. Family code is forbidden. Return time is conditional."

Midway through writing, Yura's hand slipped on the paper. The inside of her mask didn't fog for three breaths in a row.

"Eighty nine." Saebyeok read the saturation monitor. "Saturation dropped to eighty nine. Raising the flow rate."

He raised it to five liters per minute. Yura couldn't write on the table for two minutes, and no one wrote in her place during that time.

Writing it took three minutes. Her right hand slipped twice, and the second time, Saebyeok held the paper steady from underneath with his own hand. He didn't write for her.

"What about the bracelet number," Mirae asked.

"Public," Yura said. "That's not my body. It's a thing. Things need to be found, so the number should go out."

"What about the call with your mother."

Yura stopped for a long time at that column.

"Conditional," she said. "Just write that she said she had one daughter. Don't write that she recognized my voice."

"That's the strongest part."

"I know," Yura said. "But if you write that, my mother will read later that she didn't recognize me."

Mirae copied that sentence exactly into the conditional column.

"What does conditional mean here."

"Write only the date and cut the time. Just up through this morning."

Mirae tried applying the condition. Return this morning, bracelet registration before that. Instead of two times, only the order remained.

"Can this be verified," he asked Dohyeon.

Dohyeon looked at the table.

"If it's just the order, I can verify it," he said. "If I confirm three transactions on the same server, the order is settled. I won't disclose the times themselves, only the result of the verification. Under my name."

"What do we write in the article."

"Im Dohyeon confirmed the original timestamps and determined that registration came before the return. The originals will be provided only to a third party verifier on request."

Eunchae came to the clinic carrying the audit notice. She spoke from the waiting room doorway.

"There's no third party verifier right now. I applied to three places yesterday. The results aren't in yet."

"Without one, my determination is just me making a claim too," Dohyeon said. "Then I won't write this as a determination. I'll write it as an observation."

"What's the difference," Mirae asked.

"A determination is me saying I'm right. An observation is leaving what I saw as it is," Dohyeon said. "The one that can be corrected when it's wrong is the second."

Mirae fixed the word. From determination to observation.

"That weakens the impact," Mirae said. "Without a number, people won't read it."

"If they don't read it, write it again," Yura said. "I only get one chance."

Mirae heard that sentence twice. During his three years as a chronicler, the order he'd upheld was fast, plentiful, and corrected later.

Mirae wrote down that sentence. It was the shortest sentence he'd written today.

The last row of the table was Majun. Yura wrote forbidden there, and next to it added one more line.

This item can only be changed by Jin Yura.

"Why write this one separately," Mirae asked.

"If I become unable to decide the other columns, the team can decide," Yura said. "Not this one. If I'm not here, just close it."

"What do you mean by unable to decide."

"I have about an hour of oxygen left right now."

Saebyeok checked the remaining gauge. After raising the flow rate, it was one hour and ten minutes. He didn't say the number out loud.

"I'll guard that column," Saebyeok said. "If Yura becomes unable to speak, I won't open that item. I'll just close it. That's what guarding it means."

"Write that down too."

Mirae wrote that sentence at the bottom of the table. Saebyeok signed his name in the signature column.

The table was finished. Of the nine items, two were public, three were conditional, and four were forbidden.

The draft article went from eleven paragraphs to six. Mirae read the remaining six paragraphs three times, then wrote one more paragraph at the end.

He wrote the seventh paragraph like this.

This article was written after the person involved decided the scope of disclosure item by item. The original decision table is kept by the person involved. The reporter is aware of the items marked forbidden in the decision table and did not write them.

"Why put that in," Igyeol asked.

"If someone later says this article is thin," Mirae said. "it needs to stand on record as agreed on, not as thin."

Five minutes to noon. Eunchae's terminal rang first.

Two lines appeared on the screen. Field qualification audit result: warning. And below it, one more line.

External verifier designation request returned. Reason: case not established.

"Did you apply for an external verifier," Mirae asked.

"Last night," Eunchae said. "I submitted to three places. All three came back returned."

"Is the reason the same everywhere."

"Not a single character is different." Eunchae turned the screen toward Mirae. "Those three places are competitors. There's no reason for the exact same sentence to come out of all of them."

"Then did the sentence come from above."

"I can't prove that," Eunchae said. "If I write something I can't prove, my own case dies first."

Noon, exactly. Igyeol's terminal rang.

License review result: conditional maintenance. Deduction item: inadequate command structure. Condition: submit a document supplementing the command structure within three days.

There was one more line below that.

Notice of separate review regarding presence of unregistered personnel.

"It held," Igyeol said.

"Conditionally," Saebyeok said.

"Held is held. We can go in today."

Mirae looked at the draft. No seizure had come. That meant the calculation that he couldn't publish if not today had been wrong, and that took away one reason to rush.

Instead, another calculation remained. The six de identified paragraphs had no numbers, and there was no verifier to back up numbers in their place.

"Without a verifier, this is just a claim," Eunchae said. "The reader picks one of three: believe it, don't believe it, or don't read it."

"Yura," he said. "We're not publishing today. We publish once we have all three verifications."

"That's for Mirae to decide."

"The decision table is yours. When to publish is mine." Mirae folded the draft. "That, I take responsibility for."

Yura folded the table and tucked it into the handle of her oxygen tank. It went next to the paper Saebyeok had given her yesterday dawn. Now there were two sheets.