Dohyeon Opened the Chart at the Terminal Right of the Nurses' Desk

Dohyeon opened the chart at the terminal to the right of the nurses' desk. The ward was the second room on the left down the corridor, six steps from where he stood.

Forty seven minutes remained until the scheduled transfer.

Room 12, bed 1. One name. One registration number.

The first thing he looked at was the vitals log, the chart where blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and saturation were recorded every two hours.

There were empty slots.

The 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, and 2 PM slots were blank. The midnight, 4 AM, 8 AM, and noon slots were filled.

The nurse spoke beside him.

"That's just the night shortage."

"Only the even hours are empty," Dohyeon said. "If it were a shortage, the night hours would be blank in a row."

"Then what is it."

"I don't know. That's what I'm looking at right now."

He asked for the paper chart. Separate from the electronic record, the ward kept a paper copy, printed twice a day.

The paper copy arrived. Two sheets.

Same name, same registration number, same room. Different print times.

Dohyeon laid the two sheets side by side.

The first sheet had midnight, 4 AM, 8 AM, and noon filled in. The second had 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, and 2 PM filled in.

Combined, there were no gaps. Separately, each was half empty.

"Are both of these for this patient," he asked.

"There's one patient, so it's one patient's chart."

"The print times are different. But the contents don't overlap."

The nurse looked at the two sheets. Then went quiet.

Dohyeon compared the numbers. This was his job.

The pulse on the first sheet read 68, 71, 69, 70. The second read 82, 85, 84, 86.

A gap of fourteen or more. One person could swing that much across a two hour span. But there was a pattern.

The even hours were always high, the odd hours always low. All eight times.

"This isn't one person going up and down," he said.

"So."

"This is two people alternating on one record."

The nurse didn't answer right away. What Dohyeon did instead was reach into the drawer under the desk and pull out the handover notebook.

"This is the one we write by hand," she said. "Want to see this too?"

Taking the notebook, Dohyeon stated one condition.

"I won't take this notebook out of here. I'll look at it here and photograph only the lines I need. And I'll do the photographing in front of you."

"Why go that far."

"If this notebook ever disappears later, there has to be something left proving it wasn't me."

The notebook had the even hour handoffs written in it. The 2 AM handler and the 6 AM handler were different people, and both wrote that they had checked on the patient during their assigned hour.

One wrote that the patient was lying on the left side. The other wrote the right.

"Which of the two is wrong," Dohyeon asked.

"Neither, probably," the nurse said. "Both of them have been here more than ten years."

"Then I need to talk to them separately," Dohyeon said. "If I talk to them together, they'll line up their memories."

Jisu came to the desk then. Forty one minutes remained.

"Results first," he said.

"Two pulse series. 68 to 71, and 82 to 86. Split by time of day."

"What does that mean."

"It means this isn't a duplication," Dohyeon said. "If it were duplication, the values would match, or one would be a delayed copy. These values are different and don't overlap."

"So you're saying there are two people."

"I'm saying there are two records. I can't yet write how many people."

Jisu picked up the two sheets. He looked at them for a long time.

"Did Han Igyeol tell you to write it this way."

"It's my own rule," Dohyeon said. "Since I put a slash through my signature in chapter three."

"What signature."

"The no variable signature. There was a variable, and I wrote there wasn't."

Jisu didn't respond to that. Instead he asked something else.

"Give me a probability. Odds the patient in bed 1 survives if we transfer them first."

"High."

"And the second one."

"I can't calculate it."

"Then the first one is the answer."

"No," Dohyeon said.

He drew two lines on the paper. Bed 1 on the left, the second signal on the right.

"There are two reasons the probability can't be calculated," he said. "One is that there's no one there. The other is that there's no record. Those are different situations, but mathematically they both go in as zero."

"So."

"If you put it in as zero, whoever erased the record wins," Dohyeon said. "I don't enter it as zero. I count it as a separate line item. I write it as record gap uncertainty."

"That's your own personal notation."

"Yes. That's why I attached a source condition to the waveform copy yesterday. So it's clear the notation is mine and mine alone."

"If bed 1 gets delayed ten minutes because of that line item, do you take responsibility."

"I do," Dohyeon said. "But it won't be ten minutes. Your team handles the transfer prep, I only look at the chart. My accounting doesn't change your transfer time."

"Then what power does that line item have."

"It stays in the report," Dohyeon said. "If we can't find the second one today, it will be on record whether that's because there was nothing there, or because we didn't look."

Jisu set the paper down. Then he called his medic.

"Oxygen inventory."

"Two tanks for transfer, one spare."

"Leave the spare alone."

The medic answered. Yes, he said.

But four minutes later, what Dohyeon saw was something else.

The medic carried the spare tank into room 12 and was connecting it to the wall valve by the empty bed.

Dohyeon watched from the doorway. He didn't stop him, didn't call out.

"That's different from the captain's order," he said.

"I know," the medic said.

"Then why."

"Because I hear that sound."

The medic didn't open the valve. He connected it and pulled his hand back.

"Opening it drains the inventory," he said. "If it's already connected, opening it takes fifteen seconds. I'm buying that fifteen seconds ahead of time."

Dohyeon wrote that down. He asked for a name, and the medic gave only his surname. Dohyeon wrote only the surname.

Then he added one more line. Action contrary to order, reason given was hearing a sound, valve left unopened.

Twenty six minutes remained until the scheduled transfer.

Dohyeon went back to the desk and checked the two print times. The first sheet read 6:10 AM, the second 6:12 AM.

A two minute difference.

He requested the ward's print log. Both had been printed from the same terminal, twice, under the same operator account.

One person had printed twice within two minutes. But the contents were different.

"Two printouts from the same account, and the tables don't match," he said.

"Then the system's holding two of them," the nurse said.

The nurse said that first. Dohyeon recorded it. It was a sentence spoken first by someone outside the team.

He didn't photograph the two sheets himself. He called Mirae over.

"Mirae will do the original photography," he said. "If I photograph it, it ends up in the same hands as my own measurement data."

Mirae came. She photographed the two sheets separately, photographed the print time sections again, and photographed the back of the paper too.

There was no pencil slash on the back. Dohyeon confirmed that. The absence was itself a record.

When twenty minutes remained, Jisu came back.

"My medic hooked up the spare tank over there."

"Only connected. Not opened."

"Did you tell him to."

"No. I recorded the time and the reason I observed."

Jisu looked toward the door. His medic was standing by bed 1.

"That guy's been like that from the start," he said. "It's not that he disobeys my orders. When my order is too narrow, he puts one more thing beside it."

"Does the captain know that."

"I know. That's why I never cut him."

Dohyeon spent three seconds deciding whether to write that sentence down. He wrote it. He included the speaker and the time.

"Why write that down."

"Later, it becomes proof that the captain never erased an objection."

"You think I'll need that."

"I don't know."

The ten minutes of dawn had already passed. The second signal's position had only been fixed up to 40 centimeters above the floor, and below that there was nothing.

There was one reason dawn hadn't called for a halt. The position had been fixed. The condition wasn't to find the person, it was to fix the position.

Dohyeon confirmed that judgment. Only someone who never widened a condition afterward was allowed to set one.

"Saebyeok," he asked. "Are you setting a condition again."

"I am," Saebyeok said. "If no physical evidence comes up below 40 centimeters by the transfer time, I'm pulling our people out of the ward. Not leaving the patient behind, pulling us out."

"What's the difference."

"The patient's side is held by Captain Jisu's team. We're only adding risk."

A halt was a different case from a withdrawal. Dohyeon recorded that distinction.

When sixteen minutes remained, the corridor lights flickered once.

The second flicker lasted longer. Three seconds.

They went out on the third.

It took four seconds for emergency power to come on. During that time, Dohyeon's measuring device ran on battery, and the screen stayed lit.

What the device read was oxygen pressure. On both.

The wall valve pressure at bed 1 was dropping. And the valve by the empty bed was dropping along with it.

"The supply's cut," Dohyeon said.

The medic turned. He was within arm's reach of the spare tank's valve.

"How many minutes," he asked.

Dohyeon looked at the reading. It wasn't a two digit number.

"Under six minutes," he said. "Both sides."

Jisu ran in from the corridor. What he did first wasn't give an order.

"How many minutes."

"Five minutes forty seconds," Dohyeon said. "Bed 1 is five forty, the other side is five fifty."

"Why is there even a value for the other side."

"The spare tank is connected, so pressure reads out."

Jisu looked at his medic. The medic stood with his hand at the valve.

Three seconds passed. Then Jisu spoke.

"Open it."

The medic opened it. Not fifteen seconds, nine. The speed of someone who had already connected it in advance.

"Captain," Dohyeon said. "I'm recording this decision now."

"Write it," Jisu said. "But write it exactly. Don't write that I gave oxygen to a patient who isn't there. Write that I opened a valve whose pressure reading was there."

Dohyeon wrote that sentence exactly as spoken. It was accurate.