Legal Suicide
These days, the internet is supposedly crawling with people calling themselves Jack O'Lantern—the mysterious suicide whisperer. Think about it, though, and anonymity is exactly that sort of thing. Anyone who wants to can slap on the nickname Jack O'Lantern and start posting. Unlike a real name, which sticks once it attaches and never comes off, a name on the internet is a mask you can swap out whenever you like.
Silvester skimmed the newspaper and snorted. There, quoted in the article, was a passage that appeared to have been written by Jack O'Lantern himself.
"Life isn't nearly as precious as people make it out to be. So why do you think society refuses to grant us the right to die? Because society runs on us. You go to school, graduate, become a member of society, and then you pay taxes, don't you?
You hand over your taxes, earn money, keep the economy moving, get married, produce new members of society, and grow old and die. In the end, society needs us for its own survival. But I refuse to hand over the right to end my own life to society over something that trivial."
Silvester read the passage and let out a short laugh.
"Heh. You've got to be kidding me."
Willingly throwing your life away for the sake of beauty, filming the whole thing, and spreading it across the internet—what a joke. Manufacturing an aesthetic of death and trying to infect other people with it—did the man think he was some kind of cult leader? And what about the people who handed their lives over to a creature like that? Why would people who never followed so-called opinion leaders when society pointed them one way or another throw away their own lives following this Jack O'Lantern?
"Not a vampire or a monster, I expect. Still—he's starting to get under my skin."
Playing on people's vanity to manipulate them might look childish at a glance, but it worked easily enough on the mentally immature. And given that the targets were an unspecified mass of strangers, this was less a scheme with a concrete profit or purpose and more an indiscriminate assault. But why? For what reason?
"You want to cancel your resident registration?"
Kenneth Yang stared at Han Se-gun in open shock.
"Yes."
The young man with the green-dyed hair nodded. Kenneth looked at him as if the words had short-circuited his brain.
"Think this through. Canceling your resident registration just so you don't have to go into the military? That's insane. You lose all legal protection. You can't even acquire property rights."
"I have thought it through. I'm doing illegal work anyway, so staying off police databases and background checks seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Wipe the registration completely and the job gets a lot easier from here on out. Turns out canceling it isn't even that hard."
Se-gun said it so matter-of-factly that Kenneth was left speechless. He toyed with an earring and stared at the floor. Se-gun was never going to hold down legitimate work—he lived off crime—so having no resident registration would make him harder to look up. That much was true.
But canceling a resident registration meant erasing a legal person—erasing the Republic of Korea citizen named Han Se-gun. It was legal suicide.
"Listen. You won't be able to get a license either… and even if you change your mind later, you're done with normal society. Better to rot in prison. Serve a year and a half or more, keep your head down, get out early, and then—"
"I don't figure I'm living that long anyway. Let's just do it."
Se-gun's voice was flat and final. Kenneth clicked his tongue.
"You hate the army that much?"
"That's not the problem, and you know it."
Se-gun snapped at Kenneth's attempt to turn it into a joke. Kenneth only snickered at the reaction.
"All right, all right—joke. So what exactly do you need me to do? Skip the move-in report, dispose of the registered address, vanish for a month or two, and the registration cancels itself."
"I still have to eat and stay in contact, so how about you set me up with a hideout?"
Once the registration was gone, he couldn't acquire a house or any real estate. He would be a drifting weed. He could hardly go homeless while carrying firearms and blades, so Se-gun was demanding a safe house from Kenneth.
"Hmm. Fine. And the fee?"
"I'll give you my house."
Se-gun said it and held out the property papers. Kenneth's brow furrowed.
"Damn it. Not cash?"
"You can process this kind of thing and turn it into money. And I'm not asking for a hideout for life."
Se-gun's dry rebuke made Kenneth take the keys and the documents from his hand.
"True enough. All right. Call it a five-year contract. I provide a hideout for five years—deal?"
"Ten years."
"If you're planning to live that long, go do your two years in the service."
"…Fine. Seven years."
"Done."
Kenneth drew up a contract on the spot.
"If you're canceling the registration, we transfer the title first and do this properly."
"What?"
"You don't know a single thing about real estate, do you?"
"…"
"Kid."
Faced with Se-gun's silence, Kenneth roughly filled out the necessary paperwork himself.
"It's a house, so it won't take that many documents. Just a transfer of ownership registration… Straight gift would look bad, so we'll put a sale price on it. How much did you buy it for?"
"Huh?"
"Write it lower than that. I know a notary—we'll use him."
True to form as a professional broker, Kenneth pushed the process along at speed. Watching him work, Se-gun waved a hand dismissively.
"Got it. I'll leave the rest to you, then. I'm going."
"If you've got a seal, leave it."
"Here."
Se-gun tossed him the seal and stepped outside. The sun was already going down. Getting home from Seongnam would take a while. If he ran into a vampire along the way…
"Come on. Who's going to jump me in a situation like this?"
With the police on a hair trigger, no one would be stupid enough to show themselves. They already knew exactly what kind of man Se-gun was from the last attack. Still, unease clung to him. The cops had gotten so brutally sensitive to anyone on a motorcycle that he hadn't brought a gun—and if he got hit now, he was finished.
"Hmph."
Se-gun rubbed under his nose and pulled on his helmet. Same as always: on a bike in the middle of the road, vampire or human made no difference. Once he was astride the machine, he felt almost calm.
"Figured this thing would fall apart by now, but it's lasting longer than I expected."
He muttered the insult at his XR-250 and swung a leg over it.
In a PC bang thick with cigarette smoke, men who looked half-dead sat in rows, still glued to their games. Only the decent ventilation system kept the place from becoming a mass asphyxiation event.
"Damn it. Every last one of these bastards is Jack O'Lantern."
Detective Jo flipped through a manual and hammered at a keyboard, hopping from chat community to chat community. On site after site, the suicide cases had gotten so famous that impostors using the name Jack O'Lantern were everywhere.
"These sons of bitches. Playing at being murderers?"
Of course, actual murder charges wouldn't stick to Jack O'Lantern. Disturbing the social order, aiding suicide, solicitation… plenty of counts, but none of them hard enough to put someone away for even two years. Two years for a stunt like that—as a cop, it made his teeth grind. And even those two years only applied if they caught him. At this rate, catching him at all looked impossible.
"Hey. What the hell are you doing?"
Detective Jo had been bouncing through chat rooms, bickering with people, when he finally noticed what Detective Park was up to. Park—huge man that he was—sat hunched at a computer playing Go-Stop and jerked his head up in alarm.
"Huh?"
"…You idiot. We're not here on a field trip."
"Ah—sorry, sir."
Watching a giant of a man bow and scrape like a rolling teddy bear drained the anger right out of him. Besides, Jo had been digging hard himself, and hunting the guy this way was starting to feel like pure stupidity. Even hopping from PC bang to PC bang was a nightmare of logistics.
"…Forget it. If hanging around PC bangs was enough to catch him, we'd have him already."
Detective Jo muttered it and stood up.
"Come on."
"Huh? Where?"
"We're clocking out. You planning to glue yourself to that chair?"
"We're going home?"
"Yeah, dumbass. Thanks to you, I get to go on record as wasting work hours in a PC bang. Let's go."
Jo grumbled as he rose. This case belonged to the cyber investigation unit—they were already running around with their eyes on fire. It wasn't his assignment.
"But why is this Jack O'Lantern guy making people die?"
Detective Park asked as he fumbled into his jacket.
"Psychologists say he does it for the ego trip. Hell—you don't need a psychologist to figure that out."
A psychological profile had already been issued, of course. Analysis of posts believed to be from the real Jack O'Lantern—not the impostors—suggested the perpetrator was highly intelligent, had never realized that potential, and was likely physically frail.
But how many people fit that description? Profiling alone was useless. You needed a suspect in custody before profiling meant anything. When the whole world was a suspect pool, what good was a profile?
"But… why doesn't he stop? Newspapers and broadcasts are tearing into him, the police are hunting him—shouldn't a normal person quit?"
"Please. A normal person doesn't go around telling people to off themselves. He's doing it because he's not normal. Crazy bastards are everywhere."
Detective Jo said it and clicked his tongue. This country had shoved itself into the information age so fast the internet was everywhere—PC bangs on islands, internet access on every corner. Catching crimes committed with a computer took far more effort than anyone wanted to admit.
Which was probably why the guy felt safe enough to keep going. He had slipped the cyber unit cleanly so far. Judging by the way he had been indiscriminately hacking chat community IDs, he was operating close to pro level.
"Tch. As far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter how many people die—he's having fun. That's human nature for you. As long as you're entertained, other people can drop dead."
Detective Jo muttered it as he walked out of the PC bang. The wind was still cold. The case wouldn't break, and the cold wouldn't break either—his mood was foul all the way through.
"He kills people with words, so you can't exactly tell him to shut up. And there's not even a trail. Damn it."
"Then what if we gathered the people who got hacked and investigated everyone around them, senior?"
"Bullshit. People get hacked just for opening a mail. He can hit indiscriminately. And what, you think I'm an idiot? We already ran all that. No connection anywhere."
Detective Park trotted after Detective Jo, nodding along the whole way.