An Unfamiliar World
Information about me.
I had become a woman overnight, without cause or context — but I never imagined there wouldn't be a single scrap of information left about who I was. I fought the heavy feeling that kept trying to drag me under, forcing myself to look this reality in the eye. Running from it wouldn't change a thing. Sooner or later, the moment always came when you had to accept it and live with it.
Questions surged up anyway — how had this happened, where had everything gone wrong — along with a bitter, helpless resentment. Even so, I made myself move.
Clack. Clack.
Through a haze of dull consciousness I tore through cabinets and the drawers under the desk like a madwoman. Fortunately, finding out who I was wasn't difficult. An ID card told me everything I needed.
...Lee Harin.
To put it simply: the name was Lee Harin. Twenty-two years old. The photo on the ID caught my eye — a neatly dressed young woman. She'd already been pretty, but with light makeup and whatever retouching they'd done, she looked like a goddess. It was the kind of face that seemed too unreal for this world, captured in a photograph that tried to make her look ordinary.
Besides the ID, the wallet held a debit card from a brand I didn't recognize. Obviously, living in modern society required money. This body might have better fuel efficiency than my old one, but remembering that the instant noodles I'd just eaten were the last of my food made the need for cash all the more urgent.
A silver lining, I supposed. The phone I'd found with the wallet already had a banking app installed and linked. I wouldn't have to haul the wallet down to an actual bank. It was locked, but like any modern phone, a fingerprint scan unlocked it.
"At least... I don't have to worry about money."
The words slipped out before I could stop them. I flinched at the pleasant, faintly husky timbre of the voice — then went back to counting what was in the account.
I checked it several times. The number never changed. Roughly ten million won sat in that account.
How a twenty-two-year-old — too young, even, to really be called a working adult — had managed to save that much was a fair question, but I honestly didn't care how the money had been earned. If not knowing the source didn't cause any problems, what was the point of finding out?
If the balance had been a thousand won instead of ten million, I would have been hunting for a part-time job before I'd even gotten my head on straight. As long as I could eat and keep a roof over my head, that was enough. Money came and went. That was how it had always been.
Family was something I could piece together from an SNS app on the phone called Batok.
She was the person who had sent the most messages in the entire chat history. Judging by the contents... a younger sister, probably.
Dozens of messages a day, every day. Lee Harin's replies, by contrast, were almost nonexistent, and the few that existed were half-hearted one-word answers. There was even a message from just yesterday that had gone completely unanswered.
The thought of answering crossed my mind, then vanished just as quickly. Even if she was a younger sister, I had no memory of her. She might as well have been a stranger. There wasn't much I could do for the worried texts pouring in. I didn't have time to worry about someone I didn't know — not when adapting to this changed body was already an urgent enough problem.
So I had a younger sister. That much I'd established. But family wouldn't stop at a younger sister. There would be parents. There might be siblings who couldn't have cared less about me.
My head was saturated. It felt like I was working a problem that had no solution.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Then a thought struck me, and I punched in a number.
My own phone number.
"The number you have dialed is not in service..."
A hollow letdown washed through me, the kind that comes when something you'd been counting on betrays you. What if this wasn't the world I'd been living in at all? If I'd been right, I would never have even considered changing my number.
And then another thought followed. What if... someone had picked up?
Even that fleeting idea made me press a hand to my chest without meaning to. The fact that the number didn't exist filled me with a relief so thick I could taste it. If the person on the other end had been me... or Lee Harin, possessing me... how was I supposed to have taken that?
Even after confirming that "I" did not exist here, I didn't stop calling. I just wanted some faint scrap of a clue that might cut through this impossible situation.
But the world, as they say, is cruel.
"You have the wrong number."
...There was no one.
The hand holding the smartphone wouldn't stop shaking. I went through every connection I had. Nothing changed. It felt as if I had been dropped into the world completely alone. Fine — acquaintances could change their numbers. But even the company being different made no sense. The thought crept in that what had happened to me wasn't a simple body swap, but a shift into a parallel world.
A bad dream.
With a hollow, stranded feeling, I opened the previous owner's contacts. I needed to know the family situation, at least. If someone who knew her asked, I had to be able to answer.
No registered contacts.
I thought I'd misread it. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The words didn't change.
What? Had she lived cut off from the world? If you'd just come down out of the woods, sure, your contact list might be empty. But Lee Harin was no off-grid nature hermit. And still — not a single number. That was strange. Even people with no social life usually save their family. There was nothing. As if she'd severed every tie. At the very least, the younger sister she traded Batok messages with should have been saved.
I couldn't make sense of Lee Harin at all. A home too bleak for anyone to actually be living in. A girl who looked like a younger sister sending messages without missing a single day. A contact list without even family in it, and more money than a fresh graduate had any business having.
What the hell was this.
My head felt so packed it was about to burst. I found myself wishing someone would lean in and hand me even the faintest clue. But reality doesn't toss you evidence whenever you need it, the way a mystery game does. There are no hints. Sometimes there are no clues at all. Which meant I couldn't get even a fragment of one about Lee Harin.
When people hit a problem they can't solve, they look away. They can't fix it with their own hands, so they let go — tell themselves it'll sort itself out later, or that someone else will handle it. A magnificent vicious cycle. In the end the problem may circle back around and land on them again, but what else are they supposed to do? There's no way to solve it right now.
And I was no different, boxed in by unsolvable questions. You can't invent answers for problems that don't have any. So you stop trying to write them, and you run from reality.
Which is to say... I was going to get some sleep.
Time moved faster than I'd expected. I opened my eyes and it was the next day. I poked around at this and that, and then it was the next day again. All those hours of training, of working jobs as a mercenary, felt like a dream now. I was dissolving into this world faster than I would have thought possible — holed up in that bleak studio apartment, staring blankly, powering on the computer, piecing together what I could about the world.
I'd suspected it from the unfamiliar brand on the cards, from the empty contact list. This place looked modern, but it was different, in small ways, everywhere you looked. The more I searched on the computer, the more the confusion piled up. It wasn't some absurd world where North Korea was a global superpower. But the current president, the level of technology, even the famous celebrities and the shape of past history — all of it was clearly off. Maybe that was why I couldn't find the mercenary office I'd worked for, or any of the incidents I'd been deployed to.
...So this really isn't the world I knew.
I let out a breath and turned my gaze. Every light in the apartment was off; the interior sat in complete dark. For a moment it felt like my own future — no idea what was coming next — but when had I ever known that? It was a pointless, sour feeling, nothing more. Tomorrow's business, as always, could only be known tomorrow.
"...I don't know."
Tomorrow's problems were for tomorrow's me to handle.