Who Is It?
"Are you even listening to me? Hello? Lee Seoyeon?"
"Uh—huh? Y-yeah, I'm listening..."
"Okay, that's actually so rude. I'm over here talking my mouth off and you're zoning out?!"
"Sorry... the character in the video is just too pretty."
She was her own older sister, but even so, the girl on screen was ridiculously, unfairly beautiful. Just watching her was enough to draw a gasp of admiration. No wonder the chat window beside the video was overflowing with sexual harassment.
Can't I just sue every last one of those bastards?
Seoyeon seethed as the comments kept rolling in. Being pretty didn't make those kinds of remarks okay. If she could have, she would have memorized every username and slapped each of them with a lawsuit, one by one.
"Right? Her character customization is insanely good. Even the popular custom models aren't that pretty. I tried it myself and I just couldn't do it — I couldn't even get close to that vibe. I wish she'd share the custom settings."
"Absolutely not!"
Character customization. If you thought about it logically, the girl in the video who looked exactly like her sister might not actually be her sister. But the more Seoyeon watched — that identical face, that familiar voice — the more certain she became. And she already knew one of her sister's hobbies was gaming. Given that Last of Quantum was a game, the odds that it was her sister were high. Even if it wasn't, she hated the idea of other people freely using a face that looked just like her sister's.
"Uh... why are you getting mad? It's not even your face..."
"I know, but... is the person in that video famous?"
"Famous? Yeah, you could say that. She got pinned on the boards as a cheater. Now she's blowing up for a completely different reason."
"So she only got famous recently."
"Well, if you want to put it that way, yeah."
Seoyeon couldn't understand what on earth her sister was thinking.
Depression. Social anxiety.
Ever since they were little, her sister's striking looks had drawn every kind of garbage human being imaginable. That was why her sister had always been more than just shy — she'd been afraid of people, withdrawn to the point of passivity. Things had only gotten worse lately with the fighting at home. And now she'd taken the money meant for college tuition and walked out.
Of course Seoyeon was worried.
On top of everything, the games her sister usually played weren't this kind of game at all. This was a girl who lived in titles like Animal Crossing. What kind of change of heart had driven her into something like this? Seoyeon couldn't help fearing that leaving home had only made her sister's symptoms worse.
"I think I need to go somewhere."
"What? Class is about to start. Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm really sorry. Can you tell the homeroom teacher for me?"
"That's not exactly a simple favor. I need to know what's going on if I'm going to make up a story."
Seoyeon had been planning to wait until the weekend to go find her sister. That plan was gone. Whatever had changed in her sister's heart, she needed to see her right now. If her sister was struggling, shouldn't she at least be there? When things got hard, family was all you had. She had to be her sister's strength, even if she was the only one who would.
"Just say it's a family thing."
"Haa... whatever. Fine, I'll cover for you. But don't you dare blame me later."
"I won't. Thank you so much. I'll treat you to something big later."
"I'm holding you to that."
Leaving her friend behind — thumb raised like she had everything under control — Seoyeon walked out of school and set off to find her sister.
Sleep mattered. Get tired enough, or go without it long enough, and the skin under your eyes went dark. It dulled your thinking. It brought on dizziness, headaches, the whole miserable catalog of bodily complaints. And because sleep did so much work, having it interrupted was guaranteed to put anyone in a foul mood.
Like right now.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
The doorbell went off first thing in the morning, loud enough to drag me out of sleep. I sat up slowly, started toward the front door — and my body locked up.
Someone's at the house...?
I'd already been half-dreaming from exhaustion; now my head started pounding on top of it, as if it couldn't decide what kind of crisis this was supposed to be. Until now, the only people who'd ever come to this place were delivery drivers. Even then I'd put it in the request notes — Please don't ring the bell. Leave it at the door and text me — so the doorbell had never once gone off.
And yet someone was here. At this hour of the morning.
I killed every sound I could make and crept up to the front door. The sudden intrusion of reality felt like it was prying my half-asleep mind open with both hands. I ran through the list of people who might reasonably show up. The landlord was the safest bet — something to tell me, or maybe I still hadn't paid the rent.
I leaned in and peered through the peephole.
...Who is that?
On the other side of the lens stood a girl I had no memory of. Twenty, maybe younger. A baby face with the faintest wash of makeup, the kind that made you think student before you thought adult. The school uniform confirmed it. Neatly trimmed bangs sat clean above her eyes; long, straight hair fell all the way to her waist. Big eyes and the soft fullness beneath them should have given her a gentle look, but the blankness of her expression turned it a little cold.
It was a face anyone would look twice at. It was also a face that did not exist anywhere in my memory.
Then again, if I was being honest, no one in this world existed in my memory. The closest I could get were celebrities I'd seen online, and even those didn't quite match what I remembered.
Either way, a nameless girl showing up out of nowhere was more than enough reason to stay on guard. The worst-case scenarios I was imagining probably wouldn't happen. But you never knew with the world. Who opened a door without knowing what kind of trouble was standing on the other side?
Ding-dong.
The bell rang again, impatient, like she was telling me to hurry up and open it. I held my breath and played dead, not making a sound.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
The girl beyond the door already seemed to know someone was home. She kept leaning on the bell. Minutes crawled by and the ringing showed no sign of stopping, and the face on the other side looked like it had no intention of leaving at all. In the end, I opened the door.
I left the security chain on. Minimum safety.
The words slipped through the crack as the door opened with a metallic click.
"Did you just... say 'who is it'?"
The girl looked like she'd been punched.
"Harin unnie! It's me. Me! Your little sister, Lee Seoyeon... don't tell me you don't even recognize me...?"
She enunciated what was apparently her own name, carefully, one syllable at a time, and she kept talking in that same stunned voice.
"......"
I couldn't find a single thing to say. It felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs. Like I had just done something I was never supposed to do.
My head went light, floating. My thoughts scattered in every direction at once, all of them asking the same useless question — how was I supposed to treat this girl named Seoyeon?
The "me" she knows isn't me anymore.
"Unnie. Open the door."
Her voice was quiet, aimed at my hesitation. My head was already overloaded, jammed with too many thoughts at once. I passed some kind of threshold, the point just before a brain simply detonates —
And I took the chain off.
The door came open, and she looked at me like she was a second away from crying. My mind went completely, literally blank. In the tears gathering in those big eyes, I thought I could see blame — blame aimed at me — and I couldn't meet her gaze at all.
"Unnie. Just now — you didn't recognize me? Is that actually what happened?"
"N-no... that's not..."
"And why haven't you been answering your phone? Do you have any idea how worried I've been? If you were going to live like this — if you were going to end up looking like this...!"
The second the door was open she started in on me without a pause, and I could barely get a word out. She was looking at me like a single touch would set the tears off. How was I supposed to answer that?
What kind of relationship was I even supposed to have had with a little sister?
I had no way of knowing what the old "me" had done. Watching this girl talk with that heartbroken face on was more bewildering than anything else.
"Unnie, are you even sleeping properly? You know those dark circles under your eyes are insane, right?"
That one, at least, felt a little unfair. I had been about to fall asleep when someone showed up and rang the doorbell. I swallowed the thought before it could become words and tried to give her an answer that wouldn't make things worse.
"I was just about to go to sleep."
"You were about to go to sleep. Now."
"Yeah..."
"It's nine in the morning."
Even I — a man who had never had to deal with a younger sister — could tell she wasn't asking for the time. She was demanding an explanation for why I was going to bed after the sun was already up.
"Something came up last night."
The stream with Jump had ended at two in the morning. After that I'd poked around the community boards and messed with my phone, and somehow it had become this hour.
"Because of that Jump guy?"
"W-wait...? How do you know that."
The look in my little sister's eyes was sharp enough to cut.