Rules and Warnings
The alert window from the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system flickered faintly in the bottom right corner of the monitor. It was the abdominal ultrasound reading for the patient in Room 10, referred from the Emergency Department.
Suspected inflammation around the colon and early abscess formation.
The sentence on the screen was concise and dry, but the meaning it carried was heavy. It was exactly the spot where the Archive's visualization layer had been flashing red. The hidden error that had nearly cost the patient his life had finally surfaced as official data.
Without hesitation, Baek Ijun left the reading window open and walked up behind Oh Jae-hyeong to deliver his report.
“Doctor. The ultrasound results for the patient in Room 10 are back. The Emergency Department reviewed them with us.”
Oh Jae-hyeong let out an irritated sigh and spun his chair around, mouse still in hand.
“Room 10? I’m sure I told you there was no need to order that test… didn’t I?”
Oh Jae-hyeong’s brows knitted fiercely as his gaze drilled into Ijun’s monitor. His eyes swept down the screen, then froze coldly in midair.
Early abscess.
The air in the station pulled taut in an instant. Oh Jae-hyeong’s lips parted slightly, but no sound emerged.
Ijun endured the heavy silence with a calm expression. He had perfect evidence supporting his intuition right in front of him. Before the absolute priority of patient safety, he calculated that his unilateral bypass of procedure could now be fully justified.
After several seconds of standoff, no excuses or rebukes left Oh Jae-hyeong’s mouth. He snatched the mouse and closed Ijun’s EMR window with a sharp click. Then he immediately opened the operating room schedule manager. The screen showed emergency surgery orders already entered in sequence.
Lead surgeon: Oh Jae-hyeong. Anesthesia consult complete. But the fields for first and second assistant remained blank.
Baek Ijun’s name appeared nowhere. It was a clear, ice-cold declaration that the first-year who had completely ignored his order would never set foot in his operating room.
Ijun lifted his eyes from the monitor and quietly stepped back. He felt neither resentment nor injustice. Losing the chance to observe in the OR was, he decided, a reasonable price to pay for defying the system’s hierarchy.
Whatever the case, Ijun had caught the error, and the system was now back on its proper track to save the patient. For the moment, he judged that enough.
Three hours later, a notification appeared on the ward monitor announcing that the emergency abscess removal surgery for the Room 10 patient had been completed successfully.
While Ijun was organizing the afternoon treatment list at the station, Oh Jae-hyeong entered the ward still wearing his surgical scrubs, sterile gown discarded. His face was rigid. The nurses at the station, sensing his menacing aura, subtly averted their eyes.
Oh Jae-hyeong strode past the desk toward the emergency exit at the end of the corridor and dropped a cold command.
“Baek Ijun. Follow me.”
In a quiet corner of the cool, rarely used corridor by the emergency exit, only the gray late-afternoon light seeping through the window cracks illuminated the heavy atmosphere between them.
Oh Jae-hyeong leaned against the wall, staring at Ijun with a chilling gaze. Ijun, too, had shed his usual gentle warmth and met the senior resident with a steady, solid look.
“Are you secretly celebrating in there because you got one ultrasound right?”
Oh Jae-hyeong’s voice did not rise or shake with rage. It was low and dry enough to raise goosebumps.
Ijun answered in the same unshaken, logical tone.
“I wasn’t celebrating. I had no intention of it. The patient’s symptoms were clear, and I simply needed objective external data to prove my judgment was correct. I apologize for violating procedure and bypassing another department, but I calculated that leaving the patient unattended would constitute a far greater system error.”
It was a flawless defensive argument. An irrefutable justification that no physician who placed patient safety first could refute.
Yet a cold sneer curved Oh Jae-hyeong’s lips.
“Calculated? You came from engineering, fiddling with machines, so maybe you’re confused. This isn’t a simulation lab where you plug in numbers and the answer pops out.”
Oh Jae-hyeong took one step closer. The crushing weight of superior years pressed down on the corridor.
“My order was wrong. Your ultrasound was right. So now you think you’re some hotshot doctor because you saved the patient? What if nothing had shown on that scan? If the guardian filed a complaint saying a first-year created unnecessary anxiety and forced an uncovered test, who takes the heat? Can you take responsibility?”
Ijun’s breathing faltered for a fraction of a second.
“What authority does a first-year nobody have to take responsibility for a patient outcome? In the end, I have to shield it with my license, my name, my title as the attending. If it’s right, it’s your cheap credit. If it’s wrong, it’s my responsibility. You started this game on your own terms.”
“That’s…”
Oh Jae-hyeong’s words had shattered Ijun’s once-perfect logical circuit. He was right. Medicine was not a simple game of finding and fixing errors called disease. The moment a diagnosis was made, it became a terrible domain of weight in which one had to bear every complication it might spawn, every guardian protest, every legal liability.
Lacking authority meant lacking the capacity to bear responsibility.
From the beginning, Ijun had never even considered anything beyond the medical judgment itself.
“I know you’re smart. But a bastard who ignores his senior’s orders and bypasses the system has no place in surgery. To you it might look like rotten, outdated hierarchy. That rotten practice is the only safety mechanism keeping dozens of patients alive in this madhouse of a hospital. Do you even get that?”
Oh Jae-hyeong’s gaze pierced straight through Ijun’s face.
“From now on, if I say no, that’s the end of it. Ignore my order one more time and act on your own, and you will never step foot in my operating room again.”
It was not a threat or emotional outburst. It was a cold, flawless declaration of the rules that upheld the massive university hospital system.
Ijun opened his mouth, but not a single word of rebuttal emerged. Even with the tens of thousands of perfect medical data the Archive could provide, he could not break Oh Jae-hyeong’s heavy theory of responsibility.
His own calculation had been completely wrong. He now felt in his bones that arbitrary action without authority was nothing but violence.
For the first time, Baek Ijun’s mouth was utterly silenced.
Oh Jae-hyeong did not wait for a reply. He turned and walked back toward the station.
Left alone in the empty corridor, Ijun struggled to swallow the heavy, sunken air.
When he returned to the station, his classmate Kim Jinsu paused while flipping through a chart and studied Ijun’s stiff expression.
“Hyung. Did Dr. Oh Jae-hyeong call you over and rip you to shreds?”
Rare genuine worry colored Jinsu’s voice.
Ijun stood before the monitor, opening the EMR window, and tried to answer calmly.
“Not just ripped apart—logically demolished based on extremely accurate facts, I’d say.”
“Aish… you crazy bastard. Even now you’re analyzing it. Anyway, watch yourself. If a third-year decides to deliberately keep you off the OR schedule, we first-years could spend the rest of training doing nothing but ward scut work. Getting the right answer is fine, but surviving comes first, doesn’t it?”
Jinsu’s words traced exactly the same line as Oh Jae-hyeong’s declaration.
Ijun answered with a short nod and silently checked the evening treatment orders. The relief of having saved a patient was outweighed by the heavier realization that he remained a complete outsider to the system.
Eleven o’clock at night. Once the on-duty workload had quieted, Ijun headed for the emergency stairwell where the coffee machine stood. He leaned back against the cold concrete wall and closed his eyes.
His thoughts were tangled. He possessed an overwhelming weapon called the Archive, yet figuring out how to wield it within the real-world hierarchy was an entirely different problem.
Until I gain proper authority, must I hide myself completely and function as an obedient cog in the system? And while I do, how can I ignore the patient crises the Archive warns me about?
Even as Ijun floundered in this philosophical dilemma of hierarchy and responsibility, he knew that somewhere in the ward a quiet, lethal error might be tightening around another patient’s airway.
Yet Oh Jae-hyeong’s warning still rang in his ears.
From now on, if I say no, that’s the end of it.
The red flash returned.
“Guess I have to do what I’m told… just a first-year nobody…”
Ijun muttered, turning Oh Jae-hyeong’s words over in his mind. Yet he instinctively knew that the next time he saw the Archive’s warning flashing red before his eyes, he would ignore hierarchy once again.