If It Were Possible to Turn Back Time
"If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
It was the final question of the interview.
For a question from one of the most coveted companies in the country, it was a little absurd, a little frivolous — but I didn't dumbly ask her to repeat it, and I didn't laugh awkwardly, either.
If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do?
Of all the Jaerae Group hiring questions that made the rounds by word of mouth, it was the most famous. Maybe the most important, too.
"For this question alone, I promise you on the name of 'Jaerae' that no answer you give, Mr. Seon Yuhan, will be held against you in this interview. Of course, a good answer will earn you exactly as much credit as it deserves."
A gem of a question — say anything at all and you'd lose no points, while the better your answer, the higher you'd score. A chance to buy back every flaw and every misstep.
Not that anyone could tell you what actually counted as a good answer.
"If I could turn back time."
The important thing was that my present and my future hung on this one question.
"I..."
And that the answer to it lay in the past.
"Ah."
I froze for a split second, second-guessing which way to go, and by the time I recovered, the elevator doors had slid shut right in front of my nose.
We made eye contact, didn't we? He could've held the door.
Anyway, today of all days, my luck was in the gutter. The interview included.
Was I going to fail? Do they even know how much this place pays? If I could just get in, I'd be set for life.
Ha. I was about to heave a long, deep sigh when I remembered I was still inside the building, and shook my head instead.
Never mind.
It was already behind me, and there was no turning it back.
Maybe I'd catch a movie on the way home.
3:33 PM.
It felt like a waste to head straight home like this. All waiting for me there was the pleasant task of gloomily replaying today's interview on a loop.
"...Huh?"
What?
At the top of my phone screen — I'd pulled it out to book a movie ticket — the words SOS sat where the signal bars should have been.
Why is my data suddenly dead?
The moment I pressed the restart button—
Tick—
The ceiling lights flickered, then went dark all at once.
A blackout?
What about all the employees here?
Staring at the four elevator panels, now blank of any numbers, I found myself worrying less about the people who would need rescuing than about the people whose work — the kind that must never be interrupted — had just been interrupted.
I'd take the stairs down.
I turned and headed for the emergency stairwell. It was only the third floor; walking down to the lobby was nothing.
But seriously, what was wrong with this thing?
Even with the phone rebooted, that SOS was still glowing at me.
Losing service in the heart of a city like this meant something had happened to the cell towers nearby.
A fire, maybe. Or else—
Had a Labyrinth appeared?
If a transmission tower or a utility pole had been wrecked in the process, the blackout in this building made sense too.
Even so, it was the middle of the day; the dark didn't matter much.
The building was shaped like a hollow square, its heart carved out and open to the sky. Sunlight reached not only the offices lining the outer walls but the inner corridors as well, spilling in through the windows.
And as I walked, I happened to glance down through a corridor window at the ground floor below.
At its very center lay a garden, deep and green.
An enormous maze of a garden that was beautiful only from above — from below, nothing but a wall.
KRA-KOOM!
I was just starting to drift into idle thoughts when a thunderous impact rolled out from somewhere behind me.
KU-GOOM, KRA-KRA-KRASH, KRAAANG!
A sound big enough to shudder through the whole building, like something enormous slamming into it.
KRASH! THOOM!
Instinct took over. I sprinted for the emergency exit and hurled myself through it—
"Wha—?"
—and my foot slipped out from under me.
1. Do not run on the stairs.
"If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
"I'm sorry?"
I blinked at her, dumbly.
The interviewer was smiling gently.
"It seems you really didn't know about this question, Mr. Seon Yuhan. Most candidates come in already knowing it."
"In principle, it isn't supposed to be shared," she added with a little shrug.
"In any case, let me ask once more. If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
What? What just happened? What is happening right now? Déjà vu? Or had I dozed off mid-interview and dreamed the whole thing?
"Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
"Ah — yes. If that were possible, I..."
"Thank you for your time."
Half in a daze, I bowed politely and stepped out into the corridor.
Somehow I had managed to deliver the answer I'd prepared. But panic had made me stumble over every other word.
Had I overdone the mental rehearsal? How out of control does your imagination have to be to keep running after the interview is over? And toward the ominous ending, no less?
I must have been more nervous than I realized. My whole body felt heavy and stiff.
Rubbing the back of my neck for no particular reason, I stopped in front of the elevator.
Five... four... three... ding!
By sheer luck the timing was perfect, and I slipped straight in.
My eyes met those of a man already riding it, and I gave him a small nod of acknowledgment. A stranger's face — but you never know how things might turn out.
Hold on.
An inexplicable chill crawled over me, and I stole a sideways glance at the man beside me.
A face I'd never seen before... Hadn't I, though? Hadn't our eyes met somewhere? Earlier? No — before that? No... At the very start?
Clunk.
The floor-number panel went dark with a pop, and the elevator stopped.
"Hm? What the—"
The man, who had been checking his reflection in the mirror panel, lifted his head. He looked once at the dead display, then at me.
"D-did it stop?"
His voice cracked with alarm.
"Yes. It seems that wa—"
"—Come on. Why won't it respond?"
Rat-a-tat-tat.
I watched in silence as he hammered the yellow emergency call button over and over.
"Goddammit. What's wrong with this thing? My phone won't work either."
None of this felt right.
Hearing him complain, I checked my own phone. Sure enough: SOS, glowing at the top of the screen.
No way.
"Huh?"
Clunk. Screeee—
"Oh! It's moving again. Thank god. Right?"
Moving? No. No, it wasn't. That wasn't movement. This was...
"Uh— uh-oh? Why is it getting faster—"
That feeling. The one like the instant a roller coaster crests the highest point of its rail, hangs there for a heartbeat, and then begins to fall again — the feeling that makes every hair on your body stand on end.
KRA-KOOM!
The same thunder that had sent me sprinting for the emergency stairs.
KU-GOOM, KRA-KRA-KRASH!
It was the sound of an elevator falling.
2. Do not ride the elevator.
"If it were possible to turn back time, what would you do, Mr. Seon Yuhan?"
"F—"
I very nearly said —uck.
"—ine. If I could turn back time."
I clenched my fist, then opened it again. For some reason, my whole body felt numb and prickly.
"I— well. I think I would have to stay put here a while and watch how things unfold first..."
"Hm. Could you explain a little more what you mean by that?"
Because it really, truly seems like time has been turned back, so first I need to observe the situation and figure out what is going on!
I strangled the scream before it could leave my throat.
At the very least, I needed to know whether this was a situation that called for signing an employment contract or checking myself into a hospital. No — honestly, if a psychiatric ward could fix this, I'd have counted it a mercy.
"Mr. Seon Yuhan. Are you all right?"
No matter how many times she called, the applicant only kept his mouth clamped shut and trembled — and so the interviewer's concern seemed to have overtaken any trace of irritation.
"I think it's best we end things here. There's a clinic on the fourth floor — if you're feeling unwell, please have someone take a look at you."
The interviewer made a small gesture, urging me toward the door, but I didn't want to go.
Even if they gutted my score for the attitude and cut me on the spot — wouldn't that still beat tumbling down a stairwell, or plummeting in a dead elevator?
Please, let it be a dream. A delusion. An imagination grown too vivid. Please, let me be a patient whose grip on reality is impaired enough to be clinically significant.
"If it's hard to stand up on your own, I can help y—"
Silence.
Then, darkness.
I stared blankly around the empty interview room. The interviewer was gone.
Where had she gone? And where was I?
Sitting in my chair, I stared vacantly down at the phone screen.
KRA-KOOM!
Before long, I heard it — a sound I wasn't used to, but that wasn't new to me either.
KU-GOOM, KRA-KRA-KRASH, KRAAANG! KRASH! THOOM!
Six crashes in all.
There were six elevators in the building. Four of them stood clustered together, and one of those was the one I'd ridden. The other two must have been service cars.
But would an elevator really plummet just because the power went out?
The odds of an elevator in free fall converged on almost exactly zero. The safety systems were engineered to that standard. Riding inside the car while the car itself dropped — that movie-style catastrophe did not happen in real life.
Right. That was how it was supposed to be.
"Ha..."
I let out a sigh that felt like it could sink the floor beneath me.
Even so, nothing absurd had happened yet — I hadn't tipped backward out of the chair and snapped my cervical spine, and the ceiling hadn't caved in on my head.
So nothing happens as long as I stay here? Then how long am I supposed to sit here?
Silence pressed in from every side. Not a single sound reached me.
I hated that silence, so I filled my head with noise instead.
Why did you apply to our company, Mr. Seon Yuhan? Because it's the most famous name in the industry, and it pays the most, obviously. And why the Red Weaver Support Department? Because I'm a gutless, spineless coward who can't do a single thing on his own, sir. What would you say your greatest strength is, Mr. Seon Yuhan? A survival instinct — the kind that reads every room like a rat and crawls out of anything alive like a cockroach. If your assigned Red Weaver's interests ever came into conflict with the company's, how would you act as his agent, Mr. Seon Yuhan? Whichever way paid me more. And do you have any final questions for us? Yes. Just one. Why is my life like this?
Squeak. Skrrk.
How long had I been at that?
My head jerked up at the sudden sound.
Skreek. Skik. Kre-eek.
That distinct, unpleasant squeal of damp rubber soles dragging across a polished floor.
Someone was out in the corridor.
Skik. Kreek.
Footsteps belonging to no one I could name drew closer — right up to the interview room door.
I held my breath.
Knock knock!
I didn't answer.
Knock knock knock!
"What time is it?"
I shot up out of my chair.
A child's voice.
"What time? No clock out here."
A kid who lives on the internet, huh. But what's a child doing in a place like this? Oh — right. Didn't this building have an on-site daycare?
I was still thinking it through, reaching to open the door, when—
"Don't know the time. What time is it now? Want to know the time."
Something about the impish voice drifting through the door felt wrong.
"The clock's in there. What hour, what minute?"
I held my breath and pressed my ear flat against the door.
"You don't know how to read a clock? Little hand is the hours. Big hand is the minutes. There's a hand even littler than the hour hand? That's the seconds. Now you know how to read a clock."
Height.
There was something wrong with its height.
This was the voice of a child who should barely come up to my waist.
"What time? The clock's in there."
Slowly, I lifted my head — toward where that bright, cheerful voice was coming from.
"In return, you'll read it for me. What minute is it?"
The child's voice beyond the door—
"What time is it, what minute is it?"
—was drifting down from somewhere far above my eye level.
As if its head were touching the ceiling.
"Going in."
Clack!
The door handle turned.