One Hour From Now
My mind went numb, as if someone had struck the back of my head.
'Have we met somewhere before?'
That creepy bastard.
'You do look somehow familiar.'
He knew. He knew everything and asked anyway. He had known exactly who I was — from the moment we first met in the parking lot. A man who remembered even that no student named Seon Yuhan had ever existed — was it even conceivable that he'd failed to recognize my face? He had brought it up deliberately. At this precise moment. At the very moment when mutual trust mattered most — dredging up what I'd been hiding, making it sound like some dark, meaningful secret.
…Well. It was serious, to be fair.
"I—changed my name."
I answered straight away, taking care not to let my eyes wander elsewhere. Stalling would only earn me needless suspicion from Hwang Juyeon.
"I suppose it would be. Your name did change."
This son of a bitch.
"It's only that I find it a little curious. Changing one's given name is one thing, but the surname as well? That's rather rare, isn't it?"
I hid my clenched fist behind my back — to hide the trembling at my fingertips.
"That's—"
"—No, never mind. You must have had your reasons. That was presumptuous of me. My apologies."
This absolute lunatic. He had cut off my explanation on purpose, then bowed out with immaculate courtesy.
"…It's all right. It was a family matter, that's all."
Perhaps all of this — every last bit of it — had been a "family" matter.
"I see…."
So what exactly was this bastard's problem? Did he simply want to see me squirm? …Or was he trying to confirm something? Whenever that guy pulled a stunt like this, it usually came down to one of the two.
"Oh, uh, wow — so you and the CEO are alumni, Mr. Seon. The world really is a tiny place, huh?"
Choi Jaeha forced a big laugh, doing his best to crack the ice that had settled over us. Nobody laughed with him.
"Ms. Hwang Juyeon."
"Ah — yes."
Hwang Juyeon answered a beat late, as if she'd been sunk in some deep thought. I hoped to God she wasn't drawing strange conclusions. That I'd changed my name because of a criminal record, for instance. As far as I knew, name-change applications from people with bad records got denied in the first place — but explaining all that in exhaustive detail would only scratch at a boil, so I left it alone.
"Shall we go in, then?"
"Yes."
Just before I stepped into the booth's tent—
"Choose wisely."
The corners of my alumnus's mouth were most definitely curled upward. As if he were looking forward to the results.
With a sense of foreboding, the white canvas flaps rustled shut behind my back.
The interior of the booth, faintly shadowed, was narrow and close. On a table that wasn't particularly wide sat a single stylus — thin as a pen stand.
｜2｜ Transform your body into its state one hour from now ｜
My palms went cold.
…I hadn't expected the problem to start here.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is, at the very least, a labyrinth that never deceives you with lies. It only makes people deceive people. Which means the labyrinth will see to it that the content of whichever option wins actually comes true.
I had lost my spleen at Happiland, but at least both of my arms were still attached.
My body, one hour from now. Whether I would be alive or dead at that point was anyone's guess.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a labyrinth with a fixed right answer about which choice is better and which is worse. By that logic, option 1 would be the good choice.
And yet, personally…
There had been a case in the Prisoner's Dilemma of a person physically rejuvenated by roughly ten years. Granted, it was the price of betraying the other party. In other words, it was subtly different from so-called "regression." Even so, the one who'd been rejuvenated became the envy of the entire world. It certainly poured fuel on the fervent faith of the conspiracy theorists who believed temporal regression inside labyrinths was possible, too. One way or another, the fact remained that a person's time had been sent into the past.
If this Wish Vote was that kind of case, then option 1 no longer felt like such a good choice. Losing my memory of the past hour inside the labyrinth could be fatal.
'But as far as I remember, there was no student by the name of Seon Yuhan. At our school.'
Besides, I would forget the fact that Yu Hyeonjae had known me from the very beginning. That would be anything but good.
Which meant option 2 was, if anything, the better choice — for me. I would gain the next hour's worth of memory in advance.
Provided, of course, that I was still alive an hour from now.
…Come to think of it, did Hwang Juyeon know about that rejuvenation case? Knowing or not, option 1 would look better through her eyes. It would probably be the "right" answer, too. Would Hwang Juyeon assume I'd pick option 1 — to restore my lost right arm? Because that would be "normal." Because she herself would.
Which meant Hwang Juyeon, convinced I would choose option 1, would choose option 2 to minimize her own losses.
A soft slide. Carefully, I lifted the stylus.
Then all I had to do was choose option 2 as well.
Tap.
Delicately, I pressed the stamp onto the box for candidate 2. A dark crimson seal bit into the white blank like a brand.
A… maze?
Inside the red circle, an intricate labyrinth had been drawn. It looked strikingly similar to the maze engraved on the gold coin — the Life — I'd received at the arcade. Did it mean something?
I pulled the Jaerae Diary from inside my coat and pressed the stamp onto a blank page. It might prove useful someday. Or not.
A soft rustle. I folded the ballot in two and stepped outside — and the first thing to greet me was that damned CEO's face. Calm at a glance, but the delight seeping from his eyes was impossible to hide. Choi Jaeha, meanwhile, wore an expression demanding to know why on earth I'd taken so long.
The moment I cleared the booth, my eyes met Hwang Juyeon's.
…
Her face was as strained as it had been back during Hamster Raising. And yet, strangely enough, there was something oddly relieved in her expression, too.
Almost simultaneously, we dropped our ballots into the box.
The Wish Vote has concluded.
An artificial, TTS-like voice flowed from the black speaker mounted on the auditorium wall. Everyone held their breath and looked up at it.
Vote counting will now begin.
All this fanfare over a grand total of two votes.
Hwang Juyeon stole a glance at my face.
Zero votes.
"What? No — I'm sorry, what? You voted for 2?"
Hwang Juyeon shrieked as if screaming.
"Yes."
Candidate 2, "Transform your body into its state one hour from now."
Two votes.
"Why…? Why? Why didn't you choose option 1?"
"Well… either way, we were both supposed to pick the worse option, weren't we? Did you really think I'd pick 1?"
So you assumed that in the end, I'd get greedy too, did you?
"Yes… of course you would…!"
Nailed it. The only difference between us was our read on which option was actually the better one.
"Seriously — why didn't you pick 1?"
It wasn't a reproachful tone. Hwang Juyeon, I suspect, would have tried to understand even if I had chosen 1. I had simply wanted the outcome of option 2 more.
"How could anyone… not choose the option that gives them their body back…?"
I knew it wasn't the right answer. I knew it wasn't "normal," either.
"Honestly, it's not that I didn't agonize over it… but if I'd betrayed you and gone for 1, you'd be the one taking double the loss, Ms. Hwang. Who knows what'll happen two hours from now."
Option 2 was simply the more practical gain for me — and was there any need to announce that I'd chosen it purely for my own sake? A good person is a role I can play anytime I want.
Vote counting is complete.
When both players choose the "bad" option, each suffers a loss. No more, no less — exactly the content of the choice itself.
Executing the results of the vote count.
What would happen to me, one hour from now?
The bodies of voters Seon Yuhan and Hwang Juyeon will be transformed into their state one hour from now.
In a flash. An instant sliced into dozens of pieces from the span of a single blink. Everything happened within that instant.
I felt an hour's worth of memory pouring into my head.
"Kgh—khk…!"
Together with the sensation of an unbearable volume of water forcing its way down my throat and windpipe and into every corner of my body.
…I'd better be careful not to drown.
The fire alarm was ringing, too — just like it always did.
After killing the librarian alone in the library, I had allowed myself some time to update the records in the Jaerae Diary.
The mechanical room….
The floor directly beneath the 7th floor was Basement Level 2.
According to that hour of memory I'd received in an instant—
'This floor… I haven't been down here since the day I first bought the building.' That was what the CEO of Yuwi Guild had said, in that stretch of time that both had and hadn't happened.
Before the labyrinthization, the B2 mechanical room was accessible only to the facility management staff assigned to it; every other employee was barred from reaching it by elevator or emergency stairwell alike. So I was told, anyway — right up until the day it turned.
'Whoa, there are pipes absolutely everywhere… and there's water pooled on the floor, too….'
'Hot water pumps, piping — that sort of thing, I'd imagine. It's where the climate-control systems are housed.'
Countless pipes packing that vast space wall to wall. Enormous water storage tanks. The flood that came within a breath of drowning me had come pouring out of exactly such a place.
There were a few things I knew about the mechanical room.
'Just now — did you hear something?'
First, obviously enough: strange phenomena occurred in the mechanical room.
'Hasn't the dripping gotten worse?'
Second: the anomaly, infuriatingly, carried out its sabotage in the dark, beyond the reach of our eyes — wrecking valves, bursting pipes, that sort of thing.
'I-I don't wanna die like this…! I'd rather have died back when the door opened…!'
Third: up to a certain point, the water pressure was weak enough that the emergency exit door could still open — there had been a window of opportunity that would have let the group die falling down the emergency stairs instead.
'It's cold… I'm scared….'
And fourth: in the end, no one found a way to deal with it — not until every last one of them drowned.
"Hah…."
How do you fight something you can't see, can't hear, and can't touch?