The Self-Correction Patch
3:00 AM.
Minhye's studio apartment.
On the table sat two steaming boxes of fried chicken and a messy cluster of beer cans.
"Phew..."
Deokhu chugged his beer, his Adam's apple bobbing heavily. He crushed the empty can, set it down on the table, and let out a long sigh.
"Man, I finally feel alive again. Earlier, I seriously thought... I thought I was going to end up as laundry getting tossed into that washing machine."
"Don't even get me started. Do you have any idea how terrifying it was when your eyes rolled back and you just started walking toward it?" Minhye shuddered.
"Honestly, I'm kind of curious myself... Heh. Was I really acting like a zombie?"
"A little worse than a zombie..."
"A little worse how? Was I more handsome?"
"Sure, let's go with that. Good for you, being more handsome than a zombie."
Minhye tore off a chicken leg, shuddering at the memory.
The tips of her hair were still damp, glistening slightly with water.
"But, Hyung."
Deokhu wiped the sauce from his mouth and looked at me. The usual playful glint in his eyes was gone.
"What you said earlier at the laundromat... was that for real?"
"What part?"
"That the script you wrote didn't have any hypnosis setting."
"Yeah. You guys read it, so you should know."
"Sigh... Then how are we supposed to make sense of this?"
At Deokhu's question, the lively atmosphere instantly plummeted. Seyeon and Minhye both stopped eating and stared at me. It was something they all wanted to ignore, but it was a problem we absolutely had to address.
"First of all, to reiterate, there was no such thing."
I toyed with my beer can, the cold aluminum chilling my fingertips.
"The script I wrote was just a simple, brainless creature feature. A machine malfunctions, the door pops open, and a tentacle-like thing whips out to drag someone inside. That was it. Mind control that makes the victim walk in on their own? I never designed such an advanced skill."
"Then... what was that voice I heard?"
Deokhu's voice was laced with confusion.
"'Come inside... let me wash you...' That voice. It was so clear. It had this static-like quality... Even as a film major, I can't quite wrap my head around what it was. It sounded almost like a woman's voice. The moment I heard it, my mind went completely blank. All I could think was that the washing machine was my home, my sanctuary."
I let out a sigh, recalling what Professor Park Jinchul had said to me at the laundromat earlier, and the chill that had run down my spine.
"Plausibility."
Seyeon reacted to the word I muttered.
"Plausibility?"
"Yeah. That script was a 2.0-star piece of trash. Why? Because it made no sense. A washing machine turning into a monster is ridiculous enough, but the idea of someone just lingering around instead of running away and getting eaten was way too contrived."
I took a sip of my beer and continued.
"People commented on it. 'Hey, who would actually fall for that? Just run away.' And they were right. I couldn't argue with them. It was a glaring plot hole."
I looked at each of my team members.
"But here's the terrifying part. That plot hole filled itself in."
"It filled itself in?"
"Yeah. Because my story was full of holes, the causality of this world added its own settings to bridge the gap. To make an impossible situation plausible. How do you get a person to stand there and get eaten instead of running away? The most foolproof way is to make sure they never think to run in the first place."
Minhye's jaw dropped at my explanation.
"Whoa... goosebumps. So, the system basically updated the parts you wrote sloppily on its own?"
"More like a patch, to be precise. Like a Version 2.5 patch."
I gave a bitter smile.
"Thanks to that, you got hypnotized, and we almost wiped out. Even I nearly fell for it. If we had prepared based solely on my original script, we would've been in deep trouble."
Seyeon rested her chin on her hand, her expression turning grave.
It looked as though a massive amount of data was being reassembled in her mind.
"Hearing all this... this seems like a much bigger problem than we thought."
"Up until now, we treated your scripts as a sort of walkthrough guide, right? We believed we could always win as long as we followed the rules you wrote. But this incident shattered that assumption."
She picked up a chopstick from the table and drew an imaginary line over the chicken box.
"High-quality scripts—the ones with high ratings—have solid world-building. The rules are clear, and the cause-and-effect relationships are robust. That's why when they manifest in reality, they play out exactly as you intended, just like the psychiatric hospital."
"But low-rated scripts are different."
Seyeon's eyes sharpened.
"The settings are sloppy, and there are too many holes. The system recognizes these holes as errors... and to fix them, it throws in random variables we can't possibly predict. That's why we get things like hypnosis, hallucinations, spatial distortion... we have no idea what might pop up."
Seyeon, who had been muttering to herself as she analyzed the situation, clapped her hands together to wrap up her thoughts.
"Let's define it. We'll call it Self-Correction. A force of will that transforms a sloppy story into a realistic disaster. Something like that."
Deokhu swallowed hard.
"That's a terrifying name. So the bottom line is... the trash scripts we have lined up might actually be more dangerous than the masterpieces?"
"Exactly. Because they're unpredictable."
Seyeon nodded.
"From now on, we can't just rely on the original scripts. We have to find the gaps you didn't write, and predict what kind of monster or variable might spring from those gaps."
The mood grew heavy once again.
Our workload had just multiplied.
Up until now, we had been secretly relieved that the scenarios were appearing in order of lowest rating first. Subconsciously, we had assumed that a low rating meant something trivial and easy.
But this incident proved that was a complete misconception.
A low rating meant the scenario was in a wild, untamed state.
An unfriendly, merciless world that even I, the author, could not control.
"Wow, it just keeps getting harder, doesn't it?" Minhye ruffled her hair in frustration, then spoke up again. "So, what's next? Isn't it about time we move into the mid-2-star range?"
At her question, my gaze naturally drifted toward my laptop bag.
The next scenario.
The notification hadn't arrived yet. But I knew. I knew the list of countless failures sleeping on my hard drive, hovering between ratings of 2.0 and 2.5.
The next one would likely be...
It was another short story I had written under the theme of "Everyday Horror."
I searched my memory.
Who was the protagonist of that script?
Ah, right. I remembered.
A stubborn, middle-aged intellectual who refused to listen to anyone else and believed only his own knowledge was the absolute truth.
A character armed with logic and reason, who ultimately meets his demise trapped in the most illogical situation due to his own arrogance.
When designing that character, I had modeled him after a specific person.
The person who had showered me with painful, harsh criticism and butchered my scripts, yet was strangely hard to hate.
The very person I had run into by chance at the laundromat.
"Hmm... the next one..."
As I hesitated, my team members pressed me.
"What is it, Hyung? Tell us quickly so we can prepare."
"Don't tell me it's another hopeless one?"
At their urging, I let out a bitter chuckle and slowly opened my mouth.
"This time, the location isn't the problem... something else is."
"What is it?"
"This scenario centers around a specific person. Wherever they go becomes the stage, and the car they drive becomes their prison."
"A person? Who?"
I hesitated slightly before speaking.
"Professor Park Jinchul is the protagonist..."
Instantly.
"Whuuut?!"
Three voices erupted in unison.
"Professor Park... as in, our department's...?" Minhye's eyes went wide. "Professor Park Jinchul?"
Seyeon also looked incredulous.
I scratched my head and said, "Yeah."
"When I wrote that script... I modeled the character after him. The title is Road Rage. The protagonist is a stubborn-as-a-mule middle-aged professor."
Deokhu's jaw dropped.
"A secondhand car... wow, that fits perfectly. Seriously, Hyung. Be honest. You wrote this to get revenge because he gave you bad grades, didn't you? This is practically an assassination attempt!"
"No, it's not! I was just doing character research, and he was the perfect fit..."
"What's the plot? Give us a rough idea. At least the logline."
"The logline is simple."
I looked at my team and muttered quietly.
"A fiercely rational middle-aged professor buys a luxury sedan secondhand for a ridiculously cheap price. However, the car is possessed by the vengeful spirit of someone who died unjustly due to road rage, and the professor is forced into a ride of death inside a car that won't stop."
"...Wow, it's absolutely packed with clichés. But, uh, it sounds really entertaining?" Minhye said, looking both disgusted and intrigued.
"Right. It's a predictable story. But there's a reason I gave this script a 2.5-star rating."
"What is it?"
"The ghost haunting this car isn't just some typical virgin ghost or faceless egg ghost. It's road rage. Literally, the rage of the road itself."
"Road rage?"
"Yeah. It's the grudge of a driver who was run off a cliff by a road-raging driver and died. Because of that, this ghost has no physical form. Instead, it takes complete control of the car's mechanical systems."
I counted the points on my fingers as I explained.
"First, the navigation system guides them down a path of death on its own. Second, horrific screams and curses blast from the radio to eat away at the driver's sanity. Third, and most importantly... at the critical moment, the brakes lock up, and the steering wheel spins on its own to kill the driver."
Deokhu swallowed hard as he listened.
"So... the car itself is a moving coffin?"
"Exactly. A moving locked room. An inescapable prison hurtling forward at a hundred kilometers per hour."
I added with a bitter expression.
"And the ultimate reason the protagonist, the professor, dies in this script isn't just because of the ghost's power. It's because of his own arrogance."
"Arrogance?"
"Even if the car makes strange noises, he dismisses it as 'just an engine issue.' Even if the navigation goes haywire, he ignores it as a 'system glitch.' He refuses to believe in ghosts or curses, calling them unscientific, until the very moment the brakes fail... and he dies in regret."
When I finished my explanation, a brief silence fell over the hideout.
Seyeon pushed up her glasses and sighed.
"...That is literally Professor Park."
"No doubt about it. Anyone would know it's him," Minhye chimed in. "Stubborn, refusing to listen to others, believing only in his own knowledge... Sunbae, you really hated the professor, didn't you?"
"I told you, no... It was just for character study."
"The character is way too vivid for that to be the case... It feels like you built the entire story around him."
"N-no, it's not."
I made excuses, but in truth, I couldn't deny it. It was indeed a character projected from the resentment I felt when he tore me to shreds during my freshman year.
But that wasn't what mattered right now.
"The problem is that the car actually exists. And there's a very high probability that the system has matched that car with the professor as its next target."
"If my guess is correct, the moment Monday midnight hits next week, the professor will be holding the steering wheel of that car. And the moment he starts the engine, the game begins."
"Then what do we do? Shouldn't we go stop him right now?"
Deokhu stamped his feet anxiously, but I didn't have a clear answer.
"Anyway, the chances of this happening to our professor are... ninety-nine point nine percent."
Everyone held their breath for a moment.
The person we had to save wasn't some complete stranger, but the very professor who taught us. On top of that, he was a strict rationalist in his daily life.
We had to rescue a man like that from a cursed secondhand car?
Minhye shook her head.
"Sigh... This one is going to be incredibly tough."
"You know what his personality is like. If we try to stop him or do anything, how do you think he'll react?"
Deokhu chimed in.
"It's obvious. He'll say, 'What are you all doing? Do you not want to graduate?'"
Deokhu snickered as he mimicked the professor's voice, but a heavy sigh lingered beneath his laughter.
Just then.
Speak of the devil.
My smartphone vibrated with a short buzz.
[Tenth Scenario: Road Rage]