Please Come Back

The chicken I was selling made the news.

At first I assumed someone had staged it like a broadcast clip. The Gallery was full of people who made that kind of thing, and just last night the Photoshops alone could have filled an entire board.

But when I tapped the link, it went to an actual broadcaster's channel.

"……It's real."

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I pressed play.

A face I'd seen last night filled the screen.

Dogeon, who had laughed and promised to expose the fraud, pressed the purchase button, spotted the box, and bent down to look under his desk. The news replayed the moment in slow motion — the cream-colored box flickered into existence, and a red circle was drawn around it, frame by frame.

Then the notice I had written appeared on screen.

My nickname and most of the comments were blurred out. Only the last line was left in crisp, unmistakable focus:

I held the phone a little farther from my face.

Did they really have to blow that up to full-screen size?

It felt different, seeing it on the news instead of in the Gallery. While the anchor read the next segment, I caught myself rubbing the back of my neck for no reason.

The people in the footage split cleanly into two camps — those who found it fascinating, and those who smelled a hoax. One expert on screen said it was difficult to reach any verdict on tampering based on short clips circulating online.

He wasn't wrong.

If I'd only seen the video myself, I wouldn't have believed it either.

But then came the unexpected twist at the end.

My finger froze.

"The original operator?"

Only now did it come back to me.

This community — there used to be a company that ran it, wasn't there?

The previous dawn. Seo Jeong-min, Development Team Leader at the operator, answered the phone ringing beside his bed.

The voice of the on-call incident responder was urgent.

"Team Leader. We've lost access."

"How much?"

"Virtually all of it."

Jeong-min sat up in bed. By the time he'd opened his laptop, the drowsiness was gone. The traffic graph that normally rose and fell with the daily rhythm of the site had, at some point, plunged straight down like a cliff face.

The post-registration logs that should have kept streaming in had stopped. So had the comments. The servers weren't failing to respond — every piece of equipment checked out clean — so at first he assumed it was a problem on the analytics side.

"Does the site open for you?"

"It opens, but… you need to see it yourself."

Jeong-min typed in the address.

The familiar logo appeared.

Beneath it sat a gallery list he had never seen before.

South Korea.

United States.

Japan.

"What is this?"

His account was still logged in, and the app showed the same screen. When he tapped the South Korea Gallery, posts hunting for vanished boards were already flooding in.

The users were there.

They just weren't on the company's servers anymore.

By the time he reached the office, the lights were already on. Several employees had joined the call remotely from home, and the ones who lived nearby had beaten him in. The customer service inbox had begun to fill with inquiries.

The moment Jeong-min sat down, he asked.

"What about the data?"

"It's still here. Member information, the posts, all of it. The last registration timestamp matches the exact moment traffic cut off."

"Admin side?"

"The existing functions work. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠But those country galleries don't exist. We never built them."

An employee pulled up a screen connected directly to the original internal servers.

It was the site as it had looked the night before. The galleries, the notices, the posts — all of it intact. The last post had two comments beneath it, and though hours had passed since its registration, the count hadn't budged.

Jeong-min set his own phone down beside the monitor. Over there, posts were still going ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠up this very minute.

"I'll write one here."

The employee posted a short message from the phone.

Another employee refreshed the gallery. The same post appeared.

A comment came almost immediately.

The employee watching the server logs shook his head.

"Nothing came through."

"Not even the registration request?"

"No. Nothing at all."

Jeong-min stared at the screen for a long while, the new gallery's post still open in front of him.

His first thought was that someone had tampered with the site. But nothing in the code they administered had changed. An interface they had never deployed was opening at their own address. He checked the standard configurations and rolled everything back — same result. From different networks and different devices, the country galleries still appeared.

One employee ventured carefully, "Should we… take the service down for a moment?"

Jeong-min looked up. No user requests were coming in anymore anyway. The first thing they had to establish was whether that screen was actually being served out of their own running servers.

"Log it, then proceed."

They halted the original service.

The employees each refreshed their phones.

The country galleries opened. New posts arrived.

"We did take it down, right?"

The employee who asked already wore the expression of a man who knew exactly what kind of question he was asking. The responder pointed at the screen showing the halted servers.

"Yes."

No one could find the next sentence right away.

A misconfigured setting wouldn't cover it. Neither would a hijacked admin account. The original address and app were untouched, yet connecting to them delivered you somewhere the company didn't control — and that somewhere kept running even with the company's servers switched off.

Jeong-min leaned back in his chair.

"Bring it back up for now. Preserve the originals."

He hadn't identified the cause.

But at least he now knew one thing that wasn't the problem.

Jeong-min read the post an employee had pulled up.

The owner badge sat beside the author's name. It was obviously not an administrator the company had appointed. There was no telling what function that account had used to open the gallery — or even where the posts were being stored.

Past lunchtime, the store opened and began selling chicken. A customer service rep came over to the dev team with a question.

"We keep getting asked whether it's safe to put money in. Is that our payment system?"

Jeong-min shook his head. "It is not."

"Then I'll tell them no. They're contacting us because they saw the company name."

From that point on, an official statement went up on the company's verified account.

Even as the statement was being drafted, the employees kept searching for a way back in.

The old app still opened the new galleries, and the original web address stayed lost. But connected directly to the preserved servers, the old site functioned perfectly.

Which raised a question: what if they reached it through a different address?

The test address was ready by the afternoon. They brought up a temporary website with the original data intact, verified it internally first, then connected through a mobile carrier's network from a phone.

The old gallery opened.

An employee wrote a test post on a test account — and this time, the record appeared on the company's servers. Comments worked. Deletion worked. Every mundane function that should have worked did, and Jeong-min ticked off each one as it was confirmed.

"This side works."

The employee's voice brightened a little. "From outside too?"

"Yes. Confirmed on other devices as well."

They still had no idea why the new galleries existed.

But they had found a way to reopen their own service.

Jeong-min reported the progress to the CEO.

"To start, we'll resume web service on the new address. The app will follow separately once we've changed its connection path — the version people have installed now will keep opening the other side."

"Will users still be able to see the old posts?"

"Everything up to the moment access was cut off. Anything written on the other side after that, we don't have."

"Spell out exactly that scope in the announcement. Users must not assume their new posts are being carried over."

Jeong-min nodded.

For the people running a company, knowing what to do next mattered as much as knowing why. Users were hunting for their own posts; advertisers were asking where the screens they'd paid for had gone. Until the other side's identity was established, sitting idle wasn't an option.

After watching the news, I went digging until I found the official statement. That was when I finally learned that the Gallery I was looking at wasn't run by the original company at all.

I had become the GalleryOwner.

That alone had been enough to turn my head inside out, and apparently I'd never stopped to consider what it had done to the company on the other end.

It had to be baffling from their perspective. A complete stranger had appeared on a site they'd been running just the day before, strapped on an armband, and started selling chicken.

And I couldn't properly explain how I'd become the owner either.

I was drawing breath for a sigh, phone still in hand, when a new post went up.

The official announcement was pasted in the body:

Comments piled up beneath it.

I clicked the link too.

The familiar gallery list appeared — game names and hobby names strung down the page instead of country names. Less than two days had passed, yet it already felt like a screen from long ago.

I entered the gallery I used to visit every day. New posts were stacking up on top of the list that had been frozen since the outage.

It was real. The old posts hadn't vanished after all.

I opened the two sites side by side and flipped between them. Refreshing one never revealed anything written on the other.

The original gallery had come back. The gallery I managed was still there too.

"So that's how it works."

My grip on the phone tightened slightly.

Then where would people go?

Since morning, the news footage had been pulling in first-time visitors. But among those staying here, plenty had simply been waiting for the original gallery to reopen.

I would have been the same. If my old posts were still around, if the familiar faces returned, if the threads I loved reading started flowing again.

The news of the restoration kept spreading through the South Korea Gallery.

I snorted at the last comment, then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wiped the smile off just as quickly.

This wasn't something I could afford to laugh off and move past.

Every bit of chatter people made here piled up my points. If they took their conversations elsewhere, my income could shrink by exactly that much.

I opened the admin menu. Next to the freshly posted restoration notice, a delete button sat waiting.

I stared at it for a moment.

Delete it?

The news had already broken through the official account. With the media picking it up too, erasing a few posts here wasn't going to hide anything.

Worse, it would only breed backlash — whispers that I was blocking information just to keep people from leaving. And the casual drop-in visitors who got a taste of that would sour on the place for good. I'd watched communities rot that way more times than I could count.

Yesterday, someone had commented under my notice asking where to find the guides they'd saved. I'd thought I should sort out a way to help them — but I hadn't gotten around to it.

Now there was a place where those posts could be read again.

I couldn't hand them over myself, but I had no business hiding them either.

I closed the admin menu and hit the compose button.

Once it was posted, a strange feeling settled over me.

This whole thing had started as a way to keep food on my table. And now I'd gone and pinned a signpost to the exit, right at the top of the board.

Anyone watching would say I was hopeless at running a community.

The comments came in.

Posts announcing departures to the old gallery kept appearing. And in the opposite direction, posts from people who'd arrived because of the news.

Which side outnumbered the other, I'd have to keep watching to find out. I couldn't relax just watching the point counter tick upward.

In the beginning, this place had been the only place to be.

Not anymore.

Then a new comment attached itself to my notice.

I read the comment, then let my eyes drift over to the store I'd left open beside it.

There was at least one reason to come back.

And going forward, there was no reason it had to stay the only one.