Huh? This Doesn't Exist?
WHAM!
"Find out at once what piece of trash wrote filth like this. Now."
"Commissioner General, sir, if you would just calm—"
"I am perfectly calm. One object broken while I read garbage of this sort—if that isn't restraint, what is?"
The Commissioner General read the report that had been set before him, and the fury on his face ran deep. The substance of it was this: a criminal was writing a novel.
A criminal, writing a novel. He had snorted at the notion and looked anyway, and what he found on the page blew straight past anything he had ever imagined.
"What? The criminal kills police officers? And he doesn't stop there—he carries out a terror attack on a police station? How is that any different from a criminal throwing down a challenge to the authority of the state?"
He went on raging without end and brought his fist down on the office desk once more, harder than before.
"And as if butchering people that cruelly weren't enough, he goes and handles the lover of someone he killed in this hideous fashion? The idea alone would be grounds for a guilty verdict."
Watching him, the Senior Superintendent offered his own thought with care.
"Doesn't this read rather like something the man actually lived through, sir?"
"I should think so. Drawing on my years in this work, I'd say the odds are high he wrote down his own experience. If he hadn't done it himself, how could the prose come out like that?"
The Commissioner General let out a laugh of sheer disbelief and went on.
"This is showing off. He feels a thrill at the crimes he committed, and he's proud of them. The worst garbage there is."
"Commissioner General, sir... aren't you judging a little too quickly?"
"Does it look like a hasty judgment to you?"
At that, the Senior Superintendent quietly shook his head.
"This novel site. Is it one of ours?"
"No, sir. It's an overseas site. If we mean to catch the author, we'll need another country's cooperation first."
"A damned headache."
What kind of bastard was this? The Commissioner General called up every top-tier criminal he had ever faced, and it was fair to say none of them had committed atrocities on the scale the novel described. And if any had come close, they were already shot dead or locked away.
"No. It's nearly impossible, and yet there is one. Exactly one. But that man is certainly dead. He has to be."
He had put a bullet in the man's head with his own eyes and watched him go over the cliff besides. There was no way the man was alive. The Commissioner General drew a single face up out of memory and spoke.
"It shouldn't be possible, but see that the patrols are strengthened for the time being. There's no telling what may happen."
"Yes, sir."
"And curiosity will do its work. Someone is bound to copy the crimes in this novel outright. Or a real criminal may read it and decide to follow along."
"I'll increase the number of officers on patrol as well."
As the Senior Superintendent made to leave, the Commissioner General called him back and lowered his voice to a murmur.
"He might still be alive."
"Didn't you say you confirmed the kill yourself back then, sir?"
"I want to be certain. We never found a body. Who knows? He might have lived through a bullet to the skull."
The Senior Superintendent's face hardened, and he asked it back.
"Then you believe the person writing this novel might be him, sir...?"
"I can't give you a firm answer. But if someone can render cruelty at this pitch, the odds that it's him are high."
"...Is there any chance it's just an ordinary person?"
At that the Commissioner General laughed, loud and brief.
"You think prose of this caliber simply appears out of nowhere? If a man can write like this, then nine times out of ten he lived it."
"I see, sir."
"Off with you, then. You've plenty of your own work, I imagine."
Watching the Senior Superintendent leave, the Commissioner General muttered so that no one else would hear.
"The response is better than I thought."
The piece was doing far better than I'd imagined when I first sat down to write. Maybe it was because I'd put in the turns no one saw coming and kept pushing the cruelty further still.
More people than I'd expected were appalled by the crimes in what I'd written and hungry for the next page anyway.
"Well, that author. He wrote so viciously that even people hardened on the worst misery fic gave up—so of course it lands harder on the readers here."
A fresh shock, and then some. Probably. The thought carried me through the end of the chapter, and I stretched.
"Hoo. Done. That's all I'm writing today."
The episode, roughly summarized: the protagonist disguises himself as a courier, breaks into the hero's home, and slaughters the family in hideous fashion before the hero can arrive. The hero, having cheerfully crushed some other villain, comes home in a fine mood, finds the scene, and screams.
"The more I write, the more my mind rots."
Was this even the right thing to do? Maybe the reason that author had ended things on a note no one could understand and then vanished was that the endless crime scenes had ground his sanity down to nothing.
I hadn't known it when I started, but plagiarizing while still adapting the story in my own way was harder than I'd thought. Put the prose in as it stood and the plot snarled; take the cruel passages out and I lost the meticulous detail that made them what they were. Even so, the story itself had to be changed.
"Because the novel ends with the protagonist dying in a nuclear blast."
The protagonist had grown too strong and too vicious to stop, so the heroes who couldn't beat him clung to him, buying time, and the nuke took all of them down together.
The death had been so absurd that I, along with a great many other readers, had sent complaint emails. I remembered that much.
"But the author had already vanished, so it didn't amount to anything. I'll write this one so he lives, if I can. Just picturing a 5,700-character complaint email is enough to make me sick."
I was slumped against the sofa, mind worn thin, when a call came in from Jiyoon.
"I'm healthy. And you?"
She had been gone five hours at most. It wasn't my health she was calling about. She clearly had some other reason.
"What are you calling for?"
I didn't have to think about it.
"Sorry. I don't know a thing about my measurements."
"Do that. I don't have an eye for clothes."
My sister had lived as a woman far longer than I had. Thirty-five years as a man weren't going to give me a better sense of this body than she had. Some nameless unease stirred at the thought of whatever she might bring home, but I folded the thought away quickly and lay down on the bed in comfort.
"It's been a long time since I got to lie down and rest like this."
I must have slipped under, feeling the give of the mattress and the blanket, because a table that looked familiar was set in front of me.
"Hello?"
"And who are you supposed to be this time?"
It was not the god. A red-haired beauty, dripping with decadent languor, sat at the table and knocked back a cup of scalding tea in one swallow.
"Hah. Nibbling at it bit by bit like some little miser is nothing like my style. So we finally meet. You're the one, huh? Well, now... you look like you'd be frighteningly good at exactly one kind of work."
Who was this woman? I turned it over for a moment, and the one thing I was sure of was that she was not looking at me with anything like goodwill.
"We've never met, have we? And telling someone you've just met that they look good at the work—is that a compliment, or an insult?"
"Who knows. What do you think it is? People usually take that sort of thing as a compliment, don't they?"
"I hardly know what to say. So who are you?"
I asked her outright, but she only drank her tea and wore a meaningful smile, and she never did answer. It felt as if she had no intention of answering anything I asked.
"The shape of the soul is still the same, then? Well. You haven't been settled in and living for long. Of course it would be."
"You seem to know something. Couldn't you simply say it plainly? And while you're at it, tell me who you are."
"Next time. We'll be seeing each other again soon enough."
She set down the cup she'd been drinking and smiled, small and bright.
"Hmm. Should I at least give you a name? No. It'll be more fun if you find out for yourself."
With that she rose and started toward the pure-white door behind her, and from the way she moved I knew it for certain. This woman was the opposite of the god in temperament.
The god had explained as much as he could and deliberately dodged whatever he wasn't permitted to say. This woman told me almost nothing, and she said only what she felt like saying—the worst of a bad breed. And I was very, very good at handling people of that kind.
"That's enough for today. See you next time?"
"Before you go? There's something I'd like to say."
I stopped her as she opened the door to leave, and for the woman who had paused to hear me out, I brought up the line I'd prepared.
"Hm?"
"You know what a thinking being hates most?"
I watched interest, and a question, rise on her face. Then I stood, flung open the pure-white door behind my seat, and stepped out of that space as I spoke.
"The first thing is being cut off in the middle of a sentence, and—"
Probably the greatest displeasure you can inflict on anything with a mind. I was gone before I could even check her expression, and picturing how she would take it, I felt a mean little smile pull at my mouth without my leave.
"She heard it. If she's a thinking being, there's no way she isn't furious."