Distorted World: Studio Apartment (8)
Another me lay on the mattress. I had already stepped into the studio apartment, and still she showed no reaction at all.
"Excuse me."
I called out, but there was no answer.
"Can you not hear me?"
I approached her carefully. Even when I got close enough to be right in her face, the woman just kept lying there. I knelt down beside her head and leaned in.
"Excuse me?"
I put my mouth right up to her ear and called to her. Still nothing. It didn't seem like she was ignoring me on purpose. Could she not even perceive that I existed? She couldn't see me, and she couldn't hear my voice either.
"..."
I reached out, but my hand passed straight through her body. Touching this woman who looked exactly like me was impossible. Was she really a hologram?
I stood back up and stared down at the woman lying spread-eagle on her back.
"Wow. What an unseemly way to lie around."
I pulled my gaze off the woman and looked down at the chat window on my smartphone.
"Error, what is this place? I still have no idea what's going on."
Was this woman some kind of copied Distortion Entity? Or not a Distortion Entity at all? An afterimage created by a Distortion Phenomenon? And why had the viewers said they probably shouldn't look at this?
All kinds of questions were tearing through my head when Error's chat came through.
"A place of reenactment?"
I tilted my head. What exactly was being reenacted?
Before this world was made. A place where a specific period of time repeated infinitely?
"Uh... so a past stretch of time is being played back in this space like a video?"
I shifted my gaze and took in the other me again. This scene was from before the Distorted World had been created — and it was today's stretch of time?
"I've never lain around in a pose that unseemly today."
Which meant this had to be from before I became a woman. And that meant the hologram woman was the true owner of my body — the real On Yeoul.
"I never expected to see the original owner of my body like this..."
A question surfaced, unbidden. What had become of the real On Yeoul now? Had she gone into my male body in some parallel world? Had her soul simply vanished? Maybe I could find out through this scene, reenacting the past.
They said there's nothing dangerous here, so I can take my time watching.
For now, I decided to call the real On Yeoul Cham Yeoul. I crouched down and studied her face as she lay there with that vacant expression.
"Hmm? Something's off, though."
"She's missing something too."
If the doll modeled after me had been missing two percent, the Cham Yeoul lying here felt like she was missing one. Simply put, I was prettier. And no, I wasn't imagining it. Cham Yeoul was definitely less beautiful than me. But no matter how long I looked, all I could say for certain was that something was lacking. I couldn't for the life of me tell what was lacking, or why that made her worse-looking than I was.
"But I can't tell what it is. What exactly is she missing? She looks exactly like me, but... is it because she's some kind of hologram?"
A perfect copy? Then why was she like this?
The question was still sitting in my head when it came again.
"I'm tired."
Cham Yeoul's voice, once more. ...Could you even call that a voice?
"What is this now? That's not a sound coming out of her mouth."
Cham Yeoul's lips hadn't moved. I had watched them with my own two eyes — they hadn't so much as twitched.
"Am I hearing her inner thoughts?"
So the one I'd heard earlier must have been her inner voice too. This space really did have every strange phenomenon under the sun.
Cham Yeoul did not get up. She stayed sprawled on her back, staring blankly at the ceiling, and her inner voice kept ringing through the space without end.
"Haa. Even lying here like this, the fatigue doesn't go away at all."
Couldn't argue with that. You could lie there forever, sleep as much as you wanted — the tiredness never really left.
"Why is this world so full of tedious things?"
Agreed. The world had far too many things that were a hassle. Listening to her inner voice, Cham Yeoul's personality seemed very much like mine.
"Maybe this means the world itself is what's wrong?"
"...?"
Scratch that about our personalities being similar. I could relate to everything else, but not what she'd just thought. Blaming the world was an excuse. We were the ones who were wrong. Plenty of people were passionate about everything they did.
"In a perfect world, you'd never have to feel that sense of can't-be-bothered. Everything you did would be joyful and happy. If God exists, He clearly failed to design the world properly."
This girl was a lunatic. Her whole way of thinking was messed up. At the very least, I didn't go around blaming other people for my own laziness. Well — even if she thought like that, she'd probably still push through the sloth when she had to. She'd even worked a part-time job, same as I had, right? Though she'd quit on her own.
"Why do I have to move?"
"Why do I have to think?"
"Why do I have to feel pain?"
Huh? What was with her all of a sudden? Had she come down with a delayed case of eighth-grader syndrome?
"If you're alive, you have to live every minute, every second, feeling this wretched tedium."
"Life is a succession of suffering."
"There's only one way to break this cruel cycle."
"If I die, I'll return to nothing — and then I can be freed from this hellish material world."
No. That wasn't right. I was genuinely taken aback. What was with this sudden spiral? How far did this line of thought even go? Did she have no will to live? Then how had she been living until now?
"Hoo. I've been thinking this for five years already."
Ah. So she'd only been thinking it? That figured. Guess she was just mentally ill, then.
"Until now I only thought it and never acted on it... but I should start finding the courage. Living to twenty is long enough. No regrets, either."
Huh? Finding the courage?
"Still, I lived hard at the end. Even worked a part-time job. I'm proud of myself."
The end?
"Today I really don't want to do anything... but I lived reasonably hard until yesterday, so let's push a little more just for today. Because it's the last day."
She'd said "the last" again. And then Cham Yeoul finally pushed herself up off the floor. Her gaze went to the corner of the studio, where a rope was lying.
"Let's go. If I just endure a fleeting moment of pain, I can greet the eternal rest I've wanted for so long."
She was going to die so she could be at peace? It was so absurd I couldn't even speak. Did it even make sense for laziness to lead all the way to a choice that extreme?
"Do people know."
Cham Yeoul dragged herself forward, her steps languid and unsteady.
"That we're trapped in the prison of the flesh, living our whole lives in suffering."
She picked up the rope from the corner.
"It's time to break out."
Cham Yeoul fixed the rope to the ceiling. And then she actually hanged herself with it.
"What kind of crazy bitch..."
Cham Yeoul was dead. She had killed herself for the most asinine reason imaginable. I was looking at her corpse with a hollow little laugh when it hit me.
"...Wait."
I realized this situation made no sense. She'd died by hanging? That couldn't be right. Then what did that make me? If I had possessed this body after she'd died like that, I should have been hanging from the rope when I first woke up. Far from it — there hadn't even been a rope in the studio I'd been in. And there wasn't so much as a speck of a ligature mark on my neck.
"Error."
"The scene I just saw — did that actually happen in real life?"
"......"
I looked up at the corpse again. Suddenly, I remembered the body I'd seen when I opened the drawer earlier. The hologram in front of me. The image of the drawer corpse rising in my mind. The two scenes slowly overlaid, matching without a single discrepancy.
In that instant, the space reset. The hologram studio snapped back to the viewpoint I'd first seen. Cham Yeoul was lying spread-eagle on the mattress once more.
"Seriously. Everything in this world is such a hassle."
I lowered my head. Composure came back fast, and I spent a long while putting my thoughts in order. This didn't seem like something I could brush off as too much of a hassle. I was the type who stepped up when I had to.
Once I'd finished sorting through it, I looked at the chat window on my smartphone and called for Error again.
"Error."
"I have something I want to ask."
How should I put the question. What should I even ask. I didn't think about it too deeply.
I just asked, simple and clear.
Friend. I felt like I was starting to understand what that word meant, coming from Error.