The Start of Suspicion 2
Just gathering the deleted posts had been enough to complete the picture.
When I organized everything, it came out like this:
Rule 1. It isn’t unusual for Ants or Flowers to live as part of a family.
Rule 2. If someone disappears for a while and then comes back, be suspicious. Especially if they get insanely beautiful or handsome.
Rule 3. But if you realize what they really are, they’ll kill you.
Rule 4. Because their species can only hold up to one million hosts, they kill off useless humans instead of making them allies.
Rule 5. Disappearances aren’t even investigated by the police. There are people high up in politics among the Flowers and Ants.
Rule 6. If there’s a Flower in the house, mold seems to show up especially often in the bathroom.
Rule 7. Just go on living and pretend not to know. In the end, they’re beings living with someone else’s memories. They’re your family.
Rule 8. There seem to be more Ants and Flowers in South Korea than you’d think. Probably because it avoided the war, and because it’s a good place to live.
"Wait a second."
[Rule 2. If someone disappears for a while and then comes back, be suspicious. Especially if they get insanely beautiful or handsome.]
My stepmother and little sister had gone on a sudden trip abroad recently.
For fourteen nights and fifteen days.
When they came back, they really had gotten noticeably prettier, so I’d asked if they’d had plastic surgery. They’d said yes.
But thinking about it now, no matter how advanced medical technology got, facial contouring or jaw surgery still took at least a month or two for swelling to go down....
And yet they were perfectly healed in just fifteen days, with not a trace of swelling, not even a scar?
No matter how much money you threw at it, that kind of recovery speed was physically impossible.
Besides, I’d thought my stepmother and little sister being unusually kind was off somehow.
It had felt like they were watching my reaction just a little too closely.
'Shit... what if both my stepmother and my sister really came back as Flowers?'
My hand, gripping the phone, broke out in a clammy sweat.
I stared blankly into the corner of the bathroom.
Black mold was blooming between the tiles.
Until just a moment ago, I’d thought it was nothing more than mold overflowing into the air because of the Flower invasion.
But now, with the thought that those black specks might be byproducts of my stepmother and sister, a chill ran down my spine.
It felt like tens of thousands of eyes were watching me.
"This is insane."
I swallowed hard.
It could all be some internet ghost story. Some fiction made up by attention-seeking freaks.
But were the dozens of deleted posts preserved in the Wayback Machine, and the disappearances disguised as suicides, all just coincidence?
Besides, Rule 4 made sense.
If the Flower species could only keep one million human hosts, wouldn’t they kill off the useless humans and fill those million slots with valuable ones?
"Oppa! Did you die on the toilet or something? It reeks like bleach in here!"
My little sister’s sharp voice rang out from outside the bathroom door.
The pounding bass of hip-hop music was thumping along with it.
On any normal day, this was the exact moment I’d have snapped back with, "Then clean it yourself, you little idol wannabe bitch."
But my lips felt frozen shut.
[Rule 6. If there’s a Flower in the house, mold seems to show up especially often in the bathroom.]
[Rule 7. Just go on living and pretend not to know. In the end, they’re beings living with someone else’s memories. They’re your family.]
[Rule 3. If you figure out what they are, they’ll kill you.]
The rules I’d pieced together rang in my head like an emergency siren.
I had to pretend perfectly.
These things were a colony, living inside human shells and borrowing human memories to survive.
If I showed even the slightest hint of suspicion, they might chew through my brain too.
I took one deep breath, then looked in the mirror and forced my face into its usual full-time-bum expression, complete with irritation.
Three years unemployed.
This was the time to deploy the pathetic acting skills I’d built up from years of being nagged at and kicked around.
Bang.
I shoved the bathroom door open and stormed out.
"I am cleaning, aren’t I? This mold won’t come off no matter how hard I scrub. Why don’t you try it, huh?"
Wiping my hands hard with a towel, I walked out into the living room and glanced toward the sofa.
My sister was practicing dance in the middle of the room.
She was a trainee who’d spent the last three years grinding away at street dance to make it onto an idol debut team.
Among her skills, she was especially amazing at isolation, the technique of moving each part of the body separately.
Thump, snap. Thump, snap.
A heavy beat filled the living room.
Using the living room window as a mirror, my sister bounced her body in time with the music.
Her neck, shoulders, chest, and hips all broke apart to the beat, each part moving independently in perfect separation.
"Haa, haa... ah, my back."
When the music ended, she bent over and panted, one hand on her lower back.
Sweat had beaded on her forehead, and every breath made her chest rise and fall heavily.
Even the slight frown from overusing her joints.
She was perfect.
Perfectly my little sister’s physical reaction, and perfectly my little sister’s habits.
But that very perfection was strangling me.
...She hadn’t been this good at dancing before.
Now she was almost pro-level.
Her movements looked like she knew exactly how to use her body.
Rustle.
My sister turned toward me, wiping sweat off with a towel.
She sucked cola through a straw, slurping it down in one go.
"Hah... hah... haa... haa... What are you staring at? Clean the place properly."
Breathless, her voice came out in the same annoyed tone she always used.
Her appearance, the physiological way she sweated, even that irritatingly snappy personality—all of it was exactly Ha Minyeong.
There was no proof anywhere that some alien monster was living inside that body.
She’d come back prettier from the trip...
And she’d suddenly gotten much better at dancing.
Nothing else had changed.
No—if I hadn’t read that post, I never would’ve suspected a thing.
Which was exactly why it was so fucking chilling.
"What the hell are you doing, dancing or flailing around? You’re stiff as a board."
I deliberately scowled and snorted.
The only shield I had was to act like a pathetic, useless older brother.
My sister let out a short, incredulous laugh.
"You don’t even know what you’re talking about. This is popping, you shut-in loser. Would a basement rat like you even understand the finer points of isolation?"
"Quit your bullshit. Go lick a Reptilian’s ass. You stink like sweat, so go wash up."
I flopped onto the sofa and grabbed the TV remote.
I changed channels as if nothing were wrong, but my fingertips around the remote were trembling faintly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her open the fridge and guzzle cold water.
She’d just been sucking down cola through a straw, and now she was drinking water too?
That she was drinking so much water felt oddly suspicious.
Could it be because she was a Flower, and Flowers drank a lot of water?
Once I started doubting, everything became suspicious.
While pretending to watch TV, I looked at Minyeong’s reflection in the aluminum frame of the television.
That long, lean body. Her full chest. Her shoulders rising and falling with each breath.
What if, beneath that one layer of skin, there was a Flower alien in place of Minyeong?
- Flowers and Ants are nothing more than a colony. They are one. That can be their strength, and it can be their weakness.
The smug Reptilian professor on TV flashed through my mind.
What if my stepmother and Minyeong really were Flowers? Then what?
There was nothing I could do.
Even if I reported them to the police, nobody would arrest them or anything.
Flowers and Ants had been granted the right to live alongside humanity by those lofty Reptilian elites.
They even had the right to live as humans without revealing what they were.
There had never been a news report about them killing family members who suspected them.
It could all just be fake news floating around online.
Yeah... it has to be fake news...
The best thing was to just pretend not to know.
Right now, when I still couldn’t get a job, the reason I could eat and live this comfortably was thanks to my stepmother.
That was when it happened.
Slurrrrrp—
I was still stealing a glance at Minyeong’s reflection in the TV’s aluminum frame.
Minyeong was drinking cola from the tumbler again through a straw.
No.
It was the other way around.
The liquid level in the transparent tumbler was rising little by little.
She wasn’t drinking. She was using the straw to spit something back out from her mouth.
A black liquid...
What I’d thought was cola all this time.
'What the hell... what is that she spit out?'
And then Minyeong casually held out the tumbler filled with the black liquid she’d just spat out.
Black liquid, still frothing from the mouthful she’d just dumped out.
"Oppa, want some cola?"
"No thanks."
The refusal came tumbling out of my mouth on its own.
Only after I said it did chills run across my skin.
Because Minyeong had kept offering me cola yesterday too, and the day before that.
I’d stopped drinking it because it felt like I was developing diabetes.
But there was no need to say that out loud.
'Minyeong still thinks I like cola...'
I felt like this insane isolation, this terror, was the kind of thing that could drive a person mad.
Bibibiik, ding-dong.
Then I heard the sound of the front door lock opening.
"Mom’s home~"
It was my stepmother.
Looking every bit the startup CEO in a sleek suit, she came in carrying heavy grocery bags with both hands.
"Ugh, my back. Why are these bags so damn heavy?"
My stepmother groaned and set the bags down in the entryway.
Just like the old stepmother, she looked exhausted from being chewed up by investors.
I forced myself to stand and walked over to the front door.
"Oh, you’re home, Mom."
"Jeez, the house reeks of bleach. Son, did you clean the bathroom again?"
My stepmother took off her shoes and smiled at me.
It was a smile different from the one she usually wore when she looked at me with nothing but annoyance.
Why had the stepmother who used to do nothing but nag me gotten so kind?
"Yeah, well. The mold came back again."
"Good work. Come here and help me with the bags, would you?"
I made my stiff, frozen legs move as naturally as I could and walked over to her.
The moment I took the bags, her fingertips brushed the back of my hand.
Warm.
The utterly human warmth of someone who’d just come in from a walk outside, a little sweat clinging to her skin.
And the smell.
The smell of expensive designer perfume mixed with outdoor exhaust fumes.
The smell of a mom who had just come home from work.
But my sharpened nose caught, very faintly—so faintly it could have been my imagination—the damp, moldy smell of a basement.
The scent of spores blooming from the corner of the bathroom tiles.
"Mom, you got home early today?"
My sister, having finished drinking water, came over.
"Yeah. You haven’t eaten dinner yet, right? Let’s grill pork belly tonight. I bought plenty of meat."
I glanced inside the bag I was holding.
I could see packs of raw red meat sealed in clear plastic.
Normal pork belly.
I’d seen a comment saying Flower species ate insects, but maybe she’d bought pork belly in order to imitate human life perfectly.
They were performing their roles with terrifying devotion.
"Oh, and son."
Just as my mom was walking into the living room, she turned her head sharply and looked at me.
The gaze that had been tired only a moment ago had settled strangely, almost coolly.
"How did that interview go? You’re already twenty-six—how long are you going to keep cleaning bathrooms? I keep telling you, just come work for Mom."
My heart dropped.
The internet comment about how if there was a Flower in the family, you’d be killed or folded into their colony flashed through my head.
My stepmother’s startup. That place was surely some kind of spore farm for those Flower bastards, or the forward base of a colony network.
The moment I stepped inside, I’d clearly become a third shell and come back to this house again.
I ignored the cold sweat running down my spine and forced on the most shameless, worthless expression I could manage.
"Ah, whatever. That asshole interviewer was being a total prick, so I stormed out. They don’t even hire pure humans anyway because of the alien preferential policy."
"Then come work for Mom~."
I snorted and scratched the back of my head.
"And your company? No way. That’d be awkward. I don’t want people saying I got in through nepotism or whatever. I just want to chill, maybe work part-time at a PC cafe and run some ROL—Ranger of League—here and there. So why don’t you just give me some allowance?"
The most useless, most trash human alive.
A parasite not even worth spending one of those one million precious host slots on.
That was the only survival strategy I had chosen.
"Go on living like that for the rest of your life, you freeloading bastard. Tsk tsk."
My sister clicked her tongue beside me, looking down on me with contempt.
And that contempt felt all too real.
It was the exact, unfiltered disgust of a real little sister, inherited perfectly along with the host’s memories.
"Minyeong, that’s not how you talk to your brother!"
After scolding Minyeong, my stepmother stared at me for a long moment.
It was a quiet gaze, as if she were measuring my value in numbers.
Three suffocating seconds passed.
"Fine. I get it. I can’t force you. You hungry? Help me set the table."
My stepmother turned away and headed for the sink.
That same flicker of contempt brushed her face too.
I barely held myself up on shaking legs and walked into the kitchen.
I had to prove my worthlessness in order to survive.
That was the only way I could live.
I took the ssamjang and lettuce out of the fridge and acted as sluggish as I always did.
My stepmother was humming softly as she laid the pork belly on the cutting board, her back turned to me.
My sister was in the living room, fiddling with her phone and cooling off from all the sweat.
In this whole damn house, I was the only human being.
With two aliens wearing the most perfect human skins, I had to prepare dinner just to stay alive.
Or what if they weren’t aliens at all?
What if I’d gotten so hooked on those deleted fake-news posts that I was the one going crazy with suspicion?
What if I was mistaking perfectly normal people for aliens?
Sizzle—
The pork belly hit the grill, and the sound rang out.
"Minyeong. Hurry up and come eat. Put the phone away."
"Yesss!"
Minyeong came over with her phone and sat down at the table.
The smell of sizzling meat began to fill the living room.
The dinner table, which should have been the most peaceful time of day, felt to me like an execution chamber where I might have my throat cut at any moment.
I needed proof.
Proof that they were aliens.
"Ah..."
Suddenly, a good idea came to mind.