One Day in July
The alarm rang out, sharp and familiar.
Beep-beep-beep— Beep-beep-beep—
I woke to that sound, prying my heavy eyelids open with effort.
Still half-asleep, I groped for the phone in its usual spot and killed the alarm by touch alone.
I stared blankly at the ceiling for a full thirty seconds.
Only then did my brain start booting up. I slowly pushed myself upright.
“Ah……”
Still foggy, I turned on the phone in my hand without thinking.
July 23, Saturday
05:10 AM
The screen’s harsh light finally chased the last of the sleep away.
“Time really flies. It’s already the end of July.”
The date glowing on my phone felt strangely new. More than a year had passed since my regression—over a year and a half now. I’d been running at full speed the whole time, so the days seemed to blur together even faster.
“Nya?”
Som-mungchi hopped onto the bed. She was much bigger than when I’d first decided to adopt her. It felt like just yesterday she fit in my palm, but seeing her now drove home how much time had really passed.
“Nya! Nyana nyat!”
“All right, all right. I’ll feed you.”
“Nya.”
Her whining sounded exactly like a complaint that I shouldn’t just sit there once I was awake. I gave her head one quick stroke, then got out of bed.
“Here. Eat up.”
Crunch. Crunch. Cranch-cranch.
She buried her face in the bowl without answering. I watched her for a moment before heading to the kitchen to make my own breakfast.
“Today’s breakfast is~ the same old English breakfast~”
It was the same menu every morning. You’d think I’d get sick of it, but it was simple and had become routine, so I didn’t mind.
I popped the yolk of a perfectly cooked sunny-side-up egg and checked the news on my phone. I scanned everything—current events, politics, and every article about the game industry.
Nothing special today, either.
The world was still noisy, yet somehow quiet.
“Speaking of which, when is that bastard going to call?”
Thinking about the news made me remember Kim Seung-wook, who hadn’t contacted me in days. I’d told him to keep an eye on the summer situation, but not a single message had come.
I should start preparing soon…
The Black Monday I remembered happened in the summer. I’d even given him the vague window of July to September, but he’d only said the market would tell us when to move.
If he’d given me even a rough update I could have waited, but with the U.S. market hitting its peak in July, it was getting harder to sit still this close to the end of the month.
If it comes to it, I’ll have to pick the date myself.
I couldn’t just keep trusting and waiting forever. If Seung-wook kept dragging his feet, I’d set the timing alone and take the short position. July looked like it would pass without incident, so opening the position as soon as August began would be the safest bet—even if it wasn’t perfect, I wouldn’t lose money.
Rub-rub-rub.
“Nyaaaaaaa~”
Som-mungchi had finished eating and was rubbing her head against my leg. At first I thought it was just affection, but after living with her for months I knew this headbutt meant hurry up and get ready to leave.
I thought cats were territorial and hated going outside.
Maybe it was because I’d been taking her to the office since she was tiny. She wasn’t normal. She liked commuting as much as I did.
“I’ll wash up quick. Wait for me.”
“Nya!”
She even sat down like a dog when I told her to wait.
After getting ready, I tucked Som-mungchi into the backpack-style carrier and left the house. Since it was Saturday the streets and subway station were quiet.
“Oh my, she’s adorable! What’s her name?”
“Haha. Thank you. This is Som-mungchi. Som-mungchi.”
“Mungchi~ Good girl. She’s so cute!”
I’d been bringing her to work for a while now, but the constant attention during rush hour could still be overwhelming. I understood the curiosity when people saw a cat inside the clear plastic window of the carrier, but having strangers walk up and talk to me was awkward for an introvert like me.
When we reached Guro Digital Complex Station I gave a polite nod to the passersby who’d been playing with Som-mungchi and got off the train. The area was usually crowded even in the morning, but it was peaceful on the weekend.
The lively energy of people was nice, but so was this calm, quiet atmosphere. I savored it as I walked toward the office.
Creak.
I opened the office door.
No one was there.
There would be no “I’ll show you hell!” lectures about daring to arrive later than the CEO and lead director. It was the weekend, after all.
Tsk. Still, I thought at least one person would volunteer for weekend work…
This era was far more romantic than the future.
Compared to the brutally strict labor laws of the future, the current labor standards act was full of holes. As long as you could prove overtime or weekend work was voluntary rather than forced, you were safe.
Knowing this sweet time would eventually disappear, I’d been working the team hard. Looked like no one planned to come in today.
Well, everyone’s accumulated a lot of fatigue.
I let it slide with a generous heart.
“All right. Go play.”
“Nya!”
I let Som-mungchi out of the carrier and headed to my desk.
Plop.
The moment I sat down, she slipped into the narrow gap between the desk and the computer tower, stretched out a paw, and pressed the power button.
“Good job.”
“Nya!”
Our Som-mungchi was definitely a genius cat. What other cat in the world would kindly turn on the computer for its owner the moment they arrived at work? It had startled me at first, but since she never touched the button when I wasn’t coming in, I allowed it.
Ring-ring—
The PC finished booting and the monitor lit up.
I entered the password, waited about five seconds for the system to fully wake, then did what I always did—checked the business email first.
There was mail from the company handling Dot Hero ads.
An interim settlement report from the tax corporation.
An update from the figure manufacturer on the goods I’d ordered. All sorts of messages had arrived.
“Hmm. We don’t need more articles, so keep the ads only on webzine portals… Taxes are being handled well, so just reply that I’ve confirmed… The goods are coming along fast. We should keep using this company.”
I handled each one, then moved on to actual work.
Where did Jae-min say he was stuck?
I remembered.
He’d reported a bug where characters in states like Confusion, Fear, or Excitement couldn’t interact with objects and the system would break.
I opened the debugger and started tracing the code. I followed the flow step by step, pinpointing where the bug occurred.
“Found it.”
The cause was a bottleneck in the event queue. When a status effect triggered, interaction commands duplicated and kept piling up in the queue until the system froze. I quickly fixed it so duplicate commands wouldn’t stack.
Next, Daniel asked me to confirm the new track.
I opened the shared folder and found the audio file he’d mentioned.
I played it, closed my eyes, and imagined myself playing the game.
The location was an isolation ward inside a space station.
I was an administration agent sent to resolve a problem there.
Before fully immersing, I recalled the instructions I’d given Daniel before he made the track.
Space should feel quiet, after all.
I’d asked him to express the silence of empty space.
Daniel had frowned when he heard it.
“What? You want me to express the silence of space… with music?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit! Are you kidding? How the hell do I do that!”
“You can do it. I believe in you.”
I understood why he’d panicked. BGM was sound, after all. Expressing silence with sound wasn’t easy.
I pushed the image of a grumbling Daniel putting on his headset out of my mind and focused on the track.
Oh…
What I heard wasn’t an ordinary melody. It was closer to the sound of air circulation systems or the white noise generated by electronics.
Yet it wasn’t pure white noise, either.
A faint metallic “ching—” rang out.
That delicate percussion, barely audible, left a lingering resonance that felt like it was endlessly receding into the distance. Mixed with the soft, sorrowful strings that wove between the sounds, it perfectly captured the silence of space and the vast emptiness of an enormous, hollow void.
“Wow. This crazy bastard.”
The curse slipped out as I listened to a BGM that exceeded my expectations.
I’d only asked for silence, but he’d also expressed the overwhelming scale of space I hadn’t even mentioned. Listening to it made me feel like nothing more than a speck of dust on a cosmic scale.
I’ll have to give him a bonus for this.
My principle was simple: reward those who did well, and make those who didn’t stay late until they could do better.
Daniel had earned a reward.
I approved the track he’d uploaded and moved on to checking the 3D models from the art team.
Seong-bae is at it again.
Seong-bae could never let go of his personal desires in the first draft. The model he’d made felt too far from the “Administration Bureau” concept.
Can’t approve this.
I replied to his confirmation email with just the single word “Revise,” then checked Min-ji’s work.
“As expected from Min-ji. She’s so fast.”
Her quick hands had turned trees, sky, ground, and buildings into pretty decent models. I left a review asking for only minor detail tweaks and moved on.
Let’s see how our Cha Ju-hee did.
When I opened her folder, dozens of files greeted me.
“Oh~ That’s a lot.”
Just as I thought.
She constantly whined that she didn’t want overtime and that it was hard, but she was a nocturnal creature who thrived on it.
The more I made her work late, the faster her hands became so she could finish sooner. And speed hadn’t lowered the quality—on the contrary, the quality kept rising.
Programmer Cha Ju-hee was S-tier, but original artist Cha Ju-hee was a bit disappointing… At this rate, that’s changing.
I looked forward to her reaching S-tier as an artist too. I picked out the pieces with slightly weaker detail, asked her to develop only those, and closed the folder.
“Nyaa! Nya!”
At Som-mungchi’s cry I looked out the window and saw the orange sunset sky. When I turned back, she had climbed onto the desk and was lying on the keyboard, demanding I stop working.
“Time to go home?”
“Nya!”
On weekdays she never complained no matter how late we stayed, but on weekends she always started crying to go home around sunset. If there had been a lot of work I would have scolded her to be quiet, but today this seemed like a good place to stop.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
“Nya!”
I tidied the office and put Som-mungchi back in the carrier.
Riiiiing— Riiiiing—
Just as I locked the door and was about to leave the building, my phone started ringing.
“Hm?”
It was a collect call.
There was only one person who would call me from this number. It was Kim Seung-wook, the one I’d been waiting to hear from.
“Yeah. Seung-wook. Did you check the market? If you’re calling to tell me not to short again, I’m just going to hang—”
“Y-Yihan.”
“What? Why does your voice sound like that? Did something happen?”
“Something… did happen.”
“Then stop hesitating and tell me. Did you cause some kind of accident in the unit?”
“No. If we’re being honest, you’re the one who caused it. Sigh… Yihan-ah.”
“Spit it out. Stop annoying me!”
“Dude… I think you were right.”
“Out of nowhere, what… No way?”
“Yeah. Let’s… short it. I think it’s okay to do it now.”
The time had finally come.
After finishing his guard duty, Kim Seung-wook changed clothes and left the barracks. On his way to the PC room he ran into his superior and saluted.
“Loyalty! Platoon leader, sir!”
“Seung-wook, you’re heading to the PC room again today?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You finished all your personal maintenance first, right?”
“Yes! That is correct, sir!”
“Good. Well done. Go use the computer then. You know you can’t visit weird sites, right? We can check everything.”
“Yes! Loyalty!”
After the platoon leader patted his shoulder and left, Kim Seung-wook headed to the PC room with a stiff expression.
Sitting in front of the computer, he read economic news articles. His face grew colder.
After checking the social affairs section, he covered his face with both hands.
Fuck. This looks real…?
The debt-ceiling negotiations that had ultimately failed amid the power struggle between the U.S. president and the Republicans.
European countries that seemed increasingly likely to declare a moratorium.
The approaching maturity date of U.S. Treasury bonds.
At first he’d thought it was just his friend talking nonsense.
He’d been certain that his friend—who had tasted success and money through games—was trying to gamble with something close to speculation.
But the friend’s prediction that America would falter was becoming clearer by the day.
A virtual scenario drew itself in his head.
Market participants feeling anxiety over America’s unstable political situation.
American politicians promising to finish negotiations quickly, yet the talks dragging on.
Growing unease.
European news pouring fuel on the fire.
Negotiations ultimately collapsing.
Boom—!
Fear exploding, and in his mind the stock market crashing down in ruins.
Fuck. This is seriously bad…
He had never intended to help when his friend asked him to predict when the U.S. market would shake. On the contrary, he had looked for every reason to stop the short-selling.
But he couldn’t ignore a picture this clear.
After thinking for a while, Kim Seung-wook left the PC room and found a military phone.
Ring-ring-ring. Ring-ring-ring.
The dial tone felt especially long today.
Click.
Normally he would have complained about his friend picking up so late, but after a short conversation, Kim Seung-wook finally spoke the words.
“Dude… let’s short it.”
“When?”
“The moment the market opens.”
“Got it.”
“Got it…? That’s it? Aren’t you scared? What if I’m wrong?”
The too-casual tone made him explode. While his own heart was pounding and cold sweat ran down his back, the other man answered in a completely flat voice with a single “Got it”?
Kim Seung-wook was about to say something, but Jo Yihan was faster.
“What if you’re wrong? It’s fine. I won’t blame you even if we lose, so don’t worry. You coward.”
“H-how can I not worry! I’m the one telling you to short it! If we lose, it’ll be my fault!”
“What the hell are you talking about? Didn’t I tell you last time you were on leave? Trust me, who trusts you. I’m not trusting you. I’m trusting myself.”
“Fuck… There you go with that bullshit again—”
“Besides, so what if we lose a little? We can just earn it back.”
The utterly relaxed, confidence-filled voice made a hollow laugh escape him.
Some of the anxiety faded. Kim Seung-wook forced a joke.
“Ha. Do whatever you want. And if we earn money, give me a cut.”
“One meal should be enough, right?”
“Sure. It better be a really expensive meal.”
Two days later, Jo Yihan went all-in on VIX-related derivatives with 3x leverage.
Kim Seung-wook, who had expected at most a 3x inverse ETF, was utterly shocked.