The Graph Connected to My Head
"Hah. Hah..."
I'd barely managed to escape, but it wasn't as if I had anywhere to go. Of everyone, Jiwoo was at least someone I could push back against a little — relatively speaking, the most comfortable company I had.
Lately my work had amounted to little more than maintenance. There were occasional disturbances outside, but for the most part it was keep, repair, and patch — so people rarely asked me for anything at all.
The corridor was busier than I'd expected. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and headed for the cleaning closet.
The tools themselves hadn't changed from then to now, so at least they were familiar. I gathered an armful of equipment and a bucket and made for the showers, intending to fill it with water.
The time was one-twenty. I had to report to the security team by three, so if I finished cleaning in the meantime and picked up the lunch I still hadn't eaten, the schedule would work out just right.
Running through the list of tasks in my head, I made my way to the Cultivation Room. No one spoke to me, but I offered a greeting every time our eyes met, and eventually I arrived.
I set the tools where they wouldn't snag anyone's path and started cleaning. My lower body ached with every movement, but not so badly that I couldn't move — of course not.
The facility had been set up outdoors, so dirt and grit had tracked across the floor. I swept it up and scrubbed the filthy patches with a rag, killing time that way, when the noise outside began to swell. Something loud and restless...
It didn't sound like a party or idle gossip. But it also didn't sound like the kind of panic you'd hear if a predator had broken into the perimeter.
"..."
I considered going to look, then simply focused on the cleaning. If it turned out to be something bad, someone might snap at me for standing around gawking when I had no business doing so.
Besides, it wasn't as if they'd need me for it.
The people inside the Cultivation Room seemed to share the same thought; everyone kept their heads down and stuck to their own work.
"...E-excuse me..."
"Ah. Just a second."
Once I'd swept and wiped the whole space, the most important job remained.
The strawberry on top of the cake, so to speak.
Unlike the basic cleaning that you could get away with skipping, this one caused real problems if you neglected it for too long.
If someone ever asked me what I'd done all day, this was the one thing I could point to and say I'd actually accomplished.
Pipe cleaning.
Lately it had become a small, quiet happiness. When I offered to clean them, people actually looked satisfied.
Probably because biological sludge built up in there so thickly that it was genuinely unsanitary.
I called them pipes, but hoses and internal components and all sorts of small, filthy pieces came out of them too...
"This one, and... ugh, this one too. Ah, do I need to be gentle with this? This red swollen tape-looking thing — so it doesn't come off."
"Yes...!"
I'd been handed an entire pile, so today counted as a reasonably full day. I grunted under the weight of it all, carried everything to a corner, sat down hard, and began scrubbing each piece carefully with a tiny brush.
Well. It was dirty. Sludge always is, but some of it was especially sticky and slick, and every so often a mass of it had sealed a pipe completely shut.
Then again, the things we cultivated here looked like slime to begin with. Not that I minded. Having something — anything — to do was a relief.
I picked up a small component. Green sludge pooled in the basket that had held the pipes and hoses, and it smeared across my hands, but they were already filthy, so I just gripped it and scrubbed with the brush when—
"Administrator!!!"
A woman kicked the door open hard enough to nearly tear it off its hinges. A woman whose name I didn't know.
"Hic...!"
"Han Yeoreum!!"
My heart dropped straight through my chest. I'd been sitting with my back to the entrance, and a voice I'd never heard before was hunting for me like it meant to kill me.
"Kh...!"
A useless hiccup jumped out of my throat. Whether from the sudden shock or because I'd let my guard down, my body refused to move.
"Ah, shit...!"
At the sound of footsteps striding toward me, my body curled in on itself without thinking. I balled up like a sphere and managed to turn only my head when—
A hand clamped onto the back of my collar.
She hauled me up with zero consideration — a woman I'd never seen before.
"Ghk...!"
Once a person starts being dragged, it turns out you can't get your own feet under you. The collar choked tight around my throat and I flailed. The only sound was the scrape and squeak of my shoe soles skidding across the floor.
"Kh, hah—!"
Without a word of explanation she dragged me out. It would have been far more efficient to let me walk on my own, but the woman just yanked me along in a frantic pull.
"J-just— wait...!"
Like the self-defense manuals for dealing with a stranger in the back seat of a car, I managed to wedge my fingers between the fabric and my neck while she hauled me all the way to the Cultivation Room entrance.
Only then did she stop. My pants had slipped so far down that half my ass was bare.
"Ah...! Get up!"
"Hic—! Y-yes...!"
Maybe my sluggishness frustrated her. When the sudden violence left me too weak to stand and I only flailed a little, she simply grabbed my clothes and hauled me upright.
"Follow me. Fast. Ah, fuck! I told you not to wander off...!"
"I-I w-was, cleaning, cleaning..."
She didn't wait for my answer. She ran.
She was sprinting at nearly full speed, and I tried my hardest to keep up, but—
Well. I ended up being dragged again. At least she didn't drag me across the dirt, which was something.
She hauled me squeaking and thudding down the corridor for what felt like forever, and we arrived at the infirmary. Despite the mildness of the name, it was a place equipped for cancer surgery.
"Hic—!"
Suddenly I remembered that I had a Security Chip in my head.
"Ah, fuck...!"
I grabbed the doorframe and held on. I hadn't expected this moment to arrive so fast. I'd thought that at the very least Soyeon or Minseo or Jiwoo — or even the security team, who would get bored without me — would keep me alive a little longer.
"Nngh...!"
I held on for a moment. Of course the difference in strength was obvious; one hard yank and I'd be pulled free. I knew that. I held on anyway.
If I was going to die, I wanted to resist at least once first.
"Hurry—"
Seeing me like that, the woman started to explain something — then simply grabbed my hair.
Unlike the clothes, which weren't part of my body, those black strands went taut and my scalp and follicles screamed.
Tuk. Tudduk.
A few strands snapped, and I was dragged into the infirmary. Bouncing and slamming around like a indoor-shoe bag being kicked by schoolkids, I arrived inside.
Bang!
Before I could even register what was happening, the woman still gripping my hair slammed my face into a black screen. It was the same treatment I often got from the security team, and I tried to turn my head away in shock when—
"Look at the damn thing!!"
"Eek...!"
—Beep.
A green confirmation tone sounded.
"Done!! Get it out!!"
"The drug's in! Stay with me! It shouldn't hurt anymore! Hold on! It's Remover, Remover! Don't move!"
"...Ah?"
Only then could I roll my eyes enough to look sideways. Someone was driving a syringe I didn't recognize into a woman thrashing on the bed, surrounded by people.
"Haa. Fuu..."
Only after that sound did I get my body back.
The people around the bed were moving in a frantic blur.
Then — byuut. Byut. — a dark red liquid erupted in a jet, and I saw people catching it across their faces and bodies while pressing down hard on something.
It was a scene soaked in blood. Blood on the floor, even a drop or two on the ceiling, and my stomach turned.
"Haa. Why did you resist? Huh?"
"Euh..."
"No, fuck. If it looks urgent, you run on your own. Shit. Fuu..."
Only then did I roughly grasp what was going on.
The woman shoved me.
"We're done. Go."
"...Ah, I, um, that is, I th-thought you were g-going to k-kill—"
"I said go."
She swept her bangs up, wiped at the sweat, planted a hand on her hip, and said it flatly — so I hurried out of the infirmary in an awkward half-crouch.
There had been a casualty. More precisely, the number of personnel with missing body parts had gone up. I walked the corridor in a daze, and a woman ran past carrying a severed hand.
"...Stand here."
No one had made a formal announcement that someone was hurt, but everyone already knew something had happened.
In a closed group, word traveled fast — and plenty of people had also seen me being dragged around like something less than human.
The atmosphere had hit rock bottom. The escape ship interior was quieter than usual.
When the time came and I arrived, the security team members greeted me with blank faces. Clearly no one was in the mood for smiling or games.
I moved as quickly as I could. Of course I felt sorry for the injured person, and it was pitiful that they'd endured the pain of a severed wrist for so long (from their perspective) while hunting for my authorization — but
maybe because I didn't even know their name, the sympathy somehow failed to land properly.
I looked at the camera. Unlike usual, a laser swept my field of vision from top to bottom.
"...B-class hazardous materials are unlocked. Nothing above that."
"Hm."
The clatter of keyboards filled the room. No further orders came, so I stood as carefully as I could and kept staring into the camera lens.
Afraid that if I looked anywhere else I'd get scolded again.
"...Kyaa...?!"
"Hey. By the way — what did you do yesterday?"
I was standing still waiting when a sudden weight settled across my neck and shoulders. My body lurched and my head bonked against the lens.
"Ah, auh... Y-yes...?"
"Yesterday. After I left. What did you do."
...Her name. Right, it was...
Yujin. Jeong Yujin. Yes. I remembered.
"Y-yes? Ah, n-nothing...?"
Yujin draped her arm over me like her goal was to sit me on the floor, putting her full weight into it. My legs trembled as I barely stayed upright to answer, and Yujin let out a small, dry laugh — ha.
"This. Lying already."
"Euh, really, I really didn't..."
A hand slid smoothly inside my loose shirt and kneaded my breast.
She played in the gap between bra and skin, savoring the soft, shifting give of it.
"Huum... Really? You were naked like that and nothing happened?"
"Y-yes..."
Yujin kept questioning me with a face that couldn't drop the suspicion — no, a face that was nearly certain. Just the act of lying made my heart skip a little.
"Then why did you wash again? And together, at that?"
"......"
"Pff."
I couldn't answer that one. The way she said it, she'd already finished confirming everything. Had she been watching? No, that couldn't be — I'd clearly seen her leave the changing room—
"You did, didn't you? You little slut. Ugh. Disgusting. Sucking and licking all over. Hmph!"
"N-no... I d-didn't, did, I didn't...!"
"Ahah! Sure, sure. Walking around all wobbly like that — as if. Anyway, look at this."
Wobbly? Me?
That was a strange thing to say. It hadn't even hurt that much. Just a little sore — not enough to wreck my gait.
"D-did I w-walk weird..."
"Look."
Yujin casually ignored my reply and pulled a terminal from her pocket. The screen had a small crack in it, and I was thinking it must be mine when—
She powered it on, tapped around the display, and launched something that looked like an app.
"Ta-da."
On the screen, graphs of various colors bounced up and down in patterns I couldn't begin to parse. They overlapped so heavily that telling the colors apart was hard enough, and they were updating in real time.
"...?"
"Know what this is?"
"Uh..."
I had no idea. It looked nothing like the base-management interfaces Soyeon had taught me...
The design was crude enough that I could tell for certain no designer had ever touched it. I turned my gaze from the screen to Yujin, eyes full of the question — and
"Hic—?!"
She found my nipple with unerring precision, pinched it, and twisted like she meant to tear it off.
A searing pain so sharp a scream couldn't even form. My breath hit the middle of my windpipe and went nowhere.
"Ah, keep it down a little?"
"Shut up. Who are you to talk?"
Yujin brushed off Haebin's comment without a second thought, then jerked her chin at me again — look — so I looked at the screen.
A red line spiked hard, then slowly fell. Other colored graphs rose as if they'd registered my pain, then gradually settled.
"This is linked to your head. Cool, right?"
"...What?"
A chill ran through me. The sheer grotesqueness of linked to your head was part of it, but the real shock was that something as intimate as my feelings could be reduced to a graph.
Like a game character. The technology that let someone read my insides made my skin crawl.
"...Pff! Hmph! Aww. Scared? Or not? Annoyed? Oh, look, your stress is going up too."
"H-how did you e-even—"
"It's nothing special. But here's what you can do with it. Watch?"
Yujin's hand slithered out of my top like a snake, then slipped naturally into my pants. Honestly, she treated me more casually than a fleshlight stashed in a room.
"You had sex with Soyeon yesterday, didn't you?"
Apparently the shameless hand wasn't what she wanted me to watch — she whispered it right against my ear. Of course, lies always showed on my face, and my heart dropped straight to the floor again.
"See. Stress just spiked, right? Heart rate ticked up a little too."
"Euh, euh, I don't know."
"What did you do? Mouth? Chest? Hmm. Not that, looks like? Figures — what would you even do with those little things. So just sex? Kissing? Legs open? Closed?"
With every question the graphs on the screen surged and bucked. Yujin stared at them, openly enjoying my reactions.
"...Heh. Honestly, I don't know exactly. We never learned this stuff. Soyeon could probably read it? Still, hmm..."
Her hand moved. It slid inside my underwear as naturally as if she were touching her own body, and pressed flat and firm against my sex. Of course it didn't feel good—
"This graph just jumped. Haebin."
"Ah, I'm busy."
Yujin turned her head toward Haebin and kept going.
"Wanna make a bet? Which of us two she likes more?"
At that, Haebin — who had been working the keyboard — lifted her head. Looking intrigued, she stood and walked toward us.