Who Is Entity (11)
***
In the end, we never took the brain CT.
There was simply no way to wheel a patient into the CT suite while she was festooned with an echocardiography machine.
Still, wary of the possibility that she might wake up again, we bound her limbs firmly to the bed.
I was gazing down at the patient sleeping in the bed when Shiho crept up beside me.
"Professor? Just so you know, I'm asking—she's not dead, right?"
"You said this is how it's normally done."
"It is. It's just been a while, so I'm not sure I calibrated my strength properly."
"…"
Sigh. I unconsciously dragged a hand down my jaw.
Should I somehow manage to get that brain CT after all?
I shook my head to shake off the pointless thought. The neurology professor had run every reflex test in the book and guaranteed she was fine, so surely it was unnecessary.
The human skull is surprisingly sturdy. There are people who've taken a hammer to the back of the head and walked away—human vitality can be downright astonishing at times.
So it's a concussion. Probably.
"Let's just confirm the treatment method for now."
I pushed aside the unfounded worry and focused on what I actually had to do.
My mission was clear: cure this patient's Echo. Only by peeling away the very thing that had stolen her life from her, root and branch, could I truly call this patient treated.
'One thing is certain, at least, after that little commotion.'
She hadn't lost consciousness simply because her blood pressure dropped.
I'd thought it was strange from the start. Her blood pressure wasn't low enough for her consciousness to vanish on its own.
Looking at it now, the Echo itself had taken her consciousness.
If I remembered right, there was a lore entry covering exactly this state—and since it was lore I'd consulted on, I remembered it in detail.
'When an existence's narrative has been completely overwhelmed by the Echo... that would be Resonance Stage 4.'
Resonance had stages.
Stage 0, no resonance at all, up through Stage 5, when the host has been stripped of all agency entirely.
I'd proposed that classification system by borrowing from the GCS—the Glasgow Coma Scale—used in actual medicine, and I recalled it being received pretty warmly by both the dev team and the fandom at the time.
'At Stage 4, a little more delay and she'd tip into Stage 5.'
Stage 5—complete resonance—meant the incubation period was over and her very existence had been fully transmuted by the Echo.
From that point on, she'd be less a person and more a monster, highly likely to roam indiscriminately in search of victims dictated by her own narrative.
'If it comes to that... I'll have no choice but to kill this patient.'
Imagining that scenario left a cold weight sinking in my chest.
I am not a humanitarian. I took the Hippocratic Oath, so I'll do my best to save a patient—but I'm not so drunk on ideals that I'd stand by while someone turns into a monster and starts threatening other people.
'Preferably, I'd like to never see that situation at all.'
The one mercy was that right now, I had the means to treat this patient.
I opened the game app.
A001.3-GB0003/2 :[Digital Portrait]
I entered the Entity Compendium and pulled up the patient's Echo.
A cascade of records unfurled—the Echo records, the Entity records, all the way down to the containment records.
Scrolling through them one by one, I found the Echo Treatment Log sitting at the very bottom.
'Well, I do have the super account the Director gave me.'
I shouldn't have needed to play through the game at all—everything should have been right there at my fingertips.
Checking...
Checking......
"Huh?"
"Oh. Did you figure it out, Professor?"
Shiho's head popped out from behind my phone, her bright red eyes fixed on me, glistening with expectation.
"Now you can just whip up the treatment and quarantine the Echo—"
"There's nothing here?"
The end of her sentence trailed off strangely.
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing's written in it. No—wait."
I checked the screen again.
"No, it's not that nothing's written..."
"Then what does it say?"
I dropped my gaze to the Treatment Log field.
On the gray, locked-out log, one single line sat alone, mercilessly betraying my expectations:
- [This is a blank space that only the Treatment Administrator may edit.]
I relayed the contents of that blank space to Shiho, word for word.
"......"
"......"
We just stared at each other in silence, but I had a pretty good idea what she wanted to say.
"Damn it."
A curse slipped out between Shiho's lips.
I couldn't bring myself to echo it as a professor, but I agreed with her a hundred times over.
'My sentiments exactly, damn it all.'
No wonder everything had been going suspiciously smoothly.
*
"So let me get this straight. This Treatment Administrator position—"
Shiho said slowly, pressing a hand to her forehead.
"It means you can't view the treatment method. You have to write it yourself?"
"Yes. That appears to be the case."
Shiho let out a long, deep sigh and dragged her hand down her face, her voice muffled behind her palm.
"Ugh... we should've just gone looking for Hippocrates himself."
Even if we had, I doubt much would've changed.
I swallowed the words rising to my throat and checked the Compendium again. Opened it, closed it, refreshed it, reconnected the Wi-Fi, toggled mobile data on and off—the gray screen never changed.
Which meant: from beginning to end, I was the one who had to figure everything out.
For a moment, I could swear I heard Jihun's voice in my head.
—"So you're the only one on cheat mode, Hyung-nim?"
Cheat mode, my foot. This was responsibility without pleasure. All of the duty, none of the authority—quite possibly the worst job title in existence.
To my left, Shiho was sheepishly scratching her cheek.
Our eyes met by accident, and she ducked her head and apologized under her breath.
"This is... somehow I think my recommendation is what made you the boss of this whole thing, Professor? Ah—you do know what a 'jujjang' is, right?"
I shook my head.
"You don't browse the galleries?"
"Never once in my life."
I only visited online communities to gauge opinion after a patch, and even then barely more than lurking. So I never really learned the slang or the memes.
"But I know what it means, because there's an equivalent position at the hospital."
I had heard about it from Jihun, though. I can't say whether the comparison was exact, but once he'd likened a badge-holder to a particular hospital post.
"There's a position like a hospital jujjang?"
"Yes. The head of a clinical department."
People outside hospital walls hear the word 'department head' and assume it's some honorific for a distinguished, highly skilled professor.
In reality, it's the post every professor flees from.
"The pay barely goes up, but the workload doubles. So usually it lands on either the youngest—or the one just above the youngest."
For the record, my own cardiology department was no exception. Our department head is exactly one seniority above me—in other words, second from the bottom of the cardiology faculty hierarchy.
Handing the post to the youngest would've risked the whole department imploding under someone who couldn't possibly shoulder it, so he took it himself—and now he's burning with ambition to shove it onto me within five years.
'Hold on. Then in five years, I'd be a double jujjang.'
Not even a double board certification—double jujjang. That is a trial no human being is meant to endure.
"Dear God..."
"Professor? Is something wrong?"
"There is nothing about this that isn't wrong."
"I'm sorry?"
Leaving her bewildered, I turned my attention back to the patient.
"Well, since it's come to this, I suppose we treat her."
Yes, I'd somehow been saddled with crushing responsibility—but when had taking on more than my share ever been a once-in-a-lifetime thing? If stumbling into a professorship on pure luck, with the credentials to match, taught me one universal truth, it's this: a person doesn't earn a position; a position makes the person. Once you clear the minimum bar, you take the responsibility on faith and grind yourself to dust, and somehow things work out. That's the truth of this business.
Through a tablet left in the corner of the resuscitation room, I pulled up the patient's information.
Gu JihyeOccupation: Streamer.
'Why this woman resonated with the Echo, I can understand.'
Did she want fame so badly she'd try anything? Or was it beauty she craved?
An Echo never resonates without reason.
If a person's narrative doesn't resemble—or suit—the Echo's, they'd never have a chance of resonating in the first place.
Which meant Gu Jihye sympathized, at least to some degree, with the narrative of the Digital Portrait.
'Let's read the introduction again.'
"Caught between the heaven and the hell that exist within us all, what choice am I to make? In this godforsaken world, the angel stays silent, while the devil is always whispering. That the only way to be rid of temptation is to surrender to it."
Paranoid Institute is not a particularly kind game.
Instead of handing you the countermeasures for an Entity in plain language, it delivers them in the form of a story or a record.
And until you can unlock those records, you have to infer an Entity's traits from these introduction texts alone.
I focused on the Entity Compendium again.
Looking closely, the Compendium's format was similar to Harrison's—the bible of internal medicine textbooks.
'Echo records are the pathophysiology. Entity records are the clinical findings and diagnostic criteria...'
Which meant the answer for treatment was already laid out in front of me.
"There was once a beautiful artist who despised age and ugliness. Determined to deny growing old, he set out to preserve his youngest, most beautiful moment in photographs. And so he left behind countless pictures."
'Temptation, age, ugliness—and photographs.'
The artist who was the Echo's original template worshipped his own beauty.
But he couldn't beat the years, couldn't bear his own hideousness, and so he shifted his aging onto the photographs.
Yet doing so didn't make his ugliness disappear.
No—if anything, as his inner self festered and rotted away, the photographs grew ever uglier in reflection.
"The photograph is the inside... the photograph is the inside... um, Shiho?"
"Yes?"
"How did the Management Bureau handle Entities that had resonated with an Echo?" "For the most part, they locked them in containment cells."
Shiho answered matter-of-factly.
"Destroying the Entity just makes the Echo jump to the next victim and resonate all over again, so they figured it was better to chain down the person who'd already transformed where they couldn't go anywhere."
"Did the Bureau ever attempt treatment?"
"Huh? Treating them just makes the Echo go find another host and resonate again, and that runs directly counter to the Bureau's motto."
I nodded.
The Bureau's motto was the isolation of Echoes from society.
Put differently: as long as the Echo was separated from the public, the life of the individual was nobody's concern.
"Shiho. Then let me ask you one thing."
My lips were going dry.
"You're effectively the face of the Management Bureau now, so you tell me. Is it right to treat this person—or is it right to merely keep her alive and lock her away?"
"..."
Shiho's expression stiffened.
"Have you figured out the treatment method?"
"Not exactly, but... yes. I have an idea."
I looked down at the old woman, her face seamed with wrinkles.
I had a rough idea of how to give this person her life back. But if I treated her, the Echo might leap to someone else.
Yet another victim, and...
"Then what is there to agonize over?"
"?"
At that moment, Shiho drove straight through the gap in my reasoning.
"We treat her. Fast."
"But you just said the Bureau doesn't treat Entities precisely because the Echo just moves on to someone else."
"That's because the Bureau is a secret organization. If the Echo keeps spreading, keeping it secret gets harder and harder."
She shrugged.
"The Bureau isn't a secret anymore—and above all, they proved with their own two hands that their method failed."
Her voice carried unwavering certainty.
"So we do it a new way. Your way, Professor."
"..."
"Think about it—herding only the sick onto carts and sealing them away was medieval plague medicine, wasn't it?"
"Understood."
Only after hearing her out could I finally steady my heart.
"Then let's begin Gu Jihye's treatment."
"Great. So what do you need me to do?"
"First..."
***
"Mmgh..."
A private room on the cardiology ward of Castrato Hospital.
There, a woman was letting out labored groans.
"Ugh..."
The name written above the head of her bed read 'Gu Jihye.'
Three days ago, she had been admitted as an emergency through the ER.
"Hah—!"
The woman suddenly kicked off her blankets and bolted upright.
Ragged breathing filled the quiet hospital room. The first things her newly opened eyes found were an unfamiliar bed and an IV stand.
Even through the lingering fog of sleep, she could work out that she was in a hospital.
"Castrato... Medical Center?"
The logo on her hospital gown told her which hospital it was, too.
Then her gaze snagged on something—wrinkled hands. The moment she saw the back of those hands, sleep fled her body entirely.
'That's right! The Echo!'
She scrambled out of bed, hunting for a mirror.
Fortunately, this was a private room, so she could check her appearance in the bathroom. With trembling fingers she flicked on the light and faced the mirror.
'Ah...'
She had aged.
She wasn't quite the crone from her social media, but the woman in the mirror looked nearly middle-aged now.
Crow's feet at the corners of her eyes. Sagging cheeks. Skin that had lost all its bounce.
She looked the age of her own parents.
"Haaah..."
A long sigh escaped her unbidden.
Remembering the most beautiful she had ever been only deepened the gloom. That face that had drawn floods of praise on countless screens—now it existed nowhere at all.
'Maybe I shouldn't have deleted those photos after all.'
But she did not want to become an Entity.
More precisely: she did not want to end it that way—transformed into a monster, attacking people, and put down with a bullet.
Just then, from the direction of her door, she heard the handle turning.
She poked her head out of the bathroom and looked toward the entrance.
Through the crack of the half-open door drifted the voices of a beloved man and woman—and one voice she felt she'd heard somewhere before.
"Oh, Professor, thank you. Thank you so much. How could I ever repay this kindness?"
"Honey, stop clinging to the Professor. He's a busy man."
"No, no. Gu Jihye is my last patient today, so I'm not busy at all."
The couple's voices were her mother and father.
When word came that she had collapsed, they must have paid for a private room and kept vigil at her bedside. Something tight and warm seized her chest.
But the voice of the man being called 'Professor' was somehow, faintly off.
She'd heard it somewhere before—but where, she couldn't quite recall.
Gu Jihye opened the door. To see her parents' faces—and to place that strangely familiar voice.
Creeeak—
"...If there's nothing else you need, I'll stop by again during afternoon rounds, Mother."
"Thank you, Professor... eh?"
The door swung open, and the corridor's light flooded in, dazzling.
"Jihye?"
"Jihye!"
At the voices she'd longed to hear, tears welled up in eyes that could barely stay open.
A pleasant warmth and pressure wrapped around her, and when she closed her eyes and opened them again, she was in her parents' arms.
"Professor! Jihye! Jihye woke up!"
"Yes, I can see that."
Through a vision blurred by light and tears, she saw a male professor with an expression of utter calm.
She had to blink once, hard, before she could properly confirm the owner of that voice.
"Ms. Gu Jihye. You're awake."
It was Professor Lee Jeong-uk.
And behind Professor Lee Jeong-uk stood a woman with a doctor's coat draped over her shoulders like a cape.
That woman, silent until now, finally spoke.
"Huh. So it actually works."
At the very first sound of that voice, Gu Jihye recognized her—the red-eyed stranger who had saved her.
'What on earth is going on—'
Her mind was spinning in confusion.
As if sensing her state, Professor Lee Jeong-uk offered a small, gentle smile.
"As it happens, my morning schedule is open. Would it be alright if I explained everything to you, Ms. Gu?"
Gu Jihye had no choice but to nod.