The Birth of Winy

The new building's south wing of Castrato Hospital — a structure famous for housing the cancer research ward — had a lobby that was now packed shoulder to shoulder with a throng of cameras and smartphones.

As reporters who weren't even bothering to hide what they were shoved their way into the narrow auditorium entrance, Seo Siho watched the scene from a distance.

"Wow, our professor. The man's got some presence."

Sluuurp.

The woman in the black suit took a sip from the americano wedged into her cleavage. "The reporters sure are quick, though. Is he really that famous?"

"Famous? In this industry? Absolutely."

"Eep!"

The sudden voice made Siho jump and nearly drop her coffee. She snatched the cup before it could slide out of her cleavage and whipped her head around. "Department Chair!?"

"Had lunch yet, Siho?"

It was the Department Chair of Cardiology. Over the past few days, trailing after Jeong-uk, the two of them had naturally gotten acquainted.

And she'd taken quite a liking to this man. In her experience, doctors were a breed that subtly looked down on outsiders like aristocrats — and she'd met more than a few professors who lived up to that reputation.

But rather than looking down on her, an outsider, Jeong-uk and the Chair had bent over backward to make her time at the hospital easier, offering every convenience they could think of. One of those conveniences was the white coat she now draped around her shoulders like a cape. (Granted, that wasn't exactly how they'd intended her to wear it.)

Which was why the Chair was one of the precious few people she could treat casually.

"Not yet. I was planning to eat with Professor Jeong-uk after the press conference."

"Hmm. Then I'll book a restaurant under my name and you two can have a nice meal together. It's a place called Jinsol, over there—"

"Really?!"

Siho's eyes lit up. Every restaurant the Chair ever booked was expensive and delicious. And the man's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠finesse — he always reserved a private two-person booth, as if to say, eat as much as you want and don't worry about a soul watching.

Come to think of it, maybe this exact brand of consideration was the real reason she respected the man.

"I can order whatever I want, right?"

"Heheh. Of course. A department chair's salary isn't exactly pocket change."

"Thank you, Department Chair!"

That said, the Chair wasn't acting purely out of generosity, either.

In a world growing more dangerous by the day, a former Bureau Suppression Department agent was a connection you couldn't buy for a king's ransom. The people in power simply didn't know it yet — but once her name reached their ears, they'd be begging for a meeting they could never hope to get. So while he still had the chance, banking as much goodwill as possible was the profitable play.

Anyway, you fool of a professor. Would you seriously let an entity's job listing decide whether a man lives or dies? This is stock. This is Bitcoin.

For the record, in the Chair's private ledger, Jeong-uk ranked as every bit the jackpot that Siho did.

The fact that the Chair popped champagne at home with Jihun the night Jeong-uk achieved the world's first successful cure of an Echo — that was a secret between the two of them alone.

"Enjoy your meal, you two."

"Thank you. Oh — but Department Chair, you said Professor Jeong-uk was famous in this industry? What exactly did you mean by that?"

Siho cast her mind back through her old memories.

Granted, she'd worked at the Bureau, cut off from the rest of the world, but she still had a rough sense of how things ran out there. And in her memory, the name Professor Lee Jeong-uk simply hadn't existed — at least not before everything went to hell.

The Chair nodded. "He might be a little unfamiliar to the general public, but in the medical world, the man is famous. Medical newspaper reporters all know Jeong-uk by name."

"Was he some genius professor even before the Echo outbreak?"

"Nope?"

The Chair shook his head firmly. No matter how fond he was of his junior, calling Jeong-uk a "genius" wasn't something he could do even as a joke.

As someone who had personally met the genuine monsters you could call real geniuses, the best he could honestly rate Jeong-uk was an effort prodigy.

"He's not that. Don't get me wrong — the kid's hopeless at half the job, but when it comes to clawing back reimbursements and whipping up public opinion? Nobody touches him."

"I'm sorry — what?"

"That's how he got the nickname Castrato's Debt Collector... ah, no need to explain, is there. Speak of the tiger and he appears."

The Chair turned his head toward the building entrance.

Jeong-uk was walking in from that direction — looking like a man with maybe minutes left to live.

"?"

A question mark materialized over Siho's head. The man had been the picture of health at morning rounds just today. What on earth had happened?

At that moment, the Chair clicked his tongue. "There, there. Look at him already starting his buildup."

"His what?"

"Buildup. All of that is buildup. Poor doctor, hasn't been home in a week because he was treating patients — he's selling that narrative with his entire body."

As if to prove the point, Jeong-uk's appearance was night-and-day different from that morning. Bloodshot eyes. A bleary, hollow gaze. Hair hastily finger-combed into shape. The finishing touches were the ballpoint pen smeared across his coat and the button-shaped welt pressed into his cheek. Every time a flash went off, Jeong-uk would turn his head toward it as if to say: behold, a medal — earned falling asleep in the physician's office after rounds.

The whole sequence was so seamless that an ordinary person would never notice. But Siho, forged in battle against entities, could see straight through it.

That. Is. All. Acting.

"Haaahm."

"The professor's here!"

Jeong-uk yawned his way through the reporters, who parted before him like the Red Sea.

Watching his retreating back, Siho arrived at a certainty: today, in that auditorium, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a grand act of mass public fraud was about to unfold.

"People will always recognize fifty units ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of hardship only after you've performed a hundred."

It was a maxim Jeong-uk carried everywhere, and the Chair agreed with it a hundred times over. He had just one objection.

You perform two hundred, you absolute clown.

"There, look. He put steroid eye drops in before coming. The man came to win."

"No way. He staged the bloodshot eyes on purpose?"

"That's child's play, Siho."

The Chair shook his head as if worn out by the memory. "Back in his residency days, the man broke his own leg."

"I'm sorry — he what?"

"There was a press conference back then, too, about HIRA slashing reimbursements. He'd actually hurt himself playing basketball the night before, but at the press conference, he packaged it as an injury from tumbling down the stairs while sprinting to save an emergency patient."

Having seized the opening with that stage-setting, what Jeong-uk did next was paint HIRA as the devil incarnate.

"Here is a doctor giving everything to save a patient's life — and there is the HIRA, refusing to cover the treatment bill because a few tens of millions of won was just too precious."

A doctor who limped to the emergency room on a shattered leg, versus an agency that slashed the bill even after the patient survived. The question of whose side the public would take was obvious at a glance.

That was how Jeong-uk wrested back every slashed reimbursement, and from then on he launched aggressive campaigns of public persuasion whenever the need arose.

The name he earned along the way was Castrato's Debt Collector.

Word spread among the hospital's doctors that if your reimbursement got slashed, you didn't go to the legal team — you went to Jeong-uk.

"His one last shred of conscience, I suppose, is that he never filed the broken leg as a worker's comp claim."

"Hold on... you're telling me the media just swallows all that, no questions asked?"

Siho couldn't quite believe it. These were people who tripped over themselves hunting for anyone's flaws just to drag them down a rung — and they'd side with Jeong-uk over a mere broken leg?

The Chair nodded with an expression that said he understood her skepticism perfectly. "Of course the media is only half convinced. They just don't bother digging, because taking Jeong-uk's side is the safer bet. The Korean press owes that man an enormous debt."

"What kind of debt could possibly be that big? Is he backed by some shadowy conglomerate?"

"Nothing like that..."

The Chair trailed off for a moment, then let a bitter smile touch his lips.

"You... you do know the national hero, firefighter Lee Pyeong-ho, right?"

Firefighter Lee Pyeong-ho.

The hero of the nation who pulled hundreds of people out of the worst fire disaster in South Korean history before dying in the flames. It would be no exaggeration to say that virtually every citizen in the country owed the man their life, if only one step removed.

"Of course. If I didn't, I'd practically be a spy."

"That hero is his father. The public doesn't really know — but the press figures it out with ten minutes of digging. That's why the media can't print a single bad word about that kid."

"Ah..."

It made sense now. Jeong-uk was carrying around an indulgence he could draw on for the rest of his life.

And for good reason —

"The moment one of those stories turns out to be another false report, the newspaper responsible has to shut its doors."

Because the nation owed that family a debt it could never repay in a lifetime.

"This is a photograph of the patient upon arrival at the emergency room. The right side of the patient's heart was no longer beating..."

Looking like a man at death's door, Jeong-uk walked the audience through his presentation slides, remembering to punctuate his speech with strategically placed yawns.

"Ahem — my apologies. The patient's heart had, at the time, lost function entirely, as confirmed by echocardiography."

Jeong-uk brought up the ultrasound image.

A photograph of a heart, a portion of it gone unnaturally bright. As the image bloomed onto the screen, he pressed on in a voice taut with agitation.

"On the basis of this image, HIRA denied payment of the patient's treatment costs."

Back then, Jeong-uk had discovered through ultrasound that part of the patient's heart had transformed into a mass of fat. Scientifically impossible, of course — but once an Echo had resonated, quibbling about science was laughable.

"Their justification was: if the heart turned to fat, why wasn't an MRI performed? Because under existing guidelines, conditions involving fatty transformation of cardiac tissue must not be confirmed by ultrasound alone."

Tissue changes in the heart cannot be definitively diagnosed by ultrasound. For that, an MRI is mandatory.

"But at the time, the patient was fitted with an ECMO circulatory support system. A patient in that condition cannot be placed inside an MRI machine."

Jeong-uk advanced to the next slide. "This is a photograph taken after the patient's Echo was fully removed. Because the condition was an anomalous phenomenon, the heart — freed of the Echo — returned to this pristine state."

Set side by side, the difference was unmistakable. The heart before treatment glowed white and struggled through each feeble beat; the treated heart pulsed robustly in healthy gray.

Jeong-uk drove force into his voice and raised it to a shout.

"In other words, HIRA's current logic is this! Whether the patient lives or dies is irrelevant! If you want to be paid, you should have undergone an MRI while hooked up to that machine! Or — failing that — the patient recovered neatly after only three days in the ICU, so clearly it was overtreatment from the start!"

As he shouted, he called to mind the German total-war address he'd listened to on repeat as ASMR the night before.

"Let me ask you all directly! Our world stands at a turning point! In a world where no one can guarantee they will never resonate with an Echo — where is the assurance that none of you, good citizens, will ever find yourselves in this situation?!"

Jeong-uk thought to himself.

Logic didn't matter right now. What mattered was fear — the fear that anyone could transform into an entity at any moment. Plant that fear, and the public's sympathy would follow. Fail to plant it, and every time a new entity case was reported, the state would refuse to cover treatment costs — and patients would be condemned to a life where being treated counted for nothing at all.

"Honestly, I'm illiterate when it comes to politics and economics. But this much I know for ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠certain: this country is not so broke that it cannot bear an expense of this size."

As he spoke those words, his father surfaced in his mind and the rims of his eyes went red. The memory flickered past — the memory of his family being branded traitors for five long years, all because that sum of money was simply too precious to waste.

Jeong-uk lifted his head and swallowed back the tears threatening to fall.

If necessary, he was fully prepared to weaponize even this emotion as part of the performance.

"Hnk. Please help us, everyone. We need a precedent."

Click-click-click.

One sniffle of the nose, and the camera flashes erupted without pause. Amid the baptism of light, Jeong-uk barely reined in the corner of his mouth as it tried to curl upward.

Went down smooth.

By any measure, a successful campaign of agitation... no — a successful press conference.

Now even HIRA would have no choice but to grudgingly disburse the treatment costs.

And with this, when the victims of other entities start coming forward, they won't be turned away from the hospital unable to afford care.

Entity-borne illnesses flatly invalidated the entirety of modern medicine. And every time that happened, if HIRA refused payment, the result would be an apocalypse of people dying for lack of money.

Jeong-uk had no desire to see that kind of society. He'd had quite enough of watching his own family endure that particular brand of misery.

"If you have questions, please ask them now."

Jeong-uk scanned the audience. In the front row, a reporter had raised her hand. The same reporter he'd personally contacted the night before, promising an exclusive.

"Professor, I was truly moved by your devotion to your patient. That said — with no objective standards yet in place, wouldn't paying treatment costs unconditionally carry serious consequences for society?"

Jeong-uk nodded. On its face, the question sounded like it was carrying the government's water; in reality, it was the exact opposite. It existed so that Jeong-uk could seize the narrative before the government proposed any escape hatch of its own. Which was why the reporter was now delivering the question they had pre-agreed on.

"We would like to know — has Professor Jeong-uk prepared a solution to this problem?"

"An excellent question."

Jeong-uk immediately pulled up the game screen.

Revealing his account in front of everyone was a touch embarrassing — but since he knew every player saw something different, he could display it with his head held high.

"As of now, all of you good citizens are making active use of this app."

The game app had become a national necessity. A world where you either played the game yourself to unlock information ahead of time, or leaned on the galleries and the players who had — in such a world, the app was nothing less than a survival manual.

He opened the entity dossier in that survival manual, and unfolded the Echo Treatment Log for [Digital Portrait].

Where the treatment log had once been blank, unfamiliar text now sat inscribed.

Every ounce of Jeong-uk's labor over the past several days was recorded there.

He'd discovered it a few days ago. Planning to edit the treatment log and share it with the game's hardcore veterans across the country, Jeong-uk had found himself utterly dumbfounded by what was already written there before he'd lifted a finger.

"Wait — I didn't have to write it in myself?"

The remarkable thing was that only Jeong-uk's correct actions had been recorded. All the aimless fumbling he'd gone through while piecing Narrative Therapy together had been quietly edited out on its own. And if he ever tried to enter one of those dead ends himself, the log refused the entry outright, declaring it a wrong answer.

In other words, the treatment log — like every other observation log — dispensed only the correct answers. And those curated answers were visible to everyone else playing the game, too.

Jeong-uk drove the point home, emphasizing the screen. "Could any guideline possibly be more objective than this?"

"But people who haven't unlocked the game can't verify any of that content, can they?"

Naturally, this was another pre-agreed question — which was why Jeong-uk could answer without a beat of hesitation.

He passed his tablet out toward the audience. On its screen glowed a crude, hand-drawn-looking emblem.

"I've given this considerable thought as well. Even with treatment methods documented, the community as it stands suffers from a critical lack of reliability. There's no guarantee they'll always deliver accurate information."

Besides which — though he didn't mention it here — a whole catalog of other problems plagued it. Answers that only came if your thread made the front page. Desperate emergencies that went unanswered in time. The occasional outright liar.

The galleries were fast, but on the trust front, concerns kept surfacing with wearying regularity.

"And so I've concluded that what we need is an authoritative organization — one with genuine expertise and credibility, capable of responding to inquiries twenty-four hours a day."

"Are you planning to establish it yourself, Professor?"

"We're only at the earliest conceptual stage, but with active government support, it can be standing immediately."

Decoded: stop burning tax money on useless advisory committees and just do what Jeong-uk says.

"Has a name been chosen as well?"

That one had not been pre-agreed.

But the organization's name was already fixed in Jeong-uk's mind. The flashes fired in rapid succession, as if waiting on his next word. Jeong-uk took a steadying breath and opened his mouth.

"Yes. In the spirit of a twenty-four-hour entity consultation service — Who Is Entity. Winy, for short."

The hall fell silent.

Jeong-uk tilted his head.

Isn't this the part where the flashes go crazy and everyone starts buzzing?

With no eruption of the reaction he'd been counting on, Jeong-uk's shoulders sagged.

He'd stayed up all night workshopping that, for the record.

Tokxipity even said it was good... hng...

His shoulders drooped further.

Watching from the back of the hushed hall, the Chair and Siho dragged their hands down their faces in perfect unison.

"Aigoo... Jeong-uk, buddy. Whatever you do in life, do not go into business."

"Wow. That is a genuinely catastrophic name."

Their mutters were swallowed by the fresh wave of murmuring that rolled through the press corps.

And so the entity diagnostic service was born.

Whether you'd call it tragic, or historic — hard to say.

The name was Winy (Who Is eNtitY).