Yes, I am Human (5)

"So, let me get this straight."

The Department Chair muttered, arms propped on his desk.

"The world didn't end — just us?"

"An accurate summary, sir."

"Damn it. This godforsaken hospital. It's just a neighborhood clinic, for crying out loud."

Thud.

After I relayed what the Head Admin had told me, he slumped forward and began muttering into his desk. Leaving him to wallow, I turned my attention back to my phone.

My fingers paused over the keyboard.

… I would like to share the lore I discussed with the Director back when I was consulting for the game company.

The moment I was about to type out the rest of that sentence, it occurred to me — I still hadn't revealed that I was Hippocrates.

My thumb hammered away at the backspace key. The unsent sentence vanished, replaced by a new one.

That should be convincing enough.

Lately, I had been single-handedly handling the flood of consultations for Echoes and entities pouring in from all over the country. Ever since I successfully treated the Digital Portrait that had resonated with the streamer Gu Jihye, anyone who even suspected they'd resonated with an Echo came looking for me without exception.

Plenty of false reports were mixed in, to be sure. But even accounting for those, I had accumulated a truly unignorable depth of clinical experience with entities. A paper compiled from all that carried real academic weight — in fact, the conference had accepted my abstract submissions without even a formal review.

…Of course, no matter how convincingly I dressed it up, it was ultimately nothing more than a lore compendium I'd never released to the game's fanbase.

However much ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this paper had started life as game lore, its format was, strictly speaking, a medical paper. Simply hurling it at the general public and telling them to figure it out for themselves would have been an irresponsible thing to do.

And explaining it to the masses myself wasn't really an option either — I was neither gifted at that sort of explanation nor did I have the time to spare.

Which made the Head Admin the perfect choice: someone with considerable background knowledge of entities who, at the same time, knew how to communicate with ordinary people. An admin whose understanding of the study of Echoes sat somewhere between a layperson's and a grad student's would know exactly how to translate a dense academic paper into something the public could digest.

I sent the files over immediately.

Papers and reference documents, fifteen in total. A bit much, perhaps — but I had faith the Head Admin would sort them out just fine.

Besides, anyone who ends up as head admin of a gallery like this has to be a lore nerd. Should be no problem at all.

And then, a few hours later.

Looking at the post the Head Admin had put up alongside the official announcement, I found myself seriously questioning whether I had made the right call.

"…"

It would seem the Head Admin was, if anything, even more of a two-faced creature than I'd imagined.

"For now, we've secured the means to gather people."

The survivor channels had only just been created, so the numbers were still thin — but they would grow, little by little, as time passed.

In the meantime, my plan was to identify the Echo, or rather Echoes, that had resonated with this hospital, one by one.

"Chairman, I'm heading out for ward rounds."

"Didn't you just go?"

The Chairman lifted his head from the desk to ask.

"I only stopped by the ICU. Now I need to make the rounds department by department and figure out what kind of entity we're dealing with in each one."

"Hey, what if you get careless and can't make it back out?"

His concern was not without merit.

Certain location-type entities behaved flawlessly, with no hint of anything wrong, right up until their victims ventured deep enough inside — and only then did they show their true colors. No, if anything, it would be more accurate to say these cunning ones were the more common breed. Entities had evolved to lure in as many victims as possible, all in service of maintaining their own narratives.

As proof: even the psychiatry department, which had clearly and unmistakably resonated, was returning perfectly normal replies through the hospital's official system.

Even Professor Kim was answering as though nothing in the world were wrong.

Such was the earnestness with which entities went about deceiving people. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that deception was their very instinct.

Which meant that volunteering to round through this hospital could fairly be called a dangerous undertaking.

But still.

"We can't live locked up in our department forever. Someone has to investigate."

Right now, within Internal Medicine, I was the only one who knew how.

Leave it to anyone else, and all we'd get for it was a growing list of innocent victims.

"It'll be fine. If a place feels off the moment I step in, I'll pull back."

"Jeong-uk…"

The Chairman laid a hand on each of my shoulders and met my eyes with grave solemnity.

Was he about to offer to come along? I was already rehearsing a polite refusal in my head.

But the line he delivered, in a voice loaded with tragic resolve, was nothing like what I'd expected.

"I knew my eye for talent never fails. Once this situation blows over, my department chief's seat is yours. Without question."

"Couldn't the reward be you staying chief for twenty more years instead?"

"No, no."

The Chairman shook his head.

"You're the one who should be chief. It wouldn't be a bad gig, you know? The chief of Cardiology has almost always gone on to become hospital director."

"Not interested."

"Cardiology needs a young, capable, sturdy chief!"

Like imitating some mascot every man in this country loved to hate, the Chairman thrust his thumb skyward.

"Hey — let go of me."

Shoving off the clinging Chairman, I thought to myself:

Give me my touching moment back, you bastard.

A week had passed since we'd been sealed inside the hospital.

The fog showed not the slightest sign of lifting, and the mood within its walls was being steadily devoured by helplessness and resignation.

"Ahh… I want to go outside and eat something, anything…"

The Chairman lamented, sprawled face-down across the department desk.

"Being trapped in a place like this is miserable enough, but with hospital food this bad, life has lost all its flavor… Seriously, just one single bowl of jajangmyeon…"

Over the past several days, wandering the hospital, I had uncovered a rule. The Chairman stared at it, pinned to the blackboard, and muttered under his breath.

Rules stretching to roughly eleven items in all.

They had already been shared to the survivor channels, and if you had to boil the whole list down to a single sentence, it would be this:

'The medical staff act like medical staff, and the patients act like patients.'

"Hoo…"

The Chairman, who had been reading down the list with hollow eyes, heaved a deep sigh.

"The entities being able to read our conversations — that's cheating, isn't it?"

"You're telling me."

We had learned a shocking fact over the past few days: the entities, too, could access the survivor channels.

In hindsight, it was only natural. When an Echo resonates, a narrative gets overwritten onto its host — but nowhere was it written that this dulled their intelligence. If anything, they grew sharper, in service of their goals.

The Digital Portrait that had resonated with the streamer was a case in point: it ran internet broadcasts with practiced ease and navigated the Gallery at will. Aside from its habit of fanatically hunting down and murdering anyone found to be in possession of its hideous photographs, there was nothing at all wrong with its daily life.

Thus the entities did not degrade the intelligence of their originals. Quite the opposite — to preserve their identity, they twisted themselves into something more cunning, more cunningly wicked still.

"After I saw that patient, I couldn't post fast enough."

The Chairman said, gravely. I nodded along.

That patient. He meant the author of a post that had gone up on the hospital's survivor gallery a few days ago.

It was a post of genuinely excellent insight. Thanks to that patient's testimony, I had been able to pinpoint the orthopedics department's Echo almost immediately and tell people how to escape it.

The problem was the patient himself.

He had gone and used his real name as his username.

"Good grief… he was only twenty, that poor kid…"

He'd chosen that nickname out of a pure, simple belief that revealing his real name would bring me to rescue him that much sooner.

Wanting to repay that faith in kind, I had sprinted straight to orthopedics.

But when I reached his room, what awaited me was the horrifying sight of a young man whose arms were simply gone.

"Patient Shin Man-ho?"

"Eek! I'm sorry! I'll never write a post like that again, I swear!"

"Calm down. I'm Professor Lee Jeong-uk. What happened to you?"

"Ah… Professor… that… well, you see…"

The explanation that came out of his mouth was deeply disturbing.

"A few hours ago… the orthopedics professors… they cut off both my arms…"

A young man who had shared vital information out of a pure, decent wish to save others. And what came back to him was the butchery of his own two arms.

The orthopedics professors, turned entities, had decided that his sluggish recovery was because he stayed up into the late hours of the night posting useless nonsense instead of sleeping — so they had amputated his arms to make sure he could never touch a phone again.

"I… I never imagined the entities would be able to see it… haha."

The pillowcase ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠behind the patient as he said this was soaked dark with tears.

The patient was subsequently transferred to Cardiology — one of the few areas that could still be called a safe zone — but no compensation in the world could ever heal the loss of both his arms.

"It's not as if we're poets…"

From that day on, we resolved never to post the rules to the survivor gallery in plain language again.

Since the entities might be watching, we had no choice but to phrase them as vaguely and obliquely as possible — posting them as if we were writing poetry.

1. This hospital is staffed by medical personnel, patients, and employees of many kinds. Anyone among them may come to your aid, so we ask that you treat every one of them with respect.

Take that rule as an example. It reads like an ordinary hospital notice, but its real meaning is something else entirely.

The true meaning is—

That is what it conceals.

Every other rule was much the same. Phrases that could belong on the wall of any hospital anywhere — but look closely, and each one carried a second, survival-critical meaning hidden beneath the surface.

Ever since we learned that the other entities could read the gallery, we'd had no choice but to write everything in this roundabout way.

"Jeong-uk. This really keeps us safe, right?"

"Yes. I'm certain of it. The Echoes are pathologically obsessed with their own narratives, and because of that, they're strangely, unnaturally blind to this kind of contextual interpretation."

To the Chairman, who still looked uneasy, I pressed on with conviction.

"An Echo will compulsively preserve the appearance of its original source, at least on the surface."

I pointed at the rules on the blackboard.

"A doctor-entity tries to look like a doctor. A patient-entity acts like a patient. Same for the nurses, the janitors, the dietitians — all of them. Which means the advantage is ours."

"How is that an advantage for us?"

"Because of that compulsion — as long as we imitate the form, they won't notice at all even if the context is a little off."

I said it flatly.

"Those things aren't truly living their narratives. They're fixated solely on maintaining the form of a narrative. Which is why they can't comprehend the meaning or the reason behind any of their own actions."

"If you say so, that is a relief."

The Chairman's expression eased, just a little.

"So don't worry. As long as we keep to the form, nothing will happen to us. And besides — we're doctors. Within these walls, we're practically narratively invincible."

A patient must obey his doctor's orders. A doctor must not meddle carelessly in another department outside his own specialty.

Thanks to the unspoken rules of this society, we were already under a narrative's protection. So long as a colleague didn't stab us in the back, a certain measure of risk was something we could afford to accept.

"Anyway — shall we take a look at today's rounds…"

Over the past week, I had toured the departments and mapped out the safe zones and the dangerous ones.

The departments confirmed, beyond doubt, to be non-resonated in the current situation were Emergency Medicine, Trauma Surgery, Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, and Colorectal Surgery.

As for the rest, I had yet to find hard evidence that they hadn't resonated — so I couldn't certify any of them as safe.

"Chairman, did you get any consultation requests from other departments today?"

"Can't speak for the other professors, but I've got nothing today."

"I've got one from Infectious Diseases…"

"Ah, that place makes me nervous."

Infectious Diseases wasn't definitively resonated — but its probability sat close to eighty percent, squarely in the high-risk tier.

That said, word was that its rules were still relatively lenient, which made it one of the easier places to do a consultation.

"Be careful out there."

"Yes, sir. I will."

After a brief parting with the Chairman, I stepped out of the department office.

In the corridor leading from the office to the inpatient wards, Song-woo fell into step beside me, as natural as could be.

"Good morning, Professor."

"Morning, Song-woo."

Song-woo, who normally carried permanent dark circles under his eyes, looked unusually bright and rested today.

And no wonder. With the hospital transformed into an entity, the residents' quality of life had, ironically, actually improved from before.

"The on-call room has gotten so comfortable, Professor. Is this the power of an Echo?"

The hospital had made it impossible for its doctors to leave — and in exchange, gifted them splendid lodgings.

Evidently, the Echo had decided that a proper on-call room required, at minimum, one bed per physician and an attached private bathroom with a working shower.

"I suppose this is what the public always imagined an on-call room looked like. The bed sheets changed fresh every day, an easy hot shower, a full night's sleep…"

Song-woo's voice trembled with emotion.

"It's heaven, Professor. Actual heaven."

"Just so we're clear — do not start saying you wish the hospital would stay like this forever."

"Obviously escaping comes first, Professor."

Song-woo snickered.

Considering that until a few days ago his default expression had been a perpetual cry-face, it was safe to say he'd adapted to the situation remarkably well.

"Good morning, Professor~"

The nurses greeted us brightly, every bit as radiant as the residents.

Incidentally, the nurses had gotten on-call rooms too. When doors to nurses' on-call rooms — once vanishingly rare — began springing up all over the hospital, there'd been utter pandemonium. But a week on, everyone had adapted and was making excellent use of them.

"Professor, I'll begin the patient reports now."

Song-woo opened the ward round in a voice far more vigorous than usual.

I readied myself to listen to his report and inclined my ear toward him.

But before he could report on his very first patient, his phone rang out with urgent insistence.

Song-woo snatched up the phone — and abruptly shot to his feet.

"P-Professor!"

Song-woo's face had gone ghost-white.

"It's TICU on the line! The patient who was admitted a week ago with a gunshot wound — he's suddenly spiking a fever over 38.5 degrees and showing signs of jaundice!"

"What?"

I stopped mid-stride.

"On the follow-up blood work from this morning, his hemoglobin came back at 8.2 — that's a drop of more than 2 points since yesterday morning! And his urine color has suddenly turned the color of cola!"

"Oh, for God's sake."

So much for a peaceful morning.

I wheeled around at once and started for the intensive care unit.