Who Is Entity (1)
Is the person on your screen truly human?
That was neither a rhetorical question, nor a metaphorical one, nor some metaphysical conundrum. It wasn't a philosophical meditation, either.
It was a blunt, strictly biological inquiry: does the being beyond that screen belong to the species known as human?
In the darkened Director's office of the Management Bureau, I sat alone, staring at the monitor displaying the checkpoint.
On screen, the man kept wiping his forehead with a handkerchief already damp with cold sweat.
I went over his information again and again.
Eyes, nose, mouth — all where they belonged. The biometric readings on the monitor fell mostly within normal range. His blood pressure was a touch high, but that's what happens when anyone gets nervous; it wasn't a meaningful deviation. Even the one thing that nagged at me, his intermittent coughing, seemed most likely to be ordinary reflux esophagitis, given that he was taking antacids.
No matter how I look at him, he seems human.
And yet I couldn't carelessly pronounce him one.
What if he wasn't a person but an Entity? Even if not that — what if he were in the incubation stage?
If I misdiagnose this time, the Bureau is finished.
As if things weren't bad enough, the Entity that had escaped days earlier had ravaged the suppression division, leaving our Bureau with no physical force whatsoever to respond to a crisis. Restoring it would take at least another week.
Under these conditions, letting a single Entity through the checkpoint could mean a human-meat party breaking out inside our own walls.
What kind of operation have we been running here?!
This was a Bureau my sweat and blood had gone into for days on end. I refused — absolutely refused — to watch it end like this.
Tick, tock. Time flowed on, indifferent. I couldn't hold one man at the checkpoint forever.
Countless options churned dizzyingly through my head. Incinerate or quarantine the man so as to risk nothing — or accept the possibility of a misjudgment that might never even come, and preserve his humanity?
After a long, solitary deliberation, I chose to trust my employee and let him through.
[Code Red. Code Red.]
[All personnel, focus your full efforts on the East Wing.]
"Son of a—"
A few minutes later. A cold AI voice announcing my misjudgment echoed through the entire facility.
"No — no, I can still salvage this."
Sweating cold, I barked orders at the remaining staff on how to handle the escaped Entities —
[Irreversible damage to facility function has been confirmed. Code Black is hereby declared.]
Needless to say, the outcome was annihilation.
My last desperate resistance crumbled in short order, and when the dust settled, the only survivor of the Bureau was me.
Overhead, the AI's dry, flavorless voice congratulated me on my failure.
[Code Black is in effect.]
[To all staff members: thank you for your service. The Foundation will remember your dedication.]
[Effective immediately, this facility will proceed with permanent isolation procedures in accordance with the Code Black Protocol.]
[Staff are encouraged to use the humanitarian medication provided by the Foundation before isolation is completed.]
[If you have no medication at hand, please share the reserve supply with your colleagues — out of care for one another.]
[Once more, we extend our boundless gratitude for your devotion.]
[May you have pleasant dreams.]
"Ugh. Failed again."
Reading the white letters on the screen, I tore off the VR headset and hurled it aside.
Before my eyes spread the familiar scenery of my own room — and above the monitor, the words [GAME OVER] glowing in stark white.
And I only made the one mistake.
I grumbled as I stared at the computer screen linked to the VR headset. It had been a single, trivial slip.
On Day 1000, I forgot to screen an employee who had come into contact with a Mimic-type Entity. On Day 1001, that Entity released every vicious specimen locked in the facility's containment. On Day 1002, the security, suppression, and guard divisions were wiped out to a man.
And today — Day 1003 — an unknown Entity slithered into the immunocompromised husk of the Bureau, and it was game over.
One single mistake had swollen beyond all control and toppled everything I'd painstakingly built in an instant.
But I didn't curse the game.
I was the one who'd chosen this suffocating difficulty, and this was precisely the brand of irrationality I'd been craving.
"Guess I should send my feedback."
I rose from bed and sat down at my desk. I minimized the game window, opened my mail client, and typed in the address I'd saved long ago.
My history with this game went back further than most people would guess.
It was about four years ago that I first crossed paths with a certain indie game in a forgotten corner of the Busan Game Show. Back then it had no trailer, no roadmap to speak of — nothing but a demo build, barely ten minutes long, a shabby little indie title. And yet those ten minutes hooked me so completely that I slammed a donation into the developer's account on the spot.
Diagnose, quarantine, and manage Entities.
That was the premise. The game was about managing the Echo — a supernatural contagion that infected living things and objects alike. When an Echo infected a being and transfigured it into an Entity, the process was called Resonance. The player could diagnose and manage the infection from the earliest incubation stage, all the way through to full, completed resonance. And it didn't stop there: you could incinerate an Entity, forge it into equipment, seal it away in containment — or even hire it. That overwhelming freedom and web of intricate interactions was, frankly, irresistible.
Seduced by that charm, I kept throwing money at it. By the time my impulsive donations had swelled to something in the ten-million-won range, the Director offered to take me out for a meal as a thank-you.
I'd expected a light, pleasant dinner. But once the Director learned I was a doctor, his eyes suddenly lit up, and he begged me to provide medical consultation on the diagnosis and examination mechanics of his Entities.
At first, I wondered why a game like that even needed medical consultation. Consumers wanted things that felt plausible, I figured — nobody was expecting authentic, peer-reviewed rigor.
But the Director was a man wrapped head to toe in artisan's pride, and he pleaded his case with me tenaciously, all in the name of "maximum realism and immersion."
In the end, I surrendered to his passionate courtship (?) and accepted the role of the game's medical advisor.
And before long, I had to admit he'd been right all along.
The consumers of a game like this were people who worshipped detail. The news that a practicing physician was consulting on the project spread fast through the community, and fanatics who couldn't resist such things came flocking. No, I couldn't claim there was no noise-marketing effect.
But beyond that, the depth that meticulous detail gave a game turned out to matter far more than I'd imagined. With real medical rigor in place, the lore we could layer onto each Entity deepened, the strategic possibilities multiplied, and the game's entire structure grew richer. Version 0.61 — the first update to fully incorporate my consultation — was hailed as the game's inflection point, and deservedly so. It was a resounding success.
Of course, the winds weren't always favorable.
It was around version 0.76, I believe. Burning with a sense of responsibility toward accuracy, I designed the diagnostic criteria pathologically tight — like an exam written to fail medical students. The Director, delighted, implemented them exactly as delivered.
The reaction was explosive. In the most negative sense possible.
Thanks to that patch, we took an absolutely savage beating from the community, and we learned a painful lesson — that accuracy, too, has its proper measure — and had to compromise or delete several mechanics outright.
Cutting short the thread of memory that had grown so long, I typed the final lines of the email.
The moment I hit Enter, the email went out with a crisp clatter of keys.
Barely minutes later, the phone on my desk chimed softly. A reply from the Director.
I replied with a warm smile.
[I'll send you my address.]
[Thank you.]
Until that moment, I had been waiting for the Director's gift with nothing but a flutter of pleasant anticipation.
Without the faintest inkling of what kind of world would be waiting for me the next day.
The next day, I dragged my exhausted body home from work — and there, waiting at my front door, was the gift box the Director had sent.
But the surprise awaiting me wasn't limited to that.
-----!!!
Before I'd even finished checking the contents of the box, my phone began shrieking with a sound that threatened to tear my eardrums.
Startled, I snatched it up.
What glowed on the screen was an emergency disaster alert — the notice that my peaceful everyday life had just been shattered to pieces.
The final transmission of a Management Bureau whose existence I hadn't even known of.
Whatever news I'd been expecting — it was not this.