Hospital Transfer Protocol

It had been a while since I last logged into the Paranoid Institute Gallery.

The gallery still didn't feel natural to me — but then, if you wanted to survive, you adapted whether you liked it or not, didn't you? So I'd gone to the one person who could explain it: Jihun, a nurse in the cardiac cath lab and, by all accounts, a ghost permanently haunting the gallery.

"Hyung-nim. This move right here is called a click."

"You little punk. Who are you treating like a man in his eighties?"

"Oh? So you do know what a click is?"

It grated on me how he teased me every time I failed to grasp something, but thanks to him, I was learning fast.

"So, let me get this straight. Gonics are the ones with real credibility — IF scores of three or higher — and yudongs are basically tabloid trash with no standards whatsoever?"

"Uh... that's a slightly dangerous analogy, but sure, you can think of it that way."

Never in my dreams had I imagined I'd become a professor and then go study an internet community. Still, it meant that at the very least, I could now browse the forums on my own.

It was on one of those days — cooped up in the hospital, getting my secondhand picture of the outside world through the gallery — that a particular post caught my eye.

D*ckP*ssy97.

A somewhat famous gonic. Someone who showed up in the gallery like clockwork every single day, hounding people to post entity information. This gonic's signature line was: "People's lives are on the line here."

The account would materialize under every Echo report thread, leaving comments like, "People's lives are on the line here, so please give us the details properly," or "People's lives are on the line here, so share it fast."

It appeared so often that the gonic's verbal tic became a gallery meme. Roughly speaking, it functioned as a replacement for "please" — slotted into any context where a plea fit. For instance: "People's lives are on the line here, so stop posting ugly-ass memes," or "People's lives are on the line here, so get your stock tips off this board."

But none of that was what mattered right now.

"Ms. Shiho."

I pulled back the blackout curtain — the door was still under repair — and stepped into my lab.

"Do you happen to know someone called D*ckP*ssy97?"

"Yes. That's me."

So answered the woman lounging luxuriously on the cot, phone in hand. A green ice pop dangled from her lips.

"Is something the matter?"

"No, I was just... curious."

It was a strange feeling, meeting in the flesh someone I'd only known from a community.

"By the way — what does the name mean?"

The 97 I could work out from her age.

So she's older than she looks.

The other part, though, I couldn't decipher at all. At my question, Shiho simply shrugged.

"It's not 'D-D-97' or whatever you're reading it as."

"Then ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠what is it?"

"D*ckP*ssy."

"...?"

I tilted my head and cupped a hand to one ear. What was that? Had my hearing rotted away from all the night shifts? I asked again.

"Sorry, what was that?"

"D*ck. P*ssy."

"...Why on earth would you name yourself that?"

"Because the unwritten rule of community nicknames is that they have to be sex jokes, obviously?"

I had never once heard from Jihun that such an unwritten rule existed.

It was, in its own way, an educational day — one more thing I'd learned about the person called Shiho.

"By the way, Ms. Shiho."

This was after the hospital had been swallowed by the fog.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

With no new admissions and the outpatient clinic gone, a great deal of free time had accumulated. I'd mostly been spending it on consultations through the community, but lately a growing share of it had gone to simply talking with Shiho.

"How much am I allowed to disclose on the community?"

I was a doctor. Which is to say: a complete layman in politics, diplomacy, and security. Shiho had offered to manage that side of things, so whenever I sat down to write a post, I made a habit of checking with her first.

"Why? What are you planning to post?"

"Nothing specific. It just worries me. I have to hide that I'm Hippocrates, but I'm not sure whether it's safe to be public about being the 'Echo Treatment Administrator.'"

Echo Treatment Administrator.

That was the position granted to my account within the game — the authority to edit treatment methods for Echoes, or for the harm they inflicted. Recently, with Shiho's blessing, I had made it public in the gallery and the sub-channel.

"It seems nearly as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠dangerous as being exposed as Hippocrates..."

"No. Not at all."

Shiho shook her head.

"A Treatment Administrator is useless as a kidnapping target. There'd be no point."

"But in a world like this, doesn't a cure itself become power?"

"That only applies when the treatment works because you're physically on-site. Do you cure people with some secret drug, Dr. Jungwook?"

"No?"

Everything I did relied on modern medicine or the power of items. Anything I could do, other doctors could do too.

"Exactly. So there's no reason to kidnap you. One phone call and you'd hand over the treatment method anyway — why go to all that trouble?"

"Then what about Hippocrates?"

"Hippocrates is irreplaceable."

Her face was dead serious as she said it.

"Hippocrates is one of the 'Creators' who made this game. You've told people you don't know the game's secrets — but do you think they actually believe that?"

"Ah..."

"So just don't get caught being Hippocrates. Other than that, post all the treatment methods you want."

Naturally, the same went for the mobile app — don't get caught. That much went without saying.

Reassured, I went to check on the post I'd put up yesterday.

The atmosphere in the gallery was remarkably heartening.

To be fair, every now and then you'd run into someone who maliciously lured others into traps, or who lied and schemed just to save their own skin. Even so, the gallery was, on the whole, doing its job.

If only people didn't fall for those traps.

That was why, in whatever spare time I could scavenge, I'd been building a wiki with help from Jihun, the head admin, and a handful of handpicked gonics. The unofficial name: the Entity Survival Wiki.

Or, for short — Winnie.

"No, seriously, you still haven't given up on that name?"

Jihun had turned green when I christened it, and the head admin went silent for a good while — but I pushed it through, and Winnie it became.

"Mm. This is going to be the next big thing."

"Hyung-nim. Sometimes I wonder, but honestly? I think you might be resonating a little."

Anyway — Winnie was an app built to compensate for the game encyclopedia's one fatal flaw: only account holders could see its screens. Screenshots, copy-paste, nothing worked. Yet we had confirmed that survival know-how still spread mouth to mouth.

So Winnie focused on one thing: converting the game's Echo entries into the most intuitive language possible, and distilling them into survival instructions. Take the [Beggar Royalty] we'd subdued recently. The game's vague flavor text — "Clothes make the man, and the crown makes the king" — became a single plain line: "An Echo modeled on the prince and the beggar. It has an ingrained habit of going for the face of anyone of higher station."

With this, we'd have both reliability and speed covered.

Only the gonics that the head admin and I had vetted could edit Winnie, and I reviewed every entry myself. True to form, the community had started calling the wiki Valhalla and referring to its chosen editors as "the Ascended" — but none of that really mattered.

What mattered was this: even trapped inside this hospital, I could still save people.

How is it that civilians keep outperforming the actual government?

Blaming a government that no longer meant anything to anyone, I spent today as well editing Winnie and the sub-channel.

Tap, tap.

It was about time — high time — that we took on this hospital in earnest.