Hospital Transfer Protocol (2)

The story rewinds to a few days earlier.

Desperate to find a way out of this godforsaken hospital, I turned on my phone and opened up the encyclopedia.

First, it was certain that this fog had been caused by the Happy Relieved Hospital entity.

Of every Echo out there, this was the only one that fogged over a hospital.

But I absolutely hated the containment method for Happy Relieved Hospital written up in the observation logs.

It was a long report, but the conclusion came down to one thing.

Blow it up, then bury it in concrete.

It was an astonishingly, almost admirable, efficient containment method.

It was only possible because the fog kept people from leaving, while letting people in.

March in loaded down with explosives and concrete, avoid setting foot inside the hospital building itself, and render the entire site irreversibly sealed in an instant. That was the tactic.

Instead of some tedious, pedantic approach, the Management Bureau had chosen the clean and decisive one.

As a doctor, I would agree a hundred times over with the logic that simpler is better when simpler is possible.

But this method had one enormous problem.

There are this many people trapped inside, in case you hadn't noticed?

That method simply entombed whatever victims happened to be inside at the time.

Rescue looked impossible anyway, and there was no reason to believe the patients inside the hospital were in any condition to be saved. Leaving the thing to fester while the damage quietly accumulated served no one — so the approach was to write off a small number of people, cleanly and completely.

It was like treating cancer by amputating the entire organ.

The problem is, a university hospital isn't a 'small number.'

Until now, Happy Relieved Hospital had resonated only with small psychiatric hospitals out in the countryside.

That was precisely why the sacrifice-a-few approach had been an option.

But this time was different.

After the Echo pandemic, properly functioning psychiatric hospitals were a rarity in South Korea, and by process of elimination, ours was the one that got hit.

As a result, our hospital had resonated, and far too many patients were now trapped inside it.

The sacrifice would be far too great.

I needed to find another way.

I asked Shiho whether she knew any other secrets.

"Shiho. Do you happen to know of a way to escape the Happy Relieved Hospital?"

"For haunted-house-type entities, we usually just demolish them."

Unfortunately, that was the Bureau's one and only answer to haunted places.

Demolish it. If that fails, abandon it.

Exactly as it had been in the game.

"Location-type ghost stories regenerate even if you tear them down, anyway. So we only half-destroy them to knock out their function, then bury the whole thing in concrete."

Highly advanced demolition technology is indistinguishable from exorcism.

Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, once world-famous as a haunted site, had proven as much by being utterly demolished before modern demolition techniques.

(For the record, Gonjiam was never actually an entity.)

"That's... not quite what I was imagining."

"What were you imagining, then?"

"Some kind of cathartic exorcism ritual, maybe."

"Do we look like shamans to you?"

"Or solving some tragic injustice tied to the hospital's past."

You'd think someone who knows full well that Echos don't work like that wouldn't say such things.

"Tsk."

"Well, the Bureau's first priority is entity containment. Minimizing casualties is a side concern."

I had forgotten.

The Management Bureau were not exactly humanitarians.

Their priority was always containment, first and foremost.

Rescuing victims or limiting the damage had never factored into their calculations.

"Um... I hate to put it this way, but compensating victims costs far more than just making everyone forget it happened."

The dead are written off as missing persons. The injured have their memories rewritten as industrial accidents.

That was how the Bureau had handled its casualties 'efficiently' all along.

"Frankly, I never liked it."

But they had their reasons, too.

Even after an entity was resolved, it would eventually resurrect by resonating with something else. Which meant the Bureau was reluctant to pour too many resources into any single Echo.

Contain it if you can; if you can't, dispose of it at the lowest possible cost.

That was the Bureau's motto.

"Of course, you won't be using this method, right, Mr. Jeong-uk?"

"Obviously not."

Most of all, I had no desire to be buried under tons of concrete myself. So I set about devising a different approach — one that might not appear in the game, yet still worked within the narrative rather than against it.

Two days into racking my brain.

It was during a meal with the Department Chair that the answer came to me, completely by accident.

"Ugh... what am I supposed to do about this."

Over lunch, the Department Chair dropped his spoon into his soup and scratched his head.

Not an appetizing sight, but whenever this man got like this, something was always up, so I asked him what was wrong.

"What is it, Department Chair?"

"One of my patients is a dialysis patient. But there aren't enough beds for CRRT, so his turn keeps getting pushed back."

Hemodialysis patients often receive treatment at outside hospitals. Since dialysis is needed almost every day, anyone living far away finds it far more convenient to go to a hospital nearby.

But with the fog trapping countless outpatient renal failure patients inside our hospital as well, the original dialysis unit simply couldn't handle the demand anymore.

"We're running the machines flat out, but they say the queue keeps backing up. Haaah. And we can't even transfer anyone out."

"...Eureka."

"What?"

"Department Chair. Let's transfer them out."

That single conversation became the key to escaping this hospital.

"Even if we can't get the doctors out, we might just be able to get the patients out."

I shoveled the rest of my lunch into my stomach and went straight to find Shiho.

After seating her in my office — the one with the door that had flown clean off — I began laying out my strategy for getting out of this hospital.

"Our psychiatry department resonating like this isn't a normal situation, is it?"

If this were a typical Happy Relieved Hospital, escape would be impossible.

The Echo that resonates with psychiatric hospitals turns even the doctors inside into 'derived entities.' Those doctors, madly devoted to their patients, would never discharge a single one — and the fog, responding to their noble professional devotion, would permit no one to leave the hospital, ever.

And thus a psychiatric hospital where everyone was guaranteed to be happy would be complete.

But our hospital was a different story.

"Right now, the Happy Relieved Hospital has only resonated with psychiatry. Correct?"

"That's right?"

"Well then. There's an unwritten rule among doctors."

Simply put: never meddle in a disease that belongs to another department.

If obstetrics issues a diagnosis about a mother or her fetus, then every other surgical department had better keep its mouth shut.

Granted, that phrasing is a bit violent. To put it more gently:

"If you want your own department's expertise respected, you have to respect the other department's. That's the deal."

It's the same principle as no matter how brilliantly a gastroenterologist can read a CT scan, when it comes ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to the uterus, obstetrics simply has to know better.

"Hmm. I see. But why are you telling me this?"

"So, from the psychiatrists' point of view — who do you think understands internal medicine better, them or me?"

"...Ah."

Shiho seemed to have caught on to where I was going.

She clapped her hands together and broke into a bright smile.

"You're going to transfer them out!"

"Keep your voice down. You know ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my office has no soundproofing."

I pointed at the curtained entrance standing in for my missing door.

Shiho hastily clapped a hand over her mouth, her lips still flapping soundlessly.

...Why is that so cute.

I shook my head to shake off the useless thought.

"In any case, internal medicine patients need transfers all the time."

Cancer patients return to long-term care hospitals once they finish their commute-based treatment. Diving-disease patients are often transferred out, because unless you're on Jeju Island, facilities with hyperbaric oxygen chambers are few and far between.

There were plenty of other examples.

Even a hospital in the Big 6 doesn't take in more patients than it needs to.

"So, Shiho. You ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠think this method will work?"

Of course, I had no certainty.

Yes, I was acting in accordance with the narrative — but there was no evidence anywhere that this would actually fly.

And yet.

"Yes. It looks incredibly solid to me."

Just having her — a former checkpoint commander — back me up was enough to give me confidence.

"Good. Then let's put it into action right away."

Here was the emergency room of Aseong Hospital.

Today, as every day, people struck down by Echos and entities were pouring in like a tide.

A few months earlier, all anyone could have done was flee, refuse treatment, or simply let go.

But months on, guidelines for dealing with those things had cropped up one by one, and people were finally learning how to cope, more or less.

And Sung Raeho, professor of emergency medicine at Aseong Hospital, was one of the doctors who had adapted to this new world.

"Huh?"

That day too was a frantic blur of patients, punctuated by the occasional glance at the Winy app.

These were the various treatment methods that Professor Lee Jeong-uk — currently trapped inside Castrato Medical Center — had produced by cracking the whip over the wiki's editors, the so-called 'officers.'

Because this document focused on countermeasures that ordinary people could perform — not just those the Management Bureau was capable of — no small number of victims had been able to receive treatment.

But today, a brand-new category had been added to that document. One no one had seen before.

"Oh, come on..."

Sung Raeho groaned.

More countermeasures were a good thing.

The problem was that he was the one who had to memorize every last one of them.

Entity response duties fell mostly to emergency medicine in the first place. No dedicated entity department had been established yet, and victims who made it to a hospital were usually in critical condition — so naturally, the ER ended up shouldering most of the load.

"What on earth is this treatment method now, Professor Jeong-uk?"

This was why he hated geniuses.

For the 'effort prodigies' forced to follow the trails those geniuses blazed, life was sheer torture.

Grumbling, Professor Sung Raeho moved to check the document.

But before he could even lay eyes on the new section, a resident urgently called for him.

"Professor! We have a patient transferred from Castrato Medical Center!"

"What?"

"Twenty-eight-year-old male, gunshot wound to the thigh with delayed hemolytic reaction, DIC, and rhabdomyolysis — transferred for CRRT. Note: he received a Cis-AB transfusion for the gunshot wound, after which the delayed hemolytic reaction and DIC developed. The DIC is currently corrected, and all vitals are stable. The dressing on the wound site is in excellent condition."

"Hold it, hold it, hold it."

Sung Raeho stopped the resident short.

"Did Castrato Medical Center's resonance end?"

"Not that I know of..."

The resident looked equally confused, double-checking the patient's file on his tablet.

"That's... I'm not sure either, Professor."

"...Then what are the odds this person is actually an entity?"

"That's exactly why I came to ask — I can't judge whether we should accept this patient."

A person had escaped, perfectly intact, from a hospital that had turned into an entity.

Could they really afford to believe that so easily?

Resident and professor exchanged a look.

Then, as if something had just come back to him, the resident reported:

"They say the patient was sent by Professor Lee Jeong-uk."

"Oh, for crying out loud. That's the first thing you should have told me."

Professor Sung Raeho pocketed his phone, the Winy app still open on the screen, and headed for the patient.

By the time they reached him, a swarthy-skinned soldier was on speakerphone, laboring to speak to someone somewhere.

"Yes... Professor... the transfer... went through. Confirmed."

"No, sir..."

The soldier murmured as he lay his head back on the stretcher.

"I was the first one to make it out. The thanks should be mine."

He was, without question, a dying man.

And yet the soldier's face looked, beyond any shadow of a doubt, deeply happy.