The Value of a Doctor (3)
"I think I've found a way to isolate Professor Kim."
It had been exactly one week since the professor, his eyes rolled back white, had begun tearing through the entire hospital.
"Seriously?!"
Shiho, who had been munching on fried bread she'd scrounged from the cafeteria, shot to her feet with sparkling eyes.
She leaned her face in close enough to be uncomfortable. Close enough that I could feel her breath — and smell garlic.
Ah. It was garlic bread.
No, that's not the point right now.
I handed her a tissue to wipe the crumbs from her mouth, and continued where I'd left off.
"Professor Kim's current goal is to find the paramedics who resonated with the Night Regular Ambulance, right?"
Once he found them, he would deliver a suitable reckoning.
They probably wouldn't even be able to resist.
"Honestly, I don't see how paramedics at Danger Level 2 are going to do anything to a psychiatrist who's practically Danger Level 4."
At her words, I immediately looked up and met her eyes.
"Shiho. What exactly do you mean by that?"
"Huh? Did I say something wrong?"
I nearly answered, well, you're not entirely wrong.
Her statement was half right — and half wrong.
Because Danger Level does not measure an entity's combat power.
If you want combat power, you look at Containment Level, not Danger Level...
Danger Level is, at its core, an index of how actively an entity operates — nothing more, nothing less. It does not tell you how strong the entity itself is.
Granted, it's true that an entity causing five-digit massacres every single day is more likely to be dangerous than one killing a person or two a month at Danger Level 1.
But sometimes a gourmand-type entity that prefers to savor a single victim slowly is stronger than one that commits wholesale slaughter.
The flu spreading more easily than cancer doesn't make the flu a more dangerous disease than cancer.
So strictly speaking, Shiho had it wrong.
As Hippocrates 0000.0-, the game I'd once consulted for, I wanted to correct her.
But before the words left my lips, a possibility occurred to me.
Wait. Maybe out in the field, the Bureau actually prioritized Danger Level over Containment Level.
The field and the theory are different things.
The way clinical practice differs from academia.
I was nothing more than a doctor who'd done some consulting for an unidentified game. Shiho, by contrast, was a veteran who'd built her experience running real operations on the ground.
Lecturing her about the correlation between Danger Level and combat power would have been overstepping.
So instead of correcting her, I exercised a little social grace.
"No, it's nothing. I meant it differently, but you're right too."
"Differently how?"
"The paramedics won't be able to operate anymore. With the surgeon doing their transplants out of commission, they've lost their function."
The Night Regular Ambulance and the Black Cross Medical Center were two halves of a single body. In the game, when one stopped moving, the other went dormant as well. Reality was unlikely to be any different.
"An entity stripped of its narrative is endlessly frail."
Shiho would know that as well as anyone.
No need to look far — the Beggar Royal she'd faced a few months ago was the textbook example. Once its true nature was exposed, the Beggar Royal had been utterly helpless. Even though it had met the conditions of a frenzy state — Resonance Stage 6 — its narrative went unfulfilled, and it was no match for her at all.
The paramedics would be the same.
Professor Kim, coming for them, was armed to the teeth with narrative, while they didn't just lack a story — they'd been forced to halt their activity entirely.
"He'll track them down before long."
"So how does that connect to you having figured something out?"
"Because before the professor finds them, we're going to bring them to him first."
"Excuse me??? Are you serious?"
At my answer, Shiho stared at me, dumbfounded. Judging by her expression, she was wondering whether being locked up in this hospital so long had finally driven me mad — or whether I'd resonated with something myself. Then, apparently concluding I'd misunderstood something, she began trying to talk me out of it.
"Jungwook, I don't know what you're thinking, but that won't work. Entities don't stop operating just because you hand over a victim. They're not like starving beasts that can be fed off."
"I know that perfectly well."
Entities are beings that know no satisfaction.
They are unfinished echoes. No ending is written for them, and so, endlessly, they repeat the same actions to sustain their own existence.
The Most Romantic Choice will drive people to suicide, over and over. Digital Portrait will keep killing whoever holds its photographs.
And so Professor Kim, too, will probably keep operating on his 'unhappy patients' forever.
These were all things I knew perfectly well.
But Shiho was mistaken about one thing.
"Professor Kim isn't following his narrative right now — he's in a frenzy state."
A frenzy state meant, in human terms, that his eyes had rolled back entirely.
Normally, entities don't bother targeting anyone outside their narrative. But there is one exception to that rule: the frenzy state.
The Beggar Royal was the example — when its identity was exposed, it thrashed and lashed out at Shiho in desperation. That is what it means for an entity in frenzy to be acting outside its ordinary narrative.
"This is what happens when something interferes with an entity's own story."
Before the true doctor could treat his patients, his patients were stolen from him.
And so he raged.
That was how Professor Kim's current state could be read. Shiho nodded, following along this far at least.
"Understood. But is there really a reason to drag the paramedics in front of him?"
"That's not all I'm planning to do."
Otherwise, the paramedics' next target would be the other doctors. How dare you manage patients this badly. The way you people run things, no wonder the patients are sick. They'd probably spin their rampage onward with logic like that — never mind whether Professor Kim could actually overpower the other wards by force.
And maybe, just maybe, the target after that would be me.
Naturally, I flatly refused to have my brain operated on. So my suggestion to bring in the paramedics hadn't been some desperate flailing either.
"What happens if we make the professor recognize them not as outsiders who stole his patients, but as another mentally ill patient?"
The way to return an entity that's strayed from its narrative is simple: put the target right in front of its eyes.
Just as the frenzied Beggar Royal of the past had moved according to its narrative once its target — the middle-aged woman — was presented to it. We would force Professor Kim back down to Stage 5.
"Then the professor will quiet down for a while."
"Isn't that a far cry from actually solving it?"
"That's why I said isolate, not cure."
Even in ordinary medicine, management is often chosen over cure. Hypertension, arrhythmia, myocardial infarction — the conditions I see constantly — are the classic examples. Modern medicine cannot cure them, so they are monitored and managed on a regular schedule.
Come to think of it, it might be no exaggeration to say we manage more often than we cure.
"Professor Kim needs to be restored first, then managed."
Familiar work. Work I'd done tirelessly in the game.
"I'll handle the persuasion. I'll admit the paramedics as my own patients and file a consult request. Then Professor Kim will recognize them as patients too, and stop his rampage."
After that, I'd attempt narrative therapy, just as I'd done with the streamer Gu Jihye.
No idea if it would work. But these were all the tools I had.
"Shiho. Will you help me?"
Of course, finding the paramedics ourselves came first.
And narrative or no narrative, they were still entities. Even a fish rots from the head — a perfectly ordinary person subduing them was, needless to say, a tall order.
"I'm counting on you again."
"Leave it to me. It's my specialty, after all."
Shiho nodded with an easy grin.
And yet — why was it?
Unlike every other time, I found that looking at her smile brought me no relief at all.
"Finding the paramedics won't be difficult."
They were disguising themselves as patients right now. If they weren't, there was no way they'd have gone undiscovered this long.
"Entities absolutely despise any disruption to their narrative."
One thing not to misunderstand: entities do not behave like ghosts from a folk tale or scripted NPCs in a game, locked into fixed patterns. To achieve their goals, they devise the most efficient, most cunning means available.
The paramedics would be no different.
To satisfy that narrative, they too would be wracking their brains as hard as they could.
"They were probably sheltering under transplant surgery until their professor got taken down. Hiding in a collaborator's shadow would have been comfortable for them too."
But now that their collaborator was gone, they needed somewhere to hide from the predators hunting them.
"And in that situation — would they stay in transplant surgery?"
Never. They would take refuge in another department. And the department they fled to would, with high probability, be one with no resonance at all.
"So. Which department in this hospital is definitely not resonated?"
"Ahh."
I pulled up the list of patients transferred in from transplant surgery through the EMR — the electronic medical records.
Lee Hyo-sang : Acute Rejection
Not this one, of course. This patient was the recipient of the organ transplant that had set this whole incident in motion.
What caught my attention were the three patients transferred in right after him.
Kim Ho-gyeong : Varicose Veins
Lee Gil-tae : Varicose Veins
Jeong Nam-ho : Varicose Veins
One patient with immune rejection — and then, on precisely the day after Professor Kim's rampage began, three varicose vein consult requests had come flooding in at once.
Was that really a coincidence?
I was too swamped back then to notice how strange it was.
The consult request was to evaluate for DVT — deep vein thrombosis — a common complication of varicose veins. But think about it, and it was an almost suspiciously convenient request.
Varicose veins are one of the few mild conditions transplant vascular surgery actually handles.
My apologies to anyone genuinely suffering from them, but varicose veins are an excellent disease for faking illness. Particularly among people obsessed with their appearance, there are those who get treated purely for cosmetic reasons even when their condition falls short of a clinical diagnosis.
Which means — a slightly dark truth — varicose veins were one of the conditions a transplant surgery department could diagnose as liberally as it pleased.
I don't care how common DVT is with varicose veins. All three at once is too much.
These three were almost certainly the paramedics.
The driver, the one harvesting organs in the back, and the navigator.
Three people. It fits perfectly.
Still, just in case, and to guard against the possibility that they were innocent patients, I brought Shiho along and headed for their rooms.
"Mr. Kim Ho-gyeong. It's time for rounds."
The plan was simple: the moment I was certain they were entities, put them to sleep.
And if they noticed first?
Shiho would send them off to dreamland with the stock of her shotgun. Not exactly a difficult job.
...Or so it should have been.
"Uuugh! Uuuuugh!!!"
"It's all right. It's all right. The pain only lasts a moment."
I arrived at the hospital room —
and only when I saw Professor Kim gripping the patient with brutally rough hands did it finally hit me.
...Son of a bitch.
I had been planting flags all over the place.