The Value of a Doctor (4)
Right up until I opened the door to the hospital room of the patient presumed to be a paramedic, I had believed everything was going smoothly.
He's already a cardiology patient, so requesting a psychiatric consult shouldn't be difficult.
If the medics themselves became patients, the professor's fury would be left with nowhere to go.
Of course, the Resonance wouldn't be undone. But simply dissolving his frenzied state would open up plenty of options.
Maybe I could even convince him to accept treatment.
Just like with the streamer Gu Jihye, it might be possible to talk Professor Kim around.
There was no need for him to treat people in such a cruel way. I wanted to ask him to remember what he had once taught me.
If only the frenzy lifted, conversation would be possible. The professor could return to who he used to be. My mentor would not have to be sacrificed.
Swollen with that hope, I gripped the door handle of the hospital room.
And when the door swung open and I found Professor Kim, I froze on the spot.
"Professor Kim... Seoktae?"
"Ah, Professor Jungwook."
My mentor answered without taking his eyes off the medic pinned in his grip.
"I'm rather busy at the moment. Could we postpone our conversation a little?"
The patient struggling in his hands was wearing a ski mask and sunglasses, despite being indoors.
Through the cracked lenses, empty eye sockets stared back at me.
The lore of the midnight ambulance crews surfaced in my mind — that they had no eyes, nose, or ears. That they would deliver organs to the Black Cross Medical Center until they found the ones that fit them.
But their story wasn't what mattered right now.
"Professor Kim. What is that medication?"
For once, he was holding not a surgical instrument for scraping out brains, but a syringe.
When I asked what drug the syringe contained, Professor Kim replied as lightly as if making small talk.
"LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide. You're familiar with it, aren't you, Professor?"
LSD — the hallucinogen with practically the lowest dependency profile of any narcotic in existence.
It was one of the psychotropic drugs he used to mention in passing during his lectures.
"Why does that patient need LSD?"
"...I'm going to correct this man's behavior."
Professor Kim's cold gaze, syringe in hand, fixed on the medic.
"I'm aiming for the imprinting effect. Isn't that the appropriate treatment for the re-socialization of a violent criminal like this?"
"Imprinting? Don't tell me..."
LSD and the imprinting effect.
The moment I heard those two words together, something clicked.
"You're planning to brainwash him?"
"..."
The imprinting effect is, quite literally, the phenomenon of stamping a new idea or behavior into a person's brain.
A person under the influence of LSD can be imprinted with ease by external stimuli — and in the past, the CIA had tried to exploit exactly that to create agents who could carry out missions flawlessly, stripped of all emotion.
If my memory served, the criminal re-socialization program had been part of that brainwashing research as well.
"Operation MKUltra..."
"There certainly was a project like that, back in the day."
His syringe crept toward the medic's IV line.
And just as the needle slipped into the port, right before he pressed the plunger, the words burst out of me unbidden.
"Professor. I believe prescribing LSD to that patient is wrong."
"...What exactly are you saying?"
"That patient is currently under a cardiology consult on suspicion of DVT — deep vein thrombosis — following varicose vein surgery."
"So?"
"So... LSD's side effects could..."
My breath caught in my throat.
I didn't know LSD's side effects. It was a narcotic, first of all — a drug no physician in Korea would ever handle.
Where Professor Kim had obtained it was a mystery in itself. I'd seen people addicted to the stuff now and then, sure, but never in syringe form.
I didn't know what it was used for, what side effects it carried, or what its pharmacological mechanism even was.
And so—
"...Among psychotropic medications, quite a few are known to cause QT prolongation. So I... think LSD should also be used with caution."
A lame excuse was all I could squeeze out.
At my words, Professor Kim's hand — poised over the plunger — stopped.
He looked at me.
"Jungwook."
"..."
My mentor, calling me by name.
"LSD has no cardiovascular side effects. No chromosomal damage or other adverse effects have ever been found. And you may not know this, but recent research has actually been exploring LSD as a treatment for PTSD and depression."
Professor Kim pointed at the eyeless, earless medic.
"This man shows compulsions stemming from mild PTSD. That may even be what triggered this crime. So you see — LSD is precisely the most appropriate drug for him."
"Professor..."
There was no way to persuade him.
And yet I could not bear to stand by and watch my mentor become a monster.
This was the man who had helped me back onto my feet during the hardest stretch of my life, who had carried me all the way to becoming a doctor — a man who might almost be called my second father. I did not want to watch him turn into a monster.
Before I knew it, I was walking toward him, step by step.
"Professor. You're in a state of diminished mental capacity right now."
"...What do you suppose that means, Jungwook?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Your cognitive function is currently—"
"Why? Because you think my Resonance has impaired my cognition?"
"I'm sorry?"
I hadn't imagined those words coming out of Professor Kim's mouth, so all I could do was stare at him, dumbfounded.
Perhaps my reaction pleased him, because Professor Kim gave a faint smile.
"You've misunderstood something, Jungwook."
Professor Kim wore a kindly smile — the same smile he'd shown after finishing a game of basketball, satisfied with a hard-fought match.
"I resonated, yes. But that doesn't mean I'm mentally incapacitated. I told you that in class once too, didn't I?"
Psychiatry takes the concept of diminished capacity very seriously.
Because the law must distinguish between someone who committed a crime because of a mental illness, and a criminal who merely has one.
"Just as not every mental illness causes crime, not every crime arises from mental illness."
He spoke with his finger resting half-depressed on the plunger.
"My mind is perfectly sound. Of course, my appearance is hideous — by your standards, you might even call me a monster. But—"
"..."
"Everything I've done until now, I did of my own will. The Echo simply gave me the ability to act on it."
"...Then why? Why did you do it?"
"Because I grew disillusioned with this world."
The professor wore a bitter smile.
"Jungwook, you're in cardiology, so you wouldn't know. The higher-ups are always lavishing attention and funding on your department. But let me tell you — the heart is not everything. A person does not live on breathing alone."
His voice rose higher and higher.
And with it, the words Professor Kim had said to me just days ago echoed in overlap.
"It's good that you work so hard, but don't let your view narrow too much. The most common mistake specialists make is believing their own field is always the most serious one."
"When a heart stops, everyone panics! The emergency room goes into overdrive, the ICU opens its doors, the whole hospital blares the code blue! But when a person's mind crumbles slowly, piece by piece — who ever cared? When someone hangs themselves, did anyone actually try to understand why they died, or move to fix it?"
His hand trembled with passion.
"From our department, you can see the world going mad so clearly! The indifference! The depression! The alienation, the sense of deprivation! We can watch those things spread like an infection! And yet no one — no one — will take our words seriously!"
"...I... I was taking it seriously. I was."
"I know. I know that well. You always listened to me. That's why I always wanted to remain a good senior colleague in front of you. But..."
He began to put force into the plunger.
"Even that wears you down, in the end."
Press.
The drug flowed in.
The medic's struggling movements — pinned beneath his hand — gradually went still.
Professor Kim spoke, his breath coming in ragged heaves.
"Argue with people for a hundred days and they still won't listen. That's why I wanted to resonate. With an Echo, treating people actually becomes possible."
"That wasn't treatment."
"It wasn't treatment?"
A dry snort.
"Did you seriously think I treated my other patients like this? That I became a monster and dug out every single brain and pumped every one of them full of some strange drug?"
The professor, having steadied his breathing, went on.
"Where in the world would you find a quack who uses only one treatment for everything?"
Only then did I realize my mistake.
The Echo of the Happy Relieved Hospital was not a story about sealing people in fog and harvesting their brains.
"I simply provide, case by case, the treatment that suits each person."
They had merely been reckless physicians who stopped at nothing.
Lobotomy, LSD re-socialization therapy, amygdala ablation...
Come to think of it, every one of these had actually existed as a real technique at some point in history.
In other words, an entity resonated with the Echo wasn't simply pushing dangerous-looking surgeries at random.
"By today's standards, those patients genuinely needed that kind of treatment — that's what it believed."
It truly performed the treatments it judged to fall within the indications.
Only, its standard of judgment was free from ordinary ethics.
"Even now that you know — am I still a monster?"
Professor Kim asked, looking straight at me.
I was lost.
As far as I knew, beings who resonated with an Echo were devoured by the narrative and twisted into monsters. They became entities, became monsters, and harmed people.
An Echo... it was supposed to be no different from a ghost story...
"Pro...fessor?"
"You know what I always say. As time passes, values change. When values change, ethics change. And when ethics change?"
"...Treatment guidelines change with them, of course."
"Exactly. Up to date, up to date. Scholars like us must always update ourselves to match."
My breath caught.
I wanted to argue back, but with my meager eloquence there was no beating him. My own tongue had been forged in the first place by that man's gift for rhetoric.
No matter how hard I tried, winning a logical debate against him was a distant hope.
And above all, the fact that while my mentor's heart had festered like this, I had done nothing but write him off as a monster and never once tried to understand him — that realization was turning my stomach.
"..."
"Jungwook. I told you before, remember? I let you win that once because I knew you were struggling."
Professor Kim hoisted the limp patient onto his shoulder.
"Step aside, would you? I need to relocate him for his re-socialization."
"..."
"You understand me, don't you?"
I didn't want to nod.
But no matter how I turned it over, no argument to persuade him would come.
The fear that Professor Kim might operate on me had vanished. In its place, a different kind of fear — one I couldn't put into words — filled my heart to the brim.
Yet with no way to give shape to that congealed feeling, and just as I found myself thinking I might have to step aside—
Shiho broke the silence.
"Jungwook. You assumed that everyone who resonates becomes a monster, didn't you?"
"..."
It was, in effect, an admission.
Shiho seemed to read it that way too, and nodded.
"Then let me change the question. What do you think separates a monster from a human being?"
"Well, someone who's resonated would—"
"This is a good chance to think about it again."
Click.
She drew the double-barrel shotgun from across her chest.
"The Management Bureau thought that way, and they failed. No matter what, they made absolutely sure to exclude and isolate a monster's power."
With her finger resting half on the trigger, she leveled the gun at Professor Kim.
"My view's a little different, though. Not every Echo is a ghost story — and not every ghost story is malicious."
"How can you be so sure of that?"
At my words, Shiho gave a wry smile and thumped her own chest with her fist.
"Because I've got a crazy ghost story living in here, saving people."