The Consciousness Check App
After our hotel date, we began working through the problems that had piled up one by one.
My wife started going to the hospital for the narcolepsy treatment she had been putting off, and I returned to the job I had left on medical leave after the accident.
"Welcome back, Deputy Manager Choi! Wow, you've bulked up so much. I almost didn't recognize you."
Coming into the office after so long, my junior—the female employee—greeted me with almost excessive enthusiasm.
She looked completely drained from having to cover my absence all by herself, and a wave of guilt washed over me.
"You've had it rough all this time. I'm sorry. I ended up being away a lot longer than I meant to."
As I apologized without resistance and took my seat, she looked startled and hurried to comfort me.
"Not at all. I was honestly worried you might just quit for good, so seeing you back like this is such a relief."
I could understand where she was coming from.
The incident that had befallen us as a couple was already serious enough, and then there were the incomprehensible things that had happened to me afterward—truly, not a single thing had been easy.
At least the one silver lining is that since I was discharged, there's been no sign of Jang Man-su waking up inside my body, right?
I had experienced another residual echo of his memories at the hotel, but that too had only been the once.
Still, I couldn't just sit on my hands, so I kept at the things I could do—recording myself all night before I fell asleep, watching for any odd signs from my wife, and so on.
I persisted doggedly with those efforts, but they were gradually hitting their limits, so I abandoned the voluntary surveillance.
It was closer to the truth that complex factors like caring for my wife's narcolepsy and returning to work had simply made the conditions impossible, forcing me to stop.
"Haa…"
Looking at my company desk after so long, it felt refreshing to be back in the rhythm of ordinary life, yet my head already ached at the thought of the work waiting for me.
Before starting, I set my phone in its usual spot and arranged my personal things.
"Ah, I need to turn on the app."
Unlike before, one more routine had been added: checking my wife's condition through my phone.
I tapped the recently installed app, and a single graph filled the screen.
The crude yet simple interface constantly drew waves of varying height, the kind of readout you would see when measuring a person's heartbeat or brainwaves.
The female employee, who had been making coffee, came over to ask how I had been getting by.
"Deputy Manager Choi, so you're fully back now? Huh? What's that?"
She had naturally glanced over while I was operating my phone.
As my junior, she already knew about my wife's narcolepsy, so I gave her a simple explanation.
"Hyeon-ju… ahem. It's my wife's real-time consciousness check app. To put it simply, it's like how a smartwatch tracks your heart rate, calorie burn, and all those other things, right?"
"Ah~ like a health app?"
"Yes. Like a medical version of that. You can see the brainwaves when she's awake versus when she's fallen asleep from narcolepsy, all in real time."
It let me know, however fragmentarily, the state of a wife who might collapse anywhere, at any moment.
If she drifted off at home because of her narcolepsy, there was no great cause for worry—but it was meant for the times she was out, when the risk was real.
"It even has real-time location tracking."
"Eek…? R-really? Isn't that a little creepy?"
She said it gave her chills, like having her privacy monitored in real time.
I understood her completely, so I only felt awkward and made no attempt to deny it.
"Well… I can't exactly argue with that. But it's not illegal or anything. It's an app that requires the subject's consent to use."
"Ooh~ she must trust you a lot, Deputy Manager. Even if it was my husband, I wouldn't let him install something like that."
"Ahaha…"
As she said, without either of us quite realizing it, our dependence on each other had grown lately.
For her it was natural—narcolepsy made a normal life impossible. For me, it was because of the unknown phenomena taking place inside my own body.
The inflated libido plays a part too…
Even before this body, I had possessed an ordinary man's share of desire.
With a lovely wife, and still living like newlyweds even as we entered our second year of marriage, of course the fire had never gone out.
But after the organ transplant, my libido felt as if it had doubled.
I wanted her constantly. Even after we had already done it, I would sometimes wake in the night with the urge to pull my sleeping wife into my arms again.
Is it because the threshold for stimulation has risen to an abnormal level?
The sheer frequency of our lovemaking had increased dramatically compared to the past.
But the satisfaction no longer matched what it used to be.
The wretched sight of my wife after she had been helplessly raped by Jang Man-su in the hospital, the memory of being violated all night long by the Jang Man-su who had woken inside my body—those were things I would never forget for as long as I lived.
And after experiencing that dizzying thrill of willingly leaving my wife with the taxi driver for a short while so he could molest her, nothing I did afterward could satisfy me the way it once had.
Is this why people get addicted to things like gambling?
I wanted to feel again that dizzying pleasure that paralyzed reason, and that suffocating tension that left the entire body soaked in cold sweat.
I seemed to remember hearing that the human brain, the more it grows accustomed to a stimulus, demands an even greater one before it can feel satisfied.
I might have had it wrong, but experiencing it firsthand left me certain that ordinary relations were no longer enough.
I'm crazy. Stop thinking about it.
Despite the resolve, the thoughts refused to stop.
My wife was accommodating me as much as she could, just as she had promised, to relieve my lust—but I could see the fatigue building in her.
She struggled to endure the intensity of our sessions, and her shy nature remained unchanged.
I wish she would come to enjoy this kind of thing the way I do, but that would be hard, wouldn't it…? Is shame putting on the brakes? When her consciousness was hazy she felt that way…
The wife who still had her reason and the wife who did not seemed like completely different people in their reactions.
Perhaps that was why I had been so shocked when I saw her disheveled state after Jang Man-su had raped her.
Let's just be glad I discovered this difference at the hotel. There has to be a way.
It was not a matter of technique, or of length, or of thickness.
Coincidentally, when I held my dead-drunk wife at the hotel, I had clearly noticed the difference.
Unlike when she was completely intoxicated, once the alcohol had worn off enough for reason to return, she no longer let out those vulgar moans, nor did she show any sign of reaching a climax violent enough to make her squirt.
Of course, after we finished she was satisfied enough to pass out as if she had fainted—but knowing the other side of her only made me more frustrated.
Jealousy… no. Is this self-loathing?
The emotion I was feeling was closer to self-reproach, or a sense of debt, for failing to satisfy my wife.
The changes in my body, the situation we were trapped in, the problems my wife was carrying—too many factors tangled together in a complex knot that made my head ache.
"Haa…"
A deep sigh escaped on its own.
The female employee sitting beside me handed me a sweet candy with a worried look.
"Deputy Manager Choi. You don't seem fully recovered yet, so please don't overdo it."
"Ah, was my sigh that loud? Looks like I made you worry. Sorry."
Even at the office I had sunk too deeply into my thoughts.
Feeling apologetic toward the employee who had misunderstood, I accepted the candy and put it in my mouth.
As the sweetness spread, the boiling inside my head settled, if only a little.
Just then, the phone displaying my wife's real-time brainwave graph blinked to announce an incoming text.
It was my first day back after medical leave, so my wife was worried as well.
Even through the text, her happiness came through so clearly it was almost audible.
Good thing I told her to take the part-time job.
Right now she was at the daycare center where she had originally worked, clocking in for her part-time shift.
Her narcolepsy symptoms were actually worse than they had been before she quit, so I had opposed the idea at first.
But the disappointment on her face and her earnest persuasion had finally worn me down, and I had given in.
Even if the symptoms appear, they'll take good care of her.
The biggest reason I had allowed the part-time work was that the people at the daycare already knew about her illness.
Knowing her condition, they would be able to handle any emergency—and more importantly, until now I had always been with her, but from now on she would have to spend time alone at home.
Longer stretches of solitude could turn a person's thoughts dark, and my wife herself had wanted to go out and interact with people, even if only for a short while.
Anyway, her love for kids is something you have to give her credit for.
The reason she had become a daycare teacher in the first place was simply that she loved children.
Watching her smile so happily while surrounded by them made my chest stir with how beautiful she was.
I had fallen for that loving, maternal look of hers, and had even sworn to spend my whole life with her—so in a way, being a daycare teacher was her true calling.
By now she must have been overjoyed at seeing the children again after so long.
Out of overprotectiveness I sent a text urging her not to push herself.
This was the first I had heard of a dedicated teacher being assigned to look after her.
I had not expected that level of consideration, and gratitude welled up in me.
Imagining her proudly praising herself made her seem unbearably cute.
As I continued exchanging texts with my wife, colleagues began arriving one by one, so I went around greeting them and thanking them for everything they had covered during my absence.
The workplace I returned to after so long was still a whirlwind of activity.
"Deputy Manager, could you take a look at this?"
"What is it?"
Between clearing the backlog of work and trying to restore the work cycle that had grown slack in my absence, I was sweating.
Because of that, I failed to properly check the real-time status graph of my wife that was still floating on my phone screen.
The graph that had been drawing a steady, even pattern suddenly settled into a calm, low wave.
Her narcolepsy symptoms had appeared, and she had fallen asleep.
Beep.
A small notification sound announced that the subject's consciousness had changed, but I was on a call with a client and never heard it.
The calm graph on the screen looked as if it would continue forever—until a change arrived.
As if some dizzying stimulation or surge of emotion had struck, the graph began drawing large, irregular curves and leaping upward.
"Ah, Manager Kim. Yes. It's been a while. Thanks to your concern…"
Congratulations on my return and work-related calls kept pouring in, and I was too busy responding to notice anything else.
So I never saw that the graph in the corner of my desk—the one reporting my wife's state of consciousness—was bouncing madly up and down as if an earthquake had hit.
The graph that surged so violently it looked broken suddenly shot all the way up to the measurable maximum.
Beep.
A notification sound indicating that some special anomaly had occurred leaked out again, but I did not hear this one either.
The only times that graph hit its maximum were in special situations when the subject's emotions intensified to an extreme—rage, ecstasy, despair, terror, astonishment, climax, and the like.
The graph that had been scraping the ceiling, drawing nothing but the maximum value, suddenly plummeted and began tracing a calm pattern once more.
The graph that now drew the quiet lines of someone who had fainted occasionally trembled in fine little rises and falls, as if still feeling the afterglow of emotion.