The Most Important Thing in This Business: Choice (1)
On the page, it was exactly that kind of message. An office romance. In reality, of course, it was Team Leader Park. Office romance—please. I barely had time to eat and sleep as it was.
I climbed to the fifth floor with a coffee weighing down each hand. Buying coffee every time I came up here had already turned into a habit, and I couldn't complain. Thanks to it, I'd gotten pretty friendly not only with Team Leader Park but with the rest of the PR team too.
I opened the door and stepped in the way I always did, then stopped short. What is this?
Three or four people shot to their feet. A few of the faces were complete strangers; others I'd crossed paths with once or twice while haunting the building like the company ghost. What mattered was that they looked as if they'd been waiting for me.
"You're him?"
Him who? And why the casual speech on a first meeting... Though he did look old enough to get away with it.
"Team Leader Park, is that him?"
Again—who is "him"?
I was still standing there lost when Team Leader Park took the coffee out of my hand.
"That's him. Team 3's lucky charm. The one who turned Cat Guardian Spirit into a smash."
"Oh, I knew it. He looks the part!"
Wait. Looks the part of what?
The little crowd took turns tossing lines at me. Congratulations on the drama, sharp eye for someone so young, you're going to go far. All the while they watched me with glittering eyes. The feeling was unpleasant in a way I couldn't quite name. It reminded me of the time I'd taken the quadruplets to the zoo—the exact look they'd worn while staring at the rare animals.
"There's something I've been dying to ask you."
The middle-aged man who'd dropped the formalities pulled something from inside his jacket. Two photos of strikingly pretty women. Profile shots?
"These are the candidates for my son's blind date. Which one do you think is better?"
"Sorry?"
I was sure I'd misheard. Stunned, I looked at Team Leader Park—and found her turned away, shoulders shaking as she choked back a laugh. Behind her, the PR staff, women and men alike, were slurping their coffee and grinning. Hope you burn your tongues.
It wasn't only the middle-aged man. The rest were no different. Someone who introduced himself as so-and-so's manager wanted advice on overlapping offers for an upcoming Lunar New Year special; someone else shoved a script at me and asked which project would hit. I had to ask myself, in all seriousness, whether my public image was all right like this. It obviously wasn't.
I spent a long time insisting I'd only been lucky, and barely managed to send off the people clinging to my sleeves—don't feel pressured, just take a guess, they'd even pay a fortune-teller's fee if that was what it took. Once the office finally went quiet, Team Leader Park burst out laughing.
"I told you plenty of people wanted to see you."
"I didn't think this would be why."
The staff snickered and piled on.
"If you look at what Sunwoo's actually done, it tracks. The most important thing in this business—and the hardest—is choice. People or projects, same thing."
"He read a synopsis everyone else called mediocre, said it was going to be huge, shoved it through by sheer stubbornness, and it worked."
"And not just worked. An absurd, runaway success. Either Sunwoo really has something, or he burned through a lifetime of luck all at once. I figure it's one of the two."
"Isn't the second one a little too hopeless?"
I kept up my end of the conversation, but my mind was already racing. From here on, I needed to stop talking like I was certain—about my gut, about something being a guaranteed hit. Once or twice was fine. Keep repeating it, and people would start looking at me strangely. Or suspiciously.
The talk wound down and I was heading for the door when something occurred to me.
"Oh, right, Team Leader. There was something I wanted to ask you, too."
"What?"
"There's a reporter at G-Today I'm on decent terms with. The one I mentioned before."
Team Leader Park nodded as if it had come back to her.
"Ah. The one I told you to get on your side?"
"Yes. She asked if I could do an interview."
The call from Reporter Park Woo-jung had come that morning. She'd asked carefully, almost apologetically, saying her desk editor had ordered her to and she didn't have a choice. The truth was, interview requests had flooded in the whole time the Lee Songha controversy was running. I'd turned every one of them down. Talk too much and you invite trouble, and the moment you sit with a few outlets, the ones you leave out raise hell. We were already planning to set up a proper press session at a hotel later. I'd told Park Woo-jung as much, and a little while afterward she'd called again.
"She said they won't ask about the Songha controversy. They just want to hear from me as Neptune's manager."
"Figured that even with the meat cut out, an interview stamped exclusive would still land. Fair enough. You've got plenty of story, starting with bringing in Next K-Star..."
Team Leader Park trailed off into a mutter, then went quiet, thinking. For a second I thought she was just turning it over. Then she touched her chin and looked me over through narrowed eyes. Thoroughly. Inch by inch. And smiled.
"We'll talk more about that one. More importantly."
She asked it with a weight that made the question feel loaded.
"Jagi, would you mind putting your face on television a little?"
Team Leader Park stared straight at me. Kim Hyunjo was watching me just as steadily.
"A Lunar New Year variety special?"
I scratched my cheek as I asked, and Kim Hyunjo unpacked it.
"Yeah. It's IBC. The format puts the celebrity and the manager on together. They care less about rank than about the chemistry between the two, and since the managers are all civilians, they're hunting for characters who'll actually play on air."
"Public opinion on Songha is good after yesterday's broadcast, so it might actually go through."
A variety appearance.
"Why me? We've got you, Chief, and there's Geonyoung."
Team Leader Park looked Kim Hyunjo up and down without a shred of subtlety.
"Look at him. Hyunjo doesn't read as variety. He reads as one of those extreme-job documentaries."
She wasn't wrong. I nodded at Kim Hyunjo's face, which today was as hollow-eyed as any zombie's. Anyone could see he was one all-nighter away from working himself to death. He seemed to know it himself; he smacked his lips and added on.
"And Geonyoung, that kid—good luck convincing a production team. Too by-the-book. Model-youth energy. Fine for a culture program. Variety, not so much."
So what does that make my image?
"You've got a good character, Jagi. And the chemistry isn't bad when we put you with the kids."
I hesitated, but in the end I nodded. Standing in front of a camera wasn't my idea of a good time, but my face was already out there. Reaction cuts had caught me more than once on Next K-Star, and I'd turned up constantly in the Cat Guardian Spirit making-of footage. A Lunar New Year special would be a one-off anyway. If it meant the kids could break onto a terrestrial variety show as a group, fine. I'd sell my face one more time.
We wrapped the conversation, and Kim Hyunjo and I headed down to the fourth floor. The weather had a bite to it, and I was thinking I'd like something soupy for lunch, hot enough to warm me down to my insides, when my steps slowed. A few paces ahead, Kim Hyunjo's top caught my eye—a turtleneck, thick-looking. Not something he wore often. Where had I seen it?
Ah.
The memory surfaced the moment I reached for it. The future I'd seen not long ago, through the precognition. Kim Hyunjo had been wearing that exact outfit. Was this just a day he'd happened to put on the same clothes? Or—don't tell me today was that day.
With the album meeting practically on top of us, a drama shoot got dropped onto the schedule out of nowhere. Drama filming is the sort of thing you crawl out of bed for no matter the hour, but the timing was vicious. Why today, of all days? I had no choice but to miss the meeting and go to set with Lee Songha. If there was any comfort in it, yesterday's broadcast had the crew and the cast buzzing, and the set was the warmest and most easygoing I'd ever seen it.
When the shoot ended I dropped Lee Songha off and went straight back to the company. Whether today really was the day from that future, and if it was, what the traitor had prepared—I wanted to know badly enough that I could barely concentrate even on set. Whatever it was, it would be something that helped Neptune. Turning over what I'd seen and heard in the future, that much was clear. My inability to trust the traitor completely was a separate matter. The fact that he was grinding away for Neptune's sake was not. No reason to worry too much.
I called Kim Hyunjo to say I'd arrived, and the answer came back at once: fifth-floor conference room. I took the stairs almost at a run. The moment I stepped inside, I was sure.
This is it. The future I'd seen not long ago was sitting right in front of me.
A laptop and a tangled pair of earphones lay on the table. Kim Hyunjo and the traitor sat side by side, talking, the air between them warm. A bright smile—rare on him—sat on Kim Hyunjo's face, and the traitor's wore an unmistakable pride.
"Oh, you're here? Come in, come in."
Kim Hyunjo spotted me first and waved me over. I pulled myself together and went in. I'd barely sat down before the traitor asked,
"It's freezing out. You must be dead on your feet. Shoot done for today?"
"No. I've got to head back out later for a night scene."
We traded a few lines, and Kim Hyunjo cut in, pleased.
"Up until not long ago I was stuck working with a pack of useless bastards, wondering what sin I'd committed in a past life to have such rotten luck with people. Turns out maybe all of that was just penance so I could meet you two. One of you goes and lands a smash-hit drama without anyone even asking, and the other one..."
His gaze rested on the traitor for a beat, then swung to me.
"Simon Lee. That man had a song he'd written to give to Seraphic."
A name I hadn't seen coming. Simon Lee, judge on Next K-Star, star composer—and Seraphic, a top girl group ten years into their run. The thought hit like cold water. I was wide awake. Neptune's next album. The thing the traitor had been working for so long. A composer. God. I had a bad feeling.
"But after the world tour, Seraphic's been throwing everything at a U.S. push, so the domestic comeback keeps getting shoved back. The song lost its owner. We'd actually had our eye on it for our next title track, but he looked set on handing it to a group one tier under Seraphic, so we'd given up. And then..."
Kim Hyunjo seized the traitor's shoulder.
"This guy said he'd try to talk him around, and somehow he actually pulled it off."
I held my face together and offered congratulations. I couldn't let the shock show. Talking Simon Lee into giving up a song everyone wanted was, on its face, something worth celebrating, and neither of them knew what I knew—that if things had gone the way they were meant to, Neptune's next title track would take them to number one on the music shows. My thoughts snarled like a ball of thread. I swallowed the urge to drag a hand down my face and kept listening.
"Reaction in the internal meeting was good, for a start. The CEO and the Neptune kids still have to hear it, and we'll run it by the monitoring staff before anything's final. But the way I see it, this is the title."
Kim Hyunjo looked at the traitor and clicked his tongue.
"Young-hoon hyung and I both thought it was a waste of effort. You're a ruthless one. The type who actually makes things happen."
I knew what was coming next. I looked at the traitor, and our eyes met—he'd already been looking at me. Unlike last time, when the vision had been thick with noise, I could see him clearly now, and his expression was more complicated than I'd expected. Proud, yes, but with a strange heat under it. The corner of his mouth lifted, and he spoke.
"In a way, it's thanks to Sunwoo. We started the same day, and watching the gap keep widening made me work that much harder."
It had changed. The traitor walking in with Simon Lee's song—that wouldn't have happened in the future twenty-some years from now. In that future, I never would have landed Next K-Star or Cat Guardian Spirit, never would have closed my hand around success like this. So what were the odds? The odds that the song which had been Neptune's title track in that future and the song the traitor had just brought in were the same one. I swallowed and asked.
"What kind of song is it?"
"Hear it yourself."
Kim Hyunjo held out the earphones. Smaller than a coin, and they felt heavy as stones. I put them in, and silence closed over me. Then the intro poured into my ears. I'd never cared much about music. I didn't have the ear to know, on a first listen, which songs would blow up and which would die—but even I could tell this was good. Nothing but humming, no lyrics at all, and still I wanted to hum along.
But it wasn't the song I'd heard in the future.
I'm going to lose my mind. Everything had been sliding into place right up until this morning, and now this, a bolt out of a clear sky.
I listened to more than the Simon Lee track the traitor had brought. Every song that had come in during the collection window and survived the internal meeting—I went through all of them. The one from the future wasn't there. Enough to make a ghost wail. Why not? Because the future twenty-some years out and the present had already split? Because the song that should have arrived in that window never did?
The track he'd brought was good. Simon Lee had written it, and the rest of the staff had liked it in the meeting, so that much wasn't in doubt. But a song is like a drama or a film. A famous composer and a good melody don't automatically make a monster hit. It has to fit the group, and luck does a brutal amount of the work. Above all, Bureau Chief Park had said it herself in that future. The song had been genuinely great, and it had suited Neptune perfectly. It had to exist somewhere. No matter how I turned it over, I couldn't see a way to find it. I could hardly go knocking on every composer's door asking for a listen.
Was releasing the Simon Lee song the traitor had brought the best we could do? And even if we did—could it become that kind of hit? The one that, the way it had in the original future, came to mind first the moment anyone thought of Neptune?
"Oppa."
I turned at the voice and found Lee Songha watching me. Only then did the world around me come back into focus. My head was a mess, but a schedule is a schedule, and I was racing back to the Cat Guardian Spirit set with her again.
"Is something on your mind?"
"No. Just thinking about the next album."
At that, Lee Songha leaned toward the front seat.
"We heard too. Is the song Mr. Simon Lee wrote going to be the title track?"
"Nothing's decided yet, but they say it's likely."
"That's a bit of a shame."
A shame? A shame how? Before I could ask, she murmured, almost to herself,
"The song Taehee unnie wrote is good too."