Every year around this time, I find myself thinking about it.
About the only time I was ever scolded by a teacher as a child.
The teacher handed out a sheet of paper to the students.
We were told to freely write about our experiences on a certain topic.
The topic was winter,
and without the slightest hesitation, I wrote mine and handed it to the teacher.
What I wrote was as follows.
“Winter is cold.”
And then I got scolded.
No, why?
She told us to freely write about our experiences, so wasn’t that correct?
Was there some hidden meaning in the definitions of “experience” and “freedom” that I didn’t know about?
For this super-genius, perfect, beautiful boy Seol Yujin to be scolded! How vexing!
Embarrassing as it is, back then, I really did think that.
I had yet to be properly socialized or gain any self-objectivity,
so I hope you will simply dismiss it as a child’s stubbornness and move on.
But now, I know exactly what was wrong with that piece of writing.
It was that I failed to properly define “cold”!
If, in order to define that one word, cold,
I had written about the characteristics of our country’s subtropical climate, the tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis,
the descent caused by the increased density of the Siberian high-pressure system,
comparative evaluation against other seasons, and so on,
then I definitely would not have been scolded.
Although that class had been Korean class,
and although it had been a performance assessment in which we were to write our own personal essay,
isn’t nonfiction literature too?
If not, then why are there such vast amounts of nonfiction passages on the Korean SAT?
And why does the essay exam exist for university early admissions?
Thus, I justified my opinion with this and that and all sorts of other reasons.
Yes, of course,
while telling myself that this super-genius, perfect doctoral degree holder Seol Yujin could not possibly be wrong.
…So what am I trying to say with this long introduction?
The conclusion is simple.
“It’s fucking freezing…!”
Winter is cold.
It is deathly cold.
Sitting on a bench in a deserted park, I struggled to wrap my old padded jacket around myself and cursed Korea’s climate.
===
The reason I had been driven out to a park bench like this
was not because I had failed to pay rent and gotten kicked out,
or because bugs had appeared in my room.
It was not some common, hackneyed story like that.
To tell this story, we need to go back about a week…
At the time, I had been surviving for several days on nothing but a few energy bars and water.
Exhaustion and hunger.
And while suffering from the onslaught of anxietyfeardepressionangerhatreddisgustlethargy and so on,
I had been playing a hopeless defense game against life itself.
But at that moment, a miracle occurred.
My light.
My star.
My love.
As if only the most radiant rays of heavenly starlight had been woven together into one…
a truly beautiful being descended into my studio apartment and whispered to me.
Ding—
“Your salary of 1.2 million won has been deposited.”
“Aah… Hoshigami Meru-sama…! Why do you not deduct the 200,000 won I took in advance…!”
I dared to speak thus,
telling the fox-eared deity who had descended from the heavens of the grace I had taken beforehand,
but—
“Please think of that as a bonus.”
Had she not, showing mercy as vast as the sea, left me with an even greater blessing?
“Aah…! Aaaah…!”
As waterfall-like tears flowed from my mouth,
I was moved by her mercy, smiled, and whispered, “Tonight’s dinner is chicken, just you wait.”
Thus, an extra 200,000 won suddenly appeared.
Since I had been making a thorough plan for overdue rent, the bare minimum food expenses, and so on,
I was in the middle of seriously agonizing over where to spend the remaining 200,000 won.
Then the most urgent matter of all finally entered my sight.
“…That absolutely has to be removed.”
The wallpaper that had stained every corner of my studio apartment black, that is.
Branching spore mold.
By its scientific name, Cladosporium cladosporioides, was actively reproducing before my eyes.
I immediately contacted the landlord and demanded that the wallpaper be replaced,
and after an extremely thorough negotiation, I concluded a free-money outsourcing contract for 170,000 won (for the landlord).
Demanding wallpaper replacement was the natural right of a tenant, so the fact that he was extracting money from me here was unreasonable to begin with,
but the logic of power is, by nature, a law closer at hand than the logic of law,
and Korean law has the characteristic of becoming endlessly weak when the opponent is a landlord.
This is proven by the precedent of a 20-billion-won jeonse fraudster receiving a two-year suspended sentence.
This is Korean Style!
A week later, the landlord who came to replace the wallpaper told me to step outside for a while,
and thus I became a wanderer with nowhere to go, stuck on a bench in the corner of a park.
“Damn it… Maybe I should’ve gone to a café…”
The park bench was cold.
On top of that, the knife-like wind whooshing in from every open direction repeatedly hacked at my limbs.
Anyone capable of withstanding such a powerful technique must surely be a ghost.
After all, Ghost-type is immune to Normal-type.
Even now, I thought it would be better to go to a café, enjoy a warm drink and full Wi-Fi,
read illegal PDFs (papers), and happily browse galleries,
but my feet would not move.
As for the reason, uh, well… it was a little complicated.
It was… because the money felt like a waste.
Of course, coffee would only be about 2,000 won, and even if it were expensive, it would still be several times cheaper than hospital bills.
Uh… it was because of my social phobia.
Of course, on a weekday morning, there would only be a few people in a café, and it would be fine as long as I sat in a corner.
Ah, no…! I just, just didn’t want to! I didn’t want to go to a café!
Why?
Why did I think that?
“I mean…”
At the self-questioning and answering that followed,
only a troubled emotion revealed itself in my heart.
Asking myself questions and finding the answers myself was an old habit of mine.
It could also be called my greatest strength.
Why the sky is blue,
why the sun rises and sets.
Just as such questions
eventually led to the beginning of science,
questions broaden the scope of thought, help redefine problems, and assist in finding answers.
But now, that sharp question was touching the deepest part of my heart.
“Why do I not want to go to a café?”
To this question, my helpless heart eventually spat out an answer.
“Originally, I was good at enduring the cold.”
When I was young, I lived with my grandmother.
There was a time when I would push the blanket onto my grandmother because I felt hot.
Whenever I did, my grandmother would say she was stealing her cute grandson’s body heat and hug me tightly.
It was just… like that.
“But even if that was true back then, it is cold now. Why do you not go into a café?”
My heart hesitated and answered.
“I’m bothered by the subscribers on my kirinuki channel not increasing.”
It had been almost two weeks since I started the kirinuki channel, but the number of subscribers was still stuck in the hundreds.
At this rate, far from monetization, I would end up losing money instead.
Every time I saw that, I felt gloomy and upset, so I couldn’t bring myself to enter a café with internet.
“You can simply not look at YouTube there. Read papers as a hobby or browse galleries in the café. What is the problem?”
My heart did not answer.
“…Th-that is.”
I was anxious, depressed, angry, and then closed my mouth.
I could not answer against the raging emotions.
I truly could not answer.
However, my old habit and persistent personality kept digging into this point.
I realized that my heart did not want to go online right now,
and in that process, I found a clue.
It was one paper.
A paper that was currently setting the world ablaze.
The title of the paper was as follows.
[The Structure of Transplanted Minds: Functional Replication of Mammalian Intelligence on Non-Biological Computing Platforms]
This paper, published in several famous academic journals, was saying this.
That one day, humanity might be able to exist inside a simulation,
a paper proving that a brain in a vat was not some absurd science-fiction story.
The author of this paper was Korean. Twenty-five years old.
He had earned a doctorate from MIT,
was a pioneer who had opened up a new field called neuroinformation theory,
his name was Seol Yujin…
and he was deceased.
In other words, dead.
“……”
The cause of death was a fatal fall.
On the day his doctoral graduation was confirmed,
he had apparently gotten dead drunk, and while being helped back to the dormitory by his colleagues,
he died in an absurd accident after hitting his head on the edge of the stairs.
“Ha, hahaha…!”
Wasn’t it truly an absurd death?
Wasn’t it a truly shabby end?
Wasn’t it far too empty a price for a desperate life?
Sitting on the park bench, I laughed bitterly.
If I did not do even that, I felt as though I would collapse.
I believed that the world was honest.
I believed it moved with precision and honesty according to physical laws humanity had yet to discover.
Therefore, because of the memories of Seol Yujin that had suddenly entered Seol Yuna’s body,
I had entertained the faint possibility that this world might be a different world from the one I had come from.
Like some commonplace TS web novel,
I thought it was something like waking up one morning to find my identity and gender magically changed.
So I deliberately did not search for my past self, for Seol Yujin.
I told myself that surely, this world would not have him. That it had to be that way.
But the world was honest.
It honestly told me that Seol Yujin’s world and Seol Yuna’s world were one and the same.
The only lie the world left behind was the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other something that had emerged in the process.
Right now, the whole world was scrambling to talk about Seol Yujin’s great achievement and shabby end.
His funeral was held on a grand scale,
and people who had known him in the past appeared in interview after interview,
speaking however they pleased about what kind of person he had been in life.
A kind person who never cursed.
A person who researched without complaint about his circumstances.
A blessed person, an ill-fated genius.
Even the essay he had written in elementary school was revealed to the world.
The essay with the short sentence,
“Winter is cold.”
written on it.
Seeing that, people each began to speculate in their own way about what kind of person Seol Yujin had been.
But… I knew facts that the world did not.
“…Seol Yujin was really sensitive to the cold.”
His naturally healthy body simply had strong immunity, so he rarely caught colds.
He was actually extremely weak to the cold.
His grandmother, who noticed that, would joke and try to coax him into the blanket.
While placing most of the cramped blanket over his body.
“…Seol Yujin could swear in a really creative way.”
The slum where he lived was a place where gangsters, alcoholics, women who worked in establishments, and the like—
members of the impoverished classes—lived gathered together,
and accordingly, the children he spent time with in childhood were very skilled in curses and dirty jokes.
The reason he had to reduce his swearing was to hide his origins,
because he had tried to ensure that his background would not become a flaw in the battlefield called society.
“Seol Yujin… was not used to shedding tears.”
It was because, in his school days, he had deeply understood that shedding tears was a signal of defeat and submission.
Since his backing was shabby, the moment he was overwhelmed by someone’s momentum, he could suffer a miserable defeat in the fierce war of hierarchy.
Even at the funeral of his only family, the tears would not come out,
and that had made him so bewildered, and at the same time so terribly sad.
“Heh, hehe…”
And yet,
and yet…
what meaning did any of that have?
Even if I knew something about him, how could I prove it,
and how could I answer when others asked how I knew?
How could another person named Seol Yuna, whom he had never once met while alive,
become his only one who understood him?
Someone who knew all my circumstances might ask,
“Why do you distinguish Seol Yujin and Seol Yuna as different people?”
The answer to that was plainly revealed in Seol Yujin’s paper.
Seol Yujin was an expert in brain science and information theory,
and accordingly, he possessed an extremely profound insight into the soul.
He left behind the following words.
The soul cannot exist outside the human brain.
Until future humanity, through technological advancement, creates a mechanical brain made of silicon compounds,
the soul will be an accessory subordinate to the human brain, and an individual’s body will be no different from that individual.
After synthesizing all of this, reason spoke.
The something that considered itself Seol Yujin spoke.
I cannot give up the identity that I myself am Seol Yujin.
If I dismiss this as a mere dream, then I would be no different from Seol Yuna, who gave up her own life,
and so I reject that.
However, I am not Seol Yujin.
The something currently occupying the initiative over Seol Yuna’s body is also not Seol Yujin.
If I define myself as Seol Yujin,
then my efforts become meaningless.
Because my existence would be no different from proving the existence of the soul.
Because I am trapped in that paradox and turning away from myself,
I insist on remaining on this park bench in order to focus on bodily pain rather than mental pain.
“Do you… have any objections to this?”
There were none.
Reason had arrived at a perfect answer and evaluated my current heart.
However…
Drip. Drip.
Forcibly exposing a wound I had struggled to hide was painful and agonizing.
Painful enough that it was only natural for tears to flow.
The tears fell far too easily, and now they would not stop.
And because the flowing tears felt, deep down, far too familiar,
even more tears spilled from my eyes.
The shell of Seol Yujin, unable to become anything at all, was there.
On that bench, alone, it was crying in loneliness.