| Episode 2. The Boomer System (1)
My parents were extremely indifferent to both of their children.
For the most part, they were irresponsible, and at times, violent.
My upbringing could be summed up in one sentence: “I didn’t learn that people generally ate three meals a day until I went to elementary school.”
My older sister and I, unlucky in our guardians, spent our childhood under neglect, abandonment, and an overbearing attitude.
Her childhood probably hadn’t been much different from mine.
Yet despite growing up in the exact same environment, my sister must have been unable to stop worrying about me, her much younger brother. She supported me in every way until I became an adult.
Even when I was considering giving up on college because I had no way to pay the tuition, and when I was browsing part-time job listings, saying I would endure living at home only until I could save enough for a deposit.
My sister, who had been scrimping and saving desperately, got me out of the house around the time I graduated from high school, even though I couldn’t take care of myself in the slightest.
And she somehow even enrolled me in college.
‘This isn’t money I’m just giving you. I’m collecting every last bit of it later.’
‘……I’ll pay you back as soon as possible.’
‘Sure, sure. Let’s hope your little brother shows me some filial piety in my old age.’
‘Can you really make it through your old age with fifteen million won?’
‘It’s fine. I’ll be charging compound interest.’
‘So working adults really aren’t pushovers.’
Anyway, with fifteen million won in my hands, with no repayment deadline attached, I was able to separate myself completely from my family.
After that, I only had to take responsibility for myself.
A college friend who heard about my years of servitude at Hanpyeong Industries once asked me seriously,
‘If there are that many weird people at your company, wouldn’t it be better to quit while you’re ahead?’
My answer, as I mechanically edited a video titled ‘Hyung Line Being All Lovey-Dovey Compilation.Zip’ across from him, was, ‘I’d like to do that too.’
Who would want to keep working at a company that paid them peanuts and worked them like a dog?
Especially while putting fruit stickers over the faces of same-age guys I wasn’t even interested in.
But I couldn’t do that. I wanted to pay back my debt to my sister as soon as possible.
Even more so now that I was old enough to know exactly how much a young working adult could realistically save.
With even the time wasted changing jobs too precious to spare, I endured through sheer spite and stubbornness. The only thing that healed me was my bank balance inching closer to its target.
Then, on the day I finally managed to pay off the entire loan from my sister with the money I had scraped together by running my body into the ground.
We vowed to live our lives doing what we wanted at least once a year.
Even though we were both busy and couldn’t meet often, we would at least occasionally talk through messenger……
‘You ready to buy me a bag at the duty-free shop?’
‘You ready to make them announce over the intercom that they’re looking for someone at the duty-free shop?’
‘You think I can’t do it?’
……and things like that.
Then, the very next winter, my sister died in an accident.
It happened less than thirty minutes after we parted in front of a café near our home.
The last conversation I had with my sister was so ordinary that I couldn’t even remember it.
And yet, that moment was my last meeting with my only family.
Has there ever been anyone who hasn’t imagined their dead family member coming back to life, even once?
But the dead do not return. That was what death was—the end.
My confused emotions went cold. In their place, a directionless rage filled my head.
‘How do I wake up from this dream?’
For the first time since I was born, I desperately wished for my alarm to go off even one second sooner.
So this horrible sleep would end, and I wouldn’t have to relive the emotions of the past two years.
But the alarm did not ring. I felt stranded in a silence whose depths I had no way of knowing.
+
[SYSTEM] ‘Handover’ will proceed for ‘乙’.
+
Another new message was flashing before my eyes.
Go ahead and talk Xing nonsense.
I pulled the blanket over my head and lay down. If I didn’t lie down, I felt like I might slam my head against the wall.
But there was one fact I had overlooked.
The fact that, when letters could appear in midair, there was no guarantee that some other bizarre phenomenon wouldn’t occur as well.
Information about the ‘handover’ flowed unilaterally into my mind, as if I were reading a book or document.
+
[SYSTEM] Handover Progress
▷ Notification of work period: XX/XX/20XX (synchronization complete; changes unavailable)
▷ Confirm manual
▷ Confirm process
+
I was about to beat myself over the head a couple of times when I noticed something strange among the unfamiliar information.
The year listed under the work period was nine years before the current year.
The season was the same. It had been early autumn just yesterday, but the work period indicated February.
‘I haven’t gone back in time or anything.’
I turned my gaze toward the window, where the greenery should still have been lush. Then I saw several bare tree branches outside.
‘……!’
The view beyond the window was winter in its purest form.
The sun was out, but the window was fogged, and I could clearly see the stark, leafless branches swaying in the wind.
‘Where’s my phone?’
I instinctively searched for my phone. It was lying right beside my pillow, as usual.
But the model was different from mine. More precisely, it was different from the phone I had ‘now.’
What lay before me was the 2G phone I had used nearly ten years ago.
Back when everyone else was using smartphones, I had bought it because I couldn’t afford the device payments and wanted to focus on my studies.
In South Korea, where the smartphone usage rate among adults exceeded ninety percent, a brick phone had appeared—one that looked capable of blocking caller identification.
Far too many things were strange.
The face of the Center Emperor, Choi Jeho, who looked much younger than in my last memory, and the phone I had definitely thrown away long ago because it wouldn’t turn on both pointed to only one possibility.
As if possessed, I entered the password I used to use into the lock screen. Just like a lie, the password was accepted.
What I found even harder to believe was the date displayed on the phone.
‘……It’s nine years ago.’
It was the exact same date as the work period announced by the system—the days when I used this phone to look up English vocabulary.
The year when Choi Jeho, my age-mate, was twenty, and when Spark had been working toward their debut.
It felt as though all the blood had drained from my body.
I ran both hands over my coarse—no, roughly 3,400 days younger and therefore moisturized—face.
Noona…….
I think I’m Xed……
* * *
A bright winter morning.
A room quiet enough to be peaceful, thanks to someone else sleeping deeply.
And me, sitting inside it, having woken up nine years younger.
Yet now being forced to become an idol, with my sister and my future taken hostage (29 years old/office worker).
I checked my face, dimly reflected on the screen of my dead phone.
Even through the black screen, I could see that my complexion had improved and my dark circles had noticeably diminished. It was exactly the face I’d had just after graduating high school.
‘I really did get younger.’
Was that why I had felt so refreshed when I woke up? If so, I thought I might actually cry.
If I were the only one who had gotten younger, that would be one thing, but since time itself had seemingly turned backward, it might be more accurate to say I had come to the past.
If I could at least use the internet, I could find out for sure. But that was out of the question with this brick phone.
A sudden, ominous thought occurred to me.
‘Surely I didn’t die and come to some kind of afterlife?’
I knew it sounded insane, but if this was the underworld, couldn’t letters appear in front of me?
Still, the odds of a twenty-nine-year-old man dying in his room while making a banner announcing an idol group’s disbandment were about as low as the likelihood of the current situation making sense.
Something had certainly gone terribly wrong, but it didn’t seem likely that I had suddenly died after living a perfectly normal life.
And besides, would the underworld debut someone who had died like that as an idol?
What, was it insane?
It was more reasonable to assume that time had turned back.
‘Wait.’
If time itself had turned back, did I really need to debut as an idol to save my sister?
All I had to do was meet my sister right now, convince her to listen to me, and tell her to live a long life.
I hurriedly searched my contacts for my sister’s number. But the phonebook was empty.
It was an unnatural cleanliness for a phone that had once been filled with the numbers of presidents of all sorts of companies.
Fortunately, I had memorized my sister’s number. I quickly entered it and made the call.
—The number you have dialed does not exist.
But the automated response that came back was unexpected.
I checked the number again, but it was definitely correct. Something was strange.
‘My sister never changed her number.’
It didn’t really matter. If I couldn’t reach her, I could simply go find her.
I picked up the phone and got out of bed.
But my momentum did not last long.
‘Where did my sister live again?’
I couldn’t remember the name of the neighborhood or the building where my sister had lived. My other memories were vivid, but it was as if that particular portion had been extracted from my mind.
Just as I reached that thought, another lengthy text appeared.
This time, it was closer to the form of a document than a message.
+
[SYSTEM] The ‘Life Reuse Manual’ will be provided to ‘乙’.
▷ If you awaken at a point in the past relative to your previous life, your life will be considered reused.
▷ Once a reused life begins, returning to your previous life is not permitted.
▷ Memories and knowledge acquired in your previous life may only be used within the permitted scope. Violations will result in sanctions.
▷ If the memories and knowledge acquired in your previous life are judged to interfere with the completion of tasks in the reused life, the use of existing memories may be restricted without ‘乙’s consent.
▷ Accessories (résumés, schedulers, etc.) will be provided to facilitate smooth life reuse.
+
I didn’t quite understand what it meant, but one thing was clear.
Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
I had gotten up simply because I’d opened my eyes, and yet my life had already been processed as reused.
It felt like receiving a defective product that had been opened before I even bought it, only to be told that opened products couldn’t be refunded.
There had been times when I wanted to change my lifestyle, but that didn’t mean I wanted to change my life.
By the time I reached the fourth item, I felt like giving up on thinking altogether.
In simple terms, it seemed that if I tried to reunite with my sister—the final reward—through a dark route without achieving the KPI, the system’s coercive measures would activate.
For instance, by erasing the memories that served as links allowing me to contact my sister.
‘If I swore to go to the place where the accident occurred and wait until my sister came…….’
I tried to recall the date of my sister’s death and the place where the accident had happened.
And failed. I couldn’t remember a thing, as if there were a hole in one corner of my head.
* * *
What were the odds of a person suddenly going against the flow of time while living their life?
And if that weren’t enough, what were the odds of being taken hostage by one’s family and future and being forced to change careers into a profession one had never dreamed of?
What were the odds of being assigned to a job that required one to shine and sparkle—in other words, becoming an idol?
And if I refused, I would have to work for the company that had made me work overtime seven days a week until yesterday, for the rest of my life?
I didn’t know the exact odds, but I knew this was a case of getting royally screwed.
I passed through denial and anger, arriving at acceptance.
As long as my sister could live, I had no choice but to accept.
It was a filial duty I hadn’t been able to complete while my sister was alive. How could I refuse?
I didn’t want to have anything more to do with the wretched Hanpyeong Industries, either.
That left only one thing: making a dazzling debut as a six-member boy group.
Spark…… debut?
It was chilling. A dagger had flown straight into me, and the world before my eyes had gone dark.
Objectively speaking, Spark wasn’t a bad group.
It was only because I personally held a grudge against them. Looking at their individual abilities alone, they were so talented that they could have begged me to accept them and still not have been ashamed.
When the idols active in our country were broadly classified into three groups:
1. Idols with problems
2. Idols with no problems who nevertheless got beaten up for no reason
3. Idols who vanished without a sound, their debut never even becoming known
Spark had one foot in the first group and one in the second.
Their public pasts were clean across the board. None of them had done drugs.
But starting with controversies over their character, Spark was constantly embroiled in one controversy after another, establishing themselves as the idol industry’s newest issue-making group.
≫ Anyone who wants to learn noise marketing, raise your head and look at ㅅㅍㅋ
└ Spak isn’t noise marketing. Isn’t it just noise?
└ Marketing, for sure. Their awareness shot through the roof every time an issue blew up lol
Now let’s imagine me joining this group.
If an ordinary person 1 entered a visual group that got criticized for everything except their looks, the expected reactions would include:
≫ One loach ruins the whole water quality, right? Single-handedly drags down the average face score, right? That’s a talent too, I guess?
└ Five of them are first-grade water, but one is bottom-grade trash, so the pollution is insane. No names mentioned.
└ Is the face of an “idol” for real? My chest is growing narrow.
Likewise, it was easy to predict the reactions if an ordinary person 1 entered a jewel of a group said to be a presidential candidate in the idol industry based on skill alone.
≫ One loach ruins the whole water quality, right? Single-handedly puts on one hell of a clumsy show, right? That’s a talent too, I guess?
└ I’m getting secondhand embarrassment just watching him, but he’s ridiculously confident. His mentality is top-tier, at least.
└ X, what good is a top-tier mentality when the actual product is low-tier?
I was about to pour oil on a group that was already surrounded by enough talk as it was. It was the worst imaginable scenario.
Why me of all people?
Why Spark of all groups?
There were probably at least two hundred people who wanted to debut as Spark more than I did, even if only barely.
I stared at the message still floating in the air, my eyes probably devoid of all light.
Then my gaze suddenly fixed on one particular section.
+
▷ Accessories (résumés, schedulers, etc.) will be provided to facilitate smooth life reuse.
+
Accessories, huh.
Was it something like a welcome kit? Hanpyeong Industries was a total Xhole, so they hadn’t given me anything like that.
I glared at the screen, wondering how I was supposed to receive these so-called accessories.
Then, sure enough, a new screen appeared.
What popped up before my eyes was a résumé with a familiar layout.
The résumé of me, ‘Gim Iwol.’