| Episode 78. Personal Information
“I can’t believe there was another school besides yours that wears uniforms like that…… I’m genuinely shocked.”
Baek Haewon clicked her tongue. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that her brother and her idol might attend the same school.
The same went for Baek Haein. Thinking about it briefly, none of his friends came to mind as the type who would become a celebrity. So Baek Haein merely grumbled.
“Does our country only produce spinach-colored fabric or what?”
Just as Baek Haein was about to turn his gaze away with a complaint, the face of the man dancing in a uniform like well-fermented scallion kimchi filled the screen.
“Huh?”
Baek Haein froze. Baek Haewon said,
“What? Even you can see his face is on a whole different level from yours, right? Looks really do give you wings.”
Whether Baek Haewon was admiring him or not, Baek Haein couldn’t take his eyes off the television.
After the man in the green uniform was shown in close-up a couple more times, Baek Haein muttered,
“Why is he coming out from there……?”
Baek Haewon looked up at Baek Haein as if asking what nonsense he was talking about. Baek Haein’s next words were even more shocking.
“I know him. He goes to my school.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you, that’s our school uniform. That’s him, right? Kim Han.”
“Ah, you scared me. No, it’s not. That’s Kim Iwol.”
“Is that his real name? Not a stage name?”
“They all use their real names.”
Baek Haewon answered as if disappointed. She had hoped for a situation like, “My idol turned out to be my blood relative’s in-law’s eighth cousin’s aunt’s paternal aunt’s son?” but as expected, the world wasn’t that easy.
Despite Baek Haewon’s disappointed tone, Baek Haein didn’t back down.
“No, seriously. He looks exactly like Kim Han.”
“Hey, using common sense, if someone like that went to your school, would I not know?”
“What do you know about me?”
“That’s true.”
Baek Haewon turned her back on Baek Haein, telling him to stop lying.
But truly, the man on the screen looked exactly like Baek Haein’s classmate.
“His name is really Kim Iwol? He’s never changed it?”
“Seeing as he’s never said anything like that, probably not.”
At Baek Haewon’s words, Baek Haein rubbed his chin, then nodded.
“Well, I guess there’s no way he’d do something like being an idol.”
“What, are you looking down on idols?”
Baek Haewon flared up. Whether his younger sister did or not, Baek Haein said calmly,
“Can you stop picking fights with me? I had absolutely no intention of being sarcastic, okay? Seriously, your attitude is…….”
“Ugh, if you’re going to keep yapping, get lost!”
When Baek Haewon grabbed a cushion and threw it, Baek Haein swiftly dodged. It was a movement that showed years of accumulated skill.
“No, it’s because Kim Han was good at studying. I think he always did crazy well on mock exams. Would a kid like that be an idol now?”
“You must not have been close with him. You’re a dumbass.”
“Yeah, I only talked to him when we played soccer, you little sh*t.”
Sparks flew endlessly between the siblings.
Then, images of Kim Iwol looking exceptionally sharp flashed through Baek Haewon’s mind. Along with the fact that he had said he started life as a trainee at twenty.
Baek Haewon said to Baek Haein,
“Hey, go bring your graduation album.”
“If you’re curious, take it out and look yourself. I’m a dumbass, so I don’t even remember where something like an album would be.”
“Ugh, so annoying!”
Baek Haewon irritably mussed up her hair.
Although she had to rummage through the storage room with her own hands, Baek Haewon, with the overflowing power of love, obtained her mom’s son’s graduation album.
Inside, the youthful face of Kim Iwol and the two clear syllables “Kim Han” were printed plainly.
* * *
≫ Is Iwol’s name his real name?
The moment I saw that title, I doubted my own eyes. So I rubbed them and read the post again.
But nothing changed. The sentence asking whether my name was my real name was clear.
The post had gone up about three hours ago.
When I searched, there were a few similar posts. Fortunately, there were very few.
Judging by the feel of it, it seemed like something had been said somewhere once and had started circulating as hearsay. Probably on a community site or a private account.
It was true that I’d changed my name. True, but…….
‘Having my old name get out is a little.’
It was a headache. Because I had hated my former name terribly.
People who didn’t know the circumstances would ask when they found out I’d changed my name, “Still, it was the precious name your parents gave you. Weren’t you sad to change it?”
For reference, I wasn’t sad at all. When I thought about how they named me “Hyoil” while saying filial piety should come first, only to neglect their child, I got so angry I couldn’t not change it.
The sadder part was that my situation was better than my sister’s.
I heard my sister’s name was made by roughly shortening the name of the community service center in the district where her birth was registered. In other words, they named her with whatever was in front of their eyes.
My sister never went as far as changing her name, but I stubbornly changed mine. I filed the application as soon as I came of age.
Since my name had been changed in this life as well, I wanted to live as if my old name had never existed until the very end.
If my real name was revealed before I left Spark, it was obvious that after I returned to being a civilian, I’d hear, “Assistant Manager Kim, I heard your real name used to be ‘Hyoil’? Was there a reason you changed it?”
But it didn’t seem like the situation would go the way I wanted.
What kind of beings were idol fans? Weren’t they cyber archaeologists who could dig up old stories even the person involved had forgotten with their astonishing search skills?
No matter how much I wanted to hide the three syllables of my name, if someone exposed a single graduation album, it would all be over.
It was a name I had hidden desperately even at Hanpyeong Industries, but there was nothing I could do. I had no choice but to tell the members first that my name had been Kim Hyoil, and that I had almost lived as a Confucian boy who valued filial piety.
I sighed deeply enough to make the ground cave in and got up from my seat.
And as I was about to issue a detailed certificate to prove my words…….
“Huh?”
Something was strange.
The “Name After Change” field was correctly listed as “Kim Iwol,” but the “Name Before Change” was not “Kim Hyoil.”
Written there was the name that had been on my school uniform: “Kim Han.”
The school I attended was the same, but only the name tag and name had changed, huh.
Before this, I had gotten into university but hadn’t been able to go.
Analyzing the things I’d experienced so far, the phenomena until now could be summarized as…….
1. Major social factors such as prices, major incidents, and stock prices largely match my memories.
2. Personal factors such as my name, my parents’ residence, and my educational background are arbitrarily changed according to standards judged by the system.
……those two points.
Did this make any sense?
A person going back nine years was already unfathomable, so what meaning was there in manipulating my personal information and pulling this XX just to turn me into an idol?
My name before I changed it, of all things, was an area that had absolutely nothing to do with becoming an idol.
The fact that it even meddled with this meant the system had parts of me it wanted to control beyond KPI.
Why, exactly? What meaning did that have?
What changed just because my name went from “Kim Hyoil” to “Kim Han”?
Seeing as those people who treated their children like vermin still disappeared and left me behind, it didn’t seem like their feelings toward us had changed all that much, so why go through this annoying trouble?
At that moment, I sincerely wanted to fight the system. If not for my sister, I would have jumped out the window right then and there and made all this X-like nonsense the system had carefully designed completely meaningless.
But anger couldn’t change anything. I knew that fact very well.
Instead, I worked my brain. If I couldn’t remember the past, I had to at least predict the future. Trying to think that way, I went over the current situation again.
Whether my parents’ expectations for me had been shattered, or whether they had gotten even more sick of me than in my previous life and had cast me aside early.
The shape of my family was already very different from what I knew.
And my memories related to my family were incomplete.
Combining those two things produced a hypothesis I didn’t want to imagine.
If my sister, like me, had also been separated from our original home, and because of that, it was completely impossible to find any point of contact with her until I fully recovered my memories or achieved all the KPIs.
If, no matter what situation my sister was in, the structure forced me, lacking information, to be one-sidedly toyed with by the system…….
My mind, which had been spinning like mad, stopped in an instant.
“F*ck!”
I slammed both hands down on the dining table. I tried to endure the anger bursting out of me.
At the thought that I might have been played by the system all this time, it felt like my head would explode.
I covered my face with both hands and took a deep breath. At that moment, the system I’d seen last time suddenly came to mind.
+
[SYSTEM] A work instruction from “Supervisor” has arrived.
▶ Assistant Manager Kim, is that really necessary for your work? Have you thought enough about whether there’s a better way?
[SYSTEM] A work instruction from “Supervisor” has arrived.
▶ I’ll give you a list of supplies, so choose from these. Assistant Manager Kim needs to understand that there’s no company that takes care of you this much. Tsk.
+
The system at that time had clearly been different from the existing system.
Rather than giving me tasks like the usual system, it had spoken to me, reacted to my thoughts, and offered alternatives.
At the same time as I formed the hypothesis that interaction with the system was possible, I called up the system.
The system didn’t appear right away. So I built up my anger so that my emotions would be vividly transmitted to the system.
‘Come out, you XXX.’
The system appeared before vulgar curses could fill my head.
+
[SYSTEM] A work instruction from “Supervisor” has arrived.
▶ Assistant Manager Kim, do you know what time it is? Do you take your superior lightly? Am I someone you can contact at any hour like this?
+
‘Enough. You’d better talk straight.’
Glaring at the system, I asked.
Was my sister even alive right now?