SMNTCERR, Chapter 46 <111> #1.
Memories.
Sangwoo often feels intellectually inferior due to his frequent memories of high school when he succumbed to the attempt to differentiate between boys who looked alike and while in the military. Without a name pinned on the outside, he might not be able to live a normal daily life at all.
The first memory that made him uncomfortable was when he was seven years old. Sangwoo traveled to his relatives’ house on New Year’s Day in Korea, and he made his older and younger cousins, who were five years older than him, cry while playing together.
‘Don’t make fun of my name. You… you ill-mannered person!’
‘I didn’t call her names.’
The other party ran with tears streaming down their face to find their own parents and accused Sangwoo of calling their aunt by name. Therefore, the adults asked for the root cause, and he said in front of them that his aunt’s name was “Chukkoja.” Then he saw his father angry for the first time.
On the way back home, his father apologized for making him scared and warned him not to mock others by changing their names. When Sangwoo said that he didn’t mock anyone, just mentioned his aunt’s name, his older sister mocked him as a fool who doesn’t even know his aunt’s name. She asked about the names of each older and younger sibling, and Sangwoo honestly answered, but when she asked for the eleventh name, he mistakenly answered with the eighteenth name. His father sighed, and his mother remained silent for a moment before saying that they should test his IQ.
The following week, Sangwoo went to a large hospital with his parents. The doctor in a white gown reassured Sangwoo that there was nothing to worry about and invited him to play various fun activities. However, while saying that, she forced him to draw five pictures and repeatedly asked useless questions.
‘Wow, that was fun, wasn’t it?’
‘No, I want to go home.’
In the end, he played a memory game and solved puzzles of geometric shapes he had drawn on paper. There was only that moment when he felt fun.
Later on, he learned that those activities were deep psychological tests of all thirteen types, including memory tests, personality tests in various aspects, mood tests, intelligence tests, and social skills tests. His mother also showed him the test results and explained them when Sangwoo was thirteen years old. That was when a similar conflict occurred at school and he was called stupid.
“There is no diagnosis of frontal brain damage. So you don’t have to worry. The suspected symptoms of facial blindness occur because there is not enough attachment, and it is called selective forgetting. It is not an intellectual problem. I am afraid that you will become arrogant, so I didn’t tell you. But in reality, you my child, your outstanding memory skills are excellent among the gifted.”
‘Did I do something wrong?’
‘Of course not. Originally, the human brain likes to eliminate unnecessary information. Your brain simply prioritizes differently from others and works more efficiently.’
‘I am happy that I’m not stupid.’
‘Don’t talk like that. And the doctor said that your emotions are stable, but I don’t feel it’s a problem. Besides, there are some minor symptoms of obsession with something, and you know it too.’
‘Is it really dangerous?’
‘No, it’s not that bad. It doesn’t affect our daily life. You don’t have to worry about it. I have similar symptoms, but I’ve been living without any problems.’
The ability to choose to forget is the ability to delete useless memories and retain only necessary ones. Now it’s an essential ability, but it’s strange that the brain doesn’t function normally.
The memory from yesterday is still vivid. Despite being in a weakened state due to excessive drinking, the moments after getting in Jaeyoung’s car were as clear as a high-resolution video. Not just visuals and sounds, but also smells, touches, and even taste. He remembered scenes of what Jang
Jaeyoung’s skin tasted like. How tight was the embrace, and how hot was it in the car?
The scent of sweat on the forehead, the feeling of the heart dropping when leaning against the back, the sound of Jaeyoung’s cracking joints echoing through the teeth, every whispering word near the ear, every swearing word sprayed with anger.
The time when he couldn’t remember was only before his hand fell into Jaeyoung’s hands. The rest, Sangwoo remembered in excessive detail.
“Mom, I’m in trouble.”
Sangwoo groaned softly and got up from bed, doing nothing until lunchtime. After taking a shower, he picked up pre-cooked rice and instant curry from the wall-mounted pantry to warm and eat. And when he finished washing the dishes, he went to sit in front of the computer.
Now, ‘VR, Venture’ has collapsed. Until he found another designer, working seemed meaningless, and he didn’t feel like playing games either. Sangwoo sat still without turning on the computer, but for a moment, he saw a flicker of light from the machine.
“What is it?”
He had the habit of turning off the computer when not in use to save electricity. So, he couldn’t leave the computer on for more than ten hours. As he moved the mouse, the screen brightened. Sangwoo looked at the messy folders and downloads folders open on the desktop and found videos about gay sex missing.
“…”
He started to panic, checked the trash bin to see if he accidentally deleted them, but there was none. When he checked the access log, he found a record that the folder was deleted at 00:55:21.
“Jang Jaeyoung!”
Sangwoo cursed himself, thinking that he had deleted the videos, but he was wrong. The other side couldn’t see the folder showing off on the desktop. He didn’t know what the consequences would be after Jaeyoung found out that all his information available on websites was stored there.
Unable to bear the frustration, Sangwoo permanently deleted the Jang Jaeyoung folder. His hands trembled, his face flushed, and he lived his life exposed. There was never a reason to be embarrassed, but this group only brought unfamiliar feelings. Sangwoo felt lost in the vastness of a wide ocean.
‘Sangwoo? Are you crying?’
Yesterday, he burst into tears. It was a memory he wanted to erase like a folder. Sangwoo’s last cry was during military training, when he took his sister’s magazine and slapped mosquitoes with it, getting it stained and then scolded by his sister. She sought revenge and he shed tears. He also cried when he ate spicy chicken that he bought, believing the seller’s lie that it wasn’t spicy, only to have it fill his mouth and overwhelm him with words.
Sangwoo always thought people cried too much. For example, when children gathered together on the last day of camp, lit incense, sang soft songs, and stimulated emotions. Among the sobbing crowd, like broken cogs, Sangwoo often stood out as someone who remained unaffected.
‘Hey, kid, why are you the only one not crying?’
‘I’m not sad.’
Even if he watched a sad movie, he wouldn’t be moved because no matter how sad it was, it was just a story in a film. It didn’t affect Sangwoo. At least for him crying was a reaction when something fake entered his eyes, but this time he learned one thing: when the mind feels unjust and oppressed to the extreme, tears flow out, and no matter how hard he tries, they don’t stop and continue to flow like that.
Sangwoo sat for a while and wanted to cry again. He had never known before that his ability to cope with his own stress was so pitiful. A life without anything soothing was a chaotic life. He thought the period when Jang Jaeyoung wore a red down jacket was the most difficult, but compared to what happened during this time, that period seemed peaceful.
He couldn’t overcome his desires and started an inappropriate relationship with the other party. It was as if he wanted to release his desires in the most violent way possible, almost like having something sneaked in. While trying to do something he had never done before, he was no different from a penguin trying to take wide steps to follow a phoenix with wide legs [1].
This ill-fated relationship ended just like that, starting from a group project. Even a small mistake could turn into an error that affected both the program, but Sangwoo couldn’t detect the semantic error named Jang Jaeyoung, so it’s better to stop here. Before it gets worse and hurts more than this, cutting the other party out of his life may make his condition worse, but he thought everything was the price of a completely wrong decision.
“I want to go home.”
This is the first time in his life that Sangwoo missed home so much, a home where everything went according to his mother’s plan, a home where everything was where it should be and nothing posed a danger to him. Sometimes he thought that being able to be alone might just be a boast because the world he used to believe was logical and reasonable. But once he got to know it for real, it became full of turbulent waves and pirates who brought great hardships that shot cannons at Sangwoo’s sinking ship.
Sangwoo slammed the keyboard and slowly slumped his face down before the ship sank, while scattered thoughts emerged in his mind as he was in a daze.
‘I want to see… when you dressed up as a pirate gangster.’
When he realized that endorphins were released in this situation, he was almost going crazy. It was time to go see that doctor again to check if his brain had any abnormalities.
Sangwoo moved the mouse to open the browser while still slumping at the table, and clicked on Jaeyoung’s SNS from his bookmark list. However, the last post was still a photo taken with Sangwoo during a Chinese drama performance. He clicked and searched only a few times, and images uploaded by someone he didn’t know appeared.
Search, click, click, capture, search, click, capture, click, search, capture, click, search, capture.
#Hankuk Festival, #Competition, #Spirit Liquor Booth, #Hankuk Drama Club.
A smiling white-faced vampire, a pale-faced vampire, a frightening-faced vampire, a vampire with plates and cutlery held in one hand, on one arm, and three bottles of soju in the other hand. Jang Jaeyoung, who had removed his makeup but still looked radiant in the group photo, wanted to see more pictures, but he found only eight images.
Sangwoo opened the data recovery program and restored Jang Jaeyoung’s folder. Then he renamed the saved images according to the format.
‘I probably can’t delete them… for now… I still can’t do it… let’s try again later.’
One day seemed endlessly long. Sangwoo took a long nap to deal with extreme stress. Then he got up and cleaned every nook and cranny of the house before having a simple dinner. Afterwards, after playing a few games, he removed all the keycaps from the keyboard to clean off the dust and dirt. After that, there was still some time left, so he exercised as usual, starting with floor exercises and other five sets. When he finished, he took a shower, and by the time he finished preparing to sleep, it was almost midnight.
At midnight, he usually reserved a seat in the library and checked his email. He didn’t need to go to university because he had no classes until Wednesday, so he skipped the seat reservation process and opened his inbox, but there was nothing interesting. There were only newsletters from game companies he had subscribed to and grammar lesson emails in English that usually came once a week. He opened and organized them all into categories. Then there was one more email.
[0430 Assignment.
Sender │Jae. J.
4/30, Assignment Details.
Edit the requested particle[2].
Add object[3] of weapon category.
Maps, Lv7-10.
Reset Nolimit mode.
UI of Ladder Ranking[4].
Large attachment file: 0430.zip.]
Sangwoo opened the email and just stared at it for three minutes. He didn’t know what the other party wanted him to do. After creating that chaos, the other party acted like nothing happened. What’s more, even though Sangwoo had requested it multiple times, Jaeyoung never sent the work via email at midnight. If he didn’t upload the file, he would bring the hard disk with him to the meeting.
When Sangwoo downloaded the attached file to check, he was surprised. There wasn’t a single file name that matched the guidelines or was spelled correctly, not even one file.
“It can’t get any more complete than this.”
The other party did a lot for one day. He followed the schedule and completed 50% of the postponed work, but despite that, there was no trace of the burned work at all, even after careful inspection, not even a single mistake. After organizing the files according to the headings… Sangwoo felt a little excited. Then he closed the program window.
‘Well, I know it’s designed well, but what does it all mean?’
He tried checking his phone for incoming messages, hoping to find something, but found nothing. Sangwoo was left in a state of confusion. return 0;.
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[1] The phrase “뱁새가, 황새를, 따라가면, 다리가, 찢어진다”
means “If a
pheasant follows a crane, its legs will be torn apart.” It means doing something beyond one’s ability, imitating someone superior even when one lacks wealth or ability.
[2] Particle. Various effects, details of things. In games, such as maps, characters, items.
[3] Object. For games, it refers to various components within the game, such as characters, items, obstacles like trees, walls, buildings.
[4] Ladder, Ranking, ranking based on total scores, subtracting wins from losses.
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