His left eyelid trembled. It wasn't Seojun's own spasm. It was the afterimage of a sensation Hyejin had last felt, six months ago. Her eyes, gazing up at the operating lights from the cold table. The fatigue in the tiny muscles around those eyes drifted through Seojun's neural network like a faint data packet. He licked his dry lips and stared at the gray wall of the waiting room. On the digital frame hanging there, meaningless geometric patterns shifted slowly.
He was alone in the Release Hearing waiting room. The 17th floor of the Quantum Bonding Authority, a windowless room. Only the hum of the air purifier filled the space. In the 30 years since the Bonding had become mandatory, he was told, Seojun was the first person ever to apply for voluntary release. Even in cases of divorce or bereavement, most people went on living with the afterimage. A familiar absence, or a faint lingering warmth. To them, the traces of the Bonding were not pain but evidence of a last remaining connection. Not for Seojun. Hyejin's final agony seeped randomly into his senses. He'd be sipping coffee in the morning and suddenly grow breathless; he'd be walking a night street and his vision would abruptly bleach white. It was the echo of death.
The door opened without a sound. A woman in a white coat stood there holding a folder.
"Please come in, Mr. Seojun Kwon."
There was no emotion in her voice at all. Seojun rose and followed the woman inside. The examination room felt even colder than the waiting room. Medical equipment, powered off, sat silent, taking up half the room, and in front of it stood a metal desk with two chairs.
"I'm Dr. Jiyeon Lim, in charge of the release procedure. Please sit."
When Seojun sat down, Dr. Lim took the seat across from him and opened the folder. She didn't look at Seojun, her eyes following the words on the page instead.
"Mr. Seojun Kwon." Dr. Lim's fingertip paused on the first line of the document. "Your spouse passed away in an accident six months ago, and the Bonding had been maintained for 15 years." Her gaze moved to the next line as she added, low, "The stated reason for your release application is 'impairment of daily life due to residual sensation following bereavement' — is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Release is a procedure with no precedent."
Only then did Dr. Lim lift her head to look at Seojun. Her eyes were sharp and dry as a scalpel.
"Technically, of course, it isn't difficult. We simply reverse the quantum tunneling protocol used to form the Bonding. The problem is the effect on the nervous system. Fifteen years. Your brain has spent longer adapted to a state where two consciousnesses coexist than it ever spent functioning alone. Do you understand what that means?"
"I've been told about the side effects."
"It may be more than what you've been told. We call it 'ontological tinnitus.' Like someone who's lost hearing in one ear still hearing a sound that isn't there. Your brain will keep searching for a signal from the other person that's gone. In that process, it may fabricate memories that never existed, or the boundary of your sense of self may come apart. It means you might stop being you."
Dr. Lim's voice was even, but every word bored into Seojun's head with its own particular weight. Seojun looked down at his hand where it lay on the desk. Long, slender fingers. Hyejin had loved this hand. She'd said it would look beautiful playing piano. The instant the memory surfaced, his fingertips went numb with pins and needles. That was Hyejin's sensation. Her hands and feet used to tingle like that often.
"I'm feeling it right now."
Seojun said.
"Hyejin's sensation. This isn't memory. It's just data debris shoving its way in, uninvited. Like a broken receiver spitting out static. I... I want it to stop."
"How can you be certain that sensation came from Hyejin?"
"Excuse me?"
"For fifteen years, your sensations and Hyejin's have never once been separate. Every experience would have been recorded in a superposed state. Isn't it possible that the tingling you're feeling right now was originally your own? You may be mistaking it for someone else's simply because it's tangled up with a memory of her."
Seojun couldn't answer. It wasn't a question he'd ever considered. My sensation and yours. That boundary was a concept he hadn't thought about even once since the Bonding. Even in the middle of a marital fight, the other's anger had merged with his own anxiety into a single storm; when they shared joy, they'd both gotten drunk on a happiness that belonged to neither of them exclusively. The very notion of a separate 'me' felt impossibly distant.
Dr. Lim seemed to take Seojun's silence simply as data, neither affirmation nor denial. She turned to the next page of the document.
"The release procedure itself is simple. It will take about thirty minutes. But by regulation, you must undergo a final psychological verification before the procedure — a Release Hearing. I'm going to ask you a series of questions now. This process exists to confirm how firm your resolve is, and whether you're prepared to bear the life that comes after release."
She lifted her pen and pointed to a blank space on the document.
"First question. What is it you hope to reclaim through the release? Answer in a single word."
Seojun hesitated for a moment. Peace? Stability? Or perhaps quiet? No word seemed to capture precisely what he longed for now. He chose the most primal word he could find.
"To be alone."
Dr. Lim wrote 'solitude' on the form. Then, without moving on to the next question, she set down her pen and looked straight at Seojun. For the first time, something different flickered across her eyes. Not analysis, not diagnosis — something like pure intellectual curiosity. She opened her mouth. Her words came slower than before, and clearer.
"Good. Then let me ask you the last question. After you're released — do you even remember what it felt like, to think alone?"
Memory. Seojun groped for the word. The feeling of thinking alone — did that even belong to the domain of memory? It was like a blind man straining to remember light. He knew light had once existed, but the sensation of its warmth and color survived only as an idea. The "I" before Hyejin had unmistakably existed. At twenty, Seojun had sat alone in the library reading law books, had walked alone through rain-slicked streets listening to old pop songs through his earphones. Those memories remained, like film reels, but the projector running them now was no longer alone. Every frame of his past bore Hyejin's faint watermark. Even the solitude before he knew her was solitude reinterpreted from the vantage point of after.
"I don't know."
The answer, when it finally came, was honest. Seojun bowed his head. He was ashamed of his own ignorance, or perhaps his forgetting. The contradiction of wanting to be alone while unable to explain what alone even was. Dr. Lim's expression didn't change, as if she'd expected exactly this. She simply wrote "cognition unavailable" in the blank on her form.
That was the exact moment. A soft, warm touch brushed across Seojun's right cheek. Startled, he raised a hand to feel it, but there was nothing there. Yet the sensation had been vivid. The warmth of Hyejin's hand, pressed to his cheek on some winter day to thaw her frozen fingers. This wasn't memory. This too was an echo. Not of pain, but of love. Seojun's heart dropped. It was an intrusion of an entirely different kind than the twitch in his left eyelid or the numbness in his fingertips. This was a sensation he hadn't wanted to lose, one he'd believed he must never forget. As he drew a breath, he thought he caught, faintly, the freesia scent of the shampoo she used to use.
"What was that — just now? What was that sensation, Seojun Kwon?"
Dr. Lim's voice cut in sharply. She missed nothing — not the faint shift in his expression, not the tremor in his pupils. Like a researcher peering at cells through a microscope, she was collecting every reaction stirring inside him as data.
"It was nothing."
Seojun lied. He didn't want to explain this feeling to her. He didn't want this warmth added to the list of "data residue to be removed." But his voice trembled, faintly. Hyejin's final agony had been unbearable, but Hyejin's final warmth — if even that vanished, what would be left of him? For the first time, a crack of doubt opened.
"You're lying." Dr. Lim said it flatly. "Your vitals say so. Your heart rate spiked, and your galvanic skin response is well outside baseline. A textbook reaction to positive sensory stimulus. Is that also part of the 'noise'?"
Under her relentless questioning, Seojun bit his lip. He had wanted to stop the pain, not erase Hyejin. But the system couldn't tell the two apart. The quantum tunnel carried agony and joy down the same channel. Block one, and of course the other would sever too. It was a simple fact he had been refusing to face.
"It's moments like these that hurt more."
Seojun said finally, as if in protest.
"A sudden flash of some happy sensation only carves more cruelly into me the reality that she's gone now. I'd rather have numb pain than torture laced with hope. So my answer is the same. This too is part of what I want to stop."
His voice carried the desperation of someone trying to convince himself. Dr. Jiyeon Lim gazed at Seojun in silence for a while. Her eyes were still unreadable, but they seemed to hold something other than their earlier sharpness. It wasn't sympathy, and it wasn't pity. It was closer to the awe of a scientist confronting some vast, unknown phenomenon.
"I understand."
She said it briefly, then signed the last page of the file. The scratch of the fountain pen's nib against paper sounded unusually loud, like the sound of a decision being stamped down. She closed the file and rose from her seat.
"The Release Hearing's verification process is complete. We will proceed with the Release. Please follow me."
The corridor was short. But to Seojun it felt like an eternity. With every step he took, March of year 15 seemed to catch at his ankles. Every moment he'd spent laughing, crying, arguing, loving with Hyejin became an invisible gravity pulling him back. At the end of this path, would he really return to being a whole "me"? Or would he simply become an incomplete being, with something as vital as Hyejin cut away?
The procedure room was far larger and darker than the consultation room. At its center stood a white unit shaped like a dentist's chair, ringed by an enormous machine in the form of a giant circle. Hundreds of tiny optical fibers were embedded in the ring's inner surface like stars. Though powered down, it radiated an overwhelming presence all its own.
"You'll lie down there. This is the Quantum Tunneling Reverse Transcription Device. It's normally used to synchronize or stabilize the Bonding, but run the protocol in reverse and Release becomes possible too."
Dr. Jiyeon Lim's explanation was as dry as if she were reciting the operating manual for a well-made machine. Seojun slowly approached the unit and lay down. The cold synthetic leather seeped a chill into his back. Once he was down, the safety restraints lowered automatically, gently securing his body. The massive ring shifted without a sound and settled into place above his head.
"The procedure takes exactly 17 minutes. You may experience some tinnitus and visual noise during the process, but that's a normal reaction. You won't lose consciousness. If anything, all your senses may become extremely heightened."
Dr. Jiyeon Lim stood before the control panel and pressed a few buttons. The optical fibers lining the ring began to emit a faint blue light. A low mechanical hum, a droning whir, filled the room. Seojun closed his eyes. This is the last time, he thought. The last moment with Hyejin's pain, Hyejin's warmth, all of Hyejin. He tried to empty himself, tried to think of nothing at all.
That was the moment. Not inside his head. A clear voice rang out, as if striking every nerve cell in his body directly. It wasn't a voice from memory. Nor was it a recording. It was vivid and present, as if someone were whispering right beside him, right now.
"Seojun, don't."
Seojun snapped his eyes open. The optical fibers, pulsing with blue light, poured into his field of vision, filling it completely. The voice was Hyejin's. But it carried a desperation—and a fear—he had never once heard in it before. It wasn't his own fear. It was unmistakably someone else's emotion. The mechanical drone grew louder, swallowing every other sound. The voice broke through once more, this time like a scream.
"Get out of there! That's—"
The voice cut off right there, as if the transmission had been abruptly severed. And what filled the silence in its place was a sensation of a kind Seojun had never experienced before. It was neither Hyejin's pain nor her joy. Complete nothingness. A sense of absolute void, as if he had been cast alone into a vast universe with every connection cut, came crashing down over his consciousness.
"Abort—!"
Seojun tried to scream, but only a rasping, phlegmy sound leaked from his throat. The enormous mechanical drone swallowed his voice whole, and the restraints locking his body down wouldn't allow even the faintest twitch of struggle. Terror consumed him completely. Hyejin's voice—it hadn't been some echo, some fading reverberation. It wasn't an echo of death. It was a desperate warning, charged with a living will. He clung desperately to the thread of his consciousness. The connection to Hyejin he had wanted to erase only moments before—now he grasped at it as though it were his only lifeline. "Hyejin, Hyejin! What did you just say!" But nothing answered his inner cry. The connection was already severing.
Standing before the control panel, Dr. Jiyeon Lim's brow furrowed slightly. On the screen, the graph of Seojun's brainwaves churned like a storm. It was a waveform utterly unlike the predicted pattern of the ontological tinnitus—one shaped instead like a response to an extreme external threat. It wasn't the stable separation curve typical of a normal Release process. The data looked less like a sharp blade making a precise excision, and more like some enormous force violently tearing Hyejin's traces out of his neural network.
"Subject is showing a strong resistance response."
Dr. Lim murmured, almost to herself, and opened another window on the screen. It was a graph showing the state of the quantum tunnel. The tunnel wasn't closing. Its exit point was being forcibly redirected from the coordinates marked 'Hyejin Kim' toward some other, unknown dimension. Her eyes narrowed. This wasn't a Release. It was closer to a Replacement.
In that instant, the sensation of blankness pressing down on Seojun changed character. It wasn't an empty universe. There was something cold and alien filling that emptiness. It was neither emotion nor memory. It was something like a lifeless intelligence, composed of pure logic and geometric patterns. The moment Hyejin's place emptied out, the sensation slid into the gap as if it had been waiting all along. Seojun understood, then, what Hyejin's warning about 'it' had meant. The 'alone' he had wanted was not this. This was not solitude. It was invasion.
'No.'
Seojun resisted the inner vortex with everything he had. What was pushing into Hyejin's place was a cold vacuum — a pure blankness with every color and warmth sucked out of it. Within that blankness, something made of geometric patterns tried to etch itself into his neural network. Like an equation in an incomprehensible language, it tried to take his self apart and reassemble it in a form of pure logic, stripped of emotion. Was this the true nature of 'alone'? A perfect order with every human chaos — love and pain, longing and rage — removed. It resembled not peace, but death.
He clung desperately to the scraps of sensation he had wanted, only moments ago, to erase. The faint tremor of his left eyelid. The tingling in his fingertips. The breathlessness of the morning, with no cause. Hyejin's pain. It was no longer noise. It was the last proof that she had existed — that they had existed together. Seojun dug into the deepest part of his memory. The scent of freesia shampoo, the warmth of the hand that used to cup his cheek, the sour, salty taste of the kimchi stew she'd clumsily cooked for him. The sensations rose up like faint flames. They were achingly fragile and irrational things before the invader's cold logic, but they were also his only weapon.
'This is mine. This is my pain, my joy. This is ours!'
As his consciousness resisted with everything it had, the invader's pressure grew fiercer still. His vision burned white, and every sound was erased from his ears. His very existence was on the verge of being reduced to a single unit of data and deleted.
"Force-abort the protocol."
Dr. Jiyeon Lim's voice, as she stood before the control panel, was cold as steel. She was watching the catastrophe unfolding as data on the screen. The quantum tunnel's coordinates were warping away from Hyejin Kim's unique signature toward some unknown region, and the pattern of the external signal trying to parasitize Seojun's neural network was of a kind that existed nowhere in the Authority's database. This was not a procedure. It was predation. Without hesitation, she brought her palm down on the red emergency stop button.
Whummmm—! The mechanical whine, sharp enough to split eardrums, rose like a death shriek before cutting off with a sudden thud. The blue light illuminating the great ring vanished, and all that remained in the procedure room was the faint red glow of the emergency lights and the sound of Seojun's ragged breathing.
With the click of the safety release, Seojun bolted upright. His whole body was drenched in sweat. He gulped at the air again and again, greedily, like a man yanked out of a vacuum and dropped back into a place thick with oxygen. Dr. Lim approached him quietly. For the first time, her face held something other than data — an expression. Wariness tangled with a faint shock.
"Are you all right, Mr. Kwon?"
Seojun didn't answer. He couldn't. He ran a slow inventory over his own body, feeling his way through his own senses. His left eyelid. Not a twitch. Calm, as if he'd slept soundly through the night. He raised his hand — the long, slender fingers someone had once told him would look lovely at a piano. No tingling, no numbness, nothing. He touched his own right cheek. No warmth answered him. Just the sensation of his own cold fingers against his own skin.
Everything was gone. Hyejin's pain, gone. Hyejin's warmth, gone. The static, the lingering echo of love — all of it, gone. Nothing remained. The connection had been severed. The invader had been repelled, but in the process, the quantum tunnel to Hyejin herself had collapsed, permanently, forever.
He had gotten what he wanted. A perfect, pure silence. Where every noise that had once scraped at his nerves used to be, no echo answered back. An absolute stillness, like standing alone in an empty room. This was the "alone" he had wanted back.
Dr. Lim studied his condition and asked, carefully.
"What... do you feel right now?"
Seojun was silent for a very long time. Then, slowly, so slowly, he lifted his head. His eyes were empty. He looked down at his own hands. Then he clenched his fists, hard. His nails bit sharply into the flesh of his palms. A clean, vivid pain shot along his nerves. No one else's pain was tangled up in it. It was entirely, completely, from beginning to end, his alone. He fixed his attention on that feeling.
