The building hummed along in an effective way with the soft thrum of workaday life. Fluorescent lighting gave a cold, antiseptic glare on every surface, covering walls and desks in an even pall that made each hour following exactly the same as the last. The clacking of keyboards, the tinkle of the ring of a phone every now and then, and the creak of chairs created a calming background rhythm—whispered, unchanging, ignored.
Yoo Minjae rested back in his office chair on the fifteenth floor, where he usually sat in the Strategy Team 2 office corner. The screen of the monitor rested comfortably against his cheek, but the spreadsheet placed on the desk before him remained blank. Rows of numbers and projections patiently waited for his mind, but it wandered elsewhere.
His gaze skipped across a very different sheet of paper: an access log. Something that most people didn't go out of their way to read through in detail. System pings, report glances, doc downloads—it was all the normals. All normal. On the surface, at least.
But to Minjae, all little patterns counted.
And this one was not normal.
It was a report—a quarterly compliance report, run of the mill—accessible a few times in the past three days. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the user tag that had opened it. New until a short while ago, to be specific. And when Minjae checked its metadata, he saw something that made him lock up.
"Temporarily Exempt."
It was a highly selective category, one for senior-level access granted by headquarters itself. He had only observed it being utilized a dozen times or so prior to that, usually when there was someone from the Jongno office—the flagship office of Hwaryeong Group—sneakily snooping around about something.
Minjae put his arms across his chest, reclined in his chair, watching the screen. Whoever did it did not care about access seen. They left everyone uncredited for their name but the exception mark.
And this kind of discretion would go in one direction: Rennor.
He was going to look where to dig more when a soft voice snapped him out of his trance.
"Minjae-ssi?"
He settled down a bit. Ha Seori leaned back in his desk, tablet in hand, brow creased with held-back concern. She tugged at her words before speaking.
"Did you get to review the Q4 forecast variance report file? I noted down quite a number of lines that did not balance."
"I did take a look at it," he replied curtly.
She nodded, rolling eyes back to tablet. "I thought I was leaping to conclusions, but… didn't sit right. There's a credit on a sticker of budget we broke apart years ago. Supposed to be from a shell fund—but I'm fairly darn certain that fund shut down in 2020."
Minjae's eyes close. "Which branch?"
"Buenos Aires." She looked up again. "Is that a problem?
He did not react right away. Instead, he pushed back from his keyboard and opened the file she had referenced. A silence of a few seconds was followed by speech. "Where is the anomaly you noticed, precisely?" he asked.
"118th line. It is hidden subtly in the regional ledger," she said. "I almost missed it.".
Minjae scrolled, clicked, and found it. The purchase was insignificant—thousands of dollars charged against an off-limits sub-budget. It might have been written off as an error.
It wasn't.
He was quiet, however, instead sitting back and tilting his head. "I'll look at it tonight. Good eyes."
Seori smiled in a dazed way, relief and interest intermixed on her face. "Call me if you need anything."
"I will," he answered, holding still for an instant. "And good instinct, Seori-ssi."
She paled at the compliment, then let out a small, stifled laugh. "Thanks. I just thought it was… strange."
She sat back in her chair again, and Minjae continued reading. The Buenos Aires account. A shell account with a death certificate attached. And the signature on the movement log—dull but familiar.
Hours after the rest of the office workers had cleared out of the office building and lights had fallen to their night rate, Minjae held down a small shared office off of a lightly traveled side street. The tiny private office that he had leased had nothing within it but pristine white walls and a desk with an unused power source. A second computer, one which he never brought to work, rested in front of him.
In front of her on the screen were documents. Stacks of in-house memos, budgets broken down, movements of funds. Beside them were trace codes—his code, his encryption codes, designed to create patterns recognizable only to him.
And one of them was duplicated.
A code signature he had constructed his first year, under the shadow of Hwaryeong. Sloppy, embryonic work—work he had not done in years. And yet there it was, ready in the Buenos Aires trail.
Someone who triggered it knew he would catch it.
It was not surveillance. It was a message. Not that someone observed him, but that someone desired him to know they observed him.
His fingers rested on the keys, still for an extremely long moment. Then he growled to himself, "Not a coincidence."
On the executive floor of the high-rise downtown, Rennor K. Daeger's private conference room had a city view. The room was softly lit. The senior advisor leaned back against the projection screen, arms folded.
"You're shuffling Tier-3 analysts again?" the advisor wondered, surprised. "That's the third shuffle this quarter."
Rennor did not look up. He was reading a report on staff. "It is necessary."
The advisor's eyebrow shot up. "Necessary to do what? They have not rung the alarm."
Rennor's eyes flickered over a row of performance measures, then closed the folder with calculated detachment. "Sometimes motion is how things are found which static will not."
The advisor paused for a moment, then, "And if nothing is uncovered?"
Rennor continued to read.
"Then we're still closer than we were yesterday," Rennor said, returning to look out the window. The lights of the city reflected on the glass, his figure indistinct in the skyline behind him.
Minjae's living room was lit only by the dim light of a streetlamp filtering through the curtains. He lay awake on his bed, gazing at the ceiling.
The burden of something he couldn't see but was weighing him down—not from outside, but from within. Not regret. Not guilt.
Acknowledgment.
Someone had broken into a locked world, stolen his techniques, and added a caption that made sense only to him.
They were either attempting to condemn him.
Or attempt to converse with him.
And either way, the door they opened had not been closed.