[2028 – Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, Department of Transportation Technology]
A few days later, early in the morning.
The corridor of the Department of Transportation Technology was quieter than usual.
Only the hum of the printer and the faint tapping of a keyboard somewhere down the hall echoed through the still air.
Hanna walked with a coffee cup in hand, moving absentmindedly down the familiar hallway.
Even the lukewarm steam rising from her cup seemed faint and dull.
At the far end of the hall, a small group had gathered in front of the notice board.Quiet whispers.
The sound of murmuring made her slow her pace.
"…Is it true? Chief Hanna got demoted?"
"They said the decision came in overnight.
The Transport Transition TF is being handed over."
"I heard it's going to Chief Park's team…"
As she drew closer, the employees flinched and bit back their words.
Every gaze turned away from her.
Hanna stepped up to the notice board without a word.A single sheet of white paper was pinned there, as if hastily printed from the office copier.
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport – Department of Transportation TechnologyPersonnel Transfer Notice
* Chief Hanna Lee → Climate Records Analysis Division (Research Team 1)
Effective Immediately
* Transport Transition TF → reassigned to Chief Do-young Park
It was a short notice.
The stiff, dry letters seemed to sting her eyes.
She read the lines once, twice, three times, as if to make sure they were real.
The coffee cup in her hand trembled almost imperceptibly.
Her colleagues, stealing glances from the corner of their eyes, quietly drifted away.
One or two gave her a fleeting look of pity before turning their backs as if nothing had happened.
Hanna lowered her gaze to the coffee cup.
It had already gone cold.
After taking a steady breath, she lifted her head and began walking slowly down the corridor.
When she reached her desk, Hanna calmly began placing her personal belongings into a single box.
A pencil holder.
Her old laptop.
Folders of research data.
And one small book.
Each item went in carefully, one by one.
Finally, she looked at her computer screen.
The smart circuit blueprint was still open.
She moved the mouse slowly,
clicked 'Save',
then 'Exit'.
Every motion felt heavy, unhurried.
Cradling the box in her arms, Hanna walked down the corridor without once looking back.
No one called her name.
No one tried to stop her.
She passed the long hallway, opened the door—
and just then, the morning sunlight broke across her face from the far end of the corridor.
Hanna drew in a quiet breath.
Then she walked on, straight ahead.
[Outside Yoonseul's Café, 2050]
When they stepped out of Yoonseul's café, the air on the street still clung to them with a stifling heat.
The sky had turned a deep gray, but not because the sun had set.
Heavy rain clouds were already massing over the city, pressing down on the streets below, and the air beneath them was suffocatingly dense.
The asphalt, baked all day under the sun, still radiated its stored heat upward, slowing each step the three of them took.
The leaves on the roadside trees quivered faintly, but not enough to be called wind.
All that moved was the damp, heavy air that wrapped around their throats and clung like wet cloth.
Jian wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt.
Above their silent footsteps, the echoes of the conversation they'd just had—so unbelievable it still felt unreal—lingered on their skin, carrying with it a strange, unshakable tension.
Just then, Shia's tablet gave a short buzz.
She glanced at the screen and suddenly stopped in her tracks.
"…Hold on."
At the top of the city transit app, a bright red warning was flashing:
[City Metro Line ○○ – Circuit Overload Detected / All Train Service Suspended]
[Weather Alert: Nocturnal Downpour Expected – Outdoor Activity Strongly Discouraged]
"What… again?"
Jihyuk leaned over to look at Shia's screen and muttered under his breath.
A moment later, the same alert popped up on both Jian's and Jihyuk's smart bands:
[Caution: Sudden Heavy Rain Forecast After 9 PM. Expect Severe Traffic Congestion and Delays.][Rapid Temperature Drop and Flood Risk in Certain Areas. Consider Adjusting Your Return Time.]
The three of them exchanged glances.
They ran straight to the bus stop—but it was already swarming with dozens of people, milling around in confusion.
The electronic display blinked red, repeating the same message over and over:
[City Rail Lines 1–4 Service Suspended / Select Bus Routes Canceled][Climate Disaster Response: Outdoor Air Quality 'Severe' / Cooling Shelters Temporarily Open]
Someone muttered in frustration.
"Seriously, how many times is this now?
They switched everything over to these so-called transition technologies, and nothing works when it's supposed to."
"Exactly. They kept making a fuss about cutting carbon, and in the end, everything just breaks down."
Jian listened absently to the voices around her, wiping the sweat from her damp forehead.
Her breathing felt tight, constricted.
Her thoughts slowly began to tangle.
"…Was it because I said something?"
She murmured the words under her breath.
Jihyuk turned his head and looked at her.
"…I was thinking the same thing earlier.
What if we messed with it, and that changed their decision in the wrong way…?"
He lowered his gaze, pressing his lips together tightly.
"It was just something we said lightly, but if someone actually believed it and acted on it… then maybe all of this… is our fault."
Sia, who had been silent until now, finally spoke.
"That person moved because they decided they had to."
Jian and Jihyuk both lifted their heads.
"We didn't change them.
Something that was already inside them… reacted to what we said."
Sia's voice was quiet, but steady.
"And…"
She tilted her head back, eyes tracing the heavy clouds overhead.
"The future doesn't shatter that easily.
If it could collapse from just a few words… then it was never strong enough to change in the first place."
Her voice was quiet, but it carried an unshakable weight.
Jihyuk didn't answer—he only gave a slow, deliberate nod.
Beside him, Jian let out a long breath, the tension in her shoulders loosening as she lowered her gaze.
The display board flickered, its crimson letters shifting: Emergency-dispatched bus arriving soon.
Yet none of them moved.
The three stood rooted to the pavement, as if the air around them had thickened.
Long before the storm reached them, each had already crossed some unseen threshold.
What had begun as idle curiosity—and perhaps a touch of guilty responsibility—no longer felt like either.
The evening air grew heavier, the color of the sky deepening toward night.
And somewhere within that gathering dark, the next connection was waiting… unseen, but inevitable.
[2050, Aide's Office]
Early morning, in the office of a National Assembly aide.
She had arrived before dawn, the weight of the night's news already pressing down on her mind.
Record-breaking rainfall.
Subway lines crippled.
Roads collapsing under the strain of water and time.
And an endless stream of live reports from citizens.
The moment she sat at her desk and unlocked her smart-pad, the urgent headlines spilled across the screen:
"○○ Underpass wall collapses — 3 vehicles buried."
"△△ Station entrance flooded — access blocked."
"Over 74 potholes reported on major arterial roads."
"Portions of Han River bridges submerged — all vehicle traffic banned."
"Emergency discharge at ○○ Dam in southern Gyeonggi — evacuation order issued downstream."
And finally—
"Morning commute disrupted: 12 bus routes suspended / Line 3 subway partially shut down due to heavy rain."
She reached for her coffee, pausing halfway.
The cup was already cold.
She set it back down without drinking, then drew a slow, steady breath — and swallowed the knot tightening in her throat.
Some of the incidents unfolding across the country were scenarios she distinctly remembered reviewing in contingency reports.
'We saw these coming… so how did it all fall apart like this?'
She immediately pulled up the national transportation policy database.
"Seoul Metropolitan Transit Transition Policy Log""Transport Circuit System Implementation History""Energy Infrastructure Adaptation Analysis"
One by one, she opened the files—until her scrolling fingers froze.
"…That's strange."
In her memory, the Seoul of 2050 had long since been built around a smart circulation circuit:temperature-responsive distributed cooling, automated rail circuit adjustment systems, multi-layered cooling tunnels—technologies that should have been firmly in place by now.
But in the database before her, the "Smart Circulation Circuit" entry… no longer existed.
In its place was a phrase she had never seen before: Single-Circuit Network System.
Even when she dug through earlier records, the same unfamiliar term appeared.
Worse, the files for Han-na Lee—the lead engineer who was supposed to head the upcoming transit infrastructure project alongside her—were gone as well.
"…No… this is—"
The aide's breath caught as she flipped through the pages in a hurry.
Someone had rolled the system back.
Not just altered it—erased it. As if it had never existed in the first place.
Even the trial operation zone lists, once crystal-clear in her memory, had vanished entirely.
'These lines were already in service… I'm sure of it. So why—?'
She pressed a hand to her forehead.
The sudden overnight deluge, the paralyzed transit network, the people stranded or hurt…
A creeping thought wrapped around her like a shadow:this might not be just a technical failure.
From the hallway came the sound of casual chatter.
"Hey, did you take the subway today?"
"No. Line 2's completely shut down—flooded so bad they had to close it."
"Buses are backed up too. Cars got stuck in a tunnel and it's chaos down there."
"I just drove myself in early. You can't trust public transit these days."
The aide lifted her head, her gaze following the voices outside.
She turned back to her desk and hurriedly pulled up the civic complaint feed on the government's social media portal.
The outrage was immediate—splashed across the first page in bold, frantic posts.
"On my way home and the tunnel flooded. Had to abandon my car."
"People were running out of the subway station like it was a disaster movie."
"Everything's down—buses stalled, EV chargers dead."
"Can't predict a storm, can't close a tunnel… this is 2050, for crying out loud?"
"Where's the AI? Power's out, circuits are fried… there's nothing we can trust."
As she scrolled, the feed began to tilt toward conspiracy.
Speculation and rumor crowded the trending list, all circling back to the same short, cutting post from a politician—
a name she knew all too well.
'Representative Jung Jae-yoon.'
The night before, in a brief news interview, he'd said only this:
"Climate policy? In the end, it's an unproven experiment. What we need are practical solutions."
Harmless on the surface—but the weight behind those words was immense.
You couldn't just take them at face value. The real meaning was hidden in the subtle misalignments unfolding right before her eyes.
'Altered records.'
'A vanished circuit network.'
'Public transit infrastructure collapsing under a climate disaster.'
And now, once again, the return of that phrase—"realism first."
She'd forgotten about the cooling coffee cup by her side. Fingers flying, she scrolled through the feed.
#ClimateTech_Failure
#ClimateConspiracy
Within moments, hundreds of thousands of posts flooded the screen.
In the early hours, the comments had been scattered—confused.
"Is this really just a failure? You sure no one sabotaged it?"
"Did you see the train shutdown news? This is what they switched everything for?"
"Heatwave knocks out the subway, no cooling anywhere… what, are we supposed to just die?"
It didn't take long for the tone of the comments to shift.
As if on cue, conspiracy-laden narratives began to spread like wildfire.
"What if climate change itself was exaggerated?"
"It's all a scam by the global cartel."
"They wrecked the city's infrastructure on purpose—don't you see?"
Scrolling, the aide spotted linked news headlines flashing by:
"○○ Construction — Scaling Back Renewable Energy Investments"
"△△ Group — Resuming Overseas Fossil Fuel Resource Acquisition"
"◇◇ Urban Development — Scrapping Carbon-Reduction Roadmap"
The comment threads seethed with a mix of anger and resignation:
"Figures—only the profitable side survives."
"Climate policy? Just an excuse. They never planned to change anything."
"Solar, EVs—empty talk. It's all a cash grab for them."
The aide's brow furrowed.
She knew these development companies. And she knew exactly how closely they were tied to JH Group—one of Representative Jung Jae-yoon's most entrenched allies.
"…JH Group—one of Representative Jung Jae-yoon's key backers. At least, until that man changed."
The aide drew in a slow, steady breath.
This wasn't a technical failure. She was now certain—it had been meticulously orchestrated long ago.
Her fingers tapped quickly over the tablet, capturing every scrap of data on-screen.
These records would be needed. No matter what.
She rose from her seat, tablet in hand, when a memory flashed unbidden—
that brief meeting in the conference room.
A casual greeting at the copy machine from an unassuming technician.
Yet the very next morning, he had been introduced as Choi Jae-hoon, Representative of the Solar Cooperative.
She unlocked her tablet and began typing.
[Unofficial Meeting Request – Transport Infrastructure Division / Emergency Team Lead Assembly]
Then, a new file name appeared on the screen:
[Suspected Cases of Past Alteration]
And beneath it—
The growing tide of distrust in climate policy.
Each fragment was slotting into place, like a puzzle assembling itself.
'My memory is crystal clear, but reality has been rewritten as if it were a lie.
If this is a dream, it's a nightmare crafted with precision… Someone designed this.'
Her decision was set.
She switched to the social media keyword analysis system and prepared to dig.