Whenever I wanted to transcend myself, I thought it was impossible. Even the most dangerous thoughts, when they pressed against the limits of my mind, failed to satisfy me enough to set me in motion. And in depression, movement mattered more than anything. The word importance was fragile. The moment I closed my eyes, colors bled into one another. As we walked forward, I stopped at every holo-screen that appeared before us and looked at my task: [Hope]
Along with the hunger twisting in my stomach and the thirst scorching my throat, Sis and I walked who knows how many meters. Holo-screens appeared before us at regular intervals. The pixels of that suddenly emerging blue light flickered like broken bar signs. With squinted eyes, tired hands, and cracked lips, I asked Sis,
"How much farther do we have to walk?"
She let out a sharp breath, feeding the slowly growing fire of silence between us.
The moment I realized she didn't know the answer either, my steps came to a halt.
"I'm exhausted," I said, as if expecting her to do something about it.
But I wasn't.
When she looked at me carefully with eyes soaked in darkness, she seemed to nod faintly. Every thought in my head had tangled into one another. What I was experiencing here was more than hunger and thirst. More even than depression. It was torture. Maybe degradation. Or maybe just standing still and thinking about how much more my life could be ruined.
To ignore the fatigue burning in the soles of my feet, I kept walking—more calmly, with smaller steps, slowly, without forcing myself.
Sis didn't speak. She said nothing at all. But I knew she was just as curious as I was about the answers to the inevitable questions.
The straight road stretching out before us was like a vast sea. A sea for which we had abandoned ourselves just to see the shore.
"I don't understand," she said coldly; the light reflecting from meters above cast her hair's shadow across her face. A hardened expression formed in her brows. Struggling to swallow, I buried a deep breath into my lungs.
"Is this it? Just a game?"
Both our eyes dropped to the ground at the same time—to where our feet touched the earth. We weren't the losers of this game, but the game was going to sacrifice us. Sooner or later, we would turn into one of those people, leaving nothing behind but blood spilled across the floor.
Here, human life was worth less than a trash bin.
Were we imprisoned here because we didn't value ourselves?
Because we didn't care about ourselves, did others stop caring too?
If so, this was a heavy punishment. I believe in justice, in law, fine. But even in that crushing process, I hadn't surrendered to death, hadn't believed in its endlessly soothing power.
Before long, a small shack appeared ahead of us. At first it was just a dot, then it slowly turned into a crescent, and eventually into the outer frame of a stone wall.
"There's something there," I shouted, breaking free from the silence. A faint smile flickered on my lips.
Sis must have noticed it before I did—she nodded. But she didn't seem as pleased as I was.
"What do you think it is?" I asked, then ran toward the shack with whatever strength I had left. She followed behind me like a distant point. As I got closer, clapping my hands in excitement at seeing something different, it finally hit me where I was. Death crossed my mind. Women crossed my mind. I fell silent. When the stench of urine reached my nose, I cursed and covered it. It wasn't hard to understand that this place was a toilet.
The shack had a flimsy wooden door, oddly fragile compared to everything else. It looked like a hastily built village latrine. I went inside to relieve myself. As the smell grew sharper, my breath almost caught. Inside, there was only a toilet and a hose attached to the end of a faucet. It resembled a tiny, cramped cubicle.
Before finishing, I turned on the water from the double-tied faucet above. There was some liquid soap in the corner. Taking this as good news, I forced my hands to lather and wash them. Then, with my newly clean hands, I drank a little from the high-flowing tap—even though it disgusted me.
When I stepped outside and looked around, I noticed Sis leaning against the corner of the opposite wall.
"Tired?" I called out from a distance.
She watched me from where she stood.
"Look…" Her gaze landed on my face.
"Where?" I laughed angrily.
"What is there to look at—a patch of sky?"
Ignoring me, she said, "Don't be disappointed, but…" and then paused.
"Well?" I snapped, unable to hold back.
"In short…" I could feel her clenching her jaw. Only someone who had hit the bottom of disappointment could be wrapped in such stubborn anger.
"No matter where you walk, there's no food."
I waited a moment.
"You're making this up out of exhaustion," I objected.
"I'm sure we'll find food—just like that man said. Otherwise, everyone else here would have starved to death."
Pitch-black darkness surfaced in her eyes.
"No…" she said, rubbing her chin as if tense.
"Coming this far was a mistake."
What could I say? I didn't even know her.
"I can go the rest of the way alone," I continued.
"You're not obligated to anything."
"Fine," she said, crossing her arms.
"I just wanted to warn you."
I fixed my eyes on the holo-screen glowing a few meters to the right of the wall.
"My task is to hope."
Her head nodded heavily, unevenly.
"Yes," she replied sincerely.
"But I don't have a task…"
"What if you're wrong?" I warned.
"I guess you still don't understand that nothing applies outside the holo-screens," she replied, her voice not harsh.
"No," I said.
"I understand. The holo-screens, the group… I'll understand what all of them mean."
[Task Completed]
A checkmark appeared beside my name within the blue reflection.
I relaxed.
"Look!" I said, walking toward the screen.
I could feel her body remaining somewhere behind me.
Had I really managed to hope?
For the few seconds my back was turned to her, I thought about the answers to those questions. For some reason, my temples throbbed. A sharp ache cut through my stomach. My hands trembled as if ice packs had been placed on them, and a chill flowing from my nape down my spine spread through my entire body.
She… was somewhere behind me.
Just a stranger.
Just a player of a mechanism who shared my fate.
So why were my vision darkening?
Why did the presence of this unfamiliar person behind me unsettle me so deeply?
As my thoughts crashed into the ruined harbor of my mind, they tore the ships apart as well.
Who was I?
To suppress even a fraction of the pain caused by the rushing thoughts, I clenched all my teeth with every ounce of strength I had.
I didn't know why I did what I did, and what I did know was unreliable.
Whatever happened in that moment happened—I felt something enter through my back. My blood… froze. My own image… appeared before me, as if in an imaginary mirror far away. There were four scratches on it. My reflection lay beneath those four lines like a moldy photograph.
"Death," I was whispering.
"Death."
Everything had been condemned to a pitiful silence.
I felt the warm blood flowing from my waist spill onto the ground. My back burned fiercely, then went numb with ice. Only him—the mighty darkness of his presence—spread over all my light like a thick carpet.
I was stabbed in the back.
Like a dead body.