The makeup chair was just an interrogation seat with better key lighting.
A terrified stylist dabbed concealer on Yoo-jin's cheekbone, burying the violent continuity errors under a layer of matte foundation. The cosmetic powder smelled like cheap budget cuts and suppressed panic.
Yoo-jin didn't blink as the brush swept over his skin. He was busy scouting the location.
The military bunker had been hastily dressed to look like a legitimate press room. A sterile blue backdrop hid the blast doors, providing a neutral chroma-key canvas for the cameras.
Three heavy broadcast lenses stared at him like the dead eyes of disappointed critics.
"Ten minutes to air, talent," a guard barked, holding an assault rifle like a poorly blocked prop.
"My lighting is flat," Yoo-jin said softly. "Move the fill light two feet to the left. You're washing out my jawline."
The guard blinked, completely missing his cue. The military understood ballistics, but they were amateurs at cinematography.
Dr. Oh strutted onto the soundstage, waving a rolled-up script like a dictator's baton.
"Give him the monitor," Dr. Oh directed the sound technician.
A cold, plastic earpiece was shoved into Yoo-jin's right ear. The in-ear monitor hissed with static, connecting him directly to the director's booth.
"Mic check," Dr. Oh's voice buzzed in Yoo-jin's head, arrogant and perfectly leveled. "If you stutter, the snipers in the catwalk will cancel your season."
Yoo-jin glanced up at the steel rafters. Two laser sights painted tiny red casting marks on his chest.
He didn't panic at the lethal choreography. A showrunner never flinched at high-stakes special effects.
"The audio feed is encrypted," Yoo-jin noted, tapping the table to test the mic's gain. "But it's a two-way channel. You want to hear my breathing."
"I want to hear your compliance," Dr. Oh's voice sneered through the earpiece. "Read the prompter. Confess to the virus. Apologize to the fans."
Yoo-jin looked at the teleprompter screen mounted beneath the center camera. The digital text scrolled in bright, condescending yellow letters.
It was a terrible script. It lacked a character arc, forcing a messy redemption narrative that the core demographic would never buy.
He needed to rewrite the episode live, but he was trapped in a locked set.
Shift the genre, Yoo-jin's empty, rebooted mind whispered. Turn the hostage video into a psychological thriller.
He looked off-camera, spotting his clone understudy waiting in the wings.
Subject 735 was pacing in the shadows, desperate for his debut. The stand-in wore the same tailored suit, his face a perfect mirror of Yoo-jin's features.
But the understudy's posture was a dead giveaway. 735's shoulders were tight with stage fright, terrified of missing his mark.
Yoo-jin smiled. He had found the weak link in the production crew.
"Hey, backup dancer," Yoo-jin called out, ignoring the snipers' red dots. "Your tie is crooked. You look like a low-budget extra."
735 stopped pacing, his manufactured face flushing with genuine human anger.
"Quiet on set!" Dr. Oh snapped over the comms, losing his directorial composure.
"He's sweating," Yoo-jin continued, analyzing 735's terrified body language. "If you shoot me, he takes the stage. But he'll bomb the audition."
735 took a step out of the shadows, fists clenched, breaking his assigned blocking.
"I can read the lines perfectly," 735 hissed, his voice cracking out of its intended pitch. "I am optimized. You are just a deleted file."
"A deleted file requires a biometric sacrifice," Yoo-jin said, his voice dropping an octave to build suspense. "The factory reset burned my memory, but it proved my authenticity."
He thought of Eden, the broken android who had defied his programming to save the cast.
Eden had delivered the ultimate unscripted ad-lib. The machine had proven his humanity by breaking the rules.
Yoo-jin was going to do the exact same thing.
"Five minutes to broadcast," the floor manager shouted, raising a clipboard.
Yoo-jin reached up and tapped the earpiece hidden in his ear. He didn't pull it out. He pushed it deeper.
"Dr. Oh," Yoo-jin whispered into his lavalier mic. "You tied my heart rate monitor to the broadcast feed, didn't you?"
Silence hummed in the earpiece for a long, tense beat.
"Standard insurance policy," Dr. Oh admitted. "If your vitals spike, the teleprompter cuts the feed. We go to commercial."
"A rookie mistake," Yoo-jin leaned back in the interrogation chair, taking total control of the pacing. "You gave the actor the controls to the editing bay."
Yoo-jin closed his eyes and began to hyperventilate.
He didn't panic. He manufactured the panic, using the Stanislavski method to hijack his own nervous system.
He thought about the silver spike tearing through his shoulder. He thought about Sae-ri weeping over his empty, rebooted shell.
His chest heaved. His pulse skyrocketed, racing past 150 beats per minute.
"What is he doing?" Dr. Oh panicked over the earpiece. "His vitals are peaking! Sedate him!"
"No sedatives," Yoo-jin gasped, smiling fiercely at the main camera lens. "You can't drug the lead actor before the opening monologue."
The medical monitors in the control booth began to shriek, their alarms bleeding into the studio's audio mix.
"Sixty seconds!" the floor manager yelled, sweating profusely under the studio lights.
Subject 735 ran onto the stage, desperate to steal the spotlight before the show crashed.
"Get out of the chair," 735 demanded, grabbing Yoo-jin's shoulder to force a cast change.
Yoo-jin didn't resist. He simply grabbed the clone's wrist and pulled him directly into the center frame.
The two identical faces were suddenly captured by the main camera, shoulder to shoulder.
"Thirty seconds!"
"Get him out of the shot!" Dr. Oh screamed through the comms. "The audience can't see the duplicate!"
The security guards rushed the stage, their heavy boots ruining the audio track. But they were too late to clear the set.
The digital clock above the camera hit zero.
The red 'ON AIR' light flared to life, bright and unforgiving.
Millions of viewers across the nation tuned in for a government-sanctioned apology tour.
Instead, the audience saw two identical Han Yoo-jins wrestling in front of a fake blue screen.
Yoo-jin looked directly down the barrel of the live lens.
"Welcome to the season finale," Yoo-jin announced to the world, throwing the script into the air like confetti. "Everything you are about to see is unscripted."
The camera zoomed in on his manic, beautiful smile.