Ghosts of Eternity

It felt as if he could hear his bank balance being shaved down, digit by digit.

The sheer weight of the cash consumed just to keep Aether Bio—the massive, organic machine Lee Seo-han had built—breathing was staggering. Overseas investments had stalled in the aftermath of the military conflict between the United States and Iran, and the highly anticipated open innovation program with a global big pharma company was moving at a snail's pace, blunted by the wall of bureaucracy.

Seo-han casually tossed the report for his follow-up immunosuppressive antibody pipeline onto the sleek metal surface of his desk. The second-round presentation evaluation had been completed flawlessly, immaculate in both data integrity and logical structure. All that remained was the third-round face-to-face evaluation, a stage vulnerable to the subjective judgment of the panelists, but the timeline was stretching out indefinitely due to internal politics and conflicting interests on the partner’s side.

Beyond the glass partition of the laboratory, researchers were entirely absorbed in checking culture media and analyzing the latest data at their respective benches. Having completed the logic—the blueprint—Seo-han, as CEO, no longer needed to intervene in their precise manual labor. However, after setting aside the clinical trial costs for the primary pipeline, the surplus funds required to initiate cell line development or preclinical toxicity testing for follow-up candidates had virtually dried up.

A profound silence reigned within the executive office. Seo-han sank deep into his leather chair, staring into the monochromatic vacuum of the ceiling where all the lights had been extinguished.

Through the floor-to-ceiling window, the red taillights of the cars packing Teheran-ro flowed like a river of data, but the city’s brilliant noise was deflected coldly away, unable to pierce the vacuum surrounding his skin. To anyone else, it would be a mundane view of a grueling evening commute, but to him, it was merely an unreadable sequence of highly fragmented, illogical symbols.

It was not merely the pressure of a dwindling balance that weighed on his heart. At 7 p.m., when all external connections were severed and he was left entirely alone, a fierce and transparent solitude crept in like venom, consuming him.

"Data never lies, yet people are so illogical and difficult," Seo-han muttered dryly to himself, biting his lip faintly.

The names of the upper-class women that Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun kept thrusting into his orbit like offerings to secure their own safety and youth. The brilliant profiles attached to those names flashed through his mind like rows of sorted data on an Excel sheet. Behind those names lay striking appearances, an intellect so precise it bordered on chilling, and profiles flawlessly arranged with family backgrounds and elite credentials. Yet, Seo-han’s precise heart rate monitor had never once drifted from its baseline or shown an irregular pulse before any of those perfect profiles.

Why had he never experienced a genuine human relationship, even now, past the age of forty? For the past fifteen years, spanning his graduate school days to the post-founding era, he had consoled himself with the excuse that he had mortgaged his youth and life under the blue light of the lab, wrestling with molecular structures. But the truth behind that excuse coiled in a much deeper, colder place.

Seo-han suddenly recalled a winter night during his senior year of high school. It was a time when he was exhausting his brain researching build orders for StarCraft late into the night, when a bizarre and intense event occurred. A female celebrity whose name he barely even registered—someone hovering on the absolute periphery of his screen—appeared in his dream without warning.

In that dream, which was as vivid as a lucid dream, she gently took Seo-han’s hand, and they walked along a distant, unfamiliar beach. Her voice was sweeter than the sound of breaking waves, and the contact of their skin carried an unrealistic warmth, like the coziness of freshly baked bread. That uncanny encounter continued for two consecutive nights. The exact same face, the exact same warmth, and a dialogue of souls that ran far deeper than the night before. That dream had visited him and left a brand on his heart.

When the young Seo-han awoke, a massive black hole that nothing could fill had been torn into his chest. As if his brain’s reward circuitry had been forcibly rewired by the powerful signals of those two nights, he began to brutally compare every real-world relationship to the woman in his dream. The boy who had fallen in love with a two-night illusion as if it were destiny could not stomach the friction inherent in the clumsy, imperfect relationships of the real world.

Seo-han tapped the desk, trying to shake off the remnants of the past. But for a mere error, the residual effect was far too destructive and permanent. The aesthetic standards and emotional threshold set by that dream had already pierced the ceiling, soaring into orbit far beyond the universe. Conventional beauty had already become a basic prerequisite, and because he sought the absolute intensity of connection he had felt in that dream within real human interactions, every real-world encounter felt like incomplete data with missing variables.

It was not a blessing that had awakened true love; it was a curse that rendered the clumsy love of reality fundamentally impossible.

In his youth, he had imagined love to be a complex organic compound that ignited at first sight. Thinking like an immunologist, he had been convinced that just as a specific receptor must bind flawlessly to a specific ligand to trigger an immediate immune response, love too had to be a static result striking like lightning.

Consequently, Seo-han had never once considered the tedious process of 'accumulation' in a relationship. He could not comprehend the exhausting friction of time spent sharing mundane daily routines, being disappointed by each other's trivial and unseemly habits, and then messily reconciling. Like removing noise from data, he had dismissed the unnecessary emotional drain generated by relationships as a severe inefficiency and rejected it.

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Even as he held the supply lines of Ghost—a system destined to be valued in the trillions—and stood at the center of a mechanism that South Korea’s highest authorities themselves referred to as a leash, Seo-han was still profoundly alone. He remained unable to logically define even the smallest warmth beside him.

Seo-han pulled the Ghost 2.0 nasal spray case from his coat pocket. The cold, smooth plastic registered against his palm.

"Is this, too, the will of the universe, or merely the final trick played by my broken synapses?"

He held it tightly, without opening the spray cap, as if grasping his final bastion. Above the empty office, only the monotonous drone of the HVAC system filled the emptiness.

Leaving the dry silence of his office behind, Seo-han pressed down firmly on the accelerator of his Grandeur. The amber streetlights along Gangbyeonbuk-ro blurred into surreal lines against the car window as they swept past. The phone number that had been flashing on his smartphone screen for days blinked once more. Seo-han steadied the faint tremor at the tips of his fingers on the steering wheel and pressed the call button.

In a secluded alley in Cheongdam-dong, a massive, copper-colored door devoid of any signage greeted him.

Inside Avalon, a heavy, oppressive warmth enveloped his skin, contrasting with the chilly night air. The air was thick with a cold, concentrated fragrance, as if entire rose stems had been crushed into it.

"You actually came, Doctor."

Chae Do-hee was leaning back against a deep teal velvet chair in the innermost private room. Her wine-colored silk dress, which completely exposed the line of her shoulders, shimmered vibrantly under the low lights. Every time she tilted her head, the drop earrings dangling from her earlobes scattered fractured brilliance in all directions.

Lee Seo-han took his place in the center of the room, wrapped in a heavy overcoat over a jet-black turtleneck. The knuckles of his fingers were stiff as he pushed up the glasses that had slipped slightly down the bridge of his nose.

With slender fingers, Do-hee poured a colorless, potent spirit into a glass. The sharp friction of ice breaking the silence seemed to scrape against the room. Holding the glass, she glided over soundlessly, slipping into his personal space. The heavy floral scent, mingled with the subtle heat of her skin, struck Seo-han’s senses sharply.

"There have been so many articles about Aether Bio lately. I was just wondering how much grander I would have to become to lure someone as valuable as you into a humble place like this," Do-hee said, a seductive curve gracing her lips as she offered him the drink.

Seo-han accepted it silently. The condensation forming on the cold glass surface sharply awakened the senses in his palm.

"The media always enjoys adding unnecessary weight to things," Seo-han replied flatly. "I simply... needed someone to talk to."

The tips of Do-hee’s fingers froze imperceptibly before pulling away. To an empress of the social world who had anticipated a multi-million-won business proposal or a grand seduction, the words 'needed someone to talk to' coming from a scientist capable of shaking the nation was an unexpected, direct approach. Do-hee set her glass down and slowly sat beside him.

"Someone to talk to? Based on the information that crosses my desk, titans are lining up just for a chance to socialize with you. Why here, when so many glittering connections are lining up for you?"

“They want my technology or my shares, not a conversation.”

The response was dry but pointed, and the potent liquor he swallowed left a burning sensation tracing down his throat. As the heat reached his chest, Do-hee pressed closer against his shoulder, lightly brushing the collar of his coat. The smooth texture of her silk dress grazed the back of his hand. He maintained a composed gaze, ignoring her practiced allure, but he could not block out the intimate whisper brushing against his ear.

"You truly are a mystery, Doctor. A man aiming to conquer aging, yet here you are in this small room, acting like a lost child. Like someone who has misplaced their destination."

Seo-han glanced at her from the corner of his eye. Her lips, painted in vivid crimson, curved into an elegant, subtle arc.

"The destination is clear," Seo-han said precisely. "It is just that... reality differs greatly from the dream, causing me to pause momentarily."

"So a lost child in my room is your true self?"

"Not necessarily."

"Hmph. How dry."

Do-hee reached toward Seo-han’s neck, lightly adjusting the collar of his coat.

"For a scientist running a biotech venture, you keep your collar surprisingly stiff. It’s not as if you lack precision. You seem like a man who only feels at ease when something is fastened tight around his throat."

The unexpected observation, paired with the sudden intrusion of her heavy fragrance, disrupted Seo-han’s rigid composure. The deep scent of roses emanating from Do-hee’s hair beneath Avalon’s specialized lighting violently dismantled his senses, which had been preserved amid the sterile scent of ethanol and the mechanical hum of a cold laboratory.

An unfamiliar thumping resonated from the depths of his chest. Before he knew it, Seo-han exhaled a short breath trapped in his lungs, letting the tension drain from his body. A solitary, dry laugh—completely unpredicted—escaped his stiff throat like a phantom.

In that instant, Seo-han froze, startled by his own reaction.

How long had it been since he had felt a fleeting moment of genuine amusement through a conversation with someone—not driven by data or business interests, but by exchanging a pure jest? Instead of the clinical ticking of the lab clock or the monotonous hum of high-capacity analyzers, his brain’s reward circuitry was reacting dynamically to a joke laced with human warmth and raw desire. It was a primitive, dangerous stimulus, entirely different in nature from the neurological high delivered by Ghost 2.0.

Do-hee’s expression shifted subtly as well. The seductive playfulness vanished instantly from her eyes, which had been teasing him with practiced ease. As if she had instinctively captured the profound loneliness and emotional deficit hidden behind that brief laugh, her eyes gleamed with curiosity as she scrutinized every nuance of his expression.

Seo-han’s heart hammered against his ribs at a tempo faster than usual. This was not an artificial pulse forced upward by a substance. It was an uncontrollable biological error, manifested only within the proximity of another human's warmth.

"Doctor, do you realize you just smiled?"

Do-hee closed the distance until her breath practically brushed his skin, her hand subtly gripping his shirt collar. Her drop earrings swayed gently near Seo-han’s jawline, disrupting his field of vision.

"You always looked so sharply edged, as if carrying the weight of the entire world on your own. You look much more charming when you smile like that."

A genuine smile played on Do-hee’s lips.

"In fact, now you finally look like a man ready to have a real 'conversation'."

Instead of answering the provocative compliment, Seo-han drained the remaining liquor in a single swallow. The ice cracked against his lips, leaving a sharp chill on the tip of his tongue.

Seo-han stared at the unfamiliar reaction still vibrating faintly deep within his chest.

An anomaly that neither Ghost, nor data, nor the most perfect of profiles could ever trigger.

Chae Do-hee called it a smile.