UNFED

He said there was something he needed to see before they started. Hoon didn't stop him. Lee Jae-in offered to go with him. David said he would go alone.

Lee Jae-in looked at Hoon. Hoon nodded.

David walked around the basin alone.

He started from the eastern slope. The incline was steep. The trees were dense. He touched the soil with his hands. He stamped his feet on the ground. He visualized the blind spots a drone might miss. Where it would be visible, and where it wouldn't.

He moved to the western slope. There was a river. It was the side where James's hydroelectric facility was located. He heard the sound of water. He heard the sound of the generator. It was rhythmic.

North. It was the deepest part of the basin. There were buildings made of earth, wood, and bamboo. People were moving about. He heard voices. Some were laughing.

David watched it. For a long time. He had spent thirty years reading a place from a screen—satellite angles, signal density, traffic patterns rendered as colored overlays on a map.

This was the first time in years he had simply stood somewhere and let it tell him what it was, with no analyst's report standing between his eyes and the ground.

It was evening. Hoon found David. He was on a rock at the southern end of the basin.

"I saw it all,"

David said.

"Not yet."

"What else is there to see?"

David slowly scanned the entire basin. Then he looked at Hoon.

"I watched how people move. Where they put things. Where they gather at what times."

"So?"

"This basin is difficult to defend topographically. It's true that the entrance is narrow, but if you look down from above, you can see everything."

Hoon listened.

"So."

"We have to make what's visible different from what's actually there. We have to pretend that what's visible from above is real. And keep what's truly important inside."

It was the same idea Carlos had mentioned. Just in different words.

David continued.

"We need to change the communication method, too. Analog radio networks are fine, but if the transmission locations form a pattern, they can be tracked."

"How do we change it?"

"We have to keep changing the transmission location. We need to send the signal while moving. We can't send it from a fixed point."

That was what Yuki needed to hear. Hoon wrote it down in his notebook. By hand.

David saw it.

"Do you always write by hand?"

"Always."

David nodded.

"Good."

* * *

The next morning, David said,

"Let's get started."

Hoon looked at him.

"Today?"

"I saw everything I needed to see last night. Now I need to look inside."

Priya began to get ready. She cleared a corner of the shared workspace. She laid out a mat. She placed a bottle of water nearby.

David sat down. He closed his eyes. He began with his breathing.

Priya whispered to Hoon.

"This guy's posture is different from the very beginning."

Hoon looked over.

"Has he practiced this style before?"

"I don't know. But he's getting into it as if this isn't his first time."

* * *

[ David's Hallucination — Part One, 19 Hours ]

It was numbers.

At first, there were only numbers. File numbers. Case numbers. ID numbers. Things David had dealt with for thirty years. Numbers on screens. Printed numbers. Numbers in reports.

But behind each of those numbers was a person.

When he picked up a case number, a face appeared. A name appeared. Information about who they were and where they lived appeared. They were the people David had analyzed.

The people he had monitored. The people whose daily lives he had processed into data.

David had never seen their faces. Because they were just numbers.

Now he could see their faces.

They were faces he had never met. Yet they were faces he already knew from the data. Who lives here, who goes there. Where this person goes every Tuesday. What that person eats.

David knew all of that.

At the time, he hadn't processed the fact that he knew these things. Now, he was processing it.

One face lingered.

It was a middle-aged woman. Beirut. Case number 447-C.

It was a case David had analyzed for two years. The analysis was to determine whether this woman was a contact for a specific network. After two years, the conclusion was "no connection." The case was closed.

She had no idea she had been under surveillance for those two years.

David thought about that now. For those two years, her phone had been tapped. Her movements had been tracked. Nothing came of it. There was no connection.

He could still recall details he'd never consciously chosen to remember—the brand of coffee she bought on Thursdays, the route she walked her daughter to school, the name of the man she'd argued with on the phone twice a week, who turned out to be her brother and nothing more.

He had known the texture of this woman's life in a way her own neighbors probably didn't.

He had never once thought of it as knowing her. It had been data, organized into a file, filed under a number, and the number had been the only thing that was real to him.

But those two years had passed.

Those two years of hers.

David stared at her face for a long time.

* * *

[ David's Hallucination — Part Two, 44 Hours ]

It was the analysis room.

The analysis room where David had last worked. There were servers. There were screens. Data was flowing.

One of his colleagues called out to David.

"Levi, take a look at this."

David went over. It was a screen. A satellite image. A mountainous region in the Philippines. The Caraballo Mountains. A basin lay below. Buildings were visible. People moving looked like dots.

His colleague said,

"We've received a request for a group analysis. From higher up."

David looked at the screen.

"What do we need to know?"

"What they're doing. Why they aren't eating. How they're spreading."

David looked at the dots on the screen. They were people. Moving people. David knew what those people were doing. From outside this hallucination.

His colleague asked.

"What are you going to do?"

David looked away from the screen.

"I'm not analyzing it."

His colleague looked at him.

"It was requested by upper management."

"I know."

"From above, Levi."

David looked at his colleague.

"These people aren't just numbers."

His colleague paused for a moment.

"They're cases."

"No."

Those were the first words David had spoken in this hallucination. They were also the first words he had spoken in thirty years.

The analysis room shook. The screens went dark. The data vanished.

Only David remained.

It was an empty room.

He wasn't hungry. Strangely, that gave him a sense of relief in the darkness.

* * *

[ 72 Hours ]

It was dawn on the third day.

David's eyes opened.

All he could hear was the sound of the river. All he could hear was the sound of the hydroelectric facility.

Hoon was sitting across from him.

David said,

"I'm not hungry."

"Yeah."

David looked up at the ceiling. It was a bamboo-woven ceiling. Light began to stream in.

"I had a dream about the lab."

Hoon listened.

"The cases turned into faces. They turned into people."

There was a moment of silence.

"I'd never seen them as people before. They were just numbers."

"Case 447-C."

David said, after a while, as if testing whether the number still meant only what it used to mean.

"A woman in Beirut. I watched her for two years and never found anything, because there was nothing to find. I don't even remember deciding to close the file. It just closed, the way files close. I never once thought about what those two years cost her."

Hoon said nothing.

David tried to stand up, but his legs trembled, so he sat back down for a moment. It had been three days. Then he slowly stood up again.

Hoon stood up too.

The two of them went outside. It was a basin. The light of dawn was breaking over the ridges of the Caraballo Mountains.

David looked out at the basin.

"These people have come to do something that cannot be understood."

Hoon listened.

"Things for which there is no data. Things written by hand. Things that aren't recorded."

Hoon said.

"Right."

David paused for a moment.

"I didn't know that was possible. I thought there was nothing that hadn't been figured out in thirty years."

"Not anymore."

David looked over the entire basin once more.

"It's there."

And he said,

"We need to design a defense system—a system that separates what's visible from above from what's inside. I'll start today."

Hoon said.

"Thank you."

David looked at Hoon.

"Save the thanks for later. We have work to do right now."

That was his way. Once his thoughts were finished, it was time to work.

The sun began to rise over the Caraballo Mountains.

Gong grew one step deeper.