The sky is dyed the bluest blue she's ever seen. Sun catches in the corners of her eyes, the faded silhouette of the moon showing its pale face down toward her – a simple reminder that the night actually existed. Tapes whir in the background as usual, loud and persistent even over the stereo on her desk.

The first song of this particular morning is Norah Jones. "Don't Know Why." Seulgi adjusts the brim of her beige hat before sitting back down, folding her hands into the lap of her pink floral-print skirt. Turns up the sound. She keeps staring out the window, from the only occupied desk on the floor.

The tapes are such a goddamn nuisance.









Two hours pass. The stereo’s been turned off. People start filtering into headquarters, a sea of straight-sided, flat-brimmed beige hats flowing up and down the white staircases to get to their respective positions. Curt hello's and good morning, how are you's are exchanged, no one stopping or slowing the pace of their gait to actually engage in drawn-out conversation. Yerim waves to her on her way down to the production level, where the engines that power the conveyor belts are starting up, causing all the floors above it to vibrate. A standard morning at headquarters.

"Mornin', Seulgi," someone calls over her shoulder. She turns her head to catch the speaker, but he comes up beside her, hanging his dark seafoam coat onto the back of the chair in the desk next to hers. The crooked plaque on his desk reflects sunlight into her eyes. Kim Sungjoo, in small, blocky lettering. "Thanks for taking graveyard for me yesterday," he smiles, maybe apologetic, maybe not. She narrows her eyes. It was hard to tell whenever Sungjoo was being serious or not about anything.

He keeps smiling, expecting. Undecipherable. "No problem," she shrugs, brushing an imaginary speck of dust off the corner of her desk. "You know the tapes drive me crazy, though."

Sungjoo chuckles softly. He lifts his hat off his slicked-back hair for a moment, trying to flatten out the wrinkled brim, before realizing the attempt is futile. Places it back on his head, crookedly. "Well, I don't think the ringing phones of the fifth floor would be much different. Joohyun's all but diagnosed with tinnitus, you know." The mischievous twinkle in his eyes just makes Seulgi frown.

"Isn't it too early in the morning for you to be teasing me?" she groans into the palms of her hands. The hands of the clock are almost at eight o'clock, the official start of their work day. Seungwan, a few rows away, scrambles to get the files sitting on her desk in order. Sungjoo follows her lead, while Seulgi just closes her eyes and covers her ears, as if it’ll dampen the constant whirring of the tapes.

Seven fifty-nine. Sungjoo leans over slightly and whispers, "At least you won't be alone for graveyard today." Seulgi makes sure he can see her roll her eyes at him before she faces forward again. He smooths the front of his plaid vest and turns his eyes forward as well.

The hand hits eight. Sheets full of black, fine print, propelled by the spinning of the tapes, start shooting out of the reels. Voices start reiterating the wishes printed on the sheets, the sounds of paper rustling and binder rings snapping open and closed filling the office.

Half the desks on the floor are still empty.









The week before Kang Seulgi was born, her mother met the love of her life on the corner of one of the busiest intersections in the city. Until her mother arrived at that particular intersection and bumped into that particular man, she'd been quite in love with the man who was Seulgi's father. He had accompanied her to all her visits to the doctor, eagerly awaiting to meet their child, worked extra shifts to pay for everything they’d anticipated the baby would need – he was a good man. And though she knew all this, Seulgi's mother could not, for the life of her, get the stranger and his words, pardon, I'm so sorry out of her mind. So she packed her things and moved to find this stranger, promising to herself and the-still-unborn Seulgi to live life with no regrets.

Seulgi remembered all this. She knew the stranger, who her mother, by a disarming of luck, ended up marrying, whom she called “father”, was not her biological father. She remembered every word he and her mother said before her. Though as a child, she could not understand the meaning of their sounds, as she grew older and began to speak and read and write, she slowly began deciphering their messages.

She could recall with perfect clarity how much it hurt when she jumped off the monkey bars and broke her arm in second grade – the way tears leaked out of her eyes all the way to the hospital and how she bit her bottom lip until it bleed trying to keep the sobs in because second graders don’t cry. Who signed her cast first after that. Every memory, every experience, every person that touched Seulgi's life, she remembered with an almost disturbing attention to detail, filed away and able to be recalled whenever she wished.

All this made Seulgi rather sensitive to new experiences. She would spend months thinking about her memories, pulling them apart with her mind, and then putting them back together. What makes me how I am now? Is breaking my arm on the monkey bars way back then the reason why I'm hesitant to jump from short ledges now? Questions like these interrupted her train of thought often. Until Seulgi deconstructed each experience thoroughly, she wouldn't dare do anything that could possibly expose herself to something new. This led to months of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking only the red juice packs from the assorted box set her "father" bought from the supermarket. Wearing the same pair of sneakers even when her sock-covered toes wiggled through holes in the front. Insisting on staying friends with people she no longer enjoyed the company of.

Seulgi's an interesting child, her mother's friends would tell her. Sometimes even her mother herself would use this phrase to justify her daughter’s peculiar behavior. Her “father” described it differently. She's just deathly afraid of change, she overheard him sighing to her mother one night, when they both thought she was asleep. He was shaving then. Thus, Seulgi associates hushed conversations today with shaving cream and finding short whiskers in the sink when she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night to pee.

They just simply didn't get it. At some point, her "father" started sticking blue juice packs in her lunches (which she discovered she enjoyed), and her mother began rolling her eyes whenever Seulgi would bring up her usual "I just need to give it some time" line.

"How much time?" her mother snapped one day. Seulgi flinched at that. And in between her mother's words and the flinch was the startling revelation that not everyone had a memory like hers, that the details she remembered went fuzzy for others.

It took a while for Seulgi to deconstruct that idea. And after she was done understanding, she accepted new pairs of sneakers when they arrived for her in the mail. Made new friends. Ate all different kinds of food. So it was just a phase, she heard her mother sigh in relief one day (when her "father" was shaving again). But the thought in the back of her mind that kept surfacing was were there other people out there in the world like her?

She was in her last year of university when the answer came to her. He was wearing a beige hat with a wrinkled brim, a dark seafoam jacket over a plaid vest and dress shirt. She'd walked past him once before, at one of the busiest intersections in the city, several people separating them. Anyone without her memory would have passed her by without a second glance, without a hint of recognition. But the twinkle in his eyes told her that he remembered her from then, too. Could it be -

"Excuse me, but," Seulgi started. The man stopped. He couldn't be much older than her, if he even was. He looked down at her, almost amused. "I know you."

He chuckled. "You do, don't you?" Lifted his hat and ran a hand through his messy hair, a look suggesting deep thought tugging the corners of his mouth downwards. After a moment, he reached for something in the pocket of his vest and handed it to her. A business card. And as Seulgi was attempting to quickly make sense of the entire encounter (old habits die hard), he walked away.

She looked down at the card. Only after several moments did the tiny black print register as words in her mind. Even then, she had to squint to make sure she was reading them correctly.

Senior Processor, Kim Sungjoo. Wishgranters HQ.









Work is never as hard as it is tedious. As crazy as the whirring drives Seulgi, she's a natural at the tapes, organizing and deconstructing the words that come through the reels, putting everything into their respective files. Just like her brain, she likes to think.

Sungjoo raises his voice to talk to her over the clamor of the rest of the floor. "I think our first Christmas wish just came in for the year," he smiles. Seulgi snorts, but not dismissively. Christmas wishes were some of her favorites to send to production. "Just not coal. Wonder how this kid's Christmas went last year."

"Make sure that one doesn't go to Yerim," Seulgi warns, clipping several wishes to a file. "She'll probably end up giving the kid a black rock."

Sungjoo shakes his head. "I've seen Yerim make lovely Christmas gifts before." Seulgi can't help but roll her eyes again. "It's Sooyoung you've gotta watch out for."

She laughs at that.









Ten PM. The main floor lights are off, but desk lamps create little halos of light around beige hats bent over reels and sheets of white paper. More than half the desks are empty now.

Rain pelts against the window next to Seulgi's desk. Strange, she thinks, remembering the blue, blue, cloudless sky from earlier that day. Had yesterday's forecast predicted rain? It drowns out the whirring of the tapes.

The engines have long hummed to a halt below them. Now, it's just the rain, the ticking clock, and fingers rustling through paper. Hats leave one by one, the occasional bright yellow umbrella cutting through the black of night outside, disappearing onto cable cars. By midnight, it's just her and Sungjoo left on the floor, covering the graveyard shift, making sure the tapes keep whirring.

There used to be more of them, and the main floor lights would stay on, processing wishes until morning when everyone else would come in for a day's work, go home and sleep the day away, and then do it all again. All the desks were filled back then, too. Sometime several years ago, wishes just stopped coming in like they used to (some speculated the proliferation of the phrase “be careful what you wish for" had something to do with it), and then they'd been forced to lay off processors to stay in business. It didn't help that headquarters had acquired Accepted Realities not long before then, a business venture the managerial floor had almost unanimously supported ("What does reality really have to do with wish granting?" Joohyun had complained to her for several months whenever they spoke), and were still waiting for the profits to show.

"You think people would notice if the whole company just shut down?" Seulgi mused aloud once. "If we all just went on strike or something?"

Sungjoo looked at her. Looked back at the roll of white paper caught between his fingers. "That's just the thing," he said, ambiguous smile tugging at his lips. "They probably wouldn't."

Seulgi furrowed her eyebrows. The light from her lamp was harsh against darkness of the floor, burning yellow bulbs into her vision. Sungjoo was looking at her through that light. "But ungranted wishes would make wishing itself arbitrary, and then people would cease to do so. The act of wishing would go - how should I phrase it - extinct." The way the word rolled off his tongue made it sound final, cataclysmic. He leaned back in his chair, wrinkling his dark seafoam coat, a murky color in the night, further. "The human race wouldn't even know what it was missing."

She thought about it. Pulled the idea apart with her mind. Put it back together again. "Is that so bad though? Change, if you don't even know what's out of place?"

He picked up the paper again, his eyes still on her. Leaned toward her slightly, the space between them still large, the pitch black between their desk lamps making the few feet seem like an abyss. "But we're terrified of change," Sungjoo said, in a hushed voice. Leaned back again and went back to the rolls and files on his desk.

Seulgi remembers thinking of shaving cream and finding short whiskers in the sink bowl during the middle of the night then. Now, the raindrops against the window sound like hands slapping against the glass. She glances outside.

The next time she remembers this particular night, Seulgi guesses she'll recall recalling this memory and the sensation of picking her "father's" shavings up with a paper towel.









Two AM. The toilet flushes. Seulgi rinses her hands in the sink. The fluorescent lights in the bathroom flicker, rain still falling outside. What a storm, she thinks in between calculating how many hours it'll be until her next day off. What a storm. Walks out of the bathroom. The lights go off behind her.

Sungjoo's standing next to the wall where all the tapes whir, fist propping up his chin in thought. The floor is quiet, despite the echoes of raindrops pelting outside. Eerily quiet. Seulgi slows her steps. The floor's never been this silent before.

The base of her skull begins to tingle. Something's wrong. Something must be wrong. She tries to deconstruct the thought, the situation, pull apart the idea, put it back together – repeat, repeat, repeat – why is it so quiet –

Sungjoo turns toward her. The faint hint of light from their desk lamps catches on the panic in his eyes. Clear, unadulterated panic. Her breath catches and she coughs it out and that sound is the loudest thing she hears – louder than the rain, louder than Sungjoo's footsteps, walking along the wall to examine all the tapes, opening the glass cases. Why is it so quiet? –

She breathes again. The back of her head goes numb. No headache.

The tapes aren't whirring.









("Basically," Sungjoo, apparently one of the senior processors at headquarters, though he certainly didn't look the part with his wrinkled hat and coat, had said to Seulgi's orientation group with a wide, unreadable smile on his face, "The tapes are the most fundamental part about the whole wishgranting business. If those tapes don't spin, then the reels don't bring in the rolls of paper with everyone's wishes printed on them, and then we can't process them."

Seulgi raised her hand. He nodded for her to speak. "So what about the other floors?" she challenged. "The engines in production still run even if the tapes don't. And headquarters isn't just wishgranting anymore now that it’s acquired several other industries. The tapes aren't connected to anything that could hinder the progress of any other floor or industry."

Sungjoo tilted his head. There was that signature twinkle in his eyes as he considered her comment. "You're right about that. If the tapes stop spinning, all it really means is this floor is useless, doesn't it?" A sparse chorus of laughter from her group. Seulgi kept her eyes on him, waiting for him to continue. "I know it's hard to imagine, but picture this: everything about headquarters was built, ground up, from these tapes. Without them, more things would go wrong than they would right."

He turned and began walking again, leading the group up the stairs. The sound of whirring tapes grew more and more faint, and the sound of ringing phones grew louder and louder in its place. "I can't quite elaborate on the consequences of a broken tape." Sungjoo looked back and met Seulgi's eyes directly with a sharp look. "But if it ever happens, then you'll know.")









"What's happening?" Seulgi asks. Sungjoo opens more cases. "Why are the tapes not spinning?"

"I don't know," Sungjoo says, voice quivering. Laughs nervously to punctuate the sentence. "I don't know. It's all the tapes. All the tapes, Seulgi."

Her legs don't feel like part of her as she walks over to Sungjoo. "Has this happened before? Can maintenance do something?"

"I don't know!" Sungjoo whispers, so silent that the rain outside almost drowns it out. "I don't know, and it's graveyard, and no one's here! I don't know, maybe I can call maintenance, but I don't know. I don't know, Seulgi. I don't know." His silhouette shakes, a grey outline in the darkness.

Seulgi reaches up for his shoulder. Just as she's about to place her hand on his back, she feels something in her sneakers. Her fingertips graze the back of his vest, press more soundly to feel the warmth of his back against her palm, and then she realizes – her shoes are wet.

She looks down. Sungjoo looks down at her, then down to where she's looking. There's water on the floor.

He takes a step forward. The sole of his loafer hits the puddles leaking from behind the cases. Lifts an arm to touch a still tape. When he withdraws his fingers, they're shiny and dripping in the faint light from their desk lamps.

Water. Seulgi's hand is still on his back. He feels it there, but he doesn’t feel it there, either. All he feels is the liquid on his fingertips, a drop rolling off and darkening a circle on his trousers. Water in the tapes. Still tapes. Sungjoo almost laughs.

What a storm.









A phone rings. For a split second, Joohyun thinks it's just a dream - she's always hearing something ringing these days. She buries herself further into the covers. That's when she hears the rain, and the sound of the phone over that rain. It's all real.

She sighs into the transmitter as soon as she picks up. "Joohyun speaking." Checks the clock on her bedside table. Three-oh-five in the morning.

"Joohyun," a distressed voice (that sounds somewhat relieved to hear her on the other line) says. "It's Yixing. I know it's early at the moment, but I think you should consider checking your messages right now."

Yixing. Joohyun doesn't try to hide the next sigh that escapes her lips. Yixing, highly efficient but also, to a degree, paranoid about whom he shared his work with, had a tendency to contact her, his most trusted coworker (on the grounds that they'd known each other since high school, when he was a transfer from China, and Joohyun was assigned to show him around campus), during the ungodly hours of the morning. Most of the time, Joohyun didn't mind - it's not like he did it often - but for some odd reason, today she particularly did. Maybe it had to do with the storm outside. Or maybe it was just a pent-up frustration, coupled with her stress over the possibility of early-onset tinnitus.

"We'll be at work in less than five hours, Xing," Joohyun tries, covering her eyes with the palm of her free hand. "I'm sure it can wait until then."

He goes silent on the other line. If not for the sound of his breathing, Joohyun would've thought Yixing hung up on her. "Ummm," he starts again, sounding uncertain of how exactly to continue. "I just really think you should check. Now."

Joohyun furrows her eyebrows. Yixing's never called her about something like this before. Usually, it was about records and files he was missing that he needed, and he'd call her late because he always worked until late even back at his apartment and assumed she did the same (she didn't really have the heart to correct him). But this time, it wasn't a polite demand. Yixing was audibly distressed. What was this all about?

"Ok, ok," Joohyun concedes, turning on her fax machine. It stirs to life loudly and slowly. She winces and hopes her neighbor won't file a noise complaint in the morning. "I'm turning on the fax. But what's this all about, Xing?"

The raindrops and the sound of her fax machine starting up swallow whatever words Yixing speaks next into a grating blur of noise. Those words are lost forever, as Joohyun forgets to ask Yixing to repeat them. All she can see is the growing four, no, five, digit number that indicates how many new messages - how many new reports of glitches, issues, incorrectly fulfilled orders have been filed for her to look through them since she's been off work. An average operator is assigned hundreds, at most.

"That's the thing, Joohyun," he says and she hears it now. His voice is equal parts fear and awe. "I don't know."









Report 00006: The tenth floor

Operator 10, Bae Joohyun
Filed by Seoul Oversight Commission (SOC)
Accepted Realities
Time of incident 02:01





Hong Jisoo waits for the elevator on the first floor. He's the only one there, headphones over his ears, playing the recent playlist of indie songs Jeonghan suggested to him at a volume that was probably too high for his ears. Sometimes, Jisoo would take off his headphones, music still playing, and realize that anyone within a three-feet radius could hear the music about as clearly as he could. Thus, Jisoo refrained from actually playing anything in his headphones during the daytime, or in crowded areas. But in the silence and emptiness of the early morning, where everything was held in the limbo between not-quite-night and not-yet-day, he would listen to his music as loudly as he wished.

The up arrow above the elevator doors lights up. Jisoo shifts his weight from his right leg to his left. Shifts it back. The doors open. He steps inside and presses the button to the fifth floor, perfectly in the middle of all the floors. The doors begin to close as he makes himself comfortable against the wall near the buttons.

A hand slams in between the doors before they can close all the way. Jisoo looks up, the sound lost in between his music, blaring through his headphones, when the girl walks in, breathing visibly harder than usual. She had probably run through the entrance just to catch this elevator. Jisoo feels a pang of guilt for not looking to see if anyone else was coming behind him.

He lowers his headphones. The Smiths croon against his neck. "What floor?" he asks, gesturing towards the buttons.

She turns her head to look at him, eyes wide. "What? Oh, uh, tenth." She smiles, all charming front teeth with a slight hint of her gums, her eyes turning to crescents. "Thanks."

Jisoo smiles a close-lipped smile in return and turns to the buttons. Stops. "Tenth floor?" he echoes. The girl tucks a strand of her long black hair behind her ear as she regards his hesitation. "This building doesn't have a tenth floor."

She laughs, and there's amusement in her eyes, but also conviction. "Yes, there is.” She crosses her arms against her chest and raises an eyebrow at him. “I live on the tenth floor here."

Jisoo glances back at the buttons. Blinks until the numbers blur. When his eyes focus again, there is still no tenth floor. He makes an unintelligible sound around the lines of huh and a gurgle, and the girl laughs again, polite and forced this time. She clearly thinks somewhat ill of him now.

They arrive at the fifth floor. "Good night," she tells Jisoo as he exits, stepping over to occupy the spot he vacated, near the buttons.

"Good night," he says, voice faint. The elevator doors close before he finishes the phrase, the girl and her long black, black hair disappearing through the narrowing gap. Jisoo can't tell if she's smiling or smirking at him before the gap shuts completely and the elevator disappears up the shaft.

He looks up at the arrows above the elevator. The up arrow is still lit. Is she on her way to the non-existent tenth floor now? Or had no one ever bothered telling Jisoo about it before?

A minute passes. Another. Jisoo continues standing before the elevators. The Smiths keep crooning against his neck.









Report 00134: The man who stole time

Operator 10, Bae Joohyun
Filed by The Jung Clock Company
Father Time
Time of Incident 02:36





Jung Soyeon drums her fingers on the cherry wood countertop. The clock sitting before her on the counter ticks its needle-thin second hand to a different rhythm than the one hanging on the wall does. Tick, goes the big clock. tick, the little clock then echoes. Tick, tick, Tick, tick – so on and so forth.

Soyeon's used to staying nights. As a family-run business and due the...importance of their operations, The Jung Clock Company would rather employ the Jung’s younger generation for more than full time than hire complete strangers. If they're not in the blood, Soyeon's grandfather liked to say, they're not a worker at Jung's.

She didn't hate night shifts, either: there was something therapeutic to her about being alone with the clocks, climbing the staircase to the tower and staring at the city lights through the cogs of the huge clock at the top, going down to the clock room and forgetting to think through the haze of thousands of second hands ticking, all out of unison. Also, her mother always let her sleep in during mornings after, until her father stomped up the stairs and threw the blankets off her bed.

"Don't you ever think about if you see someone's clock stop in the middle of the night?" Soyeon remembers her cousin, Hyerim, asking her once. Hyerim shivered at the thought. "Just thinking about it gives me the creeps."

Soyeon considered the idea. "Not really," she said, quite bluntly.

The first time Soyeon saw a clock stop, she was seven years old. It had been the large antique clock that had been sitting in the lobby ever since she could remember, completely surrounded by glass so she could stare at its cog skeleton in open-mouthed awe. When she had nothing better to do, and when her mother and father were working, Soyeon would lay on the burgundy carpet beside that clock and just watch it for hours.

That afternoon, sometime around two, Soyeon woke up from the impromptu nap she was taking to find the clock completely still. Her elbow hit the drool spot she had left, unconscious, on the carpet as she propped herself up to get a better look. Its cogs, beautiful but weathered, weren't turning at all. She frowned. Why would the clock stop? The repair worker had visited not too long ago.

"Mother," she called, jumping so her mother could see her over the counter. "The big clock stopped."

Her mother's face went pale. Soyeon watched, still confused, as she picked up the phone and began spinning the rotary dial. "Why did it stop, mother?" Soyeon went on to ask. Her mother shushed her as the person on the other line picked up.

"Hey, I'm going to need you to pick up Soyeon and take her home now." Soyeon watched as her mother chewed her lip in thought. "No, we won't be back until late, I think...Taking her to your house? That would probably be better. Ok, thanks. Bye." Her mother stuck the phone back in its cradle quickly, as if it was burning her. She came out from behind the countertop and sat Soyeon down on one of the waiting room chairs.

"Your aunt is going to pick you up soon, ok? Mother doesn't know when she and father can come home today, so you're going to stay over at her house tonight, hmm?" she told her, smoothing out the wrinkles in Soyeon's dress.

"Why?" Soyeon asked, voice raised. Her mother shushed her again. "Why?" she repeated, louder this time. The clock stopped and now she was going to her aunt's – nothing was really making sense and her brain still felt fuzzy from her nap.

"I'll tell you sometime, ok?" her mother said, eyes tired. "Mommy's busy." Soyeon shut up then. Her mother only resorted to using mommy when she really needed Soyeon to be quiet.

And that was that. Soyeon went with her aunt when she came over to pick her up, shared the bed with Hyerim that night, staring at the ceiling through the darkness until she eventually fell asleep, thinking about still gears and frozen second hands and a silence devoid of the familiar tick, tick, ticking of that antique clock in the lobby, its beautiful but weathered cogs immobile no matter how long she stared at them.

A few days later, Soyeon learned that her mother's great uncle had died.

But stopped clocks were honestly not as creepy as Hyerim made them out to be. Clocks stopped all the time - the ones that stilled at midnight were no different than the ones that froze during the day. All you had to do was take down the number of the clock, write down the time it stopped - hour, minute, and second - and tape a notice on its face, denoting that maintenance should remove it the next time they came around. Easy peasy.

Sometimes, clocks even stopped before the person connected to them breathed their last. Clocks weren't always made perfectly in tune to whoever owned them. When that happened, her father or one of her other aunts would take the clock down to the workshop, where they usually made new clocks, to fix its gears so it would tick again.

So there was really nothing to it. Things at The Jung Clock Company always went smoothly, spinning infinitely like gears behind a clock.

Until those cogs stopped, that is.









The bell attached to the door jingles. The roaring of the rain outside becomes deafening for a moment before fading into the muted pittering as the door slides closed again. Footsteps - first wet on the wood, tap, tap, tap, then muted by the carpet, until they come to a stop before Soyeon at the countertop. She shifts her gaze up from staring at the spaces between her fingers. The little clock and big clock continue to tick out of sync.

The man standing before her is tall. His black hat blocks her view of the clock on the wall, eclipsing its white face with the darkness of his hat's brim. Everything about his attire is monochrome - black hat, grey suit, white shirt, grey tie. Soyeon can't see his shoes from behind the counter, but she's willing to bet they match the color scheme of his outfit ankle-up.

She doesn't need to glance at the navy square tool box in his left hand to know what he's here for. The man was clothed, head-to-toe, in typical repair man attire. Ever since Father Time was acquired by the Wishgranters, multiple black-hatted, monochrome-suited men had ventured into The Jung Clock Company, wheeling away defunct clocks, clocks that had to be relocated as the people they were connected to were moving far, far away, even perfectly functional clocks sometimes. Those higher-ups, her father always muttered, if he happened to be in the shop when a repair man arrived.

Soyeon never quite understood why her father minded repair men so much. As far as she knew, repair men simply came, going about their business quietly, leaving before she could even register that they were finished. It was easier having them collect the clocks that ceased to tick rather than having her uncle load them slowly into his aging truck and taking them to headquarters himself.

The man reaches for his hat, tilting it toward her in greeting, and then places it back atop his head. She nods once in acknowledgment. "Good morning, miss. I'm here to collect your stopped clocks."

"Of course," she says. He gives her an even smile, dimples denting both his cheeks, waiting for her to step out from behind the counter to unlock the back room. Soyeon knows she should - she's done it before, that's how all these repair visits go. But she's never seen a repair man make his rounds so late (or could this be seen as early?) and doesn't remember anyone telling her to expect one during the week. "But why's a repair man making rounds at this hour of night?"

A strike of lightning flashes through the glass of the entrance. Thunder booms several seconds later. The lights in the shop flicker on and off once, twice, then stay off.

It takes Soyeon's eyes a bit to adjust to the darkness. Once they do, the man begins speaking again. "We don't always have enough time, Miss Jung." He speaks in the same even tone as before, a tall monochrome shadow that could bleed into hers, if not for the counter separating them. He gives her another smile, teeth showing this time, catching whatever light is left. Silver in the darkness.

The rain booms outside.









Door swings open. The doors in the shop never creak, the hinges never catch, and nothing ever slams closed. The only door that ever makes a sound is the entrance, due to the little bell attached to the top. Soyeon points the flashlight down the stairs and begins her descent. The repair man follows behind her.

Down here, the storm isn't audible. Any sound – the man's quiet breaths behind her, their untimed foot falls as their shoes hit the stairs – is rendered insignificant by the ticking of the thousands of clocks in the room. They line the walls, mounted from vaulted ceiling down, all analog, each ticking to the beat of their respective owner's heart. Some tick in unison – those ticks echo louder in the consecutive and overlap of hands counting seconds – while others tick offbeat. Silence never touches the clock room.

In the darkness, Soyeon can't see the end of the clocks. When there was light, each clock's face would take their turns shooting fluorescent light glares into her eyes. She points her flashlight to the vague direction of the end, but the black swallows it eagerly.

The man stops at the step just above her. "Thank you for showing me the way down, Miss Jung," he smiles, all lips and no teeth – just flesh blending into the shadows, nothing shining. Soyeon recalls the silver in the darkness and shivers. He places a gloved hand on her shoulder. "I won't be long down here."

Soyeon furrows her eyebrows. "Employees are required to supervise maintenance and repair workers in the clock room at all times, sir," she says. Any repair man would know that.

And then it occurs to her.

He takes off his glove. Places his uncovered hand in hers. Slender fingers tangle with hers, palm pressed flush against palm. "I'm sorry, Miss Jung," he tells her. Her vision begins to blur.

What's happening, what's happening, what's – tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Tick. "Good night." He really does sound sorry, Soyeon thinks before things go black. There's that smile again – teeth this time, silver in the darkness, she wasn’t just imagining that. And then there's nothing.









Soyeon dreams about storms. She dreams about water filling the clock room, so much pressure at the bottom that clock faces crack and water lifts the hands – minute, second, hour – until time exists in a vacuum, breathless.

She wonders how that would feel. Your heart filling, filling with blood, pumping slower and slower and slower until the chambers became so saturated that nothing moved anymore.

And when things finally did move, they moved all at once. Explosions erupting, not of blood and broken, raw hearts, but in hues of technicolor. Violent masterpieces.

And just as sudden as they come, they go. All that's left behind is silence, the guts, and the storm outside.









Everything is quiet when she wakes up. Complete darkness in the room. For a second, Soyeon thinks she's back in the lobby. Then she feels the flashlight pressing into her side.

Turns it on. She hears it then. Tick. One uniform, deafening tick. Again. Tick.

She scrambles to the nearest clock. Checks the time. Two thirty. Checks the clock next to it, then the one across from it, then the one at the top of the column. Two thirty, two thirty, two thirty.

The flashlight beam shakes. Everything's been reset. Soyeon runs through the rest of the room, checking each clock face. When she turns the light back to the direction she came from, the black swallows it eagerly.

Silence. Stolen hours.

Storm outside. Soyeon recalls that dream she had, remembers the warmth of his palm against hers before that, for the first time.

I'm sorry, Miss Jung. He really did sound sorry, even though Soyeon doubts he actually was.

The clocks cluck their tongues in unison.









Report 40251: The eyes that follow

Operator 09, Zhang Yixing
Filed by Dreams Commission on the Relations of the Dreamer and their Dream (DCRDD)
Dreamscape
Time of Incident 03:45





Jeon Wonwoo's never regarded himself as someone who turns heads. He didn't think of himself as bad-looking, nor just plain, but certainly not someone strangers tended to look at twice, like with Mingyu. Most of the time, he was simply...just there. Living life.

That's the first indication that something's wrong. People keep looking at him. He turns down the hallway to his Statistics class and heads whip to watch him make his way past them, then follow him. People clamor to look at him through glass doors and through windows.

By nature, Wonwoo was never the most observant. He would walk into the classroom opposite his even when paying attention and not realize it wasn't his class until halfway through the lecture, mistaken some other tall guy as his best friend Mingyu if he wasn't scrutinizing. So normally, Wonwoo would not be able notice that anyone was watching him. Strange, he thinks, wondering if something happened to him overnight. Maybe he just evolved into someone else. Someone more observant. That could happen, couldn’t it?

It's when he steps into his lecture hall that it becomes clear to him. Two hundred pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on him, like he's someone, no, something, that doesn't belong. An alien, not even human. Wonwoo feels it under his skin – get out, get out, get out –

Wonwoo runs. Hundreds of people trail after him, following him with their eyes.









Yixing calls Joohyun again at four. It takes her until the fifth ring to find her phone through the stacks of reports she's been trying to sort since Yixing woke her up.

"Xing, what the happened in headquarters?" she yells into the phone, voice cracking from stress and the early morning. "There's so many reports from all the industries, someone must've ed something upbad – "

Yixing cuts her off. "I think you're frustrated right now. And what I’m calling you about is going to do nothing to calm that frustration, but please hear me out."

Joohyun groans but stops shuffling through reports for a moment. Tries to calm herself. "What, Xing. What?" Her voice sounds pissed to her own ears. Maybe calming herself was merely a useless effort.

"Do you remember there was that girl who went to our university? She's in Dreamscape right now, so she might still be at work. What was her name? Myungjin? Myungsun? I have this report filed at three forty-five, he should still be dreaming right now. Though I'd imagine it's more of a nightmare now than a dream..."

Joohyun furrows her eyebrows. "Myungeun." Interrupts him curtly. "Park Myungeun. Wait, Xing, are you doing operating work from your apartment right now, there are so many reports – "

He hangs up on her. Looks down on the now-dark screen. Joohyun blinks at her phone once, twice, before setting it down and turning her gaze back to the reports on her desk. Her eyes burn.

The fax machine goes into six digit numbers.









Re: Report 40251: The eyes that follow

Operator 09, Zhang Yixing
Filed by Dreams Commission on the Relations of the Dreamer and their Dream (DCRDD)
Dreamscape
Time of Incident 03:45
Time of Resolution 04:07





Wonwoo keeps running. The crowd behind him grows so large that each person loses all semblance of humanity. They all seem like one huge, thousand-eyed monster. Anyone Wonwoo passes turns toward him and gives him that look, and then they join the mob chasing him.

He squints. Up ahead, there's someone just standing there, facing him. When they come into focus, will they run straight at him? Look at him with those kinds of eyes and then let the people behind him devour him whole?

As Wonwoo nears, he sees it's a girl. She's looking at him, her eyes meeting his eyes, but she makes no move to approach him. His lungs ache. It's almost like she's been...waiting for him to arrive at this spot exactly, for him to recognize that the look in her eyes isn't that kind of look. That's she's waiting to do something.

Wonwoo stays on his path. At this speed, and if the girl doesn't step aside, he'll run right into her, and they'll both fall onto the pavement. Is that what she's waiting for? She shakes her head at him, as if she heard his thoughts. The look in her eyes is steady, unafraid. Just keep running, towards me, they say.

He coughs, loses a breath he needs in that split second. Okay, he thinks. Okay. One, two, three more steps and then they're going to collide –

She sticks out her arms, hands catching both his shoulders before they crash.









He opens his eyes the moment after impact. They're in a dark classroom, all the blinds drawn and overhead lights off, crouching down in the corner behind all the desks. There's chalky writing on the blackboard that Wonwoo can't seem to decipher.

Her eyes watch him. They're large, her eyes, up close, and brown. Really brown. "You're lucky I'm here to save your tonight," she whispers harshly.

Wonwoo blinks. "Wait," he says, voice coming out hoarse. "What?"

She puts her hands on his shoulders again, like she's going to shake the oblivion out of him. She doesn’t, opting for less physical, verbal communication instead. "Look. You're dreaming. This isn't real."

He considers that. The people watching him when that never happened to him in real life. Being chased by a crowd that moved like one hulking monster with multiple limbs and too many eyes, all looking at him like he didn't belong. Wonwoo's busy dissecting what’s happened to him during the past ten or so minutes as she continues. "And now I'm going to wake you up." She stands up, looking down at him with her large brown eyes. A steady look.

Wonwoo feels dazed. "Wait," he thinks he says, maybe mouths, but she's already got her fingers pointed at him, in the shape of a gun.

"This isn't going to hurt," she laughs dryly. As if he's worried about that. He's still trying to put the pieces together when she pulls the trigger –

Wonwoo's ears actually ring in the aftermath of the gunshot. But where he imagines he's bleeding, in the back of his throat, he tastes the artificial sweetness of bubblegum. The gunpowder that should be in the air smells suspiciously like candy sand.

Sleep tight, he hears somewhere in the midst of the ringing. Her large brown eyes watch him until he wakes up.









His sheets are damp with sweat when he opens his eyes. Mingyu’s light is still on, laptop fan loud, snack wrappers littered over his desk, the screen on a still-blank Word document. The door from the bathroom opens and Mingyu glances over at him before turning back to his essay.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, fingers hovering over the keys to create an illusion of productiveness. Wonwoo blinks, still groggy and confused – what just happened? Who was she?

He kicks the covers off his legs and buries his head beneath them. They smell faintly of his perspiration. “Yeah,” Wonwoo replies, even though it isn’t the full truth. Swallows. “Yeah.”

He still tastes the bubblegum in the back of his throat. Thinks about her, his dream girl, literally, and her large brown eyes, until he settles back into sleep, dreaming of desert dunes carved from the candy dust of her gunshot.

Bang.









Six fifty in the morning. Puddles from the rain last night still dot the street, discoloring the pavement. Joohyun pulls herself onto the cable car, one hand on her beige hat, arm acting as a place to hook her yellow umbrella. Yixing, who lives one stop away from her, is already seated, his yellow umbrella on his lap. She takes the place beside him.

Turns to glance at him. The dark circles under his eyes match hers. Joohyun doubts Yixing even slept much at all last night.

But rather than remark about the reports, or inquire about whether or not he was successfully able to contact Myungeun, Joohyun says with a tired smile, “Afraid it’ll rain tonight, too?”

He looks over at her. The corners of his lips tug into a timid smile to match hers. “That was quite the storm last night.”

“It was,” she agrees. A dewy quiet settles over them.

The car picks up speed. They hold onto their hats for the rest of the ride.









Seven thirty AM. People start filtering into into headquarters, a sea of straight-sided, flat-brimmed beige hats flowing up and down the white staircases to get to their respective positions. Murmurs of what happened last night?, five digit reports by the time I woke up, can you believe that?, and the occasional who worked graveyard last night? are exchanged, no one stopping or slowing the pace of their gait to actually engage in drawn-out conversation. The tapes don’t whir.

The usually-unused phones on Seulgi and Sungjoo's desks begin to ring at the same time. Glancing over to see the worn-out expression on Sungjoo's face, she sees he seems to be just as resigned to his fate as she is.

There's relative silence on their floor, for the first time since she's started working here. The sun is out, catching in the corners of her eyes, and the faded silhouette of the moon showing its pale face down toward hers – a simple reminder that the night, that stormy night, actually existed in the first place.

The sky is dyed the bluest blue she's ever seen.