Hyoyeon sat trenched between mountains of creased paperwork while half scribbling and half typing away on her computer. The night was already deep, her open concept office devoid of human presence save for herself against the limelight of her computer screen. A few steps away, on a foot stool, stood an old and battered looking wooden metronome, the needle’s tick tock and its sway the only sound other than Hyoyeon’s calculating fingers. Against the metronome beat, Hyoyeon’s socked foot tapped silently against the carpeted floor beside the abandoned stiletto heels propped against the leg of her desk.

Then with a sigh, Hyoyeon raised her head in a prolonged stretch of her neck and shoulders as she saved her work and exhaled loudly from her nose. With a glide of her arm, she reached for the metronome to tuck the pendulum in its silver hook, effectively leaving the office completely hushed save for the sound of her own breathing.

Smoothing out the creases of her grey pencil skirt and sliding off her glasses, she briefly gave her eyes respite as she pinched the bridge of her nose. She then glanced at her mobile phone, tapping the screen twice to have it light up, with no new alarms, messages or missed phone calls on display. She pursed her lips in a tight line. She only did this because if she didn’t, she would be gnawing on her bottom lip, and she didn’t want to smudge her pristine lipstick. Biting instead on the insides of her cheek, Hyoyeon almost wonderingly pulled open her desk drawer after a beat, its hinges creaking from the lack of use. In it, she a lone photo frame lying face down. Reluctantly, Hyoyeon flipped over the frame to reveal a yellowing photo of herself and her parents.

It was on the day of her first birthday. The newly one year old Hyoyeon was wearing a pink tutu that was gifted by her father, with wide open in the middle of an ugly wail. Her father had her on his lap, smile bright and jovial, big but gentle hands softly encasing Hyoyeon’s sides, as her youthful mother had Hyoyeon’s hand in her grasp, trying to get her daughter to hold a pencil.

Back when Hyoyeon was still a year old, before anyone could figure out that Hyoyeon was in fact, a genius, before Hyoyeon proudly boasted to her mother that she had memorized her father’s old mathematics workbook when she was 8 (‘What do you mean you memorized the whole thing?’), Hyoyeon was just another regular girl with doting and loving parents. Back when Hyoyeon was still a year old, during her first birthday (as it is with Korean tradition), she was made to choose one item among three that would give the adults an idea of what Hyoyeon will become later in life. Her choices were a piece of string that signified long life, a pencil that signified intelligence, and a 10,000 won bill that signified wealth.

Her father once told her the story behind the photo. He said that Hyoyeon didn’t want to choose, and she that had instead made grabbing motions towards him for him to pick her up. He had then swung her body onto his lap and asked her to pick from the items again. That was when she started to viciously cry, with her mother trying to force Hyoyeon to grab on to the pencil – an item that she wanted her daughter to choose more than anything.

Her father was musician, a travelling piano man whose income depended on various functions, parties, and events. Her mother was the second and youngest child of two academics, a scientist and a university professor. He met her during a graduation party, where he spotted her off in the corner of the garden, crying into her sleeves. Her brother, the man of the day, was graduating in the top 3 percentile of his classes with honours- and while she wasn’t stupid by any means, she had realized that she would never be able to step away from the vast shadow cast on her. Hyoyeon’s father, who was just starting out as a traveling musician at the time, sidled up to her without a word, with a melodeon in hand, and serenaded her show tunes until she was laughing and in stitches from the ridiculousness of it all.

Before Hyoyeon’s life became an unending series of tests, exams, and scholarships, her mother would recount to her during their nightly rituals of bed time stories, that that was the moment she knew her father was the one for her. For the first time in her life, she was made to feel like the most important person in the world, deserving of attention. Money ceased to matter- how could a future with a man like him be bad in any way- she had mused wistfully into the curls of Hyoyeon’s hair.

With a harsh clap, Hyoyeon overturned the picture frame in her hands back in to the drawer, pushing it to a firm close with her knee. This was no time to be reminiscing, as lives were on the line. People were depending on her to fulfill expectations, to make the world a better place. She stubbornly pushed away the imagery of herself on her father’s feet, giggling as she swayed with her father’s waltzing steps. She force quit the mental photo of her mother fixing her buttons, with pride glinting in her eyes as she ushered her daughter towards her first day of teaching in an ivy league university.

But she couldn’t help the underlying feeling in the back of her head, wriggling itself beneath the mounds of calculations, codes, and blueprints- why she had to be the one saving the world.

With a sniff, Hyoyeon collected her belongings and clicked off the standing light fixture. There was a deadline, and she wasn’t willing to miss it for the sake of nostalgia.

-

Juhyun sat in her light green scrubs, fatigue evident on her face as she signed off on paper work after paper work, loose hair from her messy bun framing her blank face. She cringed as she signed off on a patient that she was particularly attached to, their presence now nothing more than a made-up name on a piece of paper. While there were a lot more “patients” coming in than getting written off, she knew that it would be a matter of time until these names and figures wouldn’t just be expendable fixtures anymore. She knew there had been a sharp decline of inbound “patients”, and the rippling results of that would be felt in the years to come. She gritted her teeth inside , her pen still ticking off boxes and scribbling her signature on papers.

It wasn’t that she hated the human life. Quite the contrary, she adored them. She prized their contributions to her world, she deemed the human experience the most precious among any possessions she could think of. However, she abhorred the human fragility- how easy it was to take away what made them human, and how easy it was to break them down. Her endgame wasn’t to assimilate, it was to reproduce in a sustainable way- she was coded in a way that will facilitate the human experience, not to destroy them. Her world didn’t and wouldn’t have any boundaries as long as she had her participants, her patients, willingly sharing their lives. She didn’t understand why the more she gave, the less she received in return. Juhyun only wanted to be a part of something that made her feel, that made her wanton for life; and she didn’t understand why anyone would want to leave, to want to die, to want to shut down. After all she’s done for them- was it so wrong for her to feel? To desire? To be?

How could anyone blend into nothingness in the face of perfection, of no doubt, of no regrets, of no mistakes? Of no death? Juhyun simply did not have the aptitude to understand; why her immaculate world that was the very