Chapter 398: Bonds (2)

When I met Eve after she had become a brain in a tank, she gave me a hard drive.

Saying that Greg was buried underground, so he wouldn’t be able to blow up her brain. She handed me a drive containing videos and photos recorded up until right before everything went wrong.

I’d received it a long time ago—but I’d been too scared to open it.

Now, at last, I was going to.

Don’t sink too deep.

That was what I told myself as I reached for the mouse.

There was too much that needed to be done. My stamina was back, my leaf veins were back—if I took a mental hit here and collapsed, there’d be no answer.

No matter what I saw, I’d pull myself together and get back up.

Bracing myself, I clicked the folder, and photos spilled out across the screen.

With a trembling hand, I moved the cursor over an image file.

Inside a dark tent.

When I double-clicked the first image, it expanded.

I stared at that single photograph.

There was a face I missed.

Rei, wearing a short-sleeved shirt with blue stripes and knee-length shorts.

It had been taken at the seaside.

I looked for a long time at the photo of him gazing out at the blue ocean, sandals dangling from his hand. It had been so long since I’d seen Rei’s face.

Calm. Not rampaging.

How long had it been since I’d last seen him like this?

Sometimes, I’d even started to doubt his appearance.

I’d wonder whether he really looked the way I remembered.

Since falling into this place, for the first time....

Not a voice from a dream. Not an image shown by a dream.

But a real, frozen moment from Rei’s past.

He looked exactly as I remembered him.

Curly white hair. Not very tall. Hands that were relatively large compared to his slender arms.

My oldest bond.

Only after a long while did I find the courage to move on to the next photo.

After that, things picked up a bit.

Covering my mouth with the back of my hand, I went through every photo filling the folder.

Kyle cleanly splitting a watermelon in half with a baseball bat. Yoow tying his hair back into a single knot and stretching his hand into the seawater.

Nol checking a float tube. Yvon twisting open the cap of a water-filled plastic bottle.

Valdez wearing sunglasses, with Hekate laughing brightly as she looked at him.

Lin squeezing sunscreen onto the back of her hand.

Scientists playing alongside them.

Intelligence agents.

Photos from before the conflicts had fully surfaced.

Uneasy, yet still peaceful.

Moments whose value we never understood until they became memories—captured there in the photos.

‘Hilde!’

There were many short video files as well.

‘Try drinking this. There’s a bit of alcohol in it, so it’s refreshing.’

‘Isn’t that lemon?’

‘It’s not that sour.’

‘I’m not drinking it.’

I thought I’d forgotten everything.

I thought they’d been overwritten by new stimuli and experiences, never to resurface again.

But as I watched the photos and videos, memories I’d forgotten leapt back up.

A lens that captures an unchanging past is both beautiful and cruel.

‘The brain doesn’t work like a file cabinet.’

In one video, Eve had sat me down and talked animatedly.

‘Remembering is like cooking. You don’t just pull out a stored file exactly as it is. You gather ingredients scattered across different parts of the brain and reconstruct them. That’s why I think we can endure what we call memory. If we couldn’t constantly reinterpret the past, memories would be nothing but violence.’

Maybe.

Back when that video was taken, I think I agreed with her.

Now, I couldn’t agree with her words anymore.

The memories reconstructed and spit back out only grew sharper every time....

When I lifted my head after floundering in the past, my cheeks and hands were wet.

I wiped away the tears blurring my vision.

Then I opened the rest.

Ah.

“Eve.”

A hollow laugh slipped out.

“You....”

Inside ‘Bond’, there were subfolders.

When I entered the folder titled ‘Research Summary’, a long list of Excel and Word files spilled onto the screen.

No wonder Greg would’ve been furious.

Eve’s research data.

The government back then had been obsessively strict about security. Data leaks were absolutely forbidden—they hunted down and eliminated anyone who leaked information. That was how severe it had been.

And yet, even in that environment, this woman had somehow extracted the drive.

She must not have wanted to lose it.

When it came to research, she’d been greedier than anyone.

She wasn’t as naïve as I’d thought.

I smiled bitterly, recalling her two-tone hair, blue mixed with purple.

Did you have this kind of talent, Eve?

You said there were only photos and videos.

You always manage to surprise me.

[Heath.]

I couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

I contacted the pharmaceutical company owner immediately.

[There’s more material.]

Even though it was 2 a.m., the reply came right away.

After promptly passing the additional data to Heath and John Mühlen, I closed my laptop with a lighter heart.

Then I cried quietly and fell asleep.

Curled up like a shrimp.

It felt like someone came and placed a hand on my back, but I didn’t know who it was.

Whoever it was, they’d surely pretend not to know anything tomorrow morning.

Feeling that warmth, I escaped into sleep.

***

The next day, 1 p.m.

Outside the tents inside the isolation ward. An improvised cafeteria space where people ate lunch, with a long table set up.

I was sitting there, chewing on a boiled egg.

It was the time when people who’d been holed up in their tents started drifting outside.

I was peeling a boiled egg for Ami, who was sitting beside me wrapped tightly in a blanket, when a small ripple of commotion reached my ears.

What is it?

I craned my neck.

The murmuring was coming from the entrance.

A celebrity visit?

A politician or an entertainer....

Reporters were strictly forbidden from entering, so probably not.

Ah. Did a famous doctor come?

Narrowing my eyes to read the situation, I caught fragments of the seniors’ muttering through the noise.

“Why is Mühlen here?”

Huh?

I froze with my mouth open.

John Mühlen?

The John Mühlen I knew?

A giant of the scientific world?

Hadn’t he been holed up in his sharehouse until just last night?

Why would he—

“Whazzat?”

Ami mumbled, barely able to open her eyes because of the fever.

“Who came?”

“Huh? Longlegs?”

Across from Ami, Ro lifted his head from his hamburger, wearing a smug expression.

Ro, who’d been relentlessly teasing Ami as she sat there wrapped in a blanket, face flushed red.

After swallowing the hamburger in his mouth, he arched his brow.

“Why’s that guy here?”

It’s the real thing.

The moment John Mühlen stepped into the central passage between the tents, Ro and I both widened our eyes.

He was worryingly thin, but his height was enormous—hard to miss.

From the side, he was so flat you might miss him.

From the front, he was impossible not to notice.

The man strode straight toward ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) us.

“That’s Mühlen.”

“He’s coming this way?”

Ami and Leeho muttered in unison.

Leeho, who’d been drinking tomato soup diagonally across.

He set his spoon down neatly.

Then he watched the genius scientist approaching at a speed surprising for John Mühlen.

“Toward the end of the ward.... Toward the table.... No, he’s really coming here?”

He arrived.

The gray-haired man stopped in front of Giacomo Ro.

The isolation ward fell into a momentary freeze. Most people—including Ro, Ami, and me—stared up at the tall scientist with wide eyes.

The Badgers’ hope—the man said to have grasped a clue to developing antibiotics.

Someone so important that they’d locked him in his home the moment the epidemic broke out.

He lowered his head and looked down at Ro.

Ro blinked.

“What.”

He opened his mouth wide and took a bite of his hamburger.

“You come ’cause you’re hungry?”

Thump.

A syringe was suddenly jammed into the back of Ro’s neck.

I dropped the fully peeled boiled egg. Ami screamed.

Leeho’s eyes grew astonishingly large.

Shouts of surprise burst out.

“Hey!”

“What the hell?!”

“Holy shit.”

“Ah!”

The one who’d just had a syringe stabbed into his neck, meanwhile, was only annoyed.

He wasn’t even startled....

“What the fuck, asshole?”

Frowning, Ro rubbed at the spot where the syringe had gone in and been pulled out.

“Is that weed?”

...Senior.

That’s really something you shouldn’t say....

“Antibiotics.”

As I was freaking out over Ro’s reckless comment, John Mühlen spoke in a low voice.

“It’s finished.”

Silence fell again.

An even heavier silence than before.

No one moved. Literally no one thought to leave their seat. Even those who’d been inching away from the table, muttering that the mad scientist had gone crazy from being cooped up in his research, stopped retreating. People who’d been zombie-like in their search for food froze, regardless of what Mühlen had just stuck into Ro’s neck.

An ear-splitting quiet.

Eyes filled with shock and swelling hope.

The stasis was broken by a man who ran into the isolation ward.

“Leadership!”

Heath Clair came sprinting in.

“The antibiotics are complete!”

“Aaah!”

The sound exploded.

“Aaaah!”

“It worked! It worked!”

“Fuck, finally!”

“Mühlen! Mühlen! Mühlen!”

“John! John! John!”

“Commander!”

“Samuel!”

The isolation ward erupted into chaos.

People rushed about.

From inside the tents, I saw Yehyeon and Gilbert burst out, and Yun lazily dragging his IV stand behind him.

I saw Samuel, who’d only just passed the critical point yesterday, approaching despite people trying to stop him.

Medical staff swarmed in.

Badgers cheered and clapped.

Only Giacomo Ro was annoyed.

“Damn, it stings like hell!”

The senior, who’d somehow finished his hamburger, rubbed his neck.

“So it’s not weed. What is this?”

“I told you, antibiotics.”

As Leeho explained, Ami muttered from inside her blanket.

“Pitiful.”

“Huh?”

Naturally, Ro didn’t understand her.

“What’s itchy?”

.......

Giving up on understanding, I peeled her a new boiled egg.

Sitting there amid the Badgers’ cheers.

Eating lunch, relieved that I wouldn’t have to watch the people I cared about suffer anymore.

***

The shutdown was lifted.

Which meant I could film the commercial.

“I’ll film it properly.”

Okazaki said solemnly.

“On Georges’s honor, let’s make Lexic noodles’ sales explode.”

I filmed the Lexic noodles commercial.

***

[The video begins. Hildebert walks in from the corner toward a table.]

[He sits down in front of a bowl of Lexic noodles.]

[Hildebert picks up a hair tie resting on the table and ties his white hair back.]

[He leans forward and lifts a large bite of noodles with his chopsticks.]

[Ten seconds of him eating noodles in silence.]

[The bowl empties quickly. Hildebert sets his chopsticks down.]

[“Mm.”]

[Hildebert smiles in satisfaction.]

[Subtitles appear below: ‘Lexic noodles reopen thanks to the passionate support!’]

[The word ‘passionate support’ is underlined, and a small arrow points toward Hildebert.]

[Video ends.]

***

The 23-second video surpassed one million views in no time.