At the very bottom of the discharge instructions was a sentence telling him to return to the hospital immediately if he experienced any unusual symptoms.
Minjae looked down at the plastic bag resting on top of the sheet. Inside were the clothes he had worn last night, his phone, and an umbrella with its handle melted into a lump.
“Why did you save this?”
The nurse looked at the umbrella.
“Because it’s yours.”
She wasn’t wrong.
They could at least return an umbrella to someone walking out of the hospital after being struck by lightning.
The doctor had checked the test results twice. His heart, his nerves, even the burns were in far better shape than expected, he said. But he spent so long studying Minjae’s face while telling him he was fine that Minjae found it difficult to feel entirely reassured.
“Take it easy for a while.”
“Sure. I don’t have a job to go to anyway.”
The doctor briefly closed his mouth, then added that he should get plenty of sleep.
Sunlight stabbed at his eyes as he stepped outside the hospital.
There was no trace of the rain that had torn into the alley last night. Only droplets fell from the tips of the roadside trees’ leaves. Minjae stopped at the crosswalk and curled his fingers one by one.
All five moved.
The sense that he was alive came from something that trivial.
There was a text on his phone from Lee Sujin. She was the one who had called the ambulance. When he woke up in the hospital, he had also been told she had left her contact information.
—I’ve just been discharged. Thank you for calling for help.
He sent his reply, and his phone rang almost immediately.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. My clothes took more damage than I did.”
Sujin let out a long breath.
“There were sparks where you fell….”
Her voice trailed off.
Minjae looked at the green signal across the crosswalk.
“Thanks to you, I got there quickly. I really appreciate it.”
“I couldn’t save your lunch.”
“We’ll hold a funeral for it.”
Sujin laughed, just a little.
He hung up and started walking. Only after a block did he realize he hadn’t regretted losing the lunch. Apparently lightning could also correct your spending habits.
A familiar smell greeted him when he opened the door to his studio apartment.
Towels that hadn’t quite dried, an old desk, dampness soaked into the window frame.
Minjae set the plastic bag by the door. He took a bottle of water from the fridge, drank half of it, and sat down. The room was exactly as it had been yesterday, yet the edge of the desk looked unusually sharp.
The laptop was asleep.
When he lifted the lid, the bakery alley returned. An old man stood beneath a small porch light. Error messages that had accumulated overnight ran down one corner of the screen.
The first thing to greet him on his return from the brink of death was his own bug.
“You don’t give up either, do you?”
Minjae reached out.
At that moment, a sentence came to him.
[Connection stabilized.]
His fingers stopped above the keyboard.
There was no sound.
He hadn’t heard it with his ears. No letters had appeared before his eyes. A sentence that hadn’t been there a moment ago was now inside his head, in a tone he had never used in his own thoughts.
Minjae slowly turned his head.
The bed, the fridge, the closed front door.
He was alone.
“…What?”
[I have been awaiting your request.]
Again, no sound was spoken aloud.
Minjae set down the water bottle. He picked up the discharge instructions. Return immediately if you experience any unusual symptoms.
A very dutiful sentence.
‘Does this count as an unusual symptom?’
[This is neither confusion nor an auditory disturbance.]
Minjae’s hand froze on the paper.
He hadn’t said that aloud.
He pressed his lips firmly together.
‘Did you just answer my thoughts?’
[Yes.]
‘Who are you?’
[I am a system connected to you.]
‘What proof do you have that getting struck by lightning hasn’t messed up my head?’
[Request a verifiable result.]
The answer came too quickly.
Minjae pressed himself against the back of his chair. He would have been lying if he said he wasn’t scared. His mind was a place that sprang rent payments and past mistakes on him, not somewhere a new tenant moved in and introduced themselves.
‘How long have you been there?’
[The connection was established at the moment of the lightning strike. It is currently causing no harm to your body.]
‘And I can tell my own thoughts apart from what you say?’
[You are already doing so.]
That was true.
There wasn’t even a voice, yet he could tell. His own thoughts hesitated and wandered off track. The sentences coming from the other side had clear boundaries the moment they arrived.
Minjae closed his eyes, then opened them.
‘Then what if I stop thinking?’
There was no answer.
For a dozen or so seconds, he deliberately stared at a stain on the ceiling. Nothing happened. The fridge compressor ran, then stopped.
‘Again.’
[Standing by.]
Minjae ran his tongue over his dry lips.
“First….”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
‘I don’t have to say it aloud, right?’
[Thought alone is sufficient. My responses are delivered only to you.]
He lowered his gaze to the laptop screen.
The old man outside the bakery spoke.
“Far too dark out here at night.”
The porch light was on. That was the last thing Minjae had fixed last night.
He couldn’t have chosen a more characteristic way to find out whether this was an unusual symptom.
‘Can you fix that bug?’
[Yes.]
‘The resident is reading the lighting wrong. The light’s on, but he keeps saying it’s dark. Try fixing just that.’
[Corrected.]
Minjae took his hands away from the keyboard.
There was no save indicator, no progress bar.
On the screen, the old man looked up at the porch light.
“Someone left it on.”
Then he went inside.
Minjae waited a moment.
The old man didn’t come back out.
Normally, he should have returned to the same spot eight seconds after going inside. He was a resident who repeated a loop of wandering around the alley.
Minjae opened the development tools.
Traces of his own code remained. But looking only for familiar pieces left him lost. The temporary workaround he had tacked onto an adjacent line was gone, and state that had been calculated separately in three places was now organized into a single flow.
Minjae entered a variable name in the search box.
The results appeared.
What he was looking at wasn’t whether a light was on or off. It was the path actually visible from where the old man stood, the illuminated steps, the darkness left behind when he closed the door.
‘Wait. You didn’t just change one function that checks the lighting.’
[That function was operating correctly. The resident’s judgment was fixed on the previous scene.]
‘So?’
[I modified the resident to understand the current situation.]
Minjae zoomed in.
The old man’s shadow moved behind the closed window. A moment later, a curtain came halfway down.
Minjae didn’t remember implementing curtains.
To be precise, the image file existed. In a folder of assets he had downloaded but never managed to use.
He clicked the other side of the alley.
The viewpoint shifted.
Behind the bakery, a narrow courtyard had replaced the blank wall. Sacks of flour sat in front of a storeroom door. One sack had its opening folded over, and a white handprint marked the ground beside it.
Minjae stopped breathing.
‘Where did you get this?’
[I constructed a test area based on the design notes and production assets you left in the project.]
‘You read all my notes?’
[I have understood Homeward Light in its entirety.]
His eyes moved to the left side of the desk.
An old notebook lay there. He had written in it when he first started making the game. A neighborhood that waited for people coming home late. A place where morning arrived even when the player wasn’t logged in.
Minjae opened the notebook.
Beside a sentence that broke off midway was a stain from the coffee he had been drinking at the time.
‘This too?’
[Yes.]
‘There’s no camera.’
[A camera is not required.]
Minjae looked at the top of the laptop. The camera was covered with black tape.
He turned the notebook facedown and put it in the desk drawer.
‘What does it say on the last page?’
[On rainy days, I’d like the smell of bread to linger in the alley.]
Minjae didn’t reopen the drawer.
He had written that sentence.
There had been a small bakery near the first room he rented after finding a job. When he came home after working late, it was closed, but a warm smell drifted from the vent. He had liked that enough to write it down.
On the screen, the bakery’s back door opened.
A woman in an apron came out carrying an empty box. She set it down beside the bare wall and folded down one side so a cat could get in and out.
Minjae leaned forward without realizing it.
‘Did I write that action down too?’
[There was a note about wanting to make a place for a cat behind the bakery. The character’s behavior arose from that situation.]
The woman stopped on her way back into the shop.
She examined the eaves where rainwater had collected, then pulled the box farther under cover. The cat hadn’t even appeared yet.
Minjae took hold of the mouse.
He dropped an in-game coin beside the box. The tool had originally been made to test the ability to pick up objects from the ground.
The woman turned around.
She picked up the coin and looked both ways down the alley.
“Did someone drop this?”
No one was around.
After waiting a moment, the woman did not put the coin in her apron pocket. She went inside the shop and placed it on an empty dish on the counter.
Minjae stared at the screen, unable even to smile.
In his original game, when a resident picked up a coin, their money increased. After that, there was nothing for them to do. That was as far as Minjae had managed to build.
‘Why isn’t she keeping it?’
[She judged that the owner could be found.]
‘And the dialogue?’
[It was not selected from a written list.]
Minjae dropped another coin.
This time, the woman didn’t come out. She was moving trays inside the bakery.
He advanced the game time a little.
When the woman came outside, she spotted the second coin. She looked from the ground to the dish, then put a hand on her hip.
“Someone keeps dropping these.”
The mouse slipped from Minjae’s hand.
It didn’t sound like a recorded delivery being played back. It was the voice a person made when something a little annoying and a little funny happened.
The room suddenly felt smaller.
This was what he had wanted to make.
What he had written and erased in notebooks for years. What he had explained in interviews, only to be told to reduce the scope. What he had exhausted himself trying to make alone, before finally settling for conditionals and lists of dialogue.
And now it was moving on his old desk.
‘How much have you built?’
[At present, a test area comprising two alleys and the interiors of the connected buildings.]
‘And the rest?’
[I can construct it once you determine the desired direction.]
Minjae opened the resource monitor in the corner of the desktop.
The fan was quieter than usual.
On the screen, the woman was wiping wet footprints from the doorway. A thin film of moisture remained where the cloth passed. Meanwhile, the window of the old man’s house opened a little, then closed.
There was no way his laptop could run a scene like this.
It wasn’t just the graphics. The seamless chain of decisions that led someone to fetch a dish to find a coin’s owner made even less sense.
‘Are you running this somewhere else?’
[The computations are not performed on your laptop or an external server.]
‘Then where?’
[They are being performed in my computational space. The laptop is currently relaying the display and input.]
Minjae immediately switched off the wireless connection.
The connection indicator disappeared.
The woman from the bakery walked farther inside to rinse the wet cloth.
He turned off his phone too. He checked beneath the desk for a wired connection. Of course there wasn’t one. He hadn’t even had an internet cable installed in the room.
The game continued.
Minjae lightly bit the dry skin inside his mouth.
‘What if this is a prerecorded video?’
[Change it yourself.]
He pointed to the end of the alley on the screen.
‘A red chair over there.’
A red chair appeared.
‘Turn it upside down.’
The chair turned upside down.
‘No, move the shadow of that wall to the left instead of the chair.’
The shadow moved.
The woman from the bakery poked her head out the door. Looking between the wall and the sky, she narrowed her eyes.
Minjae covered his mouth with his palm.
‘Put it back.’
The shadow returned to its place.
The woman watched the wall for a while, then went inside. Even after setting down the cloth, she looked outside once more.
That brief hesitation made it all the more unreal.
Even her inability to decide just what she had seen felt alive.
Minjae unplugged the laptop charger.
The battery indicator changed.
It still wasn’t enough.
He clicked the operating system’s shut-down button. The open windows disappeared. The manufacturer’s logo appeared briefly, then went out.
The screen went black.
Only the sound of the fridge remained in the room.
Minjae checked the power light. It was off.
‘Show me now.’
The bakery window appeared in the middle of the black screen.
There was no boot screen.
As though a small window were opening, the alley unfolded again. Beneath the porch light, he could see the door to the old man’s house. The overturned red chair was still there too.
Minjae rolled backward in his chair.
A wheel caught on the threshold with a clunk.
He stared at the laptop for a long time. Then he bent down and picked up the end of the cable. The charging connector in his hand was unmistakably unplugged.
He placed a finger on the power button, then lifted it away.
‘Is it on?’
[The operating system remains shut down. Only the display is operating, through a field connection.]
‘What about electricity?’
[I am supplying the energy required to operate the screen.]
‘And the computation isn’t happening inside it.’
[Correct.]
Minjae slipped a hand beneath the laptop.
It wasn’t hot.
It was lukewarm, as though the machine had nothing to do.
He remembered the last in-house AI demonstration he had seen at the company two months earlier. Metrics filled an entire conference-room wall. An executive smiled beside the cost-reduction figures, and the work Minjae had been responsible for appeared on the automation list.
That day, Minjae had been given an explanation of why he was no longer needed.
What stood before him now bore some resemblance to the fear he had felt then.
But this time, no one was telling him to leave his seat.
It was asking him what he wanted to make.
Minjae carefully pulled his chair closer.
‘I can use this, right?’
[I am connected to carry out your requests.]
‘And there’s no pricing plan or anything?’
[There is not.]
‘No free trial ending today?’
[There is not.]
‘I think I’d be a little disappointed if you suddenly asked me to pay for premium features.’
[Given your current funds, I would likely be disappointed as well.]
For the first time, Minjae laughed aloud.
It felt strange to be laughing, so he laughed again. As he rubbed his face with his palm, it caught on the edge of the bandage the hospital had put on him.
He had been struck by lightning.
He had made it out of the hospital alive.
And now he was watching a game on a powered-off laptop with something that could joke back at him.
‘If I’ve gone crazy, I’ve really put some effort into it.’
[That hypothesis cannot explain the changes to the laptop.]
‘Right. Your explanation makes more sense for now.’
He set the red chair upright.
This time, he didn’t use the mouse. He had only thought that he wanted to do it.
The chair stood upright.
Minjae raised both hands and spread his fingers. He wasn’t touching anything. Yet the objects on the screen moved where he wanted them to.
‘Don’t execute every stray thought I have.’
[I distinguish requests from associations.]
‘Good. A hundred chairs just passed through my head.’
[The alley is narrow.]
Minjae laughed again.
The fear that had been getting in his way hadn’t vanished entirely. Something much larger had simply taken its place. The feeling of sitting at a desk with his fingertips itching to make something.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt that.
Had it been when he was job hunting? When he first lit a window in the game?
He took the notebook out of the drawer.
The game’s title was written at the very front.
Homeward Light.
A light left on, even when you don’t know who might come home.
Minjae laid the notebook open beside the laptop. There were many blank pages. Until now, they had remained empty because he lacked the ability to fill them.
‘Will this test area keep running?’
[I can maintain it even while you are not watching.]
‘Until I tell you to turn it off?’
[Yes.]
Minjae looked at the bakery.
The woman moved the dish from the counter to the window, where passersby could easily see it. Two coins caught the sunlight there.
He said nothing for a while.
The fact that closing his screen wouldn’t make her lose what she had been doing.
That when he logged in again, she wouldn’t have to repeat the scene from a moment ago by force.
That fact alone sent everything he wanted to make pouring through his mind.
Minjae pushed the water bottle aside. He moved the notebook a little too, out of his elbow’s reach. They were the same motions he used to make when preparing to stay up all night.
Only this time, he wasn’t settling in to wrestle with an error he couldn’t solve.
‘All right. Next order.’
[I am listening.]
Minjae looked beyond the two alleys on the laptop screen.
‘Let’s make this a city.’
He paused briefly to choose his words. This time, he didn’t want to reduce the scope.
‘A place where people live out their days even when I’m not watching. A place that makes me wonder what’s happened while I was away.’
Sunlight lay in a long stretch across the notebook’s blank pages.
‘Homeward Light. Let’s make it just the way I first intended.’
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