IGWKE Episode 1
by BrieEpisode 1
[Demanding the Truth Behind the Missing Espers!]
“Ah, it’s Thursday today.”
When you’re stuck doing overnight shifts with insufficient manpower, it’s easy to lose track of things like the date or day of the week. It wasn’t until Yoon-ui saw the large, fluttering red-lettered banner and the truck blocking the way to work that he belatedly realized what day it was.
Thursday is the day when protestors hold their regular rally. Yoon-ui alternated glances between the blue lanyard with the guide pass hanging around his neck and the protestors with their megaphones atop the truck, then let out a deep sigh.
On protest days, it’s best to keep your blue ID, which reveals your affiliation with the Ministry of Defense, hidden away in a pocket. But today, he had woken up late, didn’t feel like going to work, and ended up leaving the house while in denial about reality, mindlessly hanging it around his neck.
However, if he were to remove the lanyard now at such a close distance, that suspicious movement would surely make him the protestors’ prime target. It seemed better to just keep his head down and brazenly walk through, as if daring them to criticize him.
Sure enough, as he passed by, the protestors, who had been sharply scrutinizing the lanyard colors of the people heading to work, picked up their megaphones again the moment they spotted Yoon-ui with his blue ID.
“The Ministry of Defense must! Reveal the truth! Behind the missing Espers!”
“Reveal the truth! Reveal the truth!”
“Reveal the truth! Reveal the truth!”
As their chants, clearly targeting him, rang in his ears, Yoon-ui felt both annoyed and guilty. However, he knew that showing any sign of being rattled or turning to look at them could result in being dragged into their crowd.
Since he was neither the Minister of Defense nor a spokesperson, but just a low-ranking grunt, the best course of action was to pretend he neither saw nor heard anything and hurry on to work. Yoon-ui stiffened his neck, stared straight ahead, and quickened his pace, trying not to provoke the protestors.
Fortunately, there was someone up ahead he could fixate on. A red lanyard-wearing colleague walking leisurely with a coffee in hand, as if this were none of their concern.
“So, for the admin staff, it’s just someone else’s problem, huh?”
As soon as he passed through the front gate and was out of the protestors’ sight, Yoon-ui gave the irritating back in front of him a hard slap.
“Ugh.”
The person he hit was Kim Joo-min, an administrative officer in the Talent Development Team who worked in the same office as him. She made a wheezing sound as she hastily pulled her sloshing coffee closer to her chest.
“Almost got burned.”
“Seriously, I get so annoyed every Thursday seeing those red lanyard people acting like it’s none of their business.”
“Well, it is none of their business. Did we send them out? Did we make them go missing? Our department has absolutely nothing to do with it.”
Joo-min shrugged as she responded. She wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t make it any less irritating. Unable to hold back his frustration, Yoon-ui playfully bumped her shoulder with his own. This time, Joo-min wasn’t just going to take it quietly. The two of them exchanged playful shoves as they bickered their way through the entrance of the building.
The place where they both worked was called the Central Crisis Management Headquarters. The name was as vague as the crises they were supposed to manage, but that was inevitable given how haphazardly the organization had been put together in the first place.
About 20 years ago, a black hole—though not an official term, since it wasn’t the kind of black hole astrophysics talks about—suddenly appeared in the sky over Seoul, and unidentified creatures began pouring out of it.
Fortunately, it wasn’t just Korea facing this problem. Similar black holes were observed all over the world, and thanks to the tragedies that first unfolded in other countries, they had already put together some form of response systems to deal with these unidentified creatures. Korea, too, managed to overcome the first wave of crisis with a hastily assembled TF (task force) team, but that’s where things started to go wrong.
The media was the first problem, spewing sensational reports and “hit first, ask questions later” type articles—these kinds of stories always attract millions of comments.
The media turned this nationwide, worldwide phenomenon into a contest of who could produce the most shocking content. However, no one in the mass media was actually interested in what was coming out of the black hole or how it was affecting people. All they cared about was sensationalism and explosive view counts.
Headlines like:
“[Exclusive Report] The Government is Neglecting Hell… Where’s the Safety for Our Citizens?”
“Opposition Party: ‘A Government That Has Abandoned Its People,’ How the Space Crisis Will Impact the Next Election”
Five special broadcasts criticizing the government’s incompetence were produced that year alone.
In the early days of the black hole crisis, it was as if gates had opened up all across the entire Korean peninsula. The whole country was gripped with fear and despair. News outlets and online comment sections were flooded daily with cries for action—“Show us something now!” “Do something to fix this!”—without any concrete suggestions, just demands for something, anything, to be done immediately.
With elections approaching, newspapers were piling on the pressure, and the comment sections were exploding. In the midst of this chaos, a hasty decision was made to patch together a new department, pulling personnel from various other departments, creating a strange organization with multiple heads.
Thus, the Central Crisis Management Headquarters was born—a ragtag, patchwork organization cobbled together as an emergency measure. Within this single headquarters, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the Ministry of Defense were mixed together with their own administrative staff, creating a unique structure.
The staff dispatched from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, along with the in-house personnel, handled desk duties in the ‘Operations Support Department’ and the ‘Talent Development Department,’ while the Ministry of Defense personnel, who were Espers with special abilities, managed field duties in the ‘Field Response Center’ and the ‘Field Support Center.’ This led to the creation of two distinct groups: those with red lanyards and those with blue lanyards.
Given this division, it would have made sense for Yoon-ui, who wore a blue lanyard and was a guide, to head to the building on the left where the field centers were located. But instead, he was sneaking glances at the coffee Joo-min hadn’t yet sipped, and followed her to the right, towards the Talent Development Department where the red lanyard staff worked.
“Good morning!”
“Oh? You two came in together.”
“Please don’t say that with such a weird tone.”
Joo-min cringed at the smarmy greeting from the head of the Talent Development Team.
Team Leader Kim Heesoo, who was pushing 50, was the kind of civil servant who, after failing to get promoted at headquarters, ended up here in a backwater office. Despite his shortcomings, he still hoped for a promotion, which led him to spend more time making unnecessary comments like “Are you two dating?” or “When’s the wedding invitation coming?” whenever he saw unmarried male and female employees standing together, rather than actually doing his job. Annoyed by his remarks, Yoon-ui didn’t bother to respond and went straight to his desk.
“Long time no see, Yoon-ui!”
“Yeah, nothing much happened in the office, right?”
“It was boring without you around.”
“Yeah, I figured it might be.”
As Yoon-ui sat down, the other team members came over to greet him, happy to see him after a while. To an outsider, their enthusiasm might seem over the top, but considering his recent work schedule, it wasn’t that surprising.
“You’ve been on night shifts for the past few days, right?”
“Yeah, morning shifts feel strange now.”
Yoon-ui’s main responsibility in the Talent Management Team was overseeing the attendance and whereabouts of Espers. While it might sound like a simple job of checking if they clocked in and out on time, the reality was far more complex.
Espers, especially, are walking biological weapons. They had to be strictly separated from civilians, and their location had to be traceable by the headquarters at all times.
In other words, the Talent Management Team was a 24-hour standby unit that would be deployed if Espers or their guides failed to return from leave after a mission, left their assigned area without permission, or disobeyed orders.
Although part of the Talent Department, Yoon-ui’s team was the only one entirely made up of Ministry of Defense personnel. This meant their schedules were often unpredictable, with many night shifts or standby duties, making it difficult to see even their office colleagues more than once a week.
“It feels like it’s been a while since I last saw you, Yoon-ui.”
A voice greeted him from the seat across the high partition. It was Kim Woo-joo. Although he also wore a blue lanyard and was affiliated with the Ministry of Defense like Yoon-ui, he wasn’t an Esper. Woo-joo was a Ph.D. holder and data analyst responsible for analyzing the data of Espers. Despite being in the same team, he had a standard 9-to-6, five-day work week like the other administrative staff, so it had also been nearly a week since Yoon-ui had last seen him.
Sipping the half-cup of coffee he had managed to swipe from Joo-min, Yoon-ui returned the greeting warmly.
“I’ve had a mix of day and night shifts this week.”
“Ah, you’re young, so you can handle that. I can’t do that anymore.”
“You’re not even forty yet, Analyst.”
“Come on, let’s put in some more effort together.”
Yoon-ui joked, playfully tapping the partition. Woo-joo smiled and shook his head.
“You’re thirty-two, and I’m thirty-nine. You see, once you pass thirty-five, you age rapidly! Thirty-five is like the half-life of a human in terms of aging. After that, you just keep getting older without mercy.”
“I knew you when you were thirty-four, and you don’t look much different now.”
“Is that an insult?”
“It’s a compliment.”
Exchanging light-hearted banter, Yoon-ui turned on his monitor. As he logged into the system, a pop-up appeared with a list of Espers and guides who were scheduled to return by 10 AM today.
He recognized the names in the top half of the list, but the ones in the bottom half were unfamiliar. These must have been people who joined after Yoon-ui was reassigned from field duties. Checking each profile, he noticed they were all quite young, prompting a sigh.
“There are a lot of new faces among the blue lanyards these days.”
“Well, you’ve been here for five years now.”
Woo-joo responded in a matter-of-fact tone. Five years is enough time for significant changes, especially in a place like this.
Frequent personnel changes were inevitable, especially for Espers, who were prone to injuries, deaths, or transfers due to a strong desire to avoid entering the gates. The same was true for guides, who often rotated between the field and the rear or left the job altogether with each personnel reshuffle. At this point, even Yoon-ui had trouble keeping track of where his peers from his early days had ended up.
