Healer

Outside, the sound of moans alone was enough to make one imagine. The promiscuous moans subsided as the faint aria of Cocaine was heard. The heavenly song must have purged even the souls of the beasts. It was as quiet inside the cabin as it was outside. Yaba touched the tangled gel in his hair. He wanted to wash, but the place was not suitable.

He was suddenly dragged to stand in front of a strange machine, and with a small electrode attached to his head, every corner of his brain pounded. As soon as the examination was over, Cha Yiseok gave Yaba a sky-blue velvet outfit by hand.

Yaba never imagined that he, who always laughed at the chip’s existence, would be doing something like this. Plus, a yacht and an X-ray machine… Cha Yiseok was the one who he really wanted to see in his head.

The people named Minwoo and Haemin watched the printing process in front of the monitor. The time waiting for the result was as cold and silent as the time of the universe approaching from several billion light years away.

“Can I take the medicine?”

The cat blinked and asked. Cha Yiseok asked, zipping Yaba’s clothes up to the nape of his neck.

“When did you take it?”

“On the way out earlier.”

“Only two pills then.”

When Cha Yiseok brought water, the cat took a pill from his clothes pocket and ate it. Then he chewed on his lower lip and tormented it. It’s a habit that came out when he was nervous. He didn’t even know what his unconscious actions looked like to the other person.

He touched Yaba’s hair with his fingers. Rather, it was Cha Yiseok himself who was calmed by the feel of the soft hair.

“It’s out.”

Yaba shuddered at the sound of the voice. They stood together in front of the monitor. On the monitor, pictures of the head taken from various angles appeared. It was difficult to distinguish what was in the fluorescent light image. A man named Minwoo pointed to somewhere in the picture.

“You see this?”

Yaba concentrated all his nerves on the man’s fingers. There are no chips. It’s an illusion. It is Giha’s brainwashing. He repeated it like a spell. His pounding heartbeat pierced his ears. Please, please, please…!

The man’s voice stretched like slow motion and…

“Here, there is definitely some metal.”

Yaba’s eyes darkened. Cha Yiseok’s hand gripped Yaba’s shoulder, and a tremendous amount of power went into it. Contrary to the firm support of this vertigo, his eyes fluttered uncontrollably. Yaba realised he wasn’t breathing. He let out a breath he had been holding back, and only then did he see the picture. Around the junction of his skull and spine, a grain-shaped piece of rice was embedded in the length of half a finger and half of his finger. Yaba asked in a muffled voice.

“… If it’s metal… It might be some other fragment.”

The man answered, raising the glasses on the tip of his nose.

“It looks too clean to be a fragment.”

Yaba opened his parched lips.

“Then… a chip?”

“In X-ray photography, all we can figure out the shape. I can’t decide what this is.”

“So are you saying there is? Or not?”

Cha Yiseok’s voice was sharp. The man glanced at Cha Yiseok with his slender eyes.

“It is forbidden for a doctor to give an opinion without an accurate examination. It’s only certain that it’s metallic.”

This is why he hated doctors. They were no different from a pseudo fortune teller who’s always trying to find a way out of a situation with a vague answer. The only thing he could cling to now was hoping the guy wasn’t a quack.

“How long will it take to remove?”

A dry voice echoed through Yaba’s head. Cha Yiseok’s chest touched his back. His side profile was cold. The man pointed to somewhere on the X-ray picture.

“The metal is near the medulla oblongata. It is the lowest point of the brain. A person does not die if the cerebrum or cerebellum is injured, but soft tissue is vital, so you can’t touch it carelessly unless in surgery. I’ll have to do a thorough examination to find out the details first.”

“So, if there is no other way, how long does it take to try?”

Cha Yiseok chewed on each word. The man twisted his smooth eyebrows.

“It takes half a day just to do a thorough inspection. The surgery alone would take two hours. It could be less, it could be more.”

“Can’t you reduce it further?”

“It’s not like putting food in the microwave.”

Medulla oblongata? What is that now? Why does Minwoo look like that? Cha Yiseok spoke before Yaba could even organise his thoughts.

“Zoom into the chip as much as possible.”

“Okay.”

Cha Yiseok emailed the doctor’s enlarged picture and called someone. Yaba’s consciousness couldn’t catch up with them who had already moved on to the next stage. He pulled Cha Yiseok’s hem.

“What? Why are you only talking to each other? What is that?”

He gently caressed the back of Yaba’s head.

“I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is. We need to know to find a solution.”

The reason why he couldn’t be relieved by the soothing touch was because his eyes were shaking like never before. It was obvious that he was trying to hide it. Yaba decided to stop thinking like a survival instinct. When the man’s voice came over, Cha Yiseok spoke into the phone.

“I sent you a picture by email. Find out what it is. No, I will wait like this.”

He sat down at his desk with his phone to his ear. At that moment, the man named Minwoo sent him a strange signal. Cha Yiseok took Yaba and sat him on the bed a little further away from the machine. He pulled a feather from the mask on the bed and stuck it into a straw in a glass to make a feather stick. He touched the tip of Yaba’s nose with a feather. It was a touch that tickled the roof of his mouth.

“Wait a minute while playing with this.”

“No. I’m going to listen, too.”

“If you stay obedient, I’ll groom you as much as you want later.”

“…”

Cha Yiseok turned on the audio and turned up the volume, went to the party where he was, and had a conversation. The sound was muffled by the music. Yaba wrinkled his brow and twirled the feathered rod.

***

“He’s a little weird.”

As soon as Cha Yiseok approached, Eun Minwoo said.

“Lower your voice.”

Cha Yiseok muttered as he sat down at the table. Eun Minwoo glanced at Yaba and lowered his voice as much as possible.

“When he was tested a little while ago, his brain waves stopped for over 10 minutes. When the brain waves stop, a person is judged to be brain dead.”

It was an unexpected statement. Cha Yiseok spoke in a way Yaba could not hear.

“He took GHB for a long time and recently stopped. It must be because his mind is unstable and he’s very nervous right now.”

“Then we should record an abnormal EEG. It’s not even a mechanical breakdown.”

“It could be because of the metal in his head.”

Eun Minwoo shook his head.

“It doesn’t make sense either. His brain waves just stopped like a dead person. Completely. But the real thing starts now. After 10 minutes, the brainwaves responded, and I can’t describe it.”

What Eun Minwoo pointed to was a piece of paper filled with curved graphs. And it was a monitor that displayed red and blue brainwave images.

“Look at this. The colour distribution is completely asymmetric, and the graph waveform or velocity runs from pole to pole. If there was more space, the graph would pierce up and down. A serial killer who murders 100 bizarrely, a brain disease patient, a drug addict… The pattern is completely different from those people’s abnormal brain waves. But that doesn’t mean he’s normal. Whether it’s normal brain waves or abnormal brain waves, each one has different waveforms and colours, and is indistinguishable from others like fingerprints. However, in the end, it is limited within a certain range and appears in however many patterns. But his doesn’t belong anywhere.”

“That guy is alive and well. We’re on the boat, and other interferences may have been mixed in here.”

“Yeah, it would be most accurate to have him properly tested at the hospital.”

Minwoo looked at the screen and his eyes lit up in wonder.

“However, this is the first time I have seen such a pattern. EEG is said to be the voice of the brain, right? But it seems that his brain keeps sending a message.”

If it didn’t belong to any pattern, it’s not because of brain waves, drugs, or chips… It took time to answer all the questions. The problem was that there wasn’t enough time.

Then he heard a call on his cell phone. When he put the receiver to his ear, Yaba kicked his seat and tried to approach him. ‘No, stay there.’ Yiseok directed Yaba with his eyes and started talking.

“Tell me.”

The person he asked is a biomechanical engineering major, and he works for his offshore company.

― Roughly looking at the shape, it looks like an old model… It’s probably a chip.

Yiseok froze on the spot.

“Is it perhaps a VeriChip1?”

― Similar, but more primitive. It seems that this is a modified test product chip. You know right? It is also about locating the transplanted person and extracting information.

Modified. His body temperature dropped as if blood had been swept away. A small voice crossed the eardrums.

‘Actually, I have a bomb installed in my head. It can track location, but if I come late or don’t listen, my head will explode.’

‘The boy I live with is dead. The thug hit the remote and his head exploded.’

“Hypothetically,”

The sullen voice that came out didn’t seem to belong to him.

“Is it possible that it was modified to work like a bomb?”

is an injectable identification chip that can be inserted under the skin of a human being to provide biometric verification