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Recency bias: a phenomenon where once something becomes significant to you, you start to see it everywhere. For Inho, it’s always been numbers— page numbers, bus routes, random measurements— digits that appear again and again with little context and less rationality.
419.
Inho doesn’t know what this one means, only that he starts to see it everywhere he goes. Phone numbers. License plates. Price tags. It’s subtle at first, so much so that he second guesses if he’s seeing it at all. Was the flight from Hong Kong four hours and nineteen minutes, or had he misremembered? When his dream shook him awake, had the bedside clock read four nineteen, or had it been a trick of the fog-refracted light filtering through the blinds? Time passes and the number solidifies in his life. The address of the cafe where he’d stopped for coffee: 419, Teheran-Ro. The date advertised on a flyer left under his windshield wiper in Yeouido: April 19. The heavily discounted price of a bottle of GlanAllachie 21: ₩ 419,000.
132, 222, 456.
He sees those too. In store fronts and street corners and newspaper headlines. In his dreams. Numbers that haunt him like the ghosts of the dead they represent. But the significance of 419 eludes him; inconsequential, save for how conspicuous it’s made itself, how forcefully it’s worked its way into his psyche.
With the crispness of Autumn comes clarity.
He visits her in Autumn. It’s the first time he’s marked the anniversary of her death in any way other than drunk and festering. Ten years. It feels like a hundred. It feels like yesterday. He draws the tip of his finger across her black and white likeness and wonders for the first time when he’d stopped counting the days. The one year mark had meant nothing to him, not when the days and hours and minutes were still piling up one by one like stones inside his chest. Somewhere between a year and ten, he’d stopped.
That’s when it comes to him. That’s when he realizes that on a misty Autumn day the year before, he’d started counting days again. A new loss. A new unfathomable grief. A new day zero. This time, though, time doesn’t accumulate stone by stone, it counts down— a pre-determined endpoint, inevitable and immovable, drawing nearer with each passing day.
The calculation is simple enough. Four hundred and nineteen days. A day shy of sixty weeks. It brings him to December 31, 2025. Inho’s time runs out as the year ends.
The universe had gifted him a deadline, he only wished he’d recognized it sooner. Once he does, though, the number recedes, as conspicuous in its absence as it had been in its omnipresence.
This is how he knows he’s right.
As if rushing in to fill the vacuum left behind, another number appears more frequently than ever. In the usual places, but in clouds and birdsong and snippets of overheard conversations as well. In the curls of cigar smoke and spirals of cream poured over coffee and in stars as they align overhead.
Soon, it’s more than just the number.
Hints of stale cigarette smoke inexplicably wafting through his empty home. Parades of colorful umbrellas, curved handles clasped tight by passersby despite the absence of rain or snow or even harsh sunlight to protect against. Wads of bet slips that tumble like Russian thistle across his path, miles away from the nearest KRA plaza. Glimpses on the periphery of his vision— soft curls and doe eyes and radiant smiles.
456. Seong Gihun. Inho doesn’t quite know how to think of him, when he does think of him.
Which is always.
Adversary, at times. Friend, if the world had been kinder.
If their lives had been a story, Gihun might have been his antagonist, or his foil, or his everything. In the harsh reality that is, Gihun had become something else entirely. A part of him, as inextricable from Inho as any other part. His conscience, and his prison.
And now, at long last, his calling.
Inho had known the truth of it for years, the extent to which the games spread far and wide from their comparatively modest inception. When Chairman Oh first brought him into the fold, it hadn’t been a surprise to see the bounds of the corruption that allowed that spread. Inho worked as a detective long enough to see the evidence of rot at every level of law enforcement, from small precincts to multinational agencies.
He’d worked as a detective long enough to collect the evidence, too, though for what purpose, he hadn’t understood until now. A moral imperative, even for one with such compromised morals as his. Bank statements. Flight logs. Encrypted correspondence. Manifest after manifest of names and fates. Maps leading to secret locations, and maps leading to bankrollers and spectators and organizers worldwide. And tying it all together— thousands of hours of video footage.
More than enough for any agency to put an end to the games and punish those responsible.
But as he’d said to Gihun, the truth has always been that the games won’t end until the world changes. And when has law enforcement ever been interested in changing the world?
So he puts his faith, instead, in the revolutionaries. The journalists who risk their well-being to investigate the truth. The laborers who band together and fight for a better life for all. The poets and the artists and the speakers of hard truths and unpopular opinions. The people who remind him of Seong Gihun, full of righteous anger and ferocious hope and a fierce determination to do what must be done.
People Gihun himself may have chosen. People Inho wishes he’d been brave enough to join.
One or two or twenty— they’d be called conspiracy theorists at best, so the list is long. Leaders, innovators, those with the most influence. Four hundred and fifty six of them, across a hundred nations, carefully chosen to change the world.
It takes hours to send the evidence to them all. He starts in the early morning hours of the thirty-first, alone in a newly renovated hotel room he’d requested specifically for the occasion. The grey-pink carpets and dingy yellow tile had been removed, but the room number, 410, still hangs outside the door.
“For you,” he says to the presence that sits heavy in the empty room, “it’s not enough, but it’s the best I can do.”
As midnight nears, Inho prepares for the end. He places two glasses on the small round table, setting an open bottle of peach soju between them. The pills rattle when he sits down, and he fishes the bottle from his pocket and spills its contents on the table as well. He doesn’t know how many there are, didn’t bother counting them now that other numbers no longer matter.
It’s more than enough, that’s all he needs to know.
The taste of them is bitter, but the sweetness of the soju washes it from his tongue with each sip, a kindness. The soju dulls his senses, as well, easing his nerves and lending a soft, pillowy comfort to the dizzying effects of the drugs.
To die as the clock strikes midnight, just as his predecessor had, seems fitting, though he envies Oh Ilnam the company he’d had at the end. To die with Seong Gihun standing over you, to look upon him, the last thing your eyes see before they go dark— an honor beyond Inho’s imagination.
Cheers erupt, muffled and distant on the streets below, and Inho’s heartbeat slows. Fear lingers, waiting for him on the thinning edge of consciousness, but something else awaits him too, taking form amidst the veil between this life and what comes after. He feels a spark of recognition, sees the echo of a tired smile, and hears words of soft acceptance— not absolution, but understanding.
Four hundred and nineteen days since he’s seen the face of the man staring down at him now. Four hundred and nineteen days of living in the world after Gihun departed it. Four hundred and nineteen days to discover his purpose, and finally, simply, to do one right thing.
Inho lets his eyes fall shut, a peace falling over him like he hasn’t felt in years. His heart stutters one last time, and stops, just as the fireworks paint the night sky outside his window. A warm hand presses against his shoulder, gentle and solid— something to hold on to as Inho finally lets go.