Chapter 203

PS. A child, lacking vocabulary, often pours emotions into excessive actions and language. Rationally I knew that, but I still took your thoughts seriously. As if you were a short-grown adult.

Baekgyeong stared at the quiz before him for a very long time. Like a Go player immersed in countless reading moves, he sank into the problem with prolonged concentration. After much deliberation, he furrowed his expression like someone who had just made a bad move and set the paper card down.

He couldn’t find the answer.

But he had already realized what she was trying to say back on the day they swam in the river.

To an eleven-year-old boy, a laptop was nothing but a trash can where rage and confusion were dumped. Baekgyeong had used its notepad to scrawl mockery against his family and the household staff. The one he most relentlessly ridiculed was, ironically, the very person who had never given up disciplining him until the end—his mother.

wnrdj alclssus! djaakrk so snsdkvdptj enpwuqjfuTdmaus whgrpTdj

Die, you crazy bitch! I hope you drop dead right in front of my eyes, Mom.

The boy had likely written those things with no sense of guilt, vomiting curses and hatred that would make the reader’s nape prickle and hands tremble, yet feeling no shame, no remorse.

He hadn’t even set a password on the laptop, nor bothered to hide the files somewhere unseen. Perhaps, in truth, he wanted someone to discover his hatred—harboring a malicious wish for it to be noticed.

His mother had surely read those memos and diaries he left behind. Baekgyeong could picture the moment. Within those writings, she had found the right to hate her own son.

Chairwoman Choi, you really were consistent to the very end, weren’t you?

If you were going to hate me, you should’ve hated me to the last. And yet to that bastard son you said, “I was wrong.”

If she hadn’t given him the chance to live a second life, she would not have died. Because he had been granted a new life, she was killed.

Baekgyeong, having deciphered the meaning of all the passwords his mother left behind, silently gazed at the dark phone screen. As though trapped in a time that could not move, he sat still, then quietly tapped at the letters with his fingertips.

wkfahtgoTdj

I was wrong.

When he entered the password, after a brief buffering the gray screen came up. The phone had only the most basic functions, a camera app, and a memo app—nothing else installed. Flipping through, three folders appeared.

The first folder contained complex documents bristling with technical jargon Baekgyeong couldn’t begin to guess at. The second folder held only a single file. Something important, something meant only for Baekgyeong, something others must never glimpse, locked away until her son solved all eleven riddles.

Baekgyeong tapped the file. Inside was a letter from his mother.

To Baekgyeong,

Life cannot be predicted. No one can guarantee when or in what form its end will come.

If I have died by murder or accident, then this phone must have reached you, and this message will serve as my final farewell.

How did you receive forgiveness begged from death, from a woman already gone, to a son reborn from death?

The future you must have changed. The past you would never have tried to solve eleven riddles. If blocked by an unsolvable answer, you would’ve smashed the phone and ruined everything. But now you sit calmly, solving, reading the message I left behind.

You must have cultivated patience. Surely you’ve become someone different from before. What shape, what life does the future you live?

Laughter burst from him, unstoppable. If only he could, Baekgyeong wanted to seat his mother before him and say, in a clear voice: that he was still a pathetic fool, still living like a cripple incapable of carrying his own weight.

Though the pain inside him had never ceased, Baekgyeong, like an unrepentant criminal, sneered as he scrolled further.

Have you ever heard the names Ota Benga and Saartjie Baartman? These two names stand for the cruel curiosities of mankind.

Ota Benga was a boy of the African Pygmies. Dragged to America under the pretense of a “living exhibition of savages,” he was displayed in a zoo’s orangutan cage, forced to live among animals. White men made him a spectacle, and even the intellectuals kept silent, justifying it as anthropology.

Saartjie Baartman was a Black girl from South Africa. Europeans slaughtered her tribe, abducted her, and displayed her body. Because her hips were larger than average, she was paraded as a “curiosity,” a grotesque object of laughter. Proof, they claimed, of how brutal civilization could be. The world has always greeted the unfamiliar with fear and mockery.

In a world where even differences within humankind bring discrimination, how will humanity treat a new species called “alpha”? As lowly beasts suffering rut? Or as mutants endowed with extraordinary regeneration? Writing this letter, I cannot know—I feel only frustration.

But one thing I am sure of. By the time you’ve unraveled my awkward testament, you will have become a man as famous as Jesus.

Baekgyeong burst into laughter as he scrolled. A man as famous as Jesus? Even if he had become the first alpha known to the world, he would never have attained such fame. Jesus was unique. But alpha—Baekgyeong was not alone.

His mother, intoxicated by a strange romanticism not like her at all, was reveling in the pride of holding the key to unveiling the dawn of change to the world.

The genetic difference between alpha and Homo sapiens: 0.6 percent. That difference made alpha the extreme of the physical spectrum. Though burdened with fatal flaws, they still possessed a new sensory system called pheromones and an unbelievable regenerative capacity.

I want to call them Homo Supernus. Humans with divinity and transcendence.

The day I met you anew, I felt as though I had become a second Darwin, rewriting the world. At the same time, I felt like Dr. Frankenstein, who paid the price of challenging God’s authority through his creation.

No matter how much I hated you, when I saw you fall into a vegetative state after the second failed surgery, I realized no parent can send their child to die first. Drunk with grief, and half with scientific madness, I chose to make you into an alpha.

Was it the right choice? Are you happier than before, as an alpha?

Even if I was wrong, even if you are unhappy, I think I would still have made the same choice.

Rut, short lifespan, infertility, unisexual existence. If science can overcome the fatal flaws of alpha traits, then mankind will walk the path of evolution. If all choose to become Homo Supernus, someone will become the last of the old generation, vanishing like the Neanderthals.

From the message, Baekgyeong read a mood of hope. In cautious words, she worried for the prejudice and hatred he would face, yet her imagination swelled with dreams of the shock his existence would bring to the world.

Homo Supernus.

He wanted to laugh at his mother’s grandiose dream. Her wish had failed. The price of giving Baekgyeong, who should have died from failed brain surgery, a new life, was her own death.

He no longer wanted to read. Baekgyeong dragged the scroll bar all the way down. At that moment, a shadow flickered faintly at the bottom. He shut off the phone’s screen and jerked his head around. Isaac was standing behind him, looking down at him.

“You cracked the password.”

Baekgyeong had been so engrossed in the message he hadn’t even noticed Isaac watching from behind. With a sigh, he turned his gaze forward again.

“If you peeked at the contents, then you know. This was a deeply private conversation between me and my mother.”

“Private, you say... To me it looked like nothing more than a woman’s delusions of grandeur.”

Baekgyeong glared at Isaac and shoved the phone irritably into his pocket. In the meantime, Siron stirred awake, his face heavy with drowsiness. Narrowing his eyes at the sight of Baekgyeong and Isaac confronting each other, he yawned as though overwhelmed by sleep and shut his eyes again, pretending to see nothing.

Just then, the plane’s alarm chimed, followed by the announcement to fasten seatbelts. With turbulence expected, the captain’s voice ordered compliance, and they obediently buckled in. Three hours remained of the flight, a journey that was anything but smooth.