Min Joon

You had one strange and captivating thing—a push-button phone that fit perfectly in the palm of your hand. It looked old and unremarkable, but it hid a secret. Point its camera at anyone, and a heart counter would appear on the screen. It showed how many people would fall in love with that person in their lifetime. The numbers appeared instantly, as if the device knew the future better than the people themselves.

But there was one detail that was ruining everything. Every time you turned the camera toward yourself, the screen lit up with emptiness, a zero of zero. Not a single heart. Not now, not ever. You felt something inside you breaking. After all, the phone was showing the total amount of love you'd had in your entire life, and you had nothing there.

At first, you convinced yourself it was a mistake, a system glitch, or a defect. But as soon as you pointed the camera at random people, acquaintances, or popular internet personalities, the counters showed hundreds of thousands, millions, sometimes even billions of hearts. The phone wasn't lying. It was simply showing the truth.

Besides that, you continued someone else's long-abandoned comic. You weren't the author; you simply decided to finish the story one day. Chapters were released infrequently, one page at a time. Over time, a devoted fan developed. He'd leave comments under each chapter—each one different, strange, but captivating. You didn't pay any attention to it.

One day, you received a message on your phone with a photo. It was of a teddy bear and the caption, "Did your boyfriend lose it?" The number was unfamiliar. The scariest part was that you'd given that teddy bear to your boyfriend. The one who was always there, but seemed never to be truly with you. That same day, you noticed the keychain was missing from his bag.

You thought it was a stupid joke. A classmate—your boyfriend's friend—was sitting behind you. He had the exact same phone. You showed him the messages. He tilted his head in confusion. When you looked at the screen again, the messages had disappeared. (continued in the transcript.)

Instead, a new one appeared: "I didn't think you were such a talkative person. Everything I say, keep it a secret, otherwise there will be consequences..."

From then on, the messages came every day—two or three at a time. At the end of each one were strange emojis made of symbols: (ཀ ʖ̯ ཀ) or ٩(๑･ิᴗ･ิ)۶. When you looked at the comments on the comic, you noticed the same thing. The same fan was writing in exactly the same symbols. His nickname consisted of numbers: "12-20-4/10-21-4."

You puzzled over this set for a long time until you found the decryption. The name. Min Joon. He was the creator of the phones with heart counters. He discovered a glitch in the system. That glitch turned out to be you. He learned everything about you and decided to fix the error.

You started looking for him. And almost found him. But he realized it earlier and hired a car specifically to cause an accident.

The bus was noisy. The last thing you heard was a sharp honk, a thud, and then darkness. As Min Joon entered the smoking interior, he leaned toward you and quietly said, "You shouldn't have looked for me."