Episode 2. The Upbound Waiting List of B4

Inside locker 44 were an old pocket notebook, three micro-cassette tapes, and a waterproof copy of a handwritten registry. On the first page of the notebook, her father had written only numbers.

278 people.
241 transferred above ground.
37 records missing.

Seo-jin stared at the figures for a long time. Those three lines said before anything else that B4 had never been a simple shelter floor or an illegal storage room. When she unfolded the copied registry, names, birth years, temporary addresses, destination facilities, and remarks ran down the page in dense handwriting. At the end of nearly every line, the same stamped phrase appeared.

Settlement pending.

After the flood, the entire Muyeong district had been folded into a redevelopment plan. Seo-jin remembered that time only in fragments. The news had talked about temporary transport and emergency relief. Adults in the neighborhood had talked more often about which households had simply vanished from notice: tenants left out of compensation, elders listed as transferred but never seen again, whole families reduced to rumor.

Looking at the B4 copy now, the shape of those rumors became painfully clear.

B4 had not been built to move passengers. It had become a waiting room for people the city had already decided not to count properly.

She inserted one of the cassettes into the old player. A soft rush of static passed through the speaker, then her father's voice came on.

"Muyeong B4 was originally designed as an emergency waiting floor during flooding. Official operations lasted eleven days. After that, the level was declared nonexistent. The problem is that some names never came back up during those eleven days."

Paper rustled on the recording.

"The redevelopment consortium separated the temporary transfer list from the official compensation list on purpose. Several people marked as handed over to facilities were never properly registered anywhere. The names still left on the B4 board are the ones that fell through that split."

Seo-jin turned toward the electric board again. Seo Ha-neul was still there, lit more clearly than any other line.

"I still don't know whether keeping this floor open was the right thing. But erasing even the names would have been burial, not station work. So I left the waiting order and the baggage tags behind. At least so someone could read them later."

The tape cut out for a second, then resumed in a lower voice.

"Whenever a deletion job is scheduled, a fault alert rises to control. I tied it to the name of the last approver instead of a live employee. That way, at least one person might stop and think something was wrong."

Seo-jin bit the inside of her lip. At last she understood why her father had left the alert under his own name. He had wanted someone, family or staff, to feel that small jolt of wrongness and come looking.

Across from the platform, the old booth for station announcements still stood. Dusty microphones and an analog clock sat where they had always been. A note had been taped under them in her father's hand.

Ms. Ok knows. But signal room first.

She remembered the name. Ok Eun-sook had worked the station announcement desk during her childhood. Seo-jin had heard she was frail now, retired for years. Yet her father had left the note in the present tense.

When Seo-jin walked toward the service tunnel, a small wall terminal flickered to life. A countdown appeared on the CRT.

ARCHIVE PURGE / 00:41:12

Forty-one minutes until deletion.

Holding the flashlight tight, she stepped into the tunnel. Old tide marks clung to the floor and water dripped from the ceiling pipes at regular intervals. The signal-room door at the far end was locked, but her father's pass opened it too. The room beyond was wider than she expected: relay panels for track switching, bypass controls linked to central operations, and in the middle an old console reduced to three surviving buttons.

HOLD
PURGE
UPBOUND RESTORE

Below them her father had added another note.

Upbound restore does not revive people.
It returns the register, baggage tags, and station announcements to the live surface system.

At that moment her phone rang. The caller was unknown, but the instant she answered an elderly woman's voice spoke before Seo-jin could.

"You're Dong-ho's daughter, aren't you."

Seo-jin froze.

"This is Ok Eun-sook. I used to work the announcement booth. You're in B4 right now, aren't you?"

Before Seo-jin could even ask how she knew, the old woman hurried on.

"Don't just press the button. Restore the broadcast line first. The names have to surface before the archive tries to erase them. There should be two yellow cables in the right-side panel of the signal room. Connect those and the surface boards will read B4 as a temporary live train."

Seo-jin opened the side cabinet. Two old yellow lines were bundled apart from the others.

"And one more thing," Ok Eun-sook said, very softly. "Seo Ha-neul is not just a line item. She was the last child who never made it up from that floor."

The illuminated name on the board suddenly acquired a face in her mind. B4 was no longer an abstraction or a civic scandal written in numbers. It was luggage, waiting order, a morning that had failed to arrive for specific people.

The countdown kept falling.

00:18:09

Seo-jin connected the yellow cables. Dark relay lamps woke one by one, and somewhere above the signal room a long-unused station chime sounded.

Muyeong B4 preparing for upbound service.

She rested her fingers over the console and stayed there for several seconds. Her father's words kept returning. The upbound button does not revive anyone. Then this would not be an attempt to drag the dead backward. It would be an attempt to return their names to the city of the living.

The countdown dropped under ten minutes.

There was no space left to delay.