I. Transcending Realities

Seoul has outgrown its guardians. Holy mountains older than sin look up at the towers of limestone and steel, and they tremble. There were times when their great shaking would have inspired a thousand legends. Today, the steel runs too deep. Seoul has armored itself against the angry earth. The walled city will live forever.

In the heart of Seoul lies a tower emblazoned in alphabetic characters glaring red. Y-B-S. In the heart of that tower lies the man bearing those initials, the sole organic inhabitant of its ninety-two floors. In the heart of this man lie uncountable scars and half-bound sutures, and beneath them all lies a story.

A long time ago, there was a designer who could weave fashions transcending realities. He wrapped flesh in fiction, creating holographic designs that would skim the surface of smooth, tangible brocade. His ideas were complex, his execution simple. He played with the palette of gender. Cornflower blues, candy pinks and milk whites melded in a fashion that would dominate the 2060s. Yun Beom-seok was not a young man even then. His breakthrough success was the culmination of thankless decades.

The world praised Beom-seok’s bold creations. They called his body of work avant-garde, a scathing critique of decaying societal mores, and a prescient vision of humanity’s future shapes. He captured the collective imagination. In turn, the collective imagination captured him. Proposals for crossover brand promotions shelled his inbox with extravagant numbers and dense contracts. For his part, Beom-seok did not resist the forces pulling him into the stratosphere. He had worked too hard for too long. Power that binds is power nonetheless. He exhibited his work in newsclips, fragrance commercials, and the kind of staunchly progressive art museums sponsored by genocide.

Yun Beom-seok’s story was the kind that tended short, the kind to end once his sensation ran its viral course through the circuits of social networks. He might have been a rich enough man after this brief run, but the money hardly mattered to him beyond the doors it opened. He wanted to be known as the man who changed humanity.

Fashion is essential to evolution, he reasoned. Appearances are not skin-deep, they are the clearest markers of truth. There is no difference between the look of a thing and the thing itself. He studied western myth, saw how the beginning of rational knowledge and the first human fashions were inextricably linked. He saw how the monks in his childhood community left behind their worldly clothing to don the light-grey robes that signaled a higher kind of living. So he would lead the next leap. He would show humanity to itself in the glamorous mirror of truth. He would be the Bias Wrecker. His myth would not be a footnote or an interlude. He was determined to make it a saga.

Beom-seok’s story is not his alone, and this is why it continued.

They met at an art show in Milan. Beom-seok met many people that night. Many faces sanded down to smooth surfaces by time’s passage. All except one.

Tristan Arcite was an up-and-coming entrepreneur. After several meandering startups, he had struck gold with an online retail marketplace. While Beom-seok had made himself an enigma, Tristan found power in the parasocial. TRISTAN+ was a website, a business, and the idea of a man. He was a fabled bootstrapper, charming and capable. The world bought in. At twenty-nine, Tristan narrowly entered every publication’s “30-under-30.”

And there he was, in Milan. Riot followed in his wake. His entourage held back fanboys and paparazzi. Tristan was not there for the art. He was there to be seen. Perhaps he would ask around, locate the most expensive piece, and buy it. The wealth came too fast to burn these days. He had only recently bought his first summer home, a pleasant Scandinavian estate. He was new to this kind of gluttony.

Yun Beom-seok’s Continuum fashion line was displayed in a courtyard at the heart of the whole affair. Holograms lit the misty night. Everyone knew Beom-seok himself would not be present. He never traveled with his work. He let it speak for itself. And yet, he was there, transfigured by makeup and prosthetics, his eyes shrouded by a bucket hat. This is how he met Tristan.

In his lonesome citadel, Beom-seok has a passing vision. In some ways, it is true. He remembers Tristan in a suit of acid green armor. Tristan never wore armor in any world. In fact, he avoided any sort of remarkable fashion. Yet this is the way Beom-seok remembers him, at least in this moment. At his age, memory is a kaleidoscope. He cannot know if it will turn this way again. So he lingers on the image, and a hairline fracture runs through his ribs. The pain is bearable, now, only a pale echo of a deeper hurt. He will live.

The memory clarifies. Tristan wore jeans, Beom-seok remembers. Most of all, he remembers Tristan’s hungry eyes. The crooked bend in his lip when he asked whether Beom-seok knew the fashion designer. Beom-seok had scowled at the impertinence, then asked on what grounds one could make such an assumption.

“Didn’t mean offense,” Tristan said, and his words rang true. Perhaps he saw something in Beom-seok’s eyes as well. Tristan would later admit to cross-referencing the faces in the courtyard with a rare tabloid photo, using the camera sockets in his vanity eyeglasses for an AI-powered retina comparison. He said none of this when they first met. He allowed Beom-seok his privacy. Instead, quiet but showing his teeth, he said, “If you do run into the designer, will you give me a shout? I’ve got a proposal.”

A curt nod from Beom-seok before he slipped behind a man carrying cocktails, and that was that.

Many hours later, when the locals and even the tourists had retired for the evening, Beom-seok walked along a canal. He carried a sketchbook, and when he found an empty bench beneath a lamppost, he sat. Inspiration cut through him, carried in the wind chill. He imagined a cropped puffer jacket made from a thin insulated mesh. The material his signature blue.

“Hello again,” it was Tristan, bristling in the cold, “What are the odds?”

“Very good, I think.”

Tristan beamed. “You seem like a smart guy, so I’ll get down to it. I run a hypermart on the net. Maybe you’ve heard of TRISTAN+? That’s me.”

“Yun Beom-Seok will not be interested.”

“He hasn’t heard my offer. Mind if I sit?” Tristan didn’t wait for an answer. He planted himself beside Beom-seok and watched the sketchbook schematics come alive with footnotes and measurements. “I love that,” he said, and the sketchbook closed.

“Be plain.” Beom-seok looked up at the other man. “You have my attention. Do not waste it.”

“Let’s collaborate. Your designs, my warehouses and market reach.”

“If Yun Beom-seok wanted to dump his work into the world of fast fashion, he would have already done so.”

Tristan shook his head. “I’ll be the first to admit we shovel a lot of shit. That’s not what I want from our partnership. I’m talking high-end streetwear, made accessible. I’m talking banners on the homepage. I’m talking Y-B-S in big fat letters.”

“What makes you think I need your help?” Yun Beom-seok turned his gaze to the canal, the water eyeleted with reflected string lights.

“You don’t,” Tristan shrugged, “you could keep doing what you’re doing, making expensive costumes that maybe a dozen people will wear each year. That’s a living, I guess. But you want more, am I right? You don’t want to be stuck in this pretentious high fashion world forever, do you?”

“Do you care what I want?” Beom-seok reined in a yawn. The night had waned for so long.

“We want the same things. We want to be our own masters”

“And who is it you serve now?”

Tristan laughed. “Come on, you know.”

Beom-seok found himself without reply. He feared the directions his thoughts took. Before him was a man possessed. The black hole pits in Tristan’s eyes were frightening, inhuman, and possessed an inexorable pull. Perhaps because he did not trust himself to give a decisive answer, Beom-seok stood up all at once.

In affected impassivity, he said: “You may hear from my team. Also, you may not.”

“That’s all I ask,” Tristan said. He extended his hand for a shake, but Beom-seok had turned too soon.

On his flight home, Beom-seok was a brewing tempest. His qualms confused him. He knew what paved the path he walked. He had made deals for promises of fame and wealth before. Why should this be different? Regardless, it was. Tristan lay at the center of his troubles. He was a man after Beom-seok’s own heart. He had the hunger. Though he was youthful, perhaps fifteen years Beom-seok’s junior, he had already amassed a hoard to fuel a dynasty. Where could he be in another fifteen years? Where could they be together?

And then the larger question: Where would it stop? Beom-seok, at least, knew his limits. He had weighed the benefits and downsides of his shackles before donning them. He saw no such awareness in Tristan. Perhaps he could offer guidance, temper the young man.

Even then, Beom-seok knew the end. He knew Tristan would break his fists on the sky. Ah, but there was so much they could accomplish along the way.

Work began at a rapid pace. Beom-seok drafted new iterations of his best styles, doing what he could to lower manufacturing costs without compromising on quality. Tristan was true to his word. Banners rolled out across the margins of TRISTAN+ to advertise the next leap in fashion. The first wave of coats and duffle bags in limited-time color schemes entered the market to be rapidly gobbled up. Exclusivity was essential, Tristan said. It allowed them to reach commercial markets without diminishing the perceived caliber of Yun Beom-seok designs. When Tristan elaborated on his shrewd market strategies, Beom-seok often found himself drifting. Perhaps, Beom-seok thought, this is how Tristan felt listening to him explain the absolute necessity of using reconstructed Egyptian blue pigment in the new line of coats. They had little knowledge in common, though their desires were deeply intertwined.

Beom-seok and Tristan met often for business. Naturata provided a cross-continental bridge where Beom-seok could make a call from his one-room in Seoul and Tristan could join from the loft of his elevated Cornwall cottage. Together they entered an empty world ripe for creation. A red world glowing. The sky of this place bled into no earthly terminus. There was no sky, no earth at all. It was mind, and here Beom-seok felt at home. He could be anyone, anything. After exchanging progress reports, he tended to linger. Sometimes he would make monstrosities of himself. All eyes and appendages and synthetic meat.

Not every meeting was for business. Not every meeting took place in Naturata. Beom-seok may have held power in the virtual world, but Tristan was master of flesh. Here is another crystallized moment Beom-seok still clenches, excavated from memory’s consolidation of days into years: lamplight across Tristan’s bare chest. He was the shiny, translucent pink of a skinned animal. Sweat-slick, taut, and starving. Eyes as gravity wells, pulling Beom-seok deeper, deeper.

With teeth, he whispered, “I lied.” Beom-seok felt his feet leave the ground as his toes curled, parts of himself soaring and others collapsing in a dissolution playing at death. He collected his breath in sharp rasps, and Tristan went on. “I didn’t approach you on my own. They wanted you brought into the fold, and they figured I was the guy for the job. I thought you should know.”

“Who?” Beom-seok managed.

“MultiCo.” The name hung in the fragrant hotel room air. MultiCo was a name like earth or bread, representing an entire dominion. To evoke MultiCo was to evoke commerce large and small, civilization, control.

“They wanted me specifically?” Beom-seok asked. The revelation should have made him feel important. It did not. It made him feel small.

“Mark Bowen requested you by name.” This only led to more questions: had Tristan met the MultiCo CEO personally? Had he truly climbed to that rung? What did Bowen want with a mid-career designer? Was any of this a genuine surprise, or had Beom-seok willfully ignored the obvious? Did he believe a company as large as TRISTAN+ could exist without the invisible tendrils of MultiCo running deep?

His breath returned. Beom-seok asked the only question that mattered.

“Is this real?”

“As real as you want,” Tristan said, which was of course the right answer. Beom-seok smiled despite himself.

“Why do you tell me now?”

“So we can get started on the real work. I have a plan, and to make this work, I need—”

Beom-seok pressed a thumb against the other man’s dry, fractured lips. He’d heard enough. “Tomorrow,” he said, and they discussed nothing else of significance through the night.

Tristan revealed his plan over continental breakfast the next morning.

“Have you heard anything about Bank It!?” he started. Beom-seok had not. “It’s to be Naturata’s flagship esport.”

“I do not follow esports.”

“You’ll follow this one. It’s different. Development’s being overseen from the very top. They’re not making Bank It! to manufacture competition between titles. They want this to be a gateway for late adopters and busy folks like us. They want your old curmudgeonly aunt cheering for her favorite team.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“You know, the whole consortium. I think the MultiCo Broadcast Recreation Corps are the ones actually putting it together, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I see,” Beom-seok said. In truth he saw very little. The greater context eluded him. He had come so far, only to be left grasping in the dark shadows of giants.

So Tristan struck a light. He explained the opportunity Bank It! would present. The game was set to release early the next year. Anyone with a headset would be able to play and hone their skills for the first tournaments, which would kick off around six months after release. These tournaments would culminate with the inaugural World Tourney and an unprecedented prize pool for the first-place winners in the finals, which would take place the following January. The roadmap was highly unusual, Tristan explained. MultiCo wanted the game to retain momentum. Players could not be allowed to find a comfortable, increasingly dull metagame. MultiCo planned to introduce constant changes and new arenas for every annual tournament. Bank It! was designed to reward pure sense and skill.

For Tristan, the most salient detail was the prize pool. The prize was meant to entice big sponsors, he said, and it was working. He’d heard Traze was already scouting for contestants. They would need to move now if they were to secure players from the current upper crust of the virtual sports scene. This is where Beom-seok began to develop an understanding.

“You want uniforms.”

“More than that, I want a partner. I invest the capital, you create the aesthetic, and together we take the spotlight.” 

As much as Beom-seok wanted the spotlight, he could not resist poking at the wrinkle he’d spotted. “What if I am called to a higher station?” If Tristan was an instrument of MultiCo, then he was as well. Perhaps, he thought, the company would have him design garb for the umpires or the referees or whoever officiated the virtual games.

“If we succeed, there won’t be a higher station,” Tristan said, his breath like brimstone. In his fervor, he had scarfed down one too many boiled eggs. “Don’t you see? Mark will want the game rigged. He’ll have a winner picked out before the 2070 World Tourney begins.”

“Seems like you are doomed from the start, then.”

“There’s a saying we had in business school, ‘you’ve got to know the rules to break them.’ We can do that. Imagine what it would look like, defeating his chosen team with the world in the bleachers.”

Beom-seok knew his words had little power now. “We should be careful,” he said anyway.

“Caution did not bring us this far,” Tristan replied, “Will you stay with me?”

Beom-seok could not imagine otherwise.

When Beom-seok and Tristan worked together, things always seemed to fall into place. Beom-seok has not experienced this kind of creative union since. He believes he never will. They were lobes of a brain, a perfect organism striving to increase its power. This was, after all, the ultimate goal of all beings. All other ambitions were power disguised or folly.

Tristan handpicked a veteran shooter coach, who was then given an open-ended budget and instructed to assemble their dream team. Beom-seok set about crafting uniforms. He wanted a look that was at once timely and timeless. Hitboxes, visibility, brand recognition, and various other factors hampered him, yet he would not be constrained. The end result was a set of three unique outfits any other team would rightfully envy. Beom-seok made one uniform pink, another blue, and for the captain he had fashioned a suit of TRISTAN+ lime. White accents around the collar, knees, and waist tied the three uniforms together. Beom-seok was proud, as was Tristan, and together they spun dreams of godhood.

They were not alone. As it turned out, Tristan was right about the game’s appeal. Sponsors swarmed to pick clean the ranks of other competitive titles. By the time Blockbuster Stadium was revealed as the first World Tourney arena, every household brand had their fingers in the pot. TRISTAN+’s Polydins emerged as a frontrunner alongside the Ospuze Underdogs. After going public, Beom-seok waited for MultiCo to retaliate. Though they had broken no written rules, he knew their ploy was crooked. Tristan should have delivered his prize auteur further up the chain after Milan. Instead, he had kept Beom-seok for himself. He had violated sacred tenets of hierarchy.

If Tristan found himself in trouble, Beom-seok was never informed. Tristan rarely spoke of his meetings with the consortium. In those days, Beom-seok imagined a round table circled by well-dressed elites with their hands under the table. Now, he knows better.

The details of the earliest games have long since faded. What Beom-seok remembers most about the pan-flash days of 2069 is how Tristan’s appetites grew. Bank It! became an obsession. Each win only led to demands for more kills, more cash in the next round. Whenever they met in meatspace, Tristan was distant. Beom-seok’s attempts to celebrate their victories earned hollow glances and smiles bereft of mischief. Tristan avoided conversations about the past, even when that meant slumping silent while Beom-seok discussed the results of a recent tournament game. He only cared to discuss the future, elucidating increasingly grandiose visions of how the world could be improved under his thumb.

“Bowen has choked the people for too long. They need a man they can trust at the top” he once said into a hotel lobby fireplace, taking Beom-seok aback. It was not like Tristan to express concern for others, feigned or genuine. His typically blunt self-interest was one of the most refreshing things about him, Beom-seok thought. He went on like this, and Beom-seok listened, attempting to reconcile the cutthroat trader with the would-be king. “So much to unravel. Can you even fathom what they’ve done? Do you understand what Naturata is? How ENSŌ has. . . of course you can’t.” He waved a hand at Beom-seok without meeting his eyes. They sat a while longer, until Tristan abruptly stood and retreated to his own suite, where fresh escorts doubtless waited. This was not the first time, though it still opened fissures in Beom-seok’s chest. He’d thought he could maintain a stoic visage. He knew from the start that their trysts were not exclusive. He did not even blame Tristan much. They both wanted to squeeze so much out of life. Tristan was simply sampling the full range of experiences available to him. Beom-seok stayed put, letting the dance of the furnace cauterize his hurt.

Many more events transpired over the subsequent months. Few mattered. The Polydins qualified round after round. Mark Bowen had to notice. Beom-seok knew they’d overstepped. He waited for the invisible fist to come down.

Then came the final game of the season. A week before, Tristan held a celebratory gala that doubled as a housewarming for his recently constructed Chilean estate. The compound was a smart investment, he’d assured Beom-seok during an increasingly rare one-on-one, because climate refugees had poured into the territory and many more were sure to come. Real estate was set to skyrocket, he said with a glint. With the hoard already beneath them, Beom-seok could not see how the value appreciation of a single property mattered, but he did not press Tristan on this point. Mainly he was relieved to be having a somewhat normal conversation again.

Tristan’s party was well attended. Beom-seok arrived as himself, wearing a silk black turtleneck with a thin dress jacket over top. His disguises for the masses were useless here. In the grand hall of Tristan’s mansion, he recognized CEOs and COOs and CFOs of companies that made batteries and guns and toothpaste. He could not look one in the eye without seeing a mask of the consortium. Perhaps he was paranoid. Perhaps he had absorbed a twinge of Tristan’s manic delusions. A younger self would have dulled the edge with drink or something stronger. The creative director for TRISTAN+ and the famed designer who made icons of the Polydins was a man who valued sobriety. Surrounded, he was alone. Beom-seok milled about the grand hall’s perimeter and pecked at hors d’oeuvres.

“Smile. This is a party.” The man raised two shot glasses of tequila, extending one to Beom-seok. He wore a sharp square suit, sharp square glasses, and a smile exposing rows of sharp square teeth. An orange bow and pocket square lent his grave visage a touch of whimsy. Beom-seok smiled, but waved off the drink.

“Come on, look at you, you’ve been around” the man protested in good cheer, “I wager you can handle your liquor.”

“I am capable of many things.” Beom-seok made no move to accept the offering. The man looked vaguely familiar, though he could not place him. His networking efforts had taken a backseat to Bank It!, and there were new faces to know every day. As it happened, Beom-seok did not need to know the man. Tristan did.

“Ah, the devil in orange,” he said, finding his way to their corner in a lazy saunter.

“Only my friends call me that.” The devil straightened his bowtie.

“Tell me, what have you gotten out of my esteemed colleague here?”

“Nothing yet. He plays close to the chest.”

“Why are you pestering him then, Quemby?” Beom-seok understood then why the man was familiar. Quemby Rutile, founder of Holtow Insurance Group. He’d made his fortune insuring virtual assets. Word was, he had recently branched out into cataclysm coverage, though Beom-seok could not imagine such a model being profitable for long.

“Stakes are high in the game we play,” said Rutile, and it was then that Beom-seok noticed the gulf around them. Everyone from waiters to senior MultiCo executives steered clear of their corner. Surely Tristan noticed it too. Beom-seok narrowed his eyes, remembered the protective padding in his jacket. One could never be too careful.

“Gotta have stakes to win big,” Tristan said in a drawl.

“Shall we up the ante, then?” Rutile downed the tequila shot in his right hand, then replaced it with a glowing tablet of figures from behind his pocket square.

“What do you have in mind?” Tristan looked emaciated.

“We have a pot for the finals.”

“TRISTAN+ has put enough into this game, I assure you,” Beom-seok said, consciously dissolving his stance into that of a larger apparatus.

“Surely you have faith in your own team,” said Rutile, “You’re holding all the aces here.”

“Why not?” The words were not for Beom-seok. Tristan beamed holes in Rutile as if they two alone occupied the room. “I like our odds.”

“That’s the spirit,” Rutile said, side-eying Beom-seok. He knew it was a goad. He took the bait anyway.

“We owe this man nothing, Tristan.” Beom-seok fought to keep his gaze focused, with Rutile’s haughty expression taunting him in the periphery. “We have smart investments. Let our money make itself over in those holdings.”

“Your friend is right,” Rutile admitted in a voice that suggested they were all having great fun until someone’s oppressive pragmatism sucked the joy from the air. “I should let you know, this could be the largest gamble of your life. So much hangs on the outcome. You would be playing with the powers that govern this world and the other. I won’t lie, you could lose everything.”

“But what do I stand to win?”

Rutile showed him the figures, angling his tablet out of Beom-seok’s line of sight.

“Then it doesn’t matter,” Tristan proclaimed, and he signed Rutile’s tablet in a single flourish. Then his smile dropped, and he reared his head like a snake ready to strike. “I should let you know, I’m aware that Mark sent you. I know he thinks he’s stacked the deck. He has no idea. Tell him that, will you?”

“Let the cards fall where they will,” is all Rutile said before rolling his shoulders and heading for the foyer. On his way out, he downed the tequila shot in his left hand. Tristan would not tell Beom-seok the details of his wager. They did not speak again before the final match.

The next part is a matter of well-recorded history. When the match came, Beom-seok watched from the spacious headroom of his penthouse apartment in Seoul. He had suggested meeting up with Tristan to watch together, but the man was a wall. So he watched alone as the announcer’s voice came in to announce the Ospuze Underdogs and the TRISTAN+ Polydins. He had come to understand the game, at least well enough to keep up with the match. He did not need any especially esoteric knowledge to know things started poorly. The Polydins wiped once trying to claim the cashbox, then again as they raced the Underdogs to a cashout station.

Something was off. The Polydins moved with minute delay. Their maven was a moment late to defibrillate. Their zephyr cloaked just after he’d already been spotted. The stratagems they employed were nothing less than brilliant, but they seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second at each crucial juncture. The Underdogs took the first point in the best-of-three game. Beom-seok feared what Tristan had put on the line.

Then the second cashbox spawned, and the Polydins were fluid again. They secured the deposit and held it against the Underdogs’ initial assault. On a second push, the Underdogs took out two Polydins and lost a zephyr of their own. The remaining Polydin stalwart held the station with shields and barricaded doors. By the time the Underdogs broke through and finished the job, the deposit was complete. A tie leading into the match point. Beom-seok felt sick.

The teams had learned one another. Their dance was elegant and endlessly tense. The last cashbox spawned. Five minutes went by without a deposit as the contestants feinted this way and that. When one team picked up the box, the other team would rush to intercept or stake out the nearest cashout station. This continued until, at last, an Underdogs zephyr grappled out of an engagement and punted the box thirty meters. It ricocheted against a wall, hit the floor once, and bounced clean into the cashout station port. Spread out, the Underdogs were wiped and their station stolen. When they returned, they pushed the Polydins off of the objective and stole the station back.

Thirty seconds from the end, Beom-seok found his fury. He resolved to throttle Tristan when next they met. He had thrown everything away over a game. It was only a game. He would not allow himself to escape guilt either. Where was this fury when it mattered? Where was his spine?

Twenty seconds later, a simulated bell split the air. Team wipe. A lone Polydin stalwart stood amidst broken concrete and scattered fires. She approached the cashout station. There it was again, that nigh-imperceptible delay. The Polydin initiated her steal a tenth of a second too late. A buzzer hailed the end. The Underdogs materialized once more on the rooftops of the arena, where they waved to their feral spectators riding bleachers in the sky.

“Congratulations to the first Bank It! world champions: John, Scotty, and Robin, the Ospuze Underdogs! What a display! What a show!”

He could not reach Tristan. He sent messages, made calls through his headset, demanded information from every underling he could contact. This excluded Tristan’s personal staff, who had gone silent as well. Beom-seok chartered a flight to Cornwall that evening. To cover his bases, he paid contacts to check in on Tristan’s other properties, though he felt strongly that Tristan would go to ground nowhere else.

He was right. As far as his contacts could tell, the vacation homes and the Chile estate were empty. When the compact jet made contact with Tristan’s pontoon landing pad ten hours after takeoff in Seoul, it was still a mild Sunday evening. Beom-seok disembarked with a flashlight in his hand and two of his private security staff working overtime. The pontoon ended in a plank bridge leading to Tristan’s stilted, unlit cottage. Beom-seok stood by while the larger of his bodyguards kicked the door in.

The cottage was more than uninhabited. It had been systematically stripped. Nothing of Tristan remained. Perhaps Beom-seok would have pieced together what this meant in his own time. He did not get the chance. Tristan was there in the threshold of the kitchen. His presence lit the room.

“Get out,” Beom-seok commanded. His guards filed back through the front door. To Tristan, suppressing rage and relief, “You are a fool.”

“I know.” The fire was out of him.

“What did you do?” They could fix this, somehow. Whatever Tristan had gambled away, they could claw back. Beom-seok would never again be a peasant.

“You think you’re any better?” Tristan kept his eyes on the floor. “Had to do it. How the game works.”

Beom-seok would have felt pity for the drooping man before him if anger had not seized his muscles first. He moved with the speed of someone thirty years younger, his physique preserved through stem cell therapy and daily conditioning. His hands clasped around Tristan’s throat and pressed inward. Fingers clasped, thumbs pressed, meeting no resistance. Beom-seok’s thumbs sank deeper and flesh distorted into light. Tristan gave a sad smile. His distorted, shrunken neck brought to Beom-seok’s mind images of hungry ghosts painted on temple walls.

“You can’t touch me now.”

Beom-seok stepped back, unsure of the ground beneath his feet. “Where are you hiding?” he asked.

“Not hiding,” Tristan said, “I’m here. Wanted to see you.”

“And I wanted to see you, not a projection.”

Tristan’s smile crumbled. “Don’t know how to explain to you. . .” He looked Beom-seok up and down. “This is all I can give you, OK? Probably won’t have this much longer, either. Memorized codes for my home systems, maybe they haven’t thought to explicitly lock me out yet.”

“What did they do to you?” Beom-seok had never felt more capable of violence.

“Didn’t mean to cut you out. Think I was afraid, you know?”

“Tell me what they did.” Beom-seok decided to pull the projector out of the wall after this, have his team find the source of this signal.

“Do as they say. You’re here, which means you’re still valuable to them. Keep going and don’t look back.”

“Do not play at caring.” These words repeat often in Beom-seok’s dreams. “It is below us. Give me something I can act—”

A scream came out of Tristan. His back arched, his hands shot to his head. He clawed at his temples. Ring fingers dug into eye sockets and tore his face like a rake through pond water. Then the cottage was dark. Beom-seok did not leave until morning.

Nearly thirty years later, Yun Beom-seok is a name widely known yet spoken in whispers. Tristan Arcite is a more obscure name and uttered not at all. Beom-seok is a model president, standing out even among the other titans of the MultiCo consortium. His company, Iseul-T, has either subsumed or rendered obsolete every competitor. He has cultivated a measured persona of aged wisdom and ageless cunning. He rejects Naturata’s offering of eternal youth to all. The face he presents is leathery and pocked with liver spots and proud.

In the heart of his tower, Beom-seok sips a chilled, pre-portioned dinner. He is in good spirits today. The seeds of retribution have begun to bear their first fruits, decades in the making. This is where Tristan erred: the long game. He did not have the patience for building true power. He did not have vision.

“The Vogues are coming into the Ready Room,” a soothing voice hums through Beom-seok’s table. “Would you like to congratulate them?”

He dabs his chin clean. “Compose, ‘I will be there shortly.’ Send.”