This Area Is Deactivated

“Let’s open it.”

Dong-hui stood in front of the door and carefully punched in the four digits of the birthday nobody ever remembered.

— Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Each flat mechanical tone made her own heartbeat sound louder. She was as tense as someone up to no good, and her fingertips trembled. And then, finally!

— Ka-chunk!

At that familiar sound, everything wound tight inside her let go at once.

“It opened!”

Wild with relief, Dong-hui yanked the front door open and darted inside without a backward glance. There wasn’t a single fancy thing in the place, but it beat being stuck in a dream by a mile.

“Haa, thank God!”

The worn but familiar mat, the musty basement smell. For a way of climbing out of a dream it was all far too vivid, far too detailed, but she didn’t care. Relief broke over her like a wave and she flopped flat onto the mat, then shot upright at the tickle of hair against her ear. Fine chocolate-brown hair slid softly back down.

“What the—!”

She was back in her studio, and it still wasn’t her own black bob. The clothes she had on hadn’t changed either. Dong-hui held up the hand that had been touching her hair and turned it over, then back. The hands that grueling part-time work had roughened were gone; in their place, a slender, jade-pale pair moved before her eyes, as though they belonged to someone else. She was still exactly the girl who had named herself Chloe Grace, the girl who thought nothing of being waited on in the bath.

Dazed, Dong-hui got to her feet and crossed to the mirror on the wall. She looked into it and raised an arm. The girl on the other side raised an arm too. In a bathrobe hanging down in long, trailing folds, no less.

“What on earth is going on.”

Dong-hui decided to change clothes first and then go outside and look. She shrugged off the trailing robe, and a milk-pale naked body appeared in the glass.

“Ooh, look at that figure!”

For a moment the panic went right out of her; the body was that beautiful. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror, then felt vaguely like a pervert about it and hurried into underwear, jeans and a T-shirt. The jeans and T-shirt she always wore hung loose and roomy on her now, which was rather a pleasant discovery.

I hope this isn’t a dream.

She got her socks on somehow, but her sneakers were absurdly big, and there was nothing for it but to haul the laces tight and cinch them as close to her feet as they would go. She was still turning things over in her head, chiefly what to tell them at work, when she took hold of the front door handle.

The status window came bobbing up in front of her eyes again. The blue panel was the same as before, but this time something about it felt threatening. Inside her head a warning tone went off, beeep! beeep!

“What the—!”

This isn’t a dream?

Dong-hui hurriedly woke her phone screen. The date was the first thing to check.

“What— what is this!”

She flung the phone away as though she’d been electrocuted. Lined up across the screen were numbers that could not possibly exist.

She had never seen a date or a time like it in her life. Her hair stood on end.

Skin crawling as though she’d touched a cockroach, Dong-hui picked up the phone she had thrown. Her fingertip shook as she woke the screen and tapped the browser. Instead of the familiar web portal, the status window filled the display.

“This is enough to drive a person clean out of their mind!”

She checked again and again, and nothing changed. Dong-hui set the phone down neatly on the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest. Eyes wide open, she buried her face against them. Her hands were full of the hair she had grabbed at in her anxiety.

Don’t tell me the world has ended?

There was no family she missed, no close friend she wanted to see. But being erased from the world like this was frightening all the same.

Am I the only one left?

Her head felt ready to burst. She had gripped her hair so hard that her scalp stung.

“My lady! My lady! Where in the world have you gone off to this time!”

The nanny she had met in the world beyond the door was calling for her, in the weary tone of a mother out hunting for a child who never listens.

This place, frozen around its impossible numbers; that world beyond the door, where somebody was alive and moving.

Unable to get her bearings, Dong-hui paced, then yanked the refrigerator open. She had been braced for everything inside to have spoiled, but the shelves were still cool. Hollow-eyed, she stared at them, then took out the orange juice, spared a moment’s thought for the expiry date, and opened it anyway.

“Something cold might wake me up.”

Dong-hui gulped down juice that had gone ice-cold overnight. Her throat felt like it was freezing solid.

“Ngghhh!”

Draining the whole bottle only made her head feel closer to splitting. She had both hands clamped to it and her whole face screwed up when the status window came bobbing up again. Tireless as ever, it chimed a breezy ding, ding and shouldered its way back into her field of view.

“What’s the ‘hehehe’ about?”

It startled her that the status window had answered something she said out loud. The last line startled her more.

“Activate? So I’d be able to open that front door and walk out?”

Dong-hui’s eyes crawled to the firmly shut front door and away again. Believing herself locked in here had felt as bleak as the end of the world; now there was hope.

Dong-hui thought of the wide, luxurious room on the other side of the wall. That was where the nanny who fussed over her so devotedly was, and the maid who had waited on her in the bath.

“Isn’t that rich enough already?”

Head tilted, she weighed conditions over there against her basement studio, point by point.

Right now the door of the basement studio would not open. Here there was no one; over there, there were people. Ha Dong-hui’s body was gone, and only Chloe Grace existed.

Which meant that what Dong-hui could choose was as good as decided. With no regrets at all, she got up and opened the wardrobe, which held a few outfits and a great deal more empty space. She pulled out the bag lying at the bottom of it, the biggest one she owned. The square waterproof thing had been a customer giveaway at the supermarket where she used to work, and she had come away with one of the spares. Made of something close to picnic-mat material, it would swallow a great deal.

She was casting around for things to pack into it when the status window appeared yet again.

So only what went into this bag could travel over there.

“Inventory, though? So fifty is the basic capacity, the number of things I can fit?”

Dong-hui peered into the empty bag, then tossed in a bottle of juice and a lighter. Both bounced straight back out, as though a transparent membrane had been stretched across its mouth.

Nothing would go into the bag until it had been designated as an inventory. In which case there was no reason to hesitate.

“I’ll designate Bag 1 as Inventory 1.”

Once she had checked that the status window’s readout had updated, Dong-hui tried the items again. This time nothing bounced out; they slid neatly in, one after another, and the number on the storage counter moved with each one.

That settled it. The basic capacity was how many things she could take with her.

“If there’s a Bag 1, does that mean I can designate a Bag 2 and 3 as well?”

“So it’s possible, then.”

Dong-hui packed in the food from the fridge, the lighter, a paring knife, and the pepper-spray gun she kept for self-defense. She had bought the gun the day after the loan sharks came barging into her home, when she felt she needed something, anything, that would let her feel safe; she had trawled the internet and then steeled herself to splash out on a second-hand deal. The whole thing felt strange, like skipping town in the middle of the night. She had barely put anything in, and the fifty slots were already full.

“Let’s go and see. Just how dirt-poor it is. It’ll still be better off than me!”

She slung the bag over one shoulder, took a deep breath, and hauled the front door open. The damp air of the basement studio seemed to tug at her from behind. The instant the floor under her feet changed, the bag on her shoulder vanished without a trace.

“Huh? Where did it go? You said I could bring it! You said it was an inventory I could use!”

The moment the word ‘inventory’ left her mouth, the shape of the bag appeared in midair, just like the status window. The bag-shaped panel was divided into fifty square slots, and every one of them held something she had brought out of her studio, neatly stowed.

“Whoa!”

Dong-hui gave the slot with the half-finished juice a light tap. The bottle dropped out of the translucent screen and into her palm.

“Awesome!”

She was still standing there open-mouthed, past hiding her astonishment at what had unfolded in front of her, when she heard the nanny’s voice.

“My lady! Where on earth have you been? And what is that strange getup?”

The nanny, who had been hunting everywhere for the vanished Chloe, spotted her in the room and came over in enormous relief. All she had on were jeans and a T-shirt, and yet somehow Dong-hui had become a person in a strange getup. She was still agonizing over what to answer when the nanny’s next flustered question arrived.

“Heavens above! You didn’t go walking about in something that hideous, did you? I can’t take this!”

Recoiling in horror, the nanny set about briskly stripping Dong-hui out of what she was wearing.