The Beginning of the Chaos

Things didn’t get worse all at once.

That was the problem.

If they had exploded overnight, someone would have pressed a button. An alert. A siren screaming through the city. Emergency broadcasts interrupting morning shows. But nothing like that happened. Everything kept working—buses arriving on schedule, traffic lights cycling through their colors, cafés unlocking their doors before sunrise. People still complained about prices, about weather, about being tired.

Everything moved forward.

Just… with noise.

A low, persistent distortion, like static beneath a familiar song.

Seo Joon noticed it on the third day.

Not on the first, when a video circulated in the company group chat showing a man standing in front of a subway turnstile, jabbing at it with an umbrella while chanting words no one could quite make out. Someone had added laughing emojis. Someone else joked about stress getting creative. The clip was shared, replayed, forgotten.

Not on the second day, either, when a woman was escorted out of a shopping mall, her heels scraping against polished tile as she screamed that the floor was “lying” to her, that it kept pretending to be solid when it wasn’t. Security guards looked embarrassed. Bystanders filmed until told not to. The footage vanished by evening.

It was on the third day.

The day when no one laughed anymore.

Seo Joon was back on the subway, Line 6, wedged between strangers, one hand wrapped around the cold metal handrail. The train rattled through the tunnel, lights flashing rhythmically against the windows. He stared at his reflection in the glass—blurred, doubled, faintly distorted by motion.

Wrinkled suit. Subtle dark circles under the eyes. Hair still neatly combed, though it had lost its morning sharpness. His expression was neutral, practiced, the kind that blended into crowds.

An ordinary man.

This has nothing to do with me.

The thought surfaced automatically, like muscle memory. He didn’t examine it. Didn’t test whether it was true. It was something he told himself the way one adjusted posture or straightened a tie—out of habit, not belief.

Across the car, two university students leaned close to each other, voices low but not careful enough.

“…he tried to bite the fire hydrant.”

“Again?”

“Yeah. Same guy as last week, I think. Said he needed to drink ‘living water.’”

A pause. The train screeched as it slowed.

“Did they call the police?”

“No. An ambulance this time.”

Seo Joon shifted his weight and looked away. Not because fear spiked through him—there was no sudden panic, no racing heart—but because listening had started to feel wrong. Intrusive. Like overhearing a conversation about someone’s diagnosis without their consent.

At work, the change was subtle but unmistakable.

No one opened the meeting with jokes. No sarcastic comments about deadlines, no forced laughter to fill the air before the manager arrived.

When the manager did enter, he closed the door behind him with deliberate care. He stood there for a moment, hands resting on the back of a chair, as if organizing his thoughts. The projector remained off. There were no slides, no charts. Only a single unopened bottle of water placed neatly at the center of the table.

“We’re not discussing productivity today,” he said finally. His voice was calm, but tight. “We’re discussing protocol.”

A low murmur rippled through the room. Chairs creaked. Someone cleared their throat.

“If anyone displays unusual behavior,” the manager continued, eyes moving slowly across the group, “identity confusion, unprovoked aggression, incoherent or symbolic speech… you step back. You create distance. Do not confront them. Do not film them. Do not attempt to ‘help.’”

“Isn’t that HR’s responsibility?” someone asked, half-joking, half-not.

The manager didn’t smile.

“As of today,” he said, “it’s everyone’s.”

Seo Joon wrote it down in his notebook without knowing why. The pen pressed harder than usual against the paper.

Unusual behavior.

The phrase lingered in his mind long after the meeting ended. It felt unstable. Elastic. A category that could stretch to include almost anything, if pulled hard enough.

At lunch, the television mounted above the restaurant counter played a news channel on low volume. The chatter of diners nearly drowned out the anchors’ voices, but the captions ran relentlessly along the bottom of the screen.

“Authorities urge calm amid isolated incidents.”

“Experts rule out supernatural origins.”

“Cases show no apparent connection.”

“Give it a week,” someone at the next table muttered. “They’ll slap a name on it. Call it a new syndrome.”

“Like burnout,” another replied, “but more… creative.”

Laughter followed. Short. Thin. It died out quickly, as if everyone felt it linger too long.

When Seo Joon got home that evening, the apartment felt different before he even saw her. Too quiet, yet crowded somehow.

Seo-yeon was sitting on the living room floor, legs folded beneath her, papers spread in careful arcs around her. The overhead light was on, casting sharp shadows across the walls.

“What’s all this?” he asked, loosening his tie and slipping off his shoes.

“Notes,” she replied without looking up.

“Since when do you take notes?”

“Since now.”

She held up a sheet. Printed news articles, some cropped, some annotated. Dates circled. Locations underlined. Small handwritten remarks filled the margins—arrows, symbols, questions without question marks.

Seo Joon blinked.

“Are you building a dossier?”

“No,” she said. “Just organizing.”

“Organizing what?”

Her pen paused. Just for a fraction of a second. But it was enough.

“Patterns.”

He let out a brief laugh, sharper than he intended.

“Seo-yeon, half of these stories don’t make any sense.”

“Exactly.”

He sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, watching as she stacked the papers with exaggerated precision, aligning edges, smoothing corners. It looked less like a hobby and more like preparation.

“Today there was a guy in front of a school,” he said, recalling a headline from earlier. “Completely naked. Said he was ‘purifying the ground.’”

“He wasn’t naked,” she replied immediately.

Seo Joon frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“He took his clothes off, but he was covered in mud. It wasn’t nudity. It was… ritual.”

The word hung between them.

Silence settled, thick and uncomfortable.

“Where did you see that?” he asked.

“In a video they deleted afterward.”

“I didn’t see that video.”

She raised her eyes to his, slow and deliberate.

“Better that way.”

Her tone wasn’t ominous. It was practical, almost clinical.

That unsettled him more than fear would have.

Over the next few days, the reports multiplied.

Not in volume. In specificity.

A woman who tried to walk through a glass wall because “doors hadn’t been invented yet.”

An elderly man who spent hours speaking softly to a historic statue downtown, calling it “brother,” apologizing for things no one else could hear.

A young man hospitalized after attacking a streetlight, convinced it was a cursed enemy watching him.

The words changed. The imagery shifted. But the underlying logic—the certainty—remained the same.

Seo Joon began to notice that Seo-yeon was never surprised.

“Do you think this will end?” he asked one night as they ate dinner in near silence, the clink of cutlery sounding louder than usual.

She chewed slowly before answering.

“Epidemics always end.”

“This doesn’t feel like an epidemic.”

“Not yet,” she said.

He set his utensils down, appetite fading.

“You talk like you’re sure.”

She looked at him then. Really looked. For a brief moment, her gaze felt heavy, layered, as if it carried memories that didn’t belong to this room—or this time.

“I just pay attention.”

That night, Seo Joon woke to a sound that threaded through his dreams.

A siren.

Not close enough to be urgent. Not distant enough to ignore. It rose and fell, steady, familiar, frequent enough to blend into the city’s breathing.

He turned his head.

Seo-yeon was already awake.

Sitting upright in bed. Motionless. Eyes fixed on the dark window.

“Did you hear that?” he murmured.

“I did.”

“What do you think is happening?”

She hesitated longer this time.

“Forgotten things are getting impatient.”