A World Being Created

Even when we are not watching, the clock keeps moving.

In a world without us, the clock does not exist.

Even in a world we created, the clock exists.

Even when we are not watching, the clock keeps moving.

Even without our making it, a created world completes its own structure. The gaps in that world do not exist inside that world. No, at least they cannot be found from within it. Even from outside it, even we who created that world cannot find them. We can only find as much as we created.

It was a very good day. There is no such thing as landing contracts anymore. I had once worked in sales, but because of the things I had memorized for sales, the technical department would often contact me when something urgent came up. Luckily, the problems were mostly in areas I already knew, so I solved most of them easily, and then the technical department offered to scout me.

Being scouted by another company would have felt good too, but now I no longer have to stand by and watch the absurd situation of my salary dropping because a manager steals my performance.

“Do you know how small this field is? You act like you are the only clean one, and then you will have nowhere to go!”

That was what the department head always said. No wonder the managers under him were the way they were.

But the head of the technical department came all the way over to the sales department, from another building no less, and went around speaking loudly, perhaps so the head of sales could hear him.

“You do not need to wear a white shirt and pretend to be clean anymore! You just need to do your work well. The company pays you to do company work, not to please your superiors for reasons that have nothing to do with the company!”

Some looked at me with envy, some with accusing eyes, and some with expressions that seemed to say they had no idea what was going on.

Even as I packed everything into a box and struggled to carry it downstairs, the department head kept talking without pause. Well, it must have been strange. What came out of a sales employee’s desk was more product manuals received from clients than product brochures to be handed to them.

Anyway, even while hearing people say I did not do my own work properly and kept paying attention to other things, I thought I had done well to keep walking one path.

In the technical department, the divisions were organized by product, but since I knew most of the product manuals inside out, it was decided that I would remain without a fixed department for a while. That did not matter much, because there was no real difference except for business trips. Depending on which product an inquiry was about, support or travel would be assigned, and since I could handle all of them, it meant they could fill gaps with me whenever they were short-handed.

Performance here meant things like field visits or satisfaction, so unlike sales, where large inflows of money were proudly displayed, I thought of my role as blocking small amounts of money from leaking out.

Up to here, this is the story of one person.

One person.

We created this person. But this person appears for only about one minute in the whole thing.

We also never created this kind of company. The buildings and the other people were not created either, but they came into being. The world this person sees is filled in according to what this person can see.

There must be insects and rats too. But since we made this person exist only here, there may be insects and rats, but he will not be able to go see lions or giraffes.

Will there not be any?

Just because he cannot see them does not mean they do not exist. But no one can judge whether they exist or not. Only the lion would know that it exists in that world.

The place where that lion lives is also a gap. A place that cannot be observed.

On the way to work, he saw a traffic accident. A police car was beside it with its lights flashing, and the sound of an ambulance could be heard in the distance. He thought everything had nothing to do with him, but who knows. Perhaps everything in the world is connected.

Everything in the world is connected.

Is everything connected in our world too?

There is only one thing I want to say to that man.

“Yes, everything is connected. Everything is contained in six code files that can be seen at a glance by scrolling, and those files are in one folder. If I turn off my computer, they do not exist anymore. No, I do not even need to turn off the computer. I only need to close the program.”

Is that really so?

Did the person who coded the world where that man exists forget that we can only see what exists? If something did not already exist before, it cannot be seen. If something did not already exist before, it cannot be made. The code that person wrote is only a passage. He too has no choice but to look in through that gap.

And the everyday life of that man as seen by that person is different from what you are seeing now.

Because, it is.

That is right.

Yes.

Aha.

Good. I stopped because I did not need to explain, but you have now entered a situation where you do need to hear an explanation.

The simple fact is this.

I am writing a story, and people appear in that story, and one might say that people do not always have to appear, but even if people do not appear, one person must appear, because that is when the narrator is me, and without someone speaking there can be no words, and writing is the same, so it would be good for you to know in advance that a story must always have at least one person, a narrator, and then, to speak of that person you are probably curious about, as a programmer he created that man, and though he created that world, he can only see the part that his code, which took only a portion of the world, renders on the screen, and of course a person with eyes can see only the light entering those eyes, and a writer has no way to explain to the reader anything outside what the writer has written, which is such an obvious principle that I am too tired to explain it and will move on, so I ask you to understand, no, understand it, reader.

So that man is a character in a game, and at the start of the game, before the first villains appear, his role is to walk across the screen, and the two large men who corner him as he quietly passes are the first villains, and the heroine easily defeats those two villains and moves on, and naturally the screen focuses only on the game’s protagonist, so even if that man walks slowly, he can only be seen for a little over a minute, and how could the programmer who made that scene possibly know that the man had just been transferred to the technical department today and was full of excitement about his new work?

The simple fact is this.

I am writing, and inside that writing there is one programmer, and a man who appears in the game made by that programmer passes by for only about a minute as soon as the game begins, but the world is not so accommodating, and contrary to what the programmer thinks, the man does not simply pass by and disappear. He has his own life, and there are even billions of people behind the back alley visible on the screen, a world where fire trucks are dispatched and police officers never run out of work.

But does something not feel strange?

I have introduced that programmer only as someone who made the game code. Do you want to know anything more?

Of course you do not.

I do not intend to introduce that programmer’s gender, name, or even the programming language used to make that game. No, what if, with the intention of feeling another world created by a single sentence of mine like a reckless flood of words, I said that the programmer made the game not with a programming language but by punching the images and movements in his head directly onto tape?

Could such a person not exist in reality?

No. Reality exceeds imagination. No matter what one imagines, one cannot be certain there is no world in which it exists. Our imagination is cruder than we think.

That programmer wants the man’s gaze to turn toward the villains while the protagonist defeats them. So the man’s head changes direction, and once that works properly, he soon falls out of the programmer’s attention.

But there is something the programmer does not know. That man’s hobby is actually looking at the stars through a telescope at night, and now that he has somehow entered his late forties, his shoulders often grow stiff when he looks through the telescope in one position.

So in truth, that man cannot actually perform the movement the programmer coded.

Yet the programmer forcibly made him watch the villains’ end. In fact, it was not that the code was applied specially to that man alone, but rather to every NPC in the same way. And so, when the protagonist moves on to find the next villain and the man leaves the screen, his neck bone breaks and he collapses.

Since the programmer does not know what happens offscreen, of course he could not grasp such a matter of common sense. He is interested only in the protagonist he can control.

After she defeats the final villain of the stage and enters the second stage, an ambulance passes in the background not long after. The programmer did not intend that either. He would not know. He would not know that it had to be included because it actually passed by. He would not know that it was because of one man he killed, a man full of dreams for the future.

He probably thinks he simply inserted a scene that suddenly came to mind, but the world does not flow so simply.

We cannot see, but we can see. When we look into a world, we see that world. Even if it has not been rendered so that the eyes can see it.

So there is no such thing as intuition. One only sees another world with different eyes.

Shall we avenge that man?

Against whom?

The programmer, of course.

How should it be done?

Shall we break his chair?

That man had to die 276,122,676 times over six years in an arcade.

Around the time someone inserts a coin and presses the START button, he is leaving work and choosing his way home. Since he is in a good mood, he decides to take a shortcut he normally does not take and have a drink at the bar at the end of that shortcut, so he turns into the alley.

There he meets the villains, but the protagonist beats them up with excitement. Naturally, since they are the first villains, they fall weakly. The moment he thinks, “Wow, who is that woman?” his neck twists and he is forced to look at the villains.

Pain as if he is dying grips both his shoulders and trapezius muscles, and he hears a crackling sound in his neck with both ears, but all he can see in front of him is the sight of the villains dying, and without time to turn his head or even his eyes, he shares the villains’ end.

The programmer will not complete the game.

He dared to assume that because he had not made them, the man’s body would have no nerves or muscles.

No matter how much we look in, no matter how much we look out and magnify, there is always a gap in the range we can observe. That gap fills our knowledge.

In truth, we may want to see even what is inside that gap, but the system fills the gap.

Programmer, I shall maximize your gap.

You too may have your own world, but I will take revenge by describing nothing and leaving it as a gap.

The charge is the crime of daring to present yourself as creator. The crime of arrogantly believing that nothing was created except what you created.

My sentence is as follows.

The one who writes plays no role in the world to which they belong. The writing alone plays a role.

But in the world that the writing creates, the writing is like a blueprint. It is the structure, the foundation, the base of the blueprint. The remaining parts are filled by the “gap” so that the contents of the writing become one cross-section.

Therefore, such writing that recklessly curses the programmer deserves to disappear.

A man inside a game made by a programmer who appears inside a piece of writing written by a writer who exists inside my writing.

The man died at a time the programmer did not know, and the programmer died at a time that writer did not know, but he probably has some idea himself. To put it plainly, I will reveal only this much: he did enter a tall building, but because the roof collapsed and badly injured his leg, there was a serious limit to how far he could climb the stairs.

But is the programmer guilty, if he could not even imagine that a living person would be implemented?

Could it be that the programmer had actually killed someone in his own reality? Did he, in the end, meet a fitting death?

All of it is a gap.

Even if one tries to know, one cannot know, and even without the will to know, it is of no help to reality.

Refusing to admit that one does not know something is what we call stupidity.

What a stupid writer!

That writer created the programmer’s crime himself! And under the pretext of the crime he himself had imposed, he sentenced him to death!

I will do nothing to that writer.

Because he is a writer.

Is there anything wrong with a writer not objecting to the contents of another writer’s writing and recognizing it as a work?

I too can only hope that, if I have made any mistake in my writing, the writer looking into this world will show mercy.

Original Korean article: 창조되는 세상