Forty Years Later [About Forty Years Later / Center for Neural Regenerative Medicine]

Hajun returned to his laboratory after morning rounds.

A patient list was crumpled in the pocket of his white coat,

and several papers on neural regenerative therapy lay open across his desk.

Now nearing fifty,

he was both a physician and a researcher.

He knew what kind of surgery he had received as a child.

He knew that his father had transplanted unapproved neural organoid tissue.

And he knew that because of it, his father had been driven out of science.

But he did not know exactly how the technology had been created.

Taekyung almost never spoke about it.

(Hajun) : “What exactly did you do back then?”

Hajun had asked a few times when he was younger.

Taekyung’s answer was always similar.

(Taekyung) : “Something I shouldn’t have done.”

Nothing more.

Hajun stopped asking.

The fact that he was alive already made the question complicated enough.

[Weekend / His Parents’ House]

Taekyung and Jian were old now.

The stairs in their longtime home had become difficult,

and Hajun had been urging them for years to move into a smaller apartment.

At last, Taekyung agreed.

(Taekyung) : “Your mother struggles with the stairs.”

(Jian) : “Your knees are worse.”

Hajun laughed.

(Hajun) : “Both of you are the problem, so both of you are moving.”

Every weekend, the family sorted through belongings.

Books.

Old clothes.

Photo albums.

Boxes that had not been opened since Taekyung left science.

Hajun threw out or moved most things without asking.

He assumed they were memories his father did not want disturbed.

[Afternoon / Storage Room]

At the deepest part of the storage room was an old box covered in dust.

Hajun lifted it and was surprised by the weight.

Inside were black research notebooks packed tightly together.

Instead of dates, numbers were written on the covers.

D-730.

D-641.

D-412.

Hajun’s hand stopped.

He felt as though he had seen those numbers somewhere before.

He opened the top notebook.

The handwriting was familiar.

His father’s.

Neural developmental signals.

Vascularization.

Circuit integration.

Continued development after transplantation.

Hajun flipped a few pages, then stopped breathing.

One sentence caught his eye.

‘Cells don’t know the date.’

Below it:

‘Keep convincing the cells that the next time has arrived.’

Hajun was a researcher.

It did not take him long to understand what the sentence meant.

And at the same time,

to realize something was wrong.

The principle was far too similar to developmental induction techniques used in modern regenerative neuroscience.

The problem was the date.

Forty years ago.

Hajun took out another notebook.

This one contained vascularization records.

Ideas strikingly similar to techniques announced as breakthroughs only a few years earlier were written there.

Another notebook.

Again.

Neural circuit integration.

Long-term survival.

Bidirectional signaling with host tissue.

Hajun sank to the floor.

He pulled notebooks out of the box one after another.

He did not notice the room growing dark.