D-730 [Night / Storage Room at His Parents’ House]

Hajun read the notebooks through the night.

At first, he read as a scientist.

Was the experimental design valid?

Were the data internally consistent?

Could these records really have been produced with the technology available at the time?

Then he began reading as a son.

Numbers repeated throughout the pages instead of dates.

D-730.

D-603.

D-412.

D-219.

D-37.

Hajun opened a calculator, then set it down.

He already knew.

His fifth birthday.

The day doctors had believed might mark the limit of his survival.

The numbers were the days remaining until then.

D-730.

When he was three.

D-37.

Just before surgery.

Hajun could not turn the page for a long time.

For the first time,

he understood that every time his father worked,

he had written down how many days remained until his son was expected to die.

[Next Day / Living Room]

Taekyung sat on the sofa reading a newspaper.

Hajun sat across from him holding one of the old notebooks.

Taekyung saw it.

The newspaper lowered slowly.

(Taekyung) : “You found them.”

(Hajun) : “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Taekyung said nothing.

(Hajun) : “These techniques... you developed them first, didn’t you?”

(Taekyung) : “What’s in the notebook is what happened.”

(Hajun) : “We use these principles now.”

Taekyung gave a quiet smile.

(Taekyung) : “What you use now has been properly validated.”

(Hajun) : “The principles are the same.”

(Taekyung) : “That doesn’t make them the same thing.”

Hajun’s voice rose.

(Hajun) : “You did this decades before everyone else.”

Taekyung looked at him.

(Taekyung) : “So?”

Hajun stopped.

(Taekyung) : “Does that make what I did back then right?”

Hajun could not answer.

Taekyung looked away.

(Taekyung) : “I broke the rules because I was afraid you’d die. I used it on a human without approval.”

(Hajun) : “That human was me.”

(Taekyung) : “Which made it worse.”

Hajun bit his lip.

Taekyung was calm.

He did not look bitter.

He did not look like a man waiting for history to restore his reputation.

Hajun asked,

(Hajun) : “Then why did you keep the notebooks?”

Taekyung thought for a moment.

(Taekyung) : “I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away.”

That was all.

[A Few Days Later / Hajun’s Laboratory]

Hajun did not take the original notebooks home.

He made copies.

The originals stayed in the box.

Then he began verifying them.

Contemporary papers.

Hospital records.

The official data that remained after his father’s lab was shut down.

Preoperative and postoperative MRI.

His own current imaging.

Piece by piece, he compared them.

He had no intention of running to the media.

He did not need the world to call his father a genius.

Hajun was a scientist too.

Without proof, none of it meant anything.

A few weeks later,

he contacted three colleagues he trusted.

(Hajun) : “I have some material I’d like you to review.”

(Colleague) : “What kind of material?”

Hajun hesitated.

(Hajun) : “Unpublished research notebooks from forty years ago.”

From that day,

the science his father had hidden began to be tested again.