A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

by Ellen Oh

  “It’s not bad. I wish you’d finished it. You should have. Maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “If you’d spent less time in the game . . .” I want to take it back as soon as I say it, but it’s too late. That’s the point, isn’t it? All of this—it’s too late. She should have been there for me and Dad more often instead of literally losing herself in a game.

  “We’d all be better off, huh?” She sighs. “You should finish it for me.”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “You should,” she repeats.

  “Maybe. Maybe we can work on it together.” I sit up straight. “We have to get you out of there. The game—”

  “I know. This world is dying,” she says. “Maybe when it’s over, I’ll . . . move on.”

  I shake my head. I’ve just gotten her back. “I ran into your friend ShaolinSucker. He told me there’s a way out.”

  I explain about the new server that’s supposed to be running a copy of the game. I have to repeat myself because I’m talking too fast for her to follow. “We should go there. It’s based on the Underworld, so I bet that’s where you can transfer over.”

  “I don’t remember the way,” she says.

  I don’t either, but I’m already Googling for game maps and walkthroughs to get us there. “Follow me.”

  I lose track of the time while we walk and talk. I do most of the talking, filling Mom in on what’s happened in our lives and the real world since she’s died. She shares some of the adventures she’s had in LMC since she died.

  She tells me that as time went on, she started to forget she was once a living human person. The more she forgot, the more she became part of the game—she was simply Eun-Ha, the kumiho warrior.

  Best I can figure is that the longer she spent in the virtual world, the more she lost of her real self until finally she was just code held together by sheer spirit, a nearly mindless extension of the programming. The only thing keeping her tied to the real world was her connection to me, which allowed her to haunt our home. I suddenly contemplate all the NPCs I’ve encountered in the game over the years. How many of them began as more than bits of data?

  And I notice that we’re being followed. As we walk, NPCs stop what they’re doing to trail after us. Their numbers swell as we reach the southern tip of the peninsula, where there’s a gate to the Underworld. A small army of gwisin soldiers is lined up in front, with a towering figure at their head: a white tiger in full armor standing on its hind legs. The ghosts pull back to create a narrow path for me and Mom as we approach their leader. I don’t need to read the words floating over his head to know who he is.

  “King Yeomra.” I kneel before him.

  “Greetings, Ogushin.” His voice booms, a rich sound that expands beyond my headphones and reverberates on the earthly plane. “Ogushin,” he called me. In the stories, the Ogushin is the one who leads spirits to the Underworld.

  I hear shouting in the distance and lift my head, looking around. It sounds like Harabeoji, calling my name. Mom’s eyes are wide, so I know she hears it, too, but no one else reacts.

  That’s when I realize that I’m not interacting with the game through my keyboard and mouse, looking at pixels on a screen. I’m inside it, in the Three Kingdoms, and it all looks so real. Too real. How much time has passed? What if I’m still in the game when the servers are shut down?

  I have to get out of here. But first, I have to get Mom out.

  “My lord,” I say. “I wish to deliver my mother, Eun-Ha, to your safekeeping.”

  “That is not her name,” Yeomra says.

  I look at Mom.

  She bows low in supplication. “Hannah Kim Moon.”

  “Hannah Kim Moon, you must give me something of value before you may enter,” Yeomra says.

  Hasn’t she already given up enough?

  “I have many treasures, King Yeomra,” she says. “All of them yours.”

  Yeomra holds up a paw, and I see a readout of Eun-Ha’s inventory. “Mere trinkets,” he says. “But this—” He highlights one item: Kumiho Bead. “This is interesting.”

  Wait, he’s pulled that from my inventory. Mom isn’t wearing the pearl that belongs with her kumiho costume because I am.

  “No,” I say. I’ve had that bead with me since she died, and I can’t let go of it now. Once Mom’s spirit departs from this game, it will be all I have left of her.

  Mom looks to me. “Who else does my soul belong with but the king of the Underworld?”

  “Your soul?” I touch the bead dangling from my neck. I remember the moment she found it. I had gone thrifting with her to find pieces for her costume, but I was more interested in browsing through the fifty-cent books and DVDs than musty racks of clothing.

  I had heard a crash and a soft tinkling sound. When I looked for the source, I saw Mom had dropped the plastic tub of costume jewelry, and colorful glass and plastic balls were scattering and bouncing on the tile floor around her. But she ignored it all, slack-jawed as she stared at something cradled in her palm. “This is perfect,” she’d said. “It’s mine.”

  A kumiho’s bead contains knowledge, and memories are a kind of knowledge. The shape-changing fox spirits also were known for capturing people’s energy. Some myths say that the kumihos are the beads themselves. Could this cheap bauble, a sentimental keepsake, have been storing my mother’s essence since her death?

  I close my hand around the bead, and Mom looks like herself again. Not her game avatar, Eun-Ha, but the woman who used to kick my ass at Scrabble, showed me how to make Dad’s favorite seaweed soup, taught me to read, took me to the library whenever I wanted, stayed up all night with me to make a model volcano for school . . .

  This is her soul. I’ve had it with me all along. The bead has been helping me remember, whenever my memories of her start to fade, whenever I need her most. I can’t give it up now. I squeeze the bead tighter.

  “I don’t want to lose you again,” I say.

  “You never will.” She reaches out to stroke my cheek the way she used to when I was small and woke up in the middle of the night with a bad dream. Her touch had always comforted me and helped soothe me back to sleep, but now her hand is cold, not quite substantial. I lean into it anyway and close my eyes. I consider what she means about me never losing her.

  If our shared memories had been coming from the bead, they would be hers, not mine—so maybe it has been keeping us connected by holding her in my thoughts. Without it, my own memories of Mom might diminish over time, but whether I recall every detail or not, those moments are part of me. They made me who I am and will always influence who I become.

  More important, the bead is Mom’s only ticket out of here. Keeping it, trying to hold on to her any way I could, would be selfish, and she’s already been stuck here for too long.

  I let go of the bead and rest my hand over Mom’s on my cheek for a moment. For the last time. I nod and step away from her. She’s back to looking like Eun-Ha, but Mom’s face is still clear in my mind.

  “You may have it, Lord.” I unclasp the chain, slide the bead off, and drop it into his outstretched paw. I immediately feel lighter.

  King Yeomra pops the kumiho bead into his mouth like a Tic Tac and swallows it. Then he steps aside, and the doors to the Underworld open.

  Mom turns toward someone I haven’t noticed before, a tall Korean man dressed in twenty-first-century clothing like me, with a black button-down shirt and black jeans. Graying hair pulled into a long, scraggly ponytail. He’s in his fifties, and he looks familiar, but I can’t place him. The stats displayed over his head say simply “Jeoseung (Chasa), Level ∞.”

  Mom kneels before him and says, “Thank you for allowing me to see my daughter.”

  He places a hand on her head in blessing. I kneel before him, too. He clasps my shoulder. His touch is firm and charged with energy.

  “The way is open,” Jeoseung says. “Where your mother goes, you may follow, Ogushin. But not today, or fo
r forty thousand days.”

  I hear sirens, far away, as if they’re on the other side of the city. The sound washes over me. More voices shouting. Someone sobbing. Harabeoji praying in a soft rush of Korean, words rising and falling.

  My mother and I stand up and look at each other. She looks like herself again, in the white hanbok we buried her in. We hug as NPCs swarm from behind us, move around us, and disappear through the open gate.

  “Bye, Mom. I love you,” I say.

  “I love you too.”

  Jeoseung presses his hands together and bows to me. “Go well,” he says.

  I wake up in a strange bed with a hard mattress and stiff, rough sheets. Something in the room is dripping, beeping. The lights are dimmed and the blinds drawn. A hospital.

  I slowly turn my head to the right. Harabeoji sits beside my bed poring over his big Bible with the black leather cover and pages gilded in red. He lifts his head and his eyes widen.

  “She’s awake! Nurses!” He rushes to me and grabs my hand with trembling fingers. “Sun. Thank God.”

  Nurses sweep in; a doctor checks me out. They take blood and ask questions until I want to go back to sleep just to make them stop. Then they swirl out again, and when they’re gone, Dad is standing in the open door holding two Styrofoam cups. He hasn’t been sleeping. His eyes are red.

  “Well, look who’s back!” He grins. “Here comes the sun.”

  I groan. “What happened to me?”

  “I found you slumped over your computer,” Harabeoji says.

  “I was playing LMC.” I don’t know how much I should tell them now, or whether I will ever tell them what happened to me, where I really was. “I must have fallen asleep,” I say.

  “We couldn’t wake you.” Dad sits on the edge of the bed. He hands a cup to Harabeoji. I eye the other one. I could use coffee. My head feels heavy and my thoughts are muddled. “I was afraid you . . .” He sniffs and shakes his head. “They didn’t know what was wrong. Just that you were in a coma. You were someplace else.”

  “I was.” I swallow. My throat’s dry. I saw Mom.

  I reach for the pearl around my neck, but it’s gone.

  Dad sees the gesture. “I looked all over for your necklace, but I couldn’t find it.”

  “How long have I been here?” I ask.

  “Six months,” Dad says.

  I pull myself up and the room spins. “Six months?”

  Time in fairylands moves differently, so a day can be a year. But six months . . .

  Harabeoji sucks in a breath and shakes his head. “Brian,” he intones disapprovingly.

  Dad chuckles. “I’m kidding! Sorry, I couldn’t resist. It’s only been eight days.”

  I collapse back onto my pillows in relief. That’s still a long time, but much better than losing six months of my life. I look at the clock. Just after 11 a.m. Which means . . . I do the math. It’s just after midnight in Seoul, South Korea, where the makers of LMC, Chasa, are based.

  “It’s Friday?” I ask.

  “Yeah. And I know what you’re thinking, but I just heard some good news. One of Chasa’s developers launched his own private server to keep LMC running. It isn’t an official release, and there won’t be any new content except for fan mods, but eventually it’ll be a playable archive of everything that was there. They’re opening it to crowdfunding, so as long as there are donations, the game will exist in some form.”

  “It’s based on the Underworld,” I say.

  He’s surprised. “How did you know that? It was just announced this morning.”

  “Did you bring my computer?” I look around the room.

  “Oh. Sorry, your laptop’s toast. Your doctor thinks maybe it shocked you somehow. We’ll get you a new one.”

  “You’re not going back into that game, are you?” Harabeoji asks sharply.

  I give him an odd look, curious about his phrasing.

  I’ll never log into the Underworld server or visit the Three Kingdoms again. The experience wouldn’t ever be the same, and it might even be dangerous for me to go back. It’s too easy to get lost in there.

  “There’s no need, Harabeoji. She’s gone,” I say.

  It takes a moment for my meaning to sink in, but then he smiles. He looks happier than I’ve seen him since his only daughter died.

  “Sun?” Dad asks. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “A lot. Later on. Hey, instead of a new computer, do you think you can dig up Mom’s laptop for me?”

  He frowns. “What do you want with that old thing?”

  I smile. Mom didn’t disappear with the game or the kumiho bead. Part of her has continued on in me and in our memories, and in everything she created in life.

  “I’m going to finish her novel,” I say. “I finally know how it ends.”

  The Chasa Bonpuli

  A Korean Epic

  Korean mythology and fables have a robust oral history, but the stories have not been recorded as thoroughly as Greek and Roman mythology or the European fairy tales that many people grow up with in the West. Since I didn’t have a lot to work with, “The Land of the Morning Calm” became a kind of mash-up of the greatest hits of Korean mythology and folk literature.

  The framework for the story, fittingly, is the Chasa Bonpuli, a Korean epic myth that is very well known in South Korea. The tale has several variations, but its key players are King Yeomra, the god of the dead; Jeoseung Chasa, a kind of grim reaper; and the Ogushin, who guides the dead to the underworld.

  While there aren’t many Korean tales available in English, you only need to read a few to recognize some elements common to all of them, such as spirits, shape-shifters, and magical animals (often tigers). Gwisin, Korean ghosts, can be as mischievous or malevolent as poltergeists and other ghosts common to stories from around the world. Similarly, the kumiho, a nine-tailed fox spirit, is a trickster that usually takes the form of an attractive woman in order to seduce men.

  Although my mother didn’t tell me any uniquely Korean ghost stories when I was a kid, she did tell me about family members who visited her in their dreams after they died—before she heard the news that they were gone!—so I knew that I wanted to tell a ghost story. From there, an origin myth about the underworld seemed like a perfect match, and once I had that magical version of ancient Korea for my setting, I had to populate it with talking animals and creatures like the kumiho. At its most basic, I wanted to tell a story that followed the conventions of the Korean legends I’ve read, only with contemporary characters and a thoroughly modern milieu.

  —E. C. Myers

  The Smile

  Aisha Saeed

  The musicians warmed up their strings, tablas, and lutes in the marble dance hall, steps from the room where my maidservant Simran was finishing lacing the bodice of my silk dress. A sheer curtain separated us from view.

  “Almost done?” I asked.

  “With minutes to spare.” She knelt, clasping gold anklets around my ankles.

  “And the emerald earrings?” I studied myself in the mirror, from the white jasmine threaded in my hair to the silk the color of pomegranate blossoms in full bloom that hugged my curves. “Do they complement the dress? They don’t, do they?”

  “It is perfect, as are you. You will be the only thing they see, anyway.”

  This was our routine. It had been, since she was presented to me when I first arrived to be Prince Kareem’s courtesan. For two years, she had drawn my bath. She’d prepared my meals. When I fretted, she comforted. Normally she soothed my nerves as predictably as the mustard canaries that perched on my balcony and cooed each morning. But today I frowned at my reflection.

  “Is something the matter?” Simran asked.

  “No. Nothing.”

  Simran always kept my secrets, but I didn’t want to trouble her with my confused feelings today.

  The lights brightened through the sheer curtains. The murmur of arriving guests echoed against the walls. The two kerosene lamps that
lit this room were deliberately designed not to draw attention to my preparations behind the stage. They were meant to obscure me until the final moment.

  “His guest is back,” Simran whispered as she adjusted the flowers in my hair. “I heard earlier today that the prince is quite anxious about him.”

  I nodded, as I already knew this. Prince Kareem had whispered it to me this morning when we lay entwined beneath his canopy, the velvet curtains closed, shielding us from the world. This was no ordinary visitor, but an influential merchant with ties to trading routes the royal family needed to expand their empire.

  “If I don’t resolve this matter before my father returns, it will be me he blames. My brothers are already conspiring to take away my place as the rightful heir,” he’d said.

  I had soothed him, reminded him of his importance. I’d quoted Rumi’s words: move within but not the way fear makes you move.

  He had smiled and his shoulders had relaxed, the anxiety shifting off his skin like steam.

  “You will come with me to greet him?” he’d asked. “It is for you he agreed to come all this way to meet me in the first place.”

  “Of course.” Not all were granted the honor of watching the girl who danced with feet that took flight. I had dressed in my finest silk frock with gold shimmering pajamas, feathered blush against my cheeks, and penciled my eyes before joining him to greet the guest at the palace doors. I’d smiled and bowed. I had shown the guest his room and brought his tea. He had glittering green eyes like Simran’s and golden brown hair like my father’s, the color of wheat. My stomach had tightened at the memory of my father’s broad shoulders and deep belly laugh. I’d poured the man’s tea and swirled in the sugar. It did no good to remember the past. It was best to focus on the reality I now lived.

  This was not the first time I’d assisted Prince Kareem in charming his guests; it was part of being a courtesan. Nor was it the first time I had felt Prince Kareem’s eyes on me from a distance. When I’d glanced up, there he was in his royal-green kurta, his arms crossed, his lips pressed together into a thin, straight line, watching me from the parted door.