HACKED 103

Children living in orphanages are, in principle, required to leave the facility once they turn 18 years old.

According to the system, the protection period can be extended up to the age of 24 for applicants only. However, that system is practically non-existent in most orphanages. In a situation where it is already overwhelming to accommodate new young children coming in, places that have the luxury to provide free food and housing for adults over twenty are rare.

Children who become subject to discharge—the legal term is “youth preparing for independence”—cannot possibly become “youth” and achieve “independence” suddenly just because they turn 18 after attending school normally. Whether that is the case or not, they are simply handed a single box containing their personal belongings and sent out right away.

When they leave, money in the name of a “self-reliance settlement fund” is provided. In reality, it is an amount barely enough to cover the deposit for a tiny studio apartment, but it is much better than nothing. This is because this settlement fund is almost the only asset and source of support for children who are pushed out into society so abruptly.

Other than that… well. There are various minor supports, but it is difficult to see them as practically helpful. That is why cases where youth from facilities commit suicide because their life after discharge feels bleak and terrifying occur quite frequently.

To state the conclusion, it was for those reasons that I wanted to save as much money as possible before my discharge.

If I were only taking care of myself, the burden would have been a bit less, but at that time, I harbored the ambition to support Lee Jaeyoung as well. Thinking about it now, I certainly had big dreams. Especially for a teenage high school dropout whose highest level of education was middle school graduation and who didn’t have a thing to his name.

The orphanage where I stayed was by no means a good place, whether objectively or subjectively.

First of all, the director always lived with the words “we’re short on money” in his mouth. Even if there were no donations, there should basically be a budget coming from the government, so where did all that go?

Because of that, the housekeeping of the orphanage was also obvious; for example…

‘Hey, there’s something like a hair in the soup?’

‘Isn’t this a camel cricket leg? Is it a cockroach?’

‘Looking at the length, it’s definitely a camel cricket.’

‘Ugh! I’m gonna puke.’

‘This brat is acting so picky. Just take it out and eat.’

‘Still, it’s not like they gave us the same soup for a whole week like last time. It probably fell in while they were boiling a new batch. Think of it as fresh protein.’

‘This is really shitty.’

‘Wow, fuck. Even if I took the food waste bin from the snack shop where I work part-time and downed it in one go, it would taste better than this. It’s a honey-like taste compared to soup with camel crickets in it.’

Things like this happened all the time…

The kids would loudly spread conspiracy theories, saying things like the director must be embezzling, that this orphanage was actually a money laundering route for a criminal group, or that it had a pseudo-religion as its backbone.

I didn’t believe such wild stories, but I didn’t think they were complete lies either. I felt like there must be at least one shady corner. It was a level of poor conditions that was impossible otherwise.

A narrow multi-person room with bunk beds crammed in as tightly as possible, leaving no space to step. Thin walls with absolutely no soundproofing, and a mattress that creaked and screamed if you moved your body even 1 mm. The smell of mold vibrating everywhere due to lack of ventilation, mixed with the body odor of male adolescents.

When lying down in such an environment with your head buried in a damp pillow… it is only natural to eventually want to press the escape button as soon as possible and get out of this shitty place.

If only the facility were a bit crummy but the director was a kind and conscientious person, it could at least be packaged as “a life of living hopefully while relying on and loving each other despite poverty” or whatever… but the director of our orphanage was a moderately bad person.

What is a “moderately bad person”? It means he carried out gaslighting and subtle assault and abuse as if he were breathing, but not to the extent that he could be openly reported to the police and fed prison rice.

You know, aren’t such parents surprisingly common even in ordinary families? People who don’t abuse to a criminal level, but sometimes make you wonder “is someone like my parent okay?” while at other times hurting and tormenting their child enough to make them want to die.

Since the environment I had lived in since birth was like this, I was indifferent, but Lee Jaeyoung was not. He particularly found it hard to endure the physical and mental violence inflicted by the director. There was probably also trauma related to his biological parents.

Therefore, while I was saving myself from this place, I decided to also save Lee Jaeyoung, who had a bit more time left than me until becoming an adult, as a side project.

˙✧˖°🎮 ⋆｡˚

In this place, there were more than one or two guys who dreamed of a quick jailbreak—no, an escape—just like me. So by the time they became middle or high school students, quite a lot of them earned money secretly.

However, the ways minors can earn money in this country are quite limited. It was even more so for kids in a special environment like ours.

The lucky ones got permission from the director and formally signed an employment contract, and the unlucky ones didn’t get permission and worked secretly. If they then met a malicious employer who violated the Labor Standards Act, they couldn’t even report it.

Because of my personality, which had tossed sociability out the window, I couldn’t do hall service or store part-time jobs like the other guys. Since my talent, which was as small as a rat’s tail, was in music, I earned money by taking commissions bit by bit over the internet.

One day, Lee Jaeyoung happened to overhear my work.

At that time, I was working on a theme song commissioned for an indie game. Since the setting of that game was a near-future apocalypse, I tried to refine it into city pop with a heavy touch of future funk. …Even though I say that, while it might sound plausible to a layperson’s ears, it was at a level that was incredibly flimsy to anyone who knew music.

— Sleepless in the city glow

Chasing shadows we don’t know…

There was no way I could afford a guide vocalist in my situation, and at that time, AI vocals were not yet as common as they are now. A demo I had roughly sung into a microphone attached to a headset was playing on my laptop.

“Whoa… Did you make this, hyung?”

I felt like I had recorded a song I sang passionately alone and accidentally played it for someone else. No, that was exactly it. My face flushed hot, and I closed the DAW window.

“This is crazy. It’s really amazing. Myeong hyung, aren’t you a genius?”

“It’s no big deal. You can do it too if you just install the program.”

“Hey, I couldn’t do it even if I had a hundred programs like this. This is real talent. Won’t hyung become a very famous composer later? Should I get an autograph in advance?”

“How can I become famous by only making crappy things like this? I don’t have proper equipment, and the instruments are all free virtual instruments…”

“It’s something great. Since I don’t have talent, I can’t even drop out like hyung and just drag myself to school. Even when school ends, I just play games all day.”

That I dropped out because I had talent? Well.

The world’s perspective was the exact opposite of that boy’s words. I became a heretic and a failure who strayed from the set path just for the single reason that I dropped out of high school.

His gaze suddenly landed on the headset sitting on my desk.

“Then, hyung. If you get better equipment, will you get better at composing too?”

“Do you think composing is some kind of RPG game? You get stronger because you got good equipment?”

“No, I heard that these days, even creation is about the gear.”

“It’s not like talent you didn’t have will appear just because the equipment is upgraded… but it would become a bit less crappy.”

“Is that so?”

I didn’t think much of that conversation. I didn’t dream that Lee Jaeyoung, who was only a first-year in high school, would start a part-time job after that day.

˙✧˖°🎮 ⋆｡˚

Thinking about it, that boy would stick to me and chatter to a bothersome degree, yet he didn’t tell me his deep inner thoughts.

It was the same when the days he didn’t return home until late at night became frequent. I just thought that since he was a high school student now, maybe he was attending a study room, or maybe he made new friends and was going out to play.

As a result, his part-time job ended not even a few months after it started. He said the owner closed the store overnight and fled under the cover of night. He hadn’t received a single penny of his wages for several months on the grounds that the store was struggling, and that money was taken from him just like that.

If it were the current me, at the point when wages were delayed, I would have muttered “Life is a real battle, boss,” and knocked on the door of the Ministry of Employment and Labor, but because he was doing it behind the director’s back, he hadn’t even signed a contract, and on top of that, he was a young kid who didn’t know the ways of the world yet, so it seemed he had been taken advantage of just like that.

Lee Jaeyoung made the best, or perhaps the worst, choice he could at that time. It was to confess everything to the director and ask for help.

And that day, he was beaten with a golf club until his whole body was covered in bruises, and his cheeks were slapped until blood pooled in his broken mouth and two of his molars were loose. That was the point when I noticed the anomaly in him.

“Lee Jaeyoung, are you crazy? Why did you tell the director that! You know the director absolutely hates that kind of thing. Fuck, and why are you foolishly just taking all the hits.”

“…….”

“And why did you keep it a secret from me too? Do you need money? Are kids bullying you at school? Are they asking for money?”

“…….”

“Say something, you punk. Hyung is asking you!”

“I was going to buy a headset.”

The boy said slowly with slurred pronunciation. His face was entirely stained with bruises and swollen into a mess.

“A headset? Then you should have told me. I can buy that much with my own money!”

“Not mine, hyung’s… I was going to give it to hyung as a gift.”

For a moment, I was speechless.