It’s been five years since my mother died, but I still use the back door when I come home from school. She had always been there to greet me, writing on her laptop at the kitchen table with her knees pulled up to her chest.
I unlock the door and pause to press two fingers to the pearl choker at my throat, reminding myself she isn’t waiting for me anymore. But today someone is: Harabeoji and Dad sit at the table, drinking soju together. They turn to look at me when I walk in.
“Hey, guys. What’s up?” I ask.
Seeing them both there surprises me for a couple of reasons. My grandfather, a South Korean immigrant, is traditional enough that he thinks preparing meals and washing dishes are a woman’s work—that is, mine. Dad knows better, but he’s also way busy and his cooking sucks. So the kitchen’s pretty much my exclusive domain. I bet Mom used it as her office because it was the one place the menfolk wouldn’t disturb her.
Harabeoji and Dad also have barely spoken to each other since Dad started dating Lisa a month ago. I mean, of course it’s awkward to bring your new girlfriend home when your dead wife’s father still lives with you, but Harabeoji just has to deal with it. We’re the only family he has left, and we need to stick together. Plus, it’s been five years, and Dad deserves to be happy. At least one of us should be happy.
I count the little green liquor bottles lined up between them. Seven empties. Then I check how Dad’s doing. He had used alcohol to deal with Mom’s death, but he’s finally gotten to a good place. Lisa is helping with that, too.
“Where were you?” Harabeoji demands.
“School?” I toss my backpack onto the floor and lean my elbows on a chair to face them. Cigarette smoke hangs thick in the air. The ashtray next to Harabeoji’s glass overflows with ashes and butts. I wrinkle my nose.
“You got my text?” he asks.
“Yes. You only need to send it once, you know.”
My phone shows four texts from my grandfather, all identical: hannah’s angry!!! come home
Sometimes I wish I’d never shown him how to text.
“What do you think Mom did this time?” I ask.
“She hid my cigarettes,” Harabeoji says.
“Right. It can’t be that you forgot where you left them. Again.” I wave my hand in the air. “Too bad you found them. You blame every weird thing in this house on gwisin.” Like when he found his comb somewhere he didn’t expect, or tiny pebbles ended up in his slippers, or his tea went cold while he was drinking it. Gwisin, gwisin, gwisin.
Harabeoji says my mother is a gwisin. That’s the Korean word for “ghost.” Of course that’s ridiculous—I’m right there with you—but it’s not always so easy to discount, because he knew she had died as soon as it happened, even though she was three thousand miles away. He claims she visited him in a dream.
It was my eleventh birthday, which I’d been looking forward to for ages. I woke up to find a letter from “Horgwats” on my pillow—Mom obviously hadn’t committed a typo like that—along with a white owl feather, a small buttercream flower cake, and a pouch of jelly beans, which I immediately discovered were only nasty flavors like vomit and earwax. That was Dad’s doing, of course.
Before you think, “Aw, best family ever,” you should know that my parents were both in San Diego for the weekend without me. Dad was running focus groups for a new game his company was making, and Mom was at a science-fiction convention. She called it a business trip—she was writing a fantasy novel and needed to “network” to get an agent—but I knew she was really going for fun. She had made a new costume: a kumiho from The Land of the Morning Calm, an online video game commonly called LMC.
Mom had debuted her costume for us in the family room just a few days before the con. I was amazed at how her body language subtly transformed as she slipped on the brown velvet mask with large slanted eyes, pointed ears, and whiskers. She shook her butt, and the nine orange feathers attached to the back of her red shorts swished behind her, making her look more like a scantily clad peacock than a nine-tailed fox to me.
“Sunny, your mom’s a fox!” Dad said.
I groaned, but that was far from the worst pun he’d ever made. No, that one would be my name, Sun Moon. I still can’t believe Mom went along with that.
“You look just like Eun-Ha!” I told her. She had modeled her costume after her LMC character, a warrior-mage fox spirit. The purple pearl on the leather choker was a perfect match for her in-game “kumiho bead”—a relic that contained the magical fox’s knowledge and soul.
“Thanks, flower cake,” she said. “You could still come with us. It would be easy to whip together a costume for Isang.” Isang was my character, a thief-scholar who could transform into a bear cub.
“Maybe next time,” I said. Unlike Mom, I couldn’t get away with skipping out on responsibilities to go play pretend with my friends. I had to write a book report on A Bridge to Terabithia by Monday, and I still had to read the book.
“If I don’t get stuck at work, Bitgaram also will make an appearance at the con. Rowrrr!” Dad swiped at Mom’s tails with a clawed hand.
“Easy, tiger!” Mom looked around. “Now where’s my brush gotten to?”
Dad and I pointed to the computer desk, where she’d left her hairbrush beside the keyboard again.
I miss moments like that.
Anyway, so finding the letter, and even the gross jelly beans, was a nice surprise—almost magical, if I hadn’t known that Harabeoji had snuck them into my room during the night. I’d gone to thank him, and found him sobbing and rocking back and forth in bed.
“Harabeoji? What’s wrong?”
He waved me over and then grabbed me in a tight hug. He smelled like cigarettes and Tiger Balm. “She’s gone. Hannah . . . Your mother is gone.”
I pulled away from him. “What?”
“I dreamed about her. She was standing right there.” He stabbed an index finger toward the foot of his bed. “She didn’t visit you, too?”
“Oh! You had me worried for a second.” It was just a dream. Mom was fine. Harabeoji was obsessed with the prophetic meanings behind his dreams. He sometimes bought a bunch of lottery tickets when he had a good “money” dream, but he hasn’t won yet.
“You just had a bad dream,” I said.
“No. It was Hannah’s gwisin.”
He’d been telling stories about gwisin since I was little, great stuff for bedtime tales if you want to make a kid wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Gwisin were usually transparent and legless, the spirits of dead people out for revenge or with some unfinished business. Sometimes that unfinished business meant an unmarried woman who is, well—Harabeoji called it “looking for love.” Some of them hid underwater and tried to drown you, or haunted forests and killed hapless hikers. But most of them were supposed to be harmless, unless you ignored their attempts to get your attention.
“First of all, ghosts don’t exist. Second of all, Mom can’t be a ghost because she isn’t dead,” I said.
“It was her!” He slapped his knee.
“Fine!” I threw up my hands. “What did this ghost look like?”
“She had a fox face and nine tails fanning behind a white hanbok.”
I covered my mouth. Harabeoji couldn’t have known about her fox mask and tails. He hadn’t seen Mom’s costume before she left, and she never would have mentioned it since he didn’t approve of her “playing dress-up like a child.” The white dress didn’t match the halter top and shorts from her costume, but Korean ghosts typically wore traditional clothing.
This was starting to freak me out.
“If she was wearing a mask, how did you know it was her?” I asked.
“Not a mask. It was her, but she looked like a kumiho. I felt it. I know my own daughter.” He laughed gruffly. “She looked ridiculous, like a cartoon. She always was a foolish girl.”
“Look, I’ll call her right now,” I said. I went back to my room and got my phone, and for some reason I picked up the owl feather from my bedspread and brought it, too. I dialed as I returned to his room. The line rang and rang and rang before it went to voicemail. That was the last time I heard her voice, and it was telling a lie: Hi, this is Hannah Kim Moon. Sorry you’ve missed me, but I’ll call you right back.
“Hey, Mom. Just calling to see how you’re doing.” I twirled the feather around in my fingers. “Call me when you get this?”
Harabeoji was looking at me with pity, like he knew he was right, and he couldn’t even hope that he’d dreamed up her ghost.
An hour later, Dad called. One of Harabeoji’s dreams had finally come true.
Dad doesn’t believe in ghosts any more than I do, but he’s been strangely silent since I walked into the kitchen.
I want to believe the world is bigger and more mysterious than it seems. It would be great to have Mom around, in any form. But when she died, I learned that wanting something with all your heart doesn’t make it any more real.
“Dad, you’re not buying this, right?” I say.
“Well . . .” Dad drains the last bit of soju in his glass and then stands up. “Come take a look at this and tell me what you think.”
He leads me to the desktop PC in the den, Harabeoji trailing behind us a little unsteadily. This used to be the family computer, but only Harabeoji uses it now. Dad and I use our laptops on the couch or in our rooms, together but not together.
It’s a goofy horror-movie cliché, but I freeze when I see what’s on the monitor: the splash screen for The Land of the Morning Calm.
“Wow, we haven’t played this since . . .” I swallow. “In a long time.” Five years, to be exact.
While Mom was marathoning LMC at her convention, she suffered a sudden brain aneurysm and collapsed right at her keyboard. She never woke up. So you see why Dad and I hadn’t particularly felt like returning to the lands of the ancient, magical Korea of the game since then.
“This is where we found Harabeoji’s cigarettes.” Dad points behind the monitor.
“Not surprising to find his cigarettes at his computer.”
“I didn’t leave them here!” Harabeoji says. “And I didn’t turn that damn game on either.”
Dad clears his throat. “What makes it even weirder is that today Chasa announced that they’re shutting down LMC next week.”
“Oh, Dad.” I give him a fierce hug that takes him—and me—by surprise.
Chasa Entertainment has been running LMC since 1998 in one form or another. The massive multiplayer online role-playing game had been a big part of our lives. My parents met in the game. A year later they had an in-game wedding reception for their characters Eun-Ha and Bitgaram in Andong District. (They also had a real-life wedding, but they only ever talked about the virtual one.) I celebrated my eighth birthday party in LMC, when they finally let me start playing, under Mom’s supervision.
No matter how often we moved, or what else was going on in our lives, The Land of the Morning Calm was there. Until it killed my mother.
I shove our fat cat, Muta, off the chair and plop into it. She bats my foot with a paw in irritation before slinking off, tail up in the feline version of flipping me off.
Dad puts a hand on my shoulder, leans into me gently. “It feels like we’re losing her again.”
“Eun-Ha,” I say softly. When the game’s servers go offline, Mom’s character, Eun-Ha, will be wiped with them, erasing the last remnants of her from the world.
I blink away tears and reach for the fake purple pearl around my neck, the kumiho bead from the costume Mom was wearing when she died. I saw it on her during the viewing, and I took it just before we closed the casket. It was weeks before Dad found out that I had it, but by then he couldn’t do anything about it. He could hardly blame me for wanting something to remember her by. Over the years, whenever I would start to forget what Mom was like, I touched the bead and saw her again as clearly as if she were right in front of me.
I nudge the computer mouse and click on the Start Game button. I try to remember my password. Our family has a lifetime subscription to LMC—which seems morbid when I think about Mom.
Dad’s phone buzzes. He checks it, and the gloom lifts from his face.
“Tell Lisa I say hi,” I say.
Harabeoji makes a disapproving sound, and the temporary peace between him and Dad is over.
Dad kisses the top of my head and squeezes my shoulders. “Will do.”
I close the program and turn off the computer. The aging machine takes forever to chug along. When the fan switches off, it’s suddenly really quiet in the living room. So quiet, I hear Harabeoji’s stomach rumble.
“I’ll start dinner,” I say.
Mom looked over my shoulder while I created my user account for LMC on the living-room computer. She reached for the mouse to show me where to click, but I slapped her hand away. “I can do it!”
I was excited because Mom was finally letting me into her world. It seemed like she preferred spending time in a virtual re-creation of ancient Korea with a bunch of strangers to playing board games with her family. We’d never done the things TV tells you mothers and daughters do together: braiding each other’s hair, clothes shopping, trying on makeup. Once I’d asked her to help me make a Toph Beifong costume for Halloween, but she stayed up all night to make it herself. It was terrific, much better than anything I could have done, but I hated it.
“Shouldn’t you be writing?” I asked.
“I can do that later. You have to pick an animal,” Mom said.
“I know.” I clicked on the owl. The little animated bird flapped its wings and went, “Whoo, whoo!”
“Why did you pick that?” Mom asked.
I shrugged. “It looks cute.”
“This is an important decision! You shouldn’t rush it,” she said.
“Can’t I change it later if I don’t like it?” I asked.
“Life doesn’t work like that, Sun.”
“This is just a game.”
She sighed. “You’re starting to sound like your grandfather.”
“Harabeoji is old and wise,” I said. “Oh, I’m going to make my character a venerable shaman!”
“Maybe you aren’t ready for this.”
Hot tears slipped down my face. “Mom! Please. You promised.”
She threw up her hands and walked away. “Fine, do whatever you want.”
After dinner, Harabeoji goes out to drink and play hwatu cards with the other Korean old men in the neighborhood. Home alone, I curl up in bed with my laptop and prepare to plow through a mountain of homework.
But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Mom and LMC since I got home, so instead of answering discussion questions on 1984, I open my browser and load thelandofthemorning.com. The site hasn’t changed much since the early two thousands, except for the front-page notice about the game ending, with a timer counting down to midnight next Friday, GMT+9. They’re planning a big blowout to bring the game to a conclusion, and everyone’s invited. For its last week, LMC is free-to-play. A download button is right next to the timer.
Before I change my mind, I click the download link. While the game installs, I fiddle with Mom’s kumiho bead, and it all rushes back to me: The countless evenings I’d spent watching her play while I read on the couch. The stories she and Dad would tell from their online adventures, as detailed as if they’d really happened—which she had tried and failed to work into her sprawling novel-in-progress. Late nights spent as a family trying to destroy King Yeoma’s undead armies. My final visit to the Land, the night before Mom died and my world ended.
It takes three attempts before I remember my password. When I succeed, I’m surprised to see my old character, Isang the Brave Bear Cub. Isang the Naïve. He had waited for me all this time, unchanged. But Isang has a mother, and I don’t anymore. Life hasn’t been on pause for me, and I’m a different person now. So I create a new character.
I select the gwisin-hunter class, and this time I pick a girl and make her look as close to my actual appearance as I can: glasses, white tank top, black tights, short black hair with a blue streak. Some people, like my mom, put on masks and costumes to feel more like themselves, but I haven’t been into cosplaying for a long time. I don’t mind adding thick combat boots and a ludicrously large broadsword to my ensemble, though. That’s just sensible gear to have.
As a final touch, I give my avatar a necklace with a single purple pearl.
Then I consider for a moment—it’s a big decision after all—before choosing an owl spirit again. This choice isn’t only fueled by nostalgia, though; wings will let me cover the most territory as quickly as possible. I plan to log in just long enough to fly over the Land’s Three Kingdoms one last time. And it doesn’t matter anymore, so I enter my real name, Sun_Moon.
I sit up straight in bed when one name in my friends list catches my eye: HannaKimmy. Status: Online.
Mom.
It has to be a bug in the system, a cruel glitch. The last time she could have logged into the game was five years ago. But there’s no harm in firing off a private message to her: “Mom? It’s Sunny.”
It’s as foolish a hope as buying a Powerball ticket. I wait and wait and wait, but there’s no response. Of course there’s no response. I don’t believe in ghosts in the real world, but that’s the joy of the Three Kingdoms. It’s a fantasy world where animals can turn into people, people can become gods, and basically anything can happen. The eleven-year-old girl in me who once believed in magic still wishes there was something on the other side of death.
It takes a moment to reorient myself to the game’s controls, but I let sense memory take over, and soon it’s like I never left. The Land of the Morning Calm is just as I remember it, and my heart practically aches at its beauty. I should have come back sooner.
I start the game in the village of Yangdong, in the southeastern part of the peninsula. I don’t have a destination in mind, since I was just planning to explore for a little while, so I wander around aimlessly. My first encounter is with a stag walking on his hind legs. The green text floating above his name identifies him as ShaolinSucker: Level 719. Wow, that’s really high. I’d only gotten up to around level 73 when I quit, and that was pretty respectable.
“Good morning, Sun_Moon! You’re new here?” he types. “Do you need some help?”
I type: “Long-time player, new character. I’ve been away for a while. Thought I’d take one more look around before they switch off the lights.”
He types: “Bad news, alright. But hopefully the new server will hold up.”
“New server?!”
A private message pops up, along with a friend request from ShaolinSucker. I accept both. (Still no response from HannaKimmy.) I open his message and see an IP address.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“A player named Jeoseung set up his own private server to emulate the game. While he’s testing capacity it’s invitation only, unless you find an access point in-game to transfer your character over. I hear it’s running Underworld source code right now.”
I laugh. “Clever,” I type. In the Korean myth that LMC is loosely based on, Jeoseung Chasa is a kind of grim reaper working to collect souls for death.
“Sure I can’t help with anything?” He sends me a smiley face.
I hesitate, but as silly as it is to ask, it’s also silly to be afraid to. “I’m looking for someone who used to play five years ago. If you’re Level 719, you must have been around for a while.”
“Since day 1,” he types. “My user ID is 88.”
“Did you know a kumiho named Eun-Ha?”
It isn’t that much of a long shot that he would know her. Millions of people play the game, but in her heyday, everyone knew Mom. She was a guild leader and was active both in and out of the game, not to mention she was pretty well known for her LMC cosplays.
“Sure,” he types. “I saw her a couple of weeks ago in Hanhoe. I was just passing through, so I didn’t stop to chat.”
That isn’t possible.
“HannaKimmy?” I type.
“That’s her,” he responds.
A chilling thought occurs to me: Someone has hacked Mom’s account, taken over her identity. LMC has a wonderful, supportive community, but like any online group, it also has its share of assholes and opportunists. Mom was in the 500-level club, and everyone knew she possessed a few of the rarest items in the game. Dad and I left a lot of credits on the table by leaving Mom’s character untouched, which could have translated into real-world money. Maybe we should have done more with Eun-Ha, tried to secure Mom’s legacy somehow. Then we would have discovered that someone had stolen it, or prevented it from happening.
“My guild’s planning a raid on the palace later if you want to come,” ShaolinSucker types.
“Thanks, but I’m just going to explore a bit.”
“Have fun! Be careful out there. Dokkaebi and mul gwisin have been more active in the 3K lately. Stay away from open water.”
Not all gwisin are harmless. In Harabeoji’s bedtime stories, some of them would try to waylay travelers to eat or drown them, like the mul gwisin—“water ghosts”—ShaolinSucker warned me about. And then there are the dokkaebi, Korean goblins, who might challenge you to a wrestling match. More nightmare-fuel for imaginative little kids.
I turn my character into a giant white owl and get airborne. Thanks to ShaolinSucker’s information, I now have a goal: Look for whoever is masquerading as Eun-Ha.
It may just be that I’m running the game on a more powerful computer, or else they’ve upgraded the graphics engine over the years, but the Three Kingdoms have never looked better. I had read that the number of active accounts was way down from the millions of people who used to play LMC daily, but the countryside is clogged with travelers. People cluster in villages and climb the mountains on whatever random quests they’ve undertaken. News of the game’s shutdown must have brought them back, as it has for me.
I land in Hanhoe and shift back into human form. I walk up and down the village streets, and I realize that most of the travelers I see are computer-controlled characters interacting with players, making the game seem more active and alive. These NPCs, “non-playing characters,” typically react according to programmed algorithms meant to simulate human behavior. I marvel at how many there are in one place; practically the whole village is full of fake people.
I try asking a couple of NPCs if they’ve seen a nine-tailed fox, but they won’t diverge from their scripted actions. They aren’t programmed to think. Instead, they only comment on the weather or mention items they’re looking for, people they’ve lost track of—offering side missions that I don’t have the time or interest for.
Then I see her.
Even without the “Eun-Ha: Level 999” (wow!) above her head, I would know Mom’s avatar from all those countless hours of watching and playing beside her, and of course, her outfit resembles her kumiho costume.
My shock and happiness at seeing her again, even as a digital artifact of her former self, is quickly overcome by anger. Her avatar is walking back and forth aimlessly just like all the NPCs around us. Back and forth. Back and forth. I hurry over to her and click the Talk icon.
“Who the hell are you?” I type.
“Greetings, Sun_Moon. Fine day, isn’t it?”
“Who are you?” I type again. “Eun-Ha is my mother’s character. You stole it. How did you access her account?” Then I notice that her kumiho bead is missing. “Where’s her necklace? Did you sell it?”
“I am Eun-Ha,” she says.
“MY MOTHER IS DEAD, ASSHOLE.”
Her avatar graphic glitches. “Have you s-s-seen my hairbrush?” she asks.
That really unsettles me. I can practically hear Mom’s voice: “Have you seen my hairbrush?”
Mom always used to lose her brushes and combs. It got so bad that we bought them in bulk and sprinkled them around the house so that one would always be nearby, and even so, they slowly started to disappear. But here, it’s been presented as a mini-mission. This can’t be another person behind her character, but maybe someone coded her likeness into the game. Sometimes programmers added little tributes to their players when enough people asked for it. Dad and I never did—we were done with all this.
What would happen if I found or bought a brush in the game and brought it back to her? Would she give me a clue to some kind of treasure or a cryptic hint for defeating Yeoma’s hordes?
Then a tiny, hopeful voice in the back of my head wonders whether it could be her.
“Mom? Mom, if you’re in there, it’s me, Sunny,” I type.
I try any number of different approaches, but she never responds in anything but a limited, robotic way. Eun-Ha is just like any other NPC, a slave to the game instead of an agent of her own fate. And yet . . . It was like Harabeoji said. I know her. This is more than a mass of glowing pixels on my screen. It’s my mother. And I have one more thing to try.
I get up and go to my desk, rummage around, and grab my old gaming headset. I pull it on and plug the mic into my laptop.
“Mom?” I say. “Hello?”
The word “Sunny” appears onscreen. For a moment, I think her character is just remarking on the damn weather again, but then I hear her voice, too. “Sunny,” she says. “Sunny.”
I start crying.
I have to crank the volume up all the way, and even then it’s barely audible, nearly lost in an electronic hiss and crackle. No, it’s composed of it, noise and air, like very poor audio sampling. Her voice is distant and breathy and strained, but it’s her. And while I never forgot what she looked like because we have so many photos of her, I’d forgotten what she sounded like.
“Mom, it’s really you in there,” I say. “How? What happened? What are you?”
“I don’t know what happened, I’ve forgotten. It’s been too long.”
“Five years,” I say.
“You look good, little flower cake.” I don’t know if she’s referring to my avatar or if she can somehow see me beyond the screen. This is so strange.
“I sort of remember . . . I was in two places at once, in my body, and here,” she says. “I see Oppa sometimes.” Her father.
“Harabeoji thinks you’re a gwisin.”
She laughs, a harsh, disharmonious sound in my headphones, like garbled sound effects.
“He says you visit him. You move things around,” I say.
“I was try . . . get his attention.”
So she’d been trying to communicate with us in the only way she could, just to let us know she was there. But why Harabeoji and not me?
“The computer,” I say.
Harabeoji was the only one who used our old computer with LMC installed on it. Maybe that is her link to the real world. If Dad and I had continued playing the game, would we have found her in it sooner?
“Mom, we didn’t know you were still . . .” Not alive. “Around.”
“You left me here,” she says.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know! But is it okay there? You used to love it in the 3K.”
“It’s wonderful, but I miss . . . real . . .” The sound garbles. “How’s . . . father?”
“Dad? He’s okay.” I hesitate. Should I mention Lisa? “He met someone. She’s nice.”
“I think I knew that. Good.”
“I should text him to come home. You can talk to him, too!” I pull out my phone, trying to figure out how to get him to believe me. What about Harabeoji? He’d want to see her again while he can.
“No, Sunny. Let your father be. This time . . . It’s for us. How are you?”
I almost shrug off her question with the same answer I give Dad and Harabeoji and the school counselor when they ask how I’m doing: “I’m fine, really. My classes keep me busy.” But this may be the last time I get to speak with her, and I don’t want to lie.
“Not good,” I say. “I miss you so much.” Tears drip down onto my keyboard.
On-screen, her character hugs mine, and I can almost feel her arms around me. I do feel her, I’m certain of it—like a cool breeze wafting over my bare arms. I shiver.
“I miss you, too,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
“I don’t know. I go to school. I come home. I cook dinner. I do homework.”
“Is there . . . Are you see . . . anyone?”
“Like I have time for that. Which works out, because no one else has time for me.”
“You used to have a lot of friends.”
“I used to have—” A mother. I chew my lip. “Never mind. We’re wasting our time. Mom, I found your book on your computer. I read it. I hope that’s okay.”
She’s silent for so long, I worry we’ve lost our fragile connection. “Of course. What do you think?”
“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 for 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.”