Chapter Text
Science is not here to fantasize, to confirm dreams or follow paradigms. It is here to ground, to insist on method, and to rediscover, always, the same creation.
The same earth we walk on, the same air we breathe. The same organs, tissues, and cells overturned — the hope of transforming what already exists. For beyond that, what is there? Only hypotheses, whose worth can only be measured by experience and by method.
But sometimes, there comes that researcher who dreams further. Who dares to close their eyes before the trials. Who listens with compassion to those they interview and sees the world they live in with more feeling than calculation.
Celine saw that in Miyeong. Ah, she was the greatest symbol of citizen science anyone could invoke. Her research was not driven by pure scientific fascination, but by the social compassion that declared: “studies with humanity, and not only for humanity.”
The opposite of herself, Celine couldn’t deny. She was so fixed on methods and results that she lost sight of the destination. Like following a river’s course without ever reaching its mouth.
She and Miyeong. Celi and Mimi. They completed each other inside and outside the lab.
So imagine: a rainy Saturday night in August. Celine was filling out reports on zoobenthos — her habit of working beyond what was necessary. The yellow glow of the desk lamp was the only light in the room, while her mind stayed clouded under the weight of obligations.
Her phone rang once. Out of sight, she didn’t see the name. She ignored it.
It rang a second, third, and fourth time. Heavens, who would call so insistently on a Saturday night? She muttered, turned, and stretched out her hand for the phone.
Her eyes widened: Mrs. Ryu, Miyeong’s mother. Strange. They hardly ever spoke. The old woman, with her provincial ways, had never approved of the life her daughter led — too modern for her understanding. That was why it was rare, almost impossible, for her to reach out herself.
Celine answered with a puzzled expression. “Uh… Mrs. Ryu? G-good… evening?” Her voice came out hesitant. Silence stretched, until at last the woman spoke.
“…Miyeong… she’s dead, Celine. The car crashed and… and… it didn’t work out.” The tearful voice finally echoed — then fell silent as suddenly as it had appeared.
Celine did not react. The sound of Mrs. Ryu’s voice did not fully reach her, it seemed fragmented, broken by the distance. She repeated each word in her mind but couldn’t stitch the meaning together. “Dead.” The verb hung suspended, distant, as if it applied to no one she knew.
There was no scream, no tears. Only a motionless body, eyes fixed on the wall, phone still in hand. It was as if her mind had been removed, leaving only the mechanism running: breath, heartbeat, the lamp still lit.
At the funeral, nothing changed. People wept around her, sobs filled the temple, but to Celine everything sounded muted. Blurred faces, muffled voices, too many flowers. She tried to recognize the figure in the coffin, but disbelief ruled everything. It could not be Miyeong. It could not. The body there was only matter. She, the companion of so many years, had to be somewhere else, busy, delayed, anything.
The days that followed passed in a single block, without clear difference between morning, afternoon, or night. Reports piled up on the desk, untouched. The hours rushed by too fast, but to Celine they were always the same: wake up, forget for a second, remember all at once.
It was like living inside a single day that never ended.
• ★ •
Her footsteps thundered against the cold, faintly stained floor of the university, each strike echoing louder than it should, as if the entire building noticed her presence. Her hand gripped the strap of her bag with unnecessary force, almost painful, as if in that gesture there was some guarantee of control. It was just going, working as she always had, and returning. Just that. What could be so different?
The answer came at once. The space was not the same. The benches, once so familiar, seemed larger, hollow, incomplete. No longer was there that lively, glimmering figure moving between flasks and slides with the joyful haste of someone who never tired of trying. No longer the distracted humming that floated in the air, a melody almost formless, but that, once leaving her voice, gained its own identity — unique, because it was hers.
Now, silence reigned. Not the natural silence of a laboratory, but a strange, heavy silence that denounced absence. As if the entire place had withdrawn, deprived of a vital spark.
And then, even the work, once perfect and irreducible, seemed to dissolve in the air. Every note, every calculation, every microscopy blurred. Everything reduced itself to one more dragged-out, indistinct second, slipping away like all the others.
Science, once solid ground, now seemed only to record the passing of time — and nothing beyond that.
The thought made the woman’s monotonous stomach churn; she bent back over the slides, eyes fixed on the microscope, as if she could vanish inside the lens. The low hum of the machines was the only sound keeping her anchored. Notes lay lined before her, but they were nothing more than mechanical scribbles — the hand moved out of habit, without mind.
Andy approached slowly, his lab coat half-buttoned, carrying with him the smell of reheated coffee. He had lived in Seoul for a few years, and his Korean carried that foreign accent that always gave him away. Still, he spoke with ease, like someone used to no longer being a stranger there.
“Celine,” he began, hesitant. “I know it’s hard.”
She didn’t answer. Only slid another slide into place, adjusted the light, pretended to listen.
“But… Miyeong’s space needs to be cleared out. The cabinet, the files. The coordination asked.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “And they thought it best if you did it yourself.”
The silence that followed seemed longer than it should. Celine lifted her eyes from the microscope, staring at the metallic surface of the bench as if the answer might be there. Her hand tightened around the pen until its tip pressed too hard against the paper, nearly tearing it.
Andy started to add something, but stopped. The weight in the room would not allow it.
To Celine, the idea was absurd. To empty Miyeong’s space was to declare, definitively, that she was not coming back. As if gathering flasks and papers would be the act that confirmed death once and for all.
She only said, softly, almost inaudibly “No.”
Andy drew in a breath, rubbing the back of his neck, before insisting.
“Celine… it’s not a choice. If it’s not you, it’ll be someone else. They’ll send someone from the office, and then all her things will end up in boxes, without any care. You know how it is.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, the pen still trapped between her fingers. The image of unknown hands touching Miyeong’s things brought an immediate nausea.
Andy went on, his voice firm now: “No one knew better what was hers. No one will know what to discard and what to preserve. If there is anyone who can do this with respect, it’s you.”
Silence returned, but this time it weighed differently. Celine stared at the dark microscope, as if there were some refuge in it.
“I don’t want to,” she murmured, but the words came out already weakened, as if surrendering before the battle even began.
Andy didn’t argue. He only lowered his glasses slightly, his too-light blue eye meeting the woman’s brown ones. She bit her lip and murmured to herself.
Then, at last, she let the pen fall onto the notebook. She drew in a deep breath, the dry sound escaping her throat. “All right. If someone has to keep it… let it be me.”
Her eyes fixed on the bench betrayed nothing. But inside her, what felt like defeat was already turning into resolution: if there was to be a place where Mimi survived, it would be in her hands.
• ★ •
The corridor felt longer than usual, each of Celine’s steps echoing as if she were crossing a tunnel. She stopped in front of Mi-yeong’s locker. The little nameplate was still there, intact, as if mocking the situation.
She turned the key slowly, her hand trembling. The click of the lock sounded far too loud, a dry snap that tore through the laboratory’s silence.
The door opened with a brief creak. Inside, everything was exactly as she had left it. A lab coat folded carelessly, boxes of slides hastily labeled, and the notebooks. Several of them. Stacked, with colored post-its spilling from the edges, each one overflowing with notes, arrows, hurried scribbles. Miyeong’s handwriting, slanted and energetic, almost leapt from the pages.
Celine brushed her fingers over the cover of one. She didn’t have the courage to open it. The touch alone was enough to summon her voice, always rushed, saying: “I’ll organize it later.”
The familiar smell of reagents mixed with the faint perfume she used still clung to some of the papers. It was as if time had frozen inside, waiting for Miyeong to return and pick up where she had left off.
But she would not return.
Celine closed her eyes, swallowing hard. Then she began to take out the notebooks, one by one, placing them carefully on the workbench. It wasn’t just emptying a locker. It was gathering fragments of a life.
And she knew, in that moment, she would not allow any of it to be lost.
The laboratory was already empty when Celine finally gave in to the temptation of opening the first notebook. The wall clock marked nearly midnight, and the yellow lamp cast trembling circles across the paper.
The pages unfolded before her like a chorus of voices. Frenzied notes, diagrams, formulas interrupted by little phrases in an almost intimate tone: “It works, but needs revision…”, “Ask Celi if she agrees with this hypothesis…” Each line was like hearing Miyeong speak again, quick, full of ideas.
Flipping deeper, she found something different. Not simple field notes or data tables. They were records of a parallel project. Sketches of artificial tissues, calculations on cellular regeneration, references to models for synthesizing biological structures. And among the technical lines, words almost hidden, written smaller, like a secret: “A body is not enough. There must be a soul. How do you measure what escapes method?”
Celine held her breath. The following pages pressed further into the same idea — attempts to draw the invisible, to fuse the coldness of data with the tenderness of the human. An impossible hybrid.
Her hands clenched the notebook tightly. The weight of that writing fell upon her like a summons. From anyone else, it might have seemed like a mere fancy. But from Miyeong… it was a trace, a path left to be followed.
For the first time since the funeral, the emptiness inside her gave way to something else. Not consolation. Purpose.
The notebook lay open before her, its pages spread like a wound that refused to close. Celine pulled the other volumes closer, stacking them in order, and began tracing an invisible method of her own. She separated notes into distinct piles: replicable calculations, vague hypotheses, near-poetic digressions. The silence of the room was absolute, broken only by the rustle of pages beneath her fingers.
It was a ritual. Not only of work, but of permanence. As she organized, she felt Mi-yeong still there, inhabiting the space at her side, leaning over the bench, whispering low remarks.
Then the thought struck her like lightning. Mimi’s life had been cut far too early, abruptly, as if time itself had taken revenge for a delay that never existed. What sense was there in accepting such a bare injustice?
If what was written there was madness, it didn’t matter. But if it wasn’t? If biological synthesis, the attempt to seed consciousness into matter, could go beyond mere fantasy? The thought lodged within her, both venom and cure.
Celine pressed her hands against the table, drawing in a deep breath.
If science could replicate organs, tissues, cells… then why not attempt to replicate what had sustained Miyeong in her entirety?
Madness or not, it would be worth it.
And the decision, though still unspoken, was already made.
• ★ •
Hours dissolved into nights, and nights into indistinct days. Celine remained in the laboratory even when the university corridors were deserted. Cold coffee, scribbled pages, piles of articles scattered around — everything served only as a step to go deeper into the same idea.
First, she plunged into the literature of biological synthesis. Then, into clinical records, into the fragmented reports Mi-yeong had left behind. It wasn’t enough to continue: she had to surpass. Every note Mimi had left unfinished, Celine filled with almost feverish obsession.
Then came the inevitable point: the need for genetic material. The thought weighed on her as both guilt and promise. Miyeong’s DNA was not just scientific data — it was the key to reopening a destiny ripped away too soon.
But Celine did not want merely to replicate. The trauma of loss was too raw a scar. If she dared to challenge the boundary between death and life, it would not be to return fragility to the world. It would be to create something the world could not crush.
She wrote in her own notebook, in dry, hurried letters: Stronger. Faster. More resilient. Not vulnerable. Never vulnerable.
The idea was no longer just to bring Miyeong back. It was to rebuild her in a form that could survive the unexpected, the cruel, whatever chance might throw against her. A life that would not shatter like glass on the wet road of an August night.
Celine closed her eyes, exhausted, but the thought would not quiet. If she was going to create life… she would create the perfect life.
Celine prepared the laboratory as one raises an altar. Flasks cleaned, glassware sterilized, equipment calibrated to exhaustion. No one suspected — for it was common to see her buried in endless research, isolated even from her own body. But this time there was something different in the rhythm of her gestures: they were not only methods, they were rituals.
She managed to preserve genetic material from Miyeong. A strand of hair, cells kept on slides from earlier exams, tiny fragments that for anyone else would have been irrelevant. For Celine, they were seeds. Each microtube she labeled was a fragment of resistance against forgetting.
And yet, as the weeks accumulated, reasoning imposed itself: she could not truly recreate Miyeong. What had been torn from her would not return identical. Science could model tissues, even architect a consciousness, but there was no possible copy of the unrepeatable sum of a life.
Still, this was not defeat. Celine understood she would not bring Mimi back as she was, but she could create a legacy so perfect it would carry her spark in another way. A person who would not be Mi-yeong, but who would carry within her the same light — that living, tireless presence that filled the air whenever she was near.
Not the sun setting on the horizon, but a new star, burning with its own intensity. Not the same, but just as capable of illuminating.
Celine placed her hands on the bench, staring at the flasks before her. For the first time since Mimi’s death, she felt something close to hope.
It was madness. But it was also inevitable. The notes began as scattered scribbles, margins filled with arrows and circles. But little by little, Celine’s notebooks arranged themselves into columns, diagrams, conceptual maps. Each page ceased being an echo of Mi-yeong and became a new mark, hers alone.
At the center of one of those pages, after hours staring at the blank space, she wrote the first word that belonged to no protocol, no formula. Only a word, simple, like a baptism:
Rumi.
The graphite pressed hard, deeper than necessary, nearly tearing the paper.
The name seemed to carry everything she sought to condense. Not Miyeong, but something derived from her essence. Not a return, but a continuity. A life created to bear Mimi’s legacy and, at the same time, to be more. Stronger, more resilient, more prepared to survive the unpredictable. And honestly, it sounds like a name Mimi would choose for any child of hers — if she had ever had the chance to have one.
Celine ran her fingers over the letters, as if to confirm they were truly there. For the first time, there was an invisible face behind the notes. Not numbers and cells anymore, but the promise of someone who would exist.
“Rumi…” she murmured, almost in reverence.
In that instant, the project ceased to be only a response to grief. It became the only way to return to the world the light it had extinguished. She did not consider herself, in any way, a religious person.
But, as irony would have it — after violating the exclusivity and peace of the beyond, she prayed that her path would still be guided by the confident love that lingered in her distorted and hidden conscience…
• ★ •
The laboratory was drowned in absolute silence. Not the natural silence of closed rooms, but a manufactured silence, so dense it became tangible, as if the very walls were breathing with her. The air was metallic, steeped in ozone and old reagents. Decades had passed since that space had belonged to the university; it was a forgotten territory, ignored on maps, kept standing only by the insistence of a single woman.
Celine stood before the central table, arms resting on the cold metal. The body lay there, bound by wires and tubes that coiled like artificial roots. Pale skin reflected the surgical lamp’s light, almost translucent, like porcelain. Across the arms and torso, violet veins branched in symmetrical patterns, so dense they looked more like design than anatomy. In the hair, a strange hue — indefinable, as if born from a mixture of the natural and the unreal, a reflection of something that had never existed before.
But the features… ah, the features were both a dagger and a gift. The face recalled Mimi. Not identical, but an echo. The faintly rounded cheekbones, the delicate nose, the lips at rest in a serenity that almost resembled breath. Every detail was a nod to the past, a tribute sculpted with scalpel precision. It was like looking at a painting: never the same person, yet carrying the essence that memory insisted on keeping alive.
Celine brushed her fingers over the glass surface protecting the body. The chill climbed her arm, but she did not withdraw. Twenty years of work had condensed here. Twenty years in which the world had moved forward, while she buried herself deeper into the same wound. Now, at last, the moment had arrived.
At the side of the table, the control panel waited. A thick, insulated cable ran straight to the power source. A calibrated discharge — neither excessive nor too faint. It had to be exact, just enough to break the threshold between inert mass and vital impulse.
She adjusted the controls with slow, almost solemn motions. Each turn of the switch seemed to echo across the room. The red needle climbed, millimeter by millimeter, until it reached the mark in her notes.
For a moment, Celine hesitated. The image of Miyeong, laughing among the benches, humming distractedly, cut through her. Then came the memory of her body sealed in a coffin, heavy with flowers. The contrast almost made her falter.
But she did not falter.
She placed her hand on the main switch. Drew in a breath, as if she wanted to hold all the air in the world inside her chest. Then pressed.
The electric surge coursed through the cables and struck the body. The violet veins beneath the skin lit in magenta, like living circuits firing all at once. The glow surged through the arms, the torso, the neck, until it reached the face.
The body convulsed. First, a taut arch, muscles straining like cords about to snap. Then the chest jolted upward, as if seeking air for the first time.
The heart beat. Once, erratic. Then again, stronger, vibrating against the walls of the chest. The monitors erupted, signals spiking, graphs pulsing with violent intensity.
Celine felt the ground vanish beneath her feet. She did not blink, barely breathed. She only watched.
The eyes opened.
One, deep brown, utterly natural, human in its imperfection. The other, however, shone gold, an almost electric light, so intense it seemed to defy the darkness of the room. The two mismatched irises fixed themselves on her.
And in that instant, Celine saw not only her creation. She saw an abyss.
The conflict struck like a double-edged blade. Part of her wanted to throw herself on that body and embrace it, call the name she could no longer speak. Another part recognized she had committed an unforgivable trespass, crossing boundaries even science had never dared touch.
Ethics, reason, love — all whirled together in one storm. What lay before her was not just a body crafted against the balance of nature. It was something new, woven of grief and obstinacy, carrying both the calculations and the tears that had fed its making.
The heart now beat in rhythm, steady, filling the room with a deep sound, undeniably alive. The veins still flickered in intermittent magenta, as though the energy that had sparked it remained throbbing inside.
Celine stepped closer. Each footfall dragged the weight of two decades. Her reflection merged with the creature’s face on the glass, as if they were a single image.
And then she whispered to herself, so softly it nearly vanished into the machines’ hum:
“… it’s… alive.”