How do people see IT workers? Like generally, universally speaking? Close your eyes and imagine a developer in their thirties grappling with a program. Let’s call them A. First, try picturing A’s physique. Gangly limbs with no muscles to speak of, hunched back, text neck. And how about what A’s wearing? An eight-year-old black zip-up hoodie over a seven-year-old navy plaid button-down and who-knows-how-old glasses frames under a messy mop of hair. But A isn’t indifferent to the trends. They have more than 22,000 followers on social media, use all the latest gadgets and sport all the newest kicks. Now stand behind A. Behind their desk covered in an array of chocolate and energy bar wrappers. Behind their many monitors, walls of numbers and English letters. A pauses mid-sip of their juice. They clamp a hand over their mouth. Then they’re pouncing on the keyboard again.

“I found it! I found the bug!”

What did they mean, they had found it? I waved A away and pulled out their chair to sit.

“When you feel stressed, try looking at yourself from an omniscient point of view. Watch yourself from afar like you’re watching a stranger.”

Words I’d heard about 404 times. This detracted from their depth, their semblance of expertise. The AI counselor in our lounge, Deep Human Nicky, looked pensive every time she dispensed virtually the same advice verbatim. Watching myself from a distance like she suggested had never helped much. Except once.

A was neither a fictional character nor meant to be anonymous. A was for Ashley, and Ashley was me. While A may have ticked the box for every stereotype the world held about IT workers, the truth was that I fit the same description to the letter. Unfortunately, so did the majority of Dev Team 3. In fact, it was hard to tell three of the five of us apart.

“Why on earth are we using English names on the Korean Cultural Heritage Restoration Development Team?” I griped. “I thought that kind of culture died out ages ago. Look at our business cards. They’re so bizarre.”

The Dev Team 1 leader replied evenly. “The word ‘team’ is an English word, too. If Stella, the head of all the development teams, says to use English, we have to use English.”

“And I suppose doing what we’re told is how things work in a horizontal organization?”

“This is a state institution. If they tell us to go old school, do we really have a choice?”

The outdated campaign to adopt English names had been repeatedly thrust upon our team until it finally passed a vote last year. Three in favor, two against. I still remembered the two members who, unlike me, had stood by their ‘no’s to the bitter end, the way they’d decisively held up their hands. But none of us, even those who’d voted for the change, used our business cards. Developers were surprisingly serious about aesthetics. Always sensitive to elements like the innate rhythm of things and consistency.

“In addition to getting more Vitamin D, you may benefit from more regular sleep.”

Again, Nicky had given me another impossible weekly task. The life of a programmer wasn’t all wide-eyed wonder and inspiration like people assumed. I wished the media would stop making us all out to be either genius hackers or ungovernable freaks. All you needed in this line of work was infinite time and serious grit. Rarely in development was the effort you put in proportional to the outcome. I was A—a burnt-out government employee at the Cultural Heritage Administration. That was all Nicky needed to know about me.

Leader of Korean Cultural Heritage Artist Restoration Dev Team 3. Jang Hoyeon. 36 years old. Center-left. Lesbian. Non-religious. Dating Stella, overall head of development, for 5 months and counting. Stella, 51, separated from her husband and raising a son. So many movies that would have been better off unmade opened with these kinds of atrocious introductions. Information that should have come up naturally just got shoehorned in. Oh, well—what could you do? This only made viewers defensive. Show don’t tell—that age-old adage and writing rule of thumb wasn’t always correct, but it was mostly spot-on. Naturally, though, I had no intentions of divulging even this much of my personal life to Nicky. It was only right that the AI retained her biases and treated me accordingly.

I stepped out into the empty hallway and sat down on the sofa. The new cushions were of decent quality. And I liked the new painting on the opposite wall. It was a portrait of a woman with broad shoulders and a strong jawline. I stood and approached the painting but couldn’t find a signature. No label underneath mentioning the title, medium, dimensions, or artist, either.

I murmured a quiet confession to the woman smiling in the frame.

“Every other week, I go over to Stella’s house, cook for us, and teach her little boy Drake the basics of coding. You think my mother’s stomach would turn if she knew about that? Seeing as she lives alone?”

The woman’s lips seemed to move.

'I hesitate to say this, but your attraction to older women in positions of power could be a kind of complex. There’s always an inner core to these things. If you don’t mind, would you share with me some memorable anecdotes from your life?’

“What for? I don’t have a thing for older women—I fall for them and learn their ages after.”

‘Yes, of course. That’s what you usually say.’

I tipped my head back and looked at the ceiling. I’d heard it said countless times before that smart, young women would surely bring about their own ruin. I was a textbook example. That was why I couldn’t even bring myself to vent about my woes to the woman in the painting. To tell her that I had joined the ranks of the ascetics, that I was dating my boss who had been treating me with less and less consideration over time, that our relationship did not deviate in the slightest from the typical hierarchical dynamic and instead followed the standard storyline to a T.

I left the hallway and went to the café on the first floor to order a carrot juice.

“I’ll take it to go,” I said. “Please fill up this tumbler.”

The barista smiled. I copied her, knowing I looked meek and harmless when I smiled. There was no way to know what I was thinking, what sort of work I did. Thoughts and words that went unspoken didn’t matter. It was what we actually did that spoke volumes.

Radiocarbon dating began in Chicago in 1949. It was now an aged, ninety-year-old technology. With all the existing estimation techniques that used gamma rays, infrared rays, X-rays, and more, it was possible to determine whether a painting was a forgery as well as when it was produced. You only needed to find out the ratio of carbon-14 to other elements in a small sample of the artwork. This was because, unlike other carbons, carbon-14 deteriorated slowly at a fixed rate. Aside from the workers involved in the process and some academics, not many people paid much attention to the paintings that came through the radiology lab. At least, they didn’t use to.

Things changed in the late 2030s, when the quantum computer was invented in Gurugram, India. It was still an enormous machine, difficult for individuals to own or operate unless they were the billionaire CEOs and entrepreneurs who had led the IT revolution. Quantum computer-based AI had only just started being used by the biggest national institutions like the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, but it had also been introduced, albeit belatedly, to the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism to which I belonged. The various ministries related to culture and the arts were presented with similar ideas about how to use AI in our fields.

“The government needs to get out ahead of private companies and industries when it comes to AR and VR technologies,” they said.

They suggested turning everything into a game. Augmented reality jwibullori, virtual reality taekkyeon. I had predicted as much, but were games really all we could come up with? And anyway, weren’t things like pitch-pot and archery easier to do the old-fashioned way without having to connect to any sort of equipment? As far as I knew, none of the people suggesting these ideas even liked games. Oh, but there was one classic game they loved. Effective two-way communication. Innovative productivity. A brilliant leap forward. Even with the door to quantum dynamics now flung wide open, this nonsensical stringing together of words remained the favorite traditional pastime among government employees.

I thought it was time for Dev Team 3 to shift our focus from finding out when and where paintings were produced. If the tools we’d once had were like a set of tweezers the size of our fingers, we now had access to an excavator as big as a house. The cylindrical quantum scanner our department received was said to be able to compress 2,000 MRIs. It would have been only a slight exaggeration to say that it could tell individual cells apart. Calculations that could have taken 400 years were complete in 4 minutes. Gone were the days of painstakingly collecting faint traces of carbon, paint, and bristles from paintings. The strangely languid chase we had been engaged in with the artworks was over. Going forward, our team could be crushed under the weight of the story a painting told instead. It had been so taxing, only ever observing all those heaps on heaps of materials.

“Painted in Gongju, South Chungcheong, over a period of three months in 1897. That’s as much as we got out of the beta test,” said one of our team members, carefully holding the corners of an ochre painting with gloved hands.

But something was missing. The exact production time, the exact location. It was clear that more could be added here. If our inferences were right, we had to weave together the facts. We had to stack the layers we had photographed and examine them all at once. The descriptive copy we scrounged together from the test was dry and bland. No direction or narrative whatsoever.

“Try looking at yourself from an omniscient point of view. Watch yourself from afar like you’re watching a stranger.”

For years now, Nicky’s tips on managing mental health, which she doled out to everyone indiscriminately, had been an unexpected source of advice for me when it came to dealing with work. I took a few steps back from the painting and thought of somebody. The first person a painting would see, the person a painting would have encountered the most from its conception all the way throughout the rest of its formative years. A painting’s first-ever audience. The artist, in other words.

Of the immense number of results the scanner managed to yield, we could first try analyzing the characteristics of the brushstrokes. With brushstroke analysis, you can infer habits, and with habits, you can infer posture, and with posture, you can infer musculoskeletal physique. What if we revealed this information not as text but as a moving image? I thought of a program that would embody the artist as a hologram. Seeing the figure of the original artist on a canvas installed behind the painting would be way more impressive than reading label text. If we could conjure the artist, we could expand our educational contents for people of all ages, design general courses or major courses that would connect learners to experts. Wouldn’t that be better than everyone using the quantum computers to make VR games?

“What if we changed our approach? Focus on restoring the artist rather than the artwork? Instead of asking how a canvas came to be filled, asking who filled it.”

All my team members’ mouths yawned open.

“Hear me out. Using the quantum scanner, we can pinpoint the sources of these works more accurately than ever before. We could reveal information like the average number of brushstrokes, intensity, speed, angles, trajectory length, and width in detail. We could even draw the painter using the data from the scan.”

“And it would be faster than finding a Mr. Kim in Seoul or Wally in London, wouldn’t it?” said Rachel, the eldest on our team.

Andy, the youngest, didn’t understand either reference. He drew himself up. “So you want to find the paintings’ moms?”

“I’m not a fan of calling them Mr. Kims, Wallys, or moms, but in essence, yes. Now when we see a painting, we can reveal the painter behind it. I’m suggesting we construct holograms using the data from the scanner.”

The title of the project was FA (Find the Artist), and the name of this specific program was WDI (Who Drew It). Dev Team 3 had been perfecting the technology for nine months at this point. A hologram builder consumed less energy than the quantum scanner, and our team could develop one using the tech we already had without the need for outside labor. The team and I had been working nonstop to design an in-depth program that could serve as a bridge between the scanner and the builder.

“It’s not enough for the scanner to read paintings. It has to be able to reassemble what it reads into a story.”

“We’ll link the data to the internet information network and ChatGPT. After we run an auto-search, we’ll extract and reassign any content that would be a good starting point. We’ll take the least contaminated route, starting from what looks the most credible.”

“Let’s add a program that continuously verifies the search results. Once the scanner’s already gone wild unearthing a painting’s roots, we’ll need to sort through the findings and weed things out.”

“We’ll also need to decide on the aspect ratio for the hologram’s subtitles and sign language interpretation window, plus throw in a real-time audio output function.”

“How about using Nicky’s voice for it?”

Dev Team 3 took a rigorous, step-by-step approach to its newest task—giving paintings mouths and letting people hear the words that came out of them. Our team’s name was changed to reflect the program after its development had been made public. From the Korean Cultural Heritage Restoration Development Team to the Korean Cultural Heritage Artist Restoration Development Team. Stella was the one who’d suggested adding in those extra two syllables.

Stella showed up late the day we announced the final version of FA. I called her Stella in both official and unofficial contexts. As time went on, I came to think her English name suited her even more than her given name: Seo Jeong. When I called her Stella, it was like the face above her two-piece suit was replaced with a giant star. Stella was exactly what the etymology of her name described: a star. A beautiful star. But the closer you got to her, the harder it became to breathe. I didn’t know how it was for other people, but I could barely endure. Being near her felt so searing, so cold. As her star pulsed day and night with ultraviolet rays and radiation, it became more and more difficult for me to keep my wits about me. I’d thought the two of us could circle the universe, but in just a few months’ time, I’d found myself lingering in the same spot as always, alone. It was nice just to watch her star from a distance.

I found it fascinating how many clichés would spill from Stella’s mouth. Her son might pick up on things, she would say, always chiding me about being cautious when choosing a time and place to meet or talk, telling me there was nothing wrong about being careful in every regard.

I took Stella’s chin in my hands and looked her in the eyes. “Do you want to live with me or not?” I said.

“Slowly but surely, you’re losing your manners. You shouldn’t press me like this. Give me time to think.”

I could count on one hand the number of times Stella had paid a visit to Dev Team 3 in the past nine months. She had requested that we make some simple revisions to the plans we’d already gotten approved and resubmit them, but I knew she hadn’t read a word of our final proposal. The only difference between our fourth and fifth drafts had been the editing method. And I knew the reason she was pushing me away and avoiding me was just as cheap. Stella was in the process of getting back together with her ex-husband.

“Noona, Dad says he’s coming home. His business trip is over.”

Even if I hadn’t heard the news from Drake, there had been lots of clues.

The log in her car’s navigation system, the contents of her internet searches, her e-receipts from the mart. In her work and in her partings, Stella had not an ounce of sincerity. 

“Show me the program. I’m short on time, so just the highlights, please.”

Stella sounded rather nonchalant considering that she’d kept the entire team waiting for more than twenty minutes. I raised my eyebrows, then pressed a button on the remote control. The scanner swept thoroughly over the painting, the green glow of the laser illuminating a quiet riverside landscape. A moment later, a man appeared on the sheet of canvas, 97 centimeters tall and 103.3 centimeters wide, that hung behind the painting. The resolution wasn’t the sharpest, but his body and movements came out clearly. He had a cigarette between his lips. He was incredibly tall, and his spine curved slightly to the left. Nicky’s voice came through the speakers.

“This painting was created in 1983 near Gomun-ri, Yeoncheon-eup, Yeoncheon-gu. This location was gleaned from the primary materials used on the canvas. Water dyed with basalt rock broken off from the Jusangjeolli Cliffs and the bone powder of the golden mandarin fish. A trace amount of genetic material left on the canvas lent itself to reconstructing the skeletal frame and build of the original artist. He worked in a quarry, and there are bodily signs that indicate he suffered from acute pneumonia. He painted this picture in the springtime when he was 44 years old.”

“Hold on. So you’re saying all this was possible by analyzing the traces of stone, dirt, water, and genetic material all mixed up in this painting? Please say it plain, Ashley.”

“Plainer than this? Our target audience for the final product is ages 15 and older.”

Stella ignored this, carefully studying the man on the canvas as he lit his cigarette. Then, without listening to the rest of my spiel, she waved her hands.

“We should make the canvas bigger. And swap out the cheap speaker, too.”

The following day, Stella handed me an illustration. It was a self-portrait, murky and drab, as if it had been roughly drawn in color pencil. When the scan was complete, a child who looked like Drake appeared on the canvas behind the picture. The child was lying on his stomach, gripping a color pencil. He was only half-heartedly drawing, rarely looking at the paper. The space behind him, which the program had generated, looked similar to their actual living room. Stella studied the hologram. Then she hugged me. Tight. The smell of a man’s cologne on her two-piece suit irked me. I didn’t ask any questions.

“Our FA restoration method, the first of its kind, has real and enormous potential as an artist verification technology. This is also a remarkable archeological achievement, one that’s launched us into the quantum computer era. Boasting a 91.2 percent accuracy rate, this technology is a valuable foothold that will allow us to uncover more of human civilization’s marks on the world. This extraordinary, cutting-edge discovery will wrest our national culture from the hold of imperialism. This could become a significant tool for verifying Korean artifacts scattered all over the globe.”

Some time ago, I had seen the president reading out an invocation on TV. Sitting at a round table beside the dais and watching the president was none other than a smiling Stella. She must have made it to the breakfast in the reception hall on time.

“As 2040 draws near, we will ensure that our national cultural identity remains firmly rooted, even in this multicultural era…”

Stella’s face appeared on just about all the public TV channels for at least five seconds. She told me almost all of what she’d said had been edited in the footage. She complained that her critiques of our standardized global culture and the imperialism of Western powers hadn’t been included in any media outlets.

“Was everything about our team edited out too?” I asked, holding out three science magazine issues. “They included the entire introduction from the Dev Team 3 proposal, though? And the infographic I made.”

Stella lay down on the sofa and closed her eyes. I opened one of the magazines to the page I had stuck a Post-it on and started reading.

“First came a barrage of protests from the paintings’ true owners. Then artwork began flooding the black market. But public interest in the world’s first-ever restoration technology cleared away the darkness shrouding the art market. This was the first step. I’m simply returning things to their rightful places. There to overcome the adversity brought about by the development of this technology was Seo Jeong, the head of the Korean Cultural Heritage Artist Restoration Development Team. What is the source of her sense of duty? She says she was able to weather the storm with the full support of her husband and son…”

Stella sat up and snatched the magazine from me.

“All they did was highlight my role as the head of the team,” she said. “Every interview has a narrative they’re pushing. They want a universal story. Don’t you know that?”

“It reads as if you created the whole program by yourself. Do you even understand how the scanned data comes out as a hologram?”

“Ashley, an accomplishment for one of the development teams is an accomplishment for us all.”

I leaned away from Stella’s hand as she reached out to pat my head.

When you feel like crying, that’s the time to devote yourself entirely to your work. There were lots of paintings to scan. Most of them were by famous painters. I deliberated over which category in our massive database to place them in, what sorts of maps to plot out. The Special Exhibition Space at the National Museum of Korea had contacted us sooner than expected. It was a predictable email. The chief curator suggested spreading the word about our restoration technology through a special exhibit. It wasn’t a bad idea. An exhibit on Kim Buyoung, the great modern painter that nine out of ten Koreans knew. I didn’t like him all that much, but that was beside the point. He’d been a riveting, temperamental genius. Which was to say he’d been brash since birth and had lived his life with zero regard for others. A free spirit who refused to put down roots. Meaning he’d been sexually involved with scores of women. Yet in a meritocracy, a person’s flaws were easily transformed into strengths. Every imperfection was smoothed over.

Kim Buyoung was born into an extremely wealthy family in the Joseon capital of Hanseong in 1902. He had been educated in various fields since childhood, which was how he got his start in fine arts at a young age, observing the flora and fauna around him until he was blue in the face. He never spent a quiet day at home. At nine years old, he was said to have taken his art supplies out to paint the stray dogs that roamed the neighborhood, then would lash out at them when they kept moving around.

“How dare you little shits mess me up?”

He showed immense curiosity toward every object and phenomenon. There was a famous anecdote about how he and his neighborhood friends had gone rooting around Bugaksan on a mission to paint a wild boar. As an adolescent, Kim Buyoung was heavily influenced by paintings in the Western style, but over time there were strong signs that he’d started experimenting with his own techniques. 

After reading the entire document, I wavered on whether or not to click on the link to a video the chief curator had sent. The art critic in the thumbnail looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“The rumors that he studied under a foreign artist are baseless hearsay. Kim Buyoung’s paintings have a distinct individuality and vitality to them, such that they can’t be defined in terms of any one art movement. His intense brushstrokes, bold composition, and remarkable expressiveness can be said to have been on par with the global masters.”

In his early-to-mid-career, Kim Buyoung stamped or signed his pen name at the bottom of his paintings, but at a certain point, he stopped signing them at all. It’d been said that he had such a bohemian and combative personality that some days he would decide to sign or not sign a painting depending on his mood. The most popular of his paintings were, without a doubt, his series on wild beasts. He loved painting animals with as commanding a presence as his own. People said that when they stood before his paintings, they gasped, as if the beast in the frame were truly charging right at them.

The critic removed his glasses and shed a few tears before speaking again. 

“We can only presume that he painted these beasts after directly observing them. Looking at the historical records and literature, we know that each time he began a painting, he would dress himself in straw matting and vines and go outside, blackout drunk, to sit camouflaged in plain sight in the forest, observing the mountain beasts. He grasped the ferocious spirits of those beasts with his unrelentingly inquisitive mind, his insight like a gleam of light. How can you not deeply admire these works that the artist risked life and limb to create?”

The painting that had gone through tight security measures to find its way to Dev Team 3 was one in his series on wild beasts. We guessed that it belonged to a series featuring the wild tigers of Bugaksan, but the painting itself wasn’t particularly well known. It must have been one of his later works, as there was no signature. The museum’s chief curator said this would heighten the exposure effect, and that this tiger painting was the one among all of Kim Buyoung’s works that best showcased his distinctive style. It was the first time I had seen one of Kim Buyoung’s original works in person, and the power of the painting was genuinely so overwhelming that a tiger appeared in my dream that night.

The tiger stood atop a steep cliff, peering down at me. Its muscles and joints looked to be made of steel. Yet the beast before me didn’t seem violent. Several kinds of power coexisted within it. A strong but gentle, lonesome but warm gaze. It was like staring at a flickering candle flame. As the tiger descended from the clifftop, my mouth was pressed shut. It sauntered past me, then dashed toward a field of reeds. The parrotbills that had been in the field grubbing for small insects fled in a flutter of wings. I watched the flock of them disappear, and when I looked down again, the tiger was far away. From a distance, its face looked incredibly small.

It was just us minus Stella on Dev Team 3 again that day. Stella spent every day now in front of cameras and reporters.

“I hate to admit it, but it’s a good painting,” I murmured. “Honestly, good enough that I’d go so far as to say I really like it. Let’s see how Kim Buyoung painted this.”

I pressed the button on the remote control. The quantum scanner examined the painting. Soon, the hologram builder began to fill in the space on the canvas behind the piece. One member of the team half-stood, half-sat on the edge of a seat.

“Huh, that’s not in the mountains. Not by the riverside, either.”

The site of the painting’s creation was nowhere outdoors. The hologram generated the dirt walls of a small outhouse of some kind—whether a mud hut or a dugout, it was hard to tell. The room was dusty. There was a single, tiny window on the wall. A hand appeared in the image, seeming to reach for a brush. Veins bulged on the rough back of that hand, each finger knobbed with calluses. The hand was attached to a short arm. But the brushstrokes it made were aggressive. Wild. We stared in silence at that arm swinging through the air as if hurling punches.

The painter was a young, small woman. She let out hacking coughs as she stood before the canvas. I belatedly remembered to turn on the speaker beside the hologram. Nicky spoke.

“144 centimeters tall, weighing 35.3 kilograms, 22 years old. She hardly ever left the house in her lifetime. She is presumed to have spent most of her time inside, having suffered from malnutrition and bronchitis since she was a child. Judging by the wear on her joints and her bone density, it would seem that she also did various kinds of work in addition to painting.”

The scanner re-read the rough sketch underlying the painting. There was something else there in the tigers’ eyes. A face sketched from charcoal crumbs. An incredibly small face. Had this been a self-portrait before she’d painted over it? The scanner deciphered the name the woman had written underneath her face and announced the findings from its analysis.

“The artist lived from 1899 to 1923. She was unemployed all her life and neither married nor had children. Her cause of death is presumed to be potassium cyanide poisoning. The paint she used contained trace amounts of toxins. This woman is Yeo Hongok—Kim Buyoung’s third lover.”

I stared at the tiger this woman had painted in an annex entirely from imagination. Then I looked up at the woman in the hologram. Her strong but gentle, lonesome but warm gaze. Hongok gave off the same impression as the tiger I’d seen in my dream.

Two team members said we could still hold the special exhibit if we requested a different painting, and two said we should reveal the truth of this painting as it was. Rachel and Andy, the two who had voted against our English names back then, believed we should make this information public. I put forward an opinion that wasn’t quite an opinion, that we should first share the contents of our scan and then wait on the response. The chief curator read my email and called me the next day.

“We’re going to keep the title as it is. Wild Tiger: A Special Exhibit on Kim Buyoung. Instead, we’re thinking of preparing some new banners to cover the name. After the preview, we’ll change all the signs. Wild Tiger: A Special Exhibit on Yeo Hongok. We’ll make it an exhibit on historical camouflage. A chance to see nameless paintings, paintings whose names were stripped from them, cast in a new light.”

“But there are probably many paintings in the exhibit that Kim Buyoung painted himself.”

“A considerable number of his major works were likely painted by Yeo Hongok. They use Kim Buyoung’s signature technique—those rough, dry strokes.”

“Painting with a dry brush isn’t a method unique to any one artist, though.” 

“Even in the file you sent, you can see that these heavy strokes were made using a technique that involves swiping the brush up and down at a high speed. It would be hard for others to imitate. The intensity of the brushstrokes can vary a thousand different ways depending on the painter, but these are the works of the same individual. It should at least be said that because Yeo Hongok left her face and her name in the sketch beneath the painting, many truths about Kim Buyoung have now come to light.”

“Kim’s family will likely respond. You don’t want to kick things off with a defamation lawsuit, do you?”

“Seriously? Who on earth is defaming anyone here?”

“Sir, didn’t you like Kim Buyoung?”

“Sure, I liked him. Until yesterday.”

Ahead of the exhibition preview, there was a ton of news coverage. Mostly about the price. Was the painting truly expected to sell for over 5 billion? There was excitement about what the winning bid at the auction would be, plans to conserve the house in modern-day Seokgwan-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, where the artist had been born—all talk that would scatter on the wind after the preview. I rushed over to Stella as she entered the museum lobby. She looked utterly exhausted, having just gotten back from a vacation with her family in Cambodia.

“I’ll handle introducing the exhibit today, Stella. We wrapped up negotiations with the museum’s team while you were gone.”

“Ashley, you should use my title when you address me. Besides, I know Kim Buyoung’s biography as well as anyone.”

I glanced around, then whispered. “Did you not watch the edited hologram footage I sent you? First things first, you should…”

“I didn’t think we were so close as to be chatting this casually. We stopped speaking before my trip, if you recall.”

I left the museum, defeated, and made two silent laps around the parking lot. Things would be hard, whether I stayed or went. Stella called, followed by the chief curator, but I didn’t answer. I eventually returned to the museum entrance, plopped down on the stone stairs outside, and squeezed my eyes shut. I had to rehearse what I was going to tell my mom.

“I’m sorry. I might be getting fired. Maybe I can go somewhere far away. No, no—I haven’t been fired yet.”

Suddenly something was placed in my lap. I opened my eyes, saw the chocolate and the energy bar, and looked up. Rachel and Andy were there.

“Why would you be getting fired, Ashley?”

“Exactly. Stella’s the one who should be fired for neglecting her responsibilities and being terrible at her job.”

It was none of my business how Stella would run the preview now. But as long as the rest of the team and Nicky and the chief curator were there, at least the exhibit wouldn’t be completely doomed to fail.

Rachel picked up the chocolate and handed it to me. “If they fire you, we’re going, too,” she said. “And then we’ll find the sources of all the paintings in the world whose artists still are nameless. We may not have names, either, but we have the skills, don’t we?” 

I gave her a tired smile, then turned to look at the pillars holding up the museum.

In my mind, I slowly sketched an image of the people who’d carried over the stones.