The Loop

July 17th, 2024

“Seo-Yeon! You wake up now!” my mother shouted at me from outside my bedroom door. In another minute she’d start knocking. A minute after that and she’d just come right in. It was a practiced routine, and one not worth fighting against.

“I’m getting up right now, mom!” I shouted back, hoping that this would appease her long enough that I could catch another five minutes of sleep. She started pounding on the door. No such luck, I thought.

Bleary-eyed, I opened the door in nothing but my skivvies and gave her a sarcastic smile. “Happy?” I asked.

“No. Not happy. You put clothes on! Go to work!”

I loved my mom, I really did, but she was the embodiment of every stereotype about Asian-American helicopter parents that my classmates had ever thrown at me. I don’t remember her ever being like that back when we actually lived in Korea—granted I was six when we moved to America—but I honestly believe she got the whole idea of it from the American stereotypes, and liked it so much she had adopted it as part of her own identity. My dad was more laid back, and I could tell that he thought the whole thing was a little over the top, but he wasn’t about to say that to her; he avoided my mom’s wrath with greater resolve than even I did.

I stood in front of the mirror and held up various pieces of clothing. I groaned at my hair, which was held back in the most straightforward, professional business woman ponytail the world had ever seen. I’d wanted to get a pixie cut, but my mom had said no with such immediate and unambiguous disagreement that I knew it wasn’t worth debating. I held up a mauve blouse over a slate gray camisole that I liked. No, I heard in my mother’s voice. Pink shirt, darker pink jacket, white pants? No. Sleeveless burgundy top with green pants. No.

The thing that frustrated me wasn’t that I couldn’t pick; it was that each rejection didn’t even come from my own mind. With another groan, I pulled the outfit my mother had chosen from the back of the closet. It wasn’t even a bad outfit, anymore than the haircut was a bad haircut. In fact, the clothes were perfect for my body, the colors complemented my eyes, and the haircut framed my face in the most flattering way possible. But God damn it if I didn’t want to choose something for myself, even if it wasn’t as good as what she had in mind.

She controlled my life not through any real fear of punishment or reprisals, but with simple disapproval. She didn’t do anything when I went against her wishes—my parents never threatened to kick me out or to stop feeding me—but she took every possible opportunity to point out how wrong I was—oh, Seo-Yeon, you’re really going to wear that? Oh, Seo-Yeon, you think you’ll get ahead in life if you quit tennis?—until I gave up resisting and just did what she wanted all along.

Since we’d moved to the States, I’d been enrolled in more extracurricular classes than I could remember. I’d been good at most of them, too. Not because of any real innate talent, but because failure wasn’t really an option, and quitting was completely out of the question. The only time I was able to forgo one activity was when I showed such promise in another that my mother decided the first wasn’t worth my energy. Thus, I learned how to play the piano and the cello; how to speak not just English, but Spanish, French, and Japanese, too; and how to bake. I’d become particularly skilled at tennis and chess, and earned my black belt in Taekwondo.

And through all that, I’d never let my grades slip. I’d gone from not speaking a word of English to being top of my grade, writing essays that my teachers said were college level. The irony, of course, was that my mother had barely put any effort into learning English, and now thirteen years later still spoke in a stilted, accented voice that I knew made white Americans snicker when she walked away. That made me mad, but there was also a certain justice in it, I thought. If she couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort that she expected of me, then of course people would laugh behind her back. But every time I thought something like that, I felt immensely guilty. After all, I reminded myself, she had forced me to put in the effort because she had had far more hope for my future in America than she ever had for her own.

It was love at the heart of it. She wanted the best for me, and, of course, she always knew what was best.

She was also pretty much the only person who still called me Seo-Yeon, instead of Shannon.

“Now you look good,” she said, smiling at me as I came down the stairs wearing the outfit she’d insisted was right for my job. It was my first day interning at the corporate office of a regional telecom company. It was a gig that my business professor had hooked me up with for the summer. It was paid, but not very well. Part of me had wished I had gotten a waitressing or bartending job for the summer where I could actually make some decent money. I had even joked to Linc about applying for a job at the pizza place where his little sister worked. He had seemed vehemently against the idea, and although I hadn’t been considering it that seriously, his reaction made me drop it altogether. This would be better for my resume and my future prospects, anyway. And as my mom was fond of telling me, it was dumb to waste time on anything that wouldn’t help your future.

On the drive to the office, I was nervously going over all the advice my mother had given me for making a good first impression—stand up straight, look people in the eye, show respect to your boss and anyone above you in the company. I looked down at my hands, counting the fingers. It was an old trick I’d come up with as a child to deal with stress. As I looked back up I had to slam on the brakes—which, in my parents' old beater of an Elantra weren’t all that reliable—to avoid running into a woman who was standing right in the middle of the lane. Where the Hell did she come from? If I hadn’t just been looking down at my hands, I would have sworn the woman appeared out of thin air.

As it was, I was still trying to calculate in my head how she possibly could have run across two lanes of traffic so quickly. She looked up at me, and I saw my own shock and confusion reflected in her face, as if she were as surprised to find herself there as I was. She gathered herself and slowly walked away, not toward the sidewalk, but into the next lane over.

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and my eyes were flitting around like tiny birds with too much energy, not sure where to alight. I pulled over to the side of the road to catch my breath, suddenly very conscious of each movement of my body and of the car.

As soon as I reached the curb, I looked in the rearview and saw that the woman, who I half-expected to be hollering into the sky or swinging her arms against invisible demons, was nowhere in sight. If there had been another car in sight or a single bystander, I might even have stopped to ask them if they’d seen where she went. But there was no one to ask and I was already late for work.

When I got to the office, the man at the front desk seemed distracted. It took several minutes for him to work out exactly who I was and why I was there. He kept trailing off and staring at his computer monitor for several seconds before returning his attention to me with visible bewilderment, as if in that short span he’d forgotten I was there.

When we finally negotiated the fact that I worked there, he perked up somewhat and showed me around the office, introducing me to several of my fellow employees, before dropping me off at an empty desk and telling me good luck and welcome to the team. I watched as he briskly set off for his desk and when he got there I saw him waste no time in getting back to staring at his computer screen. I could only see a bit of the screen at this distance. It appeared to be a YouTube video, and I could just make out the words at the top: “Shocking Video Evidence of Supernatural Powers - July 2024 Compilation.”

The boss, Ms. Garcia, came over and introduced herself as I was getting settled at my desk.

“Hello, you must be Ms. Park. It’s great to finally meet you.”

I shook her hand. “You can just call me Shannon,” I said.

“Gabriela,” she responded, flashing a winning smile.

“So, Shannon. I saw Saul introducing you to everyone, so I’ll let Dale here,” she nodded her head in the direction of the man whose desk sat perpendicular to mine, “show you the ropes. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me or Dale or anyone else. I just know you’ll fit in well here.”

I turned my attention to Dale as she walked away.

“Hello,” I said, feeling guilty that I hadn’t noticed him until she had pointed him out to me. “I’m Shannon.” I held my hand out to him.

He stared at my hand as if unsure what he was supposed to do with it.

“Hello,” he said, after an uncomfortable pause during which I felt he had studied my face in too much detail. He had a look on his face that wasn’t entirely natural. I was about to tell him he was making me uncomfortable when he looked down. When he looked back up at me, he gave me a surprisingly earnest and disarming smile.

“Pleased to have you aboard,” he said. “Sorry, I should have introduced myself as soon as you plopped down. I was just a bit preoccupied over here. Have you been following this?” He turned his computer monitor around to face me and I saw that he was watching the same video as Saul had been.

“No,” I said. “Sorry, I haven’t been. What’s it all about?”

“Just watch. I’d be interested to hear your point of view. Always a pleasure to get new perspectives” he said. I didn’t want to tell him that my parents only watched news in Korean on their phones, and our family didn’t even own a T.V. I hardly spent any time on my phone—didn’t have time for it with all the other classes and activities I was still expected to keep up with even thought it was summer and I was in college—and I got more than enough computer talk when I was hanging out with Linc.

The video showed a zoomed out view of a mountainside. I would have placed it somewhere in Scandinavia if I’d been pressed. There was a small cabin near the base of the hill. In the foreground of the shot, there was a drone hovering. The video itself appeared to be shot by a second drone. As we watched—Dale had come around to my side of the desk to follow along with me—a figure emerged from the front door of the cabin, looked directly at the camera, and gave it a thumbs up. They then redirected their attention toward the drone that could be seen hovering in the air between them and the camera. They held their arms out toward it, and without warning there was a flash, a bang that the cheap microphone on the camera turned into crunchy static, and the drone that could be seen in frame burst into flame and crashed to the earth. The figure by the cabin let out a loud “Whoop!” and started jumping up and down, shouting and cheering. Another person could be heard shouting just out of frame.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“What do you postulate?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you think it was? I have my presumptions, but I’m in a bit of a bubble of like-minded persons.”

“Someone with some sort of power, I guess?”

“Precisely what it appears to be. Powers,” said Dale, matter-of-factly. “Superpowers, more to the point. Videos like this have been popping up periodically over the last couple days. Have you not seen them? Have you been living under a pebble?” He smiled to show me he wasn’t being serious, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and I remained unconvinced.

“Isn’t it ‘living under a rock?’” I asked. “And yeah, something like that, I guess.”

He laughed. “Well, again, I’m most penitent for ignoring you. Peculiar times. But one presses on.”

He had a very strange way of speaking, and I found it immediately off-putting. Other than that, he didn’t seem like a terrible guy—at least not on the surface—but something in my gut was telling me to watch out for him.

He spent the next two hours going over what I’d be doing for the next eight weeks. As I’d feared, it was almost exclusively tedious clerical work, data entry, and filing. Does stuff like this really look good on a resume? I wondered.

———————

The next few days went by with a predictable sort of pattern: I’d drive to work, and as often as not I’d spot the woman I’d almost run over on the first day seeming to appear or vanish right as I was looking at her—by the third day I assumed she was just a local crazy person and this was part of her routine. I’d arrive and say hello to Saul, who would barely glance up from his computer to acknowledge me, and I’d grab a cup of coffee and take my seat across from Dale to begin another exciting day of corporate tedium.

Although there was something slightly off about Dale, and I found that I could never feel fully at ease while he was around, the highlight of my days quickly became those first few minutes in the morning when he’d show me a new video of some new superhuman shenanigans. I was almost starting to believe in them. For his part, Dale was clearly a true believer.

So on the night of the president’s fateful address, I sent Dale a quick text: “I guess you were right … Sorry for doubting you lol.”

He didn’t respond for several minutes, and when he did, he said, “things are going to change now. Predators will be out to play. People will take advantage. You'd better be careful.” The message looked harmless on the surface, and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume he meant it as an earnest bit of advice, but it felt ominous to me. I shivered and tried to put it out of my mind.

The next day, after the new president's press conference, the U.S. government sent out another mass message saying that there was no more immediate danger and that everyone should resume their normal activities. I spent the rest of the day at home with my parents, slowly coming out of a state of shock and disbelief. The overwhelming direction of the online discourse suggested that people were taking everything in stride, and that these new developments might even be a good thing for humanity.

It was almost eerie how peaceful everything was. It felt like a brief respite in the middle of a storm. There was a tension that ran underneath it that was threatening to break the surface, but it felt like there was a voice speaking inside my head telling me to keep calm, and that voice wasn’t my own. I was sure I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, but as the world's initial panic eased, so did my own. By that night, I was merely eager to get back to my normal routine, superpowered Hyperhumans be damned.

The day after that, I drove to work through a miserable rainstorm. I slowed down on the stretch of road where I usually encountered the strange woman—I was no longer certain whether she was crazy or if she really was appearing out of thin air, and I had half a mind to stop and ask her. I slowed my car down to a near complete stop and looked all around, certain I’d catch a glimpse of her, but she was nowhere to be seen. Must be staying out of the rain, I thought. And it was raining. Like I hadn’t seen yet that summer.

I arrived at the office, and walked the forty feet from where I parked to the doors—getting soaked to the bone in the process—only to find that the lights were all off and no one else was at work.

What the hell? I thought.

I tried the doors and found them open. Not wanting to leave until I was completely satisfied that no one else was there, I went in. For a few minutes I entertained myself just wandering around the empty, dark office, but that got old in a hurry.

I resolved to leave, but there was one thing nagging at the back of my mind that I wanted to check out first, while I had the chance.

I went over to Dale's desk and started opening drawers at random, rifling through papers and personal mementos, unsure what I was looking for. After a couple minutes of looking and finding nothing but the sort of prosaic, quotidian items that you'd expect to find in any desk in any office in America, I was ready to give up. There was only one peculiarity: shoved in the back of a lower drawer was a picture of him with an older woman—his mother I presumed—but the woman’s face was gouged out. I shuddered. I called off my search and decided to head home.

As I was walking toward the exit, I thought I caught a flicker of movement to my right. I stopped dead in my tracks and turned my head toward it. Of course there was nothing there, but I suddenly couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. I quickened my pace and got out of there, feeling like I was barely outrunning something that was tracking my every move, keeping pace … something malicious. It wasn't until I hit the fresh and fragrant air and pale, gray-tinted sunshine of a world recently rained upon that I was able to start to calm down. Get it together, I thought, feeling silly for getting spooked at nothing.

On the drive home I didn’t even think to look for the woman. I was still jittery from some nameless, illogical fear that had gripped me. It was all I could do to calm my nerves enough to drive in a straight line.

I arrived home and, since my parents weren't around—they'd both gone in to work as well, and presumably they didn’t find their offices dark and empty—decided to head over to Linc's place. I shot him a quick message to tell him I was on my way over. He said he couldn't wait to see me, but to be careful on the way. Somehow him telling me to be careful didn't raise my hackles the same as when Dale said it. The difference? I believed Linc actually cared about my wellbeing.

I got to his house and we each grabbed a beer from the fridge, happy to have some peaceful time to ourselves in a world that had recently been turned upside down. It struck me what an unlikely pair we were. My parents certainly thought so, and I knew they didn’t approve of our relationship, and while I resented them for it, part of me couldn’t blame them.

I wasn’t ignorant of the way a lot of people looked at Linc: he was the perfect image of the stereotypical American nerd. He wasn’t unattractive by any stretch of the imagination, was even cute in many ways—narrow face, high cheekbones, small nose, and strong jaw—but it was also glaringly obvious that he didn’t spend much time actually worrying about his appearance. His glasses would already have been out of style a decade ago, his hair was frequently messy and too long for not being styled at all, and sometimes visibly greasy, his clothes were ill-fitting and mismatched, and aside from all the visual idiosyncracies, there was something more immediate that colored peoples’ perception of him: he was quiet.

If he wasn’t talking to me, his parents, his sister, or—at one time—Adam, he was rarely able to raise his voice loudly enough to be heard without repeating himself. Most people considered it off-putting. I knew that. But I also knew how much that fact frustrated Lincoln himself. Lincoln thought—often justifiably—that he was the smartest person in any room, and it killed him to be ignored. More than that, it upset him endlessly that the reason he was ignored was because of his own social awkwardness.

He was arrogant, stubborn, hard to get along with, and underneath all that a pretty great person. He loved animals, he cared about the environment, and he cried at every emotional scene in every sad movie ever. Any aspirations to greatness he’d ever had or discussed involved elevating other people with no thought to his own glory or success. He was an awesome big brother, and a loyal, loving boyfriend.

I say we were an odd pair because while you had to dig past an unforgiving exterior to get to the brilliant core of Lincoln, all of my good traits—attractiveness, popularity, conventional success—were on the surface, and all of the things I never wanted the world to see were buried so deep that sometimes even I forgot they were there.

After spending some precious minutes locked in his room, spending the time as young lovers are given to do when they have nowhere to be and no shortage of time, I laid back with my head on his shoulder, and he told me all about how badly he wanted to get powers. It made sense with his character; what better way to stop being ignored than to literally have super powers? I didn’t begrudge him the fantasy—hell, I almost shared it—but I hoped that’s all it was.

———————

The rest of that week, I fell into a new routine. The office was officially closed—Gabriela had sent me an email saying that they were using the current period of uncertainty to give everyone two weeks of paid vacation while they had some long-needed renovations done—so I spent my days sleeping in, getting up and practicing the cello for a while, showering, eating breakfast at noon, then heading to Lincoln's house to drink beers and have sex and discuss his various hare-brained ideas about superpowers and what he'd like to do with them.

Then on July 28th, halfway through our two weeks off, I got another message from Gabriela. She said she needed some extra help moving some things around at the office and asked if I could help. I debated in my head for a few minutes whether to even bother replying. After all, this was supposed to be a vacation for all of us, and I was sure if I went in to help her, it wouldn’t be time I’d be getting paid for. But then my mother’s voice intruded in my head, telling me that I was being foolish to consider passing up any opportunity to impress my boss, and to my horror I found myself agreeing with this voice.

I drove to the office—no rain that day, and no vanishing woman either, just clear skies and nearly empty streets—and was surprised to find my car was the only one in the lot. The front door was unlocked, though, and the lights in the entrance were all on. I entered into a world of organized chaos. Nearly every piece of furniture was covered by plastic sheeting, and most of the ceiling tiles were removed. There were half-full paint trays—many with splotches of still wet paint splashed onto the carpet around them—lying haphazardly along with brushes, rollers, hammers, and power tools all over the place.

I navigated my way through the clutter toward the back corner where Gabriela’s office was. The door was half open, and there was faint music coming from inside.

“Hey Gabriela! I’m here!” I shouted. My voice came out considerably quieter than I’d intended. There was no answer, so I decided to try again, but as I opened my mouth, the music became clearer, and I closed my mouth again, finding it suddenly dry. It was some sort of bizarre calliope music playing at half speed, and as I approached the office, it was getting louder.

“Gabriela?” I whispered past gritted teeth. “Are you in there?”

I could see a segment of her office through the partially open door, and as I angled my head to peer inside, some movement caught my eye. At first I couldn’t square what I was seeing, but as I looked longer it became clear. The shadows on the blank wall opposite her desk didn’t correspond to any object in the room, and they were moving. As I watched, fascinated and increasingly terrified, the shadows shifted and coalesced into the shadow of a man, and then took a step out from the wall. I let loose a scream that I hadn’t realized had been building behind my mouth.

“Hello, my pretty. My pretty, pretty prey.” I heard the voice and I recognized it, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that. I was frozen for a moment, until the shadow took another step toward me.

I turned and ran, and I nearly made it out into the light, before I was consumed by the darkness.