I woke from the shock of falling out of bed.
It was almost as if I’d been hurled toward the floor. I sprawled there, my fingertips scraping against the hard surface. A faint dizziness washed over me. After a few seconds, I barely managed to come to my senses, and my heart was pounding like mad. My sense of reality felt distant, as if I had just awakened from a nightmare. Only after looking around did I finally realize this was Room 38 of Baekho-dong in the Fourth Undersea Base.
Recalling my last memory, I quickly felt the head and face that had been shot with both hands. I’m not dead. I’m not dead! I didn’t die from being shot!
First came the liberation of setting down a boulder that had been pressing on my chest, and the relief that seemed to fill my throat. Then, overwhelmed by every emotion at once, my tear ducts burst open. At that moment, my nose started bleeding too.
I shoved the towel beside the bed into my nose and spent two or three minutes streaming both tears and blood. If I tilted my head back, the nosebleed would run into my esophagus or airway. Pinching my nose, I bowed my head forward and leaned against the orange whale plush. Every now and then, I wiped my tears with the towel and thought.
I’m alive! Those things weren’t real!
The moment I thought that, my head argued back. ……Really? Am I really alive? Then does that mean Kim Gayoung and Yu Geum aren’t dead? Emma ran away from there, so does that never happen either? What happens to Lee Jihyeon and Kanu? Did all the other people and animals survive too?
What the hell is going on? How could something like this happen to me? Did I have nightmares twice? Is this really my room? Am I even sane? What time is it now?
I immediately flipped over my phone lying on the bedside table.
May 31. 7:02 in the morning.
The last time I was aware of was around 4 p.m. on May 31, so why was the time displayed on my phone early morning? Why didn’t the time my brain remembered match the present time?
I bit the inside of my cheek hard. Then I lightly worried the wound in my mouth with my tongue. Ow, ow. ……It’s fine. It’ll heal within a week anyway.
If I can perceive pain, could this all be a dream? I thought for a moment, then concluded that there was no way all of this could be a dream.
I don’t have that good of an imagination. Having a dream where I fall while riding a cable car and get killed by sharks, or where I get shot to death through an elevator ceiling—those were bizarre scenarios I couldn’t have come up with even if I threatened my own brain. On top of that, I had no talent for inventing the appearances and personalities of people I had never met before.
No, if they were people I created in a dream, shouldn’t they be unconditionally kind to me and show me endless affection and trust? Why did they have to have parts that were annoying, cold, hard to deal with, frightening, or repulsive?
And organic, organic compound disassembler? I can’t even remember where in my life I’ve seen the phrase organic compound. And what? A dream about handing over 41.5 billion to a cult? Even if it was my subconscious, I couldn’t forgive that.
Then there were two possibilities.
The first was that I was being forced to experience this because of some external stimulus. Did I drink several bottles of kaoliang liquor without remembering it and fall asleep? Or did I eat something strange by mistake? Did someone come into my room while I was sleeping last night and inject drugs into my arm? Maybe some gas was leaking in the undersea base, and my brain reacted like this after inhaling it in my sleep.
……Thinking of gas, the thought crossed my mind that I might currently be dying in the Deep Blue clinic after inhaling an enormous amount of nitrous oxide—laughing gas used in dentistry. Nitrous oxide is colorless and odorless. It’s used mixed with sevoflurane, a general anesthetic, and I imagined someone tying me up in the clinic, pumping in a staggering amount of nitrous oxide, and giving me only a speck of oxygen. And Park Muhyeon was having extremely vivid dreams over and over.
It was horrific, but strangely plausible. For several minutes, I thought of every drug and gas I could access as a dentist, every kind of alcohol I had ever drunk—everything that could act on the nervous system and cause hallucinations. Then I went back over the past events I had considered dreams until now.
When I recalled the memory of the shark tearing into my stomach, my lower abdomen, which didn’t hurt, felt as though it contracted with tension. I worried the wound in my mouth again with my tongue. If I was hallucinating, and if hallucinations this vivid could be created, then my body after being administered those hallucinogens would already be half dead. ……Damn it.
Then let’s think of a possibility that’s at least somewhat positive for me.
The second was that things completely ignoring the laws of physics were happening to me. To put it most simply, if I observed the phenomena happening to me, it seemed that when I lived for a certain period of time and died, I could return to a specific point in the past.
To the morning in Room 38 of Baekho-dong, Fourth Undersea Base.
……This makes the least sense of all, doesn’t it? How much would Emma laugh if she heard this story? I was someone who had given up on studying physics, but if I put together everything I’d experienced in life, I had never once seen time step backward. How could a person go from the future to the past? Suddenly, I remembered the question I’d asked Kanu not long ago.
“What kind of religion is it?”
“A religion where people who want to turn back time gather.”
When I even remembered that particular leisurely voice and answer, goosebumps rose along my back.
Did I really experience the future and return to the past? Was this anomaly I was experiencing a case where turning back time had succeeded? ……Really. I hated to think this, but I considered the assumption that, in addition to sucking the blood and flesh of its followers and causing the regression of human rights and wars, religion had succeeded in creating something else horrific.
What happens if time can be artificially manipulated?
The moment I considered the idea that someone could live toward the future and then suddenly return to the past, a physiological repulsion rose in me. I could confidently say that I had lived while gripping the formless fixed point called the “present” or “now,” using each second that flowed by as my compass. But merely imagining time not flowing forward made it feel as if the foundation of my life was crumbling down. It was an eerie sensation, like being cast adrift in the open sea without a single buoy and becoming lost.
Judging only by the situation, I had returned to the past twice.
Then when does my future come? If I returned to the past because I died, then if I stay alive until the end, will time flow normally?
What if I return to the past again even after surviving? What do I do then? What if I’m trapped in this situation forever?
No matter how much I thought about it, there was no decent answer. Fine. Then let’s broaden my thinking, not as an individual, but from a more macro perspective.
Let’s assume I was experiencing these things because of what a cult had done. ……Only horrific imaginings came to mind. Whether it was a religion or some group resembling a religion, they should not possess this kind of power.
How could anyone know where, and on whom, an interest group would use the chance to return to the past? They might kill today’s Buddha and save tomorrow’s Mara. An executed serial killer might be resurrected, or a terrorist who had just died might come back to life and run through a metropolis.
They could claim their religion was right while carrying out ethnic cleansing, erasing several countries, and spouting absurd excuses to the entire world as they buried or justified what they had done. If they could go back to the era when saints were being born, every religion in the world except Hinduism and atheism might be unified into one. After all, they would only need to kill at least three people as newborns and have these Infinite Church bastards swiftly switch them out.
The thought that it was unfair came next. Time flows, and people age. Time is one of the things given equally to every living creature. Whether rich or poor, educated or not, happy or not, time flows fairly for everyone.
If you think about it, time is an innate public good we never realized we had. There is no need to worry that it can be taken away or altered. Of course, it can be traded. Working life is the act of offering up our time, our lifespan, in exchange for money from a company.
Humanity has steadily continued research to extend the limited time it can enjoy. When death by aging is assumed, the time permitted to humans, according to DNA, is said to be limited to thirty-eight years. But as a result of changes in hygiene knowledge and diet, the development of medical technology, and steady investment in vaccination and education, it has now increased to 130 years. Of course, as ever, only a specific minority can enjoy such a lifespan and a comfortable life accompanied by scientific technology.
For ordinary people like me, I’d have to work until I was ninety to a hundred and ten before I could retire and rest, and because environmental pollution was so severe, having thyroid surgery or getting cancer two or three times was nothing unusual. Due to food shortages, we lived on artificial meat, synthetic milk, substitute coffee, and foods made primarily of insects, and depending on which country you were born in, your standard of living could rise or fall vertically.
The lower-income a country was, the more people died from natural disasters or environmental pollution; if you thought only of the number of people who had died from air and water pollution from 2000 until now, it was close to astronomical. Polarization due to income disparity had grown irreversibly large, and now some particular person could control even time? If it were a petty individual using it only for personal glory, that would be one thing. But the thought that someone belonging to a religious group like this could use it for a specific purpose made my head ache.
……Probably only around two generations after I died would it be all right for something groundbreaking related to time to emerge. Right now, geniuses with groundbreaking IQs were dragging humanity by the scruff of the neck from the age of nine or ten, taking antidepressants as they did so, while humanity headed toward ruin. Maybe in about a hundred years, people would live better lives than now. By then, wouldn’t humanity be far more mentally mature than I expected?
With the current level of consciousness people have—including me—we shouldn’t have the ability to return from the future to the past, not by ten hours, not even by one second. If even this last public good remaining in the world were stolen by someone, I had no idea how completely fucked up the world would become.
Of course, there would be good points too. If the part concerning time could be manipulated however one wished, one might be able to remain in the time one desired and never age. One could always stay young and healthy, live in the era one wanted, or remain with someone one liked no matter how much time passed. There would be no need to say goodbye to the dead, and the sorrow of parting would become an old story from the lyrics of an old song.
Now let’s return to my situation on a micro level. ……Rather than a religion with insane ideology having succeeded in an attempt to turn back time, it would be better—horrific as it was—if I alone were dying while suffering hallucinations.
When the Mars base Ares exploded, the officially announced death toll was about 8,200. What if something similar happened in the undersea base? I remembered Tyler’s words.
“I don’t really know either, but apparently, to perform the Infinite Day ritual, a lot of people have to be in the building, and at least a few people absolutely have to die. They used to do it with fish, but on Infinite Day, it has to be people.”
I know at least a thousand people work here. I had to struggle with everything I had just to get one person and two animals out.