Sin Haeryang entered Deep Blue and said,
“You could die. Aren’t you worried?”
“I’m very worried.”
To be honest, I wasn’t all that worried, but I was a little worried about the others. As for me, well... if I die, I come back to life. The others... the others come back to life too, don’t they.
...I really needed to get out of this bizarre phenomenon that made it impossible not to take my own life and other people’s lives lightly. If I stayed in it too long, my mental health was going to deteriorate fast. Sin Haeryang checked the door to Deep Blue and said,
“I don’t think many people will come to check the dental clinic. At most, two or three.”
I don’t know. I feel like I wouldn’t be able to subdue even one suspicious man if he came in.
“What should I do to help?”
“Please move the consultation room chairs into the hallway. The lights will go out in a bit. Don’t concern yourself with what happens in the consultation room and the hallway. Just stay in the treatment room with Aeyeong.”
Following his instructions, I pulled the chairs that Gim Gayoung and Sin Haeryang had been sitting on out into the hallway. Sin Haeryang lifted the two metal chairs and knocked them over to the side as if throwing them. I had no idea what he was trying to do, but anyone trying to enter Deep Blue would have to avoid those two chairs lying in that narrow hallway.
“Is there anything else I can help with?”
“...Do you have no intention of being a little more honest with me? I’ll find out eventually, but hearing it directly seems like it would be faster.”
Sin Haeryang tied a parachute cord to one leg of an overturned chair, then unwound the cord wrapped around his forearm. Then he cut it and was connecting the end of the parachute cord to a low drawer he had dragged out from the consultation room.
“You won’t believe me.”
Was he setting up the cord like that so someone would trip over it? Vicious. Since they’d be holding guns, if they fell and smashed their chin into the floor, their jawbone or teeth would probably go. Sin Haeryang looked at the many nails driven into the hallway wall, seemed about to make another trap, then stopped and looked at me. Apparently, if I didn’t talk, he intended to keep standing there like that. I let out a sigh and said,
“I’m living the same day over and over.”
“...How does it repeat?”
His eyes looked at me like I was insane, but the tone and content of his question didn’t, so... I was grateful. If the only people left in this dental clinic were an unconscious patient dying, a crazy dentist spouting nonsense, and an employee who extracted teeth with her fists, then the future and prestige of the undersea base’s dental clinic had essentially gone to the depths forever. Then again, this place was already a geographical abyss, so maybe it didn’t matter.
“I wake up in the morning, struggle through the day, die around the afternoon, and wake up again in my room at about seven this morning. But since other people don’t remember the repeated day, it seems like I’m the only one living like this.”
Now that I was explaining it to someone else, it almost sounded like the ordinary day of an office worker.
“Do you die by being shot by the terrorists?”
“Uh... no. I die in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I’m shot to death, sometimes a shark bites me in the side and I die, sometimes I drown.”
“Has there ever been a time before when the three of us—you, the injured Aeyeong, and I—confronted them here in the dental clinic?”
Had there been a situation like this before? If there had, I would have tried to avoid it.
“No. This is my first time coming to Deep Blue like this.”
“How did the believers of the Infinite Church learn that you, Muhyeon, possess such a peculiar ability? You said other people don’t remember the repeated day.”
Wow. He was sharp.
“I’m curious about that too. Before, most of the Infinite Church believers were staying in the Second Undersea Base. This is also the first time they came down to the Fourth Undersea Base to find me while saying my name exactly.”
“Have you ever met anyone else with the same ability?”
“No. Ah! ...I did hear a story about a similar situation.”
I briefly explained to Sin Haeryang the story Kanu had told me about the Haitian woman who survived on the space station. As Sin Haeryang listened, he deftly tied parachute cord to a nail left behind by a picture frame, then tied it to a nail driven into the opposite wall as well. Considering that picture frames were hung at eye level, that was definitely a trap aimed at someone’s neck or chin. Sin Haeryang checked the condition of the cord and muttered,
“One survivor...”
“Couldn’t what happened to her be happening in a similar way here at the undersea base?”
“Did they say there was an Infinite Church on the space station too?”
“I didn’t hear anything like that. But the person who told me the story was one of the Infinite Church believers.”
Sin Haeryang thought for a moment, then went into the consultation room, smashed the framed Greenland shark leaning against the bottom of the wall with the butt of his gun, and collected several terrifyingly sharp-looking shards of glass. I considered offering him a scalpel instead, but since I knew what he would use it for, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Sin Haeryang lifted the frame and scattered the broken glass inside and outside Deep Blue as he asked,
“The time when our two team members disappeared was 7:02 a.m. Is that when you wake up?”
“Yes. I have memories of Sujeong and Jihyeon escaping in an intact escape craft.”
Seeing Sin Haeryang’s expression, I hurriedly added,
“There’s something I forgot to tell you. If someone escapes in an unbroken escape craft, or reaches the 0th floor of Daehan-do, they disappear from the undersea base.”
“What do you mean by disappear?”
“The people from Engineering Team A, Geumi, Henry, the snake, and the cat were in Baekho-dong and then went outside the undersea base, and after that, I couldn’t meet them in Baekho-dong anymore. This is just a hypothesis I came up with, but I think this phenomenon only applies within this undersea base. When I tried to take the cargo elevator in Jujak-dong up to the surface, the elevator didn’t stop normally at Level 0 (BA). At the time, the elevator kept stopping and starting because of the power outage, so I thought it was just a simple malfunction, but thinking back on it now, I don’t think that was it. And when I went up in an escape craft, too, some force prevented me from rising right before the surface of the sea.”
As I explained everything I knew to Sin Haeryang as diligently as I could, I lightly reached a conclusion about my current state.
“I may not be able to escape from this undersea base.”
There was a world of difference between thinking it in my head and saying it out loud. A wave of depression surged in and drenched me. Still, at least one thing was okay.
“But I can help other people get out.”
That was better than no one being able to leave this undersea base. I wasn’t able to escape, but the fact that other people could leave was at least a comfort to me. I kept trying over and over to survive, and if that didn’t help me, wasn’t it better for it to help someone else? If it had all been nothing but meaningless death and suffering, I might have shut myself in my room and spent the entire day lying there crying.
If the number of people who had left the undersea base became overwhelmingly greater than the number of people still inside, then maybe someday the people who left first could help me.
I remembered the people I had sent up in the elevator pulling me upward. The force pulling me down was strong, sure, but if a rope were tied around my body and a large number of people pulled on it, maybe I could go up, couldn’t I?
I tried to think as positively as possible about the situation I was in. Dwelling only on negative thoughts wasn’t good for brain health.
Why can’t I leave? Why can everyone else get out, while I’m the only one who has to suffer here like this? It was easier, and more addictive, to keep repeating thoughts like that and sink into despair and sadness. But if I kept chewing over those thoughts and feelings, they would become a habit. I didn’t want to live my life with a habit like that.
Sin Haeryang was now trying to tear off the consultation room door. It looked as if he was completely redoing Deep Blue’s interior, so I asked if I should help, but he refused and easily detached the consultation room door. Sin Haeryang cleverly set the consultation room door in place as if it were closed and said,
“Assuming everything you’ve said is true, that means that after only five days on the job, while you still didn’t even know the layout properly, you pushed through a gunfight started by deranged fanatics, found intact escape craft, and got people out.”
...When he put it like that, didn’t it sound way too exaggerated? According to Sin Haeryang, I was the protagonist of an action movie. I should probably have about twenty kilograms more muscle, have worked at a former employer whose English initials were three letters long, be a white man, and go around in a suit. I’d drink hard liquor and stub out cigarettes in a cool way. Somehow, none of that resembled me at all. I said, feeling a little embarrassed,
“I didn’t do it alone. You won’t remember, but you helped too, Haeryang, and there were a lot of good people among the ones I met.”
“In this undersea base?”
His face said he didn’t really believe it. Just what kind of things had he been doing in this undersea base? Sin Haeryang moved the consultation room desk forward, thought for a moment, then pushed it back again.
“Even while bullets were flying, they recovered three corpses suspected to be yours. It seems your death itself is extremely important to the Infinite Church believers. And from what you’re explaining, it doesn’t seem that this ‘abnormal phenomenon’ happens to all the believers. Perhaps even within the Infinite Church, your ability is exceedingly rare.”
“Why am I experiencing such a rare phenomenon? From what I’ve heard, there are people who donated enormous sums to the Infinite Church, so I don’t understand why it’s me and not them. I heard those people even embed shark teeth inside their mouths. If they put in that much effort, shouldn’t they be the ones experiencing this instead of me? And the Infinite Church people each carry a gemstone with them, but I don’t have any gemstone.”
“A gemstone?”
“Yes.”
Sin Haeryang stroked the area around his neck with his hand, then asked me,
“Does any mineral count?”
“I don’t know. Among the Infinite Church believers I saw, there were people who wore gemstones all over their bodies. Thinking about it now, I wonder if those people held fairly high positions within the Infinite Church.”
“Then would inserting something like gold into the body count too? What about earrings or piercings?”
...Right. Would filling a tooth with gold count too? Then what about implants? Artificial organs? Titanium is used in teeth too, but my waist was also entirely fixed in place with titanium. It was hard as steel but light, had low reactivity and no toxicity, so when metal was used inside the body, it was almost always titanium. People who had been in major accidents would all be carrying at least one piece of titanium in their bodies, so would that mean they had gemstones too?
Sin Haeryang glared at the door to Deep Blue and said in a low voice,
“You won’t believe me. A long time ago... one of my team members once got high on drugs and started talking nonsense.”
“Pardon?”
“He was so out of his mind on drugs that I asked him why he had joined the undersea base, and he said he had applied because he thought if he was here, he wouldn’t be burned to death.”
There was someone who joined an undersea base for a reason like that?
“He said a fire broke out while he was watching a movie in a theater. He said he only had thirty minutes, and he had to escape within that time. His prosthetic leg had been sent to the United States for repairs, so he was getting around in a wheelchair. He said he lost his brother in that accident. He said he saw his brother die thirty times. Normally, people say all kinds of nonsense when they’re high, so I ignored it and let it pass, but thinking about it now, it’s strange.”
Then Sin Haeryang gestured for me to go into the treatment room.