As soon as a strange sound rang out in the pitch-black darkness, people looked around uneasily. Seo Jihyeok, the one who had actually thrown the can, hid beside me and Kim Jaehee and raised his index finger to his lips. Keeping my voice low, I asked in a whisper.
“Why did you throw the can?”
“Now they’ll stop fighting among themselves so much and get a little tense.”
Seo Jihyeok looked as if he wanted to run over and grab someone by the collar right away, but was holding himself back. Kim Jaehee and I each took one of Seo Jihyeok’s shoulders and started walking.
The farther one went into Hyeonmu-dong, the wider its structure became. On top of that, everything from the floor to the ceiling was covered in drawings done in glow-in-the-dark paint. Nothing had been drawn in the corridor or near the entrance leading into Hyeonmu-dong, but around the rest plaza not far from the entrance, pictures and words in glaring fluorescent colors ran wild to the point that they hurt my eyes.
If the power hadn’t gone out, I probably wouldn’t have seen this.
Using the word “Drill,” meaning a boring tool, someone had written on the wall, [Humans have to drill to make a living.] Looking back on my job, it was a statement I could somewhat sympathize with. To think I’d end up finding common ground with people from other lines of work.
There were cute drawings of a turtle digging through the ground with its bare hands and mole characters that looked like miners. There were also puns made by changing two or three letters of the English words “Mining” and “Excavating,” as well as vulgar phrases about drilling all the way down to Earth’s inner core.
[The world is your oyster] was written in large letters across one side of the wall, and right below it, a giant piece of oyster flesh and its shell had been drawn to resemble the Earth. Did that mean the world was an oyster? Did it mean the world was something you could eat in one bite? I had no idea what it meant. It was probably a proverb. The good thing about the interpreter was that if I read a sentence I didn’t understand, it would translate it into my ear. A pity I couldn’t use it.
It wasn’t all nice sayings, either. In one corner, there was a fairly frightening glow-in-the-dark drawing of a huge, fat, pure-white mosquito with a long proboscis sucking up the land and sea. The giant mosquito’s eyes had irises and lenses drawn like a human’s, and its whole body was decked out in flashy accessories, sparkling brightly.
Looking closer, the mosquito’s proboscis seemed to be an anthropomorphized depiction of humans drilling into the Earth with long, enormous pipes. And one sentence was written there. [The will to live is a sin.]
······I felt that writing more positive things would have made enduring company life easier, but apparently the Mining Team didn’t think so. One corner of the wall was plastered with the Mining Team’s curses about each company and their work situation. Setting aside the simple profanities, the sentences alone went like this.
“I don’t want to stay in this awful place one second longer.”
“Even fish must be happier than me.”
“Every time I go to work, I die, and when I leave work, I come back to life. Therefore, I am a daily Jesus.”
“We have been forgotten on the surface.”
“I’m going to make it back alive from this hell.”
“You capitalist pigs, pay our wages on time. Unless you want to see me buy a gun with a loan.”
“Three of my fingers were severed today, but I am happy because it will be treated as an industrial accident.”
“Recruiting people to kill our team leader. The oxygen he breathes is a waste.”
“Please let today be another peaceful day without any accidents.”
“Feeble humans can only go mad under the gaze of the Old One.”
“If I could go back to the past, I’d go back to before I joined the company. It’s too hard.”
All sorts of words shone in brilliant fluorescent colors. The curses went on endlessly, but the letters flashed so brightly that my eyes hurt and I couldn’t read them all.
Do company officials never come all the way to the Fourth Undersea Base? There were a few writings that exposed, in very specific detail, the realities of companies related to oil drilling and exploration vessels.
On the ceiling was an almost lifelike painting of a turtle carrying a snake on its back. The ceiling was quite high, so I could only wonder how they had climbed all the way up there to paint a mural on it.
······Had the Mining Team people gone so crazy from hating their work here? I had decided to quit this undersea base after working five days, but it seemed the people here had endured a little longer.
Hyeonmu-dong smelled musty, like concrete and wet cement. For a moment I wondered if it was because it had been submerged in seawater, but it was probably because the Hyeonmu-dong building itself was extremely old.
It seemed they had no choice but to use it even though there were places that leaked or were routinely flooded. Recalling the explanation that Hyeonmu-dong had been the predecessor from which the Fourth Undersea Base was created, Hyeonmu-dong itself was probably the oldest building in the Fourth Undersea Base.
Seo Jihyeok and Kim Jaehee seemed used to the Mining Team’s screams written so garishly that they hurt the eyes. I had been looking around the ceiling and floor to take in the Hyeonmu-dong rest area, practically turning my head in a full circle, when Kim Jaehee’s words brought me back to reality.
“Still, it seems like he didn’t suffer enough.”
“Pardon?”
I had been so busy looking around Hyeonmu-dong that I didn’t understand what she meant.
“Sanghyeon. The guidance Team Leader Shin gave him probably lasted a few months at most, even if it was long. Since his habits and living environment changed drastically, it could have become an opportunity for him to live a life different from the one he’d lived until now. If his body changed, his mind could change along with it. But is a lazy and selfish mind easy to change? Why can’t people live according to the plans they make? Because their mental state doesn’t change. They want to live easily and comfortably by inertia. In truth, changing the body is easier than changing the mind.”
So it was a continuation of the conversation from earlier. Seo Jihyeok tilted his head toward Kim Jaehee to listen, then asked with a yawn.
“So a life of true remorse and repentance never came to pass. Is that what you mean?”
“That’s why Sanghyeon only obeys Team Leader Shin’s words. He probably just thinks he messed with the wrong person and paid dearly for it.”
“Is there any decent way, in your opinion, Jaehee, for Sanghyeon to become a good person?”
Please. I asked because I wondered if there was any other method left in Kim Jaehee’s head besides something like going back to the past. If we try it on Jeong Sanghyeon and it works, I’ll try it on you too.
“Hmm. I’m not sure. I’m not really the type to spend time and effort for other people.”
Then Kim Jaehee said simply.
“As expected, wouldn’t he come to his senses only after dying in an extremely painful way?”
“······How is he supposed to come to his senses if he’s dead?”
Kim Jaehee only laughed lightly at my words.
The lights had gone out suddenly, and when they came back on, it was just as abrupt. Like a sheepdog, Seo Jihyeok herded Kim Jaehee and me, then instructed us to hide behind one of the large machines set around the plaza.
The pictures drawn in all sorts of colors with glow-in-the-dark paint disappeared as soon as the lights came on, as if they had never existed.
The machine we were hiding behind was about the size of a car. But it had no wheels and no windows, so it was hard to call it a car. At a glance, it looked like a huge funnel with its mouth open downward, and the bottom seemed to be slightly floating above the floor.
Seo Jihyeok pointed at the machine with his finger, then spoke to me without even moving his lips.
“It’s a mining robot.”
“Ah.”
“It’s quite a bit bigger than you expected, isn’t it?”
When I heard “mining robot,” I had imagined an android-sized robot picking up or extracting minerals from the seabed, but I hadn’t thought it would be a large funnel-shaped machine like this. The robots that went around the undersea base cleaning were about the size of a rice bowl when small, or at most the size of a frying pan, but this was a robot the size of a midsize car. Seo Jihyeok tapped the lower part of the machine with the back of his hand and said,
“This part here is the intake head. It goes puttering around the seabed, sucking up manganese nodules from the floor. Apparently manganese nodules contain nickel, cobalt, titanium, platinum, copper, and things like that. I don’t really know why those are on the seabed, but in any case, it’s a rock-specialized vacuum that goes around picking up stones. Since it eats rocks, its nickname is [Crocodile].”
I guess crocodiles normally eat rocks. I’d heard of chickens eating stones, but this was probably the first time in my life I’d heard that about crocodiles.
“Then what about that one next to it with a slightly different shape?”
“That’s also a mining robot. According to the Mining Team guys, that one only digs up and eats soil. So that machine’s nickname is [Earthworm].”
They were terrible at naming things. Earthworms······ Earthworms did eat soil, didn’t they. But was the soil on the seabed also necessary to humanity? I tried to look at the people leaving the plaza, but Seo Jihyeok stopped me, telling me not to raise my head, so I asked what I was curious about.
“Why do they collect soil?”
“Something about soil having a lot of rare earth elements. Apparently there are over forty metallic components in it. In any case, that one only swallows mud. But this one swallows lumps of rock, so it breaks down easily. The mining guys get so angry that they sometimes go around kicking Crocodile here.”
If you kicked a lump of metal like this, it seemed like you’d break your toes.
“These huge machines sweep across the seabed. Are the creatures living on the seabed all right?”
At my question, both Seo Jihyeok and Kim Jaehee smiled ambiguously. They looked at each other, then Kim Jaehee shook her head and said with a smile.
“The distinguishing feature of mining robots like these is that they run a vacuum cleaner over the seabed and pick up everything on the floor. Then they suck in only the minerals humans need and spit out the rest indiscriminately. If there are creatures that build homes on the seabed, or creatures sensitive to stimuli, I imagine they all get wrecked or die.”
Seo Jihyeok scratched his cheek, then spoke to me as if slightly embarrassed.
“It’s the result of compromising with the lives of weird-looking undersea creatures we don’t even know the habitats of, instead of destroying tropical rainforests to collect minerals or starting rare earth wars. Well, they said no one knows how long it will take before the destruction of the seabed comes back to people in any meaningful way. Researchers who study undersea life probably know more about that, don’t they? In the past, people used plastic however they wanted, then got it back as microplastics, to the point where plastic is now detected in blood and even brains. It’ll probably be similar to that, right? I just hope I’m dead by the time we get the consequences of ruining the very bottom of the sea.”
It seemed many of the people working at the undersea base already knew about this problem. They say there are still creatures in the deep sea that haven’t been discovered yet, so what happens if they all die off like that?
“Is this one of the ways humanity is pissing on its own frozen feet?”
Kim Jaehee looked at me and said,
“In my opinion, it’s more like setting fire to them.”