“What’s the condition of the escape craft?”
“No idea. They wouldn’t let me get on it from the moment I got here.”
“Was there a woman about two meters tall inside? Or a cute, dainty woman with a bob cut?”
“Uh, um… I don’t think I saw them.”
The young mining team employee answered with an awkward look. Seo Jihyeok had probably spent more time roaming around looking for traces of those two than he had picking up guns. The man looked in turn at Seo Jihyeok, Kim Jaehee, and me, then said,
“Uh… I don’t think you guys should go in there.”
“Randall!”
The mining team man who had shaken off Seo Jihyeok and run away was at the end of the corridor, beckoning toward us with a fierce look on his face. So he hadn’t run off alone. I thought it was an English word I didn’t know, but when I looked at the name tag on his chest, it seemed to be this man’s name.
Randall hesitated, looking between the engineers and me, then hurriedly ran toward the corridor where the mining team man was. I heard voices like, You idiot! Hurry up! and the two of them left the corridor and disappeared toward the plaza.
Watching the chaos he had created vanish in an instant, Kim Jaehee looked deflated and said to Seo Jihyeok,
“If it’s Tamaki, well. Wouldn’t he only shoot the engineers on Team Na?”
Seo Jihyeok thought for a few seconds, then shook his head.
“I don’t know. Seeing as he told the mining team employees, who don’t have much to do with him, to get out, it doesn’t seem like he’s completely lost it yet. But it might be different for the engineering team. There’s no law saying he’ll only shoot his own team. And I don’t know how good a shot that Tamaki guy is, but if he shoots at Sato, Sanghyeon standing next to him might get hit.”
Seo Jihyeok thought for a moment, then rolled his eyes as if that didn’t sound so bad either.
“Are you saying you think Mr. Tamaki will open fire on the engineers inside the escape craft port?”
At my question, Seo Jihyeok nodded as if he had heard something obvious.
“If it were me, I would’ve shot every last bastard on Engineer Team Na dead. To begin with, I would’ve taken one look at the team’s state the moment I joined and quit right away. I’d pay the penalty and leave. I wouldn’t work on Team Na.”
“How is workplace bullying handled inside the undersea base?”
Seo Jihyeok and Kim Jaehee looked at each other at my question. From their eyes, I couldn’t tell whether they were passing the answer off to each other or whether they didn’t know how to answer. The believer of the Infinite Church hesitated, then spoke to satisfy his savior’s curiosity.
“I’ve never seen it handled. Rumor has it Tamaki is the fourth or fifth victim.”
Then Kim Jaehee stretched his body out in a long stretch.
“Is there no way to separately report workplace bullying or request outside help?”
Seo Jihyeok lightly shook his head and said,
“This is a closed workplace. In a way, it’s an even more closed environment than the military or school. You work, get off, come back to your room to rest, and your coworkers and supervisors are breathing in the rooms next door. There’s water on all sides, so it’s not a place outsiders can come and go as they please. And in a situation where public order isn’t functioning properly, who’s going to stop it just because you report it? There is a guy called the general manager, but if one Asian gets bullied by other Asians on the same team? Do you think a man who didn’t even care about racial discrimination would pay attention to something like that? He wouldn’t give a damn. And even if it was reported somewhere, I expect they’d make it look like the victim was just clowning around alone. Given Engineer Team Na’s nature, all the team members would probably side with the perpetrators.”
So this was a place where sincere apologies, legal action against perpetrators, compensation for victims, and prevention of recurrence were not carried out at all. Maybe, as Seo Jihyeok said, it would have been better for Tamaki to quickly change jobs and get out of here.
“Do you think Mr. Tamaki will shoot us too?”
“…To be honest, the engineers on other teams all knew perfectly well how Engineer Team Na was operating, but since he wasn’t on our team, we lived with our eyes turned away. If he says he’s going to kill all the engineers for the crime of pretending not to know or for the crime of knowing and ignoring it, we don’t have much of an excuse. If he shot Yamashita five times, then all we can do is negotiate and ask him to only graze our team once since we didn’t bully him directly.”
It seemed Seo Jihyeok had been quite bothered by the situation of Tamaki being bullied. I had expected him to say it was something that had happened on another team, so it had nothing to do with ours.
“I’m not sure how Tamaki will treat you, Doctor. You’ve only been here a few days. Have you ever met Tamaki?”
“Mr. Tamaki once visited Deep Blue.”
I tried to recall my memories of Tamaki Yuzuru, but it felt like something from a very long time ago. Maybe because so many frightening, exhausting, sad, and spectacular things had happened on my day off, I could barely remember what had happened on the weekdays. It felt like more than a month had already passed since I had treated Tamaki. To begin with, I forgot about things that happened at work on the weekend. It was better for my mental health.
And when I barely managed to recall what had happened on the weekday, what came to mind before Tamaki’s personal attitude was his teeth and oral condition. This was exactly what an occupational disease was. I think I saw him the way I usually saw patients. Since he was just one of the many patients who had visited the dental clinic, he didn’t seem particularly special.
Kim Jaehee asked Seo Jihyeok in a tired tone,
“Hyung. We’re busy enough looking after ourselves. Do we have to worry about another team’s members too?”
“…You’re right. It’s hard enough taking care of the lunatics on our own team. (Seo Jihyeok stared straight at Kim Jaehee.) We don’t have the capacity to worry about the lunatics on other teams too. But in the victim’s eyes, we’ll probably all look like people who stayed silent together.”
“So in conclusion, if we go recklessly into the escape craft port, we might get lumped in with Engineer Team Na and turned into beehives.”
Kim Jaehee grabbed my arm and took two or three steps back from the escape craft port door. Then he said in a whisper,
“Let’s wait somewhere safe, and once he’s killed everyone he wants dead, we’ll go in then.”
“You said you were siding with Engineer Team Ga.”
“Jihyeok-hyung and I are also Team Ga.”
Kim Jaehee grinned at me as he spoke. I looked at the port door with a heavy heart, then asked,
“If we could enter the escape craft port while minimizing the risk of being shot, would you go in?”
“How?”
Seo Jihyeok came close like a dog starved for three days and asked me as if he were about to bite.
“Can’t we ride the [Worm] or [Crocodile] in the plaza into the escape craft port? Those machines looked incredibly sturdy.”
They were robots meant to crawl around the deep-sea floor, so one or two bullets probably wouldn’t pierce them. But was it all right to ride one into the escape craft port? Did we even know how to ride them? Since it was the opinion of someone who knew nothing about mining robots, I thought they would immediately oppose it, but Seo Jihyeok, who stood blankly for a few seconds, seemed to think it over. He wore an expression as if he had heard a suggestion to ram the CEO’s office with a twenty-five-ton cargo truck or a fifty-ton helicopter, then quickly agreed.
“You’re pretty bold, Doctor. I think that might work. Let’s give it a try.”
Kim Jaehee quickly refuted Seo Jihyeok’s words.
“Even if we go back to the plaza, the machines might not work. They might have left them there not because the suction intake was broken, but because the wheels were broken. And by the time we come back to the port, everyone might already be shot dead.”
“Even if we just go in, it’s the same as walking barehanded toward the enemy. We’re supposed to enter the escape craft port with no plan, knowing we might get shot to death? It’s not like we’re going to get beaten to death by Team Leader Shin.”
As soon as Seo Jihyeok made his decision, he urged Kim Jaehee and me to run to the plaza. Then he entered the small driver’s booth located at the rear of a mining robot and made us press the button to turn on the engine first.
There were about twelve mining robots in the plaza, and we went into any random ones and frantically pressed the start buttons. Only about half of them started, while the rest didn’t. Was I doing something wrong? I called Seo Jihyeok’s name loudly and asked. Then Seo Jihyeok threw explanations at the back of my head about something to do with safety and why they wouldn’t start, before falling silent as if he was too busy.
Whether Kim Jaehee was lucky or not, he got one [Crocodile] moving. The mining robots I picked either wouldn’t start at all, or even if they did, they wouldn’t move. On top of that, I didn’t know how to drive them. Why were there two steering wheels for changing direction, and three things that looked like accelerators?
The mining robot was the size of a midsize car and looked like a combination of a tank and a vacuum cleaner. It let out a beeeep, beeeep warning sound to those around it, then moved as if gliding. Kim Jaehee waved his arm and called me over. The moment I barely managed to climb into Kim Jaehee’s driver’s booth, a gender-neutral voice sounded.
[The AI system asks for the user’s name.]
Huh. What was I supposed to answer? I couldn’t immediately think of any mining team member’s name. But Kim Jaehee lightly answered the AI as if it wasn’t much of a problem.
“William Randall.”
That was the name of the employee from earlier.
[Registering William M. Randall as the driver. Remaining work hours for the day: five hours and two minutes. Do you wish to operate automatically?]
“Manual. Verbal commands. Go straight.”
Then the [Crocodile] slowly began to move into the corridor. Impressed by Kim Jaehee’s decisive actions, I asked,
“Have you driven a mining robot before?”
“No. I haven’t.”
Kim Jaehee smiled at me as if there was nothing to worry about. Unable to suppress the anxiety creeping up inside me, I asked Kim Jaehee,
“You just spoke to the AI so confidently.”
“If it didn’t work, I was going to tell the AI to do it automatically.”
That was incredibly unsettling, though? Behind us, I could see Seo Jihyeok barely managing to get one [Worm] moving and following after us. The mining machine [Crocodile] moved as if crawling, and yet it was trying to suck in its surroundings like a vacuum cleaner turned on over a completely bare floor. I wondered when we would arrive, but in the blink of an eye, the escape craft port was right in front of us.
The entrance to the escape craft port was the type where the door opened when a person approached and pressed the button by hand. On top of that, the door was terribly narrow for such a huge machine to enter, so I began worrying whether it would pass through properly.
[Mr. Randall. There is an obstacle ahead in the direction you are traveling.]
I quickly tried to get out of the driver’s booth to open the door, but Kim Jaehee, who was beside me, stopped me and said,
“Ignore the obstacle and go straight.”