I asked as I checked the long-sleeved shirt and pants I was wearing.
“······How cold is it?”
“You can think of it as around one or two degrees.”
I could endure that. It wasn’t as cold as I’d expected. I’d thought the inside of the submersible would be below freezing, and if three people got in, one of them would freeze to death before long and we’d have to shake them awake or something. So it wasn’t that harsh.
Kim Jae-hui handed me a khaki fishtail parka hanging in the corner of the break room. After hesitating for a moment, I took and put on the winter coat some engineer must have left behind. I didn’t know whose it was, but size aside, the instant I wore it, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes hit me. It felt like they’d spilled liquor directly onto the coat; I was getting drunk without even drinking.
While Kim Jae-hui blew on his coffee to cool it before drinking, Shin Haeryang set down his empty coffee cup and rose from his seat. Then, leaving us with just one instruction—not to go anywhere and to wait here—he left the staff break room.
Kim Jae-hui sat on the sofa and spun his cup round and round, creating a tiny coffee storm inside the teacup. Watching Kim Jae-hui drink what was closer to sugar water than coffee, I grew worried and asked,
“Do you get motion sickness in a submersible like on a boat?”
“It’ll shake really badly when we first go in. And it’ll shake badly when we come out, too.”
Kim Jae-hui laughed softly once, then lifted his head from the teacup and said,
“They say Jihyeok hyung threw up inside the submersible the first time he rode one. Apparently he came out practically dead. Jihyeon noona basically had to pilot the submersible by herself. I think that hyung’s surprisingly delicate. They also said the deputy team leader threw up into the seawater the moment the hatch opened, everything he’d eaten the night before included.”
“What about you, Jae-hui?”
“My semicircular canals are sturdy, so motion sickness is fine for me. What about you, Savior?”
“You can assume I’m average. Hearing all this now······all I can think is that I absolutely must not throw up.”
Holding the coffee cup, I quietly started to worry. I’d poured three mouthfuls of this into my stomach—was I going to vomit it all up? Would black liquid start streaming out of my mouth? Kim Jae-hui and Shin Haeryang were drinking perfectly normally, so it wasn’t as if I could start throwing up coffee now on my own. I shouldn’t eat the snacks.
As I stealthily put down the snack I’d been holding, I glanced at Kim Jae-hui. ······Looking at Kim Jae-hui, it didn’t seem like the boarding requirements would be all that strict, but I still had no choice but to ask.
“Are there any other physical requirements? ······Like, people who’ve had a lot of surgery shouldn’t ride in a submersible.”
My mouth felt bitter even as I asked. Back during the Planet Project, people who had undergone surgery on major organs such as the heart, lungs, spine, liver, small intestine, or large intestine had been unable to board the spacecraft. Even if an area that had once been cut open for surgery healed, the skin tissue was weaker than it had been before the operation. Patients who had undergone surgery were barred from boarding spacecraft on the grounds that pressure differences might tear open the operated areas. But later, since any pressure difference severe enough to split open a surgical site would already be life-threatening, the boarding restrictions were lifted.
Aside from that, people with heart problems, low blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, those who had undergone vision correction surgery for nearsightedness, and patients with osteoporosis were also denied boarding before the restrictions were eventually lifted in a limited capacity.
Instead, people boarding spacecraft absolutely had to have no cavities—and if they did have cavities, they would experience tremendous pain in space because of the pressure difference—and even cavity treatments had to be done with gold in order for them to board. Since they were also required to submit a certificate proving they had no cavities, I’d heard that dentists in Kazakhstan, where the Baikonur Cosmodrome was located, and in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center was located, made quite a bit of money from the sudden influx of patients. Were submersibles, like spacecraft, places with a lot of restrictions? Kim Jae-hui looked steadily into my eyes, then smiled with his own as he said,
“Not really. If you had a physical problem severe enough that you couldn’t ride a submersible in the first place, you wouldn’t have been able to join the undersea base. Manned submersibles can be ridden by anyone, regardless of age, gender, or disability.”
That’s a relief. I felt relieved inside. Kim Jae-hui asked me another question.
“Do you happen to have some hidden incurable disease or claustrophobia?”
“No incurable disease in particular. As for claustrophobia, I think I’m about to develop some soon.”
Narrow elevators that stopped during power outages. Rooms where water rose in real time. Lodgings and corridors that created the illusion of being spacious but were actually cramped to bursting. And then, of course, the inside of a submersible that would be so narrow I’d probably have trouble moving my arms and legs. Just thinking about it gave me a headache already.
Owning spacious real estate really did require an enormous amount of money. I thought I’d known that well enough on land, but now that I was under the sea, the sense of cost hit completely differently. Space was probably similar. Kim Jae-hui smiled and said as if it were nothing.
“Everyone who lives in the undersea base is like that. Do you have more hidden flesh than what I can see right now? You have to be able to pass through the hatch to board.”
A little while ago, I’d seen Shin Haeryang enter and come back out of the circular entrance hatch of the submersible located far in the distance. If someone of his size could get into that submersible, I didn’t think I’d be unable to pass through it.
“What you see is all there is to me.”
“Then you’re fine.”
Kim Jae-hui didn’t seem to have any worries at all about the submersible. In fact, I got the feeling that Kim Jae-hui probably didn’t worry much about anything else in the world either, not just submersibles.
As for me, I knew nothing about submersibles or hatches, so there was nothing I could worry about. They say ignorance makes you brave, and that was exactly the state I was in right now. The only person here who seemed to be paying the most attention and worrying the most was Shin Haeryang, who had gone out to check the submersible.
“If you’d ridden a submersible here before, Savior, I think it would’ve been a little easier for you to ride this time. If one of the two submersibles had a problem, you would have avoided it. But don’t worry too much. Everyone has a first time. Everyone has a moment when they trip over nothing and scrape their knees on bare ground.”
Kim Jae-hui took a cookie studded with small fruits out of its wrapper, bit into it, swallowed, and said,
“Ride it this time, and if there’s a problem, remember it. Then avoid it properly next time.”
“······I’d prefer there be no problems this time. Not some next time.”
“I always used to think it would be fine too, that there wouldn’t be any problems.”
Kim Jae-hui, holding his coffee cup, laughed lightly and spoke as though it were nothing important.
“After about ten repeated failures, you start to realize you can’t get out of here easily. Seeing as you don’t seem to loathe people quite that much yet, I don’t think you’ve gone past ten.”
Kim Jae-hui swallowed the sugar water left at the bottom of his mug, then set the coffee cup down on the table.
“······Maybe I lack patience, but was it the tenth time? The eleventh? It was so painful that I don’t remember exactly how many times it was. I think it was around the time I’d tried every possible means of getting out at least once. After that, I got angry and went around smashing everything, objects and chairs, and screaming. I remember beating up everyone around me who made me angry. I started by punching my hyung in the face, the one who ignored me when I told him there would be a fire in five minutes and that we had to leave quietly. After dying about two more times, I stopped even getting angry. Anyway, the early days, when you go around visiting places you haven’t been to one by one, are the best days.”
I quietly closed my mouth. Kim Jae-hui pushed the tray of snacks toward me and said,
“If it gets too hard, too sad, too painful, then as soon as you wake up in the morning, the very first thing you should do is take the central elevator and meet the people of the Church of Infinity. And ask them for help. They absolutely won’t refuse you, Savior. Because you need us as much as we need you.”
As I listened to Kim Jae-hui, I felt as if sharks were circling, waiting for me to approach first. Did they want me to enter the Church of Infinity of my own accord and ask for help? Would I become like that someday?
“Let us see how long the Savior can maintain that attitude.”
So because I wasn’t crying and begging them to save me, to let me out of here, that meant I was still fine?
“······If I enter the Church of Infinity, I feel like I’ll just be used to my heart’s content.”
“That’s what religion is, originally. Using each other.”
“I don’t particularly want to go.”
Kim Jae-hui didn’t press any further.
“Think about it later, at least. Hm. ······What were we talking about before it veered off like this? I haven’t personally seen any major accidents at the submersible port, but I’ve heard a lot of rumors. Like how there was a hole smaller than a pinprick, and everyone inside the submersible died. Or how they injected compressed air into the diving tank wrong and it exploded, sending the submersible flying from here all the way to the far end. Or how, due to a maintenance mistake, they injected the gas in reverse and everyone almost suffocated to death, but Chelloni stopped it right before operation and barely saved them.”
I hadn’t even gotten into the submersible yet, but I felt like I was going to throw up my coffee. Why weren’t submersible accidents known to people? Was there a separate reason? About five minutes passed in silence, and Kim Jae-hui stared at the break room door before saying to me,
“We can just ride the three-person submersible, so I don’t know why he’s so anxious.”
“······In the current situation, everything might be anxiety-inducing. To be honest, I’d rather ride a big submersible that can fit a lot of people instead of this tiny one. No. Are there no submarines at all? Like a huge submarine that can carry a hundred or a thousand people.”
I wanted to go around in a submarine, stopping at each undersea base, taking their weapons, loading up only the people, and surfacing. Then we could escape without any casualties.
“The team leader told me something about that before. What was it? ······Ah. He said submarines are weapons. He said there are fierce battles going on beneath the surface to possess even one more of them. And he said how well a country operates submarines is a measure of whether it’s advanced. If you can’t operate them, they’re just expensive chunks of metal, apparently. I’ve seen advanced countries measured by GDP per capita or the UN’s Human Development Index, but I think the only person who’d measure developed nations by submarines is someone like our team leader······.”
At that moment, when Shin Haeryang suddenly opened the break room door and entered, Kim Jae-hui stopped speaking and shut his mouth. I didn’t know what he’d been doing outside, but Shin Haeryang’s ears and cheeks were frozen bright red. An unnatural silence fell for a few seconds. Shin Haeryang looked at the two of us and said,
“Let’s go ride the submersible.”