“What happens if that breaks down?”
At the panic in my voice, Seo Jihyeok hesitated, unable to give me a proper answer. He seemed to be wondering how he could put it in gentler terms.
The life-support system used in the undersea base splits water and turns it into oxygen. And the byproducts from that are used to maintain the temperature—do you understand that much? The life-support system supplies the undersea base with appropriate temperature and oxygen and lets us survive even under this high pressure. The fact that the temperature has dropped means something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Seo Jihyeok’s explanation was getting long and rambling, so Shin Haeryang summarized it into a conclusion.
“The likelihood of death increases.”
This man seemed to have a natural gift for making people anxious. As Yugeum and I blankly chewed over Shin Haeryang’s answer, Yugeum spoke with a frightened expression.
“······Then are we supposed to go to Cheongnyong-dong? Or should we go back to Jungang-dong?”
Baek Aeyeong, who was walking at the very back, kept glancing behind us to check, then looked once at Shin Haeryang and once at Seo Jihyeok before shaking her head as if dumbfounded. Then she smacked both men on the back and said,
“Team Leader. You’re supposed to explain things like this at length. Don’t worry. If we get out of Cheongnyong-dong quickly, there won’t be any problem.”
My trembling anxiety settled, if only a little. Of course, that was if we managed to escape Cheongnyong-dong. But we had already failed to take the escape pods from Baekho-dong and Jujak-dong. I asked Seo Jihyeok anxiously.
“······How much time do we have left?”
Seo Jihyeok answered me in a tone that made it clear he really didn’t know.
“I’m not exactly sure either. This has never happened before.”
Shin Haeryang accelerated our anxiety.
“I don’t know how much time is left, but the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air will rise sharply. If it keeps going like this, we’ll suffocate.”
How wonderful. Truly excellent news. Baekho-dong was flooded, Jujak-dong had been half-destroyed and blown away, Hyeonmu-dong had the engineers shooting one another over the escape pods, men with guns were roaming around Jungang-dong, and Cheongnyong-dong, where we were headed, would suffocate us if we stayed too long.
“Well. At least here we won’t be shot to death or drown.”
At my hopeful remark, Yugeum stared at me with an incredulous expression. Then she shook her head and said, sick of it all,
“I hate all of it.”
Chatting with Yugeum to distract myself from the anxiety, the first thing I saw as soon as we entered Cheongnyong-dong was the elevator leading to the third undersea base located at -1,000 meters. A vivid blue Cheongnyong was wrapped around the elevator with its entire body. A Cheongnyong model inside an undersea base where people from more than eight countries had gathered. It looked as though they had made it like that to show it ascending to heaven together with the elevator, but seeing it down here under the sea made it look like that Cheongnyong had sunk into the water instead. Looking at the bright blue scale patterns, I asked Shin Haeryang,
“Why did they put a Cheongnyong there?”
“Some lunatic at headquarters suggested the Four Symbols, saying they should turn the undersea base into a tourist product, so they made it.”
Shin Haeryang sounded displeased, but I couldn’t tell whether he disliked the lunatic at headquarters or the Cheongnyong wrapped around the elevator. Come to think of it, I had wondered why they’d gone out of their way to name the wings like this when they could simply have called Hyeonmu-dong the north wing and Jujak-dong the south wing by direction.
“Was that proposal a success?”
“······There isn’t much to see in the deep sea. Darkness, high water pressure, and nightmare fish that look like they belong in drawings made by toddlers occasionally passing by. Naturally, it failed.”
Yugeum, who had been listening beside us, let out an exclamation.
“Ah. No wonder! A few years ago, one Jujak statue each appeared at the entrances to the Deep-Sea Research Center, the Rare Earth Center, and the Seafloor Pollution Center. The researchers kept calling them roast chickens, phoenixes, turkeys, and wondering why they’d been installed. So that’s what happened.”
Baek Aeyeong, who had been quietly listening to our conversation, sighed as she walked and said,
“They got the concept wrong. People said if they’d hung crosses and faces of Jesus that looked like they were bleeding and suffering all over the place, drawn pictures of two fish and five loaves of bread, put a few angel statues here and there, and targeted Christians, it would’ve been a huge hit.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Why was Christianity suddenly coming up here? Since I didn’t know much about that religion, I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Baek Aeyeong began explaining roughly for my sake.
“Well······apparently there’s a passage in the Bible where God asks a question. I don’t really know either, but there’s a part where He asks, Have you ever walked in a place buried deep in the sea? Something like that.”
Shin Haeryang frowned at Baek Aeyeong’s sloppy explanation and rummaged through his memory before saying,
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Job 38:16.”
Was that a Bible verse? There were people who memorized things like that? Impressed, I asked Shin Haeryang,
“Are you Christian?”
“No. I have no religion.”
“How did you remember that just now?”
“Team Leader Jennifer Smith, whom we met earlier, is a devout Christian. Whenever she got drunk, she would brag until my ears were calloused that if God asked her that question, she could answer confidently.”
Baek Aeyeong nodded, then said to me, You heard that, right?
“There are probably quite a few people who’d go crazy over answering ‘yes’ to that. Lee Jihyeon unni on our team is Christian too, and she said there’s one hundred percent demand on that side. She was certain that if they started an undersea base tourism tour, more than half the participants would be Christians.”
Then for whom, and by whom, had that Cheongnyong, whose face you could barely make out at this -3,000-meter depth, been made? I stared at the Cheongnyong and asked without thinking much,
“Then who made this?”
“Some higher-up must’ve made it.”
At Seo Jihyeok’s words, Shin Haeryang opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head. It seemed he didn’t even want to bring up that lunatic from headquarters. Yugeum, who had been listening intently beside us, exclaimed in admiration.
“Oh······stories like this are fascinating. I’ve never heard them before.”
“They don’t talk about things like this in the research wing?”
Yugeum laughed quietly at my question and said,
“Researchers aren’t curious about anything except added holidays and rising salaries.”
“They don’t rise and they don’t get added?”
“You’re smart. You could close your dental clinic and become a researcher. Want to join our lab? Though it seems to be gone now.”
I politely declined. Before I knew it, we had gotten close to the elevator wrapped by the Cheongnyong, and as I looked at the design of its long body, I muttered to myself,
“I don’t particularly want to look at it negatively, but that Cheongnyong doesn’t look like it’s going up. It looks like it’s wrapped around the elevator to stop it from going up.”
Seo Jihyeok, who was looking at it with me, grinned and said,
“I agree with that opinion.”
“Hey. Put those negative thoughts aside for now. Even gathering every bit of luck we have wouldn’t be enough.”
Saying that, Baek Aeyeong pressed the elevator button. The doors opened right away. The empty elevator closed its doors after some time passed. So it did work. This was our Plan C. The best option was to take the escape pod, and if not, to take the submarine.
With the elevator right in front of me, I desperately wanted to get on. Strange. Just the fact that an elevator was open in front of me made me want to get in. I asked Shin Haeryang,
“Is it better to take the escape pod or submarine than to get on this elevator right now?”
“Yes.”
When the engineer answered like that, there was nothing to say.
“What should we do?”
When Baek Aeyeong asked, Shin Haeryang grimaced as if he had a headache and said,
“Can you go and come back alone?”
“If you tell me to go, I have to go.”
Baek Aeyeong said that, then stopped and began stretching to loosen up her legs.
“Anyway, I’m the fastest one here, aren’t I?”
“At what?”
“Running. Running. I’ll sprint all the way to the submersible, check its condition, and come back. In the meantime, you all go toward the escape pod.”
The location of the Cheongnyong-dong submersible and the Cheongnyong-dong escape pod were on opposite sides. Well, it wasn’t as if both would ever be used at the same time. And the launching of the escape pod couldn’t be allowed to be obstructed by the submersible.
“Will you be all right going alone?”
Only then did I realize that the question I’d blurted out was the same as Shin Haeryang’s. Hearing that question, Baek Aeyeong smiled with only one corner of her mouth raised. Shin Haeryang took my pad, wrote a random post on the undersea base message board, confirmed that the post went through, and handed it to Baek Aeyeong.
“Go to the submersible, check it, and post on the board. If anything happens, come straight to the elevator. If we can’t use the escape pod either, we’ll come to the elevator too.”
Tensing the muscles in her legs, Baek Aeyeong said to Shin Haeryang,
“Don’t even think about escaping without me.”
Seo Jihyeok teased Baek Aeyeong.
“I’ll escape before you, at least.”
“I’m first!”
Baek Aeyeong responded to my and Yugeum’s farewells with a smile.
“Please be careful.”
“See you in a bit.”
The moment the conversation ended, Baek Aeyeong bounced in place a few times. Then she turned around and began running fiercely. I had thought we had been walking fast enough so far to leave us breathless, but Baek Aeyeong ran as if she were practically flying.
She bounded forward in long strides like a gazelle, and only the sound of her footsteps echoed through the quiet Cheongnyong-dong. Her hair, tied back in one long ponytail, fluttered like a flag in the wind. Wow. She was really fast. Watching her back grow distant in an instant, Yugeum said,
“Aeyeong-ssi really runs well.”
Seo Jihyeok urged us on, saying we should hurry too. As we all walked quickly, Seo Jihyeok smiled, perhaps thinking of Baek Aeyeong, and said,
“The world is fair—she’s fleet-footed, but she can’t swim very well.”
Yugeum asked as if surprised,
“How does she work in the deep sea if she can’t swim?”
“Engineers work wearing large external suits. They’re big diving suits that block the water pressure. If you put one on, well······think of it as wearing a thick space suit like an astronaut. When they do exterior repairs, they work in that state. But it’s not as if only the exterior breaks down every day; plenty of things break inside too. There’s no problem at all with her working.”
Yugeum seemed to think of something, then let out a quiet ah and said,
“I once saw repairs being done in Jujak-dong because the shower room was leaking.”
“Ah, that place breaks down all the time. Seriously. It’s because the design was wrong from the start.”