No one had died yet, but Michael was talking as if everyone at headquarters were already dead. I pressed my ear to the door and waited, afraid someone might be standing outside or wandering the corridor. Was it all right to leave? Was it safe? Had the person following me gone somewhere else? Michael watched me, as though I were some clown, and asked,
“Is it true that once you become the Savior, you can go back to the past through a miracle?”
When I turned my head to look at him, Michael refilled his glass from a diamond-shaped liquor bottle and continued.
“I heard from the other candidates that you go against time and transcend death.”
“As a believer of the Infinite Church, I assumed you would know better than I do. Am I wrong?”
I answered sarcastically, not wanting to give him even a tooth-sized scrap of information. It was truly ironic. I had tried to share the knowledge and information I had without asking for anything in return. And now I was trying not to share anything at all. Michael looked at me and smiled arrogantly.
“I asked you a question, did I not?”
Michael acted as if I had no freedom not to answer. He was speaking with tremendous pressure, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because of my translator or because his attitude really was that awful.
“Answer the Savior’s questions first, with sincerity and devotion. You insolent, selfish, wicked believer.”
At that, Michael lifted his glass and spoke as though amused.
“A faithful believer sincerely obeys the Savior’s words. What would you like to know?”
“Why did the Infinite Church… target the undersea base?”
“Because a fine garden had been prepared where the seeds could grow.”
“…Remove the uniquely religious metaphors and explain.”
I had thought of myself as a guy with at least a decent amount of patience, but after talking to a cultist, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Michael, dressed in a black suit, looked at me and shrugged, then sat down in the operations director’s chair and crossed his legs insolently.
“As you can tell from our Savior candidates, they are survivors who were lucky enough to live through accidents in which large numbers of humans died. They experienced the phenomenon of time flowing backward, but they could not know the fundamental cause that brought it about. They experienced runny noses, sneezing, and fevers, but it was only after Dmitri Ivanovsky discovered the existence of viruses, and after countless experiments, observations, and studies, that people learned the cause of the flu was the influenza virus.”
Saying things like, “Can you understand this much?” Michael continued as if explaining something to an animal of low intelligence.
“The Infinite Church tried to find the essence within the phenomena of returning to the past. We were curious what kind of people such miracles occurred to, and under what conditions. But finding the cause through the experiences of barely a dozen people—and, at that, through the inaccurate accounts of survivors who were naturally suffering from PTSD and depression—was extremely difficult. In its early days, the Infinite Church seems to have had a rather barbaric side, dissecting those who had experienced miracles while they were still alive, or attempting to discover the answer through torture, but it appears the results were not particularly impressive.”
Insane. They captured people who had barely survived disasters and dissected them? They really were out of their minds.
Judging by the fact that people like Elizabeth, Ronald, and Jamal were alive and well, walking around as Savior candidates, it seemed to have happened quite a long time ago. If they were still dissecting people now, would the Infinite Church’s Savior candidates be able to openly publish articles in magazines about what they had experienced? Michael watched my expression change from moment to moment, as though he found it entertaining, then said,
“To dig into the phenomenon and discover the core of the miracle, the Infinite Church determined that not only finding survivors, but also conducting experiments in as controlled a location as possible, was essential. Since experiments of this kind could not be carried out many times or in great numbers, the location had to be chosen with the utmost caution. After a handful of experiments, we learned that jewels, shark teeth, and living sacrifices were necessary. And the undersea base was chosen as the next experimental site.”
Michael stared at my face for a few seconds, then said,
“The location we wanted needed to be racially diverse, with people gathered there whose languages, genders, ages, and levels of education varied greatly. It had to be a place that could be isolated for a certain period of time, and where a large number of people could die in a short span. It wasn’t easy to find. The first places considered were forms of public transportation, such as ships, buses, trains, and airplanes, where accidents could happen easily enough that the Infinite Church would not be suspected. Next, hotels, hospitals, schools, movie theaters, and large shopping complexes came under consideration. After much deliberation between a large cruise ship under our management and the North Pacific undersea base, we ultimately decided on the undersea base. I was assigned the task of infiltrating and managing a certain number of Infinite Church believers within the undersea base.”
Wasn’t your job supposed to be leading the engineering teams properly so the North Pacific undersea base would run well? Michael looked at me, raised his glass, and swallowed his drink. Then he began explaining in detail how he had painstakingly ruined the undersea base.
“It seems you managed the engineering teams very poorly.”
“Thank you. I merely placed the wrong people in the right positions. By any chance, Savior, have you ever raised sheep?”
When I shook my head, Michael explained slowly.
“Sheep have poor eyesight. Their character is poor as well, but as a survival instinct, those foolish animals that can barely see in front of them at least have the habit of following the leader they have chosen. This undersea base is similar to managing a flock of sheep. Depending on who becomes the team leader, you can tell which direction the sheep will go. Toward a cliff. Or toward grass. The easiest way to destroy a perfectly sound organization is to place one mad sheep as the leader of the flock.”
Michael glanced briefly at my left hand, then said,
“The most fatal thing in this kind of closed-off workplace is having a team member or team leader with no morality included in the same team. The more team members are forced to witness unethical acts, the lower their threshold becomes, until later they no longer realize that what they themselves are doing is illegal. The longer they belong to the same team and work together, the more their minds break down. Team members placed under a violent, racist, or sexist team leader gradually become similar people in order to survive. I heard that of the two victims Francis Wilkins, the former leader of the American team, bullied during his school days, one shot himself with a pistol and the other hanged himself. I thought he was perfect as the team leader who would lead the American team at the undersea base.”
What? I thought I had heard wrong. The engineering teams at Undersea Base Four seemed to maintain a certain level of chaos—was that Michael’s intention?
“About half the team members hated Francis, but as time passed, even their way of speaking became similar. They saw his face more than their own families’, lived together for long periods of time, and stayed close, so they had no choice but to observe and learn one another’s behavior. In order to survive Francis, the team members supplied easy prey from other teams. Of course, some team members who hated Francis and their colleagues resigned, but those whose circumstances did not allow it had no choice but to remain and become similar to Francis.”
Michael smiled faintly and muttered, sounding genuinely regretful, that Francis had caused an accident while driving drunk and had had no choice but to resign.
“I was also quite fond of Zhang Min, the leader of the Chinese team who worked here before. When Team Leader Zhang Min was here, new members were hired for the Chinese team every three months. The bodies of employees from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau would occasionally wash up on the beach of Daehando. He was a rather energetic and diligent team leader, so it was truly a shame that he was replaced by Hai Yun due to political issues. Since Hai Yun took over as team leader, there have been problems in the team, but it is disappointing that I can no longer see team members’ corpses washing up on the beach and being recovered every quarter.”
Michael poured more liquor into his glass, looked at my face, and smiled.
“What is even more important than placing a team leader with moral problems in a team is reducing the number of sensible and ethical people. The faster we drive out of the undersea base those who are moral and actively involve themselves in others’ problems to resolve them, those who have previously engaged in human rights activism, or those who grow angry at injustice, the easier it becomes for Infinite Church believers to take their places. Once we first filled the psychological counseling side with Infinite Church believers, everything proceeded smoothly. For example, there was an engineer named Sasaki Mori. He was the team leader who worked here before Sato Ryusuke, weak-willed, lacking confidence, and quite timid. But he seemed to get along well with his team members. If there was difficult or exhausting work, he would try to handle it first himself, and he maintained fairly good relationships with people from other teams as well. His hobby was grilling hundreds of takoyaki on Daehando over the weekend and handing them out to his team members and people from other countries. A person like that did not suit the undersea base, so we had to get him out quickly.”
“…How?”
I was afraid to ask. I doubted they had driven him out in any pleasant way.
“We would reject reports submitted on the grounds that there were problems with the work, stir up disputes with other teams, break repaired areas even worse, or blow up small, trivial matters into major issues, thereby increasing work-related stress. In that way, we intentionally made working at the undersea base difficult. Spreading rumors about that person’s incompetence at work and making him consider changing jobs is also one decent method. If he still does not leave the undersea base, then an unfortunate accident happens to his family. After losing his wife in an accident, Team Leader Sasaki had no choice but to leave the undersea base and change jobs, if only for the sake of his five-year-old daughter. He was agonizing over whether to continue working at the undersea base, so when I advised him to prioritize his family, he resigned quickly. If someone is married or has children, it is even easier to drive them out. This place is practically designed for single people to live in, after all.”
I felt the urge to snatch the liquor bottle from Michael’s hand and smash it down on his head. Did that mean I was breaking down too?
“The Savior’s nationality was Korean, was it? A few years ago, there was a Korean team leader named Yang Naeun. She was quite a decent team leader.”