“I think the prettiest girl on our team is Jihyeon. Lee Jihyeon—she’s the prettiest on our team, and she’s got a great personality too. But I guess, by worldwide eyeball standards, that’s not the case. Baek Aeyeong was the most popular.”
“I see.”
I looked up at the light, which had risen so high I had to tilt my head straight back to see it. Then I nodded.
“You know… among men… there are those bastards whose character is complete garbage. When it comes to women. They confess, ask a girl out, get rejected. Then they confess again, ask her out again, get rejected again. I mean, if you’ve been rejected once, give up. That saying about how there’s no tree that won’t fall after ten chops is ridiculous too. Do they think people are trees? How many times are they going to swing an axe at a tree that won’t fall? Do they not even think about the tree getting damaged? Selfish bastards. I mean, date someone on your own team. Or go on leave and date someone. Or at least be unmarried. I don’t understand in the slightest why married bastards are making passes at people.”
“Huh…”
“The problem was, there were at least three or four guys who liked Baek Aeyeong. And she said she had no intention of dating anyone. In a cramped, closed-off place like this underwater base, there was nothing good for her life to be gained from getting involved with a man. She said none of them were her type either.”
“And then?”
“Well… a few crazy bastards conspired together and decided they were going to force their way into someone else’s room.”
At those words, my jaw nearly dropped to the floor.
“No… What! They must have been out of their minds.”
“Right? Our team’s Jihyeon heard that. Jihyeon’s pretty, and her brain is ridiculously good too, so she can speak five languages. She’s sharp as hell. What makes her even sharper is that normally, she acts like she doesn’t know five languages—like she doesn’t even know zero languages. No, that’s not the point. Even when she’d taken off her interpreter, she understood everything perfectly, and Jihyeon told our team leader all of it.”
Seo Jihyeok kept stealing glances at Shin Haeryang beside him. Shin Haeryang said nothing. Was he even listening?
“So what happened?”
“The team leader swapped rooms with Aeyeong. Baek Aeyeong is… well, as you’ve seen by now, if the team leader said he was going to make soybean paste stew out of cement powder, she’s the kind of person who’d go procure the ingredients for him.”
From the darkness came a low laugh, like air escaping. It seemed Shin Haeryang was laughing.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Anyway! So, during our team’s rest period, Aeyeong’s room was forced open. It was supposed to be sleeping time, so the lights in our corridor were off, and seeing that, they must’ve thought she was asleep and came over. They must have been shocked too. They expected Baek Aeyeong to be there, but instead, a man who was 193 centimeters tall was waiting for them in the dark. And not only that—while he was waiting with the lights off, he’d gotten bored and was exercising with a twenty-kilogram dumbbell he’d borrowed from Sujeong. They walked into the room of that kind of person.”
“Wow. …And then?”
I had stopped climbing the stairs as I listened to Seo Jihyeok, but at Shin Haeryang’s urging, I forced my foot back onto the steps.
“He forced the door shut. One guy ran, and Jaehee and I sprinted after him like mad and caught him. By the time we dragged him back, the situation was already over. The three guys who’d gone into the room had been beaten to a pulp. Especially the one who got hit with the dumbbell—maybe because he blocked with his right arm, his arm broke. Then it fell on his foot, so the top of his foot broke too.”
Served them right. Shin Haeryang, one of the people directly involved, said nothing.
“Mr. Shin Haeryang. Is that true?”
“…I don’t remember very well. I only remember that they barged in while I was listening to Viva La Vida.”
In my heart, I was break-dancing over this exhilarating story Seo Jihyeok was telling me, but in my head, my first concern was how on earth they had cleaned it all up.
“…So what happened afterward? Did the police come or something?”
“The police? If they brought them from Hawaii, it’d take… more than two or three hours, I guess. If they came from Korea or Japan, it’d take even longer. If they came from the mainland U.S., twice as long. People who were resting heard the noise and all came rushing out of their rooms. With four men thrashing around in that cramped room, the room was a wreck too. Michael, the chief engineer, called in everyone involved and questioned them. The team leader said he’d been sleeping in Baek Aeyeong’s room when the door suddenly opened through an emergency release, those guys came in, and they assaulted him. The four of them claimed they’d gone to Team Leader Shin’s room because they had something to say to him, but then Team Leader Shin suddenly went crazy and attacked them. Michael may go around laughing, but he’s no idiot. If he were an idiot, he couldn’t be in charge of this whole mess. After hearing everything, Michael asked why four men had entered Baek Aeyeong’s room while she was resting. Those bastards had nothing to say. They did spew some bullshit, though. Well… and not long after, they received hospital treatment under records saying they had suddenly fallen on perfectly flat ground, or that there’d been an accident while they were working, or that James hadn’t taught them properly and they got hurt by a dumbbell, and so on. A few of them were forcibly sent back to their own countries a few months later.”
Seo Jihyeok fell silent as if his explanation was finished. A creeping unease crawled up my back, sending a chill down my spine.
“What about intervention by public authority? The police, or the military.”
“…This underwater base is still being claimed by eight countries, all insisting it belongs to them, so what country’s public authority would be here? I think the Dragon King would hand down a verdict much faster than they would. Anyway, that’s why, when I saw that Sato bastard whose right arm was ruined eating with a spoon because he couldn’t use chopsticks with his left hand, I felt so damn satisfied.”
I asked blankly.
“Sato. Do you mean Sato Ryusuke?”
“Yes. That bastard. His personality is absolute shit. I heard that bastard already got married in Japan when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, so I have no damn idea why he’s doing this crap here. Anyway, since Aeyeong’s room had been wrecked too, our team leader threatened that if they didn’t allow us to move our quarters to another building, he’d make sure even the most remote café in Mozambique heard about the incident. So we succeeded in moving to Baekho-dong. Even though all the other engineers are in Cheongnyong-dong.”
“The Russian team is in Baekho-dong too, though.”
“The Russian bastards were even more fiery. I heard they tied up an Australian guy who went into some woman’s room without permission—Nikita or Irina or whatever her name was—to a chair and tortured him for eighteen hours. He stayed in the hospital and then went straight back to his country.”
Good Lord. What was I listening to?
“Is there no way to punish crimes like that?”
“They say the people above are having armchair debates over things like that, but who knows when anything will be decided. Submarines from every country are all fighting over who gets to prowl around near the underwater base. Recon drones are flying around and crashing into each other and falling. The U.S. military is openly saying they’re going to build their naval base right next to the underwater base or whatever, so everyone’s fighting over that too. If a problem happens here, there’s a lot of controversy over whose country’s laws should apply.”
Shin Haeryang, who had been listening quietly, cut in.
“…Officially, no one is allowed to be armed within the underwater base. It’s a kind of extraterritorial zone. They say the people who tried to build the underwater base in the beginning made it this way so people could live based on cooperation and reconciliation with one another, transcending race, nationality, gender, and age.”
“Uh… the intent itself is good. But it sounds difficult.”
It was extremely idealistic. It seemed they had designed the underwater base while envisioning a utopia, but they had failed to reflect the desires of humans living in reality at all. Of course, if people could live that way, nothing would be better. But human consciousness didn’t seem to be that advanced, and weren’t they asking for too much? Shin Haeryang continued explaining.
“They say that, in keeping with that purpose, each country screens and sends people who are as ethical as possible and have no major issues when it comes to building relationships with others. But I question whether they’re actually doing it properly.”
“They screened us?”
“Yes.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Had I undergone any such test when I came in? What had I been screened for?
“You’re saying I was screened before coming in here too, but how exactly do they screen people before letting them into the underwater base?”
“You took an aptitude and personality test, didn’t you?”
“Uh… yes. I took it online twice. And had one interview.”
“Other than that, there were probably a few more tests related to ethics and ideology. Without you knowing, Mr. Muhyeon. Cases where someone had a fine of more than three hundred thousand won or so would likely have been excluded too. I don’t know the rest. They say it was created after I came in.”
For a while, the only sound was the quiet climb up the stairs. Only after we had gone up a few more steps did Seo Jihyeok make an “Ah!” sound. I looked over, wondering if his leg hurt, but Seo Jihyeok was looking at me as he shouted.
“So! The fact that women swap rooms with other people isn’t that suspicious, is what I’m saying!”
More than that, what had been proven to me was that Seo Jihyeok had a pretty decent memory. My mind had already become more preoccupied with the state of the underwater base, where public security seemed to be a mess, than with my suspicions about Gang Sujeong and Yu Geum.
I rubbed my forehead a few times, then recalled the dental treatment that had left me feeling uneasy and said,
“Mr. Sato seemed to bear a very deep grudge against Mr. Shin Haeryang.”
Seo Jihyeok giggled and said,
“Well, around the time that Sato bastard’s right arm and right hand and right foot and right whatsit were smashed up, all our team leader got from beating them with his fists was a busted finger.”
Seo Jihyeok swung his arm as if boxing, and without realizing it, his injured left foot went out first. Because of that, the rhythm of our climb got tangled, and all three of us toppled over. Whoa!
“……”
Shin Haeryang and I, who had braced ourselves on the stairs and were getting back up, said nothing except for groans. But Seo Jihyeok seemed to think our silence was condemnation.
“Er… I’m sorry, both of you. You’re working hard supporting a ninety-six-kilogram guy up these stairs. Please suffer just a little more. Once I get out of here, I’ll buy you plenty to drink.”
“Didn’t you say they don’t sell alcohol here?”
“That’s why I’m saying it.”
At Seo Jihyeok’s ridiculous remark, I was so exhausted that all I could do was laugh weakly. Going up while talking nonsense made it feel like we had climbed much farther than when we had been going up in silence.
But if I checked precisely with Yu Geum, we probably wouldn’t have come that far. At first, I had kept asking how many steps we had climbed every time we went up. Now, I barely asked those questions anymore. If the number wasn’t what I expected, it only left me disappointed or drained.