When you were in Deep Blue, sometimes a low, humming sound would reverberate. It was the noise of being three kilometers beneath the sea. Fish did not speak, but inside the undersea base, noise was constantly being generated. The frequent tremors and sounds made your mental stress rise even if all you were doing was breathing. And the pressure of being trapped. It was a far greater stress than I had expected.
You could only move within the undersea base, and the tension of knowing you would die instantly if you went outside into the water that was right there before your eyes was always pressing down on some corner of your mind. Living in an undersea base, I thought, was similar to living on a spaceship. In that even if you went outside, you couldn’t breathe, and you would either freeze to death or burst and die.
At -3,000 meters, the pressure was 301 atmospheres. In other words, in theory, it meant being subjected to roughly three hundred times the pressure of living on land. It would probably feel like a lump of iron weighing about three hundred kilograms was crushing your body. They said the air pressure and atmosphere inside the base were automatically maintained at an environment humans could live in, but from the moment I arrived at this undersea base, I always felt as if I were on an airplane.
The feeling of being surrounded by steel walls in an artificially created environment designed for the bare minimum of survival. Like an airplane shaking in turbulence, the undersea base swayed little by little, like seaweed forcibly planted in a giant fish tank, even in currents that barely existed. Each time, I felt the faintest dizziness. It was as if I had become a fish trapped inside an aquarium of enormous scale.
“What movie did you watch?”
Hearing the thin voice, I focused on the patient in front of me. Including me, there were about ten Koreans in the undersea base, and one of them, Yu Geum-i, was a marine biologist. She had finished her bachelor’s degree on land and had now come down under the sea for research as part of her master’s and doctorate program, only for a cavity she hadn’t even known about to worsen. The bread there really was delicious. As I checked her teeth and gums, I answered.
“Fast & Furious.”
“Is it fun?”
“Watching cars get wrecked is always fun.”
Looking at Yu Geum-i’s hands, clasped tight from nerves, I soothed her by saying I would just do a quick scaling. Dental treatment inside the undersea base was completely free of charge. So if anyone had a problem with their teeth, they could come to the dentist without worrying about the cost. Among the welfare benefits you could enjoy while living beneath the sea, it was one of the better ones, though it was not much of a benefit to me, the doctor in question.
“How’s your research going?”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to write my thesis.”
In my view, Yu Geum-i was the friendliest person in this undersea base. Unlike me, an introvert, she knew almost all the names of the people she met in the Fourth Undersea Base. Since she had been my first patient at the dental clinic, I had a brief self-introduction wrung out of me by Geum-i, and thankfully, I was able to tell her that I liked action movies.
Amazingly enough, there was a movie theater in the Central Building of the Fourth Undersea Base. On top of that, you could watch most existing movies and dramas on the issued electronic pad, so you could watch something before falling asleep. It was nice to watch several movies I hadn’t seen, but to me, this undersea base was still the strangest and most entertaining thing of all.
“Don’t you have any interesting stories?”
“This place is a tiny neighborhood. There’s nothing interesting at all.”
I swallowed the words, That’s probably because you’re writing a thesis right now. To someone like me, who had arrived less than three days ago, the Fourth Undersea Base, where at least over four hundred people lived in the research center alone, was too vast to be described simply as a tiny neighborhood. The Fourth Undersea Base was so large that I still had barely been anywhere except Baekho-dong and the Central Building.
“Maybe it’s because I haven’t been here long yet, but everything is strange and interesting to me.”
“What did you find the strangest?”
First of all, the fact that they had built such a massive facility underwater was strange. The way people from all sorts of countries worked in four eight-hour shifts was strange. The sheer number of restrictions was strange. Even the name of this island was strange.
“That the artificial island on Level 0 is called Daehan-do.”
“Ah, that. It’s because a Korean named it.”
Yu Geum-i explained with a hint of pride. Apparently, there had been a lot of discussion over what to name the artificial island located above the undersea base. People from every country had raised a fuss, insisting they should be the ones to name it. Like naming an international common zone such as the moon or the North Pole, it had apparently become an issue as if a dispute over ownership had broken out. Leviathan, Nautilus, Great Old One, Neverland, Atlantis, the Promised Land, Greenland Shark, and all sorts of bizarre names had been nominated. At the time, they had decided that the people of each country staying in the undersea base would vote on it.
“I heard there’s a rather unusual person on Engineering Team Ga, Team Leader Shin Haeryang, and he was the one who came up with the name.”
“There must have been a lot of Koreans in the undersea base back then?”
Yu Geum-i chuckled.
“Engineering Team Ga is the only Korean engineering team, but even back then, as now, there probably weren’t even ten of them. From what I heard, Team Leader Shin swept all the votes from the engineering team and the mining team.”
“Oh. He’s got skill.”
Yu Geum-i seemed pleased to have met someone she could talk to in Korean. Engineering Team Ga had the most Koreans, and from what I heard, there were seven of them in total. Kang Sujeong, whom I had met on the first day, had also been an engineer there. As I heard that there was one more doctor among the researchers, a Kim Gayoung, I nodded.
The largest groups by nationality were Americans, Chinese, and Australians, and I knew there were a few more Koreans on Daehan-do, the artificial island, working at the hospital. There was an artificial beach on Daehan-do, the artificial island. Had I been there?
“There’s an artificial beach?”
Had Priya Kumari told me to go there? She had told me to visit somewhere else too.
“They made it really pretty. Quite a lot of people go there to get some sunlight. I go often too.”
“I see.”
I nodded. It had only been two days since I came here, but the sight outside the windows of the undersea base was truly nothing but bleak. It was simply pitch-black, like ink. Every time I looked out the window, I would find myself confused as to whether this was an undersea base or a space base. Then, whenever I saw the darkness outside without a single star, I would realize that I was several kilometers beneath the sea.
They said the Second and Third Undersea Bases had quite a few large windows, but the Fourth Undersea Base barely had any windows at all. When I read the manual, it said that making windows capable of withstanding the water pressure was no easy task. In the past, they had installed many artificial sunlight lamps, only to remove them all. If someone with claustrophobia lived in a place like this, they would go mad within three days.
Even an introvert like me felt that way, so lively people like Yu Geum-i would feel the loss of sunlight even more keenly. Yu Geum-i chatted away for a while, then gave the dentist a few chocolates from her pocket and went off to the research wing, half-listening and half-not to my nagging that she should floss diligently.
Being under the sea made it easy to grow depressed. The deep sea was pitch-black without a speck of light, and fish did not make good conversation partners. That was why the emergency medical center was on the artificial island, Daehan-do, while the psychotherapy center was installed in the deep sea. In a continuous state of depression, among food, clothing, and shelter, the one thing that could satisfy humans relatively easily was food. Sweet foods like chocolate and cookies, along with all kinds of snacks, were practically piled everywhere for free. After all, it was far better for depressed humans to relieve stress with a few chocolates and candies than to set fires saying everyone should die, or attack the employee next to them.
There was a reason the counselors continuously requested carbonated drinks, chocolate, ice cream, and snacks in bulk. Sweetness made people happy. After sugar lowered the sense of depression, the dentist appeared. No matter how well you tried to brush your teeth, it was still worse than not eating them at all. The advice to get a moderate amount of sunlight and exercise had already poured out of Elliot like a broken recorder. And Elliot, using psychotherapy as a pretext, could request additional personal items, so she even showed me the kindness of asking whether I, as a newcomer, needed anything.
The words, Couldn’t we just ban candy and chocolate altogether? rose to my throat. However, I had no intention of losing my job, and humans were creatures who desired something more desperately when it was forcibly blocked or became scarce. I said I needed a teddy bear smaller than an adult’s upper body.
“Does it have to be a bear?”
“It used to be a bear, but any stuffed animal is fine. As long as I can hug it.”
She brought over a shark plush and a whale plush from the corner of her counseling room. She said she had bought them on impulse because they were cute at the souvenir shop of some maritime museum, but they had only been collecting dust and taking up space, and handed them to me. They were about sixty centimeters long, and both plushes felt nice to the touch. The shark had a blue body, teeth jutting out in jagged points, and stark white eyes. The whale, whether because it was a mutant or because of marine pollution, had a vivid orange body.
I liked the orange whale better. Because it was a color that did not exist in reality. As I handled the whale plush this way and that, under the pretense of checking whether it was big enough for an adult to hug, Elliot smiled faintly. It must have been amusing for a fully grown man to ask for a stuffed animal. After drawing even a small laugh from the exhausted counselor with my clowning, I too felt better.
“Does this one have a name?”
Elliot, while writing something on her pad, said in passing,
“You should name it, Doctor.”
“How about simply Marine?”
“Not Orange?”
“It is definitely that color.”
Since I was a person with no sense whatsoever for the study of names, I pondered for a moment, then looked at the orange body and said,
“How about Noeul, meaning red sky? In Korean, it’s pronounced noeul.”
Listening to the pronunciation from the translator, Elliot looked at the whale’s orange body, then lowered her gaze back to the pad.
“Nol. That’s nice.”
I was about to tell her that was not the pronunciation, but simply gave up.
“I’ll lend it to you sometimes if you’re short on sunlight.”
Seeing her powerless smile and hearing her goodbye, I got up from the chair because of the appointment alarm for my medical consultation. Before leaving through the door, I stuck my head out and asked,
“Doctor. Is that all?”
Since I had mostly just sat there chatting with Elliot, I couldn’t tell whether I had received proper counseling or not.
“You are the healthiest person in this undersea base. I’ll contact you separately when the mandatory regular checkup date comes around in three months.”
People who provided mental counseling always looked drained whenever I met them. They were worn down by people. Hearing Elliot’s thoroughly exhausted voice, I quickly withdrew my head from the doorway, and the massive door slid shut on its own.