The reason an undersea base had ended up with a dental clinic was because far too many people developed problems with their teeth. Even a person with perfectly healthy teeth could suffer if the air pressure changed by even the tiniest degree; even the smallest hole in a tooth could become agony. It was similar to discovering a cavity you never knew you had only after getting on an airplane.
But what were you supposed to do if you got a toothache three kilometers under the sea, where the pressure differed by more than three hundred times? Rather than downing vodka and painkillers with a grimace while enduring it until some future treatment date, it was far better for work efficiency to just stop by the dentist.
Before the dental clinic was established inside the undersea base, you first had to make an appointment at a dentist on land, then take the central elevator up from -3 km to 0 km, sea level. Since the artificial island, Daehan-do, had no dentist, you had to catch a helicopter or a boat or whatever you could from the island and go to nearby Hawaii or the relatively closer Solomon Islands. Otherwise, you had to go all the way to Japan or Jeju Island.
The minimum time it took to receive dental treatment as quickly as possible was five hours. Of course, that five hours was only if every single thing went smoothly: if a dental appointment was available; if you could immediately board the central elevator, which moved every ten minutes, and get up to the surface; if the weather on the artificial island was good enough to launch a helicopter; if that helicopter had a full tank of fuel; if, aside from my own personal business, at least two other people had reason to head outside; if, by magic, there was an empty seat on that helicopter; if the weather was good and there were no problems moving or landing; if you had remembered your passport; if it was a country you were allowed to enter; and if, from the landing point, you could get a taxi or a ride into the city to reach the dentist where you had made your appointment.
Naturally, since you couldn’t do this during your work shift, you had to pull this stunt on a day off or during vacation, and if your dental treatment couldn’t be finished in a single visit, it inevitably became an incredible nuisance.
Then why not put a dentist in the hospital on Daehan-do? The people working at the undersea base unanimously insisted that there was no room inside Daehan-do’s hospital for a dental clinic, and sent only the dentist down under the sea. I only found out later why there had been a subtle tug-of-war over whether to put the dental clinic in the artificial island’s medical center or not. All facility use inside the undersea base was free. Only things like cafés, bakeries, and convenience stores charged money. And even then, if you looked closely, it was practically free. A cup of coffee was one cent, and a loaf of bread was 300 won.
But when I met and spoke with the people at Daehan-do Hospital, located on Floor 0, I learned that only the consultation fees were free at the hospital. Even medicine was free only if it had been prescribed by the psychological counseling center or the dental clinic. When I asked why it wasn’t included in the free services, they said it was because everything built on top of Daehan-do, the artificial island, was not under the sea. It was ridiculous. It was like an insurance policy clause.
If it was located in the deep sea, whether you put gold or duralumin in your teeth, everything could be covered by the undersea base’s budget. That was why the high-demand dental clinic and psychological center had been shoved down into the depths. Both were very, very expensive services to use on land. Considering that the people working on Daehan-do and at the undersea base came from all sorts of countries, free dental treatment was no different from salvation for some. That was why the undersea base people had driven the dental clinic down beneath the sea. Because on the surface, an aggressively astronomical sum became free once it went underwater.
I took advantage of the lull between patients to read the undersea base guidebook. It was in English, so it wasn’t exactly easy to read, but I had a feeling I would never try to read it later. And once the number of patients increased, I wouldn’t have time to read it anyway.
If you were injured at the undersea base, you were immediately transported by the central elevator and treated on Daehan-do. The elevator moved every ten minutes, but if the emergency button was pressed, it stopped wherever it was and arrived three kilometers below. Once you boarded that elevator, it went straight to Floor 0.
Floor 0, called the Basic Area, was connected so that you could reach the emergency medical center as soon as you arrived. This was actually much faster than calling 119 on land and going to the hospital. With a 119 ambulance, you had to pray that no one else in the area had called an ambulance before you at the same time, that there was an empty vehicle available, that traffic on the way to the hospital wouldn’t be bad, and that there wouldn’t be any patients in the emergency room in more critical condition than you. Compared to that, you could ride the elevator once and use the emergency center directly in ten minutes.
Among the things that absolutely had to be observed at the undersea base, the first was that alcohol and cigarettes were prohibited. Of course, if you were a smoker or an alcoholic, there was technically the method of indulging to your heart’s content on the artificial island, Daehan-do, before coming down. The problem was that the artificial island did not sell alcohol or cigarettes. On top of that, bringing them into the undersea base was prohibited.
Under the sea, air was the same as life. At 3,000 meters below the surface, the air purification system controlled the air so that lowly humans without even gills could breathe, but the undersea base had no room to be considerate of smokers too.
The twenty contracts I had signed five days ago clearly stated that alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs were prohibited, and that I agreed to be expelled if caught with them inside the undersea base. However, an engineer named Michael whom I treated two days ago must have spilled it on his clothes while drinking, because as soon as he entered the treatment room, I smelled the strong, distinctive woody scent of whiskey. As for his mouth, he must have brushed and gargled thoroughly, because I couldn’t find any evidence during the examination. I also sensed signs of smoking from a Chinese researcher named Zhang Wuyi when he greeted me in the hallway as we passed each other, but I couldn’t find any particular evidence then either.
Now, from the person sitting with his mouth open, despite having brushed and gargled, there was a very faint bitter smell. I hadn’t memorized his name yet, so I glanced at the chart. Seo Ji-hyeok, engineer of Team Ga. On the electronic chart section of the pad, I messily dashed off a T in a way only I would understand. Rinse your mouth, please. Around the time the patient spat out blood and saliva, I asked.
“Is there anywhere inside the base where people can smoke?”
Seo Ji-hyeok’s eyes widened as he held the small glass cup. He seemed to hesitate over how to answer, then soon looked as if he had found a solution and threw the question back at me.
“Ah. ......Doctor. Do you smoke?”
“No.”
I was a nonsmoker. More precisely, I had quit because I didn’t have money. When I answered with a smile, Seo Ji-hyeok smiled too and said. The orange whale, Noeul, held in his arms was smiling as well.
“I don’t smoke either.”
“Mr. Seo Ji-hyeok, your teeth say you’re a smoker.”
“......I think my teeth are lying.”
“They say you like chocolate and candy, chew mostly on the right side, smoke, have a lot of stress, and have a habit of resting your chin on one hand.”
“......You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
“No.”
“Especially not our team leader?”
“That......would be Team Ga’s leader, Sin Haeryang?”
“He has a temper beyond imagination, so if he finds out I still haven’t quit smoking, things will get troublesome.”
When I answered that I understood, Seo Ji-hyeok, unexpectedly, confessed readily. Since there were an enormous number of CCTV cameras and sensors detecting heat, smoke, carbon dioxide, and so on inside the undersea base, there was nowhere suitable to smoke. However, he said that when an engineer entered an area into the system as under repair, the detection sensors for that particular zone were disabled.
There were apparently quite a few heavy smokers inside the undersea base. I continued the treatment while thinking, Of course, humans being humans. Then something suddenly occurred to me, so I asked again.
“They don’t sell alcohol or cigarettes on Daehan-do or inside the undersea base, do they?”
“That’s why if you just manage to bring them in, it’s a gold mine. A pack of cigarettes goes for sixty dollars.”
When I heard the amount, I laughed in disbelief. One pack of cigarettes was several times more expensive than my minimum hourly wage when I worked part-time on land.
“Are there people who actually buy it at that price?”
“From what I hear, they can’t sell them because they don’t have enough. A lot of the Americans do it, some of the Chinese do too, and the Russians buy a lot.”
Seo Ji-hyeok scratched his cheek with his fingertips as he spoke. Some people quit as soon as they come here, but honestly, there are people who can’t just cut it off that cleanly, aren’t there?
“That......Team Leader Sin, I suppose he doesn’t smoke?”
“Smoke? Our team leader wouldn’t bleed a drop if you stabbed him.”
From Seo Ji-hyeok, I ended up hearing in greater detail why the electrical engineering teams had been named in the order of Ga, Na, Da, Ra, and why the island’s name was Daehan-do. Apparently, at the time of the vote, there had been a lot of requests and pressure from employees from various countries, each telling them to make the island’s name derive from their own language as much as possible.
At the time, the vote was conducted over two days, one vote per person, by accessing the undersea base program on one’s electronic pad and logging in with an ID and password. On the first day, Team Leader Sin Haeryang swept up the votes of the entire engineering team, ABCDEFGH, and the entire mining team, ABCDEFGH, through poker, and threw all 160 votes into [Daehan-do]. There had been about 190 people there at the time, so it became Daehan-do just like that. Seo Ji-hyeok scratched his cheek with his fingertips and said.
“Originally, Team Leader Sin was going to name the island [Democratic Archipelago].”
I burst out laughing as soon as I heard it. This undersea base was a place built by eight developed nations pouring money into it. More than half of them were wearing only the skin of democracy.
“I wanted to see a few countries have seizures too. Back then, the Chinese and Japanese kids happened to be spouting bullshit about taekwondo being theirs, so Team Leader Sin couldn’t stand it with that temper of his and tried to name the island Taekwondo. The people around him stopped him, so he named it Daehan-do instead.”
Hearing that, the corners of my mouth rose on their own. I pictured Team Leader Sin as a white Maltese-like puppy with no patience whatsoever, then soon shook my head twice to drive the thought away.
“How did he scrape together the votes?”
“Gambling, Doctor. Our team leader probably won’t ask you to play poker, but if he ever does, never sit down at the table.”
Gambling was also one of the things not permitted at the undersea base. I started to wonder whether the people here actually obeyed any of the prohibitions at all.
“Is he that good?”
“He’s practically a ghost.”
I was someone who couldn’t play poker well, or even Go-Stop for that matter. I had no connection to gambling, or to money. I had never even won on a cheap scratch-off lottery ticket.
“Why are the team names in Korean alphabetical order?”
“Because he was short on votes from the stakes, so he started betting the team names too, and that’s how it ended up like this.”
When I finally laughed, Seo Ji-hyeok seemed to find it funny too and chuckled. He told me that the engineers of Team Na were all Japanese, and that the engineers of Team Da were all Russian. He also explained Teams Ra and Ma and the teams with English letters and numbers by country, but I couldn’t remember them all. Lamenting my memory inwardly, I tried offering myself a little consolation by thinking that ever since electronic devices became common, everyone’s memory and concentration had gone to hell. ......It didn’t help much.