Lee Jihyeon said with a frown.
“If we don’t take an escape craft, we have to use a submersible, a mining robot, or an elevator, but whether it’s the Black Tortoise Wing, the Central Wing, or the Azure Dragon Wing, we have to pass through the Central Wing.”
What if we went into the Central Wing right now and, with rotten luck, got shot? Was I just too scared? A shootout might not happen. People might resolve things through conversation. There was no need to settle the situation in their own favor by using violence against other people like in the dream. Humans had a wonderful tool called dialogue.
And I didn’t know how much time had passed, but we might have spent less time in the Vermilion Bird Wing dormitory than I thought. Then, compared to the time when the shootout happened, maybe we had ten or twenty minutes to spare.
At that moment, a sound came from far away. Thunk thunk thunk. Thunk thunk thunk. It was a very faint sound, like beans being roasted. In the dream, at first I hadn’t even known what it was, but hearing it again like this, I finally understood. It was gunfire. Gunshots were ringing out from very far away.
Like a gazelle that had sensed a predator approaching, Lee Jihyeon lifted her head and looked down the long corridor connecting the Vermilion Bird Wing and the Central Wing. There was no one at the end of the corridor. Maybe it was because the gunshots were echoing through this enormous place, but in reality, they seemed to be coming from even farther away. Lee Jihyeon met my eyes with a tense expression. Then she quickly asked Kim Gayoung, who was uploading the post.
“The Vermilion Bird Wing research center was sealed off. Can you open it, Gayoung unni?”
“What? No, no. I don’t have the authority to seal off an entire research center, and I don’t have the ability to open it either. At most, I can open and close the door to the lab I’m stationed in.”
Lee Jihyeon stood still in thought, then hesitated as she looked at the sealed door of the Vermilion Bird Wing. Then she asked me one last time.
“If we go to the Central Wing now, we won’t be able to survive among people with guns. And to get to the Azure Dragon Wing, we have to pass through the Central Wing. Even if we seal off the corridor connecting the Central Wing and the Vermilion Bird Wing, I wonder how long we can hold out in the Vermilion Bird Wing.”
Looking at me, Yugeum, and Kim Gayoung, Lee Jihyeon raised the corners of her mouth slightly and smiled bitterly. Yugeum asked Lee Jihyeon,
“Then what do we do?”
“We go somewhere we don’t want to go.”
Lee Jihyeon took a pad out of the thin bag she was carrying on her back. Come to think of it, Lee Jihyeon had never once taken out her own electronic pad before. She entered the password 000000 and logged into the screen. Around the time I was thinking something like, Wow, absolutely perfect security, a scream came from far away. Holding the pad, Lee Jihyeon began walking toward the Vermilion Bird Wing research center as silently as a tiger. We hurriedly got up and all stuck close behind her.
“I wondered why our team leader gave me this before getting on the escape craft. To be honest, I thought this pad belonged to our Team Leader Shin. But when I thought about it, the team leader said he’d left his own pad in his room. Then, when we greeted and passed that devil bastard Loaker in the elevator, there was a pad I’d never seen before in the team leader’s hand.”
Lee Jihyeon quickly accessed the undersea base’s engineering system with the pad and tapped the sealed bulkhead blocking the front of the Vermilion Bird Wing research center as she spoke.
[Would you like to open the sealed barrier wall?]
“Before he got on the escape craft, he handed this to me, and suddenly I had the thought that this was the pad of Michael Loaker, the head of deep-sea engineering.”
When she pressed the [Yes] button, the barrier wall, which looked like concrete almost as thick as an arm was long, began opening automatically. Wait, were barrier walls normally this thick? I’d thought they’d be about as thin as fire shutters. The Vermilion Bird Wing research center was being revealed, but Kim Gayoung looked displeased as she looked at Lee Jihyeon and the path toward the research center.
“I don’t know who blocked off the research center from the Vermilion Bird Wing, but maybe they sealed it off because the research center side is a mess too.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
Lee Jihyeon agreed with Kim Gayoung’s thought. But I looked toward the Central Wing, where screams and gunshots were coming from, then stepped inside the barrier wall and said. Since I’d been somewhere bullets poured down in the dream, I knew very well how terrifying that situation was. The closer the gunshots came, the more I could feel my body growing frightened.
“It feels like a bullet’s going to come flying into the back of my head any second now, and I don’t want to get shot.”
Yugeum hurried inside the barrier wall and said,
“We might run into someone we know while moving around. Gayoung unni. People who couldn’t escape. And we know our way around here.”
Kim Gayoung came in while letting out deep sighs.
“Or creatures that couldn’t escape. If we’re lucky, the research center’s freight elevator might be intact.”
Lee Jihyeon hurriedly closed the barrier wall again. Outside the door as it closed automatically, I could feel the sounds of people screaming and gunfire gradually drawing closer. Once the barrier wall closed completely, even those sounds disappeared.
It was my first time coming inside the Vermilion Bird Wing research center. It felt a little strange. I had spent several days in Undersea Base No. 4, but even so, the very fact that they had built such a huge research facility under the sea made me feel odd. The air smelled faintly bitter and burnt.
The sense of incongruity I’d felt when I first came to the undersea base, starting with the very air being different, swept over my whole body. It felt like entering an artificially created environment where humans could live, like the inside of an airplane or a hospital ward. Like I was being included in a new ecosystem, like a terrarium, an aquarium, or a dollhouse. Lee Jihyeon flicked the words Deep-Sea Life Center on the wall once with her middle finger.
Back when Earth’s sea levels were rising and climate change and the food crisis were in full swing, there had been talk that the seabed should be developed, discussed much like space development, but in the case of undersea development, people argued that it would cost more and cause more marine pollution, so more weight was given to the side favoring space development.
Only later was it revealed that space development had been one of the ways developed countries, with their enormous capital and technological power, could build a league of their own and exclude the remaining countries below a certain line.
It was just... personally, all I could think was that if those technologies had been shared by the entire world, space development would have produced more results than it had now. Was I thinking too naively? Even after things had come to this, did we still have to argue over your technology and my technology?
In the case of undersea development, to take it to an extreme, even children could block seawater with their hands and build their own sandcastles there. Humans were not the only ones who thought of the sea as a refuge on a burning Earth. Fish descended to live in waters colder than the surface where they had lived, or they failed to accept the changes and began dying, and only the individuals that could survive even when high tides invaded their habitats began producing the next generation.
As construction regulations were loosened in the real estate markets of various countries, all kinds of houses disguised as resorts began to be built even under flooded rivers or below sea level, and yet there had still been a lot of talk about why anyone would build research centers under the sea.
There had been more people saying they should just build undersea apartments instead. Thinking about it now, the fact that they built research centers instead of mass-constructing apartments when creating something like an Undersea Special Autonomous City makes me think that every scientist who lived in the North Pacific thirty years ago did the best they could in their own way.
Undersea apartments. The people who could probably enter those would be a very special few. Commoners like me would never be able to move into apartments like that. They say even the people sent into space are chosen after checking that they have at least a master’s or doctoral level education, good health, and no genetic diseases going back to their grandparents’ generation. So the fact that I, the lone dragon from the gutter of an ant-worker family that barely scraped by, had even entered an undersea base counted as truly lucky. Though seeing myself now, with water pouring in and me running for my life, I’d have to think again about whether that was really luck.
“At first, this was a place the countries pooled their money to build for oil drilling, but as development continued, more people came in, lodging was built, research centers were built, and it became what it is now. Honestly, if it weren’t for this place, anyone with the word ‘marine’ attached to their major would starve to death. And the rate of extinction of marine life was faster than my university graduation, so I thought I was one hundred percent going to end up unemployed.”
Yugeum, the marine biologist, explained that to me as I looked around here and there, then took the lead with Kim Gayoung. Even though they were walking, the two of them looked fairly steady. Probably because they had come to a place they were comfortable in.
I thought there would be an access control system, but even after passing through the bulkhead and walking for quite a while, there was nothing like that. A question suddenly occurred to me, so I asked the science people walking ahead.
“Isn’t there anything to block visitors with cards or biometric recognition? Like an intrusion detection system. Or at least speed gates.”
You know, the speed gates that stop you if you don’t tap your card when you ride the subway. Kim Gayoung looked at me as if wondering what I was talking about, then murmured, “Ah,” and shook her head.
“At first, there was talk of checking the authorization status of people entering the research center and controlling access. There was talk of issuing ID cards, registering fingerprints, faces, irises, voices, things like that, and combining them with passwords to stop people from entering the facility.”
“Is there a reason they don’t?”
“First of all, installation costs money, and managing it costs money too. Researchers can only pass into the labs they work in with fingerprints or irises. They can’t get into the other places anyway. And honestly, what would they do if they did go in? Scribble in a research log? Set a fire? Do research in our place? All the records of our research are automatically uploaded to the undersea data system called MARIA. Anyone who can use the internet can see them. The contents being researched here aren’t classified anyway. It’s not like we’re working to line someone’s pockets.”
Hadn’t they said all research at the undersea base was for the purpose of humanity’s continuation? Listening from beside us, Lee Jihyeon let out an “Ugh” and shook her head vigorously.
“I’m already dying from fixing the things that are broken now. If those detection devices broke too and they asked me to fix them, I’d run away.”
Wait, then did that mean anyone could come into the research center side itself? ...It felt like the research center was full of people even more naive than me. A research center seemed like the kind of place that would have extremely dangerous things like sulfuric acid and all kinds of gases, so could they really maintain security like that? Was I the only one overthinking this? I hadn’t been to other labs, so I didn’t know whether security was normally done this way or not. My friend in the biology department’s lab seemed to have people in it all day long. Was it the same here?