Lee Jihyeon looked around every time Kim Gayoung and Yugeum walked on. It seemed this was Jihyeon’s first time coming to the research center too, just like me. The closest was the Deep-Sea Biology Center, followed by the Seabed Pollution Center, then the Rare Earth Center, they said. Yugeum quickly explained that our goal was the cargo elevator in the research center’s main operations building before the Seabed Pollution Center, and the escape craft beside it.
Had Yugeum said she worked at the Deep-Sea Biology Center and Kim Gayoung at the Seabed Pollution Center? As Kim Gayoung walked briskly, she spoke to me and Jihyeon.
“Our center does get called a money pit, but what we were going to present this afternoon was actually a pretty big deal for the first time in a while. Our center was planning to gather everything that’s happened since the Industrial Revolution and present on just how badly each country has destroyed the seabed.”
Yugeum stopped with a gasp, grabbing Kim Gayoung, and I, walking without much thought, bumped into Yugeum and nearly fell flat on my back. Far down the corridor, a person was lying on their side, with blond hair long enough to reach their waist.
Jihyeon and I hurried over and slowly turned the prone person’s body to face upward. Ugh. Startled, I pulled myself back. Jihyeon also covered her mouth and retreated when she saw the corpse.
After taking several deep breaths, once I had steadied myself, I checked the woman’s pulse and whether she was breathing. She already appeared dead. No—she was dead. The reason I was shocked was because the corpse looked like nothing I had ever seen in my life.
Several parts of her body were missing, as if they had been eaten away by a circular maw the size of an adult man’s palm. A large portion of the left side of her face was gone, and two or three sections of her abdomen and chest where her internal organs should have been were missing as well.
Could flesh disappear in circles like this? Looking now, her thigh was gouged so deeply that the white bone was plainly visible. What on earth would make someone end up like this? As I peered at the wound on her face and Jihyeon leaned in to examine the exposed bone in her thigh, Kim Gayoung screamed in horror.
“Don’t touch it!”
Jihyeon flinched back in surprise and sat down hard on the floor. Through the holes in the corpse, her organs were visible. Strangely, there was almost no smell of blood. Instead, there was a faint ammonia odor. I flinched at Kim Gayoung’s words, took a step back, and said as if making an excuse.
“I didn’t touch the wounded areas.”
I wasn’t so insane yet that I’d touch the wounds of a dead person with my bare hands, without gloves, when I didn’t even know how they’d been injured. Yugeum seemed to recognize the remaining half of the woman’s face and murmured tearfully, stunned.
“It’s Angela Malone. She’s the director of our center. She wasn’t someone I particularly liked, but she wasn’t someone who deserved to die like this.”
Jihyeon, who had been looking at the thigh wound, measured its length with her fingers from a spot away from the injury, then measured the wound on the lower abdomen and said, sounding puzzled.
“The wounds are consistent circles about twenty centimeters in diameter. Someone made these artificially.”
Kim Gayoung had looked dazed, but when she heard that, she slowly approached Angela’s side. I pointed around the circular wound and asked.
“Can you tell what made it like this?”
“This is something we use, called an organic compound dismantler—an O.B. Originally it’s used to remove food waste or substances made of protein. We use it to process waste generated in the lab. This… this isn’t something you shoot at people. ……Absolutely don’t touch the wound. The microorganisms in there are still decomposing it.”
“Microorganisms?”
“Food waste treatment is eighty percent moisture. And once you remove the moisture, you eliminate the remaining parts with microorganisms. The microorganisms used for food removal were mostly marine bacteria like Micrococcus luteus, Streptomyces, Penicillium, Debaryomyces hansenii, Rhizopus oligosporus, things like that. The problem is that these microorganisms don’t have the ability to decompose things as quickly as humans produce trash. They’re too small to be seen with our eyes, while humans create an enormous amount of waste just by eating once. Microorganisms have to produce things like amylase, protease, cellulase, and lipase to break down waste properly, but if the pH concentration is at a level where it’s hard for them to survive, or if the salinity is too high, or if something like chili powder, pepper, or mustard gets mixed in, those have sterilizing effects too. One of the old research directions was making microorganisms survive even in those conditions and efficiently produce as much enzyme as humans wanted. If microorganisms can’t eliminate or decompose these organic polymers within a short time, foul odors occur. Nitrogen compounds or sulfur compounds start pouring out of the waste. And those can be fatal to the human body, especially the respiratory system. Do you understand so far?”
Jihyeon looked at Kim Gayoung with an expression that said, What on earth is she talking about? and I barely managed to answer yes. I wasn’t even sure if I had understood it correctly. What? Lipase? That’s used to break down fat.
Amylase is in saliva and breaks down carbohydrates. I know that much from working in dentistry.
Kim Gayoung was probably trying to explain it as plainly as possible for Jihyeon and me, but since it was completely removed from the field I had studied, it was hard to understand. From what I heard, with my limited knowledge, I could roughly tell what Kim Gayoung researched. It seemed like she did environmental research at the Seabed Pollution Center using marine microorganisms. Kim Gayoung muttered blankly.
“Our team isolated a new microorganism from marine life that can be used quite efficiently to break down proteins. We isolated a strain from a new Bacillus with proteolytic activity and studied it for a long time. Proteins take an incredible amount of time to decompose. Until the early 2000s, research focused only on protein synthesis and function. It hasn’t even been fifty years since research on decomposition began. The isolation process of the proteasome, a proteolytic enzyme complex, was only just—”
“So what you’re saying is this isn’t something that should hit a human body, but it did, right?”
Jihyeon, looking appalled, cut off Kim Gayoung’s words as they seemed to be growing longer. Kim Gayoung nodded quickly.
“Yes. It’s used to decompose organic compounds.”
Hearing that answer, Jihyeon looked at Kim Gayoung with a slightly exasperated expression and asked again.
“Are humans organic compounds?”
“……Well. Inorganic compounds are included too.”
Uh, uh, uh, uh. After listening to this conversation, Yugeum gave Jihyeon a faint smile for the first time since we had discovered the corpse. Sniffling, Yugeum shook her head at Kim Gayoung.
“Gayoung unni. If you say it like that, people won’t understand. Just think of it as her getting shot several times with something like a gun loaded with flesh-eating microorganisms.”
……Now I understood why she’d told us not to touch it. Around those wounds, those microorganisms were probably still burrowing in and decomposing her even now. Jihyeon quickly asked Kim Gayoung.
“Is there no way to stop this? Unless this person Angela shot herself with this microorganism gun because she wanted to commit suicide, that means someone is walking around with it.”
Around Angela, there was nothing except a single smashed tablet lying on the floor. Kim Gayoung seemed a little flustered by Jihyeon’s question. After looking around, Kim Gayoung spat out her words in a rush, perhaps frightened.
“But we use things like this in a hood, and the nozzle isn’t originally this big either. And something like this… how are you supposed to handle it safely? Do you wash it off with water? You just have to keep it from touching your body as much as possible. Then it’s basically useless. But among our researchers, someone with the kind of character to modify this and go around using it on people’s bodies… there might be someone. No, but—sure, everyone wants to kill a fellow researcher now and then, but shooting this at a person? Angela wasn’t even anyone’s supervising professor.”
While Kim Gayoung seemed to be questioning every researcher she knew inside her head, I sniffed the air and asked Jihyeon.
“……Do you smell something burning?”
Jihyeon sniffed around and frowned. Then, after hesitating a little, she said to me.
“I have rhinitis, so I’m not good at smelling things.”
Ah. I see. As I stood there awkwardly, Yugeum expressed agreement.
“I’ve smelled something a bit burnt since we came in here.”
Good. So I wasn’t the only one who smelled it. I’d thought this place was just normally like that. Jihyeon asked Yugeum.
“Which direction is the smell coming from?”
“I’m not sure. It just feels like it’s coming from the whole building in general.”
Jihyeon frowned, then looked at the long corridor and the labs as she said.
“Let’s go straight to the cargo elevator. Ignore any corpses we see from now on. We can’t take them with us anyway, and there’s no way to save them.”
We began walking as Kim Gayoung directed. The Deep-Sea Biology Center, the Seabed Pollution Center, and the Rare Earth Center were each seven-story buildings built in a square shape and connected by a single bridge; when you first entered from the main operations building, you started on the fourth floor of the Deep-Sea Biology Center, she said.
From the third floor of each center, you could cross over to another center through the bridges connecting them. The escape craft and external elevator were apparently located in the Seabed Pollution Center. They really made this place inconvenient. What the hell. So if I were working on the seventh floor of the Rare Earth Center and had to run away because water was leaking in like this, I’d have to go down to the third floor of the Rare Earth Center, cross the bridge, enter the third floor of the Seabed Pollution Center, and escape from there?
We were walking around the square corridor on the fourth floor of the Deep-Sea Biology Center. Trying to reach the third floor of the Seabed Pollution Center through the third floor of the Deep-Sea Biology Center, we found a stairwell and began going down. Jihyeon quickly descended first.
“Why didn’t they build one escape craft port or external elevator for each center?”
Maybe because the floor height between the fourth and third floors was high, there were a lot of stairs. Stairs. No. They were stairs going down. That happened in a dream. Endure it. As I grumbled while walking down the stairs, Yugeum smiled and said.
“You’d be surprised if you knew how much each one of our centers cost. I couldn’t even buy one bathroom stall here. Honestly, no one probably ever thought this place would be submerged like this. We came all the way into the sea to avoid being submerged, after all.”
Kim Gayoung frowned and slowly descended the stairs to the third floor of the Deep-Sea Biology Center, as if her legs hurt.