[Fingerprint does not match.] The voice was coming from so far away that my translator could no longer render it into Korean; all I could hear, very faintly, was the original audio saying, “Access denied.” Stiff with tension, I asked Yugeum in a rigid voice.
“How many failed recognitions does it take before it won’t open?”
Yugeum pondered, as if thinking back to the distant past, then answered.
“About ten times?”
Kim Gayoung kept folding down fingers as she counted, then said in a small, frightened voice.
“I think it’s already been more than seven.”
“What happens after ten times?”
“Uh… you have to try again after ten minutes.”
Lee Jihyeon frowned as she gripped her scalpel. Are there several of them? The moment I thought that, it occurred to me that it could also be one person trying the fingerprint lock over and over. Wow. No way. It couldn’t be. Ignoring the goosebumps rising on my back, I asked Yugeum.
“Can you only get in with a fingerprint?”
Yugeum hesitated, thinking, then nodded.
“After it became known that AI voice modulation could be used to open and close doors, the lab scrapped that method early on. Originally we used card tags, but there were people messing around with clocking in and out using card tags, so they scrapped all of that too. Now it’s probably fingerprint only.”
The moment she said that, from far away came a diririk sound, like a door opening. All of us froze for one second as we looked at one another. Seeing Kim Gayoung’s horrified expression, Lee Jihyeon moved without a sound and hurriedly locked the metal door connecting to the animal room.
The sound of footsteps came very faintly from afar. Yugeum looked at the almost-empty water tank, then at the locked door and the bottle of hydrochloric acid in her hand. Her face turned deathly pale, and she shouted softly at us.
“The key! The key!”
“What?”
“The key to this metal door! The key to this metal door should be next to the reagent cabinet!”
“It’s here. I took it. Don’t worry.”
Kim Gayoung opened her palm and showed us the key with a jellyfish drawn on it. Yugeum let out a low breath, and just as she gripped the bottle of hydrochloric acid with both hands, the footsteps grew closer and closer.
The inner door connected to the animal room opened just by pressing the button on the floor with your foot. The moment that thought crossed my mind, I heard the sound of someone pressing the floor button, or perhaps opening the inner door and coming in. It seemed the person had entered Yugeum’s animal room. The dragging footsteps were close. Slippers? Lee Jihyeon asked Yugeum quietly in order to head to the office.
“How do you open this?”
“Press the button on the side.”
When she pressed it, the inner door blocking off the animal room of the neighboring lab opened, allowing us to move into the neighboring lab’s office. With our faces all stiff and filled with tension, we looked at one another. …What now? Should we rush out of here right away and pray that we were faster than that person, then run up the stairs to the third floor? Lee Jihyeon opened a random notebook and scribbled with her pen as if flinging the words onto the page. Just as she had written, Rush out of here right away, a sound came.
Knock, knock, knock.
The other person was knocking on the metal door with the back of his hand. Knock, knock, knock. As we exchanged glances, listening to the knocking again, a man’s voice came through.
“I know you’re in there.”
Then he kicked the door once. Bang! At the sound, Kim Gayoung gasped and held her breath. Yugeum jumped in place.
…It’s a metal door, you bastard. Go on, kick it all you want. Since Yugeum had frozen like a statue while holding the bottle of hydrochloric acid, I took it from her and placed it in the center of the office desk. The man’s voice, speaking in ordinary English, came from beyond the metal door. It was a fairly deep voice.
“Why didn’t you come to the third floor?”
All our gazes turned to Yugeum. Yugeum went, “Uh, uh, uh,” then asked us quietly.
“…Should I answer him? Or should I stay quiet? Which would be better for us?”
Now even Lee Jihyeon looked like she had no idea. I whispered softly.
“Wouldn’t it be all right to ask what he’s doing? Why he didn’t escape from an undersea base that’s leaking water, whether the research center is fine, what the hell he’s been going around doing. What he’s trying to do by coming in here.”
We had only stopped by here for a moment before going to the Undersea Contamination Center through the third floor, but what the hell was that guy doing wandering around here? Lee Jihyeon thought for five seconds, then nodded.
“…All right. Let’s talk to him. But Geum, let’s make it so you’re the only one in this lab.”
At Lee Jihyeon’s words, Yugeum went “Ah, ah,” then nodded and quickly wrote OK in the notebook. Then she left the office, crossed the inner door, walked over to the opposite side of the metal door, and answered loudly.
“Who are you to enter someone else’s lab without permission?”
“I came in after scanning a fingerprint.”
The man’s voice answered as if teasing Yugeum. With her face full of tension, Yugeum bit her lip once, then frowned and shouted.
“If you’re going to say crap like that, I don’t want to talk. Get out!”
When Yugeum spoke firmly, as if irritated by the attitude of the unknown person beyond the metal door, the other side was quiet for a while before answering her.
“I work at the Undersea Contamination Center. Do you work here? Or did you wander in like me?”
“…How did you get in?”
“I picked up a few researchers’ index fingers. What about you?”
Kim Gayoung looked as if she might vomit from visceral disgust. Yugeum hesitated, looked at us for a few seconds, then answered.
“I work in this lab.”
“Did you come in from the main building? Or were you here the whole time?”
“I was here.”
The man kicked the door once again. Bang! At the sound, Kim Gayoung and I flinched hard in surprise, and Yugeum jumped in place, backing away several steps. At a scratching sound, I turned my head to see Lee Jihyeon writing in the notebook.
With a scalpel clenched tightly in one hand, Lee Jihyeon was scribbling with a complicated expression. I’ll open the door from this side, go out, and ambush that man from Geum’s lab. Please stall for time in the meantime—she had written that much, and the moment I saw it, I quickly shook my head.
He seems like a lunatic, and Lee Jihyeon is going to fight that guy with a single scalpel? Didn’t he say he had some strange microbial gun too? Could Lee Jihyeon take him down by herself? What if someone was waiting outside the door right now for this lab door to open?
And if that man had scanned a fingerprint, entered Yugeum’s lab, and closed that door behind him, then without Yugeum’s fingerprint, we couldn’t even enter that lab. An ambush was impossible. The man spoke to Yugeum with a mocking laugh.
“Don’t lie.”
The man said leisurely to Yugeum.
“For the sake of both our survival, let’s exchange information without lying. You and I are both busy people.”
Yugeum frowned and crossed her arms. Then, unlike her trembling lips, she answered calmly.
“Give me information that’ll help me first. I’ll decide after I hear it.”
“The barrier wall lowered on the third floor of the Undersea Contamination Center can’t be opened without authority on the level of Director Riley or Director Marlon. Same goes for the barrier wall lowered between here and the main building.”
Lee Jihyeon’s eyes widened when she heard the man’s words. Then she immediately took out Loacker’s pad, turned it on, and checked the information through the map of the Undersea Contamination Center. Then she scrawled words with her hand.
[The barrier wall was down.]
Kim Gayoung, looking puzzled, took the pen and wrote.
[I went back and forth between my lab in the Undersea Contamination Center and the main building hundreds of times, but it was never blocked even once.]
It seemed that, normally, researchers had been able to move freely between the research centers. I took the pen and quickly wrote over Kim Gayoung’s words.
[Then that guy is trapped in this Deep-sea Biological Center right now?]
Suddenly, I remembered the pad that had been almost smashed to pieces beside Angela Marlon. And the barrier wall that had sealed off the corridor connected to the main building. I thought that perhaps Angela Marlon had lowered the barrier wall and blocked it off.
Lee Jihyeon began checking the pad to see if there was any other way out of this Deep-sea Biological Center. We, too, had only been able to enter the research center side because of this pad; otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have been able to get in at all. It seemed ordinary engineers probably couldn’t control an entire research center through a pad.
Yugeum uncrossed her arms and pointed at the metal door with her finger. Then she twirled her finger around, gesturing, What do we do? Lee Jihyeon quickly wrote something. Then she held it up for Yugeum to see.
[In exchange, tell him that missiles attacked this place.]
Is that important information? To me, it didn’t seem important at all. Lee Jihyeon probably thought the same. Whether missiles had slammed into the building and wrecked it or people had set off explosions inside, the fact that the undersea base had become a leaky shoe didn’t change. The fact that we had to flee for immediate safety didn’t change either. Yugeum hesitated, licked her lips once, then answered the other person.
“The research center ended up like this because it was attacked by missiles. Now I’ll ask a question. Did you kill the people in the corridor?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I could.”
Yugeum’s mouth fell open blankly. Kim Gayoung, her mouth similarly open, was writing as if to confirm whether she had heard correctly, while Lee Jihyeon silently frowned toward the metal door. Only after Yugeum took in and let out one deep breath did she seem to recover from the shock of those words. She now stood crookedly, arms crossed, glaring at the metal door. The man asked Yugeum a question.
“Now I’ll ask. Why did you return to the research center from the main building? Why didn’t you escape that way?”
Yugeum looked at us, then saw Lee Jihyeon shaking her head from side to side and answered expressionlessly.
“I really was here the whole time. I took sleeping pills and fell asleep, then woke up and left the lab, and people were dead in the corridor. I was startled and headed for the main building, but I saw the barrier wall was down there, so I came back to the lab.”
“Why come back to the lab? Why not go to the third-floor Undersea Contamination Center?”
Kim Gayoung looked startled, then scribbled furiously. It was such a mess I couldn’t tell what the letters were, so when I wrote a question mark beside it, Kim Gayoung silently flailed both arms, then wrote again in neat block letters.
[That guy must have been in the corridor connecting the third-floor Deep-sea Biological Center and the Undersea Contamination Center.]
Ah. We had gone down from the third floor before reaching that connecting corridor. If we hadn’t come to Yugeum’s lab, we would have run into that guy head-on.
Yugeum shook her head and asked.
“Answer my question first. Why didn’t you escape?”
“There aren’t enough escape pods in the Undersea Contamination Center. There are 350 pods, but more than 500 people in the research center can’t all get out.”
Five hundred? I knew there were about 400 researchers.