The Lights That Sank

The moment we stepped into Jujak-dong, the name of the wing was lettered enormous across the face of the building. Before it stood a sculpture of a vast red bird—the vermilion bird—and beside the statue a plaque explained the creature as a being out of myth.

It read like a description of a phoenix, and I caught myself wondering whether the vermilion bird had ever really meant anything of the sort. In the five days I had spent on the undersea base I had hardly left Baekho-dong, the White Tiger Wing, and Jungang-dong, the Central Sector, so Jujak-dong was new to me—and the buildings themselves looked broader than those in Baekho-dong. Laundry rooms, lounges, and showers sat between the residence blocks, the quarter split off from the research centers. The researchers here, I supposed, ground their whole lives down in the labs and spent whatever time was left in the dormitory district that was Jujak-dong.

Everyone moved to head straight into the wing, but Yook Geum-yi stopped and looked toward the research centers. A connecting corridor ran to the Deep Sea Research Center, the Rare Earth Center, and the Marine Pollution Center. Something—a barrier, a wall—had dropped across it and sealed the passage completely. I spoke to her back.

"It might be less wrecked. The centers might only have lost power and still be standing. Don't worry too much. We get Kim Ga-young out first, and think about the rest after."

Geum-yi stared toward the research centers for a long while before she spoke.

"......They'll have survived on their own. Researchers are good at enduring hard things. They're specialists in torturing themselves. My thesis is all on a USB and in my email. So. It's fine."

"Why?"

When Baek Ahyoung asked, Geum-yi answered on something like a sigh.

"The Deep Sea Biology Center has marine animals locked up for research. If someone just opened the tanks, quite a few of them could get away."

"You can't."

"Yes. I know."

Geum-yi turned her head from the research center and took a heavy step.

"I know."

Just before we entered the residences, Shin Haeryang—who had been walking ahead for some time—turned toward the bay where the escape pods were kept. What about the Jujak-dong quarters? The question rose at once, but my body was already following the people in front of me. Baek Ahyoung slid in as if she were flying, reached the pod-port controls, and checked the panel.

"Three of them can launch!"

There were six of us, and only three pods showed a green light. They were single-person craft. The question of whom to put aboard flashed through my head and was gone. Looking around, I found Shin Haeryang staring at a monitor that occupied an entire wall.

He didn't seem to care whether there were many pods or few. Curious, I looked with him, and saw seventy-seven pods launched within the last ten minutes, drawn on the screen like tiny pictures, climbing toward the surface. So quite a few of them made it out, I thought—and the thought lasted only a moment. Shot upward at tremendous speed, the pods began to slow.

Fewer than five were still driving hard for the surface. Unlike the ones that had entered the sunlit epipelagic, at two hundred meters, the rest never broke free of the mesopelagic at a thousand meters, and their speed kept falling. Ejected from the deep seafloor at 3,011 meters, where the 4th Undersea Base had been built, meant to run a straight line for the surface, most of them never cleared that thousand-meter layer.

I didn't really understand water pressure, but if you did the simple arithmetic between the mesopelagic at a thousand meters and the surface at zero, it was the height of some twenty-two fifteen-story apartment buildings stacked end to end. Not a distance where anyone could abandon a pod and swim for the surface on human strength alone.

The pods that had failed to reach the sunlight thrashed to break out of that depth, then, under their own weight, began to plunge. Watching seventy-two of them sink, Yook Geum-yi screamed, and Seo Jihyuk swallowed his breath. Baek Ahyoung stared at the pods on the screen with a look of distaste.

"......I don't think we should get in."

Shin Haeryang watched the pods trace parabolas back down into the dark sea, and ground his teeth.

"Someone tampered with the pods."

I stared stupidly at the pods glowing on the screen like light bulbs. Inside them, the screaming probably never stops. Seventy-two can't all fail at once. Someone broke them on purpose. Blankly, I asked the man beside me.

"......What kind of lunatic touches something like that?"

"I don't know. ......There are too many."

Nothing on this base works. Not the people, not the equipment. Not a single thing. Have they all lost their minds. Seriously.

"So what do you intend to do now?"

"We came to Jujak-dong to rescue Kim Ga-young, and to use the pods in this wing. Escape from Jujak-dong is no longer possible. We rescue her."

I was startled that he was still set on getting a researcher out. I had expected him to say forget the rescue and head straight for Hyunmu-dong or Cheongryong-dong to hunt for pods. Apparently he was not that sort of man. Or perhaps it was only that I had expected nothing of him at all, as a human being.

Shin Haeryang gathered the stunned group at once and made for the Jujak-dong residences. He did not let shock slow anyone; he kept them walking. I watched his back, then asked him to hand over the child he was carrying. He shook his head slowly. Looking at him, I asked:

"Do you think the pods from the Baekho side made it out safely?"

His face tightened at that. He was silent for a while—thinking, perhaps, of his own teammates in those pods—and then he said:

"I saw the first pod launched enter the bathypelagic, between one thousand and three thousand meters. Beyond that, I don't know."

Seo Jihyuk and Baek Ahyoung looked shaken as well, but they snapped back to reality quickly and started in on why the pods had ended up like that.

"It's the launch system."

"No. Something's wrong with the engines."

"No—the ejection went bad."

"What do you know?"

"Then what do you know?"

Listening to the two of them grouse, Yook Geum-yi asked:

"If that's what happens, what becomes of the people trapped in those pods?"

It was the question I had wanted to ask and hadn't, and Geum-yi asked it first. Turning it over again, I found I didn't want to hear the answer. What we had already been through was hard enough. I didn't want to know any more tragedy, any more grief. Seo Jihyuk scratched his cheek and answered the question with a question.

"They've got GMSS and GPS on them, so they can be tracked. But who's anywhere around here to go pick those pods up one by one and help?"

"There...... there isn't."

At her dark answer, Seo Jihyuk nodded. There isn't.

"You think they packed a full seventy-two hours of oxygen into a pod you only ride once? Or just a little bit, since it's only for escaping?"

"......A little bit?"

"Ding-dong-ding!"

Seo Jihyuk played a xylophone with his mouth. Geum-yi's face went desolate, and mine was probably much the same. Frowning, he launched into a longer explanation.

Well, of course the pods weren't carrying that little oxygen. Air breathed three kilometers down compressed differently from air on the surface. If a ship or something happened to be near the pods that had reached the surface, there was a chance of living. Two minutes of breath on the seafloor was two hours at the surface. I listened to all of it in a daze—and the rest of that kind of talk—until I felt the pad tucked under my arm buzz, and opened it. The vibration was a post alert. A new post had gone up on the board of the 4th Undersea Base.

The alert dragged me back to the present. Alone in the dark, in a room filling with water, holding nothing but a pad and waiting for someone—how terrifying that must be. I couldn't even imagine it. Even in the chaos we kept walking, and now there was nothing left but to go down the stairs. The Jujak-dong residences would be right there.