A House on the Seafloor

The story of how the International Undersea Station—the IUS—came into being is simple enough. First, marine pollution had reached a point where it could no longer be left alone. Once, the collapse of marine ecosystems and the extinction of sea life had meant nothing to the capitalists, so long as development went forward and the catch came in. Now nearly every marine organism had been designated a protected species. In plain terms, even the anchovy was a protected marine animal: you could not catch it, process it, distribute it, or store it.

Take Korea alone—sea on three sides, the whole country wrapped in tidal flats, once a strip of prime real estate for anything that lived in the water. Of the roughly fourteen thousand marine species that had lived there, four thousand were extinct, and only about ten thousand barely held on. Coastal development and land reclamation, marine pollution and overfishing, fouled water, radiation: the marine ecosystem was already finished. Any further pollution would have struck directly at humanity's survival, and so the developed nations at last put their morally vacant heads together.

Second, humanity needed a new place to live. Only after we reached the point of being unable to eat seafood at all did anyone judge space development—which manufactured nothing but corpses and garbage—to be a money pit. Once the last three astronauts had been brought home, every nation officially abandoned space. They finally quit that grand and sordid dream of terraforming Mars, discarding Earth, and letting a tiny handful of humans survive on a new planet. In its place they poured every coin squeezed out of their citizens into undersea bases.

Oil-drilling firms and companies that exploited marine resources threw themselves into building the IUS. Human beings had always been more accomplished at development than at preserving the environment, and eight developed nations succeeded in raising an undersea station in the middle of the Pacific while stirring up a fresh round of marine pollution. Choosing the site seemed to have been a serious problem from the very start, but I was deep in my elementary-school years then, and I don't remember it well.

It was originally meant for the Atlantic. Site selection for ground unlikely to quake, claims on rare earths and oil and natural gas, lobbying by the nations involved, and under-the-table wars I know nothing about—through all of that, the first undersea base was built in the Pacific instead. Now they were talking about a second one and busily pouring money into the Atlantic.

Third was extraction. No matter what other reason anyone dragged forward, this was, in truth, the first. The sea was still land not fully opened, a place where fisheries and mineral wealth lay hidden in staggering quantity—oil and natural gas, rare earths and manganese nodules, deep water not yet polluted. New knowledge of the abyss, and deep-sea fish that had turned out, unexpectedly, to be edible. Humanity had not yet wholly abandoned the idea of surviving by consuming the Earth's resources.

It's a little ridiculous for me to say so, having ended up working at an undersea base, but I think the building of the thing is profoundly contradictory. When it was time to cram the ocean full of garbage, no one hesitated; now that they need it, they spout nonsense about returning to the ocean's embrace and build houses on the seafloor. A farce. Earth's resources and its living things are already close to spent. Vanished glaciers, a shredded ozone layer, the overharvest of living creatures, nuclear waste—we destroyed the planet's temperature system with our own hands, manufactured a swing from forty below to forty-five above, Celsius, and, unable to endure what we had made, we were now trying to hide in the sea.

Those who stand squarely against space development argue that meeting our end this way is only proper, as one species among those that live on Earth. I don't agree. Even so, a regret at having been driven this far down to the floor of survival comes over me often enough.

By ill luck, I was born after the year 2000. Privately I have always wished I'd arrived a little sooner. I wanted to live in an age when you could spend resources as you pleased, look the other way on environmental problems, and didn't have to put on sunscreen in order to stay alive. Most people born into the twenty-first century come basically armed with doubt and depression about life, but our instinct for survival ran far hotter than that of the humans before us. That is why we drove some six hundred trillion won in capital and labor into the seafloor and, at last, built an undersea station in the North Pacific.

The North Pacific International Undersea Station—NPIUS—is organized in four broad levels. First, on the shallow continental shelf, an artificially raised Level Zero called the Artificial Island, and directly beneath that island, Undersea Base 1. Then The 2nd Undersea Base, set in the epipelagic zone at minus two hundred meters; The 3rd Undersea Base, in the mesopelagic zone at minus one thousand meters; and The 4th Undersea Base, in the bathypelagic zone at minus three thousand meters. A fifth level in the abyssal zone, between three and six thousand meters, is still under construction, so the station consists of four bases in all.

The base where I would be stationed was the last one finished: The 4th Undersea Base, down in the bathypelagic zone at minus three thousand meters. They were opening a new dental clinic there, and I had been chosen as its dentist.

Priya, who had gathered a small collection of coral models on her desk, checked my passport and began taking out papers.

"Korea"—I shrugged—"the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Japan, and China. Eight countries bordering the North Pacific, in all."

"......And the Philippines? The Philippines borders the North Pacific too, doesn't it? I'm weak on geography, but I thought Mexico did as well. No—now that I think of it, Taiwan and Hong Kong too. So it wasn't every neighboring country."

"There's one thing that matters most if you want in. Only a country able to invest at least a trillion won a year in undersea-base development was eligible."

"Quite an expensive admission fee."

Had our country even had that kind of money? A trillion—what on earth does that come to? Thinking about it now, I seemed to half-remember a newspaper piece fretting that, because more of the budget had been dumped into the undersea base than into space, both unmanned and crewed exploration would be put off indefinitely, and asking what we would do if our space research fell behind the other developed nations. Priya went on, dry as salt.

"Eight countries went in together, poured in the money, and agreed to split whatever the mining produced. I hear they fought a great deal under the surface. Not that any of it is my business, or yours, Moohyun."

Being from India, she added, she had been free to watch this bare-knuckle brawl over North Pacific mineral rights with some pleasure. She held out the documents she had brought, plainly proud of them.

"What are these?"

"The terms on employment safety, and the enrollment papers."

"My employment safety...... NEP is responsible for that? Why?"

I had never heard of it. I dearly wished people would stop founding organizations and then crushing the names into English acronyms.

"It's taken from Neptūns, the Latin for Poseidon. Back when the undersea base was under construction, a Japanese contractor put off its workers' wages for two months. The Japanese employed by that company stayed quiet, but the Chinese hired to work alongside them raised hell. They said that if the company wasn't going to pay, it had better not think of putting up a building at all—and they brought down the elevator at The 2nd Undersea Base with a crewed submersible. A Russian contractor, over unpaid wages, tried to blow up the Central Elevator. At a Korean firm there was no hazard pay and the annual salary was far too low, so a strike ran for three months. On the American side they subcontracted the subcontractors, and a good number of people from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Myanmar were on the job. There were several fatal accidents. No compensation at all. On the next phase of the work, one bereaved relative from Indonesia scattered a suicide note and carried out a suicide attack that completely collapsed the deep-sea aquarium. Countless incidents went into raising a single undersea base. Buy me a cup of coffee later and I'll tell you about messes even worse than these. At any rate, people were going to keep dying over a few coins, or else a base into which hundreds of trillions of won had been poured was never going to be finished—so someone finally exercised a thing called thought."

"......So that's why NEP was created."

"Getting something done by pouring in endless labor on will and spirit alone, with no return, is for madmen. Proper compensation is essential. Everyone who stays at the undersea base is enrolled. Sign the enrollment and the contract, and even if Park Moohyun dies tomorrow, the compensation comes to more than two hundred million won. Whether the company goes bankrupt or the country collapses, your salary—within the budget already received—will arrive on time on the first of every month, and—"

I started scrawling my signature across the papers at once. So that was why they had taken Poseidon's name. They managed the people who lived in the sea. So long as the paycheck came on time, I was confident I could work hard under Poseidon or under a shark.

Priya seemed to find this rather funny; a small smile touched her mouth. The salary contract was at the back, and the detailed pages ran past forty. I stared holes through the pay and the leave. All treatment at the hospital on the Artificial Island was free. Right—they had said the hospital was connected straight through to the undersea base. There was also a confidentiality agreement, for the protection of personal information.

My interpreter was an old model and couldn't translate documents. The whole of it was in English. As I began to read carefully through, Priya fiddled with her phone and told me to take as long as I needed. I was silently grateful for her indifference. There must have been a great many people like me. Cursing my miserable English under my breath, I worked slowly through the contracts, and only after putting down more signatures than I had in my entire life did I hold the papers out to Priya again.

"The more detailed terms are in here. Please read them."

I was handed a thin book. I was a little surprised it wasn't electronic paper. A few pages in, it was nothing but English. This was going to drive me insane. It wasn't that I couldn't read it. I needed time—a very long time, and a great deal of it.

"Don't people use electronic signatures these days?"

Priya heard me and laughed.

"Even now, somebody out there still doesn't own a computer. And some people want paper, so they can keep a record."

Fair enough. Eight countries were involved, after all. Priya showed me the copy already signed on the company's side, digitized the papers, and sent a set to my email. An alert chimed on my phone. The message seemed to have arrived properly.

"Thank you. I appreciate the trouble."

"And I yours. Welcome to the undersea base."

At that I let out a breath and sank back in the chair. The most urgent business of the day was done. Priya rummaged in a drawer and handed me an electronic pad about the size of two palms. The pad was blue. The one on her desk was the same blue, only covered, rather sweetly, in dolphin stickers.

As I was putting the book and the issued pad into my bag, Priya gave me a novice's manual for the undersea base. Paper again. I opened it, found nothing but English, nodded as if that were nothing, and tucked it away. The moment a paycheck landed, the first thing I was buying was the newest interpreter-translator. I was going to lose my mind.