The Graveyard of Elites +27
Ground Equipment Division, Head Office.
Instead of the rigid conference table used for reports, Chief Executive Cho, Division Head Song, and I sat facing each other on plush sofas meant for receiving guests.
As the scent of tea, served by the secretary, drifted softly through the room, Chief Executive Cho spoke first.
"So. Have you heard the results of the demonstration?"
"Not yet. Did it go well?"
At my question, Chief Executive Cho burst out laughing.
"Don't even get me started. That fellow Kang Chulmin was absolutely flying."
Division Head Song, sitting beside him, chimed in.
"You should've seen the look on Vice President Nam from the finance team. He came in with fire in his eyes, ready to pick holes in everything, but when the machine ran without even a breath of trouble, he had nothing to say and just kept opening and closing his mouth."
"He was the picture of a man with his mouth stuffed full of honey."
The two of them looked as if ten years' worth of chronic indigestion had finally gone down.
Chief Executive Cho lifted his teacup and said, "In the end, they approved restoring the budget as-is. Section Head Kang was positively bristling with venom, too. He came at them asking whether they knew this was a parts issue, and honestly, it was a relief just watching it."
"That's a relief. Chief Kang must've prepared a lot."
When I gave credit where it was due, Chief Executive Cho looked at me with obvious satisfaction.
"No need to be modest. When Section Head Kang reported to me separately, he told me straight up that if it hadn't been for you, he'd have been in serious trouble. He praised you so much he was practically running his mouth dry. Said he was Baek Section Head's number-one line or something like that."
I gave an awkward smile and raised my teacup.
"After the composite armor and now this automatic loading system... Baek, you've really been on a roll lately."
"I've just been lucky."
"Luck is skill, too. I used to think you were just the sort of fellow who did his work quietly and kept to himself, but I never expected this level. Excellent. Remarkable."
Chief Executive Cho was genuinely delighted.
And at the end of such delight, there was always a new proposal waiting.
"Which is why," Chief Executive Cho said, leaning forward as he set down his teacup, "I'm wondering if you'd like to play in a bigger pond."
"...Pardon?"
"Right now, our division is sitting on a mountain of troublesome assignments. Things the finance crowd mangled in the name of cost reduction, leaving us with technical knots to untangle."
Chief Executive Cho's eyes flashed.
"The team leaders are always crying that they're about to die, but from where I sit, I think you'd be able to find the answers. I'd like you to act as the Ground Equipment Division's fixer."
"A fixer... sir?"
"That's right. Go over there and pry open the blocked arteries. And don't worry about Division Head Song. We've already talked it through. Isn't that right?"
"Of course, sir. We don't have anything urgent on our hands right now anyway. The fires are out."
"That's right, that's right. Exactly."
At Division Head Song's words, Chief Executive Cho nodded with a satisfied look.
I could only swallow hard and watch the two of them.
If they were talking about a fixer in a setting like this, that really meant, to put it bluntly, an itinerant troubleshooter sent out to deal with insane problems under a polite title.
This... should I refuse?
Or should I accept it?
If I took it and produced results, it would be a tremendous help in proving what I could do...
While I was still weighing it, Chief Executive Cho picked up the phone.
"Ah, it's me. Come up to my office now."
A short, sharp summons.
I looked at Chief Executive Cho as he set the receiver down and asked, "Who is coming?"
"Department Head Maeng Giyong from Powertrain Development."
At the name, my eyebrow twitched.
"The man in charge of the domestic powerpack project. More specifically, he's personally handling the transmission section, which is the only thing still holding us up."
"...Pardon? The transmission?"
I had no choice but to swallow hard.
The powerpack. The heart of a tank, combining engine and transmission.
And among them, the transmission development team led by Department Head Maeng was famous within the company.
I'd heard the engine had been finished long ago, but because they still didn't have a transmission that could handle that monstrous output, they hadn't even been able to assemble the powerpack for five years.
That team under Department Head Maeng was made up of people counted among the elite of the elite in Hanseo Defense's Ground Equipment Division.
Researchers from the Agency for Defense Development, along with mechanical engineering PhDs from KAIST and MIT, a dream team in every sense.
But at the same time, it was also the graveyard of elites, a place where no one had succeeded for five straight years.
Countless geniuses had gone in full of swagger, only to leave one resignation letter after another when they couldn't withstand the mysterious mechanical failures, the punishing workload, and the torrent of criticism.
And they wanted me to go there.
This was on an entirely different level from composite armor or an automatic loader.
As I desperately mulled it over, swallowing my dry saliva, the door to the chief executive's office was shoved open without warning.
And the moment I saw the man who walked in, I stopped breathing.
His hair was unkempt. His eyes were sunken and hollow.
The odor of stale sweat rolled off his work clothes as if he hadn't washed in days.
He was clearly a department-head-level executive, but instead of a manager's dignity, he carried the atmosphere of someone cornered at a cliff's edge.
Department Head Maeng Giyong.
The man rumored to be notoriously cantankerous didn't even sit down before speaking.
"If you're going to hand me a notice of dismissal, just do it with one phone call. Why drag a busy man all the way up here?"
"Department Head Maeng, sit down first."
"If you want me gone at any time, I'll go. I'm tired too, you know."
His voice wasn't venomous so much as resigned.
He looked half-collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
Chief Executive Cho let out a small sigh and tried to soothe him.
"It's not a dismissal, so calm down. Introduce yourself. This is Baek Gunwoo, Section Head of Design Team 1."
Department Head Maeng's hollow eyes turned to me.
It was a dry stare that held no hint of spirit.
"You know Baek Section Head, right? This guy's here to help you."
"..."
Department Head Maeng gave a snort.
"Hah. Another one?"
That short remark carried a whole history's worth of emotion.
Clearly, countless experts, doctors, and consultants had already been through there.
And all of them had likely thrown up their hands and run for the hills.
To him, I would be nothing more than "just another nuisance who passed through."
Was that why?
His gaze, shifting back and forth between me and Chief Executive Cho, finally moved to Division Head Song, who had been sitting quietly on the sofa all this time.
Department Head Maeng frowned.
"Senior. Is this really okay? That kid is from your team, isn't he?"
"Take him with you and talk first. He'll probably be helpful."
"I've heard that line plenty of times. But the ones who really helped never existed. Fine, whatever. Let's do it that way. If the chief executive says so and even my senior stays quiet, what am I supposed to do? I guess I follow orders."
As if stress were physically rising up his spine, Department Head Maeng scratched the back of his head hard and said, "I'll take him with me and grind him down or boil him or whatever, so can I go now? I've got mountains of test data to analyze."
He didn't even wait for an answer before whirling around and storming out.
No courtesy, no process, nothing. He was the very definition of brute force.
Bang.
I stared dumbly at the closed door when Chief Executive Cho spoke with an awkward smile.
"Please understand. He's been pushed right to the edge, so he's like that. He's not usually such a man..."
Chief Executive Cho added with a guilty expression, "From here on out, help that side. Come back to the composite armor when you have time and handle it then."
"...Understood."
As I left the office, cold sweat ran down my back.
That man's eyes... they were completely dead.
Had I just been dragged into something I couldn't handle?
*
Right after that meeting with Chief Executive Cho.
I was granted three days of special leave.
Including the weekend, that made five days in total.
For an office worker, it would have been a dream reward vacation, but for me, the meaning was a little different.
Go clear your head a bit. Once you get into Department Head Maeng's team, it'll be hard to stay sane for a while.
It almost felt as though Chief Executive Cho had said exactly that to me.
It didn't even feel like rest so much as the last stretch of free time before being sent into the jaws of death.
Click.
With the cheerful sound of the door lock opening, the front door swung open.
The entryway was sunk in darkness.
The sensor light flicked on, but all that welcomed me was cold air.
"..."
I loosened my tie and stepped inside.
The officetel was a little too large for one person and a little too small for two.
There had once been warmth here, but now only tidy, impersonal furniture stood in place like a model home on display.
After the divorce, the silence of an empty house had tormented me for a long time.
But human beings were creatures of adaptation.
Now this stillness even felt comfortable.
At the very least, it was the perfect environment for focusing on something without interruption.
Still wearing the same clothes, I took a bottle of water from the fridge and drank it.
The cold water slid down my throat and woke me up.
Transmission...
Department Head Maeng Giyong's dead eyes surfaced in my mind.
He was exhausted.
Not merely physically exhausted.
The emptiness of someone who had searched so long for an answer he couldn't see that his very soul had been eroded away.
The members of his team would be no different.
And I was supposed to walk into that place with the title of fixer?
If I went in unprepared, I'd almost certainly end up thrashing around in that swamp myself.
"My eyes aren't omnipotent, after all..."
I could see machine defects as colors and read the flow.
But to explain why it happened and how it should be fixed, theory still had to support me in the end.
What's more, my opponents would be the best mechanical engineering elites in South Korea.
To convince them, I'd have to translate my intuition into their language.
I rolled up my shirt sleeves and headed for the study.
Clack.
When I turned on the light, shelves packed with major textbooks and a dual monitor setup came into view.
I powered up the computer and began pulling heavy foreign-language books from the shelves, stacking them on the desk.
Advanced Fluid Dynamics, Automatic Transmission Design Theory, Hydraulic Control Systems.
When I opened the dust-coated books, dense equations and diagrams stared back at me.
"Huu..."
This was going to be a long fight.
I cracked open a can of canned coffee I'd bought at the convenience store and took a sip.
Then I brought up the German company Kank's tank transmission technical documents on the monitor.
"Let's see if we can die trying..."
The vacation was over.
From here on out, it was my own war.
*
I couldn't even tell how the next five days passed.
Printed A4 pages were scattered all over the officetel floor, and empty cans of coffee and energy drinks were stacked in towers on the desk.
"Uuugh..."
I rolled my stiff neck and looked away from the monitor.
My eyes were dry.
But my mind was sharper and clearer than it had been in years.
Over those three days, I had forced the structure of the transmission used in a 1,500-horsepower powerpack entirely into my head.
The torque converter that transfers the engine's rotational force through fluid.
The complex planetary gear set that regulates speed.
And the hydraulic steering unit that handles turning and braking.
It really was insane, all right.
This was on a completely different plane from a passenger car transmission.
They had to make a mass of steel weighing dozens of tons run at 70 kilometers per hour, spin in place in an instant, and then stop it dead.
The hydraulic pressure generated inside was beyond imagination, and the precision required of the parts that had to withstand that pressure came down to the micrometer.
It made sense that Department Head Maeng's team had been wandering in the dark for five years.
There were simply too many variables.
The oil viscosity, temperature, shape of the fluid passages, valve response speed...
Just one of thousands of variables going off could make the transmission explode with a roar.
But still.
I picked up the hydraulic circuit diagram that had fallen to the floor.
A maze of a circuit, tangled so tightly it made my eyes ache.
Over it, I drew the virtual flow visible only to me.
Even theoretically perfect designs always left gaps within the laws of real-world physics.
Dead zones where fluid didn't want to flow.
Bottleneck points where energy concentrated too heavily.
My eyes would see that.
If I could find it, then there would be a chance.
The theoretical preparation was done.
Now came the real thing.
Jiiing...
The phone thrown onto the desk vibrated.
An alarm.
Monday, 7:00 a.m.
Time to go to work.
I got to my feet and stretched.
My face in the mirror had gone a little drawn over the past few days, but my eyes were bright and alive.
"Let's go."
The gate to hell had opened.
Now it was time to step inside.
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