Human Navigator +20
After a short break, I went back to the conference room.
The moment I opened the door and stepped inside, the murmur in the room cut off cleanly.
A dozen pairs of eyes turned toward me.
What lived in those gazes was a mixture of exhaustion and resignation so profound it was almost painful to look at. Maybe that was the face I’d been wearing when I’d failed again and again while pushing ahead with the composite armor project.
With that thought in mind, I took my seat. Then Maeng Giyong rose from his chair and spoke.
“All right, listen up. We found the cause. Like I said earlier, it was iron filings inside the valve body. Cavitation—metal fragments shaved off by air bubbles—had clogged the valve and caused it to seize.”
“Ha...”
“So it really was something that stupid...”
Sighs broke out from all over the room.
Five years wasted because of a single speck of iron filings. The emptiness of that realization sat heavy on everyone’s faces.
But that wasn’t all.
The researchers still looked grim.
Even after finding the cause, there was no sign of relief.
“The fix is simple. Redesign the flow path so bubbles can’t form. Chamfer the corners where the fluid speed rises, and widen the orifice diameter to prevent the pressure drop.”
As Maeng Giyong sketched a rough diagram on the whiteboard, he explained.
What he was drawing was a cross-section of the valve body, the core component of the transmission.
Inside that thick block of aluminum, precisely machined narrow channels formed the flow paths. Like blood vessels in a human body, high-pressure oil rushed through them.
One of the lead researchers, who had been watching in silence, raised a hand with a drained expression.
“Director. It’s good that we found a method, but... we don’t have time.”
“Time?”
“There are only fifteen days left until the German Kanksa delegation arrives. You want us to revise the design, run the analysis, machine a prototype, and test it all in that window? Normally that’s a minimum two-month process...”
The other researchers lowered their heads as well.
“You all already know the Business Support Office has sent the notice to give up on localization, don’t you? We all know the two weeks they gave us were just for show, to make it look like they’d made an effort.”
“That’s right. Since it’s doomed anyway, there’s no point burning the midnight oil and suffering for nothing, is there?”
Watching their reactions, I could only smile bitterly.
So they all knew.
I was the only one who hadn’t.
Everyone in this room except me, who’d been thrown in the moment I got back from vacation, had already realized their project had been handed a death sentence.
No wonder the lab atmosphere had been so utterly hopeless.
“Sigh... that bastard.”
Chief Executive Choi’s face surfaced in my mind.
The reason he’d given me leave in the first place, then shoved me right back into this place the instant I returned.
He needed an outsider who hadn’t been infected by the disease of defeatism—someone sharp, fresh, and still capable of seeing straight.
Someone who wouldn’t get swept away by this hellish mood and would keep moving toward success no matter what.
It would’ve been nice if he’d explained that properly, but there was nothing for it now.
First, I’d have to make good on the mission I’d been given.
With that thought, I stood up.
“It’s true we don’t have much time.”
When I spoke, everyone’s attention shifted to me.
I walked up to the whiteboard and started layering my own lines over Maeng Giyong’s valve-body cross-section.
“But isn’t the reason it takes two months the verification time spent wandering around because no one knows what to fix? If we know exactly where to cut and how, the design revision can be finished within twenty-four hours.”
I rounded off the sharp corners of the flow path and wrote in the dimensions.
“Round it with an R value of 3.5. Expand the orifice diameter by 0.5 millimeters. That’s all we need.”
Jo Seokhun, the senior engineer who had been listening, frowned and stepped forward.
“Manager Baek. I understand what you’re saying, but fluid mechanics isn’t that simple.”
“It isn’t simple.”
“If this were a problem you could solve by eyeballing it, someone would’ve solved it long ago. A tiny chamfer on the corners is supposed to fix what even expensive flow-analysis software couldn’t catch? Frankly, that’s hard to believe.”
The other researchers nodded along with Jo Seokhun.
“Exactly. And if the hydraulic response speed drops even a little, the shift shock will only get worse.”
“This is too much of a gamble. Without verification...”
The air in the conference room sank like lead.
They didn’t believe it could work.
On top of that, there was the helplessness of not wanting to waste effort on a project that was already doomed.
Just as everyone was about to cross their arms or let their pens fall and slump back in defeat—
“You’re not doing it?!”
BANG!
Maeng Giyong shot to his feet, slamming his palm down on the desk.
The rage of a bull swept across the conference room.
“What’s with all your faces? Are you saying we should just go through the motions and wrap it up because it’s doomed anyway?”
“N-no, Director. It’s just that the risk is too big in practical terms...”
“Risk? Don’t make me laugh!”
With a derisive snort, Maeng Giyong glared at the researchers.
“You idiots. We’re already corpses! In fifteen days, when the Germans get here, our team gets blown to pieces. We’ve got nothing left to lose, so what the hell are you talking about risk for?”
“......”
“Didn’t we say we’d grab even a stalk of straw if that’s what it took to survive? You’re saying Manager Baek’s answer might be wrong, fine. But do any of you have a better option? If you do, bring it out. If you don’t, then do what you’re told!”
His voice thundered through the conference room.
At first glance, it might have looked like nothing more than rough, tyrannical stubbornness, but watching him, I could only smile bitterly.
I could feel it—that was the kind of desperate responsibility that would stake his own neck if it meant saving his team.
“I’ll take responsibility. If it goes wrong, I’ll be the one who takes off my suit, so you just go and cut it the way I said! Got it?!”
It was charisma that crushed everyone in the room flat.
The eyes of the researchers, who had been slumped and defeated, began to tremble.
Their dying embers were stirring again, just a little.
“......Understood.”
“We’ll do it. If we do it, we do it.”
Jo Seokhun adjusted his glasses and stood up.
“I’ll call the machining team right away. The moment the drawings come through, we’ll cut it even if we have to work all night.”
From that day on, the lights in the lab never went out.
I sat at my desk and wrestled with CAD.
Over the 3D model on the monitor, I layered the flow of fluid that only I could see.
There it is. A bottleneck.
I moved the mouse, shaving away the sharp edges and boldly widening the narrow passage.
It felt like being a surgeon clearing a blocked artery.
“Manager Baek.”
Before I knew it, Jo Seokhun was standing behind me, looking at the monitor.
The suspicious gaze he’d had at first was gone now, replaced by nothing but serious curiosity.
“If you widen that section like that... won’t the hydraulic response slow down? The valve reaction will get sluggish.”
“No. It’ll actually get faster.”
“What’s the basis for that?”
“Because the flow becomes smoother. When resistance drops, the fluid reaches its destination faster.”
Jo Seokhun tapped at a calculator, his expression doubtful.
After scribbling through a string of equations, his eyes widened.
“...Huh? It is true. Since the Reynolds number drops and the turbulence disappears... the speed loss gets offset?”
“Exactly.”
“Good grief... You figured that out by intuition without even calculating it?”
Jo Seokhun clicked his tongue in amazement.
That was the moment he declared himself my personal marksman, so to speak.
He sat beside me, verifying every revised design value in real time and helping convert them into drawings the machining team could use.
“Revision to flow path two complete. Sending data to machining!”
“Materials room! Is the aluminum block ready? Get the machine running now!”
Maeng Giyong’s roaring orders, Jo Seokhun’s support, and my designs all locked together, and the gears of a dying organization began meshing again, spinning furiously back to life.
Three days later—
“It’s here!”
A machining team employee burst in, drenched in sweat, pushing a cart.
On it sat a gleaming silver hunk of metal, the newly machined improved valve body.
The lab reeked of oil and sweat.
Carefully, almost reverently, the researchers began assembling the part into the powerpack.
“Check the gasket. Bring me the torque wrench too.”
The assembly went fast.
The sound of the final bolt tightening felt louder than everything else.
Click.
With the preparations complete, we returned to the control room.
The researchers stared at the monster beyond the glass with taut, tense eyes.
The trauma of another explosion like the last one.
And, threading through that fear, the faintest sliver of hope.
Every face in the room was a tangle of emotions.
Then—
“Start it up.”
Maeng Giyong’s low voice dropped into the silence.
KUUUUUUM—!
The sleeping steel monster woke.
The colossal vibration it gave off climbed up through the floor.
“Reproducing the load conditions at the critical 280-hour point...”
Jo Seokhun’s voice trembled.
I kept my eyes on the view through the glass rather than on the monitors.
I could see it.
The energy pouring out of the engine and flowing into the transmission.
WOOOONG—!
The RPM surged.
The critical high-torque band.
The place that had clogged and backed up in a dark, blood-red knot last time.
But what I saw now was a smooth, blue current.
“......!”
The fluid slid along the curves I’d carved, gliding through without resistance.
No bubbles. No vortices.
The 280-hour window—when the engine and transmission locked together mechanically in the clutch-up phase.
The moment when the most powerful hydraulic surge should have slammed into the system and triggered impact passed by in eerie silence, as if it were a lie.
Swallowing hard, Jo Seokhun, who had been watching the dynamo and the powerpack, clenched his fist and rose from his seat.
Just like him, the other researchers who had been watching with clenched fists and anxious hearts fixed their eyes on the scene.
And then, at the very instant even their faces began to fill with desperate hope—
“V-vibration... zero. Hydraulic ripple... zero!”
Jo Seokhun screamed it like a man losing his mind.
“No shift shock! The graph— it’s a perfect straight line!”
“Woooooaaaaaaah!”
“It worked! It workedddddd!”
The control room exploded with cheers loud enough to shake the building.
The researchers shouted themselves hoarse, laughing as they clutched one another.
Some covered their faces and sobbed; others only stared blankly at the powerpack.
But it didn’t last long.
“Grab Manager Baek!”
Maeng Giyong’s booming voice rang out.
And at that instant, every eye in the room turned toward me at once.
“W-what?”
“Hahaha! Come here, Manager Baek!”
“Over here!”
Maeng Giyong and the researchers closed in on me, then simply lifted me right off the floor.
“We did it, we did it! Hahahahaha!”
“Long live Manager Baek! You bastard, where the hell were you hiding before you came to us? If only you’d shown up a year earlier, wouldn’t that have been nice!”
“Don’t say that now!”
The researchers and Maeng Giyong were tossing me into the air.
And in the middle of it all, I felt genuine fear for the first time in a long while.
Every time these maniacs threw me up, the ceiling—its pipes and steel framework laid bare—would rush up toward my face, then recede again.
I, I’m going to die.
Stop it.
Please.
All I could do was clamp my eyes shut and shield my face with both arms.
By the time they’d thrown and caught me nearly ten times—
“Heh-heh, that was good, right? How’d that victory high feel?”
Maeng Giyong, having finally set me down with the others, laughed heartily and pounded my shoulder.
I looked up at him with a dazed expression.
All around us, the researchers were bursting into laughter again.
“...Haha.”
Fine.
If the lot of you, who’d been digging yourselves into the ground, felt this happy, then that was enough.
I let out a small sigh, wiped my face, and stood up.
“Anyway... the hardware problem’s fixed. No more iron filings.”
“Right. That’s how it turned out. But this isn’t the end, is it?”
Maeng Giyong, still patting my shoulder, jerked his chin toward the monitor.
My gaze, and everyone else’s, shifted to the screen at once.
There, a complex logic code was displayed.
“Now that the hardware’s changed, the software has to be reset too. The Germans are coming, and they’ll test-drive it themselves. Those guys are demons. If the shifting feel is even a little rough, or if the timing’s off by a fraction, they’ll jump on it immediately.”
“I’d rather not have my mood ruined after all this, Director. I can’t code.”
Maeng Giyong gave a small snort, as if asking what I took him for, and went on.
“I know. The PhDs will handle the coding. That’s not your job, Manager Baek.”
“Then what is?”
Maeng Giyong pointed with his chin toward the operator seated at the main controller in the center of the control room.
“Until now, we’ve been setting shift timing based only on sensor data. But sensors are slow to react. That’s why the shifts are always a beat late or early, and that’s what causes the shock.”
“......”
“But you know, don’t you, Manager Baek?”
Maeng Giyong’s eyes flashed with seriousness.
“Earlier, while everyone else was getting lost looking at the same log data, you were the only one who found it—the hydraulic spike came 0.2 seconds before the vibration.”
“Well, if you look closely at the graph...”
“No. You don’t figure that out just by looking at a graph. You can only see it if the chain of cause and effect is perfectly carved into your head—how the oil flows inside the machine, how the parts move.”
Maeng Giyong gripped my shoulder tightly.
“So you give the orders.”
He pushed me to the spot directly behind the operator’s seat, right in the center of the control room.
“When you think the hydraulic pressure is at its fullest and the gears are meshing at the perfect moment, give the signal. Then the operator will shift, and the programmers will record that timing as data.”
Only then did I understand Maeng Giyong’s intention.
He wanted to use me as a controller—at the same time, as a navigator of sorts.
With the schedule this tight, they were going to start software tuning right now.
“Jo Seokhun! Pull up the mapping program! Keep your eyes on Manager Baek’s mouth. The moment he says now, lock that data in!”
“It’s ready! Just give the word!”
Dozens of researchers rested their hands on their monitors and stared only at me.
I let out a quiet breath.
Somehow, things seemed to keep growing bigger and bigger, but...
If I could pull off something truly huge right here, wouldn’t that strengthen my voice all the more?
With that thought, I looked at the powerpack beyond the glass wall.
Then, in a low voice no one else could hear, I said, “Let’s do this right. We can pull it off.”