May I Reach Your Orbit (5)
I want to cry.
The tears are right there, ready to fall.
But what am I supposed to do? Right now, the only person who can save me is me!
...Or is that true? Could Seo Gwan-yul save me too?
Even so, what I was about to attempt was something I could never, in good conscience, ask of another person. It was that enormous.
Why?
...Because I was going to step out into space with nothing but my own body, and bring the oxygen cartridge back.
How many seconds?! Exactly how many seconds am I good for?!
The question was about to drive me insane, but there was no time left to ask VantaBot anything more. Even now, that cartridge was drifting farther and farther away!
So I seized the handle by the airlock, lashed the wire mounted nearby around my waist, and shouted.
"The second I grab the cartridge—pull this line!"
"What?!"
...The guy who was always so easygoing had, for once, a face with no slack left in it. My heart was hammering hard enough to kill me. Don't you start panicking too!
"Lee-hyun! That's dangerous...!!"
I know. I know!!!
Aaaagh—but if I stay put I suffocate, and if I go out there I die, so what's the difference!!!
I decided not to hear Seo Gwan-yul out. Then I hurled my whole body forward and did it—the outrageous thing I had resolved to do. I leapt out into space.
"...!"
One second.
All at once, everything went quiet. The ship's blaring announcements, Seo Gwan-yul's shouting voice—all of it drew away, distant as some old memory.
Two seconds.
My body crept closer to the cartridge. Thankfully, I was moving fast enough to overtake it.
Cold. I felt as if I were adrift alone in this empty, freezing sea.
Five seconds.
I reached. My fingertips brushed the cartridge. A little more—just a little more—and I'd have it. My body felt tight. A prickling numbness was crawling through every limb.
Seven seconds.
Contact!
I had it!
I caught the cartridge. I swept my arm around it the way you cradle something precious. But my mind was going dim. No. Not yet. A little longer....
Ten seconds.
Ah....
I don't know. Only the stars, thickly set into a black sheet of drawing paper—those stars.
Beautiful.
My vision narrowed into black, and I... I......
Psshhhhk—!
Opening the outer hull.
Adjusting airlock pressure.
"Haaah—!"
I dragged in a violent breath, and the consciousness that had gone all the way to the far shore seemed to come rushing back. My body shook as if in a fit. I blinked.
"...Hyun!"
"Lee-hyun! You with me?!"
Ah.
I... made it back in one piece.
I must have blacked out for a moment. I was laid out on the ship's floor, and both the open airlock and the missing oxygen cartridge had been put back the way they belonged.
...Seo Gwan-yul had handled it.
"Ah, thank god. Really, really, thank god...."
The guy with the dyed hair bowed his head as if in prayer and locked his hands tight together. Those hands were trembling. He'd had just as hard a time as I had.
"......"
Honestly... thanks. He must have been terrified too.
If he hadn't pulled that wire in time... I'd be dead.
Maybe because we'd brushed death together, the wall in my chest seemed to come down all at once.
"...I'm all right now. You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"
I sat up, leaned back against the wall, and talked him down. We checked each other over, and then, half for the sake of resting, we slipped into small talk in an air that had gone noticeably softer.
"...You like aliens that much? A ship like this is nothing but things that can kill you."
"Well... I've been seeing UAPs off and on since I was a kid."
"You said a UAP is the same kind of thing as a UFO, right? Weren't you scared? Aliens make you think of abductions and all that."
"At first, of course I was. Everyone is. Stuff you don't understand is scary."
"......"
"But then, you know, I started thinking whoever was riding in that craft might not be such a bad person. I liked them after that."
"...So that's why you took a long leave and went all the way to Peru looking for aliens? Leaving a team that was just Pascal and Henna?"
"Haha, yeah. Looking back, I do feel bad for those two."
We traded a little more chatter that didn't amount to anything, without the walls you put up when you're performing at being a professional. Saying everything I actually wanted to say left me feeling pretty good.
Now that we're talking, I get it.
His head may be full of flowers, but there isn't any malice in him.
...Right. He said this was his first job.
A wreck of an agency like this wouldn't have had ordinary human coworkers. There might never have been anyone to teach him how you're supposed to act at work. Something in me loosened. Spilling the things I'd only been sick over in my head left me clear inside.
It's been a long time since I talked like this.
...All those years of a long job hunt, and my friends had slowly fallen out of touch. Easy, idle chatter, and my mood turned genuinely all right.
My body feels a lot better, too.
Good. We've rested enough.
I got to my feet. I want off this ship, home, and horizontal!
"Let's look again for a way back to the conference room."
"Yeah. You okay? If it's rough, want me to hold you up?"
Hmm. I didn't think I needed that.
I turned down Seo Gwan-yul's arm and walked the corridor on my own feet, picking the search back up. We went on through an atmosphere that had grown considerably easier, and then—
"...Oh, a lounge?"
A wide space opened up, the kind that seemed to have all sorts of rooms branching off it.
"There's a map here. Says if we want the conference room, we go this way."
Seo Gwan-yul pointed at the spot labeled Memory Vault. The layout was simple: use the doors on either side of the vault as a cut-through, and you'd come out right at the conference room.
"Yeah. If we don't go through here, it's a pretty long way around."
...After what had happened before, I didn't have a great feeling about the vault.
Still, taking the long way doesn't guarantee it's any safer.
What if another corridor airlock blew open like last time? One trip into space was enough!
The bigger trauma won. We went up to the door marked Memory Vault.
Kiiing—
...Even so, we couldn't afford to be reckless. We opened it from the side panel and looked the interior over from outside first.
"Hmm. I don't see robot arms like before. Nothing that looks dangerous."
"Ooh~ Maybe because this isn't the kind of place that stores expensive stuff, like art?"
We decided it was safe enough to enter, and stepped in carefully.
The shelves were lined with large glass flasks and boxes. Each flask had an odd little structure: a button at the base.
"I'm curious. Can I press one? Just once?"
"...What? Isn't that dangerous?"
I said it, but honestly, I was curious too.
Memory Vault. A place where an alien civilization's memories are gathered?
Right. How often does a human being get to lay hands on the cutting edge of an alien technology?
I didn't pick the arts for nothing.
I'm the curious type. That's why I made a daring choice off the path I was supposed to take. If I hadn't, I'd have gone up to Seoul and into a business-and-econ program, the way my parents wanted!
But safety mattered more. I lifted my phone camera and ran VantaBot's image analysis.
An item that stores memories as crisp, vivid video. Press the button at the base, and the memory within plays back.
It appears to concentrate the neuroscience of a spacefaring civilization.
"Hmm. VantaBot says there's nothing dangerous. Want to take a careful look?"
"Haha, you really put VantaBot to work. All right. Let's press a button."
Just in case, we decided to try a flask near the door first, and we left the door open so we could bolt at any moment.
Click—
The moment the button went down, a crisp, high-definition image formed inside the flask, and sound came with it.
"Congratulations on launching the first ship!"
The client's own hands were clapping as a ship lifted off cleanly, and other aliens beside them pressed a bouquet into their arms.
"......"
...Come to think of it, the box beside this flask held a bouquet made of pressed flowers.
Huh. This felt entirely too much like someone's private diary. Were we really allowed to keep watching?
My excitement had gone flat. Seo Gwan-yul's only climbed.
"Quick! Let's see the next one!"
Giddy, he punched the flask right beside it. What spilled out—ah. This one was private too. Colleagues, just talking!
A little gathering of aliens, murmuring among themselves, played back.
"You're going out on assignment this time, right?"
"Yeah. I got bored working the same place forever. I decided to take a cover job on a planet called Earth, in World #000255."
"Oh? What are you doing there?"
"An AI company in a country called America. Figure I'll take it easy and come back rested~."
...?
You know that joke. Some company suddenly shows up with technology that shouldn't exist, and people say, What, are they torturing an alien in the basement?
......And that was basically true??!!
"I'm going to a smartphone company in Korea. That food they have there—chicken—was really good, wasn't it?"
......Insane. I knew it!
No wonder they keep rolling out impossible products like folding displays! At this rate, is a phone that folds fifteen times next?
And wait—did the CEO buy chicken again this time? Really locking in those foreigner—no, alien—preferences!
I sat there stunned by the enormity of it. Seo Gwan-yul, delighted, went rummaging between the shelves.
"They labeled everything by the categories written on them! That was ships and work, and this one's the art category."
The big man wandered the art shelves as excited as a child.
"Within art there's land art, and under that a subcategory for planet Earth.... This is it. These must be the memories from every time they came down to Earth!"
He slapped several of the flask buttons there all at once.
Ack—this wasn't going to cause a problem, was it?!
Uneasy, I went over to where he stood. Inside the glass bottles, separate videos were playing all at once in a chaotic jumble. And Seo Gwan-yul—
Stopped dead.
He was standing in front of a single flask, his gaze fixed on the glass as if he meant to bore a hole through it.
What is he looking at?
I followed his eyes.
What had formed there wasn't a ship, or an alien landscape, like the others.
"...!"
The round glass was showing a human child, as seen through alien eyes.
"Next time, I'll come find you."
...From inside, a familiar Korean voice was coming through.
Click.
Seo Gwan-yul pressed the button again and started the flask over from the beginning.