May I Reach Your Orbit
The child carried on the whole conversation through a toy walkie-talkie, from the back seat of the car bound for a mountain cabin in Gangwon with his parents.
It was a shame, of all days, that it had to be raining, but rain wasn't nearly enough to sit on how wound up he was. He tore around every corner of the private cabin until he couldn't anymore, then dropped face-first into sleep.
"Want me to run out for something to cook for dinner?"
"Yeah. Don't wake him. Let's make it quick."
Leaving a child alone in the cabin didn't sit right, and the two of them hesitated.
"The rain's coming down harder..."
The drizzle had thickened, somewhere along the way, into a full downpour. Setting him down somewhere warm and safe, and going without him, looked like the better choice. So they left a note beside their sleeping child and stepped out.
Mom and Dad are running to the store. Don't go outside, don't open the door for anyone, and wait for us!
The car had barely gone when a racket tore the child out of his deep sleep.
A long rumble, then a crack of thunder.
"Mmm... Mom? Dad?"
Pitch black. The fluorescent light, bright a moment ago, snapped off with a hollow little pop.
"Mom, Dad! Where are you?!"
This was back before cell phones were an ordinary thing. Frightened, the child tried the toy walkie-talkie he'd fallen asleep clutching, calling for his parents.
The walkie-talkie his parents had left behind only copied his own voice back at him from somewhere.
"I told them... I told them not to throw it away...!"
Hurt, he gathered up their walkie-talkie as well.
That was when it hit.
A roar like the sky tearing in half.
And with it, a wall of earth came down on the cabin. Glass shrieked. Timber cracked and folded. Part of the cabin was swept under the weight of the mud and caved in.
"Hhk—!"
The startled child ran the other way, away from the noise, scrambled into a tucked-away room, and threw the lock.
"Hhh... hic... hic..."
What could a helpless child do? He curled into the corner and shook.
"Maybe... maybe it's okay now."
A little time passed. When the slide seemed to settle, he opened the door.
Mud had packed itself in through every broken window, and stones stood driven into the walls. The room was wrecked. The sweet family trip was gone, and everything — all of it — was simply a ruin.
"Hic... the door won't even open..."
He tried to get outside and couldn't. The cabin was buried.
"Waaah... Mom... Dad..."
He called for them until his throat hurt, already knowing they couldn't hear him. Maybe not ever again. Crushed under the despair, he looked up through the collapsed ceiling and saw filthy mud sliding in with the rain.
"...?!"
And, punching out of a black hole torn in the sky, something disc-shaped and flying.
That was the last thing he saw through the gap overhead. After that, even this small opening sealed over with earth.
"Of all days, it's raining."
The office worker had come to Earth on his vacation, riding the sort of craft the locals of this planet insisted on calling a flying saucer. He was here to make the work he never had time for between shifts at the company. Flat painting was all he'd ever done, so this time, he declared, it would be sculpture in the round — and with great confidence he'd picked a region thick with rocky mountains.
"With this rain, the gear I brought can't even do its job."
Honestly. Didn't the sky have a heart? It was always like this. Rain, and only on his annual leave.
"Long as I'm out, maybe I should swing by Saturn. Someone on the next team wouldn't shut up about what a good vacation spot it was."
He was still turning over where to reroute when an unfamiliar bio-sign flickered onto the monitor. The sensor was something he'd stuck on in case his land art ever put a local in harm's way.
"Hmm. Doesn't look like a place Earth life would be active. Aside from the really tiny ones, don't most of them live up on the surface?"
In those huge black eyes, a bio-sign showed beneath the soil — bigger than a mole.
"That's odd. I thought I'd already seen most of the Earth specimens. Maybe I'll go down and take a quick look."
People who made art tended, on the whole, to be curious. So the office worker decided to go down.
A descending whine, and he rode a beam of light into the space under the ground. Well, well. A species that built its houses underground.
What he found was a structure collapsing under a blanket of earth.
"#$%^&@!*"
And a young alien, chirping away in a language he couldn't begin to parse.
"Earth's juvenile mammals are usually looked after by the adults, from what I saw."
He scanned the surroundings. No other bio-readings.
"Hmm. Can I really just leave it? I thought the aliens here breathed oxygen."
A sealed space. Leave the little one like this and its life wouldn't last.
"But they said you shouldn't just pick up a juvenile. The parent organisms might be searching themselves sick."
Hauling it up to the ship didn't seem wise either. An unfamiliar environment would only terrify a mammal. He'd heard as much from the lab next door, the one developing translators: when they interviewed an alien man and a woman aboard a ship, both of them had gone nearly into a panic. A physical exam to make sure they were all right, and then they'd been sent home.
"What am I supposed to do with this... A golden vacation, and nothing but headaches."
His workplace was a harsh one. Out of a 748-day year, you could take exactly five days of leave. On a rest that rare, the urge to actually rest came creeping up.
"Five days by our clock. Converted to Earth time... about three days?"
Tap.
The little creature that had been chirping caught hold of his finger. He looked down. Eyes full of water, spilling over, were looking up at him.
"......"
The tired office worker thought it over. Shaking the hand off and leaving would not be a difficult thing. And then he thought the other thought as well: looking after a young one would not be a difficult thing either.
"Ah, forget it. A hotel vacation on Saturn by myself would be just as boring! I'll stay with you for these three days of my leave. Exactly three."
The parents might come back inside that window, so he decided they would stay right where they were.
"Good thing I at least brought a gas generator and a physical barrier."
The ship was a stripped-down thing, almost none of the cutting-edge functions left on it, but the basic equipment, thankfully, was still aboard.
"Set the oxygen to about twenty percent... hmm. Switch the barrier on and it shouldn't cave in any further. That'll hold the space."
None of it was much. Easy as finding a fish washed up on a beach and tossing it back into the sea. A very small kindness, really.
"Spend a little time playing along, and the hours go by faster than you'd think."
For those three days he found the young alien something to eat, stayed beside it, listened to words he couldn't understand, and held its hand.
A deep grinding rumble.
Fortunately, right around the third day, the noise was enormous.
"Excavator coming in — everybody stand back!"
"Gwan-yul!! Are you in there, Gwan-yul!!"
"Hic... sob. Mommy's sorry! Please, please...!"
Human voices, starting to carry from far off. The office worker let himself relax; the timing was right. He got ready to leave before he could confuse the Earthlings any further.
"You take care. Huh? You're giving this to me?"
The young alien held out some object made of plastic, an identical one still in its own hand.
"*(&@#$"
And it said something, which of course he couldn't understand.
"Don't think I'll have any use for it, but... well, I'll take it. Be good~!"
He accepted the unidentified object, and quietly vanished back into the ship.
The flask that had been playing the footage went dark.
"......"
"......"
Seo Gwan-yul said nothing. I couldn't make myself speak either. For a little while we just stood there, blank.
"This box... maybe it's in here. ...Found it!"
A rustle, and Seo Gwan-yul broke the quiet, digging through the box set beside the flask.
"...I didn't throw it away."
What he held was an old toy walkie-talkie. The years were all over it, but the 8-bit screen still lit.
"The battery's still working... oh. They must have swapped it for something alien."
He popped the plastic shell, checked the inside, and let out a little sound of admiration. Then he drew something from his own bag. Another toy walkie-talkie. The match that proved the two of them were a pair.
"I had a feeling this client might be that alien from back then... so I put a fresh battery in."
"...Oh. It still works."
"Yeah. It's even got scheduled-message auto-send. I tried running it recently and it still goes."
"...Scheduled message. Auto-send?"
"Mhm. You record a message, set a time, and it transmits on its own. When I was little, my whole routine was turning on the auto-send for 1 p.m. and waiting in front of the walkie."
Beep.
Seo Gwan-yul pressed the button to play the scheduled recording, and out came a message soaked in a child's heart — thank you for saving me, and next time I'll be the one who comes to get you.
I was listening, throat tight with it, when a corner of my chest went cold.
This message. It ran about thirteen seconds, didn't it?
Oh. Don't tell me. The thing that wiped the computer data and scrambled the ship's systems — if that was this toy's signal, interfering with the ship...
"See, you press this button and the two toys talk to each—"
"Wait, wait, wait!"
I lunged in and cut him off. Stop. Stop. No more ordeals. Not one more.
That was when the door hummed open, and someone came in.
"A life sign was showing on a ship that should have been empty, so... I thought you might have lost your way."
The owner of the Memory Vault had come looking.
Seo Gwan-yul looked into those pitch-black eyes.
"...Once again, I couldn't keep my promise. Since you came to find me."
"?"
Seo Gwan-yul held up the toy, but the alien didn't seem to know what he meant. Well. It would have been a long time ago. Maybe, once it was backed up in a flask, it was small enough on his end to forget.
Oh. Right. The tattoo on Seo Gwan-yul's arm.
I realized it was the same as the image VantaBot had shown me. The picture stitched across his arm, and the diagram carried on the ship — the one explaining Earth and humankind.
Gotta hand it to him. Really commits to the concept.
Another hum, and behind our puzzled client the door opened a second time. Through it, a face I was glad to see.
"Excuse me."
It was Pascal. The team lead gave the client a small nod and came over to us, carrying the door keyring and the things I'd left behind in the conference room.
"You two never came back, so I came looking. Clock out."
The sweetest words in the world. I don't think I've ever wanted to clock out the way I did after a day this long. ...No. Honestly, I desperately want to clock out every single day.
"Thank you for coming to find us."
"Haha, and thanks to you, we dodged being lost in space~"
Pascal eyed the even more buoyant Seo Gwan-yul as if he couldn't quite tell what had happened, but he didn't bother asking.
"Our staff have been a great deal of trouble."
"Not at all. Go carefully."
The three of us said our goodbyes to the client and stepped through the swirling door.
And that was the end of our short stranding aboard the ship.
Not long after, the time came to work on the logo.
I didn't know it yet. That scatterbrained guy had another face entirely.