My Orbit
Seo Gwan-yul dropped straight back into focus mode. He pulled on his headset, shut out the world beyond it, and looked about one breath away from being sucked bodily into the monitor. Scatterbrained as he usually is, once something hooks him, he's terrifying.
This time, I had no desire to burn myself up over a logo draft the way he was. Whoever made it, all that mattered was a good evaluation from the client.
It was the first time I'd been the one to message Seo Gwan-yul. In a design bid, his single biggest problem was, without question, how easily he scattered. Right. Every now and then you need an easy stretch like this.
Coasting through the work and stealing a little rest of my own inside the office was honestly pretty pleasant. I'd been running hard, hadn't I? Overtime from the day I started. How's a person supposed to work every single day? I'm not a machine.
On the day of the client meeting, the final result Seo Gwan-yul presented sailed through without a hitch.
"Yes. We're pleased with the final design. Please proceed with production on the signage using this."
"Whoa! Thank you! We'll see the installation through properly!"
Thrilled, Seo Gwan-yul looked ready to lift clean off the floor. This brat. You're that happy?
The futuristic, cosmic logo he had made suited the museum beautifully. By the time the installation was finished and the project itself was winding down, the museum's opening date had drawn near as well.
"You've worked so hard for our museum. Won't you all come to the opening ceremony as well?"
We accepted the client's invitation with glad hearts.
Opening day. All of us boarded the splendid spaceship bearing the logo we had made, Universal Canvas. Fixed in place like a neon sign, it shone out of the dark of space—a beautiful piece of fabrication. If NASA finds this later, won't it cause an uproar? A participant in humanity's first alien-museum branding! ...Of course, tell anyone the work had been mine and I might get dragged off to a psychiatric ward.
"There will be a director's curated tour in honor of the opening. Guests, please follow the guidance and move with us."
Together with an audience of aliens in every shape and color, our team followed the curator through the exhibition. ...I'd thought I was well adapted to unusual species by now, but tentacled aliens still take a little out of me.
The first gallery was oil painting. Geometric abstraction spread across canvases of cloth. Oh—the canvas I'd tossed their way is up too, and looking perfectly fine. Thank you for overlooking it with such generous grace.
The second gallery was sculpture in the round: spheres, cubes, and other solids arranged with a quiet beauty.
"Oh, that must be an animal from Earth~."
Where Seo Gwan-yul pointed, there was a sculpture of a canid, pared down into abstraction. ......I caught myself looking at Pascal. He didn't notice, right?
The third gallery was land art.
"All of my signature works are here. Given their nature, however, we have substituted holograms and photographs for the originals."
The Nazca Lines in Peru, and all manner of mystery circles. Some had even been made on strange planets I didn't know. Mm. The scale is enormous, so it really is impressive.
"And now, last of all, we will view the special exhibition zone."
The moment we followed the curator and set foot in the new zone, the spaceship was swallowed in pitch-black dark.
"H-huh? Did the power go out?"
"What is this—part of the show? An accident?"
The director's voice came through, meant to settle the murmuring crowd.
"Our spaceship is performing a spatial warp. The lighting will be restored shortly, so please wait a moment."
Fwaaash—!
True to the announcement, the lights came back on almost at once. In the special exhibition zone hung a frame that filled an entire wall. ...No. Looking closer, it wasn't a frame at all. It was the frame of an enormous window—a border wrapped around a wall as clear as glass, so the wall itself would read as a single work.
"Everyone, please look outside the window."
What the window showed, magnified like a convex lens, was a familiar blue planet. Earth, seventy percent water. The world where we live and breathe.
As he guided us, the director seemed to glance Seo Gwan-yul's way. The look on his face was a soft smile. Maybe this explanation...
What the director had just said might have been as double-edged as the Universal Canvas we had made. The place where his signature works stood, the mystery circles and the Nazca Lines. And the place where a great value still lived and breathed: the life he himself had saved.
After we left, did you play the memory flask back?
Looking out at Earth, the rims of Seo Gwan-yul's eyes looked red. Was it only the lighting? I stood beside him and gazed at that blue sphere too. Ah. Setting everything else aside, it's a view so beautiful it could make you cry.
Quietly. For a long time. The two of us stayed like that, saying nothing, staring out the window.
My first day back after successfully closing the museum branding project. This client evaluation, too, we had cleared without incident. Mm. The second quarter's off to a good start.
Before a new project swallows me whole again, maybe I should knock out the things I still have to do. No commission had come in yet, and the lightness of that unmoored stretch felt wonderful. Ah, right—I should go pick up the business cards I put in for production last time.
After coming in and tidying my desk, I went straight down to the production floor. Of the places I needed to stop, the one that mattered was the print team. I stood before the print room and knocked.
Knock, knock.
Creeeak—
The door opened without a word. The first figure I saw was a towering, muscular woman with deep brown skin. Her ears were pointed. Some elf-like species, maybe?
"I'm here to pick up business cards. Choi Lee-hyun, Brand Design Team."
When I spoke to the hooded woman, she turned her head a fraction without a word and pointed with the tip of her chin to where the cards lay. She really is quiet. It had been the same when I'd come with Henna to learn how to supervise a poster press check. Not a single word, any time I saw her. I'd thought my direct supervisor was fairly taciturn, but next to her he was a chatterbox. And every time I see her, she looks like she's scowling.
Was she unhappy that we'd come by? ...Fair enough. Work at a company long enough and you can get plenty mad at the department that keeps handing you jobs. After entertaining a few stray thoughts like that, I looked at the cards I'd been handed.
Ah. Now that I think of it. ...They said if you print something in this room, you get brainwashed, or something along those lines. Surely the business cards didn't carry some weird effect too...
"Hello! Staff cards are printed with ordinary ink only, so you can relax!"
A bright-skinned boy with pointed ears of his own came over and spoke to me. Fortunately the assistant was the warm sort. Thanks to him, the last press check had gone off without trouble.
"Good to see you again, Lee-hyun! When we print client work, we mix in that special ink over there. We don't use it on business cards."
Where he pointed, I saw five ink tanks connected to the press. I'd wondered why there were two tanks of black; one of them had a huge X printed across its face. So that's the special ink.
"Yes, thank you for explaining. Our team gets a lot of help from you."
A brand design usually ended in either printed matter or mockups such as plaques, which meant the print team was a related department we had to see often. Better to keep the relationship friendly.
"We're the ones who have it easy, thanks to how well the Brand Design Team organizes its files. Please keep looking after us!"
As we wrapped up the warm little exchange, a pet food bowl in the corner of the print room caught my eye. Do they keep a cat, or a dog? Plenty of design agencies did. Not a bad perk. I should say I'll come see it sometime.
I finished the conversation, went back to my seat, and looked the cards over. I'm only going to work here a year, and they printed a whole stack. Sorry to Earth's environment... no. Sorry to the natural environment of some other world, somewhere.
One face of the card carried the Vanta Design logo: a circular symbol, the same one set into the door that traveled between dimensions, together with the lettering.
Henna, back from briefly stepping away, looked at me as she spoke.
"Lee-hyun, your business cards came out! The logo's so pretty, isn't it? Our team leader designed it—he's been with the company since the very beginning!"
Buried inside his partition, Pascal muttered.
"Even back then, that Blaire bastard was spouting bullshit like 'classic, but make it modern'..."
Wow. That really is the sort of thing a CEO who doesn't know the work would say. And yet our team leader had pulled off that impossible direction brilliantly. He really did nail it. A classic typeface, refined with a modern eye until it felt sleek. Look only at the result and it's nothing but one simple logo, but I work in the same field. I know how much labor goes into a mark that small. He really is a skilled, responsible boss. Work beside him and I'd probably learn a great deal...
A year felt a little short for learning all sorts of things, and that was a shame. Before I knew it, I could see Seo Gwan-yul arriving in the distance. Late, true to form. Agh, what is he wearing! Today he'd come in a red tracksuit set. On a frame that big, clothes like that stuck out far too much.
"Oh."
Headset hooked around his neck as always, he dropped into his seat and peered over the partition at my cards. I'd expected him to come straight to my desk and start talking, but apparently he possessed just enough social sense to care that he was late. He messaged me instead.
We traded the kind of barbs designers throw at each other—your sense of taste is deader than dead—while I typed. ...I was fighting a laugh. It hadn't shown, had it?
Seo Gwan-yul is still a coworker I can't entirely trust... Even so, it was pretty nice to have someone to fool around with over nothing in particular. Like this. At ease.
"..."
Oh. Right. ...I ought to set the record straight with my other coworker, too. VantaBot.
Right. Everyone has an orbit of their own.
Aside from the fact that I had come in to work, it wasn't a bad morning at all. Working at this company might be better than I thought. The pay was generous, and not every monstrous client was dangerous through and through. I could take on enormous projects, and all kinds of experience, that I could never have had in the human world.
......Clearly, up through that morning, I had even been thinking something that complacent.
Until I met that damned hunk of scrap.
...Not dangerous, and yet far, far too dangerous. That client!