Banners for a Son
Sungsam Electronics headquarters — the team leader's private office.
Ji Hyeongwoo, head of Deposition, sat at his computer working through the mail. A smile came to rest on a face that had been blank a moment before.
Mail from the man he had already marked.
Remarkable. Truly.
He had only just told him to think about modifications and improvements, and an improvement had come back at once. Unless the engineer had some special ability, there was no explaining it.
"Not a year. Half a year would have been plenty."
Perhaps he had set the deadline too wide. Well, it hardly mattered.
It isn't as if this one engineer is all I need.
The gathering-in of talent from the other sections was already underway. However outstanding a man's ability, he could not do every task alone. That was simply the way of things.
"Team Leader, the meeting is about to start."
"Yes. I'll head over."
Ji Hyeongwoo closed the window and rose. Today's meeting was one of the major agenda sessions, the kind that brought the company's internal directors together. He opened the conference-room door, found several executives already seated, offered the slight customary bow, and took his place.
"Team Leader Ji. It's been a while."
Jo Jeongsu, the team leader in the next seat, was the one who spoke.
"Yes. Good to see you, Team Leader Jo."
"Busy these days, are you?"
"Ha. Isn't that the whole of a team leader's work."
Jo Jeongsu kept his face to the front of the room and smiled, a thin flash of teeth.
"No — it's only that I heard you've been gathering people."
Ji Hyeongwoo answered without a ripple. A snake of a man. No reason to hand him anything.
"Is that so? First I'm hearing of it."
"Ha. Really? Then I must have misheard."
He knew, and he was playing this game anyway. Ji Hyeongwoo didn't give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
"So the fellows I looked into aren't your people, Team Leader Ji."
"…"
"Then I'm free to take them and use them."
"I don't know which fellows you found, but if they're able, we ought to look after them properly for the company's sake. Shouldn't we?"
"Right. That's the way of it. Train them well from the time they're new, and they'll be worth using."
Before he could stop it, Ji Hyeongwoo's eyebrow twitched. Surely not.
"No need for them to rot away on that old Line 1, either."
With that, Jo Jeongsu said nothing more.
"…So you found someone worth using."
Ji Hyeongwoo left it there as well. It seemed he would have to move his plans up.
Two days after the company dinner, I asked Senior Kim Yeongseok's leave and took a day of monthly leave. The reason was nothing else.
I had a mayor's citation to receive.
The matter of going down to my hometown and saving Grandfather Kim — and, in the course of it, putting out at the start a fire that had nearly run on into a wildfire. That was what the citation was for. I headed for Nonsan City Hall. It was a special citation, so the presentation would be held in the reception room there.
The reception room… there it is.
I found it from the directory posted inside the hall. The award was not staged like a grand event. They simply hung one modest banner behind us; I met the mayor, we shook hands, and someone took a photograph. A few reporters were there as well. They looked as though they had come after hearing the news.
"Well done, Seokhyeon."
"Not at all. It wasn't such a difficult thing. Really."
I traded the ceremonial courtesies with the mayor and received the citation, and the prize that came with it.
Onnuri gift certificates — five hundred thousand won!
Traditional-market vouchers. These I could give to my parents. I was down in Nonsan anyway; I ought to see them. When the event was finished, and I had answered a few questions from the reporters, I left city hall.
"Mr. Lee Seokhyeon!"
Someone called me. I turned. A man I thought I had seen in the reception room was coming over at a quick walk.
He wasn't a reporter.
A reporter would have spoken when the questions were being taken.
Not a city hall man, either.
A city employee would have had no need of a visitor's badge around his neck. Then who?
"Thank you. Truly. Because of you, my father is safe."
The middle-aged man came up to me and bowed deeply. Startled, I bowed in return.
"Ah — no, please. But who might you be…"
Only then did he smile, as if catching his own lapse, and introduce himself.
"I was slow with my introduction. Kim — the character chil, the character deuk. I am his son, Kim Seongcheol."
I tilted my head. Even hearing the name, I didn't know it.
"Ah, said that way, of course you wouldn't. I'm Grandfather Kim's son."
"Ah!"
So he was Grandfather Kim's son. Now that I heard it, there did seem to be a resemblance. Only then did I bow my head and greet him properly once more.
"How do you do. Lee — the character seong, the character ho. I am his son, Lee Seokhyeon."
That was the proper form, meeting an elder of one's own village.
"I only did what had to be done."
I answered with a bright smile. It had simply been something within my ability. There had been no grand resolve behind it.
"Please. If it hadn't been for you, I don't even want to imagine what would have become of my father."
"Ha ha…"
I laughed, sheepish. There was nothing to say.
"Here — my card. If there's ever anything you need help with, please contact me freely."
I accepted the card with due courtesy. Then I looked at it, and startled.
He's a president?
The surprise didn't last. I took my own card from my wallet and held it out.
"Allow me to give you mine as well."
"Aigoo. Thank you."
President Kim Seongcheol all but flattened himself to receive it. But why would a man who ran a company leave his father in a house that run-down? I learned the reason as we talked a little longer.
"Aigoo. You have no idea how stubborn he is about that house, with all the memories in it. I found him an apartment, and he still won't come out."
"I see."
"This time I mean to remodel the whole of it, top to bottom. And change the boiler out for a different one."
"Then you'll certainly be able to rest easier."
We made small talk a while longer, and then the president and I parted. I headed straight for my family home, to press the Onnuri certificates into my parents' hands. I was making for the village entrance when I saw it.
Beneath the banner that had already been hanging there—
Another banner had gone up.
"…"
I was embarrassed, and I couldn't have said why.
After I had handed over the certificates and nothing more, I went straight back up to my studio. I was due at work the next day, so I needed to come back ahead of time and sleep off the trip. Before I lay down on the mattress, I turned on the computer and started a search.
I had the card anyway. It seemed worth knowing what sort of company it was. What I found was a firm of real scale — a fastener company, making the hardware of assembly, bolts and nuts and the rest of it. The revenue was healthy, too. A proper mid-sized enterprise.
An impressive man.
Worth remembering. It might be of help someday. I finished that brief bit of browsing and slept.
The next day brought a commute unlike the usual.
The hour itself was different.
Today's the first day of the intensive work system.
The system the deputy manager had mentioned at the last dinner was starting today, and my first day under it fell in the office-hour slot. Where I usually woke before five to get ready, I got up at seven and came in. More sleep, and my condition was good. And yet something felt wrong.
I feel like I'm late.
A guilty sense that I shouldn't be doing this. I looked around and saw crowds of people arriving for work. When I came in on the day shift, there were only ever a few. So this was how fierce an office worker's morning really was.
"Good morning!"
I stepped in with a crisp greeting, the way a new hire should. The deputy manager and the department head were there as well. I greeted them again and bowed to the other seniors — Senior Yeongseok, Senior Hyeongjun, Senior Hyeonseong. Senior Uhyeon had the morning shift; Senior Jihan had the night.
Strange.
Working side by side with Seniors Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong, who until now had only ever handed over the Inform. It felt as if I had been moved to a new department. I sat down and read the log. There was a tool to fix today — one that had failed at the very end of the night shift, its cause still unfound.
This one first.
As the time for the Inform drew near, everyone took up their Inform notebooks and headed for the meeting room. Senior Uhyeon was sitting there alone.
This is strange, too.
Receiving the Inform from Senior Uhyeon, who had always been the one to give it. Today was an odd day indeed.
"Hello, Senior."
"Oh. You're here."
We said our hellos and went straight into the handover. The failed tool was unit WN-9.
"The tool isn't completing its boot. The UI window won't come up."
Everyone nodded, writing it down.
"Let's take our time and check it. Solve this, and it doesn't look like there's anything else today."
"Would it be all right if I took a look?"
I raised my hand as I said it. Senior Uhyeon and Senior Yeongseok nodded as if it were the natural thing.
"Yeah. Have a look."
Seniors Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong, on the other hand, tilted their heads.
"We don't even know the cause yet. You think you can look at it alone?"
"Hyungs — we don't have to go with him?"
Senior Yeongseok answered Hyeongjun.
"Seokhyeon does fine on his own. If there's something he doesn't know, he'll come and ask. You can go then."
The two of them had no answer to that.
Hyeongjun couldn't make sense of it.
Seokhyeon's at that level?
However well a man worked, looking alone at a failed tool whose cause no one even knew was something only a veteran could do. Hyeonseong, beside him, wore the same expression.
Even if he's good…
It couldn't possibly be to that degree. A new hire of three months?
At that stage I was busy just trailing after the hyungs.
By any ordinary standard, it didn't add up. The doubt must have shown on his face, because Yeongseok let out a short laugh.
"Then go along and see."
Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong nodded. And so the three of them, Lee Seokhyeon included, headed for unit WN-9. Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong put Seokhyeon in front and watched from behind. Just how would he trace it?
Let's see how good he really is.
That was part of it. Honestly, there was a grudge in it as well.
A new hire, and he's already got a performance grade?
Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong had only barely received theirs after a full year had passed. Seokhyeon had gotten that same grade in three months, so of course they felt it. After the dinner, the two of them had talked it over. They thought the same thing.
However well he works, a grade this early is too soon.
They had no intention of actually saying so. But that was the thought. And so the two of them watched Lee Seokhyeon work.
What is he doing?
All Lee Seokhyeon did was look the tool over, corner to corner — the tool PC, the upper section, the lower, even the SSD that fed it power. And then, abruptly, he nodded.
"Senior. I think the problem is here."
"…Huh?"
Ten minutes of looking, if that. And he already had the cause. Hyeongjun went to him as if drawn.
"Where's the problem?"
"The relay inside this SSD."
"What's it do?"
"I'd have to look that up to know…"
"…?"
He didn't even know what kind of relay it was, and he was calling it the problem?
"Then why is it the problem?"
"It won't self-hold. It's different from the SSD on the other tools, too. I think the spring inside is shot."
Hyeongjun and Hyeonseong tilted their heads. They had no way of knowing whether Seokhyeon was telling the truth or simply making it up.
"Let's just try it."
And so, once the relay had been swapped—
Vrrrm—
The tool booted.
"Mm."
Seokhyeon nodded as if it had never been in doubt.
Neither of them spoke. Hyeonseong and Hyeongjun met each other's eyes. It seemed they were going to have to take back what they had said after the dinner.