The Pneumonia from Wuhan
It happened in the moment he was about to step down into the subway.
A low murmur moved through the street. What is it? Everyone passing by had stopped as one, staring up at the electronic billboard, and I stopped with them, puffer zipped to my chin, and looked up at the board.
The middle-aged women going by watched the board with worried faces, talking among themselves.
"Looks like that's going around these days... This isn't about to turn into another MERS, is it?"
"Oh, please. As if. Still, be careful, sis—keep your collar pulled up."
And then it hit.
A chill.
What... what is this feeling?
The instant the words Wuhan pneumonia reached him, something impossible crawled up his spine—a dread so sharp it raised every hair he had. I've never felt anything this sinister. Not once. It was a foul, uncanny current he had never experienced in his life, and by instinct he knew it was coming off those words.
He froze. He stood there thinking, then abandoned the steps that would have carried him into the subway and turned toward a pharmacy nearby.
"Welcome—Stationfront Pharmacy."
Behind the counter a bare-faced pharmacist sat listless, eyes on her phone.
"Masks."
"Masks are over that way."
She didn't so much as glance at him, only pointed into a corner. The masks hanging from the hook, all of them together, numbered thirty at best, and most of them were cloth.
This won't be anywhere near enough.
He hesitated a moment, then spoke to her again.
"Every mask you've got in the store. All of them."
"Pardon?"
"Thank you! Have a good day!"
Will this much be enough?
Leaving the beaming pharmacist behind, he bought out every KF94 the pharmacy had in storage, arranged for the restock shipments still on order to be delivered to his place as well, and only then headed home.
Even so, something still feels wrong.
On an ordinary day he would have let it go at that. But the chill that had come off Wuhan pneumonia was the worst he had ever felt, and the unease would not leave him. It followed him onto the subway and all the way home, and before long he had his phone out, looking the thing up.
This is so much worse than I thought.
What he found online was nothing like the version he had been getting from the news.
China's already sealed off the Wuhan region...?
Until now, everything he knew about Wuhan pneumonia came down to a single fact: because of it, China was in chaos and the factories were shutting down. He had understood, more or less, that Assistant Manager Ryu's stock was crashing for the same reason. But he had traded on the ability alone, and he had not realized it was this serious.
The searching went on until he was through his own front door. His eyes raced over the pages. Transmission rate. Fatality rate. Those were not the only things that mattered. Wuhan had been sealed. The medical system was overloaded, and doctors were dying of overwork. People were trapped inside their homes, forbidden to step outside, held under full control.
Is this really something that's only possible because it's a communist country?
Online, people looked at those scenes and sneered that of course they were being controlled—it was a communist state. His own thoughts ran differently. The more he searched, the stronger the chill became, and that chill was handing him certainty.
No. Before long Korea is going to look like this. Japan too. Maybe the entire world.
Until now he had filed Wuhan pneumonia away with MERS and SARS and mad cow disease—just another strange flu. But the deeper he searched, the more he learned, the harder that ominous current shouted that it was nothing so small.
Even so, Korea's containment is still holding. For now.
By the time he reached the front of his building he had settled on that much, and uneasy as he still was, he went inside.
The home he finally walked into on Monday, the weekend already gone, was as cold as it had been when he left.
Just getting down here ate the entire day.
Monday was the company's founding day, so the office was closed—but the trip from Seoul down to Daegu took what it took, and the day was nearly spent. The moment he came in he turned the boiler, which he usually left off to save on the gas bill, up to full and went in to wash.
A deep hum filled the old studio. The boiler ran at maximum, and in an instant the bathroom was thick with warmth and steam. He wiped the fogged window with his bare hand, shaving, and muttered to himself.
"Haa... Back to the office tomorrow."
A moment ago his head had been full of Wuhan pneumonia. Now that he was home and thinking about tomorrow's commute, Assistant Manager Ryu surfaced without warning. A laugh escaped him while he was washing his hair.
"Tuesday ought to be worth showing up for. Just to see Ryu's face."
Deputy General Manager Kim, the supervisor—every one of them would be lying in wait for Ryu to walk through the door. He finished the shower feeling clean, hung his puffer on the nicest round hanger he owned, and sat down at the computer again.
The time was 11:12. In a few minutes the US regular session would open.
The company's off, but the market isn't.
He had waited all weekend for this hour. US stocks might trade around the clock, but the swings only got big enough to favor scalping once the regular session was open. The fifty million won or so he had made scalping during the day had been nothing but seed money. The real game started when the regular session did.
He understood how to use the ability now. Tonight was the night to multiply the money without holding back.
The moment he was ready, the session opened, and volume began to pour into the momentum stock he had been watching.
Buy!
+3.2%! The instant the chill vanished, the chart he had stepped into threw up a pillar of fire.
Sell!
−2.3%! The instant the chill returned, the chart he had fled slammed into the floor.
Click. Click.
Inside a chart that rose and fell without end, the cold along his spine kept telling him the exact moment to sell and get out.
Ryu, Wuhan pneumonia—none of it matters right now. Momentum stocks are god, and I am untouchable!
Click!
He scalped like that for a long while, until the headache crowding in finally drove him to bed.
Did I concentrate too hard? My head is killing me.
But he didn't think it was a headache at all. It was a bombardment of dopamine. And why wouldn't it be.
Five hundred million!
Tonight alone, he had pulled in fully four hundred and fifty million won.
Add in what I'm still holding on the short side...
Seven hundred and fifty million.
Seven hundred and fifty million...
The moment he saw that number, something came to him.
"With money like this... a Songdo Central Park view is finally within reach."
Real estate means Gangnam? The myth that Gangnam never loses? Don't make me laugh. For someone from Incheon, a Central Park view comes to mind long before a view of the Han River.
If you're from Incheon, getting to live in Songdo even once is the dream.
He remembered his school days—friends who, asked where they lived, didn't name a district or a neighborhood but simply said they lived in Songdo. Insufferable. And he had envied them anyway.
And now I've made the price of an apartment in that Songdo in a single day.
More than anything else, that was why seven hundred and fifty million meant something different.
I can feel the limits of scalping coming into view. Even so—is this much, in a day, what counts as stable income now?
There was no helping it. The seed had grown so large that the ceiling on day trading was starting to show.
These days, even when I want to buy, most momentum names simply don't have enough shares on offer.
What he was doing was, to put it the crude way people did, scalping shit stocks whose volume was never that large to begin with. The order book—the number of shares sitting at the price he actually wanted—was thin. And once his seed had crossed five hundred million, a single click to buy swept three or four price levels in an instant and dragged his average up, while a click to sell collapsed the book on the spot and shaved the profit back down.
Earlier I posted a sell and it wouldn't fill. I nearly walked into a real disaster.
The fear, the moment he listed hundreds of thousands of shares and the bids dropped off a cliff! The ability had gone quiet, so he had managed, barely, to wait. If that chill had stirred even a little in that instant, he would have panicked and dumped the whole position at market. Then the book would have fallen straight through, and a circuit breaker might well have tripped.
Right. Scalping momentum stocks is dangerous. No question.
The most you could bleed out of names like that in a day seemed to top out around five hundred million won.
And when I concentrate too hard, my head seems to ache.
He cleared the desk, lay down, and spent another long stretch searching Wuhan pneumonia.
Isn't there some way to use this?
He knew it by instinct. Wuhan pneumonia was not going to end so neatly. Every search deepened the chill, and the chill kept confirming the thought.
At least Korea, China, and Japan are headed for serious trouble over this...
He let out a short laugh at himself, set the phone down, and went to bed.
Last week I didn't even know the first thing about stocks, and now I'm lying here planning to make money off something like this.
Even he found the changed version of himself pretty ridiculous. He lay in bed, satisfied with the close, glowing warmth of the room, and fell quickly asleep.
And on the screen of his phone, as he slept, breaking stories rose one after another, fast enough to dizzy the eye.