The Value of a Life
An alert landed on the phone of everyone in the office who traded stocks. Anyone in the market kept at least the breaking-news notifications switched on—you had to be able to move the instant the wire did—and so everyone watching this unfold could see it.
They were watching, in real time, a man come apart.
"No! This can't be happening!"
The market did not give Assistant Manager Ryu even the time to answer. It simply drove the price into the ground.
A thin rush of air, and it was over. The 1.2 percent green candle that had been climbing in timid little steps flipped, in a single instant, into a towering bearish candle of minus ten percent.
"Ghk—khhk—"
Assistant Manager Ryu folded into his seat. Too late, he tried to sell before the limit-down, but no hand alive could outrun the program trades that dumped the moment the headline hit.
And in that flash—
Only a week ago—no, even on Friday—Assistant Manager Ryu's account had been proudly up 36.6 percent. It melted. No. It evaporated.
"Gaaaaah..."
The value of a life he had spent his whole existence piling up vanished in three days. A lifetime of stinginess at the table, in the glass, in bed. Part-time work, then a job, then a second job. Grinding his body down, treating overtime like a meal, clawing together every extra hour of pay. Then nights spent awake over charts and news, turning that hoard over a little at a time until it became money.
From twenty-three to thirty-six. Thirteen years of Assistant Manager Ryu's youth, two hundred million won, all of it in there. Gone in three days.
What remained was one hundred and fifty million won. His wife's fifteen years.
Ryu sat where he had fallen, and across the office grief and relief changed places.
"No! Go up! I said go up!"
The scream belonged to Associate Lee Ji-hye.
Tears ran straight down her face. She half-rose, awkward and desperate, and scrubbed at the monitor as if her fingertip could shove the long blue candle—the down candle—back toward the sky. Nothing, of course, changed.
Moments earlier she had trusted Assistant Manager Ryu and nothing else, and thrown her entire paycheck into the stock after peeling off 450,000 won for rent. He had told her a shattered account had only one cure: average down. Pour in more money. Drag the cost basis lower. Watching the chart churn sideways, she had pushed in another two million won with a hand shaking from fear. Because of it, the return that had been closing on minus forty percent was still negative, but it had shrunk to a single digit, and for a little while she had let herself breathe.
All she had bought, at a very high price, was a ticket to hell.
At a glance the account looked hardly different from before. That was only because, just before the drop, she had averaged down with another two million won. Her principal now stood at a full 5.2 million. Measured from the high, the loss was fifty percent.
My... my account... Thanos...
For an instant the purple villain from the superhero films rose in Associate Lee's mind. She had lost two million won off the peak. A month's salary, gone in a day.
Anyone who has ever tried to save knows that carving a paycheck into pieces and setting them aside is harder than it sounds. Even a little at a time usually takes a long while. What Lee Ji-hye had lost was not simply two million won. It was a year.
With this money I could have gone to Europe. Not just Japan...
And that was not all. She could have swapped to the newest iPhone whenever she liked, eaten everything she craved until she was sick of it, and still had money left over. Now all that remained was this month's rent: 450,000 won. No—once she counted last month's living expenses, already run up on the credit card that would come due in four days, she would have to start fearing for the rent itself. A European trip was a fantasy. She might not even get the convenience-store meal box she had meant to eat for dinner tonight.
Even so, there was nothing Associate Lee could do. Selling here would feel like losing. Once a drop like this had hit, there was no answer but to diamond-hand it and endure. So she put her head down on the desk and cried, great heaving sobs that would not stop.
Manager Kim checked his emptied account with a hand that would not stop shaking. Never in his life had a blank screen looked so beautiful. He lifted himself a little and looked around, eyes trembling.
"Gaaaaah..."
Assistant Manager Ryu sat on the floor with his soul already gone.
"Hhk... hhhk..."
Associate Lee Ji-hye was folded over her desk, crying as quietly as she could.
Hah...
The strength ran out of Manager Kim's whole body. He dropped back into his chair, hollowed out.
I... I'm alive...
What if he hadn't sold? What if he had ignored Assistant Manager Chae and held on another ten minutes? The screen in front of him would not have been empty. It would have been this.
He ran the numbers in his head for the trade he had not made. How much more would have vanished?
Twenty-one million won...
A loss that, until moments ago, had been fourteen million would have swollen to thirty-five million in ten minutes. That was no longer a figure he could wave off as the price of one bag for Hye-ji. The cost of a midsize domestic sedan, evaporated into empty air in ten minutes. What pressed on him harder than the money was the psychological weight of it: the two-hundred-million line might have broken.
If the two hundred million broke... even with loans, I couldn't have set foot in a newlywed place anywhere near Seoul.
Two hundred million had already been the minimum. A hand out to his parents. A hand out to the bank. Even debt required you to have some money first. For a man who was already an aging bachelor, marriage would have missed its moment and been gone.
I... I'm alive...
The profit that had flown away no longer even occurred to him. All that remained in Manager Kim's head was this: he had lost a mere sixteen million or so off his principal, and he had kept a principal still in the two hundreds.
This much is what I would've spent on a bag for Hye-ji anyway...
And so Na Hye-ji, thirty-six, lost a designer bag without the faintest idea why. Manager Kim, meanwhile, was simply happy.
I made twenty-one million!
Look at it coldly, and he had merely lost sixteen million won. But with Assistant Manager Ryu gone out of his mind beside him, and Associate Lee Ji-hye sobbing, the only money he could think about was the money he had not lost.
The twenty minutes it took to walk to Starbucks and back... were worth it.
The other members of the tip room, who had overheard and then dumped in a frantic scramble, were probably thinking something very similar. Manager Kim's gaze found Assistant Manager Chae. In an office a storm had swept through—no, a bombing—Assistant Manager Chae sat without a word, quietly sipping the coffee Kim had bought him. He did not look like the same man at all.
Assistant Manager Ryu's soul had left him. Associate Lee Ji-hye was sobbing. Manager Kim was breathing out in relief. Assistant Manager Kim slipped quietly into the restroom, and with a shaking hand he opened his account.
"Hhk—"
Alone, he clamped a hand over his mouth.
Thump. Thump. Thump. His heart was pounding like something insane.
His head knew better. This was no moment for simple joy—a colleague's life had just ended. His head knew that with most of the office wiped out, this was the last thing he could ever brag about. His head knew, just as Assistant Manager Chae had told him before, that a profit was something you showed to no one. You hid it.
But—
Thump. Thump. Thump. His heart was beating so fast he half feared Assistant Manager Ryu, out in the office beyond the restroom door, might hear it.
Sixty million won. Sixty million.
If he spent not a single won of his salary and let only the barest food and living costs leak out, could he even save thirty million in a year? In reality, just gathering one hundred and twenty million had taken him close to ten years. The result of trusting Assistant Manager Chae and placing the bet was five years. Assistant Manager Ryu had lost thirteen. Associate Lee had lost one. Manager Kim and the other tip-room members had lost half a year at the very least. Inside all of that, Assistant Manager Kim was the only one—no, one of exactly two—who had gained time.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
And earlier, Assistant Manager Chae had told him. Even now, this was not the bottom. It might run as high as two hundred percent.
"Assistant Manager Chae is..."
He sat on the closed lid of the narrow stall, fist clenched, and thought it—too ashamed to let the rest out of his mouth. He couldn't stand the itch on his tongue. He logged into the forum. That same day his post was pinned to the very top of the popular board, shot there in an instant by the most recommendations of all.
Assistant Manager Kim read the comments and laughed without a sound, careful that none of it leaked past the stall.
"What in the world is going on here...?"
The sight that finally met Park Chae-eun, department manager of the facilities team, as she stepped back into the office was pure chaos.