The Ja-Mari Grand Prix (1)
In the winter of 4147, a transportation revolution swept through Daehan.
A motorcycle, unveiled by Daehan Automobile.
Vroom-vroom-vroom-vroom.
A single motorcycle was cruising down the grand boulevard of Sinsi. The engines had grown far quieter by now, and the whole thing looked rather adorable.
“Wow? What is that cute little thing?”
“Oh my... it's adorable.”
Above all, the appearance. Ordinary folk couldn't have known it, but the design brought to mind a plump little scooter. The main frame was wrought from steel, then lovingly dressed in smooth, carved wood. Haneul's opinion had been enthusiastically reflected here — without a word of explanation, she'd simply insisted, over and over, that it had to be cute and pretty. Anyone could guess the reasoning: men would flock to the trucks that came out later, so the motorcycle was aimed squarely at the women.
“Wow? What is that? It runs on two wheels, but it's not a bicycle?”
“No pedals? So it just moves by itself?!”
There wasn't even any need for advertising. To the people of Daehan, luxury meant little more than mysteriously luminous black dye and Holy Water. Gold and silver were so common they didn't even qualify as luxuries anymore.
And then, before such people, appeared an object called the motorcycle.
“No, seriously, what IS that thing?”
“I've seen one before! They call it a motorcycle!”
“What's that?”
“I heard Daehan Automobile is making them.”
There were plenty of railway lines, of course, but they didn't run right up to your front door.
Clop-clop, chugga-chugga.
“Ahh... I have to clean it up again.... Mucking out takes the whole day — at this rate I'm going to be late....”
Traveling by carriage meant raising a horse, shoveling its dung, and hauling its feed everywhere you went. Nothing could be more tedious. There had even sprung up an entire profession of people hired to tend your horse at stables while you worked — that was how bad it had gotten.
“Hah, hah... what is that? A new kind of bicycle?”
Bicycles did exist, but they were exhausting. Forget the morning commute — nobody wanted to pedal one home after work. So people went about perpetually hungry for one thing: something to make the daily commute bearable.
“That thing... would be perfect for getting to work.”
“Huh? Come to think of it, it'd be great for short trips too.”
To citizens who treated silk — an extravagance elsewhere in the world — as cheap, and precious metals as mere trinkets, the motorcycle was something new. “I want one....” “Me too!” “I wonder how much it costs?”
With no fear of going hungry, people earned their money and spent their days on casual little trips — and the motorcycle slipped into their sight. For the first time, Daehan had produced something that everyone wanted, in a country where even silk was easy to come by. And wasn't it practical, too?
“If I had one of those, visiting my mother's place would be so easy....”
“I want to ride one when I go traveling.”
For getting anywhere the rails didn't reach, nothing seemed better. For outings, or even proper journeys — it spared you the misery of waiting for a carriage or riding a horse yourself. Fuel was admittedly expensive, but hardly ruinous. After all, what else were you going to spend your wages on?
The motorcycle's price was steeper than expected — the equivalent of five years' wages for an adult.
Vroom-vroom-vroom.
“This is so convenient....”
And yet it spread with astonishing speed. Within just a few years, they were a common sight on every road. Then trouble erupted in the Eastern Continent.
“This is outrageous! Why won't you ship any to us? Are you saying we're second-class citizens of the Eastern Continent?!”
“Has Haneul-nim abandoned us?!”
“Now, now, it's nothing of the sort.”
The Prime Minister of the Eastern Continent had a splitting headache — the assemblymen were now marching straight into his office to lodge complaints. The motorcycles weren't heavy, so loading them onto ships would have been easy enough. The problem was the fuel. You couldn't exactly haul it all the way around half the globe, could you?
“The fuel is the problem.”
“Fuel? What's that?”
“Just as a horse needs fodder, the machine needs to be fed before it will run, no?”
“Ah!”
Nobody planned to drag a dead machine around by hand the moment its fuel ran dry, so countermeasures had to come first.
“Where on earth is this fuel?”
“Apparently it's underground, like coal.”
“Underground?”
“Yes. They say a black liquid that catches fire seeps out of the earth.”
“Never heard of such a thing....”
With no particular techniques for prospecting crude oil, they'd have to hunt down places where it surfaced naturally. But how many such places could there possibly be? Building a refinery at every little seep would mean paving the entire planet in steel.
And that was why Haneul had planted her flag at Baku.
“Let's find oil!”
“Yes! Let's research every possible way to find it!”
In the Eastern Continent, where everyone yearned for a motorcycle, an oil rush broke out before any gold rush ever could. Every research institute received a formal request to develop methods of locating underground oil, and people scattered in all directions, combing the land for black, flammable water.
“Oh? I heard there's a place like that near our tribe's territory.”
So murmured a young man of the Seneca tribe.
“What! Where is it?!”
“Um... I'll go home and ask my grandmother! I think I heard it in an old story!”
“Hurry!”
The Seneca, bear-worshipping people that they were, had long ago gathered crude oil and used it as medicine, insecticide, and fuel — a fact passed down to the present like an oral folk tale.
People flooded to the Seneca, hoisting the tribe's elders onto their backs and fanning out in search of oil.
“Here! There's black water pooled here!”
“We found it at last!”
“Quickly! Quickly! Send word to the Original Continent! Run, now!”
Near the region of the five great lakes of the Eastern Continent, they had discovered an oil field. Everyone assumed that crews would be dispatched immediately, the oil would start flowing, and soon they'd all be riding motorcycles.
Then came the words of the petroleum engineers dispatched from Baku, and the Prime Minister nearly toppled over in shock.
“I'm sorry — what?”
“It will take several years.”
“Why?!”
Just when he'd thought everything was settled, the assemblymen were going to torment him all over again.
“That black substance can't be used as-is. It has to undergo a process called refining, and that facility is enormously large and extraordinarily delicate. It must be built with the utmost care.”
“Gahk....”
For people who'd assumed you could just ladle up the black water and pour it in, a fresh ordeal had arrived.
“Still.... we beg you....”
“We'll do our very best.”
The Baku oil refinery had taken seventeen years, but the Eastern Continent would manage it faster than that — the railway lines weren't far, after all. And there were plenty of passionate people like these:
“Waaagh! Save me!”
“Mr. Prime Minister! You get over there and weld some steel plates yourself!”
“No, let's ALL go weld!”
The motorcycle released by Daehan Automobile.
Vroom-vroom, ring-ring!
“Heading out!”
A little bell had been attached as a signaling device, and since it went ring-ring (ttareung-ttareung) when rung, people took to calling the machines “Ddareungi.”
Within mere years, Ddareungi were flying off the shelves.
“Oh my! Honey, you bought a Ddareungi?”
“Oh-ho-ho! I dug deep and bought one just this week!”
“Well? Isn't it great!?”
“It is! I don't know why I didn't buy one ages ago!”
“The waiting list was the only problem.”
Smaller than a grown woman, easy to store, and — depending on the size of the fuel tank — capable of long-distance travel, it seized the number-one spot on everyone's must-have list, regardless of age or gender. Production was falling woefully short of demand, though the company was deliberately limiting output with the future in mind.
“We can't make too many yet.”
“Why not? They're selling like crazy.”
“There isn't enough fuel. We need to find somewhere else the oil can come from.”
Fuel was the pressing problem. Small engines might sip gasoline, but Daehan's population numbered in the hundreds of millions — that was the issue. Massive oil fields like Baku's, sitting right near the surface, were hardly common. Most deposits slept one or two kilometers underground, and the question was how to find them. The research institutes were burning the midnight oil (figuratively) hunting for the answer.
And so, five years after the Ddareungi's release — the spring of 4152.
Vroom-vroom-vroom.
“Wow... this is insane.... How many are there?”
Word of an important event in Sinsi had drawn me here, only to find thousands upon thousands of Ddareungi lined up. Ugh, could somebody at least tell them to cut the engines? The air's thick with exhaust fumes....
“Mmmm. What a lovely smell. The fragrance of civilization!”
My host was President Ja Dongja of Daehan Automobile. I'm now convinced this man has gone slightly deranged from breathing nothing but gasoline fumes his entire life.
“Gahk... what is this...?”
This is the fragrance of un-civilization, more like. And yet the faces of the crowd lined up ahead are absolutely glowing with smiles. Is it really that exciting?
“So how on earth did this whole thing come about?”
“The people touring on their Ddareungi looked like they were having so much fun, you see? So we decided to make the journey a little... grander.”
Truly remarkable. They organized a motorcycle race from Sinsi all the way to Mudo. Prize money and everything. At Ddareungi speeds, that's a distance of roughly two hundred fifty hours of riding.
“Won't they break down?”
“We built them sturdy, but minor failures are inevitable.”
“There'll be a lot of dropouts.”
“They'll have to fix the machines and keep going! Repairs are part of the competition. That's why so many of our own staff are entering, too.”
Oh? That's why every Ddareungi looks subtly different? Those are competition custom-builds, then. There's everything from sharp, sleek models to ones hauling cargo racks behind — apparently loaded with fuel tanks and repair kits.
“This is genuinely impressive.”
“It will be an extreme contest testing the endurance of both machine and human alike.”
Right — people do need to sleep, don't they? But hold on, doesn't hosting a race like this mean the machines are that durable? Someday I should try it myself. This sounds fun.
“Seeing everyone gathered here today has given me one small wish.”
Huh? A first. Dongja has never once asked me for anything — making the company for him was already more than enough, he always said.
“Tell me.”
“Even after I die... I would like this race to go on.”
“That's no problem at all.”
Dongja is a truly remarkable man. He doesn't see anything else, they say — only when he's tinkering with these Ddareungi and auto-carriages does he look that happy. Ah, and he said he's also happy when he goes home to see his wife. Sure he is.
“Whether a hundred years pass or a thousand, the Ja-Mari Grand Prix will go on. Don't you worry.”
The name Ja Dongja would probably never be forgotten, not for all eternity.
“Thank you. Truly.”
A man well past forty, welling up over this? Honestly. Then I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, and his face went pale. What's this? Did he see something he shouldn't? Something terrifying?
“Please put Marie's name on it too! Otherwise I'll be in trouble when I get home....”
“Ah....”
So the tears weren't from being moved — they were from terror. His wife appears to be somewhere in this crowd. So many men really do live under house arrest. When they were courting, it was all the man winning the day, yet I've never once seen a married man who didn't grovel.
“So — is there anything you actually need from me for the race?”
Why else would he have called me here?
“Miss, shall we be going?”
“Hm? Moses?”
What's with her? Why is she so grave about it?
Hm? Is this a changing room?
“There we go, Miss — you can put this on.”
“I mean... surely you're not asking me to go out there wearing this?”
“Why not? A figure like yours and a face like yours — what are they for, if not occasions like this?”
I could probably just walk out in my underclothes and call it a day.
“Why not just tell me to strip down entirely?”
It's a tube top and shorts, after all — isn't that about what swimsuits look like these days anyway?
“Would you... actually do that?”
“Sure. I'm game.”
It's not like anyone wears out from being looked at, right?
“Haah... I'd be embarrassed, so please wear this, at least.”
“Fine. Consider it a favor granted.”
“All you have to do is stand at the starting line and wave the flag.”
“Ah, the signal-giver, is it?”
Well, nothing to it, really. The exhaust fumes are only worth holding my breath for a moment, after all.
