Movie "Moon" 4/4
There was simply too much he had to do to save her.
Paradoxically, that very abundance left him at a complete loss as to where to begin.
What on earth was a twenty-year-old country youth, fresh out of technical high school, supposed to do in order to rescue someone from a space probe that would crash on its way to the moon twenty years from now?
"I'm at a loss."
Cha Soo-hyun let out a deep sigh as he sat on the wooden platform in front of Yeongjin Super.
Just then the village chief came out of the store carrying a bottle of makgeolli and walked over.
"Aigoo, the ground's about to cave in. What's got a young fellow like you sighing so hard?"
"Grandpa."
"Yes?"
Next to the temple abbot, the village chief was the one who treated Cha Soo-hyun most like a son or grandson.
Cha Soo-hyun asked him,
"Have you ever made a promise to someone you love, not knowing whether you could keep it?"
"What kind of sudden question is that? Hmm, a promise, you say."
The chief sat down beside him.
He pulled the makgeolli bottle from the black plastic bag, glanced at Cha Soo-hyun, and tucked it back in.
"Can't be drinking in front of a kid."
He fell silent for a moment, then spoke again.
"Everyone lives like that. Not knowing if you can even take care of yourself tomorrow, yet you go around writing blank checks promising to feed and spoil your wife and kids. That was my way of expressing it. My wife who left first—I may not have given her a life of luxury, but I made sure she had no regrets."
Cha Soo-hyun listened and sank into deep thought.
The chief watched him for a while, then rose from the bench.
"I'm heading in. You get yourself home early too, Suhyun. All right?"
"...Yes, Grandpa."
The village chief trudged off with the black plastic bag swinging at his side.
Cha Soo-hyun watched the old man's retreating back until his gaze drifted to the door of the private house attached right next to Yeongjin Super.
"Ah—the computer."
He remembered how Hong Yu-jeong had come almost every day to use the computer left behind by the grandmother's son.
Cha Soo-hyun stood at once and slid open the super's door.
"Grandma! I'm going to use the computer for a bit."
"Computer? Sure, go ahead."
He closed the super door behind him and stepped into the grandmother's house.
When he powered on the computer, the desktop was crowded with all sorts of games.
Yu-jeong wouldn't have installed these. Probably the son who went up to Seoul.
Leaving the games untouched, Cha Soo-hyun began digging through the folders on the hard drive.
Click, click—
Then he found one.
— Hong Yu-jeong
A folder bearing her name.
He froze for a moment at the familiar, aching sight of those characters, then clenched his jaw and opened it.
Inside was a text file: a rough plan listing the major future events she knew and brief notes on how to exploit them.
Soo-hyun, listen! Next year the subprime mortgage crisis hits, right? And then smartphones are about to...
He could still see Hong Yu-jeong burning with determination for a while, declaring she would become a chaebol through investments using future knowledge.
If anyone else ever saw this file, her past could twist in unpredictable ways. That would be disastrous.
Cha Soo-hyun emailed the file to himself and deleted it.
He left the grandmother's house and slid open the super door again.
"Grandma."
"Oh, Suhyun. Want to buy something?"
"No. Just... nothing."
He stared at the display of coffee and instant noodles.
It was the same shelf that had once stood on the far side of an invisible barrier she could never cross.
The grandmother watched him and spoke.
"Suhyun, are you lonely?"
He turned to look at her.
"Pardon?"
"You always spend your time alone. I keep worrying about you."
For a fleeting second he had hoped she might somehow remember Hong Yu-jeong. The thought made him feel foolish.
"I'm fine. For now."
The grandmother continued, still looking at him.
"Getting older means the chances for new meetings dwindle, while the goodbyes with the people you've already met keep piling up."
She gazed past the sliding door toward the main road with the traffic light.
Thinking of the son who went up to Seoul, maybe.
He had only ever heard stories; he had never seen the man himself.
The grandmother spoke again.
"That's why, when you grow old, the moments of farewell stack up thicker than the moments of new meetings, and you learn to endure loneliness quietly. A green young thing like you—do you even understand what this old woman is saying?"
She smiled kindly.
Cha Soo-hyun thought for a moment, then nodded.
"I'm going to learn. My farewells run backward. If I keep stacking up the moments of parting I've already lived through and endure them quietly, someday I'll meet the beginning of it all again. I believe that."
"What kind of talk is that?"
"There's something like that."
Cha Soo-hyun bought a large suitcase in town.
He had never left this neighborhood, so it was the first time he had ever touched one.
Back home he opened the suitcase and packed the few clothes he owned.
Looking around the house, he realized there was almost nothing that could be called household goods, so there was little else to take.
Last of all he carefully boxed the telephone made of copper wire and the paper cup wound with red thread, then placed them inside the suitcase.
He stepped outside and locked the gate.
For a long moment he gazed over the wall at the yard, then started walking.
At that very instant, music composed by Chrissy Monroe began to fill the theater.
Just as Yeon-woo had requested, the melody carried the feeling of long waiting and heartfelt longing; the vibrations from the speakers traveled through the air and struck the hearts of every spectator.
Alongside the music, Cha Soo-hyun's life unspooled in rapid montage.
With the money he had saved he dragged the suitcase and crossed to America without a plan, then began investing.
Recalling the text file Hong Yu-jeong had left and every conversation they had shared, he opened with short positions on the Lehman Brothers collapse and rapidly multiplied his fortune.
At the same time he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began his studies.
Between the brief, edited flashes of his long life, the film kept cutting back to Cha Soo-hyun quietly staring at the paper cup wound with red thread.
Watching those moments, reporter Jang Hyo-jeong felt an unexpected tightness in her chest.
It's clearly a fast montage summarizing Cha Soo-hyun's life, yet every time the paper cup appears I can almost see him enduring those long years with quiet patience...
The very speed of the editing paradoxically made the audience feel the weight of that vast stretch of time even more keenly.
Having become a wealthy man through overseas investments, Cha Soo-hyun finished his studies and returned to Korea after six years.
With the assets he had earned abroad he established an investment firm and a research institute in Korea, then installed proxies to run them.
"If I step into the open and Yu-jeong somehow learns I exist, the past will change."
By now she should have been selected as a science prodigy and begun receiving foundation sponsorship.
To keep any influence on her life to an absolute minimum, he had deliberately avoided looking her up all this time.
Yet curiosity about her childhood finally won out. When he searched, his face filled with incomprehension.
"...Why is there no foundation support?"
She had indeed been chosen as a science prodigy.
But she was receiving only formal national education; nowhere was there any plan to cultivate her as personnel for space development.
Even the lunar exploration project, though listed as a national plan, was scheduled not for 2026—the year she had originally departed—but for the mid-2030s, far later.
The investment support for the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, which was only just launching the Naro rocket and Arirang-3, was pitifully inadequate.
"Did I do something that caused a butterfly effect...?"
He thought hard, then recalled the conversation he had shared with Hong Yu-jeong one summer when they were twenty, gazing together at a hidden vista.
From the time I was selected as a science prodigy as a child, I always grew up with foundation support. So no matter how long it took, I believed that if I just kept running steadily I would reach the goal, and that was how I endured.
Cha Soo-hyun stared at the science-prodigy cultivation plan and the lunar exploration project glowing on his monitor.
In that instant everything made sense.
"It isn't that I did something—it's that I haven't done it yet..."
He turned. From the high floor of the building the whole of Seoul spread out below him.
His own face was reflected in the glass.
"The foundation that steadily sponsored her... was me."
After that, Cha Soo-hyun established a foundation and, through proxies, began sponsoring Korea's space-development programs and talent-cultivation plans.
As if he already knew the future, everything he touched succeeded. The investment firm, now called the Midas of the investment world, poured inexhaustible sums into continuous sponsorship, and the Korean space-exploration plan advanced as if sailing with a fair wind.
Intercut with those scenes were moments of Cha Soo-hyun and Hong Yu-jeong almost meeting yet always missing each other as they came and went from KAIST and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute.
But their times had been out of joint from the start.
They moved through the same spaces and therefore seemed to cross paths, yet they were actually moving through the same places ten years apart.
Cha Soo-hyun was walking every road she would one day take, leveling the ground and paving the way ahead of her.
And then that day arrived.
The news anchor's voice filled the air.
The film had returned to its opening scene.
After a long journey.
The rocket launched.
This time, however, the camera did not show Hong Yu-jeong's point of view inside the probe; it showed the launch from outside.
On the screen the rocket punched through the sky and climbed toward the distant dark.
In almost every film, when a rocket launches, both the characters on screen and the audience watching share the same silent prayer that it will rise safely.
This film was different.
Please... crash. So Soo-hyun can see Yu-jeong again.
Boom—
Papapap—
An explosion bloomed at the base of the rocket, tongues of flame leaping outward.
Losing its center, the spacecraft began to spin and fall toward the earth.
As the rocket plummeted, the faces of the audience watching the screen ironically brightened.
Meanwhile the Korea Aerospace Research Institute was in a state of emergency.
The government immediately convened the National Security Council.
"The final transmission from the probe to the center clearly shows the emergency landing system activated! There's a chance the crew is still alive!"
"We have to put an embargo on the details for now. We can only release news to the public after we've confirmed the facts. The more we torture people with hope that the astronauts might still be alive, the harsher the backlash will be later."
It was pure chaos.
Everyone talked over one another, each voice saying something different.
The president, clutching his throbbing head, finally spoke.
"What about the search-support request we sent to the U.S. Seventh Fleet?"
"They're currently stationed in the Western Pacific. They say it will take at least three days to reach the projected crash site..."
"We've also coordinated with allies to search by drone and satellite as thoroughly as possible, but there's no sign of them. It looks like they went down in the ocean."
At the successive reports the president let out a long sigh.
Just then the chief of staff approached carrying a telephone.
"You should take this, sir."
The president glanced once at his chief of staff, then accepted the receiver.
"This is Cha Soo-hyun."
"Ah, Representative Cha. I'm well aware of how much private support you've given this project. But right now we're in an emergency situation..."
"No. That isn't why I called. I will find the crashed probe. I've lived for this day."