Nothing More Than Eyes
I had arrived at the room determined to work as hard as I possibly could—but the truth was, all anyone needed from me were my eyes and my biometric signals. Put more precisely, what they needed was my body.
"Um, do I—do I just press this...?"
"Yes."
At that short reply, I typed the same way I had on the first day I opened my eyes—filling the empty fields with the kind of random characters you get from slamming a fist down on a keyboard. Just as I was about to finish packing every blank space—
"But, uh, th-that... if you, if you do this three times, it, it locks..."
The memory of that day brought the thought up with it. Then again, the machine had already been dismantled and moved to another room, so even if it locked it wouldn't matter much. Still—if isolation protocols kicked in, that would mean losing a usable space...
"It's fine. Just go ahead."
The woman answered my question simply. She didn't even meet my eyes, her gaze fixed on the screen, and the expressions on all the women's faces were thick with the clear sentiment that answering me was a nuisance.
So, well. I shrank a little and filled in the remaining blanks.
Just like before, a red screen beeped and something like a laser swept across my pupils before sliding back into the wall with a soft click. Then—clunk. Clank.
"Hik...!"
Something rattled open and shut in rapid succession, and a fire-barrier shutter like the ones you sometimes see in subway stations came slamming down in front of me at terrifying speed.
"Definitely. The twin biometric patterns go in first. To crack it, you'd have to open both sides."
"Ugh."
"That's rough. Looks like the ECG is tangled in too. And the input sections are split."
They traded remarks back and forth, glancing between each other's monitors, and the sight of them was every bit as dazzling as the protagonists in a movie—professionals deploying specialized knowledge to overcome a crisis.
There was no room for me to insert myself into that, so I just stood with my back to the lowered fire barrier in an awkward posture, watching them. I wanted to ask if there was anything else I could do, but they were deep in their own conversation.
"......"
Should I go fetch them each a glass of water?
I genuinely had no idea what I was supposed to do. I couldn't leave—if I were free to go, wouldn't someone have said so?—and yet standing there indefinitely made me feel like I was being rude, hovering without purpose.
In the end I simply stood still for about ten minutes. Eventually a cold-faced woman glanced sideways at me, looked between me and the people around her, and said—
"...You can go."
"...Ah! Y-yes! U-understood! If, if you need anything else n-next ti—"
"Yeah, yeah. We'll probably call you fairly often going forward, so try to stay in one place."
She cut me off. For a moment something sharp seemed to dig into my chest.
"Ah, hehe..."
No one pointed out the cutting tone. It wasn't even that they were ignoring me—more that however they spoke to me simply fell outside the range of things they cared about.
I hurried out of the room a little faster than necessary.
I closed the door carefully and turned around, and the sight of people moving this way and that filled my vision. Minseo wasn't there, nor Jiu, nor Soyeon, nor Dahyeon. They were probably either recovering or hard at work somewhere.
"......"
From across the corridor, a woman came walking with a toolbox. I ran over to her.
"I-I'll carry that! Where—where are you—"
I reached for the toolbox in her hands. She pulled it back and answered,
"No. I'm fine. Rest. You've had a hard enough time."
"...Ah. Th-then, ehehe... y-yes. Good, good work... g-good luck...!"
I stepped aside, watched her resume walking at her original pace, and headed for the cafeteria.
It had been packed with people earlier, so it was bound to be dirty by now.
And so a few more days slipped by. Escape Pod 1 kept coming up in meeting after meeting. And every time it did, my position grew stranger still.
"..."
Above all, there was the food problem. You could argue that pressing a button still produced something edible—tasteless as it was—and that the cultivation modules were already running, so what was the issue?
The harvest schedule was the issue. Even with every possible cutback, a future in which we would go hungry for several days was already locked in, and people conducted the meetings with a sharper edge of irritability for it.
They still used honorifics with each other, and when voices rose they listened to Soyeon's mediation—but even so, you could tell. The flame was creeping closer to the powder keg.
"..."
Soyeon squeezed my hand tight. We had barely managed to see each other these past few days except at mealtimes, so maybe this was her way of reinforcing our bond, however small.
Every meeting ended the same way. Not that it was too soon, not that we should leave immediately—just a hold. No further progress, so wait for whatever might come and talk about it next time.
Distrust of the security team had grown a little more as well. They dragged me around nearly every day for this and that, and yet the only lock they had successfully opened was the thermostat.
At our current standard of living, power consumption sat at plus-or-minus zero, so there was no way to make things any warmer.
And then there was the food. One ruined meal is enough to sour a person's entire day, and we had already been eating like this for days on end...
In that sense, the food shortage fixed in our future almost felt like a mercy.
Even if someone hacked the system to pull out delicious meals, it would only mean more days of starvation later—so at least no one was venting their frustration in that direction.
In any case, you could see everyone's spare capacity draining away little by little. I could feel it most clearly in the way they treated me.
"Ah, come on! Stand right here."
"Hik...!"
Even when I stood in front of the scanner and an alarm announced that nothing had been detected, they would grab my forearm and shove me into position. No matter how startled I was by that grip that took no account of me at all—no matter what strange sound slipped out of me—no one ever responded to it.
"See? Does it work? Ha. Of course it doesn't. This is driving me insane."
At least Minseo, who laughed at that sound, might have been one of the kinder ones.
"...Tsk."
And once the moment they needed me was over, they would leave me standing there without so much as a glance, over and over.
"Ah, get out. Hurry up."
Eventually, after a long stretch of waiting, I would be able to flee the room. It was a fairly miserable situation—but lately I had at least found a little room to breathe.
Because, as they said, farming had begun.
Of course there still wasn't much I could actually do... mostly because cultivation turned out to be nothing like what I had imagined.
No one kindly explained anything to me, so I didn't know the principles or the proper names, but roughly speaking it looked like something green and pudding-like submerged in water and exposed to light.
My guess was that the thing everyone called the meal dispenser somehow processed it through various stages into food. I was a little curious how it managed the texture.
The space was stacked high with tank-like structures. Knowing that people had built every bit of it by hand made the place feel almost grand relative to its ceiling height.
And the work available there was, naturally, cleaning.
Even those things that barely looked alive were still organisms, and of course they produced waste. Compared to other places, my usefulness had risen—just a tiny, tiny bit.
It wasn't simply wiping already-clean surfaces for lack of anything better to do. Here, at least, there was visible progress.
So I spent these recent days scrubbing pipes fouled with something closer to mucus than excrement, mopping up spilled water, and the like.
Compared to the past, when all I did was haul things from one place to another, working hard enough to break a sweat and make the day pass a little faster was satisfying in its own way.
"Move."
"Ah, euk...! S-sorry...!"
Of course, it was still just menial labor. If you weren't concerned with visible cleanliness, there was no real reason to scrub so hard.
The pipes, maybe, were essential. But even those I couldn't disassemble myself—I had to call someone over whenever I needed that done.
Someone's shin brushed my back and I nearly lost my balance, barely recovering and pushing myself upright. I had been crouched on the floor wiping and hadn't seen them. The woman was carrying some kind of unidentifiable sack.
It looked heavy enough that I wouldn't have been able to budge it an inch.
"...Hehe..."
"..."
I looked up at her and offered an awkward smile. After watching me for a moment, she spoke.
"...Hey. Want to try this?"
She dipped a finger into one of the tanks, scraped off a tiny amount, and held it out toward me. It looked like slime with a core running through the middle.
"W-what? C-can I, can I eat this...?"
"Sure. We've all tried it."
But I had been under the impression that there was still a gap between the start of cultivation and the point when our remaining food ran out. Wouldn't eating this stretch that gap longer?
It was a reasonable doubt—but it was also hard to simply ignore the situation and throw myself back into cleaning. No one had ordered me to do this work, and it wasn't important.
"...Ah, th-then..."
When I reached to pick the thing—animal? plant?—off her finger with my own, she pulled her hand back a little and said,
"Ahh~."
She grinned playfully. Maybe this person was a little interested in me after all? Come to think of it, people had said that everyone liked me at least a little.
The thought eased my wariness somewhat. So I opened my mouth in a small "ah" and took whatever was on her finger into my mouth and chewed—
"Ubleugh...!"
The taste was, quite literally, horrific. Next to this, those cube rations looked like food from heaven. A squelching texture, and then that core—bizarrely, crunchy.
It seemed to soak into my tongue itself; a bitter, wasabi-like pain spread through my entire tongue and up into my throat and nose.
"Ahaha...! It's seriously disgusting, right? Pff! I honestly didn't think you'd actually eat it. This is the raw material. The garbage they're serving in the cafeteria right now."
She was laughing. She had the same expression as someone who had just fed a variety-show guest a wrap stuffed full of raw garlic.
"Ahh. Anyway—keep up the good work cleaning?"
She wiped her slightly damp finger on the front of my shirt and walked on the way she had been going. I hadn't even had time to complain about the taste or manage a laugh.
"..."
I swallowed it. Gulp. If everyone had tried it, it probably wasn't harmful—and I couldn't bring myself to waste food.
I screwed my face up tight and waited for it to finish traveling down my esophagus, then picked up the rag again.