The Shit Technology Department
Boss had opened a line of trade with a merchant out of Geofront. I knew that much.
They weren't close the way Teacher Myeong was close—close enough to be handed news from underground—but I'd thought they did business, and left it at that.
So what did he mean, the man wasn't a merchant?
"Walk with me a minute. Come on."
Boss's room had a back door.
I'd never once seen it opened, but I had a fair idea what it was for.
A door for special guests.
Anyone who came to see Boss through the black market, the way I did, used the front. So how did the guests who never set foot in the market meet him—the Human Meat Factory crowd, say, or a merchant up from Geofront?
Boss never went outside.
A creak.
Past the back door, just as I'd expected, a path I'd never seen ran out of the building, with a guard detail on Boss's payroll waiting along it. Special guests must come to him this way.
That wasn't all of it.
"This way. Not far."
A stair climbed toward the floor above. Boss went ahead of me, swaying on the drink.
"We're here."
A flight that rose exactly one story.
"Really not far."
"Nowhere left to go, even if you wanted. This is the end of my world."
The space was as wide as the black market itself. It was Boss's warehouse—nothing in it but goods, and not a single person. Unlike the market, it had a great window looking out of the building.
"Hell of a view, right?"
Some view. Government Complex buildings, and that was the whole of it.
"Hard to kill a view that's already dead."
"Special glass. They can't see us from out there. Look all you want."
Even so, Boss must have needed a window like this. The scrap of scenery beyond it was still dozens of times wider than his world.
"Really is a killer view..."
"I told you. Already dead."
From the day he built the black market, Boss had lived locked inside it. The market was a prison he had raised himself, enormous. It hadn't started as a prison. No one had thrown him in. He had volunteered for the sentence.
Had he truly never once stepped outside? Not quite. There was exactly one time Boss came out of this building. Six years ago, on a single day—his first outing, and his last. He went looking for his son.
"See that little window, third floor of the building over there? There used to be a woman who'd open it and smoke, every Monday at lunch."
"Mm?"
"Saw her all the time. Not this week."
"And?"
"And nothing. Just saying. Why's she not showing? Quit?"
Before Boss went looking for his son, I hadn't even known a black market like this existed. Hadn't known the man called Boss, either.
The son was the reason he had opened the market. Finding the boy took both information and money. When he decided the preparations were finished, he set out without hesitating. Up to then, the son had still been alive.
On that outing, Boss ran into two enormous things. First, he became a criminal. Second, he met the hunters sent out to pass judgment on that criminal. Nothing to do with Boss, but three of the hunters dispatched that day were stranded on the way back. Clock-out Man, Min Yeo-jin, and me.
"That woman looked like she had money. Showed up and smoked for an hour at a stretch. Didn't stop."
"...What did she look like?"
"From this far? You think I could see a face."
Anyway, Boss made it back to the black market by the skin of his teeth. From then on, it was a prison.
"I'd already set it for the Monday after I get back—leaving this place. A trip I won't be coming home from. Figured I'd stop by there and meet the woman. Now maybe she never shows again."
"You planning to remarry?"
"Out of nowhere?"
"That's some fixation."
"I meant she might buy up my whole stock of cigarettes. Bulk, so I'd cut her a deal."
Teacher Myeong would love to hear that.
"Leaving on Monday. You ready?"
"What, you worried?"
"Don't be disgusting. If this place vanishes, I have to find somewhere else to trade. That's all."
"First time in six years I'm going out into the world. Least you could do is pretend to worry. Manners."
"I'm so worried. Oh no, whatever will we—"
"Forget it. Don't."
However long he had run the black market, he was a man who had survived longer out in the world than in here. Not merely survived. He had been somebody. He would live, one way or another.
"To think even this is ending... Run a black market long enough and you learn things."
"I bet."
This one in particular sat inside the Central Government Complex. He could move all kinds of goods, of course, and he would have touched a mountain of information.
"Learned plenty of interesting stories, too. Whew. I'm getting drunk."
"Got an interesting one you never told me?"
"More than one or two of those. You haven't told me everything either."
"How about one, as a going-away present."
"This isn't exactly something to commemorate."
"Think too hard and your hair falls out."
Boss bit the neck of the little bottle he had brought and tipped it back. He had brought me here because there was something he wanted to say. I knew that. I asked for a story anyway. That was manners.
"A story... There is one truth I came to."
"Skip the crackpot philosophy. Something fun."
"The truth that no matter how wide your feet get, how big your hands, there's information you can never reach."
"You don't even pretend to listen, and now it's the truth. Information you can't reach just means you don't know it. Some truth."
"What matters is knowing that you don't know."
I needled him, gently. Boss stayed stubbornly serious.
"Same with realizing a thing is impossible. Not knowing it can't be done, and keeping on ramming your head into it—that's sad. And it's not just one or two of them. I was one."
If he meant to whine all night, maybe I ought to cut him off here.
"So I realized it. A merchant who comes and goes between the surface and the underground—that can't exist."
"Mm?"
He was drunk. No question. Otherwise his mouth would never have started on a story he absolutely could not tell.
"Six years ago. When I came back to the market. Even then, I still had a new goal. Call it a dream, if you want it grand. Whatever it was, I needed an exit I could look at and run toward."
After the goal of finding his son disappeared, Boss had never once spoken of a goal.
"I only ever thought it to myself. Saying your dreams out loud doesn't always end well."
"And that goal was becoming a merchant who travels the surface and the underground?"
"Yeah."
If he managed it, he would be the finest merchant there was. Nothing strange about that as a goal for a man running a black market.
"But no matter how far I reached, I couldn't touch it. At first I thought I just needed a longer arm. The more time passed, the clearer it got. It had been a goal I could never reach to begin with."
"Arms don't get longer."
Boss's intelligence, as I understood it, sat at the level of the Future Technology Department in the shadows. Anyone else, maybe not. If this man said so, it was roughly true.
"No amount of money, no number of people, could get a foot inside Geofront. Impossible."
"What's surprising about that. It's just common sense."
"Right. Common sense. But I thought, if the money was really that much, if someone with real power helped, maybe."
"You were looking for a workaround."
"That's common sense too. Workarounds are everywhere."
Fair enough. Boss had opened a black market inside Headquarters. Living proof that things outside common sense can happen.
"Anyway, it became certain. A merchant who crosses freely between the surface and the underground cannot exist. That's the truth I came to."
So common sense was holding firm. Worth calling a realization.
Then what the hell is that merchant I've only ever heard about.
I learned there was a merchant from Geofront through Teacher Myeong. The first time I heard it, my reaction was exactly what common sense demanded.
"Cut the bullshit."
What kind of place is Geofront? A place only the chosen are permitted to enter? That isn't all of it. A place even the chosen, once inside, can never leave. And yet, year after year, Teacher Myeong kept getting underground goods through the merchant in question, no trouble at all. By the time another year turned, I had stopped saying cut the bullshit myself.
Strange, if you thought about it. But they said it was reality, and I couldn't argue. Reality outdoing the stories in books for sheer nonsense isn't a once-or-twice thing.
"Truth or otherwise, that wasn't much of a story."
"Up to here was the truth. From here, it's new. New ought to be fun."
"Wasn't the truth something you newly realized?"
"New only to the person who just realized it. Truth is all old. Like a note that's been stuck to your back for ages. You find it late, peel it off, and it says idiot."
By then Boss's bottle was empty. Heat risen as high as it would go, he let out a breath.
"Hah. Hot."
He took off the watermelon mask. A bare face I hadn't seen in six years.
"...You haven't aged a day, old man."
"Skip the sunlight and aging slows."
"Mind if I take this goddamn bat off too? Stifling."
"No."
I took it off at once.
"I said no."
"You knew I was going to anyway."
"You've aged."
"..."
"Yeah, yeah. I got it. Don't put it back on."
Both of us bare-faced, and still we didn't look at each other to talk. We were looking out through the same window. Pretending to, more precisely. Instead of the view, I was watching the old man's face reflected in the glass. He was probably doing the same.
"By now you're wondering. Then what about that Geofront merchant I've been meeting."
"Not by now. Since a while ago."
"One thing's certain. He isn't a merchant."
What the hell was that supposed to mean.
"What's clear is, hauling goods around to sell them isn't the point. Throw every illegality and every workaround at it, and coming up from underground to the surface is still next to impossible. And he does it not once or twice, but the way other people eat? Doesn't make sense."
"So it's just a guess."
"A reasonable guess. Even if there's a method I don't know, it's the same. The profit off wholesaling underground goods? Set it against what it costs to reach the surface, and it doesn't come close."
I'd wondered that anyway. How much could the man even gain from work like that? Would surface wealth—ammunition and the like—even be recognized underground? Not a chance.
"So the merchant thing is a cover?"
"Probably."
A cover as good as they come.
"That tracks. A merchant who fetches goods from underground—anyone would want to get close."
"Getting close to people on the surface that way seems to be his goal."
That couldn't be all of it.
"Building a rapport so he can pull information?"
"Hard to say. Years of dealing, and I haven't really told him anything. The only ones who want to hear me talk are those Shit Department bastards."
What was the man thinking.
"Other way around—I did most of the listening. This time, too. Says he's shutting the black market down... You already know, seems like?"
"Heard it in passing."
"Decent information network you've got."
But what came next—
"Then you've heard they're driving Headquarters' people out. Whole place is in an uproar over it."
News to me. And the finest reaction to show at a time like this was to pretend I knew.
"So I hear."
"What do you think? Why are the ones holed up underground making life hell for Headquarters?"
Driving out the desk staff. So this was the ugly mood. But why?
"Perhaps they mean to kill all of us. I couldn't say."
Come to think of it, Jo Yong-han had said something similar. He must have known already. Teacher Myeong had been a little off his usual, too.
"Funny, really, desk work looking that far ahead. You never know how the world turns out."
Must have been talking because he knew something.
"What's there to chew on so hard? Don't tell me you hadn't even thought about it until I asked."
"As if. Of course I thought about it."
Why Geofront would make life hell for Headquarters' desk staff...
"What I can tell you right now is that the Subway reconstruction project is being held in check."
Jo Yong-han had said that. A faction with enough power to harass the Future Technology Department. If it was Geofront, it made sense.
"The outside world—that hell of a place—has come a long way, too. They're even building airplanes."
If you took even the drunk rambling Boss had let loose as part of the same story...
"It's development they're afraid of. The ones underground."
All of it would connect into a single story. Then let Woo Jungkook, who knew nothing, stay crumpled for a moment, and borrow Jo Yong-han's mouth.
"Checking them. Maybe they mean to kill them all."
"So that's how it is..."
Felt like I'd found the right key. Now I only had to slide it in and turn it, gently.
"What do you think, old man?"
Click.
"Same as mine. The goal is population control."
The door would open.