The Mouse of the Universe

It was too dark to see properly, but I could feel a gloom coming off Dr. Myeong beside me.

Might as well check.

"......It's blinding."

She eased the flashlight aside. Any other day it would have come out as Aagh, my eyes! The Gentleman and the sentries, maybe. She wasn't the sort to get rattled over a thing like this, and watching her sit there under her own private low-pressure system sat wrong with me.

"Just smoke."

"I'm quitting."

"Since when?"

"I ran out."

Nothing to be done about that, then. The foreman had looked rough right after seeing the monster, but he'd recovered quickly enough. Unlike me and Dr. Myeong, here on a tour, for him this was the job.

"Are subway stations always this deep?"

"Not all of them. This one's unusually deep, I think. Work just piled up on me because of it. Would you rather I'd drawn a shallow, cramped station?"

The foreman had no idea how extraordinary the work he was doing really was.

We reached the sixth basement, and for the moment I felt nothing in particular. Go deeper underground and everything in front of your eyes stayed the same. What the body felt was no different — none of the altitude sickness said to come from climbing a high mountain, none of the decompression sickness said to strike in the deep sea.

"Almost there. But why are you so obsessed with the platform?"

It wasn't only the foreman's thought.

"Right? I had no idea you fixated on anything besides ammunition. Woo Jungkook, who finds every last thing in the world a bother — you seemed like someone else entirely."

That was because I'd never talked about it. Anyway, once the platform came up, Dr. Myeong got a little of her life back. So she had been curious. Good.

"It's just somewhere I wanted to go at least once. Like a place you travel to."

"A travel destination? The platform? You're going to be disappointed."

The foreman sounded genuinely sorry for me. Well, I hadn't expected anyone to understand. Tell it to anyone and the reaction was always about the same. Only Jung-goo had been a little different. He was the one who'd shown me, firsthand, just how magnificent the subway was.

Come to think of it, what he'd told me was about the train that wove through the underground, not about the platform. As for a space like the cosmos, where that train ran...

Right. So I'd come all this way because of the Old Man.

"Here. Look."

"Hm?"

"This is the platform."

I'd been wondering when we'd arrive, and we already had. I swept the flashlight in every direction. It wasn't the picture I'd expected — a narrow corridor that pressed in on you, a wall sealing one side, and the other side shut off entirely by something like a door.

"Where's the cosmos?"

"The cosmos, all of a sudden? Why are you looking for that underground?"

"The space the train runs through."

"That's over there."

The foreman pointed at the side blocked by the door. Dr. Myeong recognized what the structure was.

"So this is it. A screen door. Made transparent so you can see the far side. So you can watch the train coming in."

"Then look your fill."

The foreman fitted a key into the wall and turned it.

Rattle. Thunk.

Iron doors dropped all through the station.

"This way, monsters shouldn't be able to get this far. Look around at your leisure."

Now that I thought of it — weren't these iron doors supposed to run on electricity?

"Didn't you say not a single power Core had been installed?"

"These run on emergency power. Batteries, not Cores."

Dr. Myeong stepped in close to the screen door and pressed the flashlight against it. Her red eyes glinted at the same time.

"......I can't see anything. Is it empty?"

There was nothing much. In the meantime the foreman had drifted quietly to my side.

"That doctor's an Immune, isn't she?"

We'd been moving through the dark together this whole time. Not recognizing those eyes didn't make any sense.

"Shh."

"Right."

I went up to the thing they called a screen door. Truly, nothing showed beyond it.

"How do you open this?"

"It needs current running through it. It won't open otherwise."

Seemed to me it would.

Bang!

"Wh-what are you doing!"

"This is how you open a door."

Three kicks and it was nearly there.

"That's not opening it, that's smashing it!"

"You're in charge here anyway, aren't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you? I'll only open the one. Fix it later."

Bang!

"I'm telling you, that isn't opening, that's smashing!"

"I heard you. Fix it."

Crash!

"See? Open."

"Open? What about that is open!"

The moment the door gave, Dr. Myeong came straight over, shoved the foreman aside, and thrust the flashlight in.

"Emptier than I expected by a long way. I thought there'd be something wondrous... The floor — that's the tracks."

"Fixing this costs money too, every bit of it!"

"Then they should have built it to open by hand as well."

"I didn't build it! It came made this way! And from the other side you can open it manually."

"Yeah?"

The door that had dropped below the platform lay flipped, its reverse side showing, and it didn't look like the face I'd been kicking. At a glance you could tell it had been shaped so a person could open it by hand.

"Why'd they make it so you can't open it from here?"

"Because not opening from this side is the whole point of making it."

"The point?"

"It's there to stop people walking onto the tracks whenever they feel like it."

The tracks. So that was what this space was called.

"Originally you're not even supposed to stand this close to the track side. See this?"

The foreman scuffed the floor with his foot. Underfoot was something like bumpy pink paving.

"They call this the safety line. You wait behind it, and the train comes in. The train's doors open, and the screen doors open with them. That's when you board."

It was the first time I'd heard it laid out in this much detail — nothing I'd ever found in a book, either. Maybe I'd just been unlucky, but books only ever mentioned it as a means of transport that could move huge crowds, and that it ran underground. The specifics were always left out, with a flavor of Does anyone really not know that?

An expert was an expert, though. Still, something was off.

"Why do you need doors that open on their own when a train comes in? If there's no train, you've got no business going past this anyway."

"Mm. Seems it wasn't always strictly like that."

"Why not?"

The foreman hesitated. Dr. Myeong answered in a whisper at my ear, and I didn't entirely follow.

"So the subway was dangerous. Something like that?"

"That's why they had this. The safety line I mentioned. Get too close to the tracks and it's dangerous."

I'd known vehicles like cars were dangerous. I hadn't known this. Even a subway that kept exact time was dangerous.

"So there was also something called an announcement, to warn you of the danger."

"That thing headquarters blares all day, making a racket?"

"Once this place is rebuilt, you'll be able to hear it. They're planning to record a new one."

Announcements turned my stomach. But if it was something that had rung through a subway station, I wanted to know.

"What did the announcement say?"

"What was it... Welcome to the New Government Com—"

"Not the one you're recording. The old-world announcement."

"You know how it is, don't you? All the data was wiped in the first air raid."

"What about magnetic tape that still has the audio?"

"Oh. Sharp, for a postman. There is some tape left. Badly damaged, is all."

A way of storing information on black tape. Even in the first air raid, some of the images and sounds kept there had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠survived. Those were badly damaged too, but if you furrowed your brow and stared hard enough, you could roughly make the footage out. The movies the Old Man had shown me were things that had survived that way.

They said the tape could hold all kinds of data besides what you could see and hear, but damage those even a little and they became completely unusable, so they were never passed down. Even the images and sounds you could barely make sense of kept breaking down. Magnetic tape was a medium with a lifespan. These days only a fraction of it has come down to us, copied and recopied, and even that process keeps wearing it away. Information, too, can grow old in a physical sense.

"So what was on the tape that survived?"

"It was tape of an actor being filmed. The set was a subway station, so the announcement got caught on it. Badly damaged, and they hadn't meant to record the announcement in the first place, so it was hard to make out. It was Foot-Trapped Rat."

Out of nowhere.

"What's that supposed to be?"

"There's a gap between the platform and the train. They say feet slipped into it fairly often."

"Then isn't it 'watch your step'?"

"It's Foot-Trapped Rat, no question. That's clearly how it sounds. Don't watch yourself and you end up a mouse with its foot stuck. That sort of meaning. Old-world slang, maybe?"

"You sure you heard it right? You said it was damaged."

Strange as it was, the foreman turned out to be right. Dr. Myeong's testimony settled it.

"Foot-Trapped Rat is probably correct. The medical text I read ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had a passage on screen doors, and it was written there too."

"It's in a book?"

"Not in print. Someone had scribbled 'Foot-Trapped Rat lol' in the blank margin of a corner. I heard people jot down old-world notes like that because they show up on exams."

Then that was it.

"All right, if you're done looking—"

"I'm going down. I'll be back."

"Eh?"

Tap.

I stepped onto the place called the tracks. I'd arrived at last.

The cosmos.

But it wasn't what I'd imagined. I couldn't feel any difference between where I'd been standing a moment ago and here. Because there was no electricity?

"The place you're standing is supposed to be bright, and this side dark. That's right, isn't it?"

"Right. Once the current's running, this side lights up and only that side stays dark."

With nowhere bright, the cosmos didn't feel like the cosmos. The way night doesn't. The night sky you look up into with your feet planted on the ground, and the cosmos you see after you've flown past the Earth — to the eye, there probably wouldn't be much difference.

"If you're done looking, how about coming up now?"

"Seeing with my eyes ends here. It starts now."

If sight couldn't tell me the difference, then eyes would only get in the way. I closed them and walked along the tracks laid over the floor. A few times I nearly caught a ridge and went down, but after a little walking I got the rough feel of how to place my feet.

Tap.

A light drop behind me. Dr. Myeong.

An underground space bored straight through. Eyes closed, still, I could feel the air moving. Not quite wind — a soft hand, as if it were sweeping every hair on my body in a single direction. What would it feel like to cut through this space on a train? Inside a sealed car you wouldn't feel the wind. The automobile the Old Man had shown me had no roof. Could a subway be made like that?

Tap.

The foreman joined us.

"Honestly... it's nothing but a tunnel dug under the ground."

"Shh."

Three sets of footsteps filled the space. The Old Man had said it — that in the cosmos, you hear no sound. I'd read in a book that was only half true. Human ears simply couldn't hear it; something like it existed all the same. Waves, or a tide. One of those. So a place where sound came echoing back could be the cosmos just as well.

We walked like that for a long time. Eyes closed. The way you walk in a dream.

"I don't know the reason, but this is a place you absolutely had to come. Isn't it?"

Dr. Myeong's voice was soft.

"Yeah."

"How do you feel?"

How I felt. I still hadn't ridden a train. A feeling — the feeling I had now—

"White."

"We'll be wanting light before long."

I opened my eyes at the foreman's words.

"A blocked stretch is coming up."

"The subway has dead ends too? I thought it just went around and around."

"Some lines loop and some dead-end. Truth is, this stretch shouldn't be blocked yet. Construction's still going on. Well — it was stopped."

I switched the flashlight on. It was as he'd said. The way forked in two, and both branches bore the marks of abandoned work.

"Why was it stopped?"

"How should I know. I do what I'm told. Money, I'd guess."

But the state of the work was nothing alike on the two sides. Past the keep-out marks on one, a tunnel bored clean through still looked mostly whole. The other had only just been started.

"They were restoring that way, gave up, and started boring a bypass?"

"Hm? Ah, this. No. That side's under reconstruction. This side's a new line."

"A new line? Why does a reconstruction need a new line?"

"Because I do what I'm told, I said."

The project was having a hard enough time proceeding as it was, and on top of rebuilding they wanted a new line. And the angle they'd cut was off, now that I looked. They hadn't dug far, but the tunnel was plainly aimed downward.

"Isn't the direction a little strange? No matter how I look at it, it's going down—"

"Postman."

The foreman laid an arm across my shoulder.

"This isn't a place just anyone gets to come. That Jo with the pretty handwriting you mentioned wouldn't know about this either. The only reason I didn't stop you coming this far is that you don't stink."

Twice, with the flat of his hand, he patted my shoulder.

"I'd say finding that key for me has been paid back well enough."

So that was it. This far, and no farther. A shame — but there'd be another chance. Next time, I hoped, the tracks wouldn't be empty.

"Let's head back. There's something I need to collect in a corner of the platform. Once I find it, we leave the station by the old passage. You two are going back to headquarters anyway, aren't you? I'll take you as far as where you can see it."

We went back the way we had followed him. Up on the platform again, the world was still there, in the same shape it had always been.

"Wait here a moment and—"

Thud!

"......Hm."

"You don't put that down quick, your whole workplace is coming apart."

"Wouldn't be the worst thing. Still — I ought to get the two of you outside before I get to work."

I'd been wondering what I'd do if he asked for help. The man had a conscience after all.

"You said taking a boss-class specimen needs a part you have to memorize, right? I'll bring paper and a pen, so I'm counting on you. Over this way—"

Then—

Rattle.

The iron doors had begun to open. Every iron door in the station was coming undone.