The Eye

Day two of the rest period.

Today, I suspected, was the last of it. From tomorrow I would be busy again, and times like these were exactly when time ought to be wasted with the greatest care.

Somehow, yesterday hadn't felt like a wasted day.

So today I needed to waste one properly. Indulge. Set a mood. The very luxury that had been the Old Man's hobby for years.

In truth, the Old Man had never once used the word luxury. He always called it setting the mood. It was Hee-ju who told me that was luxury, and I took to calling it luxury myself, mostly because the word was half as long.

The heart of luxury is waste.

It doesn't have to be utterly useless, but it isn't luxury until far too many resources have been burned through. And naturally, the more precious the resource you waste, the finer the luxury.

So what counted as precious? Ammunition? Important, but hardly of this class. Cores? Precious enough, depending on the kind. The truly precious resource, though, was something else.

Time.

Wasting time is luxury at its limit. Time is the resource underneath every other thing, which is why I enjoy wasting it. Want a full stomach? Finding food takes time, and eating it takes more. Want to sleep? A safe bed is not enough on its own. Sleep is only finished once a great deal of time has been spent on it.

Then maybe I'll take a walk.

What useless thing would I run into today? I was looking forward to it.

The crack in the everyday was in Building Y, on the third-floor corridor. It began when I found a door that hadn't quite shut. That gap, just wide enough to see inside, was the true crack.

A CCTV control room?

Which meant don't come in. Still, a glance seemed reasonable enough, if only so I could mention that the door was ajar.

Nothing much.

Screens crowded the room, and a man sat in a chair. Whatever they showed had to be a live feed from the cameras. Cameras aren't common objects, so you don't see them often. Of the places I knew, only Jo Yong-han's office had any. It wasn't a particularly interesting view in any case, and the distance kept the screens from offering much detail. I ought to tell him to close the crack.

"Hey. The door isn't shut properly."

"Whoa—!"

He nearly toppled out of the chair and only just caught his balance. He looked a few years younger than me, and his nose was bright red. Had he been drinking?

"Ah, that was close. Thanks."

He came to the door and bowed. Up close, the redness was the mark of physical irritation.

"A cold?"

"Huh? Out of nowhere?"

"Your nose is red."

"Ack!"

He hurried back to his seat and shoved his face up against a dead screen. As if a black screen would show him anything.

"Oh. It really is."

It did.

"Ha... Has it been like this the whole time? Those bastards. Not one of them said a word."

"You just live with a cold, then."

"Well... sort of."

Colds are miserable. Not serious enough to take to a doctor, and yet sometimes the first sign of something truly grave. They say that in the old era a doctor would even look at a runny nose. What a beautifully wasteful world that must have been. These days, if you want a doctor for the symptoms of a cold, you have to perform as though you've caught some much greater illness. It almost never works. Spotting a fake, you might say, is a doctor's basic qualification, and in that one skill today's doctors are said to outclass the old era's.

"I haven't seen your face. You work in this building?"

"Just visiting."

"Visiting...?"

"It's my day off."

"Your job?"

"Postman."

"Ah. The rest period. Why wander around instead of lying down?"

The whole time he talked, his eyes never left the black screen. I stayed outside the door the whole time, too.

"Lying down isn't a hobby of mine."

"That counts as a hobby? Well, I've got a peculiar one myself... Anyway. So wandering around inside headquarters is your hobby?"

"Something like that."

"What's fun about it?"

Idle talk like this doesn't come easily. He must have been bored as well. I wasn't sure he would understand, but I gave him a rough account of how I spend a rest period.

"You're a funny one. I like you. Come in."

"It says concerned parties only."

"We've been talking this whole time, haven't we? That makes you a concerned party."

"Sloppy work."

"Think about it. You even caught a change in the operator's physical condition. That's plenty. Get in here!"

The door swung wide. The crack in the everyday split open.

Click.

Once I was inside, he locked up with great care. I could have studied the wall of screens in detail now, but I kept my eyes off them on purpose. It was the most interesting part, and still—committing even a petty illegality—

"You can look. They aren't showing any private spaces."

"Hm."

"I'm serious. Look, and you'll see why I said it was fine."

A sidelong glance proved him right. Unlike Jo Yong-han's office, not one screen showed a private room. Every one of them was a public space inside headquarters.

"You'd know where all of these are, right? You said wandering headquarters was your hobby."

"...I know every one of them."

The plaza, the cafeteria, the shop. Nothing but places anyone could walk into.

"However much of a mess I make of the job, if this were a place that could see real private spaces, I wouldn't have let you in."

A surprising fact. CCTV cameras were not supposed to be common things.

"Surprising in a different sense."

"Ah, you mean the fact that even places like these are all being filmed and watched? Yeah. I can see that. It's classified, in its way. Grade 6 classified."

"Doesn't it end at Grade 3?"

"That's why I said Grade 6. Still, you won't go around talking about it, right?"

"They hid the cameras well. I had no idea."

In Jo Yong-han's office the cameras had announced themselves openly. By everything I had known until now, that was how it was supposed to be.

"They say hiding CCTV cameras was common in the old era."

"What do they even use footage of public places for?"

"That far, even I don't really know."

What the screens showed was perfectly ordinary life. Run to one of those places now, and I could have confirmed it all far more clearly than this.

"Requests come in now and then, asking for the footage to be sent over, so it seems to have a use."

"So you watch this without knowing why."

"My job isn't to see what's being filmed. It's to confirm that it's being filmed properly. Sometimes the focus goes, or the thing dies outright. See that?"

The black screen he had been using in place of a mirror.

"When it gets like that, reporting it at once is my job. Anyway. The CCTV cameras you usually know about are like that one, right?"

In the corner of the ceiling he indicated hung the same object that had been in Jo Yong-han's office. Wait. Was this all right?

"That camera isn't filming me right now, is it?"

"Perfectly fine. An acquaintance of mine is the one watching. They won't even ask who you are, and if they do, I can patch it up easy!"

The fact that the patch would so obviously be a sloppy one was exactly what worried me.

"Funny, a place that does the watching being watched itself."

"You could say every place in headquarters has an eye. Only the grade of the eye differs a little."

"The eye watching this room must be a higher grade."

"Right. When someone requests the material, I put the footage on a storage medium and hand it over. But that one, they say, shoots it out by radio wave. Real-time transmission, or whatever they called it. Oh—was it a live broadcast?"

"That's possible?"

"The range is narrow, though. Forget outside headquarters. They said it doesn't even work past two hundred meters."

"Useless."

"Top-grade technology, for people who don't feel like walking."

Which is why headquarters has its share of men with bellies. Anyway, I had a rough sense of what kind of workplace this was.

"The heart of the job must be fighting off sleep."

"Exactly."

He sat. There was only one chair.

"Lately it's manageable, though. Nothing to make me drowsy... Hrrk!"

The towel in front of him was for blowing his nose. I had no desire whatsoever to touch it. Blow it like that, and of course the nose goes red.

"Look at that."

"The plaza?"

"That woman. There."

The camera was aimed at the very plaza where yesterday's performance had been. A woman sat wedged into a corner of the frame, on a plaza bench, looking at something in her hands. The picture was only clear enough to mark her as a woman because of the long hair.

"A woman sitting and resting?"

"That's her working. She's handling business on the terminal in her hand."

"Official work outdoors, on a machine. High-class personnel."

"Yeah. A truly high-class person."

"So the reason you aren't sleepy is that you're busy being a peeping pervert?"

"Hey now! I'll have you know that where that person is concerned, I am a concerned party."

"Becoming a concerned party of yours takes no effort at all."

"With that woman, I really am."

He looked so wronged that this time it might actually be true.

"Family?"

"Looser than that, wouldn't you say?"

"What—a friend, a lover, that sort of thing?"

"Close."

"I'm only asking just in case. She does consider you a concerned party too, yes?"

"Have you spent your whole life being fooled?"

"Look at this mess. Everyone's living fooled."

"Hm! Can't deny it."

The whole time, his gaze never left the woman. His eyes seemed to be reddening a little as well. Don't tell me this guy...

"Not a cold. You've been wringing out tears?"

"Would you say my feelings were overflowing?"

"What's overflowing is bullshit. An old lover, or something of the sort."

"That's harsh! She isn't an old lover yet, all right? And she isn't going to be!"

Only then did he properly lay the relationship out. She was, just as he had said, a woman he was connected to—not an old lover, but a current one. After a tremendous fight, they were taking some time.

"Doesn't change the fact that you're in the middle of peeping."

"I'm worried about how she's getting on, is all..."

"Not about whether another man has turned up?"

"That would neeever happen!"

"Ah. Of course."

He looked ready to be sucked into the screen. And sure enough, as time passed, his neck crept farther and farther forward. I had seen what there was to see. Maybe it was time to leave.

"Then enjoy the rest of the peeping. I'll be—"

"You know what?"

"Yeah, I know. So I'll be—"

"In the old era, there was a thing they called by our word for eye."

"We've been talking about cameras this whole time."

"Completely different from that. The fashion back then, they say, was to put it in English."

The old era had used English more familiarly than we do. Our word for eye, then, in English—

"Eye?"

"What's that?"

"Snow, then?"

"And what's that supposed to be?"

"You said they expressed the word for eye in English."

"The word for eye, in English, is SNS."

"And what on earth is that?"

"Even now, the high-class personnel still use those old-era things called keyboards, right? Set one so the keys come out in English, type our word for eye, and what you get is SNS."

There had been a way of using English like that, had there.

"The meaning lines up with eye, too. It's for watching. Peeping, that is."

SNS. I felt as if I had glimpsed the thing in a book once.

"In some ways it was worse than CCTV. It showed what doesn't appear on the outside. Inner thoughts, that sort of thing."

Nonsense.

"You thought it didn't make sense, didn't you? It does. SNS was a place where people exposed themselves. Of their own accord."

"Exhibitionism, then?"

"Something like it, I'd say. That's why you could spy on inner thoughts, too. They published them themselves."

Well, if like understood like, then fine. So long as no one was harmed.

"If something like that existed now, everyone would do it, right? It's not just me thinking so?"

"You would, certainly. You spy this hard even when no one volunteers to show you a thing."

"That's not all I'm talking ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠about! The wish to be seen!"

"Exhibitionism?"

"The sound of that is a little off. Anyway, everyone has that feeling of wanting to let other people see just a little. Too hard to say out loud, so you set it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠down and hope someone peeks."

"Hm."

"Well!?"

"I'm not really sure."

"Tsk. Can't be honest."

I really wasn't sure. That didn't mean I thought people like that were strange. I understood what he was saying. But it was talk for people who live alongside others, with those others in mind. It had nothing to do with me.

"Look. I can watch her from here, but do you think that's going to satisfy me?"

"Then what more do you want?"

"I want to show her, too. How I live."

"And what's the matter with the way you're living now?"

"Whether something's the matter isn't the point! I just want to show her the way I am right now. I want to make her aware of me."

"Then go loiter in front of her."

"She'd be able to tell!"

Selective exhibitionism, or something of the kind. Well, it had been a decent look around.

"It was fun, in its way."

"Huh? What was?"

"This place."

"You find the oddest things fun."

"I'd never seen it before. All this nonsense."

"Hm. Fair... Now and then they install a new camera, and a screen I've never seen comes up, and that one screen is absurdly fun. I understand."

He still couldn't take his eyes off the screen.

Clack.

When I opened the door, only then did he look my way and wave.

Click.

The crack closed.

Stepping out of Building Y, I found myself curious.

What sort of person was the woman he had been watching?

She had seemed to stay in the plaza, and the plaza happened to sit right in front of Building Y. Going to look myself probably wouldn't tell me anything. The curiosity, all the same, couldn't be helped.

Had the voyeurism rubbed off?

No. I would only be looking at someone sitting openly in a public place. An implicit agreement that looking was allowed, you might say. SNS, in other words.

She was on a plaza bench, not far off, a terminal in her hands. According to the man, that meant she was working. Peeking at the work itself would feel like real voyeurism, so perhaps I would only take the atmosphere. Long hair with a gloss to it. Neat clothes. An ease of a different grain from Teacher Myeong's—restraint, rather than splendor. I could roughly see the eye he had been looking with. Atmosphere confirmed.

Time to go, then—

"...Hkk."

Hm.

Now that I looked, her nose was red too. Was hers an actual cold?

Just once.

I wasn't sure this counted as a minor offense either, but she was in a public place. Call it being shown to me, rather than peeking.

What was she looking at? I slipped past behind the bench and checked the screen of her terminal.

Hm.

The man's words came back.

Her terminal was showing the very place I had been in until a moment ago. The back of the man in the chair. That same posture, as if the screen might swallow him.

The most inefficient way of looking at each other.

If this wasn't luxury, nothing was.