The Talent Pipe Space (1)
Life is shit.
The world is shit.
What I mean is — the world is bitterly unfair, and cruel on top of it.
"Especially to a human like me."
At a crosswalk spanning eight lanes, I found myself swallowed up in the evening crowd of clocked-out workers, sinking into gloomy thoughts. Thirty-four years old, office worker at a mid-tier company, no particular talent to speak of. My entire life summed up in one short line.
...I was doing pretty well back in school, though. When exactly did things go so wrong?
By the time I came to my senses, my life had been tangled up like this for a long time. It felt like being stuck in a swamp — no matter how hard I flailed, the world never threw me even the smallest scrap of hope.
♬~
A massive billboard atop a nearby high-rise was playing an ad for some newly released blockbuster. The lead actors sat through an interview, waxing optimistic about the film's future prospects.
If only I'd been born with talent like theirs...
Stunning looks, brilliant acting. They seemed to glitter even through the screen. Sure, they'd probably ground their bones to dust suffering through years of hardship to get where they were now. But the harsh reality was that without talent, most people never even dared to dream of the starting line.
"Haaah..."
A sigh escaped me, carrying off the resentment and inferiority complex that had quietly been boiling over. Honestly, you didn't have to be an actor — there were endless ways to make it big. And in modern society especially, people were constantly forging their own paths through the strangest means imaginable. Not that I, like the vast majority of people, had a single talent suited to any of them.
"It's like a life built solely to suffer."
I muttered the famous line from some movie or other under my breath. Not a single word of it was wrong. I'd honestly rather be dead.
Whoosh! Whooosh—!
Cars tore past with a rough wind in their wake. They knew exactly how many minutes a single red light would cost them, and they sped along without mercy. The darkening dusk of rush hour made the glare of their headlights burn all the sharper.
"Ugh... it's cold."
Tap!
Green light. The signal that had felt unbearably long today finally flipped to green.
Get home, shower first... was there chicken left in the fridge? The leftovers...
"!$!^%#"
I was trudging across the crosswalk, head down, forcing myself to think positive thoughts, when the area around me suddenly erupted into commotion. Behind me, to be precise.
"What's wrong with that guy?"
"No idea. Must be some kind of nutjob."
"Honestly. Talk about impatient. Huh? Hey! You! That's danger—!"
Something about the way they were muttering and glancing in my direction made me turn around. There they were — pedestrians staring at me with bewildered faces. Alongside the red light, blinking insistently, warning me not to cross.
It was definitely green just now. Did I see it wrong?
Misreading a color when I wasn't even colorblind — I must have been more exhausted than I thought. Embarrassment and panic set my ears and the back of my neck ablaze. Either way, I couldn't just stand there, so the moment I turned back to retrace my steps—
Screeeech... WHAM!
With a bizarre sensation of weightlessness, my vision spun in circles. When I clawed back my lost consciousness a heartbeat later, the only thing before my eyes was hard, black asphalt. Red paint was pooling in the cracks of neglected, crumbling pavement.
"KYAAAAAH!"
"Call 112! No — 119! Somebody call 119!"
"Ugh... blegh!"
My whole body hurt like it had been shattered to pieces.
"What is... kgh!"
I opened my mouth to say something — and a shocking crimson tide of blood came surging up along with unidentifiable shreds of flesh. Something inside me must have ruptured; the sheer volume of it gurgling up was anything but normal. Something had gone very, very wrong.
"Hey! Stay with me! No, no — you're losing too much blood...!"
"What do we do... what do we do..."
Hkk—
Barely ten seconds had passed since the accident, by my best guess. And already the agonizing pain was fading, my senses dulling at the edges. An unmistakable red flag. I knew intuitively that the time I'd been allotted was almost gone.
Ah... not that I actually wanted to die, though.
A bitter laugh slipped out at the thought. Ten minutes ago I'd been wishing for death, and now that it had actually come calling, look at me. What an undignified way to go.
If I'd known it would end like this... I would have at least tried something.
What flashes through a person's mind in their final moments? Unfulfilled dreams. The food you always wanted to try. Family. Any number of things, I supposed. But comically enough, the last image my oxygen-starved brain conjured up was that rookie from the office — the guy who'd stormed out declaring he was going to become a YouTuber now that his subscriber count was finally climbing.
I laughed at him back then, called him an idiot... but at the very least, that guy found his talent, didn't he?
Granted, the odds of him failing were far higher than the odds of success. He might even curse his own recklessness when that day came. But the possibilities spread out before him weren't zero. Not zero.
Heh. Funny, that.
Take the college entrance exam. Get into a university. Land some forgettable office job. A daily grind spinning like a hamster wheel, and nowhere in it a single shred of meaning — just the base instinct of a creature scrambling to survive. I'd had plenty of excuses. Too busy making ends meet. Stability mattered. The whispers of everyone around me were too much to bear. But facing death, I finally understood that every last one of them was, quite literally, just an excuse. If only, even once, I had found something I actually wanted to do and reached for it.
In the life flashing before my eyes like a carousel, I could see every chance I'd let slip away, wasted. A future I would never, ever get to see now.
"If only I could have one more chance—!"
"Ghhkk... rrk..."
The desperate wish of a lifetime. But reality wasn't a novel, and no dramatic miracle was coming to save me. My consciousness dimmed. My hands and feet went cold, and I could feel the life that had once filled my body draining out of it.
So there are no miracles after all.
With the faint, belated wail of a siren swelling in the distance — the last thing I would ever hear —
I died.
Or so it should have been.
"...Where am I?"
I'd surrendered to an irresistible drowsiness mere seconds ago. Yet somehow, when my mind sharpened and my eyes fluttered open, I was standing in an unfamiliar space. A darkness like a night sky smothered in storm clouds. Squinting, I leaned on the faint glow shimmering in the far distance.
Pipes?
Filling that vast expanse — no walls anywhere in sight — were slender pipes of metal. They branched out thinly like blood vessels, as if I'd stumbled into the guts of some mechanical beast, and every now and then scalding steam would hiss from a fissure, hot enough to raise blisters on contact.
"Hot?"
Only then did I realize my body still existed. The suit and coat I'd been wearing at the moment of death, shoes included — not a single thing felt off. It all hung together as if it were still one seamless whole.
Suuuh
"!"
I reached out to touch myself on a hunch — and, infuriatingly, my hand passed straight through my own torso. A mystery no stage magic could ever replicate. And with that, I was finally able to let go of a small, stubborn hope.
So I really am dead.
Was this the afterlife? If so, the right move was to sit tight and wait for the next step. Who knew what kind of penalty I'd draw for making a bad impression. With a strangely corporate-minded caution, I lowered myself onto the hard floor and waited.
But.
"...Nobody's coming."
No matter how long I waited, no guide ever arrived to collect me. There were no clocks, so I couldn't say for certain, but a fair amount of time seemed to have slipped by.
Fine. Time to move.
I couldn't sit waiting here forever. In the end, with feet I had to drag along, I started toward the point where all those scattered pipes seemed to converge — which, by happy coincidence, was also the only direction in this dark world where any light shown.
Tong— Tong—
Apparently even this incomprehensible world had its own physical laws. With every step, a hollow resonance rang out from the empty pipes. In a place where the only sounds were this regular, monotonous hum, my footsteps made for a rather conspicuous presence.
Somebody, anybody, come out already.
At first, with my footsteps echoing like I was broadcasting my location to the whole world, I moved cautiously. But as time wore on, I grew bolder — because no matter how far I walked, that distant light refused to get any closer. The distance was far greater than I'd imagined. I ended up moving at something close to a dead run.
"Whew... finally made it. At least I'm not out of breath — small mercies."
I had no idea how much time had passed. By the time I was honestly starting to worry I might have to live out eternity down here, I at last reached my destination: the only shining spot in this entire dark expanse. And sitting there was something I never could have predicted.
"A... monitor??"
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. It was a monitor. And not some alien contraption, either — a perfectly ordinary model you'd find in any living room, sitting all alone and glowing with light from who knew where. The only odd thing was that the pipes converging on this spot were all connected to it, as if feeding it power.
Why on earth is something like this here...
Drawing closer, I could tell it was still running. Bright, unreadable machine code was whipping across the luminous screen at blistering speed. But encountering something familiar in a space so utterly alien stirred an unexpected warmth in me, too.
Vvvmmm...
A low, soothing hum of machinery. "I don't know what any of this is," I murmured, "but I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to use this thing." The single clue to be found in a vast void of nothing but pipes. If there was any device that could get me out of this incomprehensible place, it had to be this one.
Suspicious objects like this were never meant to be touched, I knew that much... but hey, I was already dead. What was the worst that could happen? Thirty-four years of life had taught me, painfully, that safe choices yield nothing but safe, forgettable results.
I stepped closer to the monitor. One meter remaining—
Krrr-ik—
"Huh?"
As I closed the distance, a chair and a mouse materialized with an unsettling metallic scrape. An unmistakable gesture: please, sit down and use me. For a moment the whole thing felt like a pitcher plant luring in an insect, and a chill ran through me at that artless, defenseless pose. But anticipation held a bigger stake in my heart than unease did, and at last, I made my choice.
"Let's see here... ngh!"
The instant I sat down and gripped the mouse, a prickling current of static swept through my whole body. The hazy screen snapped into focus, and the alien machine code began transforming, line by line, into Hangul. And in that same moment, I felt it in my bones: I was now linked to this monitor. Heart pounding with anticipation, I waited calmly for the process to finish.
Brrriiing—
A short moment passed, and with a cheerful little chime, every word on the screen resolved into Korean. And there, sitting proudly at the very top, was a word I knew all too well.
Talent
"...Talent?"
Beneath it stretched an endless list, so long that no amount of scrolling revealed its end. Regeneration, Eloquence, Animal Affinity, Mental Focus, Composure, Contamination Resistance, Body Manipulation — even at a glance, the contents of that list were anything but ordinary.
This is...
A brain hardened by every subculture imaginable snapped taut and began churning out scenarios at full speed. And the conclusion it arrived at was—
Don't tell me this place decides your next life? And you can just... pick whatever talents you want?
I had no idea why such luck had landed on someone who'd lived less than an ordinary life. An event with zero narrative logic behind it. But I wasn't about to let the opportunity slip away. Suppressing my pounding heart and steadying my trembling hand, I began operating the mouse with painstaking care.