Management Division Team 3, Rookie Manager (1)
Huh... was I dreaming?
I didn't have much choice but to think so. I was sitting in an office I had never seen before, and not just any office — one that was staggeringly large and fine. My eyes were happy enough, but the feeling of being somewhere I had no business being sat heavy on me. It was like taking a seat in an upscale hotel restaurant with a dress code, wearing a T-shirt whose collar had stretched until the thing was fit for nothing but sleep or a rag, bathroom slippers on my feet.
It had to be a dream. Something like a hologram was drifting over the table. Obviously a dream. Strange, though. I hadn't been watching that many science-fiction movies lately. Why was I dreaming this?
Oh. There were clouds outside the window.
The office was as wide as a schoolyard, one entire wall given over to glass, and clouds were sliding past beyond it. The view was exactly what you got looking down from an airplane... Were those real clouds, or footage? If they were real, what floor was this place even on? Then again, if this was the kind of world where technology had run away with itself, the office itself might have been in the air.
I was dying to check, and I couldn't. That was the second reason I believed this was a dream. My body was moving like a marionette, clean out of my control — my head turning on its own for a look at the clouds, then at the watch on my wrist.
"Hmm... It's getting on toward two."
My mouth moved by itself, and it even spoke. I couldn't steer any of it, but the senses came through with perfect clarity. Sight. Hearing. Smell. The feel of skin. Taste I wasn't certain of, though swallowing left a stale film on my tongue, so that seemed to be working too.
A chill crept up my spine. So this was a lucid dream.
"You're right. Representative Jung, if you're ready, shall we get the interview started?"
A smooth, easy voice. My head turned. I was looking at the woman seated across from me.
She looked to be in her mid-forties. From the voice alone I had pictured someone soft and kindly, and she was nothing of the sort — bright blonde hair cut short, eye makeup drawn to a sharp point over fine wrinkles, a fastidious, haughty air about her. The finishing touch was a mouth painted black as ink. Black lipstick? Peculiar taste. And had I seen this woman somewhere before? People said the faces that turned up in dreams were assembled from faces you'd seen in waking life.
"Of course."
My mouth moved again.
"But what brings you all the way out here yourself, Bureau Chief Park?"
"It's an exclusive with Representative Jung. Of course I had to come in person. You'll spare us a little more of your time that way, won't you? We're close enough for that."
"Haha, of course we are. Will you be conducting the interview yourself, Bureau Chief?"
"Reporter Song will handle the interview. I'll just chime in here and there. I already know your story as well as anyone could, Representative Jung, so I think a younger colleague, with none of the fixed ideas, will do a better job of drawing something new out of you."
Only then did I notice the young woman sitting beside Bureau Chief Park. A striking mixed-race beauty, several lineages written across one small face, and a figure to match. Even so, the bureau chief's presence was so overwhelming that the eye hardly went to her.
"Introduce yourself, Reporter Song."
"Yes! Hello, Representative Jung. I'm Song Song."
For this one moment, I was grateful. If I had been in control of my body, I might have laughed.
"Reporter Song. It's a pleasure to meet you."
My body went on for a few lines more with the mixed-race beauty and her unusual name. There wasn't a single thing I could do as I pleased, so I listened closely to the conversation and took in everything in sight. It was my first lucid dream, and all of it felt new.
The eyes that had been on Reporter Song moved. A screen flicked past — a monitor, maybe, computer or television — and on its glossy black surface a face rose up. It lasted only an instant, but I saw it clearly. The face was mine, aged by about twenty years.
No wonder the talk with Bureau Chief Park, a woman well into middle age, had felt so easy.
My body moved again. This time I looked down and straightened my clothes. A classic suit of the sort a gentleman spy operating out of England might wear. A necktie. A leather watch fitted close around the wrist. I didn't know luxury brands, but even I could tell none of it was cheap.
So I make some money, do I?
And judging by the way a journalist ranked as high as bureau chief kept smoothing my feathers — Representative Jung this, Representative Jung that — I had done well for myself socially, too. They said dreams were the unconscious showing its face... Thank God I was the only one dreaming this. If anyone else found out, I'd be kicking the blankets in shame.
"Well, then..."
Reporter Song began the interview, nerves written all over her.
"When people speak of Representative Jung Sunwoo, the success story is impossible to leave out. You started at the very bottom, and after falling seven times and rising eight, you became the head of a global management company. You began your career at W&U — do you remember your first day?"
"Of course. It was a long time ago, but that day is still vivid. I couldn't sleep the night before my first day, just tossing and turning, when a call came out of nowhere telling me to be at the company by four in the morning. I didn't sleep a wink. I got a ride in my brother's car and went straight in."
"And how was your first day as a working adult?"
"Ah, that day was truly a whirlwind."
"In what way?"
"Right up until I applied to the Management Division, I was certain I'd be put in charge of actors. I'd always loved film and television, and my dream was to raise a world-class actor with my own hands. I pushed that hard in the interview, too, and yet..."
And yet?
"When I actually showed up for work, I'd been assigned to a girl group in their second year since debut."
Well, how about that.
Had the stress of my first day gotten to me that badly? Was that why I was having this dream?
In reality, I had interviewed at W&U, received word that I'd passed, and was on the verge of my first day. Wanting to manage actors was true as well. I had applied to W&U in the first place because its pool of actors was broad and solid. Among them were more than a few top stars carrying titles like Chungmuro box-office guarantee and Hallyu star, and even actors who had broken into Hollywood, if only in small roles.
From the moment W&U told me I'd been accepted, hope and worry over which actor I might be assigned to had kept me up at night. And now, out of nowhere, a girl group?
I didn't know the name, but I knew W&U had one. Since its founding the company had handled nothing but actors, then expanded into idol production a few years back, or so I'd heard. People called the idol industry a red ocean, but once you actually managed to launch someone, the margins were good.
Their first project had been an eleven-member boy group that — as if the boys had saved the nation in a past life — exploded the moment their debut album dropped. The W&U articles called them monster rookies, a cash-cow group that swept every rookie award there was to sweep that year. The group's name was hazy, but I remembered the nickname. Elementary schoolers went wild for them, so they were the Elementary School President. The year they debuted they recouped the investment, swung into the black, and raked the money in by the fistful.
Buoyed by that success, W&U poured what those boys had earned straight back into the business, built an in-house system for raising idols in earnest, and put a new girl group on the market. That was as far as my knowledge went. The W&U pieces I'd read hadn't had much to say about the girl group, so they'd probably flopped. I hadn't cared enough to look any further. I was going to handle actors, not a girl group.
"So that's where your connection with Neptune began, Representative Jung."
Neptune?
The name called up Sailor Neptune, one of the magical-girl warriors from that TV cartoon that had been everywhere for a while.
"You must have been quite thrown at the time."
"The moment I heard, I thought I was finished. And in the end, I was. From my very first day, I was completely marked."
"Marked?"
"I was brand new to working life back then, and I'm sure it showed all over my face that I hated the assignment. There was no way that first impression was a good one. Looking back, that was when the door to hardship swung wide open. People call my life a story of falling seven times and rising eight, but if I just hadn't fastened that first button in the wrong hole, I don't think I would have fallen quite so far."
"...Hey. Sunwoo!"
My head was heavy and my chest was tight, the feeling of someone who had been underwater a long time and only just broken the surface. I looked down. A seatbelt was crushing my chest. I undid it and coughed, and the person beside me patted my shoulder.
Who? Ah — my brother. Thick horn-rimmed glasses, a plain face. It was him. I looked around, and the vast, splendid office was gone without a trace. I was in his car.
"What?"
"What do you mean, what. We're here. A guy on his first day of work needs to snap to it. Don't go spacing out in front of your seniors, either. I don't know much about managers, but whatever the job, a rookie has to be sharp."
"I wasn't spacing out. I must have dozed off."
"Dozed off? You were talking to me ten seconds ago. Your eyes were open."
What?
"What are you talking about. I even had a dream."
"You fell asleep in ten seconds and had a whole dream?"
My brother scoffed. Thinking it over, so did I.
But I had definitely dreamed. A lucid dream, at that, and what I'd seen and heard was still vivid — the enormous office, an older version of myself, Bureau Chief Park, Reporter Song, even the name of that second-year girl group, Neptune. And I'd been talking perfectly normally until ten seconds ago? I didn't have narcolepsy. Was it even possible to drop off that suddenly? Stranger things, apparently.
"I must have passed out from being tired... And it was a seriously weird dream."
"What dream?"
"I was the head of a management company."
"That's a lucky dream!"
"No. That was the only good part. I was giving an interview, talking about the old days, and it was enough to leave me speechless... I showed up for my first day at W&U and got assigned not to actors but to a second-year girl group. Then a senior marked me, and the door to hardship opened... Ah, hell. What a garbage dream."
My brother let out a deflating little laugh.
"A girl group? That doesn't sound bad. Could be fun."
"Fun. What's fun about it."
"You're good with kids. Wouldn't it be kind of the same?"
"What kind of nonsense is that. And I don't want to be an idol manager."
It wasn't that I disliked idols. Girl groups were great — pretty, cute, sexy. What wasn't there to like. But I didn't want the job of managing them. Becoming the person who raised idols felt like becoming one part in a giant factory system, and idols were the standardized products that factory stamped out. Actors, by contrast, felt like handmade work I would shape with my own hands. Whether the public granted them any artistic recognition or not, each one would be a piece that existed nowhere else in the world. Only my personal opinion, of course.
"While you're at it, I hope you get an actress you actually like. Good luck."
"Please."
I checked my watch and opened the car door.
"I'm heading in. First day — I should get there early and get a read on things."
"All right. Call me when you're done. Drinks tonight?"
He mimed tipping back a glass, and I asked him, "What time is it?"
"Dawn... three-thirty?"
"Clocking in at this hour on day one. You really think I'll get off on time?"
My brother and I laughed, easy with each other.
Outside it was still pitch-dark. A sullen sky with neither starlight nor moonlight, as if heavy cloud had settled over it, and sunrise was a long way off. I'd known this business paid no mind to when you came in or when you left, but I hadn't expected my very first day to start before dawn.
"Anyway, I'll call if I can. Thanks for the ride, hyung."
"Yeah. Hwaiting!"
The moment I stepped out of the car, the cold, heavy air of dawn snapped my head clear.
I stretched, and walked into the forest of buildings in Cheongdam-dong.