At Last, I Can Speak
Weeks slipped by like that, and at last my tongue began to loosen. Lee Haru's steady lessons surely had something to do with it, but the real reason was simpler: I already knew Korean. The whole of the language was sitting in my head. Haru was so appalled by how quickly I picked up Hangul that I started to worry people might mistake me for a genius.
"Ah... ah..."
The days I had suffered without a voice flickered through my mind. Deliverance from that long, stifling humiliation was finally drawing near.
Humanoid life-forms that could speak were not entirely unheard of, so the institute did not turn itself inside out just because I opened my mouth. Once I could manage a few words they did take me somewhere that resembled an interrogation room, but I knew nothing of the world beyond the gate.
"Bora."
"Hm? What is it?"
"I'm hungry."
The moment I said I was hungry, Bora nodded, took me along, and led me off somewhere.
It was a prime patch of ground, flooded with sunlight. Because it lay outside rather than in my room, I had to go with her. Basking in the pour of light, I looked up at Bora standing beside me and said,
"Bora, water."
Ask without the brightest, most sparkling eyes and she was likely to refuse, so I made myself look as pitiful as I possibly could.
"Yeah, yeah."
Bora answered like that and brought me a jug brimming with water. In a way, we were a manager and her celebrity.
Watching her fuss over someone she had no ties to at all, I decided she wasn't the cold-blooded woman our first meeting had suggested. She didn't stay with me all day, but while she trailed after me she zeroed in on anything uncomfortable and took care of it. She was still showing up at the crack of dawn, though, and I resented that for no good reason.
At any rate, now that the words had come, the suffocating bind was gone, and I was grateful for it. How many days had I spent thumping my own chest because nothing I meant could get through?
Even so, I was hiding the fact that I had been human. If anyone learned it, this life of mine obviously wouldn't last. Humanity's first human turned into a monster!? It would be splashed across every newspaper, and then, like the alien people swear is locked in some secret American base, I would be dragged off to the most classified place in Korea and studied to pieces. Before it even came to that, I wasn't sure anyone would believe my story. They would probably write it off as a monster's nonsense and refuse to accept a word.
And so a daily routine took shape. Wake in the morning and receive a thorough massage, spend lunch sprawled in bed watching television, and before sleep in the evening have my hair cut and turn in. They weren't even running experiments, so my free time was generous — generous enough that I wanted to snatch Bora's phone and get on the internet. Give it a little longer, I thought, and they might even hand me a phone of my own. Demanding a computer or a phone outright would look suspicious, so for the moment I was calmly watching which way the wind blew.
All day long Bora taught me the rules and common sense of society. I already knew every bit of it — I was a modern person — but I put on a diligent show of learning.
After soaking up the sun I got bored, so I wandered over to the office on the same floor as my room to play. Lee Haru and Department Head Kim Jaeman were sitting there, buried in their work. There were no other clerical staff around, most likely because I still had to remain a secret.
"Hello!"
"Hi, Haru!"
Lee Haru had noticed me come in and waved a greeting. I lifted a hand and waved back. From beside her, an octopus of a monster leveled a chilling stare at me.
"Hi to you too, Baldy!"
I did what I always did and addressed Department Head Kim Jaeman. He stopped what he was doing, turned a grave look on me, and said,
"Why don't you ever call me by my name?"
"Because you're bald."
"Ack—!"
I sent Kim Jaeman to the bottom with a single line, then wandered here and there. In this room, at least, I was king.
No department had ever been created to take charge of me. In its place, the research division headed by Department Head Kim Jaeman had been brought in to do the job. From what I had overheard, his division had the least clout in the whole institute. He had not come out of a so-called elite university; he had graduated from somewhere else. His credentials fell short, and his record at the company fell short with them.
That was why, the moment they finished assessing my abilities, they had thrown me to this division. For an all-F-rank specimen like me, landing in Kim Jaeman's research department was only natural. The people high up in the institute had probably held a meeting that went something like this.
"This life-form doesn't look useful..."
"Then where do we put it?"
"Just dump it on Department Head Kim Jaeman's division."
No department wanted to research a life-form that looked entirely useless, so the job had been dumped on them like leftover scut work. But after they discovered what my hair could do, everything changed. Inside the institute we were no longer a presence anyone could ignore, and the other departments, having already spoken their piece, did not take it back and ask to have me. Whatever was said behind my back, that was how it looked to my face.
Today, too, I turned the office upside down and played with abandon. Fooling around while everyone else is working never, ever gets old.
While Starlight Green Tea was slamming through the market like a storm, Starlight Food was driving its factories at a furious pace, determined not to let the moment slip. Their existing output was so meager that they had to run the plants all day just to scrape together the delivery quota. Before the tea launched, the factory had been little more than a building dressed up to look like one, so there was no helping it.
Last month the green tea had sold for a hundred won a bag. This month they raised it to three hundred won — triple the price. A box that had cost ten thousand won was now thirty thousand. And yet, to everyone's surprise, consumers raised no furious protest.
If a modern necessity like instant ramen had tripled, the internet would have been wallpapered with curses at the government and at the company that raised the price. Green tea, though, was a matter of taste. You did not have to drink it. If anything, plenty of people let themselves relax, sure that a higher price would mean fewer buyers and less of a scramble than before. The market did not drift along that easily.
Kim Sejin, a true devotee of Starlight Green Tea, showed up a full hour before the store opened so he would not repeat last time's foolish mistake. When he reached the front of the shop, he could only gape.
This can't be real!
A long line had already formed before the place even opened. He was fairly sure the same thing happened when they sold bread stamped with famous anime characters. Looking over the people waiting, though, he could pick out one thing they all had in common. Every one of them was a middle-aged woman with a salon perm, chattering away with the others.
Why are the ladies lining up? Is somebody running a blowout sale on kitchenware?
But Kim Sejin was still in the thick of raising young children, so he had no idea what kind of effect Starlight Green Tea had on students preparing for exams.
"Uh... Mom! I crushed my exam this time!!!"
"I can't believe my boy got a score like this! How did that happen?"
One parent, watching her son's scores leap as if by miracle, threw herself into hunting down the cause. At first she wondered whether he had climbed by some shady or illegal route, but she trusted her boy. And he was not a son hungry enough for points to do a thing like that. She turned it over and over — what had she given him? — and only one answer remained: a single cup of green tea she had brought as a snack while he studied, because she was proud of him.
She herself knew that drinking the tea cleared the mind and sharpened the eyes, but she did not sit exams, so she had not known what results it could bring. If it worked well enough to raise her child's scores like that, though, she was ready to throw her own body on the fire. She was hardly the only parent thinking it. No — every student in Korea who had drunk the tea while preparing for an exam had felt that effect in their bones.
There was no going back to a life without green tea. It heightened concentration, cleared the head, and wiped away fatigue. For studying, it was the ultimate buff. Word of mouth had it that some examinees quietly visited clinics and took psychiatric medication to sharpen their focus, but once this tea appeared, there was no need for any of that. All you had to do was brew a cup and drink. Exams did not screen for doping, and it was legal from start to finish. There was nothing about it that could be a problem.
And so everyone, without distinction, began to buy. A green-tea fever broke out among the parents. Clinical trials had already been completed, confirming there were no side effects. No side effects, and it makes you better at studying? From a parent's seat, that was utterly impossible to resist.
Which was why Kim Sejin, for all that he had come a full hour early today, found himself staring down a line that stretched on and on.