Beacon of Light in the Dark Sea

Lee Jihyun frowned as she spoke.  

“If we don’t take the escape pod, we’ll have to use the diving subs, mining robots, or elevators, but no matter where we go – North District, Central District, or East District – we have to go through Central District.”

What if we get unlucky and get shot if we go into the Central District right now? Am I being too scared? The gunfight might not even happen. People could still resolve this through talking. There’s no need to resort to violence like in dreams to forcibly tip the situation in our favor. Humans have good means of communication.  

And I don’t know how much time has passed, but we might have spent less time in the South District residence than we thought. So compared to when the gunfight happens, we might have a buffer of 10 or 20 minutes.

Just then, a sound came from afar. Bang bang bang. Very faint, like peas popping. I didn’t know what it was at first in my dream, but hearing it again now, I realize – they were gunshots. Very distant gunshots.  

Like a gazelle sensing the approach of a predator, Lee Jihyun lifted her head to look down the long corridor connecting South District and Central District. There was no one at the end of the corridor. The sound was probably echoing in this huge space, so it seemed to be coming from further than it really was. Lee Jihyun looked at me with tense eyes. She quickly asked Kim Ga-young, who was writing this post:  

“Noona, can you open the South District research center? I heard it was closed off.”

“What? No no. I don’t have the authority to shut down the entire research center, let alone open it up. I can barely open and close the door to my own lab.”  

Lee Jihyun fell silent in thought as she looked at the sealed off entrance to South District. Finally, she asked me:  

“We probably can’t make it out of the crossfire alive if we go to the Central District now. To get to the East District, we have to go through the Central District. And blockading the corridor between Central District and South District might buy us some time, but I wonder how long we can last in the South District.”  

Lee Jihyun gave a bitter smile as she looked at me, Yoo Geum, and Kim Ga-young. Yoo Geum-yi asked her:  

“Then what should we do?”

“Go where we don’t want to go.”

Lee Jihyun took out a tablet from her small backpack. Come to think of it, I’d never seen her take out her electronic tablet before. She entered the passcode 000000 – not very secure – and logged in to unlock the screen. Just as I was thinking that, a scream came from afar. Tablet in hand, Lee Jihyun strode towards the South District research center silently like a tiger. We scrambled up to follow behind her.  

“I was wondering why the team leader gave me this before getting on the escape pod. At first, I thought this tablet belonged to our new team leader. But then I remembered the team leader left his tablet in his room when he went out. Yet when I walked by that asshole Michael in the elevator, I noticed he had a tablet I hadn’t seen with the team leader before.”  

Lee Jihyun swiftly accessed the underwater base’s engineer system on the tablet, touched the barricade blocking off South District on the screen, and said:  

[Open blocked barricade?]  

“It occurred to me that this might be Michael’s tablet, the chief engineer of the underwater base.”  

I pressed [Yes]. The barricade, which looked to be as thick as an arm, automatically opened. It’s concrete, right? I thought it would be as thin as a fire door. The South District research center was revealed, but Kim Ga-young looked uneasy as she said to Lee Jihyun while watching her head towards it:  

“I don’t know who blocked off the research center and South District, but they probably did it because things are chaotic over there too.”  

“That’s very possible.”  

Lee Jihyun agreed with Kim Ga-young’s speculation. However, I looked towards the Central District where screams and gunshots were heard, then said as I stepped past the barricade: Having experienced the nightmare of being caught in a hail of bullets in my dream, I know full well how terrifying that situation is. As the gunshots grew closer, I could feel my body tensing up in fear.

“I don’t want to get shot in the back of the head, which feels like it could happen any minute.”  

Yoo Geum-yi hurried inside the barricade and said:

“We might run into people we know. People who didn’t make it onto the escape pods. And we know our way around here.”

Kim Ga-young heaved a deep sigh as she came in.

“Or things that didn’t escape. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the research center freight elevator still works.”

Lee Jihyun swiftly closed the barricade again. From outside, the screams and gunshots sounded closer and closer until the barricade sealed shut completely, disappearing the noises.

It was my first time inside the South District research center. The atmosphere felt a bit odd. Even though I’d been at Underwater Base No. 4 for days, the fact that such a huge research facility was built underwater in the first place made me feel strange. There was a stale smell hanging in the air.  

It was completely different from the air when I first arrived at the underwater base, which gave me that unsettling feeling of things being off. It was like stepping into an artificially engineered human habitat like an airplane or hospital ward. Like I was being incorporated into a new ecosystem, like a terrarium, aquarium or dollhouse. Lee Jihyun flicked the “Deep Sea Life Center” sign on the wall with her index finger.

Back when sea levels were rising due to climate change and food shortages were rampant, there were talks of developing the seafloor like space exploration. But seafloor development was deemed more costly and environmentally hazardous with greater ocean pollution, so more support went towards space exploration and development.  

Later it was discovered that space exploration allowed developed countries to pool their abundant funds and technological capabilities to form their own exclusive league, shutting out other less advanced nations.   

Personally, I just think if that technology was shared with the whole world, there would have been even greater progress in space development compared to now… Am I being too naive? Even now, they’re still hung up over “my technology” and “your technology”?

In the case of seafloor development, taking it to the extreme – even little kids could hold back seawater with their hands and build their own sandcastles there. Humans aren’t the only ones who saw the bottom of the sea as a refuge as Earth deteriorated. Fish didn’t just descend to colder waters below their original habitats or die off when unable to adapt to the changes. Individuals capable of surviving the encroaching tides took over reproducing future generations.  

With loosening building regulations, all sorts of houses in the guise of resorts started popping up underwater or below overflowing rivers and sea levels, yet there were still many objections against constructing research centers on the seafloor. 

There were even more voices calling for underwater apartments instead. Now that I think about it, rather than designating special underwater zones and mass producing apartments, building these research centers was the scientists of the North Pacific 30 years ago doing their utmost with what they had.

Underwater apartments? I imagine only a very select, privileged few would ever get to live there. Ordinary people like me would never get into those kinds of apartments. Even for space travel, I heard they screen candidates down to grandparents, requiring at minimum a master’s or doctorate level education and excellent health and genetic history. For a bottom feeder like me from an average family to even get into this underwater base is extremely lucky in itself. Seeing us running around soaked to the bone, I’m not so sure anymore.  

“This place started out from different countries pooling funds together to drill for oil,” marine biologist Yoo Geum-yi explained while looking around, taking the lead with Kim Ga-young. “But with more and more development, more people came, living quarters were built, research centers popped up, and so on. To be honest, if you have anything marine-related in your field, you’ll starve without a place like this. And I expected 100% unemployment since marine life has been going extinct faster than me finishing university.”

I wandered around aimlessly as they talked. Despite walking, the two of them looked quite sure-footed, probably feeling right at home here.  

I expected there to be some kind of access control system, but we passed through the barricade and walked quite a distance without encountering anything like that. A thought suddenly occurred to me, so I asked the scientists up ahead:  

“There’s no card access or biometric identification to keep visitors out? No intrusion detection systems? Not even a speed gate at least?” 

You know, those subway speed gates that block you if you don’t scan your transit card. Kim Ga-young looked at me quizzically before understanding. She nodded slightly and said:  

“There was some talk early on about verifying authorized personnel entering the research center and enforcing access control. Issuing ID cards and registering fingerprints, facial recognition profiles, iris scans, voice samples – stuff like that – together with passwords to lock out unauthorized visitors.”

“Why didn’t that happen?”

“Well first, installation and upkeep costs money. Research staff can only access their own labs via fingerprints or iris scans. The rest is off limits anyway. What would they even do if they went in? Graffiti research logs? Start fires? Do our work for us? All our research automatically uploads onto MARIA, the underwater database system. Anyone who can access the internet can see it, so there’s no confidential information in what we research here anyway. It’s not like we’re trying to line anyone’s pockets with money.”

Didn’t they say all research here is aimed at ensuring humanity’s survival? Listening nearby, Lee Jihyun let out a frustrated sigh, shaking her head vigorously.  

“We can barely keep up with repairs as is. If those detection systems broke down and we had to fix them too, I’d run away.”

So in other words, anyone at all can just waltz into the research center?… The research center seems filled with even more innocent souls than me. I imagined tons of extremely hazardous things like sulfuric acid or dangerous gases, but that constitutes proper security? Am I overthinking this? Maybe I’m unfamiliar with how labs normally handle security since I haven’t been in others. My biology major friends’ labs seemed to have people in them all day. Is it like that here too?