by Axie Oh
“Yes.” I wonder if I’m about to witness one of Tera’s “episodes” that Dr. Koga had warned me about.
I step onto the lift, where there’s a panel with a green button and a red button. I press the green button, and the lift ascends. Simulations can be run most anywhere as long as there’s sim technology, but the most accurate readings for pilots are measured through simulation tests run inside GMs. The GM is deactivated and put into sim mode, and the pilot can use the GM’s controls while completing missions in a simulation.
The Extension is tall for a GM. I press the red button when the lift is level with its torso. The chest cover is closed, so I have to pull to manually open the hatch.
Inside, Tera slumps on the seat with her eyes closed.
“Tera!” I say, immediately concerned. Her breaths come out shallow, her face pale. I reach out to touch her shoulder.
Before I can make contact, Tera’s eyes open, shining a brilliant, unnatural blue, like stars. She blinks, and they begin to fade to her natural brown.
I wait for her to, I don’t know, attack me — but she just lifts her hand to her head, rubbing her temple. “My head hurts.”
Instinctively, I reach to my chest, as if I’ve medicine or a cold pack on me. But all I have is a gun.
“It’ll go away,” she says. “It doesn’t last long.”
I nod and lean back from the cockpit to give her more air. Soon her breaths lengthen and slow. Whatever connection she had with the Extension wears off, and the color returns to her cheeks. Like in the simulation, her lips are thin but pretty. Her bottom lip is thicker than the top.
I realize I’m staring. I cough and step away from the opening. I lean back against the outside of the GM and wait for her.
She emerges, stretching her arms above her head.
“We haven’t officially met,” I say. “I’m Lee Jaewon.”
“I know who you are,” she says. “You’re my new partner.”
That sounds better than supervisor. “I am.”
“The last one didn’t last long.”
She sweeps past me. I turn in time to see her jump off the boarding lift. She does a graceful somersault in the sky and lands on her feet. She stands and looks back at me. Our gazes meet. “Show-off,” I mutter.
It takes me a lot longer to reach the ground via the lift. She’s waiting for me at the bottom with Dr. Chung. “Try not to lose her on your first day,” the machinist says. The woman doesn’t necessarily smile at Tera, but there’s a camaraderie that’s unexpected. I wonder what the dynamic is between the doctors — Koga and Chung — and Tera and Ama. If Tera and Ama began the project as young girls, then Koga and Chung have known them for over a decade. Can you stay objective toward a person you’ve known over a decade?
“Escort Tera to the labs, Jaewon-ssi,” Chung says. She nods at two guards, who stand waiting at the back door. “And take these.” At first I think she means the guards, but she holds out a pair of electro-braces. “It’s more for appearance’s sake than anything else. After what happened yesterday, we don’t want any complaints from the staff.”
Tera wiggles her nose but doesn’t protest.
Dr. Chung chides Tera, “Until you’ve earned back our trust, you’ll have to wear them outside confined areas.”
I take the braces.
Outside in the main hangar, the guards wait for me to cuff Tera. I place them around her wrists, but then I hesitate over the switch that powers the link. “Dr. Chung said it was for appearances. If you keep your hands behind your back, no one will notice the difference.”
Tera shrugs and we head back through the hangar, the guards giving us a wide berth.
I keep a close watch on Tera because I’m supposed to — but also because I’m curious to know what she’s thinking. She gives no signs that she’s aware of my presence, keeping her eyes focused straight ahead. She’s so remote and standoffish, it makes me want to annoy her just to get a reaction. Or maybe I want her attention.
“That’s how my grandfather used to walk,” I say, referring to the way her hands are placed at the small of her back. We’re moving up the escalator. Since I stand two steps above her, she involuntarily makes eye contact.
“Your grandfather was a prisoner?”
“No, he just had bad posture.”
Her eyes narrow. “Your jokes get worse.”
As we move across the glass bridge, she says, “You do know I’m dangerous, don’t you?”
The thing is, I do. I can’t ignore the warnings. The armed guards. Koga himself told me that all her previous supervisors had quit. The Proselytizer once said that if you put two men in a room, give the first man a gun, and tell him the other is dangerous, the first man will find a reason to shoot the second.
I’ve been told she’s a super soldier. I’ve been told she’s dangerous. But I have a mind of my own, and I’m not looking for reasons to shoot her. “I know.”
“I hurt him,” she says, and I know she’s speaking about the man yesterday, the one who told us she’d escaped.
“Did he deserve it?”
She looks at me sharply. “No one deserves to be hurt.”
I hold back from saying this reveals she has at least a sense of morality.
We step off the Skybridge and head toward the elevator. “Are you going to hurt me?”
The doors open, and she steps in. “One day I will.”
15
The Promise
The rest of the afternoon is spent in the lab. I watch as a team of scientists takes samples of Tera’s blood. Then we move to another room, and I watch as they make her run on a treadmill to monitor her heart rate. She has a nutritionist, a physical trainer, and a psychologist, a foreign woman with short gray hair and silver eyes who introduces herself as Dr. Trumbull. I spend my time against the wall of whichever room we’re in, taking notes to send to Dr. Koga.
Curious about Tera’s life in the Tower, I observe the way the scientists treat her. The answer is pretty clear after about an hour: with indifference. No one speaks to her except to give her instructions. She’s the center of their attention, and yet they never ask her questions unless it pertains to the actual examination.
When Tera finishes with her tests, it’s already 2100 at night. We head to level B8. The elevator doors open on a narrow, blue-lit hallway. One guard leads the way, and the other follows. Since late afternoon, they’ve been rotating in and out, and I’ve given up learning their names, relegating them to Guard One and Guard Two.
I walk beside Tera. We haven’t spoken much. She’s been busy with her tests, and the few times I thought about engaging her in conversation, I noticed she looked less standoffish and more tired.
“It’s 2100,” I say. “I’ll drop you off, finish up my report, and send it to Dr. Koga. I think tomorrow will be more of the same.” More tests. More waiting. We’re on standby until a sponsor event is scheduled.
Tera nods.
We enter a room at the end of the hall. It’s occupied by two scientists seated behind a set of monitors. The room is split in two by a glass wall. The larger half functions as a monitoring room while the second half behind the glass appears to be a holding chamber. It’s entirely white with one piece of furniture — a bed. The generated lights in the ceiling give the room a sterile glow.
The monitors show different parts of the room. All four corners. The bed at eight different angles. How does she sleep with that many cameras on her?
“Soldier,” one of the scientists addresses me, “your duties for the evening are complete.” It’s a dismissal. I turn to Tera to say good-bye. Her eyes are on her room behind the glass. Unlike the way she’d looked at the sky on the roof, or the stage of the concert, her eyes are empty.
A person who doesn’t exist can’t die.
“Dr. Koga wants me to check the room,” I hear myself say aloud. I
t’s a lie, and a poor one. A quick call to Koga would reveal the truth.
“Check the room for what?” This from one of the guards. He doesn’t look convinced.
“For ways to escape.” It’s the first thing that pops into my head. I distract from the poor excuse by pointing to a metal tray on a table. “Is that her dinner?” It contains standard cafeteria fare, rice and a variety of vegetables in the tray’s individual slots. There’s also a red apple on a napkin, blunt chopsticks, and a spoon. “I’ll bring it in.”
I pick up the tray. There’s a door in the far corner that separates the two rooms, and I head toward it. I think for a second the scientists won’t indulge me, but the door opens, so I step inside.
The space is small. I’d guess twelve square meters — four meters in width, three in length. I usually don’t mind confined spaces. My one-room apartment is the size of this room. I walk a little farther into the space and turn to see the glass window from the opposite side is a mirror.
“Whatever this is, it’s not going to work.” Tera stands by the door, having followed me through.
“This?” I ask. There’s an alcove in the wall, and I place the tray into it.
“Being kind to me. It won’t make me trust you.”
I raise a brow. “Have I been kind to you?”
“You haven’t been cruel.”
I think of that moment on the rooftop, when I held out my hand to her and she’d looked at me with cool resignation. What must it feel like to expect cruelty from a stranger?
I move farther along the wall. I have to at least appear to the guards outside that I’m checking the perimeter for flaws. The walls have built-in panels like those in the lobby. These must open up to amenities like a closet, a toilet, a shower.
“Well,” Tera asks, “what do you think? Can I escape?”
“How’d you do it the last few times?”
“I overwhelmed my incompetent guard and gave him the slip.”
“Ah.” I turn a corner and make my way along the far wall. “All guards are incompetent with you as their charge.”
“But you’re not my guard, are you? You’re supposed to be my partner. You’re supposed to get me to trust you, so that when we’re in public, I’ll listen to you, to the orders you’ve received from Koga or whoever. Cogs in the machine, that’s all we are. And you, you’re just the same as them, no matter your feigned empathy.”
So this is how she sees me. And although it pisses me off, I don’t blame her. What she’s said is true. One of the Proselytizer’s slogans: We are at war, and war is a machine. But she’s also revealed something of herself. If this is a machine, she’s not satisfied with its moving parts. It makes me wonder.
“Why did you go to the concert that night? You’d escaped from the Tower. Why not leave the city, the country? You’re smart, resourceful. You could have found a way to stay free if you really wanted to.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
She opens her mouth as if to answer, but then she looks away. Moving to the bed, she sits down, pulling her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “You’re annoying,” she mumbles into her kneecaps.
I decide not to push her.
I lean my back against the wall. “It’s not so bad,” I say. “You get food. You get me.”
She lifts her head. “Are you mine?”
“For six hours a day. Not including weekends.”
“And I can do anything I want with you?”
“Within reason.” I nod at the one-sided mirror. “We’re being watched.”
“I don’t know why they gave you to me,” she says. “You’re not like the others. Did they think I wouldn’t break you just because you’re young and attractive?”
“Do you watch a lot of films?”
She narrows her eyes. “Why?”
“You sound like a villain in a bad film.”
“Bring me my food.”
I retrieve her meal from the alcove and approach the bed. “Is there a table?”
“There was. But they took it away after I threw it at my last guard and knocked him unconscious.”
I sit down on the bed and place the tray between us. “Whatever this is, it’s not going to work.”
She scowls at my use of her words. “This?”
“Threatening me, telling me you’re dangerous so that I’ll be wary of you.”
“You don’t believe me when I say I’ll hurt you?”
“Oh, I believe you.”
“You think you’re the exception to the rule?”
“I think,” I say slowly, “that I got pretty far in taekwondo.”
“Are you joking?”
I shrug. “I did manage to defend myself pretty well in the simulation.”
“Simulations aren’t real life.”
“I know.” They just mimic real life. Real life is sitting in a cold room a hundred meters beneath the Tower talking to a girl on a bed while two scientists monitor our conversation.
Tera brushes her fingers over the bedspread. “People who get close to me wind up getting hurt or worse. I’m not lying to you. You should be on your guard. I will hurt you one day.”
She keeps on saying that. I wonder if it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “My father always said intent is what matters in all things.”
“Said?”
“He died when I was eight.”
“How sad for you.”
“Can I eat this?” I pick up the apple.
“You’re asking if you can eat from my highly prescribed rations I’m allowed twice a day?”
“What are partners for if not to eat each other’s food?” I take a bite of the apple. It’s crisp and flavorful, but there’s a metallic quality to the aftertaste. It must have been preserved and shipped from somewhere overseas.
“We won’t really be partners. I’ll be the gun, and you’ll be the hand holding the gun.”
“That’s an apt metaphor.”
“The only reason I went along with any of this was the surety that I would be a weapon and nothing more. And like a weapon, I can be stopped.”
I watch her carefully. A super soldier without a will to fight. “Dr. Koga said you have difficulties controlling your powers.”
She nods. “The Enhancers have left lasting effects, and most of them aren’t good.”
“Can you feel them coming? The episodes.”
“Sometimes. Other times, they’re triggered. By memories. By dreams. It’s why I spend most of my time in this room. At least if I were to have an episode, I’d be confined.” She picks up the tray, food uneaten, and places it on the floor, returning to curl even farther away from me on the bed. “I know you’re a decent person. I know you mean well, coming in here and talking to me. Pitying me. But you shouldn’t. You need to stop.”
I start to object, but she shakes her head. “Don’t deny it. I saw your expression when you looked at the room for the first time. You saw — you see how bare it is, how empty my life is. How this room is a cage. But there’s something you don’t understand. Yes, it is a cage, but it is one that I choose.”
“Are you sure about that?” I think of the concert, and just yesterday, the roof.
“There’s a reason I never went far.”
Why? Because she’s afraid she’ll hurt people? “If I’m not supposed to pity you, what am I supposed to feel for you?”
“You shouldn’t feel anything for me.”
“But I do.”
It sounds like a confession.
She looks up, her eyes stricken. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Tera . . .”
There’s a hollow knock on the window from the outside.
“Dammit.” I stand. “I should go.”
As I leave, she reache
s out and grabs my hand. Her hand is cool and light. “Tomorrow, be a soldier to me, Lee Jaewon. Don’t be anything more.”
A soldier. A stranger.
“Promise me,” she begs.
“I promise.”
She lets go.
As I walk out of the room, I look back through the glass to see Tera lying on the bed, her long black hair spilling out behind her like ink on paper.
16
The Proselytizer
The rest of the week is more of the same. I escort Tera to her appointments. When she doesn’t attempt another escape, Dr. Koga authorizes her to walk around without electro-braces. We keep our interactions brief, impersonal. I don’t make any more bad jokes. She’s right. We should keep our distance from each other, at least emotionally. This assignment isn’t forever, and the feelings I have for her — pity for her situation, shame for benefitting from the system that entraps her, empathy for her sadness — they don’t help her. They don’t help me.
First- and second-year students have physical examinations on Friday, so seniors are given the day off. Bora drags Minwoo and me to a new hot dog joint that opened in the Gangnam Station area. The doors open on a packed narrow space filled with seniors from schools in the surrounding districts. I recognize some of the uniforms as schools we’ve competed against in athletics and simulations.
Like most Neo Seoul establishments, the place is self-service with automated food dispensers and one attendant present in case of malfunctions. Bora goes up to the counter to pick up our hot dogs, while Minwoo and I grab seats in one of the booths along the walls. A cleaning droid promptly arrives to wipe the table down.
I check my phone to see I have two messages — one from Alex, who informs me I should arrive fifteen minutes earlier to the Tower for a sponsor event — our first, and one from my landlady, reminding me rent is due in two weeks. I get paid my stipend from the Tower every two weeks, so I should be able to pay her on time for once.
There’s a loud bang as Bora drops a tray onto our table. I count eight hot dogs, all covered with a variety of toppings.