WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 13: Laptop
──────
The fall of a great city was often compared to a plane crashing after it ran out of fuel.
Even after losing power, it kept flying on inertia for quite some time. But once its speed could no longer sustain lift, it plunged to the ground with a deafening roar and ended in a spectacular explosion.
Seoul would follow Beijing, Mumbai, Jakarta, and Hong Kong.
Losing the great city behind me would be painful for my plans, but it was not an unforeseen variable.
It had only come far sooner than expected.
The Korean government's determination to protect the Republic of Seoul at any cost had been firm.
Now that all hope was gone, saving Seoul was not what I needed to do.
It was neither my job nor something I could do.
I intended to spend cigarettes, the currency of the age of ruin, in a hurry.
Cigarettes would retain their value even after Seoul fell, but once the market itself shrank, the quality and variety of available goods would deteriorate.
What I needed now was a new laptop.
A black spot had appeared on my current laptop's screen in a particularly inconvenient spot.
It caused no real trouble when I played games or watched videos, but it was quite irritating when I browsed the community.
I did have a spare, but it was a gaming laptop...
Anyway, I prepared to head for Seoul, both to move some cigarettes and to see how things stood.
“This is SKELTON. How is Route 13?”
“Your personal ID has been confirmed. Hello, Mr. SKELTON. Things are peaceful at present. The entire road has been secured. If you plan to pass through, please do so within six hours, just in case.”
I rode my bicycle leisurely toward Seoul.
A few electric vehicles moved along the road, while lines of people stretched down the roadside, stripping parts from stalled cars and carrying them away.
The mood in Seoul, which I entered without incident, was quite bright.
Reconstruction projects under the name of National Work were underway everywhere. Countless people cleared rubble, swung pickaxes, and cleaned the streets.
Large signs along the roadside advertised performances by singers and idols who had effectively been out of work, while electric public transportation, including buses, traveled through empty streets.
I had not paid much attention on the community, but elementary and middle schools had reopened after a long closure.
High schools and universities were supposedly scheduled to reopen the following year.
Perhaps because of that.
Food rations had been reduced, and power outages had grown more frequent and longer, but citizens took even that as a sign that Seoul was rebuilding.
Yet Seoul looked quite different up close from what it showed the outside.
Everyone sang of hope, but behind it lay a chilling, dreadful shadow.
That shadow was not a problem only because people did not want to look closely.
The International Residence, where I always stayed for one night whenever I came to Seoul, also hung vaguely on the boundary between hope and despair.
The International Residence had once been an exam-prep dormitory, converted into lodging.
It was old and shabby, but it had suffered little damage during the war, making it suitable for a night's stay.
The owners were a middle-aged couple. The wife had brought her father, the husband his mother, and they had two children around middle-school age.
I could tell from my first visit that the couple did not get along.
“Honey! Please tell your mother to stay inside! What is she even doing? Guests won't come because of her!”
Their parents seemed to be the source of their discord.
The wife had brought her father, and the husband had brought his mother. Both elders had their problems.
The father-in-law showed symptoms of dementia caused by shock, while the mother-in-law had the habit of sitting in front of the old dormitory every day and staring shamelessly at passersby.
The wife was usually the one who nagged.
Recently, however, there had been a change.
The husband, who had never answered a single one of her countless complaints, seemed to have run out of patience. He broke his long silence and began fighting back.
“So you want to send Mom to a provincial senior welfare home?”
“Why not? It's a care program guaranteed by the state.”
“Then send your father first.”
“You know Dad has dementia!”
“That means he needs to go even more!”
But the fight ended with the wife's victory.
“Whose house is this? It isn't your house, is it? My dad bought it with his money. How can you be so shameless when you didn't bring a penny into this marriage?”
“...”
It figured.
Even to an outsider, the husband was a pathetic man with nothing redeeming about him except his face.
He always sat listlessly at the counter, blankly holding a cigarette butt between his lips, or lay around on the floor doing nothing.
I had never seen him work since the war began. From the conversations I had overheard, he seemed not to have worked even before the war.
Still, he had left his children one thing.
A handsome face.
If the couple's parents were the crack splitting their marriage apart, their children were the glue barely holding that precarious marriage together.
The eldest son in particular was truly a child to be proud of.
He was like an improved breed selectively crossed from his father's looks and his mother's diligence.
No, considering he had developed a depth and kindness neither parent possessed, perhaps he was a mutation.
“Mister, you've been coming often lately.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Don't call me Mister.”
“If you're over ten years older, you're Mister.”
“I'm only eighteen.”
“Then I'll be one. Waaah.”
He was mischievous, but much better than his older sister, who, whether she had eighth-grade syndrome or eleventh-grade syndrome[1], treated people with utter indifference.
He was fourteen and currently attended middle school.
His grades were quite good.
He was popular, had plenty of friends, and was the typical son of every mother's friend.
Apparently, prospective girlfriends lined up for him, but he turned them all down.
Most importantly, this kid had a pretty decent laptop.
From 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. was Internet Time.
It was practically a state-sanctioned drug.
For one hour, communication equipment and internet lines that had been shut down due to power and infrastructure problems were opened up.
Plentiful power was an added bonus.
When Internet Time came, Seoul became as quiet as a dead city.
Everyone was immersed in the online world, busy dealing with matters in their own virtual lives that they had put off.
The Wi-Fi was somewhat slow, but otherwise hardly different from before the war. Along with the fully functional water system, it was one of the main reasons I used the International Residence.
The dormitory cafeteria was packed with residents claiming seats to catch the Wi-Fi signal, staring at phone and laptop screens.
One man had even carried in a heavy desktop computer with a grunt. The landlady saw it and began scolding him.
“Sir! That thing uses way too much electricity!”
“I took out the graphics card.”
“It still uses too much! Pay more! Or give me a lottery ticket!”
I sat beside the owners' son and connected my phone to the shared internet.
<CarrotNet>
A neighborhood-based used-goods trading site that had continued operating even after the war.
There were thousands of accounts and posts, with dozens of new posts appearing in real time. It reminded me just how narrow and cloistered our community was.
Yeah. This was the internet.
I looked for a laptop on CarrotNet.
There were more listings than I expected, but most of them were gaming laptops.
“I don't need a gaming laptop.”
There were plenty of listings, but nothing I wanted. As I sighed, the owners' son stared at my screen and asked,
“Mister, are you looking for a laptop?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to buy mine?”
“What? Really?”
For a moment, I was so pleased I nearly grinned from ear to ear. Then I controlled my expression and asked,
“What about you?”
“I'll be fine. I'm going to a school in Jeju.”
“A school in Jeju?”
The boy smiled and showed me his laptop screen.
A government-made image flyer appeared on the spotless screen.
<“Would you like to become a hero?”>
-National Hunter Training Institute “Guard,” 27th Cohort Admissions Guide
“What is this?”
The colors and design made it clearly an advertisement aimed at boys and girls.
But there was no mistake.
It was the admissions guide for the “school” I had attended.
“Have you even finished middle school?”
“No, I'm going into my second year.”
“They recruit people who haven't even graduated middle school these days?”
“What era do you think this is? They even recruit elementary school kids.”
“They do!?”
I read the guide carefully.
It was true.
The admission age had been drastically lowered.
Not middle-school graduates and above, but anyone ten or older.
Were they really that short on people?
What caught my eye even before the age requirement, though, were the overwhelming benefits.
There were more benefits for the family than for the student.
Living support, housing support, state jobs for parents and family members, and more.
Send one child to school, and the whole household's circumstances improved.
But on the back, terms and conditions were packed in like bricks in tiny, dense lettering that hurt my eyes to read.
When I tried to read them, the boy shut the laptop.
“Want to talk on the roof?”
“Talk?”
“Business!”
On the roof, laundry fluttered in the wind, and an elder with dementia stood like a still-life painting. Beyond them, a low sunset spread over ruins leveled by nuclear attack, creating a mysterious, primitive scene.
As stars appeared one by one along the border between day and night, the boy asked me,
“I've been wondering for a while. What do you do, Mister?”
“What do you mean?”
“You always bring lots of stuff when you come. You had a gun from the first time. I figured you were a gangster, but you don't seem to be one. You've got a good face, and you're still loaded down with stuff in times like these, so I was curious.”
“What do you think I am?”
“A gang member? A raider?”
“Can you say that while looking into my innocent eyes?”
“You're an apocalypse enthusiast, right?”
The boy looked at a star and smiled faintly.
“You know your stuff.”
“I wanted to be an apocalypse enthusiast too.”
“Really?”
“Why? It's fun, isn't it? Making your own hideout and filling it with things you like. Didn't you enjoy it too?”
“It was hard, but it was fun too. It got tough later, once I ran out of money.”
The boy held out his laptop.
“Trade it for cigarettes. You have a lot, right?”
“If I sell to a kid, I'll go to prison.”
“Times are what they are, right? I'll give a little to my pathetic dad, who's always got a butt in his mouth, sell the rest, and buy Mom a present. Before I go to school!”
I sold the boy cigarettes.
He paid an absurdly high price compared to market rates, but it was a satisfying deal in many ways.
When the transaction was completed, the elder with dementia, who had been standing like a still-life, turned toward us and babbled something. I could not hear it clearly.
“If I get into that school, I won't have to hear Mom and Dad fighting anymore, right? We might even be able to send Grandma and Maternal Granddad someplace nice.”
Even if I had heard it, I would have forgotten it quickly.
What the boy cheerfully said as we went back downstairs left a far stronger impression.
He was a thoughtful child.
So thoughtful that I wondered how someone like him could come from a family like that.
The next day, when I was about to leave the International Residence, the dining room had the atmosphere of a festival.
The room was filled not with guests and residents, but with the landlady's friends.
The landlady sat proudly at the center table among the other women.
“I'm jealous. My kids hang around with thugs.”
“That test? I heard it isn't easy to pass. He actually passed?”
“Is it true that families of Hunter school enrollees get an occupancy permit for The Hope?”
Receiving praise, envy, and jealousy from every side, the landlady smiled brightly.
“Oh, Youngmin's dad. He's a pain, but I suppose I'm a little grateful to him. He gave me such a wonderful child. I mean, Youngmin's dad may be lazy, but he's good at heart, you know?”
I left the residence after watching a family that had nearly fallen apart become more tightly united than any other through the boy's decision.
The boy's laptop was immensely satisfying.
SKELTON: (SKELTON's New Rig) It's a new laptop hehe
There were no comments, but the post had quite a high view count for one of mine.
I could feel the envy and jealousy of my community comrades.
The landlady's smug smile was copied onto my face.
It was two months later that I read the Hunter school admissions guide saved on the laptop again.
By chance, I found a personal folder the boy had hidden away.
The admissions guide was in there alongside a daily timetable, photos with childhood friends, photos taken overseas with his family, and an unusually large number of photos of an unnamed girl his age.
With a trace of unease, I read the part of the guide I had not finished before.
A warning written in the corner seized my attention like fate.
-Final successful applicants will undergo three high-level psychic resonance tests and may be exposed to a few accidents during the process.
“...A few accidents?”
Bullshit.
That test was linked to death.
I knew better than anyone, having experienced it myself.
It was a trial of death.
A trial that filtered out those not chosen by a god.
When I returned to Seoul, I went to the International Residence first.
Something was wrong from the start.
The old woman's face, which had always been outside guarding the front of the building, was nowhere to be seen.
Growing increasingly uneasy, I went inside.
Sure enough, the owners had changed.
“Can I help you? Is there something you're looking for?”
“Well, the previous owners...”
At that moment, an elder passed through the street outside.
Dressed in ragged clothes and clearly unwashed, the elder looked like a dying dog. Despite the deep darkness, they resembled one of the elders who had lived in this building.
“Don't go. Don't go. Don't gooo...”
Muttering, the elder staggered along as if walking through an unfamiliar street.
Further down the dark street, a slender girl smoked while mingling with a delinquent crowd.
That girl, too, resembled the boy's older sister.
Our eyes met for only a moment, but the girl plainly showed her disgust before looking away.
The moment I saw that, I stopped myself from asking what I had been about to ask.
“No, it's nothing.”
On the brighter side of the street, a merchant exchanging lottery tickets for goods called out among the crowd.
I joined them, asked the price of a lottery ticket, and traded two cigarettes for one.
I never returned to the International Residence after that.
I knew nothing of that family's fate.
Therefore, their fate was still hopeful.
Like my lottery ticket, whose drawing had already been held but whose result I had yet to check.
Footnotes:
[1] These are slang labels for teenage posturing: eighth-grade syndrome suggests exaggerated self-importance, while eleventh-grade syndrome suggests acting too mature and aloof for everyone else.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
