Ultimately, this was the result of the long history of discrimination against extraordinary species that had lasted for hundreds of years. It was only a hundred years ago since extraordinary species were allowed to go to higher education and their entrance to universities was less than half of that time. It’s only been a few decades since an extraordinary species could legally sit in front of this noble mechanical device, which was an aggregation of advanced technology.
Park Eun-young chattered on and on as she turned at the end of the hallway. There was a small drawing room and a small kitchen attached to it. In the drawing room was a sofa for three, a couch for one, and a low table. A bag of torn potato chips, a couple bottles of beer, and two apples were scattered on the table. There were also empty cigarette packs and ashtrays beside them.
Park Eun-young opened the door on the left side of the hallway opposite the drawing room.
“This is your room. Or your workplace. The bed might be a bit uncomfortable but we won’t stay here for long anyway.”
Li Young-jin looked into the room.
It was small.
There was a window, but the blinds were drawn, and a large desk was located at an angle not visible from the window. Three monitors sat side by side on the desk with cables hanging down. Opposite was a small iron bed next to the wall. An old-fashioned steam heater under the window hissed hard, warming the little room.
“Do you need anything else?”
Lee Young-jin silently shook his head, went into the room, and put down his Boston bag on the bed.
Park Eun-young scratched her chin for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders.
“Alright. There will be a lot of things to prepare, so organize it first. Jung-hoon and I will go out to reconnaissance. Do you need anything?”
“No.”
After Lee Young-jin answered in a low voice, he hesitated before opening his mouth again.
“Are you leaving now?”
Even though it was as small as a bird’s call, an extraordinary species’ keen hearing picked it up without difficulty. Park Eun-young tilted her chin.
“Yes. We’ll walk around to try and figure out the distance. It’s my first time in Shanghai. I’m mainly on the Japanese side…remember? Yokohama was good. Haish. Do you speak Chinese?”
“No…”
“I’m not good either. Maybe a little. There were a lot of rumors that Korean-Chinese people were involved in this incident. Well, Jung-hoon is very familiar with China and has been here a lot, so his connections are all over the place. Don’t worry.”
Hearing her words, Lee Young-jin nodded.
“Leave after a while. Thirty minutes.”
“Yes?”
“I have a little something to prepare.”
Park Eun-young agreed without saying anything else, then closed the door and left.
Lee Young-jin opened his Boston bag and took out a large laptop. He put it on the desk and connected to the monitor. After turning on his laptop, he waited a moment before opening his smartphone. Synchronization started immediately. The screen started on all three monitors. He ran some software, arranged it on the screen, and operated the software as a test on his smartphone. It worked flawlessly. It was a job he could do with his eyes closed. It wasn’t even a great job anyway. After setting it up to randomly catch tens of millions of wireless internet networks that wind around this huge maritime city and change them in seconds, he went through a few checks.
After making sure everything was fine, he got up from his chair and opened his bag again. A flat square plastic box stuck on the side reached his fingertips. He pulled it out, opened the box and checked the contents. Everything was in order. He picked it up and went out.
Ji Jung-hoon and Park Eun-young were sitting on the sofa in the drawing room.
Ji Jung-hoon was sitting with his legs apart on the single-person couch while Park Eun-young was half-lying on the long sofa, stretching her legs and smoking a cigarette. Cigarette smoke filled the drawing room.
Park Eun-young folded her legs to make a place for Lee Young-jin to sit. He hesitated a little, then sat down next to her, carefully touching the edge with his butt. Then he carefully pushed the lens case out of the plastic box into the small gap between the potato chip bags and beer bottles that littered the low table.
Park Eun-young looked down at it, holding a pipe between her long fingers.
“This is?”
“Lens.”
Instead of Lee Young-jin, Ji Jung-hoon answered.
“When we wear this, the kid sees what we see. To be exact, it’s the kid’s monitor.”
Lee Young-jin tried to tell him not to call him a kid, but he glanced at Park Eun-young and just kept his mouth shut. She must have noticed that, but Ji Jung-hoon just chuckled and let out a big laugh.
Park Eun-young picked up her lens case with curious eyes.
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s already undergone sufficient clinical trials and has been used many times in practice…”
“I tried it too. Twice.”
Ji Jung-hoon replied again.
Lee Young-jin passively expressed dissatisfaction by pouting his lips at Ji Jung-hoon, who had intercepted his explanation several times.
Park Eun-young let out a low, dragging laugh. Smoke from her cigarette billowed between her lips.
“There’s no prescription. There might be a little bit of dizziness, but it won’t last long. Please let me know if the headache or dizziness persists.”
“Okay.”
“And this is only for one side. It doesn’t matter which side you put it on.”
“Why not both?”
“There’s a bit of a problem with the technology that digitally visualizes the different refractive images received by both eyes. I didn’t develop it and it’s not my major so I don’t know.”
“Okay?”
Park Eun-young calmly pressed the cigarette butt into the ashtray to extinguish it and opened the lens case. Her short ivory nails traced the thin lenses in the case. A metallic shine glimmered on the surface of the special plastic lens and soon, she put it over her right pupil.
“You can think of it like a game.”
“A game?”
Lee Young-jin nodded and continued his explanation.
“Sometimes I go through it…I mean, things like targets and directions. I’ll show you that. Not often, because I probably can’t keep watching the screen all the time. Only when it matters.”
“Okay. It really is like a game.”
Park Eun-young smiled.
Then she raised her upper body which had been loosely stretched between the armrest and backrest of the couch, put one arm on Lee Young-jin’s shoulder and rummaged through the plastic box with the other hand.
“Get out the other toy.”
Lee Young-jin raised his eyelids and looked up at her with strange eyes. Most of the field personnel usually didn’t pay much attention to these things. Just like Ji Jung-hoon, who still sat with his feet stretched out on the table and gulping down beer.
He handed Park Eun-young a soft Bluetooth earphone the size of a pinky fingernail. Park Eun-young received it and pretended to know.
“Oh, I’ve tried this.”
“Yes. It’s a little different from Yokohama, but it’s almost the same. A German technology. They said it’s reinforced since there’s a little bit of trouble recognizing proximity voices.”
“Let’s see.”
Park Eun-young, wearing the lens and earphone, jumped up from the sofa.
Lee Young-jin led her to the studio.
When he opened the software on the monitor, the view she was looking at came to mind like a game screen. It was fairly sharp, although there’s some degradation in image quality.
“That’s interesting.”
Park Eun-young looked at the top of the three monitors and her viewpoint surfaced on the monitor.
“It’s like a mirror.”
“Please turn your head for a second.”
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
Park Eun-young obediently turned her head and looked around the room. Lee Young-jin looked at his smartphone screen to see if it showed her vision, then went back to his laptop and tapped the keyboard a few times. On the right side of the monitor, a direction indicator showing north, south, east and west came to mind.
“Wow. Oh. Oh. Woow.”
She burst into extended exclamation.
“Just adjust the position of the direction indicator. A little bit down.”
“Like this?”
“Great.”
“But I won’t be able to show you the direction anyway…”
“Yeah…”
“I will mainly show you this.”
Lee Young-jin adjusted the viewing angle to the internal structure of the house, which consists of a three-dimensional floor plan, through Park Eun-young’s field of view, and then drew a blurry fluorescent green arrow along the corridor.
“In Yokohama, I only use voice commands, but this time, I will use these rather than voice instructions.”
“Wahh!”
After Park Eun-young screamed loudly, she ran out of the room and ran down the short hallway. Through her vision, Ji Jung-hoon, sitting in the drawing room and guzzling down beer, appeared on the monitor. Lee Young-jin glanced at the monitor, then wrapped a sparkling red fluorescent border around Jung-hoon.
[Haha this…]
Park Eun-young’s laughter rang through the laptop speakers. Lee Young-jin put his laptop on mute and pushed earphones to his ears.
“I will mark the target in this way. Can you see it?”
[Got it. I can clearly see the sign to deal with that grizzly bear right now.]
After that, she landed a punch on Ji Jung-hoon’s shoulder. At her sudden attack, he raised his arm and clumsily defended her fist. The two extraordinary species rolled around the drawing room for a while, punching each other, and bumping against the table. The empty beer bottles swayed and tumbled to the floor.
Park Eun-young started walking around the house.
A room filled with three or four large golf bags appeared for a moment and then disappeared. Lee Young-jin lightly brought up the 3D floor plan of the building and put it in her field of vision.
“If you go into a building you don’t know, I can launch something like this to give you a sense of the structure…”
[I like this!]
“I like this!”
The cheer was heard in two places at the same time: in Lee Young-jin’s ears and in front of the door. Park Eun-young was running back. Her slightly freckled cheeks were flushed like a girl’s. After a quick spin in place, she blinked her eyes.
“Technology is the best.”
[Technology is the best.]
Lee Young-jin took out the earphones and inserted them between the keyboard then looked up at her. She thrust her fist toward him as she grinned. Just like you would to a very close colleague. Lee Young-jin had seen it a few times, but never actually did it. He awkwardly clenched his right hand into a fist.
“Please take good care of me, Lee Young-jin.”
Lee Young-jin lowered his gaze and nodded his head as if he couldn’t see it. The back of his ear turned a dull red.
Anyway, she didn’t care.
Ji Jung-hoon and Park Eun-young put on an automatic pistol equipped with a silencer inside their clothes and changed their shoes. Lee Young-jin saw them off with the bag of potato chips that Ji Jung-hoon handed under his arm.
“Oh right.”
Park Eun-young, who was adjusting the position of the automatic pistol tucked into the chest belt above her shirt, turned to Lee Young-jin.
“If you blink five or more times quickly, it will send an emergency signal. If you can’t speak out, use that method.”
“Ah. Okay.”
She smiled.
“Well, right now we’re just going out to look around, so it won’t be a big deal. At best, we’ll run into some thugs.”
Then they went out.
The safe house became quiet in an instant.
Lee Young-jin went to the living room and sat on the sofa for a while. He heard the crunching sound of potato chips. He ate a few pieces and finished them, then pushed the bag of chips to the corner of the table. He washed his hands in the sink and went back to his room. He sat down at his desk and glanced at the monitor. The two people’s vision was split in half on one monitor. They walked quickly and without hesitation. Like extraordinary species. Unlike Lee Young-jin. Lee Young-jin flicked his eyelids up and down, then looked down at the tip of his feet. He paused, then shook his head to clear the confusion.
He still had work to do.
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