Chapter 108: The King of Korea (３)

****

BANG BANG BANG!

Professor Meyer frowned at the loud noise. Who the hell is knocking on my office door at this hour? The sun’s already going down.

There’s no way the linguistics department has anything urgent.

Professor Meyer slowly rose from the seat, but the office door lock gave way helplessly before the professor could even touch it.

“Professor Meyer. Stanford PhD in Linguistics, with specializations in Korean Studies, symbology, and inferential psychology — is that correct? We have a problem that requires your expertise.”

Professor Meyer scratched his head.

Men in Black. A man in a black suit with an earpiece, looking like a bodyguard, stood before Professor Meyer. Whatever equipment was in use, the door had apparently just been unlocked like it was nothing.

“And who might you be?”

“I’m from the government.”

Dr. Meyer mulled it over for a moment.

“Why, did you find an alien or something?”

It was meant as a joke, but the Man in Black shook his head with a serious expression.

“Not today.”

“…”

“Sorry, but we’re running a bit late on the way here. If you want to make your appointment with the Director, we need to leave now.”

“And when is this appointment?”

“Fifteen minutes from now.”

“It’s rush hour right now. Just getting into the city center takes more than fifteen minutes—”

“There’s a helicopter waiting on the roof.”

“Ah.”

“Please hurry. We don’t have time.”

“Who the hell is this Director person anyway? Do you really need to mobilize a helicopter just to make an appointment with them? If you’d given me a day’s notice, I could’ve just driven.”

“The Director isn’t that kind of person.”

It was clear no more answers were coming. Dr. Meyer gathered up the laptop.

“It’s not dangerous, is it?”

“It’s extremely dangerous.”

“Uh, and if I say I don’t want to?”

“Take it up with the Director.”

The man in the black suit shrugged.

****

It had been a while since we’d brought in an outside expert. A foreign professor, procured with difficulty through Seoul National University’s linguistics department.

“Miss Paper. Didn’t we have that outside researcher meeting today? The one about deciphering what the angel said.”

“Yes. Ten minutes from now. They should be receiving a briefing in the external visitors’ lounge right now.”

“Ah. Did you send over the transcript?”

“Sent. They should be reviewing it.”

Paper hesitated for a moment.

“But Director, did we really need to send a helicopter? Couldn’t we have just given them an extra day or so? You said one of those deployments costs as much as my monthly salary.”

She gets paid that much?

“It’s about control. Scare them half to death first, make them work hard and make sure they never think about talking about this anywhere else. Besides, the helicopter pilots need to log their flight hours anyway, right?”

Paper nodded.

****

Dr. Meyer squinted hard at the transcript. The passage under analysis was obscure, but not impossible to analyze.

“What the hell is this…”

Dr. Meyer let out a sigh. Who the hell sends a helicopter just to have someone analyze a poem? Are these people drowning in money?

Something did come to mind.

In Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror,” Professor Armitage was a Doctor of Literature. That was why he could translate the Necronomicon.

But Dr. Meyer had no such ability. Was this really one of those situations?

Eh, probably just some rich eccentric.

As he sat there spacing out, a woman… no, a girl? walked in, wearing a white lab coat over a vest suit. Flanked by heavily armed soldiers on either side.

The woman gestured, and the soldiers left the room.

****

I looked at Professor Meyer.

“Are you the Director?”

“Yes. Hello.”

That was certain. I checked the clipboard again.

“Anthony Meyer. Professor of Linguistics at Seoul National University, specializing in symbology and Korean studies. Married a Korean wife at Stanford at age 35, secured a professorship in Korea at 44. Correct?”

“Uh, close enough.”

I sat down in the chair across from Professor Meyer.

“You’ve had a look at the transcripts, right?”

“The papers I received were just a few poems. Everything else was censored.”

“Well… the less you know, the safer.”

Curiosity could get you killed.

Or dragged into our line of work. Fortunately, the family man with plenty to protect kept his mouth shut, and I pulled the transcripts out of the clipboard.

“Begin your analysis, Professor.”

First, the first poem.

– A name is such a small and fleeting thing.

The designation one assigns oneself holds no

meaning. The image reflected in others’ eyes

becomes the means by which one is called and addressed.

Dr. Meyer pondered for a moment.

A poem about names. Unknown author. Four syllables per line, discussing the meaninglessness of the speaker’s name. Dr. Meyer jotted down his thoughts on the provided paper with the pen.

“This is a poem asserting that the speaker’s name isn’t important. It might be expressing the transience of a passive being that exists only in relation to others.”

“A passive being?”

“Didn’t it say ‘the image reflected in others’ eyes’? It’s the archetype of the falling tree in the forest—something that doesn’t exist until observed.”

Magic arises from humans. It’s something born from the accumulation of thought-power or wishes. In that context, anomalies might be things that only exist when observed.

Though not all anomalies are like that.

The second poem.

– Need is a word used all too often.

Human life is a succession of needs,

but not every living being is forced into

an endless chain of needs.

“What does this one mean?”

Dr. Meyer thought for a long while.

“This… Am I allowed to assume this isn’t just a simple poem, but has some special meaning? Both the content and the structure suggest it.”

“Go ahead and tell me.”

“The speaker is subtly expressing a sense of superiority over the audience—implying they’re different. The speaker is claiming not to be human.”

It really didn’t seem to be human.

The fourth poem.

– You are those who bound providence in chains.

I know what you are. You are those who

sliced the rainbow apart with a prism.

Tailors of providence in a godless reality.

“This one’s easy. It’s simply an expression of antipathy toward modern civilization. The poetic rhetoric about Newton dismantling the rainbow is already famous. It’s sometimes called the end of magic.”

“If magic had truly ended, how much simpler would life be? Understood, for now.”

****

The fifth poem.

– The Foundation is not the one at fault. Resisting

death is the natural right of every being.

I have no intention of hindering the Foundation.

I am entirely on humanity’s side.

“I’m not sure what the Foundation is. But it seems to be regarded as an entity that resists death—something taken as a kind of guiding principle.”

“…”

I didn’t respond.

The sixth poem.

– Cherubim, Nephilim, Seraphim. We are

the heavenly messengers humanity has looked up to

for thousands of years, the arbiters of providence.

But humanity usurped that place.

“This is intuitive. It’s a description of angels. Connecting it to the earlier content, it aligns with the second poem’s claim that the speaker isn’t human.”

Now that I’d heard the analysis, the poems didn’t seem to have much substance. Just like that angel had said—unfortunately, all flash and no content.

The seventh poem.

– Not you. War is fair.

War is not fair. Seven

wars. The seventh has not yet

come. The Civil War in Heaven, the war of the gods.

“How ironic. The seventh poem says the seventh war hasn’t come yet.”

I tilted my head.

“Do you happen to know of any myths or tales related to seven wars?”

“Nothing comes to mind immediately. There is the Seven Years’ War in history, where the British Empire clashed with France. The seven deadly sins. The number seven also symbolizes a woman’s life span…”

Isn’t the important thing simply that six have already been fought? But seven is a number with immense symbolic weight. The seventh itself probably isn’t what matters.

The eighth poem.

– Nineteen forty-five. Humanity was victorious.

The age of magic ended, and the war in heaven

was forcibly brought to a close. History was

rewritten by the power of those tailors.

“This one’s easy. 1945—so it seems to be a poem referencing World War II.”

The ninth poem.

– Forced oblivion. We have not forgotten.

Non-human beings have not forgotten.

Only humanity lives on, having forgotten that affair.

The earth remembers, the angels remember, that scar.

“We’ve gone through all of them now. What do you make of it? What these poems are trying to say.”

Dr. Meyer closed her eyes.

“Hard to say. Perhaps a World War II veteran’s fear of modern civilization and lament over the horrors of war. A passive hope for the future, at best? There’s no way to know from this information alone.”

I brushed off my clothes and rose from my seat.

“Follow me, Meyer. I’ll arrange for you to meet the author of these poems.”

***

Arccosine tilted her head.