Chapter Six: Seoul

Subject: Seoul
From: Randall Clay
Date: 02/16/15 09:27
To: Douglas Clay

When Nag, the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can
But his mate makes no such motion when she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Rudyard Kipling, The Female of the Species

Did you really say that the Shouters only have one language? An entire planet, and only one tongue in which to speak? That is, in it's way, one ofthe most disturbing thing I've heard about them. And sad, in a way, because walking in a city where everyone else is speaking a language you don't know is a refreshing, clarifying experience. You get to see human interactions through a more primal eye, not knowing the levels of rationalization piled atop the simple primate dominance and submission patterns at play; not being privy to the lies and challenges laid on top of mating rituals as old as DNA itself.
On the other hand, it must be nice to always be able to ask where the bathroom is.
The new Korea is one of MP NeoTech, and thus Dad's, bigger success stories. The new plants that they built were precicely poised to transform the post-unification economy from dependence on welfare and foreign aid to a major industrial competitor. Then, after the Message, Korea was in perfect position to start manufacturing bulk quantities of nanotwine, which has then been sold to the companies behind the Mount Kenya project and the San Antonio and Kyoto Skyhooks, mainly. Demand still outstrips supply, so the Venice Skyhook project hasn't been able to get off the ground, as it were. At least that's what the brochures all say.
I had a fairly pleasant conversation with some of the officers of MP NeoTech Korea, learning almost nothing that I didn't already know. Then I struck out on my own, doing some local research on Min Lee, one of the names listed in Dad's notebook. This name is not particularly uncommon in this neck of the woods, occupying roughly three full pages of the local phone book. So obviously I would need to narrow things down a bit. I decided to start with the assumption that it was somebody important and connected with the company or it's rivals and partners. A few translated-newsfeed searches later and I had a prime candidate: Min Lee, researcher for Glowing Star Incorporated, a small business that was eventually merged into MP NeoTech Korea. She was a brilliant materials engineer from the South, who had made some of the practical advances in manufacturing bucky-tube materials that would, in a world without the message, have been the first steps on a thirty or forty year path toward developing nanotwine for ourselves, and in this world, made it that much easier for factories using patents owned by Glowing Star and herself to ramp up production once that part of the message was unraveled. She also died, in a traffic accident, two weeks after Dad left Korea.
I was intrigued. I dug around for more information. Her personal phone number bore no easily-discerned relationship to the one in the book, but I had already decided that it was in code, and it would take more than one pair of code/real numbers to even think about breaking it. The accident that killed her was a hit and run, with no witnesses and no suspects. She drove a tiny car of local manufacture; from simulations of the collision the other car must have been several times more massive; not quite the size of a truck or bus, but at least a van or sports utility vehicle of some sort. She had no living heirs or relatives, but one close neighbor: she had lived in a small house that had been converted to a two-unit townhouse by its owners. The other unit was rented out, both then and now, to a European woman named 'Lili Valo', who described herself at the time to the papers as a student. To still be here after six years marked her as either a very serious or a very unserious one. Either way, she managed to stay out of the news other than with respect to Lee's death.
OF coure, 'Lili Valo' is hardly a John Smith-like name here in Korea. Or, even, for that matter, in her home back in Kosovo, as some general trawling of net sources reveals, along with a picture which reveals her as a quite attactive redhead of a somewhat atheletic build, and further references marked her as an intermittent fixture of the local nightclub scene. Thus was I comdemned to spend several nights mingling among the local late night party people, learning, in the process, enough Korean to order drinks for myself and others, ask for a dance, and to accept or decline similar offers from others gracefully. At least once a night, of course, I would find myself among a group of people bound and determined to practice their language skills, which ranged from the 'broken' to 'excellent' levels. I had been at it for almost a week, catching no glimpse of Lili whereever I might go, before one of these groups' conversation happened to mention her, in passing, at which another member regaled me with a story of a multi-club epic binge with which she celebrated her 24th birthday. I took advantage of the opportunity, and asked if anyone knew where she was hanging out these days, but none of them knew.
So, with nose back to the proverbial grindstone, I continued my efforts, learning in the process the additional Korean words required to order better drinks, to flirt clumsily (which has always seemed to work for me at least as well as flirting smoothly does), and successfully acquire a phone number at end of an encounter. Our family does seem to have quite a talent for languages. Dad spoke eleven, down to the legalese, and I've never had trouble with any I've tried. Maybe I should take an Asian language when I get back to college.
At any rate, it was almost a week after that first indirect contact, a Saturday night, as it happened, that I first caught sight of Lili, who was, if anything, more attractive in person than on digital photograph. It was just after two AM in a place called Nightside, and pretending to be smitten from across a crowded hall did not prove at all difficult. A brief walk through the jostling crowd later and I was asking her to dance, in Korean. She accepted, in English, and the game was, so to speak, afoot.
The morality of this endeavor is a question on which I had given some amount of thought, which is to say developed some fairly elaborate rationalizations. It is not, as I have told myself, as though I have not sought out one night stands with women considerably less attractive than Mrs. Valo in the past. She would mark the oldest such, but 'late twenties' hardly represents an insurmountable or inappropriate age difference. Still, conscience demands full disclosure of the fact that I had never, prior to this point, sought to seduce someone else for reasons other than the satisfaction of the self-evident urges. But was not the general quest on which I had embarked in fact not less but more noble than the slaking of base desires? And so the conversation went back and forth within. Someday I may be able to tell you how it turned out, but action precedes thought in these matters, and drags it along unwilling. In short, we danced all night, having a few brief conversations over drinks when our feet needed rest during which far more flirtation than information was exchanged. During this sort of conversation, there is always a simple cue to determine just how the evening is going, and that is what other person the woman mentions during that conversation. If she mentions her boyfriend, then one is obviously at a severe disadvantage. If she mentions an ex-boyfriend, well, that's much better, all things considered, although one should expect a great deal of baggage should things progress beyond the casual. Lili mentioned her sister Zana, of whom, despite being completely unlike me in every noticable way, I somehow reminded her.
At the end of the evening, we exchanged phone numbers and an almost but not quite entirely chaste kiss, then went our seperate ways, me back to my hotel and her, presumably, back to the house she had shared with Min Lee.
I slept late, well past noon, and spent the afternoon scouting restaurant reviews. That evening I called her number, being careful to use my cell to allow my name to appear on the call id, and she answered. A short negotiation of her class and homework schedule later and we had a dinner date for Wednesday night, at the nicest place I expected to be able to place a reservation for on three days' notice, a French-influenced Korean seafood place with a name I had to spend a not insignificant amount of time learning to pronounce. Monday I occupied purchasing formal dinner attire, something I had not thought to pack, and Tuesday and the early parts of Wednesday were spent mainly in anticipation.
We met at the restaurant: I arrived by taxicab, out of respect for the clothes more than general convenience; it was certainly close enough to walk, and her in a sleek and silent electric motorcycle: far too large and fast to call a scooter, regardless of any technical preferred distinction between the two terms.
The food was quite excellent. My main course was mostly shrimp; hers lobster, both extremely well-prepared and presented. While the meal unfolded, we each spent time talking about ourselves. I went with, more or less, the truth, emphasising the travelling around and seeing the world part over the detective work, and strongly implying that I had full access to the inheritance that careful investment of the proceeds from Dad's MP NeoTech options garnered rather than operating on an expense account, but other than those small deceptions, and of course no mention of Min Lee whatsoever, the truth.
Her story was also fascinating. She started college here on a diversity scholarship at a school that felt like having a few Eastern/Southern Europeans would improve the quality of the student body in general, studying physics and doing fairly well at it as I understand. Then came the Christmas Message, which, among other things, almost obsoleted her entire degree overnight when the bits about Pi-Fields were translated. It turned out that she could do better teaching English here than her actual chosen field anywhere else. After a couple years of that, she re-enrolled and has been learning the New Physics part-time.
Over the desert course, she told me that she was almost done, and had already decided to leave Korea as soon as the semester ended. She said that my story had inspired her, and she was strongly considering travelling extensively before settling down to a career back home (Southern Europe being continuously in the market for engineers familiar with the New Physics, one would apparently be waiting for her. I think family connections may also have been at play.) She invited me to come home and inspire her further, and, my ulterior and anterior motives being fully in concert, I accepted.
Without dwelling on the portions of my recent story on which no gentleman ought to dwell, an extremely good time was had by all, and in other circumstances Lili Valo may well have been on her way to becoming the...let me think, the fourth Great Love of my Life. It's truly a pity, then, that she's some kind of spy or something.
I found out on my third visit to her house, the first occasion on which I was left alone inside the place and could actually do any of the investigation that, hard as it was to remember at that point, was the entire point of having gotten here. She had, in her 'office', (more of a study room, actually), a small locked box. A fairly sophisticated lock, but you may recall that I became something of a locksmith as something to make Shop Class at least vaugely interesting, and have kept the skills up to date helping fellow students who've locked themselves out of their rooms or cars in the interim. This would mark the first time for using my powers for evil rather than good, though. The lock provided no serious challenge. The contents of the box was mostly letters, written in what I can only assume was Albanian, a language which is still sufficiently obscure as not to have a free web translator out there somewhwere. One of the letters, the most recent, was dated shortly after my arrival here, and it contained photographs, of me, taken at the Airports in Vancouver and Seoul. I stared at them for several moments, experiencing a few moments of vertigo.
The nice thing about living in the twenty-first century is that every citizen has access to tools only possessed by secret agents back in the 20th. To wit: my telephone has, cunningly unconcealed within it's framework, a small camera capable of taking pictures of sufficient resolution to duplicate documents. I did so with the letter with my picture in it. Then I looked through and found two letters from the time of my father's visit, including one which contained, stuck in the middle of the Albanian text, both Dad's name and Min Lee's. This was a very long letter, and after that there was little memory left in the phone. I filled the remainder with pictures of the return addresses on the remaining letters, and then carefully replaced everything as I had found it before returning to the hotel.
Even when has entered a relationship with less than pure motivations, learning that the other person involved seems to have motives considerably less pure and may in fact be some kind of corporate or national spy or another working for god knows who tends to put a damper on things, and, indeed, two days later it was clear to me that it was time to go. We parted pleasantly, exchanging email addresses (I created a new one for the purpose rather than overload this one), with her promising to look me up when her world tour commenced.
And thus, with some things that might be considered 'clues' in hand, although the word by word translations I could manage with Albanian-English dictionaries were just good enough to let me know that the letters were, at best, written obliquely and at worst were in fact in code, I booked my flight to the intellectual capital of the New China.
Next Stop: Taipei!