I left home for work at four thirty in the morning, driving through the quiet, empty predawn streets. I'd expected the journey to take about two and a half hours, but it was six thirty when I reached Taecheon. I was aiming to get to the branch around seven when I came to the Daeryong River, which cut through the middle of the city. As I waited at the lights to cross Guryong Bridge, something emerged from the grass of the ecological park beneath Mount Guryong and slowly moved onto the crosswalk.
I'd been swaying to the music as I drove. My eyes widened at the sight beyond the windshield. A jet-black serpent was crossing on the green pedestrian light. It was nearly thirty meters long, its body as thick as a traffic-light pole. Watching its black scales occupy the crosswalk's entire four-meter width, I was so overwhelmed I could barely hear the music. Dazed, I switched it off. I couldn't tear my eyes away.
The enormous serpent traced figure eights with its body as it crossed. It was so long that its head had already reached the far side while other parts of it hadn't passed the halfway point. I hurriedly looked around to see whether anyone else was witnessing this, but perhaps because it was so early, mine was the only car stopped there.
The brief pedestrian light ended before the serpent had finished crossing. Even when my light changed, I waited for it to pass. Its glossy black scales gleaming, the serpent deftly crossed the road, playfully coiled once around a bollard, released it, and slid along the pavement. I wanted to keep watching, but the traffic signal meant I had to turn left.
As I drove onto Guryong Bridge, I caught sight of the serpent in my peripheral vision, climbing over the riverside path's safety railing, which stood more than two meters high. I almost imagined hearing the splash as it dropped into the river. Across the bridge and into town, I began seeing cars and shops preparing to open. The tension slowly drained out of my body.
What did I just see?
I'd read that Taecheon and its surrounding mountains were undeveloped and close to nature. I hadn't realized that meant giant serpents using crosswalks. ......I suppose the ecological park doesn't use pesticides if something like that can live there. As long as it doesn't turn up as my customer, it can roam wherever it likes.
I found a gimbap shop open early and ate a roll, checking the time repeatedly. I reached Goldlight Bank's Taecheon branch at seven twenty. Not knowing the back-door code, I knocked. Someone came out to open it, wearing an ivory blouse and navy suit trousers, with dark brown hair cut just below the ears.
“Good morning. I'm Officer Eun Su-won. I look forward to working with you.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you, Officer Eun. I'm Assistant Manager Bae Seo-yeon. Good to have you.”
Bae said she was always the first to arrive and open the branch. She and Manager Hwang Jae-ik kept the keys and access cards. Managers usually opened up, so perhaps she lived closest or habitually arrived early. The cleaning lady was quickly emptying the bins at everyone's desks. I introduced myself as a new arrival and said I looked forward to working here. She said she had to finish this place and hurry across the street to High Interest Bank. She was run off her feet doing two jobs, so I should stop talking to her. I shut my mouth and got out of the way.
Manager Song Byeong-jun came in next. His suit was closer to blue than navy, his hair short and curly, and he came up to my shoulder. He glanced at me when I greeted him, then went to his desk without replying. Next, I greeted the deputy branch manager as he entered through the back door.
“Good morning. I'm Officer Eun Su-won. I look forward to working with you.”
“Yes. Right.”
Kim Jong-do had dyed his hair black, but gray strands showed here and there. He looked to be in his late forties, wore glasses, and had on a light brown suit whose buttons looked ready to burst. I switched on every electronic device in sight, put my nameplate and seal on what I assumed was my desk, Yu's old one, and began unpacking.
The branch manager arrived five minutes after I did. A chill slid down my spine. The instant Ma entered, the temperature seemed to plunge from twenty-five degrees to below zero. The smile Bae had given me a moment earlier vanished.
At Hwapyeong, we'd been expected in by eight ten. If I'd arrived then here, I'd probably have been last. At a bank branch, the manager was king and god. How the place ran depended entirely on that person's decisions. Two minutes after Ma went into his office, I went to introduce myself.
I knocked and entered, privately startled by what I saw. One wall was covered in CCTV screens. Was that normal for a branch manager's office? Well. If I hadn't worked somewhere else first, I might have thought so.
Ma Seong-geon was short enough that the top of his head came below my chin. His hair was parted far to one side and slick with gel. He wore a light gray suit and a bright red tie, with his shirt buttoned oppressively tight to the neck. Seated in the central chair, he nodded as I introduced myself and said I looked forward to working with him. Let's get along. We exchanged only a few words before I left.
An employee I took to be Manager Hong Hui-gyeong was just coming through the back door, so I greeted her.
“Good morning!”
“You're new! Hello!”
With her hair pinned up, Hong smiled brightly in reply. She wore a short skirt whose hem was closer to her thighs than her calves and very high heels that struck the floor with each step. Kim Jong-do greeted her, then called me over and pointed to the corner desk.
“That was Officer Yu's desk before he resigned. Now.......”
I answered quickly.
“Officer Eun Su-won.”
“Right. You can use it, Officer Eun. Yu said he was quitting to study for the civil service exam. Do you dream of becoming a civil servant too?”
“My dream is to be buried at this bank.”
“Good. Good. As a banker should.”
I'll get cremated and leave them no bones at all. I sat at Yu's desk, logged in with my one-time password, gathered pens, sticky notes, and other work supplies, then searched the drawers. I opened every one in case he'd left me a farewell message like [Run]. Nothing.
Someone knocked at the back door. It was exactly eight. By other branches' standards, this wasn't late. But employees generally tried to arrive before the branch manager or deputy. Nobody wanted to be known as the person who came in after the boss. Bosses tended to consider anyone arriving later than themselves lazy. I checked the camera and opened the door.
“Hello. Pyeongan headquarters told me to report here today.”
The woman in silver-rimmed glasses sounded a little frightened. She wore a shirt and knee-length suit skirt, with the staff ID she'd received at Pyeongan headquarters around her neck. Her face looked very young. Her hands were white as she clutched the work guide for new Goldlight Bank employees as though it were a lifeline. So this is the new recruit assigned here.
“Hello. Come in and introduce yourself to everyone. I'm Officer Eun Su-won. Your name?”
“Bu Ha-yun.”
Stiff as a robot, Officer Bu went around greeting everyone at their desks. At eight oh five, someone knocked again. Nobody else opened the door, so I did. Anyone knocking doesn't know the code. They must all be new. After checking the camera, I opened up to a young man in navy suit trousers and a white shirt. His hair was swept completely back. The moment he saw me, he bowed ninety degrees and introduced himself.
“Good morning! I'm Ji! Geon! U! Assigned to Taecheon today! I look forward to working with you!”
“Nice to meet you. I'm Officer Eun Su-won.”
As we exchanged greetings, I learned he was the new intern. He went around introducing himself in exactly the same tone and volume. At eight oh eight, the bank's security officer, Park Sang-ryong, came in, greeted everyone, and began switching on the coin counter and all the equipment on the customer side.
Taecheon also had an android, [Goldlight], in one corner, but it didn't seem to get much use. Goldlight was a piece of android equipment the bank had brought in to replace humans. It constantly broke down. Sit it in a chair and it leaned sideways. Ask it to open a new passbook and it failed to open the first page properly, feeding it into the printer on the second. It couldn't tell the front of a card from the back when inserting it into the card issuer. It caused every kind of trouble, all of which the human sitting beside it had to fix.
It also left much to be desired at customer consultations. Customers might forget documents needed for a loan consultation or ask an unrelated question. Then all it did was repeat things like [I cannot understand you.] and [Please state your request clearly.]
“Why'd you seize my account?!”
[I cannot understand your request. Please state it clearly.]
“You made my card stop working!”
[Your account is subject to a seizure order for 62,000,000 won. Your total balance is 802,200 won, so your card cannot be used.]
“Lift the seizure!”
[I cannot understand your request. Please state it clearly. Your pronunciation is poor.]
“You tin can! Die!”
Customers got angry because they couldn't communicate with the android, and the human beside it had to deal with the fallout. Only selected branches had received one, apparently including Hwapyeong and Taecheon. It seemed they'd sent androids to the highest- and lowest-performing branches to collect data.
At Hwapyeong, whenever Goldlight turned an ordinary customer into an angry one, Kang Myeong-seong and I hurried them over to our desks to smooth things over. It constantly ruined controlled stationery, too, leaving me to fix passbooks with printing all over the place. That alone made work hard enough. But when the android suddenly stopped moving or stood still, people inevitably collided with eighty kilograms of metal. Other branches apparently used theirs to carry things. At Hwapyeong, Goldlight had carried a sack of coins toward the vault, abruptly declared it too heavy, and dropped it, nearly crushing Go Mi-sul's foot. After that, we kept it seated.
Then a male customer, fascinated by it, touched the sexless android's chest without permission. It moved an arm and struck him in the face. We'd had to apologize while he swore at us. Satisfying as it had been, the rest of us were always cleaning up its messes. Everyone at Hwapyeong wanted to switch it off, but apparently bank policy wouldn't allow it. Higher management insisted that androids had to replace human staff and ordered us to make Goldlight consult with at least five customers a day. We had no choice but to seat people in front of it. Then the branch's most junior employee had to fix whatever it did. The problem was that I was Hwapyeong's most junior employee. With its thick fingers, Goldlight couldn't turn passbook pages properly. It printed on pages two and four, mangled the passbook, yanked a driving license out of the ID scanner hard enough to bend it, then presented everything to the customer as finished. Day after day, I'd snatch away the document tray it was offering, smile and ask the customer to wait, take the mess to my desk, repair it, and return it.
I was a rookie busy fixing my own mistakes, yet I had to be responsible for an android too. The employees one intake above me must have been losing their minds teaching me while I caused trouble and helping clean up after the robot. It became so exhausting that I called Goldlight Bank's AI department and asked whether we could turn it off. They said it had been designed so branch staff couldn't switch it off at will. Just like the bank TV. For reference, we couldn't freely turn those on or off either. They came on automatically at eight in the morning and went off at six in the evening. Goldlight worked the same way. Supposedly, everything it saw, said, and did was recorded for data collection. Kang barely spoke in front of it, worried about eavesdropping. Every employee had already signed a form agreeing to Goldlight's broad data collection, but he still watched his words.
“Officer Eun. Watch what you say. No telling how much that tin can is listening to.”
“I wish it would listen to a lot and improve. This is exhausting.”
One day, Kang delivered a long lament to Kim Seong-a. He said it felt like working with two rookies. He could keep Eun Su-won under his wing, but he couldn't live with that lunatic robot. With the branch manager's approval, Hwapyeong simply switched off the queue-number machine at the android's station. Goldlight spent the entire day standing there, pressing the next-number button with its metal finger, and not a single customer came before closing. That was the audacity available to a bottom-ranked branch. Then the bank got a new president, and the drive to replace humans with androids briefly stalled. The policy of sacrificing five customers a day to Goldlight, gathering more data, and progressively updating the android foundered under the new president. The new president intended to embrace respect for human beings, insisting that only humans could advance the bank and distrusting androids and AI. Besides, cheap humans were better for boosting short-term results than an expensive money pit of an android that couldn't go out and actively bring in business.
Other branches with Goldlight units cautiously contacted us. Once they learned we'd switched off its queue machine, they quietly did the same. Taecheon seemed similar. The PC and queue machine at its Goldlight station were both off. At least at Hwapyeong we'd wiped it down from head to toe with wet wipes (one of my daily tasks). Taecheon's seemed to be wearing three layers of dust. I fetched wipes from the supply cupboard and cleaned its face and body. Black grime came away. Clearly, nobody had been maintaining it.
Inside the bank was a huge vault the size of a small studio apartment. Inside that stood a wardrobe-sized metal safe reserved for cash and a smaller one about knee-high. The huge vault door looked just like the ones in films, big enough to require your whole body to turn the handle and haul it open. These days, though, most opened automatically because the doors were so heavy. And with mornings so busy, turning a handle this way and that was tiresome and inconvenient. We used a card, key, and code instead. The turning handle saw little use except briefly during audits.
Vault doors were no joke. Bump your flesh against one and it bruised immediately. What was a studio-sized vault for? Paperwork. Almost all of it. Cash occupied less than the full wardrobe-sized safe. If a branch's holdings exceeded the appropriate amount, we called an armored cash transport to take the excess to the head office. Arranging transport was a job in itself, and each trip cost a fortune. Often, we didn't call until cash was practically overflowing from the safe.
Song Byeong-jun opened the vault, and I followed Bae Seo-yeon inside. She was the head teller. Usually, someone who'd been at a branch at least six months to a year took that job. The head teller, also the chief cashier, managed all the money in the bank. Every sum entering or leaving the vault passed through that person. It was one of the busiest roles before opening.
The head teller also managed the money in the branch's ATMs. Cash boxes and plenty of other things had to be carried out of the vault. Controlled stationery, gift certificates of every kind, and money all had to be in place before the doors opened. None of it was light. Days with large amounts of coins coming in or going out meant moving sacks of them. Apparently, in the old days, head tellers sometimes wrecked their wrists or backs carrying them without a cart.
At Hwapyeong, everyone helped the head teller prepare in the morning as a matter of course, whether or not it was their own job. Without thinking much of it, I picked up everything Bae took out of the inner safe and carried it beside her desk or mine. The customer area was reasonably spacious, but the staff side of the counter was narrower than I'd expected. Like fitting pieces in Tetris, I placed the cash box of controlled stationery and gift certificates she wanted moved behind her chair.