Ever since the ivory tower of knowledge known as the university became commercialized, there have been three majors famous for being what people call departments that can’t make money because they can’t get you a job. They are... literature, history, and philosophy.
I feel a little bad saying that to every literature, history, and philosophy major in the world, but I trust you’ll let it slide as a statement made by one of the afflicted, since I graduated from the philosophy department too. The fact that departments like these are bad for employment is an objective truth proven by Statistics Korea.
According to what my upperclassmen used to say over drinks, the greatest output the philosophy department had ever produced was one graduate who double-majored in philosophy and business, then got a job at a bank by making only the business degree matter on his résumé.
So if I got a job now as a special-rank controller, I would earn the title of the greatest output the philosophy department has ever produced without even having to say, Because YouTube is the future... Even if a civil servant’s salary is supposed to be saltier than a salt farm, it still has special-rank in front of it, so wouldn’t that be an incredible start for someone just beginning their career?
And on top of that, if I became a controller, I would get military exemption. While my classmates were off in the army digging frozen ground with shovels, I would just be in anomalies laughing and chatting with monsters that might be ordinary entities or special entities...
That was as far as my thoughts got before I snapped back to my senses.
“Thank you for thinking highly of me, but I can’t become a controller.”
“...Why not?”
“For one thing, I still haven’t graduated from college. And I can’t tell you the exact number, but my GPA is a complete disaster. Under 3.0.”
“......”
“And even if graduating from a four-year university isn’t one of the eligibility requirements to apply as a controller, I don’t have any confidence I can handle taking classes and exploring anomalies at the same time. It’s already hard enough taking eighteen credits while working a part-time job, and if controllers are civil servants at the end of the day, that means five days a week, nine to six. If I have to go into anomalies too, then overtime is guaranteed.”
It felt wrong to get tricked by military exemption into taking a job before graduation. And Jeon Jiho slapping special-rank on me out of nowhere had made me forget for a second, but right up until “Minsu” showed up, these Anomaly Control Department bastards had been on the verge of cutting off my limbs.
“You know this is a country where people are free to choose their profession, right? If you keep trying to force a job on me like this, I’m going to sue the Anomaly Control Department as unconstitutional.”
As I kept rambling whatever came to mind, Jeon Jiho’s expression worsened in real time.
Honestly, because I had dragged “Minsu” into reality just to save my own skin, I had thought for a moment about quietly joining the Anomaly Control Department. I did not know the details, but if I had put the country in danger, then shouldn’t I take responsibility?
But the Anomaly Control Department had shot me with a tranquilizer gun first and put me in restraints. Sure, I had been dazzled by ten million won tax-free and technically agreed to everything without realizing it, but I could not just jump at employment in an institution that drew my blood without permission and talked about cutting me apart. They call civil servants iron rice bowls, but these days they are really just pitiful beings tormented by complaints from the public, aren’t they?
Jeon Jiho did nothing but sigh heavily as I loudly declared my passionate opposition to forced employment.
“If you tie me up and lock me away, then my employment will stay tied up too...”
“Fine.”
After all the nonsense I had spewed, it seemed like he had simply grown sick of me. With a face that looked much more haggard than when I first met him, Jeon Jiho said he would take me home himself. Even when I said I could go on my own, he insisted so firmly on seeing me home that I finally nodded.
It was a shame to lose the chance at a high-ranking government job, but no matter how bad the job market was, if you joined just anywhere, you were bound to end up crying tears of blood. And I was not even a senior yet, so instead of thinking about employment, I still needed to spend more time messing around.
“Still, if you change your mind, make sure to contact me.”
“If I’m going to change my mind, it’ll probably be around the second semester of senior year.”
“Fine. That would still be all right. You are someone we absolutely need...”
Lee Manji was still unconscious, so unlike on the way there, Jeon Jiho drove the car himself. I was in the front passenger seat instead of the back this time as well. Even on the way home, Jeon Jiho kept going without pause, listing one benefit after another of joining the Anomaly Control Department as a special-rank controller.
The more I listened to his long speech about the incredible salary and benefits, the less I wanted to become a controller. Isn’t that just hazard pay? No matter how I thought about it, it seemed suspicious for civil servants to be paid that much.
But my suspicions did not last long. The moment we entered the highway, some van started tailing the sedan Jeon Jiho and I were in, as if it had been waiting for us.
“What’s that car?”
“Something annoying has attached itself to us.”
“No, I’m asking what that car is. Is this classified too?”
“There are idiots. More of them.”
Jeon Jiho stepped on the accelerator to shake off the van chasing behind the sedan. I just grabbed the assist handle in the car as tightly as I could.
“Do you know what the number one cause of death for Koreans is?”
“Traffic accidents. Suicide is number two.”
“As expected of a civil servant, you really do kn—aaagh!”
But speeding up accomplished nothing. The van clung right to us and then slammed straight into the back of the sedan. I was truly lucky to be sitting in the passenger seat. The airbags deployed properly, and I had my seatbelt on.
Then came the sensation of my body lifting into the air. Because the van had crashed into the sedan at full speed, I had no choice but to smash my head against the front windshield even with the safety measures kicking in.
There go even more of my already insufficient brain cells. At this rate, every time I memorize one philosophical school of thought, I’ll forget two philosophers’ names and end up living with the memory of a goldfish...
With that hopeless thought as the last thing in my mind, I lost consciousness again.
***
My life had always been a little dynamic ever since I was a kid.
I never really had the sort of adversity you could write about in a personal statement, but weird things kept happening to me anyway. I guess you could say a lot of people who were not entirely right in the head tended to gather around me. So this was not even my first time being kidnapped. I had been kidnapped once before, back in elementary school.
Still, no matter how dynamic my life had been, this was the first time I had been questioned at a police station, dragged to the Anomaly Control Department, and then gotten into a traffic accident and been kidnapped on my way home, all in a single day. With how eventful this was, I was pretty sure this year had to be cursed.
“Are you awake?”
Unlike Jeon Jiho’s stiff way of speaking, the gentle voice of a middle-aged woman brushed against my ears. It sounded so much like Professor Choi, the professor of the history of Western philosophy who never gave me Cs, only Ds, that I jolted awake. Her tone was exactly the same as when she used to say, “Iru, are you sleeping?” every time I dozed off in class.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the middle-aged woman standing in front of me was not Professor Choi. Dressed in a neat suit like some corporate chairwoman, with a bob haircut, she smiled at me benevolently.
“Our people treated you a little roughly, didn’t they? I’m truly sorry.”
“Ah, yes... But if you’re sorry, I’d appreciate it if you untied my hands...”
“Well, of course your hands should be untied once you become one of us. We were just in a bit of a hurry. Letting talent slip away is a disaster, after all.”
I was tied to some kind of chair. My hands were bound too, so I could not even undo what I was tied with.
The problem was that thanks to “Minsu,” my recovery had sped up, so there was not a single trace of injury from the traffic accident left on me. If there had been any injury left anywhere, I could have thrown myself down dramatically and started screaming that traffic accidents always leave worse aftereffects than they look like.
“It seems, fortunately, that you didn’t become a controller after all.”
“You can tell just from that?”
“Yes. Controllers are branded so they can endure anomalies. So that even if they stay inside anomalies for a long time, they won’t assimilate to the anomaly. It’s a kind of anti-contamination branding.”
The moment I heard that civil servants got branded too, I became even more certain that I absolutely should not become a controller. Jeon Jiho really was a bit of a scammer in the first place. He had talked all about the salary and benefits, but he had not said a single word about branding.
I was worried about whether Jeon Jiho, who had been driving, was all right, since he did not have any recovery ability. But right now I had bigger problems of my own, so I had no chance to ask about him.
“I’m sorry we had to bring you here by force like this, but we’d really like you to come over to our side.”
“What side is your side, exactly...?”
“Oh dear, I’m late introducing myself. We are Dore, a group that rescues missing persons from inside anomalies.”
“I see...”
“I’d like you to become the leader of our missing-person search team. What do you think?”
The blessings of employment never seemed to end.
“If you join Dore, I’ll help you start by searching for your friends. Four people went into Dowon High School and only two came out, right? Aren’t you worried about your friends?”
If jobs were overflowing, I should have been happy, but I did not feel like laughing. No matter how I thought about it, every job I had been offered so far was abnormal. It even made paranormal YouTube reporting sound more like a legitimate profession.
“Um, there’s something I need to say here too.”
“Yes?”
“I’m still a college student, and my grades are trash, so I’m not in any position to get a job.”
“......”
“And this is a country where people are free to choose their profession, so...”
Unlike Jeon Jiho, who had started frowning between the brows, the middle-aged woman did not lose her smile even while listening to my nonsense assault.
“Yes, what you’re saying makes sense too.”
“Then please untie me first.”
“But if you stay tied up a little longer, your mind will change. When people are cornered, they say they’ll do anything.”
“What?”
“Our Dore absolutely needs you.”
Which one would be the worse boss, objectively speaking: Jeon Jiho, who tried to use mental manipulation on me out of nowhere and turn me into a controller, or this middle-aged woman, who said my mind would change if they just kept me tied up? Honestly, both of them were terrible.
“If it’s for the sake of the goal, a little coercion can’t be helped, can it?”
Getting a job really does seem like an insane thing to do.
“Let me know when you change your mind. I’ll untie you then.”
My resolve that I should never get a job was only going to grow firmer from here on out. Once I got out of here, whether it was the Anomaly Control Department or Dore, I was going to enlist in the military before either of them could ever come after me again. Even if it meant turning “Minsu” into the one waiting in rubber shoes, I was going to escape this forced employment pitch no matter what.
The moment the middle-aged woman left me behind and walked out, I leaned back against the chair and started wriggling around to undo the bindings on my wrists.
The knots were more elaborate than I had expected, but not so impossible that they could not be undone at all. Dore or whatever these idiots called themselves... these people would never figure it out even if they died and came back.
That I was an experienced kidnapping victim.