Chapter Three: We’re Off to Never Never Land
222 Days until D-Day
Jinwoo Baek cautiously navigated the wet metal staircase. He carried heavy garbage bags in both hands, knowing that if he slipped, he would likely fall the two stories to the alley below.
He cursed his boss for making him throw out the trash mid-shift. During business hours, the staff was not allowed to take the garbage down via the tiny elevator. It was the holidays, however, and the restaurant was packed. The kitchen complained, and as usual, Jinwoo got the dirty job. Now, he was climbing down the emergency staircase in the rain carrying two large bags full of garbage.
Not even halfway down the stairs, he indeed almost slipped. Cursing aloud this time, his voice echoed down the alley toward the busy street ahead. Calming himself, he set the bags down on the landing and pulled back the wet hair that was hanging over his face, tying it with the elastic band he used when he was in the kitchen.
It was unseasonably warm for this time of year, but that didn’t keep Jinwoo from shivering in the cold light rain that was falling over Seoul.
He knew he only had himself to blame. He picked up the extra shifts because the boss had offered a bonus for working through the Christmas holidays. He could really use the extra cash, and since he already decided to stay in Seoul instead of taking the train back to Busan this year, he might as well save up a bit more before the next semester starts. His parents protested, of course, and even offered to send him some extra money for the train, and although he was barely hanging on financially, he knew his parents didn’t have the extra money either.
He was so happy when he had been accepted into one of the most prestigious universities in Korea. He had even managed to get a scholarship, and everything looked like he would have a bright future. Reality soon set in, however, as the high cost of living in Seoul put a much greater strain on his family’s savings than they had expected.
He was adamant that his parents not take out any loans. They both worked hard, but together, they barely made enough to get by. He took on a number of part-time jobs to cover his own living expenses, and so far, things had worked out. Still, it had been a harsh wake-up call.
The hardest part was that it felt like all the other students at the University came from rich families. He hated seeing the other students from his classes going out at night and partying at the same places he waited on tables and cleaned up. Hongdae Street was close to both his school and his dorm, but it was also the most popular hangout spot for all the schools in the area. He had to face the humiliation of waiting on his classmates on a regular basis, and it seemed like it would be impossible for him ever to get ahead.
Jinwoo wanted to scream in frustration, but instead, he wiped the rain from his face, grabbed the garbage bags, and carefully navigated the stairs until he reached the street. He walked toward the main road, where a small mountain of garbage bags was already piled, and tossed the two he brought down to the top of the pile. They promptly rolled off away from him and stopped right next to a couple of girls walking by.
They shot him a death glare, but he didn’t care. He was sick of Hongdae, and Seoul, and this whole unfair society. Walking around to the front of the building, he shook off the rain, then checked his reflection in the glass doors of the building to make sure he looked presentable enough to go back up. If that jerk owner said something about his appearance, he would pop him one the next time he told Jinwoo to take out the trash mid-shift.
A strange beeping noise caught his attention. It took him a moment to realize that it was coming from his phone in his pocket. It was unlike his ringtone or any of the alert noises his phone usually made, so it took him by surprise. He wiped off the screen so he could read the pop-up message there.
[CRITICAL MESSAGE!]
[Massive dimensional incursions in your area. This is a warning that portals are appearing in large numbers nearby.]
[For your safety, evacuate to a secure area as soon as possible.]
[Awakened individuals report status to your regional response center via your app as soon as possible.]
Jinwoo stared at the message for a moment in confusion. It looked like those alert messages they sent whenever there was a missile alert from the North, but the wording was strange. It was more like a notification from some mobile game. Just as he was about to dismiss it and put the phone back in his pocket, another message appeared.
[ALERT!]
[Due to portal activity in your area, you have been selected based on your Awakening profile for skill activation. Do you accept?]
[ACKNOWLEDGE]
Frowning, Jinwoo stared at his phone. His one vice was that he was an avid gamer. He never had money for a PC Bang, so he was limited to free mobile games, and he never spent any real money. He did play enough that he almost failed several courses a few semesters back. That’s when he deleted most of them.
One game that was still on his phone was Awakening. Like most of the country, he had been caught up in the fever when Team White Tiger made it to the world championships. Since there was no pay-to-win option, Jinwoo had fallen for the game hard, and spent far too many hours around campus, grinding his character, imagining what life as a professional gamer would be like.
That was until his faculty advisor called him in to discuss his midterm grades.
Recognizing the game’s name, Jinwoo was annoyed at first, especially because there was no option to decline—just a single button on his phone with the word [ACKNOWLEDGE] in bright blue. Vowing to uninstall the game later, he turned off the screen and shoved the phone into his pocket.
Just as he reached out to open the door, there was a loud noise from the street. Jinwoo heard horns, yelling, and eventually what sounded like screams. Assuming there had been an accident, he slowly stepped away from the doorway and looked down the street, craning his neck to see what was going on.
The street was more chaotic than normal, a feat in itself, but it was hard to discern why. People were running, but seemingly in random directions. Some appeared to be fleeing in fear, while others looked around with curiosity, trying to identify the cause of the disturbance. Jinwoo stepped onto the street as the noise of shouting and screaming got louder.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash as cars from around the corner started to move, pushing into each other as though the whole street was being forced into the intersection. Jinwoo flinched, then stumbled and fell backward as a small car flew through the air and landed upside down against the building across the street.
His immediate thought was of the possibility that this was some kind of attack or terrorism. While he had completed his military service, a requirement of every male his age, Jinwoo personally never felt prepared in case of a real war. It was all training and drills, and it seemed more like old men hazing younger ones than actual preparation for battle.
Now, in the face of what looked like a real emergency, he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do. Instead, he crouched against the doorway, frozen in panic as the screams grew louder and closer. Then, he saw the giant hoof step around the corner.
The image of the monster on the street shocked Jinwoo. This was right out of a movie. It was impossible. The three-meter tall creature stepped forward on legs like a human, carrying a wooden branch in one hand like a club. In its other hand was a woman… No, half of a woman…
Fear froze him in place as he tried to wake himself up from this nightmare. He told himself it was a dream, or a hallucination, but couldn’t muster the self-control to move a muscle as the monster stared at him a roared.
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Then, amazingly, it turned and started to walk away, down the road in the opposite direction. As it lumbered between the stopped and wrecked cars, people ran in every direction to get away from the monster. One man was knocked off his feet when it threw the remains of the woman at his fleeing back with enough force to smash him into the side of a building.
With the horrifying scene still in front of him, Jinwoo gained enough relief from the sight of the departing monster that several rational thoughts encroached on his panicked mind. Oddly enough, one of those thoughts was about a video game.
Minotaur. That was the name of the monster. He had seen it before, not just in pictures from folklore stories, but an exact likeness, right down to the four giant horns atop the bipedal cow-like monster. It was a monster he had defeated dozens of times in Awakenings. Now, it was here, in the center of Seoul, rampaging through Hongdae. The absurdity of the moment would have made him laugh if the terror he felt didn’t still control his body.
He remembered the messages that had just appeared on his phone moments before and instinctively reached into his pocket to grab his phone. Just as he moved his hand, a giant hooved foot appeared in front of the doorway to the building. Before he had time to react, a giant hand reached inside and grabbed him by the torso.
His vision spun as he was ripped from the doorway and swung violently around. His mind barely registered the unbelievable scene, and one final thought passed through his mind before the world went permanently dark.
Jinwoo’s last thought was a curious recognition of the scene along the familiar, popular, nightlife entertainment street. Half a dozen more monsters were tearing up the street and everyone on it. There were more monsters. He should have run.
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The tragedy in the Hongdae district of Seoul was not an isolated event. It was, however, one of the worst, and served as a global wake-up call. Strange events had been taking place around the world for many months. While there had been plenty of rumors and conspiracy theories, the truth was so far beyond even the craziest stories that if it weren’t for the horrifying videos from places like Seoul, New Orleans, and Rotterdam, it would have been impossible to accept.
Across the world, tens of thousands of strange portals had appeared. Floating in the air, most were small, only large enough for a small child to walk through. There were some, however, that were quite large. A portal outside London was large enough to drive a tank through.
At first, experts were baffled, calling them atmospheric anomalies. In a few locations, unfortunately, their true nature was revealed when monsters started to pour out of the portals. Local governments were taken by surprise, with mayors and governors issuing a variety of warnings, announcements, and even some outright denials. The news was filled with everything from pronouncements of dangerous accidents, to hoaxes, as people turned to the internet to get news about the phenomenon that was clearly a global concern.
National governments were conspicuously quiet. World leaders were unseen, while officials did little more than issue banal statements that the appearances of strange phenomena were “being looked into,” with more information about a response forthcoming.
At the same time, the internet was abuzz with the strange messages that appeared on cellphone screens around the world. Not only was the wording of the messages suspicious and ominous, but there were rumors of people who had been granted superpowers after accepting the offer of “Activation” that appeared.
There were stories of injured people being healed, gaining strength and speed, and even rumors of magic-like powers to control the elements. It was nearly three days after the massacre in Seoul that took forty-seven lives that the national governments of the world began to address the global crisis.
It started with the President of the United States, John Edwards. The popular leader was widely considered a shoo-in to win re-election, despite rumors of sex scandal dogging him for months. His announcement set the tone for other nations and was seen as the formal announcement of a new age of humanity on the planet.
The portals were a quantum phenomenon, creating bridges between another world and Earth. I.S.K., in cooperation with the United States Department of Defense and other governments around the world, had been preparing for their emergence for years and had developed technology that would not only would help defend against the potential dangers associated with the phenomenon, but could also harness the them as a new energy source.
While the possibility of accidents such as the Hongdae massacre was a risk, the potential benefits to humanity justified keeping the existence of another universe a secret. Meanwhile, I.S.K. had been developing technology to mitigate the dangers and take advantage of the power that the portals could bring to humanity. In a deal brokered by the United Nations Security Council, I.S.K. would share this technology with the entire planet for free in exchange for an exclusive license to develop the new energy and operate globally.
The game “Awakening” had, in fact, been a test bed for this technology. The global rollout, was actually the tool needed to monitor and respond to the anticipated global breakout of new portals, and while still in development, the tests had been largely successful. Portal power could be easily harnessed, and its application promised to launch the human race into a new era of prosperity of energy abundance.
Modern cell phones had secretly been enhanced to detect and harness the power of any portal in the area, and by accepting the offer of awakening, that same capability could be transferred to compatible people. It was estimated that over five percent of all humans alive on the planet would be receptive to the technology, and every person was encouraged to attempt awakening. While the exact effects were still being studied, improved health, physical condition, and the ability to channel this new form of energy were widely reported benefits, with no negative side effects known to exist.
In the days that followed that first announcement, the very nature of humanity changed overnight. Money, influence, fame, power, none of these things mattered as much as being compatible with portal energy. Those who had it were quickly recruited by corporations and government agencies. It was like a global lottery, with reports full of teary families celebrating the awakenings of family members.
Even the nations were forced to reassess and realign their allies and ideologies. The United States, Canada, Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, Japan, and France announced a tentative agreement to cooperate on portal-related technology. Meanwhile, the UK, Spain, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and much of Northern Africa formed a new block that treated the new developments with more skepticism. Former conflicts like the DMZ in Korea and Taiwan disappeared overnight, as the politics surrounding portal technology became the primary concern in international policy.
Richer countries with more land moved to dominate control of both the portals and the potential new energy that was promised, while smaller nations either quickly aligned with the larger blocks, or fell into instability. A bitter civil war broke out in Thailand almost overnight as the ailing King disappeared from the palace. Peru attempted to restart with its on-again-off-again alignment with Japan, only to be rebuffed, just before the government fell in an overnight coup led by the second vice president.
While nations squirmed in their seats, upset by the sudden instability, and large multinational corporations watched greedily, positioning themselves to gain access to the new technology. Meanwhile, the global population was largely unaffected.
According to news reports, more than ninety percent of the portals that had opened so far were benign. They radiated some kind of energy, and were dangerous to come in direct contact with, but seemed to be harmless to humans. Only a few had opened to release animals or monsters, and most of those had been in unpopulated, or relatively remote locations.
After the public announcements, governments moved quickly, making promises to implement technology to prevent monsters from appearing in cities, and to prevent disastrous incursions like the one that had occurred in Seoul, although the details for those plans were infuriatingly light.
Present in all of the news stories was I.S.K., a company once only thought of as an entertainment technology provider, which had overnight become the world authority on the most monumental change in human history. Only their promises to share their knowledge and technology freely with all the people of the world and to never interfere with any nation’s domestic governance provided the group with the cover to continue operations.
That isn’t to say that everyone was accepting of the company’s current prominence. Protests from every quarter and around the world rose up, conspiracy theories propagated like mushrooms in the forest, and pundits and preachers filled the internet and the airwaves, declaring them to be the devil or the greatest scam artists in history.
It was soon clear that this was both expected and prepared for. As hungry as the public was for information, I.S.K.’s ability to fill the space with updates was impossibly coordinated and satiated the public’s desire for information. Updates regarding research discoveries and potential applications came out hourly, seemingly 24 hours a day, through such high-profile and reliable outlets that even those who wanted to benefit by sewing discord and misinformation could not keep up.
Every morning, people would wake up to dozens of new stories about the efforts to control and harness the portals, and the progress in identifying and understanding the new powers that had begun appearing in the human population. Within a week, I.S.K. had rebranded to the World Awakened Association, or simply, The Association. Offices were appearing worldwide, each with the status of an embassy. Another week later, stories appeared about teams of super-powered individuals who were working with governments around the world to track and eliminate any monsters that had emerged from the portals. The Hongdae district of Seoul had been quarantined and was completely under the control of the Association, while the city was declared safe and free of any dangerous invaders.
Before a month had passed following the mass of portal appearances, the world had already begun to settle into a new normal, one that included portals to other universes, a global economy supported by a new and mysterious source of energy, and family members and neighbors coming out as ‘awakened,’ with supernatural abilities.