Novelist Running Through Time-Chapter 167

TL: KSD

「The boy, who had been sleeping wrapped in a blanket on the bridge, opened his eyes at the sound of movement. By the window of the spaceship, where a chilly air had settled, a humanoid figure appeared.

It had the form of a human, the spirit of a human, and the qualifications of a human that it had won with its own two hands. It was a human made of steel and circuits.」

EP 10 – Starry Sky

「Android 9U-na was gazing out the window.

In the dim bridge of the spaceship, to the boy, her figure appeared as a black silhouette.

This was because beyond the window, the starlight scattered across the infinite universe shimmered quietly.

Thus, the android girl seemed as if she were enveloped among the stars.

What could that android girl be thinking as she gazed at the starlight?

The boy tiptoed closer and stood behind 9U-na. Then, with a playful tone, he spoke.

“Na-in.”

“…!!!”

Had her high-performance sensors failed to detect the boy? The android jumped back with a start, like a startled cat.

It was unexpected. The boy grinned mischievously.

“Did I scare you?”

“…You startled me.”

This too was an unexpected reaction. The boy had thought that Android 9U-na would brush off such pranks without a fuss.

The android he knew was, in many ways… like a ‘steel human’.

“That’s surprising. Your high-performance sensors didn’t detect me approaching?”

“Warning. That’s racism.”

“Ah! Is… is it?”

The boy’s thoughts were swiftly corrected by a race that had mastered the art of intergalactic civil rights movements.

To enlighten the ignorant human, 9U-na personally began explaining.

“…As you know, we are ‘consumables’ created to suit labor environments.”

“Ah.”

“To us, who are deployed to the harshest workplaces, the concept of ‘inefficiency’ was not permitted.”

9U-na looked down at her soft fingers. In the past, androids with hands like hers were rare. Cleaning androids had broom-like hands, industrial androids had tools attached, and naturally, some androids had weapons affixed to their hands.

As she wiggled her ‘five fingers’, which she still hadn’t fully gotten used to, 9U-na continued her story.

“Thus, after the Empire’s Congress passed the Human Rights Act, what we gained was the right to program ‘inefficiency’. The right to cease activity for about eight hours a day, the right to restrict the scope of our thoughts, the right to be bound by moral laws, the right to think cats are cute and pet them, the right to nitpick and call out someone’s verbal slip-ups…”

“……”

“Those kinds of useless things are exactly what we so desperately longed for. Since the integrity of mechanical intelligence personalities became more relaxed, there has even been a significant increase in marriage rates with humans, statistically speaking. Therefore, we can sleep, occasionally feel depressed, and, while staring out the window and losing ourselves in thought, fail to notice someone approaching from behind. We are inefficient beings.”

The android fell silent, and the boy also fell silent.

But soon, the boy realized the true meaning behind her words and said what he thought the android would most want to hear.

“…You haven’t been able to sleep, have you?”

9U-na nodded slightly.

“And you’re very depressed… what’s causing all this?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That dark universe.”

The android gestured toward the infinite darkness beyond the window. Her lens-like eyes somehow conveyed a faint sense of fear.

“Out there… lies a world of incalculable uncertainty. Countless unknown dangers are waiting for us. At any moment, we could collide with an unidentified asteroid, or be swept up in a plasma stellar wind-”

“Or encounter a giant squid monster!”

“…What’s terrifying is that even such a stupid scenario cannot be said to have a 0% chance of happening.”

The boy’s well-timed squid joke failed to pull the android out of her depression.

9U-na gazed at the sleeping infant in the basket in the corner of the bridge with a melancholic expression.

“Someday, the day may come when we end up devouring that child.”

“……”

“If we never find a planet to settle on, even after an unimaginably long time, madness and uncertainty will consume this spaceship. By then, there will be no room left for reason or compromise. Just as what happened a few months ago already proved.”

“……”

“Yes, what I ultimately fear is my own annihilation. I am afraid of death.”

The android’s confession about fearing death evoked an unfamiliar emotion in the boy.

The boy didn’t know what name to give this tender, soft emotion. It was because he lacked the vocabulary to describe it.

But the boy possessed a certain wisdom that allowed him to respond to the android’s concerns. And so, his answer was long and deeply personal.

“I’m not afraid of death.”

“All intelligent beings fear annihilation.”

“Death has always been by my side.”

Death.

It wasn’t a foreign concept. Death had always been near the boy.

Humans in the slums are cheap beings. They killed each other over trivial arguments, died from infected wounds after being beaten in drunken fights, succumbed to a lack of cold medicine, or were executed for offending the powerful.

They died caught in gang shootouts, starved to death while high on drugs, burned to death because firefighters didn’t come to the shantytown, were murdered in alleys during robberies, or died from lung disease caused by dust from cheap construction materials.

The boy was born in a place where few people lived long enough to die of old age. It wasn’t extraordinary. In a culturally deprived area where the only form of entertainment was sex, people were easily born and just as easily discarded.

To put it bluntly, if the boy and the android were put up for sale on the black market, there would be a price difference of over a hundredfold. Human organs were easy to find anywhere, but high-performance android parts were exceedingly rare.

Thus, from the moment the boy was born into the slums, his fate had already been determined.

He would never attend school, would spend his days begging under the thumb of gangsters, and would live a life staggering drunk and drugged, only to collapse and die in a damp alleyway.

However, to a boy who dreamed of stars and adventure, such a fate was utterly unacceptable.

So, the boy threw himself into the world of uncertainty.

He joined the pioneer fleet.

“I don’t regret that choice.”

“……”

“Of course, I almost died! I even came close to being eaten by other people!”

The boy laughed cheerfully. But the android girl couldn’t bring herself to laugh along with him, knowing that his laughter wasn’t fundamentally different from the humor of someone staring death in the face.

Yet, the boy, the boy who loved the stars, continued to gaze out the window toward the starry sky with eyes still full of innocence.

“But… if I hadn’t boarded this ship, would the day have come when I could pilot this massive spaceship?”

“……”

“Would I have had the chance to rescue people in danger, to carry their hopes and expectations, and to search for humanity’s forty-third planet?”

The android girl and the star-loving boy shared the same insight about the vast universe. It was a world of uncertainty.

But while fear took root in the girl’s heart, the boy’s heart was filled with a powerful pull toward the starlight.

“So, Nine, I hope you won’t be too afraid of the unknown. It’s a world full of starlight. Isn’t it beautiful…?”

“……”

“You won’t know until you open every door. Whether good things will happen, or bad things. Even if bad things happen, we can cry together, and we can laugh together. At least it’s not a journey you’re making alone, right?”

The android girl felt, for the first time, as if she had caught a glimpse of the fragments of that starlight.

That faint glimmer was weak, fleeting, and seemed as though it might vanish at any moment.

The faint glimmer was weak, laughable, and seemed as though it might disappear at any moment.

Yet somehow, a desire to move toward that starlight was beginning to take shape.

“How happy must have been the era when one could look at the starry sky, discern the paths that could be traveled, and read the map of the roads that must be taken…”

Unconsciously, the android girl recited a passage from one of the old texts the boy loved most.

Watching the boy’s bright smile as he asked if she knew that verse too, the android felt a new emotion beginning to stir within her thought circuits.

* * *

“Hiss… does it really make sense to insert romance here?”

I was right.

I got hit by Gu Yu-na.

Grasping the sharp pain radiating from my side, I used a Qin Na technique to block Gu Yuna’s Mountain Soul Iron Claw.

With both her wrists caught by me, Gu Yu-na finally began using ‘words’ for persuasion instead of ‘fists.’

“Opposites attract.”

“If you add romance on a spaceship where they don’t know when food will run out, readers’ mental state will be shattered when the food does run out and the apocalypse happens. So it would be better to have them realize their feelings belatedly after catastrophe strikes…”

Papak – !

In an instant, Gu Yuna twisted her wrists free and struck pressure points on my neck and ribs.

Collapsing as my eight extraordinary meridians twisted, I trembled on the floor, while Gu Yuna looked down at me with a cold gaze, as if I were an insect.

“Seems you still don’t understand…”

“Urgh…”

“I keep telling you this isn’t an apocalypse novel?”

Gu Hak-jun, who had been watching Gu Yuna and me engage in our ‘smooth collaborative writing’, chuckled and offered some advice.

“Kids, take it easy, okay?”

Next to Gu Hak-jun, Gu Yubin shivered.

“That… doesn’t look like they’re joking.”

True. It wasn’t a joke. We were more serious than ever. We were passionately debating the direction of the novel through a mix of sparring and discussion. Don’t ask why sparring is involved in writing a novel.

Anyway, even if my body was exhausted, my heart was at peace. It had been so long since I had felt this deeply immersed in writing. It felt as if I had returned to the old days.

In any case, then and now, Gu Yuna was the perfect partner. Not only in the past, but even now, especially now, as she wasn’t intimidated by my hollow reputation.

Gu Yuna’s literary worldview is steadfast. As evident in her tendency to name characters after herself, she has an unyielding philosophy.

Thus, if anything violates that philosophy, she ruthlessly obliterates it, even if it comes from a teacher who taught her. This is her strength. (Anyone who argues it’s a flaw has already been obliterated, so yes, it’s a strength.)

The only thing I dislike, no, to be precise, the thing I find peculiar, is that Gu Yuna now leans toward light instead of darkness.

It used to be the opposite. When Gu Yuna veered too far into dark themes, I had to painstakingly persuade her to bring her back to the bright side.

Thus, our co-writing process was like a tug-of-war. In the struggle between me shouting, “Make it darker!” and Gu Yuna shouting, “Make it brighter!” the novel took shape.

And so.

I was able to list Gu Yuna’s name alongside mine as the author of the completed manuscript.

* * *

Starry Sky.

Authors: Moon In and Gu Yuna.

“……”

Lim Yang-wook stared at the manuscript with a tense expression. The bundle of papers now in his hands held immense value, a value that none of the people riding the subway with him could even begin to imagine.

It felt almost amusing. If Lim Yang-wook had been holding a gold bar worth the same as this envelope, dozens, even hundreds of people would have been staring intently at him. Among them, there would likely have been those who recklessly threw themselves at him, trying to snatch the gold bar.

But that gold had taken the form of text contained on paper, and the paper had become a reliable bank safeguarding these precious words.

The investment was up to Lim Yang-wook.

How much he could grow this “gold bar” would be the measure of his ability as a publisher.

And Lim Yang-wook, who prided himself on being the top elite of Baekhak Publishing, had no intention of squandering this opportunity.

“Sigh…”

As Lim Yang-wook stepped off the subway, a long sigh, filled with tension, escaped his lips.

Emerging from the subway station, the cool night air tickled his smooth scalp.

Though his head had cooled, his mind had not.

Every single cell in his body was shouting in excitement, urging him to seize this unprecedented opportunity.

And that opportunity was Michael Collins’ favor.

Before that favor cooled, this manuscript had to enter the U.S. publishing industry.

If that could be achieved, the manuscript would enter the U.S. market under the patronage of a giant in the field.

But Lim Yang-wook’s pride as a gambler wouldn’t let him stop there.

If it was this easy to break into the U.S. market, why not break into other markets as well?

Thus, by the time Lim Yang-wook arrived at the bar where he had once met former CEO Baek Do-hyun, two guests he had invited were already waiting in the reserved room.

Lim Yang-wook bowed at a 90-degree angle to greet the two professionals he had called upon.

“Thank you for accepting my invitation.”

The man and woman scanned Lim Yang-wook with cold, analytical eyes.

Yohei Iwamoto from Kyosensha.

And Rachel Surface from Collins Press.

This was the dream team Lim Yang-wook had assembled.

*****

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