Biodome
April 13. Almost midnight. Through the worn twill curtains, a viscous light was lapping into the apartment like flowing amber. Park washed his face in the bathroom, took his meds, and sat down on the sofa with the remote. One click, and the artificial blue light of the TV mingled with the sodium-yellow atmosphere of the room. He flipped through the channels. Game shows. Contestants competing for money, for marriage. The women are showing off, swiveling their hips and winking at the camera, and then they’re ranked by the amount of applause they receive. People awwing over tiny puppies. Slow, close-up shots of some new hybrid food, a rare delicacy. A man has to eat a glistening pile of meat and cheese until his face is streaming with sweat and an exhausted howl escapes from his mouth. Woops, applause, groans, laughter.
A pair of professors seated facing one another against a black backdrop. No audience, no clapping.
“There are generations of children who are growing up not knowing the meaning of the word ‘rain,’ ‘snow,’ ‘clouds,’ who have never seen the sea or the sunset in their lives. Are you saying that this is not a moral crisis?” said the pundit on the right side, a literature professor at Seoul National University.
“You are making a Romanticist error in conflating nature with morality. Nature in itself is neither good nor evil. Likewise, technology that is used to shape or control nature is neither inherently moral nor immoral. Less than two centuries ago, our ancestors argued over the morality of the ‘Iron Horse.’ Would you argue that the subway is evil because it bores through the earth and shuttles around humans in a sealed underground passageway?” said the pundit on the left side, a philosophy professor at Korea University. “Technology is strictly a matter of utility, not ethics.”
“I would be greatly presumptuous if I were single-handedly conflating nature and morality, as you put it. But take this for an example: You know that language shapes thoughts, ideas, and morals. Even you must acknowledge that in our Korean language, the word ‘God’ is literally ‘Dear Sky.’ Long before I had ever romanticized nature, as you argue, our people have used words of nature to describe what is good and sacred, for five thousand years. When people no longer know what a sky actually is—and many of the younger generations have never seen it—how would they have any consciousness of a God?”
“You have a false understanding of the nature of faith. God—at least in the Christian sense—defies representation or proof. If one needed the sky in order to recognize God, then that would not be genuine faith at all,” the philosophy professor said smugly, then carefully delivered the ultimate insult. “You speak out of sentimentality.”
“I’m not being sentimental. I’m being human,” his opponent replied calmly.
And on and on they went. Park turned off the TV.
* * *
“This is a nice place,” Park said. They were seated in the courtyard garden of an elegant restaurant in Gangnam, surrounded by trellises and arbors of roses, jasmine, and other dark and lush shrubs that Park didn’t recognize. The waiters in waistcoats flitted about discreetly like moths, lighting candles one by one.
“How many of these have you done?” Jina asked.
“What?”
“You know, matsun.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are thirty-five and unmarried so you must have gone on at least two dozen.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“The matchmaker gave me the usual specs. Your height, your looks. You’re a senior engineer at the Department of Environmental
Protection and you graduated from Seoul National University near the top of your class. But you don’t have much family money or the ability to finance a new apartment for us. You’re the only son of a widowed mother, which is guaranteed to scare off squeamish women. Physically, you have weak lungs, a common enough condition for those born before the Bio. However, I heard you have an IQ in the top 0.1 percent. So naturally, we may be a match.”
“You certainly speak your mind, don’t you.”
“Here’s what I think. I’m twenty-eight and the last of three daughters, so my parents are absolutely dying to get rid of me. My two older sisters both married at twenty-six although I’m much prettier and more intelligent than they are. My parents think it’s because of my personality. I don’t care much about shutting my mouth to flatter some man who is more stupid than I am. Do you care if I smoke?” she said, already reaching for her cigarette case.
“Be my guest.”
“I’m terribly bored by my parents’ endless entreaties and machinations. I’m just ready to end it all and marry whomever they think is appropriate. I’m tired. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
She smiled.
“You know, it’s funny. I feel like I can be honest with you. It’s not often that I get that sense at one of these things. The matchmaker did say we were an uncommonly good match with our astrological signs.”
“Western or traditional?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Why, traditional of course. Why would I put any trust in Western astrology for something as important as marriage? That stuff is just a bunch of nonsense.”
“They seem about equal in my esteem,” Park said.
She broke into a peal of silvery laughter. “I’m pleased that you disagree with me. I was worried that you’d be one of those scrawny, weak engineer types who don’t seem to have any opinions of their own. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but your first impression wasn’t too far from my expectation. But
But you know how to push back—I like that.” She took a long drag from her cigarette. “I feel like we’re going to get along quite well.”
Park wished he could come up with some sarcastic remark, but he couldn’t. As for himself, he did not yet know whether he liked or disliked Jina. She had a pale heart-shaped face and long, shiny hair falling halfway down her back. She was wearing a silk sheath in canary yellow that complemented her ivory and jet-black coloring. By focusing his eyes on her bare arms, he could almost smell the perfume on her wrists and elbows—floral and slightly musky. Yes, he supposed she was a beautiful woman. He just wasn’t sure if he could ever have any feelings for her.
“You look very nice,” Park said, at last. Jina’s eyes started dancing; she was used to compliments and had been on the verge of impatience with him.
“Nice?” she purred.
“Your dress. It looks beautiful.” Park rambled a bit in his embarrassment.
“Oh yes, I suppose. It’s yellow so I figured I’d wear it. I see you’re not wearing anything for Yellow Day? You don’t have a tie or something?”
Park didn’t have a yellow tie or socks or anything like that. All day at work, colleagues had teased him about not being in spirit. “Being a spoilsport, Manager Park? Surely you don’t want bad luck in the next year?” One of the men, a junior engineer, even jokingly offered to trade a sock with him, so they can each have one that is yellow. But grateful though he was for their good-natured banter, Park was secretly glad about not participating in the whole thing.
“I don’t really believe in that stuff,” Park said.
“Goodness, you don’t believe in anything. Not astrology, not Yellow Day . . .” Jina smiled. “Is there anything you do believe in?”
Indeed, what did he believe in? He did not know. He was only ever sure about the things in which he couldn’t believe.
* * *
The morning after Yellow Day, New Seoul was cast in sepia as usual. There was once a time when trees turned gold in September and October,
or so Park was taught in biology class; but the leaves in those photographs were nothing like the color of light here, which was a muggy reddish-brown like distant memory. Instead of autumn leaves, Yellow Day commemorated the Yellow Sand that blew in from the deserts of China and Mongolia every spring, carried by the west wind. This was a phenomenon that was documented in the earliest annals in ancient Korean history, going back at least two millennia. Through most of the twentieth century, the sandstorm happened three days a year in April, leaving a thick layer of dust over everything in the whole country, city, and countryside alike. Then as the desert in China grew ever larger, the sandstorm lasted longer every year: seven days, then twelve, twenty-five, forty-three, sixty-seven. Every consecutive year, the west wind carried even more sand over the Yellow Sea. By the time Park was born, it was calculated that the sand dumped on the Korean peninsula was one million tons a year—enough to fill 66,667 dumpster trucks.
One of the earliest consequences of the Yellow Storm was that there was no longer any spring. No more flowers or sitting outside on a park bench dazed by the scent of the sun warming up the grass. During the day, the sky was always dark gray and thick with particles; at night, it glowed an unearthly red. People couldn’t go outside during the Yellow Storm: as soon as you opened the front door, the sand would sting your face and bare skin like a thousand bees, and swarm into your eyes, nose, and mouth until your lashes crusted over with ash. Even after the storm receded, the toxic sand laced with heavy metals and pesticides remained in the atmosphere so that every breath one took, inside or outside, could cause disease—asthma, interminable coughs, rashes, cancers, and blindness. The sand mingled with clouds in the atmosphere and came down as acid rain, melting down trees and crops. Food prices, already high, became astronomical. There was nothing left on supermarket shelves, even if you could afford it; and anyone who could afford it left the country. Reservoirs and water supplies were found to be contaminated, so no one could drink or even cook with tap water. The rivers became thick with thousands of dead fish. There were protests demanding government action, and eventually riots—eruptions of chaos so that the scant resources could change hands before disappearing completely.
In New Seoul, the poor were counting every grain of rice before a meal, which started from one hundred and dwindled
to just ten pieces for dinner. When even that ran out, a family would curl up in bed together holding hands, knowing that they would not wake up.
They were saved at last, and only, by the Biodome—completed on April 14, thirty years ago. The first Yellow Day. When it was built, no one objected to it saying things like the sanctity of the sky or the humanity of nature. They were all glad to be alive and to breathe the air without worrying that it would cause cancer of the throat or lungs. The Bio (BEE-oh), as it was also called, was a clear enclosure of fifty-kilometer diameter over New Seoul, blocking off the Yellow Sand and letting in what remnants of sunlight could penetrate the particles. The Bio’s internal atmosphere was always a foggy sepia—not because of the sand passing over the enclosure, but because the combined glare of millions of neon lights reflected back on the inner surface of the Bio as a volcanic, red-tinged brown, every day and every night.
Naturally, the Bio also eliminated all other precipitation along with the sand, but they found that stable internal humidity and underground watering systems eliminated any real need for rain. It was truly an engineering feat, the world’s first successful habitable indoor enclosure at such a scale. And this turned out to be a case in which the problem also provided the solution: Bio technology became Korea’s most important and lucrative export, so that even while importing nearly all food and other products that they no longer made themselves, the country as a whole became more prosperous than ever.
People soon forgot that they were living under a dome. It wasn’t that they forgot it existed, since the Bio was now their livelihood as well as their lifeline. They just ceased to remember that they were under it. After all, it wasn’t visible or tangible for most people living inside, and life was better again. Once something became a part of the environment, people accepted it without question and, furthermore, forgot that things had ever been otherwise. It took about a month for the very intractable, but for most it was a matter of a few days before they could no longer abide by even the memory of open space. So Park found the television special the other night strange, with the two aging intellectuals arguing vociferously against each other. And also rather sad, Park thought, to observe those scrawny and balding professors sitting in their ill-fitting suits, each with a glass of tepid water in front of him, discussing what no one thought about with any seriousness or urgency. It had to have been for the
thirtieth anniversary celebration. Why that kind of public debate was even included alongside the usual fluff, cooking shows featuring yellow ingredients or dating contests, he didn’t know.
Park himself thought about the Bio quite a lot, but only at his job: his duty as a senior engineer in the Department of Environmental Protection, Office of Human Conservation, the Biodome Management Bureau, called for constant monitoring of the main Bio (now there were four total in Korea, and twelve overseas). He had been five when the Bio was built, so he had no true memories of life before it. Sometimes though, he thought he could remember being on the beach, the heat and the brightness of the sun on his skin and the cool wind that shook his hair, and the achingly vivid blue of the sea. He had had dreams where he felt so sure of the sea breeze caressing his cheek that he woke up laughing. But his mother assured him that he’d never been to the beach in his life. By the time he was born, the Yellow Storm had forbidden all but most necessary excursions outside. His mother said he had never gone out of the house until after the Bio.
There was no wind inside the Bio, only the mechanical exhale of vast ventilators creating corridors of fresh oxygen through the interior smog. So how could he imagine that pressure against his cheeks, the whipping of his hair? How could he imagine something so real if he’d never experienced it? The same way it feels so natural to fly in a dream, Park told himself. After he determined that, he stopped feeling the sea breeze in his sleep. The whole thing put him down with a leaden sense of loss, if it’s possible to lose something one has never had.
It was better not to think about the things that weren’t here and now, and yet Park had this tendency to drift—and when he consciously stopped himself, he felt caught between two worlds, one occupied by everyone else and the other where he was the sole citizen aside from his strangely companionable thoughts. That latter world wasn’t real; so he did his best to cling to the first, blending in with the others with his quiet, unassuming demeanor. His unimpressive appearance helped him move along unnoticed: his bony frame with small shoulders, hollow chest, and unobtrusive, mediocre face gave the impression of a smart though unthreatening engineer-bureaucrat. His teachers had all but pushed him along to become exactly that, praising his even temperament and cognition without rebelliousness. Despite malnutrition from gestation to age five, the most formative years for his brain, he had excelled in
his exams and personality tests as required. Bioengineering was the most promising field to which the brightest students aspired, so he’d applied to that department in the best university in the country and had been accepted. After graduation, he’d applied to just one job at the Department of Environmental Protection and had stayed there ever since.
In short, the nature of Park’s effortless existence was akin to being pushed by the crowd on a packed subway platform. During rush hour, he didn’t really walk so much as let himself be picked up and carried by the compressed mass of bodies around him, moving in mindless unity like a school of fish. Getting out at his stop at Yeouido required much more maneuvering, and Park carefully picked his way among commuters until at last he stood at the foot of his building. It was already 8 a.m. when he arrived at his office on the sixty-third floor. His colleagues greeted him with inquiries about the previous evening’s date. Despite the fact that Park would never volunteer such information, they had figured it out with just one look at his best suit. Harassing unmarried coworkers over their blind dates was as much a time-honored tradition as the matsun itself.
“So how was it?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“What, just fine? We all looked her up online. She’s gorgeous.”
“Her profile says her hobbies are ‘playing the piano’ and ‘fencing.’ What a catch!”
“If you don’t want her, I’ll take her off your hands.”
Park smiled vaguely and sat down at his desk until they went on gossiping on their own. He set down his briefcase, took his meds—the first two pills of the day—and turned on his screen. His first task was always checking the full report of the vitals of the Bio. The oxygen levels were sagging, which needed adjustment—but elsewhere he found that trace gases were unusually and concerningly high. He spent the next hour pulling up more data, and then rushed to talk to his supervisor, the chief engineer of the Bureau.
In due silence the chief engineer scrutinized the tiny green numbers filling up the black screen. He kept inhaling sharply and audibly through his nose, which appeared necessary to maintain his train of thought when it came to the most serious calculations.
“This amount of carbon monoxide isn’t something to be so alarmed about,” he said at last.
“But the spike in sulfuric acid?” Park asked
hesitantly.
“That’s likely from Yellow Day celebrations.”
“It’s at its highest level in thirty years.”
“So what are you thinking, Manager Park?” The chief engineer gazed at him steadily.
“I think there is only one plausible explanation. The sand is getting inside the Bio.”
“But the air pressure is normal. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
