Overgrowth

Who left the light on? Jo Ji-won kept her eyes closed as the thought drifted through her foggy mind. A crease formed between her brows. She instinctively turned her face away from the glare, but the light pressed against the side of her neck, hot enough to sting. This was not the light in her dorm room. It felt more like she had fallen asleep beside a heat lamp in the laboratory. The thought had barely surfaced when Ji-won’s eyes snapped open. She looked toward the source of the light and froze. There was no lamp. Blinding sunlight slanted through a long rectangular window, so bright that she could hardly keep her eyes open. She was not in bed. She was not in the laboratory either. She was sitting beside the window of a train. A KTX? Ji-won raised a hand to shield her eyes and squinted outside. In the distance, ridge after ridge rolled beneath the sun, covered in dense forest. The green was so deep it looked almost black. Closer to the tracks, however, the landscape changed abruptly. It was as though someone had drawn a barrier across the earth. The soil was a dull mixture of yellow and black, stripped of every trace of vegetation. Not even a weed broke the empty ground. That made no sense. Give a weed the narrowest c***k in asphalt or concrete, and it would force its way through. There was something deeply wrong with this place. The last of the haze drained from Ji-won’s mind. She lowered her hand and surveyed the carriage. It was unusually quiet. Hardly anyone spoke. Across the aisle sat two young women and a young man, all thin and sallow. They held their backs rigid, as if they might have to leap up and run at any moment. The young man in the seat beside her looked more relaxed. He lounged against the backrest, his long legs stretched casually in front of him. Ji-won must have been staring too openly, because he turned and smiled when their eyes met. “You’re finally awake. I thought you were going to sleep all the way to the base.” His features were pleasant and regular, but his long, upturned eyes lent him a quick, almost foxlike air. Those eyes looked vaguely familiar. Ji-won could not place them, nor did she understand what was happening. “Excuse me?” Her voice came out hoarse, as though she had not used it in a very long time. She cleared her throat. “You are…?” Ji-won had been precocious from childhood. Her parents had placed every hope they possessed on her shoulders. You have to get out, Ji-won, they had always said. Don’t spend your whole life in the fields like us. She had done exactly that. She had skipped grades and entered Hanseong National University at fourteen, young enough to be called a genius without exaggeration. Yet in the year she applied, the two most prestigious universities in Seoul had each opened only one place on their rural-talent track for her county. Ji-won had secured an offer from one of them, only for the placement system to assign her to Agricultural Sciences. Everyone told her to accept. Even her parents urged her to go. She had agreed because students could apply to change majors after enrollment. Somehow, one year became seven. She went from undergraduate study to graduate school, and now her adviser was trying to lure her into an agricultural doctorate. At that rate, she would spend the rest of her life farming. She refused to be tempted again. Jo Ji-won did not want to spend her entire life growing things. Her parents had farmed for decades to send her to university, only for her to study farming once she got there. People back home had already started making jokes at her parents’ expense. Ji-won wanted to become a city professional and sit in an office. She would have been happy researching something else or serving the country in some other way. Anything, as long as it did not involve a field. She had planned it all out. She was still young, and with her ability to learn, she could start over. Then, just before graduation, someone destroyed her experimental plot. Her thesis data vanished with it. Her graduation was postponed, and she was condemned to another season in the dirt. The previous night, Ji-won had stood beside the ravaged plot and drunk away her misery. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became. She had pointed at the sky and cursed until she lost her balance and pitched headfirst off the raised edge of the field. Waking in her dormitory would have made sense. Waking in a hospital would have been reasonable. Waking on a train was neither. “Ha Min-jae.” The young man beside her offered his left hand with an easy smile. “And you are?” “Jo Ji-won.” She shook his hand briefly and withdrew her own, unable to dispel the feeling that something was wrong. Perhaps it was the unnatural silence inside the carriage. Perhaps it was the strange landscape racing past the window. Her gaze dropped to her left wrist. A silver band had appeared there. It had a slim, squared frame and, set into it, a round silver face a little wider than the band itself. What was this? Ha Min-jae wore one too. So did the three passengers across the aisle. In fact, everyone she could see seemed to have one. Ji-won instinctively searched her pockets for her phone. She needed to contact her adviser or one of her classmates, but her pockets were empty. Then her attention caught on the white cloth covering the headrest in front of her. Several lines had been printed on it in black: SEOUL CENTRAL BASE SEEDS Mutation rate as low as 13% Available to all agricultural students www.jungang-seed.kr That was not how anyone advertised seed. You sold seed by listing its germination rate, disease resistance, drought tolerance, and other useful traits. Ji-won had never seen a company boast about its mutation rate. She stared at the words for a long moment. Then understanding seemed to dawn. A short laugh escaped her. She bent forward, covered her face with both hands, and rubbed hard. She was dreaming. Of course. That explained why the young man’s eyes looked familiar. Her adviser had the same long, upturned eyes, though age had loosened his lids and made them droop. Dreams were projections of reality. The unnatural landscape outside, the vaguely familiar eyes of the stranger beside her, and a seed advertisement that violated all common sense—everything made perfect sense if none of it was real. The stress of her delayed graduation must have gotten to her. Ji-won had never experienced a dream this vivid before. It was unfortunate that even in her sleep, she could not escape agriculture. She dropped her hands, closed her eyes again, and leaned back to wait for herself to wake up. Ha Min-jae, who had only just begun speaking to her, stared. She was taking this remarkably well. Ten minutes passed. Ji-won did not wake. Instead, the train braked so violently that her upper body pitched forward. She nearly struck the seat in front of her, but caught herself with both hands. All around her, passengers sprang to their feet. More than half crowded into the aisle, their faces drained of color. A few braver ones edged toward the windows and peered outside. Only then did Ji-won notice that every passenger in the carriage appeared to be around twenty years old. “What happened?” “Probably a mechanical failure.” “What if there’s mutant flora on the line?” “Don’t say that! This is a protected transit corridor. Nothing like that could get in.” The longer the train remained motionless, the louder the arguments became. Ji-won rested against her seat and stared at the luggage rack overhead. This dream was impressively realistic. When she woke, she would have to tell her roommates about it. While the passengers bickered, a shrill alarm erupted through the train. Red emergency lights flashed along the ceiling. The sound seemed to take physical form, a blade falling through the carriage and severing the last thread of hope. Everyone fell silent. Emergency alert. Hazard ahead. Evacuate immediately and proceed to the nearest shelter point. A mechanical female voice repeated the warning throughout the train, faster and more urgent each time. Ji-won frowned. The passengers were strange. One moment they had been arguing; the instant the alarm sounded, they went quiet. It was as though they all understood exactly what had happened. Resignation showed beneath their fear. Dreams could not be controlled. Ji-won had no idea why hers had taken this turn, but the expressions around her reminded her of the helplessness she had felt after seven years trapped in agricultural fields. This was obviously her subconscious surrendering to reality. As she considered that conclusion, the other passengers hurried off the train. They moved with practiced speed, as if they had rehearsed this evacuation countless times. “Aren’t you coming?” Ha Min-jae had risen to his feet. When Ji-won showed no sign of moving, he stared at her. She looked up at him. His tension was visible now. “Where?” She still had not figured out the logic of the dream. Min-jae pointed toward the speaker at the end of the carriage. “A shelter point. If we don’t get off now—” Before he could finish, the carriage ahead lurched violently. The passengers who had not yet made it outside screamed and shoved at one another in their rush for the doors. Ji-won still did not react. Min-jae grabbed her arm. “Move!” She let him haul her upright. She took one step toward the aisle, and both knees buckled beneath her. Min-jae caught her before she hit the floor. “Your legs gave out from fear?” He took most of her weight and added, “I thought you were calm.” Ji-won said nothing. Her legs refused to work, as if she had not stood on them in years. Since this was only a dream, she paid the oddity little attention. Min-jae half dragged, half carried her off the train. The delay left them at the rear of the evacuation. Almost everyone else was sprinting away from the direction in which the train had been traveling. Ji-won looked back. The carriage ahead of theirs was slowly rising from the track, lifted by something forcing its way up from beneath the ground. No wonder their own carriage had shaken so violently. A train car was not an enormous object, but watching one rise into the air belonged in a science-fiction film. Her dream was becoming ridiculous. “Classmate, can we negotiate?” Min-jae had been running while supporting her for some time. Sweat covered his forehead. When he turned and found Ji-won gazing around in distraction, his expression darkened. “Would you mind moving your precious legs?” Only then did Ji-won realize that she had gradually placed almost all her weight on him. “Right.” She forced her legs to move and discovered that she could just barely control them again. They had not gone far when several terrible screams tore through the crowd ahead, cutting across the barren land. These were not the frightened cries from inside the train. They were the final, desperate sounds of people fighting to remain alive. Ji-won looked up instinctively. Her face changed. Something had burst from the earth in the middle of the fleeing crowd. It resembled a plant, but it stood nearly three meters tall. Its central stalk rose straight from the ground and split at the top into five enormous, inverted-oval bracts. Each bract had impaled a living person through the chest. Blood streamed over the crimson-stained leaves as the structures ripened at impossible speed, dividing into broad, three-lobed seed capsules. From almost three meters above the ground, the victims’ blood fell like rain. Everyone caught beneath it screamed and turned back toward the train. The ovaries and styles embedded in the victims’ chests swelled and matured. The five bodies hanging from the plant went still. Jo Ji-won stared at the corpses. This, she thought, had to be the worst nightmare she had ever had.