Tower

“You’re asking me why?” Words failed Choi Sinhak, countless thoughts flitting through his head. Among them was the thought that Beanstalk would finally bite the dust this time because the people in charge of keeping Beanstalk safe had questions to answer but were currently trying to hide behind questions of their own. This was the day when those re

Someone once told me that good-humored people never become writers. That people who nurse grudges and write them down when nobody is looking instead of immediately talking them out are the ones that become writers.

“I’m not going far away. I’ll be here. Just twenty minutes away.” “You won’t be able to leave often.” “I got in. I might as well work hard.” “You won’t even get to call.” “Like I said, it’s for security reasons.” “What security bans interns from calls and emails?” “Look, Minso, that’s the way things are here. Everyone accepts that. They can teach t

Kids these days don’t know all this history and assume verticalism is categorically a rich people’s ideology and horizontalism a poor people’s one. But it’s not so simple. We can’t solve the problems of our lives with just one approach or the other, can we?

But was it really such a black and white situation? I was fascinated by A Study on Level 520, yet someone like me was labeled a verticalist without question. And she was fascinated by my horror stories about elevator maneuver exercises. To me, the line between the two camps was blurry. It was a dotted line, and treading both sides of it didn’t seem

Elephants look much bigger inside Beanstalk, since they fill up a whole corridor. People here don’t seem to have a realistic sense of his actual size as they’ve never seen an elephant outdoors. They’re overwhelmed just by looking at him.

Strictly speaking, I am not a verticalist. I’m just a government transportation official. There are people who mistake me for a verticalist because my nose is buried in an elevator map every day, but think about it: do you honestly think I can do what I do by only factoring in vertical transport? There are people who keep drawing distinctions betwe

His heart sank. This was a misdelivery. When was his last business trip? He did a mental count and realized it was over four months ago. Although Byungsoo doubted the bundle contained any important letters, something gnawed at the back of his mind. He pored over the letters. He came across a postcard addressed to a Cho Eunsoo at the E & K Desig

Born and raised in Beanstalk, he genuinely loved his city. He found it deeply irritating whenever Beanstalk was compared to the Tower of Babel. Admittedly, Beanstalk was something of a symbol of modern capitalism, where every inch and moment on its territory was commercialized, but it was not a nest of evil to Byungsoo. He told himself, “People who