Tower

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

“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

Beanstalk was an environment they had never seen before; it seemed spatially impossible. The number 674 for starters. Instead of 674 spaces lying neatly on top of each other in clearly defined floors, oddly-shaped spaces like Tetris blocks were piled to a height commensurate with 674 floors, so you could not say for sure how many floors the buildin

They drew closer to rich neighborhoods the higher they went, so the corridors grew wider and the crowds thinner. Now and then they came across private elevators, the majority of which were “premium,” “platinum,” or “noblesse” lines that they couldn’t take with their three-person Christmas pass. They had to walk a long way to find regular public tra

If the research was simply about determining who had power, taking one dog out of the picture was fine. But a power field is a different story. It is like a gravitational field, where a celestial object warps the space around it due to its mass. When massless particles of light pass through the warped space, they cannot travel in a straight line an

In Minso’s eyes, Beanstalk was another Tower of Babel—a city of hubris. He hated that Eunsoo had found a job there. It was only an internship, but Eunsoo seemed to think moving into Beanstalk would make all her dreams come true. It would not. Beanstalk was not welcoming to unestablished migrant workers like Eunsoo. Despite sitting on foreign territ

Beanstalk Tower wasn’t a pencil-thin skyscraper, but a thick one in both length and width. Adverts that hung on its outer walls were visible to everyone—everyone in the neighboring capital, that is, not to Beanstalk residents. The adverts were so massive and placed so high up that no one could avoid looking at them. They reduced the amount of sunli

But that was how a power field worked. It was not an express contractual relationship in which one paid for specific services; it was a delicate, curious equation in which variables like simple gestures of goodwill or one extra face-to-face interaction may someday result in an unexpected boon.

But soon Professor Jung claimed it was ludicrous to track the power structure of a 674-story building with a population of 500,000 using only three cases of liquor, and he ordered five more. Professor Jung added that while Beanstalk may look small, it was a globally recognized sovereign state whose power structure was not so rudimentary.