Tower

It was certainly an unexpected scenario, but we’d prepared ourselves for any situation and weren’t caught too off guard. Though swamped with work, we knew what to do. But just then, the Chief of Staff added a few conditions. You know what they were? “Half of the Office of the Army Staff’s Mobilization Planning Division has joined the coup and deser

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

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?

Dr. Lee had found a unit where the liquor wasn’t moving with the natural flow of the power structure. The inhabitant of unit A57 on Level 487 appeared to have blocked the flow. Given that five bottles had flowed into the unit in the past ten days, whoever lived there was evidently an important person. But as all five bottles went in and never came

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.

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

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

To trace the inhabitant’s identity, Dr. Lee consulted the resident directory that Professor Jung had obtained a while back by bribing a senior employee of the Security Guardhouse. All he found listed in the directory was “Film Actor P.” Deciding that sorting things out in person would be faster, Dr. Lee hopped into an elevator and headed up to Leve

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