“Who does he think he is, a saint? What did Vertical Transportation Research buy him with? Should I give him tea or something? Or ginseng? Hell, should I just load him up with cash?” Of course, the professor knew he shouldn’t do that. Straight cash was never an option, however desperate one might be for a medium of exchange as universal as money.

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

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

“For crying out loud, Dr. Hwang. We’ll look ridiculous now that you’ve got this. Seriously, myrrh? It’ll make our gifts look silly too. A gold ring, perfume, and myrrh on Christmas Eve? Heck, we’re like the Three Wise Men here.”

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.

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

Once the obvious watchdogs over the government were quieted, other voices spoke up. Then, the security guards took the lead in digging up their dirt. As before, at no point was anyone’s freedom of expression or freedom of assembly taken away. The rules were simply enforced a little more rigorously in other areas.

Listening to Professor Jung talk, he couldn’t decide if the man was a genius or a crook. But when Professor Jung announced one day that he would spend the equipment budget on three cases of hard liquor, Dr. Lee thought he finally had some measure of what this man was: a nutcase. But this conviction faltered when Dr. Lee heard how the liquor would

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?