by Brent Meske
Kim Hyejin
An Alphas and Omegas Companion (Something Super)
by Brent Meske
Copyright Brent Meske, 2013
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Dedication:
This book is for all my Korean students who were awesome. So, most of them.
Hyejin had been an accident, really. An unfortunate mishap that couldn’t be covered up and couldn’t be shoved off to a relative’s house or a Buddhist monastery somewhere deep in the mountains. Her father had been Kim Jongan, the final North Korean dictator, which meant Hyejin (Kim Hyejin) was more like a piece of history than a real human being. She would be the last big hurrah for any last North Korean sympathizers. If anything was going to happen in the wake of the merging of South and North, it would be done in her name. The North was in love with her, and the South terrified of her.
And so, Hyejin was very much a princess, and very much a prisoner. Both at the same time. At ten years old, no one had any idea what to do with her. Jongeun had grown old and died, and left Jongan in his place, and unfortunately for almost everyone in Korea, Jongan wanted to assert his power. When he did, and the ships sank off the disputed coastal waters of Eastern Korea, it was revealed that more than forty American soldiers had been on board the ship at the time. All hands were lost.
America could not just stand by and watch forty of its dedicated soldiers die (one of these a one star general), and anyway North Korea had been begging for it for decades. They had pushed all allies away, hugging to China’s knees and whining about all the rice it wasn’t getting, all the capitalist countries it was going to destroy, and how much the South had become the finger puppet of the evil capitalists. Finally China had had enough (China was quickly becoming an evil capitalist country by that time), and voted in an emergency session of the UN to allow the United States to intervene. The giant rose to smash down the starving and proud North Koreans.
It actually took only two soldiers to do the job.
By the time North Korea asked for its beating, the first few Actives had Activated, publicly, and became the world’s first super peoples. People like them were popping up in strange places all over the globe, but these were two of the first who had been hired on by the American government. The joint chiefs were interested to try these two out, to see how they would do in a situation like this. After all, losing two was nothing compared with losing a dozen extremely expensive unmanned drones, or losing some thousands of troops trying to get into the emergency bunkers and tunnel systems of Pyeongyang.
Nobody had to talk about just how scared they were of having super peoples on their own turf anyway, like having active nuclear warheads sitting in your backyard while your son is playing with Cuddles out there. They knew they’d rather have dead Super People than live Super People, so they crossed their fingers. Whatever happened, it would be a win-win situation. They crush North Korea, we win. They die, we win and get to go crush North Korea by conventional means.
These two soldiers did the unthinkable, flying into the country with false passports and fooling the North Korean authorities every step of the way. How they did it remains a closely guarded mystery. To this day, the American government regards its first Active mission the most important secret necessary to keep. The only details that were released to the public were that North Korea had been invaded by US forces, that those forces had captured and killed Kim’s senior military staff, and that Kim himself was killed.
Hyejin was taken prisoner, and the Demilitarized Zone was torn down a week later. The rest, the reunification, the sudden downturn in the Korean economy, and the rebuilding efforts, is history.
What the United States government failed to mention in their follow-up press conferences was that only one of the soldiers came home.
