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By Root 1396 0

our team, for it truly is a group effort. We have no need for a nickname, and sharp minds are our only interrogation tools. The Pubyok experienced either the war or its aftermath when they were young, and their ways are understandable. We pay respect to them, but interrogation is a science now, and long-term, consistent results are what matter. Thuggery has its place, we concede, but it should come tactically, at specific moments, over a long relationship. And pain—that towering white flower—can only be used once the way we apply it, complete, enduring, transformational pain, without cloak or guise. And since everyone on our team is a graduate of Kim Il Sung University, we have a soft spot for old professors, even our sad candidate from a regional college down in Kaesong.

In an interrogation bay, we reclined our professor into one of the Q & A chairs, which are amazingly comfortable. We have a contractor in Syria who makes them for us—they’re similar to dental chairs, with baby-blue leather and arm- and headrests. There’s a machine next to the chair, though, that makes people nervous. It’s called an autopilot. I suppose that’s our only other tool.

“I thought you had all you needed to know,” the professor said. “I answered the questions.”

“You were wonderful,” we told him. “Absolutely.”

Then we showed him the biography we’d made of his life. At 212 pages, it was the product of dozens of hours of interviews. It contained all of him, from his earliest memories—Party education, defining personal moments, achievements and failures, affairs with students, and so on, a complete documentation of his existence, right to his arrival at Division 42. He flipped through the book, impressed. We use a binding machine, the kind that seals the spines of doctoral dissertations, and it gives the biographies a real professional look. The Pubyok simply beat you until you confess to using a radio, whether there’s a radio or not. Our team discovers an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations, and then crafts it into a single, original volume that contains the person himself. When you have a subject’s biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state. That’s harmony, that’s the idea our nation is founded upon. Sure, some of our subject’s stories are sweeping and take months to record, but if there’s one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it’s forever.

We hooked the professor up to the autopilot, and he looked quite surprised when the pain delivery began. The expression on his face conveyed a desperation to determine what we wanted from him, and how he could give it, but the biography was complete, there were no more questions. The professor watched in horror as I reached across his body to his shirt pocket, where I removed a gold pen clipped there—such an object can concentrate the electrical current, setting the clothes on fire. The professor’s eyes—they understood now that he was no longer a professor, that he would never have need of a pen again. It wasn’t long ago, when we were young, that people like the professor, probably with a handful of his students, would be shot in the soccer stadium on a Monday morning before work. While we were in college, the big trend was to throw them all into the prison mines, where life expectancy is six months. And of course now organ harvesting is where so many of our subjects meet their end.

It’s true that when the mines open their maw for more workers, everyone must go, we have no say over that. But people like the professor, we believe, have an entire life of happiness and labor to offer our nation. So we ramp up the pain to inconceivable levels, a shifting, muscular river of pain. Pain of this nature creates a rift in the identity—the person who makes it to the far shore will have little resemblance to the professor who now begins the crossing. In a few weeks, he will be a contributing member of a rural farm collective, and perhaps we can even find a widow to comfort him. There’s no way around it: to get a new life, you’ve got to trade in your old one.

For now,