Eight minutes
That was enough. From that day on, Jeong knew he wanted to fly things. The what and the why came later — first the racing drones he built with increasingly better components bought with money from fixing bikes in the neighborhood, then the professional pilot's course at seventeen, and finally the job as an environmental surveillance drone pilot at Land of the Leopard National Park, three hours from Vladivostok, where he's been tracking wildlife from the air for three years.
But those eight minutes on the roof are where everything began. A fourteen-year-old, a cracked screen with a tutorial in English he barely understood, a friend who didn't ask questions and held whatever needed holding, and a device that shouldn't have flown but did. Sometimes the best thing you can do at that age is try before you're ready, break it, cut yourself a bit, and put it back together the next day.
Kolya and Jeong shared that: school left them cold socially — neither of them had a group — but they were interested in everything that could be taken apart and put back together. The roof of the block was their workshop, their test track, and their place to sit in silence watching the port as the cargo ships disappeared.
