− Ha! There ! That's what I call a car: six-cylinders injection, with that you bomb! said Fred, pointing at the vehicle in front.

–You don’t know anything, it’s just a cheap Samsung, replied Jean-Paul who had obviously decided this evening to take the opposite view of everything that Fred could say.

- Absolutely not, cut in Fred, whose voice was now starting to rise in pitch, in reality it's a Renault Talisman that they rebranded as a Samsung.

− Yeah ok, but hey the Talisman is still low end. It's not worth a Serie 3.

– Huh!? Are you serious ?! You are comparing a car equipped with a mechatronic gearbox with a body that reuses the old manual transmission of the 325i...

In the corner of my eye, Fred was giving me looks to try to attract me to his side in this conversation. But on the other side, the lights of the city were sparkling through the raindrops on the window of the taxi speeding through the night. On the sidewalk, the hurrying silhouettes of faceless workers were rushing in floks into the subway entrances.

− …Yeah you have more torque on a Tesla, I agree but on the other hand, they are limited in charging to 11kw.

− 11kw? Jean-Paul repeated. Are you sure of yourself there? Because last time I charged for an hour and I already had the battery at 90%.

− Yes, but that's because you had to be on a super-charger, and that's normal because they are in DC...direct current, he clarified for me so as not to lose me for good...while the others are in alternative and there when you have to recharge, believe me, it's the punishment...

“A punishment”, yes that was to be it, all of this was to be my punishment. No doubt I had committed terrible things in a past life, for which I had to pay today, stuck in this taxi, having to endure conversations that did not interest me, with colleagues, with whom I shared nothing.

The taxi dropped us off at an intersection and we ended up on foot. The multicolored illuminated signs which covered the facades of the buildings reverberated in the slippery cobblestones and at the corner of the street, in a mobile kitchen set up for the evening, an old lady was preparing some kinds of omelettes which she then cooked on a smoking hotplate. We arrived on a huge circular square, a sort of clearing in the middle of the skyscrapers, in the center of which was a majestic stone door, topped with a traditional double roof in green tiles and with elegant shapes, like a timeless island in a futuristic world, the tops of the buildings was disappearing in the clouds and at times, up there, the flash of a giant advertising panel ionized the mist with a bluish plasma. It was almost beautiful.

But in the end, what is not in the mist? This mist which earlier transformed the garden of the former royal palace into a 17th century Chinese aquarelle painting. Did you notice it, Fred? Did you notice that thanks to a gap, the mist had revealed a group of kisaeng walking in their loose, colorful dresses, while young scribes wearing their high conical hats spied on them from behind the pillars of the pagoda? While you were passionately debating the superiority of the Samsung S20's camera over that of the iPhone 10, while we were strolling through the tree-lined spans of the garden, did you even notice how the mist isolated us from the city around us, erasing for a moment the frontier of time? Who could have said at that moment in what era we found ourselves? I know Fred, I know that being able to check on your cell phone the humidity level in the garage of your house in France, while we are in Seoul is a subject that deserves all my attention, but you see Frederic, what interests me is to know how much longer, this place outside of time, this preserved frame, in which I would like to hide when all this chaos ends up imploding, for how much longer can-it resists before being in turn swallowed by the city, this crawling blob, which spreads like an oil stain on the surface of the world...