Analysis on "Mirage": From stem to stem, an empty, unquenchable desire

A robot that looks like a young boy, possibly a cyborg, survives on water that he harvests from stems that grow around the water pipelines that stretch through his world, a dark, foggy and seemingly dystopian one. It appears that he is not aware that he's underwater. Also, his torso is open on the top and so he has to move carefully. One day, he sees a tower in the distance, which he climbs. He finds a glowing fruit-like object hanging from some tree there, which he deduces has water and a certain living thing. Ignoring the consequences, he pierces the fruit and a fish drops out. He sees the fish dying and suddenly feels a pang of sorrow and regret and thus puts it into his chest. There, he - probably - realizes the joy of coexistence, and swims with the fish.

I first thought that no loving creator would make a robot with such a faulty design and place him in such a dystopia. That changed after the story -  I realized that it was all meant to be. However, coexistence is not the only theme in the story, as it turns out; the author had something else he wanted to tell us about: the search for happiness.

In Youngwoong Jang's point of view, this is a story about people with endless desires, collecting things for their own wants and needs. Jang was a hard worker from a young age, working from goal to goal, never feeling satisfied with the results. From high school to university, then from university to overseas job, he kept going up and up, but not feeling the satisfaction he wanted. Suddenly, his father passed away when he was in the United States, which awoke him from his "endless desire to get [a] better life." Using Mirage as an allegory, his revelation was that although he was already underwater, he did not realize it and kept going from stem to stem.