Chapter 55

SUB.05 Many sections of Baggage City were off-limits, but in one of those areas in particular was a single room whose development costs seemed to match that of all the unrestricted areas combined. The top floor of this super skyscraper was clearly a throne room, but that was only an easily understood facade. The many leaders and executives would assemble in an underground facility a good distance away. Maybe Weissland Strynikov was purposely using this easily attacked dummy facility because this was his stance. He was in no position to whitewash, but he just couldn’t allow civilian sacrifices in situations where they ended up meaning nothing. The place was contradictory in that way—if he was actually attacked while here, he would be putting civilian lives at risk—but that wasn’t the core of Weissland’s perspective. He only wished to avoid purely unnecessary deaths. If deaths were necessary, the elderly man wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. He also believed adding necessity to those who had already died was a form of salvation. He was the administrator of Baggage City. The leader reigning over one of the three groups overseeing the twenty-seven companies in the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians. The “giant elder,” who had a simple source of funds centered on food resources, who possessed an understanding of applied fields such as biofuel and microorganism engineering, and who had once supported Academy City before turning to those who rebelled against it. “…While easily misunderstood as destructionism, it is still in my nature to want to avoid tragedy.” Weissland spoke as he sat in a soft chair in front of a large ebony desk. The landscape outside was sheer white, amply demonstrating the special qualities of one of the most heavily snowed-in parts of the world, but the interior of the room was separated from it by thick panes of glass and filled with the gentle warmth of a heater. “And yet all people oppose one another in their pursuit of happiness, giving rise to clear losers. Just like the competition happening now—Natural Selector. If we still wish to do something about it, then we must construct a doctrine that allows for such tragedies to occur.” “For someone tryin’ to avoid tragedies as much as he can, you sure did pick one hell of a black box to gamble on.” Sitting on the ebony desk was a frivolous-looking man with blond hair. A single suit was all it took to give completely opposite impressions of the older man and the blond one. Though perhaps the blond man’s stance of never taking anything seriously displayed his doctrine. Utgardaloki—An official member of the sorcerer’s society known as Gremlin. “The Anti–Academy City Science Guardians have a lot of power to throw around. Both in terms of fragmentary technology and in terms of all those unmanned weapons the city gave you, then left here. But are you sure you can use ’em all? Making the tech in your imagination into a weapon, researching and developing it, mass-producing it, running live tests on it, distributing usage guides to their users—that all takes time. You don’t actually think you’ll be able to deploy even those unmanned weapons without Academy City’s support, do you? You might be able to turn ’em on, but I bet they’ll just stand in place or waddle around awkwardly. “That goes for this Natural Selector thing, too,” added Utgardaloki, without seeming to care much about it. Yes. Even if they were able to dig up something that could fight against Academy City’s psychic powers, it would take time to analyze it and create a system that would allow for its production en masse. Weissland seemed to acknowledge this. “Naturally, Academy City will not afford us the time. If they come, it will be swift and decisive.” “Yeah. The city did entrust a little something to its partner organizations, after all.” Not the unmanned weapons. In a way, something even more valuable. Something cheaper and more advanced. A weapon—albeit one that was clearly in violation of international law. “You mean the third-generation mass-produced military clones. If we could have captured even one of them, this conversation might have been very different.” “But all ten thousand or so suddenly disappeared. It’s like they knew it was coming. And they staged that small fire in their old living space as a camouflage—all to use a powerful acid to deal with the specimens for DNA map analysis and electronically destroy the records on all their storage devices.” “…I assume that someone gave a tactical instruction to them through their network. There’s no physical evidence, and the data was all lost. Independent research has been rendered impossible. Now that their sin of clone manufacturing was exposed, they’ll abandon the whole thing and brand it as one of their usual urban legends.” “But Academy City isn’t gonna rest easy just from that.” “…Which is why I responded to your initial contact. We share a common goal with Gremlin—to destroy the overconcentration of Academy City systems.” “We’re not gonna use human wave tactics to run interference for you, you know.” “Nor would I want you to. In fact, we would be grateful if you didn’t take any real action at all. That will spook them.” Weissland spread out the pile of paper reports in a fan shape on the desk, like a deck of cards. “And the more spooked the enemy is, the more information they’ll try to obtain before attacking. In other words, your inaction will buy us time. And once we have enough, we can shift into a combat-ready state. That’s what we want Gremlin here for, why we’re putting on Natural Selector, and why we’re giving them false information by bringing in large quantities of empty containers.” “Until you’re able to fight a war with them on equal terms?” “No matter how much technology Academy City has, no matter how much they implement reused tech, they are fundamentally short on resources. We make known the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians’ chance of winning throughout the world, then draw them into as wide a space as we can—by force, if need be. Letting their resources and foodstuffs dry up will be our masterstroke in preventing them from continuing a war.” “So you’re going with fake electronic warfare?” Utgardaloki gave an amused laugh. “That’s the kind of plot twist I like to see. It’s why I came all the way here in the first place.” “It isn’t what I like to see, though, despite my opting for this plan. I hate empty wars of numbers. By driving up the price of foodstuffs, we subject real people to starvation.” “And this big pile of paper is for all that stuff, eh? You know, everything would have fit on a flash drive the size of a stamp if you’d used the science side’s recording media.” “It’s a simple security measure. A meaningless one perhaps since others beside me don’t approve of this.” Weissland had a laptop on the desk, too, but apparently, it only contained numbers showing where necessary information was stored in real life. It was clearly inefficient, but perhaps spending paper resources was a concrete plan to save someone else from starving. Maybe there was a butterfly effect going on, and a long, seemingly unrelated chain of events would do the trick. But now that he’d imagined it, Utgardaloki curled his lips into a scornful smile. “I’ve been involved with a lot of people’s deaths myself,” he said. “But I’ve never been burdened with anywhere near as many people’s fates as you are. Like, want cars to start running on corn oil? You’ll cause several countries to starve. Try to stop it from happening, though, and financial difficulties could starve a completely different country.” “……” “Can you even really want to save people when you’re that tied up in their fates? I’ve got no clue what it must be like in your world, to be honest.” A mother unable to produce milk to feed her young, starving child and the hard fact it was more environmentally friendly to power machines with carbohydrates. The elderly man had a proper understanding of both situations, and his eyes were perhaps more fathomless, more filled with darkness than even Gremlin. And yet he could still see a glimmer of light in the dark. “I’m simply searching for how to use our resources fairly so that people can survive. Once, I sought that support from Academy City, and now I seek it from something else. If you knew how many people’s lives ended with each passing minute on this planet, then you would understand there is no time to waste.” “Well, we can’t do much. But if we limit the scope to just that, we should be all right.” “I can ask for nothing more. I’m not much different.” “I don’t care much one way or another, so long as it hurts Academy City.” “…I doubt such a simple desire is the only thing that moves you, but I suppose each of us is using the other anyway.” As Weissland said that, a window popped up on his laptop. He frowned. “It looks like I already have something you can do.” “A little more specific, please?” “I’d like you to eliminate an intruder.”