Chapter 343
Chapter 343
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 15
Chapter Title: Can One Who Has Seen the End of the World Plant an Apple Tree? (48)
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Andrey Gedroits. The wasteland survivors knew him best of all, the man whose name was searched more often in the community than even Jesus or Buddha.
The supreme genius, the pinnacle among the countless geniuses birthed by history.
The da Vinci of the modern age.
A singularity on two legs.
An alien.
The devil of science.
A wizard.
The father of cybernetics, and so on....
The descriptors attached to the name Andrey Gedroits were endless, but they all commonly praised the creations of this great genius.
How much easier had he made the world? In engineering, there were the active assist mechanical joints that streamlined automated factory equipment by nearly 20 percent, the wondrous hydrogen turbines boasting efficiencies approaching 80 percent, and the commercialization of 3D-printed rocket engines that ushered in an era of space exploration for small and medium enterprises.
In chemistry and biotechnology, he harnessed bacteria-infecting viruses to advance protein regeneration, creating lumps of protein called "Phage Meat"—aka "Infinite Meat"—that could be "grown" with just a bit of electrical stimulation and organic matter input. This sparked a second food revolution. For reference, Phage Meat was the main ingredient in the "calorie bars" that sustained most wasteland survivors.
On the software front, starting with a redefinition of foundational AI, there was the thinking AI that was said to have failed, followed by the learning and mimicking AI that emerged after that failure, the circuitization of neural electrical signals leading to a motion-tracking device with an astonishing 99.8% match rate, the connector attached to me, and Gedroits's Game—GG—from his later years.
Beyond that, he churned out new technologies like a fountain: fully independent modular security for electronic financial centers, chemical seasonings like "Ged Taste" that had never existed before, and more. Thanks to all this, Andrey Gedroits wasn't just called the "father of this or that technology"—he was simply dubbed the "father of modern technology."
His quip at the Nobel ceremony, holding the prizes for Physiology, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics while turning to the Literature laureate beside him—"I didn't expect anyone else here besides me"—was so famous it still circulated as a meme over a decade later. It was no exaggeration that Russia's absurd bankruptcy, brought on by corruption and flawed political structures, was reversed single-handedly by Gedroits's tax contributions alone.
The reason such intricate tech like connectors could spread worldwide was that Gedroits was an outrageous tycoon who swept up the world's money down to the percentage point.
And yet, this wealthy, influential figure spent his time holed up in a back room, just developing, developing, developing.... That aura of mystery only amplified his popularity, giving him hordes of fans. The plaques he'd ripped from companies ruined by his innovations could fill an entire junkyard, which fueled both admirers and detractors, along with endless rumors.
[You think if you hide the method, I won't find it? Try it! Let's see! I'm Andrey Gedroits himself—ow!]
Crash! Clatter!
Rumble, smash, shatter, waaah, flail, flail—
....No matter how I thought about it, the image of "humanity's greatest genius" didn't match this middle-aged man waving his finger wildly at thin air, spewing curses, then slipping on a liquor bottle and tumbling down. It just didn't match. The way his hands trembled screamed severe alcohol addiction.
"....Is his personality always like that?"
"No."
"Sigh. Well, of course not—it's Gedroits, after all. He wouldn't normally act like this. He's just had a bit too much to dr—"
"He's usually even more violent than that. This is him holding back a little, aware of the recording."
"...."
"....Humanity's greatest treasure, screaming his lungs out alone in a room littered with ashtray-filled liquor bottles rolling around, then tripping over one, falling, and getting covered in yellow, sticky tobacco sludge.... That's the man?"
"You're a saint whose fame echoes across all of 3World, aren't you? Go fetch a devotee of the Light God, play your gameplay footage in front of them, and tell them that's the saint—they really wouldn't be shocked?"
"Ugh.... Yeah, that tracks."
Nothing to say to that. My public image and my reality were worlds apart too.
While I chatted with Atlaheva, Gedroits in the video finally staggered to his feet amid the flailing and approached the camera.
[Ugh.... Sorry about that. It's just.... I've gotten into the habit of thinking multiple things at once, so I can't focus properly on any one thing.]
Gulp, gulp—urgh—
[Right.... Yeah. I was recording things I need to tell the "Completer." Ah, um. Uuuum.... Bear with me. I.... I don't have the confidence to leave a digital record of my horrific failure preserved for at least a few centuries while I'm sober....]
Stagger—
Thud!
In the end, Gedroits, clutching the camera and tottering, collapsed onto a pile of clothes on the verge of rotting.
The dropped camera caught him slapping his own cheeks repeatedly, then, seeming a bit more lucid, he lifted it with both hands and grinned.
[First off, congratulations! If you're watching this, it means the finest AIs I created deemed you worthy of the "Completer" title, and you've fully conquered "Gedroits's Game"—my ultimate lab, incubator, filter, and training ground. What a ridiculously twisted game, even by my standards, and yet someone actually cleared it all!]
Ding—
His next words made me instinctively hit pause on the nearby remote. What? How? What the hell?
"Wh.... What?"
"It was supposed to be just like he said—the video you'd face after finishing everything. But.... The world proved too capricious even for a great intellect to predict, so as administrator, I had no choice but to acknowledge some exceptional circumstances."
"This won't trigger the system going ding-ding-ding! with [Memory wipe. Wiping—wiping—fuck off and die] when I leave, right?"
"That's why the system agreed, and we're here now."
Phew, good. I'd been debating whether to plug my ears on the way out.
"Th.... That 'error' thing, right?"
"Yes. It'll come up as you watch. We'll talk after you've seen it all, so just take it in for now."
"Got it."
"Hand over the remote."
The dragon's tone was gentle but firm.
Remembering in a flash that this was the dragon who'd turned an entire village into a dog kennel with a single [You filthy humans!], the professor handed over the remote with crisp precision.
Ding—
[Someone actually cleared it! 6World was pretty scary, huh? I have nightmares often, so I visualized the demons from them and shoved them into the game. 7World's basically sci-fi, but most of it draws from my tech that couldn't be commercialized for various reasons. Probably didn't feel too detached from reality, right? How was 1World? Mind-blowing that even when humans were just emerging as intelligent beings, they were already at war, yeah? 2World—what'd you learn about death? The war between humans and monsters in 3World? The desolate 4World, left with only remnants of a brilliant golden-age civilization? Ahh, bad questions. They're all just bases laid down, built on the traces of the worlds you passed through as their foundation.]
[How does it feel to witness worlds bloom and wither from your choices? Huh? You must've felt it too, right? That sensation my wife, colleagues, and even world leaders couldn't grasp. The solitude of becoming the world's compass yourself.]
Gedroits spread his arms as if welcoming someone in front of the screen, then hugged himself and spoke.
[....Wonder if you've seen those paparazzi shots of me. You know the one? At that Montparnasse café, the seat Hemingway sat in—I was drunk with my wife. Pretty wasted, but it gave me a chance to be honest with her. If you get the chance, drink a lot. As much as possible.]
I knew which video he meant. It was one of the more famous clips of Gedroits.
Definitely....
["My love. I've spent my life cursing lazy gods, but no matter how I think about it.... I think I'm the god." Kughhh, even now, what a gem. Guess the rumor that Hemingway's ghost still writes there isn't total nonsense! Yeah, I was arrogant, but I had my reasons—rational ones. Think about it! If the formula you scribble down while wolfing street kebabs gets valued more than someone's lifelong toil, if half-assedly implementing a drunken scribble lands your never-before-so-cool mug on Broadway billboards, if picking which overflowing idea from your head alters the lives of everyone on your planet! You really think calling myself a god was pure arrogance? I didn't. At least, not back when I was still young.]
Not a joke—dead serious, this human declaring, "Objectively, I seem like a god." Could any human be more arrogant?
And yet, Gedroits made it so the listener didn't even perceive it as arrogance. What the hell was he?
[I can move the world with my own hands. That was fact. Money? Got it. Power? Got it. In a world where national borders were blurring, megacorp influence only grew, and I was king of that corporate world. So even scatterbrained Andrey Gedroits started developing "caution." "Commercialize VR? Or low-temp nuclear fusion? What if I accidentally turn the world into the Matrix? Or become the second Oppenheimer?" Those worries just piled up. After seeing the garbage spawned from my tech, developing anything new became terrifying.]
Clunk. Rrrrip—
Gedroits cleared junk from a corner of the filthy room and dragged out something like a glass fridge from between crumpled clothes. Scrawled on top: "Damn Thing."
[Take this, for example.... Instead of the usual nutrient gruel for starving kids, I made this to give them some meat—"Phage Meat"-derived ammo. Implants fast-growing cancer cells in the victim's body. Lethality's meh, but it forces amputation of the hit area wholesale, skyrocketing the disabled population. Easy and cheap to make—even a college kid majoring in 8th-stage biochem could buy Phage Meat from the mart and whip it up. It's classified as a biochem weapon with a minimum 45-year sentence, no parole—but by then, it'd already churned out hordes of limbless victims across Africa and the Third World. In the end, we had to engineer a gene to neutralize it, stick it in flu bugs, and spread it worldwide. You probably have the "Phage Safe" antibodies I unleashed in your body too.]
Click.
"No biggie? How about this? More relatable, since even civilians know about it. This little green monster? A chip loaded with the electronic drug "Paradise." Paradise! That goddamn indoor paradise! A VR program that purely makes people "happy" with zero addiction symptoms or physical harm! Worlds apart from regular e-drugs that just poke your brainwaves. I open-sourced neural signal structuring, and this is what they make. A device that just makes people happy. I was shocked when I heard it'd been developed. Crowds cheered developer Fu Rich and "Paradise." Used for depression, schizophrenia relief, reforming violent prisoners.... And as the final escape for the downtrodden. So what happened?]
[Global productive population dropped 40%. No one wanted to work. No chemical addiction? In pure human life, how much is more valuable than "pure happiness"? It marinates your brain in joys like praise from others, a happy family, landing your dream job—not the drug rush piercing your skull. Who'd want to do anything else? Fu Rich blew his brains out at home. Damn it, he should've shot me instead. Or better yet, kindly handed guns and knives to the unbridled world and brainless trash—that's who should've killed me!]
Electronic drug "Paradise." A name from high school textbooks. A brand-new drug type from eight years before I was born. I remembered the striking photo of Wall Street littered with blissed-out, slack-jawed people.
After that, Gedroits ranted on, showcasing biochemical weapons and unheard-of WMDs one after another. All stuff that'd land you life for mere possession. His post-youth life was defined by cleaning up the bastard children of his past tech.
[....I was drowning in the consequences of my choices. Develop new tech to fix mistakes, then create more to clean up the garbage it spawns.... Living like that, I realized this wouldn't do. Don't I have the power to change the world? But not knowing what results it'd bring—isn't that why this happened? Omnipotence breeds ruin without omniscience to pair it. Imbalance, structural incompleteness—the phenomenon where undirected power causes unintended environmental shifts. A scientist's brain pegged that as the root of everything tormenting me.]
[Thus, the "simulation game" was born. My personal omniscience, showing futures from my choices—the prototype of the game you cleared. Data? In an era where Gedroits Company satellites outnumbered stars, it was easy if you looked away from law and conscience. I became Big Brother, surveilling the world and peering into futures. I succeeded again. Gained eyes to see the future. Teaming with idiots was inevitable. I met the heads of state sending me love calls daily. They gawked like monkeys, raged like gorillas, thought like chimps. They praised my wondrous "Big Brother System" and agreed to share info only with world leaders here. Thus, I even seized the world's future.]
.
.
.
.
.
.
Whether from his long-winded speech or plain thirst, screen-Gedroits tossed an empty bottle and rummaged for a new one while the professor's brain ached digesting the info.
['Is that even possible for a human?']
Genius? Sure. Leonardo showed genius in unrelated fields like art, music, military engineering, anatomy, cooking, botany—and dreamed up airplanes in an era when God was grinding city-sized humans. Back to BC times, pyramids with no gears. Transcendent geniuses were rare but popped up.
But none wielded their knowledge so dominantly. Born in an age of copyrights and patents? When corps outpowered history's empires?
Sure, factors. But to me, what elevated Gedroits was the arrogance equating himself to God.
Consequences of actions. Accepting that they ripple to national, global scales as natural. Boundless self-esteem, ego.
That arrogance paired with heaven-sent talent propelled him to "Great Gedroits."
['Originally a simulation for previewing choice-futures. Not built for GG from the start.... Something went wrong, forcing the sim into Gedroits's Game.']
I'd felt it playing, and admins had stressed it outright.
'What will happen, will happen somehow.'
Words from game-creator Gedroits to players, potential "Completers."
"....Gedroits couldn't change the future."
Unlike the lively early video, his face grew etched with numbers and regret, proving it.
His plan had failed.
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