Chapter 519
Chapter 519
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 24
Chapter Title: The Greatest Creditor (9)
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[See that? The thing behind you?]
[Ah, sorry about that. With your body frozen solid like that, you can’t turn your head, can you?]
Gedroits spoke in a slurred yet jovial tone.
[It might not be visible to you, but right behind your back—in this Next Space survival station in orbit, just 300 meters away—there’s that small, cylindrical container-like thing. That’s the ‘server room.’ Yes, the very one they thought was the last hope to revive the dying Earth after the nuclear war.]
[The server room orbiting at the same speed as this survival station, the mere 300-meter distance, and the station’s outer walls being made entirely of reinforced glass so you can see the server room from anywhere—they’re no coincidence. As you know, this orbital survival station was originally one of GG’s clear rewards. ‘NEXT SPACE: 50-Person Long-Term Orbital Survival Base.’ It was a space for cowards who achieved World Clear but shirked their duties to prioritize their own survival.]
[Survivors who reach this station are assigned one simple task. Nothing major. Just press the remote button prepared in the station three times a day to light up the server room’s top beacon for 10 minutes. Like this.]
With those words, Gedroits moved his hand, and a bright light shone over my back and the station.
[It’s a trivial task, but if they don’t do it, all the station’s power shuts down sequentially. It’s a kind of scorn and punishment I set up. So those who fled here abandoning everyone on the ground below would have that hope they discarded right in front of their eyes. Three times a day, for 10 minutes, the station lit up by that light—the hope they once desperately craved, now floating before them. So they could stare at it blankly and regret it. All alone in this vast space, watching their irrecoverable home planet fade away, regretting that final moment of abandonment right up until their death.]
Gedroits stared endlessly at the server room’s light illuminating the empty void like a lighthouse until it went out.
[As you can see, coincidences aren’t all that common in this world. What looks like coincidence, when you peek inside, is just various probabilities, with precursors already pointing to the outcome. The future prediction model used in GG simply reads those ‘inevitabilities disguised as coincidences’ based on vast data and observations. Simple cause and effect, like ‘spilled thumbtacks and swept them up carelessly. Stepped on one the next day and hurt your foot.’ Why, don’t we say things like ‘I knew it’? As if we foresaw a future that hasn’t happened yet. My future prediction device is nothing more than aggregating such simple causal chains and parading them all through a monstrous computing engine. From this perspective, coincidences aren’t phenomena that occur frequently.]
[‘True’ coincidence.... It’s something truly mysterious, astonishing, and sometimes unpleasant.]
Inside the space station, Gedroits pressed against the glass as if trying to get even a little closer to me, pointing to the distinct scar on his forehead.
[See this? Huh? A fine soldier like you would recognize what kind of mark this is, right?]
‘Gunshot wound. From a smaller caliber bullet than standard. Pierced right through the brow without losing momentum or penetrating a shield.’
My consciousness flickered like a candle about to go out, but ingrained habits read the information before me without thought.
A gunshot from a small bullet. An unusually small caliber—considering the gunshot sound right before and the people there, it was easy to tell who inflicted this wound.
[That’s right, looks like you know! Your friend. Ashfield, Ian Desmond. He truly lived up to his infamous reputation with that astonishing tenacity. He did it in the end. He finally succeeded in shoving a bullet into this Andrey Gedroits’s skull....]
Beyond the reinforced glass, Gedroits pulled out a small pair of tweezers, prying open the scarred forehead plugged with what looked like hemostatic agents. My eyeballs had long frozen in the vacuum’s chill, but the mutant’s astonishing vision still clearly discerned what Gedroits was showing from not-too-far away.
The split skull, filled with blood and brain fluid. And amid the clearly damaged, twitching pink flesh, the faint, inorganic gleam of metal.
[This inside here is a ‘cyberbrain.’ You’ve heard of it, right? A kind of brain activity augmentation device. Truth be told, even I didn’t expect this to end up in Gustav’s head.]
[This is a backstory about Gustav that neither you nor Ashfield knows.]
As he spoke, Gedroits wiped the drool from his uncontrolled mouth, then nimbly unpacked several cases.
[Ashfield. Losing his wife and child, then losing even the will to live—his suicidal disregard for his own life inflicted more damage on Gustav than he’d anticipated. Publicly, to maintain Raptor Society’s fearsome reputation in the wasteland, it was announced he was unscathed, but in reality, he suffered severe injuries. The worst was brain damage. A fragment from the explosion pierced into a very bad part of the brain. Left as is, intracranial pressure would’ve caused a hemorrhage, and he was doomed to die.]
[So I saved him. Thanks to watching the situation via satellite and drones.]
[The method was simple. I just left a big, expensive, sturdy trunk along the Raptor Society’s migration path! Word of the cutting-edge brain augmentation gear—complete with blueprints and instructions—quickly reached the Raptor executives, and their doctors, with their human-butcher level surgical experience, successfully performed the high-difficulty brain implant operation.]
-Clunk!
Finishing the setup of some device, Gedroits met my eyes again through the glass.
[And so, Gustav al-Harb ‘Raptor’ was revived.]
[His damaged brain survived with the machine’s aid and functioned as before.]
[Occasionally, without realizing it, he moved according to the will of whoever controlled that cyberbrain.]
[Ultimately, he was overwritten by my uploaded data consciousness inside it.]
A tool slipped from Gedroits’s hand. He drooled, convulsing noticeably.
[In-incredible, isn’t it? My past self had no intention of directly manipulating the wasteland. So I hadn’t even considered controlling Gustav! But look at the results!]
[Ashfield dealt Gustav a fatal wound! That explosion was captured by my satellite, alerting me to the Raptors’ peril, and in saving him, I placed him under my direct control!]
[After that, all my plans failed! In the end, I wielded the last card that fell into my hands by chance! And Ashfield, the very trigger for it all, stood before me again! He shot me! His bullet lodged squarely in ‘this body’s’ brain, completely killing ‘Gustav al-Harb’ as he wished! What an astonishing coincidence! Like the perfect exit of a character who’s fulfilled every role!]
[And now! With this body—like a time bomb driven by a dead brain and a cyberbrain—we’ve risen to space! You, who should’ve been left behind on the ground overwhelmed by the Raptors’ assault, now face me here! I desperately wanted it! Just once, to meet and speak directly with my ‘completer’! Yet I never imagined it! I’d never seen such a future!]
Thud!
His convulsing head slammed into the glass, leaving a white fog of breath.
[But.... it all came true! Entirely beyond my intentions!!!!]
[This time.... this time, the world stands on my side! The world’s flow that’s only ever blocked me until now! At last! I’ve finally found the right trajectory!]
Overcome with uncontrollable ecstasy, his convulsions turned to installing the completed device toward me.
An antique camcorder and a display linked to its screen.
[Oh, this won’t do. Gustav’s dead, but this is his face for now.]
He finished his busy preparations by pulling on the helmet from the discarded spacesuit, worn backward.
[There, all set.]
Gedroits gazed at it like an artist beholding his masterpiece, then fetched a small chair and sat before it. Covered in a bloodied uniform with a large spacesuit helmet obscuring his face, he looked like some bizarre character.
The camera light came on, and the screen powered up.
The camera captured Gedroits’s twitching, distorted face, with me frozen to the spaceship’s surface as backdrop.
[Greetings, survivors of the parched world.]
Kindly, the display set up for me showed the exact same composition as a video record he’d left long ago.
The tilted angle, the eerily calm atmosphere, and Gedroits speaking composedly within.
[This is Andrey Gedroits’s confession—and my final video.]
Gedroits pointed a finger at his helmet-shrouded face.
[It is also the story of the great figure who will be reborn within it to shoulder the reviving world,]
His finger then pointed to me, frozen in the dim space.
[and at the same time, the story of the meaning your deaths will hold.]
Finally, it turned toward the space beyond the unseen station.
Following his finger, the camera screen showed what should have been an orbit cluttered with space debris—artificial satellites.
A space filled with mechanical fragments humanity had competitively launched for decades. So choked with satellites and debris that after 2050, astronomers officially abandoned ground-based space observation—the other environment ruined by mankind.
But that place, which should’ve been blanketed in a ring of metal swimming at 27,000 km/h, was empty.
Those unidentified rings seen from the ground—that’s what they were. On screen, space debris orbited like Jupiter’s rings around an immense black pillar of unknowable size. Despite the name, even a nail-sized metal fragment wields railgun-like power in gravity-free space—their collective swarm.
[Well then. Shall we hear an old man’s tale from long ago?]
After showing himself, me, and the metal ring in turn, Gedroits turned the camera back and continued.
[The tale of a genius scientist who struggled to save you all.]
The voice uttering those words carried cold self-mockery.
And so, he began to recount the full story of the world called the wasteland.
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