Bring in All the Refugees!!!
There were several reasons for trying to gather as many refugees as possible.
One was a kind of buffer, a sheer mass of bodies. Literally speaking, if you wanted to keep up with the steady drain of manpower caused by outside invasions and internal incidents, the more people you had, the better.
The other was exactly what it sounded like: building a city. A walled quarantine zone might sound small, but only the area protected by the outer walls was small; the total land inside was as large as dozens of ordinary cities smashed together.
If they tried to run something like that with only a few thousand, or even a few tens of thousands, they’d end up with their heads split open, plain and simple. No matter how much the modern age pushed automation and mechanization, the share of work that only humans could do, and the share of work that only humans should do, was still absolute.
At the very least, unless they brought in more than 100,000 people, Quarantine City would be nothing more than Quarantine Town.
The formation of the new unit is complete. A total garrison of 800 has now been assembled.
“Good.”
The more people there were, the better. That was, of course, assuming they could actually support them.
Unlike the old days, when they had relied only on the western gate, the garrisons at the east, west, south, and north checkpoints were now each reinforced with about 200 troops to guard the entry points to the outside world. As for Jeremy’s unit, Huihyun had used his authority to promote Jeremy to colonel and reorganize him into an exploration regiment.
Jeremy, who now led four companies and three twenty-ton trucks, found the rank of colonel burdensome, but he didn’t seem to be having much trouble with the actual command. The World Federation’s International Command had apparently taken a rough count of the remnants of the 31st Division and basically told him to make it work.
Each company was made up of 200 troops, adding another 800 men, and of Rosbery’s current population of 7,200, a full 1,600 were now serving as pure soldiers. In percentage terms, that came out to the nice, ugly little number of 22.22 percent.
Naturally, that was absurdly high for a population-to-military ratio. Right now they could barely get away with it because there wasn’t anywhere else to put the resources. Once they started running a proper city, a 22 percent military ratio would be nothing short of a malignant tumor in the quarantine zone.
But that was fine. There was a very simple way to lower the ratio without reducing the army.
“Quit the chatter and give me refugees.”
-Excuse me?-
“Quit the chatter and bring me 3,000 more refugees.”
-Um... there are procedures on our side, so...-
“Rosbery is seriously short on people right now. Quit the chatter and send 3,000 more refugees.”
-I understand how you feel, but...-
“Administrative procedures? Don’t even think about them. Quit the chatter and bring me 3,000 more refugees!!!!”
They just needed to increase the population.
A lot.
*
“Oh dear, this really shouldn’t be happening...”
Despite the words, the civil servants at the government office were wearing bright, cheerful expressions as they pumped out immigration permits so fast you couldn’t tell whether they were people or stamping machines.
To be honest, Rosbery? If one quarantine zone like that collapsed, nobody really cared. Until it collapsed, though, it could still absorb population, and since the deaths that happened there weren’t the civil servants’ responsibility, they could work happily without a shred of guilt.
Dumping people on someone else, while reducing your own responsibility? Hitting the immigration quota and boosting your performance review at the same time? The answer was obvious. First you scraped up as many people as you could, then you fired them at Rosbery and every other quarantine zone with zero hesitation.
“Damn it...! What the hell are all these papers?! The streets are getting cleaner, for crying out loud!”
Of course, even after shoving people out in a brute-force fashion, the streets didn’t become noticeably cleaner. Even with the population shrinking, it was only by a few thousand or a few tens of thousands. Humanity still stood at 12 billion, and the coastal cities were still under crippling administrative overload.
But when those thousands and tens of thousands kept repeating, they became millions and then hundreds of millions. The pressure on individual civil servants and ordinary citizens might have felt the same, but the overall administrative process was moving much faster. The World Federation was throwing everything it had into funneling people into the quarantine zones.
“Make them faster!!!! If we can’t build rockets, then we have to take in those refugees ourselves!!!”
“But the safety inspections—”
“Shut up and mass-produce them!!!”
And what made that migration possible in the first place was the island nations’ godlike ability to churn out rockets despite being untouched by infection. They were building rockets at such a ridiculous pace that it was almost, no, slightly faster than the stack of immigration permits growing on the desks.
For the island nations, the choice was simple: mass-produce rockets by grinding their own citizens into paste, or take in refugees and get fucked. So every employable person in the island nations was forced into total employment, running brutal three-shift rotations to assemble rockets and pump fuel into them.
There was no paradise where you ran away.
The problem was that there was no paradise to run away to, either.
Of course, those wartime emergency mass-production rockets were bound to come with a few tiny little “glitches” here and there....
-The rocket exploded.-
“Is that even allowed?”
-No, it isn’t. But, well... you know how it is. The next rocket already launched, so it’ll be here soon enough.-
“And if that one explodes too?”
-The one after that is already prepared.-
Incidents like that did happen from time to time, but the World Federation didn’t have the spare capacity to investigate the truth behind the “unfortunate accidents” that happened “very occasionally” right now.
And the quarantine zones had no reason to cry for refugees who hadn’t even arrived yet.
*
[Title: For Those Curious Why the World Federation Keeps Dropping Refugees on Us]
[Art book screenshot]
First of all, during the Bloom outbreak, almost nobody died. The population was 12 billion back then, and it’s still 12 billion now, so you can probably get a sense of just how few people actually died, right?
But the living space got shoved backward by a ridiculous amount. 300 kilometers from the coastline. And the islands surrounded by the sea. That’s the entirety of the safe zone. Naturally, with all 12 billion people crammed into that, everything turned into a total shitshow. Food is a given, but clean water, clothing, and medicine are basically gold at this point.
So the World Federation grits its teeth and drops refugees on us. They don’t exactly have options either, and they originally built the quarantine zones to disperse the population in the first place.
“Turns out a lot of people really didn’t know this background stuff.”
After reading the theory post that had shot up to the front page, Huihyun quietly hit recommend.
Just as the post said, the World Federation was currently suffering under crushing population pressure. The World Federation, with its awkwardly competent capabilities, had at least managed to keep people from starving to death, thereby preventing a mass-casualty catastrophe. But that also meant 12 billion people were being forced to live below the poverty line.
To break that situation, they either needed a productivity revolution or they needed to reduce the population they were supporting. But with more than half the world already screwed, a productivity revolution was impossible, which left only one option: reduce the population.
And that was exactly what the World Federation’s ongoing, brainless refugee bomb was accomplishing.
[Title: I Don’t Get the People Who Say They Don’t Want Refugees.]
[Screenshot showing death toll tally: 13,200]
If supporting them is hard, then just don’t support them, right?
“Jesus Christ.”
And how those refugees were used was entirely up to each quarantine zone’s commanding officer.
He was pretty sure that anonymous poster had crossed the line of humanity somewhere back there, but as things stood, without an armband on his sleeve, there was nothing he could do about it. It’s not like he could launch missiles or anything.
Shaken, Huihyun found himself reflecting once again on just how well he’d been treating the people living under him.