I'll Stab You
“??? : I’ll stab you.”
At last, this day had come.
September 1, 2053.
On this first day of autumn, the Roseberry Quarantine Zone saw its first murder.
“Let go of me!”
“What, and if I don’t? You filthy murderer.”
It wasn’t even a crime of passion, some impulsive killing born of rage. The bastard had gone home, come back out with a weapon in hand, and stabbed a man to death in the middle of a main street—an audacious act that amounted to open contempt for the entire justice system. He was arrested on the spot. The victim received emergency treatment in a rush, but in the end, he died from massive blood loss.
“He had it coming!!!”
“Even if he did deserve to die, don’t you know you have no authority to carry out that sentence? Take him away.”
“Yes, sir!”
The motive was absurdly ordinary.
He had matched an expensive outfit and shoes from the newly opened clothing shop and shoe store, then bragged about it at work. You might think that wasn’t enough reason to kill someone, but in this world, murder happened over a thrown hanger if it came to that.
Compared to that, flaunting money was, from a relative point of view, a reason with some weight to it.
Of course, that reason would never be socially accepted, and it would never be forgiven.
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“...Oh?”
“I have no words, sir...”
“No, no. If you think about it, it was bound to happen someday. It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t prevent it, but there’s wisdom in learning from another man’s mistake.”
“We’ve detained the perpetrator for now, but how would you like us to handle him?”
“Does he have any prior offenses?”
“Looking into it, the only thing he’s done is get fined for public urination while drunk.”
“Really? Then exile him beyond the quarantine zone without protective gear, food, or water.”
“Understood.”
Inside the control tower, unlike Colonel Jeremy Miller, who had his head down in shame, Hwi-hyun didn’t pile the blame onto him with a “This is all my fault.” Until now, he had been so distracted that he’d neglected the creation of a proper public security apparatus in the first place.
Roseberry’s security had been handled in a thoroughly ad hoc manner. Near the gates, each gate’s garrison acted as police, and in the city proper, soldiers from the Reconnaissance Regiment served the same role.
It was hardly an exaggeration to say there had been no real policing system at all. No matter how well Jeremy Miller performed, the system itself didn’t support him, so there was no real basis for blaming him.
“So... what do you plan to do now?”
“I’m going to establish a military police force. Civilian police are still premature, don’t you think?”
“Military police, then... In that case, I’ll select suitable personnel as the Inspector General of the Military Police.”
“Please do.”
“But what size are we talking about? The population’s nearly fifty thousand now, so we’ll need several hundred men.”
“For now, I’m thinking three hundred. We’ll also begin new production of armored vehicles and walkers for maintaining order.”
After hearing Hwi-hyun, Jeremy Miller rolled his eyes for a moment, then said, “Aren’t you overdoing it? Sure, manpower is one thing—three shifts means about a hundred men per hour, so I can understand that. But armored vehicles and walkers? Are you planning to conduct a military operation against the citizens?”
“Yes.”
At Hwi-hyun’s one-word answer, it was Jeremy Miller’s turn to answer in one word.
“...Understood.”
“Don’t think about it so hard. It’s just to crush any notion of getting too bold right from the start. And from now on, I won’t be making rulings on every petty little thing like this. I’ll delegate authority to the Inspector General of the Military Police and let him handle the trials.”
“That sounds like a little too much authority for the Inspector General.”
“That’s what makes control easier.”
“...?”
The colonel’s eyes blinked at the contradiction.
Watching him, Hwi-hyun gave a thin smile, poured him a glass of water, and waited until he’d wet his throat before explaining.
“Do you know what ‘good cop, bad cop’ is?”
“Roughly. The bad cop scares the confession out of the suspect, and then the good cop gently coaxes him into—ah!”
“Looks like you’ve caught on.”
In simple terms, it worked like this.
As long as the citizens knew that a great deal of authority had been delegated to the Inspector General of the Military Police, that man would no longer be able to deploy the huge “order-keeping force” under his command as he pleased. If an armored vehicle or walker ran over a civilian and killed him on the spot, it would be a catastrophe.
So he would inevitably take a passive stance, and then he’d get flak for being stingy with such a massive force. But if he actively patrolled the streets to maintain order? Then people would resent him for “running around with his eyes on nothing but stats.” No matter what he did, he’d be hated.
In other words, no matter what he did, people would curse him. Which meant that any anger over security would be directed not at Commander-in-Chief Lee Hwi-hyun, but at the Inspector General he had appointed.
The bear did the trick, while the zookeeper took the money. The Inspector General of the Military Police was nothing more than the commander-in-chief’s terminal.
“...Will that be all right? Human hearts are like reeds in the wind, whether you like it or not. If a coup were to break out...”
“A coup? Whose side would you take?”
“Well, of course... I’d take Your Excellency’s side.”
That was right.
A coup? It wasn’t all that difficult. In a quarantine zone—where military and politics were tightly intertwined, and the system was halfway to outright military dictatorship—the threat of a coup could be treated as a constant. But why was it that not once, either in the game or now that it was real, had a coup ever occurred?
Simple. There had never been the conditions for one.
The purpose of a coup was to seize power. And the legitimacy of that power came not from civilian support, but from recognition by the World Union, which had established the quarantine zones. Who in their right mind would hand over a state office to some fool who’d just decided to body-check a higher-ranking official?
Besides, the World Union wasn’t stupid. Before the game even began, players had gone through all kinds of screening and passed it, then been appointed alone to their posts—veritable academy-trained elites. If some ground-pounder under such an elite suddenly decided the job was bullshit and demanded that the Commander-in-Chief step down, would they listen?
Well, maybe they would. Listen, at least.
Of course, all the national armies had now been integrated into the World Union Army, so they’d be charged with crimes against humanity as well, and the only thing waiting for them would be a death sentence and a criminal record.
Even the most ignorant fool, if his intelligence was pathetic enough not to understand that, would never even think of the word “coup” in the first place. So, in the end, the only thing left to the survivors in the quarantine zone was to trust the Commander-in-Chief completely.
“So there shouldn’t be any problem, then?”
“...There shouldn’t.”
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“Holy moly.”
Anyway, after awkwardly appointing the Inspector General of the Military Police, Hwi-hyun, while browsing the gallery, ran into what could only be called a genuine monster.
One hundred and twenty hours of labor a week. It was the kind of industrial-age madness that couldn’t even be disguised as a joke about “dynamic labor.” It was enough to make him wonder why there were “only” dozens of rebels to begin with.
Hwi-hyun didn’t exactly feel deep sympathy for ordinary citizens, but he still enforced a forty-hour workweek and overtime pay to the letter. Not because it was morally right, but because, in the first place, one person’s productive output wasn’t going to differ all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Apparently, that player didn’t know that.
And little by little, the gallery began to blaze, fueled by the tremendous fireball launched by one madman.