Watching the Fire Across the River
Whirrrr.
Fshhhaaaak.
Spider-shaped drones the size of a person swarmed together, firing lasers to weld rebar into place. They kept repeating the process until, in the course of a few short hours, the skeletal frame of a building had risen from the ground, all steel bones and brutal efficiency.
The things usually called construction drones in games had multiplied before anyone quite noticed, and now more than two hundred of them were handling Roseberry’s construction. In theory, the World Union had deliberately withheld the drone blueprints from Quarantine Zone commanders in order to maintain control over the isolation zones, which meant they had to be purchased outright with Tokens. But the tokens kept stacking up, and the result was this absurd swarm.
"When you look at stuff like this, you really have to admit humanity in this world wasn’t half-bad at all."
If it hadn’t been for the bullshit of bullshit alien spores dropping out of the sky, wouldn’t the near-future civilizations in fiction have ranked comfortably near the top of the pile? Hwi-hyun thought as he watched the drones level the ground, bury the rebar, mix the concrete, cure it, and pour it with mechanical precision in the span of a few hours. It was hard not to think that way.
And by the same logic, the World Union’s survivor cities had become hell on earth despite having all this unmanned drone technology, simply because refugees kept flooding in and the inland had turned into a green inferno. The apocalypse brought on by Bloom Spore was, in the end, a genuine, civilization-ending threat.
The food cluster will be completed in 3 hours.
"How soon until it’s operational?"
Taking into account finishing work after completion, citizen training, equipment inspection, and environmental setup, it will run at 100% efficiency starting 3 days from now.
"That’s good enough."
He didn’t know exactly how it worked, but anyway, with the sheer, ridiculous 2050s-level technology, facilities like greenhouses and aquaponics systems were producing results every day. The setting claimed that it was because they optimized absurdly advanced GMO crops and raised them through highly refined mechanical agriculture, but whether that was actually possible was anyone’s guess.
"What about the livestock?"
Due to delays in completing the livestock barns, they were temporarily housed together, but as each barn is finished, they are being separated according to classification. At approximately 3:00 a.m. on September 12, 2053, 12 citizens illegally removed and slaughtered a cow, and were immediately sentenced to expulsion by field military police.
"I see."
Hwi-hyun didn’t bother making a value judgment about the unauthorized slaughter of cattle. Things were forbidden for a reason; if you blatantly broke those rules, what exactly were you expecting to happen? If they thought there were no cameras or guards watching, then they were already stupid enough to deserve death. Pitying them would be a luxury.
In a post-apocalypse, the end of a human being with no productivity was this horribly anticlimactic.
"By the way, what happened to the thing I told you to make?"
It has received approval from the World Union. It can be done at any time.
"Good. Then there’s no problem."
The movie theater and bookstores have been built, but due to the nature of the facilities, movie data and physical books still need to be transported, so full operation will take a little more time.
"Well, that can’t be helped. We didn’t buy many transport drones."
The movies and books, of course, weren’t plagiarized or fabricated. They were established works already existing in the world—things from before the Bloom Apocalypse—which had been licensed by the World Union for commercial screening and sale.
If he had to put it in a crude analogy, it was as if a copyright association had contacted the creators, or, in the case of dead creators, forcibly reclaimed their rights and granted Hwi-hyun, as a Quarantine Zone commander, permission to use them commercially.
Either way, now Roseberry would finally have movies, novels, and comics too. The citizens who had been steadily losing their motivation up to now would have a reason to square their shoulders and get back to work.
Because the movies would be priced like Korean films, and the books would be subject to a fixed-price system.
*
Yeah, I know this world sucks ass. I didn’t even play this game.
Fine, whatever, you assholes. But so what? What, like none of you got dragged here? Did some of you sign a contract, put on a suit, and take a taxi over here or something?
The losers who showed up at the start of the crisis as [User Deleted] were honestly way better than these whiners. At least those guys really died because they didn’t want to live anymore.
But what are these people? They spend all day dumping piles of shit posts on the gallery, either spreading their depression or taking their stress out on survivors and dragging the average quality of the commanders down, one of the two, yeah.
I don’t have mod powers, but once the reports pile up, it’s automatically a 30-day ban, so I’ve put together a list. Go ahead and unleash a report rush. The report button is gone, sure, but if you click an ID and open the pop-up, the report button is still there. I even tested it by asking some guys to do a ban rush on me, and yep, I got a 30-day suspension. Yeah.
And the gallery was burning in real time.
Because the players kept digging up old history, it had been revealed that the depressed nutjobs and the power-hungry dictators actually shared the same common denominator, and the firewood just kept getting piled on without end.
To be honest, a person under extreme stress spamming an anonymous board with sentimental drivel because they wanted comfort, while also lashing out at their subordinates to relieve that stress, wasn’t exactly a concept that required a dissertation to understand. It was just that, in a world where everyone was trapped in the same hell, finding out those people had been mixed in among them had caused this whole mess.
Human hearts were just too damned petty. And whether someone was a veteran or not, if they were human they ought to have at least the bare minimum of decency. Instead, they were dumping grotesque filth onto the gallery—things that inspired not just disgust but a deeply human sense of revulsion, the kind you’d expect from trash gangs in some dark, subterranean empire forty thousand years in the future—and the hostility toward them had reached its peak.
There’s a saying that a quiet cat is the first to jump onto the stove for a reason.
The fact that they hadn’t been spamming the gallery with useless whining posts meant they’d been venting their stress in real life instead. Whether they had done it on purpose or simply lacked any sense of the problem, each of them had left a trail in the logs, and Hwi-hyun was now tracing every single one down and tearing them open piece by piece.
When you give power to people who haven’t been tested, and when they can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction, then a person who hasn’t escaped stress can become monstrously cruel. These people were living proof of that.
And Lee Hwi-hyun still hadn’t opened the gallery.
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