Crank the Facilities to Hell
Grrrind, grrrind, grrrind...
[Warning. Resource extraction in progress. Do not approach unless you are authorized personnel.]
In the basement beneath the control tower stood a massive crusher, a material recycler that shredded anything fed into it and processed it back down to the molecular level.
To be honest, nobody really knew exactly how it worked, not even the World Union that had built it. More precisely, they knew how to make it and had their own theories about it, but they couldn’t prove any of those theories were actually correct. It was a bit like how humans didn’t fully understand gravity, and yet still managed to launch satellites into orbit.
“Mmm. This is sweet as hell.”
Right now, the material recycler was running twenty-four hours a day, with the exception of about three hours of daily system maintenance and a mandatory one-hour integrity check every cycle. For an early-game operation, the amount of resources it was extracting was absurd.
That was thanks to the three 20-ton trucks Jeremy’s unit had brought in and put to spectacular use. Those guys really had a gift. Somehow they’d hauled in something so precious and slotted it exactly where it needed to be.
“Man... if I had like thirty of those 20-ton trucks, that’d be amazing...”
Of course, he knew that was the kind of complaint only a person with too much on their plate made. Even if they really had thirty trucks right now, there still wouldn’t be nearly enough people to run them. In this enormous quarantine zone, there were only three hundred people. With Hwi-hyeon included, that made exactly 301 souls scraping by here, and even the three trucks were starting to feel like a burden every time they were loaded to the brim and sent back in.
No one had died yet, but it was about time they started running into larger BT packs, and that would mean the death toll was going to rise.
They desperately needed more manpower, more people, but Hwi-hyeon was still building facilities like a man possessed and wasn’t actively rescuing survivors yet.
“Once the population grows, even more annoying problems start cropping up. Unless I can finish perfect preparations first, that is.”
For example, there was something Jeremy had told him that morning.
That something was...
*
“Prostitution?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t get it... did money even exist here? There shouldn’t even be a shop yet, should there?”
“Apparently a woman didn’t want to work, so she asked a man to cover her shift. The compensation was...”
“Her body. Right?”
“Correct. What would you like to do? Strictly speaking, it’s not even worth calling prostitution, but... it can’t be good if this keeps happening.”
Hwi-hyeon nodded.
This wasn’t just about sexual morality. If the work schedule started getting thrown into chaos like this, productivity would drop in the long run, and cohesion among the residents would suffer badly too. If this were some settled class that had been freed from manual labor, maybe that would be one thing, but right now Rosebery was nothing more than a refugee camp that could be generously called a village.
“For now, give her a stern warning. Publicly shaming her over this will only make things worse.”
“Understood.”
What made problems like this so annoying was that they were the sort of thing that just happened. Too trivial to call crime, the kind of deviation that made you think, What’s the big deal?
But now was the time for everyone to fight for survival. If they couldn’t understand that half-assing their duties would only hurt themselves and everyone around them, then he’d have no choice but to cut them loose.
Of course, he wasn’t going to say that to the survivors. Not yet.
*
...Something like that had happened.
Well, who was there to blame? As he’d said before, this was ultimately Hwi-hyeon’s fault. Feeding them, giving them work, and giving them a place to sleep hadn’t been enough.
No, then what exactly was he supposed to give them?
The answer was simple.
Everything.
The Command Minister. In the original, COMMAND-MINISTER. A title as weighty as a military governor’s, this office existed to manage their grievances and preserve the quarantine zone’s continuity.
Of course, that was all lore. In practice, the players had been dragged into this world half-forced, with barely a word of warning, and now they were left to vent on the gallery like a bunch of miserable forum posters. But what choice did they have? The moment they abandoned the Command Minister’s seat, their odds of survival would plunge below ten percent.
It wasn’t even a seat they could afford to give up in the first place. The only reason even beginners and newbies were managing to claw out a living and build their own setups was because there was at least a gallery where they could share what they knew about the game.
Those too weak-willed to do even that had already been chewed up by natural selection, as the line [User has withdrawn] made abundantly clear.
Hwi-hyeon was scared too, but even so, dying after struggling with everything he had was far better than dying while doing nothing at all.
If he was going to die anyway, wasn’t it better to be dragged down by furious humans than to be torn apart and devoured by BTs?
*
“Ugh... I want a drink.”
“I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“Chocolate... castella... macarons... whatever, I want something sweet...”
March 15, 2053.
It had been about two months since the players fell into this other world.
They were having a rough time of it, but so were the survivors they managed, in their own way. The problem was simple: there was nothing to enjoy.
No alcohol, no cigarettes, no snacks. Not even a cheap little instrument or a trashy paperback. In the quarantine zone, there were only three choices: eat, work, or sleep.
Grill the pork belly, brown the garlic in the fat, pile it into perilla leaves and lettuce with some scallion salad, then finish with bibim-naengmyeon and wrap the leftover pork belly around it. After that, I want a shot of soju to wash it all down.
- Ugh, I’m drooling.
- You bastard, don’t describe it in detail.
- Sob... even plain soju would be fine, please just give us alcohol T_T
Give me nicotine, dsknqw;aklqwe;!@#!
- This guy’s lost his mind, lol...
- Take this chance to quit smoking.
- (OP) Don’t talk shit, you bastard. I got dumped into this hellhole too, and now you’re telling me I can’t even smoke one damn cigarette? Are you kidding me?
- Your body’s getting healthier, isn’t it?
- I compromise by soaking newspaper with nicotine solution I bring from the medicine refinery, then rolling that up and smoking it. Try it, bro, yeah.
- (OP) Holy shit, are you a genius?!? Get over here, kisses on standby.
- What the hell, get away from me.
No coffee means I’ve got zero will to live... I need to level up the facility... my eyes are closing, damn it...
- Seriously, seriously, no iced Americano means my digestion’s wrecked, man;;;
- Ugh, you need caffeine to get this miserable flesh moving, lol.
- I mean, he’s the Command Minister and he can’t even brew himself a cup of instant coffee? For real, what the hell;;;
- That’s just post-apocalyptic living, mate.
- Fuck.
And the players, as it turned out, weren’t any different.
No, if anything, they had it worse.
At the base level, the survivors were people who had always lived in the assumption that the world was already post-apocalyptic. But these were people who had lived in a place where material shortages weren’t a daily reality, and now that they couldn’t get even the simplest comforts like coffee, alcohol, or cigarettes, they were slowly starting to lose their minds.
Of course, they wouldn’t die without those comforts. But then again, if you’re alive and still can’t enjoy even one small pleasure, what exactly is life for?
That was why Hwi-hyeon was pushing the tech tree as hard as he could.
If he upgraded the food-related facilities and built a brewery and greenhouse, they could grow spices, all kinds of grains, hops, and tropical crops, which meant they could make alcohol and coffee. They could even grow tobacco leaves and make cigarettes.
That alone wouldn’t silence every complaint from the survivors, of course, but it would be a hell of a lot better than this.
Even from the Rosebery survivors’ point of view, it would at least look like something was being built day after day, so it wouldn’t feel like they were stuck in some endless hamster wheel. Jeremy’s unit, meanwhile, was out on external expeditions almost every other day to gather the resources needed for more buildings, so internal dissatisfaction would stay relatively low.
If there was one thing that got better after the game became reality, it was that the civilians’ dissatisfaction didn’t spike nearly as badly as it had in the game. That happened because the game-like permission for people to complain that the environment was terrible less than a day after being rescued had finally been removed.
And, of course, that also meant that once dissatisfaction did rise, it was much harder to push back down.
---