A Declaration of Surrender
The latest medical tech of the 2040s really is something else.
I turned my unmarked skin over in genuine wonder — not a scar left anywhere — and pictured the little implant that would, by now, be nestled right beside my heart. The device clinging to the heart and a handful of blood vessels was called a Blood Flow Accelerator, and it did exactly what it said on the tin: it artificially sped up the circulation. Originally it had been developed for patients with severe hypotension, or for people whose blood simply refused to reach the extremities.
In the EFD lore it was nothing more than a common junk item, but back then I had looked at it a little differently.
If the blood moves faster, doesn't that mean any drug injected into the body takes effect faster too?
Huh? Yeah. That's right. So if I stack a boost drug with a regen drug, I could theoretically pull off an extreme doping exploit with zero side effects, couldn't I? That's a completely insane idea. Let's do it right now.
And so I had personally installed this ultra-premium implant — the same piece of hardware everyone treated as trash, sold off cheap, and fed into the dismantlers. The result was a roaring success. I, Han Seungho, had opened the Age of Super-Doping.
This time I'm sucking all the honey out of it myself, for as long as I possibly can.
The moment it looked like the Accelerator's performance was about to become public knowledge, I would stockpile the latest models in bulk and drip them onto the auction house as the price climbed, skimming an enormous profit off the top. Malicious market riggers deserve a permaban no matter the reason? Ah, if that pisses you off, go get transmigrated yourself.
At any rate, on the same day I received the implant I imposed on Lee Sena's workshop for the night, and I was able to start a new day in one piece. She had borrowed my name however she pleased, so I borrowed her workshop however I pleased.
"That about covers my wild little field trip to Cell Block H-088. It's also the story of how I lost my bodily innocence."
"That sounds like… quite the ordeal. Or would 'run off your feet' be the more accurate expression?"
"Either works. Both just mean I was busy as hell."
I brushed off the concern of Lucy — a Russian who knew her four-character idioms suspiciously well — and kept pulling on my lemonade. Then I nudged the blood flow a little faster, and the lemonade that had hit my stomach was absorbed at a staggering rate, yanking my blood sugar straight up. Sugar slammed into my brain; dopamine poured out in sheets. I had always wondered why anyone bothered with cigarettes just to get that nicotine fog, but I thought I understood it now.
"…So you told me to keep my public activity to an absolute minimum. Why, then, did you suddenly call me out here today?"
I looked across the table at Ahn Moon-ho, who kept flicking glances at our surroundings. This was one of the few CCTV blind spots I had secured; he really didn't need to worry that much. Still, he had followed the advice I had given him last time and had barely left the cell he shared with the Lee Duho brothers, doing everything he could to stay out of sight. Put that way, the nerves made sense. If I hadn't dragged him out today, he would have kept up his cell hikikomori routine straight through until the next Dark Zone deployment.
Even a hardcore introverted shut-in has to step outside now and then if he wants to stay alive. Today just happened to be that day.
"Did you already forget the offer I made you? I said we should put a faction together and run it."
"Ah. The faction. To be honest, I thought it would take a little more time."
"Strike while the iron is hot. Annoying work is better handled on the spot. So? What do you think?"
"Even if you ask me that so suddenly… wouldn't it be somewhat difficult to establish a clan immediately? If we did, the fact that you and I are in league would come out almost at once."
He wasn't wrong. The prison actively encouraged clan founding, which meant every new clan had to be reported. The administration needed a full record of who had founded what, and when — otherwise criminal organizations would sprout the way they used to. The policy actually worked. Countless clans were still being born, but the number of times they committed crimes out in the open had dropped considerably.
"You don't need to worry about that. Found the clan in your name, and slot in only the Lee Duho brothers as members — same as your current party."
"That is precisely the problem. That would count as the very public activity you told me not to engage in."
"When I said public activity, I meant don't broadcast your opinions more than necessary, and don't gather people who agree with you. Founding a clan is the opposite. You've already been flagged by the prison once, and now you're volunteering to fold yourself into their surveillance system. Who's going to question your motives? In this airtight prison, where not even a rat can slip out."
"…Ah."
Ahn Moon-ho nodded, the meaning finally landing. For a bookworm who had spent his life at a desk he had a good head on his shoulders, but his social instincts ran a little thin. Then again, that was probably how he had gotten himself arrested on the outside — digging up dangerous information without ever backing off.
"Clan founding is a community system the prison actively encourages. They know perfectly well it's better to have convicts found their own clans and pour themselves into Dark Zone clears than to leave a bunch of shady prisoners huddling in corners plotting crimes."
"In that situation, my founding a clan would be no different from declaring that I will cease all subversive behavior and voluntarily enter the prison's watch system."
"Right. A kind of surrender declaration."
A man who had been blacklisted without even knowing it, whose life was already under threat, suddenly comes forward trembling and begs to be allowed to found a clan? The prison would look at Ahn Moon-ho with a sneer — in the end you're just another creature of flesh and blood — and magnanimously rubber-stamp the request. They would arrive at the obvious conclusion: this one is no longer a threat, so take him off the blacklist and pull the expensive surveillance detail.
"If you still looked like you had some venom in you, the trick wouldn't land at all. But right now you're a weakling who'd be embarrassing to trot out anywhere. Without protection from people stronger than you, you can barely keep yourself alive, so you have no choice but to cling to the prison. Now do you see why you're cut out to be a figurehead?"
"I understand. It's a little hurtful to hear from this side of the table, but it isn't wrong — and more than anything, if I can stay alive long enough to achieve my purpose, I am in no position to be picky about means."
"That's the attitude. If you're going to eat someone else's money, you need at least that much spine."
I handed him the founding fee first — ten million won, loaded onto a credit card. This prison charged for every service and every scrap of content; there was no corner of it that didn't cost money. Even the clan system, which existed to fold willing convicts into the administration's surveillance net, required a payment before they would authorize a "legal organization."
The reason they go this far is obvious enough.
From the day every inmate here had been converted to a death-row prisoner, they had become dopamine addicts with nothing left to lose. Risk your life in the Dark Zone, risk your life again inside the prison, and eventually you cannot endure unless you blow the money you earned with that life. That was why underground club fights, casinos, and illegal drugs had exploded overnight. Every prisoner's wallet had suddenly gotten fat, and something had to suck that money back up. The prison couldn't openly sell material goods, so instead they pushed the system-selling even harder.
"Is it truly all right for me to accept this money? If someone like me walks in holding this and asks permission to found a clan, I would think they would find it even more suspicious."
"The opposite. They'll think, ah, even a guy like this is scraping and borrowing just to throw a clan together and stay alive."
"……"
Ahn Moon-ho hesitated for a moment. Then he picked up the credit card I had held out.
"Founding the clan is one thing. What do we do after it's made? The Lee Duho brothers are one matter, but there won't be any prisoners willing to join a clan that I lead."
"Why wouldn't there be? We've got the brothers who shared a blood-and-sweat friendship with us last time."
"We had brothers of that sort?"
Lucy, who had been sitting quietly for some time, tilted her head and asked.
"We did. A whole lot of them. That day we learned exactly what friendship among men looks like."
"Hmm. Is that so."
Of course I ranked my friendship with Lucy above all of that, so I had no intention of changing the party now. Which meant I would appreciate it if she stopped looking at me like that.
"Ahem. Anyway — float clan membership at the guys who were with us that day, first and foremost. If you have to, you can even sell my name."
"Most of those people are either clanless wanderers or they move in small parties, so proposing they join shouldn't be difficult. But if you aren't actually in the clan and we throw the name Super Rookie around freely, won't that produce the opposite of the effect we want?"
"That's why you have to sell the name properly. Work your mouth like this: Me? Sure, I'm not in the same clan as the Super Rookie, but we hit the sauna together! We drank lemonade together! We did it all!"
Season it just that much and most of those guys wouldn't forget the skill I had shown in the Dark Zone, or the favors they owed me. They would join Ahn Moon-ho's clan. If I dropped by now and then, exchanged a few greetings, and farmed a little favorability, their trust in Ahn Moon-ho would grow on its own. A clan master who had the great Super Rookie as a connection, plus the three Lee Duho brothers as a wall of muscle — turning those people into loyal retainers would be nothing.
Ahn Moon-ho's brain and the three brothers' force can run a small clan without breaking a sweat. If I fill the gaps with help, direct and indirect, it'll be more than enough.
"The important thing isn't blindly inflating the clan's size, or cranking the profit rate through the roof. Stable operation comes first. It'd be pretty embarrassing to die because you tried to fly before you could walk, wouldn't it?"
"That's true as well. Then I should found the clan with the Lee Duho brothers as we discussed, gather a reasonable number of people, and eventually build a clan that can hold itself together even without your help?"
"More precisely, your goal is a safety-first clan that doesn't have to hitch itself to the Dark Zone. Extremely few casualties, a decent living — a perfectly ordinary lower-to-mid-tier clan. Think of it as a sturdy small-to-medium enterprise."
"In that case we would no longer need to pour every last credit and every last body into Dark Zone clears, which means we could flex more funds and personnel into other areas. Intelligence gathering inside the prison, for instance, or clandestine research conducted independently within the clan."
"That's exactly it. A little slow on the social cues, but the brain works just fine."
I snapped my fingers in agreement, and Ahn Moon-ho allowed himself a faint smile. Here, in this seat, he was confirming that the conversation we had shared in the Dark Zone that day had not been wasted. How could that not please him?
One question still seemed to be sitting with him, though. This time he turned the subject not toward me, but toward Lucy.
"Then what precise role will this person be taking in our plan?"
"If I supply you with funds and information, Lucy can bring you the kind of personnel you could never obtain on your own."
"This person, you mean?"
"Me?"
Ahn Moon-ho I could understand — but Lucy, you really ought to know this already.
"Lucy. Think about it carefully. Right now, the only one among us with a halfway decent face is you."
"…Pardon?"
"The Lee Duho brothers are out, obviously, and Ahn Moon-ho isn't happening either. Me? If I locked in and went at it properly I might manage somehow, but I'm honestly not confident. You, though — that face will work. Guaranteed."
"I've been trying to ask this for a while now. What exactly are you talking about, Leader?"
"We're going to need to bring female prisoners into the clan Ahn Moon-ho builds, and you're the best person for the job."
I will be honest. The face on this body I had transmigrated into had no particularly sharp edges, but if you asked me whether it would be popular with women, I would have to hedge. The male types that reliably did well with women were either the alpha-male hotties who radiated it from a mile away, or the boyish pretty boys who tripped the maternal instinct. Lucy belonged to the latter camp. Anyone with eyes could see she was a pretty boy.
"Think about it. What do you think happens if guys like us walk into a women's cell block? High chance we get laughed out of the room, or we get jumped as a group. You, though, Lucy — most of those women would empty their pockets for you."
The same way men will hand a stunning beauty their liver and their gallbladder, women will hand a stunning beauty of a man their liver and their gallbladder. Every world people live in is paved with the same brutal capitalism and the same lookism. Virtual or real, it never changes.
"So I am to walk the women's cell blocks myself and seduce… recruit, rather, female prisoners who are specialized in building a solid foundation, as opposed to talent useful for Dark Zone clears?"
"That's right."
"…Haa."
"There's really no one else who can do it! Don't even mention those three brainless muscle monsters — and it's not as if Ahn Moon-ho, who has probably never held a girl's hand in his life, or I, who have been far too busy and hard-pressed to hold one, can exactly step up!"
"Hold on. Why am I being dragged into this when I was sitting here quietly…?"
"It can't be helped. On days without a Dark Zone expedition, I'll walk the women's cell blocks and look for some talent. In return, please don't complain about whoever I end up bringing back."
"Of course not. I'm not so shameless that I'd criticize someone for doing the work I can't. If anything, I'd almost rather pay you separately."
"Ah. I nearly forgot to mention compensation."
That mouth of hers, honestly. She had gone on and on in the Dark Zone about silence being a virtue — so why wasn't she silent here? Fortunately, Lucy's nature was as fair as her face.
"Given the relationship between Leader and myself, I won't take money. Instead, I would like to be compensated in the form of small favors — whenever I want something, you grant a little request. Would that be acceptable?"
"That much isn't hard."
No money leaving my pocket, so that's a win.
I was under the table clenching a fist in a hard-won mental victory when Ahn Moon-ho, who had been about to wrap the meeting up, suddenly dropped something enormously important.
"Incidentally — what do we name the clan?"
"Ah."
"Ah."
We could hardly christen the first step of an important plan something like the XX Federation or Rondo Bell. Lucy, Ahn Moon-ho, and I had no choice but to settle in for another long, painful stretch of coming up with a name that actually sounded like a clan.