The Politics of Loot
I tapped a finger against the security case Lucy had pulled out and asked,
"Why do you think I told you to grab this security case that does nothing but take up space?"
"Because something important or valuable seemed to be inside?"
"That's right. But that doesn't explain why we never submitted it for a separate value assessment."
"...Now that you mention it, you're right. Whatever's in this security case, if we'd applied for a value assessment they could have figured out the contents easily."
"The answer's simple. We don't have to sell every single item we farm from the Darkzone."
"I don't really understand. Isn't money everything for us anyway? We're going to be living here for the rest of our lives, after all."
Lucy wasn't wrong. We had been converted to death-row status with no possibility of ever leaving this prison, so of course we needed enormous sums of money if we wanted to enjoy every service short of freedom itself. To the people outside, money might not be the whole of a life. For us, it might as well have been.
"Let me give you an example. If you were wandering a desert with only one precious bottle of water left, could you sell it to another traveler for a fortune?"
"Absolutely not. Even a fortune isn't worth more than your life."
"Same principle. Among the countless items we'll find in the Darkzone going forward, there will be things more precious than our lives. Just like this."
Lucy looked back and forth between the security case and me. She still didn't seem to fully understand.
"Do you already know what's inside?"
"No."
All I knew was that it was some kind of technology Crazy Clock had authenticated. But that single keyword—technology—was enough for me to be certain I had already hit the jackpot.
"I do know that items of this kind are extremely rare. Rare enough that even if someone offered a fortune, you generally wouldn't sell them."
"I don't know what it is, but if you're going that far, Leader, it must be important. So what are you going to do?"
"Open it. And if possible, split the contents fairly."
Whether the offer to split a share was really that shocking, Lucy stared at me blankly with her eyes gone wide. It was only natural to divide the proceeds after disposing of whatever each person had farmed through a value assessment—but even after I had made it clear the contents of this security case were not for sale, I was still offering to split the share. That seemed to throw her.
Did I really come off as that much of a cheapskate?
Sure, I had done my share of loot-goblin, money-crazed farming. But I was not enough of a scumbag to stiff a teammate who had pulled her own weight. If anything, I believed that differential rewards based on individual effort were the fairest form of distribution. A four-person party, so everyone takes twenty-five percent? That kind of communist thinking does not keep a team together. I had already gotten more than my fill of that university group-project experience at one crooked "great place to work."
"In a two-person party, if you pulled your weight, we split fifty-fifty. You've earned the right to claim your share."
"Th-that's so generous of you to say. I'm embarrassed...!"
"And like I said, this is a theory lesson. I can teach you myself in the field, but if you ever end up working with someone other than me, you're inevitably going to get tangled up in money problems and emotional problems. If you don't learn this in advance, you'll get robbed blind with your eyes wide open."
"I have no intention of partying with anyone who isn't you, Leader."
"You never know how things will turn out. You say that now, but later you might get confident enough to solo-explore on your own, or team up with someone else. And even if you don't, this kind of knowledge is essential literacy."
"Then... I'll listen carefully."
Good. This student had an unusually strong desire to learn. If I had been a professor, I might have casually suggested a graduate program.
And so I began my lecture on the essential virtue of Korean gamers—and something you absolutely have to master even in everyday life. Politics.
"Let's say you're the leader of a four-person party. Teammate A accidentally sets off an alarm inside the Darkzone. As a result, a Native Species Wave breaks out, and you have no choice but to escape with your teammates without getting enough farming done. In that situation, what share do you distribute to A, B, and C?"
"A, who made the biggest mistake, gets about ten percent, and B, C, and I each take thirty. Wouldn't that be right?"
"Wrong! The moment you escape the Darkzone, you have to say, 'Are you fucking kidding me?'"
"Repeat after me. Are you—fucking—kidding me!"
"You open with an initiate, stacking the double combo of pressure and responsibility on the teammate who screwed up, and as the team's leader you take control of the atmosphere first. The split comes after that."
"...Wouldn't that make the team's cohesion fall apart easily?"
"Of course there's a risk the cohesion breaks. But that's a side effect of a leader just blindly piling on. Through politics, you first take them down a peg, then you give them a chance to lift their head again."
For example, rather than pointing and saying, "That's not a Q-auto-E-auto, you moron," it was better to put it indirectly: "If you'd gone in with jungle, initiated first, and landed the Q-auto-E-auto combo, it would've been a perfect trade for perfect damage. Shame."
A team's leader was not a being whose only job was to blindly scold and punish the teammate who had messed up.
"The important thing is to initiate first, push down the nose of the one who screwed up, and then follow it with an objective, precise analysis. Which means if your own knowledge and actions don't have legitimacy, you shouldn't be hastily criticizing teammates or leading the team at all."
"So blindly yelling at or punishing the teammate who made a mistake isn't a perfect solution?"
"Exactly. That's also why I said I'd split the contents of this security case with you fairly."
"Because even if you're the leader, taking a bigger share without a valid reason will, in the long run, inevitably damage the team's cohesion?"
I nodded at Lucy's perfect-score answer.
"In that sense, go back and rethink the part where you said the teammate who messed up should be limited to ten percent and the rest should each take thirty. Is that really right?"
"...I don't think so."
"Why?"
"No matter how big a mistake they made, they still risked their lives going into the Darkzone, and they still trusted each other with their backs in a fight. Cutting the share of the person who made a mistake wouldn't make them reflect—it would just breed more resentment. On top of that, the other teammates would stop thinking, 'I shouldn't make mistakes,' and start nitpicking every little slip from their allies, trying to inflate their own share and shrink everyone else's."
"That's right. That's the group-project dilemma."
A hard-line attitude of clearly assigning blame and making people take responsibility? Of course that was necessary. Adults ought to take responsibility for what they had done. But the world did not always work that way. Sometimes you had to know how to compromise, and sometimes you had to switch from a hard line to a gentler one. We called that functioning in society. It was something the antisocial convicts who had gotten locked up for committing crimes did not really understand.
"Now give me a new solution."
"The teammate who messed up would need a strong reprimand and a warning. That way the others develop a sense of caution, and you can also ease some of the emotional pressure the majority is putting on the minority. And in that situation, a fair twenty-five percent split each would be right. Since nobody got to fully show what they could do and the Darkzone expedition ended in a wash, you should close the incident with a clean split so there's no lingering talk, whatever the reason."
Clap, clap, clap. I gave her a light round of applause.
More reliable than either hard-line punishment or rehabilitationist theory was the process of human socialization itself. Whether or not a person went through that process determined whether they became a worm worse than a beast, or a well-packaged, well-mannered intellectual. Lucy was overwhelmingly the latter. If she had been the former, she never would have ended up on a team with me in the first place.
"Then as the finale of our theory class, shall we open this?"
"I'm excited! But how are you going to open it?"
"I already called the locksmith."
Before coming here, I had briefly logged into PrisonNet, paid Technica a certain fee, and requested their technician dispatch service. The service had originally existed in EFD as a slightly different kind of content feature, but its purpose was not all that different. When you had a special security case that could not be opened inside the Darkzone, or an OOPArt sealed by powerful technology, you paid Technica and had them handle it for you.
Access by outdated, obsolete technology confirmed.
Right on cue. She had arrived.
"We meet again."
A thick, acrid chemical smell punched straight in through my nostrils. I flicked my gaze to the side, and there she was—a Technica elite technician, sitting primly in a posture so composed I had no idea when she had even appeared. Black work clothes. The familiar cogwheel emblem. Security goggles covering roughly half of a small, slender face. And, blinking in tiny glittering pulses beside her temple, a cutting-edge Smartlink.
I had the odd feeling I had described her exactly like this the last time, too. Probably my imagination.
In any case, she sat there with long black hair falling like a dark waterfall and regarded me with a quiet, unblinking stare.
"What—when did you even—!"
I had already been through this once, so I treated it as nothing. Lucy, on the other hand, did not seem pleased by the sudden appearance. She startled like a rabbit that had heard a loud noise, bouncing up even as her hand moved unconsciously to the baton at her hip, the whole motion calling to mind a wary predator.
"Did you not receive an explanation? I came because I was summoned."
"Sit down, Lucy. This is the locksmith I called."
"The term locksmith feels rather crude and discourteous. As I introduced myself on a previous occasion, I am Technica's Chief Security Officer, Technology Manager, and External Cooperation Supervisor."
"But I called you to do locksmith work, so you're a locksmith."
Ronaldo was our guy when he was running his heart out on the field. Park him on the bench scratching his belly and he was just some dude named Ronaldo. A Technica elite technician was the same. If the customer needed a service, she was just Service Worker A.
"I have no wish to discuss that matter further. So. When exactly do you intend to draw that baton and start swinging it?"
"...I won't."
"How fortunate. I nearly found myself performing additional labor outside of working hours—namely, disposing of a corpse."
"We just got back from the Darkzone. Having to haul out a salaryman's corpse on top of that would be pretty exhausting, yeah."
I returned the sarcasm in Lucy's place, and the technician looked at me with a flicker of interest. I seemed to be collecting a lot of people's stares lately.
"That's enough small talk. Let's talk business. You got paid, didn't you?"
"I have confirmed the deposited amount. It was not a sum an ordinary prisoner could have earned in a short period, and yet you paid it in a single lump sum."
"What can I say? I'm a capable man."
I gave a light shrug and held the security case out to her.
"Never mind the electronic security on this case—we need the physical security cracked on a technical level, and we don't have that kind of equipment or specialized skill on hand. So you're going to have to do the work for us."
At my explanation, Technica's wage slave began to examine the security case at a leisurely pace. The faint glow of the goggles she wore suggested her analysis system was already running.
"It would indeed be difficult to open with ordinary equipment and techniques. The exterior is that of a commonplace security case, but the security system mounted inside is of a considerably high standard."
"Impossible?"
"There is no such thing as impossible for Technica."
"And you won't turn around later and say the same thing if I throw you more time and budget, right?"
"Forty-eight hours will be sufficient."
I nearly stripped naked and screamed like a lunatic in a public place.
Forty-eight hours!
In EFD, when you farmed a sealed item like this, the time it took to unseal it was how you sorted jackpot from decent hit from total bust.
The bust line was anything that took under twelve hours to unseal. The items that came out of those were, at best, break-even. Even among the ones you could use yourself instead of selling, finding any real value was not easy.
The mid-tier line was items that took twelve to thirty-six hours. From there on, whatever came out was guaranteed profit. You could dump it on the auction house and make a killing, and there was a real chance of getting something better than the high-end gear you had painstakingly put together.
And then there was the jackpot line.
That one took forty-eight to seventy-two hours to unseal. Anything over sixty hours was what people called a mega jackpot without exception—but either way, forty-eight hours was the floor of the jackpot line.
What even drops at the forty-eight-hour mark again? A specific color of security key? Top-tier gear? A blueprint? An OOPArt?
Whatever it was, I would take it. Put it on the auction house and you walked away with an enormous fortune. Use it yourself and you still could not lose. That much was guaranteed.
If I reacted too obviously, though, the two of them might start wondering, so I desperately forced down the corners of my mouth that were trying to climb toward the ceiling.
"That's a pretty long wait. In forty-eight hours you could cook nine hundred and sixty cups of instant ramen."
"That is a timeframe possible only because it is me. Any other technician would be stuck on it for a week. Or would you prefer to cancel the dispatch service?"
The words came out curt, but the way she quietly refused to let go of the security case in her hands was kind of cute. Tech-obsessed people were like that. Show them technology ahead of its time and they practically died of joy. She was probably itching to haul it back to her workshop and crack the security right now.
I don't have to worry about the contents leaking.
Technica was an organization that valued contracts as much as it valued technology. Bound by the dispatch-service contract, she could not do anything outside that service. Even if something extraordinary was sitting inside that security case, she might drool over it, but she would not be able to pry it open or lay a finger on it. I trusted the official EFD lore.
"Well then. Theory class and field practice are both done, and the security case is with the locksmith. Let's call it a day."
I was starting to miss my cozy cell.