A Catalog You Can't Afford
Senior Security Officer, Technical Manager, and External Cooperation Supervisor of Technica. They were the kind of titles every engineer at the company dreamed of holding at least once in their career — positions soaked in romance. And the long-haired woman who held every last one of them sat motionless before the privacy glass, waiting for the other party's reaction.
She had even shown him the secret catalog: something that, under ordinary circumstances, would never be revealed to anyone outside a VVIP clientele numbering fewer than a hundred souls on the entire planet.
What kind of reaction will he give me?
She had not shown him the secret catalog because she believed he had even a sliver of a chance of becoming a VVIP client, nor because he harbored some hidden, illustrious lineage he himself did not know about. It was simple curiosity. Nothing more.
If Technica's Supreme Technology Preservation Committee ever learned of this, they would hold her strictly accountable for overreach and the leak of classified material. She was prepared for that.
What matters is an inquiry that never stops.
To secure, administer, and apply technologies that still existed in the realm of the unknown — that was the duty and the mission of every employee of Technica. And the one thing that must never be discarded in service of that mission was curiosity. A humanity that felt no curiosity toward all things in existence was doomed to be selected out. A humanity that settled for the present could never move forward. A humanity that failed to prove its hypotheses was nothing more than a collection of ordinary people.
And so she — A-01, the elite engineer of Technica who bore that peculiar name, an identification code — had decided to inquire into the man on the other side of the privacy glass.
And then, at last, the reaction she had been waiting for arrived.
"If we're going to do business, I'd prefer a catalog that's actually usable."
"I have prepared the finest catalog I am capable of providing, however."
"Showing a customer a catalog stuffed exclusively with products they can't buy — isn't that just a polite way of telling them to get lost?"
So he understood the value of the products in the secret catalog she had shown him. He was neither some hidden titan of politics and finance, nor a specialist steeped in this particular field of knowledge. And yet he had accepted, with complete naturalness, the fact that he could not purchase a single item from it.
Still, A-01 decided to probe him one more time.
"I do not share that assessment. Take, for instance, the Micro Thought Accelerator listed in row two, item six of the catalog. Regardless of model or version, it is a product that can achieve a substantial performance increase simply by being mounted as an add-on to a Smart Link. For anyone with the means to purchase a Smart Link in the first place, it is also the easiest option available."
The moment her explanation ended, a faint sigh drifted through the privacy glass.
"Sure, the Micro Thought Accelerator is an upgrade part that lets a Smart Link recipient boost performance without additional surgery or a software upgrade. I'll give you that. But how many people in the world actually need something like this?"
"The number of registered Smart Link users in this world officially reaches into the tens of millions. Including unregistered users, the figure would be at least in the hundreds of millions. That the majority of them desire this groundbreaking product of ours is not something that can be denied."
"Well, yeah. If people knew something like this existed, they'd want to get their hands on it even if it meant bombing Technica headquarters."
But among the customers, the ones who actually knew about it numbered fewer than a hundred, didn't they?
At those additional words from inmate number 77777, A-01 felt something like a peculiar thrill. Her eye — her inquiring eye — had not been wrong after all.
The other party, however, had no intention of playing along with this little farce any further, and he cut straight through with his next words.
"I know why you showed me something like this. I'm not so dense that I don't know Technica is obsessed with securing and researching unknown technology."
His read of the situation was astonishingly fast. And the nerve to know all of that and still meet her head-on, completely unfazed, was not something she could dismiss.
There really is something about him.
An ordinary person would have been baffled the moment she showed them the secret catalog. Most would not have understood the precise purpose or value of the products listed in it. And then, despite having no ability to pay, they would have gotten excited like children, picking this and that, demanding a deal that could never possibly go through.
Someone with professional knowledge and cultivation, on the other hand, would have immediately grasped what kind of situation they were in — and been frightened in advance. They would have interpreted the display of technological masterpieces they could never afford as an attempt to extract payment from them by force, in one form or another — or as an intent to kill them.
This man belonged to neither category.
If I psychologically analyze the boredom and faint inconvenience in his tone, he genuinely finds this situation annoying.
This was not mere bluster. Among the countless people she had met, there had been no shortage of the petty sort who lied as a matter of daily habit, the kind who hid their weakness behind a mask of bravado, and the fools who understood nothing at all. This man, by contrast, maintained the same attitude no matter what intention she — as a member of Technica — had approached him with, no matter why she had shown him the secret catalog: the attitude of someone lazily waving away a bothersome fly.
Had he judged that he knew too much, and that getting involved with Technica would be dangerous?
No. If that were truly the case, there should have been at least a faint tremor in his voice. Or some sign of fluster.
To feel danger meant understanding the risks that would follow and naturally becoming wary of them. A human who failed to understand risk could not survive long in this brutal society. The ordinary secret to longevity in this world was not becoming thoughtlessly brave — it was becoming a coward who thought too much.
And yet she felt none of that from this man.
Either he does not regard the risk as a risk at all... or he is confident he can handle whatever risk comes back at him?
...An absurd conjecture. Even she had only prioritized her spirit of inquiry after steeling herself to accept the risk of this overreach. What on earth was this man relying on, to come at her with an attitude like this?
She was curious. So curious she could not stand it. So curious that she no longer cared about the risk herself — she wanted to devote herself entirely to inquiring into this man.
Having dealt with Mega Corps both directly and indirectly while playing EFD, I can say this with some authority: Mega Corps are, at a fundamental level, a pain in the ass.
They're vicious and combative on a level that makes the worst late-night convenience-store nightmare look tame. They nitpick their rights and status at every turn in a way that would give the luxury-floor department-store from-hell customer a run for their money. And they have a talent for making people lose their minds that could slap a design firm's most insufferable client across the face — back and forth, dozens of times.
Not following? Fine. Let me give you an example.
1. Company A issues a prisoner a quest to eliminate a specific Native Species and recover a biological tissue sample. The prisoner completes the quest without incident. What happens next?
"The tissue sample doesn't look the way I wanted it to. Please go get another one in a prettier shape."
"Another prisoner brought us a tissue sample under much better terms than this. You're just coasting, aren't you?"
"The tissue sample's freshness has dropped. You spent a great deal of time focusing on your own personal farming instead of the commission this company issued, I take it? This is a breach of contract."
This fucking Mega Corp, bro!!!
You told me to kill a mid-boss-tier Native Species, grab a tissue sample that drops at a low rate without damaging it, and I brought it to you. While every other prisoner was going, Yeah, I'm skipping this week's quest~, I clenched my teeth like a sucker and took the high-difficulty one. It took a little time, sure, but I smashed through every cheap shot the Darkzone threw at me and completed the quest perfectly.
I fucking! Just! Did everything you asked!
...Yeah. It's like that.
Even back in the EFD days, when it was nothing but PvE, I was already sick to death of the quests those self-styled Mega Corps issued and the nitpicking, nightmare-client bullshit they pulled at every turn. Now that the Darkzone had become reality, just how spectacular would the same dogshit cheap shots and nightmare-client behavior be from every stakeholder about to adapt to it — government, prison, corporations, convicts?
That was exactly why I had sealed both Control Corp and Medician Corp's mouths with a contract for a full year before they could adapt to the Darkzone.
So why not just seal the other corporations' mouths one by one, in order?
That's just greed.
Beat me to death and I'd still only have one body. The EFD story was still in its earliest chapters. To stay safe from every incident and accident that was going to happen from here on, two or three corporate connections were plenty. Build a foothold through connections that were neither too many nor too few, then advance step by step to the next stage, stacking a proven build as I went.
I had no interest in voluntarily turning a future that should have been nothing but a flower-lined path into a road of hardship.
Especially. No matter what. Not Technica.
So. How do I get rid of this hopeless nightmare client?
She'd shoved a catalog stuffed with Technica-build-exclusive items at me out of nowhere, and I'd honestly wondered if she'd lost her mind. Every last one of them was a high-performance, high-value item you could only dip a toe into once the top-tier tech tree opened — stuff nobody but a veteran like me would even dare consider. Was it even remotely reasonable to show that kind of thing to someone who'd only just started making a name for himself as the Super Rookie?
The External Cooperation Supervisor woman's intentions were so obvious it was enough to make me laugh out loud.
She probably wants to dig into the valuable information only I know, or the secrets of the Darkzone. Not happening.
I had no intention of entering into an official contract with Technica. They were a group so massive that even among Mega Corps they were called a true Mega Corp. Worse, they were tech zealots whose obsession with unknown technology was excessive — before long they'd try to vacuum up everything that came out of the Darkzone. If I got tied into a contractual relationship with those people even once, I'd be spending the entire rest of my life with a Mega Corp. A flashy coupling — read: shackles — thrown in as a bonus.
Time to unveil the secret technique I used to defeat the countless nightmare clients and bizarre-claim customers I met while living at a small-to-medium enterprise.
The secret technique!
Just give them everything they want.
"Wait. What do you mean by—"
"I'm not asking for anything in this ridiculous catalog, so just toss me some mid-range piece of gear or a single useful tool."
I pictured the woman in black coveralls on the other side of the privacy glass, visibly flustered, and grinned. She clearly didn't get it. This contract bidding ended the moment I chose a counterpart — regardless of the fact that they were the ones holding the power.
Shame I won't get to talk to the next corporation, but it can't be helped. Getting this leech of a woman off me comes first.
And so, without demanding anything particular from the other party, I unilaterally awarded them the win and forcibly ended the contract bidding.
Technica, a security-case opener suits you.