Where There Is Radiant Progress, Shadows Must Follow (2)
Now, naturally, when ordinary players hit a situation like this, the best method that comes to mind is the "time for a total massacre" meta.
"Just asking, but I'm guessing wiping them all out and sweeping up the mess is off the table, huh?"
"Doctor. I apologize, but we of the Demonia Empire are, first and foremost, attempting world conquest of this galaxy — not world annihilation."
"Heh."
"That is nothing to smile about. If you proceed without cause, Doctor, the Empire's punitive force will attack you, and you will spend several thousand years undergoing torture — dissected alive, again and again, unable to die."
"Ooh‧‧‧‧‧‧."
If it were a necessary, unavoidable sacrifice in service of a greater purpose — casualties incurred in the course of a meaningful conquest — that would be one thing.
Killing everyone just because it's annoying was, even by Demonia Empire standards, a step well into the territory of going off the deep end‧‧‧‧‧‧ no, that's not quite right.
More precisely, it belonged to the deepest depths of that territory — so deep that Ilena was desperately talking me down, insisting that this was absolutely not something we should be doing right now.
Whether it was providing gas-chamber showers for the friends who had seized control of my spaceport, or unleashing nanomachines to grind them all into paste.
Or melting every single one of those people down into a puddle of raw material for a colossal bio-weapon the size of a satellite — something you could call Ulongi mk65535, far beyond even a mk2.
I realized I needed to take all these various disposal plans, fold them up neatly, and quietly bury them inside the office computer.
Though it felt a little wasteful to just bury them like that, so I did let one of them slip into the gallery on the sly.
(Attached: file on the whole mass-slaughter meta and whatnot)
What do you all think?
Our adjutant-slash-assistant told me not to, and honestly I wasn't planning to anyway, but still
With the other users showing much the same reaction, I was able to tuck one conviction safely away into my heart: this was absolutely not to be done.
And so, after racking my brains over and over about what a reasonably ordinary solution to this situation might look like — one that didn't involve going off the deep end —
"Come to think of it. The situation we're in right now isn't something only we're suffering from, is it? Everyone already stationed in this planetary system is dealing with the same problem."
"That is correct."
"Then we should just call everyone together and put our heads together, no? No real need for me to agonize over it all by myself."
"Understood. I will contact the other national branch heads, as well as Heisenberg."
"So when it's just the two of us now, you've stopped using honorifics entirely, I see."
Starting with the golden sun Heisenberg, then Colonel Emilia Barbel — the de facto fleet commander of the current Demonia Milano branch — and Lieutenant Colonel Alass Omitron, senior-most officer of the marine battalion.
And then Robert Salandra, Shirogane Yuki, and Scala Cervello — the branch heads of ACIC, the Earth Alliance, and the Babel Cult — were all summoned, and we set about hammering out an answer to the crisis at hand.
Granted, looking at it one way, this course of action felt — just a little — quite some distance from what the status window, masquerading as a quest, had demanded of me‧‧‧‧‧‧.
But whenever I thought, 'So what are you gonna do about it? Other than cursing me out and trembling, what exactly CAN you do?', the status window's reality was that it could do nothing but whimper helplessly — or worse, couldn't even manage that.
Perhaps because of the situation itself, barely an hour had passed since I put out the communications call.
"Everyone has arrived, Doctor."
"Already?"
"Given the circumstances, I imagine it is because a single misstep could put them in danger as well."
Watching the Breeding Press Uncle, the tanned magical girl, the virgin-bitch gyaru, the lewd nun, and the buzzcut marine all gathered in one place, I decided it was time for the meeting to begin in earnest.
Then, after the meeting — which had been so mind-numbingly dull that I very nearly dozed off halfway through — came to an end and everyone had gone home,
"Doctor, have you heard the full rundown?"
"Give me the conclusions, summarized. AssistantGPT."
"‧‧‧‧‧‧."
"Do it for me."
"Hoooh‧‧‧‧‧‧It is a simple matter. First, the immigrant convoys are to be brought to the capital star, and from there distributed across the other planets and moons at a ratio of ten percent relative to the existing population."
"And? That still leaves at least a million-odd people remaining on the capital star, no?"
"Those who remain will be given the option of becoming pioneers on newly opened planets; anyone who declines will be sent back to their original planetary system."
"Huh, you can actually do that?"
"Direct insult or oppression is off the table, but repatriating them to their original system poses no problem whatsoever. Although‧‧‧‧‧‧ regrettably, there is the matter that we will have to shoulder, separately, the cost of supplying the resources needed for their return."
"And they still chose to go back? Then they must have judged it the better deal. I'll trust your call."
"‧‧‧‧‧‧Thank you, Doctor."
Listening to Ilena — who, for some reason, seemed to have something suspicious glimmering at the corners of her eyes — I decided it was time to raise the real question: with the immigrant convoy problem now solved, what exactly were we going to do about the refugee convoy?
After all, while it sounded like we'd brought the immigrant convoy and the refugee convoy over as neatly separate groups, as Ilena's earlier reports to me made clear,
the spaceport at the outermost edge of the planetary system (I kept calling it an "airport," but that was my own misremembering of the word) was currently a churning mix of citizens, war refugees, plain refugees, and some something pretending to be a refugee.
"So — nobody had an answer for how we're supposed to sort them out, huh?"
"To be precise, as has been the case all along, everyone simply trusts that you will produce some ingenious plan or miraculous device, Doctor, and cleave the problem in two with a single stroke — like the Gordian knot."
"??? Excuse me, I have literally never done that."
Even in the middle of all this, the stack of misunderstandings I'd been accumulating, knowingly or not, was glowing with pride — and instead of actually helping, the very people I'd painstakingly gathered together
just started shouting 'You can do it — you're the one who can!' at me while slapping full executive authority into my hands.
The moment I realized that, unlike every previous occasion, there would be no one-click solution this time — that I would have to make the choices — I felt my stomach begin to cramp up at alarming speed.
But then, if I botched this halfheartedly, the planetary system we'd worked so hard to build would obviously end up a total mess‧‧‧‧‧‧.
So, swallowing my tears, I threw myself into effooooort, wringing my brain dry for all it was worth to find a way out of this situation.
And after truly squeezing every last drop out of ourselves, we were able to put a reasonably respectable solution into action.
First and foremost came the single biggest problem of the current situation: separating the refugee convoy from the immigrant convoy.
On top of that, we felt a pressing need to resolve the matter of certain lunatics who had, in a fit of audacity, surrounded and isolated the spaceport's security forces and customs-and-immigration? personnel.
So I immediately opened a channel to the convoy leaders — effectively the heads of the immigrant fleet — to organize a rescue of the isolated personnel.
‧‧‧‧‧‧In actuality, the exchange was considerably more polite than that — and since the quality of even that much had dropped far too low for official use, Ilena corrected a substantial portion of it, and we carried out the recruitment by sending over a perfectly respectable official document(?) of her making.
Beyond that, whenever we discovered among the refugees one of those rare but undeniably existing individuals known as a "law-abiding refugee,"
we quietly pulled that refugee aside, gave them separate education, and let them enjoy a sneak preview of various jobs elsewhere (not really).
"I think it's perfect. Sowing division and internal strife!"
"And if the refugees try to shake us, Doctor, it will be the perfect opportunity for us to shake the refugees right back at their center of gravity."
And so, step by careful step, we went about doing what needed doing — thereby granting the refugees a very vivid, unfiltered demonstration of the power of Korean-style, extra-spicy divide and conquer.