The Time I Handed Out ID Cards in South America (2)
Whoooosh—!
Air Force One thundered off the runway and lifted away from Libertad Airport.
"Finally gone."
In the wreckage left behind by the typhoon named Drumpf, I collapsed onto the office sofa like a corpse, a wave of exhaustion flattening me into the cushions.
"Ugghhh..."
"That old man has way too much energy."
He was well into his seventies, and dealing with him was several times harder than hauling bricks on a construction site — not that I'd ever actually hauled bricks.
"Perhaps Your Excellency should rest for the day," Isabella suggested, arriving with coffee as I groaned.
"I'd love to, but..." I pointed at the mountain of documents on the desk. "I've got a mountain of work."
"But Your Excellency's complexion is pale."
"I'll be fine if I just lie down for a bit."
"Please don't worry about the work. I'll fill Your Excellency's absence as best I can, together with the senior secretaries. Your Excellency's health is San Marcos's health, after all."
"......"
Her firm, unhurried voice made me waver.
Should I?
Come to think of it, I could count on one hand the days I'd actually rested since becoming Acting President. Ten days, maybe? I'd been running nonstop for close to a year. And even on those so-called days off, I'd sat with Isabella and talked through state affairs, so I couldn't honestly call any of it a real rest.
Yeah. I'm human too. I need a little room to breathe.
Even machines seize up without oil. A person was hardly going to fare better.
"Alright. Just one day. Contact me immediately if anything urgent comes up."
"Please rest well."
And so I won myself a honey-sweet day off. I took a car straight to Jorumaldo Forest Park, newly laid out north of Libertad. It hadn't opened to the public yet, which made it perfect for a quiet walk — and since the Presidential Palace was essentially the entire seat of government, it didn't feel like rest unless I actually got out of the building.
"Ahh. The air's so good."
The deep green scent of the forest filled my lungs, and the headache that had been grinding behind my eyes seemed to wash clean away. I climbed the dirt path at an easy pace, and as I reached the mountainside, the capital unrolled beneath me like a panorama.
"Wow."
A year ago this view had been nothing but slums and ramshackle shacks. Now it was a different city.
"Looking at it from up here, you can really feel how much it's changed."
The first thing that caught my eye was the roads — clean, properly maintained, no longer buried under trash and filth. Citizens moved along them with actual energy in their step. And it wasn't just the streets. Vitality poured off the city in a way you could feel at a glance. Once public safety had been restored, commerce had come roaring back. Young people who used to drift along the sidewalks with nothing to do were now sweating on construction sites and factory floors.
I shifted my gaze and found a cluster of buildings painted a fresh, clean white. Schools, expanded under special orders during the education reform.
Looking back, the education reform was the hardest part of all of it.
Then the massive investment from Korean companies. Then the summit with the president of the most powerful country on earth. The past year flickered past like a lantern show.
"Man... I've done a lot."
A smile crept onto my face before I knew it. Honestly, I was pretty proud of myself.
I'd give myself a nine out of ten, wouldn't I?
At the start I'd just been scrambling to stay alive. Looking at it now, I was actually pulling this off.
I climbed the rest of the way to the observatory at the summit and looked down over Libertad. The houses packed tightly below, and the thought of the people smiling inside them, put a warm, slow bloom in a corner of my chest.
I want to feed this country's people white rice and grilled meat — no. Tortillas with meat toppings.
At the very least, I wanted to make sure no one starved to death or died of something a doctor could have fixed. If I was going to be greedy about it, I wanted a country where everyone could afford to dream. A society where anyone who worked hard got something back for it. Build that, retire, and recover the retirement fund at the same time —
"That's a real happy ending."
Wouldn't that be the perfect scenario? The nation grows strong, the people get happy, and I leave a rich man. Everybody wins. Two birds, one stone.
"Hehehe."
The laugh came out on its own.
"Time to head down."
Head pleasantly cleared, I turned on a light step — and stopped.
"...Huh?"
Something strange snagged my eye. At the end of the trekking trail, at the highest point in the forest park, a massive boulder stood draped in a white cloth.
The problem was the cloth.
Flutter. Flutter.
The covering rippled in the wind, and what kept peeking through looked uncomfortably familiar.
"No way."
An ominous feeling ran straight down my spine. I walked toward it as if something had a hand on my back, and yanked the flapping cloth away.
The cloth slid off, and the thing underneath showed itself. Carved into the stone was a man's face, gazing down over downtown Libertad with an expression both benevolent and stern.
"This is..."
There was a little airbrushing involved, but there was no mistaking it.
"That's me."
And right below the statue, on a bronze plate:
From this place, he watches over the fatherland.
"No."
You've got to be kidding me.
The next morning, the instant the sky lightened, I summoned Isabella.
"Take it down. Now."
I meant the statue at the top of the trekking trail. I failed.
"That statue was made with private funds collected by myself and the senior secretaries to honor Your Excellency. How can you tell us to destroy it? How can you so thoroughly fail to understand our hearts?"
"Th-that's..."
They say a woman's tears are a weapon. Faced with her shining eyes and that quiet, relentless interrogation, I had no choice but to give ground.
"And that is not what is important right now."
"Then what is?"
While I was still wrestling with myself, Isabella set the most urgent item of state business down in front of me.
"We have completed the draft of the resident registration project Your Excellency proposed. This needs to be handled first."
"......!"
I picked up the documents on reflex.
"...This is definitely more urgent."
San Marcos's administration was slapdash at best. When you registered a birth, the local branch office wrote a name and a date of birth into a ledger and filed it. That was the entire system. The central government had no idea how many people lived in which region, and couldn't even produce a population statistic. The only reason we'd managed to limp this far was that most of the country lived in Libertad. Without that accident of geography, the administration would have collapsed years ago.
Just thinking about the education reform we'd pushed through recently was enough to remember how nightmarish it had been.
I really almost had a heart attack back then.
We'd made tuition free and started serving school lunches, all to get children through the schoolhouse doors. Then we opened the lid and found more than twice as many students as we'd planned for. Kids who'd never been registered at birth came flooding in like a cloud of locusts. We didn't have enough desks and chairs, so we pitched tents outside as makeshift classrooms. We couldn't match the lunch numbers, so we ended up ordering delivery from nearby restaurants. It was chaos. We'd failed to predict demand because we had no data.
That was why the resident registration project was currently the most urgent piece of national business in San Marcos.
I went through the draft page by page, careful not to miss a single line. You could tell they'd prepared it with real effort.
"Hmm."
It still wasn't enough to satisfy someone from South Korea — a country that takes resident registration with religious seriousness.
"This is certainly a proper draft."
"Shall we proceed as written, then?"
"No. I see a few areas that are still lacking."
"Please tell me and I will revise it."
"First, it currently treats birth registration as voluntary after a child is born. That won't work. We need to set a deadline and make it mandatory. Resident registration is the minimum social safety net. How are we supposed to protect a child if we don't even know they exist?"
"......"
"And we shouldn't just register names and dates of birth. We need to assign unique identification numbers."
"Unique... numbers, Your Excellency?"
"Yes. In Korea we call it a resident registration number. It's used for social security, and as a number to prove who you are in financial transactions. It also lets you tell two people apart when they have the same name and the same birthday."
"...Assigning unique numbers would certainly make management easier."
"And you're issuing ID cards at eighteen?"
"Yes. We are still discussing whether to mail them or have people come in to receive them."
"Have them come in. And when they do, we should register their faces and fingerprints on the computer network."
"I understand the faces, but... fingerprints as well?"
"Yes. That's how they do it in Korea."
"If I may ask — could you explain when the fingerprints would actually be used? I am having a little trouble understanding."
"They're used in all sorts of ways. Reissuing an ID when someone loses it. Identity verification. Crime prevention and investigation. Identifying people after a disaster. Oh — and it would stop ID theft, too."
Once I laid out the actual Korean system, Isabella nodded as if the pieces had clicked into place.
"I understand what you mean. To summarize: Your Excellency wants each citizen assigned a unique number, and unforgeable fingerprints registered on the computer network, so that we can exercise proper management."
"That's right. At minimum, that's what it'll take to actually manage anything."
"Hmm... Understood. I will rework the plan to reflect Your Excellency's intentions."
"Yes. I'm counting on you, Isabella."
I nodded, meeting the eyes of the woman who looked reliable just by standing there.
Beneath the Presidential Palace there was a secret room whose existence Eugene did not even know about. It had originally been built as a vault. Eugene's frugal habits had made a vault unnecessary, and the senior secretaries had quietly converted it into a lounge and a place to talk.
Isabella, Lucio, and the rest of the senior secretaries were gathered there now.
The air was stretched tight. Isabella, seated at the head of the table, opened her mouth as if the words themselves were heavy.
"After reporting on the resident registration project, I have learned that His Excellency desires complete control over the citizenry."
"...!"
The room stirred. The instructions she was conveying from Eugene were that shocking. Assign a unique number to every citizen in the country. Take the fingerprints of all ten fingers. Register them on the national computer network. You could feel, in the shape of it, a state's will to know every last thing about every last person.
Lucio broke the silence with a thin, satisfied laugh.
"See? What did I tell you. I said the last draft was far too sloppy to satisfy His Excellency, did I not?"
He raised his voice as if he had known Eugene's true intentions all along.
"His Excellency clearly intends to set this entire country in the palm of his hand. This goes far beyond producing population statistics. Who is doing what, and where. Whether they have paid their taxes. Whether they have committed a crime and run. Why do you not understand that he wants to grasp everything?"
Riding the heat in the room, Lucio's eyes flashed, and he took it a step further.
"We should not stop here. To realize the complete control His Excellency desires, the infrastructure has to be there to support it."
"Infrastructure? What kind?"
"As a long-term plan, we install CCTV throughout all of Libertad. Major roads, alleyways, government offices — we eliminate every blind spot. And ultimately, we introduce facial and iris recognition."
He went on with the calm of a man who had already decided the future.
"If we link the photo data from the national ID cards to the cameras, we can trigger an alert the moment a wanted person walks down the street. The budget would be astronomical, of course, but..."
He closed his fist.
"Fifteen years. No — ten. We can do it in ten."
At Lucio's fanatical proposal, the other senior secretaries started chiming in, none of them willing to be outdone.
"Then the problem would be the regions outside Libertad, where administrative reach doesn't extend."
"We implement the resident registration project there first, then roll out CCTV gradually."
"We'll need to supply cameras and fingerprint scanners to government offices and police stations in every region."
"There could be tampering, so we introduce cameras and take the photographs ourselves."
As the ideas piled up, Sophia, the Senior Secretary for Foreign Affairs, spoke up with careful hesitation.
"But... what if people refuse to register? Being placed under state control might feel... off-putting to some..."
Isabella shook her head.
"That will not happen."
"Why not?"
"His Excellency said that resident registration is the minimum social safety net. In other words: those who do not come inside the fence will not be protected. Would any foolish citizen refuse His Excellency's care?"
"Ah...!"
A low sound of understanding went around the table.
"Hmm. That does make sense. As expected, His Excellency's intentions run deep."
The air in the room went fever-hot. Eugene had wanted nothing more than efficient administration. His loyal subordinates were moving to turn him into Big Brother.
When the last of the discussion died, Isabella rose from her seat and brought the meeting to a close.
"Well then. We proceed as discussed."
Her gaze, cool as a blade, swept the room.
"Yes!"
In the center of the secret chamber, the golden statue of Eugene Choi caught the light and threw it back.