Do Electric Sheep Dream of the Director of the Technology Bureau? (1)
By the time Lee Jun made it home, the sun was already creeping up over the horizon.
Taking down the boss monster hadn't taken long at all — it was everything that came after, the setup, that had devoured his entire night.
"Seriously, why does the installation process have to be that complicated…"
The business-card launcher was one of the many pieces of junk he'd collected back when the Director of the Technology Bureau was in his heyday of building whatever came to mind. It allowed you to configure trigger conditions in painstaking detail, but its installation was such a colossal pain that all thoughts of commercializing it had been abandoned outright.
Then again, who on earth would buy something like that in the first place?
"Hmm…."
The Seoul Dungeon boss would be cleared around… noon, give or take? And the first-clear priority this time belonged to the Seowon Guild, if he remembered right.
Well… she wouldn't hold a grudge over something this trivial. That guild leader was perfectly rational, aside from being stubborn about all the wrong things.
If it were the first-clear boss of a Red or Blue Gate, that would be one thing — but a dungeon like Seoul could afford to let one slip now and then.
"With her personality, all I need to worry about is whether this gets leveraged against me in a negotiation."
The Seowon Guild leader loved pouring money into one venture after another. The problem was that her portfolio included oddities like a 256-round flare launcher and a glider parachute for aerial resupply….
That said, she never gave the time of day to anything utterly worthless. She liked investing in things whose value she could acknowledge to some degree — she wasn't in the business of hurling money into the void.
A woman like that would almost certainly take an interest in a hunter management venture.
And yet.
Taking investment from any guild was out of the question. Not yet.
The attention of the major guilds? Sure, of course it would help.
But in his current position, that kind of money was a double-edged sword. It would let him get the business off the ground fast — and in the end, it would put a leash around his neck.
A management operation forced to tiptoe around the guilds' sensibilities would drift miles away from Lee Jun's original purpose.
Checking the guilds' power.
And through that, strengthening the Association's authority and rallying the hunters under it.
Wasn't that the entire reason he'd set out to build a management company in the first place?
"…In the end, I'll have to burn those bridges anyway."
Lee Jun believed in human potential — and, at the same time, refused to believe in human selflessness. A proper plan always accounted for the best and worst outcomes, but even setting that principle aside, coexisting with the guilds simply didn't look feasible. Their interests were misaligned from the very foundation.
Of course, that was a problem for another day. Whatever he chose to build, the worrying could come after. agonizing over the next step when he didn't even have a functioning company yet was getting the order completely backwards.
"Should be active in about three or four hours, right?"
Yeah. Until then, he'd earned some rest.
Only then did Lee Jun lay his body — abused for seventy straight hours — down onto the bed.
It was, truly, the sweetest sleep.
In the dream, Lee Jun was utterly powerless.
Falling, falling, falling again. Falling so far he could no longer tell how much farther there was to fall.
I am incompetent.
Saying it over and over was not enough. Being aware of it every waking moment, being reminded of it again and again, was still not enough.
Lee Jun is incompetent.
Powerless.
Incompetent….
Power… less….
That incompetence curdled into powerlessness, and in the end it took even his own life. It took everyone around him, too. There was no one who stayed beside him to the end, and the clown left behind alone thrashed about in the corner of the stage until the very last moment.
Please.
Let me hold the line here.
Even from this corner of the corner, let me hold it.
I want to stay with all of you until the end.
That greed — that selfishness — will end up devouring me.
Even so, it doesn't matter.
Better to be buried beside someone than to rot away alone.
"Hah…!"
A nightmare? No. That didn't even qualify as one.
Wiping the cold sweat from his face, Lee Jun made his way down to the first floor and collapsed onto the sofa. He'd thought he was past it, but between the regression and everything else, his nerves had apparently frayed all over again.
Granted, it was still miles better than back when he'd been truly coming apart at the seams—
"…What the hell."
Something stirred behind him. Not the presence of a person — something moving. A machine, carrying neither heartbeat nor breath.
Lee Jun knew these teeth very, very well.
"Director?"
He pushed himself up from the sofa and looked back. There stood a robot of modest size, spherical in shape with a propeller mounted on top — one of the avatar units the Director of the Technology Bureau frequently used for remote communication.
"How did you even get in here?"
"How do you think? Through that hole up there, obviously." A voice positively slathered in otouto.
At those words, Lee Jun tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling.
"Ah."
There it was — a hole punched clean through both floors of the house. The very hole this guy had drilled in the name of "food resupply."
"Well, perfect timing, actually. Fix that for me."
"That is not why I came."
Whirrrrr—
The spherical robot projected an angry expression onto the panel across its front face.
Huh. It's a robot, and yet somehow it's cute.
"Why did you even build in a facial expression function?"
"Studies show people feel more affinity for robots capable of making expressions. So? What do you think?"
"It's cute, I'll give you that."
"…That is not what the feature was installed for."
Well, what do you want me to do about it, then?
"Anyway. Why was your phone turned off?"
"Phone? Ah, right. I went to a dungeon."
"Seoul Dungeon? You get signal there."
"Yeah, I know, it's just… look, it's a long story. Later."
Lee Jun was tight-lipped about the Ant Nest. He still wasn't certain whether revealing it now was the right move. He felt bad about it, but for the time being, it would stay a secret — even from this guy.
"Regardless. So what did you actually want? You must have had a reason to call."
"Are you asking me that because you genuinely don't know?"
Hold on. You have arms — why on earth did you add arms to the expression?
"The retirement thing? The Association Chairman must have relayed something to you."
"I wanted to hear it straight from your mouth. What on earth were you thinking? You're the one who said we had to build the Association. And now what? Stepping down from the Vice-Chairmanship wasn't enough — you retire from active duty? Training successors?! At least say things that make sense!"
The agitated voice carried all the way here. Picturing him actually raging around his laboratory at this very moment was, admittedly, a little funny.
"Are you laughing?"
"Ahem."
Lee Jun averted his eyes at the icy reception. This guy was perceptive to a fault — always had been. A side effect of the brain, presumably. He had his moments of obliviousness, sure, but only ever within specific fields. Where this sort of thing was concerned, he was an absolute demon.
Which was exactly why Lee Jun had kept putting off meeting the Director of the Technology Bureau. A flawless excuse hadn't finished baking yet.
But an excuse he would have to make regardless. The truth was not an option.
"It's not like it's without logic, though. Is it?"
"What?"
"Right now the whole world is screaming about how Lee Jun was a fraud, a hollow rank, whatever else — so wouldn't it actually be better, even purely for the Association's authority, if I simply stepped out of the picture?"
"…It's not wrong."
So you're not going to deny the fraud theory, huh.
"But. Did you have to go all the way to retiring from active duty? And what is this 'training successors' business? You never once cared about anything like that."
"Now I care. Hence."
"Suddenly?"
"Yes. Suddenly."
That much was the truth. At this very moment, there was probably no one on Earth who felt the necessity of raising successors more viscerally than Lee Jun did.
He'd lived through it, after all.
"I kept saying it, didn't I?"
"Level inflation?"
"Right. Over the past year, the levels of monsters emerging through the gates have been climbing at a startling rate. The hunters, by comparison, are a disaster."
"But the top-ranked hunters are leveling up steadily as well. At this pace, I don't see them being caught — let alone overtaken."
"Well. I don't see it that way."
The Lee Jun of this era had argued constantly about the danger hidden inside that widening gap. The S-Classes had grown overconfident in their own strength, and the hunters beneath them had deified the S-Classes in turn. That faith would prove poison in the end — and within five years, more than ninety percent of the Initial Awakeners, the very first S-Class hunters, would be dead.
Only after surviving that bout of measles would the hunters finally throw themselves into leveling like their lives depended on it.
But by then, it would be too late.
Lee Jun knew.
"The problem is the words 'there exists a possibility that they will catch up someday.'"
"……."
"Fine, if they never do. But what if they do? Do we all just die then?"
The Director said nothing. Clever as he was, he was no doubt running the calculations behind his eyes even now.
And then, sure enough, he would say it.
"But that's… still not a reason for you to retire, is it?"
Hm?
"You could have stayed at the Association, couldn't you?"
"Hold on. How did you arrive at that conclusion?"
"You left the Association because of the need to check the guilds. That can be accomplished plenty of other ways. Worst case, I could step in personally and do someth—"
"Director."
"……"
"You should calm down."
This guy redlined like this every so often, and every time, someone had to play the brakes — and the job never went well in anyone's hands but Lee Jun's. Let's just call it the token quirk of a genius.
"I explained your role to you, didn't I? You're important. You have far more to do than I do — far more you're capable of doing. Understood?"
What thoughts were turning behind that voice, no answer came back.
A brief silence stretched between them.
And then—
"…Are you going to keep calling me that? Forever?"
"……"
Behind the heavily modulated machine noise, a faint trace of loneliness bled through.
Lee Jun had severed every tie to the past.
Except one. The single connection left standing was the Director of the Technology Bureau.
"You need my abilities. Don't you?"
"…It's not your abilities I need. It's you."
"Liar."
"……"
"But it doesn't matter. We promised to trust each other in spite of it. You still… talk to yourself when you're alone, after all."
Words carrying far more feeling than their length suggested.
That's right — Lee Jun didn't see the old comrades he had left, the ones whose time was running out. To be precise, he couldn't.
Because it hurt.
The thing people called PTSD.
And this guy… summoned that same wretched PTSD too. Relentlessly.
The one small mercy was that, of all his comrades, this was the one who had survived to the very end alongside Lee Jun. In the previous cycle, Lee Jun had died in the end as well, which had made this guy the final survivor of them all.
…He felt genuinely sorry about that. Not that the current version knew any of it.
"Even so, I want you to tell me the reason."
"What reason?"
"The strange decision you suddenly made. You're really not going to explain it to the end?"
"……"
For an instant, Lee Jun wavered. If it was this guy, maybe it would be safe to tell him. The absurd impossibility called regression — would this guy lend an ear to it, at least?
But he stamped the thought out almost immediately.
No exceptions. A softening heart was an exposed flank.
At the very least, for him it was. Those weaker than the rest had no choice but to live without the luxury of letting their guard down.
"Remember the promise we made back then?"
"…You really are despicable."
Lee Jun had made sure of it in advance. That they would trust one another. That they would each extend that trust to the other. And that if one side ever proved unable to… the other would carry it for them both.
"That's cowardly, and you know it."
"Can't be helped. We promised."
"…I swear, it's enough to drive a man up the wall."
"Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?"
"From you, that's why!"
The guy was shouting now. The sight stirred up old memories.
In the final days of the last cycle, even their contact had been severed… but maybe this cycle could be different. This was the one who survived to the very bitter end, after all — surely it would be all right to let him a little closer.
And yet other doubts bloomed in the same breath.
What if Lee Jun's actions changed the future? What if he drew close, and the guy died for it?
What if he died… because of me?
Kzzzt—
"Next time, at least call me by my name. Understood?"
"I'll consider it."
"Give me a definite answer!"
"I'll review the matter in the most positive direction possible."
"You son of a bit——————"
Kzzzzzt—
Thunk.
Just as the Director seemed about to unleash a truly satisfying curse, his words cut clean off. In the same instant, the robot dropped out of the air as though the power had been yanked. The propellers that had been whirring away dutifully until a moment ago, and the two arms that had been churning the air, were all neatly retracted.
"Seen like this, it really is just a ball."
Lee Jun murmured that to himself as he picked the robot up. It was far heavier than it looked. Smaller than his head but bigger than his fist, yet it had to weigh close to twenty kilograms. He didn't need to inspect it to guess just how many functions had been crammed into this little thing.
"…Well. Might as well keep it around."
Still… you never knew when he might reach out again.
Lee Jun set the robot down somewhere it couldn't be missed.
Which left just one question.
What had he come downstairs to do in the first place?
"Oh, right. The TV."
He'd meant to catch the news, and had nearly forgotten thanks to his surprise visitor.
And the moment Lee Jun saw the state the world was in, he could only stand there, struck dumb.