Out of His Mind
This was pure madness.
The ecosystem of As was so unique that any biologist from Earth who laid eyes on it would salivate uncontrollably and lose sleep for nights on end. Perhaps that was only natural in a world where a single lizard hatched from an egg could rewrite the laws of nature as it pleased.
Gigantic creatures roamed freely—beasts so massive that muscle and bone of ordinary tensile strength should never have been able to support them—while evolution that ought to have taken hundreds of generations on Earth unfolded in a matter of mere years.
Even among the wonders of As, a handful of organisms stood out as especially bizarre. One of them was a parasite I myself had named the Hypnotic Tentacle.
The Hypnotic Tentacle secreted a psychotropic gas. How any creature could possibly evolve to get its host pleasantly high before settling in as a parasite was beyond my meager biological knowledge. What I did know for certain was that this parasite had once come within a hair’s breadth of extinguishing the entire ecosystem of As. Like every other lifeform on that world, it possessed formidable magical power; unless one was a transcendent of considerable rank, resisting the pleasure it offered was simply impossible.
I had therefore been forced to devise a countermeasure. If every living thing on As had drowned in that pleasure and gone extinct, leaving only a few transcendents like myself, I truly would have gone mad.
One of the methods I created back then still lingered in my memory: a spell that granted every person within its domain resistance against psychotropic substances…
“Are you certain that’s safe? Just hearing the description makes it sound extremely dangerous…”
“I already told you it’s fine.”
“I understand that psychotropic substances aren’t purely harmful—they’re used in medicine and elsewhere as well.”
“It isn’t a spell that grants complete immunity. It increases resilience.”
“Resilience?”
Even after the lengthy explanation, President Ronald could not quite hide his skepticism. Accepting the still-unfamiliar concept of magic was no easy task for an Earthling.
Making the difficult easy to understand was my job.
“As you yourself pointed out, simply being injected with a narcotic does not automatically turn someone into an addict. During the Vietnam War, a great many American soldiers used drugs, yet once they returned home the majority freed themselves from addiction.”
“So rather than nullifying the effects of the drugs, it allows someone who gets high to return to their original state?”
“Exactly. In a sense it lets one keep only the advantages of narcotics while discarding the drawbacks—so paradoxically, the number of people who get high might actually increase…”
That, however, was a problem I could not solve for them. Simply eliminating the people staggering through the streets like zombies was more than enough.
A quick search on my smartphone while heading to the White House had confirmed that America, too, was tearing its hair out over domestic drug addicts. There was no way they would refuse a proposal like this under the circumstances—and indeed, they did not.
After a brief moment of thought, Ronald decided the offer was too rational to decline. He nodded and accepted it with open enthusiasm.
“Very well. If the King of As thinks so highly of our United States… then I, as king of America, can hardly hesitate. I accept your goodwill.”
“I’ll teach the relevant magic to the ones currently learning under me.”
“More than that—you’ve only been on Earth a short while, yet you seem remarkably well-versed in American history.”
“…I saw it on YouTube.”
“I see.”
I rose from my seat, deliberately ignoring Ronald’s suspicious gaze—the look of a man wondering whether I was secretly a reincarnator. (I later learned that at the time he had been entertaining the far more mundane suspicion that I had visited Earth unofficially more than once before.) True to his position as leader of the world’s foremost superpower, Ronald immediately returned to work. The administrative documents that now needed processing, the publicity campaigns required to announce the measure—everything a president must handle—had suddenly ballooned.
Yet neither he nor I felt the slightest reluctance to tackle the mountain of new tasks.
After all, it was only natural for a king to save his people when they were drowning in misery.
America is a nation fertile with conspiracy theories: claims that the government runs human experiments on its own citizens, that every phone call and text message on the planet is monitored in real time, that the military fires missiles at its own bases and then tries to pin the blame on foreign powers.
Whether any of the rumors were true was secondary. Thanks to such stories, public trust in the U.S. government had hit rock bottom. People even claimed that one reason America could never ban private gun ownership was that no one trusted the government enough to disarm.
Perhaps that was why, when President Ronald appeared on television and began a speech about narcotics—
—the first thought that crossed most American minds was that the Ronald administration was about to pull another stunt. When he announced that the method would be loading some unidentified chemical into aircraft and spraying entire cities, people immediately concluded that Ronald was finally trying to kill them, and they lost their minds.
American citizens move as fast as bullets. They snatched up picket signs and poured into the streets.
“Ronald, resign!”
—Resign! Resign!
“Are citizens crops to you!? Spraying us like pesticide!”
—We are not plants! Not plants!
“The U.S. government must stop human experimentation on Americans!”
—Stop it! Stop it!
The marchers seemed convinced that whatever the Ronald administration intended to spray was not a cure for addiction but something closer to the Agent Orange once dumped across entire jungles to kill vegetation.
They blocked roads, hurled every curse they knew at Ronald, and displayed raw, unfiltered hatred and frenzy toward him.
Then a massive military transport aircraft passed overhead. With a base nearby, drab-green flying objects in the sky were an everyday sight; the locals had grown thoroughly accustomed to them.
Today was different.
“Uh, uh-oh—!?”
“Kyaaaaah!”
“You crazy bastards!”
Droplets of liquid began to fall onto the protesters’ heads. At first they thought it was rain—until they realized the liquid was pouring from the formation of military transports flying above them.
Those touched by the chemical scattered in every direction like cockroaches hit by insecticide, fleeing indoors where nothing sprayed outside could reach them.
“M-Mom…”
“Over here! Someone’s dying!”
“Call 911! Call 911!”
People who had been doused convulsed, broke out in rashes, writhed in agony, rolled their eyes back, and collapsed one after another.
Naturally the incident seized nationwide attention. The government had sprayed an unknown chemical that caused thousands to drop and faint on the spot? To Americans who prized freedom and rights above all else, it was utterly unforgivable.
Even those who had been at work or looking after family now prepared to join the protests. The NSA and CIA, having anticipated the backlash, warned the White House; Ronald ignored them completely.
The next day, by all rights, seventy percent of the American population should have flooded the streets in a massive national demonstration.
Instead, something astonishing happened.
“…What the hell?”
“Where is everybody?”
The streets were quiet. Puzzled, the remaining protesters decided that at least the people who had shown up should stick together and marched anyway. Only after their unattended, anticlimactic demonstration fizzled out and they returned home did they finally understand why no one else had cared about protesting.
“…Dad?”
“There’s my girl. You’re home.”
“But… how are you…?”
President Ronald had ignored public opinion and ordered the chemical spray for a very simple reason: he knew that if the medicine worked, public opinion could be flipped upside-down overnight.
The severe addicts Astria had seen wandering Philadelphia numbered only a few million.
But the number of people who had ever used illegal drugs even once was seventy million.
And those who suffered mild addiction that interfered, in large or small ways, with daily life numbered approximately fifty million—fifteen percent of the entire U.S. population.
“For some reason my head feels clear today. …Clear enough that I can see exactly what I’ve been doing all this time.”
“Ah… aah—”
“I’m so sorry. My little girl.”
“D-Dad…!”
Every parent, every child, every family member, every lover of every addict—
In that moment, the shackles that had tormented them for so long simply fell away.
“Ronald! Ronald! Ronald!”
“Yes Kings! Yes Kings!”
“He’s a god! He’s a god!”
In front of the White House, tens of thousands stretched in a long, chanting line, roaring Ronald’s name.
Watching the scene through the window, Ronald looked as if he had expected nothing less. He casually pressed the Diet Coke button on his desk. Moments later an ice-cold can of Diet Coke was delivered.
He gulped it down, then frowned slightly at the condensation-beaded cup.
“Damn it. The Coke is sweet.”
It was Diet Coke—zero sugar—so it should never have tasted sweet.
Yet somehow his palate found it intensely sweet.
Clearly the chefs who prepared the drinks had made a mistake.
“Messing up something this simple… they’re not in their right minds… not in their right minds at all…”
Even as he muttered the words, the corners of Ronald’s mouth kept twitching upward.