The Ninth Experiment
Experiment (2). Slurp. "Hmm. Not bad at all."
What I was drinking was coffee. Not water, not juice—coffee. One might wonder what made this coffee so special, but it truly was. This coffee was pure Ark-grown, cultivated after humanity had lost the surface world. Of course, given my position, it tasted crude compared to the premium blends I had enjoyed before the fall. Still, the fact that I could drink coffee again was reason enough to celebrate.
The Ark had emergency water reserves, but nothing to satisfy a bored palate. The seventy thousand citizens were, knowingly or not, starving for beverages. Seventy thousand was the size of a small city in the twenty-first century; imagine a city without a single fast-food chain. Yet the production of coffee within the Ark was profoundly encouraging. It meant we had begun manufacturing and consuming luxuries, not just necessities.
I welcomed it wholeheartedly. If we could make coffee, why not juice? And if we could make both, what else was impossible? Sweet desserts, exotic dishes with unusual recipes… or even non-edible luxuries. The animations, films, dramas, and comics we once enjoyed on the surface—weren't they luxuries too? The Ark possessed the resources to recreate them all. Now that the Ark had become humanity's cradle, increasing the variety of luxuries produced here was something any Controller should encourage. After all, the Controller's foremost duty was the preservation of human civilization.
"Phew. Things finally feel a little more comfortable."
It was absurd. A single cup of coffee had shifted my perspective. Yet stepping back to view the larger picture, the Ark's situation was genuinely favorable. No external threats, no internal divisions, and elite soldiers patrolling day and night, culling monsters. This coffee was proof of the same. While I had secured the first batch through the Controller's authority, reports said citizens in the residential sectors were already paying premiums to trade it. There might be people here who had never tasted coffee, but none who had tasted it only once.
If the Ark truly lacked surplus, could such a luxury even exist? Coffee required dedicated hydroponic facilities separate from the aquaponics systems, since coffee plants naturally contain caffeine. The fact that we could allocate those facilities without issue was evidence that the citizens were living with room to spare. Had that not been the case, no one would have approved diverting resources just to grow coffee.
If future requests came to expand production, I would approve them without hesitation. Right now, Ark-grown coffee was simply unavailable to most citizens, but scale always lowered prices. If we bought it in bulk at a reasonable cost and issued it to the soldiers, how much would their morale rise? This coffee was more than a drink. It was living proof that humanity still retained the capacity to enjoy spiritual culture.
"…"
Come to think of it, a certain curiosity stirred. If monsters ingested caffeine, would they experience the same stimulant effect as humans? They had been human once, after all. If caffeine worked on them, we could drop caffeinated bait before an extermination operation, keep them awake, and then easily dispatch the staggering, half-asleep creatures.
"Well… worst case, we lose nothing."
Muttering to myself, I began drafting a message to the research division.
*
"The ninth experiment's subject is… caffeine administration."
"Caffeine administration? Who approved such an idiotic experiment?"
"The Controller, sir."
"I'm dying to know the results. Let's begin immediately!"
A brief commotion erupted in the research wing, but it was quickly suppressed. Under the chief's direction, the researchers loaded the caffeine extract brought by the workers into the injection port attached to the mechanical arm. Suspecting a difference between intravenous and oral absorption, they also poured the Controller-provided coffee beans into the feeding chute.
"All right. Commence the experiment."
At the chief's command, the experiment resumed. Researchers in the control room operated the mechanical arms, inserting a syringe into the back of a monster that was eating potatoes for dinner. Even without anesthesia, the creature showed no reaction, confirming what the fourth experiment had already revealed: monsters were largely insensitive to pain.
"Inject."
"Caffeine extract injection commencing…"
Shhhrrrp!
Pressure from the cylinder slowly forced the extract into the monster's body. Once the dose was fully administered, the arm withdrew quietly to avoid startling the subject.
"Next. Oral ingestion group."
"Camera shift."
This time the caffeine would be consumed orally. To suit the monsters' preference for sweetness, the bitter coffee beans had been coated with sugar.
"Some monsters have it good… People have to choke down bitter medicine, yet these things get sugar-coated beans…"
Amid someone's grumbling, sugar-coated beans poured from the feeding chute. The monster's sensitive nose twitched and turned toward them. Detecting the sweet potato-like aroma, it immediately began crunching the beans, repeating the process until every last one was gone.
"Good. Now we wait and observe."
The observation window had been deliberately set at night to monitor changes in the monsters' sleep patterns. Since they, like humans, were nocturnal, any effect caffeine had on their nervous systems would soon become apparent.
*
—Grrrk… grrr…—
The conclusion was clear: caffeine produced a meaningful effect on the monsters as well. The control group, which had received no caffeine, slept soundly. In contrast, the dosed subjects wandered their enclosures well into the night, unable to settle. A few, stressed by sleeplessness, shrieked or slammed against the walls, but the barriers held; only their bodies suffered.
Still, that alone felt insufficient, so EEG monitoring was conducted. As expected, the scans showed caffeine acting on their brains and nerves. The Controller's question had been answered.
Under normal circumstances the results would have been reported on time, but the researchers failed to do so. A serious problem had arisen.
"Haaah…"
The researchers were overwhelmingly drowsy. The time was 3 a.m. Ordinary people would have been deep in dreams, yet the researchers clung to consciousness by sheer will. The sight of them struggling to remain upright in their chairs, whites of their eyes showing, was beyond pitiful—it was harrowing.
"Ugh… ah… ah…"
Before the fall they could have powered through with coffee or energy drinks, but now the freshly produced Ark coffee was unavailable and energy drinks were nonexistent. At this late hour their stamina had hit rock bottom. More precisely, without caffeine and sugar to dope their brains, their bodies were simply returning to their natural state. Regardless, they still had to write the report on the correlation between caffeine dosage and sleep quantity, investigate the physiological responses when monsters ingested caffeine, and handle a host of other tasks.
Among those many duties, they at least needed to finish the report before collapsing. Dragging their limp bodies, the researchers pecked out the report one letter at a time. Once the final character was typed and the file securely saved, they emailed copies to the chief and the Controller.
"It's… over…"
Thud!
Not a single researcher remained standing. It was the hour when 3 a.m. bled into 4 a.m. Until the chief arrived the next morning and opened the lab door, the researchers lay sprawled across the floor like corpses.
When the chief read the report, he declared it a mess and ordered the barely awakened researchers to rewrite it from scratch.