Chapter 209: Mockery 3
Chapter 209: Mockery 3
A minor Incarnation cadet and a notorious Seonghwa Gallery regular famous for leaking internal Academy info.
Just hearing her description was dizzying, but this chubby-cheeked girl had a few peculiarities.
One, the Constellation she'd contracted with was, like me, a recent arrival on this continent.
And two, that Constellation wasn't a person or an animal, but a robot from a future world.
"So your Constellation is a humanoid, then?"
"Yes, that's right."
In her world, humanity had progressed its science and technology right into a clean, tidy extinction,
and the sole intelligent lifeform left behind was a prototype humanoid.
A robot Constellation: artificial muscle and electronic skin stretched over a carbon-based artificial skeleton.
An SF world where a soul took up residence in a humanoid—fine, whatever. That wasn't the weird part.
The weird part was the humanoid's Authority, which was just absurd.
The Humanoid Constellation, Shepherd of Electric Sheep.
It had exactly one Authority: a contract with an Electronic Spirit.
"So, what exactly is this Electronic Spirit?"
"Exactly what it sounds like—a spirit that exists solely inside cyberspace. If you'll take a look here..."
She slipped her smartphone out. On the screen, a tiny fairy flitted between icons.
A boy-shaped robot fairy with metallic butterfly wings and shorts—because of course this world had gender-role-reversal robot fairies.
At a glance, it looked like a well-made 3D animated wallpaper.
Meeting the Electronic Spirit's eyes through the screen, the girl spoke to it in a gentle voice.
"Ian, could you turn on the internet for me?"
The fairy darted off between icons. Without anyone touching it, the screen swiped and the browser icon pressed itself.
So the Electronic Spirit had influence inside the device, just like its name implied.
A browser window opened. Something was typed into the address bar at blistering speed.
The window split, groups divided, tabs flipped, somewhere a login was performed—
I couldn't even catch the first letter of the ID, let alone snoop the password.
"That's your Electronic Spirit?"
"Yes. The Shepherd of Electric Sheep was originally created as an artificial intelligence to maintain, repair, and manage humanity's databases—"
An accessory to an all-purpose A.I. Constellation straight out of any SF story:
it searched information, hacked, crunched numbers, and organized everything for you.
Still, the smartphone screen was smaller than I'd like. My eyes were starting to ache.
"That isn't all..."
Mid-explanation, the girl turned her head and dropped her eyes hard.
We'd been shoulder-to-shoulder to peer at the smartphone.
The moment two hot-blooded adolescent girls got close enough to feel each other's breath on their shoulders,
her composure shattered. Expression control? Gone. Words? Jammed right up.
But unlike her malfunctioning owner, blushing just because a man's face got close,
the Electronic Spirit inside the phone registered my voice outside the device and got to work.
The busy little sprite flew right off the screen—
"...So it can enter the TV too?"
"There's a connected line to the TV as well."
Had a real-world A.I. arrived in this world and been enhanced into an Authority?
Then again, this was a world where swordswomen jumped at space battleships. A spirit hacking nearby electronics from inside a smartphone barely qualified as cute.
I settled back comfortably on the sofa. Photos arrayed themselves across the screen like a presentation.
The Seonghwa Gallery post had already passed 3,000 comments, and now it appeared to have new material tacked on.
"Anyway, if you look here... the first two people who got caught up in this were these two."
A photo expanded: a short, blunt-bobbed woman in military fatigues, a retired soldier with brown hair.
And beside it, a second photo: a freckled red-haired man, a stay-at-home husband.
"Neither of them is at all tech-savvy. They don't handle taxes or welfare benefits online—they're the kind of people who waste hours visiting the bank and ward office in person. They barely use internet banking, have no benefits cards, often shop at old-fashioned markets with cash... their lifestyle patterns are closer to analog."
As she continued her explanation, the retirees and Incarnations around the sofa gathered in closer.
A TV that turned itself on and connected to the internet instead of broadcasting—hard not to draw eyes.
The attention made her nervous. Her voice trembled, her words starting to trip a little.
But this wasn't a job interview judging presentation skills, so no one called her on it.
At least this world resembled pre-apocalypse Korea enough that it was easy to follow.
"But these people—who don't even use internet banking—let out a breath—these people started attempting irregular logins to an obscure website, using accounts registered under family members' names."
The two photos dominating half the TV screen shrank.
Beneath them, an unfamiliar website appeared.
An obscure website... something like the old Korean portals that got crushed by Naver and Daum?
More to the point—why had she gone digging into any of this?
A dirty little curiosity bobbed up. I raised my hand like an eager student.
"So... aha, do you have something to say?"
"Did the Electronic Spirit find that information for you? Or did you get curious and order it to?"
"I ordered it. I, um... originally I was planning to, you know, publicly shame anyone I caught going to weird sites..."
The girl's face went past red and straight into dark crimson.
Lee Ha-rin, who'd been watching from her seat, leaned in and whispered to me.
The surprising part was how every single retiree nodded along in total agreement.
'If you leave a record on an illegal porn site or one catering to niche fetishes, it gets preserved. Permanently.'
'Well, obviously. Always keep their weak points in your pocket.'
'When someone has a bit of social standing, sex makes an excellent weakness.'
'It wasn't just one or two bitches who spread their legs carelessly and got something other than dick shoved in.'
Everyone's thought processes seemed to run straight toward propaganda, blackmail, and public-exposure warfare.
The girl, who'd once harbored ambitions of getting recommendations via criminals' porn preferences, pressed on with her presentation.
Trying to shame people over their porn tastes and accidentally catching the tail of a terrorist organization.
This was less a blind squirrel finding a nut and more a cow backing up and crushing a rat.
"This retired soldier created an account under the name of her younger sister, who lives independently in another city. And this stay-at-home husband created an account under his ten-year-old son's name."
The rest of the story was obvious.
A chance discovery: the one thing these two had in common—emails from that obscure site.
She'd run eighteen others through the Electronic Spirit. All of them had accounts on the same site.
Their login intervals weren't regular, but they'd been sharing and forwarding anonymous emails—
No matter how you looked at it, secret orders or intelligence had been passing through.
The clandestine sexual tastes of Fallen Incarnations were one thing, but conspiracy-theory leads burned a lot hotter.
Empowered by the Electronic Spirit, she'd perfectly blended in with the cyber-ghosts who risked their lives posting, and that was her conclusion.
"So, these problematic emails?"
"Here... but there wasn't much in them."
"'Not much in them'? There's nothing in them at all."
If there was a problem, it was just one thing.
The emails were anonymous and from an obscure site, so the sender couldn't be traced.
The fact that they were completely blank suggested the other side had something like an Electronic Spirit of their own.
Which meant tracing was impossible. Finding a shared point of contact didn't change the fact that the trail was cut clean off.
The others had apparently reached the same conclusion.
Frowns spread. Muttered "hmm"s drifted through the room.
Only the girl, oblivious to the heavy atmosphere, continued her presentation.
"So tracing isn't possible yet... but if it grows a little more, maybe later I could trace the sender after all—?!"
"Grow. Grow how, exactly?"
※
They could trace an enemy contact who'd completely concealed their identity—without taking any losses.
The retired soldiers heard that and their eyes spun like addicts who'd just gotten a fresh hit.
Maybe that was just special-forces instinct—they claimed intelligence warfare was a soldier's fundamental discipline.
"I-I don't really know either! My Constellation is a robot with an artificial brain, okay?!"
Their fervent press made the girl's face flush red for an entirely different reason as she yelped.
The retired soldiers, faces intimidating enough just to look at, were shoving in close enough for noses to touch.
Under that pressure, maintaining composure with an adolescent girl's mental fortitude was never going to be easy.
"Well... that's a point."
"Time is the answer, then."
Even so, something impossible wasn't going to become possible just by waiting.
The reason lay in the Shepherd of Electric Sheep's peculiar nature.
A humanoid that had developed a soul—exactly the kind of being SF liked to use as a stock character.
The problem was, soul or not, it was still a humanoid. That fact didn't change.
"My Constellation only contracts with Incarnations in order to gather the continent's information, in a purely rational manner..."
"So it has no interest in anything other than information, I see."
A humanoid built to organize databases.
Even if it had developed a soul and been yanked into another dimension when its original world died,
at the end of the day, all that humanoid did was organize databases.
Its sole purpose was to collect and catalog the information of this Flat Continent—over a thousand years of history—
and to strengthen its Authority for the sake of more efficient information gathering.
The reason it had created an Incarnation was simply that doing so benefited that goal.
'A humanoid with a soul... does it even have emotions, like desire? No, before that—does it dream?'
The only trade goods I could offer other Constellations were the luxury items and magical objects sitting in my warehouse.
What use would a data-management humanoid have for men's cologne or a jeweled tie pin?
I had just one thing I could pin my hopes on.
That somewhere inside that soul, even a trace of desire existed.