Nowhere to Stand
“Ah. The Administrator just went stiff.”
“Pfft.”
I wondered if any of them knew I’d let out that shrill little scream from nothing more than seeing Soyeon’s… thing.
“…Hic!”
“What’s wrong, Administrator?”
Minseo was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, my terminal still in her hand. I’d tried to snatch it back and been pulled right on top of her by sheer strength.
“…”
Something hard was pressing firmly, insistently, into my lower belly.
A cylindrical shape with that particular rigidity—neither rock-hard nor soft—bearing down on me. And more than anything, it felt almost as if my body recognized it. The way you thrash around unable to sleep and then, by pure accident, settle into the one position that finally feels right—something about it was familiar like that.
And our faces were close. That didn’t help.
“…Hic.”
“Heh-heh!”
Minseo might have been under some kind of misunderstanding. The other two as well—people whose names I still didn’t even know—might have been laboring under the same one.
And one of the reasons for that misunderstanding was almost certainly the genre of porn my past self had saved on that terminal.
“…”
“…Let’s just give it back.”
That was the other one. A little quicker on the uptake, maybe—she took one look at my face and started to pull away. Not in that sense. She literally shifted her body backward.
Which made sense. There was a clear gulf between the kind of stupid pre-sleep teasing you do on a school trip with close friends and whatever this was.
“Whyyy, pfft—your reaction’s just too cute, Administrator. Can I delete this?”
“W-wait a second…”
Even the tiniest shift of my body sent fresh sensations flooding into my brain, the way moving around in a bath does.
This had crossed a line. Even someone as socially dense as me could tell we’d gone well past the question of whether I was blending in with the group.
So I moved. Minseo—still playful, though her face had gone a little red now—caught my wrist cleanly, but I kept trying to push myself up anyway.
“Trying to run away?”
“Come on. No way the Administrator’s someone with zero sense of fun.”
The other one, who’d been watching my every movement, spoke up. At some point she’d rested a hand near my thigh.
A slow stroke. Soft. Meant to be reassuring, as if to say she wouldn’t hurt me—and yet it landed on me in an entirely different way.
“…”
A touch full of the quiet certainty that I wasn’t someone boring.
“Is that right? Heh! Administrator. What did you do today?”
“W-what?”
“I’m asking if you actually did anything.”
Only then did I understand with absolute clarity that this was bullying. Not the indirect kind where everyone half-ignores you—real bullying. The kind that takes pleasure in watching someone flounder.
The problem was that I had no answer. I wasn’t trying to ignore her. Literally, everything I’d done today amounted to a handful of menial chores.
“Ah, ah…”
“Honestly, you know, right? That the complaints are just—piling up. Heh.”
I had nothing to say. Hearing it in someone else’s voice, instead of merely sensing it in the air, hit with a force all its own.
Well. This was a place with no law, no anything. For now everyone could still think rationally, drawing on the social knowledge they’d absorbed while living ordinary lives—but how long would that last?
If another crisis hit and things got critically uncomfortable, would I still be protected?
I understood what the person in front of me was really saying. There was nothing direct in the words, but the meaning—
At least the true meaning buried inside them—I understood that much.
Little by little, the strength drained out of my body. I still didn’t want to take that thing.
There was nothing I could do. No knowledge, no strength, not even a positive personality. Outside of the kind of chores a well-trained dog could handle, I had nowhere to stand.
…No. To be precise, there was exactly one thing I could do. One thing that, if I alone endured it, might make everyone happy.
If I did that well enough, at least a few people might vote against the motion to kill and eat me. Attachment forms somehow, one way or another.
The moment I let go of all the tension I’d been holding, a hand slid inward along my thigh with something like satisfaction, and—
A sudden throb. Something pulsed against my lower belly.
“Gh—!”
I couldn’t hold the sound in. Every resolution I’d made was swept away by pure revulsion, and my head simply blanked into panic.
“H-hey! Where are you going!”
“Kyaha…! She ra—”
Bang. I slammed the door. In the unlit corridor I just stood there, gasping.
Feeling, at the same time, revulsion toward that thing—and revulsion toward myself for not even being able to commit to the resolution.
“You’re scared to sleep alone…?”
“Y-yes…”
Dahyeon, when I went to her, wore an expression that looked faintly suspicious. Her face was a little flushed.
“…”
The people who shared her room barely registered my presence at all.
“…Well… but there’s no spare bed.”
Dahyeon squeezed her eyes shut for a moment—probably guessing what must have happened in my room. Then she glanced around—
“If you don’t mind sleeping together, well…”
—and patted her own mattress.
“…”
“With the Administrator…”
“Ah! Or my bed—”
A sudden murmur ran through the room.
“Go to sleep.”
It was a team with a clear hierarchy. Dahyeon cut short the woman—no, the intersex—who’d been looking at me with open expectation, offering her bed.
Then she pulled back the covers and scooted in toward the wall.
Only then could I finally relax enough to sleep. Dahyeon was a pure female, and the blanket carried the scent of another woman—which, if I’m being honest, pricked my conscience a little, but…
Anyway. It smelled nice.
Aside from waking up locked in Dahyeon’s arms so tightly it was hard to breathe, I could call it a reasonably satisfying night’s sleep.
And so the days went: sitting blankly beside Soyeon during the day until I couldn’t stand the weight of her gaze and went hunting for chores; at night, too self-conscious to keep going to Dahyeon’s room, forced to fall asleep with one or two others.
I walked a long, wide corridor. People carried basket-like containers in their hands. A scene that felt oddly familiar.
When I lifted my eyes a little, Soyeon came into view, looking excited. Her hair was pulled up tight—probably because she didn’t want greasy hair free to move after days without washing.
“…”
“I’m so excited. Right?! How long has it been since we washed! No, but isn’t it kind of amazing? How did they take that apart and build this?”
“Y-yeah…”
“Honestly, all we ever do is play with numbers and logs. Watching someone just whip up something mechanical feels incredible.”
Soyeon was running on a pretty high voltage. Going days without washing, unless you chose it yourself, was half a form of torture.
…For the record, we were on our way to wash together. If I’d known it would come to this, maybe I should have forced the issue and claimed a private room—but there were only two shared bathrooms.
If I was going to have to show myself anyway, Soyeon was probably the safest option. Showing the roommates I shared a room with carried a high probability I wouldn’t walk out of there intact.
Unfortunately, unless we were doing radiation showers, there was still no hot water…
But washing was washing. Honestly, I’d been waiting for this more desperately than I could stand.
I just couldn’t show it. Too self-conscious.
“Ah. Soyeon. Heading to wash?”
“Yep~! What about you, Seolha?”
“I’ll go a little later. Looking at it, the power module’s security seems pretty weak? I think I can crack it!”
“Wow. Really? That’s huge.”
Soyeon and the woman passing by exchanged a brief conversation and moved on. Not a single word was directed at me.
“…”
“Guess she’s busy. Hehe.”
Soyeon had noticed, and answered for the silence—but there wasn’t much more to say. I should have been grateful they didn’t openly show how much they disliked me. If I’d been normal, the work that woman was doing right now wouldn’t have been necessary at all.
So my mouth stayed shut even tighter. Honestly, I wanted to change rooms. The chilled atmosphere and the sharp little remarks they kept tossing out were getting hard to take. Of course, it wasn’t as if people in other rooms thought any better of me.
…And then there was the way they kept coming over to my bed before sleep.
They weren’t bad people. Even stranded like this, everyone did their own work, and even when opinions split they still tried to arrive at one rational solution together—it almost looked like a hymn to humanity.
“Here we are! First time in the escape ship’s bathroom—it’s way nicer than I expected? I thought it’d feel like the military.”
I hadn’t stopped walking, so we arrived quickly. Inside the bathroom, a few people were already showering with perfectly calm expressions. The warm weather helped; the water was at a pleasantly cool temperature.
“…So, um. Are you okay?”
And of course, a few of them were wearing those. Soyeon asked carefully.
“Yeah, well…”
I kept the answer short. I considered explaining that it wasn’t that I hated people themselves—only that part of them—that it was closer to a kind of phobia, in a way—
But this wasn’t the place. I undressed carefully.
Clothes into a locker. Bare feet on the floor. A twist of the handle, and water ran.
It was a little cold. Soyeon’s… didn’t seem bothered.
Meeting time. I sat beside Soyeon with my head planted on the desk, listening.
“Everyone looks clean. Except the security team? Ah—I’m not criticizing. Just, um. An icebreaker.”
Everyone produced an appropriately polite smile. No one actually thought they were unclean people.
If you thought about it, they were the most important and busiest people in the current situation.
“Still, from what I’ve seen, the water side is pretty much solved. We’re even stockpiling surplus. At this rate we can start hydroponics as soon as the systems open!”
The person shrugging was something like the head of the facilities team. I struggled to land on the right word for what to call them. Technician?
“It’s improving steadily. Of course it’ll take some time to unpack and install the equipment, but for where we are, this is really good.”
Soyeon said it while reading through the dense columns of numbers on her PDA. It almost looked like a rousing speech. The seat suited her, too.
Everyone wore faint smiles as the meeting moved forward from there.
Parts production needed to be possible within three months for any real progress—and they had to be producing within five months at the latest just to maintain the current standard of living. Figures and unit names kept flying out alongside those points.
For a fairly long stretch, a reasonably warm atmosphere held.
Then Soyeon went quiet, reading the center of her PDA, and let out a small sigh that drew everyone’s attention. As if there was something she had no choice but to say.
“…But on the food side, even with printing, it’s a bit risky. There’s going to be about a two-week gap between the day cultivation starts and the day the food runs out.”
I also caught the suggestion that hunting might become necessary.
“Unfortunately, the drone systems are completely inaccessible… so resource collection is going to have to be done by hand.”
“Oof.”
“Still! The facilities will open! Ultimately we just need materials—it’s not like we have to fire up a forge and work the bellows.”
Material collection. Wasn’t that something I could do? From the way they were talking, it sounded like pure physical labor. My eyes lit up.
The moment I lifted my head, everyone’s gaze flicked to me for a brief second.
“Eep.”
“Did you have something to say?”
“Ah, no, um, that is…”
Soyeon looked at me as if to say, go ahead.
“W-when that time comes, I might, um, be able to work a bit too…”
“…”
Silence.
“…Ah—ha! That could be! Still, well, carrying and that sort of thing, yes! So, roughly calculating, we need at least about a sixty-eight percent effective daily work rate…”
“Higher if you exclude the Administrator.”
I flinched.
“…That, phrasing is a bit—”
A woman whose name I didn’t know answered.
“No, just calculation-wise. Calculations can’t be wrong.”
In an instant, the smiles vanished from every face. As if they’d been reminded of a fact they’d briefly forgotten, the conference room sank into silence.
And that was when Minseo, standing behind the person who looked like a technician, opened her mouth.
“Um. Speaking of which… honestly, all the work that requires administrator privileges is completely stalled right now, isn’t it?”
“…”
“That’s how overworked security is, and honestly, to survive the migration with our current headcount, if we just adjust the allocation for certain personnel a little—”
“What? No, wait a second. That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”
Dahyeon’s voice.
“No, it’s not about punishment or anything like that. Just putting restrictions in place. Honestly, if there were civilians mixed in here, we would have done it as a matter of course, right?”
“…”
“There’s been a lot of interference these past few days, too. Honestly I don’t even understand why we need to keep someone who knows nothing in the technical facilities. It’s not like we have space to spare.”
“No…!”
Soyeon opened her mouth on pure reflex, but couldn’t find the words—her lips just worked soundlessly.
“…Sorry…”
“Saying sorry won’t solve anything either. No—let’s speak openly. Stop covering it up. Even that two-week risk, if Soyeon and Dahyeon inherit the privileges, everything gets sol—”
“That’s enough.”
Dahyeon cut her off.
“I don’t think it’s good to think that way.”
…
The atmosphere turned cold so fast there was no room to interject, and no room to stand up and leave either.
More than anything, I was terrified that the scenario I’d feared most in some corner of my mind had already been put on the table.
Which was probably why Dahyeon was taking the tone harsher than usual. The way her hand had drifted toward her holster when the word “punishment” came up earlier—same logic.
It had to be that way.
“…I understand what you’re saying clearly enough. Let’s leave it here for now! It’s, um, not something coming right away! We still have a little time!”
After a brief silence, Soyeon said that. The meeting, after that, only continued for a very short while longer.
Because of my existence, every smile that had briefly bloomed was gone—nothing remained but mechanical transfers of information—
And then the meeting ended.
Everyone else left for work. A few people didn’t have anything they needed to do right then, but I, at least, had complete free time.
“…Unni.”
“Ah, I-I’m fine. Th-that’s the kind of talk that was bound to come up…”
“…”
Soyeon looked at me with worry, but right now, strangely, I didn’t want to keep talking.
“Hehe… Th-then I’ll, I’ll get going too.”
I stood. My legs trembled a little, but they still worked. I supposed the idea that things would only normalize if I died had hit me harder than I thought.
Fortunately, the more I walked the more strength returned to them, so I headed straight for the cleaning supply closet. Water was plentiful now—wet mopping would be fine.
After a moment’s hesitation, I made for the facilities area. No one was showing signs of mental breakdown severe enough to need a guard yet, so there wasn’t one.
I approached the person still working on a machine nearby—
“U-um, excuse me…”
“…Ah. Yes?”
“Would there be some water—”
“Water’s not coming out? Right now? Where?!”
Clatter. The woman dropped her tool and shot to her feet.
“No! Um, for cleaning, I need some, um, drinking water… whether I can use it, I, I wanted to ask…”
The woman who’d bolted upright in alarm immediately crouched back down. She looked startled.
“…You can use it. We don’t really separate them.”
I bowed my head.
I ran to the bathroom, filled a bucket, and started wiping the floors.