Outside the Scanner's Reach
A few more days slipped by.
Fewer and fewer people remained inside the escape ship. And thanks to that, I finally got to set foot on the ground outside.
All sorts of fold-out modules had begun to unfurl. For now they only served to divide interior from exterior, but in a few more days the various facilities would start filling in one by one.
"..."
I was the only one standing around with no idea what to do. Even when I went somewhere and asked if there was anything I could help with, there was barely anything for me. Occasionally someone would ask me to move something, but...
I couldn't contribute much strength to hauling heavy loads, so the work available to me stayed limited.
So just like that first workday a few weeks after I'd transferred in... no, wait, back then they'd at least taught me what to do. Anyway, I was standing there awkwardly, reading the room, when—
"Ugh...!"
The person carrying a massive panel couldn't see me—neither the ones facing forward nor the ones with their backs turned—and I'd blocked their path.
"Ah, s-sorry. I, uh, c-can I help—"
"No. Could you wait over there? We're going to be going back and forth through here a lot."
"Y-yes..."
"...Well. Or, uh. Oh. If you head over to the facilities team right now, they'll probably have you fetching this and that."
One of the women who'd been about to walk past without another word met my eyes for a moment and said that. Apparently I'd been getting on her nerves.
"...Ah! Yes, yes! Th-then, g-good luck—with the work!"
"..."
The women passed by. Clothes were getting lighter by the day. Especially among the ones doing physical labor.
Facilities. If it was the facilities team, that was definitely near where that woman with the cute fluffy hair worked. The space they used wasn't that large, so I found the group quickly enough—
"Ah, um, e-excuse me. If there's... anything you need, feel free to..."
"Huh? Oh, uh... not really... Oh, if you go to the security team, looks like they're opening up some scanners or something."
"That—ah, yes...! Thank you...!"
And that conversation ended too. I doubted I'd be of any use even if I went, and for all I knew they just wanted to get me back inside.
So I turned around and trudged off again. The entrance was open, so there was none of that quarantine wait like the first time.
I was walking down the corridor, feeling its alien texture underfoot, heading toward wherever the security team might be, when Minseo spotted me from the far end of the opposite hall and waved.
"Yeoreum!"
"Ah, haha..."
I waved back awkwardly, and Minseo came barreling toward me. I waited, praying she wouldn't casually grope somewhere inappropriate under the guise of a joke—the kind of thing she did in the room.
"There you are! Hey, I just thought of something. Come with me for a sec?"
"Uh, no, I was going to see the sec—security team..."
"Oing. What do you need to do?"
"……"
"Ahh. You won't have anything to do over there either, you know? Heh-heh! This is way more important! Hurry!"
Minseo grabbed my wrist in a firm grip. Over the past few days, more and more people seemed to be handling me with force.
So before I could get a word in, she dragged me into the conference room—now just an empty chamber—hopped up onto the desk, sat there, and looked down at me.
...At least I trusted she wouldn't suddenly drop her pants. This was the most central conference room, after all, and the door was still open.
"...Wh-why..."
Of course, the awkward way I had my arms crossed was partly for defense.
"Okay, so I've been thinking."
Minseo pulled her terminal from her pocket, then beckoned me closer with a little wave of her hand.
"..."
"Aaa, hurry up."
I shuffled over, and she yanked me straight into her arms.
Naturally I could feel that thing right against me, a chill racing up my spine—and then a sentence I was starting to know by heart swam into view. Call it the regulations manual.
A section of the document I'd been staring at every day, hoping somehow it might help.
...in which case, authority shall be succeeded, with the successor designated as the most senior ranking individual.
"W-why are you showing me this...! Ugh, g-get your hand off...!"
My body flinched the moment I saw that sentence. It was the part I'd deliberately skipped past every single time I looked.
"Aaa, no. It's not like that. Look. The life signal of the person with authority gets picked up through the Security Chip, right? Here."
With one hand planted flat on my stomach, Minseo scrolled the screen up just a little with her finger, then tapped a particular sentence to highlight it.
"..."
"But think about it—on the main ship, sure, but right now all we've got are scanners with locked permissions, aren't they?"
"Th-that's true..."
Slap. The sound of a clap. Or rather, a clap against a stomach—a belly-clap?
"Exactly! So the authority only transfers when the life signal cuts out! Which means all you have to do is pretend to be dead!"
She wasn't wrong. Assuming it was even possible.
"...H-how would you even—w-wait, cardiac arrest...?"
"Eeeh? Why do you always go straight to the extreme!"
The way Minseo squished my cheek with her finger definitely had lust in it. I knew it wasn't just a joke, so I tried to lean back a little—and then a thought hit me.
"...Ah? Wait? Wait?!"
"That's it! The scanners aren't working properly! You just go far enough out that the authority transfers, then come right back!"
Was that right? I had zero foundational knowledge, so I couldn't tell if it would actually work—but at least someone involved had drawn that conclusion, so it might be a reasonably sound idea.
And more than that—if this kind of thinking kept going...
At the end of humanity's endless, well-intentioned creative problem-solving, maybe someday, somewhere in the cracks, we'd find a kind of cheat method that could transfer the authority without me actually dying!
Right. Even the games made by mega-corporations were riddled with bug-type cheats. And what about the scams that exploited the rules to make money?
"Oh, wow...!"
That was the moment Minseo looked different to me. I'd thought she was just some sex-obsessed person who only knew how to sexually harass me.
Of course. An elite was still an elite.
"Heh-heh. Of course, no idea if it'll actually work. Now! Go gather people!"
"Uh, r-right now? And it's your idea, so—"
"That's how you rack up points! Come on, come on! Hurry!"
When I climbed down from the desk to protest, Minseo answered by giving my butt a couple of light pats with her palm.
Looking at it again, maybe it wasn't sexual harassment so much as a sign of friendship!
Getting busy people to assemble over something that was supposedly my idea was no easy task.
Even Soyeon and Dahyun, who I'd thought would take my side in a moment like this, were currently wringing every last drop of brainpower out of themselves in the face of a genuine survival threat—literally working nonstop from the moment they opened their eyes until they collapsed into bed.
In the end, it wasn't until the next day's meeting that I finally got to present the proposal to everyone.
"...Then for now, we'll leave the meal unit—no, the Nutrient Synthesizer—intact rather than dismantling it..."
"Dismantling inside the captain's quarters is proceeding cleanly. Almost no loss rate. Numerically speaking, about ninety-nine percent. One screw broke."
"We've almost finished stripping the thruster assemblies too. By lunch the day after tomorrow at the latest..."
The fairly long meeting was winding down, and people were still patting each other on the back for a hard day's work—and through all of it, no one paid me the slightest attention.
But I still had to show that I was at least trying. Even if the idea had been Minseo's...
"Um, e-excuse me..."
How many hours had it been since I'd last opened my mouth? A few people who already knew I'd tried to gather everyone the day before reacted pretty quickly to that tiny sound.
Some sat back down. Some turned their heads while already half-standing to leave. And some just walked out.
"I, uh, I-I've been th-thinking..."
Minseo had told me to sell it as my own idea if I could. Partly because if there was some elementary mistake she hadn't caught, it would be embarrassing to have it exposed as hers—and partly because public opinion of me wasn't exactly warm, so maybe this could buy me a little goodwill.
"Ah. Unnie. Yeah."
Soyeon, whose speech had loosened back into something casual over the past few days, stopped mid-rise and sat back down to look at me. She seemed fairly surprised.
"Sooo. About how if I die, the authority transfers... Because of that. I-if everyone could just listen for a minute—"
"I told you we're not talking about that. If we go that route, we kill you, and then next we kill the security team too since we won't need to hack anything anymore?"
"N-no! That's not it! I mean—not dying, exactly..."
A few of the people still standing and watching asked me to keep going. The ones sitting and at least half-listening were, I suppose, a small mercy—they were hearing me out.
"R-right now, the scanners and... the, uh, detection? Devices are all locked, right..."
"Yeah."
"......Ah."
Had someone already figured it out?
"So, me dying means my life signal... isn't there, so... maybe, uh, with the independent, the, radio waves? The rough radar-type stuff is still running, right? So if I go outside the range of that, and then..."
Explaining it was agony too. I wanted to rattle off elegant technical terms like I knew what I was doing, but I didn't know any. Looking back, maybe I should have prepared a presentation script.
"...So what you're saying is, you go outside the signal detection range and pretend to be dead. Then the authority automatically transfers to Soyeon and Dahyun?"
"Y-yes! Th-that's right!"
Minseo's voice. She put on a tone of delighted relief that someone had understood me. She'd deliberately cleaned up my rambling for me, no doubt.
"...Huh."
"Hmm."
Everyone looked at me with suddenly serious eyes.
"...It's... not completely impossible, is it?"
And in that moment, the first to speak was that person from the security team—the team lead? Head of the team, so team leader seemed right.
"Is that so?"
Soyeon's near-instant question.
"Nothing's certain. Odds are it probably won't work, but... how do I put it. Hacking isn't only about writing fancy code."
"..."
"Worth a shot, isn't it? Or just the attempt. Even if it fails, we don't really lose anything."
People started murmuring. A few rushed out shouting to drag back the ones who'd left without hearing me.
And so. For the first time in a long while, I could straighten my back.