The Red Queen Hypothesis
The Red Queen Hypothesis. When we arrived, the broker was waiting below the parking lot with his crew. He could have slipped away immediately after the escape, so why had he stuck around? When I asked, the broker smiled and answered.
"Must be nice to have that kind of luxury."
Eileen nudged me with her elbow and grinned. I shrugged, clearly annoyed, and asked the broker another question.
"About today's deal falling through. How about you guys just take the goods instead? If I keep holding onto them, it feels like this kind of mess is going to keep happening. I'll even throw in extra cash on top."
"Of course I'm serious."
The broker waved his hands in refusal, still laughing. Then his tone shifted, mixing amusement with something far more serious.
"I figured as much."
It looked like there would be no easy way to dispose of the goods. The realization that I'd been saddled with this headache made my head throb. Maybe I never should have touched that bag that day. But regretting it now was pointless.
We said our goodbyes to the broker right then, promising to meet again someday, and went our separate ways. On the way back to the hideout, the sky was dyed a deep red by the fading sunlight.
Once we returned to the hideout, I stared at the bag on the desk with a sullen expression. There had been fifteen Leash doses. No, since I'd used one, the bag now held fourteen. All that trouble these past few days because of a single vial.
Eileen walked by, glanced at me, and gave me a light scolding.
"Wait for what?"
What was truly ridiculous wasn't how the last buyer had died, but Eileen's absurdly relaxed attitude. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. I had no idea what kind of mindset let someone stay that carefree all the time.
After staring at the bag a while longer, I couldn't take it anymore. I shot up from my seat and yanked the bag open. Eileen watched me from a table across the room, sipping a glass of wine.
"If I can't sell it, I might as well use it myself. At least then it'll be worth something. It's made for Hounds anyway, right?"
Eileen raised her wineglass high as if to say, Go ahead if you want. A stubborn streak flared up inside me. I pulled out one of the test tubes and injected it into my thigh.
I waited a moment, and just as expected, the dizziness hit. My vision swam, strength drained from my entire body, and everything went black. My muscles tensed on their own, refusing to obey. Every piece of sensory information flooding in was wildly amplified or distorted. It felt like a supercharged version of orthostatic hypotension.
"Oh?"
But the blurry, noise-filled vision gradually cleared as I forced myself to focus. The sensation of my body slowly returning to normal made me clench my fist tight. Control over my body had come back. The lingering fog in my head refused to fade, so I slapped my own cheek hard. The last traces of dizziness vanished.
Eileen took another sip of wine and offered her thoughts.
"Hmph. I've used who knows how many drugs back when I was a Hound. You think something like this would knock me out?"
I tested it by activating several of my implants at once. Sure enough, the strain was noticeably lighter than before. It seemed the dead buyer hadn't been lying after all.
"Hmm..."
Still, I frowned at the remaining burden. Was it not a finished product? The performance wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, but the reduction in load was still something. I decided to be satisfied with that much.
No matter how I look at it, it doesn't seem like something a megacorporation would desperately chase after.
Maybe there were additional conditions needed to draw out its full potential. I shrugged and dropped the line of thought. Wanting more than this would just be the greed of someone who already had plenty.
Before closing the bag, I checked how many Leash doses remained. Thirteen now. The liquid inside the test tubes shimmered like red gemstones.
I nodded at Eileen's words and closed the lid.
After that, no buyers appeared for quite some time. We passed the days taking other jobs. It felt strange when we accepted requests from corporations we'd previously clashed with, but what could we do? In this world, yesterday's enemy could become today's ally, and vice versa. That was simply how things worked down here.
Gradually, I grew accustomed to life in the underworld. If you could even call crawling through bullets and flames "life." At least, it was for me.
Anyway, another request had come in today, so I was on my way to meet the client. This time I was taking the lead. JL would stay outside the building and provide support. We headed to the designated meeting spot where we would discuss the details of the job.
I stepped out of Eileen's car and boarded a massive elevator that could fit an entire house, riding it up to the mid-levels. The transfer station was as chaotic as ever, packed with vehicles and people moving in every direction. Because of my small frame, I got jostled around relentlessly until I finally made it out onto the mid-level streets.
A cloud bridge stretched over a dizzying drop beyond the railing. I ignored the shops flashing neon signs to lure in customers and headed straight for an ordinary fast-food chain. Inside the agreed meeting place, a man in a suit and sunglasses was waiting. His face looked vaguely familiar.
He twisted his lips as he looked at me sitting across from him. Instead of answering, I simply showed him in the most natural way possible that I wasn't an ordinary child. At first he was suspicious, but he soon accepted me for what I was.
"Something like that."
Only then did his face click into place. The plain sunglasses had made it hard to recognize him, but the man sitting in front of me was the same one who'd been on the roof of the orbital elevator that day. The one who had tried to take the bag from Jude.
When I shook my head, he clicked his tongue in disappointment. Then he got straight to business.
"Hmm."
Without thinking, I rested my chin on my hand and rolled my eyes. The request was so obvious I had nothing to say. It was beyond typical; it was downright cliché. When I opened the received data and looked through it, the weapon had almost no disclosed information beyond a rough concept and its external appearance. It looked like a personal firearm, but from the visuals it appeared to be an optical weapon.
I forwarded the data to JL and Eileen, then stood up.
No solid intel. Hearing that confirmed it. The weapon they were asking us to steal had virtually no known information aside from the leaked data. They only knew it was being developed at the Seventh Laboratory; they didn't even know exactly what kind of device it was. There was even a chance it was vaporware with no prototype in existence.
Suddenly I became curious about their goal. Why spend money to obtain an opponent's "new weapon" based on such uncertain information? And it's not like this is the first time they've done something like this.
The last time we'd met on the roof of the orbital elevator, my life had been in danger. After an experience like that, most people would have learned their lesson, yet here they were repeating the same stunt. Still, I didn't ask directly. With corporate middlemen, it was best to stick strictly to business. That was better for both sides.
Come to think of it, it wasn't limited to the man in front of me. Every client I'd met so far had probably been doing the exact same thing before we crossed paths. Somewhere out of sight, the same cycle repeated endlessly. It was like a frantic race with no finish line.
What were they all running toward so desperately? Honestly, it wasn't my problem. They could do whatever they wanted. I snorted at the creeping question and left.
Time flowed on, and before long the appointed day arrived. We gathered at the location we'd been told about in advance and waited for the operation to begin.
On the edge of a cliff overlooking a wide-open wasteland, I breathed out a frosty breath. The bait teams charging forward like rhinos would be the signal to start the operation.