The Enemies' Secret Weapon
Phineas side— in orbit near Retrek.
I led the four I had rescued and set out alone to purge the Strange Zombies and the hippie terrorists. The power I had taken from the parallel universes was almost absurdly, transcendently vast. With my body alone, I could rip apart at least thousands of Strange Zombies with my bare hands; one bullet touched by my power could erupt with the force of a nuclear explosion; and if I clamped my hands around a throat, I could wrench out what passed for their self—indeed, their very soul. Whatever the enemy chose to spew, I had no reason to listen. Only my strength and my conviction remained.
Whoosh. Bang. Bang. Bang. Slash.
"Kheh!!!"
Clack.
WOOOOOOOM.
"Kuhhk!!!"
"Uweeeeeek!!!!!"
Whoosh—
BOOM.
"Sleep in peace."
Buuuuuummm...
KRAAANG.
"May your life be brief."
Bang.
"GRAAAAHHHHH!!!"
Swish.
Thud.
"Ugh!!!"
Spin.
FWOOSH.
BOOM.
"Uuugh...."
"Bite your tongue at once. The dying dead do not speak."
Crack—KRAKAKAKAKAKA!
"Close your mouth for good. Stop thinking as you please, too. You ask questions because you are wholly in the wrong, and because you were born steeped to the marrow in evil, you cannot understand goodness. And I have never once said the things you are shouting at me. They are merely the things you yourselves spat out in the most insolent, familiar tone imaginable. Have you ever thought that such conduct might be wrong? So wrong, in fact, that one must at least show a minimum of respect by speaking formally? Of course not. If you had any of that in you, you would not be human in the first place."
BEEEEEEEEEEP!
I drove pressure through their brains with telekinesis, until the fluid in their bodies burst out as though their very thoughts had been crushed.
"Utterly foolish. I would have preferred not to touch a single human being if it could be helped, and yet you do not even understand that the same act yields different results depending on what spirit inhabits it. If the subject is a ship, then the one who rides it is the sea. A ship must be well made if it is to sail well, but where one sails matters just as much. Do you wish to say that if others do not call something bad, then it is not bad? In that case, are you claiming to be the measure of all things? Do you suppose that because everyone uses different standards, nothing can be known? No—you simply never tried to know!"
And yet, even so, they refused to flee and kept throwing themselves at me. When I checked the reason, I found...
No, this is an antimatter bomb. They didn’t merely try to store it safely—they tried to develop it so it could be carried with ease, and somehow succeeded... Normally, antimatter is terrifyingly powerful, but the sheer inefficiency of the energy required to build containment vessels means even the Minister and the aide never would have considered making one. Still, thanks to the weapons, equipment, and blueprints freely distributed by the American government, it seems they dared to attempt it. And they succeeded.
I had to get that information out at once. So I said to Kendrick, Billis, Luis, and Clark, and to the hippie terrorists stranded on the neutron star, "Listen carefully, all of you. From this moment on, we have to make it perfectly clear just how mad the world has gone. No matter how long it takes."
"I know what that is too, Phineas. There’s no need to drag this out. But why are you making it sound as if it’ll take ages?"
"Because they’re still in the middle of developing it. And if they use it and that area is annihilated, the resulting gravitational acceleration will automatically generate a black hole. Unless you can throw black holes around or store them, that kind of thing would only damage our own side. What we need to do is expose the desires that have been poisoned by the power they’ve gained. If we limit ourselves to warning them about the weapon itself, we may end up disastrously underestimating the bastards who are already preparing far worse."
"Ah, so you’re not saying the antiparticle weapon itself is dangerous—you’re saying the people who want to build one are dangerous, right?"
"Exactly. Do you really think they’d be satisfied with just that one thing?"
"Of course not. At this rate they’re going to run wild exactly as they please. But still..."
"What is it?"
"I understand what you mean, but couldn’t you do that part alone? I’ve never wanted this kind of life in the first place. I think humanity needs a more technology-restraining mindset, one that would make people recoil from such dreadful weapons and equipment before they ever make them. Because..."
"Martin Kendrick Lennox, there is no rest in invention. By that logic, if portal technology exists, then why put wheels on tanks and armored cars, or engines on fighters and attack helicopters?"
"Forget it. I never wanted this war. I’ve got no more wishes left to make anyway. I only want to enlighten the fools who try to step outside the standards I set, and make them realize that from now on, discovery is invention. I’m talking about the great works my son and daughter produced—things that human knowledge and wisdom couldn’t even begin to imagine. And I am their father and their maker. I will leave behind to the future the cultural genes carrying my name and my will. How much life I have left doesn’t matter! Well then, will you follow me, all of you?"
"Of course!"
"I agree!"
"Their extraordinary abilities should be used to protect someone, not to slaughter, dominate, and rule over others!"
Of course Billis, Luis, and Clark agreed with that.
"No. I can’t follow that."
"Human beings aren’t that pathetic!"
"We’re going to rise on our own terms and make everyone look back at us."
"Those who couldn’t do it will die having sinned against us!"
"Revenge is bad!"
"That’s only true for someone like you, who has no need for it!"
"You think you’re the only one suffering? I was bullied too! I can’t stand those bastards living well and prospering as if nothing happened! But at least they should be given time to feel guilty! Jeracle and Cleas are not human beings who can simply transcend the past, the present, and the future and walk away from it all. Only when they truly learn to give up on everything will they offer us a sincere apology when they die! People will no longer be able to understand them unless they regard them as gods, and all they’ll do is flail in front of them, trying to prove their worth, only to discover that the things they did to me have come back on them like a boomerang!"
"They don’t even deserve the luxury of reflection! Those bastards have already lost their right to live! If you dare to give them a chance at repentance, then you’re next on the list to be eliminated! Of course, unlike some people, we don’t intend to repay kindness with betrayal, so don’t worry. You flinched just now too, didn’t you? That’s because your body instinctively reacted when you realized that repentance is a luxury unwarranted by an ungrateful enemy! Don’t try to deny what we’re saying by force. It’s the truth!"
Well, well. They’re fighting like dogs. I dragged them around for five years, and after we smashed the Strange Zombie stronghold on Retrek, they’ve become even less visible to the eye. At first it was a relationship of benefactor and beneficiaries, but now it has become a conflict over a difference in perspective so profound it matters more than their lives. I can’t kill them, and for now I’ll have to leave them be. If I forced them to the Minister, I’d get beaten to death by both sides on the way there; if I killed them all here, then what I saved would mean nothing. Killing them would be easy, but it isn’t my job. Besides, anti-Western extremists, underworld bosses, and business magnates will all start building their own power blocs soon enough, and NPL still exists, so I need more information.
Jeracle side— Retrek, same time.
I waited on this planet for Ansoloc White’s arrival, all the while admiring the energy field the Strange Zombies had created and thinking.
Ansoloc White, you handled it well. The Strange Zombies’ original stronghold—the place where they conducted their rites—had been in this planet’s mantle, but because I discovered it, they had hurriedly formed a temporary site on AD-1086 and the surrounding border regions. Still, there was one flaw: Ansoloc White had not realized any more than that. From his perspective, it had merely seemed as though the Strange Zombies were extending their influence. Even after confirming that there was no shielding and that nothing was spreading further, he never once found the situation suspicious. He is not cold. He is too ardent. And yet the Strange Zombies are not foolish beings. Their technology is not something human knowledge can simply comprehend. Unlike human technology, which can be used without fully understanding its exact principles, theirs works by exploiting their own nature to the fullest and building energy fields through Mantra—energy that governs the self among themselves. That was the secret of the Strange Zombies’ hive mind. Those with self were controlled through one system; those without self were used only through precisely designated Mantra, to run machinery or enhance their vitality and offensive capacity.
In other words, they have formed a kind of primitive religion that fuses animism, shamanism, and totemism, yet makes it function as if it were Mantra itself—something real, something physical, something that can exert tangible force. If self-aware individuals, following animism, use their faith to manipulate the mindless masses of Strange matter, then according to shamanism they become the cult leaders—the rulers’ children—who take command in the field. According to totemism, self-aware beings are born, and the more unusual the being that emerges, the more readily it becomes an object of worship. Of course, because theirs is an elective monarchy, their system is fundamentally based on leadership with only the faintest trace of rank, so there is no concept of nobility at all. Once a ruler is chosen, he is revered as an absolute monarch with power unchallenged until death. And when he dies, they do not simply elevate one of the cult leaders to the throne; instead, they select whichever figure seems most majestic in their eyes and formally enthrone him by fashioning a totem of the cult leaders they themselves desire. Once elected, that totem becomes their emblem, and must be guarded with utmost reverence. Beyond that, it also serves to carry newly created Mantra, so they must learn to master and apply it as well. That means the value of a single totem outweighs their own lives. If they fail to protect it, their selves are erased and they are reduced once more to ordinary Strange Zombies, fit to be repurposed as another source of Mantra. Even if they are incompetent, they are still made of Strange matter, so losing them means their very essence—and their efficiency—shrinks all the same. That is because they do not build machines by precisely assembling structures and principles so they can operate with precision; they make them work purely through Mantra. Their operating conditions therefore remain fixed, and to activate them they must always chant a spell or perform the corresponding action. Compared to the concepts we created—let alone the scientific framework—such as ether, used to handle the energy state of superpowers, and phlogiston, used to handle mass states, while regulating emotion and inventing rational ways to deploy psychic power, preserving those systems through sheer mental force and then ending the process at the exact moment preservation must cease, their method is far more primitive and crude.
How ironic. They insist that only those with self should control those without, while at the same time treating it as a virtue to arbitrarily brand and govern the unworthy. They say that self-aware beings deserve respect, yet they also prize an energy system like Mantra more than self-aware beings themselves because of its efficiency—then forbid the object of that reverence from ever gaining self, and if it questions an order, they seek not merely to suppress its self but to erase consciousness altogether. In the end, all one must determine is this: is it energy indispensable to life, development, war, and expansion—or is it merely the thing that uses that energy?
By the time I finished analyzing that, a portal finally opened and a mercenary unit led by Ansoloc White emerged.
"I was waiting."
"Ah, Minister, you were already here?"
"The first stronghold of the Strange Zombies was this very place. The records you discovered were not the trail to a new destination, but merely the remains left behind when they fled in haste."
"Ah, I see..."
"And perhaps we may even call it fortunate. Look at this."
I opened a display and showed him the traces of the rites the Strange Zombies had performed. More than that, their ritual products had opened portals, creating seams through which they could connect entire planets and engage in covert dealings, while also using them as subspace depots to store all the heavy equipment needed for battle.
"My God... just how terrifying a thing did they make here..."
"It is certainly not psychic power. Look carefully. If you inspect the countless incantations they chanted to use even one spell, the patterns they drew, and the machines they created, you can see that for yourself."
"I see. So rather than defining psychic power separately, this is just an energy source they use in everyday life."
"Exactly. In other words, they do operate heavy equipment. They simply have to secure that energy—called Mantra—in order to manufacture and move it in the first place. Without it, they are left to rely on their own physical capabilities, or sacrifice their own bodies to provide power. The reason they could not properly respond to your ambush was that the fabric of space-time warped from the rampage of psychic power, their equipment broke down in the middle, and the whole lot exploded."
"That explains why, even after being ambushed, they still charged in with their bare bodies and no equipment. In a sense, our ether and their Mantra are similar concepts. Still, if this was originally their stronghold, why did they abandon it and leave? Were they simply driven out by another nation’s army?"
"Yes. The odds are very high. They all share the same unwavering purpose: to seize more territory. So it would not be strange at all for them to strike preemptively at the Strange Zombies, who would otherwise contaminate that territory. Of course, if they had gone in while the rites were still underway and the power was functioning, it could have been dangerous. But the attack succeeded before that happened."
"I see. Then we’ll be on our way back."
"Yes. I’m truly grateful that you, as the center of gravity for the U.N. forces, are here. The U.S. military is already under my jurisdiction."
"Thank you."
After seeing Ansoloc White off, I immediately began identifying the true identities of the attackers.
Father and his friends are probably still being well looked after by Phineas... though he has chosen the road to eternal ruin. Even if he never said it directly, he was effectively saying that the reason Cleas and I never control people’s consciousness through hormones is because we find such a thing fundamentally unacceptable. At the very least, his defiance is worthy of praise in the sense that he conquered his own nature enough to realize that things which do not seem meaningful when done under a one-drop effect will probably not change much no matter how hard one tries. But he chose that only for his own daily life. When it came to the great cause, to society on the macroscopic scale, and to the sublimity of individuals beyond humanity as a whole, he succumbed to his nature and surrendered. That, he said, was as far as he could go. Yet a human being is not judged only by whether they are ambitious or socially active enough to do things well and produce results. One may also have a firm sense of self. For example, even in a state system, the nation runs according to the will of the supreme leader, while the ministers below exert their own influence. And the philosophy of the great thinker Friedrich Nietzsche can also be read that way: that the Übermensch is meant to keep overcoming everything without cease, to value that struggle, and to become a being capable of boldly acknowledging even the most dreadful life and moving forward. Which is another way of saying that, for everyone, there may one day be a hero who conquers all suffering and saves the world—so life and hope must never be abandoned. That becomes even clearer when one remembers that Nietzsche and Zarathustra themselves never regarded themselves as Übermensch. So it’s likely them. Phineas Maxwell Angelique... a tragic scientist and undertaker who was killed by a Strange Zombie while researching parallel universes... and the being who became, through a kind of dimensional paradox, the law of energy conservation itself by using the quantum fluctuations between those realms through pair creation and pair annihilation. If scientists were still in their right minds, they could uncover that fact, but on the surface it would only look like some kind of magic blatantly violating conservation of energy, and they would be left dumbfounded. Especially if one considers how absurd it is to ask scientists to distinguish between Superpower and Magic in the first place.
So for now, I decided to keep supporting from the rear so that as many people as possible could come on their own, while occasionally gathering the information Phineas Maxwell Angelique had left behind. At the same time, I would protect the camp and move forward with psychological warfare, satisfying their needs and desires as well. In any case, the infrastructure simply could not support endless expansion, so the best course was to ensure that Mephauric would one day become a holy sanctuary.