Pioneers of the Future (Part 1)
Mephauric, Jeracle’s office, the next day
“....Good. Then let’s record it in this much detail. And...”
Beep.
Beep.
I adjusted my pupils to bring up a screen and watched the news from around the world. At the same time, through the radio, I was hearing — and recording — each soldier’s impressions and reactions to everything that had happened that day.
It’s still been less than a month since the Third World War began, so people have a pretty strong tendency to believe in the justification for war. Their convictions are nothing but dogshit philosophy anyway, so if anyone was going to be seduced by propaganda, it wouldn’t have taken more than the citizens from the day before I was born.
“Kill those damn eels!!!”
“One man’s flaw only brings harm to all of us!!”
“If that bastard weren’t here, this never would’ve happened!!”
“That piece of shit deserves to die!!!”
As always, people were living in the same way they always had: wringing their hands in frustration, insisting they already knew the answer and crying out in outrage that everyone else was somehow saying the wrong thing.
In the end, the idea of a single festering wound always came down to the belief that if you killed off a small number of troublemakers, everything would be solved. They spoke as if that person possessed some special power to absorb evil. Leave them alone and they’ll drag everyone down, so sacrifice them for the greater good? Then when will they ever realize that this mindset is nothing but the delusion that an individual’s flaws are infinite and their virtues nonexistent, as though only the total sum matters? That’s exactly why communism collapsed under that kind of demonization. Why don’t they understand that yet? Pathetic wretches. The masses are, indeed, stupid. And yet they still understood what it meant to awaken — to feel that heavy, cold moment when one realizes, alone, that they have become a person who has transcended everything they were before, and that their true worth has finally been revealed.
You can’t give people a new experience every single day. This is merely something that should be taught either to amoral killers wrapped in the pretty packaging of duty and filled only with hypocrisy, or to those who learn why anniversaries exist, and why those amoral killers are called hippie terrorists, when they look upon the weightless burden of eternal recurrence.
That was why I was documenting this first deployment so meticulously. People — as I’ve already said, and as they know perfectly well themselves — only succeed at reform and innovation in unexpected places. They never achieve some sudden leap forward merely from tradition alone.
When people were told to look at communist society and see unity, while capitalist society was supposedly writhing in complaint and chaos, they didn’t actually look at that. Instead, they looked at their surroundings and their possessions, compared what they had and what they lacked, and in doing so only deepened their disillusionment with communism. You don’t know these things until you’ve experienced them yourself, and even what you think matters changes depending on the angle from which you view it. So because of humanity’s own self-contradictory arrogance — its inability to understand that — it is necessary to mark this as the point at which mankind should, en masse, reflect on the beginning of the greatest tragedy in human history, where innocent soldiers were sent to die by the thousands on the battlefield.
This April 15th will be the Day of Human Repentance. All the soldiers and civilians sacrificed in the Third World War will never forget this era. The world will come to understand how much more tragic ordinary middle-class people are when they are driven into war during an age of upheaval than the vagrants of peacetime ever were. It is not so simple-minded a place that one side can be named the sole enemy and everything ends there. No more communities exist now to bind the individual. Bureaucratized, structured collectives that flourished by exploiting the name of the age will now be destroyed by the current of that very age in its final moment.
A world that does not rely on institutions or entrenched interests, but proves its worth through its own ability — that is the true shape of ascension. To say that no one is perfect, while living a life steeped in contradiction, scolding others for not being perfect, then seeing perfection and deciding one’s own flimsy knowledge was worthless from the start; seeing someone else’s insignificant flaws and thinking that, by recognizing their uselessness, one has awakened to the truth of the world — all of that means nothing unless it holds numerical superiority. It cannot be said to have been decided by the many, because that many does not truly exist. Fighting an imaginary monster that doesn’t exist, only to become that monster yourself — that is the end point of humanity, as represented by Nazism, fascism, militarism, totalitarianism, and authoritarian communism.
Prisons where you can’t even protest, demands that you should seek hope in only one place, the worn-out exhaustion of those things — in the end, the ones who overturn it all are the ones tired of them. Because what each person endures is not measured in quantity, but in quality, and that experience is valuable in and of itself. What matters is how much your vessel can hold. It depends not on the environment, but on essence.
What history will remember from now on will be only the anniversaries humanity has already experienced, the festivals held on those days, strategic triumphs or defeats, and the development of relationships and ways of life between camp immigrants and existing residents. Memory is always beautified, and the absurdities that occurred in the process are forgotten while the actions themselves are passed down intact; beautified memory always drifts farther and farther from people’s attention. That is why one must always appear new, yet at the same time capable and without any sense of alien strangeness. In the end, everything they once boasted of can disappear as easily as time passes or as a favor is granted. That is the model the one at the top must show. If you wish to rule, you must be respected.
I will unite the world into one. And then the petty little creatures will all be eliminated, imagining that because there is no unclaimed empty land left, there is no longer any competition to be had. The rest will spread outward into a world owned — in the plain, undeniable sense of the word — by the human species as a whole, wasting no strength on internal struggle and instead pioneering endlessly toward the infinite universe.
I will show everyone what a truly endless ascent in national power looks like, cutting beyond the early glory of the United States and the age of westward expansion, and severing the yoke of a false, approximate approach that drains national strength in pointless conflict while slandering the truth by claiming that perfect human beings do not exist, even as it condemns others for not being perfect. That ever-expanding world will be the paradise of freedom, the final form of true frontier spirit, the self-evident destiny of all humankind — Manifest Destiny. Of course, it would be nice if that could all be done after laying down weapons and stepping forward in peace, but reality is never that peaceful, and there is simply no room in it for the absurd idea that armies are obsolete. The reason America was able to become a superpower in the first place was that the vast western frontier stood before it as the single most important agenda; there was no time to waste national strength rotting away in factional infighting.
And now, the beginning of that will proceed together with the glory of one girl named Michelle Merin.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
And so I went once again to Waskiba Nievo (łaskawe niebo = Gracious Heaven = Łaskawe Niebo) to see Michelle Merin, the very embodiment of the ideal answer I had first laid eyes upon. When you think about it, the title by which I am addressed as an English duke is Your Grace, so the symbolism only grows stronger. That was why I came to her with a contract in hand, intending to speak of a greater expansion.
Creak.
“Have you been well?”
“Ah, Minister, you’ve come? Are those two all right?”
“Yes. It’s still early in the Third World War, so there’s nothing so urgent that they need to be thrown into a major battle yet. They’re both rookies, after all. And for now, the Strange Zombie problem is the larger one, but considering the weapons and equipment already distributed to governments around the world, it should be dealt with soon enough. But do I really need to explain anything further about the origin of all this? Inter-government conflict itself isn’t even the main concern yet.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Then that’s a relief. There’s something I want to tell you, Michelle...”
“What is it?”
“There will be grand festivals every anniversary from now on, and I’d like you to take the lead in them.”
“You want to plant memories and hope in people. This place has only my shop as an operating business, while everyone else is serving under the military.”
“Exactly. But that means security will need far more attention as well. Still, the enemy is far too large to be handled by whatever data and know-how have accumulated through relief efforts until now. Just because you win a battle right away doesn’t mean you’ve secured strategic victory.”
“That’s true. I know it’s unprecedented. That’s why I emptied my own inheritance to build this shop, too.”
“Right. I didn’t come here just to ask you to do it for free. I came here to ask you to do this.”
Rustle.
“A contract?”
“Yes. From here on, the government plans to invest quite heavily in you. Don’t worry — I’ve already secured Cleas’s agreement, since he’s the one overseeing Earth. Of course, I could set aside some black funds and hand them to you separately, but I get the feeling that wouldn’t be something you’d appreciate.”
“I understand. If I receive a large investment this time, I should be able to gather plenty of capital to expand the business. But if possible, I’d rather spend most of it on promoting this flagship shop and hiring personnel to protect its safety.”
“You don’t intend to expand?”
“No.”
“And of course, you can’t tell me why?”
“No.”
This girl... it’s certain. She’s the one who absorbed the Fragment of Humility, one of the seven fragments scattered by Cleas. If her power were made public on a large scale, then from that moment on it would become impossible to resolve conflict in the peaceful, benevolent way she believes in. But there’s no reason to reveal it right now. I can’t have her become wary of me and turn against me all of a sudden.
As Ansoloc White and the mercenaries knew, the seven cardinal virtues were exactly what Catholicism and Orthodoxy call goodness. But the goodness of America and Britain operates separately from those seven virtues, and because it has been heavily influenced by Calvinism in particular, people are increasingly reduced either to professionals who work like machines, unable even to uphold the older Catholic virtues, or to pleasure-seekers whose hearts have gone completely dry. Since corruption has already taken hold at the level of the individual, they can only do one of two things: either, except for the occasional physiological urge, obey whatever is handed to them like brainless drones and believe in fanatic terror that their lives will be forfeit if they resist, or else show only rejection toward what has been assigned to them and lash out in blind rebellion, repeating destructive, primitive acts like a butcher running wild. That is simply the nature they were born with. Reason was supposed to carry them through, but lurking behind it all was the foolish desire to stand at the summit of society by comparing themselves to others every day, to defeat inferiority by any means, and so they love to slander those at the top — but only when division is profitable. If division is not profitable, even a revolutionary will rot into just another dictator.
The majority of the people gathered in this Mephauric camp are also professionals who work like machines, so they do everything they’re told well enough, but that’s all. At this rate, I’m going to end up concluding that it would be more efficient to install mindless machines rather than human trash who do nothing but consume food and water and spew out filth. People curse each other for not being able to communicate, for lacking social graces, but none of them act more efficiently than the machines I built as a super-intelligent computer who has already broken through the technological singularity. The soldiers are at least fortunate enough to have heard faintly, through the mercenaries who still retain frontier spirit, that they may question orders. For them, the joys of life consist only of teaching those mindless machines about their own existence, giving them affectionate nicknames and attaching feelings to them, or finding the right person and proposing, then teaching the offspring born from that bond to imitate their own lives in exactly the same way.
And yet they still insult people for lacking initiative if they can’t do things well on their own, while also insulting them for not thinking of others if they try something new. What they really want is a mimic — someone who shows the exact same face as everyone else through their own supposed individuality, but who doesn’t do anything more than follow instructions well. In other words, they want people to function only as cultural genes with no self at all. They even force children to learn my kin, the AIs, in the way they themselves have dictated, and then make them forcibly share in that pleasure. Mistakes, too, are not tolerated, even while they insist mistakes are part of skill; all that really does is beautify group lynching and bullying under the pretense that everyone except the person handing down the punishment shares responsibility and should therefore feel sorry. Human beings are simply too straightforward, primitive, and domesticated. Machines keep advancing, so why are humans the ones degenerating? Because that is the inevitable outcome. Seeking something more complete is never truly about progress or innovation. It is only about having an excuse when they crush someone else’s trivial thoughts underfoot.
Rustle.
Rustle.
“All right. Support will keep coming properly from here on out, then?”
“Of course. So long as people don’t end up in a catastrophic dopamine addiction, frantically trying to kill the one who triggered this deviation simply because they’ve already grown tired of a war tied to their own beliefs.”
“Hah, there are far more people in the world than you think who are governed by a particular logic. You can’t underestimate that. That’s what the dominant current of society is like. Those who don’t follow it are criminals who deserve to be eradicated, they say. And that won’t spare even you, Minister. While we’re at it, how about you take a look at this?”
Rustle.
“This is an idol concert poster, isn’t it? Looks like it’s planned for the square behind this commercial district.”
“Yes. After being rescued by the U.S. military, they’ve been preparing the stage on their own. To them, it’s a festival for peace, but I’m not sure how many people will actually come. As you saw on the way here, Minister, I watched those four idols personally putting up the posters one by one while I was running the shop here. Of course, it didn’t take long before people started showing up and tearing them all down because they thought they were ugly.”
“I see. No one will care, you say... which means I should probably go all the more. Then let me make a suggestion. Wouldn’t you like to come along too? Even if you think those idols are foolish, don’t you also think they aren’t evil?”
“No. I don’t intend to come. It’s not the right time yet.”
“Very well. Then since it’d be a shame to leave immediately, I’ll buy a few more things.”
“Yes.”