The Approaching Threat (Part 2)
Thus, I was finally able to identify one possible lead.
Tomorrow, on January 1st by Earth time—the day of the New Year celebration—I need to keep my eyes on the soldiers assigned to the front line. There’s a risk they could be colluding with the enemy outside, and Michelle has only just returned to her old bakery after growing even stronger from her battle with Philias, so she may well have encountered them too. That makes those soldiers all the more suspicious. Of course, it’s hard to imagine anyone betraying the side that currently holds the upper hand and offers the greatest measure of safety, especially when they have every right to decide whether or not to use their weapons through ID locks. But traitors aren’t always nobodies; sometimes even elite athletes get pulled into match-fixing for money that barely amounts to a quarter of their annual salary. And anyway, this is the Third World War, except now it’s being fought on a cosmic scale. At a time when people have already been reduced to machine-like specialists or emotionally starved hedonists, it’s a mistake to expect anyone to remain sane. Even if they’re Lennox family mercenaries with nanocripplers in their bodies, capable of reacting to an enemy’s genes and chewing through heart cells until the target dies instantly.
So it was that at 11 p.m. that night, I went out. The very fact that this camp was crowded in the first place meant that, nine times out of ten, its inhabitants were either remnants of national armies that had promised safety, prosperity, and progress through the extermination of Strange Zombies and the conquest of space, or else migrants and settlers. That left them entirely dependent on rations. And with the additional fact that I was the son of the one who had scattered Strange Zombies across space, no matter what I felt, I couldn’t help wanting to meet them.
What’s more, because the Lennox family’s financial power was already supplemented by a great many investors and revenue sources from Earth, the camp’s economy itself could continue to run without much trouble as long as the stability of the camp wasn’t called into question and the investors didn’t stop coming. Humanity prides itself on efficiency above all else, yet its fundamental flaw is that it mistakes emotion for reason; in the end, all that leads to is scapegoating and an extremist urge to identify oneself with the collective. Once that happens, one has no choice but to define the source of the problem and keep turning it over seriously, again and again.
That was why, if one had even a minimal awareness of such flaws, it was best to have people surrounded and watched closely by the mercenaries who used nanocripplers. I had already warned the soldiers yesterday, but I couldn’t possibly tell every single person who wandered around in groups, so watching them like this and controlling the crowds they formed unconsciously was the most appropriate response.
And so I headed for Waskiba Nievo. Under the current circumstances, this was exactly the time she’d have returned, so she wouldn’t be surprised to see me. Besides, it was certain she possessed the Fragment of Humility, so once I sensed that, tracing only its residue would make it easy enough to pinpoint her location.
Step.
Step.
Step.
Creeeeak.
"Hello, Michelle Merin."
"Oh, Minister. You’re here?"
"Yes. Happy New Year in advance. I hadn’t even said there was going to be an event, but because of the last Christmas celebration, everyone gathered in the square. Still, I thought you’d be here."
"Yes. I figured you wouldn’t be in the square anyway, Minister. Ah, and I couldn’t give it to you at Christmas, but I prepared a separate New Year’s gift for you this time."
She held out a round, donut-like badge in front of me, made in purple. Judging by the circumstances, it was a logo badge.
"Hm. A gift for a regular customer? Naturally, I like it."
"Then I suppose I should give one to regular customers every time."
"I know exactly what you’re trying to do, Michelle.... Do I really look like the sort of person who would get carried away and ignore profit, consumer relations, and everything else just to obsess over personal attachments?"
"Yes! Look at this. I took the photo near the commercial district."
"No, wait, this picture is...."
"See? I told you you’d get excited! And isn’t this getting a little incoherent?"
"This is a truly serious matter. Do you know where they went? With Michelle’s abilities, if she happened to find them during an accidental patrol, memorize the scene with her perfect recall, and then use a V.E.L.C.P.-assisted space-time coordinate shift toward the photograph, it would be nothing for her. And if she simply stayed here and then went out to the scene later, that would make perfect sense too. But in practical terms, she couldn’t even explain exactly what that power was, so if she said anything about it she’d only be treated like a weirdo. Better to claim she just got lucky and happened to find the place through the photograph. At the same time, wanting to protect me is, in the end, also a desire to keep what she wants to protect. Rather than attaching grand meaning to it, she would probably convince herself that it was just a trivial matter and not because I mattered to her. Just like how, if you suddenly commit violence against a minister or someone even higher in rank, you instantly become a terrorist."
"Yes. In return, please take me with you secretly too. I don’t want him to discover my ability. But if I’m going to stop this incident, then when things turn dangerous, my help will be absolutely necessary to keep him safe. Especially if we run into that grim reaper or those Strange Zombies—there’d be no answer at all. Of course, I don’t think I should be using this power for the sake of one person alone, but on the other hand, once word gets out, greedy people may start spreading nonsense that my power can’t be used whenever I want, or that it consumes an enormous amount of stamina. I need to make proper use of that while also making sure no one can keep prying into it. Like ensuring that, whatever happens, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"All right. But no doing anything too dangerous."
So we hurried toward the place shown in the photo. Both of us could have moved there in an instant, but we didn’t even know how many enemies there were, and if our movements were detected in reverse, there was a risk the unit already lying in wait would launch an early assault while we were in transit. So, inevitably, we arrived by ordinary means rather than teleporting. That actually made things worse for them: if they were foolish enough to try to surround us or drive us into a pinpoint trap, it would amount to little more than suicide. Even if they drew weapons and launched a preemptive strike, all I had to do was lock their IDs and they’d be rendered helpless on the spot. And if I struck with a brainwave attack, the target’s brain would shut down immediately; if they resisted, their entire bloodstream would overload and their bodies would erupt in a state of extreme heat.
And so, on the field, it was only Michelle and me moving together. In any case, the soldiers’ primary duty was to protect the residents right now, and the soldiers who were supposed to be deployed to the front line were, in fact, the ones we had to suspect. In this situation, the only option was to go there ourselves and eliminate them.
***
Outskirts of the Camp
The outskirts of the camp had not yet been fully developed. For now, the main purpose was simply to accommodate people inside the camp, which meant they needed some sort of contrast—some place that would emphasize, as starkly as possible, that they themselves were being treated as something special. In other words, they had to be shown why the world outside was dangerous.
They would get to experience Newcomb’s paradox in the middle of the battlefield exactly as I had planned. The stronger the sense of unity, the deeper one’s respect for the other side becomes, and in the end that makes it impossible to judge the present situation properly when important decisions have to be made, because all one can remember is how well one treated others in the past. I would sneer at that and call it humanity’s stupidity. They mock the suffering as slaves chained to the past, yet they themselves are trapped by a past obsessed only with prosperity, the sort of people who complained and started trouble only when division was profitable, and now spew the same nonsense while truly being devoured by the past—those who cling to the values of that era so completely they’ve abandoned even their own selves. Compared to that, human beings are hideous and vile beyond comparison.
That is because human anger is stronger than any obsession; it always grows in proportion to the betrayal felt toward someone deeply trusted, someone who seemed like one’s own kind, and it takes that betrayal as its root. This does not apply only to close relationships, but universally to the notion of human rights at the level of species and beyond. Which is why, when someone without that sense of kinship commits an act, people simply shrug it off as something that happens.
Swish.
"Heh-heh-heh, what a wide-open place this is. This is so easy it’s actually boring!"
"Seriously, they leave their defenses this sloppy every holiday? Let’s take everything! If there are people here, or if there aren’t, kill everyone we can see!"
"We’re psychics too, after all! These days, if you’ve got powers, people treat you like fucking royalty...."
"Exactly, exactly. We can break people’s bones and muscles with just a flick of a finger! And all according to fixed laws of physics, too!"
At that, Michelle briefly frowned. For her, who possessed a power immeasurably stronger than those two criminals and used it based on hope and humility, the very act of using that power was already an expression of her will that transcended physical law. Yet they were treating it as though it were magic—as if it were a second set of physical laws existing in this world—and using that as justification for their evil acts.
That was precisely why psychic abilities, being unique to each individual, could not be copied just because someone else followed the same conditions, so there was no reason to fear imitation. But if one treated them as magic, then the result would be something achieved through procedure, which meant that with enough effort anyone could follow it. Given the malignity of those people, the odds were one hundred percent that, once they had power and position, they would kick away the ladder, suppress everyone else, and start a riot just to monopolize everything forever. That was the common disease of the small-minded so-called normal people who liked to call themselves practical and easygoing despite low self-esteem: instead of strengthening their own advantages or compensating for their own shortcomings, they poured every ounce of their energy into belittling the strengths of others and amplifying their flaws, because in truth they believed that was the only thing they were capable of doing. And they were so narrow-minded that they thought everyone else was exactly like them and ought to be like them as well, refusing to acknowledge any difference in style; at the same time, they believed they alone should be judged only by their intentions rather than the results or processes of their actions, so every criticism was treated as criticism of their intentions. And even after all that, they still insisted they always acted rationally. It was hardly surprising, really—when all they could do was believe they were never wrong, it meant they had never once doubted themselves in their lives.
And that was nothing less than the social virtue of humanity before the Third World War—and the truth of the mentality humanity still carries to this day. To a humanity broken even more thoroughly after that, with no sense of vocation, no ambition, no creativity, no specialness, no individuality—only specialists who work like machines, or emotionally starved hedonists who have mistaken the ability to adapt for the only path to success—there is practically no hope left. In plain terms, the class struggle Marx spoke of between capitalists and workers has already disappeared.
"This is terrible. What do we do?"
"Calm down. Based on the signals they’re carrying, they haven’t reported this to anyone outside yet. We need to take both of them out before they scatter."
"Huh? Why not take them down one by one?"
"If one of us takes out a single target, the other might betray his comrade and run. Their ordinary lives are ordinary only because they believe themselves to be ordinary and normal. The moment they decide that isn’t the case, they’ll start spouting self-justifications about how they had no choice and choose betrayal without the slightest hesitation."
"Whatever they do, it just comes down to the same thing: they think they’re smarter and superior, so they have to become the majority and lead the world. And the reason is, in the end, that everyone exists inside society, so no value beyond it should be allowed to exist at all. And yet if they want to rise, they want everyone to use themselves as a role model, while the chance that they would ever admit that only those who know their place and think about social stability are wise is exactly zero percent."
"By the way, when does the event end?"
"Well, if people start shouting, I guess that means it’s over. There’s no way they’d finish the ceremony without some formal closing. Besides, New Year’s is almost here, and right now it’s 11:50 p.m. Who would dare ignore the exact moment the new year begins?"
"Well, yes. Even if they could ignore it, that would just mean they’re absorbed in something more important than that."
I could tell their behavior fit Newcomb’s paradox exactly.
So, fortunately, this means they won’t choose the optimal option of leaving immediately after being satisfied with the intelligence and supplies they’ve looted. That leaves only two possibilities: either they keep looting information and goods until they hear the cheers, then try to escape together at once; or they divide the labor, with one keeping watch while the other continues the theft, and once the cheering starts, they separate and rendezvous elsewhere. Either way, they’re already aware they might be discovered. But at the same time, the fact that they’ll flee the instant they hear the noise without looking back means that if I can make even one of them turn around in panic, I can stop them from reacting any further and shoot them down. There are only two of them in sight, but even if there are more, there’s no reason in the world to waste my psychic power killing a handful of humans. That’s why I made this pistol in the first place.
"Michelle, I’ll move ahead and set up an ambush. When I arrive at this terminal, I’ll send you a signal. Once you get it, shout from behind them. I’ll kill them both while they turn around. After that, we’ll track down the rest of the enemies by following the last direction their eyes moved in as they worried about their comrade’s death, and wipe them all out."
"Yes, Minister."
Five minutes later.
"There, walking so casually. They’re coming out of that building now. Now!"
"Thief!!"
"Huh?!"
"Gah!!"
Fwoosh.
Fwoosh.
The instant they panicked and turned toward the direction from which Michelle’s voice had come, I opened fire from directly in front of them with my Integrity automatic pistol, fitted with a suppressor, a dot-sight scope mounted on the upper rail, and a flash attachment, firing 0.984-inch high-frequency incendiary armor-piercing rounds of 19.685 inches in diameter, each round weighing 39.68 pounds and loaded into a 60-round extended magazine. I struck both of their legs and split them apart.
CRACK-KSSSSSSSH.
Thud.
"Aaaaaaahhh!!!!"
"My... my legs!!!!!"
The blood pouring endlessly from their legs made it impossible for them to endure the pain, and their hands shot out toward somewhere—anywhere. Even so, the mechanical energy carried by my bullets, along with their thermal pressure alone, was enough to physically crush their entire bodies, burn them blue, and purify them as they were destroyed.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I fired at the direction in which those hands were reaching.
Fwoosh.
Crack.
"Aaaaaargh!!!!"
Fwoosh.
Fwoosh.
Fwoosh.
Even when the shots only grazed their arms, the shockwave alone was enough to crush their ribs and hearts without trouble. On top of that, I was standing only in front of them, and they had no idea where the gunfire had come from, much less that the enemy they were fighting was me. So although they’d been dragged into an unexpected firefight, it was still likely that, based on their own common sense, they wouldn’t run like they had during the raid on the conference hall last time, but instead would stay and fight, thinking this was manageable.
Fwoosh.
"Damn it, where the hell is the ambush coming from?"
"We need to find the civilian who shouted that a thief appeared a moment ago, fast...."
"Damn it, but this is still better than last time!"
"Yeah. We’re better armed this time anyway, in case our comrades got hit like that before!"
But their expectations were spectacularly wrong. The high-frequency incendiary armor-piercing rounds I fired were, of course, reinforced by my psychic power, meaning that even a lowly infantryman’s heavy armor could be decomposed without difficulty—its molecular structure, and even its atomic structure, broken down cleanly by the rounds’ own high-frequency vibration.
Fwoosh.
"Aaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!"
Fwoosh.
Fwoosh.
Crack-KSSSSSSHHH.
And because they were clustered together, they were even more thoroughly swept up by my psychic power and killed in a chain of lightning strikes. In fact, the enemies I’d hit were a full 6,561.68 feet—2 kilometers—away from the outskirts area, so even if they could be seen with the naked eye, for them the shots were landing from a distance that didn’t even approach effective range, let alone maximum range, and they were being toyed with mercilessly. Since they were all packed together, it was impossible for them to even imagine which direction the chain lightning had come from, or which bullet had struck them to cause it in the first place. In the end, their final unconscious reflex was to reach out for their comrades in a plea for help, only to sacrifice every single one of them in a miserable heap.
The total number of bullets used to make this happen was only ten, including the two I used to sever the legs of the first two criminals, and it took only three seconds. That was why Michelle still hadn’t realized the Russian nationalists had been annihilated, until the heat of my bullets, as they burned them down into miserable blue flames and erased them completely, finally reached her.
Without taking the muzzle off the point where I’d begun the execution, I let the ten shell casings drop to the ground with a series of soft clinks, slowly raised the terminal in my left hand, and spoke into it.
"They’ve all been dealt with. But there’s no chance these bastards came here just to loot and gather intelligence. Their original purpose must have been something else."
"That’s likely. It seems there must have been some reason they were forced to stay here longer. And the fact that the camp’s center and even the outskirts are both this empty is strange no matter how you look at it. Someone must have influenced this. What sort of charity—no, what kind of charitable outcome would encourage collection by leaving the outskirts so completely empty of people?"
"Exactly. I didn’t expect everyone to have left their posts without a single exception. There must be some purpose behind it. Their response wasn’t mocking the lax defenses alone; they were mocking the emptiness of the camp’s outskirts."
So the two of us decided to investigate the matter further. The soldiers were, at least for now, absolutely committed to protecting the lives of the camp’s residents, and the soldiers who had still promised to stand watch in the outskirts were also suspects.
---