Democracy Out of This World
The order the Human Meat Factory squad leader gave his men was pitched as if the three of us were meant to hear every word.
"Don't kill the prisoners. Bring them in. They need to be in some condition to talk, at the very least. If they make a nuisance of themselves, though, killing them is fine. I'll leave that to your judgment in the field."
With that, the squad leader's car pulled away alone and vanished into the Human Meat Factory. The tire tracks it left behind were sharp on the ground, and the men following after went to the trouble of scattering every last trace.
Somehow or other, I've landed myself a way in.
I'd half expected this. The delivery had brought me out here anyway, and running into a Human Meat Factory search party was always possible. Entirely possible, if my luck was rotten. If I did meet them, I'd meant to show the Special Forces Commander's keepsake and try to talk — but a decent opening never came. They didn't seem inclined to kill us on the spot, so for the moment I meant to watch how things turned. Figuring out what they wanted came first.
"Hey, Tin Can. You take those three," one of the soldiers said.
"Hah? Why me?"
"You said that necklace might blow, didn't you? Blowing things up is your specialty, so you're the one who ought to stick with them."
"Explosives are my specialty, all right? Not blowing up."
"And the difference is?"
"Anyway, why do I have to be the one stuck to them? An explosives man standing there doesn't mean the bomb won't go off."
The two of them were starting to bicker. While they did, Dr. Myeong twisted and squirmed.
"Ugh... They tied this way too tight. I can't breathe."
First time as a prisoner. Of course it felt strange. The three of us had our wrists and torsos lashed, strung together in a line. A human subway, if ever there was one.
"If I asked them to loosen it just a little, think they'd do it? I really can barely get a breath."
"This is how tight you're supposed to tie someone."
"...Whose side are you on?"
They had arranged, on purpose, for a Postman to make a delivery all the way out here, and then they had taken us. A premeditated crime aimed at a civil servant from the start. So this really was the Human Meat Factory. Any other settlement wouldn't have dared even to think of it.
"Chunjang, reckon we'll make it back to Headquarters...?"
"Yes. We will. Without fail."
Elder Heo's color was worsening by the minute. I couldn't afford to rattle him any further.
A short while later, Tin Can, worn down by his comrades' nagging, trudged over to us.
"Pain in the ass... Why'd you have to show up wearing some useless necklace and make my life difficult?"
Why was he taking that up with me? And was this thing actually going to blow?
"Anyway, Postman, just trot along behind me. I'm only saying this in case, but don't get any ideas about running."
"I'll follow you, just as you want. In exchange, I have a condition."
"...A condition?"
"I'd like to know why you're kidnapping us."
"And you're sitting there calling that a negotiation?"
"I'll throw in a promise that I absolutely won't run, free of charge. Dr. Myeong, Elder Heo, you're both agreed, aren't you?"
"Sure, fine. I'll promise."
"Yes, yes, I'll be generous!"
Tin Can scratched his head.
"What is wrong with these bastards..."
He wound the end of the rope around his own wrist and gave it a tug.
"Fine, whatever. If you come along quietly, that makes my life easier. You'll learn why you were taken soon enough anyway, and telling you early won't change a thing."
"Deal."
"Mind you, I don't know every last detail myself."
"Because blowing things up is your specialty, so the operation itself is beyond you?"
"I know plenty, I'll have you know."
They had confiscated Backscratcher, the shield, and the radio, but the Core and the other valuables were still on us. They were hauling us along with our torsos bound, yet they weren't exactly staging an atmosphere of terror. Unnecessary violence, they were holding in check. If that was the case, what they wanted from me was most likely cooperation. The question was cooperation with what.
"Anyway, I wish you two really had been a doctor and a Core appraiser."
At the start I'd introduced Dr. Myeong and Elder Heo as a father-and-daughter pair of con artists. Afterward I'd told them again that the Complex was driving out its desk staff, and not one of them believed me. Well, I wouldn't have believed it either. Then Tin Can said something that came out of nowhere.
"Things have been pretty touch-and-go for us lately, see. All because the savior hasn't shown up."
"The what?"
"The savior. You don't know the savior?"
"I asked why you kidnapped us, and this is the nonsense I get."
"I told you. It's all because the savior hasn't appeared."
Maybe I'd been a fool to expect anything. No. This one, at least, had some will to actually talk. Play along a little, and I might pull something useful out of him.
"Grandiose name for a person."
"Huh? It's not a name. I mean a real savior. Someone who's going to save us."
"A new religion, then?"
"What are you talking about? The savior we're waiting for is a human being. You've heard the saying, haven't you? 'An age of chaos calls forth a hero.' That sort of thing."
As far as I knew, what marked the Human Meat Factory was neither a savior nor a hero. Their peculiarity lay in how they made decisions. I'd be seeing it soon enough.
"Where in the world are you going to find a perfect settlement? If you absolutely insisted, then sure, ours is probably the closest thing to perfect there is — hehe! Even so, we've got a hole or two."
"And the savior is what fills them in?"
"It's about time one showed."
"Why not just say there was a prophecy that a savior would come?"
"You know your stuff."
So they had a charlatan of their own, cut from the same cloth as Wide Foot.
"Strictly speaking, it's fairer to call it a prediction than a prophecy. It came out of rational inference."
"And who did the inferring? The prophet?"
"The savior who came before."
Then there really was a Wide Foot among them. No doubt about it.
"You'll be meeting them yourself soon."
Tin Can. Not a scrap of substance in him.
Acknowledged as quality prisoners, we walked in single file, still bound in rope. Dr. Myeong directly behind me, Elder Heo at the very rear. Tied so we couldn't be separated, there was no danger of the distance opening up and the mission being processed as a failure.
...A prisoner, and I'm still worrying about the mission.
So this was what a work addiction looked like.
The closer we drew to the Human Meat Factory, the thicker a foul smell grew. Corpses. Across the open plain, what had looked like clothing flung carelessly here and there resolved, up close, into badly ruined bodies snagged in traps. They lay strewn in every direction.
"Urp..."
At the queasy sound I looked back. Dr. Myeong had her lower lip between her teeth, and she was shaking.
"Scared?"
"Of course I am... And I don't know where I'm supposed to put my eyes."
"Desk duty or not, you're a doctor. It's not as if you haven't lived around corpses."
"I thought I'd grown immune, but a body that's been thrown away feels different..."
It would. However awful a corpse may be, once someone gathers it up and brings it in to Headquarters or a settlement, it becomes a thing to mourn — something a person looks at, cries over, puts in the ground. You come to recognize it as sediment, one long life and the memories of those left behind, sunk down together in a tangle. A body left where it fell is different. Nothing more than excrement giving off a rotten smell. A life sprawled in the open that no one cares to look at, let alone mourn. A meaningless trace.
The fear that my own end might look like that.
Even so, if a fear like that can still take hold of you, you're fortunate. It means there's slack enough left in your mind to think past the moment of dying, when simply trying not to die right now already takes everything you've got.
"But you're here, so... we won't die, will we? Right?"
Tin Can, walking ahead, glanced back. I thought he was about to tell us to quit the chatter, but he turned forward again without a word. So a little talk was permitted. Almost enough to feel grateful — except this was only the usual soft touch. We were bound tight, soldiers spread in every direction, and there wasn't a thing resembling resistance that we could actually do. Put our heads together and talk all we liked; nothing would change. That was why they could afford to relax. They wanted cooperation, so they were merely pretending to extend us every courtesy.
"Why aren't you answering? You're making me anxious..."
"Well, if your luck's bad, you can die anytime. All of us could die together."
"..."
"The thing is, my luck needs to be a little good."
"I hope it is this time, too. I really do."
Dr. Myeong was one worry. Elder Heo was the greater one.
"How is Elder Heo?"
If something went wrong with him psychologically, he was the sort of man who could cause a genuine disaster. Dr. Myeong, though, needed less than three seconds to look him over.
"Perfectly calm... Am I the only coward here?"
There was no way Elder Heo was calm. He only looked it.
"I imagine you forgot, sir, what with how nervous you were."
"Ah... ahem! Right, that's it, that's the way of it! It's been an age since I came out into the wide world, so I'm tense, is all."
Elder Heo wanted to hide that he was ill. He was acting, pretending nothing was wrong. A fair number of people with dementia are aware of their own symptoms, so it was nothing especially unusual. Still, if he had the spare energy to put on an act, I could breathe a little easier.
"If my body's shaking, it's only a physiological reaction, so just ignore it."
The rope kept shivering down the line, which made ignoring it difficult.
"If you're scared, what about holding someone's hand?"
"A hand?"
Said to a fully grown adult, it might sound absurd. It is, however, an extremely effective method.
"Mm, then, well..."
Dr. Myeong tentatively put a hand forward.
"No. Not me. Behind you."
"Oh."
I had to think of Elder Heo as well, worn out from acting on top of a mind that wasn't whole.
"...Hold on."
"Eh?"
"I know it's unseemly. I do."
"Unseemly, between family? What nonsense..."
"And why do you keep saying one thing and then another?"
I didn't particularly check whether the two of them had actually taken each other's hands. My eyes were already fixed on the Human Meat Factory's wall, which had drawn up right in front of me, and I had no attention to spare for anything else. Live long enough and you see it all. To think I'd come this far.
"We have to search you one more time, so wait here a moment."
Tin Can stepped away, but the dozens of soldiers spread in every direction stayed where they were. They had the numbers, and the tension had gone out of them completely.
Take this one's gun, get behind that one...
I was tied, but it didn't look as if I couldn't fight if I had to. I couldn't say for certain that I'd win. It didn't feel as if I'd certainly lose, either.
But Dr. Myeong and Elder Heo are the problem.
The moment it became a fight, the two of them would be dead at once. Damn it. This is why alone is better. For now, watch.
"Were settlement walls always this tall...?"
It had been a long time since Dr. Myeong had been outside. She wouldn't have a feel for it.
"No. This one's unusually high."
Even I hadn't known it would be this high. The wall, shining silver, was made of some special alloy I couldn't identify. It would be easy to take it for the Human Meat Factory's astonishing technical skill, but in fact the most important facilities here had not been built by the settlers themselves. Dr. Myeong was looking at the single most representative of them.
"Just as I'd heard... So that's what it looks like."
The enormous Railgun standing at the center of the Human Meat Factory. Its peculiar shape had caught her attention and, for a little while, let her forget to be afraid.
"Quite different from the one at Headquarters, isn't it?"
"It is. You'd never think they were made in the same place."
This was the secret to how quickly they had been able to advance. Safety from air raids, of course — and no need to go to the trouble of building and maintaining defenses like a steel roof.
"That's No. 1, right?"
"Should be."
The Railgun No. 1 standing here was the prototype. According to the Old Man, it was the very first Railgun ever made. The guns in Yeouido, No. 2 through No. 14, had all been mass-produced for actual combat and looked identical to one another, but this one was built differently. And this place itself: the Human Meat Factory had originally been a Railgun production base. The smokestacks still belching black smoke were the remains of the factory that had stood here then. They made the parts on this ground, piece by piece, and sent them to Yeouido, where the guns were assembled on a wide open lot. After all thirteen Railguns stood tall, they began filling the spaces between them with other buildings. That is the New Government Complex as it stands now.
"Feels like a very long time, it does..."
"Have you been here before, Elder Heo?"
"I came last year, what's the fuss!"
Not a chance. Fifty years ago, at the very least.
"Is it the same as it was then?"
"Wondrous, how much it's changed in a single year... Feels like a good fifty years have gone by."
The Old Man says the first impression the Railgun stamped into his memory was a monstrosity. Everyone thought so at the beginning, he said, so Elder Heo had likely been the same.
"What do you make of it? That Railgun."
"A monstrosity!"
So he said. The reason people had hated it back then was obvious. Why waste taxes on something useless? They hadn't known it would prove this handy. That was before the collapse. The people who had filled this production base moved, one after another, down into the Geofront. The achievement of the Railgun had been, in effect, a ticket underground. Once everyone was gone and the place lay half abandoned, it became prey for raiders.
Up to there, I understand all of it.
One question remained. A Railgun by itself does not mean you can defend against an air raid. The Giant Rods appear without warning and fall at tremendous speed. By the time the eye finds one, it is already too late. Headquarters can predict the raids, and so they spin the Railguns up in advance. How was the Human Meat Factory able to do the same?
Passing the main gate did not immediately show us the inside of the settlement. What met us was a completely sealed isolation space. Even an uninvited guest who somehow got through the gate would be filtered here a second time. That was the structure of the place. The men stopped walking and began a round of congratulating themselves.
"Good work, all of you!"
The squad leader, who had arrived ahead of us, launched into a speech of the sort you could paste onto any operation and still have it make sense. The best of it, anyway, was the ending.
"Before we dismiss, then, we will evaluate this operation! Noncommissioned officers, a show of hands. If you judge the operation a success, raise your hands!"
Every hand went up.
Cheers followed.
"What are they doing?"
Of course Dr. Myeong wouldn't know. However famous a settlement's traditions may be, they are of no interest to the desk staff at Headquarters.
"The principle of majority rule."
"No, I know that much. They say the Geofront is a democracy too. But—"
"You want to say that whether an operation succeeded isn't the sort of question you settle by majority vote."
"Right. We succeeded at the kidnapping, so it's just a success, isn't it? Why decide that by a vote?"
Before her question had time to be answered, they went a step further.
"Squad Leader, sir, may I propose a show of hands as well?"
"By all means."
"The person of first merit in the success of today's operation is the Squad Leader! Those in favor, raise your hands!"
"Ohhh!"
"Agreed! Agreed, wholeheartedly!"
I could see the red of their eyes going muddy.
"...Does that make any sense? Set it up like that, and who wouldn't raise a hand?"
"Here, it does."
Hyper-Democracy.
Because this is that kind of place.