The Bomber
Of all places, there wasn't a soul here who could overhear a word. Even so, for whatever reason, Tofu kept her voice low and even.
"If it weren't for that, there'd be no reason to bother with something this annoying."
"You've got some nerve."
"What, are we getting close?"
"Well. The tiniest bit."
Tofu wore the expression of someone who already had the whole world.
"If I had wings, I could come out like this without a Postman's help."
"Wings or not, you still can't dodge a bullet."
"Are civil servants always this unromantic?"
"That's postman-phobia."
"Hmph."
Not that wings would be entirely useless.
"Someone with wings would take fewer hits, I'll give you that. You can move up and down, so three-dimensional evasive maneuvers—"
"Stop."
Tofu turned her eyes back to the moon.
If I told her about my particular hunger for the Subway, I could probably find common ground with her. That would be the easiest way. But my Subway wasn't something I could take out for a reason that small.
"How much time is left?"
"Five minutes."
"Went by fast."
As her brief outing drew to a close, Tofu began, carefully, to ease out a little of what she was holding inside. Only a fraction of it.
"Do you think it's possible for someone else to make your dream come true?"
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. If somebody else fulfilled my dream for me, I wonder if that would still count as the dream coming true."
Just the slightest peek of what she really meant. She'd watch how I took it, then decide whether anything deeper could come out. Playing along would have been the smart move. But.
"No. Having someone else do it for you is meaningless. I have to do it myself. That's what I think."
I had no interest in playing along with this one. Riding the Subway. Reaching the Geofront. Surpassing the Old Man. All of it—things I had to accomplish myself.
"Yeah. Figures..."
"Still, there are plenty of people who wish someone would do it for them."
"So they're all doing something meaningless?"
I thought so. I had no business deciding that for anyone else.
"Hard to say. Maybe you think about it after someone's already done it for you."
"You think it's meaningless, though."
"That's what I think. The job is different."
"The job?"
"Doing it for someone else is what a Postman does."
Tofu only stared at me, blank.
"Is there something that needs a Postman?"
All I had to do was my job.
"Right. I've decided."
A serious look I had never seen on her.
"Then maybe I'll ask you a favor."
Tofu had come outside the walls for the first time in a long while. There was no telling when she might get out again, and still she strode back toward Animal Farm as if the outside no longer held a single thing she wanted.
Back in the workshop, Clock-out Man was still asleep. Right. That was him helping.
Tofu held out a blueprint she had kept hidden. For a moment I thought the job might come easy, but one glance was enough. It wasn't the Subway.
"...An airplane?"
"Yeah. A bomber, to be exact."
A bomber. An aircraft that drops bombs. A relic of the old era, from the days when nations still went to war. They said one pass by a bomber formation turned the ground into a sea of fire, every airframe hauling a staggering load of ordnance. A weapon out of pure fantasy.
Reproducing a legend of the old era on ground already ruined, though—that was hopeless.
Going by the measurements on the sheet, it was nowhere near the bombers I knew from that age. Big enough for five or six bombs at most, the kind that might or might not bring down a single house. Still a threatening weapon, no question. You just couldn't call it cost-effective. With the resources it took to put one plane like this in the air, think how much else you could do.
"Well? Well? Well?"
"Well what."
"Isn't it amazing?"
"Amazing how."
It wasn't even a real machine. Just a drawing.
"Ugh, you are really killing the mood. I just showed you a huge secret. If it were me, I'd at least pretend to be impressed, out of basic courtesy. You can't even say 'Amazing!' or something?"
"Amazing."
"You don't have any friends."
"Amazing. Please."
The sight of the military putting machines in the sky had died out with the old era. Not a single department at Headquarters built airplanes. A craft that burned expensive fuel every time it flew simply wasn't worth the cost. Once, a plane that could ignore an enemy nation's ground defenses must have been a tremendous weapon. This was an age of every settlement for itself. Monsters and zombies poured out without end even inside your own borders; there was no margin left to covet another country's land. Launching aircraft to sweep monsters, zombies, or raiders didn't balance the books either, so planes had quietly fallen out of use.
No planes, and anti-aircraft guns had nothing left to do. Stripped of their purpose, the old era's guns had been packed off to the warehouses. Settlements like AAA had been able to ring their walls with them only because there were so many to spare. While the regular army still did things by the book, those people had asked why a weapon for knocking planes out of the sky couldn't be turned on human beings.
"I'm not building it here myself."
So this was what she had meant by having someone else fulfill a dream.
"The blueprint has to reach a place with the technology and the resources to actually finish a bomber."
"Can you send something like this outside while you're still a pet?"
"No. That's why I'm looking for another way."
"Another way?"
"Later! First—behold!"
A single small component.
"The most important part. The auto-navigation unit!"
Credit where it was due. The name did all the explaining.
"Whoever gets the blueprint has to build every other piece of the bomber themselves. This, they don't need to make. I'll send the one I've already built, along with the plans."
Auto-navigation. So—
"It flies to a set of coordinates and bombs the place on its own?"
"Oh. Not bad."
"But—"
"I know what you're about to say. That it's impossible."
"You can't build a function like that without wireless communication."
The outside world was a wreck, chewed over by the scars of air raid after air raid. The Giant Rods driven into the earth poured out jamming frequencies without end, and even the full stock of old-era technology couldn't push a wireless signal through. That was one reason Postmen were necessary. It was also why communication cores were prized—they made wireless contact possible even inside the jamming.
"Look at this and you'll get it."
Tofu eased her secret weapon open. The answer was inside.
"A shard of a communication core?"
"Ding-ding-ding."
A small shard. There wouldn't be much energy in it.
"So it can't come back. Getting there and attacking, though—that's no problem."
"Extravagant."
"Most places put up steel roofs against air raids. Why a bomber, of all things?"
There was a way past a steel roof.
"There's a pretty wide gap between the wall and the roof, right? The Giant Rods come straight down, so they can't slip around a roof. A plane flies level. It can slide through that gap and get inside."
An unmanned craft picking out an opening and infiltrating on its own would need something special.
"I mounted an infrared sensor. Took apart a scrapped scanner from a government complex and pulled it out of—"
The engineering could wait.
"So? Now that you've heard it? Think the Human Meat Factory guys would take a crack at building one?"
So that was where she wanted it sent.
"How do you send it?"
"I've actually got a plane ready, bombing and auto-nav both stripped out. Every pet pitched in, and we barely managed the one. It's hidden up on the Clock Tower."
So that was what all the racket on the Clock Tower had been for.
"You attach it to the plane and launch it?"
"Yep!"
"A blueprint like this suddenly dropping out of the sky would look extremely suspicious."
"Thought of that, too. When it flies tomorrow night, it won't look like this. We're painting it during the day. Dressing it up so it passes for military hardware."
Make it look like equipment the army had lost. Not a bad thought. An airplane was rare enough that people would only believe in one if they assumed Headquarters had built it, and military secrets getting out was hardly a recent development.
But wait.
"If you already have a plane, then you don't really have a dream that needs someone else to fulfill it."
"It has to be a bomber. And what we've got isn't one. We don't have anything like the spare means to make explosives, and with the masters around, even handling the stuff would draw eyes."
I had wondered why it had to be a bomber. There was a reason.
"Actually, there's one trick in the blueprint and the nav unit I'm sending."
"Hm?"
"The coordinate input is a fake. The target is already set, and it can never be changed."
No wonder it had seemed too high-tech. Enter whatever coordinates you like and it flies straight there—the sort of thing you'd expect only in the Geofront. If the target was fixed beforehand, the principle behind the tracking wasn't hard to guess.
"You already planted a core shard at the bombing target, so it can talk to the shard in the bomber."
"That's exactly it!"
"The target is inside Animal Farm?"
"Ding-ding-ding!"
That was the real shape of the dream someone else was meant to fulfill. It was also exactly why every pet had thrown their strength in.
"The moment the bomber takes off, we'll know on this end. The communication core will react. Then we grab the guns and knives we've hidden, wait for the moment—"
"And when the bombing starts, the operation starts."
A bold plan. A clever one, too.
The pets of Animal Farm were exceptional technicians, every one of them. Gear to knock out defensive works—they could design as much of that as they pleased. The problem was that they couldn't build it themselves. Not being able to make the bombs mattered most. The masters didn't give their pets dangerous materials like gunpowder. They were guarding against a revolt.
So the plan was to produce only the blueprint and the auto-navigation unit, and leak them outside. The people who would actually finish the weapon would be the Human Meat Factory, taken in by the plans. Then, without anyone here lifting a finger, the completed bomber would find its own way home and drop its bombs on their enemies' heads.
Plausible enough, as operations went. There was one problem.
"The plane you launch from here is carrying the blueprint. How does it reach the Human Meat Factory? You couldn't have planted a communication core out there to guide the flight."
"That's just luck."
"...?"
"I'll send it pointed the right way, as close as I can. Their outfit is big, so the area they search is wide, yeah? Other raiders don't like stepping into it. Match the direction and the fuel, and I can crash it somewhere they'll notice. Nice and safe."
A safe crash. It was a plane with nothing resembling a landing function. Call it a Tofu-style landing.
Wherever the technology ran short, she meant to lean on luck and call it close enough. Rule out every step that depended on luck, and the whole operation got much harder. A realistic compromise, if you were being generous.
"Just asking out of curiosity."
"What, what? Did our operation move you that much?"
"How likely do you think it is that every last part of this goes according to plan?"
"Mmm... I dunno."
She didn't seem to have considered it even once.
"How am I even supposed to say it."
"A number would be good. I'm used to probabilities."
"Probability..."
Tofu started calculating, ticking her index finger in the empty air. I hadn't asked for anything quite that elaborate. She nodded, shook her head, nodded again, and at last a result came out.
"Like, five percent?"
Self-awareness, at least.
"Not as optimistic as I expected."
"Huh? Five percent is plenty optimistic. That's a good probability."
Ability Core odds.
"Most people would never call that a good probability."
"No? But it's Ability Core level, isn't it? That's enough. Pull it off, and your whole life turns around."
"That's a conversation for after it works."
"Having even a little hope is huge. Keep living like this and it's just zero percent."
Hearing her out, I found myself a little persuaded. More precisely, I understood the spot she was in.
Put an Ability Core in her hands right now, and she would use it without a moment's hesitation.
She wasn't ringed by zombies or monsters. No one had a gun to her head. Drifters without a settlement might even envy a pet's life, figuring it beat scrambling just to stay alive one day at a time. Tofu took every moment of that life as a crisis with no way out.
No freedom, and even living isn't really living. Is that it.
The pets had pooled what they had. This wasn't Tofu's thinking alone. They didn't see things the way drifters did. They couldn't. In a daily life where staying alive was simply how the days went, survival stopped being the desperate thing. And the masters, the ones with freedom, loitered in plain sight every single day. Being satisfied with what you have is hard. Coveting what you don't is all too easy. No one to blame. For anyone human, it was only natural.
"Help with this, and you'll make me a blueprint?"
"Yeah. I just need to get the plane in the air, headed for the Human Meat Factory. Isn't there a way?"
Request accepted.