Chapter. 11. The wizard of wizards (1)
****
Crunch…
crunch.
Crunchy….
“…President?”
“hmm. “Why do you do that?”
“I think you might have had a little too much to drink… I think it would be better to stop today’s work and rest comfortably at home…”
Young looked down at the glass he was holding in his left hand at the adjutant’s words.
Sweet.
Thick whiskey glass. I think I had ordered a new one 10 minutes ago, but before I knew it, only transparent ice was rolling around on the bottom of the glass.
“It may be presumptuous, but let me tell you, it’s not that your drinking has increased too rapidly recently-” “
That’s presumptuous. There’s no need to be so broke and sign something in vain, so you should just get off work. I heard your wife recently had her second child? Then you should stay home with me instead of staying with this drunkard.”
“How can I be comfortable alone when the president is staying?…”
“Should I give orders? “Do you really need to make me weigh the organizational hierarchy and trustworthy subordinates?”
“…I’ll go in first. dismissal. May you rest in peace.”
click.
‘…I’m glad you’re a quick-witted friend. I was worried it would stick to me annoyingly.’
In fact, Young himself knew it well. In the current situation, his position is the last remaining top leader of the Dome and the central point of humanity’s survival. If he falls into depression and tries to find a little peace while getting drunk, what kind of chaos could it cause?
Probably the other managers were asking for new advice. They must have said things like never leave the president alone or that he is the future of humanity. Instead of remaining by his side until the end, as they said, the adjutant chose to give him time to be alone.
Sweet.
I opened the hidden door at the back of the study and took out a bottle of hard liquor from the rustic glass display case inside.
As I rose to a high position, all kinds of bribes and favors came up to the point that I couldn’t check them. I threw away everything else, but when it came to high-end alcohol, I would catch the guy who asked for it and throw him into the Underdome and then quietly take it. The joys of life for a man named Alexander Young. I used to gloat to myself, thinking that one day, if the world becomes stable and peace comes, if a biography of him at such an old age were published, I would probably be able to write half a book about the secret liquor cabinet he created by remodeling this panic room.
“…It’s shabby.”
Before I knew it, it was almost half empty. Just two months. In two months, nearly twenty bottles of high-quality liquor, almost like a relic aged for more than 60 years, were purchased. All by himself. We shouldn’t blame him for his increased drinking. My friend, who I was going to drink a glass with, left first. Hasn’t the amount of alcohol he had to drink doubled?
“Mikhail… such an idiot.”
Even though he pretended to be cold and stone-faced all his life, he knew. It’s just that he is a person who holds those emotions so deep in his heart that they don’t even come out.
He just wanted to make the world right. Without compromise. Without discrimination.
Squeak- Pong!
Gurgling-
percussion.
After filling the glass with dark brown liquid, Young sat back down and turned his eyes to the messy documents.
[List of candidates for additional inflow refugee survival sites in December]
[Meeting minutes of reduced ammunition reproduction due to reduction in scavengers]
[Reduction in active response and countermeasures due to reduction in surveillance area due to reduction in stations]
[*Confidential* Adapter activity report]
“.. ..I thought the world would not change any more during my time.”
A major accident occurred in the 30th division two months ago.
Young blamed himself for it being a disaster caused by his own arrogance.
I thought he had at least a thorough understanding of what came into his field of vision, but alas, he overlooked those who fell into ‘good madness’ and those who threw themselves into their beliefs.
In that one moment of misjudgment, everything changed. In the worst possible direction.
Click –
Just as Young was about to enjoy his bitterness alone, the door suddenly opened and someone with hurried steps entered the office. This is the deputy who said he was just leaving work.
“…I’m sorry I’m taking a break. President. “It’s urgent.”
“I hope it’s something important enough to interrupt my thoughts. Just a little while ago, I was praising you because you were a very perceptive and excellent adjutant.”
“…I think it is important enough. “An urgent report has arrived from the administrative data consciousness exploration department, and it appears that they have succeeded in finding and awakening the consciousness of ‘that person.’”
Craddangtang!
The expensive wooden decorated chair fell over and broke off a corner, but Young did not notice anything like that. I kept repeating like a parrot that I couldn’t guarantee, I couldn’t guarantee, no matter how many times I plowed those glasses makers every day… I never thought it would succeed so quickly!
“I need to go right now. “The vehicle will be ready, right?”
“Right now… you mean right now? “I don’t want to recommend that.”
“Why? “Is this going to be a problem for the patient’s stability?”
“….BDSM people came first. As you know, since that day, they have become a bit more violent…”
Young smiled bitterly at the adjutant’s concern. Those guys definitely lost their minds. They want to hold me accountable, so they hijack the tank that was being repaired and attack the official residence of the inspection department. I don’t know how they got in, but they wait for me in my study and hold a knife to my throat.
“It’s a good thing. If the entry and exit records of those friends had been confirmed, all manager-level personnel would have gone to work, right? “Ralph, did that friend come out too?”
“….yes. “The attack at that time was an incident that touched the pride of the entire inspection department.”
“Then ask that friend to go with you. They say they also have a connection with Professor Park. “You can’t be hasty and rush in to kill him.”
“…I feel sorry for Agent Ezel Raiden.”
“….okay. “There was no one better suited to dealing with BDSM than him.”
Before leaving the office, Young took in the sight of the city reflected in the wide window behind the office.
Snow was falling over the dark city, and small lights were shining here and there around the dark city. It was the light from the wood fires that refugees had lit to endure the cold.
“….egg plant.”
The impressions end here. Now it was time to return to being a ruthless politician.
****
[p—-*&*#(@ Check connection. Welcome, ‘professor’]
“….What the fuck? Is it bugging me?”
Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing the game for too long. My head is spinning. It felt like I woke up after sleeping for about 40 hours.
It’s strange. I decided to wait a day with my group in front of the elf village, but when I logged out and the connection was lost, a white light came and said wow…
Why is it still inside the connector system?
This is a scene I saw a long time ago when I first used the connector. There was no community, no messages, no notifications, and an empty space right after logging in with just a game icon called [GG]. I waited to see
if it was loading, and other things. I looked for it, tried logging out, but nothing worked.
“…Is this really a bug? If there’s a bug like this when there’s no management… I’m sure I’ll never be able to get out of here.”
At that moment, a thought was floating around the community like a ghost story in my head. The story of ‘the person who died inside due to a broken connector’ came to mind. If I had known it would be like this, I would have found a technician right away when I had money and had the connector repaired! I can’t believe I’m being lazy with the dome right in front of me and I ended up like this! Get me out! Get me out! Let’s me OUT! Somebody! Someone help me…!
Tiring-!
“Wow!”
I was alone in an empty space, scratching into the air. I was startled by a notification sound that suddenly appeared.
[Player connection confirmed. Welcome to ‘DOOMgay.’ ‘Nim.]
‘Doomgay? Ian? No, I’m online, why is there a new player?’ Before I
even thought it was strange, a halo of light appeared in front of my eyes and quickly took the form of a person
. It was definitely him. He had a sturdy build. A metal chin. He looked like he had applied hair growth product to his beard during the few days I hadn’t seen him, so he had a shaggy beard like a junkie, and his eyes were sunken, like someone who hadn’t slept for three days.
In any case, it was a relief to see a happy face in this strange situation. “…Hey! It’s been a while! Did anything happen out there? I was just about to leave ,
but now the connection is going crazy…”
….Tduduk.
‘….what?’
The atmosphere was a bit… strange. I can’t explain it well, but I feel like I did something very wrong for not doing anything? Above all, the sight of Ian, who was even more gaunt than before, with his fists clenched and his teeth clenched… was quite scary.
I felt something strange and took a step back, but Ian started to stride towards me with a stern expression on his face.
“It’s been a long time… yes, quite… it’s been a long time.”
Blank eyes. Staggering steps. He was behaving strangely and seemed to have lost some weight.
“You bastard…”
At that moment, the professor was able to very clearly infer what state Ian was in.
“…I drank too much! You touched the connector while drinking! “This is a game that doesn’t support multiplayer, and no matter how much you put the connection terminals in parallel, it won’t work, so I said that-”
“Shut your mouth.”
Whoops!
Craddangtangtang!
Ian’s fist flew in unknowingly. Before I could react, the moment I narrowly avoided a fist the size of a pot lid that flew at my chin, a heavy military bullet kicked me in the chest.
These were not fists or feet thrown in a playful or friendly manner. The punch was so strong that my chin was chafed and bleeding, and my chest, where I was kicked, throbbed as if my ribs had been ripped out.
That bastard was truly intent on punishing me.
“Coughing, growling… I guess this wasn’t alcohol, but drugs…”
“I took more alcohol and drugs than necessary. I looked at you wrong, Professor Park. I thought he was a guy with deep concepts, but he turned out to be a guy with a head full of very rotten thoughts. Are you jumping towards it with your bare body? “In a situation where it looks like I’m going to die!”
“Tsk! Suddenly, the connector breaks down and they invade, spouting bullshit… What the fuck? “Can you please sort out the rankings properly?”
“You…you need to be beaten. As your elder, I will correct your damn stupid thinking. Professor Park.”
Chick chick hoooooo.
Ian takes a cigarette out of his pocket and lights it.
I was already confused, but when my friend suddenly showed up and started swearing and hitting me hard, I started getting heated up.
“Yeah, you damn explosion fanatic. Come here! Do you know how many times I have suppressed myself by saying that I am an older brother and a friend? Let’s take this opportunity to repay with honesty!”
At that moment, a strange feeling passed through my mind.
Feeling like you’ve forgotten something very important. I wondered if I had adapted too naturally to this strange and contradictory situation and that solving more important questions was the order of the day… but
I forgot it unnaturally quickly. As if someone poured sand on a small ember and extinguished it.
Buuuuung!
“I’ll show you that leaders aren’t leaders for nothing!”
With the sound of energetic cheers, the Big Dream Small Margin Caravan leader’s fist flew towards the large man.
****
“Huh, huh, huh, huh!” “Hey hey hey!”
“Kolok kahak tut! “What the heck.”
“That’s because being hit by Heo Eok first hit was so physically damaging. know? “If it were international rules, you’d be penalized for a foul.”
“Huuuuuuu If you still keep your mouth open….”
“Call Bex. We’re going to play for 23rd place…..”
“Ah. “Even I can’t beat him.”
“Hehehehehe damn it….”
I lost. Damn it.
It was also beaten to dust. Actually, there is a difference of almost two weight classes, but I am an asshole for jumping in with my bare hands. If I had a gun, I would have won.
“…Have you calmed down?”
“….okay.”
“My true. “I knew he was a fool, but…”
In fact, there was an opportunity to upset him once in the middle. I was lying down anyway, trying to turn things around with a submission, and was getting beat up with excitement…
———
Drop… Drop…
‘How dare you do that? To go away alone….’
‘? ???????’
———
Suddenly, the guy who was beating up people in the mount position started crying. The guy who had shed a single tear when talking about his tragically dead wife started crying so desperately that I thought I had kicked him in the ass without realizing it.
What can I do when they use cheats like that? It was only after he was able to calm down and talk about the hurt of his pride from being inflicted on a friend who he thought was on the same level as the pain of being assaulted without asking, leaving him like that, that he was able to calm down and talk about it.
Perhaps because he did everything he wanted to do, he began to explain to me in a fairly calm and composed manner.
The guy’s words, which lasted for about 10 minutes, seemed to have been prepared in advance, and were very shocking.
“therefore. I…. the person I am sitting here thinking about is a chunk of memory that was already backed up to GG 4 months ago? Am I not a person? “Is it data?”
“It’s different from that! Listen, you already logged out of the game 4 months ago, went to the 30th division to fulfill the president’s request, got caught up in all sorts of battles, and ended up almost dead. No, it would be correct to say that he is dead! “Because it was a type 3 variant, the change had progressed to nearly 90%, and the condition was sufficient to medically determine death!”
“Why… he died?”
Tick, tick, tick, ji-ing –
In response to my question, Ian uploaded an image file and showed it to me.
“because of this. An object that is a remodeled version of an old war weapon called an Orpheus or box. It is an object that forcibly transforms living people within a wide range into mutants. “I originally went over there to retrieve it… but when you saw its unimaginable power, you went out on your own, destroyed it, and died.”
Thinking back to that time, Ian had to struggle to control his feelings of tears again.
“Everyone had their own roles, so I found you only after the situation was settled. As for your condition, which the District 38 administration people have retrieved… wow. for a moment.”
Ian finally turns his head. The professor found this conversation itself strange. I couldn’t believe that I was being told repeatedly that I was dead and that I had been recovered.
“I thought he was completely dead, but his left hand started scratching the floor as if he heard us making noise nearby. ‘Help’ He asked me to save him even though he was in that situation. That way, we loaded you into the car and went straight back to Area 47. That’s because the administration in District 38 said that their medical facilities couldn’t handle this many critically ill patients. Now that I think about it, what they were doing was so suspicious, but damn it. “I had already tasted it, so I couldn’t see anything else.”
“Why them?”
“…Whoa. They connected the half-destroyed ‘box’ to the radio tower, the best wide-area repeater of this era. The core of the box that was crushed in your hand survived with a persistent vitality like a mutant. Although the output could not even match half of the finished image… the overwhelming broadcasting performance of the radio tower made up for it.”
Ian
throws away the remaining filter and puts a new cigarette in his mouth. He waved his hand a few times and opened an audio file for me.
Chijik-Chik-
=======
Dear survivors, it is a great pleasure to meet you.
My name is ‘Carel Bellemont’ and I am the administrative chief of District 38 Dom.
Living in difficult times…
=======
“…Hmm? wait for a sec. Obviously, when you were talking earlier, the person named Karel…”
“Yes. I thought he was just an incompetent administration spokesperson. “Because he said it with his mouth and it looked like that.”
Crash!
An eerie sound of teeth grinding echoed from Ian’s mouth.
=======
….So we finally had the opportunity to leap forward once again.
Research shows that small groups and individual survivors with less violent tendencies mostly live in safe shelters protected by shields. Whether it’s scavengers in the wilderness, a horde of psychos, or killer raptors that don’t have enough power to cover all those tanks, they just lead a life without a shield.
The machine in front of me right now is a war weapon made with the best technology of our time that kills people and turns them into mutants through very powerful waves.
You can rest assured. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was a small accident during transportation, and the output was greatly reduced, so you can escape the influence of this ‘box’ with just a shield for personal residence.
I’m thinking of pressing the button on this now. Perhaps the largest number of people will die since the destruction began.
Everyone, please do not consider this a massacre or something terrible. The scavengers and wanderers of the wasteland are nothing more than monsters who kill people, take their meat, and extract their oil. Turning them into mutants is nothing more than turning a clever monster into a stupid monster.
Of course, some will criticize me, but I have no doubt that this is one step back to take two steps forward. If my choice today were to be a sin, I would humbly accept it like Oppenheimer, who created the atomic bomb.
Please rest in peace for a better world.
========
Pop.
The audio file turned off and there was silence between Ian and me.
“…That guy was aiming for this from the beginning. When everyone becomes dishonest. Well, those guys are also a group crazy about research, so I guess they didn’t have at least one way to destroy the weapons they had in their hands. They didn’t give it to us and kept it hidden on purpose, but when the box was activated and everyone went crazy, voila! He appeared and snatched it away.”
All kinds of questions were running through my mind, but I understood the situation. There was a fierce fight over war weapons. Everyone suffered losses, and a completely wrong person snatched it up and used it in the worst possible way.
“If it is a wide-area repeater… how much is the range…?”
“….27 to 41. As much as the wiretapping range they boasted about. “Except for survivors living in shielded settlements, all humans within range have become mutated.”
“All those people have become mutants? Then outside now…!”
“stop! ….I’ll stop talking about the painful details here. I don’t think there would be enough time to tell all the stories about the raptors who attacked Area 38 and the allies who attacked them again. “What’s important now is your condition, not what’s going on outside.”
Ian waved his hand as if telling the rest to find out on his own, then took a deep breath and continued speaking with a serious expression.
“Let’s stop talking about what we were talking about earlier. You are now in a state close to a vegetative state. Hyde is desperately holding on to his consciousness, which would have already died and disappeared, and it would not be strange if he died at any time. The researchers at Area 47 discussed your condition and came to one conclusion. I don’t know if you know, but all the player’s actions and thought memories were collected inside GG without consent…”
“Data Soul.”
“Uh… they said there was something like that. “I decided that if I connect you, who is unconscious, to the game, there is a possibility that you can recover to some extent by fusing the stored memory with my consciousness.”
“Is that me?”
“yes. Should I say that it is a state in which memories that were illegally backed up in advance are connected to the brain of a vegetative state? Anyway, the fact that you are Professor Park remains the same. “It’s just… a little unstable.”
It’s a strangely subtle feeling. Something feels awkward. To begin with, Metal Joe is not a person who is this good at speaking coherently. Umm… something… something….
“Then how do we resolve that unstable state?”
“We are still researching that, but most people are of the opinion that it would be okay to clear it. You know…. Oh, you don’t know. Dr. Li This data soul is what makes up the NPC, and when the world is cleared, the system collects all of it, throws away the character data, and starts organizing the data to use it as an NPC for the next world. And the world clear character is a bonus….”
“Character history is inherited to the next world. In order to pass on the latest version of the collected data soul to the next world, we upload the status of the currently connected player…” “
In the process, we transfer the data soul that has been completely assimilated to your consciousness into your cooled brain. “We will be able to settle it down… This is what the gentlemen in white coats explained while spitting.”
That makes sense. I don’t know because I’m not an expert, but I heard that if you are not brain dead but in a vegetative state, you may react to stimuli such as music you enjoy listening to or a familiar smell. If you overwrite all of a person’s memories in their brain and stimulate them, there is a good chance that they will become conscious.
People who have learned 100 times more than me say that, so I guess that’s true.
“Then I’m there, and Ian, the one you accessed…?”
“Because you’re not exactly a player right now. “It’s a half-player connected to the data soul stored in GG.”
“You could say it’s a half-assed NPC.”
“That could be possible. I don’t know anymore because my head hurts. Damn it. “He seems like a very hands-on leader.”
Ian got up from his seat and said goodbye to me, as if he had finished what he wanted to say.
“I already said that other players shouldn’t be stuck in an unstable consciousness for a long time, so I’ll leave now. We will connect you to the community, but you will not be able to use chat rooms as a player. Look for some outside news. I work hard at the game and get out quickly. “I will come visit you often.”
After saying his final goodbyes, Ian hurries out.
I stared at that figure and sighed.
“…You idiot. “I can’t tell a lie.”
You look like a elementary school student who stole candy from a stationery store, you idiot.
After checking even the smallest detail in his behavior and speech, I found out that it was Ian. There can be no way there are two people like that. I think it’s also true that I’m a brain in a vat. Even when we talked about things outside, there wasn’t much of a reaction.
“…It’s not like there’s no way to recover, right? It’s like a brain in a vat forever.”
The professor was filled with anxiety as he recalled the way the guy looked at him, who became extremely unstable when talking about clearing.
****
