Chapter. 23. Gedreuz’s heir, Field (17)
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‘What on earth is this?’
There were a lot of things around me that I didn’t know about, but what I was thinking about right now was the sense of heterogeneity I was feeling right now.
Of course, it was natural to feel a sense of heterogeneity.
The place I am walking right now is a very large underground concrete facility, 2km from the entrance and at least 700m below the surface, with signs painted on the walls in English, Chinese, and Russian.
In fact, the things lined up on either side of me as I walk through the facility are not long-term living quarters, but works by great masters in art history that even laymen like me have heard of, such as Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet, and Andy Warhol, and
the person proudly explaining them is Aug. This is Andrei Gedroits, a timeless scientist speaking through a reality drone. If you don’t feel strange in this situation, it would be strange.
However, I was too concerned to attribute it to such ‘normally strange things’. If it had been a long time ago, I would have brushed it off as just an inconvenience, but after being stabbed in the back at the beginning of April World and gaining some insight, I have come to trust the signals from my intuition a lot.
‘Andrei Gedroits. ‘Does the person I identified match the person in front of me?’
Considering all the circumstances, he himself admitted with his own mouth that he was Gedroitz. Some do.
So what do you mean by ‘the rest that are not Gedroits’?
“You look like you have a lot on your mind?”
W-Gedreutz, who had returned to his normal speaking tone from the tired old man he had been before, spoke to me as we passed through the early 20th century’s modern art and the rise of 3D three-dimensional art.
“Thanks to that person for talking a lot.”
“indeed. Your specialty was piecing together small pieces of information to get a glimpse of the big picture. great. Now, before we meet the Collector, let’s take a moment to talk about the kind of conversation our precious guest wants. As a reward for waiting calmly.”
“…Do you really need it?”
“From what I’ve seen, the more doubts you have about the other person, the more aggressive you tend to be. “This is a measure for the collector’s safety, so it is an extension of my job of ‘guiding.’”
“Someone would think that I am a monster who is very devoted to his work. “It was the collector who sent the invitation, but he actually poured hallucinogenic substances on the guests.”
“Of course, that is just part of the ‘guidance’ for our artist union. “Every guest invited here so far has gone through the same process.”
….guide. And it’s work.
‘Now it’s closer to the W I know.’
According to the story I heard in the past, W was the type of person who couldn’t stay in one place when there was no official work to do. Perhaps the reason why he looks strangely excited is because he was able to return to the Artists’ Union hideout thanks to the task of ‘guiding Professor Park to the collector’? From what I remember, he seemed like a guy who really valued staying in one place.
Wow –
in the end, the person who appears to be Gedroitz appears to be close to the person named W in his words and actions.
W-Gedreuts crossed the translucent waterfall-shaped sculpture and beckoned me, who was pondering my thoughts. Hidden behind the waterfall was a shelter-like place lined with chairs and tables with only frames.
“Thoughts and Reasons 2048 Alord Karl. “It is a representative work of post-modern art that returned art to the public at a time when the public was rejecting art due to the excessive complexity of modern art.”
“…That uncomfortable-looking iron bar chair?”
“Please sit down first. “If you sit down, you will understand the intention of the work.”
“Hmm…”
I was a little reluctant, but I wasn’t one to experience discomfort due to the unevenness of the steel frame, so I just sat down.
Shiver!
“?!”
The results were surprising. A faint electric current seemed to flow from the steel frame of the chair, and soon the hard iron chair was transformed into the feel of an old sofa that I was very familiar with.
“Alrod Carl was a great engineer before he was an artist.”
“No way, he can read the memories of the person he touches and reproduce the sensations of a specific moment-” “
I’m not that great of an engineer. It simply reads which structure the body is most accustomed to sitting in through the minute movements of the muscles at the moment of contact with the structure and reproduces that as an electrical signal. My body is touching the extremely uncomfortable metal bar chair, but I am actually feeling the object that my buttocks have been pressed against for the longest time in my life. In this way, late modern art placed importance on the moment when the viewer evokes a certain sensation of recognition. “Don’t physical discomfort and sensory comfort coexist now?”
When I nodded my head in sentiment that exactly matched what I was feeling right now, W nodded as if it was natural.
“Separation of emotion and God. Can the mind replace physical sensations or can physical stimulation control the mental form? This was a field in which the aged Andrei Gedreuts was very interested. To put it bluntly, the exhibits here are items that were installed in the lobby of the Gedreuts Company headquarters building before the war. “It means that he, who hates waste, was so passionate about this work that he spent a lot of money to move this complex installation art.”
W seemed to want to talk about something important, but then suddenly switched to a story about art history. Just when I was about to move on to the suspicion that this was some kind of wasting time, I realized that
“sitting here is a necessary act to bring the ‘Gedreuts’ within me to the surface.” “I mean.”
“It was as if Gedreutz came to the surface, if only for a moment, when his ‘finisher’, whom he had longed for so desperately, called his name.”
At the story that came out of his mouth, doubt turned into astonishment.
“I am a being who deliberately absorbed the body of Andrei Gedreuts, who became a type 3 mutant, in the place where his corpse was located, in order to use the knowledge of him.”
“At the same time, he is a being with a mediocre personality who is greedy for my status to the point of being miserable and has become stained with me.” The person who walked out from behind the
three-dimensional
waterfall filled the space occupied by the virtual image of himself.
“Nice to meet you. “It’s not what I’m pursuing now, but I don’t feel so bad when I meet the ‘completer’ that Gedreutz was pursuing.”
W. His real voice, which appeared in a white suit, had a strange mixture of youth and old age.
“Let’s answer the questions of you, who won’t feel at ease even if you die until you know something properly.”
Taking off his white fedora and mask, his face was a hideous figure, combining the face of a depressed young man with the face of a stubborn old man.
****
“There was a man named William William Turner. “I told you about his ‘tragedy’ myself a long time ago, so there’s no need to repeat it, right?”
“Wait… give me time to think.”
“However much.”
There was so much information contained in just a few sentences that I couldn’t make a proper judgment.
‘In order to privatize Gedreutz’s knowledge… he was deliberately turned into a Type 3 mutant in front of his dead body? Is that the [original] story of this William Turner called W?’
Gedreutz’s death, the act of taking over his knowledge, the fact that a type 3 variant can be created at the will of an individual, and the result… the existence of multiple personalities in which a personality similar to the actual Gedreuts is manifested by specific memory stimulation.
“This… is a contradiction. It does not make sense.”
No matter how much I thought about it, there were more than one part that conflicted with the information in my memory.
“okay? “What do you not like about our completer?”
“Under the premise that there was not an iota of falsehood in what you said, W. Gedreutz…”
“I can assure you of that much. As for me, ‘I’ here refers to myself as W and the current me. Although we distinguished them for convenience, they are not actually separate personalities. It’s a kind of psychopathological condition close to manic depression. Anyway, I have never lied.”
“Then it is impossible for you to become what you just said. Because William Turner, the original of W, died at the hands of his mother.”
“hmm. Yes, it might seem that way.”
“The businessman in the white suit was your father? No, that’s too much of a leap. In the first place, it doesn’t make sense that Gedreutz, who is Russian, has a relative with a German name like ‘William Turner’. “No matter how you put it together, everything you say is bound to be bullshit!”
“Hmm. Keep trying. “The thought process is quite interesting.”
W, who had turned his head slightly so that Gedreutz’s face was in front of him, was giving vague answers as if this was an interesting quiz.
“You are a person with exceptional intuition.”
“Does that mean all my thoughts are based on a sense of irrationality?”
“No, it’s pure praise. From what I have seen, this person, Professor Park, has a looser boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness than any other human being in existence. So to speak, it could be said to be an acquired genius caused by mental trauma.”
“The unconscious mind within the human brain is like a vast repository that accepts all information without a filter .
If a person in a busy city passes by a thousand people every day, the conscious mind remembers only one or two people, but the unconscious mind stores all of those thousands of people recognized by the sense of sight. For the average person, the opportunity to connect with that vast trash can-like storage space is at most a dream, but you are different. Your surface consciousness has been in and out of deep consciousness countless times due to strange experiences. “You probably know better than me what I’m talking about, right?”
“…Hyde.”
“okay. Hyde. Another negative case that I don’t know if you named it Hyde or if you named it yourself. Looking at the data stored in the GG database, I can see how much that friend’s presence has made your surface consciousness reach deep into your subconscious. That’s a really interesting result. “If Gedroitz had been alive, he could have planned another project using it… Unfortunately, you already took all of GG’s most important data, so I can only assume that’s a possibility.”
The finger pointing to his temple turned to his chest covered with metal plates, and then quickly changed into a gesture of shrugging his shoulders as if it was no big deal.
“The point is that the intuition you thought was just a ‘feel’ is surprisingly a logical answer derived through countless calculations and cases. When your unconscious mind, which contains vast amounts of data, draws a conclusion to a certain question, you think, ‘Hmm? Something like this?’ Through intuition, that conclusion is placed on the surface consciousness. “The thinking that follows is nothing more than a process of reviewing the conclusions made by the unconscious so that the conscious mind can accept them.”
“….so. Why did the talk about William Turner and Gedroitz suddenly move on to my story?”
“If I had to explain it to you, I would say that a story that would take an hour would be conveyed to you in just 5 minutes if you calmly think about it. Think about it, Professor Park. “Let’s take a look at the answers you came up with without realizing it!”
After saying that much, W. Gedreutz closed his mouth like a clam. The gloomy young man’s head on the other side seemed to have something to say, but just kept his mouth shut.
‘I know?’
No way. Haven’t I already concluded that the author’s statement is contradictory?
‘Remember clearly. W had a pretty good tragedy.’
Because the meeting at the caravan accommodation in Area 38 was so shocking, I remembered almost the entire conversation we had that day.
My father was a prosperous businessman and liked to wear white suits.
A son who respected his father and a mother who was devastated by frequent affairs.
One day, the son secretly tried on his father’s white suit at night, and the white silhouette, clearly visible even in the dark, made him look like a cold father.
alcohol. drug. Resentment that has been building up for a long time. A son who rejects his mother’s embrace and a woman who is once again hurt and angry at such behavior. And Taang-
And William Turner died and became W in the white suit, and the guilt of that day created a special Type 3 variant that couldn’t stay in one place.
….This is his story told by W at the dormitory in District 38.
If there is no lie in this perfect story, how can a third person named Gedreutz intervene? It’s a story so full that you can picture it clearly when you close your eyes. A wealthy family, a self-made man, a playboy husband and an abandoned wife. A son who yearns for his father who rarely returns….
‘…Hmm?’
Suddenly something clicked! I felt like I was caught.
‘William Turner died like that and became a type 3 mutant?’
No, of course it could be a type 3 variant. Something about the image… didn’t match the background.
‘The variant virus began to spread after the Great War. If it had been during the war, you would have seen enemy soldiers who had been shot by rifles come back to life like zombies and run towards you.’
‘But can the family life of a family whose wealth is taken for granted happen after World War III?’
The historical background did not fit. The story of a wife who, enraged by her wealthy businessman’s husband’s infidelity, accidentally kills her son is a story that could only have happened before the war, and if that were the case, then William Turner, who was sacrificed there, could not have been a Type 3 variant W.
‘W’s original William Turner didn’t die there?’
Obviously, the story ended like this. The enraged mother pointed the gun at the white suit and asked,
“….Was the one who died not the son who borrowed his father’s suit, but the mother?”
“As expected, it’s faster than explaining it in words. The distance was close enough for my drunk mother to get stuck. The son was frightened by the sight of the gun being pointed, and tried to stop his mother, who had already put her finger on the trigger, but stopped-”
“The bullet went through his mother’s lung. My mother died screaming like a demon in great pain and bleeding. The pure white suit was covered in blood. It was my mother who rushed to her death… but even if it was a mistake, that scene was a huge trauma to my original character, William Turner. “This depressed young man who now occupies half of this place is that friend.”
“…I didn’t really intend to hide it.”
The gloomy young man’s face muttered softly, and then the old man’s face opened its mouth again.
“William Turner, a good citizen and medical student, was put on trial for the murder of a parricide. He defended himself in his own way, but anyone could see that he was a murderer. “The victim’s social status soon returned to the burning public opinion, and William faced the heavy punishment of life imprisonment.”
“Andrey Gedroits came to me while I was waiting to be transferred to prison after the trial.”
As if the stream of consciousness was moving, the head naturally turned and the young man’s face continued the conversation.
“He said he had read my thesis. He is a talent too good to rot in prison. Since I was going to be a prisoner for the rest of my life anyway, I asked if I would like to live in a nice building that was spacious, comfortable, and served buffet-style meals. It was a scouting offer. “They said they were looking for a psychiatrist to reside in the Gedroitz Company building for company welfare reasons.”
“A doctor.”
“William Turner’s ‘Contemplation of Mental Detachment’ was so famous that you can find the information even by searching now. Of course, he was hired as an attending physician, but his actual job was to help with the research and development of Gedreutz’s game he was developing. “William Turner was a talented person who had nowhere else to go but his embrace, and was the perfect talent for secret research and development.”
Creak-
W-Gedreutz. The adaptor, who had the face of both an old man and a young man, stood up with a look of ridicule on one side and shame on the other.
“As my research progressed, I could not help but respect the great scientist named Andrei Gedreuts. The fact that no matter how hard he stretched out his hand, he could not reach it, added envy to his respect, and the reality of him being tied to a leash added humiliation to it. “While rotting in his enclosure… I met her.”
“she?”
W didn’t answer my question. Instead, I just walked up to the wall behind where we were sitting and stuck my finger into the small gap in the concrete.
“She was bright for her gaunt appearance. Gedroitz said that she is the person who will be at the center of GG’s development, who will be the first owner to manage the ark of the vast electronic world that will contain humanity in the future, and who will be the first beneficiary of regaining the lives stolen from it. ”
Rattling! Drurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The place where W put his hand was pulled, revealing a hidden door beyond the concrete wall. Panic room, the safest room in the residential area of a nuclear bomb shelter, created to prepare for special disaster situations.
“The more I studied that girl’s mind and learned about her inner self, the more I fell in love with her. To be exact, she couldn’t bear the fact that she, who was dying of leukemia, had become the center of such a meaningless experiment. “I was obsessed with the idea that someone should take care of her and give her the care and treatment she deserved.”
“It’s a shame, but as Natasha’s father, I have come to covet even Gedreutz’s position.”
The gloomy young man’s face glared at the old man’s face to his right.
His hand gently knocked, the voice of someone inside came out, and the white and foreign door between the concrete walls opened wide.
Like a mental hospital, the bright white walls and blindingly bright lighting.
Countless hanging screens of various colors and thick wires connected to each screen.
And the back of a somewhat familiar woman with all those wires connected to her back.
“Natasha Gedroits. He was the only blood relative of Andrei Gedroits, who was dying of leukemia, and was originally appointed as the sole manager of GG. “You are the original person who created the first Data Soul, and the first Type 3 variant collector with her as the original.”
There were a few names I had never heard of before, but none of them were the ones that came to mind.
“World Tree…?”
world tree. A girl with silver hair who manages countless simulation worlds as GG’s manager.
The woman in front of me looked like she would grow up like this when she got older.
『The fact that you thought of her when you saw me probably means that you met her in person.』
The woman’s voice was resonating through a diaphragm rather than vocal cords.
『Nice to meet you. I really wanted to meet you in person as you are someone who has been recognized by the ‘World Tree’, who is like a sister to me.』 The
World Tree, or rather the collector who looked just like her, had a calm face as if he was asleep and a bright smile. I was greeted with a screen of emoticons.
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