Chapter 20: Constructing the Living Quarters
Translator: ShutDoor
International oil prices soared by more than thirty percent in a single day, but life did not immediately change dramatically for the citizens of South Korea.
Oil prices had already been rising because of the ongoing civil war in the Middle East, and the death of the Saudi crown prince was no excuse to skip work.
Public sentiment, however, had definitely changed.
Everyone could feel the situation growing more ominous by the day.
Tight: The world’s scary these days. First France, and now Saudi Arabia’s gone to shit too?
Anonymous: Yeah, sure~ The Middle East falling apart doesn’t mean the world’s ending~
Anonymous: Typical third-rate college student: their own life’s already ruined, but they’re worried about the world ending.
If even ordinary people felt that way, imagine how the doctoral students who had committed some terrible sin at university and been dragged off to graduate school must have felt.
Even today, they were toiling away in their laboratories until their heads split open, uttering their distinctive cry of “fuck, fuck.”
In South Korea, even among engineering PhDs, who had the best employment prospects, two or three out of ten still failed to find jobs.
An employment rate of seventy to eighty percent sounded high, but considering that the average age at which people earned a doctorate was thirty-three, it was anything but. It meant that even after pouring their entire youth into it, two out of ten still could not find work.
Doctors their age were finishing their residencies and becoming specialists, while PhDs could not even get hired.
Was it any wonder every kid these days wanted to go to medical school?
ApuApu: My meanie professor chewed me out today, so I’m sooo sad… Comfort meee….
Eom Tae-yun, an astrophysics doctoral candidate nearing graduation, dealt with those shitty feelings by shitting out a post on an online forum.
It might have looked a little inappropriate, but he considered this healthier than smoking a cigarette like everyone else.
Anonymous: This bastard’s back with another shitty gimmick.
Anonymous: Motherfucker.
The reactions were exactly what he had expected.
But his snickering did not last long. Reality soon came crashing back.
‘What the fuck am I even doing…?’
Eom Tae-yun was a fourth-year doctoral student on the verge of graduating.
Passing his dissertation defense in his fourth year instead of taking five or six meant things had gone quite well for him by the standards of the field. In astrophysics especially, he could be considered fairly accomplished.
But he felt just as lost as anyone else.
Thanks to the effort he had put into his research, a few companies had approached him, but the highest offer had been an annual salary of 48 million won. Before taxes, of course.
That was not low for a field with little money in it, but it did not seem particularly high when his friends who had stopped at bachelor’s degrees and joined major semiconductor corporations were starting to make manager and bragging on KakaoTalk about earning nine-figure salaries.
‘Am I really not worth even fifty million?’
He had published a first-author paper in one of the three leading astronomy journals, and they were offering him forty-eight million? The world certainly made it hard to earn a living.
Just as he was thinking, ‘Maybe I should start a YouTube channel too…’ a man’s voice came from beside him.
“Mr. Eom Tae-yun?”
Startled, Eom Tae-yun turned his head. He had not noticed anyone’s presence until then.
The man approaching him appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties.
He wore a neatly tailored suit and polished dress shoes. Nothing looked excessively expensive, yet he possessed the sophisticated air peculiar to someone who had spent years working at a major corporation.
Beside him stood a woman who appeared to be an assistant manager, as though there to assist him.
“…Who are you?”
Eom Tae-yun immediately became wary. He had committed no crime, but the man’s attire somehow made him feel guilty anyway.
“How do you know me? If you’re here to see my professor…”
Perhaps sensing what was going through Eom Tae-yun’s mind, the middle-aged man immediately gave him an affable smile.
“We came to meet you, Mr. Eom, not Professor Kim Hak-cheol. 「Signal Detection and Background Noise Reduction Techniques for Low-Noise X-Ray Detectors in High-Energy Astrophysical Observation」. You wrote this paper, correct?”
“I did, but…”
“I’m Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su of Astragen Technology.”
Eom Tae-yun found himself accepting a business card, then looked back and forth between it and the man’s face.
“…What do you want with me?”
“To put it simply.”
Lee Jun-su smiled.
“Our company would like to recruit you, Mr. Eom. Could we speak for a moment?”
*****
As soon as Eom Tae-yun arrived at a café in a prime location near the university, he headed straight for the restroom. He wanted to search for Astragen Technology, a company he had never heard of.
Naturally, Eom Tae-yun was not stupid enough to swallow the bait whole simply because the other party had shown up dressed respectably.
Plenty of PhDs did fall for scams, of course, but that was not because they were naive or stupid. It was because they were that desperate.
Once someone earned a doctorate, was thrown out into the world at thirty-three, and then spent a year or two failing to find a job, it was difficult to remain entirely sane. Eom Tae-yun had seen plenty of similar cases.
Fortunately, Astragen Technology did not appear to be a scam company, at least.
It was a roughly four-year-old German-affiliated startup.
Admittedly, AI had advanced so much lately that scammers could make websites like this too, but this one did not appear to be fake.
It was hard to explain, but AI-generated websites always gave themselves away. There was something subtly crude about them.
‘Hmm.’
Judging by the website, the company conducted various kinds of research in physics, including astronomy, astrophysics, and nuclear physics.
It was not an especially impressive company, but neither was it a bad one.
No, considering that there were only a handful of companies in South Korea where an astrophysics major could work, this was actually a respectable option.
‘I suppose I can hear their terms.’
If they offered more than forty-eight million, he would have to give it some thought.
The moment he sat down in the café with that thought, Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su discreetly slid a sheet of paper across the table.
“This is what we’re considering for now.”
At the top of the paper was an annual salary of 70 million won, followed by a long list of cutting-edge equipment that would drive any astrophysicist wild.
“D-Do you really have all of this?”
Eom Tae-yun’s eyes widened in shock. Jaded by society though he had become, he was still a scientist who had been drawn to astrophysics by his dreams of space.
At that moment, Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su answered.
“Of course. We have every piece of equipment listed here. Salary is important to researchers, but surely the equipment they’ll use and the projects they’ll be assigned are just as important, aren’t they? Ha ha.”
“…That’s true.”
“I once double-majored in physics myself, so I understand how scientists feel. That’s why we try to recruit talented people on the best possible terms.”
His voice was that of a fisherman dangling bait.
But the fish beneath the water could not hear it.
*****
One good thing about 「Shelter Builder」 being a game was that it did not reflect real-world price fluctuations such as the surge in international oil prices.
Oil prices had risen by roughly thirty percent in a short period because of the incident, directly affecting the prices of asphalt, ready-mixed concrete, and naphtha, a petrochemical feedstock. The same went without saying for other construction materials.
But the prices of the goods offered by 「Shelter Builder」 remained exactly as they had been on the first day.
I had been unable to sleep until dawn because the approaching end of the world was beginning to feel real. The fact that I had no way of knowing how the world would end, and was frightened by that uncertainty, played a part as well.
But the biggest reason was my suspicion that the people behind that terrorist attack were other users of 「Shelter Builder」.
I had no idea whether some outside power was pulling those users’ strings. But the methods were far too similar for me not to notice.
Unlike ordinary experts, though I had no idea whether it was right to call experts ordinary, anyone like me who had used 「Shelter Builder」 even once could easily deduce how the attacks had been carried out.
With just a few clicks, I could buy enough explosives to casually blow up the National Assembly Building and transport them wherever I wanted without leaving a trace.
All I would have to do then was plant them in an unoccupied restroom or storage room and set them off.
To people who knew nothing about the game, would it not have looked as though the explosives had simply teleported there and detonated on the spot?
In any case, this incident had convinced me of two things. First, we would no longer be able to purchase goods once the demo period ended.
To put it bluntly, if we could keep buying goods and moving them wherever we wanted like this, why would anyone need to buy mortars or expensive shells? We could simply buy a few grenades and “summon” them wherever we wanted. That was practically a precision strike.
「Shelter Builder」 allowed that function to make shelter construction as convenient as possible, not to let us easily exploit our way past the coming apocalypses.
So it would be blocked. One hundred percent.
And second.
There was a high chance that the purchasers of 「Shelter Builder」 possessed ideologies or personalities well outside the bounds of normality.
An ordinary person would not spend Christmas Eve in the middle of winter answering some survey with no clear end when they should have been enjoying time with family or friends.
They either regularly imagined this sort of thing like me, were too kindhearted to walk past a part-timer they felt sorry for, or were the sort of bastard who wandered around alone on Christmas Eve with no family or friends to meet.
No matter how I considered it, I concluded that most of them probably fell into the last category.
The Telegram chat I had joined was proof.
Because the room’s organizer, ProSurvivalist1500, occasionally posted secret invitation links in overseas communities, the Telegram chat had grown to around forty members by now.
And the general disposition of the users active there was not particularly pleasant.
King250: Instant noodles aren’t technically preserved food, but they’re not bad emergency food either. You can eat them crushed up and uncooked, which saves water, they have a six-month shelf life, and they’re high in calories.
King250: Anyone here with less than six months of food stockpiled should just go buy instant noodles. You know how crazy expensive all the survival food has gotten with things getting so bad lately, right? They say six months, but honestly, they’ll last over a year if you store them properly.
Anonymous: But if war really breaks out and refugees ask you for food, are you guys going to share?
Kimo777: Tell those motherless dirt-poor bastards to starve to death~
Cham170: So says His Highness~
WoongYumYum19: But is the world really going to end? Are we sure the demo version ending actually means the world’s ending???
Arrow300: Seriously, lol. Any food I give to refugees is food I could use to live another day.
They were, perhaps, self-centered, selfish, morally lax, isolationist bystanders.
WoongYumYum19: Someone please answer me T_T T_T T_T Nobody told me anything T_T T_T
‘Hmm.’
And honestly, I did not think I was all that different from them. What if I had no robots? No Ann or Juggernaut? Would I still have let other people into the shelter?
I did not know.
I thought I might have if my parents or younger sibling were still alive.
“Anyway, let’s get back to finishing what we started.”
“Are you certain you do not need more sleep?”
“The caffeine pill woke me right up. Since I’m already awake, I’m going to finish all this before I sleep.”
Perhaps it was because we had been together for nearly ten days now, but I had grown quite comfortable talking to Ann.
The facility I would build today was the residential zone I had put off again and again.
Our shelter produced a total of 5,820 servings of food per day from the hydroponic growing facility and another 900 from the cultured meat production facility.
That came to 6,720 servings altogether.
There was an extremely low chance that groundwater 800 meters underground would suffer radioactive contamination from outside, and even if a problem did arise, the water pipes were equipped with separate water purification equipment capable of filtering radioactive substances.
Granite regions were prone to naturally occurring radioactive substances such as radon in the first place.
Therefore, assuming there was no terrorism or rebellion inside and nothing went wrong with the power generation facilities, our shelter could produce enough food for 6,720 people under any circumstances.
The preserved-food warehouse also stored five to six years’ worth of preserved food for the shelter’s maximum population in case of emergency. As for essentials such as salt, sugar, and vitamins, I had genuinely stockpiled enough to last a hundred years.
We had also secured plenty of drinking water through the additional 25,000-cubic-meter drinking-water storage tank. As befitted a tank that had cost over a trillion won to build, it was filling with water even now.
Once the tank was full, assuming the shelter was at maximum capacity and each person drank two liters a day, it would hold enough water for roughly five years.
In other words, the shelter was designed to endure for at least five years even if it became completely isolated from the outside world.
I brought all this up because the living quarters ultimately had to be built in proportion to our food and drinking-water production.
What would be the point of building ten thousand housing units when we could only feed 6,700 people? There was no need for the numbers to match perfectly, since we had to prepare for contingencies, but there was no reason to build far too many either.
“Hey, Ann. Tell me how much space would be appropriate for a family of three.”
I had treated her like Siri or Bixby for a moment, but Ann maintained her usual expressionless demeanor as she answered.
“If we consider only the minimum, approximately nine pyeong would suffice. However, independent living quarters intended for habitation over several decades would require twenty pyeong. You must bear in mind, however, that each such living space would cost 8.25 billion won to construct.”
These days, 8.2 billion won was enough to put the prices of most apartments with a view of the Han River to shame. It was absurdly expensive, but a facility capable of accommodating two thousand households would come to 16.4 trillion won.
Jamsil’s “Tower of Sauron” cost around four trillion won to build, so this was enough to build roughly four of them.
…That’s cheap?
At that price, I could probably make the rooms even larger.
It was not because I particularly cared about human rights.
When there was no telling when people might see the outside world again, there was no way cramming them into confined spaces for decades would have no effect on their mental health.
Of course, the only people I was interested in at the moment were the researchers, but if their families’ mental health deteriorated, it would inevitably affect the researchers too.
That would reduce research efficiency, which would affect my own life.
Ultimately, this was necessary for my sake.
“Doesn’t NASA or someplace have standards for long-term habitation? Something that says how much living space people need?”
“There is a spaceflight human-system standard known as NASA-STD-3001.”
The material Ann gave me neatly laid out the size of living spaces required for enclosed environments and long-duration space missions, taking into account factors such as crew size, mission duration, required activities, and privacy.
“NASA’s data estimates the minimum habitable volume in the enclosed environment of space at approximately twenty-five cubic meters per person. By simple calculation, a family of three would require seventy-five cubic meters.”
“What is that in pyeong?”
“Assuming a ceiling height of 2.5 meters, it would be approximately thirty square meters, or nine pyeong.”
“…So that’s the minimum you mentioned earlier.”
In that case, I decided to splurge and make each one twenty-five pyeong. That was roughly the average living space of a middle-class household in South Korea.
That came to 10.33 billion won per living space, or 20.66 trillion won for two thousand households.
That should be spacious enough for families of four as well, meaning the residential zone could accommodate at least roughly eight thousand people.
‘And one artificial satellite operated by the United States costs more than this?’
In any case, everyone admitted to the shelter would own a home worth at least ten billion won, so even if they were subjected to a little control, surely they would not dare complain.
What would happen if they did complain?
They would go to the detention cell I was about to build.
For the record, our shelter had no lawyers.
And it never would.
*****
Author’s Note
There are several things I would like to address, so I am using this author’s note to do so.
Some comments have said that construction stopped being the old “click and done” process starting with the research complex, but that is only half correct.
In fact, something similar was mentioned earlier when the protagonist constructed the SMR.
The SMR itself was purchased as a completed product and installed properly, but the established setting was that it would have broken down within a few months if left as it was, because the protagonist had failed to properly build the cooling system and other supporting infrastructure, including the power grid connecting it to other facilities such as the power storage facility.
In other words, “completed products can be purchased” is correct, but “their connections are completed automatically as well” is not.
A house makes this easy to understand. The completed house itself can be purchased as a product. However, that does not mean the roads, water supply and sewerage, and power grid connecting that house to other facilities can be purchased with it. The user must design and construct that infrastructure personally.
The user must personally determine how to achieve greater efficiency with fewer materials.
This is precisely what I meant when I described the construction system in Shelter Builder as “complex”.
Anything implemented as a single independent “product”, such as an SMR or android, can be purchased and installed in completed form. However, the process of integrating it with other facilities so that it can actually function is not automatic.
The same applies to HVAC and water facilities. It was mentioned previously that Ann designed them first, after which the protagonist copied her designs.
This time, however, there were twenty-three research buildings along with several auxiliary facilities, making the process even more complex.
The reason Ann does not construct them herself and the protagonist must copy her designs is that only the protagonist can use Shelter Builder’s Construction function.
It has been mentioned several times in the story that only the user can operate Shelter Builder’s functions.
The research laboratory was an especially expensive facility, however, and I believe my attempt to explain it in greater detail led to this misunderstanding.
I will try to convey this aspect more clearly to readers in the future.
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