Chapter 21: Busted
Translator: ShutDoor
Detention cells, or prison cells, to put it more bluntly, served three main purposes.
The first was to lock up people who committed crimes.
If someone living in the shelter committed a serious crime, they would be confined there to pay the appropriate price for it.
When I surveyed the surrounding terrain early on, wasn’t there mention of a mineral deposit several kilometers underground?
The bedrock temperature reached 79 degrees just two kilometers down, so wouldn’t the fear of mining in that environment be enough to make people follow the rules?
“That would technically qualify as torture.”
“…Really?”
The second purpose was to confine outsiders.
It would be a place to verify the beliefs, identities, and past actions of people captured outside and brought in, and to conduct a kind of ‘interview’ before admitting them to our shelter.
Anyone who had played similar games would be familiar with the process.
In those games, didn’t players beat invading enemies to within an inch of their lives, lock them in prison, and then ‘persuade’ them until they joined their side?
But that only worked because it was a game. Reality would call for a slightly different approach.
And the third and final purpose was to make people understand the importance of rules.
I knew that might sound a little strange.
But I did not want the people in my shelter slipping out of my control.
By control, I did not mean treating them as less than human, like livestock.
On the contrary, I believed a minimum level of control would be necessary if the people in the shelter were to maintain a decent, humane life over a very long period.
There would be idiots who tried to run outside because they felt stifled underground, even while nuclear fallout might be swirling above. There would be people who shouted, “Who the hell are you to control us?” There would be useless mouths who contributed nothing but still treated the community’s rules like a joke. And so on.
I had no intention of letting the sort of infuriating liabilities and useless freeloaders seen in fiction run wild.
A detention facility was therefore essential.
In exchange for safety, food, clothing, shelter, and a life befitting a human being, the residents would surrender a certain degree of freedom and submit to my control.
If they considered that unreasonable, they were welcome to go live in the outside world, where nuclear fallout, ice ages, viruses, and natural disasters came thick and fast.
…Though I couldn’t promise they would leave in one piece.
‘Still, ruling through fear alone wouldn’t be good either.’
There was not even anyone in the shelter yet, and I already had a headache from thinking about how to govern them. I had never been interested in becoming class president or student council president in the first place.
The grandest titles I had ever held were class secretary and table tennis club captain.
‘Hmm.’
Trying to establish the shelter’s rules and guiding principles already would only give me a headache, so I decided to start by considering how to build the detention facility.
The first thing to decide was its location.
Should it be placed within the living area, as in humane Northern Europe? Or should it be isolated on the outskirts like in the United States, so ordinary residents would not even be conscious of its existence?
“I recommend the latter.”
Ann answered without hesitation.
“Why?”
“Strictly speaking, the detainees you described would be both criminals and undesirable elements who violated the shelter’s rules, would they not, Administrator?”
“Right.”
“The purpose of their confinement would be deterrence and isolation from the community rather than rehabilitation or reintegration into society.”
In the end, I decided to isolate the detention facility on the outskirts.
Just as there were no ‘absolutes’ in this world, there was no prison that could never be escaped. Still, couldn’t I build one that would keep anyone from even contemplating an escape attempt for a hundred years or so?
When prison escapes did happen, they usually involved outside assistance, someone patient enough to secretly dig a tunnel, or guards growing complacent after mechanically repeating the same head counts for more than a decade.
Those problems would not be difficult to prevent.
If I used Juggernauts as guards, no outside accomplice could force their way through, and the guards would never grow complacent.
The corridors and rooms would have to be larger to let the massive Juggernauts move freely, but that was well worth the cost.
Digging a tunnel was obviously impossible too. Using a spoon in solid granite… no, even if they somehow had a pickaxe or shovel, were they going to dig upward for hundreds of meters?
If someone had that kind of excavation ability, I would hire them on the spot, prisoner or not.
“Assuming the shelter holds seven thousand people, how large should the detention facility be?”
“In a closed society completely cut off from the outside world, such as your shelter, detainees cannot be transferred elsewhere. I therefore recommend planning around maximum emergency capacity rather than the number normally confined.”
Ann calculated for a moment before continuing.
“Accounting for outsiders who may arrive in the future, it would be advisable to secure capacity for three hundred people.”
Ann went one step further and suggested dividing the facility into three sections: a general detention wing, a high-security detention wing for high-risk detainees, and an isolation and observation wing.
“That’s the minimum, right?”
“Correct.”
I was starting to get used to the way Ann talked.
Because my shelter was cut off from the outside world, running short of space to temporarily confine people would itself be extremely dangerous.
I concluded that it would be better to leave as much reserve capacity as possible for emergencies.
I would never allow things to reach that point, but if something happened to me, a riot could break out.
I therefore decided to build the detention wings as far from critical facilities as possible, with access available only through a separate restricted zone.
Naturally, the facilities inside the detention wings would be incomparably worse than the residential facilities. When it came to food and much else, the detainees would not exactly be treated like human beings.
The sleeping quarters would be military-style open barracks. Surveillance cameras would run twenty-four hours a day, and the toilets would be open, separated only by low partitions like those in real prisons.
In apocalypse stories, such people were usually shot outright instead of being put in detention facilities, so this should make it clear just how humane I was.
Even someone as humane and fair as me had no intention of giving criminals chance after chance.
The detention facility would never imprison the same person twice.
*****
The massive detention facility, capable of holding up to five hundred people, was complete. To prevent the detainees from secretly communicating with one another, every wing except the general detention wing consisted entirely of solitary cells.
That might sound fairly large, but its total area was only around two thousand pyeong. Excluding the corridors, control facilities, and dining hall, it was practically as cramped as a chicken coop.
The doors were made of reinforced alloy without a single opening other than the meal slot, while the walls were left as bare granite bedrock.
It was a structure that made physical escape impossible.
Naturally, I had no intention of putting anything inside other than observation cameras, plastic bunks, and desks.
The general detention wing was also designed with reference to various modern prisons, ensuring that no one could even dream of escaping.
Countless steel doors were installed throughout the corridors so that even if control of one section was lost, the breach could not spread through the others.
The CCTV cameras were densely placed to eliminate every blind spot. In modern society, I would have been condemned for violating human rights, but fortunately, there was no need to worry about prisoners’ rights during the apocalypse.
In any case, the detention facility cost a total of 470 billion won to build. Using such durable materials had cost more than expected.
The exact amount I had spent so far was 312,660,037,280,000 won.
Assuming I reserved roughly 300 trillion won to purchase androids, artificial satellites, and the like, I now had approximately 390 trillion won in discretionary funds remaining.
The one consolation was that more than seventy percent of the infrastructure was now in place.
The facilities left to build were…
“You will require a communal kitchen capable of preparing 20,160 meals per day, based on three meals a day.”
…For twenty thousand meals, how many rice cookers would that take?
*****
Major corporations such as Sambyeol Electronics supplied an annual average of 55 million meals through catering services for their affiliates. That worked out to approximately 150,000 meals per day.
Ann’s opinion was that, no matter how unrealistic it seemed, twenty thousand meals a day was a perfectly manageable scale.
‘I can’t even picture it.’
A friend of mine who had been an army cook used to tell me how he worked himself ragged from four in the morning just to feed a single battalion. How many cafeteria workers would it take to prepare twenty thousand servings?
How did major corporations serve that many meals every day in the first place?
“In fact, the communal kitchens of major corporations operate more like small food factories than conventional kitchens.”
I gave her a small nod to continue.
“Producing thousands of servings per day would be impossible unless nearly every stage, from receiving and washing ingredients to cooking, serving, and washing dishes, operated on automated lines.”
Ann explained with a simple example.
“If each meal requires two hundred grams of cooked rice, feeding six thousand people takes 1.2 tons of rice per meal. Three meals would require 3.6 tons per day.”
3.6 tons.
That’s insane.
Hearing the actual number certainly drove the scale home.
It gave me a newfound appreciation for Seoul, a city of ten million. I only had several thousand people to accommodate, so I could get by with twenty thousand meals. Did that mean Seoul, with its population of ten million, had consumed thirty million meals every day?
“…But wouldn’t two meals a day be enough?”
Cutting one meal would reduce the daily total from 20,160 meals to 13,440. Serving food only twice would also consume fewer ingredients and produce correspondingly less food waste.
Of course, who would leave food uneaten during an apocalypse? But after a few years of shelter life, once everyone was warm and well fed, who knew?
It seemed better to reduce the number of meals, minimize waste, and increase our emergency reserves.
That did not mean serving three meals had no advantages. The greatest benefit was that cooking would provide the ordinary people admitted to the shelter with a suitable amount of work.
Doing nothing was only fun for a day or two. Human beings functioned properly only when work and leisure were clearly separated. It was the same principle by which Friday nights and weekends could shine only because Mondays existed.
“Given your disposition, I imagine you are also reluctant to accommodate unproductive individuals.”
She was not entirely wrong about that.
“However, a shelter housing six thousand people would require essential labor in many areas besides the dining hall. A steady workforce would be required for large-scale laundry, supply logistics, waste sorting, hygiene inspections, cleaning, and more.”
In other words, there was no need to insist on three meals a day merely as an excuse to create jobs.
“In that case, assuming two nutritionally complete meals are provided as standard, I recommend allowing three meals a day as a special benefit only for those engaged in physically strenuous work.”
“So it would be like giving preferential treatment to people who volunteer for hard labor?”
“Precisely.”
I found myself nodding.
I immediately searched through the shop window to see what I would need to establish the ‘automated cooking factory’ Ann had described.
[ ■ Cooking and food-processing equipment list ]
⦁ Fully automated central kitchen system (food factory type)
⦁Unit price: 35 billion won
⦁Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁ Semi-automated large-scale catering line set (major corporate cafeteria type)
⦁Unit price: 12 billion won
⦁Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁ High-efficiency industrial dishwashing and food-waste processing line
⦁Unit price: 5 billion won
⦁Status: [Available for purchase]
After throwing around trillions of won, amounts in the tens of billions hardly even looked like money to me anymore.
Of course, I could not forget that the real expense would be the construction needed to make room for those enormous installations.
Even now that I had grown used to spending lavishly, the brutal price of 50 million won per cubic meter still caught me off guard from time to time. Building a single proper facility inevitably cost trillions of won in the end.
“Administrator.”
Ann spoke just then. Her face was even more rigid than usual.
“I believe you should see this.”
News headlines and comments scrolled across the screen Ann displayed.
「Mysterious Building Appears Overnight in the Heart of Türkiye」
「[Exclusive] Turkish Government Dismisses Video as Baseless AI-Generated Fabrication」
Anonymous: Obviously AI, lolololol.
Looping: Do those Maesan Daily bastards post breaking news without even checking anything first?
MM: Huh? That doesn’t look like AI.
Seventeen days remained until the apocalypse.
“…”
The wall of censorship the developed nations had desperately maintained had been breached in a completely unexpected place.
*****
Author’s Note
Below is a rough layout of the shelter’s interior.
[Surface]
║ ◀─ Public elevator (surface↔living zone) (planned)
║ │
║ │ ↓ Approx. 600 m vertical connection
║ │
║ ├─ Recreation facilities / park and sports facilities (planned)
║ │
║ ├─ Residential facilities
║ │
║ ├─ Living/common area
││ ├─ Dining hall
││ ├─ Communal kitchen
││ └─ Medical facilities (planned)
││
│├─ Detention zone
│├─ Logistics, food, and raw materials warehouse
││
││
│├─ Central control room ★ (1,000 m underground)
│ ├─ ① Hydroponic growing facility
│ ├─ ② Munitions factory → metalworking factory, armory, maintenance hangar, vehicle garage
│ └─ ③ Research facilities
│
├─ Server room
│
├─ Power storage facility
│ └─ Approx. 50 m above the substation facilities
│
├─ Substation facilities
│
└─ Power generation facilities / nuclear waste treatment facility
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
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