Chapter 32: Now All That Remained Was to Wait.
Translator: ShutDoor
January 15, 2027. Eight days remained until the demo service ended.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the headhunting team led by Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su, who transported researchers day and night, a little over 250 PhDs had already arrived safely at the shelter.
The Enigmas dispatched across the country to install surveillance nodes had also returned safely to the shelter, except for those assigned to special regions such as Jeju Island.
The urns containing my parents’ ashes before me were proof of that. It had been weighing on my mind that I couldn’t go in person, but apparently there was no legal issue with a representative collecting the ashes as long as they had a direct family member’s power of attorney and all the proper documents.
“…”
As I quietly ran my hand over the cold ceramic surface, the heavy burden pressing on one corner of my heart finally seemed to lighten a little.
In any case, now that the shelter was finally starting to operate “properly”, it was time to organize the system in earnest.
First, there were twenty-three research institute directors in our shelter, one for each of the twenty-three research buildings, though they were really closer to senior researchers. In that case, didn’t we need someone new to take overall responsibility for the research reports this elite group churned out and coordinate their priorities? In other words, a research center director.
The reason I had invested so insanely heavily in securing research buildings and scientists was that I had concluded our shelter’s future ultimately depended on 「Research」.
Anyone who had played a lot of survival simulation games knew that if a game had a separate 「Research」 or 「Technology」 tree, failing to unlock technologies on time made survival extremely difficult, exhausting, and utterly fucking miserable.
To put it bluntly, the first things visible upon opening the 「Research」 tab were entries like <Wood-Fired Boiler Efficiency Improvement I – Reduced Wood Consumption>.
Couldn’t you see the operator’s sinister plan to screw us all over with an ice age from that alone?
Even this wood-fired boiler improvement was classified under the Industrial Age research category. In other words, without research facilities and expertise appropriate for at least the Industrial Age, the research would take longer and have a lower chance of success.
So how much worse would it be for the technologies I wanted to unlock, which belonged to the High-Tech Age or beyond?
Even the research I intended to attempt right away could be summed up in a single line: <Hydroponics Power Efficiency I>.
I hadn’t poured money into laboratories and swept up PhD-level scientists from across the country for nothing.
Of course, slightly reducing our shelter’s power consumption wouldn’t mean much. We had more electricity than we knew what to do with anyway.
However, as someone who had mastered this sort of game, I was certain that unlocking these technologies one by one would eventually unlock something like reduced water consumption.
Water, water, water! Water was the problem in the end. If only we had more of it, I could have multiplied our hydroponic growing facilities as if I were copying and pasting them. I would have expanded our cultured meat production facilities too.
In any case, I decided we needed three more people: a research center director to oversee all twenty-three research buildings, a personnel staff officer to handle the assignment, education, and training of the settlers who would soon pour in, and a medical staff officer to prepare for emergencies and infectious diseases.
There were plenty of other necessary fields, of course, but Ann could continue handling administration and finances as she had been, while General Kang was already in charge of logistics and military affairs. In practical terms, those three were the only staff advisers we still needed.
I still had 15.18 trillion won in spare funds, so I could easily purchase three Enigmas to serve as staff advisers.
‘Maybe I should make them a little more human this time.’
The research center director was one thing, but I wanted the personnel and medical staff officers to have pleasant personalities since they would deal directly with the incoming settlers and likely face plenty of conflict.
I wasn’t asking for much. Someone on the level of a saint or an angel in white would do.
“That sounds like quite a lot to ask.”
True.
I was actually asking for a tremendous amount.
To be honest, I had set the appearances of every android except the staff advisers to either “average” or “above average” so they wouldn’t stand out. This time, however, I didn’t want to do that.
It wasn’t only because of my personal preferences.
Wouldn’t it also benefit the settlers coming to live in a gloomy underground shelter to have one or two people so exceptionally good-looking that simply seeing them filled their hearts with boundless goodwill?
Preferably with puppy-like features…
And also…
*****
Huff, huff—
“All right, everyone, calm down…”
“Ghk! Y-you really have a tokamak?! Two of them?!”
“D-Director! Are we really going to conduct experiments with that? I mean, are we allowed to control it ourselves? Really? Really, really?!”
A tokamak.
A fusion research device that could only be found at South Korea’s most prestigious national research institutions, such as the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy.
But unlike the tokamaks operated in South Korea, which ranged from a few meters to a little over ten meters in size, the tokamak looming majestically beyond the thick shielding glass was a behemoth well over thirty meters in size.
It was simply staggering that a monstrous tokamak of a size found only at ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in France, was embedded in bedrock hundreds of meters beneath Gangwon Province, South Korea.
Even Eom Tae-yun, who had not majored in nuclear physics or fusion engineering, reacted that way. How much more overwhelming must it have been for the specialists who had dedicated their lives to the field?
“H-huff. A l-large-scale superconducting tokamak…!”
Men and women alike pressed their noses and foreheads against the thick reinforced glass, fogging it white with their rapid breaths as they clamored to get even the slightest bit closer to the reactor.
It was astonishing that the research institute directors could watch the spectacle without changing expression.
The researchers had rested on their first day at the shelter, and over the following two days they had gone through brief interviews, small-scale experiments, and tours of the research buildings like this one.
They had been stunned once by the overwhelming scale of the 80,000-pyeong complex, then stunned all over again whenever some state-of-the-art device beyond their wildest imagination appeared.
In other words, it was about time they stopped being surprised.
Hoping to score a few more points with the research institute directors, Eom Tae-yun did his best to put on a calm, indifferent expression.
…A researcher had an image to uphold.
He couldn’t lose his composure and jump in surprise like some country bumpkin every time he saw something new.
Unless they brought out something like <a laser-interferometer gravitational-wave observatory like LIGO in the United States or KAGRA in Japan, capable of measuring minute, quantum-scale ripples in spacetime>, there was absolutely no way he would be surpri…
“You know KAGRA, don’t you? The one in Gifu Prefecture, Japan? This is a slightly upgraded model of that gravitational-wave telescope. Its measurement precision is approximately one-trillionth…”
THERE IT WAS!
It was a piece of equipment he had dreamed of operating since before he even became an undergraduate, so he recognized it on sight.
…Why was that here?
No, how could it even be here?
Leaving aside the trillions of won it would cost, South Korea shouldn’t even possess the technology to build one in the first place.
“The observation system’s tunnels have a total length of 7,697 meters, including a three-kilometer ultrahigh-vacuum tube tunnel…”
Letting the astrophysics research institute director’s explanation go in one ear and out the other, Eom Tae-yun merely stood there with his mouth hanging open.
…
…
South Korea was capable of this much?
At that moment, the scattered pieces of information in Eom Tae-yun’s mind began fitting themselves into a plausible picture.
Back in the 1970s, when a South Korean company had recruited even fiercely patriotic Korean expatriate scientists to develop new semiconductors, had neighboring countries said, “Hey, I hear Korea’s developing new semiconductors. Shall we all cheer them on?”
No!
Japan had immediately launched an endless fire sale, starting a game of chicken to crush South Korea’s semiconductor industry.
South Korean semiconductor companies had genuinely been driven to the brink of death. Despite that, they had miraculously succeeded in developing semiconductors, allowing them to grow into the conglomerates they were today.
A quick search through old news reports was enough to reveal how desperately those companies had concealed their research secrets.
If that was true even of warfare between corporations, what about technological competition between nations?
‘Could it be…?’
What if that was the true reason this monstrous underground research institute existed?
Eom Tae-yun looked back into the laboratory.
No wonder. There had been an unusual number of mixed-race people among the senior researchers.
If they kept movement in and out to a minimum and remained buried underground in a place “no one would ever expect” like this, how could the United States or any neighboring country possibly find out?
Then it all made sense: why they had recruited particularly young researchers like themselves, why they had gone so far as to install residential and recreation facilities underground, and why the complex contained everything from particle accelerators to all manner of research facilities!
Of course, if he had thought about it a little more calmly, he might have noticed a major flaw in that reasoning.
But Eom Tae-yun and the other scientists had already lost the capacity to think that clearly after coming face-to-face with the research equipment they had dreamed about since childhood.
Perhaps they would have looked the other way even if they had known the truth.
“Huff, huff!”
The next moment, Eom Tae-yun forgot that he had just been mocking the nuclear physics specialists in his head and practically launched himself at the reinforced glass, pressing and rubbing his face against it.
His only consolation was that quite a few other scientists behaved just as disgracefully as he did.
*****
“Mr. Eom! Everyone else has already left! What are you still doing there?”
“S-sorry! I’ll catch up right away!”
Only then did Eom Tae-yun snap out of his trance. He nodded hastily and hurried after the other researchers.
After walking for a while, Eom Tae-yun underwent a physical examination like the one he had received for military conscription. They drew blood and ran several other tests.
Some of them were unusually thorough, including a scan with a large MRI machine, but Eom Tae-yun and the other researchers submitted without complaint.
They knew they would only be hurting themselves if they objected.
“Hee-hee…”
“Heh-heh…”
The strange part was that every researcher who emerged with their test results looked oddly dazed and out of it.
Eom Tae-yun tilted his head in puzzlement but obediently entered the examination room.
“Dr. Eom Tae-yun? There’s nothing significantly wrong, but there are a few things you should watch out for. May I briefly explain them?”
“Ah, yes! Th-thank you…”
As Eom Tae-yun reached for the test results, his breath suddenly caught.
It was because of the face of the woman in the white coat explaining the results to him.
She had a poised, youthful air without looking merely young or girlish.
As Eom Tae-yun, frozen in place, raised his gaze a little higher, her unreal features grew clearer in the light.
Skin that glowed translucently beneath the overhead lights. A neat bob fell softly along her neck, framing warm, gentle, puppy-like eyes that curved into a smile and melted away anyone’s wariness like snow.
His gaze naturally drifted to the name tag pinned to the breast of her white coat.
[Im A-ram]
…Even her name was pretty.
Fortunately, Dr. Im A-ram showed no sign of displeasure despite his blatant stare.
Instead, her eyes curved gently as she carefully explained the figures on his test results in a clear, kindly voice.
Was she an angel?
“If you notice even the slightest problem with your health from now on, don’t try to tough it out. Come in for an examination immediately.”
“Y-yes! I absolutely will!”
“Haha, this is a vitamin. Take one.”
Creak.
Click.
After emerging from the examination room as though he had been pushed out, Eom Tae-yun finally understood perfectly why the male researchers who had passed him earlier had looked so utterly entranced.
In his palm rested a cute little character-shaped vitamin, the sort he had not eaten once since graduating from high school.
The vitamin tasted incredibly sweet.
“Ha ha…!”
He’d found his job for life!
*****
January 17, 2027. Only six days remained until the demo service ended.
As originally planned, we had successfully transported all 400 core researchers with doctorates and moved them into the shelter.
I had privately found it strange that there hadn’t been a single protest or objection even after they were informed that they would be completely forbidden from going outside or contacting the outside world for at least a month. But after hearing the answer from Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su and the rest of the headhunting team, I could only nod in understanding.
—From the very beginning, you might say we gave top priority to academic ability and character… no, nerdiness. Haha.
Apparently, for nerds, being fed three meals a day and allowed to use research equipment however they pleased was the greatest employee benefit imaginable.
Perhaps that wasn’t wrong, because researchers who had only been in the shelter for a few days were already being spotted one after another with their heads down, working like mad on their “experiments”.
Had they gone to graduate school because they were born with personalities like that, or had graduate school turned them into people like that?
Graduate school was terrifying. Thank goodness I had stopped partway through my bachelor’s degree…
“Fortunately, every researcher who has entered the shelter so far is healthy, with no abnormalities.”
Im A-ram, the medical staff officer and hospital director, entered the central control room and smiled as she held out the neatly organized examination charts.
It was fortunate that, perhaps because they were all relatively young, their only health issues were forward head posture, rounded shoulders, being underweight, or disc problems.
The researchers’ families were also scheduled to be transported during the Lunar New Year holiday as discreetly as possible, under pretexts such as “field trips”, “accompanied training programs”, and “health examinations”.
In any case, I now had a mere(?) 9.7 trillion won in spare funds left.
After consulting the staff advisers, I found that there truly wasn’t any more infrastructure worth building inside the shelter.
We had already built kindergartens, schools, libraries, and everything else of that sort.
Of course, I could probably find more things if I searched in greater detail, but we had reached the point where buying supplies to fill our warehouses was far more worthwhile than constructing new facilities.
We had already stocked decades’ worth of essential supplies in the raw materials warehouse and the other storage areas. This time, I bought generous quantities of alcohol, cigarettes, tea, coffee, chocolate, honey, butter, spices, fruit, cheese, and other luxury and comfort goods we hadn’t purchased before. They weren’t essential, but they would be nice to have.
To rattle off the rough quantities, there were 600 tons of coffee beans, 140 tons of green tea, 600 tons of chocolate, 700 tons of honey, 700 tons of nuts, 500 tons of dried fruit, 700 tons of snacks, 20 million packs of cigarettes, and one million bottles of beer…
Despite buying such generous amounts, it didn’t even come to 300 billion won.
So while I was at it, I purchased thousands of tons each of red pepper powder, condiments such as soy sauce and soybean paste, vinegar, sesame oil, and every other ingredient used in modern Korean cuisine.
I also went all out and bought thousands of tons of hygiene products and daily necessities, yet even that only(?) cost 870 billion won.
So I spent the entire remaining 8.5 trillion won on small drones, Javelins, mobile missile launchers, and the missiles and artillery shells to stock the armory.
It would never end if I broke down every last item, so I would simply say that, following General Kang’s advice, we secured as generous a quantity of each type as we could possibly need.
Now the only spare funds I truly had left were the 30 billion won reserved for furnishing the house where I would live.
Once I purchased the Enigmas for “intelligence” work, the reconnaissance satellites, weather satellites, and communications satellites on the final day, I would truly be finished.
“Whew.”
I had truly done everything I possibly could.
I supposed I would lavishly furnish my house and wait for D-Day to arrive.
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
Join our discord server: https://discord.gg/96hMXymzMP