Chapter 37: Mind Control
Translator: ShutDoor
There were two main Telegram chatrooms where I was active.
ProSurvivalist_1500, who had created both chatrooms, had named them himself. For convenience, we called them Fish Trap and the 100 Billion Club.
There was no need to overthink it. Fish Trap was a playground for people hiding behind masks, where all sorts of small fry and princesses too precious to lift a finger and look anything up gathered to whine, anonymous or otherwise. The Club, meanwhile, was a true forum for sharing information among refined gentlemen who used their real names.
I checked Fish Trap first.
Anon: I don’t think I caught it. It’s been almost a week, and if I’m not sick by now, that means I’m really fine, right?
Roji99: Haven’t you heard the incubation period can last for months~?
bagpack264: Fifteen million infected in just six days? Is this for real? The country’s seriously fucked;;
Anon: Anyone willing to share their shelter location? I’m a woman, used to be an idol trainee, and I’m healthy. I’ll send you pictures in a private message. Please T_T T_T T_T
ProSurvivalist1500: Blocked the commenter above.
I immediately closed the window and switched to the 100 Billion Club.
InariSushi_1300: So there’s finally been a death. In the country right next door, of all places.
InariSushi_1300: Honestly, no matter how much our country has grown, we’re still not in Japan’s weight class. If Japan’s in that state, it basically means every developed country has been breached.
ProSurvivalist_1500: Everyone, stay holed up in your shelters for at least a month. Things are getting seriously ugly outside.
ProSurvivalist_1500: I’m only telling you guys this, but there’s a rumor the military will be blocking the roads soon. I hear they’re even putting up barricades, so stay put unless you want to get hurt out there.
Rather than the kind of club where young people danced and partied, it felt more like a refined social club where people exchanged information.
I wasn’t rating it highly just because I belonged there. Its users were definitely older than Fish Trap’s, and I could tell they at least tried to behave like “gentlemen”.
Ppampakabam_1000: No! My limited-edition Karis-chan figurine still hasn’t been delivered!
OnlyNegativeThoughts_1100: Sex
Or maybe not.
Anyway, Viet_1191, who was active only in the latter chatroom, served as the 100 Billion Club’s key source, swiftly bringing in all kinds of high-quality information that ordinary people would have struggled to uncover.
Viet_1191: Japanese Prime Minister Nishimura’s remarks.mp4
Viet_1191: First death reported in Nagoya, Japan. Age 55. Unmarried. Occupation: freeter.
Viet_1191: An autopsy of the body has been approved with the family’s consent.
Viet_1191: Consent given by the victim’s mother, who is in her eighties and has severe Alzheimer’s.
Viet_1191: Naturally, the information about her dementia was censored.
That breaking news about the first death from the NIV virus in Japan was one such scoop.
“Considering Viet_1191 shared the news only one minute after the embargo was lifted in Japan, there is a strong possibility that they are an active journalist.”
Or else they were a forum addict who stared at Japanese online communities twenty-four hours a day.
Of course, I had already known about the news Viet_1191 posted before they shared it. That was thanks to the central control room operators monitoring developments around the world without rest.
The report in my hand even stated that South Korea’s daily number of new confirmed cases had already surpassed 1.5 million.
At this point, it was fair to say that the South Korean government’s administrative capacity had effectively collapsed. People might start dying in large numbers as soon as tomorrow.
“South Korea aside, there is probably not a single country with enough breathing room to turn its attention overseas at present.”
That went without saying.
Even in modern warfare, a unit that suffers casualties among at least twenty percent of its combat personnel is considered effectively wiped out and forced to retreat. Right now, roughly thirty percent of South Korea’s population was infected, while over forty percent were “presumed infected”.
At that point, it would have been stranger if the country were still functioning normally.
Society would have collapsed even if only ordinary citizens had been infected. Did anyone really think this godforsaken virus had somehow spared high-ranking officials and National Assembly members?
Not a chance.
The conspicuous rise in the number of National Assembly members across both the ruling and opposition parties who had stayed out of sight for days proved that this was not mere speculation.
@minsu_0921: Yeom Jeong-gwang used to spew out three Instagram posts a day, but it’s been quiet for days.
@jinsu: Same with Kim Sang-su lololol
@coffee_and_trip: Lee Hyeok-sang too. I enjoyed watching those YouTube videos where they promoted local festivals with public officials.
Their aides’ official explanation was that they had “suspended their social-media activities for the time being due to personal circumstances”, but who knew. It certainly did not look that way to me.
While the outside world slowly crumbled, our shelter developed a problem of its own.
“Are there any problems in our shelter?”
“The other sectors are operating smoothly, but we are somewhat short-staffed in childcare.”
In other words, we had a manpower shortage.
It was not as though critical facilities such as the power systems, research institutes, central control room, or communications room lacked personnel.
Rather, we were short on people to assign to relatively less important work in places like the dining hall and school.
Childcare was the most immediate example.
No matter how far the Enigmas’ processing power surpassed anything humans could hope to match, controlling dozens of wildly energetic five- and six-year-olds was an entirely different kind of problem.
Of course, lowering the shelter’s average age was a good thing in the long run, and we had complete control over what the children were taught, so it was far from entirely negative.
Assuming a settlement had sufficient resources, bright, healthy children running around could also have many positive effects, such as giving the settlers hope for the future.
The problem was that there were far more of them than I had expected.
“How many children did you say there were exactly?”
“Exactly 431.”
…No wonder we were short on people.
Was that not enough children to fill an entire elementary school and then some?
From my past experience working part-time at a kids’ café, four hundred six-year-olds were already hell in and of themselves.
Of course, our shelter had been designed from the outset to accommodate at least 6,720 people, so taking in that many children was not a major problem in itself…
The problem was the severe shortage of trained personnel to care for them.
“Then who’s looking after them right now?”
“For the time being, Personnel Office Director Kim Mun-seok and four subordinates are handling them exclusively.”
…So each of them was looking after roughly eighty-six children?
No wonder the children ran around the central park giggling whenever they got the chance. With so few dedicated caregivers, they had apparently been more or less left to roam free.
Of course, raising children did not come with disadvantages alone.
“Parents with many children often endure even extreme circumstances because they feel responsible for them. Disaster studies have also found a close relationship between psychological resilience and whether a person has children.”
Given how rapidly the research was progressing, this seemed like a reasonable price to pay.
Of course, the reason for this manpower shortage was simple.
We had prepared for nuclear war, natural disasters, EMPs, infectious diseases, and even a zombie apocalypse, devising a plan to recruit the most capable people possible after D-Day while avoiding the government’s attention. We had even drawn up a list.
But the plan itself had fallen through because of an infectious disease outbreak so far beyond normal expectations that even the superintelligent androids had failed to predict it.
That was also why we had been unable to transport the key researchers’ parents in advance.
We had concluded that there was simply no way to transport thousands of people to a shelter deep in the mountains of Gangwon Province in a short time while also evading government surveillance.
On top of that, Tier One special forces had visited not long ago, so expanding the scale of our transport operations any further carried too great a risk of discovery.
The researchers, their spouses, and their children were the absolute limit.
We had been forced to prioritize, bringing in spouses and children first while deciding to transport the parents slowly over time after D-Day.
Then this had happened.
…Anyway, enough worrying about people we could not bring in immediately.
“How did the virus tests turn out?”
At my question, Rachel approached from the side and answered as if she had been waiting for it.
“We did find sequences similar to existing viruses in some sections. But when we examined the genome as a whole, it didn’t fit properly into any known lineage.”
Before I could ask what that meant, Ann, who stood beside me, summarized it in her characteristically dry voice and made it easy to understand.
“It means that no matching virus was found in any viral genome database worldwide. For all practical purposes, it is an entirely new virus that humanity has never identified before.”
“…Then what?”
“With no reference data, it is difficult to predict which antiviral drugs might be effective. We must also determine from scratch how the virus enters cells and replicates.”
Even the virus responsible for COVID-19 had close relatives like SARS, but the NIV virus had neither relatives nor even reference material.
Put simply, developing a vaccine would be a massive pain in the ass.
But if Rachel had only come to deliver news that hopeless, she would not have bothered reporting to the central control room in person. I quietly waited for her to continue.
“That’s it, though?”
“?”
She had really come all the way here just to say that?
“I’m kidding. Um, so… we need more samples.”
Rachel gave her characteristic smile, her eyes expressionless even as the corners of her mouth slowly curled upward.
Honestly, she looked a little psychopathic.
“Animals are enough to study the pathogen itself, but there are some things we can only learn by observing infected people directly and measuring the changes in their bodies.”
In other words, she wanted permission to bring some people in from outside.
Honestly, I wanted to do the same. I had a rough idea of how important an infected person’s immune response and various bodily specimens were to vaccine development.
Once they were inside the shelter, there would be no risk of it spreading internally. Our infection-control facilities were more fully equipped than any others on the Korean Peninsula.
The problem was bringing them here when things outside were so grim.
“Could we start by bringing in the parents of the researchers from the virology research building? We have to bring them here eventually anyway, and those researchers will be working the hardest for the foreseeable future, so it would also inspire loyalty…”
I understood what she meant.
We needed samples, and we had to rescue the researchers’ parents before they died anyway, so she was suggesting we bring in the parents of the virology research building’s staff first. If any were infected, we could conduct research on them under the pretext of “treating” them.
Just as calling perfectly ordinary people “samples” began to bother me slightly—
Smack!
“Ack!”
Our dependable Chief Secretary Ann taught Rachel a harsh lesson in manners by smacking her on the crown of the head, so I decided there was no need for me to berate her too.
I turned to my most trusted secretary and asked,
“How many days will it take?”
There was no need to ask whether she had a plan. Ann would already have calculated everything down to that detail.
Sure enough, Ann gave me the answer I expected in an indifferent voice.
“If we limit the operation to the families of researchers from the virology research building, it will take approximately four days.”
Had transporting more than a thousand researchers and family members before D-Day taken a little over four days? That alone showed how much tighter the checkpoints and searches had become outside.
“We could have shortened it further if the government had not implemented such stringent regional quarantine measures.”
Ann’s face remained expressionless, but for some reason, she seemed slightly disappointed.
But wouldn’t some of them already be in quarantine? That could seriously complicate the routes.
“After intercepting and analyzing the calls made by the researchers from the virology research building, we found that none of their parents appeared to be in serious condition. Some are likely infected, but even if they are, most are probably still in the incubation period.”
I glanced at Rachel, who was rubbing the top of her head and pretending it hurt when it clearly did not, then asked,
“If we secure an infected person, how long will it take to get the analysis results?”
Rachel answered while rubbing the top of her head, looking aggrieved.
“I won’t know until I examine one directly, but I think it would take a week at the earliest and a month at most.”
Our equipment was cutting-edge enough to rival anything in the United States, and three Enigmas whose processing power vastly exceeded human capabilities had been assigned to the virology research building.
Although the Enigmas could not perform 「Research」 itself, that did not mean they were incapable of analyzing pathogens or collecting data.
Above all, humans could never match the androids’ ability to collect data around the clock without changing shifts.
Taking that into account, our shelter might even analyze the pathogen faster than the South Korean government.
Perhaps even faster than the United States.
*****
I got out of bed at seven in the morning.
I did not know whether it was because the bed was expensive or because I still had not fully relaxed, but even a faint rustle was enough to wake me.
Basking in the warmth of the sun, or rather, the artificial sunlight, I made my bed.
The bedding would be taken care of every day without me lifting a finger, but I still thought this was something I ought to do myself.
I was the administrator of the shelter, after all. The least I could do was fold my own blanket.
The world had become a mess, but my daily life was still not much different from before. After showering and changing clothes, I stepped into the living room and found Ann waiting with a light breakfast laid out.
This morning’s breakfast was a sandwich, bacon, and a fried egg.
For now, we were using vegetables from our stockpile, but perhaps before long, all the vegetables in our breakfasts would come from the hydroponic growing facility.
As soon as Ann saw me begin eating my sandwich, she reported what had happened before dawn.
“Transport Team 1, including Deputy Manager Lee Jun-su, was deployed on a surface rescue operation as of 0400 hours today.”
As that alone suggested, we were repurposing the old headhunting team wholesale for exploration outside the shelter. They had left the shelter before dawn, while everyone was asleep, to attract as little attention as possible.
This time, however, we had changed the operating method slightly. They had prepared four types of clothing: casual clothes, business suits, protective suits, and special-forces uniforms, and would change into them depending on the situation.
They had even been issued not only basic tools for subduing people, such as telescopic batons, but also binding equipment and incapacitating agents, including anesthetics.
I frowned the moment I heard that.
“…Why go that far?”
The researchers from the virology research building could vouch for the rescue team over a video call. This was not some kidnapping operation, so I could not see why the team needed all that equipment.
“Animal experiments conducted by Research Center Director Rachel before dawn confirmed that the pathogen is highly likely to act directly on the human brain and nervous system.”
Oh.
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
Join our discord server: https://discord.gg/96hMXymzMP