Chapter 12: 28 Trillion Won Each?!
Translator: ShutDoor
The screen showed a street in France.
With one day left until the New Year, French citizens were out on the streets, laughing and chatting. Some were filming the illuminated Eiffel Tower with their phones, while others waited for fireworks on broad avenues like the Champs-Élysées.
It probably wasn’t so unusual for the interior minister, who oversaw the nation’s law enforcement and public safety, to visit such a place.
The street was peaceful and full of hope. There was nothing unusual to be seen.
Just as I thought that, an explosion erupted.
It was such an immense explosion that even watching it through a screen made my eyes sting for an instant. Every window along the street shattered at once, and the shock wave hurled people and vehicles alike through the air. A blaze of crimson flames followed.
After a suffocating silence, utter chaos descended.
The beeping of cars, distant screams, and the wail of sirens assaulted my ears.
I bit my lip and looked at the screen one last time. Far more of the image was pixelated than not. Those were probably all bodies.
The anchor and announcer expressed their deepest condolences over the tragedy in France and continued their discussion.
[So, Professor Hwang, you believe this was a meticulously planned terrorist attack?]
[Yes. Extremist forces opposed to the current French government’s hard-line refugee and immigration policies…]
[Ah, we’ve just received an update. The French president and prime minister have convened an emergency cabinet meeting, declared a nationwide state of emergency, and imposed border controls…]
[The death toll currently stands at 230, while chaos is spreading throughout Europe…]
[France has canceled all events scheduled for the end of the year…]
I changed the channel. Another station was covering the civil war in the Middle East. One clip after another showed missiles fired from high above blowing apartment buildings to pieces.
The outsiders watching those scenes spent about five seconds feeling sorry for the horrific situation in the Middle East, then went back to whatever they had been doing.
Anonymous: Made 3 mil with leverage. Sweet~
Anonymous: Why the hell did those Middle Eastern bastards have to pull this crap today…!
megaman: Looks like oil prices are really going up this time. The economy’s already rough, so what the fuck are you bastards doing~ Stop fighting already~
grace: Why does it feel like there’ve been so many earthquakes and wars lately? It’s scary.
Under normal circumstances, I would have reacted just like them. Relieved that I hadn’t been born in a country descending into chaos, I would have gone to my part-time job like any other day.
But I couldn’t afford to be that complacent anymore.
Even France’s counterterrorism units, which must have been thoroughly accustomed to terrorist attacks, had failed to identify not only the suspects but even the route used to transport the explosives.
One expert was even suggesting that an aerial drone might have dropped the explosives while flying at an undetectably low altitude. There was no other way to transport enough explosives to obliterate an entire building.
But I knew a way for one person to transport that much explosive. It wouldn’t be difficult with 「Shelter Builder」. Construction and purchase were only possible near the terminal, but previously purchased items could be ‘retrieved’ even outside its operating range.
Maybe that terrorist attack was also…
‘Ah.’
I lightly slapped both cheeks. When even that failed to snap me out of it, I threw on a single thin layer of clothing and rushed out of the tent.
The cold January air lashed my bare skin. I stood there for a long time.
This world was really going to end. And there were only 23 days left until the apocalypse.
*****
I finished constructing every type of warehouse. There were five types in total: a raw materials warehouse, an ordnance warehouse, a freeze-dried food warehouse, a frozen storage warehouse, and a refrigerated storage warehouse.
I packed the raw materials warehouse full of steel products that might come in handy someday, nonferrous metals such as copper, aluminum, and stainless steel, and industrial consumables such as spare wiring, bearings, bolts and nuts, and battery materials.
Constructing the five types of warehouses cost 5.775 trillion won. Including the raw materials and other supplies I had packed inside, enough to last at least eighty years, the total came to a staggering 11 trillion won.
‘Whew.’
I was pushing ahead with shelter construction even harder than usual. There were several reasons for that, but the biggest was that I was beginning to feel the need to scout the surrounding area.
Staying in the mountains would certainly be safe, but being too isolated also had far too many disadvantages.
Low risk, low return, as they say.
I therefore decided it would be best to leave the mountains and install the CCTV cameras and other surveillance equipment I had purchased in advance along the nearby roads and in neighboring cities.
Naturally, I had no intention of going myself. I planned to use the androids and proceed safely. While they were at it, they could bring back my parents’ urns as well.
I didn’t want my parents’ ashes buried beneath radioactive fallout.
As for why I specifically expected fallout, it was because I believed nuclear weapons were the most plausible means of destroying civilization.
If the Tsar Bomba, the former Soviet Union’s nuclear bomb, exploded over Seoul right now, Seoul would burn to the ground, people throughout the Seoul Capital Area would suffer third-degree burns, and at least ten million people would die.
Modern strategic nuclear weapons were far less powerful and far more precise than the Tsar Bomba, of course, but I doubted that the United States, China, or Russia completely lacked bombs comparable to it.
Wouldn’t they have a few hidden away in the name of nuclear deterrence? Much like no other country believed South Korea had disposed of every last chemical weapon.
In any case, once the nukes went off, civilization would probably collapse one way or another, whether mutated life-forms emerged from the radiation, zombies appeared, an infectious disease ran rampant, or nuclear winter arrived.
“We cannot know what might happen along the way, so I recommend sending them out at least three days before D-Day.”
“I was planning to send them by the end of this week at the latest.”
“Then will you be buying separate clothes for those units as well?”
Only then did I realize that Ann was wearing just a single Gore-Tex garment.
“…Do you need winter clothes?”
“If you provide them, I will wear them with gratitude.”
After buying Ann a suitable padded coat and having her put it on, I focused on construction again.
I had finished constructing the entire warehouse zone the day before, so any crops or cultured meat we produced from now on could immediately be placed in storage.
Wouldn’t it be efficient to build the communal kitchen and dining hall above it? Alternatively, assigning that level to the metalworking factory, munitions factory, and maintenance workshop might also work. There was no benefit to placing noisy facilities near the residential areas.
“May I ask what purpose you intend the munitions factory to serve?”
“Once we’ve researched enough to manufacture our own weapons, we’ll make them here. We can produce things like ammunition ourselves while we’re at it.”
Modern cartridges broadly required four components: a bullet projectile, a cartridge case, a propellant charge, and a primer. With a metalworking factory, we could take materials from the raw materials warehouse and somehow machine the projectiles and cases, but as far as I knew, gunpowder and primers required a separate fine chemical plant.
“Administrator, to be frank, I do not recommend producing ammunition inside the shelter. In terms of both practicality and cost-effectiveness, stockpiling large quantities of finished ammunition would be overwhelmingly more advantageous.”
“I know. But what happens once we use up all the ammunition we’ve stockpiled?”
I wasn’t building this shelter just to survive for ten or twenty years. I was looking toward that distant future, decades from now, when the nuclear fallout had completely settled and humanity could finally venture outside the shelter again.
When that time came, regardless of efficiency, we would inevitably reach a point when we had to churn out even crude, homemade ammunition for the sake of survival.
Munitions factories on the surface? They would have vanished without a trace in the nuclear blasts long ago. Even if one miraculously remained intact, decades of neglect would surely have reduced all its machinery to rusted scrap.
That didn’t mean we needed to mass-produce enough ammunition for thousands or tens of thousands of people. It would be enough to secure only what the personnel dedicated to outside reconnaissance would consume.
Zombies were another matter, but a single bullet to the head would finish off a raider. And in a fight between someone with a gun and someone without one, the person with the gun would win ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
So even if it was inefficient, there was more than enough value in maintaining at least a minimal ammunition production capability.
“If you insist, I recommend production lines for the most versatile options: 5.56×45mm NATO ammunition and 9mm Parabellum ammunition.”
I nodded. They were the most widely used rifle and handgun cartridges in the world. I wondered whether we really needed handgun ammunition too, but handguns’ portability and usefulness in close-quarters combat within the cramped shelter made it essential.
I wasn’t considering producing artillery shells. Their production facilities were incomparably more complex than those for ordinary ammunition, and the Juggernauts’ onboard weapons should be more than sufficient to provide that level of heavy firepower.
I therefore settled on stockpiling as many artillery shells as possible instead of producing them ourselves.
Likewise, the specialized ammunition used by the Juggernauts couldn’t be produced with modern technology, so I planned to stockpile as much of it as possible.
I wasn’t going to purchase it immediately, though. I planned to spend only whatever money remained after buying everything else for the shelter.
In any case, if we were going to produce bullets, a shooting range for maintaining real-world proficiency was also essential. I decided to have Ann lay out the munitions factory on the blueprint while I designed the range.
“For now, I will secure only the basic ammunition production lines.”
“All right. I’m counting on you.”
The shooting range didn’t require a particularly complicated design. Lanes with ranges of 10 meters, 30 meters, 50 meters, and at most 100 meters would be enough.
After all, with a properly zeroed rifle, you could hit pretty much any target by firing single shots.
[ ■ Logistics supply depot ]
⦁Human-silhouette steel target (high-strength AR500)
⦁ Unit price: ₩120,000
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁Automatic rotating pop-up target system (wired/wireless)
⦁ Unit price: ₩350,000
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁Paper target set for multiple distances (100 sheets)
⦁ Unit price: ₩25,000
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
⦁Portable electronic sight-zeroing device
⦁ Unit price: ₩890,000
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
“Whew!”
After spending several hours completing the shooting range’s detailed design, I opened the shelter’s full blueprint again.
It seemed necessary to keep access routes such as elevators and stairways strictly separated by zone. Traffic had to be controlled so that workers from the growing area could access only the growing area, munitions factory personnel only the munitions factory, and power facility personnel only the power facilities.
Even with Juggernauts around, people were bound to get ideas if weapons were right in front of them and their paths overlapped.
Therefore, I decided that the central control room would be the only place connected to every independent zone at once. Of course, construction on it hadn’t even begun yet.
Naturally, my own quarters would also be located inside the central control room.
If I eventually stepped forward as the leader, I could stay there without a care. If I decided to hide among the others while posing as an ordinary survivor, I could simply reserve a room in the outer residential zone and connect it with a secret emergency passage.
Like the bridge of a warship, the central control room’s primary role would be to maintain exclusive control over the entire shelter’s power, water resources, main server room, and access permissions for each zone. That went without saying for the surveillance network covering every part of the shelter as well.
…Calling it surveillance sounded a little strange, but it was an essential measure for mediating disputes between residents, preventing weapons smuggling, enforcing infection control, and so on.
Conversely, that also meant the entire shelter would be finished if the central control room were breached.
That was why I planned to place the central control room 1,000 meters underground, beyond the reach of any existing bunker buster. Just like the shelter’s main entrance, its entrance would also be protected by multiple layers of superheavy blast doors.
The interior I envisioned resembled the cutting-edge tactical operations centers (TOCs) seen in American blockbuster movies.
Real-time satellite imagery and tactical maps spread across an enormous main screen at the front, with dozens of operators beneath it tirelessly processing precise data in the bluish glow of their consoles.
It went without saying, but I intended to operate this control room entirely with android personnel. Things might be different once perfect trust had been established, but for now there was no reason to let outside survivors into the control room, and the risk was far too great.
Normally, it would require dozens of specialized operators, but a futuristic android like Ann should easily be able to perform the work of dozens of people alone, so manpower wasn’t a concern.
‘Ah.’
She would have been perfect if only she could perform research. It was a real shame that she could do everything else but couldn’t unlock new technology.
But perhaps that was a kind of balance patch. If androids could handle everything from construction and research to combat, players would have no reason to risk accepting other people into their shelters and forming societies.
Of course, each android cost well over one trillion won, so an ordinary user wouldn’t even dream of buying one…
“Administrator, I have completed the design.”
I examined the paper Ann handed me. Even though she had sketched the plans freehand with a pen, they were as clean and orderly as if an expert had produced them in CAD.
As I copied Ann’s munitions factory design onto my laptop screen, I casually checked the funds remaining in the corner.
「Funds available: 935,290,361,435,000 KRW」
Amazingly, I still had a staggering 935 trillion won left in the budget. One quadrillion won truly was an incredible amount of money.
I puffed up with pride and glanced at Ann with an expression that said, ‘See? Building the munitions factory was the right call.’ But as usual, Ann replied flatly without so much as changing her expression.
“Would you like me to furrow my brow and pretend to be flustered?”
Tsk.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t into that sort of thing. Losing interest, I turned away and focused on the screen again.
I seemed to have considerable financial leeway, but that didn’t mean I could expand the hydroponic growing area any further. There were clear limits to both the available groundwater reserves and the amount of water we could recycle.
For the same reason, expanding the residential zone was also impossible. The shelter’s maximum population was ultimately proportional to its food and water production.
‘…But why do I have so much money left?’
I hadn’t even built twenty percent of the shelter yet, but far more money remained than I had expected.
Should I buy more androids? Sending them to scout the surrounding cities and install surveillance cameras in advance also seemed like a good idea.
“You probably have so much leeway because the budget for purchasing artificial satellites accounts for a substantial portion of the total.”
Oh, artificial satellites?
Hadn’t the survey mentioned launching satellites like Starlink to build a community linking survivors together?
Even so, how expensive could an artificial satellite be? Surely it couldn’t cost more than Ann.
[ ■ Orbital surveillance assets ]
⦁ KH-13-class ultra-high-resolution multisensor reconnaissance satellite
⦁ Description: A top-tier strategic surveillance satellite simultaneously equipped with an ultra-high-resolution optical telescope capable of identifying objects as small as 1 cm from low Earth orbit and SAR (synthetic aperture radar) capable of imaging the ground at night and in adverse weather.
⦁ Unit price: 28.07 trillion won (orbital deployment service included)
⦁ Status: [Available for purchase]
Huh?
28 trillion?
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