Chapter 42: Something Only I Can Do
Translator: ShutDoor
There was a question that had been making the rounds online for ages.
It asked which generation had been the unluckiest on the Korean Peninsula since Dangun’s time.
Lupin720: Top 4 worst generations in the history of the Korean Peninsula.
Lupin720 posted a message.
I read it right away.
Lupin720: No. 4. Born in 1580, when life was war. Imjin War in their teens and twenties, Jeongmyo War in their forties, Byeongja War in their fifties.
Lupin720: No. 3. Born in 1660, when life was starvation. Great Gyeongsin Famine in their teens, Eulbyeong Famine in their thirties. People even ate their own children back then.
Lupin720: No. 2. Born in 1220, when life was Mongols. Mongol invasion in their teens, Mongol invasion in their twenties, Mongol invasion in their thirties, Mongol invasion in their forties.
I already knew all that, but Lupin720 added another line below it.
Lupin720: No. 1. Born in 1990, when life was just plain screwed. IMF crisis as kids, MERS and COVID-19 in their twenties, NIV virus in their thirties. South Korea nearly collapsed when they were kids, their dads’ companies nearly folded while they were in school, the whole world nearly ended when they were job hunting, and just as they tried to start families, Earth shut down its servers.
…
…
Arrow300: You in your thirties?
King250: You’re so transparent. Men in their thirties, represent!
ProSurvivalist1500: By that logic, wouldn’t people in their forties or fifties have it worse?
Cham170: (ProSurvivalist) <-Then why not go all the way to people in their nineties? They lived through the World War, the Korean War, and the virus.
Inu59: Didn’t you just copy this straight from the trending board????
As I read the comments, I placed my hands on the keyboard with a new mindset befitting my new handle.
ADMIN1000: Hmm;; Is it really that bad?
Arrow300: ???!!!!!
Inu59: A N E W I M P E R I A L F A M I L Y M E M B E R H A S A P P E A R E D
I had revealed only one ten-thousandth of my power, yet the response was explosive.
ADMIN1000: Heh
Honestly, it was satisfying.
Anyway, back to the point.
Lupin720’s post was nothing more than an internet meme meant for laughs, but it also starkly illustrated the Korean Peninsula’s current predicament.
Even if it was half a joke, Lupin720, who was presumably holed up somewhere near the Naro Space Center, was one of the brighter people in Fish Trap.
Someone with at least a master’s degree in aerospace engineering couldn’t possibly be unaware of the horrors of the Great Gyeongsin Famine or the Imjin War.
In other words, the situation outside was dire enough that a joke like that resonated with so many people.
In the past, topics like stocks, baseball, PC and mobile games, and comics had dominated the trending boards. Now the highest rankings belonged to boards about bunkers, diseases, survival, survivalism, and the military.
Among them, I entered the [NIV Virus Forum], a new board that had rocketed into the top ranks in only three weeks.
I clicked the post with the most views.
Jack_swallow: The moment you catch NIV, you may as well consider yourself beyond saving.
– My father was a neuroscience professor at a prestigious university. He regularly volunteered to provide free counseling to gambling and drug addicts and helped them return to their daily lives.
– That meant he knew very well how dangerous drugs were and how excruciating withdrawal could be. The same went for gambling addiction.
– After my father was infected with the NIV virus in the terrorist attack at Woninjae Station, he began collecting data to prove a hypothesis he had formulated.
– The data he collected is below. I studied the humanities, so I couldn’t understand all the technical terminology, but my father said the suffering was far worse than what the fentanyl addicts he had counseled experienced.
Several papers packed with technical terminology and multiple brain scans had been attached below Jack_swallow’s post.
NationalAverageFive: Three-line summary, please
Anon: Isn’t this fake? Fine, you proved he was a professor at a prestigious university, but if he couldn’t control the urges, why are you perfectly fine?
Anon: F A K E F A K E F A K E
Rather than argue with those users, Jack_swallow quietly attached one more photograph.
The photograph showed a suicide note covered in crooked writing, as though someone shivering violently from the cold had forced themselves to clutch a pencil. The paper was soaked with some unidentified liquid, whether sweat or water, and had swollen unevenly in places.
“…”
The suicide note described everything in detail, from how he had nearly done something horrific to his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, to the deterioration of his brain and the process by which the pain and urges consumed the once-kind professor.
*****
– February 3, 2027. Volunteered to help addicts. There were over twenty volunteers just last month, but only three came today. Things are very unsettled both at home and abroad.
– Spent the entire night suffering as though my whole body were burning away. I was wearing my protective suit properly, so where did it come from?
– I consumed nothing except the barley tea Bang Ok-nam gave me, and they have volunteered here for eight years.
– Tested positive.
– The NIV virus does not have a particularly high fatality rate. I will surely improve once I receive proper treatment.
– Fortunately, I am well versed in neuroscience. Just as the great scholars of the past advanced medicine by using their own bodies as test subjects, I too will record my progress and contribute to the development of a treatment.
– Abnormal swelling of the brainstem. Headache, horrific headache, fever, itching, pain, pain, pain.
– Regained consciousness after three days.
– The cumulative death toll has exceeded twenty thousand. I fear I may become one of them.
– My son and his family came to see me. I warned them again and again not to come.
– Before opening the door, I look through the peephole at my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter.
– I understand how Bang Ok-nam felt.
*****
Perhaps it was because the account was so realistic and detailed. Despite the awful handwriting, the readers, myself included, had little trouble believing that the person who wrote the suicide note had been an intellectual.
Anon: Was your father a professor at Gojin University?
Jack_swallow: Yes.
Anon: May he rest in peace.
Anon: So he didn’t open the door and jumped to his death.
kimmouse: RIP
WipingMyDickWithWetWipes: Fucking terrifying;;;
…
…
Elsewhere on the survivalism board, posts titled “How to Deal with an Infected Person: Adult Male”, “Portable Weapons”, and “How to Obtain Firearms in South Korea” openly occupied the trending list, though community moderators would have deleted them immediately in peacetime.
The public wasn’t stupid.
They had already spent three weeks living in close proximity to the infected. People had realized that the infected were beasts who merely looked normal.
After watching all this in silence, I gave Ann an order.
“Let’s compile a few informational posts about the infected and put them online. Leave out anything too technical. Include only enough to help ordinary survivors.”
“Understood.”
Ann nodded without asking any questions. She already knew why I had brought it up.
I had no grand calling to save humanity. If I were that noble, I would have built a surface city capable of sheltering far more people instead of constructing a shelter beneath a rocky mountain in Gangwon Province.
I had brought in the researchers and even taken in their parents because doing so benefited me in the long run. Otherwise, I would never have tried in the first place.
Likewise, I wasn’t anonymously releasing information about the infected online because of some paltry sense of guilt. It was because I stood to benefit if even one more sane person remained on the Korean Peninsula in the future.
I needed to fill all 6,720 spots in my original plan, after all.
More would be even better.
“…”
Clack, clack.
ADMIN1000: May he rest in peace.
I watched my homeland fall.
*****
February 18, 2027.
NNNN: Just as drug addicts abandon their families and squander their fortunes to obtain drugs, those infected with NIV exhibit similar behavior.
NNNN: However, these symptoms appear to emerge only after some time has passed following the end of the incubation period. The problem is that incubation periods vary enormously between individuals. To give an extreme example, someone infected yesterday may develop symptoms before someone infected several months ago.
NNNN: In addition, infected people suffer from severe fevers if they fail to infect anyone new for an extended period. We have not determined exactly how long it takes for the fever to manifest, but keeping them semiconscious through the administration of anesthetics or sleeping medication appears to delay its onset significantly…
Clack, clack.
Was it because we had falsely claimed that she was a Korean American with a doctorate? Or because the content was thorough enough that even ordinary people could recognize her expertise?
In only four days, the post uploaded by Ann, or NNNN, had racked up more than ten thousand comments.
The initial response had been lukewarm because the post was so dry and boring, but Ann and the operators had manipulated its views and upvotes to propel it to the top of the board in no time.
Once it began attracting attention, more and more visitors poured in. Eventually, it held the top spot without any need for further manipulation.
The method was a little underhanded, but it achieved its purpose, so I gave it the okay.
[Mm! The stage-one process is complete for now!]
Good news arrived from the virology research building as well.
The first stage of the three-stage treatment and vaccine development process was to create a sedative that delayed the infected person’s “rampage” for as long as possible.
The attempt had been possible because we discovered that the virus avoided strongly stimulating its host during sleep to conserve the host’s strength.
At last, under the direction of their respective research institute directors and Rachel, the researchers from the virology research building and biotechnology building had developed the “sedative”.
[We designed it to lower the bodily metabolic rate and induce a state similar to hibernation without completely halting consciousness or vital functions. Indiscriminately administering anesthetics over an extended period carries the risk of complications such as respiratory depression or reduced blood pressure. So we took an approach that suppresses excessive excitation of the central nervous system while gradually lowering the energy metabolic rate…]
“…”
Talking nonstop for five full minutes without taking a single break was a talent in itself.
Rather than listen closely to Rachel’s endless explanation, I turned toward the isolation ward. Beyond the screen, I could see the test subjects lying quietly as though asleep.
Separated from the test subjects by a partition, researchers wearing various pieces of equipment checked monitors and meticulously recorded something on charts. They were probably documenting not only vital signs like heart rate, respiratory rate, and body temperature, but also how the subjects’ bodies changed over time.
Since the subjects were their own parents, they certainly wouldn’t treat the work carelessly.
Systematically accumulating data like this would also help when we developed the treatment later. Not only could we compare each patient’s reactions, but we could respond far more quickly to unexpected side effects or changes in the virus’s activity patterns.
[Begin administering the drug. We will closely monitor changes in vital signs at one-minute intervals for three hours immediately following administration.]
At the instruction of Grace, the virology research institute director, the researchers moved in unison.
I also watched the procedure through the screen. The test subjects who received the sedative appeared to be breathing much more steadily and comfortably than they had under anesthesia.
[Monitoring ECG, blood pressure, and blood oxygen saturation. No abnormalities detected so far.]
[Kim Ok-ja, no. Subject 28 is showing no abnormalities.]
The researchers delivered their reports one after another.
After confirming that the various vital signs remained stable, Rachel nodded with a satisfied expression.
[Mm, fortunately, it appears to have worked.]
Of course, the sedative was only a temporary measure.
According to Rachel’s hypothesis, once a test subject awoke from the suppressed state induced by the sedative, the NIV virus would likely begin mutating at a rate incomparably faster than before.
That meant we had to keep the test subjects from waking by continuing to administer the sedative, and develop a nervous system deception agent to trick the virus in the meantime.
[All right, everyone. No breaks. Let’s keep moving.]
[Yeees…]
The researchers, dark circles heavy beneath their eyes, staggered under the strain of the grueling schedule but began moving again without questioning Rachel’s orders.
Whatever else might be said, we had already benefited enormously from stoking the researchers’ passion for their work as never before.
If the people lying there had been someone else’s parents, would the researchers really have accepted the horrific schedule of 120 hours of research across all seven days of the week, with no relief shifts?
Absolutely not.
In the end, bringing in the researchers’ parents had saved even more time than I had expected.
That had surely played a part in reducing the projected development period from over ten months to around one hundred days. After all, hadn’t the 「Research」 tab included a factor related to researcher morale?
There was one more unusual point besides that.
There were currently around one hundred test subjects in the isolation ward. After observing them for nearly three weeks, we had begun to establish some criteria for distinguishing infected people from uninfected people.
Uninfected people were wary of others. The later someone had been rescued from the outside world, the more intensely they tended to distrust our researchers. That seemed perfectly natural, since anyone who had let their guard down outside would have been infected immediately.
By contrast, infected people whose incubation periods had ended were not wary of the researchers. More precisely, they only “pretended” to be.
Instead, hunger lurked in their eyes.
They quietly clicked their teeth where no one else could hear and swallowed hard, like starving beasts wondering whether to tear the flesh from their own young.
For infected people who had never experienced the fever, it ended there. Those who had experienced it even once went a step further.
If they endured the hunger “again” and tried to believe they were still human, the virus immediately twisted the nerves throughout their bodies and inflicted horrific pain.
As they suffered that pain again and again, the minds of people staring death in the face grew ever weaker. Instinctively, they realized that there was only one way to escape, even briefly, from the horrific agony they never wished to experience again.
Cast aside their wretched conscience and humanity, and turn someone else into the same kind of being.
The virus needed only two things to control humanity: pain and the pleasure that took that pain away.
The moment humanity, which had praised itself as a social species and the lord of all creation, contracted the plague, it was forced to admit that humans too were nothing more than pathetic, lowly beasts.
Once a beast abandoned its humanity in that way, it could never return to what it had been.
Just as a smoker never truly quits cigarettes but merely resists them. Just as an alcoholic never truly quits drinking but merely resists it. Just as a drug addict never truly quits drugs but merely resists them.
That meant even if we developed a treatment, there was a strong possibility that returning someone who had already crossed the line to normal would prove difficult.
Perhaps that was why developing a treatment for the virus that had driven the world to the brink of destruction had a research difficulty of only two and a half stars.
That was why we needed to keep the infected deeply asleep so they would not cross that line.
But that was only possible inside our shelter. For those outside, who already lacked enough food and were beginning to run out of basic necessities, even obtaining a single sleeping pill couldn’t be easy.
I straightened my back after bending low to water the cherry tomato seedlings we had planted after D-Day.
“…”
As I quietly watched the droplets moisten the cherry tomato stems, a thought suddenly occurred to me.
If I could keep plants that couldn’t say a single word from withering by watering them at the proper time, why couldn’t I at least tell the people who had lived on the same land how to survive?
*****
Clack, clack.
NNNN: From now on, information about infected people and the treatment will be uploaded to another site.
Ann, who had been standing by beside me, immediately posted a message online.
More areas were suffering blackouts than before as nuclear power plants ceased functioning one after another. Even so, countless people still roamed the internet.
Everyone was so reluctant to venture outside and face the infected that it actually felt as though more people than ever were spending all day online.
With all those circumstances coming together, Ann, already a well-known user, received an outpouring of responses the moment she posted.
Anon: 4N, you really saved my life. Thank you for the information.
NipponHolsterMaster: Arigato
Anonymous775: Isn’t this the asshole who’s famous for faking views and upvotes?
└ Anonymous775 has been sanctioned for violating community rules.
LazerMagic: Are you a woman?
Lupin720: Guess this is what happens when the country collapses. Even viral marketing is getting creative.
NASA_official: Special THX to NNNN
Anon: ?
Anon: This isn’t going to turn out to be a paid site once we click the link, right?
Anon: So what’s the site called?
Ann paid no attention whatsoever to the foolish organisms babbling beyond the screen and silently carried out my request.
NNNN: [Announcement] <SurvivalNet>, an anonymous community for survivors. (Link)
The moment Ann posted the announcement, the comment brigade waiting nearby began flooding the thread with posts. No, not the comment brigade. The operators.
Lemonmon: I’ll go check for myself whether this is fake or viral marketing. Bring it on lololol (1021)
Anon: ₩$ [ SurvivalNet <- Sign up right now] $₩ (7)
Anon: I checked whether NNNN’s credentials are legit (1929)
Lemonmon: Oh, it isn’t open yet. Awkward; (81)
UMChang: That name fucking sucks (828)
The reason we were launching a community at this particular moment was that the one-month anniversary of D-Day was fast approaching.
Soon, true hell would unfold on the surface.
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