Chapter 43: The Calm Before the Storm
Translator: ShutDoor
Anyone who completed their military service during COVID-19 would know that back then, a single suspected case or close contact could send an entire platoon or company into quarantine, and in severe cases, even a whole battalion.
It might not have been so bad if quarantine had been the end of it, but the problem was that the remaining personnel were saddled with every guard shift left vacant.
If an entire platoon was quarantined, another platoon covered for it. If it was a company, another company took over. If even a whole battalion was quarantined, another battalion had to stand its watch.
I spent my entire military service trapped in that same hell of covering for others.
The sheer resentment I felt when my seniors and juniors came back from a cushy fifteen-day leave, then spent another two comfortable weeks quarantined in the new barracks while I worked myself to the bone covering their shifts too.
Getting two or three fewer hours of sleep every night was standard, and during the day, I had to handle all the work assigned to the quarantined personnel as well. There was never a real day off.
Even I went through that while stationed in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province, which was considered a rear area. How much worse must it have been for sentries who had to stand guard facing the barbed wire at the front?
And what if the country that had forcibly dragged them there was collapsing in real time because of an infectious disease dozens of times more horrific than COVID-19?
What if even the comrades who were supposed to stand guard beside them had been infected, leaving more than half their unit out of action?
Could anyone sleep soundly while fearing that the comrade in the next bunk might infect them?
Of course not.
*****
Through a reconnaissance satellite orbiting overhead, I looked down upon the military units near the border all at once.
According to a university friend who had served in the DMZ, the frontline troops were supposedly there to “hold out for three minutes before dying heroically”, buying time for follow-up units to deploy in an emergency.
—But we probably wouldn’t even last ten seconds. Long-range artillery, was it? If they fire that, we’re all dead. I’m a machine gunner anyway, so my head’ll probably be the first to get blown off.
I remembered my friend laughing as he joked about it.
I quietly watched soldiers even younger than my friend had been climb into the elevated guard posts near the barbed wire and stand watch.
Three in the afternoon. Normally, the senior and junior sentries would have been pretending to watch beyond the fence while shooting the breeze.
But the two men on the satellite feed had put as much distance between themselves as possible and stood precariously at opposite ends of the guard post railing.
The hems of their winter uniforms whipped violently in the bitter wind battering the post. White breath constantly escaped above the cold-weather masks covering their faces, and their shoulders were hunched tight against the vicious cold.
It was currently eleven degrees below zero in Gangwon Province.
Even so, neither of them showed the slightest intention of going inside the post.
They suspected that not only the previous shift, which had passed through the enclosed post, but even the comrade standing watch right beside them might be infected. Rather than risk infection inside the cramped post, they had chosen to throw themselves into the flesh-cutting wind.
I checked the other posts, wondering if those two simply happened to hate each other, but the result was the same.
At every post, the senior and junior sentries kept their distance as though they had agreed to it in advance. Far from speaking to each other, they constantly glanced sideways at one another, worried the other might come closer.
In the military I knew, the senior sentry would have grown bored by now and started badgering his junior to tell him some dating story, even one he’d picked up from somewhere, while the nervous junior rambled on about something trivial.
The fact that they were so stiff and wary of each other meant the situation within the military had to be far worse than I had imagined.
General Kang soon delivered a more detailed report on the current situation.
“We have confirmed that frontline posts which can be replaced by CCTV are being automated wherever possible, while personnel are deployed only on a limited basis, primarily to posts covering blind spots where adequate surveillance cannot be secured.”
As a result, more than 70 percent of the frontline posts were operating completely unmanned.
Anyone who had served in the military would immediately understand how serious the situation was from that alone.
Nearly half their personnel were useless due to infection and quarantine. Yet they could not simply leave the border undefended, so the military authorities had scraped together every soldier they could and stationed them before the barbed wire.
All to barely maintain the absolute minimum defensive line.
If even those sentries disappeared, South Korea would lose any means of responding immediately if the North Korean military committed to an invasion.
Every soldier left over had reportedly been assigned to maintaining domestic order.
General Kang’s operators had spent that time intercepting numerous military and civilian radio communications across the country without being detected. Thanks to them, we had learned several military secrets that had never once been revealed by the media.
“We have confirmed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each branch command transferred every infected service member to Armed Forces hospitals and decommissioned bases on the outskirts of Gangwon Province, then placed those facilities under partial lockdown. Orders have also been issued to treat any service member attempting to leave without authorization as a deserter under military law, regardless of the reason, with on-site use of firearms permitted if necessary.”
“…The country really is finished.”
“It has been collapsing for quite some time already.”
They were cramming their own infected soldiers into remote Armed Forces hospitals and threatening to stop them by force the moment they tried to escape. It was insanity.
Perhaps the military command had realized early on that infected people could no longer be controlled by normal means and issued such extreme orders as a result.
The question was whether the branch commands responsible for those insane orders even knew that the core leadership of the surface government above them was already preparing to abandon Seoul.
Judging by the movements of the divisions, they showed no sign whatsoever of retreating toward Jeju Island as the heads of the administration had.
Perhaps every field commander beneath the very highest levels of command was completely unaware that their esteemed politicians were preparing to flee after leaving them behind as human shields.
It was a clusterfuck beyond compare. If North Korea or China decided to declare war and take everyone down with them now, South Korea would never be able to hold out.
In any case, I had a reason for examining the border in particular.
I believed the military was where signs of war could be detected fastest and most reliably.
If I gradually released valuable intelligence like this on SurvivalNet, which I was about to launch, the users outside would have no choice but to gather in my community to survive even a little longer. In turn, we would be able to use the community to track the survivors’ precise movements and locations at a glance.
The faster the world ended, the more SurvivalNet would establish itself as indispensable to the people of the Korean Peninsula. Through it, I would also be able to keep enjoying a “living” internet that still carried the warmth of other people.
And if I happened to discover someone with a desirable ability or useful practical skills along the way… I could send a helicopter to bring them to the shelter while I was at it.
In truth, I had been planning a community for survivors for quite some time.
Back then, I had harbored the grand dream of launching hundreds of artificial satellites like Starlink, building a community solely for survivors, and even creating a virtual economy based on digital tokens.
I might not have Starlink now, but I did have a supercomputer server room and cutting-edge geostationary communications satellites worth several trillion won instead.
With infrastructure on that scale, I concluded that even after the world ended, I could easily operate something resembling the modern internet, if not the real thing.
Of course, an ordinary smartphone could not connect directly to a geostationary communications satellite. It would require a separate satellite terminal or a ground relay network connected to the satellite.
But did anyone really think I hadn’t considered that?
I’ll simply say that CCTV cameras were not the only things I installed when I deployed ten thousand surveillance nodes across the Korean Peninsula before D-Day.
Therefore, as long as they were within South Korea, anyone could access SurvivalNet.
Again, anyone could access it, “provided I approved”.
It was about time to bring the grand plan I had conceived so long ago into the light.
According to General Kang’s projections, nuclear war or an equally extreme armed conflict would engulf the surface within a few months at the earliest, or sometime next year at the latest.
I needed to attract as many users as possible to SurvivalNet before then.
Naturally, there was virtually no chance of being detected. How could South Korea possibly notice state-of-the-art American satellites? Especially when it was already scrambling to relocate its base of operations to Jeju Island.
Moreover, once the Korean Peninsula took a direct nuclear strike, I would be able to move much more freely, beyond the surveillance networks of the military and police.
Still, out of all those people, the honor of being the first to enter my newly established community would presumably go to…
Ppampakabam_1000: Mmm~ Eating pork cutlets in my ultra-luxury shelter pool~
Ppampakabam_1000: Heard people outside can’t even order delivery these days because they’re afraid of getting infected?
OnlyNegativeThoughts_1100: My food stockpile alone is enough for 78 years. Even stacked up every kind of canned food.
ProSurvivalist_1500: I have no clue how I’m supposed to start this Research thing. Do I have to study it myself at my age?
Viet_1191: Anyone here live on Jeju Island?
These guys here, most likely.
I immediately made a suggestion from my main account.
YeonjeUniversityLOVE_1111: Guys, how about SurvivalNet instead of this place?
YeonjeUniversityLOVE_1111: Heard it’s an anonymous community made by a genius. Seems pretty good.
InariSushi_1300: ?
Ppampakabam_1000: ?
ProSurvivalist_1500: ?
Sensing the mood in the chat room turn icy in an instant, I swiftly performed an evasive maneuver.
YeonjeUniversityLOVE_1111: Or so I almost said~
ProSurvivalist_1500: Almost kicked you out~
Ppampakabam_1000: Guy who flexes his school in his username <– 99.9% chance he’s a dumbass
OnlyNegativeThoughts_1100: Bruh
Viet_1191: ?
Dumpling_992: I’m glad I didn’t turn out like that.
Message from InariSushi_1300: Don’t act like you know me for a while;;
“…”
I took my hands off the laptop and stared at the screen.
Come to think of it, the people gathered here were wealthy enough to lounge around eating pork cutlets even if a nuclear bomb fell outside.
Was there really any need to include these well-fed bastards in my grand plan to recruit talented people?
…I definitely gave them a chance.
*****
As I had said before, people needed a proper balance between work and recreation to live a healthy life.
If internet communities were my recreation, then my work consisted of receiving reports about unusual developments within the shelter and the progress of research in the research buildings, then discussing the shelter’s future direction with my staff advisers.
Just as I alone could perform construction during the demo version, it felt as though I was also the only one who could make the final decision about the direction of our research.
Of course, projects could be conducted independently in the research laboratories without specifically selecting them under 「Research」. But without that selection, we could hardly expect efficiencies like completing a three-hundred-day project in one hundred days, as with the NIV treatment currently in development.
In other words, the shelter’s administrator was more important than I had expected.
In any case, it was time to work.
Besides the NIV treatment, numerous other research projects were already in full swing throughout the twenty-three research buildings, meshing together like gears.
And finally.
Research on 「Hydroponics Power Efficiency I」 has been completed.
「You may designate the next linked research project.」
The agricultural engineering research building had produced its first result.
Apparently, drawing on the latest papers stored in the shelter’s central server, the researchers had proposed changing the LED lighting’s operating objective from simply maintaining light intensity to “maximizing the amount of carbon fixed relative to power consumption”…
Perhaps it was because I had studied whenever I had time with help from my staff advisers, determined not to remain an ignorant fool as the shelter’s administrator.
The technical jargon that would once have gone right over my head was now beginning to form a rough picture in my mind.
…Of course, knowing what the terms meant and fully understanding the mechanism were two entirely different things.
“Simply put, you can think of it as a way to minimize power consumption while maximizing food production efficiency.”
In any case, Ann explained the results of the research to me.
“We estimate that the overall power efficiency of the hydroponic growing facilities will improve by approximately 7.8 percent compared to before.”
Being able to maintain the same level of food production with less light and electricity had produced a fairly meaningful increase in power efficiency.
In the outside world, even if they had tried to implement the results as soon as the research was completed, they would have faced tedious and complicated administrative procedures, from safety reviews and interdepartmental written approvals to trial operations. Actual implementation would easily have taken several weeks.
But here in the shelter, the matter was settled as soon as I, the administrator, made the decision.
That was partly because it was a simple matter of adjusting the light output and wavelength cycles of the specialized LED lighting installed on each vertical farm rack.
The moment I approved it, the total power consumption displayed along one side of the management window decreased by a tiny amount.
The change was minor, but it finally felt as though I had taken my first real step as the administrator.
My eyes gleaming with excitement, I refreshed the system’s 「Research」 window.
With one research project completed, new linked research nodes branched upward like roots, as though a skill tree had been unlocked in an RPG or survival simulation game.
And among the intricately interwoven lines of text, I discovered a research project that made my eyes light up.
「Linked research unlocked: Hydroponics Water Consumption Reduction I」
There it was.
Reduced water consumption.
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