Chapter 8: Cost of Purchasing Two Androids: 3 Trillion Won
Translator: ShutDoor
The K-21 armored vehicle I’d ridden during my military service was 2.6 meters tall.
The newly purchased Juggernaut stood slightly shorter at 2.3 meters. Just hearing those numbers, it didn’t sound all that big.
Thud— thud—
But seeing it right in front of me changed my mind.
‘Wow.’
It was huge. Absolutely, ridiculously huge. As it came striding toward me, I genuinely thought I was watching a tank walk.
They said mounted knights in plate armor were considered the tanks of medieval battlefields. Was this how people back then had felt?
It felt like facing an entirely different species. And this thing was far larger than any of those knights had been.
It looked like an augmented soldier inside a typical suit of heavy power armor. It didn’t appear particularly agile, but it looked terrifyingly tough and powerful instead.
Its hands, or rather, its gauntlets, were the size of watermelons. If it grabbed a person’s head with one of those, it looked capable of bursting it like an actual watermelon.
The armor plating was unimaginably thick too. Rifle rounds wouldn’t stand a chance, and I doubted even a large-caliber sniper rifle could penetrate it anywhere but a weak point. It looked like an actual antitank rocket would be needed to stand a chance.
‘It really is a tank.’
Then again, with specs like that, no wonder it was described as exceptionally effective at armed suppression.
Silently marveling, I tried to gauge the thickness of the power armor’s plating. It was insanely thick. Far thicker than the plating on the armored vehicle I’d ridden in during my military service.
Honestly, it exceeded my expectations.
At first, I’d thought I might need to form a company out of these things, but with a presence this intimidating, even a platoon should be enough to inspire plenty of fear and awe.
Honestly, even I found it a little frightening.
The weapon it carried was just as absurdly massive. The barrel was so thick that I initially mistook it for a grenade launcher, but a closer look revealed it was a rifle. Or would it be more accurate to call it a heavy machine gun?
The caliber was a staggering 15 mm. It fired depleted uranium ammunition.
As far as I knew, 20 mm was the cutoff between guns and cannons. In other words, these rounds were just shy of being classified as shells.
At that moment, I felt a sharp tingle near my temple. An alien sensation unlike anything I had ever experienced swept through my head.
It felt as though I were electrically connected to the object before me. I knew that sounded like nonsense, but there was genuinely no other way to describe it.
I truly felt as though I were electrically connected to the Juggernaut in front of me.
Maybe it was like feeling that I could communicate with it through thought alone. Would it actually move if I told it to?
The instant I imagined it raising a fist and striking the tree beside it, the Juggernaut’s massive body moved with startling agility and smashed into the trunk of a pine.
Crack!
The thick pine was literally torn apart as though struck by lightning. The sizable tree crashed down helplessly with a deafening roar, yet the gauntlet didn’t have so much as a scratch.
“…Holy shit.”
That snapped me back to my senses.
So any other user with enough money could buy a monster like this? And this game, which supposedly revolved around building shelters, had openly included such an overpowered machine?
Why?
Was it meant to make users fight each other? To let the strong and wealthy oppress and rule those without power or money? Or was the coming apocalypse so horrific that surviving without machines like this would be nearly impossible?
And why was everything else restricted to modern technology while even futuristic robots were available for purchase?
There was no way to know right now. Honestly, I didn’t even want to know.
I raised my head and looked up at the Juggernaut. Clad in massive power armor, it silently stared down at me through its cold visor.
Was it waiting for an order?
But a futuristic machine this advanced couldn’t merely wait passively for human commands. Surely it possessed at least some capacity for autonomous judgment.
I tried thinking an order at it: demonstrate its combat ability while making as little noise as possible.
At least as far as I knew as a computer science major, ordinary software would never respond to an abstract command like that. Someone would have to code exactly how little ‘as little as possible’ meant, what qualified as ‘making no noise’, how ‘combat ability’ was defined, and what process constituted ‘demonstrating’ it.
But the Juggernaut understood me. He said nothing, but through the electrical connection between us, I could tell.
The Juggernaut considered the request for a moment, though I wasn’t sure whether ‘considered’ was the right word, then slowly reached toward his waist.
It was somewhat disappointing since I’d been expecting a massive plasma greatsword straight out of a science fiction movie, but what he pulled out was an unidentified round object. It was about the size of an apple, though far more menacing and futuristic.
The Juggernaut pulled the pin without hesitation. Only then did I realize the round lump of metal was a grenade.
Was he planning to kill me because he refused to obey someone weaker than himself? No. Thanks to the machines that had burrowed into my brain, I knew what the Juggernaut intended to do.
After disengaging every safety mechanism, the Juggernaut placed the grenade on his gauntlet instead of throwing it away. Then, as if making sure I was watching, he closed his fist around it. So tightly that not a single gap remained.
Boom!
A few seconds later, a muffled explosion sounded.
Acrid smoke curled from between his clenched fingers. When the Juggernaut opened his fist, sharp metal fragments designed to kill pattered harmlessly to the ground.
The Juggernaut casually brushed off his gauntlet as though nothing had happened. He had contained that terrifying explosion with his bare hand, yet the armor’s surface bore only a few shallow scratches.
“…”
I should make sure we got along from now on.
*****
Now that I’d witnessed the Juggernaut’s usefulness with my own eyes, it was time to examine the humanoid android.
「P-7 Enigma purchased.」
This time, however, I didn’t feel myself electrically connecting to something as I had with the Juggernaut. Did delivery take time because it was an ultra-expensive product costing 1.8 trillion won?
「Appearance settings required.」
Ah, so this one didn’t simply pop into existence when I pressed the purchase button. I had to customize it first, like a game character.
At first, I considered making her an unrealistically beautiful character, but having someone too conspicuous walking around the shelter would only make people suspicious.
So once again, I gave the system a fairly abstract request.
‘An intelligent, moderately attractive woman.’
Just to prevent any misunderstandings, this absolutely wasn’t because of any personal interest. The Juggernaut looked fairly masculine, so I was merely balancing the gender ratio.
This wasn’t the army, after all. A sausage fest would be a bit much.
Fortunately, the AI system made perfect sense of my half-baked request. In other words, it flawlessly grasped the subtle nuance Koreans put into the word ‘moderately’.
Soon, an attractive woman appeared, pretty without being intimidating, the sort anyone would look at and nod in approval.
The woman who appeared before me wasn’t Asian, however, but a Westerner with short blond hair. Apparently, Western was the default ethnicity setting.
I wondered whether other survivors would believe that Westerners had built an underground shelter in the middle of South Korea, but perhaps I could just barely make it plausible by claiming it was a secret base belonging to some international organization.
Though I’d have no answer if they demanded to know why it had been built in South Korea instead of their home country, much less deep in the roadless mountains…
That wasn’t something I needed to worry about right now.
“…Wow.”
I slowly examined the android before me. She looked like a real person. No, she simply was a person.
One game had distinguished humans from androids by placing a blue LED near their temples, but the android before me didn’t even have an identifier like that.
I wasn’t a scientist, but a fundamental question occurred to me. What on earth powered these things? Did they need to be recharged with electricity? That would be a problem.
“I generate my own power through a semipermanent internal battery and biocomponents.”
To my surprise, she answered me. In Korean, no less, rather than English.
Instead of sounding like someone of mixed heritage who had been born and raised in South Korea, she had the subtle accent of a foreigner who had spent a very long time mastering Korean to near perfection.
Wait, didn’t she sound a little too much like an android? Her expression was stiff too.
“This is the result of referencing academic research indicating that women scientists in the top one percent of intelligence tend to be domineering and possess little capacity for vicarious embarrassment.”
So because I’d included the keyword ‘intelligent’, the system had given her this personality?
The android raised her gaze and met my eyes.
“Furthermore, behaving according to the social stereotype that intelligent women are stiff and inflexible makes it easier to control variables.”
“…”
…So she’d done it deliberately, planning to exploit people’s psychology and prejudices?
She was a little creepy too. Was this why she had been described as an espionage android?
“For reference, my ocular sensors allow me to precisely analyze minute changes in another person’s facial expressions. You are currently extremely wary of me. But please do not worry. I will never harm you, Administrator.”
She placed a strangely distinct emphasis on the word ‘never’.
Did that 170-billion-won brain implant truly serve as the ultimate safeguard?
“If you wish, I can install one of the human-friendly emotion modules commonly used by domestic androids, such as ‘the kind older girl next door’, ‘the prickly tsundere high school girl’, or ‘the strict female boss who secretly looks after you’… but I doubt that is what you want, Administrator.”
I kept my mouth shut. It certainly wasn’t because she’d struck a nerve by uncovering my secret tastes. It was because the more we talked, the harder it became to shake the chilling feeling that she was a real person.
She didn’t even seem to need a separate performance test.
“Where exactly did you come from?”
“I do not know.”
At least she hadn’t said, ‘I cannot tell you.’ That made it less likely she was secretly behind all this.
“Can you take the place of human researchers?”
“I can run simulations using existing research data or verify existing theories, but I cannot independently propose new hypotheses or creative theories.”
In other words, she could make full use of existing theories, but apparently couldn’t unlock new technology through 「Research」.
This matched the limitations of modern AI as I understood them. Strictly speaking, even the images AI produced these days were less works of pure ‘creation’ than products of imitation and recombination based on enormous quantities of data.
Of course, a superintelligent AI that had passed the singularity could probably manage even that, but Enigma apparently wasn’t on that level.
“We are androids created to imitate humans, after all.”
*****
I decided to call my android companion ‘Ann’. It wasn’t taken from Anne of Green Gables. Her model was called Enigma, so I loosely based her name on the beginning of that.
Anyway, to get to the point, Ann was incredibly capable.
I immediately became convinced that if Ann had been involved from the shelter’s design stage, the result would have been a flawless underground base, far more efficient than the one I’d struggled to plan on my own.
“It was impossible from the outset for a layperson to construct a cutting-edge nuclear power facility without any errors. I fully appreciate your admirable efforts, Administrator, but I have discovered several critical structural defects and ask that you correct them.”
“…”
“There is no need to feel embarrassed.”
Something about her tone seemed calculated to get under my skin.
Just in case, I turned to look at Ann, but her expression was as blank as when she had first appeared.
In any case, according to Ann, there was a very high probability that the nuclear power facility would shut down after roughly eight months. The reactor itself wasn’t defective, but there were extremely critical errors in the cooling facility and in the way the reactor had been connected to the voltage transformation facility.
…But didn’t that basically mean I’d gotten the whole thing wrong?
In any case, after personally checking papers related to the subject, I realized Ann was right.
I couldn’t be certain, but Ann seemed to possess the knowledge of someone with a doctorate, perhaps even a professor.
And not merely in one field, but in every field.
Could I finally build things with an expert reviewing and correcting my work?
“That statement contains an error. I possess knowledge comparable to that of a professor in most fields, but my knowledge of field operations and combat is relatively limited.”
“Aren’t you an espionage android?”
Ann shook her head as though there were an obvious flaw in what I’d said.
“We can produce only as much physical force as an adult man, so we are not particularly suited to combat.”
Most people wouldn’t describe an adult man’s strength as ‘only’ that much.
I took her meaning to be that she was closer to an intelligence-gathering operative than a field agent who went around shooting people.
It was truly unfortunate that someone as capable as Ann couldn’t perform 「Research」. If she could conduct research too, I wouldn’t have to bring other scientists into the shelter whether I wanted to or not.
But if it was impossible, there was nothing I could do about it.
Given the circumstances, I decided to get as much use out of Ann’s abilities as possible.
“Then could you build the shelter’s power distribution equipment and HVAC equipment? I couldn’t understand any of it even after reading the papers.”
“I can, but do you trust me that much?”
I nodded.
There was an old saying: ‘Never employ those you doubt; never doubt those you employ.’
It meant that if you doubted someone, you shouldn’t employ them, but once you did, you shouldn’t doubt them.
“That saying comes from the Myeongsimbogam.”
“Yeah.”
It had once been my family’s motto.
Though now, I was the only person left who knew it.
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
Join our discord server: https://discord.gg/96hMXymzMP