Ch.145The Second Twilight of the Idols – Atlas of Detroit (3)

“Push through the waterway! Most of their forces will be near the concert hall because of Polaris anyway! Besides, Polaris isn’t our target! You guys should go after Gardner or Lobringer…”

The Regular criminal’s head exploded mid-rant from the center of the criminal mob, with the gunshot following a split second later. The other Regulars and Extras barely reacted.

To them, it just meant one less competitor for the escape ticket they firmly believed in. That was the only thought running through their minds. In this city, all dissidents eventually blur together into Extras.

The former undertaker who once proclaimed death as sacred brushed off the neural processor fragments that had splattered on him with disgust, while the Creek terrorist who shouted that everything was for their leader now fought only for freedom.

This was Heroism & Hope Corporation’s methodology. Taking people who once dreamed of something greater and reducing them to the lowest form of humanity, concerned only with immediate survival and not dying from bomb toxins within a month.

The company didn’t care how many criminals died in this scene as long as it made for good footage. In today’s world, there was no shortage of criminals deserving bullets to the head. The supply would never run short.

Besides, in future episodes, they could show Gardner dealing with traitors, so the void wouldn’t feel that significant.

Sacrificial offerings were made before the three idols the entertainment industry served: ratings, audience desires, and consumer needs. The difference between a producer and a priest was just one thing.

A priest personally slits open the sacrifice’s belly to remove the entrails, but Heroism & Hope’s executive producer had more than enough people willing to wield the knife for him. Gardner was one of them.

As the lead Extra criminal faced the unmanned camera with hunger-crazed eyes, bullets flew the moment he saw himself reflected in the camera lens.

The projectiles scattered the gray matter that still clung to some semblance of dissident thought, now thoroughly kneaded by Heroism & Hope’s methods. It was reinforcement the criminals hadn’t expected.

The Extra at the front was torn apart by bullets before he could even blink. When his life signs ceased, the explosive in the back of his head detonated with a heavy thud. Fear spreads easily.

Among the Extras who had no proper protective gear, the moment screams rang out, it was over. Unlike their constant threats with detonators, they couldn’t actually press the button.

Not many fools would actually utter the magic spell that killed their human shields standing beside them. One volley from Red Shark Company mercenaries was enough to send the large crowd into chaos.

Red Shark’s CEO pushed back an employee who tried to leap into the fray with muscle enhancers, shoving him back into their group. He remembered Gardner’s warning not to get too close.

Then a sound that many criminals had forgotten—or more accurately, a sound that criminals lured here by the Paparazzi had never even heard before—began to echo.

It was the sound of a Smogpiercer. Gardner was approaching. As the criminals floundered without direction, Gardner appeared before them, drawing a six-barreled machine gun from the side of the Smogpiercer.

A person wielding and firing such a weapon is only possible in action movies. Gardner didn’t care. This city was where reality and fiction overlapped. One bullet grazed his helmet as gunfire rained down.

He pulled an ammunition belt from a box and connected it. Power began racing through Gardner’s neural circuits that doubled as wiring. The power reached the electric motor of the machine gun, and the barrel began to rotate.

A bullet lodged in Gardner’s shoulder momentarily shook his posture, but only momentarily. Not many criminals could stand to face Gardner boldly wielding a machine gun.

A sound closer to a motor than distinct gunshots began to ring out. With every fifth round being a tracer, it almost looked like a laser weapon.

Since the cameras were behind Gardner, the Extras being literally shredded by the machine gun looked somewhat cartoonish. Wherever the streaks of tracer rounds swept, nothing remained.

The sound of burning tracer rounds, the smell of acrid smoke, and the screams of the few survivors were all drowned out by the heavy rotating motor and gunfire. In a way, it was quite a sterile weapon.

Such thoughts were erased whenever the gunfire briefly paused for burst control. The coughing of criminals outside the line of fire, their screams and chaos, were fully exposed through the smoke from the tracer rounds.

But not for long. The pauses were merely to conserve ammunition, not to enjoy the screams. H-Enter didn’t particularly care about these criminals’ lives right now.

Perhaps it was like a New Year’s sale. Like a sale focused on the sheer volume of goods sold rather than profit, they were clearing out criminals in this special episode.

After about a minute of steady firing, the criminals either barely survived and scattered into alleyways, or were trampled by the crowd and torn apart by machine gun fire, their remains scattered across the road.

Gardner, standing among the spent casings, tilted his head slightly. He connected communications with Serena and H-Enter’s security team and muttered:

“The approaching Extras and Regulars have been dealt with. Serena, your position?”

“I was heading to sniper point 3, but… I should help clean up the stragglers! I’ll head your way! Just wait a bit.”

“No. Don’t come. Who do you think these miscellaneous thugs were expecting when they poured in, not knowing Gardner would greet them with a machine gun?”

It was obviously Serena. The Paparazzi must be watching too. Serena’s broadcast voice came through the communication. Her voice was for broadcast, but the content was typical of her.

“Me, of course. But I’m still coming! Paparazzi will run away as soon as Gardner enters his sight. Then the ratings won’t match the number of criminals we’ve cleared here. We can’t have that.”

“Countering a bait tactic with another bait tactic? Doesn’t seem particularly clever.”

“After getting hit once, I figured getting hit twice wouldn’t be much of a problem. Gardner, please leave the scene. Find a good sniping position among the cameras. After that… if I’m bait, I should know how to buy time, right?”

It still wasn’t a clever idea. Nevertheless, Gardner responded with a brief message of agreement. Serena decided to momentarily set aside her sense that she had to do everything herself. She recalled what she had only paid lip service to before.

Everyone in this city carries as much as they can bear. She too, like them, was carrying only what she could bear. Until now, that had been an obvious lie.

She herself was Serena Vanderbilt, the protagonist of the series. She had to be the guardian of this city. She had to carry more than others, more than she herself could handle. Not anymore.

Character Serena Vanderbilt now had Gardner as a mentor. Person Serena Vanderbilt had found an idol. A beast-shaped idol. An idol that held pleasure and enjoyment as absolute goods.

The Paparazzi had to fall. This wasn’t about public vengeance. It wasn’t revenge for Lobringer or Detroit! It was because he had ignored what was important to her. Because he had dared to shake what she herself had defined.

The city would survive. That was all that mattered to Serena. Even if she became a clown for the entertainment industry, for her hometown; even if her body was cut in half, for the city she loved. It was both psychosis and mania.

A normal person should avoid things that could harm them. It wouldn’t be strange to flee across the country to avoid something that could cut your body in half.

That’s why it was mania. Stepping directly in front of a gun barrel as if daring someone to shoot you was such an insane act. Serena didn’t particularly care.

She arrived at sniper point 3 on her nameless bike. The Paparazzi’s eyes began to gleam. His plan hadn’t failed. The real Serena Vanderbilt had come.

The phrase “real Serena Vanderbilt” sounded like a tasteless black comedy to him. Because Serena Vanderbilt was fake. Like the city of Detroit, she was entirely fake. Something a journalist should expose.

The Paparazzi recalled the shocking experience he had when he came to this city to cover H-Enter’s inhumane broadcasts. It was when he followed criminals fleeing from Serena. Probably.

They didn’t flee to some great hideout, but to a section of the city that was boldly connected to other streets by roads… and only blocked by painted warning signs.

When the Paparazzi asked why Serena or the DPD didn’t pursue them, they snickered. “This is outside the frame.” The Paparazzi still remembered the face of the criminal who explained this to him as if teaching common sense to a child.

At first, the Paparazzi thought it was all a show. He understood it to mean that the criminals didn’t actually die, that it was a show with actors rotating in and out. But it wasn’t even that.

Real people died, Serena hunted criminals with real weapons, but this was fiction. A fictional city provided via streaming, with clips that could be shared. It was all a lie.

A city of clowns dancing behind masks, never crossing the implicit line! The Paparazzi ground his teeth. It was a moment when his life’s pursuit of truth was denied.

That’s why the Paparazzi took up a sniper rifle. Even this was something Heroism & Hope had released into Detroit’s black market. Even the anti-enhancement rounds he was firing had been diverted by H-Enter.

For a journalist, revealing the truth was nothing short of a calling. The same was true for the Paparazzi. His only calling was to expose the truth and make the clowns remove their masks. It was something only he could do.

Perhaps the Paparazzi was deliberately turning a blind eye to the city coming alive in the struggles of those clowns. Perhaps he was gritting his teeth and denying that Serena’s actions were helpful.

As a person with rational thinking, he could understand that much, but a mind that had already had its beliefs shattered once wasn’t brave enough to make a choice that would shatter its beliefs twice.

The Paparazzi decided to wait a little longer. His target was ultimately Serena Vanderbilt. The center of this masquerade. Gardner… perhaps he was something real in this city of fakes.

Serena Vanderbilt was, on record, an ordinary Detroit police officer, but Gardner might really be from corporate security as Heroism & Hope claimed.

Serena, who had reached Gardner’s position, looked at the Smogpiercer and steeled her resolve slightly. She briefly remembered Lieutenant Ryland, who would go into the city to meet citizens even while wearing bulletproof vests.

What mattered now wasn’t how bad the Paparazzi was or how quickly he needed to be dealt with, but what Serena herself believed. The Paparazzi was just a third-rate villain. Serena muttered to herself.

Then she spoke so the cameras would catch it. She spoke to the ghost of Lieutenant Ryland, who was still riding the Smogpiercer toward somewhere better. He was still a braver person than she was.

“Lieutenant Ryland… you, yes. You went out into the streets willingly, not knowing what was coming. I’ll go out too, but at least I know what’s coming. Still, I don’t care. I wonder which is better?”

The manner of speech wasn’t hers, but the words were. Serena, who had received eight thousand rounds in two magazines and a machine gun from Gardner, gave Gardner a slight salute. Gardner whispered quietly.

“Are you sure you can buy time?”

“Of course. This time I’ve mixed painkillers and stimulants in the drug injector, so I won’t stagger around dizzy and dazed while the preservative keeps me alive. Still, at the very least…”

“At the very least?”

“The company will tell me not to do high-exposure photoshoots. No photoshoot would use a woman with two holes in her torso as a model.”

Gardner snorted at Serena’s joke, a joke written in the script. His response was improvised.

“They’re probably already growing a body for photoshoots in the company’s cultivation lab.”

This time Serena laughed quite naturally. So naturally that she had to be careful not to become too casual.

“Pff, haha! I guess so. No matter what heroic deeds I do, I’ll get less attention online than one scandal. But, well. What can I do? If you love this damn city, you have to accept this much.”

Serena gave Gardner a brief salute. Gardner slowly moved away from sniper point 3 on the Smogpiercer. In Gardner’s mind—or more precisely, in Arthur’s mind—Chance was busily working.

“As requested, I’m using unmanned cameras to find locations suitable for sniping. The Hope Globe area has quite good anti-sniper measures, and there aren’t many buildings taller than the temporary structures.”

The list Chance compiled appeared in Arthur’s vision. One was the penthouse where they had been staying, and the rest were branch buildings of other megacorporations. He would be on one of them.

The Paparazzi finally let out a short exclamation as he saw one of the few truths in this city—Gardner leaving Serena Vanderbilt’s side, a closeness he had built by observing their internal intimacy.

He slowly loaded an anti-enhancement round. With eyes reddened and fatigued from the glaring light of the Hope Globe, he began to aim at Serena. He accessed the security vulnerability he had found.

He connected to the city’s broadcast system, which H-Enter had deliberately made less secure so criminals could easily create highlight scenes. The Paparazzi’s face began to appear on skyscrapers.

He was an ordinary person. Once a forty-something woman who had won awards given by nationalists to excellent journalists for covering corporate wars. Her graying brown hair was commonplace.

“On days like today, don’t you acutely feel how out of place you are in this world, Serena? Polaris is real. Gardner is real too. Too many genuine people have appeared in this puppet show city.”

Serena, who had anticipated this, swept the area twice with Gardner’s machine gun for courtesy’s sake and muttered under her breath. It was a disparaging comment, quiet enough not to be broadcast.

“I can definitely sense that some stupid woman is about to add a highlight to the Gardner series and Serena Vanderbilt series, Paparazzi.”

The Paparazzi pulled the trigger, aiming at Serena who was still floundering like a fake—or pretending to do so. He didn’t aim for her head. His purpose was to cause pain and make her remove her mask.