Ch.173025th Work Record – The Outcome of a Coin Toss (6)

Even if I had received a lump sum payment as a freelancer, it would have been difficult to match the lifestyle of someone who had worked for a major corporation for a long time. Jerome was the epitome of upper class in the most conventional sense.

He filled his excessively spacious luxury apartment with decorative items to his taste and even hung pre-war artwork on the wall. He owned four cars.

The motorcycle, which wasn’t quite appropriate for a mid-level employee of a megacorporation, was probably for recreational purposes. I descended to the apartment parking garage where each space required a monthly subscription fee. Everything was high-end.

Regardless of Jerome’s tastes, he was someone who did his job well. The world wasn’t that picky about people. What mattered was whether you had the motivation to work and what you could do.

The good thing is that the same would apply to Arthur-2. Since she was me, she would have both the ability and motivation to work. She could become someone who could create something more in this city.

To make that happen, I needed to finish this job first. I couldn’t trip over stones on the ground while gazing at stars in the sky. The stars are too far away from us, but the stones are not.

Sitting in the passenger seat of Jerome’s luxury SUV, I double-checked my small evil deed. Arthur-2 was inspecting her Belwether company-issue pistol in almost the same posture. A mirror image that needed no further explanation.

From now on, it might be better to carry a hardware firewall that connects to the computational assist device. It costs thousands of credits, but it’s well worth the price.

Arthur-2’s expression looked quite fierce as she practiced moving while wearing Ms. Eve’s spare bulletproof vest, her teeth clenched tight and her gun holstered. I clicked my tongue, drew her attention, and told her:

“Don’t start shooting as soon as we get inside, Arthur-2. Even if it’s a criminal hideout, there’s no guarantee there won’t be civilian cohabitants. You understand that clearly, right?”

Arthur-2 was a… less refined version of me. She hadn’t experienced all those events, and unlike me who had learned about meaninglessness and the pleasure that comes from it while bringing down Walter’s stronghold, she had been thrown into meaninglessness.

I too once believed there was meaning. I believed there was meaning in being raised by Belwether, in dying and coming back to life, in experiencing everything. No. Meaning existed in only one place.

The only selfish and arbitrary meaning was in the Shepherd deliberately sending me to a hospital he knew. It only existed when I became cargo moved according to someone else’s will.

If that’s the case, it’s better to have no meaning at all. Better to receive an empty palette than one on which someone else has already painted.

Arthur-2 reluctantly nodded. Though she remained silent, she seemed to have so much to say once the job was done.

We arrived in front of an apartment building constructed by Fitts & Morrison’s construction subsidiary for slum redevelopment, though it couldn’t erase the darkness that hung over the slum. The building looked exactly like a lighthouse.

In the empty center of Fitts & Morrison’s favored angular concrete skyscraper was a holographic garden, now unmanaged, all lights extinguished, reduced to a garbage dump.

We all try. It’s just that not all attempts succeed. Jerome’s SUV certainly didn’t fit in with the slum parking lot. People wouldn’t mess with it.

They knew that stealing expensive headlights might bring security teams from megacorporations with rifles. The concept of non-immediate punishment had never existed.

After checking my weapon and verifying my bulletproof vest and helmet one more time, I turned around. Looking at the three people in the back seat who were ready to enter, I spoke. A brief briefing was necessary.

“According to information from Coco, the hacker who sold my brain scan lives on the 71st floor. External observation suggests there’s no means of escape to the outside…”

If such a thing existed in this 127-story concrete building with its top poking out above the smog, it would be remarkable indeed. I continued:

“I’ll go in, conduct an interrogation like we did this morning, then eliminate the target. If they’re storing the brain scan data separately, I’ll physically destroy the storage device as well.”

I needed to interrogate them since we’d have to wipe it from the cloud too. The chances of the hacker still having the data weren’t that high. They probably just knew the disposal location.

Considering Jerome personally retrieved the data with a drone, this might be an unnecessary worry, but whether a worry was unnecessary or not was something to determine after the job was done.

As soon as we got out of the SUV, bulletproof panels rose up. Jerome wasn’t someone involved in this kind of work. As long as he kept his head down until we returned, he wouldn’t get hurt.

There was definitely value in his willingness to take responsibility for the person he saved, even following along with what was nothing more or less than the ferocity of a freelance mercenary without even an operation name, something he’d never experienced before.

Having Jerome around was better than not. Then he too was one of the excellent employee-citizens who should be protected. All five elevators were functioning to some degree.

We boarded the elevator in the best condition. A gunshot rang out in that massive concrete jungle. The reason was unknown. There was no need to worry about it. The elevator was working.

Fortunately, the elevator reached the 71st floor without stopping. Following the information from Coco, we searched for unit 7108. We found it somewhere in the middle of the building. I focused on my hearing.

Inside the building, I could hear two voices and movement sounds. Both were female. After displaying the suspect’s face from Coco’s information in everyone’s field of vision, I prepared to break down the door and enter.

Since Fitts & Morrison had originally intended to use it as employee housing, the original door would have been unusable. The part where the original lock had been removed and a new one installed looked loose.

I grabbed the door handle and, using tendons reinforced with metal coils, pulled out the entire lock mechanism and threw it aside. I pushed my hand into the now unobstructed lock hole and flung the door open.

Screams came from inside. The woman near the door looked completely different from the face in our display. The face shape was different, so it couldn’t be a case of changed appearance.

I pushed her aside and entered. The one rushing out asking what was happening was… exactly like the photo. I grabbed the wrist reaching for a gun placed on the console table by the entrance. I felt the prosthetic hand crumple.

I didn’t enjoy it. I grabbed that wrist, threw her into the living room, and aimed the barrel of Small Evil at her. She raised her hands—one with my handprint embedded in it, the other intact.

The woman who had been near the entrance ran to the living room. She wasn’t armed, but Arthur-2’s gun was tracking her. I made her lower the gun.

The hacker with the crumpled wrist looked down at her sparking prosthetic hand, then tried to bluff with a hollow laugh.

“What is this, did Ashwood send you? I did sell their location info, but I didn’t know they had any survivors. If I call now, the people who took down Ashwood could…”

“No, it’s a much more trivial matter. Coco’s little game. You sold it on December 16th. Were you planning to buy a Christmas present for your lover?”

When you mention the location and date, it becomes easy to recall what was sold on that day. I approached one step at a time.

She had been sneering as if gangs could be laughed off, but when the date of selling an item related to a megacorporation came up, she couldn’t maintain such composure.

“That, that wasn’t Belwether information! I thought since it was information transferred to NFD Company, Belwether wouldn’t care… and, and those guys were already purged anyway! Right?”

She believed she could convince me. Believing that while Belwether might purge NFD, they wouldn’t bother purging individuals who stole their information… that’s childish.

“It’s an even more trivial matter, I said. Did you know the contents of that information?”

She waved her hands. Stupidly, the armed stranger had already been reclassified in her mind as an agent from Belwether with a reinforced-body pistol.

“No, no. No. It was just some insignificant evidence! Things recovered from the scene. Guns or whatever, anyway, anything important would have already been disposed of by Belwether itself…”

That’s true. Usually, disposal evidence consists of such things. But she had completely forgotten where she had stolen the items from. I reminded her.

NFD Company was a collaborator with the information processing team. They handled things like cerebral matter scraped clean of information, or the disposal of replicated personalities after intensive interrogation.

“Then why did Belwether entrust that to NFD Company?”

A chain of thought occurred. Her expression twisted from confusion to terror as she recalled what kind of information NFD Company typically handled.

She realized that inside was a person’s mind, or something like a code bundle, or a digitized soul extracted from cerebral matter.

She was desperate. She tried to prevent a Saturday morning from ending in tragedy, but… execution still seemed like the most appropriate punishment. I wouldn’t lie unnecessarily.

If she knew why NFD Company was purged, she would also know that she had now become a criminal that Belwether needed to eliminate. It was only a matter of time.

“Wait, wait a minute. Who, whose data was in there that makes this such a big deal? If they’re alive, let me talk to them! Maybe I can convince them!”

“You already know that doesn’t matter at all. Sigh, but… it was mine. I died and came back to life once. Not a hobby, though.”

Her pupils lost focus and began to tremble. If I said not just any returned child, there was something obvious to recall.

“The miracle children…”

I nodded briefly. She had simultaneously done something that would make Belwether hunt her and something that Panacea Meditech would hate.

If having one megacorporation as an enemy was frightening, having two simultaneously was simply suicidal.

“Is there… a way to resolve this? Please, there must be some best option…”

“It’s good that you’re being cooperative. You really don’t have anything stored separately?”

“No, I don’t. I really just stole the disposal schedule from NFD Company. Really. I can prove it with records…”

It didn’t matter if she was lying. Either way, she would completely delete all the information she had. If that happened, I would have received everything I needed to receive.

Now I had to give Coco what I promised. I had to fulfill that small request to keep Coco uninvolved. And that was the way that would result in the fewest deaths or injuries.

Jerome didn’t die, but she had to. Procuring items from a secure private trading site wasn’t quite a violation of company rules, and neither was saving a person. There was ambiguity.

Where there’s ambiguity, there’s a way out, and Jerome had created that way out by behaving well. Even Belwether could turn a blind eye to resurrection.

But theft and leakage of information… there was no leeway. There would be no leniency, and she would be dragged to the information processing team. And that would create a big problem.

If she were taken there, pressure would naturally be applied to Jerome or Coco, which would lead to more meaningless deaths.

Her death would be the lesser evil. The same applied to this hacker. Belwether wouldn’t care about collateral damage. Just like with Jaina.

If she didn’t take immediate action and was dragged to the information processing team, and it was revealed that she had said something to her lover who was now embracing her, Belwether would open her cerebral matter too.

Before being captured by the information processing team, everyone has one chance. Not a chance to escape or flee. A chance to ensure that dignity isn’t placed in an evidence bag. I nodded briefly.

“It’s been quite some time since NFD Company was purged by Belwether. They’re probably investigating, and it won’t be long before Belwether, not me, comes here. I trust you know what to do.”

“Ha, ha… could you give me about thirty minutes?”

“I won’t report anything, so you’ll have more time than 4 minutes and 47 seconds.”

For about ten minutes, she searched her entire database to show that she had no information about my brain scan. I got what I wanted.

After that, we left the apartment and waited for a while. After another ten minutes or so… a sound that wasn’t uncommon in this apartment rang out. That’s how the case concluded.

Now the full story was clear. Belwether wouldn’t go on a rampage as the foam-mouthed shepherd, dragging away everyone involved in the case.

A hacker who had accidentally stolen information from NFD Company that would make them hunted by Belwether deleted all the information and then committed suicide to prevent her cerebral matter from being opened. That’s how it would end.

Soon her lover walked out of the apartment and nodded slightly. I went in to confirm that the brain that had contained love, worry, anxiety, and soul had been scattered into cerebral matter.

I returned without disturbing the scene. Back in Jerome’s car, Jerome, unaware of the full story, cautiously spoke up.

“You were there for quite a while, but at the scene…”

“Someone just took responsibility. Like you, Jerome. Your responsibility was to drive the car and help with identity recovery, but… their responsibility was to put a period at the end. In many ways.”

A gunshot wound looks exactly like a black hole, like a period. The case of leaked identity of the deceased and the purge of NFD Company finally ended with a gunshot. But not Arthur-2’s story.