Ch.200031 Work Record – High-Value Asset (1)

The day spent elegantly at the Superior party was quite valuable, but not as valuable as a holiday spent with Ms. Eve at home. For me, the day after the party is actually the better holiday.

The day at Farmers Corporation’s party venue was more of an educational experience than a recharge. It was simply a day to feel the attitude and atmosphere of true mega-corporate aristocrats, and to take one brick from Mr. Morgan’s words.

Adding Sophie and Mr. Morgan to my contact list was a benefit. I also made a good impression on Chairman Paul Riefman, so if something comes up, Pathfinder will look for a freelancer certified by Belvedere.

Ms. Eve knocked on my apartment door early in the morning. I was in the middle of maintaining a small evil deed, so I opened the door with lubricant on my hands, and when she immediately hugged me, I almost got lubricant on her.

“Looking at you like this, you really live like a monk. Wake up in the morning and clean your guns, spend eight whole hours training if you have nothing to do until evening… Huh? Was that Belvedere bioweapon nickname not a joke?”

“It was half a joke. Belvedere doesn’t give out freelancer licenses for nothing. You don’t usually come this early in the morning, especially when Arthur-2 is still sleeping.”

Arthur-2 was often away from home. Even after leaving the night watch, he was looking for a place to live. You can write four resumes, but mercenary staffing companies hire based on the person.

I glanced toward the bedroom at Ms. Eve, who had immediately wrapped her arms around my neck and leaned against me. We didn’t sleep together anyway since my bed was only for one person. Arthur-2 preferred the hard cot to the soft one.

It won’t last long. I’m a fairly intelligent person, and somewhat enterprising. Soon enough, I’ll figure out that soft beds aren’t made of marshmallows.

“I came because I was worried you might be hiding another woman in your bedroom besides Arthur-2. Weren’t the women at the Superior party much more dazzling than this B-grade mercenary?”

“From this second-rate freelancer’s perspective, Ms. Eve is much better than those dazzling people there. I was going to visit you at night, but then I thought… you know?”

“Pfft, right. Even I’d feel awkward having a romance scene with Pastor Bill Weber and the Creek escapees right there. Ah, I should postpone having a serious talk with Bill.”

He was an insider from Hollowwood Creek. No matter how exhausted and lethargic he had become, he would know exactly what kind of place Hollowwood Creek was.

Knowledge is power. To bring down Hollowwood Creek, one needed to take interest in it, devote effort to it, and go through the process of getting to know it almost as if falling in love with it.

“That’s much better than postponing a holiday with Ms. Eve. Should Arthur-2 wake up and leave early in confusion? Let me put away the gun maintenance stuff and come out. Please sit comfortably on the beanbag.”

Arthur-2, who had been staring at us with a sullen expression as if already awake from our conversation, lay back down and tried to sleep. Leaving him behind, we headed out to Los Angeles again today.

It was a fairly good day for a date. When you don’t need to wear a gas mask, the weather is ultimately all the same. They say the thick smog, layered like lasagna, will roll in tomorrow or the day after.

Since I couldn’t accompany Ms. Eve to Farmers Corporation’s party venue, we headed to Farmers’ visitor center instead. The visitor center was propaganda built as a building, and Farmers was particularly extreme in this regard.

You could enter Farmers Corporation’s visitor center even without having anyone to meet. Inside, behind triple doors, was fresh air that knew nothing of smog, and… a garden of sorts.

The ground was covered with soil that Farmers, which had focused on hydroponics, had formulated for growing plants in soil again, and though most were young plants, there was even a small lawn.

The tree planted in the center of the garden was always under employee observation. It seemed they were studying the response when plants accustomed to hydroponics were transplanted to soil.

One way or another, Farmers was a company that had to pour budget into greenery and make people feel it tangibly. This was an efficient use of budget.

It was a space everyone could enjoy, except for Farmers’ healthy juice that contained absolutely no pseudo-ingredients—a juice that seemed to make everything healthy except one’s financial state.

After sufficiently compensating each other there for not being able to take Ms. Eve to the party yesterday, we chose lunch and dinner with absolutely no pseudo-ingredients. The amount I had received this time was… somewhat excessive.

In truth, receiving such an excessive amount doesn’t change life much. I didn’t suddenly go buy some ridiculous car or anything like that. What I gained was just the ability to spend money in places like this without hesitation.

Money is just trust written in numbers. More important than money is trust. When you move to earn that trust, credits follow naturally. We spent most of our date time indoors.

They say Los Angeles before that war wasn’t like this. It was apparently a resort city where you could walk the streets with your loved one and enjoy the sea. But now… indoors was better.

They say the environment can be restored in twenty years, or at the latest, thirty or forty years. We are people living in a transition period. That transition doesn’t guarantee only an unhappy life.

When we returned home in the evening, Arthur-2 was away. Checking the computational assistant device, it seemed Arthur-2 was also planning to go out for dinner with someone. I was a bit curious about who he was meeting.

I was somewhat curious whether there were more good people in Los Angeles that I didn’t know about, or whether it would end with Arthur-2 putting a bullet in someone’s head… but the part of life we shared was only the starting point.

He was a completely different person, so it would be wrong to make assumptions. Instead of the absent Arthur-2, I decided to focus on Ms. Eve in front of me. Waiting in bed always feels the longest.

Of course, the reward for waiting was certain. Soon Ms. Eve walked over, dressed only in steam and heat. She naturally climbed onto my thighs and, as always, wrapped her arms around my neck.

At least today she didn’t leave handprints on my waist and back. As much as a Posthuman Type IV could exert inhuman strength and grip, she naturally had the ability to control it perfectly.

At first… we agreed to call it a beginner’s mistake. We had dinner at 6:30 PM and made plans to watch some 80s classic film at 7:00 PM when we came in, but the clock was already saying it was past 11:00 PM.

Not everything goes according to plan for me either. After fixing Ms. Eve’s hair that was stuck to her cheek as she fell asleep exhausted on the bed, I was browsing the freelancer network when the doorbell rang.

I put on some clothes and went out… outside the door stood the North American Postal Service delivery person, who had become quite familiar by now. I closed the bedroom door and opened the front door. The delivery person was polite as always today.

“Good evening, freelancer. Your call sign is… should I say Boogeyman? Even though it changes depending on the job, some freelancers prefer to be called by their call signs.”

Since I had been thoroughly beaten in that insufferably corporate aristocratic quote battle with Mila last time, he didn’t quote anything this time. Rummaging through his mailbag, he pulled out two letters.

One was from New World Communications, and the other was from G Entertainment… that is, Glory & Glory. It seemed I was now in a position to choose my work.

“Two letters this time. Even though mega-corporations are said to scatter letters to freelancers whenever something happens, receiving more than two letters isn’t common. So…”

I pretended not to remember his name. It was just pretending. Since it seemed like I was trying to assert some petty pride, I shot back immediately.

“We don’t do the kind of work where we can easily forget people, Mr. Timothy Harriot.”

“Ah, of course I didn’t forget, Mr. Arthur. If it seemed like a trivial insult, I apologize. Still, your way of handling things has become much smoother.”

Just when I’m starting to form a good impression of corporate aristocrats, this delivery person appears and makes me realize how greasy and uncomfortably evasive the word “aristocratic” can sometimes be.

He was perfect as a counterbalance. Everything is dual. All good things produce bad byproducts. This dual attitude was one of those bad byproducts. Being aristocratic isn’t always good.

“And you still believe that someone who goes from house to house seeing only the scenery of entrances can judge people’s lives. It’s not about insight… it’s about being fragmentary, isn’t it?”

It was a question of why someone who has plenty of insight and knows how to think non-fragmentarily would do such a thing. I was becoming quite familiar with corporate justice dialect.

“I must say touché to that. Still, the reactions of new freelancers to such fragmentary judgments are quite standardized. Generally one of two: getting angry or enduring and moving on.”

He smiled while raising both hands as if acknowledging he had been attacked. Only after a considerable pause did he continue his story. He was among the worst of those whose true intentions were unfathomable.

“But, it’s been a while since I’ve met someone who handles things so skillfully from just the third meeting. I suppose you received help from the person who quoted on your behalf last time?”

“Everyone takes a brick from someone else’s words. Whether you like the person who made the brick or not, a brick is a brick, and if there’s a hole in the wall that fits it, you should bring it and fill it.”

Since there was no reason to speak so indirectly when I was with Ms. Eve, I felt unnecessarily tired. Mr. Timothy bowed with an overtly exaggerated gesture again and left.

He’s an exhausting person to deal with. I wonder if you can meet such people in any workplace. I returned to the beanbag while Ms. Eve was asleep and opened the letter envelopes. First, the one from New World Communications.

Again, it wasn’t recycled paper. And… I saw an eagle emblem on the paper that definitely didn’t belong to New World Communications. New World Communications was a company under the nationalists.

Unlike the letter from Heroism & Hope, the content on the paper was clean and to the point. It seemed the nationalists were looking for corporate justice freelancers for some reason.

The compensation was written high, but I couldn’t trust working with nationalists. It was hard to say this wasn’t an attempt to recruit freelancers and then eliminate them.

And around that time, a communication request came in from Ms. Julia. A nationalist agent who believed I had eliminated Prometheus. I turned on the noise cancellation space and connected the communication.

“Ah, Ms. Julia. I was just wondering whether I should contact you. I’d like to hear an explanation of what’s going on here. Why would a freelancer…”

“Did you receive a letter with a job request from the federal government, or as you might call them, nationalists?”

She seemed to already know and was calling about it. It was suspicious that the federal government would trust a corporate justice agent so easily, or trust them at all.

“After confirming that you took a big step for everyone’s future last time, I added you to the high-value asset list. In other words… I marked you as an outsider the federal government can trust.”

Could there be a lie here? Probably not. She was a person who had sincerely tried to abort the Prometheus operation she had accidentally discovered. But it could be. I had to be suspicious again.

Perhaps it was a ploy to eliminate me because I knew about Operation Prometheus. I could only take the job after hearing about it and investigating further. Otherwise, I’d work with G Entertainment.

“And another department contacted you. I’m not sure exactly, but they needed an agent from the high-value assets who showed no external signs of modification.”

I was a person whose modifications didn’t show externally at all, except for the back of my hands. Even that wasn’t visible at all since I’d been wearing artificial skin since Christmas.

Then the possibility that this nationalist agent had set a trap to eliminate me was significantly reduced. The only reason to eliminate me was that I knew about Prometheus.

And if they wanted to eliminate me for that reason, they would have to mention Operation Prometheus. She was someone who would never do such a thing even if it killed her. It was time to return to generalities.

I ended the connection with Ms. Julia and called Chance in my head. Again, lying on the beanbag, I spoke without opening my mouth. Conversations that could be held in the mind were better kept there.

‘Chance, does it seem possible that nationalists would try to hire a reasonable freelancer to assign a job? It’s not about whether to accept or not, but if this is an elimination attempt, I’ll have a lot to worry about.’

“The possibility of a direct elimination attempt is low. However, you should be cautious about being cut loose. If the federal government specifically wants to use a corporate justice agent, what would be the reason?”

‘Because we’re people who have nothing to do with the federal government. It’s easier to assign dirty work and cut us loose. Isn’t that it?’

“I agree. It’s certainly not a clean job, and it’s unlikely to be simply for gaining experience and skills. Consider the compensation, what you can gain, and what you might lose.”

If it could be the key to solving my overall lack of ability, I would gladly entrust my life and do the job, but I didn’t want to risk my life from the beginning of February. It would be better to meet and decide.

The letter from G Entertainment was inviting freelancers to participate in Glory & Glory’s underground fighting arena to earn credits if they wanted. It seemed there was only one place worth meeting.

There was nothing to gain from Glory & Glory’s arena, but there was a high possibility of gaining something from the nationalists. It’s time to be thoroughly suspicious and weigh the value.