Ch.204031 Work Record – High-Value Asset (5)

Matt Collins wasn’t Matt Collins, and dinner wasn’t dinner. It didn’t feel like stress. If anything, it felt refreshing. Like learning something new.

Actually, it wasn’t that different from playing Gardner. This time, Jeff had defined the setup instead of the executive producer, and it was at least more comfortable than Gardner without the mask and costume.

Ines made for good teaching material. She believed Jeff’s words that I was genuinely a police academy graduate and treated me like a junior colleague. Small talk was still difficult.

But each time I managed to overcome that difficulty, I felt a sense of enjoyment. Not the pleasure of deceiving someone, but the joy of realizing I had the ability to do so.

Ines wasn’t the only one I could learn from. The steak chain we visited, with the Farmers Company logo tucked into a corner of its sign, was filled with various nationalist patrons. There were even family groups.

For nationalists, family might hold even greater value than I had imagined. Since they dreamed of returning to the pre-war era, perhaps this was a pre-war value.

At a table next to ours, a man who used to work at a megacorporation branch was complaining to his wife about losing his job due to the nationalists’ anti-megacorporation stance. Inefficient.

It wasn’t that he was inefficient. The nationalists were being unrealistic, picking strange pride battles despite working with Bellwether when necessary. His wife’s response was ordinary.

She held his hand, telling him everything would be fine. She said comforting words about how he’d worked at a megacorporation factory for years and surely someone would be looking for experienced workers. Warm, gentle words.

Matt Collins wasn’t Matt Collins and dinner wasn’t dinner, but people are people everywhere, warmth is warmth everywhere, and compassion is compassion everywhere.

Someone must have decided to spend good money today because even the beer wasn’t synthetic. Agent Ines took a pleasant sip of real beer and looked at me.

“From what I hear, you were really a model student among model students. How did you know… no, why did you volunteer for such dangerous work, Matt? You could have had such a bright future elsewhere.”

Family stories were still useful. A communication request came in from Jeff. I connected. A voice using a voice module began to sound in my head.

Jeff apparently wasn’t as innocent as he looked. His voice was filled with satisfaction, completely unlike the carefree man in front of me who had just downed a beer and was leaning back in his chair.

“Maybe education wasn’t necessary in the first place. Create your own background story. Our Agent Ines is playing her role as teaching material perfectly, and we need an undercover agent who can think.”

This probably wasn’t what he originally intended. He likely planned to bring in a certified freelancer who could easily hide their appearance, train them thoroughly, and then deploy them… but I had shown something better than expected.

I came up with a reason why a police academy graduate with a bright future—someone like a Bellwether security team training college graduate—would commit to such a dangerous mission. I had something similar myself.

While speaking to Jeff through the voice module, I looked at Agent Ines and directed my words to her. Doing two things simultaneously and naturally wasn’t difficult.

‘Alright. Sit back and watch this.’

“I’m from Detroit. Growing up, I saw how hard the DPD tried to protect the city, and I couldn’t stand it when a professor slandered them as trash who sold the city to corporate states.”

I made a punching gesture in the air. Agent Ines shook her head and sighed. Apparently, it was a reasonable story. She spoke in a relaxed, drawling voice.

“Too many people without teaching qualifications these days. People who think bullying and insulting others somehow motivates them. Really…”

“Well… everyone thought that way, but rules are rules. When things looked bleak, Jeff’s people reached out first. Said I might as well go all in with my last chip.”

“Can’t just lie down and wait to die. Hmm… at least someone’s filled with a sense of duty. If we handle this job properly, you’ll have that bright future again. For real.”

She was both impressed by me and pitied me. It’s a reaction often shown by people from Panacea Meditech. Perhaps nationalists weren’t so different from corporate state people after all.

After trying to memorize each reaction, Agent Ines paid the bill. A taxi was prepared for her, but Jeff and I returned in his car.

Almost habitually, I turned on my voice module to start recording. Jeff, unaware of this, grinned as he got into the car.

“So, agent. How was it? The nationalists. Were they the emotional garbage you thought they’d be?”

“They value family, dislike modifications, and aren’t that different from corporate state people except for a few things. Why does the federal government hate modifications?”

“It’s technology made by megacorporations. There aren’t even any real side effects, right? I heard titanium skeletons get covered with bone, but they just keep pushing propaganda that it’s dangerous… that too many modifications drive you crazy.”

His answer was surprisingly straightforward. We lived in a flood of propaganda, counter-information, lies, and fake truths. Even if individuals were rational, the organizations they belonged to always delegated all judgments to prejudice.

“That’s absurd. I once saw protesters asking the federal government to allow full-body prosthetics, even if just for medical purposes.”

“Poor people. The worse part is, there’s no sign of change. The elephant brats scream about preserving American values, the donkey brats scream about regulating megacorporations. Simply put, what does it mean?”

“I don’t know what elephants and donkeys are, but… they just want to keep things as they are. They want to remain nationalists who hate megacorporations and talk about going back to basics.”

“Does it sound threatening if I say you’re too smart?”

I chuckled softly at his words. I spread my arms as if to show where I was.

“I’m already working with a nationalist intelligence agent in a nationalist city—what could be more threatening than this situation? What’s next?”

“We’re going to see if you’re as tough as you are smart. There’s a place on the outskirts of Charleston where city expansion fizzled out, and as usual, gangs have moved in. Let’s see your skills, freelancer.”

I nodded lightly. It was dangerous work. Not that gangs were dangerous, but rather that the situation could be used dangerously—killing people in nationalist territory without a proper chain of command.

At least I was recording everything, so it would work out somehow. I took a bulletproof vest from my luggage and put it on over my clothes, then checked the 9mm pistol from the glove compartment instead of my Small Misdeed.

It looked like a cheap gun compared to a masterpiece like Small Misdeed. It might sound strange to say it was too light, but it wasn’t a weight I was used to. I attached a silencer to prepare.

I put on a one-way display helmet that showed only deep black from the outside, hiding my face. I was ready to move, and I had already finished doubting. All that remained was to act.

His pickup truck began moving toward streets with less and less light. Heading toward unfinished streets. A place where smoke could be seen rising here and there into air thick with smog.

Streets where the cross-sections of buildings whose construction had been halted showed unnaturally bent rebar, like amputated limbs. A banner with a bizarre dog was hanging on a building that should have been some kind of office.

Chance’s voice sounded in my head first. It was better to trust Chance’s words than Jeff’s. Chance could get information through Homeland Security, and Jeff couldn’t reach that far.

“Charleston Mongrels, literally mongrel dogs. They’re officially listed as a group of concern, but they’re only being monitored based on the assessment that proper suppression would be difficult.”

“It’s the Mongrels. This job is about catching drug dealers too, right? These bastards are drug dealers, and the Charleston City Police have completely given up on maintaining order here. You can kill them comfortably.”

The information Chance provided also prominently listed human trafficking and drug crimes in their history. I got out of the car holding the 9mm pistol with the silencer attached. I closed the car door quietly.

Soon, a small drone flew out of Jeff’s car window and began flying beside me. It was a streamlined, well-designed object that made almost no sound, like a small flying insect.

I moved forward, feeling the drone following me. I examined the front of the building. Two gang members were already standing guard. Their posture was as disciplined as security team employees.

Nationalist security team… so, military backgrounds? At Bellwether, it was unthinkable for security team retirees to join gangs. Things seemed different in nationalist territory.

Night was usually when cities glittered and shone. Here, light was behind me and darkness was ahead. Light could be seen leaking from inside the building, but only to a certain extent.

I approached without making footsteps, hiding in the darkness. In this street, even with a silencer, a single gunshot would alert everyone in the building. Better to conceal as much as possible.

I drew a tactical dagger from my waist. With Type IV strength, I lightly threw it, embedding it in one guard’s forehead. I burst from the darkness, filling my metal coil-replaced tendons with strength as I rushed forward.

The other guard, seeing his companion collapse beside him, frantically tried to reach for the radio on his shoulder to shout something, but I was faster. I grabbed his wrist.

With my other hand, I grabbed his neck, then applied pressure with the fingers wrapped around the back of his neck. Charleston Mongrels were better off not existing. I twisted his wrist lightly. I set him down quietly.

I picked up his rifle, which showed signs of having parts removed that would have prevented automatic fire. Until now, I needed to avoid attention, but soon I would need to attract it.

Only the method of attracting attention would differ. There’s a big difference between everyone preparing for combat in response to a guard’s warning and them scrambling to assess the situation after gunshots inside the building.

There was no CCTV inside the building, but the door to what would have been the CCTV control room was firmly locked. Jeff’s voice began to sound in my head as he watched me examining the locked door.

“Hey, Donny. By now you’re probably starting to think, ‘Isn’t nationalist life pretty normal and decent? It might even be safer with only pure humans.’ Am I right?”

‘Something like that. Even the Mongrels I’m dealing with now seem to have military backgrounds, but they don’t even have military-grade eye implants with night vision. Still, people always find ingenious ways to harm themselves.’

“That’s an idealistic answer, but how does a twenty-three-year-old see reality so clearly? Dream a little, Donny. Or, like you, accept that reality is bitter and opening that door wouldn’t be so bad.”

Are they producing drugs in the control room? There would be better environments than a tightly closed door for setting up a lab. I gripped the door handle once to test its durability, then released it.

The door, covered with soundproofing and heat-resistant materials, was quite sturdy. I grabbed the doorknob with both hands and pulled hard. The nationalists probably never imagined someone could tear this door off by force.

And things people can’t imagine are synonymous with things that happen in reality. The firmly locked internal locking mechanism bent under the force, then snapped with a crack. The door was torn off.

There was nothing special inside the torn-off door. There weren’t piles of corpses, nor was anyone guarding it. I went inside and headed for the PC. I placed my hand on it lightly and accessed it remotely.

Inside the computer was just one small file named “original.” After having Chance examine it, I was about to leave when both Jeff’s and Chance’s voices sounded in my head simultaneously.

“Don’t open it, Donny. It’s a program that shorts out the computational assist implant and directly orders dopamine neurons to increase production. Use it often enough and it literally cooks your brain to medium rare.”

“It appears to be malware created by nationalists to promote the dangers of computational assist implants, crudely modified by the gang. This seems to be the last of it in Charleston.”

No one is innocent, and no one is pure. A virtual screen appeared in my vision. It was an article about the federal government admitting its mistake and beginning to recall this propaganda program.

Of course, the recall process isn’t so simple. A program injected with minimal complexity to spread widely wouldn’t be so easily eradicated.

I thought it fortunate that the nationalists were at least trying to make amends for their mistake, but I didn’t mention the nationalists’ shameful secret to Jeff.

Though we were looking at the same goal, we weren’t on the same side. I merely clicked my tongue and displayed ritual disgust over the communication channel.

‘If you’d told me about this from the beginning, I would have handled it myself.’

As I was coming back out through the torn door, I encountered a low-ranking member who had come out after hearing the sound of the door being torn off. I reached out to grab his face, then lightly bounced his head back against the wall.

At the sound of the building shaking, several gang members walked out of the room, trailing the scent of beer. They were almost pure humans, unlike the gangs in Los Angeles who were covered in implants.

The only one who could be said to have implants was one person who had replaced four lost fingers with prosthetics. I pulled the trigger of the silenced pistol, which I had been aiming since the sound of the door opening.

Compared to Small Misdeed, this plastic-shelled pistol had almost no recoil. Without the muzzle rising or shaking, I shot each of the four who had opened the door in the head and chest, killing them.

Three collapsed immediately, but the last one blinked as if unable to understand or feel the pain of the holes in his body before collapsing. His brain was damaged.

I entered through the open door. A pungent, unpleasant smell wafted out. I exited through a window. I climbed up the rough concrete wall, which hadn’t been properly finished, by gripping it with my fingertips.

There would be a command structure, and that needed to be neutralized first. The atmosphere was different between the lower floors, which were close to ruins, and the upper floors. The room on the 7th floor, the highest completed floor, even had a pool table set up.

One of the people gathered around it, sharing trivial stories, shook his head as if feeling dizzy and spoke. His pronunciation was slurred from alcohol.

“Did we… celebrate too much just because sales increased a bit? I’m going to get some fresh air, you guys keep playing.”

I quickly identified the face from the information Chance had provided. He was a drug dealer connected to the Charleston Mongrels. He would sell both drugs and spread the program.

I clung to the wall just below the windowsill. Soon the window opened, and I heard the sound of deep breathing that smelled of beer. After a few dry heaves, he leaned his elbows on the windowsill.

Hanging by just one hand, I reached out and grabbed him by the collar. Before he could be surprised, I threw him out from the 7th floor. There was no time to rest. Before being discovered, I climbed up the wall to reach an unfinished floor.

I jumped down through the shell of an elevator shaft to land on the 7th floor I had passed. I grabbed the elevator doors with both hands and forced them open, then headed toward the room I had seen earlier with the captured rifle.

I kicked in the door and squeezed the trigger at the gang members gathered by the windowsill, discussing trivial matters like “Did he slip?” or “What the hell happened?”

Now that I had cut off the head, I could go down floor by floor, clearing each one slowly.

Neither corporate states nor the federal government are anywhere near the word “ideal,” but removing one bad part makes things that much better. I decided to think of this as removing a bad part.