Ch.226Work Record #032 – Ripples (5)

“Things have never been easy, not once. I wish there had been some clear criteria, even just a little.”

My voice sounded deflated, and Tina responded with a slightly more relaxed tone. She seemed to lower her guard a bit, seeing me rushing to speak with the Grand Corps.

“Haven’t you always preferred difficult tasks, Boogeyman?”

“That may be true, but occasionally I wouldn’t mind if someone descended from heaven on a tightrope, told me ‘this is right, that is wrong,’ and then went back up. Especially when it concerns someone I care about.”

I looked at Nadia, who could now smile at me with a fairly natural expression. Nadia is someone who needs protection. I should gladly repay her for saving my life once.

“How pragmatic… Right. In that sense, you know I’m not just reciting all this out of pure goodwill toward a junior colleague, don’t you?”

“If I didn’t know that, I’d have to return the name ‘Boogeyman’ that Tina gave me. I’m assuming you’ve already decided in your mind that you’ll leave the company and secure plenty of collaborative work with the Grand Corps?”

My conversation with Tina wasn’t simply receiving a favor. It was making a kind of deal with her too. Tina nodded as she gathered her light brown hair into a ponytail.

“That’s right. But what matters is what comes next.”

“Indeed. What comes next. Once you start working with the Grand Corps, you’ll learn about irregular patrols before others do, and you’ll understand how those LA goblins handle their business, which should be helpful.”

What she wanted was information. She had judged that I was of sufficient caliber to likely work with the Grand Corps. So I accepted it without taking offense. The Grand Corps was just a means to an end anyway.

Tina, seeming pleased, tried to push me with her prosthetic frame but ended up pushing herself backward instead. She nodded with a grin.

“Your perception is top-notch. I like what you’re saying… what was it? ‘Let’s make Bellwether stop discriminating against mutants!’ That’s good. But for me, Nadia comes first.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t call you selfish. I did set that as my goal, but… you know my grand purpose isn’t as noble as those words suggest? It’s about saving my own skin.”

I made a slicing gesture across my wrist, and Tina started laughing quite slyly. She grabbed my shoulders with her two prosthetic frames and leaned in.

“This is a secret from Eve, right? Seems like you’re preparing it as a surprise gift, Boogeyman. I can keep quiet about it. For Nadia, just keeping her mouth shut won’t be enough—we’ll need to block her telepathy too.”

Ms. Nadia made a zipping motion across her lips and then lightly covered both sides of her head as if blocking antennas. I couldn’t help but laugh, though I didn’t want to make noise inside the fire escape.

“It’s not even telepathy to begin with. Being a mutant doesn’t mean you can use magic.”

Mutants manipulate signals. They can only create and transmit abnormal signals. Nadia’s “telepathy” is closer to an electrical signal. She’s just inserting electrical stimulation directly into the auditory nerve.

It might be related to her abnormally formed heart that produces bioelectricity… Anyway, the important thing is that it’s not as magical as it seems.

The terrorist from Jaina also could only send visual signals that interfered with the central nervous system, and Noah’s mother’s enemy only sent signals to stimulate the adrenal glands. It’s more realistic than one might think.

And being realistic means it can be quantified. If Nadia’s ability to create electrical signals is related to her heart’s abnormal formation, then a very simple hypothesis can be written:

‘Abnormal formations don’t give people abilities. They abnormally develop organs that already have specific functions, enabling special activities.’ Simple but quantifiable.

If it could be defined by such a simple sentence that even I could imagine, then Bellwether could certainly have imagined it too, and Bellwether had more than enough time to test the hypothesis.

Yet if their only response to mutants is hunting and killing… that’s inefficiency. It’s treating what is merely a part of human physical ability as if it were magic.

Tina simply laughed off my comment. It was a more important fact than I thought, but also something that might be difficult to realize when you’re the one being hunted.

“Whether it is or isn’t, the Grand Corps won’t care anyway. But for you, Arthur, that kind of thing matters, right? It’s what you need to say when convincing someone who’s never been appointed. I wish there was more like that…”

“Then… Nadia, can you control that ability? I think you probably can, but I’m not sure if it’s just you… or if all mutants can do that.”

Nadia could probably control it. If people passing by the company had suddenly heard a woman’s voice in their heads, the Grand Corps would have already arrived.

“Nadia can. For the rest, I don’t know either. You can hide a tree in a forest, but if a forest forms with only the same kind of trees… the Grand Corps’ job becomes simple. They just need to throw one lighter into that forest.”

Contacting other mutants for information could have been helpful, but for someone like a former underground racer who was raking in money illegally one way or another, it would have been much simpler to just solve problems with money.

And because of that, she didn’t have to worry about getting caught herself when hearing that another mutant had been captured. From Tina’s position, there might not have been much more she could do.

“I’m getting quite a few answers… but still not complete information. Not that complete information exists anywhere. But… I guess I’ll need to contact the Grand Corps first. Next time I come, don’t be afraid even if I’m scarier.”

I smiled at Nadia as I said this. She chuckled quietly and whispered. From her small room behind that wall—her entire world—she showed me a company tablet and said:

“Even if Arthur becomes the boogeyman jumping out from under the bed, I won’t be scared. In my world, the monsters weren’t under the bed… they were everywhere outside the bed.”

She turned on the tablet with just a blink of her eyes, demonstrating that her electrical signal was real. She connected to the net and showed me videos with similar titles.

They were all videos of my actions captured by people—subduing a freelance technomancer and such, all under my name. She smiled more kindly and reached out of the room with her frail body.

“So, if there’s a monster under the bed… I think maybe it’s like me, hiding under the bed because people dislike it, Boogeyman. It’s not like you’re really becoming like those people.”

Was the nickname “Boogeyman” given by Nadia, not Tina? If so, perhaps it was because she felt some kind of kinship with me, not because I was a closet monster who punished bad people.

When I met Nadia, I was certainly… terribly unstable. Half my mind was still Bellwether’s at that time. It’s different now. Now I’m Arthur Murphy, not Shepherd Six.

As I was about to gently take her outstretched hand, Tina took Nadia’s hand away and grinned. She came up with something that seemed difficult to refute. It wasn’t intentional, probably.

“Somehow you keep attracting one woman after another, and now it’s Nadia? Oh, while you two were gazing at each other tenderly, I had a thought—how about this? Whether their first crime was before or after being hunted. That’s objective, isn’t it?”

It was a somewhat discriminating statement. If someone hadn’t committed any crimes until they were hunted, perhaps they might have lived as an excellent employee-citizen if they hadn’t been hunted.

“To some extent, yes. But what if, even if their first crime was after being hunted, even if it started small, they’ve now become a murderer killing people with their ability? That’s someone who needs to be eliminated.”

Still, it’s not completely useless. This time too, it could be used to persuade Mr. Günter rather than for mutant hunting. Killing and persuading are entirely different matters.

“Still, if enough data is collected, I could use it with someone who hasn’t been appointed. To argue that mutant hunting is driving mutants to crime, essentially giving them opportunities to become criminals.”

The important thing was to persuade Mr. Günter. While Bellwether had a fairly horizontal organizational culture, the chairman’s authority was exceptional compared to other companies. That’s because he was the person who initiated this high-speed era.

Perhaps, just perhaps… if all of this was due to Mr. Günter’s stubbornness, the only solution would be to make him abandon that stubbornness. If that’s the case, the key to the conversation would be efficiency alone.

I need to ask: Haven’t you yourself strayed from the efficiency that you created, established your reputation on, and used to pave the way? Ahab is Ahab because he hunts Moby Dick.

If he throws harpoons at the crew he should be leading instead of at the whale… all his words lose their meaning and fade away. I could persuade him with such words.

I resemble Mr. Günter quite a bit. We’re not ideal people. We’re just people who see things through to the end. We don’t have the ability to discern good and evil or black and white; we can simply push forward with our own ideas.

But that “idea” Mr. Günter created had already grown larger than Mr. Günter himself. The era when he led the concept of efficiency had passed. Efficiency had begun to define itself.

Tina lightly poked my cheek with the skeletal finger of her prosthetic. She rolled her eyes as if unsure what to say, then spoke:

“Being goal-oriented is quite scary, Arthur. Why is that? You’re such a nice kid… but there’s something about you. Like you had a dark childhood, or something like that?”

“As I said recently, even if my life seems full of misfortune, it was actually full of opportunities, challenges, and rewards. I didn’t have an unfortunate childhood.”

Bellwether was an excellent parent. All the children around me were in the same situation, and we had healthy relationships of both cooperation and competition. Enough to mess with the nationalists for Ray’s sake.

“No, no, I don’t mean your environment was dark… Did you like dissecting things when you were young?”

“Would it be similar if I said I liked Gory & Glory Entertainment’s fighting programs? But I quit even that after seeing the autopsies of terrorists and security team members during college.”

I still remembered the catchphrase. But it felt somewhat inappropriate. It was a show where people killed people with truly primitive weapons. Tina shook her head dismissively.

“What am I saying to someone who’s helping me? Yeah, you’re a good guy. An exceptionally good guy. But you’re the Boogeyman. For real. Not in the way Nadia means.”

“Like, if someone wants pancakes at 3 AM, a strange monster jumps out of the closet door, bustles around in the kitchen, and brings back perfectly made pancakes—that kind of feeling?”

“Exactly that feeling. Everyone would say ‘that sounds like a great friend,’ but when you see it in front of you, it’s… you know. That thing. You know I don’t mean it in a bad way, right?”

I already knew this to some extent. Originally I lived as an ordinary Bellwether security team member or night watch member, but now that I’ve become a freelancer living for my own purpose, I feel it more acutely.

“I know very well. Everyone around me says my eyes are scary whenever I do anything! Even Eve… even Ms. Eve says so. Since I’ve never looked in a mirror when saying such things, I don’t know what it feels like.”

“Ah, Boogeyman, don’t be like that. People naturally fear what they don’t understand. And you explain things well, don’t you? If you explain what a good guy you are, no one will be afraid.”

I didn’t bother to voice the unnecessary thought: “If I tell them I can willingly kill one hundred and thirty-two people for that good and righteous cause, they might be even more frightened.”

Anyway, I killed more than that in Detroit. I willingly killed traitors and extracted information from their brains to create mind maps. It wasn’t particularly cruel for Madeleine’s Lot.

“I can keep trying. Next time I’ll bring the Grand Corps’ patrol schedule and a list of information they’ve gathered. Well then.”

I got up lightly. After saying goodbye to Nadia, I walked out of the duty room where Tina was staying. It seemed like the ripples that had been surging since my return from Madeleine’s Lot were somewhat settled now.

I would go on night watch but wouldn’t leave. I would hunt mutants but wouldn’t agree with mutant hunting. The two had to flow naturally together.

For an employee of Bellwether’s partner company, if Bellwether directly ordered them to hunt mutants, they would generally have to comply, but freelancers didn’t receive direct orders.

So, only by going on night watch and becoming a truly independent freelancer could I kill only those mutants who deserved to die by my standards while gaining recognition from Bellwether.

As for Noah… yes, I could understand his dislike of mutants. Whether he knew it was wrong to generalize or not, if Ms. Eve had been killed by a mutant, even I would want to eradicate the murderer’s kind.

I seem to have acted like a fresh graduate for a while, but that’s over now. Now it’s time, once again or perhaps for the first time, to dedicate time to the musical chairs strategy. The business with Panacea Meditech was also waiting.

Sitting on the sofa in the reception room, I turned on my computational assistant and contacted President Yoon. Should I call her Ms. Suyeon now? These trivial questions were all I had left.

“Ah, yes, Arthur. What can I do for you? It’s been quite a while since you contacted me on a holiday.”

“Could you help me register as a sole proprietor tomorrow? Originally, leaving night watch felt like losing my home, but after talking with other freelancers… it feels more like becoming independent from home.”

I heard a laugh that was uncharacteristically soft for President Yoon. It seemed certain that I was at least a mercenary she was proud to have raised. These things give me motivation to live one more day as a mercenary.

“Very well. I’m glad I told you to talk with other freelancers. I won’t claim I raised you in every aspect, but do acknowledge that you learned sharpshooting from me.”

I laughed at that remark. After laughing out loud, I replied as if it were obvious.

“If someone thinks my life is interesting enough to write an autobiography, I’ll definitely write it that way. But you know I live a boring life. I trained eight hours a day, seven days a week. No one would be interested, right?”

“If you write it like that, the net bookstores will naturally move it to the self-help section, so there’s no problem. Well then… I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s quite sudden, but enjoy your last regular day off.”

A feeling of lightness and freedom pleasantly envelops my entire body. Today I’ll probably be able to sleep comfortably without tossing and turning.