Ch.307Work Record #937 – Calzone Recipe Missing One Ingredient (1)

“…For these reasons, the Mojave Wasteland is currently in a state of extreme tension, like a powder keg ready to explode. According to our military advisor, ‘the right of first strike remains with the Order.’ However, definitive information is still…”

“While the Las Vegas Strip has dismissed these concerns as baseless rumors, no one knows how long this calm before the storm will last. This has been Daily Los Angeles…”

A god was born in the wasteland. No, is that really a god? It can’t be. A true god would show mercy. I try to imagine the silhouette of the person inside El Sueño’s power armor, but I give up once again.

Whenever I recall that arrogant and even unpleasant divine presence, a face appears in my mind unbidden. I prayed it wasn’t him, but in El Sueño’s voice, I heard the death throes of humanity.

It’s the sound of those who can ignore everything that binds them—all morality and basic humanity—for the sake of a single belief. They can change the world and achieve greatness. Just like El Sueño.

But the cost… what is the cost? The world ends up suffering under new madmen who reshape it as they please, while everyone blames the few lunatics who broke it in the first place.

A tragedy is a tragedy, regardless of scale. If that war—no, extinction war—that killed 9.7 billion people was a tragedy, then so is creating hundreds of people who leap in front of the Strip’s machine guns “just for fun.”

It’s always unsettling how much these tyrants of this high-speed era actually give to the world, despite what they are.

For a simple example, despite his appearance, it was El Sueño who transformed gang members into devout and generous religious followers. The Order of El Sueño, established in just three weeks, is mind-boggling.

Whenever I see Order members with sincere, compassionate faces talking about using former drug cultivation equipment to grow food and improve the wasteland’s food situation, I always have that thought.

I used to despise people who saw the world in black and white, but now I almost envy them. If the world were divided into right and wrong, someone would have provided an answer to this problem… but the world isn’t like that.

This world is painfully colorful. Even with just the spectrum, it was hard to distinguish black from white, but this world was like a palette where different colors are created with just a 1-lux difference in light intensity.

I wanted to do the right thing, wanted everyone to be good… wanted pure, unblemished white, but in this painfully colorful world, the only way to achieve that was always through the color of bloodstains and gunpowder smoke.

Just then, I heard someone approaching the garage door, which had been neatly repaired and was now accessible from the inside. Brendan and I had worked so hard clearing the debris and fixing it.

Anyway, not wanting to be caught looking so serious, I took out a cigarette I’d cut in half earlier and lit it.

I carried these half-cut cigarettes to joke around with Ms. Eve or my colleagues, but the ones who entered were the Creek escapee children who had been staying here for several days.

I quickly extinguished the cigarette with my hand. It should be fine since I wasn’t really smoking it. Probably. Or perhaps irresponsibly so.

“Uncle Dean! I heard you’re making calzone for lunch today. Hmm? I don’t know what a calzone is, though!”

I thought the children of Hollowwood Creek would know how to paint the world with innocence, but the pictures they painted were just sad. Once again, I feign cheerfulness.

“Well, first… have you ever eaten pizza? A calzone is what some genius made by folding a pizza in half! Amazingly… you can hold it in your hand without getting greasy fingers or dropping toppings.”

“Hmm, no. In the Creek, only stewards or higher could eat real food! But I’ve seen people eating pizza! It looked really greasy. Super greasy.”

Every time I hear things like this, I feel a surge of desire to lead Silverlining straight into Hollowwood Creek. But… the problem was that Belvedere was watching their backs.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, it seems. Or maybe I’ve killed too many people. I’ve lived too long intoxicated by the meaningless nickname “Neonsnake” that leaves social scars.

That time has given me the ability to overturn Hollowwood Creek with Silverlining if I prepare well enough and go together… but that’s all. It doesn’t tell me how to deal with the aftermath.

The chest pain intensifies. I superimpose someone’s face—someone with a soul similar to mine—onto El Sueño’s face on the virtual screen in my vision. It seems to fit perfectly, irritatingly so.

I thought you were someone who knew “how to deal with the aftermath,” Arthur. The source of my chest pain, the wound in my heart, murmured like a mouth. Now I could see the tyrants of this high-speed era in him.

Maybe he could do something with that, I tried to force out with artificial cheerfulness, but I guess I’m still just a guy suited for neon, punk hair, delinquency, and retro cyberpunk.

My own words didn’t sound sensible at all. My head hurts. I just… wish I could live without thinking, making lunch for these kids. I pat the Creek child and say:

“Don’t worry, little friend. Right now… you’re about to taste a pizza twice as delicious as the best pizza those guys have ever eaten! Really. This Neonsnake can guarantee it.”

I wish I hadn’t undergone memory erasure. I couldn’t remember who taught me how to make calzone. I’m glad I underwent memory erasure. It means I lost someone close enough to teach me how to make calzone.

The cause of that memory erasure was… Belvedere. It was one of the things Belvedere demanded after winning the corporate war against T-Enter. The removal of mutants for efficiency, as Belvedere often put it.

Apparently, the person I loved was a mutant. I felt like Holmes with amnesia, frantically searching through case files, bestseller lists, and albums to remember Watson.

The nauseating part is that I can somewhat understand Belvedere. Mutants weren’t naturally occurring as Panacea Meditech claimed. They were weapons created during the war.

So, if you think of it as nationalists trying to erase traces of the extinction war, like the one good thing they did… the fact that I could understand it made me feel like my insides would burst with frustration.

I wanted Belvedere to be at the end of the spectrum, pitch black, but the only pitch-black thing for me was the unfathomable hole in my memory. Probably something I chose.

The absence was evidence. Not that there was no evidence. The nothingness itself was evidence of what I’d forgotten. The fact that my car seats four, and Silverlining’s two people habitually sit in the back, was evidence.

The emptiness on the always-present sunbed at Silverlining’s villa was evidence. The emptiness in the soundproofed room I habitually maintained was evidence.

When Brandon says to Sarah, who carelessly discards juice packs, “You always pile them up like someone will clean up after you,” but no one does—that was evidence.

I headed to the villa’s kitchen with the Creek child. In the kitchen, stocked with real ingredients thanks to Silverlining’s credits, I took out dough ingredients and painfully said out of habit:

“Flour? Honestly, you could make it with soy starch powder too. Meat? Cultured meat or soy protein would work fine. The most important thing is not using fake cheese. Cheese is the life of a calzone.”

The most painful part is not knowing where the real holes in my memory end and where my delusions begin. I was certain I had lost someone, but nothing beyond that was clear.

I momentarily turn away from the pain. I calm myself by watching the Creek child who stares at me making dough as if I’m performing magic. Those adoring eyes allow me to keep up the pretense for one more day.

While waiting for the calzone to bake in the oven, Tisha, a former Eve, walked in from the living room. She was chuckling at some trivial news on her phone.

“When I was in the Creek, the nobles couldn’t even tell my face apart, but now why are they looking for me like they’ve lost a finger? Ah, Neonsnake. And Adam. Have you decided on a name you want to use?”

Hollowwood Creek hated the fact that she was naturally building a new life near the cult. They poured hatred on Tisha daily, but she just laughed it off.

She was also doing a great job telling the Creek escapees the unfiltered truth about the Creek. Naturally, helping Creek escapees take names other than Adam or Eve was also her job.

The child watching the oven beside me shook his head. Names are difficult to choose. I still haven’t decided what to call the person I can’t remember in my head.

Tisha crouched lightly in front of the child and stroked his head. Her body might be in its early twenties, but the gray matter inside had lived at least a hundred years. She had enough gentleness for this.

“You’re overthinking it. Your sister upstairs asked to be called Leaf. Like some kind of hippie…”

“What’s a hippie?”

“Young kids who thought they could do whatever they wanted because people were a little too indulgent when they tried to do the right thing.”

How many years have you lived to talk like you’ve experienced hippies? I glanced briefly at Tisha but didn’t show my astonishment. Here, such things are the only things to be astonished about.

It’s a comfortable place. Sometimes I envy Arthur, thinking he always lives in places like this… but I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t envy or try to resemble these tyrants of the high-speed era.

But that guy is one of the few people in LA who makes sense. Seeing him walk a path completely opposite to mine despite making sense… it hurts my heart. It seems like something I could have done too.

No. Absolutely not. If there’s a soul that has suffered until humanity screams such a death cry, it should be healed, not admired or envied. They are always born from pain.

Still… I should talk to Arthur when he returns. Perhaps someone who has experienced similar pain might understand. We could do more than just compete to see who can be more stubborn, leaving judgment for later.

That also sounded too idealistic. I handed the calzone to the Creek child whose eyes were shining, left him with Tisha, and headed upstairs. Another Creek child was coming down from upstairs.

If the child I made calzone for was about eight years old, this one was at least fifteen. Still a child… but with a sadness in her eyes that wasn’t childlike. Creek needs to die.

Still, at least this child had something she liked. She enjoyed sitting next to Sarah and creating hacking tools more than anything. She approached me with an excited smile.

“Oh, mister! Can I try what Sarah taught me today on you? Your firewall must be strong anyway, right?”

“While you’re saying that, the calzone in the kitchen is getting cold. Is that okay, Leaf?”

“Huh? How did you know? Tisha must have told you, right? But I only said it was one of the candidates… Anyway.”

I face the moment when the child suddenly becomes serious. It was trivial. Such trivial moments, like a few sips of water quenching thirst, somewhat ease my chest pain.

“Is it real food? Silverlining has bragged about having lots of money several times.”

“One hundred percent real food. The dough is made with real flour. Go watch your brother eat pizza for the first time, punk.”

The Creek girl who heard the word “punk” that I naturally uttered made a disgusted face, shuddered slightly, and then said with a shallow laugh. She was a good kid, if a bit cheeky.

“Sometimes I think it’s you, not Tisha, who’s a hundred years old. Still, thank you. When I see Adam eating real food until he’s full and then taking a nap… it makes me feel like escaping was the right choice.”

That girl walked across the wasteland for two weeks with her brother, relying on supplies set up by brokers, to reach Los Angeles.

She spent three years preparing after seeing her brother get slapped for tasting food meant for a Creek steward. At that age. It’s hard to put into words.

So she can be a bit presumptuous. That child deserved that much respect. After the Eve went downstairs, I entered the room upstairs where Sarah had set up her equipment. I lay face down on the bed.

Sarah, who was connected to the net, slowly turned her head toward me and asked. As always, her words were brief and without consideration. It stung but didn’t hurt my feelings.

“Thought swamp. Trapped again. Talk.”

“I think I know who El Sueño is.”

Sarah asked while overlaying the net in her vision again. It seemed like she didn’t care, but she listened to everything, which made it easy to talk.

“The wasteland god? Who do you think?”

“Arthur Murphy. Our Killshot. He always… gave off a similar smell to those guys, but I thought I’d finally met one of these high-speed era tyrants who could actually talk to us, but that… that’s something only they would do.”

“Evidence?”

“Intuition.”

At that, Sarah threw a pillow at me with one hand. Her cold tone continued.

“Go back to sleep. That’s paranoia.”

“No, even though the only evidence is intuition, I’m certain. If I wasn’t certain, I wouldn’t be agonizing like this.”

“Confirmation bias. Still paranoia. Don’t act like last time.”

“Last time” refers to the Half & Half Company incident. I felt this chest pain then too, and I couldn’t tolerate that injustice and palette color leaning toward black.

It was excessively dangerous for something meant to be a warning. If Sarah hadn’t jammed all communications in the area, I would have been caught in front of the Half & Half Company building.

Perhaps that’s why I was so angry at those terrorists. The only difference was that they wore bodies or half-bodies worth hundreds of thousands or millions of credits… but what they did was no different from those things.

“I was going to talk to him when he returns anyway, Sarah. Really. Maybe… we won’t have to fight with knives to determine who’s right, just who will be more stubborn until tomorrow. Right?”

“Social scars. Will lock you up. Judgment. Don’t leave it to time and history. History. Stupid. Enough to have wars again after having several. Even if we’re unsure, we need to reach a conclusion ourselves.”

It was contradictory. Having beliefs and acting on them while refusing to judge. But this time too, I had an excuse.

“I reached my own conclusion once, and I lost an ingredient from my calzone recipe, Sarah.”

Sarah paused for about three seconds at my words. If it was someone I loved, it was someone precious to Sarah too. There were few people Sarah would act childish with.

“…Who taught you?”

“Who taught me.”

Sarah slowly reached out and stroked my head a little. Even though my hair had been replaced with optical fibers, I could still feel the stroking somewhat. Sarah’s index finger lightly tapped the back of my head.

“Head. Something to clear it. Came up. Money from the Hollowwood Creek account we’re monitoring. Received by contractors. Hitmen. Still in the wasteland. Four of them. Can you handle it?”

At those words, I put on the helmet by the bedside, decorated with a dragon pattern in brilliant neon teal, and the matching teal jacket with a snake-scale texture that glittered.

Twirling the social scars in both hands, they emitted their characteristic high-frequency vibration sound mixed with a hissing noise. I changed the color setting to match the teal of my clothes and tucked them into my waist.

“All a snake is good at is leaving social scars. Any additional instructions?”

“Wear something decent. If you go out like that. Farmers will think. You’re an extinct giant iguana. And send a collection team.”