Ch.338The Supporting Character’s Story – Holy Warriors of the Free Market, Extreme Pareto Principalists, Walking Test Sites for New Weapons (1)

The free market is sacred. But it is fragile. There is no invisible hand. That is why market guardians exist.

The deployment preparations for market guardians were conducted almost like religious ceremonies. Instead of altar servers dressing the priest in vestments, there were only the finest maintainers.

They were all people who once dreamed of becoming market guardians. But they were not enough.

Mental or personality defects… bodies unsuitable for enhancement and modification… or excessive emotionality. The reasons varied. Thousands applied to become Market Keepers with each cohort, but only a handful succeeded.

The market guardians did not call the rest failures. They understood what market guardians fought for, why, and how. Though insufficient as guardians, they were not lacking as mechanics.

Thus, they were called maintainers. Dozens or more maintainers were mobilized for each guardian. If the guardians were the first and last barrier of the free market, the maintainers were the masons.

Today was no different. A market guardian named Louisa Lindemann entered the ceremonial chamber. With nothing covering her body, she walked in with only her form, the traces of modifications neatly concealed.

Louisa whispered slowly. The voice of the market guardian, stripped of emotion, didn’t even echo as it seemed to burrow into the walls of the ceremonial chamber.

“The vessel is emptied to be filled.”

The maintainers recited the corresponding verse to her whisper. Originally, it would have been a more weighty passage.

But in a situation where those who maintained this ‘ritual’ with such phrases and ceremonial words had been washed away, replaced by the current emotionless market guardians, the words carried no weight.

“Within the emptiness lies the freedom the market must possess, and the flow that goods must maintain.”

The maintainers paid no attention to the guardian’s nakedness. From this moment, she was no longer human. While she could be a person when not working as a Market Keeper, now she was merely a vessel.

She was a vessel because she carried the will of the market, its self-correcting function, and resistance against market failure, without possessing a will of her own.

Hands approached the guardian carrying the inner lining of the enhancement suit. The fragmented inner lining was fitted to the guardian’s body, connected together, completing the preparation for her to don the enhancement suit.

The frame of the enhancement suit was first placed on her body, and robotic arms layered the component parts of the enhancement suit over it. The components were directly assembled by the maintainers’ hands, with only metallic resonances filling the ceremonial chamber.

The Market Keeper’s enhancement suit—splendid yet modest, black with gold trim—moved without the slightest noise. It blended seamlessly with the Market Keeper’s emotionless face.

Louisa’s hands performed the routine check of the enhancement suit. Her nervous system, replaced with something similar to fiber optic bundles, demonstrated extreme reaction speed, and the enhancement suit could barely keep up with her body.

A maintainer completed a verification procedure different from the ceremonial rituals thus far. This was both ceremonial and not. Starting up the Market Keeper was the primary purpose.

“Neural response time normal. Enhancement suit response time also normal. Will equip weapons.”

Only then did the arming begin. A high-frequency blade protruding from the side of the forearm was installed. After equipping the enhancement suit rifle, two maintainers approached her carrying an enhancement suit revolver.

The revolver gleamed on a velvet cushion like a sacred object, in the Market Keeper’s symbolic colors that embodied both modesty and splendor. Louisa’s hand picked up the revolver and opened the cylinder.

While she inspected the revolver, maintainers checking the vibration levels of the cookie cutter rounds whispered again. This time too, it was verification rather than ceremony.

“Kappa-Psi-One-Three project prototype functioning normally. No self-collapse occurring, and vibration and resonance levels are within safe parameters. You may load.”

Louisa loaded the cookie cutter rounds—already gently vibrating before being fired—one by one into the cylinder, then holstered the revolver at her waist.

The remaining cookie cutter rounds, held in speed loaders, seemed to sing with vibrations only audible to the extremely enhanced hearing of a Market Keeper, as if begging to be fired.

The Market Keeper is the armed force of corporate justice. Not the force of a single corporation, but an entity born to overwhelm those corporate forces.

Only Bellwether’s Hammers, Fitts & Morrison’s Battle Elephants, and market guardians possessed cookie cutter rounds for discretionary firing. This weapon was authority itself.

Again, Louisa leisurely whispered the phrase. This seemingly unnecessary procedure was essentially the startup command for a market guardian.

“The guardian’s duty is not to sympathize, nor to show mercy, nor to hate, nor to express hatred.”

After the maintainers made final adjustments to the weapons, they continued the phrase:

“But only to keep the market free, and to allow goods to flow.”

For Louisa, who had already forgotten what emotions were, all these words merely dissipated emptily, but the procedure continued.

With weapons equipped and enhancement suit donned, robotic arms created temporary supports on either side of her, and a maintainer who lightly stepped onto them placed the helmet on Louisa.

As the helmet locked, the internal gas was completely evacuated, and the enhancement suit sealed. The air inside the suit was replenished, and Louisa took an experimental breath. The preparations were complete.

Only then did the doors of the ceremonial chamber reopen, and Louisa walked out in the perfect form of a market guardian. The helipad at Market Keepers headquarters was always a place where punctuality mattered.

The destination was Chicago. A city where nearly 20% of the Bellwether headquarters building had been destroyed in a terrorist attack three days ago. The federal government was seizing the opportunity to fully reclaim ownership of the city.

Such actions cause negative externalities. This opportunistic attempt by the federal government to seize control would shift the burden not to their opponent, Bellwether, but to Chicago’s employee-citizens. A negative externality.

Externalities must be eliminated. If Coase’s method doesn’t work, the market guardians’ method will be employed. Market Keepers had already warned the federal government three days ago. Now it was time to act.

This time, the Reclamation Bureau would support the Market Keepers. It seemed the Reclamation Bureau was also displeased with those attempting to seize a city that was already half theirs.

Federal government inefficiency, Louisa calculated. Multiple organizations handling the same tasks, and not stopping there but creating the Reclamation Bureau, resulting in tangled command structures.

The market guardian does not interfere with this inefficiency. If it’s an individual entity’s problem rather than the market’s, there’s no need for market guardians to intervene. Instead, they exploit it, as now.

A silent helicopter, whose propeller rotation couldn’t even be heard, led the market guardian to Chicago, and she lightly jumped from the helicopter to save even the landing time.

As the sound of the heavy enhancement suit striking the helipad ended, before her stood a member of Bellwether’s corporate force. An agent she had known since her Los Angeles assignment.

Initially a mere mercenary, he soon gained independent contract rights, became a Bellwether Hammer, and now she heard he was an external audit agent. An unusual promotion speed, but not Louisa’s concern.

He nodded slightly before speaking. His enhancement suit was the same as those worn by Bellwether’s Hammers, so there would be no performance issues. However, something grated on Louisa’s nerves.

“You’re right on time. I remember the meeting point with the Reclamation Bureau agent was The Loop. Normally we wouldn’t suggest meeting at Food Truck Street, but this situation is what it is. Right?”

The Loop was Chicago’s downtown. It was also the most natural-looking place to meet someone, and people should always be hidden in crowds.

But Louisa could sense displeasure in his voice. Though not amateur enough for emotional fluctuations to affect her work, she decided to verify.

“I detect negative emotional responses in your voice. Such responses can hinder efficient decision-making during operations. If it’s work-related, I believe substituting another operative would be more efficient.”

He sighed deeply and waved his hand. He showed no signs of being flustered. He wasn’t denying that he felt displeasure. Objective self-assessment minimizes inefficiencies caused by emotional factors.

“It has nothing to do with the job, so don’t worry. My wife and kids were supposed to go to N-Enter’s new Prime Shard in Anaheim, but of all times, this happened, so I’m the only one stuck here.”

In Anaheim were the remains of an amusement park once operated by a pre-war entertainment company whose lineage was severed with that war. N-Enter had willingly acquired those bones and grave to turn them into a Prime Shard.

Displeasure at being here when he should be enjoying a family vacation. Considering the agent’s career, the likelihood of such a trivial matter affecting his work was minimal. Louisa calculated.

“Understood. I will depart for The Loop. We will conduct the mission briefing while moving.”

She lightly jumped from the helipad, and the Bellwether external audit agent followed. They boarded a van with cheap camouflage. And they would soon be attacked.

The Reclamation Bureau agent who was supposed to meet with Louisa had quite deliberately leaked the fact of their meeting to those currently disguised as Bellwether or terrorist remnants carrying out their mission.

They were people who shouldn’t have been working domestically in the first place, but in a world mixed into a muddy mess of megacorporations and state remnants after that war, foreign intelligence had become almost meaningless.

They could have slowly become obsolete, but they started their dirty operations even on domestic soil, claiming to stand at the forefront of anti-megacorporation operations.

The Reclamation Bureau agent, a thorough nationalist, disliked this fact. He believed that letting those who caused the Madeleine’s Lot Massacre interfere in domestic issues again would only weaken moral justification.

But this case would involve modified humans created by the federal government breaking its own principles, a problem beyond a single Reclamation Bureau agent’s handling capacity. So he contacted the Market Keepers.

This was the truth, and simultaneously a scenario. The scenario described the situation up to the point where this van would reach Food Truck Street and the agent would meet with the Market Keeper, but the truth’s volume was somewhat shorter.

The truth had prepared for fifteen minutes before that scene. The truth had prepared for an ambush where vans would push in from both sides on this typically congested road. That was sufficient.

The Reclamation Bureau agent, the market guardian in the van, the Metzgerhund in radio silence, and perhaps the agents planning to ambush them all knew that a Market Keeper could rarely be defeated in direct confrontation.

That’s why the Reclamation Bureau agent set the stage for the Market Keeper to engage in direct combat, while the federal agents chose ambush. Everyone was dancing different dances to the same rhythm.

Louisa’s voice echoed in the communication channel between the two enhancement suits in the van. It was a simple briefing. The actual operation would be brute-forced anyway, so this was expected.

“There are two anticipated ambush points. This van is heading to the public parking lot behind Food Truck Street in The Loop, so the parking lot entrance, which naturally creates a bottleneck, is the first.”

While ordinary computational assistance devices merely aided thinking or connected people’s minds to the net, the Market Keeper’s computational assistance device was far more integrated and, in some ways, more dominant.

Their brains were indistinguishable from their computational assistance devices. Even as she gave this mechanical briefing to Metzgerhund, her mind contained no stray thoughts, only information relevant to the task.

Market Keepers do not think. Market Keepers calculate. Judgment was not made by individual guardians. The guardian was merely a tool for conveying decisions, never having been human.

“And the second point is the roundabout we’re approaching soon. If signs of ambush appear, we’ll circle it more than twice, so be prepared.”

Metzgerhund personally preferred to be ambushed at the former location. If a Bellwether force and a market guardian started fighting at the roundabout, collateral damage would occur.

In contrast, the market guardian preferred the roundabout, which was open and allowed both Bellwether’s Hammers and the market guardian to exert their full force without restraint.

Market guardians do not consider collateral damage. Not until that collateral damage grows too large and creates externalities.

That’s why Metzgerhund had looked up to Market Keepers, considering their cause as something transcendently inhuman, but after facing them directly, he no longer regarded them so highly.

They too are human. They’re just people who know human weakness so well that they believe cutting away all that weakness will transform them into some phenomenal, post-human law.

The problem was, that wasn’t entirely wrong. Even as Metzgerhund, now one of Bellwether’s Hammers—the pinnacle of corporate forces—a one-on-one with a Market Keeper remained a fifty-fifty proposition.

Even now, after his body had been replaced once more with a V-type prototype, stabilized by studying Adrian’s case, with added regenerative abilities.

Truly an age where belief alone can change the world. Metzgerhund, sitting comfortably in the van seat, transmitted part of the surveillance system footage being sent to his mind to Louisa.

The footage showed vehicles resembling Bellwether Mobile Division patrol cars but unregistered. They were waiting at the corners of the roundabout, not at the parking lot entrance Metzgerhund had anticipated.

It was indeed where the real Bellwether Mobile Division would wait, but for a chairman’s direct agent who could check registration numbers regardless of authorization, seeing through the disguise was trivially simple.

Metzgerhund sent a standby request to the real Bellwether Mobile Division. He didn’t explain the situation to Louisa. Market Keepers were people accustomed to such situations.

Instead, Metzgerhund spoke in a good-natured voice while drawing a small misdeed from his waist. While speaking to the Market Keeper, he simultaneously sent a support request to the Chicago branch’s management AI.

It wasn’t a request for combat support. It was for post-combat processing after the Market Keeper, who didn’t care about collateral damage, annihilated these externality-causing entities.

“Looks like they’ll ambush us as soon as the car enters, so we don’t need to circle twice. Let’s go.”

‘Amaryllis. Have Rapid Support, Medical, and Cleaning Departments on standby. Cleaning can be called slowly, but have Medical escorted by Rapid Support and waiting nearby.’

The market guardian, in contrast, picked up the revolver loaded with cookie cutter rounds, as if eager to fire.

The Market Keeper is the embodied wrath of the market. A ridiculous notion. Market Keepers are just people who believe they can gain strength through the exclusion of humanity. They were too exceptional to be limited by such words.

Therefore, the Market Keeper was merely a Market Keeper. All the surrounding tension, anxiety, preparation, regret—everything crumbled upon touching the Market Keeper’s skin, and the guardian recited that famous maxim again.

“Ambush point confirmed. Will correct market failure.”