Ch.52Work Record #010 – Routine Corporate Disputes (3)

“Even if they’re entertainment sector guys, the roads are blocked and they can’t conduct electronic warfare. We haven’t received any surrender intentions. We’ll annihilate them.”

I use the armored van as cover and shoulder my carbine. The enemies hiding behind the ridge were clearly visible under Vola’s machine gun barrage. Someone in the back appeared to be trying to communicate, hand pressed to the side of their face, speaking.

But there was no one left to hear them. When I saw them trying to retreat along the ridge, I turned the selector to automatic and gently squeezed the trigger. I held the weapon firmly to minimize recoil.

The gunfire echoed with a muffled sound. The mercenaries who had ordered retreat were now trying to hold their position, driving armored plates into the ground toward their van. Two folding armored walls were deployed, creating a makeshift cover.

They intended to fight back. These were mercenaries working for entertainment megacorporations that dealt with dozens of minor corporate disputes each quarter, so they had confidence in their ability to fight.

I gauged the distance by eye, a task so simple it didn’t even require the targeting assistance function of my Posthuman Type IV. I pressed my neck mic button and spoke.

“They’ve set up armored walls behind the ridge and are starting to hold position. Can we request fire support?”

“They wouldn’t have just brought smoke grenades, Offliner. K, I need exact coordinates. Let’s see if those meat bags can handle active defense.”

Over Vola’s communication channel, I could hear the heavy footsteps of her full-body prosthetic crossing the wasteland. Like the grenade incident last time, Vola’s high-powered weapons required her to get close enough to use them.

For now, I needed to buy time until Vola arrived. As I tried to lean out from behind the van to provide covering fire, my nerves reacted first, pulling my body back. Almost simultaneously, a sniper round struck where I would have been.

These weren’t amateurs. At least not the field operatives. A sniper had me in their sights. It was likely that others were also targeting this position. What had they seen? Probably my shadow.

I took two steps to the opposite side of the van, then briefly exposed the muzzle of my weapon. That was enough—almost simultaneously with the sound of gunfire, a large-caliber sniper round buried itself in the wasteland floor. I was just drawing their attention.

And I didn’t need to hold it for long. Vola’s voice came through the communication channel.

“Effective range achieved. Got the coordinates, so stop risking your life buying time, Offliner. You’re a machine made of meat, so you need to stay intact. Ha!”

With that short laugh, something that looked like a can began rotating through the air above the mercenaries allied with N Entertainment. It didn’t appear to be getting shot down.

After spinning once, twice, the flat bottom of the projectile faced the mercenaries as its can-like exterior opened. A handful of submunitions, each about the size of a disposable lighter, began pouring out. This was a weapon that couldn’t be used in urban areas.

Being portable, its power would be reduced. But even reduced, it would be enough. The submunitions rained down from the sky like acid rain on an overcast day.

The mercenaries’ desperate attempts to escape beyond their armored walls were frantic but ineffective. The widely scattered submunitions exploded, and my hearing was dampened once again.

Between the successive explosions, I heard what might have been the wasteland’s chilling wind or perhaps screams, as a large cloud of dust obscured the area around their cover.

Feeling a sense of devastation, I consciously blinked before looking up. Among the dust, ash, blood, and flesh, there appeared to be no survivors. I raised my hand to the neck mic button and spoke.

“Everyone appears to be eliminated. I can’t confirm visual beyond the armored walls, so I’ll need you to check, K.”

“Good. Better my drone gets blown up than someone losing their head. Just wait a moment! Just a moment. Oh, there’s one still alive? Looks like two of their guys shielded her with their bodies. She’s signaling surrender—want to go bring her in?”

If they had anticipated a firefight, they should have known the battlefield was the wasteland, not the city center, and that explosives might be used. I nodded slightly and said:

“I’ll go. I have zip ties, so don’t worry.”

Was their plan to detonate mines under our van, then pick off the survivors with sniper rifles when they ran out? Pondering this, I rose from behind the van and headed toward the bloodied corner of the wasteland.

I lightly grabbed the edge of the armored wall and pulled it down, then approached the woman lying among her comrades, who had been rendered almost unrecognizable after taking the cluster munition submunitions with their bodies. She was also of Latin descent.

She wasn’t sobbing or even trembling, just staring at me with bloodshot red eyes—it was enough to give me chills. I showed her my license.

“Arthur Murphy, general employee of Yakyung Mercenary Company, here to receive your surrender. Please report your mission failure. You know I can kill you if you refuse.”

She tried to raise her arm but seemed too weak, only managing to twitch. I bent down and took her hand, bringing it to the side of my face. At that moment, her other hand flashed.

There was something sharp on a finger that had its tip completely burned off. It was a folding blade. She thrust it upward toward my carotid artery, but I caught the blade with my left hand. She was far too slow.

I spoke without pressing the neck mic button. Her hand, having failed despite attacking from outside my field of vision, was trembling.

I didn’t appreciate seeing someone so readily throw away a life that others had sacrificed themselves to save. I wasn’t expecting the efficiency of three people, but this was an attempt to waste even the one remaining life.

“Putting a hole in my neck with that skewer won’t turn your failure into success. Do you want your abandoned office to be seized as foreclosed property months from now because no survivors remained here?”

“Even if—even if I make it back alive, do you th-think N Enter will leave me alone? The only way I can s-survive is if your report says I died re-resisting until the end. You won’t feel guilty since I declared surrender then attacked you. Ugh…”

It was inefficient. Horrifically so. Without tolerance for failure, success rates also decrease. This was why entertainment megacorporations killed each other every quarter and rebuilt from the ruins.

Was this action because she knew her comrades’ sacrifice would be meaningless? Abandoning employees is never efficient in any situation. I gritted my teeth, but it wasn’t her fault.

After she spat out blood and tissue, I gently reached out and gripped her carotid artery. Slowly, the life in her eyes dimmed, and after about thirteen seconds, she lost consciousness. It wouldn’t last long.

I pressed the neck mic button. I needed to report to the boss before executing her. The content was routine reporting. Just the content, perhaps.

I felt conflicted, but not because I had to kill this woman. It was because of N Entertainment’s inefficiency.

“It was a fake surrender. I subdued her when she tried to attack with a blade embedded in her hand. I’ll execute her.”

“Do so, Offliner. I can imagine the situation. It was strange from the beginning that a mercenary working with N Entertainment would try to surrender.”

With permission granted, I pulled the trigger. She had been staring so intently at first because she knew that if she passed out, she would be taken away without even having the chance to attack me and be killed.

She must have known that playing dead would be useless since she saw the drone scanning the area, so this was her only solution. At least she was unconscious when killed, so she wouldn’t have felt pain.

“Execution complete. I’ll return to the van. Do we just need to assist the clients with their work before heading back?”

“That’s correct, Offliner. Thank you for the clean handling.”

I crossed over that shallow hill. The slope wasn’t very steep, but typical of wasteland terrain, it was quite slippery, so I descended carefully to where Vola was waiting. She waved at me lightly.

“Clean job there, Offliner. That’s the problem with those entertainment types. If they fail, it’s over for them, so when things start going wrong, their mental state collapses. Such meat bags.”

“If we’re talking about meat bags, the N Entertainment people are more so. They threw away perfectly efficient mercenaries as meat shields. It’s horrifically inefficient.”

Her use of “meat bags” referred to something human—not the humanity where emotion and reason work hand in hand for maximum efficiency, but the regressive humanity that fails to achieve efficiency. That’s why she called them meat bags.

Hearing my words, she output a brief laugh. The van wasn’t far away.

“Do Belwether graduates really get angry when something is inefficient? For example… a movie theater visited by fifty thousand people daily having only two ticket kiosks.”

“The customer service team would collapse from stress just hearing that. The security team… they hate the inefficient waste of human life the most. I was trained by the security team, after all.”

Of course, there were contradictions. Shooting dead all Jaina members without alibis was somewhat inefficient. Belwether gave me noble words, but it wasn’t as noble as the words it gave.

I returned to the van and got in. The job wasn’t finished until the Farmers Corporation researchers planted their plant samples, but the atmosphere had already lightened considerably. K’s scan showed no other enemies.

After removing my helmet, face cover, and mask, I leaned back in the van’s seat. PD looked at the genetically modified plants in his hands and said quietly:

“All these people dying over this. Though I suppose it’s better than us dying…”

I slowly raised my head. It was a common reaction from employee-citizens. The instinctive aversion to death, whether justified or not, was universal.

As an Offliner who couldn’t immediately return to external guard duty, I carefully chose my words before speaking.

“What is it exactly? I mean, obviously they’re plants. One looks like it’s from the mint family, but I don’t recognize the others. To us they’re just cargo we were hired to transport, but to a researcher from Farmers Corporation’s Wasteland Restoration Institute, they must be something more.”

I had anticipated this to some extent. These were tools for extracting minimal efficiency from the wasteland, where efficiency had plummeted to zero and beyond. They were instruments.

But his answer was somewhat different. PD scratched the back of his head awkwardly before speaking.

“Ah, um. Do you know what they teach kids in elementary schools these days? I have a nephew, so I know—they teach that natural soil is an unsuitable environment for plant growth. Funny, isn’t it? We ruined the land, and now hydroponics is mainstream. What’s even funnier is that in a few more generations, that might seem normal.”

That war had ended, but its aftermath remained thick, and what was broken did not easily return. And with his next words, he provided me with a small excuse for my killing.

It was merely an excuse—trivial, irrelevant, offering only a slight mental escape—but it wasn’t bad.

“Before that happens, our Farmers Corporation will heal this dying land. Humans always try to fix things after they’ve broken them, but the speed of repair is gradually catching up to the speed of destruction. It might even overtake it someday. So this is… yes, gasoline. Fuel for the engine that will help us move faster. We’ll burn this to move forward faster.”

It was amusingly opposite. The N Entertainment mercenary who couldn’t tolerate a single failure, who wanted me to kill her and held a knife to my throat, versus the Farmers researcher who would gladly offer his life’s work as fertilizer.

After saying all this, he belatedly scratched his head and added some idle words.

“Ah, um. I suppose it’s a bit strange for someone from the Wasteland Restoration Institute to use gasoline as an example. Anyway, that’s what it is.”

Then it was certainly worth guarding with a gun. It aligned with Belwether’s creed of moving faster toward a better future than the present. I was somewhat satisfied.

“If you had just called it a job, I might have felt less motivated. I’m glad you didn’t.”

He looked pleased at my words. The van drove a bit further to reach the location for planting the first sample. They first broke the corroded, congealed, hardened ground with pickaxes, exposed the soil inside, and planted.

PD kept surveying the surroundings. He seemed to be reviewing how everything—the murderous sunlight, the smog that would return tomorrow, and the acid rain—was worst for plant growth.

But he didn’t set up even a simple barrier. These had already been simulated. They were already prepared for, and surviving as prepared was not his job but the samples’ job.

As we moved from site to site, the samples decreased one by one, and everyone except me in my Posthuman Type IV was sweating, but that wasn’t particularly important.

After planting the last sample, expecting resilience from what appeared so fragile, we returned to Farmers Corporation headquarters.

Perhaps because of my question in the van, PD hesitated a bit before speaking, only proceeding after a gentle push from his assistant, who had been introduced as a college intern.

“Um. Would you like to come in for brunch before you go? The company handles the financial compensation for the job, but I’d like to show my appreciation too. At Farmers, this is all we have to offer.”

Director Yoon checked the time and personnel. This job had involved a whale—a megacorporation. It was also something of an emergency request, so there was no need to return to work immediately.

“Sounds good. It’s still 11 AM. And eating non-synthetic food at Farmers is already generous and appreciated enough as personal compensation.”

Director Yoon contacted Farmers directly and even managed to borrow shower facilities. After washing off the dusty wasteland wind, I headed to the Farmers employee cafeteria wearing Yakyung’s employee uniform for the first time.

The ceiling was made of transparent glass with film inserts, allowing just the right amount of sunlight to pour in. There was no trace of the terrible fishy smell unique to synthetic food—everything was authentic without a single imitation.

PD showed us this scenery with a confident expression. He was showing off the company’s greatest pride.

“Our Farmers Corporation ensures that at least our employees can fully enjoy this. You can see why our company motto is ‘Too late to pray, too early to give up.'”

That morning was… full of sensory pleasure. Hunger, which takes precedence even over sexual desire. It was the greatest gift for someone who had grown accustomed to the taste of synthetic food and could even distinguish between artificial flavors.