Chapter 231
As I always feel, I’m a bit lacking in the common sense that a Duskian ought to have.
It’s only natural. It hasn’t even been a year since I fell here.
Could a foreigner who suddenly, truly suddenly immigrated to Korea perfectly adapt to life in Korea in less than a year? Beggar Thinking of it as a similar case - honestly, the comparison is funny. My situation would be much harder. You have to admit that. - I take considerable pride in my cockroach-like adaptability.
Even I quickly got used to basic things like language and culture, but I still have a lot of shortcomings.
If you ask where that void in common sense is most felt… right now, it is history.
This is the history of the 22nd century Dusk City, and of the world.
To them it’s history, but to me it’s future history.
I roughly know why the world ended up in this state, but it’s not easy to know the more trivial, localized city history beyond that.
Could a foreigner who recently immigrated to Seoul, Korea, know about the December 12 military rebellion or the Park geun-hye - gate?
No, there’s no need to even go that far. Could they know about the incident where the 37th Mayor of Seoul committed suicide?
There’s no way they would know. The history of Dusk feels similar to my situation.
How on earth am I supposed to know who the umpteenth Dusk Mayor was and what happened back then?
Even if I were interested, it’s hard to learn because the 22nd century Dusk City isn’t a friendly place for learning like 21st century Korea.
A library? It’s been a long time since paper books became an endangered artifact.
The internet? After the Autonomous AI Shock of the FAIV Virus, the net regressed and became a sea of all sorts of fragmented garbage.
It’s so bad that there’s even a separate specialized technique called Net navigating just to find what you want in there.
There might be useful information somewhere, but it’s hard to find, and obtaining the access rights to the sites leading to it is even harder.
Even someone like me had heard about the End Pandemic Incident.
I know it as the Virus Shock across the entire world that occurred quite a long time ago, about a dozen years before I fell into Dusk City.
This time, it wasn’t a virus that affected artificial intelligence, but a biological virus that affected humans.
However, its destruction was no less than the AI virus. You can tell just by the fact that they attached the word end, meaning the finish, to the front of it.
Following the 1st and 2nd Cataclysms, the End Pandemic Incident was so named because people at the time reportedly gave it this name, predicting that this virus would bring about the end of human civilization.
It was that serious an epidemic.
Older people enjoy telling stories of how they suffered back then when they drink at the bar.
Stories like getting infected by the virus and suffering as their whole body shriveled and their skin rotted, foaming at the mouth and having seizures before seeing a vision of the Lord from the other side and converting to Christian Science, or barely surviving after buying bottled water and food in advance, getting a hazmat suit, and staying quarantined inside their house for months…
I don’t know how much of it is a bluff and how much is the truth, but it was clear that the history of the End Pandemic left a dark stain on the lives of the Duskians here.
In short, you could think of it as the 22nd century version of COVID.
The only difference was that it was about twice as deadly as COVID, and its impact was about four times as massive.
['This might be the end of our era.” These are the words left by Henry Crane, who was the Dusk Mayor at the time.
Due to the nature of this rabies-type virus, where all kinds of mammals in general could act as carriers, the category of pets disappeared from Dusk City after this disease. The entire city became a battlefield to cull all mammals, regardless of whether they were dogs, cats, or rats.
Humans were no exception. If they showed even the slightest sign of infection, they were quarantined, and though it is a dark past that is hard to speak of, during the most horrific period when the pandemic reached its peak, there were even cases where patients with severe symptoms were subjected to kill on sight.]
It truly is a dark past.
I can clearly feel the atmosphere of the bar, which had been like a heated festival, and the scene beyond the hologram, sinking gloomily at McMillan’s few words.
Because it was something I had never experienced, this change was extremely unfamiliar to me.
Artist As always, I couldn’t read Dragon President’s expression because of his helmet, and Tony, pondering with a serious expression, seemed to have nothing but real estate and house prices in his head.
Sey, as usual, didn’t have much of a change in expression.
But somehow… was it just my imagination?
It wasn’t like I had spent enough time with Sey to be able to read his thoughts, but still, his profile as he stared off into the distance looked somewhat sad.
[But we overcame it. There is no other case of a city with this much population density producing so few casualties and recovering this quickly. We, Dusk City, are the only ones in the world. The End Pandemic was not our end. We survived the worst disease in history!]
D.D. McMillan, like a born politician, sensed the sunken atmosphere and lifted the atmosphere back up with a hopeful speech.
[However, surviving is not enough. There are far too many things we lost to the pandemic. Our loved ones, our cherished homes, the spaces where we played. We must take them back. Only then will we be able to say that we have truly conquered this disease.]
The decisive blow he delivered after a brief pause.
[During the End Pandemic, the city strictly divided its districts as part of its seal-off response and completely separated the most severely infected area from the other regions. That massive district became a hell that was beyond all help, and, called the Quarantine Zone, it eventually became outside the city and was forgotten by everyone.]
[Yes, what I argue we must take back, the district that we must make the city’s own again, is the Quarantine Zone. Citizens, if I become mayor, I will return the Quarantine Zone to the city. I will safely open the firmly closed Quarantine Zone for all of us. That is the third hope I have brought, the Opening Plan.]
The opening of the Quarantine Zone, which was said to have become a hell beyond help
“The open plan. Created through a collaboration between a politician and a corporation seeking to rip the scab off a healing wound… The research I was doing under them was…”
For a moment, the crazy scientist’s dying words overlapped in my ears.
I get a very ominous premonition.
This open plan: Am I the only one who feels like it’s going to be incredibly dangerous?
* * *
Naturally, I wasn’t the only one expressing concern about the open plan.
Strictly speaking, the End Pandemic wasn’t over yet.
This infamous virus boasts an extremely high fatality rate to the point where there are almost no survivors once infected, but the problem is that its mutation rate is also high, so the speed of vaccine development cannot keep up with the virus’s unpredictability.
The extreme measure of a Quarantine Zone wasn’t created for nothing. Literally, there was no solution other than locking it down so nothing could escape.
Even though over a decade has passed, that highly dangerous virus must still be swarming inside the Quarantine Zone, so no matter how much McMillan guarantees safety, there’s no way the citizens can feel relieved just hearing that. It would be even more so for those who remember the nightmare of the End Pandemic.
It was treated as such an extreme overreach that even McMillan’s hardcore supporters expressed doubts about this pledge.
It even reached the point where analyses came out saying that El Valentine, who had been maintaining a stable status quo, saw an unexpected benefit because McMillan pursued something too unconventional.
But McMillan was McMillan. There was no way the hottest politician in Dusk City, the mayoral election candidate causing a sensation, would have thrown a stone into the lake without anticipating this level of reaction.
[D.D. McMillan’s Opening Plan. The opposing public opinion was quite fierce, wasn’t it?]
[That’s right. I remember Mr. Hewitt also expressing concern.]
[Yes. Having lost someone close to me during the End Pandemic… I couldn’t help but worry rather than welcome the Opening Plan. Looking at the situation now, it seems my fears were unfounded, though! Hahaha.]
[The landscape has completely flipped with McMillan’s recent announcement. Anyway, his showmanship is truly something else for a Yangban. I remember there were even protests against it, but right when public opinion was about to explode from getting too heated, boom! Didn’t he just strike first like a pro?]
[That’s right. Who would have known that two corporations out of the commonly known Big 3 Medical Corporations, Megacorp BioShock Industry and Valheim Med International, would collaborate to develop the world’s first flawless cure for the End Pandemic Virus? And we certainly didn’t know that McMillan would quickly catch onto that and connect it to his pledge.]
[Come to think of it, managing director, could he have been drawing this big picture since then?]