Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume14 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 5===

The situation had grown troublesome.

“Hyah, I thought it was supposed to hold off until nightfall.”

In her skintight special suit, the Princess splashed through the puddles as she fled below the eaves of the normal barracks. The dark crunchy chocolate of volcanic rock provided poor drainage, so puddles quickly formed when it rained and those soon grew to small ponds or lakes.

What had happened to the scorching sun from earlier in the day?

The sky was covered by thick clouds.

“I guess they get these sudden downpours everywhere in the world,” said Quenser with a sigh.

“I wonder if it has anything to do with the nitrogen and whatnot the Nitrogen Mirage was spreading around. You know, like a meteorological weapon that fires a missile into the clouds to make it rain.”

“I just hope it doesn’t turn into photochemical smog.”

They had been planning to lie on the beach chairs and stare at a mobile device. The waterproofed screen showed them what was happening in the interrogation room.

The Information Alliance’s Nitrogen Mirage had apparently withdrawn once the Capitalist Corporations submarine had arrived at New Caribbean Island. It was about evenly matched with the Princess, but some line must have been crossed and they felt the need to rework their whole strategy.

So.

They could not deny that the Information Alliance’s next strategy might be to blow away the entire bluefin tuna breeding base that Frolaytia had borrowed after begging her “onii-chan”.

“Phew…”

The Princess quietly sighed below the eaves with her golden hair wet with rain. Her special suit revealed every contour of her body, so the boy’s eyes followed the droplets flowing down her to burn every last curve into his brain.

Not even the strong downpour had cooled the area. It only increased the humidity, like pouring water on the heated stone in a sauna.

“This footage is really grainy.”

“According to the electronic simulation division, the wiring is messed up. Frolaytia had the military parts attached onto the existing tuna base, so they were saying something about us exceeding the capacity on the grounding line that runs from the facility and into the ground.”

“?”

“They called it electrolytic corrosion. Send too much electricity into the ground and the earth and moisture around the underground cable will work in place of an electrolytic solution. You know what electrolysis is, right?”

“The process that separates water into oxygen and hydrogen?”

“Yes, that. The same process can apparently break down the cable or steel frames. This weird signal noise must be from corrosion to a fiber optic cable somewhere.”

Quenser felt like a guy helping out the young woman next door hook up her TV and DVR, but he had to ask.

He pointed at the mobile device’s screen as he did so.

“It doesn’t really matter, but why are you so interested in this?”

“Well, because the old maintenance lady said she was helping with the interrogation.”

Quenser just about asked why, but he found he could make a pretty good guess.

“Does she think the old woman will open up more to someone from her own generation?”

“We will of course have another witness there.”

Meanwhile, the interrogation in question was beginning.

It would all be recorded and every last word and facial expression would be thoroughly analyzed, but Quenser and the Princess leaned forward to experience it live.

The camera must have been near the ceiling because the footage looked down on the two old women from a somewhat diagonal angle. The Legitimacy Kingdom and former Information Alliance women faced each other across a table bolted to the floor.

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“It would seem neither one of us survived this long with a clean conscience.”

“Very true. I am jealous of your position since you don’t have to explain what it is you have done.”

“As someone who has done this myself, let me tell you that defection is not as optimistic a choice as you think it is.”

“There are times when you have to choose the lesser of two evils. Surely you understand that as someone who lived through that age.”

With only about a decade and a half of life under their belt, Quenser and the Princess could not imagine how much was hidden behind each of those words.

“The Martini Series is now viewed as living hardware to fill the holes in the Information Alliance’s administrative system. The idea is to make up for the deficiencies in the giant network by using human brains for the parts that computers cannot yet process. …Well, you could say that relationship between AI and humans is an expanded form of the Object-Elite arrangement that the Information Alliance has developed a few experimental examples of.”

“Based on that, it would seem the project was a success. As someone surrounded by the military in her research, you would have had all the money you could have wanted.”

“True enough. I was ''too'' successful.” Katarina gave a weary smile and elaborated as if gently nudging a giant metal ball from the top of a slope. “Personally, I only ever wanted just one member of the Martini Series. All that talk of living hardware to fill the holes in the machine-ruled administrative system was no more than a convenient way of gaining the research funding I needed. And even after they more or less threw cash my way, I never did manage to create a perfect Martini.”

“Was there a specific individual they were modeled after?”

“Cassandra Martini. She was my mother. She lived in that insane age before the four world powers formed, when Objects spent all their time wiping out land, sea, and air forces to prove the title of strongest belonged to them. In that truly lawless age of upheaval, she passed away protecting her young child to the very, very end. She is my personal hero and she is the purest, the original, and the truly perfect Martini.”

“…”

A short silence followed.

A parent protecting her child sounded like a simple thing, but since they had not lived in that time, Quenser and the Princess could not even imagine how difficult that must have been. And it was because that woman succeeded that Katarina Martini was here now.

“So you were driven by a juvenile drive toward womb regression.”

“Yes, the child attempts to create her mother and return to her protective care. The Martini Series was an experiment to take the MRI cross sections of the original, intentionally create the same ‘deviations’ in someone else’s brain, and give them the same balance as that genius. But from the very beginning, my research violated the rules of this world. I would rather not come off sounding like the Faith Organization, but perhaps you could say it was god’s will. As each roll of the dice continued to not come up in my favor, I found I had countless children who had each inherited just one cross section of my mother’s brain.”

The old maintenance lady let out a soft breath after listening this far.

And she did not hesitate to speak.

“So why do you want to defect? If you have an issue with your research environment and were hoping to get a fresh start elsewhere, the Legitimacy Kingdom’s answer is no. We aren’t going to hand you living children for your juvenile game of dress up.”

“Even though you continue to mass-produce Pilot Elites?”

“That might be a necessary evil in this godforsaken world. But what you’re doing is clearly more focused on your own little games.”

“The self-proclaimed sensible side in the Information Alliance said the same thing at first. But when faced with geniuses who were completely off the charts, that alleged sense of theirs was clouded by greed.”

That demon scoffed.

Almost like she had held this same conversation many, many times before.

“…But that is not the crux of the issue. It is true I am displeased with the Martini Series’s failure, but I do not wish to do any of that ever again.”

“What?”

“The Martini Series carries a severe problem, so I am seeking the assistance of a powerful force that can fight them and eliminate them from the Information Alliance’s system.”

“You made these children, but now you’ve deemed them failures and plan to kill them yourself!? Using war and assassinations!?”

“Just hear me out.”

With that, Katarina placed a hand on her own aged chest.

No, that was not quite accurate.

It was unclear when she had picked it up, but she held a Legitimacy Kingdom mobile device just like the one Quenser and the Princess were watching the footage on.

When it emitted a beeping sound, the people in the interrogation room also noticed something was wrong.

But Katarina tossed it onto the table before they could do anything.

“I kept the truly sensitive data embedded in my heart. I placed the files in my pacemaker’s unused memory and set it up for contactless extraction, just like the automatic ticket gates at a train station.”

“…What…is this?”

“The core of the Martini Series’s problem. This is a history of the life my mother, Cassandra Martini, lived under a second handle name.”

The old maintenance woman was speechless.

The footage did not let Quenser and the Princess see what she was reading.

But they could tell it was something shocking.

“My mother was a rational killer. …Although, in that age of insufficient resources, it may have been necessary if she was to support a young child like me.”

Katarina was blunt as she discussed the woman she had called her personal hero.

“That was a lawless age of upheaval. That file provides details on 39 incidents or uprisings that can no longer be investigated. These records must have been like a trophy to her. Succeed or fail, she would write out the series of events and add a flowchart leading to the next incident. Unsatisfied with a single coincidental success, my mother used this to refine her skills. Yes, her skills as a professional who systematically plundered from highly secure facilities, both military and civilian.”

“So…so this is what you meant?”

“I only learned of this truth after I began the genius girl project in search of my mother. And as a result, I cannot even predict how much of my mother’s violence any one of them inherited. The closer to perfection they came, the more willing they will be to kill people as long as it is ‘rational’. In the worst case, every last one of them may have reached that threshold.”

“Didn’t you say the Martini Series numbers in the thousands and has worked its way deep into the Information Alliance administration and military!? If the original’s violence has been reproduced in them, they won’t just rely on knives or guns. What if they take the great influence they have been given and begin ‘prowling around’ using it as a weapon!?”

“You should assume the state and military are entirely controlled by the kind of people who would readily kill the elderly or the very young to have fewer mouths to feed during a famine. We might see the onset of an age of joyous malice that makes the oppression and slaughter of the infamous witch hunts pale in comparison. In fact, it may already be starting simultaneously across Information Alliance-controlled territory.”

Quenser and the Princes exchanged a glance.

In this case, they could not expect the Information Alliance to purify itself. After all, the budding violence would come from the genius girls who had been positioned to fill the holes in the supercomputer-controlled administration and military. They had been placed in control of a worldwide vulnerability from the beginning, so they could bring the normal system crashing down just by switching off their own duties.

And Katarina would not have chosen to defect without good reason.

She had to have worked to fix the problem from within the Information Alliance. She had only shifted focus to an external attack because those efforts had produced no meaningful results.

Was that because no one around her could sense the danger?

Or had some member of the Martini Series already gone around and made sure nothing could be done?

“This age is supported by the constant conflict between the four world powers. It sounds strange, but that balance will fall apart if one of our enemies truly collapses.”

“…”

“So if the Information Alliance crumbles from within, the table supported by those four legs will fall over. Once that happens, the entire clean war concept will vanish like so much mist.”

For some reason, those words brought Quenser’s childhood friend Monica to his mind. She had been a haughty and sharp-tongued noble girl until her family had collapsed one day. Then she had been pursued by the people of their town and forced to tremble with her family in a commoner family’s small food pantry. The shift to a new age was not always a positive change. No matter what choices someone made, a great power outside their control could decide whether they would have fortune or misfortune. That was a nightmarish idea for a commoner like Quenser who was constantly oppressed and forced to obey the decisions made for him.

And now chaos on that same level – no, on an even greater level – would spread around the entire world.

“We might see a return of that lawless age of upheaval my mother secretly thrived in. I could easily see it happening if they decide to end this fattened age of temporary peace and instead live a life ruled by rationality and efficiency.”