Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 12===

“Wait just a moment.”

A slender young man licked his lips in a part of the maintenance base zone where the air conditioning was on full blast year-round.

“I finally got permission to use the Cluster Brain. I won’t let them get in our way any longer. I’ll hack into the clone satellite system intruding on our military satellite and I’ll burn it up in the atmosphere.”

Even in her thick uniform, Frolaytia crossed her arms to stay warm.

She was irritated, but she had learned through experience that forcing this sort through physical training only made their performance worse. Letting them do what they wanted was the most effective method, even if she hated it.

“So do we have the satellite back?”

“The Cluster Brain is a special high-speed server built for the Legitimacy Kingdom’s cyber operations. Well, to give away the secret, it’s a 45.5 kilobyte piece of spyware slipped into the base OS for the smartphones and tablets selling like hotcakes back in the safe countries. The excess processing power of over seven hundred billion devices is parallelized and used for our analysis work. It’s a pain in the ass to get permission to use it since it would be really bad if this was discovered, but now that I have that permission…”

“Do we have the satellite back or not?”

“I can break through any defenses with brute force!! See!?”

Tons of windows started appearing on the LCD screen, but Frolaytia did not understand what any of the alphanumeric strings meant.

The young man seemed to think his division would be reduced if their results were not recognized, so his explanation was much more eloquent than necessary.

“This is the inside of the clone satellite’s brain. I can shut it down, send it plunging into the atmosphere, or trace who’s been sending it commands. Now, where should I start? Maybe I should visit the sites the bastard visits the most. Who knows, we might learn how to raise a cat.”

“Recovering our surveillance network comes first. I don’t care if they notice. Just stop the interference with our signals.”

“Roger that, roger tha-…”

The young man trailed off and his smile froze over.

New windows filled the screen and even Frolaytia could tell that venomously red text was bad news.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me… This is bad.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, hell. I can’t pin it down… I can’t seem to pin it down, but that clone satellite must have had a virus in it! This is what they were after this whole time. They infected the cracking system and entered the Legitimacy Kingdom’s military network from there!! Shit. Who would go this far!?”

“Don’t make me say it again! What happened!?”

When she shouted at him from close range, the young man finally gave up and confessed.

“Contact HQ right away and have them change the Object emergency shutdown codes.”

“What?”

“They’ve stolen all of them!! If we don’t hurry, they’ll shut down Baby Magnum’s reactor!!”



A quiet electronic tone beeped.

The woman known as Yog-Sothoth tried to pull a fancy little device from her skiwear’s coat pocket, found she could not with the thick glove on her hand, and removed the glove before trying again.

Once she looked at the screen, she found she finally had some results.

“When you challenge the All-Knowing and recklessly peer into the abyss, you will always meet your doom upon facing the cruel truth. …That is the standard when coming into contact with the Outer Gods.”

Thanks to the line between the clone satellite, the cracking server system, and the military network, more and more Legitimacy Kingdom military secrets were pouring into Yog-Sothoth’s personal online storage.

When she spotted the emergency shutdown code for the First Generation sent here, her eyes narrowed a little.

(If I had gotten this earlier, I could have ended this without any bloodshed.)

The best-case scenario had been obtaining this information via the clone satellite back when the Legitimacy Kingdom was under attack by the tanks and armored trucks submerged in the swamp.

Unfortunately, the soldiers had cleverly broken through without waiting for the satellite to recovery.

When their attempt to scare the enemy had failed, Newsmaker and his men had switched to their “original plan” of psychological warfare using the manned missiles.

Where had she gone wrong?

What could she have done differently to reach that best-case scenario?

“No.”

At that point, Yog-Sothoth shook her head.

(I can’t let that distract me right now. I need to think about what I can still do instead of just regretting the past.)

She had the emergency shutdown code now.

A great number of Flying Fish manned missile hovercraft were charging toward the Legitimacy Kingdom maintenance base zone.

The enemy’s lifeline had to be the Object’s laser weapons.

So if the Object were shutdown, they would sink into a sea of explosions. That would establish the methodology of the Sixth Branch that attacked people’s psyches and it would destroy the current Object-reliant world. The world powers would begin using similar methods and the age would abandon the wars fought to live and begin wars fought to die.

That result had not been stopped.

In that case, what could Yog-Sothoth do?

Would she silence the impregnable wall of the Object so their determined deaths would not be in vain?

“…”

She looked down at the device’s LCD screen.

And with a single finger, she decided the course of history.