Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume6 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 2===

With the exception of the guards, the central island was supposedly populated solely by around 30 genius girls.

From the outside, it looked like a giant concrete military building, but it supposedly had very little sense of cohabitation. This was due to the residents being perverts. If they possessed personalities that allowed them to function within the normal gears of society, they would supposedly never have been sent to the “nursery”. For that reason, the genius girls supposedly primarily lived in personal rooms with only a few areas such as the labs with electron microscopes and other equipment shared between them. The various members would supposedly only meet each other while passing each other in the long passageways.

The repeated use of “supposedly” came from the fact that all this information came from Genelia who had never actually seen the inside of the Center. Quenser had no idea what connections she had used to get the information, but it was all things she had heard secondhand.

“Tch.”

When Quenser arrived in front of the thick door that looked strong enough to withstand an all-out war, the members of the Night Edge Platoon with black masks over their faces blatantly clicked their tongues.

“No guns, no blades, no explosives, no drugs, no germs, and nothing else either. I’d like to break your nose and that tiny thing in your pants for good measure, but I doubt you’ll get a chance to use it.”

“How about you remove that hairy hand and its hairy fingers from my neck? What the hell? Are you a mutant created after being exposed to some kind of space power or something? Isn’t that dirty sweat of yours the most dangerous thing that someone could bring in here?”

Quenser’s cocky comment earned him a punch to the cheek.

“Don’t try to act so tough, tax thief. Get inside and cause some trouble. Then I don’t have to hold back and I can just shoot you.”

Quenser raised his middle finger and entered the building.

Unlike a department store or a shopping mall, there was no guide map posted. The long passageways with rooms lining either side reminded him of a library’s bookshelves or a school’s shoe lockers.

The shorthair carpet and faint indirect lighting were just like a hotel’s. Without a guide map, Quenser had no way of knowing what was a private room and what was a laboratory. The system made it clear that was something only those living there needed to know.

“…There’s stuff piled up everywhere.”

The passageways were much too cluttered to be those of a high-class hotel. Or perhaps a hotel would look like this during cleaning time when the carts and cleaning supplies were brought out.

Some places simply had trash piled up, but some places had things like a dartboard hanging down from the ceiling by a string. Quenser even spotted some small dragonfly and rhinoceros beetle shaped robots clinging to the wall. It looked like a case where those in charge of cleaning up could not tell what was needed and what was not and so were too afraid to carelessly clean up any of it.

“Quenser. Quenser Barbotage.”

A female voice came his way from somewhere along the “library shelf”. Quenser turned toward the voice and saw a woman in her twenties stepping out into the passageway from an open door.

She had an odd appearance.

She wore a lab coat long enough to reach her ankles and a brightly-colored bikini. Her hair was long, brown, and simply left spread out without tying it in any way. Quenser was pretty sure lab coats were meant to show stains and chemicals easily and to protect one’s body, but he could not imagine what purpose there was behind her outfit’s coordination. It reminded him of the legendary bikini armor.

[[Image:HO_v06_06.jpg|thumb]]

Quenser shouted out, “I thought this was a collection of genius ‘girls’!!”

“Huh? That’s the first thing you latch onto? …Um, c’mon now. Don’t cry, don’t cry. Look: tits.”

“I’m fine with that part!! Now, I know we could never get married or be lovers, but let’s at least fuck!!”

“Hah hah hah. I see your morals have been nicely thrown out of order. There, there.”

With a generous smile, the woman accurately pulled a stun gun out of an inner pocket of her lab coat and threatened Quenser with it. That finally brought him back to his senses.

“Who are you?”

“Claire. I’m the Object designer Claire Whist. I heard you aspire to be one too.”

“…”

“Well, I guess it won’t feel real so suddenly. Unlike the pilot Elites, the designer’s identities are kept a secret. That makes it easier to prevent terrorist attacks on us.”

Quenser was unsure what to say, but Claire used her thumb to point toward the open door.

“Come with me. I called you here because I have something to discuss with you. I think it will be a beneficial discussion for you.”

The room was about 10 meters square.

It did not have much in it. It had a bed and a desk. Something like a complexly folded plastic board sat in one corner of the room. It resembled a giant controller for a robot game modeled after a cockpit. There were also a few shelves. The shelves were lined with several Object miniatures.

“They don’t move,” said Claire. “But their construction is almost identical to the real ones. It’s just that the reactors don’t function at that size. If you pursue perfection too far, a fundamental part tends to fail.”

“You make them here?”

“Why do you ask?”

“But…this is where you work? I thought it would be filled with all sorts of strange tools.”

“The people researching the materials would have a bunch of those. These days, all the action is in strengthening the materials for room-temperature superconductors. They’re busy mixing alloys and boiling wine.” Claire Whist opened a small refrigerator and pulled out a small juice box. “Designers can get by with a single computer. That’s why we’re wanted for our brains. And that laptop is connected to a supercomputer in another room, so I can handle everything quite easily.”

However, she had two laptops sitting on her desk.

When Quenser pointed that out, Claire smiled and said, “The other one is for my hobbies. How else would I get this swimsuit? The military’s fashion sense is just hopeless. …But I use it for stock and futures trading more than I do for online shopping.”

“…I thought designers made tons of money.”

“People will always aim for more. And so all that money doesn’t seem like enough.”

The numbers for some kind of trading were lined up on the screen. Even if it was not on her work computer, Quenser wondered if it was okay for someone with as much highly classified information as an Object designer to have free access to the internet.

“We’re allowed a restricted access to the internet. The line first passes through a military checkpoint. It’s a small lag, but it does work to my disadvantage in these trades.”

“…What are you trading here? Stocks?”

“Clouds.”

“So it’s a weather forecast?”

“No, no. Clouds are a wonderful resource. They’re a type of water resource. They take in the seawater and carry it as freshwater. Normally, the clouds created over the sea are carried by the wind and begin dropping rain when they hit the mountains. But these days, we can artificially control the amount of rain. Just as civilization developed around rivers, the age is coming where civilization will develop along the paths of the clouds. And once that happens,” said Claire, “competition will naturally begin. Look. This is the market for southern Africa. The amount of clouds flowing through the sky is set, but the rain could come down anywhere. If it rains on Area A, Area B beyond it will dry up. Clouds disappear after they rain, after all.”

“…I see. So just like the world-famous rivers, the flow of the clouds crosses national borders?”

“Would Area A naturally give up on the rain and let the clouds move on to Area B? If they don’t get any water, they will dry up too. They will have no drinking water or food. Its people will wither away to nothing. And they have the technology to make it rain at their fingertips. So would it be right to sit idly by and do nothing? Human life or the laws of nature? Which one should they protect?”

“…”

“It’s a difficult question, isn’t it? And our response is to find the right answer for the right spot. There is no cut and dried answer. Some are trying to create a system to efficiently distribute water through underground channels at the same time, some are trying to focus the rain on the areas with rare plants, and some are trying to make it rain on the areas with high water retention. Some are even working with corporations to create giant tanks and pools. The complex movements of all these people has created a flow of money we call the water resources market. But you don’t need to worry about any of that.”

Object designs and investments.

In both cases, her weapon was nothing more than a computer.

“So you only do the pure designs? You don’t create new materials when you fail?”

“If I need something, I make a request to an expert in that field. That’s much faster. And if I just need something that works on paper, I can let the supercomputer calculate it out. I use the computer to calculate out an ideal new material that would fill the hole in a design and attach that to an email I send to one of the specialists in the other rooms. They’re the ones who make it by hand. That’s more or less how it works.”

Claire Whist passed a grape juice box to Quenser, stabbed a straw into her own, and sat in a chair next to the desk.

“Hold it against your cheek. Is it swollen because of the Night Edge Platoon?”

“It scares me that hysteric bastards like that are allowed to carry weapons.”

“A weapon is only as effective as the person who wields it,” said Claire offhandedly. “Well, they’re a lot like you, just of a different type. They’re good at what they do, but they throw punches as much as a health nut drinks mineral water. It was decided they aren’t needed in the modern smart and clean military. Since the military hates both of you, how about you try to get along?”

(This place really is a nursery through and through.)

Quenser had that thought, but he decided not to say it out loud.

Incidentally, pressing the juice box against his cheek did little to help. He decided to just stab the straw in instead.

“To be honest, it is no coincidence that you are here.”

“Eh? Well, yes. I was called here by you, right?”

“That’s not what I mean. It wasn’t my decision to have you sent off somewhere out of the way thanks to your troublesome actions, but I did influence the decision for this to be where you were sent. I wanted to be able to speak with you like this.”

“…”

It was simple enough to say.

But Quenser had no idea if that was actually possible.

“Anyway, I want to get down to business. So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About Objects. You’ve dealt with first generation and second generation ones now, right?”

“There was also that 0.5 generation one.”

“That one doesn’t even count as an Object in our minds.”

Claire gave a scornful laugh.

She pulled a laser pointer out of a penholder on the table. Its red light pointed at one of the models lined up on the shelves.

“I most want to hear about this one. You should know this model very well.”

“…The Tri-Core?”

Quenser and Heivia had once sunk that Object in the Strait of Gibraltar. Its primary feature was its 3 giant reactors and its ability to drill for and transport oil.

Claire Whist spun the point of light around in a circle.

“I didn’t design that one, but this model was constructed based on the information received by a probe sent deep into the ocean. It’s only just barely 70% complete. Frankly, that isn’t enough. And that area of sea is packed with deep sea probes from the Legitimacy Kingdom, the Information Alliance, the Capitalist Corporations, and the Faith Organization. Everyone is trying to search further and stop the others, so they are all very busy.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“You can’t tell?” Claire sipped on some grape juice through her straw. “Modern wars are decided by the number of Objects. Individual ability can create a gap, but the difference made by numbers is overwhelming. Once it reaches one against three, it is hopeless. In that case, it is better to retreat without fighting. And yet…”

“Oh.”

“The Tri-Core has three reactors on a single Object. Normally, it would be much more effective to create three different Objects out of them. And it is now nothing but scrap at the bottom of the sea. …Ideas for oddities like this will often surface, but they are never actually constructed. The will of the many moves the military. And it is the people’s tax money that moves these projects. Any oddity that was suggested in the past has been stopped at some point or another.”

“And yet the Tri-Core was created as a single Object with three reactors on it…”

“That’s the key.” Claire smiled. “You could call it the path to the third generation. The Tri-Core made it no further than what I suppose we could call generation 2.5, but its uniqueness holds the possibility to change the battlefield. Every military tries to analyze any defeated Object, but the focus on the Tri-Core is unusually high. The top designers from each world power are probably focused on it. …In other words, the shape of the Objects that support these wars could change soon. It won’t make it to the next designs, but it is possible the ones after that will show a clear influence from it.”

The third generation.

Quenser had experienced firsthand just how demonic the current second generation could be, so it was not something he could simply celebrate. It was like a test of courage. He very much wanted to hurry up and become a designer so he could be on the side of those frightening everyone else.

But at the same time…

“But the probes are still investigating the Tri-Core, right? What do you need me for? I doubt anything I know will help you complete that model.”

“No, no. That’s not it at all. I just wanted to hear your impressions of it.”

“My impressions?”

“Your impressions after fighting it.” Claire Whist held her juice box against her head and enjoyed its coolness. “The third generation we anticipate will truly be ground-breaking. But it will be useless if it we focus too much on our design ideals and it ends up being useless on the battlefield. And so I wanted to ask you. What did you think of the Tri-Core? Did it do a job worthy of having three reactors?”

“I see…” Quenser glanced up at the ceiling and thought back. “Every Object I’ve seen has been like a demon, but for this one, I think the weight was the real problem.”

“Hm, hm.”

“In fact, I don’t think it would have been able to function if it hadn’t been on the ocean. It couldn’t completely evade the Baby Magnum’s bombardment and instead defended itself by moving areas with exceptionally thick armor into the blasts.”

“So it would be difficult to use in strategies requiring speed?”

“Yes. I’m sure it could get up to a nice top speed, but it couldn’t get any bursts of speed. For that reason, it would probably be best for it to use the output of its reactors for one-shot kills.”

“But the reports say that the Baby Magnum’s damage spread slowly.”

“It may have not specialized enough in one direction to be functional in battle.”

“I see.” Claire leaned back in her chair. “I’d say it was too much to try to put an entire oil facility on it. We need to be careful not to make a similar mistake.”

“Um…So will the third generation be made of Objects that have multiple reactors like the Tri-Core?”

“No. In fact, it is because that did not solve the problem that I said the Tri-Core was only generation 2.5.”

“…?”

Quenser was confused.

He opened his mouth to speak.

“Then what is the third generation?”

“You have already seen it,” said Claire Whist joyfully. “And it might become the mainstream form for Objects in the new wars to come.”