Interlude: The Beginning
–45 years ago.–
The bar didn’t have a particularly pleasant atmosphere. The monitor mounted on the wall was droning on with some random program. It seemed to be a variety show; various alien celebrities were letting out forced laughter at the host’s jokes.
As if to drown out the scripted cheering, a whiskey bottle gurgled rhythmically as it emptied its contents.
Gepetto waited until the glass was filled to the brim before Downing it in a single gulp. A heat that felt like it was scorching his throat bloomed inside him, but it didn’t improve his mood in the slightest.
“Customer, you’re drinking quite a bit. Did something happen?”
He scowled at the question from the bartender, whose arms were both mechanized.
“Leave me alone.”
“There aren’t any other customers. Come on, kill some time with me.”
He glared at the bartender, whose words were hardly professional, but the glare had almost no intimidating effect coming from Gepetto’s withered, frail frame.
Grinning, the bartender leaned both elbows on the counter, meeting Gepetto’s eyes.
“Let me guess. It’s a woman, right?”
“……”
“Heh, if not that, then gambling.”
“Shut up, ‘Great Detective.’ You’re wrong on both counts.”
“Then what is it?”
“……”
Gepetto remained silent, and the bartender shrugged.
“Well, as long as you pay, I don’t care. If you’re going to get alcohol poisoning, do it after you settle the tab, okay?”
“……I have the money. Give me the bottle.”
Sighing, the bartender set a bottle down.
Gepetto twisted the cap off violently and put it to his lips without even bothering to pour a glass.
He drank as if trying to drown himself; his vision and thoughts were already swaying unsteadily.
When the bottle was nearly half empty, the door bell chimed.
A man walked in wearing a bodysuit under a flight jacket.
He looked to be about thirty. He was a dandy-looking fellow with a somewhat pretentious air.
Despite the fact that there were no other customers, the man went out of his way to sit right next to Gepetto.
“Dr. Gepetto-Carlo-Rossenti, I presume?”
“Get lost.”
“Hahaha. You’re quite out of sorts…”
With a natural movement, the man slid his hand into the hem of his jacket. What he pulled out was a small laser gun. The man pointed the weapon—which looked small enough to be mistaken for a toy—at Gepetto.
Its lack of intimidation actually proved it was the real deal.
“As a genius engineer, Doctor, you can tell at a glance that this is real, can’t you?”
“So what? Shoot me if you want to.”
“Hahaha. To think you could become this desperate just because you lost a spouse. If you’re lonely, you could just pick out another good one.”
The casual way he spoke, as if choosing an accessory, struck a nerve.
“You bas—ack?!”
Gepetto tried to lunge at him, but before his fingers could even snag the man’s collar, he was struck on the side of the head with the full whiskey bottle.
As Gepetto recoiled in pain, the man grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and slammed him onto the counter.
The bartender’s eyes widened at the sudden violence. He reached out with his prosthetic arm to call the security bureau, but the dandy man allowed no further reaction.
Before the bartender could place the call, the man shot him right between the eyes with the laser gun.
The bartender collapsed, his skull pierced through.
“Good grief. I’m not fond of rough business… I wanted to have a peaceful discussion.”
The man, speaking as if he were ordering tea at a café, looked down at the bartender’s corpse with a calm expression.
It was impossible to believe he was the same person who had just subdued Gepetto with violence and murdered the bartender.
“……Kill me…… Just kill me.”
“Hey now, why are you crying? My mission is to recruit the Doctor. I have no intention of indulging your sentimentality.”
“……Olivia, I’m coming to join you now…!”
“Please don’t use me for your suicide.”
The man let go. Gepetto didn’t try to stand; he simply lay there, tears flowing uncontrollably.
“It’s not like you’re impotent, is it? You could choose a new spouse and get her pregnant again. It was eight months, wasn’t it? If you just wait a little, you’ll be back where you were.”
“You… keep your mouth shut, or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what? You couldn’t even take revenge on the government that let your spouse die. You’re just a man sobbing in some back-alley bar.”
Gepetto glared at him with eyes that looked ready to kill. He clenched his fists so hard his nails pierced his palms, and blood began to drip.
“Well, I have a small proposal for you. Our organization highly values your knowledge and skills, Doctor. If you are willing to dedicate your everything to us, we wouldn’t mind erasing that piece-of-shit planet for you.”
“Hah, listen to you… do it if you can.”
“Very well. Then let us erase it immediately.”
As if in response to the man’s words, the image on the wall-mounted monitor cut out with a snap, turning into static.
“……………………?”
Gepetto looked suspicious, but the monitor soon recovered.
However, what played was not a stupid variety show, but an emergency broadcast.
Communication with the home planet has been lost. We are unable to grasp the situation.
An android announced this in a mechanical voice, and Gepetto’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
While rare, communication failures weren’t impossible.
But losing track of the home planet? Even with solar flares, magnetic storms, or the passage of meteors and comets, a situation where the status of the home planet was unknown was simply impossible.
“……What did you do?”
“Consider it a down payment on your salary.”
The man spoke as if it were nothing. Behind him, the emergency broadcast continued to call for calm.
“Who are you…?”
“Iorgos. I am Iorgos of The Chronos Emperor Agency: Innocence Imperium, the legitimate rulers of this universe.”
It was several hours later that Gepetto learned the home planet had been annihilated.
The primary task Gepetto was ordered to perform was the analysis and reproduction of relics.
Whether it was a test or not, it began with simple things, but the difficulty ramped up quickly, soon reaching devices he had never seen or heard of.
Most were weapons for use in space, but sometimes they were nanomachines for human use or things like medical pods.
How do you analyze and make functional something whose purpose and effects are unknown?
The answer was extremely simple.
READ THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION AT LOCALIZERMEERKAT.GITHUB.IO
You just have to use it on a human.
Under Gepetto’s supervision, space pirates, death row inmates—and even ordinary people kidnapped from somewhere—were sent in.
Gepetto’s sense of ethics screamed, and he tried to resist desperately, but Iorgos would not allow it.
When Gepetto tried to let an ordinary person escape, Iorgos strangled the person to death, ripped the heart out of the corpse, and forced it into Gepetto’s mouth. The intense stench and taste made him gag, but his mouth was forced shut with vice-like strength.
“A man who chose to destroy an entire planet for the sake of his family… do you really intend to claim you’ve suddenly awakened a cheap sense of ethics now? I didn’t realize you had a talent for comedy as well as science.”
Gepetto retched repeatedly as the heart of a person who was alive just moments ago was stuffed into his mouth, but Iorgos forced him to chew and swallow with enough force to shatter his jaw.
As Gepetto crawled on the floor, trying desperately to vomit it up, Iorgos stepped on his back without mercy.
“Gah?!”
“Speaking of which, you were quite obsessed with your unborn child, weren’t you? Next time you resist, I’ll procure a fetus from somewhere and make it your dinner.”
“Guh… gugugu…! Why… why can you do something so demonic?! Do you have no heart?! That person just now was just an innocent civilian!”
Gepetto’s spine groaned as he tried to crawl away.
“For example, how would you feel if someone touched a family heirloom you cherished with hands covered in filth?”
“……What do you mean?”
“This person was a thief. That is all.”
He took his foot off Gepetto and instead crushed the head of the corpse.
The skull shattered, and brain matter and blood sprayed everywhere.
“We, The Chronos Emperor Agency: Innocence Imperium, are the legitimate successors of the glorious empire that built the Pre-Ancient civilization. We must prevent primitive monkeys who have no connection to us from swinging our inherited relics around as if they own them, and from trampling the ruins our ancestors built.”
“……Are you serious?”
“Of course. Isn’t that much more sane than a man who let a planet be crushed for the sake of one woman and one unborn child talking about human hearts?”
Gepetto fell silent, his heart gouged by the words. Iorgos nodded with satisfaction.
“Well, no matter what you think, as long as you are useful, that is all that matters.”
Slumped on the floor, Gepetto realized that his eyes had been clouded by the grief and anger of losing his wife and child, and he had sold his soul to a devil.
“……Kill me.”
“Haha. To think you’d give me an order. Who do you think you are?”
“……Kill me.”
“I see. This time you intend to martyr yourself for a cheap sense of humanism? Then let’s do this—since you seem to be so fond of pregnant women, every time you resist or try to commit suicide, I will target pregnant women relentlessly.”
Iorgos continued with the casual tone of someone deciding a dinner menu.
“If you resist, I kill a pregnant woman. If you lie, I kill a pregnant woman. If you don’t produce results, I kill a pregnant woman. And each time, I’ll stuff your favorite fetuses into your mouth.”
Iorgos’s eyes were completely serious.
Sweat soaked Gepetto’s back. He felt like he was facing a completely different species that merely wore the skin of a human.
“And if you should commit suicide, as a gesture of mourning, I’ll build a mausoleum for you out of fetal bones.”
Even if it means piling up thousands or tens of thousands of dead, this man will do it.
Gepetto understood that instinctively.
“Stop it!”
“Do not order me.”
“Gah?!”
He was kicked in the ribs and rolled across the floor.
“Now then, tell me today’s schedule. Analysis of nanomachines, or will you stuff your belly with a dinner of fetuses?”
“……I understand. I will follow your orders.”
From that day on, Gepetto became a murderer.
After finishing his day’s work, Gepetto would cry as he begged for forgiveness from the dead.
He decided that since The Chronos Emperor Agency: Innocence Imperium had erased even the traces of these people, he would at least keep them in his own memory.
Up to 200 people, he remembered their faces and names.
Up to 1,000, he memorized them desperately, determined not to forget.
But when he was informed that a star system had been wiped out by a weapon he had repaired, he could no longer even memorize them.
The total population was roughly 4.5 billion. The records of the people who lived there vanished along with the planet.
Faced with the fact that 4.5 billion lives had turned into nothing more than a number, Gepetto was left utterly lost.
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