In the course of society's material operations, no method of production, transportation, or sales was inherently good or evil. It was only the people at the center of resource allocation who gradually made things unfair in order to hold on to their control over the resources they had obtained.
It was now the second half of the 20th century—or, to be precise, the eve of the spread of information technology.
As the heir to a corporate giant, Wei Keng had a visual communicator carried around in a briefcase by his special secretary. If he wanted a meal, he could call the kitchen, have them make it, and get it delivered to him. His life came close to the convenience of the 21st century. But ordinary middle-class families still used wired telephones. Cars were widespread in cities and the countryside, and satellites drifted overhead, but electronic navigation systems had yet to appear.
Wei Keng knew a great many of the models that would shape society's future development. They could all be used to make money, and they could also be used to do something for society.
At the Luoshui Group's industrial park, which operated on a work-relief basis.
In a solar energy collection park covering three thousand square kilometers, rows of parabolic mirrors were laid out like a well-field system. The squares were one kilometer across, with roads running between them. When the workday ended, people from the small work buildings in each square made their way to the road stations and waited for the industrial park's shuttle buses to take them back to the dormitory area.
While they waited, they went to a machine with a screen and began choosing bundles of vegetables from the vegetable cabinet by video. For these workers, vegetables bought with subsidized work points were very cheap.
The vegetables were sold through a screen. That meant no spending the whole morning in a supermarket where elderly men and women peeled off the outer layers of onions or pulled the stems off watermelons, leaving only the picked-over produce for people getting off work. Once customers confirmed their choice and selected a package through a videophone, the vegetables were immediately packed and delivered to the entrance of the workers' dormitory.
Vegetables and fruit were grown in purpose-built steel frame plastic greenhouses. People were recruited from the countryside and given contracts to manage them. Thermometers and humidity gauges displayed the temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide levels at various times throughout the day. It wasn't as sophisticated as automated chip-based controls, but people could simply patrol the greenhouses and operate the equipment themselves. That created a few more jobs while also reducing operating costs.
The best produce was set aside and sold fresh that same day through the visual column. The second-grade produce was canned, while the lower-grade produce was washed, crushed, and turned into bottled juice for the Happy Water vending machines frequented by young people. (Wei Keng: "I'm an honest businessman. I absolutely don't add flavoring.") As for the pulp left over from juicing, it was sent to pig farms.
At present, the contracted growers followed standard procedures at every step, under the watch of cameras.
Would this system eventually end up with too many people doing too little work? Well, ten percent of the supply was always reserved for outside sources on the electronic sales system—so there was still some market competition.
E-commerce vegetable vendors. That was a concept the entrepreneurs at Lakeside University in the Main World's 21st century had once tried to promote. But they were roundly criticized. The reason? People simply couldn't trust businessmen who kept talking about "market liberalization." In a field with "high management, low technology," the service should be provided by the government. That way, the financial operations related to people's livelihoods could be supervised by the public in accordance with the law.
But the officials in Shenzhou wouldn't do that at present.
Since no one up top was going to take charge, Wei Keng, somewhere in the middle, had to improve things himself.
The main pillar of Shenzhou's industrial economy was electricity, but the power plants were not particularly advanced.
With poor market efficiency, the only option was to reduce workers' pay to one-fifteenth of what industrial workers outside the park earned. One of the factory's mottos even said, "The factory is my home; love the factory as you love your home." If that was the case, then the factory ought to act like a head of household and consider how its workers could get by on one-fifteenth of the usual pay.
Food consumption was handled according to the plan above, since the costs of producing secondary food products, transporting them midway, storing them, and selling them in small quantities were too high—and supported a large number of middlemen.
As for housing, workers could currently live in factory dormitories. A large plot of land near the industrial park had also been set aside for future development, with the intention of building private rooms for the workers. That meant their housing costs would be substantially reduced, both now and in the future, compared with those outside the park.
For transportation, all routine, necessary travel should be organized in regular groups. For instance, shuttle buses should take workers to and from work and children to and from school.
When it came to clothing and bedding, extravagance was discouraged. Wei Keng required everyone, himself included, to wear work clothes inside the industrial park, so that the clothing distributed and sold wholesale by the factories would be something everyone was accustomed to wearing.
Consumption! Aside from necessities and things that contributed to actual physical health, everything else should be cut back wherever possible.
Wei Keng said, "Hard work and frugality are good things. They give us greater vitality."
In the second half of 1968, the industrial parks being planned in the west underwent many major changes in their management. But from the outside, they still looked like welfare institutions: self-sufficient, closed off, and reserved, much like Wei Keng himself.
In this world, no matter what kind of ideology one followed, it had to be "exported" in order to become widely known.
But what were these industrial parks of Wei Keng's exporting at present? The parks employed hundreds of thousands of people, yet their only contribution to the outside world was providing Luoshui Industries with ten percent more electricity.
From a market perspective, those hundreds of thousands of people had nearly everything covered internally, and their external purchasing power was practically zero. They contributed less to GDP than a few dozen executives in the city clinking glasses at high-society banquets.
As for the reemployed workers in the industrial parks, they labored collectively every day, then happily enjoyed cheap goods and sports matches and gaming competitions that cost almost nothing. They cheerfully shouted about hope and the future. To outsiders, they looked just like the pyramid-scheme participants of the Main World's 21st century, who ate gruel every day while hypnotizing themselves into believing they were bound to succeed. They were trapped in a little circle, foolishly brainwashing themselves.
Unlike pyramid schemes that tried to succeed by forcing people into a rat race, Wei Keng, their leader, was genuinely thinking about the future.
A large number of schools had already been established in the massive industrial parks, and their future focus would be the IT industry.
India's path in the Main World could serve as a reference. According to Main World history, policy fluctuations in India's early civil-service exams had sent a large number of wealthy families' children to study in the United States. The United States happened to be undergoing industrial transformation at the time. Those Indian students witnessed Silicon Valley's rise, then returned home and led the development of India's IT industry.
From an objective standpoint, India's IT industry had lessons worth learning from. And the IT industry shouldn't be classified as a tertiary industry; it was a kind of industrial project within the secondary industry!
India's later failure to take off was due to a congenital deficiency. That wasn't a problem with its IT industry alone.
In a country with a population of hundreds of millions, any industry had to take upstream and downstream issues into account! If an industry was physically cut off from its upstream suppliers by transportation or geography, it was risky unless a backup system existed within the country or in a nearby area that could be controlled or influenced.
Textile industry, for example, was a bona fide industry! During the period when the Bear of the Main World fell apart, Pu Hai's textile industry was cut off from its cotton supply by the freedom-loving West, triggering a massive unemployment wave. The textile industry was left in ruins. It was far worse than the restrictions placed on India's IT industry. But then again, the fact that external restrictions could hurt the development of a single, tangible industry so badly made India's officials even less willing to develop a range of real industries.
The Luoshui Group had no such problem as it began investing in the IT industry. Shenzhou's electronic hardware industry chain was spread across the country; it couldn't be physically severed. And the two sides were financially bound together. If you dared to cut off supplies, I'd use my funds to buy up inventory while poaching workers from your factory. We weren't separated by the Pacific Ocean, after all. Could you really use the government to block the movement of people and equipment? The Luoshui Group supplied fighter aircraft. Even if Shenzhou split along regional lines, Luoshui's strength would ensure that no one dared to make trouble.
The principle was simple: if the country had no cotton, textile factories had to grovel to outsiders. If the country had consumers for mobile phone software, the local people who "made" the software were the ones in charge!
In the southeast, several academies were helping to stir up a wave of petitions. These attempts by scholars to make their voices heard by the emperor had always been a favored activity of the Pure Stream faction.
Juren from several southeastern Dao Prefectures gathered in great numbers on the streets around the prefectural yamen. Led by academic warlords who were locally respected, they petitioned on behalf of the people.
The reason? Recently, several Russian merchants had been beaten to death by local residents in Jiangnan. The perpetrators had been arrested and, under normal procedure, ought to be sentenced. But some things were difficult to explain. For instance, the Russian merchants might have been Soviet Russian intelligence agents spying on the Southern fleet's secrets. Righteous civilians had discovered them and killed them on the spot.
Xiucai and scholars were both university graduates.
The former tended toward the liberal arts and worked in various government offices. The latter studied natural sciences, equivalent to the sciences in the Main World, and were recruited by technical departments. Due to social conditions, there was currently a surplus of both kinds of graduates in Shenzhou. But the job prospects for scholars of natural sciences were somewhat better. The various industrial monopoly groups kept an eye on one another, and even if only to keep talent out of their rivals' hands, they would recruit people with training in the sciences.
As for Xiucai? The path to officialdom was extremely narrow! They could only enter government service once they reached the Juren rank, and only Jinshi counted as true high achievers. Competition was intense at the Xiucai level. The educated class was dissatisfied, and they made quite a racket about it.
A flood of letters bearing thousands of signatures poured into the various Dao Prefectures, then the local administrations forwarded them to the Central cabinet.
In response to the students' sincere concern, the land security agreement that the Central cabinet was negotiating with Soviet Russia was also affected. At the summit held by both sides in Lüshun, differences of opinion led to the talks' termination.
In the capital region, a brush, inkstone, and inkstick made from Australian quoll hair, a Jiangxi Duan inkstone, Jun porcelain from a Song Dynasty official kiln, and various other writing implements were laid out on the Cabinet elder's desk.
The impassioned memorials from the southeast were stacked one after another across the floor. Their lists of signatories had been unfolded, and the Cabinet elder stepped on them with a crackle, finding the sensation underfoot deeply satisfying.
After reading the case file in his hand, he asked the Imperial City Department director beside him, "Have you found the key witness yet?"
The director of the Imperial City Department replied, "No. The key people in this case disappeared as soon as they entered the alley."
He opened a photograph taken a few hundred meters from the crime scene in a southern city. It had been taken by someone from the Imperial City Department, which handled intelligence work. They had been keeping an eye on the suspicious Soviet Russian operatives ever since they arrived.
The Cabinet elder didn't look at the photo. He demanded, "They vanished right under your people's noses?"
The director of the Imperial City Department said, "This subordinate failed in his duty."
"Of course you failed in your duty. Several living people vanished without a trace, dead or alive. I'm starting to wonder whether it's worth allocating funds to you every year."
After receiving a thorough dressing-down...
The Imperial City Department director said, "Cabinet elder, there is something peculiar about this case. We found no people at the scene, but we did find some strange ashes."
The Cabinet elder paused. "Ashes!"
The director took out a photo showing dust found in the alley, along with the test results. It contained elements such as iron, phosphorus, and copper.
The Cabinet elder frowned and asked, "What's your take?"
The director of the Imperial City Department replied, "Your Excellency, there are currently several weapons capable of turning people to ash."
"You mean the Tesla Electric Gun?"
"This subordinate knows of it. But the power of Soviet Russia's current Tesla Electric Guns is only enough to burn ten percent of a person's body. They can't completely destroy a corpse. However, my intelligence reports say that the people of Europa are researching Spectrum Weapons. Those weapons are much more powerful."
The Cabinet elder narrowed his eyes. "All right. You may leave."
Once he was alone in the room, he opened a memorial. It concerned a trade deal with Europe to import rare earths from Shenzhou for Spectrum Components.
With a snap, the Cabinet elder closed the file.
At the Northwest Industrial Park, Wei Keng sat in a cockpit wearing VR Glasses. He was attending a Software Class remotely in the Grand Classroom with high school students who had just passed their math and logic exams. It happened to be the break. He spent his free time reading the news and came across reports of civil unrest in the southeast.
Wei Keng opened the forum, which still consisted entirely of text, and read the comments one by one, shaking his head. The information age had only just begun, and only highly educated people could get online. Yet when it came to international politics, the discussion was full of "holier-than-thou attitudes" and "resentment!"
Wei Keng grumbled in a comment, "Young people these days keep claiming that Shenzhou's technology leads the world, without having any idea of their own limitations. High-tech operations need fewer people, so does that mean fewer people die in war? Do the enemy's high-tech weapons need fewer people too? War is a collective responsibility, but individuals get swept up in it whether they like it or not. Just do your jobs and put your value to society into practice. Don't spend all day going on about fighting, fighting, fighting. Besides becoming cannon fodder and selling yourselves off to others, you'll bring no long-term benefit to your country."
The replies below were mostly sarcastic. A few were outright abusive, and in the end they simply branded Wei Keng a traitor.
He closed the forum and logged off.
Wei Keng said, "I knew it would turn out like this. That's why I posted anonymously."
But at that moment, a node in Wei Keng's consciousness flickered.
Wei Keng said, "The amount of Meson-Macro Particles has increased. Is it because my own cultivation has advanced, or...?"
Wei Keng's communication interface opened. It was Ke Feijia. "Pay attention. The activity level of the Meson-Macro Particles just increased. Did yours too?"
Wei Keng nodded and sent over the data from his node.
Ke Feijia compared it with his own. "That confirms it. Our nodes are fluctuating in the same way. We can rule out personal factors. Something must have just caused a Spacetime Disturbance."
Wei Keng said, "Someone traveled through time on this timeline?"
Ke Feijia replied, "And changed some people in spacetime. Be careful while you're working. Don't interact with any strangers, not even to shake hands."
Before you continue