Enemy of Human Civilization

The man fell into deep thought. He was pondering a very important question.

Who exactly held the power to issue currency in this world?

Yulia was determined to save money to buy Youji an adult prosthetic body, which showed that currency still existed in this era.

But after learning about the Gene Tax, he found it deeply strange.

The Gene Tax was a levy collected by the lords from residents. Every year, they took a number of people from each settlement to replenish the human Gene Bank and ensure humanity's genetic diversity. Youji's older brother had been taken away this way.

Other than that, the residents did not have to pay any additional taxes.

In other words, the "government"—regardless of what form of government it took—did not need currency to carry out public construction or meet society's public needs.

So who issued currency in this era? What role did currency even play?

And why did this Gene Bank exist? Why had the lords created such a thing?

Yet no one ever answered these questions. Yulia worked all day and only stopped by Youji's shack briefly late at night. The last time she had come back was because she heard Youji had picked someone up. The man was too embarrassed to disturb this hardworking woman's rest. As for everyone else, most simply treated his questions as a joke and responded with baffled laughter.

Now, he could only discuss the matter with Youji when they went out scavenging.

"This is so hard, Yawg..." The boy leaned against a chair covered in lead-green mold. He had just dragged it out of a garbage heap. During the Sublimation War, it might even have belonged to some high-ranking staff officer. "What could possibly be above the lords... It really does seem like nobody has ever asked anything like that..."

"There must be ranks above the lords. Otherwise, they would have no reason to follow something called the Dyson Principles." The man pondered. "What exactly are the Dyson Principles? Who proposed them? Someone named Dyson?"

—What did this person have to do with the true owner of the name "Yawg"?

Youji shrugged. "I really don't know. It seems the Dyson Principles just forbid us from killing people... Is that all?"

"Primitive." The man, who had no lungs, used his vocalizer to imitate a sigh. In his memory, the name "Dyson" was more closely associated with an engineering concept called a Dyson Sphere. At the very least, it should have had something to do with physics.

"Why not talk about the Paralympics instead?" Youji shook his head. "Yawg, have you remembered anything? You were an athlete, right?"

The Paralympics were the highest-level competition in this world. As the man understood it, they should have been called the Paralympic Games, with a corresponding event called the Olympic Games. However, in his memories, the Paralympics had been vastly superior to the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games had extremely rigid rules. To say nothing of anything else, they did not even allow genetically engineered super racehorses in equestrian events, nor did they allow horses to be given performance-enhancing drugs. In short, the competitive level was mediocre.

After artificial prosthetic technology rose to prominence, the Paralympics became a battlefield of immortals. It could even be said that the Paralympics were the stage on which nations and corporations displayed their technological prowess.

An Olympic athlete competing against a Paralympic athlete was like table tennis players from the rest of the world sharing a stage with table tennis players from some table tennis empire.

The day Paralympic records surpassed Olympic records was also regarded as a turning point in human history.

For some reason, recalling all this gave the man a faint sense of pride.

—Could I have been... the first disabled athlete in the world to surpass the able-bodied world record?

Youji, meanwhile, swore that he had never heard of any Olympic Games. There was only the Paralympics in this world—only the Paralympic Games. It was the greatest athletic event in the world, where martial artists from dozens or even hundreds of different schools competed on the same stage.

And just as its name implied, the competition temporarily deprived every defeated participant of some bodily function. [Paralympic is formed from the words paralyze and Olympic.]

This subject had come up when the man asked Youji about martial arts. According to Youji, all martial artists and athletes nowadays made their names through the Paralympics and became people above others.

At least this news gave the man some comfort—it seemed he had undergone a memory-reset rebirth rather than dimension travel. This was, after all, the future of his own world, not a parallel world.

Youji truly hoped the man was an athlete. But the man always felt that he should not be that kind of person. A voice in his mind was shouting, No—this definitely was not real martial arts.

According to Youji's description, the Paralympics only displayed "external martial arts." External styles could indeed be cultivated to an invincible level, but...

—"Practice martial arts without cultivating inner power, and in the end, it is all for nothing."

For some inexplicable reason, that sentence drifted through the man's consciousness.

Whenever the man thought of that sentence, he wanted to laugh for some reason. One part of his consciousness told him that so-called "inner power" was a fictional concept invented in fantasy novels. Yet another part told him that someone had truly created "inner power." It was different from the inner power in literary works, but... but...

Whenever he reached that point, the man felt as though his artificial eyeballs had developed some kind of bug.

For no reason at all.

But that feeling also made him suspect something.

Could the so-called creator of inner power have something to do with him?

—What kind of person was I in the past?

The man could only sigh to himself. Could he possibly have been the descendant of some great figure?

However, according to Youji, besides athletes, there was another kind of person in this world who possessed "martial arts."

They were called knights—violent thugs who wielded force. They worshipped an evil god named Mozi, regarded an ancient thug called Aaron Swartz as their spiritual mentor, disrupted peace, destroyed order, and were enemies of human civilization.

This is bad. The man thought, Following the usual amnesia-story trope, I seem... very likely to be this kind of dangerous person.

"All right, we've rested enough." Youji drank most of the last bottle of copper sugar, then picked up the man's head, found a small hole in his upper jawbone, and poured the remaining little bit of copper sugar into it. Youji's body was less than fifty percent mechanized, mainly in his hands and feet, so he could still absorb and transport metal sugar through biological tissue. But this was the only way the man could eat now.

"Let's keep looking for parts. We'll try to make you a pair of legs this month!" Youji shouted cheerfully. His feelings toward the man were rather complicated. At first, he truly wanted a father, but for some reason, as they spent time together, he developed a slight sense of treating the man like a pet.

The man nodded and followed him. He secretly resolved to make himself a pair of legs as soon as possible, then leave Yulia and her son.

It was not because he was ungrateful, nor because he feared that fool Enoch. He had merely suddenly realized that his mysterious background might bring danger to Youji and Yulia.

He was very likely a knight, and since knights were called enemies of human civilization, they presumably did not have a very good reputation with the authorities.

Still, no matter how urgent he was, gathering parts could not be rushed. It depended on luck.

More than ten days passed, and the man and Youji had only barely gathered a component for a control motherboard and two transmission bearings from large machinery. [These could be used to make the "leg bones" of thighs.]

Fortunately, a skill could keep one alive anywhere. Before long, many people in town had seen the man replace his own parts. After word spread, people occasionally hired him for simple repair work.

For some reason, the man was genuinely very skilled at repairs. Aside from the rare cases where control chips were damaged, or where his old prosthetic hands lacked the precision required for the repair, there was basically nothing he could not fix.

This earned him some payment as well.

A month later, he had finally saved up a little money.

Yulia had once suggested saving that money. In her view, all of it should go toward preparing Youji's coming-of-age prosthetic body. The man had been picked up by Youji from a garbage heap, so the money he earned naturally ought to belong to Youji. But Youji did not think so. He had already received compensation from scavenging, and the money earned through repairs should all belong to the man. He nearly argued with his mother over it.

Arguing with large-scale engineering machinery usually ended disastrously—the speaker volume was truly loud, and it consumed power. The man stopped their quarrel and promised Yulia that once he had built his body, he would earn even more money to repay the debt of saving his life.

Thus, a few days later, the man was finally able to stand.

Youji had only one assessment of this body—"So ugly."

The man now had a head. Beneath it was a short section of cervical spine, supported by a metal bracket. Beneath the silver bracket was a straight crossbeam, with a prosthetic hand at each end, each hand encased in a graceful streamlined shell. Below the crossbeam was another vertical steel column, beneath which were two ball joints. Below those ball joints were thighs cut from transmission shafts.

Simply put, the man's head had the style of a comedic drawing, his hands had the style of an elegant sketch, and the frame of his entire body had the style of a stick figure—with a realistically rendered battery pack hanging from it.

The town chief's assessment was "impractical." In his view, choosing solid steel columns as thigh material was an enormous waste. It would consume a great deal of energy while moving, and there was even some inexplicable bracket installed around the Achilles tendon area of the lower legs. As a structure for "lifting heavy objects," it was truly inadequate.

The man merely laughed at that. Well, more precisely, he simulated a polite laugh.

The town chief did not understand that sort of etiquette and merely found it strange. He patted the man on the shoulder and said, "Still, having hands and feet is good. The great officials collecting the Gene Tax will be here soon. If you had no hands or feet and looked too strange, you might draw their unnecessary interest. That would be bad."

To the townspeople, those "great officials" held the power of life and death.