Became an American Retro Novelist - Chapter 182



Only Noblemtl

182.

‘I’d like you to evaluate the novel.’

Hearing Rebecca Wong speak, I felt a strong curiosity.

What kind of novel have you written and under what circumstances have you come to have dark circles under your eyes like mine?

As I was finishing up ‘Country of Losers: Part 2’, I decided to head straight to a nearby cafeteria with Rebecca Wong after class to have a proper chat.

And then I encountered a person who had arrived there first.

“I’ve been waiting.”

Kate Moore pushes up the glasses she was wearing.

“······What are you waiting for? Do you know when I’ll be here?”

“You usually come to this cafeteria after class.”

“Police officer, over here.”

“I came here because I have something to tell you. Please talk to me.”

“The engagement······.”

I glanced back at Rebecca, who was standing next to me.

Then Kate Moore narrowed her eyes for a moment, then smiled softly.

He turned his head slightly in front of me, cleverly preventing Rebecca from seeing the ‘mask’ he had just shown me.

Kate Moore, you scary kid. You’re taking more advice from the North.

“Oh, sorry. Did I bother you?”

“It’s okay. Can I ask why you’re doing this? I thought it might be good if we could talk about it together.”

“Ah, I have something I want to talk about because of the novel of God.”

“’Country of losers’?”

“Yeah, that one! It was a really painful novel.”

“Haha! I like that expression!”

Rebecca Wong laughed heartily and held out her hand.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Rebecca Wong, a first-year Creative Writing major.”

“Kate Moore, first-year sociology student. Nice to meet you, Rebecca.”

“Because of ‘that novel,’ I also had a lot to say to God. I’d like to hear your thoughts as well. If it’s okay, can we join you and listen to your conversation?”

“I’m fine. I’ll buy the coffee.”

Hey, Kate. You’re never really that cool when you buy me coffee.

Rebecca too. Why are you two just discussing things while I, the main character of the story, just sit back and do nothing?

“······.”

Well, so what now?

Anyway, both of them had a lot to say about my novel.

Listening to their thoughts will be useful both as a writer and as an individual living in society.

I sat down at an outdoor table in the cafeteria with two other people.

Kate actually bought me a coffee, and I asked her in appreciation of her gesture.

“How long have you been waiting?”

“About 3 days?”

······If I get kidnapped any time soon, please suspect Kate Moore.

“Because of ‘Country of Losers’?”

“Yeah, that. After reading it, I had a lot of thoughts.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I want to be unhappy.”

“······If I go to California, I’ll hire a sailor from a tuna fishing boat?”

“Don’t joke around.”

Kate squints her eyes.

Now we have become familiar with these things as well.

I smiled comfortably and apologized.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m a little surprised because it’s the first time I’ve heard Kate ‘The Mask’ Moore praise you so honestly. So, why did you think you wanted to be unhappy?”

“Because pursuing happiness alone is meaningless.”

“I think so too.”

Rebecca Wong’s eyes sparkled.

“It is meaningless to pursue happiness alone. We must be able to accept unhappiness.”

“That’s right. Unhappiness is not a process leading to happiness. It is valuable in itself! Every aspect of my life where I felt like this wasn’t right, that I was unhappy, was valuable in itself!”

“······.”

Somehow, it feels like a self-esteem class.

But it wasn’t entirely wrong.

In the novel, the North deliberately brings about misfortune in order to pursue absolute human happiness.

Readers who read it ‘outside’ the novel will take it as a metaphor for the fact that, as the Bible says, ‘God loves you and therefore sends suffering upon you.’

And these friends who go further in their interpretation usually shout, ‘Human misfortune is considered a process for seeking happiness. But I will stop that! God! I consider my unhappy life worth it alone!’

I stirred the coffee that had just come out and thought to myself.

‘That’s interesting.’

People who read ‘Country of Losers’ are delighted as if they have found some kind of answer to life. And I thought it was because of the human habit of trying to give some meaning to literature or art.

That’s why, in Part 2, I was going to destroy all of that without any meaning.

Human life, happiness, unhappiness, all of it is meaningless.

It just ‘exists’.

There are two reasons why I thought of a development that many people would find shocking.

One is the futility of myself going back through one life and writing my own life again.

Another one was the words of a lovely woman who made me realize that.

‘I think the old days were better.’

A girl who was living in the 1980s.

And an old man who lived decades into the distant future.

He said the same thing.

The old days were better.

‘Why on earth is that?’

Part 2 of ‘Country of Losers’ started from that idea.

It was around the time that Simon Carver started reading.

***

“Please take care of me.

Country of Losers: Part 2 (tentative title) draft.』

As soon as Simon saw the handwritten note on the very first page of the fax that had been sent to the office, he couldn’t help but smile.

Miss Brown, who had been sitting at the makeshift desk across from him and staring blankly at his profile, opened her mouth.

“Is there any good news?”

“Author Shin sent me Part 2 of ‘Country of Losers’.”

“Part 2? I thought Part 1 was a great novel.”

“The general requirement for a long-form SF award is over 40,000 words. I’m looking forward to it even more since the author says it’s a story that ‘sums up’ the shock caused by Part 1. Hehehe······.”

“That’s a really annoying laugh.”

“Hehehe.”

“wow.”

Miss Brown looks at Simon with a slightly weary expression, a cigarette in her mouth.

Simon returned to his seat with the manuscript from God and began to read slowly, completely oblivious to the fact that her favorability rating had dropped by about 5.

Under the warm sunlight, the novel began with these sentences:

『Literally, God is dead.

And ‘The Book’ was created by human hands.

According to a theory proposed by astronomer and author Carl Sagan, based on the Kardashev scale created by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, despite our remarkable progress, humanity is still only a very weak organism capable of using energy on a planetary scale.

Humanity continued to build up civilization, knowledge, and technology in pursuit of greater happiness. And finally, they left Earth and ventured into space. After terraforming Mars, they destroyed stars floating around the sky and used the fragments to build space colonies.

In this way, humans continued to advance forward while ‘encountering’ the universe, which was called an unknown territory. As it has always been.

But after quite some time, the limit was reached.

In a world where God is dead, no matter how much you say ‘The North’, it is not infinite.

The being was constantly evolving itself and trying to continue its mission from the distant past, but when humanity surpassed 20 trillion people, a problem arose. The once watertight dam gradually became damp.

Even if you calculate all the possible cases, it is becoming impossible to make all 20 trillion people happy. As a result, some people are increasingly escaping from the North’s control.

Lucy, an astrophysicist born on Mars, was one of them.

One day, she suddenly realized something, like Moses who had received a revelation from God.

‘What does all this mean?’

She thought, dumbfounded.

All sorts of data were floating before her eyes. To be exact, the electrical signals flowing through her brain were imprinting images on her retina. In this way, with the help of the book, she raised her consciousness and cognition to an infinitely high level, and she was a genius comparable to Einstein.

No, she could be said to be superior to him.

Even among the more ‘evolved’ humans,

It was the result of something the North had tried before it got to this point.

The North wanted to directly intervene in the human brain to increase the range of happiness felt by humans, because it was impossible for all humans to live while enjoying everything within limited resources.

That is why its existence evolved mankind.

Not all humans accepted the evolution of the North in the same way. They accepted evolution differently according to their genetic limitations and differences. However, the fact that they all evolved was the same, although there were differences in degree.

Because of this, the scope of happiness felt by mankind has expanded further.

In fact, until now, the North has mainly made humanity happy through primary actions. It has focused on the happiness that humans previously felt.

Some people could feel great happiness just by the endorphin surge from hard work and the act of eating junk food. If that wasn’t enough, they were provided with the ‘human life’ of reproduction. They sometimes felt unhappy, but in the end, they found happiness through satisfaction that fit the social norms. That too was the result of each individual human being’s own choice according to the advice of the North.

With the inclusion of the means called ‘evolution’, it seemed as if all the problems had been solved.

Lucy was a completely different person among them.

Born with an innately high intelligence, she was able to accept the evolution of brain cells injected according to the design of the North almost to its limit, unlike others. As a result, she evolved almost to the maximum extent that the human brain can endure, and unlike ordinary people, she became a being completely uninterested in one-dimensional acts such as sexual intercourse.

I didn’t particularly like working out or eating, so I took weight management pills and alternative foods provided by the pharmaceutical company Dalic Corporation, and I usually lived by accepting the information provided by The Book. I had already frozen my eggs separately, and any child born without sexual intercourse and with proper management would inherit that great intelligence and be even smarter.

Her intelligence, which was so advanced that she could calculate the movements of celestial bodies while sitting, was awakened only after taking a pill to get her caffeine intake.

Suddenly, she felt that there was something strange about this world led by the North, and she began to consciously doubt it.

‘How many eras have passed?’

It was a question that naturally arose in my head while reading the novel.

A future where The North has completely taken control of humanity, making them happier, rather than a past where they were controlled by unconscious persuasion.

The thought of such a world sent a chill down Simon’s spine, and he let out a long sigh.

‘In the end, is it bound to end up like this?’

In the previous Part 1, God showed a world where mankind could live by their own power and ‘certainly’ obtain happiness.

But that future could not last forever.

As mentioned in the description in the work, the North was not a god.

‘It would not have been possible to fulfill the happiness of all 20 trillion people.’

To solve this, the North ‘evolved’ humans.

It reminded me of some dystopian science fiction novels in that it’s about humanity being transformed through control that we don’t know about.

Simon felt complicated as the story continued, with a significantly different tone from his previous work.

The story after that was the same.

“Lucy. She was an astrophysicist.”

“It was. It isn’t now?”

“I’m just a wanderer now.”

“They will track you.”

“Just do it. I’d rather die than go back to that time.”

“why?”

“I wanted to stay in this dirty cesspool.”

Lucy threw herself into misfortune.

Just as Simon ran away from the company and chose adventure, he chose to remove the Book installed in his brain and join the resistance.

And the resistance group she joined had a device that gave them unrestricted access to all information in the world without any further intervention from the North.

It was simply called a ‘personal computer’, as its name had been from the past.

Through the device, Lucy was introduced to a world completely different from the information she had previously encountered.

The truth about created unhappiness buried beneath created happiness.

When I came to, I was in the bathroom, vomiting.

And as I watched the other guys laughing at me while I was doing that, I felt like I was going to die. No matter how dirty the ‘information’ was, I wanted to hold on and hold on and truly know the truth about this world.

She pounced.

The full-scale battle with the machines has begun.

‘Hmm.’

Lucy and the resistance force looked like a future human race straight out of the 1984 film ‘The Terminator’.

Lucy struggles to save humanity against the android forces created by The North to deny the established system and to deal with forces that hinder humanity’s happiness.

But in the midst of all this, she began to gain insight little by little.

That the North exists solely for the happiness of mankind.

『Humanity is incapable of making itself happy.

Humanity needed someone to take upon themselves their sins, forgive them, and ensure that their uncertain future would be bright.

In the past it was the God of the Bible, now it is only further north.

If it had not existed, human civilization would not have developed to the level it has now, but would have remained divided and tangled, returning to the days of building the Tower of Babel.

The problem was that Lucy realized this too late.

But there was nothing I could do.

Even if it meant leading only to destruction, humanity had to be liberated.

So that they can move forward in the direction they want to go.’

The resistance forces wanted to liberate ‘Mars’ from further North Korean oppression.

They kept in close contact with resistance forces active in colonies around the planet as well as on Earth, and continued their attempts to destroy the core system of The North, located in Mars City at the center of Mars.

Although she lost many comrades in a fierce battle with the android forces, Lucy’s plan was virtually a success.

And after reading the novel up to that scene, Simon couldn’t help but tilt his head.

‘Something seems strange.’

The quality and composition of the novel itself were impeccable.

The North gradually lost control over humanity as resistance forces emerged. Resistance forces rose up in various places and fought desperately, enduring many sacrifices, but in the end, they could no longer show the perfection they once had, and the resistance forces succeeded in destroying some of the North’s strongholds.

It was exciting, and I felt a sense of pleasure at the smooth development.

‘Are you aiming to make it into a movie?’

Simon couldn’t help but think that way.

Most of the recent SF movies emphasize action and depict fantastic worlds. However, Part 1 did not follow that trend and was overall more static and prosaic. I wondered if Part 2 was intentionally structured to be more event-focused, in order to fit the trend and make it into a movie.

But if that wasn’t the case, only one other possibility came to mind.

‘no way.’

Simon fell back into the lake of letters, sweating profusely.

“We did it!”

“Yes! Lucy! We did it!! We finally took down The North!”

“······It’s not over yet. Port, Mollick.”

Lucy got off the plane that had been converted for combat. As if to prove that it had been a fierce fight, it was scorched here and there and its wings were half-broken. But she had finally arrived here.

Even further inside the center of Mars City, a space further north that was not permitted to humans.

The group, which had confidently advanced forward, finally came face to face with the North.

The being appeared as a glowing humanoid figure through a hologram and asked.

[Why do you want to break everything?]

It was like a conversation with God.

A conversation between a god who sends misfortune for the happiness of humans and a human with the greatest intelligence.

We will live as human beings even if we are unhappy.

In front of the group shouting such human praises, the North continued its final resistance.

But its existence was already slowly being erased. It was thanks to the program Lucy had created and implemented. Thanks to being freed from the oppression of the North, her extraordinary mind had learned to do things like this.

The North, writhing in pain and screaming that it doesn’t want to die.

That’s how humanity triumphed.

Oh, what a great victory.

······To Simon, the descriptions in the work felt like awkward sentences from a propaganda book.

And I turned the page to finish reading the story that still had a lot of content left in my hands.

Simon’s eyes widened.

I got goosebumps all over my body.

『Mission complete.』

A single line written on a blank piece of paper.

Another page has been turned.

『The suffering for the absolute happiness of all mankind, completed.

The number of ‘martyrs’: 31,350,671,991.

The question is, ‘Were they happy?’

Answer: ‘As a result of observation, it is so.’

Even this was in the palm of the North’s hand.

The very description of Lucy gaining enlightenment as if she had received a revelation from God was a foreshadowing.

Against the North.

By being killed by the North.

While knocking down the North.

Humans became happier.

It was all as The North had intended.

The North has never weakened, but has continued to conduct various tests to make humanity happy, going beyond the limit of ’20 trillion’.

Rather, we have continued to pursue development through various ‘experimental data’ that do not violate the rules of human happiness.

Humanity was still happy.

“haha······.”

Simon Carver laughs in vain, unable to believe it.

He counted with his hands how many manuscripts remained.

There’s still about half of it left.

And the twist revealed at this point was similar to Part 1, but it was shocking enough.

But if these facts are revealed here, what will happen next?

How much more shock is the new author trying to give the readers?

I was excited and scared at the same time.