Closing the Book on a Century-Old Feud

The towering, monolithic gate cracked open like a folded court dossier in the judge's hand, revealing a tiny slit. The ice fragments swept out by the faint draft gleamed with a chill far more menacing than bared blades. Standing before that colossal gateway, the man in heavy exoskeleton armor stared dumbfounded at the scene before him, only managing to choke out half a sentence after a long pause. "Holy shit..." Ice sculptures lay spread flat across thousands of square meters of open floor. Curled-up people clung tightly to the ground, frozen in the exact postures of their final seconds of life. Some had their foreheads pressed to the floor in prayer; some huddled together for warmth; there were mothers and fathers cradling their children, and families of three holding hands... This was the one hundredth underground floor of Shelter 100, and also its last. Its ceiling was the floor of the central lightwell, while its ground was the very bottom of the entire shelter. Perhaps because it had served as a warehouse district, this level had the highest single-floor ceiling in the entire shelter. Ten-Punch Superman had originally thought he might discover some treasures on this floor, or at the very least scrounge up some valuable scrap. He never expected that opening the door would plunge him straight into a mountain of the dead. This single warehouse alone held at least one or two thousand corpses, and there were several more warehouses just like it here. Those were very likely in similar states... The soles of his boots crunched against the ground. Ten-Punch Superman unconsciously slipped through the gap in the doorway and stepped into this freezing cold storage room, where temperatures plunged dozens of degrees below zero, raising his flashlight to inspect the surroundings. Far more than shocked, he was thoroughly bewildered. He muttered under his breath, "...What the hell happened here?" Following him into the cold storage, another player in an exoskeleton squatted down, carefully examining one of the frozen sculptures sprawled on the ground before snapping a photo of the corpse's face. A moment later, he reached a conclusion. "Most of the people here probably died of oxygen deprivation... They weren't frozen to death; it's more like they were frozen after they died." On some of the bodies, obvious gunshot wounds could be seen, and some were even missing arms and legs—clearly having been dragged in here postmortem. "...Is there a difference?" Dusting off his hands, the player stood up and sighed. "Well, not really..." Truth be told. This was also his first time seeing so many dead bodies outside of a battlefield. The intense visual shock was completely different from seeing corpses on a front line. After all, on a battlefield, nobody had time to ponder how a person had died. "...The signal shouldn't be coming from here. There can't be anyone alive in this place." Taking one last look at the rows of frozen corpses, Ten-Punch Superman swept his flashlight beam back and turned to his teammate behind him. "Let's get out of here." No one wanted to linger. The other player nodded, retreating with him out of the cold storage, courteously pressing the door-close button for those frozen popsicles on their way out. The two continued checking several other warehouses. Ten-Punch Superman soon discovered that, just as he had anticipated, the conditions in these cold storage units were basically identical—all packed to the brim with frozen corpses. Level B100 bore absolutely no traces of firefights. Exactly who had shoved these people into the freezer to suffocate remained an unsolved mystery. Just as the two finished exploring the last cold storage room, a player who had gone to search the opposite side jogged back, calling out to them from a distance. "This level is pretty much a warehouse sector. The north side is cold storage for food, while the south seems to have held engineering machines and living supplies. But the resources over there were looted clean, except for one warehouse that's different. It was converted into a workshop. We even found a generator, storage batteries, and some gizmos we couldn't make heads or tails of." Hearing that, Ten-Punch Superman's interest was piqued immediately. "Come on, let's take a look." Following behind that player, the group quickly moved from the northern warehouse sector to the southern side. The area here was vastly larger than the previous section, and its layout was far more complex. Massive metal racks rose like walls, requiring stepladders to climb all the way to the top tier. The moment he stepped into this zone, Ten-Punch Superman caught the faint scent of machine oil, instantly noticing how distinct this warehouse was from the others. If the warehouses they had searched earlier were like morgues, then this place resembled a junkyard piled high with scrap. Several "Cruncher" engineering armors sat like crabs stripped of their shells, their internal components almost entirely scavenged, their claws and heads drooping beside scaffolding erected from steel pipes. Not far off lay a pile of dust-covered coils and cobbled-together, modified machines. All sorts of equipment whose functions the players couldn't even begin to decipher were assembled here in full display. The survivors who had lived on this floor had pushed their ingenuity and technical skills to the absolute limit. They had poured ghost-face bug secretions into man-sized glass vats to purify electrolytes, creating single-use chemical batteries to power these makeshift devices. Not only that, but they had subsequently dismantled machines salvaged from other floors, transforming the entire warehouse into a mini-workstation that didn't rely on the shelter's central power grid. On crude workbenches, they had even retrofitted a series of precision gadgets, including integrated circuits. These bizarre devices looked impressive indeed, but what left Ten-Punch Superman baffled was that he had no clue what these people had actually been tinkering with. "What were they making?" The teammate beside him hesitated. "Maybe... like in *Oxygen Not Included*, they were trying to set up a closed-loop material cycle inside this shelter?" "How could that even be possible..." "It's not entirely out of the question. At least they didn't touch the bodies in the cold storage next door... Er, maybe they didn't. In any case, judging by that, their remaining resources were still quite abundant. At least they still had options." That was indeed a fresh perspective. The people here had restored power and even got the refrigeration running again, so they had clearly solved their most critical energy problem. They had frozen the corpses, and those bodies were preserved intact to this day, while the bugs outside hadn't been hunted to extinction either. Evidently, they had accomplished their objective before their nutrients ran out. Yet the puzzling thing was, where did those people ultimately go? They couldn't have toiled away like crazy only to go back and lie down in the freezer, right? Staring at an autopsy table heaped with chitinous shells, Ten-Punch Superman scratched the back of his head through his helmet, feeling a massive headache coming on. He didn't know the first thing about archaeology, yet at this moment, he felt as if he were standing on an archaeological dig. To make matters more intriguing, because the technology of the Era of Prosperity was set to be far superior to the real world, he couldn't use real-world logic or experience to deduce these survivors' motives or guess what they had been trying to achieve. Walking over to one of the dissection tables, Ten-Punch Superman picked up a bowl-shaped insect carapace and found a line of small characters carved into it. Using the translation feature on his VM to capture the text, a pale blue floating window projected onto the inside of his exoskeleton helmet's tactical visor. "...In memory of 77,274 residents, including 645 Overseers." He read it aloud softly. An Agility-type player stepped up beside him, eyeing the shell in his hand with curiosity. "What's that? A last will?" His handle was Rest in Peace, an account from the Beta 0.4 release who had joined the Storm Corps around the same time. "Probably," Ten-Punch Superman said, placing the shell back onto the table. He called up the previously recovered Administrator logs to skim through them, then glanced around at the graffiti-like murals lining the surrounding walls. "Rough guess: a conflict broke out here earlier—or rather, a war. The shelter residents clashed with the Overseers, and the Overseers drove them down to the lowest level, cutting off their power. But they also cut off the supplies to the upper floors, and both sides lived in total standoff for a while..." In fact, there was no need to guess. Their entire trek down here had been marked by signs of heavy combat, especially the corridor on Level B51, which was densely pocked with bullet holes. Fighting for control of the Administrator's office, the two sides had left over a thousand corpses in a single corridor alone, all identifiable by the shelter residents' variable-temperature coats. Of course, compared to what lay in the cold storage warehouse next door, the carnage there was merely a drop in the bucket. "Never mind what they were doing for now. Has that anomalous life sign been located yet?" a Strength-type player walked over and coughed, saying, "This place is giving me the creeps. Let's finish the quest and get back up already." His handle was Unconscious. He had joined the game back in Beta 0.1 and hadn't known Rest in Peace prior to joining the Storm Corps, yet their IDs were strikingly similar, to the point where people often mistook them for a couple's match. Who knew where Brother Spring managed to round up so many weirdos? "Haven't found it yet," Ten-Punch Superman said, shaking his head. He walked over to a section of wall carved with murals and snapped a few photos. Beside him, Rest in Peace grumbled, "Aren't there any more precise coordinates? Just 'on this floor'... That clue is way too vague." Another player shook his head. "All the cameras and sensors on B100 were ripped out. To be exact, everything from B51 down is like that. The life sign was picked up by the sensors on B51; we can't pinpoint its exact location. We can only vaguely sense that it exists." Examining the mural's details closely, Ten-Punch Superman spotted another line of text on the wall. The handwriting seemed to belong to the same person who had carved the insect shell. Tracing the rust-mottled strokes, he read aloud in a low voice: "...The Tree People did not come from an unspeakable Tree. Like the Tree, from beginning to end, they came from us. The arrogance of the other is equally the sin of our own arrogance." "Order was meant to be the fortress that sheltered us, yet we forged its bricks and stones into blades to slaughter our own kin." "We have forgotten where we were going, forgotten where we came from, and forgotten why this fortress was built in the first place, until at last we became its puppets." "We shall die in the end." "And I shall spend the rest of my days completing our tombstone." "—The Tombkeeper of Shelter 100." No name was left in the sign-off, only a string of numbers. A spark of inspiration hit Ten-Punch Superman. Thinking it might represent a cycle count for recording time, he ran a unit conversion on the digits and calculated that the final words had been inscribed in Year 60 of the Wasteland Era. "So... all those survivors died in the end?" Gazing at the century-old mural on the wall, he knitted his brows slightly, then glanced back at the mountain of machines nearby. Could all of this have merely been grave goods for a tomb? Instinct told him it couldn't be that simple. Right then, a shout came from a teammate searching not far away. "There's a hibernation pod over here!" Hearing the shout, Ten-Punch Superman rushed over immediately. At the far end of rows of shelving wrapped in tangled cables stood a machine occupying a dozen or so square meters. In the center of the apparatus sat a hibernation pod, and to its right stood a shattered glass vat. Judging from the shards scattered across the floor, the vat had been broken from the inside. Something had crawled out of it. According to the life-sign radar feedback on the VM, that faint biological reading was coming from inside this very hibernation pod! Delight instantly broke out on everyone's faces. There was a living person inside! "I'll open it!" Ten-Punch Superman stepped forward, pulled out a data cable from his VM, and plugged it into the hibernation pod's port while hitting the power button. The little hacking app prepared for them by the Scientific Expedition kicked in immediately, swift in seizing control permissions over the pod's program. Evidently, when it came to prying open fridges, that guy Yin Fang was a professional. Ten-Punch Superman pressed the door release without hesitation. Yet as a putrid stench escaped alongside a hiss of depressurization, he realized something was terribly wrong. Over a dozen ghost-face bugs squeezed through the seam of the hatch, letting out sharp *ch-ch-ch* skittering noises as they lunged toward the players gathered in front of the pod. "Holy crap!" Startled, Rest in Peace reflexively squeezed the trigger. Three loud bangs instantly shredded the bugs crawling near his feet and shattered the silence of the warehouse. "Cease fire! Don't wreck the gear in here!" Smacking an insect lunging at his face down to the floor, Ten-Punch Superman brought his boot down, crushing it into a smear of mush. Having finally dealt with the skittering bugs, he looked back toward the open hibernation pod, only to see a mutilated skeleton lying within. The figure's hands were folded over its chest, cradling the broken bottom half of a glass jar that held tiny insect molts and cracked egg fragments. Deducing from the various details, this person had likely entered the hibernation pod voluntarily with these insect eggs. However, he had not activated the cryo-freeze sequence—only the negative-pressure containment cycle. After completing some kind of ritual, he had ended his own life in some manner, surrendering his mortal remains to the insects. Ten-Punch Superman stared blankly at the fellow's remains and the insect eggs packing the skeletal frame, unable to utter a word for a long time. The vaguely humanoid life sign they had detected earlier had led them to believe a survivor was still holding on, but it turned out to be a bunch of bugs! *That works too?!* While he was still in a daze, a piercing siren suddenly wailed through the room. Unsure of what was happening, everyone scrambled to look around, only to see the warning lights overhead flashing crimson in rhythm with the alarm, rattling their nerves. "...What's going on?" Rest in Peace looked around warily. At that very moment, the screen of the VM strapped to Ten-Punch Superman's left arm—still cabled to the hibernation pod—suddenly flared with static. Then, as if possessed, the Scientific Expedition app's UI was displaced by an old man whose facial features were blurred by a mosaic. Noticing the shift on his arm's display, Ten-Punch Superman immediately stared at the old man on screen, asking on high alert, "Who are you?" As he spoke, his right hand had already gripped the data cable, ready to physically sever the connection at a moment's notice. The old man floating amidst the static looked at him quietly, his halting voice drifting out from behind the pixelated features. "I am 'Tree,' the Administrator of this facility." Hearing that unexpected name, Ten-Punch Superman was momentarily stunned before blurting out instinctively, "...Tree?! Aren't you dead?" The old man continued calmly, "An AI has no concept of life or death. The meaning of my existence is to serve the residents living here. Until they no longer require me, I will continue to carry out my mission." Ten-Punch Superman wanted to press further, but there was a far more urgent matter at hand. "What's that sound outside? Did we violate some kind of... rule?" Tree answered his question in a tone devoid of any emotional fluctuation. "It is the herald that my mission is reaching its final destination." Before the man before the screen could ask for details, it continued: "The reactor is operating normally. Life-monitoring sensors have rebooted. The diagnostic protocol continues execution. Resident active life signals have remained below 3,000 continuously for 24 hours. The Shelter Sanctuary Protocol will enter its final phase: initiating dome self-destruction sequence to guide surface ruins and earthwork structures into the lightwell." Understanding the final sentence, the players instantly panicked. "What the hell?!" "Self-destruct?!" As if sensing the group's emotional agitation, Tree said serenely, "There is no need for alarm. What you are about to witness is the ultimate destiny of this shelter. It was engineered this way from the very moment of its construction." Ten-Punch Superman stared dumbfoundedly at the figure on the screen. *No need for alarm, my ass...* *How could anyone not panic?!* It was now Year 213 of the Wasteland Era! They had deviated from the scheduled timeline by more than a century! If that dome self-destruction sequence actually executed, god only knew what the result would be—it would probably bury the entire shelter right then and there. To put it plainly, this was a program designed two hundred years ago. How could anyone expect it to remain reliable two centuries later? And what was worse, the countdown wasn't 24 hours at all—it was ten minutes! They didn't even have time to evacuate with the black boxes! The progress bar had already filled most of the way long ago! In the face of imminent catastrophe, he instead calmed down, fixing his eyes on the old man on screen. "Can you stop it? The current situation no longer satisfies the conditions for triggering the dome self-destruction protocol!" Tree replied in its completely flat voice: "Request non-compliant. Administrator privileges not detected. Sanctuary Protocol cannot be modified." Hearing the first half, Ten-Punch Superman's heart sank to rock bottom, yet upon hearing the last sentence, hope flared up once more. The reason the request was non-compliant was the *modification* of the protocol, not the request itself. In other words— So long as he didn't modify the protocol itself and merely offered a reinterpretation of the existing terms, he still had a chance to convince this stubborn AI! Thoughts raced through his head at breakneck speed. Suddenly, his eyes fell upon the remains in the hibernation pod holding the insect eggs, and his train of thought clicked wide open. The answer had been left behind long ago... Looking at Tree on the screen, he took a deep breath and spoke with utmost seriousness. "I have an inquiry regarding the assessment criteria for the disappearance of resident life signals." Sure enough, Tree responded to him. "State your inquiry." Ten-Punch Superman gazed at the virtual projection on screen, enunciating every word clearly. "Am I a resident of Shelter 100?" Tree answered coldly, "No registered biometric data detected. Assessed as negative." Ten-Punch Superman: "Therefore, only if 3,000 'residents of Shelter 100' remain can the dome self-destruction protocol be prevented from executing." Tree: "Understanding correct. That is one of the fundamental conditions. In addition, the daily average population must be maintained above 5,000 for 180 consecutive days." Ten-Punch Superman: "Then I would like to ask: what about the children of Shelter 100 residents? Can they also be counted as residents of Shelter 100?" Tree: "Naturally. As long as biological lineage between different living entities can be established, shelter resident status is granted—" Glancing at the countdown with only minutes remaining, Ten-Punch Superman cut it off, speaking at rapid-fire speed: "Then I implore you to open your eyes and look at just how many people are actually in this shelter!" Tree: "Zero." Ignoring its cold, merciless reply, Ten-Punch Superman did not give up. Instead, treating a dead horse as a live one, he pushed on with his sophistry: "Open your eyes wider! They haven't vanished! They are still right here! It's just that during the time you were dormant, they altered their form of life! Those bugs in your eyes are the continuation of their lives, and the proof lies right inside the hibernation pod before me! What was the biometric data of the last resident on B100 before he entered the pod, and what was the biometric data after the hatch opened? Does that still not suffice to prove their identity?!" Ten-Punch Superman knew full well he was splitting hairs. Yet this argument wasn't something he had pulled out of thin air. Over a century ago, a witness had already thought it out for him. That person who called himself the Tombkeeper. The rituals he had performed were not meaningless, nor were the legacies he left behind intended to be mere grave goods to be buried alongside him. That man had foreseen that one day in the future, someone would unseal this grave, and he had foreseen that those people would inevitably reboot the silent reactor. To undo the catastrophe born of their shared folly, and to halt the execution of the dome self-destruction protocol, he had designed his own final demise—exploiting a loophole in the shelter's biometric identification system to transform himself into a bug. This was his final exploitation of a Shelter system bug. Only this time, it was not to wage war against the "Tree People," but to protect the home he had once hated with all his heart and sought to escape at any cost. Tree deliberated for a moment. Under the watchful gazes of the players, it slowly nodded. "Supplementary clause updated." "Assessment result corrected. Current resident count: 6,790,000..." The shrill alarm cut off in the very last minute before the countdown expired. Ten-Punch Superman and the teammates beside him all let out a collective breath of relief. Catching his breath, he couldn't help marveling inwardly. He hadn't expected there to be so many ghost-face bugs in this shelter... A staggering six million-plus. Still, no matter what, they had cleared this hurdle. As for how to clean up this colossal mess later, they could leave that for the Administrator to worry about. There ought to be a way to reclaim administrator privileges from that Tree. At that moment, the old man on screen whose facial features were blurred by mosaic suddenly smiled faintly. Though he couldn't see the curve of his lips, Ten-Punch Superman was certain he hadn't misjudged it. "I leave it to you." Leaving behind that poignant parting line, before anyone could react, the static flickering across the screen vanished. As if he had never been there at all... Rest in Peace blinked. "What did he say?" Ten-Punch Superman was also at a loss. "It sounded like... 'I leave it to you'?" Unconscious scratched his head in bewilderment. "What does that mean?" "No idea..." Ten-Punch Superman took a deep breath, looking around at his squad. "Anyway, I'll log off first and report the situation down here to the surface. Don't touch anything here for now; who knows what other weird stuff might be hiding inside." The mission was complete. He had no desire to invite further complications. The other teammates exchanged looks and nodded in agreement. "Got it." Ten-Punch Superman sat down on the ground and closed his eyes. *** At the same time, on the official website of another world. Almost the instant he logged onto the forum, he spotted a cluster of red notifications hovering over his private message inbox. Clicking into it, he found a chat window where I'm the Darkest had been crazily tagging him. I'm the Darkest: *Holy crap, what are you guys doing down there?* Ten-Punch Superman: *Oh, that. Don't worry, we just sorted it out.* I'm the Darkest: *???* Ten-Punch Superman: *Also, we finished the final side quest... Sadly, no survivors were found. The hibernation pod was crammed with bugs, and the guy ended his own life.* I'm the Darkest: *Ended his own life? Wait, didn't they turn into bugs? (Shocked)* Ten-Punch Superman: *Turned into bugs? Is that how it works? But to me, that looked more like an ordinary neural connection setup.* I'm the Darkest: *Well, that's...* Ten-Punch Superman: *According to the last will left by the final survivor on B100, he dragged the bodies of his compatriots into the cold storage, and finally climbed into the hibernation pod himself. But he didn't activate the freezing sequence; instead, he chose to end his life... Perhaps at the very end of his days, he took control of robots or bugs to catch a glimpse of the outside world, turning into a bug just like you said.* I'm the Darkest remained silent for a long while before replying with a single line. *...That's way too absurd.* Ten-Punch Superman sighed and typed back. *Yeah, I think so too, but that's their final ending... Our mission is done. Time to pull out.* What he had uncovered was merely the perspective of the "Worker Ants," not the complete picture of the crisis that had gripped this shelter over a century ago. Perhaps in the future, the history of this shelter would be posted on the *Wasteland OL* forums, just like the other shelters unearthed by players. Though... They probably shouldn't count on the trash dev to do it himself...