Episode 138 — Reflection is a Step Forward (Part 1)
When Gustav appeared the next morning, the dark circles under his eyes were even deeper than the day before. However, his gaze no longer held hesitation—it was filled with a heavy, grim resolve.
"Good morning, Mr. Zect. Last night, I visited the worker's cafeteria in the new city and the settlement areas."
"Morning, Gustav. That’s some intense fieldwork you did there. So, how was the reality check?"
I sat on the sofa, keeping Tama on my lap as I spoke. Gustav shook his head weakly.
"The prosperity of Felsen that I was so proud of... it was achieved by stripping away the pride of craftsmen in neighboring lands and sucking the labor out of their villages. In the shadow of every individual we saved, the surrounding system is collapsing. Yesterday, when you called it a 'silent poison,' I truly felt the weight of those words for the first time. Without even realizing it... I have been a plunderer."
Hearing Gustav force out those words made me sit up a little straighter. I set my cola can on the table and admitted my own share of the blame.
"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m reflecting on it too. To be honest, I was a bit naive. I was so focused on optimizing the local environment of Felsen that I completely ignored the load balancing for the motherboard of the entire world. It’s basic logic: if you spike the specs of just one node, communication with the rest of the network times out and the whole system crashes. I should have seen that coming."
We shared a brief moment of silence. But I didn't let it linger; I swiped the screen of my tablet.
"But that’s enough wallowing. If we’ve got error logs, we need to push a patch and fix the code immediately. Gustav, take a look at this. Let’s do a deep dive into that 'Civil War' I mentioned yesterday."
With a flick of my finger, I cast the search results to the large monitor in the living room. The screen filled with vast records of an unprecedented internal conflict from my world, along with vivid documents depicting the era. Gustav stared at the unknown script and images as if trying to burn them into his memory.
"It was a war that split a single nation in two for four long years. At its core, it was a fundamental 'OS mismatch' between the North and the South. The North was pushing for industrialization; they wanted high tariffs to protect their domestic manufacturing. The South, on the other hand, relied on massive cotton plantations—a business model dependent on the cheap labor of slavery—and they wanted free trade. This 'structural economic lag' eventually spiraled past political debate and exploded into violence."
Every time I swiped the screen, the diagrams shifted, showing the blue uniforms of the Union and the gray of the Confederacy. Gustav bit his lip, eyes glued to the statistical data of the power gap.
"When the war started, the North had a population of about twenty-two million. The South had nine million, and three and a half million of those were slaves. In terms of transportation infrastructure, factory output, and total resources, the North was anywhere from several to dozens of times more powerful than the South. Technically, the process should have finished almost instantly. But the South had excellent generals, and more importantly, they were desperate to 'protect their way of life.' The conflict turned into a quagmire. They recorded the highest casualties of the time, with over twenty thousand dead or wounded in a single day."
I could hear Gustav swallow hard as he looked at the photos of fallen soldiers piled upon the battlefield. I kept going.
"As the war dragged on, the North deployed a massive patch called the 'Emancipation Proclamation.' This wasn't just a humanitarian statement; it was a high-level strategic move to collapse the Southern labor force from within and secure international moral high ground. They halted the Southern advance, and finally ended it through sheer attrition and a 'scorched earth' campaign that burned the South’s infrastructure to the ground. Total casualties exceeded six hundred thousand. Relative to the population at the time, it was fatal damage—right on the edge of what the system could survive."
The screen showed the ruins of Southern cities and the generals signing the surrender documents. Gustav remained speechless for a long time before finally asking in a trembling voice.
"What... what happened to that country after the war ended? Could they truly recover after such a wound?"
"It took time. After the war, Northern capital and technology flooded into the South, forcibly 'installing' the wave of industrialization. After several long decades, the entire country was unified under the same 'Industrial OS.' They eventually reached an equilibrium with a level of economic power that was incomparable to before. But... the price was staggering."
"And is this... the future we are heading toward? Must we spill so much blood and turn an era into ash just to achieve equilibrium?"
The light faded from Gustav’s eyes. A shadow fell over his face as his understanding twisted into despair.