Humanity Protection Company

TL/Editor: raei

Status: 5/week mon-fri

Illustrations: posted in discord

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Lee Yeonwoo rested in a filthy hospital room, receiving news through Mark Jung. Whether the company had adjusted Yeonwoo's position or not, all information was provided without falsehood.

It was information that simple field workers would find difficult to hear.

The Association President's sealing and negotiation with the Club and multiple demons.

"So they negotiated to exchange the main force and core personnel, from what I hear," Mark Jung said.

"Isn't that karma for those demon worshippers?" Yeonwoo asked, his expression ambiguous.

Sure, the Association President had suddenly appeared, but Yeonwoo suspected it happened because a deranged demon had sucker-punched them.

Mark Jung gave a hollow laugh. "You think demons care about that? They're the type to gleefully charge in when they find an excuse to go wild."

"That's true."

They were the kind of bastards who'd drop their main force into a warzone for their own amusement. That archdemon might have invaded the Seoul Arts Center just because he loved revenge and chaos.

'Why are there no sane ones? The company and Club are relatively normal at least,' Yeonwoo lamented. There were too many lunatics in the world. Weren't the magicians arguing about where to drop some Red Giant for fun?

Doomsday cultists, artists, demons, the Green Sect, other groups. They'd all lost their minds completely.

"Since there's an Association President-level figure on the demon worshipper side too, it seems they negotiated a clean exchange as if nothing happened. Nothing was killed or destroyed," Mark Jung explained.

Yeonwoo suddenly raised his head, his curiosity piqued. "Who's on the demon worshipper side? Someone like the Association President?"

"I don't know exactly..." Mark Jung furrowed his brow as if recalling something. After thinking for a moment, he said, "Not a demon, but a worshipper. I heard they're in hell. Probably not dead, but I'm not sure what they're doing."

As long as they weren't on Earth, it was fine. He hadn't heard anything about them returning so far, so it seemed he didn't need to worry about it.

Yeonwoo looked around the hospital room. It had merged with the afterlife, transforming into an abandoned hospital straight out of a horror movie. Outside, ghostly office workers were wandering about, and an eerie chill swirled through the air.

It was a worrying sight.

"Are the fragments alright? Didn't you say contamination was a problem? And those who were at war..." Yeonwoo asked, his voice laced with concern.

The afterlife had poured into reality. The once ordinary hospital had become an anomaly. Wouldn't the entities whose minds were contaminated by seeing the Association President at the battlefield also be running wild?

Mark Jung spoke with a slightly dark expression. "I hear they're in the middle of cleaning up right now."

"How?" Yeonwoo asked. Can this even be cleaned up?

Even Yeonwoo, who hadn't yet grasped the company's capabilities, asked in a worried voice. Mark Jung's lips twitched before he spoke awkwardly.

"The best options were destruction and banishment. It's similar now." Mark Jung subtly averted his gaze. "Banishment. They decided to just dump everything in other worlds. Actually, it's easier to banish the fragments separately than to banish the entire afterlife..."

Yeonwoo suddenly recalled a memory. The Earth that the Tree Person had shown him, destroyed by climate anomalies. Back then, they built a migration site in two dimensions, using Earth as a trash can to dump unmanageable anomalies.

As expected of the company. Whether they had a scenario prepared or not, they came up with a similar solution to a similar problem. The solution to dump the contaminants elsewhere.

Yeonwoo thought of various things to say, but in the end, he only uttered a brief comment. "The magicians must be thrilled."

"They're apparently in a party mood right now..." Mark Jung replied.

This one might live well if we release it there, I don't like that world so let's dump it in that other one, other dimensions might not be so bad after all.

Mark Jung imagined the conversations of the magicians he had seen a few times, while Yeonwoo rubbed his tired eyes.

Anyway, it meant there were no major problems. If the world was intact, if it wasn't an unmanageable issue like the climate anomalies, it was okay to relax.

'My job is done,' Yeonwoo thought.

He completely let his guard down and leaned back on the tattered bed. Outside the hazy, cracked window, there was chaos in full swing, but that was no longer his concern.

As Yeonwoo seemed about to fall asleep, Mark Jung turned on his laptop and plugged earphones into his ears.

'First, let's recover the memories. Then, plan the department Yeonwoo wants to create, and prepare future plans.'

Yeonwoo's work was done, but Mark Jung still had a lot of work left.

Mark Jung began playing video records he had saved while starting his document work. Before placing his hands on the keyboard, he took one last look out the window.

People were murmuring. The commotion could be heard even inside the hospital room.

"Isn't that where the meteor fell? It's completely ruined? Look at those broken windows and peeling paint."

"This is the hospital in Sangpyeong City-"

Police and firefighters were controlling the crowd. People were holding up their phones and chattering. News crews were doing live broadcasts.

Mark Jung smiled faintly. 'They've given up on keeping secrets. But they haven't stopped controlling information.'

A new era of information control. The Intelligence Department's method of abandoning outdated control methods and adapting to the information age.

Under the company's protection, ordinary people would never reach the truth. They would view this world overflowing with anomalies as safe.

---

---

Until now, the company had pursued complete secrecy and total information control. Not letting even a shred of information leak out, ensuring that ordinary people couldn't perceive even a shadow of the anomalous.

But times had changed.

The internet accessible from anywhere, phones with cameras, information easily uploaded and viewed by anyone.

An era where each person was an investigator and informant. That unfathomable sea of information.

As technology advanced and population grew, the company felt its limits approaching.

- This won't do. We can no longer maintain secrecy.

- The amount of memory eraser consumed annually is increasing exponentially, as are the resources needed to monitor all information.

And then the climate anomalies came.

The company gave up on maintaining secrecy. They had no resources to invest in keeping secrets on a doomed Earth with people who would die anyway.

But the climate anomalies disappeared, and the company changed its information control methods.

More efficiently, suited to this era.

- Big Brother doesn't suit the modern age.

- Let's make people not take interest or seek the truth of their own free will. Just like how people don't seek news of ongoing wars in other countries.

- If we tweak the information censorship system a bit, we can monitor the whole world with fewer resources. 8 billion people will be our eyes.

- We'll also use persistent individuals as investigators.

That's the current situation.

---

---

Reporter Kim Deokbok glared at his phone while smoking a cigarette. It was an emergency broadcast from the station he worked for as a reporter, but the level of broadcasting was utterly incomprehensible to him.

No, all the broadcasts were like that.

He flipped through the broadcasts being streamed live.

- This is the end! The Creator is punishing us-

- I received a divine revelation, and that is the afterlife. The afterlife has backflowed. How do I know? God told me!

- This is clearly an attack by the Reptilians! Everyone, beware of Reptilians! We must not forget the Blue House attack! There are Reptilians among us-

- Didn't they prove that Reptilian thing was a plague ages ago!

Self-proclaimed experts appeared as guests, spouting nonsense. Sometimes these quacks would grab each other by the collar and fight.

- You're saying it's a supernatural phenomenon because the meteor is translucent, but this is a rare occurrence. The water vapor in the atmosphere-

At least the professor's explanation seemed plausible.

"This isn't right," Kim Deokbok muttered.

Tired of it all, Kim Deokbok switched to another broadcast. Politics, celebrities, corporations, diplomacy, news from other countries, entertainment, sports - countless pieces of information flowed by.

Kim Deokbok snapped out of it while watching some girl group performance.

This wasn't the time. He needed to uncover the truth. To find out the truth of this world that had gone strange since the Blue House terror attack, and let everyone know.

"There's definitely another side to this story."

Because he had seen the fragment fall on the hospital with his own eyes. He had seen something different from a meteor impact.

The moment he saw that, his usual suspicions turned into certainty, and his cigarette burned down to the filter.

After some deliberation, Kim Deokbok logged into the video streaming platform where he did part-time live streaming.

The platform, where countless videos were being uploaded, recommended videos tailored to Kim Deokbok's tastes as if it had been waiting for him to log in.

Girl groups, videos investigating anomalous phenomena, videos from the broadcasting station he worked for, vitamin supplement ads, and so on.

Among them was a video that piqued his interest. Something about a snowman killing people.

"This is quite detailed..." Kim Deokbok mused as he watched the video. He noticed the locations and incident cases were specific. It was as if someone had already gathered information firsthand.

After some consideration, Kim Deokbok decided to investigate this incident.

He quickly stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and returned to his car, flexing his fingers that had gone numb from the cold.

It would be good if he could uncover the truth, and even if he couldn't, he could write an article about it. He could also stream the investigation process.

Kim Deokbok's car sped down the winter road.

He didn't know. He didn't know that the video recommended to his algorithm was one created and deliberately recommended by the company. Nor did he realize that he had unwittingly set out to investigate as the company's eyes.

He was also unaware that the viewers of his stream were the company's AI, and that it wasn't actually being broadcast.

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