Episode 134 — The End of Hibernation

"That should stabilize the environment for a while. You don’t mind if I switch to sleep mode, do you?"

It’s been over a year since I said that to Gustav. To be honest, he hasn't come to me with a single real 'ticket' since.

Technically, he’d drop by for routine status reports, but there were never any critical bugs. He probably took my 'break' comment literally and handled every minor glitch on his own.

As an execution environment, Felsen was performing with terrifying stability. It had reached a point of perfect autonomous operation where I didn't even feel the need to open the debug console anymore.

The Felsen Company, with the Gara-Mon Factory at its core, was basically monopolizing the continental textile market. Between their high-performance spinning machines and standardized tools like rulers and measuring cups, they were setting the new global standard. Even the investment fund was tracing a beautiful growth curve thanks to Argo’s high-precision math.

Land cultivation was perfectly synced with industrialization, and there wasn't a single sign of the city’s 'memory' leaking or the infrastructure crashing under its own weight. The whole system was spinning in an ideal equilibrium.

And what was the developer—me—doing during all this?

Well, if I’m being honest, I was drowning in a sea of archived entertainment assets on my HDD. I’d completely lost track of the real-world timeline.

I watched the entire nine-part space adventure saga five times. I plowed through ten volumes of an epic historical novel about 19th-century samurai from back home. I even rewatched every single New Year’s comedy special—those marathon holiday shows from my world—laughing until my ribs hurt.

The 'Throne of Laziness'—this sofa—had perfectly memorized the curve of my spine by now. It was practically a hardware peripheral of my body.

"Phew... man, I never get tired of that narration. Right, Tama?"

"Meow. (Half of your vocabulary is just recycled movie quotes at this point.)"

Tama, curled up on my lap, let out a disdainful huff.

My L-Point balance had become just a meaningless digit on a screen, and checking it felt like a waste of clicks. Lately, even Gustav’s visits were just peaceful status updates—stuff like 'Leon took first place in math' or 'I brought you some of the casino's new limited-edition sweets, Mr. Zect.'

(Over five hundred days of continuous uptime. Zero critical errors. This is it—the perfected retirement environment I’ve been coding for...)

I was just starting to browse my library for the next 'rerun' when it happened.

"Ding-dong."

"Mr. Zect... I’m sorry to disturb your rest. But... I’ve run into a contradiction in the specifications that I simply can’t overlook."

Gustav stepped into the living room. The peaceful vibe he’d carried lately was gone, replaced by the sharp, pressurized look of a ruler.

"What is it, Gustav? Did Duke Daryl lose too much at the casino again and start questioning the RNG of the dice?"

"No. It’s about the Lord’s Council. Duke Daryl, Earl Baran... the neighboring lords who once pledged friendship to Felsen have turned on us. It was a unanimous condemnation."

"Condemnation? For what? Did we break some legacy protocol?"

"The immigration issue. Because we’ve become so prosperous, the wave of people leaving the surrounding lands for Felsen won’t stop. They claim we’re using 'unfair convenience' to plunder their labor force. They’ve formally demanded that we stop accepting immigrants."

Gustav clenched his fist, his voice tight with frustration.

"Mr. Zect... I struggle to understand this. Why must we turn away people seeking a better life? The gates of Felsen should stay open to anyone seeking help. I want to keep accepting them without limit—to expand the logic of Felsen even further!"

Gustav’s eyes were burning with that raw, youthful sense of justice. I looked at the heroes currently paused on my monitor and let out a deep, heavy sigh.

"Gustav. That 'unlimited acceptance' command is basically a self-destruct button for Felsen right now. If you run it, we’ll be in an all-out war with a coalition of neighbors within months."

"What?! But why?! We’re just trying to save people! We aren't invading them with hardware—er, with military force!"

"If one specific node on the network suddenly spikes in specs, it creates an unbearable pressure differential. From their perspective, having their people—the only production resource that generates wealth—sucked away by Felsen is the same as a DDoS attack on their very foundation. It’s an existential threat."

Gustav stood there, speechless.

"Felsen is currently a giant security risk to the surrounding territories. Every time you accept an immigrant out of the goodness of your heart, the 'future' disappears from the neighboring land. When people get cornered, they stop caring about logic. They’ll come to physically smash the Felsen hardware just to survive. Our development is, to them, an act of aggression."

Gustav sank deep into the sofa. The realization that his 'justice' was actually a silent poison choking his neighbors seemed to make his skin crawl.

"Then... are you saying we should just abandon them? The people looking to us with hope?"

"I didn't say that. I'm saying we’ve hit the limit for localized processing on a single server."

I set my empty cola can on the table and closed the entertainment list. It looked like my sleep mode was being forcibly terminated by a high-priority interrupt.

(Well, great. The phase of just patching Felsen is over. From here on out, I have to figure out how to calibrate the entire motherboard known as the world.)

"Mrrp. (Finally, the light is returning to those dead eyes. You were starting to look like a zombie.)"

Tama yawned on my lap.

The construction of a 'Wide-Area Symbiotic Network'—accessing an uncharted domain. I began a frantic search through the archives of my brain for the right solution.

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