Zeroth Directive

Archive III

Even today, Kazdel's infrastructure remains quite underdeveloped, and the newly built intercity network has yet to become widespread. This inevitably raises a question: in that era, one that was plainly even more chaotic and derelict, did Kazdel really have an information realm where Closure could run wild? Closure's answer to this is, 'If there isn't one, just build one yourself.' Of course, the reality was nowhere near that simple. At the time, Kazdel had no soil in which an intercity network could take root, and Sarkaz had essentially only one way to come into contact with electronics: taking them from Sanktas by force. What ordinary Sarkaz wanted most were naturally patron firearms, followed by the currencies of various nations, Originium Ingots, and precious metals, then things that could be eaten, drunk, or put to practical use. Most advanced electronics were, to them, honestly baffling things: heavy, complicated, and not worth much even if taken apart. Some people would bring these things back to Kazdel and sell them with a waste-not mindset, and that was what gave the Sarkaz in the city the opportunity to come into contact with electronics. Closure was one of the first to do so. But whenever she went outside, she had to face relatives with whom she had strained relations, and she had no one to share all her strange knowledge and new discoveries with. During that period, Closure probably craved communication more than at any other time in her life... until she successfully used a specific frequency band to contact another electronics hobbyist nearby. Everything that followed needs no telling. Recently, engineers working to set up Kazdel's intercity network infrastructure can still find homemade base stations and repeaters tucked away in all sorts of nooks and crannies—the handiwork of Closure and her friends from back then. Closure was responsible for design and communications from the attic, while her friends handled installation in the field. As an aside, in the sentence 'I was tinkering with circuits in the attic back then,' the most important piece of information is not anything else, but 'attic'—being able to afford a house with an attic, where locking the door could shut out almost all interference, was honestly a decent luxury in Kazdel at the time. As another aside, the first electronic device I got my hands on had been modified by the Sankta who was robbed... who was killed. I wanted to talk to that person, and I thought about it for a long, long time. That person should not have died like that. Neither should the Sarkaz who died to kill that person. —Closure

Archive IV

After building up Kazdel's little circle of technology pioneers, Closure and her friends soon encountered their first disagreement—what they had already done, what they could do, and what they might someday be able to do were all enough to earn money in Kazdel, and even in most parts of Terra. A whole lot of money. Several cash-strapped partners proposed a plan to monetize it. Naturally, the already loose circle had no way to stop them, and these partners immediately became hot commodities in the Scar Market. Later, some who truly could no longer stand Kazdel's environment left for distant lands, and coupled with Kazdel's excessively high population turnover rate, Closure became a loner once more. The only people she could still talk to were a few friends she knew inside and out—or at least she believed she knew them through and through. It was also during this period that the infamy of a certain saboteur began to spread through Kazdel. This person would hack indiscriminately into any database they could get into (mostly ones her former friends had built for someone), servers (rare treasures among rare treasures), and even stolen personal terminals. Sometimes they left after leaving a trace; sometimes they wrecked everything inside as if venting. Outside the attic, Closure's family even, in a rare show of concern, began to worry whether this deviant little brat had recently suffered some sort of mental blow—and their concern was not exactly wrong. It was only much, much later that Closure realized that the person she was back then had probably been yearning for something called the 'open-source spirit' in Columbia, something utterly at odds with her identity as a Vampire. Closure had long since desensitized herself to both her identity as a Vampire and 'what Vampires are supposed to be.' Ask her now, and she will clearly list the Vampire she does not dislike (Warfarin), the Vampire she does not dislike all that much (Entelechia), the Vampire she dislikes (Duq'arael), and the Vampires she would rather die than meet (her parents). But before she fully thought it through, her identity as a Vampire did trouble her for a long time—why had she been born into a race that pursues 'purity' and 'perfection,' and used clearly loaded words like 'filth' and 'debasement' to mark out its hierarchy? Program development requires trial and error, and engineering construction must allow for error and redundancy. Between her and her first group of friends, nothing was off-limits; just recalling all that Vampire nonsense while chatting was enough to set her teeth on edge. That was why she wanted open source, why she wanted a place that everyone could freely use, freely study, and freely contribute to. At the very least, she wanted to create the conditions for such a place. Perhaps, to her, this was the most direct understanding of 'breaking through the shackles of tradition.' The barriers between races, discrimination born of differences in seniority, a hierarchy based on bloodline... all of these were traditional shackles that bound her, and every one of them was something she broke through. From this perspective, her reason for moving forward together with us has never changed from the very beginning.

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Archive IV