Chapter 447.2: Hundred Year Old Lonely Fella

Skipping over lengthy descriptions, time quickly came to the 41st year of the Wasteland Era.

The committee's efforts to exterminate the Mutant Slime Mold were immense, and the endless winter only made the problems of resource scarcity and low productivity more acute.

Even some climatologists despairingly stated that this planet might not be transforming into a wasteland but was evolving into a more resilient polar planet, with one-third of the land eventually buried under 240 meters of ice.

That war probably set the world back 18,000 years.

However, even so, clearing the Mutant Slime Mold from the planet remained the top priority. Various research indications showed that the complex life form was more cold-resistant than other native carbon-based life forms.

If the issue couldn't be resolved before the situation worsened, future problems would exceed everyone's expectations.

To date, survivors had not yet discovered any limiting characteristics of the Mutant Slime Mold. There was only pure fear of those monsters that couldn't be cleared even with nuclear bombs.

If the survivors back then knew that simply abandoning the urban circles of the Federation Era and retreating to less densely built suburbs would allow the Mutant Slime Mold to expand to a certain extent before entering a decline phase, perhaps there wouldn't have been so many troubles.

Of course, that was considering the problem from the perspective of someone later in time. Much of the research on Mutant Slime Mold was discovered during the war against it.

In summary, to compensate for the loss of manpower, the committee's defense department, based on the Wislander People Plan, proposed even further demands. They needed a type of clone soldier that could be quickly mass-produced and effective on the battlefield.

They didn't need to be very sensitive, nor did they need to possess extraordinary human intellect, but they had to complete the cycle from production line to battlefield in the shortest time possible.

Compared to the defense department of the Wasteland Era in the 21st year, the defense department in the 41st year had clearly become more extreme.

The Post-War Reconstruction Committee convened a meeting to discuss related legislation, involving the production, defense, and technical departments in the debate.

In the documents, it was recorded as the Tripartite Meeting.

That was also the second major divergence encountered by the Post-War Reconstruction Committee since its establishment.

Long-standing contradictions had already reached a peak before the end of the meeting, and the public debate at the meeting was more like an avenue for the rest to vent their frustrations.

The continuously suffering defense department demanded that the production and technical departments provide a type of clone soldier capable of being effective on the battlefield to replace the casualties.

From the standpoint of the defense department, that was a completely reasonable request.

After all, their soldiers were not only responsible for maintaining danger and order in the settlements but also protected the technical department's prospectors entering the ruins to recover pre-war technologies.

That

war had ended for 41 years, but their war had never truly ended. If a generation took 20 years to grow, their sacrifice had already crossed two generations, affecting countless lives.

And the technical department, just like 20 years ago, still expressed strong objection, claiming that it would not only bring about technical risks like DNA contamination but could also potentially lead to a collapse at the civilizational level.

Their concerns were not unfounded.

The Wislanders, cultivated through genetic technology and lacking basic political rights, had become de facto slave soldiers, and history had even regressed to a more distant feudal era of slave society.

Their approach was wrong from the start. Clearly, they had better options. There were robots and AI capable of doing the jobs!

However, their proposal was opposed by the production department.

Without a complete industrial chain to support it, the cost of producing reliable robots was not just a matter of several times or dozens of times higher. Instead, it was exponentially higher.

The high production and maintenance costs were not something the Post-War Reconstruction Committee could afford.

Unless the expenditures for all the survivor settlements, including Boulder Town, were completely cut off, allowing the settlements to fend for themselves, they would never come close to affording it.

And even so, the costs saved would still be far from meeting the defense department's needs for manpower.

𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Moreover, cutting the budget for various survivor settlements would also mean that the Post-War Reconstruction Committee would lose a huge pool of manpower. The approach was akin to drinking poison to quench thirst.

To appease the technical and defense departments, the production department proposed many compromises.

For example, granting limited political rights to the Wislanders, lifting restrictions on reproduction, and several others. They would also appropriately integrate some Wislanders into the Federation, as long as they could establish outstanding merits on the battlefield.

As for the clones which could be produced more easily, there was no need to limit their lives to the role of cannon fodder. They could be allowed to freely enter factories or farms to engage in resource production.

This high-quality labor was not only needed by the defense department but also by the production department.

The meeting ultimately did not produce any results but instead laid the groundwork for the subsequent disintegration of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee.

The next year, the second year of the meeting in 2171, or the 42nd year of the Wasteland Era, the Academy's exploration team's recovery of the Wislander laboratory became the fuse that ignited the powder keg.

That place preserved the Wislander people's gene bank and also held the Singularity-level technology's adjustable lifecycle technology that had not been completed before the end of the Prosperity Era.

Under the leadership of Julius, the rapid-response brigade composed of Wislander people occupied the laboratory and detained all members of the technical department who had entered.

Faced with the strong protests and negotiations of the technical department, the defense department merely claimed it was Julius's personal action and showed extreme reluctance to arrest their out-of-control senior officer, even accidentally sending a nuclear fusion battery to the occupied laboratory.

Clearly, they were trying to complete their research. Or rather, to use some of the sub-technologies to create a clone army capable of growing eight times faster than regular humans.

Objectively speaking, the members of the defense department had already shown considerable restraint, as they could have used force to meet their objective. At the very least, they concocted a clumsy excuse to put on a show.

The committee's control over the various departments had already declined to its lowest point, while the conflicts between the defense department and the technical department reached their peak.

In year 2172, the 43rd year of the Wasteland Era, after several accidental incidents, the technical department completely lost trust in the defense department.

Under the leadership of Dr. Conclusion, the then-minister of the technical department and the dean of the Academy, the technical department, under the guise of exploring large ruins, moved a large number of core technical personnel to the northern marshes. Under the framework of the pre-war academic organization called the Academy, they began to build their own armed exploration forces.

The defense department was indifferent to their actions. Their focus was already shifting to the desert to the west, and Triumphant City and most military facilities were actually under the control of that out-of-control senior officer.

And while the production department was low-key, they were also not to be underestimated.

Even before the spark that ignited the Tripartite Meeting, they had already been quietly building up the settlements in the East Coast through methods like resource tilting.

Ideal City was born from their actions.

Not only that, but they even collaborated with the administrator of Shelter 6 and the then-captain of the starship to promote the Enterprise plan, established a regional Supreme Council, and proposed the overall direction of industrial salvation.

Perhaps in the eyes of the then-minister of the production department, the colonizers who had stranded their starship ship on the surface to save their mother planet, as well as the brave residents of Shelter 6 who had opened the gates to save more survivors, were more trustworthy than their so-called colleagues who argued fiercely at the negotiation table.

Although idealists rarely produced immediately visible results, every advancement of civilization was inseparable from their exploration.

They decided to replace the committee and become the explorers of the new era.