Sweet Dreams

Doctor Joel Park awakened to find an email from Maschine Gott. The email request was nothing too major. Tranquilizers were easy enough to acquire and manufacture. Joel’s personal favorite was a succinylcholine-based solution. A bit of that could knock out all but the largest animals.

It could knock out most humans in a flash. The chemical would cause complete muscle relaxation, disabling the target in a non-lethal manner. Since most bulletproof vests didn’t stop sharp objects too well, the tranquilizers would go through. Each dart was like a small, rapidly injecting syringe. When it contacted with a target, a small explosive charge would rapidly inject the contents into the body. That way, even if the dart was pulled out, it had already injected its payload.

Since it was easy enough to acquire, he might want to ask for more advice on guns. The Doctor knew he might need it soon. He had been stepping up his personal hunt for Gaians, and a potential cell had been located, just a few kilometers away.

How he should handle them was a question he had no idea on how to answer. His gut reaction was to go in and shoot them all. It would be fast, brutal, and they wouldn’t know what hit them. However, there were other considerations.

First was legal. If he went in there with intent to kill, planning every bit of his attack, he would essentially be committing several counts of first-degree murder. Even though they were part of an evil, twisted group, that cell might not have done anything.

Yet, Joel mused. But still, they might have done something, but I have no means of proving it.

Maschine Gott had been very vocal about use of firearms for Network goals: Only use them in self-defense, and when you can claim self-defense. It was hard to defend a raid on a group of people who didn’t even have weapons. If he was caught fleeing the scene after breaking and entering and shooting people in their homes, it would seem more like breaking and entering than fighting evil murderers to the media.

Second, there was the risk of collateral damage. Some of the terrorists might have families, and some of the bullets might penetrate the walls and ceilings. A breaking and entering and shooting would be bad enough, but the last thing Joel needed was to shoot an innocent person. He didn’t want to sink down to their level.

Third, there was political considerations. For some reason, the South Korean government wasn’t keeping an eye on the Gaians. Then again, the government sent millions of US dollars worth of aid money to North Korea. The government might not have the surveillance powers of the neocons in the USA, but it certainly had no problems funding rogue states with taxpayer dollars.

The whole policy seemed aberrant to Joel. He had been mainly raised in the States, but followed local politics somewhat. Since the 1990s, the South Koreans had given money to the North Korean regime. The so-called “sunshine policy” had South Korean money used to execute and brutalize civilians in North Korea.

The policy was named for one of Aesop’s fables. In the fable, the sun and the wind both tried to get a man to remove his coat. The wind tried blowing harder, but that just made the man hold his coat tighter. The sun, however, shined more brightly, and the man removed his coat to enjoy the warm day. Also, interestingly enough, the politicians that pushed for the sunshine policy were investigated for corruption possibly involving North Korean money. Some South Korean companies simply wanted to exploit the cheap labor.

The intention was to get North Korea to open up and not expect anything in return. However, instead of opening up and rejoining the world community, North Korea was simply cracking down on dissent and creating a cult of personality about the warped leader. The North Koreans did not return the South’s generosity. They had denounced the idea for a center for reunion of Korean families torn apart during the war. They had been responsible for counterfeiting American money, instigating border skirmishes, and pursuing their nuclear program.

Those were hardly friendly gestures. And the South Korean government still kept the aid money flowing. Not to mention, media that criticized the North Korean government’s human rights record was banned or muted out of fear of alienating the North. The freedom of speech of their own citizens was being suppressed due to fear of annoying a Third World despot.

China had also given money to North Korea, their old ally during the Korean War. Since the Cold War’s end, however, the North Koreans had often acted counter to Beijing’s influence. Recently, North Korea had become more of a liability than an asset to the Chinese. Instead of being equal trading partners, the North existed as a welfare state dependant on outside help.

While the regime somehow wheezed along, the Chinese and South Koreans continued to channel aid money. While the state was an argumentative one, both had the mutual interest of maintaining the status quo. If the North Korean regime fell, the resulting disorder would create a flood of refugees over both borders. Never mind the UN or some international agency could help, with enough planning.

Joel never really got the Sunshine Policy, nor the Uri Party that created it. The Uri Party might ban plays, movies, and videogames showing the harsh North Korean regime, but thankfully there was criticism of it. There was misguided idealism in the policy. Submission to some Third World despots would not work. It would just continue the cycle of evil states “hitting up” First World states for cash.

It vaguely reminded Joel of an interesting medieval fact he had read. Sometimes, medieval beggars would break their own children’s bones so passer-byers would have more sympathy for them, and give them more money. That was how countless Third World states operated. The despots would use their armies to keep their citizens ignorant, poor, and starving, all while claiming they were the “victims of Western exploitation,” (or some similar crap). Then, they would use any foreign aid money to fund the military that kept their own people down.

North Korea was nothing special when it came to Third World despotism, save it had a nuclear program involving second-hand centrifuges and vintage missile systems. It was just another state shaking down and threatening its more developed neighbors, like Russia, South Korea, China, and Japan. It also gave the American neocons the “factual basis” they needed to fund the “National Missile Defense System.”

It was also giving Japanese far right the excuse it needed to remilitarize. The American neocons were only to happy to let them do that. The Japanese constitution’s “Article 9” would likely soon be “reinterpreted” to allow a larger “official” military for Japan. Since the American neocons seemed to favor Japan as a far eastern ally, they often ignored others, such as the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. That was cause for more than a bit of friction diplomatically.

Japanese colonialism and atrocities in WWII and before had set the stage for a future distrust between them and their neighbors. While many Japanese intellectuals had first publicized and brought attention to the events, the Japanese far-right began to deny them. While most Japanese textbooks decried their own WWII atrocities, a few rightwing publishers began to deny them. Instead of mentioning the Rape of Nanking, slave labor programs, sexual slavery, or cannibalism, the far right had instead claimed “Japan liberated Asia from Western colonialism” while denying the fact Japan had colonies of its own.

The Japanese policy towards Korea, for instance, could only be described as cultural extermination and slavery. Under Japanese colonial rule, the Koreans had been forced to adopt Japanese names and speak only Japanese. Korean cultural relics and skills were almost completely destroyed in the period. Even though the US was allied with both Japan and South Korea, both states had distrusted each other.

One common thing in both North and South Korea was textbooks. Even the Japanese revisionist textbooks were a fraction of the total market. In both Koreas, each government published one set of textbooks, where Japan was blamed for many of the peninsula’s problems. While Joel did agree Japan was responsible for a lot of the peninsula’s problems, he thought it was also important to realize another source of the peninsula’s problems: North Korea.

It was the government’s insistence on some mindlessly idealistic program, plus distrust of non-Koreans in general, that truly threatened the nation. South Korea was trying to attract more foreign investment, but was distrustful of most of its neighbors. In an ironic way, it was the same thing that was happening to Japan.

Japan’s economy was having problems recently due to a dearth of labor and innovation. The Japanese right, trying to prevent foreign settlement and intermarriage, had made immigration to Japan hard. Even though they had a strong electronics-drive, export-based economy, few migrant workers in both the blue collar or white collar sectors settled there. Without a source of immigrant labor, a nation was denying itself a long term benefit.

The immigrants normally worked to improve their families’ lot, and would assimilate into the nation. While the settled people might call them “outsiders,” the immigrants would assimilate within a few generations. That cosmopolitan nature was what allowed the USA to become a world-spanning superpower, after all. It was what allowed Singapore to be an emerging regional power, and the few open European countries to retain a sense of “worldliness.”

While most of Asia, Europe, and increasingly the USA distrusted anyone “foreigner,” Joel believed the opposite. He had been raised in the USA, and his wife was American. She was given token tasks at work, often forced into translating texts rather than writing them. Even before his daughter was taken, he had heard people at school told her to “go back to her own country.” If that happened to someone in the States, they’d sue the school district for that. In South Korea, no one batted an eye.

In a sense, South Korea was making the same mistake as Japan. Joel did believe South Korea was more open to change, however. They were willing to invest in biotech and nanotech while Japan simply stuck with several niche markets in electronics.

The Japanese economy stuck simply with harmless improvements on existing technologies rather than true innovation. The next generation of Japanese videogame consoles might have better graphics, and the next generation of Japanese cars might look more streamline, but neither was anything revolutionary until itself. The videogames still connected to televisions. The cars still ran on gasoline.

Even the most diverse city in Asia had some innovation. Singapore was trying to attract foreign biotech scientists, and had a strong domestic program. However, the ruling PAP disliked it when people had other political opinions than them. One Singaporean Network member, Nemo, had once recommended a simple solution to that. Create a community of foreign scientists who contributed much to the local economy, but were also active in local politics. The PAP, in order to avoid damaging foreign investments, would have to change somewhat as a result. The fact Singapore was ethnically and culturally diverse also added some strength to it.

South Korea, however, was a different story. Several factors needed to change, and cultural and ethnic diversity was merely one of them. The government, foreign policy, and others. Joel also had to either blow the whistle on the Gaians, or failing that, handle the problem himself. Of course, he might face some domestic problems. If they had friends in the government, it might be dangerous.

Of course, any corrupt government agents would likely hide behind some alleged “service to the Korean people.” Joel did not care much for such nationalistic bullshit. It was the duty of a true patriot to see behind such nationalism and reveal any bastards using it to hide dirty deeds. If he was able to somehow change the Sunshine Policy and perhaps even restore more public skepticism of North Korea, then it was a good long term benefit. Joel, however, considered himself a concerned parent first, and a patriot second.

He would have to ask the Network for advice on how to handle it, though. They would likely have some good responses. He did not want to become like the terrorists and racists. No one in the Network would want to help another child-murdering sociopath, after all. And neither he nor his wife wanted to become one.