Closure

[Code Name] Closure

[Gender] Female

[Engineering Experience] 20 years

[Place of Birth] Kazdel

[Date of Birth] Dec 10

[Race] Sarkaz

[Height] 158cm

[Infection Status]

Medical tests have confirmed that no infection is present.

[Physical Strength] Normal

[Mobility] Excellent

[Physical Resilience] Standard

[Tactical Acumen] Outstanding

[Combat Skill] Standard

[Originium Arts Assimilation] Standard

Closure, Rhodes Island's Chief Engineer, head of the Procurement Department, and concurrent overseer of several other departments' affairs.

I'll be waiting for everyone at Procurement. If you want to get to know me, do you really need to read my file?

—Closure

Imaging tests reveal clear, normal outlines of internal organs, and no abnormal shadows have been detected. Originium granules have not been detected in the circulatory system and there is no sign of infection. At this time, this Operator is believed to be non-infected.

[Cell-Originium Assimilation] 0%

Closure shows no signs of Originium infection.

[Blood Originium-Crystal Density] 0.14u/L

Closure frequently comes into contact with various Originium industrial products. Her Blood Originium-Crystal Density is relatively high, but her protective measures against Oripathy are thorough and reliable. Overall, infection is considered unlikely.

This document contains paid content and is currently locked. Please contact Closure to purchase reading access.

If you actually pay, she will refund your money, then show you the main text. If you find Closure—assuming you can catch her—she will readily admit that charging fees violates Rhodes Island regulations, then show you the main text.

If you neither pay nor manage to find her, but still somehow see the main text, she will appear behind you of her own accord, interrogate you on how you did it, then spend several nights fixing the security flaws.

(After that, the head of HR readily told you several methods she knew for bypassing the lock. You chose one of them and successfully viewed the locked content. However, while you were browsing, a desktop pet shaped like a drone appeared on your screen. You cannot close it, and every so often, it pops up little speech bubbles saying things like 'You cheat!' and 'Pay your fine!'... But Closure never cut off your connection to this file in the end.)

Without a doubt, Closure is one of the most senior old-timers aboard Rhodes Island.

Generally speaking, old-timers often develop impressive quirks, such as Warfarin and Medical's late-night horror stories. Compared to that, Closure is fairly normal. What she does generally does not exceed the scope of her duties as Chief Engineer and head of the Procurement Department.

It is worth noting that while Kal'tsit was absent, Closure also had to make the final call on important decisions for Rhodes Island's various departments (usually excluding Medical). This part of her responsibilities has indeed been lightened after Kal'tsit's return, but a considerable portion of them continues to fall to her for various reasons. Closure is rather conflicted about this: even to an outsider, the work of Engineering and Procurement is already heavy enough, but beneath that glib exterior, her sense of responsibility makes it difficult for her to toss these burdens back to Kal'tsit, who has only recently returned.

Still, why Closure, of all people, became one of Rhodes Island's old-timers, and why she holds such an uncharacteristic sense of responsibility toward Rhodes Island, remains an interesting question. We could certainly trace it back to the day Theresa opened the door to her room. We could say her intense curiosity drove her to follow in the footsteps of Babel, Theresa, and even the Doctor. We could also attribute it to the deep bonds she formed over a long period of time with members of Babel or Rhodes Island. Another part of the reason is clearly that being at Rhodes Island gives her access to a great deal of advanced technology that ordinary people have never even heard of...

Haven't you already explained all the reasons?

—Closure

...All of these are true, yet they still do not fully explain her current state. Emotional bonds and opportunities to access the latest technology are indeed enough to keep her here, but they hardly seem enough to make someone who is clearly not diligent by nature take such genuine pleasure in the work of a pharmaceutical company, especially the parts that are, in truth, extremely repetitive.

Ugh, how annoying.

—Closure

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

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.

This part is the real paid content!

I said it's paid content. Do you really still want to see it?

...Hmph.

(You thought you might see some incredible secret, but the content that appears on the screen does not seem particularly riveting. What you see is a long reading list, spanning a broad range of fields from pharmaceutical manufacturing, to precision industry, to civil engineering, to interior design. You know these are all things she has read. No one starts out as a multidisciplinary engineering expert, not even an unconventional Vampire, and Closure most likely really did spend a considerable amount of money on these journals, magazines, and books, or at least their digital editions. Looking further down, you also see all manner of experimental equipment she has purchased. It really is quite a sizable expense, you think, sighing as you scroll the list straight to the bottom.)

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