"Selfish?" the Technician asked with interest. He could already guess what Nick meant by that, but he wanted to hear if Nick thought the same thing.
"While the normal people don't live in conditions that most people would find great, these are the conditions they want to live in," Nick said. "This is not a case of not being able to improve one's life due to powerlessness but a voluntary choice."
"In that case, the people do not suffer a lot. In terms of happiness, the city is probably even one of the best ones."
"But they are not contributing to humanity," Nick added.
The Technician gestured for Nick to continue.
Naturally, the Technician was extremely interested in Nick's ideology and his feelings as a Specter.
Could Nick still feel things?
Was he lying?
Why was he deciding to do things?
Was he still thinking like a human?
"There are two things that humans want. They want to stay alive, and they want to be happy," Nick said. "Some people prefer survival over happiness. They would much rather live for 80 years in poor conditions than die early, but there were also people that would much rather die young and happy instead of old and miserable."
"Both groups can live their life however they want."
"However, humanity as a whole still needs to survive."
"It is your decision if you do not want children and die young after using up all of your money, but there is undeniable proof that if everyone were to act like you, happiness would die out with your generation."
"Does that mean that you have to have children now? Of course not."
"However, while you have power over your own lineage and your own life, humanity, as a whole, must still ensure that it continues existing."
"Grand Extractor City was happy, but they also have several Mid and even Late Heroes that have the power to help many more humans."
"Yet, they just remain there, doing nothing."
"Of course, that's the fancy moral explanation," Nick added. "More accurately,I just hate when people take but don't give."
"If anyone wants to argue that they are a city and that they do not need to help anyone outside the city, I have a simple proposition as an answer."
"Fine, if you don't want to help Aegis, you can keep your Zephyx, and Aegis will let you be on your own."
"Watch as your city gets enslaved by a random Fallen within a year."
"Let's see how happy and independent you are then," Nick said with cold annoyance.
The Technician nodded a couple of times in interest as he analyzed Nick.
While Nick made logical arguments, there were definite signs of emotions and biases in his words.
In short, he sounded like a human.
"Alright," the Technician said, "would you mind giving me a written record of all the cities and any people of note?"
Nick nodded, but before he could start conjuring papers, the Technician did something else.
At that point, the Technician smiled smugly and placed a small device on a nearby table. "Try this," he said.
Nick looked at the device with a raised brow and touched it.
It looked a bit like a Barrier, but there were a couple of things that were different.
Nick interacted with the device, and a moment later, a screen was projected into the air in front of him.
This was the same kind of screen that a Barrier from Aegis used.
Learning to write with these screens wasn't easy since the screens worked via reading Zephyx waves one gave off, but if one mastered it, writing became many times easier and faster.
Naturally, Nick didn't have human Zephyx, which meant that his Zephyx wouldn't be able to interact with these devices.
But since the Technician told him to try, he did.
Initially, the screen only distorted a bit, but then, letters began to appear.
Nick glanced at the Technician, who had a smug smile on his face.
Then, Nick grabbed the device, turned it around, and pulled open the outer casing without damaging it.Nick looked at the insides and could see how a couple of components worked, but the majority was still a bit beyond his level.
He knew quite a bit about Zephology, but that didn't mean that he could immediately tell what a machine could do just by looking at it.
Nick was no engineer.
However, when broken down, every machine was just doing physics stuff, and some parts were easier to understand than others.
"You removed the input security," Nick said with a slightly surprised voice.
The Technician was glad that Nick could tell something like that.
If he didn't need to explain the basics, talking was less work and more enjoyment.
"Yeah, I thought it would be the easiest way to get it to work for a Specter," the Technician said.
Nick looked at the other parts.
He didn't know what most of them did, but he knew that it wasn't as easy as just removing the input security.
All the parts expected specific readings and values, and introducing a different kind of Zephyx was like trying to make an electrical circuit work by using water instead of electricity as a power source.
In short, almost everything would need to be changed for such a change to work.
Nick just looked at the new device for a while before putting it together again.
Asking the Technician how it worked would probably eat up hours of time.
In the end, Nick activated the device again and tried to write on it.
He had already been able to write on such a device before he had become a Specter, and while he needed to change his new Zephyx output to do the same, his great experience in manipulating Zephyx made it relatively easy.
Within two minutes, Nick could write on the device effectively.
While Nick was relearning to write, the Technician was writing down things of his own on his Barrier.
After Nick learned to write on the device, he quickly wrote several pages of records about all the different cities he had interacted with.
When he was done, the device blinked,and all the words Nick had written were transmitted to the Technician's Barrier.
The Technician read through everything in a second and nodded with interest.
"This will be a big hit to Wrath," he said. "I'll send this to Helia. She'll deal with it."
The Technician did just that and focused on Nick again. "Now then, with this out of-"
DING! DING! DING!
At that moment, the Technician's Barrier started to ring, and he furrowed his brows.
"Of course," he muttered with annoyance.
Naturally, the Left Arm was calling him.
'That's strange,' Nick thought with furrowed brows. 'The last time I saw the two of them talk, they were talking via voice transmissions. Why are they suddenly communicating via Barriers?'
"Yes, all of this is accurate. Yes, he is here. Yes, he's in front of me. Say hi, Nick," the Technician said.
A small light appeared in Nick's eyes. "Greetings, Left Arm," Nick said.
"Yes… yes… yes… yes… no… yes… great… sure… yes…"
The Technician rolled his eyes in annoyance.
"I don't know! Why are you asking me about that? No… No… Yes… What? Oh, no! Yeah… okay. Sure!"
Ding!
And the Technician hung up before releasing another annoyed sigh.
"Anyway, that part is over. She'll deal with all of the cities," he said.
Nick nodded. "What did she say? Did she mention anything about how we will proceed from now on?"
The Technician scratched the back of his head. "Well, things are a bit different nowadays. We can't really make big plans right now. Adaptability is more important than a plan right now."
The Technician seemed rather casual, but Nick could see that the current Aegis wasn't an easy place to navigate.
"How come you communicated via Barriers?" Nick asked.
"This room is isolated," the Technician answered, not surprised that Nick noticed this detail.
"Isolated?" Nick asked, looking around.
That was when he noticed that the light was a bit unusual.
It did not have the same feeling as sunlight,but it also didn't feel like the Champion of Light's light.
'Artificial light,' Nick thought.
He also couldn't sense anything outside of this room.
There were only two things that were connected to the outside world.
The door and a Zephyx receiver embedded in the wall.
"Yes, I know what question is going to come next," the Technician said with an annoyed sigh.
Nick just looked at the Technician evenly, waiting for an answer to his unspoken question.
"Things are… not easy right now," the Technician said. "I presume you've heard of the new Champion of Light?"
Nick had expected that all of this would be connected to the new Champion of Light.
The things the new Champion of Light had said seemed to be different from what the old Champion of Light had said.
Nick just nodded.
"Let's just say that the fundamentals of the world are not as clear-cut as you might believe," the Technician said.