It would be another two weeks before Eiji saw Yuuhei again. Meanwhile his days were consumed from waking to sleep with long lectures.
They were drilled at length on the smallest known details of new Kolsivite weapons technology — range, rate of fire, muzzle velocity, chemical composition of assembly materials and associated tensile strength, estimated number of issues and installations, and so on.
There were tactical workshops where he and the other assembled veterans broke into small groups to discuss potential battlefield situations involving these new weapons and brainstorm on how best to respond to them. As the days passed, they moved into introductory explanations of the new Meihonese weapons to be implemented, as well as long talks on the new structure of the military Saitou had mentioned in Ajanum and, indeed, the planned new social order of the entire Empire. Eiji gradually came to the realization that it wasn’t just Shijima that was being dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, it was the Empire whole.
Money, for example, in its paper and coin forms, was going to be completely abolished. It would be replaced with a digital currency called Black. Almost all paper forms of registry and identification were similarly being nullified. All citizens instead would be issued a Citizenship Unit, a wallet-sized electronic device encased in a hardened metal shell, informally referred to as the “black drive,” after the name of the new currency. The black drive would digitally store all relevant personal identity information, including licenses, transit clearance, ranks, and monetary assets. Interface terminals for the black drive would be installed in every train station, military checkpoint, factory, government building, store, restaurant, bar, vending machine, every vehicle of any kind within the Empire, and these terminals would be connected to form a vast new Imperial intranet.
The black drive connection terminals would be capable of everything from simple balance debits and credits to acting as a new form of remote communication: when interfaced with a terminal, the holder of a black drive would be able to communicate via voice, video screen (for terminals with screens), and/or text in real-time with anyone else simultaneously interfaced, regardless of where either party was physically located. Letters could also be written for those not simultaneously interfaced, would be stored on the net and transmitted to the recipient’s black drive the next time they interfaced. All payphones in the Empire were also being replaced with these terminals.
There would even be a version of the terminal for home use: in addition to individual communication capabilities it would assume the functions of a television for receiving broadcasts. Through it the newly-built Information Digital Education and Art Library, or IDEAL, could be accessed. IDEAL was a central server which stored all media publications, from the war journals to news broadcasts to maps of the empire to academic works and products of the art guild.
After the transition was complete, the black drive and its terminals would be the single technology through which all buying and selling occurred, bureaucratic processing was carried out, any and all public information was stored and accessed, and all remote communications were carried on. Without it, none of these things would be possible.
The speed and efficiency with which such processes would thereon occur would be unprecedented, on the one hand; on the other, a person without a black drive could do nothing and in essence did not exist: could not be identified, employed, paid; could not send a letter, place a phone call, ride a train, drive a vehicle, watch the news; could not order at a bar or restaurant or make a single purchase of any kind. Calling it a Citizenship Unit, Eiji realized, was not an exaggeration at all.
Labor, academia, and art within the Empire was also going through a major bureaucratic reorganization. The briefings did not cover this topic in much depth, as it was of limited relevance to members of the military. Most of the soldiers in fact grew impatient and distracted for this portion of the lecture; it would have been the same for Eiji had he not met Minsuk. When Saitou went perfunctorily over the bulleted list of changes occurring within the structure of the Commerce Guild, Eiji was the only one in the room leaning forward and listening intently. Still, in the end he couldn’t make any sense of most of the Commerce Guild jargon and neither could he quite bring himself to slow the talk down with questions no one else cared to hear the answers to.
