Mansudae Assembly Hall, North Korea.
“We’d like to see a reduction in your country’s aggression, President Kim. It’s making it very difficult for us to support you at the moment,” Alexander said once the diplomatic greetings were done and the small talk was over. It was time for the meat of the conversation.
“Are you telling me what to do with my own things?” Kim Jong-Un growled.
As the diplomatic translator struggled to come up with a polite translation for that, not knowing that Alexander was already hearing a real-time translation thanks to his glasses’ AI assistant, Kim Jong-Un continued under his breath, “Who do this guy think he is? He has no right to order us around.”
He thought he was quiet enough that nobody would hear what he was muttering to himself, but it didn’t go unheard by the ears of the genetically enhanced Alexander, his “translator”—who was in actuality a Nyxian—or anyone else from the Edenian delegation for that matter, who all shared the genetic enhancements that Alexander enjoyed. They all stopped what they were doing and turned to look at the North Korean dictator, causing him to go quiet and wonder why they were all looking at him.
“Listen here, President Kim,” Alexander began in fluent Korean. Kim Jong-Un froze, finally realizing that all of his veiled insults had been understood by the man across the table from him. “While the entire world was punishing you for your violations of human rights, your insane measures to keep yourself in power and threaten the world, your greed, and the draconian measures you instituted to keep yourself in power by pushing your own people into starvation, we, the people of Eden, chose to come to your aid. WE, the people of Eden, chose to provide you the resources you need. WE, the people of Eden, chose to uplift you and your people. WE, the people of Eden did that. Not China, not any other nation, not any charitable organization, but us.”
He paused for a moment, allowing Kim Jong-Un to digest what he was saying, then continued, “But you’ve been losing your reason as you shuffled off the shackles of Chinese control. You slipped your leash and immediately attempted to prove that you were exactly what the whole world believes you to be: a mad dog kept on a leash by China to prevent it from biting any and everyone it saw.
“You detonated a fucking hydrogen bomb, President Kim, and you announced it to the entire world! Then you had the unmitigated, absolute gall to launch a ballistic missile over Japan. A country which, may I remind you, is the ONLY one to have ever suffered a nuclear attack! Did you stop to think, even for a microsecond, about the fucking consequences? Did you think that we,” Alexander gestured to himself and the other Edenians in the room, “would support your insane actions?”
“I—” Kim Jong-Un began, still shrinking back under the unseen pressure that Alexander was emanating. Whatever he was about to say would forever remain unsaid, however, as the door of his office hit the marble floor with a bang and Alexander’s Aegis team rushed into the room.
The leader of the team, Antonio Espinoza, moved to Alexander’s side and whispered, “Sir, it’s time to unass this place. We have to go, now.” Then, uncaring of the optics of the situation, he picked the Edenian president up and put him on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and rushed out of the room surrounded by the rest of his team, who were pushing Kim Jong-Un’s praetorian guards aside. The position Alexander was in was a little undignified, sure, but he wasn’t trained to the same standard as an aegis guardsman. If bullets started flying, the aegis team needed to react as a single unit in order to protect him. After all, being embarrassed would be better than being shot.
Had the praetorian guard received the same news as the aegis team did, the chaotic evacuation would have raised even more of a commotion. But with the constant monitoring of various AIs—barring Panoptes, as the cloud cover impeded the eyes of the Panopticon in the sky—the Edenians were the first to receive the news that North Korea had broken the nearly century-long ceasefire between them and South Korea. The shit had hit the fan, and the aegis team would think later; right now was the time for them to act.
The Edenians left chaos in their wake, the floor behind them littered with groaning North Korean Praetorian Guards and the hallways ahead of them rapidly filling with more. Soon, a gun was drawn and the guard that drew it shouted at the aegis team to halt.
Antonio looked to his left and nodded to the embedded nyxian. She took a large stride and flipped over the head of the aegis member in front of her, landing atop the guard with the drawn weapon and riding him to the ground, where she swiftly rendered him unconscious and began tearing through the praetorian guard in front of her like a tornado through a trailer park. While she refrained from using lethal moves, the trail of destruction she left behind was rather impressive; a single woman had left behind nearly as many bodies as an entire aegis team had up to that point. The main difference was that the bodies the nyxian left were silent and unmoving in their unconsciousness, while the guards dropped by the aegis team were groaning and rolling around in pain.
The chaos lasted for a few minutes longer, then suddenly came to a screeching halt as, in one synchronized movement, nearly every praetorian guard raised their hand to their earpieces and their faces paled. They had obviously received the news that they had fired on South Korea and had bigger proverbial fish to fry. Shield Espinoza called the nyxian back and the team stood to the side of the hall, gesturing back the way they had come. He figured it would be faster if they let the hundred-thousand-strong Praetorian Guard get out of his way on their own than fight his way through the lot of them.
Soon, the corridors of the Mansudae Assembly Hall were empty of all but the Edenian delegation, who swaggered out of the hall’s front doors and into their waiting convoy, where they were joined by the pilots of their jets. It was a shame, but the hardware could not be left behind, so the miniaturized atomic printers in each of the jets executed their last orders and printed a large scuttling charge. The charges detonated in good order, ensuring that none of the advanced technology contained in the 14th-generation fighters or in the presidential A380 would be recoverable.
Though that was just a camouflage measure, as the advanced technologies had already been decomposed and used as the raw material for the scuttling charges themselves. What was left behind after the decomposition and explosion was nothing more than the airframes of the jets themselves: Sukhoi Su-35s, a KC-35 Stratotanker, and an Airbus A380.
All in all, Alexander’s diplomatic visit to North Korea had ended in a much more spectacular fashion than his visit to Taiwan.
