The reason Woojin had an artificial heart was simple.
The man Woojin had been transmigrated into had been born with a deformed heart.
He should have had heart surgery before the age of ten, but there was no money.
Doesn't national health insurance cover critical illnesses like heart disease?
That was thinking far too lightly of Lemming City.
Lemming City did have something similar to national health insurance.
But the coverage ratio was absurdly low.
Low enough that the patient had to bear 95 percent of the surgery cost.
In the end, the body Woojin had been transmigrated into never received heart surgery.
He was lucky enough to scrape by to the age of twenty with a deformed heart.
Then he passed the sanitation civil servant examination.
He achieved a rise in status.
From Grade C3, Lemming City's lowest citizen grade, to Class C1!
Which meant he had been able to take out a loan and have the heart surgery.
‘Though all he did was get hold of a secondhand artificial heart past its service warranty and have an unlicensed back-alley doctor operate on him.’
That was why a warning message blinked before Woojin's eyes telling him to get his artificial heart inspected.
<Warning. The regular inspection period for your artificial heart has passed. Inspection at the earliest opportunity is recommended.>
Bullshit. Inspection, my ass.
It hasn't even been that long since the surgery.
And the artificial heart's the same.
The warranty's already expired and the surgery was done off the books anyway.
Go to a hospital for nothing and they'll just squeeze more inspection fees out of me.
The inspection fee could come out higher than the heart surgery itself!
I don't have that kind of money! Can't do it!
That was what the man Woojin had been transmigrated into thought.
“Wow. This isn't easy.”
Woojin had watched a fellow sanitation civil servant be butchered before his eyes and turned into fertilizer for the city.
The life of an underclass citizen, paying off debt day after day and then having his organs taken even in death, without so much as a funeral.
The fact that Woojin had become part of that exploitation system sank into him down to the bone.
‘From outside the monitor it was a comedy, watching it beside Paul it was a tragedy, and now it's a trial that's fallen on me.’
Even so, it wasn't as if there were no possibilities.
Being able to click his tongue like this was only possible because his mind hadn't crumbled.
If he made full use of the benefits he had received before being transmigrated into the game, there was definitely a chance to survive this merciless world and climb in status.
“Come at me, all of you bastards! I'm a hardcore veteran of this game!”
Woojin shouted at the sky out of sheer stubbornness.
He had done it thinking there was no one nearby, but suddenly a voice came to Woojin's ear.
A pretty voice, the sort a popular female internet broadcaster might have.
<Warning. Garbage collection work is being delayed. If the work time is exceeded, your performance rating will be docked, so a prompt return to work is recommended.>
“This voice, could it be…… Daphne?”
Woojin pulled the voice's name out of his still-unsorted memories.
<That is correct, Officer Jinwoo Martinez. I am Daphne, the Environmental Service Execution AI of the Lemming City Integrated Management System.>
“So I was right.”
Environmental Service Execution AI.
A character you kept seeing as you played [Steel Sweeper].
The demon AI that whipped the player into working faster and docked performance rating and pay if you failed to clear the stage within a set time.
In the game she only ever appeared as text, so he hadn't known; so this was what her voice sounded like.
<Do you perhaps not remember my name? Did you take a shock to the head from the incident just now?>
“Uh, a little.”
Woojin made a vague excuse.
That aside, Jinwoo Martinez?
That was this body's name?
“From now on, call me Woojin instead of Jinwoo Martinez.”
<Have you changed your name? But there is no record of a name change application in the city database.>
“I didn't apply for a name change. It's more like a nickname. I just suddenly felt like being called Woojin.”
Jinwoo and Martinez.
Weren't they both cool protagonist names?
The kind that dies at the end of the story.
‘Ominous.’
As it happened, the name Woojin was simply Jinwoo with the syllables flipped front to back.
So even if he said he had changed it because he wanted to, it would pass well enough.
<I am glad you have permitted me to use a nickname. It means we have grown quite close!>
Daphne laughed happily, in a very un-AI-like way.
Or perhaps, being an AI, she took Woojin's lie exactly at face value.
<In any case, please return to work quickly. Time is passing even now.>
“I should.”
[Steel Sweeper] was a game where clear time mattered.
Clear the stage within the set time and you got the full reward, but fall even slightly behind and the reward was shaved down hard.
That would be no different now that the game had become reality.
“Heave-ho.”
Woojin picked up the garbage bags that had fallen near the steel garbage bin and put them into the bin.
After handling two 20-liter garbage bags, a message rose up before his eyes.
A different kind of message from the ones the neural interface showed.
―You have acquired [Hauling (Level 1)].
―Thanks to your [Inexplicable] growth potential, proficiency rises rapidly.
‘This is the one.’
The reason Woojin, dropped into a crappy world, could keep from losing hope.
Once he gained the [Hauling] skill, moving garbage got a little easier.
The garbage bags felt a bit lighter, and his hands didn't slip no matter where he grabbed.
The [Hauling] skill seemed to raise his physical ability slightly as well.
―[Hauling] has risen to Level 2.
By the time he had put all the large garbage into the bin, [Hauling] had already risen to Level 2.
But the work didn't end there.
Woojin took a broom and a dustpan out of the garbage truck's tool box.
Keeping the area around the garbage bin clean was also a sanitation civil servant's duty.
SWISH, SWISH.
―You have acquired [Sweeping (Level 1)].
Once he acquired the skill, the sweeping went a little better.
The plastic trash stuck flat to the ground swept up more easily, you might say.
He wondered why, in a world this advanced, people still cleaned with something like a broom.
Probably because there was no money to buy a vacuum.
Woojin cleaned the alley with care.
To be precise, a three-meter radius around the garbage bin.
Spotlessly, without leaving a single piece of trash.
Of course, there was a reason.
<You, who keep your work area clean, are a model to all citizens!>
<Officer Woojin's exemplary environmental management has been confirmed. Awarding 0.1 performance rating points.>
A performance rating bonus.
Clean a three-meter radius around the garbage bin and there were cases where your performance rating went up.
Not every time, but occasionally.
They say the devil is in the details.
It was a small bonus, but whether you collected it consistently or not came back as a large difference later.
Because your pay only rose if your performance rating was high.
A sanitation civil servant's pay wasn't much, but it served to make the foundation of his income solid.
Because a set amount came in every month.
In other words, the performance rating was an element he absolutely had to look after, now that he had to live in this world.
“Good. And next…….”
Woojin looked at the punk's corpse.
The first enemy he had faced after being transmigrated into Jinwoo Martinez's body.
As he studied the corpse, the punk's prosthetic arm began to glow green.
―[Gold-Seeking Eye] has found a somewhat valuable item.
‘I should loot that bastard's prosthetic arm too.’
Taking valuables from a corpse.
In a game it was a matter of course.
But actually doing it brought a slight wave of resistance.
‘If I don't do this I can't make money, so what am I going to do about it?’
For a sanitation civil servant, a side job was essential.
He couldn't survive on salary alone.
Hesitate here and he would end up with neither porridge nor rice.
“In your next life, be born on Earth. Somewhere decent to live, not a place like Somalia.”
But were there even any countries decent to live in these days?
Woojin had that idle thought as he pulled a wire saw out of his overall pocket.
Expensive prosthetic arms had the mounting joint and the arm as separate pieces, so they came apart easily.
But on the punk's, the arm and the mounting joint were welded together, so he had to cut it off with the wire saw.
The wire saw seemed to be something Jinwoo Martinez had prepared in case of prosthetic looting.
Jinwoo Martinez must have set his mind hard on earning money too.
RASP, RASP.
―You acquire [Butchering (Level 1)].
“When did I ever cut flesh! I only cut through the welded part!”
The inhuman status window message brought on a wave of hollow clarity about how he had ended up doing something like this.
But Daphne's voice got him up off the ground quickly.
<Warning. Time is being delayed. If the work time is exceeded, your performance rating will be docked, so a prompt return to work is recommended.>
“I know. Damn it.”
Woojin put the punk's corpse, its prosthetic arm cut away, into the garbage bin.
He climbed into the garbage truck and pressed the button to the right of the driver's seat.
At that, the clanking sound of machinery moving came, and the rear camera switched on.
Huge robotic arms were attached to either side of the truck's rear.
Those arms extended, picked up the steel garbage bin, and tipped it into the truck.
The garbage inside the bin poured down into the truck all at once.
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE.
At the same time the truck's compactor activated.
As the garbage was pushed in between the compactor's rotating steel plates, a screeching, splintering noise rang out.
Along with the crunching, squelching sound of a corpse being compressed.
If the punk's corpse had been left lying in the alley, there would be no one to hold a funeral for him.
Vagrants would come around delighted instead, take his organs, and turn his meat into human-flesh dumplings.
If that was the alternative, it seemed more decent for Woojin, who had recovered the prosthetic, to handle him.
Burning together with the garbage was a bit much, but he would still be cremated at the incinerator.
From that perspective, maybe this garbage truck ought to be called a hearse.
Since he would be loading plenty of corpses into it from now on.
‘I'm having some insane thoughts myself.’
CLUNK, CLUNK.
WHRRRRRRM.
Before he knew it, the truck's robotic arms had emptied the garbage bin and returned to their places.
Time to move to the next site.
Without Woojin so much as taking the wheel, Daphne started the truck's engine.
<Autonomous driving mode engaged. Moving to the next garbage bin.>
‘I couldn't even ride a self-driving car on Earth, and here I am riding one.’
And so Woojin rode the AI-piloted garbage―hearse truck through the city streets.
***
Fortunately, there was no combat at the next garbage bin.
In the game, clearing one stage led straight into the next, but reality apparently wasn't like that.
Then again, it would be strange for a punk or a junkie to be standing guard at every single garbage bin.
No matter how drugged out a bastard was, his head wouldn't go so far gone that he came to love the smell of garbage.
And even if such people existed, they would be a minority.
Thanks to that, Woojin could throw himself into the work with an easy mind.
―[Hauling] has risen to Level 3.
―[Sweeping] has risen to Level 2.
His skill levels rose smoothly,
<You, who keep your surroundings clean, are a model to everyone!>
<Officer Woojin's exemplary environmental management has been confirmed. Awarding 0.1 performance rating points.>
and he collected a performance rating bonus too.
Getting the bonus twice in one day was rare; he was lucky.
<Excellent, Officer Woojin! Your work speed is getting faster and faster.>
“Will I be able to finish everything within today's work time?”
<That will be difficult. Even if your work speed increases, too much time was taken by the earlier combat. A docked performance rating is unavoidable.>
Fall behind on the work time and your rating got docked.
That was why, when someone showed up to interfere with a sanitation civil servant's work, you had to clear them away fast.
“Can't you cut me some slack? It couldn't be helped, could it?”
<Impossible. The evaluation standard time is set taking all of those conditions into account.>
“Well, I wasn't expecting anything.”
Woojin shrugged and climbed down from the garbage truck.
How many garbage bins were left?
Doing physical labor he wasn't used to made the day feel long.
Woojin might not look it, but he had been a white-collar worker at a major company.
‘Come to think of it, what happened with my company? It was so hard to get in there.’
As he scanned the garbage bin with a slightly unsettled heart, Woojin's eyes went wide.
“Oh. Is that……?”
―[Gold-Seeking Eye] has found a valuable item.
A machine buried among the heap of garbage was glowing blue.