Noldrei nodded, unsurprised. "Just as I thought. You're treating people with strong willpower as expendable resources for jobs akin to chaplains or commissars. Not much progress there. I knew you primitives would turn the work into a drain on your own people without even arranging for replacements."
Rita's heart twinged. She suddenly felt a pang of pity for Senti-Mobius. To think that even the wisdom of a Previous Era doctor was being dismissed as primitive.
He thought for a moment before continuing. "Pull the people who can't handle this work off the front lines. At the same time, find people whose psychological traumas are complementary. Shift their work from treating people's needs to assessing them. Then, let these people with their own wounds help heal each other."
"Then, assign others as external support—facilitators—to help these peer-support groups. Stop trying to control everything yourselves. Are you just making trouble for no reason?"
"Only when a situation becomes truly unmanageable should the facilitators intervene directly. In this era, it's not like there are only a handful of people suffering from the psychological toll of an industrialized society. Honestly..."
Noldrei shook his head and sighed. "Your priority should be stabilizing their mental states in the real world first, then entering the Stigma's dreamscape to deal with deeper issues. Stop thinking you need to sacrifice your best consciousness workers. Are you insane? Do you really think you can cure everyone overnight?"
He pointed eastward. "The world outside is developing faster and faster. The number of potential consciousness workers is growing. You can afford to take your time! First, focus on healing your own staff. Don't try to solve everything in one fell swoop."
"Use your heads. Humans can live for many years now. Do you still need to push yourselves so mercilessly, like in the old days? It's utterly ridiculous! Slow down and handle things gradually. Population control isn't even a concern for people anymore. Why are you in such a rush? It's not like this is a terminal illness where you only have a century or two left."
Senti-Mobius stared at him, dumbfounded, as if he weren't the very person who had pushed humanity toward such radical progress in the first place.
Rita was surprised to find that Noldrei's words made a lot of sense. She had always been prepared to die as a normal human, so she'd never considered these long-term problems. Rita needed the 'brevity' of life to fully appreciate its beauty.
But Rita felt she had to say something to be fair to the others here. She ventured, "That said, Director, weren't you the one who told us to handle the work here 'as soon as possible'?"
Noldrei felt they must have misunderstood him. Aside from taking direct control of a few essential processes, he had never dictated how others should work, let alone used a phrase like "as soon as possible."
Who on earth had told them that?
The most he had done was open the door for communication when he saw that development was causing severe internal divisions.
My 'as soon as possible' and your 'as soon as possible' are two different things, aren't they?
Noldrei couldn't even be bothered to say it out loud. He had never once given them a deadline for any task. For the most part, they had brought this pressure upon themselves, pushing things to this state.
"Have I ever once ordered you to complete a task by a certain time? Don't make things up. I haven't even used your management metrics here. It was you! You people unconsciously applied those old methods while managing this project, instinctively dragging in the baggage of the past."
"You knew perfectly well that those methods would squeeze people dry, yet you foolishly brought them in instead of looking for a new way to manage things. What is it? Do you think they have too long to live?"
"The more productive the technology, the more you must focus on how it liberates people. Why are you asking me about something so simple? Isn't this a conclusion you locals figured out long ago?"
Noldrei thought Rita's accusation was outrageous. When he designed Academy City, he had structured it around entirely new relations of production.
Called out like that, Rita realized that Noldrei really hadn't pushed them on anything. The parts he took direct control over only concerned Honkai, humanity's greatest enemy.
So... we were the ones who got it wrong? Rita felt a chill of fear. She certainly didn't want to take the blame for a mistake of this magnitude.
"Why did it come to this? The biggest reason is that you never made the purpose of your work public. You didn't seek out more like-minded people to join the effort. Instead, you worked the few dedicated people you had to the bone. Are you crazy? And after creating this mess, you turn around and say I pushed you too hard?"
Noldrei pointed at Rita and Senti-Mobius. He hadn't expected to uncover this situation with a single question.
He hadn't said much himself—just offered a few things, pointed in a direction, and this group had managed to create all these problems on their own.
"I am a ruler who manages power, not an idiot you can fool. Rita, you need to understand one thing: I only manage the authority within my domain. Don't even think about shifting other responsibilities onto me."
"As I recall, isn't there a saying in Shenzhou that goes, 'Stability overrides everything'?"
"And what is 'stability'? It's maintaining the current principles of power distribution and preserving the morale of your organization. That is stability!"
"And from what I can see, you fools can't even get 'stability' right."
Noldrei thought about all the chaotic experiments Schicksal had run, and how Anti-Entropy had split into factions and gone rogue. And then there was everything he learned about the internal affairs of the Previous Era... he couldn't even be bothered to list the rest.
"You people can't even maintain a basic conservative foundation, and you have the gall to tell me I'm moving too fast?"
As if he didn't know his own methods. If he hadn't constantly been releasing new technology, pushing for progress from the ground up and creating new societal demands in Academy City, that woman, Tesla, would have kept it locked down until the nations of the Far East were wiped out.
"Oh, Rita, Rita... I never imagined this was the image you had of me in your mind."
Rita couldn't very well claim these were her own ideas; she hadn't been with Noldrei for long. Most of what she knew about his directives had come secondhand.
The simple addition of the phrase "as soon as possible" had created a completely different level of pressure, both in action and interpretation.
"Alright, Director," Rita said, quickly changing her tune. "So, how should we handle the people who are already suffering? It's all my fault for listening to rumors. But there must be a solution, right? The people here aren't equipped to deal with these new conflicts."
Senti-Mobius glanced at Rita, who was now shamelessly fawning over the 'Director,' and thought the woman had no shame whatsoever.
"First, halt all work. Then, give these people time to recover their mental stability. Find an opportunity to assign androids to take care of them. It's such a simple problem, and you all managed to make it this complicated!"
Noldrei scoffed, no longer bothering to argue with Senti.