[b]Kaesong, Republic of Korea[/b]
[i]March, 2040[/i]

	Inside a pit lined with concrete barriers on all four sides, a row of artillery shells had been stacked neatly in the middle. One on top of the other, these artillery shells were hand placed by a pair of men in bright yellow exoskeletons. One of the two held a bundle of half a dozen shells in his arms like comically oversized firewood while the second stacked each one gently on top of the other. A row of rounds twenty-long and stacked two-high had been carefully placed down after a careful few minutes of work by the mechanically-assisted workers.
	
	Outside, a group of figured huddled around a folding table where a soldier in a sage green digital camouflage uniform carefully jotted down calculations on a sheet of paper. He punched in numbers to a calculator on his cell phone according to an equation on a laminated card in front of him. On his head was a lazily perched black ballcap that read “Explosive Ordnance Disposal.” An old civilian next to him in a high-visibility vest studied the EOD soldier’s equations carefully. After some quick math checking, the civilian gave the EOD soldier a thumbs up. His demolitions calculations were good for the ordnance in the pit.

	For another twenty minutes, the EOD soldier went back to his waiting truck and withdrew all the tools he needed for the operation. Packages of C4 explosive in neat blocks, sandbags, and blasting caps for initiation. They wordlessly retrieved their kit from the seats of the armored car: plate carriers, helmets, eye protection, and ear protection. Munitions disposal at the pit was a routine operation, but safety always came first when working with explosives. Under the watch of their safety inspectors, the EOD soldiers got to work placing blocks of C4 in carefully measured amounts along the line of ordnance. Sandbags were emplaced carefully to help direct the blast.

	After a once-over by the safety inspectors, the EOD soldiers trudged their way through on a path leading up a slight hill to a concrete bunker a hundred meters away. One of them unspooled a shock tube spool behind him as he walked up the dusty slope until he reached the bunker. A civilian, the range manger, was leaning up against the bunker and nodded as the EOD soldiers reached him. He checked off once more on the initiator before the soldiers and civilians herded themselves into the cramped bunker. Inside, they all put on their ear protection and sat down on wooden benches behind the ballistic glass window.

	The range manager, Mister Yim Nam-gi, was an old veteran of the Korean Army engineers and an old hand with explosives. While he had retired before the war, he was brought back in at his former rank of Lieutenant Colonel as part of Korea’s general mobilization. He ran a munitions depot in Chuncheon during the war, behind the front lines but close enough to see combat with North Korean infiltrators seeking to disrupt supply lines. He did his job and hung up the uniform shortly thereafter. Upon his second retirement in 2033, Mister Yim was offered a special job with the Ministry of Unification.

	He had worked in Kaesong since 2034, overseeing the Ministry’s largest munitions disposal facility. Located on the outskirts of the town’s old industrial district where environmental studies had determined that the land wasn’t fit for pollution rehabilitation, the government had deemed it an acceptable spot for the detonation of millions of tons of bombs and ammunition. Mister Yim managed the throughput and destruction of large depots of the former KPA’s stockpiled ammunition. Many facilities, often underground and heavily camouflaged, were still being located nearly a decade after the war. Their tanks, shells, and bullets mostly came to Kaesong to be destroyed.

	With a quick call to the main control center, they requested a blast window. One of the EOD soldiers pulled the initiator from it housing and grasped his hand around the plunger. With a practiced shout, he yelled “fire in the hole!” three times before depressing the plunger into the tube. Instantly, a jolt of electricity was sent through the shock tube down the hill and into the blasting caps nestled inside the C4. All of them detonated flawlessly, the stockpile bursting into a gigantic ball of flame shooting up into the air. The shockwave, mostly contained by the concrete pit, still washed over the edges and broke up against the bunker where Mister Yim waited out the blast. An instant later, a trickle of dirt and sand rained down on top of their roof.

	After a moment to check if all the explosives had properly detonated, the EOD soldier yelled out “all clear!” to Mister Yim. The range manager and his civilian cadre emerged from the bunker and thanked the EOD soldiers. They were already starting to pack up their equipment and collect the dunnage from their explosives: they had other ranges to go to and more explosives to dispose of. One of the safety inspectors would stay on site to make sure all of the debris was cleaned up while Mister Yim bid the soldiers farewell and walked out of the range.

	Down the dirt road and past the gate where an EOD soldier stood guard, Mister Yim’s SUV waited. Out here in the north, especially in the rugged terrain of the hills around Kaesong, SUVs and pickup trucks were a favorite of Korean government workers. His grandkids, urbanites in Seoul, were driving tiny cars or not even owning a vehicle at all. They didn’t like the outdoors much either, he found; nobody ever wanted to go camping with grandpa. Maybe he was old, but the feeling of hopping into his two-door truck and flying down the bumpy dirt roads of Kaesong was liberating to him.

	The five minute drive back to the command post passed by a flurry of activity. A train bearing munitions from the far north, a former KPA munitions depot south of the Yalu, had just arrived. Army trucks loaded with stacks of bombs and shells were crowding reservations at the Kaesong disposal site’s ranges. His staff were working overtime to get through the rush: none of the Army commanders wanted to store KPA ammunition in their depots for an extended period, as they all had their own concerns to manage in garrison. The government, too, would rather not have to deal with storing old captured ammo when their budget was on the line.

	Mister Yim wheeled his SUV into the gravel parking lot of the command center, the crunching of gravel underneath his heavy-duty tires drowning out the electric whining of his truck’s engine. He cut it off after pulling into his parking spot with a distinctly marked yellow curb: “DIRECTOR.” He emerged from the truck and stretched his legs, arthritis be damned, before heading through the headquarters building and up to his operations center. Inside, an innocuous group of old civilians just like him were sitting around typing on computers or talking on the phone. Each of them had their own sections of range to report on and manage, all feeding information to a central registry of what came in and what was destroyed.

	Mister Yim greeted each one of them with a crisp good morning, instinctively heading over to the coffee machine in the corner. A full pot had been brewed by one of the other civilians and he poured a cup into his thermos. Another quirk of an office filled with old retirees: the smart coffeemaker that recognized an individual by facial identification and prepared a custom mix had been replaced by an industrial-sized pot of steaming black coffee. With his priorities in line, Mister Yim redirected himself to the adjacent office where all munitions were tallied up on a spreadsheet projected to a monitor on the wall.

	“Mister Yim!” came a familiar voice, speaking in accented English. As the range manager turned a corner, he nearly ran into Suzie Grimm in her characteristic khaki photographer’s vest. Velcroed to the front was the baby-blue crest of the United Nations. Despite her name, Suzie was one of the most cheerful Germans that Mister Yim had ever met. With no shortage of chatter, Suzie was eager to keep up with the goings-on of the facility. To be fair, it was her job: Suzie was the appointed UN inspector for the destruction of excess war armament in Kaesong. “How was it? You haven’t been to a range in a while, right?”

	“I always think it’s fun,” Mister Yim grumbled, “but it’s a lot more of a pain in the ass than I remember. You know, back in my d-“

	“Yeah, yeah, back in your day you used to blow everything up you saw wearing shorts and a t-shirt,” Suzie finished. She had heard the old man’s ramblings before. “But that’s terribly unsafe,” she said as she wagged her finger.

	Mister Yim rolled his eyes. That’s just what he had grown up with in his old Korean Army days in the early 2000s. There was word back then that robots would replace humans for demolitions tasks precisely due to their propensity to do dangerous things like that, but nobody had quite been able to make a machine that replicated the human touch when it came to explosives handling.

	“So anyways, how many was that?” she asked. “I mean, I’m sure the report will come in eventually. But I figure I’ll just update the sheet while you’re here.”

	“Forty rounds of 152mm howitzer shells… M-1985 type,” Mister Yim rattled off, referring to the artillery rounds fired out of the KPA’s copy of a towed Soviet howitzer. They were everywhere in the underground facilities, portable enough to be trucked or rolled through incredibly restrictive terrain and housed in compact bunkers. Many were left behind by the KPA’s collapse and even interrogated veterans of the war had no idea where all the underground bunkers were.

	The greatest fear of the military and the government were that KPA holdouts, communist sympathizers, and other disaffected northern Koreans could find and use these weapons to harass Korean Army soldiers stationed in the north. Incidents involving small arms and IED attacks were uncommon but not unheard of, but access to heavier weaponry like howitzers and tanks could cause dramatic casualties in a region already struggling under the weight of North Korea’s collapse. Mister Yim set his coffee down as Suzie went into the spreadsheet on the screen with her laptop and quickly changed the numbers. All of the data was sent to a weekly presentation to UN officials about the process of disarmament.

	She finished quickly: Suzie had finished her degree in computer science in Germany, accepting a scholarship to work with the German government in exchange for tuition money. Her work later found herself taking an assignment to Korea as a “data analyst” for the UN mission there. Somewhat to her chagrin, data analysis often turned out to be updating a spreadsheet for other people to draw conclusions from. But it paid well for a new university graduate and gave her plenty of time to explore Korea. She had already submitted a leave packet for the next week so she could go to Seoul with her boyfriend for a concert.

	Before Suzie could reengage Mister Yim in another bout of conversation, another boom sounded in the distance as another cache of munitions was disposed of. The windows of the thickly built headquarters facility rattled slightly and after a few minutes a phone went off in the other room. Mister Yim returned to his regular office, brushing past another official who had jotted down a new number of munitions that had been detonated: apparently the range officer had just decided to call his friend in the headquarters instead of report to Suzie directly.

	So Mister Yim sat down at his desk and set his coffee aside once more, sighing as he leaned his sore back against the lumbar support of his office chair. The fingerprint sensor embedded within his mouse button instantly unlocked the computer for him, displaying a stock government wallpaper and two dozen notifications on his email client. With a sigh, he clicked open the window and checked his email. Mister Yim shook his head slightly and took another sip of the hot coffee. Explosives might be boring nowadays, but email and desk work was even more so. But what is a government without paperwork?