86 Eighty-Six
“Who knows.”
“Wh-what do you mean, who knows…?”
“What kind of details am I supposed to gather when the subject’s dead? No abnormalities were detected in the RAID Device, and that’s it. I did tell them that if they want me to look any deeper, they should bring over that Processor. Undertaker, I think he’s called? But the boneheads over at Transport starting spouting dumb stuff like ‘We don’t have room for pigs on our flights.’”
Annette crossed her arms while leaning against the chair’s backrest and snorted indignantly. This attitude always spoiled her boyish good looks.
“If they’d have brought him over, I’d have been able to pick apart his brain and investigate. Dammit.”
Lena frowned at the ominous remark. Annette wasn’t serious, of course, but it was still rather dark.
“…Hmm, how did you hear about the Processor…?”
“Heard about him from the MPs. They let me have a look at the report, but it really was just a bunch of official data. They asked me if anything came to mind, and that was it. No idea if he actually had anything to do with it.”
Having said this, Annette smirked wryly.
“Apparently, when they told him his Handler died, all he said was ‘Is that so?’ Like he had no idea what they wanted him to make of it. Guess it makes sense for an Eighty-Six to feel that way, though. Even if you tell them their commanding officer died, they won’t really care.”
“…”
When she saw Lena’s silent expression, the smile disappeared from Annette’s face.
“…Lena, you should transfer over to the lab after all.”
“?”
Annette watched Lena’s baffled expression with lustrous, feline eyes.
“The way things are now, the military’s nothing more than unemployment relief. Everywhere but the lab is full of idiots from the higher Sectors who couldn’t hold a job.”
The Republic’s current administrative center was the First Sector, and it was at the heart of it all. The other Sectors spread out from its four sides in a rectangular fashion, designated numbers by order of closeness. The higher a Sector’s number, the worse its residential environment, public safety, and standards of education became, and the higher its unemployment rate grew.
“What are you going to do in two years once the Legion aren’t an issue anymore? Having ‘former military personnel’ on your résumé isn’t gonna turn any heads during peacetime.”
Lena smiled. In two years’ time, all Legion units would shut down. That was a fact the Republic discerned by inspecting several Legion units they’d seized. The Legion’s central processors had a fixed life span programmed into them: fifty thousand hours of operation time per version. In other words, just shy of six years. The Empire likely added this design element as a fail-safe to ensure the Legion didn’t go berserk and turn on them.
And since the Empire was presumably destroyed four years ago, all of the Legion’s central processors should break down and cease operation in two years’ time. And indeed, the number of Legion they had detected on the battlefield had been gradually decreasing over the years. Units that hadn’t received the latest updates had begun shutting down.
“Thanks for the offer. But right now, we are at war.”
“Yeah, but this doesn’t have to be your job.”
Annette wasn’t willing to back down. Completing the input job, she flicked the holo-screen aside, bent forward, and began venting her frustrations in an agitated, bitter voice.
“Whatever the truth is, that’s one messed up Processor we’re talking about here. Who knows what to expect from him… And besides, there’s no telling if the Para-RAID is actually safe.”
Lena’s eyes widened.
“Wasn’t it proven that the Para-RAID is perfectly safe?”
Annette had apparently just let slip something she shouldn’t have. She lowered her voice, continuing to speak with a guilty expression that made it clear she’d just gotten herself in trouble.
“I mean, don’t you know how this country works, Lena? Even if they say that’s how it is publicly, it doesn’t mean it’s actually true.”
The Republic prided itself on being a superior race and on the country’s technology being infallible. Even if there were any flaws, they could never be made public. This held true for the Para-RAID…and just as true for the Juggernauts.
“They actually discovered this technology by inspecting people with, well, extrasensory perception. That’s how they figured out what part of the brain to stimulate…which is what this thing does.”
She poked the RAID Device in her hand: a blue crystal and a delicate silver frame. The crystal was currently connected by several wires to an information terminal, as the information inside it was being overwritten.
“Those Espers could Resonate with other family members, so the Handler and Processor devices carry quasi-genetic information that identifies the users as relatives on the second degree. We still don’t know how the Resonance actually works.”
“But…wasn’t this your father’s research?”
“It was collaborative research. The fundamental theory and hypothesis were all the work of other researchers. Dad was just in charge of preparing the lab conditions and replicating the phenomenon with the recruited test subjects.”
“So you just need to ask the other researcher.”
A cold smile played over Annette’s face.
“You can’t. The other researcher was an Eighty-Six.”
The Eighty-Six, who were considered subhuman, didn’t have their names recorded. When they were taken into custody, they each received a number as their sole identifier. At this point, there was no way of even knowing which internment camp they’d been sent to.
“The RAID Device has a safety lock on it now, but if anyone was to try to Resonate with several people’s sense of vision, their brain would fry itself from the informational overload, and if you stay Resonated for too long at maximum synchronization rate, it’s possible for your ego to completely collapse. You stay too ‘stimulated’ to be able to come back… You know about my dad’s accident, right?”
Annette’s father, Professor Josef von Penrose, was involved in an accident during an experiment that drove him mad and ultimately killed him. It happened shortly after the completion of the Sensory Resonance theory and the RAID Device. The RAID Device’s synchronization rate was accidently set to the theoretical maximum. Some believed he connected to somewhere that lay beyond the human collective unconscious. If humankind as a whole was an individual, that place was the collective—what was presumed to be the collective unconscious of the world itself.
“So like I said, there’s no telling what might happen if you use the Para-RAID too much… I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to a bunch of Eighty-Six, but if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do…”
Lena grimaced grumpily despite herself. She realized Annette was genuinely concerned for her, but still…
“But that’s…that’s just cowardice.”
Annette waved her hand as if to say she’d grown tired of the conversation.
“Yeah, yeah. I swear, you’re a weirdo…”
An awkward silence filled both sides of the room parted by the glass wall. As if to dispel that, Annette smiled mischievously.
“While we’re on the topic of things that make you act weird… Lena, you up for some chiffon cake? It’s my latest work. Made from real eggs.”
“Huh?”
Annette had to stop herself from laughing out loud as Lena looked up at her, an imaginary pair of cat ears perking up in attention. Lena was as much a girl as any other young lady her age, after all. Sweet things captured her attention in a heartbeat, and a chiffon cake made from real egg whites was a rare commodity in the Republic at present, due to the lack of available space or time to construct poultry farms. Raising chickens in her estate’s garden was the kind of precious luxury only the daughter of the Penrose family, formerly a noble house, could afford.
However…
“Hmm… It won’t taste like cheese even though you didn’t put cheese in it, or be all charred and smoky, or look like a frog, will it…?”
These were the impressions of someone who had tasted the cream puffs Annette had made once. That last comment was an abbreviated version of “the bulging, run-over corpse of a toad.” Putting aside its shape, Annette had somehow managed to replicate a toad’s color to a startling degree of accuracy.
“This one’s safe to eat. I had the guy who came over for my arranged marriage test them.”
Although he’d fainted, frothing at the mouth after the fifth prototype chocolate.
“Then I guess that’s fine… But even if you don’t like him, be sure to give him some chocolate that’s actually safe to eat, okay?”
“Of course I will. I even wrapped it up all cute-like, with pink wrapping paper and a ribbon and everything. Even put a message card with a kiss mark on it that says, ‘To my darling Theobald’… Left it in the mailbox of the apartment he’s renting with his mistress.”
It took Lena a while to decide whether she should feel bad for him or not.
Having returned home, Lena attached the RAID Device—which had finished having its data rewritten while she’d been chatting with Annette over a chiffon cake and some tea—to her neck. It was in the shape of an elegant silver choker, engraved with a subtle Alba ornamental pattern. Small, sparkling beads surrounded the quasi-nerve crystal, making it hard to believe this small choker served the same function as a military-grade communication headset.
Her talk with Annette this afternoon suddenly came to mind. The Reaper. The Eighty-Six who drove people to suicide, who didn’t flinch from the prospect of death.
What kind of person was he?
Does he…hate us, after all?
Lena shook her head once and took a deep breath. All right.
“—Activate.”
She booted up the Para-RAID. This cutting-edge method of communication could be used regardless of time and place and ignored all interference by distance, weather, or terrain.
Synchronization complete. No issues during connection. Static rustled in her ears, different from the sounds of the room she was in.
“Handler One to all units in the Spearhead squadron. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I will be serving as your commanding officer starting today.”
There was a long, somewhat hesitant pause. Lena found that disheartening. No one in the squadron knew how to respond to an officer greeting them for the first time like this, even though that should be proper etiquette among fellow humans.
But the hesitation disappeared from the line after a moment, and a quiet, young-sounding voice responded from the other side of her Resonated senses.
“Pleased to meet you, Handler One. This is the Spearhead squadron’s captain, Personal Name: Undertaker, speaking.”
Contrary to his ominous name, his pronunciation and enunciation were accurate and clear, and his voice was as serene as a deep forest lake. It was a boy roughly her age, probably originally from a middle-class or higher family.
“I’ve been informed of the change in Handlers. I wish you luck in your endeavors going forward.”
Lena smiled, able to vividly imagine his silent disposition from his detached tone. Yes, she could tell easily by simply conversing with him like this, and there was no way he could deceive her.
They were human beings.
They were not something subhuman, something known only as an Eighty-Six.
“I wish the same to you. I look forward to working with you, Undertaker.”