1

The fiercely howling wind beating on the window shattered Haruyuki’s thin sleep. In the darkness, his perked ears still covered by his duvet, he listened: the sound of countless waterdrops, thrown up by the wind, ringing against the glass. Apparently, it had started to rain at some point.

This overnight storm had almost certainly scattered the blossoms of the sakura trees dotting the grounds of his condo building. However, for reasons having nothing to do with this early destruction of a seasonal symbol, spring was a dismal time for Haruyuki.

Those reasons were twofold. The first was that spring brought with it greater humidity and higher temperatures. With sweat glands twice as active as those of your average person, Haruyuki was already mopping his forehead at 25 degrees Celsius.

The second was that spring was the start of the new school year. He was nothing other than loathe to have the classes shuffled just when the long, seemingly endless days of bullying had finally ended and he may have carved out for himself a harmless and inoffensive niche. He very nearly passed out at the thought of starting all over again, pinging and sounding out his position within a group of students he barely knew. Given this, it wasn’t a crime to want to stretch out the last few hours of spring break a bit.

With that thought in mind, Haruyuki fumbled on the shelf above his bed and grabbed his Neurolinker. Once he had attached it to his neck from behind and turned on the power, the lock arm moved to the inside with a faint whir. The startup stage completed the connection check with his senses, and a semitransparent virtual desktop appeared before his eyes.

Glancing at the clock display—2047/04/08 AM 01:22—in the lower right and sighing, Haruyuki took a deep breath and opened his mouth. “Burst—”

Link.

Before he could sing the last note of the magical incantation, the voice call icon blinked palely, and he heard a quiet ringing. He reflexively tapped the icon, only to realize simultaneously that the call was from his childhood friend in the condo two floors below his.

“Haru? You awake?”

He was a little surprised at the voice that sounded in his head. Why on earth was Chiyuri, who always went to bed at ten and slept like the long-dead until seven, calling at this hour? And what could she want?

Pushing his tangled thoughts to one side, Haruyuki mumbled a reply en neuro, “I woke up a little while ago.”

“The wind’s crazy, huh? But that’s not the reason I can’t sleep.”

“You can’t sleep?! You?!” he blurted, and in a flash, Chiyuri was shouting.

“Hey! You think I’m a machine or something? And anyway, it’s your fault I can’t get to sleep!”

“Huh? M-me…?”

“Uh-huh. Today, you—I guess it’s already yesterday—when I went to go home last night, you said something weird. You said I might have scary dreams tonight, but that I’m totally not supposed to take off or turn off my Neurolinker. And when someone tells you something like that, of course you’re going to worry about it and not be able to sleep!”

Haruyuki had, in fact, turned to Chiyuri and said that ten or so hours earlier, and for a simple reason. The first night after the installation of Brain Burst, the game searched your memories in the form of a nightmare, to filter through mental scars like past traumas and feelings of inferiority, so it could then create the duel avatar that would be your other self on the battlefield.

Six months earlier, the night after Haruyuki had gotten Brain Burst, he had had the worst nightmare in the history of nightmares. He could only remember the vaguest details, but what the software had created as a result was an extremely lanky body with an enormous helmeted head, the argent avatar Silver Crow. Remembering somewhat fondly his own disappointment at the time, Haruyuki said to Chiyuri, “Th-there’s no way around it. If you don’t dream, you can’t create your duel avatar, which is essential. Although—I just thought of this, but do you even have any mental scars—”

“You are so rude! I’ve been traumatized in my life! Like this one time, a Certain Someone on an elementary school trip was playing this game on the bus and his sense of balance got all messed up and he got super motion sick all over my lap.”

“I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry. Let’s just not talk about this anymore,” Haruyuki apologized with a groan, his own mental scars threatening to reopen.

But Chiyuri was on a roll, and her complaining tone conjured up her sullen face in Haruyuki’s mind. “And you know, now that I’m thinking about it, you never really apologized for that, did you? Perfect, you can pay me back right now.”

“Wh-what?! That was years ago. The statute of limitations is up!”

“Well, they were saying on the news the other day that ‘statute of limitations’ is gonna be a dead concept.”

The establishment of the social camera net, which recorded video of all public spaces across Japan, had, in fact, several years earlier led to the repeal of the statute of limitations in criminal cases. But if they went by this public standard, Haruyuki probably owed Chiyuri for a lot more than a school trip mishap.

“Well, with the Special Law for Childhood Friends, they decided the statute of limitations is one year, no matter what,” Haruyuki muttered in return, before sighing with his real mouth and asking a question in his mind at the same time. “Well, how am I supposed to pay you back? More jumbo parfaits at Enjiya?”

“I feel like they’re not as good lately. Prob’ly ’cos they switched from milk to that synthetic stuff. So no. Ugh, it’s such a hassle to talk like this; come dive into our home net. I’ll open a gate for you.”

“Huh?”

He blinked rapidly at the unexpected order, and the voice call was disconnected after a cluck of annoyance from Chiyuri’s side. Watching the call icon wink into nothingness, Haruyuki cocked his head in puzzlement, wondering what she could possibly be planning at that time of night. But it wasn’t as if he had the courage to bail on her now, so, having no other choice, he called out the command in his flesh-and-blood voice as ordered.

“Direct link!”

Instantly, his dim room melted into outward-shooting rays, and then swooshed out of existence altogether. Sensations of body and weight severed, Haruyuki fell gently into the darkness. His consciousness alone was released to the net, through the full-dive function of his Neurolinker.

He felt himself floating briefly as he watched several circular access gates draw near. Each was an entrance to a net he could currently dive into. Among the VR spaces he had bookmarked on the global net and his own condo’s local net was a gate tagged as the Kurashima home, to which he turned and stretched out an invisible arm.

After a moment, the system generated virtual gravity, and Haruyuki’s consciousness was sucked through the small gate. As he flew through with a pop, a circle of gentle lemon-yellow light grew before his eyes.

“Wh-whoa!” he cried out at the scene that appeared.

Usually, the VR space of the average household’s home net aped the structure of the household: living room, guest room, family bedrooms. Families often had fun customizing this space to create something larger and more inventively embellished than would be possible in the real world. However, below Haruyuki’s eyes lay a sea of cushions, an infinite number of them, in various colors and sizes.

There were no walls in any direction. Piles of pastel-colored cushions stretched out to the horizon under a gloriously blue sky. Haruyuki fell smack in the middle of the cushionscape, bounced back up, and hit the ground again on his backside.

“Wh-what is this?” he muttered, eyes stopping on the yellow giraffe-shaped cushion directly in front of him, the elephant cushion next to that, and then the stranger-shaped one beyond that.

“That’s an anomalocaris. Creature from the Cambrian period.”

Haruyuki whirled around at Chiyuri’s voice to where her slender avatar stood behind him, treading on a star-shaped black pillow, likely a crown-of-thorns starfish. The avatar design—body covered in a soft violet fur, clad in a short slip-on dress and looking like what might happen if cats evolved into people—was the one she used on the Umesato Junior High School local net.

Blinking large blue eyes in a face that was 60 percent cat, Chiyuri sniffed haughtily. “You’re still using that avatar, huh? Just change it to something else already.”

Haruyuki glanced down at his own body and saw the pig-shaped pink body he also used at school. Round limbs on a nearly spherical torso. A flat nose protruded from the center of his face, and although he couldn’t see them, he should also have had large ears sprouting from his head. No one was ever going to call this look cool or cute, and the truth was, Haruyuki hadn’t even chosen this avatar. But he just sort of kept on using it for some reason.

He twitched his nose defensively and said, “I’m used to how this body feels. It’d just be a hassle to change it after all this time. Anyway, I wasn’t asking about this weirdo cushion creature; I meant the VR space itself. Seriously, what is this, this cushion hel—heaven?”

Chiyuri had always liked these stuffed animal cushion things, and he remembered she had a bunch on her bed, but this place was completely over the top. He wondered what the total mass of the objects in the space was as he asked his question, but the cat avatar only laughed proudly, her beribboned tail flicking back and forth.

“Nee-hee-hee! Nice, huh? My parents expanded our home server to make memory just for me, as a present for passing last year. Even at this resolution, it’s fifteen kilometers from end to end!”

“S-seriously?!” He recoiled reflexively, sending his round bottom shooting backward and ending up buried between the elephant and the anomalocaris. As he struggled frantically in the pillows, he thought about how, if he had had that much capacity, he could’ve recreated the battlefield at Kursk in 1943. He could have placed a ton of Tiger and T-34 tanks on the ground and Bf 109 fighter planes in the sky. What a marvelous scene of blood and carnage this could be.

“Hey…Heyyy, Chiyu…If you wanted to share some of that generosi—”

“No!!” Chiyuri snapped, cutting him off. She stuck out her tongue, behind which he spied a mouth full of tiny teeth. “If I let you customize it, you’d totally just fill it full of awful stuff like oil and steel and smoke.”

“B-but isn’t that a good thing…”

“No! It’s! Not! Honestly, I can’t even talk to you.”

Haruyuki looked up at the cat avatar crossing her thin arms, and he finally remembered the reason he was there in the first place. “Ah…I…I see. So, what would you like me to do?”

“Just sit right there.”

“Huh?” Confused, Haruyuki cocked his head to one side, still on the enormous pillow, short legs splayed in front of him. And then—

Pyoing! The cat avatar before him pounced, and with no hesitation whatsoever, laid her slim body across said legs.

“Wh-whoa?!” Haruyuki jumped up to break free, but Chiyuri reached up and caught his nose. Squeezing snugly, she yanked him back down into their original position.

“You stay here awhile and be my pillow. And then I’ll forget that time on the school trip. And just so you know, if you do anything pervy, I’ll make the anomalocaris gnaw at you.”

“I-I won’t! But I mean—pillow? What do you…”

Ignoring Haruyuki’s now shrill voice, Chiyuri snapped the small claws at the ends of her fingers. Instantly, the calm blue sky above began to rotate, transforming from the horizon into a night sky, complete with an enormous floating moon.

Beneath picture-book stars that twinkled with a faint ringing effect, Chiyuri stretched luxuriously and curled up on Haruyuki’s lap. “This isn’t serious or anything, you know.” The mumbled words tumbled from a mouth Haruyuki couldn’t see. “I was just remembering how I used to use you as a pillow and fall asleep right away, back when you came and stayed at our house a lot.”

“Wh-when was that?”

“Dunno. A long…long time ago.” She yawned widely, and the cat avatar closed her eyes.

Ask Taku to do this kind of stuff, Haruyuki started to say, but then he swallowed the words. He was the only one who had been Chiyuri’s substitute pillow when they were kids. Takumu’s parents had a strict education policy, and he was almost never allowed to stay over at either of their houses.

But, even so, was this a conditioned reflex left over from so long ago? After all, they were both animal-type avatars in a virtual cushion heaven created by their Neurolinkers. Of course, this sort of behavior absolutely couldn’t happen with their real bodies. In fact, he wasn’t even sure it was okay in VR, either, if the truth be told.

As his thoughts spun round and round in his brain, to his surprise, he found Chiyuri had dropped into the deep, calm breaths of sleep.

“Come on…,” he groaned, and Chiyuri, not quite as asleep as he thought, responded in a muffled, indistinct voice:

“Hey, Haru…I really did try hard…”

“Huh? At what?”

“To become a Burst Linker…I worked so hard…And now, we can go back, right? Like back then…The three of us hanging out every day until it’s time for bed…Like…back…”

And now it seemed that Chiyuri had actually fallen into proper sleep. Suu, suu. Her avatar made virtual snoozing sounds. Haruyuki ran a gentle hand over the soft fur at the base of her ears and answered her with a sigh in his heart.

There are some things that never change.

But there are some things that do change and never go back to the way they were.

A few minutes later, Chiyuri’s Neurolinker detected her deep sleep state and automatically released the full dive. Even after the cat avatar disappeared from his lap with a ringing sound effect, Haruyuki sat quietly for a while among the silent animals.