4:22 P.M.

4:22 P.M.

 

We found a toolbox on the tiny landing at the top of the elevator shaft, and used it to pry the doors open.

“I’m in!”

“Keep your hands still!”

Shiro hit the crowbar with a hammer, and each blow forced the door further open. At last there was a clunk, and the door stopped fighting us. I guess the lock came off?

“Cool!”

We stepped through.

It was pitch black, with not even the dim light of an exit sign to illuminate our path.

I did a quick scan with my penlight. This was definitely not the top floor. The top was an open space with piles of pamphlets, while this had a low ceiling and felt cramped.

And there were rows of tube-like things everywhere.

Everything fell into place in my mind when I saw them.

“I see… that’s why he filled the lower areas with all those bad art projects,” I said.

“Oh!” Shiro said. “Camouflage?”

“You want to hide some weird shit, hide it with a bunch of other weird shit. The crew working on this building just assumed these were the same as that mannequin art, and brought them here without questioning it at all.”

“So these tubes are definitely…”

“Gas canisters. He called them junk art and tricked everyone.”

Hundreds of them, enough to fill the entire building.

“This is insane. He planned all of this?” Shiro sighed.

I felt the same way.

The rows of gas canisters looked like rows of mortar shells in an armory. This was an armory, and these were his weapons.

Shuddering, I swallowed hard.

“Oh, is this…?” Shiro muttered. Abruptly the room filled with a pale purple light.

Surprised, I turned around, and found him pointing at a switch on the wall.

“I pushed this, and the lights turned on.”

“So the backup power only works here?”

I turned off the penlight.

Didn’t seem to be anyone here.

We began poking around. We were 150 meters up, but this place sure looked like a basement.

“Make your way to the top of the tower, and find yourself in a dungeon. Defies all the rules of RPGs. Teratsuki Kyoichiro may have been a great CEO, but he wasn’t much of a game designer,” I said, hoping the joke would fight back the fear rising inside me.

Shiro snorted. “You can say that again!”

He seemed to be enjoying this. Dude has balls, I thought.

“Hey, Shiro.”

“What?”

“About, um… that girl who was in love with you.”

“Mm…”

“She had good taste. I can see why the age difference wouldn’t have mattered to her.”

“You think?”

“I do,” I nodded with conviction.

Because of her, Shiro had come here. And given me a partner I could trust.

Thanks, lady. You did me a real favor.

At the back of the room, we found a door.

There was a plate on it that read, “Chairman’s Office.”

“Here!”

“Looks like we finally made it.”

Both of us hesitated, glanced at each other, and nodded.

Each of us stood to one side of the door.

Shiro reached out and knocked.

No response.

I steeled my nerves, and grabbed the knob.

“…!”

It wasn’t locked. I turned the knob and pushed the door gently inwards.

I let go, and the door swung slowly open.

A burst of cold air came rushing out.

“…?!”

“Is this…air conditioning?”

We sniffed the cold air, and looked at each other.

“If they’re keeping it cold?”

“Then…computers?”

We stepped into the room.

Inside were rows of supercomputers, and the audible hum made it clear they were functioning.

It was like standing inside Stonehenge. The chill in the air made me feel like I was placing a flag on the northernmost point on the continent.

There was nobody here.

Each time I breathed out, a cloud formed. It was colder in here than it was outside. In February.

“Is this controlling all of the Moon Temple?” Shiro asked.

I shook my head. “If that was all it was doing, they wouldn’t need anything this massive. This room has to be processing the entire information load for a certain…system. Enough data to conduct information warfare on an entire country.”

“So…?”

“Let’s see if we can get anything to show on a screen.”

There was a single desktop placed almost apologetically in a corner, and I turned that on.

It booted up like normal, nothing out of the ordinary about it. I tried connecting it to other lines.

Immediately, words appeared on the screen.

“Open if you dare.”

Below that, an image of a box was flashing.

“…?”

“I…guess we should open it?” Shiro said, leaning closer.

I didn’t know what else to do.

I clicked the “Activate” button above the box.

And the screen cut out.

“…?!”

We panicked, but a moment later the screen filled with static, which in turn resolved into a single image.

A man, sitting on a chair in a dimly lit room, facing us. It was Teratsuki Kyoichiro. But there was something strange about him.

This Teratsuki Kyoichiro was much younger than he’d looked in magazines or on TV.

 

***

 

“Well done! You, and your companions—if you have any, I have no way of knowing—deserve praise for making it this far.

 

“Oh, my face? Yes, I don’t blame you. I used a great deal of makeup in my public appearances, but this is what I actually looked like. In my line of work, being of a certain age gives you that extra tinge of authority. Ha ha, putting all that makeup on every day was a real nightmare! I doubt even famous actresses cake it on like I do. Even with the makeup, people accused me of looking young, or not looking my age. I suppose I just never had the knack for it!

 

“Although I suppose that’s not the answer you’re really looking for, I know. The Moon Temple, right? As you may have guessed, all of this was created just to bring you here. Or at least, it will be. As I’m recording this, the building is not yet complete, which complicates things. How’d it turn out? I hoped to create something that would loom over the city, dominating the skyline, and yet remaining completely out of place. Did I succeed? If everyone thought, ‘What a weird building,’ then I did.”

 

The man smiled. He locked his fingers together on his knees.

 

“Right, right, I have so much to explain. But, like I said, things are complicated. Perhaps I just sound like I’m beating around the bush, but bear with me, please.

 

“Have you ever considered whether the world has a ‘flow’ to it? You can call it destiny, or perhaps a ‘trend’. Have you ever really thought about it? Thinking about it didn’t get you anywhere, did it? Ha ha, I suppose not. But this is a problem mankind has thought about since we first arrived in this world. A problem we still ponder today. And there are parts of it we’ve come to understand. After all, it’s been quite a while since we came up with the concept of ‘evolution’.”

 

The man looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.

 

“Yes…that isn’t something that can be explained with mere probability. No matter how you look at it, there must have been some direction, some flow to it. I can only think of how giraffes’ necks must have suddenly become incredibly long, and how whales abruptly became so ludicrously huge. These changes took place far too fast for these to have been minor chance mutations that slowly proliferated. Each replaced what came before quite quickly. When they didn’t replace their predecessors, things were even more extreme. The new and the old were so different they didn’t even try to kill each other off, just divided their territory up. Like humans and monkeys. And this line of thought naturally leads us to wonder if this flow is still going. And if so, then what comes next? Perhaps we can’t know for sure, but can we at least get a read on which direction the flow is going in?”

“Maybe that’s something only God can know? Not one powerful man in all of human history has ever resisted the impulse to meddle in God’s domain. But in our modern age, it is harder to tell who is in charge, who holds the real power. Instead, we have a system. A system with no real name. For convenience, we call it the Towa Organization. I belong to it, and I was created by it.

 

“Yes, I am a man-made man. I am less a human being and more of a robot made from biological parts. And my purpose was to manipulate the economy to the Towa Organization’s benefit. Yes… ‘was’. Past tense. My role has ended. Of course it has. My power grew a bit too great, you see. I’ll be disposed of soon. I predicted this, but I’m afraid the economy wouldn’t let me tone things down that easily. Once you realize you’ve grown too big, there’s little you can do to stop it. So I decided to make one last big gamble. To take a huge amount of money, and play a game with the Towa Organization. The construction of the Moon Temple.

 

“After my death, I’m sure the Moon Temple will be turned into an exhibit. That’s the only way for them to turn any short-term profit from it, after all. Is that what brought you here? Or are you from the event management team? Either way, I doubt you expected to get mixed up in anything like this. But here you are. As you should be. Things like this happen. That isn’t proven, there’s no evidence to support that notion, but I believe there are people who know things they should not, and who go where they must go. And those people are what the Towa Organization is hunting. The Towa Organization has laid traps the world over to draw those people to it. And this Moon Temple is one of those. The only one of its scale, of course, and one created without the permission of Axis.

 

“You were locked in here, and lost consciousness. But fear not, the sleeping gas used is quite weak. You were not harmed by it. What matters is that you woke up first, and made your way here. You know what that means, don’t you? You have powers beyond ‘coincidence’—certainly enough that the Towa Organization would want to keep tabs on you. You have the potential to be the Towa Organization’s enemies.

 

“I wanted to let you know. The Moon Temple and all Teratsuki Kyoichiro’s fortune existed for no other reason than to tell you to be careful. The supercomputers around you are busy distracting the entire internet, making it so no one can ever find this message. I can only hope they succeeded.

 

“The code to unlock the Moon Temple’s current state is “STAIRWAY 2 HEAVEN”. This will open every lock. Type it into the keyboard before you, and as you do, this record will be deleted.

 

“You have potential. I cannot imagine what kind. Perhaps you are not yet aware of it yourselves. But I would prefer that you not waste it. Becoming the enemy of the Towa Organization is secondary. What really matters here is how you grow that potential, and how you make use of it. I wish you well.”

 

The image changed. The man’s eyes looked away from the camera, to one side. Speaking to someone who’d entered the room. As he spoke, he reached down and pressed a button on the side of his chair.

 

“Oh, they sent you, Eugene? I’m sure you’ll do a fine—”

 

The image cut out, replaced by static.

 

***

 

“………”

I found myself remembering the first time I ever met Nagi. Wondering if the trap I’d set off that day was part of the ‘distraction,’ the jamming program he’d set up here.

But that didn’t matter. This was way beyond that.

The video started over again, playing on repeat.

“Well done! You, and your companions—if you have any, I have no way of knowing—”

I watched it again, dazed.

But Shiro nodded to himself.

“Well, that explains a lot…”

“W-wait, Shiro, this isn’t right… it’s…”

“How so?”

“B-but… but this is… how is…?”

My voice was shaking. Pathetic.

The video just kept going. “Right, right, I have so much to explain. But, like I said, things are complicated. Perhaps I just sound like I’m beating around the bush, but bear with me, please.”

The same thing as before.

“Why… why doesn’t he say one word about the King of Distortion?!”

He didn’t explain that at all!

He only mentioned us being trapped in here and put to sleep!

“………”

“He didn’t cover the most important part! What the hell?!” I yelled.

And then… the Teratsuki Kyoichiro on the screen changed. He stopped talking, and grinned.

“Don’t you get it?” he said.

“Hunh?”

“Do you really not know why?”

The light in his eyes was gone.

“…?!”

And “Custard Pie” echoed through the air…

 

Dahhdadadan, dan da-dan…

 

Pounding in my ears.

And a second later I was standing all alone in the center of a sunlit field.

“N-no?!”

A wave of heat struck me, and before I knew it I was drenched in sweat.

“God damn it!”

Sitting in front of me, just as he had been in the video, chair and all, was Teratsuki Kyoichiro.

“It’s simple. Very simple,” he said, and chuckled to himself. “How could that video have explained me? After all, he only provided the ‘opportunity.’”

“S-so you—the King of Distortion isn’t part of…?”

“Think of this as a ‘collaboration’. Between myself, and the man whose face I wear. I owe him a great deal for creating such an ideal stage for me. Bravo!”

I shuddered.

Had I been dancing on his palm this whole time?

But…

But I wasn’t out of options, yet.

I glared at the King of Distortion.

He was the same distance away as he’d seemed when I was looking at him on the monitor. This might be an illusion, but in the real world I was still sitting in front of the monitor. It sure felt like I was standing up, but that was just here. Which meant my fingers were still…

“………”

I closed my eyes. Seeing anything would just confuse me. I let my mind go blank, not thinking anything. Telling myself I couldn’t hear “Custard Pie” playing in my ear.

My fingers were still resting on the keyboard, and they should still be resting on the right keys. Obviously, I could touch type. I could type whatever I wanted by reflex, without consciously thinking about it.

I could do this.

I was sure of it.

I had to do this!

I’d been typing for years. It was effortless. I could pull this off!

I swallowed hard. And tried to punch in the code we’d just heard.

But as I did, someone grabbed my arm, and twisted it back.

“I’m afraid we can’t have anyone opening the Moon Temple just yet,” he said, quietly.

I gaped at him.

It was Tanaka Shiro.

But this Shiro… his eyes were…

“Sh-Shiro, your eyes…”

“………”

“Your eyes…if you’re in here, how is there light in your eyes?”

The King of Distortion had no light in his eyes. Most likely because he was a shadow, a reflection of other things. Shadows had no light of their own. And if there was something in that shadow that had light, that must be…

Shiro wasn’t letting go of my arm.

He spoke calmly, solemnly, with all the weight his name implied.

“Yes. I’m the real King of Distortion.”