8:45 A.M.

8:45 A.M.

 

Whoa, the line’s already this long?

I glared balefully at the line wrapped two and a half times around the Moon Temple. I’d overslept a little, but it wasn’t even nine yet! Admissions started at ten, so there were sure a lot of bored people in this world. Lots of couples, too. It was February 14th, Valentine’s Day, so they should all just go give each other chocolate where I couldn’t see them—sour grapes on my part, I guess. I was in love with a girl, but I couldn’t see Kirima Nagi ever showing the slightest interest in exchanging chocolate. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even register me as a man. Damn it all.

“Tch…oh well,” I muttered, and grabbed a place at the end of the line.

“Oh, Habara-san!” A voice came from the inner circle, a lap ahead of me in line. “Habara Kentaro-san, right?”

I turned to look, and saw a dude named Tanaka Shiro waving at me. He was a year younger than me, but we’d known each other as kids.

“Yo, Shiro!”

This was my chance. I went over to him, totally jumping the line. The people behind us scowled, but I ignored them.

“Haven’t seen you since junior high!”

“That’s right. How’s school going, Habara-san? I hear your place is pretty uptight. Is the stress getting to you at all?”

“Yeah…I’m handling it. Had my share of trouble, but it worked out okay.”

Shiro looked like your classic pretty boy. But since I’d last seen him he’d grown up a bit. There was a little more darkness there—in a good way.

“You here alone? No date?” I asked.

He gave me a sad smile, and said, “You could call it a date.”

But there wasn’t anyone here with him.

I must have looked confused, because he added, “I was supposed to be here with a girl, but she… she couldn’t be here. So I came alone.”

He was maintaining a decent poker face, but I saw some real grief behind it.

“She die?”

“I’m not sure. Probably.”

He nodded, and jerked his thumb up at the Moon Temple.

“We walked past this place together when they were building it. She said she wanted to come here someday. I just…remembered that last night. That’s why I’m here. So... to me, it’s a date.”

“R-right…”

This was awkward. Maybe I was in the way.

“Th-then, I should…” I began.

But Shiro said, “I’d like it if you joined me, Habara-san.”

“Y-you’re sure?”

“She always liked crowds. But on my own… well. You know a lot about high-tech stuff, right? Fill me in, please.”

He was smiling again.

“S-sure. I can do that.”

It didn’t feel right to turn him down. Shiro wasn’t one to say things he didn’t mean.

“Hmm…but where to start?”

“The guy who built the place died recently, right? Teratsuki, was it?”

He pointed at the tower behind us again.

“Yeah…Teratsuki Kyoichiro’s folly. Might well be the best explanation for it.”

 

Teratsuki Kyoichiro.

The man was more than a mere genius—his very name had become a synonym for “monster.”

At age twenty-four, he struck gold after founding an accessory company. He then used his newfound cash to move into a completely unrelated field, starting a large-scale delivery company able to transport packages anywhere on the globe. That was a success, too, and after that he did whatever he wanted. His company, Moon Communications Enterprises (MCE for short) had fingers in every industry there was. There were even rumors they were making weapons abroad. They were especially good at intelligence gathering, and always knew when and where to make a move. Even the starting point, the delivery service, seemed to have been founded because he planned to make use of it later.

But all this success was not because he’d gathered a skilled staff around him. Teratsuki Kyoichiro never created any sort of brain trust or advisory board. MCE was never even publicly traded. It was a private company, with no executive staff. He managed all of its divisions on his own.

So when he suddenly died six months ago, at only fifty-six, there was nothing to be done. He had no successor, not even anyone who had a firm grasp on the exact scale of his company. Teratsuki had no family, no dependents of any kind.

Wherever possible, middle management took over affiliate companies, and wherever not, they were disbanded.

And the latter group included this giant information management system tower, the Moon Temple, his very own Tower of Babylon.

As a building, it was downright bizarre. It was 157 meters tall, but contained nothing resembling floors. To keep it operating properly would cost several billion yen a month. Besides, the land it stood on was Teratsuki’s property. Taking possession of it would cost a fortune in inheritance tax, and nobody wanted to assume that burden.

 

“But since the thing is here, and they’re in need of extra funds to resolve the mess Teratsuki Kyoichiro left behind, they’ve delayed demolition for a month to show it off, earning money off admissions. The prefectural governor and the tax office and…all kinds of groups are involved.”

“Wow…” Shiro said, dumbfounded. “So they built the thing, but nobody really knows what to do with it?”

“I’m sure Teratsuki Kyoichiro had plans… like creating a giant network linking information from across the globe. Up there with the New York stock exchange. But the way things are going, information is going to fragment, not concentrate. They’ll compensate for that by allowing us access wherever we are. Teratsuki Kyoichiro should have known that better than anyone, so I really have no idea what he was thinking.”

“His ‘folly’, then? The word fits,” Shiro nodded, impressed.

We heard a stir ahead of us in line, and Hopper-kun, the mascot character of the accessory company that had gotten MCE started, was passing out balloons. The costume was basically a giant insect, but didn’t really look much like a grasshopper.

“He started with that thing, and turned into a real monster,” I said, gazing at Hopper-kun’s giant, goofy eyes. The costume had been well used, and was worn and threadbare. It wasn’t balanced well, and the head was swaying back and forth.

“But that’s just how the world is,” Shiro said. “The very beginning of anything is always laughably precarious.”

The blue skies were growing swiftly cloudy. I didn’t like the look of those clouds.

“Is it gonna rain…?” I wondered, looking up at them.