Chapter Six

Chapter Six

 

1.

 

AN AIR CONDITIONER hummed faintly.

Naomi hadn’t heard this exact sound before, but it was also painfully familiar. Two contradictory thoughts coexisted in his mind. He had merged, blended with someone else; there was a second Naomi now inside him. It was a peculiar feeling, to say the least.

Gradually, he took stock of his surroundings. He was in a hospital room. There was a large, bulky bed at its center, with an array of machines standing at its side. The window on the wall had its blinds down; great strings of folded paper cranes hung next to it, with a banner that read From the Nishiki High Library Committee.

In the bed itself lay Ichigyou Ruri.

She looked the same, just as she had when she disappeared into the sky after the fireworks festival. But this wasn’t something that Naomi had ever experienced. This had to be a little while after her accident—the accident he’d prevented.

He was seeing Sensei’s memories.

“I had shelf-sorting duty today,” someone said in Naomi’s voice. He’d felt his own mouth moving, like his body had a mind of his own. “I’ve gotten a lot more practice, I guess. I managed to get it done before four this time. It goes quicker when I’m working by myself.” Naomi felt himself smiling slightly, thinking about their strange system when they shelved books together.

 

Naomi sat in a dark hall.

With no warning, he’d been brought somewhere else entirely—to a different place and time. But he immediately knew where he was and what he was doing there. The knowledge was sitting right there in his brain.

This was the Academic Hall at Kyoto College. He was a student here.

There was a slideshow on the big screen up front, which was why the lights were down. An older man with shaggy hair and a big beard gave a lecture to Naomi and the other students around him. Naomi had seen the man before, not too long ago, when he took that tour of the Chronicle Kyoto Project Center.

A video started on the screen. A white mouse appeared, apparently from some experiment or another. The animal was deep asleep, its mouth half-open; it almost looked dead. There were a bunch of wires or cords sticking out of its head.

After a moment, the small lights attached to the wires began to flicker.

The exhausted mouse instantly awoke, pushing itself up off the ground with surprising steadiness. Naomi heard murmurs of surprise from the audience.

At that same moment, he felt something new. It was a mixture of emotions, too complex to reduce to a single word, but very, very powerful. There was astonishment, and joy, and eagerness. His mind raced, jumping between all sorts of possibilities.

But there was also guilt and shame.

Naomi understood all of it. Sensei’s feelings were his feelings now. He knew the man’s thoughts as clearly as his own.

The presentation on the screen switched over to the next slide, displaying the title of the lecture:

A Practical Application of Quantum Recording: Complementing Nervous System Regeneration via Quantum Imaging of the Brain

Prof. Senko Tsunehisa

 

Naomi sat in a laboratory.

This was Professor Senko’s lab at the university, and Sensei had his own desk there. It was covered in piles of thick, intimidating books.

The professor’s research was unbelievably advanced. Naomi had to throw himself completely into his studies if he wanted to make sense of it. He slept in his chair here most nights; whenever he was conscious, he studied with ferocious intensity. He was learning all about Quantum Recording technology and the Kyoto Recording Project.

About AllTale, in other words.

He’d decided on the path he wanted to take. He knew how he would spend his years in college, where he would work after he graduated, and the career he would pursue. He had a clear vision of how he needed to spend the next few years and the hurdles he would need to clear.

All he had to do was follow through.

He was sleeping less and less these days and eating only when strictly necessary. He knew he didn’t have much time, so he gave up completely on having a normal life.

The hurdles he had to make it over were very, very tall. He couldn’t afford to waste a single minute.

A brand-new wooden name tag slipped onto its hook on the wall. The characters for Katagaki Naomi carved into its surface.

Sensei stood in a room deep underground, far below the public Chronicle Kyoto Project offices. This was the Control Room of the AllTale Center, the heart of their secret project.

Naomi was twenty-two years old, and he’d successfully secured a job at the AllTale Center immediately after graduating college. His personal connection to Professor Senko had been invaluable, of course; but to earn a staff position on an enormous international enterprise like this, he’d had to pass many extremely difficult examinations and earn all sorts of technical qualifications. This place employed some of the world’s foremost scientists and technicians. An ordinary college graduate couldn’t exactly expect to get an interview.

But Naomi was far from ordinary. He’d structured his entire life around making it here. He’d thrown everything else aside. And even though his name was now hanging on the wall, that wasn’t the goal line. He was only halfway through this marathon, at best.

Naomi gazed at the wooden tag for a moment, contemplating the future. He was interrupted by a blow to the back of his head. Turning around, he found that someone had flown a drone directly into it. The bearded culprit was standing across the room with a controller in his hand, guffawing loudly.

This was the man he needed to catch up with.

Senko Tsunehisa was the driving force behind the AllTale Center, the nucleus that held it all together. Naomi needed to become his right-hand man. He needed to rise up the ranks to a senior position; but more importantly, he had to become genuinely invaluable to Senko. He had to become the man’s partner. It was the only way to secure an unshakable position inside this project.

To make that happen, he needed to get results. He needed to keep at his studies and his research. He needed to accomplish things no one else could manage.

There was no time to slow down yet. No time to rest.

 

A slightly worn wooden name tag slipped onto its hook on the wall. The characters for his name were carved into its surface, and beneath them was the freshly cut phrase System Management Director.

Sensei was already in conversation with Professor Senko and Xu Yiyi as he entered the now-familiar Control Center. The three of them were working on their latest revision to the Center’s formal business plan.

He was the professor’s right hand. Xu was his left.

Four years had passed since Naomi first stepped into this room. In that time, the three of them had solved all sorts of seemingly impossible problems together. The entire staff now recognized them as the heart of the AllTale project.

Naomi had risen quickly up the ranks. This place ran on purely meritocratic principles; those who demonstrated particular talent earned their promotions very quickly. But everyone on the staff here was talented in their own way, of course. There were probably others with more raw technical skill than Naomi.

And yet, he had leapfrogged them all and earned the director role. There wasn’t anything strange about it, really. He’d just done everything it took to get the job.

 

Naomi flashed his ID card at the wall-mounted camera. It beeped at him softly, and the doors that had been closed to him four years ago slid softly open.

Inside, the AllTale system itself was waiting for him.

 

Back in his personal room, Naomi began to undress.

When he was promoted to director, he’d been granted this private space within the laboratory itself. This was another crucial aspect of his plan. Accessing the system externally would have amplified the risks. He needed to be physically close, where the security was laxer, and he needed a place where he could be alone.

Naomi tossed his shirt aside, leaving him naked from the waist up. In its place, he slipped on a black vest. The contactless nerve transducers mounted on the inside pressed coldly against his back. It had naked electrical wires taped to the outside, and a single cable ran down to the PC under Sensei’s desk.

Sensei lowered himself carefully into his chair and focused on the monitor. The heartbeat display in one corner of the screen indicated that he was intensely anxious.

This would to be his first trial run.

Naomi nodded firmly to himself. His theories were solid. He’d thrown his equipment together quickly, but it met the minimum requirements. It should work. He should be able to get in.

He reached out with his pointer finger and tapped the enter key.

“Gaaah!”

Sensei’s body jerked up out of the chair. On pure reflex, he tore off the vest, then he fell to the floor and rolled back and forth in agony. The smell of charred flesh filled the room.

He’d burned his back terribly.

The injured area stretched from just below his neck all the way down to his waist. Everywhere the nerve transducers had been touching him, his skin was burnt and discolored. The blood vessels in his back pulsed fiercely; the intense initial pain gradually gave way to steady, vicious throbbing.

Grabbing hold of his chair, Naomi managed to pull himself up off the ground. There was an error message on his computer monitor: Timeout. Connection broken.

For a moment, he felt pure despair. But it faded quickly.

He’d never expected success to come easily. The AllTale was a system of literally infinite complexity. An ordinary person like Katagaki Naomi couldn’t expect to truly understand it on a theoretical level.

He wasn’t a genius like Senko Tsunehisa. There would be no shortcuts, no quick victories. This would be a process of trial and error. He would run through experiment after experiment, enduring all the consequences, until he finally succeeded.

That wasn’t a problem, really. It was how he made it this far.

With a red pen, Naomi drew an X in the first square on his table of experiments—driving his first peg into the side of the mountain he would climb.

 

“It’s pretty tricky,” Sensei said quietly. “Senko-san did create the AllTale system, but there are some aspects of it no one really understands, you know? It works, but we’re not completely sure how.”

There was no reply, only the humming of the room’s air conditioner.

“Writing down all those X’s kind of reminds me of the old days, though.” Naomi kept speaking, anyway. He didn’t care if she couldn’t hear him—he wanted to talk to her anyway.

“Remember when we were collecting donations for that used book sale? There was that calendar counting down to the day of the event and everything. We hadn’t collected many books, and we started getting antsy…” Sensei’s chest throbbed slightly as he spoke those words. The memories were still a little bitter, even if time had softened them. “I guess they all burned up in the end, though.”

Disparate memories mingled in Naomi’s mind.

He saw Sensei’s memories of those events: the fire, the charred books, and the canceled book sale. He didn’t have a magic glove, so there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He’d just pushed through the pain as best he could.

“Talking to you makes me remember all sorts of things, you know. Remember that time in April—”

Opening a brand-new notebook, Sensei wrote down a date years in the past.

Naomi sat in his personal room in the lab, working on a journal of sorts. It wasn’t easy going. He paused between every sentence, furrowing his brow and thinking hard.

What happened on that day again? What exactly was I doing?

When a memory popped into his mind, he jotted it down on a notecard. Once he had enough of those, he transferred them into his notebook, then started working on the next day.

He was creating the Ultimate Manual.

It was a retrospective diary of sorts, starting the day he met Ichigyou Ruri and ending with her accident. He recorded every bit of information he could recall about everything that happened over those weeks and months.

Sensei was going to revisit the past—or, rather, a record of it as it existed inside AllTale. Once he made it inside, this notebook would prove extremely useful. His knowledge from the future would be essential to saving her life.

He scribbled down everything he could recall on the notecards, even details that seemed meaningless: what he’d eaten, whether he’d taken a bath or not. Sometimes these little facts would lead him to a more important memory. Better to be thorough now than regret his sloppiness when it was too late.

Slowly, bit by bit, he pieced together the story of their time together like a puzzle.

Remembering her put a smile on his face. Making that notebook was a lot of fun.

 

Naomi hit the enter key. This would be the 140th experiment.

It was another failure.

Sensei tumbled from his chair. He was used to the pain by now; by the time he hit the floor, he was already thinking about what he’d tweak for next time.

Reaching up to grab his chair, he tried to stand…

He couldn’t.

Naomi pulled himself into a sitting position with his arms and stared down at his legs. He tried to spread them apart and his right leg kicked out to one side.

His left leg didn’t move an inch.

 

The air conditioner was spitting out warm air today.

“They call it monoplegia, I guess. My left leg’s permanently paralyzed.” The sheaf of medical documents clipped to the hospital bed swayed slightly in the current. Outside the window, snow was falling.

“I’m glad it was just a leg, though,” Naomi continued quietly. “If I lost an arm, it would have slowed everything down a lot more.”

There was no reply.

“Also, it affected my nerves. That means I’m getting closer. I’ll have to be careful to avoid any more accidents like this...but once I dig through the data from that experiment, I should be almost ready.”

Naomi’s gaze dropped to the floor.

After a moment, he spoke again—not to Ruri, or to anyone else. Not even to himself.

“God, I hope so.” He paused for a moment, his voice even softer. “I miss her so much.”

 

Sensei hit the enter key.

Another failure.

Naomi hit the enter key.

Another failure.

Sensei hit the enter key.

Another failure.

 

The 336th experiment.

Naomi hit the enter key.

The world went white before his eyes. There was a flash of light; an instant later, he was flying through a rainbow tunnel at a ferocious, terrifying speed.

When he emerged on the other side, the first thing he saw was a long chain of torii gates.

He couldn’t stop. He was thrown out of the tunnel at the same velocity he’d traveled through it. The world spun violently as he flew through the red gates.

As he finally started to slow…

Naomi saw himself standing on the stone path.

 

2.

 

SENSEI OPENED HIS EYES.

He was sitting in the waiting area of a hospital hallway. A glance at the clock told him he’d nodded off for five minutes or so.

In that brief time, he’d had a dream. He’d seen flashes of memory, from the distant past to the present, and he’d dreamed about Naomi.

He’d tried to shake the boy off, but he couldn’t get rid of him that easily. He’d probably remember Naomi until the day he died. Naomi would keep glaring at him resentfully forever. He couldn’t exactly want him to stop, either. The boy had every right.

He deserved this. And worse.

“Katagaki-san,” called the nurse, her face bright with happiness. “She’s awake now.”

 

3.

 

ICHIGYOU RURI GAZED down at her hands. Her wrists were so terribly thin.

It felt like looking at a stranger’s body.

She was sitting up in her hospital bed for the first time in years, but the expression on her face wasn’t exactly cheerful. From the moment she woke up two days earlier, she had been thinking constantly, trying to understand what had happened to her.

Ruri glanced across the room. At the side of her bed, a young man with a cane artfully arranged a bouquet of flowers with his one free hand. Most of what she’d heard so far had come from him, and from her doctor at this hospital.

They told her that she’d been struck by lightning at a fireworks show ten years ago, and that she’d been in a coma ever since. They told her it was now 2037, and she was twenty-six years old.

The young man said he was Katagaki Naomi, and that he was twenty-six as well.

It was all very hard to believe. It was the kind of story you might find in a novel, but certainly not in real life. How had she suddenly recovered after spending ten years in a coma? The doctors just called it a miracle, which didn’t answer any of her questions.

Mentally, Ruri was still a sixteen-year-old girl. She didn’t remember anything from the long period of time when she’d been sleeping. But she could remember events from a decade in the past as if they’d happened yesterday. She’d been a member of the library committee. They’d just held a used book sale.

And she’d just started dating Naomi.

Their relationship had only just started, and it wasn’t particularly different from their friendship. They hadn’t even gone out anywhere together yet.

Well, supposedly they’d gone to a fireworks festival together, but Ruri couldn’t remember anything about it. The doctor had said it was perfectly normal for her memories from right before the accident to be vague. She considered this, and found that there were a few small, fragmentary images lurking in a quiet corner of her mind.

She remembered a bridge, swirling clouds, and winds as intense as a hurricane. And she remembered Naomi performing some sort of magic spell.

Ruri had to assume that she’d dreamed that part; it was just too unrealistic and bizarre. But when the doctor insisted she’d gone to the Uji River, she couldn’t help tying that to these strange memories.

She was confused, of course, but it hadn’t taken long for her to accept her new reality. This hospital room had all the proof she needed. When she looked in the mirror, she saw herself ten years older. When she looked at her arms, she saw how thin they had grown. There was no point arguing with the facts or insisting this wasn’t really her body. It was the one she had now. If she wanted to object, she’d have to use its mouth to do so.

This wasn’t an illusion or a dream. This was who she was now.

There was a small thunk from the far side of the room. The young man had finally set down his vase of flowers on the windowsill. Smiling gently at her, he walked over and sat down at her bedside, leaning his cane against the railing.

He’d told her that he’d been in an accident of his own at some point in the last decade. His left leg had been paralyzed in a car crash. The practiced way he moved around with his cane suggested that he’d been coping with the consequences for a while.

That wasn’t the only thing that had changed about him, of course; he looked very different now. He was a good foot taller than before, and his once-childish face had matured. There were dark circles under his eyes that looked like they’d been there for quite some time.

Still, Ruri had recognized him instantly.

There was no doubt in her mind—she could still see traces of the boy she’d known. He still had that little scar on his forehead, too—the one she’d noticed when he fell asleep before the used book sale.

It was Katagaki Naomi, now a decade older than she’d known him. And she was ten years older than she’d known herself. It still felt something like a dream, but she had to admit it was true. This was her reality, and she couldn’t choose another.

“Do you—”

Ruri looked up at the sound of Naomi’s voice, meeting his gaze. He had a strange little half-smile on his face; he still had a bit of that adolescent awkwardness about him, apparently.

“Do you remember the fireworks we saw that night?”

Ruri shook her head. She remembered very little from that outing.

“That’s all right,” he replied gently. It made Ruri feel a little guilty. She wished she could answer otherwise.

A small dark spot appeared on her bedsheet. Another followed a moment later.

Naomi was crying.

It startled her, probably because this was the first time she’d seen a grown man cry. Even knowing he was Naomi, it was still a shock.

“I missed you so much,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I waited for you, you know. All this time.”

The tears kept falling, one after another.

It was the push she’d needed to strengthen her resolve. She was going to make the best of this. She would make a life for herself in this unfamiliar world, and she was going to repay him, as best she could, for his kindness and his loyalty.

She still felt anxious and uncertain. There would no doubt be all sorts of problems to overcome. But she would face them as best she could, with his help.

His tears were real, so she decided to trust him.

Ruri felt something touch her hand; he’d reached out to take it with his own. She accepted it and squeezed his hand back.

Maybe they’d held hands on their way to the fireworks festival. But if so, she didn’t remember it. As far as she was concerned, this was a first for them.

His crumpled, tearful face drew slowly closer. Ruri was a little frightened, but she pushed that feeling down and squeezed his hand harder.

It’s all right, she told herself. It’s him. It’s Katagaki-san.

“That book…” she said. It startled her as much as him—it felt like her mouth had moved on its own as soon as the words popped into her mind. It was something she remembered clearly from before the accident. Something she’d seen on the day of that used book sale.

That mysterious novel he’d found. The one with her name in the back.

Their book.

“What book...?” he murmured.

Ruri’s hand jerked up out of his on pure reflex. She placed both her hands on his chest and pushed him away with what little strength she could muster, sending him back into his chair.

Everything went pure white.

“You’re lying.” Ruri didn’t understand why she was saying this. And yet, it felt true.

“You’re not Katagaki-san.”

 

4.

 

NAOMI’S MIND shut down. The meaning what she’d just said wouldn’t register.

“You’re lying.”

Lying? About what?

He was Katagaki Naomi. He’d been Katagaki Naomi from the day he was born. Who else could he possibly be?

He bit his lip, his body trembling. He knew what she really meant.

He was himself. Katagaki Naomi was his name. But for her, there was another Katagaki Naomi.

Naomi’s heart thudded painfully in his chest. His mind raced wildly. He needed to calm down first, then calmly analyze the situation and find a way to resolve it.

She’d called him a liar. There had to be a reason. But judging from the expression on her face, she wasn’t entirely confident in what she’d just said. She was still uncertain, so she hadn’t made her mind up for good.

He just had to tip the scales back toward him.

He had plenty of material to help him do this. His words would be reinforced by the tangible, physical reality of the world they lived in. There was only one Katagaki Naomi here, and the boy she remembered was nothing but a quantum record inside a computer system.

He could bluff his way through this. He had no choice but to try. Long ago, he’d resolved to make a future for the two of them, no matter what it took.

Suddenly, the door leading to the hallway slid loudly open. Naomi and Ruri both turned toward it.

There was a figure in a kitsune mask standing just outside the room.