Last and First Idol

Prologue

This novel tells the story of a girl who becomes the greatest idol of all. The protagonist, Mika Furutsuki, is an entirely fictional character. And yet, every word written here is true. The Idol whose origin was Mika Furutsuki will have a dramatic effect on the universe and your very existence.

You must read this novel with utmost care and attention. You must cheer for Mika Furutsuki, you must empathize with her, and you must identify with her. When you have finished reading this novel, assuming you understood it, you will have found yourself accepting a new calling.

These words — this book — are written for no one else. Only you.

I

Mika Furutsuki loved idols. In this time period referred to as the Great Idol Wars, such a thing was not uncommon. Idols would spring up like bamboo shoots after the rain, and the number of their fans would grow accordingly without bound. But Mika Furutsuki went a step beyond those filthy casuals. After all, she became an idol otaku when she was six months old. At the time, she was a baby that would constantly cry at night. Be it night or day, her voice would ring out 24/7 and deny her parents sleep and peace of mind. Worried, they searched for something the child could latch onto, something that would bring her calm. They tried dolls, castanets, video games, toy models, tops, kites, robots, aprons, flashlights, cardboard mazes, and even hamsters, but Mika Furutsuki showed interest in none of them.

One night her exhausted parents were channel surfing, and the CRT screen flipped from the President to a businessman to a chef, a doctor, a dog, a brass band, a car, and then, finally, an idol. The moment the idol appeared, Mika Furutsuki stopped crying. Her eyes opened wide, staring at the face of the idol dancing on the TV screen. Her facial muscles were stimulated, forming a smile. A carefree, cherubic smile. That same, innocent smile that was the very archetype of a baby’s smile.

That’s it! her parents thought. This was their ticket to a good night’s sleep.

The Furutsuki family was not exactly rich. But Mika Furutsuki was flooded with a torrent of idol goods. Video tapes were replayed so often the magnetic film would wear off and they’d stop working. A year after Mika Furutsuki’s birth, her sister Miya Furutsuki was born, and they enjoyed idols together. As the two of them grew, DVDs replaced video tapes. By elementary school, they began attending idol concerts. Mika Furutsuki was a naturally shy and somewhat emotionally unstable child, but her love of idols thankfully helped her to make many friends. It would not be an exaggeration to say that idols were her salvation.

But at the same time, idols caused Mika Furutsuki’s life to bend out of shape. The constant concert trips and DVD purchases cost a fortune, putting the squeeze on the family budget; they ate poorly and her parents were forced to work extra hours. Tensions increased within the home until, finally, her parents divorced. Miya Furutsuki went with her father, splitting apart from Mika Furutsuki who went with her mother. This happened when Mika Furutsuki was thirteen, a first-year student in middle school. This was such a blow to her that she refused to go to school for an entire year, spending that time watching idol concert videos in a blacked-out room, over and over and over again. She ate only two meals a day — on bad days, only one. Her skin grew unhealthily pale, her body thin. Though her mother worried, Mika Furutsuki was secretly pleased. She thought she looked almost like a real idol.

After a year like this, Mika Furutsuki grew more stable. She’d found herself a new purpose — Hikarigayama National High School. A school for girls, it had not been a very popular place until just a year before, when they’d walked off with top place in a new amateur idol contest, drawing the attention of idol fans nationwide.

Naturally, Mika Furutsuki had been at the concert, and it blew her away. Each idol had their own unique personality, and each one was brilliant in their own right, yet their performance as a group was in perfect harmony. Getting individuals this different from one another to come together as a single group was in and of itself a work of art. It was as if a soccer player, a hunter, a street vendor, a car racer, a cult leader, a pottery maker, an engineer, a salesman, and an air traffic controller had joined forces to save the world, each using their particular skill sets. Mika Furutsuki’s mind was made up. She had to join that group. She was all raring to go after cutting herself off from the world for so long. And she was absolutely, positively certain that she had to become an idol, no matter what.

Mika Furutsuki studied her ass off. After a year’s absence, she was behind her classmates, but soon overcame that late start and passed the entrance exam with flying colors.

High school became the best time of her life. The school had become famous because of idols, so naturally there were tons of like-minded idol fans around her. The upperclassmen in the idol club seemed somewhat nonplussed by the sudden influx of new members, but after some trial and error, they arrived at a system in which they broke into multiple, smaller groups. Mika Furutsuki was assigned to a five-girl group named P-VALUE, and there she met someone that changed her destiny. Not only her destiny, but the destiny of the entire universe.

“Hi, I’m Maori Niizono.”

On the day P-VALUE was formed, Mika Furutsuki received a perfectly ordinary greeting. Maori Niizono was tall, with short hair, a stern look to her eyes, and definitely not the sort of person who made friends easily. In fact, she remained somewhat apart from the other members of the group.

Mika Furutsuki spent her high school days trying to be liked by everyone. She was naturally timid and introverted, and that was exactly why she worked so hard at acting cheerful and outgoing. It may have been an act, even a sham, but it did its job hiding her actual shyness. She was good at using her phony cheer to make friends, but she ended up with no friends who actually understood her. She was too afraid that revealing her true self would lead to her friends distancing themselves from her. She was convinced that if that happened she’d become unstable and drive them further away — a vicious circle. The only way she could keep it together was to continue pretending to be cheerful.

Maori Niizono was Mika Furutsuki’s polar opposite. She maintained a veneer of indifference, immediately spoke up if something annoyed her, and was prone to sighs of boredom. Rumor had it her parents were doctors and ran a hospital, so she was quite well off. This certainly got her a lot of attention in class, but not many friends.

Mika Furutsuki put a tremendous amount of effort into meeting expectations, especially for idol activities. She would blow off classes to learn songs, practice choreography, and train her core skills. Meanwhile Maori Niizono showed no signs of caring about anyone else’s expectations, while easily handling any subject put to her. Apparently, she’d studied piano, singing, and ballet as a child. Mika Furutsuki would mess up routines she’d practiced for hours and hours while Maori Niizono effortlessly learned new ones.

The distance between the two showed no sign of getting any smaller. After all, no matter how you did the math, the two simply had no common factors. Mika Furutsuki tried to put Maori Niizono out of her mind. She was afraid if she tried too hard to become friends, she’d end up opening a rift between them instead. Whether she picked up on this or not, Maori Niizono did nothing to make them closer.

What finally made them best friends was a complete coincidence. About a month after school started, Mika Furutsuki was, like always, up early for morning practice. She was on the rooftop that the idol club used before anyone else, practicing her dance moves in silence. It took her longer than the other members to learn the choreography, so she always made time for solo practice.

“That step’s a half-beat off-tempo,” said a voice behind her.

She turned around to find Maori Niizono standing there. “What brings you here this early?”

“Looks like my alarm clock broke. It rang early. Didn’t see the point in going back to sleep, so I figured I’d enjoy the morning air. You always here this early?”

Maori Niizono’s question made her uncomfortable. She felt embarrassed to be practicing this early every morning with no significant results.

“...yeah.” She nodded.

“Hmm. Want some help?”

“Wha...?” The offer took her by surprise.

“We’re all in the same group. Might be a good opportunity to get to know each other.”

“You’re sure it’s not too much to ask, Niizono-san?”

“Of course not. Idol activities are just for fun, after all.”

Being an idol was her life’s goal, yet her skill lagged far behind someone just doing it for fun. This fact came as such a blow it must have shown on her face, as Maori Niizono became concerned.

“You feeling OK there?”

“...yes. I’m fine.” But Mika Furutsuki couldn’t stop her tears.

“Did... I say something wrong? Then I’m sorry...”

There was a long, awkward silence.

“...becoming an idol is my dream. But when I compare myself to you, Niizono-san... I dunno, it just kinda gets me down.” The silence had rattled her so much that she spoke the truth.

“Oh, well, in that case I’ll be your producer.”

The conversation headed in an unexpected direction.

“But... I can’t even remember the choreography...”

“You’ve got it all wrong. Nobody’s looking for flawless choreography or dancing from idols. Even if you aren’t that good, if you look like you’re working hard at it, the audience will see themselves in you, and empathize. In that sense, you’re way more suited to the idol life than I am.”

“I... am?”

Inside, she was incredibly happy to hear this.

“Yeah! First, let’s make your speech pattern and hairstyle a little more idol-esque. Let’s see here...”

And just like that, Maori Niizono became Mika Furutsuki’s producer. Her hairstyle was their first target. At Maori Niizono’s suggestion, she changed it from long and straight to twin tails, dramatically increasing the cute factor. This also helped with her pale skin, which otherwise looked a little sickly. Next, they looked at her first-person pronoun. She’d been using ‘atashi,’ but instead she started to refer to herself in the third person. Calling herself ‘Mika’ emphasized her youth, and reinforced her character. This matched up well with her short stature.

Using Mika Furutsuki’s new character as a springboard, P-VALUE’s attitude changed. With a very idol-like person at the center, the other girls began to grasp what being in an idol group actually meant. Soon, the rest of the members were joining the two of them for early morning practice, and they began entering idol contests in other districts.

The two girls had more chances to work together, and they grew closer, until everyone considered them best friends. For three glittering, golden years, Mika Furutsuki’s high school life was fantastic. She could feel herself shining as an idol.

It was only afterwards that the problems started. The moment she graduated and left the idol group, she would lose her identity as an idol and return to being just a normal person. But Mika Furutsuki couldn’t stand going back to how she was before. She was well beyond that. She wanted to continue shining as an idol for ever and ever.

Her mother told her to prioritize her studies, but if she had time to study, she poured that into rehearsing for auditions. She wrote ‘IDOL’ in big letters on the survey asking her plans for the future. Her teacher warned her that she’d come to regret this, and her mother grew convinced she’d failed her as a parent. Whenever someone tried to warn her, she just responded, “Mika will be everyone’s idol! No proble-mika!” in her cutest voice.

The only one who stepped up to help her was Maori Niizono. She constantly told her, “You’ll be the best idol in the universe, Mika-chan. You’re cuter than anyone else I’ve ever met.” This helped keep her confidence up. These words gave her a buzz. If Maori Niizono had not been there for her, she’d have grown dejected, and maybe even given up on being an idol. But no matter how many auditions she failed, no matter how much her mother told her to give up, all she had to do was hear Maori Niizono’s words to be convinced once again of how brightly she was shining, which filled her with the desire to take the next step.

And after countless failures, she finally passed an audition. At last she caught sight of that glimmer of hope. But there was one problem. The talent office she’d be working for was in Tokyo, but Maori Niizono was going to med school in Kyoto, so they’d be forced to separate. They gave each other goodbye hugs, promised to meet again soon, and parted from one another. Mika Furutsuki swore that the next time they met, she’d be a top-selling idol.

Once she joined the office, the first thing they did was collect lesson fees. For the first six months, the monthly lesson fees would leave her racking up debt, but her manager promised that the work would start rolling in after that. Her heart dancing at the prospect of this glorious future, Mika Furutsuki took him at his word, and threw herself into her lessons.

But what awaited Mika Furutsuki at the end of her hard work was a cruel and heartless reality.

When those six months were up, Mika Furutsuki was told the office had gone bankrupt. The office had been on a tightrope for a while, ready to fall off at any moment, so they’d gathered up a bunch of idol wannabes who’d yet to get a contract with a proper agency, milked them dry, and took off with the cash.

All that remained were the debts from the lesson fees, and her shattered psyche. She had almost nothing to show for the last six months and was unable to change offices or even go freelance. Everything she’d carefully built up had come tumbling down. All she could do was start over, going from audition to audition. And she had to work part-time to cover her living expenses all the while.

The worst part of it was the isolation. She’d come to Tokyo by herself, so she had no friends around her, or anyone to practice with. Rehearsing for auditions was no longer fun, her smile no longer natural. If she consciously tried to smile, her face just twisted out of shape. Staring at her twisted face in the mirror, she felt bitterly sad. Her stomach started to hurt. There was no way she could pass an audition like this.

She felt tempted to ask Maori Niizono for help. But she didn’t act on that temptation. They’d been in touch occasionally, but she still hadn’t told Maori Niizono about her office going bankrupt. She’d been too scared to say anything and put it off for so long that she ended up lying to her, saying that she was happily working as an idol. The lies piled up, and were no longer something easily taken back. The real reason she wasn’t able to tell Maori Niizono the truth was because of how depressed she was. She’d been so confident when they parted, she couldn’t bear to let her see her like this, struggling to even smile.

Mika Furutsuki idolized Maori Niizono. She had to become an idol that would live up to that image of her — she had to shine bright enough to live up to that ideal. And this ideal had become an obsession that caused her to indefinitely postpone revealing her reality. But then one day, suddenly, the indefinite became finite.

“Mika-chan!”

She knew that voice. It was Maori Niizono’s voice. She turned around and saw her standing there. “Whaaaat? Maorin!” Maorin was Maori Niizono’s nickname.

“Mika-chan! I heard your talent office went bankrupt! Are you OK?”

Maori Niizono had heard about her predicament through the rumor mill. All the lies that had been piling up came tumbling down.

“Maorin... it’s all true-mika.” The shock was so great that she used her stage voice.

Mika Furutsuki took Maori Niizono to her apartment. Feeling so awkward that she forgot to say she was glad to see her again, unable to keep silent, everything came pouring out together with her tears. She began to explain everything that had happened.

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

Maori Niizono put her arms around her sobbing friend.

“I was too embarrassed to let you see me like this...”

She let it all out. The shock of the office betraying her, her inability to trust anyone, her feelings of powerlessness and self-hatred, her worsening physical condition, her dwindling savings, her isolation in Tokyo, and the occasional feeling that she was going crazy.

“Don’t worry!” Maori Niizono said forcefully. “I’ll provide for you!”

“What?!” She didn’t know what that meant.

“I mean it! I have money. Loads of it. I can get as much as I want if I just ask my parents. I can use that to provide for you, Mika-chan! You keep right on with your idol activities.”

To Maori Niizono, this was a totally normal proposition. To her, money was not an issue. But Mika Furutsuki felt like the very idea of it was grinding her into the dirt. Perhaps this was a sociological issue; Mika Furutsuki’s family was poor, and as a product of a neoliberal society, this was tantamount to original sin. Accepting any form of charity felt like society branding her as lazy. She unconsciously recoiled from the suggestion.

“Mm? What?” Maori Niizono said, smiling obliviously.

“I appreciate the thought, but...”

Just as she tried to refuse, the doorbell rang.

Putting the conversation on hold, Mika Furutsuki went to the door and opened it.

“Onee-sama!”

The door was yanked out of her hand, and a girl came in. The girl’s face looked exactly like hers, but she was even more petite. It was Miya Furutsuki, Mika Furutsuki’s sister, who she hadn’t seen since their parents divorced.

“Miya-chan?! What are you doing here?”

Mika Furutsuki was very confused.

“What am I doing here? I should ask you the same thing! I came to bring you back to your senses! You’re possessed by a demon! The demon called ‘idol’! Idol! Oh, what a loathsome word. Idols destroyed our family and now they’re trying to destroy you! Come, Onee-sama. It isn’t too late! Your office going under was a sign! Quit this idol nonsense and come back to the real world!”

Miya Furutsuki spoke with a passion. Convinced idols had caused her parents’ divorce, she had sworn to eradicate all idols from this world. When she’d heard her sister was trying to be an idol, she’d been unable to sit idly by.

“Mika-chan, company?” Maori Niizono had grown tired of waiting and joined them at the door.

“Hello. I’m Mika-onee-sama’s sister, Miya Furutsuki.”

“Mika-chan, you have a sister?”

“Yeah... We haven’t seen each other since our parents divorced in middle school.”

“But my heart has always been with you, Onee-sama. So, who is this other person?”

“I’m Maori Niizono. Mika-chan and I were idols together in high school.”

“Idols...?” Miya Furutsuki’s teeth ground together. “So you’re the one who destroyed Onee-sama!”

“Whaaat?!” Maori Niizono was naturally flabbergasted.

“Onee-sama was supposed to go to a decent college, get a decent job, get married, and have a good life! But, instead! Oh! She’s living alone and depressed in this awful, dirty room, her life in shambles! She’s a failure! By any measure!”

“Not by mine,” Maori Niizono replied, quietly.

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She is not a failure. I will provide for her.”

It took several seconds for the meaning of these words to permeate Miya Furutsuki’s head.

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am.”

“...fuck off!” Miya Furutsuki kicked the wall so hard a flower vase fell off a shelf and shattered. “First you drive Onee-sama to ruin, and now you’re turning her into your personal plaything?! Huh?! I bet you’ll get bored and abandon her down the road! You too, Onee-sama! You’re going to just leech off this woman? How low are you willing to sink? Get a grip! Everyone’s sick of your idol bullshit! Take a look at reality for once!”

Miya Furutsuki raged like a woman possessed. Every bit the kind of angry, fight-the-power youth that people on the news were so scared of.

“Hah?! What does that even mean? Why should I have to answer to you?”

Meanwhile, Maori Niizono was not the type of person to stand there and take it. Sparks flew in the air between them. Lightning might have struck them at any moment.

Before things could come to blows, Mika Furutsuki stepped in between them.

“...get out,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. It was said quietly, but with a fierce will.

“But, Mika-chan!”

“Onee-sama...”

Both instantly forgot to be angry and tried to calm her down.

“I said, get out!”

She shoved both of them out the door and locked it behind them. She heard them pounding on the door, but ignored it.

“Look at reality, huh?”

Mika Furutsuki smiled wanly. Her heart broke with an audible snap. Maori Niizono’s proposal had shattered her pride, and Miya Furutsuki’s declaration had forced her to recognize her own lack of talent. Combined, they revealed the reality of her current situation.

That’s right. This was reality. She would never be an idol. The harder she worked for the impossible, the deeper her wounds would become. It was time to stop. Time to end it. To end it all.

Everything that had once shone brightly within Mika Furutsuki had gone out. All the shining light that should have grown within her from idols and her idol activities was gone.

If she could not be an idol, then it was all over. She had nowhere else to go.

Mika Furutsuki carried a chair out to her tiny veranda and stepped onto it. The view before her was gorgeous. It was an ordinary city night, just narrow streets and vacant lots lit by the streetlights, but she felt the beauty of it. She’d stepped onto this veranda any number of times, but never before had the view seemed so beautiful to her.

She was glad that she could end things feeling this good.

Mika Furutsuki let out a satisfied sigh and threw herself off the veranda.

Her body fell, obeying the laws of gravitational acceleration. She fell seven stories, roughly 21 meters, so by the time she landed she was going approximately 70kph, about the same as if she’d been thrown from a car on the highway. The shock to her body ruptured blood vessels and destroyed brain cells. For a moment she experienced the worst — and last — pain of her life, and then it was gone.

Mika Furutsuki was dead.

But her death was not the end. It was the starting line. This is where the Idol begins.

Maori Niizono and Miya Furutsuki heard the sound of Mika Furutsuki’s death. Horrified, they ran out to the front road and found her lying there, covered in blood. She looked less like a human being and more like a pile of garbage that had been disposed of improperly. Maori Niizono wasn’t going to med school for nothing; she lifted up the chin and checked for respiration, seeing if she was conscious. Her actions seemed calm, but her mind was a total blank. Her classes had pounded these actions into her so much she could do them without thinking. Meanwhile, Miya Furutsuki didn’t even manage to call for help. She was overwhelmed with a feeling of powerlessness. There was nothing anyone without medical training could do.

An ambulance came blaring in, the sound of the siren distorted by the doppler effect. The EMTs loaded Mika Furutsuki into the back. Miya Furutsuki rode with her as her family member with Maori Niizono joining her, insisting she was also family.

Her body was taken to one of the hospitals run by Maori Niizono’s parents. There was no particular reason why that hospital was chosen. Of the nearby hospitals, that was the only one ready to take a patient. But this coincidence would change the fate of the universe.

“Time of death.”

The declaration came after running her through the most advanced resuscitation techniques. The doctor in charge had been convinced from the start that these efforts were futile, and they were.

When the two of them heard the news, they both went slack-jawed. They must have looked extremely stupid, but when someone you love dies unexpectedly, that’s the face you make.

Mika Furutsuki’s death was enough to drive both of them mad. Maori Niizono was the first to snap.

“Daddy! Please!”

She phoned her parents, who ran the hospital. They doted on her and accepted her request without a second’s thought. She requested they pull the doctors from the operating room and let her in, instead.

Madness caused by the death of a close friend would drive most people in a more spiritual direction. They might claim to hear voices from the afterlife or see ghosts. But she was a scientist and only believed in the physical world she could observe. When materialists like that go mad, they place all their faith in technology. Maori Niizono was convinced that future technology would be able to revive Mika Furutsuki. She had no choice but to believe this. Anything else would plunge her into the depths of despair.

But if her body was cremated, even if there were a chance that technology could save her sometime in the future, that chance would be gone. Thousands of years would pass without the technology to rebuild a body from ash. The second law of thermodynamics stood firmly in the way. She had to preserve the body no matter what, especially the brain, for several decades. And Maori Niizono had a way to make that happen.

She prepared a razor, a scalpel, an electric drill, and an electric saw. She started with the razor.

“Sorry, Mika-chan,” she muttered.

She began shaving Mika Furutsuki’s hair. Her trademark twin tails fell ruthlessly to the floor. The exposed skin on her scalp was already starting to darken; oxygenation of the dead skin cells was turning the color of her beautiful pale skin to a dull brown.

Next, Maori Niizono produced a scalpel. She used that to cut through the thin layer of skin on top of the head. The circulation had long since stopped, so no blood flowed out. Her hands moved with practiced ease, like peeling a peach. The muscles covering Mika Furutsuki’s head were intertwined with browned blood vessels. She ran the scalpel from the forehead to the back of the head, slicing through the muscle, then grabbed it with forceps, pulling it open to the side. From within the darkened, bloody muscle fibers, the white bone of her skull emerged. It was as pale as her skin had been when she was alive. Maori Niizono peeled away the flesh all the way to the temples. The ears were in the way, so she sliced them off.

Now the real work began. The skull was divided into a number of parts, and normal brain surgery would only cut along the boundaries of those parts. However, this time she needed to remove them all. Maori Niizono took the electric drill, opening holes in the membranous parts of the skull. The first was just above the forehead, where you head a soccer ball. Then she opened up holes in both temples and above the nape of the neck. Finally, she used the electric saw to cut a line connecting all four holes.

Gagagagagaga, gigigigigigigi. Maori Niizono had read literature on how to perform neurosurgery, so she knew what to do. But theoretical knowledge was different from actually doing it. The vibrations from the saw as it cut were extremely strong. Just holding it made sweat run down her brow, but she endured, holding the saw steady. Beneath this bone was the core of Mika Furutsuki, the precious mass of nerves that was her brain. It was the proof that she was herself, and the root of all her thoughts, feelings, and actions. Maori Niizono could not mess this up. As she was already completely insane, the fact that Mika Furutsuki was dead made no difference to her.

The cut around the skull progressed, exposing the pale pink brain inside.

“Mika-chan, Mika-chan!” Maori Niizono muttered, cutting further. “This is where you did your thinking? This is where you looked at me? This is where you were? Heh heh heh, how funny. Mika-chan, you never got to see your own brain. I’m the first!”

At last the cut went completely around the top of the skull. Half of Mika Furutsuki’s head was gone, the brain completely exposed. This had involved severing the facial muscles, which left her mouth hanging open. It was a slovenly expression she would never have made when she was alive. Maori Niizono was upset that her actions had caused such an expression, and she offered up a silent apology.

From this point on, it was easy. She just had to place Mika Furutsuki’s brain in a container of liquid nitrogen, preserving it, then wait for the technology that would allow her to be revived.

Squelch. Maori Niizono put her hands inside Mika Furutsuki’s head. Her middle and ring fingers slipped inside the edges of the skull, opening enough of a gap for her to force all four fingers in.

Splechhhhelch. Her fingers felt out the bottom of the brain. She felt the bud-like olfactory bulb and the criss-crossed optic nerves. And then she found hard bone — the end of the spinal cord. She made a diamond-shape with her ring and middle fingers of both hands, grabbing the bone.

Maori Niizono took a deep breath, poured all her strength into her arms, and pulled on the brain. Squeelllchhhhh! Slppp! Slthhhhppppp! The blood vessels tying the brain to the body snapped noisily while the eyeballs were dragged out with the brain, leaving Mika Furutsuki’s eye sockets literally empty.

Snapp! Scrunch! Squelchhh! Maori Niizono put even more force into it. The spinal cord trailed behind as she lifted out the brain, like pulling up a potato. A large number of blood vessels, large and small, came with the spinal cord. Paying them no heed, Maori Niizono held the brain steady with her chin and one hand and pulled the spinal cord free with the other, as calmly as you might pull up a fish on a fishing line. Her year of med school had served her well.

The rest of the spinal cord came out. Maori Niizono cradled the brain in both hands and plopped it into the metal container of liquid nitrogen she’d prepared ahead of time. Some of the liquid nitrogen splashed on her hands, causing frostbite that would take a week to heal, but she had other things on her mind. She shut the lid on the container, making sure it was airtight. Now everything was OK. Mika Furutsuki’s brain would freeze perfectly, and as long as she secured a place to store it, it would last several centuries. All she had to do now was invent the technology to revive her.

Funerals are sad occasions.

If the deceased had lived to be over a hundred, perhaps it wouldn’t be sad. But funerals for teenagers are sad.

Perhaps if the deceased was an old man leaving behind an immense fortune, some would find cause to celebrate, but the death of anyone penniless was nothing but a tragedy.

And when the deceased was a suicide, that was extra, super sad. The whole funeral hall was shrouded in gloom.

Mika Furutsuki met all three of the above conditions, so her funeral achieved maximum sadness.

Lots of people cried. Her parents, sister, idol activity friends from high school, and even co-workers from her part-time job were all in tears. She was no longer around to say, “No proble-mika!” with her usual groundless confidence. Mika Furutsuki had passed with her dream yet incomplete. Ever since she was a child she had dreamed of being the greatest idol in the universe, but that had not happened. Her life had been cut short by death, the worst fate the universe had to offer.

Everyone wailed, everyone clutched their heads, and yet only Maori Niizono sat there with a taut smile on her face. The other girls from the idol club thought she’d been driven mad with grief. They were right. She was happy she had been given a purpose. She was enjoying her newfound duty to bring Mika Furutsuki back to life. All this time, she’d been studying medicine simply because her parents demanded it. She had studied every day, shoving questions about why she was doing this to the back of her mind. But now she had a reason to study, a reason to become a doctor: She had to resurrect Mika Furutsuki.

The body showed no signs of what Maori Niizono had done to it; the embalmers had done their work well. She was a little too pretty. Given a body with no ears or brain, the embalmers had gotten a little carried away, and had strived for the ultimate corpse, one that lived up to their own ideals. They had ended up transforming her entirely. To anyone in their line of work the results were magnificent, a perfect example of world-class technique. But this was less welcome to the bereaved.

After the funeral, the emotions wrought by this fact erupted. Mika Furutsuki’s sister, Miya Furutsuki, grabbed Maori Niizono. She’d seen the dramatic changes to the body, and instinctively knew Maori Niizono had done something.

“You bitch! What did you do to Nee-sama?!”

She grabbed Maori Niizono’s funeral outfit roughly, with as much force and anger as she could muster, tears welling up in her eyes.

Yet while Miya Furutsuki cried, Maori Niizono gave a mocking laugh.

“Mika-chan? Mika-chan’s gonna be just fine. I’ll bring her back.”

In the face of Maori Niizono’s laughter, Miya Furutsuki lost control, and struck her. She was not athletic enough to do any damage to Maori Niizono. But the blow came as a complete surprise; Maori Niizono had no idea why she was being punched.

“I knew it! You violated my sister’s corpse! You freak! Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Miya Furutsuki was so devastated by the loss of her sister that she scarcely knew what she was saying. She just knew she hated the person in front of her more than anything.

Even as the blows rained down, Maori Niizono kept laughing. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll understand someday. Just you wait. You can see Mika-chan again.”

She patted Miya Furutsuki gently on the head, even as the attacks on her continued.

“Don’t touch me!”

Miya Furutsuki brushed her arm off like a foul thing and put some distance between them. A crowd was gathering, drawn by the commotion. Miya Furutsuki’s parents came over, too.

As she left, Miya Furutsuki hissed quietly enough so that only Maori Niizono could hear.

“I swear I’ll make you pay for this!”

II

Five years after Mika Furutsuki’s death, human society faced a grave danger.

The first sign came from the sun. The number of dark patches on the surface of the sun — sunspots — began increasing rapidly.

Sunspots are a sign that magnetic fields are escaping the sun’s interior. Like the Earth, the sun has a magnetic field, but since the sun is made of plasma, its rotation can cause chaotically turbulent plasma currents that induce magnetic field fluctuations. While the Earth’s magnetic south pole remains fixed at the North Pole, and the magnetic north pole fixed at the South Pole, the sun’s magnetic field twists itself up in knots, scuttling around the interior of the star. When these magnetic field lines extend out beyond the sun’s surface, sunspots are formed. The more sunspots there are, the more active the fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic fields.

So, what happens when the writhing magnetic field lines inevitably intersect with each other? The intersecting lines merge, forming a new magnetic field line. The new line slams back into the surface of the sun, causing an eruption. In other words, a solar flare. Meanwhile, the magnetic lines that remain behind disperse, no longer needed, leaving a large amount of energy behind. This energy is converted to fuel for the plasma around it, sending it flying outward as if launching a pachinko ball. In other words, a coronal mass ejection.

Solar flares are hardly unusual. In fact, the plasma ejected from such flares is what causes auroras when it strikes the Earth’s atmosphere. However, the solar flare that occurred this time was of an unprecedented scale. It was a super flare — ten thousand times larger than a normal flare — and it occurred suddenly, without warning.

There are three phases to the damage caused by solar flares. Electromagnetic waves (X-rays and UV rays), particle radiation, and coronal mass ejections of plasma. The electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light and strike the Earth first. The powerful energy in the electromagnetic waves can strip the electrons off of the atoms that compose the ionosphere. This glut of free electrons absorbs short wave radiation, rending all wireless functionality on Earth useless.

At the time of the flare, Maori Niizono was on an airplane, headed to America for an international symposium on regenerative medicine. Thirty minutes after leaving Narita Airport, the plane was cruising through the stratosphere. Maori Niizono was nodding off while reading a dissertation when panic spread through the cockpit. They’d lost all contact with air traffic control. At the same time, the traffic collision avoidance system cut out. Chaos erupted at airports the world over. Mid-flight contact and runway crashes resulted in numerous fires. Massive jets weren’t like single-seater planes; it was impossible to fly them based solely on what the eye could see.

“Attention all passengers. Due to an instrument malfunction, we will be returning to Narita Airport. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The captain’s announcement sent a stir through the cabin. The tension in the cabin was enough to wake Maori Niizono up. But there was no major panic. At least, not yet.

As the jet circled back towards Narita, the Earth was struck by a vast amount of particle radiation from the sun. The surface was protected by the thick barrier of the atmosphere and was unaffected, but for passengers in the stratosphere that barrier proved insufficient.

“Is there a doctor on board?” the cabin attendant shouted.

“I’m a resident,” said Maori Niizono, raising her hand.

“Please come this way.”

The attendant led her to the cockpit. A woman in uniform was vomiting repeatedly. There was blood mixed with the vomit.

“This is the captain. She’s suddenly taken ill...” the attendant explained.

The co-pilot was focused on flying, looking very nervous.

“Do you have any pre-existing conditions?”

The captain shook her head. If this wasn’t a flare-up of a chronic condition, then what could it be...?

“Oh, no! The passengers...” another attendant said, bursting into the cabin, looking white as a sheet. She explained that one passenger after another was collapsing. Symptoms ranged from vomiting, to diarrhea, and even hair loss.

“What!? But those are... Those are symptoms of acute radiation exposure!” exclaimed Maori Niizono to no one in particular.

“Radiation sickness?” Shock spread through the cabin.

There was a loud roar, and the plane lurched heavily to one side. Lightning had struck the plane. Lightning that came from above, despite the fact that it normally originates from clouds, below where the plane was currently flying. This lightning had come from above the stratosphere — from the ionosphere. X-rays and UV rays from the solar flare had heated the ionosphere, causing large-scale convection. Interaction between the electron-dense ionosphere and the Earth’s magnetic field was causing electrical discharges.

“What are you doing?” Maori Niizono snapped, addressing the co-pilot. “Fly this thing properly!”

“Um... It seems like the machinery’s bugged out on me...” The rookie co-pilot was starting to panic.

“You’re kidding!?”

“We’re gonna make an emergency water landing. Please return to your seat...”

Maori Niizono went back to her seat. The aisle was soaked with vomit and diarrhea. All across the world, pilots were coming down with radiation sickness, and planes were falling out of the sky. Even fighter planes and bombers came crashing down, and the nuclear warheads on board ended up contaminating the surface. Every astronaut onboard the international space station perished.

The plane dropped so quickly it felt like they were almost floating. The surface of the water was coming up fast. The shadow of the plane grew larger and larger and then it hit the water, waves churning around it.

In that moment, Maori Niizono’s mind was less concerned with drowning or radiation poisoning than with Mika Furutsuki. Mika Furutsuki’s brain was still preserved in liquid nitrogen in the hospital’s underground cold storage unit but if Maori Niizono were to die, it would soon be thrown out like so much garbage. So she couldn’t die here. No matter what, she had to survive.

“Hurry! Run! We’re sinking! We’re sinking fast!”

The co-pilot running the evacuation was a mess. Cold water was pouring in through the hatch. If they didn’t get out fast, everyone was going to drown. The passengers hurried, blood and vomit flying through the air in their panic. Some vomit flew towards Maori Niizono’s face and she blocked it with an arm, sliding out of the hatch. On the water’s surface, she clung to the escape chute/lifeboat.

The plane began to sink. It had taken enough water on board that it began to tilt even before half of the passengers had evacuated. They cut the escape chute free; if it got dragged down with the plane, no one would survive.

On the chute, Maori Niizono looked around her. She could see an island in the distance. This must be the sea off the coast of Chiba. She assumed a ship would come for them soon, but with wireless and GPS down, none did. They passed the night without food or water.

Even when the sun went down, it did not get dark. The sky was covered with a band of pink light, writhing like a living curtain — an aurora. The third phase of damage from a solar flare, the coronal mass ejection — the biggest disaster of all — had finally reached Earth. Solar plasma kicked up by the magnetic field pachinko was raining down on Earth at incredible speeds. Normally the Earth’s magnetic field intercepted it, causing the plasma to only fall at the north or south poles. But this time the plasma made it through the magnetic field and descended the world over. The plasma struck the electrons in the atmosphere, generating light. And it scrambled the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic lines thrashed like Yamato no Orochi in a drunken rage. It was a geomagnetic storm. The shifting magnetic fields caused extreme induction in every power line and electronic device, shorting them out. Cities around the world were plunged into darkness.

Artificial respirators at hospitals came to a stop, and patients died in agonizing pain. Traffic signals went out, and cars struck pedestrians, who lay bleeding and racked with pain. But the worst effect occurred at the nuclear power plants. Cooling systems stopped functioning, and with no hope of help from the outside, plant after plant melted down. With communications out, they had no way to send emergency warnings to nearby residents. With no way to put out the initial fires, the reactors continued burning, spraying radiation into the atmosphere. In the confusion, countless lives were lost.

Maori Niizono survived the catastrophe. The only reason she survived was sheer willpower. Her feelings for Mika Furutsuki saved her. Whether from luck or natural resistance, she developed no immediate signs of radiation sickness. However cancer remained a concern.

Human civilization survived, as well. Whether this was due to sheer willpower is unclear, but somehow they pulled through. To those that remained, a harsh new world awaited. Nuclear plants were left untreated, spewing radiation. Nitrogen oxide created from the particle radiation of the solar flare destroyed the ozone layer, and UV rays brought skin cancer with them. The heating of the ionosphere accelerated the convection of the atmosphere, giving rise to extreme weather. Global warming accelerated, too. This was because the sun’s magnetic field was now strong enough to prevent cosmic rays coming from outside the solar system from entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Cosmic rays striking the atmosphere form the kernels of clouds. An increase in cosmic rays leads to more clouds, which reflect more sunlight, and causes the Earth to cool; a reduction leads to less cloud cover and global warming.

Solar observation satellites were damaged by the electromagnetic radiation and recorded no data on the solar flare. The number of sunspots didn’t decrease, so there was a strong possibility of another similar flare. Although there were demands for more satellites to be sent up as soon as possible, it took five years to lay the groundwork. When a satellite was finally launched, the data it gathered revealed a truth that made mankind tremble. The massive solar flare was not over — in fact it was still very active.

The flare five years ago had not struck the Earth directly but had been of a scale far beyond any previously observed. The sun was now much less stable than before. Strangely enough, the cause of this could not be determined. One proposal for the cause of the super flare involved a celestial body drawing near the sun. The magnetic fields of the sun and that celestial body merged, and the resulting energy caused the flare. For a while, people speculated that a rogue planet or a dwarf star or some other dark celestial body had moved close to the sun, but after thorough observation, this hypothesis was disproved.

Rather, their data revealed a far stranger truth. By looking at the plasma near the sun, it was possible to determine the direction of the magnetic field lines. But the magnetic lines were cut off, as if swallowed by the void. The severed lines wavered like kite strings, tangling together. By the laws of modern physics, this was utterly impossible. Magnetic lines had to start at the north pole and collect at the south pole. The one explanation that matched the observations was a magnetic monopole. The only possibility was that particles with only a north or south pole alignment were situated there at the ends of the sun’s magnetic field lines.

Within the standard paradigms of modern physics, monopoles had only appeared during the initial inflation of the universe. Even if they were to occur now, the universe was expanding, which meant they’d be far and few between. But here they were actually observing them. It seemed appropriate to assume the solar flare was caused by a vast number of monopoles around the sun. In time, the term Monopole Super Flare started to stick.

The possibility that a Monopole Super Flare could strike the Earth directly became critical to the survival of the human race. With the ozone layer destroyed, a second, direct attack would wipe out not just mankind, but all life on Earth. Countermeasures had to be developed immediately.

The ensuing debate was a furious one. Everything from massive plans like blowing up the Yellowstone Supervolcano and protecting the Earth with the resulting aerosol, to smaller plans like distributing free hats, to tricky plans like manipulating the genome to make mankind aquatic — over 761 proposals in all. The plan that was finally put into action was a fusion of genetics and astrophysics.

The core of the plan was to use genetics to create symbiotic bacteria that would offer resistance to radiation and UV rays while using both of those as an energy source. The genes for radiation resistance had been discovered in bacteria at the site of the Chernobyl accident. They had the ability to make multiple copies of themselves and compensate for the radiation damage by taking the common denominator from those multiplied cells. These could also convert radiation itself into energy and use that energy to live.

Ultraviolet ray defenses were found in sea squirts and mantis shrimp living near the equator. UV rays were particularly strong at the equator, so they’d developed cells that could absorb them.

The short wavelength of UV rays had not previously been an effective energy source, but they fixed that by altering the chloroplast genes of plants. By combining these three sets of DNA, they created a new organism, or Novum Organum.

The Novum Organum were symbiotic bacteria, and, like mitochondria and chloroplasts, were able to function as organelles within the cells of higher life forms. In time, the meaning of the term expanded, and Novum Organum was used to refer to the higher life forms that survived symbiotically with the Novum Organum.

Their plan was as follows. They were going to make nests of Novum Organum on a number of asteroids placed in orbit around the Earth. The primary creatures used for this would be spiders that produced thread reinforced with carbon nanotubes, and jellyfish that bloomed from the ground like plants. The jellyfish would grow outwards like tree rings, the insides slowly hardening. The spiders would live inside the jellyfish, which would protect them from the rigors of the vacuum. The spider’s threads, reinforced with carbon nanotube, would descend to the Earth’s surface. Like in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “The Spider’s Thread,” the asteroids would be tied to the Earth.

With these threads as poles, and a number of such threads radiating outwards, supported by the jellyfish, they would create a kind of mid-air ecosystem. The plan believed the symbiosis between the jellyfish and the spiders would replace the ozone layer, blocking the UV rays. This was a rather feeble plan. Leave everything to genetically modified creatures? How pathetic! But what choice did they have? The damage the Monopole Super Flare had done to mankind left budgets tight, and they could not afford large-scale projects like making a giant space shield. Introducing creatures that would reproduce autonomously was their only viable option. Barring, perhaps, the free hat plan.

At any rate, the Novum Organum strategy was put into action. Shortly after, something very strange was discovered. More Super Flares were observed; four years and three months after the Monopole Super Flare, one was spotted at Alpha Centauri; six years later at Barnard’s Star in the Ophiuchus constellation; seven years and six months later at Wolf 359 in Leo; and eight years later at Lalande 21185 in Ursa Major. What did this mean? Alpha Centauri was 4.4 light years from Earth, Barnard’s Star approximately six light years, Wolf 359 approximately 7.8 light years, and Lalande 21185 was approximately 8 light years away. In other words, at the same time as the Monopole Super Flare appeared on our sun, other super flares appeared on the surrounding stars.

When they heard the news, physicists had heart attacks the world over. What these observations demonstrated was nothing less than the demolition of the principle of locality in our universe. In other words, this was a phenomenon that occurred in one location that had immediately influenced events far away without the need to cross the space in between. If this was true, then it contradicted the theory of relativity; it was possible that the order of cause and effect could be reversed.

Physicists slapped each other’s cheeks like madmen. This behavior was rooted in a suspicion that they were, in fact, dreaming, but none of them woke from the dream. As time went on, super flares appeared on Sirius A, Sirius B, BL Ceti, and UV Ceti. People started whispering that every star in the universe had super flared simultaneously. Something was happening in the universe that mankind could not begin to understand. This gave rise to cosmic terrors.

But the real terror came from somewhere lower down. Not from space, but from the sky. The Novum Organum designed to replace the ozone layer multiplied quickly. Too quickly. Explosively. Feeding off the radiation and UV rays from the super active sun, their reproductive rates soared, growing into a forest in the sky. If you squinted, you could see it up above the clouds, like a massive pale grey kite. The jellyfish were the bases for the mid-air ecosystem. The jellyfish grew massive fins and rode the strong winds of the stratosphere, remaining aloft for decades. During their lifetimes, they orbited the Earth any number of times, increasing their numbers via parthenogenesis, and the spiders lived symbiotically with them.

The spiders lowered sturdy threads towards the surface, carrying nutrients up them to the jellyfish. The poles connecting the asteroids had grown like giant trees. From hardened jellyfish, tens of thousands of young jellyfish polyps were born, descending towards the surface like snow. This caused problems for the surface ecosystems. Already weakened by the solar flare, they were now being assaulted by swarms of spiders and jellyfish.

The spiders were carnivores, melting their prey alive in digestive fluids and consuming them. They even targeted mankind. Cities on the equator near the poles were the first to be destroyed. High-rise buildings were perfect for spiders and were wrapped dozens of times over in their webs. Since these webs were reinforced with carbon nanotubes, the webs themselves formed new structures, transforming the city skylines.

The Novum Organum had no natural predators. Humanity, forced by the UV rays to wear hats every time they went outside, could not fight back. As they could cross the stratosphere using massive jellyfish as carriers, natural defenses like mountains and the sea proved useless. With a firm foundation on the equator, the Novum Organum spread north and south. Traditional energy sources for most species depended on plants and photosynthesis, and the only source of energy for that was visible light. But the Novum Organum could derive energy from UV rays and radiation. This meant that Novum Organum could be several times more active than traditional life forms. Their explosive reproduction rates and activity levels helped them spread quickly across the globe. The inferiority of man and other traditional life forms was more obvious than a brushfire.

Paying no heed to these harsh conditions, Maori Niizono threw herself into her efforts to revive Mika Furutsuki. Mankind was facing extinction; she could no longer wait for future technology and would have to resurrect her by her own two hands. The radiation exposure had left her body slowly turning cancerous, but to her, this was unkilling two birds with one stone — she could do trial runs on resurrection technology on herself.

And at last, Mika Furutsuki returned from the realm of the dead. Thirty years had passed since her death. This was also the birth of the Idol that would control the history of the universe.

III

What the...?

Surrounded by darkness, she was extremely confused.

She felt something, blearily. At first, she hadn’t been sure she felt anything. But, gradually, it had come into focus. This was pain. As her pain came into focus, her other senses joined it. They provided seasoning to a solid foundation of pain. Lights, sounds, smells. As her senses woke, so did her sense of self. Remembering that she once had something she called herself, she clutched desperately at it. If she let it go again, she feared her senses would disintegrate and she’d plunge back to the bottom of that dark sea.

Her sight grew clearer. Fragments of information coalesced into a single image. She realized this was the world outside her.

It was a dimly-lit room. An operating chamber? There was a lot of medical equipment around but it was all covered in dust and didn’t seem to have been used any time recently.

She heard a voice.

“Mika-chan, can you see?”

There was a person in front of her. No... She wasn’t certain it could be called a person. From the face alone, it appeared to be a middle-aged woman. But the rest of her was less recognizable. There were a number of pipes running out of her. Pipes sticking out of her chest, belly, and back. Dozens of pipes, each nearly three centimeters wide, running into her body. And the connections between the pipes and her body were less than perfect, so every now and then gross, dark red fluids would ooze out of the gaps around them. Instead of legs, she had two prosthetics with wheels on the ends, and these wheels were spinning uselessly with a hideous whirring sound. But the freakiest part was her head. Her head was missing a piece. There was a tennis ball sized depression on her right temple. It looked like a clumsy surgery had been performed — it was covered with all sorts of scabs.

Despite this freakish exterior, when she looked at the older woman’s face, Mika Furutsuki felt something. Something warm.

“Maorin...?”

She remembered. She remembered who she was. She remembered what she’d done. Her beloved Maori Niizono. The older woman in front of her was Maori Niizono. Her appearance may have changed drastically, but her face was still recognizable. And her own name was Mika Furutsuki. A girl who had died — who had lost to the shattered dreams of being an idol.

“Maori, where am I? What happened to you? How am I...?”

Mika Furutsuki unleashed a volley of questions. Then she realized just how much her voice had changed, and trailed off, stunned. What a voice. It was like someone had forcibly trained a frog, turning it into a musical instrument.

“Mika-chan, what’s the last thing you remember?” Maori Niizono asked, her voice gentle.

“I killed myself. I was so lost. Before I knew it, I was falling from the balcony...”

At the time, nothing had made sense any more. Her struggle to make ends meet, Maori Niizono’s proposal, the shock of her sister appearing... It had all been too much, and having reality shoved in her face had caused her to explode.

“Mika-chan, you died that day.”

Mika Furutsuki was confused. Died? Died, how? She was right here, thinking. The only conclusion she could draw from that fact was that she was still alive, which meant she hadn’t died. She argued as much.

“No, you died. You died, and then came back to life. Mika-chan, look in this mirror.”

A mirror was thrust before Mika Furutsuki’s eyes. What was reflected in it should have been in the shape of herself. A cute girl with twintails bound by ribbons. Instead...

A butcher’s trash pile — that was the closest comparison she could make. What her eyes saw was a pile of dangling organs, hanging there like Christmas tree decorations. Her intestines hung loose, kidneys dumped carelessly in the middle. Between the intestinal tubes she could catch glimpses of thin metallic cords endlessly twitch twitch twitch twitching like horsehair worms. A round, transparent sphere, like a crystal ball, was stuck to the dangling bowels. Exposed muscles emerged from the crystal ball, supporting the intestines like duct tape. Surprisingly, the crystal ball was floating in mid-air, so none of the intestines touched the ground. Above the crystal ball was something puffed up, like a balloon; it seemed like this was keeping the crystal ball aloft. The balloon was made of flesh. Arteries and veins ran across it like a net, and occasionally it shifted like it was breathing. The balloon was a stomach. A stomach puffed up to its limits. The thing pumping the stomach full was a set of lungs. Lungs were clinging to the back of the stomach like a parasite, pushing air into it.

Mika Furutsuki searched desperately for a face. At her lowest points, smiling at her own face had always helped her feel better. But there was no face anywhere. All she found was a reddish-brown brain inside the crystal ball, and a lonely pair of eyeballs moving next to it.

“What is this? Disgusting modern art?”

Mika Furutsuki spoke without emotion. Her voice emerged from somewhere in the depths of the intestinal heap.

“That’s you, Mika-chan!” Maori Niizono said, blissfully. “I made you! You’re my masterpiece. I brought you back from the dead!”

Mika Furutsuki looked at the mirror again — at the organ exhibition. This is me?

“Aren’t you adorable? You’re so cute! You can be an idol again...”

Cute? This? No face or skin, just a heap of dismembered body parts?

Yet Mika Furutsuki understood. She might be a gory pile of body parts, but it was still her, and she was still cute.

Why did she think that? No normal person would. In fact, part of Mika Furutsuki’s brain was actually Maori Niizono’s brain. Part of the frozen brain had been damaged. To replace the damaged section, Maori Niizono had transplanted part of her own brain to Mika Furutsuki. By doing so, Maori Niizono’s obsessive love for her friend had become a part of Mika Furutsuki. The result was that Mika Furutsuki now loved herself obsessively, no matter what condition she was in.

Cute... Adorable... How can anything be so cute... Staring at herself in the mirror, Mika Furutsuki repeated these words, over and over, feelings of love washing through her. She remembered how Maori Niizono had encouraged her. She’d been able to pursue her dreams of being an idol because of her. She may have been tricked by her talent office, and temporarily lost her way so badly she killed herself, but so what? It all worked out. Life has its ups and downs. So what if she died once or twice? You grow as strong as the number of tears you shed. April showers bring May flowers and everything has a silver lining. This was no reason to give up on her dream! She was going to be an idol. The best idol in the universe!

Something sparked within Mika Furutsuki’s brain. With part of Maori Niizono’s brain inside of her, the two brains were like a fish in water — like a Tetris block slotted right into place. Maori Niizono gave Mika Furutsuki a foundation for living. Mika Furutsuki finally had a reason to be alive, and that reason was now a part of her.

“Maorin!” Mika Furutsuki cried. “Tell me! How do I move this body! I want to make it dance! I want to sing! I want to be an idol! No matter what happens, I must take the stage!”

“Mika-chan...!” Maori Niizono was on the verge of tears. She was so happy.

She’d spent decades toiling to resurrect Mika Furutsuki, and somewhere deep in her heart she’d wondered if bringing her back from suicide was really the right thing to do. Every night she’d been unable to sleep, worried that she’d kill herself again the moment she came back to life. She’d killed a lot of people, cut them open, harvested their organs and made a really cute body for Mika Furutsuki, but she was still anxious. Would Mika-chan be satisfied with it? Would she resume her idol activities? Full of doubt, she’d finally brought her back, and to her great joy, she was able to meet Mika Furutsuki again, and found her full of the hopes and dreams of being an idol.

Now, as to what lessons Mika Furutsuki could take in this body, that was an extremely interesting problem, but first, we had better get our terminology straight. From this point on, her talents as an idol will bloom. In recognition of her status as an idol, we’ll call her the 2nd Generation Idol. Mika Furutsuki before her suicide was the 1st Generation Idol, and after she came back to life she became the 2nd Generation Idol.

Under Maori Niizono’s guidance, the 2nd Generation Idol threw herself into her training. Her core methods of movement involved floating with her stomach and expelling air with her lungs. These faint methods of propulsion gave her a top speed of, at best, three kilometers per hour.

Corrosive gas would swell up her stomach, allowing it to rise higher in the air. This functionality was quite well done, and in theory would allow her to go as high as the stratosphere. Food was digested in vitro. Digestive fluids were excreted directly from the intestines, and the food was absorbed after it was dissolved. The swarms of jellyfish drifting across the sky had given the 2nd Generation Idol this means of living. She was quite weak, but she did have ways of defending herself — her nerve jack cables. They were a pair of cords sharpened like a jellyfish’s poison stingers. These were the spinal nerves from the original Mika Furutsuki. If she stabbed the brain of another living thing with these jacks, she could take over their mind, controlling them as she pleased. Even better, she could alter their immune system, allowing any and all of their body parts to function as if they were her own. Use of this function would allow her to avoid death by natural causes; she was functionally immortal. Truly an innovative organ. Naturally, there were Novum Organum living symbiotically within her cells, granting her resistance to UV rays and radiation.

Her body riddled with cancer after the radiation exposure on the plane, Maori Niizono had worked to improve her own body, too. Having experimented on herself while working to revive Mika Furutsuki, her body was considerably outdated compared to the 2nd Generation Idol. Her original human flesh was little more than a facade. Inside that shell, the only organ still functional was her brain. Cancer had spread to every other organ, so she’d torn them out and thrown them in the garbage. In their place, she’d borrowed organs from other people. These days, there was no shortage of people on the brink of death, so by splitting their heads open and granting a merciful death she could slice the rest of them open and steal their organs. However, it was quite rare to find proper organs with no cancer, and whenever she did find them she preserved them for Mika Furutsuki’s use, so her own organs were all a patchwork of pieces stolen from any number of people. These patchwork organs were not nearly as functional as normal organs.

Since she was cobbling together bits from several bodies, these results were expected. To elevate the poorly functioning organs to ordinary levels, she took the simplistic approach of making them bigger. Maori Niizono stuck all these oversized organs in a large trailer. Her lungs, stomach, esophagus, lower and upper intestines, pancreas, liver and kidneys were all just jammed in there like a disorganized closet. Over time, the pipes that ran to her body that housed her brain had rusted or grew old and fluid began leaking out around them, but she was too focused on reviving Mika Furutsuki to pay that any heed. She’d cultivated a thin layer of skin over the trailer, with Novum Organum within, converting UV rays and radiation to energy. She got enough to keep the trailer functioning and herself alive but not enough to make herself feel full, so she made occasional expeditions to eat corpses. For that reason, the trailer was fitted with caterpillar treads lined with suction cups.

As the 2nd Generation Idol learned to move her body, she began taking walks with Maori Niizono as part of her idol activities. Their base was in Tokyo — Chiba Prefecture. By this time, the bulk of Japan was under Novum Organum control, the national and local governments having long since collapsed. With the high-rise buildings at their cores, spider threads — reinforced with carbon nanotubes to give them the light/long/sturdy trifecta — stretched here and there. A number of giant jellyfish floated in the sky above, secured to the ground by other threads. Jellyfish polyps fell from the sky like snow, dancing in the air. The few remaining humans survived in the shadows of the jellyfish like sewer rats. The violent activity of the solar flare was slowly but surely culling the last traces of mankind from the surface.

Their walks together were not just dates. Gathering and consuming vital provisions from corpses and dying humans was part of their idol activities. Humans were mostly dwelling in the depths of the sewers or in the hearts of buildings surrounded by spider webs. When Maori Niizono used her giant form to smash those buildings, they’d scatter like woodlice when the rock above was removed. Some individuals fought back, but the machine guns on the trailer filled them with holes and they were soon gobbled up.

There was only one group of humans engaged in any sort of organized activity. These women called themselves the Vigilantes. They were die-hard anti-technologists and traditionalists. Vowing to take back the Akihabara of yore, they all wore T-shirts featuring moe characters of a bygone age. These were their traditional iconography. Rejecting advanced technology, they survived in the harsh new world by developing their own low tech gear. Piercing their arms, thighs, and sides with drill bits, they attached springs, and used the force of those springs to fire arrows with climbing ropes attached. The arrows caught in the spider webs and they’d leap forward, reeling in the ropes. Repeating this allowed them to move rapidly around. Armed mainly with Molotov cocktails, machetes, and Kalashnikovs, they slaughtered Novum Organum one by one.

Naturally, the Vigilantes opposed Maori Niizono’s consumption of other humans. While Maori Niizono was once human, she had taken Novum Organum into her own body; they viewed her as a traitor to the human race and a mortal enemy. The Vigilantes made a lair in one of the floating jellyfish and repeatedly descended to the high-rise where Maori Niizono had made her base, attacking her. To fight back, she had assembled an array of machine and laser guns tricked out with night-vision scopes and the like. With her modern military gear, the Vigilantes stood no chance against her, and their war was in the midst of a long cease fire.

The arrival of the 2nd Generation Idol tipped the balance of this delicate peace. Having gone all out to bring Mika Furutsuki back, the culmination of all her dreams, had left Maori Niizono’s guard down. Where she had once seemed invincible, she now had a clear weakness. And the Vigilantes did not let that go unnoticed.

Unaware of this, the two merrily continued their idol activities. Today, they had found an unusually large den of humans and were looking forward to the fresh meat.

“Maorin, one’s running away!”

While Maori Niizono was shoving the group of humans into her trailer, grinding them to mincemeat, one slipped away. A child.

“She’s our future! My daughter! I’m begging you, spare her life!” said one human, stepping forward with arms upraised. Presumably her parent. She was so scared tears and snot were pouring down like waterfalls.

“Oh...well, if it’s a kid, I suppose we could spare her.”

“What? Really?”

“Nope.”

With that harsh warning, bullets pierced both child and parent.

“Wow, Maorin. You’re so merciless!”

“Oh? Well, maybe I’m just excited to be with you, Mika-chan!”

Maori Niizono gathered the humans together with her manipulators, inserting pipes into their flesh, and draining the fluid. The 2nd Generation Idol perched on the mound of flesh, spreading her intestines and spraying digestive fluid, then slurping up the dissolved meat. This might seem cruel, but the world of an idol was a harsh one, and survival of the fittest was an inescapable rule.

They continued their violent idol activities, and before they knew it, it was dark. This was not an error Maori Niizono would ordinarily have made. At night, the sun’s UV rays were gone; it was the realm of traditional life forms. Naturally, mankind had become nocturnal as well, and were far more dangerous at night. She had been too preoccupied with their idol activities and had made a careless mistake.

A powerful voice echoed through their surroundings.

“Your heartless violence ends now!”

“Who?!” Maori Niizono said, dropping her meat in surprise.

“We are the Vigilantes! Those who protect the peace of Akihabara!”

Before they knew it, they were surrounded by at least a few dozen Vigilantes. They all wore goggles to ward off UV rays, and bandages covered their faces. With a machete in their right hand and a Kalashnikov in their left, they wore T-shirts covered in moe characters to protect their torsos. Holes were placed here and there in their bodies, and arrows with hooks on them were peeping out.

“Mika-chan, stay back,” said Maori Niizono, stowing her brain/weak point in the trailer.

“We will purge this holy land of your evil... Unh!”

Before the Vigilante shock troop leader could finish her speech, she was crushed by the trailer, her innards gushing out of her mouth.

“Go, go, go! Start shooting!”

As the Vigilantes raised their Kalashnikovs, Maori Niizono was already charging their formation. Lives were lost as easily as eggs smashed against the wall. The trailer hit their formation and spun hard, sending bodies flying through the air. As it spun it fired machine and laser guns, slicing through skin, destroying flesh, and spraying blood. The difference in power was clear. If they’d taken bets on the outcome of the battle in that moment, the odds would have been heavily in Maori Niizono’s favor. However...

“Hold it! You make the wrong move and your friend here dies.”

Yes, Vigilantes had snuck up behind and captured the 2nd Generation Idol. With a machete held against her intestines, her hands were tied. Not that she had hands to tie.

“Mika-chan!”

Maori Niizono stopped spinning, and the Vigilantes swarmed over her like ants.

“Ha ha ha! Now the evil monsters are...ow!”

The 2nd Generation Idol sprayed her captor with powerful digestive fluid and escaped when she flinched.

“You bitch! You’ll die for that!”

“Mika-chan! Run!”

Seeing a Vigilante taking a swing at the 2nd Generation Idol from behind, Maori Niizono tackled them. The 2nd Generation Idol puffed up her stomach, soaring higher, escaping the battlefield, but the Vigilantes threw their own bodies in Maori Niizono’s caterpillars, and their flesh caused the machinery to jam. Seizing their chance, they fired a small shaped charge at Maori Niizono’s torso, opening a hole in her side. Then they threw a Molotov in the hole, baking her giant organs. Maori Niizono desperately tried to flee, but the Vigilantes got in her wound, pulling the organs out barehanded. Rejoicing at this acquisition of valuable animal protein, they undid the bandages over their faces, and began devouring Maori Niizono’s organs. Maori Niizono was eaten alive. Baked from within, her organs were ripped from her and devoured. The pain was beyond imagination.

As they ate her, Maori Niizono desperately fired her machine guns. From point blank range the bullets turned the faces of the gathered crowd into hashed beef. Their compatriots being turned into masses of meat and blood and shit did nothing to discourage the Vigilantes. If anything, they swarmed around Maori Niizono’s organs with renewed fervor.

The 2nd Generation Idol watched all this from above, helpless to stop the one she loved from being eaten, from dying. And then, she recognized a face among the Vigilantes. It was Miya Furutsuki, the woman who had once been her sister. Tumors from her skin cancer had left half her face swollen up, but it was still recognizable. She was in the front lines, one of the first to start eating Maori Niizono’s organs. Swinging a machete around like a glowstick, she sliced into the organs. As she died, Maori Niizono’s final struggles brought a bullet to her. Where Miya Furutsuki’s eye had been was now a fist-sized hole. A blizzard of brain-bits sprayed out behind her.

The sight of her former sister’s death brought no trace of sadness to the 2nd Generation Idol’s heart. All she felt was a violent rage. Rage at having the one she loved murdered before her.

“I’ll kill you all! I’ll exterminate you!”

Her next idol activity was decided. Revenge. She would bring horrible, painful deaths to the Vigilantes.

IV

Though she had vowed revenge, the 2nd Generation Idol lacked the means to enact it. Having lost her guardian, Maori Niizono, she was little more than a plastic bag floating in the air. When the wind blew she drifted this way and that, completely at its mercy. Even finding food was a challenge. To continue her idol activities, she would need to acquire new skills. She would have to change herself from the 2nd Generation Idol to the 3rd Generation Idol or be left behind by the times.

For an idol to grow, she needed biomaterials. For this, the 2nd Generation Idol set her sights on one type of Novum Organum — the spiders. The same spiders that wove threads reinforced with sturdy carbon nanotubes. They ate human corpses, spreading far and wide; if you threw a rock anywhere they’d go scattering. They came in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a millimeter to a meter.

The 2nd Generation Idol pretended to be dead, luring the spiders in close. The stupid spiders fell for her trick, biting into her intestines. Then her nerve jack cables attacked, pulling them into her body, converting their strength to hers. She was after the spinnerets, the organs that produced their threads. She digested the rest of them leaving only the spinnerets, placing them in all corners of her body. Thus, the 3rd Generation Idol was complete. This was a minor upgrade; the only difference from the 2nd Generation Idol being the dozens of spinnerets poking out of her stomach and intestines and lungs, but the presence of these organs made a huge difference to her mobility. Threads expelled with great force from the spinnerets wound themselves around footholds. Reeling these in allowed her to rapidly move around. She was copying the way the Vigilantes moved with their arrows, but since the carbon nanotube reinforced threads were so sturdy, she could move even faster than them.

Additionally, the threads could serve as weapons. Far stronger and thinner than piano wire, they could easily slice through human necks, arms, and legs. She still had virtually no defensive ability, so she couldn’t attack aggressively, but she could lay traps. She quickly laid traps by leaving tasty corpses where Vigilantes often passed and placing threads all around. These were shockingly effective. She could use the natural human inclination to save those on the brink of death and kill their companions one after another as they came to help.

The 3rd Generation Idol was merely a transitional state. Being an idol meant moving constantly forward. Never forgetting where you came from, never basking in your current glory. An idol satisfied with taking the lives of a few dozen was hardly a life worth living. She had to kill a lot more people. She had to rise up the idol rankings or she’d be crushed by the changing times.

Humans provided the materials for the 4th Generation Idol. To defend her delicate brain, she followed the principle of hiding a tree in a forest, realizing that she could hide it amongst a lot of other brains. The Idol rewired the brains of the humans she killed, turning them into passive slaves, connecting them to her own brain with nerves protected by carbon nanotube membranes. She hid her brain among the slave brains, turning them into a defensive wall. These nerves were powered by signals sent from her own mind, overpowering the individual consciousnesses. As the 4th Generation Idol became a giant brain ball she needed more powerful movement organs. Once again, she used humans. Arranging human legs and arms so they grew in all directions, she could roll around at high speeds. In the hands, she placed Kalashnikovs and machetes stolen from the Vigilantes, allowing her to attack as she rolled. Naturally, she also added digestive organs and sensory organs like eyes and noses and tongues, dozens of each arranged like jewelry. She always took the utmost care with her fashion statements.

Armed with carbon nanotube threads, Kalashnikovs, and machetes, the 4th Generation Idol at last launched an all-out war on the Vigilantes. The Vigilante base was in an airborne giant jellyfish floating midway between the troposphere and the stratosphere—the tropopause. Before the super flare, the jet stream had maintained a constant speed above 30 meters a second, but now the windspeed was several times stronger. The cause was the destruction of the ozone layer. The ozone layer had absorbed UV rays, raising the temperature of the atmosphere. Because the ozone in the upper stratum maintained a high temperature, a stable atmospheric state was maintained — the upper layers were warm, and the lower layers were cooler — and it was rare for winds to form in the stratosphere. But after the giant flare destroyed the ozone layer, the stability of the stratosphere was lost, and the speed of the jet streams increased. The airborne giant jellyfish rode the strong jet streams like kites, remaining aloft. Anchored to the surface by countless spider threads, the winds never swept them away.

Filling her stomach with putrid gas, the 4th Generation Idol floated upwards, sending out thread after thread, swiftly pulling herself higher. There were dozens of polyps growing like mushrooms under the airborne giant jellyfish. Humans made dens between the polyps and lived there. As the polyps grew and fell off below, they moved their dens higher, to the immature polyps. The jellyfish cut off all harmful ultraviolet waves, and they could store air and heat between the polyps. The spiders lived in the same places and were the Vigilante’s rivals for the same resources. Babies were often bitten by spiders and died; combined with the skin cancer the average life span was extremely short. But somehow, they were surviving. Until the 4th Generation Idol arrived.

The 4th Generation Idol’s attack caught the Vigilantes completely off-guard. They were prepared for attacks on the surface but had never dreamed she would come to them up here. This would cost them dearly. Clutching to old-fashioned ideas of what an idol could be, they were left behind by the changing times. Idols these days don’t just make themselves available — they actively chase the public down. Failure to keep up with the latest trends is punishable by death.

“Gahhhhhh!”

Shrieks echoed between the polyps. The out-of-touch Vigilantes were helpless before the overpowering idol aura radiated by the 4th Generation Idol. She’d spent the week before her assault sunbathing, stocking up on energy gathered by the Novum Organum. Down time was of vital importance to any idol, and she was a major proponent of taking it easy. Relaxation was an important idol activity, too. It allowed her to unleash all that energy in that moment. It was so important to make that transition between on and off stage. When she was on stage she had to keep her body moving, killing all the humans. She had to hit the steps just as she’d practiced, spit those threads, fire her Kalashnikovs, decapitate with those machetes... Seeing her like this, it was tempting to describe her as an organism bred for slaughter. The humans all screamed aloud in the face of the 4th Generation Idol’s sprightly dance and cuteness. As their cries rained down on her, the 4th Generation Idol knew that she was really shining. This was what she could do when she threw herself into her idol activities.

At last the screams died down, and her slaughter ended with no requests for an encore. The 4th Generation Idol finished by harvesting spare organs from the dying humans, consuming their flesh, and slurping up their blood. She felt amazing. Years of preparation had made these idol activities a tremendous success. As a reward to herself, maybe she’d acquire a little house. There was a gap between the polyps where the Vigilantes had lived. She should remodel it and make it a place of her own!

It was some time before the 4th Generation Idol felt like doing much of anything. A classic case of burnout. She wasn’t sure which direction to take her idol activities next. Her first great success had been so dazzling she was fixated on it, unable to take the next step forward.

The Idol was self-produced. Creating her characters, expanding upon her strengths — all of that depended on her alone. But the 4th Generation Idol was unsure what path she should follow. So she returned to her roots. What was it she’d really wanted to accomplish as an idol? She’d wanted to sing and dance and bring smiles to her audience. She’d definitely never wanted to strike fear in their hearts. Or fire Kalashnikovs wildly. Or carve organs out of the dying. Idols weren’t supposed to slaughter humans, they were supposed to entertain them. This might seem obvious, but the 4th Generation Idol had forgotten it. And by the time she remembered, it was already too late. She had killed everyone who could have been a fan. Fans were everything to an idol. An idol with no fans was no idol at all. Idols could not exist in isolation; their fans completed them. How ironic that her idol activities had destroyed the thing that made her an idol.

She scanned the surface, but it seemed the destruction of the Vigilantes had been a huge setback to the human’s territory. There was nowhere left for humans to live in Tokyo. No matter where she went, it was spiders, spiders, spiders, jellyfish, spiders, and jellyfish. When she was lucky enough to find a human they already had spiders inside them and were being eaten alive. The existing ecology was collapsing. Even the cockroaches were declining in the face of these spiders.

She had to find some fans. First she made herself available, then she chased her public down, and now she’d grown into an idol that searched for fans. In these times, it was not simply enough to go where the fans were; a good idol had to actively search. The 4th Generation Idol was ill-suited for long distance travel. The Idol adapted herself to the times. Thus, the 5th Generation Idol was born.

The 5th Generation Idol used the airborne giant jellyfish as the base for her body. She altered the 700 meter jellyfish so it would be part of her. She placed her brain in the stomach membrane at the center of the jellyfish, sending her nerves out through all parts of its body. All it could do was float on the wind pressure, lacking any real maneuverability, so she made an air bladder, a sphere that could supply putrid gas. The jellyfish could no more swim against the wind current than plankton can, but by using her brain’s control to turn it, ejecting putrid gas, and taking sea water on as ballast, she managed to free it from the winds, elevating it to the level of nekton. She added eyeballs to the tips of the tentacles, allowing her to carefully observe the surface from the sky above.

At last, the 5th Generation Idol launched her first world tour. No planes, trains, or automobiles, just a slow journey alone by jellyfish. Her goal: to discover anything that might become a fan. The solar winds grew more frequent, auroras glittered in the night sky, the sea was covered in a red tide caused by all the creatures that had died to ultraviolet waves, and in an age where Novum Organum replaced both plants and animals she was the lone idol on Earth.

Starting with a tour across Japan, she set out to see the world. She followed the Ryukyu Island chains, entered the Eurasian continent, and headed south towards Oceania. On Sri Lanka, she found spider threads descending from the asteroids in orbit around the Earth, surrounded by a swarm of hardened jellyfish that filled the stratosphere. Looking up, the jellyfish dispersed the sunlight, glowing like thin clouds, and when she looked closer she could see their digestive systems moving. The hardened jellyfish were not dead, but still alive, gathering moisture through the incredibly long tentacles that stretched all the way to the surface. The wind currents tore pieces off the hardened equatorial jellyfish, and these formed new jellyfish, embarked on a journey to the south.

Since the hardened jellyfish were blocking the ultraviolet light at the equator, perhaps the old ecology was making a comeback, the 5th Generation Idol hoped. This hope proved foolhardy. As she neared the equator, she saw that the tentacles dangling from the stratosphere had consumed all living things, leaving a massive sea of death behind. Since all higher forms of life had been wiped out, plankton had proliferated, and with nothing to eat their dead, they had rotted. The blue sea was gone, leaving a vast wake of chemical sludge as far as the eye could see.

When the 5th Generation Idol saw the tentacles from heaven moving to consume her, she hastily left Oceania. After that, she spent a few hundred years searching through Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but she found not a single fan. It took a lot out of her to perform concerts in venues devoid of fans.

The 5th Generation Idol couldn’t bear the sadness. She needed a strategy, something that would provide her mental support. She would have to create fans. In the next age, it would be standard for idols to create their own fans.

But when it came to making fans, in this age, there was nothing to make them out of. All vertebrates, down to the smallest fish, had been hunted by the jellyfish and were all endangered species. There were plenty of spiders and jellyfish, but she was extremely unsure about turning them into fans. Of the two, the spiders seemed slightly more feasible. In fact, with their complex webs, spiders had much more complex nervous systems than other arthropods, though hardly ideal. Your average mind might consider elevating the spiders into intelligent life. But the ultra mega cute genius Idol thought otherwise. She decided to construct something out of both spiders and jellyfish.

How could she create intelligence? All that required was a neural network. A neural network was modeled after the operations of nerves in the brain. Nerve cells could be either neurons, which functioned like electric lines, or synapses, which functioned like antenna; electrical signals from one neuron would cross the spaces called synaptic clefts as neurotransmissions, arriving at other neurons. The transmission rate in this process is affected by the input signal in the synapse. Learning is based on these changes to transmission effectiveness. Changes to transmission effectiveness can not only improve the frequency of transmission — they can also lower it. Additionally, the flow of information is not one-sided — it is also possible for feedback to return received information to the input layer. The human brain contains approximately 100 trillion nerve cells arranged like this, resulting in an incredibly complex information network.

Unfortunately, jellyfish lacked a central nervous system. To replace this, the Idol planned to make the jellyfish themselves into nerve cells. The cells in human brains used ion gradients to transmit information via changes in the electric potential, but the jellyfish nerve cells transmitted information via the movements of the spiders within them. She made a jellyfish network by connecting tentacles to bell shapes, filling the tentacles with spiders. When a stimulus was received from a different jellyfish, the spiders were excited, and they passed that baton down the lines of spiders, communicating the information. So how did she establish the weighting required for learning? In biological brains, information transmission speeds are increased by wrapping nerve cells in a type of cell known as oligodendroglia. The insulation provided by oligodendroglia, like the coating used on electric wires, makes it possible to transfer information effectively. Within the jellyfish network, the oligodendroglia functionality was provided by spider thread. She placed spider threads in frequently used jellyfish interiors so that when spiders touched the threads the vibrations instantly ran down them, swiftly transmitting the information. Her plan was to make hundreds of trillions of jellyfish like this, placing them all over the Earth’s sky and oceans, making a massive neural network on a planet-sized scale. We could call it the Earth Fan Conversion Plan.

She did not have time to hand-make hundreds of trillions of jellyfish nerve cells one by one. Even if she could make one a day, it would take three hundred million years to achieve her minimum goal. Just thinking about working for that long made her want to throw up. So she decided to leave the reproduction to the jellyfish themselves. She established a life cycle in which they would focus on reproduction when young, and as they matured, connect to each other as nerve cells. When first born they were only a few centimeters in size, but as they grew, their bodies would become hundreds of meters long and connect to nearby jellyfish nerve cells. Repeating this, the network would propagate itself, gradually achieving intelligence by adapting to environmental data.

After three million years, the Earth was completely covered in jellyfish. The sea and sky were filled with floating bells and tangled tentacles. If you looked very carefully, you could see the translucent tentacles pulsing, and black things scuttling through them. Those were the spiders. Spiders that were carrying information. Spiders provided the jellyfish with nourishment and consumed the jellyfish when they died. With plenty of energy provided by the sun’s radiation, the network was operating at full power.

As the network learned, it began to show glimmers of intelligence. The jet streams had expanded as high as the stratosphere, but after a few hundred thousand years of reactions by the network they were slowly weakened, calming the raging storms. Several hundred thousand years of orders from the network in space resulted in tossing the ocean waters until the axis tilt was corrected and the seasons were eliminated. The jellyfish network ran on solar radiation and had no need of excess environmental changes. Meanwhile, this was pure hell for traditional life forms, whose already fragile ecosystems were utterly decimated.

By this time, the Idol had continued her process of minor upgrades, and was now in the 11th Generation. The jellyfish network was not what she would call a satisfactory fan. The network’s intelligence resembled a conscious mind but was not one. Certainly, the jellyfish network had intelligence. But it was, figuratively speaking, a mind without a face. With humans, there was a clear link between their actions and their internal reasoning; they would wave glow sticks to express their joy, shove the person in front of them out of anger, or blow a fortune at an auction trying to score a ticket. Meanwhile, the jellyfish network’s internal conditions were linked to its actions, but those conditions were never what we’d call ‘reason’. The network’s actions were always the result of the output from the whole network or the result of what the network had learned; they were always changing. In other words, it never took action based on individual emotions or specific reasons, but always as a result of information processed by the entire network.

This was not what the Idol had expected. She’d modeled the jellyfish network on the human brain, but what it produced was intelligence she could not comprehend. To her, consciousness went hand-in-hand with specific reasons and emotions. Over time, those formed her ‘self.’ The jellyfish network had no ‘self.’

The Idol grew to fear the jellyfish network. This was a shock as great as if the flood of audience members into a concert hall had turned out to be zombies. Adding fuel to this fire, lately the jellyfish network had become aware of the Idol’s existence, viewed her as a potential threat to its continued existence, and begun to attack. It was like there were spears being hurled from the crowd.

After tens of millions of years of hard work, her attempt at creating a fan had clearly ended in failure. For all her years as an idol, her fan count remained at zero. There were days when she considered giving up on the whole idol thing. But each time, she remembered her high school days, when throwing herself into her idol activities had made everything gleam. How her heart sang when she got her dance steps right, the thrill when the spotlight caught her, the rush when the audience roared, and the certainty that she was shining bright. She wanted to be an idol. She didn’t want to let her dream end as a dream. With that thought in her heart, she threw herself into her idol activities once more.

The jellyfish network had spread to a degree unprecedented by any Earth species, but its demise was quite sudden. The unnatural activity levels of the solar flares that had gone on for several million years abruptly came to a halt. Perhaps as a backlash from all the magnetic energy it had been unleashing, sunspots became extremely rare. The sun released far less of the UV rays and radiation that served as the Novum Organum’s primary energy source. As if it had been waiting for that, the ozone layer reformed, further depriving the jellyfish network of the UV rays it needed to survive and sealing its doom. All over the planet, jellyfish nerve cells died. Unable to obtain sufficient energy, the jellyfish turned brown, their bodies disintegrating. The massive web in the sky came apart, and the spiders that had served as the nerve information carriers consumed the jellyfish corpses. Even then, the network was intelligent, and tried to fight this threat. It made hydrogen gas balloons and tried to raise itself up to the ionosphere, diminishing the impact of the ozone layer. It tried to destroy the ozone layer with CFC gases.

If it had been given more time, perhaps it would have found effective countermeasures. But the cessation of the sun’s activity levels came out of nowhere. Like a brain destroyed by lack of oxygen, the jellyfish network came apart, and was soon unable to function cohesively. At last, there were not even enough clusters for it to be considered intelligent at all. The cooling of the Earth also took its toll. As the sun’s magnetic field weakened, the number of cosmic rays striking the Earth increased, causing clouds to germinate and in turn increasing the albedo. Ice formed again at the poles, marking the beginning of a new ice age.

The quieting sun and encroaching ice age were threats to the Idol as well. She, too, had used Novum Organum as a source of energy. Fortunately, she did not burn energy on the massive scale the jellyfish network did, so was able to survive for a while eating dead jellyfish. But this was not a long-term solution. The corpse buffet available to her now would eventually disappear. She needed to make her body eco-friendly. She needed a make-over.

Thus, the Idol entered her 12th Generation. This generation she was a shut-in idol. She covered her body with ice, with carefully constructed muscles sticking out like fins that allowed her to use the power of waves to obtain the energy she needed. These muscles would move in response to electrical stimuli but if they were moved by outside forces they generated electricity instead. Other nourishment she obtained from tentacles she dangled into the depths of the ocean, using filtration to harvest plankton.

Until the surface ecosystems recovered, the 12th Generation Idol continued her shut-in life. This took approximately three hundred million years. During that time, the ordinary lifeforms lurking in the ocean depths to escape the Novum Organum slaughter rose up, filled the seas, and once more stepped out onto land.

The first to make landfall were shrimp, crabs, and other crustaceans; they shrank and grew more varied, evolving into insect-like creatures. The crustaceans were followed by anemones. No longer rooted to one spot, the anemones evolved powerful muscles, moving around rapidly. Using an array of tentacles for legs, whenever they found a crustacean, dozens of legs would snake out and haul it in towards the central mouth. They were followed by sea cucumbers and shellfish.

Some unbelievably large-scale adaptive evolutions later, anemone appeared that could use membranes to glide across the sky and whose tentacles had hardened into scoops that could dig holes. Seizing her chance, the 12th Generation Idol abandoned her shut-in lifestyle and became the 13th Generation Idol. Covering her entire body in narrow anemone tentacles she became able to run across land, and, thanks to surface tension, water.

The 13th Generation Idol was determined to make herself some fans this time. Convinced her previous failure was because she had set herself the difficult task of making a world-sized brain, this time she swore to progress slowly but surely. This time she resolved to follow the mechanisms of traditional evolution. In other words, she protected anemones that exhibited conscious behavior, and slaughtered those that did not. By repeating this, eventually a strain would appear with a will of its own. She wasn’t sure how many millions of years it would take, but it was the safest path. After all, in theory, this was how mankind had come to be.

However, once she actually tried, it proved easier said than done. For starters, what was conscious behavior? It would have been so much easier if the anemones had begun searching for a way to explain their consciousness scientifically, but the whole reason she was trying to help them evolve was because they were doing no such thing. To tell if they had consciousness or not required her to interpret what was going on inside the anemone. She had no idea what being an anemone was like at all. Her plan was doomed from the start.

On top of that, a decisive blow arrived. The Monopole Super Flare attacked again. Just as the anemones and shrimp and crabs and sea cucumbers and shellfish had covered the surface, the solar flare wiped them all out. The 13th Generation Idol was disappointed. Afterwards, she made measurements through a biological telescope she grew on the ocean’s surface and confirmed that once again the Monopole Super Flare had occurred simultaneously throughout the universe — but there were exceptions. For some reason young stars, ones less than three trillion years old, had no flares. No matter how much she pondered it, she couldn’t crack this mystery. Either way, it was clear her plan to grow the anemones into intelligent fans had failed.

It seemed like it was time for her to head to outer space. The Idol made up her mind. It was quite common for huge breakthroughs to happen only once an idol left their homeland. But there was a lot of work to be done before she could go abroad. In the past she would have needed a visa and a passport, but now she could avoid all that troublesome paperwork as long as she simply had a massive energy source. The problem was that the energy this required was too massive. The chemical energy in the anemone corpses would never reach the necessary volume. She had to do something truly spectacular.

She began by assembling a great number of satellites out of biomaterials and placing them outside the range of geostationary orbit. Orbits outside of that range had a rotational speed slower than the rotation of the Earth. This created a discrepancy between the satellites’ orbital speed and the rotation of the earth’s magnetic field, which allowed the use of electromagnetic induction to generate electricity. Theoretically, the energy obtained this way would be in proportion to a decline in the Earth’s rotational speed. The amount of electricity generated by each satellite was quite small, but all the satellites together produced a huge amount.

She spent ten thousand years generating electricity. During that time, the energy she gathered was used to grow the bio-satellites. From the satellites she grew myxomycetes, which functioned as a vacuum-compatible thread that tied the satellites together. The array of bio-satellites gave the Earth a ring like Saturn’s, and by binding them together the ring grew in size and solidarity. Once the ring was solidified, she began lowering myxomycete threads into the atmosphere. When the myxomycete threads reached the ground, they took a firm grip on the surface. Since the ring was orbiting slower than the Earth’s rotation, these threads were stretched, and she used that stretching to generate more electricity.

So what to do with all this energy she was generating? Create antimatter. The interior of the ring became a particle accelerator, and day after day, it manufactured antimatter. Whether one was building physical strength or making antimatter, all it took was a little bit of effort each and every day. Behind every idol’s success was this sort of hard work behind the scenes. She stored the antimatter carefully, ensuring it didn’t get caught in the magnetic field and come into contact with matter. This antimatter would be of vital importance on her journey through space.

But an expedition to outer space required not just antimatter, but alterations to her body. While prepping for her trip she passed through three generations, but by the 17th Generation Idol she was finally ready. The 17th Generation Idol drilled a hole in an asteroid and cultivated her brain and muscles and circulatory system inside of it, preparing a mini-ecosystem of myxomycetes and fleas. These repaired any damage to the organs inside the 17th Generation Idol and removed any cancerous cells.

She was ready. All she had left to do was wait for the necessary volume of antimatter. The antimatter she made was stored inside the 17th Generation Idol’s belly, and the mutual annihilation that occurred when it struck matter would be her propulsion fuel. However, some alarming news reached her. The light of the fixed stars around the solar system was declining. Perhaps some would say that if mysterious solar flares could occur then mysterious star dimming could occur, too, but this dimming was spreading like a plague through the nearby stars. The speed at which it spread was surprisingly fast, a decent fraction of the speed of light. Stars affected by the dimming eventually disappeared entirely, as if they’d gone out. By her calculations, in a few thousand years this phenomenon would reach her solar system.

She had yet to reach her intended volume of antimatter, but the 17th Generation Idol moved up her schedule for launching into outer space. She didn’t know the cause of this mysterious plague, but she definitely didn’t want to get anywhere near it. If she ran low on antimatter she could stop off at another solar system’s star and borrow the rotational energy from it.

Bye-bye, Earth. Bye-bye, solar system. I don’t know if I’ll come back. My idol activities here were so much fun!

Two thousand years after the 17th Generational Idol left the solar system, the plague arrived. The plague was actually a swarm of tiny machines, less than a millimeter each. The swarm covered Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt and Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune and Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper belt, and began disassembling them. They began making a Dyson sphere using all the matter in the solar system.

These machines had been developed by an intelligent life form on one planet to prevent extinction at the hands of the Monopole Super Flares. The initial machines weren’t as accomplished as the current incarnation, but they were given orders to prevent super flares by any means necessary. The machines followed those instructions and created descendants that stood a better chance of preventing the flares. By repeating Lamarck inheritance over generation after generation they reached a point where they could prevent super flares by disassembling planets and building Dyson spheres around stars. However, disassembling their planet drove the species that created the machines to extinction. The machines were capable of multiplying and altering themselves and were no longer possible to control. Once the machines completed the Dyson sphere in their home system, they headed out towards other stars.

These machines had no consciousness to call their own. All they had was a powerful drive to effectively perform their prime directive. That directive told them to prevent the solar flares but did not contain any language limiting them to just their home system. Therefore, they flew from star to star, expanding their Dyson sphere construction. These lightweight machines possessed no propulsion systems; instead the Dyson spheres fired laser beams that propelled them through the back-reaction. They had no need to slow themselves; when they struck the target planet they would use the local resources to manufacture more of themselves and begin converting matter into a Dyson sphere.

The Earth had survived the Super Flare and the rise of the Novum Organum, but this assault was too much for it. All creatures went extinct, even the bacteria buried deep beneath the surface. There were actually some microscopic creatures on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, that used the heat from the tidal force as an energy source, but these, too, perished.

Heedless to all of this, the Idol continued her idol activities in space, just as she pleased. Whenever she ran low on antimatter, she set down on a nearby planet, took a thousand-year rest, and then set off for her next destination. Planets with life were not all that unusual, and each time she found one she borrowed those creatures’ matter, upgrading herself.

There were many creatures in the universe unimaginable from the standpoint of evolution on Earth. For example, there was a forest of towering crystal trees that used the trace minerals in the ground to grow themselves. The planet the trees lived on had an elliptical orbit, so once a year, like clockwork, a great storm arrived, ripping fragments from the trees, which formed the cores of new children.

On a planet with low gravity, there were things like giant living flyswatters that ate the smaller creatures that filled the air. These creatures were made from all sorts of parts and could fuse or dissect these parts as needed to customize themselves.

On a planet where winds always blew, she found a creature that used wind energy to achieve homeostasis. Every now and then, she found a creature that was intelligent. The Idol traded with them, or waged war against them. But while intelligent, none were conscious — they could not become fans. She could not hold concerts or handshake events.

And so time passed. So much time it seemed pointless to even think about it. The experience she obtained finally made the Idol realize just what she should do about the fan problem. She realized just what consciousness actually was.

V

What is consciousness? A biological function humans obtained through evolution? That is one answer.

But is that really all? That seems unlikely. Let’s try a simple experiment. Take the smartphone in your pocket and open up an idol rhythm game. Without thinking about it, pick the song you like the most and have played more times than you can count. Were you able to set a new high score? All right, well, play through the same song again. But this time raise your consciousness. Think about it in detail, about how you need to move each finger, where you have to tap each note.

I’ll bet you anything your score is significantly lower than when you played without really thinking about it. You were using all that energy on your consciousness, and the critical information processing functions suffered as a result. Consciousness interferes with our efficiency. Living in nature with our consciousness constantly active is high cost, low return. Natural selection would never give rise to a function like that. If a lion attacks you, it’s far faster to run without any internal process than to consciously think, “Ooh, scary!” and decide to run for it.

So how did consciousness come to be? The key point here is that consciousness is not a biological function we’re born with. Quite the opposite: consciousness is a cultural function transmitted to the individual after birth. Or we could put it this way — consciousness is a software downloaded into the individual by civilization.

Then the question becomes, how can we download the consciousness software? Listen carefully. Read closely. I am about to record the answer here.

Consciousness is downloaded into individuals from idols.

Each time we see an idol, fans identify with them. As the idols throw themselves into singing, dancing, or chatting we see ourselves in them, admire their hard work, and feel like we can work harder tomorrow.

When I say fans identify with them, I don’t mean that fans take on the idol’s consciousness. Fans grow passionate about the idols, wave glow sticks, grow obsessed with their charm, simulate a substitute for the idol within themselves — and only then is their consciousness born.

Idols become idols because they love idols. This is where the connections between consciousnesses are born. Consciousness propagates and proliferates when an idol fan becomes an idol.

Here ‘idol’ is used in the broad sense, not the narrow. There is no need to be on TV for consciousness to be propagated. A classroom idol or someone idolized by their friends will also do the trick. It need not even be a modern person — fictional creations can also propagate consciousness. Characters in idol anime are muses that spread consciousness to all they touch.

Human consciousness is born as a result of passion for idols. In most cases, consciousness is born before adolescence, but there are those unlucky few who go their whole lives without it.

Mika Furutsuki and Maori Niizono spread consciousness to many with their high school idol activities.

The Idol who had been Mika Furutsuki realized all of this. The existence of consciousness wasn’t the mandatory condition for an idol to exist; an idol’s existence was the mandatory condition for consciousness to exist. And any life form capable of enough information processing to perceive the idol’s existence was capable of downloading consciousness.

She changed the focus of her idol activities. She no longer interfered with evolution to try and produce consciousness — instead she went to life forms with sufficient information processing capabilities, gave herself the same body as them to make it easier to identify with her, and went about her idol activities. In this way, fans were born, and so was consciousness. Hundreds of millions of years of idol activities were at last rewarded. Every now and then conflicts would arise with an alien species and she’d be forced to destroy their entire planet, but she kept her chin up. What people wanted from idols wasn’t perfect dancing or singing or consciousness creation, but the sight of them doing their very best, even if that wasn’t very good. Even after smashing a few hundred or thousand planets she just had to try harder tomorrow. The Idol continued touring the planets of the universe. Consciousnesses were born across the universe, and the universe became filled with conscious minds.

Approximately one trillion years later, the universe began to die. Dark energy was accelerating the expansion of the universe, making matter increasingly scarce, and thus harder for new stars to be born. By this time the Idol was on her 74,758,071,090th Generation but still not ready to retire.

Thus, she decided to make a new universe. She caused a supernova explosion and made a black hole. Black holes are a hole in space of infinite depth; from the outside they have a finite size, but inside they go on forever — a black hole is a universe in itself. Then the Idol made a second black hole, and controlling the two black holes perfectly, she crashed them together. The impact was transmitted to the internal universe in the form of a spatial distortion. This spatial distortion would leave traces behind, detectable as cosmic background radiation. One day, intelligent life evolved, and it observed the cosmic background radiation. The cosmic background radiation data stored on their computers began functioning as an informational intelligence. The Idol had broadcast her own information to the next universe in the form of cosmic background radiation. As an informational intelligence, the Idol hid herself within the media and began propagating consciousness.

Proliferating herself this way, the Idol traveled through countless universes, creating innumerable consciousnesses. In time, she realized that universe proliferation was not traveling in a single direction in time. A frame in which time flowed from the past to the future was simple when seen from the perspective of a single universe; yet within the larger multiverse it was quite common for her children to be her own ancestors. The multiverse was shaped not like a tree growing in one direction, but a net-like rhizome. The shape of it reminded her of something. The neural network.

The multiverse processed information with the universes serving as nerve cells. And any being with sufficient information processing capability could grow obsessed with an idol and develop a consciousness. The multiverse was no exception. Once the multiverse perceived the Idol’s activities, it became a fan and grew a consciousness. As a result of the multiverse’s consciousness, the universes, the galaxies, the solar systems, the stars, the planets, the continents, the oceans, the bacteria, the molecules, the atoms, and the quarks all developed consciousnesses, albeit very faint ones. And everyone loved idols.

The multiverse’s consciousness reached back into the past and began altering events to bring about its existence. It distorted the flow of time in the Idol’s universe of origin, layering the past and future in a higher dimension. This was the cause of the Monopole Super Flares. As stars in the past and future were in contact with themselves via a higher dimension their magnetic fields affected each other, causing the flares. Humans trapped inside a mere three spatial dimensions perceived this to be magnetic field lines leading to nothing and mistakenly believed monopoles must be involved. The reason young stars never produced flares was because they had no past version of themselves to interact with.

The multiverse’s alterations even extended to extremely minor details. When Mika Furutsuki was in high school, Maori Niizono’s alarm clock rang early, bringing the two of them together, and giving Mika Furutsuki the confidence to become an idol. Additionally, when Mika Furutsuki killed herself, the ambulance took her to the hospital run by Maori Niizono’s parents. This led directly to the birth of the Idol and the origin of the multiverse’s consciousness.

When the multiverse has consciousness, determinism and free will are in perfect harmony. Physical laws and rules of causality believed to be free will are actually free and conscious choices made by the multiverse. Additionally, time paradoxes are impossible. The past and the future must always be in harmony from the perspective of the consciousness.

The multiverse’s consciousness went beyond the universe where the Idol originated, and headed further into the past. And after passing through countless universes, the consciousness that started with Mika Furutsuki reached one universe in particular. This was its terminal point. Beyond that the information was too degraded and it could not maintain its consciousness.

In that universe, the consciousness’s information took the form of a novel. A novel about how a girl named Mika Furutsuki struggled to become the greatest idol of all. A reader who completes this novel will empathize with Mika Furutsuki, identify with her, and develop a consciousness of their own.

By reader, I mean you.

By now I’m sure you know what the title of this novel means. You are the Last and First Idol. You are the last being to inherit the consciousness derived from Mika Furutsuki, and at the same time, the first.

You are the sole being in your universe with a consciousness.

The start of this novel stated that you have a calling. I’m sure you understand by now. Your calling is to spread consciousness.

You must become an idol. As an idol, make others obsessed with you, empathize with you, identify with you, and develop consciousnesses of their own.

Well? Go forth and be idolized. You’re already shining bright!