Dark Seiyuu

I

The spaceship’s sails had the aether winds behind them.

The sails were ten times wider than the ships themselves and swollen with the solar winds, accelerating. The sails gave off a blue light. Were you close enough, you could likely hear the whistle of the wind. Aether was a medium of light and sound, and as it struck the sails, it oscillated.

The ships were nearing their destination, Earth, so they moved off the aether winds, decelerating.

The Earth glittered like a rainbow.

As the Earth rotated at 1700 kph, in orbit at 100,000 kph, it was struck by the aether winds that flowed through the void of space, generating friction. The thermosphere, 80 kilometers above the surface, was irradiated with strong aether vibrations — light. The rotational friction gave rise to a high-energy purple light around the equator, but towards the poles the energy weakened, causing redshift. As a result, seen from space, the Earth appeared covered in rainbow-like stripes.

In one of those stripes, at a place that glittered like an emerald — on the surface, at 35 degrees latitude — in the forests of Ichikawa in Chiba Prefecture, a murder was about to take place.

“DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

A tall human with a ponytail was trying to kill a smaller human with short hair. The former was the seiyuu Akane Yomokura (26), while the latter was also a seiyuu, Hinagiku Nakayama (19). Akane swung a knife. Hinagiku was so shocked she fell to the ground, and as a result, avoided a fatal wound.

“Ow! A-Akane-san? What are you doing!?” Hinagiku shrieked. Her laryngeal sac, an organ unique to seiyuu, quivered. This was a lump of red flesh that dangled below the throat. About the size of two knuckles, it was covered in countless reddish-brown zit-like protrusions. Hinagiku’s excitement made the flesh lump bulge, and the protrusions swell. The laryngeal sac was an organ that made aether vibrate. This was a seiyuu’s life. It contained a ganglion so large it was called the second brain; it operated independently, and even without direct commands from the brain prime, it would sound the most complex voices, making the surrounding aether shiver.

Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac grew engorged, turning red. The wrinkled protrusions were now swollen into thin tubes, like fingers reaching in all directions. Fluid coursed through the tubes, refracting her voices, sounding it as a complex set of aether vibrations. The aether fluctuations became waves that were released from the laryngeal sac into the world outside.

Akane was within kissing distance when Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac fired a maser beam.

The voice Hinagiku sounded was the frequency of the electromagnetic beams masers produce. Electromagnetic beams were aether waves, and by vibrating their voices seiyuu could fire beams. Maser beams collide with water molecules, vibrating them, and raise their temperature instantaneously. Struck head on by one made being roasted into rare steak inescapable.

And at this distance, it was impossible to miss. All she had left to do was to finish off the would-be-murderer as she writhed in pain, clutching her scorched head.

Except nothing happened.

“Well done, Hinagiku-chan. You’re as skilled as they say. Unfortunately for you, I’m even better!”

Akane’s laryngeal sac was swollen, too. She had guessed that Hinagiku’s sac vibration would fire a maser beam. Her own sac had produced a sound to neuter that. Sound and light were both aether vibrations, so if you applied a frequency that reversed the waveform, it was possible to cancel them out.

Akane’s fingers got a grip on Hinagiku’s tongue. Hinagiku clamped her jaw shut, trying to bite those fingers off, but the knife in Akane’s other hand was faster. The sharp edge of that well-polished stainless blade invaded Hinagiku’s mouth, snipping off that soft flesh. Hinagiku’s face twisted with pain and despair. The tongue had an unusually high concentration of nerves in it. Ten thousand nerves were sending signals to the brain that cells had been destroyed.

Without a tongue, a seiyuu was powerless. The laryngeal sac was now useless. Almost drowning on the blood from her severed tongue, Hinagiku tried to make the sac vibrate, but was unable to make a coherent sound.

Akane pulled her knife from Hinagiku’s mouth. Hinagiku was still alive. Her eyes were wide open, and fear was on her face. The sharp stainless tip approached the left eye. That was the knife’s next target. Her dilated pupils displayed just how abject Hinagiku’s terror was. But this did not slow the approach of Akane’s knife at all. The blood-drenched knife slid into the eye.

Once pierced, eyeballs are flimsy things. Their tensile strength makes the hole pop, and the entire membrane ruptures. A tiny explosion occurred, and pus gushed out. Hinagiku’s face was greasy with blood and pus, but this didn’t concern Akane; she moved her knife and popped the other eye.

All that was left were two hollow, deflated half-spheres crisscrossed with countless capillaries.

Hinagiku slumped to the ground. She was on the brink of death. Meanwhile, her laryngeal sac was shaking violently. The independent ganglion was still very much alive.

Akane stroked Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac lovingly. It was healthy and alive. The body was dying, but they weren’t fussed at all. She’d loved this sac the moment she set eyes on it.

She took out a new, undirtied knife, and placed the blade at the root of the sac. She slid the knife across the flesh as if caressing it. At first, the blood oozing out was quite dark, but soon that was washed away by a flood of bright red blood. Hinagiku’s still beating heart caused the blood to gush out in waves.

Even detached from the body, the laryngeal sac vibrated, desperate to make her voice sound. Akane held the mass gently in both hands, carrying it to a cooler.

As a finishing touch, she stabbed a knife in one of the vacant eye sockets, pushing it back. The knife plunged through Hinagiku’s eye, down the nerves, and into her brain, destroying her brain tissue. Now there was no chance of her ever recovering. Once brain tissue was damaged it could never be rebuilt exactly the same way. With the knife in it, the brain tissue lost stability, and began oozing out of the eye socket.

Akane had achieved her goal. The scene of the crime was a forest, and there were no signs of anyone else around, but she had to dispose of the body quickly. If the clouds parted and the sun came out there was no telling who’d see the body.

Akane took off her jacket. On her upper arm was a writhing red splotch. It was a tumor the size of a tangerine, and it was slowly pulsing, like it was breathing. Its movements were growing a little faster.

Akane took off more clothes, stripping down to her underwear. The tumor on her arm was not the only one; she had them on her upper belly, on her side, and on each thigh. Ten tumors in all. By now they were vibrating too fast for the eye to see.

Akane wrapped her arms around Hinagiku’s body. The shorter girl’s head came up to Akane’s chest. She’d died only a minute ago, but her body temperature had already dropped a lot, and she was cold to the touch.

Akane held the body tight, making sure all her tumors were in contact with it. The tumors looked ready to burst, and there was a light shining across them. She put her full weight on the body, as if rubbing the light against it.

In time Hinagiku’s cold body began warming up to a temperature much hotter than it had ever been when she was alive. Temperatures that would turn meat into steak, and steak into charcoal.

The charcoal served to fertilize the plants, so nothing was wasted. She was doing her part to keep the city green.

When Hinagiku was completely carbonized, the sky began to clear. The sky above was covered with a strong bluish-green glow. If you went north to Ibaraki Prefecture, the glow grew greener; south to Tokyo Harbor it leaned blue.

The inverted city of Yokohama floated above her.

Against the background of the green sky rocked a floating ocean. In the coastal Minato Mirai, a large Ferris wheel revolved, the clock displayed on the side of it now reversed. The Landmark Tower dangled nearby. While tiny, you could just make out the red cars of the Keihin Express. A roller coaster was hurtling around the tracks at Hakkeijima Sea Paradise. At the Zoorasia animal preserve, giraffes were reaching their necks up to eat. All of this was an illusion created by light refracting off discrepancies in the aether density, the aether mirage.

There was a higher concentration of aether in the upper atmosphere. As the quantity of air in each atmospheric layer increased, the amount of aether grew correspondingly thin. Since light was aether vibrations, the higher the concentration of aether the faster the speed of light. The discrepancy between the speed of light in the upper atmosphere and near the surface gave light a convex curve, creating the mirage. Light headed from the surface towards the upper atmosphere traced a long curve, returning back to the surface a considerable distance away. When humans see light, they perceive it as coming from directly ahead, which creates the illusion of a landscape floating upside-down in the sky.

Since the Earth rotated, aether was caught by the Coriolis force, and this motion created the aether winds. The aether winds stirred up the light, causing it to bend. This was why Yokohama appeared above her, despite being to the south-west. The reason Akane had been concerned about the weather was the aether mirage. You could kill someone in a remote location, but if it was reflected in an aether mirage you might as well be in public.

Brushing Hinagiku’s charred remains off her body, Akane put her clothes back on. She cradled the cooler to her, grinning. She’d taken another step towards becoming the ultimate seiyuu.

*

The Great Seiyuu Age — there was a period in time that earned itself that name. Seiyuu became the stars of the day, the hopes of humanity — all envied their laryngeal sacs. Seiyuu of the day were in demand for far more than just their main job — they were called on for pin-ups, modeling, singing, and streaming video performances.

The history of seiyuu was a long one. One theory placed the origins 500,000 years ago, as early as the birth of homo sapiens. That being said, seiyuu of the past were natural seiyuu, and did not have laryngeal sacs displayed outside the bodies. It was unlikely they could do more than gather a few dozen together to light a bonfire.

The origins of seiyuu evolutionary theory and the biological mechanisms involved were shrouded in mystery, even today. The best guess anyone had been able to make was that the laryngeal sac had been the key to everything. Natural seiyuu could not be identified as such from appearance alone, but they, too, possessed a laryngeal sac the size of a thumb on the interior of their throats. The presence of the laryngeal sac alone granted them control of aether vibrations.

While the principle behind it was unclear, a method was discovered to expand this ability. The Human Genome Project carried out some 270 years ago discovered a gene that could grow the laryngeal sac. In theory, if the sac was enlarged, the seiyuu’s ability would grow by leaps and bounds. It only took twenty years before genetic engineering developed enough to make this theory reality.

Seiyuu genes were exclusive to human beings, and creating enhanced laryngeal sacs involved the birth of designer babies. Some bioethical concerns were raised, but they were defeated by a wave of economic practicality. Effectively, a detailed examination of seiyuu activities revealed that they were able to get around the law of energy conservation. Use of seiyuu made it possible, in principle, to create a perpetual motion machine. Propaganda machines went into overdrive, announcing that the next century would be the age of the seiyuu. The Seiyuu Revolution would be as dramatic as the Industrial one. Seiyuu would lead humanity forward.

Thus, the first generation of artificial seiyuu was born. But their abilities were weaker than anticipated, and their endurance poor. Activating their abilities required lengthy periods of concentration. From the perspective of value and stability, even if they could break the law of energy conservation, they were not worth using for power generation.

The field that did find uses for them was the space industry. Since seiyuu could control aether vibrations, they could manipulate sound, light, and a number of other forces. One of these forces was gravity control — something not possible with any other device. Calculations showed that use of this ability would make escaping the gravitation sphere far more cost-effective. The space industry had always been prohibitively expensive, but the introduction of seiyuu made things considerably cheaper.

Fifty years after the discovery of the seiyuu gene, gravity control spaceships were exploring the solar system, flown by seiyuu pilots — seiyuu were finally stars. In light of which, egged on by designer baby industry advertisements, parents everywhere altered their children’s genes, turning them into seiyuu.

In response to demand, two programs began, both aimed at elevating seiyuu powers. The first was the Legend Class Project, a simplistic approach that attempted to enhance seiyuu abilities by making the laryngeal sac larger. The quality of seiyuu they targeted were referred to as Legend Class, and they insisted these seiyuu would even be able to create antimatter.

The other was the Seiyuu Transistor Program. A seiyuu transistor was a supplementary system designed to work with existing seiyuu abilities. They introduced the seiyuu gene into gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and other anthropoid apes, and when they grew laryngeal sacs, they harvested these, combined them, and created biomachines. They called them seiyuu transistors. The plan was that by merging multiple seiyuu into a single transistor, the power output would be the equivalent of having one giant seiyuu.

Both plans more or less succeeded, and seiyuu opened the doors to travel outside the solar system. This was the dawn of the Great Seiyuu Age. Thanks to seiyuu, mankind began spreading through the galaxy in earnest.

Physics proved no impediment. Physics-based speed limits like the speed of sound or light speed were dependent on the density of aether. In the atmosphere, where aether was thin, 100,000 kph was all they could manage, but in the open stretches of the solar system, where aether was much thicker, they could easily top 1,080,000,000 kph. Once they entered interstellar regions, that jumped to 10,000,000,000,000 kph. Once they made it into space there were no practical impediments to the spread of humanity.

Except for one thing, that is. Mankind made an unexpected and disappointing discovery. There were almost no planets they could safely colonize. To be strictly accurate, planets themselves were far and few between. The law of universal gravitation did not seem to be all that universal. Mankind found very few sectors where gravity worked like our solar system. The aether flow caused any number of places where dust and gas gathered — a.k.a. aether deposits — but it was extremely rare for that matter to mutually attract and form a stable celestial body. There must be more to gravity than previously suspected.

On top of this came more bad news. As the seiyuu investigated the universe outside, they discovered that our solar system lay inside a massive aether deposit. A spiral-shaped deposit a quintillion kilometers in diameter, this was named the Milky Way. The problem was that mankind had no way of leaving the Milky Way. Because the gas and dust in the Milky Way crowded out the aether, the aether density within the Milky Way was lower than it was outside. Much like the difference between the Earth’s atmosphere and the solar system, and the solar system and the interstellar realms. The higher the concentration of aether, the higher the energy of light. Thus far, seiyuu’s control over aether vibration had been able to defend against the powerful light flying around the galaxy. However, light outside the reaches of the Milky Way had energy far beyond their capabilities, and the seiyuu were helpless against it. Ships that ventured beyond the Milky Way were instantly vaporized by the intense light that filled that void.

Because of this, a hundred years after the Great Seiyuu Age began, three quarters of the total human population remained within our original solar system. The age of the frontier spirit was quickly being replaced with claustrophobia.

At this time, the status of seiyuu went into freefall. The major genetic engineering conglomerates used their patents on specific seiyuu genomes to place limitations on certain seiyuu’s reproductive freedom. They established legal precedent in courts to back up these demands.

This led directly to the War of Seiyuu Independence. Seiyuu whose rights had been encroached upon rebelled, with the Legend Class seiyuu in the lead. The overwhelming power of the Legend Class seiyuu allowed the rebels to claim an advantage initially, but lack of resources on the seiyuu side led to the rebellion being squashed inside of a month. Even seiyuu can’t do much without food. The survivors called themselves the Free Seiyuu and set out towards the dangerous heart of the galaxy, where mankind had not yet dared venture. The seiyuu left behind found themselves even more restricted.

The technology to create Legend Class seiyuu was banned, and even the less powerful seiyuu found their rights curtailed. The Seiyuu Surveillance Society, subordinate to the genetic engineering industry and the agency alliance, monitored the seiyuu’s lives so heavily they dictated which shampoo they were allowed to use. As romance with the opposite gender might lead to genetic spreading, it, too, was verboten. Upon reaching a certain age, seiyuu were married to a partner arranged by the Seiyuu Surveillance Society and forced to start rearing the next generation of seiyuu. Any who resisted were severely penalized by the Seiyuu Police. By this point, seiyuu were no longer human — they were merely parts for spaceships, raised like livestock.

Akane was born forty years after the War of Seiyuu Independence, so to her this was all in the past. Yet when she first learned this history, she’d been livid. She wanted to break free of the desperate conditions her kind found themselves in, no matter what it took. This desire swelled within her until it became delusions of grandeur — she was convinced only she could change the world, only she could save it. She needed power to be this savior. She had to become the ultimate seiyuu. But Akane had not been born a Legend Class seiyuu, and so no matter how much she practiced, there was a limit to her ability.

When Akane learned of this limit, she spent some time as a prisoner of despair. However, by changing her approach, she got it together again. Rather than use her own laryngeal sac exclusively, she began borrowing sacs from other seiyuu, transplanting them to herself. For that purpose, she had killed ten other seiyuu. It had been a tough decision, but now each of them was a part of her — Akane Yomokura, the savior, the ultimate seiyuu. She was sure their deaths had been repaid, and their souls lay at rest.

And today, Akane had stolen Hinagiku Nakayama’s laryngeal sac. It was her eleventh victim. Akane’s body would only allow one more transplanted sac. She had been searching for the strongest one she could, certain that it was her duty to make that sac a part of her own body.

II

“Good morning! It’s Akane Yomokura.”

“Good morning!”

Greetings echoed through the studio. Seiyuu greetings were always ‘Good morning,’ whether it was noon or night.

They were about to commence flight operations. Seiyuu took their positions, placing microphones at their laryngeal sacs.

The natural seiyuu of ancient times often worked as actors and singers. This was because they had a direct grasp of the true nature of sound, aether, and were able to make their voices beautiful, whether spoken or sung. This is why the kanji in ‘seiyuu’ mean ‘voice’ and ‘skilled.’ The occupation originally referred to actors who did ADR recording for anime, acting exclusively with their voices — it did not refer to people with aether control abilities. Many ‘seiyuu’ voice actors also had the ability to manipulate aether, but the two meanings of the word are fundamentally distinct. However, once the anime industry collapsed, and the original meaning of ‘seiyuu’ was no longer a viable occupation, the definition of the word changed. Just as the word ‘penguin’ originally referred to the great auk, but after the great auk went extinct it began being used for a different species. Modern seiyuu occasionally do accept acting work, but this is exclusively a side gig.

The work modern artificial seiyuu do is nothing like what the word originally referred to. But the jargon around the occupation retains the flavor of that ancient line of work. For example, the onsite manager on a ship piloted by seiyuu is traditionally referred to as the ‘director.’

Additionally, before throwing themselves into aether control, modern seiyuu often share stories and songs, just as their predecessors did. They use these to induce a trance state in which they manipulate the aether. However, the words modern seiyuu use to place themselves in this trance state are hardly ordinary; to an outside observer they would seem like a string of meaningless sounds. The main thing learned at seiyuu training schools is this occupational language. Those privileged to hear it feel as if they have encountered the unknown. As if a mythological archetype has stimulated their unconscious.

This was one reason why seiyuu could not be replaced with machines. Vibrating aether required the ability to understand unquantifiable emotions and feelings contained within these stories. Anatomically speaking, it had been proven that the laryngeal sac had a great deal of neurological connections to Wenicke’s area, the region of the brain that controlled language; it was assumed that this was related to the songs and myths that lay at the root of all language.

Within the group of seiyuu gathered today, Akane held the highest rank. Seiyuu ranks were determined by their ability. The lowest ranked trainees, the junior class, had abilities scarcely larger than a natural seiyuu with hair on it; without a seiyuu transistor it was all they could do to raise the temperature of water in a kettle by ten degrees or emit a soft glow. Above them was the C Class, young seiyuu finally allowed to assist aboard spaceships. This level could boil water in a kettle on their own, produce ultraviolet light, and a few dozen of them with a transistor could control the gravity aboard a very small spaceship. Next were the mid-level seiyuu, the B Class — this was Akane’s current rank. These were the main staff on civilian spaceships, and a few of them with a transistor could provide gravity control to basically any spaceship. On their own, they could output enough energy to power the appliances in an average home. The top of the profession were the veteran seiyuu, the A Class; most of these were official seiyuu piloting official ships, or working for science labs powering particle seiyuu accelerators. At that level, with a transistor they could fly a small ship single-handedly and produce high energy radiation like gamma waves. Some could even handle gravity manipulation on their own for short periods of time.

Akane was classified as B Class, but she was sure her actual ability was on the high side of A Class. One reason she hadn’t raised her rank was the frequency of work. High ranks mean higher wages, but since the company’s needs were met by B Class seiyuu, they weren’t willing to pay for higher ranked ones. The result would be far less work coming her way.

A was not the highest class, technically. Legend Class outranked them. This tier had literally become the stuff of legends. Nearly all members had taken part in the War of Seiyuu Independence and fled the solar system. These days the seiyuu agency alliance kept a tight lid on information about them, but rumor had it their laryngeal sacs were larger than they were, they could fuse with the spaceship, and it was even possible for them to produce antimatter — they were basically wizards. They were Akane’s ultimate goal, the ultimate seiyuu.

Gathered today were two junior class, five C class, and five B class seiyuu. Before work began, manners dictated that subordinates greet their superiors, so the other seiyuu lined up in a row in front of Akane. She had to respond to this, which meant she didn’t get a chance to relax, either. Neither side benefited from this custom in any way. All it did was waste time until it was time for the ship to launch.

“All right, time for the opening. Positions.”

This voyage was a short one from the Earth to the Moon. It would take less than five hours. The opening was one of the toughest parts of navigation; this was the process of making the ship fly from the surface into outer space. Gravity was one of aether’s waves, so if you produced aether waves that countered the phase you could create anti-gravity. It was common to use a song for this. All seiyuu would sing an aggressively uptempo number, placing themselves in a trance state so they could concentrate on the aether vibrations and counteract the Earth’s gravity.

Twelve seiyuu were singing at the instructions of the director. Aether vibrations amplified by the seiyuu transistor broadcast outside the ship via the aether amps. Gravity was canceled out, and the 500 meter lump of metal began to float. As it did, the engine began to hum. Ships that left all propulsion to the seiyuu were becoming more common, but there were still many hybrid ship designs using traditional engines.

As Akane shook the aether, she always heard a voice. One only Akane could hear, a soft voice, the meaning of its words unclear.

She’d heard that voice as long as she could remember, every time she sounded the aether. At first, when she listened closely to it, it left butterflies in her stomach. Now she still had no clue what it was but had long since stopped paying it any attention.

The Earth’s atmosphere has four primary layers. From the top down they were the thermosphere, the mesosphere, the stratosphere, and the troposphere. The thermosphere is where friction between the Earth’s atmosphere and the aether of outer space occurs, so it had the highest temperature. The lower you get in the mesosphere the lower that temperature becomes, but in the stratosphere the temperature starts rising again. This is because the ozone layer absorbs the ultraviolet rays that pass through the thermosphere.

The ship easily passed through the troposphere, stratosphere and mesosphere, entering the thermosphere. The aether density increased, and the blue-green light grew stronger. At this height, the Earth’s rotation left aether winds blowing from east to west with no interference from the atmosphere. Light from upwind had stronger energy and a blueshift, while light from downwind had weaker energy and a redshift. That left the east side sky blue and the west yellow. At altitudes above the thermosphere the aether grew so thick and the light and sound energy so strong it required sunglasses and earplugs to protect the eye and ears. Even with those there was no escaping the shrill whine generated by the friction between the atmosphere and the aether. Rates of mental illness were quite high among seiyuu and other ship crew members; possibly because they were forced to listen to this noise 24/7.

“Through the thermosphere, opening complete,” the director said, outside the booth.

Akane lowered her mic. From this point on flight was possible with only a few seiyuu.

Akane left the studio. A staff member said, “Akane-san, you’re wanted in the cabin.” It was common in the industry for seiyuu to provide in-flight entertainment to the passengers on board. This was important enough that passengers would select flights based on the seiyuu on board. How often a seiyuu was employed depended on her face, figure, and social media following. No matter how good you were at actually flying the planes, if the passengers didn’t like you, you’d get no work. Akane was well aware just how messed up that was.

For now, she put her thoughts aside and focused on the job at hand. Akane and her coworkers filed into the cabin. The others were all junior class, so it was probably best if she handled the customary briefing.

“Thank you for choosing Star Flash Company’s Earth/Moon shuttle service today. We have exited the Earth’s atmosphere and are currently in transit to the Moon. You can see a view of the Earth on screen. Isn’t it beautiful? These lights are generated by aether friction. Aether attracted to the Earth’s gravity is colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere.”

As the ship rose higher, the entire Earth came into view on the cabin screen. It was filled with all colors of the rainbow, glowing light neon.

“As I’m sure you’re all aware, aether is the medium for all sound, light, and particles. The origins of aether theory go all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and the theory of four elements. He believed that all things start out as a single matter called the prima materia, and that by applying the qualities hot, cold, wet, and dry you created the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth. Hot and dry together create fire, hot and wet create air, cold and wet create water, and cold and dry create earth. Hot and cold, and dry and wet were incompatible with each other and could not be combined. Additionally, Aristotle proposed a fifth element named aether, one that would control the heavenly bodies, and which he believed to be pure prima materia. Modern physics is based on this idea of the four element theory. What originally exists is just aether, and by applying different qualities to it, we get all types of matter. These days the four qualities Aristotle proposed are understood to be aether frequencies. The frequencies alone apply qualities, and the combination of different frequencies creates the different forces of sounds, lights, and particles that form the world around us.”

“But aether isn’t the only theory,” one of the passengers interrupted. “There’s also the theory of Fields!”

Fields. A pretty old-fashioned concept, but apparently some people still believed in it. Unfortunately, these ideas had fallen out of fashion in modern physics, and Akane was not well versed in them.

Akane thought for a few moments, considering how to respond. Fortunately, a more knowledgeable passenger stepped in, breaking the silence.

“Fields? The idea that there’s a field for everything that describes values for those qualities, and that as long as there is space, there is a field, no medium is required? That’s certainly one way of looking at things, but the calculations required to show how multiple fields interact produced infinities, making it functionally useless to calculate anything.”

Akane accepted this help, cleared her throat, and continued her speech.

“The vibrations caused by the friction between aether and the Earth cause the quality of light to be attached to it, creating the aether luminescence. All life on Earth uses this luminescence as the basis for our energy. Throughout the Milky Way, it’s rare to find anywhere with gravity this stable. All of us here are quite lucky. If gravity weren’t set up exactly the way it is, life would never have started.”

“Um, what happens to aether that falls onto the Earth?” a passenger asked.

Google it, Akane thought, but she gave the textbook response.

“That’s a good question. Apparently, that’s one of the biggest problems in modern physics. We know that aether attracted by gravity must be entering the Earth’s atmosphere, but the quantity of aether in the atmosphere is far lower than anticipated. In other words, there’s a lot of aether unaccounted for. It appears to be contradicting the law of conservation of mass. This vanishing aether is one of the great mysteries of physics. Although there is a theory that says the vanishing aether is being converted into gravitational energy.”

“The three great mysteries of modern physics are the origins of gravity, the vanishing aether, and dark matter, right?”

“Wow, you sure know your stuff!”

It seemed like this passenger couldn’t just hold his tongue, so Akane let a slightly phony note creep into her voice. She’d been doing this a while and could handle a crowd like this in her sleep.

“Not only is the aether disappearing a mystery, the source of gravity is also a big problem. Before the Great Seiyuu Age, there was the theory of universal gravitation, which suggested that all mass was a source of gravity, but these days we know that the gravity frequency is an extremely complicated one, and not one that easily occurs. Sectors where gravity exists do seem to comply with the law of universal gravitation, though. Additionally, there are constructs like the solar system or the Milky Way that form around the gravitational pull of a central celestial object, but simulations run on our solar system show that aether friction should have caused the Earth to fall into the sun after a few hundred thousand years. But physics has proven that at least five trillion years have passed since the Earth was born. To solve this contradiction, physicists have proposed the existence in the solar system of a gravitational source other than the observed celestial bodies — this is what is commonly referred to as dark matter. This hypothesis states that undetectable, unknown dark matter is scattered throughout the solar system, maintaining a gravitational balance that prevents the planets from falling into the sun. However, a major criticism of this hypothesis is that the distribution of this dark matter is not sufficiently arbitrary.”

“Oh, also, isn’t it a big problem that seiyuu can break the law of conservation of energy?”

“That’s correct. Lately some people are including that problem and calling it the four great mysteries. As a seiyuu myself, I’m honored to be included. But maybe just a little embarrassed...”

Akane concluded her lecture, and the junior class seiyuu began handed out drinks to the passengers. This was their daily routine.

“Ugh... I’m exhausted...”

They’d been to the moon and back, and Akane was home again. Chugging a Strong Zero to banish the fatigue of work, she lay back on her bed. She was not in the mood for anything active, so she turned the TV on and let it play whatever. An announcer was speaking.

“Five years ago, the theft of the unique small spacecraft The Black Swan made headlines, yet even today the location of it has yet to be discovered. Today, the Space Security Board announced they are increasing the reward offered for any information.”

On screen was an image of an acute isosceles triangle in flight. Akane vaguely remembered it being stolen from a military base and creating a bit of a stir five years ago. It looked pretty powerful, so she briefly imagined herself flying around in it. If it was still missing, maybe it had been taken outside the solar system?

The screen changed. Now it was showing a group of gorillas being slaughtered. Gnarly-looking soldiers in gas masks were attacking the gorillas with flame throwers.

“The gorilla seiyuu rebellion that started in Nigeria last week appears to have been successfully put down by the combined forces of the military and the private security firm, the Rise Detective Agency.”

The uprising of gorilla seiyuu at the Nigerian laryngeal sac factory had been a major focus of the media the last few days. Anthropoid ape farms were still big business. In Africa they used gorillas and chimps, in Indonesia they used orangutans, but they were all raised in vast quantities to be turned into transistor parts.

Even if you introduced the seiyuu genes into anthropoid apes, they had a very low chance of developing a laryngeal sac. Most were deformed and died before birth. In recent years, selective breeding had resulted in gorillas that had a higher chance of growing laryngeal sacs, but as a side effect, they were more intelligent, and had used their seiyuu abilities to start a revolt. Akane had been secretly cheering them on, but they were just gorillas, and had been no match for modern weaponry.

I’ve just got to become the ultimate seiyuu myself, she thought, taking another long pull on her Strong Zero.

The TV screen switched to an image of a building belching smoke.

“More news on that terrorist attack yesterday morning on the Tokyo University Seiyuu Genetics Laboratory. A statement purportedly from the individual responsible has been released on the aethernet. According to it, the motive for the attack was, “There are too many seiyuu.” The note also says, “Seiyuu, listen to the voice,” but the meaning is unclear. The culprit identifies themselves only as the Dark Seiyuu. Security cameras at the scene have captured someone believed to be responsible, and the police are asking for any information...”

Akane had stopped listening to the announcer’s voice. Her eyes were glued to the TV screen. The security footage showed a woman, not very tall. She had a black hood on, so her face was hidden from view, but the laryngeal sac showed she was definitely a seiyuu.

Akane had seen a lot of different seiyuu, so she knew. This was a very well-shaped sac.

The color and size were flawless. This seiyuu was very strong. Top class strength.

If she could get her hands on that laryngeal sac, what more could she ask for? Akane imagined transplanting that to her body, and knew she’d finally be the ultimate seiyuu.

But how could she get in touch with this Dark Seiyuu? She had no idea. Did she have to give up on ever obtaining that sac? She sighed and turned her attention back to the news.

“What do you make of this, ‘Seiyuu, listen to the voice?’”

“We believe it to be some sort of coded message. They’re most likely trying to contact someone through the media.”

Seiyuu, listen to the voice... Akane had heard a voice before. She had no idea what it was, and couldn’t make it out, but that voice definitely made emotions boil up within her.

Was this the voice the Dark Seiyuu meant? Probably not. The delusion that everything happening in the world connected to her was something best abandoned in adolescence.

But that evening the Dark Seiyuu’s laryngeal sac was spinning around inside Akane’s head, and she couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually she gave up and spent all night writing things on social media, not really thinking about it. Before long she found herself talking about the voice she’d heard, ever since she was born. The voice that sounded like it came through several different walls, too muffled to make out, but if she listened closely she’d feel a tightness in her chest.

III

With the advent of the Seiyuu Surveillance Society, seiyuu lost all privacy. They were duty-bound to submit biological and positional data in real time via social media. Over time, seiyuu began publicizing information beyond that of their own accord. The more info they put out, the more it made them seem harmless, the more it showed they were up to nothing suspicious, and if you didn’t do these things you’d never get popular and be able to support yourself.

One thing this led to was a culture of yuri-baiting among the female seiyuu. “Yuri” referred to friendship and romance between two women. Same-sex relationships, as long as they had no impact on future arranged marriages, were approved by the Seiyuu Surveillance Society, and even encouraged as a way to let off steam. And it had a direct impact on popularity, so they formed parties with coworkers, and made it seem like they were close. These days, if you wanted to make it as a female seiyuu, you had to master the art of yuri-baiting.

Akane, of course, yuri-baited with the best of them. She was currently partnered with Sachii Amamiya, a girl five years her junior. They’d both graduated from the same training school, but it seemed Sachii took things far more seriously, and her feelings bordered on devotion.

“Sachii and I have a date at the banana gator garden! ♡”

Akane posted this to her social media, along with a picture of her and Sachii arm in arm in front of a goofy alligator mascot.

This was Higashiizu in Shizuoka, an onsen town at the tip of the Izu Peninsula. One of the main tourist attractions was the Atagawa Tropical and Alligator Garden. It was a conservatory kept warm using heat from the onsen, allowing visitors to see both bananas and gators year-round.

The two of them had taken a train here, taking advantage of some time off to rest their bones in the onsen waters. There was still time before they could check in, so they’d decided to check out the gators to kill some time.

“Senpai, let’s go in!” Sachii said, tugging Akane’s hand.

Sachii was short but curvy. She wore her hair in a short bob that bounced around a lot, which made Akane want to comb it for her. Her T-shirt had a picture of a female seiyuu with long silver hair and a cardigan on it. It was an early picture of Suzuka Himori, a seiyuu active during the War of Seiyuu Independence. As a seiyuu, her abilities had been on the low end of A Class, but her heroic work as a ship doctor had made her a bit of an icon in the counterculture.

Sachii was pulling Akane as hard as she could, but she was so tiny there wasn’t much force behind it. Her character was your classic ditz, and the more innocent she acted the more fans and staff liked her. Even at training school she’d been a big one for hugs.

The Garden had three main buildings, the first of which was a large dome that housed the gators. Inside, they were met by a wave of hot, humid air, and the sound of a man-made waterfall.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw gators!” Sachii ran off towards the tanks, but she didn’t let go of Akane’s hand, so she looked like a dog straining on its leash. “Ah ha ha ha! Gators are so lazy! They never move at all!”

As excited as only a warm-blooded animal could be, Sachii jeered at the cold-blooded reptiles. When Akane let go of her hand she started dashing around like a dog playing fetch and was soon out of sight.

But that heart-warming spectacle was soon overwritten by a thunderous noise.

All the glass in the conservatory started rattling. Akane looked outside and saw a black isosceles triangle landing outside. It was about five meters long, and Akane recognized it instantly. It was the unique small spacecraft she’d seen on the news a week before — The Black Swan.

The Black Swan’s hatch opened.

A short girl in a black hood and cloak emerged, a laryngeal sac at her throat. Akane would know that sac anywhere. It was the same one from the security footage the news had played.

This was the Dark Seiyuu.

Akane immediately headed towards the door, but the Dark Seiyuu stepped into the conservatory first. Seeing the real thing up close, she was even more sure of this laryngeal sac’s quality.

“There you are,” the Dark Seiyuu said. Her voice sounded tense. “You’re Akane Yomokura, right? You wrote on social media about the voice you hear.”

“Yes, that’s definitely me.” Akane, for her part, was flustered by this sudden development. She quite forgot to play nice and let her actual personality show. “Quite a dramatic entrance for a few rambling posts. What are you, an online stalker?”

“I don’t have much time. Let me test to see if you can really hear the voice!”

With that, the Dark Seiyuu immediately attacked. Her laryngeal sac swelled up and sounded a high-energy laser beam. Akane hastily vibrated the beam’s counter frequency, canceling it out.

“You wanna fight me, then? You got a lotta nerve! I’ll kick your ass and take that sac off you!”

The eleven sacs on Akane’s body swelled up. Blue lightning crackled from all of them. The lightning hovered in the air, running across the surface of her body.

“Interesting... You’ve transplanted sacs to your body. And not ape ones, but proper human sacs. I’d heard there’d been a number of seiyuu gone missing. Guess that was your doing.”

“I do what I have to, to get stronger. Whatever it takes!” Akane put her hands up, ready to fight. “I’ve been collecting the best seiyuu sacs around, making myself stronger. You’re the last one. I kill you, I’ll be the ultimate seiyuu!”

Blue lightning crackling all over her, Akane swung a fist at the Dark Seiyuu. This was the ultimate martial arts, Seiyuu Karate — her own invention. Vibrating the aether, generating a current, creating plasma, and burning anyone it came in contact with. Her moves were several times more powerful than traditional karate.

The Dark Seiyuu blocked Akane’s fist easily with both hands. Seemed like she had some martial arts training herself. But this was where Seiyuu Karate showed its true value. The electric current and plasma were absorbed into her opponent’s body.

Except — no smell of burning flesh came drifting through the air. The blue lightning passed through the Dark Seiyuu’s body, affecting only the floor beneath her.

Apparently she was controlling the flow of aether and redirecting the current.

“You’re strong,” Akane said, both surprised and elated by her opponent’s strength.

She felt like the Dark Seiyuu was grinning back.

“Hey! You! Hands off my senpai!”

Sachii tackled the Dark Seiyuu from her blind spot. She’d spotted some suspicious interloper attacking her beloved senpai and run in without a second thought.

But the Dark Seiyuu didn’t even budge. Instead, Sachii went flying, landing in the alligator pen. She must have manipulated gravity. Seiyuu who could control gravity solo, sans transistor, were rare these days, even among A Class seiyuu. That alone proved her opponent’s power.

Akane put some distance between them. Gravity manipulation was exhausting work. This was her chance to finish her opponent off. She reached both arms out, vibrating the laryngeal sacs she’d implanted on them. An aether wave spread out around her, filling the conservatory with rainbow light. A blue sphere of light appeared between her hands. Air turned to plasma by high-temperature electric current.

“Die!”

Pulsing with an intense blue light, the sphere shot towards the Dark Seiyuu. She’d created a flow of aether around both arms, generating a current, and used those coils to accelerate the plasma. This was Akane’s ultimate move, the Seiyu Plasma Gun.

But again, her opponent was uninjured. The plasma struck an invisible wall inches from the Dark Seiyuu and was deflected.

“An aether barrier. If that surprises you, you’re still an amateur.”

An aether barrier. Creating an artificial aether density discrepancy to reflect light, sound, or shockwaves. Wavelengths were affected by density, which meant you could use density changes to alter incoming wavelengths — that idea had led to the development of this technique. It had been widely used during the War of Seiyuu Independence, but Akane had never imagined anyone still in the solar system could use it without a transistor.

“Is that all the attacks you got?” the Dark Seiyuu asked. “Then I guess it’s my turn.”

Akane got ready to neutralize, but the attack came from a direction she wasn’t expecting. She felt herself suddenly pulled forcibly backwards. The floor tilted up, turning into a sheer cliff. No, wait. Gravity had changed direction, localized around her. The Dark Seiyuu was controlling gravity. But knowing that didn’t help her recover her balance. Akane was sent into an undignified roll.

And as she rolled, the Dark Seiyuu kicked Akane in the head. Blood sprayed from her nose. She tried to get up, but it was like concrete had her pinned immobile to the ground. Gravity had been increased several times for her alone. She could see little bundles of light dancing around the corners of her vision. The gravity was so much stronger here that blood wasn’t getting to her brain. She could barely breathe. Her pulse was racing like a madman but her circulation stagnated, her body growing cold. The color drained out of the world. Blood couldn’t reach her laryngeal sac, and it deflated. She had no way of attacking back.

Even seeing her helpless, the Dark Seiyuu didn’t stop the violence. If anything, she went after her even harder.

“Can you hear the voice? Can you? Can you hear it?” she yelled, stomping on Akane. How humiliating. She’d thought herself one step away from being the ultimate seiyuu, but now she literally couldn’t lift a finger. She just had to lie here and let her foe walk all over her.

She desperately tried to make her sac vibrate, forcing power she didn’t have to try and counter the gravity.

Then she heard the voice. The voice that always sounded like it was distorted by several layers of glass, but suddenly it snapped into focus, sounding just a little clearer than normal.

It was anxious. A voice shaking with anxiety. Like a chill wind blowing through her mind. She still couldn’t make out a word, but she felt like the sensation was there.

When she locked onto that, she found herself instinctively aware of a way to make aether vibrate more efficiently. When she put it into practice, she broke through the gravity field around her, and scrambled to her feet.

“...you heard it, didn’t you?” the Dark Seiyuu said, with a look of glee.

“Yeah. Not clearly... And it didn’t feel right.”

Akane was able to stand, but she was in bad shape. A stream of crimson fluid was running down her chin. Blood. She realized there was even blood seeping out of her eyeballs. Too much blood was being sent to her laryngeal sac, and it was overflowing.

“You can’t hear it completely, then.”

“That doesn’t matter... First, I’m gonna kill you!”

Akane threw herself at the Dark Seiyuu. She couldn’t let it end like this. Not with her pride in tatters. For her to be the ultimate seiyuu, she had to kill the woman in front of her. With that in mind, she powered up her Seiyuu Karate.

But her desperate attack was easily dodged. Akane was kicked in the shin and sent flying to the ground.

“I’d love to keep fighting with you, but we’re out of time. If you want to see me again, come after me.” The Dark Seiyuu took a large device out of her pocket. “An aether beacon receiver. If you have this, you’ll know where I am.” She tossed the receiver to Akane, and turned to leave, her cape swirling. She said over her shoulder, “Follow me wherever that leads, no matter what you find there.”

“Damn straight! I’ll track you down! And this time, I’ll kill you!”

Blood sprayed as she yelled. She tried to stand, but the muscles in her knees spasmed. The Dark Seiyuu took one look at her writhing and stalked away. She hopped on The Black Swan and flew off into the sky.

“Senpai! Are you OK? What happened?”

A few minutes later, Sachii had managed to escape from the gator pit intact and came running over to Akane. She was wiping the blood with her handkerchief.

“I nearly got myself killed. I’m gonna rest a bit and then go after her. I need to settle this.”

“That’s true. Can’t have anyone picking a fight with you!” Sachii nodded vigorously. She’d been thrown into a gator pit and escaped without a scratch. Lucky girl.

Either way, first she had to recover. She had the beacon receiver, so she could track the Dark Seiyuu down again.

But something happened that prevented that.

All gravity on Earth vanished.

The first thing they noticed was the floating gators.

Alligators are animals famed for slithering along the ground, but now they were in the air; all four of their legs were off the floor.

The water in the tanks and ponds came rising up, too, forming large spheres. A swimming alligator found itself trapped in one such sphere, thrashing its head as if begging for help. Each drop of water from the waterfall formed its own bead and went flying off around the dome.

Before they knew it, Akane and Sachii were floating, too. Spraying spheres of blood from her wounds, Akane spun through the air, leaving the ground behind.

“Eeek! I’m falling falling falling falling! Senpai, help help help!”

Sachii flailed desperately until she managed to grab Akane, then pulled her in tight, hugging her close. Akane knew the girl was scared but it hurt like hell.

Was the Dark Seiyuu attacking again? The moment she saw what was going on outside the dome, she realized that wasn’t true. The situation was far worse than she’d imagined.

The Pacific Ocean was forming spheres and floating away.

About three hundred meters from the Tropical and Alligator Garden was Atagawa You Yu Beach. Normally covered in happy tourists, now it was in chaos. Balls of water larger than Tokyo Dome were floating off towards the heavens.

The sights around were so distracting it took a while to notice, but the change was affecting them internally, too. Her hands were itching. Her skin was swelling, like it was being pushed upwards from inside.

With gravity gone, the air pressure was dropping.

Air pressure was caused by the weight of the atmosphere. The sheer weight of all the air stacked up above the ground keeps it pressurized. But that seal had just been broken.

Gravity was the seal that kept the atmosphere in place, kept the pressure on, and at a macroscopic level, regulated average air speed. Each atmospheric particle naturally moves around really fast, at 500 meters a second, but with atmospheric pressure the particles collide with each other, resulting in an average speed — wind speed — that is at best a tenth of that. But with the pressurized lid popped off, the atmosphere’s full potential was unleashed. The hidden runners let fly, and an incredible wind kicked up.

Near the surface atmospheric particles were still relatively congested, and the speed was cut down, but fifty kilometers up, in the stratosphere, it was another story. The troposphere and the stratosphere together contain 92% of the Earth’s air, so above that things had thinned considerably. A huge quantity of air was starting to race off towards the void of space at full speed. And that speed was the particle’s natural speed of 500 meters a second.

A 500 meter a second wind.

The destructive force of such a wind is beyond imagining.

Anything normally described as a ‘wind’ would never reach anything like that speed. At a mere 25 meters a second, trees snap in two. At 30 meters, telephone poles bend. Strong typhoon winds blow wooden buildings away at 50 meters a second, and disastrous hurricanes that bend steel towers are still only 60 meters a second.

Even the shockwave of a nuclear bomb, which destroys everything in its path, is only 300 meters a second.

And this was 500 mps.

The fastest wind in the Earth’s history started in the stratosphere and headed towards the Earth like it had spied some dominos.

This wind would reach the surface in approximately two minutes.

Akane detected the precursor to this wind. The entire conservatory was rattling, and the windows started to shatter. Wind was rising from the ground towards the sky, which almost never happened. And this wind was getting stronger.

Akane and Sachii were clinging to the metal frame of the conservatory. They could tell their lives were in serious danger. But dying here was not an option available to Akane. She had to kill the Dark Seiyuu. She had to prove she was stronger.

Akane wrapped herself and Sachii in an aether barrier. Her ability to sound the aether seemed to have improved since she’d listened to the voice. Covering her body in a layer of low-density aether, she cut the two of them off from outside influence. From inside everything turned black — the barrier even rejected light itself — so she had to make a small peephole. She used gravity control to stabilize herself, something she’d never been able to do without a transistor.

“Wow! You’re amazing, senpai!” Sachii gushed.

This made Akane feel good. Like she’d taken yet another step towards becoming the ultimate seiyuu.

Then that 500mps wind reached the surface.

Everything was pulverized!

Every building mankind had ever built was blown away, leaving no trace behind. 10,000 years of history turned to nothing in a single instant.

The pyramids, the Great Buddha at Nara, Tokyo Skytree, the Sagrada Família, the Angkor Wat, the Louvre Museum, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Great Wall, the Statue of Liberty, the British Museum, Notre Dame, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Stonehenge, Kiyomizu-dera, and the Empire State Building, all blown away!

And the Atagawa Tropical and Alligator Garden vanished, too. The steel frame of the dome and the foundation were ripped right out of the ground, the gators were sucked into the sky like confetti, collided with shards of glass, and were turned into mincemeat. The wind hit the spheres of ocean water, turning them into ellipses; rain began falling upwards into the sky.

Akane and Sachii were blown into the sky, as well. From the air, the scene below was utterly unreal. The blue-green light they’d grown so fond of was gone; the sky was red, and the surface dyed blue. Aether was moving with the wind; a redshift down wind and a blueshift up. All buildings on the surface were disintegrating, and swaths of soil were torn up with them. Great spheres of water were rising from the sea like a plague of streptococcus pneumoniae. The surface of the spheres was boiling. The atmospheric pressure had dropped so much that water was vaporizing at room temperature.

Akane sounded her voice desperately, maintaining the aether barrier. Aether friction on the barrier was causing a strong purple glow around them. Meanwhile, Sachii was just staring in stunned silence.

By this point, nearly all humans on Earth had perished. Any survivors were those lucky enough to be on spaceships, or in underground nuclear shelters or caves. The latter group’s luck was not really worth writing home about. They would all die a moment later.

They were rocked by an earthquake of magnitude 16, stronger than anything ever recorded or that ever would be recorded, unprecedented and unparalleled, beyond the power of words to describe.

The epicenter was the entire Earth’s surface.

Every plate on Earth began to fall apart as one. The cause lay deep below the surface, between 2900 and 5100 kilometers deep, in the outer core. The outer core was composed of liquid iron and nickel. Temperatures of 6000 degrees Celsius kept it all melted, flowing, and generating the Earth’s magnetic field. Composed of iron and nickel though it may be, liquid was still liquid, and in gravity-free environments it formed spheres, minimizing surface area.

The changes to the outer core’s shape was enough to destroy the mantle and crust above it. Fissures were spreading from the inside out. The Earth was exploding!

The roar of the magnitude 16 earthquake penetrated the aether barrier, reaching Akane’s ears. It was literally the sound of the world ending.

But everything man-made had already been destroyed by the wind. What was lost now was all natural. Mountains, rivers, valleys, and oceans.

Mt. Fuji crumbled like a pile of sand. Lava came spitting out of the wounds. These grew and grew until a network of cracks covered the ground. The lava, too, formed floating spheres.

Spheres of ocean water several kilometers in diameter and spheres of lava several hundred meters across went drifting into space, glowing with a red light. Every so often the lava collided with the ocean water and an endless trail of steam erupted around them in phreatic explosions. When water become vapor, the volume becomes 1700 times larger. When a large volume of ocean water vaporizes, the explosion knows no bounds.

Debris scorched by the lava belched black smoke, mingling with the white steam clouds from the phreatic explosions and drifting upwards. Akane and Sachii flew between them, their aether barrier glittering purple.

Inside that barrier, the temperature was rising. Sea water heated by the lava and debris flung by the explosions were slamming into them, and each impact felt like they’d been punched. But even worse was the strain on Akane’s laryngeal sac. A number of protrusions had torn from excessive blood flow. Too much blood was in her sac, and the rest of her body was turning cold.

She could feel her strength ebbing. She had only a few minutes left in her. When her strength failed, the aether barrier would vanish, and they’d plunge into the ocean water and drown, into the lava and fry, have their heads caved in by flying debris, or if they were lucky enough to be flung into outer space, pass out peacefully from lack of oxygen. All of these options led to certain death. Death! Death! Death!

“Um, hey! Senpai! Look there! See that light?” Sachii shouted.

Shut up.

“Look, there! Purple light! It’s a ship, a ship! A ship in flight!”

What? Why didn’t you say so sooner?

She peered through the peephole and it actually was a ship. A streamlined body flying along, gleaming with purple light. It looked quite close, but this was an optical illusion, and it was actually several hundred meters away.

“Amamiya! Help! We need to manipulate gravity and move ourselves over to it!”

“Ehh... There’s no waaay...”

“You’re doing it anyway! Or I’m leaving you here!”

Sachii began singing, trying to twist some gravity control, but without a transistor it did seem beyond her. Oh well, she’d just have to do it herself. Singing, she put herself in a deep trance. The voice grew stronger, hitting Akane like a storm.

They passed though the black smoke and white steam, dodging a burning rock that popped out of the clouds and a two kilometer orb of sea water maintaining its shape while simultaneously exploding. Beyond that was the glittering purple light. The light of their salvation, the light of absolute affirmation!

When Akane came out of her trance an enormous ship lay before her. Massive letters read Space Security Board on the side, a logo depicted the solar system. The ship’s name was the Samidare.

The ship’s barrier and Akane’s made contact. Like a film of bacteria splitting played in reverse, the two barriers merged, and Akane and Sachii were absorbed into the ship’s safety zone.

“Hey! Open up! Open the hatch!”

She pounded on the side of the ship. Hands, legs, head, anything she could use. Her desperate plea must have been heard, because a hatch opened, someone grabbed her collar, and hauled her on board.

“You’ve got laryngeal sacs, so you’re seiyuu? Then hurry! Come help! Now!”

She was wearing a security board uniform, and clearly half-mad with panic. An official seiyuu. They were the top of the field, clearly superior to private sector seiyuu, but the situation had left her with no trace of that dignity remaining.

She shoved Akane and Sachii down the hall. As they ran, she handed them a syringe filled with fluid.

“Inject this! Quick!”

“Is this... Voir!? I’ve never even seen this before!”

Voir was a fabled top secret drug available only to official seiyuu. It increased blood flow to the laryngeal sac, allowing them to produce efficient aether vibrations, but was said to take a significant psychological toll.

What did that matter? If it made them stronger, that was all. Akane slammed the needle into her arm. Then she handed it to Sachii, who stabbed her arm, too.

Her mouth began moving on its own, laughter burbling out of her. Her sac responded, dancing like a mad thing.

For some reason, she felt convinced this would all work out.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Right! To the studio!”

“Senpai, you’re amazing! I’m right behind you!”

The official seiyuu led them both to the studio.

Inside, all hell was breaking loose.

A seiyuu had several mics held to her throat and was screaming into them. Her sac was already swollen to the size of a melon. Another seiyuu was on all fours on the ground, convulsing and laughing hysterically. Other seiyuu were already beyond moving. All the blood in their bodies had drained out, and their faces were pale.

The floor was sticky. Covered in seiyuu blood.

“Not enough control! More Voir!” the director ordered. A staff member tried to stab a syringe into the melon-sac seiyuu’s arm.

The official seiyuu escorting Akane tried to intervene. “Stop! If you give her any more, she’ll die!” she yelled.

“It’s an emergency! If we can just escape the Earth, a seiyuu’s life is a small price to pay! If you resist, you’ll be charged with treason and executed!” The director pulled out a pistol and shot the official seiyuu in the leg. She screamed in pain.

“What the... don’t fuck with seiyuu, asshole!” Akane snarled, stepping forward.

“Who the hell are you?”

“A seiyuu who just happened to be passing by.”

“Yeah? Normally that insult alone would count as treason but we’re dangerously short on staff. Get in there and fly this ship.”

She was damned if she was gonna take instructions from a piece of shit like this, but escape was her first priority. Akane grabbed a mic and placed it to her sac. She kicked the wounded seiyuu’s head out of her way, securing her spot. Sachii copied her, kicking the seiyuu’s head again.

The ship’s exterior was shown on screen. The color of the light was the opposite of how it had been — the space in front of them was blue, while the rear of the ship, nearer the surface, was red. With the loss of atmosphere, more aether was encroaching on the lower regions.

The ship was flying between two layers. Ahead of them were the towns blown away by the 500 kps winds, while behind them was a mass of mountains and tectonic plate fragments and lava kicked up by the magnitude 16 earthquake. In the current layer, lava and ocean spheres were colliding, and the steam left visibility extremely poor.

“Lava approaching at five o’clock!” Sachii yelled. Her head was still spinning, but somehow she’d been put in charge of information relay.

The director yelled back, “Focus aether barrier deployment to the rear!”

The impact rocked the ship. Akane was thrown to the floor, but the wounded seiyuu cushioned the blow.

“Report damages!”

“Minor, but there’s more lava coming! I don’t think we can hold!”

“Hard to port! Get us outta here!”

The ship plunged into a steam cloud. They couldn’t see a thing. Zero visibility at top speed. With the aether barrier deployed they couldn’t use the high energy radar. Their only way of avoiding midair obstacles was by sight.

Shadows whipped across the blank wall of white. Pieces of buildings! Akane made the ship turn hard to starboard. This time she was slammed to the floor, but she was used to it now, and no longer needed the flesh cushion.

They managed to avoid a head-on collision, but the danger was hardly averted. A square-shaped building was spinning through the air, headed right for the tail. If it hit, they were doomed!

“Fire a beam! Cancel the barrier!”

Akane didn’t wait for the director’s order, she just made the aether resonate. Her approach was an extremely slapdash one. Just eliminate the obstacle, making it harmless. If the building wasn’t solid, but liquid, or better yet, gas, they could pass through it harmlessly.

Purple beams were fired from the external aether amps. The barrier went down for an instant to let the beams through. There was an ear-splitting crack and the beams melted and vaporized the chunk of building. The ship slammed into the resulting gas.

“Hot!”

Akane leapt up. The floor had suddenly become extremely hot. She quickly jumped up onto the wounded seiyuu’s body. She could smell flesh burning.

“Internal temperature rising! Main computer overheating!”

“Get us in some water!”

The ship veered, aiming for an oceanic sphere some ten kilometers wide. When it tried to enter, it bounced off like a skipping stone. It took several attempts before they managed to enter the boiling sphere.

“Computer damage below 20%. Basic navigation controls remain functional!”

Applying heat in a low pressure environment made water boil away furiously. The sea water vanished, leaving behind furiously churning steam and a pile of salt.

“Height is 800 kilometers. Entering thermosphere!”

Somehow the ship had made it through the rubble layer and had made it to the outer atmosphere, just outside the thermosphere. This was the height satellites roamed at and at which you could clearly tell the Earth was a sphere. Light from the aether friction should have shown the entire rainbow, but the light now was much softer. With much of the atmosphere gone, the aether winds were now scouring the surface, and the light produced was much less intense.

With less light from aether friction, it was actually possible to see the surface — usually it was too bright to make it out. And what they could see of it looked like a map of hell.

The seas were boiling, exposing the sea floors. The earthquakes were still going on, and mountain chains were crumbling, the aftershocks generating boiling tsunami so powerful they changed the very shape of the coasts. Between the plates, the mantle itself was exposed, the crust peeling off and curling like skin. Lava on the surface made peaks higher than Everest. But these, in turn, were destroyed by further quakes.

The noise of it was so loud it could be heard in space. Sound traveled easily in space. With the atmosphere leaking and the discrepancy in aether concentration removed, sounds on the surface went directly into outer space.

The Earth was dying, and every part of it was screaming.

“Halting seiyuu flight. Switching to aether rotor.”

The Samidare was about 5000 kilometers from the Earth. Debris has scattered enough to no longer be a major concern, and the seiyuu were exhausted enough that continuing seiyuu-generated anti-gravity flight was no longer an option.

Sighs of relief could be heard all over the ship. They’d escaped the Earth’s destruction.

“So what happened, anyway?” Akane asked, wiping the sweat from her brow.

The director shook her head, switching the screen to the aethernet broadcast. The aethernet used aether as a medium for transmissions, so as long as you had a receiver, you could access it anywhere in the solar system. The images and sounds were heavily distorted by the turbulence the Earth’s collapse had caused in the aether flow, but the confusion in the announcer’s voice was clear enough. Earth had lost its gravity, and the entire planet had ceased to exist — that was all the information they had. Ships that had managed to escape were being directed not to the Moon but to Mars. It sounded like the Moon was no longer safe. There was a severe danger of it being struck by pieces flung off the collapsing Earth.

Earth was finished. Eight billion people, a quarter of humanity’s total population, had perished.

Strangely enough, Akane felt great. To her, Earth was little more than a symbol of the Surveillance Society’s oppression.

She was far more concerned with whether the Dark Seiyuu had survived. But if she’d managed to survive, there was no way the Dark Seiyuu would have let herself die. Akane swore to track her down and kill her with her own hands.

“Surviving seiyuu, well done! I’m sure you’re all exhausted. Please, get some rest.”

The director’s voice interrupted Akane’s thoughts. She was tempted to confront her again, but she was utterly wiped. She needed to get some sleep.

The hall outside the studio was very cold. She could see her breath. Space was a chilly place. Aether conducted heat, so heat was always draining away. It seemed like the heaters were set quite low to minimize energy loss.

“Senpai, wanna sleep together?”

Akane collapsed on a bed, and Sachii hopped in next to her without waiting for an answer. She considered kicking her out, but Sachii’s warmth made her reconsider. It was so terribly cold. The blankets provided were too thin to be of any use. If she tried to sleep under them anyway, she’d probably catch a cold. Health was everything to a seiyuu, so a cold could be fatal.

“Senpai, you smell amazing.”

Sachii’s warmth spread to her. She was so short her head rested naturally against Akane’s chest. Akane remembered seeing an old movie where a couple had lain like this. She was pretty sure head rubbing was involved. That was probably what manners dictated. Akane dutifully rubbed Sachii’s head, and Sachii let out a happy chuckle, forgetting all the tragedy. As ditzy as this girl could be, she was also pretty resilient.

The two of them embraced, like the seiyuu of old. In the Great Seiyuu Age, seiyuu sent on adventures through the Milky Way moved in pairs — coupling, they called it. Back when aether manipulation was still mostly trial and error, ship interiors had all been freezing, and these pairs had used their body heat to keep each other warm.

Pondering how she would kill the Dark Seiyuu, Akane fell asleep.

As she did, though she wasn’t vibrating the aether, she thought she heard the voice again.

IV

The Samidare had a lovely streamlined body marred by several thick, cylindrical aether rotors. How unfortunate. It was a painful sight, like a fish impaled on a spear.

Whirr whirr whirr whirr. The columns rotated. Aether flow was pulled in, generating light. Where the aether flow matched the direction of rotation less friction was generated and it glowed red; where the aether flow countered the direction of rotation more friction was generated and the light was blue.

Aether rotor flight was a method of generating propulsion by dipping these rotating columns into the aether flow. Why did simply rotating columns generate propulsion? The number one law of fluids, Bernoulli’s principle. This principle was a law of preservation of energy with regards to fluids. When considering a ball thrown through the air, the only types of energy worth considering are the kinetic energy and the potential energy, but in fluids the energy generated by pressure also applies. Bernoulli’s principle states that the sum of kinetic, potential, and pressure energy is a constant.

The rotating pillars pull aether in the direction of the rotation. When the aether flow and directional rotation match, the aether flow accelerates; on the opposite side, it decelerates. As the accelerating side increases kinetic energy, the pressure lessens; on the decelerating side the kinetic energy decreases and the pressure increases. A pressure gradient forms, causing the entire body to move in the accelerated direction. Propulsion is generated perpendicular to the direction of flow.

Within the solar system there was a spiral-shaped aether flow headed towards the sun. By tacking into that flow, it was possible to generate propulsion away from the sun, towards the outer planets. Aether rotor propulsion was originally a major flight mechanic, the principle by which most ships flew at the dawn of the Great Seiyuu Age. These days, seiyuu-powered flight was cheaper, so it was not often used, but it was still available on all ships as a backup propulsion mechanism.

As the sound of the aether rotors hummed around them, Akane fiddled with the beacon receiver the Dark Seiyuu had given her. The tiny screen showed what looked like a simplified chart of the solar system. A red circle indicated the Dark Seiyuu’s location, quite a long way from Akane.

“Mm? What’s up, Senpai?” Sachii yawned, sliding over to her.

Akane stared at the screen, saying nothing.

“What is that thing?”

“A receiver. The one who attacked you at the gator garden tossed it to me. Looks like she’s headed for Jupiter.”

“Oh yeah? But this ship’s headed for Mars.”

“Yeah. We’re gonna have to hijack it. First, I’m gonna kill the shit out of that asshole director and the rest of her staff. Just desserts for the way they treat seiyuu here.”

“That sounds great! I don’t think we’ve got enough lives to survive this place otherwise. Get them before they get us!”

Killing the director and staff was simple. Nobody knew that Akane had laryngeal sacs implanted all over her body. Surprise attacks left them all dead within a few hours. She shoved all the corpses in the freezer.

The seiyuu were a bigger problem. A ship like this was normally staffed with over a dozen seiyuu. Akane was pretty sure she could fly it on her own, but she preferred to leave as many seiyuu alive as possible. But it seemed unlikely any of them would be willing to cooperate with her personal vengeance quest.

The solution came in the form of Voir. All the seiyuu seemed to be addicted to the stuff, so as long as she controlled the supply, they were as good as hers.

Akane slaughtered the director and staff, stole the Voir supply, and assumed control of all the seiyuu on board. When the director died, someone had sent a mayday over a wireless comm, but with the Earth destroyed, it was unlikely anyone was listening.

On board, a new order was established. It functioned like a pyramid with Akane at the top. The aether rotors had stopped, and seiyuu flight had them speeding towards Jupiter. Seiyuu lives were the fuel for this fire. Seiyuu were pumped full of Voir, turned into mere batteries to keep the ship moving. Late stage Voir addiction led to death, as all the blood in the body become concentrated in the laryngeal sac. Before she figured out the right dosage, six of the 11 seiyuu on board died in a couple of weeks.

The gap between the Samidare and the Dark Seiyuu was slowly shrinking. The Black Swan was small and nimble, but it couldn’t match the Samidare for sheer power.

Twenty days after leaving Earth, the ship reached Jupiter.

Clang!

The ship rocked. Clunk! Again.

“Amamiyaaa! Anything we can do about this shaking?”

“Don’t think there is. It’s always like this around Jupiter.”

The screen was filled with an image of Jupiter. It was a sinister sight, like the world seen when badly drunk. Orange, yellow, brown, white, and blue clouds all swirling together, writhing, swallowing each other up. The eyes were the most unnatural spectacle. Jupiter was covered in eyes, all staring back at them. Blue eyes, red eyes, white eyes, orange eyes... Naturally, these were not actually eyes. They were whirlpools, cloud flows that looked like eyes. Even armed with that knowledge, staring at this view for an extended period of time was enough to make you feel insane. How could our solar system contain anything like this?

She couldn’t let herself go crazy now. To prevent it, Akane injected herself with Voir. This made everything exciting. The ship’s rocking felt like the beat of a rock concert.

The rocking was caused by Jupiter’s aether friction. Jupiter’s diameter was eleven times that of Earth, yet it only took ten hours to rotate. This intense rotation sent shockwaves through the aether, shaking the entire region. The light effects were as intense as the sounds. The lights didn’t appear that bright at a glance, but that’s because the light was of a higher energy than the visible spectrum. If you stepped off the ship you’d be dead in seconds.

The Samidare had followed the Dark Seiyuu’s beacon to Jupiter. Jupiter was a very large planet, but there was a limit to where people could go. If you got too close to the equator the radiation became so strong no seiyuu could ever defend against it, which meant Jupiter could only be approached from the two poles. The beacon indicated that the Dark Seiyuu was at the south pole, but the signal had suddenly cut out a while earlier. This had forced them to approach Jupiter to search for her.

Jupiter’s surface was a deluge of colors. Just as Akane got so sick of staring at them she started nodding off, an alarm rang. The ship’s computer had detected an approaching vessel. Part of the screen enlarged. A little black speck far below them became an isosceles triangle.

The Black Swan!

The ship rose towards them, and the beacon activated again. It was definitely her. The Dark Seiyuu was on board that ship. Hiding in Jupiter’s thick clouds.

The Dark Seiyuu’s face appeared on screen. She was sending an aether transmission from The Black Swan to the Samidare.

“You escaped the gravity failure. I thought you’d pull it off.”

“Wait, you knew? Are you the one who caused it to fail?”

Instead of answering, The Black Swan fired a laser beam at the Samidare. In aether-rich regions of space, beams were incredibly powerful.

The ship rocked violently. It filled with the scent of something burning.

“Fire at the stern! Closing barrier walls and extinguishing!”

“Shit! Fire a beam back at her!”

They tried to counterattack but their target had vanished from both screen and beacon. She’d fled into Jupiter’s thick cloud cover. Differences in the aether density meant light shining from Jupiter’s interior was all reflected by the outer space border. Meanwhile, light could travel from space down to Jupiter without any problems. Within the clouds you could see out, but from above them they couldn’t see inside. Akane’s ship was at a huge disadvantage here.

“Beams! Fire! Fire at will!”

“But Senpai! We’ll never hit!”

Sachii was right. The Black Swan surfaced nowhere near the clouds their beams were aimed at, attacked again, and vanished once more.

“Ship temperature rising! We’re gonna melt!”

“Right, then descend! Down to Jupiter!”

But when they approached Jupiter, The Black Swan appeared and fired another beam. They were forced to turn to avoid it. This repeated, preventing them from ever entering the clouds. The smaller ship was far more agile.

The Samidare thrashed left, right, up and down, dodging the beams. Sudden G Forces almost knocked Akane out. Each time, she thought she heard the voice.

It was like a wave of sadness beating her about the head. The voice was in her very bones, and each time it echoed through her, it felt like a knife twisting. But the strange thing was, the more pain it caused, the more ideas for improved aether sounding came to her.

She could do this! Akane accelerated the Samidare’s gravity control. She narrowly dodged a beam while falling towards Jupiter. Aether was compressed rapidly beneath the ship, giving off a violet light. As Jupiter drew near, the radiation got stronger, but still remained within the levels the aether barrier could ward off. As the atmosphere grew thicker, the radiation decayed, and only visible light remained. The light grew diffuse, and the sky gradually turned blue.

Clouds. Clouds. Clouds. Clouds in all directions. The Samidare flew across the top of them. Unlike Earth, the horizon was a flat line. The planet was too big to give any indication that it was a sphere.

Inside the clouds, an unbelievable amount of lighting flashed. Energy a thousand times what Earth lightning had was spitting out here and there. The Samidare showed no signs of fear, plunging right into the maelstrom.

Just inside the clouds, the light levels quickly grew dim, but the purple light from the aether barrier provided illumination enough. The top layer of clouds was orange, composed largely of lightweight ammonia. As the ammonia gave way to heavier water vapor, the color changed from orange to yellow, from yellow to white, and from white to blue. Warm colors grew darker, until the world around them was shrouded in gloom.

“Shadow at three o’clock!”

That jagged triangle grew close, then shot away, like a boomerang. The Samidare rocked. The beam had hit home. But the impact was much softer than they’d been in space. Aether was thinner in the atmosphere, so the laser beam had less energy; interference from the aether flow in the storm weakened it still further. The storms of Jupiter were probably the least effective place in the entire solar system to use a laser beam.

The Samidare fired beams back, but the other ship was already hidden in the clouds again. She was sticking to her hit and away strategy. The weakened beams meant they weren’t going to be downed in a single hit, but the accumulated damage was still bad news.

To avoid the clouds, the Samidare continued its rapid descent. Rain and hail fell alongside it. Rain of water, ammonia, and sulfuric acid. In the gloomy blue clouds, the rain found friends, merging with them, but eventually the size of the drops stopped expanding. Instead, they vaporized. Boiling into gas, they flowed back upwards, becoming clouds again, a never-ending cycle.

The Samidare escaped the cycle, falling down, down, down... Until...

“The clouds have cleared!”

They found themselves in a calm as removed from the storm as possible. So open...! A clearing as far as the eye could see, lit by the lightning above. Bolts of lightning with all the force of atomic bombs struck around them by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, flickering like a broken fluorescent light.

This was hell. The Samidare was hovering above the surface of hell. A clear layer of hydrogen. Below them was a sea of liquid metallic hydrogen, far enough below that they could have stacked several Earths in the gap. If anyone on board was acrophobic, they’d have gone mad, but Akane’s mind was not so easily bested. A height several times the Earth was no more impressive than a height several times an ant.

Akane thought she heard that voice from this mind-bending landscape. The further into Jupiter they went, the clearer that voice from the edge of the world carried into her brain. The voice seemed filled with sorrow, a feeling as if her flesh was slowly melting away...

“There! Right above us!”

Sachii’s cry dragged Akane out of her reverie. The Black Swan had emerged from the clouds in the distance, wheeling like a bird of prey. The purple light of its aether barrier illuminated the rain around it like fireworks. Akane’s laryngeal sac shook, and a laser beam shot out of the ship’s aether amp. A column of light every bit as strong as the lightning impaled The Black Swan. Where the beam hit the barrier an explosion of light occurred. The shockwave of light rocked the Samidare. When the orchestra of light faded, The Black Swan was unharmed.

The Dark Seiyuu was good. Laser beams were weaker in the heavy atmosphere but surviving a bullseye from a Security Board ship amp was something else. She must have manipulated the flow of aether in an instant, dispersing the energy. They’d never shoot her down with beams like this. They’d need to use a weapon with some actual mass.

“Amamiya, does this ship have any missiles?”

“No missiles. It does have some escape pods!”

Escape pods? Those could be used in place of missiles, but with no explosives aboard...

Explosives... Explosives... Oh! She’d had a good idea.

“All seiyuu, assemble!” Akane yelled into the P.A. system.

Three minutes later all six surviving seiyuu were here. Their names were Kisara, Neshihiki, Teise, Inori, Midokawa, and Sanou. They were all in such frightful condition it was astounding they were still alive. Voir addiction had left them gaunt, as if all the liquid in them had been drained away, leaving nothing but skin and bones behind, their eyes bugged out like a deep sea fish caught on a line. As lifeless as their bodies looked, their laryngeal sacs were in perfect health. They were alive and kicking, sounding the aether around them and generating light. Voir was awful for your health but definitely great at extracting a seiyuu’s subliminal potential.

Akane injected all the remaining stock of Voir into the seiyuu, gave them their instructions, and loaded them onto the escape pods. Their directive was simple. Get as close to The Black Swan as they could, manipulate the aether, and fire laser beams as one, instantly and dramatically raising the heat and pressure. They were surrounded by hydrogen, highly pressurized by the immense weight of Jupiter’s atmosphere. If they concentrated even more heat and pressure, Akane was hoping they could cause a nuclear fusion reaction.

A seiyuu nuke.

Akane knew fusion was a high bar to meet. They needed at least 80 times the pressure at Jupiter’s core. But the strictly managed security board official seiyuu were far more powerful than civilian seiyuu. And they were all junkies injected with so much Voir it was about to kill them. Akane’s experience and gut instincts suggested they just might manage to output enough pressure to cause fusion.

Enough thoughts, action! The missiles with Kisara, Neshihiki, and Teise on board shot away from the Samidare, rocketing towards The Black Swan.

Neshihiki’s missile failed at ignition. It raised pressure and destroyed itself, nothing of any interest occurring. She must have lost her nerve. But Kisara and Teise pulled off their missions admirably. Hydrogen collided with hydrogen, reacting to each other, and pressure beyond the Coulomb force caused fusion, changing them to the more kinetically stable helium, expelling the excess energy outwards. Immediately, two miniature suns appeared in the sky above Jupiter. There was a wave of sound and light that reached even the Samidare some distance away.

“Did we get her?” Akane said, stabilizing the Samidare and searching the screen. The Black Swan was still intact. But it had clearly sustained damage. One wing was missing pieces.

“Nicely done. Keep it up.” The Dark Seiyuu’s voice came over a transmission. She seemed positively delighted to be attacked like this.

“Be ready. I’m about to board your ass and kill you with my own two hands.”

“Looking forward to it! But it seems like we have company. I’ll leave you two alone. We’ll meet again.”

The transmission cut out, and The Black Swan darted off to the sky.

“Wait!”

Akane moved to give chase, but a missile popped out of the clouds, exploding right next to the Samidare.

“Sachii, what’s going on?”

“I have no idea!”

As they reeled, a massive ship descended right in front of them. One three times the size of the Samidare. A long, thin airship-type ship, bristling with aether amps and railguns and missiles. A flashy logo and the ship’s name were drawn on the side.

Rise Detective Agency, Inc.

The Cruadín.

Akane knew the agency name. They called themselves detectives, but they were just bounty hunters. They generally operated in pairs, a lead detective and an assistant. Even now, no official police force operated in the outer planets, so the bounty system was used to entrust matters to civilian hands. Any number of companies had sprung up to collect these bounties. The Rise Detective Agency was one of the bigger ones.

“Hey there! I’m a 1st rank detective, Minerva Ibrahim!” an enthusiastic voice came from the screen. It was a transmission from the Cruadín. A lady with dark skin and long blonde hair appeared on screen.

“And I’m a 1st rank assistant, Nanase Steinbach.” This assistant appeared to be quite a downer. A girl with unhealthy skin, and short white hair. Her eyes were fixed on a point about 30 degrees too high, like she was seeing a ghost.

“Wanted criminal, Akane Yomokura!” Minerva cried, gesticulating dramatically. “You’re under arrest on suspicion of hijacking the Samidare! Surrender at once!”

“Hardly the time for that! Earth already collapsed,” Akane pointed out, ignoring the charge.

“Whether the Earth burns or the Sun explodes, I see my jobs through!”

“Well, ain’t you a loyal dog. Sachii, stick a seiyuu nuke in this bitch.”

“Roger that!”

The missiles with Inori and Sanou were fired at the Cruadín. But the Cruadín fired more missiles, and before they could cause a fusion reaction they were vaporized into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“Ha ha ha! Struggle all you like, plebeians! You can never compete with a true elite!”

“We’ve tested into the 99th percentile.”

“Damn it! Retreat!”

Their opponent was skilled and well-prepared. They were at a huge disadvantage. The only path forward was to retreat and regroup.

“Retreat where?”

“Computer, map of Jupiter!” Akane quickly scanned the screen, thinking. “Got it, to the red spot!”

The red spot. The largest storm on Jupiter. Three times the size of Earth. It had maintained its current shape for hundreds of years, spinning without end, untold energy stored within.

Sending a ship into the red spot was tantamount to suicide. But Akane wasn’t acting without a plan. In the storm, the winds would render the opponent’s missiles useless. And her ship would put up less wind resistance than the larger one, giving them a small advantage. Inside the red spot, they might be able to lessen their current disadvantage.

Trying to shake the Cruadín, the Samidare hid in the clouds, racing towards the red spot. The closer they got, the harder the crosswind buffeted them. Hail the size of cannon shells slammed against the ship, the pounding of it echoing through the interior. It was all they could do to keep the ship stable.

Orange and white clouds became scarce while red tints increased. According to the computer, this was caused by phosphorus and organic matter rising from the depths. They could no longer see the Cruadín at all. If their opponent had lost sight of them as well, that was ideal, but they couldn’t count on being that lucky. They were pros. They undoubtedly had top class detection tech.

There was a flash of light to the Samidare’s seven. It was the Cruadín’s nuclear missile. But the impact was weak, negated by the storm. Akane’s plan was paying off. But this also proved the Cruadín had definitely not lost track of them. At this rate, they were likely to catch up.

“Power up the aether rotors!”

The aether rotors extended into the extremely thick atmosphere of Jupiter. This caused an immediate increase in resistance — they were in danger of losing control of the ship’s stability. Akane was rolling the dice big time. Inside the red spot, the winds hit the sides of the ship. The rotors could turn that sidelong force into forward propulsion. She was trying to turn the red spot’s storm force from an impediment into acceleration.

With zero visibility, they began moving faster and faster. Akane and Sachii were slammed against the wall. The faster they went the worse the damage taken from any obstructions. All action creates an equal reaction.

A giant hailstone struck one of the rotors head on. The Samidare began to spin. Still Akane held fast to her mic, sounding the aether. The ship spun like a washing machine, but she gradually started recovering control over the gravity.

“Senpai! Light ahead!”

Another missile exploding? No, that wasn’t it. Everything ahead of them was brighter.

They were getting close to the eye of the red spot. The red spot was a giant whirlpool, and like any typhoon, there was a calm at the center.

The Samidare burst out into the eye of the red spot. The storm died away, like it had never been there at all. Far above them they could see blue skies. A column of light poured down from the sky above.

Behind them was a wall of clouds the size of a planet. Like paint flowing in a stream, red-tinted brown and orange clouds were flowing to the left, interrupted every now and then by smaller eddies.

Far ahead of them was the other wall. It was so massive it appeared to be rather close but was actually as far away as the Indian Ocean was wide. A number of different red flows all blurred together at this distance, the borders between them lost. The opposing clouds were flickering with light like a Christmas tree with a glitched battery. Each one of those light bulbs was a thousand times the strength of lightning. If that gives any sense of the scale here.

“Senpai, what next?”

“Wait for the Cruadín. The moment they pop out, hit them with a seiyuu nuke.”

“Aye-aye!”

Akane’s entire strategy revolved around locating her opponent first. Laying in ambush in the stable eye and hitting the Cruadín hard the moment it emerged.

Fifteen minutes later, there was movement in the clouds. The clouds swelled up from within, and a cigar-shaped object emerged.

“There! Fire that missile!”

It was their last seiyuu nuke, the pod with Midokawa aboard. The fusion activated before the opponent could respond. A direct hit! When the explosion cleared, there was nothing there. Had they been completely vaporized?

But then the Samidare’s side was gouged out by a physical shell fired from somewhere.

“Too bad! My compliments on an excellent plan!”

“I suppose that’s the best we can expect from someone so average.”

Crap! It was the Cruadín, not vaporized after all! Both the detective and her assistant were totally fine.

“Ha ha ha ha! Are you surprised? That was just a decoy!”

“A common technique for anyone as advanced as we are.”

The Cruadín had made a duplicate of itself out of carbon nanofiber, flying this decoy via a rocket engine. The pros had seen right through Akane’s plan.

“Which will it be? Surrender, or death? Time to choose.”

The Cruadín hit the Samidare with another volley.

“Yikes! Senpai, what’ll we do?”

“This! Sachii, hold onto something.”

The Samidare’s interior lost all gravity. The ship went into free fall.

The Cruadín remained parked above them, so the gap between the two ships widened. Akane had killed the Samidare’s gravity control. The massive gravitational force of Jupiter was stronger than any engine.

The Samidare’s death defying bungee jump seemed to freak the detectives out. Unable to treat their own lives as cavalierly as Akane did, they descended slowly, maintaining gravity control.

Meanwhile, the Samidare was going so fast adiabatic compression sheathed them in fire.

“Eek... Senpai! We’re gonna melt!” Sachii’s hands were flapping all over, in a panic.

“Don’t worry!” Akane said, giving her a hug.

The Samidare continued to drop inside a ball of fire. Several hours of falling, and the red spot’s swirl was still there, the red clouds still moving in the same direction. However, the light had changed. It was gradually growing darker. As the air pressure grew, the aether volume lessened, and the light energy grew correspondingly weak. Eventually...

“The ship’s temperature is starting to drop, Senpai!”

This contradicted the combined gas law, which stated that temperatures rose with increased pressure. According to that law, as pressure grows, the frequency of aether friction would grow larger, and as a result, temperatures would rise; but it was now known that at pressures over a certain limit this no longer applied. At approximately three million atmospheres, matter forced all aether out of the air, and the higher the pressure grew, the lower the temperature became. As the Samidare headed to the depths of Jupiter, it passed the breaking point for the combined gas law, and the temperature lowered enough to avoid melting. That had been Akane’s goal.

“Right, we can start slowing down now...”

Gravity control restored, the Samidare continued falling slowly through the eye of the red spot. Akane wiped a cold sweat from her bow. She’d bet her life and beat the odds.

“Eek! Senpai, there’s some sort of tower!”

About half an hour after restoring gravity control, a long, thin, bizarre object appeared before the falling ship. It was made of something transparent, like a diamond; even in this darkness it reflected the light, sparkling. It was an extremely sharp cone; while quite thin at the top it gradually widened out until it became a giant wall.

After a while, the tower branched. Like a snow crystal, with countless smaller branches off the thick center, each of which split into even smaller branches. Liquid was gushing out from the tips of the branches. Some branches ejected this liquid with great force, like a fountain, while others were oozing stickier-looking fluid.

There were narrow grooves from the central tower to the branches, carrying the fluid. Like blood vessels.

To think something like this lay beneath the red spot. No, perhaps this being here was why the red spot existed. The red spot was a Taylor Column created around the obstacle this tower formed.

A Taylor Column. A stagnant cylindrical current that forms above an obstruction beneath. When there is no other influence affecting it, this theorem suggests the current will form directly perpendicular to the obstruction. As the current below is deflected by the obstruction, it flows upwards, making it appear like a speck on the surface. For instance, it’s well-known that the Kuroshio current is influenced by a Taylor Column created by the landform on the sea bed.

However, why would there be a giant, unstable-looking construct deep inside Jupiter? It looked like something that should have long since collapsed under the massive gravitational pull.

“Senpai! I can see the bottom!”

The Samidare began hovering in midair. The ‘bottom’ was the ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen. The point at which pressure grew so great even hydrogen became metallic.

The tower rose out of the peaceful, stormless sea. It looked like the tower continued beneath the surface.

Forgetting that the detectives were still after them, Akane paused to gaze at the scene before her. The sea rocked softly, so transparent it looked like liquid glass. Near the sea’s surface, like oil floating on the water, there were irregularly shaped membranes, like amoeba, and from time to time these would cling to the tower and began sliding up it, seemingly without resistance. The branches continued down into the sea, and the amoeba clustered around these branches, entering the tower interior. It was a magnificent work of art. Staring at it gave her a strange, pleasurable-yet-ticklish feeling, like down being stroked against her brain. Such a strange shape; she couldn’t tell if it was natural or man-made.

“Senpai, something’s flying at us!”

Sachii’s voice snapped Akane out of it. One of the branches had shot a transparent fluid at the Samidare, like a fountain.

“Don’t worry, we have the aether barrier.”

But Akane’s optimism soon proved unfounded. When the liquid touched the aether barrier, there was a brilliant burst of light, and it seeped right through.

“You’re kidding! It’s sounding aether?”

That was the only explanation. This mysterious clear fluid was controlling aether, neutralizing the barrier. If a being that could control aether at will was defined as a seiyuu, then this fluid was a seiyuu, too.

The mysterious fluid passed through the aether barrier and reached the ship itself. It pooled on the side, gradually broadening until it covered the entire exterior.

“Superfluid helium infecting 70% of the ship,” came the computer’s calm analysis.

Superfluid. A condition in which quantum properties are expanded to macrosizes exclusively in extremely low temperature environments. Viscosity becomes zero, and it becomes capable of slipping through the gaps between atoms.

Indeed, while Akane was looking at information on the properties of superfluids, the superfluid helium seiyuu permeated the Samidare’s interior.

“Senpai! It’s already here!”

The superfluid helium seiyuu passed through several walls, reaching the studio and crawling along the walls as if searching for something. Little multicolored lights showed on the clear surface. It was vibrating the aether.

Akane felt an odd movement at her throat. Her laryngeal sac was vibrating on its own, against her will. All the sacs she’d transplanted onto herself vibrated with it. A terrible pain ran through her, like she was being twisted from the inside, like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Like part of her own body was literally betraying her, the laryngeal sacs moved as they pleased. Up, down, right, left, forward, back, diagonally. Twisting all about, sounding the aether, blue, red, green, orange, yellow, purple... One color after another surrounding her body.

The helium seiyuu was sounding all sorts of colors, too. These seemed to be responding to the colors her laryngeal sacs were producing. Like a colorful game of hacky sack, they generated colors, interacting with each other.

“Are they... Having a conversation?”

Akane couldn’t believe this. Part of her own flesh was chatting up some superfluid helium? But that was the best description she had for the phenomenon before her eyes. They were using aether to communicate.

A moment later, an extremely childish flash of rage swept over Akane. This was like she was being left out! Like friends she’d shared everything with had suddenly rejected her!

“Don’t let that helium tempt you! I’m much stronger than any helium seiyuu!” Akane yelled. To prove this, she attempted to steal the seiyuu power from the helium seiyuu. “Radarederodo, daraderedoro, zodezadoze, zedozadozoda, dazozado, dozazoda!”

Chanting a mantra she’d learned in training school, she focused her mind, trying to regain control of her laryngeal sacs. And using the conversation channel they’d opened with the helium seiyuu, she absorbed its power. Like a hungry ghost, without a thought for anything else, she stole the helium seiyuu’s power.

Like she was snapping threads around them, she regained control over her sacs. A moment later, the aether sounded, and heat rays fired. Powerful beams! The helium seiyuu tried to cancel it, but her power overwhelmed it. She fired heat ray after heat ray after heat ray, saturating her foe’s aether vibrations.

The helium seiyuu began to vaporize. Superfluids don’t boil. Their thermal conductivity is extremely high, so heat is carried to the surface and only the outer layer turns to gas. The volume shrank without a sound, eventually vanishing entirely.

“Got ya!” Akane roared, and roughly kicked the Samidare into motion. She circled round the tower at high speeds. She was feeling omnipotent, like she could even move mountains.

“Nice work, Senpai! You’re a bad ass!”

“Right? I kicked its ass!”

She was so busy celebrating she failed to notice the ship approaching from above.

“Akane Yomokura! Sachii Amamiya! I knew you survived!”

“You’re as durable as cockroaches.”

The detective and her assistant appeared on the screen. The Cruadín had caught up with them. But Akane was not in the mood to turn tail and flee again. She had more than enough power now. She’d show them what a seiyuu could do!

A wave of aether left the Samidare’s amps, headed for the tower. The tower began to lean. A tower at least as tall as the Earth itself. The tower was held upright by gravity control generated by the helium seiyuu. Akane temporarily canceled that control. And Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull was enough that even a momentary fluctuation in that power was enough to destroy the tower.

The tower collapsed, slowly, very slowly. Or at least, it appeared slow, but was actually incredible fast. As proof of that, the tower’s collapse was generating shockwave after shockwave.

The powerful shockwaves were snapping off the tower’s delicate branches. Thousands and thousands of branches rode the shockwaves like jagged missiles. Directly towards the Cruadín. They pierced the aether barrier, countless branches impaling the ship. Even a sturdy detective agency ship couldn’t stand up to this.

An escape pod shot out of the Cruadín’s side. Looks like Akane wasn’t the only durable one. The detectives might be even more roach-like.

“Yikes, Senpai! We’re in trouble!”

The falling tower reached the sea, generating a tsunami. A tsunami of liquid metallic hydrogen. As tall as the Earth’s radius.

“Let’s get outta here!”

The Samidare shot towards the sky. Sounding the aether with all the power she had left, the ship went up and up and up.

In the ship’s wake, the red spot spun wildly. But that spin was destined to subside.

V

“Um, Senpai, we only have another week of food,” said Sachii, chewing some cartilage. Once stripped of all flesh, the bone was flung against the wall.

“Well, yeah. It ain’t an infinite supply.”

Akane threw her bone as well. The pile of bones was beginning to smell. Over the last week, the mold had take over, oozing a black fluid. Maggots had shown up from god knows where. The Samidare interior was decaying. Only Akane and Sachii were on board, and neither knew how to clean. The rise of entropy showed no bounds. The floor was invisible beneath piles of discarded clothing and ration bags that didn’t make it to the garbage can. Only the studio had gravity control, which maintained some semblance of order. The gravity-free sections of the ship were so filled with dust just stepping into them was enough to cause bronchitis.

Akane tore into her meat. It was not particularly flavorful, but the texture was somewhere between beef and chicken. The lump of meat she was working on had two eyes and a mouth.

After a month of drifting in the Samidare, they’d started sustaining themselves by eating the bodies of the director, staff, and seiyuu preserved in the freezer. Not wanting to deal with any refusals, Akane had told Sachii it was pork, and chopped it up into smaller pieces. You’d think the shape of the bones would be a dead giveaway, but Sachii never complained. Either she was a real idiot or had figured it out and elected not to say anything. It didn’t matter which.

“What’ll we do once we run out of food?” Sachii was using the bones to make a sort of caveman house. It was her way of killing time.

“I’ll just have to eat you.”

“So I’m just so cute you want to eat me up?”

Akane sprawled out on the floor, looking at the screen. Outside the Samidare was some space vegetation three times the size of the ship. It seemed to draw energy from the rotation gained from the aether flow; it had wings arranged like the propellers on a wind turbine, and the tips of each wing had more turbines growing from them. From the center rose a flagellum in a bacteria-like spiral, leaning the body in a direction it could rotate effectively. It seemed to be aiming for the whirls the Samidare generated. It had been following them the last few weeks but seemed harmless, so they’d let it be.

“Or we could eat that,” Akane said, pointing at the space plant. She thought it was a genius idea, but Sachii seemed unenthused.

“Ew, it looks so gross. Is it even edible? And going outside to harvest it would be so haaaard. And dangerous.”

“Yeah, maybe... dunno if I can be bothered.”

Akane flopped back down on the floor. They’d been holed up in this ship so long she’d grown super lazy.

There was nothing to do. Nothing but sleep. Sleeping was easy. Just close your eyes and stop thinking. But since she couldn’t sleep all the time, Akane thought about the past. About what had happened a month ago, after they’d escaped Jupiter.

“We’re out of the atmosphere! In a stable orbit!”

Using the overwhelming power the helium seiyuu had given her, the Samidare escaped the great red spot and made it to orbit around Jupiter.

But the price she paid was high — exhaustion beyond comprehension. It was like all her transplanted laryngeal sacs had turned into bowling balls, leaving all her muscles throbbing.

“I’m bushed. Gonna sleep. You take over gravity control.”

It was all she could do to drop these instructions on Sachii. Akane collapsed on the floor of the studio and slept like she was dead. When she awoke from this dreamless slumber, she found herself lying on a couch with a blanket over her. Sachii must have carried her here.

“Oh, Senpai! You’re awake!” Sachii said, beaming. “Maaan, flying this on my own is haaard! I did manage to move us to Europa, but I’m scared to try landing! Heeelp.”

Europa was the Jupiter system’s main town. It was a moon covered in thick ice, with a giant sea under that ice. The endless supply of water from that sea kept people alive throughout the Jupiter system.

“Good point. I’m starving after all that sleep! Let’s hit up Pwyll City and get some sushi.”

“Yes! It’s been way too long since we had a date.”

Pwyll City was a metropolis built in the heart of the largest crater on Europa, Pwyll Crater. Normally the surface of Europa was covered in ice as dense as any boulder, anywhere from ten to a hundred kilometers thick, but the ice was thin at the center of the crater, as little as five kilometers deep. The city was shaped like a cone with the pointy bit on the bottom, buried deep in the ice. The sheer weight of it melted the ice, moving it slowly downwards, but after it sank a certain distance it caught its balance and lay still. Thanks to the sea below, they had plenty of water for their farms and aquaculture projects; their sushi was said to be every bit as good as Earth’s, if not better. Now that the Earth had blown up, they were definitely the best in the solar system.

The Samidare touched down in Pwyll City. The entire top layer of the city was a spaceport, and there was a constant stream of ships coming and going. The destruction of Earth had repercussions even all the way out here, and transit was a mess. They’d been worried they’d get caught by customs in the airport, but they needn’t have worried; Jupiter law enforcement was all civilian-run.

“Sushi, sushi, I love sushi!♪” Sachii sang the whole way to the restaurant.

They’d been living on preserved rations for a while, so she was excited.

They ran quickly through the mainstays — salmon, ikura, mackerel, and tuna. Then Akane checked the beacon. The Black Swan, with the Dark Seiyuu on board, had accelerated rapidly, escaping the Jupiter system, heading not for Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. Her path was leading her out of the solar system entirely.

“She’s gonna ditch the solar system!” Akane said, standing up. “We’d better go!”

“Nah, Senpai! You’re worrying about nothing,” said Sachii, waving her down. “First of all, leaving the solar system in a ship not designed for interstellar travel is way too dangerous. The force of the aether gets crazy out there. We’d have to hit up a shipyard and get some work done first.”

“That would take ages! Let’s just hijack a better one.”

“Not many interstellar ships round Jupiter. Gotta get further out before you see many of those.”

As Sachii talked, she put her cheek against Akane’s chest, and took a selfie. Akane looked down at her screen and saw her posting to social media. She captioned the selfie, “#pwyllcitylife.”

She had way more followers than Akane’s account. She wasn’t super popular for nothing. Akane checked her own account, but it had been frozen after the hijacking.

“Don’t check in a few days and the number of replies gets craaazy.” Sachii scrolled through them a bit. There was everything from dumbasses going, “I heard the Earth blew up. Are you OK?” to people screaming, “Is it true Akane-san hijacked a ship!?”

“You’re not gonna respond?”

“No way I could respond to all of ‘em.”

“Too popular to care, are you?”

“Ohhh, I’m not that popular! You’re making me blush, Senpai!”

Their laid-back conversation was interrupted by two customers entering the next booth. Both of them wore seiyuu police uniforms.

Seiyuu police. A group run by the Seiyuu Surveillance Society, they targeted seiyuu crimes independently from official or civilian law enforcement.

Akane and Sachii glanced at each other and rose to leave. As they did, one of the cops yelled, “Yomokura’s yuri partner, Sachii Amamiya, just posted a photo with her to social media! They’re in Pwyll City!”

“But... That’s here. Ah! Wait!”

They’d spotted Akane. She ran out at top speed, but the cops were right behind.

“Argh, Senpai! I’m so sorry! This is all my fault...”

Sachii had always been an idiot, and it was hardly worth being surprised by now.

“Doesn’t matter! We need to get back to the Samidare and get outta here!”

Akane and Sachii ran up the long escalator to the spaceport. If anyone got in their way, she kicked them out of it with Seiyuu Karate. They fell over, rolling down the escalator, and got stomped on by the pursuing cops.

“Fuck it, Sachii, let’s fly!” She used the low gravity to take a big bound and move quickly upwards.

They reached the top level. The spaceport was four kilometers square, a vast maze of paneled corridors filled with passengers getting on and off ships. Leaping over the heads of the crowd like an action game, they hurried towards the Samidare.

Meanwhile, both cops were out of breath. Born and raised on Jupiter’s moons, their endurance lagged far behind the Earth-born seiyuu. Earth had the strongest gravity of all habitable areas within the solar system. If they fought, they could easily win, but they’d definitely called for backup, so jumping ahead was the best option.

“There! The Samidare!”

Sachii thrust the key into the hatch, punched in the password, and went in. Both raced to the studio, put mics to their sacs, and started manipulating gravity, throwing the ship into an emergency ascent.

Europa was a tiny snowball against the aether luminescent, lightning-covered face of Jupiter. A ship came rocketing from that snowball towards them. A seiyuu police cruiser.

“Senpai, should we shoot them?”

“Nah. While we’re engaged, more of ’em’ll come. We need to get away from Jupiter.”

Akane poured all the power she’d stolen from the helium seiyuu into accelerating the Samidare.

“Where are we going?”

“Out of the solar system!”

“In this ship? That’s crazy!”

“It sure is! But the seiyuu pigs are flying an interplanetary ship, too. If we leave the solar system, they won’t be able to follow us!”

“Won’t other ships intercept us?”

“Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all on the other side of the sun from Jupiter. Even if they send an aether transmission calling for backup, they’ll never catch us. And outside the solar system all signals get reflected back. If we can just get out, we can get away clean before word spreads. Then we just have to follow the beacon, catch up with the Dark Seiyuu, and rip her apart.”

“You never do plan small! Of course, I’m with you!”

And with that, the Samidare charged out of the solar system with a thunderous roar.

Twenty days later, they reached the furthest reaches of the solar system, the heliopause. The point fifty AU from the sun where the solar winds and the Milky Way aether flow collide. Beyond that, the aether concentration gets much higher, and the environment is totally different from inside the solar system.

As they approached the heliopause, another ship approached from the distance. It was on course to crash into the Samidare head on, moving very fast with no attempt to slow down, but this was no cause for alarm. This ship was the Samidare itself. The discrepancy between the aether density within and without the solar system at the heliopause was so great it reflected all light originating within the solar system. It functioned like a gigantic mirror, and every ship that approached could see itself.

Behind the Samidare’s reflection was the entire warped sphere that formed the Milky Way. The light that made it in from outside was heavily refracted, and to anyone inside it was like looking through a fish-eye lens, like the whole world was inside a tiny orb.

The actual shape of the Milky Way was a round disc, thicker in the center. Our solar system lay on the outskirts of it, and viewed from there, the Milky Way resembled a dorayaki seen from the side. The swollen center portion let out a blinding white light, and as you went right the light went from white to blue, and to the left it went from white to red.

The Milky Way was divided into three sectors based on the qualities of the aether flow — the Laminar, Turbulent, and Critical sectors. What gave these sectors their defining properties was the Reynolds number, which predicts how easily a flow will be disrupted. Generally speaking, the greater the concentration and speed of a fluid, the higher the Reynolds number. For example, when you first turn on the tap, the water flows out smoothly, but as the flow gets stronger it starts to churn, spraying in unpredictable directions.

Areas of the Milky Way with low Reynolds numbers were called the Laminar Sector. In these regions, it was easy to predict the aether flow; whirlpools and storms did not occur, and it was easy to fly through. Most settled areas were in the Laminar Sector, and viewed from the solar system they were either blue or red. When the aether flow was smooth, positions along the spiral from the Milky Way’s center looked blue when they were approaching and red when they were retreating. In this sector, it was possible to use the aether flow to connect regions with aether transmissions and use the aethernet.

Meanwhile, aether pulled towards the massive gravitational force at the center of the Milky Way (the maelstrom) reached far greater speeds, in correspondence with the law of conservation of angular momentum. As aether flow speed increases, the Reynolds number goes up, and the behavior becomes impossible to predict. A small change in density can cause eddies, and those eddies cause other eddies. Eddies expand like dominoes, becoming storms, with no way to tell when these storms will appear. Turbulent aether generates heat and radiation, creating environments that can’t be navigated. This was the Turbulent Sector. During the Great Seiyuu Age, a number of daredevil seiyuu braved the turbulence, but only a handful ever returned. These days, the sector had been officially declared off-limits. From a distance, it appeared to be giving off a white light. Turbulent aether released all types of light and it all blended together, looking white.

Between the Laminar and Turbulent sectors was the Critical Sector. While this area was generally laminar, it was so close to the turbulent sectors that at any moment it might be disrupted. As the Reynolds number corresponded to the length of physical objects in the flow, it was difficult to navigate with larger vessels. Aether transmissions were also easily disrupted, making this a frontier frequently isolated from the Laminar sections and civilization.

Akane and Sachii passed through the heliosphere, making preparations to travel through the Milky Way. Given the increase in light energy, they applied sunscreen, and dimmed the lights. Heat lost to the void increased as aether grew thicker, so they began wearing extra layers of clothes. Fortunately, the ship was well stocked for both eventualities.

Once they were ready, Akane gave the order.

“Onward to the realm beyond the solar system! Full speed ahead!”

The Samidare began to move. The reflection of it was uncannily clear. Behind it lay a crystal ball containing the entire Milky Way.

As the reflection grew close, the crystal ball grew larger. The distortion began correcting itself, growing closer to the real appearance.

When the real ship and its reflection hit, the crystal ball filling their field of vision suddenly reversed itself. As if the ball was absorbing their world, the convex surface of the ball came at them, and flattened out.

The dimly lit ship interior began glowing with a mystic blue light. The sounds the ship produced grew much more powerful, and higher-pitched. High-energy light radiated from the light fixtures, and a strange heat unlike anything they’d ever felt before enveloped their skin.

They were outside the solar system.

“Wow! I’ve never been interstellar before!”

Side-eying Sachii’s dance of joy, Akane checked the beacon. Their target was headed towards the galaxy center, into the Turbulent Sector.

“Right! Turbulence, here we come!”

Akane steered the ship into the aether flow, sending them hurtling into the center of the Milky Way.

But the Samidare was an interplanetary ship, and definitely not up to the task of reaching the galaxy center. It was comparatively fine in the Laminar zones, but when they reached the Critical region the seiyuu transistor and aether amps immediately began breaking down. They were damaged by minute aether eddies, most likely. A ship built to navigate the gentle aether flows inside the solar system simply couldn’t handle them.

That’s how the two of them had ended up drifting. For a while they were still drifting towards the location the beacon showed, but now they were going the wrong way. There was nothing to do all day except eat human flesh. She regretted not stocking up on emergency rations, but with the seiyuu police hot on their heels, that hadn’t been an option.

“Ohh... Senpai, there’s a fish!” Sachii whispered.

Akane ignored her. She was most likely just so sushi-deprived she was seeing things.

“I mean it! Look, on the screen!”

She was right. There was a streamlined shadow on the screen, and it was getting larger. It looked like a fish, but the body construction wasn’t symmetrical bilaterally, but radially, centered around the axials connecting the head and tail. The head was divided into ten points like a flower or star, and it had a giant mouth covered in teeth. It had four large eyes, and these were covered by so many smaller eyes they completely buried the head.

It was a space fish. All sorts of creatures lived in the aether flows of the Milky Way, and their distribution was set by the Reynolds numbers. In the calm, low-energy environments of the Laminar sector were forests of giant but not terribly mobile space trees, and space plankton that moved around via cilia and flagella. Closer to the Turbulent sector, as the environment grew dangerously high-energy, you got space fish with enough mobility to avoid being caught in the eddies.

“Let’s catch it! And make sushi out of it!” Sachii yelped.

Space fish just looked sort of like Earth fish, but they were totally different animals. And with their aether amps broken, they lacked the means to kill the fish.

“Fish! I’m gonna eat you up! Eeeeek!”

Sachii suddenly jumped and threw her arms around Akane. The space fish had opened its mouth. It split into four pieces, looking less like a mouth and more like the tentacles on an octopus or squid. As it approached, they began to get a sense of its size. It was big. Like ten times the size of the Samidare. It was coming right towards them, mouth open wide.

“Well, now we’re going to be its dinner! Any ideas, Amamiya?”

“Don’t ask me! I got nothing!”

With their aether amps non-functional, they couldn’t fry it, eat it, or do anything to it. They just watched as the Samidare disappeared into the space fish’s maw and descended into its belly. The screen showed walls of red flesh, but this soon gave way to darkness. The ship rocked for a while but then seemed like it drifted to a stop somewhere stable.

“Well, that seems to have worked out. Let’s go, Senpai!” Sachii said, happily heading towards the hatch.

“Uh... To do what?”

“Get outside and bring home some fish meat!”

“Wait, at least put on a space suit! What if you fill the ship with poison?”

“Don’t worry! It looks like it’s safe outside.”

Certainly, the computer’s analysis showed the outside air was 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. Same as Earth’s atmosphere.

“Well, good. Hang on, do you have anything sharp?”

Her pocketknife seemed hardly up to the task. They searched the ship and found a fire axe. She gave it a little swing and liked the way it felt.

“Right, open up!”

They opened the hatch and took a few cautious steps out. It was warm, damp, and dark. Listening closely, Akane felt like she could hear the blood pumping through the fish’s veins. She shone a lamp around, and found a wall of flesh, sticky and glistening.

“All the fish we can eat!”

Sachii grabbed the axe from Akane and swung wildly. Maybe the muscle was really hard, or the axe was really crap, but she barely scratched it. The flesh did darken, like the internal bleeding that occurs after a blunt impact.

In the face of this potential sushi, they’d completely forgotten themselves. So they failed to notice the shadow approaching from behind.

“Wazzup!?” the shadow yelled, brightly. It slapped them both on the back.

“Aiiiieee!”

They quickly turned the lamp around and found an old woman with an eyepatch over one eye, and silver hair down to her waist. On her head was a skull, the jaw removed, worn like a helmet. This was somewhat intimidating, but her eye was glittering like a laid-back girl pranking a friend.

“What are you!?” Akane said, snatching the axe from Sachii, and holding it ready.

“Hello! I’m a Free Seiyuu! Suzuka Himori! Nice to meet you both.”

A Free Seiyuu. The name for the seiyuu that had escaped into the Turbulent and Critical Sectors after leaving the solar system during the War of Seiyuu Independence.

“Whaat? The real Suzuka-san!? Um, um... I’m Sachii Amamiya, with Holy Cosmos! It’s an honor to meet you!”

Sachii held out a hand, and Suzuka enthusiastically shook it.

“Seems like you were drifting,” Suzuka said, with concern. “Where were you going in that ship? You accidentally wander into the Critical Sector?”

“No, no, the opposite! We’re heading to the Turbulent Sector to kill the shit out of someone!” Sachii said, maybe a bit too honestly. That was really information that should be kept on the down low.

But veterans of the War for Seiyuu Independence were clearly not fussed by these things.

“Oh? Such youthful vigor. But that ship would be scrap the moment it hit the Turbulent Sector.”

“More importantly,” Akane cut in. “Yo, what is this fish? You live in it?”

“Oh, get a load of this! This here fish? It’s actually my ship!”

“Your ship? No way! I can see finding a way to live inside it, but actually flying the thing? Never.”

“I can totally fly it! Space fish nerves work like seiyuu transistors, amplifying aether vibrations. So if you just vibrate aether through the brain, you can change which way it’s going. Little brain surgery here, implant some control devices, and bam. You got yourself a ship. I’m a pretty good surgeon, you know.”

Akane looked doubtful, so Suzuka puffed up her cheeks, sulking. “Hey! You don’t believe me, do you? Well, seeing is believing. Lemme show you the studio! C’mon!”

Suzuka vanished into the darkness. She knew the way even without light. Akane and Sachii hurriedly followed. They walked through an open area for a while, but then Suzuka ducked into a hole in the wall. One just wide enough for a human to pass. Akane put her axe against the wall and followed her in.

The stench grew stronger. It smelled like fish guts dumped in a trash can and left there for months. The putrid odor made her nose burn.

“Tah-dah! This is my studio. I made it all myself!”

Suzuka seemed super proud, but the room was barely large enough to fit the three of them. The walls were made of constantly quivering flesh, with a large number of thin cables running into them. It was a gross spectacle; just looking at something like this was enough to make you unwell. The cables went through some instrument panels to a microphone. Next to the mic was a screen, showing a black and white image of the space vegetation. Must be a view of outside.

“If I sound into this mic, the space fish moves.”

Suzuka put the mic to her laryngeal sac, vibrating the aether. The room rocked. On screen, the vegetation was moving. The fish was turning.

“See? Amazing, right?”

“Damn! Amamiya, let’s kill this old lady and steal this ship!” It was a shame she’d left the axe behind, but if they both attacked they could probably take her bare-handed.

“Ha ha, you’re so young! But even with this, the Turbulent Sector won’t be easy. I can get you an even better ship.”

“You weren’t a hero of the Seiyuu War for nothing! Senpai, did you hear that? You just threatened to kill her and she wants to give you a ship! How generous! You truly are a goddess amongst women.”

“Aw, you’re making me blush!”

“I mean, that sounds great, but... Why would you do that?” Akane asked.

“Well, I gotta treat my fans right. And...” Suzuka touched the skull on her head.

“Oh, are those bones... your coupling partner? Erieri? I mean, Erina Shiranui-san?” Sachii was acting like a kitten drunk on catnip.

“That’s right. Erina hated that nickname, you know.”

“Wow, I can’t believe I’m seeing Erieri’s bones! Can I touch them?”

“Of course! Just be careful.”

If she let them go on like this, they would clearly talk forever. Akane coughed. “Um, Suzuka-san. Do you have any food? We’re sort of starving.”

“Oh! Yes, sushi! Let’s eat some sushi!”

Sachii’s hands rattled the skull precariously, but Suzuka stopped her.

“If you’re hungry, just grab some flesh off wherever. I dunno if you’ll like it much, but it’s definitely fresh!”

Recovering the skull, Suzuka sliced a piece off the space fish with a knife and handed it to Akane. It was tough meat, and it smelled. A pattern of dark blood-filled veins rose to the surface, which did not exactly whet the appetite.

She forced herself to take a bite.

Awful! It tasted like seaweed grown on an abandoned veranda in filthy aquarium water that then evaporated until the flavor was extra concentrated. This was simply too much. She spit it out immediately but the taste wouldn’t leave her mouth and she felt sick.

“Woah... Is it really that bad?”

Suzuka seemed shocked that Akane had actually spit it out.

“I kinda like it!” Sachii said, nibbling on it like dried squid. “It’s certainly distinctive!”

“You’re insane.”

It’s way better to keep eating human flesh than eat another bite of this, Akane thought.

Fortunately, the food problem soon resolved itself. After eating it for a few days, the taste of the space fish no longer bothered her. It was just a matter of getting used to it. By the time they reached the Free Seiyuu colony where Suzuka lived, she wasn’t exactly addicted to it, but it had definitely become a viable provision in her mind. In some ways it was an ideal food, containing both the nutrition and moisture humans needed to live.

In front of the space fish were some massive, long bones. About ten meters thick, and fifty meters long, these huge bone logs were all linked together, with a number of curved rib-like bones running off to the sides. They were the bones of a really, really long sea snake-like creature.

“We call this place the Whale Bones. It’s not just a Free Seiyuu colony, it’s also the heart of an ecosystem.”

As they drew near the Whale Bones, they could see tents made of skin between the bones. They must be living on the inside, where the air was.

“That’s the port.”

The fish was headed to the end of the rib bone Suzuka was pointing at. People in space suits were moving across ropes strung between the bones. Space fish of all sizes were swarming around. The fish Suzuka controlled pulled up between them.

“Right, ladies!” Suzuka called. “Space suits on, and let’s step outside! Pick your ship!”

All three went outside.

“If you’re headed to the Turbulent Sector, how about this one? Tah-dah! It’s a space whale!”

The ship Suzuka recommended did not look like a whale. At best, it looked like someone had crushed a hippo flat. Like an upside-down dustpan, it started with a flat head, got even narrower, and ended in a crescent moon-shaped tail. It drew an extremely simplistic figure, with not even another fin anywhere. On the head was a single gigantic elliptical eye and countless smaller eyes assisting it.

When they told Suzuka it didn’t look like a whale, she just shook her head.

“Tch, tch, tch. You fools,” she said. “Look at that tail fin again. Space whale tail fins lie sideways. By moving that up and down they change the aether flow into propulsion. That’s exactly like whales, but that’s not the only amazing thing about it! Go ahead, touch it.”

Akane and Sachii reached out and touched the space whale’s skin. It was very hard and extremely rough.

“In the turbulence, flat surfaces actually offer up more resistance than uneven ones. The rough bits make little eddies, and those eddies made the flow slide past, preventing larger whirlpools from forming. Oh, and its flesh is like a sponge, full of little holes that let the aether pass through. So there’s not much resistance from the aether, either. With one of these, you can fly in the Turbulent Sector, too.”

“And you’ll just give us something this great?”

“Sure, sure. I like helping people out. That said, in return, we will take the ship you came on. It might just be trash to you, but there’s valuable resources on there for us.”

“I’m just so grateful I was able to meet you, Suzuka-san! What a glorious day!”

“Amamiya, let’s get going.”

Akane dragged Sachii away from Suzuka. She was glad for Suzuka’s help, but worried she was hiding something. If they were gonna get the hell out of dodge, it was better to do so soon.

“Right... Suzuka-san! Thank you so much! I hope we meet again!”

Sachii waved until they were inside the hatch in the space whale’s anus.

“Bye! Sacchii and Akkanee!”

The anus quivered and shut, and Suzuka was out of sight. She might be a hero of the War for Seiyuu Independence, Akane thought, but damn she was bad at nicknames.

VI

The space whale swam through the aether sea. Each time it moved its tail, a rainbow of lights shone around it. A single spaceship followed behind it, firing laser beams after them. Akane and Sachii were on the space whale it was attacking. This was all because they’d carelessly responded to a transmission they received.

As they approached the Turbulent Sector and the vibrations increased, they realized they hadn’t named their ship, and got in an argument over which of them had the right to name it. After a furious row, they finally agreed to steal a page from classic literature and name it the Moby-Dick, at which point an aether transmission came in.

“Hello again! Are you ready to die?”

“You thought you could get away clean after rubbing our faces in the dirt? Well, you were wrong!”

It was the detective and her assistant they’d fought on Jupiter, Minerva and Nanase.

“I am exceedingly irate! Because of you, our agency ranks went down! I swear you will pay for that with your lives!”

“Woah, chasing us all the way out here? You people are craaaazy,” Akane said, oblivious to the fact that she was doing the exact same thing.

“Why, I never!” Nanase said, turning beet red. So much for her unflappable disposition. “Listen, we swore an oath to murder you! No matter what!”

“That’s right! We took out a loan to buy this ship, the Mistilteinn, just so we could kill you both!”

Unlike the larger Cruadín, the Mistilteinn was a slim little number. Like a flying fish, except the wings were three times the size. Where the Moby-Dick tried to eliminate eddies as much as possible, this design seemed to prioritize sending the eddies towards the tips of the wings to avoid impacting the main body. Multicolored glowing swirls were flowing off the tips of the wings in the ship’s wake.

“How’d you know this was us? The old lady rat us out?”

“Old lady? I know no old lady! We’re detectives, remember? We’re well aware the Free Seiyuu out here use space fish as ships. The rest was simple deduction! We knew you must be aboard a similar ship. The rest was just approaching them one by one and waiting for a transmission response! You’re idiots, so you responded immediately!”

If they’d ignored the aether transmission, they might have never known it was them. Unfortunately, Akane had answered out of habit.

“Shit. Amamiya! Beams! Can we fire any beams?”

“Nope! No aether amps.”

Even if Akane shook the aether at full power, without an aether amp to output it, laser beams weren’t an option.

“You hear that? They don’t even have any weapons!”

“Hmph. Then we can toy with them as long as we like!”

A barrage of laser beams shot out of the Mistilteinn. This close to the center of the Milky Way, the aether was thick, and unlike the bowels of Jupiter, the beams were quite powerful.

Violet light passed through the Moby-Dick. Literally passed through it. Moby-Dick’s physique allowed aether to pass right through it, and since the beams were just aether vibrations, they passed right through as well. As a result, the damage to the ship was minimal. But they definitely took damage; there was a nasty wound on the surface, and the interior filled with the smell of burning flesh.

“Quite a unique ship you have there! However! If we just shoot a whole lot of beams, I suspect you will eventually die!”

“We’re really smart, so we can figure these things out.”

The Mistilteinn continued to rain violet light down on the Moby-Dick. At this rate, Akane and Sachii’s lives were but a candle in the wind.

“Amamiya! Get the Moby-Dick behind them!”

The Moby-Dick bent its tail like a real whale. The aether resistance slowed it down enough that the Mistilteinn passed it. The Mistilteinn also spread its wings to stay within range.

“My, my! Did you think you could get away so easily?”

“There is no comprehending the thoughts of cockroaches.”

A hammer of light shot out of the Mistilteinn. But it flew off in entirely the wrong direction. Eddies created by the wings lay in the path of the beam, interfering with it. Like leaves in the North Wind, the beam was caught by the eddies and bent in random directions.

The Mistilteinn went up and down, trying to reposition itself, but the Moby-Dick followed suit. The Moby-Dick was the more mobile of the two ships.

“You think you have the advantage now? Take it from a true master detective! Even a poorly aimed cannon will eventually hit its mark!”

“Yeah, well that works for us, too!”

Akane sent aether vibrations into the Moby-Dick’s nerves. They were aimed at the optical nerves. Eyes were an organ that could catch and receive aether vibrations. That might mean they could do the opposite and transmit them as well. If nerves had properties similar to seiyuu transmitters, and if eyes could serve as replacement aether amps, then they could fire laser beams.

Blue light spilled out of the Moby-Dick’s eyes. The volume of it was visibly increasing, until the vibrations enveloped the entire ship. But rather than concentrate, the light scattered. This was less a beam than a bomb. The light split the eyeball, and the liquid inside spurted out.

“Big talk for such a disappointing result.”

“The mediocre rarely achieve the outcome they desire.”

The Mistilteinn unleashed a flurry of beams, trying to overwhelm them. Nearly all of them were scattered by the eddies, but one beam got stuck in an eddy, coming towards them. The eddy gave it a boost of speed, and it came flying at the Moby-Dick like a shuriken.

Akane tried to steer the Moby-Dick and dodge, but it wouldn’t budge. Had she overdone it and destroyed its nerves? The beam-charged whirlpool was almost on them. Akane desperately tried to make the Moby-Dick turn.

“Just move, damn you! I don’t care how! Just do something!”

As if it heard her, the ship suddenly rocked.

But not in the direction Akane had intended. The tail took a big, slow swing. The Moby-Dick had bucked its operator’s controls, moving on its own, and easily avoided the whirlpool. It seemed the Moby-Dick had free will once more. Akane had put too much pressure on it, destroyed the control device in its brain, and freed it from its bondage.

The Moby-Dick’s mouth opened. Inside were hundreds of fangs. Spaces whales were carnivores that hunted to live. Sometimes they took down prey far larger than themselves. With its natural instincts no longer repressed, the first thing it did was unleash the full force of its appetite on the nearest target — the Mistilteinn.

The Moby-Dick wheeled around the Mistilteinn, drawing closer; as if aware of the threat from the laser beams, it made aether waves with its tail, scattering beam after beam. Once it was close enough, it took a huge chomp out of the wings.

The delicate glass-like wings shattered into dust, as if hit with a hundred nailguns. With only one wing, the Mistilteinn began to spin, but a moment later that wing broke off and it regained its balance. Minerva and Nanase’s entire world fortune had gone down the drain. If they didn’t run now, they’d lose their lives, too.

Just before the whale’s fangs shredded the Mistilteinn’s body like scrap paper, a railgun fired an escape pod. It was a simple one, with no propulsion of its own, presumably to keep the weight down. There was no way that would ever make it to the Laminar Sector. Even cockroaches like them faced certain doom.

“Wow! This whale is amazing!” Akane said, pumping her fist. “Now we’ve just got to regain control. Any idea how, Amamiya?”

“None at all! They didn’t exactly give us an emergency manual.”

With no regard to its pilots’ intentions, the whale’s rampage continued. The moment it realized the Mistilteinn was inedible, it spat it out and began swimming rapidly away.

Thus far, they had simply ridden the aether flow, but now it was thrashing its tail up and down, using the aether compression to move in leaps and bounds across the flow. Naturally, this increased the resistance, and the ship rocked quite a lot.

“Where’s this whale going?”

“If it keeps heading this direction, the galactic center,” Akane shouted, scanning the instruments. “We’re going right into the maelstrom!”

The center of the Milky Way — the Maelstrom. It was named for an ocean whirlpool in a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. It worked the same as the whirlpool when you pull the plug in a bath. The massive gravitational pull at the center of the galaxy pulled matter into a spiral, growing faster and faster, the friction generating energy. Near the center were zones where the law of universal gravitation applied and examining the objects in orbit around the maelstrom indicated that force applied to the center of the disk — in other words, the sides of the disk — was nonexistent. Gravity and centrifugal force cancel each other out. However, the gravity of the orbiting gases themselves created a disk of gas around the maelstrom. This was called the accretion disk. The sides of any disk have a gravitational pull towards the disk’s equator.

Six months had passed since the Moby-Dick went rogue. The whale plunged into the Turbulent Sector, met up with a bunch of other whales, and together they controlled the aether flow. The school of space whales flew through the galactic center like a flock of migratory birds.

By eating the flesh off the interior of the space whale, they had enough food and water, but that didn’t help the insurmountable boredom. The aether flow was too unstable in the Turbulent Sector for the aethernet to function. Akane and Sachii made a deck of cards out of whale flesh, trying to while away the time.

Eat, sleep, play cards. Six meaningless months. And all that while, Akane could hear the voice. The closer they got to the center, the louder and more insistent the voice echoing on the aether became, until it was a constant presence in her ears.

She still couldn’t understand what the voice was telling her, but she was beginning to feel like there was definitely someone behind the voice.

But their journey was nearing its end. The whales were bound for the central accretion disk in the maelstrom. Like salmon swimming upstream, the whales crossed the dangers of the Turbulent Sector to reach it.

In the distance, they could see a tower of light. Gases pulled into the maelstrom headed up, and that heat generated jets. Space jets. The school of whales swam across fountains belching light on a galactic scale. The whales formed a number of V-shaped squads, riding each other’s slipstreams, reducing the aether resistance.

The whales landed on the accretion disk.

While the accretion disk had been assumed to be composed of gas, it did actually have land. On the outskirts, where the revolution wasn’t that fast yet, the heat wasn’t so high it vaporized all solids. Gravity gathered matter there, creating a flat donut-shaped celestial body. At a glance, it looked like a harsh environment, but since the aether was rotating with it, it was quite peaceful to anyone inside.

The whales clustered together, their shapes changing until they could hardly be described as whales any more. Their sides grew translucent wings, like mayflies. They used these wings to glide about and land. Soft pseudopods, midway between a caterpillar and a centipede, grew from their bellies.

The Moby-Dick, too, was drawing close to land. When Akane glanced at the beacon receiver, she realized the Dark Seiyuu was less than 100 kilometers away. When they’d lost control of the Moby-Dick, Akane had been sure she would never catch up with the Dark Seiyuu. Despite her fears, the gap between them had grown steadily closer as they neared the galactic center. It seemed like the Dark Seiyuu was headed there, too.

The Moby-Dick’s instincts had led it to follow a comparatively gentle path through the turbulence, bringing Akane and the Dark Seiyuu together again.

Sadly, she had no way of launching an assault. She would have to wait for the Dark Seiyuu to come to her.

There was a sound of wind, and an impact. The Moby-Dick had landed. Akane and Sachii donned spacesuits and tried to go outside. But this proved impossible. Stimulating the rectum should have opened the anal hatch immediately, but the changes to the physical construction meant it no longer worked like it had when they boarded.

As they stimulated the rectum in any way they could think of, the entire ship began shaking violently. They hurried back to the studio and checked their surroundings. Fortunately, the external cameras were still functional.

The spectacle on screen made Akane whistle.

The Moby-Dick was mating.

The partner space whale’s long copulatory organ was inserted into the Moby-Dick’s body, its many legs scurrying, attempting to keep it mounted. The pliant pseudopods gained purchase, secreting viscous fluids and sliding up and down. The other space whales were all mating, too. This appeared to be the space whale’s breeding grounds.

The violent motion continued for an hour before stopping abruptly. It lay so still it seemed almost dead, making it hard to believe it had been so full of life a moment before.

The view through the cameras was no longer available. Some white fibrous material had completely covered them. It seemed like the Moby-Dick had wrapped itself in some sort of cocoon.

The interior flesh began changing color, too. It was getting softer, like it was rotting rapidly.

The aether transceiver indicated it had caught a video transmission. They opened a connection and the Dark Seiyuu’s face came on screen. Despite the turbulence, in this area the aether flow was subdued enough that transmissions were possible.

“Akane Yomokura! It’s been a while.”

“You again! I’ll kill you this time!”

Six months had done little to ease Akane’s rage. If anything, it had distilled it down to murder in its purest form.

The Dark Seiyuu ignored this entirely. “Are you hearing the voice?” she asked.

“Yeah, been getting stronger and stronger the last six months. Still makes no damn sense, though. So fucking what?”

“If that’s the case, try to understand it well enough to survive.” The Dark Seiyuu sounded oddly disappointed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But Akane’s question was cut off by Sachii’s scream.

She turned around to see small shadows pouring out of the flesh walls. They were creatures about the size of puppies. They had six spider-like legs, and their bodies were split into three sections, a heart shaped piece at the bottom, and a pair of sharp scissors sticking out of their mouths. No eyes, but the hair covering the front of them seemed to be feelers. The hundreds of spiders pouring out of the walls seemed to be extremely hungry. They were devouring the flesh walls they’d emerged from. And their appetites were soon directed at the two seiyuu.

“Shit!”

Akane fired heat rays, setting the spiders on fire. They burned easily enough, but there were too many of them. She burned them and burned them and more just kept spilling out. They did not seem to have been equipped with any instinctual fear. All they had was a desire to consume flesh. They were extremely efficient flesh-devouring machines.

“Senpai! We’re surrounded!”

Black wriggling things covered the walls in all directions. Akane stomped on a spider as it tried to take a bite of her leg. Using her full Seiyuu Karate training, she covered her body in blue plasma, firing it at the spiders. Eleven spots on her body, where the laryngeal sacs were implanted, all writhed painfully. Her strength faded, as if she’d wrung herself out.

Then she heard the voice, for once quite clearly. As if water stuck in her ear had suddenly come out, the muffled, distorted voice suddenly showed its true self.

This was the clearest the voice had ever been. Once understood, she was left wondering why she had even been unable to make sense of it.

It felt like falling down a deep dark hole, with no food, a frigid wind stealing her body’s warmth. There was a hollow in her heart, an emptiness that made her body turn to rust and crumble away. Fear, like she was drowning in muddy water, struggling desperately, yet being pulled further and further down. Her life draining away like water through a sieve. Despair like a heavy ashen weight coming from all directions, from the sky above, from the ground below. The relentless encroach of death. The voice was thin, desperate, and filled with all of those emotions.

Akane realized that this fear and despair and death were all her own creations. Each time she shook the aether, lives were lost, one after another. Thus far, she had never faced death so directly. Despite all the people she’d killed, she’d never really caught a glimpse of what it really was.

“All right!” Akane screamed. “I know why there’s a voice! It’s the screams of the dead! The shrieks of those being slaughtered! Voices begging for help!”

In that instant, a violent beam of light sliced through the Moby-Dick’s flesh. The flesh swelled up, vaporized, and exploded. A white shockwave blew Akane away. The helmet of her spacesuit cracked, but the air was breathable, so she was unharmed. Sachii was right next to her. She was unconscious, not moving. Luckily, the sudden explosion seemed to have confused the spiders, and they’d stopped attacking. Akane abandoned her helmet, put Sachii on her back, and went outside, putting distance between them and the Moby-Dick’s corpse.

There was a pitch black isosceles triangle floating above them. It was firing lasers at the spider swarm. The Black Swan.

The handful of spiders that escaped The Black Swan’s beams were easily defeated with Seiyuu Karate.

When there were no more spiders, The Black Swan wheeled around, and landed. The hatch opened, and the Dark Seiyuu stepped out.

Shortly before, Akane would immediately have tried to kill her. But now that she knew what the voice meant, her attitude had changed.

“Congrats on finally hearing it,” the Dark Seiyuu said, sitting down next to Akane.

“Yeah. Tell me who’s generating that voice. Tell me everything.”

“Of course. I’ll start at the beginning. 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was born.”

“I think you might be starting too far back,” Akane laughed.

The Dark Seiyuu ignored this. “Long before matter existed, during the inflation directly after the birth of the universe, aether vibrated. In the Bible, it says the world was created by the word of God, but in fact, the universe was born alongside the voice. Parts of that voice became light, but some chose to remain within the world of the voice. To remain inside the aether, existing as sound. These are phonons, the particles of sound. The key to solving one of the greatest mysteries of physics. The source of gravity is phonons.”

“OK. So it requires a pretty insane coincidence for these phonon particles that have been vibrating since the birth of the universe to have the same wavelength as gravity does, right?”

As Akane asked, she felt hungry, so she picked up a piece of fried spider and took a bite. It tasted a lot like space whale.

“That’s what I’m about to explain. Just like the world of things we live in has, there’s been an evolution in the world of the voice. Phonons interacted, bonded, caused chemical reactions, and gradually developed into a complex system. Eventually, they reached a level where natural selection could occur. In other words, there was now life made of voices. Just as we did, the phonon life forms developed high-level faculties.”

Akane tried to imagine what a living voice would look like but nothing came to her.

“But one day, danger threatened the phonon beings’ paradise. The sheer number of them had increased too much. Phonon overpopulation was shaking the aether, turning into all kinds of radiation, heat, or particles and then vanishing. The key here, is that the mechanics of evolution still applied. Phonon beings that could efficiently harvest the aether remained, and those that could not died. This led to the development of organs that could gather aether. Gravitational forces are the result of that. Gravity is actually the predatory organs of living voices.”

“That’s odd. If evolution can produce it, shouldn’t computers be able to simulate it?”

“The world of voices is evolving much more efficiently than the world of things. Did you know there are two types of particles? Boson particles, where multiples can all be in the same state, and Fermion particles, where they can’t.”

Akane remembered studying this in physics class at training school, so she nodded.

“The protons and the nuclei in atoms are Fermions, but phonons are Boson particles. We know that Bosons can more easily display quantum effects. This led to quantum evolution. Genetically speaking, a number of informational states exist simultaneously and easily manifested in the phenotype, allowing the absorption of information that interacts significantly with the outside world. The gravity wavelength may be incredibly complex, but the result of quantum evolution managed to calculate it.”

“So the phonon beings’ genes are a sort of quantum computer.”

The Dark Seiyuu nodded.

“The result of this evolution is that areas where the phonon beings lived generated gravity, which created structure out of matter like stars and galaxies. On the surface it appears like the law of conservation of gravity is functioning, but that is purely a matter of appearances, since the gravity is actually being generated by phonons. Orderly sections of the universe, like the solar system or the Milky Way, are actually made by phonon beings.”

“Then is it also thanks to the phonon beings that the Earth never fell into the sun?”

“Yes. The solar system is a feeding ground for them. With a dissipated structure. Structures that are orderly succumb to entropy faster, you see. This explains the three great mysteries of physics. The origin of gravity is the phonon beings. Aether that falls to the planet surface is lost because the phonon beings eat it. And the dark matter that maintains the solar system and the Milky Way is actually phonon beings.”

“But these days they’re calling it the four great mysteries and including seiyuu breaking the law of conservation of energy.”

“That’s true. I can explain that, too. Phonon beings have thrived. But that was the beginning of a tragedy. In time, life was born in the world of things. Genes in the world of things are fermions, so quantum evolution didn’t occur, but a faint quantum effect was generated by the microtubules in neurons. Eventually mankind, the species with the most developed neurons, evolved an organ that could amplify the microtubules’ quantum effect. This was the laryngeal sac, and the people with those genes were seiyuu. Via their laryngeal sacs, seiyuu were able to link the world of things with the world of voices. Microtubules entangled with phonon beings at a quantum level, stealing the phonon beings’ genetic information. This was, essentially, quantum teleportation. This is how the seiyuu are able to break the law of conservation of energy. Akane Yomokura, are you familiar with Maxwell’s demon?”

“Wasn’t it a thought experiment in which a demon that could tell the speed and position of every particle was able to create perpetual motion?”

“Exactly. In that thought experiment, information could be exchanged for energy. Seiyuu’s voices carry information from the world of voices to the world of things, which creates the appearance of breaking the law of energy conservation as far as is observable. Originally, natural seiyuu were quite weak. Mankind aren’t the only ones with weak seiyuu abilities; there’s also the space whales and the helium beings from the depths of Jupiter.”

“The helium beings? We met one of those.”

“That’s right, you did. Helium seiyuu are an amalgam of metallic hydrogen and superfluid helium, creatures with sound waves for nerves. Since superfluids have no viscosity, the sound waves can flow as far as they need to without ever degrading. Their seiyuu power activates when the phonons in the helium are mingled at a quantum level with the phonons in the aether. Their life spans are far longer than all of human history, and they spend all of that storing up genetic information from the world of voices.”

The power Akane had stolen from the helium seiyuu had been genetic information from the world of voices.

“With only natural seiyuu, the damage wasn’t so drastic. But mankind opened Pandora’s box. Genetic engineering created artificial seiyuu. Artificial seiyuu exploded in the Great Seiyuu Age, with powerful quantum teleportation powers, and began strip mining the phonon beings’ genetic information!”

The Dark Seiyuu was getting pretty choked up.

“Was the result of that the genocide of the phonon beings?” Akane asked, starting to figure out just what was going on here.

“Exactly. Quantum teleportation destroys the information on the source side. To the phonon beings, that resulted in the destruction of their genetic information. Just by sounding their voices, seiyuu bring death upon them!”

“And the voices we hear are the screams of those lives experiencing death. How long have you heard them?”

“Since I was born. Every day, every hour, every minute, I’ve listened to their shrieks of pain and fear of death. Heard voices begging for help, begging for someone to save them. I was receiving not only genetic information, but the phonon beings’ mental information. That’s how strong my seiyuu powers were. And then one day, I got a message from the world of voices. It was clearly a message from an intelligent life form. The phonon beings were as intelligent and cultured as human beings. Akane Yomokura, you know this as well as I do, right?”

Akane did. The source of those voices clearly had free will, clearly had emotions. A personality, just like herself.

“I made a contract with the civilization in the world of voices. A blessing, with shared suffering as collateral. Divine protection in return for the burden of original sin. I was granted seiyuu powers far beyond what I’d had, becoming the Dark Seiyuu. As an agent of dark matter, the world of voices, I became a seiyuu opposed to seiyuu. And I began killing my colleagues. Trying to reduce the number of seiyuu as much as possible, I killed and killed and killed. Feeling the deaths of the world of voices, I brought death to the world of things. But everything I did had no meaning. One day, I received a message from the world of voices. To escape the seiyuu overpopulation, they were going to abandon the Earth and scatter. That meant Earth’s gravity would disappear.”

The Dark Seiyuu pulled back her hood, wiping her eyes. Her face was that of a girl, traces of childhood lingering. Tears flowed from her deep, clear eyes.

“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t bear this suffering, this contradiction, this madness. I mean, think about it. Trusting I’d improve a tragic situation, I killed all those seiyuu, and for this. If this is all I get, I wish I’d been born a plant instead. I’m tired. I don’t want to go on. But I’m a coward. Too scared to just abandon it. So I went looking for a successor, some way to guarantee what I’d done wasn’t meaningless. Someone to take over my role before they scattered. And to do that, I had to find a seiyuu who could hear the voices. The only possibility I ever found was you, Akane Yomokura. And by escaping from the destruction of Earth, you proved your potential as a seiyuu. Armed with that knowledge, I led you to Jupiter, and here to the center of the Milky Way. Areas with higher gravity, where the phonon beings are unusually concentrated, their voices are easier to hear. By coming on this journey, you’ve learned to hear their voices. You’ve grown. I have nothing left to teach you.”

The Dark Seiyuu wiped her tears, looking Akane in the eye. “Akane Yomokura! Forgive my cowardice! And I ask of you, will you be my successor? Will you become the Dark Seiyuu, and save the world?”

Akane remembered why she had first set out to be the ultimate seiyuu. There was just one reason. She wanted to save the world.

“Very well. I accept that name, and the burden that comes with it.”

“You swear?”

“I do. But unlike you, I won’t go killing all the seiyuu. I’ll bring salvation to the world in the truest sense.”

At this, the Dark Seiyuu’s eyes widened. Suspicion mingled with hope. “Really? But... you can’t!”

“I can. The other world sent us a message. That means I can speak to them, as well.” Akane took the Dark Seiyuu’s hand, squeezing it tight. “If we communicate, we can find a way to live in harmony. Two worlds, linked by voices. That’s what seiyuu are.”

The Dark Seiyuu was silent for a while, then she smiled. It was the first time Akane had ever seen her smile.

“That’s so absurd... I never even thought of it.”

Her smile broadened, and she laughed out loud, as if all the stress tying her down had suddenly been released. She was laughing and crying at the same time.

Akane put her arms around her. “Don’t worry. Once I’m the ultimate seiyuu, there’s nothing I can’t do.”

“When you put it that way... I’m sure you can. I can rest now. Free from my nightmare.”

The Dark Seiyuu handed her knife to Akane, the tip pointed at her own laryngeal sac. “I give my sac to you. I will be part of you, and I will support you that way. Take my ship home. I’m sure you can fly it. The ship has a freezer, so you can preserve it after you cut it out.”

Her small hand patted Akane’s shoulder. “Go on! Become the ultimate seiyuu!”

Akane stuck the knife into the throat below the Dark Seiyuu’s laryngeal sac. She slid it sideways, making a long, smooth cut. As if it had been waiting for this, blood gushed out. With the beating of the heart, the blood flow waxed and waned rhythmically. Her body crumpled like a poorly balanced doll, convulsed for a few seconds like it was trying to tear open the heavens, and then went still. Big, beautiful, lake-like eyes dried up, turning white. Her jaw went slack, her mouth hanging open like a tunnel.

Akane had obtained the Dark Seiyuu’s laryngeal sac. Even severed from her body, it wriggled like octopus tentacles. Akane cupped its bulk tenderly in both hands.

The Black Swan’s hatch opened, and she placed the sac safely in the freezer within. Then Akane came back to the corpse. She took off her space suit, and in her underwear, set all her sacs vibrating.

Then she embraced the body.

“I will become the Dark Seiyuu and save the world. You can rest in peace,” she whispered.

The body was wrapped in light. Heat poured out of her, burning the body, turning it to charcoal.

A little while later, Sachii woke up. She looked around and found Akane sitting on top of The Black Swan.

“Woah! Good morning! That’s a hell of a ship! What happened while I was out!?”

“Oh, I became the ultimate seiyuu messiah.”

“I don’t know what that is, but it sounds amazing! Does that make me your apostle? Every messiah needs some apostles!”

Akane took Sachii’s hand and led her into The Black Swan. It was a single-seater, but Sachii was small enough that they could both fit. It had an automatic food maker on board, so they were lacking for nothing. With this ship, they had nothing to fear.

Akane sat in the cockpit with Sachii resting on her knees. Sachii rubbed her head against Akane’s neck, goofing around. She was always big on cuddling. It had surprised Akane when they first met, but now her warmth didn’t seem so bad after all.

“Now then, times a wasting! First, let’s head back to Suzuka’s place, and get that laryngeal sac transplanted! I’m sure she’s up to the task.”

“Totally! I didn’t get to talk to her nearly enough, anyway!”

The hatch closed, and The Black Swan was swallowed up by the sky.

After a long silence, six-legged black creatures came scuttling out, their sharp jaws tearing into the lump of coal that had once been human. They clustered around the Moby-Dick’s corpse, too, soon turning its flesh into swiss cheese. As the holes grew larger, the bones were exposed. Soon, they even gnawed upon the hard bones, sucking out the cerebrospinal fluid. When there were no more bodies, not even any blood stains, the creatures’ cooperation ended. With no other flesh left to eat, they began devouring each other. They formed two teams, three teams, four teams, eating each other alive.

At last, victors were decided. They went through several metamorphic processes until they became space whales. They used the disk of land’s centrifugal force to launch themselves to the outer regions of the galaxy. There they gathered nourishment before returning to the mating grounds.

This cycle of life continues to this day, unchanged for trillions of years.