Chapter 015
NOTICE OF THE communication center’s temporary closure came on a Saturday.
That day, her legal foster father came home with no warning, which was unusual and made Hazuki feel cloistered.
But that her foster father came without warning did not mean he came alone.
Executive secretaries, assistant secretaries, security details, and the like came streaming in, clearly having created time between duties to force this meeting.
So yes. They were there.
In this case though, it’d be more accurate to say they had come to this building where Hazuki, the man’s foster child, resided, merely to pop their heads in.
He’d always say something nice to the people he met. He was a gentleman.
You seem well.
You’re pacing through your curriculum well.
You’ll only lower your achievement level if you work too hard.
The day’s average study periods are too long, aren’t they?
Hazuki’s foster father knew a tremendous amount about Hazuki. Before he came home he would always examine the data collected on her. It was no doubt his commute read, prepared for him as her guardian.
In just one hour, this person could know what Hazuki had done in the past month.
She felt fortunate but not happy about it.
Hazuki’s foster father had six children to his name. Not all of them were biologically his. Legally, Hazuki had one older sister and older brother, two younger brothers and a younger sister.
She’d met them before but couldn’t remember their faces.
Each of them had been sent to a home, each of them had started a life there. Her foster father would take in and raise these children as his own.
You could have said Hazuki was lucky.
Orphans in this country were beyond numbers. Fifteen years ago when Hazuki was born, the nation was at its peak in the number of parents who’d abandoned their children or else were denied the right to raise their own children, though both figures had waned over the years.
These parentless children lived mostly in welfare institutions. Though they were institutions, the environment was good and there was no real social stigma attached to living in one. Orphans weren’t discriminated against as they were in the past and enjoyed all the freedoms every other child did. From the child’s point of view, it was probably much better than living with impoverished parents.
Hazuki’s life in the institution was not so different from the one she lived now.
You could have said the house she lived in now was like her own private institution.
But she had a father figure, at least legally. The person with kind words for her was not just a guardian or counselor, but a man who assumed the role of father.
Hazuki didn’t know why her foster father did any of this. As far as his actions were concerned, Hazuki had heard that at one point he’d been criticized, but lauded at other times. Hazuki didn’t really care one way or another whether he was a philanthropist or hypocrite.
All that mattered to Hazuki was that here was a man who invariably assumed the role of father over her, and that he was sympathetic and kind toward her. That was enough for her.
However, Hazuki’s father was a sort of foster father and yet not quite a foster father. He’d not once ever called her by name. It wasn’t as if she hated it or refused to let him. Just that having this gap in their relationship put her at ease.
Her foster father was saying the same thing with the same tone as he always did. Adding that she ought to pay particular attention to her surroundings now.
That was his reason for coming home. He had come for real access to assure Hazuki would “pay attention to her surroundings” since there’d been another murder in the area.
He could have just sent her a message, but it was very conscientious of him to go out of his way to engage in real access.
At times like this Hazuki realized that her foster father worried about her deep down inside. It was clear in his body language he was sincerely concerned, but if he weren’t his actions were still pretty impressive.
Whenever she saw her father she recognized that she had developed an adeptness at expression comprehension, and she didn’t see the usefulness of communication labs anymore.
It was difficult to learn an unquantifiable, uncodifiable skill. When you spent your days in front of a monitor you gradually forgot the power of communicating via your expressions, with your gestures.
Maybe not so much forgot as stopped being aware of doing so.
Hazuki would certainly laugh when amused and cry when sad, but she didn’t know what she looked like to someone else.
For that reason she also couldn’t tell when looking at a laughing stranger whether they were laughing because they were amused or for some other reason. She couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t imagine.
Everything outside the monitor really was fake.
Her foster father’s power of expression and his ability to convince her that lies were true perplexed Hazuki.
She did think he must have been a good person.
She received the message about the community center’s closure in the midst of this cloistered feeling.
Because of this, she evaded her father, who kept doling out statements of worry.
“I’m sorry.”
Say it.
There was no way to verbally distinguish one sort of apology from another.
No, if apologizing for interrupting a conversation, it should sound different from when you apologized in earnest.
Though Hazuki didn’t know why it was different.
When an apology was in writing there was no nuance to detect in the first place, and eventually you stopped using ambiguous expressions. Flat words with limited meaning became the language of choice. It was meant to prevent confusion. Expressions with only one interpretation. Writing under this rule was a mandatory condition of the era’s uninterrupted communication style. Of course, it was no more than a pretense. Trouble couldn’t be avoided, but at least this way it never surfaced.
Hazuki’s generation derived 80 percent of its conversational communication from written language, so saying “I’m sorry” for any other reason than to apologize was practically obsolete. There was no use for the expression and no one knew how to say it.
“What’s the matter?” her foster father asked.
Next week’s communication sessions were canceled. All outside travel was prohibited, day or night. If you absolutely must leave the house, you had to take your monitor and set it on GPS mode so that if for example you were killed, the authorities would know where to find your body.
Hazuki’s foster father grimaced as Hazuki read her message. Then said, “This is a serious problem.”
He kept talking about something or other, but Hazuki heard none of it.
Hazuki’s consciousness was focused on her monitor.
At the bottom of her screen was an icon she’d never seen before.
A turtle.
The shape of a turtle.
There’d been no stupid icons on her screen this morning.
She was pretty sure there hadn’t been anything there till she got the message from the center, actually. Her foster father was still saying something or other, but her voice recognition was turned off.
Mindful of her foster father’s gaze Hazuki deftly slid her finger across the tablet and moved the cursor.
OPEN.
No audio upon opening the file.
THERE WILL BE A POWER OUTAGE FROM 5:55:30 TO 5:56:00 PM.
LEAVE THE HOUSE DURING THOSE THIRTY SECONDS. WAIT AT THE DOVEROOM.
WE MEET AT THE PRIVATE ROOM.
DO NOT PASS YOUR FOYER UNTIL AFTER THE OUTAGE.
WRITE BACK RELEVANT INFORMATION ON BACK OF THIS MESSAGE.
THAT’S ALL.
--MIO
Mio. Mio Tsuzuki.
As Hazuki scrambled to close the file it closed on its own. It must have been programmed to do that. If the message were open for any less time she wouldn’t have caught all the information.
Five fifty-five pm.
The clock on her monitor said it was 3:33. She had two hours and twenty-two minutes. The helper would be gone by then.
But…
Hazuki looked up.
“Just don’t worry so much,” her foster father said. “The security on this house is impeccable. Intruders cannot get in. You have no reason to go out anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure the community center will reopen soon enough. I’ll also tell the police to ensure the foolproof safety of the house.”
Intruders…
Intruders had penetrated this house several times now. It just hadn’t been a crazy killer or some sly pervert. It was a little girl with some hacking skills.
Nothing would make her feel safe in this house.
Her foster father said, “I’ll be off now,” and placed a hand on her shoulder.
That hand was warm and soft. But it made her think of the sensation of Yuko Yabe’s wobbly body.
She felt somehow odd.
“I’m thinking of dropping by your little brother and sister’s. I don’t think they have anything to worry about, but…I’m going to spend the night at my office tonight so I won’t be far. If anything comes up please contact me.”
He smiled. See ya.
“Okay, goodbye.”
Soon the helper had arrived, and Hazuki went to her own room.
Wait at the doveroom.
Ayumi’s rooftop.
Had something happened to Yuko?
She turned her monitor on. The turtle icon was also on her bedroom monitor, but no matter how many times she opened it the file would immediately close. She didn’t know what was going on, but it must have been one of those things. Mio had made it, after all.
It sounded like she was supposed to reply by typing in “relevant information” on the “back,” and she sought just enough time to jot something down. As long as she was typing it seemed the window would not close. She started to wonder what would happen when her voice changed, and while thinking about it she accidentally pressed the enter key.
> WHAT THE HELL
She meant to type “hell is going on?”
She tried once again to open the file, but this time at the end of the text her own additional sentence was tacked on and immediately disappeared. When she saw her incomplete sentence on the screen she went limp. She didn’t feel like finishing it anymore and put her monitor in sleep mode.
Hazuki remained there till 5:55 pm, sitting in that chair doing nothing. She didn’t put her hands on anything. At the fiftieth minute she left her room. She was going to leave her house as instructed.
She moved to the living room. The helper was gone. Her dinner was on the dining table as usual.
Two more minutes.
Those two minutes were long. Curiously, looking at the food on the dining table whetted her appetite, but she had no time to eat. Why am I suddenly hungry now? Hazuki thought.
Fifity-five and ten seconds…twenty seconds…thirty seconds.
Hazuki reflexively opened the door and went through the hall.
She hadn’t had any intention of obeying orders, but there she was.
Through the foyer and out the front door. She stopped outside the door and took a gulp and spun on her heel.
The gate light snapped back on. The foyer and house lights all went back on shortly thereafter.
The occupancy light turned on.
She could not go back in now.
If she went back in now the security camera would spot her. Once in the foyer she would also have to use her ID card to get into the house.
But the house thought she was still in it. If someone ostensibly already inside entered this house, the system was sure to go haywire.
What a mess.
Oh.
Hazuki scrambled to get her monitor out. She made sure her GPS wasn’t on.
It would be another system contradiction if her GPS showed her outside the house. Fortunately it wasn’t turned on, but for some reason the monitor was on audio mode, even though Hazuki never listened to music.
Geez.
She deleted all the notices from the center.
No one was following the letter.
It wasn’t that dark out yet.
Hazuki stared at the road leading straight ahead. The road went on forever. It made her uneasy. She couldn’t get a complete view of it. She couldn’t position herself on it. She didn’t know where exactly she was. Nothing changed in the frame when she moved, making it pointless to move at all. Maps were maps because of the delineations they made.
She looked at her monitor. Not being able to use her GPS also meant she could not use the navigator. It wasn’t as though she’d forgotten how to get there, but…
At this rate she couldn’t tell how quickly she was moving either. Nor could she confirm exactly where she was. No…
Hazuki was most definitely in her own home. The Hazuki standing on the side of the road now was a mere ghost of the real Hazuki. Hazuki’s ghost moved around like a real ghost would. Aimlessly.
Even when she stepped on the ground it seemed insincere.
She checked the time.
She wanted at least to know how much exercise she was getting out of this.
If she couldn’t measure distance she could at least measure how many calories she was burning.
She’d been walking for twenty minutes.
She walked past what used to be a burial ground for the dead.
Beyond the alleys was a wild forest.
There was a three-floor regulation-size building holding back the forest.
There was…
There was a nonregulation structure.
Ayumi’s place.
Hazuki had walked for twenty-five minutes and twenty-two seconds to reach the doveroom.
After confirming the vacancy signal at the front of the building she walked around to the back.
She climbed the metal spiral staircase.
In the illegal structure built on the roof of this building a light was on.
Hazuki hesitated to move immediately toward the door and walked along the fence to where Ayumi had first been sitting. She sat down on the chair left there.
She sat down and looked up.
She looked at the sky the way Ayumi had. The world had gone dark. It was pitch black here and there. Night skies are inconsistent, Hazuki thought uselessly.
As she focused her eyes Hazuki began to see lights. Mio had said it was weirder to be able to see the lights than not, but even Hazuki could see a few. They were smaller than the pixels on her monitor.
After much concentration she realized the black part of the night sky was actually an obstruction—it was a physical object. She thought it was one deep black object, but it was actually a bridge. And as soon as she thought this, she felt like she could recognize the entire world.
The bridge was black and large.
There was a loud noise behind her.
“What are you doing?”
Two catlike eyes peered at Hazuki from behind the door.
It was Mio.
“You were supposed to come in when you got here. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Jesus,” Mio let out, leaning forward to grab Hazuki by her right sleeve and pull her into the room.
“Don’t you think this is a bad work environment, Kono?”
Mio’s hands clasped Hazuki’s shoulders as she spoke. Mio’s face was right in front of hers. She didn’t have time to back away and was trapped looking straight into Mio’s big round eyes. She was stunned.
Pupils. Iris. Capillaries. Eyebrows. Eyelids.
A living thing.
Mio thrust Hazuki into the room.
Hazuki took a few steps toward the dove cage with her eyes still open. Mio slammed the door shut.
Mio must have felt the same thing, Hazuki thought.
She was not used to making eye contact with humans either.
Mio looked over her shoulder.
“You’re really weird.”
“What do you want?” Hazuki said in a small voice. She looked away from Mio.
“What do you mean what do I want?”
“Your file.”
“You didn’t recognize that drawing?”
“I know what it was. That’s what I’m asking now.”
“You knew? I’m so bad at drawing.”
“So?”
“It’s a turtle! I don’t know how to draw anything else. At least not animals.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Hazuki brought her hand to the wire netting. “What was that?”
“Huh? Oh, well…an electronic message or voice message would leave traces. I had to think of a way to communicate without leaving a trace. It was really hard. I found a path no one in the general population would use and put out a weak signal on it. A signal of extremely random numbers, so if anyone did happen to pick it up it wouldn’t make sense, but on a specially programmed monitor the code can be deciphered.
That’s how…”
“That’s how nothing!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Why did you do that?”
Hazuki looked around nervously. Mio started cackling. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I got…worried.”
“Nah, I mean if we still had labs I wouldn’t have called you out here, but it’s canceled. They don’t know when they’ll solve the case, and I knew you’d be worried about it in the meantime.”
“Worried about Yabe?”
Was she worried? Sure she was a little ruffled and generally uncomfortable with the situation, but as soon as she got home everything was normal, and as long as everything was normal she wouldn’t think anything out of the ordinary. She was not worried about Yuko Yabe.
Yet, Hazuki had trouble identifying what she had thought or how she felt specifically during that time.
The unpleasant sensation of carrying Yuko Yabe’s body?
Hazuki looked at the doves.
She would remember the smell and movements of the creepy animals.
What have I gotten into?
She heard Ayumi’s voice.
The door to the room with the bed opened and Ayumi appeared.
“I’m sorry if we’re causing any more trouble.”
“We’re not doing any such thing, Hazuki. Jesus, you’re so weird.”
Hazuki thought Mio was much stranger than herself.
“Tsuzuki’s explaining it poorly,” Ayumi said.
“Explaining what?”
“That message you sent, which made no sense.”
“Yes it did. I sent just enough information to get Makino to come here. I got around the system just fine.”
“Not that.”
Ayumi pushed a chair toward Hazuki. “Then what?” Ayumi said.
“The plan?”
“I think so. Yabe’s almost completely recovered. She wants to go home. Tsuzuki objects. That Chinese girl can’t be caught. I don’t care either way. Tsuzuki thought we should ask what you thought since you’ve been in this from the beginning. She thought you would be concerned. I don’t know why you would be, but that’s what Tsuzuki said.”
Mio took the chair Ayumi brought to Hazuki, spun it around, and straddled it.
Ayumi grabbed another chair by the back and pushed it toward Hazuki.
“But there was no protocol for secret communication. Anything we sent you would have been recorded. And we couldn’t guarantee any record of communication wouldn’t get you in trouble. I told her to go see you personally but this one wouldn’t have it.”
“It didn’t make sense for me to go to your place alone.”
“So Tsuzuki came up with this weird coded message. I thought she was going to ask you point-blank what you thought we should do about Yuko, but then she made you come out here. If you ask me, I think she wanted to see you.”
“What?” Mio’s face scrambled.
Wanted to see her?
Mio dropped her chin to the back of the chair. “What do you mean wanted to see her? I don’t know what you mean, Ayumi.”
“I think you do. You went to a lot of trouble to hack into electrical systems and security systems, and you used unheard-of precision to design a way to get Hazuki to come out. So yes, I think you wanted to see her. If you can make such grandiose gestures, you can certainly make much simpler ones. If you got caught you’d be in big trouble. Hacking and illegal data transfers are serious offenses, even if you are a minor. This time you shut off the power in her house for thirty seconds on top of everything. I bet you’d have to pay restitution on that.”
“Stupid. No one’s going to think some fourteen-year-old kid would commit such pointless criminal acts. Most people think kids won’t act against the system.”
“It’s because they’re kids that they do. Do such meaningless things.”
“I guess.” Mio lifted her brow.
“Either way,” Ayumi said to Hazuki, “this crazy one called you out here and wanted to talk to you face to face. I didn’t think you’d come, but…”
“Sorry.” Hazuki’s voice was soft. She was sure this was the last thing Ayumi needed. It didn’t occur to her till now.
“This one’s always apologizing, isn’t she?” Mio pointed at Hazuki. Ayumi didn’t respond. She simply turned toward the other room and said, “She came.”
Yuko Yabe stuck her head halfway out from behind the door.
“Sorry,” she said.
“This one’s apologizing now too!” Mio sounded entertained. She stood up and offered her chair to Yuko.
After looking at the chair for some time with her pink eyes, Yuko sat down.
She was wearing the same thing as when they’d first met. Ayumi must have had it cleaned. It didn’t look dirty enough.
“I started to feel weird. I was a little…confused.”
Of course.
You were violated.
You were about to be killed.
But, she said, she was also on her period, which made her disoriented.
It was a very matter-of-fact thing, but Hazuki was not used to hearing people talk about periods, and…she got a horribly raw, which is to say visceral, feeling.
“Yuko’s assailants were Ryu Kawabata, who is now dead, and Nakamura, who’s now on the run,” Mio said. She leaned against the dove cage.
“On the run?”
“On the run. The police and the area patrols are looking for him. He threw his monitor away, so the investigation has just gotten more difficult for them.”
“His monitor?”
“When there’s a person of extreme interest in a level D crime, the courts are authorized to follow their GPS units. You can track everything by satellite nowadays. According to the police report, all they found was his monitor at the house. There was no money withdrawn from his account, so it doesn’t look like he’s used his ID card. He’s apparently been on the run without food or water. I mean, unless he is a criminal he won’t get that far. A criminal will get himself caught even before there are notices out for his arrest. It’s just a matter of time before he’s caught. It’s best we wait till then.”
“You really think so?” Ayumi said.
“The police are also looking for Yuko. If it’s just a matter of time before Nakamura’s caught, it’s also just a matter of time for them to find her. Neither of them have monitors right now.”
“Yeah, but…”
“It’d be stupid to think Nakamura would get caught and not Yuko.
If they can find him, they can find her, and if she can hide here indefinitely, then Nakamura can hide somewhere forever and not be caught either.
I don’t think we can say for certain one way or the other.”
Yuko looked up uncomfortably at Ayumi. Mio looked unhappy.
“No one’s going to find Yuko because she’s got us protecting her.”
“There’s nothing to say Nakamura doesn’t have co-conspirators too,” Ayumi said.
“Yeah, but…” Mio said. She brushed against the wire netting.
The doves were startled.
“All the more reason to keep her here.”
“Uh, the subject in question is saying herself she wants to go home.”
Ayumi walked away from Yuko and sat in the chair in the corner of the room.
“Right, Yuko?”
“I don’t want to keep being a nuisance,” Yuko said.
“Well—”Ayumi started.
“The wider the window of opportunity to go home, the harder it is to do it. I think it’s plenty difficult to send her home now,” Mio said.
“Why…why were you attacked?” Hazuki asked.
Mio’s eyes went wide. It must have been a bad habit. “Good question. Yuko, why were you attacked?”
“I’m sick,” Yuko replied.
“What do you mean you’re sick? Like you’re carrying a disease?”
“No. Nothing like that. I have what they call an extrasensory defect. I think.”
“Extrasensory defect,” Mio pronounced slowly.
What did that mean?
“You’re talking about that?” Mio said. “But that was never declared an illness or a handicap. It was just announced, right?”
“It’s what I have though. I think.”
“What is it?” Ayumi asked.
It was hard to ask what kind of sickness this was.
“You don’t know?” Mio asked. “You don’t know either, Hazuki?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s kind of difficult to explain. The Academy of Perceptual Disabilities just announced it last year and said they were going to further research whether there was a relationship between aberrations in the olfactory senses or whether they were unrelated, and whether one could call them aberrations in the first place. Opinions were very divided.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I heard from my friend’s doctor. Well, ‘heard’ meaning I read something he wrote.”
“A friend’s doctor?”
“A twenty-eight-year-old German,” Mio said. “He’s taking the same session as I am. You know, statistics.”
Hazuki’d completely forgotten that Mio conducted graduate-level classes in statistics. Mio was so genius she could talk circles around anyone.
“You know how there are people who are color-blind?” said the genius. “There have been people who’ve been unable to distinguish certain color frequencies since long ago. Now, there are people who also can’t distinguish smells and tastes in the same way. They can’t determine if something’s bitter or sour. People with extrasensory defects can’t tell shapes apart, er—it’s not that they aren’t capable of it. Oh, it’s hard to explain.
“Okay.” Mio drew a tablet from her pocket and connected the monitor and drew something with her fingertip. While drawing she started to chuckle.
“Ha! I’m so bad at this! Oh well. Okay, Hazuki, what is this?”
On the display screen was a drawing of something that looked like a bird.
“A bird.”
“Ha ha ha. You can tell? I feel like it looks like a turtle or something. Okay, so it’s a dove. I drew that guy over there sleeping in the corner of the cage. I drew it the way I thought it looked. See, you can tell by this bit here that it’s a dove. See it?”
Now that you mention it.
“Thing is…” Mio started and got serious. “If that’s what this is, then what’s this? It’s a little childish, but then…”
Mio drew erratically on the screen, then searched for something in the monitor and showed the new drawing to Hazuki.
“What about this?”
On the screen was a cartoon deformée image of a dove.
Even Hazuki could tell what that was. Some famous person had drawn it. It had been used as the logo of the international bird preservation society a few years ago. The lines were simple and the details were charming. For an animal lover like Hazuki the attraction was obvious, and she had even downloaded a whole picture book of drawings by the illustrator.
“This is a caricature of the dove. But a real bird?”
Mio faced the monitor toward the dove.
The monitor beeped.
“This is the real bird.”
On the screen was an image of the dove behind a wire-mesh cage.
“People long ago used to call these photographs. This image and that bird are almost identical. The image was taken from the dove. And this cartoon character is also a dove, at first glance.” Mio worked at the monitor and divided the screen in two, the drawing of the dove on one side and the picture of the bird on the other.
“But these two things are totally different.”
“So what?”
“I can see that this image is the dove. It’s not that cute. It’s kind of gross, even. It’s growing feathers. It has bumps all over it. I tried to draw all those details, but as you can see, it didn’t matter how hard I tried. The result was this ugly drawing.”
Mio divided the screen in three now to present her first drawing along with the other two.
“It’s really bad. But it’s because I don’t know how to draw that it looks this way. What I see when I look at the bird is this picture. You following me so far?”
“Yeah, but…” Hazuki answered tentatively.
Mio turned the display toward Yuko.
“Yuko, which one is real?”
Yuko looked at the screen for a while, then turned and looked at the birds behind Mio.
“I’m not sure.”
“Right.”
“If I had to guess,” Yuko said, and pointed at the caricature.
“There you go,” Mio said, looking at Hazuki again.
“There I go where? What do you mean?”
“Yuko sees the world this way.”
“What way?”
“In these cute cartoon caricatures,” Mio said, annoyed. “Deformée actually means something that’s been misshapen. Exaggerated or diminished visual characteristics in drawings. With abstraction and symbolism and transposition. Hard stuff. Anyway, this kind of art is an expression.”
Mio turned the screen toward Hazuki.
“When I try to express it, it’s shitty. When an expert does it, it’s cute. But that’s just a difference in drawing skills. I’m sure the guy who drew this and I see something closer to that picture when we look at doves. Actually, I’m positive people think we are seeing the same exact thing. There are those who differ, though.”
“You mean that the cartoonist might have seen the dove exactly the way he drew it?”
“I have no idea how he sees it,” Mio said. “Only Yuko can know what she sees. Consciousness is a response and responses can’t be embodied, so they can’t be transformed or moved or transferred. Drawing what your consciousness responds to is about as close as we get.
“Look,” Mio said once more and showed Hazuki the screen. “There’s no way someone can draw exactly what they see. I thought I was drawing it exactly, but it’s still closer to the cartoon of the dove than it is this picture.”
“I see…”
In other words, you couldn’t look directly into someone’s mind. Hazuki suddenly got uncomfortable.
People couldn’t connect to each other.
“But if we believe what Yuko’s telling us, that means that at the very least she does in fact see the world differently than we do. But actually, even the world Ayumi sees is different from the one you see. It’s just that the difference in perception between you two is a normal aberration. When the difference is much greater, it’s called abnormal. Yuko’s perception might be abnormal, but it doesn’t affect her daily life or have a serious impact on the human workings. For now.”
That was why they didn’t call it a disability.
“It’s hard to imagine this is congenital, but if it’s acquired then there’s no way to discern who’s been affected by it. Cause unknown. Some people say it’s the result of reality deprivation.”
“Reality…you mean real access?” Hazuki said.
“It’s like people who are tone-deaf. People say that it’s a result of children being exposed to electrical noises while developing their sense of hearing. I don’t really understand myself, but they say that you go tone-deaf when you’re restricted from experiencing the broad range of natural sounds. Similarly, people are saying you have extrasensory defects from being raised from infancy in front of a monitor’s limited range of colors and shapes. Like I said, I don’t know personally. It’s just someone’s theory.”
“That could be me,” Yuko said. “Mom and Dad were really busy all the time. They bought me a fundamental guardian system.”
“Ah…”
“We had that at my place too,” Mio said. “I didn’t use it properly though. I broke it and played with it like a toy. They were so pissed. I was pretty much raised by that Chinese family below us, anyway. But you, Yuko, you were much more obedient.”
“Not obedient,” Yuko said. “Just that if I broke that thing they would never buy me anything again. Then I’d have nothing.”
“It was expensive. Well, cheaper than hiring someone, but still…”
“And…”
Ayumi had remained silent this whole time but finally turned to Yuko and asked, “What does your extrasensory defect and the attack have to do with each other?”
She didn’t see how they could be related.
“Someone said I was blasphemous.”
Yuko lowered her eyes.
“What do you mean, blasphemous?” Mio asked.
“Remember when we drew pictures of ourselves in communication lab? Was it last year?”
“Yeah. I remember. I was really bad at drawing back then too,” Mio said and searched her monitor anew. “Look. Here. The instructor didn’t say anything, but that damned counselor Fuwa straight out laughed out loud.”
On her screen was a drawing of what looked like a human face, easily distinguishable as at least having been drawn by Mio, regardless of any resemblance to herself.
“That was a major failure on her part as a counselor.”
To think of what you looked like; to imagine what your face communicated to others; to then know how people perceived you; to determine the difference between how you saw yourself and how you were seen by others—that had been the goal of that communication exercise.
Hazuki had hated it, to be honest. She didn’t see the point in looking at herself for any length of time or in knowing how others perceived her. Hazuki never looked at anyone and didn’t let herself be seen by anyone. She looked at no one.
“Can I see that for a second?” Yuko extended her hand. Mio handed over her monitor.
“Is it a problem if I pull up my public file?”
“Not really. Not if it’s public data.”
Yuko pressed the keys with her slim fingers. Her pink nail polish was badly chipped.
The self-portraits from communication lab were used through the year on everyone’s public profile pages—with their consent, of course. Hazuki hadn’t consented. Yuko, having accessed her own profile, turned the monitor screen toward the others.
“This is my self-portrait.”
Pink hair, pink pupils. Pink piercing.
It was a splendid rendering of a young woman.
“You’re good!”
“I don’t know. I drew that looking in a mirror. Just like you did looking at the dove, I was drawing exactly what I thought I saw. I didn’t think anything of it when I was drawing it. A lot of kids were drawing this way.”
“It’s a copy.”
Mio kept looking at the screen in admiration.
“You can tell there’s an original. Every expression is always just a copy of some kind of original. There’s some originality in the process or method. But when it’s a child, it’s difficult to simplify complex patterns, so they mimic a method that’s easier to understand. That’s how they draw buildings and for that matter, animals. It’s a copy of a drawing, but it’s also an imitation of a thought process, because you’re drawing something deliberately unlike the way it is in reality. The child adopts a method of abstraction. But after depicting things in this way for a while, you eventually learn the difference between what you see and what you depict. That’s how you learn to revise and develop your own patterns. But these days we don’t really have the opportunity to draw anything. Most homes don’t have paper, for starters.”
Hazuki’s home had paper that her father had brought over once.
But she didn’t have anything to draw with.
“That’s why you don’t get to practice the process. And more and more people keep imitating. We fix it in our minds that this is how we have to draw, so we never learn the difference between what we see and what we draw. It’s all right since we hardly see reality. So there are some people who can draw themselves exactly how they look. But you’re different, Yuko.”
“Really?” Hazuki asked and Yuko nodded.
“But you can’t know that. There’s no way to know. So…”
They couldn’t know, could they. In fact, Hazuki had no idea even now.
“I never thought that I was so different from everyone else. I was told I drew very prettily. I wasn’t concerned with how differently I saw,” Yuko said.
“I was laughed at,” Mio said.
“But, so yeah, I got a strange message at the beginning of last month.”
“Strange how?”
“An anonymous one.”
“You can always find out the sender, even if it’s anonymous.”
“I didn’t know who it was,” Yuko said.
“What did it say?”
“Exactly what you just did, Mio. That it was a copy.”
“Copy?”
“Yeah. Copy. As in, it isn’t a self-portrait. It’s plagiarism. They said it was extremely inconsiderate of me to pass off the drawing as my own face. So I responded that it wasn’t a copy. I said that’s exactly how I drew it originally, exactly how I saw myself. Then they said I was sick. In fact they said it was a blasphemous sickness. That if I really saw things this way I didn’t deserve to live.”
“That’s creepy,” Mio said.
“But what does that mean, blasphemous, anyway? What is it blaspheming?” Yuko asked.
“If anything’s blasphemous, it’s what Mio thinks a dove looks like,”
Ayumi said.
“Ouch! I won’t disagree, but it’s not my fault Yuko’s so good at drawing. It’s not about that anyway. Okay, so what’s blasphemous about extrasensory defects?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know then either. But I started wondering if it meant I was sick that I thought I looked that way, and then I started to feel weird. I knew a little bit about it. I did a little research. But I didn’t really understand. Then we had that medical exam. You remember…”
“Did you talk to Fuwa about it?”
“I couldn’t. I wanted to ask someone I knew.”
It would be difficult to talk about accusations of blasphemy to a relative stranger, no doubt.
“So I tried divinations and things like that. I went to medical pages on my monitor. That’s when I found the International Caricature Symptoms Academy’s extrasensory defect recognition test.”
“International what?”
“Caricature Symptoms Academy. I took their test and the results were positive.”
Yuko cocked her head to one side. “It was bunk. It was baseless. It couldn’t be. It was no more than a gag page created by some pervert to increase his page views. Total bunk.”
“Well, maybe not bunk, but probably a website made by the guys who sent you the message,” Mio said.
“What do you mean?” Hazuki asked.
“The original message came from them, right? They did a search on your self-portrait and found someone who drew a deformed character that resembled your drawing and sent you a scary message, then they said they’d kill you for having an extrasensory defect.”
Then…
What were they planning on doing preparing such a test?
“In other words, they want to cleanse the world of people with extrasensory defects?”
Mio placed her chin in her hands and said with an unusually quiet air, “It has nothing to do with whether it really tests the abnormality but whether anyone will take the test. In other words the test is a trap, and those who take it…”
Are killed.
“I wouldn’t have ever thought of that,” Yuko said. “The results of the test were serious, and I got this reply from them saying that my abnormality was dangerous. That it was a problematic disease I should tell no one about. Then it told me to come out for the cure.”
“Don’t believe that crap,” Mio said aloud. “Only a child would fall for that.”
“We are children,” Ayumi said.
“You can’t make that judgment.”
“Judgment? Well, I wouldn’t buy it. Besides, it was nighttime, right?
Weren’t you scared to go out?”
“I was more scared of doing nothing about it. You know, because of that first message. I thought I would be killed if I really had this disease.”
“Oh, right,” Mio said.
“Mom and Dad couldn’t know. They were too sensitive. I couldn’t talk to them about any of this, so if I was going to be able to fix this, I figured I’d fix it as soon as possible. I didn’t fathom…”
No one would have thought there’d be someone waiting to kill her.
“You know that old building by the bridge?”
“No, I don’t,” Mio said, put off.
“It’s an old factory,” Ayumi said.
“It’s condemned.”
“I didn’t know that. I confirmed the location they gave me on my monitor and it didn’t come up as a commercial building, a manufacturing building, or a residential building. It was…nothing. It was just a site off the middle of a traffic route. It was public land, but still…on the map the building was simply marked green, so I assumed it was a hospital. If it were Section B or C, I wouldn’t have gone. But when I arrived no one was there.
“Just when I got scared and was about to leave, those guys came out with sticks and knives.”
“Yikes,” Mio said with a grimace. “That’s scary. That’s when they were like, ‘Die!’?”
“They didn’t say anything like that. But they were saying something about how God made man and something about an eternity of something or other…I didn’t understand. They just yelled at me, and then as they attacked, I defended myself with the only thing I had—my monitor. Then my monitor snapped and broke. I didn’t know what was going on. In fact I didn’t realize I was set up until yesterday. So I started running with all my might and got to the bridge, when…”
Rey Mao was there.
“And that’s when the fight began,” Mio said, standing up. “What was cat girl doing? Probably practicing her gongfu, right? Then it got out of hand, and that’s when she showed up, right?”
Ayumi.
For some reason she was staring through the floor.
“I was so scared,” Yuko said. “I probably hung on to her when I saw her coming my way. I vaguely remember screaming, but I don’t know what I said, and I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember anything after that. When I came to, I found myself following her.”
Section C. The old red-light district. Rey Mao’s neighborhood.
“Where’s she living now?” Mio asked.
“Near your place. It was underground, but I knew it was Section C.”
“How?”
“The smell. Back when I lived in the city, I had relatives in Section C. When I was little my parents would leave me there while they went on vacation. I hated it. There were all these weird people and gross smells, and it was all polluted. But when I complained about it they’d get mad at me. They told me the red-light district was just like that.”
Mio made a confused look.
She was also a resident of Section C.
Yuko read Mio’s reaction. “Shit, I’m sorry,” she mumbled softly. “But that’s how it really was. I was only four or five, but I thought it was so much better to look at the district on a monitor. No offense, Mio, but I really hated it there. That’s how I knew by the smell that I was there again. But I was scared. I couldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t keep walking. Then she started bringing me food.”
“The cat.”
Rey Mao.
The undocumented girl with Chinese clothes.
“She didn’t tell me her name. I answered all her questions. Then she said, ‘You’re the same as Mio Tsuzuki, then,’ and she told me you lived nearby. She told me to go see you.”
“Hmph.”
Mio plopped down on the floor. What’d that bitch say about me? She sighed.
“Nothing bad, actually. She said you were friends…once?”
“Tch, friends. We played together when we were little.”
Yuko looked straight at Mio with her pink pupils.
“But…she told me a lot of stories. I was crying the whole time and couldn’t remember anything, but thanks to her I calmed down a little. But just as I stopped being so scared I realized suddenly that I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have a monitor, so I didn’t have a sense of time and I didn’t know where exactly I was. I was so confused, and when she left I went outside. That’s when you two came by.”
“Is that so.”
That day in the rain…
Hazuki had had no idea of all the things going through Yuko’s mind when they saw her there. Her talking with such familiarity about Section C, her knowing exactly where Mio lived, her standing there in the rain without an umbrella: there was a reason for all of that.
Yuko’s not knowing about the murder and her strange reaction to news of it would all be normal in that situation. Everyone had their reasons for doing what they did; those reasons produced all kinds of emotions; and those emotions prompted action. The more Hazuki thought about it the more obvious it all seemed to her, and she became uneasy. You couldn’t look inside a person’s head. So?
There was no way of knowing anything about this.
None at all.
Wait. Ayumi might have known.
“After that I lost consciousness again,” Yuko said. “The person that was killed was one of the guys attacking me. In which case, I had even less of an idea of what had happened, and I panicked.”
“Then you broke into a fever,” Ayumi said, still facing the wall. “You had a 105 degree fever.”
“You’re cold, Ayumi,” Mio said as she approached her. “I mean, you knew, more or less, what was going on. And you didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t know what happened to her afterward. She was safe as far as I could see, and since she didn’t ask for help I didn’t offer it.”
“Miss Kono did everything she could. See, I feel better and everything.” Yuko looked up at Mio.
“And you too. I wanted to thank you and Miss Makino.”
“What the…”
Mio walked past Ayumi to the other wall and said she’s so weird.
“So I’m ready to go home. I won’t continue to be a bother.”
“But,” Hazuki began and paused. “One of the assailants is dead and the other is on the run. Isn’t it dangerous?” she said finally.
“The police will protect me.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
Mio let out a sound of uncertainty.
“The police are trying to establish a connection between your disappearance and the murders. Obviously they’ve looked into your communication logs. They’re certain to have made the connection between you, Nakamura, and the now-dead Kawabata. They don’t know how Kawabata died, but it’s clear Nakamura is involved, and they’ll agree you were being followed. So yeah, if you appeared now they’d protect you. But…”
“But what?”
“How will you explain the several days of disappearance?”
“I don’t want to cause anyone any more problems,” Yuko said, looking down. “Not for that other girl either.”
“You mean Cat Freak? If you think about it though, if Nakamura is ever caught, they’ll find out about her too. She helped you knowing that much, so if you were interrogated you could just tell them you were hiding out at her place the whole time. It’s like you were anyway,” Mio said.
“No. For the time being she should just not say anything about any of this,” Ayumi said.
“Yeah…” Mio responded. “It makes no difference, right?”
“No, if Yuko talks about Rey Mao before they catch Nakamura, she’ll be under suspicion.”
“Oh, right.”
The one who was killed was not the one being violated, but the one who was violating—the violator was the victim.
If someone saved Yuko knowing who her assailant was, Rey Mao would naturally be the first under suspicion.
“I don’t think Nakamura will be caught so easily. There was another murder yesterday. I still think it’d be better for her to be protected by the police than to hide out here.”
The latest victim—Asumi Aikawa. Hazuki couldn’t remember her face.
However, Nakamura was on the run and wanted by the police. Would someone in that situation still be killing right now? Couldn’t this be an unrelated event?
“But, Mio, you’re the one who said that Rey Mao being questioned by the police would threaten the entirety of Section C and its residents. That may still be, but I doubt if Nakamura knows all about Rey Mao’s situation. I mean, even Yuko didn’t catch her name. There’s no way she’d have given up that information accidentally,” Hazuki said.
“So what’s she supposed to say about the week she disappeared?”
“I’ll just tell them I don’t know,” Yuko said.
“Temporary amnesia,” Ayumi said “Isn’t that a little childish? It’s so convenient,” Mio said.
“That’s not true.” Ayumi stood up. “If she were lying—if she were lying, that would be the most productive answer. You just say you don’t know anything if they ask.”
“You mean she just lost consciousness for a week and magically regained it?”
“No, I mean that if she started to make up something she’d have to pile on more and more lies, details. Eventually she’d say something that would expose the lie. Why not just say ‘I don’t know’ and be confused about the whole situation from the beginning.”
“One answer for all of it then. ‘I don’t know,’” Yuko said.
Mio crossed her arms and started pacing. “What do you think, Hazuki?”
“I, uh, don’t really know, but even if she decided to pretend she doesn’t know, how’s she going to get to the police?”
“Ahh.” More of Mio’s signature eye-widening.
“What do you mean how?”
“Is Yuko going to go home still having no idea what’s what?”
“Well, she’s not going to just waltz in and say hi to her parents, but let’s say she’s walking aimlessly around her neighborhood. The police would apprehend her then, right?”
“And what if Nakamura finds her first?” Just as Hazuki asked the question, Yuko hugged her shoulders.
She was scared.
“Where do you live, Yuko?”
“Huh?”
Yuko said her address.
It would take at least an hour to get there on foot.
“So you’re pretty far from here. You think she should walk that alone? I didn’t see any police or area cops in the twenty minutes it took me to walk here. I assume you didn’t either, Mio.”
“This is a safe area, so they never patrol here,” Mio said.
“If I got this straight, a straight path from here to Yuko’s house would lead through Section C. Even if she went by way of the community center she’d have to walk through Section B.”
“There’s that green preserve by the center. The police think Nakamura might be hiding out there, and they’ve focused their search to that area. So what about going to the community center? Guaranteed to be lots of cops there.”
“But that means Nakamura might be there too,” Ayumi said.
Shit! Mio spit out.
“Anyway,” Hazuki continued. “If she’s going to go to the police, this is the safest place for her to be picked up.”
“But,” Yuko lowered her pale eyes. “You all would be…”
“That’s the safest way to go.”
“Call the police here? Hazuki. What are you going to do when they come? Are you retarded?”
“Look, I know we can’t do that. We can’t explain why she’s here. It’d be unnatural for us to say we just saw her milling around coincidentally and decided to protect her. We’d been told not to go out and all. If we obeyed the warning how would we have run into her, right?”
“Maybe we take her somewhere else and call the police there?”
“How? Yuko doesn’t have a friggin’ monitor.” Mio scowled.
“She needs to borrow someone’s monitor to get ahold of the police. What about the emergency monitor at the center of town?”
“Someone with amnesia using the emergency monitor? You’d think she’d have used it earlier rather than waiting a week.”
“Then there’s no other way for her to go to the police other than to have them find her. But sending her out alone is too dangerous. It’s no less dangerous if we go with her, and if the police find all of us, it’d be the same as if they came and got her here.”
“Hazuki’s right,” Ayumi said. “In the end, we’re just kids. If we’re thinking about Yuko’s safety, the best solution is to call the police from here and explain everything. But then we’d be completely exposed— Hazuki’s sneaking out, Mio’s hacking, and my being up here at all.”
Yuko’s life couldn’t be exchanged.
Ayumi didn’t say it but Hazuki heard it.
Mio shook her hands through her hair frantically. “Yeah, I mean getting caught is one thing, but isn’t this all really frustrating?”
“I don’t understand. Frustrating?”
“Frustrating, meaning I don’t like the way this feels. Do you understand that?” Mio said. Ayumi said, “No, I still don’t understand.” Hazuki had a feeling she did.
Though it was just a feeling.
Mio rubbed her head with her right hand and then stopped. “Wait a minute!” she said. “I know how we can call the police without actually calling them.”
She looked around at everyone.
“Cheer up!” Mio said. “Okay, we all go to Hazuki’s house.”
“Huh?”
“It’s near here, and it’s in the safe area of Section A, plus no one’s there, and it’s secure as hell. Am I right?”
“You are, but—”
“You guys are no fun.” Mio sighed. “Look. First I’ll jigger the system to let Hazuki back into her house. Then Yuko will kind of wander past the gate of the house. The surveillance camera will catch it and notify the security company. Hazuki will say she was just studying when she looked at the screen, recognized her, and immediately called the emergency line. What do you think?” She looked around, trying to make eye contact with the others.
“The police will come flying to her place,” Mio concluded.
“Is that…okay?” Yuko turned her painfully beseeching look over to Hazuki.
Hazuki nodded.
That should be fine, she thought.