Chapter 003
HOW DO I describe this smell? Hazuki couldn’t stop asking herself.
RGB. CMYK. Describing colors was easy. Hazuki didn’t know the words herself, but there were apparently any number of ways to describe various timeless color palettes. There existed even a plentiful lexicon for shape and texture. Brightness and temperature could be quantified. Sounds had wavelengths, and there were even ways to describe timbre. Sound itself was a way to describe aural input. There were even mimetic words to describe touch.
Sight, touch, sound could all be described.
When it came to taste and fragrance however, things got really miserable.
Even taste though could be described with any combination of sweet, spicy, bitter, and sour. There weren’t such categories for smell. If you took apart the components of a smell you could probably quantify aspects, but smell could not be understood in numbers. There was unfortunately no figurative translation of this hypothetical math.
That was why there was no more concrete way to describe a smell than to announce what it was you were smelling.
But if you said something smelled like roses, a person who’d never smelled a rose would not know what it was you meant. You could say it was intoxicating or stimulating, but those things meant nothing. You could also say something smelled sweet or sour, but those were expressions associated with flavor; well, except for something that smelled fishy, but that described a situation, not necessarily a smell.
Something either smelled good or it smelled bad.
Smells were generally categorized as pleasant or unpleasant.
Particular distinctions or unique characteristics could not be precisely described. This smell was not necessarily good or bad. It was unlike any other smell. The smell of the city. The smell of outside. The smell of air.
So this was the smell of water.
Water from a faucet didn’t smell like this.
In any case it wasn’t a smell you found indoors.
“I’m wet,” Ayumi said. “Is this material really water repellent?”
Hazuki didn’t know either. “A small clear droplet of water crystallizes like dew.”
When she said that, Ayumi told Hazuki that real dew was whiter. Hazuki didn’t know what real dew was. Was it like when the cable broke down and data got noisy, creating a white haze?
The air was clear but the town was dark.
The buildings were old. There was not even a uniform architecture.
If it looked sooty out it was because the building materials were blackened. Verticals were all a little crooked. Cables connecting the tops of utility poles to individual doors drooped, only adding to the effect of incoherence. This region hadn’t been retrofitted with underground cables. Meaning that the town must have been built at least twenty years ago.
It was Section C.
More commonly known as an extinct red-light district.
Of the two great residential zones in the region, one of them was Section C. As the name implied, it hadn’t always been a living quarter, but if asked, Hazuki could not say what it was. She had the impression from the phrase “red-light district” and the age of the buildings that the area must have been a low-level living quarter, but she’d been told over and over that there was nothing different about the people who lived here.
That much was obvious. Where someone came from or what they did was no reason to judge them. It wasn’t possible. It was so obvious it didn’t bear repeating, and careful instruction on that matter made such discrimination actually seem less natural.
However, Hazuki’d just learned that there was a time in the past when geographic discrimination and physical discrimination had sparked conflict. Everything had a troubled history. She thought that to bring excessive attention to it would actually have the opposite of the intended effect.
If you keep saying we’re all equal, people will start to think we aren’t.
In reality, there happened to be a disproportionately large number of Section C residents who were economically depressed. Section C also happened to be located next to the most ethnically diverse residential section—Section B.
There may be no difference between us but there is disparity.
You could tell just by looking at the color coding of the navigator. Public institutions with green areas were all green, commercial regions were blue, and the industrial areas were gray. General residential sections—save for the one under development, Section A—were mostly marked white. And yet Section B was yellow and Section C was magenta. Where B and C overlapped was red. It wasn’t to denote how dangerous it was. It was ostensibly just color-coordination, but red was officially designated a color of danger, and thus the association was impossible to avoid. Even a child could discern the significance of a map simply color-coded in red, with a little thought. So…
They couldn’t conceive of discrimination against people who lived in that region, but Hazuki couldn’t say with any confidence that if the preconceived notion of the area being dangerous wasn’t germinating deep in the minds of these children.
But if they’d not kept insisting we were equal I’d never think about it, thought Hazuki.
People who lived in the same region didn’t have intimate relations to begin with. Most communications took place on monitors through cables, so there was no way of knowing where they lived or what thy looked like; their gender, age, or even ethnicity.
The information broadcast through the wires was the only reality. Most of reality was a lie.
There was no difference between truth and falsehood.
There was no point in knowing it.
Proof of this lay in the fact that Hazuki had no idea of the names or provenance of most of the people she’d physically met in communication groups.
Under that circumstance, Hazuki thought it would be difficult for these same people to start any kind of antagonism.
Maybe these were just the ramblings of a child.
Hazuki took another look at the view. She couldn’t get her eyes used to it. She couldn’t get used to either the front or back. If the cityscape were in a monitor, it wouldn’t matter how dissimilar the elements were on screen, she’d just turn her head and be in her room again.
She couldn’t get stable. The width of the road, height of the buildings, and layout of the city were all curiously inconsistent, her sense of scale totally inverted. She couldn’t place herself in it. She felt as though she might just float off into space.
She looked around and ended her gaze upon Ayumi.
Ayumi was looking at her portable monitor.
“It should be around here. Tsuzuki must—” Ayumi bent her neck before finishing the words, tilting her face away from Hazuki. She must live in Section C. Ayumi swallowed the rest of the sentence.
Hazuki, uncharacteristically, was also thinking about this. Mio Tsuzuki and Section C didn’t go well together. But the address they got from their search clearly indicated that she lived in the area.
Yet for her to think such a thing must mean that despite herself Hazuki had some prejudice against Section C. Because all she knew about Mio Tsuzuki was that she was at an unusually high study level, she assumed that Tsuzuki couldn’t be from Section C, and therefore assumed this was some kind of coincidence. Considering she wasn’t conscientiously disdaining the assumption, there was no mistaking Hazuki had some kind of prejudice.
“Oh.” Ayumi made a small sound.
Hazuki expanded her gaze out toward where Ayumi was looking.
Just beyond an unusually narrow road.
Another even narrower road sandwiched between walls made of cheap building material.
“Yabe.”
A groupmate.
She had trouble putting a face to the name. In regular clothes, it’d be even harder. She concentrated her eyes. She started to recall what she’d looked like. Skin nearly translucent, wearing pink contacts that were popular a while ago. It looked good on her, so it didn’t strike Hazuki as outdated.
She didn’t know much else. But that she remembered that much must mean Yabe was a girl from her class. No matter how tenuous the relationship, she could at least distinguish between people she’d only seen on monitors and those she’d physically met. And if she’d met them in person it couldn’t have been anywhere outside of the communication group.
Speaking of which…
Yabe, Yuko Yabe…she hadn’t been in class today.
I wonder what she’s doing.
Yuko Yabe looked up, exhausted, and stood under the eaves. She didn’t appear to be wearing any rain gear and had on only a light layer of clothing. She must have been soaked.
“She’s wet.”
Waterproof materials are made precisely for this kind of thing, Ayumi thought, just as she stepped into a flooded road. “Let’s leave quickly,” Ayumi said without turning around.
I’m glad I didn’t say anything pointless, Hazuki thought.
Still, was Ayumi not concerned about that girl?
Wouldn’t you normally be concerned?
It wasn’t really any of their business. Thus revising her opinion, Hazuki stepped out under the rain and into the unsettling city. That was when it happened.
Ayumi had turned away from Yabe’s face. Probably on purpose, so she didn’t have to look at her.
No matter the situation, of course she didn’t like being looked at. Hazuki did not look at her either, so she wasn’t sure why she thought it. But for some reason she did. It seemed Ayumi had the same thought occur to her, and they both stopped moving.
Wait. The sound just came through the shushing of the rainfall.
Ayumi wasn’t sure whether she’d stopped or heard the call first.
As she turned on her heel the pink-lensed Yuko Yabe was approaching them.
“Wait,” Yuko repeated.
She was talking to Ayumi, because Hazuki had already stopped and turned around.
“Is everything okay?” Yuko asked. Ayumi didn’t turn around. “Hey,”
Yuko probed, and Ayumi said, “I’m fine.” Hazuki didn’t know what was going on.
Yuko tentatively stared at Ayumi’s back, which showed no sign of turning about, and eventually put Hazuki back in her field of vision.
“Did something…happen?”
She asked as if her thoughts were deep somewhere.
Hazuki probed further instead of answering. “What do you mean, did something happen?”
“Well you’re…acting strange.”
“You don’t know then?”
She apparently didn’t know about the murder that had taken place in the area.
News had gotten out about an hour ago.
Hazuki had confirmed it on their way here. If Yuko had been at home she should have known. This kind of emergency data would be displayed on any active monitor, no matter your profession.
When Hazuki asked if she really didn’t know, Yuko said it was because her monitor was broken.
“Broken?”
Was there some kind of trouble? Even so, she should have been at home. Was she saying the main terminal was broken too?
“Murder. In this area.”
“Murder?”
Yuko raised her eyebrows.
“Random killing under the North-South Line bridge.”
“So.”
“So?”
“So that person, after that thing…”
“This time it was a boy,” Ayumi said and turned her body.
“Here.”
Ayumi showed her own monitor to Yuko.
Portable monitors have small displays, which made it hard for Hazuki to see, but she was sure Ayumi was showing information on the victim.
“Ryu Kawabata. Age sixteen. Son of an average insurance and hygiene clerk.”
Ayumi brought the monitor closer to Yuko after speaking. The pink contact lenses reflected the screen.
“This is the victim.”
Yuko stared at the monitor until the mist on her temple collected enough moisture to trickle down. Then, tensing her forehead, she glanced at Hazuki.
“What are you doing with this?”
That’s what I’d like to know, Hazuki thought.
But…
She couldn’t help but think Ayumi and Yuko were sharing some kind of information, just from having listened to the way Yuko spoke earlier.
He wasn’t dead. Ayumi must have known why Yuko was absent from class today.
Still…
If that were the case, the way Ayumi saw Yuko looking at and then ignoring her, and then acting like she couldn’t get away from her fast enough, was all unsettling.
As if Yuko noticed Hazuki was unusually deep in thought. What. What was it?
“That can’t be.”
“Don’t worry, we didn’t come here to check on you,” Ayumi said.
“We’re looking for Mio Tsuzuki’s house.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s raining.”
The raindrops grew heavier, lengthening. They fell harder.
“Her house is over there, by where the car is parked.”
“Car?”
“Yeah, one of those gas-consuming things that moved people around a long time ago.”
On the road at the edge of Section B was an old-fashioned personal car, one not to be ridden. Did it still run?
“Her entrance is on the second floor. The ground floor is a store. Only people from China in there.”
“What do you mean store? Is it a Real Shop?” Ayumi said that it wasn’t.
“It’s a deli that resisted the trend of distributing legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Even though they’re legal, people didn’t look favorably upon them, so it was impossible to get vendor licenses in the commercial zones.”
“Alcohol…drug-related then.”
Ayumi chuckled for some reason and said, “That probably wasn’t all.”
“It used to be that kind of place,” Yuko said. “…since it used to be a red-light district and all.”
Hazuki didn’t quite understand.
As Ayumi dithered, she had already started heading toward the buildings.
Yuko was still getting wet from the rain.
Hazuki selected and without inputting any more words, followed Ayumi.
She felt Yuko’s pink lenses on her back all the way down to the corner of the block. Something was making an unrecognizable cracking sound. She turned and looked over her shoulder to find Yuko still standing there. In the distance behind her, the concrete wall was ablating, slowly falling apart.
The city was decaying.
No, buildings from the twentieth century weren’t made with proper materials.
The design was passé. The windows didn’t match, and on top of it all, strange ornaments with ancient messages decorated the walls.
She’d heard that those were called “advertisements.”
Are advertisements like notifications? she wondered.
Exposing so little data to the outside, and in that dirty way, making it stand out, exactly what kind of notifying purpose was it serving? Hazuki could not fathom. She could not fathom the way people in the past thought.
The middle of the poster was blackened. There were several women in outdated fashions sitting on chairs.
“You shouldn’t peek in.”
Ayumi circled the building as she spoke and stood by a glass door that looked like an entrance.
She said, “This place looks old-fashioned. I wonder if we can go in,” and poked the keyboard she found at the entrance.
“We can’t use our ID cards.”
“There’s no card reader. We can’t even connect our monitors? What about vocal recognition readers?”
“I’m pretty sure they had PINs back then. Otherwise we have to actually get permission from someone on the other side of the door.”
Ayumi said what an ordeal that would be and stood in front of the door.
The door creaked open.
“It’s open. There’s no lock.”
The building lobby was lined with well-worn cheap imitation marble. The old elevator had long been out of service, and beyond a sliding door left open were scattered plastic utensils and empty glass bottles. Some of the walls had long since collapsed and exposed all the cables, some of which had been yanked out and connected to what looked like a golden box on the floor. There was yet another thick cable coming out of the box as if crawling on the floor and along the wall. Ayumi looked at it nonchalantly. Then glanced at Hazuki. “Let’s go?”
“Isn’t it kind of amazing?”
“Maybe.”
To come all the way here just to go back? It wasn’t like the rain was going to let up anytime soon. Their uniforms wouldn’t get wet, but their hair was already soaked. Hazuki pulled the disc out of her bag.
“Here,” Ayumi said as she followed the cable on the floor with her eyes.
“But…Tsuzuki has severed communications on her monitor.” Which is why we came here, Hazuki thought.
In other words.
She doesn’t want to see us.
“Isn’t that what you were thinking?” Ayumi said. She hadn’t said anything but probably read the look on her face. Even though they wouldn’t look at one another’s faces or anything.
“We’d be a bigger nuisance if we just left.”
“Do you want to access the terminal at home?”
“Not really.”
“It looks unused. It should be fine,” Ayumi said as she approached the cable.
The cable wound up the stairs.
Her footsteps made thumping sounds. There was an endless buzzing.
It must have been either an old lamp or an electric fan.
Or was the cable running something?
“She said it was the second floor, right?”
Three along the hall, one around the corner, four doors altogether. Ayumi looked at the floor. The cable extended not just from the bottom of the stairs but out from the top of them too. Two outlets were conjoined at one point, then the cable ran down the middle of the hall and through the doorway around the corner. The wall on one side of the hall was slightly peeling, with a hole dug through where the cable ran.
“It’s so primitive,” Ayumi said smartly as she went straight to the door at the corner. There was no sign on it or anything. There was no way of knowing which room was Tsuzuki’s. The address they found online indicated only the neighborhood and building number. Hazuki hadn’t even considered that the building might be some old tenement housing complex.
“Wait.”
She couldn’t possibly just know where to go. Ayumi definitely knew a lot of things Hazuki didn’t, but this building had been pretty hard to find. Ayumi pointed a finger.
“We can’t get in.”
The doorknobs had been plucked off all three doors in the hallway.
Ayumi stopped dead in front of the door around the corner. It was a nondescript door. It had a doorknob at least. There was no residential name plaque on it, nor a visitor scan sensor. Ayumi peered into the hole through which the cable ran.
Probably, this was where the old-fashioned interphone used to be back in the day. You’d see houses like this in old moving pictures. Complicated machines that combined mics, cameras, and speakers so that residents could communicate with people outside.
“Can you see anything?”
Ayumi answered, “Nothing.”
They briefly stopped moving.
Ayumi has probably never visited another person’s home. She’s not used to it.
The buzzing continued.
Suddenly, Ayumi grabbed the doorknob.
The door opened easily. The volume of the noise increased.
“It opens,” Ayumi said as she opened the door and took one step in. Hazuki stuck her head in.
Hazuki was at a loss for words. The interior of the room was beyond her imagination.
Black. That was the impression she got. It was neither a wall nor a ceiling, but thick black cables winding everywhere. There were chips and parts and exposed machine insides, various displays, and other metal objects Hazuki had never seen before scattered all over the room. Black cables twisted around everything and connected each and every object together.
It’s the insides of a monitor, Hazuki thought matter-of-factly.
When she was small, seven or eight years ago, an engineer came to repair the main terminal at her home, and she was able to sneak a look at the disassembled machine.
Happy things, shameful things, proud things, problematic things, and, of course, messages from other people, notifications and warnings, all of it appeared on monitors. She had wanted to look at the insides of that monitor, beyond the window on which information appeared.
Inside was just black.
It was a flavorless dry enclosed space built out of a variety of cables, chips, and materials. Be it lines or boards that broadcast onto a contained box, it was the entirety of the world, and suddenly the young Hazuki had realized that must mean the whole world was an illusion.
Realizing this did not surprise her, nor did it make her feel sadness or joy.
She thought she might have experienced some tightness in her chest.
There was something fake about the world. But she soon forgot about it. Afterward, what with walking around holding the portable version of this world in her hands, knowing this rarified realness, Hazuki assimilated with the fake reality and forgot about the insides of the box.
This room was…
This looked just like that inner room.
zzzzz
That was the sound of that intangible electricity and data that circulated through black lines.
This was the other side of the world.
“There are no cable guards or anything around here. We could get electrocuted.”
In the midst of all these cables and boxes stood Mio.
“It won’t kill you or anything.”
Mio did not look at all surprised.
In fact it was Hazuki who was shaking.
Ayumi told her to get her monitor connected already.
“Thanks to you I’m all wet.”
“It’s such a pain. The outdoors I mean,” Mio said, and placed some kind of tool on the counter by her hip. “More importantly, what’s going on? People have never come inside here before.”
Ayumi turned her face toward Hazuki and prompted her with a raised brow. Hazuki held up the disc they had brought with them.
“This…”
“Oh.”
Mio had a bored expression on her face.
“I didn’t even notice.”
“We thought it might be important.”
“It’s not that it’s important. I mean, it serves no purpose.”
“Really?”
“It’s just for fun.”
Hazuki stepped forward, careful not to step on any of the cables, and handed the disc to Mio.
“So you didn’t need it back?”
“No…Well, if I’d lost it I would have had to redo some calculations, though we’re talking about a few minutes to do the math, and it’s reentering data that’s the most bother.”
Hazuki had no idea what she was talking about.
Ayumi looked over the room expressionlessly.
It looked like the three doors in the hall, though separate, all opened onto an adjoining room.
“This is an amazing place you live in. Administrative counselors must not come here much.”
“Administrative counselors?”
“Youth protective services people. You know…people who come in to take care of kids who are in less than ideal living environments.”
“Ah. Well my parents live above this floor, and there’s nothing going on there. Except that they’re never home. I don’t think they’ve ever laid a hand on me, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t experience any serious parental deprivation. But well, my place is okay. Fuwa came here once, but she was disgusted and went home.”
“Because you’re a genius.”
Right.
“So this is only your room.”
“At first it was only this room, but everyone left, so I’ve taken over the floor. Breaking down the walls was pretty hard.”
“You broke down the walls? Yourself?”
“I totally broke them all!” Mio said, laughing. “I didn’t have a place to sleep anymore. Thinking about it now, it would have been better to leave the entrance by the stairs. I started to pile things against the wall down there, and then soon it was no use.”
“No use…What was no use?”
“What do you mean what? The machine.”
“I know about the machine, but…”
“My main monitor.”
“This whole room is a main monitor?”
“Yeah. But you know, thinking about it, a monitor implies that you are looking at something. That’s weird, right? Why do we call it a monitor when it’s a number-crunching unit with the capability to send and receive information? Don’t you think that’s amazing?”
When she put it that way it seemed right. But Hazuki didn’t think it was “amazing.”
“They say in the past a machine that received on-air information was different from online monitors.”
“Hmph,” Ayumi interjected, unimpressed.
“But reception devices were totally normal back then. They even had sound-recording equipment. But it would only record sound. How pathetic, right? Of course it only received information; the devices couldn’t transmit or manipulate data. Wired communications were also audio-only.”
“Only sound?”
That was inefficient.
It was like being blind.
“Actually it was just sound-based reciprocal communications offline too. Something called a telephone. I don’t know what language that is. As for images, especially moving ones, they were exclusively received communications. And the diffusion rates of these exclusively reception machines were unusually high, so the styles persisted and evolved into the terminals we use for news in the home to this day. And the device that displayed this visual information was called a monitor. That’s why we call it that, apparently.”
“You’re quite the know-it-all,” Ayumi said. Mio ignored her and continued.
“But here I thought it was called a monitor because through them individuals could observe the world. Like, Let’s really observe it then! So I reconstructed it.”
“Still, look how ugly this is.”
“I’m a genius, so I don’t have a sense of aesthetics. It’s got great performance. It has approximately twelve thousand times the data-mining power of an average household monitor. It has memory capacity at, I’d guess, around eight thousand times the average. Of course I’ve only used a hundredth of it. But for that matter, it can connect to any kind of data origin in a split second. It runs fast and can do heavy lifting.”
“Meaningless. We’re just kids.”
“Like I said, it’s just a hobby.”
“Like your disc.”
“This is The Monster.”
“Monster?”
“I saw something about it in a moving picture, a fiction. This giant turtle-like thing has fire come out of its mouth.”
“What are you talking about?” Ayumi furrowed her face.
“An old moving picture! Like what they show in optical science class.”
“A fire-breathing turtle?”
“Yeah, it’s amazing.” Mio then pointed toward the back of the room, that is to say, the room next door.
In the next room was a piece of equipment they’d never seen before.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around a turtle doing something humans couldn’t. That’s a plasma generator, designed to emit plasma streams, but I failed.”
“It’s a weapon!”
“It’s a crime,” Ayumi said.
“It’s a failed weapon. I have to think of another way. It won’t be like in those entertainment motion pictures from decades ago. So I thought up a different method. And this guy has all the data on that plasma-spewing machine. The Monster.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“Just because I make it doesn’t mean I can use it. There’s no use for it. Things are different now. Nothing changes when you destroy things, but there is still the impulse for destruction.
“It’s an instinct,” Mio said in the midst of humming electric waves.
Ayumi bared her hatred.