Chapter 005
AS HAZUKI DISCONNECTED, some rote on-air news appeared on-screen.
At the bottom right of her screen floated a file called violent criminals of the twentieth century.
The on-air menu flooded the screen with text, so she knew the basic gist even with her speakers on mute.
A middle-aged man with old-fashioned dyed hair was rapidly moving his mouth. Words appeared in a text box below his face in conjunction with the movement of his mouth.
NO WEAPONS / THEATRICAL / CALLED A PSYCHO-KILLER / MINORS / “EDUCATIONAL” / IN THE HOME…
AROUND THIS TIME THE STALKER / FAMOUS/ BIZARRE MURDERD…
The words ran so quickly she couldn’t read them all.
Not that she wanted to.
To begin with, Hazuki wasn’t sure what bizarre meant. She just thought it must mean something bad.
Well, not simply bad, but immoral. That was the impression she had. She didn’t know why, but probably because of the way the word looked. Even if the meaning wasn’t apparent, the appearance of that series of characters could signify so much. She might be totally wrong, but there was still the unspoken meaning that was implied.
She tried viewing the word in English. Still, she recognized words by spelling, which vexed her. At wit’s end, she switched to Arabic.
Then, suddenly she didn’t understand anything. The middle-aged man with brown hair or anyone from any country. She didn’t know what they were saying.
They showed picture after picture of young girls.
They were explained with words she’d never seen before.
These must be victims. Judging from the age of these girls they couldn’t be perpetrators. Their clothing looked unfamiliar to her, meaning they could have been of foreign nationality. Yet their faces looked recognizable, meaning they must have been Japanese.
These were children from a really long time ago.
If I were murdered, I wonder if I’d appear foreign to people looking at me in the future.
More familiar scenes on her monitor.
Though surrounded by incomprehensible words, the images were clearly taken from the area where Hazuki grew up.
However, it was only for a split second that the images were familiar. The footage soon took on a morbid cast. These were probably images from the murder investigation of the local killings—under the North-South Line overpass—Mio had been talking about, which was more accurately said to be taking place under the Central North-South Line directly adjacent to her neighborhood.
Hazuki could point out on a map where this was but had never seen it herself. This broadcast was the first time she’d seen it.
They went back to showing headshots.
These must be of the latest victim.
It was a boy. Hazuki tried to remember his name but couldn’t for some reason. No, it was because she hadn’t ever known it.
This was a foreigner too.
It was because of the Arabic writing on the screen.
In any case this was a language from a world Hazuki had nothing to do with, she reasoned.
She looked at her monitor.
Four fifty-one pm and twenty seconds.
It had been at least five hours since she connected to the area center cable. She’d long surpassed the suggested amount of time for connectivity. Or rather, Hazuki’s group had been instructed not to spend more than two hours at a time on work.
Hazuki put her monitor on sleep mode and got up from her chair.
Dinner should be ready now.
She left her room and went down the hall.
In the dining area was, as expected, a neatly laid-out meal.
She was four when they pulled her out ten years ago. Hazuki had been eating this same kind of meal every day in this room ever since. Her foster dad was a busy man who only came home about once a month. She no longer had a caretaker, so she was frequently alone.
She wasn’t hungry.
She drew water from the faucet and drank one glass. She felt full.
Whether Hazuki decided to eat or not, every morning the dining table would be set for breakfast. The home helper sent over by the security center was very conscientious, correct, taciturn.
She thought of throwing away the food. She knew it would be a waste, but if she left it, there would be an ordeal later. If you left a meal out twice without touching it, the security center automatically notified a counselor.
Then they’d start sending you all these messages, and pay visits, notify your caretaker, and generally create a bother.
She wasn’t without a caretaker, but what would they make of this kind of behavior? They might bring her to a medical caretaker. If you were under sixteen and determined to have an eating disorder, they would abruptly cart you out to a rehabilitation center.
This diagnosis was apparently made through a medical interview conducted via another monitor. If you answered the questions poorly, it wouldn’t matter if you were healthy—they would declare you ill. Conversely, you could be suffering from a grave illness but answer the questions correctly, and the monitor would not diagnose you.
Unlike other illnesses, psychological ones like eating disorders were problematic. Still, what child would answer these questions honestly, Hazuki thought.
She kept looking at the food.
I’ll keep it for now. She might want to eat it later. It wouldn’t matter when she ate it as far as anyone was concerned. It would just be cold.
But just as she’d resolved this— A thunk. Was the helper still around? Usually she tried not to be seen.
She considered it a matter of custom. Hazuki would only see the caretaker on days she cleaned the house.
Today?
Not cleaning day.
She expected no visitors. It couldn’t have been her foster father. He never did anything alone. Whenever he came home he’d have an entourage trailing him. And then there were all the people who’d come the day before to prepare everything for their return.
She heard the clicking of the doorknob moving.
Hazuki looked at the kitchen monitor. If there were someone at the door the monitor there would automatically turn on. All she saw displayed on it was the time. Hazuki pulled the emergency receiver from her main monitor and gripped it tight, then turned on the monitor.
The monitor beeped, and the front door clicked open.
Hazuki reflexively moved to push the dial button, but her fingertip stopped at the button, paralyzed. What came on her monitor was so unexpected it arrested her stiff.
“What a huge house,” came the voice through her monitor speakers.
On her monitor screen was Mio Tsuzuki.
“What’s…going on?”
Hazuki was confused, but after hesitating a moment, she advanced to the foyer with her emergency receiver. She couldn’t feel at ease. Wasn’t sure what exactly was going on.
Mio was standing in the foyer.
“I failed at breaking in.”
“Hey!”
She was about to ask what the hell was going on, but her voice didn’t let her. But Mio probably didn’t know she was disoriented. Hazuki remained quiet and stared down Mio’s small animal-like eyes.
“I meant to sneak in unnoticed. But then there was the distance between the gate and the door, and even after opening the door I wasn’t in, and when I thought I’d gotten into the room it turned out to be the foyer.”
“How did you…get in?”
She left it at that for now. Mio pulled out her card.
“This opens almost everything.”
“Is it a forgery?”
“It’s all-purpose. When you say forgery you mean like a counterfeit. This isn’t a fake. It can work in any place, so it’s all-purpose. It opens locks and passes most clearances. Now if it could just bypass sensors.”
“You can bypass sensors?”
Sure you could.
“But here, even if I get past the door I have this big surveillance AI to deal with.”
Mio pointed at the machine hanging from the ceiling.
“That’s recording, isn’t it?”
“Probably. That would be normal.”
“Maybe I should erase it then. Ugh, what a drag.” Mio craned her neck.
“Erase…What are you talking about?”
“Look. If there’s video of me visiting, the counselors find out. That we became friends or whatever. Or that we could be. Don’t you think that’s annoying?”
“Annoying…I guess.”
“Besides, I passed the sensor at your gate and then in your foyer.
If the house determines that was a system error they’ll send a repairman. If not, they send an area patrolman. My face shows up on it, they arrest me.”
“Arrest you,” Hazuki said, looking to the side. “Aren’t you doing this in order to get arrested? I have nothing to do with it.” It was all she could think. A genius like Mio had no use for Hazuki. Even if she did want to talk, a simple connection to her monitor would suffice, and if for some reason she couldn’t do that and decided to come all the way up to Hazuki’s house, a proper announced visit would do the trick.
If she’d known it was Mio to begin with…
…she would have let her in.
Hazuki was vaguely presuming these feelings.
It wasn’t like she hated Mio or anything.
She didn’t mind talking to her, seeing her or being seen by her…It wouldn’t bother her the way it usually might.
Still, she was tired of it. She got tired of it. She didn’t want to talk anymore.
“Go home.”
Hazuki didn’t want her face looked at. She raised her emergency receiver.
“Wait. You’re being weird,” Mio said.
“You’re the one being weird! Didn’t you see my vacancy light turned off? So…”
So by running their personal ID card through the reader the visitor would be properly identified on a screen inside the door.
If the words Mio Tsuzuki had appeared on her monitor to begin with, if her ID number appeared, then Hazuki could have graciously let her in.
If.
“You didn’t need to use some fake card. You have your personal ID, don’t you?”
“Yeah I got one. But this is payback. Payback. I don’t know about you…” Mio pulled her hair back. “You guys just came into my place yesterday. You came in unannounced.”
“Huh?”
Hazuki stole a glance. Mio sneered.
“We’re even.”
“You came here for revenge?”
Is that why you secretly invaded my house? You wanted me to know how annoying it is, that’s why you did this? Still…
Hazuki dropped her emergency receiver and faced Mio. Mio was wearing unornamented pants made of industrial-strength textile—she was dressed like a maintenance person.
Yesterday at her house, Hazuki hadn’t thought Mio looked at all bothered. She hadn’t seen any indication of annoyance. She didn’t even remember any negative impressions from her on their way out. But that was all Hazuki’s personal viewpoint, and maybe the sudden intrusion had been a horrible nuisance after all. Actually, it probably had been. If Mio’s break-in today bothered her this much, Hazuki’s visit yesterday must have upset Mio even more.
“Are you upset?”
“It’s not that.” Mio scrunched up her face. “Here.”
She jutted out her arm. Something small hung from her fingertip.
Hazuki looked closer. It was shiny.
“Is that a piercing?”
“Is that what it’s called? I don’t really know, but you’re supposed to put it on your body, apparently.”
It was a pink gemstone.
Judging from the size she decided it was for the ears or cheek.
“What about this?”
“What about it. This isn’t yours?”
“Mine?”
Hazuki hated piercings; seeing them made her want to tear them out.
“It’s not yours then?” Mio placed the object in her hand and stared.
“I brought this back to you since you’d come out to bring me my hard drive.”
“This is your payback?”
“Sure. I’m just returning the favor. Right?”
“That’s not called payback, Mio.”
Hazuki suddenly became self-conscious and looked Mio dead in the face.
“Tsuzuki, are you really a genius?”
“Bona fide. I’m sorry. But, well, this must be Kono’s then.”
“Ayumi?”
Had Ayumi been wearing a piercing?
She couldn’t remember. Hazuki had only seen her from behind, and then diagonally, so if Ayumi had been wearing it in her left ear Hazuki wouldn’t have noticed it. Hazuki wondered allowed if Ayumi would ever wear something like this.
“Yeah, I figured you’d be the one to wear a dangly little thing like this. No offense.”
“None taken.”
It was true. Hazuki tended to buck the trends. Ayumi was more…
“She’s really simple, you know?”
Right. Ayumi didn’t do anything excessive.
“I don’t think it’s hers,” Hazuki answered.
It wouldn’t suit her. Of course that was just a personal opinion, and even if that personal opinion coincided with the general consensus, whether such a thing suited Ayumi or not would be up to the person in question. It didn’t preclude Ayumi’s wearing a dangly piercing.
“This guy’s neo-ceramic, so it’s really sturdy,” Mio said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I guess it doesn’t, but you two are the only ones who came over, and no matter what anyone says it’s definitely not mine. If it’s not yours it’s hers.”
Mio closed her hand on the stone.
“More importantly, can I use your main terminal for a second? I need to erase the security tape in less than fifteen minutes or it’ll report me.”
“Can you erase it?”
She sounded like she could.
“You don’t have any more surveillance cameras?”
“There’s one in each room, but they don’t act unless something happens.”
“Wow, one in each room?” Mio took off her shoes, said she was coming in, and went to the monitor. Before Hazuki could stop her, Mio was down the hall, walking toward the dining area.
“Gotta hand it to the prefectural housing people. This place is solid. It feels lived in, like an old house.”
“They built it to feel that way.”
Hazuki followed her.
Mio opened the dining room doors.
“There’s no sensor here, right? Wow.”
Mio approached the dining table.
“That looks good!”
“Yeah?”
“That’s a home-cooked meal.”
“Not really.”
“I mean like, as a style of menu,” Mio said. “Just like there’s French food. No matter who made this, I’d call it home-cooked. Probably.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t have a family either. So where’s your terminal? Oh, this will work.” Mio sat in front of the kitchen monitor and started tapping at the keys. Her fingers moved effortlessly.
“How’s it going?”
“Nothing really. I just have to switch the times. I came into the foyer at 4:57 pm and twenty seconds. It’s 5:10 now. Not a lot of time here.”
“You’re going to…switch the times?”
“I’m going to cut it out, then splice in the same time frame from yesterday. No one came yesterday, right? The time in here is made up anyway. It’ll be like nothing happened.”
Was that all?
“Can you believe we depend on this meaningless math? I can’t believe this world. Would you notice if all your clocks were wrong?”
“I wouldn’t if they were only off by a little bit.”
“What’s a little bit? One second? One minute? You wouldn’t notice if it were twelve hours, would you?”
It was true she lost track of time when sitting in front of a monitor.
“I suppose, but I’d know as soon as I compared my portable monitor against them.”
“What if that was off too?”
“It can’t be.”
“I’m just saying if it were. Actually all these clocks are regulated now, so normally, an isolated clock won’t get derailed. If one clock went off, all the clocks in the world would be off. If all the clocks went off by a whole day, I bet a lot of people wouldn’t notice. No, even half a day. If we were off by a half day, people wouldn’t question their clocks, they’d just wonder why it was so dark at noon.”
Mio laughed at her own joke, then continued. “So I can cut and paste this moment and no one will notice. And…there. We’re set. I am no longer here.”
“But you are.”
“I’m not here,” Mio said, and turned in her chair to face Hazuki.
“You can see me, but according to the data in your house you have no visitors, so historically speaking, I am not here. It’s magic.”
“Magic?”
“People in the past were carefree, so they thought up stupid things like time travel and teleportation, but, like, they really believed in it. But people from even earlier eras thought realistically, so they called those stupid things—like time travel and teleportation—magic.”
“Magic is more realistic?”
“Of course. Magic is not real. A real attempt at magic would be unrealistic. If it were magic, it would be easy. The time for easy living, for thinking you can do anything you wanted, is over. We’re finally back to the old times we were living in originally.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“The time for the real has been left running. Order—the unidirectional flow of time—must be preserved.”
“What do you mean, preserved?”
“Meaning you can’t go against the stream or do something over again. If I explained it quantitatively you wouldn’t understand. According to the laws of physics, moving around in a closed linear timeline is impossible.” Mio rolled her eyes once and looked at Hazuki. “People from the past had all kinds of convenient theories, like superstrings or wormholes, but it was all a bunch of false logic that existed only on paper. It was useless. Those of us in the space-time continuum cannot alter the continuum itself. But a continuum will do anything without these silly theories. If it’s going to be limited to being on paper anyway, it doesn’t need these exhaustive theories behind it. You can just say or write that you have flown through space or traveled through time. That’s how people used to do it a long time ago. In other words, magic. The slightly less old humanity tried to actualize that magic and built planes and let electricity fly, but when all’s said and done it was just awkward. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t interfere with the system. There’s no such thing as all-knowing magic. That’s why they thought of this.”
“Thought of what?”
“Today’s world. To make everything numerical, digital.”
“Numerical?”
“This is numerical,” Mio pointed at the monitor.
“This is all signs. The images, the words, they’re all composed of numbers. We look at these compositions to understand the world. In which case, it’s a free-for-all of magic. Since it’s just numbers, I could be 150 years old, or a man. Erasing just over ten minutes was a piece of cake.
“No one would not do it,” Mio threw out, then faced the dining table. “Still, magic can’t help an empty stomach. Aren’t you going to eat that, Makino?”
“You can eat it,” Hazuki said.
Why had she said that? Hazuki twisted her neck. Mio hadn’t asked to eat it. She’d just asked if Hazuki wasn’t eating it. Normally one would have answered that she was going to eat it later or that she wasn’t going to eat it at all. If they’d been chatting through their monitors this wouldn’t have happened.
In a daze, Mio went to the table.
“I eat Chinese food from downstairs every day, so…” Mio started, and as she spoke she reached out for the ratatouille.
Hazuki was amazed at how much of a conversation could be understood with so much left out of it.
“Downstairs?”
Anyway. Hazuki sat down across from Mio.
She didn’t like being agitated by something like this.
“You saw when you came. The foreigners. Half of them are Chinese. I don’t know what ingredients or seasonings they use. I don’t know what they use or how, but it tastes good.”
Mio marveled at the delicacy of it all as she spoke. She ate the raw vegetables, the warm vegetables, and the main course. Hazuki watched her mouth move in a daze.
“Are you vegetarian?”
“No, but there’s always a protein in those meals. I don’t know what it is, but…they don’t have any good produce there. What’s this?”
Mio pushed the broccoli in the casserole around and uncovered something else.
“Looks like some kind of clam.”
“Clam? You mean like seafood?”
“Well, yeah. Tsuzuki, you’ve never seen it before?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen turtles, but I have no interest in nature.”
Mio pierced the bit of food with her fork and inspected it up close. She wondered aloud how it was cultivated, then popped the whole thing into her mouth.
“It’s pretty good. Even though I don’t know what it is.”
“You’re weird.”
“You think so? I think that’s pretty normal,” Mio said and placed her fork back down on the table. It looked like she’d just played with the food.
It wasn’t like she’d simply tasted the food, nor was it like she savored the whole meal. Plus she said it was delicious like someone much older might have.
“Food is important.”
“Well, sure.”
“I think our ancestors must have been really weak,” Mio said conversationally.
“Weak?”
“Sure. They were the ones being eaten. I’m sure of it. That’s why they took such pains to get out of the food chain. We’ve all collectively stopped killing animals, right? No one in this country eats animal meat anymore.”
“You mean it’s wrong to kill.”
“But we used to kill. We’d kill animals and then eat them.”
“You can make food without killing it.”
“Of course you can.”
“You can even make vegetables,” Hazuki said. “People have been making vegetables since a long time ago.”
“Make. You mean grow them. Grass is a living thing too. It’s different from being made. Making things from scratch is only a recent thing.”
Oh…
“But since we started replacing everything from grass to beasts, humans have extracted themselves from the food chain. It took us millions of years, but we’ve done it. We’ve been able to improvise edible food out of nonliving things. Not so long ago, synthetic food was talked about like it was a bad thing, but it’s no different from what we use to make food now. People lacked the proper technology in the past, making the first synthetic foods toxic, but that was stupidity on their part. Still…”
“Still?”
“If you don’t eat or aren’t eaten, you are not an animal.”
“Animal…”
“Beast. Even in the sanctuaries, beasts eat beasts. They survive this way. Humans are the only ones that don’t do this.”
Is that a bad thing?
“There are animals that have gone extinct because of humans’ killing them.”
“You’re talking about tigers and stuff, right? But humans stopped killing whales, and now they’re rampant. They eat every living thing in the ocean.”
“Whales don’t eat every single thing.”
“Don’t they eat clams?” Mio said. Despite being a genius, Mio seemed to be lacking much knowledge of animal biology. Hazuki liked animals for some reason. She’d hardly seen any in her life, but she liked looking at old pictures and had even filed some of them.
Like wolves.
One night ago, she’d been researching a file on extinct animals and came across one that from the picture looked like a dog. Like a dog she’d seen as a very small child.
A dog…
Where was that?
She couldn’t remember.
“Animals. That’s derived from anima, which means life, breath. To be animated.” Mio wiped her mouth with the thick fabric of the sleeve of her maintenance uniform. “We aren’t very animated, are we? I think we’re trying to stop moving altogether.”
The chair squeaked as Mio got up and went back to the monitor.
“We sit here for hours on end. And yet we continue to live. Anything else would die.”
The sound of keys being punched.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m about to copy the next ten minutes of yesterday into today. I have to go now. If I’m found walking around too late in the evening the police will give me trouble. They have more guys on the street now with this killer and everything.”
“Tsuzuki, you going somewhere else now?”
“Somewhere else? I’m gonna go return this stone, of course. I’m going to Kono’s house.”
Ayumi’s house…
“This time it’ll be a real payback. All right, it’s as though I was never here.”
Never here. So this was all a lie.
“It was all a dream?”
Mio turned back and laughed.