28

Atsuko finished examining Tokita the following morning.

Atsuko had warned his mother to keep her front door locked at all times, and had then taken Tokita back to her own apartment. That was certainly no mean feat; despite his mental vacancy, it was still beyond the means of any woman to carry his gargantuan body. Instead, she’d led him along with a combination of gentle cajoling and crude persuasion. Once he was asleep, she had attached the gorgon to his head and started to analyze his dreams with the collector.

To Atsuko’s immense relief, Tokita’s personality hadn’t completely disintegrated. His condition might have been best described as acute schizophrenia, but not that of the acute phase immediately after onset. Rather, Tokita’s mind had been suddenly and violently fed with delusions that were quite unnatural for him, as a person not inherently of a schizoid disposition. His condition would definitely be cured in time, even if it seemed serious now. Atsuko was confident of that. She only needed to make sure there could be no recurrence, and that the condition would not become chronic once he’d entered the remission phase.

The images projected into Tokita’s subconscious seemed to have been taken from Himuro’s dreams after the onset of schizophrenia. That was perfectly clear from the images appearing in Tokita’s dreams: a cute bob-haired Japanese doll, intensely sugary sweets and chocolate bars, infantile TV games. Somehow, somewhere, Himuro had already been infected with schizophrenia. His condition had been induced by having the dreams of a severely schizophrenic patient fed directly into his mind. Atsuko had come to know this particular patient’s subconscious world in the process of her treatment. She recognized the patient because the doll kept saying things in German, like “In den sechziger Jahren schien die Sonne auch nachts,” “Wegen des Vietnam-Kriegs wurde ich von meinem Vater in ein hochwertiges Restaurant gebracht, und habe da eine sexueller Atmosphäre erlebt,” and “Während des Ise-Buchts-Taifuns besuchte ich ein öffentliches Badehaus mit Premierminister Nakasone und konnte ganz einfach im Wasser schweben.” Even when awake, Tokita seemed mesmerized by the doll’s incoherent babbling.

The perpetrator of this obscenity had first driven Himuro mad by implanting the dreams of a severely schizophrenic patient into his mind. The content of Himuro’s dreams had been recorded at some stage of this schizophrenia, and then projected into Tokita’s subconscious. Though their intellectual levels were different, it must have been relatively simple to contaminate Tokita with the latent content of Himuro’s dreams, since the two were both equally geekish in nature. Judging from the genius behind this act of cunning, Atsuko had no trouble in identifying the culprit as Seijiro Inui.

Even while Atsuko was examining Tokita, her monitor occasionally intercepted images suggesting that Inui and Osanai were still communicating via the DC Mini. Many of the images had the atmosphere of an occult or esoteric religion, giving the impression that Inui was passing down some kind of quasi-sexual, quasi-religious education to Osanai in his dreams. Nothing more certain than that could be known, however, owing to the fragmentary nature of the images. Atsuko couldn’t use her collector to access their DC Minis, as they were wireless. To access their dreams in person, and to discover what form those dreams took, she needed to have a DC Mini herself. She badly wanted a DC Mini. Desperately so. If only she had a DC Mini, she might be able to glean their plans in advance, avoid falling into their traps, and turn their own conspiracy into a counter-offensive.

Tokita had previously confessed his love for Atsuko. Yet he was now so distant that he couldn’t even hear her voice, not even faintly. Atsuko was deeply saddened to realize that. She began to feel intense hatred for the people who’d done him such harm. They must have known she loved Tokita; they’d committed their loathsome deed in the full knowledge of that fact. Now the thought of revenge flashed through Atsuko’s mind. If only I had a DC Mini, I could avenge him, she thought. It was the first time she’d ever had such thoughts. She was sure she could find it in herself to see it through, whoever the adversary was. Her mind was now bent solely on vengeance; Atsuko forgot that she too was likely to face some danger in the process.

Atsuko woke at nine after a short night’s sleep. She immediately called the caretaker and asked him to change the lock on her apartment door. She could well imagine that the perpetrator had somehow obtained a master key allowing free access, not only to Tokita’s apartment, but to any apartment in the building. She then called Tokita’s mother, Makiko, and asked her to watch over Kosaku in her absence. She gave detailed instructions to ensure no further harm could befall him. She finally called Shima’s apartment on the same floor, as she’d started to worry that he too could be in danger. All she heard was his answering message; he must already have left for the Institute.

Some days had passed since Atsuko had wanted to talk to Shima, to ask his advice on various issues. But an unforeseen series of emergencies had prevented them from meeting since then. As she drove through the congested city center toward the Institute in her Marginal, Atsuko decided to go to Shima’s office immediately after arriving at the Institute.

On checking in at her research lab, however, she heard the news that Himuro had been found. The call came from the hospital. A nurse had spotted him wandering aimlessly among a group of outpatients in the hospital waiting room about ten minutes earlier. Atsuko immediately made her way there.

In the hospital office on the ground floor, Himuro was surrounded by a crowd of doctors, nurses, and office staff, all yelling at once. He smelt awful. His hair was disheveled, as if he’d just woken up, stubble stood on his chin, and his body was covered in grime and dust. His lab coat, which he’d evidently worn since his disappearance, was dirty and crumpled. He wore no trousers, possibly because he’d fouled them. And he was barefoot. No one knew where he’d been before his appearance in the waiting room, or how he had got there.

Luckily, there was no sign of Osanai yet. Atsuko instructed two nurses to take Himuro to her own examination room in the Institute. Himuro remained expressionless throughout, showing no reaction to the commotion around him, and allowed himself to be led without any resistance. Though lacking expression, his face was deformed. It had always been fat and puffed up, but it was now transformed into something hideous – something that seemed not of this world …

Atsuko asked the nurses to lay Himuro’s soft, round body on the bed in her examination room. Once they’d left, she let him fall asleep, then went to her research lab in the adjacent room, where she examined his field of consciousness with the scanner. In Nobue’s absence, she had to enter all the settings herself.

Atsuko shuddered with horror when she looked at the monitor screen. Nothing remained but fragments of Himuro’s mind, a desolate landscape of random images. A virtually blank screen was occasionally interrupted by images of decomposing almonds, crushed Braun tubes, small objects that looked like buttons, paper clips, bits of toys and sweet wrappers, a symbol for a ladies’ WC, underground signs and other symbols scattered sporadically in time and space. Even more infrequently, a broadly grinning Japanese doll would appear in a corner of that field of consciousness, making a rocking noise as it nodded repeatedly.

Next, Atsuko used the reflector to extract more detailed images from Himuro’s brain. As before, she found nothing but intermittent recollections of disjointed fragments, entirely devoid of rational connections. Seized with fear, Atsuko abandoned the idea of accessing Himuro’s mind via the collector. Entering the consciousness of a person whose personality had been so utterly destroyed could easily drive her mad as well.

Whoever had put Himuro in this state must have known that his personality would be completely annihilated in the process. The perpetrators must have been confident that his mind was quite beyond repair, and that he could no longer give testimony against them. With that reassurance, they had released him from confinement. Even so, it would have required very intense projections over a lengthy period of time to so thoroughly wipe all signs of humanity from the mind of a human being. The evil nature of the perpetrators now became clear; their identity was beyond doubt. Theirs was a crime on a par with murder. Atsuko knew there was only one way to stop this series of criminal acts, to foil a conspiracy that even threatened her own safety. She would have to fight the enemy on their own terms.

Atsuko bit her lip hard as she watched the sleeping Himuro through the reinforced glass window. After a while she opened the partition door and went to examine Himuro’s head. The perpetrators would surely not have released him with the DC Mini still in place, but the device could have left the same wound as she’d found on Tokita’s head.

Himuro’s hair was unusually thin and soft for a man. Atsuko parted it to discover a tiny bald spot about seven or eight millimeters in diameter on his crown. The spot was lead-gray in colour, contrasting with the whiteness of his scalp. According to Tokita, the DC Mini used biological elements that permitted proteins to self-assemble, and bioelectric current was applied to facilitate mutual access. Atsuko thought back over what Tokita had said about the shape and color of the DC Mini.

She let out a cry.

The patch on Himuro’s scalp was not a bald spot, but the base of the DC Mini itself. The device had been attached for so long that it had been absorbed into Himuro’s head. It could no longer be pulled out by hand. And since it was fused with his head at an atomic or molecular level, it would be impossible to remove even surgically. Atsuko now understood what had caused the wound on Tokita’s head. It was left there when the DC Mini was forcibly pulled out after the tip had started to fuse with his head.

In the horror of her realization, Atsuko failed to notice that she’d been crying out, almost screaming for some time. She also failed to notice that the telephone in her lab had been ringing continuously.