Soft and White by Kafka Asagiri

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Looking down from a multi-rotor helicopter, Hide only saw a lone heliport on the tiny uninhabited island.

He furrowed his brow despite himself.

A private island floating in the Pacific—Leigo. A small solitary isle whose circumference an athlete fitted out with prosthetics might run in two minutes or less. It was Hide’s destination.

When the helicopter landed, expressionless cyborg technicians greeted him and connected a cord into the QRS plug on the nape of his neck to conduct a final check on his prosthetics and cyberbrain. He had to sign an agreement, electronically, for the umpteenth time.

Hide sighed. Good grief. How many hoops did he have to jump through to visit one little island?

There had been no end to the procedures even prior to his arrival: two inspections lying on a machine table at the hands of technicians, and signatures for eight agreements on e-devices and two via paper media; on top of that, installing a designated prosthetics-control program and submitting a ghost-infiltration key.

The only other sites in the world that imposed as many hurdles to entry were American Empire nuclear submarines and Self-Defense Forces program design facilities.

They had their excuses for these stringent inspections, of course. This remote island was one of the prime resort islands on Earth, a high-grade cyberbrain entertainment zone you couldn’t hope to enter unless you were in the top 0.01 percent.

A world above the clouds.

It was for a reason that rabble like Hide had been invited to sojourn in celebrity high heaven.

Info had been obtained—that the legendary terrorist “Jupiter” was expected to pop up here.

Hide was an expert on Jupiter.

Still…

He looked around.

There really was nothing on this island. While its location, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, meant not having to sense the hiccup errors (HEROs) caused by electromagnetic noise…

Would Jupiter really show up on this little island?

Hide entered the island’s only structure, the elevator shaft. The interior of the streamlined elevator room was a pearly white thanks to the titanium oxide surface coating.

As the chamber descended, he started to feel more and more despondent. He couldn’t tell if it was from being cast into celebrity pandemonium or if he was unplugged-anxious because he couldn’t connect to the net. Or was it hope, that he might capture her, the terrorist Jupiter, and anxiety that he might swing and miss?

The elevator came to a gentle halt. When the door opened, the pressure difference made itself heard as a gush of wind. Beyond the door stretched a man-made corridor that led to an underground geofront.

Or so he’d thought.

“Wha…” Hide couldn’t help mumbling like an idiot.

What spread beyond the elevator was a Baroque palatial interior.

It had a foyer. The meticulous rocaille ornamentation on the granite arches exuded a phantasmal sort of beauty. The walls to both sides were lined with High Renaissance paintings of the Nativity. The soft velvet curtains draping the windows fluttered in the breeze. Palace-guard plate armor, decorations, stood watch along the walls like unspeaking sentries. The crimson Persian carpet covering the marble floor could have muffled the footfalls of a raging military cyborg.

But it wasn’t just the exotic trappings that almost made Hide feel faint.

He could see the sky.

Above the arch of the foyer, a clear blue morning sky extended limitlessly. A pair of thrushes flitted across it as if to celebrate the spring of their lives.

Looking down from the helicopter, Hide hadn’t glimpsed such an edifice anywhere. To begin with, he was underground, having descended three hundred or so feet in an elevator!

Hide got off it somehow on shaky legs.

When he did so, the decoration full-plate armor right next to him moved.

He instantly reacted.

Swaying back and evading the sideward swipe of the double-edged sword, he kicked the floor with just his leg strength, spun, and pushed against the floor again, this time with his hands, to execute a back flip and gain some distance.

The plate armor pressed with an overhead strike. Hide jerked his head out of the way, grabbed a nearby scimitar, and with it met the sword’s return arc. The blades clashed with a spark. The impact shot up to his shoulder.

The sense of weight and pushback—he wasn’t being robbed of his vision. This was an attack from the material world.

Backhanding the scimitar, Hide aimed for the plate armor’s neck—or rather, pretended to, instead twirling and ducking in close to launch a high kick. His toes landed a clean hit on the plate armor’s chin, and he heard the metal snapping. When the plate armor lurched backwards, he used the same leg to hook its neck, and grabbing its wrist, leapt on his opponent to shove it down to the floor. Then with a reverse-cross move he locked its arm joint.

“A cyborg with a brain or a remote-controlled decot?” Hide asked twisting up the arm. “If it’s the former, I can wait for the pain signal block. If it’s the latter, this arm is coming off right now.”

“I-I surrender!” the plate armor yelled. “I’m sorry. You’re an even better prosthetics-wielder than I heard.”

The plate armor flung its visor up with its free hand. From inside peeked the eyes of the friendliest black man.

“Forgive me…My name is Coma. I’m the security chief here,” the black man said with the friendliest smile, “and your client.”

“Hide”—full name, Hideo Hisaragi.

A crackerjack prosthetics-wielder, he had served in a prosthetized military unit on invitation after a research stint at a university cyberneurology program. He’d left the government’s employ for a certain reason and now worked as a freelance prosthetics consultant who was also active in tracking down terrorists, as an info broker.

A certain reason—the terrorist Jupiter. A life-altering person for Hide.

He’d been invited to the island in light of intelligence that Jupiter would appear here. The remuneration was off the charts. Even if there weren’t any at all, he had no reason to refuse, of course. None other than Jupiter might appear here.

Led by Coma, he walked through the geofront lobby.

Decorations reminiscent of eighteenth-century French palaces filled the area from one end to the other, and the staff and guests that he passed by now and then were also decked in rococo attire. Hide shook his head at the unreal sight.

“Leigo used to be a prison island,” Coma, walking ahead in his armor, explained to Hide. “A certain wealthy person purchased and remodeled it into a resort geofront. People who know of this place have come to call it SOFT.”

“Soft?” Hide furrowed his brow. “As in software?”

Coma laughed and shook his head. “Nope, simply as in ‘gentle.’ ”

Why such a name, asked Hide, to which Coma just smiled and said, You’ll see.

Guided by Coma, the two of them entered the staff room. Hide was astounded once again. Beyond the French doors adorned with inlaid work was a near-futuristic interior with an aerodynamic floating table and white-leather chairs. There was no visible lighting, but the entire ceiling seemed to be glowing and illuminating the room.

“Well, sit down,” Coma offered to Hide and took a seat himself. “Anything to drink? Coffee, tea…We even have sencha tea.”

“Enlighten me first,” Hide said as soon as he sat down. “What’s the deal here? On the net it’s just described as a top-of-the-line resort island…Don’t tell me it’s a cosplay island. Or has someone added a branch to my visual component?”

“That last bit isn’t far off the mark,” Coma replied with a meaningful smile. “But forget hacking, your cyberbrain is completely bare now with no defensive wall. Even a rat with a cyberbrain could sneak in just to take a walk.”

Hearing that gave Hide the chills all over again. Leaving your brain unprotected in a high-cyber society was like strolling around a battlefield in your underwear. If an ill-meaning hacker spotted you, you could even have your ghost taken over and end up a puppet.

“Now, drink some of this and relax.” Coma placed a coffee cup on the table. Faint steam rose from the dark-brown liquid. “We’re on a standalone island that’s sequestered from the outside world, physically and electronically. We conduct thorough inspections of personal belongings including prosthetics, so there’s no need to worry. If there’s even the slightest chance of a ghost hack, why would all those rich people be flocking here in the first place?”

That was true. According to Hide’s prior research, that elevator was the only point of entry on this island. The underground shell was sealed and shut out even satellite signals. Moreover, there wasn’t even an undersea cable for wired comms with the outside world, and the only info transfer took place through the scheduled freight deliveries. In other words, it was an isolated intranet—in this heyday of cyberbrain crimes, the perfect and almost only countermeasure against hacking.

Still, Hide was seized by a vague anxiety. He sipped at the hot coffee and wondered. Was the security here really flawless? Could its system respond to a guest who bore malice? What if the system itself went haywire? To begin with—

Having thought that far, Hide realized something. Aghast, he asked, “Hey…How did you pull out this coffee?”

With a grin Coma said, “That’s this island’s magic.”

He snapped his fingers.

Instantly, the coffee cup that Hide held disappeared.

It wasn’t just the cup. The room’s furnishings, the table accessories, and Coma’s plate armor vanished into thin air. What remained were bland white walls, Coma in a regular security uniform, and Hide, along with their cushioned chairs. Even the bittersweet flavor of coffee in his mouth was gone.

“Not just…the visual component?” observed Hide, still confused. “My senses of touch and smell and taste were interrupted simultaneously?”

“Exactly.” Coma was smiling in his security outfit. “And not just you. Everyone on the island is having the same illusion in complete synch…You know about cybertech that allows for electronic interventions into visual components, don’t you?”

Hide nodded. A cyberized mind could replay video and audio within itself via a MicroMachine that dispensed electric stimuli to the brain cells. It was possible to flood a target’s visual field with false data and foist an illusion—to “steal your eyes,” in other words. Bravura cyberthieves were said to resort to such foul play on occasion.

“This island’s mother system is capable of granting totally synchronized fake sensations to everyone present.” Coma snapped his fingers again. The room reverted to its near-futuristic streamlined décor. The coffee cup in Hide’s hand was also resurrected. “That’s it, in a nutshell: simultaneously duping all neural components in the system package. The interminable procedures, a dedicated program, and this huge cavern were prepared for just that purpose.”

With that, Coma tilted the cup in his hand and splashed Hide with its liquid content.

“Ack!” Hide leapt out of his chair. The dark-blown fluid, still steaming, covered his clothes from his chest to his waist. The painful heat felt like an open-handed slap, and he couldn’t but curse, “Damn you! I’ll bet there’s no tactile-membrane pack maintenance on this—”

Before he could finish, Coma snapped his fingers again. The room furnishings vanished along with the coffee, and so did the pain from the burn Hide had felt just a moment ago.

“Nothing on this island can hurt you, Hide,” Coma said, smiling. “Nothing that can actually hurt you. There isn’t a single knife or even a small pin on this island. The chair you were sitting on is the most lethal weapon here.”

Coma pointed at the white cushioned chair by Hide’s legs. It was soft and seemed to be made of pressure-sensitive hardened polymer, yielding gently to a poke of the finger.

“On this island, only the chairs and beds are real. Because you can’t rest your weight on something that doesn’t exist. All the rest is an illusion cast by sensory components…a synthetic reality. That’s why it’s called the SOFT system. It’s the gentlest place on Earth.”

Belatedly, Hide suffered an intense bout of vertigo—as if the floor and ceiling had heaved and switched places.

Apart from the chairs and beds—it was all an illusion?

The coffee and the palace, the sword and the plate armor, none of it really existed but were electric stimuli to his visual and tactile perceptions—merely the shadows of his sensory nerves firing up?

“Unbelievable,” Hide finally managed to squeeze out. “How? How do you maintain your sanity in such a crazy place?”

“Human beings aren’t wise enough to keep living on the level of philosophers,” Coma said slowly. His smile almost hinted at satori. “In short, you get ‘used to it.’ You’ll see in time. But…I think you get it now. The menace of a terrorist bent on destruction slipping in here.”

Hide gasped. Right, that’s why I’m here. The terrorist Jupiter. Her, I have to personally—

“We have intel that the terrorist brought a real gun onto this island,” Coma said, looking concerned for once. “You understand, don’t you? We security can snatch out of thin air a sword, a rifle, or if we want, a 20-mm antitank cannon, weapons that would send you flying. But…they’re no match against a real gun.”

With another snap of his fingers, Coma conjured numerous firearms on the floor: a shotgun, a submachine gun, an anti-materiel rifle…

From among them, he picked up an ordinary revolver and gazed at it. Then he said, “We need you and your expertise regarding this terrorist, Hide. Find the one handgun smuggled onto this gentle island.”

Hide was shown through the facilities, introduced to colleagues, and brought more or less up to speed, and by the time he retired to the room he’d been assigned, it was nearly past three in the morning.

“Give me a break…”

His room had simple furnishings in the style of resort hotels. This, too, had to be a synthetic reality. He could see and touch the curtains, the glass of water on a table, the book by the pillow; he could bite them or destroy them. But they didn’t actually exist.

Tumbling onto the steel-frame bed, Hide let out a massive sigh.

Today the island assumed a European rococo style, but apparently that was just the area concept of the week. Depending on the day, guests were treated to Cretaceous period or Chinese three-kingdom era or underwater metropolis designs.

It was enough to drive you nuts.

This wasn’t a virtual cyberspace. It was physical reality. And yet…

Hide glanced at the bedside night table. On it was a desk clock, a glass of water, and a leather-bound book leaning on a bookshelf.

He reached for the book. A random title from the library would be displayed every time he opened it, he’d been told. Flipping through the pages, he read a passage that caught his eye.

“What we call outward objects are nothing else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made.”

It was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant’s work The Critique of Pure Reason.

Hide flipped the pages again.

“We believe that we cognize objects as things in themselves, although in the whole range of the sensuous world, investigate the nature of its objects as profoundly as we may, we have to do with nothing but phenomena.”^*

Hide thought about those words.

What Kant called outward objects, namely things that human beings could see and touch, were not the true form of the things as they existed a priori—were not “things in themselves.” They were merely experienced. In his book, Kant declared so in no uncertain terms. Everything that we can recognize is only subjective, arising in the mind only upon being reflected in our eyes, and are never perceived in their own being.

We were all prisoners bound in chains in a cave who were only allowed to witness figures reflected on a wall. We only recognized space and God and free will as vague hints and not as true Ideas—

Confirming the book’s physical texture, Hide thought, What would Kant say if he visited this island?

The book wasn’t actually there. Gauging the tactile membrane’s contact pressure and movement speed, the core that received the prosthetic signals almost simultaneously returned transmissions of texture to the touch sense device. The brain misunderstood this as “handling a book.” If you tried to poke your fingers through it, the prosthesis would make a stop-contact judgment so you wouldn’t squash it. The book was a shadow created by cyber signals.

As Kant would have it, reality, too, was a shadow manifested via the same methodology.

If so, wasn’t the book on par with an actual one in its significatory intensity? To begin with, for humans with cyberbrains, wasn’t distinguishing between a real world and a synthetic reality fundamentally pointless? Illusions were also real, the digital was mind, and through cyber technology, were we unknowingly selling the uniqueness of reality to the devil, bit by bit?

This island realized at a nightmarish scale a prediction that Kant had made over two hundred years ago.

Hide shook his head to yank his consciousness back to reality.

It wasn’t true. We were okay. No place like this island existed anywhere else. This was a technological point of singularity, an exception. He shouldn’t overthink it.

Plus, he’d been told the SOFT system’s weak point.

Hide placed the book standing on the floor. Stepping on with his right foot, he applied his weight.

For an instant, his sole met strong resistance, but when he bore down on the book with his whole body, it slipped out from under him with a beep. Turning translucent and spitting out a few error messages, the book shone red and disappeared.

The chairs and beds were real for precisely the same reason. With nothing to support you, SOFT might dupe all five of your senses but couldn’t make you float in midair. When you applied your weight, it slipped through.

“So even a peerless processing system can’t defy God…” mumbled Hide.

He felt a momentary urge to go around stepping on everything the island contained. Then he wouldn’t have to worry over some binary opposition between reality and its synthetic counterpart that was frying his head, and he’d have no trouble finding the gun Jupiter supposedly smuggled into this soft and white underground world.

The international terrorist Jupiter.

Hide didn’t need to access any external memory apparatus when it came to Jupiter because he had all the info memorized. That said, surprisingly little had come to light. What they did know was that Jupiter was a master cyber criminal who intervened in wars and skirmishes the world over and operated with a full-body prosthesis that almost always assumed a female form.

An idea, a bewildering one, came to Hide. He hesitated for five full minutes before summoning a console out of nothing. He gestured with his fingers to send a directive to the core.

As security personnel he’d been granted N-B Class rights to access SOFT. That included synthesizing weapons, dissolving the synthetic reality of persons judged to be a menace, and—

“What’s the idea, calling me like this?” a voice suddenly asked from the doorway.

Hide shifted his gaze to where a woman stood in a negligee. Her long hair a lapis lazuli blue, she wore gold earrings. She sported long eyelashes and intimidatingly lustrous, rose-pink lips.

“You’re…” After muttering that much, Hide noticed that his throat was parched dry.

“You must have wonderful taste if this is how you synthesize a woman you’re fond of. I feel like I’m dealing with a teenager who can’t stop fantasizing. How embarrassing of you.”

Hide was stunned. This—this easily?

“Why don’t you say something?”

The woman’s words brought him back to himself. “You aren’t actually here,” he noted. “My senses are perceiving you, but what’s there is just thin air. That form is only an imagined you out of my cyberbrain. Jupiter must look nothing like it now.”

“Right. Pretty foolish, isn’t it?” The woman, Jupiter, came to sit by Hide. The bed creaked. “It’s been thirteen years since we last saw each other. What’s more, I’m a wanted person, an actual terrorist these days. I would never present myself to you in this sort of getup.”

Jupiter’s shoulder brushed against him—a slight warmth, mass. Hide’s thought processes went wobbly.

“Was it—really you?” he asked out loud despite himself. “Toppling the Republic of Kuzan’s government, assassinating the programmer in exile. The numerous other massacres and instigations and electronic attacks—the public enemy, the monster that cyber technology begat, Jupiter. Is that really you?”

“It is,” she replied, looking straight at him. “Breaking this world is my raison d’être. Hearing the orphan’s scream, the refugee’s lament, and everyone with cyberbrains wailing and begging for their lives is the only amusement allowed to me. My next target is this island.”

Jupiter gazed into Hide’s pupils. Hers had no maker engraving or serial number, were dim enough to suck him in. Her eyelashes were so long he could almost hear her blink. The scent of her warm breath.

Unconsciously, he’d gone and reached out his hand to touch her cheek. The soft, yielding sensation at his fingertips shook and jolted his soul to the very bottom.

“…If I said so, would you be satisfied?”

Jupiter made to stand up and pushed Hide aside.

“You’re just a shadow,” he said to her back. “Where is the real you? Have you already infiltrated this island? Where is the gun? What do you intend to do here?”

“I can’t answer your questions. All I can do is ask them. Tell me, when you meet the real me, what do you intend to do?”

Hide couldn’t reply. He was too afraid to. His true thoughts were sealed deep down, below even the sixth degree that is the ghost line.

“What can we do with you?” Jupiter shook her head and stood. “Well, I’ll give you just one hint. This island isn’t as singular a place as you think. Human beings only ever see a distorted world and merely manage to picture something like a world by collating that distorted information. Wherever you are in that world. So it wouldn’t be strange at all if I actually stood here now. You’ll understand when you see this.”

Hide’s own face appeared before his eyes.

The suddenness of it threw him off—but he did understand soon enough. Jupiter had taken out a hand mirror and thrust it at Hide. It was old, and the frame featured amateurish wavy embellishments.

Hide received the hand mirror and gazed at it. His face and Jupiter’s were reflected side by side. He looked perplexed, while she wore a mysterious smile.

“Funny mirror.”

“Don’t say that,” Hide objected. “It still took me forever to make. If we ever saw each other again, I’d have a gift—”

He gulped and broke off mid-sentence.

The hand mirror was one of the few personal belongings that he’d brought onto this island.

In other words, it was an actual object.

Why was a synthetically realized Jupiter able to hand him the mirror?

He turned his head. Jupiter was already gone. The mirror slipped out of his hand and bounced against the floor.

“Look at the mirror carefully, Hide,” a disembodied voice echoed in the lonesome room. “It’s the only path beyond the wall of cyberbrains, to the true reality that’s not composed of electric signals.”

For a while Hide stood there alone in the center of the room.

He couldn’t utter a word.

His gift lay on the floor, and in the mirror, which now had a few cracks in it, multiple Hides quietly displayed their wavering reflections.

The main cafeteria, located in underground central. Hide, Coma, and two other security personnel were taking their meal at a table.

“Like I said, at the time of the Japan Micro Industry terrorist-blackmail incident, I happened to be on vacation and wasn’t there,” Coma said with his mouth full. “Same for the Sagawa Electronics Headquarters case. I was bowled over. The desks were lined in a circle, and some program’s aerial…”

Outside the cafeteria spread a tropical beach. The hall itself was worthy of a first-rate hotel, and the terrace on the opposite side offered a grand ocean view. A fountain spraying realistically transparent water sat at the center of the cafeteria.

Gazing at the endlessly blue sky and water horizon, Hide was lost in thought.

The faint scent of the sea, the scintillating horizon, and all the rest of it was a synthetic reality created through innumerable processing operations. So was the woman who’d appeared last night.

But if that was the case, from where in such a world had the words “Look at the mirror carefully” sprung?

“And the rumor was that the next blackmailing would target a cyborg food corporation. The very one that supplied the meal we’re having. I mean, Laughing Man or not, robbing people of their chow is no joke—hey, Hide? Why aren’t you digging in?”

Coma addressing him brought Hide’s thoughts back to the table. “…Yeah, pardon me?”

“Jeez…I know it’s only your second day here, but are you fasting or what? You do get hungry even in a place like this, okay? ‘The painful canine yelps make themselves heard to the traveler’s stomach devoid of a grain of millet.’ You can’t slap around a terrorist on an empty stomach, am I right?”

“Takuboku Ishikawa?” Hide raised an eyebrow. “Quoting him without using an external memory apparatus makes you one weird American Empire national, you know that?”

“I’m pretty erudite when it comes to chow,” Coma replied and stuffed his face. “Under different circumstances, staying here a night and having this food would wipe out our annual salaries. Gotta appreciate our daily blessing. Or pray, sir, are you not fond of American cuisine?”

“Come on…”

Hide’s eyes fell to the dish in front of him, a steaming, golden-hued paella.

The shrimp still had their shells and heads on and lent themselves to a vivid feast of colors along with the mussels, paprika, and green asparagus. All of the ingredients shone as if they’d just been harvested. Yet in reality what graced the plate were 90-percent gluten and a sprinkling of amino acid-based MMs, which is to say, cyborg fare, tasteless in both senses of the word.

Hide could hardly get into the mood, but it was true that he needed to eat. Poking at the paella, he ferried a spoonful to his mouth.

His thoughts died for an instant. It was delicious…

Countless tastes fizzed on his tongue. All of the savor, the aroma and the mouth-feel, seemed to blend into his body via his oral cavity. Another taste, he needed another taste of this!

Hide was beginning to see why the richest people in the world desired one and all to sojourn on this island.

Watching Hide gobble down his paella, Coma broke into a wry laugh. “This is where folks start getting used to it.”

The security chief resumed chatting with his staff once he saw that Hide was feeling full and human again.

Hide, for his part, continued eating and merely listened to the table talk.

Serial anti-corporate blackmail by a hacker who never seemed to rest—he’d heard about it in the news. “The Laughing Man Incident.”

The kidnapping of Ernest Serano, CEO of Serano Genomics, on February 3, 2024 kicked off a case where a total of seven MicroMachine manufacturers received letters threatening to compromise their assembly lines with viruses.

If he recalled correctly, even as witnesses watched during the abduction of CEO Serano, the culprit rewrote his own mug as a pop design face mark. In real time, too…If it was indeed a lone-wolf crime, then he had the wizard-class skills to pull off multiple simultaneous ghost hacks.

A flawless, synchronic visual rewrite—putting aside the criminal aspect, it was pretty much what this island’s system did.

“I wonder where that perp is now,” Coma said, tilting his head. “If he snuck onto this island, he’s mine.”

“As much as I enjoy the banter, let’s talk about work,” Hide spoke up. “Any clues about the gun’s whereabouts?”

“That’s the thing.” Coma’s expression turned serious. “From our investigation, we know that it was disassembled down to its base components and brought in among a load of repair parts. The supply administration department’s scan found one latch, one primer, and two firing pins.”

“A revolver, then,” remarked Hide. “Bugs me that it’s just the smaller bits.”

“The bigger ones like the cylinder and grip would stand out. There has to be a separate smuggling route, but it’s eluding us for the moment.”

Hide gave this some thought. If there was a route that security wasn’t aware of, the latch and primer that had been spotted and confiscated could be smuggled in anew using that other method. It was entirely possible, then, that a gun had already been reassembled somewhere on the island.

“What did the dispatcher of that load have to say?” asked Hide.

“The vendor has no idea. These are small parts, so maybe the culprit simply snuck into the warehouse and shoved them into the load. We’ve requested Niihama’s cyber police to pursue that line, but there hasn’t been any development to speak of.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t mount a decent investigation over stray parts, in the absence of victims or suspicions of terrorism…”

An idea suddenly came to Hide.

“How about checking the memories of all guests and staff using the ghost-infiltration keys that they provided?” he suggested. “The SOFT system is sticking its virtual fingers into everyone’s cyberbrains all the time. It should be possible, technologically speaking.”

“That would certainly make our lives easier.” Coma sighed. “The island doesn’t permit that move. We staff seeing fit to dive down to the ghost line isn’t a measure stipulated anywhere in our agreements, and infringes on cyberbrain ethics laws as well. Only SOFT’s mother system, which has no mind or will of its own, can touch our guests’ brains, you see? In the first place, we staff haven’t been told Mother’s admin code or main-unit location, so it’s impossible.”

“You don’t know her location?” asked Hide, sounding a little surprised.

“To guard against eavesdropping and theft, I’m sure,” Coma said. “Thanks to that, we’re clueless about Mother’s shape and form and physical durability…Well, our dear God dwells somewhere on this island. That’s enough for security purposes.”

Hide could only sigh when Coma flashed a playful smile.

If only Mother would cooperate, no case would be simpler…But it was true that the SOFT system’s power was too great for any individual to wield.

Hide found himself glancing at the fountain at the center of the cafeteria.

The transparent water that tumbled down prettily reflecting the surrounding light—the permeation processing and the physical computations of the aerial transformation must have been fairly burdensome, but SOFT executed such tasks handily as well.

“If this island’s system fell into some country’s hands whole-sale,” Hide muttered out loud without meaning to, “and if they coerced every citizen’s cyberbrain to install it…”

“What was that?” asked Coma, his voice low.

“Nothing…” dismissed Hide.

If they could do such a thing, it would be a rulers’ paradise. Policy and welfare would become unnecessary. There would be no rebellions or revolutions. Inhabiting an ideal world, the citizens would keep voting in favor of the administration like zombies.

Prior to his arrival, Hide had presumed that Jupiter’s objective was to kill one of the celebrities who visited this island. But perhaps Jupiter’s aim—

A wireless warning interrupted his thoughts.

“A guest has struck a guard in Area West-E and bolted! All personnel, apprehend the offender immediately!”

Hide exchanged glances with Coma and the others and started to run.

As he ran, the case sit rep streamed into Hide’s cyberbrain.

The perp was a VIP guest, a Middle Easterner. The events that culminated in his escapade were, in a word, peculiar.

A guard had spotted a guest removing his own arm in Area West-E and called out, concerned that the prosthetic was malfunctioning. The guest struck the guard with that arm and bolted.

In other words, the prosthesis had served as a club. Swinging a fortified-carbon-frame arm made for a potent weapon here. The man, however, was royalty from an oil-producing nation and incredibly rich. Why would he?

Dashing to where the man had escaped, Hide caught sight of him in a lobby area.

A dust box was set into the wall, and the culprit was in the middle of disposing of his arm.

“Security!” Hide yelled as he ran. “Hands up please!”

Alerted to Hide’s presence, the perp got into a crouch and attacked.

He leapt and went for Hide’s right ankle, and when Hide saw through it and dodged, he struck the floor with just one arm to twist in the air and launch a roundhouse kick.

Hide blocked it with his right arm. Sparks flew from their prostheses.

“Hide, use the lance!” hollered Coma from far behind, still in pursuit.

When Hide issued a command in his cyberbrain, a white stick the size of a pen materialized out of nowhere. It was a special-command weapon available only to security personnel.

He shook the lance. It instantly extended almost ten feet.

The perp swayed to evade the huge stick as it swung. But it elongated some more, and rearing its head like a snake, wrapped around his leg. Anchors that resembled white fangs grew out of the stick and bit into the perp’s leg.

“Gah…” he moaned in pain.

Hide switched the lance’s mode without missing a beat.

In a split second the white stick turned blue, and just as soon, a powerful membrane current coated its surface. The perp writhed, his body twitching.

After twenty seconds, Hide cut the switch to end the electrocution.

“Uh oh. One prosthetic steak, done,” quipped Coma, who’d caught up, looking at the man on the floor.

“He actually hasn’t suffered a scratch, so it’s fine?” shrugged Hide, erasing the lance with a command. “I’m wondering why this guy tried to throw away his arm. Please check that dust box.”

“At any rate, I’m amazed, Hide.”

“About what?”

“Extension is supposed to be the lance’s only command,” Coma marveled. “Yet you made it go all curvy, grow fangs, and stun with an electric current. What a waste of cyberbrain affinity on someone who’s just keeping tabs on terrorists.”

“I might not look it, but I used to be military,” Hide told him. “And it’s not like I’m a cyberbrain specialist. My imagination is a bit more fertile compared to other people, that’s all.”

“Imagination. The most powerful force on this island,” Coma said, laughing.

“I found the arm!”

Hide and Coma turned toward their colleague.

The arm discarded in the dust box was just a generic prosthetic for male use. The connector bolt was removed, the synthetic skin torn. Hide’s breath caught when he inspected it.

“Coma…Check this out,” he said, pointing to where the arm had been attached.

Visible there, silver white, was prosthetic bone, and its cross-section showed a dent as if some part had been pulled out. If the part had fit there snugly, then it was cylindrical with holes, like a sliced lotus root.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Coma groaned. “This dent…It’s the revolver’s cylinder…”

“We’ve tracked down the smuggling route,” Hide said. “The gun parts were brought here concealed in prostheses. It was made of the same material so the scanning didn’t register them.”

“So this guest is the culprit?”

“Not necessarily. Maybe he’s an upstanding citizen who got ghost-hacked and turned into a mule off-island. It’s plausible.”

“Yet invading his ghost to find out would violate our service provisions. How do we go about this?”

“We’re going to have to be anachronistic,” Hide said, smiling. “Question him.”

“Yikes,” Coma sighed with an exaggerated grimace.

They waited for the smuggling suspect to come to before interrogating him, but he didn’t surrender any useful info. He was royalty from the Middle East, he said, on here on vacation; a guest, who had every right to discard in a dust box what was concealed in his own prosthesis. Now, he didn’t know what had been concealed, nor why he’d done such a thing, but he certainly had the right. To restrain and interrogate him thus was rude behavior that he absolutely condemned.

Watching the video of the questioning, Coma and Hide could only frown.

“What do you think?” asked the security chief.

“It’s the typical reaction of someone who’s been ghost-hacked,” Hide said, folding his arms. “I did expect as much…”

Coma chuckled helplessly. “ ‘My laments, my sorrows, unbow your heads. And depart not, memories…’ ”

“Are you quoting Chuya Nakahara this time?” Hide glanced at Coma. “We can ruminate later about the sorrows of having your memories scrambled. Because we’ve figured out the enemy’s m.o. Let’s check the surveillance camera feed for the last few days and search for whoever’s retrieving stuff from dust boxes and staying on the move.”

Hide was walking down a hotel area hallway alone.

Overall, the island felt a little on the cramped side because the space was underground. The room doors were lined at relatively close intervals.

Examining the surveillance camera feeds, they’d come across several scenes of tourists picking things out of dust boxes and moving along. They were retrieving gun parts. These collectors, of diverse nationalities and creeds, were no doubt victims of ghost-hacks, too. Analyzing their routes, Hide concluded that all of them had passed through this hallway. The true culprit had to be in one of the nearby guest rooms and taking advantage of the cameras’ blind spot to receive the gun parts from the collectors.

Hide stopped in front of one of the rooms.

Using his cyberbrain, he called up the visitor list. The name of the guest in Room E4403…

Seymour Glass.

Something about it bothered him, but he didn’t know what.

He called up the roster details. Seymour Glass, a business owner from the former state of Connecticut, American Empire. He was here alone, on his third visit to SOFT. Guest Class N-A—he enjoyed super VIP treatment and could synthesize almost anything on this island, with access rights surpassing security’s N-B.

Hide felt oddly agitated.

That name Seymour Glass…Something about it bugged him.

He tried knocking, but the room seemed to be empty and there was no reply. Hide used his security emergency rights to create a cyberbrain-print key to open the lock and stepped into the doorway.

It was a simple one-room unit. It had a synthetic-reality potted plant and clock and built-in bookshelf. If a person was hiding there, Hide couldn’t sense him. Slipping into the room, he shut the door and looked around.

Nothing in particular was off. Still, he felt an odd presence. He checked his cyberbrain sensor-input signal but to no avail. There shouldn’t be anyone there—

Hide was slowly beginning to change his mind. Invading the ghosts of multiple billionaires to make them smuggle gun parts. It wasn’t Jupiter’s m.o. She’d opt for a more radical method, like having a guest ingest a liquid explosive and blow up near the target. The inefficacy of orchestrating a large-scale ghost-hack to sneak in a measly handgun was unlike her.

Was Jupiter…not involved in this case?

Had his hasty assumption conjured her as a mirage?

—Look at the mirror carefully.

The way she’d delivered that line came back to him.

An idea flashed like lightning in his brain.

“I see…So that’s it.”

He remembered now. Seymour Glass was a character from an old story from the old America. Its author was J. D. Salinger. A genius of a young man ends up committing suicide with a handgun in a hotel room.

In the story is a scene where Seymour talks to a little child who mishears the young man’s name and asks:

—See more glass?

Hide gasped and pulled out the hand mirror he’d been carrying on himself.

Having slipped out of his hand during his conversation with Jupiter last night, it had several cracks. His face was reflected on its uneven surface.

The super VIP Seymour Glass enjoyed N-A Class rights and could synthesize realities that security personnel weren’t permitted to. But stepping on it wasn’t the only way to see through it.

Hide held out the mirror and gave it a few quick shakes. A flipped image of the room wavered on its uneven surface.

This mirror wasn’t synthesized. It was an actual physical object. Whatever appeared on it needed to be computed and synthesized by SOFT, but shaking a cracked mirror that already needed to show a distorted image increased the processing burden. Thus a momentary time lag occurred before the scene became visible in the mirror. In other words, only for that instant, the world presented itself in its true form.

A human figure appeared in the mirror for a split second.

Hide turned around without thinking. Naturally, he saw no one there. But the truth lay in the mirror.

Shaking it again, he looked at the reflected image, carefully. The person in it—was familiar to him.

A round black hat with a brim. A blue overcoat with a hood that hid the face. A calm air. In the right hand—a gun.

As soon as it all became clear to him, an electric current assailed his cyberbrain QRS plug.

A cyberbrain lock—all of his strength left Hide, and his body started to topple, aslant.

In his fading consciousness, Hide recalled where he’d seen the figure: off-island, on a documentary news program.

Coma had brought it up in the cafeteria. A spree of anti-corporate terrorism that began with the abduction of the Serano Genomics CEO—that culprit’s moniker was also from a work by Salinger, the creator of Seymour Glass.

A pop face mark appeared over the face of the gun’s wielder.

“Allie doesn’t belong to anyone,” the guy said. “It isn’t to be used by those phonies that Allie exists. I have to protect Allie. That’s why I came.”

“The Laughing Man…” groaned Hide at last, deep in his throat, and with those words his mind plunged into darkness.

Pain formed a circle around Hide.

They were memories from his boyhood that remained in his cyberbrain.

Darkness and solitude bound him. Not only could he not swing his arm to brush them away, he couldn’t even scream.

Where is my body? Where is my body?

Squeezing out silent howls, the young Hide cursed the fact that he’d been born. It was the only resistance the boy could mount—resistance to life.

Not a single part of his body would move. Except his left hand. The rest, strangers had taken away somewhere.

Hide was confused. Was this a remembered past? Or was it just a nightmare? Or was this reality, and what he’d taken for reality merely a synthesized version? Just the dream of a fluttering butterfly?

It was as Kant said. Structural approximates of human beings, which was what we’d ended up becoming with our prosthetic bodies and electronic brains, no longer had the ability to distinguish reality. Fake cognition, fake reality. A pitiful mimesis of the Idea that forever failed to arrive at the Ding an Sich.

A ray of light shone through the darkness. It was a girl. The girl’s smile had beamed and illuminated him in his darkness. That’s why he stopped cursing life itself. But she, too, was now gone.

Just once more.

If she could, just once more—

“Ah, you’ve woken up.”

Hide opened his eyes on a bed in the security staff waiting room.

“Cyberbrain activity, green. So you were just forced to nap for a while. Scared the shit out of me.”

Hide’s eyes moved and caught Coma’s figure by his bedside.

“How long was I…asleep?”

“About half a day. Don’t sound so worried. We won’t dock your pay or anything.”

Hide raised his upper body. The mechanical pressure was still a little high. He felt faint.

“Hide, we found you collapsed in Room E4403. What happened? Did you come into contact with the perp?”

“Ah…Before I tell you about that, could you search the name ‘Allie’ on the island’s database?”

“Sure…but you’ll have to give me a minute,” Coma said. “That the perp’s name?”

“I don’t know yet.”

While Coma searched the data, Hide decided to scan the security log that had accumulated while he’d slept. An orange message panel appeared out of nowhere. He followed with his eyes the info that it displayed.

There was no trace of any commotion. Except for the alarm signal for Hide passing out from a cyberbrain lock, nothing particularly eye-catching had occurred. In other words, after knocking him out, the Laughing Man just quietly walked away, and behaved.

—I have to protect Allie.

What was his objective?

Perusing the log, Hide noticed an oddity.

“Is the freight liner behind schedule?” he asked.

It was forty-one minutes past the arrival time for the ship that ferried food and spare parts to the island.

“Hm? Oh, I guess she isn’t here yet today. Still, this much of a delay isn’t unprecedented. Her departure must have been held back because they went nuts over checking the freight thanks to this brouhaha.”

“Hmph…”

If she’d simply left port behind schedule, then that was that.

Any sort of trouble put Hide on edge given the timing. It couldn’t help but seem like something more. He ran his fingers over his nape where he’d been cyberbrain-locked earlier.

That was when Coma piped, “Holy…Is this ‘Allie’?”

“What’s wrong?”

Coma pointed at the bluish white search panel that floated in midair. “The system admin log retains that name. Allie is SOFT’s Admin001.”

“Let me see.”

Hide turned his attention to the airborne panel—another synthesized image created by the SOFT system.

“What’s going on here?” he groaned. “Allie has been accessing the system continuously since it began operating. He still has a connection from somewhere on this island.”

“Impossible,” moaned Coma. “This place isn’t big. I’ve at least got a handle on every employee’s face and background. But not one person has never left the island since we started up.”

A current shot through Hide’s head. “There is,” he blurted out without thinking. “There is one, isn’t there? Someone who’s never left the island since it started up—who can’t.”

Hide looked at Coma before continuing.

“The god of this place. Mother. Of the SOFT system.”

Suddenly a number of red alert messages popped up in the air.

“What is it?” asked Hide.

“It’s from the aboveground monitoring team.” Coma ran his eyes over the messages, and as he did so, his expression grew stiff. “Damn…seriously?”

When Hide read the message as well, he couldn’t help but voice his reaction. “The freight liner…got sunk?”

The messages noted that the ship, which had been behind schedule, was sunk in nearby seas and that multiple heat sources indicative of combat were detected in the vicinity. Due to having to clear several checks, the report hadn’t been immediate, but it was that much more reliable.

“Hello, Topside Security Team, what’s the deal?” Coma called out on his cybernetic line. “Hello? Come in, Topside Security Team!” After trying a few more times, he turned a stunned face to Hide. “No signal from our aboveground personnel.”

“What?”

Hide confirmed it. Indeed, the vitals were flat for the four members of the topside team. When he consulted the log, all four had been severed from the system simultaneously.

Something had happened.

“Coma. It mentions heat sources indicative of combat at sea…Did the freight liner that got sunk have any maritime warfare capabilities?”

“Yeah. Against pirates and cyberthief divers. TASS sonar and guided grenades, and two anti-air turrets.”

Run-of-the-mill pirates would disengage at the mere sight of such weaponry. If a ship with those armaments had gone down…

“It could be the doing of a fairly large criminal syndicate,” Hide said. “At any rate, we need some personnel topside as reinforcements.”

“A large criminal syndicate…like who?” Coma asked worriedly. “Mafia, cyberthieves, or terrorists?”

“We don’t know yet,” Hide replied, walking already. “Whatever the case, let’s hurry up there.”

He had a bad feeling.

Pushing aside the guests, Hide made for the only elevator to the surface.

As he waded through the baffled clientele, he espied beyond the wall of people a familiar silhouette.

A black rimmed round hat and a blue overcoat with a hood.

It was the Laughing Man. There was no mistaking him.

“Hey, kid! Wait!”

As soon as Hide yelled out, the Laughing Man spun and vanished into the wave of bodies.

“Shit, halt!”

“Jeez, Hide!”

Coma tried to stop him, but Hide dashed forth. Whatever the Laughing Man’s objective, he was linked to this situation, no doubt, and couldn’t be allowed to escape.

Chasing after his figure, Hide ran through the narrow hallway and into the supply warehouse. The area stocked food and accessory parts, and no synthetic reality seemed to be projected here. Storage shelves that rose to the dim ceiling stood in endless rows like taciturn soldiers.

“Laughing Man, where are you? This warehouse has no other exit. You’re trapped!”

Hide prowled forward cautiously. Coma looked uncertain but followed beside him.

“Hide, he’s here?”

“Yeah. Watch out. He has a gun.” Hide spotted something peculiar deeper into the warehouse as he spoke. “Wait…I see something. There.” He pointed at a brown object sitting on the floor.

“Is that…a catcher’s mitt?” asked Coma, perplexed.

Hide picked it up and gazed at it. Apart from being left-handed, it looked like an ordinary catcher’s mitt. Not an accessory part that the island would include in its inventory, it had to be a synthetic projection. Was this the Laughing Man’s doing?

Just as Hide tried to inspect the mitt—

“To all security personnel! Topside lost! Repeat! Some party above—”

Almost at the same time, the island shook.

The ceiling and walls creaked, and fragments flaked off—as if a sizable explosion had rocked the island’s surface.

“What the hell was that?” asked Hide.

“I don’t believe it,” Coma muttered, aghast. “The signals for our topside reinforcements…have all died out.”

“Died out?!”

Hide glanced at the catcher’s mitt in his hand. On the inside, in blue printing ink and in type, were the words:

—RUN AWAY.

“Hide, watch out!”

All of a sudden, Coma shoved Hide, hard.

He sailed through the air. Before he could register his predicament, he slammed against one of the warehouse’s metal shelves.

A moment later, countless bullets rushed to where he’d stood.

Innumerable muzzle flashes sparkled at the entrance. Bullets bore into the warehouse’s back wall, leaving their mark.

“Wha…” Hide got up and yelled, “Coma!”

Bullets had riddled the fallen security chief as well. Almost no part of him was untouched. Another hail poured toward Hide before he rushed to Coma’s side.

“Go…I’m…fine,” Coma said haltingly. “Hurry to…the SOFT core…the water…”

“Don’t talk, Coma!”

Taking cover behind a metal shelf, Hide reached out his hand as best he could. He had to shield Coma from the volley, his head at least. Even a cyborg with a full-body prosthesis would die for certain if the brain shell were destroyed.

Hide’s fingers caught Coma by the collar. Pulling him behind the shelf would have to do.

The security chief brushed away Hide’s fingers. “You idiot! Go!”

A second later, a bullet sliced through the air from the entryway and blew away Coma’s brow.

Specks of blood and cranial fluid splattered Hide’s arm.

“Wh…”

Another hail of bullets. Hide could only roll away to get some distance.

Dead. Coma was dead.

Assaulted by some unknown enemy—what, what was going on? Why was this happening?

He looked at the entryway. Three figures in tight black bodysuits. Their hands held submachine guns. Steyr TMPs.

“Goddammit,” Hide groaned through clenched teeth. “The enemy isn’t a criminal syndicate…We’re facing military spec ops!”

They controlled the warehouse’s only exit. And clearly, they had orders to take out guards with extreme prejudice. He had no place to run, nor any weapon with which to strike back.

The soldiers stepped into the warehouse. They didn’t seem inclined to let him be.

Was this the end?

Someone tugged his arm out of the blue.

“This way!”

Coaxed by the mysterious voice, Hide turned around to find an air duct popping up on the warehouse’s empty wall. The speaker who’d addressed him, however, was nowhere to be seen.

“Inside, get in here!”

From behind approached the soldiers’ footsteps. There was no time to think.

Folding his body, Hide hopped into the duct. He slid down its slanted interior, or more like fell.

“Koff…”

Past the dusty duct was the AC Control Room.

A youth came sliding after Hide, stood up, and spoke.

“It’s a matter of time before the enemy finds us here. We need to go to Allie.”

The youth must have lost his hat in the duct. For the first time, the face of the “man” was exposed to Hide.

Dark, unkempt hair. Calm pupils that seemed to suck in all surrounding sounds even at a time like this. He was much younger than expected—perhaps a minor? At the very least, he didn’t look like an anti-corporate terrorist who’d made the world quake in fear.

“You—are the Laughing Man?”

“I never introduced myself as such, not once.” The youth smiled. “They called me ‘Aoi’ back at the institution. I’m the one who summoned you to this island. Please help me protect Allie from that bunch.”

“W-Wait!” interrupted Hide. “What do you mean you summoned me? Who’s Allie? Who are those soldiers?”

“We don’t have the time for detailed explanations.” The youth who’d given his name as Aoi looked around. “First, please witness the state of the facilities.”

When Aoi shook his finger, numerous clips appeared in the air. They were real-time feeds from the place’s surveillance cameras.

It was an un-simulated hell.

In front of the elevator, the point of entry, six troops clad in slick, dark assault suits and two in heavy-duty armored suits fired at the guards. Under the arch of the Baroque-style palace, the intruders looked like true devils.

Two security personnel lay lifeless. By their hands were lances extended to their maximum length. SOFT’s peerless suppression organs had proven powerless against actual lethal weaponry.

“They’re an assault force attached to the Gavel Republic, with backing from the Eastern bloc. Unit code RASP. Their objective is to collect the system here, in order to regulate internal antiestablishment elements in the name of welfare.”

“A government using the SOFT system on the people, huh? True, a regime that employed this place’s capabilities would be synonymous with God…”

Still, inserting an assault force onto this island where the very rich from nations all over the world stayed was sheer madness.

“If that’s the case, we’re all the more stuck,” Hide noted. “We don’t have the firepower to counter a military strike.”

Aoi, his expression unchanging, said, “There is a way. Cybernetic warfare. That, however, requires wired access to Allie and usurping SOFT’s admin rights.”

“I take it Allie is the system mainframe here?”

“Yes.”

A groan escaped Hide. “But establishing a wired connection won’t be easy. No one on this island has been told where the mainframe is.”

Aoi nodded. “We’ll just have to search for it. The attackers have yet to locate it, too. Any hunches? Thick cords, servers, and a cooling mechanism would be indispensable for running Allie’s reality synthesis program around the clock. They have to be somewhere on this island…”

Hide considered the possibilities. A cooling mechanism…Seawater? With Mother on the ocean floor…No, to avoid any subsurface electronic interference, the mainframe had to be inside the island’s protective underground shell.

When he thought that far, a bolt of light streaked through the back of his mind. Coolant. Water.

“I know,” he said, “where the core is. Come with me.”

The place where Hide and Aoi rushed to was the island’s public space. The cafeteria where Hide had eaten just half a day ago.

“The fountain?”

“Right,” Hide nodded in reply to Aoi. “It’s been bothering me. Computing complex reflections for images like a fountain entails a high processing burden. Synthesizing a three-dimensional image that requires computing the reflections and transparency of countless drops of water in a cafeteria with so many people is inefficient. If the fountain is here—that’s because it’s not a synthetic reality but an existing physical reality.”

Hide crouched by the fountain’s foundation. Feeling with his fingers, he searched for the interface bay.

“Here it is.”

Peeling away the camouflaging tile, he exposed the bay. The wire plug, however, featured a cover to guard against connections. A physical key in the administrator’s exclusive possession would be needed to open it.

“Damn. We don’t have the time to be looking for a physical key,” Hide griped.

“It’s actually going as I planned. I went to all the trouble to smuggle in a lock-pick just for this reason.”

“A lock-pick?”

Aoi pressed the muzzle of a revolver against the cover’s sealing mechanism and fired without batting an eye.

The sound of metal breaking echoed, and the lock was destroyed. The cover came off.

“So that’s what the gun was for,” Hide muttered.

From his neck Aoi extended a QRS code and connected it to the plug. “Now I’m diving into Allie.”

“Wait.” Hide grabbed Aoi’s shoulder. “Tell me. Who are you? Why are you trying to protect Allie…the system?”

“At the institution where we grew up, Allie was my little brother,” Aoi said. “He was a crybaby who didn’t like being alone…He always wanted to be connected to someone and repeatedly performed these ghost-hacks that bordered on merging. In time, he came up with a plan. A plan to be connected to everyone all the time…When he parallelized brains and became the island’s system itself, he was happy. Even if the repeated ghost replication and parallelization meant he no longer knew who he was.”

Hide was at a loss for words. Ghost replication and parallelization. In other words, Allie used to be a human being…and the island’s system was his brain itself in parallel form?

Hide muttered, “These parallelized, replicated cyberbrains…”

“The data says there are 118 of them,” Aoi stated unceremoniously. “I’ll be diving, then…It might take me a while to break through the central cyberbrain defense barrier. It’s 118 against one, after all, and at the institution, that guy was the only one who was better at hacking than me.”

All of a sudden Hide recalled where he’d heard the name Allie.

Alley Caufield. A boy from Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist Holden Caufield’s little brother and a child genius who’s already dead when the story begins.

“A big brother ought to help his kid brother.” Aoi smiled just a little. It was so sad a smile you almost felt bad for him.

Entrusting the revolver to Hide, Aoi closed his eyes and said, “Take care of my body while I’m diving.”

Aoi was in a cyberspace that blinked a bluish white.

He drifted as an electronic signal in the endless expanse. Eventually, the exterior of a cyberbrain array that was intertwined like a molecular lattice came into view.

Aoi lacked his customary support AI array and decoy barrier. He had to break through Allie’s ghost line despite being as good as naked, electronically speaking.

“Time for the ‘Laughing Man’ to shine,” Aoi said self-mockingly. “Shooting back my opponent’s arrows is the only option. Decoy 8, stand by. Copying barrier array with URF code to anchor opponent.”

Aoi dove into the glowing blue sea of innumerable electronic connections and directories. He had no problem clearing the second and third levels. Assembling countless viruses and Trojan horses simultaneously on the spot, he sent them into Allie’s barrier gate.

Aoi was diving into a cyberbrain as casually as he might brush away a curtain, but the amazing speed of his hack trampled on common sense and would have stunned a connoisseur.

The ghost line of the linked cyberbrains was now visible. In electronic space, it looked like a sea whose surface was a blinking net.

“Chief.”

It was the voice of a young boy.

The data of Aoi in the cyberbrain came to a halt.

“Allie…”

“Chief, I knew you’d come. Let’s play. How about diving into someone today?”

“Allie. I’m not here to play. Bad guys have invaded the island. To counter them, could you hand over the SOFT access code?”

“How about a race through a barrier maze? I know, let’s go ‘skin diving’! We’ll see who can penetrate and dive through more cyberbrains without using a barrier—”

“This isn’t a game, Allie. And you’re not a human being anymore, but the remains of 118 ghosts that deteriorated from being copied over and over. You’re the end result of a genius hacker who hated being standalone and merged with others like mad.”

“Why…” Allie’s voice echoed through the cyberspace. “Why shouldn’t I fear solitude? You were so scared of it too, Chief!”

Two offensive barrier arrays stabbed Aoi’s cyberbrain. His consciousness data blinked red. The attack tore through the second stratum, and he finally neutralized it at the third.

“Allie. We don’t have the time to talk…The world of us peeping Toms has come pretty far since you shut yourself inside this island. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to pry my way in by force.”

The cyberspace blinked red. Multiple interceptors shone like the eyes of a predator that wantonly gobbled its prey.

“Let’s see you try!”

Soundless sparks blasted in the space.

Carrying the motionless youth’s body, Hide grew impatient.

Not yet? Hadn’t the core been suppressed yet?

One warning transmission after another about facilities getting subdued came in via e-comms. It was a matter of time before the enemy came flooding in.

An armed trooper dashed in from one of the entryways. He seemed to be a scout detached from the main force. He and Hide noticed each other nearly at once.

Hide danced and leapt without even thinking. He launched a level, sweeping kick against the intruder as he tried to aim his submachine gun. The SMG left the soldier’s hands and clattered across the floor.

The soldier thrust out his fist, but Hide tilted his head out of the way and countered with a palm strike to the abdomen. An armored jacket absorbed the impact, however, and Hide’s hand did little damage.

Such hardness—meant a full-body prosthesis. Blows wouldn’t suffice. Hide had to target a weak point, the joint mechanisms.

The soldier backed up and assumed a fighting pose. Hide charged him anyway.

His opponent greeted him with hooks meant to rattle Hide’s brain. Two, then three, to the chin. But instead of collapsing, Hide grabbed his opponent’s ankle, tackled him, and brought him down to the floor.

“Nkk…!”

Hide wrapped both of his legs around his opponent’s right arm and put all of his back into the elbow cross hold. The soldier’s joint exceeded its sundering threshold and the conducting actuator shattered. Prosthetic bone stuck out.

Pulling a combat knife out of its chest holder, the soldier swung it down at the clinging Hide.

Before the tip could sink in, Hide fired all the remaining ammo from the revolver he was keeping for Aoi.

Shards of light drifted in cyberspace.

The wreckage of anti-immunity factors undulated like so much debris near the ghost line.

“Ch…ief…”

A parallelized ghost, whose sixth level had been breached and deprived of its barrier, was issuing commands to reboot its array, but it merely crumbled into white light each time.

“Allie. I would have loved to chat with you.”

“No…No way, Chief. Hey, don’t erase me. Chief. Don’t erase me. Chief. Don’t erase me. Chief. Don’t erase me. Chief. Don’t erase me. Please, Chief.”

Aoi fell silent in electronic space.

This wasn’t Allie. Born of something like Allie who had parallelized and lost himself, it was the shadow of a ghost. Just a processor.

“The world is overflowing with phony stuff. I actually wanted to talk to you again,” Aoi said. “On a bus stop bench, at a hotel bar, in a museum lobby. Just like that, we’d talk about a world that isn’t phony…”

Instead of answering, Allie kept spitting out error codes.

“I’m taking the SOFT admin rights and control access pass, Allie,” Aoi stated calmly.

The space went dark.

When Aoi opened his eyes, the gunfight had already begun.

Hide was trying his best with a submachine gun he’d gotten off the enemy but failing to undo the sheer numerical disparity. Hemmed in by his opponents, who approached on three sides, his disadvantage was only growing starker.

“You’re up!” he saw Aoi stirring and shouted, sounding fairly desperate. “I can’t hold out any longer! Is SOFT in your hands now?”

“I need to borrow the body of the solider lying there,” Aoi said, pale but calm. “I’ll mount the SOFT program on a virus array and stream it through their comm lines.”

After Hide somehow managed to drag the body closer, Aoi established a wired connection to the soldier’s QRS plug.

“But the enemy’s cyberbrains are guarded like you wouldn’t believe with military-grade offensive barriers!” cautioned Hide. “I doubt you’ve been able to bring barrier-penetrating viruses onto this island! What are you going to do?”

“I’ll assemble them now.”

“Now?!”

Military-grade barriers were inordinately more complex than civilian ones. Any half-assed infiltration could end in your cyberbrain getting fried by a four-tiered offensive barrier and instant death. An attempt with no more than handmade viruses was like charging at a fully defended fortress with a climbing knife.

“Barrier 014, 017 cleared…Comm gate under control…Branch positioning complete. Program ‘SOFT’ infection via enemy admin…Minus six seconds, five…Link complete.”

Had he—already broken through?

Aoi calmly told the astonished Hide, “Now, that bunch are members of this island too.” A bead of sweat rolled down the hacker’s cheek. “Actually…There’s a reason I chose you to be this place’s savior. Your cyberbrain depth…the width of your gate lets you connect to multiple cyberbrains and manipulate them simultaneously. It’s what people in the old days used to call ‘grit’ or ‘willpower’…With your cyberbrain complexity and strength, you…can become SOFT’s hero…”

Aoi trailed off, and his body lurched. Hide hastily propped him up.

“Please…Allie’s…playground…this tiny paradise…”

With that, the youth passed out.

He’d been at his limit. Even for someone who stole passersby’s eyes in real time, infiltrating Allie with its transcendent processing capacity, then penetrating military barriers in quick succession, must have taken all of his mental energy.

“Leave it to me.”

Hide started walking.

The troops fired their submachine guns at once. Hide simply raised his arm without ducking or taking cover.

The soldiers’ eyes went blank in their assault suits.

The bullets—hung midway.

When Hide waved his hand, the bullets turned upright in the air before striking and burrowing into the ceiling. Hide nonchalantly resumed his march.

“Soldier time is over,” he said. “From here on, it’s wizard time.”

When Hide swung his arm, a massive antitank gun appeared out of nowhere. It immediately let loose in the soldiers’ direction.

An explosive round hit the wall and spewed orange flames.

Hide leapt toward the troops as they tried to withdraw. Flying almost fifteen feet with a single jump, he landed along their escape route.

His fist shot forth and struck a chin. A soldier spun in the air from the impact, smashed into the wall, and slumped unconscious.

The other troops let out a scream and tried to run away.

Yet, their legs wouldn’t move. When they looked at the floor, the material was churning and had formed an army of hands to grab their ankles. Try as the soldiers might to kick them away, the stone hands didn’t even budge.

“You know what happens to scoundrels who point their guns at a kid?”

Hide poked one of the trapped soldiers in the head with a forefinger, which instantly transformed into a submachine gun. The 9mm HV ammo it regurgitated destroyed the suit’s head. Amidst the scattering fragments, the soldier fainted.

From the opposite hallway rushed in two armored suits and eight soldiers—reinforcements, apparently.

“So many,” Hide said. “Gotta fight numbers with numbers.”

Hide walked behind a pillar, and every time he passed, separate Hides emerged. One became two, two grew to four, and four turned into eight.

The eight Hides deployed lances in their palms.

From there, it was one-sided.

The armored suits’ machine guns groaned and spat out bullets, but he flung them all away. Single-handedly. The tips of the lances danced like snakes.

The coiled soldiers, zapped by electrical currents, passed out. An armored suit approached from the flank and brought down an arm like a tree trunk. Hide met the appendage straight on with a fist and a bang and pulverized the whole suit.

The troops’ howls and angry shouts, and storms of bullets—Hide appeared everywhere and crushed the enemy inside the island.

“Gkk…” The commander lay on the floor in his thermo-engineered camouflage suit. “You exploiting devil…Slave manufacturer!”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Hide was stepping on the commander’s chest and glaring down at him. “You guys massacred innocent people on this island. Including my colleague…You’ll have to pay for your crime.”

“Crime?” Even as the commander’s face twisted in pain, his lips curled into a sneer. “Compared to the sins and evil spread by the developed world, this is nothing…”

“That’s what I call the audacity of a thief.” Hide furrowed his brow unpleasantly. “A dictatorship that military rule gave rise to seeks the SOFT system to attract votes to an instable regime and to dominate the citizenry’s ghosts, their very souls. What’s that if not evil?”

“You brainwash with vulgar media and cyber entertainment, while we rely on guns and divine dispensations…Where is the difference? At least we are trying to bring happiness to the people!”

“You’re wrong,” Hide declared. “Being responsible for your actions and recovering from mistakes is what makes us human. Like Aoi and I have…What you’re attempting isn’t even manufacturing happiness, but the production of zombies.”

“Kkk…keheh,” the commander chortled deep in his throat as though he were enjoying this. “What ignorance, what a blinkered view! The world…human beings, aren’t so classy. Creating nothing, understanding nothing, they flock to convenient information and willingly assimilate it and get played in droves. Feeling no responsibility whatsoever no matter how irresponsible the outcome, they eat up infrastructures that they take for granted with their aimless behavior. That’s the people for you. Humans are born zombies.”

“Shut up.”

Hide pointed the barrel of a gun at the commander.

“Watch what you say. This one is a physical reality that Aoi smuggled in. If I punch through your brain shell with this, your gray matter will splatter across a physical-reality floor unlike with a synthetic-reality gun. You’ll ghost out once and for all.”

The revolver’s muzzle pressed against the commander’s forehead.

“A naïve brat like you?” the man mocked. “You wouldn’t dare. You need my cyberbrain as evidence for the international law court.”

All expression dropped from Hide’s face. “You killed Coma.”

His eyes saw nothing. Neither drawing breath, blinking, nor feeling, his face was an object that merely existed.

The commander’s own stiffened. “Wai—”

Hide pulled the trigger.

A high-velocity bullet capable of penetrating a titanium brain shell stabbed the man’s forehead, exited from the other side, and dug into the floor. Blood sprayed from his head like the petals of a grand flower.

For a while Hide gazed down blankly at the commander’s destroyed head.

Eventually, the revolver that he gripped vibrated all of a sudden—and vanished like smoke. So did the bloodstains on the floor.

“Take care,” spat Hide. “Your motherland’s assassination squads aren’t so generous.”

The surf lapped Leigo’s shoreline.

Seated in a white chair, Hide was looking out at the waves on the horizon.

In his hand was a cracked hand mirror. The one with an amateurish frame, intended for her.

Jupiter wasn’t here. It’d been a piece of disinformation from the outset meant to invite him to this island.

“Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to meet you in person,” a voice said from behind. When Hide glanced around, it was the young Aoi. “After all, I’m known as an anti-corporate terrorist.”

“How’s your body holding up?” asked Hide. The youth who stood before his eyes was supposed to be a terrorist that the police searched for high and low, but any compunction on Hide’s part to do something about it was long gone.

“I’ll be making myself scarce too,” Aoi said, nodding. “I actually came here because I had a request for Allie. At the center, he and I were like brothers growing up. But Allie, too, didn’t seem to be here anymore.”

“A request?” asked Hide, turning toward Aoi.

The young man didn’t reply and just silently looked out at the horizon.

“Hey, Laughing Man.”

“It’s Aoi.”

“Aoi,” Hide said. “You mentioned Allie not being here anymore. But that’s not true. Your kid brother is right beside you.”

Aoi laughed weakly. “He lives on in my heart—that stuff?”

“Nah.” Hide shook his head and showed his palm to the youth. “Allie was right next to me from the beginning. Look at my hand.”

After studying it for some time, Aoi answered, “There’s nothing there.”

“Yup. Nothing. That’s what’s weird. It should be coated with blood. Coma’s blood, from when he was shot in the head. But there’s not even a trace of it. What do you think that means?”

Following a pause, Aoi’s expression changed. “Don’t tell me…”

“Mm-hm.” Hide nodded. “Apart from the 118 cyberbrains, Allie had an externalized memory apparatus.”

Jupiter’s line about looking at the mirror carefully had helped solved the case at hand. Plus, she’d handed him the mirror. It couldn’t happen, Hide thought, unless the system side tampered with his entire perception.

There was only one rational possibility.

“Right, Coma? Or rather…‘the one hundred nineteenth Allie’?”

No sooner than Hide spoke, empty space fluctuated and gave rise to a human form.

“Impressive, Hide.” Standing there wearing the selfsame fun-loving smile was Coma.

“Security Chief Coma doesn’t exist in this world,” Hide said. “A SOFT creation, it’s synthetic life that can laugh and cry…an AI.”

“That’s about it. As for the memories and abilities, it’s a synthesis of several different guards. Overlaid by a good portion of Allie’s…‘my’ recollections.”

“Allie,” Aoi called gently, looking at Coma. “You’re Allie?”

“I have a message from ‘my’ memory field.” Coma chuckled. “Chief, sorry for the hassle.”

Aoi looked at the ground and didn’t reply right away.

When he finally raised his head, he said gently, “Allie. I had two reasons for coming here. To protect you from the soldiers…and to ask a favor.”

“I know, Chief.” Coma nodded. “You aren’t the Laughing Man. Except for the first kidnapping case, they were copycat crimes by an impostor. Yeah?”

Aoi returned a slow nod and proceeded to explain.

“I came across a bad guy one day. A scoundrel who made a killing selling drugs that didn’t even work. I felt like I needed to do him in. If I did, the world might become just a little more decent…But reality was different. I was simply crushed by a bigger, more ridiculous scoundrel, an uglier phoniness in the world.” Aoi was probably talking about the Laughing Man Incident that shook society. Then he wasn’t the mastermind behind the case?

“I…Allie, I actually came to have my memory erased by you,” Aoi said, his expression no less calm. “My memory of that nauseating Laughing Man Incident. I thought I’d then shut my eyes and ears and close my mouth and escape into solitude. Few hackers have the skills to delete specific memories from a ghost, and you can’t erase your own memories.”

“Chief.”

“I envy you, Allie.” Aoi grimaced. “On this island, everyone is together. No lies, no boredom, and none of that nauseating snobbism. If, like you, I could—”

“Chief, we all wanted to be like you.” Noise ran through Coma as he said this, and his appearance switched out.

He looked about twelve. Soft chestnut hair, a faded baseball uniform. Big round eyes looked up at Aoi.

It had to be Allie’s true form…when he was still alive.

With a youthful smile he said, “Chief, you’re one of the good guys fighting against phonies. If you won’t, who will? And we can always be together. You just need to come here. To this soft island that shuns no mind.”

Aoi didn’t reply. He just faced up biting his lip like he was bearing it.

Hide thought looking at Aoi’s profile: Ordinary people spend their whole lives as if what surrounds them—their family, their organization, and at most the media and news—is the whole world. For those like Aoi and Allie who have an exceptional affinity for the net, though, society means innumerable cyberbrains connecting to the network and a deluge of information. Many hundreds of times more malice and wicked thoughts prick them compared to the normal adolescent. Beaten down by the odiousness, they burrow into standalone shells or, conversely, try to merge with others right up to the ghost line.

Only they understood their loneliness.

“The system is entering into sleep mode. I’ve gotta go.” Allie’s form started to blink. “The next time we meet, let’s talk more. On a bus stop bench, at a hotel bar, in a museum lobby. About a world that isn’t phony but fun…”

With those words Allie vanished.

Young Aoi simply stood there unspeaking.

Was uttering some encouragement the thing to do? But Hide’s voice failed him, and he, too, remained silent by Aoi’s side.

Soon, the multi-rotor helicopter for guests arrived and landed on the heliport.

“Time for me to go,” Hide said. “Are you all right?”

Aoi didn’t open his mouth and just gave a straight nod.

“I’m considering going back to the military,” Hide shared. “The enemy commander told me that I’m a ‘naïve brat.’ Maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s why I can’t find Jupiter—and so I’ve decided to see humans in a wider world. To see the world from the same dimension that Jupiter does. For the time being, I could hitch myself to the U.N.-led peacekeeping forces and hop over to the peninsula.”

Aoi nodded and spoke. “About me—”

“I don’t intend to tell anyone,” Hide interrupted with a hint of a smile. “If you were the mastermind, you wouldn’t look so damn hurt. In the first place, you’d just erase my memory if I tried to spill the beans.”

Aoi smiled a bit too. “I’d recommend purchasing a quality cyberbrain barrier.”

“There’s not much I can say, but…Aoi. Keep at it.”

Aoi looked at Hide and responded with a small nod.

“Well, so long.”

“Yes, so long, Mr. Hide…um…Mr. Hideo Hisaragi.”

“Hisaragi is my birth parents’ surname,” Hide corrected. “I lost them both in an airplane accident when I was six. I was badly injured too…At that point, as an experimental subject for a full-body prosthesis for children, which was still a rare thing back then, my doctor adopted me. Now I use my foster father’s family name.”

“Which would be?”

Starting off toward the heliport, Hide laughed a little and said, “Kuze, written with the characters for ‘nine’ and ‘world.’ My real name is Hideo as in ‘hero’ Kuze.”

Seated in the helicopter, which had taken off, Hide gazed at the dwindling island.

Jupiter wasn’t there either. Where was she?

—Can you fold cranes with your prosthesis?

The question he asked her that day, that he shouldn’t have, remained lodged in his heart to this day.

The girl who was in the next bed, after that airplane accident…the other survivor, who left without even saying goodbye: the reason he wanted to go on living even though his whole body was prosthetic.

Was she able to fold cranes now? No doubt, Hide thought—baseless though it was. She did hate losing. Surely she had turned into an even more formidable prosthetic-user than him.

The terrorist Jupiter. He didn’t know why they called her that abroad. But there was a chance she was involved in unofficial operations as a mercenary who handled governments’ dirty work. If she belonged to “that side”—the world of conflicts, of politics, of the commander from earlier—then Hide needed the resolve to cross over to it as well. Developing nations, refugees, lands ravaged by war—he had to see people in such places with his own eyes to fathom what she was fighting for.

There was no need to panic. It was quite possible that she belonged, in fact, to a government organization—like Public Security—in order to fight.

He thought about the events on the island that was shrinking beyond the window.

Everything there was a false image created by electric signals. And the island taught the truth about existence: Your outside world is no different from this island.

Human beings absolutely cannot recognize the world in its true form according to Kant. He was probably right. Touching your beloved is but a tactile signal. Hearing your beloved is hearing the waveform signals of your auditory device. We’re prisoners imprisoned in brain shells who forever misinterpret the shadows of Ideas. We live out our lives misconstruing those misinterpretations in their totality as “mind” and “consciousness.”

Even this longing that pierced the heart like a thorn.

Still, with cyber technology, we’re able to touch what comes closest to the Idea. The Geist. The root of humanity in the depths of a cyberbrain…The island exposed it and made direct contact with others possible. Moreover, just as we don’t know why human beings have ghosts, it wouldn’t be all that strange if linking to a network of ghosts is the only way to access Kant’s truth—the “higher structure” whereof language cannot speak.

Then, for the first time, we’ll be able to hear the immediate voice of our beloved, and softly caress our beloved.

If their paths ever crossed again, he would revisit the island.

It, and cyber technology, as Aoi and Allie showed, was by no means the dwelling place of devils that people were banished to for pursuing convenience.

The island was a soft island.

There, where barriers and even ghost lines melted and mixed—to touch the same thing, to feel the same thing, in that world.

Surely you’d want for nothing then.

Hide prayed for that day to arrive.