But when it came to reproducing the other senses, touch in particular, research still lagged due to the difficulty in assigning numerical values to these senses. Even with unlimited memory and CPU capacity, the creation of a single person took all of the Neurolinker’s processing power. It was impossible to perfectly re-create in a virtual world the complex sensations of the texture of skin, the resistance of muscles, and the reflexive contraction in a human cheek. So when Haruyuki pulled on her cheek, the only thing his fingertips would feel would be lifeless rubber—
“Fwah ah you doon?”
“Holy crap?!” Haruyuki yelped, let go, and fell backward, hitting his butt on the refrigerator.
The illusion was perfect. Soft, velvety, young. In other words, a sensation of pulling on the cheek of a ten-year-old girl that was nothing shy of perfect—although he had never before had such an experience—was generated in his fingertips.
Staring into the saucer-sized eyes of the girl puffing up her cheeks in sudden outrage, Haruyuki reached a shaking hand up to the Neurolinker on his neck, released the lock, and ripped it off in one go.
The augmented reality information, like the clock, calendar, and app icons, were wiped from his vision.
The girl did not disappear.
“Haruyuki, I’m sorry, but…”
So began the message from his mother that Haruyuki belatedly noticed on their home server. Neurolinker reequipped, he stood stock-still and listened to it.
“I’m sorry, but the daughter of a relative is going to be staying with us for a few days. You know them, don’t you? The Saitos in Nakano? My cousin? He said it was a sudden business trip overseas. And I already told you, I’m in Shanghai from today. I’ll be back in a couple days, so you keep an eye on her, all right? Mail me if you need anything. Bye.”
His mother, Saya Arita, worked in the trading department of a bank that had its home office in the United States. She was never home before the clock struck midnight, and she was always flying overseas, leaving Haruyuki alone for days at a time. Although it was unclear how much of this travel was work and how much was getaways with the man she was dating. Haruyuki sometimes thought that if the divorce seven years earlier hadn’t been because his dad was cheating, it would’ve been exceedingly strange for the family court to let her have custody.
Thus, ever since elementary school, Haruyuki was often taken in by the Kurashimas—Chiyuri’s family—two floors down in the same condo. If Chiyuri’s mom and dad, who always welcomed him warmly, had ever shown him even the slightest hint that they were inconvenienced by this, he would have been crushed. He would have had nowhere to go and probably would’ve ended up bullied ten times more than he was.
Thoughts like this filling his brain, Haruyuki watched Saito’s kid whirling around busily in the kitchen.
The oven timer sounded lightly, and the girl opened the door to pull out a metal tray. The sweet scent hanging in the air became even stronger. Apparently, the source of the fragrance was the cookies.
After carefully transferring the dozen or so cookies via tongs to a large plate covered with a paper towel, the girl exhaled sharply, as if relieved. She took the plate in both hands and turned around, looking up at him. “Um…I’m sorry for using the kitchen without asking. I thought my big brother Haruyuki would be hungry when he got home…so I…”
Her voice is even smaller than before, Haruyuki thought. Oh, duh, she’s probably worried that the “big brother” in the place she was abandoned looks put out by her. She’s insecure. I’m the older one, I shouldn’t be so freaked out, just meeting a girl.
A formless pain deep in his chest, Haruyuki did his best to put a smile on his face. “Oh, thanks. I’m starving.”
And just like that, the girl also grinned, ice melting. “Um, I’m Tomoko Saito. I’m in fifth grade. I figured you maybe forgot me since we haven’t seen each other in years, but…I think we’re second cousins. Um…I’m sorry to just barge in on you like this, but I hope we can get along.” Still holding the plate reverently with both hands, she dipped her head neatly, causing Haruyuki’s pulse to skyrocket and his sweat glands to open to their fullest.
But he quickly remembered the conclusion he’d just reached and somehow managed to respond with something along the lines of a coherent greeting. “Right! Um, I-I’m Haruyuki Arita. M-me, too, I—I hope we’ll get along, Miss Saito.”
Immediately, the girl declared, “You can call me Tomoko!” with a grin, and Haruyuki frantically reined in his distant thoughts, which were moving out into nowhere land at a dizzying pace.
If he was honest, the only memory he had of the Saitos in Nakano was a vague sense that such relatives existed. Which was, he supposed, par for the course when it came to your parents’ cousins.
“So. Are you an only child, too?” he asked, and Tomoko nodded pertly.
“My dad is the only family I have. He had to go away on business suddenly, and I said I could stay home by myself, but he said he would worry. So he brought me here from school a little while ago and then went straight to the airport,” Tomoko replied as she placed the plate of cookies on the table.
Haruyuki checked without thinking. “Oh, so you didn’t see my mom, then.”
“No. I just got a spare key to your house.”
That was extremely good luck. That mother of his wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot Tomoko a look of pure, venomous, and complete annoyance had they met.
However.
Right. So, then, that means…for the next three days, I’m supposed to live alone with this girl, right? No, no, no, no need to panic, you big dummy. She’s in fifth grade. There’s a full two years separating us…Two years…so? So then…?
Tomoko seemed unaware of the sudden uneasiness swallowing Haruyuki, and she smiled again with a “Please restrain yourself until they cool” smile before stepping back. She quickly washed up the bowl and other dishes in the sink while she waited for a pot of water to boil, returning in a few short minutes with a tray of tea. She was clearly already more at home in this kitchen than Haruyuki.
Marveling at how incredible girls are, Haruyuki shook his head abruptly. She’s a kid, a kid. She’s just a kid.
But the cookies were so delicious, they could’ve been sold in a specialty shop. Making short work of a rather large portion of them—nine, to be exact—he sipped the tea Tomoko had made for him, wondering exactly how many years it had been since anyone had baked him any treats.
On the other side of the table, redheaded Tomoko blew little puffs of air over her cup with a serious look on her face, a mannerism both unsophisticated and touchingly lovely. Just watching her, Haruyuki felt a kind of warm glow.
“Thanks for this…Um…Th-they were delicious,” he managed to say in a somewhat normal tone, and Tomoko flashed him a broad smile, as if relieved.
“Really? I’m so glad! You weren’t saying anything, so I was a little worried.”
“S-sorry, I just spaced out while I was eating.”
Chuckling softly, she rose halfway, reached out, and plucked off a cookie crumb stuck to Haruyuki’s cheek. Which she then popped into her mouth, smiling again.
Haruyuki heard a weird heart-popping sound effect in his head and frantically rubbed at his mouth. “U-uh, um, okay. R-right. What should we do now? P-p-play video games? I have a ton of them, some from, like, forty years ago—” he said, before remembering that the majority of them were bloody hellscape–type things.
Fortunately, however, Tomoko shook her head lightly, still beaming. “Um, I don’t really play video games. I’m not very good at full dives.”
“H-huh.” Shifting his gaze as she spoke, Haruyuki finally noticed that there was no Neurolinker, that essential tool of modern life, around her thin neck, which was covered by a blouse buttoned tightly all the way to the top.
He knew there were more than a few families who avoided daily Neurolinker wear while the kids were in elementary school, because the infinite global net was also a hotbed for all kinds of cr
iminal activity. Even with the parental control function, it was hard to completely block harmful information.
He could also understand being scared of a full dive, with the way it blocked all input from your actual senses if you usually only used the audiovisual mode in classes at school. That being the case, he was beginning to seriously wonder if there was anything they could do when his eyes finally landed on the large-panel monitor attached to the living room wall.
Haruyuki pointed at it. “O-okay, we could watch a movie or something? And I’ve got some pretty good 2-D programs from way back, too.”
But Tomoko shook her head slightly again and said, as if embarrassed, “Um…instead of that, would it be okay if we talked? Like, about your middle school? I’d like to know about that.” She stood up and navigated around the table to sit down next to him.
A sweet scent like milk tickled Haruyuki’s nostrils, activating now of all times the antigirl force field he had cultivated over many years, and he reflexively threw himself backward. His chair tilted precariously, and he waved his arms out at his sides to pull out of what was nearly a side-fall onto the floor.
Tomoko stared intently at him as he thumped back down into his original position before giggling, “Big brother, you have some pretty cute qualities, don’t you?”
—Aaah.
Listening to the sound of bubbles burbling up from his mouth, Haruyuki sank deeper into the bathtub.
Bathing being a particular love of his mother’s meant that the Arita bathroom was ridiculously large. So, too, was the bathtub, and even Haruyuki, with his ample frame, had room to spread his arms and legs out without feeling boxed in. He took a deep breath of moist air, smelling the scented bathwater through his nose, held it in his lungs, and exhaled slowly.
Although he’d been fairly tongue-tied at all the wrong times, his throat hurt from having spoken at such length after so long. Interrupted only by the curry and rice Tomoko had made for dinner, he’d somehow spent a total of four hours basically talking nonstop. He was mildly impressed that he could find that much in his regular life to talk about.
In the end, he’d spilled nearly every detail about his life, starting with the various systems at Umesato Junior High all the way up to random episodes with his two childhood friends, plus this and that about a certain older student dressed in black, who happened to be the most important person in the world to him. The only thing he didn’t talk about was the bullying that had plagued him until just a few months ago. That and anything related to the other world.
And Tomoko had listened intently to every bit of it, conversation that couldn’t have actually been all that interesting, occasionally laughing out loud.
Haruyuki reflected seriously that this might be what it was like to have a real little sister. At the same time, he hated himself for not being able to get rid of that last nagging doubt that something was off.
It was just—it was too perfect. One day, he comes home from school and he suddenly has a little sister who makes him cookies, curry and rice, and—the clincher—she’s all “I want you to talk to me.” Not to mention that it would be just the two of them for three days?
His mother hadn’t raised him to simply accept surprises out of nowhere without question. But if there was some ulterior something behind this, who on earth could have put it together and what was the purpose? And how was he supposed to find out?
After thinking on this a little, Haruyuki pulled himself out of the water and picked up the aluminum Neurolinker hanging on the rack beside him. It was water-resistant, but just in case, he wiped the water from his neck before attaching it from behind. The arms of the U-shaped device swung out lightly from inside and locked around his throat.
He turned it on, and the start-up symbol sparkled before his eyes, the brain connection check continuing for about twenty seconds before his virtual desktop opened. Swiftly moving a finger on his right hand, he opened a window for the Arita home server.
Haruyuki hesitated slightly before he opened the family album in data storage. They hadn’t taken any photos or anything as a family these last few years, but there had to be hundreds of images buried in there from before he puffed up into his current physique, back when his mother and father were still in love. He’d rather have died than look at those. He went back a level and instead opened the external nets connected to his home server.
Several three-dimensional access gates opened to fanfare, all home nets of Arita relatives. Naturally, you couldn’t just go poking through the server data willy-nilly, but you could leave messages and view schedules and things made public for the family.
However, there was no “Saito in Nakano” house among the access gates. Most families used the top screen to collect family photos and recent news, so he thought he could double-check there, but of course, only his mother’s parents and siblings were connected, with a few aunts and uncles; apparently, cousins weren’t covered.
Haruyuki momentarily shifted his gaze away from his desktop and listened for noise on the other side of the bathroom door. He could faintly pick up the sound of the panel TV in the living room. Apparently, Tomoko was still watching a family-friendly variety show. He felt bad for not getting out of the bath sooner after she had so firmly insisted he get in first. And he felt even guiltier that the reason for his long soak was his doubt that she was really his second cousin.
He focused on his desktop once again and opened the access gate in the middle of it—his mother’s parents’ home net. Ignoring the peaceful family photos taken against the backdrop of a farming village in Yamagata, he clicked on the gate to connect to the net interior. And naturally, a confirmation window popped up to block Haruyuki’s progress.
Here he entered the ID and password his mother had given him. Because this login would be recorded on the other end, his mother would find out he used her ID if her parents asked her why she’d logged in, and he’d be in serious trouble. But he didn’t imagine that his grandpa and grandma, who ran a cherry orchard, would actually check their home net’s access log. Still, it was obviously best to get the job done as quickly as possible. Haruyuki hurried to dive into their home net and open the album folder.
There was an enormous catalog of photos collected over several decades. Annoyed, he applied a filter for date and number of people, narrowing down the total number of images. He dimly recalled that the entire Arita family had gotten together at his grandpa’s seventy-seventh birthday party five or so years earlier and felt like he’d said hello to the Saitos from Nakano then. In which case, Tomoko, who would’ve been about five at the time, should have been there, too.
His search filtered soon enough, throwing up several thumbnails. He flicked one after another with the tip of his finger.
Not this one, not that one, either…Oh, around here? Like the next one maybe.
“Big brooooother!”
A singsong voice came out of the blue from his right, and Haruyuki reflexively twisted his neck around. His right index finger froze in midair.
At some point, the door to the bathroom had been opened slightly, and now Tomoko was standing on the other side, face and right shoulder peeking through.
His eyes fell from her head—reddish-brown hair wrapped in a towel—to her face, with its somewhat bashful smile, then down to her slim neck and the smooth skin of her shoulder. “Wha—wh-wha—”
She turned a faintly cherry-colored smile on him as his jaw flapped furiously. “Big brother, can I get in with you?”
“Get…in…That’s—”
“It’s just, you’re taking so long. I’m tired of waiting!” Without waiting for his reply, Tomoko stepped into the bathroom, giggling.
Haruyuki frantically pushed his body under the water with a splash, shut his eyes tightly, and cried out, “S-sorry! I’ll get out right now! I-I-I’ll get out right now, so just wait a second more!!”
“It’s fiiine. I mean, we’re cousins and all.”
It’s totally not fine at all!! he screamed in
his mind, but his bio-optical visual processing units—that is to say, his eyes—betrayed their master’s intention, and his eyelids lifted slightly of their own volition. Tiny bare feet stepping across the ivory tiles leapt into his field of view, and he stopped breathing.
His focus shifted upward automatically. Calves drawing out a surprisingly thin, smooth line. Round knees, supple legs. The base of those legs was just barely obstructed by a pink bath towel, and he wondered momentarily just what was going on before his gaze continued traveling upward, and he cursed his own idiocy. The towel covered the small torso perfectly, with minimal bumpiness, and a delicate collarbone jutted out, smooth skin above the seam in the fabric—which threatened to unravel at any second.
“That’s exactly why I’d be grateful if you didn’t look so intently at me right now!” From the freckled face, finally, eyes turned downward, as if embarrassed.
It was this view that Haruyuki compared to the Arita family photos from five years ago still displayed on the right side of his field of vision.
The children, including himself, were clustered together in the front row. After all this time, he had absolutely no clue who was who, but fortunately, photos from that period were already using technology to embed data in the pictures. If he unfocused slightly, the names popping up in front of each child would disappear.
The name he was looking for showed up on the sixth kid in line. Tomoko Saito.
When he fixed his gaze on the name, the photo automatically zoomed in on the child who bore it, enlarging the image to the same size as the Tomoko in front of him.
Five years old at the time. And girls change, so I mean, her face, in five years could have…
There’s no way.
Haruyuki took a deep breath and held it, before exhaling at length. Then he turned toward the puzzled girl calling herself his second cousin and spoke to her with a sad smile. “Tomoko…”
“What is it, big brother?”
“…You’re a new Burst Linker, aren’t you?”
The Red Storm Princess Page 2