by Satoshi Hase
But, Arato could tell there was something different about Snowdrop’s garden that day. Thick pillars rose from the ground every fifty meters or so, as if to block off the road. Green cables stretched between these pillars all across the city, making them look like a cluster of old, mossy trees. It was almost like she had created her own little ecosystem, turning sunlight into energy.
Arato walked slowly through the city, which had been transformed into something far removed from the human world it had once belonged to.
“Man, this looks bad,” he murmured. The road was too torn up by the vines to ride his bike over them, so he was forced to walk, pushing it alongside.
An old man, one of the people who had been left in town when the cordon went up, opened his window when he spotted Arato. “Hey kid, it’s dangerous out there,” the old man called. According to him, there were still feral hIEs stalking the area.
Arato waved his arms and gestured toward the area where the soldiers were holding their blockade. “I didn’t see anything coming in from outside all the way here,” he said.
Then he remembered the incredible pillar of flame he had seen go up from the old Inokashira Park. “If you’re gonna run, it’s probably safe right now,” Arato said. “All the hIEs have been looking over that way ever since the explosion.”
The whole residential area looked like a dry, verdant forest made of stone.
Of course, despite Arato’s assurances that it was safe, the area wasn’t exactly empty. There were broken remains of hIE soldiers strewn here and there, Snowdrop’s vines twisting around their bodies.
Gunfire seemed to echo from every direction. It was strange to Arato how accustomed he was becoming to that sound.
“You came from outside?” A woman burst out of a nearby house, holding a child and peppered Arato with questions. “I can’t get through to anyone, and the army showed up but they aren’t doing anything to help us! If we go out there, will they save us?”
There was a greater number of people locked up in the quarantine zone than Arato had anticipated, and he knew that Snowdrop saw no purpose in trying to coexist with them.
A heavy feeling settled down in the pit of his stomach. He may have been an idiot, but he was at least aware that a single mistake in that place could end his life. Not just his life, either; one wrong move, and he wouldn’t be the only one who died for it.
“Ahh dammit, why is everything so complicated!” Arato yelled, scrubbing a hand through his hair in frustration. His brain was about to explode. Closing his eyes, he turned his face up toward the cloudy sky. There was only one answer he could see. “I didn’t run into any hIEs on the route I took,” he said. “I’m gonna leave my bike, so someone athletic should take it and check real quick.”
“What are you gonna do, then?” the old man from the window asked.
“There’s someone I need to find, so I’m gonna head toward that big explosion we just saw,” Arato said. “So seriously, go ahead and use this bike. I’m gonna try to do something to fix this whole mess!”
Just a ten-minute run would get someone outside, back into the realm of humanity. The artificial flower garden was still fairly narrow.
“It’s dangerous out there,” the man warned.
“I know, but I’ve got someone waiting for me,” Arato replied. The thought suddenly came to him that, if he had been with Lacia just then, he might have been able to help those people. He was sure Ryo would insist that this would have been a deadly mistake, letting Lacia’s influence grow and whittling down the meaning behind human activity. Despite that, Arato couldn’t help but regret the things he couldn’t do just then because he hadn’t taken Lacia’s hand.
Having left his bike behind, Arato pressed on deeper into the green, toward Kichijoji Station. Snowdrop’s world looked so close to actual nature that it was eerie. With each step, the oppressive strangeness seemed to press in, turning Arato’s stomach. All Snowdrop had done was take nature itself and twist it into a printing pattern for her creations. Her plant and insect child units mimicked nature and its cycle, but it was obvious that the green pillars were too thick to be actual plants, and the colors and shapes were too vivid to be natural. There was none of the mottling ugliness that made reality look real. The too-perfect greenery was just the mass-produced character version of nature.
There was no guarantee that Arato would find Lacia there, as he forged deeper and deeper into the dense forest. It seemed to Arato as if Snowdrop had succeeded in creating her own little world and cutting it off from the world of humans.
As he went deeper on his own two feet, Arato began to feel more and more as if he was mistaken about something. The area was sealed off by the army, and there should have been soldiers running around, but the only people he saw were residents of Kichijoji, peeking out of their windows.
“Where did all the hIEs go?” he muttered to himself. Then he felt a presence, and whirled around. His path of retreat had been cut off without him noticing. Behind him stood three hIEs with oddly slumped postures, bunches of flowers blooming from their heads and eye sockets.
“Dammit, you fell for Snowdrop’s trap!” he cursed himself, turning to run.
The footsteps of the hIEs behind him sounded close and, when he turned to look back, he saw that they were already right on top of him. Without their limiters to keep them from running, the hIEs easily outpaced him.
He was already gasping for breath, but he kept forcing his legs to move at full tilt.
Arato was an idiot, and it wasn’t as if the whole world was revolving around him. It should have been obvious that rushing into an area that even the military hadn’t been able to effectively assault would most likely end up with him dying.
Something grabbed the back of his clothes with intense power, and then a fist slammed into him with incredible force. The breath whooshed from his lungs, and his legs crumpled. Arato struggled wildly, only to take a severe blow to his head. His whole world shook and seemed to go white as his thoughts turned hazy.
When he came to, Arato was being dragged by the legs by two of the hIEs. His roiling stomach made him want to vomit. Even moving his body a little made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. The pain let him know that this pathetic ending to his adventure was real. He couldn’t even get his jaw to close properly, and tears blurred his vision.
He was overcome by a wave of self-loathing. A black pool that looked like blood was spreading on the road, and its coppery scent made it hard to breathe. On a whim, he had stepped carelessly into a world that no longer needed humans.
“Was I asking for too much?” he asked, regret filling his eyes with tears. It had been his own selfish decision to reject Lacia’s outstretched hand. If she had been by his side, she definitely would have stopped him, or at least stayed with him through it all.
The ground started shaking. Arato couldn’t help but notice, given that his face was being dragged across it. He wondered if it was an earthquake. But it wasn’t as though the place was rocking up and down or side to side; instead, it was almost as if the city itself was undulating like a wave.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
A massive pillar of fire shot into the sky again. It was almost as if the sun had descended to the Earth.
The zombie hIEs stopped moving.
Something heavy fell from the sky, piercing the road with a loud crash. Rubble came raining down as Arato curled defensively on reflex, shielding his head. Something flew right by his ear, sending a shiver down his spine at the sound’s proximity as it passed him by.
“Uwah!” he yelled.
Fist-sized chunks of rock were raining down on the hIEs, as well. Their heads must have been struck hard enough to shatter their control chips, as they each fell, scattering petals to the wind as they went down.
Arato was helpless to do anything but watch as the rocks rained down. Not that he had any right to complain, but he would have preferred a method of being saved that didn’t involve mortal peril to himself,
as well.
He pushed himself up to all fours, then stood just in time to see a human figure approach.
“You still alive?” a voice asked cautiously, as a young boy about his own age approached. Apparently, he had been one of the people who had been slinging the stones that had saved Arato. Looking past the boy, Arato saw over ten people standing on the roof of a five-story building about fifteen meters down the road from him. If one of the stones they’d been throwing had hit him, it would have been the end.
“I thought I was gonna die,” Arato panted.
“We figured throwing the rocks was at least better than just watching you die,” the boy said apologetically. He seemed to be an energetic kid, but also a little flighty.
Arato stood up to go, before more hIEs could show up to avenge their fallen comrades. He stopped, though, when he saw a familiar face appear among the rock-throwing squad on the roof of the apartment.
The one who had pulled together the band of instant vigilantes was none other than Ryo. Even though Arato had only left Ryo a few hours earlier, here Ryo was already leading a group of people, albeit a small one, in a disaster area.
Ryo looked down at him. “So you decided to come here too,” he muttered.
“Ryo! What the hell!” Arato shouted, feeling the blood rushing to his head. If Ryo was there, that meant the huge pillar of fire from before was most likely Methode’s doing. And if a weapon as powerful as Methode was around, it meant that Snowdrop and her zombie hIEs should have been dealt with already, most likely in a quick and neat fashion.
“If you’re here, how come things are still shitty?” Arato shouted. “It should be easy for Methode to clean this all up.”
Instead of a response from Ryo, Arato got a relentless punch to his gut. His jaw clenched, and he struggled to breathe.
“Bring him to me,” Ryo said. “I want to talk with him.”
Right after being freed from the zombie hIEs, Arato had fallen into the hands of a murderous group of locals. Their base of operations turned out to be a building on the south side of Kichijoji Station, beyond the overpass. There were more low-rise buildings crowded into the area, which was near the spot where the old Inokashira Park had been redeveloped, than there had been in the downtown area on the north side.
Arato’s captors tossed him into a room where office chairs and desks were lined up neatly. The building was only dimly lit from the outside—apparently the electricity was out.
“What do you want us to do with him?” Four youths, two or three years older than Arato with dyed hair and dangerous demeanors, stood around him. Arato saw ten other people beyond his ring of guards, ranging from teenagers to thirty-somethings. Each and every face showed anger and fatigue.
As they all stood around, the air seemed to stagnate and every few minutes, one or the other of them would glance down at their pocket terminals. Then they would spit or click their tongues, and jam their terminals back into their pockets with a disgusted look. They were all uneasy.
“When the hell is the network gonna be back online?” one of them asked.
Since Arato was just sitting there on the floor, he decided to check for himself. Sure enough, his pocket terminal was showing the warning screen that told him it had no connection with the network.
“Has it been disconnected this whole time?” Arato asked.
Everyone’s terminals were based on cloud networking; almost every function on the device, up to storing photos, was handled by the network. Without a connection, they were completely useless.
“Yes, since before noon! They’ve been like this since the city started going crazy,” one of the citizens answered him. “I’m sick of this shit. Can’t get anything done without a connection!”
It occurred to Arato that they hadn’t gone to seek help from the military personnel stationed a few hundred meters away because they weren’t aware of what was going on, thanks to the network being down. The network had become such an essential part of their lives that they preferred waiting around for it to come back online than actually banding together to resolve the situation themselves.
“Even Ryo doesn’t have a working terminal?” Arato asked. He wondered when Ryo had even arrived in Kichijoji. When Snowdrop’s attack had started, Ryo had still been chasing Arato around Akihabara.
Then Arato thought about Lacia, and a strange sense of hilarity seemed to bubble up from within him. Shiori had said something about Ryo using him as bait for fishing. So apparently Arato was the only one who wasn’t sure if Lacia would return to his side.
One of the people detached from the group and moved over cautiously to the circle of Arato’s guards. She was a woman, somewhere in her thirties. “Do you know Ryo?” she asked. The thought of just being someone who ‘knew’ Ryo, rather than a good friend, weighed heavily on Arato’s heart, but Ryo himself was nowhere to be seen.
“Yeah, I’ve known him for a long time,” Arato said. “I just figured he was the kind of guy who would have prepared for situations like this.”
Once everyone heard that Arato knew Ryo, it seemed their estimation of him changed in an instant. The almost suffocating feeling of enmity in the room softened.
“I’ve gotten way too used to crazy situations,” Arato said with a sigh. When he thought about it, he had been so close to death so many times that, if he had been the type of guy who actually worried about things, he would have had a mental breakdown by now. And yet, there Arato was. He was Lacia’s owner. Lacia would most likely be wherever Snowdrop was, so he had come searching for Snowdrop.
“I need you to let me go toward where those explosions happened earlier,” he said, standing up. As he stood, he saw that his clothes were covered in dust. “And, thanks for helping me,” he added. “I would have died if you hadn’t.”
A spot on his leg where one of the zombie hIEs had bit him stung sharply as he put his weight on his leg, and he winced and reached down reflexively.
One of the men guarding him grabbed his shoulder. “Hey, sit back down. We’re not done with you here,” he growled, then shoved Arato back.
Unable to keep his balance, Arato fell back to the ground. “I don’t care if you’re done with me or not,” Arato shot back. “Ryo and I are responsible for this whole mess, or at least for part of it.”
He tried to stand up again but was immediately shoved back down. This time the shove was harder, and there was anger in the man’s eyes. “If that’s so, then you’d better apologize,” he said.
Arato was surprised. Not in what was happening itself, but in the fact that what was happening had surprised him. He had no idea who Snowdrop’s owner was, or even if there was a human pulling the strings behind that nightmare. But, thanks to the way human society worked, everyone always wanted someone to take the blame.
“Sorry,” Arato said. “When I say ‘responsible,’ I mean I feel like it’s my responsibility to try and stop this if I can. I don’t think anyone would openly admit to actually being behind this whole thing.”
A foot slammed down mercilessly on his injured ankle. His guards must have decided he would be a good scapegoat as they surrounded him, pelting him with kicks. “Ryo’s the whole reason any of us are alive,” one of them said. Then a particularly hard kick sent him rolling away.
Arato could guess how Ryo had become their savior; he’d probably had Methode save them. For the people exposed to Snowdrop’s attack, it was probably heartening to have been saved by a person who wielded greater destructive power than the enemy. So now they were attacking Arato, who had shaken the image of Ryo as their perfect savior in their minds.
When Arato finally lost count of how many times he’d been kicked, someone came to break it up. “Stop it! The kid’s trying to say something,” his savior said. “What’s beating the shit out of him going to do for us?”
Arato looked around from between the arms he had wrapped defensively around his head. Before he could manage to focus on his surroundings, his first thought was to thank his luck
y stars he hadn’t been killed. Then he observed that the room he was in was narrow, about ten meters square, and looked to have been used as an office. All the desks and equipment had been pushed to the corners of the room.
An earthquake-like tremor ran through the whole building. If another pillar of flame had just gone up, considering Kouka was dead, Arato figured it was most likely to have been caused by Methode.
“Snowdrop doesn’t have that kind of power,” he muttered. “Where’d the explosion come from?”
Even with his injuries, none of the people nearby offered to help him. He felt like he understood then what it meant to face down a mob. “You’re full of shit,” one of the people spat. “Saying you can do something to stop this. It was the army that cut off the network.”
Arato had no idea about how to fix the network, but he did know exactly who would have done an analysis like that. “Ryo told you that, didn’t he?” he asked.
“He said all wireless and electric communications are cut off inside the military cordon area. The government in Omoto is caught up in this, too.”
Arato didn’t even need to ask; the survivors spat things out without any prompting.
“Man, screw the army!” One of them burst out. “They start shooting even though they know we’re here. The old lady that used to live next door to me got hit by a stray bullet and died.”
Arato stayed on the ground, covered in dirt and looking up at everyone. It was the easiest way to keep from getting beat up again. He couldn’t figure out exactly what Ryo was thinking, but he could at least infer his friend’s thoughts to a certain extent.
“So they probably don’t want any videos of what happened getting out on the network,” he mused. “And, if they take down Snowdrop, the army probably plans on coming around then and explaining what happened before restoring the network.”
The army was probably hoping to avoid the kind of commotion that had been caused the night Kouka was taken down. They wanted to be in control of the situation. Arato wasn’t completely sure, but he figured that would probably be the path that Ryo’s thoughts had taken.