Hazuki didn’t quite understand.
As Ayumi dithered, she had already started heading toward the buildings.
Yuko was still getting wet from the rain.
Hazuki selected and without inputting any more words, followed Ayumi.
She felt Yuko’s pink lenses on her back all the way down to the corner of the block. Something was making an unrecognizable cracking sound. She turned and looked over her shoulder to find Yuko still standing there. In the distance behind her, the concrete wall was ablating, slowly falling apart.
The city was decaying.
No, buildings from the twentieth century weren’t made with proper materials.
The design was passé. The windows didn’t match, and on top of it all, strange ornaments with ancient messages decorated the walls.
She’d heard that those were called “advertisements.”
Are advertisements like notifications? she wondered.
Exposing so little data to the outside, and in that dirty way, making it stand out, exactly what kind of notifying purpose was it serving? Hazuki could not fathom. She could not fathom the way people in the past thought.
The middle of the poster was blackened. There were several women in outdated fashions sitting on chairs.
“You shouldn’t peek in.”
Ayumi circled the building as she spoke and stood by a glass door that looked like an entrance.
She said, “This place looks old-fashioned. I wonder if we can go in,” and poked the keyboard she found at the entrance.
“We can’t use our ID cards.”
“There’s no card reader. We can’t even connect our monitors? What about vocal recognition readers?”
“I’m pretty sure they had PINs back then. Otherwise we have to actually get permission from someone on the other side of the door.”
Ayumi said what an ordeal that would be and stood in front of the door.
The door creaked open.
“It’s open. There’s no lock.”
The building lobby was lined with well-worn cheap imitation marble. The old elevator had long been out of service, and beyond a sliding door left open were scattered plastic utensils and empty glass bottles. Some of the walls had long since collapsed and exposed all the cables, some of which had been yanked out and connected to what looked like a golden box on the floor. There was yet another thick cable coming out of the box as if crawling on the floor and along the wall. Ayumi looked at it nonchalantly. Then glanced at Hazuki. “Let’s go?”
“Isn’t it kind of amazing?”
“Maybe.”
To come all the way here just to go back? It wasn’t like the rain was going to let up anytime soon. Their uniforms wouldn’t get wet, but their hair was already soaked. Hazuki pulled the disc out of her bag.
“Here,” Ayumi said as she followed the cable on the floor with her eyes.
“But…Tsuzuki has severed communications on her monitor.” Which is why we came here, Hazuki thought.
In other words.
She doesn’t want to see us.
“Isn’t that what you were thinking?” Ayumi said. She hadn’t said anything but probably read the look on her face. Even though they wouldn’t look at one another’s faces or anything.
“We’d be a bigger nuisance if we just left.”
“Do you want to access the terminal at home?”
“Not really.”
“It looks unused. It should be fine,” Ayumi said as she approached the cable.
The cable wound up the stairs.
Her footsteps made thumping sounds. There was an endless buzzing.
It must have been either an old lamp or an electric fan.
Or was the cable running something?
“She said it was the second floor, right?”
Three along the hall, one around the corner, four doors altogether. Ayumi looked at the floor. The cable extended not just from the bottom of the stairs but out from the top of them too. Two outlets were conjoined at one point, then the cable ran down the middle of the hall and through the doorway around the corner. The wall on one side of the hall was slightly peeling, with a hole dug through where the cable ran.
“It’s so primitive,” Ayumi said smartly as she went straight to the door at the corner. There was no sign on it or anything. There was no way of knowing which room was Tsuzuki’s. The address they found online indicated only the neighborhood and building number. Hazuki hadn’t even considered that the building might be some old tenement housing complex.
“Wait.”
She couldn’t possibly just know where to go. Ayumi definitely knew a lot of things Hazuki didn’t, but this building had been pretty hard to find. Ayumi pointed a finger.
“We can’t get in.”
The doorknobs had been plucked off all three doors in the hallway.
Ayumi stopped dead in front of the door around the corner. It was a nondescript door. It had a doorknob at least. There was no residential name plaque on it, nor a visitor scan sensor. Ayumi peered into the hole through which the cable ran.
Probably, this was where the old-fashioned interphone used to be back in the day. You’d see houses like this in old moving pictures. Complicated machines that combined mics, cameras, and speakers so that residents could communicate with people outside.
“Can you see anything?”
Ayumi answered, “Nothing.”
They briefly stopped moving.
Ayumi has probably never visited another person’s home. She’s not used to it.
The buzzing continued.
Suddenly, Ayumi grabbed the doorknob.
The door opened easily. The volume of the noise increased.
“It opens,” Ayumi said as she opened the door and took one step in. Hazuki stuck her head in.
Hazuki was at a loss for words. The interior of the room was beyond her imagination.
Black. That was the impression she got. It was neither a wall nor a ceiling, but thick black cables winding everywhere. There were chips and parts and exposed machine insides, various displays, and other metal objects Hazuki had never seen before scattered all over the room. Black cables twisted around everything and connected each and every object together.
It’s the insides of a monitor, Hazuki thought matter-of-factly.
When she was small, seven or eight years ago, an engineer came to repair the main terminal at her home, and she was able to sneak a look at the disassembled machine.
Happy things, shameful things, proud things, problematic things, and, of course, messages from other people, notifications and warnings, all of it appeared on monitors. She had wanted to look at the insides of that monitor, beyond the window on which information appeared.
Inside was just black.
It was a flavorless dry enclosed space built out of a variety of cables, chips, and materials. Be it lines or boards that broadcast onto a contained box, it was the entirety of the world, and suddenly the young Hazuki had realized that must mean the whole world was an illusion.
Realizing this did not surprise her, nor did it make her feel sadness or joy.
She thought she might have experienced some tightness in her chest.
There was something fake about the world. But she soon forgot about it. Afterward, what with walking around holding the portable version of this world in her hands, knowing this rarified realness, Hazuki assimilated with the fake reality and forgot about the insides of the box.
This room was…
This looked just like that inner room.
zzzzz
That was the sound of that intangible electricity and data that circulated through black lines.
This was the other side of the world.
“There are no cable guards or anything around here. We could get electrocuted.”
In the midst of all these cables and boxes stood Mio.
“It won’t kill you or anything.”
Mio did not look at all surprised.
In fact it was H
azuki who was shaking.
Ayumi told her to get her monitor connected already.
“Thanks to you I’m all wet.”
“It’s such a pain. The outdoors I mean,” Mio said, and placed some kind of tool on the counter by her hip. “More importantly, what’s going on? People have never come inside here before.”
Ayumi turned her face toward Hazuki and prompted her with a raised brow. Hazuki held up the disc they had brought with them.
“This…”
“Oh.”
Mio had a bored expression on her face.
“I didn’t even notice.”
“We thought it might be important.”
“It’s not that it’s important. I mean, it serves no purpose.”
“Really?”
“It’s just for fun.”
Hazuki stepped forward, careful not to step on any of the cables, and handed the disc to Mio.
“So you didn’t need it back?”
“No…Well, if I’d lost it I would have had to redo some calculations, though we’re talking about a few minutes to do the math, and it’s reentering data that’s the most bother.”
Hazuki had no idea what she was talking about.
Ayumi looked over the room expressionlessly.
It looked like the three doors in the hall, though separate, all opened onto an adjoining room.
“This is an amazing place you live in. Administrative counselors must not come here much.”
“Administrative counselors?”
“Youth protective services people. You know…people who come in to take care of kids who are in less than ideal living environments.”
“Ah. Well my parents live above this floor, and there’s nothing going on there. Except that they’re never home. I don’t think they’ve ever laid a hand on me, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t experience any serious parental deprivation. But well, my place is okay. Fuwa came here once, but she was disgusted and went home.”
“Because you’re a genius.”
Right.
“So this is only your room.”
“At first it was only this room, but everyone left, so I’ve taken over the floor. Breaking down the walls was pretty hard.”
“You broke down the walls? Yourself?”
“I totally broke them all!” Mio said, laughing. “I didn’t have a place to sleep anymore. Thinking about it now, it would have been better to leave the entrance by the stairs. I started to pile things against the wall down there, and then soon it was no use.”
“No use…What was no use?”
“What do you mean what? The machine.”
“I know about the machine, but…”
“My main monitor.”
“This whole room is a main monitor?”
“Yeah. But you know, thinking about it, a monitor implies that you are looking at something. That’s weird, right? Why do we call it a monitor when it’s a number-crunching unit with the capability to send and receive information? Don’t you think that’s amazing?”
When she put it that way it seemed right. But Hazuki didn’t think it was “amazing.”
“They say in the past a machine that received on-air information was different from online monitors.”
“Hmph,” Ayumi interjected, unimpressed.
“But reception devices were totally normal back then. They even had sound-recording equipment. But it would only record sound. How pathetic, right? Of course it only received information; the devices couldn’t transmit or manipulate data. Wired communications were also audio-only.”
“Only sound?”
That was inefficient.
It was like being blind.
“Actually it was just sound-based reciprocal communications offline too. Something called a telephone. I don’t know what language that is. As for images, especially moving ones, they were exclusively received communications. And the diffusion rates of these exclusively reception machines were unusually high, so the styles persisted and evolved into the terminals we use for news in the home to this day. And the device that displayed this visual information was called a monitor. That’s why we call it that, apparently.”
“You’re quite the know-it-all,” Ayumi said. Mio ignored her and continued.
“But here I thought it was called a monitor because through them individuals could observe the world. Like, Let’s really observe it then! So I reconstructed it.”
“Still, look how ugly this is.”
“I’m a genius, so I don’t have a sense of aesthetics. It’s got great performance. It has approximately twelve thousand times the data-mining power of an average household monitor. It has memory capacity at, I’d guess, around eight thousand times the average. Of course I’ve only used a hundredth of it. But for that matter, it can connect to any kind of data origin in a split second. It runs fast and can do heavy lifting.”
“Meaningless. We’re just kids.”
“Like I said, it’s just a hobby.”
“Like your disc.”
“This is The Monster.”
“Monster?”
“I saw something about it in a moving picture, a fiction. This giant turtle-like thing has fire come out of its mouth.”
“What are you talking about?” Ayumi furrowed her face.
“An old moving picture! Like what they show in optical science class.”
“A fire-breathing turtle?”
“Yeah, it’s amazing.” Mio then pointed toward the back of the room, that is to say, the room next door.
In the next room was a piece of equipment they’d never seen before.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around a turtle doing something humans couldn’t. That’s a plasma generator, designed to emit plasma streams, but I failed.”
“It’s a weapon!”
“It’s a crime,” Ayumi said.
“It’s a failed weapon. I have to think of another way. It won’t be like in those entertainment motion pictures from decades ago. So I thought up a different method. And this guy has all the data on that plasma-spewing machine. The Monster.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“Just because I make it doesn’t mean I can use it. There’s no use for it. Things are different now. Nothing changes when you destroy things, but there is still the impulse for destruction.
“It’s an instinct,” Mio said in the midst of humming electric waves.
Ayumi bared her hatred.
CHAPTER 004
WITH HER HEAD tilted all the way back and the muscles taut, her windpipe collapsed a little and started to choke her.
I can’t keep doing this.
Shizue had supposedly fallen into a depressive fit that doctors said was the result of eye fatigue.
This was clearly a retaliatory move on their part.
Of all people, they’d named Shizue—the spearhead of the opposition against this information mining of the authorities—head director of the new martial law on gathering information.
This was nothing but their way of getting even.
That councilman with the memory hair no doubt maneuvered this with the center’s bureau chief. Probably getting back at her for being embarrassed in front of the area chief.
It wasn’t like Shizue was trying to embarrass the filthy bastard. She might have thought slanderous and libelous thoughts, but it wasn’t as if she’d voiced them. It was, to be sure, Shizue’s fault the conference didn’t go smoothly, but it was hard to imagine it didn’t bother the man responsible specifically for making the conference run at all.
Those guys would prefer a seamless conference to actual results.
How pathetic.
The Information Act was unlawful. Even if it weren’t, it was at least problematic. Each and every thing about it needed to be obstructed.
But now Shizue was complicit.
If the truth came out and the crime in this were recognized, Shizue was in no position to criticize the program or shut it down.
In any case, Shizue hersel
f was doing the actual work on this now, so no one would hear her excuses.
She couldn’t say she didn’t want to do it after the fact, and no one would listen if she said she was forced to accept the position. It would just sound like a bunch of excuses. That was totally unlike Shizue.
Of course she’d thought of saying something before, but now that she’d started the work, it would be difficult to back out.
Shizue frantically pounded the keys.
It’s no use.
“It’s no use.” The officer brought in from the prefectural police spoke out in a nerveless voice.
Kunugi, she thought his name was. A boring forty-something-yearold man. As far as police officers went, he was probably not very important, Shizue decided.
She didn’t determine that based only on outward appearances.
It was because he’d demonstrated such a lazy attitude that he’d reluctantly and needlessly been brought around to this job. That much he had in common with Shizue, but this man didn’t seem to then ask himself why he was here at all. So, burrowed in this room since noon doing futile work was the consequence of his being incompetent, whereas Shizue was here as a result of having offended the system.
“It’s such a waste. I don’t know why we have to do this,” the officer continued, peeking at Shizue’s fingertips. “Isn’t there…I don’t know, something else we can do?”
“Are you saying you’re less than satisfied with the results of my work?” Shizue looked straight at the officer. Not that she wanted to look at him.
Kunugi looked like he didn’t know what to do with his obstinate body, all clenched up on his seat. He had no presence. His saving grace was the fact that he didn’t seem gross.
“What would you do yourself? Anyone can do this in the time it takes to make copies.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Kunugi said. “How do I put this…I’m just wondering about the way we’re obtaining the information. I’m not really in a position to be saying this, and it’s probably nothing, but isn’t this medium obsolete?”
“We can’t transmit this information online.”
“The program doesn’t support it?”
“No. Of course it can be done. It’s just been specially encrypted. Even perusal of this data requires a secret PIN, so as it stands transmission connections are tenuous and copying the data would be impossible.”
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