Loups-Garous

by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

  “Huh?”

  Hazuki stole a glance. Mio sneered.

  “We’re even.”

  “You came here for revenge?”

  Is that why you secretly invaded my house? You wanted me to know how annoying it is, that’s why you did this? Still…

  Hazuki dropped her emergency receiver and faced Mio. Mio was wearing unornamented pants made of industrial-strength textile—she was dressed like a maintenance person.

  Yesterday at her house, Hazuki hadn’t thought Mio looked at all bothered. She hadn’t seen any indication of annoyance. She didn’t even remember any negative impressions from her on their way out. But that was all Hazuki’s personal viewpoint, and maybe the sudden intrusion had been a horrible nuisance after all. Actually, it probably had been. If Mio’s break-in today bothered her this much, Hazuki’s visit yesterday must have upset Mio even more.

  “Are you upset?”

  “It’s not that.” Mio scrunched up her face. “Here.”

  She jutted out her arm. Something small hung from her fingertip.

  Hazuki looked closer. It was shiny.

  “Is that a piercing?”

  “Is that what it’s called? I don’t really know, but you’re supposed to put it on your body, apparently.”

  It was a pink gemstone.

  Judging from the size she decided it was for the ears or cheek.

  “What about this?”

  “What about it. This isn’t yours?”

  “Mine?”

  Hazuki hated piercings; seeing them made her want to tear them out.

  “It’s not yours then?” Mio placed the object in her hand and stared.

  “I brought this back to you since you’d come out to bring me my hard drive.”

  “This is your payback?”

  “Sure. I’m just returning the favor. Right?”

  “That’s not called payback, Mio.”

  Hazuki suddenly became self-conscious and looked Mio dead in the face.

  “Tsuzuki, are you really a genius?”

  “Bona fide. I’m sorry. But, well, this must be Kono’s then.”

  “Ayumi?”

  Had Ayumi been wearing a piercing?

  She couldn’t remember. Hazuki had only seen her from behind, and then diagonally, so if Ayumi had been wearing it in her left ear Hazuki wouldn’t have noticed it. Hazuki wondered allowed if Ayumi would ever wear something like this.

  “Yeah, I figured you’d be the one to wear a dangly little thing like this. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  It was true. Hazuki tended to buck the trends. Ayumi was more…

  “She’s really simple, you know?”

  Right. Ayumi didn’t do anything excessive.

  “I don’t think it’s hers,” Hazuki answered.

  It wouldn’t suit her. Of course that was just a personal opinion, and even if that personal opinion coincided with the general consensus, whether such a thing suited Ayumi or not would be up to the person in question. It didn’t preclude Ayumi’s wearing a dangly piercing.

  “This guy’s neo-ceramic, so it’s really sturdy,” Mio said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I guess it doesn’t, but you two are the only ones who came over, and no matter what anyone says it’s definitely not mine. If it’s not yours it’s hers.”

  Mio closed her hand on the stone.

  “More importantly, can I use your main terminal for a second? I need to erase the security tape in less than fifteen minutes or it’ll report me.”

  “Can you erase it?”

  She sounded like she could.

  “You don’t have any more surveillance cameras?”

  “There’s one in each room, but they don’t act unless something happens.”

  “Wow, one in each room?” Mio took off her shoes, said she was coming in, and went to the monitor. Before Hazuki could stop her, Mio was down the hall, walking toward the dining area.

  “Gotta hand it to the prefectural housing people. This place is solid. It feels lived in, like an old house.”

  “They built it to feel that way.”

  Hazuki followed her.

  Mio opened the dining room doors.

  “There’s no sensor here, right? Wow.”

  Mio approached the dining table.

  “That looks good!”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s a home-cooked meal.”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean like, as a style of menu,” Mio said. “Just like there’s French food. No matter who made this, I’d call it home-cooked. Probably.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t have a family either. So where’s your terminal? Oh, this will work.” Mio sat in front of the kitchen monitor and started tapping at the keys. Her fingers moved effortlessly.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Nothing really. I just have to switch the times. I came into the foyer at 4:57 pm and twenty seconds. It’s 5:10 now. Not a lot of time here.”

  “You’re going to…switch the times?”

  “I’m going to cut it out, then splice in the same time frame from yesterday. No one came yesterday, right? The time in here is made up anyway. It’ll be like nothing happened.”

  Was that all?

  “Can you believe we depend on this meaningless math? I can’t believe this world. Would you notice if all your clocks were wrong?”

  “I wouldn’t if they were only off by a little bit.”

  “What’s a little bit? One second? One minute? You wouldn’t notice if it were twelve hours, would you?”

  It was true she lost track of time when sitting in front of a monitor.

  “I suppose, but I’d know as soon as I compared my portable monitor against them.”

  “What if that was off too?”

  “It can’t be.”

  “I’m just saying if it were. Actually all these clocks are regulated now, so normally, an isolated clock won’t get derailed. If one clock went off, all the clocks in the world would be off. If all the clocks went off by a whole day, I bet a lot of people wouldn’t notice. No, even half a day. If we were off by a half day, people wouldn’t question their clocks, they’d just wonder why it was so dark at noon.”

  Mio laughed at her own joke, then continued. “So I can cut and paste this moment and no one will notice. And…there. We’re set. I am no longer here.”

  “But you are.”

  “I’m not here,” Mio said, and turned in her chair to face Hazuki.

  “You can see me, but according to the data in your house you have no visitors, so historically speaking, I am not here. It’s magic.”

  “Magic?”

  “People in the past were carefree, so they thought up stupid things like time travel and teleportation, but, like, they really believed in it. But people from even earlier eras thought realistically, so they called those stupid things—like time travel and teleportation—magic.”

  “Magic is more realistic?”

  “Of course. Magic is not real. A real attempt at magic would be unrealistic. If it were magic, it would be easy. The time for easy living, for thinking you can do anything you wanted, is over. We’re finally back to the old times we were living in originally.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “The time for the real has been left running. Order—the unidirectional flow of time—must be preserved.”

  “What do you mean, preserved?”

  “Meaning you can’t go against the stream or do something over again. If I explained it quantitatively you wouldn’t understand. According to the laws of physics, moving around in a closed linear timeline is impossible.” Mio rolled her eyes once and looked at Hazuki. “People from the past had all kinds of convenient theories, like superstrings or wormholes, but it was all a bunch of false logic that existed only on paper. It was useless. Those of us in the space-time continuum cannot alter the continuum itself. But a continuum will do anything without
these silly theories. If it’s going to be limited to being on paper anyway, it doesn’t need these exhaustive theories behind it. You can just say or write that you have flown through space or traveled through time. That’s how people used to do it a long time ago. In other words, magic. The slightly less old humanity tried to actualize that magic and built planes and let electricity fly, but when all’s said and done it was just awkward. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t interfere with the system. There’s no such thing as all-knowing magic. That’s why they thought of this.”

  “Thought of what?”

  “Today’s world. To make everything numerical, digital.”

  “Numerical?”

  “This is numerical,” Mio pointed at the monitor.

  “This is all signs. The images, the words, they’re all composed of numbers. We look at these compositions to understand the world. In which case, it’s a free-for-all of magic. Since it’s just numbers, I could be 150 years old, or a man. Erasing just over ten minutes was a piece of cake.

  “No one would not do it,” Mio threw out, then faced the dining table. “Still, magic can’t help an empty stomach. Aren’t you going to eat that, Makino?”

  “You can eat it,” Hazuki said.

  Why had she said that? Hazuki twisted her neck. Mio hadn’t asked to eat it. She’d just asked if Hazuki wasn’t eating it. Normally one would have answered that she was going to eat it later or that she wasn’t going to eat it at all. If they’d been chatting through their monitors this wouldn’t have happened.

  In a daze, Mio went to the table.

  “I eat Chinese food from downstairs every day, so…” Mio started, and as she spoke she reached out for the ratatouille.

  Hazuki was amazed at how much of a conversation could be understood with so much left out of it.

  “Downstairs?”

  Anyway. Hazuki sat down across from Mio.

  She didn’t like being agitated by something like this.

  “You saw when you came. The foreigners. Half of them are Chinese. I don’t know what ingredients or seasonings they use. I don’t know what they use or how, but it tastes good.”

  Mio marveled at the delicacy of it all as she spoke. She ate the raw vegetables, the warm vegetables, and the main course. Hazuki watched her mouth move in a daze.

  “Are you vegetarian?”

  “No, but there’s always a protein in those meals. I don’t know what it is, but…they don’t have any good produce there. What’s this?”

  Mio pushed the broccoli in the casserole around and uncovered something else.

  “Looks like some kind of clam.”

  “Clam? You mean like seafood?”

  “Well, yeah. Tsuzuki, you’ve never seen it before?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen turtles, but I have no interest in nature.”

  Mio pierced the bit of food with her fork and inspected it up close. She wondered aloud how it was cultivated, then popped the whole thing into her mouth.

  “It’s pretty good. Even though I don’t know what it is.”

  “You’re weird.”

  “You think so? I think that’s pretty normal,” Mio said and placed her fork back down on the table. It looked like she’d just played with the food.

  It wasn’t like she’d simply tasted the food, nor was it like she savored the whole meal. Plus she said it was delicious like someone much older might have.

  “Food is important.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “I think our ancestors must have been really weak,” Mio said conversationally.

  “Weak?”

  “Sure. They were the ones being eaten. I’m sure of it. That’s why they took such pains to get out of the food chain. We’ve all collectively stopped killing animals, right? No one in this country eats animal meat anymore.”

  “You mean it’s wrong to kill.”

  “But we used to kill. We’d kill animals and then eat them.”

  “You can make food without killing it.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “You can even make vegetables,” Hazuki said. “People have been making vegetables since a long time ago.”

  “Make. You mean grow them. Grass is a living thing too. It’s different from being made. Making things from scratch is only a recent thing.”

  Oh…

  “But since we started replacing everything from grass to beasts, humans have extracted themselves from the food chain. It took us millions of years, but we’ve done it. We’ve been able to improvise edible food out of nonliving things. Not so long ago, synthetic food was talked about like it was a bad thing, but it’s no different from what we use to make food now. People lacked the proper technology in the past, making the first synthetic foods toxic, but that was stupidity on their part. Still…”

  “Still?”

  “If you don’t eat or aren’t eaten, you are not an animal.”

  “Animal…”

  “Beast. Even in the sanctuaries, beasts eat beasts. They survive this way. Humans are the only ones that don’t do this.”

  Is that a bad thing?

  “There are animals that have gone extinct because of humans’ killing them.”

  “You’re talking about tigers and stuff, right? But humans stopped killing whales, and now they’re rampant. They eat every living thing in the ocean.”

  “Whales don’t eat every single thing.”

  “Don’t they eat clams?” Mio said. Despite being a genius, Mio seemed to be lacking much knowledge of animal biology. Hazuki liked animals for some reason. She’d hardly seen any in her life, but she liked looking at old pictures and had even filed some of them.

  Like wolves.

  One night ago, she’d been researching a file on extinct animals and came across one that from the picture looked like a dog. Like a dog she’d seen as a very small child.

  A dog…

  Where was that?

  She couldn’t remember.

  “Animals. That’s derived from anima, which means life, breath. To be animated.” Mio wiped her mouth with the thick fabric of the sleeve of her maintenance uniform. “We aren’t very animated, are we? I think we’re trying to stop moving altogether.”

  The chair squeaked as Mio got up and went back to the monitor.

  “We sit here for hours on end. And yet we continue to live. Anything else would die.”

  The sound of keys being punched.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m about to copy the next ten minutes of yesterday into today. I have to go now. If I’m found walking around too late in the evening the police will give me trouble. They have more guys on the street now with this killer and everything.”

  “Tsuzuki, you going somewhere else now?”

  “Somewhere else? I’m gonna go return this stone, of course. I’m going to Kono’s house.”

  Ayumi’s house…

  “This time it’ll be a real payback. All right, it’s as though I was never here.”

  Never here. So this was all a lie.

  “It was all a dream?”

  Mio turned back and laughed.

  CHAPTER 006

  SHIZUE SMELLED SYNTHETIC resin. She smelled a cheap synthetic leather sheet.

  No, wait, that wasn’t all. She smelled something medicinal. It was mixed with a volatile astringent.

  People who were bothered by potent smells once liked this kind of smell, but at the end of the day, this wasn’t pleasant to the human olfactory sense. To be frank it was a noxious odor.

  Research on pleasant smells was thriving, and a perfume boom was spreading through the younger generation. Some of Shizue’s kids had taken up a hobby of perfuming but unfortunately had never experienced a delicate fragrance. If they knew a fragrant odor it was smelled in passing.

  It was no wonder, with odor-deficient people suddenly increasing in number.

  Shizue opened a window.

  It wasn’t as though it smelled better outside. The air wasn’t invigorating
by any means, but the mere presence of the breeze made her feel better. The atmosphere and landscape ran without end throughout the residential quarter like an ancient scroll of parchment.

  “Is it stuffy?” Kunugi asked. “I might be a, uh, germophile, but the person usually riding this car is a clean freak of a woman. She’s always sterilizing everything. I figured you’d be okay in here.”

  “She probably has anosmia.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kunugi sniffed the air a couple times.

  “More importantly, are we all right? It’s already almost five.”

  “We’re fine. I told them if they waited around it was pointless. We couldn’t get our finished work in during business hours. I made the call directly to the prefectural police headquarters through the center’s terminal and not my portable one, so they won’t suspect anything. I’m ostensibly on my way home. That said, I’m going to stop by headquarters on my way to your office tomorrow. Though that means you can’t start working till I get there.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “More importantly…is that girl who didn’t show up to the group one of your kids without a guardian?” Kunugi asked.

  “No. However, her parents have been gone for three days.”

  “Gone?”

  “They’re traveling.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?”

  “It’s not private. It’s a public matter.”

  “Ohh,” Kunugi let out in neither a sigh nor a word. “They’re one of these couples that are both employed by the same people, eh?”

  “Yes. It’s one of those awful ‘partnership’ systems. Supervising and protecting children under sixteen is obviously mandated of guardians, but this partnership system exempts those guardians who have applied for paired status. It’s a matter of work productivity, apparently. When the child is thirteen they’re allowed to be left home alone. Minors between the ages of fourteen and sixteen have the right to be under guardianship, but that right can’t be enforced.”

  “Wherever there is a law there is a loophole.”

  “Our system is riddled with loopholes,” Shizue said. “It ends up being the center’s responsibility to protect children during those years. However, there aren’t enough people designated to do that there. Counselors end up having to be extra careful. But even when careful, we can’t watch over one child the whole time. We can’t actually take over their guardianship either. The center forbids us from infringing on their individual freedom. We can only initiate communication with them via monitor. Fortunately, most kids these days aren’t without a portable monitor, so we’ve not had any problems communicating, but—”