“It's because you don't see doves in there but humans shaped like doves.”
“What? Human-shaped doves?” Mio ripped into the synthetic meat. “Why would I think that? That's no bird.”
“It's only gross to you because you're thinking of them in human terms. Same thing when something is cute.” As Ayumi spoke, in exactly the same way she would normally, she handed Hazuki a bottle of mineral water. Hazuki took it without a word.
“Pitying and adoring animals are both acts of human arrogance. In fact I see no big difference between protecting and hunting them. Human logic is only understood by fellow humans.”
“Feeling sorry for animals is arrogant?”
“Not your arrogance, Hazuki, but humanity's arrogance,” Mio said.
“Hazuki's a human, remember?” Ayumi said.
Hazuki felt like she'd been cast off or something.
Then all of a sudden, Rey Mao spun around. Mio was no doubt stunned, coughing up a little water. “What's wrong with you?” she said. Rey Mao crumpled up the food packaging and said
all done
.
“Did it move?” Ayumi said.
Rey Mao didn't answer, saying instead “I'm going home.”
Ayumi looked outside and grumbled, “You'd know.”
“When it sounds. Went east.”
“Eastâthat's the opposite direction. But it's really an animal-like feeling, isn't it? I'm fed up.”
“Hey, Kono. What do you mean
did it move
? What moved? What sound?”
“On our way here there were some area patrols on the street ahead.”
“Area patrols? I didn't notice. Makino, did you notice anything?”
Of course she hadn't.
“Then you, Catwoman. You gonna go like that?”
Rey Mao opened the door without responding, turned around and gave the room a once-over, then pointed her gaze at the entrance to the next room.
“Be careful,” Ayumi said. Rey Mao lifted one hand and took one step outside.
“See you, Mio.”
There was a very short pause.
Just then, as Hazuki stared at the fingertips Rey Mao lifted, just in that brief moment, Hazuki felt unsure and looked to Mio for reassurance. Mio had no sort of reaction, and with food bits still on her cheeks she just sat there looking dazed. While Hazuki was looking at that small dazed face, the door slammed shut.
Hazuki looked for Rey Mao's back, though the shut door hid it.
Needless to say, the doorâa quadrilateral affair with no decorationsâbroadcast not one piece of information on Rey Mao's current location, distance, or speed of departure. Nonetheless, Hazuki knew implicitly that Rey Mao was going farther and farther away.
She looked at her monitor. It was already eleven o'clock.
Hazuki stared briefly at the doves and then left Ayumi's house along with Mio. She said
goodbye
in a very soft voice, but Ayumi probably did not hear it.
For some reason Mio was silent as well and barely spoke to Hazuki until she reached home, where, thanks to Mio, the occupancy sign was lit even though no one was inside.
It's as if nothing happened
.
Time stood still in her house.
No, it was like it continued to flow despite being stopped. No part of the configuration had changed.
Whether Hazuki was inside or not did not really matter.
On her dining table was the meal that came out while she was gone, in exactly the position it had been left, already cold.
She checked the kitchen monitor. Nothing. No visitors on the log, no items that warranted any special attention. There were two messages in her main monitor, but one was a notification of how many kilowatt minutes she'd used this month and the other was an announcement of a discount on opening new lines of electric wiring service.
There was no point looking at this stuff now, so she put her monitor on sleep mode.
As she stood in the dining area she saw a scene, a setting that had not changed at all in ten years. She began thinking every part of today had been a complete lie.
Of course she remembered the feel of Yuko on her back, the smell, the weight; but the memory had practically no reality to it.
What Mio had said was true.
The world in our monitors, the world displayed in numbers, was the truth, and what took place in actuality was all lies.
Hazuki thought.
One just had to repeat the pattern.
In the end, that was all Hazuki's past was. There was no such thing as truth in Hazuki's brief life. What she thought was her past was just an accumulation of patterns.
People misled themselves into believing they knew time or history because they could mince the repetition of patterns. They depended on their ability to measure the passage of time. They counted on their ability to count.
The digitized past was all the same.
A today identical to yesterday.
Last month, last year, last decade, the same.
In that caseâ¦
We
are
the same as animals.
Hasuki stared at her cold food and took three sips of her soup before giving up.
After hesitating for a long time she finally drained it into the garbage disposal.
The food looked like it was squirming. It made her lose her appetite.
Hazuki knew synthetic food that had never lived had no chance of moving, but she couldn't help think that meat and fishâthat is, food that looked like meat and fishâlooked like it was glistening, moving, fighting for its life.
Hazuki felt ill. She splashed her face with cold water and gulped down a large amount of mineral water.
This only made her feel woozier, so she took a shower and went to the room she was supposedly in this whole timeâthe bedroom.
She made her room pitch dark and got into bed.
She felt like she could smell just a hint of animal.
THE NEW CORPSE
was found the day after Shizue had visited Hinako. The victim, Asumi Aikawa. A fourteen-year-old girl from her lab class.
If it were one of the serial killings, Aikawa would be the sixth victim, the seventh if you included Ryu Kawabata, second if you only counted those killed in Shizue's residential district.
She was killed on a school day.
The communication session ended in the morning. That afternoon was a designated administrative break for faculty.
Even though there was no better foothold on the murder investigation, no clearer leads, and though the center still didn't know the whereabouts of Yuko Yabe, the center didn't seem any different. Not one person asked about the case. People weren't more nervous than necessary, and everyone was doing their job as usual.
It was someone else's problem.
The details of the other cases had long been returned to storage in monitors. Only the information newly delivered contained any controversy, and there was nothing unusual in the daily news. That was probably what everyone was thinking.
Shizue realized the police had probably finished processing the data on the community center's children.
For that reason perhaps, news of discovery of this dead body felt horribly unreal by the time Shizue heard it.
The news came in right after the area chief's regular communiqué had been deployed to everybody's monitors at the center.
These communiqués were sent from central and were supposedly meant to highlight model areas of health-regulatory environments, or something like that. No one read them.
This week's communiqué spotlighted the recent medical exams.
Shizue's section happened to yield the highest percentage of children deemed of Triple-A health. Though 10 percent fewer Triple-A results would by no means be a bad statitistic.
Shizue should not have been thinking about her charges' performance in a health exam. The discrepancy of 10 percent fewer or more children of optimal health was hardly negligible. Instead of thinking of the 10 percent laxity she could get away with, she should have realized that the 10 percent her clients had over the average child was a feat.
A list of the children who made Triple-A status was sent to each area counselor. At the top of that list, coincidentally, was Asumi Aikawa.
Shizue didn't think that was a good sign.
The fact that Asumi Aikawa was at the top of the list was merely the coincidental result of an alphabetical order.
Still, she was the first recorded child of supreme health, only to have her second introduction to the world be as a corpse.
So.
It seemed like there were not enough people worried and too few people panicked.
Another communiqué was sent to each area counselor to make sure people went home, and after a little less than an hour on standby, the local and prefectural police were there again, another emergency meeting organized, and finally, almost everyone grasped the gravity of the situation.
Asumi Aikawa's body had been disposed of in the residential area right in the middle of Section A.
Wounds on her body were severe, and the corpse itself was dumped unceremoniously.
The area police explained the discovery in a tone neither resentful nor outraged but officious, describing the way the body was treated with a figure of speech.
“Treated like trash.”
Shizue's thoughts drifted to refuse.
She'd never seen “trash” in Section A.
For ostensible upkeep of living conditions, all unnecessary and damaged goods were categorically hidden, because then it was unquestionably “clean.”
In Section A, each household was held responsible for managing its own refuse. Any unusual trash that the household was not able to dispose of properly could be taken care of by the area municipality for a nominal fee. Anything the municipality could not handle went to the Prefectural Office of Living Standard Maintenance, and anything the prefecture couldn't dispose of could be collected by the National Special Waste Disposal center.
Collections were swift, clean, and expensive.
It was costlier to throw things away than to buy them.
Which was why no one threw anything away. Trash never left the home. Never left the city. Never left the prefecture.
Moreover, the fines imposed on those who illegally dumped trash were exorbitantly high. No one wanted to take the risk of throwing anything out at all.
The same went for Section B and the commercial district.
The establishments had self-imposed management.
Whatever waste couldn't be managed by individual firms was collected by the cooperative waste collection agency and dealt with periodically.
You couldn't see it from the outside.
Shizue had heard that the waste management problem was dire even in the last century, but as she had never seen mountains of trash, she had absolutely no feelings about it. No one threw anything away, and that was that.
Therefore, Shizue wondered what it meant to be comparing a corpse to trash. In a world without trash, would such an analogy work? The city was beautiful.
Still.
No, it couldn't be.
What made it dirty was simply not visible. The city was by no means clean. Shizue knew that. Since there was absolutely nothing dirty, it was impossible to know what was clean. There was no context.
The city just looked vaguely orderly. As a rule, everyone threw away their trash. That must mean that the city was overflowing with trash.
People thought the entire world was controlled, but there were things that couldn't be. Anything that couldn't be controlled, humans removed as unnecessary and then disposed of it.
Proof of this impulse to throw out the useless was in those other placesâthere was this so-called trash in Section C. Section C was by no means the type of slum you used to hear of in the past. It wasn't as though you couldn't set foot in it, nor was it like the area was full of the desperately poor. Section C simply couldn't pretend it was in control of anything. Because they couldn't pretend they were in control, the trash was visible. Illegally dumped waste was immediately collected in other sections, but not in Section C.
That was what came to mind when Shizue heard the word
trash
.
And generally speaking, Section C's rubbish was industrial trash no typical household would produce.
Tiles, ceramic bits, metal pipes, resin containers, wiring and tubes, magnetic film, needlesâ¦
In fact it wasn't just in households you'd never see these things. You'd just never see these things, period.
It was like a time warp.
And when the chief said
thrown out like a piece of trash
, this was what it meant to Shizue.
And all Shizue could hear when the area chief spoke were hackneyed platitudes and bureaucratic condolences, and in the end all she could think of was a corpse lying in a pit of industrial refuse.
There was no dignity in the image.
Broken things, useless objectsâthose were what got disposed of illegally. That stark image figured prominently in the back of Shizue's mind.
Arms, legs, the head, scattered on the sidewalkâeven these graphic details did not seem real to her.
That notwithstanding, Shizue had never seen a dead body before. In fact, other than one specific group of people, no one in the nation would have ever seen a corpse in their lifetime. Like industrial refuse, no, even more so, dead bodies were painstakingly covered up and were always swiftly processed.
No.
Shizue had actually seen a dead body. Once.
Her mother's. She had been made up to appear as she did when she was alive. Not because Shizue's mother was in fact alive, but it was not
really
her mother's dead body either.
It was a replica of a human.
A fabrication.
The corpse that was destroyed and left by the side of the road was, to Shizue, the replica of a person.
And Shizue was unable to find that atrocious.
It was just
a body thrown out because it had no use anymore
.