“She's wet.”
Waterproof materials are made precisely for this kind of thing
, Ayumi thought, just as she stepped into a flooded road. “Let's leave quickly,” Ayumi said without turning around.
I'm glad
I
didn't say anything pointless
, Hazuki thought.
Still, was Ayumi not concerned about that girl?
Wouldn't you normally be concerned?
It wasn't really any of their business. Thus revising her opinion, Hazuki stepped out under the rain and into the unsettling city. That was when it happened.
Ayumi had turned away from Yabe's face. Probably on purpose, so she didn't have to look at her.
No matter the situation, of course she didn't like being looked at. Hazuki did not look at her either, so she wasn't sure why she thought it. But for some reason she did. It seemed Ayumi had the same thought occur to her, and they both stopped moving.
Wait
. The sound just came through the shushing of the rainfall.
Ayumi wasn't sure whether she'd stopped or heard the call first.
As she turned on her heel the pink-lensed Yuko Yabe was approaching them.
“Wait,” Yuko repeated.
She was talking to Ayumi, because Hazuki had already stopped and turned around.
“Is everything okay?” Yuko asked. Ayumi didn't turn around. “Hey,”
Yuko probed, and Ayumi said, “I'm fine.” Hazuki didn't know what was going on.
Yuko tentatively stared at Ayumi's back, which showed no sign of turning about, and eventually put Hazuki back in her field of vision.
“Did somethingâ¦happen?”
She asked as if her thoughts were deep somewhere.
Hazuki probed further instead of answering. “What do you mean, did something happen?”
“Well you'reâ¦acting strange.”
“You don't know then?”
She apparently didn't know about the murder that had taken place in the area.
News had gotten out about an hour ago.
Hazuki had confirmed it on their way here. If Yuko had been at home she should have known. This kind of emergency data would be displayed on any active monitor, no matter your profession.
When Hazuki asked if she really didn't know, Yuko said it was because her monitor was broken.
“Broken?”
Was there some kind of trouble? Even so, she should have been at home. Was she saying the main terminal was broken too?
“Murder. In this area.”
“Murder?”
Yuko raised her eyebrows.
“Random killing under the North-South Line bridge.”
“So.”
“So?”
“So that person, after that thing⦔
“This time it was a boy,” Ayumi said and turned her body.
“Here.”
Ayumi showed her own monitor to Yuko.
Portable monitors have small displays, which made it hard for Hazuki to see, but she was sure Ayumi was showing information on the victim.
“Ryu Kawabata. Age sixteen. Son of an average insurance and hygiene clerk.”
Ayumi brought the monitor closer to Yuko after speaking. The pink contact lenses reflected the screen.
“This is the victim.”
Yuko stared at the monitor until the mist on her temple collected enough moisture to trickle down. Then, tensing her forehead, she glanced at Hazuki.
“What are you doing with this?”
That's what I'd like to know
, Hazuki thought.
Butâ¦
She couldn't help but think Ayumi and Yuko were sharing some kind of information, just from having listened to the way Yuko spoke earlier.
He wasn't dead. Ayumi must have known why Yuko was absent from class today.
Stillâ¦
If that were the case, the way Ayumi saw Yuko looking at and then ignoring her, and then acting like she couldn't get away from her fast enough, was all unsettling.
As if Yuko noticed Hazuki was unusually deep in thought. What. What was it?
“That can't be.”
“Don't worry, we didn't come here to check on you,” Ayumi said.
“We're looking for Mio Tsuzuki's house.”
“Why?”
“Because it's raining.”
The raindrops grew heavier, lengthening. They fell harder.
“Her house is over there, by where the car is parked.”
“Car?”
“Yeah, one of those gas-consuming things that moved people around a long time ago.”
On the road at the edge of Section B was an old-fashioned personal car, one not to be ridden. Did it still run?
“Her entrance is on the second floor. The ground floor is a store. Only people from China in there.”
“What do you mean store? Is it a Real Shop?” Ayumi said that it wasn't.
“It's a deli that resisted the trend of distributing legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Even though they're legal, people didn't look favorably upon them, so it was impossible to get vendor licenses in the commercial zones.”
“Alcoholâ¦drug-related then.”
Ayumi chuckled for some reason and said, “That probably wasn't all.”
“It used to be that kind of place,” Yuko said. “â¦since it used to be a red-light district and all.”
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.
“Butâ¦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 wasâ¦
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 Hazuki 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?”
“Noâ¦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.”