Loups-Garous (7 page)

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 herself 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.”

“But aren't you copying it now?”

“Yes, I am. That's why it's a question of what's going to take longer— renewing the whole system and exposing all the data, or adjusting all the information and copying it to traffic media.”

Putting their hands in the system would probably guarantee a better quality of work. But there was a problem. If they altered the mainframe, all of the information stored in there would, for a moment, be exposed. Information about children under ten wasn't given to the police, and beyond that, there was no small amount of top secret information the details of which couldn't be publicized collected on the mainframe. In addition, once the system had been altered, it took as long to return it to its original state. Shizue was no expert, but she knew enough to know that a serious mix-up during that brief moment of exposure wouldn't be unheard of.

Data leaks from everywhere. That much was determined in the 2030s. Copyright and trademarks, privacy…None of it was protected by ethics or morals. If you wanted to protect something, never save it as electronic data.

Ultimately, people depended on things.

There were supposedly old people who had homes packed full of paperwork from the past, but was that how it was all going to end?

People needed concrete objects.

“The police just decided it would cause too many problems, so they want to put everything on discs,” Shizue said, as it was too complicated to explain the rest.

“I don't know about that,” Kunugi replied, unimpressed. “That seems…oh I don't know. I'm not good with words. I'm sorry.”

“It doesn't bother me,” Shizue replied.

The truth didn't bother her.

Things like words were good when communicating something. The issue was that the words actually had to say something. Shizue's problem was that there were so many idiots who didn't. Saying something politely didn't make it all right either. Things like vocal tone were displayed on-screen through things like typeface, but that had nothing to do with meaning.

Kunugi had no doubt heard things about Shizue from either that guy Ishida or the area policemen near Yokota.

I bet they told him I'm a frigid bitch.

“As you can tell, I'm an awkward cop, plus, I was at the police academy before the turn of the century, so I'm from the old century in every way. So you see, with young people like yourself…There I go again. That's harassing language isn't it. Well, unlike those of you who were born this century, I'm totally inept with current technology.”

“I'm no specialist either.”

“I'm sure. But still, when I was young, old men my age didn't even know what a computer was. I was often asked what they were for. But I didn't know how to answer. All I could say was that it could be used for anything. But if it can do everything, then you need it to be efficient before you can understand it. It was simple. When I became a cop, the Internet and the something something revolution still caused a commotion.”

“Was that wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Computers were viewed strangely for too long,” Shizue said. “Clearly the excessive illusions about computer technology wrought confusion at one point, and society thereafter attempted to adapt midcourse, and these thoughts overflow in this generation of people who can't let go of their outmoded ideas.”

“Our generation,” Kunugi said.

Shizue pointed at the edge of the keyboard with her index finger.

“You think too hard about this everyday technology. You still believe computers can do everything. These are all programmed machines. They can only do a set number of things.”

“I'm sure that's right, but is that all?”

“Of course. It goes without saying scissors are good for cutting paper, but you can't use scissors to suture paper. Similarly, the best accounting software can't make music. Computers are nothing more than calculators. It's a system built to do the math necessary to accomplish a task. If humans were able to do several calculations at once there'd be no need for computers. No matter how grand the calculation, nothing but cutlery can cut paper.”

Kunugi's lips creased at the corners.
Hmm
, he muttered.

“What I mean is, those old men from when you were young were already right on about the purposes of computers.” Shizue spoke as calmly as she could, then returned her gaze to the screen. It was more settling.

The download status bar gave no sign of movement. Only 10 percent of the work was finished. This would take at least another half hour.

More specifically, it would be another 1,820 seconds.

Shizue just had to sit there and silently wait.

It was that kind of work.