“Good morning! Ah, it’s a bright, brisk morning, isn’t it?!” She sat up, her petite little body popping up. Flashing me an ear-to-ear grin, she struck a dynamic pose. “Huh? Hey, it’s not bright out at all. I don’t like this. I like for the sun to be way high up in the sky when I wake up in the morning.”
“You’re talking about the afternoon.”
“Eh, either way. That was some good sleep.” Ignoring me, she kept on talking. “I’m pretty sure I got to bed at three a.m. Some really bad stuff happened yesterday and I just huffed off to bed. Y’know, cuz sleep is the best thing when you’re feeling really terrible. It’s like sleep is the one and only gift of salvation God gave mankind. Now, Ii-chan?”
“Yeah, Tomo?”
“Stay still for a sec.”
Without even giving me time to be confused, she hugged me. Or to put it more accurately, she draped herself on me, burdening me with the entirety of her bodyweight. She rested her tiny head on my right shoulder, with our bodies stuck together, her slender arms wrapped around my neck.
Squeeze.
Not that she was heavy.
“Uh, Kunagisa?”
“Recharging.”
Evidently she was recharging. Thus, no moving allowed. I gave up on the idea of resistance and supported her weight.
But hey, what was I, an electrical outlet or something?
Looking at Kunagisa, I noticed she had slept with her coat on. As far as I knew, she wore it all the time, indoors and outdoors, summer and winter. A jet-black men’s coat. On a girl of Kunagisa’s tiny stature, the large-sized coat easily touched the floor. But she seemed to be madly in love with it anyway. I had told her millions of times to at least take it off when she’s sleeping, but to no avail.
One thing was for sure: Kunagisa Tomo did things her own way. In that sense, she was kind of like me.
“Okay, thanks!” she said, and finally let go of me. “Battery full! Now, let’s go face another day.”
With a grunt she rose from bed, blue hair bouncing. She walked over to the computers by the window opposite her bed. They were the three computers she had brought from her home in Shirosaki. All three were tower models. The two on the left and right were of typical size, the one in the middle was exceptionally large. They were all white, of course. I just didn’t get why she was so into a color that was so easy to get dirty.
The three computers were on a U-shaped rack, with a cushiony rolling chair in the center. Kunagisa plopped down in the chair and leaned back. That way she could simultaneously control all three computers. But no matter how you counted it up, she still had only two hands. Why she would ever think to use three keyboards at the same time was beyond me.
I looked over her shoulder. The three keyboards were neither ASCII nor JIS nor Oasis, but instead some weird, mysterious key alignment. But to question the unnaturalness of it would be futile. For an engineering whiz like Kunagisa Tomo, designing a keyboard from scratch was probably like a walk in the park.
Incidentally, Kunagisa didn’t use a mouse. Because “they’re a total waste of time,” she would say. But to a novice like me, the sight of a mouseless computer was unnerving, just totally impossible to get used to. Not that that’s the worst feeling in the world.
“Ii-chan.”
“Yeah?”
“Tie my hair up.”
Got it. I went up to her chair. I slipped some hair bands off her arm and tied her hair into two braids.
“Man, wash your hair already. My fingers are getting oily here.”
“I hate taking baths. Cuz y’know, your hair gets all wet and stuff.”
“Well, of course. Look at this, the blue is getting dark.”
“I can’t see my own head. Hehehe, if I leave it like it is, it’ll turn ultramarine. Thank you, Ii-chan,” she said, biting her lower lip with a giggle. I just looked back at her with an innocent, confused smile.
“Uh, no problem, really.”
Even as we talked, her fingers never stopped moving. They moved with the accuracy of a machine at a constant rhythm with every keystroke. Her movements flowed so smoothly it was as if she were unconsciously tarrying out some preplanned assignment in some preprogrammed way. Incomprehensible English characters and numbers streamed along on all three monitor displays at an unbelievable pace.
“Tomo, what are you up to, anyway? You just got up.”
“Mmm, well, I don’t think you’d get it even if I told you.”
“Hmm. You really need all three PCs to do it?” I said.
She gave me a perplexed look. “Ii-chan, this one in the middle isn’t a PC, it’s a workstation,” she said.
“What’s a workstation? It’s not a PC?”
“Nope, it’s different. Well, I guess PCs and workstations are similar in that they’re both intended for individual use, but, it’s like, workstations are way more top-of-the-line.”
“Ah, so a workstation is like a super-good PC?” I said, openly displaying my ignorance.
She groaned. “Ii-chan, a PC is a PC and a workstation is a workstation. They’re both GPCs, but think of them as two completely different things.”
“What’s a GPC?”
She looked at me as if I were some kind of a caveman. “Ii-chan, you don’t know anything, do you?” she said with a touch of disbelief. “What exactly were you doing in Houston those five years?”
“Other things.”
She sighed. “Okay, okay,” she said, tilting her head. Then she resumed her work as if a switch had been toggled in her brain. Letters and numbers that looked like hocus-pocus to me continued to stream by on the displays.
I wanted her to tell me a little more about the different classifications or what have you, but I’m not really that intellectually curious. Besides, it would be rude to interrupt whatever she was working on. That, and, for an “outsider” like me to try to follow this nerdy cupcake’s explanations seemed as if it would just lead to a headache, so with that I ended the discussion. I massaged her shoulders for a bit, then decided to borrow her sink, where I washed my face and changed my clothes.
“Hey, Tomo, I’m gonna go for a walk.”
Without looking up from her work, she gave me a halfhearted wave. The other hand kept on tapping keys. I shrugged and left the room.