Seemingly with no intention of explaining himself any further, he broke his gaze and looked back at Kanami-san. Predictably, Kanami-san was still staring at the cherry blossoms with complete concentration. She was surrounded by a sort of transcendence, as if just that one spot was isolated from the rest of the world. She had the air of being unapproachable, even sacred.
“So Kanami-san’s been painting even since coming here?”
“Well, it’s more like she came to this island to paint. That’s really all she does, after all. I suppose you could say she lives to paint. Can you believe it?” He spoke with a tinge of frustration, but if you took his words at face value, it sounded like an incredibly enviable existence; a life where what you want to do and what you have to do are directly connected. It was a way of life I could never even hope for. I, who had discovered neither what I wanted nor what I had to do.
I noticed that Shinya-san was watching me with a wicked smile, like he had just remembered a bad prank. I recoiled a little. I was getting a bad feeling, like a premonition. And then Shinya-san, with a look on his face as if to say, “I’ve just had a revelation from God,” clapped his hands deliberately.
“That’s right! It’s such a prime opportunity, so why don’t you try modeling?” He set me aside as I stood at a loss for words and unable to comprehend his, and faced Kanami-san. “Hey!” he called. “Kanami! This fella here says he wants to be your model!”
“Wait, Shinya-san!” Finally grasping the situation, I spun in front of him. “I can’t just, I mean, give me a break!”
“Now, now, why are you so embarrassed? That hardly suits your character.”
I don’t think so. Asking Kanami-san to paint me? That was an incredibly intimidating idea. But Shinya-san blew off my protest with a simple “Now, now, don’t be shy,” and waited for an answer from Kanami-san.
Kanami-san adjusted the direction of her wheelchair and took a look at me. She scanned me up and down, from the tip of my head to the tips of my feet, observing me, assessing me, and said, “So you want me to paint you?” She sounded truly irritated.
This was a difficult question to answer. With someone as talented as Kanami-san, the simple act of hesitating would have been rude. I was weak in these situations. A real pushover. A nineteen-year-old boy who’s spent his life going with the flow has not the power to alter the flow of a tale.
“Yes, absolutely, if you don’t mind,” I said.
Kanami-san simply looked disinterested. “Fine then. Come by the atelier this afternoon.” she said, and swiveled her wheelchair back toward the cherry blossoms. She spoke with heartfelt apathy, but at least she had taken pity on me.
“Well, that’s settled then. Are you free this afternoon?” Shinya-san said, strangely joyful.
I told him I was free and decided to get going before I got into any more trouble.
I returned to the mansion and visited Kunagisa’s room once again. Kunagisa was just as I had left her, sitting in her revolving chair, her three PCs (I mean, two PCs and one workstation) in front of her. Right now she was focused on the workstation, and the two PCs had their power switched off.
“What were you up to, Tomo?”
No reply.
I went up to her from behind and tugged both her braids.
“Oww,” she uttered in a strange voice, seeming to at last notice my presence. Without changing her position, she gaped at me in bewilderment. Surely I appeared upside down in her eyes.
“Yooo, Ii-chan. You’re back from your walk.”
“Yeah, well… Say, is that a Mac?”
The monitor on the workstation opposite Kunagisa was displaying some kind of Mac OS screen. As far as I had heard, Mac OS only worked on Macs.
“Yeah, it’s Mac OS. Y’see, there are some applications that only run on Mac OS, so I’m running it on a virtual machine.”
“Virtual machine?”
“Basically I’m making the workstation think there’s a Mac inside it. In other words, I’m tricking the software. Of course Windows is in here, too. Most OS’s are installed on this workstation, so it can do anything.”
“Ah…”
I didn’t really get it.
“This is a dumb question, but how are Mac and Windows different, anyway?”
She gave my truly amateurish question a moment’s thought. “They’re different because different people use them,” she answered, with an air of precision.
“Well, yeah, that’s true, but… Well, forget about that. So an OS is like the core software, right? I think that’s right. So then it’s like this computer has multiple personalities?”
“It’s a strange metaphor, but you could say that.”
“So then that PC, er, workstation, what’s its core core OS? Like with multiple personalities you have a ‘main’ personality, right?”
“Geocide.”
“Never heard of that. Is it like Unix?”
“That’s Unix, with a ‘yoo’ sound. Come on, you studied abroad; you should know not to pronounce the alphabet like Romanized Japanese, Ii-chan. It makes you sound so stupid. Uh, well, it is compatible with Unix. But it’s an original OS developed by a friend of yours truly.
“A friend…”
Kunagisa’s friend. The only friend of Kunagisa’s who could’ve developed an original operating system was someone from that “team.” From that notorious “team.”
Several years back, in the last century, during the time when the Japanese network was still underdeveloped, that group appeared. Or, no, “appeared” isn’t the correct expression.
They never for an instant let their visage, nor their shadow, nor even their smell grace the public eye. They never announced their name; whatever name they had ever been known by had been applied by others. Whether you called them a virtual club, cyberterrorists, a crack unit, or a gang that made mountains out of molehills, it didn’t matter to them, and they probably wouldn’t respond.