“Can I ask you one last thing?” I called after the man, who’d quietly started to make his exit. “Why were you so kind to me?”
His answer was pretty much what I’d expected.
“Ha-ha! Because it’s an adult’s job to protect kids.”
✦ ✦ ✦
After leaving Bruno’s mansion, I jumped back onto the motorcycle and headed for the embassy of the Mizoev Federation.
Nobody had summoned me. If I had to say why I was going there, it was because my instincts as the Singularity were telling me to. For some reason, I knew for a fact that our enemy was there.
There were no guards out front when I got there.
I went inside the embassy and walked around on my own, eventually finding Abel Arsene Schoenberg in a spacious office that looked like it belonged to the president of a country.
“How many times do you suppose we’ve faced off like this by now?”
Abel didn’t even glance at me. He was at the desk in the back of the room, writing something long on a piece of parchment. He must have known I’d come. Either that or maybe one of his codes had been what had called me here.
“The first time I met you was a pretty similar situation, wasn’t it?”
That had been over a year ago. At the time, Abel had been passing himself off as Fritz Stewart, the Revolutionary and a politician, and Siesta and I had failed to catch him.
Back then, Siesta had sworn an oath to him. She’d said that a new Ace Detective was about to take her place. That the girl was incredibly passionate and would never lose to an enemy who used human hearts the way he did.
However, that Ace Detective wasn’t here now.
“Abel, where have you put Nagisa?”
Abel didn’t answer. In Bruno’s library, I’d seen the happy dreams in which Saikawa, Charlie, and Mia were being held, but I hadn’t seen Nagisa. It was likely that the Ace Detective had been more carefully hidden from the Singularity than everyone else.
“Actually, let me change my question: What did you do to the people of this country?”
Finally, Abel glanced up at me. “If you mean the vanished human race, it’s temporary, and they only seem to have disappeared. Once all the preparations are in place, I vow to put them back in their proper places.”
That was the answer Ms. Fuubi and I had predicted.
“I’m currently preparing to rewrite the malicious genes humanity innately possesses,” Abel said. “Through my previous vast criminal undertakings, I created the necessary codes. Now I’ll borrow the power of the Akashic records and apply the change to the entire human race. That will eliminate evil from the world. A new world is about to be born right here. A world where no one harbors malice, so naturally, there will be no sinners. A perfect world where all ideals become real.”
It’s not possible, I almost said before I could stop myself.
There was no way you could call something like that ‘ideal.’ Controlling people as if they were computer programs? Even if that brought peace to the world, the result wouldn’t be a world anyone wanted. But…
“Abel, what made you come up with this?”
That was what I had to ask about with this whydunit. Why had the criminal committed this crime? I needed to shed light on his motive.
“It’s simple.” Abel’s pen kept moving as he spoke. “I was born like this: as an evil program to guide humans toward an ideal world.”
That was Abel’s answer. Just as he’d said on the train, he claimed there was no motive behind his crimes. That he was evil, pure and simple.
“I see,” I said plainly, then began confirming the answers I’d found.
“So you really are the progenitor of the human race.”
For a moment, Abel’s pen stopped.
Several hours ago, in Bruno’s library, I’d touched a book that was part of the Akashic records. Its pages had held the story of a certain man.
The young man had been born several thousand years ago, maybe even further in the past. He had been favored by God and lived as a sheepherder until one day, driven by jealousy, his older brother Cain had killed him. It was the first murder in human history.
However, in that moment, the man’s real life began. He was reborn. What’s more, he retained the memories of his previous life. Why had his brother killed him? The man lived his second life confused and bewildered by his first—and he’d ended up suffering the same fate. In an age where humans still lived in caves, a greedy tribe had stolen his provisions and murdered him.
In his third life, once again, the man was born with the memories of his previous lives. However, he was worked like a plow horse by a lazy leader and died without even getting a drink of water. On his fourth, his tenth, his hundredth life, he was killed by human wrath, lust, pride, and gluttony.
“That was you, Abel Arsene Schoenberg.”
Having begun as history’s first murder victim, Abel had been reborn again and again, accumulating more memories while being inflicted with every kind of wickedness humans were capable of.
This time, he’d have a good life. This time, he’d be happy. He must have thought it dozens—hundreds of times while he lived as people of different genders with all sorts of different backgrounds. His hopes had always been dashed, though. Human malice had always killed Abel.
At some point, a realization had occurred to him: Whatever he was, he was no longer human. He must be a program designed to make the world aware of the evil that came from humans. He thought God must have defined him as “evil.”
“And so, Abel, in order to rebel against that god—the Akashic records—you’re trying to make this world a utopia with no concept of evil. Isn’t that right?”
The ticking of the clock was the only other sound in the room as I hammered home my point.
“I never thought so much had been recorded,” Abel said after a short silence. “…I will make it. No matter what I have to sacrifice, I’ll create a utopia governed by righteousness and logic, where no unfairness exists.”
He’d just confirmed my theory.
“I see. In that case, we’ll shut it down as many times as it takes.”
I drew my gun and leveled it at him. I knew he wouldn’t be easy to hit, but I was sure this was what the Ace Detective would do if she were here.
“You can’t kill me. But I can’t kill you, either.”
Unexpectedly, Abel ignored the gun. He didn’t try to hit me with another code, either, but just started scrawling on the parchment again. “As I said, my mission is to rewrite the human race’s malicious genes. It would be difficult to generate a code to kill the Singularity at the same time.”
“…You did say that the closer a person or phenomenon was to the center of the world, the harder it was to manipulate it with a program.”
That was why even Abel hadn’t been able to kill me or Nagisa directly. Trapping us in dream worlds had been the best he could do. —And yet.
“Abel, what have you been writing?”
It had been bugging me all this time. He’d hardly so much as glanced at me since I got here. What was he doing? Working on a code to rewrite humanity’s malicious genes? But hadn’t he said that was done already?
I thought about it logically. Say someone was trying to pull off a crime. If they knew their plan wasn’t going to go well, what would they do? They’d almost certainly take a hostage. Bank robberies, hijackings, kidnappings—I’d been dragged into all those things, many times, and I’d seen it happen.
“No…” I felt my skin crawl. That was the exact situation we were in.
“Singularity, will you take an order from me?” Abel set down his pen and looked up. “To protect the loved ones of you and your companions back home, I want you to surrender to me.”
“…And if I refuse?”
“I’ll activate a code that makes the leaders of every country in the world press the buttons that activate certain weapons.”
So that was the code Abel had been writing. He didn’t even have to say what those “certain weapons” were. If I didn’t voluntarily choose defeat, the world would be…
“______________!”
My eyes went to the gun I was pointing at Abel. Where should I really be pointing it?
It probably doesn’t matter.
I didn’t have a messiah complex or anything, but if it was just a fact that my death would save the world, well, that was fine. I could deal with it.
It was too bad this was happening when I’d recently started doing better in the human relationships department, but clearly you couldn’t compare the weight of a single life with the lives of eight billion people. That said…
“If I die here, there are a few lives no one will be able to save.”
“I see. Then it’s a pity, but it seems negotiations are unsuccessful.”
Ignoring the gun I had trained on him, Abel reached toward the phone on the desk.
“Hey,” I called out to him. “I’m negotiating with Abel right now.”
His hand froze in midair.
“So don’t get in the way, Cain.”