“No. Their death itself is a part of them. Their final moments are a part of them,” Sousuke said. “That’s why we’re all so earnest, fighting for life with every inch of our being. That’s the one unchangeable rule in life. That was one thing even Gauron respected. He was an awful person, but he understood life’s fleeting nature. The difference is that he reveled in it, and I don’t.”
“A very interesting opinion,” Leonard said, straining to lift up a large chunk of concrete. “Gauron, eh? I told him about this once myself... about time and destiny going off the rails. He didn’t doubt it, but like you, he showed no interest. His words were quite similar to yours. Two mortal enemies with such similar opinions... would that qualify as irony?”
“No, it stands to reason. It’s a soldiers’ unwritten rule.”
“And Gauron was a soldier?”
“He was. And I don’t think you are.” He didn’t mean it disparagingly; Sousuke was simply stating the truth as he saw it.
Yet the words seemed to trigger something inside of Leonard. “I see,” he said coldly. “Then... I feel like I should make sure to ask this, but would you say the same thing if Chidori Kaname died?”
Sousuke stood there, and didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure himself.
“You don’t know, I see.” There was no particular insinuation in Leonard’s tone. “If I were in your position, I probably couldn’t accept it. Pleasantries like laws and unwritten rules can do little to override sheer emotion. Are you sure you haven’t oversimplified things? Good and evil, love and hate, enemy and ally... you can’t possibly subscribe to such two-dimensional thinking.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not sure,” said Leonard. “There may be no need for us to fight after all.”
Sousuke was surprised to hear those words. No need to fight... Why would you say that? You’ve been nothing but my enemy from the start. You’ve interfered in our missions, killed my comrades, and kidnapped Kaname. How could there ever be peace between us?
“I know, I know. I’m not trying to craft a treaty,” Leonard assured him. “And no matter how I explain myself, I’m sure you’d refuse regardless. I’m not trying to win you over.”
“Of course.”
“Your group is as stubborn as a band of fundamentalist terrorists. But Kalinin was different... Though he was also hesitant at first.”
“The major?”
“The first time I contacted him was around Christmas of last year,” Leonard explained. “I told him about the off-the-rails world we lived in, and though he didn’t believe me right away, he eventually came around. That was during the January attack.”
“He would never believe your nonsense,” Sousuke scoffed.
“I showed him the proof, you see. I told him I’d use an unpredictable natural event to enable Amalgam to strike a blow against Mithril.”
“A natural event?”
“The solar winds,” Leonard explained. “I used the TAROS to predict that massive solar activity would take down all communications. Predicting terrestrial weather and societal movements are still beyond me, but solar activity isn’t especially hard to predict, thanks to a general lack of interaction between the sun and the lives of the tiny people here on Earth. I knew the timing down to the second, and I exploited it. It’s the only way Amalgam would have been able to strike so hard against Mithril in such a short period of time.”
Sousuke had heard that Kalinin acted strangely during the attack. Was it because of Leonard’s ‘prophecy,’ then? he wondered. Amalgam had mounted their attack using what should’ve been an unpredictable solar flare. What better proof was there that the notion of time-traveling communications through the TAROS and the omni-sphere, and the resultant changes to history, were real?
“He consequently accepted that the mistake could be fixed, and that I had the power to make it happen,” Leonard continued. “It’s not Amalgam that he’s joined, precisely. It’s me.”
“Impossible...” Sousuke muttered. Isn’t Andrey Kalinin the living embodiment of the soldiers’ unwritten rule? he thought. Even if ‘putting the world back on the rails’ were possible, he surely wouldn’t join in on a plan to do it. He was a man who accepted his losses and failures so that he could incorporate them into his next plan.
He has to be that way, Sousuke thought again. If he isn’t, then what was our loyalty for?
“Andrey Kalinin is a realist,” Leonard insisted. “He accepts things that you people never would. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t try and explain it to you.”
“Does the colonel... does Tessa know?” Sousuke asked next.
“I suspect so. And yet, she’s been working to stop my plans without telling the rest of you what they are,” Leonard pointed out. “Can you imagine why that might be?”
“Are you suggesting that anyone in Mithril would agree with you?”
“Of course. That’s why Teletha keeps you in the dark. She thinks we should accept the past and let history continue to play out. She’s forward-looking, noble, and utterly narcissistic,” Leonard said bitterly. “She also wants revenge against Amalgam, and finds the idea of anyone controlling the world abhorrent. But her main motivation is to lash out against me. She thinks that denying me is the only way for her to assert her own power.”
“She’s not that self-serving,” Sousuke denied.
“She probably doesn’t even realize it herself,” Leonard continued. “If I told her this, she’d just insist that I was wrong. She’s still a child, you know, and her above-average intelligence only makes it worse. She’ll say whatever it takes to justify what she’s doing to herself.”
They pulled out a steel pipe buried in the rubble, and the surrounding concrete tumbled down noisily. From there they created a hole large enough for an arm to pass through, and felt a cold wind blowing in through it. They were almost there. If they could clear the surrounding rubble now, they could escape.
“Amalgam is currently heading for a rapid weakening,” Leonard revealed as they stripped the rubble away. “Though I don’t think anyone realizes it. My plan, to put an end to the history of a world gone off the rails, requires considerable funding and resources. The previous democratic system was inconvenient to that end, so I’m giving it a shot in the arm.”
“A shot in the arm?” Sousuke asked suspiciously.
“The instatement of a dictator,” Leonard stated calmly. “Undermine the delicate power balance between the higher-ups, spread suspicion and uncertainty... then watch a firebrand appear and pick up allies through the tacit use of carrot and stick. It took six months of boring drudge work, but things are finally getting there. Thanks to the activities of Kalinin, as well, of course.”
“So, you’re the dictator?”
“Not quite yet. I know the identities of most of the major executives, and I’ve finished implanting a sort of a virus into their communications network,” Leonard clarified. “I call it a ‘communications network,’ but it’s not the Internet, if you’re wondering. It’s a far more primitive system of encoding. Amalgam has been using it for decades to grow themselves in secret.”
Even if Leonard doesn’t tell me what their network is, this is still important information, Sousuke thought. Why is he revealing things about his own organization so flippantly? Out loud, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Well, what’s the harm?” Leonard asked in return. “Amalgam will die out soon enough, whether or not you noble knights do the honors. No... it would be more accurate to say that the world will be remade before you ever could.”
Sousuke’s confidence in the emptiness of Leonard’s boasts was shaken. If Leonard were simply mad, he could write it off easily, but he clearly wasn’t. Kalinin’s betrayal, Amalgam’s recently strange behavior, the unnatural state of the world... it all matched with Tessa’s explanation. But if he wasn’t lying, and he wasn’t mad, then how exactly did he intend to carry out this plan of his?
“Is this the reason you need Chidori?” Sousuke asked now.
“Yes. We’re building a new TAROS right now, at a scale far grander than any before it,” Leonard confirmed. “Its power will let me affect the past, but the catalyst can’t just be any ordinary Whispered. It requires the person uniquely suited for it, the one who was imprinted with the greatest power of all.
“After a long search, I found that person,” he continued. “The one who received the longest exposure to mental waves emitted during the Yamsk-11 disaster—the whole of the tau wave information—from start to finish. The one who’s been sending technological know-how to the Whispered from the future hasn’t been some unknown entity; it’s been her. She’s about to do it very soon.”
“Chidori will...?”
“That ‘unusual luck’ of hers is the result of her being a living singularity. She was made that way. It’s destiny. She isn’t really a Whispered, you see... If I were to give Chidori Kaname a name, it would be ‘the Whispering,’” Leonard mused. “She is the one who sent the black technology into the past and threw the world off the rails.”
“She’s an ordinary person,” Sousuke insisted irritably. “She’d never willingly disseminate technology that would be used to kill people. I don’t understand all this talk of ‘has been doing’ and ‘is about to do’... but she wouldn’t do it, now or ever.”
“And that’s what’s so strange,” Leonard said, with a laugh. “Why would someone so strong and self-righteous interfere in the past? What’s happened that she can’t accept? Is it something that from long ago, or something yet to happen? And why did she—or will she—send black technology, of all things? Who was it that came up with the information she has? Is there another Whispering even further in the future? I’ve been ‘hands-off’ in the past because I wanted to know the answers... But what do you think?”
His words were full of self-recrimination, and had a sort of cold ring to them. Leonard had the air of a devil around him now, laughing ironically about an act of God that exceeded his own prodigious knowledge.
“How would I know?” Sousuke asked, feeling as though he was going crazy. The things Leonard was saying scrambled his understanding of past and future tense, of cause and effect. The one thing that was clear to him was that Chidori Kaname, that innocent girl, was about to be sacrificed on the altar of some kind of arrogant plan based on nonsense logic, whether she wanted to be part of it or not.