The yellow message light blinked in the top right corner of the virtual blackboard.
Haruyuki, who had drifted off during class, shifted the focus of both his eyes, pulling his neck back automatically. As he did, the deep green of the blackboard filling his field of vision faded suddenly to translucency, and the figure of the teacher standing beyond the orderly rows of student backs became clear.
The classroom, his classmates, and the teacher were all real, but the transparent blackboard and the closely packed equations on it were not. The Neurolinker around the back of Haruyuki’s neck projected the numbers and symbols the teacher wrote in the air directly into his brain.
The math teacher, a man in his early forties, continued with his whispered explanation of one formula while running an empty hand along a blackboard only he could see in areas that seemed particularly difficult somehow. His voice was nowhere near loud enough to reach Haruyuki’s ears as actual sound, but the Neurolinker twined around the teacher’s neck amplified and clarified it, conveying it to Haruyuki.
When Haruyuki brought his gaze back in, the blackboard materialized once again, covered in even more equations than before. It seemed unlikely that the message he had received was a compressed file sent by the teacher packing up today’s homework. And given that he was separated from the global net right now, that meant the sender had to be another student in his school.
In the six months since he’d started junior high, Haruyuki had long abandoned the hope that one of the girls might have broken school rules to send him a friendly message. He desperately wanted to drop the message unopened in the trash in the lower left corner of his eyeline, but if he did that, he’d have no idea what was going to happen to him later.
Reluctantly, taking advantage of the teacher’s turned back, he raised his right hand in the air (this action was real rather than virtual) and clicked on the mail icon with the tip of his finger.
In an instant, bubibaborububiru, a sound without any actual character, and graphics like a flood of primary colors assaulted Hiroyuki’s senses. Then the real message played—not text, but voice.
Piggy, today’s command order! (Several voices laughing gleefully in the background.) Bring two yakisoba buns, one cream melon bun, and three strawberry yogurts to the roof five minutes after lunch starts! If you’re late, it’s pork bun punishment for you! And if you squeal, it’s the pork roast punishment! Got it?! (Another explosion of laughter.)
Haruyuki mustered every ounce of willpower to fix his neck in place and not look in the direction of the eyes he could feel burning a hole through his left cheek. He knew he’d only be even more humiliated by the sneers of Araya and his underlings A and B if he allowed himself a glance.
Since you obviously couldn’t record messages like this during class or add in these kinds of visual and auditory effects, the message had to have been prepared in advance. Those guys had too much free time on their hands. And then that “command order” stuff! Totally redundant! Idiots! Complete morons!
Although he could curse them out in his head, Haruyuki couldn’t even answer this message, much less utter his curses out loud. Because if Araya was an idiot the likes of a cockroach, indestructible no matter how the world moved forward, Haruyuki was an even bigger idiot for being bullied by him. If he possessed even the tiniest bit of courage or the ability to act, it’d be an easy thing to submit the several dozen messages he’d saved, including this one, to the school as evidence and get those guys in trouble.
But Haruyuki inevitably ended up thinking about what would come after that.
People could talk all they wanted about how half of our lives were lived in the virtual network now that Neurolinkers were so ubiquitous that basically everyone in the country had one, but in the end, human beings only existed according to the lowest common denominators chaining them to their flesh-and-blood bodies. Three times a day, you get hungry; you go to the toilet; if you get hit, it hurts, and you cry as a consequence. It’s all so miserable you could die.
Linker skills determining which school you went to and how far you made it in the world, these were nothing more than the enormous network industry’s branding strategies. What determined the value of a human being at the end of the day were simply the primitive parameters of appearance and physical strength. This was the conclusion Haruyuki reached at the age of thirteen, having reached sixty kilos when he was in fifth grade and never having run a fifty-meter dash in less than ten seconds.
He was forced to spend the five hundred yen his mother charged to his Neurolinker in the morning for lunch money to buy buns and yogurt for Araya and the rest, and still he ran over budget. He had a little of the seven thousand yen saved up from his allowance, all the money he had in the world, but if he spent that now, he wouldn’t be able to buy the Linker game coming out later that month.
Haruyuki’s ample build got terrible mileage. If he skipped just one meal, he ended up dizzy with hunger. Even so, he had no choice but to suffer through it today. At least he still had one trick to get through the day, a full dive, only allowed during lunch.
Sucking in his round body as far as it would go, Haruyuki headed for the second school building, which held nothing but special classrooms. And because everything from science experiments to home ec cooking classes were conducted virtually now, the building no longer served any purpose, and few people went near it. Particularly during lunch, the place was devoid of students.
Haruyuki’s special hiding place was the boys’ washroom in one corner of the dusty hallway. Trudging into this refuge, he stopped with a sigh and looked at the mirror above the sink.