She closed the hardcover book with a snap and invited Haruyuki, still standing stiffly, to join her, as she glanced around at the other council members at the table.
“I’m the something. Sorry, can you vacate?”
The last part was directed at the ninth-grade boy sitting next to her. When the tall senior with short hair stood up with a bemused look on his face, she directed Haruyuki to the chair with the palm of her hand.
Mumbling his thanks, Haruyuki pulled his round body in as much as possible and lowered himself onto the seat. The slender chair creaked magnificently, but Kuroyukihime appeared not to notice at all and, after digging around in the left pocket of her blazer, pulled out something long and thin.
It was a cable. A thin, silver line, with small plugs at both ends of the shielded cord. After bringing her long hair around to the back with her left hand and inserting one plug into the terminal of the Neurolinker (naturally painted piano black) attached to her surprisingly thin neck, Kuroyukihime casually offered the other plug to Haruyuki. Now a large stir arose among the students in the lounge, all of whom had been carefully studying these events. Mixed in with the din were cries of something akin to distress: “No way!” and “She can’t be serious.”
Haruyuki was equally taken aback. Beads of sweat appeared suddenly on his face.
Direct wired transmission.
Kuroyukihime was inviting Haruyuki to “direct.” Normally, communication happened only through Neurolinkers wirelessly connected to that area’s network server, with several layers of security as intermediaries. Connecting directly with a wire, however, rendered 90 percent of these protective barriers useless. If you had the Linker skills, you could peek into the other user’s private memory and even set up a malevolent program.
Which is why, normally, directing was limited to people the user trusted implicitly: family, maybe lovers. Put another way, 99 percent of male/female couples directing in public were dating. Even the length of the cable reflected this level of intimacy, in a custom that had no scientific foundation.
The XSB cable Kuroyukihime was currently holding out was about two meters long, so the problem in this case wasn’t the length. Staring fixedly at the glittering silver terminal, Haruyuki managed somehow to squeeze his voice through his throat and ask, “Uh…um, what am I supposed to…”
“You can’t do anything besides stick it in your neck, can you?” she asserted without missing a beat.
Very close to passing out now, Haruyuki took the plug with a shaky hand and fumbled to put it in his own Neurolinker. The moment he did, a warning flashed in front of his eyes: WIRED CONNECTION. As this message faded, only the figure of Kuroyukihime before him was alive against the backdrop of the lounge.
Although her lips, still toying with a faint smile, did not move a millimeter, her smooth voice sounded in Haruyuki’s brain. “Sorry to ask you to come all the way over here, Haruyuki Arita. Can you neurospeak?”
The skill of having a conversation without moving your lips, going only through the Linker. Haruyuki nodded and replied, “I can. Um…what exactly is this about? Some kind of elaborate…prank or something?”
He thought she might get mad, but Kuroyukihime tilted her head slightly to the side and murmured softly, “I suppose…in a certain sense, that’s probably exactly it. Because right now, I am sending an application program to your Neurolinker. If you accept it, the world you have known until now will be completely and utterly destroyed and then rebuilt into something you can’t even conceive.”
“M-my world…destroyed…?” Haruyuki repeated, dumbstruck.
Already, the student council members at the table were staring with deep interest in where this would go and the students making a fuss around them had essentially disappeared from his view. Only Kuroyukihime’s words reverberated in his brain over and over.
The student clad in black smiled again at Haruyuki’s confusion, raised her right hand, and quickly flicked the tip of her supple, pale finger.
Followed by a beeping sound.
And holo dialogue: OPEN BRAIN BURST2039.EXE? YES/NO
Despite the fact that this was supposedly his own familiar system display, Haruyuki almost felt like the window had its own secret, independent will and was pressing him for a decision.
In terms of common sense, opening an unknown app sent by a direct connection from a person you didn’t know very well was the very definition of indiscretion. The obvious thing to do would be to yank out the cable right now. But Haruyuki couldn’t do that for some reason. Instead, he looked down at his own body, wedged in tightly on the chair.
My world. My reality.
This dull body. Dull face. Endless bullying, escaping to the net. And more than anything else, me doing absolutely nothing to change any of it. My own self, giving up. I just tell myself it’s fine this way and nothing’s going to change anyway.
Haruyuki shifted his gaze and stared into Kuroyukihime’s pitch-black eyes. And then after a five-second pause, he raised his right hand and poked the YES button with the tip of his finger. He saw her white face suddenly colored with a slight surprise, and a slight satisfaction dripped into his heart.
“Just what I was hoping for. As long as this world…breaks,” he mumbled, while at nearly the same time, an enormous blaze leapt up to fill his field of vision. The wild flames that had engulfed him, causing him to stiffen up instinctively, finally focused in front of him to form a title logo. The design style was definitely nothing new, with a roughness that brought to mind a certain type of fighting game in fashion at the end of the last century.
The text that appeared: BRAIN BURST.
This was how Haruyuki and the program that would revolutionize the world he knew met.