His cane clacking against the tile floor, Naomi stepped into his workplace. The group at the central monitor all turned to look at him with expressions of confusion and concern.
“Naomi!” whimpered a bearded, middle-aged man at the center of the group. Like the others, he wore the white jacket of their official uniform, but there was a T-shirt clearly visible underneath it, and his shorts and sneakers weren’t exactly professional either.
Senko Tsunehisa, the chief operations officer of the AllTale Center, was a 57-year-old man who’d somehow managed to avoid growing up. It was part of what let him achieve so many genuinely astonishing scientific feats, to hit on ideas a true adult never could. And at the moment, he was pouting like a cartoon character.
Naomi deeply trusted and respected the man. He was the only mentor Naomi had ever had. He was also a serious annoyance when it came to anything outside of work.
“You’re here, Naomi!” said the woman seated beside Senko, speaking in Indonesian rather than Japanese. “We’ve got serious localized damage in the records. We tried using the automatic data repair module, but it can’t keep up.”
This was Xu Yiyi, Senko’s assistant and the project’s chief researcher. Quickly tapping her fingers against the table monitor, she called up a summary of the ongoing incident. This woman did the work of three ordinary researchers; she single-handedly made up for Senko’s capriciousness and lack of common sense.
“Don’t know what caused it, either!” said Senko with a casual shrug. “Any ideas, Naomi?”
For whatever reason, these two had started using Naomi’s given name rather than the more professional Katagaki-san, and now almost all the other staff members followed their example. It didn’t really bother him, but it did feel a bit like he was still back in school.
The two of them looked at him expectantly, but he shook his head rather than replying. The most convenient answer was that he just didn’t know what was wrong.
“Let’s focus on the problem at hand for now,” he said, approaching the monitor table and tapping at the screen, which showed red lines radiating away from a large circle labeled AllTale at the center of the display. “Looking at the map, the damaged data seems to be causing cascading damage to other sections of the records. At this rate, the butterfly effect is going to push us past the point of no return. And if we let that happen…”
“The whole simulation collapses,” said Senko, scratching his head. Xu didn’t say anything, but she was staring intently at the map with a deep frown on her face. It was clear from the display alone that their intricate, infinite-capacity masterpiece was on the brink of a complete system failure.
Senko folded his arms and closed his to eyes think. After a few moments of hesitation, he turned back to face Xu and Naomi. “We need to initiate recovery mode.”
The pronouncement elicited a chorus of groans from the other staff members. Everyone in the room was familiar with the procedure, but they’d never had to use it since the AllTale system started running.
Recovery mode involved a temporary shutdown of AllTale’s hardware systems, followed by a backup and repair of all the records it preserved. It was a last resort emergency maintenance method, only to be used in a Stage 4 crisis scenario. Even with the staff working at full speed, it would take thousands of hours to complete.
No one objected, despite the grumbles. With a situation this dire unfolding, Senko’s decision made sense.
“This way, we’ll at least keep the hardware safe, right?” said Senko with a glance around the room, his tone consoling.
The formal order hadn’t been issued yet, but Xu was already rising from her chair. “First things first, everyone. We need to retrieve and preserve the records in block format. Then we get the repair started.”
“Yeesh, this is going to be a pain,” Senko added helpfully with a shrug of his shoulders. He looked at Naomi with an apologetic expression. “Can you get on this right away, Naomi?”
“Of course.” As he replied, Naomi reached into his pocket and took out an ID card, clipping it to his shirt. The terminals automatically scanned these cards to authorize access, so he needed to have his on when he was working.
The plastic case still had the word NAOMI! scrawled on it in Magic Marker—the remnants of another one of Senko’s stupid pranks. He’d been meaning to wipe it off for ages, but never seemed to get around to it.
The card encased inside the holder, on the other hand, was a very professional-looking ID that listed his full name and official title.
AllTale Center
System Management Director
Katagaki Naomi
3.
ONE OF THE ALLTALE CENTER’S PERKS for senior staff was a personal room on site. Naomi had earned one of his own upon his promotion to director.
The room was about 140 square feet and it contained everything he needed: a work desk, bookshelves packed with technical tomes, and a thick blanket for the days when he was forced to sleep at work. At first, he’d tried to keep this room tidy, but by now it had acquired the clutter of a lived-in space.
Naomi picked out a few books from his disorganized shelves. This would be the first time they’d ever run Recovery Mode on the AllTale system, so they’d probably run into unexpected errors. He should prepare as thoroughly as possible.
Once he’d chosen everything he thought he might need, Naomi glanced down. There was a half-open cardboard box sitting partway under his desk; a grimy vest was visible inside it.
It wasn’t a particularly fashionable piece of clothing. Exposed electrical wires were taped clumsily to its entire surface, and since he couldn’t wash the thing, every inch of it was dirty…but the inside of it was particularly filthy, especially the back.
It wasn’t just sweat that had soaked into the fabric. It was blood, and skin, and bits of charred human flesh. The stains had dried out long ago, but they were still disturbingly vivid. Most people would have flinched and looked away with a grimace.
But Naomi just smiled with a far-off look in his eyes.
Reaching down to close the lid, he sealed the box shut with tape and pushed it out of sight entirely. With his books under one arm and his cane in the other, he left his room and headed for the control center.