Chapter Six
1.
AN AIR CONDITIONER hummed faintly.
Naomi hadn’t heard this exact sound before, but it was also painfully familiar. Two contradictory thoughts coexisted in his mind. He had merged, blended with someone else; there was a second Naomi now inside him. It was a peculiar feeling, to say the least.
Gradually, he took stock of his surroundings. He was in a hospital room. There was a large, bulky bed at its center, with an array of machines standing at its side. The window on the wall had its blinds down; great strings of folded paper cranes hung next to it, with a banner that read From the Nishiki High Library Committee.
In the bed itself lay Ichigyou Ruri.
She looked the same, just as she had when she disappeared into the sky after the fireworks festival. But this wasn’t something that Naomi had ever experienced. This had to be a little while after her accident—the accident he’d prevented.
He was seeing Sensei’s memories.
“I had shelf-sorting duty today,” someone said in Naomi’s voice. He’d felt his own mouth moving, like his body had a mind of his own. “I’ve gotten a lot more practice, I guess. I managed to get it done before four this time. It goes quicker when I’m working by myself.” Naomi felt himself smiling slightly, thinking about their strange system when they shelved books together.
Naomi sat in a dark hall.
With no warning, he’d been brought somewhere else entirely—to a different place and time. But he immediately knew where he was and what he was doing there. The knowledge was sitting right there in his brain.
This was the Academic Hall at Kyoto College. He was a student here.
There was a slideshow on the big screen up front, which was why the lights were down. An older man with shaggy hair and a big beard gave a lecture to Naomi and the other students around him. Naomi had seen the man before, not too long ago, when he took that tour of the Chronicle Kyoto Project Center.
A video started on the screen. A white mouse appeared, apparently from some experiment or another. The animal was deep asleep, its mouth half-open; it almost looked dead. There were a bunch of wires or cords sticking out of its head.
After a moment, the small lights attached to the wires began to flicker.
The exhausted mouse instantly awoke, pushing itself up off the ground with surprising steadiness. Naomi heard murmurs of surprise from the audience.
At that same moment, he felt something new. It was a mixture of emotions, too complex to reduce to a single word, but very, very powerful. There was astonishment, and joy, and eagerness. His mind raced, jumping between all sorts of possibilities.
But there was also guilt and shame.
Naomi understood all of it. Sensei’s feelings were his feelings now. He knew the man’s thoughts as clearly as his own.
The presentation on the screen switched over to the next slide, displaying the title of the lecture:
A Practical Application of Quantum Recording: Complementing Nervous System Regeneration via Quantum Imaging of the Brain
Prof. Senko Tsunehisa
Naomi sat in a laboratory.
This was Professor Senko’s lab at the university, and Sensei had his own desk there. It was covered in piles of thick, intimidating books.
The professor’s research was unbelievably advanced. Naomi had to throw himself completely into his studies if he wanted to make sense of it. He slept in his chair here most nights; whenever he was conscious, he studied with ferocious intensity. He was learning all about Quantum Recording technology and the Kyoto Recording Project.
About AllTale, in other words.
He’d decided on the path he wanted to take. He knew how he would spend his years in college, where he would work after he graduated, and the career he would pursue. He had a clear vision of how he needed to spend the next few years and the hurdles he would need to clear.
All he had to do was follow through.
He was sleeping less and less these days and eating only when strictly necessary. He knew he didn’t have much time, so he gave up completely on having a normal life.
The hurdles he had to make it over were very, very tall. He couldn’t afford to waste a single minute.
A brand-new wooden name tag slipped onto its hook on the wall. The characters for Katagaki Naomi carved into its surface.
Sensei stood in a room deep underground, far below the public Chronicle Kyoto Project offices. This was the Control Room of the AllTale Center, the heart of their secret project.
Naomi was twenty-two years old, and he’d successfully secured a job at the AllTale Center immediately after graduating college. His personal connection to Professor Senko had been invaluable, of course; but to earn a staff position on an enormous international enterprise like this, he’d had to pass many extremely difficult examinations and earn all sorts of technical qualifications. This place employed some of the world’s foremost scientists and technicians. An ordinary college graduate couldn’t exactly expect to get an interview.
But Naomi was far from ordinary. He’d structured his entire life around making it here. He’d thrown everything else aside. And even though his name was now hanging on the wall, that wasn’t the goal line. He was only halfway through this marathon, at best.
Naomi gazed at the wooden tag for a moment, contemplating the future. He was interrupted by a blow to the back of his head. Turning around, he found that someone had flown a drone directly into it. The bearded culprit was standing across the room with a controller in his hand, guffawing loudly.
This was the man he needed to catch up with.
Senko Tsunehisa was the driving force behind the AllTale Center, the nucleus that held it all together. Naomi needed to become his right-hand man. He needed to rise up the ranks to a senior position; but more importantly, he had to become genuinely invaluable to Senko. He had to become the man’s partner. It was the only way to secure an unshakable position inside this project.