To make that happen, he needed to get results. He needed to keep at his studies and his research. He needed to accomplish things no one else could manage.
There was no time to slow down yet. No time to rest.
A slightly worn wooden name tag slipped onto its hook on the wall. The characters for his name were carved into its surface, and beneath them was the freshly cut phrase System Management Director.
Sensei was already in conversation with Professor Senko and Xu Yiyi as he entered the now-familiar Control Center. The three of them were working on their latest revision to the Center’s formal business plan.
He was the professor’s right hand. Xu was his left.
Four years had passed since Naomi first stepped into this room. In that time, the three of them had solved all sorts of seemingly impossible problems together. The entire staff now recognized them as the heart of the AllTale project.
Naomi had risen quickly up the ranks. This place ran on purely meritocratic principles; those who demonstrated particular talent earned their promotions very quickly. But everyone on the staff here was talented in their own way, of course. There were probably others with more raw technical skill than Naomi.
And yet, he had leapfrogged them all and earned the director role. There wasn’t anything strange about it, really. He’d just done everything it took to get the job.
Naomi flashed his ID card at the wall-mounted camera. It beeped at him softly, and the doors that had been closed to him four years ago slid softly open.
Inside, the AllTale system itself was waiting for him.
Back in his personal room, Naomi began to undress.
When he was promoted to director, he’d been granted this private space within the laboratory itself. This was another crucial aspect of his plan. Accessing the system externally would have amplified the risks. He needed to be physically close, where the security was laxer, and he needed a place where he could be alone.
Naomi tossed his shirt aside, leaving him naked from the waist up. In its place, he slipped on a black vest. The contactless nerve transducers mounted on the inside pressed coldly against his back. It had naked electrical wires taped to the outside, and a single cable ran down to the PC under Sensei’s desk.
Sensei lowered himself carefully into his chair and focused on the monitor. The heartbeat display in one corner of the screen indicated that he was intensely anxious.
This would to be his first trial run.
Naomi nodded firmly to himself. His theories were solid. He’d thrown his equipment together quickly, but it met the minimum requirements. It should work. He should be able to get in.
He reached out with his pointer finger and tapped the enter key.
“Gaaah!”
Sensei’s body jerked up out of the chair. On pure reflex, he tore off the vest, then he fell to the floor and rolled back and forth in agony. The smell of charred flesh filled the room.
He’d burned his back terribly.
The injured area stretched from just below his neck all the way down to his waist. Everywhere the nerve transducers had been touching him, his skin was burnt and discolored. The blood vessels in his back pulsed fiercely; the intense initial pain gradually gave way to steady, vicious throbbing.
Grabbing hold of his chair, Naomi managed to pull himself up off the ground. There was an error message on his computer monitor: Timeout. Connection broken.
For a moment, he felt pure despair. But it faded quickly.
He’d never expected success to come easily. The AllTale was a system of literally infinite complexity. An ordinary person like Katagaki Naomi couldn’t expect to truly understand it on a theoretical level.
He wasn’t a genius like Senko Tsunehisa. There would be no shortcuts, no quick victories. This would be a process of trial and error. He would run through experiment after experiment, enduring all the consequences, until he finally succeeded.
That wasn’t a problem, really. It was how he made it this far.
With a red pen, Naomi drew an X in the first square on his table of experiments—driving his first peg into the side of the mountain he would climb.
“It’s pretty tricky,” Sensei said quietly. “Senko-san did create the AllTale system, but there are some aspects of it no one really understands, you know? It works, but we’re not completely sure how.”
There was no reply, only the humming of the room’s air conditioner.
“Writing down all those X’s kind of reminds me of the old days, though.” Naomi kept speaking, anyway. He didn’t care if she couldn’t hear him—he wanted to talk to her anyway.
“Remember when we were collecting donations for that used book sale? There was that calendar counting down to the day of the event and everything. We hadn’t collected many books, and we started getting antsy…” Sensei’s chest throbbed slightly as he spoke those words. The memories were still a little bitter, even if time had softened them. “I guess they all burned up in the end, though.”
Disparate memories mingled in Naomi’s mind.
He saw Sensei’s memories of those events: the fire, the charred books, and the canceled book sale. He didn’t have a magic glove, so there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He’d just pushed through the pain as best he could.
“Talking to you makes me remember all sorts of things, you know. Remember that time in April—”
Opening a brand-new notebook, Sensei wrote down a date years in the past.
Naomi sat in his personal room in the lab, working on a journal of sorts. It wasn’t easy going. He paused between every sentence, furrowing his brow and thinking hard.
What happened on that day again? What exactly was I doing?
When a memory popped into his mind, he jotted it down on a notecard. Once he had enough of those, he transferred them into his notebook, then started working on the next day.
He was creating the Ultimate Manual.