I had believed Tousuke to be my friend, but the weight of his sudden betrayal had hung heavily on my shoulders ever since I left his apartment.
He had been the one to propose all this. He had talked about how much he hated Moai.
I returned home alone and practically threw myself into my empty desk chair, not even bothering to wash my hands. I immediately turned on my computer and plugged in the USB stick. On the drive I found, other than “Corporate Shared Register (For the Resistance),” several files that Tousuke had forgotten to delete. I opened them to find a resume that he had probably prepared for some class presentation, along with some other things I could not make heads or tails of, lacking the requisite specialized knowledge. They were irrelevant to me, so I deleted everything I did not need. Given that he had abandoned these files, I assumed he no longer needed them.
When I opened the register again, I was shocked at the sheer number of people who were included in it. Had these all been collected through events like that barbecue? I felt like it would be a lot more efficient to just go through everyone who attended their meet-ups.
It was a shared file, so the password for viewing had been the date of Moai’s founding—which meant that it had been Akiyoshi who had set it. It was not just the date when Moai was first recognized by the university. It was the day when the two of us, just Akiyoshi and I, had come up with the name “Moai.” Which meant that, naturally, Akiyoshi was aware of this list as well. The question was, to what extent was Akiyoshi controlling this? If, and when, this turned into a public matter, and if the group’s leader was proven to be calling the shots, it would become all the more perilous for Moai.
The head of a job-hunting group at a respected university was gathering and distributing people’s personal information to corporations without permission. That was sure to get the young people and those with a distaste for academia fired up.
Come to think of it, whoever it was that was spearheading this effort, what exactly was Moai getting in exchange for giving this out to corporations? Operating funds? I was sure they had official sponsors, though. It had to be for strengthening ties to those companies, then. Or at least to give their members preferential treatment at interviews?
Whatever, I could just leave a question mark on that one, and others would come flooding in with malice to fill in the rest. That was how internet rumors and virtual lynch mobs were formed.
Now that I was on my own, there was nothing that I would accomplish by just sitting around thinking. I immediately converted both the register and the e-mail from that HR rep into image files, editing them into an easy to post format. It was not a difficult task. These were skills I had picked up in my university classes, so it was easily done.
With this, the bomb was now complete. Now I had to just plant it online and pray that it exploded.
I took a breath and thought about what Tousuke had said.
Speaking honestly, I could not say that I felt no guilt over this. However, my guilt was only in regard to those who were caught up in Moai who were not calling the shots in the way that Akiyoshi and Ten and the others were. What the present Moai was doing was wrong. However, like Tousuke said, there must have been people who had chosen Moai as a place of salvation, of acceptance, such as Kawahara-san. For the sake of people like her, it was not enough to simply hope for the destruction or atrophy of Moai. There was more than that. It needed to go beyond, to a future that denounced the Moai of the present and returned to its origins—a place seeking only ideals.
If I could make a place like that, I was sure there would be a place for Kawahara-san there. And there might even be a place for me.
There was no need for the present Moai there.
I loaded the edited images onto Tousuke’s USB stick, ejected it from the computer, and placed it in my pocket. For the sake of caution, I had to deploy the bomb from somewhere else.
What Akiyoshi had once made into a lie, I would return to the truth.
Not only had the flames inside me not burned out, but now that I was on my own, they burned stronger still. Like pushing the first tile in a row of crooked dominos, I opened the door and stepped outside.
When I opened the back door of the drugstore building and stepped inside, giving an, “Evening,” in what could only barely be qualified as a greeting, I found Kawahara-san huddled on a stool, her knees to her cheeks, staring at her phone screen. Her eyes were open wide, brows furrowed in such a way that I could almost hear them creaking. I had never seen a look like that on her face before, but I knew what it meant.
She was livid.
I crept along as closely as I could to the edges of the locker room, careful to avoid the sphere of her anger, returning a resigned, “Yo,” to the “Howdy,” I finally heard. There was a clear rage in the eyes that glanced my way.
It would be far too idiotic to ask, Did something happen? and so I refrained. You’d have to live under a rock or be a total eccentric to now know about what had happened at our own school that had gotten Kawahara-san so angry. I was neither, so I chose words appropriate to neither.