The spaceship’s sails had the aether winds behind them.
The sails were ten times wider than the ships themselves and swollen with the solar winds, accelerating. The sails gave off a blue light. Were you close enough, you could likely hear the whistle of the wind. Aether was a medium of light and sound, and as it struck the sails, it oscillated.
The ships were nearing their destination, Earth, so they moved off the aether winds, decelerating.
The Earth glittered like a rainbow.
As the Earth rotated at 1700 kph, in orbit at 100,000 kph, it was struck by the aether winds that flowed through the void of space, generating friction. The thermosphere, 80 kilometers above the surface, was irradiated with strong aether vibrations — light. The rotational friction gave rise to a high-energy purple light around the equator, but towards the poles the energy weakened, causing redshift. As a result, seen from space, the Earth appeared covered in rainbow-like stripes.
In one of those stripes, at a place that glittered like an emerald — on the surface, at 35 degrees latitude — in the forests of Ichikawa in Chiba Prefecture, a murder was about to take place.
“DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
A tall human with a ponytail was trying to kill a smaller human with short hair. The former was the seiyuu Akane Yomokura (26), while the latter was also a seiyuu, Hinagiku Nakayama (19). Akane swung a knife. Hinagiku was so shocked she fell to the ground, and as a result, avoided a fatal wound.
“Ow! A-Akane-san? What are you doing!?” Hinagiku shrieked. Her laryngeal sac, an organ unique to seiyuu, quivered. This was a lump of red flesh that dangled below the throat. About the size of two knuckles, it was covered in countless reddish-brown zit-like protrusions. Hinagiku’s excitement made the flesh lump bulge, and the protrusions swell. The laryngeal sac was an organ that made aether vibrate. This was a seiyuu’s life. It contained a ganglion so large it was called the second brain; it operated independently, and even without direct commands from the brain prime, it would sound the most complex voices, making the surrounding aether shiver.
Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac grew engorged, turning red. The wrinkled protrusions were now swollen into thin tubes, like fingers reaching in all directions. Fluid coursed through the tubes, refracting her voices, sounding it as a complex set of aether vibrations. The aether fluctuations became waves that were released from the laryngeal sac into the world outside.
Akane was within kissing distance when Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac fired a maser beam.
The voice Hinagiku sounded was the frequency of the electromagnetic beams masers produce. Electromagnetic beams were aether waves, and by vibrating their voices seiyuu could fire beams. Maser beams collide with water molecules, vibrating them, and raise their temperature instantaneously. Struck head on by one made being roasted into rare steak inescapable.
And at this distance, it was impossible to miss. All she had left to do was to finish off the would-be-murderer as she writhed in pain, clutching her scorched head.
Except nothing happened.
“Well done, Hinagiku-chan. You’re as skilled as they say. Unfortunately for you, I’m even better!”
Akane’s laryngeal sac was swollen, too. She had guessed that Hinagiku’s sac vibration would fire a maser beam. Her own sac had produced a sound to neuter that. Sound and light were both aether vibrations, so if you applied a frequency that reversed the waveform, it was possible to cancel them out.
Akane’s fingers got a grip on Hinagiku’s tongue. Hinagiku clamped her jaw shut, trying to bite those fingers off, but the knife in Akane’s other hand was faster. The sharp edge of that well-polished stainless blade invaded Hinagiku’s mouth, snipping off that soft flesh. Hinagiku’s face twisted with pain and despair. The tongue had an unusually high concentration of nerves in it. Ten thousand nerves were sending signals to the brain that cells had been destroyed.
Without a tongue, a seiyuu was powerless. The laryngeal sac was now useless. Almost drowning on the blood from her severed tongue, Hinagiku tried to make the sac vibrate, but was unable to make a coherent sound.
Akane pulled her knife from Hinagiku’s mouth. Hinagiku was still alive. Her eyes were wide open, and fear was on her face. The sharp stainless tip approached the left eye. That was the knife’s next target. Her dilated pupils displayed just how abject Hinagiku’s terror was. But this did not slow the approach of Akane’s knife at all. The blood-drenched knife slid into the eye.
Once pierced, eyeballs are flimsy things. Their tensile strength makes the hole pop, and the entire membrane ruptures. A tiny explosion occurred, and pus gushed out. Hinagiku’s face was greasy with blood and pus, but this didn’t concern Akane; she moved her knife and popped the other eye.
All that was left were two hollow, deflated half-spheres crisscrossed with countless capillaries.
Hinagiku slumped to the ground. She was on the brink of death. Meanwhile, her laryngeal sac was shaking violently. The independent ganglion was still very much alive.
Akane stroked Hinagiku’s laryngeal sac lovingly. It was healthy and alive. The body was dying, but they weren’t fussed at all. She’d loved this sac the moment she set eyes on it.
She took out a new, undirtied knife, and placed the blade at the root of the sac. She slid the knife across the flesh as if caressing it. At first, the blood oozing out was quite dark, but soon that was washed away by a flood of bright red blood. Hinagiku’s still beating heart caused the blood to gush out in waves.
Even detached from the body, the laryngeal sac vibrated, desperate to make her voice sound. Akane held the mass gently in both hands, carrying it to a cooler.
As a finishing touch, she stabbed a knife in one of the vacant eye sockets, pushing it back. The knife plunged through Hinagiku’s eye, down the nerves, and into her brain, destroying her brain tissue. Now there was no chance of her ever recovering. Once brain tissue was damaged it could never be rebuilt exactly the same way. With the knife in it, the brain tissue lost stability, and began oozing out of the eye socket.
Akane had achieved her goal. The scene of the crime was a forest, and there were no signs of anyone else around, but she had to dispose of the body quickly. If the clouds parted and the sun came out there was no telling who’d see the body.
Akane took off her jacket. On her upper arm was a writhing red splotch. It was a tumor the size of a tangerine, and it was slowly pulsing, like it was breathing. Its movements were growing a little faster.
Akane took off more clothes, stripping down to her underwear. The tumor on her arm was not the only one; she had them on her upper belly, on her side, and on each thigh. Ten tumors in all. By now they were vibrating too fast for the eye to see.
Akane wrapped her arms around Hinagiku’s body. The shorter girl’s head came up to Akane’s chest. She’d died only a minute ago, but her body temperature had already dropped a lot, and she was cold to the touch.
Akane held the body tight, making sure all her tumors were in contact with it. The tumors looked ready to burst, and there was a light shining across them. She put her full weight on the body, as if rubbing the light against it.
In time Hinagiku’s cold body began warming up to a temperature much hotter than it had ever been when she was alive. Temperatures that would turn meat into steak, and steak into charcoal.
The charcoal served to fertilize the plants, so nothing was wasted. She was doing her part to keep the city green.
When Hinagiku was completely carbonized, the sky began to clear. The sky above was covered with a strong bluish-green glow. If you went north to Ibaraki Prefecture, the glow grew greener; south to Tokyo Harbor it leaned blue.
The inverted city of Yokohama floated above her.
Against the background of the green sky rocked a floating ocean. In the coastal Minato Mirai, a large Ferris wheel revolved, the clock displayed on the side of it now reversed. The Landmark Tower dangled nearby. While tiny, you could just make out the red cars of the Keihin Express. A roller coaster was hurtling around the tracks at Hakkeijima Sea Paradise. At the Zoorasia animal preserve, giraffes were reaching their necks up to eat. All of this was an illusion created by light refracting off discrepancies in the aether density, the aether mirage.
There was a higher concentration of aether in the upper atmosphere. As the quantity of air in each atmospheric layer increased, the amount of aether grew correspondingly thin. Since light was aether vibrations, the higher the concentration of aether the faster the speed of light. The discrepancy between the speed of light in the upper atmosphere and near the surface gave light a convex curve, creating the mirage. Light headed from the surface towards the upper atmosphere traced a long curve, returning back to the surface a considerable distance away. When humans see light, they perceive it as coming from directly ahead, which creates the illusion of a landscape floating upside-down in the sky.
Since the Earth rotated, aether was caught by the Coriolis force, and this motion created the aether winds. The aether winds stirred up the light, causing it to bend. This was why Yokohama appeared above her, despite being to the south-west. The reason Akane had been concerned about the weather was the aether mirage. You could kill someone in a remote location, but if it was reflected in an aether mirage you might as well be in public.
Brushing Hinagiku’s charred remains off her body, Akane put her clothes back on. She cradled the cooler to her, grinning. She’d taken another step towards becoming the ultimate seiyuu.