We decided to stay the night inside the building. Evidently, it had belonged to North River Co., a passive foreign investment company. Remarkably, English reigned supreme here; the indoor map, the precautionary statement, and even the door signs were all in English.
While we hadn’t brought any food supplies, we did find two boxes of chocolate cookies and a hot-cold water dispenser, which helped keep us feeling full. On the top floor alone, there were three water dispensers. In addition to water, they also served coffee, green tea, and black tea, likely as a morale booster.
“Why didn’t we call them over?” I wondered aloud.
With all the security measures in place, the building was clearly more secure than the sandbank ever could’ve been. Then again, it was no bomb shelter, meaning it was equally susceptible to a nuclear meltdown, according to Otoha.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?”
Otoha and I were in the computer room. There was something oddly soothing about being surrounded by all those monitors, displays, and whatnot. Probably a carryover from our hardware store days.
Incidentally, Shiiko’s name tag doubled as a key card, but she had told us we couldn’t go to any of the lower floors. Getting past the locks wouldn’t be an issue, but the zombies certainly would. The reason we hadn’t come across any zombies was because the building had been put on lockdown to keep them at bay.
We could see zombies wandering about on the displays in front of us, which were hooked to the building’s many CCTV cameras.
Each floor had a bunch of rooms boasting a fairly intricate layout. If we were able to pinpoint each zombie’s location, getting down might not be impossible.
“If the elevators were still working, getting down would be easy. But then what?”
As our luck would have it, the first floor was simply teeming with zombies. Better yet, all three elevators were located far away from the entrance.
We could try barging past the zombies, but the wheelchair almost guarantees we’ll be surrounded in an instant.
“Oh, and Hiroaki,” Otoha said, “I see you’ve gone back to calling her ‘Shino.’”
“Urk!” I froze up like a crook caught red-handed.
Relax, you’ve done nothing wrong, I tried to convince myself.
“She insisted on getting the Otoha treatment, not me.”
“And how do you explain Uemura?”
“She’s my superior!”
You really think I’ve got the balls to call her by her first name? Get outta town.
“Suuure.” Otoha peered into my eyes, her head tilted to one side. The signature deadpan expression made it hard to get a read on her.
“Anyway, how should we go about this?” I opted to change the subject. “How do we save her?”
“We don’t.”
“Come on, now.”
“There’s no getting around the fact that we’re out of options.”
“She’s just a kid, Otoha.” For a brief moment, memories of when Yoshiaki was in elementary school and we still got along bubbled to the surface, then burst just as quickly. “We can’t just leave her out here. Like, on a moral level.”
“Says the guy who’s hellbent on deciding her life for her.”
“She’s gonna off herself, Otoha.”
“That’s her choice to make,” she replied without flinching.
“Yeah, you’re right.” Insisting that suicide was bad to someone who was perfectly aware of the consequences and nevertheless felt like it was the only solution wouldn’t help anyone. “It’s not about whether it’s right or wrong; I think I’m the problem.” I shrugged my shoulders.
I don’t want other people to die. I don’t want to see them die. It doesn’t sit well with me. Ego, that’s all there is to it.
“By the way, what’re you doing?” I said, looking down at Otoha.
She was sitting in front of a computer, her hands moving about. “Trying to get the net back up.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Not great.”
“Lemme have a look.” I walked up behind her and peered at the screen.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Field Battle’s servers, among many others, had still been up and running during the initial phases of the apocalypse, allowing me to “no life” so hard that I hadn’t even noticed.
As time went on, the connection had gotten progressively worse, to the point where I’d stopped booting up my phone almost entirely. Ethernet, however, might just do the trick.
The last thing a PFIC specializing in cutting-edge technology would’ve wanted was a data leak. That being the case, they might’ve even had a private network for safe data transfers. It was certainly worth investigating.
Actually, if all the company’s buildings had similar security measures in place, it might be worth making one into a permanent base, assuming it wasn’t anywhere near a nuclear power plant.
“It’s asking for a password.”
The password field was empty.
“No way.”
“What’s the password?”
“How should I know?” I brought the keyboard closer and began entering random passwords, common sense stuff like the company name and all that. Wouldn’t you know it, none of them went through.
I sighed. “It’s a lost cause... Wait a sec.” An insider might know the password, and we’ve got exactly one of ’em. “I’ll go ask Shiiko.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Shiiko sat by a window, overlooking the street below.
A zombie occasionally emerged from the shadows as it passed by the evenly spaced streetlights, attracting Shiiko’s inquisitive gaze.
She didn’t have a set goal in mind. Observation simply came as naturally to her as breathing. If it didn’t, she never would have made it this far. She derived her self-worth almost exclusively from her ability to observe, analyze, and hypothesize—the hallmark of any competent researcher.
“It’s okay,” she told herself. “There’s nothing to worry about. You’ve got this.”
North River Co. had always valued results above all else.
Shiiko had been granted the perfect research environment. In exchange, she’d had to provide results, or else it would have been stripped away from her.
The higher-ups hadn’t cared about potential or unexpected setbacks. They’d valued one thing and one thing only: results. Those who hadn’t been able to provide them with results had been treated as worthless.
Shiiko had devoted herself to her research as though she were under observation herself.
The pressure would have been enough to break any fourteen-year-old, but luckily for Shiiko, her caretaker, Noriko, had always been looking out for her.
“Genius, Shiiko, pure genius! People tend to think I’m smart because I wear glasses, but I’m nowhere near your level. Besides, it’s pretty discriminatory to assume women who wear glasses are capable of anything, don’t you think?”
One couldn’t even begin to imagine what an impact Noriko had had on Shiiko. She had looked after Shiiko with so much care, one might’ve thought they were sisters or mother and daughter. Noriko had been by Shiiko’s side not only on weekdays but on weekends as well.
Her single-minded devotion couldn’t have been brushed off as Noriko simply doing her job; there had been so much more to it than that.
“Heard you beat your own record on the eight-sample experiment again?”
Noriko hadn’t been the only one looking out for Shiiko. There had also been Keith Wayne, one of North River Co.’s senior managers who’d transferred directly from their HQ.
With his blond hair, sparkly blue eyes, and well-defined facial features, Keith had been the stereotypical Westerner. Despite his position on the totem pole, he had always gone out of his way to be humble and kind.
Keith hadn’t been by Shiiko’s side 24/7, as he’d overseen multiple labs. Still, he had occasionally shown his face around lab four to check on the results.
“She sure did, Keith,” Noriko had replied at the time. “Shiiko’s genius knows no bounds!”
“How come you’re always the one jumping for joy?”
“I’m compensating for Shiiko’s lack of excitement, naturally.”
“Shiiko, if she ever gets on your nerves, you know who to call.”
“I heard that!”
Keith had valued results like the rest of the higher-ups at North River Co., but what set him apart had been his generous definition of “results.”
The man had always had an intuitive sense for people. He could’ve gotten a read on someone’s potential from the tiniest of details, invisible or incomprehensible to most. Most of the time, he would’ve considered that discovered potential a result in and of itself.
Occasionally, he had even drawn out potential in Shiiko that neither she nor Noriko had been aware of to begin with.
“Don’t be shy. You’ve got plenty to be proud of, Shiiko,” he had said to her once.
“You got your PhD at twelve years old,” Noriko had added. “Twelve! If that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is.”
“Well put, Noriko. Shiiko, you should let loose a little. Bask in your glory and give the others a chance to feel proud of their work for once.”
It would be no exaggeration to say that these two had saved Shiiko.
A lonely wunderkind abandoned by her parents had finally found a place she could call her own.