“I’m Shido. Shido Kumano. I live on this island.” The wild-looking man introduced himself in a high-pitched voice that didn’t match his size. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Haikunterke checked and confirmed that Shido was not emitting any signature Suika brain waves on a sudden whim.
“…Haikunterke.”
“That’s a strange name. You from Shikoku?”
She tried to bob her head in a way that might be construed as a nod. At the very least, this suggested that the man did not interact with anyone from the island of Shikoku. Most likely, he was from the Inside. Yet if Haikunterke couldn’t detect any traces of Suika on him, that meant he hadn’t been in Yokohama Station for quite a long time. He’d probably been exiled from the station for Suika violation.
“You crossed the sea on that boat? Were you on the run?” the man inquired, pointing at the raft on the shore. Haikunterke nodded again. Until she knew more about this man’s background, she did not want to give away any information. Such judgment calls were one area where significant variation existed among the saboteur agents. Nepshamai, in the Kanto region, was the kind to talk about all sorts of things he thought necessary to say, even if they weren’t asked of him.
“I guess things must still be really bad in Shikoku. I’ve been living on this island a long time, but I’m too scared to go near there.”
“Are there others here?”
“Nope. Been alone here for years, and you’re the first to show up. It’s a long journey from Shikoku, so they’ve never made the trip. There are a couple of folks around Shodoshima and Teshima, I think. But I suppose they’re afraid of this island. On account of that strange building.”
Based on the names of the islands Shido mentioned and the map data in her supplemental memory, Haikunterke had a relatively good idea of her current location. She was right in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku. It was the perfect place to avoid Suikanet’s coverage and wait out its immune memory.
The man hoisted up the large bag he had placed on the ground and said, “Well, why don’t you come in and get out of the rain?”
Shido Kumano walked off, and Haikunterke followed him in silence. She would need to stay here for a while to investigate the spore. As such, it suited her purposes to know just who this man was.
Shido’s home was atop a hill with a good view of the island’s south side. It was a container house, the sort popular during the Winter War. As the name suggested, it was a metal box with the bare minimum of living materials within. These homes had been mass-produced when the attacks on cities were frequent and fierce, so that you could pull one with a truck and flee for safety at a moment’s notice. Many of the homes in Hokkaido were containers, and Haikunterke had heard that in east Hokkaido, there were nomads who roamed around in them, gathering relics of the pre-war era.
Shido’s home had not been moved in a long time, however. Thick roots twined around the satellite TV antenna, which hadn’t received any signal in many decades. It likely hadn’t been his house initially, just a leftover structure that had belonged to some different resident of the island long ago.
Once he got to the little building, he opened up a poly bag and asked, “You hungry? Here, have this,” handing her a piece of bread. It was a roll about twenty centimeters long and torn off on both ends, for some reason. Haikunterke took the food, put it into her mouth, and chewed. Her body could not digest organic material, but she thought it wise to act like a human for now.
Shido pulled quite a large number of torn-off rolls from the bag, stuffed most of them into a cupboard, and ate one for himself.
“You want something to drink? I’ve got filtered rainwater.”
“I’m fine,” Haikunterke replied. “Why do you live here?”
“I went on the run, too. From Inside, in my case. You know Inside? It’s the big island to the north,” he explained. Shido was evidently having difficulty figuring out where to begin his story, probably because he believed he was talking to a six-year-old. Haikunterke felt it was best to play the part, but she didn’t know how a six-year-old girl was supposed to act. There were no memories to that effect in her main memory device.
“I did some stuff Inside, and the important people there kicked me out.”
“You did something bad? Did you break stuff?”
“No, it wasn’t bad. But I made the important Inside people angry. So I ran away from them.”
“What do you mean, important people?”
“They’re called turnstiles. They’re very, very scary.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you have anywhere else to go? If not, you can stay here. There’s plenty of water and food, so I don’t have any problem with another person being around.”
Shido Kumano smiled kindly at her.
Present situation: Landed on island in Seto Inland Sea. Half covered by station spore (attached image 1). Outside of network range, so precise location is unclear, but likely around here (coordinates 1). One resident. Shido Kumano, male, exile from Inside. Age around 40, background unknown (attached image 2). Will stay on island for some time to gather information about spore. Haikunterke.
Haikunterke compressed the brief message and stored it in her communications module. Once she reached a place with any amount of Suikanet signal, it would automatically send the data to JR North Japan. That was going to be quite a long time in the future, however. There was no reception anywhere she went on the island, and the weather was too poor to go out into the water again. Given her objective of waiting out the immune memory, that suited her just fine.
Haikunterke continued collecting data about the station spore. Thanks to its flawed structural genetic field, the building resembled avant-garde artwork. Still, like the real Yokohama Station, it did endlessly produce and expel a variety of matter on the inside.
However, the spore’s products were warped, much like the building itself. The torn-off pieces of bread Shido always gave her were bits he’d pulled off of what the spore created, which were single bread rolls that measured dozens of meters long. But at least they knew what kind of food it was. Others were white blocks of condensed protein and hunks of vitamin-carrying fiber. Shido called them “eggs” and “veggies” and ate them without pause. If Haikunterke were a biological human, she would not want to eat them. There was also a pipe that produced a dark green sludge. When passed through a tank connected to the container house, it became fuel that powered the little building. The spore had a circumference of several kilometers, and it seemed like Shido knew precisely where everything within that range could be found.
While Haikunterke studied the nature of the station spore, she helped Shido with his daily tasks. Despite looking like a hardy wild animal, the man was actually in poor health. He spent one day out of every three sleeping and helpless in his home. He said that her arrival had made things much easier for him, but he also seemed guilty about having a small child doing hard work for him.
Haikunterke wanted to search inside the spore, too, but the structural genetic field canceler worked poorly here, and it wasn’t easy to open a hole she could use to get inside. The waveform of the genetic field was too different from the proper Yokohama Station on the mainland. Modifying the canceler to overwrite this altered waveform data was possible (the workings of the device were saved in her supplemental memory), but it risked destroying the tool. Tinkering with mechanisms wasn’t Haikunterke’s strongest suit. Samayunkur would probably do well at it, she thought. In fact, she learned sometime later that the reason he was able to act like such a natural human being was that he had modified his own android body to do so.
At night, Haikunterke listened to Shido’s stories. The android hardly ever spoke to him about herself, but the man didn’t seem to mind. “You’ve had it hard,” he would say. “You don’t have to speak about it until you want to. You’ve been a big help to me just by being here.” It seemed to her that he believed she was a little girl with deep mental scars who had escaped Shikoku after a harrowing experience.
It had been a very long time since Haikunterke had followed a twenty-four-hour cycle. Inside, such a thing held almost no meaning. She needed sleep to recompile and store her memories, but she’d done so only when necessary and when there was a safe place for it.
After several days, Shido finally realized that Haikunterke was much too smart to be a five- or six-year-old girl and began to speak in more specific terms about himself. One day, he described his past.
“Inside, I lived in a city called Kyoto. I was a member of the Dodger Alliance.”
“Dodger Alliance?”
“Never heard of it, huh? We were pretty famous Inside.”
Haikunterke quickly shook her head. It was a name in JR North Japan’s list of Inside groups to be wary of, but someone from Shikoku couldn’t have possibly known that, and so it was imperative that she acted as though she didn’t, either.
“I get that you were in that group…but why were you kicked out of Inside?”
“You want to know? It’s a very long story.”
Haikunterke bobbed her head, just a little bit.
“I’ve never told this to anyone else. I mean, I haven’t had anyone to tell it to,” Shido began, laughing.