“The poor girl. Her mother went of illness when she was eight, and her father followed after when she was fifteen,” Modori Tanaka told Shido. Keijin Nijo’s daughter, Keiha, lived on Kanoeuma, the seventh floor of Kyoto, with an older woman named Modori. She was an old friend of Keiha’s mother, and she had taken in Keiha after the girl lost her parents.
Their residence was a spacious one-floor unit, one commonly seen in Inside cities. Keiha’s personal space was segmented off with a screen that was not particularly tall, so Shido could see what she was up to even when sitting at the table.
“Kei? This man is a friend of your father’s,” said Modori. Keiha glanced over at Shido, silently bowed her head, then turned back to the large display on her desk and began to type fervently on the keyboard.
She wore thick glasses and a tracksuit, and her long hair hung all the way to the back of her chair. She was eighteen years old, but unlike the other city girls her age, she kept the vibrancy of her youth locked away.
“Do you mind if I ask you about what happened to Keijin?” Shido inquired. Modori glanced at Keiha, then described the events in a low voice.
Keijin’s transport system using automated turnstiles caught the attention of Kyoto’s criminal elements. The police couldn’t do anything about turnstiles, which made it the perfect method for moving tobacco and harder drugs. Keijin did not have significant qualms about this particular use of his system, either, apparently. He was an engineer’s engineer, through and through.
However, between the desires of several criminal cliques and the two police groups, the dealings and motives got very tangled indeed, and the man at the center of all the wrangling wound up shot with an electric pump gun. The shooter was a young trooper from a drug-smuggling ring that was a rival to the one Shido worked for. The automated turnstiles promptly dumped him into Lake Biwa.
Shido had read about murders in old mystery novels before, but he couldn’t hide his shock at hearing the story of a real one. When someone killed another person Inside, the turnstiles would come and clean it up right away, so the concept of the “murder case” found in novels didn’t exist here.
“If only he’d kept his nose out of those inventions and stayed home to watch after Kei,” Modori said wistfully.
Despite a moment of hesitation, Shido explained, “I was born in a village on the south end of the Kii Peninsula. That’s where I met Keijin.”
He recounted his background and the system of the place where he grew up.
“When I was younger, I never understood what a horrible village it was. The lower-floorers were always at the bottom. Even on the middle floors, everything was decided for us before we were born. But I didn’t know anything about the outside world, so I just assumed that was normal. Learning about the existence of someone like Keijin, who started his own business with only his tech knowledge and freely traveled around Inside—it saved my life, honestly. I’d hazard to say that people in other places experienced the same feeling I did just by coming into contact with him.”
These words were his true feelings, and he hoped they might serve as some small measure of comfort to a girl whose father was cruelly ripped away from her.
However, Shido did not mention his current alignment with the Kyoto underworld. Modori mumbled and made little statements to fill the silence, like “Oh, that must have been hard.”
The state of food production and other living infrastructure was good all over Kyoto. Even those in the lower classes were rarely ever in want of the basic elements of survival. Still, Kanoeuma and the floors below it had the atmosphere of slums. You often saw people resting in a lifeless daze on flattened cardboard boxes in the hallways. Some had spouses and made children, but they knew from the start that they could never afford the 500,000 milliyen the kid would need. They had no hope to look forward to. The few scraps of money they earned went into the cigarettes that Shido’s gang dealt or were frittered away on lottery tickets run by other criminal groups.
There was no real violent disorder in the city, so it wasn’t just the poor who lived on this level, but also frugal types, which was the category Modori Tanaka seemed to fall into. Shido knew from experience that people like her did not think highly of the underworld society.
Modori offered to serve dinner and went out to buy food, leaving Shido and Keiha behind. Shido kept glancing awkwardly at Keiha, trying and failing to think of something to break the silence. She paid him almost no mind, typing away at the keyboard and plugging and unplugging cables from strange machines. Shido stared at the TV screen on the wall, wishing Modori would return soon.
Suikanet broadcasts of late were full of news about JR North Japan. Stories about the people of Hokkaido outside of Yokohama Station’s grasp were stirring up tensions in the northernmost part of the station. Supposedly, outsiders were crossing the Tsugaru Strait to kidnap Inside children. Inside maintained a fundamental noninterest in the JRs, but when it came to harming the residents, there was understandably some anger. Of course, that rage was impotent, as no one had any means of doing anything to JR North Japan across the strait.
“According to our station’s exclusive sources, even the media in Hokkaido is outraged by these actions,” the news claimed. Reports on Suikanet were not organized and sent out by some core agency. Instead, they were mechanically collected from all over and transmitted according to frequency. It took three days for information from the Tsugaru Strait to reach Kyoto, and Shido had no way of knowing what “our station” was or if it was a trustworthy source.
Idly, he considered the outside world. Yokohama Station was already expanding in Shikoku, but Hokkaido and Kyushu were purportedly maintaining their defense lines. He wondered why they would need to protect their lands to the point of kidnapping Insiders. Wasn’t it much more pleasant Inside, rather than being exposed to all the rain and wind of the outdoors?
“About your village,” Keiha began out of the blue. It took Shido several seconds to recognize that it was her voice and not part of the news program. It was calm and low in pitch. “You said the rulers of the village got their money from somewhere and paid it to the lower classes for their labor?”
“…Y-yes,” Shido replied.