“I think they must have a milliyen miner.”
“Miner?”
“When the population of Yokohama Station increases, the Suika implementation means paying another five hundred thousand milliyen to the net, right? If that process repeats enough times, it will eventually exhaust the supply of milliyen. Haven’t you ever thought that was strange?”
“That’s a good point. I’ve never considered it before in my life, but it is strange.”
“Well, that’s because there are machines that mine the milliyen that are lost, thus returning them to the money supply. They were all made a long, long time ago, but I’d assume the one in your village is still functional.”
“What do you mean, mining? Are there buried milliyen somewhere in the form of coins, like the money in the old times?” Shido asked, recalling his own job of scavenging cigarettes for money.
“No. For one thing, milliyen don’t have a physical form. Suika milliyen are simply a history of transactions that are sent through Suikanet, indicating which Suika has how much of a balance, and so on. There are several complex encryption systems working in the background, and not particularly complicated calculations guarantee the encryption. So to make more milliyen, you need a special kind of device. I call that a miner, although I’ve never seen one before. That’s how those people were able to offer money endlessly, and thus order around everyone else.”
Shido didn’t quite understand what Keiha was talking about. He was more startled by the way that, after holding her silence for so long, she’d suddenly burst into a fountain of words. Her manner of speaking with no regard to the listener’s comprehension struck him as similar to her father, Keijin.
“You know about some very complicated subjects,” he remarked.
It did not cause much of a change in her demeanor. “Anyway, here’s my real question: Do you hate those people who ruled over you and kicked you out?”
“Actually, to tell the truth, I wasn’t that sad about it. Once I met Keijin, I was more interested in seeing the city. I think it was a greater disaster for my parents and Mimi.”
“So you feel that it was a ‘disaster,’ specifically?”
“Er, no. It was the work of human beings, of course. It’s just that society is always plagued by some kind of unfairness that can strike like a natural event. It’s something we just have to live under, I suppose,” answered Shido.
Keiha made an extremely displeased face, then rotated the large monitor on her desk to face him. “Here, this is a system I created.”
In the center of the black screen was a white circle with lines extending outward.
“With a bit of concentrated interference from Suikanet nodes in the vicinity of a miner, you can render them incapable of mining milliyen. Or, to be more accurate, it puts an extreme load on the node the miner is connected to, which scatters the mined milliyen all around. I made the thing but couldn’t test it because I didn’t know where to find any miners. If you want revenge on the people ruling your village, I’d like to mess with their miner. Could you tell me where to find it?”
“W-wait, just a moment.” Shido held up his hands to stop her. “Don’t just rush through with this. First of all, this miner thing? You don’t even know if there is one in the village. I’ve never heard of any such thing.”
“Then we’ll try running the device to find out if they’ve got one or not. Nothing will happen if they don’t.”
“Listen, that’s not the problem… And for one thing, what reason would you have for doing this?”
“I want to find out if my system works or not. I’ll need it eventually.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain later. I’m just saying that I have this tool. Do you want me to use it?”
Shido considered this. “First of all, the village has its own circumstances. I don’t feel right about manipulating its fate for my own personal reasons.”
“But think about it. The people who rule your village control everyone else just because they happen to own a miner. It seems only fair that someone with an interference device exploits them for a bit, don’t you think?”
“You’re being stupid. That’s not a valid reason,” Shido snapped. It seemed to intimidate Keiha, for she fell silent. “Listen, this might be cruel to say to a girl I just met today, but I think you’ve been through a lot in life despite still being young, and it’s made you a little bit crazy. I can tell that Modori’s right, and you’re very smart, but once you get older, I think you’ll see more of the logic of how society—”
“Enough about me,” she interrupted. “It’s simple. Your family and your former fiancée underwent a ‘disaster.’ You might have the means to help them now. So you should probably try. Wouldn’t you agree?”
That kind of made sense to him. However, Shido got the feeling this girl was seeing him as nothing more than a machine that would act on her orders, and when he saw her looking at him, that was exactly what he glimpsed in her eyes.
About two months after that, he received a Suikanet message from his family back in the village. The exile edict had previously forbidden them from contacting Shido, so the presence of any message suggested the mandate had been repealed.
According to his parents, the fifth-floor residents had vanished from the village all of a sudden. Rumors were they had been lax on their milliyen payments, leading to widespread distrust from the rest of the settlement. After some discussion, the fourth-floor families decided upon a new system of government, and the edict to have Shido exiled was no more. They wanted him to come back home and said that Mimi wished to see him, too. Shido considered his response carefully.
“I’m in Kyoto now. I’m leading a comfortable life and have many friends. I’m very happy to hear that I’m welcome in the village again. I have some things to do here, so I won’t be back for a while. I’m sorry. Say hello to Mimi for me.”
Shido reported what had happened back home to Keiha, who did something she’d never done before—looked happy.
“Okay. So the milliyen redistribution function works. Next up, the automated turnstiles.”
She began to type on her keyboard. Shido considered that maybe she wasn’t just a poor unfortunate girl who lost her parents too young, but that she was something else entirely, strange and unfathomable. And he was caught in her snare.
“What are you planning to do?” Shido asked.
“Nothing that serious,” the young woman replied.