“Osaka?”
“Yes. We’ve pretty much finished acquiring all the net nodes around there, so the station employees in the area wanted us to send over a representative of the alliance. Could you leave tomorrow?” Keiha asked, holding the electric kettle.
“This is quite sudden,” Shido replied. It took an entire day to walk from Kyoto to Osaka.
“It’ll take a while, I’m thinking. Many kinds of people live there. Controlling the net will be a lot easier than all of them. I’ll need someone trustworthy to go.”
“Got it.”
Osaka was once the second-largest metropolis in Japan, but with Honshu covered by Yokohama Station, it had lost its past glory. The structural genetic field found it easier to build up stratified cities in basins. However, because Osaka possessed such a highly developed rail network and the stations were so much denser than in other regions, the concentration of Suikanet nodes was tremendously high. Seizing them all was a pain, but they would be tough to wrest from the hand that held them later, making the region a valuable base.
The screen on Keiha’s desk displayed the nodes they presently controlled.
“How far are you going to expand?” Shido questioned. Keiha’s nodes were shown in green on the digital map of Japan. The range of nodes was expanding by the day and currently spanned from Osaka Bay to the east shore of Lake Biwa. He didn’t know what it actually meant to acquire control over Suikanet; Shido was purely impressed with the level of Keiha’s ability to achieve so much.
She did not answer his inquiry, however. She just poured green tea from the pot into two cups.
“Want some?” she asked, handing him one.
“Thank you,” Shido replied, carefully taking the cup. Keiha had dutifully waited for the boiled water to fall to one hundred and sixty degrees before steeping the tea, so the cup wasn’t all that hot to the touch.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. Anyway,” Shido said, pointing at the right side of the map. “There are some big gaps. Why did you seize these spots out in the mountains?”
Farther away from the Kansai cities, there were some volcanoes like Mt. Haku, Mt. Ontake, and Mt. Asama, where Keiha had captured several nodes. Compared to their control over their own territory, the dots were tiny and isolated.
“That wasn’t me. Dad did that.”
“Keijin did?”
“Yes. When he was young, he said he could use Suikanet to predict disasters, and he scooped up the nodes around the mountains. These are leftovers from that.”
“Like…eruptions?”
Keiha took a sip of the tea. “The nodes Dad claimed were on a much smaller scale than mine, but they’re all extremely tough. I haven’t touched them in over a decade, but they’re still firmly uncontested. My nodes, on the other hand, can’t be left alone for more than a few months, or else neighboring nodes will reclaim them.”
“Uh-huh…”
Silence settled between the pair for a minute. Shido watched the specks of tea move about the inside of the cup, thinking what he should say.
“This might be a strange thing to ask, but…what was it like having him for a father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“He was always out traveling. Hardly spent any time in Kyoto. Every now and then, he’d send a huge amount of data back home.”
“Data?”
“Yes. He would report back with his new discoveries about the structure of Suikanet and its Codama language. It was just after Mom died, so that would have been when I was eight.”
“He sent that back to his eight-year-old daughter?” Shido exclaimed, distressed.
“Is that odd?” Keiha asked. By the light of the glossy screen, he could see that her expression was perfectly serious.
“Even knowing how smart you are, it’s strange.”
“But isn’t it normal for parents to teach their children about things necessary for survival?”
There was no doubt that Keiha’s abilities were potent within the environment of the Inside world, but that didn’t seem to connect to “survival.” Shido had to think before he answered.
“Hmm. That’s a good point. My family was a line of bioelectric technicians. When I finished school, they taught me how to do Suika implants. In my village, you couldn’t choose your profession, so that was a skill I needed to survive.”
He assumed that was how she meant it. However, her father had been murdered because his tech had proved a little too effective.
Keiha continued to zoom in and out on the map of Japan. It was like she was reassuring herself of what her father had left behind for her.
“Is that hole a volcano?” Shido inquired, pointing at the screen. Around the center of Mt. Ontake, there was a black region with absolutely no Suikanet nodes. Based on the legend, the hole was about a kilometer across. For an inland station hollow, that was huge.
“No. That’s an exit. See where it says Exit 42?”
“Exit 42?”
“Strange, right? Yokohama Station’s exits are numbered in the order they’re generated, so the smaller numbers should all be in the Kanagawa area, where the city is. Why would it be out in Nagano? My father had nothing written about that in his notes.”
“It probably wasn’t important enough to mark down. Weird things like that happen Inside all the time, don’t they? For example, the hallway where it says ‘Nara Line Ruins’ is in Kyoto, not Nara,” said Shido, chuckling.
Keiha suddenly turned very grave. “Shido, the fact that exit numbers are consistent across all of Yokohama Station suggests there is a functioning core that maintains the entire station. If each regional structure in different areas handed out exit numbers, there would be redundant numbers all over the place.”
“Core?”
“Something like the brain or heart, in human terms. In other words, the big question is, is the station structured like a plant, as a collection of localized modules? Or is it structured like an animal, split between core functions and terminal points? Perhaps this strange exit is a hint to the answer.”
“Uh-huh,” Shido replied. “So ultimately, you’re hoping to go and seize that core. And then you’ll be able to take control over all of Yokohama Station.”
“Do you think so?” Keiha asked. She seemed a little sad for some reason.
That was the very last day Shido saw Keiha in person. Whenever he thought back on her, it was that slightly forlorn expression that came to mind.
✦ ✦ ✦
The moment of truth arrived when Shido left for Osaka on Keiha’s orders, finished his job there, and was on his way back. He received an emergency communication from Keiha.
She’d told him that it was possible to engage in voice communication long-distance using Suikanet, but this was the first time he’d ever seen it work. It was an ominous sign.
“Don’t come back to Kyoto. It’s bad. Get as far away as you can,” she instructed. Her tone of voice was just as relaxed as it always was, but he could make out the sound of rapid breathing in the background.
“What do you mean? Get away from what?”
“From Yokohama Station.”
“…That’s impossible. What happened?”
“I’m losing control over the automated turnstiles. The reactions from all of our Suikas are going wrong. We’ve probably been declared illegitimate. They took Mom away.”
“Modori? She had almost nothing to do with the alliance’s activities.”
“Just flee from the station, as far as you can. I’m going to find some kind of countermeasure. Stay alive until then.”
Then Keiha ended the communication. That was the last time Shido and Keiha ever spoke.
Not long after, Shido’s Suika stopped receiving net access. The automated turnstiles showed up and nabbed him, and they tossed him onto the coast of Osaka Bay.
Awaji Island wasn’t totally Stationized yet, and there were pirates without Suikas who made their base on the islands in Osaka Bay. They captured Shido and sold him to Shikoku as a source of labor. He was transported over the exposed ground in a terribly shaky vehicle called an automobile until he was assigned to do earthworks at a port in Takamatsu.
He understood from reference materials that human beings built structures in the outside world, and it sounded exotic and exciting enough. Performing the process in person was an excruciating experience, though. The civil engineering foreman struck him with a baton all the time. It was his first time being beaten, and he found the mental anguish to be even worse than the physical pain.
After that, Shido waited for his chance to steal a little boat and escape to sea, which was when he came to the island with the station spore upon it. Shikoku knew about the island, but because of the eerie appearance of the spore, they feared it and considered it even more frightening than Inside. Shido found the abandoned container house there and settled in it.
And he’d remained there ever since. He had no way of knowing what had happened to Keiha and the other alliance members.