They made their way around the entire mountain, placing their handicap stones where appropriate, and returned to Hill Town two days after they’d left.
“That completes our placement of the stones. If anything happens, I’ll be sure to let you know at once,” said Nijo. He promptly holed himself up in the room next to Dr. Blue-Eyes’s.
For a while after that, regular life persisted. The doctor continued his practice and spent his free time reading books and occasionally thinking about that fat little girl. The frequency of earthquakes dropped, and so did the strange exclamations that Nijo made next door.
Dr. Blue-Eyes began to wonder if this was all just Nijo getting ideas into his head. Obviously, the lack of an eruption was a good thing. However, Nijo already gave people a poor first impression, and the fact that he’d embarked on a two-day wild goose chase might worsen that reputation.
“We’ve had enough, Doctor,” said a man who acted as a kind of town dignitary. He’d led off with a long speech about how much the town depended on the doctor to survive. “That bug-eyed man is leading you on. Please, from all of us, just kick him out and send him on his way.”
“This town is along a traffic route, so anyone is free to settle down in any room they find,” he snapped. That response was the spark that caused the locals’ frustrations about Nijo to explode. Within a few days, there was a line of petitioners outside Dr. Blue-Eyes’s office.
“I speak for a group of ascetics in the mountains,” said a woman dressed in white, with the phrase All things have the Station-nature written in kanji on her sleeve. “Our training place is in a station hollow on the north face, where it is open to the sky. This way, we can purify our bodies with valuable natural rain.” With that explanation out of the way, she continued, “Then that man barged in without warning, and he started blathering about how the surface tension made the density of Suikanet so high around station hollows.”
Dr. Blue-Eyes could not envision what their training involved for the life of him, but she painted a very vivid picture of Nijo.
“Er, I hate to interrupt, but why does a man’s presence interfere with your training?”
“The station’s ability to replicate is rooted in its femininity. So if a man enters the sanctity of the training grounds, he introduces impure male essence,” she claimed.
A man asserted that Nijo was intercepting private communications. But Dr. Blue-Eyes remembered that this person had come to Nijo before and gotten help with his technical trouble.
After several days of nonstop complaints, he could no longer get any reasonable amount of work done, so he went to knock on Nijo’s door.
“Are you in there? I need to talk with you,” he called, opening the door.
Nijo was seated, his eyes locked on his screen. “Dr. Blue-Eyes. The handicap stones on the mountain have vanished.”
His voice was strangely quiet. Dr. Blue-Eyes marveled that he was capable of speaking so softly at all.
“Vanished? You mean the signals died out?”
“No, they’ve physically disappeared. However, the log shows a sudden surge in the temperature sensors just before they did.” Nijo played a very grainy video on the screen. “Look, this is the final image captured by the rooftop camera.”
Black smoke spilled from the top of the mountain with tremendous force, and within a few seconds, an ebony shape (most likely some volcanic rock) flew toward the lens, and then all was dark.
“Go ahead, Doctor,” Nijo said, his voice oddly calm. He held out what seemed to be a speaker acting as a mic, its paper cone exposed. The controlled volume of his voice impressed upon the doctor the gravity of the situation.
“I have to do it?”
“Well, of course. If I made the announcement, it would only harm my already-poor standing. I don’t have the space to save a recording, so we have to do it live. The camera’s right there, so look in that direction. I’ll hook us up in five seconds.”
“Five seconds?”
He didn’t even have time to be alarmed. Nijo started counting down on his fingers.
“Er, ahem, ahem.” Dr. Blue-Eyes coughed. Voices from down the hallway yelped, “What’s this?” and “Isn’t that Dr. Blue-Eyes?”
“All residents in the Mt. Asama area. The mountain is currently erupting, putting us in a perilous situation. Use the downward escalators and evacuate to a place as far from the volcano caldera as you can. Uh, station employees, please offer guidance to the elderly and children to help them evacuate. I repeat. The mountain is currently…”
His words came out of the speakers in the hallway a second after he spoke them, creating a very odd echoing effect. On top of that, the sound of his voice was not at all the way he heard it from inside his head.
“Well done, Doctor. All that’s left to do is whip up an evacuation route to show them. We should get moving, too.”
“How far was that message just broadcast, exactly?”
“It got displayed on pretty much all the guidance boards that hang from the ceiling. And there are lots of spots that only have speakers, no monitors.”
Somewhere in the distance, thuds and slams sounded from the ceiling, as though there were objects falling from above. Apparently, a volcanic projectile had landed over their heads.
How many floors of the station are above us here? The doctor had been living in the area for a long while, so more levels must have grown in that time.
Nijo had already been gathering his possessions during the announcement, and he promptly picked them up and walked out of the room. Dr. Blue-Eyes followed him. On the way to the down escalator, he stopped at his own chamber, glanced at the piles of books on his bookcases, then picked up only the bag full of medical supplies and hurried out.
There was a huge line of people on the descending escalator.
“Dr. Blue-Eyes!”
“Was that really you on the announcement, Doctor?” someone demanded.
“Don’t panic, please. Just focus on evacuating to safety for…”
Just then, there was another series of bangs and booms. It was much closer than before. Perhaps the layers above them were thinner than he realized. A person screamed.
When they reached a more open space, they saw that the station’s roof had already been punctured by heated rocks the size of automated turnstiles. The residents had never seen natural boulders in their lives and gazed at them with great curiosity. A few took pictures. Stones and ash fell through the holes in the ceiling.
As Yokohama Station developed and escalators became the primary mode of transportation, the population gravitated toward the mountains rather than the plains, especially compared to the era of human-built cities. Before the station’s growth, hardly anyone would have ever attempted to live within the range of volcanic projectiles, surely.
“Seems like quite a few were too late to escape the slope,” Nijo noted. He had his laptop open while standing on the escalator, and the map displayed on the screen showed red dots all over. The eruption had damaged Yokohama Station in many places, and people who’d lost their evacuation routes were wandering with nowhere to go.
“Each one of these dots is a person?”
From what he could see on the screen, over a hundred had been left behind.
“Yes. Although technically, they’re Suika implants.”
“And I suppose even the station employees can’t go rescue them… Oh, why don’t we use the automated turnstiles?”
“Huh?”
“You once told me that if you controlled Suikanet, you could manipulate the turnstiles. You were extremely proud of it, as I recall.”
“Listen, that was more like a business pitch than anything. All I can do is overwrite a few variables and flag values. There’s no way for me to reprogram them with anything complex like escorting people to safe…ty… Oh!”
“Did you remember something?”
“Well, I’ve never done it before, so this would be an attempt on the fly…”
While using one hand to prop up the laptop, he entered commands with the other.
“I’ll reverse two flags on the automated turnstiles’ action algorithm. They’re the ones for Suika possession and movement direction. Normally, they attempt to push people without Suikas outside of the station, but if I switch them, they’ll try to push people with Suikas away from the outside. Because the top of the mountain is blowing off and becoming outside, they should carry the people who failed to escape down to the foot of the mountain. In theory, at least.”
And with that, Nijo smacked the ENTER key.
“It’s the only thing we can do now. Let’s try it,” said the doctor.
“I’ve already executed the command. All we can do is pray.”
After several hours of descent, they reached flat ground, where a huge crowd of evacuees was already gathered, clamoring and panicked. Dr. Blue-Eyes borrowed an infirmary and started aiding people there. By passing through areas without roofing during the evacuation, many had inhaled volcanic ash or fallen and hurt themselves.
As each person came through, they said, “It’s him! The man from the broadcast!” Soon the hallway was packed with people. Every day, he was surrounded by a crowd of patients in need and other assorted onlookers. It was exhausting.
He gave instructions to bring together all of the medical practitioners in the surrounding area, then fell into a deep sleep for nearly two whole days.
When he woke again, there were posters of him put up all over Inside. Apparently, screenshots were taken of his evacuation transmission, and they were made into fliers.
Dr. Blue-Eyes is watching you. Follow the rules of Inside! said the large caption. Underneath, in smaller letters, it read, To victims of the Mt. Asama eruption: For current medical information and emergency food supply, please see Yokohama Station West Gunma Region Employee Association, Skynet Address: XXXX-XXXX.
That suggested it was local station employees who were issuing the posters. In the few days since the eruption, the station employees had presented him as their leader, presumably because they were desperate for someone to follow. Evidently, people who’d never met the doctor before saw in his blue eyes something greater, a transcending of their common humanity.
An article made the rounds on Suikanet titled “How Dr. Blue-Eyes, Physician of Hill Town, Anticipated the Eruption of Mt. Asama and Averted Disaster.” Based on the inclusion of the handicap stones, Nijo himself had likely penned it. Information that was frequently viewed on Suikanet spread to more distant nodes. Thus, the article circulated until Dr. Blue-Eyes became something of a celebrity within Yokohama Station.