“Miika Shimabara, your marks are good enough for you to go to JR. I will write you a letter of recommendation,” her schoolteacher had told her a year ago.
“I’m honored,” she had replied. The teacher was very kind and helpful, the sort of person who said, “If there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask the question.”
At this point, Miika could no longer remember why she had said it was an honor. All she could recall was that it was considered a respectable career path among the students at the school.
Historically speaking, educational length corresponded to social worth. In the High Civilization era, there were students at age twenty-five and even thirty. But in present-day Kyushu, those who stayed in school until twenty were the elites, and only a small portion of them served in the governing company known as JR Fukuoka.
In other words, the people here had finished their education at the same time they became legal adults.
The door had only the room number and the name of the one in charge written on it. She knocked twice and, once she heard a response from within, quietly pushed it open.
“It’s nice to meet you. My name is Miika Shimabara, and I was placed in this division today,” she stated mechanically, bowing in the doorway. Men sitting at desks pointed toward the wall turned in her direction one at a time, then looked at each other in confusion. Their faces said that they weren’t supposed to get anyone like her.
For a moment, she started to worry she’d knocked on the wrong door. Then a middle-aged man wearing a white coat appeared from the back. “Ah, Miss Shimabara. Welcome.”
He was Sugimoto, the leader of the chemistry team of JR Fukuoka’s engineering division. The others quickly returned to their work.
“Boy, it sure heated up quick today, didn’t it? Aren’t you hot dressed like that, Miss Shimabara?” asked Sugimoto, fanning himself with a hard file folder while staring at her up and down. Underneath the coat, he seemed to be wearing only a T-shirt.
“It said this was our summer uniform,” Miika replied. All of the company buildings had internal cooling, so she was cold, if anything. It seemed like a waste when there wasn’t enough energy to regulate the civilian homes, but given that most of the employees were men, there might not be any point in arguing.
“Well, we aren’t as strict on the rules as the military, so relax, and we’ll all get along fine. As for your seat and such, well…”
Sugimoto had an odd way of pausing as he talked. He walked toward the back of the large room, and Miika followed. There was a complex, chaotic scent typical to rooms that held a large number of people. It was two o’clock, and it smelled as though some people had just been eating lunch. This seat had mustard, and this one soy sauce, Miika guessed, and then she caught a whiff of perfume. It was the kind of odor she wouldn’t have expected to encounter in a place like this.
“Can you show her around, Miss Kuroki?” Sugimoto called out to the opposite wall.
“Oh! Yes!” replied a pleased female voice from behind a partition. The owner emerged—a woman whose beauty startled Miika.
The rainy season was over, and summer had arrived in earnest. After their three-month training period, the new employees were shipped off to their respective assignments in smoke-belching trucks. However, because Miika had been assigned to the engineering division’s chemistry team, she remained at the Kumamoto branch.
In the Hakata main office, they performed lots of practical work like developing weapons, but the officers in Kumamoto mainly were dedicated to deciphering pre-war texts and recreating their technology. Much of humanity’s accumulated knowledge had been scattered during the Winter War, and this office’s task was to scrounge up what reference materials survived, to see if they proved useful. There was a common saying around the office: “In Kumamoto, you learn more about ancient kanji than chemical formulas.”
The primary success of the chemistry team was the development of the fibrous material known as structural genetic field-resistant polymer. It was highly effective at blocking the contamination of the structural genetic field attached to the material that Yokohama Station flung over the Kanmon Straits from Honshu. Naturally, this earned very high praise from JR Fukuoka headquarters, whose top priority above all was keeping the station from taking hold on Kyushu.
“It utilizes a conductive polymer, you see,” Kuroki explained while showing Miika some company materials. “It’s difficult to acquire a sample contaminated by the structural genetic field, but we got a hint from the way the station can’t cross the ocean. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes. Like seawater, the conductivity disperses the structural genetic field, but unlike metal, it has no free electrons, which means it can’t be infected by the structural genetic field itself,” Miika recited according to what she’d studied ahead of time.
Kuroki looked amazed. “You’re good, Mii.”
“So what is the team working on now?”
“Our group is working on recycling waste liquid from heavy metals.”
“Waste liquid?”
“It comes out of here,” Kuroki replied, pointing at the map. To the east of the Kanmon Straits, past a stretch of water called Suo-nada, a cape jutted south from Honshu. “There are many points where Yokohama Station dumps into the water, but the material is different depending on the location. Around here, there are lots of rare metals.”
“You can acquire mineral resources from the station?”
“Yes. But it’s a bit of a slurry of various elements, so we’re researching how we might separate them effectively. Some of the waste is composed of rare materials you can’t get anymore, so this is a very important job.”
Miika nodded vigorously at the phrase important job. “When you say separate them, you mean through electrolysis, adding electrons to ionized metal to reduce them.”
“Yes!” said Kuroki. She was delighted every time Miika correctly described something. “It’s nothing but men on this team, so I’ve been really excited all week after I heard we’d get a girl this year. I’m so happy.”
The entire company was about 85 percent men, but the engineering division was where that ratio was pushed the furthest. Miika knew through experience that when a woman joined a team of mostly men, it was the minority of women who were actually more excited about it than the men.
“I’ll do my best to grow and meet your expectations. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
“Expectations?” Kuroki repeated. She chuckled. “Mii, you ought to relax a little and be more casual about things.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you keep coming into the office like you did today, people are going to freak out and think it’s a surprise inspection from the conduct division. There are investigations fairly often within the company, although not so often in our office.”
“I apologize. I will be careful about that.”
“Listen, Mii, you don’t have to talk like you’re at a job interview. Relax a little.”
“I understand.”
The issue was that this was just how Miika talked. She knew it was weird, but it was the style she’d adopted, and there was no changing it now.
They told her to show up at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon, so Miika decided to arrive at eight thirty and leave at five thirty. In the morning, she worked on deciphering and sorting documents, and in the afternoon, she learned how to use the tools in the lab. JR’s laboratory was very impressive and much more advanced than the one she’d studied in at school.
“I have a question, sir,” she said to Foreman Sugimoto when he handed her some forms.
“What is it, Miss Shimabara?”
“I noticed that your lab coat does not smell like chemicals at all.”
The only odor clinging to his clothes was the one belonging to all men his age. He cleaned his attire often, though, so most people probably wouldn’t even notice it. Miika didn’t think it smelled bad.
“My actual lab coat I wear during experiments is in my locker. The ladies in the mess hall don’t like it when I wear it in there. I keep it separate from my ordinary wear, you see.” Sugimoto chuckled. Miika couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious, but she replied, “I understand,” anyway.
“You’ve got a very sharp nose, Miss Shimabara.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“That might make the chemistry team unpleasant for you. We work with plenty of things that smell downright awful. So…good luck.”
“I’m fine. In fact, I don’t have any problems with chemical odors,” Miika responded quickly. She did not want them to identify her as having poor aptitude for her new assignment. While her nose was quite discerning when it came to picking out particular scents, her advanced sensitivity didn’t mean she was grossed out by more smells than the average person—with a few exceptions.
“Is there anything about the job that’s causing you trouble so far?”
“No. Everything is going well. Miss Kuroki gives excellent guidance. If anything seems off, it’s that I’ve noticed many people not abiding by the start and end of work hours,” she said.
The team leader considered this. “Well, our job doesn’t exactly require us to be punctual, to be fair. It would be a different story if we were in the military division.”
“I understand. But if we do not mind our time precisely, it will make us less efficient as an organization…”
“You have a point. If you’re here early and Kuroki is late, that leaves you with no one to instruct you,” he said.
Miika felt like he was taking her comment as a criticism of Kuroki and hastily added, “No, sir. I’m sure it’s harder for people with families to make the proper time, after all.”
“Huh?” the team leader asked, taken aback.
“Isn’t Miss Kuroki married?”
“Huh? I’ve never heard as much. And I’ve known her since she joined the company.”
“But she’s pregnant.”
“She is?” His eyes were wide. Miika suddenly regretted her comments. It was a very subtle thing, not something the average person would notice. “Did she tell you that?” he continued.
“…No, sir. Perhaps I was mistaken. I’m very sorry for my comment,” she said, shaking her head. It was such a different gesture from Miika’s usual clockwork precision that the man gave the young woman a suspicious look.
When he returned to his office, Miika examined the materials he’d given her, regretting her lack of discretion. Every time she committed one of these mistakes, she worked harder to comport herself properly. It had been a habit of hers ever since she was a child.
Miika’s observance of the schedule was so precise, in fact, that people started to claim she was an android developed by the mechanics division. She was used to that. It made things easier for her if people treated her like a machine. Being treated like too much of a human being had the potential to throw off her rhythm.
And so it was two months after her assignment that Miika had to deal with something that threw off her rhythm like nothing she’d ever experienced before.