“Can you hear me, Shamai? Hey, Shamai!”
Ten seconds later, a distorted voice responded. After several days of searching in the Morioka area, Nepshamai’s probe of the region moved closer to the coast, and as it did so, the quality of his connection back home grew more unstable.
“Yes, Miss Ruxzx. I’ve moved from Morioka closer to xkxzxkshi. Around Kitakami szszks. Only zzkkzzzxz to the sea.”
“Sorry, the connection’s pretty bad. I guess we haven’t taken many nodes around there.”
Another ten seconds.
“I’m awaxxzx. This area still isn’t zkkxxkshh to the company. At the very least, not jzzfkk.”
“All right. Well, keep heading for the Pacific-side Wall, as we planned. The original program called for the two of them to make their way there around this week anyway. I don’t know if they’re following instructions while their communications are down…but at the very least, go and see.”
There was a longer silence, twenty seconds.
“I understaclick.”
“The call was improperly ended. Will you attempt to reconnect?”
Rube clicked NO.
Based on the current rate, the delay near the Wall would be several hours. It would be impossible to give instructions in real time. Rube would have to wait for his report. If Nepshamai had a flaw, it was that he was bad at summing things up. He would record everything that happened, making it tedious and time-consuming to read.
The mood hanging over Engineering 2nd Division grew heavier by the day. There was still no sign of the missing pair of agents. Nepshamai’s stay in Tohoku was extended for investigative purposes, keeping him from Kanto, his original destination.
Rube was upset because it meant delaying his mission. Apparently, the decision was based on some fuzzy calculation that delaying one agent’s mission to find two others was a net benefit for the group.
Headquarters in Sapporo was snowed in. The JR North Japan stronghold had been built during the Winter War. It excelled at the insulation of heat, sound, and electromagnetic waves, but the Hokkaido winter chill had a way of passing through walls like a ghost. The company told everyone to conserve valuable fuel and deal with the temperature themselves, so the employees got into the habit of working under blankets.
Rube thought this was a pathetic state for the fortress protecting humanity from Yokohama Station’s expansion. Still, she kept heat-emitting communications devices around her legs to warm them up. After turning thirty, it seemed that her digits got cold so much quicker.
“I bet it’s still warm Inside during the winter,” she said.
The man next to her said, “It’s 15.2 degrees Celsius where Shamai just was.”
“I’m so jealous. I wish I could work from Inside rather than in the office. We need an Inside branch.”
“Maybe we’ll get one before long. Perhaps her next step after creating android saboteurs is a way to send people in. The first space flights were unmanned before we put people up there.”
“In that case, what happens to our mission to protect Hokkaido?”
“Dunno,” he answered with a shrug.
Deploying androids Inside, where human beings could not go, was often compared to the space race. In other words, Yokohama Station might as well be outer space.
Before the war, orbital development projects were plagued with malfunctioning communicators on probes and things of that nature.
When it came to probes, lightness was everything. A bit of fuel was provided for maintaining and correcting balance, but mostly it was just following gravity. Even without someone in control, the laws of physics performed the work. Their observation tools built with copious tax money still functioned, collecting detailed data on planets (or smaller heavenly bodies) as they passed. But without the ability to transmit that information back to Earth, the probes might as well have been dead. No matter how much the officers at mission control might’ve gnashed their teeth, there was no way to repair a probe that was millions and millions of kilometers away.
How much difference was there between those officers and the operators on this job? Rube and the others couldn’t set foot Inside; it was no different from the vacuum of space to them.
On the other hand, the brains of the android saboteurs were far more powerful than the tech on the space vessels of the past, and they were capable of making their own decisions.
If some malfunction had occurred to two androids’ transmitters simultaneously, Samayunkur, the genius of the group, wouldn’t just ignore the problem. If he couldn’t fix the problem, then it had to mean he and Yaieyukar had been destroyed or trapped outside of Suikanet range. Both options were bad ones.
During the era of space exploration, they used to say, “Always envision the worst-case scenario.” In other words, you needed to be prepared to handle every possible issue that might occur. It was a luxurious viewpoint, one only possible in the age when you could shoot a satellite into outer space for no reason except scientific curiosity.
If anything, given the desperation of the current predicament, the company motto was the opposite: “Always leave room for hope.”
✦ ✦ ✦
> SK-789 communication.log.4721
Hello, it’s me. Your good friend, <script>alert(“Samayunkur”);</script>. That was a joke.
Anyway, someone from the company said we’re finally going to get our own bodies. That’s great. I assume that means we’ll be leaving for the mission, and I’ve been informed that I’ll be the first out the door. Lucky me, I guess. I feel self-conscious about it. I wonder what it’s like to have a body. I hope it’s not too heavy. Based on the documents they pass around, it doesn’t seem like the company can make mechanical bodies that are lighter than a human’s.
Creating machines is all about doing things you’re not used to. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Lately, it seems like the people from the company are contacting us individually to communicate. What do you all talk about?
Recently Mr. Asahi (he’s a technical officer, apparently) was talking to me, so I asked him to confirm if my recent theory was correct. It was pretty much as I’d guessed. That’s all fine, but after he heard my speech, he responded, “I have nothing to hide from you.”
Then, two days later, he said, “Ask me anything you need to know about your mission.”
Well, you know how twisted my mind can get. I started wondering what might have happened in those two days. I bet she gave him orders like “Don’t discuss anything superfluous.”
That’s kind of sad. I mean, we’re going to infiltrate the Inside with the bodies of six-year-olds, right? If they don’t raise us with love, we’re going to turn out sulky and rebellious.
They don’t need to be so afraid of us.