Accel World - Volume 23 - Chapter 6

6

At any rate, even if we are attacked by the kings’ Legions and no one is able to flee, no member would dream of leaving Oscillatory.

Haruyuki heard the echo of someone’s faraway words in his mind the instant he returned to the real world. But whose were they, exactly? Ah, right—the first of the Seven Dwarves, the executive group for the White Legion, Platinum Cavalier.

Haruyuki and Fuko had encountered Cavalier in the sky above the battlefield immediately before he’d dropped Inti there using the Luminary, which had been entrusted to him by the White King. Fuko had warned him not to drag the rank-and-file members of Oscillatory into Black Vise’s madness, but Cavalier had replied without seeming the slightest bit moved that not a single member of Oscillatory would leave. Was this because they were bound to the White King by the Judgment Blow or some similar fear? Or…

“Good work, Haruyuki.”

He heard a voice in his ear and opened his eyes. An unfamiliar ceiling. The cushion wrapped around his back. And a soft warmth touching his arm.

Finally remembering the situation into which he had dived, Haruyuki bounced up and tried to get out of the massive beanbag chair. But before he could, a slender arm snaked out from his right and held him back.

“Ah! K-K-K-Kuroyukihime, what…” His half screech died out the instant he saw her slight pout. He wondered if he’d messed up yet again.

“You were fine when Rin Kusakabe was holding you, so why the overreaction when it’s me?” she asked.

“Huh?” It took him two seconds to understand the meaning of the question, and then he was even more stunned. “N-n-n-no! That was two avatars! B-but this, it’s you and me, um, like, our, uh real selves!”

“Our avatars are also parts of our real selves,” she noted. “It’s only the amount of information they’re made of that’s not the same. There’s essentially no real difference.”

Maaaaaybeeeeee?

In his mind, he raised his eyebrows almost off his forehead, but before he could voice any objection, Kuroyukihime leaned her whole body against him, and his thoughts stopped once more. She weighed a good deal less than the average ninth-grade girl, but even so, his body sank deeply into the beanbag, rendering him unable to move. Now she was forced to look up at him, and she smiled playfully.

“Let me just stay like this for a bit. When we’re touching each other, there’s this synergistic effect that recovers my mental exhaustion.”

He was about to say that was ridiculous, but stopped himself just in time. Instead, he asked in a hushed tone, “Um, I feel like the meeting was pretty hopeful… Was that not enough to replenish you?”

Kuroyukihime blinked twice before shaking her head. “Ah, my apologies. I gave you the wrong impression. I did feel hopeful. The biggest hurdle is finding the blacksmith, but it’s not as though I don’t have a few ideas on the subject. But everyone doing whatever they can to rescue me… it’s hard for me. I can hardly stand it, it’s so frustrating,” she told him in a hushed voice and pressed firmly against his chest.

After hesitating for a second, he lifted his hands and gently wrapped his arms around her slender body. For once, the words came up from somewhere deep inside him, without him having to desperately reach for them.

“Just because you’re the Legion Master doesn’t mean you have to carry everything around all by yourself.”

Her shoulders suddenly shot up in surprise. Slowly patting them, he told her what was in his heart, one careful word after the other:

“Ever since you reformed Nega Nebulus, you’ve always tried to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the Legion members. When we fought the fifth Chrome Disaster, when we rescued Shinomiya from Suzaku’s altar, when I turned into the sixth Chrome Disaster, when we dealt with the ISS kits, and even in the Territories yesterday or at the meeting of the Seven Kings today… And not just that. When Araya charged us with that car, you used the ultimate command, spending ninety-nine percent of your Burst Points, and were so seriously injured, your life was on the line, just to save me.”

“Well, that was only natural,” she murmured in a hoarse voice, face still pressed to his chest. “I’m your Legion Master and… your parent.”

But he shook his head firmly. “It wasn’t ‘only natural.’ It absolutely wasn’t only natural.”

He moved his hands from her shoulders to her back.

“You’re superstrong,” he continued. “So at some point, it just started to seem natural for me to rely on you. I’m always thinking everything’ll be fine as long as you’re with me. I didn’t realize I was basically making you carry this heavy burden constantly.

“You’re one of the Seven Kings. You’re a level niner. You’re stronger than anyone. But the truth is, you’re just a year older than me, and in junior high just like me. I… I’m still totally weak, and all I do is get lost and struggle in both the Accelerated World and the real world, but I want to get stronger so that you can rely on me more. So that I’m not always being supported, so we can support each other, help each other, I want to move forward together toward the same objective.

“I’m sure all the other Legion members are the same right now. Not just the Nega Nebulus group, but the members of the Prominence group, even though they only just merged with us. I just know it. So this time, lean on us. Please believe in us. We will rescue you, and the other four kings, from Inti’s Unlimited EK. So… So…”

This was perhaps the first time in his fourteen years and change of life that Haruyuki had been able to utter such a long statement without stuttering. But at the end, his heart was full to bursting, and no matter how deeply he breathed, he could not put it all into words. Eyes damp with tears that had sprung up at some point, he breathed raggedly.

Kuroyukihime lifted her face and looked at him from that close vantage point. Her obsidian eyes also looked a little damp. “You’ve gotten stronger, hmm, Haruyuki?”

She moved a hand to touch his cheek.

“You’ve gotten very strong in both the Accelerated World and the real world. You’re not simply being supported here… You’ve been holding us up for a long time now: me, Fuko, Utai, Akira, Niko, and the others. We’ve managed to make it this far because you spread your silver wings and continue to soar high in the sky for all of us.”

When Kuroyukihime shifted, her face was suddenly directly above his own. He looked at her lips, lustrous like pearls, trembling a mere ten centimeters away from him. She moved closer. Her black hair was a flowing stream, and he could smell a distinct sweetness. The pounding of his heart accelerated.

Beep-beep-beep!

Suddenly, an electronic noise rang out in the living room, putting an end to the magical moment. Kuroyukihime jerked her face up and touched her virtual desktop.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have it set for this time every day for the bath.”

“Oh… Y-yeah?”

“Mmm. Yes… Haruyuki, you get in, too.”

“Huh?” Here, his choice of words was decisively mistaken. He should have first asked if he shouldn’t maybe go home. But he was caught off guard by the unanticipated proposal, and he ended up saying the first thing that came to mind.

“Uh… Um, do I stink or something?”

“Hmm?” She raised an eyebrow. “No, that’s not what I meant. But you’ve been running around since noon. You must be tired.”

She stood up and then offered him a hand. He accepted this and got to his feet, but he wasn’t any more certain of what he should do.

“Um, but I can’t use the bath before the head of the house,” he protested.

“Oh, don’t be like that. You’re the guest, you know,” she replied. “No need to make a fuss. Go and wash that sweat away.”

“S-so I do smell,” Haruyuki muttered, and Kuroyukihime pushed his back with both hands to deliver him to the washroom/changing room in the middle of the hallway.

“Use all the shampoo and body soap you want. Take your time.”

The sliding door was closed, and he stood there dumbfounded for a minute or two. He wondered vaguely how it had come to this, but his brain wasn’t working. At the very least, however, it was clear that he couldn’t just say he was heading home now. On top of that, he couldn’t help but feel like he really did need to wash away the sweat and grime.

Mechanically, he got out of his school uniform and folded it neatly in the clothing basket provided before opening the folding glass door and stepping into the bathroom.

It was about the same size as the bathroom in the Arita house, but the bathtub itself was the latest model, complete with jet nozzles. Naturally, however, he couldn’t simply jump into the bath. He sat down on a transparent stool, took the Neurolinker off his neck, and hung it on a hook on the wall for that purpose before showering himself in hot water. After diligently cleaning his entire body so that not a speck of dirt remained, he sank into the tub. The water wasn’t too hot, just how he liked it, and a sigh escaped his lips as his entire body relaxed; exhaustion he hadn’t even been aware of evaporated from his limbs as he gradually loosened up.

He retrieved his Neurolinker from the hook on the wall and put it back on so he could connect with the bathroom control panel. In the menu that was displayed, he turned the jet nozzles on, and a stream of tiny bubbles hit his back.

“Hyaah!” he cried out. It was a strange sensation, almost painful, yet also ticklish, and once he had a moment to get used to it, definitely not unpleasant. In fact, it felt pretty good.

As he dreamed about how nice it would be for the Arita bathtub to have such a nifty feature, too, he gave himself over to the bubbles, and his thoughts drifted in new directions.

His parents had bought their condo fourteen years earlier, the year he was born. It was the kind of building that allowed fairly free customization of the interior and the facilities, so he was sure his mother and father had debated one feature or another while peering at the catalog together to decide on the specifications one room at a time. Maybe they had even gone back and forth over whether or not to have jet nozzles in the bathtub.

They had divorced when he was in second grade. When his father finally moved out, Haruyuki hadn’t been able to hold back his tears and had clutched at the man’s legs, pleading with him not to go. But after letting him cry for a while, his father had peeled Haruyuki’s arms away with his large hands and gripped his shoulders tightly just once before stepping out the front door without a word. Haruyuki never saw him again, not even once. He didn’t even know where his father was or what he was doing now.

The reason for the divorce had apparently been his father’s infidelity. So it was possible that he had built a new family with the other woman in some other town. Maybe they even had children. At the age of fourteen, he no longer wanted to see his father, and remembering him didn’t make him particularly sad anymore. Even so, Haruyuki continued to use the bed and mesh office chair his father had left in his own room and had no intention of replacing them, even if they were a little worn out.

He closed the bath control panel and opened the storage of his Neurolinker. Digging into his folder structure, which had gotten quite complicated and multilayered from long years of use, he finally reached a folder by the name of “F.”

The F was for “father.” Inside, he had archived the pictures and videos, mails, work-related folders, and more from his father that he had secretly copied from the home server before his mother erased them all. When he was in elementary school, he would sometimes access this folder with a blanket over his head and repeatedly play the very few videos of his father alone or of the three of them as a family. But at some point, he’d stopped doing that, and the last time he’d accessed the folder was… in the middle of the Dusk Taker incident when he’d pulled out materials for his full-dive technical history.

That time, his father’s data had helped him. If he hadn’t had the annotated text his father had written in one place in the chronological table, Haruyuki wouldn’t have found out about the brain implant chip that was Dusk Taker and the Acceleration Research Society’s secret. He didn’t particularly want to see the man, but if he happened to glimpse him from afar one day, he wanted to offer his silent gratitude. Thanks to you, I’m still a Burst Linker.

“Hey, if you stay in there too long, you’re going to get dizzy from the heat.”

Haruyuki hurriedly closed the window as he replied, “Oh! I’m sorry. I’ll be out in a min—”

There, his whole body froze, he turned his head awkwardly to the left, and his thoughts stopped again for about three seconds before he shouted, “Whadeerookiheem!”

He had intended to say “What are you doing in here, Kuroyukihime?” and hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that. But he didn’t even have the presence of mind to notice this; he simply flapped his mouth open and shut.

At some point, the glass door had opened, and Kuroyukihime had taken a step into the bathroom. She came to look because she was worried about him—no, that was apparently not it. He was able to throw that possibility out because her long hair was held up with a clip, and she was only wearing a white bath towel wrapped around her body.

“Um! S-s-s-s-s-s-sorry! I-I-I-I-I-I’ll get out right away!”

This time, he managed to shout in actual words and started to stand before freezing for the third time. Naturally, Haruyuki didn’t have anything to cover himself with, so the process of getting out of the bath and moving to the changing room presented a massive problem.

“Uh! Um, K-K-Kuroyukihime, c-c-c-could you wait outside until I-I-I get—”

“Oh, it’s fine, though. I mean, once in a while,” she responded easily, and stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She cut in front of the dumbfounded Haruyuki, and dropped down onto the bath stool.

“… O-once in a while… I-I’ve never…” He squeezed a voice out from his throat as it threatened to close over, and Kuroyukihime glared at the mirror in front of her.

“That’s it right there,” she said, her voice slightly thorny. “That’s the problem.”

“P-problem?”

“It’s obvious. I can’t exactly not do what Niko did.”

“Huh? Wh-what did Niko…?” And then he finally remembered.

The first time she’d met Haruyuki, Niko aka Yuniko Kozuki had identified herself under the alias of Tomoko Saito, the name of Haruyuki’s actual second cousin on his mother’s side. Niko passed herself off as Tomoko, got into the Arita house, and had even jumped into the bath area where Haruyuki had been bathing—although it was the first time they’d met—an all-out social engineering plot.

“O-oh, it’s true that did happen, but that was so Niko could get some dirt on me and poach me to Prominence… Wait. Did I ever actually tell you about Niko’s bath attack?” Haruyuki cocked his head curiously to one side, hands gripping the edges of the tub.

Kuroyukihime kept her back turned to him. “I didn’t hear about it from you; Niko herself told me about the time the two of us took a bath at your place.”

“… R-right…”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since. That if I ever got the chance, I would collect on that debt.”

“D-debt?” he asked. “From Niko? Or me?”

“Both. Now then… Since I’m here, will you wash my back for me?”

“Ooeee?!”

This time for sure, Haruyuki was going to say the words—I can’t I’m sorry I’ll get out now—but while they were stuck in a traffic jam in his mouth, Kuroyukihime grabbed the bath towel wrapped around her body with one hand. She seemed to hesitate for a mere instant, but before Haruyuki could say anything, she undid the towel and pulled it away from her body, and then balled it up and held it in both hands.

Even in the slightly orange light, Kuroyukihime’s back was as pale as snow, slender like a sprite’s, and Haruyuki couldn’t even blink. His thoughts ground to a complete halt, and all he could do was stare, mouth agape.

A few seconds later, Kuroyukihime rounded her back a little and sneezed.

This finally undid his petrification. “K-Kuroyukihime, you’re going to catch a cold,” he told her, hoarsely.

“Then you’d better hurry up. Master’s orders.”

“Uh, um, uhhh… Okay…”

If she was going to go so far as to order him, then he had no choice other than to obey. Haruyuki finally got to his feet, straddled the edge of the bathtub, and stepped into the washing area. Hiding the front of his body, he inched forward and dropped to his knees when he was about twenty centimeters away from her back.

Was this real life? He thought he’d linked out after the meeting ended, but maybe his Neurolinker had been submerged and forced the full dive to continue. With such thoughts in his head, he pinched his thigh, but the current situation did not change.

Firming up his resolve, he stretched his arm out as far as it would go and took the showerhead out of the holder on the wall. After turning the dial to get hot water to come out and checking the temperature, he timidly brought the stream of water to the back in front of him. Countless droplets bounced off the fair skin and glittered in the glow from the panel lights in the ceiling.

As he innocently let the water flow, he heard a voice of complaint.

“Haruyuki, I’d appreciate it if you would wash my back before I turn into a prune.”

“Oh… R-right!” he half said, half shrieked, and turned off the water before picking up the bath sponge with his other hand and foaming it up with soap. He took the sponge in both hands and carefully, ever so carefully, rubbed it against Kuroyukihime’s back.

“Hyaah,” she squealed. “Y-you can do it harder, you know. That tickles.”

He hurried to put more force into the movement. “I-is this okay?”

“Mmm. Perfect.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, he sent the sponge back and forth from right below her black Neurolinker to the top of her hip bone, paying the greatest of care to the job.

“Mmm.” Letting out a purr, Kuroyukihime continued, “This is the first time anyone’s ever washed my back. It does actually feel good.”

“Huh?” He was surprised. “Didn’t Niko do this?”

“Hee-hee! Back then, we weren’t as open with each other yet.”

“I—I guess. But what about your mom or your dad—?” Haruyuki quickly clamped his mouth shut. She had already told him she wasn’t close with her parents. He regretted saying anything, but, well, he couldn’t take it back.

“Perhaps when I was a baby,” she said gently, but also a little sadly when he stiffened up and stopped near her shoulder blades. “But as far back as I can remember, I never took a bath with my mother or my father. I did bathe with my sister until I was eight, but on the day I became her Brain Burst child—a Burst Linker—she told me that from then on, I would have to bathe by myself.”

“… She… did?” Haruyuki started to move the sponge again. But then Kuroyukihime said something unexpected.

“Haruyuki, could you take off my Neurolinker?”

“Huh? …S-sure.” He returned the sponge to the counter before timidly raising his hands and grabbing the piano-black quantum transmission device on the impossibly slender neck with his fingertips.

The act of removing another person’s Neurolinker was the biggest taboo in modern society; it was a serious offense if you didn’t have the person’s consent. Even if it was done as a child’s prank, it would result in a harsh scolding. Heart pounding, he pushed the arms out to either side and slowly pulled it off her neck.

“… I-it’s off.” He offered it to her and she accepted it with a “thanks” before hanging it on the wall hook.

He figured that she was basically telling him to wash her neck, but what she said next was even more unexpected.

“Look very closely at the part of my neck that was under the Neurolinker arm. Is there… anything there?”

“Huh? …Like what?” Blinking in surprise, Haruyuki pulled his face in close to her neck. The straggling hairs plastered bewitchingly to her skin almost blinded him, but he mustered up his willpower and stared at the space between her third and fourth vertebrae—at the strip of skin that was even more devoid of color than the rest of her pale neck.

“Oh… Oh?!” Haruyuki let out a cry, his surprise was so great.

Something like a pale-purple pattern rose up ever so faintly on her snowy skin. No. It wasn’t just a random pattern. It was a bar code. And numbers.

“K-Kuroyukihime…”

“You see it? Eight numbers and a bar code?”

“Yes… What is it?”

Unconsciously, he raised a hand and rubbed the bar code with a finger. But the row of slender lines did not disappear. It didn’t seem to be drawn in ink or anything like that.

“Mmm…” Kuroyukihime twitched, so Haruyuki yanked his hand away as if it were on fire.

“I-I’m sorry! I—I just…”

“No, it’s fine,” she told him. “But listen. It’s not some kind of fashionable tattoo, all right? This was printed on me when I was born. I was told it would disappear when I’m an adult. But it seems that it’s still there…”

“This was printed on you when you were born?” Unable to understand the meaning of these words, Haruyuki simply parroted them back. “You were told… by whom?”

“Mmm. Before that, do you mind if I wash my hair? Thanks for getting my back. Go and warm up in the tub.”

Thus instructed, he nodded and returned to the bath. Even though the water couldn’t have cooled off already, he didn’t feel its warmth even submerged up to his shoulders. The shock of finding the bar code and digits on that pale neck had chilled his limbs to the point of numbness.

While he watched, Kuroyukihime removed the clip from her head and let her hair fall free. After wetting it, she foamed up shampoo in her hands and then massaged it into her hair.

Normally, Haruyuki would never have been able to directly witness her doing something like this; he would have turned around or submerged himself beneath the water. But for whatever reason, he was unable to take his eyes off her for even a second now.

Having finished shampooing, Kuroyukihime carefully rinsed the lather out of her hair, turned off the water, and then massaged in conditioner. She combed this through neatly with a brush and rinsed for the third time. She gathered it all up again and pinned it in place with the clip. Then she sighed before scrubbing her body with the loofah.

The whole time, Haruyuki felt like she was a fairy or even a goddess. But of course, she was neither. Kuroyukihime, after all, was a flesh-and-blood human being. Just like Haruyuki, she ate every day and took showers. A regular girl in just about every respect.

But then what was that bar code about?

Rinsing off the lather, she rose from the stool and looked back. When her eyes met Haruyuki’s, a slightly challenging smile spread across her lips, and she raised a hand and flicked the drops of water on her fingertips at him. He reflexively looked away, and she slid into the hot water of the tub, leaned back against the opposite end, stretched out her long legs, and let out a deep sigh.

“Um. Th-that’s a lot of work, huh?” The water was a cloudy white thanks to the jet nozzles, but even so, Haruyuki took care not to turn his gaze that way as he spoke.

He got an exasperated voice in return. “You do the same thing every day, though.”

“B-but… I just basically scrub my head and I’m done. It’s rough being a girl, huh?”

“Hmm. You’ve learned something.” Smiling once again, Kuroyukihime touched the wall with her left hand. Part of the plastic panel slid away without a sound, and a small compartment appeared. Inside there was a single glass, and a transparent liquid poured into it from a nozzle above.

“Here.” She offered him the glass, the sides of which instantly clouded over. “It’s just water, though.”

“Th-thank you… I’d love some.” He accepted it with both hands and brought it to his lips. The nicely chilled water was so good it was almost intoxicating. Maybe because he was a little dehydrated, he drank the whole glass down in a single gulp before exhaling deeply and returning it to her.

Kuroyukihime filled it again and took a sip or two herself before returning the glass to the compartment. The panel closed as if it had never been there, and the sound of cleaning reached his ears.

“You like the bath?”

“Um.” Haruyuki thought a minute about the sudden question before answering. “About as much as anyone, I guess. I don’t hate it or anything, but sometimes, I do think it’s kind of a hassle.”

“Ha-ha! I suppose boys your age do,” she said. “I actually feel the same.”

“H-huh? The features on this bath are amazing, though. So I just sort of assumed you love them.”

“I don’t hate them. But sitting in the water like this always forces me to recognize the limitations of my real body. The essential nature of a human being is a single tube—the alimentary canal, basically. Limbs, sensory organs, even the brain, they’re nothing more than parts for the efficient operation of that tube,” she told him. “I end up thinking about things like this. Sometimes, I wish I could turn myself inside out and clean every part of me.”

Haruyuki didn’t know how to respond to these words, which seemed strangely desperate for Kuroyukihime. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but she wasn’t talking about her physical appearance. He understood that much at least.

He must have been making an especially pathetic face, because she looked at him and clapped her hands on the water surface.

“Sorry for being weird. The essential nature of human beings is a tube… My older sister told me that when I was little. Honestly. How many years has it been and I’m still stuck on a joke like that. It’s like she cast a spell on me.”

“But I think it’s good that people evolved from creatures with a mouth and an alimentary canal,” Haruyuki replied unthinkingly, and Kuroyukihime raised her eyebrows slightly.

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“I mean, if we were creatures that absorbed nutrients with our entire bodies, we never would’ve developed cooking and stuff,” he said. “In which case, the Nega Nebulus dinner parties would just be, like, everyone getting into a nutrient pool or something.”

“Pfft!” Kuroyukihime burst out laughing. “I can’t beat your imagination. True, spare us that at least. If I’m going to eat, I want it to at least be delicious. Like those squash croquettes and the sandwich I won off you.”

“R-right.”

“Mmm. And lately, I’ve been thinking that my sister’s words might also have a different meaning.”

“A different meaning?” Now it was Haruyuki’s turn to tilt his head to one side.

Kuroyukihime lowered her eyelashes and fell silent for a few seconds, but then finally asked him a question, half murmured. “Haruyuki, do you know the basic theory behind the Neurolinker?”

This was a big leap from the previous topic of conversation, and it took him a few seconds to switch mental gears.

“The basic theory? You mean, the quantum connection… right?” he answered, timidly. “It connects with the user’s brain wirelessly on the quantum level and inputs and outputs sensory information.”

“Mmm,” she agreed. “It’s not generally known, but at the development stage, that quantum connection technology was apparently called ‘soul translation technology.’”

“S-soul trans… lation?” The words were just barely in Haruyuki’s English lexicon. “You mean like translating the human spirit?”

“Exactly.” Kuroyukihime nodded. “‘STLT’ for short. In other words, the Neurolinker is communicating not with human brain cells, but more precisely, the spirit.”

“Th-the spirit… Does that even actually exist?”

“The developers of the STLT believed it does. I only have the roughest knowledge of this myself, but in every cell in the human body, there are these ‘microtubules’—microscopic tube-shaped structures, just like the name suggests, and they’re apparently connected with the shape, maintenance, and movement of cells. Of course, these microtubules are also in the neurons in the brain. They have coherent light particles inside of them. The decoherence brought about by those photons is itself human consciousness, the soul.”

Haruyuki could only understand a tenth of what she was saying. But the concept of light cohering in the brain easily created an image for some reason, and he stared into space in a daze. He suddenly felt like this image was connected to something, and he gasped. But before that something could take shape, Kuroyukihime went on.

“Sorry. I got a little off track. At any rate, the ‘tubule’ of the ‘microtubules’ in these cells means a ‘tiny tube’ in English.”

“A tube,” Haruyuki repeated.

“Yes. And given that, perhaps when my sister said the essential nature of human beings is a tube, she didn’t mean the alimentary canal, but rather the microtubules in the brain. Although that doesn’t change my estimation of that girl.”

“Oh… Maybe,” he muttered, and then was at a loss for what to say next. But urged on by her eyes, he resolved himself and asked, “Was it maybe your sister who told you the bar code on your neck would disappear when you grew up?”

“Oh! How sharp of you. You’re exactly right.” Kuroyukihime smiled and brought a hand up with a splsh to touch the nape of her neck. “I suppose if I’ve told you this much… I might as well tell you everything.”

She lowered her hand before looking straight at him on the opposite side of the tub. He’d been trying not to look right at her this whole time, but sensing that he could not avoid her gaze in this moment at least, Haruyuki stared back into her ebony eyes.

“The first generation of personal-use Neurolinkers came on the market in April 2031… Two years before you were born and one year before I was.”

Kuroyukihime glanced over at her device, still hanging on the hook on the opposite wall.

“Two companies developed the first generation—the largest general electrical manufacturer Lect and the mid-sized net device manufacturer Kamura. I don’t know myself why the STL technology that forms the basis of the Neurolinker found practical application at two companies at the same time. But while Lect stopped at using the STLT in its Neurolinkers, Kamura was more ambitious. Using a super technology to decode the human soul, they tried to reach into the domain of the gods.”

“‘Domain… of the gods’?” he repeated.

“Haruyuki, if you could read and write all of the information comprising the human soul, don’t you think you would be able to realize something more than an interface with that technology?”

“More than an interface… Um, so you mean…” While his brain had every gear whirring toward decoding this excessively difficult topic, a single word fell from his lips. “Duplication?”

His own imaginings sent a shiver of fear up his spine, but he didn’t try to stop his mouth.

“If a person’s brain is a medium… then you could load someone’s soul and post it to someone else’s brain?”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Kuroyukihime also looked pale somehow, although she was soaking in hot water. “If it were possible to duplicate the soul… But to actually carry that out would be equivalent to murder. The mind of the person it was copied to would be overwritten and destroyed. And it seems that not even Kamura could go that far. But by even producing the copy medium, they tried to smash through that wall.”

“Medium… So you mean a mechanical memory device that could save the soul in place of the real brain?” Haruyuki said, convinced that that was the only possibility.

But Kuroyukihime shook her head slowly. “No. Kamura created a person. The technological hurdles were likely not that high. They were already making practical use of artificial wombs in 2030.”

“B-but even if there was the artificial womb, you can’t make a person from nothing,” he protested. “We learned that in biology.”

“You’re quite right. But as long as you have a man to supply the sperm and a woman to supply the egg, you can raise an embryo fertilized outside the body in an artificial womb. Even at present, this is done as a matter of course as a treatment for infertility.”

“I—I guess it is,” Haruyuki agreed quietly, only to shake his head quickly back and forth. “But I mean, overwriting the brain of a baby born like that with someone else’s soul… No one would allow that, right? The original baby’s soul would disappear!”

“Mm-hmm. But Kamura—no, my parents—did it anyway.”

A violent tremor ran through his body before his brain could process what she was saying. Clenching both hands tightly in the hot water, he muttered hoarsely, “Y-your… parents…? What…?”

“In kanji, Kamura is written ‘kami’ and ‘mura,’ or ‘village of the gods.’ My mother’s family name. My mother was the daughter of the Kamura Company owner, and my father was a researcher there. Even after they got married, they both remained involved in STL technology research, and they ended up getting their hands dirty with a prohibited experiment. Duplication of the human soul…”

Haruyuki’s eyes shot open wide, and his vision wavered with a purple afterimage. A small bar code and numbers inscribed on pale skin.

“Kuroyukihime… Kuroyukihime.” Muttering almost incoherently, Haruyuki moved toward her in the tub. But her toes gently pushed against his knee and stopped his forward progress.

“I know now. I wasn’t born from my mother’s stomach. I was an embryo raised in an artificial womb after being fertilized outside the body—a so-called machine child. The term’s discriminatory, so you’re not supposed to use it, but there’s no issue with the child in question using it.”

She chuckled bitterly and lifted her hands out of the water. Staring at her palms like they were unfamiliar creatures, she continued her shocking confession.

“But although I might be a machine child, there’s no doubt that genetically, I am my parents’ daughter. I was equipped with a Neurolinker while I was still in the artificial womb and soul duplication measures were implemented. The bar code on my neck is a vestige of that. Meaning that on the soul level, I have no connection with my parents whatsoever.”

“So… So then,” Haruyuki said in a voice so faint he himself almost couldn’t hear it. “So then your soul, your mother and your father…? It has to be somewhere, doesn’t it? Your real soul…” He gasped. “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that your parents aren’t your real parents.”

“No, it’s fine,” she told him. “I’ve basically never felt any familial love from the parents of the Shirokane family. I’m grateful that they’ve allowed me to live without any kind of physical want, at least, but for them, I’m, at most, just an experiment. They only yelled at me not to be so fussy because the menu had been calculated to specific nutritional requirements.”

Kuroyukihime returned one hand to the water. She turned her other around in the air and tapped the water surface with her fingertips like she was playing the piano, generating several small ripples that spread out and disappeared.

“I don’t know where the soul my brain was overwritten with came from. But I think most likely, it wasn’t that of an adult or a child, but of a baby. There wouldn’t be enough capacity in an infant brain to write all the information of an adult soul.”

“A baby’s… soul?”

“This is all nothing more than supposition. For instance, they tried to transplant into me the soul of a baby that died soon after it was born. Or some such.”

“Um, did you never ask your parents about this?”

Kuroyukihime shook her head gently. “The Shirokane parents… Most likely, they don’t know that I know the secret of my birth. I dug up all of this information on my own after I was given the SSS Order.”

“Tr-triple?”

“Oh, you don’t know about that?” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll explain it later, but for now let me continue. I snuck into the main system at Kamura headquarters and tried to get as much information as I could about the experiment fifteen years ago. But almost all the data had been deleted. I pieced together whatever information I could dredge up in the corners of the server and managed to get a grasp of the general overview. But it’s full of holes, and the final objective of the experiment is still unclear. I can’t even begin to guess at where my soul came from. My sister was the only one I turned to in search of the truth, but all she told me was what I said before about the mark disappearing when I’m grown up.”

“That’s it, huh?” Haruyuki hung his head.

Kuroyukihime patted his knee, still up against her leg. “No need for you to lose heart,” she assured him. “It’s not as though I don’t have hope myself. It might be meager, but I do have a clue.”

“A clue?” He lifted his face to look at her.

“Mmm. You saw them, yes? The eight digits inscribed next to the bar code on my neck.”

“Yes. 20320930… right?”

“Do you know what they mean?”

He gaped at her and was about to ask what she meant when it finally hit him. This sequence could have been nothing other than a date. So then it would have been September 30.

“Oh… I-is that your birthday?”

“I wanted you to get that about three seconds faster.” Kuroyukihime pouted a little, so Haruyuki shrank into himself.

“Sorry,” he said. “But how is your birthday a clue?”

“According to the records, I was in the artificial womb for thirteen months. Despite the fact that there were no developmental failures… And I also don’t understand the intent in going to the trouble of inscribing my birthday on me. In other words, this date must have some special meaning. For some reason, they chose September thirtieth to remove me from the tank.”

“September thirtieth,” Haruyuki muttered. “Is that a bank holiday or something?”

“Apparently, it’s Walnut Day,” she answered with a serious face. “Also, Crane Day.”

“W-walnut… Crane… Neither seem like they’d be connected…”

“Not really.” She nodded and then giggled. “But I’m sure to come across this date sometime, somewhere. And then I’ll understand the history of the soul written into me. I just have a feeling…”

Her smile was innocent, and thus it seemed so ephemeral that it might fade and disappear at any moment. Unconsciously, Haruyuki gently removed his knee from the leg it was pressing against and moved another twenty centimeters forward to clasp her hand tightly in both of his own.

“Kuroyukihime, you might have been raised in an artificial womb, you might have been part of an STLT experiment… but that was before you were born. From the time you were born until this moment, you’ve eaten meals, slept like a log, studied hard, exercised a lot, cried and laughed a whole bunch, and created your own self—that’s who you are. Me and Master Fuko, Shinomiya, Akira, Taku, Chiyu, Niko, Pard… What so many people love is the Kuroyukihime of right now,” he told her earnestly.

She didn’t say anything for a while, just cocked her head slightly to one side. Suddenly, her wide, obsidian eyes blinked repeatedly. A sharp light glinted there—the steam of the bath or sweat or…

Hand still in his, Kuroyukihime leaned forward and wrapped her arm around Haruyuki’s neck to yank him closer. In the hot water, skin against skin, he no longer knew where the boundary between them was.

“… Thanks,” came a faint voice in his ear. “I’m okay… Because you’re always here to anchor me like this.”

“… Right.” That was all he could say in reply, but he felt his feelings had been conveyed well enough. He closed his eyes and desperately tried to keep whatever threatened to spill out contained behind his eyelids.

* * *

While they were bathing, Kuroyukihime had put the things Haruyuki was wearing in the laundry. Which meant that she had touched his underpants, which gave him a start. But she simply replied, mysteriously, “This’ll make things tough in the future.”

They had both been in the bath for too long, and the blood was rushing to their heads, so they cooled down for a bit, drinking chilled barley tea, and the clock showed 10:30 PM. But he couldn’t let the message to his mother be a lie, so rubbing sleepy eyes, he tackled his summer homework. Although he made better progress than he’d expected since Kuroyukihime was there next to him, offering advice, he finally reached his work limit at 11:45.

Haruyuki had been thinking he would get Kuroyukihime to sleep tucked away in her bed, with the beanbag chair in the living room being plenty for him. But she brought out blankets from the neighboring room and laid him down on the chair before setting herself down beside him like it was the most natural thing in the world. He assumed there was no way he’d be able to sleep like that, but that turned out to be his last thought of July 21. The Sandman visited him before he knew it, and tucked up against Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki was swallowed up by a gentle darkness.

The next day, Monday, July 22, 2047—7:00 AM on the second day of summer break—Haruyuki woke up to the sound of mail arriving.