Dark Matter
A Touhou Project Fanfic in the Danmakuverse by Achariyth
Hidden inside a basement recording booth beneath a steel and glass box building at Tokyo University, Sumireko Usami yawned and rested her head against her computer desk. Ignoring the flashing scarlet warning from the On Air signal lamp on the wall, she set her glasses by the phone switchboard near her head. "Just fifteen more minutes, Mom."
"I'm not your mother and the first commercial break is in fifteen minutes," Ruri Himeyuri called out over the intercom. Separated from the recording booth by a pane of glass, the slight recording engineer reigned over the upcoming radio show from her perch in the sound booth. "Dead air won't pay for our tuitions."
Sumireko waved away Ruri's concern before melting against her desk. A howl of shrill feedback squealed from the recording booth's speakers. The dark haired girl leapt to her feet and fumbled for her glasses.
The On Air lamp flickered one last time before bathing the booth in a steady red glow. After a short explosion of clicks and pops from the speakers, the intro to Sumeriko's radio show started playing.
"From Godzilla's Playground on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, good morning, good evening, wherever you may be. Welcome to Tokyo University's most listened-to late night talk show, Dark Matter."
As the recording of a communications student pressed into the service of Tokyo University's only late night talk show rattled off the phone numbers for the call-in lines, Sumireko spun around and stuck her tongue out at her sound engineer. Ruri laughed and pointed Sumireko back to her chair, the red light giving her elfin features a devilish cast.
"Slavedriver," Sumireko mouthed. She took her seat and placed a set of mammoth tin-can headphones over her ears. She flipped the page on the daily calendar and groaned. For every show Sumireko hosted about magic, telepathy, and lost civilizations like the Turtles of Pararakelse, Dark Matter needed two shows on UFOs, government cover-ups, and cryptid sightings, complete with the cringe-inducing refrain of "Aliens!", to pay the bills. Only engineering students would be calling in tonight.
"…and now, here is your host, Sumireko Usami."
She unmuted her headset microphone and read from her prompt. "Three years ago, the space station greenhouse TORIFUNE malfunctioned, flying from low earth orbit to Lagrangian Point 4, some 384,000 kilometers away from both the earth and the moon. At the same time, the crew vanished, leaving what should have been Japan's lush green ark floating derelict through the night sky. The newspapers have all told their version of the story over the years, but tonight, on this Phone-in Friday, I want to hear from all you True Believers on what really happened out there in space."
Sumireko rolled her eyes as Ruri added a deepening echo to the word "space." Glancing down at the switchboard, she saw a constellation of phone line light up. Picking one at random, she read from the display. "Tokyo University, you're on the air."
A syrupy voice bubbled from the speakers. "Hi, I'm Karin-"
"No real names. You never know who might be listening."
"Can I be called Spooky Girl?"
"We do have two others calling in by that name," Sumireko said.
"They'll just have to choose new nicknames."
The radio host stifled a giggle. "So, Spooky Girl, what's your take?"
"It's obvious. Aliens."
Sumireko rolled her eyes and waited for more. After thirty seconds of silence, she cleared her throat. "That's it?"
"It'd be more fun if it were ghosts, but I wouldn't expect a ghost to know what happened to a space station. It would make for an amazing tale for your ghost story show, though. When's the next one?"
"Next week."
"Oh. I'll call back then. I've got the perfect story. No space stations, I promise."
"I'm looking forward to it." The twintailed host toggled her switchboard. "Hello, Lake Suwa, you're on Dark Matter with Sumireko Usami."
"Good evening, Sumireko. Call me Inari. I'm a long time listener and a first time caller," a matronly woman said. Sumireko could hear pages rustling in the background as though Inari was correcting papers while she spoke. "You are right not to listen to the newspapers."
"Tell me why." Sumireko steeled herself for the certain cry of "Aliens!"
"Look at the delta-V and the distances. Numbers don't lie," growled Inari.
Sumireko shuddered. The respite from the engineering dorms had been short lived. "I hope you're not asking me to check your work, because I'm not a physics major, thank the gods."
"Fine. Let's start with a simple claim, that TORIFUNE was moved to the L-4 point for the purposes of recovery from earth."
"That is where the astronomers found it."
"True, but for recovery? With what?" Inari gave a sharp laugh like a fox's bark. "TORIFUNE is as far from both the earth and the moon as they are from each other. It's been forty years since humanity had the capability to fly that far, and the Apollo program is now nothing more than a museum piece. Soyuz and the Space Shuttle could only reach TORIFUNE when it was in low earth orbit. There is no recovery at L-4 possible without designing a new spacecraft from scratch.
"Furthermore, there wasn't enough fuel on TORIFUNE to move the station the 604,442 kilometers to the L-4 point, much less in a single day. You'd need a rocket the size of the station to do that, and you'd kill all life aboard in the process. Since the camera feeds from the onboard greenhouses still send back pictures of the plants and animals, we know that didn't happen.
As Inari lectured on, Sumireko jotted down notes on scratch paper. Math wasn't her talent, so she would need to copy tonight's show off of Ruri's hard drive so she could have Renko check the claims. Her cousin ate up math problems as complex as the ones Inari described. "Those numbers say a lot."
"The numbers don't lie," Inari said.
"Do they say who moved TORIFUNE to its new orbit?" Sumireko waited for the inevitable refrain.
"No." Inari sighed. "You can't tell that from the numbers alone. But the L-4 point is a hint. Not only is it too far away for anyone on Earth to reach, it's one of two points in all of space where a space station can remain over the same point on the moon's surface without drifting."
An emerald light flashed atop her switchboard. Sumireko looked over her shoulder towards the glass window that divided the recording booth from the sound engineer's domain. Inside, Ruri held up two fingers. The talk show hostess nodded and reached towards her switchboard. "You've given us a lot to think over, Inari. Thank you for calling." She toggled the switchboard to line two and read the identifier. "Mount Yatsugatake, you're on Dark Matter."
"Sumireko, darling, it's Cherry," a husky voice crooned into Sumireko's earpiece.
Ruri pointed to the clock and mouthed, "Keep her talking."
Smiling, the radio host flashed a thumb's up at her engineer. The coquette was a favorite of the audience and Sumireko alike. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you tonight. You usually don't call in during our space shows."
"I couldn't bear to think that you might replace me with that vixen that was just on the phone," Cherry cooed.
"Wait, you know Inari?"
"Honey, I get to meet everybody." As Cherry giggled, the switchboard filled with calls. Between shows, Dark Matter's audience flooded the suggestion line with demands for callers to talk to Cherry while she was on. Sumireko and Ruri were adamant in their refusal. People dialed in to listen to Cherry vamp her way across the air waves. Horny engineering students and drunken frat frats stumbling over the latest pick-up line would tank the show's rating faster than a night of commercial reruns. "She should know better than to slip her leash like that."
"Have you met someone who knows what happened to TORIFUNE?"
"Several of the darlings. If you do meet them, don't look in their eyes."
"Let me guess." Sumireko braced herself. "Aliens?"
"No," Cherry chirped, "moon bunnies."
Sumireko cast a glance at her calendar. It was indeed the night of the full moon. "Aren't they the same?"
"Hardly, dear. The only saucers those precious girls use are for tea. Haven't I told you about my visit to the moon?"
"For a month with your gardener, right?"
"You do remember. Excellent! But maybe I should retell it for all of the True Believers listening?"
"Maybe next time." Sumireko ignored the pounding against the recording booth's glass. "We'll make an entire show out of it." That would mollify Ruri. The advertisers would pay five times the going rate just to have Cherry simper her way through the phonebook on the air. And after Ruri finished her newest extortionate shakedown of the advertisers, they would pay six times more.
"It's a date," Cherry purred.
"Looking forward to it." Sumireko coughed and tried to hide her burning cheeks in her hand. She cleared her throat. "Tell me about these moon bunnies. What do they look like?"
"Like you or me, but with long white jackrabbit ears."
Sumireko shook her head, trying to banish an image from her mind. "TORIFUNE was stolen by Playboy Bunnies?"
"Nothing that crass, dear. Trust me, you'd understand if you saw one. Just don't look in her eyes."
"You've said that already."
"I always forget if I've said that. But then again, I forget a lot after the moon bunnies visit for some reason," Cherry said.
"When did you last see them?"
"Last evening, while I was watching the sunset underneath my cherry tree. Such delightful girls. I did mention not to look in their red eyes, right? Anyway, after a stiff shot of spirits, their leader started bragging. You see, the Moon is a garden, and the moon rabbits need new plants. You humans were so kind to ship up a special delivery to your neighbors. Who could resist that opportunity?"
"Why didn't they just take the station to the moon? What's so special about the L-4 point?"
"You know, she didn't say, but I think the answer to the first has something to do with purity. As for L-4, didn't you listen to that vixen? That's the only place where you can park it overhead on the Moon and have it stay there, which makes it easier for the rabbits to travel to it. With proper care, the seeds and cuttings from TORIFUNE will last for millennia."
Sumireko whistled as she mulled over Cherry's revelation. "Well, an interplanetary heist makes more sense than most of the stories I hear on the show. So what did the rabbits do with the missing crew?"
"No, silly girl, the rabbits were the crew-" A shrill whistle on the phone line cut Cherry off. Sumireko flinched and covered her ears, forgetting about her headphones.
"Seiran, terminate the phone call from T-7," an aristocratic woman ordered over the phone.
The line went dead.
As the disconnected tone pulsed like a heartbeat in her headphones, a wild-eyed Sumireko caught her breath. "Cherry? Please call back. Let us know that you're all right." She hung up the call and tapped the "return phone call" button on her switchboard. Once again, the monotone disconnected signal rang out into the night. "True believers, I don't know what just happened, but we'll try to get Cherry back during this commercial break."
She muted her microphone. As the red On Air lamp faded away, Sumireko unplugged her headphones and charged into the sound booth. "Ruri, did you hear what just happened?" A squeal escaped her lips as she froze in the doorway.
Behind the soundboard and laptop of the sound engineer's desk sat not the petite wunderkind Ruri, but an athletic schoolgirl in an amber crop top, shorts, and a battered newsboy's hat. The stranger chewed on a long wooden skewer as she pried the hard drive out of the computer with a screwdriver. Two white rabbit ears hung out of her cap like twintails.
Cherry was right. A chill ran up Sumireko's spine.
A willowy woman in a white dress stepped out from behind the door. A white derringer with bunny ear sights rested on her hip. Sumireko shrank away from her, for, like the yellow stranger clutching her prize, the lavender-tressed woman sported a pair of snowy bunny ears, like a March hare's. The white rabbit grabbed Sumeriko by the wrist and pulled her inside the sound booth.
The door slammed shut behind her.
Sumireko clenched her eyes shut, just as Cherry advised. "Where's Ruri?"
The white rabbit shrugged. "She had a sudden errand to attend to."
"At three in the morning?"
"She didn't say before she left."
"She's going to be furious that you're messing with her computer."
"I don't think she'll remember." The willowy woman caressed the radio host's cheek. "Neither will you. Try to remember to leave the hidden things alone. If you can."
Sumireko pulled away from the electric touch, wide-eyed. She looked up at the white rabbit and whimpered. Despite the warnings, despite her will, Sumireko grew mesmerized with the woman's glowing red eyes.
Author's notes:
ZUN put a lot of time into getting the astronomy of TORIFUNE and Trojan Green Asteroid right, even down to correct distances, to the point that a reader could figure out that the station had been moved to one of only two specific points in space. The rocket science, however, leaves a little more to be desired…
Karin Sasamori and Ruri Himeyuri are borrowed from ToHeart2 by Aquaplus.