Author's Note
After taking a short break from my longer Higurashi Fanfiction, I decided to write this brief one-shot. Will this have any influence on my other fanfic? No, not really, but it'll contain a single cameo appearance that will tie this Fanfiction to the other one (since I have to name the OC at the end something), but this story won't have any bearing on that one. Note that there are spoilers in this story up to and including EP7. No EP8 spoilers anywhere.
Also, just to make setting the mood for this story a bit more in depth, the bulk of this story was written with Ballade Continuer from the Umineko OST playing in the background. Just figured I'd throw that out there.
Also, if you're confused by the Sci-Fi sub genre I labeled this with, then I don't blame you. At least until you get to the midway point of the third paragraph.
Anyway, now with that taken care of, please enjoy the first and last installment of this.
Locked. Locked, with no hole for a key. Locked, with no window to peer through. Locked, with no door open. Locked, locked away, in the deep, faceless, and most prevalent of all empty room. But such a place could not exist, correct? Perhaps it was not empty, perhaps it was not faceless. Perhaps there were simply too many things, too many faces, to be able to understand what the room really looked like. Perhaps there were many doors. Perhaps there were many holes for a key. Perhaps there were many windows to peer through. But was such a place possible either? To the trapped man, it was quite the former, simply an absolutely vacant room- an impossibly vacant room.
His brain quite literally booted up as what he thought could have been human eyes that his visual feed was connected to opened to find nothing but the purple void. He tried to understand the situation he was in. But in this room it was as if his human brain could not properly function. He didn't know if he was standing or sitting, nor did he know exactly where he was at that precise moment, on the coordinate grid within the room, if he was even anywhere in this room at all. He could not even recall his name at the precise moment he came alive, and doing so could take up more energy then he might have had.
It took him a very long time to so much as process a single notion about what this place was. It could have taken him hours or even days to so much as think in this room that was so unaffected by time that, coupled with the reduced state his brain was seemingly trapped in, made it impossible to count seconds or minutes. He would have to recall what time was before he could calculate it. His mind was about as empty- or as overflowing- as this room. It was as if he were a computer that had consumed all of its memory and desperately needed to reset its RAM before it could so much as read a single byte of code. This was likely the best way to describe it, as his brain was essentially much like a computer now.
Was this the cost of being forced into a place that no human being should ever be allowed to cross into? Or was this place simply impossible for him to comprehend? Hours became seconds, and days became minutes, or perhaps the seconds became hours and the minutes became days. The thought lingered in his brain until eventually he came to a simple, yet important realization.
This place that he could not understand. This place that made his human mind collapse from what might have been the human equivalent of an overload or shut down. A place that no human should ever be allowed to enter.
Even though he couldn't bring himself to process his own face or name or even what exactly a 'room' was, he found he could understand one thing.
Was this, perhaps, her heart? A place consumed by everything and nothing at the same time? Could this have been the reality behind 'one, yet many'?
But who was she? What was a heart? What had led him to that line of reasoning? He spent what appeared to be an endless amount of time trying to process his line of thought. Eventually, what the human mind would process as five months, twenty five days, fifteen hours, twenty four minutes and nineteen seconds, he gathered all the information and files that he needed.
Of course, that period of five months, twenty five days, fifteen hours, twenty four minutes and nineteen seconds that would be considered hell to a properly functioning human being didn't stack anywhere near the six years of suffering she, the witch in gold, was forced to sit through.
Yes. He knew it was so. He knew where he was, and why he was here. This was the heart of the Golden Witch, Beatrice- or rather the source of the witch, who was also the source of this room, and the endless number of things that he was sure resided in it. And he was here, because this is the type of hell that was deemed suitable for him.
Indeed, such a hell was suitable for such a man as he was. The same man who'd sinned on a level that made his sin far worse than murder.
The simple and clear truth was that the reason why he was trapped here and the reason why the room was so inconceivable went much further back than he did. He didn't even know her when it all began, long before the October of 1986, and long before the six years of one thousand years of pain the begotten and miserable Ushiromiya servant Yasuda was forced to experience.
His mind began to move once again. In standard human time- the next year, five months, sixteen days, twenty two hours, forty minutes and fifty seven seconds would be spent processing all of the required information that would be needed in order to process the long string of memories and factual statements that composed this line of thought. It would take twice the amount of time it took to process the information to order the most active part of his conscious brain to read and transcribe it. Out of the 3.6 terabytes that were apparently needed to compose a single human being's intellectual mass of electrical signals that in the English language was defined as a brain, he needed to accumulate approximately 1.4 terabytes of that information in his reduced state to properly "express" his memory's process. One third of the active ten percent of the human mind was required to properly express the reality behind a single thought- the reality behind a single woman and her ill fate. The emotions and emotion based human thought process batch file set to run multiple aspects of the human psyche that he didn't have in execution reach just yet in themselves took up most of this information, but the older the memory the larger the file-size. But the largest file he could produce, accumulating approximately 419.86 gigabytes was the file labeled "". And upon extracting the entirety of that emotion file he understood exactly why.
When he met her she was already Shannon, or perhaps she had been Shannon long before she even knew she was. She was the most responsible of the servants. She was the most demure, yet the kindest and most outgoing of them all in his opinion. At the time he just believed that they were destined for each other, at least in his fantasizing mind. She was simply the perfect image of a woman he could produce, although in the end he never would have known exactly why the reality of it all was so horribly different from what he had believed it to be- until now.
Shannon was born as a result of Yasuda's inability to hold together from the constant verbal and mental abuse she took from the rest of the servants. She was, put bluntly, the absolute worst maid anyone could have ever hoped to meet. Her skills were so below average that it took the intervening of one Chiyo Kumasawa to prevent her from emotionally collapsing entirely. But in the process she generated the witch of vanishing objects, Beatrice, based off of the island's mystery of the witch of the forest who went by the same name.
Eventually Yasuda decided that it would be best to abandon her other delusion, Shannon, and became the witch herself. Of course now Shannon, Yasuda's image of the perfect woman she had wanted to be, was left to live on her own. Eventually, as time went on, she became more and more of a person, and eventually fell in love. She fell in love with that man(whose name he had apparently erased long ago), the fool who broke a precious promise to her that, six years later, on the fourth of the October of 1986, would come back to haunt him.
This is where he, the person transcribing this information, came into play. He, George Ushiromiya, interfered with Shannon's self imposed trial from god. He essentially forced his own feelings upon a broken woman, and in the end led her so far off the edge of despair that she was forced to rely on yet another personality to care for her in a way that was different from the ever painful feeling of love in the form of the boy servant, Kanon, who she had created to save herself from the pain that man had left her.
He was a fool, oh, such a fool. He thought he knew everything about her. He believed she was the same as any other woman in the world. He couldn't tell the difference, and he only saw her for what he saw, and not for what she may or may not have been desperately signaling toward him. It was likely something akin to please, leave me alone. I don't want to suffer anymore.
But how could he have known she had a body that could not love? How could he have known that trying to convince someone that he was truly and adult and would treat them as atypically as a man would ever treat a woman could result in something akin to telling someone to go kill themselves- or in this case, everyone around them?
Perhaps if he were smart enough- or in this case old enough- to have been able to understand those silent cries for help, then he would have.
But it was too late, and while he remained completely ignorant of it all, those silent cries for help turned into a deafening howl of vengeance.
At first he wanted to blame Jessica, who fell in love with Kanon. But her love for him was legitimate, while George's love for Shannon was far more artificial. After all, it was all a simulation he'd concocted in order to get her to fall in love with him. It had been a mesh of stereotypes and sugar coated statements that he believed would work on anyone. He originally believed that such a poorly strung together set of ideas and methods would ever work. If it had been directed at any other woman in the world then perhaps they would have failed and he would have given up. But poor Shannon, as broken as she was given her multiple personalities, escaped to George's flimsy idea of a relationship, if only to escape the one that she never had with that man. And so he continued onward, never so much as glancing toward her to see how she was doing.
In the end, he was to blame for most of it. Perhaps if he had stayed out of everything and let that man return to her, even if it was six years too late, then everything would have been avoided. But he knew nothing, compared to what he knew now.
The man who abandoned her was to blame. He once thought that he could have shifted all the blame onto his shoulders, but that was before he realized his own imperfection.
He was the one who made everything into what it was. That man was just a child back then. He couldn't have been held responsible for his actions, could he? But George believed that he who wanted to be adult at the time. And so he was the one who was responsible.
Now, in this world that was composed of that woman's heart, he could finally reflect on all of it. He could finally see the flaws in his own existence, and with the knowledge he now possessed, he could realize just how evil he had been in the eyes of that poor girl- or rather, the eyes of the woman behind the woman. The witch in gold- the witch who carried out those murders.
Or so he wanted to believe. He knew that the witch was not responsible. Yasuda had been motivated to do so, but instead it was one of his coveted status of adult that had done the deed. But who was it? Surely, he knew.
Since he already had made ready most of the information necessary to register the who, the how, and the why of the evident mystery, he only needed to discard the non-essential memory files or at least cut them down. He decided that the bulk of the information regarding his own mother was not important, and chose to erase the bulk of it from the memory files. Of course as he did the file labeled "" grew 141561 bytes in size every second for, in standard human time, around one hundred thousand seconds. He understood what this meant but chose to disregard it. Now all he had to do was draw as many memory files related to everyone outside of his immediate family. This entire process, in standard human time, took roughly six months, fourteen days, twenty hours, fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds.
He managed to find the last few memory files that he brain had stored before he had apparently died. Just from one of the clips he'd found, he could pull up all the information that he'd made available and compare it to the clip at the same time. He quickly dumped the unnecessary clips and ran the logic batch file, which took roughly two days to fully execute.
And then he knew. He knew who the person was. The emotion files all increased and decreased in size at a random pace as he mulled over what he saw.
Shannon died…Because of…
It was too much for him to tolerate- the emotion files were exceeding their limit and he was close to running out of even his backup memory. Relative to humans, this was akin to nearly passing out from shock.
He dumped the remaining files and latched onto the output logic file that he prompted his brain to label "" and quickly backed out of everything but the core emotion files and his more recent memory files.
Everything was his fault, wasn't it? He had the chance. He had the ability to stop the killings. He had the opportunity and he'd failed to take it.
Even now…I'm still such a child…A scared, pitiful child…
Just then the world around him shook violently. He wasn't sure what was going on but he could feel everything around him like some earthquake was passing straight through where he was. Was he being rejected from this place? He wouldn't blame anyone who would want him to disappear from that place- he himself wanted nothing but to disappear. Was Shannon rejecting him? This was her heart, after all.
"…" He still couldn't produce any sort of sound. He didn't know where he physically was, and as such could not figure out where his body or in this case his mouth would be and as such couldn't direct the 564.2 gigabyte voice file to render any sound. He could have been completely fragmented, with various parts of his body scattered about this impossibly vacant room. He might not have had any eyes to begin with, now that the logic batch file was in full effect and the thought crossed his mind.
But he suddenly realized. He could read that file, even though he hadn't been searching for it. It was practically instantaneous.
He then realized that the earthquake had pulled his mind out of that reduced state. He could think clearly now, and the files had become mere thoughts once more.
And then he suddenly was hit not with just the core emotions he'd left accessible- but every emotion he had all at the same time. It was as if he were a normal human again.
And then he received the full psychological impact that came with the tampering he'd done practically unconsciously with his memories to save space.
…No…Mother? Why can't I…Why can't I remember….
I should know what you look like…No, I have to remember you…
Sayo…? After everything I've done I can't remember your face either?
No, this isn't happening! What is…?
If he could have made a sound, he would have screamed. Now that his brain's electrical signals had gone from a usage percentage of .01% to the human standard of 10%, everything rushed at him like a train.
Thousands of thoughts, emotions, and memories, all suddenly pouring into his brain. His heightened state of shock didn't improve the situation. He felt a tremendous amount of pain as his brain seemed to re-format itself due to a lack of space and the execution of too many 'files' at the same time. He had gone into a state of overload.
Their faces all flashed before his eyes- his entire family, before the disappeared one by one. And at the last moment, the faces of Shannon and that man both appeared before him.
No-No-No-No, please, don't go! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Don't leave me!
But they vanished as well, along with all the others. And he forgot everything. His family, his parents, even Yasuda- every aspect of himself, sans his very identity and name, was completely erased.
As everything slowed down and he came back online, he realized something else as he quickly tried to determine what had happened to him. As the core of his brain reformatted, his internal clock was once again operational. He could comprehend time as a normal human being once more. So he would feel each passing second for all eternity, assuming that he could even survive in a place like this for that long.
No, this is wrong! This is unfair! What did I ever do-
And at that moment, what was left of his identity and his past that had been forever burned into his now incredibly scarce memory.
Six years of one thousand years of pain.
Certainly, whatever eternity that he would be forced through, no matter how blazing the hell he would be trapped in-
It would never amount to that woman's suffering. She had even welcomed him into her heart like this, and for that, prior to his reformatting he had been genuinely grateful. He should have been in hell, but instead he was in the heart of a woman he had destroyed.
And so he would endure, for that long eternity. Because it was what he deserved in the end.
But then, after what he believed to have been at least thirty or forty years later, the impossibly vacant room filled to the brim with a strong white light that blinded him.
Before him, he could read two words: Visual Feed. Underneath them a small red light was displayed, but in a matter of seconds it flickered green.
And then his eyes opened. His sight was extremely blurry, most likely because he wasn't wearing his glasses, but in a matter of moments he realized that he didn't need them as his vision focused on the room around him.
Unlike the impossibly vacant room, this room was covered with pure white walls, adorned with various pieces of medical equipment. He realized that he was behind what appeared to be some sort of large glass tube. He looked downward and found a roughly medium-height man in a lab coat standing there before him.
"I don't believe it." He practically whispered, apparently dumbstruck by George's sudden awakening.
"…Ah…" He made a sound. The man suddenly moved into action, and after pressing several buttons on the console in front of him the tube was lifted and the large amount of water that George didn't even know was inside with him poured out into the drainage area beneath him.
"…Can you understand me? I'm speaking Japanese. Do you understand Japanese?" the man spoke.
"…Y…Ye…Yes…I under…" It was still very difficult for him to speak given his current condition. Apparently he'd been breathing water.
"Don't speak if you don't need to. Now, do you know what year and time it is currently? Or better yet, can you tell me what day you last remember being active on? You can type the numbers on the wall."
George knew that he shouldn't have been able to remember, but he knew exactly what to input into the number pad that was attached to the nearby wall of the now glassless tube. He tried to reach with what he thought were his arms but was unable to make any sort of movement. The numbers were still fresh in his brain, and apparently the key pad could understand his thoughts.
October 5th, 1986
That was what the pad displayed.
"Good…For future reference, the current date is December 25th, 2023. We almost lost hope, since you came online at some point during your hibernation. You did a real number on yourself. Luckily we kept a backup of your brain on a hard drive…Not that you should know anything about modern technology. After all, you've been out for quite a few decades."
"…I…Where a-a-am…"
"Oh, of course….You're at the Tokyo Research and Enrichment Center. You've been here for quite a few decades like I've said, SR-461."
"…Geo-Geor-George…Ca-Ca-Call me…"
"Ah, right. Your name is George Ushiromiya, it's good that you remember that…You see it's quite a miracle that you're here with me in this room today, George… Re-animation is about as experimental as medical procedures can get...You must know by now. We gave you all the information we had on the incident and- well, a bit more than what we had." The man still seemed to be a bit bewildered by the fact that George had woken.
"…I know…Y-Ye-Yes…"
George's optical receptors-although he should be calling them eyes at this point- suddenly grew wider as he suddenly remembered something.
"…Why am I….Why am I…Here? Why am I…Alive….?" His basic speech patterns were returning to him.
"Ah yes. The question of the day. You see, George… You must know that there was an explosion on the island that destroyed all the evidence of the murders, correct? All that was recovered was the jaw of Maria Ushiromiya, your cousin."
"..Yes, I'm aware…." George continued to hiss.
"It was a miracle that we found you, but…I suppose that you should see for yourself."
The large screen on the wall behind him lit up, with a live feed of a small, spherical object with four large packs of wires seeping out of it that was suspended from a large crane above it, with what appeared to be a human head attached to the top.
It took George a few moments to realize that this was a live feed of none other than himself.
"…You see, we could only recover your head and upper torso. Your arms and legs were removed and we removed your damaged ears as well… We managed to preserve your heart until 2014, after which we hooked it up to the power supply of that central unit. Your brain was mostly replaced, but we managed to encode as much of your emotion sector as we could. We had to cut 'joy' off, however, but I doubt it'll matter in the end…I'll let you take it all in."
But George had already stopped listening. He had to accept his fate.
Of course. Of course, it was all just my imagination.
Sayo…Yasuda…She never let me into her heart. I was always just here, trapped inside this glass prison…
I should've known-
You can compress a human being! You can't make a person think in 'emotion files' or 'logic batch files' or anything like that!
I'm not human! I'm a machine!
But why me?
Jessica…Battler…Shannon…!
Jessica was a pure and innocent girl! She loved Kanon with all her heart!
Battler was sorry for what he'd done! He loved Shannon deep down, but because he knew we were together he decided to let her go for our sake!
Shannon…She didn't deserve any of it! She didn't deserve any of the pain or suffering!
Why…Someone like me…Why am I the only one?
And George let out a howl that was more of a depressed laugh than anything else. He went on for several minutes before he shivered, his head drooping.
"…We'll be able to give you limbs, but it'll take another five years before you can actively move again."
"…I don't care. Five years will be a mere blink of the eye for someone like me."
"I understand that there was some interference, so the reduced state we placed your brain in was lifted. It wasn't intentional by any means, but it wasn't like we could just check on you…You have my apologies."
"Don't apologize." George almost cut him off with his fast reply. "I deserved every lasting moment of it."
"…I see." The man cleared his throat. "Anyhow, I don't believe I've introduced myself quite just yet, even though I'm already far too familiar with you."
"…Very well, tell me your name."
"…You're sure, now?" The man's face was almost hesitant.
"Just tell me."
His face tensed once more. "…I am Dr. Saturn Anne. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, George Ushiromiya."
"Dr. Saturn Anne…" George raised his head to peer at the man once more. "…This really is hell, isn't it?"
The man, whose face was stoic before now, displayed what appeared to be a malicious grin.
"…How can you say something like that- you, who have no perception of hell?"
And at that moment George let out another sickening laugh.
Indeed. He'd stepped out of purgatory, after all of those years. He'd risen to the top of Mount Purgatorio and had seen the witch Beatrice at its peak.
And he'd been sent straight back down, to the darkest depths of hell.
But that hell was not the Golden Land, as it was to the witch.
That hell was the real world.
The world that he'd left behind for years.
The world that drove even the kindest of men off the deep end.
The world that he must brave alone, for all eternity.
The world- that was quite possibly more "vacant" than the impossibly vacant room.
Author's Note
And so concludes this…different story. There haven't been too many stories focusing around George, especially from a post-murder perspective (since he's kinda dead), so I figured that another one couldn't hurt. That being said, I can't really tell if I'm bashing him or not (not that I really liked him as a character all that much to begin with, mind you). Anyhow, please review, I'd like to know what you thought about it. Thanks in advance.