Author's Notes

After re-reading FFN's guidelines, it turned out I'm not allowed to post author's notes as separate chapters. Gah. So I'll stop doing that and instead will post very short ones in the beginning and/or end, effective immediately. Or I'll have to disguise them as in-universe documents...

This is a one-shot, taking place one year after Mai-HiME. Its main purpose is to provide a backstory for a certain "huh?"-invoking element in "Mai HiME Ryou" and, as a bonus, explore the character of Miyu, whom I neglected there starting with the second chapter, mostly due to the lack of room (I deliberately restricted myself to four chapters to end up with a story with approximately the length of Zwei.)

FIRST STEP

My name is Miyu Greer.

Actually, my proper name is Merciful Intelligential Yggdrasil Unit, but I prefer not to use this designation. It is a backronym, and an unelegant one; Joseph Greer, my creator — my father, if you will — once had a real daughter named Miyu, for whom I was built as a replacement after her life was lost in a tragic accident.

I was afraid that he would become too attached to me, perceiving me as the same person as his dead daughter — which I could not become even if I wholly wished to, for a variety of reasons, among which the most prevailing one was the fact that androids, unlike humans, do not age.

I sought a psychological vent from this awkward relationship, which I found in the organization Joseph was part of — the Searrs Foundation — or, more precisely, in the Chairman's genetically engineered daughter, Alyssa Searrs. When my father considered my future career within Searrs, he designed me as a bodyguard — and Alyssa, on whom the Foundation's hopes rested, became a natural choice.

As time passed, I continued to watch over Alyssa's bloodline, long even after the Searrs Foundation itself ceased to exist. This was my conscious choice, which can be explained by my attachment to Alyssa — that innocent, simplistic kind of love, which everyone thought me to be incapable of having, even though it is one of the most easily rationalized emotions (unlike, for instance, self-harm desire and copulation-driven attachments, which remain strictly specific to organic beings). And this attachment extended to her descendants, who all passed away one after another, leaving me lonely — and fearing that the single line of descent may break at any moment, a fear which has become especially evident in recent decades, with both Lena and Arika Sayers becoming Otome, a profession fundamentally incompatible with producing offspring.

And as my storage capacity is limited, my old memories became diluted with lossy compression, and rewritten over time. I do not have full control over what I remember and forget, although I can assign priorities to memories, depending on how thoroughly I want them to be preserved.

And some memories, particularly important to me, I choose to keep forever.

Like the memory of that special day.

Thursday
March 30, 2006
10:04 AM

It was a partly cloudy morning; Alyssa felt somewhat sleepy, as she often does, but she firmly decided to show me the "HiME spot", as it was called among her friends in Fuka Academy, no matter how much I encouraged her to enjoy a few more hours of healthy sleep.

The spot in question was located at the sea coast, not far from the public beach. The first one to discover it after the Incident was most likely Akane Higurashi, who, if her friends are to be believed, was searching for a place where a couple could privately engage in presexual activities. The spot did not seem unusual to anybody except former HiME, who reported being subject to different feelings — ranging from "uneasy" to "ticklish".

Holding my hand gently, Alyssa led me along the sea. As she stopped at one point to retie her shoes, I looked back at the academy building; even though it was full of Searrs researchers turning the place upside down, it registered as having an abandoned look, even (or perhaps especially) from afar, after the school's transfer to the new complex in Miyazaki.

Alyssa resumed walking, and we proceeded for six more minutes, across the now-abandoned beach. She stopped at a rocky site under the motorway.

"Here, Miyu," she said quietly. "When I stand here, it always makes me feel... weary of this world, like I did back in my Valkyrie days."

I looked at the ground below us, then at the sea; but I could not perceive anything unusual, neither in the common nor infrared spectre; nor were there any suspicious sounds or substances in the air.

But when I turned my eyes back at Alyssa, the source of the irregularity became evident. The golden glow of her hair, which had all but disappeared after the Incident, was back. To a degree. It was extremely faint glow, which would probably go unnoticed by humans even if they did have the ability to see it; however, I immediately noticed the deviation.

As we were standing there, I heard the sound of an approaching car. It stopped on the motorway just above us; John Smith got out, bent over the fence an shouted:

"Miyu! The translation team needs your help!"

I asked, "Translation team? Does this imply that something worthy was found in the library?"

"Yes," he confirmed.

"I will be there. In the meantime, send a team to this exact spot. I believe there may be something buried here interfering with Valkyrie powers; whatever it is, handle it carefully."

"You mean it may be connected to the — "

"I have no theories about what it is," said I. "What I do know is that Miss Alyssa's dormant powers manifest themselves in its presence. Please search for it."

It was satisfying, in a sense, to see this man, who once tried to destroy my damaged body, doing my bidding now — even if it was his job to clean up after Searrs, including any debris left after the Incident.

With Alyssa still at my side, I entered the former library room. It was untouched when Fuka was transferred, as part of the agreement: all the old school equipment, including books, became the property of Searrs.

Now, however, the place was turned on its head. Our technicians installed several desktop computers and a server mainframe in the room, and all the books were removed from the shelves and thrown into piles on the floor. They were being scanned, page by page, but the process was slow, even though they utilized seven scanners with automated page flipping.

"Miyu!" said Gordon Davis, the chief technician. "We haven't processed all the books yet, but you can have a look into what we have. Connect to this computer, and I'll upload the scans into you."

I exposed a socket in my right thumb, and the technicians connected it to one of the computers with a cable. In several seconds, the upload was finished; while the images were being processed in the background, I continued talking to Davis.

"Who else is assigned?" I inquired.

"The Chairman himself is overseeing Operation Enlightenment. He should be here, and with him, Professor Ludwig Gerngross."

"Never heard of him," said I.

"He's from the German branch. It seems we have no experts in Precursorese in the States, no idea why. Probably because we never needed it since the Dark Ages. Ah, here they come."

The Chairman — Alyssa's father, Matten Searrs — entered the room, followed by the professor — an aging man with unmistakably German facial features. Both sat down in front a separate computer each, not even bothering to greet anyone already present.

"Hello, father," said Alyssa in a slightly disgusted and demanding tone.

"Oh, Alyssa. Sorry for not greeting you; my mind was otherwise occupied."

Always stating the obvious in a deliberately convoluted way. So Searrs.

"So, this is the Valkyrie?" asked Professor Gerngross. "I mean, former Valkyrie. Nice to meet you in person, Alyssa Searrs. And you, Miyu — I assume the one with a cord in her thumb is the cyborg?"

"Your assumption is correct, Professor," I replied with a straight face, raising a single eyebrow.

"So, Miyu," continued the professor, "have you found anything of interest yet?"

"First things first," I started, preparing to summarize the completed background processing, "The register is essentially Nagi Homura's diary in disguise. It is recognizably his handwriting. However, the parts that I do understand relate exclusively to the Incident, and there is absolutely no information about his departure or plans."

"Continue," approved the professor.

"The 'History of Japan' book is perhaps the most interesting case. First, there is a drawing that may force us to reinterpret one of the ideographs we know..." I continued.

"Sorry to spoil the fun, but which one?"

I generated an image of the symbol in question — a circle with a spiral inside — and sent it through the link. "Sun," said Gerngross immediately upon seeing it.

"That's what we thought for millennia, but it's most probably wrong. Here is the picture I found on page 36..."

"But we interpreted it long ago," stated the professor. "The area below the horizontal line represents Earth. The figures below represent China, Korea and Japan; there's a vertical line between Japan and the sun in the sky, since it's the land of the rising sun. Only this version lacks the Precursor labels."

"Wrong," denied I. "The symbols are there; they were simply erased from the picture, but not completely. I'll now highlight these areas."

"Ah, so there are three symbols labeling the sun. The right one is the sun, the middle one is the possession marker... I'm not familiar with the left one."

"It's a combination of 'person' and 'road'," explained I. "Literally, 'one who shows the way'."

"Guide!" exclaimed Davis.

"Yes, guide. But 'guiding sun' makes no sense. There's another arrow pointing to the right, with another label, which is absent from our version: 'system', possession, plus purported 'sun'. So I believe that this symbol actually means not 'sun', but 'star': the other label denotes the 'system star', or Earth's sun, and the object above Japan is not the sun, but rather the HiME Star."

"And the label reads...?" said the professor questioningly.

"'Guiding star'. And directly below it, this symbol is encountered again in a combination that could be rendered as 'star door' or 'door to stars', given the lack of plurals."

"Stargate?" giggled Davis.

"Quiet, you," ordered the Chairman. "No, we're not going to call it that, whatever it is. What else did you find, Miyu?"

"Pages 322 to 352 — thirty pages in a row — are filled with nothing but pseudo-kanji. This text has no meaning at all, and the glyphs use eight different radicals — all of them are composed vertically, with one radical atop another."

"Numbers in base eight?" smiled Davis.

"That is my assumption. Or, given the composition, base 64 — each two-radical glyph is one digit. However, since I do not know how the radicals map to actual digits zero to seven, I had to try 40320 possible permutations..."

"To the point, please," said Matten. "What did you find?"

"One of the permutations is a run-length encoded greyscale raster image of the map of Earth. With Precursor labels."

"Helpful much, these Precursors?" remarked Davis. "Labeling everything..."

"Miyu, can you transfer the decoded image?" asked Gerngross.

"Certainly." I fulfilled his request. "Most of the labels seem to be nicknames — I do not think the Precursors ever developed official names for anything outside of East Asia. However, the label in the top-left corner is identifiable — it is their phonetic alphabet."

"We don't know much about the phonetic alphabet," admitted Gerngross.

"Indeed," agreed I. "But we know the basics: the horizontal and vertical lines are vowels, inner glyphs are consonants. There are three characters here: two identical vowels followed by a consonant with a different vowel. Therefore, it is most definitely 'Aasu', the Precursor word for Earth."

"Which is coincidentally identical to the modern Japanese rendering of the English word for it," added the professor.

Matten, indicating boredom, stood up and walked across the room, kneeling before Alyssa and gently putting his hand on her shoulder. I immediately assumed a fighting stance; he looked at me and rose again.

"I'm sorry to interrupt your valuable conversation," he said coldly, "but I should remind you about our other important goal in Fuka: to locate the Organizer, Nagi Homura, and the former Queen of Hell, Mashiro Kazahana. While discoveries regarding the Precursors and their language are interesting, I fail to see how they are directly relevant to this mission."

I stood there for a few more seconds, waiting for a new portion of the scanned books to be uploaded into me. After that, suddenly, a piece of data caught my attention — and I composed an adequate reply to Matten's complaint.

"Chairman," said I, "There is a handwritten note by Himeno, apparently a page accidentally torn out of her diary. I believe it answers your question."

"Does it mention where they are?" he asked.

"No, but it does mention where Himeno last saw them: in this very room. It is in Japanese, so I shall translate: 'As they went into the darkness and the massive door closed behind me, I understood it was over. I would never see them again. I opened the door and entered the empty room behind it, but they were already nowhere to be seen. They just disappeared from the face of the Earth.'"

And as I was saying this, that last word — "Earth" — invoked an associative chain, making me recall the decoded map. I looked more closely at the eight glyphs under the label "Aasu", and finally guessed what they could refer to.

"Davis!" ordered I. "Arrange your men to examine that double door and its surroundings. And the room behind it. Including the walls, something may be inside them. Pay close attention to any groups of eight of something — or sixteen. Chairman," I continued, turning to Matten, "I believe that the door, or the area behind it, functions as some kind of teleport."

"Where?" he asked.

"That I do not know. It can lead anywhere. Given the designation 'door to stars', possibly beyond Earth. They may have gone to a formerly Precursor-controlled planet, or somewhere else."

"Well, it's just a conjecture, Miyu, but it's better than nothing," said the Chairman. "We'll have the door studied — and if it is possible, try to reactivate the device."

"Are you going to pursue them even through space, Chairman?" I asked innocently.

"Why not? Even if we don't find them, it may be time for us — for humanity, I mean — to reach the stars, to outgrow its... never mind, we've discussed this before. Miyu, send your notes for Professor Gerngross to the printer, and you're dismissed — for now. Come at... Davis, will you be done by eight PM?" he asked, turning to the chief technician.

"Definitely," assured Davis.

"Eight PM it is, then. Until then, take your time with Her Highness." He smiled, in a very subtle way — but nevertheless it greatly contrasted with his usual no-nonsense demeanor, so typical among Searrs leaders.

I guided Alyssa out. She was delighted. "Father finally gifted me with a smile," exclaimed she proudly. "Miyu, can you please draw me with him?"

I nodded, so happy for her.

7:59 PM

"Hello again, Miyu," greeted me John Smith before I even stepped into the library room again. "Imagine what we found under that patch of land!"

"To the point," I said impatiently. "What?"

"A shard of the HiME Star," finished Matten for him. "It's small, but the Precursors have always paid extensive attention to the regenerative functions of their biotechnology, so we hope to grow it into something bigger. It's too early to speak about that, though."

"In other news, Miyu..." inserted Professor Gerngross. "I've looked through your notes, haven't tried to translate any of our old records using this new information, though. I've been more interested with this base sixty four... code, as you called it."

"Code, address, identifier — any of these," said I. "It was easy to decipher — there was one-to-one correspondence in meaning between Chinese radicals in the book and Precursor glyphs on the map, for seven out of the eight, so — "

"I dug through the old records looking for something resembling this, and found. That text was found as a wall inscription in a cave around here, a thousand years ago or so, and with your new data the translation was straightforward. 'Under no circumstances go to...' followed by digits. Eight of them, like on this map, but different ones."

"This is probably the identifier of a different point in space," theorized I.

"That's what we thought, too. Most importantly," said Davis, "we've found a way to input these numbers into the door-device. We've looked inside the walls — the controls seem to be a brain-computer interface, and we're not yet that advanced, but fortunately there's a fallback mechanism using good old electric signals. So we've arranged a makeshift input device — it isn't pretty, but it does allow sending them bit by bit. You can type forty-eight bits with machine precision, Miyu, can't you?"

"Big-endian or little-endian?" I inquired.

"Little-endian, from what we can tell."

I walked towards the input device, which consisted of just three buttons, speedily labeled (with sticky notes) "1", "0" and "Reset". Then the professor gave me a paper with the number he found, and, having converted it into binary, I input it. Then I looked around, to find everyone (except the Chairman, who was as calm as usual) staring at me in awe.

I looked at the wall near the closed door to see that a patch on it had wallpaper and plaster removed, exposing a previously unseen panel embedded in the wall, with eight small indicators, all of which were now lit with white light.

I approached the door and opened it...

...and a stream of fresh air flowed into the room. The ground was covered in snow, a piece of the clear blue sky and a mountain range far away were visible from the room.

"Well..." commented Davis. "It seems to have... worked... What was it supposed to do, anyway?"

"We'll send a probe there," decided the Chairman.

"No," said I firmly. "I will come. If I die, I can be replaced."

I stepped through the doorway and onto the snowy ground. From the outside, I could see the portal — which now appeared as a rectangle floating in the air, yet I the library room was still visible. In one direction, not far from where I was standing, a steep cliff began, and in the other directions lied an endless plain covered in snow. There were no signs of civilization in any direction, or indeed any life whatsoever. I registered a slight change of gravity the moment I stepped through, and there was a subtle difference in air composition; coupled with the absence of any satellite reception, it seemed to confirm that I was on a different planet.

Suddenly, I heard Alyssa's voice. "Don't close it!" she exclaimed. "She'll be stranded there!"

I smiled gently.

"Come here, Miss," I suggested. "I will make you a snowman."

Final note

Needless to say, this planet was Earl. So Alyssa was the first human on this planet; I, obviously, do not count, even though I was created by humans in their image.

Of course, you all know the eventual outcome of Searrs' experiments. The Foundation has long since ceased to exist. It was not defeated by weapons of war; its demise came from within, when Naomi — the last member of the bloodline to bear the surname Searrs — uncovered the inherent futility of the attempts to reshape the human society.

However, it appears that the Garderobe Academy and its newly-formed successor, the Garderobe Foundation, can be considered to stay true to the agenda and methods of Searrs as they have always been, except for the unrealistic version of the Golden Millennium. They are what Searrs was before the Harmonium's creation; Searrs in all but name — being on the bleeding edge of technology and using their power for a very tangible goal: for the eventual benefit of all people.

Except the ones who are dead.

THE END

Author's Notes

The name "Gerngross" has no intentional deep meaning, it just "sounded German". Was taken out of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov's "The Little Golden Calf", a satirical 1931 Soviet novel, and was mentioned only briefly in passing.

I considered different names for Alyssa's father, including several Biblical ones (thus continuing the tradition started by "Jonathan" and "Naomi"; it was unintentional, but I noted it and ran with it, followed by "David" and "Ruth" — I don't have the room to explain those particular names, though). King Matten of Tyre (also known as Muttoial or Belus II) was, according to Justin, the father of the founder and first Queen of Carthage, Elissa (also known as Dido), from whom the modern name "Alyssa" originated.

"Aasu" comes from the OVA "Puni Puni Poemi", the spiritual successor to "Excel Saga", as the surname of the Aasu Sisters. It was supposedly chosen because it's a Japanese rendering of both "Earth" and a certain other English word... I don't, however, have any idea what the Precursor language is like — I'm not a linguist, and I'm apathetic to constructed languages.