Kanata Thawed
(sequel to "Kanata: Totally Dead??")
by Dee Eon
The Izumi kitchen phone rang and Konata jumped from her chair.
"Easy, Konata, easy," Soujirou said, barely composed himself while answering the phone. "Yes, Izumi here.Yes...yes...positive irradiation? Yes, I understand...yes. None? I see. Yes...yes..."
On pins and needles, Konata watched her father pace the kitchen with the phone, her anxiousness mixed with consternation every mounting second;
'Com'on dad, com'on! Spill it!!'
"Two weeks? God, that's a long time! Yes, I understand. I apologize for my impatience. Thank you. Thank you, doctor. Yes, I'll tell her now. Thank you."
Soujirou hung up.
"Well??" Konata anxiously blurted.
Soujirou smiled like the Cheshire Cat. "They got – vital signs and brain waves," he announced with a catch at his throat.
Stunned, Konata slumped against the wall as though a once wild fantasy struck her like a brick wall. "O wow!..." she blurted, settling to her seat. "O wow! Mom – defrosted! And – alive??"
"Kanata's not conscious yet, but she's relatively stable on life support till they do the liver and pancreas transplants they had on stand-by tonight, and they're administering her the anti-cancer virus while we speak," Soujirou explained, taking it with a sigh of grim relief. "I knew they'd come up with the cure one day. I just never dreamed it'd come so soon. Phoenix Corp's just as happy too; she's only the second client they've successfully re-animated."
"Second?? Just second??"
"Konata, don't look a gift horse in the mouth when you're in a desert. Suspended animation's a bleeding edge science. Even NASA's stumbling with it."
"Sorry. You're right, dad. So, when can we see her?"
"Not for another two weeks. I know, I know, it's way to long to wait, but she's not just recuperating from immersion in liquid nitrogen but a double transplant and gene cancer therapy and they want her as stabilized and sterile as possible before receiving relatives. So these will be the longest two weeks of our life, full of anxiety and joy. I will certainly be at temple tonight and until she's back."
"Yea, me too!" Konata shook her head. "Awesome! It's like – like so unreal I'm all freaked out! I mean, you expect something like this happening in a game or a movie, but this is – is more than real! It's – it's so freaky unreal!"
He smiled and squeezed her shoulders, and for once she didn't cringe the slightest at that. "I know how you feel, Konata. This day was an eternity to me every day for seventeen years, and soon we'll find out whether all our hopes were worth it."
"But – if she's alive –"
"Her body is..." he began with apprehension and reserve, "...but there might also be brain damage, as they keep warning us. Brain cells are very sensitive to thawing, but even weak brain waves are a positive sign. Remember, this procedure is highly experimental and extremely controversial. Phoenix Corp's stipulation of getting Kanata into this program virtually without charge was that she's a highly classified test subject. If anything – happened, they don't want any negative publicity to stain all their research."
"Because she's their guinea pig, right? Well, why didn't you pass on reviving her until they were more sure that they could've done this down pat?"
"The re-animation process itself isn't likely to change for another decade or so, so once the cancer cure popped up there wasn't really a reason to wait, especially since I'm not all that sure about my longevity these days. Besides, Kanata's last wish was that the next time she opened her eyes that she'd see both our faces on earth or in heaven, and if not, for the company to – er, dispose of her body."
Konata nodded as though trying to grasp that there could be such unselfish love. "Man, like – I – I don't know how I oughta feel! They pluck my mom outta a freezer like a crab stick and stick her in a big microwave and she's alive. Alive! It's like so – so unreal!"
"Yes, it is. I remember Kanata's family lambasting me for not putting her in an urn or deep the ground instead of a cryogenic capsule, but now my eccentricities will be vindicated!"
"Should we call them?" she asked, taken aback when Soujirou shook his head.
"No. Until the outcome of this is overwhelmingly positive no one else must ever know. In their minds and souls Kanata is totally dead and buried, and if they learned that she was actually revived then there's any kind of setback, or a – a relapse..." he said stopped with a voice clenched tight as his heart.
Sensing his grim meaning, Konata soberly nodded. "Yea...they'd go totally ape-shit. Like me!" She soberly looked at the family photo on the wall, of her twin holding a tot in her arms and embraced by Soujirou. "Dad...this is going to be a real creep-out. I mean, I never really thought about Mom all that hard before because I don't even remember her, though sometimes I feel her haunting my memories like it's my baby memories remembering her, especially when sensei bashes me on the head just because I rest my eyes a little in class. Now I'm glad they're there because now it won't feel like I'm meeting a total stranger, you know?"
Soujirou smiled and squeezed her shoulders. "I think we're both going to seem like strangers to her, my Konata. And her being back is the best thing that's happened to you even past seeing your mother again."
"What do you mean, dad?" Konata asked and Soujirou sheepishly shied like it was something unseemly she was long blind to.
# # #
It took them several hours to drive north near Sapporo in the mountains at night, which was scary enough for car-sick Konata, but on a dusty turn-off from the main road a sign instructed Soujirou to turn off his headlights and in the darkness ahead a string of embedded red lights came on like illuminated beads on a runway for him to wind along a mountain.
Konata moaned. "O man, like this is sane as a roller coaster in a blackout!"
"Don't worry. I won't hit a deer," Soujirou joked just as she again heaved into a barf bag.
"Like I'm rolling on the floor, dad! Why did they want us to come so late anyway?"
"So there's no chance of a camper or private plane stumbling over them. They're very serious about security. From industrial espionage and assorted moral and religious fanatic groups. This research can affect everything from space flight to the funeral industry, not to mention threatening the life and soul continuation claims of many religions."
After twenty minutes they stopped on a mountainside plateau, where under towering firs was a large wooden cabin that looked like it was built against the hillside, only a lone dim lantern at its rustic door casting any light.
"This is it??" Konata blurted in surprise and disillusionment. "Naw, we made a wrong turn!"
Soujirou smiled and looked up as a flashlight beam came from nowhere and scraggy man looking like a country bumpkin with a hat and smoking a pipe sauntered up and tipped his hat. "Howdy, sir!"
"Howdy," Soujirou replied.
"You must be new to the deer hunters club! Did you make reservations for the retreat?"
"No. I'm no hunter. I'm a veg-head."
Konata groaned. "Dad, we're definitely ain't there yet!"
"Lots of folks lose their way from the highway, missy!" the man chuckled to Soujirou like he was expecting a hand-out.
"Well, thank my lucky star I ran into you to straighten my way!" Soujirou answered as Konata's eyes rolled in exasperation, and he took out his wallet and gave a black card to the man who whipped out a pocket scanner over it and a green light came on. He returned it.
"Just leave your car here with the keys, sir," the guy said with a bow and Soujirou bowed back and led a bewildered Konata toward the cabin's lantern light.
"What was all that about, joking with that hick?"
"We were exchanging passwords and that 'hick' is actually a security guard and ex-Defense Forces commando."
"Com'on!"
"Nope. They've been monitoring us since we left the main highway. We only got this far because they're expecting us and know the car and passenger i.d.'s."
"All that – just for this??" Konata said as they came upon the cabin and the door opened and a man in a black guard uniform nodded and ushered them into a hi-tech room surrounded by smoky glass and left them to inspect a console's X-ray-infrared monitor. He nodded and pressed a button and a door ahead slid open, and even more nonplussed, Konata gawked at a brightly lit passageway that stretched far far longer than the cabin was on the outside.
"Man! This is way WAY out!!" Konata declared as they strolled down what could've been the corridor of a small ultra-modern office building. "Like, when's James Bond popping out, uh?"
"Actually you're not far. That cabin conceals the opening of a cave system that was once part of the top-secret Japanese Early Warning Defense system in the late sixties. This place was designed to survive a nuclear attack so it could control the military if headquarters was ever destroyed. Phoenix Corp discretely purchased it when the Cold War ended since the Yankees decided to shift our defense on their backs."
"Dad, I know rent in Tokyo's off the wall, but isn't all this a little much?"
"The security costs are nothing when you consider that the success of the research here can reap tens of billions of yen easy. Even if it just slipped out how far the company's research has gotten, it could inspire a storm of rivals who can blow a monopoly."
An intern in the hall smiled and exchanged bows then escorted them down a hall cluttered with lab and hospital equipment and showed them into white room with traditional Japanese paper partitions and flowers everywhere as though to make up for windows.
A nurse outside one of the closed-in partitions smiled and bowed to Soujirou.
A lump swelled Soujirou's throat. "Konata...can you wait here for one minute, please?" he requested.
"Uh, sure dad," Konata reverently said, sitting on a chair, her pumped uneasiness more than willing to stall as she watched her father, almost staggering as though in a dream, moved behind the partition. Her heart twisted with clueless helpless empathy as she heard a short sob and whispers from him.
After a few minutes the male nurse appeared and waved Konata over, and dazed with awe and misgivings, she walked behind the partition and stopped short of the warmed water bed where Soujirou was half slumped across a sheeted form hooked up to a spaghetti of i.v.s and electrodes and oxygen masks.
Konata sucked a sharp breath of eerie awe.
Omigod! Omigod!..
Ultramarine tresses splayed over her white pillow like a veil blowing in a breeze around her small pale face, the patient in the bed looked far more girl than woman, and what most struck Konata senseless was their semblance.
Though pale and shrunken, the girl-woman could've been her sister.
No.
Her twin.
'Just like all her pictures!' Konata breathed aloud, spellbound and slowly shuffling up to the bed like in a delicate dream. 'So utterly totally freaky! Like, she's my dead ringer! Oh, bad choice of words, but it's true!'
Soujirou looked up, his face a wet mat and smiled. "See? She's just like you, Konata. Exactly!"
"Yes –" Konata managed to strain from her throat. "Awesome!"
"She's exactly the same when she took her last breath that day," Soujirou continued, his hand touching the girl-woman's pale lips. "But she breaths again, Konata! She breaths! And cancer free! And soon she'll gain her strength and beauty again. Like you."
"That's so great, dad," Konata said, pausing for something apt to say. "Uh. so, what do I say when she wakes?"
"That won't be for a while, Konata. Her brain's still numb in a sense..." He paused as though at a party pooping truth reluctantly offered. "Then, we must also be prepared that – that she might not fully wake again, God help us."
"I – understand," Konata solemnly nodded, gingerly and skittishly reaching to touch the woman's thin pale hand. Like her hand.
'Like, it's so eerie! It's like seeing myself all shriveled up from some disease!'
"So...how long does she stay here?" Konata finally managed to say.
"Another month or so of observation then she can finally go home under remote monitoring. It's important she wakes in a familiar environment to minimize shock to her delicate system."
"Mom. Back home after all this time. Awesome."
"In secret of course, as cited in our contract. Besides, Kanata was always very modest and shy anyway, so publicity would drive her back into her capsule for a hundred years."
"Keep mom home a secret? For how long?"
"Until she makes as full recovery as possible. Secrecy shouldn't be that hard though; happily we live in Japan, not nosy-pokey America! We respect another's privacy here. Not even my loli fans have ever seen my bedroom! Besides, Kanata was always very modest and shy anyway, so any publicity would probably drive her back into her capsule for a hundred years."
"But what about Yu-chan? She keeps secrets like a kitchen drain!"
"I'm asking Yui to take her back for a while until a pest control company totally fumigates a rat and spider nest under Yu-chan's room – which will take months because of environmental impact statements, and in the meanwhile that 'company' – a.k.a Phoenix Corp – will provide Yu-chan free limo service to and from school or anywhere they wanna go. That ought keep 'em happy!"
# # #
Konata never thought spoon-feeding soup to someone would ever hold it's own drama, though she had to gently push the spoon through Kanata's tender lips. Kanata was filling out, the blush returning to her softening face every day and Konata marveled how much her mom was more and more resembled a slightly older twin.
'Man, talk about keeping secrets! Yuki and Kaggie and Tsukasa's dropped by a couple of times and never even guessed Mom's right in the next room!'
Having arrived in the dead of night after Yutaka's room was set-up, Kanata was like a sleeping baby and everything she did was instinctive, from eating reflex to heeding calls to nature which Konata dutifully attended to. A Phoenix Corp doctor daily came by to check on Kanata even though she was remote monitored via electronic bracelets and ankles and small house cameras. One of the most revered instruments to Konata was the little EEG, tracing out the rhythmic waves of Kanata's brain. As long as those blips danced there was hope that Kanata would fully join the living and Konata forced herself not to think in any other way, although she grimly suspected that Kanata had made a moral pact with Soujirou on just this contingency, but she doubted he'd ever bring himself, like her, to ever honoring such a terrible promise.
One day, three weeks in while Konata was playing Ryōō Gakuen Ōtōsai on her PS-2 at the foot of Kanata's bed, she thought she heard a soft moan over the game voices, and rose to check.
Nothing. Just a petite sleeping beauty still doing so.
Konata sighed a thousand wishes; 'Mom, are you ever going to wake up?' she rued. "Please wake! If there's truly any God, please make her wake!"
An eyelash fluttered.
Konata blinked aback, unsure; 'Maybe I'm just hoping too much –'
Another twitch!
And the EEG went nuts like lights at a Saturday night disco.
And Kanata's eyelash trembled again.
"Mom??" Konata shrieked, leaning over the other's face if waiting for a whisper reaching out from the grave.
Soujirou was in the room in seconds. "Konata! What's wrong??"
"Her – Her eyes fluttered! Twice!"
"Are you sure??"
"Yes! Look! She did it again!!"
Excitedly, Soujirou perched the bed beside Kanata. "Kanata? Kanata, do you hear me?"
The girl-woman's eyelashes fluttered then feebly, tiredly opened from huge jade eyes which for a moment gazed the ceiling in a daze then sluggishly rolled to Soujirou.
"Kanata!" Soujirou cried.
Lips trembling, Kanata blinked quizzically at him. "S – S – S Soujirou?" she weakly breathed. "Soujirou...is...that...you??"
Wetness burst in his eyes. "Yes! Yes! You recognize me! Thank god!!" he gushed, gently embracing the girl-woman whose huge jade eyes looked back at him, nonplussed.
"But you...look...look so – so different??" she asked in a soft sweet gentle voice almost too angelic for Konata to believe.
"It's called years and hope and prayers, my little plum. Far too many years!" he gushed and their hands clasped and squeezed like teenagers while a lump welled Konata's breast and throat.
"Mom's – alive! Totally alive! What do I say? I should make a good impression on her to see how good I turned out! But I don't have a dainty thing to wear!'
Kanata's eyes groggily rolled around the room; "Where – where am I?"
"Home, Kanata. Your old art room. Don't you recognize it?"
"Home?? This isn't home. This isn't my flat over the florist."
"Of course not. You moved in with me!"
Kanata's eyes widened in appall and she pulled her blanket up to her chin. "Mo – Moved in? With – you??"
"Hey, how else did I get here – a stork??" Konata impulsively quipped and Kanata eyed her as though astonished.
"What...who...who are you??"
Soujirou grinned at Kanata's bewildered look. "I know she's far different than you last saw here, but this is Konata."
"Hi Mom!" Konata perked with a compromise of excitement and formality. "Uh, long time no see and so so glad you're back!!"
Kanata blinked, puzzled. "Ko–nata?..."
"Yes, Kanata, our daughter's all grown up! Er, well, she's an adult anyway."
"Dau – Daughter??"
"Yes. Little Kona now big Kona!"
"Ko – nata?? Daughter??" Kanata repeated, looking very confused and even skeptical.
"Yea, Kanata! Look at her closely! See the semblance??"
"Daughter??" Kanata weakly shook her head and closed her eyes several times as though straining to recall. "How – How can she be our daughter? We're not – even married."
Konata winced aback; 'Whoa! If she thinks you gotta be married to have a kid, then maybe she's way more pure than even dad used to brag about!"
Soujirou chuckled. "Of course we're married! See our rings?"
"Ring??" Kanata looked confused at her hand. "But – we're just friends!"
"'Friends'??" Konata coughed, boogled.
"And why are you saying she's my child when she's about as old as I am?"
"Actually you got that reversed, honey. You're the youthful-looking one here – as you used to keep reminding me!"
"Yea, Mom! You kinda look exactly like me and I'm only nineteen!"
"But I'm – I'm nineteen," Kanata said, looking confused. "I'm so tired...dizzy!..but I know I'm nineteen!"
"Kanata, right now you're thirty-eight. A magnificently well preserved thirty-eight at that!" Soujirou quipped, levity waning.
"Thirty-eight?? Soujirou, why are you teasing me so?"
"I'm not joking, Kanata!" he urged with a trickle of dread. "When you were frozen, you were nearly twenty, and that was nineteen years ago."
"I was – frozen? I'm – thirty-eight? We're – married??" Soujirou, what – what are you talking about?? Why do you look so different? And where am I without any clothes on underneath??" Kanata bewilderedly asked in distress, facing Konata. "And who is this spirit that looks so much like me? And why does she keep calling me 'Mom'?? Soujirou, I want to go home!"
"Oh-Oh..." Konata soberly uttered under her breath.
& & &
Entirely composed and uploaded on iPhone during boring commutes.
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