Author's Note: Hello, everyone! So, I blew another motherboard on my computer, which means right now I cannot access the final chapter of Progression of Evil to finish it. I'm not TRYING to keep you insuspense, I'm not, really...
So, instead, here is a short, three-, maybe four-chapter look at another pair of songs which is dear to my heart: both Rin's and Miku's rendtions of "Roshin Yuukai ~MELTDOWN~"
Story info? Sure!
Title: Roshin Yuukai
Setting: The data world of Crypton, I suppose.
Main Characters: Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin, "Little Rin," "Little Miku"
Plot Summary: A virtually untraceable girl has gone missing and Hatsune Miku has been given the job of finding her. What should be a simple suicide case turns into something way more, however, as Miku follows Rin on the journey to uncover the omnipresent government's biggest secret, located in the core of a huge nuclear reactor.
Chapter One
Receiving the Case
I met a girl one day, while walking to work. She seemed sad and distracted, which is probably why she ran straight into me. She didn't apologize, but simply stared at me; not contemptuously, like some people do after a collision when they expect the other person to apologize first, but as if there was nothing to say, as if there was an understanding between us and she was acknowledging it.
Then she said to me, "Where is your reactor?"
I didn't know what to make of this, but she didn't care, it seemed, or else she understood my stunned silence, for she nodded and continued walking in the opposite direction, turning her head toward the cloudy sky.
Two days later, that girl had vanished, presumed to be dead. I was assigned to her case. I was supposed to delve into her mind, discover the hidden thoughts that made her kill herself, or that made someone kill her. That she had managed to do something so secret as suicide in this age where your every move was tracked by the government and their database was something short of a miracle. That I was assigned to her case was nothing short of Fate.
I believed in Fate, even then, in that dismal place of little sunshine, little freedom, little joy. Every person who lived in our world had a Fate divined for them from Above. I believed it then. I believe it now.
The only difference is that now, I have proof.
These files are worth nothing if the reader is not willing to open his or her mind a little bit. These files contain only the truth as I see it. They contain only my observations, the facts I discovered, and my conclusions on the matter. My superiors wanted nothing to do with this strange case after I presented them with my findings. They wanted nothing to do with Fate or its workings.
So, be advised, reader, that this report, while under the aegis of Crypton Investigative Services, was not read or approved by any who hold any sort of position with this agency. I was promised that my report would be kept safe for the next person to discover, but nothing else. I was the only one to work on this very strange case of what seems like suicide, and therefore I take credit for anything written in these files, good, bad, ugly, or hard to accept.
My name is Hatsune Miku. I'm a minor detective with the government's information gathering sector, run completely and totally by the government-sanctioned company CIS. I don't hold a position of power at the time of this report, but I've heard my superiors considering raising my standing. I wonder sometimes if it's only to buy me off. They may promote me only under the condition that I keep my mouth shut.
Well, if I'm to keep quiet about my findings, then I'll be totally frank in this report, for it may be the only written truth out there.
When I was handed that assignment, two days after seeing the blonde girl on the street, I was still brooding over her strange words. Then the file landed on my desk and my immediate superior informed me that file was my next assignment, the case of a girl who had disappeared. I browsed the file, but as soon as I opened it my mind froze.
There was the girl I had met, right there on the page before me, her picture clear and sharp. Her blonde hair was held back from her face by a combination of a white headband and a collection of bobby pins.
"Her name is Kagamine Rin," my superior said indifferently. "Been missing for two days. Never showed up for work, that's how they found out. Apartment's empty. See what you can find out. Looks like she took her stuff and ran, maybe a suicide case. From what her coworkers say, she kept to herself, kinda an oddball."
"How did she manage to get rid of the Tracker?"
"That's just it. She didn't have one. She was almost impossible to trace. She worked, but she'd change jobs if anyone tried to get too friendly. When she was asked to get a Tracker planted, she'd disappear under the radar for a few months, and then show up in a different sector, almost a different person."
"I thought all babies are planted with Trackers now?"
My superior nodded. "If they're born in a hospital. She seems to just have cropped up out of nowhere, so that tells me her mother might have been too ill to get herself to a hospital, and therefore Kagamine never got herself a Tracker."
"Who was her mother?"
"Some poor gypsy woman who lived in one of the worse-off sectors. She had a Tracker, but she was, by nature of her living conditions, usually in her house, getting over some bug or another."
I nodded. "I'll take it."
That's how I ended up investigating the probable suicide of Kagamine Rin. A simple disappearance case. Figure out where and how she committed the dreadful act, and that was it. Case closed.
How wrong I was.
I started at her apartment, which lay in a hidden, thoroughly middle-class corner of the sector where she also worked. My superior had told me all I wanted to know about her workplace and what the others thought. I would get no more information by interviewing them, and so I set out to dig deeper under the surface. I had to figure out what was going through her head.
Her apartment was small, which was fitting; one woman on her own probably couldn't afford too much more than this. That was another thing: as far as I could tell, Rin had never had a male counterpart. She was always alone. I doubted that her mother survived too long past her birth; could the girl have been alone all of her life?
My information had been correct; her apartment was bare. It had three rooms: a combined kitchen/dining area, a combined bedroom/study, and a tiny bathroom. There was a bed, a set of bookshelves, a dresser, and a desk set in the bedroom, kitchen appliances and a table and chairs in the kitchen, and a toilet, sink, and small shower in the bathroom.
Nothing else, no frivolous furnishings, not even so much as a wall hanging. The bookshelves were packed to bursting, though; I could actually see the cracks in the middle where the thing was threatening to collapse. It was here I started, browsing the titles of her books.
Nothing out of the ordinary. There was something from every genre here. Rin liked to read, it seemed. Just to have something to look at, I pulled out the most worn book of her collection, and it turned out to be a strange one. Titled "Roshin Yuukai ~Meltdown~," the book seemed to be nothing but a collection of notes, possibly written by Rin herself. I read the first page, trying to figure out what the book was about.
Fate – does it exist?
Nuclear Reactor...government secret? What's really there?
Nothing governing the government. Why are we oppressed?
Wall. Outside of it?
Found an old recorder. Why does nothing else survive? No old holos, No ancient relics. Only present?
I have strange dreams sometimes, and I sleepwalk. Took to locking my doors to stop me from getting outside my room. Why does this happen? The dreams unsettle me.
It seemed to be a combination of journal and notepad, but undated and unorganized. None of it made sense. But I had a place to start. This "old recorder" Rin mentioned...it had to be somewhere in the room. She would have tried to work it, tried to connect it to the past. There were enough history books on the shelf to tell me she was a history nut, intent on preserving ancient junk.
I found it abandoned in a drawer of the desk, just a little machine, really. It had two buttons: "record" and "play." I assumed it created a data file after the fact. I hooked the thing into my headphone and hit the "play" button.
What followed was a sound I cannot possibly describe in words; and unfortunately the recording is destroyed, and so I cannot ask you to listen for yourself. It was Rin's voice. It was her voice, completely and totally. It was her voice. It was her voice. It sounded as if she had just materialized beside me just to sing, to sing this song of lament, the only real clue to her whereabouts, to her mind.
I admit, I was struck dumb for several long minutes. Her voice. Singing to me.
I don't say this in the sense that I was surprised that she was able to record her voice; in our world we had always been able to do that, since the dawn of time. I try now to convey to you the realness, the warmth of her singing voice. Even the most natural singers sound slightly different when switching between the singing and the spoken tone. Not Rin. It was clear, sweet, and sounded as if her spoken words had simply taken flight and gathered a melody about them. Yet there was a sadness about them, as if she'd been concealing tears.
Her voice struck you straight through to the deepest reaches of your soul. She sung not to the recorder, but to me. To the next person to listen. She sung straight to me.
As to the matter of the lyrics, well, I had to listen to the recording several times just to get myself to actually focus on the lyrics and not on Rin's voice. Once I had, the subject matter was so unsettling, and the phrases so strange, that I had little doubt this was the clue I had been waiting for.
The town is filled with brilliant light
The chill of anesthetic ether
It's 2 AM and I can't sleep
Everything is changing so fast
The lighter's out of oil
The pit of my stomach's on fire
If everything is such a lie
Then it really would be better
I dreamed of wrapping my hands around your neck
on an early afternoon overflowing with light
I dreamed, with eyes full of tears,
of cinching your narrow throat
I want to dive into a nuclear reactor
surrounded by beautiful blue light
If I dive into the nuclear reactor
then I can let it all go.
The nuclear reactor. Our world only had one, and it was immense, a big honking secret kept by the government. Many had attempted to delve into the reactor's secrets, and those had disappeared. Could it possibly be that Rin, the only person around without a Tracker, had actually discovered something? I scanned her notes again.
If Fate exists, then it lies in the reactor. The dreams get stronger every month, more vivid. I wake often in a cold sweat, shaking with fear. I have to find a way to end this.
Went near the reactor site today, as near as I could get. Security is so uptight. If I'm to properly explore it, it has to be by night, and I have to plan it for the exact moment the tracking equipment changes to night-mode. Window of about three minutes to get inside. Once in, they won't find me.
So she had gone to the reactor. Or at least, she had planned to go to the reactor. She wanted to research it. She certainly had researched a solid plan to get herself into the site. But what did Rin mean by "once in, they won't find me?" Surely there was security inside the reactor as well?
When I say "inside the reactor" I mean inside the reactor. It's common knowledge that the nuclear reactor is not functional, and that we do not rely on nuclear power; that's why so many are keen on figuring out what goes on at the reactor site.
Was whatever went on at the reactor so secret even the government didn't know what was going on? This came as a huge shocker to me, the government employee. The government knows everything that goes on, and that's why every person has a permanent Tracker implanted in their skin at birth.
But Rin didn't have a Tracker. She would be the perfect person to investigate the reactor site, because she was virtually untraceable. If Fate exists, it lies in the reactor.
Rin had jumped into the reactor, and she was correct; they couldn't find her in there.
But the nature of my case commanded me to find her.
I listened to the rest of the recording.
On the other side of the balcony
The sound of someone climbing the stairs
The clouding sky falls into the room
Through the window panes
In the scattering twilight
the sun is red like teary eyes
Bit by bit, as if dissolving
little by little this world dying
I dreamed of wrapping my hands around your neck
'neath curtains rustled by a breeze
The words overflow from your
dried-up lips, like bubbles
I want to dive into a nuclear reactor
so the memories melt away to white
If I dive into the nuclear reactor
then I'll be able to sleep as I did long ago
The cryptic sentences held clues, clues to what Rin had discovered, more than her scattered, unorganized notes. Still, the notes were important, too. I had pockets in my uniform, and the recorder went into one of those, the little worn book into the other. I had nothing else to go on, and so it was time to head to the reactor site.