Akane had been sick again.
Huddled under the blankets, while Doctor Moon took her temperature, she had tried to unsuccessfully blink the sweat out of her eyes. Her mouth and throat was parched.
'You'll get better.' the Doctor had promised, handing her the glass of water and two white paracetamol tablets.
'It's the static. It's making my head hurt.' She said, remembering the white noise skittering across the old-fashioned plasma in the living room, but she felt like weeping. Her eyes were scraped raw from the loss of Yuki and she could only remember the metal walls as the doors to her friend's life had closed. Her remains, her photograph and the flowers had been dried, then cremated.
'The nightmares are about Yuki, aren't they? Don't worry, sooner or later you will get better, Akane.'
She thought about disagreeing. It wasn't a nightmare. 'I was confused, that's all.' Was what she said instead.
'Of course.' His half-moon glasses were silver against his dark face. 'But didn't you see Yuki yesterday morning, Akane?' The voice was gentle and imploring.
There was an image of a knife – a switchblade – at the back of her mind. She swallowed. What had it sliced into?
'When you saw Yuki after work, what did she say?'
'She said she was happy,' Akane said haltingly. 'Yeah. I forgot about that.'
'And did she seem very dead to you?' he queried. 'When she asked for you to have dinner with her at the restaurant tonight? Some kind of graduation party, I gathered.'
She suddenly felt very uncomfortable, but the moment passed. 'Oh yeah. Gosh, I'm late, how could I have forgotten about that?' She scrambled out of bed, in only her pyjamas.
'But then you remembered.' He called to her as he left the room to tell her parents that she had recovered.
She found herself at dinner at 7 PM in the Chinese place outside Tokyo. The road was crawling with traffic and the coloured lights shone through the glass like a mini galaxy. The interior was golden and she was in an elegant dress, her hair coiffured and nails manicured.
Had she really managed to walk down ten blocks and arrive perfectly in time? Apparently, yes.
'You look stunning,' Yuki said, with her large dark eyes. 'I'm glad that you're better. How's therapy going with Doctor Moon?'
'Great.' Akane was fishing for the napkin. Doctor Moon had said "dinner" and here she was at dinner.
'Oh well you know, Akane. There's never been any trouble with your Psycho Pass before. I'm glad you've recovered. Doctor Moon is very reliable you know. He trained abroad and Sibyl gaped as his attitude. Amazing, you know. Absolutely stunning.'
She wasn't paying attention. She'd just noticed the very long queue for the restaurant wending its way down and somehow through the traffic. There were thousands of people, face pressed to the back of the person in front of them. She couldn't comprehend how so many people had managed to fit into the tiny interstitial spaces between the traffic.
'Akane?' The voice startled her out of her daze. The people abruptly faded from view as she swung her eyes up.
'Sorry, wasn't paying attention there for a second. I'm better now.'
'Yeah, I certainly hope you are better. You're a Detective Inspector, now. The system consults you, so hopefully you're not an amateur.'
'People consult Detective Inspectors?' She asked, eyebrow half raised.
'You started a precedent, I suppose. Head of the CID branch. Excellent academic scores too, so I definitely envy you. Your family had good taste recommending you for the position.' Yuki dropped a glittering wink.
The queue jumpers started arriving late into the night. White numbers flashed up on her laptop screen, and she grumbled as she pulled out the Hue chart and her Coefficient reference.
She had administrator privileges, so she pulled the plug and called it a night once she had spent several hours pouring over it, together with a cup of coffee. It was hot and humid and difficult to sleep that night.
One by one, each screen of the electronics store flickered with white static as she passed by. She sighed for a moment, then decided to walk into the store. She swung the door of the store open with a faint annoyance.
Then she bit down a cry of horror. Each screen in the store leered down on her, depicting a different image of brutality. There was one woman – a 37 and rising, being bashed to death with a baton by a male 32. There was a woman of 24 being stabbed with a ball point pen. There was a man of 282 lying face down and bleeding to death.
He seemed to be mouthing 'Akane'. Nothing more. Just her name.
'Can I help you Akane?' A friendly store assistant was bowing from the waist down, oblivious to the scenes of nightmare stretching on and on in the screens behind her.
'It's nothing.' Akane said abruptly. 'I was disturbed, that's all.' She walked mechanically out of the door.
When she was out of sight, the white noise consumed the screens, leaving only a flustered woman in a cooking channel. A white haired man walked, disappearing from one program and in the next screen in a smooth transition as if he was hurriedly trying to catch up with Akane.
Doctor Moon lifted up a newspaper. 'No more dreams, then? Of this Shinya Kogami, endless destruction and endless betrayal?'
'No.' Akane's tone was sad. She was remembering what Yuki had said to her the other day.
Akane, I know it sounds strange, but when you're not here, it feels like I'm not here. When you close your eyes, it feels like I just... stop.
Sometimes, her life felt empty. Was it seventy years, or seven years? Sometimes, it felt like no time at all, like she was an endless tape going on replay.
She visited the dying man on his death bed. He was coughing up blood, red flecks of it escaping from his lips. The strange thing about him was there was a number hovering above his head. 0. Exactly like the white numbers on her laptop. Just by looking at him, she thought of pure white static rising in a linear shade.
Moon's diagnosis was this: compound fractures in the fifth, sixth and seventh ribs and his lungs had been punctured.
'I'm sorry.' Doctor Moon was saying, reading the chart. 'I don't think he will be able to recover. I think his mind is-'
Recovery was unlikely. 'No.' Akane said. She pushed passed him and entered the hospital room. 'I saved you. There's no need to worry anymore.' She said to the patient.
Shogo Makishima looked back at her from behind the white hospital curtain with the frightened eyes of a hunted animal. 'You don't remember me. Is this what happened to the rest of the criminally asymptotic people? What did you do with Touma?'
'We've met?' She asked swiftly, latching onto that one curious idea and moved a step closer.
'Don't touch me!' He jerked away as if she had slapped him. His hands were trembling visibly.
'It's safe here.' She held out her hands as if to show him that she was unarmed.
'No it isn't. Look at the sky. There's something wrong with the sky'
'The real world is a lie, and your nightmares are real.'
She never noticed it. Not once. Not until long after the man who refused to be cured had died. Her hand was half in and half out of the bread bag that she had been using to feed the ducks, when it hit her like the lightning coming out of the clouds.
Sibyl, it said on the sky in a perfect font, engraved on the sky. It was written there as matter-of-factly as her name, penned by a pilot in an aeroplane as part of a skywriting exercise.
She clutched her head and screamed.