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Looking at my watch, I am again reminded of the amount of time spent disjointed. The blinking digits tell me that the difference is only eleven hours and twenty three minutes -- not even half a day. It seems like so much more, but as Nagato says, the data does not lie. Still, I'm sure she has a more accurate number.
It's been a while, and things have settled down enough for much of the "classified information" to become revealed. The "enemy" has disappeared -- this "enemy" was probably just part of Suzumiya's fantasies manifest, unemployed now that she's more content with playing around -- and The Organization has become a bunch of idling bureaucrats pulling the strings of more official idling bureaucrats, kind of like the Illuminati, but lazier.
I have finally found out what the nature of the IDTE is, and the way that nagato and the others were made. Nagato has become progressively more human -- not so much as that cute yet disturbingly butchered replica from that strange, cold december, but enough to say things that makes sense -- and so, finally, she explained it enough that I could get it. She said that the data life forms are ideas that propogate through things that can think -- that anything that can think has a data lifeform in it, the same way that a computer is useless without an OS installed. Nagato simply is a data life form made by a much bigger, more connected, and smarter network of life forms, and she has the know-how to modify the world because of her knowledge and connections, not because of any special hardware (in fact, her body is completely human, except when she feels the need to turn it into something else).
Looking at all the years, all the craziness, it's hard to believe that number. My digital watch, trusty as it has always been... does it lie? How can it be that all that time spent doing nutty things -- fighting giant cave crickets, eating and drinking merrily in a nonexistent mansion in the snow, watching gaseous giants smash buildings like two year olds smash sand castles... How could all those experiences be summed up into a mere half a day? Less that twelve hours, yet so filled. I could ask Koizumi, but he'd spout a stream of incomprehensible psychobabble. I could ask Nagato, but she would only plead the fifth.
But no matter. I know the reason.
I once heard Nagato (in a rare, and therefore memorable moment of precious soliloque) describe poetry as thus: the compression of information, by relying upon existing memories.
The last few years are like a very thick book, the kind that Nagato reads by the windowside, and those nearly twelve precious hours of madness are the glowing, dancing words hidden in plain sight that draw the whole thing together, and reveal the hidden meaning which, without being pointed out, would remain invisible.
Some day, I hope Nagato reads such a book, by the window in the old club room. And even if she doesn't need it, I will lend her my coat as she did for me, as the snow falls gently outside.