A Shattering Game

"Hikaru, I want to play too!" Sai moaned after Toya placed his second hand.

'Sai, if I suddenly get a lot better and then drop back down to my level it will look weird,' Hikaru thought at the spirit. 'I do not want to end up as some scientist's thesis!' The hospital hadn't really had much in the way of entertainment for a previously soccer-obsessed ten year old boy, and the TV in the 'play room' the hospital brought the non-contagious kids to was stuck on educational programming. Shindo had watched a special on the mysteries of the mind. He'd been tempted to just tell the doctors he was hallucinating a childlike ghost, but the idea of being studied any more than he already was, and some of the methods he'd seen on the program, had shut him up better than anything could have.

"Then let me put down a few stones. Just a few! I want to see how good this boy really is, as a test of his abilities," Sai begged. Hikaru could never deny the spirit much, so he agreed.

'Alright, you can play as much as every other hand, but only as much as you have to. This is Speed Go and you've been distracting me though the whole opening! I don't have time to count coordinate points.' Hikaru huffed as he set down a stone he knew was in a bad place, but couldn't come up with a better option in the fast-paced timeframe.

"Then I'll just point with my fan," the suddenly cheery ghost replied and found a brilliant place to counter the stone Toya put down to attack the weak hand Shindo had played.

Ashiwara walked over and looked down at the one-sided game he had fully expected to see. The light that had shone in Akira's eyes had dulled as he played the disappointing game. He felt sorry for his young friend. He had no one to challenge him… What was this though? The middle game was about half over and suddenly things were turning around. Shindo was coming back from behind at an alarming rate, the large gap between them dwindling. Moving into the end game the sporadic insights seemed to come together into a more cohesive and sable ability, like an engine sputtering and struggling before suddenly roaring to life. A few moves that seemed rather poor earlier were suddenly critical points.

"After komi you win by 3 and a half points," Hikaru declared when it was over. 'I caught on to what you were doing in the end game, didn't I, Sai?'

"Yes, you did," Sai smiled at his young student. "Thank you for letting me guide you along in this game, some of your moves inspired me, and your opponent is no weakling either. That such wonderful children exist, and that you could meet like this… God is truly guiding our actions this day!" Sai waxed poetic about the perfection of Go and Hikaru tuned him out. Sometimes the old ghost could be a little much. Sai had only played about ten or fifteen hands over the course of the game, and Hikaru thought he could take credit for the game with little trouble.

"How… how did you do that?" Toya was looking down at the board like the stones had started dancing a jig.

"It was a very impressive comeback!" Ashiwara announced his presence over the goban.

"I'm not so great at the opening game. People on the 'net are always telling me my opening moves are a hundred years out of style, but I'm great at life and death. I do lots of puzzles and small-board games, since I can't always get a good game in between my tutors and doctors dragging me from one kind of test to another." Hikaru tried to play it off, but had a bad feeling. Toya looked like he was going to cry, and he didn't want that.

"Are you very sick?" It was the man asking. What had the clerk called him?

"I'm getting better, Ashiwara-san, thank you for asking. I passed out in my grandpa's attic when I was helping him put some things away in the summer heat two years ago." It hadn't been the heat that had made Hikaru pass out, it was the sudden appearance of a certain ghost, but no one needed to know that. "I fell into a box behind me that had a bunch of old rusty tools and stuff. I got a really bad infection, and it triggered some kind of auto-immune response. I've been living in the hospital for about two years, but I got out about a month ago."

"You learned to play Go while in the hospital, then. One of the doctors taught you?"

"Nah," Hikaru shook his head, and flinched when his casual language was criticized. "I got a laptop computer so I could do my school work and send it to teachers without going to a school building. I found NetGo, and taught myself how to play by doing life and death puzzles on it. Then I started playing actual games online. My grandpa found out, and told me he used to be a big amateur tournament player once upon a time. He started coming to the hospital to play with me on a little magnetic board every other week or so, and he got me a book about Honinbo Shusaku."

"You want me to believe you taught yourself by playing occasionally? No way; I study every day!" Toya asked, stunned. In the background Sai was being unnecessarily noisy again.

"Well, the people I play online teach me things. We can discuss the games after, if they have time and they speak Japanese. I caught a European pro once, and it was an amazing game – I was totally creamed – but I couldn't talk to him after 'cause I couldn't understand what he wrote. One of the nurses told me later his message probably meant 'good try, keep learning' but she wasn't sure." Hikaru was babbling, but he couldn't help it. Toya looked like he was trapped between the urge to punch him in the face and the urge to burst into tears. As wimpy and geeky as Toya looked, he seemed to be leaning more towards the first choice.

A sudden, piercing tone cut through the conversation.

"Um, that's me. I have to go, so bye!" Hikaru scooped up his bag and ran. His pump, a medical device clipped to his belt that fed him little dips of medication, squealed a few more times before he got to sit down on the train. He pulled a fresh cartridge out of his bag and popped it in to replace the spent one; glad the little thing gave him an out. It was a headache sometimes, but better than carrying around an IV drip or giving himself larger injections throughout the day.

'No one can know I have a formal tutor, Sai. You know what they'd do to me if they found out about you!' Hikaru thought at the emotional spirit.

"I know, and I'm sorry for all the trouble I've caused," Sai murmured from behind his fan. He always got emotional when Hikaru's illness was involved. He considered himself solely responsible for everything.

'It's not your fault, Sai. You didn't make me sick,' Hikaru offered, 'My body over reacted to an invading presence – an invading bacterial presence – and started attacking itself. You heard what my science teacher said about what makes people sick and what modern science has discovered. You absolutely had nothing to do with the way my body did what it did. Spirits do not cause sickness,' Hikaru proudly proclaimed. It had taken him a lot of effort to understand what was wrong with him. Even if he couldn't remember the exact names of the illnesses that the doctors had decided he had; he had a solid hold on the cause and effect explanation he'd been given: one problem complicating or causing another on down the line. He'd broken his leg when he fell down the attic stairs, and the tools his grandfather had been preparing to throw out were the worst thing he could have landed on. He'd picked up more than one bug from that, and while the doctors treated one thing the other one had a free ride. It was complicated, it was messy, and at some point his immune system gave up trying. White flag waving, Hikaru was in a terrible state for about six months, during which he lived in a clean room and slept almost all day. That was when Sai decided his third chance at life wasn't worth the suffering he had caused.

Just after Hikaru's eleventh birthday he'd started getting better. The medications had fought off the swampy mess that moved in when his immune system stopped policing his body, and he was well enough to spend more hours of the day awake than asleep. By that time he'd been with Sai for nearly a year and the ghost had already infused Hikaru with a fair understanding of Go. Mostly they had played in Hikaru's lucid dreams. In the watercolor recreation of the opulent palace that Sai's stories had imprinted into Hikaru's drugged mind the pair could sit across a goban from one another. Even when he was at his worst, awake and aware for only a few minutes at a time, Hikaru could walk into that blurry place where the only sharp lines were on the goban and Sai would walk in with his flowing sleeves and fluttering fan and they would play a game together.

When he was awake, they played using the grid-patterned sheets his mother brought him to make the room less white, since he had no board at first. In place of stones he used the building blocks the nurses had given him to play with. Black was all the cool colors and white was warm ones, and sometimes they ran out of blocks or Hikaru shifted under the sheet, destroying the game. At Christmas he'd gotten a cheap magnetic board and played Sai there. Shortly after that New Year Hikaru got his laptop, and he got an account for Sai on the internet so the ghost could play real games. The program he downloaded had a place to recreate games not played online, and they could use that to play each other with Hikaru clicking the mouse for both of them. It was less bother than the cheap plastic toy.

Sai didn't just teach Hikaru about Go in his watercolor palace. He'd shown Hikaru calligraphy and recited what parts of the Tale of Genji he could remember. He insisted that Hikaru would not miss out on his chance at life, so long as the doctors said there was hope. When Hikaru was bored, Sai could always come up with something to talk about even if it was usually about a certain board game.

Hikaru was pulled out of his thoughts as the train reached his stop. He gathered his bag and depressed ghost and headed home. His parents were at the kitchen table waiting with dinner. His mother immediately started in asking him how he felt. Was he tired? Did he have any trouble with his pump? Did a meteor fall from the sky and incinerate him on the way home? Could pigs fly?

"I'm fine, mom, really. I went to a Go salon and there were a couple of kids my age there. The people who worked there were very nice. I changed the cartridge in my pump." Hikaru pulled out the empty one and handed it to his mother.

"Did you have any trouble?" Mitsuko asked, concerned.

"No, I changed it and came home."

"The nurses made sure he knew how to do it right before they let him out of the hospital, didn't they? Let the boy be," Masao stood up to ruffle his son's hair. "You'd tell us straight away if you had a problem. So did you win?"

"I won the first game; it was against this really bad sport. I challenged him because he was treating the other guy, Toya-kun, like crap after Toya-kun beat him. I lost against Toya-kun too. It started out as a total slaughter, but it was a close game at the end. He's really strong, but kind of geeky. He was wearing his school uniform today, and it's Saturday!"

"Lots of schools have classes on Saturdays. If you pass the entrance exam, the private Jr. High I want you to go to has Saturday classes," Masao explained.

"Oh, Masao… I don't know if Hikaru could keep up in that kind of school. Kaio is rather advanced…," Mitsuko worried.

"Can't I go to Haze?" Hikaru asked. "Everyone I know is going there."

"I know you want to go with your old soccer buddies, and Haze does have a good sports program, but Kaio has excellent activities with the best advisors. I'm going to have to side with your mother about you playing soccer, Hikaru. You were a great player, but that's in the past," Masao laid down the law. It didn't happen often, but when Hikaru's father spoke about how things were going to be, the laws of nature prepared to bend to his will. It was the flip side to Masao's loose parenting style: Those few rules his father did lay down were etched in stone. "Those tutors you had in the hospital said that your main problem was motivation. You're a smart kid, when you want to be, but you have this nasty habit of not being curious enough to look at the big picture and figure out what it all means. That's just laziness, Hikaru, and I won't stand for it, understood?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Good. You can't be satisfied with what you know – you have to strive for better every day. That is the struggle all living men face: to better yourself every day. You need to be more aware of how much you do not know," Masao trailed off, at a loss for how to convey his full meaning. Sai was nodding behind him.

"You can apply to both schools, Hikaru, and we'll meet with the teachers to decide what's best for you together," Mrs. Shindo offered, knowing she would be having a talk about this later with her husband. The infuriating man wouldn't budge on his proclamation that Hikaru's life had been controlled too much by too many people already and that the boy needed to sort himself out. He was only twelve, for heaven's sake!

"Oh, by the way, your grandfather brought one of those boards over for you to play with. I put it on your bed – find a place for it to live after dinner," Masao said before digging into his fish, effectively stating his disinterest in further conversation.

"A real goban with stones instead of little plastic chips?" Hikaru asked, bouncing in his chair.

"Yes, he said you'd do better on a real board instead of that awkward toy the nurses gave you last Christmas," Mitsuko soothed, happy to see her son happy. When the nurses passed out the cheap charity toys in the hospital's play area Hikaru had traded a coloring set for the little goban, the little girl who unwrapped it almost as happy to be rid of it as he was to get it.

"It's not the quality of the board, it's the quality of the hand played on it," Hikaru echoed Sai's wise words, "but it'll be a lot easier and more fun to play on a real board!" After eating twice as much as his mother thought he could, Hikaru raced up the stairs to set up the goban and play with his very excited friendly ghost.

"He's a fine boy, Mitsuko. He couldn't dash up the stairs like that if he wasn't, and my office pals said Go's a thinker's game, and a highly competitive one at that. With the way his body's been these last two years, it's no wonder his fighting spirit found a new outlet," Masao said from behind his newspaper. "If that ancient strategy game's got him interested in history as well, then it can only be a good thing. Put a fire in him, it's just what he needs."

"It's just… He's our fragile little boy and I don't know where he got the idea. Dad didn't teach him, and his tutor showed him that website after he was already obsessed…," she lamented. "I understood sports, but this…."

"Little boys are made of rubber bands and craft glue. Sure, he had a scary patch, but he's bounced back good as new. Another few months and they can take that pump off him. We just make sure he keeps to his physical therapy sessions and doesn't get too distracted from his studies. Honestly, he's the same with Go now as he was with soccer before the accident… calling it an obsession is just plain silly." His wife shook her head at him, but he couldn't see from behind his newspaper