Part 4
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Haruhi took the lie more easily than I thought she would, though she did give me some flak for not accompanying them to the hospital myself rather than "making Yuki do it." Of course, then Koizumi nearly screwed the whole thing up by suggesting that we all head over to check on them, but Haruhi nixed that idea right out of the gate. She said that it was because she was confident in Nagato, but I think it was far more likely that she was still not comfortable with Mutsumi-san.
Even though I was relieved that she chose not to follow that suggestion, I couldn't help noticing that she looked conflicted, as though she knew that she should be concerned for the older girl even if she didn't like her very much. I chose to look at this as a positive.
From there, the weekend Mystery Search drew to an unceremonious close, with Haruhi dismissing us to go about our business. This gave me the chance I needed to brief the other two about the recent events in the library, as well as Hazuki-san's request to meet at her apartment that evening. Asahina-san was practically beside herself at the news of what had happened to Nagato, and even Koizumi looked unnaturally grim. Nonetheless, he promised to arrange for us to be picked up for the evening meeting.
And thus, after eating dinner and rapidly excusing myself for the "study session with Nagato," I found myself in a familiar taxi, with Arakawa-san driving, Koizumi in the passenger's seat, and Asahina-san and me in the back. We were dropped off in front of Nagato's apartment building at 7:00 pm on the proverbial dot, and I called upstairs to apartment 505. Hazuki-san buzzed us in, and upstairs we went.
She greeted us at the door, and to my relief she was a bit more fully dressed than the last time I had seen her here, wearing black skinny jeans and a wine-red mock-turtleneck very similar to the one Chikaru-san had been wearing the other night. She looked none the worse for our interesting afternoon, without so much as a limp as she escorted us into the living room, where she had set out some snacks on the coffee table in front of the sofa. "Have a seat on the couch, please. Chikaru will be calling in a few moments. Kyon-kun, would you mind helping me with the tea?"
Asahina-san and Koizumi bowed politely in thanks before taking their seats, and I followed Hazuki-san into the kitchen. In spite of having been in a pitched battle hours before, she honestly looked no different than the day we had met her. (The visible part of her left leg was still bandaged, but that seemed to be a constant with her.) Seeing her look the same as always was actually a bit unsettling.
That was when I put my finger on why. "Hazuki-san... did your hair grow back?" I asked.
"Yes," she said simply. She was wearing it loose tonight, and it fell in a vivid black curtain almost all the way to her knees.
"How did that happen?" I asked.
"Trade secret," she said with the tiniest smirk.
"I... see," I nodded, reaching to scratch the back of my neck. "Er... and what about..?" I went on, gesturing lamely toward the spot of her gunshot wound.
"Completely healed up," she nodded, putting a hand to her chest. "Didn't even leave a scar. Want to see?"
She said the last part in such a normal, conversational tone that it took a second or two before the thought properly registered, and I felt my face turn bright red. Hazuki-san held her innocent expression for a few seconds more, then snorted with laughter. "Sorry, Kyon-kun. I may be as gay as the day is long, but that was too easy for even me to pass up."
Ah. So embarrassing men isn't just for straight girls, then. Good to know. Desperately willing my skin to return to its normal color, I took a small tea tray from her and brought it out, then took my seat on the sofa, so that Asahina-san was sitting between Koizumi and myself. After we had each sampled the tea (the same red tea she had served me at my first visit), Hazuki-san turned to the flat-screen television in front of us and called out "Chikaru, are you there?"
The screen immediately lit up, and once more, there was Chikaru-san sitting at a desk positioned in front of a set of bookcases. "Good evening," she smiled. "Nice to see you again, Kyon-kun. These must be your fellow brigade members, then?"
We made introductions, with both Koizumi and Asahina-san standing to bow to the television. It was all pleasantries at this stage, but now that we were here and settled, I was beginning to grow impatient.
"Chikaru-san," I said at the first opportunity, "can you tell us about Nagato? Is she..." I couldn't bring myself to ask the rest. Alive? Was that so hard a word to say?
"I'm sorry, of course you'd want to know that right away," Chikaru-san nodded. She then took a breath, and I suddenly felt very nervous. "Nagato-san is... recovering. Mu-chan was able to hold her energy together long enough, and we... prevailed upon the goddesses to help her."
"It was a combination of calling in a favor and appealing to their good sense," Hazuki-san said from behind us. She had remained on her feet, and was slowly pacing at the rear of the couch as she sipped her tea.
"Thank you, Minamoto-san," Koizumi nodded. "We're very grateful to hear that."
"Can we see her?" I blurted out.
Chikaru-san blinked a few times, then briefly looked to someone outside the picture. "Of... course," she said slowly. "Though I must warn you... she may still be in a bit of shock. This was a rather traumatic experience for her, I'm guessing, and she's... still adjusting."
As well-disposed as I might have been toward Chikaru-san after our overall pleasant first meeting, I was starting to feel like she was hiding something from us, and I didn't like it at all. "May we see her, please?" I insisted.
"Of course," Chikaru-san said again, smiling more kindly this time. "I'll take you to her."
That said, Chikaru-san appeared to reach around the edges of the screen, and the view jostled suddenly. I quickly realized that she had been communicating with us via a laptop computer, which she was now picking up and carrying.
The way she was carrying it, though, meant that the camera was pointing straight at her... well, let's just say her torso. Asahina-san blushed and looked away, and even Koizumi calmly averted his eyes. For her part, Hazuki-san let out a low, slightly evil chuckle.
"And what are you laughing at, my love?" came Chikaru-san's voice. She then seemed to realize what was happening, as she sighed and turned the laptop around, making the picture spin drunkenly for a moment. "You're incorrigible," she scolded, but it was obvious that she was smiling.
"Guilty as charged," Hazuki-san nodded.
The gently rocking picture took us along a stretch of stone-tiled floor with tall bookcases to either side, and then into a more open area. It was at this point that we saw Nagato: she was standing at a gently curved railing, and had her back to us. Rushuna-san was standing to one side of her, and Mutsumi-san was at the other, with one hand resting upon Nagato's over the top of the railing. Nagato was dressed in her school uniform, and it took me a moment to wonder where they had gotten one for her.
Upon seeing Chikaru approach with the laptop, Rushuna-san smiled and stepped aside, allowing Chikaru to bring the video feed to Nagato's side. "Nagato-san?" she said quietly. "I have your friends on the line."
The picture tilted upward until it focused on Nagato's face, in profile. She was staring into the distance, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. The look of shocked amazement on her porcelain-doll face was odd enough, but I felt my heart in my throat as I saw the trail of tears from her visible eye.
My next reaction was anger, and I wanted to stand up and demand to know who made Nagato cry. This feeling passed quickly, however, as I realized the magnitude of what I was seeing.
It wasn't that Nagato was crying. It was that Nagato was crying.
I heard Asahina-san's tiny gasp from beside me, so I knew that I was not alone in my amazement. "Nagato?" I called.
Her pale face slowly turned to look at us. "It's... beautiful..." she whispered, in a tone of voice I was certain I had never heard from her, even in that other world where she had remade herself as a normal girl.
"What is, Nagato?" I asked her. "What's beautiful?"
She turned to look back into the distance, and Chikaru-san helpfully turned the laptop-mounted camera to follow her gaze. For a moment, I didn't see what she was referring to, but then something in the video feed adjusted, bringing the picture into perfect clarity.
Have you ever been to a multi-level indoor shopping mall, where all the stores ring a central open area, so that if you're standing on any one level, you can look out into the middle and see every other floor above and beneath you? That was the first thing I could think of to compare this scene to. The railing at which we were "standing" continued in a wide circle, probably a hundred meters across, and by looking either above or below one could see endless levels stretching into the darkness, with double-helix spiral ramps connecting one to the next. The wide, open atrium in the middle was not empty, either: huge crystals and bits of what looked like broken Greek pillars hung suspended in midair, spinning in a slow orbit around the center point.
As amazing as all of this was, however, it was once I looked past all of this that I realized the source of Nagato's shock.
On every level, upward and downward, every visible surface was lined with bookcases, or hallways leading to more bookcases, each and every one of them filled. Thousands... no, tens of thousands of books just within the picture alone, never mind how many more levels there might be, or how far each level's shelf-lined hallways might extend. Distantly, I remembered Hazuki-san referring to The Great Library, and Chikaru-san's assertion that each individual book was an entire world in itself. All of us, everything we knew, everyone who ever lived, from the tiniest grain of sand to the most distant galaxy, was contained within the covers of one of those tiny shapes lining the shelves.
Haruhi had once told me that finding herself in the crowd at a baseball stadium had made her truly realize how small an individual was in this world of ours. If she could see this now... how small our entire world was compared to this place at the center of creation...
After a few moments, the picture slowly panned back to Nagato. She was still staring unblinking as tears slowly rolled down her cheeks, though I certainly could not blame her for being awestruck: she had found something very much like Heaven... and it was a library.
"Nagato," I said quietly. "Are you okay?"
She did finally blink then, and turned back to look into the laptop's screen. "I am," she said softly, her voice hinting at surprise at her own observation.
"You should be able to return to your friends soon, Nagato-san," came Chikaru-san's voice from off-camera. "Once we're convinced you'll be safe, you can go whenever you're ready."
"Thank you," said Nagato with a tiny nod, her eyes focusing at a point above camera-level. "Right now, though... I would like to be alone for a while." She then looked back at us, and for the tiniest moment, I thought she was going to smile. "I'll see you soon."
The picture jostled, and there was some murmured discussion between Chikaru-san and the other two sliders. I didn't catch all of it, but it sounded like she was asking Mutsumi-san to join her for the remainder of this call, while Rushuna-san said she would give Nagato some space, but would be close by if needed. After a return trip down one of the many shelf-lined passages, the laptop was returned to its desk, and this time both Chikaru-san and Mutsumi-san pulled up chairs to join the conference with us.
"As I said, I'm afraid she's still in a bit of shock," Chikaru-san said in an apologetic voice.
"I daresay I can see why," Koizumi spoke up then. "Your library is quite the spectacle."
"Well, it's hardly ours," Hazuki said with a wry chuckle.
"It's more than that, though," Mutsumi-san went on. "You see... this is Nagato-san's first time inhabiting an actual body."
"What do you mean?" Asahina-san asked. "She's always had a body, hasn't she?"
Mutsumi-san shook her head. "Not as such. I could tell the first time I took her hand. She was something very human-like, down to every last blood cell and body system, but the body itself was never truly alive. When the Entity severed her data link, what it really did was remove her ability to manifest in a structured form."
"From what we can tell," Chikaru-san continued, "for most data entities, that would have been the end. The energy would disperse and be reabsorbed, and the data of that interface's experiences and memory would still be stored somewhere within the Entity itself."
"But you stopped them from taking that energy back," I said, directing this at Mutsumi-san.
"Yes," Mutsumi-san nodded. "But only because it was hers, and not the Entity's."
There was a pause. "I'm not certain I understand," Koizumi said, echoing my own thoughts.
"What I'm trying to say is..." Mutsumi-san started, then stopped and furrowed her brow. "How shall I put this? When she was created, Nagato-san was part of the Integrated Data Sentient Entity. She and the other interfaces were beings of pure energy given form, but they were merely extensions of the Entity: facets of a hive-mind which was still, in a very real sense, a single being."
"And the energy that makes up the Entity and all of its terminals," Chikaru-san continued, "is Souma. Specifically, Maker Souma. The very energy that Suzumiya-san carries in great quantities."
"That's why we were able to harm them directly when we fought," Hazuki-san said from her place behind us. "Because Kaname, Ryofu and I are living beings with Souma, our energy was shielded from their ability to manipulate, but theirs was right out there in plain sight where we could disrupt it with our own. They had no choice but to use brute force." She then laughed softly to herself. "Of course, if I'd known that then, I would have put my sword down and just tackled her. Live and learn."
"But going back to Nagato-san," Mutsumi-san said, taking up the narration again, "somewhere along the line... she changed. The Nagato-san that I met when I took her hand this morning was not merely the extension of a larger entity: she was an individual, with her own thoughts, her own wishes..." She paused as if considering whether or not to say her next words, then did it anyway. "You could say that she had her own soul, separate from the Entity.
"Her error data," I whispered.
"So you're saying that Nagato-san... evolved?" Asahina-san ventured.
Mutsumi-san nodded. "So it appears."
Koizumi laughed softly. "My goodness. For all the Data Entity's quest for autonomous evolution, they were too short-sighted to realize that it was happening right in front of them."
"What does this mean for Nagato, though?" I asked. "Is she still a part of the Entity?"
"No," Chikaru-san said with a shake of her head. "The Entity severed ties with her when they cut her link, probably assuming her raw energy would be reabsorbed in its pure form, purged of what they considered to be 'bad data.' Luckily, Mu-chan was there to stop that from happening." She smiled at the girl sitting next to her, and Mutsumi-san returned it with a rather bashful smile of her own.
"Then what is she now?" Koizumi asked. Perhaps... an individual form of the Data Entity?"
"No," Chikaru-san said again. "She was no longer in a state that could manifest a body on its own. That's where the goddesses stepped in, specifically Eve." She closed her eyes and said the next words carefully. "Nagato-san has been given a new body. A human body. She is now a true flesh-and-blood living being, albeit one who contains Souma." She opened her eyes again to look back at the rest of us. "As you might imagine, this transition has been traumatic for her, but we've been helping her as much as we can."
"When she decides she's ready to return," Mutsumi-san said then, "she'll probably need all of you more than ever. Please do your best for her."
It was hard to imagine the omnipotent Nagato truly needing anyone, to be honest, but what they were saying made sense: if Nagato's entire life had been spent as part of a hive-mind, what would it be like for her now, her head filled with silence save for her own thoughts? How... alone would she feel?
Koizumi ended up being the next to speak, as I could not piece two words together. "Thank you very much for helping her, Minamoto-san, Otohime-san. I find myself concerned when giving consideration to what the Entity might attempt next, however. Would they strike at Nagato-san, now that she is move vulnerable? Or might they attack Azuma-san again?"
"We're assessing the risk now," Chikaru-san nodded. "That is to say, Tamao-chan is. It might be too much to say that she has the Entity cowed at present, but it certainly seems extremely wary of her after that last encounter."
"That's our girl," Hazuki-san nodded, giving a satisfied smile.
"More than that," Chikaru went on, "it knows now that there are people who can hurt it directly, including Hazuki-chan and now Nagato-san." She smiled maliciously, which was something I had yet to see on that face. "From what Tamao-chan can tell, this was the first time that the Entity felt itself being metaphorically hit on the nose by a rolled-up newspaper, so it may give us some peace for the time being at least. We don't believe it had ever felt pain before, so it's in a bit of shock as well." Her expression then soured slightly. "That being said, as much as we hate to propose such a thing, would any of you object if we had people keeping close tabs on your book at all hours? I realize it seems like a horrible invasion of privacy, but we'd like to be able to send you help right away in the event that the Entity or anyone else decides to act against you."
So much for my relief at not having a teenage girl watching over me 24/7.
"I... I don't mind, actually," Asahina-san ventured. "I'm sort of used to being monitored, so it's okay."
"If you feel it is best," Koizumi nodded, though he looked a bit more guarded. I wondered briefly what it would be like to be a member of a secret organization and finding yourself dealing with beings who could lay all those secrets bare.
"Kyon-kun?" Chikaru-san asked, snapping me out of those thoughts.
"I suppose there isn't much choice," I sighed. "I'll just get dressed in the dark for a few days. Might as well pretend I have some privacy."
Hazuki-san snorted with laughter again. "If it makes you feel any better, Kyon-kun, neither of the girls on book duty would be likely to peep on you. Wrong side of the Kinsey scale."
Of course. Was being a lesbian one of the job requirements for this serving-the-goddesses line of work?
Asahina-san shot me an alarmed look, and I realized I'd said that last bit out loud. Damn you for failing me, Inner Voice!
To my surprise, Hazuki-san merely laughed, and Chikaru-san and Mutsumi-san exchanged curious glances. "Happily bisexual, myself," Mutsumi-san said, as though it were nothing.
"Rushuna's straight, isn't she?" Chikaru-san asked.
"Ara, her husband certainly seems to think so," Mutsumi-san replied.
"She's our token," Hazuki-san nodded sagely.
Right, then. I'd taken us off course; it was my duty to put us back on it again. "Did you discover any more about Haruhi's instability?" I asked.
Thankfully, this question served its intended purpose. "Partially, though it's a complicated thing to explain," Mutsumi-san began. She then looked slightly off-camera. "Tamao-chan, you'll correct me if I say anything incorrect?"
There was no reply from Suzumi-san, wherever she was, but Mutsumi-san nodded nonetheless and turned back to us. "Picture an onion. It has many layers, each fitting around the previous one. What's been happening in your world is that Suzumiya-san, along with altering things in the here and now, is constantly creating new worlds on top of your own."
"Such as the closed spaces," Koizumi nodded.
"Yes, including those," Mutsumi-san affirmed. "Your organization has been dealing with those for some time, and for the most part you've been doing a great service for the stability of this world. Even so, however, those closed spaces don't just go away after you collapse them: they leave behind residue, if you will: a broken, incomplete world that cannot be seen or felt, but which still exists as another layer of the onion."
Koizumi had brightened a bit at the "great service" comment, but the rest of it seemed to bring him back down to Earth. Again, I wondered how it was that they knew so much about his organization and their activities. For that matter, they had always seemed to know a little bit too much about all of us. Then again, if our world truly existed within the pages of a book, had Suzumi-san or someone else simply been reading back? If so, the implications were... frightening, to say the least. Who was reading my life's story while I wasn't looking?
"The closed spaces are just the beginning, however," Mutsumi-san went on. "There have been times when Suzumiya-san's power has made a copy of the entire world and dragged everyone into it. It looks as though there was even a period last summer where she copied and re-copied the world..." she briefly looked away, presumably for confirmation from Suzumi-san, "more than fifteen thousand times, was it? Right, more than fifteen thousand. Each of those worlds lasted for two weeks, and then she made another. The remains of each of those worlds still exist, each one another layer, and..." Mutsumi-san frowned. "Ara ara, Now I wish I hadn't used an onion for a metaphor, because my point is that the world is starting to collapse under the weight of all these added layers."
"Think of it as stacking wooden blocks, maybe," Chikaru-san offered. "If there are only four or five blocks, one atop the other, it's still fairly stable. The more blocks you add, though, the less stable it will be, until finally there's a collapse. This could have dire consequences for your entire world, and that's why we're here. We need to try to find a way to stop this."
"Before Lilith decides playtime is over and takes the blocks away," Hazuki added in a grimly amused tone.
"So we've been traveling from one world to another, and didn't even know it?" Asahina-san asked. She then looked from Koizumi to me. "That might explain why I wasn't able to contact my superiors last August: if we were in a completely different world somehow..."
Asahina-san might have missed the exchanged glance between Chikaru-san and Mutsumi-san, but I didn't. "That's partially correct," Chikaru-san said, "but you never actually left your book. It was a world within the world, if you will. A layer, like Mu-chan said."
"So Suzumiya-san brought us, along with every other living thing, into these new layers," Koizumi pondered, "and then in the end brought us back to the original?"
Hazuki-san sighed, but she still looked grimly amused. "Told you they'd ask," she said quietly.
"I was going to get to this," Chikaru-san said, and I found myself briefly wondering if I were witnessing the tail end of a lovers' quarrel. "Koizumi-san, you're right in the sense that after the thousands of repetitions, you were returned to the layer you'd started from, but..." She paused and shook her head. "That wasn't the original one either. The world-within-the-world that you currently inhabit was created between three and four years ago, and the original one... the true reality from your book... is still buried away somewhere. Suzumiya-san abandoned it, and took everyone with her, but it's still there. We believe that this, more than even the thousands of other sub-worlds, is the true source of the instability. Reality is constantly trying to reassert itself, and Suzumiya-san is doing everything in her considerable power to suppress it. However, she's stretching herself more and more thinly with each closed space and time loop. The energy of creation is infinite, but she's still human, and even her affinity with it, as vast as it is, has limits."
There was a long silence after this, and from their faces, I saw the pieces were falling into place for Koizumi and Asahina-san as well. The reason why time travel was impossible beyond that day three-plus years ago: the same day that Koizumi's powers had awakened. That was the day that Haruhi had decided that reality was not good enough, and had substituted her own, overlaying it upon the world that was, and bringing everyone else along for the ride.
"Chikaru," Hazuki-san then said, very deliberately, "we need to tell them the rest. You know that."
From the screen, Chikaru-san closed her eyes and nodded with obvious reluctance, and I felt an enormous sense of misgiving: there was more? And it was worse?
"Ara, let me start, then," Mutsumi-san spoke up. "The reason why I was the one to join Hazuki-chan in your world today is because of something fairly unique in my background. I've had my Souma since I was very small, even though I wasn't aware of it, and when I was a little girl, I actually managed to transfer some of it to two of my friends, when we made our promise to go to Tokyo University together." She gave a small smile at the memory. "From what I understand, I'm the only one who has ever done such a thing, even though I don't know how it happened, and I don't think I could do it again even if I wanted to. But anyway, that was what I came to see: if I could sense anything about whether Suzumiya-san somehow transferred some of her power to you."
"That brings us to Nagato-san," Chikaru-san went on. She paused for a breath, and her ongoing displays of reluctance were putting me even more ill at ease. "We said before that Nagato and the Entity were beings of pure Souma, of the same type that Suzumiya-san possesses. The reason it's the same type... is that it is Suzumiya-san's Souma. She created the Integrated Data Sentient Entity of whole cloth, which means that Nagato-san, Asakura-san and Kimidori-san were creations of hers as well."
I'm fairly sure I gasped at that point. Sure, this thought had come up more than once in the past, but to have it confirmed that Nagato was nothing more than a creation of Haruhi's was... indescribable, really.
"There's more than that," Mutsumi-san went on, "and... ara, this is the hard part, so please bear with us, and... please, remember that we're here to help all of you, not just Suzumiya-san."
I was beginning to wonder how much of this feeling of impending doom I could handle, and found myself wishing they would cut to the chase already.
"Asahina-san," Mutsumi said, giving the other girl a wan smile from the screen, "I realize this may come as a bit of a shock, but you're not really from the future."
Asahina-san paled. "I'm... I'm not?" she quavered.
"No," Mutsumi-san said, shaking her head. "The future that you know is actually another of those layers existing alongside the reality you're living in now. It's not part of the current timeline, or the original one."
"Let me tell them the rest," Hazuki-san said in a quiet, unusually gentle voice. She came around to the front of the sofa, set her teacup down on the table, then crouched in front of Asahina-san and Koizumi, offering each of them her hand. As soon as their hands touched, I could swear I saw a trace of that green energy passing between the three of them through this connection.
"Asahina-san, the 'future' that you come from was also created by Suzumiya-san," Hazuki-san said to her, then turned her eyes to Koizumi. "The same goes for your organization. Both of them were created of whole cloth, just like the IDSE."
Neither of them seemed able to say a word, so I did it for them. "What are you saying, Hazuki-san?"
She lowered her eyes for a moment, then looked up at them again. "That the two of you are no more human than Nagato-san was. You're beings of pure Souma... created by Suzumiya-san."
Next: An uncomfortable drive home, and a dream within a dream.
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Lastly, the world of Haruhi fic, and the world in general, lost a great one this month. Brian Randall (also known as Durandall), author of Kyon: Big Damn Hero and many other wonderful stories, ended his life on January 17, 2014. Though I never knew the man, he was a true storyteller, I'd like to dedicate this story to him. I only wish things had happened differently, Brian. Rest in peace.