Kazuo Kiriyama opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, on a bed. The room was dark - not the hospital - and above him, he heard the metallic clang of boots, back and forth, in a continuous circuit. The smell in the air was worn linoleum, boiled food of some description, the smell of repressed violence.
Prison.
Sometimes there were voices, too - laughter, even. Convict camaraderie. They were talking about the kind of things his gang used to talk about.
Perhaps he slept again. When he woke, there was the sharp tangy smell of a contraband cigarette being quietly smoked in the next cell, and two men were talking, on the other side of the wall. Through the opiate haze, he heard: "...then I punched the fucker's face flat. Don't give a shit if I get put in solitary. He had it coming..."
He had it coming. Mitsuru used to say that kind of thing, usually after doing something very similar. Kazuo thought, suddenly, of the faces he'd bashed in, the bones he'd broken... the eyes and hands and soft bodies... human things that he'd destroyed.
He felt the bile move in his throat and jerked towards the wall to be sick. It was as if his body was trying to rid itself of the deep revulsion that he felt, for the first time in his life directed towards himself. He lay there, face pressed to the concrete, shivering.
All those people...
The guards' cyclic pacing stopped, turning back towards his cell. There was a key in the lock and footsteps on the stairs. "Get the fucking medic in here! He's convulsing!" someone shouted down the corridor. But Kazuo could not hear any more.
For a few moments, there was absolutely nothing, like before. Then, the colours and the feelings came back. He thought they'd given him a shot of something by the light stinging in his arm, but couldn't be sure. He remained perfectly still, eyes closed.
"I still think he was brought here too soon," said the doctor. "He's in no fit state... he needs round-the-clock care, for the psychological damage as much as the physical... head injuries are not like other injuries…"
"You tell me about psychological damage - well, he's scum, and that's all there is to it. No police record, of course - the really evil bastards never have one - but look." There was a rustle as paper was unfolded.
"He had them all in order. It's like a school shooting, but in slow motion. This is cold, premeditated work. Complete and utter psycho and clever to boot. You take him back to the hospital, he'll get out..."
"May I remind you, the charges against my client are, as yet, unproven. He wrote his own name on the list," The only female voice, presumably that of his lawyer, cut through the fog. He felt kindness behind her cold words. He wanted to speak to her, if only to thank her for representing him. But the drug was kicking in, and his tensed limbs went slack, the world around him fading to grey.
"Yeah," said the officer. "Unproven. And they usually suicide before the end. Proof'll turn up before too much longer. It always does... and you've seen the tapes. Tell me, has anyone else out of his school come to a nasty end since we had him in custody?"
She didn't have an answer for that.
-
"So... Kawada, right? Planning on explaining anything or do we just sit here in silence?"
Shogo shifted the car into third. The weather had improved, but the road was still steep and winding, and his silence was mainly concentration on keeping them on the road.
"Look..." he said. "Before we start, want to make it clear I don't have all the answers. There's still a hell of a lot that makes no sense to me."
"If you've even got some of the answers, that'd be a start," said Shuya. "It'd be an improvement on what we've got."
"Right," said Shogo, digging in his pocket for his packet of Wild Sevens. "We were going to be on the Program."
He said it so suddenly, so calmly, that it took them a while to understand.
"What, you mean... our class?"
"On the Program?"
"How did you find that out? It's top-secret, and their security is the shit... no hobbyist hacker's getting in there," said Shinji.
"I'm no hobbyist." Shogo turned round fractionally in the driver's seat. "None of you recognise me, do you? Suppose I've changed a bit since then. Scar's healed over, new haircut, all that jazz. Saves unwarranted questions. Anyway... I'm what Shuya here would have been. I'm the winner. Last year's, in fact."
There was another stunned silence.
"You're the winner?"
"Yeah, I'm the winner. Jeez, is there an echo in here or something? Before you ask... I won the normal way. It's not what I would have chosen, but back then, I had a reason to do it. Anyway, they got me, gave me a weapon, I did what I was told, and I won. This time round, I thought I'd go back in, try a bit of revenge. You know, been through it once, I can do it again, except this time, I'll have time to do my research. Enough to fuck them over well and good for what they did to me. So I got into their databases, read and memorised everything that was useful, from the weapon pool to the collar specs, and got myself transferred into your class." He sighed, lighting up a cigarette while guiding the steering wheel with his elbow. "Seems like it wasn't meant to be. I'm pretty sure my plan wasn't discovered, so it must have been that bridge collapse that stopped us getting put through the Program. Anyway, so far, so normal. I was thinking I'd try again next year, no sweat, if there's a will there's a way and I don't mind waiting. Then you lot start dying."
Shogo paused, flipping on his indicator and turning off the motorway. "This is where it starts getting complicated. I mean, for a good while, I didn't believe it. It was only once this List turned up, and the freak accidents carried on as predicted, I began to think... hell, I still don't know what I think. I thought I believed in free will and self-determination. Anyway, what appears to be happening is that we're getting killed off, in the order that we would have died on the Program."
"Well..." Shinji was the first to break the silence. "It makes sense."
"In a kind of non-sense-making way," qualified Yutaka. "I'm number twenty-four. Not bad, for the five-foot wonder. Guys like me usually don't last five minutes. I wonder what would've happened?"
"I just don't see how it could be possible," said Hiroki, frowning. "I admit that it all makes sense, and the List is right so far, it's just... hard to swallow."
"This is something Keiko told me about. I ripped on her about it at the time, but now, I'm glad she did," said Shogo. "Never mind who she is. But she said that there was this theory that if the universe is infinite, there is an infinite number of parallel worlds with an infinite number of possibilities and small differences. For example, there's probably a world which is exactly the same as this one, except my car is red instead of blue. Or in which America won the war, and we're going for a burger and fries without a care in the world. There's one where Shuya's destined to be the greatest rock star the world has ever seen, there's another where he's a druggie burn-out."
"Thanks…" said Shuya, looking put out.
"Don't take it personally. So," continued Shogo, "if this theory is right, there's a world where that bridge didn't collapse - where we got to where we were going, and went on the Program. In that timeline, we were all meant to die. If that reality exists, and we exist too... it's possible there's been some kind of overlap. A confusion of realities. Even though we didn't actually go on the Program, at the point where we were on the bridge about to cross, the two timelines came so close together that some things got confused. We got their fate and they got ours. So to iron things out and get them parallel again, Fate - or whatever you call it - is killing us off in this reality in order for the other one to make sense."
"That is mind-bending," said Shinji.
"Well, look on the bright side. It's better than being in the other reality, where we went on the Program but, I assume, came back to life again," said Shogo, quirking his mouth.
"Do you mean… zombies?" Yutaka was agape.
"I have no idea. It's only a theory and might be complete shit. But wouldn't it be interesting if it was right? It means Shuya would have won the Program. Congratulations are in order, I think."
Shuya could only stare. He slowly shook his head as the implications whizzed around in his mind.
"No dice, Kawada. There's no way I would do that. Ever. Kill all my friends, just like that? Just to win? It's not a game!"
Shogo shrugged. "A game is exactly what it is, but not everyone follows the rules. Maybe you played like me, for survival, or maybe you did it because you wanted to. I don't know you that well, not well enough to judge. But from what I've seen, I'm guessing you played for survival. Shu the psychopath? It just doesn't fit. Maybe you just got lucky and had victory thrust upon you."
"So just because I won in the other version, it doesn't mean I actually killed anyone?" Shuya brightened. "So I could've won just by chance, or luck, or whatever? Maybe your plan to beat the Program worked after all, and all it means is that we all died of old age in the other reality."
"Not quite." Shogo passed the List back to Shuya. "Someone played the game. That's why people are dying now, not in forty, fifty years or whatnot. I wasn't planning escape. I just wanted to show them that I could screw over their system - I know the collar specs, remember? I'd have deactivated them, instead of playing, and given them twenty-odd winners. Anyway, unless there was some sort of mass-suicide pact, you probably wouldn't have ended up as the last man standing without doing anything. There'd have been at least one person left in endgame, and chances are they were one of the hardcore ones. By that point, the survival instinct is too strong. You play." Shogo's face darkened. "Trust me, I know."
Shuya traced the list with his thumb, from his name at the bottom to the names before him. "It's me, then Noriko. Does that mean..."
"Yeah. Noriko Nakagawa. At best - meaning, morally, involving the least number of kills on your part - you killed her. Maybe she was trying to kill you. Maybe she was your ally. I'm not going to speculate why you did it, but in the other reality, I died, my escape plan got fucked up, nobody escaped, you won the game. Maybe you killed me too, maybe not. But you definitely killed Nakagawa. And there's nothing you can do to change that."
-
The desk was a mess of scissors and glue, notebooks with barely legible squiggles, and half-finished probability trees. On top of everything was a plate of crackers and cheese, as well as a can of cola, long-abandoned. Kyoichi Motobuchi (Male Student #20) was pulling his first ever all-nighter. This time, the outcome was rather more important than a school exam. Once Tatsumichi Ooki was confirmed dead - and it was only a matter of time - Motobuchi was next.
He traced circles in the margin with his pencil as he thought. Then, he wrote:
Hypothesis: intelligence gets you to the end of the list.
No. The arrangement was too random, too many pieces of aberrant data. Although the cleverer students tended to score above average, the correlation was not strong enough to draw a solid conclusion. Anyway, he himself only ranked 29th out of 42 on this List, which smarted. He was consistently in the top five across the board, sometimes even number one, if Kiriyama didn't show up. It couldn't be that.
Hypothesis: it's some form of physical evaluation.
Unlikely. The biggest, burliest guys in the class mostly got killed off early, while the top ten was scattered with wispy girls. Souma was more tits than muscles, and could shrimpy Noriko Nakagawa beat the hulking man-mountain Shogo Kawada? Give me a break.
Kyoichi Motobuchi bit the end of his pencil in frustration, then wrote:
Hypothesis: It's all completely random.
Maybe random distribution was the only way to make sense of the List. And even that had flaws. It'd be an unusual random generator that, by chance, threw Class B's two dating couples together, as well as creating a near-perfect rendering of the Kiriyama gang and Yukie Utsumi's... nice gang. Whatever they were.
This gave him an idea. He wrote:
Hypothesis: Niceness?
No: inverted niceness. A list of evil in ascending order. Daft, lovable Yoshitoki, caring Fumiyo and Mayumi, harmless Akamatsu... yes... hardcore Soma and Kiriyama finishing in the top 5. There were a few blips, of course: the Kiriyama gang getting eliminated so early, with Noriko and Shuya, of all people, apparently the winners. Hidden depths?
Perhaps their niceness was a front?
Then, there was a noise in the room. A crackling, staticky sound, apparently emanating from the old television in the corner. The hairs on Kyoichi Motobuchi's neck stood up. He didn't think he'd left it on, and not on that channel…
"...and after a blistering battle that lasted two days, thirteen hours and seven minutes, all but one of Class E of…" There was a static buzz. "…have been eliminated. This year, several records have been broken, including number of kills by one individual contestant..."
Kyoichi jumped to his feet, knocking over his half-empty coke can. Sticky dark liquid ran down the chair leg and pooled on the floor. How did the television turn itself on? That had to be impossible without someone pressing the button...
"... we are here live at Shiroiwa Military Academy, where the lucky winner is about to disembark from the helicopter which has carried them directly from the field of battle."
Huh. The Program. Violence porn (and sometimes, actual porn) playing to the lowest common denominator. Not his cup of tea. He turned it off, and turned his back.
"...many new records this year, including the first successfully-completed consensual sexual act, involving the yet-to-be-announced winner, and unlucky runner-up Yukino Matsui... so can we infer that our winner is male?"
Irritated, and beginning to feel afraid, Motobuchi pulled the plug out at the wall. With a satisfying electronic blip, the screen went black. He didn't have time to be screwing about with misbehaving televisions. He had his life to save. But now he was distracted and he'd lost his chain of thought. Fucking Program, he thought venomously. It's messed everything up.
There was an electronic hiss as the television screen flickered to life again, impossibly.
"We are authorised to inform you that our winner, issued with a Smith & Wesson M19 revolver, completed the Program in near-record time, making a staggering nineteen individual kills. Oh, they're opening the doors... the winner is coming out... it's... he's... It's the class president! Boy #1, Yukio Inoue, is the winner! What a true show of leadership!"
But the face on the screen, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was Motobuchi's.
His yell of horror was entirely involuntary. Kyoichi Motobuchi's entire body jerked away from the possessed television, wanting to put distance between his own body and the uncanny other self, standing there, slim and diminutive amid the soldiers, blood-spattered, grinning. His heel slid on the spilt coke, sending him careering across the floor. Elbows slammed into the wardrobe, which toppled, pinning him to the desk.
Clumsy idiot, Motobuchi thought. He blinked.
Tried to blink. His vision was red and oddly unfocused, and there was something getting in the way of the eyelid. It said 'HB' on the side.
There is a pencil in my eye, he thought, perfectly calmly. I must have fallen against my desk-tidy and impaled my head on a pencil, helped by the weight of the wardrobe, which probably weighs more than I do. So, I am trapped... and... dead?
Looks that way.
Fucking Program.
On the TV screen, Yukio Inoue's father came forward to congratulate his son. As Motobuchi quietly bled to death, the blood-spattered boy and the government director walked away arm in arm.
-
13 eliminated, 29 to go…