With Echo on the loose again, Rockman pushes the limits of his bond with Netto to pursue her. Meiru, devastated and alone, searches for Netto to hold her life together, and Imi struggles against another voice, one that refuses to be silent. The adventure continues in Remnants, the conclusion to Echoes, and chapter ten, "Meiru's Quest," coming soon.

Afterword, Part One

It all started with Noein.

I've watched Sci-Fi channel for many years, mostly for such things like Stargate SG-1 or Battlestar Galactica, and wouldn't you know it, I heard they would have an "Ani-Monday" promotion. At first, this did not impress me, but then again, there's not usually much to do at eleven o'clock at night. I was willing to give it a shot.

Noein, for those unfamiliar (which I expect to be…nearly everybody), is probably what happens when a quantum physicist meets Salvadore Dali (you know, the melting clocks guy). Just what any good physics major likes to see, isn't it? Naturally I would pick apart the scientific inaccuracies as I could—not because they detracted from the story (inconsistency detracts from stories much more, in my opinion) but because…well, it's fun.

Noein is a good show, though, an intriguing story in both philosophical and personal terms, and I will say I wished for there to be more development between Haruka, the protagonist, and Yuu (yes, Haruka and Yuu, this is not a joke), but then again, the foundation for the relationship was there…and explored in parallel universes ("timespaces") well enough.

What Noein did for me, though, was get me to delve back into the world of anime. Truth be told, it was a class of work I'd only brushed upon in my younger days, mostly due to a one-time religious ritual to watch Kids' WB on Saturday mornings. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! kept me entertained for many a morning, along with, of course, Megaman NT Warrior.

It took me a while to revisit that subject in particular. I started with Cardcaptor Sakura, emptying my mind of the corruption that was the English dub and replacing it with subtitles of the original Japanese. I won't say dubs are inherently inferior forms—for instance, I watched both subtitles and the dubs of Chobits, and I felt the dubs were very true to the original. There's more to what we say than the content, though. There's rhythm and cadence, emphasis and stress. Though I've written in English for Echoes (and that's about the only thing I could write in), I tend to imagine, however inaccurately, the rhythm of how characters speak, how the dialogue I've written might sound in Japanese—not in so many words, but in terms of the quality of it, the feeling of it. And perhaps there is some illusion here: very little sounds unusual in itself, to me at least, in Japanese, while a bad voice actor can easily kill the rhythm of the moment for me in English.

I worked my way through Cardcaptor Sakura and moved on to Chobits, then Angelic Layer (yes, I said, "Hey, why not try some other CLAMP stuff?"). Chobits probably appealed to me most in the intellectual sense; that they balanced this with a very personal journey, for both Hideki (sound familiar?) and Chii, was a very artistic touch. Angelic Layer, too, had its moments, particularly Misaki's reunion with…someone very dear to her…but on the whole, while that had been an undercurrent for the whole series, there was, in my opinion, too much tease and not enough payoff, not to mention a lack of other compelling storylines.

But after Angelic Layer, I happened to remember a tale of a world in the year "200X," where people of all ages had their own personal navigator programs, which they could use to fight for sport…or for the sake of humankind. That's when I reentered the world of Rockman EXE.

To this day I'm still delving into it, mostly at the speed of translation, but also limited by…shall we say, "storage constraints." Needless to say, when I bought a new laptop nine months ago, I did not anticipate I would need so much room for "original Japanese DVDs." Yes, that's it. That's why my 80 GB hard drive is too small, yes.

Perhaps to overcompensate for my incomplete knowledge, I've paid extreme attention to detail—maybe too much attention—but I also feel that details and history are what make characters who they are. We are products of our pasts, after all, and though it's tempting to neglect the past in order to make a character fit the needs of the present, I like to think the past is what drives the character in the present.

—

But enough about petty background. Let's talk about Echoes.

It began as a nice little fluff story called "Masquerade dot com" with the two elements unique to Echoes: Imi, a navi who could imitate and would hear voices whenever she touched someone, and Hideki, her father, who booted her out after his daughter, Masuyo, passed away. As I said, it was a fluff story. Imi was a simple hostess at a masquerade club, where she could harness her abilities to disguise navis, and Rockman and Roll would casually meet at this club and discuss their problems with each other, naturally not realizing who they're talking to. Even Netto and Meiru got in on the fun, sending each other letters under pseudonyms. A beautiful story.

A beautifully confused story.

Echoes never would have been born if it hadn't been for FFN's policy not to accept submissions from newly registered users. In that waiting period, I sat on my piece—a story of roughly 14,000 words—and decided it was…not enough. I shelved it and returned to my work of original fiction (also a novel; the style of Echoes is very similar to it, but the subject matter is…a touch different).

My original work was slowly creeping to a halt, however, and I found myself more and more distracted by watching Rockman EXE as I could manage. I'd also begun to read about publishing and structuring (as my original work had, in fact, gone so far as to complete the first third of a trilogy, and I seriously considered publishing that before the whole work was finished). That's when I met Randy Ingermanson's "snowflake method." (Google this if you're interested.) It promised to be a methodical means of organizing a novel or helping to rewrite it. Though most of my original work was already outlined to some extent, I felt like I could use a good chance to test this method and make it my own.

And thus, Echoes was born.

Ingermanson's snowflake method is an iterative process, with each step building on the last. One builds the higher structure of the novel and progressively fills in more and more detail, with an equal emphasis on characters and plot. After disregarding some of my natural instincts (I tend to build small scenes that capture what I want and work the plot around them), I found it very useful for structuring this work, and it's interesting to see how it's evolved, as each step in the process is a modification of the last.

Indeed, the original rough outlines for Echoes only bear some resemblance to the final, scene-by-scene outline, and more than that, as I write each chapter, I modify its outline and rewrite it as needed to accommodate what I've done (and changed) before it. I'll elaborate on this later on in the chapter discussions; right now, let me give a broad sense of it.

For example, this excerpt is from the original "one-paragraph" outline.

Nakamura Hideki couldn't bear to keep Imi EXE, his daughter Masyuo's navi and his creation, after Masuyo's death. Imi roams the streets of Internet City, trying to survive, and is taken hostage in an attempt to draw out Rockman, but she annihilates her captors with her ability to copy. This revelation stunned Imi, but the mounting number of voices in her head, from copying many navis, drives her to kill all the navis she's copied, including Rockman and Roll…

As you may have noticed, a lot of things changed. The "hostage situation" became the incident at the Treble Clef, which had nothing to do with drawing out Rockman. Indeed, I felt any such hostage crisis would be (a) unoriginal and (b) lack the necessary depth. I struggled to make it work for ages, trying to write in a backstory for characters that would make sense and explain why they would want Rockman (or, in later ideas, want to find Imi). In the end, it wasn't until the third outline (the "four-page" outline) that I even conceived of Sonicman per se, though the idea of a first navi to makes Imi realize who and what she is had crossed my mind before.

I also discarded the plotline of Rockman and Roll being threatened by Echo's attacks. As I moved on to having Imi stay with them, it simply wasn't going to work out. This actually still left some holes later on, particularly in "The Cage," where I had to gloss over why Rockman and Roll would be "protected." But I felt that Imi wanting to keep from harming them was a compelling plot point, more so than having the two of them in danger personally.

A key turning point in the development of Echoes was the third "act." Indeed, each chapter of Echoes is like its own story: connected to the others tightly, but each provides an opening, a hook, and, hopefully, some closure. I derived this structure from television, as a matter of fact, particularly from Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski, the show's creator, described as a "novel for television," and I've taken his model and reversed it. It appeals to me to make the characters grow slowly and evolve over the course of many encounters, many small stories that link together.

And in the style of old theater, I divided Echoes into three acts: the first, Imi's attempts to murder all the navis who touched her, culminating in her faked death at the end of "The Cage"; the second, her regrouping from this point and entry into the real world via Rush's powers to finish off the rest, ending with her surrender and the heartbreaking death of Roll ("Selfishness"); the third, Rockman's reaction to Roll's death and his dogged pursuit of Echo, until…well, don't let me give the rest away, for as you can see, this "third act" lies mostly after what you've read by now. Indeed, in the original outlines, this third act felt too rushed to me, so I expanded it, and it now comprises part two of Echoes. I took what was to be a single novel and lengthened it into two. I even contemplated a trilogy at one point, but I soon realized that was asking a bit much. Two parts just felt right.

In many ways, the relics of that structure remain, however. The first half still really only has two parts: the turning point between "The Cage" and "Spine of the Hedgehog," and the end. The turning point I wanted to have with Imi's capture just simply didn't pan out, and so I fit in the revelations—Echo's identity, Roll's love, and her death—into the last two chapters.

Did I mention that Roll dies?

At any rate, I think I've said all I can say about part one as a whole. The rest of this afterword will discuss the individual chapters in more detail.

—

Prologue

In retrospect, I have many doubts about the purpose of the prologue. I feel like perhaps it hasn't hooked enough people to read the way a good prologue should, but I can assure that it is entirely appropriate. Perhaps what it needs to do is give more hints of what is to come; I'm not quite sure.

Chapter One: Echo

A short chapter. I'm surprised at how much longer all the other chapters are compared to this one, especially with so much exposition. Like the prologue, I've worried that this chapter doesn't grab the reader enough, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more appropriate opening than the confrontation at the Treble Clef (which, if memory serves, isn't named in this chapter). But as opening chapters go, this one did everything I wanted out of it: it introduces all the major story threads—Imi's plight, Hideki and Yuuichirou's loss and their mission to revive their children, Rockman and Roll's relationship. To be fair to Netto and Meiru, they don't get a lot of time spent on them at this point, but they will.

Chapter Two: The Maze

This chapter was outlined very differently. It began as a simple "Rockman and Roll are trying to reach Mazeman, but there's this booby-trapped maze in the way, and Echo's following them as they disarm each trap" story, with the ultimate irony being Rockman's attempt to save Mazeman is what allows Echo to delete him. But this made Mazeman very dull, and I couldn't write a whole chapter around a trapped maze.

Instead, on my third attempt to write this chapter, I made Mazeman the prime instigator, and I was very pleased at how the chapter turned out. Indeed, I still feel it is one of the best, with perhaps Netto's adventures to contact the other operators detracting somewhat from the flow. I say this because that whole passage (with some minor tweaks to the scenes at Saloma's) were written in the earlier drafts.

But Mazeman turned out to be a very interesting character, perhaps the most interesting of all Imi's targets. The only other one I spent a significant amount of time writing was Egami. Yes, I made a mistake; when I wrote the outlines, Egami was the character's name and the name everyone used because no one knew her. Then I changed her backstory to be someone Netto and Meiru knew, though not too well, and I realized I needed a given name for the girl, but…I liked Egami too much. The rhythm was too nice, and no given name I could find had that kind of rhythm and sound. So, I wrote her to only like being called Egami, hence Meiru's snarky "Aya-san" when they're at Saloma's. She knows it grates on Egami.

Some people might think I set up Egami and Grove to be rivals for Meiru and Roll. In truth, I only intended them to illustrate Meiru and Roll's possessive nature. Grove is very distant from everyone, even her own operator, while Egami is the opposite: kind and friendly and, to some extent, oblivious. But Egami, along with Ikeda and Yukawa, suffers largely from being neither the hero nor the villain nor the victim (yet), so I couldn't spend much time with her, with all of them.

A couple other things of note for this chapter: I took it as plausible that, after Makoto developed copyroids in Beast, it wouldn't be long before safer versions hit the market for the general public. Hence, Mazeman doesn't have his navi abilities when he walks the real world. This is also important for "Playing Roulette."

In addition, I felt it was important for Imi to confront Mazeman herself, despite the risk that Rockman and Roll would overhear their conversation. It requires some suspension of disbelief, I admit, to think that neither they nor Netto and Meiru overheard Imi's conversation with Mazeman, but this is in part why I made Rockman suspect that something was amiss when it was all said and done, though it might be somewhat out of character.

Chapter Three: Playing Roulette

"Playing Roulette" didn't exist in the original scene-by-scene outline. Indeed, the chapter was to be "Heart of Stone," save with Rouletteman being on the run. Rouletteman would have impeded the effort to apprehend Echo through cowardice, but I soon realized this was more and more of a stretch—after all, how could action be sustained if Rouletteman ran away from the fighting?— and I changed the subject of pursuit to Slateman.

I'm reasonably proud of this chapter, though for reasons of pacing I chose to skip over some things. Meiru's reappearance is unexplained, for instance, but we can imagine she managed to coax the secret of Netto's whereabouts out of Meijin. Some of the mechanics of how Imi manages to take over Rouletteman's PET are hand-waved, also, mostly because I felt there was a large gray area in how navis interact with their PETs and the outside net.

Is Halo's death gratuitous? I'm not sure. It is what it is.

And then the little mindgame with Netto's dream coming true—that was fun to do, even if it was a bit over the top.

The last important thing is Rockman's refusal to slay Echo there and then, when she was weakened and vulnerable. He's the good guy, and as is later observed, he had to give her a chance, just one chance, but even so he will come to regret that.

Chapter Four: Heart of Stone

As I said, I originally planned this chapter with Rouletteman in mind, leaving Slateman's entrance to "The Cage," where his life and death could be properly chronicled. Like "The Maze," I planned this chapter around three traps. The third, as a matter of fact, was the Fire Soul trick Netto pulls off at the end of the previous chapter, and as with "The Maze," I realized three traps was not enough content to build a chapter around.

Since I originally planned it as chapter three, it was meant to hit home just how powerful Echo is. As chapter four, some of that power is diluted, but the themes remained: Echo turns each trap and stratagem around, using against our heroes. And Slateman's hard-headedness doesn't help, either. Is Slateman too single-minded? Perhaps, but he and Yukawa are uncompromising, and I feel I was consistent in portraying that.

A subplot I managed to work into this chapter was Roll's struggle. Since "Echo," this is really the first time we get to see substantial interaction between Rockman and Roll, even though it's dominated by Rockman's guilt over having let Echo go. This guilt drives Rockman to fight harder than he ordinarily might, beyond what good judgment would suggest, and Roll, helpless to intervene as she is thanks to a plot device, panics. She loves the poor guy, after all, and the depth of that has always had a strong effect on her—obsessiveness, possessiveness. I've got to think there can be excessive worry and fear there, too, for all the dangerous tasks Rockman's performed. It is fitting, to me, that Meiru goes to bat for Roll, and surrounded by insanity, Meiru is the one who does the sane thing and ends the massacre.

But Rockman is still torn over his errors; he means nothing malicious when he ponders what Echo will do next, but it does hurt Roll, to think that he can't appreciate that she saved him.

Chapter Five: The Cage

This was a tough chapter to write. It's hard to be psychological without overdoing it, and with a limited number of interesting viewpoints (really only Imi's is interesting because she's the only one who can be proactive and try to defeat the cage), it was…restrictive.

I knew right off that I wanted Slateman to die in this chapter and that I wanted Yukawa to be the one to do it, but I realized that it would take some doing to get there. Originally, Imi was simply going to deceive the others into thinking Slateman was Echo by use of clever timing, but I found the idea of having a new effect of her touching someone—transmitting her thoughts and memories back to them—a provocative one. It is, in fact, something I'd had planned for much later on in the story, and this gave a good opportunity to ease into it, at the risk of coming off as a device invented for the purpose of killing off Slateman.

People are on-edge in this chapter, and this works to Imi's advantage. Netto has his nightmare (which addresses the "tactical mistake," as Laika puts it, of using Greiga and Falzer against Echo), and the navis are willing to fight and scuffle a lot more than they otherwise would be. Roll's frustrations come out, to Rockman's confusion, and we can see he still doesn't quite get it.

The ending of the Cage does require some…finagling. Is it plausible that Yuuichirou wouldn't test all the other navis after Slateman's demise? I think so; I think they'd all be fatigued and stressed enough to just want to go home, but I admit I don't like having left it so easily perturbed. Something to work on for the future, though.

Chapter Six: Spine of the Hedgehog

I felt the Sonicman subplot of this chapter was important to hit home that Imi was in fact Sonicman during the Pickman incident, even though I'd hoped I'd made it fairly obvious over the course of the preceding chapters. I had to sit on this chapter for a while, though, as I struggled to find a way to bring Roll to the Treble Clef again in search of information. Would she be looking for Echo or for Imi? Obviously the latter.

After the first draft fizzled at around 5000 words, I had the idea for Yaito's party. Perhaps somewhat tasteless, to have a party to celebrate Echo's demise (and I tried to have Meiru point out this view), but Yaito is as Yaito is, and far be it for anyone to stop her, either. It turned a rather confused chapter into something I could string together tightly.

But we can see that Meiru's perspective in this chapter is very grim. To me, her feelings are complex and not completely articulated, but she needs stability in life, most of all from Netto, a person who is not inherently unstable but, perhaps, unsteady or whimsical. Meiru's song is as much about love as it is about stability and the passage of time.

I freely admit that writing a song may not come out so well in pure text.

I rarely step into Netto's head, mostly because I find his thought processes a bit simple. He's much better as a reflection of other people's feelings, as I use him in "Selfishness" to foil Rockman's confusion over his new identity. When writing from Netto's perspective, I feel I have to be more subtle than may be conducive to the reader, but for the volleyball scene, it was doable. He notices but doesn't understand Meiru's behavior, and that much is enough.

In the first draft of this chapter, there was a scene in which Masuyo confronts Grove and Rouletteman in an imaginary bedroom—Masuyo's bedroom. We see part of this bedroom in flashback, as Imi returns home to try to find her father, but Masuyo's scene would've expanded on the description of this room greatly, and I hope to use it again, perhaps as Masuyo's own abode, in part two.

Chapter Seven: Collage

When I finished Echo's attempts at Rouletteman and Grove after 3000 words, I was a bit concerned. When I finished the chapter at 10000 words, I was…puzzled.

In hindsight, I would've liked to expand a bit more on Roll's feelings, as I haven't stepped in her mind many times over the course of the work, but the pacing overall of her section felt good, and I'd have a hard time changing it without rewriting it wholesale.

Rockman's still confused. Oh boy is he confused. I think confusion suits him well. He's dealing with emotions that he's not prepared to confront or even fully understands. Just how can he make Roll happy if he doesn't comprehend her needs?

Originally, I hadn't meant for Imi to realize her father was working with Yuuichirou. This had a profound impact on the structure of subsequent chapters—indeed, as a result I ended up ditching a whole chapter and dividing its content between "Golden Silence" (originally called "Zeroes," which would've ended with Egami's death) and "Selfishness" (though most of this chapter's content is the same, I added more reaction to the revelation that Imi was Echo). On balance, this was probably for the better, as the original "Golden Silence" would've consisted of everybody going around and just trying to figure out what happened, which…could've been slow.

And poor Rush. I wanted to give him more "screen time," so to speak, but I could never find a good place (over the course of the book thus far) to include him that wouldn't detract or distract. Is it gratuitous? I pondered the danger that it could be, but given that it becomes a plot point in the next chapter, I felt it at least made sense.

Chapter Eight: Golden Silence

The first draft of "Golden Silence" had about 7000 words. It was fairly straightforward, and several scenes from the first draft made it intact and unchanged to the current version: Echo's attack on the Victorian, Meiru's hunt for Rush (and the race to reach Egami), and the flashback with Grove and Egami. Originally, Egami was just going to go on the run in a panicked attempt to save Grove from Echo. I added the small subplot with Hideki coming into the picture to help extend the action and clue Imi in about Masuyo's resurrection. I felt this was a good thing to do, as originally, Imi wasn't going to even find out at all, but her father personally rejecting her provided the necessary devastation that I wanted. It locks her up, so to speak.

On balance, I did kind of take for granted that Imi could touch a human and hear them like she would a navi. A reference to Mazeman and how he heard humans through his copyroid body would've been…a good idea.

I played with a fair number of ideas with this chapter. As I hinted earlier, I wanted Egami to play a larger role in this chapter, perhaps to bring more meaning to her demise. Indeed, the original idea had her going to great lengths (extreme, morally questionable lengths) to protect Grove from Echo. I soon began to feel that this was gratuitous moral ambiguity (I imagine there can be such a thing, anyway). Grove, however, is still insistent that Egami give her up to protect her.

As I mentioned in the notes for "Collage," this chapter was conceived as two—the first in which Egami is slain and Imi quest ends, and the second in which Netto and Rockman find out the truth about Saito and Hideki learns of Imi's presence and her identity as Echo. I deemed the second to be inordinately slow, and for that reason, I merged the two together and cut a lot of material, but it did give me an ending conundrum: what do I end this chapter on? Egami's death, the revelation of Saito, or Imi's unmasking? Ultimately, I decided that the middle option was the best, as it was truly necessary to set up the events of "Selfishness."

Chapter Nine: Selfishness

And here we are, the final chapter of the first half. Once again, I'm surprised with how long it ended up, considering the lack of action, but I also feel like everything fleshed out well here.

The first deviation from the outline (after having corrected it for the compression that occurred by combining two chapters into "Golden Silence") was the scene with Meiru, Netto, and Dingo confronting the devastated Imi. She doesn't resist; she's too far gone, and Netto's sorely, sorely tempted to delete this program right then and there, but hey, he's a hero, and she's helpless. It'd be so much easier if she resisted, if she were simply evil and not insane to boot. I hope that's what came across here.

Roll's in a very peculiar state of mind, but Meiru cuts through it well. A lot of her anger with Imi comes from having been used, in her eyes, but for all her deeds, Imi is still vulnerable. She has a weakness, and it's a weakness anyone with a heart can sympathize with: the need for love. Roll can't ignore that, for it's a topic close to her heart as well.

When I conceived of this chapter, I didn't originally think about the relationship between Netto and Rockman, but it quickly became obvious that this would be the central conflict in Rockman's decision, for either way, he would lose some aspect of Netto's life: as a human, he can't be there all the time. As a navi, he can't be there in some very important times, and there would always be a fundamental divide between them. It's tough, and there's no easy decision that stems from pondering this dichotomy.

And then we have the confession. I think it was critical to understand that if Rockman truly loved Roll on the same level that she did, we wouldn't be here at all. Rockman's always been a bit oblivious (though he's been getting closer to realizing it over the course of the first half), and when that obliviousness is shattered, he just breaks down. A lot of it is guilt: Rockman has consistently been a guilty person, and in his mind, not having shown Roll the love she wanted is something he greatly regrets. But, like all people, he can only handle so much guilt, and to cope with it, he excuses himself from it, he justifies it; if he were to cave in to this guilt, he would have to do something worse: show her love he doesn't feel, even though it's dubious as to whether he really doesn't.

So he makes the choice. He makes the choice to flee from Roll's love, to become human, even though he's making that choice mostly to avoid confronting his feelings and not because he wants more to be human than navi. And we see the ironic consequences of this choice in the link. Roll, of course, believes he's chosen to forsake her, and now she must begin to move on.

We have the virus fight scene. To this point, I've tried to seriously avoid viruses, if only because…they're lame, but aside from the ear-pinching scene, this is the first hint we get that Rockman's fighting shape is in jeopardy, though he and Netto seem to be in curious synch as a result of the link.

As I mentioned earlier, I'd wanted to show more of Masuyo (through Imi's representation of her), but here I got to work it in nicely. This scene was critical to bringing Roll full circle—from reviling Imi to identifying with her. And it's that identification with Imi that makes her feel her ability to move on rests with Imi.

And so we have the deletion scene. I knew that Imi would have to get pretty agitated to want to touch Roll and risk condemning her to death. I do think Roll's conversation does this, as she is doggedly trying to comfort Imi, yet Imi is refusing to walk that path. She's still committed to her father. It's hard to see Imi's thought process here; I hope to visit it in later chapters, but I feel she is pushed enough to question whether Roll's the good-natured navi, unlike the ones she touched, that she believed. It's enough to want to make Roll understand. It's enough to make her touch her. And Rockman tries to save her, but his link helps cost her her life.

The supreme irony of his choice.

I originally planned everything after this as its own chapter, but I felt that it was good to wrap everything up (at the risk of making it a ginormous 14000 words). Meiru's reaction is a bit muted at first—it is the next morning, after all. And Netto is really important to her ability to recover from this, so much so that, despite her grief, she needs his comfort.

And she asks him to call her Meiru.

Rockman is not oblivious to this point. It's bitter for him, to see Netto getting along well with Meiru while Roll is gone. This is the first hint that not all is well with Rockman, as he uses the memory of Roll's death to convince Netto to go after Echo, and their sudden disappearance forces Meiru to go after them. She has to, or else everything she had will be gone.

And somewhere out there, Imi is looking for her father.

In Conclusion

Thus, the end of the first half of Echoes. I hope you've enjoyed it so far, as dark as it is. I know I've not been kind to these characters, but they are strong, every last one of them, and they will endure. More than that, they will learn. That is why I chose to write this story—because they had much to learn still about themselves and each other, and I felt I could bring that out.