Chapter 25: Snow Flakes

A gentle snow was falling on the city.

It coated the streets and sidewalks in a soft blanket that muffled the sounds of footsteps, and slowed traffic to a quiet crawl.

It was Winter Break, and students were out of class. And looking out at the city sidewalks, it seemed that nearly everyone who was outside was out to walk or play in the snow.

Yuzuki was staring out an upstairs window. She had lost about half her data about Kaede more than a year ago, and Minoru had never re-entered it. But the data she did have gave her a special appreciation for snowy days, because Kaede had loved the snow.

"Want to go for a walk?", she asked Minoru. "It looks beautiful out there."

"I'd like that", Minoru replied with a slight smile. "A day like this ought not be spent entirely indoors", he added as he donned his thickest Winter attire.

Hand-in-hand, they ventured out.

Meandering along the city sidewalks, Minoru and Yuzuki took in the sights and sounds; trees with their branches all white, the footprints of others who had been out earlier, a wide variety of snowmen and snow-angels, and the kids who made them, still out there, screaming and giggling as they scooted around in the new-fallen snow.

"Kaede always loved the snow", Yuzuki mentioned, as they passed a mausoleum.

"That is so true", Minoru replied. It was a big mausoleum, and there were lots of people buried there... and one of them was Minoru's sister.

"I haven't paid my respects in a while", he added as they entered the maze of boxes and grave markers. Some were big ornate statues. Others were tiny drawers in a wall.

Kaede's grave was a modest little box, one of many in a row by the far wall, and with the snow blanketing everything, it took some thought to figure which one it was.

As they approached, they could hear the sounds of someone quietly sobbing.

"Oh. Didn't mean to bother you, sir", Minoru blurted out in surprise when he realized that someone was kneeling at his sister's grave. "I mean ma'am..."

The woman turned to face Minoru, her face wet with tears, and Minoru stood there, his eyes wide, his mouth open, unable to speak.

"You've certainly grown", she told him gently.

The memories came flooding back; here was a woman he had seen his sister with, many times. But she'd been so quiet, Minoru had never really known her. And when his sister died, she had just... vanished.

"I... remember you", he stammered. "You were one of my sister's friends."

The woman nodded, as even more tears streamed from her eyes. "We were the best of friends!", she sobbed.

"I haven't seen you since she died", he told her, hoping she'd tell him where she'd gone.

"I know", she deadpanned. "I moved to Osaka... Just couldn't take staying here after she died."

"Care to come in for some tea?", Yuzuki asked her. "You're covered in snow, miss... um..."

"Jounouchi", she replied as she stood up.

Freya was covered in snow, too.

She'd been spending her winter break the same way she'd spent her autumn break, wandering around her home turf, dividing her time between the Gub Jogasaki, the Kokobunji place, and Kojima's.

Only this time, she had a lot on her mind.

Soon, she'd be touring the U.S., and she wanted to have at least one new song... but nothing, absolutely nothing, was coming to her.

Eventually, she knew, Yatsumi and Kojima would find out she was seeing them both, and she was worried. She didn't know how they'd react.

And most of all, she wanted to make sense of that final night of her Autumn tour. All those adoring fans, all that crazy-code... {Am I a pervert, or just a fool?}, she wondered as she trudged though the thickening snow, unsure of where she was going.

Right now, Freya didn't really feel like being anywhere in particular. There was an ornate building nearby, with gargoyles adorning the edge of the roofline; and in her black coat, the hood up pulled over her head, she joined them.

Perched up there like a vulture, she spent the afternoon watching the gentle snowflakes fall, and the people playing and meandering about below.

I bet she comes up with a new song now.

"So, Ms. J, what brings you back to Tokyo?", Yuzuki asked, as she and Minoru headed home with their guest.

"A teaching job at the college", she replied. "I finished out my degree in Osaka, but couldn't find a job in my field there, what with the recession and all."

She glanced over her shoulder at the mausoleum. "Somehow, I just kind of drifted over there...", she commented with a look of nostalgia. "I've been back in town for two days, and it starts snowing."

"Kaede always did love the snow", Yuzuki repeated, and Ms. J nodded sadly.

"So true", she replied. "Actually, Yuzuki, you look a bit like her. You didn't have TWO sisters, did you, Kokobunji?"

The heavy motorized gates of the Kokobunji estate opened wide, and the three of them went in where it was warm. Yuzuki disappeared into the kitchen, while the humans sat down in the living room.

"About Yuzuki", Minoru explained. "When Kaede died, I just couldn't take it, being here without her. So I built Yuzuki."

"So, she's a persocom", Ms. J replied in a near-monotone. "Don't tell me you were trying to bring Kaede back..."

"I'm afraid so", Minoru replied sadly. "Her resemblance to Kaede is no coincidence. I even entered data about her personality."

"Although, now that I've been able to let go of Kaede, Yuzuki has developed a personality all her own", he added as he looked in the direction of the kitchen.

"Losing his sister was really tough on Minoru", Yuzuki cut in as she returned with a tray of tea. "You can't know how tough unless you've been through it yourself."

"I have been through it myself", Ms. J said to the floor. "I lost my own sister to illness a decade ago... and I don't know what I would have done if Kaede hadn't been there to help me through it."

She turned to look out the window, as a single tear fell from one eye. "I could probably tell you things about your sister that even you didn't know, Minoru."

"Really?", Yuzuki asked, leaning in with interest. "What kinds of things?"

"You're not looking for her to enter more of Kaede's personality data, are you?", Minoru asked Yuzuki. "There's a reason I stopped entering it."

Yuzuki shook her head. "I'm not looking to be like your sister anymore. I'm just curious, is all", she explained as she poured the two humans some more tea. "She was a big part of your life, Minoru, so her influence is a big part of you."

The Gub Jogasaki was ready for the Winter with its new roof and other refurbishments. But Chitose and Zima were not to be seen out and about much. They were spending most of their time down in the lab. And when they did go out, they were usually shopping for computer chips or servo parts.

They showed up on Dita's tracking screen at a persocom technology symposium. "What.. are.. they.. DOING?!", she wailed. "Their behavior has suddenly changed!"

"It is an unproductive use of your time to track them", Sollwert monotoned. "They have yet to do anything that would flag them as a security risk."

"Oh, they're up to something, I just KNOW it!", Dita retorted. "And if the higher-ups won't let me investigate them, I'll do it on my OWN!

"That procedure is not recommended", Sollwert replied. "We are, after all, government property."

"I don't care!", Dita angrily announced as she flung open the door to the stairwell. "I'm going to find out what they're up to!"

Down the stairs she went, oblivious to a persistent beeping in her ears that had started the moment she left the cybersecurity lab. As she stepped onto the ground floor landing, the beeping stopped. So did her forward motion.

"What's going on?!", she gasped as she stood there frozen in place at the bottom of the stairs, unable to move.

As if in response, the door opened, and in walked several men in black suits. "Dita!", one of them called out. "8375 Fuji Honto!"

And at the sound of those words, everything went black.

She awoke to find herself, yet again, in the diagnostic bay, the I.T. guy standing beside her, his programming console plugged into her data port.

"What did you guys DO to me, Kei?", Dita demanded. "Some men in black yelled something at me, and I blacked out."

"They brought you in here unconscious", Kei told her. "Said you were going AWOL."

"Oh, let me guess", she deadpanned. "You had slipped some kind of trojan horse into my OS, just in case I tried to leave."

The I.T. guy looked at the floor. "I'm sorry, Dita. It's not like they gave me a choice about it... Install their shutdown program or lose my job..."

Dita rolled her eyes at Kei, and he was sure she didn't believe a word he was saying.

He typed in a few codes on his keyboard. "How about this, Dita... They said I had to install the trojan horse, but they didn't say I couldn't remove it later..." He pressed 'Enter', and Dita heard a confirmation beep inside her head. "It's gone", he told her.

"So, I can go AWOL now?", Dita asked.

"Um...", Kei hesitated, scratching his head. "How about I find a way to sneak you out of here instead?"

"Such as?", Dita asked skeptically.

"I'll think of something", Kei responded, sounding, um... semi-confident.

Winter Break, it seemed, was over way too quickly, and even before the students had returned to their classes, the 'CPU' tour bus was there to take Freya and the rest of the band to the airport, for their trip to America.

But no sooner than the U.S. tour began, there were already signs of trouble. Freya had become aware of a nagging stiffness in her servos.

Not that it was severe or anything, but it did worry her. And she was sure that it was affecting her onstage performance.

And scarcely more than a week later, her servo glitch got worse.

Right in the middle of a concert, her left leg started intermittently locking up. She tried to finish the song she was singing, only to fall with a loud "Clunk" onto the stage. Her fellow band members carried her off the stage to the sound of gasps from the audience.

Mr. Furoku took Freya straight to the nearest persocom shop.

"I don't see anything wrong with your computer hardware", the I.T. technician told her, "and your primary OS is a black box to us."

"I think it's the servos themselves", he told her, handing Mr. Furoku some handwritten directions to the nearest place where they could get her servos checked out.

...Holy Cow! Is that... Freya?!

They brought her in on a hand cart, unable to walk on her own.

On stage, she had always seemed larger-than-life. But there on the cart, she looked so small and fragile... it was hard to believe that this was the same Freya who was just on TV the other day.

The stricken look on her face was just heartbreaking as they wheeled her into the work area. "I... I can't move properly, it's all... jumpy!", she explained in a weak and hesitating voice.

Mr. Furoku pointed out the side seam on her left thigh, the site of the worst of her malfunctioning servos, and a handheld heat gun proved sufficient to open up the seam.

Coolant squirted out! And even though the stuff was clear, it looked like she was BLEEDING! JEEZ, I felt like I was gonna pass out right then and there! (I'm a technician, dammit, not a vascular surgeon!)

Mr. Furoku calmly stuck a plastic hose into the seam and siphoned off some of the coolant into a metal canister. With her leg elevated and some of the coolant siphoned off, the servomotor and its drive were accessible.

The servo drive responded properly to all of its recommended test signals, and the servomotor itself checked out fine, at least electrically.

But moving it by hand, the servomotor FELT sticky. Something was hanging up in there mechanically. Plus, something in that servo smelled really rotten. It was oil.

(Her servos use pumped oil? Far out! Most servomotors have ball-bearing packs with sealed-in grease)

But the oil just wasn't flowing properly. It was all thick and lumpy, like some kind of gravy. Like... RANCID gravy.

"Maybe she got ahold of some bad oil?", a co-worker offered. "Or she overheated and burned it?"

"It doesn't smell burnt", I told him. "It's kind of a bacterial smell."

Whatever it was, Freya's problem wasn't in her processors or her servos. It was in her oil. Mr. Furoku siphoned the bit of coolant back in, and we sealed her leg back up as best we could.

"Ah, I guess we should have thought to examine her oil in the first place, before having her servos looked at", Mr. Furoku admitted. He wheeled her out the door, and right into the lube shop across the street.

Apparently, we don't have servo flush here in the U.S., so the lube shop guys gave her engine flush instead.

It was disgusting stuff, but Freya did her best to drink it all anyway. She made awful faces as it went down. It foamed even worse than kerosene, and much to Freya's embarrassment, some of it seeped its way out past her drain valve.

"What IS this stuff?", she asked, a pained look on her face. "It feels like it's eating my insides!"

After a few minutes, her joints and servos were starting to free up, but Freya was doubling over in pain. "Oh god I'm gonna DIE!", she groaned as she braced her hands against the used-oil barrel and waited for the inevitable. Mr. Furoku held her hair back for her as she repeatedly puked up greyish blobs of lumpy rancid oil, awash in slimy engine-flush.

When at last she stopped barfing, she took an oil-drain pan into the restroom with her and let the rest of the awful mixture drain out.

When she came out, the mechanic had a freshly-opened bottle of 15W40 ready for her, and Mr. Furoku had one of her other outfits hanging across a nearby chair.

She felt a bit better as she drank in the clean new oil, and before long she was looking better, too. That is, she didn't look deathly ill anymore.

Slowly, but under her own power, Freya walked out of the lube shop and got back into the limo. And before they were even out of the parking lot, she was fast asleep.

A few days later, she was back on stage, singing as beautifully as ever. But within another week, she was limping again.

This time, they looked at her oil first. It was clotted and sticky again, and it smelled like something rotten.

Mr. Furoku took her straight to a hospital.

That's right, a human hospital.

If her oil had a bacterial smell to it, then maybe there were actual bacteria growing in it. A medical lab should be able to say for sure, and find a way to get rid of them if they were there.

"Name please", the hospital receptionist demanded in a bored-sounding voice.

"Tadao Furoku", he told her. "And this is Freya. We need to get some lab tests done to see if there are microbes in her oil..."

"You need to have a seat, sir", the receptionist told him bluntly. "Someone will call on you when it's your turn."

Furoku-san helped Freya into one of the waiting room chairs, and sat down beside her.

Nearly 2 hours had passed, and they still hadn't called on Mr. Furoku or Freya.

The receptionist who took down his name had left by now, and in her place was an athletic-looking young woman with short blond hair, and a big wad of chewing gum in her mouth.

She looked with confusion at the sign-in sheet, then showed it to a clerk. "Whatn'a hayell 'uzzat say?", she asked.

"Heck if I know", the clerk replied. "Cain't nobody read that girl's chickenscratch."

The receptionist took one more look at the sign-in sheet, then turned to face the waiting patients.

"TOADY FRAWG", she called out.

Lots of people looked up, but no one answered. She looked out at the waiting room, then back at the sign-in sheet. "Toady Frawg, Chick!", she called out, a bit hesitatingly this time.

"I'm callin' her cellphone", the clerk told her as he dialed the number.

"Yeah, I'm calling from the hospital", he told the previous receptionist over the phone. "Um... What's this 'Toady Frog, parentheses-chick' you got wrote down on the sign-in sheet?... Uh-huh... Okay..."

"She says some Chinese guy brung a robot in here", the clerk told her, once he'd hung up the phone. "That's probably them over there."

Mr. Furoku felt his ears burn at the conversation he was hearing. "I am not Chinese!", he told them indignantly.

The lab test, surprisingly, didn't take long. A quick look under a microscope showed that Freya's oil was teeming with bacteria. And not just any bacteria. It was Borkumensis.

"What?!", Freya gasped. "You mean I have oil-eating bacteria?!"

The doctor nodded. "Just because you're a persocom, that doesn't mean you're impervious to every kind of microbe. And these microbes are attacking the hydrocarbons in your oil."

"Are humans susceptible?", Freya asked.

"No", the doctor replied. "Borkumensis eats oil, so basically any persocom can be affected, but humans can't get it."

"Yatsumi!", Freya immediately emailed. "I'm at a hospital. You've got to get yourself checked out for Borkumensis! NOW!"

"Borkumensis?!", Yatsumi answered. "How'd you end up with oil-eating bacteria?"

"How would I know?", Freya lied. She actually had a pretty good idea of how she'd been exposed, but the details were just too embarrassing.

While Freya was emailing Yatsumi, Mr. "Toady Frawg" was filling out paperwork at the exit desk.

"WHAT?!", he shouted at the clerk when he saw the amount of the bill. "I could buy a used CAR for that amount. All she had was one little lab test! What kind of hospital IS this?!"

Freya's American tour had to be cut short. As soon as she could travel, it was back to a hospital in Tokyo to be pumped full of disinfectants that would, in time, eradicate all remnants of that pesky Borkumensis bug from her circulating oil system.

A few days later it was in the papers: "Persocom admitted to human hospital with Borkumensis!"

(At least, in Japan it was in the papers. Here in the U.S., there was no mention of it at all.)

"I need to take Dita to a hospital", Kei told his bosses. "I think she might have Borkumensis or something."

"Get ready to fake a servo malfunction", he texted Dita. "I'm sneaking you out of here tonight."

In the next chapter or 3:
Hideki gets his intro to programming
Yatsumi and Kojima both visit Freya at the hospital, uh-oh!
Mayhem at the Cherry Blossom ANSA party, brought on by Dufus and Dumbus.
Kei the I.T. guy puts his job on the line for Dita.

And eventually...
Sora gets into a serious moral dilemma.
And perhaps Ms. Jounouchi will tell Yuzuki more about Kaede.

p.s.
Don't worry about the language difference; Mr. Furoku speaks more than enough English to get by here in the U.S., and 'CPU' plays mostly to the anime-fan crowd.

Oh, and here's one from the 'Outtakes' reel:

As Minoru and Yuzuki approached Kaede's grave, they noticed something really odd. On her grave alone, the snow wasn't sticking. Something was making it melt.

Minoru bent down and felt of the soft green mossy earth. It felt strangely warm. And for a moment, he thought he could feel something moving. He took a step backwards, unsure what to make of what he was seeing.

Something WAS moving. The clump of moss was torn open from beneath, and a ghastly white hand thrust itself out of the earth!

...Just kidding! There are no zombies in this fanfic...