Demanufacture
They had based it on such things, he thought, feeling the weight of the belt in his hand, the smooth black and silver, the sharp lines of yellow, the paint now chipped and worse for wear. It had been a good many years, yet still Smart Brain had been ahead of their time, he considered, placing the belt down upon his desk, turning his back to it and facing the large stereovision screen on the far wall of his office.
Whilst it was true that there was very limited usage of the belts fashioned by Smart Brain, whilst it was true that nothing the corporation had made had been truly made with the comfort of a purely human user in mind, still their decisions and innovations had informed the work of Fenix in the decades following the discovery of the Vistamps by Karizaki's late father in South America.
The three core belts developed by Smart Brain—Faiz, Kaixa, and Delta—along with their research material regarding later mass-produced models had been significant acquisitions by Fenix when Smart Brain had collapsed beneath its own weight, making it easy for them to swoop in and offer to take what little they had left off their hands.
There were other belts, he had been told, other suits of armour in the hands of persons unknown, yet he was not inclined to chase such rumours; in time, they would reveal themselves, he was sure, and with Karizaki's son on staff and the new Revice Driver now in its primary testing phase, bound body and soul to a young man named Igarashi Ikki, Wakabayashi found himself more than comfortable with Fenix's position should there be any future reprisals from those once associated with Smart Brain.
Briefly, he considered again the mass-produced armour that had been employed by a number of the former company's staff; Riotroopers, they had been called, their use swiftly shut down by the Japanese government as being in direct contradiction to the country's constitution, its dedication to the avoidance of all offensive military action.
He wondered what a Japan policed by such Riotroopers might have been like. He had noted with only the mildest interest the reintroduction of a certain type of right-wing rhetoric in Japan's political discussions over the years, but he did not concern himself with it, being far more interested in the prospects of the Vistamps and their esoteric function—yet it could not be denied that a Japan policed by men in Riotrooper armour would not have been a safe place, nor would it have been acceptable for Fenix to ignore the possible threat that this would have represented, especially in light of unrest across the Japan Sea in other parts of Asia, and the danger of such technology being acquired and reverse engineered.
The Revice Driver would prove a buffer between them and such possibility he hoped, the technology that Karizaki's son based upon his father's discovery of the Vistamps putting the user in touch with the devil on their shoulder and providing them great power.
He smiled, a tight-lipped grin, the stereovision screen enacted a repeat of Igarashi's recent conflict with the Kamakiri Deadman.
A devil on the shoulder, they called it, for they all felt that conflict, didn't they? The tug between altruism and self-interest. He knew the manifestation that came with use of the belt for what it was however, a mechanism by which the ordinary human might pervert the terms of a contract with their Imajin. With the Revice Driver, whether he admitted it or not, Karizaki's son had outplayed the future, changing the flood of spectral presences from the sands of time as they flowed backwards into the past and arresting their power for the greater good of humanity in the present.
He turned away from the screen, looking again at his desk, the assembled pieces of the Kaixa Gear laying amidst the clutter of his desk, papers covered in detailed equations, digitised photographs, antique illustrations of life upon other worlds.
In many ways, Smart Brain had failed so that Fenix might triumph. They had built their institution standing on the shoulders of giants, he thought, crossing the office once more, again lifting the driver from the desk. Despite the mistakes of the past, however, they had learnt their lessons, and unlike those who had tried and failed to harness such powers, who had approached the esoteric mysteries of the beyond without conception of the truth, Fenix was not unprepared.
He smiled again, feeling the weight in his hand, warmed by its reassuring shape. They had based it on such things, he thought again, considering the connexion between the Revice Driver and the Kaixa Driver.
On the clean white floor, on the path between the screen and his desk, behind him, there was a thin trail of dark sand.