Chapter VIII
"And I think it is not only true in this,
but that the best of the actions of us all are so silly,
that the meanest people begin to see through them, and contemn them."
-- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, July 1, 1667
Taro arrived at the Mathematics building just after 10:00 the next morning, knowing full well that most of the faculty would either be teaching or in their offices. Several technicians were going through the unused rooms wiring them for MAPU's. Taro had to act fast.
It was simple enough to talk a tech into unlocking Chairperson Yamamoto's office for him. Once inside he went straight to the desk. Taro knew that Reika kept a number of personal items locked away in there. He was hoping that the Men in Black had been careless when they had come through here, and he was happy to find his belief in human imperfection had been confirmed yet again by the unlocked drawer. There was a lot of written material, which would take more time to go through than he had time for.
Reika was a very private person, and she had never told Taro about her friends, or even if her family was still alive. A personal letter would be good, or even....
The photograph was obviously several decades old. It showed four teenage girls standing in front of a nightclub. The back of the photo had the caption "First visit to Cyberia", but the location was a no-brainer to Taro, as the Shibuya techno-café had been his own personal haunt thirty years ago.
The girl on the left side of the photo was pretty-clearly Reika. Next to her was a girl with fluffed-out brown hair that he didn't know. The third girl was a bit of a puzzle, until he saw that she was Arisu, the technician from the night before. The fourth girl looked like she didn't belong, and was dressed completely wrong for the occasion. But she was the easiest to recognize as Professor Chisa Yomoda, nearly unchanged after thirty years.
There had been a lot of people coming and going through Cyberia in its heyday, so the fact that Taro didn't remember these four as teen-agers didn't faze him.
He heard someone coming down the hallway, so he picked up two tickets in the drawer just as the technicians came in with their equipment. "For Chairperson Yamamoto, " he explained as he walked past them out the door.
He then stopped to talk to their supervisor. "Say, do you know a new tech named Arisu?"
This instantly caught the man's attention. "Yeah, have you seen her? She hasn't shown up for work this morning."
Taro shook his head, then turned and walked as fast as he could for the building exit, afraid that Professor Yomoda might be missing as well.
The Literature Department was on the other side of the campus, so it took Taro a good ten minutes walking to get there.
Taro's relationship with Chisa Yomoda was rather unique. He had read her poetry, and he had always gotten a kick out of the weirdly sarcastic way she had phrased the descriptions of her courses in the catalog. Despite her moderate degree of fame he couldn't once remember a fan striking up a conversation with her--something about her kept everyone at a distance. The chief link between Taro and Chisa was the fact that he had decided to base his clueless persona largely on her. He therefore knew her idiosyncrasies in fine detail without knowing much of anything about her as a person. Like himself, Chisa's public personality was an act, and for reasons he couldn't fathom, she had always let him see her true self. Not that she was easy to figure out. Chisa seemed to be at war with the inanimate world, and constantly losing. Her clothes were always somehow askew, and she seemed to have run through the list of possible ways to break a pair of glasses several times. There were at least three occasions when Taro had been the sole witness to freak un-accidents involving Chisa, moments when the woman should have died through sheer clumsiness, but somehow managed to survive. Despite all the odd things that happened to her, she always seemed to be in perfect health. Perhaps the fact that he was a witness to all this was why she confided in him.
She had also apparently escaped the wrath of the Men in Black, because he found her sitting behind her desk. She didn't give him the opportunity to start the conversation. The woman's eyes were on her papers, her hands clasping and unclasping, as she desperately tried to suppress a panic attack.
"Professor Okada, just the person I wanted to see," she began in a rapid stream without looking up at him. "I know why you are here, and it is a subject of more than passing interest to myself as well, but first you must indulge me as I dwell on the minor paradoxes of my own existence." Only then did she look him in the eye. "As a mathematician, you must have a firm grasp of logic, so perhaps you can tell me how it can be possible for the same person to be stuck in a lobby and standing in the neighboring auditorium at the same time? My best friend was able to carry on an elaborate, albeit mostly one-sided, conversation with my duplicate, without ever catching on. Would you say I was that easy to impersonate?" Taro didn't dare speak. "No, don't answer that; I'd rather not know. What I'm really trying to get at is the mechanism. My attendance at your presentation was rather spur-of-the-moment, as I noticed you noticing last night. The whole affair rather smacks of the supernatural, unless you have a better explanation."
Taro hemmed and hawed while he tried to think. He couldn't be sure of the consequences if he told Yomoda the full truth. Lain still held the upper hand, because presumably she knew where he could get his hands on a memory unit to fix Reika (and possibly the technician Arisu as well). "Well," he stammered, "there were MAPU units installed just that day. Perhaps someone was impersonating you holographically."
The sitting professor leaned back in her chair and smiled enigmatically. "Yes, that would be within the realm of the possible. I have to work hard to keep my life on a rational footing, Professor Okada. When I'm not paying attention I find my life spinning under someone else's control, like I am being saved for a task I may not be happy performing. But you are free to dismiss that theory as the raving of a poet. If you'll allow me then to change the subject, I was just about to call you before you poked your head in here, to see if you might know why the Men in Black had kidnapped Reika Yamamoto."
Taro shuffled his feet. He realized just then that he was doing "shy Chisa" for Chisa Yomoda when she didn't appear to be in a very "shy Chisa" mood. "Ah, actually, no, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I was here because I thought, as her friend, she might have confided something in you."
Professor Yomoda raised an eyebrow. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you know her a lot better than I do, or at least you wish you do."
Taro inwardly cursed. As her poetry proved, Professor Yomoda was almost ludicrously observant.
"I..."
Yomoda closed her eyes, bringing the tips of her fingers together. "You saw me in a photograph with her." She then looked him in the eyes. "Did she show it to you? No. So it's bad enough that you went through her personal belongings. You hardly need to think me psychic, Professor Okada. I received a visit yesterday from the Men in Black. That was the reason I showed up at the auditorium last night, in a futile attempt to warn her. Of course, the fact that I was visited by the Men in Black and yet am still sitting here now in my right mind is yet another of the unexplained flukes I have to deal with on a continual basis. The nature of my interview with the tall fellows in the dark suits made it rather obvious that my interrogators had only a single piece of data linking the chairperson with myself, hence the photograph. You see, I am learned in logic myself.
"As for that photograph, my acquaintance with the teen-aged Reika Yamamoto, Juri Kato, and Arisu Mizuki was purely casual. Arisu liked to take up pet projects. One week it was nursing a sick bird back to life. That week it was turning a recluse into a party animal like herself and her two friends, via the miracle of Cyberia. As the present day and I'm sure the photograph itself also attests, the treatment did not 'take'.
"I told all this to the Men in Black, because it would have been easy to use facial-recognition software to identify Ms. Kato and Ms. Mizuki from that photograph, and because the Men in Black have been trained to recognize a lie on sight, and perhaps because I'm a coward and I was afraid my protector would choose not to step in this time. But I did hold something back, something that perhaps Tachibana doesn't know.
"When Reika Yamamoto first took over the Mathematics Department (and failed utterly to recognize me), I grew nostalgic enough to try to look up some of the other significant entities in my past life. Arisu Mizuki was teaching middle school in China, while Juri Kato had become a hacker by the name of Alecto. I can see you've heard of her under that name. Well, after the Men in Black let me go, I thought I'd press my luck by following up on those two. Ms. Mizuki was no longer a teacher, and I could find very little about her current whereabouts. But Juri Kato, alias Alecto the Hacker, had a more ominous fate: neither of them had ever existed. She had been erased."
