Chapter IX
"...how few people I see,
and those looking like people that had taken leave of the world."
-- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, August 28, 1665
It wasn't likely that the Men in Black had seen it worthwhile to start following Taro, but just in case, the professor took three different trains to get to the suburban neighborhood of Masayuki, his childhood friend and most dependable resource for those times when Taro wanted to know something Wired-related that he didn't already know himself.
Masayuki was an odd duck, even more so than most of the other hackers Taro knew. He earned a good portion of his income as an informer for the police, despite the fact that he purposefully made his leads so worthless as to never result in a conviction. The other oddity was his choice of obsession: Mika Iwakura, public representative for all things Tachibana. Masayuki maintained a public web site dedicated to extolling the woman's virtues and perfect fashion sense, and to telling the world the story of her rise from Masami Eiri's favorite "niece" to her present summit of fame and fortune. The site was also a front for a bewildering array of pages exposing and attacking the woman's multitude of evils. The web addresses of these secret pages changed daily using a complicated algorithm Masayuki only confided to his most trusted colleagues. Iwakura herself had agreed to the publicity and occasionally mentioned the site in interviews, a dupe Masayuki never let his numerous fans forget.
More disturbing was the fact that Masayuki now lived in the very house Mika Iwakura grew up in. He scrupulously maintained every detail of that house as it was when the Tachibana executive lived there, spending most of his time in the spare bedroom "so as not to disturb the Iwakura vibes." He called the house his "anti-shrine" but with Masayuki, sarcasm had a way of becoming so arch it was indistinguishable from passionate devotion.
And then there was the neighborhood: the kind of suburb a long-time city-dweller like Taro got nightmares about. The place was freakishly normal. Every house was exactly the same, and at least at a casual level, the same could be said of every family living in those houses. Taro half expected the wives behind the kitchen windows to be wearing kimonos as he strolled down the center of the empty road. The ghosts of dozens of stockbrokers who had worked themselves to death cried out to him: Conform! Conform!
Masayuki quickly answered the door and sat Taro down at the kitchen table while he prepared some tea. He got a good laugh out of Mika Iwakura's antics at the presentation. "It's been a long time since your last visit," Masayuki remarked as he fiddled with the pot, his back to the table. "I suppose you want something."
It was no secret that Myu-Myu had been the glue holding the three of them together, so Taro simply let the first implied question drop and simply addressed the second one. "There are two hackers I want to know more about."
Masayuki turned around. "Okay, shoot."
"Did you know what Alecto was working on?"
"Oh...Alecto. You didn't believe me on the website, huh? She...um." He stood there a few moments until he was sure his voice wouldn't break. "Did you know she lived a few blocks down from here? Used to go to Cyberia when we were kids. You probably never noticed her, though."
"Apparently not."
"Her last project then...she certainly was aiming high. She, well don't laugh or anything, but she was after the Holy Grail."
Taro nodded. That would definitely explain the high panic Tachibana seemed to be in, given the events of the last few days. The "Holy Grail" was the one weapon Tachibana feared more than any other. Its creator, Masami Eiri, had engineered it into the Seventh Protocol so tightly that the protocol couldn't work without it. Even worse, there was no practical way for any of the IP protocols that followed to exist without incorporating it as well. In short, it was nothing less than the universal undelete command.
"That's not to say she found it," Masayuki interjected. "It was pretty obvious that the setup was a trap, but with bait like that, how could she resist? The funny thing is, that trap wasn't meant for anyone in Japan. The coded messages that were meant to be cracked were strictly found on foreign-language boards: Memories of America, UNICEF, that sort of thing. I figure, from how brutally they went after her, that either she actually found something, or Mika Iwakura is harboring one hell of a grudge against a foreigner--she just pushed the 'Kill Intruder' button on the first person to call her on her challenge."
Taro tried to digest this. "Are there any foreign hackers left who would be a threat to Tachibana?"
"Yes, but the main threat to Mika is still home-grown, as far as I can tell. I think that's what really interesting about her, that odd dash of wild irrationality in the midst of the plans within plans."
Taro decided to get back to the reason he had come. "So do you know who Alecto confided in? Who else knew what she was after? I'm trying to do some damage control."
"I'm the only one I knew about. But that means nothing. She knew better than to tell any of her contacts about the others."
"You taught her well," Taro stated.
"Almost," Masayuki replied, "almost." He rubbed his eyes for a few moments. "So who's the other hacker?"
"What do you know about Lain?"
At that moment the tea kettle's whistle went off. Masayuki jumped. He quickly turned and poured out the two cups. "Um, that's the past participle of the English verb 'to lie', right?"
"So you've never heard of her?"
Masayuki opened his mouth, and then closed it. He then turned and got the sugar. "I've never seen her on the Wired, never heard her on the news, never met her on the street, not in this lifetime," he declared in what sounded like a well-practiced litany. "Why don't you pick the right time and ask Myu-Myu?"
Taro scowled while rubbing his cheek. "You know she doesn't like it when I talk about other women." But he also realized he had no other choice if he wanted to know beyond any doubt if Lain was trustworthy or not.
When Accela came out, it was thought to be the perfect drug, accelerating mental processes up to twelve times for up to an hour with no long term effects. The problem was the tests hadn't been run for long enough or far enough. High enough dosage, or long enough exposure, always had the same inexplicable effect: the subject's mind would start cycling through time. This made the victims completely useless to society, so they were rounded up and put in homes. The Cyberia Massacre filled those homes to capacity. The government would prefer that this particular group got around to dying, the sooner, the better. This meant that it was private funds that ran these homes, but only just barely. The electrical drain of the medical equipment in buildings designed only for residential use (and a lot fewer residents) meant brownouts and blackouts were commonplace. No one had died as a result of these occurrences--yet. It was to one of these homes that Taro went to speak with Myu-Myu.
After signing in he made his way to the south corridor and spoke with the attendant. Accela patients were usually perfectly safe (at least to the visitor's physical health), but occasionally they would relapse to infancy, in which case they had to be restrained to keep them from hurting themselves or others. One of the many mysteries of Accela Disease was that its sufferers cycled completely in sync, so if one of the patients was re-living his first years, they all were.
Taro learned that the patients were currently in their early teens. This was certainly not when he wanted to visit Myu-Myu, but the cycles changed erratically, so he had to be by her side when she reached the correct age.
Gingerly, he knocked on the door to her room.
"Come in!" the high-pitched voice on the other side cried. "Comein-comein-comein!"
He opened the door. Myu-Myu was sitting at the edge of her bed with a wireless keyboard, her legs swinging back and forth. Her attention was on her monitor, as she bounced her way around the limited borders of the mini-Wired that had been set up for the patients (another drain on the electrical budget, but considering who was being cared for, perhaps more vital than the medical equipment). She looked up at him in obvious disappointment.
"You again! Aren't you done with me? Go back where you came from and let Taro come over. I haven't seen him for ages!" Unable to accept Taro as an adult, teen-Myu-Myu had convinced herself that he was an older relative.
"Taro's very busy right now. He's...studying."
"Stop lying! Taro never needs to study. He knows everything! He said we could go to Cyberia, or even that new place they opened, the one that..." she suddenly straightened and stopped kicking, continuing in mid-sentence. "...got that cake you sent me. It had raisins in it. You know I hate raisins."
"It was the only one they had with maple syrup in it," Taro replied. He gave Myu-Myu this particular cake five months ago for her birthday. He closed the door behind him and walked up to the bed.
She pointed at a nearby chair. "Sit. You know I hate looking up at you. Well, hurry up and tell me, before I go somewhen else. Have you finished yet?"
Taro was always careful to keep his tenses correct when talking to Myu-Myu. The two of them also knew to keep their talk general, as the rooms were all monitored. "I will. It will go very well, but I don't know yet how it will turn out."
"Well, keep me updated. Tell me every time you can! It's so...well, I'd call it boring but it certainly isn't. You're all the outside I've got, Taro. You know Masayuki is too chicken to come over here. Too scared of the future, like the rest of them."
Taro could hardly blame Masayuki. The strangest part of Accela Disease was that the patients seemed to truly connect with their future selves, something that no physicist was able to explain yet. It was more than a little unnerving to hear about his future, and to be absolutely powerless to change it. Thanks to Myu-Myu, he knew he would die in a pointless railway accident on April 17, 2056. Masayuki was probably thinking his own date might come a lot sooner, and he had done so little to show for the time on Earth he had used so far as it was.
The patient put her hands on his knees. "You're waiting, aren't you? I don't mind. Looking at you keeps my mind off of the other regrets. You know, there's a bit of a backlog leaking through, what I've been thinking when I'm in other times. It's all sort of bleeding together. On the one hand, I suppose we'll all die when all the time leaks together, but on the other hand, my memory is becoming more and more selective. I can pick which memories to keep and which to put away. There's a lot of Cyberia in there."
"Yeah," said Taro. There really wasn't anything more to say. After a sort of mechanical sigh, the overhead florescent light (as well as the light under the door) started flickering, slower and slower, until the sunlight became the only reliable source of illumination. Taro was surprised to find the natural light more soothing. The woman's back was to the window, but at a slight angle, so that the light caught her eyes and made them seem the only part of her that was alive. The two of them just sat like that for several minutes.
Myu-Myu suddenly cried out. Her face sort of dropped before Taro's eyes and she pulled her hands into her chest as she hunched over. Her breath came out in short shallow gasps. She was old now, perhaps older than Taro had ever seen her. He also heard a number of thumps from some of the other rooms, as those who had exceeded their life capacity on this cycle dropped (temporarily) dead.
With a shudder, she lay down in her bed. Taro pulled the blankets around her. An understandably stressed medic burst through the door, but he left with a relieved look after seeing Taro caring for her.
He rubbed Myu-Myu's hands for several minutes until she had calmed down. "Are you all right, Myu-Myu?" he asked gently. "Do you remember who I am?"
"Of course, you're Taro. I remember Taro. Taro is my friend." It always struck Taro at these times how much Myu-Myu's second childhood resembled her first. She had always seemed older than she looked when they were kids, one of those people who are most themselves when they reach old age.
Now came the hard part. "I'd like you to help me, Myu-Myu. I'd like you to tell me about someone."
"I can tell you. I know so many people, Taro."
"I'd like you to tell me about Lain."
Myu-Myu gasped, this time in wonder. She looked up at the ceiling with a beatific expression. Then her eyes fixed on him, and she reached out and slapped him with all her strength.
"So it's back to Lain, huh? What about all of the times I saved your hide?"
Taro put his hand to his aching cheek. "Ow!" Myu-Myu was obviously no longer old, although probably still in the future judging from the fact that she knew Lain.
Myu-Myu threw the covers off and advanced on him.
"I just want to know if I can trust her," Taro offered.
"That's not the question and you know it! What you want she'll never give you! Trust you'll get in spades, because you two happen to want the same things, but she'll never love you the way you love her! Why can't you be happy with...with..." With that, she turned her back on him.
Taro had dealt fairly often with midlife-crisis-Myu-Myu, and every time she clammed up it was because she was thinking about his family. Taro had no idea how he acquired this particular family, owing to the fact that midlife-crisis-Myu-Myu had convinced herself that only she was worthy of his love. He also knew at one point she'd try to kill him with a butter knife.
He figured he had as much of an answer as he was going to get, so Taro left before Myu-Myu had a chance to turn around with a piece of stolen cutlery. He made sure to leave a contribution on the way out.
