Since the first time I saw him in the hall, I knew the guy was trouble. When he passed us on the way to Watari-san's office, something careless about his gait or the look in his eyes, like a man with a purpose and a place to do it, piqued my suspicion — and in this crazy place, it isn't just anytime, anymore, my suspicion gets piqued. Not to mention I can't stand that high and mighty kind of character. I should have known something was up when I couldn't read any vibes off the guy. But who knew murder could smell like book glue and small electronics? By the time I added up two and two to make four it was too late for Watari-san; but so long as I still had a shadowy semblance of a pulse, and the mysterious stranger in my sight, I wanted answers; and I wasn't going to rest until I had them—

—

"Aren't you getting a little tired of this yet?" said the dark-haired young stranger in the suit and glasses. He turned slowly in his chair, his hands still up in the air, an assured smile planted firmly on his lips. It bugged Hisoka, made him think he was going to try something funny. He kept his pistol steady. "Tired of what?"

The other shrugged.

"The air in this place tonight. It's like a major case of deja vu. Sam Spade on auto-repeat. It's so cliche it hurts, don't you think?"

Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Hisoka briefly turned his eyes.

"So," said the other with much too much enthusiasm for his predicament, "I suppose you've finally come to accuse me of murdering Watari."

"That's right," Hisoka said warily. "Am I to take that as an admission of guilt?"

To his surprise, the other man laughed. "If I was going to do something like that, don't you think I'd want to be the one with the gun? At least I'd have prepared a monologue or something. The bad guys always have a set up like that. . . . For that matter, how do I know you're not the murderer, trying to cover your tracks?"

"Don't be ridiculous!"

The stranger shrugged. "Of course, I know you're not responsible. Word's been going around, that's all. So let's just get it all out in the open right now, shall we?" With hands still raised, he lowered his head in a gesture of surrender. "I didn't murder Watari."

"But I saw you going to his office. You were the last person to see him alive, and you match Watari-san's description of the man who had been snooping around his concoctions lately."

"Unfortunately for your theory, however, I have the means but zero motive. You see, I had the misfortune of dying with a rather persistent case of athlete's foot. I've tried plenty of different treatments over the many years I've been dead, and Watari's is the only kind I've never built up a tolerance to. Honestly, now, would I get rid of my only source of relief?"

Hisoka said nothing while he tried to wrap his mind around the other's answer. Was he supposed to take that as a motive for or against?

In any case, he came to a decision — against his logic's better judgment — and lowered the gun. "All right. Do you have any better explanations, then?"

"Really, Watari's untimely death is the least of our worries at the moment. For one, you're soaked to the bone."

Hisoka looked down at his clothes that were now dripping wet in addition to smelling vaguely like whiskey and sewage. As though he had been prepared for just this, the stranger pulled a wad of clothes from a drawer in his desk and tossed them to Hisoka. "You might want to change into something a little less sticky."

"How thoughtful," said Hisoka upon unraveling the bundle of throwbacks to 1986.

"For another," the other continued, "I have some information that I urgently need to share with you. I was hoping to speak with you sooner, but we should still have time."

Was it just Hisoka's imagination, or was there a condescending tone to the other's voice meant just for Hisoka as he said that last bit? "Incidentally," he said looking up, "who are you? . . . And where are we?"

The other gave him a charming smile.

"You can call me Natsume," he said. "And this is the storeroom for the various artifacts and creatures Enma has collected and catalogued over the centuries. I like to refer to it as my humble office."

Hisoka took a closer look at the giant creature mounted behind Natsume's desk. He was quite familiar with the existence of dragons by now not to try and fool himself into thinking it was otherwise; but it made an impressive backdrop for one's workspace nonetheless. Between that and the various other skulls and bones around it he could not place, the place looked like some university backroom, impossible to all but the initiated to find, where the actual scientific work went on. There was an ancient computer on Natsume's desk, hooked up to a giant server which was being cooled by an industrial fan. On the other side of the desk was a rather impressive compact Stonehenge of porcelain and crystal figurines of kittens in various adorable poses, intermixed with a few collectable plates on stands with the same subject matter.

Looking up from the multitude squished-in faces of Persian kittens, Hisoka said, "All the time I've been here I've never heard of you."

"I'm not that surprised," said Natsume. "I am what you would call a phantom character."

"Phantom character?"

"Is there an echo? That's right. They probably thought my qualities overlapped a little too much with the rest of the cast, so they relegated me down here. You know, black hair, creepy glasses, animal sidekick—"

Hisoka jumped as something brushed past his leg. "Jesus! What was—" he started, before realizing with much embarrassment that it was only a calico cat.

"My animal sidekick," said Natsume as said cat jumped onto his desk and rubbed Natsume's hand affectionately. "K."

Hisoka shook his head.

"This is just too much," he said. "You expect me to believe a man named Natsume with a cat fetish and a sidekick named K."

"Well, yes." Natsume blinked as he stroked the cat. "What's wrong with that?"

"Don't you think it's just a little too convenient? I mean, that's like a guy named Kafka having a pet cockroach, or if someone called Adams kept rabbits."

Hisoka was, of course, referring to the fact that Natsume Soseki, the most famous novelist in Japan, listed among his repertoire a series called I am a Cat and a character referred to as, simply, K. But Natsume didn't seem to get the connection. "You look cold," he said instead, again referring, of course, to Hisoka's soaked and dripping clothes.

—

A good fifteen minutes later found Hisoka pacing the collection of skulls and bones around Natsume's desk dressed like a New Kid on the Block, hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea while his clothes dried in front of the fan. K sat on the edge of the desk like an oversized figurine regarding Hisoka curiously, and Hisoka — trying to avoid looking back — could just sense some monologue about the sad appearance of his present self working itself out in that cat's head.

Meanwhile, Natsume poked his head up from where he had been bent over a cabinet like the kind for storing maps. "Ah . . . I think I found it!" he yelled reassuringly to Hisoka from across the room. "Wait . . . no, this is the wrong date. Who filed these things anyway? . . ."

"What are you looking for?" Hisoka asked disinterestedly.

"Plans," came the noncommittal reply.

"Well, if you were expecting my company, shouldn't you have retrieved them long ago?"

Natsume was silent for a moment. "Huh," he said as though the thought had never occurred to him, and went back to searching.

Meanwhile, one particular skull had occupied Hisoka's attention. It was vaguely gazelle-like in shape and size, a little flatter around the mouth and nostrils like a camel. What was remarkable about it, however, was the single large protrusion on the top of the skull just behind the eye sockets, which sat there like an old withered tree trunk. He reached a hand out tentatively to touch it.

"Didn't think they actually exist, did you?" said Natsume, approaching with a roll of translucent paper under his arm.

"Didn't think what existed?"

"Unicorns."

Hisoka drew his hand back like he'd been burned. "You're kidding me."

"Well, technically it's a kirin, which is completely unrelated to the western variety. See, those share an ancestor with the modern rhinoceros, whereas kirin are clearly artiodactylous. I could show you a Germanic specimen if you're interested—"

"That's all right," Hisoka said quickly. He indicated the roll under Natsume's arm. "Is that what you wanted to discuss with me?"

"Right."

Natsume quickly cleared a spot on one of the worktables and spread out the blueprints, setting a couple of straggling crystal cat figurines to hold down the corners. On the paper were the remarkably well drawn and finely detailed plans for a boxy robot with caterpillar treads and prehensile appendages sticking out of its otherwise nondescript shell. There were several sensory apparatuses scattered on the surface to make a sort of monstrous countenance — a cluster of cameras here, a microphone there, a small screen on the front — that, knowing Watari, would probably have looked to its creator as endearing as an infant's pudgy face.

"This is what Watari was working on twenty-two years ago," Natsume began, "when on the night of the—"

"Of the lunar eclipse it mysteriously disappeared, leaving Watari-san with no recollection," Hisoka finished. "Yeah, I heard that part. So, what is it?"

"It's a prototype recognition AI, ECRU-Seventy-nine-Ex-oh-three. Apparently it was supposed to house a complex artificial personality able to collect and process information about its environment, and in time learn from those experiences how to react appropriately to the various factors in it, such as different individuals. I guess in short it was an experiment to see if a program could eventually come to imitate the mental processes we take for granted every day, and for a while its progress was rather promising — that is, if Watari's notes can be trusted." He smiled. "I never got to see it in action, myself. But from these specs it seems it wouldn't have been much bigger than a basset hound. What's the look for?"

"You mean this is his precious lost invention? A Commodore Sixty-four on wheels? I don't see what the big deal is."

Natsume looked at him like he was daft. "You're kidding, right? You're looking at the plans for the machine that could revolutionize the way we think about perception itself, and you think it's no big deal?"

Hisoka shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I was just expecting something different."

The other thought for a long moment, then revised, "Well, it's not the most impressive-looking thing in the world, I'll give you that. But when you think about it, it didn't have to be to serve its purpose. Any old box would do. As they say, the physical body is just a shell. The internal mechanisms it houses — the synapses, the electricity, breath, the spirit — the true beauty of it is in there, where it can't be grasped. You've seen Aibo and Asimo in action?"

"Yeah, on television."

"Well, they seem to exhibit a remarkable range for spontaneous action, recognition, producing the correct responses — in fact, you might even say they seem almost human, but that's a scam. The ones in the demonstrations are just actors: preprogrammed to run on a continuous loop. One slip-up on the part of the human co-conspirator and the illusion fabricated for a hungry audience is ruined. It's easy to believe we might not be alone, that there might be intelligences besides ours, intelligences of our own creation, silicon golems that will obey our every command and still be spontaneous enough to surprise us with a good joke or some random cuteness. Hell, I want to believe it."

"I guess for normal people, these days, there's something comforting about a machine having a little bit of a mind of its own," Hisoka said as though to himself, raising the mug to his lips. "At least, it's not as disturbing as, say, the existence of demons or undead watching their every move."

"Exactly. Now, as I was saying, those models are frauds. However — what Watari was building, on the other hand, was the genuine product. A homunculus of a contraption whose mind was alive, that could continue to grow and learn based on the knowledge it had accumulated. Not just recognize patterns but actually process, adapt, judge, predict. Emotionalize. He wanted it to ultimately be able to assign value to various things in its environment like a living organism."

"Could he actually do that? I mean, it goes against one of the fundamental laws of the universe, doesn't it? To create something from nothing?"

"Well, you could say the same thing about us. How do four measly nucleotides determine who we are and how we end up different from everyone else? It's all a matter of programming, of which Watari is a regular genius. At least, was, until—"

"Until the summer of nineteen-eighty, when Mother selectively wiped his memory. Zer— someone told me."

"Then, did that person tell you that that same summer's night Watari actually lost two inventions without a trace?"

Now, that was new. "No," said Hisoka, "I hadn't heard that. I mean, I heard about the one. I just assumed it was some kind of chemical solution that was going to revolutionize the way we do laundry, or a revamped food processor or something."

"Hm, I guess you could say it was something like that."

"Yeah, a memory processor. A recognizer droid."

"Ironic, isn't it? It would have revolutionized the way we do laundry, too. But, no. This other thing was much bigger, and much more dangerous."

Saying that, Natsume pulled the top sheet of paper which held the designs of the ECRU-79-X03 from the table like a magician pulls away a scarf, revealing something far more sinister underneath. The image this time was sketchier, less professional, as though it had been drawn and edited in a frantic manner, yet it still looked far cleaner than anything Watari produced now. Maybe the memory wipe had also affected Watari's drafting skills, Hisoka thought, but didn't actually believe something as ludicrous as that.

"He was a brilliant engineer, Watari was," said Natsume as though reading his train of thought. "Back in the day. Really. A better engineer than chemist. I think machines were his real passion."

"And I take it this thing is the reason for the switch? This . . ." He took a closer look at the plans. A series of pipes like a crammed-together horn section protruded from something vaguely tripodal, with viscera of knobs and wires like those on a Moog synthesizer. "'Tee-vee-cee One-five'?"

Natsume smiled at something that went right over Hisoka's head. "Yes, interesting choice of name, but then Watari always has been eccentric like that. That's one thing Mother can't change."

Then he tapped the drawing of the so-dubbed TVC-15 and brought his thumb to his lips in thought, looking as though the thing had somehow bit him. "This thing, however, I can't get any clear information on. This drawing is all that's left of it, and even that appears to be a lucky fluke. Any physical record of its working seems to have been destroyed along with Watari's memory. Even if he remembered anything remotely useful, it's not like he can be of any use now, is it?"

"So, you don't even know what this machine did?"

Natsume shook his head. "All I know is that it was somehow responsible for what happened that night in 'eighty. What's more, I have a theory that it is the same thing that is responsible for what's happening tonight. The electrical disturbance, the problem with the phones, the fluctuations in Meifu space — they all bear remarkable similarity to the accounts of that night.

"I've been trying to piece the puzzle back together. You'll notice the switchboard on the body of the machine kind of resembles a synthesizer. And knowing Watari's love of music, I wouldn't be surprised if he designed the Tee-vee-cee One-five as some kind of musical instrument. Perhaps it was an instrument to be used to affect the world around it, like some kind of tuning fork, re-tuning the world through forced resonance. Imagine a kidney stone dissolving — or better yet, Galloping Gertie but all over, everything exciting itself on the molecular level until it can no longer hold its structure and falls apart."

"You make it sound like a weapon."

"Well, it must have been dangerous to acquire such a high level of secrecy."

"But you're forgetting who we're talking about, here. It doesn't sound like Watari-san to make a weapon like that — at least, not the Watari-san I know. Besides—" Hisoka crossed his arms skeptically. "This stuff is just hypothetical. Only sci-fi buffs and New Agers believe in the 'music of the spheres.'"

"Yet there are many respected members in the field who believe that sound is an untapped resource. Maybe it couldn't quite be used to levitate the stones that make the Great Pyramid, but consider this. Everything has a frequency, including our own bodies and thought-waves. There are certain frequencies that certain muscles in your body respond to, such as your heart or the muscles that move your bowels. Some think that if you could narrow down a certain harmony a thing emits, and reverse it, you could cancel out the sound that thing produces. Or worse, if you could discover at what frequency something destroys itself, and channel that frequency — well, I'm sure you can imagine you'd have a device with some rather deadly potential on your hands. Something that you wouldn't want getting into the wrong hands."

"And that's why you think Mother was programmed to wipe those parts of Watari-san's memory."

"Well," Natsume shrugged, "it would make sense on a practical level, especially if he was destroying Meifu property."

"If that's the case, I'd be surprised if Tatsumi-san didn't want to kill him himself."

Natsume chuckled, then quickly sobered. "Which brings us to the problem at hand. We thought the Tee-vee-cee One-five had been destroyed; but all things considering, we must be prepared for the possibility someone, somehow, has brought it back to life and is using it to take down the complex's defense shields. That's why I thought it urgent to fill you in on that night, because I'm going to need your help counteracting the device. Otherwise, the shield could come down at any moment. I'm afraid we're going to have to wing it, but surely you can see that with Watari gone, we're left in quite a bind."

"Yes, that's what we thought, too, but we managed to take care of it."

Natsume looked as though he'd just had the wind blown out of his sails of ominousness. "Really?"

"Er, yeah." Hisoka rubbed the back of his neck. "It's really only a temporary solution, but they're sure they can get the shield to hold for a little while."

"Who's 'they'? The Gushoushin brothers?"

"Well . . ." Hisoka's thoughts returned to 003, in all her brainy and very much human beauty. Surely Natsume wouldn't believe him if Hisoka told him, despite how many other improbable things they had been discussing. "They were part of it."

"Then what are we doing wasting time here? There's no more to lose," Natsume said with a renewed sense of urgency, and began rolling up the papers on the desk. "We have to take these plans to them right away; they don't know what they're up against. The fate of existence itself might be at stake."

"Don't you think you might be exaggerating?" Hisoka began, grabbing his clothes from in front of the fan. "You said yourself you don't even know what that thing does."

K jumped down from his perch on the desk with a jingle of bells as Natsume turned to fix him a dramatic look.

"I hope I am exaggerating," he said in a grave voice. "For both our sakes, I sincerely hope I am."

Then he dropped the spooky tone the next moment as he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. "You can fill me in on the details on the way up. Come, K-kun."

With a sense of dread, Hisoka turned back toward the way he had come, in the direction of the quietly raging waterfall.

"Oh no, not that way," Natsume stopped him with a chuckle as though to say he should have known better. "That's just to discourage the nebelungs from coming in here." And he pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "This way is much dryer."

"What are—" Hisoka began, but thought better of it as Natsume wasn't really paying him much attention, and he thought nebelungs sounded like something he'd rather not know about. Stifling a curse, he followed Natsume back into the dark rows of shelves and file cabinets, thinking that the more he got to know the young man, the less he liked him.

—
tsuzuku

Footnote: Natsume (and his trusty companion K-kun, who was apparently purchased for 500 yen) appears in Matsushita's sketchbook. I took a guess and translated her "maboroshi no kyara" as "phantom character," although I really don't know what she was trying to say. In any case, he never actually gets any panel time, hence a lot of guesswork on my part. So that's where he comes from. Again, continued props to Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland.