" . . . When I saw your picture again on the security tape, I remembered the floor you had been going to when we shared that elevator," Hisoka said, carefully leaving out the part about how sure he had been the man was responsible for Watari's death; "and . . . Well, the rest you know."

His companion, Natsume, nodded with a quiet hum, digesting the information Hisoka had just given him as they walked through old hallways below the building complex. From Watari's strange behavior and the discovery of his body and office in disarray, to Muraki's strange appearance and 003's brilliant work on the security system — he took it all in and turned it over in his mind without surprise or judgment. "That certainly is a curious story," he said at last.

"To say the least," Hisoka muttered under his breath.

Bells jingling as he trotted along beside them, K looked up as though waiting for the humans to come to some decision.

"I'm particularly interested in these anomalies you told me about."

"You'll have to ask Zero-zero-three about them. I can't tell you much more than I already did."

"Well, whatever they are, from what I could gather they do kind of fit in with my idea of some sort of universal tuning fork. How else can you explain regular mortal people mysteriously arriving in Meifu, not of their own will, and bypassing procedure?"

"I don't know if I'd put Muraki in the same category as regular people. But even so, you say frequencies are to blame, she says dark matter—"

That got a reaction out of Natsume. He paused in mid-stride. "Dark matter, you say?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, my friend, that's a horse of a different color."

"And you think that's any better an explanation?" Hisoka said, looking sideways at him as they continued on. "At this point, dark matter is entirely hypothetical."

"So are a lot of things in this world. But when the usual suspects have been eliminated, you can't help but think there might be forces out there human beings as of yet don't understand, right? That doesn't mean they don't really exist. I wouldn't put it past man to have it in him to apply mathematical formulas to everything," Natsume said wistfully; "it's just a matter of time. And I certainly wouldn't put anything past Watari."

Maybe he was right, Hisoka conceded in his mind; yet he couldn't help feeling the unwelcome sense of responsibility of someone who had innocently conspired in weaving a great cosmic farce, only to be told it was all true and had been going on for millennia.

"Up this way," Natsume said, interrupting him from his thoughts, and Hisoka followed him and K up an open-rise staircase from the 1960s.

They emerged on the bottom floor of a large and open room that resembled a modern library without the books. Instead there were worktables and cabinets and clean-up stations in scattered archipelagos, and volcanic islands of large machines the purposes of which Hisoka could not even guess as they were all covered with translucent plastic sheets. The outside wall was all glass windows, stretching up the two oversized stories to the distant ceiling. In the daytime, it would have lit the place up with vibrant, natural light. At night, however, the dim orange glow of the moon cast suspicious shadows, and the covered instruments looked like ghosts of Showa's industrial prowess, or scavenging creatures of the Cambrian deep sea.

"What is this place?" said Hisoka.

"The engineering lab," Natsume said beside him. "Hardly anyone comes down here anymore, so you'll have to pardon the dust. As you can see it's seen better days."

"Is there something we need to get here?"

"No, this is just a more direct route to the file room is all," said the other indifferently, gesturing for Hisoka to follow him.

Which he was eager to do and escape the ominous feeling that overcame him in the laboratory. This was where 003 had said the invader was headed, and no doubt where it had leaned on the shields. And he couldn't help wondering why. There didn't seem to be anything here of great importance. At least, not anymore.

As he walked he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye something massive moving slowly past the tall windows, watching him with great interest, like a child watches a fish in an aquarium. But when he looked, there was nothing there but the hazy shapes of the cherry trees, obscured by the tinted glass. He hurried to catch up.

They were standing at the door of the file room within minutes, and the Gushoushin seemed resigned to the inevitability of seeing Hisoka instead of the secretary as they ushered him in.

003 turned in her seat hearing him enter. "Any luck?" she asked him.

"Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto," Natsume said to himself, "you're beautiful!"

"Er, yeah," Hisoka said in answer to her question. "I filled Natsume-san in on your predicament down, er, up here, and he's brought some plans that might be of some use. The inventions Watari-san lost in the accident. Natsume-san—" He sighed. "This is Zero-zero-three."

Shaking himself out of a stare, Natsume took her hand and shook it eagerly. "What a pleasure to finally meet you in, well, the human flesh."

"The pleasure's all mine," 003 said with a chuckle. "Believe me, it's a pleasure to meet anyone like this."

The same could not be said for K, who hopped up on a nearby desk and studied 003 carefully. He'd been duped, his expression seemed to say, as he stared at what his olfactories told him should have been an owl a quarter his size. 003 glanced back at him uneasily.

"So," she said to Natsume, "you've found Watari's old drawings? I thought they'd all been destroyed. May I. . . ?"

She unrolled them reverentially in her hands while Natsume said, "It seems King Enma was holding onto them for just such an occasion. Either that, or we're lucky his honor's memory isn't what it's cracked up to be. Now, those are the right ones?"

"Oh yes, these'll do just fine. —Why don't you pull up a chair and we'll see if we can find a use for you. I've just been calculating the size of the invader based on fluctuations in the shield recorded by security. Here, take a look."

"Jesus, if you're right this thing is huge."

"Yes. And that's what I don't quite understand. Um, what do you know about quantum theory?"

They quickly became so absorbed in one another, Hisoka began to think they had forgotten about him. Feeling a sudden urge to leave — and it wasn't as though they had a job for him — he said, "I'm going out for a bit. You guys want me to bring back anything?" He might as well have been talking to himself for the short negative replies they gave him before returning to their conversation.

Ignoring Gushoushin the younger's request for a snack-pack of Cream Collons, Hisoka left the file room and wandered aimlessly through the building.

What was he thinking, being jealous of that Natsume guy? Hadn't he already decided 003 only had eyes for Watari? But the fact remained he was jealous. He'd always considered himself fairly well-read, even if he wasn't nearly the pillar of useless information Natsume made himself out to be. That is, on any other night but this, useless information. Yet for the first time in years, he felt a little inadequate as a man.

"You're being ridiculous," he said, hitting his temple with the heel of his hand as though pounding those words into his brain. "Getting all worked up over an owl."

Eventually he found himself back at the cafeteria. He changed back into his own clothes — which were dry and no longer smelled like a sewer, but instead reeked strongly again of whiskey thanks to Watari's stain remover. Retrieving a can of coffee from the back room, he sat down at one of the long laminate tables to think, trusting the caffeine the beverage was unreasonably loaded with to turn his mind from such inconsequential things to the situation at hand.

—

Naturally, at some point, Hisoka fell asleep. It was the kind of sleep that sneaks up on a person so suddenly that he doesn't even realize he's slipped into slumber. Reality and the dream that is woven by the subconscious overlap, their borders difficult to delineate. For all he knows he is still awake but things have changed and events taken a turn for the demented.

It did seem a little strange to Hisoka to suddenly find himself in a grand and lush European garden in the middle of the day. What was stranger still was that Watari was there in a white tropical suit that looked a size too small for him, a huge red carnation in the breast pocket; and Hisoka was so surprised to see him alive and well he almost called out to him. However 003 was there as well. Not 003 the owl, to be precise, but 003 the girl he had left downstairs, except that she was dressed as the Lady of the Camellias in a white, ruffled dress.

"Am I dead?" Hisoka thought aloud — a rhetorical question to be sure because, of course, he quite was. But for all he knew this place could have been the Pure Land of Amida Buddha, except that no sutra ever mentioned behavior like this. For just as he was thinking it, Watari hopped around with his arms outstretched and one leg bent.

"Pioo," he chirped like a songbird. "Pioo. Pioo."

After a moment, 003 took a step and answered with a tentative, "Cuckoo?" of her own.

Then Watari flapped his arms and bounced gaily closer, and 003 twirled around him. They took turns whistling and bobbing their heads over one another's shoulder in a see-saw fashion, precisely like a couple of lovebirds.

Hisoka went red with embarrassment and hoped no one else saw these two grown adults acting like this. Although, he thought after a moment, the mating habits of two scientific minds as obsessive as they were bound to resemble something in a late-night nature documentary.

Still, spoil-sport that he was, Hisoka found himself saying: "Come off it, Watari-san, you can't marry her!" Where this idea of marriage sprang up he didn't know; it just seemed obvious.

"But I love her, Bon," Watari said.

"But she's a bird!" said Hisoka.

"Of course she's a bird," Watari said, in his jaunty accent. "My little turtle dove, my bird a' paradise. My dreams made flesh or a reasonable facsimile thereof—"

"No," Hisoka insisted, "a real bird! As in, an owl!" He found himself flapping his own arms to illustrate.

To his surprise Watari just gave a great big laugh. "Very amusin', Bon, but as you can see, I am happy. I'm the sunshine man, the driver of the gravy train — chu, chu, chu . . . I am impervious t' your negative insinuendo."

"My what?"

"Insinuendo," said Natsume, appearing out of thin air beside him on a child's three-wheeler shaped like a unicorn, "is insinuation toward innuendo, brought on by an increased negativism out of a negative reaction to their positivism."

"Oh my God!" said Hisoka, holding his head. "You've all gone completely bonkers!"

"Bonkers is a word I reject absolutely," said Watari. "It's negativism. It's a word I put it in my galvanized pressure cooker — whrooom! It's gone—"

"This isn't happening."

"Of course not. You're having a nightmare," Natsume told him matter-of-factly, studying him through a periscope while Watari and 003 had taken up a hearty rendition of the toast song from Verdi's La Traviata. "But after all, reality is all in the eye of the beholder — and penguins have an organ above their eyes that converts sea water to fresh water. They claim Mount Yoshino in bloom is covered in snow, and not breakers of waves frolicking with whales and seals, and little fish with parasites that change their sex. Seals get old and crack and leak oil, but the maiden doesn't notice 'til the empty tank is like the Kingdom of Heaven, and Saint Peter needs a cat's paw to break him out of Palatine's sewers. If a cat falls in a box and there's no one around to see it, does it make a sound? Oh hail, Fugen Bosatsu! divine whore of infinitesimal possibility and wisdom, perception incarnate!"

He clasped his hands in prayer, and looked over the rim of his glasses; and the sun dimmed to light only his face, which expanded to impossible size in Hisoka's mind like the head of Memnon. "The point is, Bon, Schroedinger's radioactive isotope was just a ruse, a red herring, a maraschino cherry on top of a cosmic sundae. Space and time exist only within the walls of my own brain!"

—

With those last words ringing in his head, like a tap on the skull by Saint Michael, Hisoka started. He raised his head from the table as reality in all its inevitability returned to him in particles and waves. He wasn't sure how long he had been asleep. He glanced at the clock on the wall, but that only told him it was past three in the morning.

And what did that mean, anyway? "Space and time exist only within the walls of my brain"?

It didn't make any sense, but at the same time it did. As though he had met Watari in the void of the unconscious, and come down with a spot of his madness. For a single moment he was convinced that simple declaration was the answer to everything — the amalgamation of all this night's empty theorizing. He promptly rejected it as preposterous. Those two in the file room had given his imagination such a workout tonight he was ready to believe almost any damnfool idea set before him. And at the thought of them, feeling he had been away too long, he set off once again for said file room.

When he reached it, however, he found a Post-it note taped to the door informing him they had left and he should come to the conference room. Did that mean 003 had put the final pieces of the puzzle together? Or had something more sinister happened while he was away?

He raced down the hall back to the conference room as fast as his feet would carry him and threw open the door. "What's happened, Ze—" he began to say.

Then he came to a complete standstill.

Natsume and Tatsumi, the latter of whom trailed off at the interruption, turned to look in his direction. But it was the figure sitting at the end of the table that had startled Hisoka.

Genial as always and seeming in better health than ever, Watari raised a hand in greeting and winked. "Yo, Bon!"

—
continued on page 16

Major props to Peter Barnes' The Ruling Class for the dream sequence, and Peter O'Toole whose JC is a deadringer for Watari, aside from the facial hair.