"Blues?" Yuichi's muffled voice called out from the other side of the basement door. "Are you all right?... No, of course not. I really can't blame you for wanting to hide down there..."
Blues didn't answer. He set his generator on the stainless steel table, wiped at his eyes, then reached down and twisted the cap from one of the kerosene jugs.
If he was going to die soon anyway—or if the self he'd painstakingly formed over the course of his life was going to be erased, which to him amounted to the same thing—then he figured he might as well get it over with now and destroy the code while he was at it.
From the top of the stairs he heard nervous knocking—Yuichi's—and the man's shouts for help.
"Dr. Light, Dr. Sorensen!... He ran into the lab and locked the door. I'm sorry... I couldn't stop him in time."
Then low voices speaking to each other, followed by louder knocking.
"Blues," said the voice of Judith. "I know you're frightened... Perhaps it's too late to prevent Nurtech from getting the code... but despite what Albert said, Tom and I haven't given up on saving you. There's still time... with a little ingenuity and sacrifice, we could..."
"Are you still trying that bullshit on him?" said the very faint and distant voice of Albert.
It was ignored.
"Move over, Judy, would you? Blues," Dr. Light's baritone, hesitant and tremulous, called out. "I know it all sounds bad... and it is." There was a pause. "You deserve better than this...
"I led the project to create you, and I pushed for that contract with Nurtech. I was the one who engineered your power core. And I always thought, if something were to go wrong with your design, it would have been a flaw in your code that would have left you less than human... I never expected it would be a simple hardware component... such a small thing... and it was my fault."
"Albert was right. I lied to you... but I did it to protect you. If the only way to keep you alive was to... erase you, of course I wouldn't have told you. I... didn't want you to suffer..."
Blues's only reply was to screw off the cap of one of the kerosene jugs and pour out its contents onto the floor. Dr. Light's words were drowned out by the the glug, glug of the kerosene as it exited the container, and the cold splatter of the liquid hitting against the concrete. The stuff smelled noxious. Some of it soaked through his house slippers and chilled his toes, and he let out a gasp. Ignore it, he thought. This won't take long. He watched for a few seconds with grim satisfaction as the widening puddle spread beneath the locked door.
"Blues, listen..." Tom's voice continued. "There was a time before your activation, and a little while after, when I entertained the notion of being a God. I was full of myself . What you needed all along was... a father...
"I let you down."
Blues stifled a sob and turned back to his work. If he had any hope of destroying the contents of the next room along with himself, he knew, he would need more materials to ignite. His body seemed to move of its own accord as he splashed his way toward the bookcase beside Dr. Light's desk, then ripped through volumes of programming manuals, dusty stacks of Tom's patent certificates rolled up in their cardboard tubing, and yellowed hard copies of research publications bound with clips. As he pulled a few books from the shelf, two photographs of Tom and Catherine together slid out onto the floor—Blues felt bad about that—but in the end they too went into the pile he amassed in front of the locked room.
All the while, Dr. Light was still speaking to him. "...But, Blues, I'm afraid of what Nurtech's going to do if they have to break this door down... These are dangerous people..."
"Listen to him, kid!" called Albert. "No truer words have ever been spoken."
"Shut up!" shouted Tom and Judith in unison.
They hadn't done it on purpose, but the syncronicity of their reply was comical in a way, Blues thought. He let out a little laugh, and for a half-second even forgot what he was doing... What was he doing, again? Oh, right... He was unbuttoning his shirt. His hands began to quiver, and soon they were trembling so hard that he gave up in frustration. If this was too difficult for him, then the delicate operation to disconnect his pain receptors was surely a lost cause too. But perhaps he was steady enough... just steady enough to light a match. He wiped his face with his shaking hands.
Well, nevermind about the pain, he thought. At least Dr. Wily said it would be quick...
As he ran again toward the kerosene jugs on panicked feet, by chance he banged his knee against the wall—and a memory came to him of a particularly hard collision between his shin and the low table he'd suffered on his second day of life, when his movements had still been clumsy. The force had knocked him gasping to the floor, and moments later he'd heard Dr. Light's heavy footsteps bolting up the hall. When Tom's face had come into view, he'd seemed to have a guilty look.
"Here?" he'd said as he rubbed at Blues's smarting leg with his big gentle hands. "That feeling... it's awful, I know... but it's meant to keep you from damaging yourself, and to allow you to be capable of empathy..." He'd paused, staring downward, and his voice softened. "Still, even if it was necessary... Well, I'm sorry, all the same..."
He'd never told Dr. Light how grateful he'd felt for his calm and patient presence during a beginning otherwise marked by so much confusion. Perhaps there was still time...
No. It's too late...
Just then he heard a percussive banging against the front door at the end of the hall—followed by the eerily cheery ding-dong, ding-dong of the doorchime.
"Blues," called Dr. Light's voice, strained and higher in pitch. "Come out... please... you have to..."
Blues hoisted a second jug of kerosene above his head—this one was meant for himself—but a piercing scream startled him, and the weight slid out of his hands and landed with a great thud on the floor.
"No—don't do it!"
He raised his head. It was her again—and he'd never been more overjoyed to hear her voice.
"I'm not gonna let you give up so easily," the voice said. "So come on, Blues, think! Look behind you."
He looked—the lab's one and only window in the far corner of the room, up near the ceiling above the spare desk, was large enough for him to squeeze through. He could reach it if he climbed a chair... and it led to a side of the house unenclosed by the garden wall and out of view, he thought, of Nurtech's cars. Beyond it was a path into the forest, a vast place to hide... and whatever lonely struggle of a life awaited him there until his core had reached the end of its span, it had to be better, at least, than dying like this.
"Kalinka, you're a genius," he said. He grabbed his generator from the table, wadded up a piece of paper from Dr. Light's desk, and retrieved the box of matches from its drawer.
"Tom, I'm scared..." said the muffled voice of Judith from upstairs. "That noise a moment ago... What's he doing down there, anyway?"
Dr. Light didn't answer.
"I have a bad feeling... Go get the skeleton key, Tom. Hurry!"
There was no turning back now. Blues stacked a chair on top of the desk below the window and scrambled up. Then, with his generator still tucked under one arm, he lit a match, set the crumpled ball of paper alight, and flung it across the room. A flame leapt up from the puddle of kerosene, widened, and within seconds engulfed the pile of books and documents on the floor.
There was a great whoosh, and a wave of heat washed over him. The corner of the lab closest to the stairs became bright and crackling, while dark smoke blurred out everything else. Blues stared at the sight, unable to believe what he had just done.
"You know, Blues, I don't feel right about this," said Kalinka's voice, a bit chiding. "You should give yourself more credit. You imagining me here, helping you escape... but I wasn't there. I had nothing to do with it."
"But it makes me happy," he said, as he slid open the window. "It just does. Please: tell me I've got to get out of here alive."
"Oh, all right." She put on her most irritable affectation. "Blues, if you don't get out of there alive, I'll never forgive you!"
He laughed. She was so funny. Smart, too—smarter than he'd ever be... but if he had any hope of meeting her some day, he'd have to do what she asked.
He felt the heat of the flames on his back as he turned again toward the open window. But instead of a ground-level view of the outside, he saw nothing but a white rectangle of packed snow. He thrust his arms into it—to his relief it was fresh and soft, and a little avalanche poured in in front of him. Teetering on the edge of the chair, with his generator still tucked under one arm, he hoisted himself up. He kicked the chair out from behind him, and with all the strength he could muster pulled his body through and burrowed to the surface.
The blast of cold air, and the darkness that greeted him, were exhilarating. He saw the faint glow from the headlights of Nurtech's cars far to his left, but he was well out of sight of anyone who might still be inside. Yes, he had a chance after all. He pulled the window shut behind him, clutched the generator to his chest, trudged through knee-deep snow along the stone wall toward the back of the house, rounded the corner, and made a break for the cover of the trees—as fast as his legs could carry him. Though soaked to the skin with melted snow, reeling with a sudden flash of pain in his stomach, at least—he fought back the urge to shout with joy—at least, for now, he was alive.
It was then that he realized the problem with his escape plan: the trail of deep footprints in the snow he'd left behind. He steeled himself for a chase—but just as he reached the perimeter of the woods, and the pitch-black of the forest loomed in front, he heard distant screams, and he hesitated, positioned himself behind a tree, and looked back toward the house. The intensity of the snowfall had trickled down to a fine powder, which gave him an unobstructed view.
A sinister-looking plume of smoke rose up from the roof. As Blues watched, Dr. Wily appeared from around the corner carrying Catherine's urn. The man paused, looking down at the footprints and the hole in the snow in front of the window with an expression of deep confusion—or was it disappointment?-but the moment was short-lived. He put the urn down and, with a few quick, wide deliberate steps, Albert covered the prints in the snow with his own. Then he returned to the window, and with a few brisk kicks—he grunted with pain—shattered a hole in the glass. He crouched down to slide open the window, which was of course unlocked, and a burst of grey smoke billowed out. He took a few limping steps away, crumpled into the snow, and shouted curses at his aching foot.
"Son of a bitch... Tom!"
Dr. Light came into view, followed by Judith, Yuichi, and six men—Nurtech employees—whom Blues had never seen before.
"Tom, over here," said Albert. "Since the staircase is on fire, this is the kid's only chance. I searched around for a rock, but in the end I had to break my damn toes to get the window open."
Tom and Judith each let out a gasp and huddled in front of the opening.
"Blues!" shouted Judith. "Blues, come here! If you can hear us, come to the window!"
Dr. Light crouched down on his stomach and stuck his head inside, calling out Blues's name, but of course there was no answer.
When at last he pulled himself away coughing, and Yuichi had helped him to his feet, one of Nurtech's men approached him.
"Dr. Light," he said, a bit hesitant, "are you responsible for this?"
"Of course not," snapped Tom. "Blues is still in there... My boy—he's still in there!"
"Tom," Judith said, her panic rising, "The nearest fire department is a twenty minute drive away. My God, what are we going to do?"
Just then Yuichi, who up until then had been silent, must have recognized that he was the only person around small, agile, and willing enough to fit through the window—and he tore off his coat, ran to the opening, and slid inside feet-first. As his head disappeared into a cloud of smoke, Judith's jaw dropped open.
"Yuichi!"
She and Tom shared a furtive glance and got down to their knees to watch, but Albert limped forward and pushed them out of the way.
"Yuichi, you stupid boy. Get back here!" he said. "Think about your wife and daughter, for Christ's sake."
Blues stared with growing apprehension as the seconds ticked by. At least a full minute passed, and the shouts of the three figures poised in front of the window became more frantic.
If he doesn't come out... Blues was gripped with terror, and was just about to step out from the cover of the trees and reveal himself when, at last, two greyish hands appeared clutching the bottom of the window frame.
"Come on, Yuichi, you idiot, up you go," said Albert, as he and Tom dragged his limp and blackened body through the opening.
Yuichi gasped for air. He crawled forward, then rolled onto his back in the snow, taking raspy labored breaths. Judith clutched him by the hand. She was crying.
"I'm sorry. I... couldn't..." he said, and was overcome with a fit of coughing.
Dr. Light, moaning, began to pace back and forth. He looked back in horror at the window, from which the smoke was now pouring out so thick that it was impossible to get close. Albert, sitting up in the snow, gingerly removed the shoe from his broken foot.
"Tom, let's be realistic here," he said. "Remember: the code is gone now. Even if Blues makes it out in one piece, those guys..." He tilted his head toward the six men hovering in silence a few meters' distance away. "No sooner than he'd wiped the soot from his face...They'd ferry him away to get his head opened up and taken apart. If he meets his end here now, this way... then perhaps it's for the best."
Tom, in a fit of displaced rage, ran forward and kicked Albert's injured foot. Albert cried out; then Tom sank down into the snow, pulled at his hair, and let out a long, low wail.
The sound cut into Blues like a knife. He was almost overcome with an impulse to burst out into the open and shout, "Dr. Light, I'm here! I'm alive!"-but he remembered Nurtech, and he put his free hand over his mouth and hunkered down more closely to the trunk of the tree.
He continued to watch as, a short while later, flames lapped at the basement window and all hope of his survival was lost. Judith, crouching on the ground with her arms tightly crossed, shrieked; Yuichi, sitting beside her, gazed listlessly up at the rising smoke between paroxysms of coughing. Tom leaned forward where he sat, his head bowed, and on his face was an odd pursed and wincing expression which Blues would not learn to recognize until years later: the greenish look of a human about to be sick.
Only Dr. Wily, silently nursing his broken foot, didn't appear particularly distraught.
It's because he knows, thought Blues. He shuddered at the idea, but then calmed himself with the reasoning that if Albert intended to tell anyone he was still alive, he would have done it by now.
Minutes passed. Fire and smoke engulfed the house. The noise was terrible: a low crackling roar. The tile roof groaned, buckled, and collapsed in on itself, sending a spiral of flame high into the air—and for the first time Blues realized the gravity of what he had done.
I'm sorry. Blues had destroyed the code and saved his own life, each a heroic feat in itself, but he felt terrible nonetheless. The oak table where Dr. Light used to let him win at cards, Catherine's piano and the soft upholstered armchair, the trees in the garden (collateral damage, helpless innocents—even now the pine closest to the house was sparking up, its branches twisting and curling): soon they'd all be nothing but skeletons and ash. Of all the beloved objects Dr. Light had accumulated over the course of his lifetime, only Catherine's remains, destroyed already by fire long ago, survived.
It was actually kind of funny, in a way, Blues thought.
It would be many years before Blues would learn what would have happened to him if Albert hadn't come that evening, if Blues had remained behind wrapped in the comfortable dream Dr. Light had woven for him. After Tom's obedient surrender of the copy of his source code to Nurtech, Blues would have been bidden to open the envelope on the table: inside he would have found four tickets (Albert was not welcome) to a performance of Beethoven's Ninth by the Vienna Philharmonic at the Bunka Kaikan the following day.
After he'd endured the press conference, they would have taken him there. And he would have loved every moment of it: first the view of passing scenery through the window during the two hour drive to Tokyo, then the bright lights of the city, throngs of curious people eager to meet him, and the rapture of the music.
That night, Dr. Light would have tucked Blues into his futon happy, at peace, distracted—at least for the moment—from the doubts that haunted him. Then, once Blues had settled into sleep mode, Tom would have—after a few minutes, perhaps, of anguished hand-wringing—lifted his shirt, opened him up, and shut him down.
Over the next weeks he, Judith, and Yuichi would have exhausted themselves in frantic exertion and sleepless nights to invent a "miracle cure," as Albert had called it; then at last, defeated, with Nurtech's deadline looming, they probably would have been forced to cut their losses, mourned the person Blues once was, and wiped him out themselves. It was a matter of principle that they wouldn't let Nurtech do it—strangers who wouldn't have the first clue what they were destroying.
Blues, unconscious since January fourth, by design never would have learned his own fate.
And then, maybe, a while later, perhaps in early summer, while Nurtech was hard at work developing its new product line, Dr. Light and his colleagues would have greeted the birth of a new being through whose eyes, which had once been Blues's, Mt. Fuji would perhaps have looked a little different.
But it never came to pass. Blues was alive—although he didn't know for how much longer—alone and shivering behind a tree in his kerosene-soaked house slippers. He felt the pain in his stomach growing, and looked down with apprehension at the precious generator in his arms. Before its energy reserve was depleted, which would take a month or so, he'd have to find a way to charge it. Although he was already afraid then, he had no idea how much of a hard scramble his life would soon become.
A sudden cacophony above his head startled him: the sound of several crows cawing in unison and the creaking of lesser branches bending under the weight of hopping feet. He looked up, but couldn't see anything at all through the darkness. He knew the crows' caws had to mean something: it would make sense if only he could understand the signifiers. But he'd been calibrated for the human sphere; the world outside of it was alien and played by rules of its own.
Already, he had the vague notion that "Nature" was more than just a pretty picture to draw, and that a walk in the snow was pleasant only if one had a warm bed to come home to afterwards.
The wind picked up and blew a plume of acrid smoke in his direction. He heard a burst of flapping wings from the tree above; it was time for him to go too. He wiped his eyes with his scarf one last time, turned, and trudged into the night.
Hi all. Kaguya here. Well, this marks the end of part 1. Part 2 will follow Blues as he wanders on his own, up until the time a... certain someone finds him.
As always, thanks for reading.
