"The station's... gone?" called someone at the other end of the aisle. "What does that mean? Fire? An explosion?"

Throughout the crowded carriage a tumult rose up. A few people jumped to their feet and barked out their questions at the conductor, who pressed his back against the door and shielded himself with his hands.

"I'm... I'm sorry," he squeaked, as he removed his hand towel from the pocket of his jacket and wiped a few beads of sweat from his face. "It's only just happened... We're still not sure of the details..."

"I'll be damned," said a voice that carried just barely over the din. It belonged to a man who was staring trance-like through the south-facing window. "Look at that."

In the distance, above an otherwise ordinary rice field hedged by trees and tile-roofed houses and bathed in the orange glow of the afternoon sun, a plume of black smoke snaked upwards and merged with a cluster of low-hanging clouds. To Blues, who for the moment had pushed his shades back onto his head to get a better look, the sight looked exactly like the terrifying interlocking chordal triplets in the agitato of Rachmaninoff's "Prelude op. 3, part 2." He shut his eyes, but the image remained burned in his mind and overlaid itself on an intruding memory of Dr. Light's house engulfed in flames. He gritted his teeth.

Stop it, stop it...

A flurry of rapid speech, punctuated by gasps and cries, swirled around him.

"That's Kanaya Station over there, isn't it?"

"Oh no, it must be..."

"Was Kanaya Station, you mean."

The conductor, whose eyes were locked leftward toward the window, cleared his throat. "Now, if you could all just stay calm and..."

"Oh, my God! My mom was waiting for me there," said a teenage girl, as she cupped her hands over her mouth. "Oh my God, oh my God..."

She pulled her netphone from her pocket and dialed with shaking fingers as a little crowd gathered around her. A moment passed without an answer—and then another, and another. The color drained from her face, the device slipped from her hand, and she dropped along with it to the floor of the carriage. Panicked screams rang out around her. A path formed through the crowd, the nearest bench emptied itself of its occupants, and two men lifted the girl and set her down. A middle-aged woman settled in beside her and fanned her with a plastic Yomiuri Giants uchiwa. Another passenger picked up the netphone and placed it discreetly back into her hand.

Blues squeezed the straps of his backpack, not knowing what to do. All around him was a mixture of reactions and conflated emotion. Some people remained slumped in their seats, sullen; others swiped frantically at their netphones. A man in spectacles hunched over the bewildered yellow-haired family, calmly explaining what he knew of the situation in broken English. The girl put a hand over her gaping mouth and stared up at the ceiling, speechless.

The novel sort of pain Blues felt then was nothing like the near-constant ache of his dying power core—which nibbled at his stomach even now—or the still-burning afterglow of the plasma rifle shot in his leg. It had no physical source he could detect, but he felt its effects in his hands, which tightened their grip even more fiercely around the straps of his backpack, and in his eyes, which burned into the girl's netphone with a hatred that surprised him.

You're going to ring. She's going to answer and hear her mother's voice.

Ring.

On tiptoe Blues scanned through the crowd; at last his searching eyes found the Light Labs robot resting peacefully in its corner, blinking out over the fray as if nothing was amiss. The sight was eerily comforting.

"Now, if I could please have your attention..." A hush fell over the car as the conductor raised a gloved hand in the air. "Obviously, we've got to get out of this train. We're between stations and there's no platform outside, so before I open the door I'm going to ready the emergency ladder. There's a crew on the way to assist you in getting to your final destination, but for now..." He ducked into the front compartment, and reappeared moments later carrying a plastic box piled with bottles of tea and packaged buns. "Take some emergency rations, if you need them."

At the phrase "emergency rations," the Light Labs robot sprang to life. It reached up, closed its stiff and multi-knuckled white fingers around the handles of the box, and began another gentle weaving course back down the aisle. "Here you are," it said in its cheerful monotone to each passenger it approached. With one last glance across the car, the conductor scrambled again into the front compartment and out of sight.

A dreadful hush settled over the crowd. Outside, the billow of smoke rising up above the trees now darkened half the sky. The wind shifted its direction, the rippling waves of rice arched toward the train, and before long the very air was grey and people were coughing and burying their faces in their shirt collars. Windows were flung open. The girl lying on the bench, still clutching her netphone in both hands, sobbed uncontrollably.

Blues closed his eyes and braced himself against the acrid air, willing himself not to breathe- but somehow the scent lodged itself in his lungs anyway. It was a smell he'd long wanted to forget, along with the terrible memory associated with it—except that, this time, it was much worse: tinged with a sick, ferric sweetness whose origin he didn't want to guess.

A woman, gasping, pushed her way into a corner of the compartment and retched.

"Well, here it is," said a man to Blues's right, who held up his phone with solemn aplomb. A dozen faces turned in his direction, and he cleared his throat and began to read:

"At 4:53 p.m., September 5th, 2064, an explosion rocked Kanaya Station in Shimada, Shizuoka Prefecture. Two people have been confirmed dead, although emergency personnel on the scene have warned that there are "many injured" and that the death count is expected to rise.

"A few witnesses on the scene managed to take photos of a non-human figure placing bombs around the outside of the station just minutes before the explosion. Pattern recognition technology has linked the figure's image to a recently-published photo of "DRN-006," an advanced humanoid industrial robot debuted by Dr. Thomas X. Light at an expo in Tsukuba last month, and which, along with five others, Dr. Light last week alleged was stolen by his long-time friend and partner, Dr. Albert Wily.

"Dr. Wily's whereabouts are currently unknown.

"Dr. Light could not be reached for comment at this time."

Blues knew in that moment that his world had changed—and indeed it had. What he didn't know then, and couldn't dare to guess, was how. But there was no time to wonder what it all meant: a collective gasp rose up through the interior of the train, and then things began to happen very quickly.

The passengers suddenly turned their attention to the little Light Labs robot still rolling quietly down the aisle. Screams rang out as it approached, someone shouted "for God's sake, turn the damn thing off!"-and the harried conductor reappeared in the carriage with his netphone squeezed against his ear.

"Yes, yes, I understand completely... I will... right away."

Coughing into his sleeve, he came bounding down the aisle, stopped in front of the robot, and withdrew a key from his suit pocket. Finding its way forward blocked, the robot looked up at the conductor with serene curiosity, cocked its head to the side—and just then Blues, in mute terror, realized what was going to happen next.

The key went into an unseen keyhole on the robot's back, followed by the whoosh of a panel sliding open. Adroit hands entered, found their mark... No one let out a protest or came forward to help...

Don't... It's not fair...

Two hands appeared in Blues's mind's eye—his hands, raised, pushing weakly against Dr. Light's shoulders. Another pair of hands reached forward, caught his own by the wrists, yanked them upward—and then there was the terrible feeling of the two halves of his shirt being parted, the cold tickle of Dr. Light's hands tracing the outline of the panel in his chest...

When Blues pulled himself back into the present with a gasp, the Light Labs robot was right in front of him, silent and motionless, its eyes dark. It was a little, just a little—no, much too much—like the dead and staring face of Mr. Mitsui.

"I always knew Light was a kook," said an old man in a self-satisfied voice, to no one in particular. "He claimed those contraptions were safe, but see, one little hack and it all goes to hell... I suppose we won't be able to breathe easy until every last one of his inventions have been destroyed. Shame."

"Now," the conductor said, and heaved a shaking sigh, "If I could have your cooperation in exiting the train one at a time... Slowly, please..."

In the next instant Blues was jostled by the rush of people scrambling toward the door—and, suddenly more desperate than ever to do anything he could to appear human, he reached out, grabbed a bun from the plastic box, and squeezed it awkwardly in his hands.


Clouds gathered overhead, the sky dimmed, and the last remaining traces of smoke faded into the gloam. In a daze, Blues found himself among a dire parade slogging along the side of the freeway toward the next viable station four kilometers away. A cool drizzle came down and soaked through his hair and clothes, compounding his misery.

Every so often as he walked, where the furrows jutted just close enough to the road, he reached out to brush the feathery tops of the rippling panicles with his open hand. Their soft rustle and crunch between his fingers, and the pop and chatter of grasshoppers as they fled... they were something real, something he could hold, and hear: priceless assurance in a world which seemed to be making less sense by the minute.

People glancing up from their netphones spoke to each other in hushed tones about the rising death count—five dead, now nine, now nineteen—but their voices were muffled and distant. Once a minute or so his eyes flitted to the sky above, searching for any sign of the floating wheel. He couldn't see it through the encroaching darkness, but that gave him little comfort. He now had more than the wheel, or even Nurtech, to worry about.

"...debuted by Dr. Thomas X. Light... which, along with five others... was stolen last month by his long-time friend and partner, Dr. Albert Wily."

He heard the words replay in his mind exactly as he'd heard them spoken, each syllable in its proper place, but every time he tried to piece together their meaning his train of thought became jumbled.

It doesn't make sense... none of it makes sense...

But, at the forefront of his mind was the increasing pain that had shot through him twice since he'd exited the train. Not only was it more severe than usual, it had also taken on a different timbre: bitter, deep, and dark. Stranger still, each time it took hold of his stomach, stopping him in his tracks, it echoed just afterwards in his injured leg. He could deny it no longer: within the last hour, something had changed.

If his pain as he'd experienced it before was like a minor key played in bass notes, this was a tritone. It was, for lack of a better word, evil.

That ache which for years had been his constant companion—torture though it was—had in time taken on a kind of morbid reliability, sure as the sunrise or the phases of the moon. Even the relentless dwindling of the period of time he could last between charges, whose tick-down toward zero was a march toward his death, had up to now at least followed a steady and predictable course. During his time on the mountain, he'd accepted each small step downward with stoic grace—but what he perceived now wasn't anything like that: it was like tumbling head-first from a boulder...

"Hey, kid... you all right?"

With hesitation he raised his eyes; a grey-haired man in a suit, walking beside him, was glancing down at the scarf on his leg with a look of concern.

"Yeah," he said, and was surprised by the sound of his own voice: the mask over his mouth made it sound muffled, otherworldly. "I'm fine."

Lie. Among other things, at this very moment it was getting harder for him to put one foot in front of the other. He felt the pall of an all-too-familiar fog settle over him.

His last charge had been only twenty-four hours ago. It was much too soon for this.

This was wrong.

Something had changed.


"Tokyo, please."

A voice spoke; a hand reached out and prematurely placed a small stack of bills onto the counter of the station service desk. It was his voice and his hand, but they seemed like someone else's: he hadn't asked them to do those things.

For just a moment, he managed to focus his eyes on a squat, roundish object behind the attendant, in the back corner of the office. A white plastic sheet covered it like a shroud, but Blues knew exactly what it was: another Light Labs ticket-check robot in shutdown mode. He shuddered. He wondered how many of them were out there now, across the country—or was it the world?-being pulled from their train carriages and tucked away into dark corners and closets...

"Sir... excuse me, sir?"

"Huh?"

"One way or round trip?"

The question took him by surprise, and he glanced down at the wallet in his hands. I'll go to Mr. Mitsui's house, he repeated to himself, as if reciting a mantra. I'll tell Ms. Mitsui where her husband is... I'll tell her he loved her, like I promised, and then... and then...

It hadn't occurred to him to imagine what he'd do next.

He supposed he'd find another forest to hide in, and press on until either Nurtech caught him or his core gave out—the latter of which now seemed like more than only a distant possibility—but he didn't want to think about any of that now. He could think of nothing but getting to Mr. Mitsui's...

"Sir... are you all right?"

Another jolt tore through his stomach, radiated outward, and reached a second apex in his right leg—and although he managed to stifle a cry, when he came back to himself and looked downward he saw his two hands, vice-like, clenching the edge of the service counter. The station attendant was staring at him with wide eyes.

He jerked his hands away and shoved them into his pockets. He wished she'd look somewhere else, anywhere else—anywhere but at him.

"Sir...?"

"One way," he said through gritted teeth.

After what seemed like an eternity the train pulled up to the platform and opened its doors. Blues didn't even bother to search for his seat first; though the world now seemed to him to be speeding up and fading out of view, with single-minded lucidity he darted down the aisle, brushed past a stressed-looking man in uniform checking tickets, and ripped into the first open lavatory he could find. He pulled his precious generator from his backpack. He raised his shirttail, clicked the input into place, and sank against the wall with a heavy sigh.

By merciful coincidence his pain, having subsided, for now gave him a reprieve. The train roused itself to life and began to rock him gently back and forth. Soothed, and at the same time feeling his strength returning, he forgot all about Nurtech, Dr. Wily, the Light Numbers, and Kanaya Station... He forgot even what was beneath the scarf tied around his leg, thinking only about how cheery it looked—it was a cheery color, as Judith had said, wasn't it? Blissful minutes passed; even the occasional knock, a sudden jiggle of the handle, or the impatient clicking of heels outside the door couldn't shake him from that momentary peace. It was beautiful, beautiful...

And then a great collective gasp, like a rush of wind through trees, rolled through the compartment outside the door.

What is it now?

Blues folded the generator back into his backpack, pulled himself to his feet, and with dread wrapped his fingers around the door handle. He hadn't even finished his charge—but if the cause of that gasp had anything to do with him, as he feared it did, then for his own sake he'd better learn about it now.

When he returned to the carriage he was met by three dozen gaping, staring faces. With a pang of terror he assumed they were looking at him, and took a hasty step backwards—but then he noticed the news broadcast streaming on the wall-mounted netscreen behind him.

"...Although Dr. Wily has not claimed responsibility for these atrocities, police have now named him as a prime suspect... netphone photos captured by multiple witnesses reveal that the stolen Light Numbers instigated each incident... Please be warned: what you're about to see may disturb you..."

With his eyes locked on the netscreen, Blues with an awkward half-backwards gait located his seat and sank in next to the window. The seat beside his own was empty, a small mercy for which he was deeply grateful.

A procession of images flashed by, each more horrifying than the last: corpses being zipped into black bags, victims writhing, or screaming, or wide-eyed and catatonic, wheeled on stretchers into the backs of ambulances, tall buildings swallowed up by churning vortices of flame, the crushed and splintered remains of houses half-buried in mud...

"I'll be damned," said a man behind him—a jarring outburst of noise in an otherwise dumbstruck crowd.

Wringing his hands together, Blues turned away toward the window. The reflection he made in the glass was clear, but besides his usual mess of black hair there was nothing of himself that he could recognize. Concealed behind his sunglasses and surgical mask, his face was gone—as if it had never existed at all.

Dr. Wily did this. Dr. Wily, who had once kissed him, whom Blues hadn't exactly liked but at least had told him the truth when he needed it most, was killing people with Dr. Light's inventions. Lots of people.

It didn't make sense.

"Life... mostly, a crock of shit." The words replayed themselves in Blues's mind, as clear as he'd heard Dr. Wily say them the day he was activated.

Was that it? Did that explain it? No, it still didn't make sense.

Were Ms. Mitsui and her baby all right?, he suddenly wondered. The thought gave him a surprising sense of relief. If only he could remember why he was going to Tokyo, and what he was going to do there, he could keep his nerve. Everything else was too big for his mind to encompass.

Big drops of rain dripped down his window. Beyond them, the lights of an unknown town partitioned out the night. They came to a stop at a line on the horizon—beyond them, an even deeper darkness stretched into the immeasurable distance.

It was his first time to see the ocean. Vast and undefined, it frightened him.

The audio of the news broadcast continued on unabated. Unable to close his ears, Blues steered his mind toward the one thing he was sure of.

"...Dozens of people electrocuted at a public swimming pool in Shinagawa Ward..."

I'll go to Mr. Mitsui's house...

"...A conflagration at an apartment complex in Musashino City... hundreds presumed dead..."

I'll tell Ms. Mitsui where her husband is...

"...Structural collapse at Shiromaru Dam... entire communities downstream washed away..."

I'll tell her he loved her, like I promised...

"The government has just declared a national emergency... Self-defense force troops preparing for deployment... Panic and looting in cities across the Kanto region... Eyewitness reports suggest the six so-called "Light Numbers" can disappear and reappear in different locations at will... Police on a desperate manhunt for Dr. Albert Wily... Officials are warning against all non-essential travel to Tokyo..."

...And then...

"Kalinka." Outside, the lights of the city slowed and fixed themselves in place. The clack-clacking of the train ceased. The netscreen went silent, locked on an image which he wished, for the moment, not to re-see. He got to his feet, glanced at the frozen faces around him. All was still. Good. He had the right; this was his memory, after all.

"...Yes, Blues?"

"What happened after I went to Tokyo... what I did... even though I knew Wily had killed people... what I'm showing you now proves it... I had no excuse..."

She paused. The sound of her breathing, calm and steady, filled his ears.

"Have some compassion for who you were then," she said at last. "I do."

"I don't think I can."

"Go slowly, then," she said. "Show me what's on the netscreen... It's something painful, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is." Reluctantly, he raised his eyes. The world around him roused itself. The lights beyond the window began to move, frightened voices whispered behind him, and the netscreen newscaster began to speak.

"We're here live outside Dr. Light's property in Shizuoka, where the celebrity scientist remains holed up in his home... So far, he has denied all media requests for a statement concerning today's events. We're going to try again... hopefully, he'll be willing to talk with us this time..."

The network's dial rang a few times; the camera turned then zoomed in on its target.

Small and distant in the lower right corner of the screen, framed by the black outlines of low-hanging branches, the house, silent and dim, squatted against the blank black sky. Though the image was grainy, Blues found the house eerily similar to the one he'd escaped: built in modern minka style, topped with the same tan-tiled roof, its posterior shielded by a near-identical stone wall. The only differences he could discern were the positioning of some of its windows and the age of the two cherry trees, now mere saplings, that flanked the front door.

In spite of himself, Blues felt his eyes go wide, and he hugged his backpack before him as if it was a stuffed animal.

Dr. Light, I'm alive... he thought. But I'm sure I'm dying now, really dying. Do you ever... think about me?

"Tell them I still love them," Mr. Mitsui had said. Blues couldn't understand why the phrase had just now come to mind. He was overcome by a sudden rush of agitation... he was on the verge of making a connection... a connection between the feelings stirred within him by the image of the house, and his decision to help Mr. Mitsui... if only he could put the two together, he would know why he was going to Tokyo. Something would fall into place, something big... and it was bigger than Tokyo... It was something he'd wanted his entire life...

And then his hands of their own accord pulled at the seams of his backpack with such force he might have ripped it open. He looked downward at what he was doing, caught himself, and buried his shaking hands in his pockets.

Dr. Light was a liar. Judith... Yuichi... they were liars too. I hate them.

Only... only Dr. Wily ever told me the truth.

The phone continued to ring. He blinked up at the picture of the house, befuddled, unable to decide which outcome—the call answered, or the call refused—he dreaded most.

Another few seconds dragged by. The house remained just as it had been: no rustle of curtains or lights going on. No signs of life. Dr. Light's car huddled, dark and still, in its usual place on the gravel drive. To his own surprise, Blues felt his heart sink.

"It appears we won't be getting an answer today," the reporter's voice said, crestfallen. "Now, we're going to speak with Mr. Daichi Hasegawa from the Shizuoka City Police Headquarters. Mr. Hasegawa, it's believed that there are two remaining 'Light Numbers' still inside the house, and that's making local residents very tense. Do you have any information that could indicate whether their programming may have been corrupted by Dr. Wily during his alleged break-in last week?"

"When Dr. Light called in to report the thefts, he didn't mention those two at all," said Mr. Hasegawa. "Of course, we won't know anything more until he agrees to talk with us. The fact that he's been so uncooperative today is troubling, to say the least... At this point, there's no question that the six Light Numbers reprogrammed by Dr. Wily will have to be destroyed, and every Light Labs product currently on the market shut down until we can fully assess its safety. As for the last two—regardless of whether Dr. Light is in any way culpable for today's attacks or not—we owe it to the public to launch a full investigation into the risks they could pose, and to take appropriate action as necessary.

"Unfortunately, if Dr. Light remains unresponsive, our next step will be to obtain a warrant to enter the property by force and seize them."

"According to an article written by Maika Sasaki for the Daily Yomiuri back in June," said the reporter, "those two Light Numbers look and behave remarkably human. So far Dr. Light hasn't allowed any pictures of them to be published in the media, and for now we can only speculate...

"Mr. Hasegawa, before we move on, do have any final words to share with us?"

"Yes, I do, and they're for Dr. Light," said Mr. Hasegawa. "Doctor, if you're listening to this broadcast now, I urge you to cooperate with our investigation. If you're innocent of any wrongdoing, then talking with us will only make things easier on yourself. This may be the end of Light Labs, Inc., but it doesn't have to be the end of your career..."

Given what he knew then and the faculties of logic he possessed, Blues could have deduced that the two beings inside the house, whose fate now hung in the balance, were in fact like him—and that by rights it was correct to assume they were frightened. And he could have dug deeper still... could have wondered what kind of people they were, could have seen them the way he'd seen Ms. Mitsui pacing back and forth in front of her door, could have felt their fear the way he'd experienced the terror of a teenage girl who had lost her mother—or, on the other hand, he could have rejoiced that he was no longer the only person in the world to reside in a body and a brain like his—but, but...

But I destroyed the code, he thought instead, and at the time that was that—and his imagination, stretched to its present limit, could go no further.

But that wasn't really that. In truth there was something else, a wish buried so deep that even his future self would find it painful to admit... the single-minded expectation that, in the remote chance he'd ever be able to safely return to... to Dr. Light—not that he'd ever want to, of course...

"Blues, go on."

...That, if he ever did want to, anyway... he'd have him all to himself.

"So, that's when it started!" said Kalinka. "The schism, I mean... between how alone you felt..."

"Kalinka..."

"...And how wrong you were."