We three, we're all alone

Living in a memory

We're not even company

My echo, my shadow, and me.

Goro gazed steadily at this person who looked so much like him. His height and build - and face - were identical, but his body language and manner of speaking were noticeably different.

"Come on. Let's go. What are you, slow or something?" said the black-masked figure.

Goro wasn't about to take orders from a stranger, even one that looked just like him. Instead, he took a good look around. The streets, which he'd initially thought were empty, were actually filled with dark shapes shuffling silently along. It was similar to the real world except that these things barely qualified as people; their skin, clothes, and even their body language was a dull monochrome. Farther away, he could see enormous searchlights beaming high into the sky. What sounded like fireworks or gunshots popped in the distance. It was unsettling to say the least.

When he was good and ready (and his double was fuming with impatience), Goro said, "I'm not going anywhere without an explanation. Why are you dressed like the drummer in an emo band?"

"The question is, why aren't you dressed like some reject from a Tchaikovsky ballet?"

Goro looked down at his clothes. He was still wearing the pajamas he'd gone to bed in. For no reason he could see, a word popped into his head. "Crow…?" he said to himself.

The other boy rolled his eyes. "Yeah, me Crow. You Goro. You really don't remember, huh? This is the Metaverse."

"Then...you must have my memories," said Goro, putting the pieces together.

"Bravo, ace detective. You want 'em back or what?"

Goro let that sit for a bit. Then he said, "I don't know."

Crow's eye twitched. "You don't know? Is it necessary to be so asinine? We're the same person. You need me and I need you. This isn't a hard choice."

Goro stroked his chin. "Do you know why this happened?"

Crow didn't answer, apparently unwilling to admit that he didn't know.

"There must be some reason I can't remember things that happened to me," said Goro. "Wouldn't you say?"

Gritting his teeth, Crow growled, "Listen, Dr. Maruki says we need to get back together, no matter how repulsive that may be to either of us. Let's get it done."

Without waiting for an answer, Crow grabbed Goro's hand and squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating hard.

Goro blinked.

Seconds passed.

Nothing happened.

"You don't know how to do it," said Goro dryly, shaking off his twin's hand.

"Let's go see Maruki. He better have a good explanation."

Crow turned and started to walk away, but looked back over his shoulder to find Goro still standing there.

"If you're really me," Goro said thoughtfully, "Then tell me something. Is there or is there not proof that I worked with Masayoshi Shido?"

"How dumb do you think we are? Of course there's proof. I recorded all my conversations with Shido on my phone and backed them up on the laptop."

"I don't have the phone or the laptop anymore, but the prosecutor's office should have access to those. Hmm…."

"So? What do you need that stuff for?"

"Shido is denying any knowledge of me and my activities. If I want to testify against him, I'll need some evidence to back it up."

Crow put a hand on his hip. "Aren't you overlooking something rather obvious?"

"What's that?"

"You can't testify against Shido unless you have a testimony, idiot. I'm the one who holds those memories, or so you've been saying. If we recombine, then you'll have all my memories and I'll have a body again. Win-win, no?"

Goro's thoughts spun, trying to make sense of all he'd learned. Rationally, he knew there was no chance he'd get to the bottom of things without his doppelganger. Emotionally, he felt like a pawn on a chessboard, moved around and promoted or sacrificed at the whim of some unknown player. There was very little that made him angrier than that.

"I...need to think all this through. I'm going home," said Goro, and went back towards the apartment building.

"Coward! That's not your home!" yelled Crow at the apartment building, but it was too late. His other half was gone.

Inside the building, Goro paused, rolling his eyes as he heard the other one's shout.

At the same time, though they couldn't hear each other, both Goro Akechis muttered to themselves, "What an asshole."

When he woke from that strange dream, Goro felt equal parts sick and encouraged. He had a new lead, though, and that wasn't nothing.

Over breakfast, he asked Sae whether she was able to get ahold of his laptop and phone.

"Mm? Why do you ask?"

"Last night, it occurred to me that I may have recordings of my meetings with Shido. I would have kept them on either my phone or my laptop."

She sighed heavily. "Wouldn't that be helpful. Actually, I've made numerous requests to the prosecutor's office for access to the belongings of yours that they're keeping as evidence..."

"Numerous…? They've refused?"

"They've been giving me the runaround for weeks. Truth be told, I think they don't have it anymore."

Goro sat back, sipping his coffee and thinking. "I see. Shido's out of the picture - maybe - but his organization is still intact. It wouldn't be hard for either him or one of his associates to get one of their purchased police officers to take a few things out of an evidence locker."

"It's probably Shido himself still directing things," said Sae. "The way he spoke at his hearing gave me the impression that he knew already the evidence was gone."

"Damn." Goro banged his hand on the table.

"Then you're certain you don't want to pursue a full denial?" asked Sae, peering over her coffee mug.

Goro shook his head. "I can't stand letting that man get the better of me. I'm going to take him down, just like I promised -" his voice faltered. He had sworn on his mother's grave, but he wasn't ready to tell Sae about all that. "Just like I promised I would."

"Very well. I still think there are a lot of mitigating factors, so I'll focus on those. Having those recordings would help, I'm sure."

In school that day, Goro dedicated a fraction of his brainpower to looking normal in class and the rest to his case and the mysterious double. Unlike a normal dream, he remembered his conversation with his other self clearly. It was true that he couldn't testify without intact memories, but that didn't mean the black-masked thing necessarily had leverage. If he was really me, thought Goro, he'd know I wouldn't just roll over.

There were still avenues to explore with this new information. All of a sudden, in the middle of math class, he was struck with inspiration: backup. He'd made a backup on the laptop. But surely he also would have set up automated cloud backups! He had lost some memories, but he could still remember his passwords.

He was so taken with this idea that he cut his next class, instead barging into the computer lab, attendance be damned. He opened up a browser window and started brainstorming his accounts, every personal, school, and work account he could think of, opening them all in new tabs and organizing them by likely relevance. Then he went through each one methodically, logging in and checking their file repositories.

The first one had nothing that seemed likely. Fine; that was a school account, he probably wouldn't have kept anything secret there. Second was a drive he'd shared with some police officers under the table (the police officially didn't use cloud storage for data security reasons, but convenience tended to trump security). That account had been closed, the files presumably deleted.

One by one he went through them, from the obvious all the way down to the music account where he saved his playlists.

"No...no!" he cried, banging the keyboard in frustration. Not only did these accounts not hold what he was looking for, it was worse than that: some of them had actually been cleaned out, either the files deleted or the account closed entirely. The person who had his phone would be able to do that, if they'd cracked his unlock code. And it looked like they had.

He put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. He stayed that way for a long time, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.

"Akechi-san?"

It was Suzui.

Goro looked up blearily, wondering what time it was. Was school over? How many classes had he missed only to faceplant straight into the metaphorical pavement?

"Are you okay? The office sent me down...they said you were having some kind of a meltdown."

"This isn't a meltdown," he said morosely. "This is just frustration."

The rest of the class was filing in and watching them curiously. Sighing, Goro let Suzui lead him outside where they could speak privately.

"You aren't acting like yourself, Akechi-san," she said. "If there's something bothering you, anything at all...I want you to know that you can tell me."

He hesitated. He didn't want to tell her about the court case. Although she was trying to be nice, she was just giving him one more problem to fix: the problem of getting rid of her without offending her. Times like this he would so much rather be alone.

"I understand if you can't, though," she said, after a moment. "If it's something big...all I ask is that you remember I'm here for you before you do anything drastic. Okay?"

He blinked, surprised. If he hadn't been so distracted with his own problems, he might have connected the dots to her "accidental injury," but he was too preoccupied to think about it.

"Okay. I will." Strangely, he felt a bit better. Maybe it was just knowing he had an extra option, even if he never intended to use it. "Um...Suzui...how is it I'm here talking to you and not getting chewed out in the principal's office?"

She smirked at that. "Ah. It seems they're kind of terrified of your mom? They would rather not get her involved."

"I don't blame them," said Goro, thinking, Bless you, Sae. You are a queen among peasants.

"Did she...is she the reason you're able to carry my things?"

"Yes. She's the one who came up with the arrangement and got the school to agree. It helped you and got me out of trouble, so…."

"I'm a little jealous," said Suzui wistfully. "My parents...well, they don't rock the boat. When I started here, I thought at first that the school administration had refused their requests to get me some help."

"Hmm? You mean you asked for someone to do what I'm doing?"

"Yeah, among other things. I talked with my parents about what I thought I'd need. But I think...I think they just didn't bother asking for any of it."

She looked distressed, but he wasn't sure what to say. Lazy and uncaring parents were far from the worst he'd ever encountered, but he didn't think that would make her feel better.

Suzui followed up her own thought, filling the awkward space. "I'm sorry - look at me, talking about myself when I came here to comfort you. God, I'm -" she stopped herself, flustered. "Okay, look. A friendship can't be all take and no give. You promise me if I can help you with something, you'll ask. I feel like such a freeloader! You have to let me repay you somehow."

Goro smiled. At last, this he could understand. Taking charity was humiliating; she wanted a more reciprocal relationship. He respected that.

"I promise," he said, shaking her hand.

That night, Goro found himself again in the surreal un-Tokyo world. He returned to the street and found his doppelganger there again.

"Did you bring me here?" Goro demanded.

Crow shrugged. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't."

"Don't try to bluff me, of all people. You don't even know if you're bringing me here, isn't that right?"

"All the more reason to find Dr. Maruki."

"Who is that?"

"You don't remember him? Oh, that's going to hurt his feelings." Crow smirked. "Let me tell him, please."

I hate you, thought Goro. Out loud, he said, "Go find him and bring him here if it's so important. I'm not going anywhere with the likes of you."

He wasn't even sure why he was so opposed to helping the doppelganger, but his dislike and suspicion of him grew every day.

Yet every night, they met again in dreams.

For the next few days, Sae noticed that Goro was getting grumpier. Dark shadows appeared under his eyes. Occasionally his eyes would glaze over and he'd just stare into the middle-distance for a few seconds before blinking back to life.

Yet whenever she asked, he said firmly that he wouldn't stay home from school, he was just fine, in fact sleep was the last thing he needed. That was a strange thing to say, Sae thought. Perhaps another sign that he was unraveling somehow.

On top of that, the prosecutor's office called with bizarre news. According to them, the signal from Goro's GPS monitor was disappearing each and every night. Then, after a while, it would reappear. After some badgering, Sae discovered that the location didn't change; he was in their apartment before the ankle bracelet "disappeared" and back there again afterwards. She gave them a piece of her mind for wasting her time with their own flaky technology, but in the back of her mind she wondered if this might not be connected with his apparent insomnia.

She broached the topic at breakfast one day, beginning with the ankle bracelet mystery.

"The bracelet is disappearing?" he said blankly, looking lost.

"Kind of. Since it isn't actually going anywhere, I was able to hold them off for now...but if you have any idea what's happening, it would be better to stop it."

"Disappearing…." he repeated.

"You do seem a bit tired," she said, frowning. "Do you think the two things might be related?"

"It's fine. I'll figure it out. Oops, time to catch my train" he said, throwing her an obviously fake smile that did nothing to ease her mind.

Sae sighed as he ran out the door like he was being chased. She wanted to help him, but unless she could somehow gain firsthand knowledge of the Metaverse - or he could bring himself to trust her - she was flying blind.

On the way to school, Goro dozed off on the subway and almost missed his stop. He found a coffee vending machine on his way out of the station and bought six cans, finishing off two as he walked.

When he got to the front gates of his school, Suzui greeted him cheerfully as she always did, but as he came closer, a little worry line creased her forehead.

"Are you doing alright, Akechi-san?"

"Why does everyone keep asking that?" he said with a sigh.

"Well, um…your tie's crooked, your hair's messy, and you've buttoned all your buttons one-off. It's just not you," she said apologetically, as if any of this were her fault.

"Entropy," he said, unbuttoning his blazer to try it again. "The tendency of order to devolve into chaos."

She smiled. "Now that sounds like you. Hey, I got this great app the other day. It has a library of guided meditations."

"Hmm," said Goro, his attention already waning. It was so hard to pay attention to things lately.

"I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping, but now I just drift right off and sleep like a baby. Let me send it to you."

Suzui flicked through her apps. There was one she didn't recognize, something she hadn't installed. Malware, how annoying, she thought. She deleted the rogue app and sent a link to the meditation one. A little thing, but it was all she could think to do for him.

That night, Goro had a shift at Crossroads. The sound of the train always made him a little sleepy, but he was too apprehensive about meeting the other him to do more than doze.

As he walked into the bar, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He rejected the call and said, "Shut up, Amamiya," to the phone. Ah yes, talking to an inanimate object, surely the sign of a stable mind.

"Ooh, what's he got to say?" said Lala-san, raising her penciled eyebrows.

"Nothing. He annoys me all day long with nonsense," said Goro, poking at the phone. "Oh wait, that's a chess move…. Tch, he evaded my trap…. Anyway, just listen to these texts: 'Class is boring today. We covered this last year at Shujin.' 'Here's the view out my bedroom window' - what is this, a corn field?"

He showed her the phone, scrolling to demonstrate the ridiculous number of texts Ren had sent him.

"Looks to me like a beautiful sunset over a corn field. What else, what else? Is this his new school uniform? Aww." Lala watched the pictures scroll by with her chin in her hands and a big, goofy grin on her face.

"What?" said Goro suspiciously. "What's that look for?"

"Amamiya, he's your…."

"Rival. My rival."

"Right. I had a rival in high school too. Everything he did, I tried to do one better. Followed him around all the time, just waiting for the chance to one-up him. Thought about him day and night, trying to figure out how I could beat him. That sound familiar?"

"Yes, that's exactly it," said Goro. "He's so good at everything. It drives me crazy!"

Lala picked up a fan and fanned herself theatrically. "He's sending you pictures of his hometown, right? Like he can compete with Tokyo. Send him a few selfies in some exciting places. Make him regret he ever went back to West Podunk. That's what I would do."

"That's...a great idea," said Goro, nodding. "He's going to be burning with jealousy. Thanks, Lala-san."

"Mama Lala always provides," said Lala, covering her mouth with the fan and winking over the top.

By the time Goro got home he was so exhausted he nearly fell asleep in the elevator, but he made it to his bedroom and flopped down on the bed. His phone buzzed. There was a message from Amamiya.

What's up? read the text message. The most worthless of all greetings. He sighed. Amamiya was the nosiest person he'd ever met - he would never leave him alone until he got answers.

Goro: I don't know. You messaged me.

Ren: Niijima-san is worried about you. She asked me to check up

Goro considered the best way to get Amamiya off his back. Then something he'd said earlier popped into his head - something about the Metaverse…. Something about tying Shido to his crimes? He didn't love going to Amamiya for help, but it was his last lead.

He called Ren's number and set up the phone on the headboard behind him.

The second Ren answered, Goro said, "If you say 'what's up' again, I'm hanging up."

"Sorry, didn't mean to start on such a controversial note." Ren cleared his throat and dropped his voice an octave. "So what are you wearing?"

"What are you - stop joking around!" said Goro, flustered. Unable to think of any other retort, he snapped, "What are you wearing?" He regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

"A mask. Wanna know what else?" said Amamiya slyly.

"No. Look, Amamiya...when you were in that other place did you ever encounter a...a double of a person?"

"Yes," said Ren immediately. "A few times. Did you meet another you? Someone else?"

"Another me. What is the nature of these things?"

"What are they...not a simple question. Some of them were cognitions. Some were shadows. If we were inside one person's head and we encountered that person, that would be a shadow. But if we saw other people, those were cognitions."

Goro thought that over. "To restate...my concept of myself versus my concept of someone else?"

"Yeah. You have to be careful, though. If it's a shadow and you kill it, you'll die too. If it's just somebody else's cognition, then nothing will happen."

"At least the risk/benefit ratio is pretty clear. If you didn't kill these things, what did you do with them?"

"Beat them up and stole their stuff - " There was an angry cat yowl on Amamiya's side of the phone. "Uh, Morgana wants me to say we only stole their distorted desires."

"Distorted desires…? For instance, you could steal an addict's craving for drugs?"

"Yeah, you got it."

Goro yawned. It was getting dark. "Tell me some more about the Metaverse. I kind of understand, but Sae's explanation was kind of light on details."

Ren launched into an explanation. "Well, first of all, it's important to understand that it's the world of the subconscious. Except Mementos, that's the collective unconscious, and then there are Personas...have you ever read any Jung?"

"Of course, but I'm more of a Nietzschean myself."

"The 'God is dead' guy?"

Delighted that Amamiya knew what he was talking about - but clearly a lot less - Goro chuckled and said, "That's the one. Although I'm more interested in his interpretation of the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic, the balance between order and chaos." He savored Amamiya's silence for a moment, then said, "Anyway, I'm taking us on a tangent. Back to the Metaverse."

He drifted off to sleep with Amamiya's voice in his ear babbling about grappling hooks or something.

...And he woke up with Amamiya's face in his face, staring into his eyes, upside-down.