Naked girl, tubes, wires

Summary:

Dr Maki Nishikino is summoned to a hospital to find Nico Yazawa, her high-school idol partner, in a coma. To her

horror, Nico has apparently volunteered to be experimented on by a scientist funded by the Japanese government.

Maki assumed - she hoped - that the Muse girls had drafted her to visit Nico Yazawa because she was, after all, a qualified doctor. Not that other stuff.

Classic coma patient profile. Eyes closed, no motion under the lids even with bright lights. Limbs unresponsive to temperature, at least.

"Did our friend donate her organs? Has the family been notified?"

In other words, why is she here, and why am I here?

"You were part of a group with Ms Yazawa at Otonokizuka Koko?"

"Otonokizaka Gakuin," Maki answered reflectively. Hey, the school eventually shut down, but not for another ten years.

The older man nodded. The lighting bouncing off his glasses gave him a sinister, eyeless appearance. Much like Maki, he wore a lab coat. And a tie, because they had Maki as a visitor. "And you are the one from the group who's a medical practitioner." Oh, thank the gods.

"I greatly admire Nico-chan, you know," he said. "She lost her father so young, but is so very brave. She's a pioneer, a hero, almost you'd say."

"It sounds like you saw her as almost a daughter, yourself," Maki said. It sounded bizarre even as she said it.

Finally, she could see his eyes, and they were kind. "I wonder. I wonder if I could let a daughter of mine go - do what Nico-chan is doing."

"Is ... is she in an induced coma? As part of an EXPERIMENT?" Maki demanded.

"She might as well be. But I have a good budget to keep her muscles going, prevent bedsores - this water bath is where she spends most of the day. What would you say if I told you that even after we, as you say, induced this coma, I could have undone it, immediately?"

"Bullshit. I would have said bullshit. Nico's family is poor but mine isn't and neither are several of the other girls from that group. If that's the kind of story you fed her..."

"The problem is, you'd never know. You'd never be here in the first place," he said with a creepy smile."

"It cost a fortune, the first time I laid down, with robots monitoring me, and undid the day before. That's the other problem with that. The budget. We got money from the JDF, from the Technology ministry, but it's expensive."

Nico had been put in a coma by a lunatic working for the Japanese government.

"I couldn't take anything with me, you know. I immediately wrote down everything I would do that day, from memory. Then I changed as much as possible. I even did not do the experiment - why would I? It cost far too much and I already had my data."

"It's a requirement of my medical license that I turn you in. In fact ..." Maki punched in 119.

The mad doctor reached over, hung up Maki's phone, and pocketed it.

"You, not I, are the one endangering Nico-chan, Ms Nishikino," he said. No trace of his earlier smile remained. "A bunch of police busting in here, unaware of her true condition? A recipe for disaster."

"I called you here for another reason. It turned out sending someone's memories back a very long way didn't use a proportional amount of energy, compared to a day. I found that out by doing multiple experiments, always remembering not to do them after I went back."

"But it's best I showed you," he finished. He pressed a button, and a nurse came in. "Ms Nishikino and I are going out, and I am leaving for the day." She did not reply.

Maki was still in shock over having her phone stolen. Letting a mad doctor drive her to an unknown location was the worst idea ever. But Maki couldn't ignore a mystery.

One of the flagstones of Otonokizaka was still here. The doctor pulled out a shovel and a mallet and chisel. After a long while, he unearthed what was clearly a time capsule.

"I had Nico-chan memorise current conditions - who won what elections, when. Which stocks did well or poorly. Who won sporting events. Major news and historical events. Who was governing. It took months."

The documents in the capsule were all in Nico's handwriting.

Fumio Kishida running the Diet. The latest variants of the Covid-19 virus. It was creepy Nico had agreed to do this and stuff it all inside a flagpole looking antiqued.

Then the message.

"I am doing this because I love you, Maki-chan. And no other reason."

"We could have talked!" Maki cried out.

"Why would someone go to the past, Ms Nishikino?" there was a pause. "It's terribly dangerous, it's arduous, you will be a fish out of water." After another pause, he continued, "I would say it is a person with a lot of regrets. And you are, for whatever reason, her biggest regret."

"This is insane!" she responded.

"Maybe, but I don't think so. Give it a few days. These documents are yours. They are precious - beyond price. You will have the only record of how the world was before Nico-chan's journey. I instructed her to get to the flagpole as soon as possible. There was, actually, another time capsule there, she just swapped it in before it was sealed. It was due to be opened in 25 years."

Maki felt helpless. If the government was involved, there might not be anything they could do. She would talk with Tojo Nozomi. All the girls had looked up to her as House Mother. And she understood Nico. She'd been her last remaining friend when Muse started.

She paged through the documents just before she slept. She would have to look up who Fumio Kishida was. The last she'd known, Shinzo Abe was clinging to power in the LDP. And a million deaths in the United States alone from the pandemic? She was a medical professional who played music on her vacations. IF there were half a million deaths worldwide by now, she'd be surprised.

If he'd really made Nico memorise and write these notes, then he hadn't done a very good job. And why hadn't she mentioned anything about this last year at Honoka's party?