The Rise of Shiroi Nami – Chapter 30

The sun has set, and the ground shakes beneath our feet as we hustle into an alley, past a dilapidated apartment building. We keep our heads down and avoid making any noise — our footsteps quiet on the wet pavement. Keeping my new android body in check is… interesting. There’s so much data to monitor; it’s overwhelming. I brush the feeling aside like shooing away a fly. Where are we anyway? The location shows up on my display, but I don’t understand it.

We round another corner, and I follow everyone into the side door of a shuttered restaurant. Rin turns the lights on, and cockroaches scatter, heading for darker corners. I cling to the wall of the room and close my eyes. This place reminds me of Kitakyushu and the hell hole I lived in there. Nothing about that time is pleasant for me, and nothing about this makes it any better.

In my head, I wander through the maze of boxes and find more specific memories of Kitakyushu. There’s one of me laughing and drinking with Saki, but the background is blank like someone has come in and erased it. Where were we?

Being in Kitakyushu reminds me of another thing…

“What’s going to happen to Ninjin?” I open my eyes and take a deep breath. Everyone is in the room now. Kazuo walks the perimeter, Hidéki looks like a giant in this small space, and Rin hovers near the door. Is he standing ready to block me if I run? I wouldn’t blame him for thinking that of me. I’d like to escape and hide away forever.

“He’s with all the other animals at our moon base,” Hidéki says, his voice rolling over me like a summer storm. “We don’t plan to do anything with him.”

“But I’m an android now.” My voice fills with despair, even if my body doesn’t. How did Saki live like this? “How will he know it’s me?”

Ninjin only ever tolerated Saki. He won’t know it’s me if I get to see him again.

“Don’t concern yourself with this now,” Rin interrupts, his tone annoyed. “We have other more pressing things to worry about.”

I flinch, his words a slap to my face. My whole life has been turned inside out, and I’m not allowed to worry about my dog?

Human Yumi would’ve lit into him for being so careless about my feelings. On an analytical level, I can play back this conversation and see what I would have done differently as a human. But as an android, I file away the interaction with mild disappointment.

Kazuo’s eyes bounce between us, Rin to me to Rin again, preparing for a fight.

“Of course,” I whisper, returning to my placid state. “Where are we, anyway?”

“Matsubara Ward.” Rin’s voice turns cold and hard, and I open the box in my brain to remember our time at the cafe, so long ago. “There was this job about four years ago. We were tracking errant androids through the bowels of Matsubara Ward. You haven’t been there yet —”

“I haven’t been anywhere yet,” I had said.

Rin continued, “Yeah, you haven’t. Hmmm. Anyway, Matsubara is a lower caste ward, people living on top of other people. Six people to an apartment half my apartment’s size. I lost an android in a converted apartment building. There were people everywhere, and I didn’t see that he ducked behind a stack of shipping crates. I ran past him, and he reached out and grabbed me by my hair. Nearly scalped me. At the time, my hair was long, and I kept it pulled up. I hated this scar…”

“You hate this ward.” I could tell from the animosity in his tone that the scar he hated was not as bad as the ward he had to work in.

He shrugs. “That’s precisely the reason I chose it. No one will look for us here. And with the press of millions of bodies, we will blend in. Shiroi Nami is fighting hard for this ward. We can help here.”

Kazuo turns on more lights and heads towards the front of the shop. Out of the storeroom, we step into an abandoned kitchen. It’s the opposite layout from K&G Noodles, but it still has most of the same equipment. I run my finger over a nearby steel counter, and it comes away dusty.

“This place is a mess. How long has it been abandoned?”

“Three years.” Kazuo picks up a pot and jumps back when a dozen bugs run past his feet. “It’s going to need to be fixed up.”

A double-hinged door separates the kitchen from a tiny seating area, just enough room for five or six tables, more if we expand to the sidewalk.

I nod my head as I walk around. “I see. So, we’re starting our own noodle shop?”

“We own the entire building now.” Rin avoids my eyes and looks out the front shutters. “There are tenants, a lot of them, on the fourth through eighth floors, but we will have this shop and those floors right above. We plan to move everyone in.”

“Do we have to be actual landlords? Do we have to unclog toilets and fix windows and collect rent?” This is a horrible idea for someone like me, but my voice is even-keeled.

“No. There’s a management company to handle that.” Kazuo stops and folds his arms over his chest. “Do you think you’re up for this?”

Rin, Kazuo, and Hidéki are all watching me, so this is the time to come clean.

“No. I want you to put me back in the data storage until I have a body… or never.”

Kazuo turns his eyes to the floor.

“I died, right? I am dead to the general public. I don’t even understand why you brought me back like this.” I gesture at Saki’s body. “It makes no sense. How long until you’re done growing my clone?” I ask Hidéki.

He shrugs, a slight lifting and lowering of his right hand. “Hard to say. Two to three months, maybe longer.”

“See?” I throw up my hands and marvel at the awkwardness of the gesture. That’s something I do all the time, but I never thought about the mechanics of my hands and arms. My screen read-out tells me everything that’s happening with my body, and I haven’t learned to ignore it yet. “In a few months, you could have skipped this interim android body or left me to be dead and gone.” I drop my voice. “I can only imagine how I actually died.”

Kazuo and Rin look at each other, but neither of them says anything. Either they weren’t there, or they know and don’t want to tell me? I’m not sure.

“It was a risk we decided to take, Yumi,” Rin says, “because we were unsure of what you would retain. We rushed you to a hospital and tried to revive you. You were conscious for a short time but unable to talk or communicate. We asked that memories be retrieved from the previous hours, but Kiiroi Yama techs weren’t sure if it worked.”

“It didn’t. Why go through all the trouble? This is such a mess.”

Rin steps closer to me. “Before you died, you said Gen had a secret, and you seemed genuinely distressed about it.”

“He told me a secret? Or just said he had one?”

“I don’t know. You passed out before I could question you further.”

“Let me…” I hold up one finger.

Most of my memory boxes are right up front and easy to access. I don’t even need to search for them. They’re just there like they were when I was a human. I can effortlessly slip in and out of them. But some boxes in my warehouse are shut. They require effort to open them and view them. Some are hopelessly locked, and I may never discover what’s inside.

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell if it’s here or not. So, you were hoping I’d remember the secret?”

“Yes. And there’s something else, too,” Rin starts, but he pauses and swears. “It happened after we backed you up. You asked me to save your body. You wanted to freeze your eggs for future offspring.”

I look at each of the men in the room. They are all quiet for a long moment.

“And?”

“Your body is now in deep freeze, in Kadoma Ward General Hospital,” Kazuo says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “A hospital occupied by Aoi Uma.”

I close my eyes, but the gesture brings me no peace.

“Of course.” I sigh. “I see your conundrum. It’s better to have me here in this body than nothing at all.”

“Well,” Rin continues, “we’ll spend the next few months serving up noodles until your new body is ready. And we’ll help Shiroi Nami reclaim this world before your people come. That’s what Saki would want you to do. Do you think you can live here until Shiroi Nami has made its final move? Are you up for cleaning this place and living here until we can move forward?”

It doesn’t escape my notice that Rin is back to the way he was before we kissed, before we fell in love. He’s turned all-business, stiff and cool. Not cold. I can see his heart is hurting by the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention. My imagination is sure to run wild with doomsday scenarios of him leaving me for someone else because I’m everything he’s grown to hate over the last ten years.

A memory bubbles to the surface of Reina Hirohata, telling me I can’t trust Rin, that I shouldn’t trust Rin. I know why they said that. He’s an orphan and a former Kiiroi Yama employee. He has no one else to vouch for him. They don’t want me to trust him because they think he’s untrustworthy.

And there’s nothing I won’t do to prove her wrong.

Because he did love me, and he could love me again. I know it. This situation is just a temporary setback. If I’m careful, I can keep him from drifting away from me. I can hold him in my heart until I’m back in my own body, or this consciousness is gone. If it’s gone, I won’t know the difference, anyway.

So, I pull up my shoulders, raise my chin, and smile. Smile like I believe in happiness and love and hope, even if those concepts feel so far away that they might as well be fairytales.

I clap my hands and rub them together.

“I love a good challenge. Let’s get to work.”

END BOOK 4.