Pandion (Genera #1)

Chapter 8

H arumine felt better when he woke up. There was still that persistent feeling of something not being as it should, but it wasn’t as ominous as the night before.

The chat with Kagesawa in the middle of the night had helped him gain some perspective. It was possible that the symptoms he was experiencing had something to do with Kagesawa’s mental states and would resolve on their own if the root cause was addressed. So long as it got no worse, he’d wait and see.

There was a steady, soft sound of typing in an otherwise silent room. Harumine listened to it for a while before he committed to waking up.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” Kagesawa asked. By the looks of it, he was preoccupied and multitasking heavily: using the BCI while typing on a keyboard, eyes fixed on the fairly wide screen in front of him. Why was he using a keyboard? It seemed like a waste of energy alongside the much more efficient BCI. To Kagesawa’s credit, he was using both with the ease of someone who had long since perfected the method.

“What are you doing?” Harumine asked.

“Just some… wait just a…” Whatever it was, it was intense enough to require most of his attention. Harumine sat at the edge of the bed and waited. Some five minutes later, Kagesawa pulled the wireless connector from his neck port, slapped shut the screen and turned to Harumine.

“Aa, you asked something?”

“Yeah, I was wondering what you were doing. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“I was nearly done. It’s something I do for stress relief, nothing that’d interest you.”

“You seemed pretty into it.” Harumine hadn’t paid much attention to Kagesawa’s kit before, but now that it was there in front of him, the multitude of it did look somewhat unusual. Half of his bedroom had been taken over by his gadgets.

“Ah haha, I guess. Anyway, you seem better than yesterday. Breakfast?” Kagesawa asked.

“Is this an older model? Looks ancient.” Harumine reached for and examined the extension on the wireless connector, which in turn seemed brand new.

“Umm, yes.” Kagesawa scratched the back of his head. “But I’ve upgraded it to be compatible with protocol 27.0-5d so it’s still up to standard and works with the new P4. I have a regular Endō Instruments T-60 with the included extension piece, but it chafes, so I hardly use it. You can have it if you need a spare.” He fished the 100-yen-sized button out from the depths of a desk drawer, revealing one of his credit chip stashes in the process.

There were indeed quite a few of them amongst miscellaneous paraphernalia. Kagesawa was about to close the drawer when Harumine stopped him and started sorting through the clutter for the chips.

“I’m sure as hell not going to work at another garbage facility. It’s time to build you a CV.” Harumine picked up a snack bowl that had once, in a very distant past, held something other than its current composition of dust and crumbs. Judging by the residue and Kagesawa’s taste, the likelihood of it having been tōgarashi- or wasabi-flavoured rice crackers or crisps was high. After tapping out the contents, Harumine used the bowl to gather the chips. “Where else did you say you have them?”

Without a word, Kagesawa pulled open two more drawers for Harumine to check and rummaged through a couple of boxes of random tech crap. Then he went into the bathroom, returned with at least a dozen more chips and deposited them all into the bowl in Harumine’s hands.

“Is that all excluding the closet?”

“Probably not.”

“All right, well, I’ll deal with the closet, and we’ll search for the rest later. This is already enough to annoy the other people in line behind us.” Harumine’s words made Kagesawa cringe.

“Did you want the T-60…?” he asked after a moment of trying to figure out why he was walking around with the thing in his hand.

“Sure.” Harumine had a rundown model from the year before. These things required a lot of maintenance or replacing every other year, and they didn’t come cheap. “I usually hack this piece off for a better fit.” Harumine pointed at the edge that was probably causing the chafing issue. Most people preferred the added stability, but it could get uncomfortable in prolonged use.

“You can do whatever you want with it, it’s yours. The static makes me grind my teeth,” Kagesawa explained. “I’ll fix us something for breakfast.”

“The static? What static?” Harumine had never noticed static with the earlier EI T-series models.

“I guess it only does that with the amp.” Kagesawa rubbed his stubble. “Breakfast, how about it?”

Harumine had been ignoring his hunger, but it had to be getting bad for Kagesawa to notice. He wanted to ask about ‘the amp’, but food was more of a priority for now.

“The closet.” He took the bowl of chips and got to work while Kagesawa prepared the breakfast.

Twenty thousand three hundred and sixty… no, seventy… and some change. Some of the chips were from one-day assignments, but there were also a few with a full month’s salary attached. The whole of it added up to more than four years’ rent. Four years!

“What?” Kagesawa looked up from his breakfast of steamed broccoli, eggs, bacon and miso soup.

“It’s quite a lot of money. You could have easily taken a year or two off if you’d wanted to.” Harumine had sorted through the chips and confirmed some of them were indeed very old. “This one’s from twelve years ago.”

“Oh? Let me see.” Kagesawa acted nonchalant, but something was off. “I think I’ll save this,” he said, as if on a whim.

“If it’s that important, I think you should.” Harumine poked the ice with a stick.

Kagesawa turned to look, startled. It was mind-blowing how clear this stuff was getting through the link. Harumine knew links improved with time, but after such a short time? Sometimes it was difficult to discern Kagesawa’s feelings from his own. Maybe they were already mixing more than he cared to admit.

“What the hell is with this link.” Kagesawa frowned, visibly irate.

“You said something about an amp. Could that be it?”

“Yeah, nah, I added a custom amplifier to my port years back. The standard ones don’t do jack shit. This one’s a bit more refined, but doesn’t perform miracles… also, there’s an off-switch.” Kagesawa scratched the back of his head and the port nestled somewhere under his hair. It didn’t itch, but when it brushed against hair, tugged and got caught on it occasionally, Harumine could tell it felt nice to shuffle it loose.

Kagesawa turned so Harumine could see. There was a subtle addition of a ring dial around the port itself. Kagesawa turned it gently. After the initial snap, the effect was immediate and scalable by turning the dial.

This is as loud as it gets , Kagesawa demonstrated. It did help make his projection clearer, but there was a slight distortion to it.

“It works both ways?”

“Yes, but not at the same time. I need to turn it the other way. I’ve also got some other filtering options on it like a manual dampening mode, but that causes A LOT of static.”

“You’re pretty good at this tech stuff.” Harumine hadn’t expected to be impressed, but it was a nice surprise.

“It’s not what’s causing this freakish link. Whatever it is, I feel like I should be dampening continuously to save you from all my crap. I haven’t had to do that with anyone else before.” Kagesawa made a point to laugh to indicate it was a joke, but Harumine could tell he was worried. “I should be happy that it’s working so well, right? My port’s connection has been so degraded for the past five years, I haven’t been able to project anything through it.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not intentionally. Stuff seeps through randomly, though. It’s been a pain. That’s why I added the filters, to help reduce the load. After Shimizu, my next link failed completely in a matter of days. I thought things were going fine with the one after, but she suddenly requested an emergency transfer. They never explained why, but it was approved, so I guess she must have had a valid reason.” Kagesawa shrugged.

Since the subject was on the table and it would never become less rude, this seemed the time to ask. “What about all the rest of them?”

“That’s going to be a long story.” Kagesawa took another bite of his breakfast and chewed very deliberately.

“I’ve got time.”

There was something big, dark and difficult surrounding this topic, the way Kagesawa’s mental state became so volatile thinking about it. Trauma probably. He’d managed to cover it up surprisingly well up until the link had gone into overdrive. From the outside, there were some clues, but Harumine likely wouldn’t have known to pay attention if not for the link. If anything, Kagesawa seemed annoyingly carefree.

He grabbed his palm reader, opened up his link transcript and set it down on the table facing Harumine. It read:

Kagesawa Tsuyoshi [57d8] 46-11-11

Link #01: Ayano Seimei [62d8] Status: Expired Link Failure, Removal Protocol Failure, Organism Replacement

Link #02: Choi Hyun-jung [23f5] Status: Expired Standard Removal Request, reason: personal health reasons

Link #03: Yajima Ryūga [90k1] Status: Expired Link Failure Standard Removal Request, reason: other

Link #04: Hashimoto Kentarō [22b1] Status: Expired Standard Removal Request, reason: retirement

Link #05: Shimizu Takuya [45d7] Status: Expired Expedited Removal Request, reason: removal from duty

Link #06: Ming Xuě Lì [10z4] Status: Expired Linking Failure

Link #07: Kobayashi Sayaka [b5-34f7] Status: Expired Expedited Removal Request, reason: compatibility issues

Link #08: Itō Kōji [51e9] Status: Expired Linking Failure

Link #09: Urano Akihiko [25d9] Status: Expired Expedited Removal Request, reason: compatibility issues

Link #10: Harumine Satoru [12m05] Status: Active

Harumine had seen this list before. It was included in the files they’d given him at the assignment meeting. He’d found it too shocking to peruse, so he’d merely skimmed the gist of it. It was only now that he realised he was looking at a person’s life and not just a reprehensible track record.

Kagesawa was about to start from the top but was left tapping his finger over the first name. Harumine was abruptly overcome by a relentless sense of sadness that tightened his chest and made it difficult to breathe. He hurried to dampen and took a deep breath before projecting something calmer through the link.

“I… I’d better not start with this one. It’s a bit much.” Kagesawa moved his finger down to the next entry and cleared his throat. “She lasted four months. It took two months to terminate the link.”

“‘Personal health reasons’?”

“Depression. In hindsight, I should have taken time off. I feel awful for subjecting her to it.”

“What about this link failure? Is it for the same reason?” Harumine pointed at the next entry.

“No, I was linked to Yajima for four or five years. He was a little rough around the edges, but we got along fine. I don’t know what happened to him. One day, he and the link were gone.” Kagesawa shrugged.

“Shady.”

“Indeed. We did all sorts of less than reputable things back then. Who knows what he got himself into. I was pulled into another review because of it.” The EA only conducted these performance reviews as part of larger, more serious investigations, and they could result in various disciplinary actions or even loss of one’s empath’s licence. Before Harumine could probe further, Kagesawa hopped forward to link number four. “Retired, that’s self-explanatory. Not a great link, but he didn’t care so long as we got the work done. Number five…” He hesitated. “That was my third review.”

Third? Having seen Kagesawa the night before, Harumine had already guessed the reason for the ‘removal from duty’ could be no small transgression. A review didn’t seem surprising under those circumstances. But if this was the third, what else had he been reviewed for? Did it have something to do with the first link he’d skipped as ‘a bit much’?

Kagesawa pushed his breakfast plate to the side. “The rest of this clusterfuck was me freaking out over being linked, trying to figure out what filters I could use to make it bearable, and my partners understandably losing patience having to deal with me.”

“Sounds rough.”

“Yeah, I’ve caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people.” He sighed.

“I meant for you, stupid.”

“Oh, right.” Kagesawa fell silent. It seemed like he wasn’t going to bring it up himself, and Harumine considered letting it be, but not knowing something this important about the person he was linked to seemed like it might cause issues later.

“I’m a little hesitant to ask, but… the ‘organism replacement’?” He’d never actually met or heard of anyone who’d needed it before. It was only done when all other options had been exhausted.

“It was forced on me when I refused to let go.” Kagesawa sounded strained, so Harumine turned to look at him. Grief descended over them like a thick, heavy veil. “That was all I had left of Seimei.”

Kagesawa collapsed to lean on his elbows on the table. He supported his head with his hands but bent down slowly from the weight of it. As his tears hit the surface below like in so many melodramatic film scenes, Harumine felt first-hand the likely reason why all those previous links had called it quits before him. It was excruciating. He was sucked into it, helpless, without anything left worth offering through the link.

“Stop,” was all he managed to say.

Kagesawa reached to turn the dial at the back of his neck, and along with it, made a feeble attempt to dampen the link. Seeing him make this effort made it worse somehow. Harumine started to cry.