Kenji, I Swear, This Better Not Be ASMR

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Haruki read the note again.

She’d lost track of how many times she’d done it.

And every time, the message was still the same.

The memories aren’t yours.

She thought about the girl she met at the culture matsuri. She wanted to find her. She needed to. But she couldn’t, because she never asked for her name.

Instead, she decided to turn to the only person that might be able to help:

Kenji.

So for the first time in her life, she sent a text to him.

“Hey Kenji, it’s me. Can we talk about something?”

Then she put her phone down and thought about something else.

It wasn’t until half the day had passed before Kenji bothered to reply.

“Who is this? How did you get this number?”

She scoffed, then replied:

“Haruki. You know, the girl from school??? Is there somewhere we can talk?”

A moment passed.

Then finally he wrote back:

"Okay. My apartment. Chūō-ku, Minami 4 East 3, Apt 2-18. Knock on the door. DO NOT ring the bell. Come alone. I’m turning this phone off now."

Haruki stared at the text, wondering if it was actually worth the trouble.

No directions, no details, complete with irrational paranoia. Typical.

She placed the note in the inside pocket of her jacket and headed out to find wherever this place was.

It turned out, Kenji didn’t live too far away from her. Only about a 10-ish minute walk.

The apartment complex looked… fairly normal. Similar to the one she lived in. Although, there was a marker drawing of a TV with an Illuminati symbol on the wall next to the entrance which, now looking at it closer, seemed suspiciously similar to Kenji’s handwriting.

Yep, definitely the right place.

She walked up the stairs and looked for his unit.

2-16…

2-17…

2-18.

There it was.

And like he requested, she knocked.

No answer.

Then Haruki, naturally, did the exact thing he told her not to do.

She rang the bell.

Immediately, a shrieking WEE-OOH WEE-OOH sound blared from somewhere deep inside the apartment. A yell, followed by something metallic crashing.

Kenji ripped the door open three seconds later.

“I told you not to ring it,” he said flatly.

His hair stuck straight up as if he'd just survived some terrible industrial explosion, and only had one sock on. He was wearing his boxers.

Haruki looked at him for a second, then she turned around.

"I’m going home.”

“No! Wait—!”

She sighed dramatically but stopped mid-step and turned back around to face him.

“Just the alarm system. Don’t worry about it.”

He was still a little out of breath. “You came fast.”

“I don’t live far from here.”

“Oh, alright... Cool.”

There was a painfully awkward silence.

Then a loud noise from next door.

Kenji flinched.

“Oh sh— he heard it. Get in, quick!”

“H—hey!”

He grabbed Haruki by the arm and yanked her inside, slamming the door shut behind them.

“That guy freaking sucks,” Kenji muttered under his breath.

But Haruki didn’t respond.

The smell hit first.

A potent combination of instant ramen, socks, and something like burning plastic.

“Where are your parents?” Haruki asked with genuine concern.

“On a trip.” Kenji casually replied, eyes elsewhere. 

“So, you’re alone then?”

“Yeah, they go abroad often. Don’t worry, we got the place to ourselves.”

“That’s not exactly what I was worried about.”

Kenji casually tossed an emptied soda can onto a table, narrowly missing a two-foot-high stack of CDs and some type of soldering iron.

He pointed down a dark hallway. “My room. Come.”

Haruki questioned her decisions as she slowly followed him to his room.

As they entered, the humidity was the first Haruki noticed. Just as the computer clubroom had been, Kenji's room was noticeably hotter than the rest of the apartment. The odor, too, was unpleasant here. 

It was too dark to see anything. A blackout curtain covered the only window, the only source of light being the sickly blue glow from his monitors, which sat precariously on a wobbly desk in the middle of the room.

“Can we open a window or something? It’s like, a thousand degrees in here.”

Kenji paused, looking at her like she’d just asked for an insane request.

“There’s a system,” he said. “If I open the window, the airflow messes with the acoustics.”

She stared at him.

He stared back.

“Fine. I’ll crack it.”

He got up and begrudgingly cracked the window a few inches, letting in a thin strip of sunlight.

“Better?”

“Hardly...”

With some light illuminating the room, it became clear how much of a mess it was.

Books, wires, cables, empty chip bags, and dirty clothes all lived in harmony around the room’s perimeter.

And the posters...

Depictions of various well-endowed fictional girls in dangerously revealing positions plastered on the wall next to his sheet-less futon.  

Haruki tried her best to ignore the fictional girls in bikini tops. 

Beside them was a poster that stood out from the rest, depicting odd-looking rows of symbols.

“Hey what’s with the weird computer graffiti?” She asked, pointing to the poster.

“Huh? Oh, that? Mayan numerals.”

"Huh?"

"Mayan numerals. They used dots and bars for numbers. See? A bar’s a five, two bars, ten, three, fifteen, and so on, so forth... Like tally marks but cooler."

Haruki stared at him. “Why?”

“I’ve been trying to build a programming language using Mayan base-20 instead of binary.”

“Is that… useful?”

“Absolutely not.”

Another awkward silence.

Finally, Kenji asked. “So, eh… what was it you wanted to ask me?” 

Haruki was too fixed on the catastrophe in front of her that she'd nearly forgot.

“Right,” she said. “So we went to the mall the other day and… something weird happened.”

Kenji leaned against the wall. “What sorta weird?”

“Well… this whole week has been strange. I kept remembering things that no one else did. Stuff my friends say apparently never happened.”

“Okay… so memory problems. Maybe see a doctor?”

“No... It’s not that, you idiot!”

She dug through her pocket and pulled out the note, shoving it into his hands. “Someone gave this to me. At the mall. Well, technically, they slipped it in my pocket.”

Kenji adjusted his glasses, squinting at the note.

“And…” Haruki hesitated for a second, realizing how crazy it sounded. “I met this girl. I’m not sure who she was. We talked briefly, and she said something that just felt off. I think she was the one who gave it to me.”

Kenji stared at the note for a second longer, then handed it back to her.

“I’ve got something too.”

“What do you mean ‘something too’?”

He suddenly looked uncomfortable and there was a hesitation before he spoke again. “I didn’t want to show you at first, because… I thought you’d freak out.”

Anxiety began to creep in again.

“But?” Haruki asked. 

Kenji turned to his monitors. He pulled up a tangled mess of windows on his desktop.

“You remember the corrupted audio clip from your performance? The one that looked like a creepy message?” 

Haruki nodded.

“Well… I’ve been messing with it. I ran the waveform through some filters, translated it into binary, isolated the background frequencies... basic stuff.”

“Kenji, you’re sure this isn’t just another one of your tech-goblin hallucinations?”

But Kenji’s expression remained serious.

“Okay, fine, maybe it’s a little wild. But I wasn’t hallucinating. But it’s not just binary or text. In the audio… when I filtered it again, something came through.”

“You mean a hidden message? Like last time?” Haruki asked, stepping a little closer.

“Yes, but this one…”

He paused, almost unable to find the right words. He reached over and handed her a pair of headphones.

Haruki hesitated, then slowly slipped them on.

“…What am I listening for?”

“You’ll know.”

For a couple seconds, all she could hear was her own breath.

Then, gradually, a low hum of white noise, followed by that same pulsing static. And then, through the distortion, came a voice.

It wasn’t a human voice. A robotic one, barely audible with human ears. Spliced together like some sort of digitally-reproduced Frankenstein. It was layered, fragmented, as if speaking from within a dying machine.

But the message was clear:

“—existence unstable—

                         —Anchor is not supposed to—

—memory bleed accelerating—

   —dimensional—

—if convergence completes—

—irreversible—”

Haruki yanked the headphones off.

“What the hell was that?”

“I didn’t know at first,” he said. "I decided to blow it off as some sorta prank by a very talented hacker. 

“But based on the note you got…” He looked up at her. “I think it’s for you.”

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