CAS9

Ding!

The doors of an oversaturated convenience store slid open with an echoing sound. A young woman came fumbling out; her hair styled in a French braid with tips tinted sky blue. She wore an oversized white sweater draped over with a pastel purple windbreaker jacket. A sticker loaded backpack hung from her shoulders, with her feet covered in shoes with platforms thicker than a block of Swiss cheese. One of her hands looped through a plastic bag while the other struggled to open a pack of roll cakes.

Bzz, Bzz

“Ack!”

Startled by the unexpected sensation, her heart skipped a beat as she yelled aloud. Everyone around flinched from her abrupt outburst while she shuffled her eyes back and forth before hastily proceeding forward. Swiftly gripping the pastry with her mouth, she fished around in her hard-to-reach pants pocket before yanking out her phone.

“M-Mirai?” she mumbled through her cake filled lips, with her eyebrows sloping from one to the other. “Why would she be calling?”

Finally bringing herself to a halt she perched up against a side rail, bit off a piece of cake, and then slapped the most arrogant smug onto her face.

“Heya!”

“Shiyui it’s me, Mirai”

Her posture slumped as she thought to herself how obvious that fact was.

“Mirai! I haven’t spoken to you in like… whatever the equivalent of forever is.”

“That’s not true.”

Irritated by Mirai’s unnerving need to always state the obvious, she found herself thinking back to why she’d grown distasteful of Mirai’s company.

“Listen, I need to ask you something.”

“Well, I highly doubt you called me to say hi.”

“I need to know how to hack a tablet.”

Now finding herself indulged by what Mirai had to say, she fixed her posture and held a firmer grip onto her phone. “You can’t,” she then solemnly, but curiously replied.

“What do you mean? I’m sure there’s a way to hack through the login.”

“No, I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying YOU can’t do it.”

“Are you being straight with me?”

With the conversation leaning in an ominous direction, Shiyui began to grow eerily conscious of her surroundings.

“Listen, I’ll admit you’re good at things, Mirai, but this ain’t one of ‘em that you can learn overnight.”

As a moment of silence followed, Shiyui carefully awaited Mirai’s response; still completely dumbfounded by the situation before her.

“Well, I need somebody who can.”

Standing tall with her chest puffed up and chin high, she resembled a set of armor on display at a history museum… A perfect depiction of presentation, but vacant of a presence on the inside.

“The only person that can do that... is me,” she paraded, “if it wasn’t for that a-hole of a director I would’ve been qualified to join the–"

Before Shiyui could rant any further, Mirai interjected, “Listen, I don’t need your monologue of self-servitude right now!”

“Okay, fine!” Shiyui chanted before nabbing another bite of her roll cake. “If I can get connected to the computer tablet then I can probably still use my old service code to bypass the login. Apparently, they don’t give general enlistments much priority when removing security access. I know because I actually used it the other day to get through the train gate for free. Hahahaha! I was down to my last 500 credits and couldn’t imagine using it on pub–"

“Hey!”

“Alright, alright, calm down. I have my laptop with me so send me the address and I’ll catch a cab there.”

“Fair enough.”

“Oh, and by the way you wouldn’t have money to pay the ca–"

Once again caught off guard by her phone's buzz, she saw Mirai had already ended the call and sent the address. “Oh, she freakin’ hung up on me!”

Throwing her hand in a fit, it was already too late before she’d noticed her strawberry roll cake slipping from her fingers and thrusting through the air. Rotating as it edged closer and closer to the solid, cold, filthy pavement beneath it.

SMUSH!

“Damn it!!”

Tires rutted against the paved road as the vehicle came to a pause. “Twice in one day. That might be a cab driver all-time record,” the man chanted as he sat in the driver’s seat peeking out towards the house from the window. “What?” Shiyui barked staring forward, dumbfounded as the cab driver looked at her with a stark face. “Never mind, that’ll be 21 hundred credits.”

     As she gazed at the price tag, she leaned in closely to the driver and pleaded, “Can it be charged to the person in that house?” with her finger pointed straight out the window beside her.

Now trading dumbfounded stares, the driver gaspingly uttered, “… What?”

As she opened the front door, Mirai stood staring at an expression as mystified as a racoon in the dead of daylight. “I always assumed it’d be more science-fictiony around here,” Shiyui chanted. “I’m more so surprised that face of yours is capable of speech,” Mirai tediously countered.

But without missing a breath, Shiyui’s mouth kept on its treadmill. “I mean you always hear about how exclusive this neighborhood is with its illuminati-esque nature and all the rumors and speculation and whatnot. People who live here aren’t really real, and how it’s from a different dimension, and time doesn’t pass, and it’s all a simulation… You just learn to expect more! And can you believe the cab I took was driven by an asshole?!”

“Shiyui, shut up,” Mirai jabbed as she locked the front door shut, “can you get into this thing?”

Standing in the living room with the tablet in hand, Mirai had a burning glare to her eyes; one that Shiyui had come to despise. Shiyui then replied with a single sigh; her expression descending into defeat.

“You know something Mirai, even you can try and show a little humility sometimes…”

     Neither of them dragging their words on any longer, Shiyui pushed past Mirai as she snatched the device from her and stood face to face with the assignment at hand. She observed it briefly before navigating around its lock screen widgets. Finding intrigue in its surprisingly colorful appearance in contrast to what she viewed as a dreary home interior.

“So… who’s house is this?”

“It’s mine.”

Looking back over her shoulder at Mirai, she challenged, “And you were telling me about self-servitude.”

“Can you get inside it?”

“Mmm, depends on what I get in return.”

“You came all the way over here to bargain?”

Slipping her backpack off her shoulders and placing it at her feet, she looked towards Mirai with a change of character and a pointedness to her delivery. “Mirai, I don’t know what the hell is going on right now. We’re standing in someone’s house hacking into a tablet… In Inagi of all places.” With her voice decreasing to a whisper, “Who even knows what happens to people that get arrested here?”

“You won’t get arrested, because it’s mine.”

“The house or the tablet?”

“Both!”

Forcing her finger in Mirai’s face with over-expressive eyebrows furling across her forehead, Shiyui’s nagging became relentless. “YOU called me here because YOU can’t access the damn thing. Like hell it’s yours!”

“Fine, give me the computer and I’ll do it. You can leave.”

Possessively gripping her bag in both hands and holding it close to her chest, she retorted. “No!”

“Don’t make me take it from you.”

“You still need my service code!”

“And you’ll tell me what it is.”

Now lost picturing herself being painfully tortured by Mirai, she snapped back to reality and acquiesced.”

“If I hack this thing… You get me rehired.”

A bit thrown off by her request, Mirai took a moment to follow. “That’s what you want? To go back?”

“Yea, and not just as a regular employee, I wanna be one of those in the really dim room with ten screens plastered on the wall and can appear as a hologram in the corner of a field agent’s visor or something!”

As another one of her typical tirades came to an end, she took a second to catch her breath. Mirai looked upon her with the thought of disbelief blended in a dose of, I’m not even employed there anymore, roaming around in her head.

“None of that exists.”

“Well, I’ll request for them to make one when I get there!”

…

“Fine, if that’s what you want.”

Like the flick of a lightbulb, Shiyui’s usual obnoxious personality came gushing back to the surface as she faced her task with a renewed sense of conviction.

“Okay!” she cheered before cracking her knuckles and needlessly stretching. “Let’s pop this baby open shall we!”

Clawing away at her keyboard she tried seemingly endlessly to find a breakthrough.

“Can you get it?” Mirai eagerly asked. “This system is oddly complex,” Shiyui reluctantly admitted. Diving further into her computer, she let the sequence of code guide her fingertips. Her eyes jutting back and forth as she consumed mountains of information, deciphered it, and boiled it down into a moment defining string of text.

“I’m in!”

The two of them immediately looked at the tablet’s interface which had the words, INITIATING SEQUENCE scrawled across it,

“But I haven’t activated anything yet…”

Authorization code: CAS9

Mirai, visibly confused, carefully looked towards the tablet. Biometric Confirmation Required was written across its screen. As her eyes met the front of the device, a checkmark appeared and suddenly the display changed.

Citizen ID 3055. Access confirmation complete.

“Access confirmation?” Shiyui muttered, struggling to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, Mirai stared at the device with a feeling of uncertainty coming over her.

Stupefied, Shiyui then needlessly cried, “I think my brain is being juiced…”

As the two of them briefly glanced at one another, the tablet screen began to glow a bright white. Grabbing their attention as a shape slowly began forming. As the glow of the light dissipated, a round floating orblike shape appeared on screen, coating itself in a sky-blue hue, and drawing a smiley face onto its surface.

“Welcome to the TERMINAL. It is a pleasure to see you.”

Staring at the image before them, they both struggled to find words to speak.

Shiyui yanked Mirai by the arm and pulled her to the side, facing away from the device. “Inagi was built by aliens!” she theorized with her eyes nearly falling out of her head. Mirai peeked back over at the screen, her eyes squinting as a thought popped into her head. Motioning to step away, Mirai was stopped again as Shiyui latched back onto her sleeve. “And what the freak is CAS9?!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve never heard of anything like it…”

“So, who cares!?”

Passing Shiyui nothing more than a dead stare, Mirai approached the orb like animation which met her with the equivalent of a warm smile. She then held the tablet with a suspicious glare.

“Is this your first time being activated?”

“I was first previously activated 12 hours, 32 minutes, and 8 seconds ago.”

As the orb spoke, it elegantly floated around the screen with a water like buoyancy to its motion. Its animated visage was uncanny and its voice, although stiff and direct, very soft-toned.

“Do you have any data from your previous activation?”

“I have 1 video file within the TERMINAL storage system.”

“Show it to me!”

Mirai stood silently as she glued her eyes to a video playback. A frightened Yukue appeared on camera. Fear lacing her eyes. “Is she standing in her office?” Mirai asked out loud as she languidly passed a glance towards Yukue’s study some distance away before briefly eying her surroundings.

Mirai then watched her sister ever so closely, trying to work out every detail she could. The haste in her movement as she seemingly navigated through her phone, the exhaustion beneath her eyes, the unusual injury on the left side of her face.

Then, Yukue abruptly stopped what she was doing as she peered directly into the camera, taking a single breath before finally moving her mouth to speak.

“It’s not her, It’s–”

Her words suddenly cut short and her focus now attached somewhere off camera, astonishment trickled its way over her countenance. Something had drawn Yukue’s attention away, leaving Mirai yet again itching for answers. But as Yukue panned her eyes back towards the camera, the video playback ceased, and with it, Mirai’s hope for a conclusion.

Mirai hesitantly leaned in towards the video before holding herself steady in place. Looking through the eyes of her sister frozen on screen.

A blank stare, an empty voice, and a heavy heart.