35°41'46.404"N, 139°45'24.105"E

Once Kenichiro had stumbled his way home, the first rays of morning peering through his window, he appraised his haul. He had apparently purchased a mobile gaming console and several games for it, already an excess he couldn’t afford. He had won several figurines from crane arcades, mostly of shows he’d grown up on, and had a huge pile of junk food. He was relieved somewhat: this stuff would last awhile so he could just not buy anymore food this month. He was living paycheck to paycheck before, so there was no way he could afford his tiny apartment now. He had several credit cards in his name; he was paying them off, but he had a line of credit that he could use to pay for a while. He might be able to get a loan from a bank, but these are all temporary solutions. He needed to find another job.

That was easier said than done; the economy was struggling, and it had never been great. He began scouring online, seeing if he could find any openings for similar positions to his previous job. He didn’t expect a good recommendation from his old job, and many companies were suspicious of those who were transitioning from another company. He began scouring the internet, seeing if there were open positions for accountants. The short answer was no, but the long answer was a long list of companies with job boards, but the links didn’t work, or automated emails with euphemistic messages like “We have decided to move forward with other candidates,” or asked for a level of experience that exceeded even his five years. Those few that seemed accessible, he did apply for anyway, but felt no hope of a response. Settling into his chair, he did what every unemployed person his age does: Doom-scroll. He checked on the profiles of high-school friends he hadn’t talked to in years, random trends, and news. An article caught his attention; the homeless population of Tokyo was increasing, at an all-time high this year. He thought about the girl who seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving behind only a few strands of hair. Against his better judgment, he still had them, a stranger's hair resting on his desk. He felt like a weirdo, but somehow, if he lost this strange artifact, he felt that she would cease to exist, and his inexplicable experience would become another testament to his degenerating sanity.

The numbers had only grown clearer and more prolific as the day progressed. He attributed it to insomnia: he had already worked all night the day before into yesterday morning, and then started the morning shift. He might have been awake for 4 days straight, so hallucinations were no surprise. Numerals covered everything out of his window and everything in his house, shifting digits 1 through 9 creeping over everything in sight like pests, reminding him of the bugs that crept out of the screen this morning.

He felt the little food left in his stomach start coming back up, forcing him to retreat from his computer. Drawn like a moth to the flame, the strings of numbers flowing through his apartment out of the door drew him out. He grabbed a coat but didn’t bother to change his clothes: he still had the clothes he was fired in, the mark of his failure. He was overwhelmed immediately upon exiting his apartment, the surface of the great metallic monoliths alike to massive spreadsheet covering the whole city. He had left his job, but apparently, his job hadn’t left him. The doors to his neighbors' were almost painful to look at, the bright iridescent string of digits illuminating the entrances. A particular string of digits caught his eye in front of the door of his neighbor, Fujiwata. 19880814. He almost dismissed it as a meaningless hallucination had Kenichiro not remembered a rare conversation he had with Fujiwata.

He never had time to chat; his time was spent working, drinking, and sleeping, but he had caught Fujiwata smoking on the balcony overlooking the street. The older man turned to look at Kenichiro, his salt-and-pepper hair making him look older than he was. The exchange was brief, but Fujiwata mentioned that today was his 39th birthday, and he was celebrating by smoking an expensive foreign cigar. On no other day would Kenichiro remember what was at best a polite courtesy, but today, his judgment dulled to a nub, he assigned an insane logic to this number. That was the day Fujiwata was born.

In retrospect, standing in front of a practical stranger’s door staring with a glazed look in his eye would arouse suspicion, as Fujiwata stepped out from Kenny’s memories into the present day, standing in front of him in a wife-beater and slacks. It was still quite early in the morning, so it seems Fujiwata hadn’t left for work or even finished dressing himself. “Is there something I can help you with, Mori-san” The statement intoned with no intent wasn’t quite a question or statement. Kenny couldn’t quite remember the last time someone called him by his last name, having dwelt at the bottom of the social totem-pole so long that most people referred to him as “Kenny” regardless. It was almost a relief to have the polite detachment of the stranger.

“Oh, apologies, Fujiwata-san.” Kenny gave a soft bow to the older man. “I was just taking a walk.”

“And standing at my door.”

“Yes, that too.” The silence was deafening as the two stood for a spell, looking at one another. He casually added, “I was fired yesterday.” He let it slip almost by accident, lacking the mental fortitude to play social politics. His body reacted even though his mind was lagging behind, feeling his breath catch in his throat.

“Oh,” The news didn’t seem to faze him. “I see.” His lips were pursed, seeming like he didn’t really know what to say either. It was clear that no one here wanted this conversation to go on.

“I’m going to take a walk.”

“Ok, do that.” Fujiwata closed the door, the numbers smacking Kenichiro right in the face. A new 4-digit number is generated in the middle of the visual noise: 2356. Unsure what to make of this new code, he walks off and down the stairs to the street below.

Soon, he began to notice patterns everywhere: boots had the number of steps stamped on their sides, increasing each time they landed on the ground. A stretch of road had a number stamped on it, which he believed corresponded to the Kilometer dimensions of the street. People’s height and weight were written on their spine and across their waist, and he tore away his eyes to avoid gleaming any unsavory details. He felt like a voyeur, intruding into people’s lives without even meaning to. Was he the only one who could see this? He desperately wanted to be crazy, to simply be projecting some sense to the hallucinations haunting his waking nightmare. He was halfway convincing himself: the birthday could have been pulled from his unconscious mind, the numbers on the shoe arbitrary before he decided they corresponded with foot-steps, afterwards increasing because he believed they should. This all started to paint a disturbing but sensible picture: he had well and truly lost his mind, and every impossible thing he had seen so far was a symptom of that. This gave him no solution, of course: he didn’t have money for rent, let alone a therapist, and even if he did, who knows if they would have anything to help him.

Yet this distressing but solid footing started to crumble as he felt the black hair in his hand, clutched in his pocket. The one thing that couldn’t be explained, the impossible of impossibles. If that girl had been a hallucination just like the numbers and the bugs, why is there very real, solid human hair in his hand? And why can’t I get rid of it! What will I do if I see her again? Give it back?! Yet in his pocket the hair remained, anchoring him somewhere between sanity and madness. Then he noticed the dumpster

How oblivious he felt, an entire world of information invisible to him to this point. The dumpster had a set of numbers on it, their meaning totally obscure on their own. Succumbing to his delusions, he watches the receptacle, waiting to see the numbers shift in front of him. People give him sideways glances, wary, disgusted looks at this vagrant staring at nothing. A gentle-looking older woman walked over and handed him 1000 yen. “Please, get something to eat, you don’t have to go through the garbage.”

Realizing how it looked, Kenny handed back the money. “No, it’s okay, I’m not homeless,” she looked a bit confused, and tried to insist that he take the money. Kenny politely refused again, and the woman kind of nervously laughed, then walked away. A number ticked up, confirming this was the number of people who had walked by, whether today or ever, he couldn’t discern yet. If I stare at the numbers long enough, Kenny thought, maybe the mysteries of the universe will unravel themselves… or my mind.

Standing at the mouth of madness, he saw what he waited for. A homeless man opened the lid and reached his filthy paw into the refuse, focusing on the task like it were his magnum opus. His eyes were half lidded, brow furrowed in concentration. After appraising the garbage, he found a piece that was to his satisfaction and stuffed it into his mouth. Overcoming the visceral disgust, Kenichiro tried to pay attention to which number increased when he withdrew the trash.

When a 10-digit number is what increased, he couldn’t believe his eyes. At most, there are 4000 homeless people in Tokyo, and surely they wouldn’t be scrounging around in the trash close to millions of times. Was this every time someone took food out of the garbage truck since it was put here, Kenichiro wondered. He examined the dumpster, trying to find a date as he had seen on Fuji-wata’s door. After scanning the surface, not rehabilitating his image at all, he noticed that it had been installed just a few weeks ago. No way, Kenichiro balks. How could it have been visited so many times in the last several weeks? Suddenly, he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, goose-flesh raising on his arms. Though no one is ever truly alone in a big city like this, he felt suffocated, like he was crammed into the metro in an early morning rush. The image of that girl dissipating right in front of him. How did she do that? How is that even possible? Kenny looked at every crack and crevice in the alleyway he’d found himself in: were there more people hiding, disappearing into God knows where, teleporting? He felt his sense of self breaking in two: one half of him had fully bought into the numbers as a real supernatural phenomenon that only he could see; the other trapped inside this madman's body, only able to watch as he is controlled by this conspiracy theory, all his rationalizations buzzing uselessly in his skull while he lurches forward, driven by his own unraveling sense of reality.

He barged into a local department store, tearing through like a man on a mission. He scoured the shelves, racing up the floors, and pushed past people without a care. Dirty looks, Evil Eyes, cries of surprise and fear followed in his wake as he looked furiously for what he needed. All other paltry concerns like common decency, personal space, and whatever remained of his reputation were discarded to find a magnifying glass. Sprinting through the aisles, he eventually found it in the school supply section. He quickly purchased it and made his way back home, slamming the door behind him and moving to his desk.

Hunched over the desk, he pulled out the girl's hair, the artifacts holding his universe together. Taking the magnifying glass, he examined the threads carefully and saw exactly what he thought he would: small numbers written on the surface of the follicles, confirming to him once again that his hallucinations had a sick reality to him. If he thought about it too much, it made perfect sense: the universe is math, the laws and rules that dictate how everything works are complicated equations. So if he can see the numbers, the equations that create this world around him, then it would endow him with an uncanny insight into this hidden world. He shook his head, trying not to indulge in this fantasy more than he had to. He knew he was captured by a certain compulsion, but he could at least preserve part of his sanity by acknowledging what he was doing was utterly insane… right?

The numbers on her hair were hard to discern, logical considering how thin a human hair is. What would the numbers even represent? As far as he knows, it could be something like ‘This is hair number 76,543 of 100,000’, which would be utterly useless to him. What he wanted to know, frankly, was where she was right now. This meant he needed to find a changing number, moving up and down with her position in space. There were a few of those on several strands, but as far as he knew, it could be her number of heartbeats or the minutes she had been alive. What he needed, Kenichiro decided, was a pair of numbers that went up and down, corresponding to latitude and longitude. If he could find those in her hair, then he could track her location and find her. What if I got the wrong hair? The thought hit him like a stray bullet; all this effort would be wasted if he had ended up grabbing the wrong strands of hair. That he was trying to divine information from a random homeless woman’s hair had already escaped him; he was already too far gone. He desperately looked for a latitude and longitude, trying to find the needle in the haystack.

As he began to despair, unable to find the two numbers he was looking for, he remembered Fujiwata’s birthday. It was one long string of numbers, no spaces, no distinguishing between the month, day, and year. Same with the date on the dumpster. Kenichiro looked up the coordinates of Tokyo, seeing that it was roughly 35° latitude and 139° longitude. Taking that, he started looking for a long string of numbers that included 35 and 139 in it, thinking that this must be her latitude and longitude. He returned to the hair, looking high and low for these numbers written out. Second, minutes, hours, he couldn’t really tell how long it was taking him, any sense of time and schedule gone with no career to regiment his life. He didn’t think he would ever find it, but in all the noise, he saw this number:

3569622338677551513975669602775355.