01010: His grim Past

Ando-sensei looked at me and started smiling widely. “Kanaoka! You actually made it!”

I nodded. “Yeah, I made it.”

“You can’t believe how glad I was, seeing your name on the entrance list. I totally forgot to tell you about the arcades back in the day. I am so sorry!” He bowed.

“Why didn’t you try to reach me through the school?”

“It was part of the deal I had to make with Ineigaikan: To cut off all connections with my past.”

I backed away a bit. “What deal?”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Arano-senpai came between us. “You want to tell me that you know each other?”

I nodded. “Ando-sensei was my informatics teacher at junior high.”

“You’ve been HIS student?” she asked further.

I shot her a confused look and remembered back at the things Lynx told me about his programs that have been cracked by some intelligence agencies. What was it actually about all this? Just as I inhaled to ask, he laid his hand onto my shoulder. “Yes, and I am quite proud of what he achieved.”

Arano-senpai’s gaze wandered to me in what I identified as shock. Before anyone could intercept again, I turned to him and uttered: “Why is everyone acting like you are some kind of pop star?”

He looked at me for a moment and breathed through. “I guess you have the right to know …” His gaze wandered to the table. “Fujinami?”

Within a split-second Fujinami-kun stood straight up and made a saluting gesture. “Yes!”

“Would you please fix the electricity and clean up this mess? I’ll bring our newest addition to his room and … explain a few things.” He looked back at me, tilting his head to follow him. “You should know that I am also your dorm father and club adviser for those folks.”

Fujinami-kun and the others started moving their stuff. Ando-sensei walked towards the entrance.

I took my suitcase to follow him but stopped in the motion to look at Arano-senpai. With a kind of tensed expression, she fidgeted around with her hands.

“Uh …,” I began, “originally Arano-senpai wanted to show me the island a bit. We only planned to bring my baggage to the room and then be off again.”

“Oh …!” Ando-sensei’s gaze shot back and forth between us as he stopped in the doorway. The questions about him were really burning inside me, but I did not want to be impolite towards Arano-senpai. She blinked at me with a speechless expression. Ando-sensei nodded. “I don’t want to crash your plans. We can do this la-“

“No!” Arano-senpai made a step towards us and reached out with one hand. “I mean … I can wait. I’ll go to my room and … when you are ready, you can … come and pick me up.”

I turned back at her. “You live in this dorm as well?”

She nodded. “But I’m not in the White Hood Club. My club is the student council.”

“You may do that, but if you want, you are invited as well.” Ando-sensei gave her a warm smile. “I won’t reveal any dark secrets, so no worries.”

Her cheeks flushed. She looked down and made a small step to my side. “Thank you,” she said in a quiet voice that almost made her seem cute.

The three of us trotted to the upper floor and down the left corridor. Through the window at the end, I could see the leaves of a tree that scattered green diffuse light across the glossy floors. The corridor itself was very dim, averted from the sun as it was.

“Do any other people live here?” I asked.

“Apart from the people you already met only your dorm mother. Mixed dorms have both a male and female teacher,” Ando-sensei explained as he looked to me. “But she is not here, currently. She is busy with the transfer of all new students to the island. Maybe you’ve already seen her on the ship. She looks rather young – got already confused as a third year a few times. She has black hair with blue colored strands.”

“Are you talking about MacKenzie-sensei?” I asked.

“Yeah, exactly! Trisha MacKenzie! Even though she seems a bit cold at first, she is the kindest woman I’ve ever met and a very good friend of mine.”

“You’ll really like her!” Arano-senpai added with a smile. “She is at least as awesome as Ando-sensei.”

He laughed dryly. “But we don’t want to badmouth about other teachers, but rather about my ‘dark hidden secret’!” he joked and chuckled lightly as he looked towards us. “To be completely honest, I never understood all of it myself. I never felt like my programs were anything that special. I’ve always been just a guy that used his scarce free time to create programs from his knowledge.”

“You have to know that he is being extremely humble there,” Arano-senpai explained. As both of us looked at her, she went on: “Ando-sensei developed like … a few of the most advanced and most secure pieces of software in the history of humanity. Literally every somehow skilled hacker on this planet knows him and what he is doing. Well … except you I guess.”

He sighed. “Arano-san … please don’t …”

“… But it’s true!”

We reached the end of the corridor. Through the big window I could see the green trees swaying in the wind. Probably to brush the topic off, Ando-sensei ignored Arano-senpai’s praise and turned towards the right door. “We still have other rooms, but Fujinami somehow insisted that we assign this room to you.” I already had a grim premonition on why Fujinami-kun chose this exact one and looked at the name plate at the door right opposite from mine: Rukami Arano, I could read there. She evaded my view with a wry expression when I looked at her. This guy was really incorrigible.

“This is the sunny side with a nice view at the bay. However, in this room the sight is a bit obscured by trees and you need to lean out the window to see it,” Ando-sensei explained. He took out his phone and held it over the digital doorknob. The lock whirred and he pushed down the door handle, opening the door to let me go in first.

I took a few steps inside. At the left side was a small bathroom with a shower. Then I came into the main room. A single bed leaned against the wall. There was a big desk, a closet, a couch, a TV, a tiny kitchen unit with a refrigerator and sink. Behind all that I could see a big window and a glass door that probably led to a balcony. Through the closed venetian blinds on the outside, light only fell through shallow slits into the room. The swaying trees right in front of the window made the light streaks dance on the floor and illuminated the room diffusely. I made a few steps further in, taking in the atmosphere. It was clean an even more modern that I expected.

“If you prefer another room, we can still switch. They all look the same, while some are being mirrored. Also … my room is right next to yours so better stay quiet when you have a lady visitor late at night.” Ando-sensei winked.

I had to suppress a grin when I noticed how Arano-san’s face slowly flushed at that idea. “No … I think this room is perfect! It’s really cozy,” I said.

It did not really matter to me where my room exactly was. This one was a bit closed off and would probably not heat up too much when the summer sun burned the brightest. I placed my suitcase next to the kitchen and offered my two guests a seat at the couch, while I took one of the kitchen chairs and placed it in front of them.

“Yamata no Orochi …,” I asked, “is it one of those programs you talked about as well?”

He nodded. “It was the second or third thing I made. Easy to crack in theory, but much harder in practice. However, it was never as widespread as the next software, called Enenra. Last time I checked we were at round about 800,000,000 downloads. It’s a special access manager for servers and still holds up until today. I could live quite well from the donations of my users. But … problem was, it was too secure.”

I chuckled lightly. “How is that a problem. Isn’t that great?”

“I received emails and calls from several shady people. They all offered me money, up to ten million to build a backdoor into Enenra. So that they could easily access all servers operating it.”

“Ten million … Yen?” I assured myself.

“No … uh, US-Dollars.”

I had to swallow that was a whole lot of money. Without an overly excessive lifestyle you would have provided for life with that much. “But you declined?”

“Of course, I asked for twenty million,” he said.

I stared at him. “Did they … agree?” I asked.

“That was obviously a joke.” Arano-senpai crossed her legs and leaned back into the couch. “Ando-sensei would never let himself be bought.”

He sighed deeply. “But sometimes I wished I had. After they didn’t come further with that strategy, they tried attacking my servers and when they even failed there, they broke into my apartment and rummaged through everything, took my computer. Of course, they were unable to find a usable hint to my servers, and … after the first failed kidnapping attempt, I went underground.”

Kidnapping attempt? He said all that so casually. “You went underground? But didn’t you receive police protection?”

He nodded. “That probably wouldn’t have been enough. I really had an insane amount of luck. When three masked guys tried pulling me into a Van, I was with a very good friend of mine. I didn’t know it at that time, but later found out that she was a special agent from the MI5 with years of training in several martial arts. She managed to knock one of them out and instantly the others fled.” With a dry laugh Ando-sensei shook off his uncomfortableness. “But she assured me that this wouldn’t be it and that I was in inherent danger. Luckily it was when I had already completed my studies. I cut all contacts to the people I held dear, afraid that they could be used to pressure me, and I moved far away from Kyoto to Kisarazu in Chiba prefecture, where I started teaching. And where I got to know a red-haired boy with a big affinity for all the things I loved.”

I smiled in response.

“It has never been meant as a longer solution. I knew Ineigaikan and their application progress for teachers is even more complicated and time-consuming then for you students,” he explained. “I grew as paranoid as I could and as it seemed, it paid off. The latest physical attack was at the last school day when you were with me. But … if we are being honest, it only turned physical because of you.”

“What does that mean, ‘because of him’?” Arano-senpai asked.

Ando-sensei grinned. “I traced the attack source back and you couldn’t believe how fast he was running when I located it in the school’s cafeteria.”

Arano-senpai’s eyes grew wide in horror. “Are you like completely stupid?”

“Yeah, I admit: It wasn’t the best idea,” I explained and scratched the back of my head.

“What if they had been armed or hurt you or … what else?” In her eyes I noticed a kind of care … or scolding, I wasn’t quite sure about that. Her eyes had this vibrant, red color with light hints of a magenta. A beautiful shade and almost captivating if it weren’t for …

“Guys …” I began, “Do you maybe happen to know ArcticLynx?”

Silence for a moment. Ando-sensei and Arano-senpai exchanged a confused look.

“ArcticLynx became something of an urban myth at this school.” Arano-senpai explained. “He came into the school as a junior last year and got into the top ten of the student ranking in the first term. In the second and now in the last term he even took the first place. Nobody managed to get into his systems, and he hadn’t lost a single Kibansentou. There are some really wild theories. A few people even suspect that the person itself does not really exist and that it is an AI, Ando-sensei developed, since Lynx appeared in the year he came to the school.”

Both of us shot him a gaze and he just threw his arms up defensively. “I have nothing to do with this guy, really.”

So, it was true, that Lynx was a student at this school – as my senpai. I felt a joy in my chest. But all of this assumed that she told me the truth back in the day. Maybe she just lied to me and used a name that had first come to her mind. When Lynx was some kind of legend at this school, it was definitely a probability. But … no!

The attack on Ando-sensei’s laptop happened shortly before the end of the school year and only after that a student with the same handle appeared at the school. However, she attacked Ando-sensei’s laptop. So, she was probably a part of the shady organization that was after him. But it didn’t make sense. She had to be 14 or maybe 15 years at that point. At such a young age it would be impossible … or would it really, if she actually was skilled enough to reach the top of the school ranking in such a short amount of time?

My head was spinning with questions. The only way to answer them would be to find her and ask her myself. I just had to keep my eyes open and then would eventually find her.