The Chicken, The Egg and a Lot of Coffee

They limped toward the station’s arched entrance, Kurama leaning on Rinako’s shoulder, a crutch under his other arm. He stumbled occasionally, laughing self-consciously when he did. As they neared the entrance they heard voices. Chief Goda and Hashimoto were talking to one of the tall Inspectors.

‘Great.’ Said Kurama.

Hashimoto caught sight of him and looked away as though he hadn’t seen him.

‘—and errr, I expect you’ll want my report for the commissioner—‘

The Inspector’s tall helmet rotated as Goda rambled on. Up close, the armour was far more imposing, old and dirty, covered in a patina of scars and gouges.

Kurama leaned away from them, trying to keep out of sight. Goda’s monologue was interrupted by a hollow tinny voice, stripped of its human components by the old speaker unit from which it sounded. ‘I will speak to Prosper Kurama.’

Kurama stopped. He hopped in a half circle to face the approaching Inspector, who stopped in front of them, turned to look at Rinako for a moment, then back to Kurama. Its breathing echoed within the bucket like helmet. Two narrow slits stared at them, then looked down at Kurama’s injured hand. ‘You were an Inspector?’

Kurama looked down. ‘It was a long time ago.’

The inspector looked at him for several moments. RInako rolled her eyes, adjusted and jumped a little to lift his arm higher up on her shoulder.

‘Why are you no longer?’ The voice rasped.

This time there was a long silence. ‘Whatever it was made me join up...’ Kurama paused. ‘That wasn’t the case anymore.’

The inscrutable slits in the helmet seemed to be looking deep into his eyes, as though excavating something within them. It made a long rumbling noise, which Rinako took to be the closest approximation of assent it could muster.

‘You were really one of them?’ She said, as they hobbled up the stairs to the exit. ‘Did you wear the helmet, and the robes?’

‘Yeahhh… there’s a whole creed. They’ve got a song and everything.’

She looked back over her shoulder, as she helped him up the stairs. Goda and Hashimoto were standing awkwardly, annoyed expressions on their faces.

The Inspector was nowhere to be seen.

***

Kurama’s apartment was a tip. The holo was already on when they came in, bathing the lounge in flickering blue light. He slung his crutch and keys on the couch, made a pot of coffee then led her to a room at the back.

‘Draaaak—‘ she said as they went in, her head turning all about the room. Every surface, the walls, floor and ceiling, was covered in holo-stills, videos and articles. There were different coloured glowing lines joining them. It looked like a giant room sized metro map. There was a table in the middle, with a slightly more organised looking set of holos.

She patrolled the room, looking around like a tourist in a cathedral. ‘You did all this?’

Kurama scratched his head, coffee in hand. ‘Yeah… I guess it looks kind of nuts, huh?’ He looked around the place.

Rinako looked down at the table, her hand brushing the images laid on it. After a few moments she looked up. ‘It’s amazing.’

Kurama looked up at her in surprise.

They sat at the table for a long time, drinking coffee while Rinako studied the images and articles on its surface.

‘At first, I didn’t notice anything.’ Said Kurama. ‘But then there were a few cases, all bunched together that seemed different somehow.’

He leant across the table, gesturing with his hands. ‘See, truly random sequences of events have little pieces of order thrown in. That’s what makes them random. Like pieces of a melody, phrases here and there that seemed to lead somewhere then disappear. What makes a pattern isn’t the pieces themselves but how they’re arranged, how they relate to each other. So you see—‘ he pointed to a map on the table, covered in tiny bright dots.

‘Yeah.’ She whispered absently, tilting her head.

‘When there’s an artificial disorder, there are none of these pieces. Ok, you might get the odd one, but overall the normal distribution of these flashes of order isn’t there. There’s a deliberateness to the chaos.’

She looked up. ‘A coordination.’

‘Chizuru and I analysed the pattern.’

‘Chizuru’s in on this?’

‘Chizuru thinks I’m seeing faces in data clouds.’ He stopped. ‘But yeah, she helped.’ He pointed back at the table.

‘Anyway, I had Chizuru run it through—-you saw the topology displays?’

Rinako thought back to the huge holoscreens in Chizuru’s basement room. ‘Yeah, I didn’t really understand it though..’

‘The topological grids show the state of the light-field everywhere. Everyone is part of it, like peaks in a mountain range. But when something’s light-level reaches a certain magnitude.. it’s like a volcano, those peaks break open and become unstable. They can predict where geists are most likely to appear, where tensions are most concentrated. It’s not foolproof but it works ok.’

‘Like weather forecasting.’

‘Yeah and how often do they get that right? Even with all this technology, it’s hard to predict.’ He set down his coffee. ‘If you knew the weight, material and velocity of every vehicle in a collision you could predict which passengers would be in most danger. But it’s not enough. To know for sure, you have to know all the variables, air pressure, wind speed, whether the driver was in a good mood that morning… everything is predictable if you have all the information but information is infinite. Knowledge is the limiting factor. The only complete data store of an event is the event itself.’

Rinako’s mind was reeling.

‘So… I had Chizuru send me the geist call-outs that fitted the pattern.’ He tapped the map.

‘See, all of these events are tagged with times and geographical coordinates. I ran it through the system and—‘ he pulled up a holo from the table. ‘Filtered the call-outs where there was a fatality almost immediately after the Geist’s appearance on the topology. Geist related fatalities are random and happen as a Geist passes through an area. These killings occurred at the same location the Geist appeared.’

‘We ran the data, looking for any sort of similar template. There was a pattern that matched. Intraderma. The sales data for their internal cosmetics.’

Rinako looked from the holo to Kurama’s face, blinking.

‘Supply and demand.’ He put down the holo. ‘It was a harvesting operation. They’re reusing parts from dead people. Only some of the people didn’t start out so dead.’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘But the woman in Chinatown was different.’

Rinako stared at him.

‘Sometimes the topological anomalies aren’t Geists. There are various possibilities, power surges, data storms… but one of these is when a person’s light-level exceeds their own. You remember what Itari said about Prosper’s Law? Before the regulations we used to monitor for criminal light use. Things like the Inspectors and—you saw what I did. Imagine that in general use. When a person breaks their light-limit the system cannot perceive any difference between them and a Geist.’

Rinako looked shocked. ‘But you—‘

‘Yeah. Takeru gives me the meds and I have take a photon-bath once in a while. Keeps it in check. Mostly.’

‘Anyway. There are various things people can do to keep below the limit. One of them is a full sens-sim transplant.’

‘The woman in Chinatown…’ said Rinako. ‘She was one of the killings that happened where the Geist appeared…’

Kurama nodded. ‘She was one of Chizuru’s patterns.’

Rinako thought of the alleys through which they had chased the Geist.

Kurama looked exhausted. ‘I just dont know why.’

***

After a new pot of coffee was boiled, they sat down in the front room. The v-ball flickered in the background. Apparently, he found it helped him to think.

‘So the data-chip you got from Kingfisher. I had Chizuru decrypt it. The woman had gone to him for those ocular prostheses, the ones we found on the body. Her file listed her as complaining of hallucinations, recurrent nightmares - guess she thought the eyes would fix it.. I doubt the doctor was particular forthcoming about the chances of that.’

‘Must have been pretty bad nightmares to end up there.’ Said Rinako. She’d had a few of her own since.

‘There was a footnote in her file. The sens-sim upgrade was nothing to do with them. They’d found it during the operation. Official Intraderma upgrade.’

Rinako thought of their visit to VisAge. ‘But why did you want to speak to Kurogari?’

‘Because I knew they were connected but I didn’t know how high up it went… or if it was just Intraderma.’

She thought about this. ‘You told him Intraderma had come up in multiple cases…‘

‘Yeah, that was a lie. I wanted to see how he’d react.’

He looked at her. ‘I was running a hemispheric scanner the whole time—almost everything Kurogari said was coming from his prefrontal cortex. He was lying.’

Rinako let this sink in.

‘One thing was strange…’ Kurama sipped his coffee.

She looked at him.

‘Just that everything else scanned correctly. It picked up my lie about Intraderma. But when you started on him about Toyama Prefecture and a coverup and everything… ‘ he looked at her. ‘It wasn’t coming from your memory.’

Rinako frowned. She was more puzzled than anything. She knew he wasn’t accusing her. In the end, she could only shake her head.

After some time, Rinako spoke. ‘There’s one thing I dont understand. I get how you traced this pattern with Chizuru but you said before that something seemed wrong… how did you know?’

‘Just a feeling.’ He said, scratching at his messy hair. ‘Something felt.. off.’

She looked at him for a long while.

‘Alright. Now you know as much as me. And we’re still nowhere.’

Rinako slumped back in the sofa. ‘If only we knew what her nightmares were…’

Kurama’s eyes widened suddenly, and he almost choked on his coffee. ’You’re a genius!’

‘I am?’

He was drying his shirt with his hands. ‘I’ve been trying to catch a chicken, when I should have been frying an egg.’