6_Epilogue_ The Night It Ended

EPILOGUE The Night It EndedWelcome_to_Tomorrow. 0 (Sep.01_AM00:00 timeover) “Surgery complete. Right, that was some good work, everyone.” Kikyou Yoshikawa opened her eyes at the voice. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t know where she was. She seemed to have been sleeping somewhere. She could only see a blue tiled floor and walls. The ceiling was completely white, and there were glass windows lined up on the walls close to the ceiling. It was like a gallery. She heard a metallic click sound from outside her vision. There was a guillotine-esque synthetic fiber curtain hanging near her neck, so she couldn’t see anything going on farther down. The only part of her she could move was her head. The rest wasn’t moving. She couldn’t even feel any of it. Then, someone peered into her face. It was a middle-aged man, his hair wrapped in a green hat, his mouth covered by a large, similarly colored mask. His face looked like a frog’s, and he was looking down at her like she was an old friend sleeping in the grass. Yoshikawa finally realized where she was and immediately gave a tsk. “Such bad taste. Heart surgery with local anesthesia?” “Best to lighten the burden as much as possible, no?” Local anesthesia was something one used on simple surgeries, like removing an appendix. The patient was conscious during the surgery, and some patients even got to see the process happening with a hand mirror. But one wouldn’t use local anesthesia for something as huge as heart surgery. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not it had merits. A person just didn’t do it. It would be like a street performance. The doctor may as well have been holding a scalpel between his toes. And yet this doctor had done it and the surgery had succeeded. She couldn’t imagine why. Maybe they’d come out with a new method of surgery. He was the Heaven Canceler. He prevailed over any injury or disease. He would do whatever it took, making use of new technologies and theories not even approved for use by the Academy City General Board, much less by the medical world outside the city. He had only one belief: never to abandon a patient. He walked his own path with only that in his heart. His skills were said to be able to bend even God’s will and that he had once triumphed over even aging and life span by developing a special life-support device using untested theories. Nobody understood what he thought at that point, but she’d never heard of him continuing to do any life-span research after that. She only knew that there existed a single test model, safely installed in a certain windowless building. “…So this means that I survived, then.” “Of course you did. Who do you think performed your operation?” he said in an easygoing way, never once showing any stress to his patients. “Though you were in a real bad state. Even I can’t heal a dead person, after all. Perhaps you should thank that boy for it.” “That boy…Wait, what happened to him? But wait…I was shot straight through the heart with a military-grade handgun at point-blank range, wasn’t I?” “To be precise, it didn’t go through your heart, but instead ruptured the coronary artery coming out of it. Well, either way, you probably would have died on the spot if left alone.” Her coronary artery—it was the largest artery in the body, connected to the heart. Its rupture meant certain death, of course. It was no different from severing the carotid artery with a knife. “But then, that…” “Hm? Well, that’s probably because of the boy’s ability to control blood flow. He was almost like an invisible hose—he passed the blood from your torn artery from one opening to the other, without letting a single drop go. Thanks to him, we could transport you here without you dying, and after I connected a hastily built bypass, we headed for the surgical room. You really should thank that boy. He was using his power all the way until you got to the surgical room, even though he was unconscious, you see.” “…” Yoshikawa listened, baffled. “Three hours have passed since we brought you here, and it sure isn’t smooth sailing over there, either. He’s having to endure the removal of skull fragments from where his frontal lobe was pierced. I’m about to go over there to cheer them on—is there anything you want to tell him?” “…You aren’t using local anesthesia on him, too, I presume,” she reflexively asked, though she knew the answer was of course not. “Will he be okay?” “Hm? Well, his frontal lobe is injured, after all. It’ll effect his speech and mathematical abilities, see?” “His mathematical abilities…” For Accelerator, that could be lethal. In order to alter vectors, he needed to calculate the vector before changing it and the vector afterward. His unconscious reflection was no more than him solving the simplest equations without thinking about them. He might not be able to use his power anymore—not even his “simple” reflection. “Well, I don’t think there will be any problem, hm?” The doctor must have figured out what she was thinking from her expression. “It’s my creed to do something about the impossible, see? I will restore his speech function and mathematical abilities.” His last sentence hadn’t ended with the upward-rising rhetorical question that time. Yoshikawa was about to catch her breath, but the doctor turned and said in a breezy voice, “Of course, I’ll need his own understanding and consent. You seem to have made something quite troublesome as well, so I’m going to use that. Do you think ten thousand brain links would be enough to compensate for a single person’s language and mathematical functions?” Ten thousand. The Sisters. Last Order. “! R-right! What about her?!” “Oh, the girl in the glass vessel? There’s no need to worry about her. Fortunately, I’ve come into the care of a similar child. I believe her serial number was 10032—Little Misaka, was it?” “Wait…wait a minute. You have…incubators here?” “I will procure anything my patients need, see? And I’ve heard all about this. It seems there’s a parallel arithmetic network that created the ten thousand clones, too. I’m going to use that in order to restore the lost parts of the boy’s brain. What? I’m not returning lost memories, I’m only substituting for his lost functions. It’s not that difficult a thing to do, see?” declared the doctor in an easygoing voice, though for a moment, a cloud came over his expression. Lost memories. It was said that even this doctor could not return the memories of a certain hospitalized high school student back at the end of July. That was probably the first defeat he’d ever tasted. “But that network can only be made up of people who have the same brain-wave wavelengths. Accelerator’s are different, so if he forces himself to log in, the conflicting wavelengths will fry his brain.” “Then we just need to come up with a converter that can match the two wavelengths. Design-wise, perhaps it would be a choker with electrodes attached to the inside?” He said it so simply, but the amount of skill and budget needed for such a venture would be staggering. He probably wouldn’t hesitate even when he found out, though. And he wouldn’t ask for the development funds from anyone else. That’s the kind of person he was. “Well, then, off I go for real this time. What are you going to do?” “What am I…?” “You seem to be suffering with extreme anxiety, but it looks like the higher-ups have been informed of this incident, see? The lab has been dissolved, and the experiment is now entirely stopped, not just frozen. In other words, you’ve been laid off. It wasn’t a private establishment, so you won’t have to shoulder any monetary debt, and the whole gun thing can probably be explained away as pure self-defense. But it is a rather large ignominy, an entire laboratory going under. I don’t believe you can live as a scientist anymore, do you?” “…Then I wonder…what other road is there for me?” “Plenty, I would think?” he responded easily. “There are plenty of roads to choose from.” Yoshikawa’s eyes glazed over at that as she remembered days long past. One of a multitude of paths—perhaps one of them was as a schoolteacher. A teacher who was kind, not soft. Perhaps the path was to teach the important things to Accelerator and Last Order, who didn’t have a scrap of common sense. That was an attractive prospect. So attractive that she gave a tiny smile in spite of herself. “Hey…,” she addressed the doctor, who had his back turned and was about to leave the room. “What is it?” “Please save that boy. If you can’t, then I’ll never forgive you.” “I wonder who you think you’re talking to. That is my battlefield, all right? And I always come back alive from the battlefield—along with my patients, who had been fighting by themselves the whole time.” The doctor left the surgical room. Yoshikawa closed her eyes. The people wearing operating gowns around her seemed to be finishing up, but she didn’t pay attention to them. She directed her awareness inward, as if she would just go to sleep. And then, she remembered the words of one boy. And she recalled his words. “You have any idea who you’re askin’ here? I’m the big bad guy. I killed ten thousand of ’em, you know? You’re telling the villain to save someone? Are you serious? I can kill anything, but I can’t save anyone.” “How about that.” Yoshikawa gave the most minute of smiles. “He managed to do it anyway.”