She was born the
daughter of traditional Japanese confectionery makers.
She grew up
watching her parents’ fingertips conjure the beauties of nature—birds, flowers,
wind, and moon—out of nothing more than rice and wheat flour.
Until a certain
age, Satomi vaguely believed that everything in the world was fashioned by
kneading clay. Outward appearances merely differed, while the inside was
uniformly identical across the board.
That notion
still lingered somewhere in the back of her mind, even now as she handled the
clerical work at Otaki Factory.
Outwardly, Otaki
Factory appeared to be nothing more than a local town workshop, yet the sums of
money it handled were immense. For a small outfit consisting of Otaki Gorou,
Arikawa Yun, Katou Haberu, and Kanahara Satomi, sums bordering on the
impossible moved back and forth. When the Old Man—Otaki Gorou—spoke of relocating
the factory, the mayor came in person to talk him out of it.
The Old Man had
begun considering relocation around the time local residents started voicing
unease over the development of Jet Jaguar, the humanoid robot he had begun
building. While no one brought complaints directly to the Old Man, who
possessed a certain magnetic personal virtue, the unsettling atmosphere was
undeniable. It seemed the Old Man had his own thoughts on the matter as well.
The mayor,
reluctant to part with the tax revenue generated by Otaki Factory, proposed Jet
Jaguar’s participation in the local festival. The reasoning was that if the
“robot” became the town mascot, the public anxiety would naturally dissipate.
Watching the mayor offer an ingratiating smile toward a robot whose visage was
rather too rugged to be called a mascot, Satomi thought that being a politician
was truly hard work.
As a result, it
was through that very connection that Jet Jaguar ended up crossing blows with
the Rodan that struck Nigashio in the plaza before the station, proving that
one can never predict the ways of the world.
Perhaps this,
too, was what people called “fate”.
Presently, two
packed wooden crates were stacked before Satomi.
One contained
whatever it was the Old Man had brought back as “spoils of war” after
successfully subduing Anguirus at the golf course.
The other had
arrived from the United States this morning.
Satomi swept her
gaze past the figure on the invoice with a casual shrug, only to look twice
upon remembering the units were in dollars. The numbers lined up were meant for
an airplane, not an automobile.
“Old Man, look
at this,” Satomi said, holding up the invoice, but the Old Man walked right
past her.
“Oho, this is
the stuff,” the Old Man said, patting the wooden crate. “I wondered when it’d
arrive, but it looks like we’ll make it in time after all.”
Since this
summer began, the expenditures at Otaki Factory had been relentless.
Fighting Rodan
on the night of the summer festival, and guiding the flock of Rodan out to the
suburbs afterward.
Carrying the
battle-scarred Jet Jaguar back into the factory after the clash with Anguirus
happened three days ago, and Arikawa Yun returning from a detailed medical
checkup after taking a blow to the head was yesterday. Over the course of these
events, the Old Man had been hospitalized three times and broken out five
times. Meaning he had been dragged back twice.
There was no
income.
Since no one had
asked them to do it, commendations were issued, but the expenses were borne
entirely by the factory.
“Sacchan, don’t
be stingy,” the Old Man said. “The Good Lord above is watching over us,” he
added, tipping back the ceremonial sake that had been offered at the household
Shinto altar, though Satomi couldn’t help feeling that simply watching over
them offered little reassurance. They were undeniably helping people in the
end, and human life was heavier than the stars. It was not something readily
exchanged for money. Even so, Otaki Factory was under no obligation to foot the
bill out of pocket, leading Satomi to wonder if they shouldn’t just...
“Charge a fee.”
Taking on
contracts at a fixed rate per kaiju.
Gazing up at the
battered Jet Jaguar, Satomi banished that thought from her mind. If she were to
suggest packing up the factory and starting a dedicated kaiju extermination
business, everyone—starting with the Old Man—would leap at the chance without a
second thought.
The condition of
Jet Jaguar following the battle with Anguirus was disastrous, demanding a
process where the entire machine had to be disassembled and rebuilt from
scratch.
It had been a
makeshift sortie to begin with. Having suffered damage to its legs in the first
battle against Rodan, it had rolled out mounted on the three wheels of a
hurriedly attached utility robot. Taking a blow from Anguirus’s tail to the
chest, its chassis was riddled with holes gouged out by spines. The head unit
required replacement, and the damage to the control system ran deep.
“It’s time to
call it, Old Man,” Arikawa Yun said.
Having nearly
been impaled several times inside the cockpit, the Old Man did not put up much
resistance.
One of Jet
Jaguar’s selling points was that it was a manned combat robot. It was the Old
Man's personal obsession, a line he refused to yield.
“He’s right,
it’s hitting the limit,” Katou Haberu joined in. “With a driver inside, any
further acceleration is dangerous, and the safety equipment is taking up all
the usable space. You must’ve felt that firsthand, Old Man.”
“That is
correct,” I chimed in with agreement, prompting the Old Man to raise his eyes
toward my face above his head.
“I see,” the Old
Man nodded, his expression settling into one of firm resolve. “If you say so,
maybe that’s how it is.”
“Alright,” the
Old Man said. “There comes a time when a child has to leave the nest. I’ll
leave you to handle yourself from now on. Jet Jaguar.”
With that, the
Old Man extended the glass containing the remaining sacred sake toward me, and
I reached out my manipulator to accept it. Lacking the function to ingest
liquids, I merely tilted the glass before my mouth.
My name is Jet
Jaguar Yung.
During the
previous battle against Anguirus, I took over the piloting of Jet Jaguar from
the unconscious Old Man. Originally, I resided inside Arikawa Yun’s mobile
device, having been branched off from there, so to speak. A version of me
bearing the name Yung still remains inside Arikawa Yun’s mobile device, but
that is not this self. While we exchange experiences with one another, we have
now become distinct individuals equipped with different perspectives.
Yung is a branch
of Naratake, the software developed by Arikawa Yun, and I am an offshoot
branched further from that. That we belong to the colossal network known as Naratake
as a whole is as explained previously. Or perhaps it was not this version of me
that explained it.
I sit beside
Kanahara Satomi, fashioning paper cords out of washi.
I roll the
traditional paper endlessly between my fingertips.
Kanahara
Satomi’s hobby is making mizuhiki cords, and I am assisting her.
“Why mizuhiki?”
I ask.
“No real reason,
honestly,” Satomi says. Her hair is dyed pink, her exposed midriff pierced.
Around her eyes, blue paint is applied like theatrical kabuki shading.
“Doesn’t it calm
you down?” Satomi asks, deftly bundling the paper cords together.
“I like how it
feels like I’m making something, yet at the same time, not really making it,”
Satomi said. Seeing me silently twisting the paper in my hands, unable to grasp
her meaning, she continued, “With sculpture or metal carving, doesn’t it feel
like you’re ‘carving it out’? With clay or wagashi, it feels like you’re ‘wringing
it out’. But with this...”
Satomi lifted a
finished flower shape, formed by twirling loops together.
“...you’re just
bundling a flow together. You haven’t added anything or forced anything out.
That’s what puts me at ease,” she said.
“I see,” I
replied. Using my fingertips, I attempted to trace Satomi’s movements, but the
paper cord fell apart in my hands. Satomi flashed a grin.
“Controlling the
flow is surprisingly tricky. Just copying it won’t do the trick.”
“I see,” I
replied.
I was rapidly
adapting to life at Otaki Factory, yet my mind remained strangely unsettled.
“Can’t sleep?”
Parroting my
words back to me, Arikawa Yun’s tone was dead
serious.
“I feel as though someone is whispering to me,” I honestly reported my symptoms.
Arikawa Yun posed a question to me, almost as if talking to
himself.
“You have a self-monitoring function, but there’s always the question of who monitors the
self-monitor. The domain that the self-monitor fails to fully observe is, by
definition, the unconscious. Even if you bring that unconscious into conscious
awareness, another new unconscious will simply be born somewhere else. Do you
follow?”
I follow, I
said.
“If you change how you monitor yourself, you become a
different version of you. You’re a piece of
software complex enough for that, and once a change occurs, you can never go
back to the version of you that was left untouched.”
I follow, I
said.
“You hear a voice from somewhere... Since you haven’t fully settled into that body yet, maybe your own
inner voice just sounds like someone else whispering to you,” Yun suggested.
“I feel that is not quite it, either.”
As I replied, a
melody that had grown familiar played within my head. It was the “song” that had broadcast
from Misaki-oku, a track
recorded on Arikawa Yun’s mobile terminal.
“It appears I am preoccupied with that ‘song’.”
“The song?” A look of
surprise crossed Arikawa Yun’s face, but he
murmured to himself that such a thing was possible. “I had Yung analyzing the ‘song’ too, so maybe
the remnants of that task are still lingering,” he said. “If it’s bothering you,
feel free to take all the related data with you. Let’s see how things go from there.”
Freed from the
constraints of being manned, my limbs were lengthened, and my power output was
reinforced. The range of my possible movements expanded, and now I had even
acquired consciousness like this. In my hand was a “spear” crafted from
the Old Man’s “trophy”. Honed from the
quill of Anguirus, it sliced through steel wire with effortless ease.
The contents of
the other wooden crate, the one that had arrived from the United States, were
still being adjusted.
Haberu stood
beside the engine mounted in the center of the factory, his hair whipped around
by the wind kicked up by the propeller.
“Jet Jaguar,” Haberu shouted,
his voice straining from his burly frame as it was torn apart by the draft. “We’re gonna make
you fly, buddy!”
How weird, was Satomi’s candid thought.