045. Previous Life
045. Previous Life
On the way back.
Rinne asked to stop by a shopping center for a moment, saying there was something she wanted to buy.
I allowed it, assuming it wouldn't take very long.
......It had clearly been a mistake.
I had overlooked just how long my companion had gone without shopping in person, and how many things she had wanted to buy during that time.
In the end, Rinne dragged me around for nearly two hours and made me carry her purchases.
Most of the items purchased that way were related to writing.
Specifically, a special-edition light novel that was out of stock online.
A keyboard for writing.
—Just how much did she like writing, anyway?
Had my bewildered feelings shown on my face?
When we finally boarded the train heading back, Rinne suddenly said this to me.
"You know, I used to hate writing. A long, long time ago."
"You did?"
"Yeah. Light novels too. Totally hated them."
Rinne answered nonchalantly, looking out the window.
I couldn't believe it.
No, even before that, I couldn't comprehend it.
"Why?"
At that, Rinne turned the question back on me.
"Oppa, why do you think the Public Affairs Department keeps a biodroid specialized in novel writing on staff?"
"......Who knows?"
I couldn't answer.
It wasn't that I couldn't guess the answer.
It was simply that I hoped the only answer that came to mind was not the truth.
But there was no twist.
"The Public Affairs Department's main job, you see, is making things up."
Inflating military achievements.
Minimizing allied casualties.
Covering up illegal orders as if they had never happened.
That was how they manipulated public opinion, deceived the public, and lied to the bereaved families of the fallen.
That was the work Rinne had been assigned in the Public Affairs Department.
"So I hated it."
Because she had to be in charge of such filthy work.
She loathed writing, loathed the salvation narrative laced entirely with lies.
At the same time, she despised herself for being bound to such a fate and deceiving people.
"Then what made you come to love the salvation narrative like you do now?"
Had she read some especially entertaining light novel, perhaps?
I was expecting some trivial reason like that, but Rinne gave me a completely unexpected answer.
"It's because of my past life."
"Past life?"
"Yeah. Past life."
I couldn't understand.
......No, I understood the literal meaning of the words themselves.
Past life.
In short, it referred to the 'time when they were human' for a human who became a biodroid through corporification.
However, to understand why that period was deliberately distinguished from their present life, one needed an understanding of the biodroid manufacturing process.
As is known, biodroids are produced by mounting a female brain into a body made of machinery.
The female brain required for this, in principle, must be a cultured brain grown in a laboratory.
This restriction does not pose a major problem when manufacturing biodroids for military use or simple labor. That's because, in those cases, any brain can be made to work one way or another.
The problem arises when manufacturing specialist-type biodroids.
In these cases, a brain with high intelligence or a high synchronization rate with specific components is needed, but due to technical limitations, the cost of culturing an appropriate brain is extremely high.
For this reason, several manufacturers opted for a kind of trick.
Namely, smuggling the brains of human women with high suitability through various channels, erasing only their memories, and mounting them into biodroids.
......Of course, not all memories are cleanly erased.
Or, even if they were erased well, there were frequent cases where memories returned due to a specific triggering event.
Rinne asserted that she was exactly such a case.
"You know, I once had memories from my past life come back."
I was dumbfounded.
"You've been acting all this time as though you had no memories of family or your school days."
"Those I actually don't have. Because those kinds of memories didn't come back at all."
"Then? What kind of memory did come back?"
Rinne answered after a brief pause.
"A book."
"......A book?"
"Yeah. A memory of a book I read in my past life. And that memory is why I came to love writing."
What on earth.
Rinne shrugged at my baffled expression and added.
"It's a long story."
A long story was no reason to just brush it off.
Maybe Rinne thought so too. Or maybe it was simply because I was glaring at her.
Rinne began speaking, searching through her memories.
"Well...... It was around a year after I started working in the Public Affairs Department, I think."
One day, on her way home after drafting a pile of lie-filled articles for the Public Affairs Department, she happened to stop by a bookstore and read 'The Little Mermaid.'
There was no particular reason.
It simply caught her eye.
She picked it up casually and read it without giving it much thought.
The Little Mermaid is a public-domain fairy tale, so countless editions exist. The one Rinne read was the version we commonly think of as the original.
—The little mermaid, who had fallen in love with the prince she rescued, visited the sea witch to obtain legs so she could be with the prince, but lost her voice in exchange.
—Unable to speak, the little mermaid could not confess her feelings to the prince.
—In the end, the prince mistook a neighboring kingdom's princess for his rescuer and married her. Bound by her contract with the witch, the little mermaid then dissolved into sea foam because she had failed to win his love.
That was the plot.
Biodroids were implanted with common knowledge during manufacturing. The Little Mermaid was basic common knowledge, so Rinne already knew the plot of the standard version.
But why?
After finishing The Little Mermaid at the bookstore, Rinne thought something about it was strange.
It was different from the Little Mermaid she knew.
This was not the real ending of The Little Mermaid.
A sense that something was off. Or perhaps déjà vu.
Had she once read a different edition of The Little Mermaid?
At the time, Rinne had been a biodroid for only about a year. She could easily compile a list of every book she had read, and The Little Mermaid was nowhere on it.
She couldn't even remember reading any fairy tales, let alone The Little Mermaid.
And yet, for some reason, she had a memory of having read The Little Mermaid.
Why?
Whose memory was this—— and from when?
Rinne pondered it for days and days...... and suddenly it came to her.
Before Rinne had been Rinne, she had once read a completely different version of The Little Mermaid.
In that version, instead of turning into sea foam and dying, the little mermaid met a pirate and was saved by him.
Only that memory surfaced vividly.
She did not know why that memory of The Little Mermaid alone had remained so vivid while all the others were gone.
In fact, she did not even remember exactly what happened in that peculiar version of The Little Mermaid.
Even so, Rinne wanted to find the version of The Little Mermaid she remembered.
If she could learn more about that version, perhaps her other memories of her past life would return as well.
Like family, or friends. Or memories about her school days.
Maybe she could recover the other things she'd longed for too.
With that single-minded determination, Rinne set out to find the Little Mermaid within her faint memories.
The method was simple: read every version of The Little Mermaid she could find anywhere in the world.
She was convinced that if she found the version she'd read in her past life, she would recognize it immediately: This is it.
So, she read, and read again, and——
"Long story short, I couldn't find it."
Rinne said.
I had been listening intently, and the anticlimax took the wind out of my sails.
"You couldn't find it?"
"Yeah. No matter how much I searched, I never found one that made me think, This is it!"
"......Couldn't you just be remembering it wrong?"
I cautiously offered an opinion.
Listening to Rinne's story, all she really had was a memory of once reading a strange version of The Little Mermaid where a pirate appeared near the end. It didn't sound as though she'd consciously remembered being someone else.
In that sense, the memory Rinne believed came from a past life might simply have been her imagination.
Or perhaps she had confused it with some other memory, or simply had such a dream.......
Or it could have been the result of some error during the brain-optimization process when she was manufactured.
That seemed far more rational than assuming Rinne really was the product of illegal Corporification and genuinely carried memories from a past life, but——
"Shut up! If I say I had a past life, then I did!"
......She just dug in her heels.
If the person involved was certain of it, then as an outsider, I had nothing more to say.
As I reluctantly conceded, Rinne shrugged and carried on.
"Anyway, I searched for a year or two like that. Not just The Little Mermaid, but other fairy tales rewritten with similar happy endings. Later, I started searching for any salvation narrative I could find."
"And even then, there was nothing?"
"Yeah. So...... eventually, I gave up."
She gave up.
That didn't mean she came away empty-handed.
The chance memory of her past life had led Rinne to discover another side of salvation narratives.
"You know, while I was searching for the Little Mermaid from my past life, I was incredibly happy."
Reading novels for her own salvation.
And within them, encountering the salvation of countless characters.
Even though she couldn't verify whether the memory was real, Rinne found great joy in the search itself.
So, you see.
"......Like you said, Oppa, maybe it really is a memory I made up. No, I think there's a 99% chance that's what it is."
But it was alright.
Because Rinne now understood.
A well-crafted lie—a story—did not always have to deceive, hurt, and humiliate people.
Even if it was 99% a lie, the remaining 1% of hope could sometimes give someone the courage to live and the motivation to keep working hard.
And so.
"I decided to write light novels because I wanted to share the salvation I received with other people too."
By the time she finished speaking, we'd already arrived at Krädel.
***
We returned to the base.
It was late, so we didn't schedule anything else.
Each of us returned to our rooms to rest.
Of course, only my body was resting. My mind was tangled with all sorts of thoughts.
Most of them were about the story Rinne had told me.
The story of The Little Mermaid, which might have been a trace of a past life.
The ending where, instead of dissolving into sea foam and vanishing, the little mermaid met a pirate and was saved.
That preposterous ending—why was it?
It did not feel all that unfamiliar.
Had I once read that edition Rinne could not find?
After pondering it briefly, I shook my head.
As expected, I had no such experience.
I could say that with confidence because Sion had occasionally read The Little Mermaid to me at my bedside.
In truth, by the time Sion started raising me, I was already past the age for fairy tales. But she wanted so badly to read them to me that...... I reluctantly went along with it.
And I still vividly remembered the contents of that Little Mermaid. It was a very standard edition, ending with the little mermaid dissolving into sea foam.
Before meeting Sion, I'd never really had the chance to read fairy tales.
The Little Mermaid was famous enough that I'd picked up the basic plot somewhere, but there was no way I'd actually read some obscure version featuring a pirate.
Even so, that sense of familiarity was probably just the fairy tales Sion had read to me getting jumbled together in my head.
Even if I had never read a fairy tale about a pirate saving a mermaid, there were countless fairy tales featuring at least one of pirates, mermaids, or rescue.
I had unconsciously combined things I'd read separately in those different stories into one and mistaken it for something I'd read before.
It was probably the same for Rinne.
It was a mistaken impression, not a trace of a past life.
If it wasn't a delusion and she truly had a past life, why would the very first thing to surface be some fairy tale she read once, rather than family or friends?
......Even on the off chance that a past life really existed, there was no time to worry about that now.
What was important now was Rinne's present life.
I decided to think about the past-life issue another time and got ready for bed.
But then, right before I actually fell asleep.
Someone knocked on the door of my room.
Eight or nine times out of ten, no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would be Laika.
So certain of that, I opened the door without even asking. And yet——
"......Oppa, are you sleeping?"
Instead of Blue, Red had come.