058. Memory (3)
058. Memory (3)
Memories of Rinne's past life surfaced in her mind.
Even saying they had "surfaced" wasn't quite right. They weren't vivid like something she had personally lived through.
It felt more like remembering the plot of a movie she had watched long ago.
......No, truly.
She still couldn't entirely shake the suspicion that she was mistaking some movie she'd once seen for her own memories.
But rationally, there was no chance she had ever seen a movie like this.
No movie about a life this dull and insignificant would ever have been commercially released.
Yes.
The past life Rinne remembered was dull and insignificant.
The only people in it were her parents and doctor.
The only places were her small room and the hospital she visited regularly.
Even the daily routine that passed for its "plot" was more monotonous than the cast and setting.
She'd wake up, occupy herself with things she could do without moving around much, eat when it was time, then sleep.
That was all, repeated endlessly.
It wasn't a matter of blaming anyone.
She had been ill.
After a Legion injured her in an early childhood she couldn't even remember, she lost the use of her lower body.
And that was only as long as she minimized fatigue and stimulation. Outdoors, she couldn't last even ten minutes.
Treatment was impossible.
All they could do was suppress and slow the Phase Erosion.
Even the cost of buying that time was horrifyingly high.
High enough to drive a middle-class family that ran a small distribution business and lived in central Metropolis out to a derelict mansion on the outskirts.
Under those circumstances, the Girl's condition continued to worsen.
Eventually, her parents made the decision they had kept postponing.
They would put their daughter through Cyborgization Surgery.
Of course, Cyborgization Surgery that preserved the patient's pre-surgery memories was permitted only in extremely exceptional cases.
The Girl did not qualify for that rare exception, so she could not legally undergo Cyborgization Surgery.
Her parents tried pulling strings with military contacts, but the bribe required was several times everything the couple had earned in their lives.
In that desperate situation, a scout from a certain manufacturer approached them.
He learned of the Girl's circumstances and discovered that her brain was exceptionally suitable for a Writing Specialist Type biodroid, then made her parents an offer.
If they handed over their daughter's brain, he would install it in a newly manufactured writing biodroid.
Her memories would, of course, be erased in the process.
The revived daughter would have the same physical brain, but as a person she would be someone entirely different.
Even so, she would be alive.
If there was no other way, wouldn't saving their daughter even like that be better?
Her parents accepted the proposal.
The Girl herself—Rinne's past life—did not want it.
Because she was afraid.
She didn't want to become a biodroid who couldn't remember her parents, or even who she herself was.
She thought she would rather die.
Like the Little Mermaid she had once seen in a fairy tale.
Rather than be reborn as someone else, she wanted to dissolve into sea foam.
So the Girl tried to kill herself.
Before it was too late.
Before her parents ruined their own lives trying to save hers.
She would die, no matter what.
The day she made up her mind—
That boy appeared.
***
The boy appeared.
No, "appeared" was not quite right. He had barged in.
Through the window. Completely out of nowhere.
His arrival was so absurdly sudden that at first she wondered whether her parents had sent him.
At the time, she was staging a silent protest against the surgery.
Maybe they had sent a handsome boy her age to coax her into talking.
It was plausible enough to suspect.
......In the end, it turned out not to be the case.
She realized otherwise because of the stories he told her about the outside world.
The outside world in his stories was, well......
Different from what her parents had told her.
Until then, her parents' descriptions of the outside world had been inconsistent.
When they wanted to keep her indoors, it was a sinister, dangerous, brutally violent world.
When they urged her to have surgery, it became a paradise—a utopia—she absolutely had to visit someday.
She couldn't make heads or tails of those abstract contradictions.
She had secretly researched it online, but that only gave her a superficial picture.
And yet.
The world the boy showed her was concrete and vivid.
......No, that didn't mean it was beautiful.
The boy was an orphan wandering the streets, and the world he described was unmistakably stained with violence and conflict.
Yet he didn't treat it as darkness or a monster she must never approach.
It was a place you sometimes had to fight, sometimes flee, and sometimes endure by laughing and crying within it—not a utopia or paradise, but somewhere everyone had to live.
That was the outside world the boy had told the Girl about in her cradle.
If he had been an errand boy sent by her parents to persuade her, he would never have described it so differently.
So she became convinced he had simply wandered in by chance, and she soon lowered her guard.
He didn't look especially dangerous anyway.
He didn't look especially smart either.
Above all, he was two years younger than her.
He was just a kid.
So she kept calling him back to relieve her boredom.
In retrospect, that might have been her fatal mistake.
She had let her guard down.
More than that, she'd no idea how dangerous it was to place a boy her age into a life as empty as a glass bottle.
She did not know that, and after a childhood full of misfortune, the Girl had developed an unusually strong sense of self.
......Anyway, after all that explanation—
Once she had let her guard down, the Girl gradually started doing pointless little things with the boy.
For example, she began asking about him instead of the outside world.
She began speaking to him directly instead of writing.
When she ate something good, she started thinking, "I'll save half for Si-hu when he comes."
Then eventually, she came to——
That boy.
A kid two years younger than herself.
[Here.]
"Huh?"
[Eat it. Chocolate.]
The Girl fell for him.
And once she did, her thoughts began to change.
She didn't want to die.
She wanted to someday live in the outside world together with this boy.
She began dreaming that absurd dream.
How long had it been?
Her parents finally came to tell her the surgery date.
Because the illegal operation had to be carried out in secret, there wasn't much time to spare.
Only two days later.
Only then did the Girl remember her original plan.
To kill herself before her parents went through with it and vanish into sea foam.
It wasn't too late yet.
At the moment she tried to follow through, the boy got in her way again.
No—it wasn't the boy himself, but her feelings for him.
As she gripped the knife to cut her wrist, she remembered something he had told her.
That it would be unfair to die without experiencing romance at least once.
That wasn't the end. The boy had also said this:
"Especially for a girl, it's even worse. A girl who dies without ever dating becomes a virgin ghost and wanders the afterlife, unable to pass on."
That was horrifying.
She'd die because she hated becoming a biodroid, only to end up as a ghost even worse off than one.
Wouldn't that make her death completely pointless?
Remembering that, the Girl decided to meet the boy just one more day.
And on that day, she would try dating him.
As always, the boy played along with her unreasonable request.
He even granted her absurd wish to go on a date despite her frail body.
He carried her on his back and showed her around the house while her parents were away.
It was fun.
She couldn't describe it as anything but fun.
And fun like that was something the Girl almost never felt.
So, how should she put it?
She felt as though she could finally die without regrets.
Just as that strange sense of relief settled in, the boy cautiously asked:
"Why don't you want the surgery?"
There was no reason to wonder how he knew. During the date, she'd relaxed enough to let some details about the surgery slip.
Not much. Only part of it.
That the surgery was scheduled for a few days later.
That it could cure her current condition, but she didn't want it.
It was all true.
It was only a half-truth, missing the most important details.
From his perspective, none of it could have made much sense.
So he had apparently been wondering and finally asked when the mood relaxed.
After thinking for a long time, the Girl answered with another half-truth.
"They said if the surgery goes wrong, I could die."
"What?"
"I... don't want to die."
Why was that.
The words spilled out easily.
When she had always thought she wanted to die.
No, when she had been resolved to die even up to that very moment.
While she was still wondering why——
the boy, carrying her on his back, reached the study.
And right then, the Girl abruptly asked:
"Hey, what's the most fun book you've ever read?"
The boy obviously knew she was changing the subject.
Even so, he answered honestly.
He had never read a book.
Not because he'd never had the chance.
Even for a wandering orphan, Metropolis wasn't so poor that books were completely inaccessible.
The boy simply didn't understand.
What was supposed to be fun about mere strings of print? What was the point of reading them at all?
That answer didn't so much bewilder the Girl as infuriate her.
What was more fun than books? It wasn't as though someone had held him at knifepoint and forbidden him to read—he'd simply never chosen to.
Even she, a girl who couldn't walk properly, had asked her parents to collect books and build her a study.
The boy asked the fuming Girl, sounding annoyed himself:
"Then recommend one."
"Recommend?"
"Yeah. Might as well try reading one. What book was the most fun for you?"
"Hmm, then......."
Maybe that one.
The Girl pointed to a book.
The Little Mermaid
She hadn't just picked one at random. The Girl genuinely thought The Little Mermaid was the finest fairy tale.
Or rather, she looked down on the other fairy tales.
Because most fairy tales were full of lies.
In fairy tales, wishes came true if you wanted them badly enough, effort was rewarded, and salvation always waited at the end of tragedy.
Reality rarely worked that way.
Most wishes failed, effort came to nothing, and only death waited at the end of every human life.
That, at least, was the life the Girl knew.
To her, fairy tales saturated with happy endings felt dishonest, almost deceitful.
That was why she admired The Little Mermaid, where the heroine gained nothing and disappeared into sea foam.
"Try reading it."
If the boy read it and praised it, she felt as though something inside her might finally settle.
Frankly, she thought it might let her die satisfied.
So she had gone out of her way to recommend it, and yet——
Why on earth.
"......What the. This isn't fun at all."
The boy's reaction after reading her beloved The Little Mermaid was ice-cold.
"Wh-what? You did not like it?"
"Yeah. It's boring. More than that, it's stupid. No wonder you only think depressing thoughts when you read stupid books like this."
"Which part exactly is stupid?"
Convinced he was trashing it without having read it properly, the Girl demanded:
But the boy began rattling off every flaw he had found.
First, the heroine supposedly wants to confess her love, yet gives away her voice without any real plan.
Then a princess from a neighboring country impersonates her and she just watches.
Meanwhile, the so-called prince couldn't even recognize the girl who'd saved him.
Faced with all that injustice, she never once fought back against the witch and meekly turned to sea foam as though death were the answer.
"All in all, it's pathetic, stupid, and boring."
As if that weren't enough, the boy added:
"The author's name is... Andersen? I don't know what kind of person he is, but he's probably not a famous author, right? Judging by his writing skill, nine times out of ten he's a nobody."
That hit the Girl exactly where it hurt.
In hindsight, it wasn't something that should've gotten under her skin.
For one thing, the famous sea-foam ending wasn't even Andersen's original ending.
And the boy's criticism wasn't exactly wrong or unusual.
In fact, that's the same criticism people who disliked The Little Mermaid often made.
That the Little Mermaid was too indecisive and simply let events carry her along.
Even so, the Girl was furious.
Not at the boy, but at herself—at the part of herself that had projected onto the Little Mermaid and was trying to escape into death, exactly as he had accused the heroine of doing.
She really was angry at herself——
yet somehow she ended up shouting at him.
"Then you try writing it!"
The boy was startled.
"What, you. You knew how to yell?"
"Shut up and try writing it yourself! Let's see how much better you can do. Who do you think you are?"
"No, I......."
"Write it! There's a notebook and pen in that drawer!"
His confusion lasted only a moment.
Then his eyes sharpened and he grabbed the pen.
The story he wrote wasn't much different from the Little Mermaid he'd just read. The prince failed to recognize the Little Mermaid, and the Little Mermaid despaired.
Immediately after——
"The Little Mermaid kills the prince."
"......What?"
"That's so unfair. Just because she can't talk, he can't even recognize the benefactor who saved him."
The boy complained as he said it.
He argued that the prince hadn't truly failed to recognize her; he'd been unsure and simply chosen the prettier princess.
The Girl was so dumbfounded she lost her voice, just like the Little Mermaid.
And yet, that wasn't the end.
"And the Little Mermaid, having returned to the sea, kills the witch too."
"Even the witch?"
"Yeah. She kills her for forcing an unfair contract on her."
"Sh- she kills them all?"
He said she did.
And with the witch dead, the curse on the Little Mermaid disappeared.
Having narrowly escaped death, the Little Mermaid resolved never to get involved with another looks-obsessed idiot like the prince.
Instead, she would find someone much better.
"......What kind of person?"
The Girl asked.
The boy clearly hadn't thought that far ahead. Flustered, he asked back.
"Uh...... anyone, I guess? Who do you think would be good?"
The Girl answered after a brief pause.
"......A pirate, maybe."
The Girl blushed after answering.
The boy's eye was injured then, and he wore an eyepatch the Girl had lent him, making him look like a pirate.
In other words, by suggesting a pirate as the savior, the Girl was unconsciously casting the boy as her own savior.
Maybe it was fortunate that the boy was oblivious.
He didn't seem to find it strange at all.
Instead, as if she'd given him the perfect idea, he continued the ending.
"Right. Let's say that the moment she resolves never to meet another guy like the prince, a pirate suddenly appears. The pirate falls for the Little Mermaid because of her fighting skills and confesses to her. And of course, he's more handsome than the prince and a better fighter, so the Little Mermaid accepts and they form the Bubble Pirate Crew together.
"After that, they conquer the seven seas, rescue other pitiful mermaids like her, retire, have children on Treasure Island, live happily together, and eventually die. The end!"
It was an absurd, half-hearted ending.
The boy handed the Girl the completed 「The Little Mermaid —The Corrected Version—」, having written the story all the way through to that ending.
Right after, the boy said:
"See? Even the Little Mermaid can get a cool, perfect, happy ending. So why are you worrying about failure before you even try the surgery? Think about getting through it and getting better."
It was misguided consolation.
If the Girl underwent the surgery, she would be unhappy.
She would forget her family, and the boy who had become more precious to her than family.
And yet, why?
"Do you really, really think it might be okay?"
"I'm telling you, it will be. It'll be fine."
That clumsy reassurance.
"What if it goes wrong? What if my head gets messed up and I can't recognize my family or you?"
"Then I'll recognize you."
Those foolish words, which the boy hadn't thought through deeply.
"Like the pirate who appeared for the Little Mermaid, I'll appear and save you."
A forced Salvation Narrative that ignored plausibility, verisimilitude, and reality.
It touched the Girl's heart.
So.
Even if it was an absurd hope.
Even if it was impossible.
She decided it might be worth trying once.
"Alright. I'll try the surgery."
The Girl promised.
And made one request.
"The next time we meet, if something like that really happens, let's definitely go on another date."
What came next——
would continue a full ten years later.