Who Is Entity (10)
[New content unlocked: The Echo Treatment Log!]
The instant I saw the notification, I grabbed Shiho's wrist by pure reflex.
She didn't resist my grip and followed me into the duty room without a word.
Only when we were alone in that cramped space did I round on her, my question coming out like an accusation.
"What is this?"
My voice came out rougher than I'd intended. Her expression stayed perfectly calm, while my breathing turned ragged in contrast.
When I opened the game, there it was in my inbox — a single notification.
And the moment I laid eyes on it, I had no choice but to confront her about it.
"How did you know about this?"
The game shows a different screen to every person who looks at it.
I couldn't begin to guess which supernatural phenomenon was at work or how, but the fact remained: this game displayed only the content tied to each individual account.
Which meant the screen I saw and the screen Shiho saw could not possibly be the same.
Notifications were no exception.
The notification that had arrived for me should have been visible to me alone. No one else — not anyone — was supposed to know it existed.
Everything I'd learned so far said it had to be that way.
And yet she had known a notification had reached me. Down to the exact timing.
"Don't tell me, Director Shiho — you're the one who..."
My voice trembled. A tangle of hope and dread caught in my throat and nearly choked me.
The possibility flickered to life that she might actually be able to make this horrifying reality better.
That she might be someone who saw straight through this game of unknowable origin — that single spark of hope ignited in my head and began to burn.
But before I could even finish the sentence, a curt, cold answer came back.
"I don't know anything."
Those few words cut like ice.
Normally that would mean I'm not going to tell you, and the sensible thing would be to shrug and let it go.
But this was hope I'd gone out of my way to grab hold of. I couldn't just swallow it and move on.
"I'm sorry — what exactly don't you know?"
"Everything, whatever you're about to ask. Like I said before, I don't know the cure. I had nothing to do with making the game, I don't know what the game actually is, I don't know what you're seeing on your screen right now, and I don't know why the world turned into this."
Shiho shrugged as if she were stating the obvious. There was no apology in the gesture, and no sense of responsibility either.
"You can ask all you want — there's nothing I can answer. The only thing I know right now is that a notification arrived on your phone, Professor, one that might turn this whole situation around."
"And you expect me to believe that?"
The plunge from hope to despair hit me so hard I nearly choked on it.
Even if you're going to lie, at least the logic has to be plausible enough for someone to pretend to buy it. This didn't even deserve to be called an excuse.
Besides, hadn't she said it herself, plainly enough?
I will turn your hypocrisy into virtue.
Where in that sentence was there any room for misunderstanding?
I'd flung away my social mask entirely, and now I was firing raw, unfiltered emotion straight at her like a projection of everything festering inside me.
"Shiho. Given what the Management Bureau is, I understand perfectly well that there are things that need to stay secret. But the Bureau doesn't exist anymore, does it? Or is it only the information about this game that you can't share with me?"
"Haah... Professor?"
She raked a hand roughly back through her hair. The gesture spoke less of irritation than of sheer frustration with the situation.
"I'm not like the Suppression Department or the Research Department — I don't hoard information and play those creepy little games. I really don't know anything."
"But you knew a notification had come to me, didn't you?"
"Ah... that's..."
She worked her lips for a moment — then suddenly strode straight toward me. She took up a position at my side, leaned in, and brought her face right up to my ear.
The whole sequence was as smooth and silent as a cat's footsteps, and I had no time to react at all.
Close enough that her breath brushed my ear, she whispered.
"I'm the one who recommended you."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
With a giggle, her voice drifted away.
I turned my head to find a woman grinning from ear to ear, thoroughly pleased with her own little prank.
Holding her index finger up to her lips, she went on.
"A few days ago I signed up for the game, and it turns out I'm not an administrator — I'm a 'Checkpoint Keeper,' and even playing is blocked for me. Instead, the game announced that to celebrate the official release, it was selecting an Echo Treatment Administrator, and it told me to nominate one qualified candidate."
"And?"
"And so, just now, in the heat of the moment, I recommended you, Professor. I thought, no way it actually works — but apparently it really did. If you don't believe me, I can show you the recommendation screen."
She turned her phone screen toward me. But all that showed on it was my own account.
She must have realized her slip a beat too late, because she flipped the phone back around with an awkward laugh.
"Right. I keep forgetting about this game's anomaly. So how do I even prove it, then..."
"I believe you."
"You do?"
Shiho blinked at me, visibly surprised.
I let a sigh carry away whatever wounded feelings I still had.
"I have to trust that your intentions were good."
As a physician I've dealt with countless people over the years, and I'd like to think I've developed a decent eye for reading them.
And to my eye, she didn't look like she was lying.
Of course, I couldn't rule out the possibility that she was exploiting the game's 'anomaly' to put on a performance.
But if she could act this naturally, then no amount of pressing would have gotten anything out of her in the first place.
Either way, in the end, I had no choice but to trust her.
Fine. I'll let this one go.
Instead, I pivoted to a different question.
"Then can you answer just one other thing for me?"
"Depends on the question."
"Earlier, at the very start, you said you weren't affiliated with the game and knew nothing about it. So does that mean the Management Bureau itself had no connection to the game?"
"Now that's a good question."
As if I'd asked something truly excellent, Shiho snapped her fingers.
"To give you the conclusion first — yes. Not a thing. The Bureau didn't know anything about the game either."
She shook her head slowly.
Her glossy black hair swayed behind her like a tail.
"It was about three years ago, I think? When the game was first announced."
"Four."
"Has it been that long already? Anyway, the moment the game appeared, the Bureau went into an absolute uproar. Who leaked internal classified information? Even the Director-General was frothing at the mouth over it."
Made sense, I suppose.
If the Management Bureau was a functioning organization at all, then when a game surfaced containing their internal information down to the last comma, that reaction was inevitable.
"So headquarters launched an investigation into the game's developer. And you know what the strange part was?"
She seemed to be fishing for a reaction, so I shook my head.
With the cue she wanted, she picked up the story with obvious relish.
"The investigation came back None."
"None?"
"Yep. No matter what methods the Bureau tried, it couldn't dig up a single solitary fact about the game company."
When they infiltrated agents, the agents' identities were rewritten into game company employees — instead of investigating anything, they earnestly helped develop the game before eventually returning to base.
When they deployed an entity to sabotage the company, the entity vanished at the front entrance and, before anyone knew it, was back in its containment room.
"The company was sitting on the very top of the Management Bureau's head, in other words."
At that, the Director-General declared that humanity's last bastion could not be allowed to fall, and threw everything into cracking the game company somehow.
But two years passed without a single gain — nothing but being toyed with the whole time.
"Two years ago, the Bureau issued a formal 'uncontainable' ruling on the game company and washed its hands of it."
The Bureau's resources were finite.
With far too many entities and Echoes to manage, they couldn't afford to mobilize their people against a mysterious game company that wasn't causing anyone visible harm.
"Instead — call it the last shred of their pride — installation of the game was strictly banned for all internal Bureau staff. Supposedly to prevent internal information from leaking, or whatever. That's why the Bureau never learned a single detail about the game's updates."
But with the Bureau collapsed now, she was free of that rule.
"After I escaped from the Bureau a week ago, I downloaded the game myself. The result was, well... as you can see, I got banned before I could even play."
"But the fact that a recommendation feature exists suggests the game isn't hostile toward you."
"Right? What's that about. Maybe they're granting some courtesy to former staff, who knows."
She was presumably looking at a completely different screen than mine, poking idly at the display for no reason at all.
She stared at the screen with eyes full of something like wistfulness.
"Since we're on the subject of the recommendation — and I'm sorry to say this, Professor — I was actually planning to recommend someone else."
"Who?"
"I dug through the community boards and found out there's a physician who's been consulting on this game. Their handle is P0000.0 — Hippocrates."
Oh, wait a second.
"Naturally, that person would have to be an authority on entity diagnosis, right? But no matter how far back I traced the IP, I couldn't find anything. They must have vanished along with the developers."
"...May I ask whether that's your own conclusion?"
"What do you mean?"
"The part about that physician disappearing along with the developers. Is that your personal guess, or does everyone in the community think so?"
"Going by the general mood on the boards, most people seem to take it that way. Why?"
"Uh..."
That was the part I hadn't thought through.
In all my time serving as a consultant, I had never once revealed my real name.
If it came out that a university professor was consulting on the game, the damage to my university would be obvious and severe.
The only thing I'd ever lent them was the title of practicing physician.
"Uh..."
Honestly, I'd never intended to hide it.
Everything had simply spiraled so fast that I'd missed my window to bring it up.
Having accidentally become a physician with a hidden arsenal, I probed her, half testing the waters.
"But a consultant is separate from the developers, so wouldn't they not have disappeared?"
"That's possible."
"And what would you do if you ever found them?"
"Hmm, let me think."
Shiho rested her chin on her hand.
"I'd have to protect them, wouldn't I? Stay close and keep them safe."
"I'm sorry — what?"
"Think about it. An Echo is a dangerous power, but at the same time it's a set of laws that can overturn the entire existing order in one stroke. Do you really think the world would just leave that alone?"
She pointed to the corner of the duty room, where the news had been playing on mute all this time.
It was reporting that the U.S. government, taking the The Most Romantic Choice incident as its lesson, had begun forming an advisory committee composed primarily of game players.
"No telling how the world will change, but one thing's certain. The people with the information closest to the vanished developers are going to become the eye of the storm."
"So when you say 'protect'..."
"Wouldn't it be nice if there were only civilized approaches like that news piece? But the world has far too many unhinged people in it."
Her voice dropped lower.
"So I'll protect them. That's a standing directive of the Management Bureau."
Echoes that harm people are suppressed.
If suppression fails, they are contained.
And entities that are friendly or necessary to humanity —
"Not every entity is evil, and not all of them get locked away. Sometimes we receive help from them. Sometimes we negotiate. And we have to keep them from being exploited, too. Of course, protection is normally the Guard Department's job, but—"
She gave a lonely smile.
"I'm the only survivor, so I suppose it's mine now."
"...Why would you go that far?"
At my question, Shiho's gaze flickered — just for an instant — toward something inside her phone case. A name tag of some kind.
Then her eyes met mine again.
"Because I'm a Management Bureau agent. Even if the Bureau is finished, what I have to do hasn't changed."
She said it with a smile that looked faintly tired.
Watching that smile, I felt, for a fleeting moment, the urge to believe her — then I pulled myself together.
No. Get a grip. If what she says is true, that actually makes her more dangerous.
I remembered that I knew nothing about this woman, and shut my mouth.
I had to at least consider the possibility that this was a lie too.
Not a single thing had been proven, and trusting her on the strength of a few minutes of conversation was a risk.
An awkward silence settled between the two of us.
It was I who broke it first.
"...Shall we head back?"
"You have patients to see, Professor. Sorry for taking up your time."
"No, no, it's nothing like that. You unlocked a new feature for me with your recommendation — I should put it to work right away."
Forcing conversation over the awkwardness, we made our way back toward the resuscitation room.
I still hadn't been able to check the details of the treatment protocol, but I planned to verify them step by step at the patient's side.
That was when an ugly commotion came boiling out of the resuscitation room.
—Aaargh!!
Shouting from deep inside the resuscitation bay.
For a heartbeat I thought Arrest! and quickened my pace — but the scene waiting for us at the door was something else entirely.
The patient was trying to tear out the ECMO line connected to her own body.
"Hey, hey! Grab her! She's delirious! Get the lorazepam!"
The neurology resident was shouting urgently at the residents from other specialties.
But the patient, old woman though she was, ignored the men hanging off her arms and legs and kept reaching for her own lifeline.
The moment I witnessed that scene, the diagnosis assembled itself automatically in my head.
No — this isn't delirium.
Her eyes were still closed; the patient had not regained consciousness.
Delirium presupposes, at minimum, a state of wakefulness.
It may present with severe cognitive impairment, but it does not make a patient thrash around asleep like a sleepwalker.
And sleepwalking didn't fit the situation either. Only one explanation accounted for all of it.
The Echo has seized her consciousness.
The patient had lost her mind, and the Echo had taken the reins of her body and was moving it.
And given the Echo's story, the reason she was trying to rip out the ECMO line was glaringly obvious.
—Better to just die than live in such ugliness.
"Damn it."
I moved toward the neurology resident, who was still misdiagnosing this as delirium.
Lorazepam?
That's a drug for sedating people and putting them to sleep.
But the patient's consciousness had been abducted by another being. There was a very good chance that drug would only make things worse.
I have to stop this.
But someone had beaten me to it.
CLANG—!
A bright, ringing note of metal echoed through the emergency room.
The residents restraining the patient, the neurology resident reaching for the medication, the other patients and the medical staff —
and me.
Every head in the room snapped toward the source of the sound.
At the head of the bed, where the patient had collapsed again with foam at her mouth — at the very center of every gaze — stood Shiho, holding a dented tray and looking distinctly sheepish.
"Um... ah... it's fine, everyone."
She said it with an awkward smile.
"You can't kill someone with this. Wait, no — you can't kill an entity with this."
"..."
"This is how it's supposed to be done anyway, so everyone back to work. Hehe."
Standing before her, staring down at the entity she'd knocked out cold all over again, I found myself seriously debating whether I should request a neurosurgical consult for a possible intracranial hemorrhage.