Chapter 7
I am not asleep!
True, the body has pajamas on, curled in on itself with its eyes shut, and most of the sensory signals never reach the brain. Huh? Does that count as sleeping?
And yet I am unmistakably awake. The information coming in through the body called Rebecca Rolfe may have thinned, but of the hundreds of screens I keep, only five or six have gone dark. My condition is stranger than I thought.
I lie there letting out an even breath. At the same time I am above that body, looking around. A third-person view. When the girl is awake, the immersion comes as easily as being inside a computer game. Right now I have drawn back, the way you push away from the monitor when you want a rest mid-game. Not even the computer — the feeling is closer to glancing at the phone that sits beside it. That is how I am watching the woman called Joanna Smith.
I am learning a little about myself, too. I know I am something strange, but even so. Might it not be that my functions have increased? A sharper mind. A face grown handsome, or beautiful. That sort of thing. If you have been reincarnated, it is what most people go through. Of course I have only ever seen it in works of fiction — but a work of fiction needs something that can give you catharsis when you set it beside reality, doesn't it?
This place, though, is reality to me. Reality, and yet viciously short of any sense of the real. The only reality I possess is this cold. And so I want more warmth.
While I was thinking that, Hieronymus came into the room. He edged toward me in little hesitant shifts, the way you approach a sleeping wild animal to see what it is. Springing up and shouting would be funny, but that would cross a line. One cry of Aaah, at last he's shown his true colors! and the body I am inside could be wrecked all over again.
Just a moment ago I turned away the warmth that had presented itself right before my eyes. I do not have enough warmth. Still, I can bear the cold a little longer. All that time I spent looking up at the light, unable to do anything but endure — it helps, in a moment like this.
Now, where did I see it. They say hunting and farming both take patience.
Hunting. You learn the creature you mean to take in careful detail, find the path it travels, and lie in wait there. Then you take it. More than half the time, you fail. So you begin again.
Farming. In order to eat, you pour a very long stretch of time into labor. You sow the seed, and until it grows you hold off countless threats, and only then, barely, can you harvest what comes of it. Even so, whether it lives or dies is left to heaven.
Patience is necessary. So is luck. To rely on those a little less, you need a great deal of information. For now I ought to quiet my breath and gather it.
That aside — he confirms that I am asleep, and simply leaves? If he had taken some other measure, I might have been willing to look on him again. Nothing to be done. We will call this a relationship in which we only use each other.
Meanwhile, far off, Joanna Smith is standing in a room. She looks awkward, staring at her own blue hand. No — watching her fold and unfold a single finger over and over, I think she is marveling that the finger she lost has come back.
She has set a terribly old mirror before her and is gazing, wonderstruck, at the self reflected there. Through her eyes, I am looking at her. It feels like looking at a picture inside a picture inside a picture.
There are drag marks across the floor, which means she never used to look in the mirror. Thinking of how she appears in memory, she may not have wanted to. But it is different now. Joanna is glad, looking at what she has become. And every so often she starts to call out to someone, then stops.
Hm?
Unfortunately I cannot tell clearly what she is thinking, so I do not know what she wants to say. Guessing from the words that leave her mouth, from her gaze and her actions and the state of her body — that much is possible. They call it cold reading.
Cold reading is telling what the other person thinks by watching the body's unconscious movements. Pseudo-religions use it, of course, and so do men of business. People we commonly call good with others are often using the technique without knowing they do. All anyone has done is sort it into language, so that it is easy to recognize.
Soon Joanna murmured a single sentence. It was the command Hieronymus had given only a moment before.
Mm. Simple. And the motivation is certain, besides. Unless a person is wholly without instinct, it is not hard to see how this woman thinks of me. Faith. Worship. Human beings are the sort who can tumble out of a place like that without any warning, but for now, that is where she stands.
She is fixed on the latter half. But the part that truly matters comes first: you set down the tasty bait, and then you put them to work. Until now that tasty bait was nothing but the spoken blessing of a god that does not exist. Now she has enjoyed the blessing in the flesh. And so she chooses the trade of Warrior of the Faith — a trade in which faith is reason enough to kill a person.
Look only at the situation as it stands, and it is exactly the same as those ancient bands of assassins. Feed them a hallucinogen, show them pleasure, and tell them that if they obey the command they can reach this garden of pleasure. Then they become assassins who do not fear death, and off they go to kill. Dying themselves is perfectly fine. Because they will go to the garden of pleasure.
All the more so when everything around them is built to cut off any other thought at the root. It is a structure in which doubt is difficult to hold — doubt about that garden of pleasure, and about the person giving the orders. People who think in exactly the same way surround you, and covering the face with a mask has become so ordinary that no deep bond can form. And so you hunger all the more for a connection with those above. The only individuality to be had shows in the patterns on the mask and the clothes one wears. To gain even that much individuality, there is nothing for it but to display a loyalty fiercer still!
Hah. Hahaha.
It really is a vicious cult. Even so, I have decided to use this place as a feeding trough, so I will have to adapt. Before I start sorting out good and evil, don't I have to live as well?
Before long she pulled a mask over her face, put on a rag of a garment that could cover her to the crown of her head, and walked to the place where Warriors of the Faith are trained. No one has to teach her the way. She has cleaned this entire underground den. Thanks to that, the complete map of the lair is in my hands.
Heehee. Goodness — I even know the secret places. All of them.
People ignored her, dismissing her as a shabby old woman. There is no such thing in this world, but she was like a cleaning robot: an existence you can ignore completely, there when it is there and gone when it is not. Because of that, she knows every part of the place. And do you know? She even knows the passages meant for escape. Those passages need upkeep and repair as well. She maintains the lights along the road you would flee by, and checks whether any stretch has collapsed.
Of course, it is not work she was ever meant to do. There is a person whose proper duty is to see to it. But that person is, in their own way, of high rank in this cult. Which means they have no wish to do the menial labor. Isn't this precisely the part of things people call human error? There is a saying, too, that the greatest enemy of a security measure is not how refined the measure is, but the person who uses it.
While she walked, I rifled a little through Joanna's memories. I do wonder what Hieronymus is doing — vanished somewhere between her line of sight and mine — but so long as I cannot see him, I keep my attention here.
In that span Joanna arrived at a place crowded with people called Warriors of the Faith. It was, surprisingly, quite loud. Some of those who had been up above the place where I was summoned were here as well. Armor stood in a neat row along one side.
And a man in something like an instructor's place was laying a whip across people who wore nothing but their underwear and held grueling postures in a line before that neatly ordered armor, pouring out his anger as he struck. Listening, I gathered that they had made a danger in the place where the Cult Leader was; that they had fired when no order was given; that the responsibility was therefore collective — words of that sort, spilled out in a stream. But if you listen closely, he is only afraid the blame for that failure will come down on him. Whether Joanna knows it I cannot say, but the sight is familiar to her. There is not the slightest stir in her heart. She has seen it often in memory, too.
Nor does she pity the ones being abused. Because once the instructor is gone, they abuse the people beneath them. So Joanna, reading the moment, used to slip quickly away to some other place whenever things turned like that. She is an unhappy human being, and an abused one. Therefore she is a villain.
Goodness is something a person living a happy life can do as a matter of course. To a person living a life like hell, it is a luxury. That is why, when an unhappy person does good, that good is said to hold great value. Because it is a miracle. At least, no one here possesses a miracle like that.
And now villain speaks to villain.
Joanna explained first. As Hieronymus had commanded, she intended to become a Warrior of the Faith. At those words a trace of jealousy, and of doubt, faintly shaded the face of the man who was the instructor, and he looked her over from place to place, trying to grasp who she was. Naturally he did not recognize her. The instructor asked her name, and even when Joanna spoke it, he did not know it. Because she had never once said her name. The Joanna of until now was no different from an NPC standing midway along the road you walk in a game, with no quest attached at all.
The instructor seemed to decide she was newly come, and introduced himself. Joanna, of course, already knew who he was. Then he called over one of the people he had been striking with the whip. Skill would have to be judged first, he said, and he urged Joanna to fight.
Joanna accepted it with a heart that was, strangely, at ease.
Aside from her body having recovered and her skin having gone a dark purple, she has no special power, does she? I have been watching the whole time through her eyes, and she has never once acted like someone freshly made superhuman, testing that new strength. I was puzzled. The instructor was puzzled. The opponent set to fight her was puzzled as well.
The man serving as instructor shouted for them to begin.
In the same instant a man slipped into the blind spot of Joanna's sight and kicked her in the head. The mask shattered with a bright, ringing crack.
It ought to hurt. But Joanna's body shows none of the tightening that comes with fear. She takes the blow with an impossible calm, as if it does not hurt at all. She does not even raise a hand to the place that was struck.
Then another foot comes flying. Joanna's eyes, though, are fixed on her opponent. No — a little below his line of sight. For the briefest moment her gaze touches the foot driving in again, then falls away. She stops looking, and blocks it with her hand.
A tremendous impact lands against her palm, and with it the sensation of the wrist being crushed — and yet, strangely, there is no pain. Rather, together with the feeling of it growing back, she seizes his foot, hauls him in toward herself, and with the other hand drives that hand into the chest of the Warrior of the Faith.
Not the heart. Seen only as flesh, it looks as if she aimed for the heart and missed a little to the side, or simply stabbed the center. But I can see it. She aimed for the place where the light is.
And the moment her hand touched the light, warmth touched me.
Heh. Heheh.
This is the true taste of auto-hunting! Warmth, when I did not do a single thing — goodness!
Joanna is wiping away the blood and saying it was nothing. The instructor is aghast. Warriors are leveling weapons at her. None of that matters in the least!
Aha. At last I have learned a new method. A method I can use. If I can manage it, I want to pour myself out a little more indiscriminately. I will need to negotiate with Hieronymus — the one who cut in so calmly, as if he had been watching this place from the very start.
I need warmth.