I'm Not a Child
For a while, I watched nothing but dull educational videos. Even when I tried to do something else, Bora was right there on the bed, staring at me, so I stuck it out and watched them through—and the longer I watched, the more I had to admit they were quietly interesting in their own way. There was even a bit of everyday common sense in them that I hadn't known.
When the videos finally ended, Bora stroked my head and told me I'd done well. For no particular reason, I felt my shoulders straighten with pride.
NewTube was locked to Kids mode, so the slightly provocative, primitive videos I used to know were blocked at the source. That part was a little disappointing.
Even so, NewTube still had plenty of fun videos on it. Lately, I had gotten completely hooked on Little Magician Rumi.
Just because it was a children's anime didn't mean it was something to look down on. I had no idea how much money they'd thrown at it, but the fight scenes were better than most action shows, and the story actually moved me. When that mage—the physical kind—tore into the villains, it felt as if I were the one throwing the punches.
The television beside me only picked up the terrestrial channels, which offered nothing but boring news and dramas, so it was through the computer that I found a whole new world.
Today I meant to binge Little Magician Rumi from episode two. I had watched through episode one yesterday and fallen asleep before I could start the next, so I set to the keyboard in high spirits, working it at a careful pace, and searched. A whole column of videos spilled out underneath.
I skipped the highlight compilations and clicked the full episode two that the studio itself had uploaded. It was still morning, no one was out wandering around, and the world was mine. I watched with such fierce concentration that I felt I might be pulled straight into the screen.
"Whoa..."
Sure enough, Little Magician Rumi was the strongest there was. For a moment at the start I thought the villain had her on the back foot, but then she drew on the power of friendship and landed a hidden finishing blow on the very enemy who had been overwhelming her all along, and the rush of it was incredible.
It ended on the closing theme, and still I couldn't pull my eyes from the monitor. My heart was pounding as I moved to click episode three.
Just before I started it, though, I heard someone moving outside the room. I shut NewTube in a hurry and opened the Hancom typing tutor.
It really wasn't that I was embarrassed to be watching a children's anime. Watching Little Magician Rumi together with someone else just felt a little... off. I typed diligently, eyes on the sentences scrolling across the screen.
"Hana, hello~"
The one who had come in to work unexpectedly early was not Bora. It was Haru.
"Are you going to do typing practice all day? You can do other things too, you know."
Haru stroked my head and watched me practice. My mind was still parked on episode three of Little Magician Rumi, so I couldn't focus on a word she said.
I wanted to be alone so badly I could taste it. Haru, however, showed no sign of leaving the room.
"How is the air this fresh all the way from the hallway? Is Hana's ability getting stronger?"
I didn't feel a thing, but from where Haru stood the air seemed fresh. I wished I could feel it that way too. On my end, I couldn't tell in the slightest whether the air was pleasant or foul.
We talked for a few minutes—how many, I couldn't have said—and then Haru, a working adult with things to do after all, went back to the office. Being an adult, it turned out, was no great prize. Even when there was something you wanted, you had to swallow it, let nothing show, and go to work.
I didn't want to become an adult bound in shackles like that. At the same time, I didn't want to be treated like a child, and the contradiction left me restless and unsettled. The truth was, I didn't really understand my own heart.
I crept toward the door, cracked it open, and carefully checked both ends of the hallway. Once I was sure no one was there, I hurried back to the computer.
I killed the boring typing practice at once and opened NewTube to watch episode three of Little Magician Rumi. The search bar was already packed with what I had looked up earlier, so there was no need to type again.
And so, from early that morning, I lost all track of time watching Little Magician Rumi. Bora did come into the room later, but my reaction speed was quick enough that she never caught me.
It wouldn't really have mattered if she had. Even so, it seemed better kept a secret.
"This..."
Kim Jaecheol, professor of neurology at Hankuk University, could not help the cry of wonder that escaped him as he watched the phenomenon unfolding before his eyes.
Before him lay a person on a bed, face and body stuck with all manner of electrode patches. Ordinarily, plenty of people found the patches so uncomfortable they could not sleep at all. This one was sleeping with an utterly peaceful expression.
"The specimen— no. The subject has fallen completely asleep."
A researcher beside him made the report. Even to Kim Jaecheol's eye, the sleeper looked perfectly at ease, as comfortable as if he were in his own home.
The room was filled with the singing of the little child called Hana. The sound between the rooms was, of course, completely sealed off. Hearing Hana's song brought drowsiness flooding in, so the sound had to be blocked this way. Listening to it did not, of course, drop a person into sleep all at once the way narcolepsy would. It was better understood as something that simply helped sleep come more easily.
Asleep on the bed was a graduate student—that cheap experimental subject, always on hand. In an ordinary experiment, stick the electrode patches on him and he could not sleep, which made him useless as test material. This time was different.
Cumbersome patches covered his entire upper body, and still he had sunk into a deep sleep. Beside him, the machine was tracing out a stable EEG.
"The sleep stage, at present?"
"Currently stage three."
"He hardly seems to have been asleep at all, and already he has reached deep sleep..."
"So it would seem."
Sleep had five stages. Stages one and two were light sleep; stages three and four were deep sleep.
For this graduate student, the bed seemed uncomfortable enough that every experiment had ended the same way: he cycled through light sleep, then woke. Today he had gone all the way to deep sleep.
"This should not be possible..."
The result lay plain before his eyes, and still Kim Jaecheol could not make his mind accept it. As a professor who researched the nervous system, he did not deny that white noise had its place in falling asleep. But white noise differed from person to person. Some people could not sleep precisely because of it. It was not a sound that was unconditionally good for rest.
Hana's song was different. It produced a dramatic effect on the sleep of everyone who heard it, without exception. Once, he would have called such a thing impossible. After the Gates appeared, there was no such thing as impossible.
Byproducts harvested from monsters produced effects that defied all reason, and no one could explain why they worked. In the same way, people in the modern world used all sorts of devices, while barely a handful of them understood how those devices actually functioned. Would someone using a smartphone know Maxwell's equations? Those who did could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most people living in this age had no idea by what principle the machines they relied on operated. Even so, a theory of that working existed, in one form or another.
Nothing simply went poof and started functioning in empty air.
Therefore Hana's song, though not yet brought to light, must also operate according to some theory. It was only that they themselves, the ones researching it, were too dull to know that theory yet. There was no leisure now, however, to worry over theories. For insomniacs, and for anyone who struggled to sleep, this song would offer the optimal treatment.
They had already verified the effect across a great body of experimental statistics, and confirmed that there were no side effects. Or if one insisted on calling something a side effect, perhaps it was this: that when it came time to sleep, people habitually went looking for Hana's song.
"With this much data accumulated, this ought to be a ray of light for people suffering from sleep disorders, don't you think?"
The researcher beside him held the folder of data and spoke as if the words delighted him. It was not a medicine that cured sleep disorders. Still, it was something. For those who suffered every night because sleep would not come, this song would make an excellent remedy.
"By the way, what sort of person is the child who sings this song? Judging by the color of her hair and eyes, she doesn't seem ordinary..."
"Quite so. I should like to go and see her myself sometime, but however many letters I send the institute, I never receive a reply."
He had no way of knowing, of course, that the inbox at the Starlight Research Institute was on the verge of bursting, flooded with mail from institutions of every kind and from private individuals as well, so full that no one could even check it. He simply assumed they must be busy.