Book 8 Chapter 2
Think.
I had to think.
That darkness was as thick as the middle of a vast forest. What could it mean? I was hesitant to take the long, long emergency stairs to the ground until I could process what that was.
1. The blackout covered a wider area than just the Skytool.
2. The people on the surface had chosen to switch off their power so they could evacuate to some safe place just like the people who should have been on the viewing deck here.
3.
“…”
Were there really any other possibilities when everything already felt so ominous?
There were.
And once the possibility had come to mind, I had to list it up no matter how ridiculous it was.
3. There was no one left in the city of Tokyo. Something unimaginable had happened out there.
“Are you kidding me?”
We had no idea what had happened during the more than an hour we were trapped inside the elevator. It was blatantly abnormal for things to be so dark outside. I mean, even the traffic lights, hospitals, and broadcast towers had gone dark. The storm breaking a major power line wasn’t enough to explain a blackout on this level! There should have been backup power, not to mention the headlights and tail lights of cars on the roads. Even powerful flashlights should have been visible from up here, but there was no sign of that!!
I tried to check the ground using one of those binocular-like stations you had to insert a 100-yen coin into, but…
“No good.”
The device could apparently count the money without electricity, but the view was a blurry mess with all the rain blown onto the reinforced glass and there was nothing but inky darkness out there anyway. I couldn’t see anything useful.
But.
This really was weird.
Why was there nothing but darkness filling the glass? It felt less like the power going out and more like the electricity – or the people who used it – had been intentionally eliminated.
Had they escaped outside the range of all this, or had they been killed within it?
I still couldn’t see the true nature of this disappearance act.
That was when the curtain of rain seemed to swell out unnaturally beyond the reinforced glass.
“Watch out!!”
Erika shouted and tackled Ayumi and me out the way just before the glass shattered and a storm of transparent blades tore horizontally through the air toward us. The powerful storm also blew in. Ugh! I would’ve been killed if I had stayed standing there. And the glass wasn’t the only part that scared me. If Erika hadn’t pinned me down, the wind might have dragged me out the window!!
“Let’s get away from here,” suggested Erika. “We have no way of predicting how the wind will blow when it gets inside.”
“Ayumi, you got pretty wet just now, but is your Zombie body okay?” I asked. “Y’know, with your preservative and everything.”
“I’m not weak enough for that to get me rotting. What about you, Onii-chan? Don’t press your hands against the floor and slash yourself on the broken glass, okay!?”
Erika and Ayumi dragged me away along the floor covered in a mixture of glass and rain. My only option was to search for something I could do.
“A-anyway, we need Maxwell. If we can regain an internet connection and connect to them, we can at least learn what is really going on out there.”
Ayumi frantically waved her hands with her wet white tank top and shorts plastered to her skin.
“F-fuguu? Explain yourself, Onii-chan!”
“I-is that it? What channel is it? No, it doesn’t matter. We just need a commercial broadcast! They never place a warning over that even during an earthquake or typhoon. If they’ve switched that over to an emergency broadcast, then Japan really is doomed!!”
“I – asked – you – to – explain!!”
I was leaving it unsaid out of kindness, but she refused to accept it.
After getting away from the shattered window, we could all catch our breath while soaking wet. We could only speculate right now, but like I had expected, that idiot had forgotten what I said and her face was growing pale!
“Ah, awa, awawawawawa!!”
“Wait, Ayumi. Like I said, we have no proof of anything! We just need to contact Maxwell and have that AI call us fools for worrying!!”
Even a pacifist like me doubted it would be that simple, but we had to avoid panicking and screwing up what chance we did have.
If there had been an obvious monster, we would have had a target for our emotions. Having a goal to focus on – be it running away or fighting – might have helped us stay sane.
But this was different.
We were surrounded by the creepy emptiness of the nation’s capital with no sign of anyone in it. Something had clearly happened, but we had no idea what and were left all alone here. We were plagued with the sticky unpleasantness of an undefined fear, as if the more we were delayed, the greater the ultimate penalty would be. Yes, it might have been like trying to ignore the obvious signs of a serious stalker.
What was it we wanted?
Definite, absolute, accurate, and unmistakable information. Instead of speculation pieced together by our imaginations based on our fragmentary observations, we needed a simple answer that would sweep away the darkness.
What was happening outside?
I glanced down at my phone. The fastest way would be to directly ask someone out there. I had no signal now, but I had to find a way to connect myself to Maxwell!
“But, Satori-kun, what exactly are we going to do? Um, my phone has no signal either. Since the entire city’s power is out, doesn’t that mean the base stations on the ground aren’t working either?”
“F-fuguu?”
“This is going to get complicated, so let’s go over it one thing at a time.”
We could not reach a stable position without preventing Ayumi from panicking, so I decided to move at my little sister’s pace here.
“First, cellphones and smartphones don’t communicate directly with each other. The signal is first received by a device on the surface, that is routed to a large base station by fiber optic cable or whatever, and the connection to the home phone or mobile device is finally made from the surface device closest to the person receiving the call.”
“Fugu. I know phones aren’t radios. That’s why they stop working when the power goes out even when the phone itself still has battery left.”
“Then let’s move on. This is the Tokyo Skytool’s general viewing deck. It’s located about 450m up. Tokyo has to be littered with the bento-box-sized surface devices, but each of them only covers a radius of less than 100m. Their signal can’t reach us up here. …So blackout or not, you wouldn’t be able to use a phone on the viewing deck.”
“Eh? You can’t get any bars on your phone while inside the country’s largest broadcast tower?”
Some devices would have support, but we had to start with the basics.
“That’s why I’m betting they have one of those bento-box-sized surface devices directly in the viewing deck. And it’ll be connected to the surface via fiber optic cable. That lets people use the internet in this elevated blind spot.”
In tourist locations where visitors were meant to enjoy the view, devices like that were usually hidden out of sight. But I still had an idea.
“Let’s check out a restaurant first. They’re sure to rely on the internet for table reservations, employee timecards, buying ingredients, tracking their finances, processing credit cards at the register, and maybe even waiters sending orders to the kitchen.”
The glass had only been shattered on one side, but when we walked through the center of the tower to reach the other side, the blowing wind still reached us and I felt some raindrops on my cheeks. The wind was entering through the one side, racing around the donut-shaped viewing deck, and ultimately crashing into the wind that went the other way around.
We walked across the dark and creaking viewing deck with only the light of my phone to go on and…I was right. Even a fairly fancy restaurant had the card reader, LCD monitor, and keyboard out where people could see them at the register.
Yeah, they had a wireless router too. Those were convenient since you didn’t end up with a tangle of cables, but I didn’t like the idea of transferring credit card information over the air like that. It was useful now, though.
“Fugu. But it’s all dead. None of it has any lights on. What good is this with the entire city’s power out?”
“Don’t give up quite yet.”
…This next part was what really mattered.
“It’s true there’s no sign of light when we look down from the viewing deck and this broadcast tower is just as dark. …But to be that thorough, it had to have been done intentionally. This was no accident or disaster.”
“And? Intentional or not, all the power’s out.”
“Doesn’t it seem like that assumption might be wrong? If this was done intentionally, they might have only made it look that way.”
Yes.
From a technological standpoint, it was actually possible to create this situation.
“There is a system in place to intentionally shut down the normal phone and internet lines during a major disaster so the police, firefighters, and other emergency services have priority use of the lines. Same with power. If there isn’t enough to go around, the power to the normal shopping and residential districts will be cut so it can all go to the hospitals and such. If you wanted to, you could cut all the city’s power and sell the power to some other jurisdiction. Technologically speaking anyway.”
We still had no idea what was happening on the surface, but if someone had done this intentionally, they were definitely trying to restrict people’s options. By cutting the power and internet lines, the people would return to being naked apes with no fur or fangs. Then you could either have them escape to safety or directly attack them depending on your intentions.
“If this was caused by flipping a switch and not by a malfunction in the power lines or transformer substations, then there has to be a loophole.”
If someone had caused the blackout to give themselves an advantage, they would want to keep power and internet for their own use.
“It will work just like the prioritized transmission for emergency services during a disaster. The data or packets must have some exclusive key attached to distinguish them from ordinary ones.”
So there was power out there and there were communication signals being sent.
The Tokyo city center was still covered in EM waves and fiber optic cables, but everyone was locked out of using them.
“So what is it we need to connect to Maxwell? It’s simple: we find the special loophole similar to the emergency services connection. There has to be one somewhere.”
“But, Satori-kun, do you know what exactly it is? You don’t have Maxwell’s help right now.”
That was true. I was a normal high school boy without that disaster environment simulator. I could not hack into a system or break into a safe on my own.
But there was something even high school student would understand.
“Whether it was to get the people to evacuate or to make a direct attack, whoever-it-was must have been upset to find this storm raging. They would be wondering why it had to happen today.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“I don’t know what their original plans were, but if they’re trying to do something using the blackout, they’ll be tracking the storm in real time. I mean, if they get caught in some flooding now, the normal system isn’t up and running. The police and firefighters aren’t going to come rescue them no matter what happens. Traveling through the dark and stormy city is risky when you don’t know what rivers are flooded and what roads are underwater, so they’ll want some weather data.”
I raised my index finger.
“And let’s not forget that the Tokyo Skytool is gathering meteorological data. And they do it by checking the slight distortions in the TV broadcast signal from temperature, humidity, and rainfall.”
“Are you saying the bad guy is using the Skytool?”
We still did not know who we were up against, but Ayumi was already calling them the “bad guy”.
I understood why.
We were facing a mysterious darkness and a Tokyo missing its people. In that bizarre situation, it was a relief to reach such an understandable conclusion.
An anthropomorphized fear could be defeated.
Unfortunately, this was similar to the way some humans found peace of mind by hating Archenemies.
“Almost certainly. The Sumida River and its tributary run right by the Skytool. You saw it when we arrived, right? And the Arakawa River isn’t far away either. We’re surrounded by water. To transmit the gathered data and to receive data on river water level, the Skytool must have a fairly heavy-duty connection to the Meteorological Agency.”
…And if that connection was still functioning, we only had to use it.
Once my phone had an internet connection, I could contact Maxwell and figure out what was going on.
“I get that we have to hook your phone up to a computer doing weather stuff, but then why are we at a restaurant?”
“The selling point here isn’t the foie gras or the caviar, Erika. It’s the view. Whether it’s sunny or rainy will greatly change how busy they are. That affects how much ingredients they need, so if the entire broadcast tower is gathering raw weather data, they’re sure to have some kind of deal worked out. That way they don’t have leftover high-quality ingredients that would get damaged in the freezer.”
So with that…
I circled behind the register and checked the devices there…but they were all dead.
“In that case, maybe it’s in the office space in the back. I should be able to connect outside the tower if I hook my phone up to the computer there.”
“Fugu. But aren’t computers made so they won’t run without a password?”
“I have some ideas for how to deal with that.”
We walked through the darkness to reach the door in the back located where it could not be seen from the front. Once again, we only had my phone’s light to go on. I hoped I could recharge it with the cable.
We had some trouble in the narrow hallway thanks to some weird height differences and some cardboard boxes piled up, but we found ourselves somewhere very different from the kitchen.
“Is this the place?”
It had a cheap sofa and table plus an outdated computer on a work desk, so it felt like the combination of a rest area and an office. It was a desktop computer, but the actual computer was installed in the back of the flat screen monitor, making it little different from a large tablet. Since no customers would see the room, there were a lot of things strewn across the floor. The computer had a card reader attached, so timecard management was probably one of the tasks it was used for.
After I grabbed a label from the desk and placed it over the small camera lens as per my usual habit, Ayumi spoke up with doubt on her face.
“We found it, but that looks as dead as everything else.”
“No.”
The monitor was dark and the cooling fan wasn’t running, but when I felt the back of the tablet-like flat screen monitor, I felt some faint warmth. A lot more models no longer used fans now that smartphones and tablets were common. It could be hard to tell at a glance if something had power.
“It is running. Although it might be using an internal battery now that the power from the outlet is down.”
I touched the screen, but there was no response. When I tried touching the power button on the edge, the bright light seemed to stab into my dark-adjusted eyes. It was far brighter than my phone.
“Agh… Look here. The communication icon on the edge of the screen is lit up. The fiber optic cable is connected to something!”
The actual screen was stuck on a password entry screen, but the task tray of standard programs contained the icon for an internet connection.
There was no doubting it now.
Any computer in the tower that had anything at all to do with the meteorological data was still connected to the outside. That proved this was not just a blackout. Someone had intentionally chosen to lock the general users out of the power and internet.
“So you just have to hook your phone up with a cable now?” asked Ayumi. “But what about the password?”
My phone’s battery was at about 50%. Once that was gone, we would lose our light in the darkness. The remaining power was approaching worrying territory and I wanted to recharge it via USB as soon as possible, but…but there was a problem. I wanted to unlock the password before attaching the cable. I doubted I could hook my phone up without going through the computer and my phone was full of personal information. I wanted to turn off any auto-reading settings on the computer before attaching it.
That meant I needed to break through the password before I could contact Maxwell, but I could not hack without Maxwell. This was not a problem I could solve on my own. So…
“I’ll start by repeating some random letter.”
“Onii-chan, there’s no way it’s ‘aaaa’. And if you get it wrong too many times, I bet it locks you out.”
That was not what mattered. I only wanted to know how many characters the input box took, so instead of hitting enter, I erased it all with the backspace key.
“I see. 25 alphanumeric characters.”
“What does that tell you, Satori-kun?”
“Your average person can’t memorize that.”
I looked around the office now that the monitor had brightened it up a fair bit.
“I’ve read that the longest string a Japanese person can memorize at a glance is the reading of someone’s name or a phone number without the area code. That means it can’t reach the double digits. And our memories may have gotten worse now that everyone relies on their phone’s address book. That’s why everyone abbreviates long movie and manga titles down to about four characters. And if it’s a random alphanumeric string you can’t make a good mnemonic for, there must be a memo around here somewhere.”
That was about as careless as you could get and entirely defeated the purpose of the password, but it was a surprisingly common mistake made in offices. Especially when the same computer was used by multiple people instead of every employee being given their own computer. Plus, the office floor was so cluttered because they assumed no guests would ever come back here, so there was a decent chance the workers had grown lazy about security.
I checked in the most suspicious drawer in the desk.
“Ayumi, Erika, you two search too. It could be in a notebook or on a label, but there should be a 25-character alphanumeric string around here somewhere.”
The drawer was pretty messy too. I found writing tools like a pen and an eraser, a USB memory stick, a key to something, a pack of pocket tissues, and even some balled-up receipts and coupons. Did they actually take the elevator all the way to the surface during their breaks? But I didn’t see any scraps of paper with a password jotted down on it.
“Wah!?”
Ayumi gave a panicked cry as she searched another part of the office. I turned around thinking she might have tripped over one of the cardboard boxes on the floor, but what was she doing? She was staring at the whiteboard by the wall in the dimly-lit room.
Erika also looked puzzled.
“Ayumi-chan?”
“I think…something just moved???”
Ayumi continued staring at the whiteboard without looking back our way. Moved? What had? Was she talking about the colored magnets on the whiteboard?
“Hey, Ayumi, we need to take this seriou-…”
I started speaking and shined my phone’s light over her way out of habit.
That was when it happened.
I saw something odd illuminated by the dual light sources of the computer monitor and my phone.
I honestly could not believe I had not seen it until now.
Something made of what looked like frog skin was spread out across the whiteboard right in front of Ayumi’s nose and it was…wriggling???
“Whoa, wh-what!?”
It was a strange lifeform bent like a boomerang and measuring about 150cm long. I realized it was even bigger than Ayumi. It had no eyes or mouth as far as I could see, but its “skin” was enough to instantly know this was a living creature and not an inanimate object. The slimy surface had a mottled pattern colored the light brown of dried grass, but strange patterns appeared on occasion. The patterns were a combination of large circles and straight lines, so they reminded me of constellations or crop circles.
“Wait, Satori-kun! Focusing on it will only draw you in! It doesn’t turn transparent; it’s messing with our visual recognition!!”
At any rate.
It may have been a mistake for Erika and me to shout when the creepiness of the thing belatedly hit us.
Our little sister’s body was slammed to the floor.
Ayumi must not have even had time to cry out. Had that faceless and limbless boomerang thing kicked off the whiteboard to leap at her!?
“Damn that thing!!”
“Wait, I will do it!”
I immediately grabbed a pen and a large pair of scissors from a nearby penholder, but before I could do anything, Erika’s body slice through the darkness in her gothic lolita dress and leather pants. Her slender leg kicked up toward the mysterious light brown mass and the thick heel of her boot slammed into it.
Did she feel the blow land or not?
By the time she grimaced, the boomerang-like thing flattening Ayumi bent even further and leaped toward a nearby wall. Then it jumped to the ceiling. It did not seem to stand up or grab onto anything and the ends of its boomerang shape did not have any limbs attached. Did it normally crawl around with its flat body and bend itself like a bow to spring away when it sensed danger? The back side was probably covered with fine hairs or suckers. It reminded me of a univalve attached to a rock or a horseshoe crab moving through the shallows. No, I was trying not to think about it, but its movements really were most like a roach that could jump even better than a grasshopper. It had barely made any noise, but if I was asked to explain its movements to someone, I would probably mimic some kind of scurrying noise. And since it was larger than Ayumi, that kind of movement really was enough to give me goose bumps.
But…eh?
The creature with frog-like skin, a light brown color, and occasional crop circle patterns had attached itself to the ceiling…but then it disappeared!?
“Wh-where is it? Where’d that thing go!?”
“…”
I aimed my phone’s light all around, but I couldn’t find it again. There was no trace of it. I belatedly remembered I had a camera app and started it up, but I couldn’t see anything through the screen either. And I had no way of knowing if it had simply left or if it could fool the machine too.
Erika spoke while cautiously viewing our surroundings.
“I think it uses the gap between the known and the unknown. That would do nothing against a camera, but that must be how it tricks our minds.”
Had it escaped from the office?
Or was it still in here with us?
Now was not the time to stand around talking…or was it? I felt like taking action before hearing this would be a fatal mistake.
“People think separately about things they already know and things they are seeing for the first time. Take a human face for example. If you arrange dots like they’re the corners of an upside-down triangle, the brain will mistake it for a face. That is because your brain simplifies what it must process by opening that existing drawer and using that framework. We mistake ordinary things for ghosts because our brains can take that process too far at times.”
“Come to think of it, there were some silly rumors of an ancient wall painting showing someone using an air conditioner.”
“Exactly. So what happens if we come across something that we think we can categorize but a closer look shows we don’t actually recognize it? When there is no clear yes or no, our brain doesn’t know what drawer to use and we fail to recognize the thing right in front of us.”
Pretty much everyone must remember a time when they scared themselves as a small child after seeing a face in some wood grain.
But what about the opposite?
After growing up, do you still remember the random wood grain patterns that did not look like a face or anything else? Do you still remember where you saw it and how it made you feel? …It seemed normal for that to slip from your mind even though you had actually seen it.
The human brain did not process everything equally.
So in that sense…
“Crop circles.”
That did seem perfect. They had a retro ring to them and everyone was familiar with them, but there had never actually been a clear answer about them. There were reports of people messing with fields for attention, but that one answer did not actually explain every last one of them.
That was when I heard a loud metallic banging. My shoulders jumped and I aimed my phone’s light over to see the office’s door standing halfway open.
I was pretty sure the wind had not done that.
Yes. That was it.
Even if it could pass right in front of us without us noticing, it could not pass through walls or doors. I had no idea what it was, but it apparently needed to push the door open to leave.
That was it, right?
I seriously hoped it was not clever enough to have thrown something at the door while staying in the room with us.
“Erika, Ayumi, are you all right? If you’ve checked it already, can you scatter that stack of copy paper on the floor?”
“Satori-kun?”
“It’s like stepping on fallen leaves. We might not be able to ese it, but we should be able to hear it step on the paper and see the track it leaves.”
We had no idea which direction to worry about as we spread the A4-size paper across the floor. Then I slowly approached the door and gently shut it.
“…”
No response.
That 150cm slimeball must have left a trail because some of the copy paper soaked up something sticky and changed color. That wasn’t poisonous…was it?
It could still be clinging to the walls or ceiling, so I poked around with a mop, but I never detected the unnaturally soft sensation of frog skin getting in the way.
…That meant we were safe, didn’t it?
Thinking back, it was pretty big. After all, it was bigger than my little sister. Even if it was mostly flat, I doubted it could fit below the sofa or behind the shelves.
“What…was that thing? Was it some kind of Archenemy?”
I had no idea what to make of all that and Erika looked just as clueless while she used the arm extending from her torn sleeve to lend sticky Ayumi a handkerchief as she finally got up from the floor. I mean, it was a slimy boomerang. Most anyone would be confused.
But.
“Is that thing to blame for the viewing deck being abandoned and Tokyo being wrapped in darkness?”
“Ugh, cough, cough… Onii-chan, Maxwell is more important. I bet they’ll know everything.”
My little sister groaned some with her track suit and midriff-baring jogging wear all slimy.
If all of this was connected, she was probably right.
I couldn’t rid myself of my unease as we searched the office again. We had to find a memo containing the 25-character alphanumeric string used for the computer’s password.
“Come to think of it, there were empty snack boxes scattered around.”
“Fugu. There’s nothing in them.”
“Yes, but someone’s attached a new QR code on this one.”
I wasn’t sure if you would call that analog or digital, but I held my phone up to it to decode it.
“23, 24…okay, that’s 25. This has to be it!”
We had to solve one problem at a time. And that thing might have some obvious vulnerability known everywhere in the outside world. It would not hurt to connect my phone to Maxwell.
I once more faced the computer on the work desk and typed in the password while checking each character in the dim lighting. Afterwards, I clicked the enter button on the screen.
“Okay, it worked.”
It switched to an ordinary desktop. There was an aurora wallpaper with a few icons on the left side of the screen. That was all it was, but it felt as nostalgic as arriving home after a long journey. I could tell just how badly I had longed for a perfectly ordinary computer with an internet connection.
First, I messed with the settings a little to make sure it would not read any data in from my phone.
Once I was through the password and had the cable attached, using the same connection was simple. I no longer had to mess with the computer and could connect to the internet with just my phone’s screen.
It still had no signal, but I had a decent speed. Seeing that was enough for my legs to feel weak.
“Maxwell, if you can hear this, respond using the usual process.”
“Sure. I have been cycling through the nearby devices for a while now, but I could not make a connection until you created an opening.”
Seeing the familiar social media speech bubble was like seeing the light of a convenience store or family restaurant after walking through the dark night in midwinter. Finally. At long last. It had not been all that long really, but things were back to normal.
“We’re stuck on the general viewing deck of the Skytool. What happened while we were trapped in the elevator? This seems like it has to be more than just the storm damaging the broadcast tower.”
“Sure.”
I thought I was ready for whatever the answer was.
Tokyo was wrapped in an unbelievable level of darkness and we had seen a weird slimy boomerang with frog-like skin in the restaurant office. Something abnormal was happening here. That much was clear.
But.
None of it prepared me for the shock I felt when I saw the precise and emotionless text on my phone’s screen.
“Based on an analysis of multiple data sources, the most likely theory is the arrival of unidentified intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms. The JSDF has fully sealed off the 23 wards, which includes the Tokyo Skytool.”
[Mobile Temp] Aliens and the Possibility of Contact [File 04]
The word alien originally referred to outsiders and foreigners, but most people associate it with space aliens in modern times.
It is unknown how much life exists in this vast universe, but it is thought to be highly unlikely that extraterrestrial life with intelligence equal to or greater than humans will make a planned visit to this planet.
Reason 1: We have detected planets with an environment similar to Earth’s, but they are so far away there would be no benefit in targeting Earth.
Reason 2: If the lifeforms live in an environment entirely different to Earth’s, they will likely view ordinary water or oxygen as harmful and have no reason to seek out Earth.
Reason 3: If they have the technological level or intelligence to visit Earth across those vast distances, they are sure to understand the risks and downsides of doing so.
But with all that said, do not forget that these reasons are only looking at the case of a planned visit. They are no guarantee for an unintended visit such as an unforeseen accident leading the lifeform to drift or crash land here.
You think this is absurd and not worth considering because the odds have an astronomically large denominator?
Yes, but I am talking about outer space, which is the very realm of astronomy.
Plus, the birth of life on Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs had equally miniscule odds of happening. I am sorry to say, the odds of something occurring are no reason to let your guard down in this field.
Back to Chapter 1
