Ch.276Work Record #039 – A Pointless Dinner Appointment (2)

This was once my own routine. Arriving at the airport, parking my bike in a corner of the subscription parking lot, and boarding a plane to enjoy luxuries I wasn’t sure I deserved.

It felt both strange and joyful to be sharing this routine with my Eve. I lifted Eve’s bike and placed it in my subscribed parking space, which could fit one large car or two bikes.

Though nothing was on my hands, I dusted my palms off before wrapping my arm around Eve’s waist with a smile. I must have been a bit excited. Going out with Eve wasn’t rare, but it was always a pleasure.

“Are you ready to experience how inappropriately well freelancers get treated? It’s quite disconcerting, I tell you.”

“Nobody calls it that anymore… But hey, might as well enjoy being treated like a woman who cleverly snagged a capable younger partner to make life easier.”

Eve had become quite adept at responding to my remarks. When I was with her, even this smog-filled city seemed brighter.

Until now, I’d had to leave Eve behind when leaving the city, tasting the bitter and cold outside world alone. But today, I would take Eve away from this city. I rolled this thought around in my head like some villainous scheme.

As we entered the airport together, an airport employee was already waiting. Clearly a cyborg, but one who showed no trace of artificial skin smell or any visible signs of modification.

Unless you were a cyborg supremacist like Vola, every cyborg’s dream was to maintain performance while looking as human as possible. She bowed deeply to both of us in greeting.

“We received the cooperation request from Bellwether, Freelancer. I’ll guide you to the waiting aircraft. Thank you for using Pathfinder Corporation’s airport today.”

The fact that she skipped the company motto and went straight to the point showed she knew Bellwether people well. In situations like this, when summoned urgently by the Chairman, small talk was completely avoided.

It might have seemed a bit cold, but sometimes the standard approach was best. After a light nod, I naturally snatched Eve’s bag as well, ignoring her protests as I followed.

A man waiting along the way began approaching me. There was nothing special about him—an ordinary man with a solid but unremarkable appearance.

I returned his casual three-finger salute. His voice carried no particular weight either. He could easily pass for an ordinary Bellwether employee.

“For the company, employees, and shareholders. I’m William Tushinski from headquarters’ Chairman security team, temporarily assigned to security maintenance duty. Please feel at ease during your trip. Oh, and…”

After pausing as if about to say something important, he came out with something trivial. That unpretentiousness was actually quite characteristic of Bellwether people.

“Do you know any good places for tofu dishes? Preferably somewhere close to downtown. I’m not picky about the type.”

Tofu dishes were considered cheap everywhere, but tasty for something made primarily from synthetic ingredients. There were hardly any upscale restaurants serving them.

After telling him the names of a few decent restaurants, I waved lightly and headed toward the runway. Chairman Günter’s personal jet, painted in Bellwether’s distinctive style, was waiting for us.

I’m starting to feel a bit nauseated. Perhaps I’m much closer to being the ordinary twenty-three-year-old that my Eve sees than the fearsome Boogeyman others perceive.

Actually, the cheers for the Boogeyman aren’t that different from those for the Gardner. People find it more satisfying when criminals are hunted by the Boogeyman or the Gardner than when they’re just handcuffed and thrown in prison.

Who am I to say that’s strange? Instead of putting Walter in a neural prison, I killed him by impaling him with the harpoon in my hand. I did that even though Mr. Günter said it wasn’t rational.

Perhaps… this is normal and natural. Everyone wants villains to be destroyed. Including myself, we all choose the quickest, easiest, and most tempting method to achieve that goal.

Sometimes those easy methods aren’t available. John Rutherford, the cult leader of Hallowd Creek, seems untouchable as the chairman of a mega-corporation in a stable orbit and a Bellwether collaborator.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop wishing for his downfall, nor will I pray for lightning to suddenly strike and burn him. In situations like this, I’ll willingly choose the difficult and painful path. That’s all.

Instead of getting lost in thought, I gently patted my Eve’s waist—she looked a bit nauseated too—and we climbed the stairs to board the plane together.

The interior looked like a corner of a luxury mansion. It seemed excessively luxurious for a flight of just an hour and a half. In fact, it looked too luxurious even for a week-long stay.

I shouldn’t be too overwhelmed. This must be just the beginning. After taking a deep breath, I looked down at my Eve, whose hand rested on my arm around her waist, and smiled slightly.

“The problem isn’t riding this, but that when we arrive, there’ll be a car with a driver waiting, and that will take us to the tallest building in the middle of headquarters. Are you already feeling dizzy?”

My Eve made a face that seemed to express disgust. Still, the only bad thing about luxury was that enjoying it too often created bad habits. Once in a while was fine.

I sat down in a fixed chair across from a small table—a chair much softer than my bed—and the plane took off. The brief orientation about our destination was almost habitual.

The landscape of Los Angeles came into view below. The city became hazier as we ascended through the gray smog. Through the whitish gaps, the faintly visible city looked like an illusion.

This was a view I saw every time I left the city. It was familiar to me, but new to Eve… and now it had become one of the things I could share with her.

After briefly looking at the view, Eve turned her chair to face the interior of the plane. She had an expression that suggested discomfort, but it wasn’t motion sickness. Or perhaps it was—a sickness about the past.

“When I think about how Hallowd Creek and Los Angeles might be just a hand span apart when seen from up high… it makes me feel sick. You know what I did to cross that span, Arthur.”

She didn’t deny that her actions were problematic. Nor did she treat herself as a criminal whose entire life should be consumed by those actions. She simply acknowledged what had happened with composure.

It didn’t reduce the pain. But the desire to treat the pain could be suppressed by that single acknowledgment. People shouldn’t hope for pain to be healed but learn to live with it.

My Eve had accomplished that brilliantly. Perhaps I had too. The fact that I was betrayed and killed hasn’t changed, and I still don’t deny it, but now I no longer feel like I’m drowning in a soft bed.

That’s why I opened my arms to my Eve. It took her exactly one and a half seconds to rise from her chair and slip into my embrace with natural, fluid movements.

“Since that hand span of history brought Eve to my side, I don’t think I have anything to complain about. What about you?”

“That hand span of history brought me to your side, and you taught me how to accept that history. Since I’m the one who asked for the solution… yeah, I’d have to say it’s not bad.”

All these words were originally meant for Eve, who had been looking out the window feeling uncomfortable, but thanks to them, we didn’t try to look outside until the plane arrived at headquarters.

San Francisco Island had quite an artificial coastline. A bit south of San Francisco Airport, there was a coastline shaped like an arc of a circle. More accurately, it was part of a massive circle.

During that war period, when the Allied Forces’ weapons fell, they completely vaporized the corridor that originally connected San Francisco Island to the mainland. They say it was more powerful than what destroyed Brooklyn.

I heard it was meant to target San Francisco but was misdirected and landed far from the intended target, yet it was enough to peel away the city’s surface like fruit skin.

If I had paid more attention while on the plane, I might have seen that massive, artificial circular coastline created then… but I didn’t want to turn my eyes away from Eve to see the remnants of that war.

We arrived at headquarters and disembarked from Günter’s private jet. As I expected, we got into a waiting vehicle and headed toward the downtown headquarters.

The city didn’t look that different. The Bellwether-style minimalist design I was familiar with just spread more widely than in Los Angeles.

While in Los Angeles only the buildings around the corporate office had that atmosphere, as if dyed in it, at headquarters most buildings had that appearance. That’s because Bellwether had rebuilt this entire city.

The city had vitality. It wasn’t mechanical. There were people jogging, and unmanned food trucks waited along the streets. This was the ideal that Bellwether sought through efficiency.

Everyone performing at maximum efficiency, everyone moving beyond the past to create a world better than the present. Creating a future where that war could be forgotten was Bellwether’s ideal.

I could love that ideal. That ideal had poured love into me and raised that empty-eyed child in the old photos I occasionally looked at into someone capable of loving others.

But when I thought about how there would be no place for Nadia in that ideal city… it all felt wrong. Like something that needed to be corrected. There’s no particular order to it.

Perfectly simultaneously, I both loved and couldn’t love this city. The vehicle that had been driving for quite some time headed toward the Bellwether headquarters in the center of the city.

The headquarters looked like a cluster of white clouds. The structure—with the executive building towering in the center, surrounded by other buildings—wasn’t much different from the Los Angeles branch.

The biggest difference was that the headquarters was draped in a veil of dreams and ideals. For all Bellwether employees, the headquarters was a place they wanted to be assigned to at least once.

It was a reward in itself. Having headquarters directly acknowledge your efficiency was an achievement in life that could make a Bellwether employee shed buckets of tears.

For me, it was a somewhat more personal space. Because I know Günter Lighthammel. Though there’s much I don’t know, saying there’s much I don’t know means I can sketch some outline of the person.

It’s a place built by mixing all the emotions a person can have—the sadness, love, hatred, and hope of a father-like figure… That’s how I’ll define it. Our car stopped at the executive building of the headquarters.

Without any people present, two unmanned security drones in closed reinforcement suits without helmets, with holographic ram’s head shapes floating above them, and… Günter himself was waiting for us, unpretentiously.

It was almost amusing that the tycoon-like person who had made me think all those thoughts was waiting so modestly. As I got out carrying Eve’s luggage too, Günter nodded.

“I haven’t spoiled the kid after all. If I found out someone wearing a Type 4 was letting the person they claim to love carry their own luggage, I would…”

“It’s dangerous for someone who could erase people from existence to trail off with lines like that, Mr. Günter. Have you been well?”

Günter responded with a hearty laugh. Clicking his tongue, he gestured with his chin toward the towering executive building in front of us, then turned to me with one corner of his mouth raised in a smile.

“Who’s worrying about whom, Metzgerhund? Still… it’s been a while since I heard that. Well, I’ve been fine. Occasionally asking about your callsign… why is your callsign like that, Metzgerhund?”

“A colleague gave it to me, so don’t criticize it too much. You know I don’t have a hobby of scaring people.”

“But you’re quite skilled at it. I was going to say a more solid callsign would suit you better, but tsk. Since a colleague gave it to you. My security team colleagues wouldn’t have given such a callsign.”

In response to his words, which clearly revealed he was still regretful, I took another step back.

“People I’ve never worked with aren’t colleagues, are they? Anyway, what were you going to say after mentioning the callsign?”

“Nothing special. I’ve been occasionally asking Bellwether what the callsign Boogeyman has been doing and where. Your record is quite impressive. Willingly working even with companies we have awkward relationships with.”

He must be referring to Panacea Meditech. Günter didn’t seem to be reproaching me. After all, the free contract right was created so I could do necessary work in all sorts of places. I naturally responded with humor.

“I’d work with anyone to protect Polaris’s song.”

“I can’t argue with that. That was exactly our kids’ taste. Ah, yes. And who came with our Metzgerhund? I didn’t go so far as to politely ask Bellwether to pull up employee information.”

Usually, even someone capable of making animal-like sounds wouldn’t make such noises normally. But Günter alone… such sounds leaked out as if he couldn’t control them.

A beast that looks old but hasn’t aged at all. No beast stays so vigorous for over a hundred years, so “monster” might be a more fitting word than “beast.” He’s like a father to me.

My Eve cleared her throat, seeming a bit tense at Günter’s voice. For the chairman of a mega-corporation to speak like that was truly being polite.

“Call me Eve. I don’t have a number. I’m no longer the Hallowd Creek cult leader’s Eve… but this guy’s Eve.”

Günter smiled at me, sensing something in those words—something I once felt in my Eve’s voice.

“So that’s why this woman hasn’t come to headquarters.”

“Are you finally starting to feel like giving up?”

“Whether I feel like it or not, I have to give up, Arthur. A person who has built their own life can’t abandon it and leave. Still, I see there might be hope if I prepare a residence at headquarters.”

With those words, Günter put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. A silent zone briefly spread, and I heard about two short words. He still has beast-like senses.

“If you love a Hallowd Creek escapee whose scars have healed enough to show, well. I’m curious what insane plan you’re hatching for that person, Arthur.”

“Let’s have a pleasant dinner first and then talk slowly over drinks in the study later. A dinner appointment is a dinner appointment, right?”

At those words, Günter naturally patted my shoulder and released the side-hug, speaking in an uncharacteristically human voice filled with what felt like longing.

“Yes, it’s been a while… The dining table won’t be quiet. Let’s go up.”