When supposedly close-knit groups in search of new lands encounter hardship upon arrival at their destination, they often succumb to partisanship and infighting. It wasn’t a rare occurrence in humanity’s 7000 years in space. In that respect, the unity of the Circs after arriving at Fat Beach Ball from the Galactive Interactive 300 years ago was an oddity.
Clans discussed small matters among themselves, while bigger matters were negotiated during the Bow Awow. They had coexisted without ever turning their base ships’ cannons on one another up to the present day. The reduction of the original twenty-four clans to the modern sixteen was entirely due to natural population decline.
“What do you think made a life like this possible?”
This was a question posed to kids in elementary school, no matter what their clan. The answer teachers gave, human and AI alike, was, “The fact that we brought our strong ideals along with us.”
The Circs had indeed brought firm wills and clear ideals along with them to establish themselves on new land as soon as they arrived in the Mother Beach Ball system. Unfortunately, they were unable to obtain several critical resources, contrary to their pre-arrival expectations. More fortunately, the planet they had settled at, Fat Beach Ball, allowed them to avoid an unpleasant end with its abundant fuel. Afterwards, they established their industry of exporting besshu to the GI and used it to maintain their pacifist lifestyle... Nearly every Circ was taught that growing up. Every year, though, kids were guaranteed to question those teachings.
“Why did a large group of our ancestors leave the Galactive Interactive and settle at a remote place like this? I want to ride an apatosaurus in a big savanna and chase morpho butterflies, too.”
“I want to try petting a cat, and gulguiuli too! Both the red and blue ones! That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”
“I want to board the Dàxúnniǎo.”
To that, human and AI instructors each gave different answers.
AI would respond with a happy smile: “You might be allowed to board if you live a consistently virtuous life.”
A human teacher, by contrast, might wryly respond, “I also attempted to board it, myself...”
The requirements to board the Dàxúnniǎo, which came from the GI every two years, were unknown. Anyone could apply, but applications were rarely approved. Rejections came with the explanation that Dàxúnniǎo was not a passenger ship or for sightseeing, but many believed there was no way the gigantic bird with a sixty-kilometer wingspan wasn’t capable of ferrying a huge number of passengers. Stowaways were tossed out in capsules, and while it was possible some attempts had succeeded, there was no way to confirm that.
Still, the Circs had a few scraps of information from outside. They were told that there were a variety of planets in the GI—cold planets and hot planets, violently stormy planets and desolate rocky planets, planets with cities and people crowding the roadways and planets shrouded in mist with no people at all. Strangely, though, they weren’t told of their location or how to get there. The Dàxúnniǎo didn’t inform them about any of the bright stars in the night sky and feigned complete ignorance of the matter. Both its point of departure and its destination were classified.
To the Circs, it was clear that the Dàxúnniǎo controlled their access to information, but the intent for doing so was beyond them. It didn't seem like it was a simple matter of not wanting to allow Circs onboard, but a decision with an air of inviolability being enforced. Neither human nor AI instructors dared mention it.
Surrounded by a world that treated them like that, most kids only developed a vague sense of anxiety for the outside. The Galactive Interactive was a world that existed far away from theirs, a background prop that was spoken of nicely. The Circs’ reality, in contrast, was small and peaceful. They didn’t need to go to the very ends of a galaxy where nothing existed, not with another 15 clans right there. The differences in food and customs could be shocking, but it was the kind of shock they hoped for. They could visit another clan every two years. It would take thirty years to see them all, and an entire lifetime to visit each clan three times. Well, isn’t that experience refreshing enough?
It was rare for a kid to reach a different conclusion. The ideal of settling down somewhere else wasn’t totally out of reach—young people spread their roots at FBB feeling that, with nowhere else to flee, the very act of fighting another clan was a dangerous, foolish act.
It was precisely because the Circs were a peaceful society that the other clans needed to deal with the abnormal situation surrounding the Gendō clan’s conduct in CC 304. They had attacked the home of a woman in another clan at night, shot live bullets from a small ship—and as if that hadn’t been enough—forcefully abducted someone from another clan’s base ship. Any one of those was considered an atrocity worthy of compensation and censure.
The reality was that it hadn't been the first time the Gendō clan behaved questionably. In the back half of the previous year CC 303, they had repeatedly taken an aggressive stance by objecting to remarks by the Itar and QOT concerning the Circs’ freedom and criticizing the Jack-of-All-Trades’ proposal to redistribute work between men and women. Issues were piling up, and it had become a topic of discussion at the most recent Bow Awow in CC 304. That discussion, and its investigation into the situation, had taken place behind closed doors, though the Gendō participating in the Council of Elders were also summoned to attend.
That was when it became clear the Clan Chief himself was the source of those issues.
Nurude Shikiriyōni Keiwaku, who assumed the role of Gendō Clan Chief the year before last, seemed to have bizarre notions. He made decisions that, from an outsider’s point of view, seemed arbitrary and capricious. While he got into arguments that were pointless at first glance, there was a hint of a deeper purpose behind them—but even those involved in the Council of Elders found it extremely difficult to pin down what that purpose was.
Known for its analytical skill, the QOT had a belief bordering on total confidence that the Gendō were attempting to provoke a reaction from the others. Taking their actions into consideration, it appeared as if they were quietly gauging how the others would react in the event of an accident or change in circumstances. If that really was the case, then it further hinted at a deeper purpose.
With that in mind, the modern Circs put their differences aside and attentively watched a single ship—Fuyō.
Fuyō, the floral settlement that spun with its face to the sun. Light gleamed off its five petals and their rows of innumerable square windows. Inside them were the Gendō’s dwellings, their offices, classrooms and stores, roadways connecting each residence, parks for the elderly to rest, farms which grew vegetables in abundance, and factories exploiting photochemical reactions—and no matter the window, the profiles of people could be seen in the plentiful sunlight that poured through each one as Fuyō sailed over FBB’s day side.
Due to their design, most of the Circs’ base ships had given up on their star’s direct light and instead relied on artificial lighting, and so the Gendō took great pride in their Fuyō receiving light across its wide span. Since sunlight could come in from side-on, it was necessary to think of solutions to things like glare or asymmetric tanning. But whenever other clans complained of such things, the Gendo blew them off as trivial concerns in return for the ability to bask in the plentiful light.
Still, that didn’t mean the Gendō were devoid of people who disliked that light—one such person inside Fuyō was rummaging around an especially dark place where the light couldn’t reach.
“Being left alone was exactly what I needed, even if it’s not for long...”
The faint self-monologue faded into the incessant sound of wind and black hole darkness of the cramped, endlessly long space. The voice’s owner was crawling through a ventilation duct.
There was a bang and an echoing “ouch”, followed by a small light suddenly switching on. For a moment, a pale, thin, sleek silhouette appeared in the intersection of dust-coated ducts, then disappeared into the darkness again just as quickly.
“Ah, I’m here already?”
Its way confirmed, the voice faded out again. If anyone had heard it, though, they were more likely to doubt their ears or their sanity.
The voice belonged to Diode, but she wasn’t dressed in her usual deck dress, nor the fletched kimono and hakama she had recently been given to wear. Her long silver hair was wrapped in a bath towel and a cookie-sized lighting plate hung from her neck. Below that, there was nothing else. Top, bottom, back or front—nothing. In other words, the tiny girl was crawling around on all fours inside the bleak ducts almost completely naked.
Her exact location was a ventilation system exhaust subduct in the Typhoon Palace’s sepal, under the administrative center’s location in Fuyō’s fifth petal, Year 231 Ring. Or, more simply, in the shadow of the Cabinet Building where she was being held captive, using one of the pathways that lead into a chaotic mechanical sector.
The date was CC 304, Day 109. At some point during the fifteen days since her kidnapping, her General Imagination Concretization Exam had begun, and she’d gone through various tests. It was the day she received her results.
The girl unflinchingly made her way through the long, dark, and cramped space. She stopped just before intersections, sensing the sound change as she approached. Occasionally, she’d use the lighting plate she’d torn off a wall to read the codes scratched on the ducts’ walls, but didn’t feel the need to do so for most of the turns she took. She smoothly navigated her way left and right through the labyrinth of linked ducts.
Whenever she encountered one of the loud air supply fans that blocked her way at set intervals, she fumbled for its power cable and pulled, released the maintenance latch, then rotated the fan off to the side to allow her to pass through. When vertical sections came up, she relied on the handles that served as a ladder and ascended several tens of meters that way.
That these passages allowed for human access wasn’t odd. Unlike life inside of a habitable atmosphere, settlements in outer space had to fully recycle their air. Since it was impossible to crack a window for fresh air, the entire volume was joined together with ductwork. A purification center in the central section produced clean air, which was distributed everywhere by a system of ducts for clean air and retrieved by another system of ducts for the exhaust. Any breakdown inside the ducts could lead to suffocation, so the system used large diameter pipes that were accessible from the monitoring stations where technicians tracked the air’s chemical composition at the part-per-billion level. It allowed them to swiftly remove any harmful contaminants.
So, it wasn’t the ducts that were strange, but Diode’s being there. She knew their routing, had a sense of direction, could crawl and climb her way through them, and had the determination to reach her goal. It wasn’t the behavior of a girl who was simply making a break for it.
After twenty minutes of sneaking through the ducts, she saw a faint light ahead—the first light that didn’t come from her. She quietly approached and carefully peeked through an entryway.
The scenery inside was totally out of place. It was at the bottom of a small, rectangular shaft. It was about two meters on a side with a high ceiling. It was a place known as an air distribution well. Its walls were full of openings, and, as its name implied, air flowed in from the ducts in its vicinity.
Diode now had another objective to accomplish. Nestled up to the wall was a worn bench that had been picked up somewhere. A table, also borrowed, was placed in the room’s center. Its top was a mess; there was a sketchy-looking information terminal in questionable working order, a general-use printer, along with a mirror and makeup tools. Empty food printer cartridges, plushies, clothes, and shoes were scattered around on the floor; a mattress had been cut in two, with one half forced up against the wall. The bedding strewn around it made it look more like a bird nest than a bed or a sofa.
A lone girl sat on top of the mattress, hugging her knees as she idly watched a concert projected on the tabletop. Her wax-hardened black hair was sculpted to resemble bird wings, and a printed accessory resembling a bird of prey’s eye adorned the right half of her face. She looked quite flashy. Diode didn’t know who she was, but could guess what she was, since she wore the same fletched kimono and hakama that had been given to her.
The girl was a student from the Gendō girls’ school.
Their ideal was stated as, “Grace and wellness. Our setting maintains the tradition of raising and teaching girls to weave outstanding nets.” The Gendō girls’ school would never allow a student of theirs to relax in a messy hideout within the ducts.
After glimpsing that forbidden sight, Diode paused for a moment to breathe. She had already expected there to be an obstacle here. Still, it didn’t mean she could totally let her guard down yet. She only stuck her face through the opening and knocked on the wall.
“Hello, are you weaving a net?”
Surprised, the girl looked in her direction and replied, “‘Sup. Yeah, I’m weaving, uh...”
They had exchanged a codeword and not a greeting, and the exchange made them fellow travelers, more or less. Whether they actually felt they were was another question altogether. Naturally, the sudden appearance of an unfamiliar girl put the student on guard.
Her eyes sharpened into a glare at Diode. “Who are you?”
Diode couldn’t afford to pick a fight. It was possible she could carefully talk her way in, but she couldn’t think of anything that might persuade the girl. The only option was to tell the honest truth.
“I’m Kanna Ishidōrō Gendō. I used to be a regular here. I came to use the equipment here, for reasons. Is it okay if I come in?”
“What? Who?” The girl frowned again and stood. She was of medium height, but had a very imposing physique. This could turn ugly—Diode readied herself to jump back and run for it.
The other girl’s eyes shot open. “Kanna... Kanna... Small body, silver hair... Is it really One Bottle Kanna-san?”
“...Is this about that time I drank too much medicine?” Diode grimaced. Not too long ago, while doing the usual stupid things with her stupid friends, she had gone lights out by doing the stupidest thing of all. It happened while they were having fun popping weak, candy-like sleep meds together.
She’d adopted her current name after that. Her friends, people she had only recently met, all thought she got cocky and did something crazy to try and prove herself—and it was precisely that belief that led to their nickname for her.
However, the face of the girl in front of her suddenly lit up. “Yeah, that! That’s what I am talking about! Kanna-san, didn’t you swallow all the remaining medicine and run off so the other kids wouldn’t get caught? You took care of the evidence! Is that true?”
“...How did you know that?” Her reply meant, I thought I was the only one who saw it that way.
However, the girl took Diode’s reply as confirmation, then got up and got close to Diode without a second thought.
“So, it is true, right? Your face tells the whole story, doesn’t it?! Dude, I can’t believe all of that was true, that’s so rad! You’re this seriously crazy cool person who did a lot of drugs, got one over on teachers, broke tables in anger, and became a fugitive from the shopping district vigilantes after you lit up three stores! And if that wasn’t enough, you jumped ship and then boarded a fishing boat! Like, what?!”
“Why do you know so much...?” Diode had some points of disagreement about the level of violence being described, but everything the girl said was true for the most part. It took her by surprise, since she had been certain she was about to be mocked again.
“Meika-san told us about it! And that you also made this hideout happen by crawling around the ducts in search of a good place!”
“...Right.”
“Ah, I’m Ranju, a couple behind Meika—er, it is my pleasure to study two grades behind her! Ranju Yomosugara Tachimachi! I’m so happy to meet the lege—I mean, it is my pleasure to become acquainted with the legendary Kanna-senpai!”
“Legendary? I haven’t even been gone a year, though...”
Ranju completely dropped her defensive posture and excitedly leaned towards Diode’s face. Diode, who looked troubled, responded with a slow, uncertain nod. She was disgusted by the thought that Meika’s praise was responsible for a junior treating her fondly for the first time.
That said, amicability was amicability.
“So, what do you wa—er, what brings you to grace this humble hideout with your presence, Kanna-senpai? Ask me anything-please-andthankyou!!”
Since Ranju was offering, Diode gratefully took her up on the offer.
Before she borrowed the equipment, Diode was tossed an airtight jacket as a temporary loan. (Her nudity worried Ranju somewhat, but she had to accept Diode’s explanation that she came to the hangout by escaping through the baths.) Then, she sat down and booted up the communications terminal on the table.
“The truth is, I’m here to contact someone on the outside.”
“Outside meaning... another clan? You know that’s forbidden, right?”
“Yeah, I do, but if there’s anything that’s sure to get through, it’s this, right?”
Diode manually operated the terminal’s old input device. Meika had somehow gotten her hands on it and provided it for the space. Diode had mentioned watching underground Content shoulder-to-shoulder with her friends here to Terra.
Contacting anyone outside of the clan was forbidden, but Diode had an account on the terminal allowing her to do so. After booting it up, she went through her individual authenticator and sent a request to contact another clan—it didn’t go through.
She didn’t give up, though. Diode still remembered the alts, fake accounts, and others’ legitimate accounts she had collected just for this eventuality, trying one after another. None worked.
“Unnnngh...” Diode threw up her hands and thought through her next best option.
Ranju shyly piped up. “Not to bother you, but if you need to talk to another clan... I have an account too, honest...”
“Really?” Diode asked, reflexively pivoting towards her. “Could you lend it to me?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t mind, but—can you tell me who you’re talking to and what it’s about?”
Diode stared at her, and Ranju stiffly turned her eyes away as she replied, “I mean, using accounts for that usually gets them suspended, so, um, lending it out without knowing why feels a bit... You know?”
Of course, her question was mostly curiosity about what would drive her “legendary senpai” to go that far. The possibility of another reason kept Diode on her toes, though. That said, it seemed to Diode that Ranju had been fond of her from the start of this encounter, and the girl acted like her friends—a secret tomboy outside of school. Diode decided it was safe to tell her.
“I scored a seven.”
“Excuse me?”
“The General Imagination Concretization Exam, the one to become a decomper. I scored seven points on it, you see.”
“...Seriously? Can a student in the girls’ school even score that badly?”
“Don't give me that.” Diode could understand Ranju’s genuine surprise, so she forced a smile. “One can. It’s me, the student who scored an all-time low.”
Nurude had gotten the results that morning. He must have already realized that Diode was a girl who was completely useless at decomping, and the most valuable decomper in history was actually her partner back then. It meant he was probably scheming to bring Terra over to Fuyō.
Only now? Really? It was all Diode could say to how long it had taken others to realize how good Terra was, but that realization inevitably meant that she was in increasing danger. One way or another, Diode needed to get in touch to let her know, however far she needed to push herself.
“There are just so many ways to communicate with foreign clans. Maybe I should have hacked into the central communications tower or passed a paper letter at the spaceport instead? Neither of those sound like tall orders for the legendary One Bottle Kanna, do they?” Diode punctuated her explanation for coming here with a dramatic thwack of the table.
Ranju listened to her quietly, but nodded and responded, “Got it.” She started to input her account name in the terminal. Diode wasn’t sure Ranju actually understood but left her to handle the inputs.
“I think it’ll connect this time...”
After entering the connection instructions on the terminal, Ranju turned to Diode. The two watched with bated breath until an image of twenty-four points circling a planet eventually appeared.
“Yes...!” “It worked!”
Diode immediately tried calling Terra’s minicell and the Intercontinental house back at Idaho, but the calls were rejected. It hadn’t been refused on the basis of coming from an unknown sender—the reason was clearly stated as a rejected interclan server connection.
“Wha? What’s up with that?”
“Um, can I check something?” Ranju seemed to be knowledgeable about those operations, so Diode swapped places with her to let her investigate.
Before long, the reason became clear. Terra was headline news.
<The 58K decomper jumped ship in an unidentified spacecraft>
“Terra-san...!”
Diode automatically looked up at the ceiling. Of anything that could happen, it had been this, and with the worst timing. But now that it was happening, her only choice was to think through her options with the assumption Terra was on her way.
She needed to escape and meet up with Terra somehow, but she would get caught immediately if she ran now. She needed a different way to sneak out once Terra arrived. For that, she needed a helping hand from someone she trusted, plus a surefire method to contacting them—one with absolute secrecy.
How am I going to manage that? Bothered, Diode covered her face.
Ranju spoke up. “Senpai... Could I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Was that woman your new girlfriend?”
Diode immediately stopped breathing. She started to think about how much of this she could innocently play off, but the word “new” said plenty about what Ranju already knew.
“...Did you hear that from Meika?”
“Yeah, she’s told me about you,” Ranju replied, smiling wryly.
If the situation was different, I wouldn’t mind talking a little bit about how I feel about all kinds of things—Diode thought. Time was short, though.
As tersely as possible, she replied, “We work together in the same pillar boat. That, and she’s someone important to me.”
“I see. And she cherishes you just as much?”
“Yeah, I don’t have any doubt about that. Terra-san is the kind of person who can cherish others, or, more specifically, me.” Diode immediately got the feeling she had been too earnest.
“Heh, that’s nice,” Ranju replied with a faint smile. “I see, so she’s the kind of person you’re willing to deal with the trouble of crawling through the ducts for the sake of getting in touch...”
Ranju softly rubbed her fingertips together. It made her seem like an entirely different person compared to when she had been glaring or gesturing happily. Diode took her as someone who contained multitudes when expressing herself.
“Why are you here today?”
“Meika-san told... No, I mean—I can’t dress like this or listen to this sort of music back in the dorms.”
Ranju touched her hair, which she had probably done up only after coming here, and displayed the concert that had been playing on the terminal when Diode showed up.
“Meika-san approached me after I got caught listening to this back at the dorms and told me there was a place I could do this kind of thing to my heart’s content. Then, well... after that she became someone I got along with. She’s a nice person.”
“Right.”
“But she also does that a lot with others, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, don’t I know it.”
“I’m sure.”
Then again, you would know that too, Diode thought.
It was time to retreat. Diode printed a single paper towel from the general-use printer on the table and thoroughly wiped between her fingers as she stood up and announced she was headed back.
“You’re going back? Not running away?” Ranju asked, confused.
Diode smiled back, a little sharply. “It’s almost like you knew I’d come here trying to escape something.”
“N-no...”
“If I came here to run away, I’d be found soon enough, so I’m going back now. Ah, right, thank you for lending this to me, I’ll be taking it,” Diode told Ranju. She thought it might be a little weird to undress again, so she crawled into the duct wearing the airtight jacket.
“Err, catch you later! I mean, please, take care!” Ranju shouted from behind her.
Diode backtracked along the route she had come in. That route would be a maze to an outside observer, but as she went through, she left everything how she found it, resetting the fans she stopped and erasing all traces of her presence. Halfway back, she tore the hand towel into small pieces and let them float off in the wind.
Finally, she arrived at the bright tunnel near the exit. She removed the jacket, then crawled on her belly to emerge feet first from the hole. The hole was an open vent high up on the walls of a large room, and Diode dangled from its edge using only her grip strength. Just as she was about to hop down, palms supported her feet from below, and Diode’s skin instantly erupted in goosebumps.
“Feel free to climb down on me, Kanna-san.” Diode looked down. Meika was raptly looking back up at her. “This is quite the pleasant sight. You’re as stunning as ever.”
Completely nude, Diode maintained a neutral expression and replied, “Why are you there?”
“I assumed you would have a difficult time climbing down.”
“Quit lying.”
“It was because you ran away, of course. Well, you’re forgiven, since you came back.”
“Could you stop staring at me so hard?”
“You’re cute, so I don’t think that will be possible.” Diode shifted her weight onto Meika’s palm in an effort to intentionally lose her footing, but Meika easily handled it and lowered her to the floor.
Steam shrouded the womens’ public bath in the Typhoon Palace. There was no one else there, despite bathing time approaching. Meika must have pulled strings to keep people away. Not long ago, Diode had left the baths using a mop as a ladder to climb into the vent. She had come to escape Jigō’s watch, since men weren’t allowed in the womens’ baths. In exchange, she had to settle for crawling around the ducts in the nude.
Enjoying herself, Meika continued, “Can you guess how I knew about this?”
“Come on. You used Ranju.”
“So you noticed? Oh my.”
“I think catching an honest girl to use like that is disgusting.”
Meika’s face remained unchanged despite Diode’s harsh, direct words. That was the sort of woman she had always been.
The Gendō clan’s iconic public baths came in both modern and old styles. The one here was old-style, and the high-class kind to boot. A giant bathtub with a twenty-person capacity and standing stalls for rinsing were surrounded by a garden projection behind naturally cultivated plants. It was the kind of space people could come in as they pleased, walk as they pleased, and clean as they pleased. Or, in other words, there was no mechanism to get in the way of looking. Or touching.
Meika let go of the bath towel that covered her and sat on an ornamental stone nearby. She extended her right hand. “You were exposed to the wind for quite a while, so you need a proper warming up. Would you care to join me?”
“You should save that invitation for someone who cares about you.”
Despite the beauty of Meika's exposed body, Diode freed her hand and left for the dressing room.