Paprika (27 page)

Even while Atsuko was examining Tokita, her monitor occasionally intercepted images suggesting that Inui and Osanai were still communicating via the DC Mini. Many of the images had the atmosphere of an occult or esoteric religion, giving the impression that Inui was passing down some kind of quasi-sexual, quasi-religious education to Osanai in his dreams. Nothing more certain than that could be known, however, owing to the fragmentary nature of the images. Atsuko couldn’t use her collector to access their DC Minis, as they were wireless. To access their dreams in person, and to discover what form those dreams took, she needed to have a DC Mini herself. She badly wanted a DC Mini. Desperately so. If only she had a DC Mini, she might be able to glean their plans in advance, avoid falling into their traps, and turn their own conspiracy into a counter-offensive.

Tokita had previously confessed his love for Atsuko. Yet he was now so distant that he couldn’t even hear her voice, not even faintly. Atsuko was deeply saddened to realize that. She began to feel intense hatred for the people who’d done him such harm. They must have known she loved Tokita; they’d committed their loathsome deed in the full knowledge of that fact. Now the thought of revenge flashed through Atsuko’s mind.
If only I had a DC Mini, I could avenge him
, she thought. It was the first time she’d ever had such thoughts. She was sure she could find it in herself to see it through, whoever the adversary was. Her mind was now bent solely on vengeance; Atsuko forgot that she too was likely to face some danger in the process.

Atsuko woke at nine after a short night’s sleep. She immediately called the caretaker and asked him to change the lock on her apartment door. She could well imagine that the perpetrator had somehow obtained a master key allowing free access, not only to Tokita’s apartment, but to any apartment in the building. She then called Tokita’s mother, Makiko, and asked her to watch over Kosaku in her absence. She gave detailed instructions to ensure no further harm could befall him. She finally called Shima’s apartment on the same floor, as she’d started to worry that he too could be in danger. All she heard was his answering message; he must already have left for the Institute.

Some days had passed since Atsuko had wanted to talk to Shima, to ask his advice on various issues. But an unforeseen series of emergencies had prevented them from meeting since then. As she drove through the congested city center toward the Institute in her Marginal, Atsuko decided to go to Shima’s office immediately after arriving at the Institute.

On checking in at her research lab, however, she heard the news that Himuro had been found. The call came from the hospital. A nurse had spotted him wandering aimlessly among a group of outpatients in the hospital waiting room about ten minutes earlier. Atsuko immediately made her way there.

In the hospital office on the ground floor, Himuro was surrounded by a crowd of doctors, nurses, and office staff, all yelling at once. He smelt awful. His hair was disheveled, as if he’d just woken up, stubble stood on his chin, and his body was covered in grime and dust. His lab coat, which he’d evidently worn since his disappearance, was dirty and crumpled. He wore no trousers, possibly because he’d fouled them. And he was barefoot. No one knew where he’d been before his appearance in the waiting room, or how he had got there.

Luckily, there was no sign of Osanai yet. Atsuko instructed two nurses to take Himuro to her own examination room in the Institute. Himuro remained expressionless throughout, showing no reaction to the commotion around him, and allowed himself to be led without any resistance. Though lacking expression, his face was deformed. It had always been fat and puffed up, but it was now transformed into something hideous – something that seemed not of this world …

Atsuko asked the nurses to lay Himuro’s soft, round body on the bed in her examination room. Once they’d left, she let him fall asleep, then went to her research lab in the adjacent room, where she examined his field of consciousness with the scanner. In Nobue’s absence, she had to enter all the settings herself.

Atsuko shuddered with horror when she looked at the monitor screen. Nothing remained but fragments of Himuro’s mind, a desolate landscape of random images. A virtually blank screen was occasionally interrupted by images of decomposing almonds, crushed Braun tubes, small objects that looked like buttons, paper clips, bits of toys and sweet wrappers, a symbol for a ladies’ WC, underground signs and other symbols scattered sporadically in time and space. Even more infrequently, a broadly grinning Japanese doll would appear in a corner of that field of consciousness, making a rocking noise as it nodded repeatedly.

Next, Atsuko used the reflector to extract more detailed images from Himuro’s brain. As before, she found nothing but intermittent recollections of disjointed fragments, entirely devoid of rational connections. Seized with fear, Atsuko abandoned the idea of accessing Himuro’s mind via the collector. Entering the consciousness of a person whose personality had been so utterly destroyed could easily drive her mad as well.

Whoever had put Himuro in this state must have known that his personality would be completely annihilated in the process. The perpetrators must have been confident that his mind was quite beyond repair, and that he could no longer give testimony against them. With that reassurance, they had released him from confinement. Even so, it would have required very intense projections over a lengthy period of time to so thoroughly wipe all signs of humanity from the mind of a human being. The evil nature of the perpetrators now became clear; their identity was beyond doubt. Theirs was a crime on a par with murder. Atsuko knew there was only one way to stop this series of criminal acts, to foil a conspiracy that even threatened her own safety. She would have to fight the enemy on their own terms.

Atsuko bit her lip hard as she watched the sleeping Himuro through the reinforced glass window. After a while she opened the partition door and went to examine Himuro’s head. The perpetrators would surely not have released him with the DC Mini still in place, but the device could have left the same wound as she’d found on Tokita’s head.

Himuro’s hair was unusually thin and soft for a man. Atsuko parted it to discover a tiny bald spot about seven or eight millimeters in diameter on his crown. The spot was lead-gray in colour, contrasting with the whiteness of his scalp. According to Tokita, the DC Mini used biological elements that permitted proteins to self-assemble, and bioelectric current was applied to facilitate mutual access. Atsuko thought back over what Tokita had said about the shape and color of the DC Mini.

She let out a cry.

The patch on Himuro’s scalp was not a bald spot, but the base of the DC Mini itself. The device had been attached for so long that it had been absorbed into Himuro’s head. It could no longer be pulled out by hand. And since it was fused with his head at an atomic or molecular level, it would be impossible to remove even surgically. Atsuko now understood what had caused the wound on Tokita’s head. It was left there when the DC Mini was forcibly pulled out after the tip had started to fuse with his head.

In the horror of her realization, Atsuko failed to notice that she’d been crying out, almost screaming for some time. She also failed to notice that the telephone in her lab had been ringing continuously.

29

After recovering from the shock and returning to her lab, Atsuko made some coffee and drank it as she planned her next move. She tried to think as calmly as she could. Finally, she telephoned the hospital and asked the duty nurse to arrange a vacant room for Himuro, then to bathe and feed him.

Next, she called the Administrator’s Office. Shima wasn’t there.

Or was he? Atsuko had a nasty premonition. She decided to go to his office anyway. As she stood to leave, the telephone rang.

“I think he’s from the press,” the switchboard operator said uneasily. “He’s already called several times this morning.”

“So why didn’t you refuse as usual?”

“He says it’s an emergency. Not an interview or anything like that. He said his name was Matsukane and you’d know what it was about.”

“Ah. Him. All right, put him through.”

“Doctor Chiba?” Matsukane of the
Morning News
said in a tone of great urgency as soon as the operator put him through. “Can I talk to you somewhere? I’m not far away.”

“Where are you? What’s it about?”

“I’m in the café near the front entrance. Corcovado. But I can’t really say anything … Not on the phone … Has anything untoward happened?” he added hurriedly, as if he was worried Atsuko might hang up on him.

“What do you mean ‘untoward’?” Atsuko returned his question warily, stiffly. She’d started to feel she could trust no one, but at the same time thought it an unwise policy. She risked losing an ally and turning him into an enemy for no good reason.

“Well, if nothing’s happened, that’s fine. One thing I can say is that, well, I’m a friend of Morio Osanai, you see. Well, no. I don’t mean a friend as such, rather that we went to the same university.” Matsukane paused for a moment, as if he expected Atsuko to draw her own conclusions.

“So is that who it was? Your informant at the Institute, Morio Osanai?”

“Yes.”

It was Osanai who’d leaked the information to Matsukane about Paprika’s identity, about Tsumura being infected with schizophrenia and everything else.

“And now he’s told you something new? That’s why you’re calling?” Atsuko could imagine how Osanai saw Matsukane as a trusted ally. He’d won his confidence by leaking information, and was now boasting of the plot he’d set in motion.

“Er, is this telephone safe?”

“No.” Atsuko couldn’t be sure that the operator wasn’t listening in. “And I don’t have a direct line.”

“I wouldn’t be allowed in the building, would I. Can you come and meet me in the café?”

“I can’t go there. The nurses from our hospital use it. Come to the parking lot in half an hour. I’ll meet you where we spoke last time.”

“All right.”

Atsuko replaced the receiver and got up immediately. Matsukane’s call had given her ample cause for worry about Shima, as she’d suddenly remembered his odd behavior in the Junior Staff Room the other day. That was certainly what she’d call “untoward.” She hurried to the Administrator’s Office, hoping beyond hope that Matsukane’s phrase didn’t refer to Shima.

The door to Shima’s office was slightly ajar, as always.
I wish he wouldn’t do that
, Atsuko thought with a sigh. Only recently she’d seen an employee going into the office without knocking. Though most of the staff liked Shima’s easygoing personality, others were happy to take advantage of it.

Atsuko knocked, then opened the door wide. There was no one in the office. Anyone else would have given up and walked out again, but not Atsuko. Not today. She closed the door firmly behind her and went toward the back room, where Shima took his naps.

There, Atsuko’s fears took physical shape with the sight of Shima in his underwear. Just as Tokita had the night before, Shima was sitting on the edge of the bed, deeply withdrawn and gazing vacantly into space. His right arm was raised diagonally in front of him. He showed no reaction when Atsuko called his name.

Judging from Shima’s raised-arm posture, he must have been fed the same images as had been implanted in Tsumura’s mind. Atsuko felt reassured to recall that Tsumura’s condition had only been mild. She searched Shima’s head but found no sign of the DC Mini. It must have been attached and removed intermittently, as it had in Tokita’s case. That meant his condition could definitely be treated.

Why had the perpetrators set out to drive Shima insane in stages? They could have destroyed his mind instantly by projecting intense images, as they had with Himuro. They must have wanted people to think that the timid Torataro Shima had lost his mind naturally, under the strain of internal disputes at the Institute. His eccentric behavior in the Junior Staff Room, caused by the initial stages of image projection, had given that very impression. As such, the plot had been more than successful so far.

Shima couldn’t be left as he was. Pandemonium would break out if it were known that the Institute Administrator had been infected with schizophrenia. Even the internal conflicts would then become public knowledge.

Atsuko thought things over for a few minutes before deciding to take Shima back to her apartment. What he needed above all, before any thought of treatment, was a refuge. This was a war. A filthy, nasty war in which, instead of actually killing each other, the combatants would destroy each other’s personalities along with their human dignity. Atsuko urgently needed to foresee the enemy’s movements, yes, but the need to secure Shima’s safety took priority over that.

Using the outside line in Shima’s office, she called the operator to find Corcovado’s number, then phoned the café in the hope that Matsukane would still be there. A waitress called him to the phone.

“Something terrible has happened,” Atsuko explained. “I don’t want anyone in the Institute to know about it. Will you help me?”

“By all means.” It was an answer that encapsulated the pride and righteous enthusiasm of a major newspaper reporter.

“I need to take Doctor Shima from his office without anyone noticing.”

“This is a direct line, isn’t it. What’s happened?”