Mika sat patiently in her swivel chair, her eyes locked on Yoshi Myomoto. The naked and bloody old man in the glass box picked himself off the ground, very slowly, until he was in a sitting position, the whole time panting heavily. She waited for him to open his eyes before turning and pressing the button to activate the incinerator installed in the wall right in front of him. She worked on completing her notes while the body was reduced to ashes.
Her work completed, she got up and opened the door leading from the Erasure Room into the hall. The walls were lined with at least a dozen men and women, all staring at her expectantly. Mika said nothing, and allowed no emotion to cross her face as she strode briskly past them. She did make sure to leave the door ajar, though.
A few minutes later she reached the open door of the Interrogation Room. The show was evidently over, or else they had all gone to see the remains of Tachibana's founder. The small room had only two inhabitants: Carl and Hyashi. Carl, unconscious, was bound to a platform that was attached to one wall. Nearly a hundred wires led from various parts of his body into a port in the wall. At the other end of the room were two workstations, the nearer of which was manned by Hyashi. He was too busy to acknowledge Mika's entrance, but he was certainly aware of it.
Mika closed the door behind her. She walked up to the unconscious subject, then reached into the inside pocket of her white lab coat and removed a mini disk in a clear plastic jacket. Turning around, Hyashi got a good look at it before she slipped it into Carl's shirt pocket. It was the Ultimate Weapon (or, more likely, a copy), the means by which Mika had forced herself into the position as Hyashi's right-hand woman. He turned back to his work as Mika sat down at the second workstation and activated the memory re-writing program.
"Don't you think it a bit risky to give him Eiri's little toy to play with?" Mika noticed that he didn't bother to look at her when he asked her that.
"We need a reason for the Virtuosi to gather together. I can think of nothing better, can you?" Hyoshi merely shrugged, so Mika continued. "I notice you didn't show up for the erasure. Perhaps you shouldn't have scheduled it for the same time."
"I was busy," the director answered brusquely, "and I thought it best if it happened during the assembly, when there'd be fewer witnesses."
Mika smirked, as she was confident her boss had more emotional reasons for staying away. She was about to start on the job of creating false memories for the subject when she was interrupted.
"I got a hero list from Carl, and I'd like you to take a look at it." In the dozen years since Tachibana had been using electronic means to rip memories out of people's heads, the hackers had been able to come up with a variety of counter-measures, from doing everything compromising while deeply intoxicated to permanently erasing their own memories. In response, Tachibana developed techniques for getting to the subconscious mind, to sense memories that were impossible to tamper with. One of these techniques involved "pushing" a particular part of the midbrain, which caused the subject to cry out to anyone and everyone he or she considered a "hero".
Mika glanced down the sheet of paper, which Hyashi had covered in shorthand with the names Carl had very rapidly blurted out under the treatment. As usual, most of the list consisted of fictional characters: Superman, Green Lantern, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and so on, as well as figures like the former president of America, who were probably in a worse situation than even Carl at this particular moment. Mika noticed that "Dick LH" was circled near the top of the list. She pointed that out to Hyashi.
"Richard the Lion-Hearted," he explained. "Let's just say that it revealed an awful lot about him I never understood. Anyway, this is the one I don't recognize," and he pointed to the name at the bottom of the list, the hero Carl was most reluctant to reveal.
"Lain."
Mika sat there and blinked a few times, trying to make the name go away by force of will. "Are you sure you heard this one right?" she asked huskily.
"I think that's right. You know how the subjects get towards the end. So, do you have any idea who or what this is?"
"It's nobody I know," she answered, turning back to the computer and hoping Hyashi would stop asking her questions. She was relieved when he turned back to his monitor and resumed his typing.
Mika skillfully worked her way through Carl's memories as extracted by Hyashi, re-writing and adding new memories to create a credible story of how the company's Achilles Heel would come to be in the vest pocket of a receptionist. She took particular pleasure in creating a moronic version of herself for this little drama, as she always had a love of acting. As usual when she was concentrating, she was humming a fragment of a particular show tune under her breath, and as usual, she strangled the high note.
A few minutes later, she turned to her partner. "We still have a sniper station watching the front entrance, right?" she asked.
"Yeah, sure. Why do you ask?"
"I'm setting up the subject's future memories so he will confess all at a news conference at the front entrance of Tachibana Tower. I was hoping for a dramatic ending."
"Wait...you're writing his future memories? How is that possible?"
"It was pretty easy once I figured out the mechanism. You see, the mind only believes what it wants to believe. When confronted with future memories, it will actually ignore them until the time when they are supposed to occur, then play them on top of whatever you're experiencing at the time. In this case, I'm using a guilty conscience, the kind of thing that causes a serial killer to brag about his crime to anyone that will listen. I think it might make a simple replacement for brainwashing, especially for short-term directives like this one."
Hyashi said nothing, simply turning back to the glowing screen and pressing the call button for a pair of guards to remove the wires from Carl and put him in position to wake up as the crowd emptied out of the assembly.
A call came through to Hyashi's computer while Carl was being escorted out. He waited until he and Mika were the only ones in the room to answer it. On the screen was Nobusuke, one of the members of the Committee that ran Tachibana. "I hear you've erased...?" he said quietly. He could not finish the question because it was a very serious offense at Tachibana to speak the name of an erased person. It was obvious to Mika that the man was afraid of being overheard.
"That's right," answered Hyashi in a neutral tone.
"Good!" cried the councilman. "Even in a padded room, that man was holding this company back. With him gone and forever off-topic, my faction will finally be able to move onto the world stage. I will see that you will be rewarded for this. You and..."
"Just me," stated Hyashi. Mika sat still and said nothing. "By the way, there will be an operation tonight. You might want to stay late, as we are demonstrating a new technique of mine." With an effort, Mika kept all traces of emotion from her body as the man beside her boldly stole her "future memory" idea.
"Excellent! Excellent!" cried Nobusuke. "I'll expect to see you right after your operation is complete. We have a lot of plans to make." He looked around nervously, saying "until then" abruptly before signing off.
Hyashi turned to his subordinate, hoping for a good reaction. He was disappointed to see none, but he had a good speech prepared, so he gave it anyway.
"You think you're the only one around here allowed to play dirty tricks? You did not qualify for this promotion or any of the other ones because you don't meet the grade. You're not smart enough and you're not strong enough, and you never will be. I'm moving you into Carl's job starting tomorrow morning, disk or no disk. Not even the ghost of Eiri can hold a sword over my head. Well, don't just sit there! Say something!"
She simply looked up at him, her face as empty as a manikin's.
"Fine!" he screamed, jumping up and stalking out of the room.
"You call technical knowledge intelligence and physical brawn strength," Mika stated quietly to the door. "I possess cunning and courage. And no one is going to stop me from taking my rightful place at Tachibana Networks. No one."
Juri had moved into Reika's apartment the night before. As usual when anything went wrong with her life, she was bawling incoherently. There was something about losing her job and being evicted from her house. Reika was certain that things were not as bad as her friend made them out; they never were. She tried to call the judge, Juri's father, but he was out at the golf club for the weekend.
Reika had sat with Juri until she had cried herself to sleep, then got her tucked into the sofa bed. She would have taken the day off from work, but she had an important presentation to prepare for the budget meeting at the university the following day, and there was a good chance that a promotion was riding on how well she did. She made sure to leave the TV on the game show channel when she left, so there was no way her guest could be accidentally upset.
The work at the library wound up taking much longer than Reika expected, and she spent the night working. She occasionally thought about Juri, reflecting on the dozens of occasions when she'd show up at the doorstep in tears, a pattern reaching all the way back to elementary school.
Juri woke up sometime after noon, her face bloated from crying. She stared at the television screen for hours as a way to keep from thinking. An hour or so after sunset, the power blinked off and then on (probably a truck hitting one of the few above-ground power poles in the city), causing the young woman to focus on the TV. Once she realized that it was the revival of "Wheel of Fortune", she had to grab the remote. That show terrified her for reasons she dare not name.
She drifted from channel to channel for several minutes, the rhythmic shouting of the game show audience echoing in her head. She stopped when she heard a strange and distant high-pitched keening emerging from the speakers. The live image showed the outside of a warehouse-like building. A man with a microphone was speaking some sort of nonsense, but Juri's attention was on the building. It was maddeningly familiar to her. And the sound apparently coming from the building resonated oddly in her head, causing a migraine to build behind her temples.
The door of the building started to open. The cameraman, spotting this, dashed forward, causing the scene to jerk in wild directions as the building grew larger on the screen. The sound became much louder, and was now recognizable as the screams of hundreds of people. They were not the kind of screams you might hear on the movies or in normal life. These were screams of terror, but these people had been screaming for hours, and the physical effect of this on their throats had distorted their cries into something more birdlike than human. It was in all likelihood the most horrifying sound ever heard. Juri collapsed to the ground, clutching her head in pain. It felt like her skull was squeezing inward, harder and harder, until her brain would begin leaking out of all of her orifices.
People were now emerging from the building, in pairs carrying stretchers. On each stretcher was a screamer, tightly bound. The camera voyeuristically zoomed into the faces of each victim in turn. All had the faces of those that were experiencing eternal damnation first-hand.
Face after face was recognizable to Juri as she peeked out between her fingers and through the tears in her eyes. These were her co-workers, her friends, the guy she bought coffee from every morning. Hackers, all of them. All of them enduring worse pain than she thought imaginable. And there were so many of them. The stream of screamers went on and on, and the cameraman never turned away. He leered at all of them, invading their privacy at their most vulnerable moment.
A memory unwanted, the sound of a man humming an idiotic circus song out of tune, grew in Juri's brain, becoming and strengthening the pain until she couldn't hear the screaming anymore. But the humming was much worse, for it was the sound of cosmic injustice and ineffable loss.
"Make it stop!" Juri chanted. "Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it..."
Chisa got up from her desk and stretched. She had just sent off her latest whimsical poem--she knew one person at least that might find it amusing.
It was past her bedtime, but Chisa felt strangely uneasy, so she sat down on her couch and turned on the TV.
The news was on every channel. A group of hackers had gathered at Club Cyberia, only to be struck down by an unknown agent that had killed most of them and driven the rest insane. Chisa had muted the volume when the screaming began in the playback. She had to do this multiple times, as it was the only news anyone had at the moment, so it was re-played at every possible opportunity.
The scene then changed to in front of Tachibana Tower, where someone apparently had something to say. A half hour went by with nothing happening: plenty of chances to play the scream footage. Finally a man stepped up to the podium.
"Greetings," the man said. "My name is Carl, and I am a hacker. I am also the only survivor of tonight's Cyberia massacre. God in his wisdom has seen fit to spare me, in order that I might reveal how mankind has just been saved from destruction.
"Yesterday, I discovered this." The man displayed a minidisk for the cameras. "This disk contains a program capable of destroying Tachibana Networks. I was going to give this disk to the Virtuosi at Cyberia, but the moment they looked upon it, they were the ones to be destroyed.
"Do you know why? Because of the name that is on this disk." He held the disk forward for the cameras to zoom in on. "'Eiri'. The disk says 'Eiri'. That's because this disk was created by Masami Eiri, founder of Tachibana and the greatest programmer who ever lived. There isn't a man, woman or child on Earth that doesn't know this man's name. And now his name is powerful enough to kill.
"Eiri made only one mistake in his life, and that was to create this disk." With that, Carl crushed the disk to splinters in his hand. "And now that I have done Eiri's bidding..."
At that moment the top half of his head was blown to pieces by an explosive bullet.
"Good shot!" remarked Unso, binoculars at his eyes.
JJ, former DJ at Cyberia, lowered his rifle and took a look. "It'll do," he grunted. The two disappeared into the abandoned building across the street from Tachibana Tower, taking a secret passage into the tunnels that connected it with the Men in Black headquarters.
Chisa covered her eyes and wept at the futility of it all. Why? she demanded. Why save me and not them?
A voice in her head answered her: Because She can't change history. She can only affect the lives of nobodies like you.
Masayuki sat in the least comfortable chair at the waiting room of the hospital, his eyes glued to the news channel on TV. The on-air shooting had been added to the removal of the victims as rating-sustaining tidbits by all of the news stations. In between, the scant details of this "Cyberia Massacre" were being listlessly repeated for the thousandth time by the news reporter standing in front of Tachibana Tower. There was no longer any reason to remain there, but the reporters could not think of anywhere else to go.
The hospital was strictly off limits to them. The doctors had finally managed to get the victims into unconsciousness after using up practically their entire supply of narcotics. Myu-Myu was among those that were now in a dreamless state. No one had any idea what they'd be like when they woke up, if any trace of rationality would be left. And everyone was still in the dark as to what exactly had happened (except for the worshipers of "the great God Eiri", as he was now being called by all the loonies of the world).
Masayuki was one of the few to catch on to the remark the mad hacker had made about "founder Eiri", proof that Tachibana had erased Yoshi Myamoto. He feared the implications of this act.
The swinging doors opened, and Taro and a doctor emerged. Taro removed the surgeon's gown and mask he had worn in his role of observer and handed them to the doctor, who turned and returned to the emergency room without a word.
"Well?" asked Masayuki.
"No change," reported Taro. He picked up his hat and coat and headed for the outside door.
"Where are you going?" asked Masayuki.
"University. Those algorithms aren't going to write themselves."
Masayuki was flabbergasted. "Myu-Myu's life has been destroyed forever, and you're going to muck around with some stupid search engine?"
Taro donned his hat. "Hey, I've got a job."
"You heartless bastard!"
Taro looked Masayuki coldly in the eye for a few seconds, then turned and walked out into the windy night.
The black limousine took the exit off the freeway leading to Tachibana Tower. The silent driver kept his eyes on the road, while behind a sound-proof partition, two anonymous Men in Black sat stiffly and equally silent. Opposite them were Hyashi and Mika, who carried on a conversation as if they didn't exist. The two guards gazed at their boss with a seemingly dead expression, which hid well-trained minds capable of carrying out any order, often before their brains had a chance to process it.
Mika was using a mirror on the wall to put on some make-up. "I think we used too many agents this time," she suggested over her shoulder.
Hyashi nodded. "I agree, but it's understandable. For one thing, we haven't undertaken an operation this big for several years. And for another, I expected the Virtuosi to put up far more of a fight."
Mika's y-phone rang while Hyashi was finishing his thought. He paused as she answered it.
"Yes?" she said to the voice in her ear. "Yes, I understand. I won't let you down." The eyes of the two guards were now on her.
Mika disconnected from her call and pressed a button on the partition to the driver's compartment. "Could you pull over here, Hatchiko?" she asked once it had been lowered.
"Something I should know about?" observed Hyashi dryly.
The woman, about to step out of the car, looked back as an afterthought. "I've considered your job advice of a few hours back, and I didn't like it. I've got a new job. I believe you call it 'media whore'." She then emerged from the limo and made her way through the crowds of reporters to the podium, followed by the two bodyguards. Hyashi leaned out to watch.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she announced. "My name is Mika Iwakura, and I am the spokesperson for Tachibana Networks. I will answer any questions you might have about the events of the past four hours."
She waited patiently, a confident look on her face, as dozens of radio and television reporters talked to their station managers and got through introducing her to their live audiences. Only a couple of them managed to mangle her name. Once their upraised hands had joined those of the print journalists, she picked her first target. "Mr. Tanaka of News Now, you have a question?"
"Yes, this is..." The reporter then realized that the woman had introduced him already. "What do you think of the shooting of the mad hacker?"
"I thought that it was a very clean shot, and I am grateful that the mess was cleaned up before I got here." Mika said this with a straight face, and dared the group of mostly men before her to laugh. "Muruyama of Popular Science Monthly, I'm sure you have an interesting question."
The reporter in question stepped forward, stylus and HandiNavi in hand. He decided on the direct approach. "Is Tachibana Networks responsible for the Cyberia Massacre?"
Mika signaled to the two Men in Black, who quickly stepped forward and "escorted" the gentleman to her side. "I thought the television audience might want to see the face of the man who had the nerve to ask me that question. I shall answer your question with another question, Mr. Muruyama: do you have any proof for this allegation, or are you asking all of the likely suspects in hopes of getting an exclusive confession?" She used her superior height over the small reporter to best advantage.
The man was not intimidated. He stepped up to Mika to use the podium's microphone. "The hackers at Cyberia are suffering from Accela Disease, the result of a massive overdose of the recreational machine drug Accela. The company that discovered Accela Disease is Fructo Industries, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tachibana Networks. Hackers are stereotyped for their Accela usage, but expense, the plateau effect, and the higher intelligence of the average hacker precludes the kind of mega-dose of Accela required to trigger Accela Disease. Therefore, they were poisoned by such a massive dosage without their knowledge, something only possible with nanite Accela, which is exclusively manufactured by Fructo Industries. Fructo's sales of Accela were rising over the past several years, and the company would have no reason to poison their principal customers. Either Tachibana used Fructo's nanite Accela to poison the water at Cyberia, or the drug was stolen from Fructo by an unknown party, which would make the Men in Black incompetent, since they were responsible for guarding Fructo's shipments."
Mika raised an eyebrow in admiration. "Very good deductive work. I was expecting this to take another week at least." She then turned to the cameras. "Everything this man has said is true. Tachibana is responsible for the 'Cyberia Massacre'. We did it, we'd do it again, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."
She waited a few moments for her collective audience to recover from the shock of hearing the truth from a company bureaucrat. "But let's not forget who the so-called 'victims' are in this case. These are the Virtuosi, the largest and most-ruthless gathering of hackers on the planet. The mad hacker certainly got one thing right: the Virtuosi were planning the destruction of our way of life. The hacker wants to destroy the economy so only he will be able to buy food. The hacker wants to take everything you own and make it his own. The hacker wants to take your freedom and make you his slave.
"As the greatest company on the face of the earth, Tachibana is the primary target of these insidious dogs. Time and again they have tried to infiltrate this company, tear it down from the inside. In every case we have stopped them, but we have kept that fact from the public because we feared a panic. That was a mistake, because you were fooled into thinking the hacker was a clown instead of a ruthless thug. Tonight, we discovered a plot to completely destroy this company and steal the privacy of every man, woman and child on earth. Every secret you have ever cherished, every mistake for which you have repented and been forgiven, all would be revealed, and all would be exploited. Tachibana decided the time to act was now. Did we break the law? Yes. Did we start, and did we finish this all-out war against Absolute Evil? Yes. Did we save the lives and souls of every one of you listening to me right now? Yes. Would you do the same if you were in our shoes?"
The sheep of the world answered, right on cue.
Mika walked into the lobby of Tachibana Tower rather than return to the limousine. Hyashi scrambled to catch up.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded.
"It's called 'provoking a crisis'." she answered calmly, walking to the elevator and pressing the down button.
Hyashi followed her in. "Damn right it was! This will mean the World Government will blockade Japan for sure. Do you realize how many lives that will cost?"
"You're thinking about lives now?" she asked incredulously. "Give me a break! Mark my words, a blockade will break Beijing long before it breaks Tachibana." She used her card to access the security sub-basement. The doors opened and she strode quickly down the halls, dogged by Hyashi.
"What if you're wrong? In any case, you have far exceeded your authority."
Mika stopped suddenly and turned to face him. "I don't think so," she spat out contemptuously. Hyashi seemed to notice how much taller she was than him for the first time in his life. "I've been in communication with Yoshida, who leads my particular faction on the Committee. It appears that most of the management at Tachibana is appalled at the cruel murder of their dear founder. Nobusuke and his followers have all been ousted, and as you were so very clear to tell everyone that you alone were responsible for that heinous act, you alone will have to suffer the ultimate penalty. Goodbye, Hyashi. I'll do my best to remember you, though I'll be the only one." She stepped aside to reveal that they were in front of the Erasure Room.
Hyashi looked about suddenly, to discover that he was surrounded by Men in Black, all of them fans of Myomoto, their eyes as cold as the dead. Breaking into a cold sweat, the former boss leapt for freedom, and was quickly grabbed and dragged towards the open door. "No!" he screamed. "I want to be remembered!" He was little more than an wild animal by the time they got him into the glass box.
Mika rubbed her chin in disappointment. "That's a wonderful scream you've got there, Hyashi. If I had known, I would have scheduled a lot longer session."
"We did it, we'd do it again, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."
"...stop, make them stop. Make them stop! Make them stop!" The woman in Reika's apartment sat up and turned the television off, staring at the black screen for nearly a minute. Then she got up, put on her coat, and left the building.
"The vote in the World Assembly is very close. A group of Europeans is making a speech. They are now being attacked by another group of Europeans. This is very unusual. The two groups are identifying themselves as Germans and French, inhabitants of countries that have not existed for the past fifteen years. The two groups are now coming to blows! The constables are moving in to separate them, and...the two groups are banding together to fight off the constabulary! It is now mass pandemonium on the floor of the Assembly. The Blockade vote is now at a complete impasse."
Masayuki reached forward and turned off the radio. He was sitting in the DJ's booth at Cyberia. The police had left long ago after boarding it up, but it was easy for him to get in through the Chinese restaurant next door, an entrance he had probably used more times than the front door.
In a few hours, Tachibana has achieved everything it has ever wanted, and the love of the people to boot. He sat there a few seconds trying to let the new world order sink in, then he got out his HandiNavi and tried to find a picture of Mika Iwakura.
"Hey you!" said a voice in the doorway. "Are you Taro?"
Masayuki looked up. A woman was standing before him. She had brown fluffy hair, was fairly good-looking despite a swollen face, and wore a pokka-dotted dress. But none of that had any significance, because all of it was wrong for her. She was a pair of eyes, burning with hatred and a new-found sense of purpose. Nothing else mattered.
"You don't want Taro," Masayuki stated. "Taro is a worthless bag of shit. If you want a hacker, you should have come here ten hours ago. Now, you're going to have to settle with me. What do you want?"
"I want to learn everything you know," the woman replied. "I want justice."
"I can give you what you need. Who are you? What's your name?"
"My former name has given me nothing but pain. I am now Alecto."
"Very well, Alecto. Where shall we begin?"
Serial Experiments Lain is the invention of Yasuyuki Ueda of Production 2nd, and the resulting anime was written by Chiaki J. Konaka, animated by Triangle Staff, and distributed by Pioneer LDC; it is these individuals and entities that own the copyright to the series and the vast majority of named characters used in this story. What I have done was completely without their permission, and with no intention whatsoever to harm this property or profit materially from it in any way. The character of Yoshi Myamoto is the creation of Jody Armstrong ("The Story of Success", available on fanfiction.net). The various unnamed characters, the Virtuosi and Tachibana's Committee, the Committee leaders Nobusuke and Yoshida, the reporters Tanaka and Muruyama, and the chauffeur Hatchiko, are my own invention, as are the interpretations of where all these characters will be twenty-five years after the end of Serial Experiments Lain.
Besides the above, I would like to thank TechTV for introducing me to this series, the authors of Fanfiction.net for sharing their ideas with the world, and all those Serial Experiments Lain websites, including Above and Beyond Anime, Cyberia Cafe, and especially thought experiments lain, for providing insights into the some of the knottier problems of this series.