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almondinflower2009-06-03 02:00 am
fromastudio) wrote in almondinflower2009-06-03 02:00 am
Prognosis [one-shot, Streets of Nippon sidefic] - Oshitari, Yagyuu, Niou
Prognosis
Characters: Oshitari, Yagyuu, Niou.
Summary Sidestory to the Streets of Nippon cyberpunk AU. Five years before the events of SoN, Oshitari and Yagyuu are studying at medical college, when the precognitive Niou Masaharu arrives to disrupt their lives.
Wordcount: 6500 words.
Warnings: Violence; some coarse language.
Notes: Somewhat first-drafty, especially towards the end; I welcome any concrit people may have to offer.
Every day after dinner Oshitari and Yagyuu would return to the room they shared to study. Cramped and windowless, it was still more comfortable than the overcrowded library. Yagyuu needed the desk to keep his head organised and would sit there with stylus and keyboard and built-in wall monitor, updating his exhaustive, very linear notes. Oshitari, who didn't mind either way, lay a half-metre away sprawled on his bunk, tapping on his widescreen infodevice. Every twenty minutes his attention waned and he would pick up one of the bookmarked paperbacks that lay scattered in the sheets around him. At time of the midyear clinical exams he was three hundred pages into Clarissa and on the fourth chapter of Little Women. Printed books were expensive and hard to find, but Oshitari had few other uses for his weekly allowance.
They passed four hours of each evening like this. Yagyuu turned the lights off at eleven without fail, and it was at this point of his life that Oshitari picked up the habit of reading in the dark on infodevice. In the morning Yagyuu woke first, used the bathroom, had breakfast, and at seven-thirty made sure that Oshitari was out of bed, more than once by forcibly yanking him onto the floor. All that year this ritual which had been established in the first fortnight of their acquiantance would continue; in tandem with four lectures a day and another twenty-five hours of academic weekly contact time, it made for a highly rigid existence. Afterwards Oshitari would develop a simultaneous dislike of, and infatuation with, order and structure – it explained many things that would happen in the future, such as Atobe Keigo.
During the day they hardly saw each other, being in different years. Oshitari spent the average of forty-five spare minutes he had each day (excluding Sunday) in the vast cultivated park that stood in the middle of campus. There was a significant category of mood disorder associated with insufficient exposure to natural flora, and the college was reputation-conscious enough to have a passing concern for the health of its students. The park was rectangular and bordered with thin trees that shed their leaves once a year, like clockwork, and contained many lawns of extremely resilient, genetically modified grass. It was always filled with students. Within two months of coming to medical school one could tell on sight which ones were the aspiring doctors and which ones the future medics, the health technicians: student-doctors were older, more likely to flaunt a white coat, more emotionally rather than physically stressed, while the medics were teenagers more often than not, casual in speech, and conversationally crisp on account of needing to be somewhere else five minutes ago. Student-doctors were old money; student-medics were new intelligence, and what intelligence they had! Oshitari had never felt mentally slow before he came here. To be sure, he had the excuse of being four years younger than his average classmate, but youth could not protect him from failing an exam. Yagyuu was his age and facing finals and planning a minor thesis besides. He spent the evening of Oshitari's birthday (otherwise celebrated with special-delivery fish and chips, an hour-long VR shooting expedition, and a cup of illegal sake each) running database searches for a literature review.
“Mitochondrial changes in individuals with high psionic ability?” Oshitari lay on his bunk, slightly drunk and dubious. The topic sounded far too interesting for Yagyuu to be interested in it.
“Professor Whitaker of the Faculty of Genetics has a special interest in the subject. He offered to be my supervisor, and also guaranteed funding.”
“Isn't it too complex for a six-month research project? The grads are always telling us not to be too ambitious for the minor.” Secretly he hoped Yagyuu would go ahead, and fail; Yagyuu's habit of being good at everything was annoying even for Oshitari.
“I'll only be making a small contribution to their work: taking family histories, and doing psionic testing, and sample collection. Other research assistants will be doing the lab analyses. Besides, I've always found psionics interesting.”
Yagyuu's tone suggested that if Oshitari were to argue the point any further he would find himself being woken up via a pail of iced water the next morning.
“My cousin is 4.3 telekinetic. He's a pain in the bum.”
“All cousins are. It's probably nothing to do with the telekinesis.”
Oshitari used the spread-open copy of Fanny Burney's Evelina to cover his face. “Probably not. But the telekinesis makes him a bigger pain than usual.” He lapsed into memory, remembered Kenya levitating over fences, crawling up walls Spiderman-style, spinning cutlery above their heads in a rapid gyre only to drop a knife on Oshitari's foot when the grown-ups discovered (and startled) them.
Yagyuu said, “I need to recruit psionics of Level 6 and above. Preferably telekinetics.”
“Try a virtual hub. I read somewhere that psionic-types like the Tennis Hub.”
“The Tennis Hub is famous for gangsters. Runners.”
“So what? You're not looking for upper-class telekinetics.”
Chilly silence, except for the sound of touch typing.
Oshitari felt lightheaded even though he was lying very still. That was the problem, he thought, you could never just make a suggestion to Hiroshi; you had to somehow convince him that he had thought of it all by himself, and all the better if you gave the impression that it was something you didn't want him to do, and really, Oshitari wasn't his mother, so what was with that attitude? If only Oshitari's mental faculties were working better.
Yagyuu shut down the monitor. He switched off the ceiling lights, so that the only brightness remaining in the room was a bluish haze of infodevice that lit the peripheries of Oshitari's vision, making partially visible the blurred darkened text of pages 117-118 of Evelina that crammed into his gaze.
“Happy birthday,” said Yagyuu.
#
Yagyuu's birthday was four days after Oshitari's, and fell on a Monday, which gave Oshitari the weekend to search for a present. He was unsure of what to buy. Neither of them needed anything and there was little space left in their room for new objects. Yagyuu liked sports and mystery novels but had not done much of either for months, thanks to the impending finals; in any case, he already had a gym membership and a subscription to the largest electronic library on the globe. The purpose of a birthday present was largely to express friendship and goodwill and to avoid offending Yagyuu by neglecting his birthday. Yagyuu himself took birthdays very seriously, and had given Oshitari a twenty-third century hardback edition of Jane Austen's complete works.
Their medical college stood at the heart of one of Shin Tokyo's busiest wards, and there were ample shopping districts located within a stone's throw of the entrance gates, teeming with all the eclecticism of this city. Holographic advertisements prowled the streets. Biomodified teenagers promenaded through open air malls. Oshitari began his shopping quest in a robot-operated combini above the local subway station, and shortly after, found himself in a massive, traditional department store, submerged in elevator music, displays of cologne and aftershave, and racks of leather shoes and silk ties.
“Get a watch,” came a voice from behind him, as Oshitari was examining a glass spray-bottle of golden liquid with product information written on the back in six languages, none of which Oshitari spoke.
It was a boy Oshitari's age, wearing a thin wide-collared T-shirt over a celadon singlet, and cargo pants, with a black chain-belt wound loosely around his hips. His eyes were Asian, sharp and narrow, but striking due to their colour, a light shimmery silver.
He was smirking. As Oshitari stared at him, he took the bottle out of Oshitari's hands and hurled it to the ground.
Glass shards flew out around them, and the scent of verbena and menthol rose up like a cloud.
Shocked into speaking, Oshitari said, “What do you think you're doing?”
“Leaving.” The boy was already on his way out of the aisle, but turned his head back to reply. “You coming? Or do you plan to stick around and pay for it?”
“The security cameras--”
“Won't see us. Come with me.”
Spurred on by the knowledge that he could not afford to pay for the damages, Oshitari stepped over the carnage of cologne and followed the strange boy out of the department store, trying to mimic the other's insouciant, unconcerned air. His own heart was beating very hard, but none of the other shoppers seemed to notice anything amiss, and he was sensible enough to make the best of the situation.
Outside they blended in easily with the other pedestrians, heading to the opposite sidewalk and then towards a major intersection, where the crowd was thickest. They moved steadily, the strange boy setting the pace.
“Who are you?” Oshitari asked, deciding that the best initial approach was to get as much information as possible.
“Niou Masaharu. You're Oshitari Yuushi.”
A reply that posed yet another question. “How do you know my name?”
“It's a talent of mine.” Niou grinned at him. It was a friendly grin, but suggested that Niou did not really care whether Oshitari smiled back or not. “Are you going to get that watch?”
“Why do you care?”
“I can't afford a birthday present. So when you buy one, tell Yagyuu that it's from both of us.”
“Does Hiroshi know you?”
“He will.”
Exasperated, Oshitari asked, “Do you ever make sense to anyone?”, before they got separated in a sea of pedestrians at the traffic lights. Oshitari kept track of Niou by the boy's platinum blond hair, which bobbed its way across the junction in a diagonal line.
When they were reunited at the corner, Niou answered: “Only to logical people. That rules you out.”
“Why did you break that cologne bottle?”
“Because I could.”
“Obviously.”
“I know where you can get cheap prices on watches,” said Niou, thus proving himself the sort of person who stuck to a goal once he had it in mind.
“Why would Hiroshi need a watch?”
“He doesn't. But he'll like it.”
“And you know this, because--” They were cutting across a alley, so narrow that the protruding steps at the back of shops nearly spanned its entire width. At least three graffiti artists had been at work here: one in biopaint that had reproduced into new patterns and reached even to the roof of buildings, one with traditional spray cans, and one in a black substance that emitted mathematical sequences of electromagnetic radiation. Oshitari felt bursts of infrared heat on his skin as they walked past.
“I told you already. It's a talent. Here we are.” They had arrived at an outdoor shopping arcade. Niou led Oshitari to the centre of it, into a transparent plastic bubble elevator, and they floated downwards.
On the basement level, at the end of a corridor tiled like a checkerboard in sienna and ochre, stood a little store crammed full of accessories, which they entered. There was barely enough room for them to stand in between the shelves. Oshitari picked up a burgundy wallet, careful not to disturb the precarious balance of the other wallets that piled around it, and checked the price tag.
“Three thousand shin yen? Are these fake?” He sniffed the leather. “It's cheap even for fake leather.”
“I've found the watch.” Niou held up the object of his search. It was gold-plated, with a classic clock face; Oshitari could hear the faint tick of the second hand. “Ten thousand shin yen, with a ten-year warranty. Not bad, right? Comes with a nice box, too. All you have to do is wrap it in some tissue paper.”
“It's still an expensive gift.”
“All the better. Yagyuu hates cheap.”
How did Yagyuu know a strange kid like this? “Why should I buy it?”
“Why shouldn't you buy it?” Niou folded his arms across his chest, and his gaze went distant, indicating that he had said all that he cared to about this subject.
“Nobody wears this kind of watch anymore.”
“Yagyuu's not most people.”
That was true. “How do I know it's any good? I can't tell a high-quality wristwatch from a poor one.”
“I can. It's a good watch.”
“And I should believe your words, because-- Something caught Oshitari then, at the edges of his mind, and he frowned. “No, you're not lying.”
As he spoke this he saw a feral, delighted expression cover Niou's face.
“Why do you think that?” Niou asked.
Oshitari was prevented from answering by a sudden, fleeting blurring of his vision. Pain flashed through his skull. “Give it to me,” he said.
Niou handed him the watch and its case, and Oshitari walked over to the automated sales machine standing in one corner. After he'd paid, Niou gave him a small wave with his fingers. “I'll see you tomorrow. Good luck with the headache.”
Then he was gone, exiting through the shop's tinted sliding glass doors. Oshitari paused to tuck the watch into its glossy black case and slip the thing into his wallet. He was barely a second behind Niou, but when he emerged into the chessboard corridor, it was completely empty.
The headache that had cursorily come and gone minutes ago, reappeared again as he took the elevator back up, and by the time he arrived on campus it had thoroughly made its home with him, necessitating a Sunday afternoon in his room spent with acetaminophen, sips of water, and a sleeping mask.
In years to come when Oshitari thought of Niou he would think secondly of pain, but firstly of question after question all hanging in midair, never leading to any sort of real answer.
#
He woke up at six the next morning, flushed and shivering. He was tachycardic. He was agitated. He had been having nightmares.
He crawled out of bed, checking the upper bunk to see if Yagyuu was still asleep (he was), and switched on the wall monitor. It came to life displaying several windows still open, demonstrating that last night Yagyuu had been a) reviewing management guidelines for trauma life support; b) writing an e-mail to his physician father, c) searching for information about psionics on every search engine Oshitari could think of.
Eschewing the stylus and using bare hands to control the touchpad, he fingered his way through the websites. Yagyuu preferred his monitor in 2D mode, and had his colour schemes set to neutral -- but all over the planet, server owners were upgrading from traditional circuitry to neural networks, and web standards were a joke globally. The holographic main portal for Nousaemin, the international community for young psionics, appeared as a maimed image on the flatscreen display, surrounded by placeholder icons for multimedia of all kinds.
He recalled Kenya showing him the website a couple of summers ago, in all its varicoloured, epilepsy-tempting, three-dimensional glory. Kenya had had headaches. Fevers, too. Pyrexia, chills, generalised aches and malaise: all symptoms of non-specific viral infections, systemic inflammatory illnesses – and burgeoning psionic powers.
He wasn't sure where Kenya's telekinesis came from. Neither of their fathers had ever demonstrated so much as one microjoule of psychic power. Although, if Yagyuu was correct about the mitochondria hypothesis – mitochondrial DNA was all passed down maternally. Which meant that Kenya's genetic source of psionic talent was completely separate from his own.
Oshitari could not have explained how he knew that he was psionic. The fact came to him as he was half-staring at (through, rather) the computer screen – not as epiphany, but in the way the date of one's birthday or the memory of a smell might drift into mind. Soon after he began idly to construct the logical argument leading to his knowledge, but the knowledge came first, the deduction later. He had psionic powers, like his cousin Kenya. He was just coming into them.
In future it would be usual for his precognitive gifts to manifest themselves thus. A knowing, a simple entry of information, flowing in easily like electricity through a wire. His visions were terrible but rare. His distress was purely psychological.
He asked a healthcare search engine to look for items related to “suppression psionic activity pharmacological treatment.”; then realised, by the rustle of cloth coming from behind, that Yagyuu was waking up. Feeling awkward, Oshitari aborted the search and greeted Yagyuu happy birthday. Yagyuu's response was barely mumbled. He was not much of a morning person by nature; it was only the force of habit and discipline that kept him waking up at this time.
Oshitari passed the day in a dreamy medicated haze of ill-defined pain, into which details of DNA-modifying drugs, vasculature and innervation of the lower limb, pre-, intra- and post-hepatic causes of jaundice, barely penetrated. Not for the first time he wondered why he was here, instead of in high school; instead of doing quantum chemistry at university as his father had suggested. Physiology was fascinating, pharmacology delightful; the prospect of real patients tantalised. But he would not be allowed professional licensing until he was sixteen, which was the age at which he could go to medical school to do proper doctor's training.
His parents had been ambivalent about whether to send him to Shin Tokyo to study. His uncle, on the other hand, had been forcefully against it, and told his father as much on at least one occasion that Oshitari had overheard: “You know as well as I do that medics are a thing of the past. When there weren't enough actual doctors on this planet it was different; medics were essential for providing healthcare in rural and remote areas. But that hasn't been true since we were children. The only place to get work is in the space colonies.”
“He can be a doctor later if he wants to be. With a medic's degree, admission to medical school will be automatic. Or he can go to university afterwards. It's only a two-year course.”
“Two years is a long time for a child to be away from his parents.”
“If he's keen, I'll let him do it. He's young enough to do whatever he wants to.”
Yagyuu had been even younger. Ten years old when he applied, eleven when he enrolled. The average age of graduation was eighteen. Despite the decline in job opportunities, the course was still popular – medics still commanded strong respect here, as they did on any recently colonised planet.
“...plus if possible, I'd like to avoid Yuushi working for Shitenhouji.”
His uncle's reply had been quite cold: “It's a syndicate with a long tradition, and a deep history with our family.”
“It's a syndicate, and illegal.”
“In case you haven't noticed, brother, everything in this country is illegal! You won't find a city or burb in Nippon that doesn't depend on runner activity. And the Silver Emperor, may he stop discovering nanotech miracles of regeneration and croak soon, is worse than most of the so-called syndicates. Yuushi and Kenya would be safer in Shitenhouji than in most other places.”
The week after Oshitari started medic training, Kenya had messaged to say that he had run away from home to become a Shitenhouji runner. Oshitari's reaction was mild alarm tempered by a grim satisfaction. Their fathers' plans, in the end, mattered little in the face of what they themselves wanted.
Oshitari returned to his room after classes to find Yagyuu outside the door, talking to Niou Masaharu.
Yagyuu nodded in greeting. “Yuushi.”
“Hiroshi,” Oshitari replied coolly. “Niou.”
“Oshitari. That makes full circle. Can we leave now? Yagyuu doesn't like to stay up late.”
The slightest movement of Yagyuu's eyebrow told Oshitari that this was not information that Yagyuu had given to Niou.
“Niou's a precognitive,” he explained to Yagyuu. “That's where he's getting all this information.” And he knew that it was true, although he had no sense of where or how he was acquiring this knowledge.
“I never told you that,” Niou said, mimicking Yagyuu's subtle brow curve.
“I'm intelligent. That's why I'm studying here.”
“So I see. Have you got Yagyuu's present?” Without pausing Niou turned his attention back to Yagyuu. “We went shopping together for your birthday present yesterday.”
“Is that so?”
“It's a watch. It tells you exactly what time it is, right now.”
“That's the usual purpose of a watch,” Yagyuu said dryly. To Oshitari's surprise he did not seem put off by the appearance and mannerisms of Niou. To the contrary, he looked interested.
“There are variations,” Oshitari added, caught up in the subject despite himself. “Some watches tell you what the time is in several cities, all at once. Kapitalstadt and Santa Teresa and Fengzhou. New York. Paris.”
“Some watches,” said Niou, “don't run. They just tell you the same time, all the time.”
“Like Miss Havisham's clocks?”
Yagyuu cleared his throat. He was always impatient with Oshitari's literary allusions. “I want to be back by nine,” he told Niou.
“Yeah, yeah. Don't repeat yourself. Wouldn't you like your present first?”
“Not really. Yuushi can give it to me afterwards. Are you coming with us for dinner, Yuushi?”
“Of course,” Oshitari said, even though it currently felt like he was having a headache in his neck, hips, and sternum, an experience that had doubled in intensity the moment he came within five feet of Niou.
“Let me get changed then, and we'll go.” Yagyuu disappeared into the room, leaving the remaining two in the passageway.
At first they were silent. Then Oshitari spoke: “I did some research in the library today. Did you know that a high-level psionic can activate the latent talents of another psionic by using their psychic abilities on that person?”
“Yes. I remember you telling me. A long time ago.” Niou's lip curled. “But you're wearing the wrong clothes. I made sure I was wearing the right clothes, too, when I met you, and today. I even made sure to smash the bottle yesterday, and instead you show up in high-tops and jeans. All the calculations are off. I'll have new bad dreams tonight.”
“Do you have bad dreams when you're awake?” It was not the question Oshitari had meant to ask; it was simply the first thing that had come out of his mouth, and he felt like if he decelerated the conversation, gave himself time to think, he would go mad from the effort and result.
“Not unless I let them happen. It's the sort of thing,” Niou draped himself against the wall in a lazy pose that belied his focused, focused eyes, “that you get good at after a while.”
“Is that why you came here? Because you saw yourself coming here?”
“I came here for Yagyuu's project.”
That, Oshitari thought, was not really answering the question.
“You should get help. There are clinics for people with problems like this -- special academies--”
“Nobody can help.” Some quick dead emotion flickered across Niou's face. “Not you. Not me. Not people like us.”
Oshitari groped for words. There was a tutorial he had attended last month -- on drug counselling, emotional abuse victims, full of helpful suggestions. There was something he could say or do.
“We can try.”
“You will,” Niou said, before turning towards the door to Oshitari's room. It eased open to reveal Yagyuu, dressed in casual smart, bespectacled.
#
Yagyuu never wore glasses on campus and always wore them everywhere else. It was one of those Yagyuu quirks, the sort of peculiarity he always had a perfectly logical-sounding explanation ready for – an explanation that would make no sense once Oshitari stopped to think carefully about it. Everything about Yagyuu was a bit like that. A non sequitur disguised as de facto.
Niou liked Yagyuu's glasses and said as much, at the Korean barbecue place where they celebrated Yagyuu's birthday. The way he said it, it was as if he was saying that he liked Yagyuu. Yagyuu's response was intriguing. He readjusted his frames that Niou had pulled crooked, took up his metal chopsticks to place more beef strips on the grill, and said the usual polite and disdainful things -- but there was no real venom in it, there was bemusement, there was fascination. It offended Oshitari. Seven months of living together, and he'd never seen this side of Yagyuu.
Three weeks later Niou bought Oshitari his first pair of glasses.
“Thanks. Though I don't need them.” Oshitari folded them into their cloth-case and put them in the front pocket of his satchel, which was hanging from a wondrously horizontal branch of an oak tree at the centre of the quadrilateral college park.
“I've seen you wearing them. They look good on you.”
“Because you knew I was going to wear glasses, you bought me glasses? That's what they call a philosophical paradox,” Oshitari said, although the fact was he didn't know the first thing about philosophy and cared only vaguely, in the sense of regretting that he couldn't sound reliably intellectually impressive at times like this.
Niou shook his head. “No, it's not a paradox.” Niou was very, very good and logical about his definitions. There was a kind of academic purity about his brain; something that Yagyuu lacked. Moral and emotional purity weren't the same thing as intellectual purity.
Niou sometimes talked like a little kid, sometimes like a older teenager, sometimes like Oshitari's father. More often he talked like Yagyuu, mannerisms and all. Oftenest he was silent, a state he lapsed into more and more often as their acquaintance continued. By November Yagyuu had finished his literature review and begun the practical aspects of research, and Niou was accompanying him in the laboratories every week. When he wasn't himself the subject under study, he was helping Yagyuu find other volunteers. According to Yagyuu he was a very patient study subject.
Yagyuu came back one evening in an agitated silence that made the atmosphere of their room terrible. Oshitari put up with it until nine o'clock, jamming headphones into his ears and losing himself in reading bodice-rippers, until he decided Yagyuu's fingers on the keyboard were too arrhythmic and loud and annoying; also when Oshitari paused to check he noticed that Yagyuu seemed to be reading the same content on the monitor over and over again, since the screen never changed.
“What happened with Niou?” he asked.
For the next, literal minute he thought that Yagyuu was not going to reply.
Then: “He broke the scale,” Yagyuu said. “The test for precognitives. The assessment's done by using a program to output true random numbers, and asking the psionic to predict the number. We did ten thousand numbers today. He only got three wrong.”
It was unsurprising news, but Oshitari was still caught up in the shock and drama of it. “Which makes him a level--”
“This style of assessment is only valid up to level 8.999. Any rating higher than that has to be assigned by a psionics expert. I...had to lie on the test.” Yagyuu had stopped typing and now rested his hands on the table; except for speech, every part of him was unmoving. “I put him down as a 6.8. If I recorded him as a 7 Professor Whitaker would want to intervene personally. They put people like Niou in institutions.”
“They put people like Niou in the palace. To work for the Emperor.” Not even that, Oshitari thought; they shipped people like Niou back to Old Earth, cloned them, spliced their DNA, turned them into celebrities, built mini-industries around them. Here in Nippon, where espionage was more lucrative than fame, it was a different story.
Oshitari's list of psionic suppressant drugs was getting longer and longer and he showed it to Niou every time they crossed paths.
“I went to see a doctor last week,” he told Niou in December. “He gave me a long-term prescription.”
“One of your teachers?”
“Of course not. That's unethical. He's a family friend. He's a good guy. I could make an appointment at his clinic for you. If you wanted.”
“Have you taken the tablets yet?”
“Not yet. I'm still deciding.”
“You'll take them, but not for long. And if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. If seeing meant that you only saw evil things, would that mean you'd want to be blind?”
“You could try for a while. It's not like gouging your eyeballs out or anything.”
“No,” said Niou, expressionless. “There are people I want to see.”
“Who?” And again the knowledge was simply there for Oshitari to access, to bring out. “Yagyuu.”
“Yagyuu. Someone else. Not you.”
His fingers curled and clenched before he could control them. “A real privilege, of course. A starring role in your nightmares.”
But he was jealous and left out, just as Niou had intended. He wanted to tell Niou that he was he was a freak. He wanted to punch something, or else to walk away from this conversation. He thought of looking down at his feet and avoiding eye contact. And he knew that right now Niou could see everything Oshitari might do in the next minute, in a waking collection of superimposed possibilities.
So he chose the future that Niou would experience for real, and said: “Yagyuu doesn't have clinical practice this afternoon. Wanna go out for dinner?'”
“....Sure.” And Niou smiled after he was done with looking surprised, and something was – not averted, but temporarily stayed.
#
And still he was – not drifting away, but being locked out. Gradually the gates of Niou and Yagyuu's friendship swung close, and each day the remaining gap in-between grew narrower. By Christmas Oshitari could just barely slip in.
“All my life, I've seen you in my dreams,” Niou informed Yagyuu, in the middle of a street of falling snow. They were eating meat skewers. All around them the city flashed red and green. It looked and sounded like a very very bad romance novel. “You and the blue-eyed boy. He sees us. We'll go to him. It's the natural outcome.”
Yagyuu's gaze was as Oshitari had never seen it or thought possible: hot, furious, wanting. “Tell me.”
It was no longer Oshitari's world. It was not his future. He could, however, taste and and precognise glimpses of it – and it was frightening and bloody.
He went back to his doctor and asked for his prescription dosage to be doubled. His headaches fluctuated. They had gone away when he began the suppressant drugs, but now they struck unpredictably and with a vengeance. Oshitari sat the supplementary exams feverish and confused, trying to ignore the facts that he should not know, the details that materialised suddenly in his mind when he glanced at a blank line; despite his explicit certainty that he did not know the answers. He passed with flying colors and felt guilt.
The morning of the Lunar New Year (mid-February this year), Oshitari stared at the plastic stylus lying askew on Yagyuu's desk and told it to float.
It did.
“You saw this happening,” he accused Niou, the next time they met. “You knew.”
“I thought you preferred not to know.”
“I did, I do. Nothing has made sense since you came.”
“You're wrong. Everything has always been perfectly logical. Take more of your drugs if it bother you so much.”
“I can't. I'm at the maximum dose.” Already he was on the strongest drug available on the general market; anything stronger and it would render Oshitari clumsy-gaited, make him thow up every meal he ingested.
“You're like me, so of course nothing would work. You'll never be a doctor, you know. You should stop fooling yourself.”
“I'll be a doctor if I want to.”
“Then you'll never want to,” Niou said, mockingly agreeable.
“Just go away, please.”
Niou did, and when he came back to visit, he only came to see Yagyuu. By then Oshitari was too preoccupied with faces and voices, phantasmagoria, to care. Futures loomed in his mind in waking and sleeping visions, and they were not images of anybody or anyplace he knew. Solid objects acquired malleability, stationary items shifted without his purposing. Precognition, telepathy, telekinesis all melded into a single experience. It was all the same. Oshitari feared all of it. Oshitari could no longer keep any of it at bay.
He stopped seeing his doctor. There was no way to be honest about what he was going through, and he did not want to be removed from medical college.
His prescription lapsed, and finally, reluctantly, one lunch break when Yagyuu was not in their room, he went to the desk and clicked his way to the Nousaeimin website, pulled up a single plain text file. Its heading covered the top of the screen in stark neat black: “Controlling your psionic abilities: a personal training guide.”
He read it all. He followed the links and read more pages of advice. Afterwards, he shut the computer down and began to practice.
#
March brought final exams, end-of-year ceremonies, and for Yagyuu, graduation with honours.
“You deserve it,” Oshitari told him. “You worked hard.”
They went up in a flyer that night, per Yagyuu's wish. Neither of them was licensed or experienced at piloting one, and the jerky accelerations and near-collisions were exhilarating. The air was polluted and crisp with cold, the moon seen only as an undefined brightness from beyond cloud and smoky atmosphere.
Gravity was gravity, and continued to be gravity, as Yagyuu demonstrated at least five times within the course of an hour's flight.
“We could die,” Oshitari said, after Yagyuu managed to recover the vehicle from nosediving into a skyscraper. “Scratch that, we are going to die. Let's park right now. I have too many plans for my life -- oh, shit.” They missed a head-on collision by inches, and the driver whizzed passed them, screaming expletives and comparing their brains to various scatological items.
Yagyuu, Oshitari opined, seemed to be enjoying this entirely too much.
“Don't worry. Niou told me we would survive.” The flyer wobbled again, and Oshitari's visceral organs attempted to flee to some parallel dimension where they would be safe.
“What a shame. Takes all the suspense out of it. Where is Niou tonight?” Privately Oshitari was glad of Niou's absence. It allowed him the illusion of things being as they had been before, just the two of them, studying to be medics. When he thought he had understood Yagyuu perfectly.
He could feel Yagyuu's thoughts even now, hovering just out of reach, held purposefully at bay. If Oshitari wanted he could touch them, know what the other boy was thinking. But his recoil at the idea was instant and automatic.
“Don't know. He said that he shouldn't come with us.”
A ringtone emerged from Yagyuu's infodevice.
“It'll go to message mode,” Yagyuu said. “I can get it later.”
“You don't get messages often. It might be important.”
“Not important enough.” Yagyuu flicked a button. The flyer twisted up savagely, and looped around a light-bedecked tower, turning sideways to do so. Oshitari fell towards the left door of the vehicle, felt his neck loll downwards suddenly, dug his fingernails into the double seatbelt that covered his body.
“Definitely enjoying this too much,” he muttered, softly enough that his voice was lost in the sound of wind.
After they returned the flyer to the rental garage Oshitari had to resist the urge to hug the ground. He closed his eyes, revelling in stability, the solid stationary ground. Beside him, Yagyuu checked his infodevice.
“That was fun. Might have been improved with anti-nausea drugs,” said Oshitari. He felt movement beside him, and opened his eyes to see Yagyuu running out of the garage, silver infodevice still clasped in one hand.
Oshitari chased him outside and then along the nighttime streets, towards campus, dodging traffic and people. Yagyuu was unnaturally fit. By the time they reached the front gates -- when Yagyuu tugged his glasses out of a shirt pocket and impatiently shoved them on, before dashing inside -- Oshitari's calves were burning with anaerobic buildup.
He gasped for oxygen, then resumed the sprint. He followed Yagyuu's quick smooth-moving figure across school grounds, finally catching up at the Faculty of Genetics building. Yagyuu had come to a stop in front of the closed main doors, which he was staring at with fists balled at his sides.
“What is it?” Oshitari asked quietly.
Yagyuu looked almost surprised to see Oshitari there. “Professor Whitaker,” he answered shortly, without turning his gaze from the metal doors. “He found out about Niou. I deleted Niou's original test results, but I couldn't wipe all the raw data; it automatically gets backed up to a secure university server.
“He figured out what I did. He said he'd forgive me for falsifying research data and not alter my final grade. How ridiculous is that? But he wants Niou for research. Research subjects like him are too invaluable to pass up.”
“That's silly. Niou won't cooperate.”
“He would. If he thought I'd fail medic college if he didn't. I'm leaving with him after graduation, you know. To find the boy he's always going on about.”
“The blue-eyed boy? You're crazier than I ever thought you were,” Oshitari said. It was a shame, really. He would have liked this Yagyuu better. If they'd ever had a chance to talk.
“Sometimes I think I've been mad all along. I hate this place, you know.”
When placed against Yagyuu's perfect attendance record, his perfect perfect study habits and fearsome clinical skills, the statement somehow made perfect sense.
“You're different,” Yagyuu added. “You'd be a good doctor. Internal medicine, or paediatrics.”
“You're wrong,” Oshitari said. “I'll never be a doctor.” He thought: so this is what being Niou was like. The knowing, the certainty. “Please don't do it.”
“Do what?”
“The thing you're thinking of right now.”
“Get out of my mind.” Yagyuu's face darkened. “Fuck you. I have to graduate.”
“Hypocrite.” Oshitari couldn't see the way out. Knowledge poured in from every future that could happen; in all of them a man lay dead, and Yagyuu walked away.
“Don't try to stop me.”
He had to stop it. He had to try and fail. He struck out with his mind, aiming wildly, untrained, reaching for Yagyuu, trying to be fast enough -- And Yagyuu had seized him by the arms, was hauling him around, and Oshitari was struggling with body and mind but couldn't get free, couldn't get free.
Yagyuu slammed the base of Oshitari's skull against a pillar.
#
Yagyuu graduated in absentia. After spending a week in hospital with a concussion, Oshitari went back to Neo-Kansai for the holidays. Neither of them attended Profesor Whitaker's funeral.
A year later, Oshitari dreamed of meeting Atobe Keigo.
On to Streets of Nippon Chapter 7
Characters: Oshitari, Yagyuu, Niou.
Summary Sidestory to the Streets of Nippon cyberpunk AU. Five years before the events of SoN, Oshitari and Yagyuu are studying at medical college, when the precognitive Niou Masaharu arrives to disrupt their lives.
Wordcount: 6500 words.
Warnings: Violence; some coarse language.
Notes: Somewhat first-drafty, especially towards the end; I welcome any concrit people may have to offer.
Every day after dinner Oshitari and Yagyuu would return to the room they shared to study. Cramped and windowless, it was still more comfortable than the overcrowded library. Yagyuu needed the desk to keep his head organised and would sit there with stylus and keyboard and built-in wall monitor, updating his exhaustive, very linear notes. Oshitari, who didn't mind either way, lay a half-metre away sprawled on his bunk, tapping on his widescreen infodevice. Every twenty minutes his attention waned and he would pick up one of the bookmarked paperbacks that lay scattered in the sheets around him. At time of the midyear clinical exams he was three hundred pages into Clarissa and on the fourth chapter of Little Women. Printed books were expensive and hard to find, but Oshitari had few other uses for his weekly allowance.
They passed four hours of each evening like this. Yagyuu turned the lights off at eleven without fail, and it was at this point of his life that Oshitari picked up the habit of reading in the dark on infodevice. In the morning Yagyuu woke first, used the bathroom, had breakfast, and at seven-thirty made sure that Oshitari was out of bed, more than once by forcibly yanking him onto the floor. All that year this ritual which had been established in the first fortnight of their acquiantance would continue; in tandem with four lectures a day and another twenty-five hours of academic weekly contact time, it made for a highly rigid existence. Afterwards Oshitari would develop a simultaneous dislike of, and infatuation with, order and structure – it explained many things that would happen in the future, such as Atobe Keigo.
During the day they hardly saw each other, being in different years. Oshitari spent the average of forty-five spare minutes he had each day (excluding Sunday) in the vast cultivated park that stood in the middle of campus. There was a significant category of mood disorder associated with insufficient exposure to natural flora, and the college was reputation-conscious enough to have a passing concern for the health of its students. The park was rectangular and bordered with thin trees that shed their leaves once a year, like clockwork, and contained many lawns of extremely resilient, genetically modified grass. It was always filled with students. Within two months of coming to medical school one could tell on sight which ones were the aspiring doctors and which ones the future medics, the health technicians: student-doctors were older, more likely to flaunt a white coat, more emotionally rather than physically stressed, while the medics were teenagers more often than not, casual in speech, and conversationally crisp on account of needing to be somewhere else five minutes ago. Student-doctors were old money; student-medics were new intelligence, and what intelligence they had! Oshitari had never felt mentally slow before he came here. To be sure, he had the excuse of being four years younger than his average classmate, but youth could not protect him from failing an exam. Yagyuu was his age and facing finals and planning a minor thesis besides. He spent the evening of Oshitari's birthday (otherwise celebrated with special-delivery fish and chips, an hour-long VR shooting expedition, and a cup of illegal sake each) running database searches for a literature review.
“Mitochondrial changes in individuals with high psionic ability?” Oshitari lay on his bunk, slightly drunk and dubious. The topic sounded far too interesting for Yagyuu to be interested in it.
“Professor Whitaker of the Faculty of Genetics has a special interest in the subject. He offered to be my supervisor, and also guaranteed funding.”
“Isn't it too complex for a six-month research project? The grads are always telling us not to be too ambitious for the minor.” Secretly he hoped Yagyuu would go ahead, and fail; Yagyuu's habit of being good at everything was annoying even for Oshitari.
“I'll only be making a small contribution to their work: taking family histories, and doing psionic testing, and sample collection. Other research assistants will be doing the lab analyses. Besides, I've always found psionics interesting.”
Yagyuu's tone suggested that if Oshitari were to argue the point any further he would find himself being woken up via a pail of iced water the next morning.
“My cousin is 4.3 telekinetic. He's a pain in the bum.”
“All cousins are. It's probably nothing to do with the telekinesis.”
Oshitari used the spread-open copy of Fanny Burney's Evelina to cover his face. “Probably not. But the telekinesis makes him a bigger pain than usual.” He lapsed into memory, remembered Kenya levitating over fences, crawling up walls Spiderman-style, spinning cutlery above their heads in a rapid gyre only to drop a knife on Oshitari's foot when the grown-ups discovered (and startled) them.
Yagyuu said, “I need to recruit psionics of Level 6 and above. Preferably telekinetics.”
“Try a virtual hub. I read somewhere that psionic-types like the Tennis Hub.”
“The Tennis Hub is famous for gangsters. Runners.”
“So what? You're not looking for upper-class telekinetics.”
Chilly silence, except for the sound of touch typing.
Oshitari felt lightheaded even though he was lying very still. That was the problem, he thought, you could never just make a suggestion to Hiroshi; you had to somehow convince him that he had thought of it all by himself, and all the better if you gave the impression that it was something you didn't want him to do, and really, Oshitari wasn't his mother, so what was with that attitude? If only Oshitari's mental faculties were working better.
Yagyuu shut down the monitor. He switched off the ceiling lights, so that the only brightness remaining in the room was a bluish haze of infodevice that lit the peripheries of Oshitari's vision, making partially visible the blurred darkened text of pages 117-118 of Evelina that crammed into his gaze.
“Happy birthday,” said Yagyuu.
Yagyuu's birthday was four days after Oshitari's, and fell on a Monday, which gave Oshitari the weekend to search for a present. He was unsure of what to buy. Neither of them needed anything and there was little space left in their room for new objects. Yagyuu liked sports and mystery novels but had not done much of either for months, thanks to the impending finals; in any case, he already had a gym membership and a subscription to the largest electronic library on the globe. The purpose of a birthday present was largely to express friendship and goodwill and to avoid offending Yagyuu by neglecting his birthday. Yagyuu himself took birthdays very seriously, and had given Oshitari a twenty-third century hardback edition of Jane Austen's complete works.
Their medical college stood at the heart of one of Shin Tokyo's busiest wards, and there were ample shopping districts located within a stone's throw of the entrance gates, teeming with all the eclecticism of this city. Holographic advertisements prowled the streets. Biomodified teenagers promenaded through open air malls. Oshitari began his shopping quest in a robot-operated combini above the local subway station, and shortly after, found himself in a massive, traditional department store, submerged in elevator music, displays of cologne and aftershave, and racks of leather shoes and silk ties.
“Get a watch,” came a voice from behind him, as Oshitari was examining a glass spray-bottle of golden liquid with product information written on the back in six languages, none of which Oshitari spoke.
It was a boy Oshitari's age, wearing a thin wide-collared T-shirt over a celadon singlet, and cargo pants, with a black chain-belt wound loosely around his hips. His eyes were Asian, sharp and narrow, but striking due to their colour, a light shimmery silver.
He was smirking. As Oshitari stared at him, he took the bottle out of Oshitari's hands and hurled it to the ground.
Glass shards flew out around them, and the scent of verbena and menthol rose up like a cloud.
Shocked into speaking, Oshitari said, “What do you think you're doing?”
“Leaving.” The boy was already on his way out of the aisle, but turned his head back to reply. “You coming? Or do you plan to stick around and pay for it?”
“The security cameras--”
“Won't see us. Come with me.”
Spurred on by the knowledge that he could not afford to pay for the damages, Oshitari stepped over the carnage of cologne and followed the strange boy out of the department store, trying to mimic the other's insouciant, unconcerned air. His own heart was beating very hard, but none of the other shoppers seemed to notice anything amiss, and he was sensible enough to make the best of the situation.
Outside they blended in easily with the other pedestrians, heading to the opposite sidewalk and then towards a major intersection, where the crowd was thickest. They moved steadily, the strange boy setting the pace.
“Who are you?” Oshitari asked, deciding that the best initial approach was to get as much information as possible.
“Niou Masaharu. You're Oshitari Yuushi.”
A reply that posed yet another question. “How do you know my name?”
“It's a talent of mine.” Niou grinned at him. It was a friendly grin, but suggested that Niou did not really care whether Oshitari smiled back or not. “Are you going to get that watch?”
“Why do you care?”
“I can't afford a birthday present. So when you buy one, tell Yagyuu that it's from both of us.”
“Does Hiroshi know you?”
“He will.”
Exasperated, Oshitari asked, “Do you ever make sense to anyone?”, before they got separated in a sea of pedestrians at the traffic lights. Oshitari kept track of Niou by the boy's platinum blond hair, which bobbed its way across the junction in a diagonal line.
When they were reunited at the corner, Niou answered: “Only to logical people. That rules you out.”
“Why did you break that cologne bottle?”
“Because I could.”
“Obviously.”
“I know where you can get cheap prices on watches,” said Niou, thus proving himself the sort of person who stuck to a goal once he had it in mind.
“Why would Hiroshi need a watch?”
“He doesn't. But he'll like it.”
“And you know this, because--” They were cutting across a alley, so narrow that the protruding steps at the back of shops nearly spanned its entire width. At least three graffiti artists had been at work here: one in biopaint that had reproduced into new patterns and reached even to the roof of buildings, one with traditional spray cans, and one in a black substance that emitted mathematical sequences of electromagnetic radiation. Oshitari felt bursts of infrared heat on his skin as they walked past.
“I told you already. It's a talent. Here we are.” They had arrived at an outdoor shopping arcade. Niou led Oshitari to the centre of it, into a transparent plastic bubble elevator, and they floated downwards.
On the basement level, at the end of a corridor tiled like a checkerboard in sienna and ochre, stood a little store crammed full of accessories, which they entered. There was barely enough room for them to stand in between the shelves. Oshitari picked up a burgundy wallet, careful not to disturb the precarious balance of the other wallets that piled around it, and checked the price tag.
“Three thousand shin yen? Are these fake?” He sniffed the leather. “It's cheap even for fake leather.”
“I've found the watch.” Niou held up the object of his search. It was gold-plated, with a classic clock face; Oshitari could hear the faint tick of the second hand. “Ten thousand shin yen, with a ten-year warranty. Not bad, right? Comes with a nice box, too. All you have to do is wrap it in some tissue paper.”
“It's still an expensive gift.”
“All the better. Yagyuu hates cheap.”
How did Yagyuu know a strange kid like this? “Why should I buy it?”
“Why shouldn't you buy it?” Niou folded his arms across his chest, and his gaze went distant, indicating that he had said all that he cared to about this subject.
“Nobody wears this kind of watch anymore.”
“Yagyuu's not most people.”
That was true. “How do I know it's any good? I can't tell a high-quality wristwatch from a poor one.”
“I can. It's a good watch.”
“And I should believe your words, because-- Something caught Oshitari then, at the edges of his mind, and he frowned. “No, you're not lying.”
As he spoke this he saw a feral, delighted expression cover Niou's face.
“Why do you think that?” Niou asked.
Oshitari was prevented from answering by a sudden, fleeting blurring of his vision. Pain flashed through his skull. “Give it to me,” he said.
Niou handed him the watch and its case, and Oshitari walked over to the automated sales machine standing in one corner. After he'd paid, Niou gave him a small wave with his fingers. “I'll see you tomorrow. Good luck with the headache.”
Then he was gone, exiting through the shop's tinted sliding glass doors. Oshitari paused to tuck the watch into its glossy black case and slip the thing into his wallet. He was barely a second behind Niou, but when he emerged into the chessboard corridor, it was completely empty.
The headache that had cursorily come and gone minutes ago, reappeared again as he took the elevator back up, and by the time he arrived on campus it had thoroughly made its home with him, necessitating a Sunday afternoon in his room spent with acetaminophen, sips of water, and a sleeping mask.
In years to come when Oshitari thought of Niou he would think secondly of pain, but firstly of question after question all hanging in midair, never leading to any sort of real answer.
He woke up at six the next morning, flushed and shivering. He was tachycardic. He was agitated. He had been having nightmares.
He crawled out of bed, checking the upper bunk to see if Yagyuu was still asleep (he was), and switched on the wall monitor. It came to life displaying several windows still open, demonstrating that last night Yagyuu had been a) reviewing management guidelines for trauma life support; b) writing an e-mail to his physician father, c) searching for information about psionics on every search engine Oshitari could think of.
Eschewing the stylus and using bare hands to control the touchpad, he fingered his way through the websites. Yagyuu preferred his monitor in 2D mode, and had his colour schemes set to neutral -- but all over the planet, server owners were upgrading from traditional circuitry to neural networks, and web standards were a joke globally. The holographic main portal for Nousaemin, the international community for young psionics, appeared as a maimed image on the flatscreen display, surrounded by placeholder icons for multimedia of all kinds.
He recalled Kenya showing him the website a couple of summers ago, in all its varicoloured, epilepsy-tempting, three-dimensional glory. Kenya had had headaches. Fevers, too. Pyrexia, chills, generalised aches and malaise: all symptoms of non-specific viral infections, systemic inflammatory illnesses – and burgeoning psionic powers.
He wasn't sure where Kenya's telekinesis came from. Neither of their fathers had ever demonstrated so much as one microjoule of psychic power. Although, if Yagyuu was correct about the mitochondria hypothesis – mitochondrial DNA was all passed down maternally. Which meant that Kenya's genetic source of psionic talent was completely separate from his own.
Oshitari could not have explained how he knew that he was psionic. The fact came to him as he was half-staring at (through, rather) the computer screen – not as epiphany, but in the way the date of one's birthday or the memory of a smell might drift into mind. Soon after he began idly to construct the logical argument leading to his knowledge, but the knowledge came first, the deduction later. He had psionic powers, like his cousin Kenya. He was just coming into them.
In future it would be usual for his precognitive gifts to manifest themselves thus. A knowing, a simple entry of information, flowing in easily like electricity through a wire. His visions were terrible but rare. His distress was purely psychological.
He asked a healthcare search engine to look for items related to “suppression psionic activity pharmacological treatment.”; then realised, by the rustle of cloth coming from behind, that Yagyuu was waking up. Feeling awkward, Oshitari aborted the search and greeted Yagyuu happy birthday. Yagyuu's response was barely mumbled. He was not much of a morning person by nature; it was only the force of habit and discipline that kept him waking up at this time.
Oshitari passed the day in a dreamy medicated haze of ill-defined pain, into which details of DNA-modifying drugs, vasculature and innervation of the lower limb, pre-, intra- and post-hepatic causes of jaundice, barely penetrated. Not for the first time he wondered why he was here, instead of in high school; instead of doing quantum chemistry at university as his father had suggested. Physiology was fascinating, pharmacology delightful; the prospect of real patients tantalised. But he would not be allowed professional licensing until he was sixteen, which was the age at which he could go to medical school to do proper doctor's training.
His parents had been ambivalent about whether to send him to Shin Tokyo to study. His uncle, on the other hand, had been forcefully against it, and told his father as much on at least one occasion that Oshitari had overheard: “You know as well as I do that medics are a thing of the past. When there weren't enough actual doctors on this planet it was different; medics were essential for providing healthcare in rural and remote areas. But that hasn't been true since we were children. The only place to get work is in the space colonies.”
“He can be a doctor later if he wants to be. With a medic's degree, admission to medical school will be automatic. Or he can go to university afterwards. It's only a two-year course.”
“Two years is a long time for a child to be away from his parents.”
“If he's keen, I'll let him do it. He's young enough to do whatever he wants to.”
Yagyuu had been even younger. Ten years old when he applied, eleven when he enrolled. The average age of graduation was eighteen. Despite the decline in job opportunities, the course was still popular – medics still commanded strong respect here, as they did on any recently colonised planet.
“...plus if possible, I'd like to avoid Yuushi working for Shitenhouji.”
His uncle's reply had been quite cold: “It's a syndicate with a long tradition, and a deep history with our family.”
“It's a syndicate, and illegal.”
“In case you haven't noticed, brother, everything in this country is illegal! You won't find a city or burb in Nippon that doesn't depend on runner activity. And the Silver Emperor, may he stop discovering nanotech miracles of regeneration and croak soon, is worse than most of the so-called syndicates. Yuushi and Kenya would be safer in Shitenhouji than in most other places.”
The week after Oshitari started medic training, Kenya had messaged to say that he had run away from home to become a Shitenhouji runner. Oshitari's reaction was mild alarm tempered by a grim satisfaction. Their fathers' plans, in the end, mattered little in the face of what they themselves wanted.
Oshitari returned to his room after classes to find Yagyuu outside the door, talking to Niou Masaharu.
Yagyuu nodded in greeting. “Yuushi.”
“Hiroshi,” Oshitari replied coolly. “Niou.”
“Oshitari. That makes full circle. Can we leave now? Yagyuu doesn't like to stay up late.”
The slightest movement of Yagyuu's eyebrow told Oshitari that this was not information that Yagyuu had given to Niou.
“Niou's a precognitive,” he explained to Yagyuu. “That's where he's getting all this information.” And he knew that it was true, although he had no sense of where or how he was acquiring this knowledge.
“I never told you that,” Niou said, mimicking Yagyuu's subtle brow curve.
“I'm intelligent. That's why I'm studying here.”
“So I see. Have you got Yagyuu's present?” Without pausing Niou turned his attention back to Yagyuu. “We went shopping together for your birthday present yesterday.”
“Is that so?”
“It's a watch. It tells you exactly what time it is, right now.”
“That's the usual purpose of a watch,” Yagyuu said dryly. To Oshitari's surprise he did not seem put off by the appearance and mannerisms of Niou. To the contrary, he looked interested.
“There are variations,” Oshitari added, caught up in the subject despite himself. “Some watches tell you what the time is in several cities, all at once. Kapitalstadt and Santa Teresa and Fengzhou. New York. Paris.”
“Some watches,” said Niou, “don't run. They just tell you the same time, all the time.”
“Like Miss Havisham's clocks?”
Yagyuu cleared his throat. He was always impatient with Oshitari's literary allusions. “I want to be back by nine,” he told Niou.
“Yeah, yeah. Don't repeat yourself. Wouldn't you like your present first?”
“Not really. Yuushi can give it to me afterwards. Are you coming with us for dinner, Yuushi?”
“Of course,” Oshitari said, even though it currently felt like he was having a headache in his neck, hips, and sternum, an experience that had doubled in intensity the moment he came within five feet of Niou.
“Let me get changed then, and we'll go.” Yagyuu disappeared into the room, leaving the remaining two in the passageway.
At first they were silent. Then Oshitari spoke: “I did some research in the library today. Did you know that a high-level psionic can activate the latent talents of another psionic by using their psychic abilities on that person?”
“Yes. I remember you telling me. A long time ago.” Niou's lip curled. “But you're wearing the wrong clothes. I made sure I was wearing the right clothes, too, when I met you, and today. I even made sure to smash the bottle yesterday, and instead you show up in high-tops and jeans. All the calculations are off. I'll have new bad dreams tonight.”
“Do you have bad dreams when you're awake?” It was not the question Oshitari had meant to ask; it was simply the first thing that had come out of his mouth, and he felt like if he decelerated the conversation, gave himself time to think, he would go mad from the effort and result.
“Not unless I let them happen. It's the sort of thing,” Niou draped himself against the wall in a lazy pose that belied his focused, focused eyes, “that you get good at after a while.”
“Is that why you came here? Because you saw yourself coming here?”
“I came here for Yagyuu's project.”
That, Oshitari thought, was not really answering the question.
“You should get help. There are clinics for people with problems like this -- special academies--”
“Nobody can help.” Some quick dead emotion flickered across Niou's face. “Not you. Not me. Not people like us.”
Oshitari groped for words. There was a tutorial he had attended last month -- on drug counselling, emotional abuse victims, full of helpful suggestions. There was something he could say or do.
“We can try.”
“You will,” Niou said, before turning towards the door to Oshitari's room. It eased open to reveal Yagyuu, dressed in casual smart, bespectacled.
Yagyuu never wore glasses on campus and always wore them everywhere else. It was one of those Yagyuu quirks, the sort of peculiarity he always had a perfectly logical-sounding explanation ready for – an explanation that would make no sense once Oshitari stopped to think carefully about it. Everything about Yagyuu was a bit like that. A non sequitur disguised as de facto.
Niou liked Yagyuu's glasses and said as much, at the Korean barbecue place where they celebrated Yagyuu's birthday. The way he said it, it was as if he was saying that he liked Yagyuu. Yagyuu's response was intriguing. He readjusted his frames that Niou had pulled crooked, took up his metal chopsticks to place more beef strips on the grill, and said the usual polite and disdainful things -- but there was no real venom in it, there was bemusement, there was fascination. It offended Oshitari. Seven months of living together, and he'd never seen this side of Yagyuu.
Three weeks later Niou bought Oshitari his first pair of glasses.
“Thanks. Though I don't need them.” Oshitari folded them into their cloth-case and put them in the front pocket of his satchel, which was hanging from a wondrously horizontal branch of an oak tree at the centre of the quadrilateral college park.
“I've seen you wearing them. They look good on you.”
“Because you knew I was going to wear glasses, you bought me glasses? That's what they call a philosophical paradox,” Oshitari said, although the fact was he didn't know the first thing about philosophy and cared only vaguely, in the sense of regretting that he couldn't sound reliably intellectually impressive at times like this.
Niou shook his head. “No, it's not a paradox.” Niou was very, very good and logical about his definitions. There was a kind of academic purity about his brain; something that Yagyuu lacked. Moral and emotional purity weren't the same thing as intellectual purity.
Niou sometimes talked like a little kid, sometimes like a older teenager, sometimes like Oshitari's father. More often he talked like Yagyuu, mannerisms and all. Oftenest he was silent, a state he lapsed into more and more often as their acquaintance continued. By November Yagyuu had finished his literature review and begun the practical aspects of research, and Niou was accompanying him in the laboratories every week. When he wasn't himself the subject under study, he was helping Yagyuu find other volunteers. According to Yagyuu he was a very patient study subject.
Yagyuu came back one evening in an agitated silence that made the atmosphere of their room terrible. Oshitari put up with it until nine o'clock, jamming headphones into his ears and losing himself in reading bodice-rippers, until he decided Yagyuu's fingers on the keyboard were too arrhythmic and loud and annoying; also when Oshitari paused to check he noticed that Yagyuu seemed to be reading the same content on the monitor over and over again, since the screen never changed.
“What happened with Niou?” he asked.
For the next, literal minute he thought that Yagyuu was not going to reply.
Then: “He broke the scale,” Yagyuu said. “The test for precognitives. The assessment's done by using a program to output true random numbers, and asking the psionic to predict the number. We did ten thousand numbers today. He only got three wrong.”
It was unsurprising news, but Oshitari was still caught up in the shock and drama of it. “Which makes him a level--”
“This style of assessment is only valid up to level 8.999. Any rating higher than that has to be assigned by a psionics expert. I...had to lie on the test.” Yagyuu had stopped typing and now rested his hands on the table; except for speech, every part of him was unmoving. “I put him down as a 6.8. If I recorded him as a 7 Professor Whitaker would want to intervene personally. They put people like Niou in institutions.”
“They put people like Niou in the palace. To work for the Emperor.” Not even that, Oshitari thought; they shipped people like Niou back to Old Earth, cloned them, spliced their DNA, turned them into celebrities, built mini-industries around them. Here in Nippon, where espionage was more lucrative than fame, it was a different story.
Oshitari's list of psionic suppressant drugs was getting longer and longer and he showed it to Niou every time they crossed paths.
“I went to see a doctor last week,” he told Niou in December. “He gave me a long-term prescription.”
“One of your teachers?”
“Of course not. That's unethical. He's a family friend. He's a good guy. I could make an appointment at his clinic for you. If you wanted.”
“Have you taken the tablets yet?”
“Not yet. I'm still deciding.”
“You'll take them, but not for long. And if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. If seeing meant that you only saw evil things, would that mean you'd want to be blind?”
“You could try for a while. It's not like gouging your eyeballs out or anything.”
“No,” said Niou, expressionless. “There are people I want to see.”
“Who?” And again the knowledge was simply there for Oshitari to access, to bring out. “Yagyuu.”
“Yagyuu. Someone else. Not you.”
His fingers curled and clenched before he could control them. “A real privilege, of course. A starring role in your nightmares.”
But he was jealous and left out, just as Niou had intended. He wanted to tell Niou that he was he was a freak. He wanted to punch something, or else to walk away from this conversation. He thought of looking down at his feet and avoiding eye contact. And he knew that right now Niou could see everything Oshitari might do in the next minute, in a waking collection of superimposed possibilities.
So he chose the future that Niou would experience for real, and said: “Yagyuu doesn't have clinical practice this afternoon. Wanna go out for dinner?'”
“....Sure.” And Niou smiled after he was done with looking surprised, and something was – not averted, but temporarily stayed.
And still he was – not drifting away, but being locked out. Gradually the gates of Niou and Yagyuu's friendship swung close, and each day the remaining gap in-between grew narrower. By Christmas Oshitari could just barely slip in.
“All my life, I've seen you in my dreams,” Niou informed Yagyuu, in the middle of a street of falling snow. They were eating meat skewers. All around them the city flashed red and green. It looked and sounded like a very very bad romance novel. “You and the blue-eyed boy. He sees us. We'll go to him. It's the natural outcome.”
Yagyuu's gaze was as Oshitari had never seen it or thought possible: hot, furious, wanting. “Tell me.”
It was no longer Oshitari's world. It was not his future. He could, however, taste and and precognise glimpses of it – and it was frightening and bloody.
He went back to his doctor and asked for his prescription dosage to be doubled. His headaches fluctuated. They had gone away when he began the suppressant drugs, but now they struck unpredictably and with a vengeance. Oshitari sat the supplementary exams feverish and confused, trying to ignore the facts that he should not know, the details that materialised suddenly in his mind when he glanced at a blank line; despite his explicit certainty that he did not know the answers. He passed with flying colors and felt guilt.
The morning of the Lunar New Year (mid-February this year), Oshitari stared at the plastic stylus lying askew on Yagyuu's desk and told it to float.
It did.
“You saw this happening,” he accused Niou, the next time they met. “You knew.”
“I thought you preferred not to know.”
“I did, I do. Nothing has made sense since you came.”
“You're wrong. Everything has always been perfectly logical. Take more of your drugs if it bother you so much.”
“I can't. I'm at the maximum dose.” Already he was on the strongest drug available on the general market; anything stronger and it would render Oshitari clumsy-gaited, make him thow up every meal he ingested.
“You're like me, so of course nothing would work. You'll never be a doctor, you know. You should stop fooling yourself.”
“I'll be a doctor if I want to.”
“Then you'll never want to,” Niou said, mockingly agreeable.
“Just go away, please.”
Niou did, and when he came back to visit, he only came to see Yagyuu. By then Oshitari was too preoccupied with faces and voices, phantasmagoria, to care. Futures loomed in his mind in waking and sleeping visions, and they were not images of anybody or anyplace he knew. Solid objects acquired malleability, stationary items shifted without his purposing. Precognition, telepathy, telekinesis all melded into a single experience. It was all the same. Oshitari feared all of it. Oshitari could no longer keep any of it at bay.
He stopped seeing his doctor. There was no way to be honest about what he was going through, and he did not want to be removed from medical college.
His prescription lapsed, and finally, reluctantly, one lunch break when Yagyuu was not in their room, he went to the desk and clicked his way to the Nousaeimin website, pulled up a single plain text file. Its heading covered the top of the screen in stark neat black: “Controlling your psionic abilities: a personal training guide.”
He read it all. He followed the links and read more pages of advice. Afterwards, he shut the computer down and began to practice.
March brought final exams, end-of-year ceremonies, and for Yagyuu, graduation with honours.
“You deserve it,” Oshitari told him. “You worked hard.”
They went up in a flyer that night, per Yagyuu's wish. Neither of them was licensed or experienced at piloting one, and the jerky accelerations and near-collisions were exhilarating. The air was polluted and crisp with cold, the moon seen only as an undefined brightness from beyond cloud and smoky atmosphere.
Gravity was gravity, and continued to be gravity, as Yagyuu demonstrated at least five times within the course of an hour's flight.
“We could die,” Oshitari said, after Yagyuu managed to recover the vehicle from nosediving into a skyscraper. “Scratch that, we are going to die. Let's park right now. I have too many plans for my life -- oh, shit.” They missed a head-on collision by inches, and the driver whizzed passed them, screaming expletives and comparing their brains to various scatological items.
Yagyuu, Oshitari opined, seemed to be enjoying this entirely too much.
“Don't worry. Niou told me we would survive.” The flyer wobbled again, and Oshitari's visceral organs attempted to flee to some parallel dimension where they would be safe.
“What a shame. Takes all the suspense out of it. Where is Niou tonight?” Privately Oshitari was glad of Niou's absence. It allowed him the illusion of things being as they had been before, just the two of them, studying to be medics. When he thought he had understood Yagyuu perfectly.
He could feel Yagyuu's thoughts even now, hovering just out of reach, held purposefully at bay. If Oshitari wanted he could touch them, know what the other boy was thinking. But his recoil at the idea was instant and automatic.
“Don't know. He said that he shouldn't come with us.”
A ringtone emerged from Yagyuu's infodevice.
“It'll go to message mode,” Yagyuu said. “I can get it later.”
“You don't get messages often. It might be important.”
“Not important enough.” Yagyuu flicked a button. The flyer twisted up savagely, and looped around a light-bedecked tower, turning sideways to do so. Oshitari fell towards the left door of the vehicle, felt his neck loll downwards suddenly, dug his fingernails into the double seatbelt that covered his body.
“Definitely enjoying this too much,” he muttered, softly enough that his voice was lost in the sound of wind.
After they returned the flyer to the rental garage Oshitari had to resist the urge to hug the ground. He closed his eyes, revelling in stability, the solid stationary ground. Beside him, Yagyuu checked his infodevice.
“That was fun. Might have been improved with anti-nausea drugs,” said Oshitari. He felt movement beside him, and opened his eyes to see Yagyuu running out of the garage, silver infodevice still clasped in one hand.
Oshitari chased him outside and then along the nighttime streets, towards campus, dodging traffic and people. Yagyuu was unnaturally fit. By the time they reached the front gates -- when Yagyuu tugged his glasses out of a shirt pocket and impatiently shoved them on, before dashing inside -- Oshitari's calves were burning with anaerobic buildup.
He gasped for oxygen, then resumed the sprint. He followed Yagyuu's quick smooth-moving figure across school grounds, finally catching up at the Faculty of Genetics building. Yagyuu had come to a stop in front of the closed main doors, which he was staring at with fists balled at his sides.
“What is it?” Oshitari asked quietly.
Yagyuu looked almost surprised to see Oshitari there. “Professor Whitaker,” he answered shortly, without turning his gaze from the metal doors. “He found out about Niou. I deleted Niou's original test results, but I couldn't wipe all the raw data; it automatically gets backed up to a secure university server.
“He figured out what I did. He said he'd forgive me for falsifying research data and not alter my final grade. How ridiculous is that? But he wants Niou for research. Research subjects like him are too invaluable to pass up.”
“That's silly. Niou won't cooperate.”
“He would. If he thought I'd fail medic college if he didn't. I'm leaving with him after graduation, you know. To find the boy he's always going on about.”
“The blue-eyed boy? You're crazier than I ever thought you were,” Oshitari said. It was a shame, really. He would have liked this Yagyuu better. If they'd ever had a chance to talk.
“Sometimes I think I've been mad all along. I hate this place, you know.”
When placed against Yagyuu's perfect attendance record, his perfect perfect study habits and fearsome clinical skills, the statement somehow made perfect sense.
“You're different,” Yagyuu added. “You'd be a good doctor. Internal medicine, or paediatrics.”
“You're wrong,” Oshitari said. “I'll never be a doctor.” He thought: so this is what being Niou was like. The knowing, the certainty. “Please don't do it.”
“Do what?”
“The thing you're thinking of right now.”
“Get out of my mind.” Yagyuu's face darkened. “Fuck you. I have to graduate.”
“Hypocrite.” Oshitari couldn't see the way out. Knowledge poured in from every future that could happen; in all of them a man lay dead, and Yagyuu walked away.
“Don't try to stop me.”
He had to stop it. He had to try and fail. He struck out with his mind, aiming wildly, untrained, reaching for Yagyuu, trying to be fast enough -- And Yagyuu had seized him by the arms, was hauling him around, and Oshitari was struggling with body and mind but couldn't get free, couldn't get free.
Yagyuu slammed the base of Oshitari's skull against a pillar.
Yagyuu graduated in absentia. After spending a week in hospital with a concussion, Oshitari went back to Neo-Kansai for the holidays. Neither of them attended Profesor Whitaker's funeral.
A year later, Oshitari dreamed of meeting Atobe Keigo.
On to Streets of Nippon Chapter 7