“Stay there,” Kodai again motions at Hajime with his weapon, “if you try anything, you’re done.” He steps around the coffee table. The afternoon sun is visible over his shoulder, increasing the length of his shadow. “I’m going to forget what you just said. I’m going to forget how you disrespected me. Consider yourself lucky for this. You really don’t know what I’m capable of.”
Ryuk’s knees feels rubbery and weak, but he manages to take a few steps towards his brother. I will stand my ground, he thinks, I will not let you bully me again, he subvocalizes.
“What was that?” Kodai asks.
“Get the fuck out of my home!” Something odd happens to Ryuk’s pane of vision that reminds him of his Extreme Focus skill in Tritania. The corners dim and he suddenly feels as if he’s looking through Kodai to the coffee table behind him directly at …
Kodai takes a step closer to his younger brother. “Are you challenging me?”
“I’ll tell you one thing you aren’t capable of … ” The words flow out of Ryuk’s mouth, seemingly of their own volition. He closes the distance between them. “You aren’t … aren’t capable of completing college! I know what happened at NYU, you lying sack of shit!”
Kodai is speechless as Ryuk slams both hands against his older brother’s chest, pushing him backwards into the glass coffee table.
The sound of shattering glass and the thud of Kodai hitting the floor loom large in the apartment. Hajime springs to his feet and plucks the humgun from Kodai’s grasp just as the door explodes inward.
Gorira leads the charge gun first, and is quickly met by Hajime, who disarms the man-mountain with insolent ease, spins him to act as a shield, and tucks the muzzle of Gorira’s own gun up under his ear. “Pick up your employer and leave, all of you.” Hajime instructs the other two. “Do it now.”
The two help Kodai up out of the wreckage of the glass coffee table.
Blood dribbles from a gash in his palm and there’s a tear along the sleeve of his Kiton suit jacket. With a wordless cry of rage, he leaps for Ryuk, only to be restrained by his own two men. Kodai screams again, flicks blood on the floor, raises a single finger at his younger brother and grits his teeth as he says, “I won’t forget this! You will never disrespect me again!” He pulls his arm free from his goons and storms into Ryuk’s room.
There is the unmistakable sound of electronic equipment being smashed, and Ryuk knows instantly what Kodai has done.
Ryuk’s legs go wobbly as Kodai steps out of the bedroom.
“Fuck you.” Kodai throws the broken NV Visor into his chest; it bounces off and lands at his feet. “This isn’t over.”
With that, he marches right out the front door, followed by his two thugs. He doesn’t so much as look at Gorira, who is still held by Hajime.
Once Kodai and his posse are out, Hajime releases Gorira but keeps the gun trained on him. “Leave.”
“My gun,” Gorira says.
“Later.” Hajime motions to the door. “Leave now.”
Chapter 26: Kaizen
“Well, that certainly went poorly,” Hajime observes.
Ryuk nods and swallows a breath of what has to be the freshest, most life-sustaining gulp of air he’s ever tasted. His brother’s blood spatters the wall and the carpet here and there; his broken NV Visor is more liberally smeared with it.
“Order another one.” Hajime drops the magazine from Gorira’s hand cannon and places it on a side table, racks the slide and catches the oversized round in mid-air. He examines the humgun for a moment, noting its make and model. “If you order a new visor on Rakuten, it’ll be here within the hour. Your chair will take a day to arrive.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Ryuk manages to say.
A sense of freedom washes over him and for once, he doesn’t feel like logging in. His avatar can handle the zombie battles for now, and he’ll see Tamana soon enough anyway. He should be ordering a new visor, he should be coming down from the adrenaline high, he should be doing something other than standing here, frozen as if he’s been struck in the chest by a time marble. But as he stands there a thought becomes crystal clear – none of this matters.
Once he is done here, he can spend eternity with Tamana. The real world is irrelevant. His feud with his brother? Pointless. His family business? Immaterial.
But an RPC isn’t really you.
And the cold, hard corollary to that comes to him unbidden – it isn’t really Tamana either.
Ryuk knows this, knows that she is simply a highly complex arrangement of ones and zeroes created by D-NAS, that she is really no more alive than Hajime. But knowing and truly understanding the implications of such a statement are very different things.
He stands in his living room and surveys the chaos before him, as the thoughts come at him a mile-a-minute, Ryuk makes the choice right then to take command of his future. He’ll become an RPC and he’ll live forever that way, but until that day comes he will live without fear or regret. He will seize his own reality in a way he has never contemplated before. He will stand up to Kodai; he will attend the Proxima school that he’s been eyeing for the past year now; he won’t follow in his father’s footsteps, but he will learn about manipulating power.
“I want to keep the gun,” he tells Hajime. “I mean, guns, I want to keep them both.”
“Oh?” Hajime considers this for a moment. “Do you think that when the time comes you will have the resolve to use them?”
“I really don’t know; I just want to feel safe and I don’t want to be a … ” He wants to say ‘target’ but this doesn’t see like the right word. Neither does the word ‘victim’.
Ryuk bites his lip as he takes in the humandroid standing before him. Hajime is calm and collected, as if he’s just woken up from a pleasant nap and is on his way to a meditation class. Meanwhile, he’s on pins and needles, in a weird state of existential self-reflection, sure, but there isn’t much he can verbalize at the moment, which makes it strange that the only request he has is to weapon up.
“I’ve ordered you a replacement visor from Rakuten,” Hajime informs him. “It should be here within the next hour.”
“Are you trying to distract me?” Ryuk asks.
“No, I’m trying to comfort you. If you are interested in the weapons, I will show you how to use them. Are you hungry?”
Ryuk notices the prompt doesn’t have his manga-stylized face in the corner this time, likely because Hajime is trying to be serious. And this is how he shows me? Even amidst the destruction in the room, his existential bullshit, and the adrenaline still pulsing in his veins, Ryuk has to smile. “I’m not hungry.”
“Tea?”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you sit?” Hajime suggests. “Not there, at the dining room table. I can tell that you are thinking deeply about something.”
“You can tell, huh?” Ryuk takes a seat at the table. He hears Hajime click on the plastic kettle to boil water for tea and he listens to the water bubble and hiss until Hajime’s hand on his shoulder draws his attention. “I may not be human, but I can ‘sense’ things, if you expand your definition of the word ‘sense’ to mean ‘perceive chemical changes and other indicators of human emotion.’ Whatever is on your mind, let me say this.”
Ryuk looks up at him.
“You did well back there, Ryuk. You stood your ground and finally were able to emphasize the difference between you and your brother, by overcoming your fear of him and being cognizant of your surroundings. Don’t think I didn’t see you quickly glance to the coffee table. Don’t think I didn’t see you approach him in a way that you’d be in a position to push Kodai into it. That took guts, it took cunning – something that you humans have and that I do not fully possess. We humandroids are logical entities that can do many things, but the sort of quick, visceral cunning you exhibited comes only with tens of thousands of years of evolution.”