–I’m going to make a dictionary. My own original.
“Brilliant. When you grow up you could become a linguist, or a poet.”
–Well, I always wanted to go to school and have a dictionary like everyone else. The sort of school that children like me go to. So this is instead of that. My own self-study classroom.
“And you could still go to school. As soon as this case is closed we’ll apply for re-enrollment.”
–Won’t work. You need both your parents’ signatures, Balot replied, bluntly.
–Children who don’t have any get put in the Welfare Institute. I don’t want to go back there.
“But aren’t both your parents still alive?”
–They don’t think of me as a child. Not their child, anyway.
She informed him of this without stopping her hand that was holding the marker. Wordlessly. As an electronic signal.
Balot stopped writing only when the young waiter came over to bring her the drink she’d ordered.
“Is it a report you’re working on, miss? For school?” the waiter asked. Balot nodded ambiguously. The waiter laughed, showing the whites of his teeth. He pointed at the monitor on the table.
“You can look up almost anything on this thing. This café has access rights to the library, you see. The official time limit is two hours. But if you want an extension, just let me know. I might be able to sneak you one.”
Balot touched her choker so that the young waiter could understand her next words:
–Thank you. If I need an extension I’ll be sure to ask.
The mechanical sound she produced to answer him caused the waiter’s face to stiffen very slightly.
At least the waiter was a straightforward enough young man. He wasn’t the sort to start thinking in terms of If you took the device on her throat away from her she wouldn’t be able to speak.
Instead, he inevitably came to a different conclusion. He shrugged his shoulders and stood there somewhat embarrassed, as if he had accidentally offended her in some way.
Balot put the things that were out on the table back into her bag. The waiter watched this before eventually being called away to attend to another customer. He wasn’t a bad youth. It was just a question of pride. The youth’s, and Balot’s.
–Let’s get down to some work, said Balot.
Oeufcoque turned with a squish into a mouse and jumped on top of the table. Checking that the waiter wasn’t looking his way he made another turn, this time into a plug-in adaptor device for a computer.
“Try me out.”
She took a cord from the side of the monitor that up until that moment had been showing a floor plan of the department store, and in a moment the screen went fuzzy.
Through Oeufcoque’s efforts they connected from the store’s secure net navigation to the much wider-ranging user services of the outside world.
“Through the Broilerhouse, we’ve managed to suppress your personal information that Shell-Septinos forged. In particular, any attempt to hack into your residential ID is now a serious crime. For access privileges you need thirteen different types of password combined with a physical key—in other words, we’ve made it so that no one has access to your personal data without me.”
As she watched the screen in front of her being decoded layer by layer, she suddenly remembered the rooms in the hideaway. The room that you could lock from the inside at night.
There were two locks on it. One was the electronic sort on the door knob, and the Doctor could also open this from the outside. The other was a chain, and this was purely Balot’s. Of course, both Balot and the Doctor knew too well how little use a chain on a door was in this city.
But this chain is made of a special alloy and a unique textile, the Doctor said. It can’t be broken easily. Definitely not. Because Oeufcoque made it himself. That comforted Balot. A chain that was Made by Oeufcoque. The chain caused the door to close perfectly, with no gaps or cracks.
“Right, I’m now about to check the entries one by one. Okay?”
Balot placed her hand on the adaptor. She thought she could feel Oeufcoque’s pulse in her palm.
–Okay.
She took a deep breath, then snarced Oeufcoque.
The truth was unbearable. She hadn’t realized just how much her life had been graffitied over.
Her birthplace, date of birth, names of her parents, family tree, personal history, address, telephone number, usage records for her cash card, log of her access to the net, questionnaires from department stores and online shops, mailing data, contents of letters to her friends.
All lies. She realized just how abnormal this Shell-Septinos must be to manipulate another person’s existence according to his whim in such precise, meticulous detail.
And moreover, this wasn’t just any old graffiti: it was beautifully done.
It was a cruel veneer, as if to emphasize the ugliness of the original, of what had gone before.
Oeufcoque highlighted certain entries on the monitor from various pages, and each time he did so Balot snarced Oeufcoque and made a separate copy—with her true details added—into individual reference files.
Like unearthing fossils from underneath a beautiful display of ostentation.
Balot tried to remember the first time—and indeed the last time—that she had accessed the data. The very act that triggered the events that caused Shell to burn her to death. Was she grateful to the man who had made such a vainglorious display of her? How pathetic if she was. It was like taking a file to her heart surrounded by the perfect shell.
According to this data, Balot was currently nineteen years old. She was from a middle-class family, and if you had to use one word to describe her it would have been wholesome. There was no trace of an incident in which her brother was sent to prison for beating her father so badly he was left with permanent damage. There was no sign of an incident in which ADSOM—the Alcohol and Drug abuse Society of Mardock City—put a cap on her mother’s pregnancy rights, meaning that IVF was the only route open to her, which in turn led to a cycle of abuse driven by the inferiority complex this had given the woman.
Here, her father was a salaryman, an average office Joe. He wasn’t driven to extreme neurosis thanks to backbreaking manual labor, and the despair that he was plunged into after losing his job didn’t cause him to cling to Balot and take her virginity as if she were just another woman. Balot had been able to go to school properly, and she wasn’t subjected to sexual abuse by Social Services. And it certainly wasn’t the case that, after she had escaped from the institute along with a few others, she was forced into the even harsher position of having to sell her body and soul piece by piece.
A dream family—a dream life. Not a life in the depths of despair and hatred, where the tears had run dry.
“I’m starting to see it now—I’m beginning to understand what Shell was plotting with all his evil business with you,” Oeufcoque said. Even as they confirmed Balot’s personal details Balot and Oeufcoque both sped through the huge network, collecting any other relevant data.