#92: Impossible / ep.6
Basement Level 2.
In her secret hideout, the designated smoking area, Kuto idly passed the time while waiting for her freshly repainted bright-red nails to dry.
Kotone, who had shot off like a bullet earlier, was probably going around tapping her ID against terminals indiscriminately and having the time of her life searching for secret rooms.
“So that’s what she’s really like~. Well, I suppose I knew she would be.”
Kuto gave a quiet little laugh and played back the recording she had saved on her smartphone.
If this ever got out, it would make a respectable scandal. If she approached a journalist she knew, she might even be able to sell it for millions of yen.
“You’re lucky I’m not a woman who’s obsessed with money~.”
She deleted the recording containing such a clear record of Kotone’s true personality and stood up.
She had better get back to the Secretary Division office soon, or the section chief would chew her out.
Dealing with that hysterical old woman was part of the job too, Kuto told herself as she left the storage room.
Behind her, the autolock engaged with a mechanical click.
“But I do wonder why I can get in here~.”
Had there been some sort of trigger that allowed it?
Kuto pondered the question with a low hum as she made her way back to work.
＊
“I don’t recall asking you to capture the moment the scandal happened…”
“But Mikoto-san was cheating on her! It was a total landmine!”
After receiving a call from Toko, Sanae had returned to the rooftop once again.
Even after watching the video Toko had sent her, Sanae felt nothing.
If anything, her reaction was closer to, Well, of course that happened.
“If you’re dating someone as nasty as her, I can understand the temptation to cheat.”
“Shandy-san is a good person! You’re horrible, Sanae! Waaah!”
Sanae was completely at a loss with Toko, who was bawling hysterically on the other end of the phone.
“So what exactly are you expecting me to do after watching this video?”
“It’s a landmine! The official version is an interpretation error! Comfort me!”
“Yes, yes. There, there.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“That must have been painful.”
“That’s it! It hurts so much… I’m a generalist when it comes to ships, but my absolute favourite is a landmine if it isn’t a fixed pairing! I’m totally fine with NTR and stuff with other pairings because I get all emotional and worked up over it, and that’s what I like, but MikoSha has to be pure love, you know? Sanae, are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“That ‘yes’ is the one you use when you don’t care!”
“Yes, it is.”
“Just watch it properly!”
At Toko’s insistence, Sanae played Mikoto-san’s Cheating Scene: Director’s Cut on her tablet.
Within seconds, she had decided that there was no need to watch it.
But if she wanted to placate Toko, she would have to sit through the whole thing.
The video had been filmed from a distance.
The two people in it were therefore quite small, but anyone who knew who they were could identify them.
Moreover, the audio had been picked up clearly by the listening device hidden in Mikoto’s ID card.
There was no plausible way to deny it.
A textbook piece of evidence for an affair.
The video went roughly as follows.
Mikoto cornered Michelle against a wall and offered her a kiss in exchange for lending her an ID.
Mikoto was putting on quite the theatrical performance, but that was apparently how things went at antiqua in Roppongi.
Perhaps this was how she acted when seducing women.
After a brief exchange of flirtation, their lips met.
Mikoto’s quick-witted honey trap had brought Michelle down, and using Michelle’s ID, the two of them unlocked the door to the Planning Division and disappeared beyond it.
“…Hmm?”
Sanae noticed immediately.
Something impossible had happened.
“Toko. How many minutes ago was this footage taken?”
“About ten?”
Sanae immediately logged into the Secure administrator system.
She sent a query to the database and checked the returned logs.
“…There’s nothing.”
What Sanae was checking was the entry record for the fifth-floor Planning Division.
The video clearly showed Michelle using her own ID to open the door to Planning, which meant an entry record should have been left in Secure.
Yet there was no record of Michelle entering anywhere.
Secure was a reliable child, one Sanae herself had designed.
Therefore, the absence of a record was not because Secure had malfunctioned.
Someone had tampered with Secure so that the record would not remain.
“You’ve done well, Toko. Thanks to you, we’ve drawn closer to the wolf.”
“Mikoto-san does kind of look like a wolf, though!”
“I’ll hang up for now.”
Cutting Toko off, Sanae narrowed the suspect down to one person.
The werewolf hiding within the countermeasures headquarters.
She had grasped both the culprit’s motive and the evidence.
“…Kusumoto Kaori.”
With a grim expression, Sanae returned to the meeting room.
＊
At the very bottom of the countermeasures headquarters sat Kusumoto Kaori, a fourth-year employee of the Information Systems Department.
She had forgotten even to push up her slipping glasses as she dealt with the security warnings appearing on the administration screen.
Two unregistered guest IDs had suddenly appeared, and for some time now they had been tapping themselves against terminals all over headquarters.
Every time, Kaori had to dismiss a pop-up notification reading:
UNREGISTERED ID DETECTED.
Who the hell was this idiot going around accessing everything indiscriminately?
“We have something I’d like to discuss.”
Still dismissing notifications, Kaori glared at the speaker.
The person who had not only stolen her work, but torn apart her standing within the department, her reputation, and her pride.
An unforgivable existence.
The General Affairs employee who had joined the company at the same time as her.
Yanase Sanae.
“At present, actress Kurosu Kotone is touring the headquarters. If necessary, we can direct her and interfere with the enemy’s movements. Please let me know if you require anything.”
So the unregistered IDs belonged to an actress who had turned up for a tour at precisely the worst possible time.
Apparently she had been given not one but two IDs and was running rampant throughout the building.
And, to make matters worse, people from the conference room kept gathering around Sanae, asking her to grant access to this place or prevent entry to that place.
Everyone trusted Yanase Sanae.
Kaori had destroyed Sanae’s plan to fight the Secretary Division specifically so that suspicion would fall on Sanae.
Yet nobody suspected her.
Everyone believed her to be completely white, a trustworthy person.
It was unforgivable.
“We’ve found a serious defect in Kusumoto-san’s design. It needs to be redesigned.”
Two years earlier.
Kaori had been the young star of Hibiya’s Information Systems Department. She had completed the design of Secure, and when her fellow new hire Okamura Sanae, then still using her maiden name, had stuck her nose into the matter despite belonging to General Affairs, Kaori had scoffed at her.
“With all due respect, what does someone from General Affairs know about system design?”
“I’ll be blunt. I’ve prepared a redesign proposal. Please consider my plan before this develops into a matter of responsibility for the Information Systems Department.”
Sanae had submitted her proposed corrections to the server that everyone in the department could access.
Correction proposal?
No.
She had produced a perfect alternative built completely from scratch.
And, as if to rub salt into the wound, she had listed every security hole in Kaori’s design.
There was no way someone from outside the field could pull off something like that.
Kaori had taken it lightly.
But the Information Systems Department acknowledged the problems with the existing design, and after consideration, adopted Sanae’s alternative.
The design of Secure had been Kaori’s chance at promotion.
If she could make her mark there, it would give her prestige and establish a place within the company where she could build her career.
That was why she had poured everything into it, sacrificing sleep and meals.
And the only reputation she had gained was that of a defective designer.
“I heard Okamura-san graduated from engineering. Kyoto University, too.”
“No wonder. What a waste to leave talent like that in General Affairs.”
“Yeah. And she’s tiny and cute, too. She’s kind of soothing.”
“I wish we could get that General Affairs dachshund over here.”
“I’d trade her for someone else! Not saying who.”
“You basically just did.”
“Because that person is just a downgraded version of Okamura Sanae.”
It had been painful.
She had joined Hibiya with great expectations and steadily built up results, only to be thrown out of the promotion race after that incident.
The Information Systems Department treated her like something unpleasant to touch.
Nobody needed Kusumoto Kaori anymore.
She hated even coming to work.
But there was one person who had been different.
A new employee in the Secretary Division who was just as bad at talking to people and just as shy.
Hirose Michelle.
“Kusumoto-san. Do you have any requests?”
Lost in thought, Kaori concealed the Secure administration screen before Sanae could see it.
She met Sanae’s eyes with an expression of innocence.
The same sullen face as always.
An expression so utterly calm that you could not tell whether she was angry or sad, and might even wish it would simply disappear.
“Requests?”
“Regarding the actress, Kurosu Kotone. She is walking around headquarters under the pretext of an ‘exploration’. If there is anywhere you would like her to visit, or anywhere you would like to refuse her access…”
“Nothing in particular.”
“I see.”
Sanae exhaled softly and smiled faintly.
The expression looked so out of place on the embodiment of cold efficiency that Kaori’s eyes widened.
“Come to think of it, I was rather rude to you before. I apologise.”
Sanae suddenly bowed her head.
Kaori had no idea what she was trying to accomplish.
And there was no way a mere apology was enough to make her forgive Sanae.
“What are you talking about?”
“The Secure design. At the time, I was so focused on getting the work done that I failed to show sufficient consideration.”
Kaori could not deny Sanae’s ability.
It was infuriating, but Sanae’s redesign of Secure had been perfect.
Yet just as there were no perfect human beings in this world, Sanae had exchanged empathy for her extraordinary ability to solve problems.
She did not even understand how deeply it could wound and infuriate someone to have the person who stole their work and completely destroyed their reputation bow their head to them.
“…I don’t mind.”
“Then I have a favour to ask. Would you assist with modifying Kurosu Kotone’s ID? I will issue you temporary administrator privileges.”
As she spoke, Sanae held out the ID rejection list she had been asked for by members of the countermeasures headquarters, along with a small packet of KitKats.
Did she really think she could reconcile with someone by casually offering them sweets after apologising?
Kaori’s distrust and irritation only grew.
“…………”
“I would like to borrow your information-processing abilities. Please.”
Sanae bowed her head again.
Kaori had tried to take the mature approach and leave her answer pending.
At once, Sanae dropped to her knees and performed a full dogeza in the middle of the conference room.
A flawless movement, with no resistance or hesitation whatsoever.
Kaori began to wonder whether Sanae lacked not only consideration and restraint, but pride as well.
What made this inconvenient for Kaori was the fact that she had made Yanase Sanae bow her head.
The head bowed by someone who had won the trust of everyone around her carried a certain coercive power.
Kaori did not have the nerve to refuse the request while everyone was watching.
Reluctantly, she picked up the rejection list.
“…I’ll do it. Please raise your head.”
“Thank you. How shall we divide the work?”
“Then I’ll take the second ID.”
Kaori realised that the entire exchange had been a trap immediately afterwards.
Because Sanae’s next words were cold enough to freeze her throat.
“How did you know there were two IDs?”
Kaori realised her mistake and almost cried out.
By the time she understood that reacting at all had only made things worse, Sanae was already glaring at her.
“I only said that actress Kurosu Kotone was touring the company. Guest or not, the principle is one ID card per person.”
“I-it’s…”
“You have administrator privileges and can view the access logs. Correct?”
At that moment, both Kaori’s and Sanae’s smartphones vibrated simultaneously.
A Secure pop-up notification.
Two unregistered IDs had just tapped the terminal in the employee cafeteria kitchen.
There was no longer any way to explain it away.
Even if Kaori tried to pile up excuses, the hound in front of her would never let go of prey once she had sunk her teeth into it.
“You look rather pale, Kusumoto-san. In times like these, you should get some rest. Nomura-san.”
“Leave application, approved! Stay safe!”
“I… I…!”
Sanae efficiently gathered her things and left the meeting room.
The instant Kaori ran after her and put a hand on Sanae’s shoulder, her body was slammed against the wall.
The sharp gaze of a hunting dog that had caught its prey pierced straight through her.
“If you are frustrated by defeat, then do not drag other people down. Surpass me through your achievements, you fool.”
“Ugh… ah… aah…”
She had lost completely.
Kaori was taken to another room, where she would await Nomura’s interrogation.
＊
“This is Hibiya Trading’s famous employee-cafeteria speciality, Hibiya Curry! Look at this colour! It’s so dark!”
In the middle of the employee cafeteria, Kotone had begun lunch and a food review while still in full actress mode.
The employees who were at work had formed a crowd around her, maintaining social distance.
Rinko, meanwhile, was completely exhausted.
The battle between Kotone, who was determined to get Rinko into the same frame, and Rinko, who absolutely refused to appear alongside her, had continued from Basement Level 2.
In the end, Rinko had lost the battle of stamina.
Never underestimate an actress’s physical fitness.
She was not merely pretty.
“All right, Expedition Member Rinko! Give us your food review!”
“What…!?”
“Here comes the airplane. Say ahh?”
Kotone, sitting beside her, brought over a spoon with a sparkling smile.
Being fed with an “ahh” by your oshi was a manager’s privilege, one that inspired envy and jealousy among the vast majority of Kotone otaku.
Rinko had desperately tried to maintain her refusal of contact and refusal of recognition, but that defensive wall was no longer usable.
The woman before her was her beloved oshi.
Kotone’s acting had improved by leaps and bounds.
The instant she put on her actress persona, the elementary-school-boy personality underneath disappeared completely.
She was the Kurosu Kotone whom Rinko loved with all her heart.
And when that woman looked at Rinko and held out a spoon for her to eat from…
“I-I can’t…”
“Why not?”
“Y-your face is just too good…!”
Manager Shirai Rinko’s genuine agony became a minor topic of conversation on the internet afterwards.
And it was because of that that Kotone proceeded to make fun of her.
But that is a story for another time.
＊
“I finally… made it…”
Inside the Planning Division, Mikoto opened the door to the General Manager’s office using Michelle’s ID.
At last, she could relax the string that had been pulled taut all this time.
Just as Sanae had instructed, three cardboard boxes’ worth of proposals and their samples had been placed beside the Planning Division General Manager’s desk.
“Thanks, Michelle-san.”
“Mm… hehehe…”
Mikoto gave Michelle a light pat on the shoulder.
Michelle caught that hand and gently brought it up to her own head.
Her softly permed hair felt warm and pleasantly cushion-like beneath Mikoto’s hand.
“I prefer being petted.”
“Cute…!”
Cute.
The sheer cuteness of this tiny creature threatened to swallow Mikoto whole.
Actually, she had already been swallowed.
Ever since childhood, whenever people lined up by height, Mikoto had always been at the back. She also had mature-looking features.
Naturally, she was weak to small, cute things.
It was just a case of wanting what she did not have.
After ruffling Michelle’s hair for a while, Mikoto finally got down to the work she had almost forgotten about.
To establish the fact that Mikoto had participated in the competition, she slipped her own proposals into the cardboard boxes.
One was the potpourri project.
The other two were proposals for online events during the pandemic, created jointly with her former colleague from Meiji Stationery, Aomi Shiina.
They might not amount to anything.
But a bullet could not hit its target if you never fired it.
When it came to planning, quantity mattered more than quality.
“Finished!”
“Good work, Mikoto-san. Here I go… up… and…”
This time, Michelle tried to pat Mikoto on the head.
But she was too short, and had to stretch herself up and down repeatedly to reach.
Every little gesture was adorable.
It was enough to make Mikoto understand the feelings of Michelle’s eleven lovers all too painfully well.
Mikoto bent her knees and let Michelle pet her.
Her face came into view directly in front of her.
Her cheeks were faintly flushed.
The instant their eyes met, those jade-green eyes smiled softly and closed.
She was waiting for a kiss.
There was no mistaking that expression.
“…Close your eyes.”
“Um…?”
“Just do it.”
Mikoto had let her guard down and forgotten to keep putting on airs.
Michelle, of course, had no idea.
She smiled shyly.
For the moment, they were not merely on a date.
They were in the middle of an affair.
Perhaps Mikoto’s kiss had flipped some sort of switch, because Michelle was now approaching her somewhat more assertively.
Mikoto did as she was told and closed her eyes.
In the darkness, all she could hear was Michelle’s voice.
“Mikoto-san… you really are tall… Could you sit down for me?”
“Like this?”
Following Michelle’s instructions, Mikoto sat on the General Manager’s desk.
A soft “That’s right” was whispered beside her ear.
Then Michelle took both of Mikoto’s hands in her tiny hands and raised them behind her back, positioning them as though Mikoto were being arrested and taken into custody.
Click.
“Huh…?”
When Mikoto moved her hands, she heard the metallic clatter of chains and felt pain around her wrists.
She could not bring her hands in front of her, let alone return them to their original position.
“Don’t open your eyes yet… but… I think it’s okay now…”
Michelle was still smiling shyly.
But when Mikoto opened her eyes, she saw shining silver restraints around both her wrists and ankles.
She had been tricked again.
“W-what are you doing, Michelle-san…?”
“Because… if I didn’t do this… you wouldn’t listen to me, would you…?”
She was, after all, a member of the Secretary Division.
Mikoto had made the mistake of underestimating her as nothing more than a cute, calculatedly adorable natural airhead.
“You tricked me, Michelle…!?”
Her translucent white skin clouded with sadness.
＊
“…Now then. Don’t take this personally, Kusumoto-san. I’m doing my job too. I’d like to settle this peacefully if possible.”
In a small room beside the conference room where the countermeasures headquarters was based, Kusumoto Kaori was being interrogated.
Kaori sat with her head bowed, refusing to look up.
Sanae stood over her alongside Nomura, holding her breath.
Kaori was her contemporary.
Two years earlier, Sanae had taken over the design of Secure because there had been a serious defect in Kaori’s design.
Sanae’s complete lack of consideration in pointing it out had left Kaori with nowhere to belong within her department.
It was more than enough reason for Kaori to resent her.
“You possess administrator privileges for Secure. Is that correct?”
Kaori maintained her silence.
Sanae exchanged a look with Nomura and signalled with her eyes for him to take over.
In these times, when anything one said could be labelled workplace harassment or sexual harassment, Nomura, being a man thirty years older than Kaori, would have an easier time speaking without causing trouble.
Sanae conspicuously placed Kaori’s smartphone on the desk.
The exploration team had just tapped a terminal on the third floor.
A Secure access notification danced across the screen.
“Since it is already clear that you possess administrator privileges, I will continue.”
“…I don’t want to talk to you.”
Sanae ignored the objection.
If she were the sort of person to be stopped by something like that, nobody would call her the Hound.
“Nomura-san, could you leave us? We’re going to have a girls’ night.”
“I see.”
Nomura reluctantly left.
Sanae locked the door so he could not return, then sat opposite Kaori.
Kaori would not raise her head.
Worse, she had collapsed face-first onto the desk like a sulking child.
Sanae found the sight deeply unpleasant.
Sanae was the north wind.
She stripped away a traveller’s cloak by blasting them with cold words until their true identity was exposed.
She could never imitate a bartender who deceived people with warm words like the sun.
“I am perfectly aware that you resent me. I have no intention of making you like me either, so please hate me as much as you wish.”
“………..”
“There is only one thing I want to know. Your relationship with Hirose Michelle.”
“…!”
Kaori’s body stiffened where she lay against the desk.
A tiny flicker of agitation.
Rather than interrogating her, Sanae had chosen to have her confirm a deduction.
Right or wrong.
Yes or no.
At least this was meant as a small kindness, giving Kaori questions she could answer with only two choices.
“First, this is merely a conjecture. You tampered with Hirose Michelle’s ID, didn’t you?”
The evidence lay in what had happened during the design of Secure.
Specifically, the true nature of the serious defect Sanae had identified in Kaori’s design.
“Your design contained a bug. The probability of it occurring was extremely low, but it could automatically generate an ID that left absolutely no entry records. If the conditions were known, a malicious person could deliberately create one.”
Kaori listened in silence.
Even if she was not listening, it did not matter.
Nomura was listening to everything from the corridor, separated from them by only a thin door.
“For example, the basement, the men’s nap room, the president’s office. Someone possessing this ID could sneak anywhere without leaving a record. Since it is like a ghost, let us call this ID the ‘Ghost Protocol’ for convenience.”
Kaori’s original design had contained this Ghost Protocol.
Sanae had noticed it immediately and fixed the defect, so it should no longer have existed in the current version of Secure.
“I thought I had eliminated it. But the defect, the Ghost Protocol, is still operating as a feature. If there is anything I can praise you for, it is that you implemented it so cleverly that nobody noticed.”
Sanae played only the ending of the video Toko had sent her.
She deliberately did not show the footage of Mikoto and Michelle doing various things together.
That was Sanae’s own consideration.
“Hirose Michelle. As a member of the Secretary Division, she should not normally have permission to enter the Planning Division. However…”
Sanae showed her the Planning Division entry records.
Just as she had discovered, there was no record of Michelle anywhere.
“She easily entered the Planning Division, and left no record behind. She possesses not only the Ghost Protocol but also a master key. You were the one who gave her such powerful privileges, privileges even the president does not possess, weren’t you?”
“………..”
“Please answer yes or no. It is not my job to blame you.”
The logic was incomplete.
Sanae had been unable to find evidence directly connecting Kusumoto Kaori and Hirose Michelle.
So she had closed off every escape route and approached the truth through deduction.
Kaori, who had remained silent until then, finally spoke in a weak voice.
“Michelle… was the only one who was kind to me…”
“Tell me the rest.”
After the incident with Secure, Kaori had lost her place within the department.
Her superiors and colleagues had distanced themselves from Kaori, the defective designer, and she had heard cruel gossip behind her back more than once or twice.
It was around then that she met Hirose Michelle.
“Michelle… always listened to me. She listened to my complaints and comforted me… Michelle said she didn’t have anywhere she belonged either… so I made one for her…”
“The Ghost Protocol?”
Kaori nodded and continued.
“I tampered with her ID so she could go anywhere without being caught. And I made the Basement Level 2 storage room a place for her to belong, somewhere ordinary employees weren’t permitted to enter.”
“So that is your connection?”
“She asked me to do it. But Michelle…”
Kaori was crying.
“…She asked me to give all sorts of people permission to use the Basement Level 2 storage room… Tazawa from Sales, Koike from Accounting… even Akazawa from the Secretary Division.”
Sanae could not understand why Kaori was crying.
Kaori had simply been manipulated and used by Hirose Michelle.
That was the obvious conclusion.
But once Sanae reached it, she finally caught a glimpse of what Kaori was really suffering from.
“Michelle didn’t need me at all…”
“I see.”
Sanae left the room.
She entrusted the aftermath to Nomura and went to lie down on the rooftop bench.
With her eyes half closed, she mentally arranged the information against the blue sky and sorted through the situation.
The incident involving Mikoto’s rewritten ID.
The person who had destroyed Sanae’s plan was Kusumoto Kaori.
Kaori had developed one-sided feelings for Hirose Michelle in the Secretary Division and, for Michelle’s sake, had configured the powerful Ghost Protocol into her ID.
If Kusumoto Kaori’s connection to the Secretary Division came through Michelle, then the case should have been solved.
But…
“No. Something is wrong.”
There was nothing but something wrong about Hirose Michelle’s behaviour.
As the Secretary Division, they had to reject Mikoto’s participation in the competition at all costs.
Yet Michelle had willingly let Mikoto into her confidence.
On top of that, she had betrayed even Kusumoto Kaori, the person who was supposed to be connected to her.
That was clearly an act of rebellion against the Secretary Division.
And Hirose Michelle herself had no place within the Secretary Division.
As her personnel evaluation documents made abundantly clear, Section Chief Mochida Latifa had written her off as an incompetent fool.
Would Latifa really use someone like that as part of her countermeasures?
“…Michelle and the Secretary Division aren’t working together?”
Sanae reconnected the points she had mistakenly linked together.
What if Kusumoto Kaori’s interference and Michelle’s actions had nothing to do with one another?
What if the culprit was not a single, united faction?
What if the incident that had seemed like one event was actually two separate incidents happening simultaneously?
“I see. A lone culprit! This is bad!”
Sanae realised her mistake.
The person she had been fighting was neither the Secretary Division led by Latifa nor Kusumoto Kaori.
It was Hirose Michelle.
“Mikoto-san, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to use the trump card!”
Without hesitation, Sanae sent Mikoto-san’s Cheating Scene: Director’s Cut to the person who could act on it.
Her opponent was her.
The bartender who was probably sleeping peacefully at Kyōdō.
Mikoto’s guardian.
“…I’ll accept your reproach later, Charlotte.”