The Stories of Ibis

by Hiroshi Yamamoto

  I recalled Shawn’s face from that one time we met at last year’s year-end club gathering. Contrary to the impression I had of him from the forums as a chatterbox, he was a quiet, reserved-looking kid. I had a hard time connecting the phrase “killed someone” with the image I had of Shawn.

  “Can I talk to you for a bit?”

  Before I knew it, I had answered “yes” and was undoing the chain on the door. The policeman said “I’ll be on my way” with a bow and left. The detective took off his shoes and came inside.

  Before sitting down on the cushion I put out for him, the detective took a slow turn around the center of the room, eyeing various things with a penetrating look. “Hmm…” he murmured. It was probably a habit that came with the job, but I couldn’t help shrinking in embarrassment. The bookshelves stuffed with science fiction novels, the piles of manga stacked on the floor, the model of the Enterprise hanging from the ceiling, the computer taking up most of the small table, a half-finished drawing, and the toy figures arranged along the top of the monitor were hardly the kinds of things found in a single woman’s room.

  “Did you want to keep that running?” the detective asked, pointing to the computer screen.

  “Oh, that’s not a problem,” I replied.

  “But you’re on the Internet, aren’t you? Doesn’t that cost money?”

  “No, I always keep the computer connected with ADSL.”

  The detective gave me a blank look. Apparently he didn’t know much about the Internet.

  “I pay a fixed fee, so it doesn’t cost extra to be online for long periods. It’s fast too. Actually, fiberoptic wire and CATV are faster, but those services aren’t available here yet.”

  “Oh, I see.” The detective nodded but didn’t look like he completely understood.

  “You wanted to talk about Yuichiro Tanizaki?” I asked timidly.

  “Yes, that’s right.” The detective cleared his throat and opened his notepad. “Yesterday around four PM, he stabbed a classmate in the woods near his high school in Niigata City. It was in the morning paper—didn’t you read it?”

  Come to think of it, I might have come across it in the paper. But even if I had read the article, there was no way I could have known that “one suspect, age 18,” was a reference to Shawn.

  The detective’s report went something like this: The victim was Ryosuke Namikawa, a classmate. The body was discovered two hours after the incident. It was already past midnight by the time police identified Yuichiro Tanizaki as a suspect based on the account of a witness who saw a young man fleeing the scene. According to his mother, Tanizaki came home after the incident and seemed confused when he told her, “I did something horrible.” Then he took his cash cards, laptop, and other personal effects and ran out of the house. Soon afterward, his entire savings had been withdrawn from an ATM across from a train station. After questioning witnesses at the train station, the police suspected Tanizaki had boarded a bullet train for Tokyo.

  “But why would he do such a thing?” I couldn’t help but ask the fundamental question. “Not Tanizaki…”

  “Well, the matter of motive falls under the jurisdiction of the Niigata Prefectural Police,” the detective said a bit dismissively. “We’re merely tracing his steps to look for places he might go.”

  The detective went on to explain that the address book Tanizaki left behind at his home listed only a few local names but many from the Kanto area. According to his mother, he was a member of some sort of manga club called The Celestial. That was when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police got the call from the Niigata Prefectural Police to conduct a joint investigation, which was why the detective was here to see me, the president of the club.

  “So you think he might come to me for help,” I said.

  “That’s about right. Has he tried to contact you in the last two days?”

  “No,” I replied. “I haven’t received any emails, and I haven’t seen him either, of course.”

  “Really?” His tone was so blatantly suspicious that I was slightly offended.

  “Really,” I answered coldly.

  “Can you think of any place he might go? Any club members he was especially friendly with?”

  “I don’t think so. He isn’t a local member, so the only time we saw him was at an end-of-the-year gathering last year.”

  “And he came all the way from Niigata for that?’

  “Yes.”

  “He must have been very invested in this club of yours.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I replied, even as my face began to feel hot. It wasn’t because I was embarrassed; I was irritated by the detective’s provocative tone. He seemed intent on linking me and The Celestial to the crime.

  “About this club,” the detective continued, “it’s supposed to be some sort of manga club according to the mother.”

  “No, I’ll show you.” I couldn’t have him entertaining any strange suspicions. I decided to explain everything to the detective in detail.

  I turned to the computer and put my hand on the mouse. The screen saver vanished, and the Celestial’s homepage appeared on-screen. The 2,040-foot interstellar starship. Its beautiful streamlined body, reminiscent of a dolphin in shape, gave off a pearly white sheen. The CG was a labor of love by the first officer Rafale Ardburg.

  “The Celestial is both the name of the club and the name of this starship here. The members of the club are all crewmembers aboard the ship. We all call each other by our character names.”

  I clicked on the CREW icon to pull up a schematic tree displaying each section: Bridge, Navigation, Science, Security, Combat, Steward’s Department, Medical, and Maintenance.

  I clicked on BRIDGE first. The faces of the captain, first officer, and each of the section chiefs were arranged in a circle over the layout of the bridge.

  “This is me, for example. The captain, Ginny Wellner.” I felt a little embarrassed introducing myself. The red-haired intellectual beauty that appeared on-screen bore little resemblance to me. “You can pull up their data if you click on their faces. Sex, age, height, weight, abilities, personal history—not of the actual club members, of course. The data is for the fictional characters.”

  “How do you come up with the data?” the detective asked.

  “You’re free to make up whatever you like when you join. Well, I do have to veto certain character settings that are too unreasonable, like the galaxy’s most powerful supernatural being or a reincarnation of God, that sort of thing.”

  “How many members do you have?”

  “Right now about sixty. About half of them live in the Kanto area, while the rest are scattered around the country.”

  I went back a couple pages and clicked on MAINTENANCE this time. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and Shawn Mornane’s face appeared. Four feet, seven inches. Eighty-eight pounds. Blond mushroom cut. He was an innocent, genial-looking boy.

  “This is Tanizaki’s character. I believe he joined the club two years ago.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “He’s of the Domage race, whose maturation rate is slower than that of humans. He possesses anti-ESP abilities, enabling him to shield himself against telepathic and clairvoyant powers. No other abilities to speak of besides that. He’s part of the maintenance crew, so he’s good with machines and has a shuttlecraft license. That’s about it.”

  “So what do you do after you create these characters? Play some kind of game?”

  “We write relay novels. We all come up with the stories.” I clicked on STORY to pull up The Doomsday Ship cycle currently in progress. “First someone writes the initiating event, which I upload onto the website. The members read it and email me the continuation they’ve written. Or they can throw out possible ideas in the members-only forums. In the end, it’s up to me to decide how the story progresses. I keep stringing together the ideas everyone sends in to create a complete story.”

  “Do you end up with a coherent story doing that?”

/>   “Well, we usually have to negotiate inconsistencies. But it’s not like any of us are trying to become professional novelists. We just enjoy the act of creating the stories.”

  I clicked on RECREATION ROOM next, and out popped a humorous picture of Steward’s Department Marie Ouka with a cake about to fall out of her hands.

  “This is where you’ll find shorter stand-alone stories. These are stories written by one member, not by relay. There are also some novels and manga here.”

  “Did Tanizaki write any?”

  “Yes. He submitted two short stories.” One was a skit in which the protagonist Shawn rigs an automatic door to slide open and closed too quickly, causing the long-haired characters (and there were many on the ship) to get their hair caught in the door. The other was a longer slapstick about a beauty contest aboard the ship. Both were light comedies. “He also wrote a lot of the story for the relay novels. Shawn writes well and always comes up with good ideas to get us out of a sticky situation, so he’s very helpful.”

  I got carried away and even introduced the detective to several of the stories Shawn had contributed to: The Aeon Headline cycle, about a search through ruins to uncover the mystery of The Sower; The Solomon’s Gate cycle, a time-slipping adventure to the Earth of the past; The Pleasure Satellite cycle, which amounted to a whole lot of hijinks from beginning to end, etc.

  “So it’s all in fun,” the detective said.

  “That’s right.”

  “To escape reality.”

  I was offended, but I forced myself to swallow my anger. I answered calmly, “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Uh-huh.” The detective nodded as if he understood everything. “Wouldn’t you consider that a negative influence?”

  “A negative influence?”

  “There are battle scenes in those stories, aren’t there? Ones where you kill the enemy?”

  “Yes…” I realized where the detective was trying to lead the conversation and felt nauseated.

  “You also identify with your fictional characters and call each other by your character names. That’s how much your stories are mixed up with reality. You go on killing people in your stories, and soon enough, you end up wanting to kill in real life.”

  “That’s not true!” I could no longer remain calm. “We know the difference between reality and fiction! And in the first place, Shawn—I mean, Tanizaki’s character—isn’t the type to kill anyone!”

  “But he has killed someone.” My protest was silenced completely by the detective’s heartless words. “Excuse me for asking, but how old are you?”

  “I-I’m twenty-nine,” I stammered.

  The detective’s lips curled into a contemptuous smile. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but aren’t you embarrassed to be playing pretend at your age?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “It isn’t healthy for an adult your age to be so invested in this stuff. There was a university professor on TV just the other day talking about how the brain gets dumber when people spend hours and hours a day on games and on the Internet. It’s because these people only have faceless interactions over email and forums and don’t know how to engage in real face-to-face relationships that all these Internet dating site murders happen.”

  “You’re not…” Finally I regained the ability to speak. “Are you saying that it was our fault that Tanizaki killed someone?”

  “Well, I couldn’t say so for sure.” The detective smiled. “But you’d be hard-pressed to say that this game to escape reality is a positive influence on a young man’s psychological development. Am I wrong?”

  The detective went on half-lecturing and half-questioning for another half hour. Then he said, “Let us know if you hear from him,” and left after leaving me his card.

  “To be so caught up in this nonsense” was a phrase my parents often hurled at me. Sometimes it was uttered within the club in a self-lacerating way. But this was the first time a complete stranger had said something like that to me. Though I understood it to be a common sentiment, it was still a bitter blow.

  I felt confused. I couldn’t accept it. I didn’t want to believe that Shawn had murdered someone, let alone that we were to blame for it.

  I summoned the courage to call Shawn’s house. I needed to hear his parents’ account of the incident.

  His mother answered the phone. She was distraught and confused, and I had a difficult time calming her down and getting her to talk. I learned for the first time that Shawn had lost his father when he was in grade school and lived with his mother.

  Shawn was a victim of bullying. He himself didn’t understand why. Somehow he always became the target in the class, according to his mother. It was utterly absurd.

  The bullying didn’t stop when he entered high school. The bully clique enjoyed taking out their daily frustrations on Shawn, who offered no resistance. The group’s leader had been the murdered Ryosuke Namikawa. The bully group was thoroughly underhanded. They didn’t shake Shawn down for money, nor did they put a mark on his body. They taunted him mercilessly, poured corn syrup in his shoes, scribbled graffiti on his gym clothes, and put sand in his bento box to torment him. Although his mother had pleaded repeatedly with the school, the school authorities continued to turn a blind eye. She had also talked to the police, but they had sent her away, explaining that they were unable to act unless there was an incident.

  The bullying only escalated. With every means of escape cut off, Shawn felt driven into a corner. He had repeatedly said to his mother with a pained look, “Namikawa is going to kill me.” Then finally yesterday, he had left the house with a knife hidden in his bag.

  It was after eight o’clock. After a somber meal of instant dinner out of a box, I opened the window to get some air and looked up at the night sky.

  Unlike in my hometown in Gunma, the nights in Tokyo were bright, making the stars in the sky sparse. I had looked up at those stars as a child and dreamed of going there someday.

  But I now knew that was an impossible dream. With the developments in space travel all but stalled in real life, I couldn’t believe that the age in which civilians could take a casual trip to space would come before I died of decrepitude. Traveling to another planetary system at speeds surpassing the speed of light was physically impossible, and the probability of an interplanetary visitor attempting first contact virtually nil. The human race would likely continue to be bound by Earth’s gravity, only to die in obscurity without having learned of the existence of multitudes of intelligent species.

  I nearly teared up every time thinking about it.

  Science fiction, an escape from reality? It wasn’t anything anyone had to tell me. But was reality all that wonderful to begin with? Was it all that worth confronting? The papers were filled with news of murders and wars. The blood of innocent people was spilled needlessly in the real world. Justice was not always rightly served. Sometimes a bad man, who had tormented many people, went unpunished and was allowed to live in comfort for decades until his death.

  Nothing like that ever happened in the world of The Celestial. No matter what the crisis, the crew was able to draw from their skills and belief in one another to overcome it. The story always had a happy ending. Villains were punished, while love, trust, and justice emerged victorious.

  Wasn’t that the world as it should be? Wasn’t it reality that was all wrong?

  It was probably the same for Shawn. His reality was all too cruel to confront. His life as part of the crew of the Celestial had to be much happier. It was the reason why the stories he wrote were so filled with life.

  But in the end, he had succumbed to reality. He had been unable to escape it and had been crushed by its horrible weight.

  I recalled Shawn’s profile. Was that boyish exterior a representation of his desire to go back to his childhood? Did his anti-ESP barrier signify the reality that no one understood his soul?

  None of us had understood his loneliness.

  But even if we had, what
could we have done—told him “cheer up”? “Don’t give in to bullying”? What power would such hollow words have against the hard wall of reality?

  Would Shawn come to see me? I didn’t feel that he would. After he had committed an act his character would never have committed, he had to be thinking that he had forfeited the right to be a part of the crew. Having lost his place in both reality and in his dreams, he was probably wandering helplessly with no place to go. A high school kid couldn’t have much in the way of savings. A ride on the bullet train and several nights in a hotel and it would be gone. Then what would he do? Where would he go?

  Would he choose death?

  I felt frustrated; neither could I accept what was happening. That one member of the club—no, that a member of my crew was faced with such a sad dead end was something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

  But I was powerless to save him. In reality, I was not Captain Ginny Wellner but an office worker at a small trading company.

  The next morning, I dragged myself to the computer and checked the forums mostly out of habit. There were already posts in response to Xevale’s story that had been uploaded only a half-day prior. Many members had likely accessed the site on Saturday night, especially because of the extended holiday weekend.

  “What if the workers’ deaths were caused by a psychic attack?” It was Francois in the Steward’s Department. “If the DS is a living being, then its brain is a living part too, right? Then maybe it could send out psychic waves.”

  This proposal initiated a debate. If the DS had a mind, wouldn’t it seem strange if none of the telepaths aboard the Celestial sensed it? No, the DS was too far away, and they weren’t actively trying to detect it. But did the DS’s killing the workers psychically have any significance? Maybe it wanted to take over the base’s mining facilities in one piece.

  A psychic attack.