A Simple Survey - Volume 01 - A Simple Survey

by Kazuma Kamachi

  “Led me…? So 385D was never really there…?” I said blankly.

  With her index finger still raised, the woman said, “What I was calling strange was that ‘something’ has trapped you in a mindset where you are obsessed with 385D. I do not know what the person who did this is after or how they did it, but if they can make 385D fit completely different things, it could be used for a cult or something. They could claim that everything in the world is related to ‘something’ and all your problems can be solved by relying on that ‘something’. You might have gotten caught in some experiment being run by some dangerous people.”

  “Wait, this is way more than just being followed around by a number. What is this? What is happening to me? What have I gotten involved in!?”

  “Listen.” The woman stood up with a light smile on her face. “I was just killing time after having finished a ‘job’. I suppose I can solve this 385D puzzle of yours to help kill some more time.”

  “What do you mean by ‘job’? Oh, right. Who exactly are you?”

  “It may be due to 385D’s influence that you got so far into this conversation without asking that.” The woman paused for a moment. “Let’s just say the ‘jobs’ that seem to follow me around have much deeper meaning than some number.”

  File 07: A Comfortable Casket for You

  We lived in a world where the influential science magazine Planet had recognized the existence of everything from fairies and werewolves to zombies and bigfoot. I would be lying if I said that did not come with its advantages.

  For example, a casket maker could find customers other than the dead.

  Those types tended to come by in the dead of night, so the only real change I had to make was an alteration my hours of operation.

  “The outside has to be ebony. I am sure I do not need to tell you, but there can be no cracks.”

  A blonde girl of about 10 sat on the table.

  However, she was about a tenth the size of a human.

  The fairy seemed to realize this was bad manners, but she was simply too small to see the blueprint I had laid on the table if she was sitting in the rusted folding chair. Also, my office was rather cluttered and she did not want to get anywhere near the electric fan or my pet cat.

  By the way, I had some doubts about the age she had given.

  “Make it completely out of wood that fits together perfectly. No metal nails are to be used. And glue is out of the question.”

  “Fine, fine. So you want it done using something like parquetry.”

  “Yes, yes. Parquetry.”

  No casket had been made yet. The customer and I were staring at the blueprints to make sure there were no imperfections in the order and discussing it to make sure there was no discrepancy in what we thought the finished product would be.

  …But making a casket for someone of her size felt more like making a bento box. I had heard that making one of the nice multi-tiered ones could be quite difficult, though.

  “Cover the inside with the low-resistance material I ordered from elsewhere.”

  The girl crawled on all fours across the blueprint so she could tap at a point for emphasis.

  “Sigh. You said you wanted a casket to use as a bed, so I thought you would want to fill it with roses or something,” I commented.

  She glared at me.

  Given her size, it did not have much impact.

  “How am I supposed to sleep with those thorny things everywhere? A garlic-hater in my neighborhood was bragging about a bed from here, so I wanted to try it out. Why would I want scratches all over my body?”

  “From your neighborhood? So are you an overseas student from Romania?”

  “…Oh, and don’t forget to cover every inch of the low-resistance material with silk velvet. I am allergic to petrochemical products. I would rather not end up in the sick house after spending so much.”

  “Umm, are you not going to put a giant cross on the front or anything?”

  She glared at me more.

  “Do you have something against me?”

  “No, it’s just that roses and crosses add to the gothic image. Your clothes are fairly lacy, so I thought…”

  “You are mixing together things I like and things I hate. Are you mocking me?”

  “…You also want audio equipment, right?”

  “People spend half of every day and therefore half of their life in their dreams, so it is only natural to prepare the proper environment for it. You have measured me. I would like speakers set up right next to where my ears will be on the right and left. Make the outside of the speakers out of ebony and the diaphragm out of paper. The inside components do not matter as much, but do not forget to make anything that will touch my skin out of natural materials.”

  The girl rolled over onto her back on top of the blueprint and placed her palms over either side of her head.

  “I guess I will need to fill the walls with cotton to soundproof it.”

  “No, that would make it too hot.”

  “I could add a small air conditioner…no, that that would show up too much. How about I add some coolant? You know, like the kind you put on your forehead when you have a cold…”

  “I am allergic.”

  “…Then, what about a cool mist sprayer. But with the audio equipment too, that might use too much electricity. It would be hard to power that for 12 hours straight with a laptop battery.”

  “I will not have a power cable coming from my casket. And it cannot have a car battery on it either. That lacks elegance. There is something wrong when the power source is bigger than the casket itself.”

  The girl stood back up as she did nothing but complain.

  I chose to interpret her complaints as meaning she trusted me enough to resolve them.

  “Umm, should I add solar panels then?”

  “…You want me to leave my casket under the sun? I think you do have something against me. What kind of idiot would put their bed outside?”

  “Yes, you probably would get attacked by crows.”

  “I will view any further insults as disrespect.”

  A pale light came from the girl’s palm, but I was not entirely sure what kind of effects it would have.

  “I guess I’ll have to set up a wireless power transmission system. You’re fine with electromagnetic waves, right?”

  “It is beginning to sound like this casket would function even on Mars,” said the girl as she eliminated the light.

  “What do you want for security?”

  “That is a nonissue as I can simply lock the door to my mansion. More importantly, I would like to speak about this here. You say there will be wheels on the bottom of the casket.”

  “They’re convenient when you need to clean or want to rearrange things, don’t you think?”

  For a human like me, a bento box-size casket seemed like nothing, but it would be difficult to move for someone who was only 15 cm tall. …That was my thinking anyway.

  “If we are talking about security, that worries me more than anything else. Someone could use those wheels to take the casket somewhere while I am sleeping in it.”

  “I thought security was a nonissue because you could lock the door to your mansion?”

  “If any unease of that sort remains, I will not be able to sleep comfortably.”

  “Well, it’s my job to make the casket to the customer’s order, so I’ll do as you say.”

  Since it was the size of a bento box, I didn’t really see what the presence or lack of wheels would matter to a “large intruder”.

  Perhaps she was planning to hold it in place with magnets.

  “One last thing, but it is probably my most difficult request. I need some kind of ventilation. However, it cannot allow in any outside light. That too would get in the way of sleeping comfortably.”

  “Look here. I can handle that. You know the U-shaped pipes used in plumbing? By bending a pipe back and forth again and again like that, the light can be kept out, so don’t w
orry.”

  “Then please do that.”

  Hmm.

  But given the size, it would be difficult to build from scratch. I decided it might be faster to use some everyday items as jumping off points. For example, I could make the speakers by disassembling a small pair of headphones and replacing the external portion with parts made of natural materials.

  Also, I would need to add a fan to the ventilation pipe, so an extremely small motor would be necessary. If only I could find something convenient to use for that…

  “At any rate, do everything you can to ensure I, Titania, can have peaceful sleep. Bear in mind that doing so is directly connected to the stability of your fragile human society.”

  “That makes you sound like some kind of evil demon king.”

  “Unfortunately for you, I do not just sound like one,” said the girl as she put her hands on her hips in a triumphant pose.

  Eight days had passed since I had overcome all of the unreasonable requests of that selfish rich girl and had completed her made-to-order casket.

  I used my successful works in my advertisements, so I was editing some photos I had taken for a catalog. As I was doing that, a familiar face came up to the counter.

  “How dare you sell me something defective!?”

  “Ma’am, that is the cat door. The entrance for customers is over there…”

  “I could not manage to open it, so I had no choice! Also, if cat siths are allowed to use it, why can’t I? But more importantly, it was defective!!”

  The girl must have felt humiliated because her face of beet red as she yelled at me.

  Leaving that aside, I had no idea what about it could have been defective.

  “It is past the cooling-off period,” I warned her.

  “Are you talking about the money? I don’t care about those scraps of paper!”

  “I’m jealous.”

  “…You told me not to worry about the ventilation.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was constructed so no light could get in.”

  “That is not the issue. You added a fan to the ventilation pipe, didn’t you?”

  “If I hadn’t, fresh air couldn’t have gotten in.”

  “But why did you have to use the same kind of motor used in the device that drills into people’s teeth at the dentist!? It sends a chill down my spine so I cannot sleep!!”

  File 08: The Clogging Time Lodes

  “Hurry up. You really need to pay your video rental late fees. The longer it takes you, the more you’re strangling yourself, so just hurry up and pay up.”

  The part-time worker girl speaking to me over the phone was looking down on me. I was dealing with the last finishing touches before putting the script together, so I could not have any distractions. In this age where a home computer could intercept a cruise missile (assuming the household could somehow get their hands on a radar and surface-to-air missile to connect to said computer), it may have seemed silly for me to be writing out calculations on paper, but super computer simulations took a really long time once they began. For that reason, I wanted to make sure I had all the calculations perfect before actually running the machine.

  However, the video rental late fee was completely my fault, so I couldn’t really complain. And I had been stuck at a complete standstill on those finishing touches for two weeks now, anyway.

  “…I see. So the charges have been piling up ever since the disk return date.”

  “Don’t vaguely think back on it all. Just pay up already. You’re an engineer that deals with time lodes, right? Then you must be loaded. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t insist on these high quality disks during the age of download rentals.”

  The data on the disks was nothing but a collection of digital signals, so it could be sent over the internet easily enough. However, when the amount of data was too great, the internet lines would be overloaded if a large number of people used them at once. For this reason, the movie market had been divided into the internet version that was low quality but could be obtained immediately and the high quality disk version that had incredibly high resolution but took time to obtain.

  However, I had rented a reprint of an old horror movie, so the master data itself was full of noise.

  “I just feel more comfortable with physical media. I am an old-fashioned sort of person.”

  “Even though you deal with time lodes which couldn’t be more digital?”

  “Time lodes, yes.”

  A time machine had been created surprisingly easily.

  It had all started with the discovery of a certain phenomenon during an investigation of the relationship between solar winds and auroras. Just as Einstein would have been feeling relieved due to neutrinos, this phenomenon would have left him perplexed once more. It was a natural phenomenon that was related to the identity of the UFOs that people claimed to see from time to time.

  However, the time machine was in the form of thick gloves covered in cables. They allowed you to grab and move objects in the “other era”. The gloves were nothing more than an interface. In reality, a set wavelength amplitude was used to apply pressure to the coordinates of the target. In the “other era” it was likely mistaken for a poltergeist or something similar.

  That left the question of how to use it.

  Currently, an international treaty only allowed history to be changed “for the equal good of all people” and care had to be taken not to put too much stress on history.

  This meant that it could not be used to avoid a large war in history or to evacuate people before a great disaster.

  However, there were reasons other than the treaty that these things could not be done.

  “The breadth of what we can do is limited. It isn’t easy. Since we can only interfere so as not to put too much time stress on history, the ‘time’ we can target is limited to small spots. That is why they are referred to as ‘lodes’.”

  I spun my pen around as I spoke and I could hear the tempo of the voice on the other side of the phone dropping. It was the same as most students listening to a lecture in school.

  “Hmm… I get paid the same either way, so I guess I can slack off and chat,” said the girl. “A time someone has already interfered with cannot be interfered with by someone else, right? They say that is causing the spots to grow smaller and smaller.”

  “Yes, but we still cannot abandon the time lodes. After all, the amount of resources available here in the future is overwhelmingly low. If we do not interfere with the past to lower the rate at which resources are used, human culture will dry up before too long.”

  I jotted down a few formulas, drew two lines through them, repeated the process, balled up the paper, and tossed it to my trashcan. My aim was dead on, but it struck a mountain of similar papers sticking up from the trashcan. The mountain collapsed and fell to the floor.

  “The amount that is historically saved comes to us like a vein of gold suddenly appearing, right?”

  That was correct.

  However, time lodes were not a magical technology that could produce resources and fortunes indefinitely.

  The general public spoke of it as if it was, but that was nothing more than information manipulation carried out to ensure fear of resources drying up did not spread through society.

  Third-rate tabloids and internet message boards usually did not have anything important to say, but they were occasionally right on the mark.

  “You were wondering before why I couldn’t pay my late fee if I deal with time lodes, right?”

  “Technically, I should still be talking about that.”

  “The number of spots is growing more and more limited. To be honest, I’m having trouble putting together a script.”

  “Eh? Is the world really in that serious a bind? There’s practically an inexhaustible supply of time that has passed, right? There should be plenty of spots…”

  “Well, that is technically true. However, there is a more fundamental issue. Time lodes have to do with fin
e-tuning history. You trim the fat and save as many resources as possible so they can be used by us in the future. However, once human history has truly been optimized, we will be unable to save any more.”

  “Is that close to happening? That sounds bad.”

  “It’s still a ways off.”

  But it would still be coming much sooner than that part-time worker girl was thinking.

  “But if it comes to it, can’t you just ignore the spots? After all, we can’t just dig up resources like normal. If we don’t dig them up from the past, humanity is finished. So in the end, won’t we be forced to get past all this posturing about changing history? We just have to start making major changes to history to find some new time lode spots, right?”

  “You say that like the changes would have no effect on you.”

  Also, it was impossible.

  In fact, there had been some idiots who had tried to challenge history.

  “Soon after the first time machine was completed, everyone was eager to try to make themselves into gods or kings. There was research into making a time weapon that would utterly wipe an enemy nation, a religion, or a culture from history. However, every single one of those attempts ended in failure.”

  The reason for this was unknown.

  I mentioned before that the time machine was a pair of special gloves that allowed you to move objects similar to a poltergeist.

  However, there were objects that could be moved and those that could not.

  In fact, your hand would go straight through most objects even when you tried to move them forcefully. There was no correlation with the mass or makeup of the objects. There had been reports of only being able to move one of two identical coffee cups sitting right next to each other. This was a problem troubling scientists across the globe.