Loups-Garous by Natsuhiko Kyôgoku Page B

monitors.”
    â€œHmph,” Ayumi interjected, unimpressed.
    â€œBut reception devices were totally normal back then. They even had sound-recording equipment. But it would only record sound. How pathetic, right? Of course it only received information; the devices couldn’t transmit or manipulate data. Wired communications were also audio-only.”
    â€œOnly sound?”
    That was inefficient.
    It was like being blind.
    â€œActually it was just sound-based reciprocal communications offline too. Something called a telephone . I don’t know what language that is. As for images, especially moving ones, they were exclusively received communications. And the diffusion rates of these exclusively reception machines were unusually high, so the styles persisted and evolved into the terminals we use for news in the home to this day. And the device that displayed this visual information was called a monitor. That’s why we call it that, apparently.”
    â€œYou’re quite the know-it-all,” Ayumi said. Mio ignored her and continued.
    â€œBut here I thought it was called a monitor because through them individuals could observe the world. Like, Let’s really observe it then! So I reconstructed it.”
    â€œStill, look how ugly this is.”
    â€œI’m a genius, so I don’t have a sense of aesthetics. It’s got great performance. It has approximately twelve thousand times the data-mining power of an average household monitor. It has memory capacity at, I’d guess, around eight thousand times the average. Of course I’ve only used a hundredth of it. But for that matter, it can connect to any kind of data origin in a split second. It runs fast and can do heavy lifting.”
    â€œMeaningless. We’re just kids.”
    â€œLike I said, it’s just a hobby.”
    â€œLike your disc.”
    â€œThis is The Monster .”
    â€œMonster?”
    â€œI saw something about it in a moving picture, a fiction. This giant turtle-like thing has fire come out of its mouth.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Ayumi furrowed her face.
    â€œAn old moving picture! Like what they show in optical science class.”
    â€œA fire-breathing turtle?”
    â€œYeah, it’s amazing.” Mio then pointed toward the back of the room, that is to say, the room next door.
    In the next room was a piece of equipment they’d never seen before.
    â€œI couldn’t wrap my head around a turtle doing something humans couldn’t. That’s a plasma generator, designed to emit plasma streams, but I failed.”
    â€œIt’s a weapon!”
    â€œIt’s a crime,” Ayumi said.
    â€œIt’s a failed weapon. I have to think of another way. It won’t be like in those entertainment motion pictures from decades ago. So I thought up a different method. And this guy has all the data on that plasma-spewing machine. The Monster.”
    â€œThat’s dangerous.”
    â€œJust because I make it doesn’t mean I can use it. There’s no use for it. Things are different now. Nothing changes when you destroy things, but there is still the impulse for destruction.
    â€œIt’s an instinct,” Mio said in the midst of humming electric waves.
    Ayumi bared her hatred.

CHAPTER 004
    WITH HER HEAD tilted all the way back and the muscles taut, her windpipe collapsed a little and started to choke her.
    I can’t keep doing this .
    Shizue had supposedly fallen into a depressive fit that doctors said was the result of eye fatigue.
    This was clearly a retaliatory move on their part.
    Of all people, they’d named Shizue—the spearhead of the opposition against this information mining of the authorities—head director of the new martial law on gathering information.
    This was nothing but their way of getting even.
    That councilman with the memory hair no doubt maneuvered this with the center’s bureau chief. Probably getting