21 Jin's Reason for Fighting 2
"Nano-machine cleansing is convenient, but it lacks charm."
"Simple is good enough."
"Still, I'd rather use a bath if I'm cleaning my body. Just fill the tub completely and plunge in like this."
"Wasting water like that is wasteful."
"Reducing waste is important, but history has shown that when humans lose the ability to enjoy waste, they're doomed."
Rei, having finished cleansing with nano-machines, had also changed clothes in the process.
The enclosed nano-machine cleansing box doubled as a changing room.
Looking at Rei, dressed in loungewear and fully relaxed, Jin sighed again.
Though Rei's age might explain a slight preference for youthful aesthetics, she looked appropriate.
He wasn't interested in touching that flat frame, but the presence of a woman in his private space unsettled him.
What if she were a sergeant? Jin considers.
(…………This is painfully awkward.)
He would rather not be in this enclosed space, alone with her right now.
So perhaps gratitude is warranted—even if only slightly—for the current state, which is less dire than the worst possible scenario.
“By the way, does Higashi have someone… like her?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m curious.”
Silence. A silent prompt to continue.
“If he did, I’d feel like a mistress—kind of awkward. I’m a little anxious about that.”
“That concern… you should’ve had it before coming here.”
It would’ve been a serious problem for Jin, if he’d actually been that way.
But.
“Relax. He doesn’t.”
“Yeah. That’s not reassuring either.”
“How am I supposed to answer that?”
A question that offers no relief, whether you say yes or no—close to a trap.
If neither answer brings peace, then why ask in the first place? He feels like questioning it back.
"Well, if he's not here, then he's not here."
Rei dismisses the topic with ease, settling onto the cushion she'd taken without permission.
She pulls a conventional keyboard from her belongings, puts on glasses resembling a display, and begins typing.
"What're you doing?"
"I told you before. I'm a historian. Since I'm here on official business, I should write a proper report."
The glasses function as a display.
"Such old-fashioned mechanical input devices."
"Only because systems like nano-machine injection or neural implants like those in the Fourth Fleet seem overly specialized."
Is that so? Jin thinks.
"Adapting interfaces to human advancement seems natural."
"Still, altering the human body itself is something else entirely."
"Surprising. A member of the Second Fleet advocating for naturalism?"
Naturalism—simply put, as you just said, a collective term for those who recoil from augmenting humanity.
The Second Fleet is the mechanization of the human body.
The Third Fleet undergoes bodily transformation through nanomachines.
Neural implants for cyberization within the Fourth Convoy.
The human augmentation technology, each vessel formation bearing its own distinct characteristics.
Naturalists are common in the First Fleet, since such things are prohibited there.
It was slightly unexpected that the Second Fleet-born cyborg, Jin, would be the one to say it.
It's not quite that grand or steadfast to call it naturalism... It's just... scary.
Scared?
It's all technology derived from ASID, isn't it? Doesn't that mean it's bringing humans closer to ASID?
Is that so?
It was a story Jin had never heard before.
Technology derived from ASID.
He had known all along that the Ether Reactor itself was such a thing, and that other variations existed was common knowledge.
Yet the idea that it extended to the human body—derived from ASID—sent a chill through him.
But upon reflection, it made sense.
The Second Fleet focused on the body.
The Third Fleet on ecology.
The Fourth Fleet on thought.
Each striving to approach ASID.
"Wasn't it invented by someone?"
"History itself testifies. Every technology appears—suddenly, truly out of nowhere. There should be accumulated prior knowledge, foundational research."
"Maybe the records just scattered? Didn’t Nakagi say herself there were no such records?"
"Exactly. So my research is, honestly, meaningless. Because those records were lost. Perhaps researchers whose names have vanished had already traced the path to this point."
But then, Rei lifts her gaze and stares directly at Jin.
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe it truly is an ASID artifact. That’s why sounding the alarm is necessary.”
“Why is that?”
“Because if this era possesses the material to think this way, then it can convey will to the future.”
She smiles faintly, removes her glasses.
The work seems to have reached a temporary conclusion.
“Then, shall we move on to Hijō’s history?”
“Why me?”
“Because you mentioned something that caught my attention just now. You said you don’t understand the reason to fight. The circumstances leading to that. Your past. Without knowing these things, you can’t offer an opinion.”
“Don’t you forget my opinion? I never asked for your opinion in the first place.”
“If you weren’t truly seeking one, you wouldn’t say you don’t understand the reason to fight.”
Her words strike a nerve with Jin.
He cannot act upon them.
I'm sorry, but I can't be the reason you fight, Jin.
—...
The words of rejection.
Even if she had found that reason now, the rupture was already clear—there was no going back.
Yet she had seen through his wish to find it, even if he hadn’t voiced it.
"You don’t have to say it if you don’t want to. But think of it this way—"
Mio sat cross-legged on the cushion, showing her teeth in a smile.
"After all, we’re just strangers with no real connection. You can say anything, even something shameful, and it won’t matter."
"That’s an absurd logic..."
A laugh nearly escaped him—yet he realized, with quiet surprise, that Jin didn’t actually mind such absurd logic.
"It’s not particularly interesting, though..."
"That’s fine. I don’t expect it to be. I just want to know your history."
Being told as clearly as that made it easier for Jin to accept.
“I’m from a children’s protection facility. I don’t know my parents’ faces.”
A child with no known name or origin.
That was Jin, once.
“If I’d been a registered citizen, I could’ve traced them if I’d wanted to… but I never felt that way.”
Citizen IDs are linked to DNA data. A search for a similar DNA pattern should have been immediate.
The reason it wasn’t simple.
In a migrant convoy where blood relations could be found so quickly, abandoning a child required a substantial reason.
Meeting such a person and expecting joy in return—unthinkable.
“My facility was truly a dump… all of us raised in the same room until about five years old.”
The conditions were poor.
Staff did little.
Only left three meals a day—cube food.
No supervision.
To speak to them was impossible.
Nothing existed.
Now, Jin could say it.
That place was not an environment for raising children.
Even livestock might have lived better.
Jin's habit of tidying arose as a reaction to a sergeant from training school—but perhaps its foundation lay in that filthy children's room, permanently stained in memory.
"Many died. How they concealed it—I don't know."
Those who could not endure it and were no longer breathing by morning.
Those who vanished without warning.
Those taken away by staff.
"By six, I began to seem somewhat normal. But the environment remained the worst. I never attended elementary school. That facility held official school status, so I was confined there."
Thus, he was trapped.
Attempting escape was not easy, given the facility’s structure, entirely enclosed by a dome.
And if failure occurs—what then?
The incomprehensible fear bound the children.
About ten years from there. The number of children fluctuated—some were taken in occasionally, but...
Whether it was truly valid or not is now questionable to Jin.
I couldn’t get any aptitude results other than for Defense Force pilot in the assessment. That’s why I was allowed to leave the facility.
Children deemed unfit to leave the facility remained there—Jin did not know what became of them.
She had vanished without a trace, somewhere along the way.
The year I joined the training academy, the facility was closed.
Inappropriate financial flows and traces of child prostitution were discovered, leading to the facility's closure.
That's why family couldn't be part of the reason to fight—grew up in an environment like that.