Chapter 13 — Shinosuke Nohara (02)
(Future Shin narrates)
They told us the world outside our little house was orderly.
That politics moved like careful currents, that clans kept their distance unless invited, that experiments were bound by ethics and law.
They lied.
It started small. Little things that smelled wrong if you paid attention — a shadow at the edge of the market that watched my mother's carriage a little too long, a holo-billboard ad that glitched to display a face no one wanted to see, a complaint filed with the university about "unsafe experimental practices" that conveniently appeared in the same week as a wealthy donor's visit. Someone whispered my mother's name in corridors, as if the syllables themselves could infect reputations.
I was fourteen when it began properly. Year 6663. Old enough to notice and too young to understand the machinery behind it.
The Takahara Clan didn't announce themselves with banners. They were subtler — money threaded into the right hands, influence folding like a map until it matched the pattern they wanted. The Takahara were the eleventh strongest clan on United Earth, and the things that made them powerful were the same things that made people not speak their names in certain rooms: political connections, funding, a legal front that gleamed like marble and hid rust beneath.
They came for my mother, Akari with courtesy and velvet voices. "Professor Nohara," their envoy said, "we admire your work. Imagine what we could do with your mind applied to human gene mutation. Think of the breakthroughs, Professor. Think of the prestige."
Akari smiled the way people smile when flattery smells like a trap. "I work for science," she said. "Not for prestige."
The envoy smiled back, and for a moment I thought it was over. But the invitation was only the first step — an opening gambit. Rejection, politely phrased, was treated like a challenge.
Hiroshi refused them outright.
That refusal sent a ripple of small cruelties across our days. At first it was petty: slashed tires when the family went out, a message delivered to Akari's lab that contained nothing but an ugly symbol, lab reagents that had been mysteriously swapped for cheaper substitutes. People who had once been casual acquaintances avoided our street as if infection lingered. Rumors bloomed like mold. "Her methods are dangerous." "She's reckless." "If we don't push her now, someone else will."
When polite pressure failed they grew louder. Late-night scanners hummed outside our windows. An unmarked van idled at the end of our lane at three in the morning, its engine off though a single dim light remained on inside. Once, a technician assigned to our project found his personal research files corrupted; another morning, a courier dropped a crate of falsified reagents at our doorstep. The Takahara didn't shout. They rearranged the world quietly, so a family like ours would feel smaller by degrees.
My parents tried to weather it. Akari tried to ignore the whispers and work with the stubborn devotion of someone who believed that truth would outshine lies. Hiroshi moved like a shield between our home and the outside; he tightened routines, scanned incoming deliveries, met with security contacts. He smiled with a calmness that made me think of mountains. "It will pass," he told my mother. It didn't feel like enough.
They thought I didn't notice. My parents thought my head was still full of childish things — games and pranks and the constant risk of stepping into another of mother's experiments. They were wrong.
Children notice the wrongness that adults smooth over. We are tuned to what's under the table. I saw the courier's eyes lingering on Hinata's toys longer than was polite. I saw men in suits walk the perimeter of our neighborhood and pretend the fog had nothing to do with them. I saw the way the mailboxes trembled when the Takahara's shadow moved through town.
The first time the Takahara aimed directly at Hinata, everything inside me changed.
Hinata was ten. She still climbed my back when she was sleepy and stole the last piece of bread when she was hungry. One evening, a holo-ad van pulled up by our alley and projected a vicious sequence of content — a smear. The ad was subtle: a rumor framed as news, implying that Akari's research had caused a local resident to fall ill. It used a doctored clip of an experiment, spliced to make a harmless reaction look lethal.
People began to look at us differently.
At a market the next week a man pretended to trip near Hinata and coughed a chemical-laced mist at her; it was weak enough not to cause damage but strong enough to set her lungs off for a coughing fit. He watched for a reaction — for my mother to run, for my father to confront him — and when their faces stayed neutral, he smiled and walked away.
That was the day something in me snapped. When Hinata gasped and my hand shook as I crossed myself to help her, I tasted a bile of rage I had never known. The world narrowed down to one simple calculus: hurt my family, and I will make the people who hurt them wish they had never learned how to breathe.
I started to collect small things. A discarded badge with the Takahara insignia thrown into a gutter. A man's sleeve that smelled faintly of the same lab solvent my mother used. A delivery manifest that showed our lab reagents marked as delivered when no one had signed. Small things that were meaningless apart from the pattern that built between them.
It occurred to me then that hiding only toppled on a brittle edge: if you could gather the brittle pieces — the receipts, the logs, the casual messages — and hold them up to a light, the lies would show.
I am not a heroic child. I am a hacker.
The truth of it embarrassed me for a while. I had learned to pick locks and read code because it was fun. Because it was a puzzle. Because I enjoyed annoying my teachers with problems they couldn't see solving. Because father asked me to copy a file one afternoon and I found I liked the way the machine answered me.
But the things I did after Hinata's coughing fit were not games.
I started small. I watched the Takahara's public feeds and I watched their private tendrils even more carefully — the registries, the contractor lists, the off-hours registrations that pretended to be something else. I wrote scripts that watched for patterns and spat them back like evidence. I learned how to mirror a database without leaving fingerprints and how to seed an account with a file that would open only if someone tried to tamper with it.
Every small hack felt like throwing a pebble into a pond. The trick was making the pebble land precisely where it had to, so the rings reached the people who could do something about it.
The Takahara's networks were not amateurish. They used proxies, layered servers, encrypted handshakes the way some people used perfume. Their firewalls smelled impregnable. But I had time and stubbornness, and sometimes time and stubbornness beat money and influence. I studied their access windows, their update cycles, their human rhythms. I found that the richest systems have the most complacent windows; someone who believes the locks cannot be picked will leave the keys where they can be stolen.
I moved like smoke. I built dead drops inside innocuous subdirectories. I disguised my pings as maintenance echoes. I watched the logs hum and wrote my own record of everything I found. Emails between Takahara administrators and private contractors referenced shipments to an "offsite facility." An itemized list of materials contained reagents with clinical labels that did not exist in any authorized registry. There were patient identifiers without public records, and then an encrypted exchange log that, when coaxed open with a bootstrap key I crafted from a misapplied certificate, revealed coordinates and dates.
And then I found the files that should have stopped my stomach cold.
There were operation reports, clinical notes, and audio logs — not polished, but raw, the kind of documents human beings drop when they forget they are being people as well as machines. They named a program: Project Morrow. The notes described human gene-alteration experiments, testing of unstable spirit conduits, and a candidate list that read like a shipping manifest for bodies. One crudely labeled folder contained surveillance stills taken inside a facility: faces in cages, eyes wide and empty, hands grasping at bars. Another file was a cropped video, its edges burnt to hide context; it showed a person strapped to a table while instruments whispered and a woman in a white coat took notes. The audio track had low voices and the words, "administer the compound," and a soft mechanical sound like a pump.
The Takahara were not experimenting for prestige. They were experimenting on people.
Not on willing volunteers. Not ethical subjects. People missing from neighborhoods. Unmarked transfers.
And worse than that — some of the logs weren't in Takahara's handwriting alone. The metadata pointed to signatures from something else, something dark and foreign. The header tags matched patterns I had seen only in fringe comms — Asura-affiliated signatures, coded language that meant command nodes in places we did not speak of. My fingers went numb as I traced the digital footprint. They had collaborators who were not human; they were using techniques beyond ordinary cruelty. Somewhere in their archives, a ritual of technology and something older had been fused together.
I made copies. I made backups. I encrypted them with layers that even I couldn't open without stepping through specific keys. I built a deadman trigger: if I disappeared, the files would be transmitted to a network of people I could trust — Kenjiro, Arun, people who would not look away at the sight of a cage. I didn't tell anyone. I couldn't. Who would they believe? Who would protect us if the people who were supposed to enforce the law were paid to look the other way?
For months I worked in the thin hours when the house slept and the labs hummed with idle ventilation. I let the pretend-child vanish and became something else: a shadow that read the private lives of powerful machines and turned their lies into light. I learned to watch what they thought was invisible. I learned to make their shadows spill bright.
The work took time. I moved data in slow increments, so as not to trip alarms. I masked my transfers into innocuous packets, promising nothing until the last second. I had to be careful; if I was careless, an innocuous ping could be traced and then the Takahara would know a child had been poking around.
And then, in the small hours of one winter morning, I pulled a folder that had been misfiled by a careless intern and slid it into my safe net. The folder contained a name that was not supposed to be on their ledger: a list of residents taken during a "containment sweep" from a township two hours from our own. It named people who had never returned. It listed dates.
I pressed my face to the screen and felt older than I should. The room spun a little. Hinata slept in the next room, unaware. Akari's lab fans hummed. My father's tea cooled on the counter.
I did what anyone who loves their family and knows how to use a computer would do. I hid the proof. I made copies. I built redundancy. I buried it behind so many layers that an emperor would need to dig to reach it.
And then I waited.
I didn't tell my parents. I could not bring the horror into our lunches and say, "Mother, father, we are at war." I carried the knowledge like a stone in my chest. At times it was a hot coal. At times it was an icy weight. There were nights I woke and read the logs again and again until the words stopped meaning anything, until I could look at the faces in the cages as if they were only pixels.
LaughingFlame69 wasn't online for months. At first DaddyVyuk thought I'd just fallen off the grid. IcyPrincess messaged our guild chat, then our private line. "Where's LaughingFlame?" she typed, impatient and worried. DaddyVyuk pinged me once — a small, precise message: you okay? There was no answer. They would later say they had been worried. In their world of raiding schedules and leaderboards, a missing player was odd but not catastrophic. But I knew why I was gone. I had work to do that no dungeon could contain.
So I kept the files. I kept the deadman trigger. I kept my mouth shut. I learned patience in a way I never had before. Because hatred, once planted, grows slowly and with an appetite. I had planted a seed. I was now bound to its harvest.
My parents thought I was still a child who played games and acted like an idiot.
They were right, in part. I still played. I still laughed. But underneath that I had something like a duty — a small, private war that would decide whether our home remained ours.
That was the first time I truly hated someone.
Not for hurting me…
but for hurting my family.
Next Chapter: Shinosuke Nohara — 03