In a room lit by holograms, drawings and symbols appeared and vanished like a fireworks display of light and color. Or as if someone had trapped a phenomenon resembling the aurora borealis inside a room. Anyone might feel delight just from looking at this dazzling display, but they would surely take it for a mere visual show, and think these symbols nothing more than random decoration.
No one would understand what they pointed to except the one who had caused them. That person was the boy standing in the middle of the room, whose face showed no expression other than total focus, though inside he felt optimistic; he sensed he was about to make great progress in the thing he was searching for. He kept writing for hours on end, standing amid this beautiful chaos like a maestro, moving his hands quickly in different gestures, and the symbols shifted accordingly. Every so often he'd stop to wander the room, lost in thought for a few moments, then return to writing while thinking: "Yes… yes, I think I'll achieve the progress I want this time… surely, this is it…"
But suddenly he stopped again to think. A minute passed, then it turned into an hour, then another hour.
This time, the pause lasted longer than any of the others, and he kept hovering around the room, examining everything in front of him: the books holding some of his memories, now gathering dust; the working model of the theories he had discovered — a model he had designed to simulate them on a device he had also built himself, surpassing anything anyone else on the planet had ever made.
When he looked at it, he thought:
"No, this won't work."
Then he went to wash his face. As drops of water fell down his face, he looked in the mirror and saw the face of a boy in the middle of his teenage years, with black hair and ordinary features, but the most distinctive thing about his appearance was his wide, black eyes, resembling a child's eyes.
He then thought, addressing his own eyes: "My eyes, tell me — how can you see other people's memories? Is it that other people's eyes hold memories of what they've seen and felt, storing them somehow, and you read them, clouding my mind? Or are other people's eyes a gateway to what people call the 'soul,' and you read them, making me absorb their personalities and lose myself? Or are you simply cursed eyes, made — you and my own curiosity — to be my curse?"
Black knew that these interpretations of his would never reach certainty unless the full nature of the world was laid bare before his eyes, and only then could he seek to control it, turning what seemed like a curse into an advantage, and finally be free. But… there was still a long road ahead of him to travel.
Suddenly Black clenched his fist, and returned to thinking about the problem, pacing back and forth around the house; sometimes doing a bit of exercise, sometimes going to prepare something delicious to eat.
After four days of thinking about a solution to the problem he faced, and constant scrutiny and searching for answers, he decided he should sleep a little; so he went and lay down on his bed. An hour passed, then two, then two days passed, but he still couldn't stop thinking or fall asleep, so he climbed up onto the roof of the house, hoping that seeing the night sky would let him forget his thoughts and finally drift into sleep.
When he climbed up and lay down on the rooftop, he found the crescent moon looking like a wicked smile, as if someone was mocking him and all his efforts, as though Black would never reach what he aspired to. If Black had any reaction to this sight, it certainly wasn't anger or despair — but we don't know what his reaction was in that moment, because he had already fallen fast asleep.
Black woke up to find himself on the roof of his house, with a tent set up around him. He opened the tent and looked outside to find the sun rising, its rays blooming, like an original work of art — it was beautiful.
Black also found he wasn't the only one gazing at this captivating sight; Robby was also standing beside the tent, looking at it too — even though he was a robot? But then he stopped and instead looked toward Black, saying to him: "Good morning, Black. You slept for three days. Would you like me to fill you in on everything that's happened over the past two weeks?"
Black always tried to know everything about the world he lived in, for he no longer trusted in mere probabilities. Yes, his knowledge had surpassed the entire planet by leaps and bounds; yes, he had become capable of breaking through even the toughest data security systems to learn anything he wanted; and yes, he had capabilities that made him self-sufficient beyond anything else on the planet.
But no — he still saw randomness and unknown possibilities that he was certain he didn't understand, for if he did understand them, all his problems would have been solved. So he never stopped paying attention to unfolding events, and he never let anything strange pass without trying to look into it — and indeed, some strange things had been appearing.
So Black answered Robby's question as usual: "Yes."
Robby then said: "As for the latest scientific news, there's been nothing new since the catastrophic explosion of the Kazar experiment — only claims from the experiment's supervisor, Professor Gale, that the explosion was deliberate, not the result of an error on their part. He agrees with our view, but I still haven't been able to identify the perpetrator among the thousands of possibilities. As for scientific progress overall, there haven't been any unexpected breakthroughs; I've gathered all the new developments in one place so you can take a look."
The Kazar explosion had indeed been one of the biggest events in history; the project had been a huge disappointment, since it was originally considered the thing that would trigger a giant leap in science and would also prove all the major theories that hadn't yet been proven. But the results turned out to be the opposite.
From Black's point of view, this experiment was the only one whose results he genuinely looked forward to, and it had indeed proven very useful to him — its failure even gave him a powerful surge of new information that let him glimpse things he had never seen before at all. Unfortunately, there would be no chance to attempt rebuilding such an experiment again. If only he knew who those bastards were who had caused the experiment to fail.
For this reason, he had to keep watch over the world as a whole, so Black asked Robby: "And what about the other news?" Robby then told him everything important that had happened in general, across every field. He told him about wars raging on for no reason, about racial division, injustice, and political conspiracies, about people who no longer found any purpose and so had made chaos and their base instincts their driving force instead.
"As for the terrorists, they've been doing what they usually do, but I've discovered some recent connections between them and certain wealthy individuals and politicians — here is all the old and new data on these people."
Then everything about this organization appeared before Black.
It was a group of deranged individuals equipped with the latest, most advanced banned technology; most of the operations they carried out were for amusement and entertainment. There were, of course, larger operations aimed at achieving the goals of the important members, but they were more like a circus of the mentally unstable than an actual terrorist organization.
Black knew everything about them — their goals, their plans, detailed information on every one of their members — to the point that he could wipe them out in an instant from where he sat. But he didn't do it. He saw that they weren't harmful; on the contrary, he could use them to achieve a noble goal.
"That's all the news I was able to gather. I think you're wearing yourself out too much, and that might hurt you more than it helps. You should rest for a while — I'd recommend some fun games."
"Indeed, Robby, I think I should rest, but I won't play games — I'll go for a walk instead. I need to come to terms with my curse and put it to use, so I think I need to see the memories of a few bastards."