Volume 1 (Light Novel)/Chapter 3

The Yoke of Memories and Mnemosynes

## Synopsis

Chief Totoki gives a briefing on Uritsky. Uritsky is actually a electronic drug manufacturer who infiltrated Rig City for unknown reasons. The police are planning to enter his apartment and apprehend him. Echika runs into Kleiman and has a cold confrontation with him, but Harold stands up for her, which surprises her because it's the first time someone has done that for her.

The raid on Uritsky's apartment goes successfully, and Uritsky is taken to the police station. Echika and Harold investigate his apartment and find matrices of electronic drugs in his bedroom. Just then, they catch a woman who had been hiding in the closet and tried to escape. Harold manages to disarm her, but before going unconscious she manages to stab him. Despite Echika's insistence that he needs to go to the repair shop, Harold claims to be fine and tells her to call an ambulance for the woman. Echika feels mixed emotions at being saved by an Amicus.

During the interrogation, Uritsky claims that he was dragged and threatened into this. The woman, Manya, was an escort who came to him for help. He claims that a laptop in his desk would explain everything, but the investigators are having trouble decrypting the files. Totoki gives Echika permission to Brain Dive into Uritsky. Echika has trouble with the dive as she keeps running into countercurrents. However, she is suddenly pulled out of the dive because Harold had collapsed. His injury was more serious than he let on. While they take Harold to the repair shop, Echika blames herself for not noticing Harold's condition sooner and realizes that she's so worried about Harold because he was the first person to ever defend her.

Echika and Harold leave the repair shop after Harold was repaired. They go to the apartment where Harold lives, where Echika meets Daria Romanovna Tchernova. Echika mistakes her for Harold's wife at first, but learns that Daria is actually Harold's family member. Harold met Daria's deceased husband Sozon three years ago and was brought back to his home. Despite once being a vagrant, Harold is actually an RF Model Amicus, one of a set of triplets presented to British royal family for the queen's sixtieth anniversary. After the queen's death a few years ago, they were given to charity organizations but ended up getting stolen and sold on the black market because of their cutting-edge technology. Harold had been through a lot before ending up on the streets of St. Petersburg.

Echika learns from Daria that Sozon was a detective for the city police and was killed a year and a half ago during The Nightmare of Petersburg case, in which Amicus sympathizers were brutally murdered. Sozon was the one who honed Harold's deductive skills, and the two worked together on the case. Sozon was kidnapped by the culprit and Harold was forced to go alone to save him. Harold was also captured and forced to watch Sozon get dismembered as the culprit told him that he couldn't feel anything because he . Daria says that after the incident, Harold threw himself into more and more investigations, and since The Nightmare of Petersburg was never solved, she thinks that Harold wants to restart the investigation by becoming an investigator aide for a successful investigator like Echika in order to find clues on Sozon's killer.

After the talk, Echika goes to see Harold, who correctly guesses that Daria told her about his past. Echika now feels terrible about the things she said to him. She explains to him she blamed the Amicus for not getting affection from her father, but deep down she knows that they aren't the ones to blame. The two make up. Thinking about what Daria told her, Echika tells Harold to take care of himself.

Echika proceeds to tell Harold her theory of how Uritsky is spreading the virus. Uritsky used holo-ads, which people scroll by all day, to spread the virus, configuring it in a way where it wouldn't leave a record in the browsing history of the patients' Your Formas and triggering the virus only after he left Rig City to cover his trail. Harold goes through his memory data and finds the sneakers ad that all the patients had seen.

Just as they are about to send these findings to Totoki, she and Benno show up at Daria's house. They inform Echika that they had cracked open Uritsky's laptop and found that it was Echika who had him make the virus. They Dived into his Mnemosynes and saw her in them, coercing him to make the virus. Totoki tells her that they are going to Dive into her Mnemosynes, but Echika adamantly refuses to let anyone look at them. She purposefully made herself look at the sneakers ad to force her Your Forma into an inoperable state, and then runs away. While the police are busy dealing with the disappearance of Echika's GPS data, Harold drives off in search for her.

## Characters

* Vi Totoki
* Echika Hieda
* Harold W. Lucraft
* Benno Kleiman
* Manya
* Makar Marcovich Uritsky
* Daria Romanovna Tchernova
* Sozon (mentioned)
* Madeleine (mentioned)
* Steve H. Wheatstone (mentioned)