Volume 1 (Light Novel)/Chapter 4

The Proof That Comes with Pain

## Synopsis

Echika is running through the streets of Saint Petersburg, trying to go to Bigga so she could inject the suppressant. Just before she collapses, she realizes the truth of the sensory crime: it wasn't actually a virus.

When Echika wakes up, she finds herself lying on a hotel room bed with Bigga watching over her. Bigga informs her that it was Harold who rescued her and that she had already been injected with the suppressant. She learns from Harold that Totoki was still looking for her. He confronts her with the fact that she already knows who the mastermind behind the sensory crime is. He shows her a newspaper article about the Matoi, an expanded function of the Your Forma. It was meant to help users who exclude information recall their humanity by making them spend time with child AIs to stimulate altruistic affection. However, a problem arose during the experimental stages. The Matoi was capable of regulating the user's body heat and adjusting the weather using augmented reality, but a bug in those functions caused subjects to fall ill, and one person even died. Harold notes the similarities between the Matoi's issues and the current sensory crime.

The Matoi's development team was broken up following those events, but Harold suspects that the Matoi program itself wasn't deleted, and one of the members of the team secretly executed it within the Your Forma users' minds. Harold hypothesizes that the culprit believed the bug was the result of some external conspiracy, and the trigger for the bug was being used in this crime. He believes that what they thought was an illness was in fact a simple unlocking of the Matoi feature hidden in the users' Your Forma. He reveals that Chikasato Hieda, Echika's father, was the team leader for the Matoi project, and he was the one who hid it in the Your Forma. Echika admits that her father had written in his will that he believed the Matoi was a normal program and the bug was a product of conspiracy, so he planted it in everyone's Your Forma out of defiance. Echika had obeyed his instructions for her to keep his crimes a secret out of a desire to protect her own secret.

Echika asks Harold how he could prove that the Matoi's bugs and the sensory crime are related. Harold points out that despite her difficult relationship with her father, she obeyed his last wishes for a reason. He suspects that there had been something supporting her heart during her childhood and asks her to show him the contents of the necklace she treasures. With Harold getting closer to her secret, Echika panics and runs out of the hotel room, telling him not to follow her. But he follows her anyway. He guesses that her father implanted the Matoi into her, and it became the only person she could trust in her household. But when the project was suspended, Echika, not wanting to be parted from Matoi, copied the program and hid it in the nitro-case she wore as a necklace. Since copying a suspended program was illegal, Echika infected herself and ran away in order to prevent people from Brain Diving into her and taking Matoi away from her for good.

Harold had suspected that she had a connection to the crime when they Brain Dived in Rig City and when she looked shaken after talking with Taylor, and that the mastermind would try to make contact with her. Knowing that she would never show him what was inside her nitro-case, Harold carefully manipulated their interactions with each other so that he could build a relationship of trust with her. Harold is sharing his true thoughts in order to get her to give him Matoi. Echika refuses, even when Harold tells her his other secret: he intends to judge Sozon's killer by his own hand. Harold tells her that when you loved someone, you had to accept the fact that you'll have to say goodbye to them. Echika remembers the day she copied Matoi's program and how her sister told her that there was only one of her in this world. Echika acknowledges that her sister died when she copied her. She finally finds the will to remove her necklace on her own and gives it to Harold. Harold tells her his plan to arrest the culprit.

Echika, Harold, and Bigga go to Rig City. In order to sneak in, Harold pretends to be Steve and hides Echika in a large box, claiming that it is a decorative plant. The two manage to enter Taylor's room. Harold forces Taylor to see the sneakers advertisement, disarming him. Echika places him under arrest for being the mastermind behind the sensory crime. Taylor had known Chikasato hid the Matoi in everyone's Your Forma and erased it from his own head alone. In order to pin the crime on Echika, he blackmailed Uritsky by threatening to expose his real identity and had him talk to a holographic model of Echika. Taylor manipulated his employees' Mnemosynes to lead Echika to Uritsky, and picked the study tours' participant to serve as the index cases. By doing so, he created an investigation that led her to him. Echika figured it out when she saw the blizzard, which reminded her of the snow her sister would make. When her father saw that only her Matoi continued to function normally, he immediately realized that Taylor was the one behind the bugs.

Taylor confesses that he did this out of revenge against Chikasato for stealing the credit for the Matoi. He originally made the Your Forma out of a desire for friendship, but soon became more interested in twisting people's thoughts into whatever direction he needed. Chikasato figured out what he was doing and blackmailed him into handing over his project for his own Matoi project. Since Chikasato died years ago, Taylor took revenge against his daughter instead. Just then, Steve walks into the room with a gun. He claims that he became Taylor's accomplice out of his own will. Even though Amicus aren't able to harm humans due to the Laws of Respect implanted into them, Steve claims that he is operating normally and that he came to learn what the Laws of Respect truly are. Steve shoots Echika, but Taylor shoots his own gun through Steve's stomach. Harold asks Taylor if it's snowing right now, which he confirms. Now with the proof to back the claim that the sensory crime is caused by the Matoi, Harold calls out to the real Echika, who had been hiding behind a curtain all this time. She disarms Taylor and reveals that the "Echika" he had been talking to was actually a hologram created from one of his own laser drones.

Taylor is taken away to a hospital, and Totoki will be in the US as early as tomorrow. Steve's words about the Laws of Respect still worries Echika, especially in regards to Harold. She tells him that she will be quitting her job as an electronic investigator. She thanks Harold for everything, which unexpectedly surprises him, because he hadn't predicted that she would open her heart to him right then.

## Characters

* Echika Hieda
* Matoi (mentioned)
* Chikasato Hieda (mentioned)
* Bigga
* Clara Lee (mentioned)
* Harold W. Lucraft
* Makar Marcovich Uritsky (mentioned)
* Daria Romanovna Tchernova (mentioned)
* Steve H. Wheatstone
* Elias Taylor
* Echika's mother (mentioned)