Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 8 - Chapter Pr

A prologue from the future

“This is what I found in Grandfather’s study.”

One afternoon at the Shirogane Detective Agency, our client—Noel de Lupwise—held out a scrap of notepaper. Siesta, Nagisa, and I leaned in to look at the line of text on it. It was brief, just three words long:

“The Akashic records”

The three of us exchanged looks.

“A dozen other notes turned up as well, but every one of them contained this phrase in other languages.”

Taking several pieces of paper from her bag, Noel spread them out for us. I couldn’t read most of them, but she was probably right about what they said.

“And Bruno wrote these?” I asked.

Noel nodded. “I believe so.”

After Bruno’s death, Noel had begun organizing the mansion where he’d lived, and a week ago, she’d contacted us to tell us she’d found these. She wanted us to see the notes in person, she’d said, and she’d hastily flown over from France.

“Something’s wrong with the world.” Siesta the Ace Detective took a sip of her black tea, then went on. “Bruno held the world’s wisdom, and he relayed the truth to us with the final gamble of his life.”

Two weeks ago, a peace ceremony known as the Ritual of Sacred Return had been held to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Great Cataclysm’s resolution. At that ritual, Bruno had rebelled against the Federation Government and all humanity, passing himself off as a resident of Another Eden.

At the end of his life, he’d told me his true motive: He’d been trying to warn the human race, which had grown numb and complacent in peaceful times. Bruno had said that the world had forgotten something important. Just before his death, he’d predicted that a crisis would occur soon.

Ever since then, Siesta, Nagisa, and I had been independently collecting information in an attempt to learn what exactly was about to happen.

“These notes are hints about that, aren’t they?” Nagisa, the other detective, gazed at the legacy Bruno Belmondo had left us. Bruno had mentioned the “Akashic records” at the ritual. I didn’t know what that meant, and he had reacted with despair when he saw as much on my face.

“We should know what the Akashic records are,” I said.

And yet we’d forgotten. All of us had, even the detectives.

Bruno had asked me several other questions that day, and it had seemed to confirm to him that what we knew didn’t line up. For example, he’d asked me what “the Singularity” meant, and how many Tuners there were.

“It can’t mean the memories of everyone in the world have been rewritten, can it?” Nagisa asked dubiously.

“It may not even be that simple,” Siesta told her, pointing out that the situation could actually be worse. “If we’ve only lost our memories, all we’d need to do is retrieve the information from some other source. But what if we search the whole world and there is no such source?”

“…No way. That would be ridiculous.”

Was she suggesting our memories weren’t the only things that had been rewritten? Had records been affected, too?

“Bruno had an abundance of knowledge; he may have recovered part of those lost records somehow.”

Were these brief notes the fragments of data he’d retrieved?

“Want to look it up in a dictionary?” Nagisa hauled over a thick book and opened it on the table in front of us. “So, um, what are the Akashic records? ‘The concept of the world’s memory, in which everything since the beginning of the universe or the world has been recorded.’ …Hmm. Okay!”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?” I pointed out.

“…Ngh.” Nagisa winced and turned to Siesta for help.

“I knew what the term meant, at least,” Siesta said.

“There you go again, immediately trying to one-up me!” Nagisa scowled and shook Siesta hard.

“I’m sure that isn’t what Bruno was trying to say, though.” Patting Nagisa’s head, Siesta looked down at Bruno’s notes again. “I think ‘the Akashic records’ had another meaning, one that wouldn’t be in the dictionary.”

Silence fell.

What exactly were we forgetting? What had been lost?

“I think Grandfather entrusted this to you.”

Noel raised her head to look at the three of us. Then she glanced over at the empty spot on the sofa next to her. “A month ago, he sat here. At the time, he said nothing definite. However, I think he came here in person because he had a case for you. He visited your detective agency as a client.”

Noel’s words made me think about the day Bruno had suddenly stopped by.

Bruno knew his own death was approaching, and he’d still traveled ten thousand kilometers over land and sea to meet with the detectives. He’d wanted them to pick up on the impending global crisis no one knew about.

“Allow me to make a formal request on behalf of my grandfather: Please save the world.”

Noel bowed to us. Siesta and Nagisa nodded firmly to each other, while I gestured to Noel to raise her head. “First, we’ll need to get a handle on the problem, huh.”

It was easy enough to talk about saving the world, but what specifically did we need to resolve? We had to figure that out first.

“The first issue is that we seem to have forgotten whatever these Akashic records are. Not only that, but records all over the world may have been rewritten as well.”

Although at this point, that last part was just Siesta’s theory.

“Why don’t we try asking the five W’s and H?” Siesta suggested. That seemed like a good, simple way to start. “What is the fact that we’ve forgotten these Akashic records. The remaining questions are when, where, who, why, and how.”

“Should we start with when, then? But we don’t know when we forgot, do we? We only recently learned we forgot anything at all,” Nagisa said.

“True. Next is where, but we probably didn’t forget in a specific location. It isn’t as if everyone in the world got together in one place.”

Siesta continued, putting our current issues in order one by one. After that came who had taken the memories and records of the Akashic records from the world, how they’d done it, and why.

“I think there’s a good possibility that the who was someone connected to the Federation Government.”

Noel suspected her colleagues. It was a reasonable assumption, given Bruno had spent the last days of his life opposing them.

“In that case, would the why have to do with the government as well?” I asked. “Maybe they took those memories because it would be inconvenient for them if we remembered?”

“If that’s true, then how did they erase our memories?”

Even Noel, who was a member of the Federation Government, frowned and fell into thought. She wasn’t a high-level bureaucrat, and she said there was a lot of information that she didn’t have the clearance to access. Was there really a way to take a specific, isolated memory from everyone in the world?

“Let’s start back at the beginning. When did our memories and the world’s records start being wrong? Why don’t we check into that?” Siesta asked, getting up from the sofa.

“How, exactly?”

“Well, by reminiscing, of course.” Siesta returned with a box of snacks.

That got a reaction from Noel. “My, those look delicious.”

“They’re rice crackers softened with soy sauce.”

“Japanese snacks intrigue me.”

The conversation had suddenly shifted to a lighter topic.

“We’ll need tea, then.” Even Nagisa went to the kitchen to brew some green tea. Was this place actually a detective agency? I smiled wryly.

“This is how we’ve always been, though, isn’t it?” Siesta smiled back at me. “We’ve never let the gravity of a situation weigh us down with worry. The two things we’ve never forgotten to do are banter and take tea breaks.”

“…Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

At this point, it had been seven years since Siesta whisked me away on a rambling journey around the world. We’d resolved all sorts of incidents, we’d traded jokes, and we’d paired black tea with shortcake to bring out the bitter and sweet.

Before long, Nagisa brought us tea. As I sipped mine, I asked Noel about something that had been tugging at me. “By the way, what’s the wooden box?”

A box made of what looked like paulownia wood had been sitting on the table ever since Noel had arrived and set it there. Guess it wasn’t just a gift for us after all.

“I’d been waiting for an opportunity to tell you. Grandfather left it for me. He said it contained a picture book I’d loved when I was a child. However…”

With visible confusion, Noel opened the box. Inside was a small, bronze-colored, pyramid-shaped…art object? Or maybe a really old ritual implement.

“Was it a gift from his travels or something?”

“I don’t know. I even wondered if he’d given me the wrong box.”

…I doubted it. I couldn’t see Bruno making that kind of mistake.

“May I…?” Siesta asked. She picked up the mysterious object, then examined it from various angles, murmuring half-formed theories about what it was made of and when.

The object passed into Nagisa’s hands, then mine. It was hard and cold under my fingertips. What on earth was it?

“……”

Suddenly, a memory flickered through my mind.

I froze up for a few moments. The other three watched me, confused.

“Sorry. We were telling old stories, weren’t we?” I tried to get the conversation going again. When had our memories started to go strange? Why had we forgotten the Akashic records and the Singularity, among other things? If we wanted to find hints in the past, we needed to retrace our memories.

“Where do we start, though? At the Great Cataclysm, maybe?” Nagisa set her teacup down.

“Mm, a little earlier might be better. While I was asleep, for example,” Siesta said. That was two years ago.

We’d told Siesta about that time after she woke up, of course, but she seemed to think there was more to discuss about it. I agreed.

“I’m guessing we should start with that one story, then?” For some reason, Nagisa gave me a chilly look. “You know. The time Kimihiko cheated.”

“That’s one heck of an accusation. And a lie.” Although, I did get where she was coming from.

“My brother, cheating? I certainly want to hear about that.”

“Noel, didn’t I say you weren’t allowed to call me your brother?”

“Huh. My assistant, cheating? Color me intrigued.”

“Siesta, don’t polish your musket.”

Weirdly enough, though, that time was the very thing I’d just felt the urge to talk about. Setting down the whatever-it-was, I thought back to two years ago.

“This happened three months after we defeated Seed and Siesta fell asleep…”

We were about to embark on a journey to the past, in search of clues to the Akashic records.