It was a short ride from Babylonia Station, situated under the Tower’s mall complex, back to Enmei’s apartment in Minato Ward. The journey felt numb and infinite. He kept murmuring a name without realizing it. Katsumi. Katsumi. Softy, again and again. I’ve failed you, Katsumi. Now I can never be by your side.

She was the one who had told Enmei of Heaven’s Program in the first place. She had told him because she wanted him to come with her. To Heaven, to the Moon. Katsumi always was the real genius. It was all Enmei could do to keep up with her.

Now, well, he supposed the chase ended here.

Minato Station was only two stops away from Babylonia, but Enmei nearly missed the announcer’s voice blaring their arrival. He shuffled off the train just as the doors sealed shut.

It was 6:53 by the time his apartment door snapped shut, and Enmei collapsed against it. The whole affair had taken under an hour.

It was only then that he began to cry. Enmei clutched his hands behind his head, knees close to his face as the tears began to fall. The numbness didn’t fade, only amplifying in the dimness of the apartment.

Five years. He hadn’t broken down and cried in five whole years. He had spent that time bettering himself, learning, trying with all his strength to become someone worthy of standing beside her. He had tried his best to become special.

And he had. He had. He had become special, so special. He had done everything to proclaim that to the world, to show them, to show Katsumi–

Dr. Campbell’s words rang in Enmei’s head.

You are special, Enmei. Just not special enough.

Fuck.

FUCK.

Not special enough special enough special enough special enough special enough special enough special enough.

Failure was a foreign thing. With it came all the feelings he had repressed in the years following his parents’ deaths.

The image found its way unsolicited to the forefront of Enmei’s mind – his mother, blood soaking into the carpet around her.

Wrists slit cleanly down the center.

And then it all came flooding back. The pain, fear, and incomprehension of that time. Enmei’s breath became ragged, his body racked with sobs and the remembrance of the fear he had felt.

Even before his mother’s death – the helmet cam footage his father’s best friend, Lieutenant Fujikawa, had shown him, because Enmei wanted to know . . .

“He needs to know, Akasaki-san,” Fujikawa was saying, arguing with Enmei’s mother, who was yelling at him to stop because Enmei was too young, too fragile, too–

Enmei, eight, finding a small datapad under his bed. Fujikawa had snuck it there. Its drive was blank, except for a single video.

A helmet cam, scratchy footage. Deep green trees around a stationary hovercraft, floating in a cloud of dust kicked up by its thrusters a few feet above a dirt clearing. The cam peers from an open side door to see a young child crawling out from the trees, wounded, leg bent awkwardly. The hovercraft door is filled by a figure. The recorder sets a firm hand across his chest, blocking him, the man pushes it aside, sprinting out from the reinforced hull of the hovercraft. Sprinting towards the child, a rifle slung about his neck. He reaches the child, bends down. The video has no audio, but the man hears something, head flicks up, rifle following in time for the blur of a drone to explode into his chest. The cam buckles as the recorder flinches back from the blast, video cutting to the simple words: END OF FOOTAGE.

How many times had Enmei replayed that recording over the years? He had been addicted to it – the child, his father, the explosion. The blur of the drone. Each frame of the video was drilled into his mind. Enmei hated his father’s friend for letting him see that video. That video, his mother’s blood, his father’s death – they had haunted him for years.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He had been given into the custody of his aunt, who had paid for therapist after therapist, psychological evaluation, medications, anything else that might bring back the joyful, smart child from before. All Enmei remembered from that time were the adults discussing his mind in hushed tones while he sat beside them, staring dead at the ground. And who was it that ripped you out of that depression?

It had been Katsumi Kanbe. Though Katsumi herself hadn’t known that at the time.

He first saw the beautiful extent of her mind in middle school, when they were both first years. Even in his depressed state, Enmei had been consistently at the top of the class in exams and participation credits. He recognized his own talent, and saw that the curriculum that challenged others was nothing to him. Even so, he had no particular desire to excel. The faculty praised him every day for his exceptional work, but when their praise fed into higher expectations, then into criticism at any simple mistake, he wished he had never tried at all.

He was lost.

Enmei remembered watching her during class, the day it all changed. He hadn’t paid any mind to her before. Just a small, sullen girl who spent her time in the school library rather than with friends. But he had begun to wonder about her that day, why she always stared out the window, across the baseball field where the upperclassmen often played, that look of such stricken determination ever etched into her face. She was always there, even during lunch break. He had never seen her eat once, nor had he seen her paying attention in class. It was the third week of class when the teacher had finally paid enough mind to say something.

“Kanbe-san, care to tell what you’re daydreaming about over there?” the teacher had called. Most of the class began giggling. Enmei sat up, realizing he actually wanted to know. Then he sank back when he recognized the teacher’s jest for what it was. She wouldn’t really spill the contents of her mind in front of the class.

“Do you really want to know? I can come up to the board and explain it if you want,” Katsumi asked with complete earnestness. The teacher cocked his head, then smiled.

“Sure. We could use a short break from the lecture, right everyone?”

Some laughed, some applauded jokingly. Katsumi moved to the front, grabbed a marker and began to write. As the cheers died out, she made the last strokes of an equation on the board.

H(X) = -Σ p(x_i) log₂ p(x_i)

“This is Claude Shannon’s Information Equation.”

The class went dead silent. Enmei gawked at the smattering of letters scrawled on the whiteboard. That wasn’t middle school level math. That wasn’t even taught in high school.

“This is a fundamental concept that we take for granted in our daily lives. It’s part of a larger system of ideas Shannon called information theory, which he coined in 1948.”

She began scribbling mathematical characters on the board while she talked, introducing variables into the equation and simplifying it. “Its original uses included things like entropy calculation in noise-free communication or the compression of data files, but even a century and a half after its discovery, researchers in all fields are finding new applications for it. The application I was just considering were the theoretical limits it imposes on human cognition. For example, the concept of Bounded Rationality says that because humans have a limited capacity to process and store information, we make decisions based on what satisfies our minds at any given instance rather than striving for an optimal result. That is purely theoretical, and quite distanced from the mathematical foundations of the equation, but if we were to take another concept like Cognitive Bandwidth and assume the existence of five possible cognitive states, then we could actually estimate the ‘entropy’ of a person’s decision-making process. If we break that down in the equation, it would look something . . . like that.”

She punctuated her explanation with a tap of her marker to the board. In the time the explanation had taken, the board had filled itself with incomprehensible calculations, and near the bottom of the board lay a circled number.

“Thus, if a human is making an average of 25 decisions per second in regard to various sensory inputs, the human’s Cognitive Bandwidth is limited to around 58.05 bits per second. Unless we start modifying the human genome, or giving ourselves cybernetic implants, we’re locked there.”

She tapped the number, clearly pleased with herself.

Nobody knew if she was right, of course. It didn’t really matter.

“I’m finished, Fujikawa Sensei. Thanks for letting me present,” she said, setting the marker on the lectern and moving back to her seat.

She glanced at Enmei as she sat down, softly smiled.

Wha–

She had in those few minutes usurped Enmei’s position at the top of their class. The position that Enmei had taken for granted since the beginning of the year had been dragged out from under him. Others had realized this as well, glancing between him and Katsumi. Enmei knew he should feel indignation at Katsumi for proving herself smarter in such a showy fashion, for making him suffer such an absolute defeat in the eyes of the class.

But instead, Enmei’s heart had fluttered. Excitement? Competition? Something else?

Whatever the case, Enmei realized that day, three years after his parents’ deaths, he had found a purpose. He had found his reason to continue on.

She is truly special, Enmei thought. But I can show her that I’m special too.