CHAPTER 11: HAJIME - ALGORITHM PAI A LA MODE
“I dance not to escape, but to reveal the rhythm that hides within.”
– Sisterpon, “Lvcky disaStars”
Hajime tried not to think about what had just happened. She had heard shouting, and there had been almost no way to see anything, so she had run away. Ran until the only sound left was her own footsteps, a steady rhythm that felt like safety.
A sense of heightened awareness buzzed at the edge of her thoughts, an intuitive realization creeping in—her body was in survival mode, flight activated. Her mind knew instinctively she needed to stay hidden, to find somewhere safe.
She saw a path outlined on the floor in glowing light modules. She couldn’t tell where it led, the outside of her helmet dark and shadowed. All she could see were those guiding illuminations. She followed, fumbling her way through opening a secured door, hands moving on autopilot, reacting before her brain caught up.
Another pulse of awareness surfaced, less panicked now. Her initial fear was ebbing, morphing into something else. She was acting on instinct, pushing through the fear, moving forward without thinking too much. The realization gave her a strange sense of resolve, like she was regaining some control.
She sang softly to herself, her voice a thread tying her thoughts together. “Strung through stardust, woven in light, sounds of chaos chasing me tonight. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the robots’ walk, gotta move fast off this hunk of rock.”
Singing gave her confidence. Like she could weave the future with her lyrics.
The path continued, guiding her back to where they had entered about twenty minutes earlier. The cool, windowed corridor stretched out before her, the stars casting their faint glow across the comet’s surface.
She didn’t want to think about what had happened in the materials processing facility. About the Everything. It was a shadow in her mind, looming, but she shook it off. Instead, she let herself sing again, letting her voice fill the silence.
“Neon trails on cosmic rails, gear and wire, and so much ire. Robot hearts, in the stardust mart, hiding underneath, to rip off her sleeves.”
She paused, listening to herself, a small grin tugging at her lips. “All of this is turning me very nightcore.”
Without thinking, she broke away from the tension of the moment and began improvising a chorus with a dance. “In the quantum rhythm, feel the vibe, sway in the symphony of the cosmic tribe. In the dance of dimensions, where secrets hide, just another echo, on the universal ride.”
She moved with the beat in her head, feet finding a rhythm, arms extending, twirling, and cutting through the air. She thought about where she was, what it would be like to explore a comet—before she had actually explored a comet. Now that she was here, it was different. She let her thoughts drift, thinking about the universe, the planets, the endless stretch of space. “It’s just another cosmos.”
She paused, the words lingering in the air, and then asked herself, “Am I safe?”
A realization bubbled up—was there ever a true "safe"? Not with a killer robot roaming nearby. The question nagged at her, but at the same time, the thought of other people dealing with the issue made her feel lighter, almost giddy. That was their problem now, not hers.
She threw herself into her dance, the motion pulling her out of her thoughts. She executed a few aggressive dance moves, arms chopping through the air in rhythm. Each move was sharp, deliberate. “ワイヤー切って、クエーザーの合唱隊、銀河のグルーヴで、魂が舞い上がるように,” she sang, her voice rising with excitement.
She struck a pose, as if transforming into a new character—someone who had just escaped the attack of her first self. She cringed dramatically, dodge-rolling away in a theatrical flourish, before breaking into a mock run. Her face contorted into a parodied expression of woe, exaggerated and cartoonish, like a character she’d played years ago in a performance of Sisterpon.
She started dancing again, stepping to the beat playing from her AVP. The shadows from the window panes shifted along the floor like slow-moving saw blades. She danced with them, syncing her moves to the rhythm. Every step felt alive with energy, each beat pulsing in her helmet, reverberating in her chest. She felt high on the sound.
“On the dance floor of light, where shadows walk by, just another flash, another passer, in the runaway night.”
She hadn’t sealed her suit yet, leaving it baggy and loose. She had been apprehensive about drawing attention to her figure out here, in this place. Her body—45 kilograms of what the industry deemed “perfect”—felt like something shaped for someone else’s desires, not her own.
The conflict lingered in her mind, a reminder of the pressures she faced. She danced on, feeling that tension in her body, but also feeling the freedom of movement in the loose suit. Baggy-suit dancing—it was fun, liberating, like the world couldn’t see her the way they wanted to.
And then it hit her. This was exactly the moment she needed for the show, for her recording. Her AVP had captured every second of her improvised performance. This was her contribution—her creative stamp.
“Oh yeah!” she shouted, throwing her arms up in a final flourish, laughing as she twirled down the corridor, the weight of the world briefly forgotten in her rhythm.
Hajime glanced at her AVP timeline for half a second, making sure the footage was captured perfectly. Satisfied, she quickly mapped out how to keep the spectacle going. Her mind raced with excitement as she imagined how to make her surroundings come alive in a way that would dazzle and entertain.
The comet’s rapid rotation cast moving shadows across the floor, and one, in particular, caught her attention—a slow-turning shadow that resembled the top half of a gear. It seemed to rotate horizontally on the ground, its teeth reaching out in a slow, menacing dance. Hajime, ever the performer, saw an opportunity. She moved in sync with the shadows, positioning herself so that her silhouette would interact with the environment, becoming part of the shadow play.
The beat dropped. A heavy reverberation pulsed through her helmet, matching the rhythm in her mind. With each drop, her baggy silhouette shifted, dodging the teeth of the shadow-gear. It was a dance—her shadow avoiding the inevitable, skipping just out of reach of the turning, umbrageous cog.
But the shadows closed in, and finally, there was no escape. Her silhouette merged with the rotating gear, and in a dramatic moment of shadowplay, her figure seemed to pop and twist into a sliver of itself, a distorted version of her "paragon" form.
She pressed her suit tighter against her body, highlighting her figure, but made sure to capture only her shadow doing so. It was all about the illusion, the performance. One moment she was a slim, exaggerated being, the next, an indicator flashed in her helmet’s HUD.
The atmosphere had changed.
Her excitement dulled into immediate annoyance. One moment she was immersed in her creation, and the next, the world interrupted her flow. She let out a soft, frustrated sigh, knowing she'd have to adapt, but already thinking of how to spin it into something worthy of the AVP.
At the far end of the passageway, black dust particles floated, filling the air. A large shape pushed through the haze—a figure. A man, his face caked with black crud. He stumbled forward blindly, gasping for air, brown hair visible through the grime, blue eyes wide with panic. His mouth hung open, searching for the clean air, and he coughed violently, doubling over.
Hajime watched as he fell to his hands and knees, vomiting thick black goo onto the floor. It looked like he was painting the ground with cobalt. The man finished, laughed—a strained, painful sound—and stood, swaying on his feet. Then he saw her.
He started walking toward her, shaky but determined.
“止まれ!” she called.
The man—Mike, she realized now—stopped, raising his hands in surrender. “Don’t shoot!”
“I don’t shoot,” Hajime replied calmly.
He took another step toward her.
“Stop!” she repeated.
“But you said you didn’t shoot.”
“That’s not the point. I told you to stop.”
Mike hesitated, then finally stopped again. “Okay,” he muttered.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Silence hung between them like a weight. Then, to Hajime’s surprise, Mike started dancing—slowly at first, as if testing his legs, then faster. He laughed, spinning clumsily in his own little world, black vomit still smeared across his face.
Hajime stared at him, trying to process what she was seeing. The sight was absurd—this filthy guy, smeared with black goo, dancing badly and laughing like a madman. For a moment, she couldn’t even react, her brain stuck on what, exactly, she was looking at. Then she remembered her AVP was still playing music, feeding the bizarre scene. With a quick glance, she gestured for the music to stop. The beat cut off abruptly.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Mike halted, blinking at her, as if coming out of a trance.
“Pardon me, miss,” he said, his voice oddly formal. “But I’m supposed to be going to get help.”
Hajime shook her head, “I do not think that is how this works.”
Mike looked confused, genuinely shocked at her response.
“Did she die?” Hajime asked, her voice colder than she intended.
Mike shrugged, giving her the most useless expression possible.
“Should we try to leave?” he asked.
“The ship separated, remember?” Hajime said, still shaking her head. “We’re not supposed to be safe here. That is the point.”
“And you were just dancing?”
“So were you,” she said, tilting her head. “In a way. And what else is there to do? If we run, we should run in a way that’s entertaining. Otherwise, we just came to this stupid place for no reason at all.”
Mike looked at her, baffled. “What?”
He laughed, but this time it was more confident, less manic. Hajime’s confusion grew. This man was infuriatingly obtuse.
Her HUD blinked again, warning her of an air pressure shift. She turned toward where Mike had come from, scanning the area, but saw nothing. A metallic scraping sound echoed from the opposite end of the corridor. They were being cornered.
A towering machine appeared at the far end of the passage, painted in vivid yellow. It stood over two meters tall, its hydraulic stabilizer legs moving with eerie precision. The machine's arms—brutal, mining tools—twitched with an unsettling grace, and where its head should have been, a flat-screen monitor rotated, as if it had a neck. From this distance, Hajime couldn’t make out the words displayed on the screen. The machine glistened under the cold, artificial light.
“Mike, can we go back that way?” Hajime asked, glancing at the way she came.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, helpless.
She looked down at the grated floor beneath them. There were pathways running above and below—visible through the metal slats. They seemed to mirror the passageway they stood in. Convenient. Too convenient.
The yellow machine started moving toward them, not with the mindless gait of an industrial tool but with cautious, almost deliberate movements. It circled slowly, as though trying to separate them, its stabilizing legs flexing with a calculated, predatory grace. It wasn’t human, but it was trying to mimic something close.
Her PAI was flooding her with data, too much to parse. It couldn’t decide what to tell her.
“It knows it’s outnumbered,” she muttered. “It’s trying to separate us.”
I need to fight. I want to fight.
Her PAI disagreed, feeding her synthetic emotions that made her feel uneasy, an unsettling blend of confusion and logic. She wanted to call it Quantumor—an emotion born of paradox, where conflicting information collided in a swirl of contradictory feelings.
Why? Run where?
You will lose. Over there.
A white square panel on the floor caught her eye. Without hesitation, she darted toward it, throwing it open and scrambling inside. She barely glanced back.
“Maiku, bai bai!”
She half-hoped he wouldn’t follow, that somehow he’d manage to save himself. But at the same time, she felt a small pang of guilt. Maybe she should have stayed. Maybe this would get her into trouble again.
But there was no turning back now.
Sometime later, Hajime was still crawling on her hands and knees, trying to enjoy it as much as possible despite technically running for her life. Her mind drifted, half detached from the chaos around her, savoring the strange newness of moving this way. Life hadn’t often placed her in situations where crawling was a practical means of movement, and she took a bizarre kind of satisfaction from it now. She could feel the muscles in her arms and legs working in concert, a reminder that her body was capable of far more than her usual performances.
Behind her, Mike suddenly yelped in pain. Hajime paused and looked back, watching him drop onto his rear, rubbing at his shoulder like a child who’d fallen off a bike.
Somehow, Mike had managed to injure himself yet again, despite the elbow and knee pads built into his spacesuit. This time, it seemed he had hit his scapula at just the right angle to bypass the suit’s protective padding. It was impressive in a way—if by impressive, she meant irritating. Mike had a talent for discovering all the ways his suit’s protection could fail through sheer clumsiness.
“Excuse me, miss... ma’am... sir?” Mike stammered, looking both exhausted and embarrassed. “Can we sit for a spell?”
There wasn’t any real reason they couldn’t stop. The immediate threat felt distant for the moment, and Hajime sensed that Mike wouldn’t be able to keep crawling much longer without further incident.
So, she spun around, plopping down in front of him with a quiet sigh. The passage stretched out behind them, dark and uninviting, while the identical view loomed ahead, offering no sense of progress or destination. The long corridor felt endless.
Mike was staring at her expectantly, clearly waiting for some kind of guidance or reassurance. But Hajime stayed silent, choosing instead to focus on the ambient noise around them. The rhythmic sounds of machinery—the hissing of pressurized air, the faint clatter of loose grates, the warped groan of metal ducts—filled the space, creating a ceaseless background hum.
She let it wash over her like white noise, or rather, brown noise. The mechanical symphony lulled her into a trance-like state for a few moments. She yawned.
Mike, as if prompted by some unspoken connection, yawned too.
For a few strange seconds, neither of them spoke, just sitting in the quiet drone of their environment, completely detached from the chaos they had escaped and the uncertainty that lay ahead.
When Hajime could push the looming threat of the robots out of her mind, she felt a fleeting sense of safety—being so far from the known danger, hidden underground in a remote location. It wasn’t enough to feel fully secure, of course, but the brief respite offered a strange kind of relief.
Temporary emotional relief detected.
Not far or remote enough for true safety, though. Her PAI wouldn’t let her forget for long. Even in these quiet moments, the underlying threat kept bubbling up, reminding her that they weren’t out of danger yet.
A loud, extended rumble came from Mike’s stomach, a belly-womble that lasted a solid seven seconds.
Startled, Hajime yelped, “Wah! What was that?”
Mike chuckled. “That’s my belly-worm.”
She stared at him, confused for a moment. "Oh... yeah? What does the worm want?"
“He’s telling me it’s supper time,” Mike replied casually.
Hajime took a moment to process what Mike was saying. "Supper." The word felt almost foreign. She had forgotten people actually needed to eat food. It wasn’t that she wasn’t aware of it—it was just a non-issue for her. Eating had become one of those things other people did, like something you only saw on System Mundo. In a way, it felt like a fantasy concept now.
The idea of being responsible for a creature, like a pet owner with a demanding talking animal, stressed her out.
Change the topic. Regulate your mood.
She shifted gears, thinking about Mike’s problem more practically. “How much food do you have? Did you bring any food?”
Mike didn’t answer immediately, his hands patting down his suit, searching his pockets. He unzipped a random decorative zipper that didn’t actually open anything, and after an exaggerated attempt, gave up with a sigh, accidentally banging his elbow in the process.
After his dramatic display of “injury,” Mike finally responded. “I got nothing in my pockets. Or my pockets that... ain’t... pockets.”
Hajime nodded, accepting that fact—or those facts, rather. Mike’s lack of preparation didn’t really surprise her. She considered how best to steer the conversation toward something useful.
“Are you ready to go?” she asked, hoping to shift the focus.
Mike, seemingly oblivious, poked a finger into yet another pocket and mumbled, “Whuh?” His stomach gurgled again, and he laughed.
“I don’t know if I want to find the others first or find something to eat,” he said with a shrug, as if the two options were equally important.
Hajime blinked at him, not sure what to say.
Lead by example.
She turned away and began crawling again. If they were going to get anywhere, she couldn’t wait for Mike to decide between food and finding the others.
Mike, not wanting to be left behind, quickly followed her, asking, “Do you think we’re winning the game yet?”
“What game?” Hajime asked, confused.
“The game show we’re on, silly,” Mike replied confidently, as though that answered everything.
Hajime just stared ahead, her mind working through the bizarre disconnect in their conversation. Winning a game show? Really? Was that what Mike thought was happening here?
Disparity in reality perception detected.
Hajime took a deep breath, trying to decide if she should even bother responding. Reality wasn’t something you could easily argue with someone like Mike. Instead, she just kept crawling forward, hoping the next crawlspace would bring them closer to something resembling sanity.
Her mind raced with how to handle this. Should she explain to him that they weren’t on a game show, that their lives were actually in danger? But she figured it was easier to just distract him, like before.
“Do you like music, Mike?” she asked, hoping to shift the conversation.
“You know I do,” he said with a hyuk-like laugh.
“Oh, yeah,” Hajime muttered, remembering his earlier awkward dancing.
“I like my waifu’s music.”
The word didn’t register with her at first. When it clicked, she froze for half a second.
Social and cultural disconnect detected.
She stopped crawling. This dude is one of those guys. She resumed crawling, trying to keep her cool.
Long story short, there were certain types of fans—those who could subscribe to “fan marriages” with their idols, affectionately known as “waifus.” Hajime had recorded her voice for such a service but took great care to avoid any further association with it. She didn’t even want to imagine what people did with her digital likeness in their AVP simulations.
“Yeah… my waifus got me through some hard times. Like right now. ‘Cept my daddy doesn’t let me bring them outside the house.”
Hajime nodded, listening despite how alien the whole concept felt to her. She kept crawling, pretending everything was normal, even though Mike’s confession was growing more and more surreal.
Mike continued, “Each one of them is special... but they’re all designed to be perfect. But it’s like... they’re more than that. Like they’re as real as anything else.”
Hajime felt an odd sensation, a mix of discomfort and intrigue as he spoke.
Conflict approaching. Hajime’s identity as a virtual idol, known as a ‘waifu’ in certain subcultures, is about to collide with her present existence. Emotional strain detected.
Something inside Hajime told her to back off, to not engage. But she asked the question anyway.
“Which waifus are you talking about?” she said, her voice more tense than she intended. “Because I think they’re all actually real people originally.”
Mike, lost in his memories, barely registered the shift in her tone. “Oh, I had lots and lots of them, lol. But my all-time favorite was Haji_Haji. She was different—not like the others. She had this melancholy about her, like she really understood what it felt like to be lonely, y’know?”
Hajime’s neural processes practically froze. The words Mike had just spoken hung in the air, like more of the black vomit she had seen him spew earlier.
High-stress revelation imminent. Hajime’s online persona, ‘Haji_Haji,’ was known in certain virtual idol circles. Emotional strain detected.
Hajime exhaled softly, barely above a whisper.
“...That’s me.”
I have to be kind, gracious, interesting, good, funny, clever, easygoing, but also a distinct and memorable personality with enough edge to catch attention. Purity. Friendliness. Flawlessness.