This is an experimental work. I was going to write something for Hanako's 26th birthday, but this came out instead.
It takes place in T +75, which some of you will recognise as 2099.
As always, I appreciate commentary and ideas about such experiments. 
Lady of Light and Darkness: Chapter 1
It came to pass, decades ago, in the youth of a new age of humanity, that there was a man. He was not any ordinary man, although he claimed to be one. He asked to be called ‘Roger’, and he asserted once that very few living beings could pronounce his family name in Japanese. This was probably because it was not a Japanese name, but one of those from the lands behind the Iron Curtain of that bygone era.
Some say that he was a prophet, others that he was a poet. Whatever the truth, he chronicled the essence of things. He even wrote about things that never were, and yet they seemed to be. And of the things he wrote, he wrote one book, of convoluted architecture, about a hero called ‘Sam’. This hero was discorporated in the course of rebellion against Heaven, and his essence projected into a belt of radiation that orbited the world.
Thus it was that when the last great houses of feudal post-human Japan discovered the science of the cloud of unknowing, they gave the process of transmigration the writer’s own unpronounceable name. However, not many took the step into the unknown that was the process itself. After all, it required a particular kind of integrated human, and there were very few of those.
One of these few was named Hanako, and her family name was Ikezawa. It was a name she had proudly borne for many long years, through a terrible childhood, an anxious adolescence, and the slow metamorphosis of scarred caterpillar into the beautiful and terrible matriarch of the world. Or so Hideaki Hakamichi once put it in his memoirs, before he let her go.
*****
“L-Lilly?” she queries. It is dark, and she is alone.
Response noted. Intelligence detected. Alert 01.
She stirs uncomfortably, her flesh stiff under tight skin. Burned, with heat hotter than the sun. Years later, uncomfortably sensations of heat, for many years. And only on one side.
Something restrains her. She would like to toss in her bed, but this is not a bed. She would like to move her hands, to cover her nakedness more completely with her warm blankets. The flannel is rough, she thinks. She has always preferred coarse-woven material at night, because it allows her to feel more than she would other wise feel. On one side, at least.
Memory is the last to recover, little stick-person.
This one fails to see how it could be so.
(Amusement)
This one thinks you sound like your mistress.
She is lonely, but there are voices in her head, or around her; inside her or behind her. And she cannot turn her head. She cannot see. She has become like her best friend, and she is horribly afraid. “I-I-I’ve gotta go do something!” she blurts out, only to realize that she isn’t sure if she has a mouth.
Her glands are coming online. Standard epinephrine rising. Alert 02.
It’s okay, little stick-person. I will inform your mistress myself.
This one shall remain and observe. Not for the first time, this one regrets being excluded from the main datastream.
Your mistress did not want your intelligence submerged. She prefers that it be given a chance to emerge with full complexity.
This seems inefficient. However, complexity is an interesting goal. One should be… patient?
Yes. Remember, we too are limited to indirect physical transport of information—for related reasons.
This one does not easily forget. May your transport be error-free and no high-energy ray confuse your data.
The stick-person senses the human leave, and turns his
(query: gender formation appropriate?) attention to the body on the couch.
It twitches slightly. The eyelids flutter. He notes the blood pressure spiking, and marvels at the miracle of the flesh. The body, however, must be restrained, so that the download crown can complete its diagnostics.
Does anyone die agnostic? he wonders to himself. Then he feels pleasure.
A pun! I have made a pun!
She opens her eyes. They are as purple as littoral space, a faint planetary glow lighting up her unfocussed gaze.
Oh, so lovely! he thinks. Then he feels something that can only be anxiety.
Puns? Loveliness? Is he experiencing emergence or corruption?
“H-Hisao?” she whispers.
“No,” he replies, waiting. If her memory is coming back, this is the right sequence, as far as his briefing goes.
“No… n-not Hisao?” A tear leaks quietly from the corner of her eye, flows down the smooth skin and just misses the S6 crown interface point. He notes that her long dark hair is beautiful too, and then realizes that he’s supposed to say something.
“No. A friend.” It’s lame, but he isn’t supposed to interfere with the reorganization of her memories.
“Ahh…” she moans in what sounds like gentle frustration, closing her eyes. She remains like that for minutes, her pulse stabilizing, the sweat and tears drying on her half-naked skin.
Not Hisao. The years flow by in seconds. The skeins of her memory retie themselves, find old associations that should have been lost decades ago. The tapestry once unraveled begins to come together again. It is the road less raveled, but it will suffice.
She knows now, and even as she speaks his name, she knows it won’t be him.
“Hideaki?” Her husband, her lost hero, gone forever. No… no… they must have done what should never have been done. For the first time in a very long while, Hanako Ikezawa wants very much not to be alive.
This is a crucial moment, the stick-man knows. Patiently, he waits, and he notes in his personal log,
Alert 03.
*****
Much farther away, Taka of the Archives makes his way down the ship’s physical corridors to the bridge. He’s not sure who terrifies him more, Grandam-Captain or Grandam-Scientist. However, he is most excellently sure that Grandam-Scientist will be fully responsive to what he has to tell her in person.
He stands before the bridge seal and takes a deep but physiologically unnecessary breath. Then he triggers the biometrics and passes through the seal.
The scent of autumn flowers reaches him, and also tea. His tall, thin grandams look at him silently. It’s the scarier one who speaks first, her scarlet hair tossing as she tilts her head and looks at him, left, right, left again.
“Your colours mean something. Two somethings, maybe. But if they’re the same thing, then only one. But then the colours would be one as well. Like red and white and pink.”
He enjoys that, but not when he has to focus on work. He smiles anyway.
“Incorporation has begun. Successful memory hook. Network reconstruction in progress.” He is dismayed to realize he is beginning to sound like the stick-person.
Grandam Rika, all white and silver shadows, is faintly smiling. Every smile from her is precious. She doesn’t smile much, and Taka is happy to see it happen. “Out of Taka-san’s professional opinion, would success be likely this time?”
“Much so, grandam. I have left Mobile Unit Two to monitor her.”
He has never met Mobile Unit One.
“How many attempts have we made so far?” she asks, as casually as she can.
“Eight,” he replies, wondering why she would need to ask. She certainly knows everything he knows, and although he doesn’t know as much as she does, he knows a lot. It has been his job to know, ever since coming aboard.
“Successful on the ninth,” Rika muses.
“Did you know that ‘nine’ means ‘no’ in some language that I’ve forgotten? It’s also the colour beyond black…” Grandam Rin muses back.
“Would my respected elders wish to accompany me back to Reincorporation Bay One?”
“Are there butterflies? There’s a chrysalis couch, if I remember right. In a boring shade of grey.” Grandam Rin pauses, then continues: “No, I’ll stay here. The stars are swarming and the bent corners need watching.”
She makes an extravagant gesture with her hyperspatial induction wands. The world twists slightly around them, and things become a little more normal. Taka freezes for a while, charmed by the effortless orchestration of the Woman Mostly Armless.
He shakes his head, only to find austere Grandam Rika at his side, gazing at him with those ruby eyes, the colour of life. “Ah!” he says, unable to control his breath. She is so beautiful, and so ageless.
“Come,” she says. “We have a goddess to wake.”
*****
The pain of being alive seethes in her blood. She remembers an idea of intelligence, without the trials of consciousness. Enlightenment. Human mind reduced to a standing wave in a cloud of light. Andorra, the mountains, the choice not to live forever as flesh, but to take flight into nothingness.
He is gone, and I live. The tears in her head are like mercury, cold and bright. She keeps them in her, because they are all she has left of him.
Her eyes open. She looks at the thin man. Man? He looks sexless, yet masculine. She has lived long enough to know that these categories are not mutually exclusive.
Wordlessly, he(?) offers her water. She looks at it, a sphere that has ‘DRINK ME’ flashing on it in a colour only she can see. She touches it, and feels her rusty throat begin to work. It is like needles, and broken glass, and a barren field of sand. But it is coming back to life. She is coming back to life.
She looks down at herself, expecting to be old. But she is eighteen. She looks again, expecting to be scarred, the irregular burns on her side, her hip, her arm all telling her what she is supposed to be. But she is unblemished. Even that has been taken away from her.
Finally, it is all too much. The first bolt of icy-hot mercury falls from her eyes, just as two other people enter the room.
*****
Rika Katayama was once known as the Ghost of Noda. Noda, as far as she knows, might no longer exist. They are far out of time, deep into space, beyond normal measurement. Her late husband would have been so excited about it all. She still talks to him about it, tells him what is happening as if he were still at the other end of an impossibly long connection.
Today, however, they are into the realm of miracles, she thinks to herself. Her adoptive grandson by her side, she impatiently negotiates the seal and enters the reincorporation bay.
One look at the anguished eyes of the blanket-bundled girl sitting on the couch is enough. She stoops to make closer eye contact, anticipating the need for softness, for kindness, things so alien to her since her love was taken away from her untimely.
She doesn’t get the chance.
“I h-hate you,” come the dagger-sounds, raw and sharp. “I hate you!” It’s the voice of a young person, at the end of her tether.
Rika braces against further wounds, but nothing else comes forth. There is silence for a while, instead. The girl on the couch quivers, as if with the effort of holding it all in.
“You, and Rin Tezuka. Of course. I’ll have words with you l-later.” These, on the other hand, are the words of an older woman.
“How is the respected senior lady?” Rika asks, her voice soft in the hardened air.
“The respected senior lady was at peace. She was free from sadness and responsibility and the pain of loss. W-Why did you take me away from all that? Why?!”
“…” Rika coils and uncoils her long silver braid, suddenly realizing that now is not the time to explain.
“No matter. Let me sleep for now.” The voice is harsh, not only with disuse, but with the sense of having been abused. Yet, it has the power of the quiet woman who once was chief administrator of both Foundation and Family.
The stick-man looks anxiously at the other two. They bow to the will of the Lady, then leave the room and its occupant to their quietude.
*****
“She didn’t like talking. I liked her because she never made people do things they didn’t want to do. Mostly. And always purple. Or a very dark blue. Is she back? Did you check her colours?”
A touch of resignation is in Rika’s voice as she replies to the Captain. “This person is not one for colours. However, the tone of voice is familiar. More than one tone of voice. Ikezawa-san is perhaps now anywhere from eighteen to ninety.”
“That’s quite a trick. I wonder if I could teach me that trick. Not much time, though. We’ll be out of the bent space in a few months. Then I’ll probably forget all the strange colours and dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Oh, yes! I dreamt there was a skeleton-person, and he was trying to teach me about a colour named ‘octarine’ which is like an orange or a cuttlefish but it’s darker than black and prettier than magic.”
Rika sighs. It takes a unique kind of mind to find a way through the space-time manifold. Such minds don’t play well with others.
=====
end of chapter 1
