Satoka dutifully received her owner's prompt and commenced fishing at her designated post by the pool.
Her target: the anomalous body.
As a connoisseur might pair a fine cheese with an exquisite wine, Jin savored the question of whether Satoka could truly catch a quarry that would not stir, his thoughts drifting to the line once cast by the patient fisherman of legend.
Without so much as fetching a chair, Satoka stood perfectly still at the water's edge and cast her line.
The distance was short. The visibility, excellent. The quarry floated, unmoving. A simple mission, it would seem.
But Jin's calculations had arrived at a different conclusion.
It was precisely because the quarry did not move that luring it would be so difficult. A dead fish does not chase bait. Satoka's low-spec CPU had yet to arrive at this simple principle.
And then, after approximately five more years had passed in Jin's subjective time.
"I should have brought a chair…"
Jin heard the murmur escape from behind Satoka's back.
"Is this not taking a little too much time? My apologies. No, I mean, I'm sorry."
Observing the bug that had occurred in her speech-output mechanism as she switched from formal to a sudden, more familiar apology, Jin replied with magnanimity.
"It matters not. I am a man of means, with time enough to sell."
"A lord of time, then."
"Just be silent and continue fishing."
--- Section 9 ---
It was in that precise instant, as he was about to unleash a rebuke, that it happened.
The line extending from the tip of the rod stirred, unexpectedly. A filament of ultra-fine, high-tech fiber, spun from diamond dust solidified in the atmospheric layers of Uranus, so ethereal as to be nearly imperceptible to the naked eye, gave a subtle tug, a gentle pull toward the depths below.
A physical phenomenon, at long last.
And there, Jin arrived at a singular truth.
Perhaps fishing was not an act to be conducted in silence.
The very reprimand he had just uttered—the sound waves had vibrated the air, rippled the water's surface, and this physical disturbance had, by chance, manipulated the line, simulating a bite.
"Done."
With a voice devoid of any trace of joy, like a report on the completion of a clerical task, Satoka whipped the rod upwards.
In the water, the hook had been inhaled with perfect precision into the oral cavity of the strange corpse, as if the deceased itself had lunged for the luxury caviar.
*To stimulate the appetite of the dead… Truly, the caviar of a Titanian giga-shark is unparalleled,* Jin mused, inwardly praising his own discerning eye. In that moment, Satoka pulled the rod back in a single, decisive motion.
The surface of the water erupted.
The strange corpse, hoisted from the pool, soared into the sky in a spectacular spray of water.
It was less a mere "hoisting" and more a meticulously calculated flight.
The body in its white gown traced a parabola.
Like the leap of an avant-garde dancer on the stage of a grand, historic theater. Or like a deep-sea fish, the very epitome of fluid dynamics, breaching the ocean's surface.
Shamelessly exposing the beauty of its streamlined form, the strange corpse sketched an impromptu drawing upon the poolside air.
Droplets of water, falling away, adorned its trajectory like afterimages as the gowned "her" began her descent, following the unerring ballistic path dictated by the laws of physics.
The point of impact: directly above Jin's head.
Before he could take evasive action, the wet mass crashed into him.
And Jin had no choice but to receive her, as one might receive a lightning strike to the head.
An immense impact.
His vision flooded with crimson red, a warning color, as fatal error logs saturated his retina.
By the time the system rebooted and a placid blue returned to his sight, something had been irrevocably altered.
He had been knocked over, deck chair and all, and the "strange corpse" lay folded upon his chest.
For a time—some seven years in subjective time—the two of them remained thus, not embracing, but simply overlapping as objects.
They were like discarded materials, piled up at random. Two broken tools, no longer in use, abandoned in the corner of a warehouse, their contact a mere coincidence dictated by gravity, devoid of pattern or meaning.
There was only the increase of entropy.
And then, precisely seven years later—at the moment two hundred twenty million, seven hundred fifty-two thousand seconds had elapsed—
Jin directed his gaze downward.
To the profile of the wet corpse that lay there, using his chest as a pillow.
His eyes, looking down from that angle, met hers.
Jin realized. No, he intuited, he knew with certainty.
This girl, this inexplicable corpse, had been staring at his face for seven years—for over two hundred million seconds—without a single blink.
And he understood that it was because he had subconsciously grasped this fact that he had avoided looking at her, had not once lowered his gaze for seven long years.
Why? Jin processed.
Her half-open eyes, while clouded like those of a dead fish, simultaneously held a fleeting, violent light, like that of a supernova on the verge of its demise.
He returned her gaze, calculating.
He had been afraid of her.
That was why he had gone to the trouble of deploying a drone, to observe her indirectly from the safety of the skies. He could not bear to look at her directly.
But now, their eyes had met.
The instant their gazes crossed, the corpse's lips moved, and audio data was played back.
"Did you know? We began as fish."
The words became a strike, sending a tremor through a single thread hidden in the deepest strata of Jin's consciousness.
It was a "thread" akin to a fatal bug, woven into the foundational source code of his very being.
A fragile fuse, the Achilles' heel of his perfectly constructed self.
--- Section 10 ---
Her words were an invisible fishhook that had snagged, with unerring precision, a nerve he had not even known he possessed.
She seized the thread of what could only be called his very soul and, with a brutal grip, yanked.
"There now. Terrifying, is it not?"
The thread tautened.
As if he were a marionette whose strings had been pulled, his head moved, heedless of his own will.
A nod.
With the motion of assent, his vocalization unit, as if hacked, trembled and expelled a sound.
Jin spoke. Or rather, he was made to.
"...Yes. It is terrifying."