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CHAT—
    —SETTON HAS LEFT THE CHAT—
    —KANRA HAS LEFT THE CHAT—



Chapter 3: Headless Rider, Subjective
    National Route 254 (Kawagoe Highway)
    This really sucks.
    The owner of the black bike—the headless rider—was in a foul mood as it rode the highway in the middle of the night.
    It was supposed to be a simple job. And what was my reward for showing a bit of mercy? I got hit by a car. Should have shut him up from the start.
    The headless rider slowed its speed, reflecting on the job it had been doing.
    Without signal lights, it had to hand signal a left turn down a narrow side alley. It stopped before the garage of an apartment building, got off the motorcycle, and stroked its handlebars.
    The engine gave a faint purr, and the vehicle
drove itself
into the garage.
    Satisfied, the headless rider walked up to the entrance of the building.
    “Hey, welcome home.”
    A young man in a lab coat greeted the rider inside an apartment on the top floor. He was a pleasant fellow in his midtwenties who matched the crisp coat, but there were no medical instruments to be seen inside the apartment. He looked quite out of place surrounded by the luxury furniture and electronics filling the room.
    The shadow in the riding suit, looking equally out of place, stomped into the back room with apparent irritation.
    “Uh-oh, someone’s angry. You need a higher calcium intake,” the man in the lab coat said, pulling the chair out from a computer desk in a corner of the room. He sat down and turned to the screen, and the sound of clicking keys came rattling from the back room.
    Text appeared on the monitor in front of the man in the coat. The two computers were connected in a LAN configuration, arranged so that they could talk to one another.
    “
Am I supposed to eat eggshells?
”
    “Sure, why not? Then again, I don’t know much about nutrition, so I don’t know how much calcium is in eggshells or how efficient a means of intake that is. There’s also the question of how necessary calcium really is when I don’t know even know where your brain is. How do you eat, anyway?”
    The man in the coat did not type at his keyboard, but spoke out loud to the headless rider in the back. The rider rattled the keyboard with another message, not bothered by this one-sided conversation.
    “Shut up.”
    This was apparently how the man in the lab coat and the headless rider communicated, a means of conversation that worked for both.
    “All right, I’ll shut up. On another topic, staring at a computer monitor all day wears out a human being’s eyes. What about you?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Say, Celty. If you don’t have any eyeballs, how do you perceive the world around you? I keep asking, but you never tell me.”
    “I can’t explain something I don’t understand myself.”
    The shadow—named Celty—had no head. Therefore, it had no organs to sense sight or sound. But in Celty’s world, there
was
sight and sound and even smell. Celty could read the letters on the screen and make out even subtle color differences in crisp detail. The one difference was that Celty could see a slightly wider range of things at a glance than a human could. But only slightly—if Celty could see all around at once, that nasty collision with the car would not have happened.
    Celty’s vision generally came from where the head would be, but it was also adjustable to come from any other part of the body. The only thing that wasn’t possible was a disengaged bird’s-eye view.
    Even Celty did not know exactly how this body worked. And as Celty did not know how a human being saw the world, there was no good way to explain the difference between them.
    Noticing Celty’s silence on the monitor, Shinra offered his own explanation.
    “Here’s my hypothesis: It’s that strange, sci-fi-worthy, shadowlike substance that issues endlessly from your body. I’ve never observed this for myself, but I think you emit that into the environment around you, then