Digging into Kaoru

Karasu’s office was darker than usual. The blinds were drawn, slicing the neon outside into green lines across the floor. A low hum of jazz pulsed beneath the floor boards; the Den alive. On the low table between Karasu and Aoi, sat two half-empty sake glasses and a data slate, its screen filled with organized information.

Aoi‘s huge shape almost bulged out the velvet chair, his bearing casual but eyes hard. The soft light caught on the edge of bald forehead. He flicked through another page of the dossier he’d been building and sighed under his breath. “Doctor Kaoru Sato,” he began, his tone halfway between reluctant admiration and disgust, “He was a poster child in the academic world, but the kind that leaves bloody fingerprints on the walls.” Karasu leaned forward, elbows on his knees, a cigarette burning between his fingers, “Go on.”

Aoi tapped the slate, pulling up an image of a much younger Kaoru; sharper suit, cleaner tamed hair, the wide-eyed intensity of a prodigy. “Top of his class at Tokyo Biotech. First to integrate Synapse Dive memory recordings into an interactive simulation. Not playback, not a simple immersive file, but an actual variable timeline,” he explained grimly, brows furrowed, scrolling, “Users could change the date with a voice command. Different memories from the same subject, different days, different states of mind. It was supposed to be revolutionary for therapy, interrogation or entertainment.”

Karasu’s eyes narrowed as he took a sip of sake. Aoi swiped again, revealing a headline from an old ethics tribunal: ‘SD Researcher Violates Human Rights Laws.’ He slid the data slate towards Karasu, “Predictably, he pushed it too far. Subjects came out broken. Some didn’t come out at all. He served time – not much, but enough to make the news. Lost his university position. Rumor says he never stopped experimenting; just went off-grid, funded by black-budget divisions and private corps too rich to care.”

The air was painted in neon stripes from the street below, cutting across the floor. Aoi’s massive form seemed to absorb the dim light, his usual casual bearing growing more rigid with tension. He placed a new data slate on the low table with a definitive click.

“I found the specific black site project,” Aoi said, his voice a low rumble, “The one before the ethics tribunal. The official file was scrubbed, but the traces remain.” Karasu leaned forward, his blue eyes glinting in the semi-darkness. He didn’t speak, just gestured for Aoi to continue. “It was called ‘Project Mnemosyne’,” Aoi explained, his thick finger tracing a line on the slate, “The theory was sound, in a twisted way. Use Synapse Dive recordings to overwrite traumatic memories. A surgical strike on the psyche.” He paused, his jaw tightening, “The practice was a slaughterhouse.”

“How so?” Karasu prompted, his voice dangerously soft. “They didn’t just play back the memories. They edited them. They’d take a subject’s SD recording of a car crash and… tweak it. Change the outcome, remove the sound of breaking glass or, in the more extreme phases, they’d splice in elements from other subjects’ recordings; a calming voice, a peaceful image – trying to graft a new emotional response onto the old trauma.”

Karasu’s expression was stone, “Did they use an AI to do the editing?” Aoi sighed. “Unclear,” he admitted, a flicker of frustration in his eyes, “The technical logs are the most heavily redacted part. It’s buried under so many layers of encryption, corporate and governmental red tape, it’s a miracle I even found this much. The level of secrecy… it’s not just corporate. It’s the kind of deep, permanent burial the Iron Oni specialize in.” The implication hung between them, more chilling than the air conditioning. The Iron Oni, tied complicatedly to Karasu via his mother who fled the syndicate, they were masters of information control, and might they have had a hand in this?

“The results?”, Karasu asked, though he already knew the answer would be grim. “Catastrophic,” Aoi stated flatly, “The subjects’ minds couldn’t reconcile the edited reality with their lived experience. It didn’t heal the trauma; it scrambled their perception of self. Most developed severe schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder… their identities became a patchwork of real and implanted memories. There were… suicides. A lot of them.” He looked up from the slate, meeting Karasu’s gaze, “And the other researchers on the project, the ones who didn’t disappear – they’re all in high-security mental institutions. Diagnosed with the same conditions. It’s as if someone used the very technology they were developing to… tidy up the loose ends. To shuffle their memories of what they’d done.”

A profound silence filled the room, broken only by the distant thrum of bass from the club below. Karasu sat back slowly, the weight of the revelation settling on him. This wasn’t just reckless ambition. This was a deliberate, systematic scorching of the human soul.

“So,” Karasu murmured, his voice like gravel, “Kaoru doesn’t just want to record memories. He wants to rewrite them… and Takumi has given him the perfect, pristine canvas.” He looked toward the window, at the teeming, rain-slicked city where Rei still existed somewhere. Karasu exhaled a slow stream of smoke, watching it curl in the glow of the screen, scanning the contents of the ethics tribunal article again. “Kaoru is relentless,” he murmured, “The kind who doesn’t see humans; just steppingstones to achieve results and recognition.”

“That’s Kaoru,” Aoi’s voice hardened with a tinge of resentment, “His papers don’t paint a picture of a guy motivated by science for the betterment of humanity – or even just for money. They reveal an obsessive interest in mapping the human mind and experience, to morph or simulate it perfectly. Total capture. He’s fanatical about knowing everything about how the human mind reacts to artificial input: Synapse Dives, AI, simulations… he wants the complete blueprint. If Eidolon is his playground now—” he let the implication hang.

Karasu leaned back, flicking ash into the tray. His blue eyes were chilling, “Then Eidolon isn’t just a product launch. It’s an ecosystem and Takumi’s put Rei right at the center of it.” Aoi didn’t wince, “She’s most definitely already inside. But it means we’ve got an inside line too. If she can keep feeding us details, we can map what Kaoru’s building. Maybe even use it, pass it on to competitors, sell it.”

Karasu’s fingers drummed on the tabletop, a steady, measured beat. His mind was already weaving, pulling threads in his web, “Find me everything. Off-books funding. Patents, investors, research partners on Eidolon. Anyone Kaoru ever shared a research paper or coffee with. Anyone who vanished after working with him. No matter how small.” The air in the room grew stale.

“Already on it.”, Aoi’s lips quirked, “The deeper I dig, the stranger it gets. He’s filed for something called a PLM: ‘Persistent Liminal Construct’, three years ago – under a shell company. It reads like digital necromancy. Rebuilding consciousness from stored fragments.”

Aoi let the silence hang for a moment, then with a tap on the slate, he brought up a new file. This one was encrypted under layers of fractal code, a flicker among traces. “This is the real key to understanding Kaoru’s current obsession,” Aoi said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, as if the walls themselves might be listening, “The name is a confession in itself: Liminal Construct, as in existing in a transitional state. They’re building something meant to live permanently on the edge of being.”

Karasu’s eyes narrowed, his full attention locked on the slate. “Digital voodooing,” he exhaled along with smoke, the concept now taking on a terrifying shape. “Something like that,” Aoi confirmed, “The theory was to take the Synapse Dive memory fragments and use them as foundational blocks. They’re not just stitching together a simulation; they’re trying to reverse-engineer a consciousness from the rubble. It’s an attempt to reassemble a soul from its footprints.”

He swiped, pulling up disjointed progress reports and corrupted video logs, “But the constructs were… unstable. The early, simpler models, built from a handful of core memories and basic emotional templates, could hold a simple conversation. They could follow straightforward commands, like tidying a virtual room or describing a static image.”

Aoi pulled up a graph. It showed a steep, declining curve, “But the more data they integrated, the more memories, the more complex the emotional history, the more ‘complete’ they tried to make the consciousness… the worse it performed. It’s inverse. They become less functional and more fractured.” He opened a text log, a transcript of an interview with a later-stage construct.

> USER: What is your name?
> CONSTRUCT: …the sound of rain on glass… the color of her hair…
> USER: Can you tell me what you see in this picture?
> CONSTRUCT: …the weight of a hand… static… fear of being unmade…
> USER: Please pour a glass of water from the pitcher on the table.
> CONSTRUCT: …the pitcher is a memory of thirst… I cannot touch it… I am only the thirst…

“They regress,” Aoi said grimly, “The complexity overwhelms them. It’s like building a tower out of sand; the higher it gets, the more it collapses under its own weight. The additional data doesn’t create coherence; it creates noise. The constructs don’t become more human, they become less of everything, until they’re just… fragmented echoes trapped in a feedback loop of their own creation.”

He looked at Karasu, his expression grim, “Kauro tried to build a God from shattered pottery, but all he created was a broken imitation of human reasoning“, Aoi lowered his slate, his voice becoming carefully level, “Takumi hired Doctor Sato and is probably using Rei’s captured data as the blueprint for the next round of Kauro’s attempts at immortal digital constructs… even with the capable backing of Kuroda’s technical department, it’s a high bar…”

Karasu’s jaw tightened. The shadow of a thought crossed his face, but he didn’t voice it. “Good work. Feed me everything you find. Quietly. If this is what I think it is…”, he stubbed out his cigarette, “Then Takumi isn’t just grooming Rei for a campaign. He’s turning her into a template.” Aoi stood up, tattoos dancing across his arms, “And what will you do if he manages to create and starts selling… digital copies of Rei?”

Karasu rose too, rolling his shoulders, the weight of the risks and a budding plan settling around him like a coat. “What I always do,” he said quietly, “Find the weak spots, exploit them and then, if necessary…”, his eyes flicked toward the window, to the neon and the night beyond, “…burn all the bridges.”