Genocide of One: A Thriller (58 page)

“I’d like to say hello to Ema,” Yeager said.

Yuri Sakai looked a bit perplexed. “I’m afraid she’s very shy around people.”

The group looked over in the children’s direction. To them, Ema and Akili looked like
small animals fearful of human beings—or, to put it more aptly, like a human brother
and sister afraid of gorillas.

“Did that child actually develop GIFT?” Jeong-hoon asked.

“She did.”

“All by herself?”

Yuri Sakai nodded and smiled. “There’s one thing I forgot to tell you. After a set
time, that drug development software will automatically vanish. By the time you two
get home, it should be gone.”

Jeong-hoon looked stunned. “Was this all a dream, then?” he said. Kento smiled and
patted him on the shoulder, comforting his friend.

“What are all of you going to do now?” Yuri asked.

“I’m going back to the apartment in Machida,” Kento said. He was in the middle of
synthesizing three years’ worth of GIFT. “I need to give more of the medicine to Mr.
Yeager.”

“I understand. Well, we’re going to leave now, but please don’t try to find out where
we live. If anything comes up, I’ll get in touch.”

“All right.”

“We’ll see you again someday,” Yuri Sakai said. Then she shook everyone’s hands and
headed back to her van.

The little children, beaming, clung to their foster mother. Yuri lovingly lifted up
Ema and Akili one by one and put them in the backseat. She gave the men a final wave
and got in the driver’s seat.

Under the dawning sky the red taillights shone, and the van quietly pulled away.

As he watched the van merge into the highway, Jeong-hoon said, “We should have tried
out more on that software.”

Kento, too, had his regrets. “We might have even found a cure for cancer.”

“I guess we’ll have to figure that out on our own.”

“I guess so.”

Jeong-hoon was exactly right, Kento thought. To advanced beings, maybe humans had
pitifully little in the way of intelligence. And minds that were base and coarse.
But that was everything they had—all they’d managed to wrest from the evolutionary
process. All they could do was do their very best to hone their imperfect brains and
face any difficulties that came their way.

The van carrying Akili drove around a curve and disappeared from view. The shore was
again enveloped in silence.

Meyers, quiet up until now, spoke up. “I suppose it’s really all over,” he said. “Yeager,
now that Akili’s gone, don’t you feel lonely?”

Yeager paused only for a second. “Maybe I’ll get a cat,” he replied, thinking of Akili’s
feline eyes.

Kazuaki Takano majored in film studies at Los Angeles City College and has worked
for many years as a scriptwriter in Japan.
Genocide of One
is his first novel to be translated into English.

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