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sparklyjojos · 6 years ago

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--[Disco Wednesdayyy 24/?] The brave new world is made out of closed rooms, or are we really switching the genre over 1000 pages into the book? Okay then. [tw: csa, child abuse, brief gore]--

Last time, Disco arrived at the World’s End, accidentally jumped to the year 2019, and discovered that a company called Styron Japan built themselves a nice new skyscraper in Chofu. As soon as Disco enters the building, a bunch of company vicepresidents introduce themselves and tell him JJ Styron is already waiting. Judging by their quick explanations, JJ naturalized himself through marriage with a Japanese woman and was planning on spreading his influence to Japan.

JJ welcomes Disco with tea and sweets and says he’s been awaiting this visit for years. He looks startingly young for his 38 years, but asked about it claims he’s just taking good care of himself, since it’s not like he can jump in time or something, haha! Already unsettled, Disco asks about Sharon Styron’s death.

“Ah, yes, she’s dead.” JJ answers casually. “I killed her. Drugged her so she couldn’t move and cut her to pieces while she was still conscious.”

“...Why?”

“Why? Because she betrayed me, of course! The only thing she cared about was protecting you. I’ve been trying to find you and your family, and she refused to give me any information. She claimed you were an orphan.” So she must have sincerely believed the lies Disco told her about his identity... “Well, but it turns out she wasn’t lying... Mr. William Eady.”

Completely confused, Disco looks at the documents JJ shows him. A birth certificate. ‘William Eady’, ‘orphan’, a slightly different day of birth, ‘St. Paul’s Church in New York’ as the place he was found in. Everything exactly like in the made up story he told Sharon. ...If emotions can take external shape, can imagination, fiction? But then Disco notices the documents were ‘found’ by the law office in which the real William Eady is employed, so it’s likely that the lawyer forged the certificate to protect Disco.

“What were you going to do to me when you found me?”

“Kill you, if you went in my way. But now that the company is big enough to no longer be threatened by you, I don’t really care. And you know what? I can’t help but feel deep respect for you for doing your best to solve the mystery. Which is why I’d love for you to become the sales promoter for our wonderful Kozue Method! I can vouch for its effectiveness -- why, I’m my company’s client as well, and look how youthful I am. Well, my body is physically 11, haha!”

He spreads a variety of pamphlets on the table.

“You’ve heard about using stem cells acquired from clones to grow organs and such, have you? The Kozue Method is bolder! You can exchange the entire body at once! It’s perfectly possible, since the personality of a person is tied to consciousness, and not their physical body. Of course, we cooperate with the Blackswan company, who’s the patent holder for the Main Child treatment and for thouroughly preparing the Jacket, that is, the vessel Sub Child. It’s the single greatest development in the world’s history, and it’s all thanks to you, Disco!”

The Kozue Method involves the following procedure. The client -- the Main Child -- is given horrible abuse, so just like it was with Kozue parts of themselves split off and take over fetuses still in the womb, pushing the original souls out. These split off parts -- the Sub Children -- are born and raised, then mysteriously disappear one day, and the empty bodies (the ‘Jackets’, as JJ calls them) are used as new vessels for the Main Child.

That’s not all. From what JJ says, it seems the global consciousness, humanity’s emotions and will, can now be curated -- after all, there’s a way to get negative emotions and violent thoughts quite literally out of you, and apparently resentment will vanish with ‘split personalities’ too. This resulted in a clean, shiny, perfectly peaceful world with apparently zero creativity, to the point that no new fictional media is really made. [I’m... honestly confused as to how this exactly works, especially considering some later parts. Maybe JJ is just overexaggerating.]

“It really is all thanks to you! You found Kozue and the six others, managed to connect them back together, and the news spread all over the world. You’re a hero, Disco!”

“...How many kids did you... did you sell?”

“In the last 10 years it’d be, hm, two hundred millions? Now, now, I understand you have reservations. There’s a little guilt involved, but it’s not like people don’t live with many little guilts on their backs anyway. We’re improving the procedures, too! We already established that sexual abuse makes the job done the quickest, and hey, the faster it is, the shorter it hurts! The kid will just forget it anyway. The Blackswan guys are true specialists, they can do a lot in just one tiny moment. In a single second the child gets, what did you call it? ‘Abuse’, and in the next, the memory has already been moved to the other personality. It’s good that the parents don’t have to see it, since nobody likes to live thinking their children are being hurt.”

Blackswan. The company’s logo on the pamphlets looks familiar.

[The name Blackswan (or Black Swan? I’m not sure of the spelling here) may be a reference to Project Bluebird, which -- at least according to all the conspiracy websites out there -- involved among other unethical experiments trying to induce DID in healthy subjects.]

“You may think: what about the parents of the Sub Children?” JJ continues. “Aren’t they angry? Here’s where one of our big achievements comes into play. You’ve heard about the vanishing twin phenomenon, right? Of course you have, you met Daibakusho Curry. It happens a lot in nature. The strongest survives. What we’re doing here is just giving the poor weak kids a chance! We retrieve and raise them, so they can get a go at living before... being reused.”

How can this future be avoided?, Disco thinks. Is the Black Bird Man involved? Maybe if Disco finds and defeats him, all this can be fixed. But no, he can’t change the future in any way... so what can he do? Find children. Somehow protect the Main Children from abuse, so this entire system breaks. So twins no longer vanish, just like he promised to Run Run -- oh God, if Run Run can speak and act like a human, does this mean...?

Disco asks JJ if Run Run was a victim of their experiments too (maybe they tried to transfer human souls into animal bodies at first?), but JJ seems to genuinely have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Ah, whatever,” JJ says, waving his hand. “You don’t seem convinced, and I’ll forget everything that happened here anyway once you leave.”

But before Disco can actually leave, JJ turns on a futuristic screen and shows him a documentary called LAMIA SYNDROME (2019), sponsored among other by Styron Japan. “Just so you know I’m not lying to you,” JJ says.

The documentary states that 4- to 8-year-old children have been disappearing all over the world since autumn 2006 in a phenomenon called Lamia Syndrome. A few parents talk about how their children suddenly vanished even under close supervision. We see a recording from a mall security camera showing a little girl holding her grandfather’s hand one second and disappearing the next. The footage is then repeated frame by frame. Just before the girl vanishes, another man shows up in the frame.

It’s not the Black Bird Man.

It’s future ‘Disco’. He looks around sixty and seems very happy about something. Looking straight into the camera, he gives it a thumbs up, and with the other hand holds up a sign with a single sentence:

THE WORLD IS MADE OUT OF CLOSED ROOMS

The documentary has a literary critic explain that “this is the title of Ehimegawa Juuzou’s 1996 novel, the 7th book in the Runbaba series. In it, a criminal called the Locked Room Billionaire announces that he’s going to kill a billion people in locked room situations in just ten years. Even if people may try to avoid going inside buildings or returning home, they’re nevertheless trapped in the locked rooms of their own fear.”

[Lore note: this is not even remotely what Maijo’s 2002 novel The World is Made out of Closed Rooms is about. Instead, it seems to be a combination of Seiryoin’s Cosmic and Carnival, with the main villain’s name and modus operandi being a mix of the Locked Room Lord and the Billion Killer. 1996 is when Cosmic was first released, too. I honestly wonder how different JDC is in Disco-verse if Mitamura could get away with this.]

“The crowded mall situation seems similar to one from the book,” the critic continues, “although there’s no proof that the same locked room trick was used. This time, there’s just an evil man at work. He seems similar in looks to Disco Wednesdayyy, a detective and one of the 31 people who disappeared in the Pine House case, which concerned Ehimegawa Juuzou’s death. The same man was involved in finding Yamagishi Kozue, the origin of the Kozue Method. Closed Rooms predicted our current situation in which children are sent to shelters in order to protect them from the Lamia Syndrome. Maybe by using the book’s title, the man is trying to say that he, a great detective, will eventually open the locked room... that is, bust open the shelters and kidnap the children.”

(Disco’s like, no, no, I’m not even a great detective, I’m a hardboiled detective! I don’t know shit about locked room tricks! I haven’t even read Mitamura’s books! [You know, you probably should, Mitamura seems to have put a lot of useful hints in those.] And all this must be a mistake, it’s not like I’d ever start kidnapping children... right?)

The documentary then shows an interview with the only survivor of the Pine House -- Dezuumi Style, now much older, who isn’t sure whether the man in the photo really is his friend Disco Wednesdayyy (and aw, he really refers to Disco as his friend, even if they hardly ever talked). From the interview we learn that this new world doesn’t need writers or great detectives anymore; no locked room murders or tricky false alibi cases or anything similar ever happens anymore. Dezuumi believes that ‘Disco’s’ Closed Rooms message is sarcastic, to show that “in a stiff world without different points of view or creativity, instead of people being closed in locked rooms in mystery novels, it’s now human emotions, ideas and values that are closed in new locked rooms...”

“But isn’t it right to stop the unwanted thoughts and focus on the useful ones?” the interviewer asks.

“No. People should be always thinking about new topics and coming up with new inventions. They should dare to break things. Trying to keep everyone’s thoughts perfectly ordered is terrorism.”

Next, the documentary shows Iwasaki Kousuke, the taxi driver from Nishi Akatsuki, who also isn’t sure if that’s Disco in the photo. When the interviewer brings up that Iwasaki’s family defeated cancer thanks to Kozue Method and that the idea of ‘a lifespan’ may soon be irrelevant to humanity, Iwasaki says that he’s still not sure if that’s a good thing. Death is a fact of life, after all, and we should be grateful for happiness and sadness.

The documentary then says the whoever the mysterious man is, he has kidnapped close to three hundred million children since 2006...

JJ stops the movie, saying that what he wanted Disco to see is that there really is only a tiny group of people in Japan standing against him, and the rest of the world is pretty much his. “But do you understand now why I have respect for you? Three hundred millions! For the first two years, we could hardly ever find the kids, since you hid the majority of them! I thought that maybe killing your family would lure you out, but that plan didn’t work out... and it’s not like the Blackswan guys haven’t already killed you seven times.” The time fold effects must have protected Disco from permanently dying in the future.

Three hundred million kids?! That’s be over 60 000 a day! You’d need an entire organization of space-jumpers to pull off something like this... or thirty one people from the Pine House. Did ‘Mercury C’ prevent everyone from leaving because they were meant to form a group, and their mysterious disappearance meant they simply moved to the shadows? Have the others spent years and years helping him hide the kids from Styron and recruit new space-jumpers?...

But where do you even hide three hundred million kids? They could probably warp any small space to accomodate even that number, and since they could jump in time they’d just make it so a child stays there for merely a second before it’s returned to their parents once the world becomes safe. But would they ever return them, considering that Styron won the battle for the world?...

Disco asks if JJ hurt the families of Disco’s accomplices, to which JJ claims he wanted to take down Disco first, so he didn’t bother yet. But anyway, JJ really wants Disco to stop this whole children kidnapping thing, because can’t Disco see how much the parents are hurt by his actions~? [You’re one to talk, buddy.] He resumes the documentary to show one last scene.

19-year-old Kozue says she’s not sure if the man in the photo is Disco. “I feel sympathy for the affected parents, and I think it'd be best to return the kids to them. The Disco I knew wouldn't do something horrible like that. Are you sure it's not someone else?” Then, as she’s leaving the shot, she looks back at the camera and yells that maybe it’d be better if she had never gotten involved with Disco at all.

The documentary ends by stating that the global birth rate is drastically falling, since women are afraid to bring children into the world in which the Lamia Syndrome runs rampant. It’s predicted that by 2080 the human race will stop procreating except for the purpose of prolonging their immortal lives.

“See? If you keep going, you’ll be the one responsible for the destruction of the human race,” JJ says. “Don’t you feel bad about it?”

But all Disco answers with is “Thank you for the movie, JJ. It was quite illuminating.”

“Huh? That’s not just some movie, that’s reality! Don’t you feel bad? Angry?”

“Not really. All it did was prove me that I’m right. Have you ever seen the kanji for ‘lifespan’ (寿命)? The first one (寿) may mean ‘congratulations’, ‘celebration’, ‘being happy with life’. There would be nothing to ‘celebrate’ if there wasn’t a finite ‘lifespan’. You really aren’t naturalized yet if you don’t get it. Japanese people understand why there would be no charm in making sakura trees bloom all year long.”

“Well, clearly Japanese people are mistaken. You can’t look at kamikaze pilots and tell me there’s nothing wrong with their heads!”

“You really don’t get sacrifices for a great cause, JJ. While kamikaze sacrificed their lives, they yelled ‘banzai’, which means ‘ten thousand years of life’. Not death, but life. You saw me smile in that photo in the documentary, did you? That smile is my banzai. If the future can’t be changed, then all this movie proves is that my future is bright: every single day spent fulfilled as I’m protecting children.”

As Disco sets to leave (again), JJ pulls out his last trump card and calls his Japanese wife to the room.

It’s Norma Brown. Or rather, Fuyuno Norma Brown. JJ’s new name is apparently Fuyuno Shinji.

Norma is overjoyed to see Disco and sweeps him in a hug, saying that she’s been looking for him all this time. She’s different than he remembers. Sure, she has the same personality, but she looks Japanese, which overall makes her the spitting image of Norma-faced Koeda.

“Do you not like this body of mine, Disco?” she asks seeing his reaction. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t obtained from some poor child! Shinji, haven’t you explained that to him yet?! The method has been improved, Disco! The Jackets are now cultivated in artificial wombs. No more pushing out souls out of the original to obtain a Subchild! After birth, they’re raised by good volunteer mothers. In addition, we discovered that stimulus other than ‘suffering’ works for inducing new personalities. Children aren’t hurting anymore, Disco!”

“It’s useless, honey,” JJ says. “This isn’t the Disco you knew. He no longer protects children.”

Norma tries to persuade Disco to stop taking children away, but he still won’t budge. She has a little exchange with JJ who seems to be seriously jealous (”Do you love me like you love Disco?”), and assures JJ that of course she loves him, Disco starts considering to bring out one of his hidden knives and attack JJ...

But before Disco can make a move, something explodes. It takes Disco a few seconds to realize that while he’s still holding Norma in his arms, her lower half was blown off by a small bomb hidden inside her body, much like the one Disco once pulled out of Nils. Her last words are, “You’re my hero, Disco.”

Disco desperately puts her body back together, trying not to ‘run away to the Pineapple Home’ [I like that this became a metaphore for withdrawing into your mind from shock]. But no matter what he does, she doesn’t come back to life.

“This isn’t her original body,” JJ says. He looks almost as shocked as Disco by what just happened. “The soul can’t return to it, and the original body is already gone...”

“But there’s a spare one, right? There must be!” Disco yells, mortified at his own response. Would he really sacrifice a child for her?... “No, wait... If I just return to the past, all will be undone. She’ll be alive again--”

“No. Norma is dead,” JJ says. “She’s going to be dead in every possible history from now on. Sure, this is just an imaginary, fictional future... but she wasn’t. She came from the past. We met in 2003, and the Blackswan guys helped arrange it so that she’d be taken to 2008, and then we’d get married. Now that she’s gone, her research will disappear too. She was the one who came up with all the new projects, so our progress will be lost... according to plan. Of course! The Blackswan guys must have swindled me again! She’s been kept here all this time for the sole purpose of being killed in front of you! It’s your fault!”

Was it really his fault?... No. Everything's already decided. Every attempt to change history is already contained in that history.

While JJ is still blaming him, Disco doesn’t take that shit and asks “JJ, what was the phrase activating the bomb? It was the question you asked her, wasn’t it?”

[Wait, those bombs are phrase-activated. Which means Nils openly opposing JJ Styron while in a conversation with him was even more awe-inspiring than I thought. DAMN, kid.]

Disco puts the bomb back together, slam dunks it into JJ's body, and starts the last barrage of questions.

Why isn’t JJ busy with drug cartels anymore? Apparently the Blackswan guys managed to somehow remove the hallucinatory effect of drugs, since it could destroy their idea of perfectly managed global consciousness.

So there’s peace in the world, but no new media is created, no Spielbergs or Hendrixes? Maybe so, but hey, even Disco’s beloved San Diego is now clean and pretty! (Disco finds this fact hard to imagine and honestly quite disturbing.)

What was going on with that case with JJ’s seven underlings, why were they all hanging by just one leg? “I don’t know, have you tried asking that kid that should be in the Pine House, Nils Mikami?” [Yeah, you better remember his name!]

Does JJ know about the Pineapple Home? No clue what that even is.

Alright. As Disco prepares to leave (for the nth time in this sequence), JJ says, “If you go back to the past now, the childless method Norma invented would cease to exist too, you know.”

“No. Norma was a great person, but not a unique one. There are many others like her who can come up with it.” [I assume that since the future is unchanging, somebody else really will come up with it.]

“...in the end, I’m weak and you’re weak. No matter the time or place, the weak are an easy target. No, maybe we just have different kinds of strength. After all, you didn’t run away even as Norma was dying in your arms. ...you know, she didn’t answer my question properly. She said that she loved me. But my question was... Do you love me like you love Disco?”

Disco instantly pulls the bomb out of JJ’s body and tosses it through the window, where it explodes at a safe distance. Not ouf of mercy or anything, just because fuck you, you slimy bastard, you’re not getting off that easy, and Disco will be sure to think of a much, much worse punishment later. [HELL YEAH]

Leaving the room (and pretty devastated looking JJ), Disco happens to glance at the sweets he was welcomed with, and notices the logo of a shop called Makuri-ya. ‘Makuri”... “Mercury”? Mercury C did say he was the owner of a traditional Japanese confectionary shop in Chofu...

It may be a good time to go shopping for some explanation.

#sparkly reads disco #maijo and jdc stuff #long post #I still have no idea how this entire system works tbh this was... a confusing chapter #also are there really TWO female characters who solely exist in this book to get fridged for manpain. seriously maijo what the hell

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