Un Paralyzed

I'm in love with the sheer brilliance of this anime's dystopian society, and this is my humble attempt to pay homage to it.

This is short but it's something I've been typing on and off for a week. Please leave some feedback.

After tasting her first sip of vodka from Kagari's neatly hidden stash, Akane knew she would never get drunk.

It wasn't because of pride or experience, she'd barely had three glasses in her life. It simply wasn't possible for her to feel that sort of lightheadedness. No matter how woozy her eyesight became, how far her limbs tripped over themselves, her mind always stayed clear. And one year later while she sat in Kogami's dimly lit kitchen pouring out the familiar liquid once again, she started to develop her theory.

"Kogami-san, did you ever want to kill someone before becoming an enforcer?"

He looked back at her with weary eyes, swishing around the clear liquid in his glass. "Sometimes I felt like killing Sasayama, when he was being especially annoying." Seeing her eyes widen, he drowned it with a chuckle. "No, no I never did. Isn't that the point of Sibyl? I was like you once, you know. I graduated at the top of my class."

Akane looked around the room. Now he was living in the middle of nowhere, a small cabin off the forests of China that still maintained the old regime. The place was startlingly antiquated. It even had a real fireplace, one that you had to throw wood into. She brought him hamburgers whenever she could but she knew that he did physical jobs in the local villages and ate local food, in a land not yet corrupted by Sibyl, not yet enhanced by it.

"So?" He went on. "Aren't you going to give me the full rundown of what's been happening over there these days? How long is your vacation, anyway?"

She rubbed her head sheepishly. "I left everything to our new Inspector, and he should be able to take over for at least two weeks. Ginoza-san is trying to help him, although he's scared of the Enforcers."

"Then he's a smart kid," Kogami remarked. "Not like you. I remember that you treated us like actual humans when you saw us. But that must have been the naivety of childhood, Sibyl always liked that."

But she was twenty now, and no longer a kid. She'd held her place as Inspector for three years, two with Ginoza, and one with Miyazaki. That was enough to teach a kid what the world was really like. Akane finished her glass and reached for more, because even if it never affected her mind, the tingling sensation through her body was nice.

"Sometimes," Kogami said quietly. "I wonder if killing Makishima was best. It was right, of course, since he would have gone out and caused more chaos. But I think we need people like him anyway. But if I understand your intentions right, then yes, I really did want to kill him. Before and after."

We need people like him. Akane shivered slightly, remembering Sibyl's words. If they were true, then she could become a Makishima without a second thought. If the wrong ideas ever entered her head, their society would have another monster on its hands. "Why?" She asked, knowing the answer.

"Our society runs on the assumption that criminality is linked to sanity," he grumbled after another swig. "But then there's people like you and Makishima who don't fit that mould, and a system with exceptions is just useless. So we need people like that to dissemble it and show the rest of us why it can't work."

Disassemble it and show the rest of us why it can't work.

Akane wondered.

.

There was no doubt that Ginoza had changed drastically after he'd become an Enforcer. While before he kept his opinions strictly under the hold of his psychopass, he was now free to express them at leisure because he had nothing else to lose. Akane watched him closely, because she was in his former footsteps, and for the first time she was feeling the true weight of what he'd had to carry. It was disorienting to be worried about when the Enforcers would escape.

"You're late," he told her strictly when she entered their office. Nearly, Kunizuka and Karanomori were listening intently while slurping ramen noodles and typing away at the neon screens.

"I thought I'd help Kogami-san cut logs for his fireplace," she confessed. "It was kind of fun learning how, even though I wasn't very good at it. He told me to come back and try again after going through all the mod training sessions." She unconsciously rubbed her sore arms. "But I'm no good at this hand-to-hand stuff." Her strength was her mind, and she was comfortable with that.

"Well, Miyazaki is on his leave now, so it's just us," Ginoza muttered, reaching to push up his glasses before realizing they were no longer there. "Frankly I prefer it this way. He's far to complaint, it's almost scary." He shot a peeved glance at Karanomori, who giggled.

"But that's what makes him fun~" she commented, waving her lacquered nails. "Lots more fun for me and Yayoi to enjoy. It's a pity I didn't get to sleep with Kogami before he left. Only Akane can have him now."

Akane reddened. "But he's… thirty," she muttered. "His age is mentally incompatible with mine. All the men on Sibyl's suggestions for me are in their young twenties. I don't think Sibyl likes it when people have larger age differences in relationships."

Ginoza raised an eyebrow. "Really? The women on mine are far older than myself."

"Well, that just proves that you're an old man at heart," Karanomori teased.

When he proceeded to launch into a debate with her about the unreliability of Sibyl's choices – a topic he never would have dared to breach before – Akane settled into a chair, placed her head in her hands, and watched them closely. After being around Kogami's life and energy and pure vitality, these people were the only ones who felt like real humans anymore.

.

"It works," Akane told Kogami, twirling the ancient house-phone cord around her index finger. The phone was the only type of technology they could afford to communicate though. No one knew how to tap onto something this antiquated. "It does work, Kogami-san. And I know you're depending on me to take it apart, but I won't."

"I'm not depending on you," his irritated voice streamed in through the landlines, harsh against her ear. "I know you too well, and no matter what you say, you're one of the best of Sibyl's generation. I'm depending on another Makishima, and maybe on myself one day."

For a while, Akane simply held the phone to her ear in silence. The arguments she'd carefully prepared all seemed to drain away at the sound of Kogami's voice, taunting her because she didn't have the experience to say them and he did, and exactly when had her life begun to revolve around the idea of him in her mind? It wasn't Kogami-the-person anymore, it was Kogami-the-ideal that haunted her. But she finally managed to draw her thoughts together and speak calmly into the mouthpiece.

"I had the choice to destroy it, and I didn't," she explained, wondering if that was a tinge of regret in her voice. "Because in some utilitarian way, it's better than the alternative. It puts the general interests of mankind first."

"You've started reading Hume," he spoke wryly. "Have they made that available in the library CommuField? I don't remember seeing the digi-copy."

Akane shook her head, and he could hear it by the rustle of her hair. "I found a physical book in the border-shops." That was how they'd begun to refer to the places that sold things not entirely legal on Sibyl's terms. Most didn't dare enter the places for fear of ruining their psychopasses, but Akane knew that she had the ability to murder in cold blood and still remain pristine, a mental beauty just like Makishima. It was a frighteningly powerful thing.

"You visit those places? Be careful, Tsunmori," his voice dropped lower. "The public may still rely blindly on cymatic scams but after that business a while ago, the police is going to be more persistent."

"I know," she smiled. "I just… don't want to be like everyone else anymore. I keep remembering what Kagari told me, and how he laughed when I said I was trying to find a purpose. He said that we can't make a purpose out of life anymore now that Sibyl tells everyone what to do."

"Stop spouting that philosophical blabble," he muttered into the phone. "It doesn't suit you. If you like reading, come by sometime and I'll show you the collection that Saiga-sensei passed on to me."

Her heart leapt at the idea, and then fell when she realized she'd used up all her permitted vacations for the next six months. She found herself reluctantly cursing Sibyl's work policies, because why was constant work supposed to be the incentive for productivity anyway?

That was when the thought struck her. Sibyl was already too far engrained in their society, and the people wouldn't know what to do with freedom if it was shoved in their faces, but she did. People like Karanomari and Kunizuka had already found their niches in the world, and Ginoza had settled into his but Akane found that she was still floating somewhere in the middle. In some meaningless void inhabited by Kogami's image. Kagari's words. The sharp taste of imported vodka tingling down her spine. And it wasn't all-or-nothing.

She didn't need to drag everyone else out with her. Selective freedom was perfectly possible and more than probable and she could ignore the good of the world for the moment.

"I'd like that," she said. "In fact, I'll come over right now."

"Oi oi didn't you just use up your vacation-"

She hung up in her excitement, figuring that choosing the perfectly sized bag and figuring out how to best pack her growing realphysicalbook collection was more important than listening to Kogami's complaints.

Right before she exited her apartment, she picked up her cell and asked for Ginoza, barely keeping herself in one spot with the extent of her sudden excitement.

"Tsunemori-san," his voice drawled. "What is it? It's too early in the morning for this."

"Would you mind if I leave?" She blurted out. "You can all come by to visit sometimes, of course. And maybe by then I'll be good at chopping wood."

His smile filtered through with his tone. "With your twiggy arms? I doubt it, Inspector."

.

When he opened the door, she spoke before he could open his mouth.

"I'm going to live in this little cabin-thing with you," Akane said bluntly. "See? I brought all my things." She held up her bulging zipper-bag.

Kogami blinked. "You… have another extended vacation? Already?"

"Yes. Very extended. I'm not even sure when it'll end, actually," she admitted.

His expression sobered. "Listen, I think it would be better if you-"

"It'll be nice," she interrupted with a slight smile. "I even brought books with me, since you don't have access to any others. The street scanners don't catch me, so I can enter the border shops and buy them whenever I like." She shuffled around in her bag. "Look, William Gibson's Neuromancer – you've already read this one, but isn't this a pretty copy? – and Kurweil's Singularity. Did you know Sibyl was created in the year he predicted that we would reach the boundaries of what the older generation called Moore's Law? They were so interesting back then. I even found a copy of Rand's Fountainhead. It's really weird, but the story is interesting."

Kogami gave her a strange look. She knew what he was thinking. Then he recalled his previous words and he chuckled and rubbed his face in one hand. "What is your family going to think of this?"

"I'll send them a note saying I eloped with some tall and handsome mental beauty."

He sighed. "Something tells me I'm witnessing the birth of something terrible."

"If this is terrible then I want to be terrible," Akane replied, and he finally began to understand. She pushed past him into the small cabin, setting her zipper bag on the couch. Then she turned back with a smile that seemed oddly out of place on her features, and Kogami realized that he'd never seen her smile so much before.

"This is my theory, Kogami-san," she began. "You were wrong. There is an intrinsic link between sanity and criminality, except the thing we call sanity is actually emotion. The older generation always knew this, that the most emotional ones, the artists and the musician and the people drenched in the love of their work… they were all kind of mad. They couldn't escape it, just like the Touma Kouzaburo and Oryo Rikako that Makishima played with.

"But Kagari was right. Sibyl tries to drain the emotion out of us so we end up perfectly sane and perfectly stable. And there's no point in a life like that if you diverge even slightly from their expectations. So it's fine for the people living there, happy with their psychopasses, and it's not fine for you and the other latent criminals. And if I had to choose, I would choose to live like this, and maybe they'll join us too one day."

There was silence in the cabin, disrupted only by the crackling of the fireplace. When Kogami spoke, it was with unobstructed surprise.

"When did you come up with this, exactly?"

"When I realized that I can't get drunk. I'm too sane to get drunk. So I have to do something about that." She paused. "So is it fine if I live here with you? I'll help you chop logs and everything, and I'm sure I can find work in that little town a few kilometers west of here."

Kogami gave her a considering look. "I wonder…" he murmured. "If I took your cymatic scan right now, how high would your psychopass be?"

And it was the brief turn of her lips that indicated beyond anything else that she no longer cared.