The burden of perfection(part 2) - Dead Logic

She pulled out a chair, sitting backward on it with her arms resting across the backrest. Her expression had changed slightly. The playfulness remained, but beneath it was a quiet serious, the sort that surfaced whenever she discussed what she viewed as "crucial business".

"Eventually, the organization reached a dead end with our education," she began.

"The instructors had taught us what they knew, and they had exhausted most of the methods. So they basically let us do our own work. Self study typa thing"

"Hmm, that much I can remember, I guess. Our classes lessened and I spent much of my time in my room, reading books," Shuhi added.

"Well as you are aware, Intelligence doesn't mean knowing everything. At some point, you have to start asking questions that nobody has prepared answers for."

Rina tapped the table lightly with one finger. "I was bored at the time, so I began experimenting with something that had interested me for a while. You know how much I enjoy playing musical instruments, right?"

"You once spent an entire afternoon playing the same section of a song because you disliked the way one note sounded."

"Wait, so you remember?" Rina was a little baffled as she was expecting things like that would be forgotten till now.

"Oh I remember everything, trust me," Shuhi said with a smile, "Everything," now her smile started to fade. Rina understood why was that. By everything, she was referring to their painful and traumatic times inside the organization as well.

"How…you had amnesia problem, right?" Rina asked as she was confused how could she remember things very clearly.

"It's nothing to do with amnesia. That amnesia problem has gone till yesterday. I feel good now. It's like…I don't know." Shuhi turned aside, breaking eye contact as she couldn't express her thought properly.

"It's like…from childhood. For some reason, I can't forget anything. Even if I try to. Anything that I experience gets stuck in my head. It's painful whenever those dark memories resurface!"

Seeing that the air was getting rotten due to the shear amount of negativity, Rina decided to break out of it.

"Okay leave those aside. Back to what I was teaching you," she wore a smile.

"Right." Shuhi's gaze returned towards her.

"Listen to this story. I was playing a guitar one day when I noticed something peculiar. Whenever I plucked a string, I felt a faint disturbance in the air around my fingers. At first, I assumed I was simply noticing the vibration of the string or the movement of my hand, but the sensation seemed to extend beyond that. I started paying closer attention. When I pressed a piano key, I sometimes noticed a tiny movement of air against my hand as well. The sensation was subtle, but it was there. Different actions produced different disturbances, and that made me wonder how much information the surrounding air could carry."

Shuhi leaned forward slightly. "You wanted to use airflow to identify objects?"

"That was the goal I eventually settled on. I wanted to perceive the world through changes in airflow, without relying on sight or hearing to identify what was around me." Rina held out her palm, moving it slowly through the air. "Think about what happens when air encounters an object. Its movement changes. The direction can shift, the speed can vary, and the pattern of the flow can become more complicated. Those changes depend on the object's shape, position, and surroundings. If a person moves through the environment, they can create disturbances too. The air doesn't simply stop at the object's surface and disappear. It flows around it, and some of those changes can propagate to other locations."

"Provided the signal reaches you clearly enough," Shuhi added.

"Exactly. That's one of the difficulties. The changes are often extremely small, and the environment produces countless other disturbances. Your body receives sensory information constantly, but conscious awareness doesn't register everything. The brain filters out much of it because paying attention to every tiny sensation would be exhausting. My idea was to train myself to recognize some of those otherwise ignored changes and learn how to interpret them."

Rina explained that she had initially used the organization's virtual reality system to create controlled environments. She began with a simple simulation, one in which the airflow was stable and the surroundings were carefully arranged. By repeatedly experiencing the same conditions, she learned to memorize what the ordinary flow felt like across different parts of her body. That reference became her baseline. Once she had established it, she began introducing objects and altering their positions. She practiced with different shapes, sizes, distances, and arrangements, comparing the resulting sensations with the original pattern. Over time, she developed a mental catalogue of the disturbances she could recognize and the circumstances under which they appeared.

"Suppose there's an object in front of you and you turn your back to it," Rina continued. "You can't see it, but the surrounding airflow still interacts with it. Depending on the conditions, that interaction can alter the flow reaching your body. If you learn to recognize those changes, you may be able to infer that something is there and estimate where it is. With enough practice, you can begin distinguishing between different patterns rather than simply noticing that the air has changed."

"So you aren't directly sensing the object," Shuhi said. "You're interpreting the airflow that has interacted with it."

"Precisely. The object is the conclusion, not the sensation." Rina looked pleased. "And that's where the reasoning comes in. A disturbance can have several possible causes. I need to compare it with my baseline, consider the surrounding conditions, and decide which explanation is most plausible. If I mistake every change in the air for a person, the technique becomes useless. I have to learn what the environment is telling me, and just as importantly, what it isn't telling me."

Shuhi considered that for a moment. "Then how did you practice after leaving the organization? You didn't bring the vr equipment with you."

"Me? Oh no, I already mastered it while I was in the organization." Rina said.

"Oh, I see."

Rina folded her arms, looking satisfied with herself. "Yeah so that's how I developed the technique. It isn't magic some magic. It simply allows me to notice and interpret things that most people would ignore."

Shuhi remained silent for a while, turning the explanation over in her mind. The technique was more complicated than she had initially assumed. It required a baseline, a reference for comparison, extensive practice, and the ability to reason about ambiguous evidence. Rina had not merely discovered an unusual sensation and declared it useful. She had constructed a method around it, tested it under controlled conditions, and continued refining it when the equipment that made her work easier was no longer available.

Then another thought occurred to Shuhi. She got up, "So tell me, how am I gonna learn it? The vr is not here."

"Well, for that…we can use Akari's laptop."

Shuhi turned towards Akari's laptop on the bed. Akari had gone outside. His laptop was still there, opened.

"But vr?" Shuhi turned towards Rina and asked.

"It won't be the same as mine though. The best I can do is describe you the senses of environments through some kind of pocket fan. The monitor would show the simulations of the environment."

"But I don't have a pocket fan." Shuhi bluntly said.

"That's gonna be a hassle. I can call Akari kun…but I doubt he has the money right now."

Shuhi looked at Rina with a piercing stare. Rina understood what she was trying to mean, "Don't tell me to go! Your mom-dad are below."

"I can go but…"

"I think you need to recreate it in your head." Rina stopped Shuhi's words by the tracks, "Yes, a fan wouldn't work. It's not gonna be able to generate the varities of wind we need.

"Then you are in luck, I am good at imagining stuffs."

---

"It's taking ages!" Shuhi sat on the floor, seemingly exhausted. She had been trying to learn the technique.

"Come on girl! Make me all deaf and blind and I can walk around the streets without any effort at all." Rina tried to motivate Shuhi by showing her own achievement.

"You don't get to say that! I am basically learning with scrapes compared to what privilege you got!" Shuhi complained.

"But you WANT to face off Hiroshi senpai tomorrow, right?" Rina reminded her.

"Yes, but that doesn't change the…" Shuhi's phone started ringing. It was vibrating and slowly coming towards the edge of the table it was on. Before it could fall, Shuhi grabbed it and received the call.

"Hello," the person on the other side talked for a few seconds, "Oh that's nice! Won't we get in any type of problem?" another pause from Shuhi as she was listening what the call had to say, "Can you say that for certain?"

After the last pause, Shuhi hung up the call.

"It was Akari. He said that he managed to place all those three police officers into their places. Now suspicion would definitely rise but they can't track us back. Eventually, it would be forgotten as a hallucination of those three." Shuhi updated Rina.

"But isn't it too odd that three people experienced the same kind of hallucination?" Rina asked.

"Did you forget that we discussed about it before? We agreed to leave this behind. Even if it's weird, they have no way of tracking back to us." Shuhi said.

"Okay, alright. Let's get back to your training shall we?"

Shuhi looked at the screen, already imagining the possibilities.

Chapter 64 - The burden of perfection(part 2)