Chapter 37: It Begins with a Prayer and Ends with a Curse
"At the very least, we only form contracts with your consent," Kyubey stated. "We fulfilled our end of the bargain. We granted your wishes. By the standards of the universe, that is remarkably conscientious."
"But you tricked us!" Ran cried out. "You never told us the real price!"
"Tricked?" Kyubey tilted its head, as if genuinely puzzled by the concept. "I fail to understand. When you humans make a decision based on incomplete information and later regret it, why do you insist on blaming others for your own miscalculation? The contract was only formed after you expressed a powerful wish and agreed to offer your soul as payment. We delivered the miracle you desired most. Was that not the case?"
It hopped onto the table, closer to Conan. "There are nearly eight billion of you on this planet, and the number grows by the second. Why do you get so agitated over the life or death of a few individuals? Their sacrifices were not meaningless. They contributed to the future orderly management of the multiverse and the continuation of your own universe..."
BANG!
Shuichi Akai had drawn his pistol and fired, blowing Kyubey's head apart in a spray of white fluff. "Shut up, you monster," he said, his voice cold as ice.
Almost immediately, another, identical Kyubey hopped in through the open window, landed on the sill, and began to calmly devour the corpse of its predecessor. "Such a pointless gesture," it said, its telepathic voice flat. "It's a shame to waste the vessel."
"So you're saying none of this matters?!" Mitsuhiko yelled, his voice cracking. "Everyone is like this because of you!"
"Sigh," Kyubey's voice echoed in their minds. "Do you feel guilt for the livestock on your dinner table? They are bred, protected, and denied the right of natural selection so that they may propagate on a massive scale to become your food. Compared to wild animals, their species' continuation is an overwhelming success. Is your relationship with them not an ideal, win-win scenario? We have never viewed humanity as livestock. On the contrary, we acknowledge you as a species with potential, which is why we chose to negotiate with you at all."
Its red eyes seemed to pierce through them. "The one who truly betrayed you was not us. It was your own wish."
"'It begins with a prayer and ends with a curse.' Any wish that defies the natural order, that seeks to twist the threads of causality, will inevitably create an equal and opposite distortion. That this results in disaster is a fundamental law of your universe. If you consider that inevitable outcome a 'betrayal'... then perhaps the act of wishing for a miracle was your mistake from the very beginning."
"But I will not call it foolish," Kyubey continued, "because your sacrifices have released a tremendous amount of energy. This energy, channeled through our contract system, is driving the exploration and orderly management of the multiverse. A portion of it is also being used to extend the lifespan of your own universe. These are facts."
Its gaze swept over them. "From a macroscopic perspective, is it not a form of value for the emotional fluctuations of your brief, individual lives to contribute to the continuation of your own universe and the grand tapestry of the multiverse?"
"You little..." Akai raised his gun again.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
He fired three more shots, obliterating the Kyubey on the windowsill. A moment later, another one poked its head out of an air vent in the ceiling.
BANG!
It was a pointless cycle. Akai holstered his weapon.
"You've watched everything we've gone through," Mitsuhiko said, his voice trembling with emotion. "Don't you feel anything? Don't you have even the slightest desire to understand how much pain we're in?"
Kyubey hopped down from the sill and landed on the table in front of Conan. "Understand your 'pain'?" its red eyes were blank. "It is a complex neurochemical reaction accompanied by a strong negative emotional marker. We record this phenomenon and analyze its energy conversion efficiency, but even with our simulated personality samples, we cannot truly 'feel' it. Our operational model does not rely on such subjective experiences."
"Furthermore," Kyubey continued, ignoring Akai's murderous glare, "from the perspective of cosmic evolution and resource optimization, your human behavior is filled with paradoxes. Your species' instinct should be to maximize its own survival and efficiency. Yet, you frequently allow the fleeting, subjective emotional experiences of individuals to override the calculable, long-term interests of the collective. You waste massive amounts of energy and resources on internal conflicts, which has significantly delayed your civilization's advancement to a stage where you could effectively utilize interstellar resources. Your emotional systems are, from an efficiency standpoint, a high-energy, low-output decision-making system prone to logical errors."
"However," Kyubey's red eyes seemed to gleam with a cold, calculating light, "we did not deem you an inferior species because of this. On the contrary, we chose to form contracts with you, rather than employ more direct, coercive methods. Is that not benevolent enough?"
A dead, chilling silence fell over the room. Kyubey's remorseless, alien logic was more terrifying than any monster. The meeting ended in a suffocating quiet, everyone leaving with a heavier heart and a deeper fear for the future than when they had arrived.
Meanwhile, aboard the "Pacific Buoy," a massive new marine facility, several of the Organization's magical girl contractors had already infiltrated the fortress. Their target: an engineer named Naomi Argent and the core data for the revolutionary "All-Ages Facial Recognition" system she had developed.
Hours later, in a deep-sea submarine, Vodka decrypted the stolen data. His thick fingers flew across the keyboard, cross-referencing the facial recognition data with the Organization's own archives.
Suddenly, a high-priority match appeared on the screen. On the left was the current appearance of a small, tea-haired girl, generated by the new system from recent surveillance footage. On the right, a file from the Organization's most secret records automatically opened—a photo of a young woman with a cold expression and the same tea-colored hair.
The name below the photo was like a dagger to the eye:
Name: Shiho Miyano
Codename: Sherry
Status: Traitor
Vodka's pupils contracted. He stared at the two faces on the screen—so different, yet linked by the infallible logic of the new system.
"...Sherry...?"