17. I Know Waltz
As we stepped inside, the city's clamor vanished instantly, replaced by a sound with a different texture, spreading around Jinri and me like a giant whale breaching the surface.
Classical music.
"…A waltz?"
I hazarded a guess, and Jinri nodded beside me.
"Yup. Looks like it's Waltz Day today."
"What's Waltz Day?"
Instead of explaining with words, Jinri suddenly grabbed both my hands.
Until now, we'd been holding hands like childhood friends walking together, but this was different.
It was a formal stance, facing each other, hands clasped together.
I immediately understood what she was planning.
"You want to dance?"
When I asked, Jinri, still holding my hands, stepped even closer.
"At Sunspot Department Store, just walking around while shopping isn't allowed. You'll get kicked out by scary security guards right away."
"Why?"
I asked, exasperated, and Jinri explained with a slightly haughty expression, as if she were the store's manager.
"'If you can't even dance a waltz, you're not our customer'—that's the philosophy of the store's owner."
"That's a problem."
Genuinely troubled, I looked around.
There stood security guards in black suits, easily five meters tall. Their faces looked like teenage girls', but their builds were sturdier than bodybuilders', creating a terrifying contrast. These grotesque humanoid robots were watching the customers closely.
In the hall, thousands of humanoid robots were all dancing waltzes. I caught my breath.
"I can't dance."
"It's fine," Jinri reassured me lightly. "I'm not great at dancing either. Just download it."
"Download?"
"Yup."
Jinri picked up a small, pale tangerine-colored jellyfish floating nearby and brought it to her nose as if sniffing a flower.
The jellyfish turned transparent the moment it was inhaled, vanishing like it had evaporated.
"Download complete. Today's waltz is Chopin," she said, then urged me.
"Hurry up, Yura-kun. If you don't dance, the security guards will come."
"Uh, okay…"
Reluctantly, I grabbed a passing cobalt-blue jellyfish and awkwardly brought it to my nose to sniff.
Suddenly, my CPU overreacted.
It was as if my transistors sparked independently of my will, like I'd been hacked. After 0.005 seconds, the process finished, and my stalled thoughts resumed. It felt like paying a hacker to unlock my system—an unsettling sensation as I regained control of my CPU.
Then I realized.
"I Know Waltz."
Jinri's face turned preachy, and she said with dissatisfaction,
"I told you, no English. Like I said before, Japanese is the standard language here. Mixing in English messes up the coding. What if you cause an error?"
"The engineer would fix it, right?"
Her eyes narrowed even further.
"It's humanoids like you, Yura-kun, that make engineers quit."
"Sorry, sorry," I apologized lightly. "I won't use English anymore."
"Please don't. You can use it as much as you want once we leave the city."
"Got it, got it."
"Then let's dance."
"Okay."
With a few security guards starting to eye us, we began dancing the waltz.
Like figurines in a music box, spinning endlessly to the same tune until the mechanism breaks.
The hall was enveloped in the atmosphere of a Victorian ballroom, steeped in an old-fashioned air.
Seeing everyone in suffocating dresses, my anxiety grew.
"Are we okay dancing naked like this?"
"It's fine. Being naked is a perfectly valid outfit."
"But everyone's wearing dresses."
"The people in this hall just lack imagination. Go to other floors, and you'll see humanoid robots in all sorts of outfits."
"Really?"
"Yup," Jinri said with a confident smile. "As long as you're dancing, anything goes in this world."
"…"
"That's what's wonderful about department stores, right?"
Honestly, I had no memory of ever going to a department store.
Even without amnesia, crowded places like this weren't my thing.
But dancing a waltz with Jinri felt amazing.
"Have you ever seen the sun up close?"
Jinri spoke as part of the dance, and I immediately understood it was part of the waltz.
"It's like a swarm of flames dancing."
"I'd love to see it through a telescope someday."