"Sumire, you're here," Sora said, taking a deep breath and smiling as he gestured to the chair in front of him.
Back when they were still working on The Sacred Knight and the Princess, Sora had already interacted with her quite a lot and understood her personality well. If Sumire said she would consider it, that wasn't mere politeness. As long as the material had some spark-so long as it didn't look, right on the page, like an animated disaster destined to be torn apart by viewers-and with a small emotional push, persuading her to join the Voices of a Distant Star project wouldn't be impossible.
But there was one clear condition.
She had to like the story. She had to believe the concept had a place in the market.
At the very least, the script couldn't give off the feeling that it was doomed to fail before it ever became an animation.
"You don't have to keep calling me 'Sumire-onee-san' all the time," she said as she sat down, looking straight at Sora. "I'm only three or four years older than you. And besides, you're the company president. Just call me by my name."
"Ah…" Sora hesitated for a moment, then decided not to dwell on it. "Right… Sumire. This is the script for Voices of a Distant Star."
He pointed to the table in front of her.
Voices of a Distant Star?
Sumire didn't waste time on formalities. She picked up the script and began flipping through it.
[Exterior - interior of a high-speed train.
A girl holds her phone, staring fixedly at the screen.]
…
As an animation director, Sumire possessed an exceptionally rich inner world. To an ordinary reader, a text-only script like this might seem dry, devoid of imagery. To her, however, the words immediately transformed into vivid scenes within her mind.
From a technical standpoint, Sora's writing was merely decent-after all, this was his first time attempting something like this. Even so, the story he wanted to tell was all there, complete, without any essential gaps.
The opening of Voices of a Distant Star depicted the memories of Mikako Nagamine, a fifteen-year-old girl, and Noboru Terao, a sixteen-year-old boy, back when both still lived on Earth.
The setting was the year 2047. Humanity had acquired alien technology and mastered interstellar travel, defeating the invaders known as the Tarsians within the solar system. To eliminate any future threats, the Space Force began recruiting young candidates capable of piloting combat mechs, sending them into space to eradicate the remaining enemies.
Mikako and Noboru, who had harbored vague, unspoken feelings for each other since middle school, believed they would attend high school together.
However, Mikako was selected as a pilot.
And soon after, she left Earth.
One remained on the planet. The other departed for deep space. The only bond between them became the exchange of text messages.
At this point in the script, Sumire unconsciously adjusted her posture.
She had always liked romance stories, and beyond that, the idea of a love separated by the stars… just thinking about it was enough to draw out a quiet sense of melancholy, pulling her emotions into the narrative.
As Mikako traveled farther and farther away from Earth-from Mars to Jupiter, and then to the outer edges of the solar system-the time it took for messages exchanged between her and Noboru to reach their destination gradually increased.
As she read, Sumire also found herself recalling bits of physics she had learned in high school.
Text messages traveled via electromagnetic waves. And the speed of those waves was the speed of light-roughly three hundred thousand kilometers per second.
On Earth, calls and messages felt instantaneous because the planet was simply too small. The delay was so minuscule that humans couldn't perceive it.
But on a cosmic scale…
The speed of light no longer seemed fast at all.
For Noboru, who remained on Earth, those one or two messages arriving from space each day became the most important moments of his entire routine.
By that point, the look in Sumire's eyes had already changed.
In the modern world, a hundred kilometers was enough to be called a long-distance relationship. Ten thousand kilometers nearly meant losing contact altogether.
But millions… tens of millions of kilometers?
Two teenagers who couldn't even make a video call, maintaining their connection solely through text messages that took days, months, even years to arrive-what exactly was that?
How long could this habit-almost like that of a couple-of telling each other about their daily lives really last?
It was an inevitable question for anyone following the story.
And it was precisely the kind of question the work sought to provoke.
Love and space.
Love and time.
Love and the very fabric of space-time.
…
The first major turning point came when the joint fleet, stationed at the edge of the solar system, detected enemy activity. After a deadly battle, Mikako, piloting her mech, managed to defeat her opponent and return to the ship at the last possible moment.
But the ship, pursuing the fleeing enemies, initiated a warp jump.
It was then that Sumire felt, for the first time, a genuine pain in her chest.
The ship jumped to a region one light-year away.
As soon as she arrived, Mikako sent a message to Noboru.
That message took one year and one month to reach Earth.
[Message from Mikako: The Lysithea has just completed a one-light-year jump.
To me, a light-year doesn't mean anything.
To you, this happened a year ago… but to me, it just happened.]
[Message from Mikako: The Lysithea is about to begin a long-distance jump. The destination is Sirius, 8.5 light-years away. When you receive this message, I will already have arrived.
The next time we receive a message from each other… it will take 8.7 years.]
[I'm sorry.]
…
Even without music or images, using nothing but words, the script conveyed the quiet despair of the situation the two of them were in.
Noboru waited over a year for that message… only to learn that Mikako was already 8.7 light-years away, in a completely unknown region of space.
Between him and the girl he loved now lay a gap of eight years-just for a single message to be received.
For a boy still in high school… what kind of cruelty was that?
Would he…
Give up on this feeling that seemed doomed from the very beginning?
A trace of sadness passed through Sumire's eyes. The simplicity of the words had carried the suffocating atmosphere of the story straight into her heart.
…
[We are like lovers separated by the Earth and the entire universe.]
When that line appeared, Sumire's fingers tightened involuntarily. She raised her head and looked at Sora, who was watching her reaction with a faint smile.
Her face still held its usual calm, elegant composure, but inside, those few thousand words had already stirred her emotions deeply.
She kept reading.
Ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
Only after more than half an hour did her fingers reach the final page.
Lovers separated by the universe. Eight years reduced to a single message. Mikako fighting alone against aliens eight light-years away. The mech charging toward the endless void of deep space.
And finally, that last line-the one that made her heart tremble and her eyes sting slightly.
The script could have been read in ten minutes.
But it took her more than half an hour.
When she finished, there was a quiet emptiness in her gaze, mixed with a sense of helplessness.
So that was the meaning of Voices of a Distant Star.
Two people separated by time and space, whose thoughts and feelings aligned perfectly at certain moments in their lives.
Mikako, eight years ago.
Noboru, eight years later.
At the most crucial moments, when death loomed close, what they longed for was nothing grand.
Sharing an ice cream from a convenience store.
Getting soaked together in the rain.
Listening to the sound of cars passing by on the street.
Walking home after school beneath the setting sun.
As long as they were together, even the most ordinary things in the world would become special.
And yet…
The distance of eight light-years between them was no different from eternity.
Those simple wishes were luxuries that could exist only in imagination.
…
"This… was a story you came up with?" Sumire asked. Compared to her usual cool tone, her voice now carried an emotion she couldn't quite hide.
"Ah…" Sora hesitated for a moment. "Yes."
She fell silent for a few seconds before asking again:
"And what comes after this story?"