Read Your Forma :: Volume One: Part 3

The semiautomatic vehicle slowly started moving and drove out of the roundabout. The streets of Saint Petersburg sailed past in all the glory of their anachronistic architecture. It was an elegant, beautiful sight, but it was blotted out as advertisement holograms unfurled over the walls.

One of the Your Forma’s features was an augmented-reality advertisement system. By reading the user’s tastes, it displayed business advertisements tailored to their preferences. These days, buildings around the globe were covered in commercials, and no matter where one went, one couldn’t appreciate the view. You could opt to turn them off, but it came with a steep fee.

After all, the developer of the Your Forma, Rig City, was mostly funded by ad revenue. What’s more, the Your Forma installation procedures were performed free of charge for all users, which was also thanks to this revenue source.

“According to today’s schedule, you should be heading for the Union Care Center next. You’re to Brain Dive and identify the source of the virus today, yes?”

“Correct.”

“After Washington, DC, and Paris, there’s a third incident here in Saint Petersburg.”

“Forget the schedule—what about my new aide?”

“He’s ready and waiting for you. Would you like to hear more about him?”

“No, I’ll find out when I meet him.”

Cutting off the conversation there, Echika used her Your Forma to browse the news. Lines of headlines tailored to her interests danced before her eyes.

<Notre-Dame Cathedral restricts end-of-year countdown event>

<Bookstore networks to increase year-end sales of paper volumes>…

The identity of her new aide didn’t interest her per se. She’d just do the work laid out before her regardless. Echika had stopped thinking about her partners a long time ago; that way, she could shield her heart from all kinds of guilt.

That was the slogan for the first advertisements.

The invasive augmented-reality device, Your Forma, was an information terminal fashioned after a sewing thread that sat within one’s head. After being shaped into a three-micrometer smart thread, the device was inserted directly into the brain using laser surgery.

With the Your Forma, one could do almost anything, from monitoring one’s health to online shopping and updating social networks, via thought alone.

It all started thirty-one years ago, the winter of 1992, when a virus that came to be known as The Spore caused a worldwide pandemic. The development of vaccines and antibodies couldn’t keep up with the virus’s rapid mutations, which swiftly paralyzed society. The death toll climbed to thirty million, with the most frequent cause of death being viral encephalitis. As such, preventing brain inflammation became a matter of urgent concern.

Under a World Health Organization initiative, different corporations and groups cooperated to create a prototype of a brain-machine interface, which they eventually rolled out for general use.

Over the next several years, they developed the invasive medical-thread device Neural Safety. With its help, treating the encephalitis symptoms became easier, and the mortality rate was greatly curbed. Future iterations could outright prevent the disease.

And the population, exhausted from years of fighting the virus, had no reason not to be drawn to this new thread.

And now, long after the pandemic’s conclusion in the year of 2023, Neural Safety had since been reborn under a new name, evolving into the Your Forma, the cutting-edge, multipurpose, multifunction information terminal.

One of its most noteworthy features was Mnemosynes—records of real events, plus the emotions and impressions of the user at the time. They were formed through converting the memories in the hippocampus into binary data and producing a visualization of the heart.

Mnemosynes went on to revolutionize the face of criminal investigation. Interpol’s Electrocrime Investigations Bureau became the sole organization with the authority to investigate Mnemosynes, which they exercised to solve major offenses. There were, of course, rare instances of criminals tweaking or erasing Mnemosynes to escape judgment. Still, since it was impossible to falsify Mnemosynes with current technology, they nevertheless contributed greatly to the solving of criminal cases.

The people who plunged into Mnemosynes were electronic investigators—also known as Divers—like Echika.

Divers connected to a victim’s or perpetrator’s Your Forma to quite literally plunge into their minds in search of key clues for solving crimes. Mnemosynes were stored in a stand-alone environment that was disconnected from the network, which meant you had to interface physically with them through a wire. On top of that, Mnemosynes were housed in a multilayered structure resembling a mille-feuille. This ensured people with average processing speed couldn’t so much as view the surface level of this data.

As such, the job had very specific compatibility requirements. These basically boiled down to a genetic resistance to stress and an affinity with Your Forma.

When brains grew accustomed to using Your Forma from the early stages of development, some would, in rare instances, adjust themselves to the device to an extreme degree, spurring a formation of myelin. In simple terms, the brain grows too used to the Your Forma and exponentially increases its information-processing speed as a result.

Those kinds of slightly distorted people were selected to become electronic investigators. And Echika stood head and shoulders above her peers, to the point where even now, no aide had ever been able to match her processing speed.

In other words, people calling her a genius wasn’t a compliment but sarcasm of the highest degree.

***

Her destination, the Union Care Center, was a building designed in the style of Gothic Revival architecture. Echika couldn’t help but stare at it, but that soon prompted ads to flash into life on the outer walls. Her Your Forma automatically read their data matrices, instantly opening the products’ purchase pages in her browser.

Ugh, stop that.

Needlessly exhausted, she arrived at the center’s lobby with the driver Amicus in tow. The lobby was full of haggard outpatients, and none of them looked like the kind of person who might work as an electronic investigator aide. Echika exhaled hard. Her partners being late wasn’t anything new.

“Maybe I should tell you about him anyway,” the Amicus started again. “Your aide’s name is Harold Lucraft, and he recently transferred to your department from the city police. He has blond hair and is about 175 meters tall.”

“I said it’s fine. I’ll just check his personal data when I see him—”

But as Echika turned to the Amicus to complain, she got her first good look at him, then froze up in amazement. She didn’t care much for him because he was a machine, but his features were incredibly handsome.

His age had been set to his mid to late twenties. He had blond hair held in place with wax, and he had uniform brows and gentle eyelashes. The bridge of his nose was perfectly straight, and his lips were thick in just the right way. The back of his hair stood up a little, and he had a faint mole on his right cheek, granting him a very human appearance.

From top to bottom, he looked like a work of art that a craftsperson had put their heart and soul into. He clearly wasn’t a mass-produced model but a customized one that cost a great deal of money.

“As for Lucraft’s attire, today, he’s wearing a tartan scarf and a melton coat.”

Echika couldn’t even blink anymore because the Amicus in front of her was wearing exactly that. Even his coat, with its mundane design, somehow accentuated his slender, well-proportioned physique.

“No way…,” she uttered, her mouth feeling awfully dry all of a sudden. “You’re joking, right?”

He smiled serenely—a smile so sophisticated, it almost gave her heartburn.

“My apologies for not introducing myself sooner. I’m Harold Lucraft,” the Amicus—Harold—said, extending his hand for a shake.

Hold on. No. Stop messing with me.