"Link the gate to Tokyo," I ordered Cir, and then added to Archer. "This is the last one. Or more precisely, the last one we can reach in time."
We were sharing the Entrance Hall, just the two of us. GLaDOS hadn't been destroyed with Thor—Recall Protocol had already retrieved her backup.
"I hate this," Archer muttered as we approached the door now leading to Tokyo.
"What, saving people? I thought that was your favourite hobby—right after cooking," I joked, trying to cheer him up.
"Saving some people, and leaving others to die," Archer corrected. I could feel his muscles tensing. "Having to choose. To weigh lives against means and risks."
"If you hate triage, it's good you're not a doctor," I said, stepping through and into the Hotel New Otani Tokyo's lobby via a side door that usually led to the conference halls. I added, trying to change the subject, "You've chosen a nice place to tag."
"It was convenient," Archer shrugged. "This was the type of place where someone like Dr. Hutter would stay in Tokyo."
He was right, this was a suitable place for a high-ranking Aperture scientist.
The lobby unfurled before us like a tableau of restraint and heritage. Polished stone underfoot, inlaid with a whispered fan motif, caught the overhead glow of low-hung chandeliers. Dark wood columns framed the entrance, grounding the modernist sweep with the solidity of time-worn carpentry. On the wall, the silhouette of cranes—ancient symbols rendered in lacquered relief—watched silently, as if guardians of this transplanted serenity.
It was deserted. That was no surprise. Places like this would have priority for evacuation.
"It was easier to see when I stayed, rather than seek another place," he continued explaining. It seemed to calm him. Good. "Look closer. First: this side door sits in a blind spot—no camera coverage. Second: it leads to the conference halls. People come and go there, so strangers emerging from this corridor don't get a second look—even if they're not guests."
"I need direct sight of shoreline, like before," I replied, drawing back conversation to our task, not that he was feeling better. "Do you know any pots with a good view of Tokyo Harbour?"
"From here? Rainbow Bridge. South walkway looks straight across the bay. Or Odaiba, below it—open sightlines. Either way, you'll see the whole harbour."
"Lead the way," I said, and watched as he slowly began to float.
I followed after, passed through the wall, and flew over the nearly abandoned Tokyo streets as a plain ghost.
We had shifted to our ghost forms to evacuate after Thor was destroyed, and stayed in them ever since. It was simpler that way.
One thing ghost form did was to mute every sense but sight. Sound reached me as if through water, warped and far away. In the distance I caught the evacuation—sirens, horns, the press of bodies—but all of it felt twice removed, like hearing the echo of a drowned memory. And for scent, there was nothing—just a flatness that also felt like an absence of dust.
Slightly unpleasant, but suitable for task at hand. Ghosts by their nature were invisible and intangible, so there would be no interruptions.
As we drifted toward the shore, the absence of dust was replaced by the absence of salt. An interesting indicator of phantasmic senses—one I might have explored further on a more leisurely occasion.
Although we had passed those who were still trying to evacuate, the streets were not completely empty. These were the ones who had given in to despair and foolishness. People huddling in prayer or lost in hedonism, drinking, drugs, public indecency. Or those taking advantage of the absence of law to indulge in what they could not afford otherwise. Like that one woman dancing in the street covered head to toe in jewellery, or a mob robbing a high-end convenience store…
"Well, at least they'll drown in riches," I idly commented to Archer, watching a group of young men in spiked leather robbing an ATM. As if money mattered now. "Possibly even if we succeed. This is a bit close to shore."
He glared at me, as if it were my fault there was only so much we could do. After all, we had come to mitigate, not completely prevent, what was to come.
"You're taking this too lightly," Archer said. "This, after all, is our fault."
"It is the consequence of our actions, but not our fault," I corrected. "Only in comics do you get to save the world cleanly. The best we can do is to try to clean up after ourselves."
The Recall System had pulled Thor safely back to Irem even as her fusion core was pierced. The Vril-ya ship had no such safeguard. It struck the Pacific at hypersonic speed, and the sea rose—hundreds of meters near the wound, rolling into long, fast walls that would climb tens of meters where the coast gave them purchase.
"It's not enough," Archer countered, but there was little in his words. Just soft sorrow, like the touch of black velvet. I would have preferred bite.
"We only have two hours at most," I countered as I saw the sea in the distance. It was not far now. "We had to choose the most populous cities in range of the waves."
"And what of the smaller cities, or coastal villages?" he asked. "What of the people at sea? On ships?"
"They will most likely die. Although, villages are easier to evacuate than cities," I replied. "It is already a miracle we've saved as much as we have. It would be greedy to ask for more."
"Then I suppose I am greedy," he replied.
Following after Archer, I drifted low above Rainbow Bridge—its towers suspended like silent watchers, strung with solar-lamp halos. Beneath me, Tokyo Harbor curved west into lights, and Odaiba lay flat beyond—waiting for the wave. In ghost-form, I traced the coastline from above, not touching, but seeing everything.
Everything that mattered.
It was time to raise the towers.
It was not as though Tokyo and the other coastal settlements were entirely without defences against giant waves; indeed, given their long and tragic history, such an omission would have amounted to an almost unimaginable folly.
For centuries, coastal communities have constructed seawalls, breakwaters, inland embankments, and in some instances even cultivated protective groves, each measure intended, at least in principle, to dull the force of tsunamis. Some villages even went so far as to erect so-called tsunami stones—markers carved with warnings for future generations, urging them to build their homes above the known high-water lines.
Yet all of this prudence, however admirable, was nevertheless shaped by precedent: by disasters born of nature's ordinary wrath, rather than by the singular contingency of a spaceship collapsing into the sea.
Our intervention, then, had been directed precisely at this inadequacy.
Aperture had long been developing, and in some instances even implementing, solutions that sought to balance brute force with finesse. Full seawalls rise like scars—but they fail catastrophically when overtopped. Detached reef-breakers and perforated barriers disrupt run-up even when breached—they bleed the wave, not stop it. Some systems rose only when needed, powered by the sea itself—pure mechanics, requiring no advanced computation. Yet we ourselves were constrained by time: any method had to be simple, efficient, and immediate—capable of implementation across multiple cities within the span of two hours.
Thus, rather than pursuing further complexity, we scaled upward, making use of existing resources—though certain lines of prior research remained applicable.
Instead of attempting some new and monolithic seawall—whether by freezing the bay into a glacier or by heaving the sea floor upward—I elected to bring into actuality the kilometre-high towers of Irem.
The towers did not rise like leviathans from the sea. Their emergence was closer to the splicing of two reels of celluloid film: on one frame the ocean lay bare, on the next the towers stood complete. No slow ascent, no spectacle of motion. Simply absence, and then presence—as though they had always been there.
I have often said that Irem lay "beneath the skin of the world," though that was only because of the inadequacy of language. Up, down, forward, backward, left, right—none of these directions applied.
In truth it was not only about Irem. As Aperture's knowledge of the true topography of the universe expanded, we found the dimensionality of language itself constricting. No term yet proposed fulfilled the requirement of being at once clear, simple, and unassailable. And so we trudged on, employing allegory where clarity would have served better.
It did, at times, make scientific papers read as though submitted to a Lovecraft convention.
On the other hand, the shapes and colors of Irem drove men mad. This was why I had the towers shrouded in mist. Yet it was the mist of Irem: it concealed, but it also teased—like Salome's veils.
"Inadequate solution, but best under the circumstances," I said aloud.
Archer snorted and dryly remarked, "You conjure miracles, and still call them inadequate."
"You are greedy, and I am prideful," I replied with a soft smile. "What a pair we make."
Give an archer a target and he would shoot. But I was not displeased. When focused, he would slip from melancholy back into sardonic. I liked him better that way. Make no mistake, I loved both sides of him. But I had preferences. It was like comparing sucking his fingers and sucking his cock. Both were fun; one was usually better than the other.
"Look," Archer said, pointing downward.
The sea was withdrawing, as though taking a deep breath before the plunge. We could not see the wave itself—the mist-covered towers broke the horizon, as if we stood at the end of the world, a mystical place where sky touched sea. But this was enough.
Finally, our preparation would be put to the test.
That was why Tokyo had been left for last in our tour: it was the first place the wave would strike. And thus we would be here to witness it—to see whether our work was effective.
Had I been less cautious, more vainly certain of my own genius, Tokyo would have been the first stop, and then we would have proceeded in order along the path of the wave, one city after another. In such a way we might have maximized the number of sites covered. But that would have left uncertainty whether the method worked at all.
This way, I could be certain—after witnessing it personally. And if it proved effective, it was not as though I could not still visit the others before the wave reached them.
The sound of the wave striking the towers was dulled by both our ghost form and the mist. And yet… it still carried: a deep, grinding thunder, like cliffs breaking apart beneath the sea. Beneath it came sharper cracks, like cannon fire, as water sheared against stone.
Water poured in between the towers, and the sea rose. But less than I expected.
"It worked better than I thought it would," I commented to Archer. "The streets might get wet a little, but nothing like the catastrophic damage we feared."
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Well, I suppose people will learn the wrong lesson. The prudent who evacuated, and the looters who stayed," I remarked idly.
"Waters," Archer continued. "They don't carry enough death."
"Well, we know liquids are poor mediums for psychometry," I answered, though I frowned.
"Still. There should be more," Archer pressed.
I sighed. "If we apply Ockham's razor, the simplest solution is most likely. And the one thing we know that devours psychometric impressions of death, especially nearby, is the Crown of Midnight. If we are lucky, it was carried on the waves, and we can simply collect it when it washes ashore."
"When have we ever been so lucky?" Archer asked.
"It has to happen at least once," I replied. But as I spoke, I dismissed the towers. They had served their purpose, and now they were only an obstruction.
The mist did not disperse so much as dissolve, and the towers it had concealed faded like a dream upon waking. I wondered, for a brief second, what people would make of this later—whether they would say a white cloud had hidden the secret that broke the death wave. But some mystery would do them good.