October 2, 1988, Funabashi Seaside Industrial Zone, Chiba Prefecture.
The damp, cold sea breeze carried sulfur and salt, buffeting the newly renovated silver-gray structure without pause. This had once been a cold-storage depot for an ocean-fishing company. Now the exterior walls were repainted. The huge exhaust fans sat motionless under the gray sky, like rows of silent black eyes watching the murky waters of Tokyo Bay.
The automatic sensor doors slid open.
Saionji Satsuki stepped into the pure white space.
Today she wasn't in haute couture. She wore Seika Academy's autumn uniform — dark gray pleated skirt, black flat loafers, a neatly cut navy double-breasted short coat, and a beige cashmere scarf around her neck.
Though dressed as a student, the group of adult men behind her walked carefully, matching their pace to her slower steps.
They didn't know who Satsuki was, only that she was their boss's boss's boss.
"President."
Factory Manager Kobayashi was a balding man in his fifties, in full sterile gear. Only his bloodshot eyes were visible. He jogged to keep up with Satsuki, wiping fog from his goggles with a handkerchief. His voice was nervous in the empty factory hall.
"Hardware debugging is complete. Automatic rice washers, high-pressure steamers, vacuum coolers… At your command, this place can output twenty thousand standard curry rice meals per hour."
Satsuki stopped. She stood on the second-floor viewing corridor and looked down through the massive glass curtain wall at the work floor.
Below were rows of cold stainless steel pipes and mechanical arms — the internal organs of a sleeping steel behemoth.
"What about the ingredients?" Satsuki's voice was muffled by her mask, low.
"The first batch of potatoes and onions shipped from Hokkaido last night is already in storage," Kobayashi said, pointing to the storage area behind them. "Cold storage is set at 4 degrees Celsius. But…"
He hesitated, looking at the static machinery. Confusion flickered in his eyes.
"If we don't start production soon, the freshness of those vegetables drops every hour. The spoilage rate gets counted as cost. Oh, of course, I'm not questioning the decision from above, just offering an inexperienced suggestion…"
"Alright, alright, what's the rush?"
Satsuki turned and waved a hand.
"The distributors haven't been finalized. If you start now, who are you going to sell to?"
Huh? The sales channels aren't locked yet? This… Kobayashi was starting to suspect this factory was just the young miss's toy.
Satsuki had no intention of explaining. She turned and walked toward the freight elevator at the end of the corridor that led underground.
"Where is that American?"
When Kobayashi heard that designation, his expression twitched like he'd bitten something sour. He pointed down.
"Shimomura is in the underground machine room… He's been down there three days straight without coming up once. Also, the smell down there might not be pleasant."
---
B2 Floor.
The moment the elevator doors opened, a smell hit you — overheated electronics, stale dust, and strong spicy sausage pizza mixed together.
There were no windows. Hundreds of server fans idled at low speed, emitting a low-frequency hum that was almost deafening. The central console was piled with empty cola cans and tangled cables of every color, like a massive, chaotic spiderweb.
Shimomura Tsutomu sat cross-legged on the chassis of a Sun Microsystems workstation.
He still had on the gray hoodie printed with "Los Alamos." One foot wore a flip-flop; the other was bare, kicked off somewhere. He had a piece of cold pizza in his mouth, hands flying across the keyboard. Green code flowed down the screen like a waterfall, reflected in his thick glasses.
"Damn NEC… damn proprietary protocols…"
Shimomura chewed pizza while muttering curses indistinctly.
"Do these Japanese old fogeys have mush for brains? Insisting on this twenty-year-old SNA architecture — it's like trying to control a space shuttle with an abacus…"
Satsuki walked up behind him and nudged an empty can on the floor with the toe of her shoe. She frowned slightly.
The genius is useful, but later I'll have to make him pay attention to personal hygiene…
Clang.
The crisp sound of metal on metal made Shimomura's fingers pause. He turned, saw Satsuki, but didn't move to get down and bow. He just swallowed the pizza and pushed up his glasses.
"Yo, Boss, you're here. This job is impossible."
Shimomura pointed to a bulky gray machine nearby — an old POS terminal borrowed from Seibu Department Store, the standard terminal currently used in FamilyMart stores.
"This thing is mute. It only understands the ancient dialect of the IBM mainframe, and it has to slowly package and send back a day's data via dedicated phone lines late at night when no one's using them."
He jumped off the server, stamped around on the floor with one bare foot, and ran his hands through his hair irritably.
"But the inventory system we need to use runs on UNIX and speaks TCP/IP. That's like asking an old man who only speaks Ancient Greek to argue with a rapper speaking modern English. If we don't fix this, your 'real-time replenishment' is just a pipe dream."
Factory Manager Kobayashi, trailing behind, was completely lost, but the words "pipe dream" still made his face pale.
Satsuki said nothing.
She walked up to the pile of messy cables. Her gaze swept past the complex equipment and settled on an inconspicuous beige metal box.
The casing was rough. No fancy decoration. Only a few green indicator lights blinking irregularly.
Cisco AGS Multi-Protocol Router.
That was the "Key to the Tower of Babel" she'd gone to great lengths to acquire from a couple's garage in Silicon Valley.
"Mr. Shimomura, I recall you boasting to me that with this thing, you could make a stone talk."
Satsuki took off her gloves, tossed them onto the console, and smiled at Shimomura.
"What's wrong? Can't even manage to be a translator now?"
Shimomura got provoked. An arrogant grin spread across his face.
"Who said I couldn't?"
He pulled a screwdriver from his pocket and spun it in his hand.
"I've spent the past three days writing patches for this damn router. The NEC protocol is definitely tricky, but I 'took it apart.'"
He squatted down, grabbed a thick, custom-made cable, plugged one end into the parallel port of the old POS terminal, and jammed the other end roughly into the backplane of the Cisco router.
Click.
The connector seating was crisp and satisfying.
"Watch this. This is aesthetic violence."
Shimomura sat back at the keyboard. His fingers blurred. After entering the final line of code, he slammed Enter.
Bang!
The red error codes on the screen vanished instantly, replaced by lines of green text: "Connected."
"The road is open."
Shimomura turned and jerked his chin toward Factory Manager Kobayashi, who was still staring blankly.
"Hey, old man. Go scan something on that POS."
Kobayashi paused, then reacted. He hurried to the old POS and picked up the scanner gun.
On the table was a plastic rice ball model used as a sample, with a barcode sticker on it.
He swallowed and pulled the trigger.
Beep.
A crisp buzz rang out.
Almost in the same millisecond.
On the huge LCD monitor directly in front of the machine room, the previously static inventory datasheet suddenly flickered without warning.
****
****
****
A line of red text exploded onto the screen.
The delay was virtually negligible.
It felt like flipping a switch in Tokyo and having a lightbulb turn on instantly in Osaka.
In 1988, an era when most data transfer still relied on physically moving magnetic tapes and floppy disks, this "millisecond-level" sync was nothing short of a miracle.
"This…"
Factory Manager Kobayashi gaped at the fluctuating number, blinking.
"How is that possible… so fast? We don't have to wait for the nightly dial-up?"
"That's TCP/IP."
Shimomura pulled a piece of gum from his pocket, unwrapped it, popped it in his mouth, and chewed contentedly.
"It doesn't go straight, and it doesn't take detours. It uses 'Packet Switching.' This Cisco box breaks your scan action into countless tiny data packets, then throws them into the network like stones, and they reassemble on the other end."
He patted the beige router, his motion rough like he was hitting an old TV set.
"Now, even if a rice ball is sold in a convenience store in Hokkaido, the boiler here in Chiba will instantly know to cook an extra 100 grams of rice."
Satsuki looked at the line of red text on the screen.
The red light reflected in her pupils, like a burning flame.
She knew what this meant.
This meant the Saionji Family was no longer just a rice ball supplier. They were a behemoth that controlled the nervous system of the entire retail network. While 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, and Lawson were still using yesterday's sales to guess today's demand, S-Food could adjust its production line based on real-time data every second.
Efficiency is profit.
This was a generational, crushing advantage.
"Very good."
Satsuki turned and looked at Factory Manager Kobayashi, who was still in shock.
"Factory Manager Kobayashi."
"Y-Yes! Yes!" Kobayashi snapped to attention, standing straight.
"Since Mr. Shimomura has completed the preliminary system debug, I want you all to test the system's compatibility with the production line."
Satsuki's voice was remarkably clear, even over the roar of the machine room.
"Start Production Line A. But I don't want mass production."
She raised her wrist, glanced at her delicate Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso.
"I only want five hundred servings. Five hundred servings of standard Curry Beef Rice." (Note: The beef used here is not domestically produced Hokkaido beef; according to the production cycle, the cattle won't be ready for slaughter until next year.)
"I want you to use this system to precisely control the thickness of every piece of beef and the weight of every spoonful of sauce. Margin of error cannot exceed 0.5 grams."
"These five hundred servings are not for sale."
Satsuki's gaze swept across the blinking indicator lights and finally settled on Kobayashi's tense face.
"They are bullets."
"Tomorrow, I will take these steaming bullets to the Akasaka Prince Hotel to meet a very important person."
"If the taste doesn't satisfy him, this priceless system will be nothing more than a pile of expensive electronic junk."
"Do you understand?"
"Yes! Understood!"
Factory Manager Kobayashi bowed, turned, and ran toward the elevator, looking somewhat exhilarated.
Well… it looks like the boss invested so much that this isn't just a casual project…
Only Satsuki and Shimomura remained in the machine room.
"Boss."
Shimomura leaned against the server rack and blew a bubble.
"Although the connection is open, if those old guys at NTT find out we're running proprietary protocols on their phone lines, even bypassing their switches, they'll probably be furious, right?"
"Then let them jump."
Satsuki walked to the old POS, extended a finger, and lightly stroked the scanner gun's handle.
"By the time they realize it, our blood will already be flowing through the veins of all of Tokyo."
She looked up at the dense, spiderweb-like cables overhead.
"Shimomura."
"Present."
"Keep this machine running. Twenty-four hours, no stopping. If the power goes out, I'm coming for you."
"Don't worry. Unless Tokyo loses power, it'll run steadier than my own heart."
Shimomura turned back and kept typing. Green characters flowed across his glasses, reflecting a face both fervent and focused.
Tokyo losing power?
Hearing Shimomura's words, Satsuki turned thoughtfully and walked toward the elevator.
The elevator doors slowly closed.
In that final glance, she saw the green indicator light on the beige router blinking rapidly.
Above ground, night had fallen over Chiba. The sea wind howled across the empty factory grounds, sweeping up fallen leaves.
But deep underground, within the network woven by fiber optic cables, dawn had already arrived ahead of schedule.
"Are you ready, Mr. Yoshiaki Tsutsumi?"
Satsuki leaned against the cold elevator wall and whispered to herself.
"I hope your appetite is worthy of this expensive menu."