Mardock Scramble

the monitor before her eyes. As a result she didn’t even notice the presence of the waiter who passed beside her.

For some time now the youth had been wandering back and forth from her table. Like a bellhop angling for a tip. Balot snarced the monitor right in front of his eyes without lifting a finger.

Just then she realized the waiter was looking at her and raised her head, taken aback.

The waiter was marveling at Balot. Not so much because he’d been peeking at her private documents, but simply at Balot’s abilities. And then he quickly thought that she must be using some newfangled electronic device, and moved away, having convinced himself.

Balot averted her eyes. Like she was coldly pushing him away. She checked the monitor. She saw the symbol that confirmed the documents had been safely transmitted.

She let go of Oeufcoque quietly and took her lipstick from her bag.

She gave it a twist and used the poppy-red stick to graffiti the monitor.

SWITCH, WITCH, BITCH

She wasn’t particularly thinking about her actions. She just knew that she wouldn’t be satisfied unless she did.

I AM THE WITCH

she added, then put the lipstick away.

Oeufcoque popped his head out of the adaptor and watched Balot writing the graffiti.

Oeufcoque said nothing but returned to being a mouse and looked up at Balot.

Balot turned away from him and sipped at her half-finished cappuccino.

Her lips felt the milk that was stuck to the rim of the cup. She licked it off with her tongue. Deliberately. Thoroughly, lasciviously. Then, unable to stand being under Oeufcoque’s gaze for any longer, she put the cup down.

Casually she extended a hand toward the monitor and focused her consciousness in her fingertips. She felt electricity crackling through her fingertips. The lipstick on the monitor peeled and fell off.

Oeufcoque seemed a little surprised. Balot was extremely adaptable when it came to using her abilities, had figured out all sorts of handy tricks. It took her less than five seconds to neatly clean all the graffiti.

Balot took a pinch of the flecks of lipstick that had piled up around the edge of the monitor. She rubbed it together with the dirt that it had picked up and brought the mixture up to Oeufcoque’s eyes

–This is what I am.

She manipulated the screen, bringing the letters up.

“It’s a pretty shade of red. In the right context and as long it’s matched with the right things,” Oeufcoque expounded, seriously. “It’s undoubtedly an appropriate color for you at the moment. That’s what you mean, right?”

He gave an extremely raspy chuckle for a mouse.

Balot sighed. A long, drawn-out sigh. Enough to make her tight clothes loosen a little.

–We’re like kids arguing.

She brought this up on the monitor, then cut the power. She wiped clean the red stain on her fingers with a napkin, and then made Oeufcoque turn into a choker before putting him on.

Inside the crystal pendant a golden mouse was wearing garish red lipstick and winking.

04

–When did you first start watching me? Balot snarced and asked Oeufcoque as they walked through the mall.

“Since before you started living in Shell-Septinos’s apartment.”

–Then all the time I was with Shell?

“On the whole, yes. We weren’t particularly focused on you at that time, though.”

–So how far did you guys investigate me?

“We don’t know anything more than what was in the documents we sent off today.”

–Well, everything’s there, but there’s nothing really about me.

“How do you mean?”

–Do you think I’m crazy too?

“Crazy? Why?”

–Well, letting people touch my body for money, for example. A child who’d do that sort of thing.

“All I know is, the way our society is set up, that sort of thing is pretty much part of the system. And that it’s men, with their notions, who prop the system up. If you are crazy, then there’s an awful lot else that’s crazy along with you.”

Balot looked around the mall, now bathed in twilight. People were gradually starting to hunch their backs in response to the cold wind that was now blowing. The transparent rays of sun were casting long shadows across the hard glass surfaces, and no one walking along the ruby-colored Sunny Side seemed particularly crazy.

–Can I tell you a little about myself?

“Talk to me.”

–When the Hunters—the cops—closed down the house where I used to work, one of them asked me a question. “Why prostitution?” he asked.

I answered, “Because I wasn’t a virgin.”

When I did, the Hunter whistled. Whew, just like that. Like I’d done something incredible.

“Is something funny?” I asked.

“You girls these days, you got it all worked out,” the Hunter answered. And then he asked, “When did you give it up—your virginity—to the lucky guy?”

The lucky guy—I didn’t know that this was how you were supposed to look at it.

And then I answered.

“To my father, sir. When I was twelve.”

I thought that the Hunter would whistle again, but he didn’t say anything.

When he first met me the Hunter said that he had daughters. Two of them. The elder already at high school. The younger the same age as you, he said. As if to say, Don’t worry, you can talk to me. So I tried asking him this question.

“Have you ever wanted to touch your daughters, sir? Have you thought about sleeping with them?”

I was just wondering if everyone was like that. But the Hunter said, “You’re crazy. What a ridiculous idea. Such a thing!”

I didn’t understand why it was such a thing, and it hurt me when he said I was crazy. And the Hunter’s expression—as if he were staring at a crazy woman. I couldn’t understand anything. Only that the Hunter wasn’t a friend of mine, like everyone else.

Soon after that I met Shell. He came to meet me, saying he was a fan of mine. He’d once come to me as a client. He promised me everything. Said he’d reinvent me completely. I asked if that meant he loved me. He said, “That’s exactly right.” Then I got in his car.

And then:

–Oeufcoque, are you going to tell the Doctor all this?

“No, I’ll lock everything you’ve just told me away inside myself. Only you can decode it.”

–And what do you think? Do you think I’m crazy?

“Hmm… I wouldn’t know. After all, I’m just a mouse with his intelligence amplified to human levels for the sake of research. I’m not even a mouse anymore, just something that looks like a mouse. There are people who say that my very existence is crazy.”

–You? Why?

“Who knows. From their perspective I suppose I am crazy. I’ve been trying to pin