Chapter 19: 19. The Girlfriend Who Study Abroad With A Long-Distance Relationship

[GOOD MORNING. NICE OF YOU TO ASK INSTEAD OF JUST ASSUMING.]

"Okay, don’t fucking push it now."

[MADISON REED REQUIRES A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENTRY POINT. SHE’S NOT RUNNING FROM SOMETHING. SHE’S MANAGING SOMETHING. THOSE ARE DIFFERENT PROBLEMS.]

[LEVERAGE EXISTS. YOU FOUND PART OF IT LAST NIGHT. THE BOYFRIEND SITUATION IS USEFUL, BUT USING IT AS A THREAT WOULD CLOSE EVERY DOOR IMMEDIATELY.]

[IT’S MORE USEFUL AS SOMETHING YOU KNOW AND DON’T MENTION. PEOPLE LIKE MADISON ARE MORE UNSETTLED BY THE IMPRESSION THAT SOMEONE SEES THROUGH THEM THAN THEY ARE BY DIRECT CONFRONTATION.]

"So I just show up near her again and act like I know something without saying what."

[ESSENTIALLY, YES. BUT YOU NEED A REASON TO BE NEAR HER THAT ISN’T THE CASINO. ONCE A WEEK AT A POKER TABLE ISN’T ENOUGH CONTACT TO BUILD ANYTHING.]

[WHICH BRINGS ME TO SOMETHING ELSE.]

Mike raised an eyebrow.

[VALCREST UNIVERSITY OF EROSYNE. DISTRICT 2. STARTS MONDAY.]

"What the fuck...?" He stared at the screen. "You want me to go back to school...?!"

[I WANT YOU TO ACCESS AN ENVIRONMENT WITH HIGH DENSITY OF VIABLE TARGETS AND SIGNIFICANT SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE THAT YOU CAN OPERATE IN. THE UNIVERSITY FRAMING IS JUST THE PACKAGING.]

[ALSO: MADISON REED IS ON RECORD AS AN OCCASIONAL GUEST LECTURER IN THE PERFORMING ARTS FACULTY. SHE DID IT TWICE LAST YEAR.]

"Of course she is," Mike said.

[YOUR ENROLLMENT IS ALREADY PROCESSED. MIKE HAWK’S ACADEMIC RECORD — TRANSFERRED CREDITS FROM INSTITUTIONS IN THREE COUNTRIES, ALL LEGITIMATE — QUALIFIED HIM FOR DIRECT ENTRY INTO THE POSTGRADUATE PROGRAM IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS.]

[NO TUITION COST, BECAUSE MIKE HAWK ALSO APPARENTLY QUALIFIED FOR A FULL ACADEMIC MERIT SCHOLARSHIP BASED ON THAT RECORD.]

Mike looked at the phone. "You forged a postgraduate academic history for me."

"This feels like a fucking dream, but eh... I ain’t going to complain about it."

[I SYNTHESIZED ONE FROM YOUR ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE AND THE INSTITUTIONAL RECORDS OF ESTABLISHMENTS YOU GENUINELY OPERATED WITHIN. I WOULD NOT CALL IT FORGING.]

[I WOULD CALL IT VERY THOROUGH DOCUMENTATION.]

"That’s exactly what forging is, dumbass."

[YOUR ORIENTATION PACKET WILL ARRIVE VIA EMAIL BY SUNDAY. YOU’LL RECEIVE YOUR STUDENT ID WHEN YOU PRESENT AT THE MAIN ADMINISTRATION BUILDING ON MONDAY MORNING. DRESS LIKE SOMEONE WHO BELONGS THERE.]

"That fucking fast, huh...?" Mike laughed. "Well, I’ll accept it, as long as I can see many virgins who have already been taken."

Mike paused to consider the offer. A university with thousands of students. An international student from across the country, the system had indicated, suggesting a diverse population from all over the country. This promised the kind of anonymity and variety that made the environment intriguing to navigate.

And Madison Reed, occasional guest lecturer.

"Fine," he said. "Monday, not to study, but to hunt."

[ALSO, YOU HAVE AN UNREAD MESSAGE FROM PETRICIA SCHNEIDER.]

He checked it. It had come in twenty minutes ago.

"Sorry to bother you on a Friday morning. Are you around? I need some help with something in the lobby... it’s not urgent, but I would appreciate it if you could spare a moment."

He typed back: "Coming down."

He set the coffee cup on the counter and went downstairs.

The lobby looked the same as it always did, which meant whatever Petricia needed help with was not a plumbing emergency or a structural problem.

She was standing near the entrance with her clipboard and a look on her face that he had started to recognize as the one she used when she needed to coordinate something and was slightly annoyed that she needed to coordinate it.

"There’s a new tenant arriving this morning," she said when she saw him. "Unit five."

"She’s coming from overseas, and she messaged me last night that she’s got more luggage than she expected to be able to manage on her own."

"Gerald’s out on a call, but something’s wrong with a drain in unit eleven, and I’d normally handle it myself, but I’ve got the building inspector coming in forty minutes."

’What a pain in the ass, but I don’t have anything to do other than raising her desire level by doing this...’

"I can help," Mike said.

"Thank you," Petricia said, genuinely expressing her gratitude in the straightforward manner she typically used when not filtering her thoughts through landlady mode. "She should be here any minute."

’Oh, it’s a woman, huh?’ Mike thought. "I can totally help it if she’s a baddie."

The front door opened four minutes later.

The woman who came through it was carrying a large duffel bag over one shoulder, pulling a suitcase with the other hand, with a second smaller bag somehow also hanging off her arm.

She was doing all of this while looking around the lobby with an expression of complete delight, like someone who had arrived somewhere they had been wanting to be for a long time and couldn’t stop being pleased about it.

She was Asian, with short brown hair cut in a way that framed her face, and she was not particularly tall, which made the amount of luggage she was carrying look even more impressive.

She was wearing a yellow sweatshirt with a small cartoon on the chest and jeans, and she looked like a person who had been traveling for a long time and somehow still had energy left.

She saw Petricia and immediately brightened further, which Mike had not thought was possible given her current level of brightness.

"You must be Mrs. Schneider!"

"I’m Haruka Kanata." She bowed down. "I’m so sorry that I’m a little late, the taxi driver took me to the wrong Harwick, and I didn’t realize until we were already there—" She was talking quickly, with a slight accent that sat somewhere between Japanese inflection and the kind of English that came from watching a lot of international media.

"I should have double-checked, but I was so excited about it that I forgot, hahaha..."

"Don’t worry, it’s no trouble at all," Petricia said, smiling genuinely. "Welcome to Erosyne."

"This is Mike, he’s in unit six, right next to yours. He offered to help you get settled."

Haruka turned to look at Mike with the focused energy of someone who was fully committing to every new experience.

"Oh! Hi!" she said. "I’m Haruka Kanata."

"It’s really nice to meet you, Mike!"

"Mike Hawk," he said. "I’ll take those."

He reached for the suitcase and the duffel bag before she could argue about it, which took approximately half a second because she immediately let go of both of them and said, "Thank you so much. I was going to drop that one because I’m starting to feel the exhaustion taking over me."

Petricia then showed her to unit five, handed over the keys, apologized briefly for having to get back for the inspector, and left them to it with the efficiency of someone managing three things simultaneously.

Mike carried the bags inside.

Unit five was a mirror of his own layout in reverse, which made sense given they were on the same floor on opposite sides of the stairwell. Haruka walked through it with the same barely-contained excitement she had brought into the lobby, stopping in the middle of the living room and turning around once with her arms slightly out at her sides.

"It’s so nice in here," she said. "I was so worried it would be smaller or maybe uncomfortable."

"Did someone tell you it would be smaller?" Mike asked, setting the bags down.

"No, but I’m just worried... and I do that a lot." She went to the window and looked out at the view, which was the same street as Mike’s balcony view but from a slightly different angle. "The light is good, and I need good light for studying."

"What are you studying?"

She turned around. "International relations and political communication."

"I’m a new college student at Valcrest." She pronounced the name of the university as if it were a place she had longed to visit. "I’ve been trying to get in for two years, and finally...! I got the acceptance letter in January, and I literally cried."

Mike raised an eyebrow. "Valcrest, huh?"

"Yes! Do you know about that university?"

"I’m starting there Monday, actually."

Haruka stared at him. Then she made a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.

"Are you serious?! That’s unbelievable! What program?"

[INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS]

"International economics."

"Oh my god," she said, with the energy of someone processing genuinely good news. "We might have some overlapping courses."

"The IR and economics programs share two modules in the first term, I saw it in the orientation documents." She paused. "I read all the orientation documents three times, and I know that’s a lot."

"It’s thorough," Mike said.

"My boyfriend says I do too much research before things and not enough during them." She said it cheerfully, without any particular weight to it. "And... he’s probably right."

Mike looked at her. "Your boyfriend?"

’Jackpot... a girlfriend who studies abroad far away from her boyfriend... a long-distance relationship.’

’Oi, oi ,oi, are you sure about this, Mr. Boyfriend...?’ Mike thought. ’To leave such a beautiful girlfriend right here all alone in this new country?’

’Don’t mind if I do then...’

"Ren." She had already started unzipping one of the bags and was pulling things out in the organized way of someone who had packed with a system. "Ren Fujiwara."

"He’s back in Japan, and sadly... he didn’t get into Valcrest even though he applied, but it’s really hard to get into from Japan, the English proficiency requirements are high... so we’re doing long distance for now."

"For how long?"

"Two years, probably. Until I finish the program." She held up a framed photo and looked around for somewhere to put it, then set it on the windowsill.

It was a photo of her and a young man at what looked like a train station, both of them squinting slightly against sunlight. "We’ve been together since high school, so two years isn’t that scary."

"We trust each other."

"That’s confident," Mike said.

’But we’ll see about that...’

"Is it?" She tilted her head at him. "I think trust is just a choice you make."

"You decide to trust someone, and then you do."

Mike looked at the photo on the windowsill. The man in it had the comfortable, unguarded smile of someone who had absolutely no idea what was happening.

"Sure," Mike said. "That’s one way to think about it."

[NEW PROFILE DETECTED: HARUKA KANATA. AGE: 22. DESIRE LEVEL: 0/100.]

[CLASSIFICATION: ADJACENT PROXIMITY TARGET. HIGH ACCESSIBILITY. LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP STATUS: CONFIRMED.]

[NOTE: YOU’RE GOING TO THE SAME UNIVERSITY ON MONDAY.]

Mike kept his expression neutral.

"Do you need help with the rest of the bags?" he asked.

"If you don’t mind," Haruka said, already handing him a box.

"And thanks for helping, Mike... I just know that you’re going to be a great neighbor~!"