Morning came without warmth.The rain had stopped, yet the sky still looked heavy, like a screen left on pause.Tokyo 2040 had perfected that feeling—always moving, yet somehow empty.
Ren Ishikawa walked down the glass hallway of the Behavioral Crime Division. His reflection trailed beside him in every panel, tall, neat, distant.He carried coffee in one hand, case tablet in the other, a man who looked like he belonged nowhere in particular.
Inside, officers moved with practiced energy. Holographic boards flickered with new cases: financial fraud, emotional data leaks, neural-sync accidents.Ren ignored them all. He was here for something different—the case from last night.
Briefing
Detective Arisa Kondo waited in the small meeting room, her hair tied back, jacket still damp from the rain.On the digital screen floated a clean 3-D projection of the victim—Aya Morimoto, age 26.The model rotated slowly, skin translucent to show internal readouts: no wounds, no bruises, just a faint red glow around the brainstem where the implant had short-circuited.
"Autopsy came in an hour ago," Arisa said, tapping the display."No drugs. No sign of struggle. Her MoodSync overloaded itself. The system registered extreme empathy spikes—off the chart."
Ren took a slow sip of coffee."Empathy spikes?"
"Yeah." Arisa scrolled through the data. "She somehow felt everything. Every emotion around her. Coworkers, neighbors, maybe even the city feed. It flooded her nervous system."
Ren's eyes narrowed slightly."She drowned," he said, "not in water, but in other people."
Arisa frowned. "So you're saying the implant malfunctioned?"
Ren placed his cup down. "Not a malfunction. A design correction. Someone changed her parameters intentionally."
He leaned closer to the screen. Aya's face was peaceful, almost beautiful, like she'd fallen asleep after seeing something unbearable.
A death from too much feeling.The most human kind of tragedy.
Arisa crossed her arms. "You talk like you knew her."
"I don't," Ren replied. "But I've met her kind. People who mistake empathy for connection."
She tilted her head. "And what's the difference?"
"Empathy is wanting to understand," he said softly."Connection is being understood. Only one of those can destroy you."
The Apartment
A few hours later, Ren stood again in Aya Morimoto's apartment.The police tape had been peeled back for authorized access.Outside, the city was loud—drones, traffic, voices—but in here, silence ruled.
The room was neat in that lonely way single apartments often are. One cup on the counter, one towel by the sink, one pillow on the bed.He looked around, tracing her life through the small details: half-read books, a mug stained with cold coffee, and a wall of digital post-its glowing pale blue.
On the desk lay her data tablet. Ren powered it on.Message threads opened like small windows into her mind.
Hundreds of texts:"Are you okay?""Lunch later?""You've been quiet lately."
All unanswered.
Then, buried near the bottom of her drafts folder, he found one unsent message:
"Do you ever feel like you're drowning in other people's feelings?"
Ren stared at it for a long time.Something inside him shifted—faint, familiar, like a memory scratching the surface.
The wording. The tone. The exhaustion behind the politeness.He had read something like this before.Not in a report… in a poem.
Do you ever feel too much, Ren?—Miyu.
The name echoed from another lifetime.
Flashback I — The Girl Who Asked Why
Tokyo, 2029.A quiet hallway at Ishikawa Private High.Fluorescent lights buzzed softly; the smell of chalk and disinfectant hung in the air.
Seventeen-year-old Ren walked down the corridor, eyes on the floor, shoes whispering against the tiles.He didn't try to be invisible. It just happened naturally—like the air curved away from him.
From behind came a gentle voice."Hey, Ishikawa. You dropped this."
He turned.Miyu Takahashi stood there, holding a black notebook—the cover slightly burned at the corner.Ren's breath caught.
"You… read it?" he asked quietly.
She smiled, not mocking—just curious. "Only a little. It's poetry, isn't it?"
He reached for it, too quickly. "They're notes. For class."
"They don't sound like math notes."Her tone was light, but her eyes were serious."'Even silence has a temperature.' That's beautiful."
Ren looked away. "It's meaningless."
"Then why hide it?"
He had no answer.When she handed the notebook back, her fingers brushed his for a second—warm, normal, human.It startled him more than he expected.
Later that day, when he opened the notebook at his desk, a small sticky note fluttered out.It said, in neat handwriting:
'If you ever need someone to listen, I'm not afraid of ghosts.'
Ren stared at it until the bell rang.He didn't smile. But the world felt… louder.
Back to Now
The hum of Aya Morimoto's apartment returned.Ren blinked once, pulling himself from the memory.
He copied the unsent message to his tablet.A search revealed the sender's online alias: @Eidolon.
Ren's heartbeat skipped.That name—he knew it.It was the username of the anonymous friend who had once replied to every one of Nocturne's poems.His only true confidant during those hollow high-school years.
"Impossible," he whispered.
The system flagged another clue: Aya's MoodSync firmware had been accessed remotely, only hours before her death—from a masked account titled Eidolon-root.
Ren stared at the reflection of the monitor in the shattered mirror on the desk.His own eyes looked back at him—calm, but darker now, as if an old shadow had woken.
The Discussion
Back at headquarters, Arisa caught him by the elevator."Got something?"
"Maybe," Ren said. "Her system was modified. Not by a hacker, by someone she trusted."
"So it's personal?"
"Always is."
They rode up in silence. The elevator walls were polished enough to reflect them both—two figures, similar posture, opposite light.
Arisa finally said, "You sound bothered."
Ren's gaze stayed on the numbers climbing."I don't like mirrors," he murmured."They lie differently than people do."
She half-smiled. "And people?"
"They tell the truth when they're afraid."
Arisa exhaled. "You make empathy sound like a weapon."
Ren looked at her then, eyes steady."It is. The sharpest one we have."
The doors opened with a soft chime.
The Realization
In his office, Ren sat at his desk, surrounded by half-lit screens showing fragments of Aya's emotional data.Each color pulse represented one heartbeat, one surge of feeling.He watched the patterns loop—calm → panic → calm → panic—until the line went flat.
A cycle of self-correction.Like a human pretending everything's fine until the mind gives up.
Ren closed his eyes briefly. He remembered his classmates, the rumors, the teacher who told him he was "strong enough."He wondered if Aya had ever been told the same lie.
He opened his eyes again."Empathy overload," he said under his breath. "Someone forced her to relive the pain of others. Like a mirror reflecting too much light."
He pulled on his gloves—smooth, dark, spotless.When he spoke again, his voice was colder.
"Whoever did this," he said, "isn't killing for pleasure. They're making statements."
Arisa's voice came through the comms. "Statements?"
Ren looked at the mirror on his wall—his reflection split into pale shards by the city's neon.
"Yes," he said. "They're painting emotions. One corpse at a time."
Closing Scene
Night settled again over Tokyo, the city lights breathing like slow heartbeats.Ren stood on his balcony, coffee steaming in the chill air.Somewhere far below, sirens wailed—familiar, almost comforting.
He took out his old, cracked phone. The screen saver still bore a single folder: Nocturne.Inside were old poems, locked files, fragments of a boy who had wanted to disappear.
He opened one at random. The text scrolled up, a message written to someone named Eidolon:
"You said empathy connects us. I think it erases us."
Ren closed the file and whispered into the night,"Looks like we're meeting again."
The city's light fractured across his face like a broken mirror.And somewhere inside that reflection, the shadow of a seventeen-year-old boy smiled.
End of Chapter 1 — The Mirror Girl