NULL PROJECT
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Wasn't There
There is a specific kind of invisibility that has nothing to do with being unseen.
Reo Tanaka was visible. Teachers called his name during roll call. Hallway cameras would have caught his face if anyone had bothered to check. He occupied physical space, cast a shadow, breathed the same recycled school air as everyone else.
But invisible is the only word for what he was.
It wasn't dramatic. Nobody bullied him in the cinematic sense — no shoved lunches, no cruel nicknames screamed across hallways. That would have required someone to care enough. What Reo experienced was something quieter and in many ways worse: he simply did not register. He was background. Furniture. The kind of person your eyes slide off of without your brain filing a report.
He had learned to prefer it that way.
Kanemori High School smelled like floor wax and cafeteria rice, and on Tuesdays it smelled like floor wax, cafeteria rice, and Daisuke Mori's cologne — which Daisuke applied with the confidence of someone who had never once been told he was wrong about anything.
Reo was sitting in his usual seat — third row, second from the window, the chair with the wobbly left leg that nobody else wanted — when Daisuke's bag swung off his shoulder and caught Reo's notebook, sending it skidding off the desk.
Daisuke didn't stop walking.
Didn't look back.
The notebook hit the floor and splayed open to a page of margin calculations Reo had done during yesterday's economics lecture — not the assigned problems, but a separate set he'd constructed himself after the teacher's example had struck him as inefficient. Three different approaches to the same problem. The third one was significantly cleaner than the textbook method.
Kenji Ota, passing by, glanced down at the open notebook.
"What's all that?" he said, not unkindly, the way someone might ask what a strange insect was doing on the pavement.
"Nothing," Reo said, picking it up.
Kenji moved on.
Reo closed the notebook and slid it into his bag — the one with the fraying strap he'd reinforced with a strip of packing tape last month. The tape was starting to peel again. He pressed it back down with his thumb and turned to face the front of the class.
The teacher was writing something on the board.
Reo already knew the answer to whatever question was coming. He kept his hand down.
His uniform told a story he had no interest in narrating.
The jacket was two sizes slightly wrong — not enough to look costume-like, just enough to look like it had been bought for someone else or a different version of himself. The collar had been washed so many times the fabric had gone thin and slightly translucent at the fold. His shoes were clean. He was meticulous about his shoes because shoes were the one thing you couldn't explain away — dirty shoes meant something specific to people who looked for things to mean something. So he cleaned them every morning with a rag and whatever was left of the polish tin, which was almost nothing.
The rest he couldn't fix.
The uniform had been his father's school jacket, altered badly. The shirt beneath was clean but the cuffs were fraying in a way that no amount of folding could fully conceal. He had one pair of school trousers. He washed them every other night and laid them flat to dry by morning.
Nobody said anything about this directly.
But during group project selections, when students were allowed to choose their own partners, Reo was always chosen last. Not with cruelty. With the mild inconvenience of someone picking up a grocery item they didn't particularly want but needed to complete the set.
He had stopped finding this interesting by the end of first year.
Lunch was a calculation he performed every morning before leaving the apartment.
Today's calculation: ¥0 remaining in the tin on the second shelf. Rice at home, already cooked, already eaten. Vending machine coffee was ¥120 and he did not have ¥120. The school cafeteria sold a small bread roll for ¥80 and he did not have ¥80 either.
He sat at the end of a long bench near the window — alone, which was fine, which was preferable — and drank water from the fountain he'd filled his bottle at before class. Around him, the cafeteria moved in its loud, warm, social ecosystem. Groups laughing. Someone sharing chips from a bag that got passed around a table like a ritual. The smell of tonkatsu from the hot food line.
Reo watched the window.
Outside, a crow was sitting on the school gate, doing nothing in particular.
Reasonable, Reo thought. Same energy.
His stomach made a small, private complaint. He ignored it with the practiced ease of someone who had been ignoring it for a long time.
There was a moment, halfway through afternoon chemistry, when Reo almost raised his hand.
The teacher — Mr. Adachi, mid-fifties, perpetually tired, a man who taught chemistry the way one might describe a long commute — had posed a problem to the class. A reaction sequence. He'd made an error in the second step, a small one, the kind that would cascade incorrectly through everything that followed.
Three students attempted answers. All three built on the flawed second step without noticing it. Adachi nodded vaguely at each of them.
Reo's pen tapped once against his notebook.
He saw the correction clearly. It wasn't even complicated — a misapplied stoichiometric ratio, easily fixed, the kind of thing that once you saw you couldn't un-see. If he raised his hand, the problem would take forty seconds to explain. The class would move forward correctly. Adachi might even appreciate it.
He imagined raising his hand.
The small pause. The heads turning. The particular quality of attention from thirty-odd students who had never needed to actually look at him. Kenji Ota's face reconfiguring from mild boredom into something sharper. Daisuke noticing, perhaps for the first time, that Reo Tanaka existed and apparently knew something.
And then — inevitably — the recalibration. The way people respond to a variable that suddenly behaves differently than expected. The questions. The attention. The social weight of being seen that would follow him for weeks like a debt he hadn't agreed to take on.
He set his pen down.
The class ended with the error intact. Three students would write it incorrectly on their next assignment. Adachi would mark them wrong without remembering he'd led them there.
Reo packed his bag and left.
The walk home from Kanemori High was forty minutes on foot.
He could have taken the bus. The bus cost ¥210 and he walked.
The route took him through the older part of the district, past the hardware shop that had been closing for approximately three years without ever fully closing, past the laundromat where the third machine from the left was broken and had been broken since winter, past the narrow alley where someone had installed a community plant shelf that Reo privately thought was the most optimistic thing in a three-kilometer radius.
He took the route that passed the job board outside the ward office. He checked it every day. Today it offered: a pachinko parlor cleaning position requiring proof of age eighteen or above, a warehouse loading shift for the same, and a survey completion study paying ¥800 for ninety minutes that had almost certainly already been filled.
He noted this, filed it, and kept walking.
He heard his mother before he opened the door.
Not the cough itself — she tried to suppress it when she heard his key in the lock, he knew this, had known it for months, the way the sound would cut off right at the moment it should have continued. But he was seventeen and he had been listening for this specific sound since he was fourteen, and the sudden silence was as loud as the cough would have been.
He opened the door.
Natsuki Tanaka was sitting at the low table near the window, both hands wrapped around a cup of tea that had probably gone cold, her back carefully straight in the way she held herself when she was trying to look fine. She was forty-one. In certain lights, when she was not tired, she looked younger. Today she did not look younger.
"You're home early," she said.
"Same time as always," Reo said, setting his bag by the door.
He crossed to the kitchen, filled the kettle, noted the near-empty state of the rice bag on the counter. Less than two days left. He filed this.
"How was school?"
"Fine."
He brought her a fresh cup of tea — the tea was low too, he noted, they were using the same bags twice now — and sat across from her. The apartment was small enough that there was never far to go.
She looked at him with the particular expression she wore when she was deciding how honest to be.
He waited.
The cough came anyway — not the suppressed version but the real one, sudden and wrenching, the kind that bent her forward over the table. She pressed her sleeve to her mouth. Reo was already up, hand on her back, the automatic response of someone who had performed this motion enough times that his body had filed it under reflex.
When it passed, she sat back slowly.
He looked at her face.
He was good at reading faces — he'd had a lot of practice with no one noticing he was doing it — and what he read in his mother's face right now he did not like. It wasn't just the exhaustion. He had catalogued her exhaustion for two years and built a baseline. This was something past the baseline. Something that had moved, quietly, while he wasn't looking.
"The symptoms are back," he said. Not a question.
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, something — a car, a bicycle bell, ordinary life — passed by the window.
"I'm not sure," she said carefully, "how much longer I can manage, Reo."
The sentence landed in the room and stayed there.
He did not look away from her face. He did not let his expression shift into something she would need to manage on top of everything else. He had learned this too — how to receive bad news the way a wall receives it, absorbing rather than reflecting, so the person delivering it didn't have to watch their own words hit something.
"I'll get the money," he said.
"Reo—"
"The medication. I'll get it."
She looked at him with something that lived in the space between love and exhaustion. "You're seventeen."
"Almost eighteen."
"That's not—" She stopped. Tried again. "I don't want you spending what you have left chasing after what I need. Your father would have—"
"Dad isn't here," Reo said, quietly, without bitterness, the way you state coordinates rather than an argument.
The silence after that was not unkind. They had learned to share this particular silence well. It was the silence shaped around his father's name, the space where Kenji Tanaka used to exist before he didn't, before the hospital bills started arriving in his place like correspondence from a country that had swallowed him whole.
His mother reached across the table and put her hand over his. Her hand was thinner than it used to be.
"Think of yourself first," she said. "For once. Please."
He looked at her hand on his.
"I'll be back before dark," he said.
Outside, the evening was beginning its slow negotiation with the remaining daylight — that particular hour where everything goes slightly gold and slightly grey at the same time, which Reo had always thought was the most honest time of day, not pretending to be more beautiful than it was.
He walked with purpose he didn't quite have yet, moving on the assumption that purpose would present itself. It was a strategy that had mixed results.
The ward office job board: checked. Already updated from this afternoon — two new listings, both requiring eighteen and above. He noted this with the flat acceptance of someone who had stopped being surprised by closed doors.
He turned down the next street.
He needed something he could do at seventeen with no certification, no referral, and no uniform that would survive close inspection. Convenience store restocking — some places hired at seventeen. He had tried three. All three had looked at him with the careful neutrality of people performing a kindness by not saying the real reason. He suspected the uniform. He suspected the address. The ward he lived in had a certain postal code that carried a certain weight in certain conversations.
He was mid-thought, calculating distances to the next cluster of shops, when the poster stopped him.
Not because he was looking for it.
Because it was large.
It was affixed to the side of a building he passed every day — the long concrete wall beside the shuttered photo studio — and it had not been there this morning. He was certain of this because he inventoried this route the way some people inventory breathing, automatically and without deciding to.
Someone had put it up today.
It was professionally printed — not the pixelated community notice board variety, but something with weight and intention. A dark background. Clean design. White text. The kind of poster that said: whoever made this had a budget.
NULL PROJECT
A fully funded closed-environment research study.
Compensation: ¥2,000,000 upon completion.
Meals, accommodation, and all necessities provided for the duration.
Ages 16–20. No experience required. No academic qualification required.
Limited participation slots available.
Interested parties report to: Kanemori District Processing Center, Building 9, before 18:00 this Friday.
Below this, in smaller text:
All participants will be required to sign a standard non-disclosure and liability waiver upon registration. Terms and conditions apply.
Reo stood in front of it.
¥2,000,000.
He did the calculation without meaning to, the way his brain processed numbers — immediately and without ceremony. His mother's medication course: ¥340,000 for three months. Rent: two months behind, approximately ¥160,000. Rice, utilities, the fraying ordinary cost of staying alive: call it ¥80,000 over the same period.
¥2,000,000 was not just enough.
¥2,000,000 was the kind of number that changed what the next year looked like. Changed what the year after looked like. Was the kind of number his father had spent his last years trying to reach from the wrong side.
He read the poster again. Then a third time.
No experience required. No academic qualification required.
A research study. Closed environment — meaning residential, meaning they fed you for the duration. He would not have to worry about the rice bag. He would not have to calculate bus fare.
He photographed the poster with his phone — the cracked-screen phone, the one he kept functional through a combination of a ¥300 screen protector and daily careful handling — and kept walking.
His brain was already working.
His mother was still at the table when he came back. She had moved to the window. The tea was definitely cold now. She was watching the street below with the distant expression of someone watching weather.
He sat down across from her and showed her the phone.
She read it. Read it again.
"Reo."
"It covers everything. Three times over."
"It says closed environment."
"Research study. Probably a behavioral study, observation-based. The university programs do these."
She looked at him. "You don't know that."
"I don't know it isn't."
"That's not—" She pressed her lips together. "¥2,000,000 is not a normal research study payment."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
She handed the phone back. The expression on her face was the one she used when she had already lost an argument she hadn't started yet and was deciding whether to start it anyway.
"How long?" she said.
"It doesn't specify duration on the poster."
"Reo."
"I'll find out Friday," he said. "If it's wrong, I'll come home. If it's right—" He stopped. Looked at his hands on the table — the dry knuckles, the callous on his right index finger from the pen, the same hands that had been doing calculations in notebook margins for three years to no particular end. "If it's right, we don't have to do this anymore."
The this covered a lot of ground. They both knew which ground.
His mother was quiet for a long time.
Outside, the street was doing its ordinary things.
"Come home," she said finally. "Whatever it is. You come home."
"I will."
She looked at him with the expression that had no name he'd found yet — the one that was love and terror and helplessness and something fiercer than all three combined, the look of a person watching someone they made walk toward something they cannot follow them into.
"Promise me," she said.
He held her gaze.
"I promise," said Reo Tanaka.
He was seventeen years old. He did not know yet what he was promising.
Friday.
The Kanemori District Processing Center was not what he had expected, which itself told him something.
He had expected a university outpost. An administrative annex. Something institutional in the mild, bureaucratic sense — fluorescent lights, a bored clerk, a clipboard.
Building 9 was none of these things.
It was a registration facility that had been constructed recently — he could tell by the concrete smell, the newness of the fixtures, the way the staff moved with the precision of people who had rehearsed this exact scenario rather than grown into it organically. There were twelve registration desks. All occupied. All processing.
And there were people. More than he had expected.
Students, mostly — he could tell by age, by the particular way they held themselves, the mix of nervous energy and performed nonchalance that was the universal register of seventeen-to-twenty-year-olds trying to look like they had not done something impulsive. Some came in groups of two or three. Most, like Reo, came alone.
He took a number. He waited. When his number was called, he sat across from a woman in a grey uniform who had the carefully neutral expression of someone trained to have it.
She asked his name. His age. His emergency contact — he gave his mother's name and felt something move in his chest that he elected not to examine.
She slid a document across the desk.
It was long. Longer than he'd expected. Printed in a font sized to technically qualify as readable while discouraging thorough reading. He read it thoroughly. It took eleven minutes. The woman across from him waited with the patience of someone who had watched many people not read this document and did not care either way.
The key terms, as he parsed them:
Closed-environment behavioral study. Duration unspecified, subject to research completion. All necessities provided. Compensation as advertised, payable upon study conclusion. Participant acknowledges voluntary enrollment and waives standard liability claims for the duration of the study period. Participant agrees to comply with all facility directives for the duration.
All directives.
He looked up at the woman. "Duration unspecified," he said. "Can you define the expected range?"
"The study concludes when its parameters are met," she said. "Compensation is guaranteed upon conclusion regardless of timeline."
"And the facility directives — what do those typically include?"
"All information relevant to your participation will be provided upon entry."
He looked back at the document.
¥2,000,000. His mother's medication. The rice bag. The bus fare he'd been walking past for two years.
He picked up the pen.
He signed.
They were taken by bus.
Not a school bus — a chartered vehicle, windows tinted, seats clean. About forty people boarded at the Kanemori center. The driver said nothing. The staff member accompanying them said nothing beyond: please keep your belongings secured and remain seated for the duration of transit.
The duration of transit was one hour and forty minutes.
Reo spent it watching the city recede through the tinted window. First the familiar density of his district — the laundromat, the ward office, the concrete wall where the poster had been, which he noticed as they passed was already gone. Then the city proper, thinning at its edges into the peripheral zones he'd never had reason to visit — industrial blocks, storage facilities, the long stretches of highway infrastructure that cities built away from themselves so they wouldn't have to look at them.
Then nothing familiar at all.
The facility appeared at the end of a road that wasn't on the maps he'd checked on his phone before departure — a long access road, recently paved, leading to a complex that was massive in the way that only became apparent slowly, the way large things reveal their scale when you're already inside their shadow.
Concrete. Steel. High walls. No windows on the exterior that he could see. Lights along the perimeter that had the particular quality of security lighting rather than architectural lighting.
Closed environment, the poster had said.
He understood now, viscerally and without ambiguity, what that had meant.
The processing hall inside was vast.
Two hundred people — he counted, because counting was automatic — filtered in through a series of internal checkpoints, phones collected at the second checkpoint by staff who offered numbered receipts in exchange with the cheerful efficiency of coat check attendants. Reo surrendered his cracked-screen phone and received ticket number 094.
He kept moving.
The hall opened into what could only be described as a compound interior — multiple levels visible above, corridors branching in several directions, the architecture of a place designed to contain rather than to welcome. The ceiling was high enough to create its own quality of air. Everywhere: concrete, steel, the hum of industrial ventilation. Everywhere: fluorescent light that left no shadows and offered no warmth.
And people. Two hundred of them, milling, talking, some photographing the space before remembering their phones were gone, a few already forming the early social clusters that humans build on instinct when placed in unfamiliar environments.
Reo stood apart from the clusters and observed.
Age range: predominantly sixteen to twenty as advertised, with a few who seemed older, though not significantly. Economic indicators, visible in the same grammar he'd spent years reading in his own reflection: a significant portion of this group had come for the same reason he had. Worn shoes cleaned carefully. Jackets that fit almost right. The particular posture of people accustomed to being somewhere they weren't sure they were supposed to be.
This was not a group of people who had come out of curiosity.
This was a group of people who had needed ¥2,000,000.
He was still processing this when the doors closed.
Not the gradual, administrative close of doors at the end of a normal procedure. These doors — the large, reinforced entry doors through which the last of the participants had just passed — closed with a mechanical finality that silenced the room by about forty percent before the sound of the lock engaging silenced it by the remaining sixty.
The silence lasted approximately three seconds.
Then the noise began — not panic, not yet, but the immediate human response to a sound that doesn't belong, the sound of two hundred people turning toward the same door at the same moment, the sound of someone near the front saying hey in the particular tone of someone who has just noticed something they need explained immediately.
Reo did not move toward the door.
He turned instead toward the center of the room. Toward the large screens mounted high on the walls — four of them, positioned at each cardinal point, currently dark — and waited.
He was not sure why he was certain the screens were about to activate.
They activated.
The voice was synthetic but well-designed — not the uncanny flatness of cheap text-to-speech, but something smoother, almost human, calibrated to a register that was calm without being warm, informative without being kind. The voice of something that wanted to be understood but had no interest in being liked.
The screens showed text as the voice spoke. White letters on black background. Clean. Clinical.
"Welcome to Null Project. You are registered participants in a closed-environment behavioral study. Your registration is confirmed and binding. Please direct your attention to the following operational parameters."
The crowd noise was dropping fast now — not because people had calmed down, but because the voice had the specific quality of something you needed to hear all of, the way your body understands certain sounds as important before your brain has processed why.
"Parameter One. This facility is sealed. Entry and exit are controlled exclusively by the study system. No external communication is available for the duration of the study."
Someone near the doors started pulling at the handles. The handles did not move.
"Parameter Two. Sustenance and resources are available within the facility through designated scavenging and supply zones. Participants are responsible for their own resource acquisition."
Scavenging. The word dropped into the room like a stone into still water, rippling outward through two hundred faces.
"Parameter Three. The study requires a minimum elimination threshold of three participants per twenty-four hour cycle. Elimination is conducted by designated Killer participants. The Killer designation has been assigned. Killers are aware of their designation."
The ripple became a wave. Someone screamed — short, sharp, immediately choked back. A cluster near the left wall began pushing toward the sealed doors again, a surge of bodies against something that was not going to open.
Reo stood still.
Killers. Elimination threshold. Three per day.
His brain ran the numbers before he could stop it. Three per day. Two hundred participants. The math described an arc — a descending curve toward a number he had not yet been given but already understood was coming.
"Parameter Four. Three Killers are active. Two Detectives have been designated and are aware of their designation. Detective participants are tasked with identifying and formally accusing Killer participants. A correct accusation results in Killer elimination. An incorrect accusation results in Detective elimination."
"Parameter Five. If the surviving participant count falls below twenty-five, all non-Killer participants are eliminated. The study concludes."
"Parameter Six. All additional rules will be communicated as they become relevant."
The screens held for a moment. Two hundred people and the sound of the ventilation system and nothing else.
Then:
"The study has begun. Good luck."
The screens went dark.
For exactly four seconds, the room was completely silent.
Then two hundred people remembered how to be afraid, and the room became everything at once — screaming, surging, the crash of someone falling, the sound of fists on sealed doors, voices climbing over each other in the specific register of people who have just understood that the situation they are in is not a situation that is going to be explained away.
Reo stood in the center of it and did not move.
In his right ear — so small, so precisely placed that he had not noticed it during processing — a tiny speaker activated. A different voice this time. Still synthetic, but quieter. Designed for one listener.
"Participant 094. You have been designated: Killer. Your elimination tool has been secured in locker 094-K, corridor seven, sublevel one. Daily threshold contribution is tracked individually. You will be notified of your standing each cycle."
A pause.
"Welcome to Null Project, Reo."
Around him, two hundred people were falling apart.
Reo Tanaka stood in the eye of it — the boy who had spent three years learning to be invisible, the boy who had cleaned his shoes every morning and kept his hand down in chemistry class, the boy who was almost eighteen and had promised his mother he would come home —
— and for the first time in a very long time, he felt something clarify inside him. Not calm, exactly. Something colder than calm. Something that had been waiting in the margin of himself, patient and unnoticed, for a situation that finally matched its shape.
He looked at the screaming room.
He began to observe.
End of Chapter 1.