He was intentionally backing me into a corner using nothing but stupid, indirect observations. If I threw the soda away now, he would continue to narrate my actions to the clouds. The most efficient way to terminate his auditory harassment was to eliminate the physical object causing it.
I tilted my head back. I raised the can.
I swallowed the dark purple liquid in four large, highly uncomfortable gulps. The heavy carbonation burned the back of my throat. The sheer volume of sugar coated my tongue. My stomach, already occupied by the water I had previously consumed, protested the sudden influx of pressurized gas.
I lowered the can. It was completely empty. I set it down on the bench with a quiet, hollow sound.
Kato looked over at the empty can. He looked at my entirely blank face.
"Hey Asakura," Kato said, pointing a lazy finger toward a crow resting on the top of the chain-link fence. "If that bird suddenly swooped down and stole your empty can, what would you do?"
My brain instantly engaged. I analyzed the payload capacity of a standard city crow. It can lift roughly three hundred grams. An empty aluminum can weighs about fifteen grams. It was aerodynamically possible.
What is the optimal response? Chase the bird? No, the caloric expenditure required to sprint across the gravel heavily outweighed the ten-yen recycling deposit. Report it to the faculty? They would likely assume I was hallucinating. The only logical choice was absolute inaction.
"I would do nothing," I replied flatly. "Burning calories just to chase a bird over a piece of trash is a complete waste of energy."
Kato slowly rubbed his temples. "You're supposed to say you'd be surprised. Or maybe take a picture. Who calculates calories for a bird stealing trash?"
I froze.
He shook his head, letting out a long sigh. "Okay, let's try a basic personality test. Just to see if you can actually function in normal society."
I braced myself. A psychological evaluation. I needed to answer perfectly to maintain my average persona.
"You are walking home in the rain," Kato said, resting his chin in his hand. "You only have one umbrella. You see a stray kitten shivering in a wet cardboard box. What do you do?"
I evaluated the trap. It was a standard empathy test. If I leave the kitten, I am labeled a psychopath. If I give my umbrella to the kitten, I expose myself to the rain. This risks a drop in core body temperature and compromised immune function. If I catch a cold, I might miss class. The school heavily penalizes absences, which would damage our Class. Therefore, sacrificing my health for a stray animal was mathematically detrimental to my survival here.
"I would walk past it," I stated with absolute certainty. "Catching a cold from standing in the freezing rain is a much bigger risk to my health than whatever happens to a stray cat."
Kato stared at me. A long, silent stare. He looked like he was witnessing a car crash in slow motion.
"You could just... pick up the box and carry it with you under the umbrella," Kato said, his voice entirely flat.
I froze again.
The third variable. I had completely failed to account for moving the box. In strict mathematical logic, you treat the given parameters of a word problem as absolute constants unless stated otherwise. The parameters were: me, the umbrella, the rain, and the box on the ground. I had treated the kitten and the cardboard box as static, immovable variables in an equation. My brain had calculated thermal dynamics and viral load, but it had entirely missed the concept of simply picking the animal up.
"You overthink things until you become stupid," Kato sighed, looking away. "It's actually kind of amazing."
The physiological heaviness settled right behind my eyes again. He had bypassed my complex ethical computation with basic, primitive common sense again.
"I never receive messages from you," Kato said. He shifted the topic with absolutely zero transition. "We exchanged contacts a while ago. Why?"
I processed the question. It was a simple inquiry regarding digital communication logs.
"I have nothing important to say," I replied truthfully.
Digital messaging exists to transfer necessary data across a distance. Meeting times. Locations. Emergency alerts. If I possess no critical data to transmit, initiating a message is a waste of network bandwidth and battery life.
Kato let out another heavy sigh. He slouched further down into the bench.
"That's why you don't have friends," he said, sounding genuinely disappointed. "Friends do talk for no logical reason. They talk about things that are not important. Like what they ate for lunch. Or a weird dog they saw on the street."
He turned his head to look directly at me.
"I can't believe how a loner you are, Asakura."
I remained silent. I stared straight ahead at the chain-link fence.
The concept of transmitting data packets containing zero actionable information is completely foreign to my operational baseline. If I see a dog on the street, the dog is a temporary environmental variable. Once I walk past the dog, it ceases to be relevant. Why would I spend the physical energy to type a description of the dog, send it through a cellular network or messaging app, and force another human being to read about a dog they cannot even see?
It is a fundamentally flawed system of resource allocation.
But attempting to explain this logic to Kato would be useless. He operates on a frequency that considers random noise to be valuable currency.
"We should go to the pool nearby during the weekend," Kato said casually. "together with the class on one weekend."
My cognitive alarm systems immediately triggered.
A pool trip.
This was a high-level threat masquerading as a leisure activity. I rapidly calculated. A class trip to a public swimming pool involves prolonged social exposure in a highly chaotic environment. It requires purchasing and wearing specific aquatic clothing.
More importantly, it presents a severe risk to my quiet life. Wearing a swimsuit requires exposing a large portion of my epidermis to unfiltered ultraviolet radiation and the chaotic, unhygienic splashing of other teenagers.
The standard school uniform provides optimal thermal regulation and physical concealment. An aquatic garment provides neither. It is a flawed piece of clothing designed strictly for societal vanity rather than practical utility. If I wear one, the other girls might attempt to initiate conversations about fabric choices or dietary habits. The resulting social friction would be catastrophic.
Furthermore, a pool environment usually involves physical games. If a ball is thrown at my face, my biological reflexes will automatically intercept it before my conscious mind can tell my body to act clumsy. The risk of exposing my actual physical capabilities is entirely unacceptable.
Kato reached into his pocket and pulled out his smartphone. The screen illuminated his face in the dim light.
"I'll tell our classmates you are coming," he said, his thumb hovering over the glass screen.
I needed to shut this down immediately.
"I can't go," I stated. I kept my voice flat, ensuring there was no room for negotiation. "I prefer staying at the dormitory on the weekend."
It was a perfectly valid, socially acceptable excuse for an introverted student. It established a boundary based on personal preference.
Kato stopped typing. He lowered the phone slightly and looked at me. His dull eyes held a strange, immovable gravity.
"That's why you have no friends," he said. "You are a loner."
I stared at him.
My logic was flawless. My excuse was sound. But he completely bypassed my firewall. He did not attempt to counter my argument with logic. Instead, he deployed the exact same insult he had used three times already.
He uses the word 'loner' as an absolute override code. To him, any rational objection I present is automatically categorized as the sad excuse of a person who does not know how to socialize. He weaponized my own unsocial lifestyle against me. If I argue back, I prove I am difficult. If I stay silent, I accept his assessment.
There is no correct defense against someone who simply ignores a rational argument.
I looked at his unblinking stare.
"Sorry for being a loner," I said.
It was a tactical surrender. I offered an apology for my optimal lifestyle to end the conversation loop.
Kato simply nodded, accepting the apology as if it were a factual admission of guilt.
He stood up from the bench and raised his phone again. His thumb pressed down firmly on the digital keyboard.
He clicked the 'SEND' button.
"Everyone is expecting you to come, Asakura," Kato said as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. "Don't make our classmates disappointed for not coming or else you'll never get any friends."
Without waiting for my response, he turned around and started walking away. His shoes dragged against the gravel, the lazy sound fading as he disappeared into the evening shadows of the dormitory path.
I sat alone on the bench.
The hum of the vending machine compressor continued to buzz in the quiet air.
I looked down at the empty purple aluminum can resting next to me. I looked at the half-finished bottle of water I had originally intended to drink. I looked at the empty path where Kato had just been standing.
My brain attempted to compile the data from the last five minutes.
I had been subjected to a highly illogical interrogation. I had consumed two hundred milliliters of unwanted, heavily carbonated synthetic sugar to stop a boy from talking to a cloud.
I had failed a basic personality test because I treated a hypothetical cat like a math constant.
I had apologized for my own perfectly efficient personality. And despite verbally refusing the invitation using a clear, absolute negative, I was now locked into a high-risk social event because he simply decided to hit send anyway.
My supposedly flawless logical reasoning and all of my high-level calculations had failed to stop a single one of his actions.
I sat in the silence of the twilight while staring blankly at the gravel.
"What just happened?"