Toro Tokuda

# The beginning of an overly-ambitious world, circa 2019. I would love to return to 76-J at some point. It is called that simply because I did not have any sort of name for it, and I still do not.
# This Razor is wholly unrelated to the one present in other manuscripts. I guess I just like the name.

Razor sat back in his chair, balancing it on its hind two legs. A pen twirled through long and slender fingers, picking up the light from the library in which he sat. His boots were on the desk in front of him, as well as a number of datapads and one good old fashioned regular paper pad, but his eyes and attention weren’t on his work. He was focused on a woman that he could see through the stacks, sitting at her own little desk, talking into her recorder as she went through her notes.

‘So the Great War and the War to End All Wars were the same until the dissolution of Germany’s holdings in ’45…’ she trailed off languidly, biting at her stylo before it tapped loudly against the tabletop. He had seen her before, and often in their university’s library, but she wasn’t in any of his own courses. Her skin had a pallor that told him she spent too much time indoors, her hair the drab dull of not being properly cared for with the stress of a scholar’s life, her glasses sliding down her nose that were corrected with a push from her stylo and a wry noise. Her other hand held her recorder, and she pressed the button again, eyes up on the tiled ceiling as she thought. ‘School children are taught little to nothing about what really happened at the end of the second world war, and less still about Germany, even thirty years later. So many of their families are refugees that NAS took in, and yet they are denied even their own heritage, supplied with technology and mobile devices instead to supplicate them, appease them as Hitler couldn’t be.’

‘Maybe their parents prefer it that way,’ Razor noted, just loud enough for her to hear. Her thumb released the recording button and looked over at him with a wild look that said ‘I had no idea anyone could hear me.’

‘What?’

‘Everything that is German is taboo and shunned now, right? Surnames changed, our primary and secondary schools had their grades changes to forms, and you can’t find a damn bratwurst to save your life. Protestant Christians no longer acknowledge their beginnings, and I still see both women and men dying their hair from blonde to a darker shade. Those are things their parents had to go through, the same parents that are trying to protect their children, giving them good French or Spanish names now, aye?’ She nodded an agreement. ‘Let Germany fade from memory and maybe their crimes against humanity and hornchins alike will fade as well.’

She turned in her chair so her legs were to the side, revealing sweatpants with stains and bare feet on the dirty library carpet. ‘That’s not the goal of a good historian, or a scholar for that matter. We should be looking to preserve this part of our history, of Germany’s and the EU’s history, no matter what semblance of peace we have right now.’

‘The peace is an illusion,’ he returned smoothly, hands out to demonstrate a smooth arm of a wall protecting the naïve public from the truth. ‘There is no peace, and there hasn’t been. The UN is corrupt, the NAS and the EU are corrupt, and the rest of the world is falling to pieces alongside them. When’s the last time you heard news about the USSR?’

Her eyes widened. ‘I… don’t know. I follow a few photography accounts based out of there…’ She trailed off, glancing at her comm before looking back at him. ‘So… you’re saying that the public is being fed lies.’

‘The people in masses are primed to believe in whatever bullshit the people in charge deem to feed them. People are stupid. You study history, you should know this by now.’

‘By all accounts, the leaders in Germany weren’t stupid, but actually rather tactically sound—‘

‘You’re thinking individually,’ he cut in, pen up to bite at the end briefly before it was back out. ‘Get someone alone or in a small group and you can generally prove they’re not idiots, able to see reason, that sort of thing. But you get a large group, say a mass of voters, you feed them some propaganda nonsense and most won’t even question it. “It’s on a poster, so it must be real!” Absolute idiots. Throw a familiar face up on one of those billboards winking at passerbys and asking them to vote for So and So, and they will.’

‘You don’t have a very high opinion of people, do you?’

‘Not really, no,’ he admitted with a shrug, free hand up through brown hair to sweep it away from his face and eyes. ‘But back to your original point, and mine, that’s the generations that came before trying to protect the generations growing up now, me and you included.’

‘But when they learn the truth, won’t it shock them?’

‘Only some of them ever will, and it’ll be because they went looking for it.’

She fixed him with a look through her glasses that showed her disbelief. ‘Where’d you learn all this, anyway?’

‘Research, friends, colleagues. It’s not difficult to come by if one only knows where to look.’ His stoic look finally broke into a crack of a smile, and his easiness returned. ‘Don’t let me keep you from such noble work.’

‘Don’t be so ridiculous. I’ve learned more just from talking to you than I have in two years at this ruddy place.’ She scooped up her datapad and comm and walked through the stacks carrying her shoes in her other hand to sit on the desk beside him. Neither one spoke, but she looked over his desk top with an interested eye. ‘Working on something noble yourself?’

‘Hardly, just some shit for a 200 class.’

‘So you have time, then,’ she reasoned, eyes returning to his. They were brown, a good, strong colour, not unlike his own.

‘You have more questions, do you?’ Razor wondered in an amused way. ‘All right then, shoot.’

‘Okay, well, what about Japan?’ It was a hoarse whisper, as if what they had been talking about before hadn’t been heretical enough. He glanced around their area just to be sure they were alone before his eyes were back on her, his boots dropping to the floor with a quiet thud.

‘What about them?’

‘Everything.’

He shook his head before running a hand through his hair. ‘Like our alliance with the PRC isn’t shaky enough,’ he breathed before he looked back up at her. ‘During the war, we did exactly the same thing as Hitler was doing to the hornchins and anyone else he didn’t like, right? We rounded up anyone with Japanese heritage and put them in concentration camps. We were the loudest voice on the council, right there next to China, when the world was deciding what to do with Japan. We were both holding grudges, with due cause.’

‘But we dropped the bombs,’ she whispered, and he nodded. ‘Wasn’t that punishment enough?’

‘We thought that the sanctions after the Great War were enough for Germany, too. No one wanted to take that risk again. But Japan still exists, in some form, unlike Germany. They’re just owned by the PRC, and quite harshly, if the re— stories I’ve heard are to be believed.’

‘We never hear anything about Japan,’ she murmured, and he nodded. ‘What’s going on there?’

He turned in his chair, again checking that they were alone before he came to sit on his desk, datapads out of the way so his tone would be even lower, a small partition between them but little else. ‘Look, it’s bad. The governments will try to play it off like it’s not— that great PRC healthcare, right, all those factories, the shows and entertainment— but Japan is up to her teeth in military. There’s strict order, the children apprenticed or shipped off to military schools, marriages arranged, a public hanging square, and those that try to escape—‘ he cut off with a shake of his head, looking down the nearest row of books to the far wall. ‘And that’s just what’s reached me. Who knows what is really happening being their closed borders.’

She pushed up her glasses again before biting at her thumb, clearly thinking hard about this new world she was being introduced to. ‘So… why do the other powers allow it to happen?’

‘You think they’re just turning a blind eye?’ She nodded smally. ‘You’re right. We look away from what the PRC is doing in Japan, they look away from the way the EU is still fighting over the Middle East and large swaths of Africa, away from the USSR’s disputes over their borders with both bordering alliances and India, they all look away from the NAS eyeing South America. On the surface, sure, absolutely, we’re all working together, utilising the sciences to cure new diseases, logging a hundred new species of flora and fauna a week, solving the world’s issues one step at a time— but that’s just on the surface. How long until the tension breaks and the public perception sees down into the depths?’