The Universe And Me

When I looked up at the sky, the Milky Way shone brightly, a sight impossible to see in the city. Having retired from my government job at fifty-five to enjoy a leisurely life, I had come alone to a campground in Yamanashi Prefecture.

“All alone in the world, huh?”

I was born in Kansai and moved to Kanto with my parents when I was twelve. I studied international politics at university before choosing a career as a civil servant.

I was still single and lived alone. For as long as I could remember, I had gone through life feeling that something was wrong with the world around me. I felt as though this wasn’t the world where I belonged. Perhaps because of that, I had made very few friends and spent much of my life alone.

However, ever since I began enjoying my retirement, I had started thinking about trying different things to make the most of my life. This camping trip was one of them.

The campground was tucked away in a forest near a river, a hidden gem where visitors could enjoy both fishing and camping. I pitched my tent in a clearing among the trees, boiled some water over a campfire, and began preparing dinner.

Not to toot my own horn, but since I worked out at the gym twice a week, I looked pretty good in places like this. At around 180 centimeters tall, with reasonably handsome features, I probably looked like a distinguished older gentleman enjoying a camping trip.

As the sun sank behind the western mountains and darkness settled over the surroundings, even the cicadas fell silent. I dropped some instant noodles into a pot of boiling water and started timing them.

The instant noodles I was preparing were a deluxe version, enhanced with chicken stock powder, kelp-based noodle broth, cabbage, green onions, marinated boiled eggs, and slices of roasted pork. After enjoying my finished ramen, I began stargazing.

It wasn’t anything particularly sophisticated. I simply used binoculars to observe the Milky Way, constellations, the moon, and other celestial sights. Sitting in a folding chair, I gazed up at the Milky Way.

Moments like these made me feel as though time had slowed down, allowing me to relax. While I was searching for Deneb, the first-magnitude star in the constellation Cygnus, the starry sky suddenly warped for an instant.

“Hm? What was that just now?”

I tilted my head and examined the night sky again. It looked perfectly normal. Nothing seemed out of place.

“Come to think of it, I saw some strange news online.”

It was a report about an increasing number of missing persons. Apparently, people who had been alone in natural surroundings were disappearing as though someone had abducted them. Wild speculation that aliens were responsible had been spreading across the internet.

Missing persons weren’t particularly unusual these days, but these cases apparently had one thing in common: they occurred in secluded places with few witnesses, such as campgrounds. Another common factor was that the victims had disappeared on nights when the stars were particularly beautiful.

There were apparently rumors that aliens were responsible, but… honestly, I had to wonder whether the people spreading them were even sane. Chuckling at the thought, I returned my gaze to the stars. Just then, I heard a distant mechanical humming sound, something like a vwoooom. As I wondered what it was, another vwoooom reached my ears.

The sound seemed to be getting gradually closer, making me uneasy. When it grew louder again, the branches of a nearby tree suddenly rustled.

I stood up from my chair and looked around nervously. The light from my campfire was blocked by the surrounding trees and couldn’t penetrate very far into the forest. I sensed something moving deeper among the trees, but I couldn’t see anything.

Something felt wrong, and anxiety spread through me. I decided to head to the campground’s administration building and speak with the caretaker.

Taking my flashlight and smartphone, I started walking toward the administration building along the paved road. When something resembling headlights illuminated me from behind, I turned around, only to be blinded by a dazzling light that obscured everything around me. A sharp crack sounded, and something pierced my body, sending pain so intense that I could barely breathe coursing through every part of me.

Lights began dancing all around me. A chaotic storm of light surrounded me, and although I sensed danger and tried to escape, my body wouldn’t move, as though it had been paralyzed. …Move, move… I desperately willed myself to move, but my body didn’t so much as twitch.

The light drew closer, and just as I thought it was all over, darkness swallowed my consciousness.

My name was Zen Jinguji.

As my consciousness slowly emerged from the darkness, I felt cold. I tried to open my eyes, only to discover that my eyelids wouldn’t budge.

“Following the antibody-immunity nanomachines and language-element nanomachines, we’re now injecting the internal-regulation nanomachines.”

“Hurry it up.”

I heard a raspy voice with a strange accent. Although the words weren’t Japanese, I understood them perfectly. What was happening? Was I in a hospital?

A sharp prick of pain ran through my shoulder. Apparently, someone had given me an injection.

“How long until he can move?”

“He should be able to move in approximately one hour (one ax).”

I heard another strangely accented voice, one that sounded almost as though air were escaping with every word.

The moment I heard the term “one ax,” I somehow knew that it meant approximately one hour. It felt as though the translation had happened automatically inside my head.

“Once this guy can move, you’re responsible for looking after him and starting his training. Got it?”

“Y-Yes, understood.”

What were they talking about? What did they mean by training? Where was I?

Time passed while I remained completely unable to move. Eventually, I began feeling warmth deep inside my body, and little by little, I regained the ability to move.

My eyelids finally opened, allowing me to see my surroundings. The first thing that entered my field of vision was a dog-man with a human body from the neck down and a dog’s head on top. His canine face resembled that of a Shiba Inu.

What was this, Halloween? Surely nobody would wear cosplay in a hospital. What anime was this character supposed to be from?

“Banatsu, you’re waking up, yesh.”

The dog-man spoke to me. For some reason, the ending of his sentence sounded strange. Had I misheard him? And what was Banatsu supposed to mean?

“Is this a hospital?”

When I asked in Japanese, the dog-man’s face twisted into a grimace. Wait, wasn’t that a costume mask?

“I don’t understand that language. You should be able to speak Gapan, the official language, yesh.”

Apparently, this dog-man couldn’t pronounce the final “s” sound properly, turning it into “sh” instead. Setting that aside, I was about to tell him I couldn’t speak the language when I realized that I probably could. Somehow, knowledge of Gapan already existed inside my head.

“Who are you? Is this a hospital?”

I tried speaking Gapan. To my own astonishment, the words came out perfectly. What on earth was going on?

“I’m Sario Barakel of the Kuushi race. This isn’t a hospital. You’re aboard the Brava, a supply ship belonging to the Gonuvah Empire, yesh.”

A ship…? Were we at sea? I sat up on the strangely shaped bed. Looking around, I found myself in a small room surrounded by what appeared to be metal walls. Four unusual beds resembling oxygen chambers stood inside, and I seemed to have been lying in one of them.

“Let me off. I have to get home…”

Realizing that I apparently wasn’t in Japan, I found myself at a loss for words. The dog-man looked at me with something resembling pity.

“What are you talking about? We’re in outer space, yesh.”

The dog-man led me to a place resembling an observation deck. When I looked outside through the window, I was rendered speechless. Countless tiny points of light glittered against a background of pitch-black darkness.

I realized there was something profoundly wrong with the view. Even when I looked downward, I couldn’t see the ocean’s surface. What was going on? Surely we couldn’t actually be in space.

My conviction that we couldn’t possibly be in space was completely shattered when the dog-man took me to what looked like a storage room. The moment I stepped inside, my body floated upward, and my head struck the ceiling. There was no gravity in that room. With Sario’s assistance, I managed to get back outside.

“Ahhh…”

I felt utterly hopeless and bewildered at the same time. I had just been enjoying a camping trip…

“Now you understand, don’t you? We’re in space, yesh.”

“B-But there was gravity in the room earlier.”

“That was artificial gravity. We generate gravity in the areas where the crew lives, yesh.”

Apparently, the ship generated artificial gravity that was close to Earth’s, though its gravitational acceleration wasn’t quite identical. At that point, I realized that Sario, who spoke about artificial gravity as though it were perfectly ordinary, couldn’t possibly be an Earthling. His canine head wasn’t part of a costume. It was real.

I asked why I was aboard a spaceship.

“The goblin military purchased you from a dark syndicate run by the Oni race, Banatsu, as an illegal lower-class citizen, yesh.”

Apparently, they were calling me “Banatsu.” That hardly mattered, though. What mattered was that I had been captured by a criminal organization operating in space and sold to the goblin military as a lower-class citizen, a status practically indistinguishable from slavery.

The ship I was aboard was apparently a supply vessel built by the goblin race. There was a scale model aboard, which they showed me, and it had a rugged, imposing design reminiscent of an old diesel locomotive. Incidentally, the ship was 170 meters long and painted dark green. Apparently, all goblin military vessels were required to be dark green.

But what exactly was the goblin race? The only goblins I knew were the small, ugly, impish creatures that appeared in fantasy stories.