Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, some fine gentlemen were in a spot of trouble. Though it should go without saying that they weren't having anywhere near as much trouble as I was, but, all things considered, their trouble was not an indecent amount.

Unfortunately, comparisons aren't always as useful as we'd like them to be.

"Do we have any burger steaks left, Hayao?" Miyamoto-san asked.

"No, sir," Hayao said, "we're out." The rabbit man had been nursing a gob of spit in his cheeks. Whiskers bristling with a wiggle of nose, he swallowed it which was wise, because he let out a fiercely subdued cough only a moment later.

"What?" Miyamoto-san asked.

"No, sir," Hayao repeated, "we're out."

He must have said it too softly the first time; that would explain why Miyamoto-san had had trouble hearing him, especially over Tajiri-san's screaming.

"How can you even think about eating at a time like this!?" Tajiri-san said. He sounded even shriller than usual.

"I can't keep looking at my pictures of my dogs all the time," Yoshida-san replied, glaring at Tajiri-san. "All of them are dead now, you jerk! That makes me very sad! Don't you care?"

Leaning forward, Urameshi-san slapped his palm on the tabletop. "Yoshida, shut up about your dogs already! Nobody cares!"

Hayao let out a quiet sigh. His rabbit ears flinched at Urameshi-san's outburst.

Days earlier, Hayao tried to tell the group of CEOs that locking themselves in a hermetically sealed conference room was ill-advised, and he hadn't made that recommendation lightly. He was intimately acquainted with the conference room, and knew well the risks posed by long-term confinement.

For as long as he could remember, Hayao dreamed of seeing the fields; the forests and the rice-paddies. He wanted to see the sea, and feel the crumble of wood chips and loam beneath his pawed feet. During his youth in the lab, many of the others had spoken of the outside world with a sacred reverence. It was their only light in those dark, moist, mechanical halls. As an adult, he'd hoped the role he'd been given—caretaker of the conference room at the top of the DAISHU HQ skyscraper in downtown Noyoko—would give him the freedom he'd always yearned to have. And though it hadn't done that, it hadn't done nothing, either.

Up here, at the roof of the sky, he could see all the way to the ocean. He saw the forested hills and the wave-carved rock, and it was beautiful. It made his dreams a little more real. Were it not for that, he would have surely gone mad.

Sadly, the CEOs never gave the view more than a glance. They hardly ever looked outward or inward, just forward, at their next advance. People like that had trouble staying still, especially humans. Worse, even in the best of circumstances DAISHU's board of directors inevitably ended up chafing at one another by the time a meeting was through, so bottling themselves into a conference room was doomed to turn it into a pressure cooker, and the fact that a plague was ending the outside world all around them only made things worse.

Humans were masters at finding reasons to not get along. Fortunately, even if the people that ran DAISHU weren't aware of this, as a business, the company certainly was. That was part of the reason DAISHU took safety so seriously.

You could never really know what might go wrong, so, why not prepare for the worst as best as you could?

The conference room's windows were a great example of this. Despite their size—the large, glass paneled windows covered most of the conference room's walls—the windows' one-way glass had been specially tempered and reinforced. You'd have to drive a truck into the windows at high speed to have a chance of knocking them out of their sills, let alone breaking them.

Hayao was eternally grateful for that. During his spare time, when he wasn't reading, he could lean his whole body against the windows with his nose and whiskers pressed up against the glass, as carefree as a kit, watching the world play out before him. He was upset that he couldn't do it anymore. The CEOs didn't like it when he did it, and even if he hadn't, they'd ordered ALICE to darken the windows to obscure their view of the city.

"Sirs," Hayao asked, "could we perhaps undarken the windows?"

"No, Hayao," Ogino-san said. "It stresses us out, especially Tajiri-san."

After about three days into their confinement in the conference room, Tajiri-san developed a morning ritual where he'd press himself up against the windows and sob into the glass, bashing it with his fists as he slowly slid down onto his knees. Hayao could still make out streaks of dried mucus the CEO had left on the windows.

"He still does it every morning," Hayao said.

"Yes, well, Tajiri has always been high-strung."

At that, Tajiri-san started to sob again.

"You're all fucking nuts!" Urameshi-san barked.

"Please don't curse, Urameshi-san," Ogino-san said. "We need to stay calm. The world is counting on us."

Tajiri-san raised his head out from between his arms where he'd crossed them atop the conference table. "Everyone is dead! Nothing matters!"

"We could watch another movie," Shimamura-san suggested.

Shimamura-san always found a way to see things in a good light, even when there was only darkness.

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Urameshi-san slammed his fist on the tabletop, making Tajiri-san flinch. "It better not be another fucking Trenton crusader period piece!" he barked.

"But I really like the crusader stuff," Miyamoto-san said. "It's so cool! And because of the Soran Occupation at the time, they're packed full of two cultures' worth of period drama." He turned back to face the rabbit-man butler. "So, Hayao… how about that burger steak?"

Hayao's tail twitched. It wasn't the biggest tail he'd ever seen, but it was decent enough, and satisfyingly fluffy.

"As I said, sir, I'm afraid we're out."

"I thought we still had some left!" Miyamoto-san said.

"We did, but they spoiled," Hayao replied, after a pause.

Miyamoto-san hissed. "Shit." He seemed genuinely disappointed. A moment later, he started straightening his tie and collar for the nth time.

The conference room was self-contained and self-sustaining; a hybrid of an environment for work and one for living. Appropriately, it was as much of a penthouse suite as it was a conference area. A staircase in the corner of the room subtly descended two floors down, with the kitchen and living area on the floor below this one and the showers, beds, and communal baths on the one below that. The beds were plush, the clothes were tailored to a T, the showers and communal bath were warmed to perfection, the kitchen was to die for, and the spacious conference room, with its wide screen and holographic displays, was fit for a king.

Hayao's room was a small suite in the corner of the middle floor, extending out from the building like an oriel, walled in glass and sky. His mattress took up two-thirds of the floor space. When Hayao wasn't working or watching through the windows, he loved nothing more than to lay on his bed with his long, lagomorphic feet outstretched and his console in hand and the totality of human civilization at his fingertips to read, and dream, and wonder. Scientific or historical topics were his favorite, followed by fiction and political philosophy.

More than anything else, Hayao missed that precious free time. Now that his owners were in here with him, their needs took precedence, and unfortunately, the five men were quite needy, though each in their own way.

As per company policy, the high threat-level DAISHU had assigned to the NFP-20 organism mandated that the board of directors take the necessary precautions to protect themselves and the shareholders' interests, hence the CEOs' sequestration in the conference room. The facility amenities and supply reserves were more than enough to keep the CEOs safe and comfortable for several months. Following DAISHU protocol, the executives were fully equipped in emergency gear. Their safety vests were color-coded according to their departmental responsibilities, and clearly indicated their names and positions in large, bold-face characters. In case of flooding, the vests doubled as flotation devices, and could also disperse flame retardant gel in the event of a fire incident. These and other functionalities could be triggered by one of the many switches or pull-straps on the vests. That being said—except for Miyamoto-san, who had opposed the decision—the CEOs had deviated from protocol when they'd removed their hard helmets, due to how they increased the difficulty of sleeping comfortably.

Hayao had served his masters since adolescence, when he was first brought to this place from the lab. On most days, the five men exuded an eccentric, avuncular charm that did a reasonable job of covering up their behavioral pathologies. Ruling the world was hard work, and brought a great deal of stress with it, though the money and power more than made up for it.

In spite of everything, Hayao sympathized with them. They hadn't asked to be born, or given intelligence or a conscience. Neither had he.

By and large, DAISHU's CEOs weren't bad people, not intentionally. Some, like Ogino-san or Shimamura-san, were genuinely well-meaning. Like Hayao himself, their lives would have been so much easier if they'd been born idiots. It was easy for an idiot to be a trillionaire: you had no reason to care about what you were doing, or what it did, and to whom. Miyamoto-san and Tajiri-san had inherited their positions, which in Tajiri-san's case, was tragic, because he lacked the mental fortitude to properly wield the authority he'd been given, and was too bound up in conventions of honor and group solidarity to divest himself of them. Miyamoto-san, meanwhile, lived to work. He was the only one of the five who turned glum whenever a meeting had to wrap up.

Of his five masters, Urameshi-san was the only one Hayao would categorize as genuinely mean-spirited. By all accounts, the man's family had a long history of war profiteering, and also illegally held large numbers of Arrakan peasants in slavery to labor in their secret emerald mines. It came as no surprise to Hayao to learn that Urameshi-san's father was a known Munine supremacist. Cruel ventures tended to make for cruel people, and vice-versa.

"Hayao," Miyamoto-san asked, in an unexpectedly frail voice, "can you make some tamago kake gohan for us?"

"Forgive me, sir," Hayao said. He bowed apologetically and then shook his head. "We are out of eggs."

After a moment of silence, Miyamoto-san bit his lip and nodded shakily. It looked like he was about to cry.

Except for Ogino-san, who was old and gray, all five CEOs were in the awkward phase of the human life cycle on the far side of middle-age where a man looked like a young person with an old face. The spark was there—the dashing black hair, the scruffy professionalism, the mysterious perspicacity—but it had begun to crack and wrinkle.

Hayao knew the five men like the pads on his palms.

Miyamoto-san was the maverick. Hayao couldn't count the number of times a meeting started with Miyamoto-san suddenly and firmly proclaiming that DAISHU ought to invest in an interesting looking start-up he'd seen on social media, or some up-and-coming environmental case célèbre that he'd read about in a magazine article. The man also had several lifetimes' worth of hobbies, which he loved to bring up whenever possible. His quirky personality worked well with his position as the supervising executive for DAISHU's many entertainment properties, such as Monimega.

It was sad to see him buckle under the pressure like this.

Shimamura-san shook his head. "I keep running over it in my mind. There has to be something we missed, something we could have done to contain the plague."

"I kept telling you people we needed to build more bunkers," Urameshi-san said, "but nooooo, you guys thought I was nuts to suggest it. For years and years and years, I told you: build some fucking safety bunkers! But did you? No! And look at where that's gotten us!"

Urameshi-san crossed his arms in disdain.

Shimamura-san was an engineer—what kind, Hayao was never really sure—and, fittingly, the man believed that every problem had to have some straightforward solution, even when it absolutely didn't.

Appropriately, Urameshi-san was the brute of the group. He liked posting racist jokes on social media. By an odd twist of fate, he had the best hair of the group: a bristled black chevron with a widow's peak sharp enough to cut steel. No one would blink twice if you dropped him in a yakuza movie.

"Please, gentlemen," Ogino-san said, "stop fighting."

Ogino-san was the company's sage and conscience. Hayao wished people would listen to him more often.

Off to the side, Tajiri-san wept in silence, drawing a bushy-browed glare from Urameshi-san.

"Stop whining!" Urameshi-san hissed.

Tajiri-san was the most enigmatic of the group. He didn't talk much. He was like a river reed: silent and slender, always looking wherever the wind blew.

All things considered, Hayao's masters treated him rather well. He was their property after all—and not even human—but, still, they showed him a modicum of respect, except for Urameshi-san, who had sexually abused Hayao during Hayao's first few years of service. Hayao was wise enough to know Urameshi-san would never face justice for that, or any of his other crimes.

But fate had its own way of making the worm turn.

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