Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter2 (section)

===Between the Lines 2===

“Aren’t these things so convenient?”

A girl who looked only ten leaned against the cold bars.

Her long, long hair gave off a rosy scent as she whispered into the neighboring cell.

“Smartphones, I mean. Now, computers will have plenty of software preloaded onto them when you buy them at the electronics store. Too much, really. But isn’t that the real difference between a smartphone and a computer? You have to read through all the manuals if you want to know how to use a computer, but you can just intuitively pick up how to use a smartphone just by touching it. That seems simple enough, but it’s actually incredibly hard to pull off. Masking the work that went into it is the trick to getting your new service to spread.”

Anna Sprengel received no response, but she did not seem offended.

She welcomed having an audience who would listen. What she could not stand were the fools who interrupted her with stupid questions while acting like they knew what they were talking about.

Self-proclaimed experts were a cancer on the world. They would end up destroying themselves, but the problem was how they spread their so-called expertise to others beforehand.

“Oh? But don’t you have firsthand experience with this? You inherited Academy City, after all. After the old Board Chairman squeezed out every last drop of its power, he handed it over to you as a bunch of codes. And what kind of hardware did that use? Hee hee hee. Wasn’t it a smartphone?”

She slowly breathed in and out before continuing.

“But human psychology is a strange thing.”

Most likely. that was something not even she had an answer for.

The human mind.

If she had a perfect grasp of its illogical and incomprehensible actions, she would not be here doing this in the first place.

“When you find something convenient and comfortable, do you ever get an urge to take a look behind the curtain? I know you do. For example, maybe you were curious about how exactly R&C Occultics managed to spread so quickly?”

Maybe she could control the masses as a single large group.

Maybe she could hold the reins by placing them in the category of “monster” and understanding them that way.

But now, Anna smiled thinly.

“But is that really what you should be looking into? How much do you understand about the workings of that phone you carry? Why is the internet a fixed fee while calls are charged by the minute? How does it connect while out on the ocean, up in the mountains, or anywhere else? Cross talk used to be an issue with phones, but why doesn’t it happen anymore? There probably isn’t a single person out there who can explain every single thing that goes on inside that card-sized case. The internet has no shortage of self-styled experts, but if they really could do what they claim, they would be filthy rich. The real experts tend not to let anyone know about the valuable knowledge they have.”

Why did people suddenly find the word Kirarazaka in their phone’s dictionary?

Why would a phone’s AI assistant respond to questions about aliens with the word Zoltaxian?

Was it a simple input error, was it a joke by the developers, or was it something secretly added in for some definite purpose? There were so many unexplained blind spots in the devices people carried with them every day.

“You inherited this city in the form of a smartphone, but how much of its functions do you actually understand? A normal user should be commended if they use even thirty-percent of what their phone can do.”

What was she hinting at with these questions?

This was a dark lullaby meant to drag the listener into a nightmare world.

Anna Sprengel quietly said one last thing.

“Let your guard down and you might just have your feet swept out from under you. That thing might be filled with undiscovered vulnerabilities you aren’t even aware of.”

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