"Now. On to the main business."
Mikoshiba set down his coffee and stood his tablet up on the table.
"Aya. A request came in through your connections, didn't it?"
"Yeah." Some of the lightness drained from Aya's voice. "A woman named Ms. Mano. We worked together on a previous job. In her thirties, mother of two. Ten years ago she started a parenting information site called Hagukumi Navi, and now she runs it as a small company."
Aya pulled up the site on the tablet. A plain page in soft colors. Baby food recipes. How to get through night crying. How to find baby goods that had gone cheap as last year's models. The writers weren't Ms. Mano alone. They were mothers from all over Japan. The ads were a single modest slot in the corner.
"It started as a blog where Ms. Mano wrote up all the stuff she'd dug up, crawling along the ground, when she was struggling with raising her own kids. That's why there are no lies in the writing. Eventually moms who said 'I want to write too' gathered there, and it became a place where people bring their know-how together. A site mothers open in the middle of the night when they're grasping at straws. In ten years, tens of thousands of registered regulars."
"That's good work."
"It really is good work. That's exactly why—" Aya bit her lip. "Ms. Mano called me sounding like she was about to cry. She said, 'The "recommendations" on our site have gone completely wrong at some point.'"
Mikoshiba read the key points of the request email aloud.
"'Over these past few months, little by little, the "recommendations" to our users have come to be nothing but unknown products I've never seen. A baby carrier from a maker I've never heard of, at nearly twenty thousand yen. Imported childcare supplements that don't properly list their ingredients or effects. They've settled firmly at the top of the popularity rankings and haven't budged in weeks'—"
"And then the complaints flooded in," Aya picked up. "'The recommendations lately feel off.' 'Has this site been taken over by some company?' Emails like that, every day. A few people have already stopped coming. The trust Ms. Mano and the moms spent ten years building is melting away in these few months. And Ms. Mano hasn't touched a single line of code."
Mio pulled in the attached logs. The time series of access. Page views per article. The counts of "likes" and bookmarks on products. The columns of numbers rearranged themselves into bar graphs in her head on their own.
One unknown baby carrier had an exceptionally high number of "likes." Lots of views, too. On the numbers, it was a popular product with nothing anywhere to complain about. And yet Mio's finger stopped there.
"...That's puzzling."
"Oh?" Mikoshiba raised an eyebrow. "That's Himuro's amused voice."
"There's nothing wrong with the numbers anywhere." Mio traced the baby carrier's numbers with a finger. "Views, ratings, bookmarks, all perfectly healthy. Shake them as hard as you like and not a speck of dust comes out. And yet my finger stops. I can't say where. I just feel like something's wrong."
"Even though the numbers are perfect?" Aya tilted her head.
"Yes. That's the puzzling part," Mio answered honestly. "The numbers aren't lying. But I can't put into words yet what's snagging on me."
Mikoshiba stood up.
"Let's take it," he said without hesitation. "I can't let ten years melt away in a few months. Himuro, can I count on you?"
"I have no reason to refuse." Mio was already starting to dive to the bottom of the logs. "Too-perfect applause always has someone behind it. All I have to do is find their hand."
Aya quietly set a can of energy drink on the edge of Mio's desk.
"Mio. Please, for Ms. Mano." Her voice was unusually serious. "She hasn't done a single thing wrong. She's just someone who still sits up at night facing the words of all those moms."
"I know," Mio said, without taking her eyes off the screen. "It's not Ms. Mano's fault. That much is certain. But it's not settled that it's someone's doing, either. It could be just a bug, or a frayed setting. I'll figure that out first. If it is someone's hand, there will always be traces left somewhere. All I have to do is find them."
Whether those traces were the footprints of malice or just a fraying. Mio's fingertips couldn't grasp that yet.