Toaru Majutsu no Index Light Novel Volume SS2/Chapter 6

Synopsis
Shirai Kuroko enters a familiar hair salon and is greeted by its completely unmotivated shop owner, Sakashima Michibata, playing a handheld game. She exasperatedly orders him to put his handheld game down, otherwise she would traumatize him under the name of "customer service". Kuroko can hardly believe that Michibata does not seem to care about attracting customers for the salon, with only the recently-employed staff members there being worried in his place. Regardless, Kuroko sits down on a chair to get her hair done, where Michibata begins removing her hair ribbons. Michibata asks if she wants a drill or croissant using his new irons, saying they would match her domineering personality. Kuroko retorts that her hair is naturally curly and as such she wants him to give her a straight perm. Michibata messes with her by placing a hair dryer helmet on her head while asking if she wanted to have an Afro, to which Kuroko frantically yells at him that all she wants is just a straight perm.

Pulling out a thin pair of scissors, Michibata tells Kuroko that it must be tough requiring a teacher's permission for choosing the salon she gets her hair cut at, being from such a prestigious esper school like Tokiwadai Middle School. He mentions that even though he was chosen as a designated salon by their school, allowing him to rake in some easy money, it must be pretty restrictive having to follow those rules. Kuroko simply replies that complaining won't change anything, since hairstylers like him can get basic genetic samples from their hair, and therefore Tokiwadai doesn't want people trying to collect the students' DNA map. Continuing to work on Kuroko's hair, Michibata glances above his head at the large number of cameras installed by her middle school.

He moves the topic to a rumor that there is a new subsidy for researching on the development of teleportation powers, as dealing with 11th dimensional coordinates is difficult enough to the point even the scientists in charge dislike it. Kuroko corrects that statement, explaining that it's not because scientist dislike 11th dimensional calculations, since they're heavily related to Schrödinger's quantum theories, and it's more that the higher ups are just worried at the sheer lack of teleportation espers. In response to Kuroko saying that some abilities show up frequently while others don't, Michibata notes that one of the mysteries regarding the Power Curriculum Program is the variations in the different esper abilities, despite some of the students taking the exact same courses.

He then wonders why Academy City is even developing esper powers in the first place, but Kuroko admonishes that he should not deny the core reason why Academy City exists. Michibata responds that he understands how esper powers would be an attractive prospect but also thinks that there's some influential person dreaming of eternal life or world domination who controls it all from behind the scenes. He wonders if the textbooks given to students like her even talk about the uproar during the Cold War, referencing the United States and the Soviet Union investing money in it. Kuroko asks if he is talking about the Stargate Project, to which she affirms that they had learned about it in history class, saying that the scientists had no clue what they were doing since they kept repeating their large-scale experiments despite their inconclusive findings, and only managed to waste federal funding in the end.

Michibata wonders if the project was truly for developing esper powers for military use and not for more for selfish reasons such as being special, before questioning where the esper development between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War ever got their "esper samples" from. Kuroko simply believes that they were merely bluffing, but Michibata highly doubts all of them were fakes. At the very least, he doesn't think anyone would wish to create something like an esper without seeing one for themselves. Kuroko responds that people don't need facts or evidence to believe in something, pointing out that royalty and nobility in ancient times believed in Alchemy because they thought that they had witnessed it with their own eyes. Michibata laughs that he believes in superstitions like Alchemy, UFOs, or the New Jersey Devil.

In disbelief, Kuroko asks if Michibata is implying that information on Academy City technology got leaked during the Cold War, but Michibata says that would be impossible for the outside world due to the sheer difference between their technology levels preventing them from breaking Academy City's advanced encryption. For comparison, he states that an "outside" supercomputer in the past wouldn't have been powerful enough to even run the handheld game he had been playing. With Kuroko asking what he was trying to convey, Michbata asks her if she has heard of Gemstones before. Kuroko turns silent for a moment, causing Michibata to ask if he has upset her.

Kuroko says that he did upset her, explaning that her power was developed through the Power Curriculum Program by simulating her brain, and admits that she would rather prefer to not hear the term Gemstones. Michibata simply calls it the difference between an artificial diamond and a natural one, saying that if a certain phenomenon has been caused artificially, then as long as the same circumstances from the experiment are recreated in the natural world, an identical phenomenon will occur without the need for input from humans. Effectively speaking, if Academy City's curriculum can produce espers, then the outside world can also create espers through natural means very similar to the curriculum.

He then compares espers being a manufactured stun gun and Gemstones being a lightning bolt. A bored Kuroko denies their existence by saying that Gemstones are just a hypothesis. After all, she has never seen a Gemstone for herself and even if they did exist then the sample size would be small enough to be mistaken as an error in the data and probably wouldn't even show up in the end results. Hearing this, Michibata just smiles and once again challenges her in this debate by using his analogy of the stun gun and lightning, asking if she thinks lightning strikes rather frequently, to which Kuroko answers that they do, though it is extremely rare for it to strike a specific person.

Characters
By order of appearance
 * Shirai Kuroko

New Characters

 * Sakashima Michibata