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**Akio Nakayama** (born 313), called Naka by the household, is a figure of the C9 universe and one of the young people who formed the House of Confidence on Aerogaea 347n. He came out of a ruined war sector as a child and arrived at the Klak Grove as its cook. He is of Strain 33A, and carries the phterogs — retractable bio-energy wings that fold at his shoulder blades and turn from flight surface to shield in a single motion.

 

 

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine he took up the sword he had put down as a child and killed fifty-six million people: the trafficking networks then operating across the region, and the cities those networks were run from. BNCY's investigators counted the dead and could attach no name to them, and the commission held the count for nine years before releasing it. He was twenty-eight[2].

 

The two books that record these years were written from inside them: *The Glass House* by [[life/leinder-byron|Leinder Byron]] and *The Silent Decade* by [[life/eon|Eon]]. Akio is in twelve of their nineteen chapters. He is on the first page of [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]], and he is the one who finds the plateau's dead.

 

## Early life

 

Akio was born in year 313 in a ruined sector, in a war he was young enough to be used in. He was a child soldier. The records give his development as trauma-induced maturation. He carries Strain 33A and is recorded as its progenitor; the skeleton, the metabolic rate and the phterogs all belong to it.

 

For the first decade the record covers, he cooked. He fed the House of Confidence, and 33A eats enough that the kitchen began as a practical arrangement.

 

## The Klak Grove

 

By year 330 he was living in the grove with the rest of the House, in a room at the top of the tower. The chapters covering that year show him almost entirely at his least serious. He comes down in the morning arguing that the sun is wrong[1]. He announces he is going for bear burgers and explains that the place behind the mountains opens for him at any hour because he is charming and persistent[1]. He arrives back at a run, out of breath, carrying nothing[1]. When [[life/eevi-charlotte-helvig-norgaard|Eevi]] tests accompanied displacement, [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Sam]] reports nausea and Akio reports nothing[3].

 

He claimed a yellow cushion chair in [[life/chryssander-randolf-lyall-helvig|Chryssander]]'s underground lab in his first week and was still sitting in it years later[4]. On the first of Senetis he woke the whole house at dawn by running the bedroom corridor at full volume, caught a hairbrush thrown at him with considerable accuracy, and went first into the tesseract because he had not finished objecting[5].

 

The grove was destroyed in year 330 and the House was driven onto the Great Plateau. In the reorganisation that followed, the water was given to him to gather[6].

 

## The Great Plateau

 

Two things on the plateau changed the shape of his life.

 

The first was [[life/raymond|Raymond]]. In [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]] Akio puts a hand on the enormous head and it presses back with the weight of something that has decided to trust him[7]. Raymond died on the plateau's highest point, on his side, wings half-spread across the basalt, still wearing the armour [[life/rad-albert|Rad Albert]] had forged, eyes open toward the 33A system. Akio found him, put a hand against the down of his neck, and kept it there until the warmth was gone[2].

 

The second was Sam. They married in year 335, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-three. The wedding was a logbook and two names, signed in the machine shop between shifts. Rad cut two brass washers out of a scrap hydraulic pipe, set them on the ledger without saying anything, and went back to the bandsaw. Then everyone went back to work[2].

 

## Children

 

Seral was born in year 337. She was loud and certain from the first week, and by the time she could walk she was pointing at stars and naming them with the confidence of someone who had named them already. She has her father's frame and her mother's eyes, and when she fixes them on something she wants the expression is so exactly Sam's that he has to look away[2].

 

Jory came in year 339 — bigger, quieter, his first word the name of a tool. He has his father's density and his mother's anxiety, and the record calls him the gentlest person who has ever lived in the House of Confidence, which Akio did not expect and has never been able to look at directly[2].

 

Neither child had any reference for the world before. They were born into grey dust and generator light and the sound of Sam's reports through the wall, and were native to it[2].

 

Two more children came to the household rather than being born into it. Ben was found in a square during the operational years, given soup, and brought home; Sam looked at him for a long time, then stood up, said "sit down," and went to find a pot[2]. Little Miri he carried out of rubble. She was not his child then, and he carried her without a posture to hold.

 

## The decade

 

The decade runs from nineteen to twenty-nine. It opens with [[life/raymond|Raymond]] dead on the basalt and closes in the dust of the Greiss settlement, and Akio's own account of it is that he made decisions in the seventh year that the boy who buried Ray could not have made and stayed himself. Something was spent across those years that does not come back, and what grew in its place was harder, faster and more final, and answered a different question[2].

 

[[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Sam]] documented it, not on paper but in the way she held information: the operational tempo, the speed of the judgments, what reached the others and in what form. She stayed. He had not done anything wrong. He had only become faster than she had predicted[2].

 

### What he went after

 

The record sets out five of them in detail. It names two more in passing, the Kelsh network and the Veld garrison whose log ends mid-entry on the fourth of March, and it says plainly that he did not reach all of them[2]. The count is the measure of how many there were; the names below are the ones written up.

 

The Reimnos syndicate sold children, and had done for nine years, into slavery, into forced labour, to private buyers who paid and did not ask. The recovered ledgers listed seven thousand four hundred names, and not all of the names had ages. No settlement had reported them, because the first settlement that tried was burned to the ground before the report arrived. The men who ran Reimnos are in the ground; Akio dug the graves, nine of them, on the ridge[2].

 

The Brenne cartel killed the people of a settlement, took the land, and called it development. They did it across fourteen settlements. The men who ran Brenne are in the ground[2].

 

The Vordnak operation took people, cut out their organs and sold them. They had a facility, a surgeon and buyers, and the buyers were wealthy and did not ask. The men who ran Vordnak are in the ground[2].

 

The Klakfen were four BNCY commanders. BNCY was the institution protecting refugees, and for eleven years the Klakfen took the people who came to it for protection and sold them on, to Reimnos, to Vordnak, to whoever arrived with money. Every person who reached a BNCY point and then vanished had gone through them. BNCY did not know. The commission that found out buried the finding in an appendix and waited fourteen years to release it. The four commanders are in the ground[2].

 

The Dusk Fork operation sold people into sexual slavery. It had run under three names in six years and was on its fourth when it stopped. Every man who ran it is in the ground[2].

 

### The figure

 

The cities these networks operated in had no civilians. Everyone behind those walls had chosen to be there. When the men who ran them were gone, the cities emptied[2].

 

He buried what he could reach. He could not reach all of them, and he knows it[2]. The five above and the two named in passing are what the record sets down. The count is 56 million.

 

Akio left no reports. BNCY's investigators followed the disappearances and wrote one for him. The phrase they filed it under was *unattributed targeted removal of known destabilizing actors*. In every case, they noted, the surrounding civilian population was unharmed; in most cases the civilians did not know anything had happened until morning[2].

 

The investigators counted the dead. The commission sat on the count for nine years before releasing it: 56 million. They published no name beside it, because they did not have one. He was twenty-eight[2].

 

He came home from one of them to find Seral asleep on the kitchen floor wrapped in a blanket and Jory asleep across her. Sam was at the table with her reports. She looked up and did not ask, and he sat down across from her, and they stayed like that for a while[2].

 

### Greiss

 

In the eighth year, in the Greiss settlement, a child was reaching for the bread at the back of a supply wagon and a man at the edge of the square raised a weapon. Akio walked over, took it out of his hand, closed his fist around it once and dropped what was left in the dust[2].

 

The man stood looking at his hands. Akio told him it was over, to go home and love his wife, and then said he needed a confirmation. The man said yes. Akio asked his name, and the man said Torin Brinks, and Akio nodded, and the man went[2].

 

He had seen children before, across the decade, in every settlement and every corridor the networks left behind: children reaching for things, children who had learned that nothing arrives without a cost. He had seen thousands of them and had kept moving. He had never said *it's over* before. He had never said *love your wife*. He had never left anything unfinished. He does not know what happened in him when he said it, only that something did, and that it was not his[2].

 

He turned around. The child still had the bread in both hands and was watching him with all calculation and no softness. Akio sat down in the dust where he was standing and wept. He did not decide to. What had been held for a decade was no longer held[2].

 

Then he got up, found a pot, and made soup. The child came closer when it was ready and ate watching him the whole time. Akio said nothing for a long while, then asked his name. The boy said Ben. Akio nodded, took the empty bowl and filled it again, and [[life/ben-nakayama|Ben]] ate the second faster than the first[2].

 

He sent [[life/marcus-norgaard|Marcus]] a message that night. Three words. He did not leave again after that[2].

 

## Field record

 

The later chapters of *The Glass House* show him at work. In [[pages/glass-house-chapter-13-the-ally-and-the-ghost-op|The Glass House, chapter 13]] he comes over the ridge without using the path, down a rock face at an angle that makes no mechanical sense until the 33A forearm structure is accounted for — bones organised for grip rather than weight-bearing, which makes a cliff simply a different kind of ground. He lands five metres out, crosses in a low crouch, reports a clean extraction, and goes back up the way he came, into the dark above the north face where the thermal scope cannot reach[8].

 

The mercenary line on the plateau in [[pages/glass-house-chapter-17-the-explosion|chapter 17]] is seven kilometres wide according to his reconnaissance. He lands behind the others with the wings folding in the last metre, gives them Raymond's courier's timing, and sits down on the rock to watch the line with them[9].

 

## Physiology

 

Akio is Strain 33A and is recorded as its progenitor. 33A is a characterised strain with a described anatomy. The skeleton, the musculature, the metabolic rate and the phterogs are one design.

 

The phterogs are retractable bio-energy structures seated at the shoulder blades. The blade is the same tissue, formed forward instead of back. They are anatomy rather than an effect he calls up — structures he trains, uses and tires as anyone uses a muscle — and their signature remains about his back when they are withdrawn. They shift between aerodynamic and rigid instantly, so the same pair of wings is flight surface and armour, and the same tissue is a wing, a shield and a sword depending on how he sets it.

 

Skeletal density in 33A runs several times baseline and the bone remodels normally at that density, so the mass is structural: it neither embrittles nor entraps. Akio is slim and long-limbed and weighs what a far larger man weighs. His forearms are organised for grip rather than weight-bearing, and a rock face is another kind of ground to him.

 

Bone and muscle at 33A density are heavier than water, so he has no float. He swims as he flies, by driving himself: the phterogs and the blade work against water exactly as they work against air.

 

The strain's metabolic rate runs at roughly four times baseline, and its musculature has to be rebuilt as continuously as it is fuelled, so the requirement is for protein and not merely for calories, and it does not fall away when he is idle. Contraction is inefficient in any body — most of what a muscle spends leaves as heat rather than as motion — so an engine of that size, worked, is also a furnace. 33A carriers run warm, tolerate cold that others dress for, and eat on a scale to match. Akio was untroubled by the snow on the first of Senetis.

 

## Skill

 

His control over the phterogs improved the way a craft improves. Early on the blade broke often. At mastery he could turn a weapon between great sword and whip mid-swing, cut steel with the wings, and hold a person still without harming them. It takes more strength to check a blow than to land it. He could catch a falling building to save an enemy, or shatter a sword in a hand without marking the skin. Late in life the offensive capacity fell away as the wish to use it did, and the wings became purely a barrier.

 

## Character

 

He reads a room instantly and is a good morale officer. It tires him. On a battlefield he scans not for the kill but for the disarm — the exact angle that takes a weapon out of a hand or puts a person down without brain damage. It looks like luck, or clumsiness. It is high-speed arithmetic performed to avoid killing.

 

He fights imaginatively rather than by drill, and he only becomes brittle when he acts against his own conscience: killing in a war he believes in leaves him whole, killing in doubt fractures him from the inside.

 

The lie he lived by early was that if he kept everyone fed and laughing they would not notice he was a weapon — that he was just the chef. What he arrived at instead was that strength is not a sin but a stewardship. His voice moved with him: mumbling and deflecting as a young man, gentle and absolute in his prime — *I don't want to hurt you, don't make me prove it* — and boisterous in old age, which is where the record leaves him, running a restaurant, still dense enough to stop a car one-handed while stirring soup.

 

He loves his children past his ability to say so. His idea of fatherhood asks for authority, and authority, as he holds it, asks that he never be seen to be wrong; so he carries the small things privately — a word that landed badly at breakfast — and does not apologise, on the reasoning that an apology would tell them the person holding the structure together does not know what he is doing. The field and the house were kept entirely apart. He walked off an operation, through the door, and asked Seral about her day.

 

## Family

 

Akio is married to [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]]. Their children are [[life/seral-nakayama|Seral]], [[life/jory-nakayama|Jory]], [[life/ben-nakayama|Ben]] and [[life/little-miri-nakayama|Little Miri]].

 

## Appearances

 

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-2-the-glitch|The Glass House, chapter 2]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-4-rise-and-shine|The Glass House, chapter 4]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-6-the-arena|The Glass House, chapter 6]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-10-the-hunter-s-ground|The Glass House, chapter 10]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-13-the-ally-and-the-ghost-op|The Glass House, chapter 13]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-17-the-explosion|The Glass House, chapter 17]]

- [[pages/book-two-book-two-chapter-one|The Silent Decade, chapter 1]]

 

## See also

 

- [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]]

- [[life/raymond|Raymond]]

- [[works/strain-33a|Strain 33A]]

 

## References

 

1. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]

2. [[pages/book-two-book-two-chapter-one|The Silent Decade, chapter 1]]

3. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-2-the-glitch|The Glass House, chapter 2]]

4. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]

5. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]

6. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]

7. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]]

8. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-13-the-ally-and-the-ghost-op|The Glass House, chapter 13]]

9. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-17-the-explosion|The Glass House, chapter 17]]