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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, a role he treated as ordinary and which the others learned only slowly to read as something else. He is of Strain 33A, and carries the phterogs — retractable bio-energy wings that fold at his shoulder blades and can be turned from flight surface to shield in a single motion.

 

He was seventeen in year 330, when the grove was destroyed and the House was displaced onto the Great Plateau[1]. He married [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]] in year 335 and they had four children. In the decade that followed he took up the sword he had put down as a child, and conducted the campaign that BNCY's investigators, unable to attribute it, recorded as the unattributed targeted removal of known destabilizing actors[2].

 

Akio appears in twelve of the nineteen chapters written so far. He is present from the first page of [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|Chapter 1]] and is the last of the House to leave 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. The records give his development as trauma-induced maturation, which is the archive's way of saying he was a child soldier and stopped being a child early. He carries Strain 33A, and is recorded as its progenitor: the bone density, the metabolic rate and the phterogs all descend from it.

 

What he did with that inheritance, for the first decade the record can see, was cook. He fed the House of Confidence. The archive is explicit that this was not a hobby. His body burns calories at roughly four times the human baseline and food is the condition of his staying conscious, so the kitchen was maintenance before it was anything else. It became something else anyway.

 

## 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, which the narration notes is itself a report[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|Chapter 9]] Akio puts a hand on the enormous head and it presses back, and the narration marks the difference — the weight of something that has decided to trust you is a different weight[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[8].

 

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[8].

 

## 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[8].

 

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[8].

 

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[8].

 

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[8]. Little Miri was carried out of rubble. The record is careful about her: she was not his child then, and because she was not, he did not have to be infallible in front of her — he could simply carry her, without a posture to hold.

 

## The operational years

 

Between the wedding and the end of the decade, Akio picked up the sword he had put down as a child, under what the record calls a covenant of restraint. He fought to save rather than to win: using his speed to evacuate and to disarm, standing as the wall between civilians and the E1s.

 

Sam noticed before anyone else, and documented it the way she documents everything — not on paper, but in how she held the 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[8].

 

The work of those years was the Reimnos syndicate, the Brenne cartel, the Vordnak operation, the Kelsh network, the Klakfen, Dusk Fork, and the Veld garrison whose log ends mid-entry on the fourth of March. The men who ran Reimnos are in the ground; Akio dug the graves, nine of them, on the ridge. He left no reports. BNCY's investigators eventually traced the disappearances and wrote one for him: *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[8].

 

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[8].

 

## Field record

 

The later chapters show him at work. In [[pages/glass-house-chapter-13-the-ally-and-the-ghost-op|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[9].

 

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[10].

 

## Abilities

 

The phterogs are retractable bio-energy structures at his shoulder blades. They shift between aerodynamic and rigid instantly, so the same pair of wings is flight and armour. Their energy signature stays around his back even when they are withdrawn.

 

Their physics answer to his emotional state, which makes his control a measure of his conviction rather than his strength. Early on the blade he formed broke often, because his confidence was shaky. At mastery he could switch a weapon between great sword and whip mid-swing, cut steel with the wings, and — the ability the record dwells on — restrain a person without harming them. It takes more strength to hold a punch than to throw one. 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.

 

The cost is immediate. Using them empties his blood sugar; extended fighting brings tremors, then loss of focus, then unconsciousness if he does not eat. His bones are dense enough that he does not float — he has to generate real lift to fly, and he sinks in water like a stone.

 

## Character

 

He reads a room instantly and is a good morale officer, and 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.

 

As a father he is not what the surrounding accounts assume. He loves his children past his ability to say so, and his idea of fatherhood requires authority, and authority in his mind requires never being seen to be wrong. He cries over small things — a word that landed badly at breakfast — and cannot apologise, because he believes an apology would teach them that the person holding the structure together does not know what he is doing. He is wrong about that, and will not fully learn it. 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

 

 

## See also

 

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

- [[life/raymond|Raymond]]

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

 

## References