The Future Is Japanese (41 page)

“Yeah, but I haven’t been in there in years,” the faceless hacker said. “My lab is boarded shut and full of your chained-up dorks from the mainland. That’s a dirty shame too, because that place was so perfect. We had creative freedom in there. We had our freedom to build anything we could dream up.”

“I have a hostage friend in there who also longs for freedom,” said Miss Sato at once.

“What, you want some kind of deal from me then?” scoffed the faceless man. “You, a no-budget peacenik who hangs out at the fringes of a provisional government? What are you gonna do for me, write me a trillion-yen personal check to ‘Mickey Tronic’? You have no idea what we accomplished in there. We were fantastic. We were beyond your world.”

“I know that you were top secret.”

“No, no! First, we were top secret. Then, second, we were war- on-terror secret. Third we were anti-nuclear-missile-proliferation secret. And then the whole lab was officially run by a sleazy private contractor—a crooked Japanese camera company in hock to the yakuza to keep its stock price up! They just paid our bills and never asked a word. That’s how great my situation was. Then some North Korean secret bomb-lab morons had to ruin the whole arrangement.”

“My hostage is still a hostage,” said Miss Sato patiently, “and she still has a shackle on her leg. Nothing you said has changed that.”

“We pulled in cool mil-spec hackers from every garage in the world,” said Mickey Tronic mournfully. “Most of us couldn’t speak a word of Japanese. I still can’t speak any Japanese.
‘Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu
,’ that’s about it.”

“That is a good thing to say to me,” Miss Sato admitted. “But the prisoner is still in chains, even though you say that to me.”

“Just check out that guy stuck in the mud pit over there,” said Mickey Tronic. “He was one of us! Terrific guy, never knew his real name, of course, but he was our ideal lab subject. Imagine building a tactile, augmented interface for a blind soldier. An interface so he can literally feel every centimeter, practically every cubic micron of the 3-D spaces around him … Do you know what ‘prioperception’ is?”

“No,” said Miss Sato, gazing at the stir of pirates reluctantly gathering around Zeta One. “I don’t know that. I do know that they’ll never pull him out of there with that chain.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty well mired in there like a water buffalo,” Mickey Tronic admitted. “That’s a shame, because once that guy was a true Japanese Special Forces ninja. Superb martial artist, totally dedicated, complete devotion to the Japanese nation—if Tokyo existed, he’d still be saluting his emperor. I have to say, I always liked him.”

“I should admit that too,” said Miss Sato. “I like him myself.”

“That brave guy—he lost everything that mattered to him in two bomb blasts, but he never says one word about his past. He just lives for the now. Very Zen. He wanders this island, pretending to pray—hell, he’s probably really praying—and whenever people annoy him, they blow up. This whole section of the island is painted in infrared targeting lasers, right now. These cannibal Peter Pan children can’t see that, but they’d be stone-dead if he twitched a finger.”

“Is that true?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The guy is the one-man focus of death from above. The thing that’s great is that, after he liquidates the bad guys, he never attempts to assert any law and order on the ground! He’s too soulful for that! That’s what I love about him, that’s why I never … you know … put a land mine under his tatami mat. There’s something rare and magnificent about him. It’d be like poaching a tiger.”

“If there’s going to be an airstrike on these coordinates,” said Miss Sato, “then we should leave right away.”

“What is your hurry? I need my machine-gun robot back,” Mickey Tronic said. “I mean, I don’t need the gun itself, I’m happy if this weepy clown here mounts that gun in the office of his commie rag. But I need the visual coding for the microcontroller of the gun. Five of us worked on that project for three years, and we were so busy that we never commented the code! You know how much hard work that is, computer-vision coding? No, you don’t get that, do you?” Mickey Tronic sighed within his blast helmet. “Why am I talking to you?”

“If you had the software code you want so much,” said Miss Sato, “could you get a prisoner released from that computer lab of yours?”

“Let me share the big secret with you here,” said Mickey Tronic. “Your hostage, Mrs. Nagai, she doesn’t have any jailer. All her jailers are dead. They all got wiped out by mud-pit boy there. That’s why you never got anywhere around here, and you’re never going to get anywhere. It’s not in the interests of anybody anywhere to straighten your situation out.”

“So that’s it,” said Miss Sato. “Then the truth is, I am facing anarchy.”

“Not really,” said Mickey Tronic. “I’m an anarchist, but your problem is red tape. A setup like yours is just very Japanese. Everybody just ignores your uncomfortable problem till it turns impolite to mention it.”

“Well, I am Japanese,” said Miss Sato, “and if nobody talks about Mrs. Nagai staying in the prison, then nobody will talk about her if she leaves.”

Mickey Tronic shrugged beneath his plate armor. “Go ahead, be all Japanese like that, I never said any different. Be Japanese, just let me have my true hacker freedom, all right? That’s all I wanted. Freedom. Not ‘free as in beer,’ not ‘free like free speech.’ I mean total hacker freedom, like, completely free of any obligation to any other person, ever. And that’s what I’ve got here on Tsushima. Still.” He sighed. “Even when I’m down to a goddamn paper and pencil.”

“If you give my treasure—Mrs. Nagai—to me, then I promise that, in return, I’ll give your treasure to you.”

Drizzle was falling again. Mickey Tronic wiped the smoked glass of his faceplate. “I’m supposed to believe that strange promise of yours?”

“Yes,” said Miss Sato, “because I am an honest woman of moral principle, and when I make a promise, I never lie.”

“Every tough guy thinks he’s bulletproof,” said Mickey Tronic, “just like every honest woman thinks she’ll never be a whore. But the truth is, people break. They break whenever life gets hard enough. The only guy who will never break is that guy stuck in the mud over there, and that’s why he’s not human.” He sighed. “I didn’t even mention all that cyber-stuff we installed in his brain. That was just technical.”

“So, do we have an arrangement?” said Miss Sato. “Because you won’t see the last of me on Tsushima until I get what I want.”

“Yeah, well, you never saw me in Tsushima in the first place. I’m so deep-black budget that I don’t even exist. Nobody sees me at all.”

“All right,” said Miss Sato.

“Then we might, actually, have some kind of deal,” admitted Mickey Tronic. “Just, don’t ever try to find me. Because, believe me, I can easily locate you.”

The Queen of Pirates suddenly loomed upon them in her furious majesty. At close range, her headdress towered over them like a feathered gun turret. The pirate queen had golden rings, silver bracelets, pearl buttons, and spangled, sequined sashes wrapping her grand, pregnant belly.

The pirate queen shouted at Mickey Tronic in very broken English. “Why you talk to this woman so much like that? You betray me now?”

Mickey Tronic gave an indifferent tilt to his smoked-glass faceplate. “Look, lady, don’t try to boss me around. If you’re the Queen of Pirates, then I’m the Witch Doctor of Pirates. I got your stepping razors, your whipping sticks, I got tech voodoo that would scare you so bad your grandchild will be born two-headed. So back off.”

“I never understand this stupid computer man,” said the pirate queen to Miss Sato, her regal face wrinkled with dismay. “Why does he speak English to me like that?” She pointed east, with a rattling clatter of bangles. “Does he think that is England over there? That is Japan!”

“Tell the Third World mother-of-eight here,” said Mickey Tronic, “that I don’t need any geolocation lessons. Tell her to get lost. Tell her that the ninja in the mud pit there is about to liquidate her the same way he did to pirate boyfriends one, two, and three.”

“I’m a woman of honor! I hate disrespect!” shrieked the Pirate Queen. “A quick death is too good for this no-face turtle man! I will kill him now in such an awful, terrifying way that everyone will be impressed! Tell me, you, peace woman, you’re always crying about the people suffering! What is the very worst thing in the world that ever happened to anyone? Tell me that! Tell him I’ll do that to him.”

“She claims she’s going to torture you,” said Miss Sato in English.

“Hell, this is Japan,” shrugged Mickey Tronic. “Her torture’s no good around here. Tell her I’ll commit an agonizing hara-kiri just to spite her.”

Miss Sato wisely said nothing.

The pirate queen glanced behind her, where half-hearted attempts to haul the blind man from his mud were getting nowhere. “Talk to him in English and make him scared of me, and I’ll reward you richly. Don’t make that face, because I’ll give you back your real clothes. You’ll be just like you were before we beat you. I will, you’ll see, I’ll do that now.”

The pirate queen turned and raised her voice to harangue her scattered minions, but a rolling peal of typhoon thunder blotted out her commands.

This was the season of the sacred winds, and a huge storm front was rolling in from continental Asia. The kamikaze was serious, world-scale weather, a storm front big and black and presumably radioactive. The kamikaze was full of tainted rain from the city-sized craters of North Korea. A tremendous rain was coming, the kind of rain that would scatter a horde of Mongols the way Mongols scattered civilized nations.

“Oh what a bother,” said the pirate queen. Gathering her robes in the patter of thumb-sized raindrops, she waddled to her jeep and fled the downpour.

The tempest bent the trees. Howling, ship-killing winds roared across Tsushima with salvo after salvo of thunder.

No one could remain in rain of this kind, so everyone simply left the scene.

Miss Sato and Yoshida found some shelter under the leaning roof of a dead vacation home. This stately family mansion had died not long after Tokyo had perished, as a collateral casualty. The house had suffered a fuel shortage, a water shortage, an electrical blackout, abandonment, a fire …

The beautiful island house had just fallen over in that strange mysterious way a civilization decays when nobody champions it. The dead house was a filthy mulch of fire-blackened memorabilia, wise books, tasteful paintings, meaningful photographs, important and civilized things.

These civilized things were so entirely gone now, so entirely flaked to nothingness and debris, that they lacked even the mono no aware of a cherry blossom. They were like an entire cherry orchard blown flat by a giant storm. With a loss of such scale, one could not even start over. One could not even vow to persist. One could only, in some halting but seismic fashion, come to identify with the storm winds.

Winds lashed and rain fell in buckets for four hours. When the tempest finally faded, the island landscape was foggy, silent, dark, and very cold. The swimming pool had flooded to its brim. When the evening sun flashed on it, it looked pretty and sweet again, a place of leisure and pleasure.

Zeta One had vanished. A blind aircraft had ditched in his swimming pool. It was perfect and sleek, pearl-white above and, from below, as blue as a sunlit sky.

1.

am watching a movie.

A bleak country road in a foreign land.

A truck moves along the unpaved track. It stops in a village. Castile, Spain. The 1940s. A sign, screen right—
HOYUELOS
. That must be the name of the village. Children run toward the truck. High excitement. The men are wearing caps. They open the rear of the truck. The children shout.

“Movies in a can!” Film cans. The men are traveling cinema operators.

“What kind of movie?” “Cowboys?”

The men answer. “A great movie.” “The best you’ll ever see.”

The children’s shining eyes open wide.

am watching a movie. Let me put that differently. The film I’m watching—along with countless other works—is already part of me. I can access any scene in it instantly. Or maybe it would be better to say that this movie has incorporated me. That I’m swimming in it. That would not be wrong, but it’s not quite right either. Anyway, I selected a movie—and I’ve dropped into the opening scene.

The movie proceeds. The men put up a poster on the wall of the town hall. A man’s deformed face with a stitched-up wound across his jutting forehead. His eyes are half shut. Thick bolts protrude from his neck. The title is
AUTOR DEL MONSTRUO
.

Right, Dr. Frankenstein is the “author of the monster.” It makes a strange kind of sense and I move farther in. Japanese burn-in subtitles. This must have been a print for distribution in Japan. Maybe it was the print Jundo Mamiya saw when he was a boy.

Villagers gather in an empty room in the town hall. Children, women, old men, each bringing a chair.

A black frame painted on a white stucco wall. That must be the silver screen. The stains, cracks, and finger marks on the wall are part of every movie people see in this village. Faces float in the dim reflected glow. Two children, sisters, stare raptly at the screen. The younger girl’s enormous eyes are wonderful.

The movie proceeds. A black-and-white film comes up on the stucco screen. A man and his young daughter. The shore of a lake. Flowers everywhere in full bloom. The man says something to the girl and leaves her. She plays innocently, picking the flowers.

Frankenstein’s monster steps out of the shadows. The children in the audience freeze. The little girl on the screen shows no fear at all. She speaks to the brute. Do you want to play with me? The monster is mute. The girl presses flowers on him. He kneels and starts to play with her. The carefree child seems to free him from the terror of his pursuers. He smiles, plucks a blossom, plucks another, tossing them onto the water. The lake dances in the sparkling sunlight. The children stare, wide-eyed, mesmerized by the tranquility and suspense.

A new scene. The father we saw earlier walks stiffly through the village, cradling the girl. His eyes are empty, his heart is clearly broken. Her arms and legs dangle limply. They testify wordlessly that she is dead.

The children gasp. Their expressions are real, without a trace of pretense or artifice, especially the little sister. Her awestruck eyes seem to swallow the film’s light.

#Introduction

This story—leaving aside the question of whether this is in fact a story—is the record of an extended interview with that renowned man of letters and murderer, Jundo Mamiya. I can’t post the complete transcript, please bear with me. The interview can’t be related in a sequence of orderly sentences. It’s not even an interview in the usual sense. The subject—Jundo Mamiya—died thirty years before the conversation took place. And the interviewers—<
I
> and —are not human either, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The interview was also, in and of itself, the struggle with Imajika. At its peak, this epic confrontation commandeered three percent of humanity’s total computing resources. Those untold myriads of calculations make up the substance of this interview.

I can already picture you wincing, but I must impose on your patience and add one more thing.

and are not first-person pronouns. You’ll be very close if you think of them as proper nouns temporarily allocated to a specific program. When the subject is <
I
>, it doesn’t automatically mean singular. Let’s just say that <
I
> is a placeholder for the subject of the sentence.

Naturally you’re going to end up reacting to

and as the first person; no harm done. I won’t even object if you assign a male voice to

and a female voice to . Allowance has been made for that too.

What follows is the tumultuous story of how Jundo Mamiya, a notorious killer who harried scores of victims to the grave, returned from death to strike down a monster. But on the surface, it’s nothing more than a quiet conversation. Even an action-packed novel is written out on a silent monitor—or on paper. This story is no different.

That’s enough prologue, I think.

You’re free to go now.

If you do, I’ll ask you not to return. And I’ll say, Go in Peace.

2.

The elevator descends quietly. am trapped within my sensation of movement, falling toward an underground prison, closing in on a single prisoner confined in the bowels of the earth.

There are two elevators only. The indicators display no floor numbers. Individual digits and letters flash by and vanish with dizzying speed. The Justice Ministry officer who brought me as far as the elevator told me this was how they keep escapees from finding out which floor they’re on. Other than knowing that I’m in a prison built into an abandoned mine, I have no clue where I am.

Faint vibrations penetrate the soles of my shoes. The weight I gave up earlier is returned. I straighten my collar, smooth the hem of my skirt, and cough lightly. Two corrections officers wait in the corridor. An elaborate procedure verifies my identity. The older one says, “Thank you for your patience. Do you want to see him right away?”

His misgivings seep through the politesse. It’s not because of my youth, lack of experience, or slim build.

We walk down the corridor. A barred gate slides open, metal grating on metal, an atavistic sound. The younger officer steps me through the rules. Do not approach the barrier. Do not accept anything from him. Anything you need to give him goes into the cell through the sliding meal tray. No pens, no pencils. No paperclips. And no conversations of a personal nature under any circumstances.

I almost laugh in his face. Personal? That’s right. I have to act like a “person” in here.

My houndstooth jacket is tacky. My bag clashes with my shoes. This dungeon is so overdone. Do I have to explain the meaning of every one of these things?

“Well then.” My escorts pull up short before the final gate. “This is as far as we go.”

I walk on. The gate rumbles shut behind me. Barred cells line the left side of the corridor. All of them are empty. Farther down, a steel pipe chair stands in the middle of the corridor, facing Jundo’s cell. He is the only prisoner here.

I sit down and face the cell. Jundo is directly across from me. Between us stretches a heavy glass barrier.

He sits cross-legged on the bed with his back against the stone wall, staring at me.

Jundo Mamiya. Forty-five years old. Novelist, playwright, poet, critic. At the pinnacle of his fame, the inexhaustible fount of a staggering oeuvre, each work without peer. A year from now, he’ll confess to seventy-three murders and pass sentence on himself, a sentence with no possibility of appeal.

He killed himself.

Jundo Mamiya. Just over five feet, heavily muscled like a judoka. Round face atop a thick neck, hair cropped close to the scalp. He’s utterly motionless, but he seems capable of sitting in this cross-legged posture for hours and then instantly breaking into a sprint. I’m certain he could reach me in a single motion. I can’t relax. Even with the barrier—

I erase that from my mind very quickly. Just the thought is dangerous.

“You needn’t worry. I won’t move from this spot.”

Jundo speaks. It’s like my thoughts are transparent to him.

“You were observing my posture. You’re right; my body is idling. It’s a technique of mine. But I repeat, you needn’t worry. I’ve no intention of harming you. I’ve been craving someone to talk to.”

Coming from Jundo, nothing is more terrifying than
you needn’t worry.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“Welcome. Why are you here?”

“I want to talk with you.”

“Conversation. I’ve been dying for it. What’s the topic? Concerning what I did? Or what I’m going to do?” Jundo asks.

“Neither. People have been grilling you about your actions since you were a child. Criticism from parents and teachers. Fawning counselors interviewing you. I’d like to keep discussion of your past history to a minimum today. Just so you know, I already know everything about you. I’ve read your novels and essays, all several hundred of them.”

Jundo rarely blinks. His face is a mask. He fixes motionless, half-closed eyes on me. “Nothing.”

“What?”

“I don’t smell anything.” He points to the small round openings in the barrier. “When I have a guest, the trace aromas tell me whether the weather is fine or if it’s raining in the world up above. I can infer your brand of soap. Perfume. Skin lotion. But—” The slightest hint of wariness crosses his face. “There’s no odor about you at all. Fascinating. All sorts of airborne particles stick to people’s clothing and hair as they move. But not to you.”

Jundo was a master profiler. He could characterize someone accurately from the smallest detail, even on first meeting. Casual conversation was all he needed. Invariably the other person would end up spilling his secrets without intending to. In such situations, Jundo often used his sense of smell as a guide.

Which is why I made sure to erase any odor.

“Are you really human?” he asks.

I pause. “Are you really human?”

A beat. Jundo is silent. He’s usually very verbal, but he can use silence strategically. This is different. He’s thinking, vast computations. The response comes back after a lag. Does he suspect the meaning of my question?

“Intriguing. I’d have thought I was thoroughly tired of that question. But in this context, it’s refreshing.”

“Mr. Mamiya—”

A gesture cuts me off. “You haven’t told me your name.”

I shake my head and smile. “I don’t have a name.”

Jundo’s narrow eyes close. “No scent. No name. You’re far more interesting than a riddle. And that … that ensemble! That truly makes me want to hold my nose. It reeks—the rube jacket, the shabby pumps. Completely beyond redemption. It’s not what you usually wear, is it?”

“What do you think?”

“Did someone put you up to this?” Jundo asks.

“I wonder.”

“There’ll be a motive of some sort. You planned that getup. And the subtext?”

I’m at a delicate juncture here. If all I had to do was guide his attention to the truth, things would be straightforward. But I have to get him to notice the significance of the situation on his own by feeding him tiny hints that are hardly even clues.

“Ah, yes,” says Jundo. “Now that I think of it, I recall a scene just like this. From a movie?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

Jundo turns his face toward the wall. The rough-cut stone trapezoids are like the wall of a fortress. A fortress buried in the earth, tens of meters deep. Captivity with no possibility of escape.

“Mmm, very impressive. Yes.” He considers. “And what was it you wanted to talk about?”

“I’d like you to take a look at this.” I take a book from my bag, an old, heavy book.
Moby-Dick
. The tome is large and thick. The surface of the massive leather cover is a jumble of bulges and furrows: tree roots, knots, an old man’s veins. The pages are swollen, bursting from the covers.

“Waterlogged?” asks Jundo.

“You’ll take a look?”

I put the book in the meal tray and slide it into the cell. As Jundo opens the book, the pages separate with a sickening, gelatinous sound. His face contorts with disgust.