The Future Is Japanese (44 page)

“Niwahiko? You’re Niwahiko Taira.”

The boy glances up sharply. He’d locked the door from the inside.

“Who …?”

Niwahiko’s last name will not formally change to Mamiya for five years. Jundo is a pen name he’ll use when he publishes his first collection of works in his second year of middle school. Right now he’s Niwahiko Taira. His arms and legs are skinny. He’s still just a child.

“Don’t move. You don’t want to start bleeding again.”

Of course, healing him would only take a moment, but I feel it would be better to avoid that. The tatami is gritty with dust. The paper screens are missing random sections like gapped teeth. The room is so littered with plastic supermarket bags and cast-off clothing that it’s hard to avoid stepping on them. An old game console. Unopened mail scattered about. A black coat hanging from the stump of a broken light fixture.

Standing there, I feel the poverty that fettered Niwahiko.

“All you all right? That’s a terrible wound.”

Of course he’s not all right. Niwahiko actually fainted from shock and loss of blood within a few minutes of severing his ear. What I am “writing” now embellishes the truth to render Niwahiko Taira with crystal clarity.

“What were you and your teacher doing?” I sit next to Niwahiko.

“We were just talking.”

Yukiko Tsuge is a thickset, tanned woman with a broad back in a short-sleeved pink polo shirt. The skin on her elbows is thick and dry. Her wiry hair is short.

“Do people stab themselves in the throat just because of something someone said?”

Niwahiko doesn’t react.

“This is the eighth time, isn’t it?”

The boy’s pupils dart sideways, but he quickly conceals his panic.

“Did you have to go this far?”

He stares at the floor. A new emotion wells up that he can’t hide. He looks terribly discouraged—almost despondent. He’s here because he was craving something. It was a craving he couldn’t fulfill. A frail, delicate boy. This is so unexpected that I had to sit next to him.

“You had to do it, didn’t you?”

Niwahiko is silent.

“You wrote a composition right after you came to your new school. ‘Mrs. Tsuge is always smiling, and she has a loud voice, and her hand was so strong when she shook hands with me, and her skin was so rough that I was surprised. Later I heard it was from playing softball. I’ve never seen such a sunburned teacher in all the schools I’ve been to.’ ”

Plain, unadorned sentences. That’s important.

During his life, Jundo Mamiya wrote over a hundred thousand pages of text, every sentence a superflux of expressive power and weird technique, with an abnormal kinesthesia that seemed to burrow deep inside the reader. That style was his signature, right from his first-grade composition about a school outing. He wrote using plain language only once.

“You liked Mrs. Tsuge, didn’t you?” I put my hands on Niwahiko’s. His hands are very cold. “I don’t mean as a woman. But you felt something when you touched those strong hands, didn’t you?”

Niwahiko clenches his small hands into hard fists, like his heart.

“You have a talent that frightened you. And you thought she had the strength to stand up to it. But you couldn’t control your power. The more she resisted, the more you sent it back at her. You finally had to cut your ear off before you could push her over the edge.”

Then I notice something.

Niwahiko has no fingers.

Or more accurately, his fingers have fused. His fists are as hard as stone. I reflexively try to pull my hands away. It doesn’t go so well.

I look again. My hands are embedded in Niwahiko’s fused fists.

A low, small voice says, “You’re stuck now.”

That’s not possible. In the graphiverse, I—we—possess absolute, unrestricted license to delineate worlds any way we please. Worlds appear just as we write them. Therefore, I should easily be able to withdraw my hands from these fists of stone. And that’s when it finally hits me. There is no one who can write “My hands are embedded in Niwahiko’s fused fists” except me.

Or is there?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

“Would you listen to what I have to say?” Niwahiko’s voice is serene. “I found out something nice. If I hold on to your hands, it means you won’t die like my teacher. You can’t run away from me either. You can’t cover your ears. I can talk forever and you’ll listen.”

Who is writing Niwahiko’s words?

Is it me?

Is it Imajika?

Or is it Niwahiko himself ?

“You’ll listen no matter how long I talk. Won’t you.”

6.

Three space cruisers commanded by Jundo Mamiya attack a sentient rock in orbit around Mars.

Or:
Jundo the Barbarian leaps atop the monster as it rises out of the water. He plunges the stone point of his spear into its slimy back.

Whatever write happens as soon as we write it. That is the unique feature of this cathedral we have built in the graphiverse, with Gödel’s Entangled Bookshelf and literal technology. We don’t have to write the details. All we need is an outline of the basics, even a single sentence. The fine details are built up by legions of CASSYs.

GEB’s CASSYs are more sophisticated than commercial agents. Their sentences are more varied, more apt, and more original than anything a human might come up with—styles from the burning roughness of rotgut bourbon to the sensual swirl of whipped cream.

That’s why

am here, in the captain’s cabin of an old sailing vessel, sitting across from Jundo Mamiya. The age of steam is in the future. The cabin reeks of seaweed and whale oil. Everything is damp from sea spray.

“So? What new indignity is this?” Jundo scowls. I’ve written him with a wooden leg, like Ahab.

“I don’t want you to run away.”

“That’s not it. I mean the food.” The captain’s dinner is salt pork and potato gruel.

“This ship left port a year ago,” I remind him. “You’re the captain. If you want something fresh, work harder. Catch a whale and you can dine on fluke steak.”

No one on a whaling vessel yearns for whale meat. Even a fresh bloody steak wouldn’t tempt the crew of the
Pequod
.

The sperm whale’s massive head contains a prodigious cache of oil for candles and lubricants. The blubber under the hide also yields huge quantities of oil. Before petroleum distillates and cheap vegetable oil, the limits of civilization were practically defined by the availability of this single resource. Whales! Living oil fields, roaming freely across the world’s oceans. To hunt them, humans perfected a system—huge winches to raise the carcasses, specialized knives to flense them, precise techniques for coiling harpoon rope, the surest ways to con men into joining the crew, when and how much to pay them, protocol between ships. Every facet served one goal: hunting whales. Humans always do this. They overadapt.

“You’re the captain, go ahead and eat. You don’t have to worry about appearances.”

“Captain, am I? Do you expect me to bellow orders to the crew? And in the final act, lash myself to Imajika as he dives for the depths?”

I smile. “No need to follow the movie script. Do as you like. This ship isn’t searching for Imajika anyway.”

“By the way—” The meat is so tough that Jundo gives up and throws his fork across the room. “You’re quite a talker. Are all the rest of you like this?”

“Interviewing is our job. We talk to you. You respond. We output your responses immediately. We use a certain method to integrate your responses and generate virtual Jundo Mamiyas in other locations. We’re compiling all the fine details. Calculating a complex mega-Mamiya.”

“Interesting. I ask a simple question and you bury me with information. Aren’t you worried that I might be the one who’s interviewing you?”

Jundo sure knows how to get right under your skin. “It doesn’t matter, actually. It won’t affect our process.”

“So you’re out of reach. Well, it’s nice to be confident. But I have one question. I hope you can give me an answer.”

“Fire away.”

“If you’re writing me, I don’t see how the ‘me’ you’re writing can be Jundo Mamiya. It can’t be anything more than ‘you.’ ”

“That’s a valid question. May I give you a slightly roundabout answer?”

I can hear the waves striking the prow. The creaking of timbers and the noises made by the crew flow beneath our voices. Everything is rocked by the ocean swells.

Everything surrounding us at the micro level is nothing more than text generated with blinding speed.

<
I
> am a composite generated by extended-feature CASSYs. I am outside this cabin. Whenever I write something I have to exit this setting.

First I have to explain how GEB originated. It’s critical that Jundo understand this. Otherwise, “Jundo Mamiya” won’t be able to fight Imajika on equal terms.

“Jundo, I assume you remember Gödel?”

“Don’t mock me. I know what Gödel is, and CASSYs too. Gödel is the company that developed a totally new search algorithm. What was it called? PageRank? They stood the industry on its head.”

“Correct. Gödel laid its foundations as a clever fusion of search and advertising. Their mission was to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Their business exploded—automated news editing, maps, photo albums, video upload, OS development. In 2009, they reached a settlement with authors to digitize the holdings of the world’s libraries and make the content available to users.

“The official name of that new service was Gödel Entangled Bookshelf.”

“I remember. They wanted to make money by digitizing everything published, complete with illustrations, then slice them up, ferment the slices, and create a data cloud like strands of sauerkraut. It didn’t interest me at all.”

“Really? Why not?”

Jundo actually wrote about this.

“I rarely read books. When I left middle school I’d read exactly seven hundred, and that was quite enough. Reading books was merely basic training, like pushups or marathon running. Very boring.”

“Training for what?”

“To hold myself back. My words are too powerful. In first grade I wrote about getting carsick on the bus during a field trip. A teacher read it and vomited. Reading books taught me how much I had to dial back that power so people could read my works. It was truly mind-numbing.”

“You had your power on a leash with everything you wrote?”

“Of course. Using my raw strength would hardly have been art. But no one noticed.”

Indeed. If Jundo hadn’t held back, who knows what might have happened to his readers.

“Well, I suppose it was useful. I didn’t go to high school, but I could make as much money as I wanted. No need for academic credentials or family wealth.”

“And the books you wrote were caught up in Gödel’s project.”

“I told you, I didn’t care whether it helped my book sales or hurt them.”

“I see. Then let’s set this aside for the moment.

“So GEB was launched, and as expected, it generated huge amounts of red ink. First it focused on the world’s libraries. Then it gradually expanded its net. Finally it started swallowing up any kind of printed material. Government and corporate publications. Handwritten manuscripts from before the invention of the printing press. Everything ever written anywhere in the world.

“Of course, the project included moving images, music too. Advanced analytics tagged images and musical effects with linguistic data that was fed into GEB’s archives—to borrow your image, it became part of the sauerkraut. At first there were conflicts over author rights, but ultimately that hurdle was easily surmounted.

“GEB’s real significance is that it put a vast amount of the world’s ‘paper’ information into Gödel’s belly.”

“Its belly?” Jundo asks.

“People thought they were searching the Worldwide Web via Gödel, but they were searching a mirror of the web built up in Gödel’s belly. Gödel used unique metaheuristics to parse and analyze the content: finding relationships, ranking them, performing countless iterations of the same operations on the metadata, and incorporating every search query into its evolution, moment by moment.”

“And the ‘paper’ data went into the same belly.”

“The sentences stored in GEB become, in a sense, anonymous. Of course, they’re tagged with author and publisher data, but parsed into phrases. The process of cross-linking starts immediately, and when users encounter a book’s content, it’s in the form of search results triggered by a key word. In GEB’s library, the books are shelved with the spines facing inward.”

“What’s wrong with that? Authors and their obsession with rights bored me to death.”

“There’s more to the story,” I say. “For one thing, there’s far more information buried in paper data than even Gödel realized at first—enormous volumes of information, written down and recorded once, never read or understood by anyone.

“For example, say there was a minor conflict fought in some remote corner of nineteenth-century Europe. The only records might be trivial. A diplomat’s expense report for a banquet. A procurement slip for a single overcoat or a knapsack. Hundreds of revisions to land registers after territory was surrendered. Pension records for thousands of soldiers. There are mountains of this kind of information. And people’s memoirs, from best-selling works by politicians to the recollections of a private in the army, privately printed for some library.”