The Future Is Japanese

by Неизвестный

  That was only the first-order damage. At least it was restricted. The real damage occurred several seconds later, when the countless secondary works linked to Alice’s typhoon took the impact, precipitating a cascade effect.

  All at the whim of Imajika.

  3.

  am watching a movie.

  An overwhelming plain stretches across the frame. A dry land, blanketed with small stones. The sparse grass is white-brown, but I can’t tell if it’s dry or just looks that way on the screen.

  Two small figures sit in the foreground. Sisters, the girls who were watching Frankenstein in the town hall. They’re wearing matching white clothes, holding book satchels, looking out over the endless plain from a small rise. The ground slopes gently down to the gigantic plain at their feet, with nothing to break the line of sight all the way out to the distant, blue-shrouded mountains. A featureless waste you would only see in Westerns.

  The wind is blowing. I feel the sound of the wind gradually merging with the clicking of the projector at my back. In fact, that uniform plain is getting hard to distinguish from the screen itself.

  Tiny waves of movement seem to envelop the screen. Is it waving grass? Is it film grain? Maybe it’s just noise in the audience’s vision?

  “That house. With the well.”

  The older girl points below them. A small building comes into sight and disappears again, half buried in the waving of the plain. There seems to be a well next to it.

  “Is he there?” says the younger one. Her sister has told her that the house shelters Frankenstein’s monster from the movie—actually, it houses the Spirit of the Beehive.

  The girls stand and walk down the slope. Their receding forms quickly grow smaller, then tiny, melting into the wind, into the film grain and the visual noise. They pass into the screen itself—into the source of the movie.

  I lean forward. Something terrible is coming.

  This location, this movie that was released in 1973, is also within Imajika’s reach. The presence gets stronger. I clench my fists on my knees. My hands tremble violently. I feel the urge to get up and run.

  But escape is forbidden.

  The figures finally disappear. The waving of the plain is violent now. The sand-colored film grain runs amok.

  Then it happens.

  On the undulating surface, at the center of the plain, a hemisphere pushes up like soft candy, a huge bubble. The hemisphere grows with uncanny speed and spreads its footprint. It expands faster and faster, pulling the landscape along with it, and in a moment covers more than half the plain. But its footprint, its diameter, keeps expanding. More than half of the sphere is still below the surface.

  I am resigned to my fate. The sphere dwarfs everything on the screen. It’s bigger than the screen itself. The swelling quickly reaches the edges of the screen, spreads beyond them and engulfs the row of seats in front of me.

  I can only look up and away. When I look back, the sphere has fully emerged. A sand-colored rock now floats where the movie was, in an utter void, like a small, incongruous, sandy moon.

  Then the surface of the sphere crumples inward, as if unable to bear its own weight. Chasms form and rumble inward, collapse upon collapse, altering the surface contours with a violent roar.

  I watch as scene after scene from the movie, scenes in motion, are sucked into that parched avalanche. I listen as fragments of soundtrack—dialogue, music, and effects—rumble in a last dying convulsion. Then the rumble is cut off, the collapse stops, and suddenly the orb morphs into the very image of Méliès’s weeping moon.

  Again the chasms collapse and the moon’s surface is reshaped and transformed, and now it is not a moon, but a fist—a fist clenched so tightly, I’m certain the fingers have fused.

  4.

  The walls in the high-ceilinged room are lined with bookshelves that are filled with dark, leather-bound volumes. The books absorb the light, pushing this study a long step past four PM, the time it is now, toward night. The gold-inlaid titles on the spines have flaked off and the dyed leather has darkened. What little light there is comes through a tall, narrow window. The window is floor to ceiling, about a foot and a half wide. It can’t be opened, and the light coming through it is enervated, scattered by the complicated layout of the courtyard beyond.

  A large, old-fashioned chair stands next to the window. Its legs and armrests are elegantly curved. The seat back is broad. place—I placed—Jundo Mamiya in that chair.

  Jundo clears his throat and blinks his slitlike eyes. The expression in those tapered, hooded eyes is hard to read. His eyebrows are slender. His head is shaved. Jundo strokes his face from cheek to chin. He strokes his ears and shakes his head slowly. His neck is thick with muscle. His body seems to be bursting from its short frame. Jundo Mamiya in his late thirties, vigorous and robust. His shirt has a standup collar. His pants are silk. On his feet, leather slip-ons.

  “Nice to meet you. Is this room suitable?”

  Jundo looks dissatisfied. “What are these clothes? I can’t take them off.”

  “Your clothes have no buttons. No metal clasps or strings. No belt, of course, and no seams. Everything woven to fit your body. You can’t take them off, unless you rip them off.”

  Jundo’s clothes were generated along with the rest of him moments ago.

  “There’s something rather peculiar about this situation. You have me at an overwhelming disadvantage, I take it.”

  “The clothes were a hint, yes.”

  “And you can erase me anytime?”

  “Yes. And I’m afraid you can’t influence me with words.”

  You are completely at my mercy. That’s sure to get a rise out of Jundo. Maintaining the right degree of resistance is part of my role here. Extremely dangerous, but unavoidable. We need as many Jundos as we can generate, and we need a wide range of variation.

  “There’s something I really must object to.” Jundo gestures toward his left ear. “This. I certainly can’t accept this.”

  Jundo’s left ear is smaller and less mature than his right. It is his ear at age thirteen.

  “I’m sure you know I cut this off when I was in elementary school.”

  “I’m aware of that. You had two last names then, didn’t you? At school you used Mamiya, your mother’s name. Your father’s name was on your birth certificate. You were living with your mother in a provincial town of about thirty thousand. You cut off your ear in order to murder your teacher during a home visit.”

  “I didn’t kill her. She did it herself,” Jundo says.

  “She used your knife to stab herself in the throat.”

  “That’s right. Mrs. Tsuge used my knife. Thank you—I hadn’t thought of that name for a long time. Yukiko Tsuge.”

  “Your teacher had no reason to kill herself, of course. She had a warm family life with a husband, a daughter in fourth grade, and a son in kindergarten. She was happy.”

  “She had her reasons. We all do. I just gave her a little encouragement.”

  “You manipulated her. No threats, no hypnosis, just conversation—”

  Jundo had the ability to drive people to suicide with nothing more than conversation. This he confirmed in writing before his death. If it struck his fancy, he could make you take your own life, no matter who you were.

  Seventy-three victims. His final testament contained a list of their names.

  Each one had proved to be a real person. They each had had a relationship with Jundo, just as he stated. He knew the time and manner of each death. Yukiko Tsuge was his eighth victim, which meant Jundo had already wielded this power as a child. His first victim was the father of a classmate, a man widely known for making violent threats. On his way to work, he jumped the center divider and plowed head-on into several other cars, dying instantly. The evening before he was killed, he had been talking to Jundo.

  Some victims took their own lives on the spot, others committed suicide months or years after their conversation with Jundo. According to
his testament, he found it amusing to force people to recall long-forgotten personal secrets and sins. Then he would bore in and finish them off.

  Jundo’s testament reproduced an example, a fragment, of one of these exchanges. It ended in the suicide by poison of a fellow writer his age. Everyone who read the account was struck by a physical conviction that it was genuine. It was as if the letters Jundo used to record the conversation began to move like insects on the page, crawling under the nails of the hand holding the document. The quiet abuse he unleashed on his victims is still under analysis by more than one organization.

  “—just conversation.”

  “Not always.” Jundo looks annoyed. “Words weren’t enough for Mrs. Tsuge. She was obstinate. She wouldn’t go over the edge until I gave her my ear. It was never that difficult before. That was my biggest disgrace. The worst stain on my record. I made up my mind never to repeat such a blunder. So you see, my missing ear is the core of my identity. But you’ve grown it back. You mock my dignity.”

  He doesn’t look as angry as he sounds. His eyes are a mix of boredom and irritation with a trace of interest. A viscous look, something slowly mixed together and congealed, like the film on a bowl of porridge gone cold. That disturbing gaze, the one that comes to mind when anyone hears the name Jundo Mamiya.

  “The ear of a child on an adult’s head. The technology to do that without the slightest effort is the core of what I am. You regard yourself very highly, but you can’t even escape this room with no locks. From where I sit, you’re a nonentity.”

  Jundo’s eyes smolder. “I want this ear gone.”

  “Then maybe you’d like to do it again? I can’t give you a razor, but you can always tear it off.”

  “Tell me to tear it off. I’ll probably use all my strength to do it.”

  This surprises me, frankly. Jundo is nearing the core. No, he’s already there.

  “I’m sure you would. You are completely in our power.”

  “ ‘Our power’? I see.” Jundo never misses a detail. A man who can kill with a few words. Superhuman profiling ability. “This is some sort of project, isn’t it? And I’m one of the inputs.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You regenerated my ear. You control me completely. Dress me in clothes I can’t take off. How can such technology be?”

  “You yourself are the proof of its existence.” I manage to force that much out.

  “At minimum, I seem to have no physical existence. Are you using some kind of emulator?”

  “In a sense. But you know that simulating a real person’s body and their mind and actions would be impossible. It’s far too complex. Especially when the person you want to simulate has been dead for thirty years.”

  My function is to draw Jundo’s attention to the fact that he’s dead. That he is not of this world. That nevertheless, our literal technology has given him a brief resurrection.

  We agents—thousands of us deployed throughout GEB—are each delineating thousands of Jundo Mamiyas. I am speaking to one of them. I speak to spark awareness.

  You are one of the dead.

  A patchwork monster.

  A botched Ahab.

  Then—

  “And what if I’m not a simulation?”

  The dead man, the monster, the Ahab, gets out of his chair and faces me. Small and tough. He stands relaxed, like a veteran judoka. The tall, narrow window behind him is turning the color of boiled pine pitch. Night is flowing in. Night air seems to rise from Jundo’s body. I try to speak, but I only mumble. Is he controlling my will? Jundo takes a step forward.

  “In that case, what are you doing?”

  “I—”

  I sense that Jundo has already reached this conclusion, but I speak anyway.

  “I am ‘writing’ you.”

  #The Letter

  Those happy hours we all spent together will never return

  I have been praying to God to reunite us

  I have prayed every day since we parted in the civil war

  In this remote village

  Where Fernando, the girls and I struggle to survive

  Except for the walls, this house has changed completely

  What could have happened to all the wonderful things we had

  I say this not out of nostalgia

  That is something I have not been capable of feeling for years

  So much that we knew was lost, so much has been destroyed

  Only sadness remains

  Along with the things we lost,

  I think we have also lost the strength to live life fully

  I don’t know if this letter will reach you

  The news from outside is so sparse, so confusing

  Please let me know that you are alive

  All my love

  —Teresa

  5.

  am in a decaying apartment. It’s a three-story public housing block surrounded by farmland on the outskirts of a small provincial town. The tatami mats are sun-bleached, scuffed, and gritty with dust. I see paddy fields through grime-clouded windows. It’s been years since anyone cleaned them. The golden rice stalks lie flattened by yesterday’s typhoon, as if some gigantic dog shed its fur all over the fields.

  I turn away from the sliding window and shut the paper screen. The paper is spotted with round stains. A young boy is sitting on the floor, kneeling on a cushion with his heels under his buttocks. Black shorts, a white shirt. His left ear is already gone. His shirt is dyed crimson from shoulder to chest. The cushion is squishy with blood, but not his blood. His teacher faces him in the same formal posture, torso thrown forward. Her forehead touches the tatami. Her hands are pinned beneath her throat. The point of a knife protrudes from the left side of her neck. She probably died less than an hour ago.

  I hear the musical sundown announcement from a distant PA system, a distant melody. A child’s voice speaks over the music. “All primary school students, time to go home now.” The voice belongs to Yukiko’s daughter, but the boy may not know it. He moved here less than two months ago.

  “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—a
lmost 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.