The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Copyright © 2017 by Eli K. P. William

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover illustration and design by Markus Lovadina

  Print ISBN: 978-1-940456-52-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-940456-53-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  A corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.

  —Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

  Opportunity

  Came to my door

  When I was down on my luck

  In the shape

  Of an old friend

  With a plan, guaranteed

  —“Opportunity,” Bobby McFerrin, Spontaneous Inventions

  PART 4

  NAKED JOURNEYS

  1

  AN ALLEY?

  From the depths of oblivion, a pair of eyelids moved. Whether they went up or down, opened or closed, was not yet clear, nor could it be said whose eyelids they were. But their movement had been perceived. Of this there was certainty.

  Perhaps triggered by this perception, something immediately began to buzz into existence beneath the eyelids. A sort of tactile cloud, a pinprick tingling that spread through an area of space as though dead TV static were coalescing into a definitive shape: a body? A human body? A man’s body?

  All along his right side, the man could feel hardness, and against his right arm from the wrist down, warm grit. It was a familiar sensation. Yes, he could remember it, the touch of the metropolis’s skin—concrete. He could smell exhaust, a dusty sourness, and the musk of dirty water. He could taste the phlegmy acid of morning breath stagnant in the back of his throat.

  The pair of eyelids moved again. They were the man’s eyelids. Attached to the face on his newly awoken body. But whether they were going up or down, opening or closing, he still wasn’t sure, for whichever way they went all he found was darkness.

  Denied light to fully rouse him, the man could feel the pull of sleep, an undertow that threatened to drag his still-mending awareness back down into the abyss of fractured slumber from which it had just arisen. Somehow, this first brief gasp of waking life felt precious to him, and without yet knowing why, he wanted to remain there. At the same time, he sensed with helpless anxiety that the buoyancy of his mind was tenuous and could do little more in his frail state than continue to blink.

  Yet this very act seemed to have significance for the man, for on about the sixth or seventh blink two words came to him suddenly—Amon, Kenzaki—and immediately they began to link to various thoughts, like a hub firing lasers to all the nodes in a vast network inside his head…. Amon Kenzaki >>> jubilee >>> Monju >>> forest >>> Mayuko >>> forest >>> GATA >>> Mayuko >>> Rick >>> jubilee >>> Birla >>> ??? >>> Sekido >>> virus >>> bankdeath >>> … Then a multitude of memories burst forth all at once, everything he remembered jumbling and blurring together like millions of Venn Diagrams flitting across a blackboard, like countless droplets of water smashing each other in mid-air.

  Amidst this mnemonic tempest, the man hung on to those two words—Amon, Kenzaki—and knew this was his name, his raft, nailing his sensation of blinking and warm gritty hardness to it, clinging to it with desperation until he remembered where he was, or where he last was. Running out of cash before he could get to the Sanzu River, he had sat down in an alley to commit identity suicide. Yes, that’s what this feeling of concrete was, that’s why he could smell the water. Now he had to get there. Had to cross over into the District of Dreams. The largest bankdeath camp on Earth. There was nowhere else to go.

  Focusing on the little muscles beneath his brow, muscles over which he had mastered subtle control during his blink reduction training, Amon told his eyelids to drop and then lift. As expected, this brought the distinctive sensation of thin epidermal curtains sliding down his eyes and then up again, the direction of motion now as obvious as ever. But contrary to expectation, this did nothing to dispel the black void before him. He fluttered his eyelids, stretched them wide; he blinked and blinked and blinked and blinked and blinked. But however many times he tried, there was no blinking away this darkness.

  To say “darkness” actually wasn’t quite right, for darkness implies the absence of light. Yet this wasn’t the absence of anything visible in particular, but the absence of sight itself. Eyes open or closed, Amon was blind.

  And just when he realized this, another revelation came to him. Unless the metropolis had fallen into a state of torpor—a deep, quiet urban coma in which even its pulse of cars and images and people had settled into utter silence—he was deaf too.

  Layered on the exhaust fumes and stench of the river, he could smell the dusty sourness of concrete beneath him, as it shook now and then, perhaps with the passing of cars or trains. In the thick humidity that seemed to settle on the ground, his skin felt sticky all over, and licking his lips, he tasted the salt of accreted sweat in the right corner. The right side of his body ached from lying on the hard ground for … How long? Just a moment earlier, it seemed, he’d been sitting in an alley. Then he’d committed identity suicide, cash crashing himself and demolishing his perceptions, experience itself collapsing like a house of cards. He’d been expecting to lose the overlay. The ImmaNet was obviously going to disappear when his BodyBank went offline. But what had happened to everything else? Why could he not hear or see anything? What the hell was going on?!

  Amon felt the clenching of his diaphragm, the vibrations in his chest, the tearing pain in his throat, the stretching wide of his mouth, but no scream came out. Though his lungs ejected air as hard as they could, his ears picked up nothing, only increasing his terror. He began to writhe about, his arms and legs flailing, the wetness of his own spittle and tears spattering his face. When suddenly there was a sharp crack on the back of his head as Amon accidentally smashed himself into something solid and wall-like.

  The impact seemed to knock sense into him, for he realized the stupidity of what he was doing and stopped moving, letting his limbs flop down limp. People had been after him. He had lost them many stations back in his invisible dash through Wakuwaku City and his train ride on the Oneiro Express. But drawing attention to himself was foolish, however small the chances were they might find him.

  After his spastic fit, Amon found that the hardness was beneath his back now. With the weight off his right side, the compression no longer numbed his ribs and they began to throb with sharp tiddlywinks of pain. Still panicked, his breaths quivered in and out rapidly, and Amon started his blink reduction, instinctively seeking calm in this habitual exercise. As always, it would transport him back to his apartment in Jinbocho, to that sanctuary of frugality where he had practiced every day. As always, it would reassure him that he was saving money and advancing towards his dream. As always, it would make him feel like he was doing something significant with his life. But right now it was accomplishing none of these things and
whenever he lifted his lids during each blink cycle, the feeling of having his eyes open and yet not being able to see only magnified his unease, so that he gave up within seconds and clamped them shut.

  It was then that Amon noticed his throat was parched, his skin oozing with moisture in the heat. While one perspired constantly just staying still in the stifling, sultry air of Tokyo summer, he had been hurrying like mad through the metropolis before cash crashing, frantically struggling to save Mayuko, weeping. Now he’d been thrashing about without taking in any fluids after lying there in the alley for who knows how many hours, assuming he was still in the alley. That was a disturbing thought. How did he know he hadn’t been moved? Or hadn’t sleepwalked? He’d never been somnambulant before, but he’d never been bankdead before either, not to mention deaf or blind. From the smells, the rumble of the ground, the sickeningly warm feel of the concrete, and the dull throb in his head from when he’d smacked against some wall-like surface, it certainly seemed like he was in the alley. But how could he be sure?

  As though powered by wills of their own, his hands began to feel their way around his vicinity: the hard, rough, dustiness beneath; a lumpy but smooth plasticky material rising vertically to his left, and groping upwards only empty air. Reaching to his right, his fingers brushed over more concrete and, recalling that the alley ought to have a wall just a meter or so in that direction, he got to his knees and warily began to crawl towards it. What if you’re touching premium real estate? the voice of his nerves whispered. What if you’re headed for the road? He knew it was irrelevant who owned the surfaces and what they cost now that his BodyBank was turned off. But that didn’t lessen his feeling of guilt for possibly wasting money, and his concern about the road wasn’t totally without basis. Nonetheless, he forced himself apprehensively onwards, only a few knee-paces to go, his awareness concentrated into his right hand outstretched ahead of him as it felt along the ground for signs of danger like a curb or a train track or passing shoes. His fingertips hit something, and he recoiled in fright. Then, gingerly extending them again until they touched whatever it was, he traced upwards while edging closer until he could flatten his palm against it and felt a wash of relief when he found a flat plasticky surface like the other.

  Being ensconced between what could only be two walls, he felt certain for a moment that he was in an alley (the faint, muggy breeze telling him he was outside and therefore not in a room or hallway). But even if it was an alley, he realized, he couldn’t be sure that it was the alley. He’d only been in it for a few seconds before blacking out, and in that brief interval his mind had been swirling with stress and fear and remorse and thoughts of Mayuko and countless other distracting things, so his recollection of his surround was highly suspect. He did a series of subtle twitch-gestures with his fingers to open up the seg of the moment before he cash crashed, but obviously that didn’t work. And the realization that he was hopelessly lost, unable even to access his LifeStream and check how he got here, came slamming down on him like a bag of sand so that he flopped down flat on the ground. There he curled up close to the wall he’d just discovered as he shook in the darkness that was not dark enveloping him, trying to force the question of where he might be from his mind.

  But this only awakened a second question and without thinking, he glanced into the bottom left corner of his eye, where, of course, he found no clock overlaid, only the same void abiding everywhere else he looked. Not only did he not know where he was, he didn’t know when he was. He wanted to think he’d only been lying here for a few hours. Yet perhaps it had been longer. Was it morning? afternoon? evening? If he thought about it, the warmth of the metropolis felt subdued, suggesting night. But if so, was it the night after he sat down here, or the following night, or maybe the night after that … ?

  As his trembling began anew, Amon reverted to blink reduction, but the experience of not seeing with his eyes open only brought terror quivering outwards from his chest again and his eyelids spasmed uncontrollably. Accepting the counterproductive futility of the exercise, he automatically switched to the next stage of his frugality routine—breath reduction—focusing on the muscles around his diaphragm to extend his breath. With his nerves frazzled, he found himself panting uncontrollably, and decided to overcompensate with deep breathing. Since this action was more expensive than regular old breathing, he began to feel guilty for wasting money, and his stress intensified, until he realized that the cost probably didn’t matter. No, it definitely didn’t matter. Keeping his eyes closed was no longer more expensive than opening them or blinking or squinting or winking, just as deep breathing was no longer more expensive than wheezing or hyperventilating or anything else. In fact, none of his actions were any more or less expensive than any other. Now that he was severed completely from the ImmaNet and GATA’s vigilant tallying, his actions had no price at all, nor did blink or breath reduction bear any relation to his savings. If he thought about it more carefully, he didn’t even have any savings, couldn’t have any savings. This meant that trying to save money would not help him get to the forest. Therefore, there was no connection whatsoever between conserving his actions and the realization of his dream. But this truth undercut everything that made these practices meaningful. They were pointless!

  All the same, he found the deep breathing calming. And although a certain part of him—the self-monitoring, ambitious part—told him that this calmness merely distracted him from his aspirations, making him anxious for not taking shallower, more affordable breaths, he continued to breathe deeply and gave himself fully to the feeling. Amon, this is not about money anymore, he told himself. You don’t have any money and you may never have it again. This is just one way to cope. With these thoughts he focused as intently as ever on his diaphragm. Except now, instead of heeding the self-ingrained reflex that steered him away from “deep breathing,” he intentionally aimed for it.

  Once his heart was settling to a stable trot, he began to consider what had happened to him, what had happened to his eyes and ears. His initial impulse was to check online for articles about post-bankdeath audiovisual impairment or anything that might clarify his current condition, and he did the gestures to open FlexiPedia, using a bronze search engine of course because silver was too expensive. But the window never opened, and this reminded him that not only was his BodyBank deactivated, but that a web search would be impossible without sight and hearing anyways, an awful epiphany that brought dread quaking up from his gut. No ImmaNet? With three senses? How the hell am I going to get to the District of Dreams? But he defied these despairing, exasperated doubts and returned to deep breathing once more. Innnnnnnn. Ouuuuuuuuut. Innnnnnnnn. Ouuuuuuuuut, he found himself humming in his head, and, with the help of this impromptu mantra, he soon summoned enough focus to return his attention to his predicament.

  After entering the Death Codes into his BodyBank and committing identity suicide, the last thing Amon remembered was the overlay being torn away, and the blank patch in his memory that followed told him he must have immediately fallen unconscious. This was no surprise. In fact, he had been expecting to faint. From touch-crashing bankrupts in the course of his duties as an Identity Executioner, Amon knew that if you input the Death Codes into someone’s BodyBank without nerve dusting them and shut it down suddenly while they were still conscious, this generated a cognitive backlash that knocked them out. That was why, before executing himself, he had sat down in a small side street, beneath the shelter of a balcony, away from the crowds and traffic and other dangers. While he would have preferred somewhere more private and secure, this was the best place he could find in a hurry when inflation surged and pushed him suddenly to the brink of bankruptcy. At least here, he was unlikely to be trampled or run over.

  Yet although he’d been expecting to lose consciousness, he hadn’t put any thought at all into what would happen when he awoke. He’d simply assumed that he would get up and find his way to the camps. But his job had never required him to deal with bankdead aft
er they’d been cash crashed, and he realized now that there were gaps in his knowledge of the liquidation process. He knew how liquidation worked in outline of course, as he’d met many Collection Agents when they came to retrieve the inert bodies of bankrupts he’d executed. They were taken to the Ministry of Records for LifeStream upload and then to the Ministry of Access for surgical removal of their BodyBank, before being transported to the camps. He also knew a bit about life in the camps, how the donations of basic supplies were generous, how the bankdead were totally free (if not quite Free with a capital F), how the mysterious workings of the Market ensured that the District of Dreams was the best of all possible slums. Despite all his growing suspicions about the justice of the AT market, Amon still believed that this series of procedures was as humane as could be. But now he saw that his details on the transitional period between displacement and life in the camps were a bit spotty at best, and he wondered why it had been treated so cursorily in GATA’s usually comprehensive seminars or why it had never come up in the InfoFlux. Was there something that GATA and the MegaGloms didn’t want people to know? Could all bankdead go blind and deaf as he had?

  Possibly. But if so, what would cause it? Being forced to perceive the world without any graphical overlay? No. Clearly not, as he’d experienced such moments before, like when he’d taken off his training bank as a child in the BioPen, when the activist called Makesh had hacked his eyes in Sushi Migration, when he’d accidentally clicked the wrong command in the Eroyuki bedroom … So then what about his being disconnected from the ImmaNet entirely? No. That didn’t explain it either as he remembered severing his own connection—partially at least—in the elevator when he’d fled Shuffle Boom, which had been incredibly jarring, but hadn’t taken away his vision or hearing entirely. So the reason had to be something other than losing the overlay or the ImmaNet, something at a deeper level … like the shutdown of his BodyBank maybe? Yes, that seemed to make more sense, as it was plausible that the cognitive shock that caused his fainting might have been related to his sensory problems in some way. But how exactly? Though Amon was no expert in cyberneurology or anything, he did have some common sense knowledge about how the BodyBank functioned, and, after a few minutes curled up on the ground breathing and thinking about it, this enabled him to muster a guess.