The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  The biological sensors and chips of the BodyBank were, after all, networked into a seamless whole with his body. And along with the display in his eyes and the speaker in his ears, they had become an integral part of his perceptual system. The audio-video input-output loop that made the ImmaNet possible was ongoing even when no overlay was present, so that even naked perceptions would have been jointly constituted by his inherited sensory organs and the organic machines that were a part of them, in tandem with his brain and nervous system. This meant that his eyes and ears, along with their corresponding neural matrices, would have been habituated to receiving signals from digital devices connected to the ImmaNet, beginning when he was a child with a Training Bank and continuing for the last seven years since he received his BodyBank. Once the BodyBank had shut down and the artificial component of his senses was lost, the nerves involved would have been suddenly deprived of an information source that they had long grown to expect, which was woven inextricably into their regular function. This was probably what ruptured the awareness of people like him who cash crashed while awake. Then when they woke up still lacking the regular inflow, they would find themselves afflicted with blindness and deafness.

  In other words, Amon, like every other Free Citizen, had perceived everything through a technological filter for his entire life. What he’d thought of as moments of raw, unprocessed experience, such as those moments in the BioPen, Sushi Migration and Eroyuki, had in fact been mediated by the calculating engine implanted within him. Now that his BodyBank was deactivated, now that he was perceiving for the first time without any manmade crutches, he was confronted with the naked world—the actual naked world—for the first time, and it was so unprecedented and alien to his consciousness that he was literally unable to see or hear it.

  While this explanation did seem convincing to Amon, it was only a guess. And even if he was right, he had no way of knowing if it applied to all bankdead, only some of them, or just to him. For if he thought about it further, his situation was different from all the others before him. He, unlike anyone else in the history of the Free Era (as far as he knew), had committed ID suicide and so never had his data extracted or his BodyBank removed. Retaining his data shouldn’t have been affecting his mind in a distinctive way, as all bankdead were unable to access them when their BodyBanks were shut down, but the fact that he still had his hardware might. Perhaps the surgery dust that removed BodyBanks in the Ministry of Access also repaired damage done by the disconnection, and he had missed out on this standard treatment. Liquidation had to work something like that, didn’t it? GATA couldn’t just let bankdead enter the camps in the same condition he was in, could they? They’d never survive a day! So what about me then? he wondered. Am I going to survive the day? Or am I going to die like this, withering away in an alley … ?

  Isolated from his habitual network of information, he felt like a star in a black hole, his confidence cracked right to the core. And a glassdust flame of remorse seared gratingly through his flesh when he remembered that Mayuko too was lost to him … At least you didn’t go bankrupt before cash crashing, he consoled himself. At least you still have the information your enemies fear, not to mention your freedom. Yes, freedom. Actually, he wasn’t sure just how useful that information would be or whether he was indeed as free as he supposed, but telling himself this helped to surmount his sense of helplessness, and he reminded himself that this wasn’t the first time he’d figured things out on his own. After his run in with Sekido and the recruiter in Shuffle Boom, he’d crouched in the Open Source Zone and woven the tattered fabric of events that had led him there into a story, without any help from the ImmaNet. Then as now, he still had hope, fragile as it might be, even if Mayuko wasn’t coming to save him this time. Somehow he would reconnect, get back online, clear his unwarranted debt. Somehow, he would find Mayuko, make it to the forest, start his life over and live it right this time.

  Reassured by such positive thinking, Amon pushed himself away from the foot of the wall, rolled over onto his back, and jolted to a sitting position. He then reached his left palm for the wall, leaned on it for support, and stood up. On his feet encompassed by a great, vacant unknown was profoundly bewildering. He could have been standing beside the edge of a rooftop or a roaring highway and he wouldn’t have known it. If he was going to get something to drink, he would have to forge onwards.

  But after two steps he stopped, a chill of fear freezing his spine. Which way to the Sanzu River? He didn’t know. If he got oriented in the right direction, how was he going to get there? He couldn’t say. Should he shout for help? That would only draw unwanted attention, possibly from his enemies, and likely no one would care. Was he going to grope his way along the alley or wherever he was? This would only make him sweat more and increase his thirst, wet beads already collecting along his hairline from the effort of standing up. And what if he made it out of this seeming alley? Then where would he rest? Where could he feel even remotely safe? Or if he did find another sanctuary, how would he recognize it? People could trip all over him, or he could walk out into traffic, or stumble off the bank and drown in the river itself. His dread of this silent domain, this uncharted ocean of muffled ink that surrounded him, was paralyzing. He wanted to go on, but found the trembling arising from his core with greater force than ever before and immediately sat back down on the ground. Where am I? What’s going on? What happened to my eyes and my ears? Am I going to be like this forever? Am I going to just die here? I need help. Who can help me? I want to text somebody. An ambulance. A taxi. A grocery delivery. Mayuko? Anything. Anyone. Please. Help me …

  Again, Amon gave in to his helplessness and curled up with his face against the wall to focus on his breathing. This was his only mercy, he realized, his respiration. But as calm gradually spread outwards from his diaphragm to the tips of his fingers, he started to feel weaker and weaker, the hard grit and dusty sourness and stench of the river growing dimmer and dimmer until his eyes slipped closed and the undark darkness sunk into slumber once more.

  2

  AN ALLEY? A STREET. THE ALLEY?

  Blink, blink, blink.

  As the grog cleared from Amon’s eyes, he recalled where he was and what state he’d been in before falling asleep, and a titillating thrill flared up from the pit of his stomach: I can see! It wasn’t so much what he saw, just an encompassing gray blur, a single nethercolor that had consumed his world. But even this was so exciting he immediately tried to push himself to his feet.

  Lying on his right side, he pressed his left palm hard against the concrete and managed to pop his torso just above the ground for a moment, but to his horror, his right arm refused to move or support his weight, and flopped back down with the rest of him, limp and senseless. Have I traded blindness for paralysis, he wondered for a terrifying moment, until his fingertips began to tingle and he realized they were asleep.

  Apparently he had been using his right bicep as a pillow. He rolled onto his back to shake it out and get the circulation going, but found the light too bright now that he was facing upwards and turned his head left to avert his eyes. Pins and needles flooded down from his shoulder to his fingertips, and he noticed that the pain in his ribs had sharpened, two of them on the right throbbing with an almost harmonic agony like resonating xylophone keys. Sleeping all this time on concrete, he probably had bruises, sidewalk bedsores. But at least he could see.

  And as he rotated his shoulder tenderly, he detected a faint noise. Nothing more than a kind of reverberation of a whisper. Still, it was something. I can hear! his thoughts cheered again, though this time his excitement was tempered by lethargy, a deadening weight that seemed to pool beneath his cheeks and the skin all over his body. He realized that the feeling had been there since the moment he awoke, but he had only just noticed. Now it had grown so heavy he thought he might faint, if not for the tingling in his arm just then swelling to an excruciating pitch. Then there was the pain in his chest. And his thirst too. His tongue pasty
and grainy against the roof of his mouth, his thoughts frail and fuzzy around the periphery of his awareness as even his mind seemed to parch and shrivel.

  Something to drink! Now! cried a voice inside him and Amon clambered to his feet, cautiously this time so as not to bang his head. It took him a few moments to straighten out his stiff body, his lower back sore now that his joints had thawed from slumber. But once he was upright he began to look around, trying to get his bearings.

  On three sides of him were gray surfaces that appeared to be the walls and ground of an alley, though somehow he couldn’t tell how far away they were. When he glanced at the two walls in turn, they seemed to draw away and return again rapidly, their distance from him constantly shifting. When he looked down, the ground played the same trick, his shoes appearing only a meter away and then stretching off on the end of his pant legs as though at the base of long stilts. The texture of the surfaces refused to resolve too, fizzling constantly like boiling champagne, so that he was unable to tell what material they were made of or identify the line that separated the walls from the ground, that is, the corner. While the noise in his ears might have been from traffic, it seemed to synchronize with these frenzied optical distortions as though the city around him was an instrument playing a dull dissonant song, or else the song was painting a flickering sketch of the city.

  Dizzy, Amon lurched to his right, nearly losing his balance, and cast his gaze about in search of something solid to focus on. He found the walls approaching each other infinitely into the distance, forming a V-shaped pinhole horizon, and turning his head found the same on the other side. Then, following one of the vertical gray surfaces upwards with his eyes, past the blob-like protrusions he guessed were verandas, he saw a searing gray blaze above that he couldn’t stand to look at for even a second.

  Gray below, gray left, gray right, gray around. Everything as gray as the Liquidator uniform he wore. But Amon soon realized that “gray” was not the right word for what he was seeing just as the darkness of his blindness had not really been dark at all. Although he had never considered this until that moment, grayness seemed to exist only in relation to color or at least the possibility of color, as the colorless intermediate between black and white. With all such possibility banished from his experience, the metropolis had been reduced to light and dark gradations, like a jumble of shadows in various concentrations, some thick, some rarified, others in between. There seemed to be no word for this, any more than there was a word for “movement without duration” or “perspective with no angle.” And his hearing was in a similar state. He wanted to say he was surrounded by “white noise,” but his auditory experience didn’t seem to merit the word “noise” at all. Some integral aspect of sound was missing; the wispy, gray hiss filling his ears too hollow and numb to qualify.

  Although Amon wanted to start off and find something to drink, fear kept his feet pinned in place once again. He guessed he was in the alley he’d crashed in, or somewhere very similar, and that was somewhat reassuring, but still he was terrified of venturing into the vast unknown around him. Thirsty, drained, half blind and deaf, he wondered how much it would cost him to traverse this seemingly infinite alley. Shit, he caught himself immediately, feeling like an idiot for still calculating the price of everything he did. But he couldn’t help himself. Even if he understood that his actions incurred no expenses, there was just no way he could accept this undeniable fact so quickly, not after a lifetime of believing and behaving otherwise. But if his doings lacked monetary value, he realized, then what value did they have? None, it seemed. All his actions were now equally worthwhile, so he had no reason to choose one over another. In other words, he might as well do nothing. It wasn’t like he was going to achieve anything in his current condition anyway. He would be better off just lying down where he was and never getting up again, giving in to the quicksand of his—

  Before these thoughts could decimate his will entirely, something substantial reached out from the vague formlessness around him and gripped his consciousness firmly: the smell of water. Thick and rank with a sweet hint of chemicals, it held him so much more firmly than the wispy ephemera that he saw and heard. The perception seemed to thread its way into him, thin tendrils of air reaching inside his nostrils and weaving themselves into his flesh and brain.

  I have to cross the Sanzu River, he resolved. I have to get to the District of Dreams. And thinking of Mayuko, of the forest, of jubilee, Amon tucked his bunched-up dress shirt back into his pants, put his left hand on the wall beside him, and took a step down the eternally receding alley. Solidity under foot, and bare fingers brushing the plasticky wall, he lumbered gingerly forward on stiff legs. With each step, the hollow hiss grew louder, until, after a few more paces, the lines of the never-ending V suddenly split apart. And with that, his hand found empty air, his visual field expanding before him.

  In front of Amon was an open space filled with a flux of dark movement. A torrent of charcoal blotches bubbled and blurred by in a constant stuttering onrush, distorted as though filtered through a warped fish-eye lens.

  For some time, he stood transfixed by this dappled, colorless flurry, unable to comprehend or accept what he was seeing. Gradually, his eyes seemed to adjust, for slowly but surely he began to perceive its dimensionality and directionality.

  The torrent was made up of four streams. The one closest to him rose to about his neck, with currents going left, some right, and others mingling or eddying back. The one behind this went right and the one behind that went left, both of them undulating by at varying heights like a landscape of Rorschach tests being reeled away. Beyond these was yet another multidirectional stream like the one right in front of him, and behind that a sheer wall rising into the bright gray blaze above.

  Gazing at what could only be a busy street sandwiched between two bustling sidewalks, Amon remembered when he had crouched in the Open Source Zone on the verge of bankruptcy and tried to imagine what bankdeath would be like. He had pictured naked consciousness as something similar to a mirror with missing shards, reflecting existence incompletely. That was exactly how he felt now. The flowing, shapeless layers each emanated a different noise—a faint sibilant popping from the foreground, something more gravelly and gargling from the middle—as though his auditory experience were being sluiced through a fractal honeycomb, echoes of echoes colliding again and again with other echoes before finally reaching his ears. Until that moment, Amon never would have imagined that sounds could have shadows, but that was the best way he could think of it. Shadow sounds. Shadow things.

  Although the thick breeze no longer carried the scent of the Sanzu River, its memory lingered in his awareness. It reminded him not only of where he needed to go, but conjured the image of water, further goading his already ravenous thirst. And he saw himself bent over the edge of the bank, lapping at the peaks of waves like a dog, though from the effluent-rich smell he knew this wasn’t even an option. Instead, he would need to find something to drink before he went there, which meant, of course, that he needed a vending machine.

  Amon wondered how he was going to purchase anything given that he had no money, but decided he would have to deal with that problem when he came to it. For the time being, his first task was to locate one, and he automatically did some finger-flicks to open Scrimp Navi and ask it for directions. When the program didn’t respond, he felt a hot pulse of irritation, and even when he remembered that his access to the ImmaNet was totally cut off, his fingers continued to jitter of their own volition. They twitched out the command to pull up Career Calibration and ask his decision network for advice, then tried to access his inner profile to call Mayuko … Amon felt his frustration swelling at these failures and then got annoyed with himself for being frustrated about something he had no control over, his emotions and impulses at odds with his knowledge that what they sought was pointless. Only when the implications of his total solitude, his disconnection from any and all networks, set in, did his scuttling fingers fi
nally relent and drop limp on the end of his palms, his chest quivering with dread. For if he couldn’t get directions to a vending machine, how the hell was he going to find one? And if he couldn’t message anyone for advice, how was he going to solve this problem, or any problem? He had never tried going to a new place without a navi, even in areas of the metropolis he was familiar with, but now he was on the edge of Tokyo—as far from the familiar as he’d ever been. Caught in the most bizarre, perplexing predicament of his life, he needed input from other minds more than ever, and yet he was severed from them all, even Mayuko. Survival seemed impossible. He might as well be on a desert island, though he stood in one of the most populous cities on Earth.

  He couldn’t feel any sunlight—if it was even day—but the summer heat was getting to him. Pooling moisture clung to the fuzz of his buzzed head, his skin sticky everywhere, his mouth itchy with dryness. Beginning to feel light-headed, his fingers did the gestures to open MyMedic, wanting advice on resolving these symptoms as though he was connected to such an app, and he was left to guess as a layman what diagnosis his sensations might signify. I must be really thirsty, he supposed, as if he didn’t already know that, and started to worry that he might pass out if—

  Ah. Out of nowhere an idea took form. From experience he knew there were vending machines somewhere on every city block, so what if he wandered around and tried to, well, look for one? Amon had never thought to search for something without an engine before. It struck him as an oddly inefficient way to do things, and in his present condition he wasn’t confident he could safely cross the road or even recognize a vending machine if he saw one. But after pondering the issue for a few moments—his throat seeming to parch as he watched the insipid muddle froth by—he could think of nothing better.