The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Amon couldn’t concern himself with such questions for long. They were important perhaps, but if there was any chance this man might help him, he had to forget his reservations and just try asking. There were simply no other options.

  “Please. I need to ask your help with something,” said Amon, his voice clear and crisp in his ears for the first time, albeit raspy with the dryness of his throat. He thought he could detect a slight nod of the man’s forehead but he wasn’t sure. “I’m …” Amon pointed to the vending machine, “th-thirsty.”

  Not showing any sign that he’d acknowledged or understood Amon’s request, the man continued to stare at him impassively. Amon didn’t think he had ever felt a gaze so unwavering. Even when fixed on one thing, eyes usually twitched or vibrated slightly, but his seemed uncannily still, like a car somehow rolling without spinning its wheels. No one on the street had paid Amon any attention, except to dodge or push him aside like an inanimate obstacle. Now this man was giving him far too much of it and Amon couldn’t help but periodically look away for a split second, feeling as though he might wilt. “I’m not sure if there are any drinks in here and I don’t have any money. But if it isn’t too much trouble, would you mind getting me a drink? Anything will do, even the cheapest one.”

  His eyes still locked on Amon, though not seeming to quite meet his gaze, the man opened his mouth as if to speak, but it was another second or so before any words came out. “And …” The man cleared his throat several times as though he hadn’t spoken in a while. “And after that?” His voice was quiet and gruff.

  “Huh? P-pardon?”

  Again the man’s mouth opened and his throat and tongue quivered as though silently stuttering before he spoke. “After your drink. Where to?”

  “Th-the river. I want to go to the Sanzu River.”

  “Know the way?”

  “I …” Then it hit Amon that he would have to find his way there without navis. The smell of the river might lead him somewhere, but the lay of the streets wafted the breeze in odd ways, and although his vision and hearing were getting better, he’d had this much trouble just finding something a few paces away. Imagine traveling a longer distance, he thought, and the metropolis suddenly seemed to loom gigantic and enigmatic about him, an endless puzzle made glass and concrete. “No … not exactly. Still, I—”

  “When you get there, what you going to do?”

  “I’m going to—I’m going to cross. Into the District of Dreams.”

  “Got a boat?”

  “A b-boat? There must be—I was planning to use the Bridge of Compassion.”

  “Got money for the toll?”

  “Toll? There’s a toll?”

  “What about the barricade?”

  “Well …” There was a barricade? On the bridge? For what? The bankdead were perfectly free to come and go, weren’t they? “I’m sure I’ll figure something out.” Amon wasn’t sure of this at all now and only said it so he wouldn’t sound like a fool. “But for the moment I’m really thirsty like I said. So could you …” Amon indicated the machine with a quick flick of his eyes that brought up a flash of nausea. “Please?”

  The man seemed to give another nod, though it could have been a trick of Amon’s imagination. “Got something for the road?”

  “Um, pardon?”

  “Something to offer me for the journey.”

  “Oh. Like I told you already, I don’t have any money I’m afraid.”

  “Forget money. We’ll do a trade.”

  “But all I’ve got is this suit I’m wearing and …” Amon remembered that his duster was gone and wondered what could have happened to it. He was sure he’d had it when he lay down in the alley but couldn’t recall whether it had been with him when he woke up.

  “How about a story?”

  “A story. You mean, you want me to trade you a story?” Was that slight vibration of his head another nod? “I … I don’t think I have any stories.”

  “Everyone has a story. The one about your life will do fine. Understand?”

  Amon thought he understood but paused anyways, thrown off by the oddness of the idea and of the person who had proposed it. Who was this fat, balding, middle-aged man, and why was he dressed like this? Surely he looked different to those who could see his digimake, but why have all the pockets? Obviously he wasn’t sent by Sekido or those that backed him, because then he would have surely dispatched Amon on the spot, and Amon sensed no suggestion of a threat in his stare, though that still didn’t mean he could be trusted.

  “Of course,” Amon said finally. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But please”—he pointed in the general direction of the vending machine without looking at it—“something to drink.”

  The man gave a subtle flick of his chin that might have been another nod and stepped over to the machine. Reaching around his waist to a pocket on his lower back, he took out a strange bundle of wires and what looked like a piece of glass. Once he’d slipped this onto his left hand, Amon saw that it was a glove. The back was a tight weave of electronic substrate, wires and circuitry, the front a clear flexible display that stretched from the bottom of his palm to the tips of his fingers.

  The man went up to the wall beside the left half of the machine and stuck one finger into a thin pocket around his thigh. From there, he fished out a device that looked like a small steel cylinder. When he put this against the sidewall of the machine, it clicked onto the surface like a magnet. Immediately images lit up on the flat of his hand, various alphanumerics and blueprint-like schematics that Amon took to be the specifications for the machine. The man then began to scroll through them by subtly moving the joints of his gloved fingers and brushing the fingers of his other hand on the palm display.

  While it was nauseating already for Amon to stand so close to the machine and catch glimpses of it, this was only exacerbated by a raunchy smell that clung to the man, like a fermented synthesis of dirty toilet and filthy locker room. Nonetheless, as he was curious what the man was doing, Amon watched him with a mixture of fascination and disgust. After a few seconds of scrolling through the schematics and clicking in several locations to expand particular sets of numbers, the man plucked off the cylinder, returned it to one of his pockets and poked the fingers of his right hand into five separate narrow pockets to withdraw several tiny items from each one: two circular sheets of black plastic, a skein of thread-thin wires, half a dozen obsidian-like beads, transistors, diodes, an assortment of electronic components, and a tiny rubber hand.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said, and Amon did as instructed.

  Using Amon’s palm as a sort of worktable, the man then lay down one of the fingernail-sized plastic sheets and several other pieces. As he moved the fingers of his gloved hand the tiny hand began to move in synch, shadowing his motions. From a hole in the tip of each of its pin-sized fingers, even smaller tools popped out—a screwdriver, a blowtorch, a wrench, a key, a gluegun. Then the hand formed a sort of tripod with the base of its pinky, thumb, and wrist to stabilize itself and assembled the various parts together using these tools, the man stroking his palm display to manipulate them. First, it glued a substrate strip to the plastic. Then it began to glue the pebbles and components in various spots and soldered these to wires, crisscrossing and re-linking them into a circuit. As Amon watched, he noticed that the man’s fingers were longer and thinner than his build would have suggested and worked with surprising speed and nimbleness. His gestures were fluid, the tiny hand never fumbling or faltering at even the most delicate of tasks, transitioning smoothly from one procedure to the next as its minuscule appendages rewired and reconfigured barely visible pieces inside the makeshift chip.

  “What are you doing?” asked Amon, but the man ignored him and kept at his task. The man’s behavior was totally inscrutable. If he was going to get him a drink, why didn’t he just buy something?

  Within less than a minute, the chip seemed to be nearly finished. The man did one last check—the littl
e fingers tugging lightly on the wires and prodding the nodes to make sure they were secure—before dropping the hand back in his pocket and snapping the other plastic sheet over the first to seal everything. Finally, he took it from Amon’s hand and reached into a tiny pocket on his left shoulder with his right index finger and thumb. There he pinched some sort of fabric and pulled it out as a magician might flourish a handkerchief, flicking it open so that it expanded into a plastic sack.

  “Get set to unload,” he said, handing Amon the sack and pointing to a spot just in front of the machine. Amon wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he took the sack and, keeping his eyes averted from the revolting machine, stood where the man indicated.

  Once Amon was in place, the man put the device up to the side of the machine, where it clicked onto the surface as the cylinder had a minute earlier. Immediately there was a buzz and a clack, and then cah-chunk cah-chunk cah-chunk as the internal mechanisms engaged and various items began tumbling one after another into the two receptacle bins. Before Amon could blink, the man was kneeling in front of the machine, reaching into both halves and shoveling plastic bottles, rice balls, and sandwiches into his pockets. Amon fell to the ground to the left of him, where he saw the glistening bottles popping out. He dry-heaved twice in the presence of the machine but closed his eyes and probed greedily with his hands beneath the plastic flap of the bin, grabbing the first bottle he could find, snatching it out, twisting the top, chugging.

  “Load up!” barked the man, but Amon ignored him and kept the bottle tipped back into his mouth. Whatever it was he hardly tasted it, only felt it. Like a cool, succulent waterfall of refreshment itself pouring through his gullet and being absorbed by his tongue and throat before it even reached his stomach. Amon then chucked the empty bottle over his shoulder and groped inside for another.

  “Let’s go!” called the man. “In case the CareBots come.”

  CareBots? They didn’t sound so bad, and Amon was too immersed in downing his second drink in the same way, the rich moistness soaking into—

  The man yanked him by the arm and the bottle fell from his grasp, splashing onto his suit as it spun to the concrete.

  “Gwa!” cried Amon as he flailed pathetically for the bottle, which had already bounced well out of reach and was spewing its fizzy contents against a wall.

  “Here,” said the man, proffering a sack full of vending goodies. Amon took the sack and, when he felt its bulky weight in his hand, realized that the man must have grabbed it from him and filled it up while he was in his rehydration rapture. With all the drinks inside, he wouldn’t have to worry about going thirsty for a while. But then he had to wonder. Did I just aid and abet a robbery? And why would this man pay the fine for this blatant credicrime when buying the machine’s whole inventory would have obviously been much cheaper?

  “Go go go!” shouted the man, pulling Amon along by his bicep, but Amon stiffened and resisted when he suddenly realized what this man was. His lack of interest in money, his disregard for credilaw, his bizarre attire, his curiosity about Amon’s life in the Free World, his smell. He was bankdead, the first one Amon had ever met outside the line of duty.

  When Amon stood his ground, the man gave up on him, let go of his arm, and stepped hurriedly out of the alley into the crowd. Realizing that he would soon be alone again, Amon swallowed his bewilderment and dashed onto the sidewalk in pursuit.

  3

  TOKYO NAKED

  Slinging the heavy sack over his shoulder, Amon followed behind the man as he waddled through the crowd with incongruous agility and speed for his size.

  He was relieved to find that he could see and hear reasonably well again. Though all remained colorless with a sort of fuzzy haze drifting about, and traffic noises were still slightly muffled and distorted, the vehicles whipping along the two-lane road to his left looked and sounded like vehicles whipping along a two-lane road, the people walking on the sidewalk around him like people walking on a sidewalk. Now he could move along without feeling bewilderment at every step, his weaving between pedestrians conscious once again.

  But soon a new sense of bewilderment struck him, when, after tailing the man for a few blocks, the crowd came to a standstill at the next intersection, and Amon’s gaze was untethered from the task of navigation for a moment, drawing outwards from what was right in front of his face and taking in the city all around him.

  On the one hand, Amon knew that the street he walked along had to be part of Tokyo, for he had no reason to suspect he had ever left. The same cloying perfumes and exhaust fumes invaded his nostrils. The same hard concrete met his shoes. The same sultry air steamed his skin. The sweet, lingering tang of the vending beverage in his mouth tasted no less familiar. This was the metropolis he had inhabited his entire life. His touch and smell and taste left no room for doubt.

  But his eyes and ears fed his consciousness a different tale. The first thing he noticed was that there were no images anywhere. No animated shop signs or winking billboards. No advertainment blazing walls or logos cruising airways. No rainbow promostrobe, trademark phantasmagoriflow, or talking-head kaleidoscopes. Without perceptual candy, commercial markings, or semantic adornment of any kind, a strange stillness seemed to envelope the streets and the sprawling skyscraper surround, matched also by the dampened sonic atmosphere. Engines droned by. A coptor chopped above. Stilettos and leather soles clacked around him. But there was no adverbabble, no character assassination jingles, no idol product placement debates. No variety show murder mystery theme songs, no mockumentary soap opera laughtracks.

  For Amon, who’d never even thought to imagine the metropolis without information, the transformation was eerie. Yet what he found disturbing more than what was lacking was what had been added. In place of the InfoFlux was filth. All the windows, whether of shops or apartments or cars or buses, were encrusted with white sediments and dust, smeared with grime and handprints, some cracked or broken with rusted frames, as though they hadn’t been cleaned or repaired in years. The sidewalk was speckled with gum spots, plastic wrappers fluttered about, and he glimpsed the faint sparkle of broken glass crushed into powder on the tarmac between the bumpers of the cars sliding by beside him.

  The passing streetwalkers had changed as well, looking a decade older on average than the crowds he was used to, with wrinkled, sagging, lusterless skin; baldness, and gray hair; yellowing, crooked teeth. Then there were the asymmetries and flaws that had little to do with age: the off-kilter, bloodshot eyes; hairs twizzling out of mismatched nostrils on bent noses; flabby arms, bloated bellies, and jiggling thighs; birthmarks, moles, sunspots, scars. They were all slovenly too, with shirt collars invariably ruffled and askew; pants creased and stained; shoes scratched and scuffed; unibrows unplucked and bristly; nails long and grotty; bedhead, hathead, shag.

  Altogether, they reminded him of the people he’d seen behind the overlay in Sushi Migration and the Shuffle Boom elevator, of the whore from Eroyuki … The difference was that this was not some fleeting window into another realm, not a brief peek through the slats in an existential veneer. This drab, dirty, blighted city, along with the rickety worn-out cars and unattractive slobs that inhabited it, stretched endlessly in all directions and was undoubtedly here to stay. This realization about the spectacle, though obvious and undeniable, was almost as unsettling as the spectacle itself, and Amon looked up in search of a visual (and intellectual) respite, some seam in this all-too-encompassing new locale. There he found slivered gaps in the roofscape, but the glare of the sky was too bright for his still-healing eyes to look at, too distant for his discombobulated pupils to focus on, and he quickly averted his gaze streetward once again.

  Immediately Amon realized that the man was no longer in front of him and frantically whipped his eyes about in each direction. What if I’ve been left behind? he thought. I’m doomed. Spotting him on the other side of the road as he made his way around a corner, Amon took one step to rush after him, then halted abruptly, noti
cing something perplexing: there was no signal at the intersection. Apparently that had been part of the overlay too. Since the cars were stopped and no pedestrians were crossing, Amon guessed that the light was probably in the middle of changing, which meant it would be safer to wait a few moments and make sure it wasn’t turning red, though if he stayed he might lose the man forever and be left here all al—

  Amon bolted across the empty road, the heavy sack bouncing its irregular contents against his back. Just as he was reaching the other side, a car leapt towards him and he bounded forward to clear the edge of its hood, the air of its passing brushing the back of his neck as he staggered to regain his balance, shocked that Mindfulator hadn’t warned him of the danger. With his apps all gone, it was up to Amon to watch out for himself, and he hurried around the corner, where he was relieved to catch sight of the man just before he turned another corner up ahead.

  Catching up with the man after a quick dash, Amon followed him down several side streets. This time he stuck close with his eyes glued to the man’s back, partly for fear of losing sight of him again, and partly to avoid the sense of dissonance from looking at a place that was at once the Tokyo he knew and a very different city altogether.

  The man moved at a brisk pace, showing no signs of tiring despite having to carry the large weight of his flesh and whatever he had stashed in his pockets, and Amon was soon running out of breath, sweat dribbling down his forehead, faintness rising to his head. When the man pulled some kind of pastry out of a pocket, unwrapped it and devoured it in mid-stride, Amon realized that he was hungry. Though it hadn’t dawned on him until that instant, it had been either a day or days since his last meal, and the sudden throbbing of his gut now dominated his awareness. It wasn’t long before Amon found himself lagging behind, and he used his last burst of energy to jog ahead until they were shoulder to shoulder. “Hold on … please,” he panted. “I need to … take a break?”