The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  “Where were you born?” asked the man, his words cutting into Amon’s tripped-up reminiscing.

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “Where were you in the first moment you can remember?”

  “Green Ladybug,” Amon replied without hesitation. “A BioPen called Green Ladybug. That’s where I grew up.”

  “What happened?”

  “That was when …” Amon trailed off, retrieving images slotted in a forgotten fold of his mind, “when I met Mayuko Takamatsu, my first friend. It’s not much of a memory really. Just a few fuzzy moments …”

  The man nodded without nodding, perhaps encouraging him to continue.

  “So I’m on the roof of the BioPen, where we used to play sports. There’s a mini putting range and a tennis court, except the nets are down and the equipment is away because it’s not gym time. The air is kind of cool but pleasant, so it must be spring or early fall, I’m not really sure. I guess I’m not supposed to be there because I’m feeling kind of guilty and afraid. Then I notice there’s another kid there, a girl, and she’s hanging from this fence at the edge of the roof. She doesn’t seem to notice I’m there but I’m curious to know what she’ s looking at, so I toddle over on my unsteady legs. We’ve got to be three or four I guess. I pull my chin up right beside her, so close that we’re touching, but she doesn’t seem to care and neither do I. Kids are like that about touch sometimes, you know.

  “Anyway, there’s this sea of skyscrapers below us. Just a typical patch of Tokyo, but it looks breathtakingly huge and mysterious to four-year-old me. The sky is stunning. It’s this deep complex blue, with hints of red and ochre and other hues that only young eyes like mine can see, and there are these gorgeous streaks and dabs of cloud all linked together like the skin of a fruit peeled in one go, and the sun is behind one of them, blazing it all silvery-gold. And, like her, I’m instantly mesmerized.”

  Amon closed his eyes and pictured the scene. To his surprise, it appeared vividly before him, ten thousand times more vibrant and compelling than the frail colorless world he was in, as though his mind’s eyes could view waking life while his body’s eyes were stuck in a dream. Strangely, there were no images or adverpromo segs wriggling across the cityscape, and Amon realized that he must not have been hooked up to the ImmaNet. His first time viewing the naked sky had not been on the riverbank minutes earlier, but here on the rooftop years ago, though he’d forgotten all about it until now, as though only with this second viewing could he unlock the memory. Was it before he’d received a Training Bank or during a brief period when they’d taken them off? He couldn’t remember, but found himself drawn ever more viscerally into this vision of the past as more words tumbled from his lips.

  “We’re hanging off the fence and our bodies sort of dangle together. I can feel the warmth of her shoulder and hip against mine. Then Mayuko raises her arm all of a sudden. She points up at this one spot above a skyscraper and cries, ‘there!’ It takes me a moment to see what she’s talking about, but just fading into view is this single star, which is puzzling to my three- or four-year-old mind because I can’t figure out what a star is doing in a blue sky during the day. I look over at Mayuko, and at the same moment she looks at me. Past the strands of her comet hair, I see her eyes fixed on mine and she looks just as confused. Then I look back up at the star and wonder how long it would take for more stars to appear. I start to hope that maybe we can just hang there all day until the sky is full of stars, and I kind of know that Mayuko is feeling the same way. Then out of nowhere I feel a hand grab my ankle and someone tugs me away from my perch.”

  Had it been Rick disrupting them to get their attention? That was Amon’s first thought, but no, he decided, because Rick had been orphaned to the BioPen much later. So maybe it was the SubMom coming to discipline them for wandering off? But Amon wasn’t sure and the memory stopped there. The abrupt ending left him with a feeling of nostalgia, for a simpler era when everything had been decided by the comforting educational protocol of Fertilex, and Mayuko was with him, and he hadn’t hurt her yet … and with this thought his nostalgia turned to longing and his longing to fierce remorse. I left her there with those men … I lost her … forever?

  To evade this razor-cutting, answerless question, Amon opened his eyes and found the man meeting his gaze directly for the first time. This was startling, but Amon could detect no menace there, and began to search his face to see how he’d taken the story so far, scanning for some indication of whether he’d told him too much or too little. He could find no suggestion either way, but thought he sensed the man’s eagerness for Amon to continue, and accepted that he would just have to rely on his own judgment to sort out the mnemonic chaff as he went along.

  As the words began to spill out, emotions bubbled up with them—rage, sorrow, joy, despair—sometimes bleeding into his voice, making it shake and quaver, lilt and grate. Amon’s manner of telling could hardly be called eloquent, with its frequent starts and stops, digressions and regressions, non-sequiturs and abandoned threads. But the man’s apparent interest unshackled Amon from his inhibitions and soon he was talking on and on without thinking, holding nothing back that might aid him in relating who he was.

  Amon told the man about growing up in Green Ladybug with Mayuko and Rick. About how he and Rick became Liquidator partners working for GATA while Mayuko ended up as an in-house designer. About the night of his Identity Birth, when his boss, Sekido, had persuaded him to sleep with a prostitute and his relationship with Mayuko had ended. He told him how he’d scrimped and saved to visit a forest he saw in his dreams, how he’d worked at GATA for seven years and had been promoted to Identity Executioner, how he and Rick had fallen out after Amon became his supervisor. He told him how Mayuko and Rick had begun to date, how Rick had wanted to start a family with her. He told him how he and Rick had cash crashed the mad, flower-obsessed Minister Kitao, how the MegaGlom Fertilex and its partners had colluded with GATA to gain control over the Ministry of Records in his absence, how they’d forged records to fool Amon into liquidating Chief Executive Minister Lawrence Barrow. He told him how Rick had disappeared, how even Mayuko had been unable to reach him, how his co-workers Freg and Tororo had said he cash crashed. He told him how an activist calling himself Makesh Adani had offered him a job and warned him of impending danger, how he’d been charged a huge amount for an action he hadn’t performed called jubilee, how Fertilex and GATA had both refused to reverse the charge and provided no explanation. He told him how he’d visited the PhisherKing and received several files proving that Barrow’s cash crash had been a trick, that jubilee was brought about by a Blinder who’d willingly chosen the BankDeath Penalty, that Rick had not been cash crashed but had committed train suicide. He told him how Minister Sekido and a GATA recruiter imposter who had been the spitting image of Makesh Adani had lured him to a fake job interview, how Sekido had infected him with a virus and delayed his incoming salary, how he’d done the same to Rick before he died, suggesting that he had in fact been murdered. He told him how the virus had nearly bankrupted him, how Mayuko saved him at the last moment, how they’d figured out that the lookalike activist and recruiter were the Birla sisters, Anisha and Rashana, quarreling over their inheritance. He told him how he’d taken refuge with her at a weekly mansion, how the virus had hidden in his finger and given away their location, how a hideous emoticon man and his goons had shown up with piranha dusters, how Amon had been forced to flee, leaving Mayuko to be beaten and hacked. He told him how he’d insisted she erase all records of him so her assailants would never know she had harbored him and made a deal with the PhisherKing to keep her safe, how he’d committed identity suicide using the Death Codes that only an Identity Executioner like him was privy to, how this had been the only way he could escape and hold on to his information about the conspiracy surrounding jubilee, since it allowed him to cash crash without going bankrupt and thereby keep his location blinded from Liquidators who would have otherwise apprehended him and
removed his BodyBank. Finally, he told him how he’d woken up blind and deaf, how his vision and hearing had recovered only partially, how he’d been searching desperately for a way to get something to drink when the man had arrived.

  While Amon spoke, the man stared off in the direction of the river, glancing at him only when Amon occasionally reached a particularly moving scene, and fiddled continuously with the things in his pockets. Although Amon hardly noticed as he focused on telling his tale, the movement occasionally caught his attention. It made him think of upside-down juggling: one thing always held in a hand while another fell into a pocket. Tiny wrenches, penlights, crystals, hooks; he could barely make them out in the dim glow that reached across the river. The man hardly seemed aware of what he was doing, as though he were unconsciously reorganizing his possessions, and Amon wondered how it was that he always seemed to know exactly where to find something when he needed it. Also, how did he fit all those things into his pockets? His clothes appeared snug around his bloated contours, yet there were no visible lumps anywhere. If not for the occasional glint Amon caught from the wider ones, they would have looked empty. It seemed impossible that there could be space beneath his clothes for all those snacks, tools, and components, as well as his ample flesh. At one point, Amon found himself imagining what might be going on beneath the fabric. He saw the fatty wrinkles of the man’s neck continuing all the way down his torso, carving deeper and deeper into his flab to form capacious recesses, the pockets mere doorways to deposit valuables into seams in his flesh …

  When Amon got to the end of his story and the sloshing of the river had reigned for several minutes, the man’s hands came to a rest. “What now then?”

  “You mean, like, my plans?” asked Amon, wondering what the man thought of him now that he knew all his secrets. He was exhausted and had a slight headache after so much talking, though he felt relieved to have fulfilled his side of the bargain.

  The man un-nodded.

  “Like I told you before, I need to go to the District of Dreams.”

  “What for?”

  “What for …” The wheels of Amon’s thinking caught on the question. What for indeed. He’d been planning to go to the District of Dreams before cash crashing because he’d simply assumed that that was where bankdead were supposed to be, and when he’d awoken the smell of the river had reminded him of that intention. But he’d never carefully considered why that should be his destination, and after that first eerie glimpse of the far shore, he wondered if it was the right choice after all.

  Not that he had anywhere else to go. He’d vacated his apartment days ago and lacked the means to rent a room anywhere else. His only remaining friend was Mayuko, and part of him wanted to seek her out directly to make sure she’d got out safe. But the weekly mansion where he’d last seen her was all the way on the other side of Wakuwaku City and she would have surely vacated long ago. Her apartment was supposed to be somewhere near the mansion, but lacking access to the map in her inner profile, he couldn’t narrow down its coordinates any further, and in all likelihood she would have gone into hiding after escaping anyway. Even if Amon could somehow learn her location, he had no navi with which to reach it, and could only wander the metropolis aimlessly on foot. This was obviously a hopeless task and, from what he’d seen of naked Tokyo so far, probably suicidal as well.

  The whole metropolis seemed designed to exclude. The many devices and elements of infrastructure Amon had always thought of as enablers of convenience for those who’d earned it did double duty cutting off access to those who hadn’t. The vending machines were locked boxes that kept non-citizens from food and merchandise, the automatic doors checkpoints to filter them out of buildings, and the elevators he’d seen through lobbies armored cells to keep them grounded. Something similar, Amon supposed, would be true of ticketing lines at train stations and airports, of shops and services of all kinds. And any bankdead that tried to defy these barriers would have to be kept out by force, violence if that was more cost effective, for they could not be deterred from behavior that caused damage or loss of property using fines and fees as with Free Citizens. Hence the security system on the vending machine, and the CareBots the man had mentioned. Only an electronics wizard like his guide would have any chance of surviving in such an inhospitable place, and Amon wondered for a moment whether he might say he’d changed his mind and beg the man to help him find Mayuko. But even if his pleas succeeded, and the man was somehow willing to stray from his son for however many weeks, months, or years it might take, allowing Amon to mooch sustenance from him all the while, in all likelihood they would never find her for all the reasons Amon had already considered and Amon would end his days a mendicant phantom, grown fat like the man on soda and junk food, or eventually splitting from him and wasting away alone in some alley … No, Amon’s instincts had been right. His answer was clear.

  “There’s … There’s nowhere else for me to go … nothing else for me to do … and I have so many questions. The District of Dreams seems like the only place I might find the answers.”

  Clearly he had to go to the District of Dreams. Not just because that was where bankdead went, where the supplies were, where the charities would give him shelter. But because of the promise he had made to the PhisherKing, to keep asking questions until all doubt had been vanquished from his mind. If he would have any hope of finding answers he would need to reach the Birla sister calling herself Makesh, as Fertilex seemed to be at the center of everything. And since he’d left her a message telling her to find him in the camps, going there was his only chance, as slim as it might be.

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Like what is this whole plot at GATA about and who’s behind it? Why did they crash Barrow and Kitao and why did they choose me to do it? Why did they murder Rick and why are the Birlas involved? What is jubilee?”

  “How are you going to get your answers?”

  “I’ll get in touch with Makesh. I’ll learn the truth about what’s going on, about the meaning of jubilee, and about all the connections between GATA and Fertilex, those two recruiters and Sekido. Somehow, I’ll have to get my BodyBank working again … and … and I’ll use my LifeStream to show the world that Barrow was assassinated, that Rick was murdered, and that my bankdeath was a sham! Then I’ll take back my identity and my savings and my job. I’ll find Mayuko … and one day we’ll go to the forest, together.”

  In the silence after he’d said this, Amon was surprised by his own words. For going to the forest had always been a solitary ambition, but now he wanted someone else there with him, and a faint intuition gave him hope that it might actually happen some day, though how and in what form he could not fathom.

  5

  THE SANZU RIVER

  Come,” said the man. “There’s no time for sleep. We have to catch the drone window.”

  Drone window? At these words, Amon opened his eyes, dreams vanishing unremembered like smoke. He was lying on his side with his back wedged into the crook of the ledge, his cheek resting on the hard, gritty ground. Looking straight across a stretch of concrete under pale, early light from the sky, he could now see a smattering of bird shit, soybean rinds, cigarette butts, and shards of glass spreading to the railing of the bank. For a few moments, he lay there listening to the slosh of the river, the hiss of traffic, the whispering voices, and the rakhaw of crows, not yet grasping the meaning of the man’s words. Though Amon had been up all night talking, somehow he didn’t feel groggy, as though his fractured slumber in the alley had been enough sleep for days, perhaps even a lifetime. Yet his body was tired and he didn’t feel like moving.

  Only when the man started walking towards the river did Amon get to his feet and shuffle after him. The lingering cool of night still softened the heat of the sultry air even as a milky dawn glow seeped from behind a cluster of buildings downstream. The moment they reached the fence along the bank, a thin blade of light slipped over the rooftops, and Amon gasped as color bloomed on
everything it touched.

  A thick curtain of silver-gray smog hung above the river and draped over the surface, obscuring everything beyond a ribbon of brownish-green along the water’s edge. Looking up, he saw through the veil of fumes that the sky was still fairly dark, a platinum blue that got lighter as it approached the sprawling roofscape horizon. Peering back over his shoulder, he saw grimy blighted skyscrapers leaning over the ledge where they had slept, its bare concrete dappled in brown and discoloration by ocean wind funneled along the river.

  Green! Brown! Blue! Silver! And gray! Real gray! Whether this was the dawn of the city or of his own mind, Amon couldn’t tell, but his skin thrilled with goosebumps. At the same time, his excitement was tainted with a certain jarring dissonance, as something about the scene seemed slightly off. The feeling was difficult to describe, but somehow the colors seemed unlike any colors he had seen before. Take the platinum blue. Patches of the sky were undoubtedly composed of this color. But what if what he now saw was blue, and what he’d seen before was “blue,” or the other way around. If his memory could be trusted, “colors” in his past were more sleazy, whereas colors now were more tangy. These adjectives were the best he could think of to articulate the ineffable difference in his experience. Something integral that was once so prevalent it had been impossible to perceive was missing, as though he could no longer feel air on his skin, taste his own mouth, or smell his own nostrils. It wasn’t like he was seeing a different part of the light spectrum as far as he could tell—not different shades or hues—more like a different spectrum altogether, as though he were adjusting to a whole new kind of light.