The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Rakhaw. Rakhaw. The calling of crows from across the river brought Amon’s focus to his ears and he realized that the sounds (or “sounds”) around him seemed out of whack in a similar way. The hum of cars, the whispers of the far shore. While everything he heard was sharply defined and crisp now, something in their tonal quality seemed off-kilter, as though his eardrums had been tightened or loosened ever so slightly. But if these colors and sounds are different from before, he wondered, how do I determine which are the right ones?

  While Amon struggled to assimilate the new richness of his existence, the man remained by the railing, staring out at the river-fume fog. Finding no resolution to his quandary, Amon imitated the man, unsure what he was doing but hoping to learn what he might do next. Under the disc of light now swelling over the skyline, the hazy shroud began to thin and dissipate, nibbled away by a gentle ocean breeze blowing continuously from downstream. Amon watched as pockets and channels opened up, widening the visible strips of water through which various boats—freighters, trawlers, cruisers—were moving up and down the river. Then a gust of wind ripped the veil away, its yellowish-white strands rippling as they fled, until the whole width of the river expanded before Amon and the other side was revealed in the bright clarity of morning.

  The far shore had no riverbank. Instead, rising straight from the water was a haphazard conglomeration of skyscrapers, as tall as the buildings elsewhere in Tokyo but packed together far more densely. And if they were skyscrapers, they were the strangest skyscrapers Amon had ever seen. Each shaft was built of cubes in different colors—burgundy, silver, avocado—and joined to its neighbors without clear delineation, the individual cubes spanning and connecting different buildings like toy blocks stacked out of alignment. Heaps of these interlocking structures tumbled along the length of the river and mounted back in layers to the serrated skyline, forming a terraced topographical jumble of jutting right angles and hard edges.

  Nowhere could a level surface be found, with the cubes indenting and tilting at all possible angles, and many leaning shafts bowing their rooftops or distending their middle sections over the river. The only gaps in the tight press of architecture were slight cracks between shafts, no taller than a story and too narrow to accommodate two adults standing shoulder to shoulder, let alone a car. There were no windows either, just sporadic stretches of stairs attached to some of the walls, stopping for several stories and then starting again, or covering only one story on one side and then continuing on another. Numerous people climbed up and down them, or squirmed through the cracks, and Amon guessed these were the figures he’d seen passing the lanterns at night. The cookie-crumble lights were not visible in the daylight, but the shadow snow that had fallen with them was. He could now see these flakes drifting steadily from the buildings and fluttering down into the river. They seemed to originate in numerous jagged holes and pockmarks that glared from the faces of many of the cubes as though the buildings were coming apart. And it might have been his imagination, but Amon thought he could see the cityscape growing gradually, as new stories seemed to pop up suddenly among the rooftops, forming higher towers that rose above the others into the sky.

  What mess is this? he wondered, standing there transfixed, A place where people live? the color, depth, unity, and texture that were returning to his vision only intensifying his bewilderment at the scene.

  Prying his eyes from the far shore, Amon glanced to his side and found the man still standing there, staring out over the river. His gaze seemed to follow the boats, which continued to float by in both directions.

  “Are you looking for something?” Amon asked, not expecting an answer but trying anyways.

  “There,” said the man, pointing downstream. A three-decker freighter was just then coming around the furthest bend in the river. It had a grayish-green metallic hull, perhaps 100 meters in length and 25 in width, with neither windows and portholes on the sides, nor cabins and railing on top—just sheer surfaces everywhere.

  The man pulled out the same display glove he’d used before, slipped it onto his left hand, and watched the boat intently as it crept up the river towards them. Amon could sense a sort of tense determination in the man, a poised readiness.

  The freighter grew bigger and bigger as it approached, passing other boats coming and going on its course along the shore about ten meters from the bank. When it was close enough that its huge bulk loomed over them, the man reached into his pocket, withdrew a cylinder just like the one he’d used on the vending machine, and tossed it with a soft underhand motion at the boat. It hit the side of the hull about one-third the way up from the water with a faint click as it attached itself there, and the man began to move the fingers of his left hand while stroking the palm display with the fingers of the other. For a few seconds Amon wondered what he was doing, when the boat began to decelerate and veer sharply towards the shore. Soon it was coasting gently straight towards them, losing momentum until it bumped the bank softly with its prow and rebounded to a stop. In response to more flicks and strokes, a column of horizontal grooves about two meters in length carved themselves down a section of the hull wall and the segments between them began to protrude, forming the steps of a staircase that ran down to the water, the bottom step half a meter from the shore. The man then climbed over the railing, hopped across, and bounded up the stairs by twos and threes.

  Clearing his befuddlement with a shake of his head, Amon followed, going over the rail and timing his jump carefully to match the slight bob of the boat.

  Atop the deck, the man proceeded to the bow and continued to stroke his display. Amon stumbled after him as the boat lurched to portside, the man now steering it towards the far shore. A humming sound came from the direction they’d boarded, and Amon glanced starboard to see the top step fold back into place in the hull. The retraction of the stairwell seemed to signify that there was no going back. And when the boat turned, Amon looked back to watch the blighted metropolis drift away. It then struck him that this was his farewell to the city, and his gaze flitted over the cluttered sprawl of dull blank buildings, as if it might find a last bit of visual dazzle—of promotainment and adverflomo—to feed his eyes. Yet the grimy windows merely gleamed a sickly dull blue in the dawn light, and he felt a stab of fear and sadness watching everything he’d ever known left behind in the white, frothing wake.

  Turning around, Amon joined the man at the edge of the deck and watched as the heaping shoreline ahead loomed rapidly closer, the outer face of the District of Dreams growing clearer by the second. The cubes it was built from appeared to be about half a story tall and each had what looked like a sliding door. These were positioned to open onto a stretch of stairs rising diagonally from corner to corner. Few of the stairs had handrails or banisters and some were simply a series of escalating pegs or rungs. Given the doors and their size, Amon supposed that the cubes were individual rooms or shelters. Their exteriors were not merely in different colors as he had thought, but seemed to be made of different materials: turquoise stucco, white granite, persimmon tile. All were in various stages of dissolution, some looking brand new and immaculate, some letting off only a slight sprinkle of flakes from still-intact surfaces, some peeling away rapidly from shallow depressions, some spewing their fibers from multiple jagged holes that went straight through to the walls behind. Others were just perforated husks straining under the weight atop them and one was just rubble, the shaft it had supported now leaning upside down into the river, having toppled headfirst. It was as though the shelters were being eaten by slow acid, except instead of melting they came apart bit by bit. And with the breeze blowing the flakes into the sky or dispersing them in every direction, Amon suddenly recalled one day in the BioPen, an eduvidtrip to Ueno Park near the end of the cherry blossom season, when all the flowers came apart in a flurry of pinkish-white, a petal snowstorm. In a similar way, the flakes before him swirled down to the greenish-brown surface of the Sanzu River, coating it with specks of the buildings as thoug
h shattered reflections of the city were drifting rapidly downstream. All over this disintegrating crush of shelters, men, women, and children thronged, climbing up and down the intermittent staircases, crawling through fissures where the rooms didn’t fit together cleanly, cramming the deeper layer of buildings that kept peeking in and out of view through thin gaps as his vantage shifted with the progress of the boat. Amon simply could not comprehend what he was seeing. Such precarious disorder, such crowding, such decay …

  Thlop-thlop-thlop-thlopthlop. The sound of something hard and wet hitting the side of the boat reached Amon’s ears. Dropping flat to his belly so as not to fall, he peered over the starboard edge of the deck, where forms hung submerged in the water around the hull. Though it was difficult to make out what they were beneath the brown-green waves, the freighter seemed to be cutting through a whole field of dark patches, and Amon watched as whatever they were smacked into the hull one after another with a thlop, before bouncing away to continue their journeys downstream. Then one of them broke the surface momentarily, and Amon caught a clear glimpse. A face? he thought with a shudder, Was that a face? wondering how that could be possible and—

  Vweeeen. Amon lifted his head and perked up his ears as a whirring sound suddenly phased into hearing. It seemed to originate somewhere downstream and he spun around to his feet only to find himself immediately blinded by a searing light. The sun appeared to have emerged from the Tokyo skyline, because it was too painful for his still-healing eyes to look anywhere remotely near a particular cluster of buildings, the whole area a great white blot in his visual field. Instead, he tried to hone in on the whir, darting his gaze from the water to the sky to the cities on both sides while squinting to minimize the glare. For several seconds, he spotted nothing, the sound growing louder and louder, until an airborne sparkle around the edge of the blot leapt into view.

  The strange glass creature he saw flying about fifteen meters above the water dazzled him as sunbeams refracted through its body, and he could only stand to watch it in his peripheral vision. From what he could tell, it had a torso like a housefly the size of a cat, its wings a glittering blur, its six legs shimmering lines that dangled below. But in place of the usual composite eyes bulging at the front, it seemed to have two small heads poking forward, one that of a horse and one that of an ox. Though Amon couldn’t make it out clearly, obviously it was some kind of drone, and though it meandered slightly the way flies do, its flight path was straight enough that he had no doubt it was charting an intercept course for their boat. An attack drone or a reconnaissance drone? he wondered, thinking back to his Liquidator training, and remembered a word the man had used—CareBot—the pounding of his heart and electric tingle of his skin poising him to leap overboard if need be, floating faces or no floating faces.

  “Look!” Amon cried, when the drone was about a hundred meters away. “What’s that?”

  “Ah!” the man exclaimed, his eyes going wide. Immediately he snatched something from a front pocket and chucked it in the drone’s direction. Arcing through the air was what looked like a baton. It was sketching a trajectory wide of the target, but the toss hadn’t seemed intended for a direct hit, and as the baton or whatever it was passed a couple of meters to the drone’s right, the drone suddenly started to shake, its wings stuttering erratically. Then the palsied robot changed course and began to chase after the baton. Splish-thwip-thwithwip-SHA. The baton fell into the river and the drone plunged in after it like a dog chasing a ball, spraying the tips of the waves all about as its wings batted them. Then all was as it had been moments earlier, except for a slight sloshing around the entry point in the river. For several tense seconds Amon stared at the water, but thankfully the drone never resurfaced. He had no idea what it was or why it had come. Good thing I have this guide, he thought, looking at the man with a rush of gratitude, for without him he might have been dealing with the drone—whatever its nefarious purpose—on his own, assuming he’d even made it this far.

  Soon the freighter entered one of the clouds of flakes that fell steadily into the river. As the air around them filled with specks of the buildings, the man steered right until they were moving upstream alongside the over-leaning, bulging shoreline. Suddenly there was a tearing sound like someone ripping up tape and a burst of screaming. Amon turned with alarm to see a shaft just behind the stern in mid-collapse, a cascade of varicolored room chunks sending up a puff of petals as they dropped into the water with a splash that rocked the boat. The heavily perforated shelters spat flakes into the air while they sank slowly out of sight. Moments later, several survivors surfaced from the wreck to begin swimming back and Amon realized with horror how many had not been so lucky. He now noticed the rubble of other fallen shelters littering the edge of the river just beneath the waves and saw that the man kept the boat just clear of these dangerous shoals. Soon enough, there was a break in the reef of debris and he turned the boat into a cove of open water, directing the prow towards the shore. Many of the people climbing the steep stairwells that hung out over the water stopped to glower at their approach, as the calling of the crows grew progressively louder, their ominous concert all that seemed to greet Amon’s arrival.

  The shore was nearing fast, only about a dozen meters now, and with a few strokes on the palm display the boat began to slow, then to coast. Amon could feel his his breaths quivering fast and his knees trembling in sheer terror. All that separated him from a new life in the District of Dreams was a rapidly shrinking strip of water. Just the sight of this bizarre formation of shelters had overturned all his expectations, and already he had witnessed a horrendous accident. He didn’t want to even imagine what it might be like to set foot inside. But how was he to enter? The stairwells all ended several stories above and the base of the structures went straight into the water below, leaving nowhere to disembark.

  The man guided the coasting freighter between shattered skyscraper shallows to a spot where the angle of the buildings over the water wasn’t so sharp, leaving space for the prow to drift further in to the shore. As the boat came to a stop, it juddered under their feet and the man said, “Give me the sack.”

  Amon handed him his sack as instructed, and the man reached into his pockets to procure an armful of drinks and snacks, which he dumped into it.

  “Take this with you,” said the man, handing the sack back.

  “Thank yo—”

  “And this,” the man interrupted, taking something else out of a pocket beneath his belly and profferring it to Amon under his palm so its silvery form was partially concealed. Amon knew it by touch even before the man took his hand away and allowed him to see it: his nerve duster. “How did—”

  “Bring this to a place called Xenocyst.” He handed Amon another item: five sheets of plastic rolled up together. “To a man named Hippo. Tell them Tamper sent you. And watch out for Opportunity Scientists.”

  Amon unloaded the drinks and food into his suit jacket’s outer pockets, slipped the roll of plastic sheets into its right inner pocket, stuffed the sack into its left inner pocket, and slid the duster into his holster. He then glanced at the seemingly impenetrable mass looming over them and looked at the man called Tamper, confused. “But how do I—”

  “Into the hole,” said Tamper. “You’ll have to jump.” He pointed to a room with an oblong hole eaten diagonally from the right to left corners. It was about two meters from the edge of the deck and nearly level with it, though tipped back ever so slightly like a receptive mouth. Flakes of the grayish asphalt-like material of the room’s exterior sprayed rapidly from the zigzag lips of the hole like a swarm of flies taking flight.

  “You’re saying I should—”

  “Quickly, before the current drags us out of range and another drone arrives.”

  “But …” Tamper gave Amon one of his off-aim stares and Amon frowned back for a moment. “Thank you. I—”

  Without warning, Tamper bent low and began to plow Amon slowly towards the edge of the deck. “Tur
n!” he shouted and Amon, instinctively accepting there was no point in resisting, spun around and leapt, his flailing arms outstretched as he flew through the spray of flakes into the crack.

  6

  THE FAR SHORE

  Thudwhack! Amon’s ankle banged the bottom lip of the hole as he flew into the shelter and slammed chest-first into the floor. Taking most of the impact with his forearms and legs, he bounced once and flopped out prone onto a surprisingly soft surface. This cushioned his fall somewhat, though he was winded nonetheless and lay there huffing away the nausea for a while. When his breath was back, Amon rose to his knees and found himself in a two-meter-by-two-meter room with a ceiling too low for him to stand, the interior of the shelters out of which the whole District of Dreams seemed to be built. Twisting around from the waist to look back the way he had come, he saw sunlight pouring into the room from the hole. He searched outside for Tamper, but found only a stretch of greenish-brown waves covered in boats, with a smog-hazed sprawl of neglected skyscrapers on the other side, the freighter nowhere to be seen.

  Twisting back around, Amon looked about slowly and saw that the interior was the same grayish asphalt material as the exterior, though if the floor was anything to go by, it was much more pliant than it appeared. Flakes swirled into the room from various holes in the walls and ceiling, all of which offered jagged windows on walls of other colors and materials. Only the several thin tears in the wall straight ahead of the crack let in additional light, though much dimmer than the direct sunbeams behind him, and Amon guessed this would be his way out. Careful not to put his hands or knees through holes in the slanted floor, he crawled in this direction and found a little knob in the wall that he guessed was a handle for a door, a crack running straight down the center indicating where it opened. Jiggling the knob in different directions, he discovered that it twisted clockwise and heard a click after one rotation, before sliding half the wall open to the left.