“A Liquidator seeking justice!” the man scoffed. “Think of all the innocent lives he’s ruined.”
“You saw the faces he made when he talked about his missions. We need someone like this, a man with substance.”
“If we can believe anything he says,” said Vertical.
“Well I for one don’t see how he could have come up with something so incredible on the spot,” said Hippo. “And everything he told us is independently backed up. The document is in Tamper’s code and he was found with Liquidator gear. His eyes also confirm that he was telling the truth. Am I correct?” Hippo looked to Book.
Little Book tapped once on his tablet and Book nodded in confirmation.
The man with the gray-streaked beard opened his mouth to speak, but Hippo preempted him. “Before the discussion opens up any further, I should be honest and tell you all that there’s also a personal reason I support his admittance into Xenocyst. You see, I feel him to be a kind of kindred spirit. Because, like me, he chose to cash crash of his own volition without going bankrupt. And like me, he’s bankdead but still has his BodyBank beneath his skin.”
Amon found these words profoundly puzzling. How could Hippo have cash crashed without going bankrupt? he wondered. Had he too been an Identity Executioner who used the Death Codes to commit ID suicide? If so, why?
“So taking into account the objections, I’d still like to propose that we offer him a standard trial period. Does anyone wish to respond?”
A discussion followed, with the bearded young man and a woman behind Amon arguing to have him excluded, reiterating and expanding upon the man’s original points about his psychological and moral inadequacy. Though Ty remained silent, Vertical seemed all too eager to back them up with specific examples of his uselessness from earlier that day. When the debate settled, Book held another vote and this time it was five to four in favor of giving Amon a trial period without the need for Hippo to break the tie.
Nodding his head in acknowledgment of the result, Book turned to Amon. “The official pronouncement of the council is that you will be offered a standard trial period at Xenocyst. In other words, you will be granted approximately six weeks to complete our treatment regimen, stabilize your psychological condition, gain proficiency at the tasks we assign you, and demonstrate that you can make useful contributions to our community. During this period, or until you become capable of obtaining your own supplies, we will provide you with the minimum of clothes, food, and shelter. At the end of this period, or at the council’s earliest convenience, your performance will be subject to a second review, at which time the council reserves the right to promptly eject you if for any reason they deem it necessary. Do you accept the offer under these conditions?”
Amon still had no idea who these people were, what tasks they would expect of him, or even where exactly he was; for all he knew, Xenocyst could have been this one room floating in a void. Nor could he say with confidence that his mind would get better in the allotted time, if ever. But he had been accepted, and people would be taking care of him, and with their help he might be safe … at least for the time being. He could see little other choice
“I accept,” he whimpered, bowing his head to the floor with another sigh of relief that transitioned into full-body shaking, tears coming to his eyes.
Hippo had suggested Ty and Vertical be in charge of Amon because “you two neglected to escort him yourselves,” and in spite of their protests the council had voted unanimously for this proposal. So they had been forced to lead Amon out of the council chamber and guide him through the building. With his cowl off, Amon saw the interior for the first time. Although the hallways were high and wide, a clutter of various medical items—forceps, syringes, boxes of diapers—was heaped along the walls, leaving only a narrow passage. Along this, staff in white, linoleum-looking gowns bustled, some wheeling metal trays cluttered with scalpels, gauze, IV packs. Amon and his two escorts tread on the layer of dissolving wrappers and packaging that littered the patches of open floor. Its discolored tiles, from which carpeting seemed to have been uprooted, the holes in the ceiling every few paces for absent chandelier fixtures, and the empty portals where apartment doors must have once stood suggested to Amon that the building had once been a luxury condo. After turning down numerous hallways and climbing similar stairwells, they had arrived finally in front of the closed elevator doors, which Ty had immediately opened with a hand crank before Vertical had coaxed him in with, “Be a good little recruit and you might even get some food,” in a patronizing tone usually reserved for children.
Creak, creak, creak. Amon awoke to the sound of the crank. He lifted his lolled head from his chest and wiped the drool from his lips, realizing he had nodded off as a blade of light slipped between the doors. Blinking in the sudden brightness, he watched the crack widen just enough for something round to fly into the elevator and strike the back wall.
Food!
Ravenously Amon fumbled the flattened thing from the floor with a quick “Thank you!” and heard more creaks as he tore off the plastic and the doors closed. Back in darkness, Amon bit into his splat rice ball and crunched on a pickled plum at the center—or something that vaguely tasted like one. The texture was more brittle than any umeboshi he’d had before. The rice too had an odd, melty softness to it. But that didn’t stop him from gobbling it in two bites and wanting more when he was done. Already his memory of being able to have as much food as he wanted whenever he wanted seemed distant and removed, even though it had only been a few days since this was possible. It was as though having his first meal in the District of Dreams had changed something inside him, nailing him to this bizarre, incomprehensible place, as though the carbohydrates and sugars now nourishing his cells were messages that said he could never go back.
But if I can’t return, I’ll never see Mayuko again, I’ll never resolve jubilee, I’ll … In his exhaustion, Amon felt bereaved. So much of who he was—his friends, his job, his beliefs, his city—had been ruthlessly hacked away, amputated from his soul.
Yet the moment he lay his head down on the damp, spongy mattress in the dark enclosure, Amon left these thoughts and feelings behind for a time as he plummeted into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When Amon opened his eyes, the bulky shadow of a figure standing in the slat of light from the open door fell on him. It was Ty with his tricycle’s front wheel rearing from his back, there to fetch him for his first trial day.
2
Xenocyst was an enclave within the District of Dreams that offered various services to bankdead, especially mothers, orphaned children, and infants. Unlike the venture charities, it was managed and operated by the bankdead who lived there. Each member of the Xenocyst Council was an elected representative of one of its nine districts, while Hippo served as an unelected special advisor. They were in charge of deciding who was granted membership, adjudicating disputes, and setting citywide policies. Beneath each councilor were various subcommittees that dealt with local issues and put council resolutions into practice.
At the center of the city was the battered condo in which the Council Chamber and Amon’s elevator were located. It was known as the Cyst—a solid cell of glass and metal embedded in the midst of thousands of flaking shelters. The windows, all of which had remained miraculously in one piece over the decades, were milked over with filth, peeking out in grayish-white patches from the dissolving architectural mass that encased the building. With so many structures glommed around, Amon could never tell exactly how large the Cyst was, but it seemed to be nearly eighty stories tall and might have covered an entire block in Free Tokyo. In addition to serving as the central administrative base for the whole community, it also contained several service centers, each of which took up one of the lower floors: a nursery, an orphanage, a library, and a hospital, with obstetrics, pediatric, gynecological, and emergency wards. Radiating from the Cyst in uneven patches were the nine districts. These were built of what everyone called “disposable skyscraper
s,” or just “disposcrapers” for short, all connected together into a dense, continuous reef of city with just enough spaces left between them to form a complex warren of channels and fissures that allowed passage.
Amon’s job on his first day was to help with construction. Ty took him up many flights of stairs to the roof of the Cyst, a flat concrete square extending approximately half a kilometer in each direction. There they joined a construction crew of about twelve residents and greeted a landing supply centicopter, the hundred tiny rotors on its pale plastic body whining and whirling against a bluish inky blanket of clouds in the pre-dawn glow. Under Ty’s instruction, Amon helped unload the crates before lifting one to his shoulder and descending to one of the Cyst’s exits, from which he lugged it to a much lower rooftop an hour’s journey away.
Inside the crates—Amon discovered after the crew had all unpacked—were roombuds. These were about the size of an adult’s head but shaped like bullets, flat on the bottom and tapering up to a small, dull tip. With a sack-full slung over his back, Amon climbed almost a hundred half-stories and walked hundreds of meters across narrow ledges to a particular spot Ty had indicated. He had warned Amon repeatedly not to drop the roombud and on his first installation Amon immediately understood why, for the moment one touched the surface of a room it bonded there and immediately began to swell. Once the bud reached about twice its original size, it would burst open in various locations as hundreds of structures folded outwards like origami flowers. The roombud cylinders were all black on the outside, but flowers with petals of various colors emerged and the shell of the bud flattened out and disappeared beneath them as they expanded and joined, weaving themselves together into flat surfaces that formed the cuboid shape of a room. Though the pattern and imitated material of the façades varied from room to room—wood, marble, polka-dot—depending on the color of the petals, they always felt soft to the touch irrespective of how they looked, and lost the illusion of texture up close, appearing to be made from some sort of tightly latticed crystal fibers.
Ty explained that roombuds were 3D-printed starters for self-assembling rooms. Originally designed as relief shelters for refugees, they were now provided individually to each bankdead by the venture charities or, as was the case that morning, flown in by special arrangement to select enclaves. Once triggered by touching another room, the fuel cells inside began to pop, the fuel mixed with oxygen, and a chemical reaction was initiated. This sent the nanobots that composed it configuring into larger nanobots that configured into larger nanobots, eventually realizing a formation that accorded with their instructions. Though individual roombuds were relatively light, Amon had to scale massive towers in the hot, muggy air carrying a dozen at a time, his body still aching from the strain and punishment of the previous day. Once these were installed, he would return to restock before immediately heading off to a new location. The work was exhausting and, due to the short lifespan of the rooms, had to be constantly repeated, the disposcrapers they formed constantly rebuilt. Made out of Fleet as Amon had guessed, the rooms remained in “full bloom” only until their pre-programmed expiration date, which varied from a few days to a few weeks. At this point they would begin to dissolve petal by petal, at first slowly but with the rate of dissolution increasing daily until they imploded under the weight of other rooms and the building collapsed. It was the job of demolition crews Amon saw here and there to bash apart such precarious structures before they posed a safety risk, and Ty told him that he would soon assist them.
At around noon, the construction crew headed off to the nearest feeding station, a concrete square either on a condo rooftop or the ground level of the island that had food and drink machines often called feeders. There the crew lined up, though Amon was told he couldn’t access feeders because he hadn’t yet registered at a place called Delivery, where the venture charities were all concentrated. Still suffering from webloss, he wasn’t deemed psychologically prepared to make the journey. In the meantime, Ty provided him with rice balls and sports drinks, which he said came from a common pool of bonus supplies Xenocyst received. Amon devoured these eagerly and found them surprisingly filling for their size, though not quite enough after days with little to eat.
After lunch, Ty sent a guard to take Amon to the library for an interview with Book and Little Book. The library was a large room on the fourteenth floor of the Cyst, identical in dimensions to the council chamber but filled with shelves built from various scrounged up pieces of wood, metal, and plastic. The books and documents on the shelves were likewise of varied material, with an assortment of paper books, uncurled tin cans, concrete slabs, and plastic sheets like the one used by Tamper. Amon was brought to a round space at the center of the room where many shelves ended and the aisles radiated out in all directions. There stood a square table and four chairs of different sizes and designs. Amon was given the swivel office chair with wheels that appeared to be broken, Book settled in a holey armchair across from him, and Little Book took a plastic lawn chair. The guard left the folding metal chair empty, leaning instead on one of the shelf ends, paddle in hand.
Even though Amon had already told his story to the council, they apparently had many more questions and he soon found himself answering them for hours on end. Book asked him about all sorts of topics, from the personal (what he’d eaten growing up in the BioPen, how many people worked in his office) to the political (what the names of recent GATA ministers were, what policies affecting the bankdeath camps had been enacted) to the economic (what the values of certain currencies were, when the market crashes tended to happen) to the latest fashion trends and idols. Sometimes his questions seemed too obvious to take seriously (where GATA Tower was located, what the capital of Japan was, what fifteen times twenty-two was), and Book repeated them so many times that Amon began to question the man’s memory, though he had little right to complain as he was having memory issues of his own. Often he was slow to answer, the faint threads he followed breaking again and again under his inner gaze, connecting to nothing. At the end of their frayed vagueness, he would sometimes find another thread, but this too snipped apart, his past forever like a word on the tip of his tongue, close and abiding but invisible and irretrievable.
Book was persistent with his questions, humming them out in his nasally bass, and Amon answered as best he could. The whole time Book stared at him through broken glasses—one eye planetary in its magnification, the other small and pale—while Little Book looked up at him from the tablet now and then, both man and boy considering him with careful, clinical interest. Little Book took notes constantly, but only occasionally did he tap out a message with the strokes of his pen, prompting Book to follow certain lines of inquiry with Amon and supplementing him with facts. Amon marveled at how the boy was able to express two meanings with a single motion of his hand, the strokes on the screen recording the conversation around him and the taps initiating a separate conversation with Book, though as he never uttered a word Amon began to suspect he was mute.
Various people would come over periodically to browse the nearby shelves. It reminded Amon of the bookstores in Jinbocho and the manga library in the Tezuka, and again he thought sadly of the life he had lost. He was surprised to find the titles indecipherable. The spines of some of the books were close enough that he could make them out, yet the lines that formed the script seemed to scramble and blur together.
“What language is this?” Amon asked during a lull in the interview, as he squinted at the strange runes arrayed down the lanes about him. He had noticed them on his way into the center of the stacks and wondered now if Hinkongo had its own script.
“It is Japanese,” said Book. Tap-tapatapatap, tap-tap… “We infer that you are experiencing perceptual processing difficulties as a result of your affliction with cogwither.”
“Cogwither?”
Taptap, taptap, taptaptap … “Cognitive atrophy. If you wish to re-acquire your former reading capacity, habituation is the only effective strategy. Fo
r this reason, making an effort is highly recommended. This will, moreover, ameliorate the symptoms of your infoyearn and crowdcrave.”
Amon nodded, though he had no intention of following Book’s (and Little Book’s) advice. While it was disturbing to find his vision still wonky, if getting better meant doing something as boring and pointless as reading he was almost willing to accept it. The measly amount of information that could be contained on each sheet of plastic, tin, paper, or whatever hardly seemed worth the effort to take down. Scribbling on a tablet was slightly more efficient perhaps, since at least everything would be saved in one place, but it still seemed like a painstaking way to record someone’s voice, and the playback method—reading—seemed immeasurably inferior without the option of audio speech.
“What are you writing?” Amon asked Little Book eventually.
Taptap, tap, taptaptap, ta-tap … “We are summarizing the key points in your answers,” Book interpreted.
“What for?”
Ta-taptap, tap, tap-ta-tap … “To produce a record of events occurring in the Free World and compile a report for the council.”
“Why rely on me? Are there no better ways to learn what’s going on outside?”
Taptaptap, taptaptap, taptaptap, tap … “It is a rare chance for us to query a relatively verbally comprehensible crashnewb, especially one such as yourself who was employed at GATA, as a Liquidator no less.”
Amon wondered why they would go to the trouble of isolating the “key points” of his speech rather than copying it verbatim. By allowing this boy to decide how to distill Amon’s message instead of producing as exact a representation as possible, individual bias was being introduced into the record. And why would they place their confidence in Amon, who depended on no more trustworthy a source than his own fickle memory?
Being subjected to this absurd method of information transfer irritated Amon. He just wanted to send segments of his LifeStream or links to appropriate websites and be done with it. As the interview went on, Book’s odd voice and Little Book’s occasional tapping grew increasingly annoying. The stickiness of his skin from the close, dusty summer air only made it worse. After about two hours, the silence, the simplicity of the room, was just too much for Amon to handle. His breathing quickened, his head began to ache, and jolts of stress tremored from the base of his spine to the tips of his fingers. He did his best to ignore these sensations and comply with the interview, but was inevitably overwhelmed. He tripped on his tongue, blanked on words, scrambled his grammar, slurred incoherently, rambled, and flew on tangents only to realize that he’d forgotten the question. Soon his desire for apps, for indirect connection, for promotainment, for a measure of the value of his actions became so strong that his hands jittered and tears came to his eyes.
The Naked World Page 15
