The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  But to his surprise, none of the dozen women, some holding newborns, or the equal number of men waiting with him, seemed concerned by the struggle. They just stared at him, dull-eyed, some with bemused smiles. Amon felt the man’s hips clamp against his buttocks and his hot breath wrapping around his neck. The closeness was violating, but something, perhaps the man’s smell, made Amon’s arms go limp, his urge to resist suddenly deflating.

  “Tha fuck!” the man whimpered as though on the verge of tears. “How the hell’d you end up here?”

  Amon recognized the voice immediately, and as the man’s arms loosened, Amon shook him off to turn around.

  There, standing before him, was Rick. In the flesh, for there was no other way for him to be in this naked place, his face contorted with doleful joy. The air between them stirred almost visibly with emotion as their locked eyes and their hands quivered with the desire to get closer to each other though unsure how to do it. Despite their long friendship, they had never hugged before—given the high cost it had not been something anyone they knew did—but after seeing Xenocyst residents do it many times Amon had grown used to the idea, and Rick must have too, for soon the tension became unbearable and they collapsed into embrace. Their arms shifted about awkwardly for a few moments until they figured out how to fit together. Several onlookers laughed at the sight but Amon hardly noticed. Here in his arms was his resurrected friend, substantial, warm, breathing. Please don’t let this thin breeze carry him away, Amon thought, tears slipping from the corners of his closed eyes as he felt the warm drip from his friend’s on the side of his neck.

  After a bittersweet span of time, they extricated and Amon looked Rick up and down, as his friend did the same to him. He was still the tall, broad-shouldered man with the brooding eyes that Amon remembered, though he had lost a fair amount weight. He was bony and grubby. They were both bony and grubby. Seeing Rick, Amon realized, was like looking at his own reflection, something he hadn’t done since the council when he still retained his bankliving plumpness and luster. Like Amon, his clothes were beginning to flake away, his beard growing in straggly, his hair a tangled mess, his skin greasy. The camps had changed them both, irreversibly perhaps. But how could Rick be alive?

  “What are you …” A million questions scrabbled with each other to breach the surface of Amon’s mind, a million stories he wanted to tell summoned from the depths.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “But …”

  “They told me to come here this morning.”

  Before he could ask who, Ty sauntered into view from around a bend with two young men and stopped in front of the group. “Morning, everyone,” he said.

  “Good morning,” the crowd replied in unison with a bow. The intersection was tight with similar groups gathering before heading for Delivery. Petals from the overhanging disposcrapers drifted silently over their heads on the faintest draft.

  “For those of you who don’t know, call me Ty. I’m in charge of seeing you all safely to Delivery today. Now that we’re all here, lemme tell you the plan. Everyone here has been assigned to floor seven, gate twelve, for supply pickup this morning. That’s excepting me and the guards.” Ty glanced left to right at the young men on either side of him. “We’re only here as escorts. And one of us”—Ty glanced at Amon—“who hasn’t been assigned a gate yet.

  “Now listen up. Our route will take us through one of the territories in Xenocyst’s jurisdiction to a neutral area outlying Delivery. We may run into OpScis there, but we’ve agreed that the Road to Delivery and its branches are ceasefire zones, so we’re not expecting any conflict. Still, there could be a few loose cannons. We don’t fully get their religion and it’s hard to guess what they might do. So we have to keep our wits about us and stick tight. You follow?”

  Everyone in the group said “yes” or nodded in agreement.

  “Good. So of our twelve women, six are bringing babies. Four of the fathers are here with their partners, but we have two without an escort. Amon, Rick. That’s your job.” Ty pointed from Amon to one woman and from Rick to another. Amon nodded his head in greeting to his partner: a tall, big-hipped woman with waist-length wavy hair, freckles, and a slight lazy eye, who introduced herself as Bané. Her baby boy of about six months sat hanging against her chest on a piece of flaking fabric tied around her shoulders, his legs dangling to her midriff as he stared wide-eyed at something over her shoulder. “Stay close to them the whole way and be ready to fight for them if need be. Issues?”

  Amon and Rick shook their heads.

  “Now until we get outside the compound, you’re all welcome to travel as you will, but no wandering or straggling!” Ty swept a piercing, narrow-eyed gaze across everyone with his hand over his shoulder on a tricycle wheel, as if in warning. “Once we go through the checkpoint, we’re gonna travel in a line of twos. I’m taking the lead and these two”—Ty pointed to the guards—“will keep a watch on our rear at all times. Once outside Xenocyst, you will obey our orders at all times. If there’s any contradiction in what we say you listen to me. Issues? Anyone?”

  Everyone in the group shook their head.

  “Alright, follow me and let’s go.” Ty began to walk down one of the alleys and the group set off behind him, leaving Amon and Rick standing there.

  Amon had caught only the basic gist of what Ty had said (“follow me,” “watch out for OpScis,” “protect the mothers”) as his mind was overwhelmed by the reappearance of his friend. And he immediately turned to Rick for answers, finding him already looking in his direction with an expression of quizzical stupefaction.

  “So wha—”

  “I—”

  “You—”

  “But—”

  In the ensuing seconds of silence between them, their lips trembled stupidly as they tried to catch the right moment to say something, but hesitated for fear of being preempted by the other. Then Rick laughed nervously, spurring Amon to do the same, and put his hands on Amon’s shoulders.

  “Amon, Cheapskate Extraordinaire, a.k.a. Ebenezer Scrooge gone monk, what the hell are you—”

  “No! You first! I thought you were dead.”

  “Dead? Bankdead?”

  “No! Dead dead! Those bastards, they …” Amon’s voice cracked.

  Rick looked tenderly at Amon, the brooding sadness in his eyes offset by a wry smile.

  “Amon, my friend. It’s so nice to hear you swear again.” Rick squeezed Amon’s shoulder. “Like fucking music to my ears.”

  A kind of doleful, bittersweet joy welled up in Amon’s chest, and he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, locking eyes with him as they leaned on each other for a moment.

  “Come on,” Rick said, “before we get called out for straggling,” and they jogged a few paces to catch up with the rear of the group.

  Crowding along the path from the rooftop alley intersection by the Cyst to the nearest border checkpoint forced the group to proceed slowly, giving Amon and Rick a bit of time to catch up. Since both were excruciatingly eager to hear what had happened to the other since the last time they’d spoken, neither would agree to fill the other in first, and they decided to settle the matter with a round of rock-paper-scissors. Rick lost and reluctantly began to tell Amon his story as they plodded their way along with the party. Whether the alleys were wide enough for them to walk side by side or so narrow they had to walk back to front, Rick and Amon stayed close to each other, leaning in and speaking into the other’s ear in a low voice to create a private space for their communion.

  “So the day we crashed Minister Kitao, right after we … had that argument at Self Serve, Sekido-san FacePhones me up and orders me to crash Barrow later that night.”

  “No! That fucking …” Amon shook his head ruefully.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Amon, shocked that Barrow had assigned Rick to do the same job as him just a day earlier. “I’ll tell you when you’re finished.”

  “Don’t tease me like t
hat.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. You were saying.”

  “Well, basically, Sekido tells me that the ministry is about to fire me. They’re pleased that we dealt with Kitao discretely and everything, but that was hardly enough to make up for all my slacking. So based on my performance with Barrow, the higher-ups will make their final decision. If I do really well, they’ll forgive me for everything and maybe consider promoting me. If I fail, my chances of staying employed are slim.

  “Even without all the threats and ultimatums I’d have probably done the job without question the way I always did. But something seems off when Sekido-san says I’ll be going in solo and then orders me not to tell anyone, even you, about the mission. I mean, why would they want me to ignore protocol and go on a mission without a partner? If the mission is so important, me and you should be on it together, to do the job right. Then he tells me to wait for his go-ahead before moving in. But if Barrow is already bankrupt, shouldn’t I be rushing in there as fast as always to stop his bad debt from building up? Keeping me on standby just doesn’t make sense.”

  Amon shook his head again, disappointed with himself for not clueing in on such oddities when Sekido had given him exactly the same assignment.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. Maybe later.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Later. Definitely.”

  “Stop doing that.”

  “Sorry. I’m listening.”

  “Where was I?”

  “‘Standby just doesn’t make sense.’”

  “Right. So I voice my concerns to Sekido-san right away, but he reassures me that the ministry has its reasons for keeping this secret and waiting for the perfect moment to strike, but he can’t explain any further at the moment because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then goes off on one of his diatribes about ‘faithful reliabilism.’ Usually I’d leave it at that, but something just doesn’t feel right and I start to push him for more details and some more convincing justification for his atypical and probably illegal approach to the mission. I’m sure you can guess how far that got me.”

  “He started rambling in meaningless circles and you got precisely nowhere with him.”

  “The guy should get a prize for saying the littlest in the most number of words.”

  “Do the sounds he makes even count as words?”

  “Ha ha! That’s it, Amon—what a douchebag—how come you couldn’t say things like that when we were still working for him? I could have had someone to vent with.”

  “Your story?”

  “Fine. Yeah, so not surprisingly, our talk ends inconclusively. None of my concerns have been answered, but through that pushy roundabout way he has Sekido has managed somehow to leave it that the mission is still in my hands. We’re having this conversation as I walk around waiting for his instructions, and when it’s over I get on the train home at Tokyo Station to go kill time before the mission. But when I go to transfer at Otemachi, this guy bumps into me in a really rude and careless way, and the next thing I know Mayuko is calling me on FacePhone. I pick up, and I see her there, but I can barely make out her face because she’s in this really dark place, screaming like crazy. I ask her what’s wrong, but she’s all panicked and completely inarticulate, just shrieking and begging me for help. I can hear her MindFulator going crazy in the background, telling her a train is coming. Asking questions isn’t helping anything, so I bolt for where it says she is on my map, right on the tracks of the Chiyoda Line in the very station I’m in. I’m thinking what a weird coincidence this is when the display tells me the next train is in one minute and I start running like I’ve never run before while Mayuko is screaming away in my ears for help. I get to the platform with ten seconds to spare. She’s about ten meters inside the tunnel and I leap onto the track and dash straight for her with the train coming right at me. But when I get there, no one’s there. I can see someone looking up at me on FacePhone as I approach, but on my eyes the space in front of me is just empty. I flatten myself against the wall of the tunnel just in time. The train blasts by the tip of my nose. When it’s stopped at the station, I return to the platform and climb up. The suicide crew is already there with their vacuums and hoses and cleanup dusters and stuff.

  “I stagger through the crowd of gawkers and back up the escalator, trying to put together what’s just happened. A guy bumps me and suddenly I’m having a sort of digital hallucination. Obviously this isn’t some random hacking because the image was carefully fabricated. Whoever it was knew Mayuko was my girlfriend and wanted to get rid of me. But BodyBank security is supposed to be impenetrable. Someone committed a serious credicrime against me and I need to figure out who. But when I get to the top of the escalator, two Liquidators are waiting for me, a man and a woman I recognize from another squad, though I can’t remember their names.

  “I was too panicked earlier, but I finally think to check my AT readout and see that I’ve been fined for train suicide and I’m deep, deep in the red. But the costs don’t add up. I was in the red to begin with before I made the jump, but not that far in. And with my evening pay arriving a few minutes earlier, I should still be solvent in spite of my crime. I think about appealing the fine to the Fiscal Judiciary since I’ve been tricked into doing it by someone who’s breached me illegally. That’s when the nerve dust hits.”

  As Rick told his story, they hiked with the party down crowded alleys cutting through the dense disposcraper mounds that encompassed them. Ahead of them, the mothers marched along carrying their fabric-harnessed babies, the rest unencumbered. Ty led the way, striding purposefully with his trike carving through the clouds of petals falling all around like a shark fin through water.

  “So who the fuck do you think did that to me, Amon?” asked Rick, a look of raw rage and hurt blazing in his eyes. “I guess it was Sekido. I just can’t imagine who else it could be, but I can’t see why he’d do it.”

  “It was definitely Sekido,” said Amon. “Your story is just dripping with his MO.”

  “But why would he have me crashed? Because I was late for work a few times? Because I asked some questions about a mission that didn’t make any sense? Fire me? Sure, I could see that. But this …”

  “Hmm,” Amon hummed sympathetically, seeing how wounded and bewildered his friend was by the betrayal. Amon had gone through more before his bankdeath, much more, and confronted mad bureaucratic tangles, but at least he’d had the opportunity to resist the incomprehensible machinations around him, as futile as that resistance had been, and in the end he’d even managed to dispel some of the mystery surrounding them. How much worse it must have been for Rick to be fooled into cash crashing without warning, to be taken advantage of by an organization he’d entrusted his life and career to, and to wake up in the camps without the slightest inkling why.

  “I can make a pretty good guess what happened to you,” said Amon, “but I think it’ll be easier to explain if I tell you what happened to me first.”

  “Please,” said Rick. “I know I was the one who said all that stuff about how the stress from your frugality would drive you insane and bankrupt you. But I was thinking ‘eventually,’ like maybe a few years down the road. Not even two months have passed since that night and here you are, already adjusted to bankdead life. You must have arrived here weeks ago.”

  “I guess I should start with the day you disappeared.”

  Amon told Rick what had happened to him the night after their argument in the bar, beginning with his assignment to crash Barrow and ending with his identity suicide. He tried to summarize all the events as accurately and honestly as he could, but he was too ashamed to admit what he’d allowed to happen to Mayuko and too guilty to relate their parting words—Rick had been her childhood friend and lover after all—so he found himself fudging the details of his interactions with her. To avoid describing how she saved him from a humiliating fate in the Open Source Zone, Amon omitted
the fact that he was nearly bankrupt after the parasite infected him in Kabukicho, and pretended as though he’d reasoned out that the recruiters were the Birla Sisters without Mayuko’s help. On this version, he’d gone to hide out in a weekly mansion alone, but the virus in his pinky had exposed his location and by the time strange men were coming for him he didn’t have the funds to fight back. His only choice, to hold on to his information and escape, was to flee and finally cash crash himself. Then, trying to tell the whole truth this time, he briefly narrated his encounter with Tamper and how he’d found his way to Xenocyst, where they’d granted him a trial period.

  About halfway through his story, the buildings around them began to change. They were entering the area built of logoed shelters, with logoed vending machines and residents wearing logoed clothes that Amon had seen the day he wandered to the border. This, he now knew from the so-called orientations the Books had been giving him, was one of Xenocyst’s communities of “gifted” bankdead: select individuals who were entitled to brand name supplies and other perks, as opposed to the “giftless” who made up the majority in the camps.

  By the time Amon had finished his story, he could see a wide, curving alley up ahead, and Ty told them that it would lead them to a border checkpoint. The narrow passage their crew took was the center prong of a three-forking path that merged into the alley so that other groups proceeding along the paths on the left and right streamed in alongside them, their progress slowing as the crowd converged.

  “Now that you’ve heard what happened to me,” said Amon, “I bet you can make a pretty good guess about how you were cash crashed.”

  “You’re damn right I can. I replayed those last moments before I got dusted a million times in my mind while I was recovering in Er. I knew the guy who bumped me had something to do with it.”