The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Rick glanced over his shoulder as Amon knelt to gather what he’d dropped and chuckled, saying, “Lucky timing there, Amon. I’d hate to have been down there when it started raining bricks because of your butterfingers,” before the two of them and their load melded laughing into the crowd. Amon began to restack the bricks, thinking how he would have been annoyed if it had been anyone other than Rick who had mocked him. But he wasn’t annoyed. He couldn’t be annoyed. He was simply too glad to have his friend back.

  It had been only two weeks since Rick had reappeared suddenly before the supply pickup, and Amon reflected back on their conversation after the visit to Delivery when Rick had finally explained how their reunion had come about … or part of how it had come about. As with everything else in Amon’s life, unanswered questions still obscured his story, like globs of oil in an aquarium.

  By the time their crew made it off the Road to Delivery, they were trekking through gloom as the sun had long since fallen below the slumscape skyline. Ty warned them to watch out for Opportunity Scientists and unaffiliated bandits skulking along the highways, hurrying them along with their new loads of supplies so they could reach the outer walls of Xenocyst before nightfall. It wasn’t until they entered a proxy territory that Ty allowed them to slacken their pace and Amon and Rick were able to walk side by side again.

  “So who was that woman back there in the lineup?” Amon asked the first moment he could. “Do you know her?”

  “You saw that, did you?” said Rick. “Yeah, I know her. Kind of. Actually, she was asking about you.”

  “Oh. Okay. What did she say?”

  “She wanted to know if I knew where you were, but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to tell her so I lied and said no. Was that the right thing to do?”

  “Um … maybe. I don’t know. I guess it depends on who she is.”

  “Rashana Birla.”

  “That’s how she introduced herself to you?”

  “Yeah. But not at Delivery. I met her before. In Er.”

  “I keep hearing about this place. Some kind of rehab center or something, right?”

  “Yeah. For webloss. I lived there a few weeks until I came here.”

  “Why do they call it Er?”

  “I think they said the guy who developed their system was named Er. Something like that.”

  “Okay. So you met the Birla sister there?”

  “Yeah, she came to visit me while I was recovering. But let me back up a bit. It’ll be easier to explain that way.”

  “Why don’t you just pick up where you left off?”

  “With the train station?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, like I told you, I got dusted there. The next thing I remember was waking up soaking in this bright tank. No one explained anything, but I figured out pretty soon it was Er.”

  “What’s it like in there?”

  “Kind of like being back in the BioPen, except it’s full of adults instead of kids and everyone’s a bit crazy. They give you rehab banks, like training banks but with limited features. That way you can see the overlay, but no one can personalize the way they look or send messages or anything like that. A lot of the time, you’re in a LimboQuarium. We just called it the tank. It’s filled with this stuff that’s the same temperature as your skin, but you’re not really sure if it’s a liquid or a gas, though it’s kind of soft and burning in a cool sort of way. Like some kind of … menthol feather goo? It’s hard to describe … you just sort of float there in stillness while doctors or addiction technicians or whatever have total control over what you see and hear. As time goes by, they gradually adjust your audio-video feed so you get less and less information each day. At first the images and music were on twenty-four hours straight, but soon it started to go off for one minute each hour. Then two minutes. Then four. Without warning, the ImmaNet would just die and the naked world would appear—then suddenly it would switch right back. It was shocking in the beginning, but they gave us lectures, and training seminars, and cognitive exercises on how to use our minds in place of apps, like for navigating around this complicated obstacle course. We did everything outside the tanks as a group, so I got to know the other patients a bit. In the last couple of weeks they started to teach us about the District of Dreams and how the supply system works at Delivery. Also how to use roombuds to build our own homes.

  “I won’t go into all the details right now, but it was a really carefully worked out recovery program. They kept telling us how lucky we were to be getting in. Supposedly not all crashdead are accepted. The rumors say only about 10 to 20 percent. No one ever told me what happens to the rest. I figured out eventually that my Er facility was a special one for ‘giftless crashdead.’ You have any idea what that means?”

  “Yeah, but it’s too complicated to get into right now,” said Amon, realizing that Rick hadn’t heard about the origin of the bankdead—or at least not in the way Book told it. “So when does Rashana Birla come in?”

  “About a week after I cash crashed. Some secretary tells me that a big shot philanthropaneur who’s the patron for the facility is coming to see me, and then Rashana Birla shows up. The first thing she asks after introducing herself is ‘if Amon were bankdead, where in the camps do you think he’d be?’ This surprises me. You bankdead? As far as I know, you’re still scrimping away in the city. And I’ve never been anywhere but Er since crashing, so how the hell am I supposed to guess where you’d be? But the way she stares at me, I can tell she’s not playing around—is it just me or are her eyelashes terrifying?”

  “Her eyelashes are terrifying.”

  “So I think about it and say, ‘Somewhere he could get promoted and live a quiet, orderly life.’”

  “That sounds kind of like Xenocyst.”

  “Not bad, right? I guess I know you pretty well. But she didn’t seem impressed because then she just nodded and left without even saying thanks, and my routine went right back to normal.”

  “How did you get to Xenocyst then? They told me I’d be getting a roommate and all of a sudden you show up! It almost seems like a miracle that you would end up here, with me, on the exact same crew. Don’t you think?”

  “I know. What a shock. I have no clue how it worked out this way. But it was Vertical that brought me here. About a week before my discharge. I was expecting to get kicked out like all the other patients. Then she came and brought me to the Cyst. I went through the council, told them my whole life story just like you did, and for the last week, the Books have been questioning me in the library every afternoon. Then, just yesterday, the interviews wrapped up and they told me I was going to Delivery. Said my pickup time was tomorrow. Then I joined the group this morning and that’s when I saw you.”

  “Wow. Okay. So you’ve been here for over a week? Did anyone tell you why Xenocyst went to the trouble of picking you up?”

  “Naw. No idea. The people at the clinic just said that someone had come to get me and I followed Vertical here and that was it, no explanation or anything.”

  “Hmm …” Amon considered this question for a moment, but no answer was forthcoming and a different query soon bobbed up from the turbid waters of his mind to bump it aside. “Um … so just returning to Rashana Birla again. What exactly happened at Delivery? What did she say to you?”

  “She asked me if I knew where you were. I said no because you’d just told me how the Birlas were involved with what happened to you. It seemed dangerous. Was that what you wanted me to do?”

  “Yeah … maybe. I don’t know, but thanks. I think you were right to be cautious. If I’d wanted to meet her, I could have tried to wave to her from the line or something. I just wasn’t sure … But did she say anything else?”

  “Um. She said that you’d asked her to meet you here, in the District of Dreams, and that if I saw you I should tell you she got your message.”

  Amon felt a glowing trickle of excitement and hope, but it quickly congealed into anxiety and regret. “Shit …”
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  “What?”

  “I left a message for the activist. If Rashana knows about it, it must be her.”

  “Better safe than sorry, right?”

  “Yeah. I guess … but how do you think she knew you’d be in Delivery? There’s no way you two would have just happened to meet by coincidence, and on the same day that we met. The chance of bumping into one person in this big, crowded maze is small enough.”

  “The Er staff were the ones who told me my first gate and pickup time, so she could have easily heard it from them.”

  “Okay. So that means she could be waiting for you at your next pickup?”

  “Um, yeah, sure. If she can figure out what the supply scheduler told me. But just because she has access to information from Er, that doesn’t necessarily mean she can get it at Delivery.”

  “You don’t think someone with her kind of resources could find out when you’ll be there?”

  “Money’s not the problem. From the way her guards acted all cautious around the Charity Brigade, I got the impression she’s not welcome there. But if I see her again, do you want me to tell her you’re here this time?”

  “I … I’m not sure. Let me think about it and see what else we can figure out.”

  Soon after their conversation finished, they stepped out of a tunnel to the edge of the canyon surrounding the outer walls of Xenocyst. Amon remembered feeling a brisk wind blowing, that end-of-summer wind carrying a melancholy hint of fall, and looked up at the jagged patch of gray-blue evening sky far above them, sensing the memory that eluded him closer than ever.

  Now the fall presaged by that wind had arrived and a chill breeze crept steadily beneath his clothes, as Amon finished stacking his embyrbrycks on the rooftop and stood up to look around. He was in the north-west corner of a wide square formed of many rooftops, a solid field of small room squares assembled around the large condo square of the Cyst at the center. A dense throng milled about on top, making various preparations for the festivities: stacking embyrbrycks in equidistant piles, assembling packaged food and drinks into orderly ziggurats, setting up enclosed fences so toddlers and young children could play safely, anchoring poles for personal hammocks with bags of Fleet flakes, setting up huge telescopes salvaged from who knows what anadeto hoard, doing last minute rehearsals of acrobatics and drama, lugging various items up the stairs from below. The residents performed these activities with visible anticipation and excitement, filling the air with a buzz of laughter, shouts, and chatter, though the tiredness that underlay each of their motions was clear to see, if not from the day’s labor and inconveniences then from having to climb over two hundred meters to get here.

  Bending down to cradle his stack of embyrbrycks, Amon stood up with their weight in his arms and was about to carry them into the crowd, when he felt the urge to look down. Curiosity had been building on the way up as he restrained himself to stave off the vertigo and now, he realized, was the perfect chance to take a broad view on the District of Dreams while keeping a safe distance from any dangerous falls. So he turned and stepped over to a few paces from the edge of the wall he’d just ascended, gazing west.

  The precipice dropped away into a vast expanse of shadow dappled at different heights by the dim wavering circles cast by crumbling light cookies. Inside each circle were the right-angle layers of tilted rooftop clutter, and the black speckles of petals passing ceaselessly through. Above the silhouette skyline of hunched tower-mounds trickled a white-gold splash of fading radiance from the fallen sun, as the purple-black of evening bled into jagged cloud gaps and flushed out the lingering cobalt of twilight from the sky. Just to the south of this afterglow, two great segments of sky were blocked out by the twin horns of Opportunity Peaks, the twinkle of lights arrayed across them inserting the night’s first constellations over the tumbling horizon. To its north was the bright mirrored bulk of Delivery, from which fresh stable lanterns radiated along each of its many bridges and connecting roads that carved through the slumscape, all paths a-shuffle with shadow hordes of bankdead, a darkly glimmering cloud of CareBots swirling above. Rearing behind all this and wrapping around to the eastern rim was the second layer of sprawl added by Free Tokyo—stripped of its digital clothes, those shifting neon fabrics woven of rapacious commerce—a slumbering behemoth of utter darkness nothing like the metropolis Amon had known, and yet from which he could still sense emanations of his past, like the outline of a shining jewel seen through the palm of a fist closed around it.

  Is there some way back? he wondered. Is there some way for me and Rick to return and find our old friend? If there was it had something to do with Rashana Birla, but whether it was safe to approach her he couldn’t tell, and either way they might have already missed their chance.

  Upon returning to Xenocyst, Amon and Rick had delivered their supplies to a collection station and received a roombud to bloom in a spot not far from the Cyst. Their room turned out to look like off-white corkboard, and with the two of them stretched out on the rubbery floor-cum-bed of the tiny, insane-asylum-like chamber, it was tight and sweaty. Still, Amon felt infinitely relieved to be out of the elevator and reassured to have Rick by his side, falling immediately into another dreamless sleep.

  The following day, Rick was assigned to Amon’s disposal team and Amon was put in charge of training him. Soon they were spending almost every moment together. Waking up together, heading to work together, eating all their meals together. Rick even accompanied Amon after work to the stargazing rooftop where they jointly partook of the universe and the calm, soothing late-summer air. Only on supply run days, for which they were always assigned a different gate, were they ever apart.

  For the first while, Amon couldn’t believe that Rick was actually alive and with him again. But watching his friend carry roombuds, scrape waste off concrete, crush the Fleet rubble of skyscrapers into powder day after day, his existence became undoubtedly palpable and gradually Amon’s disbelief turned to simple joy at having him back.

  Now that Amon had someone who could relate to his struggles, adjusting to life there suddenly seemed easier. He could turn to Rick for advice whenever he was feeling indecisive, and share with him in the sense of pride that came whenever he mastered a task he’d once relied on a program for. Though Amon still occasionally succumbed to fits of restless gesture-twitching and spaced out on what his supervisor or co-worker was saying, it was heartening to know that Rick, even though he’d been through the Er program, did the same. Soon the pale, unedited, uncleanly faces that surrounded them no longer repulsed him, and he stopped worrying about the way he looked. He was still anxious that one of his targets might recognize him, but with Rick there he almost felt confident enough to face them, and when he saw how cheerfully his friend seemed to accept their new position, he could almost forget the shame of thinking how far he had fallen.

  At night after work—wandering, lying in his room, or gazing at the sky—Amon’s thoughts often turned to that moment when Rashana approached Rick, and he wondered if hiding from her had been the right thing to do. At first he regretted his decision, as it seemed clear that Rashana was the activist—not the recruiter. After all, she had received the message Amon sent to the activist, and her support for Er was in keeping with what the activist had said about wanting to help bankdead. Perhaps she had come specifically to find Amon and would be willing to do what she could to help him? But as he rehearsed the memory of the lineup beneath his eyelids night after night, he began to think that avoiding her had been wise. He remembered how the guards protected her—tracking her every movement with regimented ease—and it reminded him too much of the tengu who had accompanied the emoticon man when he broke into the weekly mansion. The recruiter had been with Sekido when he infected Amon with the virus that gave him away to the emoticon man, so the recruiter and emoticon man were most likely the same person, or at least in close cooperation. But what Amon had seen still left open the possibility that the vicious asshole who abused Mayuko might have been th
e activist all along, or else had intercepted Amon’s message for the activist to now impersonate her. In either case, that would make Rashana, or more accurately the Birla sister calling herself Rashana, his greatest threat.

  By the time Rick’s next supply pickup rolled around, Amon had been unable to make up his mind about Rashana and, by default, his decision was to not have Rick approach her. His undecided decision turned out to be irrelevant, however, because she wasn’t waiting for Rick anyway. Apparently, she didn’t know where Rick would be showing up or thought it pointless to talk to him when he had failed to find Amon, or maybe had just lost interest in Amon altogether. Now Amon was back where he’d started before she appeared, trying to make sense of his new abode but holding onto hope that she would return and be the one he sought, whether deluding or guiding him towards salvation only the future could teach.

  Returning from his reverie, Amon became aware of the weight of the embyrbrycks in his arms and turned from the rooftop edge towards the bustling center to look for where he was supposed to bring them. On a nearby roof, he spotted three women tending an embyrbryck pile and decided to ask them. They were rubbing embyrbrycks in their hands to activate them and laying them in a pyramid configuration where they gradually began to glow orangish-red dappled black. The faint light of each brick combined into a barely visible aura around the pile, and as Amon approached, he felt infrared heat radiating him, glad for his first taste of the lurid warmth these new fall supplies gave.

  One of the women said that they already had enough and told him to take his stack over to the Cyst rooftop. So he made his way there, stepping across the makeshift plastic plank walkways laid over the cracks between shelters, careful not to bump anyone and drop his load. Already embyrbryck piles were going at the center of every cluster of ten rooftops or so. At the center of everything, atop the Cyst helipad where Amon had unloaded many a centicopter, was a square stage made of salvaged Fleet walls layered atop each other, flaking away and decaying before his eyes. Embyrbrycks were piled in an L-shape snug to each corner, with an open laneway between their tips allowing for access to the stage from all four directions. A dozen men and women clustered on top tuning treadle turntables, standup basses, and other instruments.