The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  “You and Mayuko took care of me. I’ll always be grateful. You two were closer to me than anyone I’d ever known. So don’t fool yourself that I couldn’t tell you were hiding something in that story. While I was listening, I thought to myself, Where’s Mayuko in all this? The Mayuko I knew would be calling you about me non-stop after I disappeared. I could only think that you cut her out of the story because you two had sex or something. I was jealous. I should have asked you the moment I had the chance. Maybe I was afraid to hear you tell me what I’ve always known. Because being back together with you here in the camps, I learned something. I used to think I was in love with Mayuko, that she was the only one I could be happy with. But then you became a big part of my life again, not just as a distant partner, as a close friend, and I realized … I did love Mayuko … I loved her as a friend … but not in that way. I only thought our connection was something more because … because you weren’t around anymore. We were just sort of filling in the gap that you left when you were busy chasing your dream … Getting involved with Vertical was the only way I could chase mine …”

  “You and Vertical? What does she—” Amon stopped himself, remembering the look of joy on Rick’s face when they danced together at the festival. In a flash of insight, he understood why Rick wasn’t around in the evenings, why he’d been reluctant to leave the camps, why he’d volunteered to be the agent provocateur on the mission.

  “She was the one who picked me up from Er. She listened to my story at the council, and she trained me … I got to know her a bit … a bit too well maybe. After Tamper’s story at the festival, I saw her sitting alone on the edge of the roof … She looked down … and I wanted some company … why not go cheer her up … And we discovered we have a lot in common. Then they made us dance in the circle with all the booze and before you know it …”

  Rick gave the faintest, momentary smile.

  “After that, we started seeing each other … these few weeks … I was disgusted with myself … disgusted to be interested in other women. Especially when it got serious …” As Rick spoke, he began to pause now and then, as though summoning strength for his voice. “We were careful not to have sex at the wrong times … charted her cycle. Neither of us wants a baby in this place … but it made me feel like I was moving towards being a father, even if I knew it wasn’t going to happen … Do you have any idea how painful it was? Doing cleanup work in the Cyst with babies around all the time. Me and you … we were never even in the same room with babies in Free Tokyo … They were always something strange … far away … raised by SubMoms in distant BioPens for future industries we couldn’t even imagine … or pets for the super-rich. Then we were surrounded by all kinds … babies, toddlers, children … those fetuses we had to throw away … I heard their cries and gurgles, I said ‘hi’ to the mothers cradling them in the hallways, I watched them lying under blankets while we swept around the incubators … and all I could think was how much I wanted one of my own …

  “I wanted to teach my kid … son or daughter, it didn’t matter, but I imagined him a son … teach him everything … the truth about the Free World and this place … I wanted to raise someone beautiful and wise and good … and happy … not a happy lie … but aware and accepting … I wanted my son to see the stars, not with ads on them, but pure, and to really see them … Maybe someone like that could make a difference in the future … be part of a generation that gets us out of this awfulness … It was a dream destined for tragedy … just like my family and Vertical’s family and all families in this fucked up world … but Vertical showed me how to believe in the impossible and keep going in the here and now … just like her with her running … and with Vertical I found out that it didn’t have to be with Mayuko … So … I was ashamed to tell you … I didn’t know what you’d think after everything I said before … I was worried you’d hate me after I was with … your ex-girlfriend … after I talked like I was really crazy about her and … just moved on to someone else. I’m glad to hear I wasn’t betraying her and you like I thought …” Rick paused to shake a glob of blood that had collected in the hollow of his right socket. “I guess it’s too late for me to be a father … If I’m lucky maybe one of my seeds will come to fruit. But I don’t regret being in these worlds … the Free and now the naked … because I got a chance to meet great friends like you and Mayuko … Vertical too … I admire her strength and decisiveness … not just quick on her feet but quick-thinking … And let me tell you, when Vertical is horizontal, she’s just fantastic …” Rick tried to laugh but it came out as a series of weak pants. Amon didn’t react. It might have been funny at another time, but not here, not now. Was the flow from Rick’s eyes beginning to slow, or was time distorting in Amon’s mind?

  “That was why … I’m sorry, Amon.” His words came out as faint mumbles. Amon almost couldn’t hear him over the quavering rasp of his own disturbed breathing. “I told you I wanted to stay to take care of our friends and everyone else … and that was true. But I knew you wouldn’t leave … not if I refused to go. Whatever happened, I wanted … I wanted to keep you and Vertical by my side. Now you’re stuck here … If it wasn’t for me, you’d be safe already … and you’ll never … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

  Amon shook his head, cringing with sadness, but Rick didn’t see as he closed his eyes and his body went limp. Then suddenly he opened them, squeezed Amon’s hand so hard it shook, and looking at Amon said, “Now there are no more lies or secrets between us, right? Just two friends completely open with each other …”

  Amon nodded, as a tremor of sadness shook him from his core and he gritted his teeth, clenching all his muscles to contain it before it could seize his body. While the light flickered and sprinkled the chamber with increasingly dim fireflies, Rick squeezed Amon’s hand and Amon squeezed back, their tears streaming down, linking their bodies and souls in liquid sorrow.

  “I-if only I could have …” Amon said, his voice faint, somewhere between a whisper and a whimper, the dripping of the tears almost loud enough to obliterate it. “I should have been there for you and Mayuko all those years. I should have made time and really told you what I thought when you asked for advice. But I let my selfish dream get in the way … I-I mean, I wish …”

  “Forget what happened then … Just be here … now.”

  21

  XENOCYST WEST CHECKPOINT, THE LIBRARY

  Password!” demanded one of the two guards that faced Amon in the middle of Xenocyst’s west tunnel checkpoint. Both held dissolving nightsticks recoiled, ready to strike, one right-handed and the other left, so that they mirrored each other in the same stance, crouching with their weight on their back foot and the opposite foot forward. It was the right-handed man who had spoken. He was broad shouldered with bristly hair protruding from his sunburned cheeks and huge knuckles gripping his stick. The left-handed man beside him was wiry and short, with worm-like blue veins bulging from the sides of his forehead, the bald spot in his shaggy mop aimed just above Amon’s head. Both looked to be in their early thirties and stared at Amon with bloodshot, circle-ringed eyes, hungry eyes, eyes that seemed ready to stop at nothing.

  Amon stood there with his fists upraised boxer style, his heart pulsing in his ears. After he’d climbed up the outer wall these two sentries had shouted out for him to halt his approach, apparently reacting to his Opportunity Scientist outfit.

  “Nighthawk Star,” Amon replied. Although the two men remained in the same offensive posture, he could see their shoulders relax. They were at ease enough now to pry their gaze from him and exchange a glance. Lefty gave a nod to Righty, who said, “Okay. We can let you in. But our orders are to escort you straight to the Cyst.”

  “Escort me? For what?!” Amon snapped, annoyed with this unfamiliar procedure. “I know the way.”

  “Thez in’t about guiding you,” said Lefty, who had a strong Tumbles accent. “Anywen with the michin passwod still has t’ get approval frem from the councel before thiz allo
wed t’ go unsupahvised.”

  “What’s this?” Amon growled, his eyes going wide with indignation. “We risked our lives for all of you!”

  “Our riginal ordahz were t’ welcome membahz of your party,” said Lefty. “But aftah th’ attack on Xenocyst last night, th’z breaches all ovah our fortifications. No one knows who t’ trust anymore.”

  “So that’s … I saw the wrecked buildings on my way in …” Amon said, “and the bodies. Who did this?”

  “We don’t know,” said Righty. “Some rumors say the OpScis, some say the Brigade. All I know is you’re not going anywhere without an escort. Not till you report to the council!”

  Amon gave the men a murderous stare, as though injecting the concocted poison of his exhaustion, guilt, rage, and sorrow into their eyes across the space between them. A group of incoming residents slunk past the three battle-poised men and down the tunnel, where other guards stood ready, watching intently.

  “So you coming with us or are we throwing you out?” asked Righty.

  The two men tightened their mirrored stances, declaring through posture their readiness to back up their words with force. Amon had no energy for their suspicions. In fact, he was so tired it took all his will just to hold his fists up, keep his eyes fully open, and stay upright on his feet. He thought of the duster in the holster attached to his waist behind his back. He’d left it hidden because he didn’t want these men to sound the alarm, but was ready to dust or pistol-whip them unconscious if he had to. No one was stopping him getting in, certainly not a couple of grunts. Yet he could tell they weren’t bluffing, and picking a fight by rejecting their escort was only going to delay and tire him further. Considering the destruction he’d seen just outside the tunnel, it was understandable that they’d be on high alert, and somewhere in his turbid mind he began to suspect he might be overreacting. So he decided to swallow his pride and impatience, for he had to see Hippo right away, to tell the council what happened, to rest, to grieve …

  “’ts go,” Amon said with a curt nod and then winced, the image of Rick that flashed behind his eyelids like a jagged hunk of slag bursting into the depths of his soul.

  It wasn’t long after Amon and Rick had opened up to each other and finally come to an understanding about Mayuko that Rick stopped talking or responding. For a short while, he let out the occasional enervated groan, but these too soon stopped. All Amon could do was crouch in the dark puddle beside him, his back against the wall, and hold his friend’s hand as he became visibly weaker and weaker. Hours passed, though to Amon they felt like years dragged over the rough rocks of time. And as the uneven thumbnail-sized chunk of what remained of the lantern began to shed the last of its fireflies, the light faded to the faintest blue-white glow above them, leaving the chamber dim and colorless. Amon watched his friend’s face carefully, as he continued to cry without crying, his life seeping away, drop by drop. With the night withering away, the nauseating tide of exhaustion pushed at the back of Amon’s eyes, and it seemed as though his memory of Mayuko crying on the floor of the weekly mansion were doubling up with Rick, each one of Rick’s red-black tears bearing his dream, an obsidian bead necklace of forests reeling from his best friend’s eyes.

  At first, he dismissed the expanding interval between each droplet going down Rick’s cheeks as distortions in his own sense of time, but soon the change became so consistent and steady as to be undeniable. It was the most pitiful, revolting, heart-rending sight Amon had ever witnessed and, to his shame, part of him desperately wanted it to be over already almost as much as he wanted his friend to be healed and revived, his beautiful friend. As if to satisfy Amon’s dark wish, Rick gave out one last spasm of body quakes, opened his eyes, and turned his gaze to Amon’s. The look of brooding sadness that had often been in Rick’s eyes was gone. All that remained behind the red, cloudy veil was raw pain and confusion that seemed to demand answers of the world and Amon as its nearest representative. Eventually the flow stopped, the oneiric excretions running dry, and when Rick’s last tear fell, Amon knew that his dream was dead, once and for all.

  Eventually, Rick’s hand began to go cold and Amon gently put it down in the black liquid below. He sat there for a while longer, his head between his knees, his buttocks floating above the dark pool, the small ripples his own tears sent against his shoes visible only as hazy arcs of motion beneath the faintest hint of a lantern that remained. Before long, Amon began to think about leaving and stood up, sloshing over to the doors to peek out of the elevator. Into the lobby the palest glow of morning dusk was just beginning to ooze, outlining the shadowy figures of men, women, and children sprawled on the floor and along the wall. He had to get back to the Cyst as soon as possible to seek safety, check that the others were okay, and figure out what to do next, not to mention get some food and drink. Then he thought of Rick’s body. Though he wanted him to have a proper sky burial, there was just no way he could haul him all the way to Xenocyst. While Amon would be in danger unencumbered as it was, the exertion of carrying him could literally kill him in his weakened state. But when Amon finally stepped out of the elevator, intent on returning to Xenocyst, he stopped in the lobby, ignoring the residents staring at him fearfully, and turned back around. The idea of just leaving his friend there to rot in his own fluids wrenched him open from the inside, and he began to clench his fists, gnash his teeth, quaking from head to toe, his every buzzing breath seeming to stoke the sickly flame of misery in his core like a bellows.

  GRAAAHHHHHH!

  Before Amon knew it, he was shrieking at the top of his lungs and delivering a swift kick of rage to the elevator doors. But rage at whom? The drones obeying their programming? The freekeepers that deployed them according to protocol? The engineers that designed them on spec? The managers following instructions from their managers? The executives working to satisfy investors and corporate principles and market dynamics? The MegaGlom subsidiaries of which they were all a part? The Philanthropy Syndicate? GATA? The systems that bound them all together like the Charity Gift Economy or the Action Transaction Market? Who or what exactly was responsible for this? In the end, he felt the flame of his rage turn inwards and scatter within him, finding nothing left to burn except Amon himself, the fool behind the plan that failed.

  The door of the elevator had bent inwards like wet clay, surely built of a more malleable material than the metal it appeared to be. Amon wanted to kick it again ten thousand times, pulverize it, cave the chamber in on itself, and seal his friend in his own private coffin forever. But he stopped himself as he remembered the boys who made it their home. Space was precious in the camps and destroying this shelter would only displace them, pushing their gang to displace someone else. While it wasn’t exactly nice to throw them out for the night or to leave a bloody mess in there, he couldn’t do anything about that now and it was better than battering it to uselessness. He doubted his hole-filled, flaking shoes would have held up anyway. Seizing this moment of control over his anger, Amon peeked one last time through the crack in the elevator, at what remained of the person he had known for almost as long as he had memories, lying on a stagnant bed of glistening black gradually turning red in the heightening glow of dawn. He then whipped around to dash past the residents out of the lobby and into the alley, forcing himself to run away from the condo and never look back.

  As Amon had wound his way up a long, continuous stairpath, wrapping his way around shaft after shaft and hiking over roomslopes, a petal blizzard fell on the camps, shrouding the nascent morning light. Chill autumn winds blustered his skin from narrow cracks and squeezeways, and raised a great flurry of flakes that slapped his skin as they swirled in all directions. Every structure in sight seemed to be decaying—holes eating their way through walls, rooms crumbling, shafts leaning at ever more precarious angles as their foundations crunched down floor by floor—as though undergoing entropy in ultra-fast-forward. Shocked, exhausted, sleep-deprived, and thirsty, Amon trudged and clambered along in a daze. He h
ardly knew where he was or what he was doing, but some part of him still sought Xenocyst and hoped, though he saw no familiar landmarks and had lost all sense of direction, that he was meandering the right way. Although it was too late to meet Rashana on top of the Cyst, he didn’t know if she could be trusted anymore and wasn’t sure if he cared. For whatever she might give him, wherever she might take him, Rick would not be there to share in his fortune.

  Nevertheless, he climbed along furtively, ever on the lookout for drones as best he could with his dull, tired eyes, dancing frantically away from stairs that broke off underfoot and jumping gaps between the narrowest of footholds as the path came apart beneath him. Coughs sounded constantly from all directions as the emaciated droves shambling through every alley and ledge inhaled the flake-thick air. Amon tried to breathe through his nose, though he could only stand the smell of death that permeated the whole district for so long and occasionally had to use his mouth, choking like all the rest when he did so.

  Eventually he reached a fan-shaped plateau of roofs, with a ridge of shelters curling over him on the left and the hundred-meter drop of a crevice on his right. Although the view beyond the crevice was shrouded by the petal-blizzard at first, the air soon cleared during a brief intermission of the winds and the shimmering cube of Delivery appeared above the slumscape in the distance, a murmuration of glass forms sketching glittering patterns before it. The upper five levels of the bridges were visible and Amon could see that they had all been retracted, now reaching only halfway across the moat. Though the disposcraper sprawl blocked the Road to Delivery from view, he could imagine the supply pilgrims jammed in like never before, the crowds at the front backing up so as not to be pushed over the edge like lemmings. Clearly Delivery was not designed to maximize disbursement efficiency but to protect against revolt, was not a welfare mall for bankdead as it seemed but a fortress against them.