by Naim Kabir
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 102
Table of Contents
Slowly Builds An Empire
by Naim Kabir
Cassandra
by Ken Liu
The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild (Part 2)
by Catherynne M. Valente
All Original Brightness
by Mike Buckley
Coming of the Light
by Chen Qiufan
The Clear Blue Seas of Luna
by Gregory Benford
The Book Seller
by Lavie Tidhar
Dark Angels: Insects in the Films of Guillermo del Toro
by Orrin Grey
Music, Magic, and Memory: A Conversation with Randy Henderson and Silvia Morena-Garcia
by Jason Heller
Staying Sensitive in the Crowd: A Conversation with Chen Qiufan
by Ken Liu
Another Word: A Shed of One’s Own
by Chuck Wendig
Editor’s Desk: Reader’s Poll Winners, Nebulas, and Forever
by Neil Clarke
Keter
Art by Peter Mohrbacher
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Slowly Builds An Empire
Naim Kabir
There was no need for talk in Tokyo, so the streets were silent.
The loudest features were the colors of the electric motorcars and the styles of the eclectic fashions—polychromatic shells that switched from lip-pucker lemon to cut-grass green and double-cut polymer skirts alongside old-fold silk suits.
Shinsuke Takinami stood above and apart from it all, teetering on the edge of a ledge and wanting to yell down below, but swaying silent and still. They wouldn’t hear him anyway. Where his world was quiet, theirs was boisterous and noisy. Vibrant. Lively.
Lovely.
For a moment he considered letting the breeze pluck him from the rooftop like the floret of a dandelion, but a tone from his phone made him think better of it. Money had just come from what he called the Department of Pay. Shinsuke could have always let the yen funnel directly into his personal account, but he preferred walking on the marble floor of the brick-and-mortar building, where perhaps he had a chance of interaction.
He took the mechanical elevator down twelve stories, walked past faded yellow wallpaper, through a set of double wood-and-glass doors, and onto the glistening street below.
The taxis there had either forgotten how to interpret a hand signal or were willfully ignoring him. After fifteen limp minutes of flailing on the sidewalk, he stepped in front of a vehicle and watched it automatically roll to a stop. Shinsuke cleared his throat and whisper-yelled, “Oye! I need to go somewhere!”
The driver’s eyes widened at the use of a mouth and tongue and forced air, but he remembered the rudiments of language and opened the door, thinking all the while that he had picked up an oddity.
Shinsuke offered an address and they were off.
The sun was high in the sky by the time they arrived, and Shinsuke squinted in the glare from the road. But the shade of the concrete pillars fell coolly over his eyes as he moved to enter the building, just one of three hundred people in lines feeding into a faraway desk.
All was quiet.
He wondered what they must’ve been saying to each other, these people. In intimate shades of sound and thought passed from mind to mind, with no need for facial twitches or a squeezed throat to speak. He wondered what they must be saying, these people so unlike him.
He tried offering a smile, but was met with a glacial wall of empty face, all flat lines and smooth skin. Inscrutable.
For the rest of the wait he kept his head down, wondering if they were trying to talk to him. Maybe they were giving him mental nudges that he just couldn’t feel, and maybe he was surrounded by hellos.
He stared at his shoes, hoping he wasn’t being rude. Those hellos could turn into a collective hatred, the type felt by all tight-knit tribes as they came upon an outsider. They might have been thinking he was one of those loud, bad ones—those angry ones that roam at night and vandalize the city.
Or maybe they were feeling pity; as they basked in the warmth of each other’s thoughts, perhaps they felt sorry for this poor hikikomori, this puppy left alone and afraid in the cold.
He looked at the floor until he reached a desk, where there was an awkward silence as the attendant stared through him. Shinsuke whispered a word and the attendant seemed to catch on, presenting him a small electronic tablet.
He pressed a button that transferred the money to his account—something he could have easily done at home—and was shooed out of the line and back onto the street. This always ended the same way, but he kept coming back.
It gave him something to do.
The screen at home shouted a constant stream of entertainment from the Misinformation Age, with bombastic characters and honorable warfighters yelling and jumping and trying their hardest to make Shinsuke feel like he wasn’t alone.
It worked, sometimes.
But Shinsuke’s greatest secret was the little black box nestled beneath the screen, connected illicitly with a tangle of wire and two paperclips. His father, Haru, had installed it some twenty years ago with a screwdriver tucked behind his ear and his tongue peeking out from the corner of his mouth, long before Shinsuke decided to run away from home.
Deep into the afternoons Shinsuke would roll wire from a controller, plug it in, and roam through virtual worlds and talk to virtual people who spoke to him, joined him, fought with him, against him, and all those wonderful things he imagined must have gone on before the war on social parasites.
His mother, Aiko, had told him the story while he played with his father. As they roamed through a dungeon she recounted the camp they escaped with shovels and wirecutters. While they waded through the inevitable sewer level she talked about how dank and cold and smelly it could actually be underground, among hundreds who lacked the “complete empathy” of their countrymen and were forced into hiding.
When a god-emperor granted them three wishes as reward for defeating the demon king, Aiko told them how their only reward for survival was the sudden cessation of mass killings and an uptick of forced sterilizations instead.
Shinsuke always lived in a sort of awe and loving respect for his parents, and then Shinjuku happened. A group of hikikomori gunmen had crashed into a surgery suite and destroyed the equipment with lead bullets before being neutralized by hyperefficient police machines. They had called themselves the Nation, and Shinsuke was convinced they all lived out in the countryside together. He wanted to set off at once.
His parents said no. His mother hugged his head to her chest and just repeated the word, “No, no, no, no . . . ” She called him a miracle, their one miracle in a life of curses, and told him please not to go, he was a miracle, he couldn’t.
Haru stood gruffly at the door with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, a bouncer meant to keep him inside. His mother tugged at his arm and said, “Shin, you have to stay, you’re a mir—” And that’s when he started yelling.
He yelled that he couldn’t just be cooed at like that, that he wasn’t special, and that they could shut up trying to make him feel like he could be anything in this world when he was branded hikikomori, social recluse, parasite, insect who could never truly love someone.
Shinsuke made to throw a lamp at the video game console and his father bolted
to it with his arms flailing wildly, and then he dropped it to the floor and hurried out the door. Haru chased him a good three miles to the metro, but Shinsuke finally lost him in the crowd.
After roaming for months in search of the Nation, he realized that his mother must’ve only been twenty years old when the sterilization procedures had been rolled out. They would have used an injection, radiation, or some surgery—but six years later there was a drooling baby boy who’d learn to talk and smile in their tiny apartment.
Miracle. That’s what she called him the day he left.
To the government’s credit, local law enforcement didn’t take any action when they found out about new hikikomori children. The experts weighed in and stated there was too tiny a population of nonpathics to affect the rest of the country, as long as they were spread far apart.
So they let baby Shinsuke bounce, grow up, and tell his parents that he could never truly love.
Sighing, he spun up the usual disk and sat at the usual rocking chair. Long into the night, he played through dungeons and wide-open landscapes, fighting, dancing, and singing along with his party of colorful friends.
Shinsuke. Mama. Papa.
Molotov cocktails can hardly mark a supercrete wall, but they made for an impressive lightshow. Shinsuke watched from his rooftop as a column of shouting hikikomori rode down the block on ancient revving motorcycles coughing black smoke, launching fiery bottles at the walls as they passed.
They exploded deep unnatural red over the empty street: the color of the Nation Within a Nation, the Peoples Without Voice. Their shouts held a certain rhythm:
Call, “We, the folk of Nihon-koku!”
Response, “The Sun in the midst of the Cold White Field!”
Call, “We, the folk of Nihon-koku!”
Response, “Blood-drop red and the People’s shield!”
Unwittingly, Shinsuke found himself mouthing along, wondering how these riders found each other, wondering how he could find them and belong. Was there really a city of them out there?
The rumble of the thirty-person column echoed through the avenue and faded to silence, scarlet flames dying down in their path. The LED red and blue of a pursuing police machine and the whistle of a siren came later, much too late to catch them.
The hallucinations started in summer.
Twin suns in a slow waltz and a rust-brown sky. Volcanoes throwing ice twenty meters into the air, golden-brown lakes, soaked spongy islands, a smart clean smell that whipped the air.
Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come.
He was told in impersonal government letters that social isolation had its costs, and that some year he would begin to develop a sort of dementia. This, the letters said, was the line between a hikikomori who was a commensal symbiote of society and a hikikomori who was a parasite. To keep from becoming a parasite, he’d have to visit his city’s counselor.
Thankfully, for this appointment Shinsuke could travel by train. It was a red and white rocket that floated on an invisible cushion, pushing off underneath the dense intersection at Shibuya. He bumped into padded shoulders and he scuffed a hundred polished shoes while everyone around him moved in rehearsed lockstep. After a few moments a circle of space bubbled around him as he walked, the crowd retreating and rerouting like a school of fish. He smiled meekly in gratitude and made his way to the platform as the masses parted ways.
He got off at Yamato, deferentially bowing to the crowd that swirled around and blebbed him out into the open-air prefecture with rolling green hills and a sweet yellow sun.
The counselor’s office here in Kanagawa was meant to serve the nonpathics of Tokyo and all of its wards and outlying towns, too. It was quite sufficient for this task.
For the first time in a long time, he was addressed by name, spoken aloud.
“Shinsuke Takinami.”
The counselor was a brusque, short man in a bad brown suit and golden glasses, with a square moustache over tight lips. “You are here today because you have begun to see things.”
The man had been trained well in speech, though his facial expressions were a little exaggerated, as if he were a player in a traditional kabuki history. For all Shinsuke knew, traditional theater actually was where he’d gotten his vocal training—this was a common practice for nonpath-liaison positions within the government.
The man continued with a too-wide smile, “I am Dr. Otani, would you like to come into my office?”
Shinsuke nodded meekly and entered, lowering himself onto a plastic chair as the counselor took his seat at the desk.
“How long have you been alone at home? You are quite young to have these problems now,” said the doctor, jotting down a few notes on a yellow pad.
Shinsuke answered in a hoarse whisper, “Maybe eight years, now.”
The doctor frowned comically deep. “Ah, that’s a painfully long time. Perhaps that explains all these young people becoming sick so soon.” He put down the pencil and his face went to a stone neutral. “This year we have a new initiative. My colleagues and I have convinced the State to allow group meetings for many such as yourself.”
Shinsuke’s eyes brightened. A group?
“The problems are caused by extreme isolation. Conventional wisdom says that screen-entertainment helps you avoid this, but we’ve seen this isn’t true. We’ve convinced the government to allay this acute isolation by having meetings where you may speak to each other. Of course, there are limitations, but overall this sounds like a good idea, neh?”
Shinsuke nodded vigorously, almost obsessively.
Dr. Otani’s face lit up with a smile that could’ve been seen from the last row of an amphitheater. “Good, good. For now we will just take some tests and perform a short interview. But I will see you here again, in one week. Be prepared to socialize.”
A vaulted sky of swirling red and yellow, like jelly spooned through cream. Dark spots of passing moons, thin sounds of music like wet thumbs on a wine glass. What sounded like a voice but was more like a thought being born, saying: Here is a part of Us, who are part of You.
The train ride to Kanagawa was quiet like the streets were quiet, and the lobby of the counsel building was, too. But when Shinsuke shouldered through the doors to his first group meeting, the noise washed over him like a hot breath in wintertime.
Shuffling chairs, men and women, boys and girls, all speaking to each other in voices loud and hushed. He basked in it.
Some paused as he came through the door, and he forgot how to introduce himself. He said, “Hello, hello,” and they fell silent before a girl asked:
“Nice to meet you. I am Saeko Inamasu. What’s your name?”
“Ah, ah, Shinsuke Takinami!” he whispered back, smiling the warmest he had in years. The others introduced themselves. Rena Hasegawa, Ayano Nojima, Eiichiro Matsushita.
Dr. Otani moved to the front of the room and rapped on a blackboard.
“Before you get too friendly, some rules. You may not,” he fumbled with a piece of paper from his jacket pocket, “exchange addresses. Trade phone numbers. You may not leave together, or . . . ” He squinted at the page, “Engage in physical affection.”
Shinsuke looked nervously at Saeko as she listened attentively. Dr. Otani continued reading, “If you are suspected of doing any of these, you will be forcibly removed from your home and sterilized. If your offense is especially grievous, you will be killed.” The room was silent, and then the counselor smiled that rubber-mask smile of his. “With that, continue introducing yourselves! In a few moments you will tell each other your stories!”
The first story was an old man’s. He had survived the first wave of the war against social parasites but had been kidnapped and operated on during the second. He had a wife, once, and now she was back. That was why he was here.
Shinsuke furrowed his brow. This was unfamiliar: the man was seeing ghosts?
The second story was a gray-haired woman’s. She had always spoken to her cats, but it was only recentl
y that they had begun to talk back.
Shinsuke was glad for a moment that nobody in this room could read his mind, fully aware of the irony.
Dr. Otani cleared his throat, “The dementia of a nonpathic always comes in this form. The human mind craves company, and when it does not receive it, it creates it. It is cruel of the State to discourage nonpathic communities, I know. But hopefully this meeting can make you feel better!”
It was a bitter tragedy that even in this room full of hikikomori Shinsuke still did not belong. When his turn finally came, he went to the front of the room and spoke in a waver.
“Sometimes, when I am alone at home . . . ” He inhaled deep as if he could breathe in more time to think, as if he could inspire a good lie.
“Sometimes when I am alone at home I see my parents still there.” And the rushing gurgle of a dark current, a city lit by heat alone, and the warm sour taste of hydrogen sulfide. “I have not seen them for many years, but now I can finally talk to them.” A voice as old as starlight, saying, Look. “My last words to them were that I could never truly love someone, but now I can tell them that’s not true.” You are Us. “I can finally touch them and hug them.” We are You. “I can tell them I love them.” You belong.
His audience nodded silently. He bobbed his head and returned to his seat so the next person could speak.
When the meeting was concluded, they were let out one-by-one, at fifteen-minute intervals. Shinsuke left the same way he’d come and boarded a metro car.
Partway to Shibuya, he felt a tug on his pinky. He whirled around to see Saeko staring dead ahead, her face blank like everyone else’s. But she had his pinky pinched between her thumb and forefinger. He looked dead ahead, too, trying not to blush. If anyone suspected two hikikomori meeting together, the news could travel at the speed of thought to someone who could stop it with an electric rifle and a plastic club. Who could have them thrown in a hospital and forcibly treated, down where Shinsuke wanted no scalpel to ever touch.
When they reached Nagatsuta station she briefly tugged on his finger before floating away with the crowd. He did his best to follow, but was soon lost and spat out alone into the wide-open Midori ward, empty hill-country of Kanagawa prefecture.
