by Naim Kabir
Then he saw her standing perfectly still, ten meters away. When she caught his gaze she was off again, and he followed. This time it was much easier: the crush of the crowd disappeared and it was just the two of them, beating a path from the cracked concrete sidewalks of Midori proper and into a hilly wilderness.
When they crested the first peak she stopped and turned around to face him.
“You see them too,” she said, in a voice strong and clear. She’d had more practice than he had in recent years. “The other worlds.”
He whispered hoarsely, “How did you know?”
“Your story was so much a lie. You didn’t shed a single tear. That’s how I knew,” she said, glancing periodically at the way they’d come. “There are more of us, at the camps. Not many, but more than just two.”
“Camps?” This was very much illegal, and could very much get Shinsuke killed. But it was the dream he’d searched for as a young man, dropped into his lap. A commune. A place to be together.
She grabbed his hand and jerked her head southwest.
“Camps.”
Hexagons of hard and warm, smells like a homecooked meal and a mother’s hair, and the comforting vibrato press of family. A hive. Even here, he was told, A revolution can take hold. We are You, You are Us, You belong.
The camps were built from wooden planks and plastic bags, with the doorways draped in deep red flags and guarded by hard grown men and women. Motorcycles and jeeps girded the perimeter in a makeshift fence of headlights and black tires.
“Welcome to the capital of Nihon-koku.” Saeko took him to one of the larger wooden cabins while he let out a hoarse, amazed sigh. This was the home of the Nation Within A Nation—the Peoples Without a Voice. He had actually found it.
A big man with scars came out of the cabin and saw Shinsuke next to Saeko. The man had a stern face and what seemed like a permanent squint aimed right at him. Shinsuke had watched enough streams to know that this was when the newcomer would get grilled about his loyalties, his origins—everything. He needed to build trust or else he’d be turned away.
The scarred man stomped through the dirt, Saeko averted her eyes, and Shinsuke braced himself. Then he was hugged tighter than he could remember, so firmly that he let his legs hang limp as he was lifted off the ground. So tightly that he saw stars, that the knots in his back unraveled and he was as soft as steamed rice in this big man’s arms.
“You will never be alone again.” Shinsuke was placed gently back on the ground. “Welcome to our family.”
Asteroids peppering a small red moon, craters like pinpricks in its skin. Then a massive barge, dragging rocks in a net of gravity, crushing them closer like fingers folded into a fist. A flick of a gravitic wrist, a sudden squeeze of gees, and the stone let loose from its sling to wreck that lunar face.
“What are they?”
Shinsuke was sitting on the dirt floor of a hut along with Saeko, Grace Ueda, and Keigo Naktani. All of them had the visions, and those bubbling thoughts that felt almost theirs but were far, far too old.
Keigo explained as if he already knew, in a deep gravel voice: “They are voices from other worlds.” Shinsuke had already suspected this, but hearing it said aloud gave it a strange and terrifying life. He shuddered, and Grace smiled at him with wrinkles around her eyes.
“We were each afraid, too,” she said. “How strange to find that we aren’t alone in this life!” She touched her fingers to her temple: “But think also how wonderful.”
Keigo smiled and his thick bushy moustache curled up like a caterpillar reaching to nibble at his nose. “Think of what this means. Not only that we have friends in faraway places, but that it is possible to even hear them at all.” He put a fist over his heart, “The me inside can talk to someone millions of miles and millions of years away, someone as distant as the faintest star—and they can talk to me. We’ve seen their worlds, so unlike ours, and yet . . . ”
Grace continued, “And yet here we are. Inside we are all the same.”
Saeko had been silently nodding while sipping at a bowl of soup, but she lifted her head to lazily say, “Grace and Keigo think that means we have souls.”
Shinsuke turned to her. “You don’t agree?”
Her eyes were hard. “It would also mean there was a God, and what kind of God would make us live like this?”
“Perhaps the same kind who would connect us with beings so far away,” Keigo offered. “One who is now giving us an opportunity.”
Shinsuke’s brow crumpled in puzzlement. “What opportunity?”
“Haven’t you understood? They’ve been talking to us about a revolution.”
Upwells of deep ocean churning the thermocline, catalytic magnesium bubbling liquid in a vial, a diamond planet pecked just right and shattered into a trillion shining pieces throwing rainbows into space for light-minutes in every direction.
Shinsuke had been learning how to be useful. In the mornings he helped cut a terrace from a hill and soak its soil with water for the rice paddies. After a nap ‘till noon, Keigo would take him to the hives to collect honey from the bees. Some horrifying days he’d have to wear a thick jacket with a netted hat and wield a wooden racket. Hornets the size and width of his thumb would sometimes come to steal bee-children, and he and Keigo and some others would need to swat them out of the sky. Their stings were brutal, and their biting jaws were just as bad.
Today, Keigo asked him to do something he knew he couldn’t do. The pig was tied to a post and squealing like a child might cry, desperately tugging at the rope and lying limp in the dirt in awful alternations. Shinsuke was handed a small rifle and told to make it quick and painless.
He shook his head no. “I can’t do this, Keigo.” His voice had gone from hoarse to the smooth timbre of a young man’s. “Give me another terrace to dig, or more rice to plant. But I can’t do this.”
Keigo smiled and gently placed his hand on Shinsuke’s shoulder. Then he breathed in deep and asked, “Do you know why the countrymen use machines to fight for them? To act as their police, to hunt down their dissenters?”
Shinsuke shook his head.
“It’s because they are afraid of accountability. To their own feelings.” He drew a circle in the air with two fingers: “They are all connected like this, and if one of them commits a violence they all feel the guilt. So they give that job to their machines.”
He gestured to the tied pig with an open palm. “You’ve eaten pork every week. You’ve spoken with, danced with, and played with everyone here who is happy to be well fed. And now it is time for you to pay for that pleasure.” Keigo pushed the rifle deeper into Shinsuke’s grip. “Will you be like the countrymen, too afraid of their feelings to do what is necessary? Or will you be like the men and women of the Nation?”
Shaking, Shinsuke raised the weapon to his shoulder and took careful aim. The iron sights jitteringly aligned above the snorting creature’s eyes. He tightened his finger slowly, let go a long breath, and with one deft move he squeezed the trigger.
Fire exploded from a bonfire and the week’s big feast was underway. Keigo cleared his throat in front of the crowd and publicly thanked Shinsuke for bringing them all a delicious dinner. And then the drums began.
Everyone talked, ate, drank. When the time was right they danced on the flats that had been stamped down by the weeks of dancing that had come before. Saeko came by to lure Shinsuke away from the tables, but he remained and ate slow and shuddering everything but the pork.
Monsters the size of subaquatic mountains lumbering through trenches in the sea, blankness in cold pursuit and a promise to unmake, spores released that latch on and change the very shape of the mind.
Shinsuke awoke to find Keigo in moth-eaten fatigues and slung with a very large gun. Saeko was there, too, with grenades strapped to her belt and a long rifle strapped to her bulging pack. They gave him clothes and told him to get into the jeep outside.
A girl was already there. Shinsuke knew she was named Na
miyo, and that her father was an engineer. He traded awkward hellos and asked where they were going. She opened her mouth as if she were about to speak, but fell silent and told him to just wait.
They spent a few minutes looking at the pre-dawn tease of orange across the cold gray sky before Keigo jumped into the driver’s seat and the jeep rumbled to life. Saeko joined them and they set off, tumbling through the hills.
“Shinsuke, tell me—what happens when we miss a hornet and he makes his way into the hive?” He aimed his question over his shoulder, since the jeep’s mirror was missing.
“He kills anything in his way,” Shinsuke said.
“But?”
“But then the hive will come together, surround the hornet with their bodies, and cook him until he dies.” Keigo slapped the steering wheel and laughed as they rolled between hills and onto an overgrown road.
“Yes! Yes, that is perfect. And, what occurs if a fire is left too close to a hive when this happens?” Namiyo, the engineer’s daughter, blushed at this. Two weeks ago she left a torch next to a hive when hornets came looking for food.
Shinsuke put his hand on her shoulder and answered, “The whole hive dies. Even a little more warmth is enough to kill every single one of them.”
The vehicle bounced over cracks in the road and pieces of broken stone from the curb. Mottled light fell between leaves that blotted out the sun, flashing in a golden strobe when Shinsuke cared to look up.
“The key to causing a defensive reaction like this is singular. Saeko, what is that key?” Creaking metal towers whipped by amidst the overgrowth, sagging under powerlines and leaning at dangerous angles.
Saeko answered, “Abject fear.”
“Precisely. Fear from a single hornet can kill the whole hive, under the right conditions. And we,” he said, setting his jaw, “We can be the hornet to the countrymen’s hive.” They arrived in a time-shattered lot of an old facility when Keigo snapped up the brake and jumped outside.
“But the hornet dies,” said Shinsuke.
Keigo waved away the thought and beckoned him inside the building. Hulking police machines stood limp at the gates, seventeen feet and sixteen tons of metal left deactivated to rust. Namiyo produced a small screen and began to swivel oddly with it as they proceeded through the facility.
They finally reached a room designed like half of a stadium, with raised platforms filled with desks and chairs and a giant screen dominating the wall. Namiyo pressed a button, there was a loud rumble, and the room came to life. Panels turned on, the screen grew bright, and the loud tortured thrum of an old fan beat noise through the walls.
Shinsuke wondered for a moment what the guns were for. Perhaps a safety precaution in the event this place was less abandoned than it seemed.
Keigo gripped him by the elbows and looked at him with pride and knowing. “Shinsuke.” He took a deep breath. “Though you are our newest member, I know you’re the right man for the job.” He gripped harder. “I know you will act without hesitation—like a true man of the Nation—because I’ve seen you do it before.” Shinsuke had killed many pigs in his time with the Nation. And other animals, too.
Namiyo dusted off a console and presented Shinsuke with a seat. Keigo guided him to it and sat him down.
“This is where countrymen once piloted their machines themselves. Today, that job is yours.” Keigo patted Shinsuke on the back. Shinsuke threw Saeko a bewildered stare, but her face was blank. “You need to remind them what it is to hurt, Shinsuke. And then they’ll rush to defend themselves so hard and clumsy that we can take them all out with ease.” He did not elaborate.
A control-stick slid out of the console with an aching whir. Shinsuke grasped it and asked, “What do I have to do?”
Keigo sighed. “You are going to have to kill a lot of people.”
An ocean boiled, a continent charred, a planet sliced open like an orange, a system sucked into a black hole, all necessary, all horrible, death that paved the way for new life, a spreading fire with revitalizing ash.
Saeko and Keigo stayed until Shinsuke reached his first target. The controls were easy, like a game’s. They were all surprised that Shinsuke could pilot the rusted heaps so gracefully. Many of the guns attached to the walking mech-machines had long since been jammed, but the rockets and sheer mechanical force provided by the limbs were enough to smash a building to pieces. This target was simple enough: Shinsuke could see no bodies in the rubble and went on guilt-free.
Keigo left his list of targets and said he and Saeko needed to attend to other business. “Don’t lose focus,” he said. “Keep going. If one machine is destroyed, engage another.” He glanced at Namiyo and unslung his rifle. “Trust only your senses, and do what is needed.”
Their footsteps disappeared and the loud shunk of a metal door slamming shut followed their exit.
Namiyo finally spoke. “They’re tricking you.”
Shinsuke looked away from his screen and the growing scene of a chaotic crowd pulling at the rubble to find hands and feet crushed beneath. “They’re tricking me? Tricking me how?”
“They never intended to wipe out these people. Right now they’re going to warn them, in exchange for replacing their police force with unconnected people like us. A hikikomori tribe that countrymen would encourage to grow, as protection.”
“How do you know this?” Shinsuke’s hands left the machine’s controls. He saw the red-and-blue lights flash in the distance on-screen as the engineer answered.
“I heard. Keigo finished yelling at me for being so stupid with the hive, and when I left, I heard him whisper to Saeko and Grace. This was always the plan.”
Shinsuke closed his eyes and asked a question he already knew the answer to. “And what exactly will happen to us now?”
“Keigo, Saeko, and a contingent of others from the Nation will come here with their big guns and destroy this entire facility.” She sank into her seat with what could only be described as acceptance. “They’ve locked us inside.”
Shinsuke didn’t feel any roaring hot anger. It was cold, like a sword left in a quenching pool. It was sharp.
He snapped up the controls just as an autonomous police machine approached his own, ready to fight, but instead it simply bent down to help the people with the rubble.
“Your robot’s friend-or-foe identification is still valid.” She crinkled her nose. “Strangely enough. They won’t attack you.”
“Perfect.” Shinsuke activated another machine close to the facility and followed the tire tracks in the road. He dropped his mech into full-transport modality and sped like a sportscar after Keigo and Saeko’s jeep.
“Namiyo, what capabilities for speech are on board these machines?” Shinsuke flipped a few switches and returned his attention to the main screen.
“Both audio and visual. Only audio when in transport mode. Speak into the microphone and press the green talk button to broadcast your message.”
Shinsuke nodded, “Good. Now pull up a console and take a mech to Kanagawa prefecture, at this address.” He wrote down a street number and slid it to her desk. His machine was rolling at two-hundred kilometers per hour, bouncing high into the air when it hit ruts and ridges in the concrete. The jeep’s dust trail was only a few hundred meters away, and Shinsuke spun up the engine as fast as it could go.
A defunct space station hanging derelict around a shattered star, a glowing glass world left devoid of life, a great machine sparking and blown to smithereens upon first touch. First Plans, first Results.
Shinsuke activated another machine and commanded it to follow the jeep as well. His first mech was coming up close from behind, now. At a meter away, he swerved around the speeding vehicle and went perpendicular to the road in front of it. The spherical wheels slowed and the moving barrier ran the jeep off the steep shoulder of the road.
Keigo and Saeko picked themselves out of the dirt while Shinsuke punched the talk button and calmly said, “Namiyo told me what you were planning.”
Their voices streamed in as if through tin.
“Shinsuke? What are you doing? What did Namiyo tell you?” Keigo stepped in front of Saeko and said, “I thought I could trust you to stay focused on your targets?”
“She said your ultimate plan was to join with them, Keigo. To come back here and blow us to pieces. It’s a good plan.” Keigo raised his hands above his head, slowly.
“We would never do that to you, Shinsuke. You’re family.” Shinsuke turned to look at Namiyo, who was still busy performing the task he’d asked her. When he looked back at the screen, he saw Saeko had slipped the big gun from under Keigo’s raised arms and was aiming directly at his mech. The barrel was as dark and deep as a black hole: until she fired and the camera feed burst into static.
Cold, cold anger.
The second machine was already within a hundred meters and he saw the smoldering wreckage of the first smoking in a junked heap. He jumped the mech into full-combat functionality and it rolled out into a heavy six-limbed titan in mid-air, swiping wildly at Keigo and Saeko and forcing them to dodge and drop their weapons. The mech landed with a thump and an explosion of dirt, with the two cowering at its feet.
Phospholipid bubbles effervescing out of primordial ooze, the scaled predator hunting the fat prey, one set of teeth gnashing better than the last. Strong rules over Weak.
Shinsuke smashed them into puddles of red mud almost without thinking, burying them deep with thirty-ton stomps of piston-legs and sealing their graves with jets of flame. Then he dropped back into transport mode and sped down the overgrown roadway, trying to remember the path back to the camps.
Namiyo had finally made it to Dr. Otani’s office in Kanagawa prefecture, and was waiting for Shinsuke’s command.
“Give me the microphone, and put me at full volume.” Namiyo complied.
“Dr. Otani!” he called, and the mech’s speakers thumped with every syllable.
The counselor emerged from his office and looked curiously at the big machine.
