by Kei Urahama
Ohizumi still stood at the bathroom, a stopwatch in one hand and the camera in the other. Ishida didn’t feel he had the energy to hit him anymore. He didn’t much care what Ohizumi was even doing there now.
“Speaking of which, Chikama is…” Just as Fukazawa said his name, Chikama appeared from the door of the bedroom.
“Sorry. I went into the closet to find a belt to use as a tourniquet. Then I heard Ohizumi yelling that it came in…”
So he’s been cowering in the closet until now.
“I’m sorry.” The young man bowed many times truly ashamed of his cowardice.
“Don’t fret. It’s better than me. I was so scared I couldn’t even move out of the way in the hallway.” Fukazawa helplessly smiled at the young man.
Looking at everyone’s miserable state, Ishida felt an odd relief. It wasn’t just me scared witless. No such thing as perfect heroes in the real world.
“We’ve got to get out of here now,” Fukazawa said as even the nervous smile on his face faded.
Yes, it’s not over yet. Soon it will be back…
Ishida could guess at what the sphere would bring back but he definitely didn’t want to stick around to see it. Absolutely not.
Eventually Room 1108 was sealed as it was.
Just a few short minutes after everyone had left the apartment and Chikama finished locking the door, sounds of movement could be heard within. The angel had returned its resurrected charge to the room. Not just movement, clearly something was dragging itself along the floor.
“It won’t be able to open the lock,” someone said. So instead of isolating the revived corpse in the garden below as usual, it was confined to the room as it was. Later Chikama returned for safety’s sake and nailed an iron sign across the wall and door with the words, “DANGER! KEEP OUT!”
The one inside would eventually die of hunger. Then the angel would return and the cycle would continue. So many times, over and over again.
The first cycle would definitely take longer than the following one. This is because it had food this time. The remains of its own lower body in the bathroom.
This is hell, Ishida thought.
The old man had tried to resist to the end at least.
He studied Kyoko slumped down in the corridor. Aside from the blood smeared there, her face was pale and had a dazed look. She looks miserable, not strong and cheerful as she used to be. Yes, this is truly hell. We have to get out of here somehow. Of course some other way than suicide. Death will trap us in this place forever.
Anger grew inside Ishida as he pondered this. Not the simple kind of anger he felt toward Ohizumi a short time before. But an intense hatred for something much larger, greater.
We can’t just survive here. If we’re going to get out, we have to do something.
Ishida felt a strong determination forming along with the anger inside him. Strangely enough, it was the first time since the Dome’s appearance that Kazuya Ishida had fostered such a sense of fortitude.
I’ll fight against them too.
The foundation for this new resolve was his outrage and hatred for the Dome and its angels.
Chapter 11
Digital camcorder’s LCD screen, 200,000 pixels. The date is Friday, 26th October.
The Dome appeared on the twenty-second of this same month at approximately 3pm on a Monday. What is on the video now is four days later.
The location is the guest area on the first floor lobby. The film director Naoki Fukazawa is shot from a low perspective, medium close-up at a slightly canted angle.
“This must be a sneaky street-style shot. Isn’t it just like Fukazawa to do it like this?” Ohizumi stated, watching the playback monitor of the video camera on his desk.
It recalled memories of those days in his own mind. He’d also been there at the time. It’s clear that this is a video taken of the conflict between the residents and the refugees on whether or not to release the empty rooms of the building for the non-residents.
Fukazawa cleared his throat on the screen image, drawing the attention of the crowd that had been standing before him.
“Okay everyone, I want to ask you something…” Ohizumi wasn’t really paying much attention to the screen or the raised volume on the monitor speakers.
“Have you ever seen any suspense-panic films? You know, Hitchcock’s ‘Birds’ or Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’, ‘Earthquake’, ‘The Towering Inferno’… Oh, maybe those movies are too old? In any case, simply put, one day the residents of a peaceful city are suddenly thrown into an abnormal state of events and become panic-stricken, a genre of film of epic proportions that Hollywood does best. A large shark or octopus attacks peaceful townsfolk, volcanic eruptions, huge tornadoes, earthquakes, meteor strikes and so on are the subjects of this kind of film. Who is going to die first? Who will live? Survival, after all, is the defining theme of these films. You must have seen at least one movie like this? Right? Anyone…?”
Fukazawa paused, and held it for effect.
From the off-screen crowd came some calls such as, “What’s your point?” or “I’ve seen ‘Armageddon’.”
People were becoming interested in his talk but also frustrated at the same time. At this point the frustration seemed to be winning out a little.
“Well, everyone, I’m a filmmaker so I’m slightly more familiar with these types of movies than you might be. If you watch a lot of these films you’ll easily notice that there are generally two distinct groups of characters in them. Those being the ones who survive to the end and the ones who die throughout the movie. It applies to any genre of film, really.
But as I mentioned, in catastrophe movies, who will survive and who won’t takes up most of the story and that is what distinguishes it from other genres.
Who will live and die. Most of the time the main character survives but sometimes he dies as the ultimate sacrifice for everyone else. Americans love this kind of film. Japanese too. It’s a recurring theme for us, really.
So who dies besides the good one who sacrifices himself? Let’s not count the many extras who are on screen for just a few seconds before they perish. Just think about it…
Yes, of course the evil ones have to die. That is pretty obvious. But in these films many die who are neither good nor evil. This is my point here–if you think about it hard enough. Who is that certain type of character, not even villainous, that the audience will accept dying without question? Simply put it is, for example, the characters who fuss too much, who panic and put the main character in too much danger. So stupid that even the audience hates them and even feels a sense of relief when they are killed off. That is one sort anyway...
Even more so, the authority characters who act by thinking only of short-term profits, not acknowledging that an abnormal situation is occurring around them. Once upon a time this kind of character always appeared in this sort of movie. You know, the idiot mayor, the incompetent police chief, the rich…” Here Fukazawa pauses to cough dramatically.
“You get it right? In short, the ones who can’t recognize the situation around them. The type of character who doesn’t notice the rules have changed. The audience will accept the death of this type of person so readily because they are the villain. At least while the audience is watching a movie…” Off-screen there is a murmur from the crowd as Fukazawa pauses. Finally someone spits out the words he has been waiting for. “Don’t mix up a movie with reality! Reality has nothing to do with stupid movies.”
“If so…” Fukazawa responded. His voice is now low and clearly penetrating, different from his earlier tone.
“Then let’s stop acting like childish characters in stupid B-grade panic movies. That is if you don’t want to die like the stupid characters in a stupid film.”
He’s quite the actor, this husband of the beautiful actress, Ohizumi thought while fast-forwarding the video past this scene. Ohizumi had to acknowledge that these words had a significant effect on suppressing the panic impulse of the confused surv
ivors.
‘The characters of stupid B-movies.’ This phrase had caught on among the survivors for a while. Being a director, Fukazawa was skilled at manipulating audiences.
Ohizumi stopped the image when it reached the video clip he had taken a short while before. The image of the sphere going slowly into the bathroom wall. Ishida’s head annoyingly blocks part of the frame in the foreground, but beyond that the video is quite clear. Ohizumi begins to play the video forward, frame by frame.
As I imagined, some form of nanotechnology must be involved here. Ohizumi was convinced of this. It had to be a true nanotech such as Eric Drexler proposed in the 1970s. It goes through walls, revives the dead, a technology that can transform the human body in just a few short minutes can be nothing other than this. That angel must be a collection of molecule-sized robots.
Yet… it not only can float through the air, it also can lift and carry a heavy human body. Could this even be possible with nanotechnology?
Anti-gravity? Ohizumi shook his head.
Anyway, it is technology advanced several steps ahead of current human science, that’s for sure. So far that’s the one certainty.
Ohizumi was overcome by a terrible sense of helplessness.
Shit, get the fuck out of the way, Idiot! Ohizumi felt his anger rising at Ishida’s annoying head taking up the frame. In such an unusual situation, it was more than shocking to find in these people such a lack of curiosity or drive to solve the mystery. I can understand they are struggling to survive on a daily basis, but what makes them so indifferent to the situation around them?
During the period of the bubble economy at the end of the past century, the commercial press had actively made it a virtue to be ignorant. Clueless, barbaric celebrities grasping after sex or money were touted in the media and became social role models for the youth. Being ignorant and shameless became a kind of trend and it spread throughout Japan. This trend would eventually be called by some a moral hazard brought about by the total entertainment business.
So-called intellectuals were also leaping wholeheartedly into the spree making matters worse, spreading their philosophy of reducing all social morality to cultural relativisms that could readily be sacrificed at the altar of selfish desires. The “bubble” burst so quickly, but the aftermath remained. Young people lacking anything resembling intelligence just chased after short-term gratification. They actually increased in number after the economy collapsed. Like so many zombies they proliferated. Even if this hadn’t happened, Japan was on the road to becoming an island of zombies anyway.
Sci-Fi novels didn’t really sell too well since then. In fact people had stopped reading novels for the most part. As people’s imaginations dried up so did many other things deteriorate; Japan’s supposed technological ingenuity, the economy and the country’s vaunted political position in the world all rapidly declined.
Stupid movie characters think and act for short-term gains, as Fukazawa said. Well then, Japan is a den rife with such foolish characters.
Ohizumi suddenly recalled one of his own short stories. It was an end of the world sci-fi tale where the main character spends the last moments of his life fretting about trouble he’d had with his boss that day, even though it was meaningless. But in fact, when the world really did fall apart, the reality hadn’t been so far from Ohizumi’s story after all.
During the 1980’s economic bubble, another ‘enclosure’ called the information society confined Japan within itself. In the bubble of information fed to the public by the media, the common sense and morality that once was essential to human relations became unnecessary in the new insatiable drive to consume that replaced it.
Information, after all, is just a fiction lacking substance. No matter how much the high-tech media gave everyone a sense of some universal world, people remained trapped in their bodies living as not much more than wandering bags of meat. When the economy deflated and people finally had to wake up from their dream of limitless consumption, they found themselves to be vulnerable flesh stripped of their assumptions of their connectedness with others.
One’s ‘inner reality’ was nothing more than a subjective view comprising one’s own few meters’ radius. After the bubble collapsed, the media left people stranded in a virtual sea within their own enclosed floating bubbles.
So I could even call it a bubble. This new bubble wouldn’t pop, however. A boy in his own, a girl in hers, office workers in their offices, housewives in their houses, politicians functioning in their own realities–so many tiny selfish microcosms where those inside have no clue about reality outside their little bubbles. Everyone intoxicated with a kind of megalomania swollen by the media spoon-feeding them the fiction that the entire world is there within their little bubble.
Unlike the economic bubble of the past, these little bubbles confined each and every one of them and would not expand but instead keep shrinking. It should be called ‘The Big Shrink’, not ‘The Big Bang’. Their universes would eventually rupture under the pressure of compression.
Those formerly called geeks and criminals, who were the grist for the media’s sensational stories, now socially withdrawn youth and fanatic cult followers, are nothing special. They’re just slightly ahead of their time is all.
It is this virtual reality of the media that, unfettered, fractures all living reality, yet relies on scientific thinking and technology for its own progression and survival.
Somehow, Japanese continue to suffer under the misconception that science and technology should be blindly worshipped while they abandon rational thought and skills that had raised them up in the first place.
Media seems to almost aggressively seek the destruction of rational thought since it is this very quality that will overcome the desire to constantly consume.
It is inconvenient for media sponsors to have a consumer who thinks critically and rationally. On the contrary, the consumer should remain clueless and hooked on that which is sensual and transient so that the media can cash in on selling them something they buy today but discard tomorrow.
In this way the process of idiocy among Japanese accelerated. For this reason, hardcore sci-fi novels of the type that Ohizumi wrote, where readers need at least a basic foundation in critical thinking and science, gradually came to be shunned by publishers. To be more precise, there were no more readers to buy them since no one could really understand them anymore.
And now, in this unusual situation where everyone has been completely cut off from the media’s virtual reality, the imbecility of the Japanese becomes more apparent than Ohizumi even imagined.
Most of the survivors within the apartment building were graduates of decent universities, some quite well educated with graduate degrees. Nevertheless it was only Ohizumi who knew how to get power for common household devices from a car battery. (No, really!)
The problem was not only the lack of expertise. Most of the residents, beyond what was founded in a vague fear of the unknown, had no intellectual curiosity at all.
For example, meat and vegetables didn’t rot here. Despite the clear fact that it never rained and the seasons had come to a full stop, the plants in the garden and the trees lining the road were still lush. Not a single person became sick. No one caught a cold here! Shouldn’t people notice something like that? Does anyone stop to wonder how light or air continues to exist inside the Dome?
Above all, do the people here realize that this is probably humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence? How many people have any idea how amazing the situation is where they find themselves?
Is it just me who sees that this is the greatest event in the history of mankind other than its own birth into the cosmos?
Ohizumi was seized with a sense of overwhelming loneliness.
The memory of his wife revived within him. That day when she went out shopping and never came back. Oh, Yuko… If you were only here. You were intelligent and curious and had an exuberant imagination. If you were by my side, you wo
uld have lent me force to solve the mystery of this new world.
Ohizumi paused the video screen and picked up one of the small fragments arranged side by side next to the camera. It was a piece of vinyl material taken from a discolored wall scored by the angel as it passed through it. Even though he wanted to examine them in greater detail, there was no such scientific equipment available here. I once had an optical microscope but then sold it. But if this was affected by real nanomachines then such a microscope would be useless. In this world, all that was left to him as a weapon to solve the mystery following scientific methods were his knowledge, senses and imagination.
Ohizumi still determined to overcome the mystery of this world.
Perhaps revealing what lay behind it would clarify the greater question of the entire universe in such a way as human beings had never imagined. I am going to solve the riddle. Ohizumi’s imagination yearned to stretch further.
At that moment a slight knock came at the door dispelling his renewed intellectual enthusiasm.
“Dad…?”
When Ohizumi turned he saw his only son standing beside the door he’d left open.
“I need to talk to you a bit. Is now okay?”
As usual, he spoke in a weak, reedy voice. Ohizumi sometimes regretted naming the boy Yuji. It meant “Brave Samurai” in Chinese characters but his boy was anything but.
“Where were you? I was worried.”
Ohizumi said this even though both of them knew it was a lie.
“I… I’ve decided to leave here. I’m going to go live in the Game Park.”
Unlike his usual way of speaking, his voice was determined. Perhaps a little shaky from nervousness but determined nonetheless.
“Right…”
As he said this, Ohizumi recalled that a girl had been hanging around with his son lately. He’s probably planning to go live with her. He’d become an adult when Ohizumi wasn’t looking. These thoughts crossed his mind accompanied by a faint sense of guilt.
“So… when are you leaving?”