Number9dream

by David Mitchell

“My eleventh what?” The moment she looks at her feet I pepper her neck with enough instant-action tranquilizer microdarts to knock out the entire United Korean Army. Her knees give and she slumps conveniently into her chair, and forward onto her blotter. I make a witty pun in the manner of James Bond for my own amusement.

  I knock three times. “Finny Friends, Inc., for Ms. Kato?”

  A theatrical pause. A complex lock retracts. “Enter!” Checking that the corridor is free of witnesses, I slip in. The actual lair of Akiko Kato matches the imagined one, except I was wrong about her view being above the clouds. A checkered carpet, a wall of old-fashioned filing cabinets—haven’t seen those in a while. Of course, a filing cabinet cannot be hacked however ingenious your hacker. A wall of paintings too tasteful to trap the eye, a curved window of troubled fog. Between twin half-moon sofas stands a spherical tank in which a cloud of Okinawan silverspines haunts a coral-encrusted sunken battleship. Nine years have passed since I last saw Akiko Kato, but she has not aged a single day. Doubtless she can afford the latest DNA reravelers from certain Chinese labs. She glances up from her desk. Yes, her beauty is as cold and callous as ever. “You are not the little fish man who usually comes.”

  I close the door, and with my left hand turn the old-fashioned key— retained on the same security theory as the filing cabinets—and pull out my gun with my right. “No, Ms. Kato.” I have her full attention. “I am not a little fish man at all.”

  “So what in hell’s name do you—”

  “We are both busy people, so why not cut the small talk? It is a simple-enough matter. You already know my name, or at least you knew it, once upon a time. Eiji Miyake. Yes, Ms. Kato, that Eiji Miyake. Why am I here in Tokyo? Think about it. I am here to find out who my father is. And why you, Ms. Kato? You know his name and you know his address. What? No, I never threaten anyone. But I am telling you that you are going to give me the information I want, and right now—”

  Akiko Kato blinks once. An abrupt laugh. “Eiji Miyake?”

  “I fail to see the funny side.”

  “Not Luke Skywalker? Not Zax Omega? Did you compose that spiel yourself, to reduce me to awed obedience? Or did you steal it from a movie? One island boy embarks on a perilous mission to discover the father he has never met. Well, Eiji Miyake, I’m afraid you are going to discover what happens to island boys who leave their fantasies.” She shakes her head in mock pity. “Even my closest friends call me the most poisonous lawyer in Tokyo. What makes you think you can scare me into handing confidential client information over to a child with a popgun?”

  “Give me your file on my father or you will see how dangerous a child with a popgun can be.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  I release the safety catch and move away from the door. “I certainly hope so. Hands up where I can see them. Stand back from the desk. You don’t want to make me jumpy. Not at this range.”

  “This nonsense has gone on too—”

  I fire, and her intercomscreen explodes in a plastic supernova. The bullet ricochets off the assassin-proof window and slashes into a picture of lurid sunflowers. Akiko Kato’s complexion finally turns ashen, the way I want it. She walks over to the painting and hisses: “You gutter-bred, urine-blooded infidel! My van Gogh! You are going to pay for that!”

  “More than you ever did, I am quite sure. The file. Now.”

  “Security will be here in thirty seconds.”

  I allow myself a smile. “I have the blueprints to your office. Spyproofed, soundproofed. No messages in, none out, except via your intercomscreen, which is currently out of order. So stop blustering and give”—I level the gun at her head—“me . . . the . . . file.”

  She is alarmingly unconcerned. “You should have spent your youth on your island picking oranges with your granny and your uncles.”

  “I won’t ask you again.”

  “It isn’t going to happen. Your father has too much to lose. And so do I. If news of his whored brat—you, that is—leaked out, red faces would be caused in higher places than you could ever dream of. This is why we have a modest secrecy retainer agreement.”

  “So you are blackmailing your own client.”

  “Blackmail is a strong word for someone still in search of the perfect zit cream. My position as your father’s lawyer calls for discretion. Discretion is a precious commodity in this city, and like all precious commodities—”

  “I am not leaving this office without the file.”

  “Then you shall be here for a very, very long time. I would order us some coffee but you put a bullet through my vidcom.”

  I don’t have time for this. I flick the switch from handgun mode back to tranquilizer. Her forearm is exposed to the elbow—the long-dreaded Akiko Kato barely has time to register the sting of the darts before she collapses where she stands, unconscious as the deep blue sea.

  Speed is everything. I peel the Akiko Kato fingerpads over the Ran Sogabe ones, and access her computer. The deeper computer files will be heavily passworded, but overriding the locks on the filing cabinets is simple. MI for MIYAKE. I doubleclick: my name appears on the menu. EIJI. Doubleclick. I hear a promising mechanical clunk and a drawer telescopes open halfway down the wall, blocked by Akiko Kato’s prostrate body. I drag her onto one of the sofas—not a pleasant task; I keep thinking she might come back to life. I put down my gun, pull out the drawer as far as it will go, and leaf through the slim metallic carrier cases. MIYAKE—EIJI—PATERNITY. The case shines pure gold.

  “Put that back.”

  Akiko Kato closes the door with her ankle and levels a Zuvre .441 Lone Eagle at the spot between my eyebrows. Dumbly, I look at the Akiko Kato still slumped on the sofa. The doorway Kato permits herself a satanic chuckle. Rubies are set in the enamel of her teeth. “I see you have already met my bioborg. Well, I hope you feel stupid. Because you are. Very. Our spy in Jupiter Cafe picked you up—the old man next to you. His vidboy is an eyecam linked to PanOpticon’s combrain. I saw you coming. Tracked your every tediously predictable move. Now. Lightly kick your popgun over the floor toward me . . . that’s right . . . and kneel down. You don’t want to make me jumpy. Not at this range. A Zuvre blast from here will scramble your face so badly your own parents wouldn’t recognize you. But that was hardly their strong point, was it?”

  I guess I have ten seconds to live. “It was unwise of you to handle an intruder without backup.”

  “Your father’s file is a sensitive issue.”

  “So, your bioborg was telling the truth. Osugi and Bosugi don’t know you are blackmailing him.”

  “Why are you worried about my professional ethics when you should be begging for your life?” I glance at my gun, still on the floor halfway between us, letting my eyes linger a moment too long. She may be a professional blackmailer but she is an amateur hit man—she falls for my ploy and lunges at the gun. Her eyes are away from me for only a moment but that is all I need to aim the carrier case in my arms at her and flip open the switchclips without entering the disabling code. The lid-mounted incandescent booby trap explodes in her face. She screams, I roll-dive, her Zuvre fires, glass cracks. I spin, leap, boot her face, wrench her gun from her grip—it fires again. Her fingernails drill into my wrist, I elbow her face, her heel crunches my nose, the Zuvre flies from my hand, but finally I score a full-force blow to her head and follow up with a crushing upper-cut. The real Akiko Kato lies motionless on her bioborg twin. I don’t think I killed her. Okinawan silverspines thrash on the soaked carpet. Crunching glass, I retrieve the Zuvre—a much more potent gun than my own— and the sealed file on my father, which I stuff into my overalls. I close the door on the stain already spreading over the carpet. I stroll back toward the corridor, whistling “Imagine.” That was the easy part. Now I have to get out of PanOpticon, and not by means of a body bag.

  Ministry of Law drones fuss around the receptionist still slumped in her rainforest. I summon the elevator, and show appropriately nongenuine concern while I
wait. “Sick Building Syndrome, my uncle calls it,” I say to nobody in particular. “It affects fish in the same way.” I proceed to make myself invisible by boring anyone who may notice my presence. The elevator arrives and an old medic barges out, tossing onlookers aside. “Space,” she growls, “I must have space.” I slip into the elevator and the doors close on my crime.

  “Not so fast!”

  A polished boot wedges itself between the closing doors. I consider blasting it away, but outside Akiko Kato’s office spyproofing a single shot would alert Security. A guard muscles the doors apart. He has the mass, nostrils, and hair of a minotaur. “Ground Zero, son? Me, too. Okay, elevator, down we go.” Our descent begins. “So,” says Minotaur. “Are you an industrial spy, or what?”

  Adrenaline and confusion swish through my bloodstream in strange ways.

  Minotaur keeps a straight face. “You’re trying to make a quick get-away. That’s why you nearly took off my foot in the door up there.”

  My laughter goes on too long. “Yep.” I rap my toolbox. “Full of top-secret data on PanOpticon’s fish. Double agents, you know, the whole tankful.” My father’s file in my overalls suddenly feels three times bulkier. “To be honest, I was afraid of the fainted receptionist. One glimpse of blood and I’m a goner. I could never do your job.”

  Minotaur snorts. “Get used to anything.” When the elevator doors finally open I say “After you,” even though he showed no sign of letting me go first. The elevator is more polite. “Thank you, Guard Murasaki and Mr. Sogabe. I look forward to serving you again.” Floorpad arrows return me to the security booth. I am sealed in again. “Have you fully discharged your duties?”

  I beam for Ice Maiden. “I get you on the way in and on the way out?”

  “Standard procedure.”

  “You call it standard, I call it the hand of destiny. Yes, the silverspines are fully immunized now. You know, Finny Friends has been in business for eighteen years and we can truthfully say we have never once lost a fish due to negligence. It is a part of our standard procedure to conduct a postmortem on each and every ‘friend’ in our care, and it is old age each and every time. Or client-sourced alcohol poisoning around the end-of-year party season. I could tell you about it over dinner, perhaps?”

  “We have nothing whatever in common.”

  “We are both carbon-based life-forms. That’s a big head start. We wouldn’t have to talk about fish. We could talk about anything you like.”

  The pause chills as it lengthens. “Let’s talk about why your toolbox contains a Zuvre .441 Lone Eagle.”

  How, oh how, could I have been so stupid? “Absolutely impossible.”

  “A Zuvre .441 registered under the name . . . Akiko Kato.”

  “Oh!” I laugh, setting down the toolbox, opening it up and taking out the offending item. “Do you mean this Zuvre .441?”

  “I do mean that Zuvre .441, yes.”

  “I can explain. This is for—”

  I am not playing for time. She is. The glass flowers with the first shot. Alarms scream. The glass mazes with the second shot. Gas hisses above me. The glass cracks with the third shot. I sledgehammer my body through. The lobby beyond is full of shouting and running and jaggedness and a thousand flashing arrows. Men and women crouch, terrified. Guards’ boots pound. I glimpse Minotaur, a dozen Minotaurs, a dozen dozen Minotaurs. “The man in the overalls,” I hear Ice Maiden say, “the fish man!” I engage the double safety catch, set the Zuvre on continuous plasma fire, and lob it at the onrushing squadron of guards. Three seconds doesn’t give me enough time to make the entrance, and the explosion lifts me up and hurls me into the revolving doors with the force of a typhoon and literally spins me down the steps outside. Chaos, smoke, and sprinkler water belch from the PanOpticon lobby. Around me are dominoing traffic collisions and what any fugitive from injustice needs most—panicking crowds. “A madman!” I rave. “Madman with grenades! Call the cops! Call the helicopters! We need helicopters! Everywhere!” I hobble away down Omekaido Avenue, past Jupiter Cafe—this will give Dowager and Donkey something to gossip about, just look at them gawping. She is still at the sink. Her neck is still an oasis of soft calm in this sandblasted world. I hurry into a Fukuya department store and head for Menswear.

  Thirty minutes later I emerge in a sharp gray suit and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses. I hail a taxi and ask the bioborg driver to take me to Kita Senju. I remove my father’s file from my brand-new briefcase, and mentally record the moment for posterity. Upon this day, August 24, at 14:50, in the back of an autotaxi rounding Yoyogi Park, under a sky murky as a teenage boy’s underfuton, I, Eiji Miyake, less than twenty-four hours after my arrival in the metropolis of Tokyo, officially bring to an end 7,290 days of ignorance and discover my father’s true identity. I imagine Anju on the seat next to me, swinging her legs. “See?” I wave the file at her. “I promised I would. Now we’ll know his name, his face, his house, who he is, what he is.” The taxi swerves to avoid a fleet of ambulances and fire engines. “Open it then,” says Anju, “c’mon, bro, open it.” I slit open the seal with my thumbnail.

  Far things feel near.

  Page 1.

  The air-reactive ink is already vanishing from ghost-gray to absolute white.

  Lao Tzu growls at his vidboy. “Damn, damn, damn bioborgs! Every damn time!” I drink my dregs, put on my baseball cap, and stare at PanOpticon. Time to locate my maker. I limber up. “Say, Captain,” Lao Tzu croaks, “no chance of a spare cig in that box, is there?” I show him the empty carton. He looks doleful. Well, I need some more anyway. I have a stressful business meeting ahead. “Is there a machine in here?” “Over there.” He nods at a cluster of potted plants. “You’ll find one hidden in the greenery. I smoke Carlton, as a rule.” I hunt for the right change, but I have to break yet another thousand-yen note. Walk a hundred meters in Tokyo, check your wallet, and you discover another thousand yen has mysteriously spent itself. I mean it. I decide to order one last coffee before facing the real Akiko Kato. The adrenaline forcefield generated by my last coffee is already dying away. I deploy my incredible powers of telepathy. Hey! Waitress! You with the celestial neck! Take off your rubber gloves and come serve me a coffee! My telepathy lets me down today—I get Dowager instead. This close up I notice her nostrils are hairdryer-plug-compatible—two pinched slits. She nods when I thank her for the drink, as if she is the customer, not me. How to Be a Tokyoite, Lesson 1: nonobligatory thank-yous are weird. I walk back to my window seat, trying not to spill my coffee, sit down, open my Carltons, and fail to coax a flame from my cheapo lighter. Lao Tzu slides me a box of courtesy matches from a bar called Mitty’s. I light my cigarette—then his—as he is concentrating on a new game. His fingers are crocodile-tough. He takes a deep drag, and sighs with a gratitude only us smokers can understand. “Thanks a million, Captain. My son nags at me to give up, but I tell him, ‘Hey, I’m dying anyway—who am I to interfere with nature?’ ” I make a vague sympathy noise. Nothing prospers in Tokyo but pigeons, crows, rats, roaches, and lawyers. I sugarize my coffee, rest my teaspoon on the meniscus, and sloooooowly dribble the cream onto the bowl of the spoon. Pangaea rotates, floating unruptured before splitting into subcontinents. Playing with coffee is the only pleasure I can afford in Tokyo. The first three months’ rent on my capsule wiped out all the money I saved working for Uncle Orange and Uncle Pachinko, leaving me with a chicken-and-egg problem: if I don’t work, I can’t stay in Tokyo and look for my father; but if I work, when do I look for my father? Work. A slag-heap word that blots out the sun. My two saleable talents are picking oranges and playing my guitar. I must be five hundred kilometers from the nearest orange tree, and I have never, ever played my guitar for anyone. Now I understand what fuels dronehood. This: you work or you drown in debt and the underclass. Tokyo turns you into a bank balance with a carcass in tow. The size of this single number dictates where the carcass may live, what it drives, how it dresses, who it sucks up to, who it may date and marry, wh
ether it cleans itself in a gutter or a Jacuzzi. If my landlord, the honorable Buntaro Ogiso, stiffs me, I have no safety net. He doesn’t seem to be a con man, but successful con men never do. When I meet my father—at most a couple of weeks away—I want to prove I am standing on my own two feet, and that I am not looking for handouts. Dowager heaves out a drama-queen sigh. “You mean to tell me this is the very last box of coffee filters?”

  The waitress with the perfect neck nods.

  Donkey joins in. “The very last?”

  “The very, very last,” my waitress confirms.

  Dowager shakes her head. “How can this possibly have happened?”

  Donkey maneuvers. “Well, I sent the purchase order off on Thursday!”

  My waitress shrugs. “Deliveries take three days.”

  Dowager clouds over. “I hope you aren’t trying to blame this crisis on Eriko.”

  “And I hope you aren’t trying to blame me because I was the one to notice we are going to run out of coffee filters by five o’clock. I just thought I should say something.” Stalemate. “Look. Why don’t I take some petty cash and buy some more?”

  “I am the shift supervisor. I make these decisions.”

  “I can’t go,” Eriko the Donkey whines. “I had my hair permed this morning. Any minute now it’s going to rain buckets.”

  Dowager turns back to my waitress. “Go and buy a box of filters. There’s a supplier right next to the subway entrance, behind the clock.” She pings the register open and removes a five-thousand-yen note. “Keep the receipt, and bring back the exact change, or you’ll ruin my bookkeeping.” My waitress removes her rubber gloves and apron, takes an umbrella, puts the note in her purse—actually, she has a boy’s wallet—and leaves without another word. Dowager squints after her, as if taking aim down a telescopic lens. “That young miss has an attitude problem.”

  Donkey tuts. “Those rubber gloves! She thinks she’s a hand-cream model.”

  “Students today are too coddled. What is it she studies, anyway?”