Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “You said I could come and see you sometime.”

  Suga frowns. “But I never thought you actually would . . . How is the lost-property business? Mrs. Sasaki still freezing the ground beneath her feet? And did you see Aoyama’s final dive on TV? It was all over the news until that high school kid went and busjacked the holiday coach. See that? Cut the passengers’ throats. Goes to show, if you’re going to perform a dramatic suicide like Aoyama, schedule it clear of any major news stories.”

  “Suga, I came to—”

  “You’re lucky I’m in. Pull up a chair. You might find one under— never mind, sit on that box. I got back from my week at IBM yesterday. You should see their labs! They put me on the phone-line help desk to wipe asses. Deep grief. I wanted to be in R and D to check out the new stuff, right. It took me a few minutes to hatch my escape plan. My first call comes in, this bumpkin from Akita with an accent even thicker than yours, no offense. ‘I’m having some trouble with my computer. Screen’s all blank.’ ‘Oh dear, sir. Can you see the cursor?’ ‘The what?’ ‘The little arrow, sir, that tells you where you are.’ ‘Don’t see no arrow. Don’t see nothin’. Screen’s all blank, I tell ya.’ ‘I see, sir. Is there a power indicator on your monitor?’ ‘On my what?’ ‘On your monitor, sir. The TV. Does it have a little on light?’ ‘No light, no nothin’.’ ‘Sir, is the TV plugged into the wall?’ ‘No idea, can’t see nothin’, I tell ya.’ ‘Not even if you crane your head around, sir?’ ‘How could I? It’s as black as night in here, I’m tellin’ ya.’ ‘Maybe it would help if you turned the lights on, sir?’ ‘I tried, but they won’t come on—the electric company is testing all the wiring, and there won’t be no power until three o’clock.’ ‘I see, sir. Well, I have good news.’ ‘You do?’ ‘Yes, sir. Do you still have the boxes the computer came in?’ ‘I never throw nothin’ away.’ ‘Splendid, sir. I want you to pack your computer up and take it back to the store you bought it from.’ ‘Is the problem that serious, then?’ ‘I’m afraid it is, sir.’ ‘What do I tell ’em at the shop, then?’ ‘Are you listening carefully, sir?’ ‘I am.’ ‘Tell them you’re too much of a shit-for-brains to own a computer!’ And then I hang up.”

  “That was your escape plan?”

  “I know my calls are monitored by the moron in charge of me, right. Plus, I know they know I’m too valuable to chop. So the supervisor agreed my talents might be more profitably employed in another department. I suggested R and D, and off I went. Miyake, what is that thing you’re carrying?”

  “A pineapple.”

  “I thought so. Why are you carrying a pineapple?”

  “This is a present.”

  “I thought they came in cans. Who are you giving a live pineapple to?”

  “You.”

  “Me?” Suga is mystified. “What do you do with them?”

  “People slice them into chunks with a knife, and, uh . . . eat them.”

  Suga suddenly beams. “Hey, thanks. I forgot lunch. Guess where I am?” He nods at his computer, and pulls a beer free from its six-pack—I shake my head. “French Nuclear Energy. Their antihacking tech is iron age.”

  “I thought your Holy Grail is in the Pentagon.”

  “Oh, shit.” Suga hiss-pisses beer everywhere. “It is. The French are zombies.”

  “Zombies? I know their Pacific nuclear tests suck, but—”

  Suga shakes his head. “Zombies. No hacker worth his silicon ever hacks directly. We hack into a zombie computer, and go fishing from there. Often, we zombify another zombie via the first. The hotter the target, the longer the zombie conga.”

  Time to get to the point. “I have a favor to ask. A delicate one.”

  “What do you want me to hack into?”

  He looks at me as he swigs his beer. I realize there is a whole lot more to Suga than I judged. I judge people too fast. I get out the library book that Miriam dropped in the park. “This might be difficult, Suga, but could you get into a Tokyo library computer and look up the address of the person who has borrowed this book?”

  Suga wipes away the beer froth. “You must be joking.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Can I piss straight when I whiz?”

  Miriam’s Korean name is Kang Hyo Yeoun. She is twenty-five, and has three books on loan from the library service. I take an overground train to her apartment in Funabashi. It is a run-down neighborhood, but sort of friendly. Everything needs a new coat of paint. I ask a woman who works in a cake shop next to the station where I can find Miriam’s address, and she draws me a map and says goodbye with a crafty wink. I walk past a long row of bicycle stalls, turn a corner, and there is the sea, for the first time in a month. Tokyo Bay sea air has a gasoline tang. Cargo ships lie berthed, loaded and unloaded by cranes with four legs and llama necks. Fiery weeds sprout from wrinkled tarmac. A yakiniku restaurant smokes the evening with meat and charcoal. A garage band rehearses a song called “Sonic Genocide.” A taxi driver stands in a corner of the quay, rehearsing his golf swing, watching imaginary holes-in-one land in the calm evening. A window-grilled pawnshop, a bright curry shop, a laundromat, a liquor store, a gateball ground, and Miriam’s apartment. It is an old three-story affair. I smoke a Seven Star in a record few drags. The first floor has already been abandoned. The metal stairs jangle as I climb up. One decent typhoon and the whole structure would be blown clean across Hokkaido. Here it is. 303.

  Her face appears in the gloom above the door chain.

  She slams the door.

  I hammer, embarrassed. I crouch down to speak through the mail slot. “I brought your library book. You dropped it in the park. This is nothing to do with Daimon. Miriam, I don’t even know him! Please.” No reply. A dog with its head in a lampshade walks past. Its overweight owner is several paces behind, panting. He scowls, daring me to laugh. “Bob had his bollocks lopped off. The restraint is to stop him licking where he shouldn’t.” He unlocks the apartment next to Miriam’s and disappears. Miriam’s door opens. She is smoking. I am still crouched down. The door chain is still on. “Here is your book.”

  She takes it. Then she silently judges me.

  “You gave Daimon my message?”

  “I tried to tell you, I don’t know Daimon.”

  She shakes her head in frustration. “Why do you keep saying that? If Daimon didn’t send you, how did you know where to come?”

  “I, uh, got your address from the library.”

  She accepts this without me needing to explain the illegal part. “And so you returned my book from the kindness of your heart?”

  “Not only that, no.”

  “So what do you want?”

  She shifts, and reflected amber light catches the side of her face. I understand why Daimon fell in love with her. I understand nothing else. “Do you really know who my father is?”

  “What?”

  “In Ueno Park, you talked about my father as if you know him.”

  “He’s a regular at the club! Of course I know him!”

  I swallow. “What is his name?”

  “What are you talking about? Your father is Yuzu Daimon’s father.”

  Plan C buckles past its crumple zone. “He told you that?” Oh, it all falls into place now. “Plan C” was a fat name for a skinny little lie.

  “He signed you in to Queen of Spades as his stepbrother. His— your—father keeps a couple of mistresses at any one time, so you aren’t the first one.”

  I look away, hardly able to believe this. No, this is all too easy to believe.

  “You are not his brother?” Miriam probes. “That was all Daimon bullshit?” My father rejoins the unknown millions. I don’t answer her. She sort of yowls. “That selfish, stupid jerk. Just to get back at me . . . Listen, Eiji Miyake, whoever you are. Look at me!” She stubs out her cigarette. “Queen of Spades is not . . . an ordinary place. If you ever go back there, bad things could happen to you. Oh, hell. This could be very bad. By admitting you, Daimon—well, he broke a major rule. Normally, male g
uests are blood relatives only. Listen to me. Do not go back there, ever. Steer clear of Shibuya, in fact. And do not come back here, ever. Understand?”

  No, I do not really understand, but what can I do but nod? She closes the door. It is the last moment of the day. The sunset would be beautiful, if I were in the mood. A dying SF-movie sun sits on a WARNER CINEMA multiplex. I wonder what subway line takes you to that sort of sunset, and what station you need to get off at. I amble back the way I came and find a video arcade. Inside are a whole row of full-sized 2084 machines, doing brisk business with schoolkids. Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon has moved on. Today has been a bad day. I change a thousand-yen note into hundred-yen coins.

  Photon fire bursts around me, and my final comrade falls. I get the prison guard in my sights and fricassee him. Eerie silence. Is the shooting finally over? Eight stages since the red door. The metal walkway clanks as I walk over the pile of guards and fallen rebels. It is down to me. Here is the prison door. “Prisoner: Ned Ludd. Crime: Cyber-Terrorism. Sentence: Life Incarceration. Security Access: Orange.” Inside is my father, the man who will free humanity from the tyranny of OuterNet. The revolution to reverse reality starts now. I fire the OPEN pad, and the door slides sideways. I enter the cell. Darkness. The door slides shut and the lights come on. OuterNet intelligence officers! With old-fashioned revolvers? I open fire, but my photon gun is dead. The whole cell is a dampening field. Somewhere I took the wrong turn. Somewhere I failed to read the sign. Before my eyes, my ENERGY bar shrinks to .01. I cannot move. I cannot even stand. A man—I recognize him, he is the farmer from the soy farm during my waking hours—walks over, loosening his tie. “My name is Agent K00996363E. The revelation is this, Player I8192727I. Ned Ludd is a project created by OuterNet to detect antigame tendencies among players, and assess their potential danger to OuterNet. Your susceptibility to indoctrination is evidence of defective wet-programming. The very idea that ideology can ever defeat the image is proof of insanity. OuterNet will reprocess your wetware, in accordance with Propagation of Game Law 972HIJ. This grieves me, I81, but it is for your own good.” He brings his face up close. It is not hateful. It is tender and forgiving. “Game over.”

  four

  Reclaimed Land

  So this is how I die, minutes after midnight on reclaimed land somewhere south of Tokyo Bay. I sneeze, and the swelling in my right eye nearly ruptures. Sunday, September 17. I cannot call this unexpected. Not after the last twelve hours. Since Anju showed me what death was, I have glimpsed it waiting in trains, in elevators, on pharmacy shelves. Growing up I saw it booming off the ocean rocks on Yakushima. Always at some distance. Now it has thrown off its disguise, as it does in nightmares. I am here, this is real. A waking nightmare from which I will never wake. Splayed on my back, far from anyone who knows me, my LIFE bar at zero. My body is racked and I am running a temperature as high as this bridge. The sky is spilling with stars, night flights, and satellites. What a murky, gritty, pointless, unlikely, premature, snot-sprayed way to die this is. One gamble that was rigged from the beginning. Very nearly my last thought is that if this whole aimless story is to go on, God the vivisectionist is going to need a new monkey for his experiments. So many stars. What are they for? How did I get here?

  Wednesday afternoon, I go to the bank near Ueno Station to pay for my ads in the personal columns. The bank is a ten-minute walk down Asakusa Avenue, so I borrow an orphaned bike—the company car of the lost-property office. It is too rickety for anybody ever to want to steal, but saves my lunch break nearly a quarter of an hour’s walk down a busy road hot with fumes and the dying summer. No shade in Tokyo, and all the concrete stores the heat. I park the bike outside and go in—the bank is busy with lunchtime, and burbling with bank noises. Drones, telephones, computer printers, paper, automatic doors, murmurs, a bored baby. Using an ATM to pay for Plan D—the newspaper personal ad—is the cheapest way, as long as I don’t make a single mistake typing in the long string of digits, otherwise my money will go flying into the wrong account. I am taking my time. A virtual bank teller on the screen bows, hands clasped over her skirt. Please wait. Transaction being processed. I wait, and read the stuff about lost cards and cheap credit. When I next look at the virtual bank teller she is saying something new. I gag on disbelief. Father will see you shortly, Eiji Miyake. I triple-check—the message is still there. I look around. This must be a practical joke, and someone must be on-site to enjoy it. A bank teller stands at the head of the row of machines to help people in difficulty, and she sees the look on my face and hurries over. She has the same uniform and expression as her virtual coworker. I just point dumbly at the screen. She traces her finger across the screen. “Yes, sir. The transaction is now processed. This is your card, and don’t forget to keep your receipt safe and sound.”

  “But look at the message!”

  She has a Minnie Mouse voice. “ ‘Transaction completed. Please take your card and receipt.’ No problem here, sir.” I look at the screen. She is right. “There was another message,” I insist. I look around for a practical joker. “A message with my name on it.”

  Her smile tightens. “That would be most irregular, sir.”

  People in the line are tuning in. I flap. “I know how irregular it is! Why else do you think I . . .” A uniform in a yellow armband arrives on the scene. He is only a couple of years older than me but he is already Captain Smug, Samurai of Corporate Finance. “Thank you, Mrs. Wakayama,” he dismisses his underling. “I am the duty manager, sir. What is the trouble?”

  “I just transferred some money—but—”

  “Did the machine malfunction in any way?”

  “A message flashed up on the screen. A personal message. For me.”

  “What leads you to conclude the message was for you, sir?”

  “It had my name.”

  Captain Smug puts on a sympathetic frown from a training seminar. “What did this ‘message’ say exactly, sir?”

  “It told me my father wanted to see me.”

  I feel housewives in the line bristle with curiosity and turn to one another. Captain Smug does a passable imitation of a doctor humoring a lunatic. “I think it might be quite possible that our machine uses characters that may be somewhat tricky for you to read.”

  “I may not have a job in a bank but I can read, thank you.”

  “But of course.” Captain Smug eyes my work overalls. He scratches the back of his neck to show he is embarrassed. He glances at his watch to show I am embarrassing. “All I am saying is that either some misunderstanding has occurred here, or you just witnessed a phenomenon that has never before occurred in the history of Tokyo Bank, nor, so far as I am aware, in the history of Japanese banking. Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”

  I put my card back into my wallet and cycle back to Ueno Station. I am so on edge all afternoon that Mrs. Sasaki asks what the matter is. I lie about feeling feverish, so she gives me some medicine and I have to drink it and lie again about feeling better. During my tea break I use the ATM in the station, which gives balance statements but does not make payments. Nothing unusual happens. I search the faces of lost-property customers for knowing glints. Nothing. I wonder if Suga did it. But Suga doesn’t know about my father. Nobody in Tokyo knows about my father. Except my father.

  Riding the submarine back to Kita Senju, I look around. Paranoia, but. No drone catches my eye, only a little girl. Who in Tokyo knows about my father? My stepmother, and Akiko Kato. Neither of them would need to communicate with me in such a weird way. Walking back from the station, I catch myself looking in the road mirrors for stalkers. In the supermarket I buy a 50-percent-off okonomiyaki and some milk for Cat. “Buntaro,” I think while I wait in line. I got my capsule because a relative of my guitar teacher in Kagoshima knows a friend of Buntaro’s wife—could he have found out about my father? But what sort of video store owner is powerful enough to use ATM screens as a personal telegraph system? Some sort of unholy alliance between Suga and Buntaro?
I get back to Shooting Star to find my chief suspect on the phone with his wife, running his hand through his thinning hair. They are talking about kindergartens for Kodai. He nods at me and makes a nagging goose with his hand. I watch a scene or two from a movie called Jacob’s Ladder, about a man who cannot distinguish between nightmares and reality. “I know what you’re thinking, kid,” Buntaro says, putting down the receiver. “Kodai isn’t even born yet. But these places have waiting lists longer than Grateful Dead guitar solos. Get into the right kindergarten, and the conveyor belt goes all the way up to the right university.” He shakes his head, sighing. “Listen to me. Education Papa. How was your day? You look like you had your bone marrow sucked out.” Buntaro offers me a cigarette and strikes himself off my list of suspects. Unlikely as it seems, the sole remaining candidate is now the likeliest: my father. What are we up to now? Plan E.

  On Thursday lunchtime I go back to the same branch of the same bank to try out the ATM again. The same woman is on duty—she avoids eye contact the moment she recognizes me. I insert my card, type in my PIN, and the virtual bank teller bows. What dark room has no exits but only entrances into darker rooms? Father is watching. I search for meaning—is this a warning? I look around for Minnie Mouse, but Captain Smug has been lying in wait for me. “Another inexplicable message, sir?”