Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  Why are you being told this? Tomorrow is the final day of September. It is the day I plan to go public. I shall hand my data over to my contacts in the police and the media. One of two things will happen: the media will scream, and Japanese public and political life will be hit by a vice scandal that will send shock waves from hospitals in Kyushu to the parliament building; or I shall be killed by those I seek to expose. If the latter comes to pass copies of this disk and letter will be distributed to an audience I have selected for widely differing reasons.

  Understand this: you are holding a letter from a dead woman. I have been killed by my enemies, as foreseen by laws of probability and power. My death itself is of no importance to me. You can understand why, I am sure. What is important is that the information now in your possession is the only weapon that could destroy the harvesters. Act with your eyes open, as your conscience dictates. I cannot advise you—my best attempts have failed. The yakuza is a ninety-thousand-strong state within our state. If you approach regular police channels, you will achieve only the issue of your own death warrant. You are holding a high card for a very dangerous game into which you never asked to be dealt. But for the repose of the soul of my son Eiji Matani, who was killed by these people, and for countless others, past, present, and future, I implore you to act.

  Please.

  Kozue Yamaya

  Why me? Her son and I share a name with the exact same kanji— ei for “incant,” ji for “world.” I have never encountered this combination in someone else before, but this alone cannot account for Kozue Yamaya putting me on her trustee list. I sift my memory of the time we met for clues, but find none.

  I call downstairs. “Machiko-san? Any big stories in the paper today?”

  “What?” says Machiko. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard?”

  “What?”

  Machiko reads from the front page: “ ‘Top Politician in Honesty Shocker—“I’m Not on the Take!” Integrity Revelation by Minister Stuns Colleagues!’ ”

  I manage a smile, and close the door. So Kozue Yamaya is probably dead. I feel hollow with pity for that scarred person who visited me during my week at the study of tales. But I would be a fool to get involved in this. Keeping this disk is suicidally dangerous. I stow it in the most unused corner of my apartment—my condom box under my socks— until I figure out what to do. If no foolproof idea comes today or tomorrow, I should drop it in the river and hope another addressee is in a wiser, stronger position. Uneasily, I imagine us lined up in a row on the bridge, all dropping our disks in, acting on the same easiest-way-out impulse. I change the water for Cat, switch on my fan, unroll my futon, and try to sleep. Despite not having slept for twenty hours, I keep thinking of Mrs. Yamaya. I sense a weird week ahead, one with sharp teeth. My pulse thuds. An unbreakable spear striking an impenetrable shield.

  I arrive at work at one minute to midnight. I change into my apron and white bandanna—I wear it to keep my hairs out of the food, not as a fashion accessory—and a big group of off-duty taxi drivers stops by to order an office-party quantity of pizzas. I am kept busy for ninety minutes. The radio is weird tonight—it keeps changing frequency at whim, swinging among Chinese-, Spanish-, and Other-speaking stations. “Tagalog, man,” reckons Doi. “The stratospheric ether is hyperpure tonight, man, I can feel it in my sinuses.” He waits for the inferno to deliver his pizza, smoking a cigarette of his own creation in the cage. He rubs his eye. “Miyake, I got something stuck in the corner here—pass me a toothpick, man?” I ignore my misgivings and pass him a toothpick. “Thanks.” Doi uses it to pluck his eyelid down. “No good, would you mind looking? I think a tiny fly flew in.” I walk over, and peer close. Doi suddenly sneezes, his head jerks down, and the toothpick punctures his eyeball. A jet of white fluid spatters my face. “Shit!” screams Doi. “Oh shit! I hate it when that happens!” I just stand there, unable to believe that reality is this grotesque. Sachiko appears in the hatch. I gibber— she shakes her head—I stop gibbering. “Falling for him once is cute, Miyake, but two strikes and you’re Mr. Gullible. Doi, if you waste many more of those coffee whiteners you’re going to force me to be Ms. Assistant Manager and dock your salary.” Doi snickers. I realize I have been fooled again. “Hear and ooobey, chieftainess.” Sachiko glowers and addresses a supernatural agency above the inferno. “Is it my karmic destiny to oversee lunatic asylums, lifetime after lifetime, over and over, until I get it right? Miyake—one double Titanic, thick base, extra shark meat.” I box up Doi’s pizza. He leaves, bathed in victory. I cannot stop thinking about the package from Mrs. Yamaya. Tomomi slinks into the cage for one of her never-ending coffee breaks. She tells me how frantically busy her life is—busy is definitely her favorite word—and asks how I know Ai doesn’t fake her orgasms when we have sex, because while she was having her affair with Mr. Nero she felt obliged to busy things up on a number of occasions, because men are so insecure about performance. Tomomi has a tarantula-in-underpants effect on me. She sharpens her fingernails while I try to work out what sort of denial would give her least gossip fuel. I am saved by a toy-helicopter-size wasp that flies in—Tomomi shrieks, “Kill it! Kill it!” and runs back through to the front. The hatch doors slam shut. The wasp buzzsaws around for a minute, warily checking me out in its multilens eyes, and lands on Laos. Hard to concentrate on the pizzas, but I prefer its company to Tomomi’s. I stand on the counter and clap a plastic tub over Southeast Asia—the wasp strikes up a death-by-flugelhorn noise and tries to knock a hole through the side—I get unbearably itchy and, instead of making a portable wasp-release box, semipanic and shove the tub over the exhaust fan, which is flush to the wall. The flugelhorn stops with a nearly inaudible crackle. “Last of the action heroes,” says Onizuka, fingering the spike in his lower lip. He always arrives in the cage quiet as a ghost, and he speaks so softly I have to semi-lip-read. He nods at the inferno, where a pizza is waiting to be boxed. “That my Eskimo Quinn for the KDD building? Customers give me shit if their pizzas get cold.” The hatch opens a crack. “Is it dead?” asks Tomomi. “The wasp is fine,” says Onizuka, “but Miyake got mushed trying to leave through the extractor.” Tomomi performs an overture laugh to see if she can rile me. Onizuka departs with his pizza without another word. Doi arrives back a minute later—I could swear his left leg was limping yesterday, but today it is his right—and Tomomi tells him about the wasp. The drug pusher and the queen of all evil discuss whether I am guilty of the murder of a life-form. “It was only a wasp,” I say, “there are plenty more where it came from.” This is not good enough for Tomomi: “There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay?” This is too stupid to argue about—especially as Tomomi was shrieking “Kill it! Kill it!”—so I watch pizzas inching through the inferno. When I tune in again Doi and Tomomi are talking about crows. “Say what you want,” Tomomi says, “crows are cute.” Doi shakes his head. “Crows are winged Nazis, man. The porter in our building, he chased one away with a broom. The next day, the same crow dive-bombed him and pecked his head hard enough to draw blood, man. A crow? Attacking a uniformed porter? Freaky, man. Kinda short-circuits nature.” Tomomi sharpens her eyeliner pencil and snaps open her hand mirror. “I love nature. The weak are meat, the strong eat.”

  Ueno to Kita Senju is easy, even during rush hour, because outbound submarines are empty except for night-shift workers and eccentric billionaires. The subs heading the other way into Ueno are human freight wagons. Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by five A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and everything surges back toward the center, where mass densens for the next explosion. My commute is against the natural law of Tokyo. I feel dead beat. Giving up on my father is taking some getting used to. Ai is coming over to my capsule after her rehearsal, at about five in the afternoon. Her dinner is my breakfast. To my relief she asked if she could do the cooking— she prefers to choose what sh
e eats because of her diabetes. To call my culinary repertoire “limited” would be boastful. Walking back from Kita Senju Station to Shooting Star, a weird cloud slides over half the sky. Cyclists, women with strollers, taxi drivers stop to stare up at it. Half the sky is clear October blue—the other half is a dark funnel of storm cloud. Plastic bags get caught in vortexes and fly up to heaven. Buntaro is in the store early to bring the accounts up to date after his week away. He looks up at me and sniffs. “I know,” I say, “I know. Cheese.” Buntaro shrugs, all innocence, and goes back to his calculator. I crawl upstairs. Cat bids me good morning before vanishing into her universe. I wash her bowl, change her water, shower, and decide to have a quick nap before cleaning up for Ai.

  My face is melted out of position. My tongue is a pumice stone. Saliva, collected in my tongue-root gully, drools out onto my pillow. At my table, Ai chops carrots and apples. For a moment I think I have married Ai, and she is making dinner for our nine children—but then I smell the apple. Nutmeg, too. Cat is licking her paws, watching me. Buntaro lets Ai up, she knocks, I am too deeply asleep to wake up, Buntaro confirms I am definitely up here, Ai peers in, sees me, goes out and buys food for a salad. Life is crisp bliss when it wants to be. Ai must trust me, to be alone with me in my capsule while I am dressed—or not dressed—how I am. Being trusted makes me trustworthy. Carrot and apple go together great. She is chopping walnuts—I never much cared for walnuts until this moment—and raisins, and sprinkles them over lettuce. She is wearing old jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt lighter than her skin and her hair is up. Here is that mythical neck. She scrapes peelings into the garbage bag. She wears thick black-framed glasses that suit her in a quirky sort of way. Ai never ever tries to impress, and that impresses me so much. She has a silver pirate earring. “Hey, Kyushu Cannibal,” she says—I realize all this time she knew I was watching her—and chords inside me change from A flat to loose-string D minor, I am that happy. “Why do you keep letters in your icebox?”

  “Watch out,” says Ai, “I think there may be fish in these bones.”

  “It tastes great.”

  “Do you live entirely on noodle cups?”

  “I vary my diet with pizza, courtesy of Nero. Mind if I finish the salad?”

  “Do, before you die of scurvy. You never told me about your view.”

  “That is no view. Yakushima has views.”

  “It beats the view Sachiko and I have at present. We used to overlook a low-security prison exercise yard. That was quite nice. I used to leave the windows open and play Chopin waltzes back-to-back. But then I got back from class one day to find a parking garage had sprung up since breakfast. Now we have a view of concrete six inches away. We want to move, but paying a deposit on a new place would wipe out our savings.”

  The telephone riiiiiiiiings. I answer: “Hello?”

  “Miyake!”

  “Suga? Where are you?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Downstairs, where?”

  “Downstairs here. Mr. Ogiso tells me you have company in your chambers—but would you mind if I come up?”

  I do, to be honest. “Sure. Come up.”

  When Suga enters my capsule I gape. He has apparently had a body transplant. His eczema has vanished. He has a contoured haircut that must have cost ten thousand yen. He is wearing the suit of a Milanese diamond robber, and Revolver-period Lennon electric-folksinger glasses. “Are you going for an interview?” I ask. Suga ignores me and bows shyly at Ai. “Hi, I’m Masanobu Suga. Are you Miyake’s Korean girlfriend?”

  Ai bites the head off a celery stick and looks at me quizzically.

  “No, uh, no. Suga, this is Miss Imajo.”

  Ai looks thoughtful. “Suga the Snorer?”

  Now Suga looks confused. “I—er—Miyake?”

  “Uh . . . Some other time.”

  The only sound in this very awkward pause is celery being munched. Suga breaks it with some news. “There won’t be another time for a long time—I came to say goodbye.”

  “Leaving Tokyo?” I chuck a cushion down for him. “Near or far?”

  Suga slips out of his sandals and sits down. “Saratoga.”

  “Which prefecture is that in?”

  Ai has heard of it. “Saratoga, eastern Texas?”

  “Heart of the desert.”

  “Beautiful.” Ai munches. “But wild.”

  I find a sort of clean cup. “Why are you going to a desert?”

  “I’m not allowed to tell anyone exactly why.”

  I pour his tea. “Why not?”

  “I’m not allowed to tell anyone that, either.”

  “Is any of this to do with your Holy Grail?”

  “After I left here last week, I went to my research room and got my brain back in gear. So offensively obvious. Write a Waldrop search program, smuggle it into the file field, and get it to scan through the nine billion files to see if a real Holy Grail site had been hidden anywhere, right? My first attempt backfired. In megabyte terms it was like trying to squeeze China through the Sumida Tunnel. The Pentagon immune system recognizes the program as an alien body, zaps it, and launches a tracer program. I only just get out in time.”

  “The Pentagon?” Ai asks.

  Suga twiddles his thumbs, modest and boastful. “So I sleep on the problem for a couple of days, then—deep genius busts the door down. Dawn raid of inspiration. I break into the Pentagon immune system, softjack its own OS, muzzle its alarms with a highly localized Jassemstyle virus, and get it to search the very files its job is to protect! Like retraining your enemy’s sniffer dogs to show you his hidey-hole. I make it sound easy, I know, but first I had to boot my flight path through six different zombies across six different cell-phone networks, second I had to rewrite Jassem’s bioform program, third—”

  “You did it?”

  Suga lets the details slide. “I did it. But the number of Holy Grails it had to check was, right, deeply cosmic. Think about it. Nine billion files, at the apex of nine billion pyramids, each one built of nine billion files—as far as I had dared to look. After turning loose my search program, I drowse off. Deep Sleep City. It is eleven in the morning by now, right—I worked at my computer since seven the evening before, and you know how low I was last week. My body decided to shut down until I was fully repaired. So. What next? I wake up to find three men searching my office. Late afternoon, deep shock. One guy—a hacker, I can tell—is downloading all my personal files onto a handheld drive I’d never even seen before. Second guy, an older headmaster type, is making an inventory of my hardware. The third is this fat, sunburned foreigner in a cowboy hat leafing through my Zax Omega mangas and drinking my beer. I was too amazed to be scared. The headmaster guy flashes some ID at me—Data Protection Agency, ever heard of that?— and tells me I have violated the Japan–United States Bilateral Defense Treaty and that I have the right to remain silent but that if I don’t want to be tried for espionage under U.S. jurisprudence at the nearest military base, I had better get down on my knees and blab for dear life.”

  “Is all this true?” Ai asks me.

  “Is all this true?” I ask Suga.

  “I was wishing to hell that it wasn’t. The buggery scenes in every prison movie I ever saw keep flashing before me. The headmaster gets out a matchbox-size recorder and starts firing questions at me. I’m expecting him to strap electrodes to my balls. How had I got into the Pentagon in the first place? How had I softjacked their antiviral OS? Was I working alone? Who had I spoken to since? Had I heard of any of the following organizations—I hadn’t, I can’t even remember them now. They know what schools I went to, where I live, everything. Then the hacker guy talks technical data—I can see he is impressed with my zombie ring. Even so, it gets dark, and I don’t know what they plan to do to me. Finally, the foreigner, who has been flicking through my photo albums and MasterHacker, speaks to the headmaster, in English. I realize he is the one in charge here. I ask if I can take a leak. The younger hacker accompanies me—I ask hi
m for some more lowdown but he shakes his head. We get back to my office and headmaster offers me a job or prosecution under some obscure but terrifying-sounding law buried in the U.S.-Japan Defense Pact. He describes the job, and the money—serious Big Time! Artificial intelligence, missile shield systems”—Suga bites his lips. “Whoops. That’s the only downer. I can’t go around boasting to anyone about it.”

  “What about IBM and your university?”

  “Yeah, that was my next question. Headmaster nods at the foreigner—the foreigner barks an order into his cell phone. ‘Already taken care of, Mr. Suga,’the headmaster tells me. ‘And we can arrange a Ph.D. if your parents are worried about qualifications. Would MIT be acceptable? Other details can be worked out later.’ In fact, I fly out the day after tomorrow, so I have a million things to do. I brought you a present, Miyake. I considered tropical fruit, but this is a bit more personal. Here.” He produces a square case, flips it open, and unclips a black flat thing. “This is my finest home-cultivated computer virus. For peacetime uses.” For the second time in two days I am being given a computer disk. “Uh . . . thanks. Nobody ever gave me a virus before.” Ai mutters something, and then speaks up: “If those things get into hospital systems they put lives at risk. Do you ever think about that?” Suga nods righteously, and slurps his tea. “For sure. Ethical cyberexplorers are responsible, yeah? We are friendly ghosts in the machine, not poltergeists or hooligans. We are a growing breed. Over sixty-five percent of top-flight systems explorers are ethical.” Ai gives Suga a black look. “And over eighty-five percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.” Suga soldiers on. “Take this virus—‘Mailman,’ I call it—it delivers your message to every addressee on the address book of whoever you send it to. Then it duplicates itself and delivers itself to all the addresses in those address books—and so on, for ninety-nine generations. It doesn’t even need to be opened. Neat or what? Direct democracy, it is. Freedom of speech. Mailman can’t be censored—it outperforms any antiviral software on the market. But it won’t harm any system it enters.” Ai looks unconvinced. “Spreading junk mail to tens of thousands of people doesn’t strike me as especially ethical.” Suga has a proud-father beam. “Not junk mail! Miyake can spread whatever message of joy and peace he wants to hundreds of thousands of users. It isn’t the sort of thing I can take to Texas, Saratoga being a top-secret research installation, right, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste.”