The Future Is Japanese

by Неизвестный

  Faint vibrations penetrate the soles of my shoes. The weight I gave up earlier is returned. I straighten my collar, smooth the hem of my skirt, and cough lightly. Two corrections officers wait in the corridor. An elaborate procedure verifies my identity. The older one says, “Thank you for your patience. Do you want to see him right away?”

  His misgivings seep through the politesse. It’s not because of my youth, lack of experience, or slim build.

  We walk down the corridor. A barred gate slides open, metal grating on metal, an atavistic sound. The younger officer steps me through the rules. Do not approach the barrier. Do not accept anything from him. Anything you need to give him goes into the cell through the sliding meal tray. No pens, no pencils. No paperclips. And no conversations of a personal nature under any circumstances.

  I almost laugh in his face. Personal? That’s right. I have to act like a “person” in here.

  My houndstooth jacket is tacky. My bag clashes with my shoes. This dungeon is so overdone. Do I have to explain the meaning of every one of these things?

  “Well then.” My escorts pull up short before the final gate. “This is as far as we go.”

  I walk on. The gate rumbles shut behind me. Barred cells line the left side of the corridor. All of them are empty. Farther down, a steel pipe chair stands in the middle of the corridor, facing Jundo’s cell. He is the only prisoner here.

  I sit down and face the cell. Jundo is directly across from me. Between us stretches a heavy glass barrier.

  He sits cross-legged on the bed with his back against the stone wall, staring at me.

  Jundo Mamiya. Forty-five years old. Novelist, playwright, poet, critic. At the pinnacle of his fame, the inexhaustible fount of a staggering oeuvre, each work without peer. A year from now, he’ll confess to seventy-three murders and pass sentence on himself, a sentence with no possibility of appeal.

  He killed himself.

  Jundo Mamiya. Just over five feet, heavily muscled like a judoka. Round face atop a thick neck, hair cropped close to the scalp. He’s utterly motionless, but he seems capable of sitting in this cross-legged posture for hours and then instantly breaking into a sprint. I’m certain he could reach me in a single motion. I can’t relax. Even with the barrier—

  I erase that from my mind very quickly. Just the thought is dangerous.

  “You needn’t worry. I won’t move from this spot.”

  Jundo speaks. It’s like my thoughts are transparent to him.

  “You were observing my posture. You’re right; my body is idling. It’s a technique of mine. But I repeat, you needn’t worry. I’ve no intention of harming you. I’ve been craving someone to talk to.”

  Coming from Jundo, nothing is more terrifying than you needn’t worry.

  “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Welcome. Why are you here?”

  “I want to talk with you.”

  “Conversation. I’ve been dying for it. What’s the topic? Concerning what I did? Or what I’m going to do?” Jundo asks.

  “Neither. People have been grilling you about your actions since you were a child. Criticism from parents and teachers. Fawning counselors interviewing you. I’d like to keep discussion of your past history to a minimum today. Just so you know, I already know everything about you. I’ve read your novels and essays, all several hundred of them.”

  Jundo rarely blinks. His face is a mask. He fixes motionless, half-closed eyes on me. “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t smell anything.” He points to the small round openings in the barrier. “When I have a guest, the trace aromas tell me whether the weather is fine or if it’s raining in the world up above. I can infer your brand of soap. Perfume. Skin lotion. But—” The slightest hint of wariness crosses his face. “There’s no odor about you at all. Fascinating. All sorts of airborne particles stick to people’s clothing and hair as they move. But not to you.”

  Jundo was a master profiler. He could characterize someone accurately from the smallest detail, even on first meeting. Casual conversation was all he needed. Invariably the other person would end up spilling his secrets without intending to. In such situations, Jundo often used his sense of smell as a guide.

  Which is why I made sure to erase any odor.

  “Are you really human?” he asks.

  I pause. “Are you really human?”

  A beat. Jundo is silent. He’s usually very verbal, but he can use silence strategically. This is different. He’s thinking, vast computations. The response comes back after a lag. Does he suspect the meaning of my question?

  “Intriguing. I’d have thought I was thoroughly tired of that question. But in this context, it’s refreshing.”

  “Mr. Mamiya—”

  A gesture cuts me off. “You haven’t told me your name.”

  I shake my head and smile. “I don’t have a name.”

  Jundo’s narrow eyes close. “No scent. No name. You’re far more interesting than a riddle. And that … that ensemble! That truly makes me want to hold my nose. It reeks—the rube jacket, the shabby pumps. Completely beyond redemption. It’s not what you usually wear, is it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Did someone put you up to this?” Jundo asks.

  “I wonder.”

  “There’ll be a motive of some sort. You planned that getup. And the subtext?”

  I’m at a delicate juncture here. If all I had to do was guide his attention to the truth, things would be straightforward. But I have to get him to notice the significance of the situation on his own by feeding him tiny hints that are hardly even clues.

  “Ah, yes,” says Jundo. “Now that I think of it, I recall a scene just like this. From a movie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  Jundo turns his face toward the wall. The rough-cut stone trapezoids are like the wall of a fortress. A fortress buried in the earth, tens of meters deep. Captivity with no possibility of escape.

  “Mmm, very impressive. Yes.” He considers. “And what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “I’d like you to take a look at this.” I take a book from my bag, an old, heavy book. Moby-Dick. The tome is large and thick. The surface of the massive leather cover is a jumble of bulges and furrows: tree roots, knots, an old man’s veins. The pages are swollen, bursting from the covers.

  “Waterlogged?” asks Jundo.

  “You’ll take a look?”

  I put the book in the meal tray and slide it into the cell. As Jundo opens the book, the pages separate with a sickening, gelatinous sound. His face contorts with disgust.

  “What is this, the work of some author who thinks he’s an artist?” He holds the book out to me. The letters multiply, spill out of their lines, overlap, devour each other, get bigger, turn pages black, metastasize to the cover, penetrate it, fuse into knots.

  “No. It’s an ordinary book. No gimmicks. One day it changed. In the end, it became what you see. No outside agent did that. The letters did it themselves.

  “Mostly it starts unnoticed. Letters in a line multiply. Closer examination shows the letters overlapping and replicating. Spaces open up in words, splitting them into terms with unknown meanings. The process accelerates. Soon the letters spill into the gaps between lines. They can’t be contained. The letters begin to overlap. Words join and swallow each other up or divide into new words.”

  The phenomenon manifests in a variety of forms. Sentences on a page might intertwine into a helix. Chapters shrink or explode. Letters expand or flake off the page. New pages form, letters invade the new space and breed there. Further detail would be pointless. That corpse of a book sprawled in Jundo’s cell—that tumor-devoured carcass—testifies to this bizarre destruction more eloquently than anything. But the carcass is not the final stage.

  “And you ask me to believe that?”

  I shrug my shoulders and glance at Moby-Dick. “Why would I come all the way here just to lie? You can see what’
s happening yourself. And you already believe, don’t you.”

  Jundo’s confidence in his senses is absolute. If he can see it and smell it, it’s real. That’s his creed. His calm is unshakeable.

  “It’s not just this book, is it?”

  “Unfortunately no. Thousands, tens of thousands of books have been infected by the same disease. And not only books.”

  I take a plastic case from my briefcase. A movie disc. The jacket photo shows two little girls in white standing side by side. An endless red-brown plain stretches into the distance behind them.

  “I don’t see the anomaly,” says Jundo.

  “At a certain point in visual works, a catastrophe occurs. The content changes.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Certainly.” I pass the disc through the slot.

  “Oh, that’s right.” He gives me an elfin wink. “Now you just need to send through the equipment to let me watch this.”

  “Very easily done.”

  “How are you going to get it in here?”

  I don’t answer immediately.

  “The person who designed and built this cell—that was you, wasn’t it?” says Jundo. “No, this jail, this whole prison is probably your creation. And you created me too, didn’t you? Created and ‘loaded’ me here.”

  I sigh, satisfied. Jundo’s acuity is truly marvelous. Not totally accurate, but still outstanding. I should mention that he was never held in a prison like this when he was alive. This is nothing more than an imagined location, generated from moment to moment.

  “I’ll prepare a viewing device now.” I gesture. A fully equipped screening setup appears in the corner of the cell, but Jundo shows no trace of surprise.

  “So why are you here?”

  “I wanted you to know that this phenomenon exists. We call it Imajika. All you have to do is talk to me, like we’re doing now.”

  One of Jundo’s eyes closes very slowly, then opens again. “And the reward?” Apparently that was a wink.

  “I know you’ll like it.”

  I take a small cassette tape player out of my bag. Its shell is cast as a single unit, completely enclosing the cassette. All risk has been carefully eliminated.

  “Magnetic tape. Very contemporary.” Jundo happily accepts the machine and presses one of its buttons. They’re in a line, like a keyboard. “Let’s hear what we’ve got.”

  The Goldberg Variations flows from the toylike speakers. The sound quality is superb.

  “Thank you. It’s not Gould, is it? But still, a wonderful performance. So—how should I say? So human.” A satisfied smile spreads over his face. He quietly hums the melody.

  I don’t trust that smile.

  Yet even Jundo’s smile is nothing more than my creation, a product of literal technology.

  Jundo Mamiya.

  A monster, fashioned from our corpses.

  #Imajika

  Alice Wong’s status as Imajika’s first victim is debated, but we won’t try to settle that here. Without a doubt she was an early example, one so sensational and tragic that it was carved into our memory as a crime for the ages. That much is certain.

  Alice was a celebrated poet. That morning, about three weeks after her thirteenth birthday, she was out on her daily run, working out ideas for new poems. No one else was on the streets at that hour. Her family was still in bed when she left the house. The wind carried a foretaste of the winter to come, and Alice loved the bracing feeling of cutting through it as she ran. The road was nearly dry, but the air still held the fragrance of rain from the night before.

  #Like eyes purified by tears #Autumn’s fair daybreak unfolds, crystalline

  This verse was left behind by the swarms of CASSYs that Alice used to propagate her apparently endless streams of poems. With their stripped-down feature set, restricted message size, and bare-bones AI, these unsophisticated CASSYs were blunt tools, but they could piggyback toll-free on the city’s pervasive services net, and they acted as useful assistants. Alice’s generation of women used CASSYs as personal secretaries to continuously convert their thoughts and actions into text. Users could choose from a wide range of expressive styles, all of them awful. But for Alice and her friends, that quirky AI style was part of the fun.

  CASSY-generated text—with location data, timestamp, ambient temperature, street views, and user browsing history—were routed to GEB, which stripped out personal ID tags and absorbed the text into its resources. GEB’s archive of anonymous murmurs and actions from people all over the world expanded constantly, from moment to moment.

  Alice often wove worthless CASSY snippets into her own poems. Her touch transformed these childish phrases into something compulsively appealing.

  #Long black hair in a pony tail/effortless acceleration/sugar maples by the road/crimson leaves splinter morning sunlight

  Alice’s voice and movements were recorded from tens of different distances and angles. Physiological data generated by bloodstream and nervous system sensors, links to the dozen or more literary works she was consulting, the music she was streaming, observation data from satellites in the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—the fresh data streaming over her from the pervasive services network was like an energizing wind as she ran that morning.

  Was her existence unraveling into untold strands of data? Or were strands of data weaving her into existence?

  As she focused on her run, she began to feel body and spirit funneling into the narrow borderland between weaving and unraveling. Far off within the vast space of her mind she saw a horizon, a mind regarding itself. Something reverberated there. She strained to make it out.

  Along that horizon, her poems were born.

  #Humanity in this era has nearly abandoned poetry #Since the Entangled Bookshelf and literal technology absorbed human knowledge, literature has not made a single creative impact #Alice Wong was one of the doves that landed on that blasted plain with an olive branch in her beak #A genius who limned herself anew in the tension between clashing character strings, cascading from all directions

  #The run was going great #Her horizon was sharper than ever, she felt the stirrings of several poems #She was in such good form, she wanted to start outputting them as soon as she got home

  #Feeling refreshed, she glanced up at the bright sky #She stopped to look at something strange in the sky #Her streaming hair fell to her back

  #Pebbles floating in the sky

  #Definitely there, floating high off the ground #But then they would be more than ten meters across #Shape and texture, smooth, like something from a stream bed #Ordinary pebbles, floating in the sky #Alice rubbed her eyes in surprise

  #Then there was just one pebble, as if there wasn’t a sky at all #No sense of illusion, no Magritte feel, just a realistic pebble

  #And

  #In an eye blink, the stone disappeared

  Alice craned her neck, peering upward. Whatever had been there a moment ago was nowhere to be seen.

  By now, Alice had already been subjected to an intrusive, destructive contact from Imajika. In a split second—from her point of view—the contact ended and Imajika was gone. Alice resumed her run without realizing what had happened. She went back to planning her next batch of poems, completed her usual circuit, and returned home. Her selfhood had already been destroyed, but she had no awareness of it.

  As the maid served breakfast, Alice turned to her mother to tell her about the strange sight she had witnessed. She searched for a word, cocked her head.

  And froze.

  She was trying to remember how to say something she had never said before, but Imajika had already destroyed the retrieval pathways. The features that made Alice distinctively herself, personal settings she had fashioned over thirteen years, were corrupted; her search function was disabled. Her awareness had lost its way. But because there was no return path, she dropped.

  Living organisms are highly flexible systems. The brain can recover from sleep, lapse of consciousness, or corrupted awareness as t
hough nothing happened. Before her family even noticed, Alice’s awareness moved smoothly to reboot itself.

  But her settings were corrupted. No one knows what Alice saw when those settings were read into her mind on startup. The maid’s CASSYs recorded the entire tragedy. Alice screamed throughout the incident. She was the fearful exterminator, but she was also the one who was most fearful, the most ravaged by terror. Two people died and three were slightly injured in the Wong Family Dining Room Incident. Her mother, mortally wounded, crawled into the kitchen. A falling refrigerator—she had toppled it to create a barricade—killed her daughter. The mother was declared dead two hours later at the hospital.

  That was as far as it went, at least at the scene of the crime.

  The problem was that Alice Wong was a poet.

  Alice’s poems were not written by putting pen to paper. Such poems were already extinct. Her poems were a typhoon of words run amok on GEB, the “Golden Eternal Bookshelf,” as she thought of it. With CASSY support, Alice often generated up to a hundred poems a day. When new poems were entered into her archive on GEB, the words were deployed according to their potential, mixing with previous poems, multiplying and dividing repeatedly, keeping her works fresh and new. GEB was home to several thousand collections of poetry, but Alice’s poems were the most full of life, the most introspective and sensual, and her readers were hungry for more. As her collection detonated other works and devoured them whole, it grew to almost unequaled size.

  If typhoons are like living organisms metabolizing heat and water, Alice’s poems were a life force that metabolized the freshness of language. Alice was nearly always online, connected to her collection of poems, and although she and her CASSYs were contributing new poems all the time, the typhoon was never the same from moment to moment, yet never anything but distinctively Alice Wong.

  Some people are excited by typhoons. Others chase tornados. Alice’s poems were accessed by a vast audience that loved her gale force winds.

  This morning was no exception.

  The corruption of her settings spread to this typhoon of words, sending it spinning out of control. Some who surfed in to rubberneck at the explosion of language were killed instantly. Hundreds of others had their settings totally corrupted. The impact varied, but a few of these victims were driven to acts that closely matched Alice’s.