Hold on. Just because this was how he appeared to himself, that didn’t mean it was how he would appear to everyone else. Come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed anyone react with disgust or horror towards him. No one passing him on the sidewalk seemed to take special notice of him despite his uniform. On the contrary, they hardly seemed to notice he was there at all. The only time their gazes paused on him was when he was directly in their path, and even then they simply stepped around him and moved on without even looking him up and down. Perhaps they’re just too distracted by the InfoFlux to pay me any mind, he supposed, until he noticed that the crowd treated his companion exactly the same way, neither the streetwalkers nor the drivers giving him a second glance. There was just no way a fat, balding man wearing a jumpsuit made of pockets could blend in, even in a district like Akihabara or Harajuku where people often wore digiguises, let alone amongst this workaday crowd. The man’s son had looked straight through them, suggesting they had been edited out of his feed, which was perplexing in its own way. But these people could see them and yet apparently not in the way that Amon and the man saw themselves, which returned Amon to his initial question: What exactly did they look like?
Amon had no idea, but he stared deeply into the eyes of the multifarious men and women blurring by, as if to dredge his figure from their souls. And although he succeeded at no such thing, his thoughts soon arrived at what seemed the most likely conclusion: that he and the man were digimade in the most generic way possible, probably as salarymen in typical business attire. If he was right, then the default settings of every Free Citizen’s overlay digimade bankdead to be maximally inconspicuous, preventing them from either appalling or distracting. So while Amon was isolated from the meaning of the metropolis and the minds of the denizens who shared of it, he was being simultaneously incorporated into it, a thread of the wrong material woven imperceptibly into the same cloth. Never had he felt more lonesome and estranged despite the proximity of so many, and the feeling only worsened each time he and the man walked by one of the automated doors that fronted the street, for they steadfastly refused to budge only for them.
As the minutes went by, Amon’s gaze drifted over the countless faces streaming past, and he was surprised to discover how many variations there were. Physiognomic diversity that had been eliminated by esthetic algorithms now appeared vividly before him. The location of a birthmark or a freckle, the angle of an akimbo jaw, the dimensions of an oversized ear, the intricate topography of acne craters and wrinkles, the detailed coloration of eye redness—idiosyncratic flaws were endless and ugliness was infinite, while beauty, it seemed, was a narrow set of possibilities. At the same time, Amon was surprised at the uniformity of their dress. They wore garments of different sizes to fit their bodies, and there were different types like jeans and chinos, blazers and vests. But without brand names, logos, and overlaid designs, there was little to distinguish garments of each type. The same was true of the cars, with sedans, jeeps, convertibles, and trucks that seemed almost interchangeable, except for slight variations in their dimensions and degree of wear. The same was true of vending cuisine and beverages. The same was true of all sorts of products surely, Amon realized. And while everyone believed their precious possessions were designed by product development teams just for them—in accordance with the finest breakdown and analysis of their unique preferences, personalized to their very essences—there seemed to be little difference between anything anyone owned. Some strutted proudly with their chests puffed out, like an elite executive or an emperor, while others hung their heads meekly, but to Amon all appeared equal in their unattractiveness and unimportance. It was only because of the job he had done as a Liquidator that the digital differences of more money and less money, better style and worse style, higher status and lower status became palpable differences. For without the threat of bankruptcy, it would all be so much specious nonsense.
At least that was how it looked to bankdead Amon. He questioned the validity of his own perspective, especially since he still saw everything without color and was now visited occasionally by other, more worrisome sensory disturbances. Like how a face would occasionally break up into a granulated enigma of shaded flesh. Or how the angles of the streets ahead would warp into spirals that corkscrewed into an endless horizon, the skyline collapsing into a flat, distanceless smattering of texture. Engine rumble melting into a woman’s snore. Oddly enough, the most dependable aspect of his world seemed to be the strange man—his guide?—without whom his journey would have surely ended before it began, Amon fading away like the netherbeing that he was into this vague husk of a city called naked Tokyo.
4
THE NEAR SHORE
As Amon followed his guide to the ends of the metropolis, only the cityscape’s transitions marked the passage of time, the streets growing wider and narrower, busier and calmer. Seconds or minutes or hours passed as unending tracts of chipped, crusty concrete passed underfoot. As sheer cliffs of smudged glass and metal reeled along on both sides. As countless identical cars blurred by on rattling, wheezing engines. The sloppy, blemished streetwalkers misting around him, their eyes and minds an infinite distance away. Tokyo’s titillating buzz had been syringed from its veins, the bland hum of one-sided conversations, whine of motorbikes, and swish of automatic doors the only sorry excuse for stimulation it still retained.
Gradually the air grew clingy as a swirling, granular fuzz seemed to smother everything in sight. This thickened with every step, until Amon could smell a solvent sting and taste a sort of battery-char tang on his tongue, feeling as though he were being digested by the metropolis. When at last the stench of the river began to mingle with this smog, Amon identified a distinct time: it was twilight. With the sun now fallen far beneath the looming skyline, evening shade began to creep its cool over the concrete at his feet. And catches of a cloying barnacle-turpentine pong slipped on drafts through the alleys he passed into his nostrils, announcing the approach of his initial destination, the threshold between city and camps, between bank life and death: the Sanzu River.
Now that Amon was certain the river was near, his anxiety about where they might be headed settled down, but was replaced immediately by a jittery foreboding. For what would the best of all possible slums look like? Soon he would see with his own eyes, not the humanidocupromo images all Free Citizens knew, but the place itself. Soon he would cross over, perhaps never to return, and his jaw began to tremble at the very thought.
Every now and then the man would stop for a moment and scan the rooftops in the direction the sun had set, only faint traces of shaded swirls in the sky to show it had ever been there. Soon the air was darkening as the dregs of the day sank beneath the hidden horizon. By the time they arrived at the Sanzu River, night was beginning to blot out the streets. The roads and sidewalks sketched in pitch, the skyscrapers lining the road like monoliths of nothingness reaching into the sky. Amon could barely see his guide right in front of him, until they turned left off a broad, busy boulevard onto a narrow laneway and the view before them opened up like never before.
At the end of the lane, they stepped out onto a raised walkway that stretched in both directions above a concrete riverbank, beyond which was a massive watercourse glimmering faintly under light from the other side. Was that blurry, glowing mass way over there the District of Dreams? It was hard for Amon to make anything out in the distance with his still-healing eyes, but what else could it be?
The man had already taken a seat on the edge of the concrete ledge facing the river, his legs dangling down. Seeing that they were taking a break, Amon used this opportunity to go down the nearest of the stairwells running to the riverbank at intervals of about twenty meters. There he leaned against the railing that bordered the water’s edge to get a better view of his imminent future.
Across the river, a dark, mountain-like mass towered, slight jagged irregularities at the top silhouetted against the sky in the soft white glow of what looked like lanterns. In various
places—both high and low along this structure—these round lights wavered in the breeze, some fixed in one spot while others wandered slowly, appearing and disappearing, climbing and dropping, approaching and receding. Wherever their shifting, scattered circles of illumination were cast, Amon could see segments of the looming darkness carved out into skyscraper shafts and thin alleys past which innumerable figures melted in a steady stream. Particles of something kept fluttering down through these lit-up areas, almost like black snowflakes though it was the heat of summer, and a few of the lanterns seemed to break apart, like crumbling cookies of light, contributing radiant crumbs to the shadow flurry.
What awaits me on the far shore? wondered Amon, transfixed by the strange, baffling scene, this question summoning memories of the many sympathvertisements he’d seen. Scrubby men, women, and children in rags lining up before volunteers who doled out supplies from boxes stacked behind them. Mothers proffering babies to nurses who lay them gently in rows of little cribs. A preschooler sitting on the lap of a Charity Brigade freekeeper laughing with joy. Such images represented all that he knew about the District of Dreams, and only now that its border was nearly in plain sight did he realize how incomplete they were. While they displayed the good work of the venture charities, an important facet of the camps to be sure, details on the day-to-day life of bankdead were scarce. Yes, there were videos introducing the various slum tours, hikes, and safaris on offer, but they provided only glimpses so as not to give away too much of their product. Where were the exposés on the conditions residents faced? Where were the interviews with grassroots operators on the ground trying to make lasting improvements? Perhaps they were available on silver and gold search engines, but Amon had never been interested or rich enough to check and it was too late now.
He could hear the faint hiss of countless whispers drifting over the water and the swish of cars along a highway not far behind him as he traced the course of the river with his gaze. It ran right to left, curving itself away out of sight on both ends like a bow of flowing lead, the dull membrane of its surface distorting with the eddies and undulating sway. Wavering and warping with the waves and current, he could see a spatter of stars. Yet while his eyes could capture the reflection, they fell short of the reflected, and looking up into the cloudless sky all he saw were diffuse shimmers like sunbeams through a kaleidoscope smeared against the black curtain of space. This was his first time seeing the sky and river without the ImmaNet, he realized, and his mind was simply not up to the task of perceiving them.
When Amon looked back at the far shore straight ahead, his fingers began to twitch involuntarily again. Concerned, he raised his right hand and saw that he was doing the gestures for zoom in. Once again, he felt frustration rise in him at being trapped in his body, unable to turn on night vision and toss his perspective across the river, or even search for “District of Dreams” on FlexiPedia. But he knew such thoughts would only irritate him further, and as a cool sea breeze along the river stroked his hands and scalp, Amon tried to remember what he knew about this place. Immediately a map he’d once seen floated up into his mind’s eye. A huge almond-shaped territory bordered on all sides by thin channels of water. The fresh water of the Sanzu River separated it from Tonan Ward to the east, where he now stood, and the saline Tokyo Canal from the Miura Peninsula to the west. These two streams wrapped around the shoreline and merged at the southern point of the almond, where they wove their way between an archipelago of smaller artificial islands and at last fed into the Pacific. At the northern tip, the Bridge of Compassion served as both a dam between these two bodies of water and as the main land bridge connecting the city to the camps. There had been no neighborhoods or municipal divisions of any kind on the map, just one contiguous landmass. For all the detail the map provided, it might as well have been one of the blots on the globe he’d found when searching with God’s Eye for his dream forest. Already Amon could tell it was nothing like the spick and span city he had beheld from the window of the weekly mansion he and Mayuko had taken refuge in, just as he had suspected. The mystery of what lay ahead did fill him with a faint thrill of adventure and expectation, but this was overpowered by his dread. The longer he looked at the distant cityscape—with its crumbling lights, shadow snow, dim figures, and cluttered architecture—the more intense became the conflict between his desire to cross immediately and his urge to run in the opposite direction. Of course he could do neither, and the contradictory energy of these impulses soon became so intense that he had to avert his gaze.
But when Amon turned around and looked back the way he had come, he was struck by an even more disturbing sight. Whereas the far side was lit by the uncertain glow of those crumbling lanterns, the metropolis on this side was completely dark. Not a streetlight or a headlight, a flashlight or a candle. The city he had inhabited for twenty-seven years was completely blacked out, just a great inky mound looming before him. He remembered the darkening streets they had just walked through, but with all the bewildering experiences that day he’d hardly taken notice. Never for a moment did he suspect that the night could have eaten Tokyo whole. Where was the promoglow that had danced constantly on the walls and windows, the sidewalks and cars? He wanted to blame this on his eyes, but then he recalled his flight from Shuffle Boom. Inside the elevator, when he’d hacked the nodes that connected the space to the ImmaNet and the overlay had peeled off the naked things beneath, the light too had disappeared, ripped off into the shaft above. Could the entire city have been like this? Could all light have been a projection, every glint and glimmer, every shine and shimmer? Considering these questions, he imagined himself and the man stepping onto this riverbank a few minutes earlier, emerging from blank absence as though from a cave for the first time.
The idea that he’d spent his entire life in darkness was too tragic and absurd to contemplate, so Amon swept his gaze about for something to get his mind off it and found the man sitting on the bottom of the ledge. Facing the river with his back up against the wall, he was just then taking out various individual-size snack packets from different pockets, and arranging them on the ground around him. When Amon saw the man unwrap an apple Danish and bite into it, he suddenly felt his stomach clench up with hunger and sat down beside him, laying his sack at the base of the wall. He could smell the man’s odor mingling with the smog and river fumes, and scooted about a meter away before eyeing the packets spread out on the ground.
“May I?” he asked, pinching a foil bag whose contents he couldn’t see between his fingers and holding it up. Glancing at the packet for only a split second, the man gave Amon another one of those borderline nods and tore open a pouch of some sort of powdered nugget. Amon popped his bag and poured it straight into his mouth, finding deep-fried cheesy fish puffs. When he finished chewing, he rummaged in his sack for more and was soon gnawing on beef jerky while the man crunched on peanuts. One after another, Amon plucked unlabeled junk food from his bag or the man’s spread and devoured them, tasting a sweet potato crepe, umeboshi kelp salad, pork cutlet roll. Containing mostly carbs, salt, chemicals, and sugar, it wasn’t the most satisfying meal and Amon was eager for the better nourishment he would surely find in the District of Dreams. But it was enough to fill him up temporarily, and he washed it all down with an opaque drink, his tongue blazing with the unmistakable flowery, carbonated cream of Cloud9 Nectar.
Having fulfilled his immediate hunger, Amon felt a touch of calm sink in again. It was the first time he’d sat down in … in a while anyway, and it felt good to get the weight off his sore feet, which had been punished by walking in dress shoes for so long. He watched as the man continued to eat, packing in pastry after salted snack and alternating with a gulp of some soft drink until scraps of torn plastic litter and bottles surrounded him. Gradually the man’s pace began to slow and after one last pinch of smoked squid he swept together all his litter with both hands, cradled it to his chest, and carried it to the river’s edge, where he dumped it all in. He then returned to t
he ledge and, sitting beside Amon in the same spot, turned to him and said, “How about our deal?”
The question caught Amon off guard, and he paused before responding, “Right. You want to hear my story?” The man gave that nod that wasn’t a nod. “Okay. Well … where should I begin?”
“The beginning. Where else?”
Amon considered this for a moment. What the man said made sense enough, but where was the beginning? He would have to skip to the very first seg in his LifeStream and did the gesture to open—
“But I’ve lost my … my ImmaNet. I mean, I can’t get the video.”
The man just gave him his off-target stare.
What does he expect me to do? Recall without assistance from my BodyBank? The past scenes in Amon’s head were so faded and dull in comparison to their digitally recorded counterparts that the work required to conjure them in his awareness hardly seemed worth the effort. And once they came to him, he would have to assemble them into a story himself, without the powerful banality filters he had always relied upon. Then there would be nothing to stop him from saying something incredibly boring. Recounting his life in a tolerably entertaining way without the sentence proposals and auto-correcting of VentriloQuick seemed like an impossible task … but the man had brought him to the Sanzu River as promised and if Amon wanted his help crossing he no doubt had to do his part. So he closed his eyes and reached shoulder-deep into the recesses of his unconscious, stretching and groping for the point where it all started. There he felt the trigger of diverse memories awaiting him, but most escaped his grasp, as though he were tugging off the tails of lizards hidden behind a curtain. Whatever he did manage to snag refused to stay in his private theatre, dissipating like a stale mist released from a cellar the moment he focused on it.
The Naked World Page 6