The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Directly outside was a staircase, and a meter in front of that the exterior wall of another room. Sticking his head out beyond the edge of the stairs, he found a vertical tunnel or fissure only about two meters wide. Below he could see a sort of flooded canal walled by the structure Amon was in and the adjacent one ahead, but an overhanging ledge blocked his view upwards and jutting shelters blocked his view left and right. There was little else visible from where he was. If he wanted to get a better vantage, it seemed, he would have to move.

  Here we go, he thought, into the District of Dreams. And with trepidation, Amon stepped out onto the stairs. Running diagonally up to the right, they linked to the line of stairs attached to the wall of the next room above, forming a zigzag that went up half-story by half-story through the tunnel. As there were no connecting stairs below, Amon’s only option was to climb. In three strides with his long legs, he reached the end of each flight before doubling back to the next one and continuing upwards. The steps were little more than flat nubs, like the blades of paddles sticking from the wall, and since there were no railings, he stepped with heightened tightrope carefulness, steadying himself by grabbing the bottom of the stairs above whenever they were in reach.

  He could hear a muffled hum of muttering and whispers emanating from every direction, as though the buildings themselves were conversing, and a steady excretion of flakes gently pelted his head and arms as he ascended. For about a dozen half-stories, the stairpath continued upwards like this, until it wrapped around to another wall of the same shaft and he stepped around to the other side. Then a few flights up it shifted to a neighboring shaft separated by a small gap that he needed to hop. At one point the stairs ended entirely so that Amon had to stop and search for a moment before he found a new staircase starting behind his head and turned around to climb onto it.

  He continued like this for several minutes—zigzagging, winding, turning, and climbing—until he guessed that he was fairly high up. Though with the tight enveloping walls built of misaligned cubes sticking out and leaning at erratic angles around him, and his only light a faint glow filtered through cracks between them, he couldn’t see more than a few half-stories up or down at any time and had no way to determine his elevation.

  The air was musty and thin in the fissure, and he was just beginning to feel short of breath when he heard someone slide a door open below him. Startled and afraid to meet anyone in this strange, constricted place, Amon hurried upwards panting as he went. Soon the encompassing murmur grew louder and he could tell he was approaching many voices above him. A couple more flights and the stairpath came to a roofway about eight rooms wide that was packed with bodies trudging from right to left. Immediately an intense reek, much like that of Tamper but ten thousand times stronger, struck his nostrils, and he hesitated on the top step, watching in awe as hundreds passed slowly by, his first up-close encounter with bankdead in a group.

  Amon found them hideous, even worse than the undigimade Free Citizens yesterday. They were gaunt, pale-skinned, and milky-eyed. Many were missing teeth and those they had were brown and chipped, sometimes black and visibly rotten. Some had skin bright red with eczema or acne, dotted with warts, blotted with purplish discoloration. Some had black eyes and scabs, gashes and scars. Others hobbled along, hunching, limping or dragging a paralyzed limb. Though Amon found their ages hard to reckon, the majority appeared to be adolescents, teenagers, or early twenty-somethings, with few over thirty and none over forty. Many, irrespective of their age, carried babies sitting bundled to their chests.

  Everyone wore a combination of T-shirt and shorts in plain, subdued colors that were in varying degrees of disintegration just like the buildings, from untorn to moth-eaten to barely clinging rags, flakes of fabric wafting in their vicinity. None of the women had bras, and glancing down, he saw that they were all barefoot, that no one in the crowd had shoes.

  Suddenly Amon heard someone behind him yelling impatiently in words he didn’t understand, and feeling their hand prod his back, he bristled and hopped forward, slotting himself in. The crowd’s force began to shuffle him along and they immediately passed through a square tunnel. On the other side, Amon found himself in a trench cut two stories deep and four roofs wide into the floor of what looked like a cavern made out of stacked shelters. Narrow dissolving skyscrapers joined together into upside-down-stair-like structures that leaned inwards from all directions, meeting overhead to counterbalance each other and form an irregular dome of jutting sharp angles.

  Looking around, he was taken aback by how seamless the city was. Though the metropolis that raised him was an endless swathe of tightly clustered buildings that blocked all horizons, there were always slivers through which one could see beyond to the InfoSky. Here he could see no such breaks, just a solid mass enclosing him, with some new layer of obstruction always looming behind any other. Even looking straight up yielded no vista but irregular arching shafts overshadowing all. Though the elevation was high, it almost felt subterranean and it was hard to tell how light from the sun crept in. There weren’t even roads or proper walkways. The constant flow of bodies had to carve its passage through whatever spaces could be found, rising up start-and-stop stairs and along irregularly terraced rooftop ledges, spilling into crevices and squeezeways, cramping the open squares and jumping the gaps. Thousands squirmed along every available surface, entering and leaving the cavern along the tightest pathways, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical, sometimes sloping precipitously.

  Viewed from in their midst, the staggered stages of disintegration for each room didn’t appear to be the result of age or blight. Every wall, even on the heavily perforated rooms, looked newer than the buildings in Tokyo, without rust, dirt, or wear of any kind. They were simply coming apart for whatever reason, immaculate rooms atop brittle waifs, vice versa, and everything in between. The downward-drifting flakes they gave off filled the air, a motley assortment of rooms shedding a motley assortment of materials that fluttered over and around the heads of the crowd—tinted glass, aluminum siding, straw, cobblestone, split log, vinyl, clapboard, granite, limestone, off-white toilet seat, red brick—mingling with the flakes from their clothes, which seemed to be dissolving too. Amon held out his palm to catch one. Bringing his hand down to inspect it, the surface looked like wood. Except it had a jagged crystalline structure like a snowflake and was shaped like a flower petal. Less than feather-light, it was almost weightless and soon blew away, though he felt not the slightest draft.

  With so many people crammed in this tight, unventilated space, the heat and humidity were like nothing Amon had ever experienced. The air seemed to hang so utterly still around his skin he felt as though it might solidify and seal him in while melting him into a new form, like the factory mold of plastic figurines. Now the body odor combined with other smells, the dominant one being a strange combination of gasoline and watermelon. Beneath this stench, he caught occasional wafts of something musty and eggy, like sulfur mixed with deep-fryer fumes and mold, and something earthy that was even worse. At the same time, droplets of fluid regularly fell tap-drop on his head, running down his cheeks and neck with his sweat.

  While many plodded along silently around him, enough of them were talking in low voices to each other that a murmuring buzz echoed through the uneven contours of the cavern. Even when Amon could make out the sounds, he could understand none of it as they were speaking the camp dialect, pejoratively called Hinkongo. While it supposedly incorporated many Japanese words, the pronunciation was too unfamiliar for him to catch them, and he had no chance with the Korean, English, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Russian vocabulary mixed in. The buzz was layered with the crying of babies and the calling of crows: rakhaw, rakhaw, rakhaw. There seemed to be a whole flock of them above at any given moment, though Amon could never spot them.

  Trudging along, Amon watched architectural formation after formation pass by—from deformed pyramidal alcoves to tottering tilted towers to petal-spitting heaps of rubble where whole
sections had collapsed—and he began to catch glimpses inside rooms through jagged holes in walls and the occasional open doorway. There he saw lone residents hunched against walls or couples cuddling on floors, the spaces invariably devoid of furniture, with only a few small items he couldn’t identify scattered in the shadows. In dark nooks left by oddly fitting corners, children huddled while adults crouched on elevated stairwell stoops with blank downcast eyes. Down cracks and tunnels here and there, he also caught the gleam of glass and steel, and supposed it was from the luxury condos that had been built there during the infamous construction debacle … or at least what remained of them after all these decades.

  Amon couldn’t think to describe how all these sights and sounds and smells made him feel. It was all too absurd for him to even accept, let alone articulate in his mind, his new abode like the dregs of countless dreams brewed again into an impossible new nightmare.

  Soon the progress of the crowd began to slow, and beyond the bobbing headscape up ahead, Amon saw that the trench was blocked by a skyscraper with only a narrow passage busted in its wall. With everyone in the trench apparently headed in the same direction, Amon began to wonder where they were all going.

  “Excuse me,” he said, turning to a gnarly dreadlocked woman beside him who looked around thirty. Her eyes went wide and she flinched slightly as though surprised and afraid. “Sorry to bother you, but do you know where this path leads?”

  The woman frowned, apparently confused by his question, but after a few seconds, “Thez ez thah Rawd teh Delayvry,” she responded in the accent bankdead had when trying to speak standard Japanese. Road to Delivery? Amon was about to ask more when the woman ducked her head into the crowd and slipped away.

  Puzzling over her wariness, Amon realized how much he stood out here, just the opposite of how he’d blended in on the other side. Here was this tall man, with a buzzed head, relatively clean-shaven, the only blemishes on his skin scars from long-faded teenage acne, wearing (admittedly somewhat scuffed) dress shoes and a full suit, while everyone around him was shoeless, ungroomed, their plain summer clothes falling off their bodies. That would explain why he sensed eyes scanning him from head to toe, though when he looked around no one would ever meet his gaze, and why there always seemed to be extra space around him in the crowd, as though he were a glob of oil in water.

  In his uniform before cash crashing, he had stood out even in the Free World, as Liquidators were generally feared and revered. But he could only guess what impression he made on the people here. Had they ever seen a Liquidator before? Certainly the crashdead had, though Liquidator dispatches here were extremely rare to Amon’s knowledge, as bankrupts rarely tried to hide out in the camps, so most crashborn probably hadn’t. They most likely mistook him for bankliving, whatever significance that had for them, but he doubted many connected his gray uniform with the profession it signified.

  The earthy smell increased suddenly as the wall to his right ended, opening up into a gap between buildings where the rooms fell away to form the jumbled cube-terraced sides of a steep valley. Jostled by the crowd, Amon found himself pushed up to the edge and overwhelmed by an atrocious stench rising from the bottom, where he saw a pool of thick, mud-like liquid. Lining one side of this open sewer were several stairwells, from one of which stood three boys pissing over the side. Where their streams fell on the surface of the mire was a mound crawling with insects and rats. Could those long whitish objects sticking out of the mud be human bones?

  To stop his gagging, Amon reeled in his gaze and saw that he was approaching the skyscraper hole into which everyone was pouring. Whatever extra room the crowd might have been giving him soon disappeared as the trench began to bottleneck. Suddenly the weight of bodies crushed in on him so tight the air was pressed right out of his lungs, and he felt hands groping and patting him from all sides. While the men and women encircling him all seemed oblivious, averting their gaze from him as before, their hands were touching him everywhere as if they had minds of their own, reaching into his pockets, between his armpits, down his shirt, into his pants.

  “Off!” he wheezed, unable to muster enough breath despite the panic electrifying his whole body. “Hands off!” Even those closest to him didn’t hear, or pretended not to, and he wriggled spasmodically as though that might brush them away, but the groping only seemed to grow more frenetic. Raising his arms, he put his hands onto two shoulders and used all his strength to push himself up, leaping out of the squeeze. The crowd closed in tighter, trapping his legs, and he relaxed his arms, letting his body ride them, so he could reach down for his holster. He found two hands engaged in a tug of war over his duster and wrenched it up from between them, before putting the tip of the barrel into the back nearest to him and screaming, “Back off or I’ll shoot!” The man or woman—Amon couldn’t tell in the melee—fought their way scrambling into the crowd away from him. Nearby onlookers soon spotted the gun Amon held over their heads and began to flee frantically. He couldn’t tell where they found the room to get away, but the bodies soon evaporated from his vicinity, and with nothing to support him he plopped to his knees. Not wanting to be overtaken, he sprang to his feet and spun, wheeling his duster in a circle in case anyone dared to approach. Amon had never identified the faces of his assailants and had no idea who to trust, so he wanted to keep them all away. Voices some distance behind him were shouting out complaints as the scuffle had brought the procession to a standstill.

  “Keep moving!” he huffed to everyone nearby, still panting, and flicked his gun towards the skyscraper hole. All who saw him obeyed his gesture and started forward, maintaining even more distance from him than before as he too continued on ahead.

  With the duster still firmly gripped in one hand, he patted himself down with the other as he proceeded, discovering that the food and drinks in his pockets were gone, though the plastic roll was still safely in his jacket. Rolling it open on in his palm, he saw that the five sheets were sliced-open plastic bottles and found tiny etchings written in neat vertical lines down both sides. Some kind of strange script that he’d never seen before and couldn’t read …

  On the other side of the hole, Amon saw that the crowd began to diverge up ahead, everyone taking one of three separate routes. Some went up a stairpath to an elevated alley on the right, some climbed a series of terraced rooftops that wound up around a corner to the left, and some disappeared down a hole in the floor just before a dead end in the trench ahead.

  Now that he was finally presented with a choice, not just bumped relentlessly along a fixed course, Amon remembered that Tamper had told him to go to a place called Xenocyst and find a man named Hippo. That, he decided, would have to be his destination and goal. He had no reason to distrust Tamper, who had been true to his word, and in any case, there was nowhere else to go. But which one of these paths was more likely to take him there? He had no idea of his location, so what hope did he have of picking the right one? It was so frustrating to be lost like this. The District of Dreams was far too crammed and convoluted to take in with his eyes, but one quick glance at a navi and he would grasp the whole layout immediately. Why did finding his way around have to be this hard? It wasn’t fair! Suddenly he felt his hands begin to spasm. Raising them before his face, he watched as his ten digits snapped, flicked, pinched, tapped, strobing involuntarily through a series of gestures as though possessed. He wanted so desperately to cast out his perspective and explore the area safely without exerting energy; to click on the buildings and the attire of the people, check their material and learn why they were dissolving; to open a travel advice page and study up on the customs here, activate auto-interpreting; to ask his Decision Network for advice or consult with Mayuko … check the time … his heart rate … More than anything he wanted to know how much everything he was doing cost and how to reduce those costs; to reassure himself that his actions had value. For each of these frustrated desires, Amon’s fingers shifted through commands that were supposed to satisfy them, twi
tching rapidly and inexorably, his chest tightening as a shudder radiated out from his spine to his restless hands.

  It was all too much. He had to stop somewhere and gather his thoughts. What he needed was a quiet spot with less traffic. Searching around, he quickly found a half-story flight of stairs attached to one of the rooms that formed the left side of the trench. It was a short distance above his head, and pushing his way to the wall beneath it, Amon leapt up to pull himself onto the bottom step. There he sat with his eyes closed, his head hanging between his knees, his mind awhirl, his breathing rapid, his nerves buzzing in pandemonium.

  Shock. That was the word for what he was experiencing, Amon realized. The constant barrage of hunger, congestion, excrement, disease, had left him perplexed, appalled, almost delirious. Was this the “best of all possible slums?” Could the market truly provide nothing better for the world’s poorest? It was hard for him to imagine anywhere worse, and he felt like he had just scratched the surface. Sure, being without the ImmaNet was supposed to take away some of your options. The people here were not entitled to all the freedom they could earn, as they were incapable of earning at all. In other words, even if they were still entirely free, they lacked capital F Freedom. That was why the pecuniary retreats were so dreaded by all Free Citizens. But the conditions weren’t meant to be this bad. The donated supplies and their custodians, the venture charities, were supposed to alleviate suffering for the bankdead and make life as comfortable as those who’d forfeited their right to be a part of the action-transaction economy could hope for. Yet where was there even a trace of comfort here? And this was where the people he cash crashed had ended up, the nerve dust scream he’d always hated to inflict nothing compared to—