The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  When Amon’s concentration completely broke down, the Books dismissed him and the guard took him down to his elevator. He had been saved by exhaustion on his first night there and fallen straight to sleep after waiting for only half an hour. But this time it was still mid-afternoon, leaving more than twelve hours of captivity before his construction workday began, and he found himself lying on the damp futon with his eyes wide open for hours.

  The chamber was utterly dark and quiet. In the stagnant, moist heat his body felt as though it were evaporating and circulating back to be absorbed by his skin, a cycle of melting and regeneration, like the ever-dissolving slum. Surely there was a ventilation crack or hole somewhere—otherwise he would have suffocated last night—but the only stirring in the air was his own breath. This darkness was different than the partial darkness when he’d been cowled and the darkness that was not darkness when he’d been blind. It was more like the darkness when the wall-less elevator had plunged him into the PhisherKing’s domain, deep within the bowels of Tokyo, and suddenly Monju was there with him.

  Something tells me your search is leading you to our rejuvenation, he had said, gazing at Amon with his multicolored eyes as he floated on the mercury sea in the hard light of the metallic sky. Can you swear to keep asking questions until no doubts remain in your mind?

  Of course, Amon replied. I don’t know if it will lead me to understanding jubilee or Rick’s death or the meddling at GATA, but I’ll do my best to learn about this place and …

  Amon shut his mouth, realizing that he was talking to himself. As time passed, it was becoming harder and harder to distinguish the black space around him from the spaceless arena of his mind’s eye. As he lay shaking and groaning with intense boredom, the muddy depths of his consciousness were astir, lumps of sunken memory whirling up into the dim waters of his awareness. Long forgotten memories, like the time he and Rick and Mayuko had invented a coded language to secretly mock their SubMom. Momentous memories, like his first day of work at the Liquidation Ministry. Embarrassing memories, like when he’d mistaken a minister’s title at a GATA function. Images and sounds began to emanate from his surround too—pet koala ice sculptures, soap opera aromatherapy brawls, a jumble of conversations and soundtracks—like several TVs flicking out of synch from one channel to the next, the advertainment that had made up such a large portion of his life refusing to go down without a fight.

  It was as though the darkness had become the mirror but shattered, the narrative pieces of his life scattered into no particular order. Except some fragments resurfaced more often than others—the moments he regretted—as though his guilt had been summoned by the exercise Hippo had made him undertake. Instead of staying to be rewound and skipped and fast-forwarded and edited as he pleased, they came and went as they pleased—butterflies escaped from their pins to flit through a storm-filled sky. It was terrifying to watch his own mind slip from his control or witness for the first time that it had always been thus, while his mistakes revolved back to torment him, riding on the tumult he had unleashed.

  Sometimes he found himself weeping, other times laughing, whimpering, clenching his fists and jaw. Rolling on the mattress, off the mattress, flailing his limbs against the walls, curling up in the corner, cycling through every emotion and concoction of emotion for which there was no name, sweating in the stuffy, dank air. He chattered to himself, chastised himself, recited slogans and poetisements, sang jingles that got stuck in his head. Although he hated the council for locking him in here, he could understand why crashnewbs would be isolated like this, as part of him revolted at the collapse of his rationality, while another much deeper part was delighting in this purge. Caught in a momentary delusion born of habit, he searched for the settings of his brain to turn off repeat, but it just kept on rolling.

  When Vertical finally stood there in the slat of light, Amon had never felt so grateful for the arrival of morning, for the start of a new day.

  3

  Amon was awoken each day by either Ty or Vertical and escorted to a different area of Xenocyst for his construction duties. Although he saw no rhyme or reason to the placement of the rooms at first and simply followed orders, after several days he began to grasp how his efforts shaped the city. The Xenocyst council did everything it could to prevent the short-lived nature of the buildings from engendering the tumbledown chaos seen everywhere else. In areas where each bankdead laid their room to suit their individual needs, there were constant battles over location, with everyone wanting enough elevation to get sunlight, proximity to the ground floor feeding stations, distance from paths prowled by gangs, and so on. With no possibility for compromise, they all fought to set up in the best spot they could, and the end result was convoluted, spiraling pathways, dead ends, darkness, overcrowding, and structural instability everywhere. To maintain an orderly cityscape that avoided these problems, the council had established a complex urban planning system, though its implementation took a large amount of manpower and fine-tuning for localities absorbed much of the subcommittees’ time.

  While the population of Xenocyst was just as dense as elsewhere—its shelters able to house just as many people—careful planning had ensured wider pathways to facilitate foot traffic, straight-standing, evenly spaced buildings to maximize and equally distribute available space, better ventilation to reduce overheating and mold, isolation of sewers and sky-charnels to reduce smell and vermin, installation of disposcraper-to-condo suspension wires to mitigate the destabilizing influence of fractured or liquefying ground …

  Since there was no way to tell what material would emerge from each black roombud, the skyscraper shafts were composed of as motley and incongruous an assortment of rooms as elsewhere. But buds picked up from the venture charities on the same day were stored together so they could be matched by expiration date. This ensured that each shaft dissolved at relatively the same time, preventing them from toppling due to premature room dissolution and allowing for rolling replacement.

  On the fifth day, Amon was assigned to demolition. His crew was given picks and sledgehammers to smash apart buildings in which perforations had begun to peek through. The walls were almost crusty at this stage, and they beat them until all that remained was a pile of rapidly flaking rubble, which a cleanup crew hauled away in plastic sheets.

  A construction crew then moved in to install fresh rooms in the empty spot, yet the new structures they put up were never the same ones as before. They would always have a different number of stories, relocated and realigned alleys, or would branch off into other buildings at a different height. This arrangement was intentional as well. One of the main reasons was to introduce an element of unpredictability so that—even though the thoroughfares, both elevated and grounded, were less meandering and the stairpaths had fewer interruptions than elsewhere—trespassers such as the Opportunity Scientists would get lost. Xenocyst was an ever-changing three-dimensional maze, a single intricate structure, the layout of which was altered periodically and systematically as part of the rebuilding process. Only residents knew the ways from one point to the next, and usually only along their own customary routes as they adjusted to the incremental alterations.

  After Amon had completed his morning duties, Ty or Vertical would take him to a feeding station and give him a meal—if a single rice ball, sandwich, or mini-bento was enough to count. Although he never exactly felt satisfied, he was never quite hungry either. The feeders, he soon learned, were 3D printers that used meal-replacement therapy ink. Whether reconstituted and shaped into grains of rice, fish tubes, broccoli, or whatever, they were supposed to provide all the necessary nutrients for a healthy diet. Like the umeboshi rice ball he’d had on his first night, the texture was frequently off, with meat being too crunchy and the rice and bread being crumbly or crispy. In some cases there were even flavor simulation mixups, where what looked like egg salad might for example taste like kimchi, or cod roe like sweet chestnut. While such culinary surprises were disturbing and oftentimes
disgusting, Amon had always eaten the cheapest vending fare in Free Tokyo and got used to it quickly.

  The strangest part for him was the food wrappers. Every morsel came out wrapped in what looked like clear plastic, though really both were made of exactly the same ingredients synthesized through a different method. The printer just painted on layer after layer of the nutritional ink until a single unit of meal-inside-wrapping was produced, which meant that all packaging was technically edible and just as nutritious as what it packaged. Amon was grossed out by the idea of putting garbage in his mouth, but since he was always left wanting a bit more, he quickly followed the lead of his fellow bankdead and began to eat the plastic bowl for pastas, the transparent shell for rice balls, sandwiches, and burritos, the wood-like snap-apart chopsticks. The bottles for the beverages, on the other hand, were made of Fleet, and he tossed those into the designated heaps, which never seemed to change in size as the bottom layer flaked away and vanished as fast as the top was replaced.

  Once lunch was finished, a guard took him to the library for more questions. After his second night, he fought with all his will to stay focused on the interview, afraid of being returned to the elevator. Anything but being shut away in that awful chamber, locked up with himself, with all that he had done. Inevitably his concentration would fail him and the guard would take him there, but he was able to remain articulate for a little bit longer each day. With all his work done, he always craved a shower, and had to content himself with a few squirts of PeelKlean soap (which—along with the disposable clothes and shelters that made laundering and cleaning superfluous, and the beverages that provided all hydration—was supposed to take care of all individual water needs).

  Then, alone in the dark, he stopped thrashing about and crying and laughing as the visions gradually subsided. He wasn’t sure if he ever slept, but he managed to remain on the futon, his attention on his breathing as he rolled restlessly from side to side, trying to imagine the forest that refused to visit him anymore, his nights forsaken by dream.

  4

  This routine went on unchanging for weeks. Ty or Vertical in the slat of light, the endless stairs, the unfolding flowers, the collapsing towers, the summer humidity, the questions, the darkness. All the while, Amon was expecting to fail his trial period and be tossed out into the chaos at any moment, as his performance was terrible compared to the other workers’.

  Vertical and Ty, despite their distinct teaching styles, both displayed their impatience with Amon and seemed resentful that he was keeping them from their main duties. Ty was a supply crew leader, in charge of guiding Xenocyst denizens safely to Delivery where they could restock, while Vertical was a scout, roaming the camps to gather information about the movements of the Opportunity Scientists, Charity Brigade, nosties, and other groups of concern. Whereas Ty barked out quick orders in the fewest words possible, and then shouted at Amon when he misunderstood what was expected, Vertical gave detailed instructions for the smallest tasks and snapped at him if he varied from them even slightly or if something went wrong in spite of his perfect obedience. He had been doing his best to follow along without complaint, but he was clumsy and acquired the knack slowly—sometimes dropping his buds, installing them at the wrong angle, or accidentally denting walls not slated for demolition—as he found learning without step-by-step videtutorials challenging and unfamiliar.

  When he had learned to hit a baseball in the BioPen, for instance, a voice had said “grip the bat on the bottom with your right hand” while a blinking hand had gripped it in demonstration, then “lift the bat” with an arrow pointing upwards and so on. The tutorials awarded points for speed and accuracy and repeated themselves until students could perform the task proficiently. But even Vertical, in spite of her efforts to micromanage every operation, only gave vague instructions like “hammer the wall” or “roll the cart,” leaving the minutiae of motor movements, like how to hold the hammer and how hard to push on the cart handle, up to Amon to figure out for himself. To crashborn residents like his co-workers, these simple procedures were common sense and they had trouble understanding how Amon could possibly be struggling to pick them up. In moments of pity, the kinder ones would come to his side and try to show him by example, but with the language barrier between them their explanations always degenerated into gestures, and when these failed, they would walk away, often sighing or shaking their head.

  Supposedly, standard Japanese was the official language of Xenocyst, to make it more difficult for hostile outsiders (like Opportunity Scientist grunts) to understand them, and to train residents for communication with the bankliving, including the venture charities with whom they had to negotiate for supplies. But aside from the councilors, Book, Vertical, Ty, and Hippo, Amon had never heard anyone actually speak it, as the vast majority of residents were crashborn, and almost everyone used the camp dialect in practice. Despite sharing its grammar and many of its words with the standard dialect Amon knew, the pronunciation of Hinkongo was radically different and his ears could still only catch about half of what was said after several weeks surrounded by it 24/7. Though learning a new language wasn’t a totally alien process to Amon, as he’d studied a bit of English and Persian in his BioPen schooling, he had always relied on apps like InterrPet, which assisted comprehension through real-time translation, and VentriloQuick, which made culturally accurate suggestions for what to say in a given moment. The fact that most people could understand at least a bit of standard Japanese removed the necessity to try expressing himself without it, making it even harder to improve. So not only was he incompetent at work and showing little promise of improvement, he was unable to comprehend directions or communicate with his crew. This made Amon increasingly nervous and afraid, and he felt a twinge of self-loathing every time he made a mistake, always expecting that the next one would be his last, his feelings only further impeding his performance.

  A break in his routine finally came one afternoon in the library, when Little Book’s hand drew still on his tablet and Book sat there silent for longer than ever before. Amon had been sensing something changing in the interview for several days, as the two seemed to be struggling to find questions for him. He had taken this as a sign that they were on the verge of wringing out the last of his useful information and discarding him. So when Book said, “Our interviews have now reached completion,” Amon felt his whole gut tense and looked around in confusion, as he could not find the guard waiting by the shelf-end to escort him to the elevator.

  “There’s nothing else you want to ask me?” In the beginning, the questions had been agonizing and Amon had wanted them over as quickly as possible. Now he wished that he could draw them out and extend his time in the safety of Xenocyst even the slightest bit longer.

  “I repeat,” said Book, “our interviews have now reached completion.”

  “So when’s the guard coming?”

  “Never at all. I have advised the council that your webloss recovery has progressed sufficiently for you to be released from supervision and they have granted me their approval.”

  “So I can stay in the elevator? You’re not sending me out there?” Amon pointed to his right, unsure which direction led out of Xenocyst.

  “Although your trial period is still in process, in our opinion, your confinement to the elevator is no longer necessary.”

  “So what do I do now? Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Starting today, your movements will no longer be hindered within the Xenocyst compound once your daily duties are complete.”

  When the implications of this finally percolated through to Amon’s mind, his entire body sighed with relief and he bowed his head low in gratitude. “Thank you.”

  Stepping into the hall outside the library, Amon made his way without thinking to the elevator. For the first time since his hearing, he could choose for himself how to spend his time and, as he was unable to think of any other options, habit immediately seized control. But when he stood before the doors half-
opened on the dim vault with his moist futon and felt the musty air on his face, he paused for only a moment, before turning on his heel and walking back down the cluttered hall to the stairwell, remembering it was the last place in Xenocyst he wanted to be.

  He wandered the Cyst for a while, climbing past the urban planning room and the council chamber, until he reached the rows of guards outside the storeroom and was turned back when they discovered he lacked the password. From there he went to the lower floors, felt like a nuisance for getting in the way of the medical staff hurrying through the halls on various errands, and finally decided to head outside through an exit on the third floor often used by his construction crew.

  Apparently Amon had been much more deeply absorbed in the interview than he realized, because when he stepped out onto a raised alley the sun had just set. He had never been outside in the camps so late before, and he watched mesmerized as the faint twilight creeping down through rooftop cracks faded and artificial lights blinked on one by one at various elevations above. Clearly these were the crumbling cookies he’d seen the night he sat with Tamper on the shore of the Sanzu River. The dim circles they cast dappled the dark labyrinth that subsumed him, from the looming toy-block canopy to the alley he stood upon, some hanging from stairs just beyond his reach. Up close they looked like paper lanterns containing an undulating sphere of pure glow.