The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Once night had fully taken hold and the lights stopped coming on, Amon snapped out of his trance, realizing he was blocking the narrow thoroughfare, and proceeded ahead with the crowd. When a bend in the alley approached, he feared he might lose sight of the Cyst—the only landmark he knew—and so began to make his way around its perimeter. Spiraling up the stairs and ramp-like angled rooftops, winding along the various squeezeways and tunnels, Amon circled it several times. How many hours this took he could not say, but as the night progressed he watched the lanterns begin to dissolve from the inside out. Fragments of their core fluttered out through the hole in the bottom, like falling fireflies that winked out after only a second. These had to be firefLytes, another kind of disposable supply provided by the venture charities that Vertical had said he would help to install in the near future. Sparkles showered down and vanished just above his head as he passed through one bubble of illumination after another on his meandering course, gazing at the steady stream of shadow figures and petals that emerged from darkness into other such bubbles all around and then melted into darkness again. Taking deep breaths and basking in the sense of liberation that graced him, Amon thought of what he might do tomorrow when the day was done.

  5

  Finding little else to do with his time, Amon took to exploring outside after work. Although he traveled the same counterclockwise course around the Cyst for the first few nights, he began to gradually widen the circumference of his circle, moving ever further from the only place he knew. It wasn’t until a full week had passed that he rallied enough courage to let it slip completely from view behind the layers of other structures. He then gave up on circles altogether and began to strike out in a particular direction, only turning back when the journey felt too far for comfort and his anxiety became unbearable. When he did inevitably get lost, he would follow the current of foot traffic that flowed constantly to and away from the Cyst until he could he see it again, or, if that failed, find a passerby to tell him the way in a pidgin of words and gestures.

  He’d never had to build a map of an area in his head before and found the process maddeningly slow, especially since it needed to be updated constantly as the city changed day to day. Being bounded by his body and the limitations of his senses was frustrating. The walls of the shifting labyrinth were not supposed to be opaque but transparent, his perception floating about unfettered by barriers of any kind. But learning this new skill was also rewarding in some ways. His understanding of each space, he found, was not merely visual but visceral as well—his memory of where to turn on a roofway or how far to climb a specific stairpath imprinted in his nerves—and he felt a slight flutter of excitement whenever he sensed intuitively which way he ought to go.

  Occasionally he spotted Vertical and Ty on their leisure hours. Ty could sometimes be found on a particular enclosed rooftop designated for guard training, usually around dusk. There, he would be engaged in target practice, tossing up several chunks of rubble at once, hurling a wheel, and altering its trajectory with the wires to hit them out of the air one after the other.

  Amon only ever saw Vertical in motion, a blur appearing suddenly from some hole in the slumscape and then tearing through it at unbelievable speeds. She sprinted straight along alleys and squeezeways, leapt hand over foot up the outside of stairpaths and along the surface of slanting roofs, dodging around bodies, springing off walls, bounding over the heads of crowds.

  Whereas Amon had thought of his after-work hikes at first as an effort to get oriented and grasp his surround, they soon turned into wandering for its own sake. When he remained still, he felt the burn of webloss and was reminded of all the apps he craved. Without PennyPinch, Teleport Surprise, MyMedic, AutoBarter, Career Calibration, Distinction, and all the other digital crutches he’d depended on since childhood, he had been deprived of something that seemed fundamental, and wondered if his mind would remain impaired forever, like a broken bone healed crooked. The boredom was particularly painful. It made it difficult for him to remember new events, every dull unadorned moment blurring indistinguishably into the next. But on the move, the unending trove of immersive relations he could enter into with walls and stairs and roofs and people soothed his heart and soul, helping him forget his lingering debilitations and escape from the visual and auditory disturbances that still plagued him from time to time. The possible combinations in which the buildings could be constructed and laid out was infinite, the routes he traveled all replaced as soon as he came to know them, so that his attention was constantly engaged with finding his way, each step a discovery.

  At the same time, Amon felt lonely in a way he had never before experienced. Due to his lack of fluency in the local dialect, he was excluded from conversation, a pastime the residents seemed to enjoy more than any other. Everywhere he looked people were walking and talking, sitting and talking, eating and talking, their voices punctuated with the rakhaw of crows from high above. Nowhere could he escape the sound of constant chatter. Not even the elevator provided insulation now that the doors remained half open, allowing in echoing voices that came steadily down the halls. And yet Amon was never included in what he heard. His crew clustered away from him at lunch and during breaks, avoiding all communication inessential to the job at hand. And, on the days they finished early, loitered about blathering in the heat before sauntering off somewhere together without inviting him. None of the people whose faces he remembered from his daily routes greeted him, though he saw them greeting each other. Only the bone-chillingly creepy roaches that blinked their eyes at him—some blue, some brown, some hazel—seemed to pay him any mind, and so days went by where he spoke to almost no one.

  Not that Amon desperately wanted to speak with anyone face to face. It wasn’t just that looking at them without digimake made him uncomfortable or that it still felt like a waste of money. It was bizarre to have someone stand in front of you, their voice reaching your eardrum directly through the air, their breath on your face, their body close enough to touch, rather than communicate at a distance by voice, video, or badly spelled text. If conveying his thoughts was going to require such crude intimacy, he preferred to keep them to himself and maintain his solitude in the crowd.

  The other Xenocyst pastimes Amon witnessed during his wanderings were no easier for him to grasp or appreciate. He saw children play catch with shards of rubble from collapsed disposcrapers and fly kites made from strips of clear bottles and dissolving rags; saw them scamper after each other up stairpaths, leap across rooftops, and slide down angled alleys; saw them play hide and seek in buildings slated for demolition and wrestle with each other in the holes, as though the whole slumscape was one massive jungle gym. Their games of make believe were so unlike the ImmaGames he had grown up with, staged as they had been in elaborate digital domains that were fully immersive without requiring any imagination, and he wondered about their sanity, spending so much effort to conjure the vague unconvincing realities of the mind’s eye for the sake of mere entertainment.

  Adult pursuits often took the form of massive communal undertakings without any clear purpose outside the undertaking itself. They carved intricate reliefs into the Fleet walls of abandoned, crumbling towers; cut out sequential images and speech bubbles in the rooms of lined-up buildings to make gigantic architectural comics; converted vast complexes into jack-o’-lanterns by smashing patterns into the walls and installing firefLytes inside; huddled in wavering cookie-crumble shadows, tossing bottles at a wall to gamble with their food; sang strange songs while beatboxing, rapping, whistling, clapping, banging out rhythms on their laps. It was all so strange and unnerving. Some of the art and music was familiar from stock clips or soundtracks for infopromo he had seen. The bankdead were, after all, incapable of owning rights to what they created or to anything else for that matter, and Amon had heard of “art scouts” who slipped inconspicuously into the District of Dreams in search of the next “folk entertainment” hit. But marketers knew well what “samples” of the “content�
�� would suit the taste of Free Citizens, and lacking their editing, placement, and sleek design, he found the works here too crude for media consumption. He couldn’t understand why the residents wasted so much effort when it was all going to vanish without selling anything, their songs fading unrecorded, their etchings dissolving unauctioned, and the overall effect was to leave him feeling more lonesome than ever.

  Being alone was of course nothing new for Amon. As part of his cost-cutting, he’d forced himself into solitude for long stretches of time and had grown accustomed to it. But here, his isolation felt different somehow, more complete. Even after drifting away from Rick and Mayuko, he’d at least talked with his co-workers, like Freg and Tororo, and his supervisors, like Sekido and the other ministers. He keenly missed apps like FacePhone and Instant Get, which had provided the option to contact anyone instantly, even if he’d rarely invested in using them. Without his realizing it, the potential virtual companionship that had always existed in the background—his friends, colleagues, Decision Network, paid conversationalists, date seekers, online therapists—seemed to have endowed him with a low-level sense of belonging whether or not he ever actualized it. And whereas before isolation had been a choice, willingly imposed for the sake of his savings, here he was excluded from social activities irrespective of his wishes, which somehow made the loneliness worse, watching the bankdead of Xenocyst from the outside, aware at the same time that he was one of them.

  It was difficult for him to accept this, for he wasn’t just one of them. He was the worst of them, unable to succeed at the simplest of tasks. He was glad to have graduated from the interviews and took it as a positive sign for his trial period that they continued to let him work. But he had once been a promising Liquidator—no, Identity Executioner—and believed he had a shot at working with the Executive Committee, the highest governmental organization in Japan. He was aware now that the inspiration he’d derived from his career had been based on denial, on lies he’d voluntarily accepted about his life and who he was—that Liquidation was a service to society, that the AT market was beneficial for everyone, that the bankdeath camps were the best of all possible slums—but that didn’t change how inadequate he felt. Reflecting on what he’d been and where he was now while strolling circuitous routes or lying in the dark of the elevator after a long, hard, bewildering day choked him with shame, his former pride transmuted to its opposite in this land of bankdeath.

  Nothing seemed to bespeak his change of fortune more vividly than his clothes. The disposable shorts and T-shirt he’d worn since the day Vertical forced him to strip had become dirtier and dirtier until they had started to disintegrate and Ty had provided him with a replacement. These too had begun to flake away, a few specks flying off with every breeze that touched him, and he found himself missing his uniform. It was the only outfit he’d worn in the past seven years, as he’d been too cheap to buy garments other than underwear and socks, and he knew it was presumptuous to expect enduring materials when everyone else made do with transient cloth, but wearing it had always made him feel like a somebody.

  At the same time, he was glad to have an outfit that allowed him to blend in. With his former muscle thinning out from reduced calories, his skin losing its color from lack of light, his buzzed hair growing in, and a beard taking shape, he was rapidly beginning to look like the bona fide bankdead non-citizen that he was. His ignorance of the customs and language still set him apart if anyone spent a few minutes with him, but at least they could no longer identify him as crashborn at a glance and being able to meld into a crowd was comforting. In fact, he wished he could be more completely indistinguishable from the rest and craved for the seamless anonymity of a digiguise. Partly he wanted to have the total privacy in public he had once enjoyed while concealing what he perceived as his own ugliness. But he was also hounded by a faint fear that one of the bankrupts he had cash crashed might recognize him and wanted a surefire way to hide.

  It was an irrational fear, he knew. Crashdead were few and far between in the camps, and screenings ensured they were even fewer in Xenocyst, so the chances he’d bump into someone that he’d personally taken out were incredibly slim. Even if he did, his targets would have only seen him for a split second before he crashed them, so they were unlikely to remember his face, which was slightly different than his face now due to digimake enhancement in any case. Still, as improbable as such an encounter was, being an ill-adjusted crashnewb, he was highly vulnerable and couldn’t escape the anxiety that someone might one day wreak retribution.

  6

  Amon’s confidence with navigation improved gradually and his curiosity overcame his fear of getting lost, driving him ever greater distances from the Cyst. Until one evening, just before twilight, he found himself approaching the furthest limit that he was allowed to travel as a non-resident: the Xenocyst border.

  He first began to realize that he had strayed from familiar territory when he noticed a change in the types of buildings. Instead of motley shafts made of various faux materials, rooms here were stacked with those of their kind—brick on brick, aquamarine stucco on aquamarine stucco, white granite on white granite—and there were patterns he hadn’t seen before like stripes, checkers, wood lodge, tiger. Each room of a particular kind had a logo on it similar to those he’d seen on the patchwork robes of the Opportunity Scientist field priest. These were emblazoned on the door of each room so that they lined up on shafts with aligned stairwells and faced different directions on those that were unaligned. These brand name rooms also appeared to be slightly larger than the generic rooms, reaching to three-quarters of a story rather than one half, and had wider stairwells with proper railings that looked much less hazardous than the separate steps, pegs, or rungs elsewhere. The feeding stations were more numerous in this area so that the lineups were shorter, and the vending machines had logos that matched those on the rooms, as did the clothes of the local people. Though their garments were otherwise similar to the standard outfit, they fit the bodies of their wearers better and appeared to be of a sturdier weave of Fleet fabric, including matching sneakers whereas most bankdead went barefoot. The food was of slightly larger quantities—with fatter rice balls and bigger noodle bowls—not to mention more variety of toppings—and the drinks were in colors Amon had not seen elsewhere. The packaging also bore the same logos, and in addition to tossing the bottles into a heap, as was common in other places, they flicked away their wrapping as though they scoffed at such piddling nutrition, which some of the regular bankdead passing by stooped down to pick up and eat if one fluttered into their path.

  Though Amon remembered seeing roombuds with logos on them and guessed that was how the construction crews here knew to connect rooms of the same kind, he had never been assigned to construct such buildings and found it all exceedingly puzzling. What was with the better quality, quantity, and design, and the brand coordination between shelter, clothes, and food?

  As Amon continued through this perplexing area, the slumscape opened up into a large egg-shaped space illuminated by numerous firefLytes. Countless tunnels and squeezeways terminated at this capacious nexus and fed a continuous torrent of foot traffic onto various stairpaths that wound around the inner walls of the egg. These paths invariably connected to two portals side by side in a solid wall of buildings on the other side of the gap, about ten stories above where he now stood. Half the crowd streamed empty-handed along one network of routes into the left portal and the other half poured out of the right portal with bags of supplies hung over their shoulders. These he supposed were supply crews heading to and coming back from Delivery. Surprised to find he could read again for the first time since cash crashing, he saw a slogan written in English on the bags of the ones returning:

  The gift of a baby is the best gift for your baby.

  It took Amon a moment to translate this phrase into Japanese in his head, and once he’d done so he wondered if he was misunderstanding it. While the phrase seemed to suggest that the venture
charities were encouraging mothers to give up their babies for adoption, he couldn’t imagine why they would want to do such a thing. Since the altruistic act of rescuing babies from squalor and poverty and granting them the opportunity to earn unlimited freedom was expensive, it ran counter to their interests if more mothers took advantage of their programs, and should have appeared as a boon to the mothers without anyone needing to point it out. So why the advertising?

  As Amon watched the faces of the mothers plodding in and out along the paths with babies bundled to their bosoms, he was suddenly filled with an inexplicable sense of foreboding, a sort of nauseating dread that compelled him to turn on his heels, vacate the egg-shaped space, and return as quickly as he could to his elevator, though the path looked different now that night had descended and he immediately got lost, not finding his way back until dawn when it was already time to wake up.

  “What does it mean?” Amon asked Book in the library several nights later, his tone of voice betraying more urgency than he intended. “Why would the venture charities print that phrase on their clothes?”

  Ever since witnessing that baffling spectacle at the border, Amon’s unease had lingered, and for several days he had lost his desire to explore. Instead, he had been dealing with such restlessness that he kept circling within the areas he knew, yet lacked the will or energy to leave the perimeter of the Cyst. As he trekked the same handful of courses night after night, he mulled over the phrase on their bags obsessively, sensing somehow that the meaning it represented was an aberration but unable to unravel enough of it to understand why. Clearly he would never decipher it without more information and soon hit upon the idea of asking the Books. While he might have tried Ty or Vertical, who both spoke Japanese and were in charge of overseeing him, they had shown little patience for any queries unrelated to tasks immediately at hand, whereas the Books had carefully answered all his questions so far.