The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  “Two of the five had died en route, and one was ejected after recovery and interviewing. The remnants were a woman and a boy of approximately eight years of age, both of whom were unconscious due to concussions. When the woman regained awareness, she repeatedly asked for information concerning her son and was granted access to the bedside of the still-comatose boy. Although Xenocyst policy forbids membership to any individual with connections to Opportunity Science, her doctors negotiated with the council to allow her to reside until the boy recovered. However, several days before he did so, she attended a supply run and did not return, presumably to beg for absolution at Opportunity Peaks.

  “When her son opened his eyes, he made no mention of wanting to see his mother as one might predict of a boy that age. In fact, the nurses discovered his inability to produce verbal speech, although he seemed to comprehend it, and he was sent to me for assessment. Whether his condition was congenital or resulted from the head trauma, I immediately recognized that he was a cognitive outlier. The precocious boy read at remarkable speed, displayed fascination with codes of all sorts, and developed a highly efficient tap code that he taught me so as to facilitate our communication. With the council’s permission, I have personally overseen his education ever since and his knowledge in my areas of expertise already surpasses my own. After Tamper observed the degree to which he enjoyed writing, he designed him this tablet and Little Book has since assumed the roles of official record keeper, historian, and cryptographer.

  “As I am certain you can deduce, the council named him after myself. However, he is sometimes referred to as LB, and when I am in a condescending mood my preferred appellation is Puchiboo, an abbreviation for ‘petite book.’”

  Apparently not at all pleased with this cutesy nickname, Little Book began to tap furiously on his tablet and Book said, “I refuse to interpret that part.” So Little Book stopped his writing for the first time, breathing heavily with apparent indignation as he continued staring at the tablet, and the group laughed.

  After Little Book, they went slowly around the circle in no particular order and the other six odd members told Amon and Rick their names, and why they had been given them. Despite their drunkenness, everyone was surprisingly courteous, cutting off all tomfoolery and giving their undivided attention when someone was speaking. Storytelling, Amon was learning, was something the bankdead took very seriously. Eventually they all went silent, and Amon noticed that everyone was looking towards one person who had not yet spoken.

  Under their stare, Vertical shook her head. “No. I’m not getting into that here.”

  “Feeling embarrassed in front of these handsome new recruits, is that it?” said Ty.

  Vertical glanced at Rick and then Amon before her eyes settled on Ty. “Believe what you like. Just leave me alone.”

  “Come on Vertical, we—”

  “In the spirit of fairness,” interrupted Hippo, “I do believe it’s our turn to hear your story, Vertical.”

  “Fairness?” she said as though in disbelief. “You only told your stories for the crashnewbs. Do you really think I wanted to hear them again?”

  “What’s this—” “Oh, so she thinks—” “Ha! And you—” Several protests trundled in at once until Hippo’s voice stopped them short with authority. “If not for us, Vertical, then for these two,” he said, glancing at Amon and then Rick. “They bared their souls for all of us at the council, including you, and they may leave Xenocyst with no other reward than what they learn here.”

  Leave Xenocyst? Amon’s mind echoed, the cold teeth of fear digging deeper.

  “The least you can do is give them another story for the road.”

  “I would, but Ty was right from the start. The embarrassment …” Vertical’s excuses were drowned out by fed-up calls of agreement with Hippo and Ty. She kept her mouth shut as the clamor continued, merely shaking her head. But the group was persistent in their cajolery, and when she eventually rolled her eyes, letting out a big, shoulder-sinking sigh of capitulation, they cheered.

  “In my banklife I was a world-class sprinter. I’d placed well in several global races and was selected to represent Japan in the next Olympics. But just when I was reaching my peak as an athlete, massively multiplayer online sports began to take over and the popularity of traditional analog games hit a new low. I was one of the best in the world but even for someone like me sponsorship funding had almost completely dried up. Though I might have found work as a coach, the pay was pathetic and I had no interest in that. So I kept up the same training routine as always and attended every competition I was invited to at my own expense, just coasting along on my savings for as long as I could. The turnouts were small, but I’d spent my entire life running and I literally couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

  “I guess it’s not surprising that my husband disapproved. He wanted me to balance my passion with practical financing and compromise on a day job. When he saw that I’d made a clear decision and wasn’t willing to budge, he offered to support me. I refused. Yes, I was terrified of bankruptcy, but he was a law student living mostly on a scholarship. I wasn’t about to drag him down with me. Not for my own selfish goals. As time passed, he worried about me more and more, until he got so tense I couldn’t bear to tell him about my debt. I knew he’d try everything to stop me if he thought my situation was serious. In the end, I went bankrupt before we could say goodbye.

  “After Er, I eventually found my way to Xenocyst and was accepted into the community. I’m grateful to be here. I feel like my abilities are valued and respected. The whole District of Dreams is my personal gym and the nutritional bonus the council provides allows me to train as much as I like. I may not have the chance to compete with anyone at my level and there’s hardly any space for open running, but I’ve learned to direct my momentum in vertical directions.”

  As Vertical told her story, she kept her eyes half-closed with her gaze downcast, as though she were summoning memories from deep in her body. Only when she was finished did she finally look up, open her eyes wide, and take in the gaze of her audience. Immediately Ty said, “Vertical directions? You’re not going to pretend that’s how it ends?”

  Painful emotion quivered momentarily across Vertical’s face before she glared at Ty with a look of pure vitriol.

  “What?” said Ty, grinning his raucous grin again. “That’s not how I heard you got your name. You’re leaving out the best part!”

  “Ty is right,” said a middle-aged woman with a white ovular face that reminded Amon of a clam shell. Her name, he had just learned, was Jiku. “I remember the day of her hearing well.”

  “I wasn’t on the council then, so I wanna hear it too, if there’s more,” said the man with the gray-streaked beard, whose name was Yané.

  “Come on.” “Just give it—” “Yeah!” Others called out in support.

  Vertical just shook her head repeatedly, mouthing the word “no.” Although it was too subtle perhaps for the more inebriated members to catch, Amon thought he saw a moist glaze of sadness glitter in her eyes despite the affronted scowl as they pressed.

  “Let’s stop this now,” said Hippo, apparently noticing the change in Vertical too. “I think she’s given us enough.”

  “Half a story enough?” said Ty. “What about when you tried to go back there with him? It’s only fair.”

  “Ty!” barked Hippo. “Let her be!” But before he’d finished the sentence, Vertical was on her feet and skipping rapidly from gap to gap in the tight knots of seated bodies, vanishing before they knew it.

  “Vertical!” called Ty as the eyes of the group stared at the spot in the crowd into which she’d slipped, all of them looking startled and guilty. With a loud “tsk,” Ty slumped forward, shaking his head with his face in his hands.

  11

  BETWEEN SLUM & STARS, NIGHT

  The group went silent for a time, but they were too drunk for the incident with Vertical to spoil the celebration and gradually broke up into separa
te conversations in twos and threes. As Amon sat there bathing in reddish warmth from the nearby embyrbrycks, he watched several men hauling a sack through the crowd and handing out the vending grub inside as more bottles of suposhu made the rounds. The kites of children were sliding bird-like shadows over a skyscape of scattered cloud, blinking satellite, and concentrate of star as the crowd chattered and swayed around him. The sack of food approached, and when a man passed Amon a burrito, he imitated those around him in rubbing it between his palms just like the women with the embyrbrycks earlier. Soon he felt it begin to warm in his hands and chomped it down in two bites without removing the wrapper.

  All the while, his thoughts were caught in a loop on what Hippo had implied earlier about him and Rick failing their trial period. Amon remembered the harsh eyes of the councilor after he’d cut him off to question his mental stability. Then he recalled moments when other councilors present had met his gaze with what he now imagined was similar disapproval in their eyes too. Has the council already decided against us? he fretted. Are our days here numbered? They would starve out there. Or die of illness. Or be crushed. Or attacked. But Hippo had said … and that man had cut him off … and the other councilors …

  The same worries cycled again and again, until the band was finally set up on stage and music, the likes of which Amon had never heard, washed them from his awareness. Turntablists sat on chairs before treadle performance record players with attached amplification horns and built-in cross-faders. Behind them was a choir of singers, beatboxers, and fluteboxers, and on a raised gazebo-like platform several zither players. Over the clambering, jerky tit-tatter of a vocal drum ensemble and the eerie hum of the zithers, two choirs separated by three octaves sang bullfrog overdrive throat-bass and buzzing gospel-laser as the fluteboxers layered on pulsing, sorrowful ululations. The turntablists embellished it all with fade-in-and-out waves of improvised scratching, their pumping feet modulating the pitch of each warping sound as their hands jumped in skittering blurs over the vinyl. The result was a sonic tapestry of amelodic transharmonies in low tempo polyrhythms, reminiscent of traditional DIY dubstep, but with an otherworldly gagaku flavor, the beat seeming to celebrate a sort of persistence amidst oppressive monotony.

  A few young couples started dancing beside the stage and the crowd cleared a circular space around them. To Amon’s eyes, it was old-fashioned—a sort of pair dance that involved synchronized movements like videotape functions while holding hands. Their bodies appeared to flow together in slow motion punctuated by jolts of fast-forward, sudden pauses, and occasional rewinds. The skilled pairs timed these temporal shifts so synchronously they might have been controlled by the same remote. They also had this way of angling their bodies and breathing that made them appear two dimensional, as though they existed as flat images on a screen that was the sky behind them.

  With so many novel experiences coming one after the other, Amon soon forgot his troubles and found himself in silent thrall to his surround. If they weren’t performing or dancing, the participants were chatting, holding hands, smiling, frowning, cringing, laughing. The babies cradled in sheltering arms stared with all-absorbing wide eyes, smiled delirious baby smiles as they were rocked to the beat, or wailed as their mothers cooed soothingly. Children gamboled in the in-between spaces, darting beneath the arches of men leaning close for drunken conversation and receiving smacks when they tumbled onto the dance floor or made sudden movements anywhere close to the outer edges.

  Without exception, it was the most bizarre spectacle Amon had ever beheld: people just being together bodily and sharing the night in celebration of the changing seasons. He thought he could almost sense the grinding hum of their souls, their struggles and needs and little joys in every gesture and vocalization, not released into the public for anyone’s personal enjoyment but given over to all others in attendance fully and completely, the gathering itself a work of art for the sake of nothing but itself. The lines between entertainer and entertained seemed to blur and break so that even though he sat silently on the rooftop as dazed with curiosity as the infants, he felt as much a part of the performance as the audience—as though he were a viewer sucked inside a movie that they were all creating together.

  Glancing around at the group, Amon saw everyone looking as absorbed and ponderous as he felt, their eyes capturing the moment yet somehow removed from it. Above them all, a rift had opened in the center of the cloud peel, as though a wedge of densely clustered stars were splitting the sky asunder. There, traced out in twinkling lights, Amon thought he could see Tamper giving the drink to his son on that balcony, just as the InfoStars had once animated logos. It was a sad vision, the gulf of light years separating these star-figments seeming no more traversable than the digital gulf separating the people Amon’s imagination had made them from. He wondered then about the coded letter that Book had described as “personal.” What did it say? Had Hippo read it?

  Just then Hippo was sitting there watching the stage in silence, his chest rising and falling with long slow breaths, listening. He wore such an intense and serious look of absorption, Amon had to move his lips several times before he worked up the courage to say anything and interrupt him.

  “Hippo-sama.”

  Drawn by his name, Hippo turned to Amon. There was a split-second pause before he returned to the present, saw who Amon was, understood his words.

  “Just Hippo is fine,” he said. “That’s what everyone else calls me.”

  “Hippo.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering …”

  Hippo met Amon’s gaze, waiting.

  “Just now I was looking at the stars … and … I started to think … I-I remembered about Tamper. I mean, what about his name?”

  “That’s right. You met Tamper, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Does anyone here know that story?”

  “Well, several of us could tell it, I suppose, if there was anything to tell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who would like the honors?” said Hippo, glancing around the circle. “Anyone?”

  “This one’s yours if it’s anyone’s,” said Ty, who had been sitting up straight for a while now, no longer moping about Vertical.

  “You could help me out, couldn’t you Ty? I do believe you two were friends.”

  “Tamper was a good guy. I liked his work. But he wasn’t exactly a talker. You knew him better than anyone, I bet, though that’s not saying much.”

  Hippo closed his eyes, nodding thoughtfully. “Yes. Fine. I don’t think I’ve told this one before but I suppose there’s no better time than tonight.”

  Then Hippo raised his head and opened his eyes wide, taking in the attention of the whole circle.

  “Several years ago, the council heard rumors of a bankdead man who had an incredible talent for electronics. It was said that he could build almost any device if given the proper materials. We thought he could be useful in Xenocyst, and decided to have our scouts seek him out. They eventually found him in the Tumbles, where he was living in a sort of burrow. He had dug a hole in a heap of Fleet rubble at the base of a disposcraper and lay curled up inside, surrounded by various tools and electronic parts. The walls around him were literally shaking with the strain of shelters piled on top, being nearly on the verge of collapse. So our scouts offered him a place to stay in exchange for his services, to which he accepted.

  “After no more than two weeks, the council was already so impressed by what he could do that we fast-tracked his trial period and invited him to a membership screening. He agreed to attend of course, but when we asked for his story he refrained from telling it. He didn’t explicitly refuse or even shake his head. He simply maintained his silence no matter what anyone said to him while his fiddling with all the doodads in his pockets grew faster and faster. Obviously this man had been hurt by something in his past about which he was unable to speak. So in order to keep his skills within Xenocyst, we voted on an unprecedented exception and
waived the requirement of a hearing. Since we never learned who he had been, we named him after what he seemed to enjoy doing.

  “Tamper ended up working here for several years. LB’s tablet and the transistor radios we use are his handiwork, as are a few emergency lights and the digital quarantine devices installed in the council chamber. Being a man of few words, no one ever learned much about him. He used to come to my quarters at the end of the day and join me for an evening walk, but he rarely spoke even to me. Then one day about two years ago he said he was leaving for Free Tokyo, though he wouldn’t say why. We occasionally received coded reports with information he had gathered from the other side—usually carried back by crashdead escapees who realized they couldn’t survive outside the camps and had to be boated back by Tamper in exchange for a story—but those stopped a few months back and we imagined the worst.

  “After what I heard from you, Amon, I think we should have called him Ghost. It’s sad to hear how he haunts his son. If only we’d known how troubled he was by their estrangement, we might have been able to give him advice. Now it seems he’s overweight and his fiddling is much worse than before. It worries me particularly that someone as private as Tamper was willing to open up the way he did in that letter. It’s almost as though he’s expecting something bad to happen and wants to clear his conscience before the end … I suppose that’s what you get for trying to start a family in this world. But let’s leave this heavy topic for now. It doesn’t suit the occasion.”

  Hippo stopped and took a sip of suposhu, tilting his ear towards the stage as though listening carefully to the music, and the other members went silent, lost in their own thoughts. Amon glanced at their faces one by one and reflected on their various stories. Although relating memories by speech still felt alien to him, there was something comforting, he realized, about knowing what brought them here. He sensed intimacy between them now, even more so in some ways than he had with Rick before cash crashing, as they’d mostly shared LifeStream segs whereas there seemed to be something more binding, more … communal? about the act of narration directly through the air from tongue to ear.