by Project Itoh
My mother’s life, as regurgitated by computer software.
The story of the pair of eyes that constantly watched over me.
So why was there was no room for me in this story?
Traces of my mother’s gaze. The feeling that I was constantly being watched. These were my childhood memories. And it seemed that they were betrayed. If my mother’s biography according to the Life Graph was anything to go by, I barely featured at all in her life.
I wasn’t completely absent, of course. The important events and landmarks were all there, but with minimal detail. Almost as though I were an afterthought. The person who really came to life in my mother’s memory was my father. Overwhelmingly. The man who had blown his brains out and suddenly disappeared from my mother’s life. And yet he had not disappeared at all. Not from her memories.
Mom wasn’t looking at me. She had never been looking at me.
I could now say with confidence that the person who’d scrubbed my father’s splattered brains off the walls after he shot himself was my mother.
Everybody’s life story is interwoven with sections of other people’s stories. My story contained elements of Mom’s story, of Williams’s story, of the stories of Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. But Mom’s story barely mentioned me at all.
But …
I tried to work out what had actually happened in my past then. That constant presence, the gaze that I always felt on the back of my collar. It had to have been real. It had to have been. Even after all these years I could still remember, vividly, the goose bumps I used to feel when I met my mother’s gaze from the most exquisite of angles, such as from that little slip of space between the kitchen and the hallway to the bathroom. We were like two snipers targeting one another, discovering the spine-tingling coincidence that the other was looking at you through their scope at the very same instant that you had found them with yours.
And yet the record that was supposed to confirm that this constant gaze I’d felt upon me was indeed a mother’s love was curiously, bafflingly, bewilderingly absent.
So what the hell was it?
If I thought that I was empty after that last mission, well, I hadn’t seen anything yet. Because now I was empty. Now I was hollow. Now there was a gnawing void inside me.
And John Paul’s notebook filled that void. It was a perfect fit. Maybe it was even the case that the notebook sensed the void in me and picked me out.
So I’m feeling pretty satisfied because I’d been able to squeeze in plenty of appropriate grammatical forms into the news clip I’m now watching. The email account that John Paul left me contained a text editor that could generate a grammar of genocide for the English language.
John Paul had used this to imbue all kinds of words with the tincture of death. He had disseminated those words around the world. Well, that was then. This was now. I’m weaving my own tale of genocide.
John Paul’s grammar was, in a way, like sheet music. As an homage, I decided to make my version as close to music as I could.
So I chanted it and I recited it. The sound. The rhythm. I prayed, deliberately, intensely: I want you to start killing each other. Just like so many people outside America have already killed each other. All the while I thought how nice it would be if someone noticed what I was doing, noticed the simple, functional evidence that this was a prayer, a song.
My words started to take shape, and gradually they penetrated the fabric of American discourse. My words, my songs, my images, my tone of voice, all started seeping into the collective psyche of the people who watched or listened to or had any interest whatsoever in my Congressional hearing. Even if a person merely accessed the Congressional Record after the fact, there was enough latent deep structure embedded into my transcribed speeches for my grammatical tune to kick in inside their minds.
In no time at all the original scandal stopped being an issue. I rammed home the grammar of genocide into this country, the USA, a country that previously never even showed the slightest of omens that a civil war might be brewing. I was a puppet master, a god riding the crest of an unstoppable mechanical force, ruthlessly, relentlessly changing the course of the lives of mere mortals. It was a smooth process, almost automatic.
There have already been plenty of casualties all across the country. And we haven’t even really started yet. The handful of news networks that are still going report that the country is on the brink of an all-out civil war. There haven’t yet been any large-scale massacres that you could properly call genocide though. Not yet. But soon. Soon enough.
The seemingly eternal Starbucks and the once-ubiquitous Domino’s Pizza have disappeared. I knew this was going to happen, of course, so I’d stocked up on supplies big-time. The other day I had to shoot a burglar who was after my hoard. His corpse is still in my hallway. I wonder what I should do with it. The deep structure of genocide has spread across the whole of America, quickly and easily, using English as its vector.
See? There was another way to eliminate the risk of terrorist attacks on the good old US of A after all. Who’s going to bother with us now? We’ve stopped trading internationally, the import and export markets have utterly collapsed. No country is going to have cause to be jealous of us or hate us for our economic imperialism anymore.
You see, I decided to take the burden of sin upon my own shoulders. I decided I was going to punish myself. So I took America, dangerous America, the bane of the rest of the world, and I cast her into the abyss. In order to save all other countries, I gritted my teeth and made up my mind to plunge my country into a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.
It was a tough decision. But I’ve decided to accept responsibility for it. Just as John Paul accepted responsibility for the lives of people from all the rest of the world.
Outside, somewhere in the distance, I can hear an FN Minimi firing on full automatic.
Oh, hurry up and kill them already so we can get some peace. I’m trying to enjoy my pizza here!
No, it’s still firing on full. The noise is starting to bother me.
But then I think about how everywhere else in the world is quieter now. That makes me feel a little better.
Keikaku (Project) Itoh was born in Tokyo in 1974. He graduated from Musashino Art University. In 2007, he debuted with Gyakusatsu Kikan (Genocidal Organ) and took first prize in the Best SF of 2007 in SF Magazine. His novel Harmony won both the Seiun and Japan SF awards, and its English-language edition won the Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation. He is also the author of Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots, a Japanese-language novel based on the popular video game series. All three of his novels are available in English from Haikasoru. After a long battle with cancer, Itoh passed away in March 2009.
HAIKASORU
THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE
INCREDIBLE SCIENCE FICTION BY PROJECT ITOH
HARMONY
In the future, Utopia has finally been achieved thanks to medical nanotechnology and a powerful ethic of social welfare and mutual consideration. This perfect world isn’t that perfect though, and three young girls stand up to totalitarian kindness and super-medicine by attempting suicide via starvation. It doesn’t work, but one of the girls—Tuan Kirie—grows up to be a member of the World Health Organization. As a crisis threatens the harmony of the new world, Tuan rediscovers another member of her suicide pact, and together they must help save the planet … from itself. Winner of the Special Citation of the Philip K. Dick award!
METAL GEAR SOLID: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS
From the legendary video game franchise! Solid Snake is a soldier and part of a worldwide nanotechnology network known as the Sons of the Patriots System. Time is running out for Snake as, thanks to the deadly FOXDIE virus, he has been transformed into a walking biological weapon. Not only is the clock ticking for Snake, but for the world itself. Snake turns to the SOP for help, only to find that it has been hacked by his old enemy Liquid Ocelot—and whoever controls the SOP System controls the world.
THE
FUTURE IS JAPANESE, EDITED BY HAIKASORU
A web browser that threatens to conquer the world. The longest, loneliest railroad on Earth. A North Korean nuke hitting Tokyo, a hollow asteroid full of automated rice paddies, and a specialist in breaking up “virtual” marriages. And yes, giant robots. These thirteen stories from and about the Land of the Rising Sun run the gamut from fantasy to cyberpunk, and will leave you knowing that the future is Japanese! Featuring the military SF novella “The Indifference Engine” by Project Itoh!
www.haikasoru.com
Table of Contents
Copyright page
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
Epilogue
About the Author
HAIKASORU