“Dad, please, can we talk about it?”
“There is nothing to talk about, son. You will do great. I’ll buy you new clothes, cool stuff, whatever you want. We can go shopping tomorrow.”
“Dad, I don’t need new stuff. I just don’t think I can go through this…”
Dad’s face turned red like a burner stone.
He stood up, smashed his fist at the table top. The soup swooshed out and started seeping through the wooden boards of the table, to the floor.
“Daichi, this conversation is over. You don’t want the clothes? Fine. But on Sunday I’m taking you to the school. You better be packed by then.”
With those words, dad left the table without finishing his meal. On the way out he grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat in the chair of the living room, flipping through the channels.
Mom came over to Daichi and placed her hand on his shoulder.
“You know he wants the best for you, son. He is trying so hard.”
“I know, mom, but, wait, are you on his side too?”
“Well, give it a try. You always have this house if you want to come back.”
“I know, but I will be a disgrace to everyone if I go there and quit. It’s not like I have a choice of coming back, and everything goes back to normal.”
Mom knew she should have said something, she should have lied, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t a strong woman, and it took a strong person to be a good liar. She went back to her chair at the table and started crying.
***
Flash forward five months. Daichi was at the cram school, and he was not doing well. He kept falling behind on all his classes, and the gap between the succeeding students and himself grew so wide, that it started swallowing him, bit by bit. Every evening the cohort took retention tests. The tests started after a long day of cramming, around 7 pm, and the kids could not go to sleep until they answered enough questions correctly.
It was customary for Daichi to go to bed past 5 am. However, the whole preceding week he got only one hour of sleep, only because the teachers took mercy on him and dismissed him without passing.
It was the end of term, and his parents were going to pick him up for a week. It was likely that based on his performance, Daichi would have been expelled.
When dad finds out that he wasted a whole semester worth of non-refundable tuition money, he’ll go crazy, thought Daichi while taking a restroom break during the class. There, sitting on the toilet, he couldn’t bring himself to go back to class. The hot wet tears heavily and silently fell on his knees. He took out his cell phone and ear buds, plugged them into his ears, and surrounded himself with a wall of sound. Daichi was in a trance, floating weightless in the universe, being everywhere at the same time, and feeling emotions so strong that his whole body quivered. But the anxiety still didn’t go away. He reached down in his pants and gratified himself, quietly, matter-of-factly, while tears kept rolling down. For a split second, the whole universe took a big step back, leaving Daichi alone, but the minute the pleasure quivers subsided, he crashed hard to the concrete reality, back to the restroom, where he was sitting on the toilet, and his legs were about to go numb.
Daichi wiped his hands into a sheet of toilet paper, cranked his music a bit louder, and reached down into his pants again. This time it took only a little longer to finish, but the second he was done, Daichi knew that he was back to the ugly restroom, and it was only a matter of time until the instructor came looking for him.
Something had to be done, he thought. He wasn’t sure what, but he was sure as hell he was not going back to the classroom. As he looked down at his feet, he noticed long colorful shoe laces in his sneakers. He looked around and up. Above his head he saw a water pipe running across the ceiling. It looked sturdy enough to handle Daichi’s weight.
Once Daichi had a plan, the tears burst out of him even stronger, bringing even sharper feeling of hopelessness, also mixed with some relief. That was it, that was the way out for him, there and then. There was nothing to look forward to in life, and everything to be afraid of.
***
Moments later, the instructor walked into the restroom looking for Daichi who had been absent from class for almost an hour. He knew he should have checked on him earlier. Daichi was a typical profile for a runaway kid, especially before the end of the term. Not once the faculty had had to catch kids like Daichi who snuck out of the toilet window and crawled down the fire escape ladder. Instead of finding an open window in the restroom, however, the instructor immediately saw a rope hanging from the water pipe on the ceiling.
He smash-opened the door to the stall.
There, he found Daichi, standing on the toilet with his pants down, trying to reach the end of the rope with a loop. “I couldn’t reach it…” cried Daichi… “It was too short…”
***
The cram school immediately expelled Daichi on the grounds of his academic performance, privately telling his parents that they should look into his emotional health. The incident left Daichi’s mom so shaken that it gave her an emotional permission to divorce her abusive husband. Without having any idea what to do with Daichi further, she decided just to give him some space. And time. And so Daichi receded to the basement, and never came out for the next three years.
***
Daichi was surfing through the dozens of garbage notifications in various chat rooms and social media web sites. Not a whole lot of likes on his selfies, as they were of awful quality and always looked the same. He almost overlooked one of those messages, because the profile picture featured a cute girl with dark-rimmed eyes, pink hair, and beautiful cleavage. Sex bot, he thought immediately. Not that he was against sex bots, but there were just too many, and most cost money to engage.
Daichi didn’t want to pay for sex. He probably would have, if he could afford it, but the way his life went, he couldn’t splurge on anything that was not a necessity. Online sex had started losing its appeal a long time ago and only added to Daichi’s perpetual self-loathing.
“Are you in a juvie?” read the message from the pink-haired girl. That was not a typical sex bot pick-up line, and he took a chance.
“No. Why would you think that?”
The girl immediately started typing.
“You look like shit.”
Daichi wasn’t offended. He really looked like shit. His wispy teenage beard and moustache looked hideous, and his hair was so greasy it almost formed dreadlocks.
“Well not everyone is a looker like yourself. What were you doing on my page?”
“We play in the same game. I’m Dragon67. You beat me in the Rigonara tournament. The app here suggested that I could have known you. So I looked. I don’t know you, just played a game… I’m Nyoko.”
“I remember you. You played good. I just had a lot more time to practice.”
“I have all the time in the world to practice. I’m just not as good as you are.”
Damn. A real person on the other end. It was unusual, exciting, and scary. His whole life was built around avoiding anxiety, and this connection threatened to unravel something he might not be able to control. Daichi immediately decided not to get involved much further.
“I guess you are not as good after all, Nyoko. Maybe you should go back to practice,” typed Daichi, changing his status to ‘off-line’.
Year 2045.
Tokyo, Japan
Old city in Tsukiji district. Fish market. Busy streets. A fest of life and death. Colorful fish is being slaughtered, gutted out, hosed down, flayed, fried, or worse, eaten half-live. Gleeful passersby line up at the food trucks for the taste of a delicious flesh of their choice.
Fah wore her new expensive poncho, a blend of merino wool and silk. The threads of silk in the poncho were reflecting light so softly, as if they were alive.
Veronica Starr and Fah walked into an old sake
house. Ambient Japanese music was stirring her imagination: pictures of the old days flashed in the corner of Fah’s mind, like dreams or memories she had never had. She sat at the table facing the entrance door. The waiter brought a jug of hot sake - top shelf, with an eye-catching seal on the side - a trademark of an ancient sake brewery.
Fah poured a cup and took a sip. Hot liquid streamed down her throat, going straight to her head. Her hands felt heavy and her head felt light. Looking at the entrance, Fah visualized glorious samurai soldiers walking through the door. She saw their hand-crafted outfits in striking detail: textures, thousands of tiny seams, leather and metal plates, woven together - a lace of impenetrable armor. Wild, imaginative colors, audacious designs… and their faces. Those faces communicated resolve, fearless demeanor. They were glorious and honorable. Fah saw them as if they were flowing through a calm Zen river; that river guided them, controlled them, owned them. That river was Mushin, a mental state of remarkable sensory acuity that took over samurai mind and body, in time of war and in time of peace.
“You see it, don’t you?” Veronica’s voice broke through to Fah’s mind, like through a sound-proof wall. “The ghosts of the past. Nakamura believes they walk these streets till this day.”
“Who is Nakamura?” asked Fah, and someone gently placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Michio Nakamura,” said the voice. “You are working for me now.”
***
When Nakamura turned 18, his father took him to his laboratory. They walked through several levels of security in a corporate building in the heart of Tokyo. Renowned in the world for his cancer research, Haruto Nakamura made one breakthrough after another, and nobody knew where his insight was coming from. In beating the cancer cell, he was a few steps ahead of everyone.
“This is where I work, son. Since you want to follow in my footsteps in medical research, I think it’s time to share some secrets with you.”
Nakamura’s office was all white, meticulously clean and minimalistic, with the exception of one tiny blooming cactus on his desk, in a white porcelain pot. Young Michio looked around, trying to identify anything of interest to look at, but it wasn’t very easy.
“So… Is this where you do you research? In this office?” Michio wasn’t impressed and could not figure out what in that office needed protection.
“Yes, son. This is where I do the most important research. I need to keep this place under tight security, because I can’t allow industry spies to capture my secrets.”
“There’s not much here, dad…”
“And I certainly want everyone to think this way.”
With those words, Haruto Nakamura grabbed a remote and pointed at the AC unit under the ceiling. The AC came to life, and with the humming sound of blowing air the white wall of the office began to slide aside, revealing a spacious modern laboratory behind a glass partition.
“Son, I need to tell you a fascinating story about a patient that I treated many years ago, Ichiro Akyama.”
Nakamura passed a white lab coat to his son and directed him to pass through the sterile chamber, where both were radiated in harsh blue light.
The lab was filled to the brim with high tech equipment and various vials containing all sorts of test samples. In the very center of the lab sat a glass sarcophagus. Michio walked straight to it and saw a body of a man, in his 40s or 50s.
“Son, this is Ichiro Akiyama. Well, what is left of him. Ichiro was a commercial pilot back in the day. I treated him for a rare form of brain cancer. The cancer was terminal, and there was nothing I could do. Ichiro decided to take one last cruise to Paris before retiring and settling his affairs in order. But when he returned from that flight, he was in remission. I could not get a word from him about what had happened. Since treatment of that particular cancer was nonexistent, only a miracle could have stopped Ichiro’s tumor from spreading throughout his brain. And he acted all weird about it too. He would not tell me what had happened, but he would not deny that something did happen to him. He kept saying that it was not safe for him to talk.”
“So… How did you end up with his body, dad?”
“He willed it to me, for medical research. And I also received a letter from him.”
“So he died? I thought he was cured.”
“Well, he was in remission for two years. He stopped seeing me after that time. But sometime after two years, the cancer returned in a more aggressive form, and took his life within weeks. I did not see it coming. It was as if the treatment he received expired, and cancer immediately moved back in.”
“What was in the letter, dad?”
Nakamura reached into the pocket of his lab coat and extracted an envelope.
“Now this letter is yours, son. Treat it with extreme caution. Akiyama made sure that nobody knew about its existence.”
Finally Michio felt excited at the promise of a mystery.
“What is in it, dad? I can’t wait to read it, but maybe just tell me in a few words.”
“Ah, son, always so impatient!” smiled Nakamura and grabbed his tall kid in a warm hug.
***
Fah was listening to Michio Nakamura’s story having not a slightest clue why a pharmaceutical giant was interested in her little research.
“See, Fah, in 1986 Ichiro Akyama encountered something unusual on his last flight from Paris to Tokyo, when they flew over Alaska. Some unidentified objects took over the flight controls and blasted the airplane with some kind of a radiation. When the flight was forced to land in Anchorage, some cogs from the U.S. secret service took Akyama into an interrogation room and scared him to death; and death scared Akyama a lot because of his terminal cancer diagnosis. But when he got home, it turned out that his cancer was gone, and the secret service knew both about the cancer and about the upcoming remission.”
Sake was corrupting Fah’s thinking. She thought she had lost the ability to follow the logic of this conversation.
“I am sorry, what are you talking about? Secret government experiments?”
“More like the government’s cover-up. Here’s my wild theory, substantiated with years of research, both mine and my father’s. The governments, and by that I mean the leading world powers, have known about the alien presence on Earth for… I don’t know, for generations.”
“Aliens?”
“Oh don’t tell me that you were not thinking about it!”
“I was, but I never spoke about it with anyone in practical terms.”
“Well this is going to get as practical as possible. The governments are both scared of the world’s panic and reluctant to open their cards because they reap the benefits of the alien presence.”
“Don’t try to tell me that all the governments of the world are in collusion with aliens! That is nonsense!”
“Oh no, the problem is much more delicate. See, let’s say the governments were to go public, what would happen?”
“The world would go to shit in a hand basket.”
“Exactly. Outing a vastly superior enemy would likely cause some pushback from the aliens. Whatever their agenda is here, it certainly involves secrecy and limited interaction with the world order.”
And then it dawned on her:
“Oh my god… We are in a cold war with the aliens…”
“It’s a bloody ballet in a cold war theatre…” whispered Veronica Starr.
Both Fah and Nakamura stopped in their tracks for a second.
“Now you understand…” continued Nakamura. “I believe that the world leaders are trying to understand the enemy, to study it, and under no circumstances do they want to awaken the force that they are not ready to tackle. Imagine waking up next to a rattle snake! Akiyama’s experience was by no means isolated. The whole Project Blue Book, its European, Asian, and Australian counterparts, accumulated so much research about such sightings, miraculous cures,
and unexplained events.”
“Crop circles?” suggested Fah.
“Perhaps. It goes further. For example, the Portuguese ‘Our Lady of Fátima’, now a holy Catholic place that once witnessed a mass sighting of what looked like a divine presence witnessed by thousands, and followed by miracles, especially healings. There is a strong evidence that something akin to Akyama’s experience happened on that site.”
“Now you are going to tell me that Roswell crash was real…” Fah was still sceptical.
“I’m afraid so. And so many other instances, when the governments and corporations managed to salvage alien technology and make incredible breakthroughs. The United States is one of the easiest countries to trace alien influence because of the free press and the public information legislation. Both NASA and DARPA were created in the wake of the Roswell crash, as well as other massive UFO sightings, well documented in history. Out of only these two organizations came so many innovations that they changed the course of our evolution.”
Year 1604.
Edo, Japan
Tatami was expecting Ennuturat’s audience in the Tokugawa palace. A year had passed since Tatami introduced Ennuturat, disguised as a Portuguese merchant under the name of Jose Brito, to the Shōgun. Whatever merits were behind the nature of Tokugawa and Brito’s relationship, Tatami could tell that the two remarkably got along. That Nanban merchant Brito definitely had something to offer, thought Tatami, and it was time to remind him about the role Tatami played in Brito’s access to the palace.
“Greetings, honorable Jose Brito!” exclaimed Tatami as he walked into the spacious palace room, designated as Brito’s headquarters.
“Greetings Daimyo Tatami. How have you been?”
Initially Ennuturat was simply behaving the way that was expected of him, in order to keep his disguise. The shield that he was wearing depended on the humans’ gullible belief that they saw nothing out of the ordinary, merely a human being from a different country. And if that belief was shaken, the human mind would start seeing glimpses of Ennuturat’s true appearance - tentacles, alien skin, the suit that shielded him from the toxic Earth’s atmosphere.
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