A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  “Well,” the man said, “I know it’s old and out of style. But I plan to buy a new pokkecon here in Tokyo. I’m told that they sell pokkecons by the basketful in Akihabara electronics market.”

  “That’s right. What kind of translator program are you running? Your translator talks like someone from Osaka.”

  “Does it sound funny?” the tourist asked anxiously.

  “Well, I don’t want to complain, but.…” Tsuyoshi smiled. “Here, let’s trade meishi. I can give you a copy of a brand-new freeware translator.”

  “That would be wonderful.” They pressed buttons and squirted copies of their business cards across the network link.

  Tsuyoshi examined his copy of the man’s electronic card and saw that his name was Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman was from New Zealand. Tsuyoshi activated a transfer program. His modern pokkecon began transferring a new translator onto Zimmerman’s machine.

  A large American man in a padded suit entered the lobby of the Daruma. The man wore sunglasses, and was sweating visibly in the summer heat. The American looked huge, as if he lifted a lot of weights. Then a Japanese woman followed him. The woman was sharply dressed, with a dark blue dress suit, hat, sunglasses, and an attaché case. She had a haunted look.

  Her escort turned and carefully watched the bellhops, who were bringing in a series of bags. The woman walked crisply to the reception desk and began making anxious demands of the clerk.

  “I’m a great believer in machine translation,” Tsuyoshi said to the tall man from New Zealand. “I really believe that computers help human beings to relate in a much more human way.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Mr. Zimmerman, through his machine. “I can remember the first time I came to your country, many years ago. I had no portable translator. In fact, I had nothing but a printed phrasebook. I happened to go into a bar, and …”

  Zimmerman stopped and gazed alertly at his pokkecon. “Oh dear, I’m getting a screen prompt. I have to go up to my room right away.”

  “Then I’ll come along with you till this software transfer is done,” Tsuyoshi said.

  “That’s very kind of you.” They got into the elevator together. Zimmerman punched for the fourth floor. “Anyway, as I was saying, I went into this bar in Roppongi late at night, because I was jetlagged and hoping for something to eat …”

  “Yes?”

  “And this woman … well, let’s just say this woman was hanging out in a foreigner’s bar in Roppongi late at night, and she wasn’t wearing a whole lot of clothes, and she didn’t look like she was any better than she ought to be.…”

  “Yes, I think I understand you.”

  “Anyway, this menu they gave me was full of kanji, or katakana, or romanji, or whatever they call those, so I had my phrasebook out, and I was trying very hard to puzzle out these pesky ideograms …” The elevator opened and they stepped into the carpeted hall of the hotel’s fourth floor. “So I opened the menu and I pointed to an entree, and I told this girl.…” Zimmerman stopped suddenly, and stared at his screen. “Oh dear, something’s happening. Just a moment.”

  Zimmerman carefully studied the instructions on his pokkecon. Then he pulled the bottle of bay rum from the baggy pocket of his shorts, and unscrewed the cap. He stood on tiptoe, stretching to his full height, and carefully poured the contents of the bottle through the iron louvers of a ventilation grate set high in the top of the wall.

  Zimmerman screwed the cap back on neatly, and slipped the empty bottle back in his pocket. Then he examined his pokkecon again. He frowned, and shook it. The screen had frozen. Apparently Tsuyoshi’s new translation program had overloaded Zimmerman’s old-fashioned operating system. His pokkecon had crashed.

  Zimmerman spoke a few defeated sentences in English. Then he smiled, and spread his hands apologetically. He bowed, and went into his room, and shut the door.

  The Japanese woman and her burly American escort entered the hall. The man gave Tsuyoshi a hard stare. The woman opened the door with a passcard. Her hands were shaking.

  Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon rang. “Leave the hall,” it told him. “Go downstairs. Get into the elevator with the bellboy.”

  Tsuyoshi followed instructions.

  The bellboy was just entering the elevator with a cart full of the woman’s baggage. Tsuyoshi got into the elevator, stepping carefully behind the wheeled metal cart. “What floor, sir?” said the bellboy.

  “Eight,” Tsuyoshi said, ad-libbing. The bellboy turned and pushed the buttons. He faced forward attentively, his gloved hands folded.

  The pokkecon flashed a silent line of text to the screen. “Put the gift box inside her flight bag,” it read.

  Tsuyoshi located the zippered blue bag at the back of the cart. It was a matter of instants to zip it open, put in the box with the maneki neko, and zip the bag shut again. The bellboy noticed nothing. He left, tugging his cart.

  Tsuyoshi got out on the eighth floor, feeling slightly foolish. He wandered down the hall, found a quiet nook by an ice machine, and called his wife. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing.” She smiled. “Your haircut looks nice! Show me the back of your head.”

  Tsuyoshi held the pokkecon screen behind the nape of his neck.

  “They do good work,” his wife said with satisfaction. “I hope it didn’t cost too much. Are you coming home now?”

  “Things are getting a little odd here at the hotel,” Tsuyoshi told her. “I may be some time.”

  His wife frowned. “Well, don’t miss supper. We’re having bonito.”

  Tsuyoshi took the elevator back down. It stopped at the fourth floor. The woman’s American companion stepped onto the elevator. His nose was running and his eyes were streaming with tears.

  “Are you all right?” Tsuyoshi said.

  “I don’t understand Japanese,” the man growled. The elevator doors shut.

  The man’s cellular phone crackled into life. It emitted a scream of anguish and a burst of agitated female English. The man swore and slammed his hairy fist against the elevator’s emergency button. The elevator stopped with a lurch. An alarm bell began ringing.

  The man pried the doors open with his large hairy fingers and clambered out into the fourth floor. He then ran headlong down the hall.

  The elevator began buzzing in protest, its doors shuddering as if broken. Tsuyoshi climbed hastily from the damaged elevator, and stood there in the hallway. He hesitated a moment. Then he produced his pokkecon and loaded his Japanese-to-English translator. He walked cautiously after the American man.

  The door to their suite was open. Tsuyoshi spoke aloud into his pokkecon. “Hello?” he said experimentally. “May I be of help?”

  The woman was sitting on the bed. She had just discovered the maneki neko box in her flight bag. She was staring at the little cat in horror.

  “Who are you?” she said, in bad Japanese.

  Tsuyoshi realized suddenly that she was a Japanese American. Tsuyoshi had met a few Japanese Americans before. They always troubled him. They looked fairly normal from the outside, but their behavior was always bizarre. “I’m just a passing friend,” he said. “Something I can do?”

  “Grab him, Mitch!” said the woman in English. The American man rushed into the hall and grabbed Tsuyoshi by the arm. His hands were like steel bands.

  Tsuyoshi pressed the distress button on his pokkecon.

  “Take that computer away from him,” the woman ordered in English. Mitch quickly took Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon away, and threw it on the bed. He deftly patted Tsuyoshi’s clothing, searching for weapons. Then he shoved Tsuyoshi into a chair.

  The woman switched back to Japanese. “Sit right there, you. Don’t you dare move.” She began examining the contents of Tsuyoshi’s wallet.

  “I beg your pardon?” Tsuyoshi said. His pokkecon was lying on the bed. Lines of red text scrolled up its little screen as it silently issued a series of emergency net alerts.

  The woman spoke to her com
panion in English. Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon was still translating faithfully. “Mitch, go call the local police.”

  Mitch sneezed uncontrollably. Tsuyoshi noticed that the room smelled strongly of bay rum. “I can’t talk to the local cops. I can’t speak Japanese.” Mitch sneezed again.

  “Okay, then I’ll call the cops. You handcuff this guy. Then go down to the infirmary and get yourself some antihistamines, for Christ’s sake.”

  Mitch pulled a length of plastic whipcord cuff from his coat pocket, and attached Tsuyoshi’s right wrist to the head of the bed. He mopped his streaming eyes with a tissue. “I’d better stay with you. If there’s a cat in your luggage, then the criminal network already knows we’re in Japan. You’re in danger.”

  “Mitch, you may be my bodyguard, but you’re breaking out in hives.”

  “This just isn’t supposed to happen,” Mitch complained, scratching his neck. “My allergies never interfered with my job before.”

  “Just leave me here and lock the door,” the woman told him. “I’ll put a chair against the knob. I’ll be all right. You need to look after yourself.”

  Mitch left the room.

  The woman barricaded the door with a chair. Then she called the front desk on the hotel’s bedside pasokon. “This is Louise Hashimoto in room 434. I have a gangster in my room. He’s an information criminal. Would you call the Tokyo police, please? Tell them to send the organized crime unit. Yes, that’s right. Do it. And you should put your hotel security people on full alert. There may be big trouble here. You’d better hurry.” She hung up.

  Tsuyoshi stared at her in astonishment. “Why are you doing this? What’s all this about?”

  “So you call yourself Tsuyoshi Shimizu,” said the woman, examining his credit cards. She sat on the foot of the bed and stared at him. “You’re yakuza of some kind, right?”

  “I think you’ve made a big mistake,” Tsuyoshi said.

  Louise scowled. “Look, Mr. Shimizu, you’re not dealing with some Yankee tourist here. My name is Louise Hashimoto and I’m an assistant federal prosecutor from Providence, Rhode Island, USA.” She showed him a magnetic ID card with a gold official seal.

  “It’s nice to meet someone from the American government,” said Tsuyoshi, bowing a bit in his chair. “I’d shake your hand, but it’s tied to the bed.”

  “You can stop with the innocent act right now. I spotted you out in the hall earlier, and in the lobby, too, casing the hotel. How did you know my bodyguard is violently allergic to bay rum? You must have read his medical records.”

  “Who, me? Never!”

  “Ever since I discovered you network people, it’s been one big pattern,” said Louise. “It’s the biggest criminal conspiracy I ever saw. I busted this software pirate in Providence. He had a massive network server and a whole bunch of AI freeware search engines. We took him in custody, we bagged all his search engines, and catalogs, and indexers.… Later that very same day, these cats start showing up.”

  “Cats?”

  Louise lifted the maneki neko, handling it as if it were a live eel. “These little Japanese voodoo cats. Maneki neko, right? They started showing up everywhere I went. There’s a china cat in my handbag. There’s three china cats at the office. Suddenly they’re on display in the windows of every antique store in Providence. My car radio starts making meowing noises at me.”

  “You broke part of the network?” Tsuyoshi said, scandalized. “You took someone’s machines away? That’s terrible! How could you do such an inhuman thing?”

  “You’ve got a real nerve complaining about that. What about my machinery?” Louise held up her fat, eerielooking American pokkecon. “As soon as I stepped off the airplane at Narita, my PDA was attacked. Thousands and thousands of e-mail messages. All of them pictures of cats. A denial-of-service attack! I can’t even communicate with the home office! My PDA’s useless!”

  “What’s a PDA?”

  “It’s a PDA, my Personal Digital Assistant! Manufactured in Silicon Valley!”

  “Well, with a goofy name like that, no wonder our pokkecons won’t talk to it.”

  Louise frowned grimly. “That’s right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You’re involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States Government. You’ll see.” She paused, looking him over. “You know, Shimizu, you don’t look much like the Italian mafia gangsters I have to deal with, back in Providence.”

  “I’m not a gangster at all. I never do anyone any harm.”

  “Oh no?” Louise glowered at him. “Listen, pal, I know a lot more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I’ve been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you’re getting all this time?”

  She pointed a finger at him. “Ha! Do you ever pay taxes on those? Do you ever declare that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales.… You’re a tax evader! You’re living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions!”

  Tsuyoshi blinked. “Look, I don’t know anything about all that. I’m just living my life.”

  “Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government-approved, regulated economy!”

  “Well,” Tsuyoshi said gently, “maybe my economy is better than your economy.”

  “Says who?” she scoffed. “Why would anyone think that?”

  “It’s better because we’re happier than you are. What’s wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Year’s Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those.”

  “Not the way you Japanese like them. You’re totally crazy for gifts.”

  “What kind of society has no gifts? It’s barbaric to have no regard for common human feelings.”

  Louise bristled. “You’re saying I’m barbaric?”

  “I don’t mean to complain,” Tsuyoshi said politely, “but you do have me tied up to your bed.”

  Louise crossed her arms. “You might as well stop complaining. You’ll be in much worse trouble when the local police arrive.”

  “Then we’ll probably be waiting here for quite a while,” Tsuyoshi said. “The police move rather slowly, here in Japan. I’m sorry, but we don’t have as much crime as you Americans, so our police are not very alert.”

  The pasokon rang at the side of the bed. Louise answered it. It was Tsuyoshi’s wife.

  “Could I speak to Tsuyoshi Shimizu please?”

  “I’m over here, dear,” Tsuyoshi called quickly. “She’s kidnapped me! She tied me to the bed!”

  “Tied to her bed?” His wife’s eyes grew wide. “That does it! I’m calling the police!”

  Louise quickly hung up the pasokon. “I haven’t kidnapped you! I’m only detaining you here until the local authorities can come and arrest you.”

  “Arrest me for what, exactly?”

  Louise thought quickly. “Well, for poisoning my bodyguard by pouring bay rum into the ventilator.”

  “But I never did that. Anyway, that’s not illegal, is it?”

  The pasokon rang again. A shining white cat appeared on the screen. It had large, staring, unearthly eyes.

  “Let him go,” the cat commanded in English.

  Louise shrieked and yanked the pasokon’s plug from the wall.

  Suddenly the lights went out. “Infrastructure attack!” Louise squawled. She rolled quickly under the bed.

  The room went gloomy and quiet. The air conditioner had shut off. “I think you can come out,” Tsuyoshi said at last, his voice loud in the still room. “It’s just a power failure.”

  “No it isn’t,” Louise said. She crawled slowly from beneath the bed, and sa
t on the mattress. Somehow, the darkness had made them more intimate. “I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law.”

  She sighed. “I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.”

  The shower came on, all by itself. Louise shuddered, but said nothing. Slowly, the darkened, stuffy room began to fill with hot steam.

  “My toilets don’t flush,” Louise said. “My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people.”

  There was the noise of scuffling in the hall. Distant voices, confused shouting.

  Suddenly the chair broke under the doorknob. The door burst open violently. Mitch tumbled through, the sunglasses flying from his head. Two hotel security guards were trying to grab him. Shouting incoherently in English, Mitch fell headlong to the floor, kicking and thrashing. The guards lost their hats in the struggle. One tackled Mitch’s legs with both his arms, and the other whacked and jabbed him with a baton.

  Puffing and grunting with effort, they hauled Mitch out of the room. The darkened room was so full of steam that the harried guards hadn’t even noticed Tsuyoshi and Louise.

  Louise stared at the broken door. “Why did they do that to him?”

  Tsuyoshi scratched his head in embarrassment. “Probably a failure of communication.”

  “Poor Mitch! They took his gun away at the airport. He had all kinds of technical problems with his passport.… Poor guy, he’s never had any luck since he met me.”

  There was a loud tapping at the window. Louise shrank back in fear. Finally she gathered her courage, and opened the curtains. Daylight flooded the room.