Realms Unreel (2011)

by Audrey Auden

  “What’s wrong?” Emmie whispered.

  “Someone’s called in TSA screeners. I’m sure it wasn’t Falsens. He uses private contractors for that.”

  Emmie watched the men pacing leisurely alongside the small private jet.

  “Could the TSA be working for Amos?”

  “Could be. But even if they’re not, any body scans they take could end up somewhere Amos can find them. That would make it hard to cover our tracks.”

  Naoto waited for a moment, then said sharply,

  “Falsens? Are you paying attention?”

  “I am aware of the screener issue at the jetport, Mr. Kimura,” Falsens replied curtly, “Please hold for further instructions.”

  Emmie wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, chewing on her knuckle as she watched the TSA agents ambling back and forth, swinging their scanner wands beside them.

  “Mr. Kimura, can you confirm that the TSA agents are wearing audiovisual sensory augmentation devices?”

  Naoto squinted out into the darkness. The TSA agents were standing near the edge of a pool of runway lamplight, making it difficult to see them. Emmie said,

  “There. The guy on the left just made that gesture,” she imitated him, “He’s listening to music. He’s got earbuds on, at least.”

  “And the other agent?” said Falsens.

  “Can’t see him,” said Naoto, “It’s too dark.”

  “Miss Bridges,” said Falsens, “I’m afraid that in order to get you onto that plane, we’re going to have to take somewhat of a risk. Statistically speaking, there is a seventy-one percent chance that the first TSA agent is wearing some kind of sensory augmentation equipment. The second agent, who appears to be listening to music through auditory immergers, is more than ninety-five percent likely to be wearing visual immergers of some kind as well.

  “In the event that both agents are in fact equipped with audiovisual sensory augmentation susceptible to the remote sensory projection program that I will provide to Mr. Kimura for this operation, your boarding process should be quite straightforward. They will never see you pass. However, in the event that one or both of the agents is entirely without audiovisual sensory augmentation, you will need to authorize Mr. Kimura to forcibly incapacitate both agents.”

  Naoto tapped his side, where he was evidently concealing some weapon of force. Emmie swallowed.

  “That’s not …?”

  Naoto shook his head.

  “No. Tranquilizer gun.”

  A liability waiver prompt appeared on the vehicle dashboard display, as Emmie was no longer equipped with her own headset.

  “You’re definitely not going to kill anyone?” she said to Naoto.

  “Scout’s honor. And, anyway,” he said sardonically, “Falsens would have to get a different authorization for that.”

  She sighed and pressed her thumb to the dashboard to sign the waiver.

  “Stay in here until I say otherwise,” said Naoto, “I’ll be on the car audio channel if you need me.”

  Naoto stepped out of the car and walked casually toward the TSA agents. Emmie saw him offer each of them a cigarette from a pack he produced from his jacket pocket. One man accepted, while the other waved him off. Naoto and the smoker stood to the side chatting for a few minutes, and afterwards Naoto stepped toward the other agent and clapped him on the shoulder before walking off to the nearby private charter terminal.

  “Both of them are wearing immergers,” Naoto said through the car speakers.

  “Should I get out of the car?” said Emmie.

  “Not yet. Costume change.”

  Less than a minute later, Naoto re-emerged from the terminal wearing a pilot’s uniform, carrying a small briefcase, and looking about six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier.

  “How do you do that?” Emmie said, staring at him in disbelief as he approached the plane again. She thought she saw Naoto wink at her across the tarmac.

  He stopped before the TSA agents and chatted with them as they patted him down and took a full body scan followed by a scan of his briefcase. They waved him aboard.

  “Wait for it,” Naoto’s voice came over the car speakers.

  Emmie watched with bemusement as the two TSA agents continued their wand routine, this time with an unseen subject. They were now under the influence of Falsens’ interference projection program.

  “How do you do that?” Emmie said again, this time to Falsens. Again, her question went unanswered.

  “Okay,” said Naoto, “Just walk around behind them. Don’t bump into them.” When Emmie hesitated, Naoto urged, “Quickly, Emmie. Trust me.”

  Emmie steeled herself, opened the passenger door slowly, and stepped out of the car. The door started closing automatically behind her, and she hurried across the open tarmac toward the airplane, painfully aware of her heart in her throat, her sneakers thudding softly on the pavement, and her long shadow pointing like an arrow straight toward her. It seemed impossible that the TSA agents wouldn’t see her.

  But the TSA agents never even looked her way as she crept past them and climbed as quietly as she could up the gangway.

  “Have a nice flight, ma’am,” said one of the agents. Emmie wheeled around in surprise, almost tripping back down the stairs of the gangway. Naoto was instantly behind her, one arm around her and another covering her mouth. She felt her pulse racing as she stared down at the agents standing just feet below her. They waved into the darkness at an unseen person.

  “Get in the back and sit down,” Naoto whispered in her ear.

  He pulled Emmie back into the cabin and started to close the hatch. Emmie gripped the arm of the first seat she found and collapsed into it.

  ∞

  Emmie could not bring herself to open her eyes during takeoff, and they must have been miles out over the Pacific by the time Naoto came back from the cockpit with his briefcase and sat down in one of the swiveling leather recliners across from her.

  “Who’s flying the plane?” Emmie asked in alarm.

  “Falsens,” Naoto said calmly, “Remotely.”

  Emmie decided that it was pointless to freak out about this. They had already reached a stable altitude.

  “Do you think you could sleep?” said Naoto, “It’s about ten hours to Japan.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Emmie, still feeling the aftereffects of adrenaline overload, “I’m totally wired.”

  “Here,” said Naoto, climbing out of his recliner to open a small refrigeration panel mounted on the cabin wall. He poured her a double whisky and set it down on the table beside her, “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m going to stay up there in the cockpit. Falsens and I need to work out some of our ground logistics, and I want to stay at the controls in case we need to switch out of autopilot.”

  “Do you think something might …?”

  “Nope. I don’t think anything’s going to happen. Just being careful.”

  Emmie sighed. She picked up the whisky tentatively, took a sip, and promptly started coughing. Naoto grinned and turned to leave, but Emmie stopped him, her eyes still watery as she rasped,

  “Hey — If it’s not a security hazard now, do you have any immergers I could borrow to surf the alternet? Helps me get to sleep.”

  Naoto laughed.

  “Oh, yeah. Falsens said to check the briefcase.”

  Emmie turned to the briefcase that Naoto had carried aboard and popped it open to reveal a full set of the very finest immerger gear.

  “Falsens, you’re the best,” she whispered, holding up the headset appreciatively.

  “Thank you, Miss Bridges,” Falsens said over the airplane intercom, “I hope you will say so in your review.”

  Emmie smirked briefly. She rose from her seat and made her way into the surprisingly capacious lavatory to put on the new gear. After a few minutes spent configuring interface preferences and installing essential tools, she flipped on a visual overlay and started crawling
through her alternet feeds for news on the leak.

  Barely an hour had passed since the plane had taken off from Oakland when Emmie came across the first chatter about the leak. As the anonymous collective had predicted, a number of the server farms hosting the first wave of leaked video had gone offline under mysterious circumstances. This had automatically triggered the spread of the leak to the second-degree servers.

  Emmie began to mentally cheer on the anonymous collective as the plan played out. Faster than the video streams could disappear, several high-reputation alternet identities, repaying or earning the favor of the anonymous collective, conveyed their loyal followers to the content with pointed commentary about the exceptional speed with which the content was spreading and disappearing. Identities inclined to conspiracy theorizing gamely picked up the story and commenced speculation as to the purpose of the leak and the significance of the covert attempts to suppress it.

  The video hosting providers, perplexed as to the cause of the outages and harassed by their subscribers, sent up a hue and cry about the attacks on their servers. Emmie watched the videos as mainstream news outlets happily sensationalized the story with the generous support of alternet security sponsors promoting one-day-only product discounts.

  Mere minutes after the mainstream coverage on the video server outages began, however, an armageddon virus took a large alternet currency exchange offline, handily co-opting the attention of most commentators and concluding that news cycle. The exchange meltdown rekindled Emmie’s fears about the spiraling consequences of the leak she had initiated.

  To Emmie’s surprise, the attention of the conspiracy theorists proved tenacious. By the time the news cycle about the exchange meltdown had ended, she started picking up public forum discussions that revealed a somewhat cohesive narrative about the leak. The conspiracy theorists had dubbed the leaked content the World Tree Codex, based on the recurring symbolic references in the texts it contained.

  The Codex, the conspiracy theorists claimed, was a long-lost cache of ancient mystical texts and artwork. Depending on the commentator Emmie read, the Codex proved the extraterrestrial origin of life on Earth, provided the precise location of the lost continent of Atlantis, confirmed once and for all the date and time of the apocalypse, expressed the mathematical formula reconciling quantum and relativity theory, or encoded the master plan of the Freemasons to consolidate control over world governments.

  The catchy new name re-captured the attention of the mainstream news outlets, who now sensationalized the World Tree Codex story with the help of panels of renowned author-scholars from a variety of disciplines. Emmie noted with amusement that these panelists had all, most fortuitously, and seemingly only moments earlier, released bestsellers in the conspiracy non-fiction genre.

  Wholly-owned subsidiary news outlets, to more fully capture the momentary surge of popular interest in the World Tree Codex story, produced their own panels of even-more-renowned author-scholars. These experts cast aspersions on the deplorable fabulists on the nominally competing news outlets, while coincidentally pitching their own newly-released bestsellers.

  By the time Emmie had finished her whisky, over sixteen hundred expert contributors had synthesized their speculations into the definitive wiki article on the World Tree Codex, which was deemed a hoax perpetrated by a cabal of alternet security consultants to spur product sales. Falsens was implicated in the hoax, although a footnote conceded that this was disputed. The wiki article directed readers who wished to view the hoax videos and the virus code that had caused the cascading server outages to the offshore alternet content repository operated in an unknown, secure location by the anonymous collective.

  Emmie watched through the semantic hits chart in her feed reader as the World Tree Codex story faded into the distant past of the alternet’s memory. She was only mildly surprised by the speed with which it had all unfolded. She said to Naoto over their shared channel,

  “All that, and still I have absolutely no idea what the World Tree Codex is about. Unless Midori was really writing a book about aliens or telepathy or something.”

  “I think that guy going on about the JFK prophesy might have been on to something,” Naoto offered. Emmie snorted.

  CHAPTER 15

  Into the Mountains

  Emmie drifted in and out of sleep for the next several hours, until Naoto said on their shared channel,

  “We’ll be landing soon, Emmie.”

  She blinked sleepily and stretched, leaning over the padded arm of her recliner to peer out the window. The sky was dark, but below, the bright lights of an urban sprawl illuminated broad valleys enclosed by the dark folds of forested mountains. She imagined how delighted Owen would have been to look down on an unfamiliar landscape like this, with the prospect of a real-life adventure before them.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “We’re passing over the Kansei region of southern Japan. We’re going to land at the Itami airport.”

  Emmie pulled up a map on her visual overlay to orient herself to the new location. After a few attempts to guess the correct spelling of Enryaku-ji, she located the temple where they would meet Amaterasu: atop Mount Hiei, a three-hour drive northeast from the Itami airport, according to her navigation system.

  “We can’t land any closer?” she asked nervously, the freeway encounter with Amos still fresh in her memory.

  “Sorry. Falsens doesn’t have any landing strips in the mountains.”

  “What are we going to do about the Japanese — whatever they’ve got. TSA? Immigration officers?”

  Naoto laughed.

  “The Japanese and their immergers are inseparable. As long as we have Falsens’ remote sensory projection program running, you’ll be invisible to nearly everyone. ”

  Naoto was right. Emmie easily sidestepped one airport security checkpoint after another. She watched in amazement as security personnel waved through the invisible young woman that Falsens seamlessly integrated into their experience while erasing their perception of Emmie. Emmie kept up a near-constant stream of pestering trying to get Falsens to tell her where he had acquired such technology, but he remained tight-lipped on this topic.

  An autopiloted car picked them up at the curb, and Naoto took the wheel. Emmie settled into the passenger seat and stared out the window as they raced through the tangled undergrowth of narrow highways, raised train tracks, and power lines that stretched from one high-rise to the next. The concrete jungle thinned a bit as they crossed the river into Osaka and turned north into a more human-scale landscape of residential neighborhoods.

  The first light of dawn began to glow on the eastern horizon, illuminating a dark green ridge of low mountains ahead. An hour later, they passed under raised train tracks, and Naoto slowed as the road narrowed. Sidewalks separated from the road by low barriers pressed in on both sides, and pedestrians walked by an arm’s length from Emmie’s window. Supermarkets opened their doors, and window shades slid open on the second floors of houses facing the road. A few industrious gardeners were already at work tending patches of greenery in the alleyways between buildings.

  The road passed beneath a series of brightly painted torii archways and through intersections marked by small stone pagodas, reminiscent of the entryways to subdomains in Tomo’s Kaisei. As the sun rose over the mountain that both Tomo and Midori must have ascended so many years ago, Emmie experienced for the first time in many months a true sense of peace, and, inexplicably, security.

  A few miles outside the city, the road entered a wood at the foot of Mount Hiei and began a winding climb toward the summit that concluded at a deserted parking lot beside a tourist bus stop.

  “Is it safe to go out?” said Emmie, uncertain why she felt the need to whisper.

  “Falsens and I are checking it out,” said Naoto, flipping through visual overlays so quickly that Emmie could not determine what exactly he was looking at, “The marathon monks do a good job maintaining a secure perimeter here. But better s
afe than sorry.”

  “Marathon monks?” Emmie said curiously. Naoto did not seem to hear her, but she asked another question anyway.

  “What do a bunch of monks need perimeter security for? Are they afraid of the Church of the True Cross?”

  “No, not officially,” said Naoto, “Or, at least, not specifically. It’s more like tradition. A long time ago, there was a lot of violence in this area. Competing monastic orders, local political squabbles, lots of warrior monks from different sects attacking each other.”

  “Whoa. Warrior monks? I thought Buddhists were non-violent.”

  “No religion’s exempt from extremism. Even Buddhism,” said Naoto, giving a last glance to a heat map of the surrounding woods before saying,

  “Okay. Follow me.”

  Emmie hopped out of the car and followed close on Naoto’s heels as he made his way up a path into the temple complex. They passed a large pagoda with a curving slate-blue roof supported by wooden pillars and carved walls painted brightly in red, white, black, and gold; a smaller pagoda housing an enormous bell; and a series of increasingly ornate halls. Naoto turned off the path to climb a stone staircase leading to two-story pagoda that formed a great gate amidst a tall stand of cedars. They passed through the gate and looked down another staircase, which led to a large temple fronted by a long colonnade.

  They hurried down the stairs and toward the red wooden doors at the center of the colonnade. Naoto reached up and knocked three times.

  “The temple doesn’t open to visitors for another few hours,” he explained, “Amaterasu sent a guide to meet us.”

  A moment later, the doors creaked and swung out to reveal a smiling young woman, head shaved, robed in orange. She bowed to them, then spoke to Naoto in Japanese.

  “She says Amaterasu is waiting in the main hall,” Naoto translated, “and that we should follow her.”

  Emmie looked around nervously as they crossed a small courtyard shaded by flowering trees. Before them stood the enormous main temple, raised up on a foundation of short red columns. A flight of stone steps led to a dark, carved wooden door, framed on either side by panels of wood latticework.