Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  "Yes… more drinking stories, really?"

  "Right… cool! Ok, business question… what are we doing."

  "It's complicated. In essence, we had been trying to get this lawyer to join us to help with a big legal problem we have been having. We tried a standard conversion. He received literature and animated cartoons of the leader's life story… "

  "Anime?"

  "Yes, we have some at home. But he did not convert and so we… some others… kidnapped his wife and daughter… this was about six months ago. The plan was that we would hold them for a few days and then begin conversion again. Only, it Was a messy extraction … you know… "

  He smiled like I knew and I think I did too. He seemed relieved.

  "… and all signs pointed to the two women being dead. So he began to grieve, but we didn't know. And when one of our spiritual advisers arrived at his door he began to pray on his knees that nothing made sense. Within an hour, things made more sense to him … he began the Forgetting.

  "Since that time he has been an excellent follower, defeating legal challenges to our money and our science."

  "And… and you kept his family?"

  "The Master decided so. He is an excellent judge of character. Or seems to be. Really no judgment is required, he has knowledge complete of everyone he meets."

  "I see."

  "You will meet him. And, to conclude, the lawyer is now the target of our enemies who know that he knows many things. We must remove the target."

  "I won't kill anyone personally, Honda."

  "No one will die tonight."

  For some this is a prayer, for others a commitment and for still others a necessary illusion but many of us say it on many nights.

  ++++

  We stopped the car a few hundred meters from his gate on a very quiet lane where hardly any traffic was available. We were all in black and had ski-masks. I was under instructions not to speak if not absolutely necessary.

  Odajima's face was twitching beneath his mask: the twitches seemed to correlate to acts of violence and intimidation he was sharpening in his mind.

  The lawyer's house sat in a peaceful garden with a pool of a specific and meaningful shape. The long blue tiles of his roof were a little wet and caught what light they could to work their charm. Paper doors held light for a second before releasing it, softened. Slow shakuhachi flute music came with the light, at the same speed. It sounded live, not recorded.

  Junko seemed dissatisfied with the fit of her leather gloves and adjusted them constantly. Moments of peace between the stretching were undoubtedly metaphysical : they came quickly and took over completely.

  Finally Yosuke. He was looking at the small club in his hand, seemingly imagining a bursting head at the end of it and the approval that might gain for him.

  Honda was fully tuned to his outfit and was capable of anything anyone in such a suit and mask could do.

  We got out of the car and edged our way to the path. Benny hid the plates with branches that looked like they had simply blown there. We walked as a loose cluster , not a file. We were all headed toward the door.

  In the days after we had first met, Claire and I became friends. She seemed to know more than me about the computer. She explained how her father had been training it. That after a few months it could now solve mazes and play a game of cards and do very well. I asked how it did it. She told me it could make its mind up whether to say yes or no very quickly. Only yes or no. She had light red hair.

  Silhouettes invaded and then left the shape of the door: I was one of them. No one could argue with that.

  Who made the most noise? Was it me with the tremendous beating of my heart?

  I had the feeling that I was compromising the mission and my whole life. But what could I do?

  Honda moved fast and flattened against the wall like a shadow when you turn the light on. We all approximated it with varying degrees of success. We then edged in towards the window as Honda did. He stopped us with a hand and with the noises it made as it rushed through the air. Yosuke and Benny then split off, circling the house in opposite orbits, Honda held his hand in the air suspending doubt as he held us in position.

  Inside the room, beneath the flute, we could hear the small noises that accompany being alive. I was fully committed to maintaining those noises, I realized. Flashes of light darted in front of my eyes… distance of flashes changing. My internal sphere fluctuated. Fireflies.

  Honda's hand, our foundation, began to slowly move. Off in the distance I saw a shadowy figure climbing over the wall. But obviously I didn't, so I didn't mention it.

  Honda's hand was definitely moving slowly down in typographically fine increments. I fully expect there is a form of Japanese theater where this move is highly valued… if not the entire performance.

  When the hand dropped like a knife in water, we moved, Junko pulled back the window, Honda moved in with lightning speed and karate precision and I sort of followed him.

  The room was floored in tatami, the rice mats. The grain was against me, so I did not slip like a fool. A small pillow, pushing up a warm hollow, was in the center of the room which also had wall hangings, a Sony stereo and a tea set. Yes, no people. Except three people now, who had thought like shadows until the warm butt-dent started pushing up at them. Honda moved us to rear corners of the room and listened by the door.

  A scream came through the door.We all jumped, even Honda.

  "Bengoshi" he said. That meant lawyer. Footsteps came towards the door of the room we felt quite at home in by now. When someone bursts through a door in the West it is something special, second only to jumping through a window in its ability to cheaply excite movie goers etc. When the door is sliding, its very different, like high speed tai chi and thunder and clunks as you try and get the thing moving on its wood-on-wood runners.

  Chapter 15

  We are still in the lawyer's room. Shortly we will learn who is also in the house. But I have to take a break from that.

  I was in Japan, a terrorist, mainly because of my father. As you know, he was never the same after the Cambodian genocide. He saw it for what it really was: i.e. nothing that out of the ordinary. He also saw other things. The intense beauty of the Cambodian ballet. The geometry of the pyramids and of the Cathedral of Chartres : shapes so big that people would die for them. Man's fondness for the animals he just couldn't stop eating. The computer and the other computers that we as a race brought up like a strange egg in our nest : a dinosaur egg. Faces that appeared everywhere you looked, from plug sockets to the stars. Satellites, telephones, and other vast systems (like molecules) that only inertia kept random. Inertia was dropping. Complex systems were looming. Man was a beautiful thing but something was wrong, or perhaps had never been meant to be right.

  But he didn't really dwell on it much when I was a kid. All of this was one possibility. Astronauts kept him going.

  I remember the first Shuttle launch. I left school and a shiny red car that I had never seen before pulled up to collect me. If cars have body language that's how I knew it was for me (chassis language?)

  Dad was inside, wearing mirrored sunglasses. "Hop in!" he said.

  "We got a new car?" I asked as I clumsily fastened the seat belt.

  "Yes, that last paper of mine finally earned me some money. Look what I have for you on the back seat!"

  It was 2000AD - Judge Dredd's comic. It had never spontaneously appeared before and my excitement was unprecedented. Next to it was a pack of cards. I picked them up and I saw that Dad had carefully taped on the starship card game that had been gradually materializing on the back page of 2000AD for a month. I said wow and thanks. On the way home I read the new issue and found that Dad had cut the final page of the comic off in the making of the cards, ruining the ending of the story. I was too young to piece it together myself… the structure of things escaped me. I had to keep quiet about it but it seemed strange that he was more concerned with getting the game together than seeing the end of t
he story.

  We went home and watched the shuttle launch. Because the shuttle had wings and resembled a plane I didn't enjoy the launch as much as usual and told Dad as much.

  He sympathized. It was definitely less of a stunt than the rocket, Houdini aeronautics. But the shuttle, and the space station that it pointed towards were man's first gestures at doing something big and selfless and that would make him bigger and better. Downing a vodka he added that it had better be. He watched the TV some more, I watched the pinkness claim his eyes. I had heard of the phrase about the rose colored glasses.

  The shuttle went up and it came down. Over the years, that became evident. Also, the space station became something I might learn about in an old folk's home rather than the place where I might go after college.

  One night when Dad smelt funny and there were noisy people downstairs listening to Gary Glitter, I bumped into him on my way back from a midnight piss. "I've stopped kidding myself about the spacemen, son," he slurred (on the ess-es, perhaps for fun) "No need to keep doing all the squat thrusts… he's talked me into it… with the computer. I give in, you know. That computer's come so far in 3 years. Claire is moving in too. We have to work on the computer. So no more squat thrusts… grow your hair a little. I don't know if they saw anything… the old astronauts. They might just be fucking each other … anyway good night." And a kiss on the head.

  In bed I thought about the astronauts. Dad had access to some of the psychological tests they had undergone on the their return. All showed signs of repression and secrecy. All missions had radio silence that did not correspond to sun spot activity. The majority of astronauts moved house after their flights, usually to be closer together and from plains with full night skies to suburbs that fuzzed out when the sun went down. But we disregarded that when they started sending women and Japanese TV reporters up and down and up and down and slowly it was obvious that the whole thing was being phased out. The US and the USSR had found the limit of space and its value. Shortly after this was discovered, the war between them ended. The USSR, atheist, then had to lay down and die. Rockets continued to go up… the usual slight of hand and plus we needed SKY TV etc.

  Also, of course I thought about my new 'sister': I was eleven or so now, and the whole thing sounded like trouble to me.

  When I was younger, I had loved dinosaurs. Dad had encouraged that: often when we went for a walk, like to the chip shop, he would ask me how many dinosaurs I could see.

  Chapter 16

  The Lawyer turned around and saw us all there. He wasn't as surprised as you might have imagined. Honda quickly pressed him up against the wall, but with a touch like he was hanging a painting. Junko left the room and Honda's eyes flashed that I should do the same.

  I left the room and it was only when I was out and following the ungainly Junko down a narrow hallway full of bonsai that I questioned the wisdom of being here, since there was a good chance I would be stabbed in the belly by whoever was chasing around in here (if it wasn't just the other two as seemed likely)

  We saw Benny mosaiced, lying on his belly next to a large vase with a hole that nearly consumed it. He was half conscious and he started talking to Junko. He was pointing to an open window. We found Yosuke upstairs, flicking through a magazine and we didn't find anyone else.

  In the car, on the way home, Benny told us that someone had tried to exit the house just as we moved in, someone all in black and very suspicious looking. He had chased the figure and as he bent over to climb through the window, the lawyer had broken the vase over his head. Benny clearly had a concussion and equally clearly thought I knew more than I did.

  The car was small, and Benny held a grudge, so the Lawyer, Mori, rode in the trunk. Every couple of dozen miles someone checked on him. We only let Benny do it once because of the disgusting noise that we could not quite place which came from the trunk when he was back there. It was a wet thumping noise.

  Honda told me he was disappointed by the violence of the mission, and also by the possibility of a leak. The lawyer had information that they wanted to make sure that he didn't leak. They had no doubt of his faith, but also had seen how easily he could be converted and didn't want to take any chances. The Leader occasionally sanctioned strong measures like this and he had a way of being right. In the run up to the vast mass murder, you couldn't take any chances.

  "Tomorrow, I think you should meet the leader," he said, "I know you are not one of us… that you help us for reasons we don't fully understand… but you need to meet the leader to make sense of the moment you will participate in."

  "Why do you think I am helping you out? Why do I want to kill so many people?"

  "None of us want to kill people… . as such. But certain events are necessary to… deflect human history to a new direction. We know that your group thinks the same."

  "We do"

  And we did. Who were my group, though? There were about 20 of us. That was about the most you could fit at Dad's dinner table.

  When I got home I had another encrypted email from one of them, Claire, waiting for me.

  I decrypted the email and read it. It was longer than last time. I felt no real excitement or anticipation. Claire had long ago ceased to affect me that way. But there was that other feeling which I had no other name for except love. It is possible for love to float away from all of the other emotions that cluster around it such as passion and need and stand alone. Like 100% pure water, you are surprised when you taste it, or rather don't taste it… you just feel it and you realize that you had got to like the taste of some additive.

  "Hi there! A longer one this time.

  "So you finally made it to Japan! I remember you saying that you wanted to go there back when we were kids."

  She did have this incredible memory, so my complete non-recollection of this sentiment was quickly replaced by the new sentence I had just read.

  "Things in Bucharest remain very similar. Neo-nazism is slightly on the upsurge and I've been monitoring that. The Nazis burnt down someone's home a week ago and a girl died. It's hard to believe all of this is still happening. All over Europe… home of civilization. As far as we can determine there is nowhere near as much coordination between these groups as the media would have you believe. They just spring from the same bent gene. The media (which is getting more and more independent from humanity as the years go by… almost has enough cliches stockpiled to reach memetic critical mass and just needs a few more computers to go it alone and eventually it will create its own countries where the news is always interesting)… . well, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the media! They find vast conspiracies. And since it is generally agreed that they try and keep us happy, that makes it clear that something more horrific than even that is truly the case… spontaneous building of huge hate structures by unrelated human beings. The horror of being us.

  "Enough of that talk! We got enough of that when we were kids!"

  True. She moved in and she was more beautiful than on the first night I had met her. As an eleven year old boy I was considerably less beautiful. Dr Blythe was carrying seven large bags up the long garden path on the sunniest day in English history with a slim girl in slightly flared jeans and a long thin white shirt that was essentially the same thing as a flower out in that sun. She had long dark hair now and the freckles on her small nose were the only thing that was not placid.

  The unlikely dryness of her father's head was bothering me. It seemed to presage a huge fountain of sweat spraying on the ceiling as soon as he got in the house. He was clearly in a huge body clench that went as far as the pore level. Dad was back at the Blythes' car pulling out gleaming steel cases: the computer.

  Dr Blythe made it to the house. He stopped for a second by me. I was worried and I could smell sea air. But he started moving again, up to the third floor where they would be staying. Claire said "Hiya!" to me and I was amazed by her teeth, why I could not say until years later in a hotel bar when I heard some Americans laughing about English teeth. Retur
ning to the island I was confronted by more than a few monstrosities of tooth gone wild. Claire had more American teeth.

  Dad shouted from outside and I ran out to help with the computer parts.

  "How a plastic surgeon got into all this, I don't know!" he exclaimed as we carried the various boxes out to the garage.

  Over the next several days the computer developed in the lab (formerly garage.) It was a much more ambitious machine than the one I had glimpsed that night a while before. Blythe had apparently plunged himself into the quest for the artificial mind. And as he talked to Dad it became clear that Dad thought the artificial mind was something humanity had to make. He had been making sure that everyone who read his "papers" got to think this. He spent trips to Europe making sure that humanities departments of great universities donated huge sums to the Artificial Intelligence research labs rather than teaching history.

  Some years later, I discovered that my Dad made his living as a well known Professor of Genetic Science and Virology. 13 years and all I had known was that he wrote papers and knew a lot of people called 'doctor.' And was a 'doctor.'

  The lab was full of valves and screens and smaller transistor based units. They kept the valves because Blythe, whose knowledge of these systems had multiplied one thousand fold in his seven years of study, felt that the valves could be triggered to act in a non-linear manner that would create an interesting feedback, perhaps akin to creativity, on the otherwise digital system.

  "Hello Cranwell."

  "Hello. How are you?"

  "Fine? How are you?"

  "Fine… what's new?"

  "Oh the usual"

  "FAIL!!!!"

  Claire was home schooled before she came to stay with us, but her Dad had a new project now so she came to my school. We would cycle to school together, and often there was thick rain and we just looked down and I had a premonition of the awful feeling of pulling a soaking wet exercise book out of your bag and the sea-like sadness of ink spreading through the pages erasing what you had done.