Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  I see the Phillipina prostitute who saved my life walking by. She is wearing a vibrant pink and orange universe that has something of the handkerchief about it. She has had her hair cut somewhat boyishly. I imagine that is the mark of a top-notch transsexual: to become so feminine that you can be boyish.

  I get up and decide to ask her if she knows where Tetsuo is. I leave a wad of cash on the table, feeling like a hot shot or like I have a terminal disease.

  She wriggles ahead of me and, I admit, I take my time catching up. After a few seconds the flower pattern on her behind looks like the fractal fingerprint of a lung opened up. Her brown skin breaks into different textures just as I get very close, marks of hands collage her: a bruise archaeologist could write the story of her abuse but she probably wouldn't believe it if you read it to her.

  "Sumimasen… excuse me." My hand hovers near her arm.. I nearly grabbed her.

  She turns and her eyes twitch weirdly looking at me. "You… English boy. Tetsuo friend."

  "Yes." Affirmation and agreement: two humans.

  "Come on," she says and leads me to a bar. She talks to the old man with the ice face who rules the bar. He hands her a note which I read.

  It says "I thought you would come back. I have to leave town. Go to a special hospital. Get fixed up. Bad fight. Don't be crazy, OK. You are still young… if you need to do something crazy wait you are old man.

  "Also, take care of Mayumi. She is dangerous."

  Hmm.

  I call Mayumi and we go to the top of the Tokyo Tower. We don't discuss Tetsuo, nor do I ask how she was able to meet me just twenty minutes after I called her.

  From the top of the Tower we see the whole of Tokyo and like a galaxy you live in, all patterns we see are invented by us.

  She kisses my cheek. Tokyo Tower is based on Eiffel Tower. But it is orange and white. And romance here is real, because you have to bring your own.

  She says "Tomorrow… do what you have to do. But use real gas. Be real. For once be real."

  Chapter 42

  We got home a bit late… after midnight. She spurned my advances, which was a first. She did it by acting tired and intangible. She was telling me: don't let us down.

  She must have known I wouldn't kill hundreds of people, I thought as I rolled over on my boner. On the other hand she probably still thought my virus was really ebola. So of course she would be confused by my unwillingness to use real sarin. Of course, that was it! What the hell did she think my plan was, my compunctions about using poison gas with my deadly virus? She had invented a version of me that was even more bizarre than the truth (quite an achievement.)

  I slept for three hours. That was an incredible sleep. A regular dreamer, I recall none from that whole week. The black hole of that night took them all, I think.

  +++++++++

  Yosuke:

  I couldn't sleep that night. The first time ever. Time was going so slowly. I couldn't wait for the next day. I was wondering if I was going to die, of course. I heard that if you got a tiny drop of the gas on your finger you just died. How crazy that there was something like that in the world. If it just killed my finger that would make sense but how did it know me well enough to kill all of me?

  I meditated on the master. At first his body, his holy feet to his holy hair, and then all of his power points and then the mystic character that they spelled out. Then I tried to put my flesh around the mystic character but I have a bit too much flesh for that: I have never succeeded in that exercise.

  Meditation can squeeze a thousand years into a single second. So if I had a second chance to spend that night I wouldn't have meditated. Because there were a lot of seconds in that night.

  I had not really settled in to Disciple Maruhashi's house. It was too different from Japan, from my past and from everything I liked. It smelt different… I missed the tatami mat smell and that smell of burnt wood that… well I don't know where that smell comes from but it has always been with me.

  And the windows were too big.

  If I could remove that night from history I would. Because… my mind was going so fast. Normally it is slow… I know. That's the way I like it. But that night it was so fast, like a train, that I couldn't help see what we were doing from all perspectives. All the children crying, the TV specials, my mother who was still alive and very old.

  And after all that, I didn't have any doubts but my enthusiasm was down. I felt like I was one of the salarymen commuting to work in the dark the next day. I had a gun, but so what.

  ++++++

  Junko:

  I slept ok. It was hard to wake up. It was obvious to me, and not to the others, that we were going to be sacrificed. So why didn't I run? Why didn't I escape?

  Stupid questions. You can run from men, but not from gods. They can sacrifice you without standing up from their table.

  And anyway… how many people scream all their lives for even a moment of attention from their gods, busy gods? And we were brides.

  But still, a bride is afraid on the wedding night.

  +++++

  Mayumi:

  He was asleep next to me. I was stiff all over, and I didn't know why.

  Everything else I needed to know, I knew. Except about him. Why did he have fake gas? Why was he here?

  Oh there was one other thing I didn't know. Maruhashi hadn't made his mind up whether I was going to kill them all after the gas was dropped.

  +++++

  Maruhashi:

  I had my usual dream. Woke up. Enjoyed a spot of hot milk. The TV looked so much like an eye that I couldn't stay in the den.

  Would the attack stop the dream? As regent of Japan and heir of Atlantis I would be in a position to stop it from coming true: to stop the fall of the humans.

  Or hasten it I suppose. I became weary at this thought which took the taste of triumph from my mouth, which was, admittedly, coated with hot milk anyway. I had to laugh.

  But I don't laugh when I'm on my own.

  ++++++

  Sato:

  I made the calls and listened to the oaths. They were credible and all were in full possession of the facts. The revolution was ready to go. The woman and the foreigner gave me doubts but I trusted Honda. Strange that.

  The military is the best thing this world ever made.

  +++++

  Honda:

  It had been a long time coming. The chance to ask the world the big question: are you ready for the future? Are you ready for the implications of the laws you have made and the way you have broken them? Are you ready to be judged by people who know what it really is to be human? Who have kept the rules and are therefore empowered to crush you? Are you sorry now that you were happy to be 'wrong' to be 'naughty' to be 'weak'?

  Are you?

  But all this I kept in the cool, hard flask of my skull. Even my skin was not aware of the fire that the question had put inside me.

  +++++

  Samsara:

  I slept on a bench, believe it or not.

  I believed it. History is full of errors as it repeats. Time is God's experiment. His meditation on a set of rules he applies to himself. It takes work, but he is a hard worker.

  Chapter 43

  I was able to piece together most of what happened that day from clues, media etc. I also know the people involved well enough to invent their feelings and responses etc. After all, that is all that we ever do. People are things that happen to us, little events that we weave into our own stories. We never know what is behind their eyes. So if I read something in a paper about them or if I was in the room with them is just a difference of degree. Even with Mayumi. Or especially. I still can't trust her words… but we get by.

  If I invent dialog, it is their ideal dialog. They would thank me for that.

  At five am, Sato left in a modest Mitsubishi, literally stuffed with explosives. Even his parallel parking maneuvers would have to be carried out with military precision if he was to get this in one piece to a group of Iranians who
had big plans for the Tokyo Tower. His mind was not racing, as mine would have been. Even though he had a hundred things to do that day, they were his favorite hundred things to do.

  The rest of us were cleaning our guns and in my case popping vials of chemicals onto a nylon bandana that I wore underneath my white shirt… extra thick for opacity and for the sweat of a hard day. In my briefcase were the rods and levers that composed the timing mechanism. All our testing back in Europe had rejected electronic injection of the two cataloids in favor of something more like one of those bobbing head drinking bird toys. It worked over 99% of the time if it was not disturbed by outsiders. Electronic we never got above 80%

  I hope that the irony of that was not wasted on my step-father, the distributed electronic intelligence technically known as "gAIa"

  I was sure that Maruhashi was not rash enough to have any kind of network connection to the various cameras and mikes that he must surely have had all over the house. But if he did, I bet gAIa was sniffing around us, pulling down what it could from the little applets that we had developed.

  But I was exaggerating. The conversation with gAIa was almost certainly 50% canned… Dad had intentionally crystallized pieces of himself for gAIa to use… like Marlon Brando in "Superman the Movie."

  gAIa had a series of parameters about gaining information and a series of key persons to spy upon. I was certainly in that list. But although its speech recognition was very good it still couldn't see very well last time I 'met' it. It would recognize my face at most and see bodies moving around. But what would it learn, other than that I still had a face and was in the right place at the right time? I smiled into a vase that was suspiciously mirrored.

  Mayumi carried three guns. I saw her pack them up and then look at her arms, obviously longing for one more. She wore a pretty beige one piece dress and a black leather jacket that concealed all that needed to be concealed about her in terms of physical objects.

  In a salaryman suit, his hair either slicked down or replaced by an ingenious helmet, Yosuke looked quite different. He would be the one to loosen the screw of the hatch and to feign a fit if anyone like security got too near. Two tasks we all felt happy with him doing.

  Junko was in a flowery smock. Her gun was in her handbag, which ,quite frankly, she carried with such unfamiliarity and discomfort she might have been better off with just the gun. She would be in radio communication with Honda through something that appeared to be a Walkman concerning changes in train schedules and so on that might prove significant.

  Honda was going to check that all was well. He would be the one to say yes or no. He would signal me, I would move in. After it was in, he would secure the area for the four minutes required for the gas to release. After that he would kill a bunch of people to make sure that even more people died.

  Mayumi would watch my back. She also carried replacement parts for the machine. And she was under orders to make sure that their were no betrayals. That is to say, no betrayals of Maruhashi's own perversion of the original concept; his coup d'Žat.

  We took two trains, and all sat in different carriages. We didn't have to be as careful as usual since we had not been shot to pieces upon stepping out of the front door that morning, which strongly implied that no one (who cared) knew what we were going to do.

  Maruhashi went downstairs to his command center. Yes, it had a large map in the center, yes, the walls were covered with monitors and yes, tea and cyanide pills were fully stocked. There was a small picture of Mussolini, hanging from his ankles, on the main desk down there. Much like those posters that say "Teamwork" and show people rowing.

  He had a small staff of women in uniforms and two bodyguards. He was happy and a part of him wished that this little oasis of trappings without responsibility could go on for a very long time. The monitors showed people exercising, local news, the newest cartoons that were feeding into the brains of youth. He ignored them but for a second he visualized his face, as rendered by an expert cartoonist, transmitting confidence to a resurgent nation.

  We and everyone else were heading to the center of things, on trains. The trains had started all this, the trains and their telegrams. Today was just inevitable once you went and connected everything up like that. National borders, like that between, say, Cambodia and Vietnam, were scored and pierced by technology that spread and therefore amplified truth. Genocide versus connection was the balance of the game.

  Enough of my shit, you get it by now. I want to end the human race. But not because I don't like it. I just have a better idea.

  Honda moves off the train and I am surprised that the platform attendant can restrain himself from applauding, so perfect is his step, so in tune with the system: the perfect commuter. Honda quickly moves through the perpetual construction, dangling cables that you expect to have huge flies in them but they don't. He moves through all the floors… the ghost of Shinjuku station. No one knows this station like him, no one else could check all the exits in just twenty minutes. If he knew the station any better, trains would actually be able to pull into his brain.

  I stroll off, wondering who I am going to bump into today. Smart money favors the ghost of my mother. I know where I am going, I know how to get out and I remember a lot about the station. I am going to take something away from everyone at the station but I feel ok. Yes, I feel OK.

  She is watching my back, in her jacket. She is always in tune with what is going on. At one point I think I see one of the Avon English School bleach blonde terrorists. In fact I am sure. I turn to look at him and I see her first and she says with her eyes "never you mind."

  Suitably chastened, I continue on the spiral path determined in advance that takes me past so many blank faces that I will scar with expression.

  During the walk, I see at least three white men who look like trouble with their too much stubble and tans from elsewhere. This place is seeded with white terror - to make the cult more terrifying? I am sure no one who knows the truth about Maruhashi's membership is alive or difficult to kill. I include myself in that list.

  Junko gets off her train, where she has been gritting her teeth watching tall teenage boys in their pseudo-military uniforms twisted funky talking to each other about nothing. They are so happy, so content and so stupid. Just their existence is a problem, is a blot on an otherwise suitably bleak and void universe. Her Walkman feeds her static at a low level that starts to do something to her brain after a while, as she wanders around looking at monitors that tell her what the trains are doing. The static pacifies the hatred that is, essentially, her. She is absorbed in the data of the trains and the non-data that is the static. They are the poles of her brain. She is a robot. She is happy, and she thinks it is the mass murder that is doing it, but I get to see her face one time and I know the truth.

  Yosuke, an anchor falling through black water and knowing which way is down, heads to the spot: ground zero. He gets there. There are policemen nearby. He looks at them. He remembers why he got into this, to taste death like the exquisite flesh of the puffer fish and come back and tell the world "Don't be afraid." Or "Be Afraid." He didn't much care.

  Armed with this knowledge, he ignores the police and what they stand for and walks down the little alcove we have found, the breeze ruffling the hairs that have managed to escape the intense smoothing of his mane. He moves toward the air vent that is like a vein we will lethally inject.

  Is that everyone? I think it is. Except the master, Samsara. He is somewhere eating something, having a good time. His decision to go into hiding among the people seems so familiar when I think about it: it is in some bible or Mahabarata that I don't know well enough to place it. It is not just a day off, you know what I'm saying.

  I stop by the "Let's Kiosk!" and buy rice crackers from a little man whose lungs and whose genes I will soon control. I lean on the counter like a heavy flirt as we make our exchange. I feel like his boss a little, yes, but also like I owe him some time. This is the feeling of being a king and it is
the last feeling I expected to have on this long anticipated day.

  She is watching me: I know she may try to kill me today. Or may not and may never. Of course, I tell myself, this is true of all these savages I am surrounded by but I have grown to love Mayumi. It's not just 'cause Claire hates me so much. It is because Mayumi is just like this… modifier. To describe her you could really say no more than that she is "very." And I love that.

  I turn and look her in the eye… the first time I have done so from more than six inches distance. Faces pass us. Everyone has a face! And I am waiting for a smile.

  I am amazed. It comes. The smile. It says "you're right… we are alive now!" It is amazed and it is all we can ask. It justifies this whole trip to Japan and in many ways it is the end of my day, the highlight, the thing I'll take to the grave with me, fighting if need be.

  I turn back to the kiosk guy and he thinks I love him. He is as wrong as he was moments before when he thought I didn't love him.

  Yosuke walks down the niche. The police didn't see him. A small screwdriver falls from his sleeve and sinks into his palm which sweats like a cloud scraping the mountains. The screwdriver bobs up and down in his palm.

  He pops it out and walks up to the air vent, much like the one that American tough guys escape through to catch their breath before returning to wreak havoc. It is about five feet off the floor. Not perfect for surreptitious tinkering but perfect in every other way for a gas attack.