by Aaron Lee
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About the Author
Aaron is a native of Massachusetts, the shores of which he left years ago to live in Tokyo. He spends most of his days working as a professional translator, some of his mornings skateboarding and most of his nights exploring the streets of Tokyo by bike after most sensible people have gone to sleep. He is somewhat hard at work on his next novel. You can see his sporadically updated blog at the following address. Be sure to check out a sample of his next work in progress below.
autumnsdataforge.blogspot.jp
The Cosmonaut’s Descent
They must have been bleach-bombing the bay again. I heard the barely audible buzzing of the auto-copters as they made pass after pass dropping their payloads, and a few soft thuds as the bombs detonated, the chlorine smell wafting through the open sliding glass doors of my bedroom on the eleventh floor. I was always surprised when the fumes didn't burn my nostrils. Old memories of rust-spotted washing machines in a musty basement and a white plastic jug of bleach and the way it hurt my nose ingrained the idea that the smell had to be accompanied by acrid fumes. Of course they weren't using real bleach, because that wouldn't kill all the Nasties swimming around in the bay. But it smelled exactly like bleach so the name stuck, despite half-hearted PR campaign commercials with the official name warning people not to go near the water. The bleach bombs (I couldn’t remember the official name, and I doubt anyone else could either), the commercials insisted, would not only kill the Nasties, but you as well, if you so much as set foot in the water. The smell didn't bother me though, so I kept the sliding-glass doors open and tried to sleep. One nice thing about the bombs was that they killed all the bugs for hundreds of kilometers around, so I could keep the screens open and not worry about mosquitoes.
If I could only get to sleep, that is. I only hoped tomorrow wasn't going to be as bad as I was imagining. There was no point in worrying when I would find out tomorrow anyway. And the dwelling on it would only ratchet the stress up to levels that made sleep impossible. My brain had the annoying habit of replaying audio snippets of conversations in my head when I lay down at night, the layers of conversation overlapping in Japanese and English and Inbetween. They were always clipped, the words stripped of context and meaning as they shifted position in the conversations, endings jumping to where beginnings should have been, and middle sections switching place with endings, language continuity close to zero. I could never remember if they were conversations I'd had or overheard, or if they were software artifacts from the faulty bio-silicate inlays implanted during the surgery. I hated not knowing, and I hated the sound of the conversations. There was nothing sinister about them, but they were monotonous, like oenophile AIs repeating uploaded descriptions of someone’s list of favorites into infinity, and they frustrated every effort at sleep while my brain did it's best to fruitlessly grasp some thread of the conversation. Code had offered me a drug to block the static of voices, but I didn't trust anything in his pharmacy, and it seemed to be confined to those times when I was overtired. If it started to bleed over into full conscious thought during the day I would probably have to give in and call him.
I kept my eyes closed, not willing to give up just yet, but the conversations kept buzzing around in my head like I was walking through a crowded party where people were speaking backwards, and I felt the frustration leak tension into my muscles. I picked up my phone, debating about whether to call Code and just ask what type of drug he had, or take a brisk walk when the heavy droning bass of trawler skiff engines scouring the ocean floor of the bay floated in through the doors. I smiled, the conversations quickly fading into the background, almost gone. The sound of the trawler skiffs sounded almost exactly like the decades-old dishwasher in my mother’s house growing up. Every night I would roll out my sleeping bag in front of the scuffed white plastic front, turn it on, and fall asleep while reading a battered paper book, the rhythmic sounds of the motor and liquid sloshing lulling me into a deep, warm sleep while a half dozen people slept on the floor of the living room just a few feet away. It was mechanical tranquilizer. I fell headlong into a warm cocoon of sleep, free from the buzzing conversations, dreaming about my mother.