Felled by Ark

by Aaron Lee

  ***

  I walked down the stairs into a pocket of warm air, one of those trapped thermal envelopes of heat and humidity in the subway stations that kept the walls dripping constantly and lent a persistent slippery feeling to everything. One of the earliest of the Nasties, a particularly bad strain of poisonous mold had claimed the thermal pockets early on, causing blindness and rupture of the alveoli in the lungs leading to permanent respiratory damage, and sometimes a slow and painful death if the inhaled spores took root in the lungs. The metro government had released a custodial swarm of pill bugs that were engineered to eat the stuff, cleaning out the mold. The thumbnail-sized creatures walked around slowly, almost like lumbering, fat, little pigs, cleaning up small patches of black sandy looking growths. The process of metabolizing the poison caused them to glow a bright violet. When they ate a particularly large portion of spores that were too much to metabolize, they'd crawl back to traps scented with a control pheromone to die. But they didn't always make it, and would sometimes die on the station platforms, bursting into little fluorescent violet clouds of spores. When that happened you'd see everyone running for the closest mask container, tripping over each other to get away from the tiny spreading clouds. After the drop in population, the ministry of health stopped working on a cure and sent in the bugs. Apparently it was a lot more cost effective to hatch a few hundred thousand modified insects than manufacture a cure.

  Aoyama station was known as one of the most mold-infested in all of Tokyo. I spied the green dispenser in-between two vending machines, leaking out bacteria-killing ambient UV light in all directions. I slapped the button in the shape of a gas mask and pulled out a floppy pink rubber mask from the open compartment, depressing the seals to feel it harden and suction over my nose and mouth, feeling a little embarrassed. I liked to think of myself as cautious rather than superstitious, but I couldn't always tell which was the truth. I wondered how many people had worn the mask before it was sanitized, already feeling my throat start to itch from imaginary bacteria. Still, it was probably better then having my lungs burst open the next day if I happened to breathe in the spores.

  A train pulled into the station, a hulking mass of welded patches and oil stains, the acrid fumes of spent brake fluid smelling like a pot of coffee left on a burner for too long. The interior of most of the cars were pitch black, dark shapes faintly reminiscent of old medical equipment under plastic sheets crowding the darkened cars. The dark cars had the same message in Japanese, English, and Inbetween: DANGER - UNLIT CARS ARE NOT FOR PASSENGER TRAVEL. I cursed myself silently, remembering now why I almost never took the subway. When I had first arrived in Tokyo, I thought the signs that read TRAVEL BY SUBWAY IS DANGEROUS. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK over the station entrances were jokes. I should have hired an autocab, but the subways were free and much faster. Lit cars were illuminated only by glow panels the distinct blue of Cherenkov radiation, plastered to the ceiling by the dozens but doing little to brighten the car other than making it look like an aquarium at night.

  I picked the most crowded car, which held only five people, still pretending I wasn't afraid, and sat down next to a yellow-suited person, covered in face mask and gloves like a radiation plant worker from thirty years ago. I guess some people were actually more paranoid than me. The yellow blob didn't acknowledge me as I sat down and looked at my sneaker, and the black gritty substance like sand that I could feel as my sole ground against the floor, so slight it bordered on the imperceptible. I had some on me. For all my carefully placed steps, I had some of that poisonous mold stuck on my shoe. I could almost feel an itch in my lungs, the barest whisper of a cough like at the beginning of a cold. No. No, you idiot. You haven’t stepped in any, get ahold of yourself. It was only some dirt, probably fine stone grit from the excavation site I had walked by on my way to the station. My nerves were overwrought, not quite strung like piano wires that had been tuned an octave too high, but I was feeling the lack of sleep and tension from the last few days. I didn't want to draw any extra attention to myself, and even though none of the other passengers were looking at me, the bright blue sticky-looking lumps of gel on the ceiling told me I should do my best to avoid looking like a nutjob. Tiny flickering optical scanners were embedded in the gel substrate by the hundreds, winking on and off like globular star clusters or a small globe full of tiny fireflies. I might not have been on any to-watch lists, but you could never be too careful. A police AI on a server somewhere in Hokkaido could watch a live feed of the train, decide it didn't like me, and there would be an armored paddy wagon waiting for me to comply like a good citizen when I got out at Shiodome. It wasn't likely, in fact it was almost laughable, but after seeing what Ken's message contained, I was getting really paranoid.  Besides, those autonomous paddy wagons still did drive around Tokyo, even if you never saw them pick people up. And I didn't want to think of what it would be like in a prison run entirely by autos.

  Against all odds, I fell asleep. I drifted into warm, wet weather, where I drove a late ‘80s model Peugeot 505 that ran on actual diesel fuel down a small road that twisted between pine trees, iron fence and brick wall ensconced estates. New England houses of centuries past drifted by in the warm rain and I slowed the car to a stop underneath a small stone bridge spanning the road, out of place in the real world, but not in my dream. The wipers swished wetly on their fastest setting, clearing away the raindrops until they squeaked on mostly dry windshield glass. The rain poured down outside, obscuring the road any further than a few short feet away. I got out of the car, the warm raindrops spraying my face. I started walking past the ruins of a bathhouse, another thing that didn't belong on the grounds of a Massachusetts estate, only a single wall and doorframe standing, a few Jacuzzis bubbling invitingly. I walked past, toward the sound of breaking waves… 

  …and slammed into wakefulness as the train screeched to a halt, an automated voice announcing an emergency stop with the unhurried quiet of a regular train stop announcement. If it were possible for the train electrical systems to fail they would have, but the glow panels stuck on the ceiling and the security scanners didn't need power sources.

  The yellow blob sitting next to me stood up and went to the door peering outside the train window while nervously shifting its weight from foot to foot, looking like a deflated yellow balloon. He/she, I still couldn't tell which, was muttering in a voice that was too muffled by the suit for me to make out anything. The blob turned its blank face mask in my direction, the lenses of bright blue glasses just visible behind the eye shields. It said something in a louder mumble that sounded like it was coming through wet cotton.

  "What?" I said in an even louder voice, trying to compensate with enough volume to get through my own mask and the layers of suit the blob was wearing. I heard more mumbles, this time louder, but no closer to intelligibility. It sounded like it was speaking English, but it was impossible to be sure. "I can't hear you. Don't you have a speaker on that suit?" The blob looked at me for a second with what I would assume was a dumbfounded expression if I could have seen its face. Then it held up a forearm and touched a panel of inlaid keys I hadn’t noticed, and a blue LED winked on over the blob's heart.

  "How's this?" an elderly female voice blasted out at ear-splitting decibels. I clamped my hands to my ears on impulse and backed up a step without thinking, my cool, tough persona blasted away in an instant. The blob tapped the panel on her arm again and spoke in a normal volume. "Sorry! I haven't had this for long, still getting used to it. My son bought it for me, said old ladies shouldn't go out without some kind of protection. Us oldies, we're affected by the Nasties much easier than the young ones, he says. I kind of like it, makes me feel important!" She said all this in native English, her accent somewhere near the old southern states, her tone surprisingly cheerful. If she was a younger Japanese, she would almost certainly have addressed me in Inbetween. "Anyway, I was hoping you could help me open the door."

  "You want to go out there? Off the train?" I had a
hard time keeping the disbelief out of my voice and she must have heard it.

  "Oh I know the stories they tell about the subway tunnels and what lives down here but I don't believe it, really. And even if some of the stories are true, I'm sure we'll be fine. You look strong enough to open the door so I'm sure you can keep us alive out there until we get above ground!" This last part was even cheerier than the rest, and I found myself wanting to help her. "Besides," she continued "the last time I waited for the Tokyo Metro autos to come and fix the train, I was here for half of a day!" She emphasized this sentence like it was the most impossible to believe situation you could ever encounter. It didn't sound far off to me though.

  I nodded in agreement. "OK, let's see if we can get off this thing."

  "Good! I knew you'd be up to the job. Anyone left in this country, well, we don't wait around for people to help us." Boy was she right about that. No one came to help after the plane full of containers crashed in Tokyo Bay, unleashing the first wave of Nasties five years ago, and no one came after the eruptions in Kyushu covered the western half of Honshu in radioactive ash. We still got messages on TV every day that urged us all to stay calm, and wait for the authorities that were on their way. We should have followed two thirds of the Japanese population when they abandoned their country and left en mass for the center of secessionist America; what used to be the Midwestern states. Anyone who stayed here ignored those messages and did their best to live with what they could find here.

  Doing my best to tamp down my paranoia and ignore the twinkling constellations of the security scanners, I unfolded my knife. Its regulation bright magenta ceramic blade glinted dully in the lights of the glow panels as I used the chisel tip to pry open the cover securing the manual door release handle. The edges were encrusted with small branches of weed coral, the yarn-thick structures sticking the cover shut.

  "Are you sure..." the woman in the environment suit started, then stopped just as suddenly, the worry apparent in her voice.

  "It's dead, you can tell by the color," I said, trying to reassure her even though I was starting to sweat, trying my best not to touch any of it, just in case. The blade slipped in, shearing off a corner of the plastic panel in the process with its razor sharp edge. The cover popped open and the door handle release was nested in a small growth of the weed coral. I unconsciously fingered my mask, making sure the seals were intact, then scraped and sliced away enough of the coral strands to free the handle. "Here goes," I said, wishing I had brought my gloves with me. They’d be handy to have in my backpack in case I ran into any live weed coral. The door-release handle slid smoothly up, like it had been oiled and ready to use, and the sliding doors popped open an inch. The coral must have never gotten as far as the mechanism, otherwise it would have been much more difficult to release. I looked around, the paranoia refusing to dissipate, and saw that the other passengers were staying put. Pulling out laptops or tablets, plugging in earphones, all ready to wait it out until the metro maintenance autos came to repair the train.

  "I knew you could do it!" my new friend said with vigor, and I doubted how much of a help I had been. She probably would have been able to get out on her own. I folded my knife, and thumbed on my flashlight, switched to wide dispersal, and clipped it to my belt. It illuminated a circle of track about ten feet in diameter, and gave me enough light to jump down without twisting an ankle on the rails. I jumped down first, then reached a hand up as the yellow-suited lady sat on the edge of the open door, then let herself be steadied as she made her way to the tunnel floor with a grunt. "I'm getting too old to live in this city, but I won't let it beat me yet!" she proclaimed, cheerful as ever.

  Beyond the extent of my light, the tunnel was densely dark in both directions, and I had no idea which way to go until my eyes stumbled across a small but helpful sign that read: THIS WAY TO DAIMON STATION, in Japanese. I unclipped my light from my belt and shined it in the indicated direction, but still saw no sign of a station, nothing other than the swallowing darkness. I looked back to the train that was not much brighter, but suddenly more appealing with its glow panels and even the security scanners. I thought I heard something off toward where Daimon station was supposed to be, a scrape like a long sliding footstep, but it was impossible to tell if I hadn't just imagined it. And I sure wasn't going to look like a chicken in front of a woman who sounded like she was three times my age. Maybe she had sensitive microphones in that suit... No. I stopped myself from asking her, it would just sound stupid. "Looks like we head this way," I said and shined the light down the tunnel.

  "Lead on!" she said and patted me on the shoulder. I pulled my knife back out of my bag after a second's hesitation and clipped it to my belt for easy access. We trudged through the darkness of the tunnel, my light pushing back the inky black shadows a few feet around us. I looked back once to the darkened train and thought I saw the face of one of the passengers pressed up against the window trying to see us, and shaking its head slowly. My cheerful companion was uncharacteristically silent, the lights on the forearm of her suit automatically dimming to save power in the tunnel while the air recyclers on her suit kicked into a higher mode, the whirring sound of the tiny fans bouncing off the tunnel walls. We both walked within an arm’s reach of each other, me, listening for shuffling steps of something dangerous in the tunnels, my companion for something I couldn’t imagine. I was reminded of training for the Sentinel Corps back in Boston, slamming into wakefulness from a drugged unconsciousness to find my entire unit in a pitch black tunnel, the only illumination coming from the luminescent blue ID tags we all wore directly over our breastbones. The scared faces of all eight men in my unit painted in blue light, wearing full combat kit except for me in only my cold weather uniform and equipped with a sidearm. The fear blooming into full-blown terror when one of the men, Gale, I think it was, realized we were in one of the sealed tunnels of the defunct Red Line, and obviously in our final test before being sent out to combat on the border states. I pushed the memory away roughly, maybe even grunting in the process, because the old lady in the yellow suit looked at me.

  “Did you say something?” she asked in a slightly concerned tone.

  “No, sorry,” I replied. “Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

  “Well, we all do that from time to time!” she replied, the chipper tone back from out of nowhere. That broke the pall of gloom that hung over me, and we walked swiftly, chatting about nothing in particular until we saw the platform lights at Daimon station. Helpfully tucked into a concrete cubby underneath the platform usually reserved for escaping runaway trains if a commuter fell onto the tracks was a step stool. I pulled it out and put it against the platform so my new friend could step up with a few grunts. I returned it to the cubby and propelled myself onto the platform with a less than graceful push and hop. It was deserted, just like most Tokyo subway stations these days, and we walked past a sealed off ticket booth and up the dead escalator and into afternoon sunshine.

  “Glad to have made your acquaintance young man!” she said, and before I could tell her that we hadn’t actually introduced ourselves, she walked off at a brisk pace, side-stepping a dwarf cherry blossom tree that had pushed its way through the cracked pavement, carpeting the asphalt in pink blossoms even though it was summer. I stood for a few seconds, watching her retreating form, not sure what to do, but then remembering I hadn’t skipped out of work early today for nothing.

  I started walking toward Hamamatsucho station, thinking I’d have more luck with the above ground trains, pulling out my phone to check the time table. I tapped the surface of my phone to wake it up, and pulled up the metro train map only to find that the JR maglevs weren’t working today. Crap. If I couldn’t take the train to Ken’s place, it would mean taking a ferry, which didn’t let off anywhere near his house, so I’d have to hire an autocab or walk. Unless I just went back home and got my own skiff and tied it up close to Tokyo Disneyland. I didn’t like that idea either though, it had been a while since
anyone had gone in there. The whole thing was stupid, anyway. Ken could handle himself, he didn’t need my help. I could just tell him that I had to stay at work, that there was too much of a backlog to work through. They were finding more containers at excavation sites all time, after all. There was that massive hoard of two hundred of the things (the biggest stash found yet) underneath that neighborhood somewhere behind Roppongi Hills, and the collector autos needed constant debugging. He didn’t need me, he would be fine on his own. It was a thin lie that anyone could see through. The guilt soaked through it like grease through a paper bag, and I felt ashamed, as though the few passing pedestrians could hear my thoughts. Ken was one of the only true friends I had made after coming here, and he had sounded so scared. It was that fear that I had a problem with. I knew it well.

  And part of it was that lingering hero complex I’d had as a teenager had carried over into my adult life. I thought I had left it behind in the States right next to my fear, like it had been a dusty piece of century-old electronics mummified on a shelf in some museum, but it followed me across the pacific, ghosting me like a nightmare program crawling along on a fiber optic cable that didn’t want to let me go. I’d wanted to save everybody, especially girls, back then. Anyone who was in trouble, being harassed, or just had their own problems. I knew I couldn’t save them all, but I wanted to. Which is probably why I joined the Sentinel corps when I was old enough. I worked my way through the ranks, patrolling borders and fighting in skirmishes, eventually getting recruited for Top Tier as an agent. But I declined, because I never could get used to the combat conditioning, and I had heard that Top Tier required even deeper brain scrambling. The Sentinel conditioning still bothered me. It was an image or a memory, I was never sure which, but it was of a woman’s face, someone I felt I knew, and she was sobbing in pain and terror. The only way I could stop her pain was to destroy all that stood against me. The funny thing is, you could almost forget about the conditioning until you needed it. I don’t know exactly what triggered it, stress, the sound of gunfire, or a command phrase subliminally whispered into our headsets, but it was suddenly there. Battle patterns were quickly analyzed and a line of kills became instantly clear, all enemy combatants picked out like they had been daubed in luminous paint, each one of them somehow the sole cause of her suffering. All I wanted was to stop it, to heal her pain, and that motivation made us Sentinels utterly fearless. It was a driving force that propelled us like rockets, and punched us through our adversaries one by one, each death feeling like I was a step closer to saving that phantom girl in my head. It was an awful feeling, the worst thing I can remember, diametrically opposed to the feeling of relief I was bringing this girl I carried in my mind. And although I knew the images were probably not real deep down, that there was no girl, there was no stopping the programming. The only way I could keep it at bay was to cut a swath through my opposition. It was a better motivator than patriotism or speeches about protecting the ones you loved, touching you and bonding to a part of you no one else should have ever been able to see. I never knew what the images were for the rest of my fellow Sentinel troops. I only knew it made us virtually unstoppable. And no one ever talked about it.

  I found myself standing near a small, two-story building in an area I didn’t recognize, having wandered there with my head stuck in the mists of combat on the Fringes. I hadn’t been back to the Commonwealth since I moved here eight years ago, and I hadn’t been to the Fringes in even longer. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had thought about it before today. Maybe I owed it to Ken to help him out, or maybe I actually wanted to help him. Either way, this slab of memory hadn’t worked itself loose from the dusty ceiling of my mind in the course of a regular work day. The implications of Ken’s message had scared my conditioning back to the surface, like it was rebooting and priming itself after lying dormant for so long. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the building in front of me blurring for a second. It had been halfway demolished by a ten-foot-tall dismantler auto that had frozen in mid-operation, probably months ago. The auto was one of the smaller sizes, the hermetic compartment on its chest big enough to hold two or three containers at the most, its spindly, multi-jointed black nanofiber arms and legs ending in massive articulated claws big enough to pick up a motorcycle. The weed coral that entangled it was still living, although the color indicated it had gone dormant, freezing the joints and effectively destroying the machine. It had frozen while grasping a rafter inside the open wall of one side of the building, like some kind of massive, robotic primate reaching for a piece of fruit. The movement of olive-green domes the size of hundred yen coins, hundreds of them slowly creeping across and inside and outside the building, indicated the presence of a swarm. Location-specific, obviously, since they weren’t attacking the other buildings. I could hear cracking and munching sounds as they slowly took apart the building where the dismantler auto had failed. With their completely solid design, they were immune to weed coral, but they had only been introduced to Tokyo recently. There were some stories of software bugs causing them to take apart the Kyoto Tower and half of the bridges on Dotonbori in Osaka.

  I had left a dozen dismantlers like the one here waiting on the factory floor to be debugged while I skipped out of work to meet Ken. My phone vibrated and a message danced across the screen. Ken was already in Odaiba, waiting for me near my place. It seems he couldn’t wait for me to come meet him. I caught sight of the Yokoso Rainbow Tower building, two massive right triangles stuck together to make one building, slightly offset, and made out of bluish glass. A massive sugar palm, nearly eighty feet high, towered out of it pointing toward home. It sometimes dropped coconuts so large they apparently killed a pedestrian once. Rainbow Bridge was next to it, and if I was lucky it would be open to pedestrians so I could just walk back home. I set off walking.