The Future Is Japanese (42 page)

“What is this, the work of some author who thinks he’s an artist?” He holds the book out to me. The letters multiply, spill out of their lines, overlap, devour each other, get bigger, turn pages black, metastasize to the cover, penetrate it, fuse into knots.

“No. It’s an ordinary book. No gimmicks. One day it changed. In the end, it became what you see. No outside agent did that. The letters did it themselves.

“Mostly it starts unnoticed. Letters in a line multiply. Closer examination shows the letters overlapping and replicating. Spaces open up in words, splitting them into terms with unknown meanings. The process accelerates. Soon the letters spill into the gaps between lines. They can’t be contained. The letters begin to overlap. Words join and swallow each other up or divide into new words.”

The phenomenon manifests in a variety of forms. Sentences on a page might intertwine into a helix. Chapters shrink or explode. Letters expand or flake off the page. New pages form, letters invade the new space and breed there. Further detail would be pointless. That corpse of a book sprawled in Jundo’s cell—that tumor-devoured carcass—testifies to this bizarre destruction more eloquently than anything. But the carcass is not the final stage.

“And you ask me to believe that?”

I shrug my shoulders and glance at
Moby-Dick
. “Why would I come all the way here just to lie? You can see what’s happening yourself. And you already believe, don’t you.”

Jundo’s confidence in his senses is absolute. If he can see it and smell it, it’s real. That’s his creed. His calm is unshakeable.

“It’s not just this book, is it?”

“Unfortunately no. Thousands, tens of thousands of books have been infected by the same disease. And not only books.”

I take a plastic case from my briefcase. A movie disc. The jacket photo shows two little girls in white standing side by side. An endless red-brown plain stretches into the distance behind them.

“I don’t see the anomaly,” says Jundo.

“At a certain point in visual works, a catastrophe occurs. The content changes.”

“May I see it?”

“Certainly.” I pass the disc through the slot.

“Oh, that’s right.” He gives me an elfin wink. “Now you just need to send through the equipment to let me watch this.”

“Very easily done.”

“How are you going to get it in here?”

I don’t answer immediately.

“The person who designed and built this cell—that was you, wasn’t it?” says Jundo. “No, this jail, this whole prison is probably your creation. And you created me too, didn’t you? Created and ‘loaded’ me here.”

I sigh, satisfied. Jundo’s acuity is truly marvelous. Not totally accurate, but still outstanding. I should mention that he was never held in a prison like this when he was alive. This is nothing more than an imagined location, generated from moment to moment.

“I’ll prepare a viewing device now.” I gesture. A fully equipped screening setup appears in the corner of the cell, but Jundo shows no trace of surprise.

“So why are you here?”

“I wanted you to know that this phenomenon exists. We call it Imajika. All you have to do is talk to me, like we’re doing now.”

One of Jundo’s eyes closes very slowly, then opens again. “And the reward?” Apparently that was a wink.

“I know you’ll like it.”

I take a small cassette tape player out of my bag. Its shell is cast as a single unit, completely enclosing the cassette. All risk has been carefully eliminated.

“Magnetic tape. Very contemporary.” Jundo happily accepts the machine and presses one of its buttons. They’re in a line, like a keyboard. “Let’s hear what we’ve got.”

The
Goldberg Variations
flows from the toylike speakers. The sound quality is superb.

“Thank you. It’s not Gould, is it? But still, a wonderful performance. So—how should I say? So human.” A satisfied smile spreads over his face. He quietly hums the melody.

I don’t trust that smile.

Yet even Jundo’s smile is nothing more than my creation, a product of literal technology.

Jundo Mamiya.

A monster, fashioned from our corpses.

#Imajika

Alice Wong’s status as Imajika’s first victim is debated, but we won’t try to settle that here. Without a doubt she was an early example, one so sensational and tragic that it was carved into our memory as a crime for the ages. That much is certain.

Alice was a celebrated poet. That morning, about three weeks after her thirteenth birthday, she was out on her daily run, working out ideas for new poems. No one else was on the streets at that hour. Her family was still in bed when she left the house. The wind carried a foretaste of the winter to come, and Alice loved the bracing feeling of cutting through it as she ran. The road was nearly dry, but the air still held the fragrance of rain from the night before.

#
Like eyes purified by tears #Autumn’s fair daybreak unfolds, crystalline

This verse was left behind by the swarms of CASSYs that Alice used to propagate her apparently endless streams of poems. With their stripped-down feature set, restricted message size, and bare-bones AI, these unsophisticated CASSYs were blunt tools, but they could piggyback toll-free on the city’s pervasive services net, and they acted as useful assistants. Alice’s generation of women used CASSYs as personal secretaries to continuously convert their thoughts and actions into text. Users could choose from a wide range of expressive styles, all of them awful. But for Alice and her friends, that quirky AI style was part of the fun.

CASSY-generated text—with location data, timestamp, ambient temperature, street views, and user browsing history—were routed to GEB, which stripped out personal ID tags and absorbed the text into its resources. GEB’s archive of anonymous murmurs and actions from people all over the world expanded constantly, from moment to moment.

Alice often wove worthless CASSY snippets into her own poems. Her touch transformed these childish phrases into something compulsively appealing.

#
Long black hair in a pony tail/effortless acceleration/sugar maples by the road/crimson leaves splinter morning sunlight

Alice’s voice and movements were recorded from tens of different distances and angles. Physiological data generated by bloodstream and nervous system sensors, links to the dozen or more literary works she was consulting, the music she was streaming, observation data from satellites in the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—the fresh data streaming over her from the pervasive services network was like an energizing wind as she ran that morning.

Was her existence unraveling into untold strands of data? Or were strands of data weaving her into existence?

As she focused on her run, she began to feel body and spirit funneling into the narrow borderland between weaving and unraveling. Far off within the vast space of her mind she saw a horizon, a mind regarding itself. Something reverberated there. She strained to make it out.

Along that horizon, her poems were born.

#
Humanity in this era has nearly abandoned poetry #Since the Entangled Bookshelf and literal technology absorbed human knowledge, literature has not made a single creative impact #Alice Wong was one of the doves that landed on that blasted plain with an olive branch in her beak #A genius who limned herself anew in the tension between clashing character strings, cascading from all directions

#The run was going great #Her horizon was sharper than ever, she felt the stirrings of several poems #She was in such good form, she wanted to start outputting them as soon as she got home

#Feeling refreshed, she glanced up at the bright sky #She stopped to look at something strange in the sky #Her streaming hair fell to her back

#Pebbles floating in the sky

#Definitely there, floating high off the ground #But then they would be more than ten meters across #Shape and texture, smooth, like something from a stream bed #Ordinary pebbles, floating in the sky #Alice rubbed her eyes in surprise

#Then there was just one pebble, as if there wasn’t a sky at all #No sense of illusion, no Magritte feel, just a realistic pebble

#And

#In an eye blink, the stone disappeared

Alice craned her neck, peering upward. Whatever had been there a moment ago was nowhere to be seen.

By now, Alice had already been subjected to an intrusive, destructive contact from Imajika. In a split second—from her point of view—the contact ended and Imajika was gone. Alice resumed her run without realizing what had happened. She went back to planning her next batch of poems, completed her usual circuit, and returned home. Her selfhood had already been destroyed, but she had no awareness of it.

As the maid served breakfast, Alice turned to her mother to tell her about the strange sight she had witnessed. She searched for a word, cocked her head.

And froze.

She was trying to remember how to say something she had never said before, but Imajika had already destroyed the retrieval pathways. The features that made Alice distinctively herself, personal settings she had fashioned over thirteen years, were corrupted; her search function was disabled. Her awareness had lost its way. But because there was no return path, she dropped.

Living organisms are highly flexible systems. The brain can recover from sleep, lapse of consciousness, or corrupted awareness as though nothing happened. Before her family even noticed, Alice’s awareness moved smoothly to reboot itself.

But her settings were corrupted. No one knows what Alice saw when those settings were read into her mind on startup. The maid’s CASSYs recorded the entire tragedy. Alice screamed throughout the incident. She was the fearful exterminator, but she was also the one who was most fearful, the most ravaged by terror. Two people died and three were slightly injured in the Wong Family Dining Room Incident. Her mother, mortally wounded, crawled into the kitchen. A falling refrigerator—she had toppled it to create a barricade—killed her daughter. The mother was declared dead two hours later at the hospital.

That was as far as it went, at least at the scene of the crime.

The problem was that Alice Wong was a poet.

Alice’s poems were not written by putting pen to paper. Such poems were already extinct. Her poems were a typhoon of words run amok on GEB, the “Golden Eternal Bookshelf,” as she thought of it. With CASSY support, Alice often generated up to a hundred poems a day. When new poems were entered into her archive on GEB, the words were deployed according to their potential, mixing with previous poems, multiplying and dividing repeatedly, keeping her works fresh and new. GEB was home to several thousand collections of poetry, but Alice’s poems were the most full of life, the most introspective and sensual, and her readers were hungry for more. As her collection detonated other works and devoured them whole, it grew to almost unequaled size.

If typhoons are like living organisms metabolizing heat and water, Alice’s poems were a life force that metabolized the freshness of language. Alice was nearly always online, connected to her collection of poems, and although she and her CASSYs were contributing new poems all the time, the typhoon was never the same from moment to moment, yet never anything but distinctively Alice Wong.

Some people are excited by typhoons. Others chase tornados. Alice’s poems were accessed by a vast audience that loved her gale force winds.

This morning was no exception.

The corruption of her settings spread to this typhoon of words, sending it spinning out of control. Some who surfed in to rubberneck at the explosion of language were killed instantly. Hundreds of others had their settings totally corrupted. The impact varied, but a few of these victims were driven to acts that closely matched Alice’s.

That was only the first-order damage. At least it was restricted. The real damage occurred several seconds later, when the countless secondary works linked to Alice’s typhoon took the impact, precipitating a cascade effect.

All at the whim of Imajika.

3.

am watching a movie.

An overwhelming plain stretches across the frame. A dry land, blanketed with small stones. The sparse grass is white-brown, but I can’t tell if it’s dry or just looks that way on the screen.

Two small figures sit in the foreground. Sisters, the girls who were watching
Frankenstein
in the town hall. They’re wearing matching white clothes, holding book satchels, looking out over the endless plain from a small rise. The ground slopes gently down to the gigantic plain at their feet, with nothing to break the line of sight all the way out to the distant, blue-shrouded mountains. A featureless waste you would only see in Westerns.

The wind is blowing. I feel the sound of the wind gradually merging with the clicking of the projector at my back. In fact, that uniform plain is getting hard to distinguish from the screen itself.

Tiny waves of movement seem to envelop the screen. Is it waving grass? Is it film grain? Maybe it’s just noise in the audience’s vision?