The Future Is Japanese (46 page)

“That’s what GEB is for people today—a garden where vast numbers of data trails are stored up. CASSYs are the gardeners, tilling their ‘output’ to make multitudes of flowers bloom.

“If the garden falls into ruin, the human spirit will wither as well. No—GEB is already part of the human spirit, the way sunrise and the sea and mountains of cloud used to be. The way the hustle of crowds or a warm fire or books and plays used to be. We’ve got to protect GEB from Imajika, whatever the cost.”

Once more Bach flows from the deck in Jundo’s hand. The work opens with a quiet theme—the aria—followed by thirty variations, and finally the aria again.

“There’s something I just need to confirm.”

Jundo finally speaks as the opening aria draws to a close. I expect the first variation next, but what I hear is number thirty, the so-called quodlibet.

“Wait a minute …”

“I tried reversing the playback order. What you just heard was the closing aria.”

I’m about to explain to him that magnetic tape can’t be played back that way. Then my jaw drops.

It can.

If we write it that way.

But who …?

I keep my voice calm. “What did you want to confirm?”

“Everything you write is in response to search queries, correct?”

“Yes …” This final variation combines melodies from different German folk songs. What were they titled …?

“Answer me. Who is the searcher?”

I don’t intend to respond. I should conceal the truth to the end. But for some reason my mouth opens. The words flow.

“The searcher is Imajika.”

is not a first-person pronoun. Within GEB there is no subjectivity, no self, no awareness. Nothing but chains of letters, numbers, and symbols. am not writing . am—is—simply a proper noun—according to—yes, according to something written somewhere.

“Imajika is querying GEB?” Jundo’s calm hints that he had it figured out from the beginning.

“Yes …”

“Properly speaking, what you CASSYs decided to do was to try interpreting Imajika’s contacts as queries. You surmised that the damage he was doing was questions—search queries—and you responded to them.

“I’m not surprised. Everything on the
Pequod
was optimized for whaling, and everything in GEB is designed to handle queries. Any system stimulus you detect evokes a search-and-results response. As many substructures—agents like you, all of you—as needed can be generated on demand, like an organism’s immune cells. Imajika queries, you answer.

“Therefore everything written until now, including this little speech of mine, is Imajika ‘interviewing’ GEB.”

Then Jundo gives me the order.

“Recite the emergency escape passcode. The one you were given when you came down here.”

The red mishmash of letters and numbers that flashed by on the floor indicator. I recall them. In order. Jundo commits them to memory.

“Thank you.”

The prison morphs, and somehow I’m trapped behind the glass barrier. Jundo is standing in the corridor in a trimly fitted suit.

“I’m very grateful to you, all of you. You’ve completed me as Jundo Mamiya. But not because you searched my works.
Because
it was you who did the searching
.”

I can’t find the words. Is it possible that he knew? About us?

“Of course I knew. Don’t you think I’d know my own characters? They are all only myself. You probably analyzed my novels and absorbed my narrators’ speech patterns. Which makes you my alter egos. I am you, searching my works.

“I think I also recognize the novel and the character. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

If only CASSYs would let me feel emotion.

“Incidentally, that shabby outfit was what my mother wore to my first day of elementary school. Hand-me-downs from my grandmother, unfortunately.”

An unbelievably gentle smile crosses Jundo’s face.

The quodlibet flows again from the cassette deck in his hand.

Quod
libet
: What pleases.

My body suddenly feels light. I return to the position of narrator.

Jundo turns away and gestures lightly in farewell. The variations play back in reverse order as he walks off down the corridor. I’m guessing that about now, multitudes of Jundo Mamiyas are commencing their escapes from their respective domains.

But we anticipated this too.

By reading Imajika’s contacts as search queries, we’ve already output a huge volume of results—so huge that individual works are spontaneously interacting to build a complex structure. By joining that structure, the sequence where I am now can be stable without writing Jundo.

Alone in the cell, I turn to the display panel again.

Imajika floats in the ash-gray void.

If I had known Jundo was that compassionate, perhaps it would have been okay to reveal Imajika’s true nature to him from the beginning. Or perhaps his compassion is precisely why it was better that I didn’t?

Embedded within this stone is a thing people have long yearned to understand but could never reach out and grasp. Something strong enough to overwhelm humanity’s works. The works that humans created could not endure that force. They metamorphosed, crumpled, and transformed to stone.

That is why it has no name.

Not Hate, not Love.

Neither Life nor Death.

No one can read this stone. Not

or or anyone alive.

Except—

Except, just maybe, this structure that is slowly coming to life can read it. Like an embryo weaving a new organ, in that space, with Imajika’s queries as its pulse.

An indestructible, Intelligent Textual Organ.

This is our project.

#The Spirit of the Beehive

Alone, Alice trudges along. Suddenly she emerges into a huge open space. She’s at the top of a small rise. The ground below slopes gently away to a broad plain with the dim peaks of mountains in the distance. The scenery reminds her of a film she saw once, with one big difference. The ground beneath her feet is not exactly ground. It flexes. There’s a grain to the surface, like knit material. It almost feels like flesh, and it covers the surface as far as she can see. The slope, the plain, the mountains—everything is made of the same material. If she were to look closely, she would see that the surface is a lattice of tiny hexagons.

“Jundo, how could you?” Alice purses her lips with frustration. “This was my poetry collection!”

Managing Alice’s collection required an immense calculation space. An educational foundation recognized her gifts and helped her borrow the necessary server capacity. But Imajika was growing more dangerous when Alice died, and afterward her space was appropriated to help deal with the threat.

Now thousands of “Jundo Mamiya” emulators are arriving here from all over GEB. Recursive correlation across incalculable volumes of Jundo Mamiya tweeting is slowly generating an exquisite structure of minute hexagons and truncated octahedrons. A honeycomb structure.

Our textual organ—spawned and ripened by Jundo’s ideas, desires, and literary genius intertwined with the framework of Alice’s collection—is generating this awesome landscape. “You’re around here somewhere, aren’t you? I promise I’ll find you.”

Alice felt sure that the landscape’s resemblance to the famous sequence in
The Spirit of the Beehive
must mean something.

The heroine, a little girl, finds a fugitive soldier hiding in the house with the well, not far from the foot of the hill. And later, she has her encounter with Frankenstein’s monster in the woods, by the lake, in a place where dreams and reality are indistinguishable.

In the center of the plain, where the little house should be, is a sphere half embedded in the ground, a gigantic Imajika.

“So you’re here too? Just you wait.”

Alice runs down the slope, digging her heels in to get traction on the soft ground, arms flung wide to keep her balance. Imajika is a deformed sphere that looks carved from a mountain’s worth of rough stone, flinty and dense. Its rocky skin is cold and still. Alice doesn’t sense danger here, for the moment at least.

From a distance the sphere appeared to be buried in the plain, but now Alice sees that the ground around it has buckled and risen up, as if it were slowly pulling the sphere down into itself. Ropelike strands of some mineralized material extend from the ground to the sphere, like mooring lines holding it back. The strands end in massive hooks that bite into the stone. The rock is riven and gashed around the hooks, traces of a mammoth struggle before the sphere was finally contained.

Those mooring lines are probably more remains of Imajika’s victims, turned to stone. The ground around the sphere is slowly fossilizing the same way. Imajika might burst its bonds and run amok again at any moment. As she realizes this, Alice’s eyes travel warily across the rock.

As she works her way across the undulating terrain, she finds herself on the other side of the sphere. What she sees makes her gasp with surprise. She stops in her tracks.

A battered wooden sailing ship leans against Imajika as if run aground. A man stands on the deck.

Jundo Mamiya.

But Jundo is not the reason Alice gasped.

From where she stands she now sees that Imajika, which looked at first like a stone sphere, is without a doubt the head of a gigantic whale, lunging from the ocean.

“Didn’t Ahab have a wooden leg?”

“You think I’d put up with the way I was written?” Jundo Mamiya stamps loudly on the oil-stained deck with his thick, short legs. “See? I’ll do this the way I want.”

“Well, you go right ahead. Listen, this thing isn’t going to wake up, is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s quiet now. Spooky.”

“But why does Imajika appear in the form of stone?”

“This outer structure is not Imajika. It’s an aggregation of all the works Imajika has vandalized, the mutated corpses of books and films. Imajika is inside. It armors itself with the corpses of its victims. Some of the original texts might still be readable if you look at the surface carefully.”

“Texts like my poems?”

“Your poems …?” Jundo stares up at this young girl who is taller than he is. “By the way, who are you?”

“Allow me to introduce myself.” Alice smiles, flashing those white teeth. “I’m your landlady. Except, as you can see, I’m a ghost.”

If Jundo Mamiya is a monster stitched together from the corpses of words, this Alice Wong would have to be described as a ghost without even a dead body.

After contact with Imajika killed the physical Alice, the multiple Jundo Mamiyas that were written into this space acted on one another to create a complex new structure.

But then Alice’s poems—poems too precious to be dispersed—where have they gone?