The Future Is Japanese (5 page)

“That’s not true.” He looked at me in a way I didn’t like, as if he were seeing through my makeover habit to whatever I would have looked like without all the surgery. “Not rubbing, actually. For your information. Just sort of … holding.”

“Ugh,” I said, and a burst of music played. He grabbed a gadget off the table. A phone. Wow. I hadn’t seen one of those in years.

“Yeah. No. That’s not good … Yeah? On my way now.”

He disappeared into the bedroom.

“I’ve been called out. Sorry. Can we finish this on the way?”

“To where?”

He came back out tying a necktie around the collar of a Y-shirt. He was wearing a suit. I hadn’t seen one of
those
in … God, since I was a kid. My dad used to wear a suit to go to …
the office.
That was what we called it,
the office.

“Hey,” I said. “You work for a living too, don’t you? Asshole.”

“We weren’t talking about me.”

I followed him down to the building’s carpark. A Tata Buzz glided out of the darkness, making a throaty engine noise. We got in. The car rolled up the ramp and straight onto the elevated highway. Tokyo stretched to the horizon, a dim grid of energy-saving LED streetlumes, dotted with a few sparkling islands. My guy switched on the interior light and flipped through the divorce paperwork. “I’m not signing this,” he said.

“You have to.”

“I don’t
have
to do anything. Neither do you.”

The car exited at Kokkaigijidomae. We passed the Diet building and pulled up outside a nondescript office block on Sotobori Dori. My guy worked for the government. He was a civil servant. I remembered my father saying that civil servants had the best jobs of anyone. That was in the days before National Life Support started and suddenly there was no reason for anyone to have a job at all. Most of my teachers quit. My father stopped going to the office. We were happy at first, but then my mother broke up with us and went to be a biobot developer in China. She died in the Rongcheng nuclear accident. A while after that, my father hanged himself in the bathroom. He left a note saying that he wasn’t worried about leaving me because he knew National Life Support would take good care of me.

As we walked toward the doors, my guy squirted me a security code via my public inbox. The guards scanned us through. Inside the building, men in suits were running. Some of them had guns. I thought nothing of it, probably because I’d seen so many guns in people’s WORLDs … and then we plunged through another set of doors, big wooden ones with rosettes on them, and we
were
in someone’s WORLD. Had been all along, perhaps. The seamless intro had fooled me.

“Well, this is kind of pathetic.” Hands on hips, I surveyed the twilit countryside spread out below. We seemed to be standing on the parapet of a castle built on a craggy outcropping. Flat farmland stretched to a line of distant hills. I could just make out the familiar triangle of Fuji-san, the sun still bright on its snowcap. “Are we actually still in your car? Or still in your apartment?”

A cold, fresh wind licked at my face.

“This isn’t a virtuality,” my guy said. “It’s 2417 AD.”

“Oh yeah? Because it looks like an out-of-the-box WORLD set in the Warring States Era.”

“Have another look.” He pointed toward the hills. I saw motion along a distant crease in the fields, too fast to be a column of horses. The tops of trucks zooming along a sunken road. Farther away, something flickered brightly, burning.

“They ambushed Supply Convoy Number 313 thirty minutes ago.” Another suit was briefing my guy. “We’ve secured the area and are evaccing casualties.”

“Retaliatory measures?”

“Not yet. We’re waiting for a decision.”

“I’d better take a look at the damage. Do we have control of the local airspace?”

“Yes sir, we do. They do not appear to have surface-to-air missiles at this time.”

“Right, right. That comes earlier.” My guy frowned at the distant flames. “Get a chopper ready then.”

“Can I come?”

“No.” He was different now, distant.
Working
. “Stay here.”

“He cares about me,” I explained to the people who were left on top of the gatehouse. “He wouldn’t want me to get hurt.” I’d analyzed the security code he sent me, using the basic suite of tools in my onboard processing unit. It identified me as his “secretary.” Whatever. I didn’t know what a secretary was supposed to do, but complaining seemed like a good start. “Why is my OPU running so slow? I’m only getting, like, gigabits per second.”

They exchanged glances. “Limited bandwidth on this side, miss.”

I rubbed my fingers over the top of the parapet. Gritty yellow stone. Licked them. Taste of dust. In the west, the sun was slowly sinking. I love sunsets, all the yellows and the reds, like an oil painting by Mother Nature. But this one looked like an amateur effort, just a few lemony veils of cloud drifting above an orb too bright to look at. “What’s with the sky?”

“It’s the air, miss. No pollution out here.”

I felt cold, and not just because of the wind. “This really is the twenty-fifth century, isn’t it?”

“Yes, miss.”

I wanted to go home. I’d spent my whole life chasing reality, trying not to get sucked into a WORLD-based existence like most people, but now I didn’t want this to be real.

The problem with reality is it doesn’t care what you want.

I spotted a trapdoor in the roof and went for it like a mouse diving into its hole. Inside, the gatehouse was less castle-y, with ordinary stairs and wide gray corridors, more evidence that this was real; if it was a WORLD they’d have kept it authentic. Two of the people from up top followed me, a female suit about my age and an older guy in a coverall that said
NaLiSu
on the pocket. The female suit led the way down through several levels where people in military uniforms were working at desktop computers and out to a big yard surrounded by a sloping drystone wall.

Trucks rumbled in through a security chicane with two hairpin bends that hid the world outside the gate. Each one stopped for about a minute in the chicane, then got directed into one of the big hangars inside the yard. There were a lot of other buildings too. It was all very administrative and functional-looking.

“They do it with lasers,” the older guy said. “I don’t know the details, but it turns out light can bend space. And once you can bend space, that bends time. It’s all in Einstein.”

“What’s Einstein?” I said.

He gave me a pitying look. “Died about a hundred years before you were born. See,” he said to the female suit. “This is what you’re creating. Plundering the future to keep your kids spoiled and ignorant.”

“What’s that smell?” I said.

The female suit said, “Exhaust fumes. These trucks run on gasoline. We can’t risk letting the downstreamers steal our battery technology.”

The older guy sniffed. “In the next century upstream, they’ve already got it. We take it off them. But it’s not going to be easy.”

“What’s in the trucks?”

The guy had crooked, discolored teeth. “Rice, mostly.”

Little black shapes fluttered across the darkening sky.
Bats.
I’d seen virtual ones before, but these were real. There was something exuberant about their flight that just couldn’t have been generated by an algorithm. And green stuff grew in the cracks between the stones of the wall. The truck engines made the same noise that you’d expect, but throatier, louder, because it wasn’t electronically generated to prevent collisions—it was real.

I looked at the female suit. Her neat, practical look made me feel embarrassed by my pink hair and temp-tats. “How do I get a job here?”

She laughed. “You can’t. We’re closing this era down.”

“Moving upstream,” the older guy said. “Getting too hot in this century.”

“He comes from the twenty-seven-hundreds,” she said. “Started out as a supplier, jumped to the logistics and procurement side. That’s one way to get a job with us. Be born in the future.”

She was sneering at me. Looking down on me because I was a noob. For some reason, I could take it from the old guy, but not from her. “Well, screw you,” I said. “You’re only a gofer anyway.” I wandered away from them across the yard. The trucks had stopped coming in. The human staff banged the gates shut. It was getting dark.

While we were talking, I’d had my OPU working on an environmental analysis of my new “secretary” identity. I was using harvested processing power, which constrained me to a rate hardly faster than the public datarate here. But I had some black-hat tools purchased from contacts in the New SSR, and these now spat out preliminary results telling me that I had access to a bunch of self-explanatory facilities such as “Dining Hall,” as well as something called the Mallett Gate, which did not show up on the map the tools helpfully pushed onto my left retina.

The noise of a helicopter announced the return of my guy and his companions. His nice shirt was smudged and dirty. He smelled like burning.

We ate in the dining hall with the day-shift staff of the Kanto Collection Point (KCP), which was what this was. My heavy consumption of onboard power had given me a ravenous appetite, but the food would’ve tasted good anyway. Real baked fish, real leafy greens, and rice that made me feel like I was six years old again. None of it was tank-grown or reconstituted. It came from the farms here which supplied the goods we trucked through the collection point and back home to 2082.

“We can’t take too many more losses like today,” my guy said. “The instability premium is cutting into our margins.”

“They’ve got it worse in Kansai,” the old guy said. “The downstreamers there are using suicide bombers.”

I said, “What’ve they got against us?”

I’d already picked up a lot from listening to people. KCP was located in the same place where the Tokyo city government offices stood in our own century. That’s why the view from the gatehouse had looked familiar. But the whole expanse of land that I knew as Tokyo, a city of sixty million, had reverted to wasteland partially reclaimed for farming. It was scary to imagine what might have caused that to happen. Maybe another big nuclear accident. Maybe a war. Maybe it was scheduled to happen the day after I got home.

My guy picked a fishbone out from between his lips. “Well, it’s not just rice,” he said. “We collect all kinds of commodities. Minerals. Biomass. Timber. Natural gas from the Sea of Japan—
that’s
a security nightmare. The downstreamers in this era haven’t got the technology to hit our drilling platforms, but we’ve got the commies from our own century on our asses, trying to expand their catchment areas. All the same, the goods get through. Everything we need to keep society functioning, really.”

“The future supplies the difference between what we produce and what we consume,” the female suit said. She’d gotten a bit drunk on
shochu
during the meal; her face looked softer, kind of confused.

“But we don’t produce anything at home,” I said. “Unless you count virtual stuff.”

The old guy cackled. “Exactly.”

My guy said, “We pay for everything, of course. But for some reason, they always end up hating us.” He helped himself to some more shochu. “The Mallett Gate was invented in America. A lot of the early users ended up taking one-way trips to, like, extinction events two billion years downstream. They thought it was a wash. Time travel as Russian roulette. It was us that refined the technology, fine-tuned it. Japan has always been poor in natural resources. That’s often driven us to take desperate risks … Pearl Harbor, Midway. That didn’t work out. But this did. With the flick of a switch, we were suddenly the richest country in the world.” He looked wistful. “Unfortunately, the technology leaked, and now everyone’s got it. So we’re still stuck in a competition for resources … in the future.”

“Started off in the twenty-ninth century,” Kurosumi-san said. “Go any further downstream than that and you run into an extinction event presumably caused by a meteor strike. That was forty years ago. Ever since then, we’ve been hopping upstream a few decades at a time. See, when we go
upstream,
they don’t know we’re coming.”