The Future Is Japanese (6 page)

I nodded slowly. “But what happens when we go so far upstream we bump into ourselves coming the other way?”

“Ah, well then we’re screwed,” my guy said. “But we can get another generation out of the system at our current pace.”

“And then what?”

He refilled my cup. “Kanpai.”

The downstreamers were shooting at us. Apparently they did this a lot, creeping up close at night. The sky thundered. Our soldiers were shooting back. I covered my ears as my guy dragged me toward the gatehouse. “The demographic bulge,” he shouted at me.

“What?”

I cowered against the clammy stone wall. I felt like I needed shelter, even though I wasn’t really in danger. My guy swung in close, facing me, one arm braced over my head.

“National Life Support was supposed to produce a demographic bulge!” he shouted. “To reverse the graying of society! To expand the workforce so we could keep the whole thing going! Hasn’t happened! We don’t even have enough people to defend our downstream facilities! Those are biobots up there! I was being ironic!”

He grabbed my hand and tried to hold it. I pulled away. “If this is some kind of an elaborate pickup line, forget it! I’m not interested in breeding! Ugh!”

“Not that.” He swayed closer to me so he was speaking into my hair. His breath smelled of shochu and his voice sounded like he was crying. “Be my proxy.”

“What?”

“It happens in 2106, according to our latest timeline. You’ll see. You’ll know what you have to do.”

Incoming!
A huge slug of data landed in my inbox, trailing a long tail of links. Phraud alarms blinked on my left retina like tracer fire. Then everything went black.

Two Years Later

“Everyone clear on what they have to do?” I looked around the hollow at the faces of my friends. Hard, weathered, young faces striped with camo cream mixed from charcoal and potato starch. No one said a word. These were the pick of the New Edo samurai: they’d been fighting the upstreamers half their lives, and now, for the first time, they had a chance to defeat them. Every line of their tense, squatting bodies screamed
ready for action
. I nodded, pleased. “If there are no more questions, then let’s get moving.”

We walked in single file, our guns and equipment tied down so nothing rattled, utilizing upstreamer asphalt where it was safe, cutting across country in other places, making for the obscenely bright glow of KCP. I mentally reviewed my own plan for the upcoming action. I hadn’t even told Tomoki how I hoped it was going to play out.

As if my thoughts had summoned him, he moved up from the rear of the column. “If anything happens to either of us tonight …”

I spoke past a sudden lump in my throat. “Your mom and dad will take care of Michiyo. She’ll grow up to succeed where we failed.” Mentioning our daughter, just six months old, made me question what I was doing. Made me remember my own parents, who’d both left me, as I was leaving Michiyo tonight. “But we aren’t going to fail.”

He nodded, his face shadowed by the scrub woods we were moving through. “Asuko …”

That’s my name. Asuko. I never told it to anyone before.
Tomorrow’s child.
Ironic, huh?

I tripped on a chunk of centuries-old debris buried under the dead knots of winter grass and kicked it, upset. We were walking uphill in the region that had once been known as Shibuya.

“When the upstreamers are gone for good,” Tomoki said, “we’ll rebuild.” He squeezed my hand. “This will be a city again.” He had grown up as a slave on one of the upstreamers’ vast collective farms in what had formerly been Saitama Prefecture. He’d never heard of any such thing as a city until I told him what Tokyo used to be. I had actually described a WORLD set in the early twenty-first century that I used to visit a lot: the incessant construction and development, the commercial bustle, the warmth of neighborhood communities that interlocked like links in a fence keeping out the night. Maybe it was just some WORLD-designer’s dream, but it was the kind of dream this ravaged century needed.

We called a final halt on the bank of the Kanda River, almost within earshot of the blazing-bright towers of KCP. I gathered everyone close.

“The guy who sent me to you,” I said, “wanted me to act as his proxy. See, back upstream, I was licensed as a kind of relationship expert. I had qualifications in compassion and warmheartedness.” Knowing me, they snickered at that, as I’d hoped they would. “He sent me out to spread the word that we, I mean the upstreamers, were withdrawing. He wanted me to break up with you. To say goodbye, no hard feelings, it wasn’t you, it was us.”

The river gurgled over the shallows we would shortly be fording. My men squatted as still as stones.

“Well, I was like, screw that. I don’t owe you anything. So I just shared the data he gave me with you … and the rest you know. We’ve stepped up our campaign. Killed hundreds of them.”

I reached blindly for Tomoki’s hand. Now came the hard bit.

“But I didn’t tell you everything.”

Assaults tend to succeed or fail in the first thirty seconds, and this one was no exception. We blew up the gates using a grenade launcher captured from the upstreamers themselves. After that it was no contest, since I had the security codes to dismantle the KCP biobots. The codes were two years old but still worked piecemeal, leaving fatal gaps in the perimeter defenses. Our guns did the rest. Amid the clamor and carnage, I wondered again why that guy had given me the codes. I imagined, or remembered, a voice from somewhere:
They asked us to kill them.

Maybe
that’s
what he’d really meant when he asked me to be his proxy.

In which case, I was two years late getting on the job. I’d taken time out to fall in love, have a child, and find out what being human really meant.

Now it was time for me to act on that knowledge.

Takagi-san, a huge samurai in particolored scrap-metal armor, emerged from the gatehouse waving his gun triumphantly. The building was clear. I ran inside and up the stairs. At every turn I had to jump over the bodies of office workers sprawled in their gore. We hadn’t spared a single soul. This time, the upstreamers would not be coming back. But I knew that already.

Reaching the command center on the third floor, I tried to open the blastproof door with my security codes. Nothing happened. “Shit!” The base network had gone down. I could not transmit any data.

Tomoki materialized at my side. “Stand back,” he shouted, and fired a full magazine of armor-piercing rounds into the door. I hit the floor as ricochets screamed around the corridor. Raising my head I saw the door sagging on its hinges. I also saw Tomoki’s lovely smile.

“Get out,” I shouted, my hearing shot. “Get everyone out. The whole gatehouse is the Mallett Gate.”

“I’m coming with you,” he said, and our hands touched just as the building seemed to twist on two axes at once, spinning sickeningly as if gravity had gone on vacation. I knew what was happening. They were shutting down the Mallett Gate from the other side.

I felt my OPU reestablish a connection with the national internet for the first time in two years, and time stretched as I fought the operators. I jammed everything I had learned into the maw of the program that crunched time and space. I told them about breaking my ankle in the woods and being rescued by villagers who lived off the grid … about pain and recovery: swimming in the river, working in the fields, helping to build really useful things with stolen parts … about holding and kissing the person you love. I gave them a whole WORLD based on my experiences, designed over the last two years with the sensory-conversion software that every kid in my own time got preloaded. The twisting and spinning slowed as the unseen operators, humans and AIs alike, took the bait.

Somewhere along the way I lost Tomoki. But I’d been going to lose him anyway. Him and our daughter and everyone.

I sat up, aching all over, in a rectangle of dusty sunlight. Several men and women in lab coats and masks were staring down at me. Someone was screaming in the background. One of the men frantically pushed buttons on a piece of equipment that looked as jerry-rigged as anything we used to build in the twenty-fifth century. I knew roughly where and when I was: America, sometime in the 2060s. I had seized control of the Mallett Gate and gone back as far as possible, to the end of the line, the day the very first working prototype was built.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Asuko.” They weren’t Japanese. They didn’t understand me. I spoke on anyway. “I’m canceling your experiment.” I stood up and pushed the prototype, knocking it over. Glass crunched. Next I pulled my twenty-fifth-century pistol out of my waistband and fired at the researchers, dropping each of them in turn with body shots. It felt as if I were shooting the people I’d loved. By changing the past, I would change the future. I’d never be able to return to my own time, let alone the twenty-fifth century. But with luck, my actions would help to head off the nuclear war that was scheduled to kick off in 2106. And somewhere, somehow, I prayed my daughter would have a chance to grow up. Through my tears, I said, “This is goodbye.”

There used to be a snack bar or a kebab shop or something at the side of the hangar. It’s scrap now, a shapeless pile of fiberglass and corrugated tin, broken pieces of brown and white signs advertising
döner
and currywurst. Some of the plastic chairs have survived though, and now Jacob drags three of them through the green-uniformed cordon of nervous Ländespolizei into the rain shadow of the hunched Colombine and Pantalon. Maddy takes one without a word and sits, or rather sprawls, knees wide like a salaryman on a late train, looking out at nothing. After a moment the black figure of the Scaramouche crouches down beside the other two robots; the cockpit opens, and Abby slides down to join Maddy and Jacob.

“Captain Asano says the transport’s almost here,” she announces.

Maddy nods.

Jacob says, “Tanimura get any?”

“She didn’t say.”

Jacob is still wearing his helmet. He takes it off now and flings it across the tarmac. Some of the Ländespolizei look round at the clatter and then hurriedly away. Without his big Malcolm X glasses Jacob’s face looks naked. Maddy and Abby can see that he’s crying.

Abby goes and retrieves the helmet and sets it down at Jacob’s side. Then she draws the third chair up next to Maddy and perches there, her knees drawn up to her chest. In the white chair, in her black Nomex suit, she looks very small.

“You got a few of them, Maddy,” she says after a moment. “Didn’t you?”

“I got one or two,” Maddy says, her voice sounding flat, echoless in her own ears.

Abby looks over toward the hangar, the second ring of Ländespolizei, the green tarps and trailers of the field hospital and the makeshift morgue.

“That’s something, I guess,” she says.

Maddy doesn’t answer.

The transport comes in, low and heavy, roaring down the length of the runway so the wind of its passage rocks the trailers, rips tent pegs from the ground, and sends the Ländespolizei scurrying to secure the tarps. It slows and turns down at the far end and taxis slowly back.

A squawk comes from Jacob’s helmet. Abby lifts her own to her ear, says something quietly into the microphone, then listens. She looks over at the others.

“Tanimura’s gone,” she says.

“What?” says Jacob. “They got him?”

Abby shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He’s AWOL. Asano wants one of us to go look for him.”

“You’re kidding,” says Maddy. “Isn’t that her job?”

“He’s taken the Pierrot too,” Abby says.

Maddy stands up. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll go.”

She doesn’t bother putting on her own helmet, just climbs back into the Colombine’s cockpit, closes the hatch, powers up the instruments and screens, plugs the IV into the cannula in her hip. She waits for Jacob and Abby to get the Pantalon and the Scaramouche moving, follows them up the ramp into the transport.

“All right,” she says into the helmet, as the crew locks the Colombine into its cradle. “Where’s he gone, Disneyland Paris?”

Asano’s voice, coming from the helmet, is reedy and strained.

“He’s gone into the zone,” she says.

The secret robot base was an old oil platform somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. Officially it was the United Nations Provisional Containment Authority Northern Hemisphere Rapid Deployment Facility, but after six weeks in the British Columbian woods at the United Nations Provisional Containment Authority Pacific Region Candidate Induction Centre Camp Chilliwack, Maddy had had enough of UN word salad, and when Abby had called it the secret robot base, Maddy had picked the name up and made it stick. The walls of the base were white-painted steel that flaked in places to reveal an older layer of nicotine yellow and occasionally bits of faded Russian stencil. The UN had rubberized the floors and put in new signs in English and Japanese, but to Maddy it still felt like they’d gone back in time, or like they were on the set of some old war movie like her dad was always watching on the History Channel,
Top Gun
or
Blue Submarine No. 6
or
The Final Countdown
. She liked that. Jacob said the gray glop on the ceilings was asbestos and it was giving them cancer.

They would come back from one of their thirty-hour Rapid Deployments to the edge of—but never into—the Canadian zone, or the European zone, or the zone off the coast of the Philippines in the South China Sea, and the doctors would strip Abby and Maddy and Jacob out of their Nomex pilot suits and decontaminate them and flush the zone drugs out of their systems and put them through a battery of medical and psychological and parapsychological tests that would have been humiliating before Camp Chilliwack. Likewise before Chilliwack Maddy would have been self-conscious about being undressed and prodded in front of Abby and Jacob, would have been conscious of Abby’s bony nakedness and Jacob’s invasive gaze, but now it was just Jacob and Abby, and Jacob’s gaze wasn’t invasive, just exhausted, and Abby’s naked body wasn’t remotely erotic, just tired and bruised, and Maddy could care less what she herself looked like. If the doctors put Tanimura through any of this they did it somewhere else.

In three months at the secret robot base Maddy had had exactly one conversation with boy hero Shinichiro Tanimura. It had gone like this:

Tanimura (English strongly accented, eyes behind his unkempt black bangs never lifting above Maddy’s none-too-impressive chest): “You lived in Japan.”

Maddy:
「東京。三年間。」
(Tokyo. Three years.)

Tanimura:
「日本語上手だね。」
(Your Japanese is pretty good.)

Maddy (lying): “I don’t understand.”

She’d understood fine. She just didn’t want to make friends with Tanimura. Which raised the question of why she’d felt it necessary to show off by speaking Japanese in the first place when Captain Asano had introduced them, and Abby had asked Maddy exactly that when Maddy had told her the story.

“Competitive much?” Abby had said, and Maddy had given her a withering look; but Abby tended not to notice things like that. And Maddy had to admit—to herself, anyway—that Abby was probably right. But she was getting that geek-boy crush vibe from Tanimura, or thought she was, and she wanted to shut that down right away. She wasn’t here to be Tanimura’s friend, and she certainly wasn’t here to be his girlfriend. As far as Maddy was concerned, she was here to be his replacement.

Maddy and Abby and Jacob were American. Almost everyone else on the secret robot base was Japanese, apart from a few of the doctors that had followed them from Camp Chilliwack, who were Canadian. They were Japanese because Tanimura was Japanese, and until the Camp Chilliwack graduates had turned up, Tanimura, and Tanimura’s shiny white robot the Pierrot, had been the only thing standing between the enemy coming out of the zones and the human race.

There had been twenty-seven test candidates at Camp Chilliwack and five of them had graduated. Of the twenty-two who hadn’t, four were dead and seven would need serious medical attention for the rest of their lives. Of the five who had, two had been killed the very first time they were Rapidly Deployed: Hailey Peterson had died trying to save a busload of Taiwanese schoolchildren who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the operational area, and Oscar Jara—who was a soldier, and at twenty-three the oldest of them by five years, and who Maddy privately thought should have known better—had died going after Hailey. Hailey’s body had been sent back to Ontario and Oscar’s to California, and the Docteur and the Arlequin to wherever dead robots went.

The Colombine and the Scaramouche and the Pantalon came back in one piece, and Maddy and Abby and Jacob did too, more or less. They got better at what they were supposed to be doing. The zones got bigger, the things coming out of them—crawling out of them, usually, crawling and dying, but not always—got weirder, and Maddy and Abby and Jacob killed the monsters and turned back the machines and they stuck to the mission and none of them died. They stood for press photos, with Captain Asano just out of frame; they got crayon robot drawings from schoolchildren in Nunavut and Poland and Hong Kong. Abby said they were saving lives and giving people hope. Jacob said they were saving a lot of property.

The showers in the secret robot base were new and Japanese, but as industrial as all the rest of it, with spray nozzles in worrying places, oversized controls suitable for clumsy gloved hands. Maddy made sure the cannula in her hip for the zone drugs was sealed, turned on about half the nozzles, made the water as hot as she could stand it; wet her hair, scrubbed at her shoulders and upper arms. Coming back, maybe it was the disinfectants, maybe it was going off the zone drugs, something made her itch all over. She was breaking out again. She lathered her hair, rinsed, rubbed in conditioner, leaned her forehead against the smooth ceramic of the cubicle wall. She closed her eyes and saw the enemy.

Back at Camp Chilliwack Abby had made a game out of the enemy recognition cards they’d all been given. It was a sort of mah-jongg or gin rummy, except instead of making sets by number or suit you had to make them by the shared characteristics of the enemy machines. This one, a thing like a walking mushroom that a UN committee or computer had named the AG-7
Grauekappe
, Abby classified “bipedal.” As she did this one, the dumpy, vaguely humanoid AM-3
Zwerg
. But the
Grauekappe
, at forty meters plus, was also “gigantic” and so could make a set not only with the
Zwerg
but also with the MC-11
Wiatrak
, spindly and three-legged. Or so Abby had said as she took the trick.

It had seemed funny at the time, and probably served the purpose the cards were meant for, inasmuch as it helped the test candidates of Camp Chilliwack memorize the different shapes and sizes. But even back then Maddy had seen that what the otaku-obsessive cataloguing mostly did, the profusion of numbers and abbreviations and code names that might have come out of Jacob’s anime collection, was mask UNPROCON’s ignorance regarding the zones and regarding the enemy, an ignorance that was deep and practically total.

Now behind Maddy’s closed eyes, the alien shapes moved gray and blue between white stuccoed houses, were chased across the Colombine’s screens by cursors and reticles. She remembered looking down into a railroad cut overhung with green under a gray sky, a parked string of heavy freight cars, angular black metal forms folding and tearing like foil as the
zwergs
and
hryuks
slammed through them, tumbling along the cut away from Maddy’s fire. Remembered the shadow of the
grauekappe
above her, and then the shocking brightness of its weapon, the way it cleaved in an instant through rock and vine and concrete, shearing away a building-sized chunk of city so that for a moment Maddy saw pipes and wires and foundations and bedrock, before a water main exploded into a linear cloud of steam and Maddy was throwing the Colombine forward into the cover it gave, down onto the tracks, the cockpit at the Colombine’s heart spinning like a hamster ball to keep Maddy upright as they rolled, and then they were down on the tracks and Maddy’s finger was on the trigger, cutting down the smaller machines with the Colombine’s rifle, sticking to the mission, finishing the job. Saving the world.