The Future Is Japanese Read online

  “Shouldn’t you be asking what will happen if you do go along?”

  “So, that way, I suppose.”

  The old man says to me disparagingly, laughing: “The two of you are going to have to work this out. Find the being that is now newly occupying the cognitive niche formerly owned by humankind, and then I don’t care if you fight or if you negotiate or if you find some way of living in a new niche. Or you can look for a law to destroy the law itself. It will be a great adventure.”

  “I have no interest in great adventures.”

  The old man points his chin out toward the plain. “That girl does …”

  My shoulders droop as I let out a sigh.

  Beneath the eclipse, a small shadow stands imposingly like a temple guardian, shaking its fist repeatedly at the sky.

  I raise my eyes with bated breath. All I see is a blank space. Right where Orion should be. Where Orion should be there is a blank space. Only Orion’s space is completely erased. Not that there is a space there. What I notice instead is merely a vertical alignment of stars. Although I’m not sure that “merely” is the right word here.

  This may be the moment at which I really enter Leo and the old man’s “club.” Which is like getting into some club of social insects, or batlike aliens, or the somehow super-intelligent. Two people might share a delusion, but if three are involved it’s something else entirely. Isn’t there an aphorism like that?

  My mind is desperately searching for some reason why Orion should choose this instant to show me its turned form for the first time, but this effort fails to bear fruit. It may be nothing more than coincidence, or it may have something to do with Saturn interrupting the moon’s gaze. The moon looks down upon us even in the daytime, so the likelihood of the latter is extremely low. Saturn’s shadow may have obscured what sanity remained in my heart, perhaps that is it. Saturn is the ruler of melancholy, and perhaps what I am experiencing now is a concealing of the crazy moon in my heart. Thinking is futile. Even more so thoughts that are realized because they are observed by the moon. This is the point where ordinary logic ceases to function, and the only thing to do is to create new logic.

  Once this is seen, resistance is pointless. We are what we are. Existence, as we know it, is over.

  The filthy words Leo spat at Orion appear to have been carried by the wind and reached their destination, however faintly. I record them here, cleaned up just a bit.

  “You just hang on there a minute, I’m coming to show you what’s what.”

  Now I know the reason why I am able to see Orion turn. I think it cannot be understood, actually, but if you look, you can see it. That self that is there within my body, transmitted in an unbroken chain from ancient times down through the ages in my cells, just rips right through thought and discovers a new niche, and then, of its own accord, starts to recognize it. I choose myself, and I know that I do so. At least in that sense, it is I that has to choose something.

  I can see Orion as he slowly shakes his rough club at Leo.

  My body leaves my head behind.

  “Leo!” I cry out, and I start to run across the endless plain. Her fine, small body is starting to stir, somewhere way out there. Whether she is looking this way or that way, it is too dark for me to tell yet.

  “Wait for me!”

  I’m on my way there to you.

  Goku Mura thought the old lady probably wouldn’t have fallen for it if the scammer hadn’t had the bright idea to use the term “Easter egg.” Emmy Eto, as she was known to her neighbors in the retirement community, was one of the last of the generation who had actually used the antiquated term. She was in her mid-nineties, which also made her old enough to remember Japan as it had existed physically, before quakes and tidal waves had reduced it to fragments that would have been uninhabitable even without the radiation. He didn’t want to think it made her more gullible.

  He had no idea why Doré Konstantin had sent the case to him. For one thing, he hadn’t laid eyes on her in several calendar-months—more than two, fewer than six? Seven, for sure—which Konstantin said was a lot longer in AR time. Dog years, she called it. Although he had seen her in AR during that time, but only just barely—a flicker in the corner of his eye, too fast or too far away, but recognizable as Konstantin if only by the empty spot she left behind. Hello too busy talk later, he supposed, and marveled at how she managed to do it in Augmented Reality as well as Artificial Reality. The deregulation of Augmented Reality in the US had been a legal shit storm, leading to what Goku thought was the single most awe-inspiring piece of legislation of the last century: legal reality. He’d been dying to talk to Konstantin about it, but he’d been too busy even to send her a smart-ass remark.

  Maybe that was why she’d sent him the Emmy Eto case, so he’d have to get in touch just to ask wtf. He read through it to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, but it seemed to be nothing more than what Konstantin called straight-up bunco—despicable but hardly a job for I3. The local law machinery could run it on autopilot: the prosecutor would claim two counts of special circumstances, saying Eto had been targeted not only because she was elderly and more vulnerable but also because she was Japanese. That made it a hate crime and therefore under federal jurisdiction. The prospect of facing a federal judge was usually enough to make offenders and their (usually) court-appointed lawyers amenable to a plea bargain, which was heavy on plea without much bargain. The DA simply removed the special circumstances charge. Relieved felons went off to serve sentences barely lighter than what they could have expected after a jury trial, thinking they’d been given a break, while overworked prosecutors were even more relieved to have saved themselves the trouble of working up special-circumstances briefs that were all too likely to be shit-canned by equally overworked federal judges with no room on their twenty-four-hour dockets.

  The only thing slightly out of the ordinary about it was how the scammer was refusing to sit up and beg like someone who had seen the error of her ways, even just for the time it took a judge to gauge the sincerity of her remorse and pass sentence accordingly. She was a piece of work named Pretty Howitzer, not just legally but from birth. With parents like that, Goku Mura thought, she’d never stood a chance. Her record backed that up—a long list of unremarkable misdemeanors and felonies, suspended sentences, sentences commuted to time served, sentences reduced because there just wasn’t room in the correctional facility, along with a number of dismissals and DTPs. A Decline To Prosecute usually meant lack of evidence or witnesses or both, though one was also marked TFB, which, Goku discovered after a little digging, stood for Too Fucking Boring.

  Too funny to ignore, he thought and phoned Konstantin.

  He got one of her detectives instead, the one with the muttonchops. It took him a minute to remember her name: Celestine.

  “Jurisdictional nightmare,” Celestine told him cheerfully. He’d never been a fan of facial hair on women or men, but something about her smile always gave him a lift.

  “International?” He shrugged. “You guys handle international all the time.”

  “In AR, sure. But this is also AR+.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It’s both Artificial Reality and Augmented Reality, with offline interludes, all crossing international borders. Our DA took one look and decided it was someone else’s headache. I gotta say, though, I didn’t think you’d be the lucky winner.”

  “I didn’t know Konstantin was sending things out for the district attorney’s office these days.”

  Celestine’s cheerful smile faded. “Uh, say again?”

  “I got the case from Konstantin, not the DA.”

  Now her face lost all expression. “Hang on.” She started paging through something on her desk just below camera range. It was almost half a clock-minute before she looked up again. “The DA’s office says it’s on record as exported to I3 twenty minutes ago. They’re also saying this must be a world record for turnaround.”

  “I guess
so,” Goku said, “because it got to my inbox twelve hours ago. You guys using neutrino mail?”

  Celestine shifted uncomfortably. “Well, someone’s clock is off, maybe on this end. Somebody screwed up with the time zone or something.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Goku said, “but as Konstantin always says, stranger things have happened.” The detective all but flinched at the mention of her name. He started to get a bad feeling. “Could be her joking around.”

  “It’s not Konstantin,” Celestine insisted stonily. “And if it’s a joke—hell, I can’t think of anyone that tasteless even in the DA’s office.”

  “Something happened.” Goku kept his voice even as a small, dense knot of dread formed in the pit of his stomach. Civil service: bureaucracy relieved by sudden incidents of homicide. Konstantin had laughed at that one till she cried.

  “She got shot.”

  Shot. Shit. Shooting the shit, she got shot. He forced the thought away. “How?”

  “Sniper. Right in the eye.”

  “Around the turn of the twenty-first century,” Lieutenant Bruce Ogada said as he and Goku sat in the empty waiting room, “someone had the bright idea to take a laser pointer and aim it at the night sky.” His dry, matter-of-fact tone reminded Goku of the last international economics report he had endured, minus the ambiguity. Ogada was dressed in a standard suit and tie. His one concession to his own comfort had been to remove his jacket and lay it over the arm of his chair; he hadn’t even loosened his tie, and his white shirt seemed as crisp and clean as if he had put it on only minutes earlier, fresh from the store. Fresh from the showroom, as Konstantin would have said had she been there, Goku thought, wishing she were with an intensity that under other circumstances he might have tried to tell himself was surprising.

  He made himself sit up straighter in the peculiar chair. It was a weird piece of furniture, too large for one person and not big enough for two, making it impossible to rest both elbows at the same time without them being absurdly akimbo. The arms were thin, squared-off tubes of metal too uncomfortable to lean on anyway. It was a style of chair Goku had never seen anywhere except in waiting rooms, usually the kind that people didn’t want to be in—assuming there was any other kind. He was only in this one because he’d been turned away by the smiling gorgon at the entrance to Intensive Care. One visitor at a time, and even if her lieutenant hadn’t been visiting at the moment, his name wasn’t on the approved list. He’d have to see Lt. Ogada about that, if he cared to wait. He had, barely pausing to get a cap of the gorgon. The projection was completely opaque even as close as twelve inches, and its features had an authentic quality that suggested there was a real, possibly unwitting, model.

  “A thin red beam of light going straight up into the dark, all tight and narrow and focused, must have been fascinating,” Ogada was saying. “ ‘Look at me, I’ve got a lightsaber a hundred miles tall.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely folded. “One night during one of these do-it-yourself light shows—and I’m just guessing now but that’s how things like this usually happen—somebody noticed a plane flying in the vicinity and thought, what the hell. That’s what you do with a laser pointer—you point.”

  Goku nodded, although Ogada wasn’t looking at him.

  “When the beam hit the cockpit, it blinded the pilot. Temporarily, of course, although there were a few cases of burned retinas.” He looked over at Goku, eyebrows raised, a man about to reveal a critical detail. “Didn’t show up till a few days later. Pilot’d get a strange feeling in the eye, have a doctor check it out, and there it was.” He gave a short, soundless laugh. “A little round spot. Like a cigarette burn. Aiming a laser pointer at aircraft became a serious crime. Committed by morons, since it was easy to trace a laser beam back to its source.”

  He let out a breath and sat back in his chair; it was similar to Goku’s but smaller, with padding on the arms. “The statute’s still on the books because, believe it or not, every so often, some idiot gets the brilliant idea to go outside and wave a laser pointer around. The aviator lenses most cockpit crews wear inflight usually protect their eyes so they don’t get burned, but sometimes, if a beam hits just right—excuse me, just wrong—it can actually fuck up the lens in a way that affects the pilot, or whoever. They get dizzy, disoriented, even have seizures.” His gaze had drifted away; now he looked at Goku again. “I don’t suppose any of this is news to you.”

  Goku shrugged. “I’m not familiar with every country’s aviation laws.”

  “You probably never leave home without your state-of-the-art safety goggles, just in case lenses aren’t enough. Or is that too low-tech for Interpol 3?”

  Goku’s half smile was wry. “We have a small collection of old hardware, kind of an in-house museum—CB radios, break-glass fire alarms. Black lights. Modems. There’s even a Zippo lighter with a military insignia. I think it’s the US Marines Corps but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just the army.”

  Ogada’s face was expressionless, and Goku suddenly felt ashamed of his feeble attempt at humor. He was formulating an apology when Ogada spoke again.

  “I know I3’s been trying to recruit her.” His face still gave no hint of emotion. “And before you ask, no, she didn’t say anything about it. She never mentioned you at all—I mean, not so much as a vague reference. As if she weren’t even aware of your existence. Which was how I knew. She didn’t want to give me an opening to ask any questions she didn’t want to answer. I know how she thinks.”

  “She always said no.”

  Now Ogada’s eyebrows went up again. “Did you ask her if she was thinking about it?”

  Goku hesitated, unsure of what Ogada was getting at. “I had asked her to think about it.”

  “But did you ask her if she was thinking about it?”

  “Well …” Goku shook his head slightly. “She didn’t say she wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah. That’s what she didn’t want to tell me, that she was thinking about it. She didn’t tell you that either. She just said no every time you tried to recruit her.” Ogada gave a short laugh. “I keep forgetting you’re not from around here.”

  Goku smiled a little. “I was thinking the same thing about you,” he said, “until I remembered where I was.” Pause. “Look, I didn’t know anything about what happened till one of her detectives told me, the one with the—” he made a widening gesture on either side of his face with both hands.

  “Celestine,” Ogada said.

  “Right. And the only reason I called was to ask about a case. I thought I’d got one of hers by mistake.”

  Ogada looked at him sharply. “Which one?” It sounded more like a demand than a question.

  Goku gave him the gist.

  “Oh, that one.” The lieutenant shook his head. “Jurisdictional nightmare. We voted it off the island. Something my father used to say,” he added in response to Goku’s puzzled look. “Case too small for you guys? Well, don’t worry—the minute Pretty Howitzer finds out I3’s interested, she’ll probably lie down and plead like she should’ve done in the first place.”

  Goku decided against mentioning the contradictory information as to how it had come to him, at least for the moment. “Right now, I don’t give a shit one way or the other. I came to see how Konstantin’s doing.”

  “No change from yesterday or the day before or any other day in the month since it happened,” Ogada said wearily. “I stop in two, three times a week, sit next to her, tell her I’m eating lunch, and suggest she lose some weight.”

  “Why would you do that?” Goku asked, drawing back slightly.

  “I figure that’ll get a rise out of her if nothing else will. So far—” He got up and put on his jacket. “No joy. We’ll get your name on the list, maybe you’ll have better luck. But not right now. You might as well come back to the precinct and question What’s-Her-Name Howitzer, she’s still in Holding. You guys got this case a lot faster than usual.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Goku sai
d.

  Pretty Howitzer was a type that Goku privately classified as cute. He couldn’t decide how much Japanese there was in her lineage—more than a fourth, possibly more than a third, but certainly not more than half. The jailhouse lenses dulled her eyes a bit, but he could still see they were closer to gold than brown, and there was a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her turned-up nose. She was also very petite, more so than he had realized from her mug shots.

  But the most striking thing about her at the moment was her relentless nail biting, which did nothing to undercut her blasé attitude. Someone had once told him that for some people, nail biting had nothing to do with anxiety—it was merely a neurological glitch, possibly a half-baked form of OCD or even Tourette’s. Pretty Howitzer made it look like self-indulgence; the longer she chewed on herself, the more relaxed she seemed, awkward as it was with the handcuffs.

  Goku found it hard to watch, and there was nothing else in the small interrogation room to draw the eye. The observation window was camouflaged as bare wall, so there wasn’t even a mirror. Anyone with the slightest tendency to claustrophobia would have a rough time in this room. He remembered Konstantin’s partner, Taliaferro, who worked out of an office on the roof. Too long in here, Goku thought, and he might have to join him. Assuming Taliaferro was still getting away with it now that Konstantin was benched.

  “So you’re the big bad I3 agent,” Pretty Howitzer said, removing her left index finger from her mouth briefly. “Thought you’d be taller. Or maybe it’s this room.” She dipped her head like she was afraid something would fall on it and looked from side to side. “Is it me or is this a goddamn shoebox?”

  “It’s you,” Goku lied, mildly surprised at how confident he sounded. “Shit doesn’t get a whole lot deeper than this—well, not while you’re alive anyway. So if you feel like the walls are closing in, it’s because they are.”