Most of the people on the dance floor were Floating. Yuki slid between bodies, shouldering some of them aside. They moved for her unprotesting, glad of the extra stimulation. By brushing past, she had probably brought several dozen of them to orgasm. Call it the ripple effect, she thought wryly, or another example of the domino theory at work. Perhaps somewhere, someone was writing a scholarly treatise comparing the ripple effect with the domino theory as functions of current nostalgia for the drugs of a bygone era. *Yes, they called it `Xtacy' in those days (click here to see Ex-tasy and Ecstasy), and while we may consider that another example of late twentieth-century hyperbole, perhaps we should also remember that if we had to live in the late twentieth century, we'd call Floating `ecstasy,' too.*
Ash would have said she was a real comedienne, most likely right before having another dose. She wasn't much for it herself; the hypersensitivity that most users found so sensual and arousing reminded her too much of artificial reality, with all of the artificial of a hotsuit, but without any reality.
*What do you mean,* artificial *reality?* Tom used to say that when anyone mentioned AR. *If it's reality, how can it be artificial?* But that was Tom. Questions and answers, not necessarily in that order, and not necessarily matching.
*Where are you, Tom?*
*That depends, Yuki. Do you believe in the hereafter?*
*Are you dead or alive?*
*How should I know?*
*If you don't know, Tom, how can I?*
*Do you believe in the hereafter?*
*What if I say I don't know?*
*Then how can you know what you're here after?*
It should have been a groaner, but in the terse back-and-forth of e-messaging, there had been no groans and no laughter, only the sound of her own voice alternating with a stranger's. Somehow, after a lifetime of friendship, she had never managed to put a sample of his voice on her service, so his e-mail came in an impostor's voice, a neutral contralto that refused to commit itself to male or female. It made everything seem even more bizarre.
Not that Tom had ever been so terribly normal. He didn't really know what normal was.
*And you do?* she could hear Tom asking, but in the impostor voice of her message service, not his own.
*Yes, I do. You don't have to* be *normal to know it when you see it.*
She emerged on the other side of the dance floor, facing the corral of tables where Ash had told her she would find Joy Flower sitting in her regular spot, scanning the crowd for likely prospects. To be chosen as one of Joy's Boyz was prestigious for the duration, if ultimately futile and empty. Joy Flower never kept a Boy forever, no matter how fond she might have become of him. Ex-Boyz who resurfaced in the general population were conspicuous by their ex-ness and also their uniform refusal to discuss the details of their tenure among the chosen, which made it all but impossible to find out what had happened to the ex-Boyz who never reappeared.
There were rumors of the usual kinky sex scenes, as well as the unusual. Joy Flower was sexually insatiable due to an experimental brain implant gone wrong; no, gone *right.* No, she was really just a celibate procurer for a cabal of rich and powerful perverts and her Boyz were the ones with the implants, to keep them from talking to tabloids later about their experiences. There were other things as well, just hinted at in almost inaudible whispers, about the Boyz who had vanished. They were dead in hideous ways; they were worse than dead, shut away in secret clinics and hospitals, brain dead but maintained on life support as their bodies were parted out to those rich and powerful invalids who might need a heart, a liver, a pair of lungs. No, they were installed in the world's fanciest barn, pumped full of nutrients, massaged daily for a month, and then butchered and roasted for the palates of a secret group of rich and powerful cannibals.
Rumors seemed to be clouding her vision as well as her thoughts. She realized she had been staring at a woman sitting at one of the back row tables farthest from the dance floor. The woman was gazing levelly back at her. She had thick, blue-black hair fixed in an old-fashioned page boy. Behind her right ear, she wore a rose that cycled from white to pink to shades of red that deepened progressively until it finally turned black; then it reversed the cycle, black becoming deepest arterial red and then lightening, to pink and back to white. Her clothing, a stylistic variation on a suit, also old-fashioned, did not change colors, though the slightest move sent moire patterns shimmering through the material.
Yuki felt nervous laughter threaten. People like this--whatever they were, rich, powerful, or just stone lucky--always seemed to be either deliberately making themselves look ugly or just ridiculously obvious. Of course, it could have been some wannabe hoping to get mistaken for the genuine article, or a professional facsimile covering an appearance while the real person relaxed somewhere else, spared the ordeal of Being Seen without having to remain un-Seen.
Either way, the woman would expect to be treated as if she were Joy Flower, member of Celebrity Aristocracy. Yuki was annoyed. She might persuade Joy Flower to listen to her, or she might be spinning her wheels with an unsanctioned impersonator, one that the real Joy Flower could later claim to have had no knowledge of.
Quickly, Yuki scanned the rest of the people sitting at the tables. There were eight or nine of them, and none of them looked anywhere near as promising as the shifting-rose lady. Bracing herself, she skirted around the outside of the seating area until she stood directly in front of her.
The woman watched with a professional expression of disinterest, the look of someone used to rebuffing the overtures of common slobs. Yuki hesitated. What was she going to say, just come right out and ask her what the hell she had done with Tom Iguchi? *Come clean now, Ms. Flower, did you screw him, eat him, or kill him?* Joy Flower would surely become so unnerved by so direct an approach that she would collapse under Yuki's scrutiny and confess to having done all three, though not quite in that order.
*And not quite in this reality, either,* Yuki thought ruefully.
*Everyone has always moved in many worlds at once, Yukiko. But only the Japanese have always been aware of that.* Grandma Naoka; she had always been a strange mix of grande dame and old Japan. If that *was* a mix.
Naoka would have been able to get this woman to tell her almost anything she wanted to know without actually having to ask her any questions. All right, maybe not *anything,* exactly. It was easy to exaggerate her grandmother's abilities now that she had progressed to the Afterlife.
*Try `dead.' Or use a softer term: `passed away,' `gone.' Or the currently popular `recycled.' As if there really was an Afterlife of a more metaphysical nature than the harnessing of knowledge and ability no longer in use by a living person.*
Her mother's mother would have made amused noises at her. *What you have to realize, Yukiko, is that it is not a matter of whether there is such a thing as an Afterlife, but whether one has the capacity to believe there is.*
Which had nothing to do with this . . . did it? Yuki took a slow breath, uncertain whether to stay and try to talk to the woman or leave quickly. As if sensing her indecision, the woman smiled suddenly and pointed at the empty chair to her right. Yuki sat down before she could think better of it.
An intense feeling of awkwardness bloomed inside of her. She must look like a bumpkin, with her too-short, bristly, black hair and her vending-machine overalls and jacket, a bumpkin having her first stumble around the big city. She stared at the tabletop, wishing she had thought things out instead of charging off into the night as if she knew what she was doing.
The woman leaned forward; behind her ear, the rose's color slid from pink to red. "I know what you want."
Yuki looked up from under her bows without lifting her head. "You do?"
"Of course. A thousand others have come to me for the same reason. Always that same look to all of you. Why wouldn't I know?" Joy Flower put her very white hand on the table and lifted her index finger, pointing it at Yuki. Surprisingly, her nails were unpainted. "But you, I like. You're true Japanese."
Now Yuki frowned at her, bewildered.
"Aren't you."
Yuki swallowed uneasily. "Well, I--"
"So. You're hired." The woman pushed back her chair and stood up.
"Hired," Yuki said, mystified, also standing up.
"Yes, hired. Come on." The woman got up from the table and was at once surrounded by tall thugs, male and female. They all looked Oriental but Yuki could see that it was strictly cosmetic. She marveled. Grandma Naoka had told her about a time in the past when it had been the vogue among Japanese to have surgery to widen the eyes, to make them *less* Oriental. *My parents had the operation,* Naoka had said, looking distantly unhappy. *I thought that was stupid. What did they want, to be less Japanese? But I was very young, and the very young seldom comprehend their own world.*
"Where are we going?" Yuki said as the woman and her entourage began herding her toward the exit.
"Well, to work of course," the woman said. The bodyguards/thugs/escorts were all at least six inches taller than Yuki and the woman; Yuki began to feel slightly claustrophobic.
"What kind of work?" she asked the woman, half-hoping that she would find the question stupid enough to fire her as quickly as she had hired her.
"You're my new assistant," Joy Flower said, walking ahead of her briskly.
"What happened to the old one?" Yuki asked, hurrying to keep up.
Joy Flower didn't bother to turn around. "Who says there was one?" She reached the exit and pushed through it into a dank hallway lit just brightly enough to show the mold growing in the cracked cement walls and floor. "Vlad, get the car."
#
The figures on the screen made a ridiculous sum. "Over how many years?" Yuki asked, wondering uneasily if she were being conned.
Joy Flower almost smiled. "Very funny. But what you need to know here is that I have a very poor sense of humor, and it is not a good idea to make many jokes with me. I'm just that way. Some people are." She swiveled the screen back around to face her where she was sitting on the other side of the desk. Yuki decided that someone had an obsession with the past; the whole office was appointed like a nostalgia exhibit. All the wood was highly polished, dark with gold overtones. The chairs were enormous ersatz-leather monsters with backs that rose up high and wide enough to conceal even the largest person. The brass-colored buttons dimpling the upholstery were supposed to suggest cushioning, but Yuki's own chair was as hard and unyielding as a board. Not that there was much danger of her getting too comfortable here; this wasn't a place where anyone went to feel comfortable. Even Joy Flower held herself a little stiffly, as if it weren't really her office, just a place she made use of from time to time.
Yuki cleared her throat. "When do I start?"
"Half an hour ago," the woman said absently, studying the screen.
Yuki nodded to herself. "And I guess you want me to live in?"
"I knew you were smart." Joy Flower's preoccupied tone was on the verge of acquiring an edge. *On the edge of an edge,* Yuki thought; a very uncomfortable place to be.
"And my stuff, back at my apartment--"
Joy Flower gave her a sideways look. "Already taken care of for you."
Yuki shifted slightly in the chair and the ersatz leather gave an authentic creak.
Joy Flower rested one arm on top of the monitor. "You know that old saying about how you should ask questions because how else are you going to learn? I personally don't have time to waste with anyone who hasn't learned already. This means that I use the time I would have burned answering questions to do something more important. You know what I mean?"
Yuki started to answer, but the woman turned away from her in such a final way that a spoken dismissal would have been pointless.
Outside in the heavily carpeted, sound-deadened hallway, one of the thugs was waiting for her, a beefy man in a black-red turtleneck sweater and matching trousers with extra pockets on the thighs that suggested vague associations with the military. Professional bodyguard pants, designed to project the image of the matter-of-factly lethal mercenary. He looked down at her through surgically altered eyes. His face had a certain flatness that she could tell was natural, so the eyes didn't look so out of place. The bright blue-violet pupils, the straight blond hair spilling over his shoulders and down his back--those looked out of place.
"How about you?" Yuki said without preamble. The walls seemed to swallow each word; she had the sensation of being trapped in a cotton ball. "Do you answer questions?"
"If I must." He looked down at her as from a great height. "I'm supposed to take you to your quarters. Your things have either arrived, or will arrive soon."
"Oh. Good." The look on that face, she realized, was not disdain but the complete absence of any expression. He turned away abruptly and began walking up the hall. *My Master says for you to walk* this *way. Well, I'll try, Igor, but it's going to take practice.* She followed at a distance, wondering if she had lost her mind as well as her friend.
No, Tom was more than a friend to her. But not vice versa. Grandma Naoka would have contemplated this with some concern. *Old Japan was never kind to those who loved--those usually being women. But then, the country itself was not kind to anyone. Life was not a right but a privilege. Honor meant more than love.*
Yuki had often wanted to ask her grandmother if honor had really just been easier to come by than love, but the question felt too impertinent even for Naoka's favorite granddaughter to get away with.
She had expected the guy to lead her through a long and twisting maze of hallways to something like a techno-Buddhist monk's cell. Instead, they went down one flight of stairs at the end of the hall and halfway down another sound-quiet corridor to a room she estimated was directly under the office she had just left.
He caught her looking up at the ceiling and said, "Yes, it is."
She turned to him, stubbornly maintaining a casual air. "Right under her office?"
"Exactly underneath."
*The better to walk all over you, my dear.*
"Put your hand on the plate," he told her, gesturing at a white plastic square stuck onto the door at slightly above her eye-level.
She obeyed. There was a moment of mild heat and the sensation of the plastic crawling or writhing under her touch. She heard a soft chime and the door clicked, opening about an inch.
"The lock is keyed to you, now. Only you, and her." Was that supposed to be reassuring? Yuki wondered. He pushed the door open and turned on the light. Instead of a cell, there was a generously large apartment that seemed to have been furnished by a random choice generator. The couch was a puffy white thing with pillows that looked as if they would bounce if thrown on the shiny, hardwood floor. The two chairs matched neither the couch nor each other--one was another leather-and-wood monstrosity like the ones in Joy Flower's office. The other was smaller and lower, upholstered in a nubbly fabric in a cabbage rose print. The loveseat facing the chairs was a very good copy of an old-style church pew. None of the stuff was hers. Yuki frowned and turned to the guy.
"Are you going to show me around?"
The guy made a short, breathy noise that might have been a laugh. "It's your place. You live here. Look around all you want."
"But--"
"The only thing you have to remember," he said, raising his voice to talk over her, "is not to sleep naked."
Yuki shut up, startled. He nodded at her once and walked out, closing the door behind him. "Naked," she said after a moment, and then turned to look at the hilariously mismatched living room furniture. So hilarious she forgot to laugh.
There were two doorways off the living room, one in front of her and one to her left. The one in front took her to the dine-in kitchen, where she found her small, blocky wooden table from her one-roomer had been installed with its single chair. If the sight was supposed to be reassuring, it had failed. In the setting of the shiny black cabinets and the mirrored floor, the table and chair looked out of place, alien and lonely.
*Like me.* A mirrored floor. How crazy could you get. She wasn't sure she could ever make herself sit down and see herself reflected from below. It was almost too bad the decorator hadn't gotten *really* excessive and mirrored the ceiling, too. Then the room would have been completely unbearable.
"After all," she muttered, "why do things by halves?"
No windows, just simulated scenery and artificial light from one rectangular simulation over the sink and another on the far adjoining wall. At the moment, it was night, so the soft light spilling in over the sink was supposed to be moonlight. Or maybe a streetlight. She'd have to check later to see if the environment sim were urban or rural. She hated the rural sims, couldn't tolerate them. Some things were too fake.
*Like your relationship with Tom?* whispered an acid little voice in her mind.
*Stop it!* she told herself. She whirled away from the kitchen and marched through the living room to the bedroom. *Just because a relationship isn't on my terms doesn't mean it isn't a relationship.*
In her heart, she knew that *wasn't* the problem at all, but she wasn't listening to that part of her heart today. Her futon had been delivered to the bedroom and set up on a platform with cabinets at the head; a spare set of neatly folded sheets had been placed on top of a white chest of drawers. To the right of that was the bathroom, which had a separate chamber for the toilet. All very proper and livable.
Against the wall opposite the bathroom doorway was the work station, the over-large screen sitting like an icon of a fat spider within a nest of shelves bearing storage disks. Except spiders didn't have nests, did they? No. They had *webs.* Anyone knew *that*. How stupid was she?
"Don't sleep naked," she murmured, going over to the work station. Something else she would have to find out about, along with the fate of her unnamed predecessor, and Tom's current address. As soon as she touched one of the dark shelves, the screen lit up. Not surprised, Yuki watched with mild interest as a fractal flower bloomed in the center and kept blooming, seeming to turn itself inside out. Yuki's mouth twitched with bored amusement; nostalgia graphics didn't do much for her, though she had to concede the 3-D effect was respectable.
The cabinets at the head of her futon caught her eye again. That was probably where they had put whatever she was supposed to sleep in so she wouldn't be naked. Maybe special uniform pajamas that could double as street clothes on short notice, in case of any midnight fire drills. She went over to take a look.
Kneeling in the center of the futon, she pulled the cabinet doors open. At first she thought she was looking at an elaborate S and M harness and bridle set with extra restraints and she felt her heart leap with fear as a million things went through her mind at once, about Joy Flower, her bodyguards, about some of Joy's Boyz being Girlz. Then she saw what was really there and wasn't any happier.
Carefully, she lifted the headmounted monitor out of the cabinet and held it up. The wires trailing from it were still connected to the lightweight, translucent hotsuit, folded into a square that made her think of wilderness weekends in nature preserves. She had done a few of those years ago, not so much because she had been such a nature-lover but because the people who ran the weekends were so . . . *intent* on them. They had exuded a sense of purpose more strongly than anyone else she had ever known, and she liked that--people who knew what they were alive for. Most of them had subsequently been arrested in an eco-terrorist conspiracy dragnet, but strangely enough, Yuki had never been able to find out what had happened to any of them, whether they had been convicted or released or tried at all, or even if any of them had actually had any eco-terrorist connections.
She came back to herself still holding the headmount. She put it down and moved to spread the 'suit out on the futon. It was her size, all right--but was *this* what the thug had meant by *don't sleep naked?* Sleep in a *hotsuit?* She couldn't think of anyone she knew personally who did such a thing.
She shook her head. What the hell was she doing--what did she *think* she was doing? Letting some party boys' den mother order her around on a job she hadn't even asked for. It was ridiculous. How was she supposed to find out what had happened to Tom if she were busy fetching and carrying for some jumped-up lady pimp? Yuki smeared a tired hand over her face.
*Oh, come now--would this really be any more bizarre than sleeping under a canvas shelter--in a* sack *under a canvas shelter--with four other people in the middle of a government forest preserve? Back in the* good old *days?*
But it still didn't make any sense, she thought, frowning at the suit. There was no point. It wasn't like you could use this stuff if you were asleep.
*So maybe the point is for* it *to use* you.
*God,* she thought. Now *there* was some glorious hot-brain reasoning. So what if it also happened to be the typical plot of innumerable slay-rides ground out for game modules from movies, for movies from game modules, in a ceaseless and circular blood-orgy of redundant, derivative, copycat murder. Simulated, of course.
She felt heavy with fatigue. How was any of this supposed to lead her to Tom? She should have walked away from Joy Flower and her band of thugs; this was just some blind alley and she would probably wake up tomorrow morning in a *real* alley, after a long, horrible night she couldn't remember. If she were lucky.
Was that where Tom was now?
She lay down on her stomach, rested her chin on her fists and gazed at her distorted reflection in the shiny black headmount shell. From this angle, she looked sly, knowing, even cynical. *Sure,* she thought, *that's me--good old cynical Yuki Harame.*
Perhaps she *was* getting cynical. Too many years of watching Tom fade in and out of her life, unabashedly leaning on her for emotional support but unable to reciprocate. Just when she was about to give in and fall in love with him, he would be gone, usually without saying good-bye in person. She would tell herself that since she hadn't fallen in love with him, his abrupt departure hadn't, wouldn't, couldn't *possibly* hurt her. And after some interval during which she wasn't the *least bit* hurt, life would start moving her forward again and her attention would move along as well and pretty soon she would be contemplating the possibility of something completely different, something or even someone with the potential to become a passion that would displace Tom Iguchi and his gypsy feet.
Somehow that was always the cue for Tom to come back into her life.
He seemed to have an instinct. He seemed to understand exactly how long it would take her to get him out of her system so that she might build up a resistance, possibly even an immunity to him. Before anything of the sort could happen, he would descend on her, sweep his problems around her like an enveloping blanket and the next thing she knew, he was sleeping on her couch, eating her food, and radiating angst. *At least he isn't using you as a sex toy,* she would tell herself, and another part of her mind would answer, *Of course not--even that requires* some *giving.*
She knew why he would always come to her--they were both full Japanese. If, indeed, it was possible to still be Japanese at all when the country of your forebears had been all but obliterated. Grandma Naoka had been among the last to visit the islands before the earthquakes had shaken them all to bits too small or too ravaged to continue to support even one small city. Yuki couldn't imagine the Tokyo her grandmother had told her stories of, a Tokyo so overcrowded that transit trains needed special employees to push and shove and pack the masses of people inside each car.
But the most interesting stories were about what Naoka had called the water trade. It was a euphemism for something that seemed to be close to prostitution, that perhaps even was prostitution at times, but was, more often, just not quite.
*In those days, Yukiko, many people did not know how to enjoy themselves after a day of hard work. We showed them how. We helped them have a good time; they helped us make a living.* We *were all women, even those of us who were men. And of course, the ones who came to us, without exception* they *were* all *men.*
Yuki remembered thinking that she wouldn't have lasted long in that Japan. She would have much preferred being a Samurai. And then again, maybe she would not have done very well in any Japan. Perhaps it was just as well that she was what Grandma Naoka had called a *sansei,* a Japanese who had been born and raised outside of Japan.
And Tom--well, who knew about Tom? Most of the time, he seemed to her to be too . . . *disorganized* for the real Japan. She could not picture him as a salaryman, not the way Naoka had described the eager young men in their business suits, clustered around their bosses in the clubs, drinking gamely and then stumbling home to apartments the size of a postage stamp. As for old Japan, she thought it was more likely that Tom would be on the receiving end of a Samurai sword rather than the handle. No, the only role for Tom was the one he already had--daft young man who happened to be of Japanese descent.
And where did that leave her? Friend of daft young man who happened to be of Japanese descent. Now and always, friend of daft, etc. A gullible soft-touch of a friend of daft, etc. And for what? The chance to approach strange and unsavory people in bars. There were plenty of others out there dying to do the same, with less justification.
She surprised herself by getting up, stripping off her clothes and pulling on the hotsuit. What the hell, she thought, she might learn something.
The 'suit was one of the pricier models, soft, weightless, scented even. Was this one of the newest 'suits, with triple-density coverage, she wondered, or possibly an advance working model of the famed Climax Envelope? If the C.E. was real at all. It was supposed to develop segments that mirrored the wearer's own nerves, making the sensations that much more customized and subsequently that much more authentic. Whatever *that* meant. How authentic did it get before there was no point in putting on a 'suit at all?
Maybe she should have asked Tom that question.
The sensation of the suit adjusting to the contours of her body was both comforting and disturbing, like being caressed by a stranger who seemed to know you better than anyone else. She left the genital area of the suit inactive. While her sex life left a lot to be desired lately, she wasn't in the mood for a virtual encounter in a strange 'suit. Even if the 'suit did look as if no one had ever used it.
She hesitated with the headmount, looking into it carefully, as if she might find something that she had never seen before. But it was only a very ordinary headmount with all the usual technology--no Aladdin's lamp, no magic carpet, no door into summer.
Yuki ran a hand through her thick, short hair. Two days ago, she had cut it off herself, thinking it would just be easier, one less thing to fuss with. Ash had told her it made her look like a sex change of indeterminate direction, asexual and uncaring. Yuki figured that would probably be easier, too. Ash had disagreed.
"Being attractive, beautiful, sexy--all that is *always* useful. It helps. It makes people care more about you," he had argued, tapping the remote in the arm of his couch. The mural-size screen obediently delivered the interior of Waxx 24, the online club he'd never been able to get into. He could get into the virtual version available on NETsuke, but anyone could. The actual club was much tougher; Ash had never been able to get past even the first checkpoint, and they wouldn't even give him a hint. Privately, Yuki thought he probably looked too eager. "There's *no* excuse not to be beautiful any more, it's so easy."
"If it's that easy, how do you know if you're really beautiful?" she had asked.
Ash had rolled his designer eyes. Cream pupils with delicate aqua filigree. "*Everybody* knows if they're really beautiful or not."
"And what if I tell you that this--" she had brushed her bad haircut with both hands "--makes me beautiful? All right, then, it makes me *feel* beautiful," she added quickly.
"I say you're lying. You're a dumpy little Nisei, Yuke. You got that classic daikon radish body that all you full Japanese females are cursed with. Your parents should have tried to give you the benefit of custom genes."
"That may be true, Ash, but it's shoddy to say so."
Her reproach hadn't bothered him in the least. "Don't try to fool me, I know you weren't raised ethnic. Hardly anyone is any more. After all, what would be the point?"
"Maybe not in *this* country. I don't think they see it that way in Japan."
"They don't see much in Japan, period. What few of them are left. The news says there may be only about three dozen people left where Tokyo used to be and less than half that in the crack formerly known as Kobe."
"That doesn't mean they're dead. It just means they left the geographic coordinates that were once the country of Japan. It doesn't mean there *isn't* a Japan. Somewhere."
Ash's haughty pink face had taken on an even haughtier expression. "Don't tell me--you're going on a quest to find the lost motherland."
She had almost told him they didn't call Japan the motherland and decided that she didn't want to have to argue with him any more than she already had. To her relief, he had allowed her to change the subject to Joy Flower and their absent friend Tom. He didn't believe that Tom had become one of Joy's Boyz, but neither had he said it was impossible--
Again, she ran a hand through her chopped-off hair. Maybe she should take a short nap before she did this, except with the suit on, she really didn't feel so sleepy any more. Tired, but not sleepy. She pulled on the headmount; it molded itself to her head, with a sensation like a million tiny slender fingers pushing into her hair, sliding along her scalp. The stimulation was so strong that she lost all awareness of her body for several seconds, unable to discern whether she was lying down, standing up, or still sitting on the bed with her legs folded.
#
Something stung the back of her neck and she slapped at it. There was a lot of long, straight hair between her palm and her neck and she automatically brushed at it, shaking it out in case the insect, or whatever it was, had become trapped. Then she remembered that she no longer had long hair and she felt a wave of confusion mixed with vertigo.
She froze with her hands still in her impossible hair and waited for the dizziness to pass. It seemed as if the floor below her were teetering but she couldn't feel it well enough to brace her feet.
The world settled and she opened her eyes. She was standing in the middle of what looked like a gigantic combination train station and airport. People moved around her, past her, unconcerned that she had just materialized in their midst. A few of them glanced at her but she could see their curiosity was idle, felt in passing and forgotten when they looked away. She turned around slowly, trying to get her bearings.
This was a *big* place, even for an AR traffic center. The windows in the distant walls were a couple of stories tall, possibly three. The light from them was diffuse, filtered, showing only a brightness and nothing else. The ceiling disappeared into soft, indistinct shadows.
"Information?" she asked, turning around and around, looking for anything indicating an entry, an exit, or a directory. It was hard to see over people's heads but even more maddeningly, it was impossible to see any of the crowd clearly at all--faces, hair, clothing, colors, everything streaked past, trailed away, faded out.
The white glove congealed out of the air above the blurry crowd around her. The only thing in focus, it beckoned to her and she took a step toward it.
Abruptly, she was looking at the glove on the hand of a tall, orange-haired teenage boy standing behind a counter. The sudden dislocation sent a cold prickle from her neck down to her legs. The boy saw her shudder.
"Righteous effect, init?" he said, leaning his gloved hand on the smooth, featureless surface between them. "You know there's a special few that comes in just for that effect? Over and over, till it goes away and they have to stop. You work for *her* now, right? You gotta get *to* it."
She put both hands up to stroke her hair on either side of her face, mostly because she wanted to be sure it was still there. Only then did she notice that her hands were covered in the same white gloves. Had that just happened, she wondered, or had they been there all along? She started to ask the boy behind the counter something and then thought better of it. This was just a supply station and he was the distribution interface. D.I.s never knew anything.
"I'm here for my equipment," she told him, hoping she wouldn't have to tell him what it was.
To her enormous relief, a vest with many pockets appeared on the counter in front of her. Another right guess; she had better hurry, she thought, before her luck turned. If there actually *was* such a thing as luck in AR.
She slipped the vest on easily, though the movement itself felt strange. All her movements felt strange, she realized, fuzzy and dreamlike. She thought that had just been a lingering effect of the vertigo, but it still hadn't faded. Troubled, she touched the back of her neck under her hair but couldn't find anything that might have been a bite or a sting. Maybe she could feel it better without the gloves, she thought, and tried to take them off.
"Bad flex," said the kid, "unless you're quitting so soon."
"Oh, of course," she said quickly and started to turn away. She hesitated, and then turned back to him. Maybe he did know *something.* There had to be some information that came with the equipment. "Just between you and me, okay?"
He said nothing.
"What am I doing here?"
"I'm here to give out equipment."
"Information?" she asked hopefully.
He shrugged. "Only stock."
She looked down at the many pockets on her vest and then unzipped the topmost on the right. Perhaps there was an instruction book or a map, she thought.
All she came up with was a small round mirror. She stared at the reflection for some unmeasured time, a long time, maybe, or only a minute; she wasn't sure. A minute often felt like an hour in AR.
The face in the mirror was as knowing as the distorted image she had seen in the headmount out there in her room. She tilted her head slowly to the left and then to the right to make sure she was seeing a true reflection rather than receiving a transmission. She frowned; in the mirror, the face of Tomoyuki Iguchi frowned back at her.
#
She wandered for what felt like hours, looking for a door out of the enormous, indefinite place she was in, whatever it was supposed to be. The walls of the place were deceptively far away. Sometimes she thought she was drawing close to one of the tall windows only to find that the floor had somehow stretched under her feet, or rolled like a treadmill, and she was no closer.
Irritated, she looked around the edges of her vision for the exit icon. Time to pull the plug on this stupid excursion. What the hell--Tom was a big boy. Maybe he was even now living it up in some online resort. Or in hell, whichever he was in the mood for.
*If you're going, then* go. *Or admit you're too curious now* not *to stay. One or the other.* Commit. *Remember that word? Or is it impossible now that you're wearing Tom's face?*
"I should *be* committed," she said aloud. She put a hand out to stop one of the vague people moving past her; it went through the vagueness without touching anything solid. "Great. How am I supposed to get out of here?"
The pocket at the bottom of the vest on the left side beeped. She unzipped it and found a folded map. *Figures,* she thought, glad now that there was no one to see her embarrassment. The front panel of the map showed a simple illustration of a rectangle with a stick figure inside; next to it was a green dot marked *EXIT.* She laughed at herself. Of course; just ask. As Ash would have said, *Some things are just too bone-simple for us real smart people.*
#
The wall encircling the stone courtyard seemed to be infinitely large, with an infinite number of doors leading to various AReas (as the map called them). Yuki knew it was indefinite rather than infinite, but considering that a person could theoretically starve to death before looking at every door--and legend had it that someone had, though legend was also vague on where this had taken place, maybe DC (life was so cheap there)--it might as well have been infinite.
She consulted the map again and found that it had, very helpfully, set itself to a new page.
PREVIOUS ROUTE NEW ROUTE HELP & NEWS
Help and news? Maybe later. She ran a virtual finger across PREVIOUS ROUTE.
*User?* the map wanted to know.
"Tomoyuki Iguchi," she said carefully.
A cartoony yellow arrow appeared with Tom's name on it and, underneath it in smaller letters was the terse command: *See News.*
She ran her thumb up the panel to the word *NEWS.*
Yuki stared. She tried pressing *NEWS* again; the words blinked but did not change, and there was no further explanation. Out of desperation, she pressed her fingertip on *deceased.* There was a brief pause before the words came up underneath.
*1. Post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty; transferred*
*Re-registered active; equipped*
*2. Post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, homicide*
*Unregistered active*
"What does this mean?" she asked the map, tapping the word *transferred.* The map didn't answer. A cherub head suddenly materialized in front of her, floating just a bit higher than eye level.
"Help you?" the head asked cheerfully, wings fluttering. It was blue-eyed and pink-cheeked and looked absolutely thrilled to be there.
"It says `transferred' here. What does *that* mean?"
The cherub head pursed its rosy lips thoughtfully. "Identity transferred online."
"But *what* identity?" Yuki demanded. "His name and appearance, or his online character?"
"One is the same as the other, online," replied the cherub, in a kindly voice.
"But Tomoyuki Iguchi is his *real* name, not his online name."
The head tilted to one side and winked cutely at her. "Online names are real names online."
"I know, but--" She paused and took a breath. "Tomoyuki Iguchi was the offline name of the person who called himself Tomoyuki Iguchi online. But he must also have had an online identity, another one besides Tomoyuki Iguchi. What was it?"
The head tilted to the other side. "There's no cross-referencing between any real and/or online name, and any other real and/or online name."
"Then how do you prevent duplications?"
"Duplications of what?" the head asked her, looking honestly puzzled.
"Appearances. Names. Online identities."
The cherub's eyes twinkled. "There is none."
Yuki hesitated, unsure if she had heard correctly. "No, that can't be right. There *has* to be. There is in real life."
"There is none in *any* life," the cherub announced with obvious joy. "There are always at least minute differences that distinguish one thing from another. They might not be immediately perceptible, but they *are* there."
"Are you trying to tell me that it's impossible for someone *in here* to duplicate someone else's appearance *exactly?* Even if you copied every little detail?"
"I am not trying. I *did* tell you."
Frustrated, she considered yanking on the cherub's wings. "What if I duplicated--exactly--*this* appearance, all the way down to the tiniest detail? What would be the difference between one and the other?"
"Duration," the cherub said promptly.
Yuki's mouth dropped open. "Duration?"
"How long one has been active. Age. How old. Period in time, which is marked very precisely here. Billing, you know."
"Right," Yuki said, more to herself. "God forbid that somebody gets away with a free half-second."
"A lot can happen in half a second," said the cherub, managing to look both wise and cute now.
"Is that so?" Yuki felt herself sighing both inwardly and outwardly; it seemed to take a long time, just as the cherub had said. But then, even Tom had made good use of the power of suggestion. "How do I find out someone's duration?"
"Ask the person."
"And if the person won't tell me? Or lies about it?"
The cherub's face puckered sorrowfully. "Then you won't know. Privacy in an unprivate world is a precious commodity."
"Then how do you know who to bill and how much?" Yuki demanded. "Tell me that."
"I don't know," said the cherub, happy again.
"Why not?"
"I don't know that either."
"You're a big help," Yuki said, disgusted.
"Thank you." The cherub kissed the air between them and sent a small cluster of tiny red hearts at her. They disintegrated around her head in a silent explosion of sparkles as the cherub vanished. Cutesy help files; Yuki wondered whose idea that had been.
She looked down at the map again. What little information there was began and ended in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. Maybe that was too simple-minded, but she would try it anyway. Maybe flashing Tom's face around his last known location would stir something up.
Maybe even raise the dead.
#
POST-APOCALYPTIC NOO YAWK SITTY
ENTRY POINT
Bureau of Tourism
Yuki looked from the sign to the map and back to the sign. Pressing the destination on the map should have delivered her right into post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty; instead she was standing in a high-ceilinged hallway that dead-ended at this sign in front of her, and disappeared into indefinite shadows behind her.
"You coming in?" asked an impatient voice.
"I thought I was already in," Yuki said, frowning at the sign.
"You will be as soon as you complete the entry procedure," the voice said, bored. It might have been female, or male; like the vocalizer on her e-mail service, it was ambiguous.
"Isn't it absurd for someplace that's supposed to be post-Apocalyptic to have a tourist bureau?" she asked.
"It's absurd for someplace that's supposed to be post-Apocalyptic to exist in some medium as technological and structured as Artificial Reality. If it really *were* post-Apocalyptic, there wouldn't *be* any Artificial Reality. You can stand there and talk philosophy and popular culture all day--I was developed by a frustrated philosopher and I've got conversation forever. But it's all billable time, so think it over--how important is it to you to be right?"
"Stop that and let me in," Yuki said, feeling stung without really understanding why. Immediately, she was standing in an office, facing an androgyne dressed in something that suggested a collision between a military uniform and a dance costume from the Middle East. Yuki groaned.
"Are you in pain?" asked the androgyne, bored.
"Ten million years of evolution and technology, and the best anyone can come up with in *artificial reality* where *anything's* possible is a standard office situation."
"Oh, you're in aesthetic pain." The androgyne sounded even more bored.
"I just don't think it's right to charge for online time spent standing in an *office.* You don't have to be in artificial reality to stand in some *office.*"
"Indications would seem to be that you need or-ree-en-*tay*-shun." The androgyne's voice rose and fell in a supremely wearied sing-song. "Or-ree-en-*tay*-shun is best accomplished in very familiar and mundane surroundings that don't distract from the essential information."
"Ten million years of evolution and technology and we haven't figured out a better way to convey essential information," Yuki said in disgust.
"Agreed. I'm taking suggestions for something better. You first." The androgyne waited a beat. "Well, maybe another time. Here's your map, here's your catalog, here's some icons to put in your catalog. You might want to take some time to look that over. Orientation time is billed at a lower rate."
"Now I remember what I always really hated about AR," Yuki said, clumsily trying to hold onto three things she couldn't quite see clearly. "Every other word out of anybody's mouth has something to do with billing rates."
"I didn't realize you were here on a scholarship."
Yuki had started to turn away with her vague bundles; now she turned back, frowning. "Um, exactly how *is* my time being billed?"
"I don't know, that's not orientation," said the androgyne, leaning back in the chair with a rattle of beads. All the beads seemed to be cycling through a series of colors, except none were running the same series at the same rate. Yuki felt her eyes crossing and wondered why she hadn't noticed this before. Or had all that color-changing started just this moment? She thought of Joy Flower.
The androgyne yawned noisily. "Next case?"
"Wait--I mean, is this my account, or is someone else responsible financially?"
"I don't know," the androgyne said again.
Yuki's eyes were starting to hurt. "You don't know who's paying?"
"Don't you know? Somebody is, because you're here. But that's all I know. That's all I *have* to know. Now move over to a privacy area if you're going to look your stuff over, and if you're not, just go."
"Aren't you going to wish me a pleasant session or something?" Yuki asked.
"No," said the androgyne. "Why would I?"
"Whatever happened to customer service?" Yuki said. "Aren't you supposed to make me happy so I'll want to come back?"
"You already want to come back. Everybody wants to come back. Everybody needs it. Everybody wants it. Everybody's happy." The androgyne shrugged.
"A customer service module probably wouldn't take up any more space than your boredom program," Yuki said. "And why are you an androgyne? Isn't that kind of a stupid stereotype, being camped-up and bored?"
"It would be as much a stereotype as a man or a woman. Did you want the suggestion box? Do away with stereotyping minor administration employees and clerks in dead-brain jobs? I've got several of those in the suggestion box to be forwarded." The androgyne held up a shoebox marked *Suggestions.* "They're all from minor administrators and clerks in dead-brain jobs. What do *you* do for a living?"
Yuki shifted uneasily. "I'm an assistant."
Apparently, that wasn't a trigger word for another program; the androgyne put the box on the desk between them. "I'll leave that there until you exit. Anything else?"
"No. Uh--" Yuki turned around, unsure of the direction she should take.
"Follow the blue line on the floor," said the androgyne through a yawn. "It'll take you to the nearest available privacy area."
"I still think your boredom program is offensive."
"It's not a program. You think this is bad, you ought to see the show on low-speed access."
Yuki had started to walk away; now she turned back again, wanting to ask what the androgyne meant by *that,* and saw that somehow, a closed door had materialized between them. *Exit Only!* said the raised letters in the imitation wood. *To re-enter, log out and log in again.* And below that, in smaller letters: *Not for use as an information source or help file. Users are directed to consult help files in the appropriate handbook. Handbooks are available for a nominal extra charge, plus a surcharge for indefinite reservation and custom annotation.*
Yuki shrugged inwardly and followed the blue line on the floor until it dead-ended at a plain empty white cubicle with a built-in desk and chair. As soon as she sat down in the chair, an ad came up on the desk surface advising her that she could reserve the same privacy area for repeated visits at a rate less than half of what it would cost her to reserve an address in a moderately popular city. Yuki leaned over and, without letting go of her items, swiped at the ad with one hand to erase it. Then she put everything down.
The map was a standard issue as far as she could tell. She spread it out on the desk and surveyed the overview of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. Major landmarks and exits were noted, along with trauma treatment sites--legend had it that the Sitty was not for the squeamish--but there were a number of vague, clouded areas on the map. *Because,* said the sell-line running along the bottom, *you don't want us to tell you* EVERYTHING, *do you!*
She ran a finger over the settings icon in the bottom right-hand corner. There it was--high-speed access. She puzzled over it. She'd never heard of high-speed access. Multiple levels of access, yes, but not multiple speeds. What if she tried to change the setting?
But that particular setting wasn't accessible, she found. Somehow, it had been bundled into the account as a fixed feature.
She turned her attention to the route-planner, and tried to program it for Tomoyuki Iguchi's previous route. There was a long pause, and then the same notation came up, about Tom's transfer of online identity and then decease.
"So *what*," she growled at the map. "He's deceased online so I can't follow the previous route taken by this username?" She stabbed the word *route* with one finger and an explanation box popped up out of the map to hang in the air before her at eye level.
*Deceased routing not saved; information erased.*
Yuki poked *Deceased.* "Where did he become deceased? You should be able to tell me that."
The explanation box morphed into an arrow and touched the map on the shoreline on the west side of the Sitty.
"Okay. *That's* where I want to go. First destination, select."
A small animation of a sausage roasting over a flame blossomed on the spot. *Hot Link;* Yuki rolled her eyes. Another thing she had not liked much about artificial reality was the penchant for terrible puns. She started to fold the map; it emitted a sharp buzzing noise and she opened it up again. A word balloon popped up and hung over the map for a few moments: *REMINDER!!! Only three Hot Links permitted per session!* "Yeah, yeah, yeah," she muttered. God forbid anyone should use billable time too efficiently to run up a big tab. Yuki turned her attention to the catalog and the icons. One seemed to be a ticket of admission to something, probably a club--the words *admit one--ALL hours* had been done as flashing multicolored neon tubing on a plastic rectangle the size of the real Waxx 24 admittance cards that Ash could never persuade anyone to give him.
There were also two circular pieces slightly larger than the palm of her hand; she knew those were tokens for some conveyance--flying submarine, underground plane, or even a warp booth, if she could find the right kind. One token to go on and one to return, saving much billable time; very considerate. She tucked those and the club ticket into the catalog. The three other items were museum-quality reproductions of old-style lottery tickets--you scraped off a colored surface material to see what was underneath. But these were information lottery tickets--she could ask a question of each one, and then scrape off the colored surface for an answer. She might get a right answer, a cryptic hint, a *dunno,* or the one-in-a-trillion jackpot--all questions answered free. Scraping off the surface without asking a question would do her no good at all--there would be no answers of any kind unless she activated the program by asking something specific.
She let them all fall into the icon catalog, which she zipped back into the vest pocket. Maybe she would even think quickly enough to use some of them.
*That's* really *why you don't like AR, isn't it--because you can't usually think fast enough to get a decent run out of it.*
She tried to shove the thought away. AR was for people who were too scared to take chances in real life, and anyone with any sense knew *that.* AR was for people like Tom Iguchi, who would rather pursue a nonexistent grail through an imaginary world than try to sustain a real life in a real place, where things sometimes took years to develop rather than nanoseconds.
*Which begs the question, why do you bother?*
"Oh, who wants to know," she muttered aloud, and surprised herself. *Getting twitchy, are we?* She picked up the map and touched the Hot Link.
#
Yuki stood in the middle of a wide, six-lane street, squinting out over a body of water in the late afternoon sun. Shiny particles in the broken, ruined pavement sparkled and glittered, as if the streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty were paved with crushed diamonds. Perhaps they were, or at least this one, which was also studded with clumps of car and building wreckage that made her think of teepees. Otherwise, there were no signs of any kind of life.
So, was *this* it--the big bad Sitty? Where was all the post-Apocalyptic glamour everybody were always raving about? Or was modern life so absurdist now that abandoned ruins from the last century were the bleeding edge of this-minute fashion?
The sun seemed to be stuck where it was in the sky, later than afternoon but not twilight yet. She looked around and then jumped, startled--a skinny kid, maybe 11 years old, had materialized on her right. He was grimy in a way that suggested repeated showers wouldn't have helped and his peculiar silvery-gray hair had been cut at various times in various places with various cutting implements. The expression on his face was nothing like a child's, and it wasn't just the very light blue eyes. Their hue was so pale that they were actually more tinged than truly blue.
"Who are you?" she asked him as he studied her with one hand to his chin. Like a little old man, Yuki thought. There was a flicker; he was holding a butterfly knife so that she could see the reflection of Tom's wide eyes in the blade. One of them closed in a sly wink and her mouth dropped.
"Nick the Schick. What's the matter, you don't remember me? You on *drugs*, Iggy?" The boy lowered the knife, frowning. "*Are* you Iggy?"
"Do I look like Iggy?" Yuki asked him, trying to sound lofty instead of spooked.
"*Just* like him," said Nick the Schick. "But you sure don't *act* like him. And you sure don't *smell* like him."
"Smell?" Yuki tilted her head skeptically. "You can smell me in here?"
"You pay extra, but it's always worth it. *But* I don't pay extra to be around someone who keeps saying shit like `in here' or `out there.' I don't come here to get my illusion ruined."
"Really? Where *do* you go for that?"
Nick the Schick stuck out his tongue and licked the flat of his blade. "I could show you, but what would be in it for me?" He tossed the knife into the air with a flick of his wrist. It spun around and came down handle-first to balance on the back of his hand. A moment later, he snatched it away, as if he thought she might try to take it; the movement was quick, but not so quick that she didn't see an ornate logo reading *SCHICK* on the ice-blue handle. He started to make another movement but she put a hand on his arm.
"Save it. I saw the handle of that thing. Where would little pokes like you be without the subsidies?" To her own ears, she sounded more bitter than sarcastic.
He pulled away from her, swaying and nodding his head to some rhythm that only he could hear. "What about it? They don't make me sing and dance over it, I just give good value and get good icon. No different than if I was top chop in the shop."
"Uh-huh. You're a walking ad."
"Icon," the Schick corrected her. He twirled the knife one-handed, passing it through his fingers with a dexterity that was no doubt part of the package. If the right advertiser got ahold of you, you could do pretty well in AR. Although they only approached you if you were already pretty good anyway. *Potentiate;* she remembered that from an old course on jargon. *Got to be a good potentiator.* "Someday you could check in here and find the Nick the Schick icon is the one everybody wants for their cat."
"What will you be an icon for?"
He threw back his head and laughed. "What do you mean, what for? Who wouldn't want to be an icon?"
"I don't mean why. I mean, for what. What would I get from you if you were an icon?"
The kid started to answer and then paused for what felt like a very long time. "*Ack-*sess," he said finally. "Big *ack-*sess."
"Access to what?"
"The famed Nick the Schick level." The kid made a complicated flourish with the knife, drawing a shiny chrome line that hung in the air for a few moments before twinkling out of existence.
"Nice effect," Yuki said sincerely. "But what's the Nick the Schick level?"
"Isn't. Yet. But someday, it could be the next level everybody wants to go to." He gestured at her with the knife. "Is this the highest speed you can get on that?"
"I don't know."
He looked her up and down and it was as though she could feel the force of his gaze as a physical pressure, like a wind. Or a force-field. *Or a hot-suit.*
"What," she said, sounding defensive instead of defiant. "What's the big deal about high speed?"
"Can you see this?" The boy held up his left hand palm outward. Yuki saw an animated tattoo of a cobra rearing up as if to strike. A moment later, the flat, hooded head was poised a few centimeters short of her nose.
"Yeah," she said. "I can see that."
"You can't at low speed. The faster you go, the more you know."
"Sounds fancy," Yuki said. "So how does someone go fast in here?"
"If you're gonna try to tell me that you didn't get no hot shot before you came in here, I'm gonna let my pet bite you." The cobra snapped back into his palm. She thought of the sting at the back of her neck. All right, she had understood that was some kind of injection, and she had figured it would be some kind of stimulant. But she didn't feel terribly speedy.
"They say you get going fast enough, you can find the Out Door. Somebody said they thought you did that." He took on a studiedly casual look. "So, how about it? Can you get higher, and did you do it already? You get anything new?"
"Aren't you supposed to buy that information?" she asked him.
He laughed. "Okay, you're Iggy. Or an acceptable replacement."
*Acceptable replacement.* The words echoed in her mind. What 11-year-old talked like that? None, of course. Kids couldn't access this kind of AR . . . could they? Yuki felt a vague nausea pass through her like a warning sign. "Um, how'd you decide that?" she asked the kid.
The boy snorted and then stared at her incredulously. "You really *don't* know what you're doing."
Yuki yawned. She felt a sudden sore spot at the back of her neck. Where there had been a sensation like a needle going in. An injection. She really had been injected. She made to touch the spot and then realized she couldn't without disconnecting the helmet from the 'suit. Let it go; later. "So?" she said to the kid, who was watching her suspiciously.
"You just pricked a destination on a map, right? You still got the map?"
Yuki shrugged, adjusting the vest.
"Well, take it out, I'm not gonna steal it. It won't work for me, it's keyed to you."
"Oh." Yuki took the map out and unfolded it, holding it at waist level so they could both look at it.
"Yeah, you just pricked on location. You didn't specify anything else--time of day, mode, module. I mean, the default module is *General* if you don't choose one, but there's no defaults for time and mode, you have to set those. So where you are now is the sample set."
She nodded. "Okay. I didn't know." She looked at him sideways. "What's your excuse?"
"I was about to go party and I saw you pop in, so I waited to see what you were gonna do. I thought you were Iggy."
"Tomoyuki Iguchi. In other words."
"Yeah. So, what's the take-up with Iggy? You're a real Jap and he wasn't?"
She found his kidney on the first try. "*This* time, I'll pretend you hiccuped after the first syllable of `Japanese,' so I didn't hear the rest of the word. But just *this* time."
He rubbed his lower back. "You know, there're plenty who disable the pain option. *I* coulda."
"How generous of you not to. And if you hurt someone whose pain option isn't disabled, your suit automatically restores yours, at the same level. Everybody knows *that.* How stupid did you think I was?"
The kid shrugged and twirled his knife again. They came to another cross street, where the wreckage of two cars, sans wheels, stood on end, leaning against each other in an impossibly balanced A-shape. Yuki stifled a laugh. "The ruins of one civilization become the ornaments of the next."
Nick the Schick gave her a wary look. "*You* are most definitely *not* Iggy. *That* shit would *never* occur to him." He didn't wait for an answer; instead, he went over to the abandoned building on the diagonal corner from them, stood on tiptoe to reach as high as he could, and drove the knife into the dirty stone.
The knife went through easily; the kid sawed his way down from the top of his reach to a point about a foot from the bottom and then took the cut sideways for a couple of yards. Then he reached down and pulled up the corner he had just cut in the wall as if it were a piece of paper. In the roughly triangular space that had opened, Yuki could see pavement shining wetly, reflecting nighttime neon colors. "Care to use my entrance?"
"Sure," she said, stepping forward. Immediately, he put one leg through the hole so that he was straddling both sides holding the flap of building up for her.
"I'll go first," he said smugly, "just in case."
#
She wasn't sure what she had been expecting--music, lights, colors, a one million-piece marching symphony orchestra conducted by a giant purple rabbit--even just a one-note chime signaling a change in status or location. Instead, the passage from one area to another was so uneventful, it threw her completely off balance. She staggered back and hit the wall with her shoulder blades. It was brick on this side and the impact made her wince; it felt more real than any other wall she had ever met.
"Watch the vertigo," she heard the kid tell her, his voice faint as if he were already far away from her. She started to push herself away from the wall and found two strong arms encircling her neck and shoulders from behind. She looked down; the arms had the brick-and-mortar texture of the wall they had come out of, although they felt like living, hard-muscled flesh.
"What's your hurry?" said a gravelly voice close to her ear.
"Let go," she said, wincing. The brick-textured skin scraped like sandpaper.
"You didn't pay the *toll.*" There was a gargled laugh. "What's worth giving up to have a good time, huh?"
The kid reappeared, the knife balancing on its point on his index finger. Yuki gave him an impatient look. "Sorry, you got to give it a token from your cat."
"Did you know?" Yuki managed to choke out.
Nick the Schick smiled. "Guess you're pretty green after all. Don't worry, you buy it back on the black market."
She wanted to ask what would happen if she refused this generous offer, except she couldn't seem to get enough breath for it. She worked the catalog out of her vest pocket and opened it up to where the transport tokens were. The brick arm around her throat relaxed; the transportation token levitated out of the catalog, told her *Bye-bye!* in a squeaky little voice and disappeared into one of the brick hands. The hand patted her on the head good-naturedly and let her go.
Yuki moved quickly out of reach, but nothing came after her. The wall was just a wall again; there was no outline or pattern that suggested arms or any other body parts. "It took one of my travel tokens," she complained to the kid, who was still laughing at her. "What in *hell* does a goddam brick wall want with a travel token?" She waited while he laughed some more. "Well?"
"Maybe it's gonna become a travel agent?" the Schick offered, giggling a little.
She moved away from him and consulted the map. "Okay, where am I *now?*" she asked.
It looked as if some sort of overlay had been added to the map to give it more detail. She was on a side street near the six-lane highway paralleling the shore, not far from where she had entered at first, on the abandoned street under the stalled sun. But the street was no longer abandoned and there was no sun at all in the black sky. For all she knew, there never had been one here. But it wasn't just the unending night that made everything look out of whack.
There was something funny with movement here, movement and perception. She looked up at a vintage neon-tube sign formed into a green palm tree next to a fuchsia ankh. When she turned away, both tree and ankh bled streams of color across her field of vision.
"*Hey.*" There was another sharp poke in her kidney. "Are you still here, or did you already *ass*-end to a new level of existence?"
She ignored his snickering and looked down at herself. Tom's body was unhurt; there was just a little brick powder on his sleeves. She brushed it away, dusted off her still-gloved hands. "*Stupid,*" she whispered, glaring at the wall but meaning herself. The only way anything happened to you here was if you let it; she knew that as well as the most addicted die-hard AR fanatic knew it. Allowing yourself to be fooled into buying the illusion was a big sign of weakness. You looked out for yourself here because nobody else would, and judging from what bits Tom had told her and what she had seen, nobody did.
She turned to say something to the kid but he was gone. Down at the end of the street, where it opened onto the defunct road, she could see a burning clump of wreckage and a lot of foot traffic, not all of it human or even humanoid. She moved down the alley, willing herself to stroll casually, as if she did this all the time. A little ways from the corner, some movement on her right caught her eye. She dared a quick glance and then jumped, startled.
Across the street, her reflection in the grimy, streaked store window stared back at her. Or rather, Tom's reflection. She didn't think she would ever get used to seeing someone else's reflection. Even the expression on the face was all wrong, it didn't look anywhere near as frightened as she actually felt.
The image in the glass broke into a broad grin and then laughed at her. Yuki felt as if a giant, cold fist had clutched her stomach; deliberately, she brought her right hand up and waved it around. Tom's reflection laughed some more, straightened up to push itself away from the wall and walk toward her.
If it walked out of the glass into the street, Yuki thought, she would drop down dead.
The image went only as far as it would have been able to go if it had been a real person standing on the other side of a window. It beckoned to her, still grinning but now the expression was almost sheepish. Yuki looked around to see if anyone else was catching this, but she was still alone. Cautiously, she approached the glass, watching for some sign that the image could burst out of its medium. Not that it made any sense to her.
*No sense, just sensation,* She stopped a yard away from the glass, ready to run.
"Cryin' *out,*" said Tom's image. "What's your snarl?"
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Who do I look like?"
"Nobody," she snapped.
"You cut me with that one, Yuki. You cut me *bad* with that one. And after all we've meant to each other."
Her eyes narrowed. "Tom Iguchi is missing and presumed dead. In here."
"But not in *here,* not through the old looking-glass." The image gestured behind him. "And for that matter, not where you are, either. *You're* Tom now."
"Not really. Everyone who knows him knows I'm not. Who are *you?*"
The image moved an inch or two closer to the glass. "It's me, Yuki. It's really me."
"Really?" she asked warily.
He put a finger to his lips. "Yeah. Well, yes and no," he added quickly. "I'm Tom, *but I don't think I'm the one you actually know.*"
Yuki glowered at him. "I'll take a hammer to this thing. Then where will you be?"
"You don't have a hammer. The best you can do is a travel icon and a couple of lottery tickets. Listen to me, I don't have much time here. I'm piggybacking for the moment and it won't be long before someone notices the extra energy expenditure isn't balanced."
"What am I supposed to do?" Yuki asked. "It isn't like we're in a real place."
"I'm in a real place, and so are you. I just don't know where I am exactly. I need your help to get out of here."
"But you don't know where *here* is."
"Do you know anything about old Japan? True Japan?"
Yuki looked up briefly, exasperated. The stretch of dark sky above her was completely devoid of stars. "What has that got to do with anything?"
"They're putting Japan back together, Yuki. That's what they say they're doing."
"`They'? Who's `they?'"
His palms pressed against the glass. "I swear, if I could reach you, I'd shake you till your brains rattled, even if you do look like me on a good day."
Yuki brushed imaginary lint off her shoulder. "I'm sure that would help a lot."
"I have a catalog hidden under the name Shantih Love."
"Is that the name of the catalog?" Yuki asked him.
"No, it's one of my avatars in here."
"And what *are* you in here, some kind of Bombay elephant demigod?"
"It's the name I had when I was murdered."
"But here you are, with me. Me and my shadow, so to speak."
Tom beckoned to her with outstretched arms. "*Listen,* will you? Things got serious. It was just supposed to be a game, that's all it was ever supposed to be. The tokens, the icons, that was all supposed to be just status crap, like having someone on the door at one of those clubs like Ash is always trying to get into. You flash your icons, claim you're fast, you're the new buzz. And after awhile, if you're not real stupid, you start to understand, they're never going to let you out, because someone's gotten to like it there and it isn't you, it's--" He stopped and shrugged. "I sold Shantih Love off. The buyer managed to scrape up enough residue to get my name and wear it under the Shantih Love form. It got him killed, in here *and* out there."
Yuki sighed. "Are you plundering old scenarios again?"
"It's real, goddamit, it's not a scenario."
"Big talk for a *reflection.*"
"*Stop it.* You don't know. You're running around in here on high speed and you don't have the faintest idea of what you've flashed into."
"Why don't you tell me, then?" She crossed her arms--his arms? In the glass, Tom, or his reflection, or whatever he was, started to follow her movement, caught himself, and pushed his arms straight down by his sides, looking annoyed.
"You don't know how fast you're going do you? You're running real hot, Yuki, and I got to tell you, you can't do that forever. It ages you. You can age 20 years here in one night. They let you have my appearance because they know you're full Japanese, and everyone who sees you will know it, too. She sent you in here--"
"She who?" asked Yuki.
"Joy Flower--who else?" Tom's mouth curved down bitterly. "You want to know all about that, the world's best-kept secret? Yes, I was one of Joy's Boyz, and yes, I liked it, and yes, she used me. Because I was full Japanese."
"Really," Yuki said. "I thought she used you because you were *male.*"
He laughed. "In here, you can get better than anything out there. Nobody really cares about sex any more, Yuki--"
*Speak for yourself,* she thought bitterly.
"--no one cares about ecstasy or drugs or going to heaven. But everybody--*everybody*--wants godhood."
Yuki started to say something.
"Power, dammit, *power.* Power *to do* things, power *over* things . . . power over ideas, power over living things."
"And?" Yuki said, trying not to show her impatience.
"And *what?* Nothing comes after that, that's all there is. Except for people like you and me, we're different. We don't get that far. We get to be--" In the next moment, Tom was gone and she was staring at a regular-style reflection. Some impulse made Yuki raise her head; there was an enormous chrome flying saucer hovering above the alley in a silence that she somehow knew it had produced. Or imposed. Or projected. What the hell did you call that kind of effect, anyway?
A ring of searchlights lit up in a circle around the bottom centerpoint of the saucer. They moved separately, sending long cones of light in all directions. Yuki watched, wondering if this was only more flash or someone else's idea of a trip to post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty.
There were shouts and screams from the trafficway. The saucer began to move in that direction and Yuki trotted along under it. One of the spotlights moved with her, lighting the area directly in front of her as if to oblige her.
Coming out of the alley, she could see that the UFO was larger than she had thought. The crowd that had gathered, stretching up and down the trafficway as far as the eye could see, spilling onto the beach and into the water, covered nearly as much area on the ground as the saucer did in the air. The chrome hull reflected far fewer people than appeared on the street. Was there really that much filler on the street or were only the elite reflected in a flying saucer hull? If so, what kind of elite did you have to be?
Yuki walked in a slow zigzag, trying to see if the saucer reflected her, too, but the distortion was too extreme. She moved further into the crowd, making her way through the virtual bodies and trying to keep an eye on the saucer. She had a sense of something momentous about to happen, the atmosphere seemed to thrum with it.
*Nice effect--wonder how they do it,* she thought, and then tried to be at least slightly abashed at her own cynicism. Tom used to tell her she was far too cynical to enjoy the illusions of AR even as entertainment.
*I feel sorry for you cynics,* he would say. *They say cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing.*
*Maybe so, Tom, but if you don't know your *own* price, how can you be sure of your values?* She would always laugh when she said it, so he wouldn't know how much that price-of-everything-value-of-nothing crack stung her.
There was a sudden roar on the other side of the crowd; a large midnight-blue woman was levitating toward the saucer. No, not levitating--the saucer was pulling her up to it. She spread her arms and shook her overdone mane of white hair joyfully. When she reached the saucer, she passed directly through the chrome and vanished.
If she was even real, and not just flashy local-color filler. Rumor had it half the so-called people you met in AR were just programs; rumor also had it that some of them had been left running and forgotten about years before, but Yuki wasn't so sure that she believed that one. How could a program run forgotten for years? Someone would have to notice the energy and data drain. She thought it was more likely that some of the more affluent AR enthusiasts used placeholder programs to keep their personas active when they couldn't be online themselves.
More of the crowd, some human, some not, rose up to pass through the chrome. She turned away and slipped through the crowd, heading for the pier. There were a lot of characters gathered there and a good many of them seemed to have lost interest in the saucer overhead.
The show here was almost as entertaining; apparently walking on water was a popular stunt. One guy in a straw hat, red-and-white striped jacket, and white pants was tap-dancing on the waves barefoot. From time to time, a cane would grow out of one hand. It wasn't a bad trick, really. His feet smacked the waves in perfect time. If that was just a program, it was a pretty corny one.
"There's a program for everything."
The person standing next to her was exquisite, dressed in silks that shimmered and changed in various hues of blue-green, so that it was all but impossible to determine the exact shape of the garment. Or garments. Yuki put out a hand to touch the material, but it was like trying to touch a whisper. Two darker hands caught hers between them.
She looked up; the face regarding her was at least a foot higher than her own, the features dark and exotic, a blend of India and the Orient that had become something startling, new and unto itself. Attraction glowed in her immediately, suspended, then resurged. An androgyne; the realization only made her even more confused. She had never felt anything like that before, at least not over an androgyne. Why would she feel something like this now? Especially for someone whose throat had been cut and then stitched together in a clumsy way that suggested a fast basting job done in front of a mirror.
"What are *you* doing here?"
"I had some spare time," Yuki said cautiously, pulling her hand away.
"Stop it. Where'd you get the outfit?" The androgyne gestured at her. "Did someone give it to you, or did you buy it, or did you just find it lying around and put it on?"
Yuki stepped back but the androgyne caught her arm.
"Don't you know me?" The exotic eyes, also blue-green, narrowed. "You don't, do you?"
"What if I do and I don't care?" Yuki asked.
The androgyne tilted his/her head and studied her. "And what if you *don't* know and your bluff doesn't work? I've been waiting for you for I don't know how long in here. You want to see this. I run it regularly." The androgyne hustled her off the pier and onto the sand. "Go ahead, throw your pov in. Maybe you'll learn something."
Before Yuki could pull away, the androgyne shoved her forward into a dark spot in the air.
There was a moment of dizziness and disorientation and then she was staring into that face again, but now their eyes met on the same plane. The androgyne was wearing some kind of royal purple robe or gown, edged in gold. The hair was different, too--there was more curl to it and threads of gold were woven into random spots. Dark gold eyes; Yuki knew they didn't see her, couldn't see her. And yet, those eyes were aware of *someone* watching. That face was smug, arrogant, proud, pleased to be so beautiful, so desirable. It seemed to shift, from being a woman's face on a man to a man's face on a woman, reminding Yuki of Escher's optical illusions, where things became each other, tossing dominance back and forth. Maybe this was what she found so exciting, the prospect of a man who was sometimes a woman, a woman who was sometimes a man.
*Or maybe I've wasted so much time on Tom that* everything else *looks better.* It should have sounded comical to her, but it didn't; it only sounded true.
"That's the damnedest thing, isn't it," said the voice of the androgyne, very close to her ear. "The way that fancy dancer seems to know there's an audience. Or that there will be an audience."
Yuki started to say something, but her perspective jerked away to a concrete barrier, waist high, edging the street on the shore side. A blurred shape jumped up on it. The outline was humanoid but that was all she could make out. There were no features to speak of, just an indistinct noncolor, an area of fog or static, an absence rather than a presence, shaped like a human.
Now she could see the androgyne in purple again, who was staring at the shape. The exotic face went from conceited to troubled, and s/he started to move along more quickly. This was something that wasn't supposed to have happened, Yuki realized; this whatever-it-was had not been part of the night's plan.
The indistinct silhouette slipped over the barrier to the street side and the androgyne mirrored the action, moving from the pavement to the soft sandy shoulder, keeping his/her back to the figure, pretending not to be running from it. Whatever it was. For all Yuki knew, it could have been a generic house antagonist, thrown in randomly to keep things moving. Except that the androgyne's movements seemed too frantic, too panicky for something like that.
The shape paced her/him, arms wild in jerky gestures. Yuki had the idea that the thing was saying something to the androgyne, but there was nothing to hear, no voice, not even the sound of the water, or the crackle of flames from the burning wrecks.
The perspective shifted again to the androgyne's right shoulder as s/he took long, stumbling strides toward a ghostly gathering superimposed on the present crowd on the beach. A lot of them were identical to the re-run ghosts, unless it was an optical illusion, or a hallucination--or was the re-run simply filling in space with graphic echoes of the surroundings?
The double exposure had her blinking dizzily, unable to maintain a focus on either the re-run crowd or the current one she was being dragged through. There was a sharp jump in the visual and she found herself seeing out of the androgyne's eyes as s/he turned, still running, staggering backward, almost falling. The figure had jumped up on top of the barrier again, waving its arms, pointing in accusation, ranting in silence.
The androgyne turned in a clumsy circle and lurched into the gathering just as Yuki found herself receding from it, as if she had been on an invisible elastic leash that had reached its limit and now had to retract. For a moment, she thought the flying saucer had decided to take her after all. Then she heard harsh and labored panting nearby and she knew the perspective had shifted to the creature.
To be precise, the pov had shifted to a spot that was actually a few inches in front of the creature, and she had a sense of simultaneously chasing and being chased. That lasted only a few seconds before she found herself enveloped by the creature, wearing it like a holosuit. When she lifted her arms, its arms rose into view instead of her pristine white jacket, and she saw now that the gray was neither static nor fog, but bandages. Bandages and an indeterminate number of fingers, like a maniac medical grotesque.
Now its vision superimposed itself over hers and for the first time, she felt something like fear. Everything began to shimmer and ripple liquidly with each movement, as the thing forced her to chase the androgyne.
Something made her want to call out, "*Tom!*" but what she heard herself say instead was "*Shantih!*"
*. . . one of my avatars . . .* The androgyne? *That* was Tom? She'd always known there were aspects of Tom that she was unacquainted with, but--
This was a re-run, not a real-time, she reminded herself. The androgyne she was pursuing might have been Tom at the time, but the one who had thrown her in here could not possibly be Tom. Frustrated, she tried to dig her heels into the sand and stop everything, but something kicked her legs out from under her and slid her along in midair with her feet dangling just a few inches above the ground. No one seemed to find this remarkable. The androgyne kept going and the creature kept chasing it. Barbarians and slaves gave ground; Jesus blessed them both as they passed. Another androgyne, this one with wings, lifted gracefully to see over the heads of the crowd. A vampire blew her a kiss, and the red hearts that floated into the air dripped blood.
A blade tore through the re-run crowd; a moment later, the familiar, obnoxious features of Nick the Schick were level with her own. "That switch-hitter's a *cop!*"
"A what?"
The kid's face was all puckered up as if he were going to burst into tears. He made a grab for her but she was already out of his reach. She wasn't sure what good it would have done. And what kind of police did he mean anyway--AR or the more substantial type?
There was no time to wonder. They had passed through the crowd and now she was chasing the androgyne up a rise that was all stones and dirt, onto a sidewalk. She reached out, straining; her fingers might have brushed the rich purple material but she couldn't catch it. The androgyne was still a few seconds too fast, vaulting the barrier that edged the road and running toward the divider that separated the north- and southbound lanes. Yuki thought s/he was going to fall over it; instead, s/he cleared it in a high leap and headed for a pile of wreckage just now catching fire in front of a storefront that had once been called The Pyramid.
Flames licked skyward, burning without consuming. Not that anyone cared. Nearing it, the androgyne slowed, squinting against the heat, looking at it as if s/he thought help might come out of it; nothing did. But there was *something* in there--Yuki could see it moving among the flames, not frantically like something on fire but with purpose. What would live in fire?
Salamanders, phoenixes--a rather ho-hum lot for AR, not terribly original. But then, neither was AR, she reminded herself. She could feel the pursuer's effort inside her own muscles, way inside, from the inside out, as if she herself were a hotsuit on the pursuer's body. On *someone's* body. She tried to concentrate, to separate her own sensations from whatever was coming through the 'suit but even just thinking of it seemed to have made it impossible.
*It's just AR, none of this is actually happening, for chrissakes,* pull out. *Just stop. The worst that could happen, you could pass out from vertigo.*
Maybe she moved as if to withdraw--she couldn't tell. But suddenly there was a force all around her, as if she had stepped into an invisible bubble of pressurized air. She was fighting for each breath now, her body lost among sensations. The action began to slow down, just the way it did in certain kinds of dreams, running dreams, when she needed to run and could barely strain a few inches forward. Her heart leaped with bizarre hope that it really all was just a dream, that she had fallen asleep (not naked) with the headmount on, and she was dreaming this crazy place--
The slowing action continued until she could see each discrete unit of movement, as if she were trapped in a poorly timed animation. Her brain protested, insisting that she could break out of the slow-motion action but her body was still sunk in excess, senses saturated, useless for meaningful information. The perspective descended steadily and she watched broken pavement go by, hanging awhile where the sky had been before it finally passed out of her field of vision. She found herself staring up at the starless black and it was as if she were gazing into the enormous opening of a tunnel or a cave, waiting for something to emerge from it.
"*Keep looking,*" said a voice, so close and so softly she wasn't sure that this, too, had come from somewhere inside of her. There was a strange pressure in her head, at her temples and over her eyes, as if some kind of spasm in the nerves or the muscles were trying to force her to look down while some other impetus was trying just as hard to keep her gaze upward.
Just before the two opposing pressures would have become too painful to bear, her vision split into two layers, one going down to show her the perspective moving from a position above the androgyne's terrified face to the side, to see her/him in profile while the pursuer pushed her/his chin back and up with one hand, exposing his/her throat and preparing it for what came next.
At the same time, Yuki could see deeper shadows moving in the night sky, formations flowing together, spreading apart, billowing.
"*Look deeper,*" the voice urged again. Yuki strained forward.
Blood spattered in her face, on her perfect white clothing, on her gloves. Her hands began to tingle, the sensation isolated for only a moment. Before it was crawling over her body, spreading not generally but in a way that felt like a pattern. She looked down at herself. The blood from the androgyne was sparkling, glittering, glowing as the tingle intensified to a stinging and then to a burning. She could see now that the spatters of blood had become streaks.
*Not streaks, but strokes.* It was her grandmother's voice correcting her, she could hear it quite clearly in her head. *Each stroke is executed in proper order, to yield the proper thinning and thickening of the lines. First stroke first, last stroke last, and all those between in order.*
*Was* the voice in her head? It was so distinct over the sizzling white noise that she could have sworn--
Her grandmother was above her in the night sky, leaning down with one hand tracing, in the air, the patterns of blood that had splashed all over her from the androgyne's throat. The bright trails streaming from her grandmother's hand were recognizable as *kanji.* Semaphore from heaven. Yuki stared, unable to speak.
"Even the most ignorant *sansei* knows what these are," Yuki's grandmother said, her hand moving with graceful precision, like a dancer's hand. "Isn't that so? You can't read them but you know what they are."
Yuki stared at the *kanji* and then at the woman. "Grandma?" she asked uncertainly.
"Body," the woman said.
"Whose?" Yuki asked, confused.
Her grandmother looked patient. "Body Sativa."
"You look and talk just like my grandmother." Yuki drew back suspiciously. "Is this how they use you in the Afterlife? You generate post-Apocalyptic AR cities?"
"I'm dead, I'm past caring what it's for. Old Japan is waking, from me, from other Japanese. Even if they use us, even if we die as mortals do, even if some of us are already dead, Old Japan will live."
Yuki was about to ask how when the portion of her vision that had been looking up at her grandmother--or whoever she was--looked down, while the part that had been watching the androgyne's murder looked up. Her vision melded for a moment and there was a feeling of implosion. She closed her eyes, dizzy, and her inner ear told her she was toppling over in very slow motion.
The sensation ended abruptly. She opened her eyes and jumped, startled. She was sitting in a leather chair like the one in Joy Flower's office, but this one had been pulled up to a large, round, dark wood meeting table. There was a touch on her arm and she turned to find her grandmother sitting at her left.
"You are full Japanese," her grandmother said approvingly.
"What makes you think so?" asked Yuki, suspiciously. The woman's face seemed to be going in and out of focus, like a cheap illusion about to fail.
"Your tissue was sampled when you were injected."
The stinging at the back of her neck. "Injected . . ."
"For high-speed access. As you move, you pick up momentum, and you come to a new place. A new level."
"The new level is Old Japan?" Yuki leaned over the table. There was an enormous opening in the center of it, like a large virtual window. Or monitor screen.
"Yes, Old Japan. You share your movements with others."
"What have you done with Tom?" she asked. "Tomoyuki Iguchi--"
"Iguchi Tomoyuki tried to sell his birthright. The one who purchased it was set upon by a demon, who killed him."
"Sorry, I don't believe in demons," Yuki said sourly.
"Then ask the nice police officer wearing Shantih Love's face. That one believes in demons--*now.*"
"You don't know that's a cop," Yuki said, hoping she sounded more defiant than she felt. "You probably don't even know whether this is somebody's scenario, you probably lost track of what's story and what isn't."
"Ask Tom, then, when you find him, if he believes in demons."
Yuki looked down at the highly polished tabletop. Did her reflection just frown at her and give its head a barely perceptible shake no, or was she imagining it? How could there be anything left to imagine in here? A chill swept up her back to her neck.
"Why should *I* find him for you? How did you lose him in the first place?"
"He became greedy. He took the catalog, he decided he would sell the high-level accesses for money, to anyone, non-Japanese as well as Japanese. Greed is a very old, very unoriginal scenario, so boring. But if we could recover the catalog, the accesses to the higher levels--"
"If Tom's in here," Yuki said slowly, "why can't you find him? Or do you already have him--out there--and he just won't talk?"
"--we would forgive him, we would make him a part of *bunraku.* As you are."
"*Bunraku,*" Yuki repeated, mystified. She looked down at her reflection again. It was staring up at her with an urgent, worried look. Casually, she put her forearms on the table and folded her hands like a studious schoolgirl, making a roughly circular area of the tabletop that she hoped only she could see.
"The method by which Old Japan will be remade--no, *awakened*--for good. Not the cheap amusement park of post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, but the *real* Old Japan. Real and *for* real."
In the frame of her arms, her reflection had morphed into a hospital bed, with a comatose patient lying on the perfect white sheets like a broken doll. Tubes for life-support came from various places on the patient's body. Except the one that fed into the base of the skull. "But what is it?" Yuki asked, gazing steadily at her grandmother.
On the tabletop, the patient's skull appeared in cross-section; something flowed through the tube up into the brain, where it spread among the blood vessels. As Yuki watched, the brain abruptly multiplied into a crowd of brain images, shrinking in size as they became more numerous, until it became a solid circle that began slowly changing from black to gray and then to red, the vivid, perfect red of the Rising Sun.
"Can't you feel what it is?" her grandmother asked, her voice sharp in a way it had never been in life. Yuki wondered if it was a crime to desecrate the dead in AR. Apparently not, but it should have been, she thought. "Look down, Yuki."
She jumped, startled, and put one arm on top of the image on the table. "What? I--"
"Look down at your*self.*"
She splayed both her hands on the table now. "You mean my hotsuit? Or--" The *kanji* was still spattered all over her. Something rippled through her, like a sensation from someone else's body--as if someone else were sharing the suit with her by some remote access.
No, not someone, not *just* someone but several someones. There was a gentle touch on her shoulder and she looked up again to see a large doll in traditional Japanese costume floating in front of her on the table. It bowed to her and began to move slowly and precisely, with as much grace as a living person.
But there would be a living person behind the movement--several, up to four at the very least. *Bunraku:* Japanese puppet theater--not a children's diversion but the classic puppet theater of Old Japan, as serious as Noh and Kabuki, a demonstration of skill and grace and cooperation. Now she could see the outlines of the people moving the puppet, if not their faces. See them and feel them--
She held up both her hands, looking at them in shock. "Tom?" she whispered, rubbing her hands together, trying to sense the presence of any others, all the others whose hands moved and felt with her own.
"You won't find Iguchi in there," Body told her. "He broke the chain. He didn't believe Old Japan could be revived, and he sold his place to the highest bidder. He thought no one would know, not if he was careful to sell everything. People can believe in absurd things, like Doors Out, or Out Doors, or whatever they're calling them now. They can believe that Joy Flower's whores do not mind that a dozen people put on their sensations like hotsuits, for the pleasure of feeling powerful. Or that the Japanese would *want* a post-Apocalyptic city open only to us. We've had that, thank you. Or are you such an ignorant *sansei* that you didn't know?"
Yuki blinked. Her eyes had gone all funny on her, unable to focus, as if her brain had simply decided to shut down the visual display. Her inner ear started to act up again as well, telling her she was moving in several different ways all at once, in an environment where up and down were matters of opinion. She tried to turn toward her grandmother--if it *was* her grandmother--and felt her arm flail up and back, striking something that felt like a side of beef. Someone grabbed her arm and she managed to look over at the other woman, who was watching her with an expression of mild curiosity. Yuki's eyelids were heavy and they seemed to keep falling closed, or maybe falling open, but the woman only watched.
*Ridiculous, I'm fighting, swinging my arms and legs, bending, twisting, and someone is grabbing me, trying to hold me still, but she keeps staring at me as if I am sitting perfectly still and I am seeing her as if I am perfectly still and now I want to go home and quit my--*
The woman frowned and looked at her more closely for a moment. "All right," she called loudly, looking up at the darkness above them. "What's going on?"
There was a one-second glimpse of a completely different room, an oddly familiar room where she was being held down on a bed by many strong hands and someone was kneeling on her left, pulling Yuki up and forward with one hand and holding a needle gun at the ready in the other. Only one second, but very clear, incredibly clear and so real. Yuki tried to shout and then twist away. They let her move and then the person with the needle gun was kneeling on her lower back.
"*. . . faster they go, the faster it wears off . . . told you be ready f--*"
"*--arger dose . . .*"
Someone shoved her head down and forward and suddenly she couldn't move at all, not even to breathe. Panic shot through her and then was gone but she still couldn't move.
But now she could breathe, at least. Concentrating, she could feel her forehead resting on the table. There was a hand on her shoulder and the woman was leaning close to her, looking into her eyes with a worried frown. She was so close, Yuki could see her own reflection in the woman's eyes so clearly, as if it wasn't really a reflection--or twin reflections, rather, but two images etched directly onto the corneas.
She could see quite clearly when each of the two tiny images of Tom Iguchi raised a finger to his lips, warning her not to say anything.
Yuki jumped back. The woman glanced upward once more, seemed satisfied, and leaned forward again. "Do you know the art of filling an empty cup with tea when you have no tea?"
Yuki shook her head silently, trying to feel her arms and legs. She couldn't. If she looked down at herself, she could feel them just fine. But without seeing them, she might have been a disembodied mind. Or a balloon. Tied to an armchair by a string so she wouldn't float away and get lost--
"Perhaps I should have said, the art of producing Iguchi Tomoyuki where there supposedly is none. You will find him for us and through him, the catalog. We are recovering many of the arts of old Japan. *Bunraku,* for one. So that we can know again what it is to be one people."
"Who gets to be the puppet?" Yuki asked suspiciously. She clasped and unclasped her hands, felt her forearms. The puppet dancing in the center of the table bowed to her and disappeared. Yuki looked from side to side, then grabbed the woman, shoving her forehead against her and staring into her eyes.
"Tom! Tom! I won't do it! You come out and fight for yourself, damn you! Come *out,* I said--"
Her grandmother brought both feet up and pushed them against her stomach, trying to force her away. She hung on, holding the woman's head hard against her own. "Tom, you son of a bitch--!"
And then it wasn't her grandmother she was head-to-head with but the puppet. She could feel the unyielding porcelain bruising the thin flesh of her forehead, and the pain was real, not the weak, synthetic discomfort a hotsuit might produce for the sake of realism, but terrible pressure, actual hurting.
*Withdraw, you idiot!* her mind shouted at her, but the command came from far away, from a different universe where things made sense. In that universe, she would have been able to find the cut-off switch on the headmounted monitor screen, she would already be out and reacquainting herself with reality, instead of being literally head-to-head with a *bunraku* puppet in a crazy-assed and very unauthentic emulation of a sumo match. *I hope this isn't Man-Mountain Gentian,* she thought absurdly, the memory of the old story coming unbidden to her.
They stayed that way for a long time, neither of them losing nor gaining ground, though Yuki could feel herself beginning to weaken. She concentrated, trying to sense the position of her arms and hands. If she could bring them up, and shove--
Her hands came up, but so slowly and only with great effort. She could barely feel them--the pain of the puppet's head against her own left almost no room for any other sensation. It was as if she were trying to levitate two inanimate objects rather than manipulate her own body.
*It isn't* your *body,* her grandmother whispered to her. *It's* Tom's *body.*
Something inside her gave slightly. Yuki kept pressing back against the puppet, but the puppet--or whoever was behind the puppet--knew she was weakening. She concentrated on moving her hands forward, to push against the doll, to punch, squeeze, tear the body of sticks and rods and cloth apart, shatter the porcelain, but it seemed that her hands couldn't find the puppet's body. There was nothing to touch in front of her, only empty space.
She willed her hands to come up higher, to the puppet's head, but there was nothing to feel there either. No porcelain, nothing.
Not even her own head.
The quarter-second of shock was all the puppet needed. Pain seared through her head like a hot knife spearing her just above her eyes and driving all the way through and out the back of her head. At the same time, her inner ear told her she was falling again, going over backward and plunging feet first into an even bigger emptiness and she realized as she felt herself plummet faster and faster that she was not afraid of finally hitting some surface, pavement or earth or water. She was afraid that the impact would never come, and she would fall through nothingness forever.
#
Still falling, she opened her eyes and saw an enormous expanse of nighttime city below her, a multitude of colored lights glittering against the darkness. She wanted to cry with relief that the long fall would end, had to end, and then there would be peace, at the very least. No Tom, but she had tried. Perhaps he was watching her plunge into this city nightscape from some hiding place, some mirror or someone's eyes. Maybe if she had a mirror to reflect her own eyes, she would see him in there, twin miniatures--
Abruptly she realized that she wasn't as high up over the city as she had been, and she could see the lights more clearly now, flashing, twinkling patterns that resolved themselves into gargantuan signs flashing words, flashing pictures, flashing *kanji* as if in a long and complex display to what universe there might be out there in the dark, delivering, over and over, the message: *Japan lives!*
*Yes, Japan lives.* She closed her eyes again and waited for Japan to take the offering of herself.
#
She came to on a futon in a pleasant though austere room with paper walls framed in bamboo and the slightly astringent aroma of green tea being prepared.
A little while later, someone helped her sit up so she could drink the tea. Though it smelled even more strongly, it didn't have much taste at first, though the more she drank, the stronger the taste of it on her tongue became. And it must have been a much larger cup than she had thought, for it seemed as if she drank forever before stopping, not because there was no more tea but because she had drunk her fill. The aroma remained.
She lay back and found herself staring at another person also lying on a futon, somehow suspended on the ceiling. Or perhaps *she* was the one on the ceiling and the other person was the normal one, lying on the floor. There was actually no way to tell which of them was up and which was down, no matter how long she stared, or how much she thought about it. The person always mimicked her actions, as if this were an exercise in dance movement. But sometimes, when her attention wandered, she thought she saw the other person make a furtive move that had nothing to do with what she had done. She waited for someone else to come and tell her about this peculiar situation.
Eventually, someone else did come. A woman named Joy Flower came and stood over her, and, taking no notice of the person on the overhead futon, told her she was a young man named Iguchi Tomoyuki who had been lost in a strange country for a long time. And for an equally long time, Yuki found no reason to doubt her.
