Chapter 9:

Guess They Don’t Have Iglus in Ikeda

Tokyo5: Prosper’s Law


Relative Time: 3.2.09, 2nd Phase, Copper Rooster Cycle

Geo: Takaya Place, Akihabara

Case ref: 0223614–4L

‘Hey, hey..!’ She ran to keep up as Kurama strode upright through the dark back streets behind the main thoroughfare. The ground glistened from a recent rainfall, reflecting the flickering illuminated signs that buzzed above them advertising all kinds of nefarious sounding clinics and pachinko parlours.

‘Sirrrr…!’

‘I told you not to call me that.’ Steam trailed a coffee cup in his hand.

Rinako stepped around an old pedlar sat cross legged by the wall. A carpet was laid out before him, above which hovered little figurines carved in some kind of luminous waxy substance. His burnished skin, indented with scored swirls and deep set jewels made him look like one himself.

She hurried alongside Kurama. Daylight shone down at them from the crack of sky between the buildings above as though they were looking down on a river far below. It was hard to get used to the relative timezones, like there was some singular meta-time that existed between them.

‘We’re not going to the office?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But didnt dispatch say—’

He pushed between a couple of onlookers who were blocking the street, one of them shooting him a disdainful look as she teetered out of the way on her high heels. Pink lights flickered ahead. The street beyond had been blocked off with light tape. Two uniformed enforcers stood at the corner, chatting happily. When they caught sight of Kurama, their expression changed.

‘Hey—hey!’ One pushed off the wall and stepped out to block their path.

Kurama flashed his id and without missing a step continued straight past them. Rinako scurried beside him, looking back apologetically.

The officer was shaking his head. ‘Fucking Prosprs, think they own the streets.’

‘Tell me about it, just glorified shit cleaners.’ Said the other.

‘I could have done it, you know—I ever tell you about…’

She looked up at Kurama. ‘Listen, shouldn’t we be—-‘, but stopped when she caught sight of the scene on which his eyes were set.

Beyond the tape there was a crossroads, a broad central shopping street with ramshackle places of business on either side occupying several tiered levels, the higher sidewalks bustling with people, many of whom were leaning over the safety-railings to survey the scene below. The floating traffic lights on the upper levels were all showing red, with spherical police-bots making sudden vertical and horizontal movements around them like hummingbirds. This main thoroughfare was bisected by a narrower street in which the shadows of the tall buildings made the stores look even less reputable, if that were possible. The kinds of businesses that existed in daylight were evidently quite different from those that grew in darkness. On the corners were four large stores that extended up through all the levels. Though in disrepair the signs were painted blue, red, white and black respectively, the store names written in what she recognised as Chinese symbols. A crooked pole near one corner, serried with variously coloured and shaped signs in different languages, marked it as ‘Four Houses Crossing.’ Light-tape sealed off the lower entrances to the other streets too, and she saw a single enforcer arguing with a remonstrating crowd beyond the one opposite. She didn’t envy him his job.

But it was none of this that had silenced her. In the middle of the crossroads there stood a dome shaped structure, its single curved wall composed of frosted light so that whatever was within it was obscured from view, reduced to just a few diffuse patches of colour. Every now and then it flickered.

‘It’ll glitch a bit at first. Don’t worry, it’s not actually the iglu, just your sens-sim. They build them right at the edge of the prehensile spectrum here.’

She looked up from the dome. Kurama was looking into her eyes, his face darkened against the pale sky behind him.

‘Huh?’

‘The full conversion… I presume you had it?’

Her mind reeled for a moment before she caught onto his meaning. ‘Yes.’

The somatic conversion had been what she feared most about enlisting. Most people from outside had taken holidays in one AR resort or another which only required a temporary mantle - a shroud of code that converted the sensory data for however long the trip had been booked. After that they would disintegrate. The internal travel bureaus made a fortune from them. But when you were on a work pass for over six months, full conversion was mandatory. She had visualised some kind of long surgical procedure in a sterile, intimidating medical facility somewhere. In fact, it had taken little more than a few minutes in something that was no larger than a photo booth. She’d entered from the transit terminal one moment, and emerged the next into the same large hall, with the bong of the public service announcements echoing around it, and the tilted smile of the female attendant. She had thought it hadn’t worked until she realised the great queue of people who had been just behind her had vanished.

‘Just takes a little while for your brain to adjust. Happens to all of us that weren’t born light-side.’ He carried on ahead past the fold-out restricted area signs that had been left around the dome and Rinako followed.

Us.

‘Police! How long you gonna be?? We got shop to run.’ An irate looking old man dressed in a traditional tunic hanfu was leaning over one of the signs outside the green corner store. ‘You gonna pay me for time—hey! HEY! POLICE MAN! COME—’

Rinako felt a momentary sensation of pressure on her skin as they passed through the dome, like entering a body of water. The old man’s voice suddenly vanished as though it had been zipped away somewhere along with all the background noises of the street, the enforcer arguing with the onlookers, the distant sound of angry traffic horns, sounds she had barely noticed before. The silence inside the dome was startling. It had a strange artificial feel to it, like the air in a conditioned room, shorn of all the tiny particles that the body interpreted as normality. The texture of silence. Now it was the world outside that had been reduced to blurred areas of colour.

Kurama was crouched, sipping from the cup in his hand. Beside him, its waist twisted at an impossible angle, lay the body of a young woman. Small holo labels floated in the air all about it with dotted lines joining them to various locations on the body and the ground nearby. She saw that one pointed to a crumpled light-stick packet that lay beside her. Azure Haze.

It was the woman Chizuru had mentioned on the radio. The one that wouldn’t be ‘filing any claims for compensation’.

Her limbs were bent against the joints. Every joint in fact was contorted unnaturally. The silence now felt like that within a morgue.

Kurama stroked the air with a finger and the labels all fell away as one, like raindrops from the leaves of a shaken tree. He looked up at her. ‘I guess they dont have iglus in Ikeda, huh?’

She thought back to the precinct there. An old wood-beamed building, with a small garage containing the single police car built halfway up a hillside above the old town. The chief Akabe also ran the local fishing tackle shop. Most callouts were just to see if old man Watanabe was still fishing on the old manor grounds. Not that the owner cared, they were just worried he’d fall in when no one was around.

‘Not exactly.’ She said. ‘Shouldnt we check them—‘

‘Why? They just get in the way. Clean-up squads are normally enforcers trying to make some point about how they could do our jobs. And so demonstrating exactly… why… they… can’t…’ As he spoke he lifted his hand and a single centipede like strand of articulated silver rose from the woman’s hair. Rinako stared at the dull surface of the object rotating in the air. Clouds of colour had started to criss cross the roof of the dome. They must have reopened the higher streets to traffic.

There was a beep and she saw Skit floating above the body. A small opening appeared on his chassis and he moved forward to capture the suspended object before withdrawing to Kurama’s side.

‘What was that?’ She asked.

‘Probably nothing.’ He stood up, dusting off his knees. ‘But from the looks of the injuries—‘ He looked up then at Rinako and stopped. ‘I tell you what. What do you think?’

He waited as she looked several times between the body and him. Then, alive with apprehension, she walked over to the body. She really didn’t want to mess this up. Aside from the angle of the limbs, the waist was the most obvious point of trauma. Her legs were so badly twisted so that they were almost facing backwards. It was the result of the force imparted by a body travelling at great speed. These were the most common types of geist-related injuries, like a great ball of fire shooting blindly into an area of low pressure. Sometimes it was a streetlight snapped like a twig, sometimes a hole blown through a residential building, someone’s living room exposed to the street, and sometimes, sometimes it was this.

The woman’s face had been torn apart by the impact. The nose and mouth remained relatively intact but the upper half…

A wave of confusion washed over her. Her nerves faded as something else took over. Something that was in her genes. The woman’s eyes.

‘Noticed that, did you?’ Kurama was smiling.

‘They’re unlit.’

‘Mmmhmm.’ He sipped at his coffee and stretched luxuriously, taking in all the second morning sun had to offer, even in the diffuse light of the iglu.

When someone died in light-space, the sens-sim that replaced the part of the brain normally assigned to sensory interpretation would be disconnected from the sensory organs. The first sign of this was often the fading of the irises - one of the charming peculiarities of full AR conversion. There was no point in them remaining illuminated, like keeping the lights on in a building scheduled for demolition (—maybe remember not to put it like that when breaking the news to a grieving family—). Unless someone had prosthetics. These would stay alight several days after brain-death. In theory they would last for centuries if not for the built in fail mechanism that kicked in when the sens-sim had been idle beyond a certain threshold; for some reason people found the idea of glowing eyed corpses buried just a few meters beneath the ground unnerving. Even in a coma people dreamt or produced subconscious abstractions and this was enough to keep the fires of their eyes kindled.

This woman had prosthetics. Yet they were dark as the hole in Nakano’s heart. The only way a prosthetic could be extinguished while remaining intact was if death had occurred as a result of a direct light attack to the sens-sim. Then the overload would blow out all prostheses. But this woman had been killed as a result of external impact.

She looked up at Kurama. ‘She was killed before the geist hit her.’

He continued to watch her silently.

She looked back at the body. Other than the dormant irises the eyes were in good condition. Aside from hanging halfway out of their sockets. Whoever had manufactured them had done a good job. She noticed a small dark blue stain on the chassis. A weight of realisation started to press in on her. In fully converted bodies, everything was tied into one system. Once the sens-sim had been shut off the transport-medium of the circulatory system (you could choose from several types during the conversion process, including newer algorithmic and charged-particle technologies but Somatika’s pseudo-fluids were the most common, and the cheapest) was immediately sealed off from the rest of the body, like the passersby in the streets around the crossroads they stood in. Even a second or so later there would be no visible bleeding because there would be no circulating medium. The only way for there to be bleeding from the impact was if…

‘The victim was killed immediately before being hit.’ She paused and frowned. ‘Whatever hit her was also responsible for killing her.’

She felt some surprise at her own words. ‘Satisfied?’

He sipped his coffee and smiled. ‘Very good. Alright, you got that too.’

‘But what does it mean?’ She still wore the frown. Had it just gone crazy, started lashing out uncontrollably?

He was staring at her again.

She opened her mouth to speak then stopped. The presence of the blood did make it virtually impossible for anything other than the geist to have been involved… but… she was drawing a blank. It was like assembling all the pieces of a puzzle and still not knowing what you were looking at.

Kurama bent down beside her. ‘See this?’ He was holding out his hand ‘Come on.’

She stood up beside him and examined his hand.

He tilted it and on the tip of his index finger she saw tiny crystals of some sort glinting in the light.

‘What is that?’

‘Crystallised neural resin.’

She looked up at him. Converts’ neural networks used an antiquated type of resin to aid in signal transference. Over the course of time or through extended disuse the resin would coagulate and eventually crystals would form, reducing its viability. It was a far milder version of what caused the light-sickness. It wasn’t something she liked to think about. Seemed like wherever you went, time found a way to follow you.

‘Meds often miss it. Doesn’t show up on new scanners. Especially if you’re not looking for it.’

She stared at the minute white-turquoise shards glowing on his fingertip.

‘The sens-sim was old.’ She looked back up at his face. ‘But the victim is thirty, thirty-five max.‘

Kurama smiled again.

A blizzard of colours fluttered on the dome around them. The police had opened up the barricades.