Chapter 10:

The Quarry

Tokyo5: Prosper’s Law


‘—-there’s a market for everything.’

There was a pause while Rinako tried to wrap her mind around it. ‘But how do they get past the ident - don’t organ transplants have to match the recipient’s ANA. For that they’d need to have the proper signatures…’ her eyes rolled back as though assailed by a wealth of recollection. ‘… data branches, proprietary encryptions, bio-locks…’ She had anxiously studied the reading materials the clinic had given her in the weeks before her own conversion, though they mainly comprised of photos of technicians smiling in front of green spaces and happy bronze-skinned converts playing volleyball on a beach somewhere. Why is it always volleyball?

‘Like I said: there’s a market for everything.’

Her mind continued to race. She knew of the existence of the black markets well enough; back in Gokayama half the kids only had com-plants because of them. The authorities turned a blind eye unless it constituted a ‘threat to public security’  ie. had come to the attention of the copyright division of one of the larger tech corps. But unlicensed sens-sim upgrades. At least with a com-plant if it goes wrong you might lose a few contact numbers, worst case, have to have an embarrassing conversation at the nearest med centre if the dissolvable capsule turned out to be not so dissolvable. What do you do if your brain bricks?

‘People actually have it done?’

‘Yeah, they have it done.’

She thought of her own conversion. The whole soft-death concept had stuck in her mind for the entirety of her training. It was like an unwelcome tenant in her head that she couldn’t evict. In the end, she’d just given up and let it keep the room. And that was in a clean VisAge booth, with trained attendants at one of the official clinics.

‘Why would anyone take that kind of risk?’

She had to hurry to keep pace with him. She’d given up on trying to keep track of their route now. Kurama seemed to know his way around. To her the streets and little esplanades all blended into one, from the bright Chinatown area to the busy evening square full of restaurants and glowing awnings they had wandered into now. That was the thing about the exotic, once it reached a certain threshold, everything just sank back down into mundanity, a monotony of spectacle.

‘—because they can’t afford the proper surgery, or they’d prefer it was untraceable - some are just desperate to slip the databases entirely, erase their cerebrograms like burning off a fingerprint. There are all kinds of reasons.’

‘Enough to risk dying?’

‘People will risk anything if you give them enough of a reason.’ He went quiet. Rinako had a feeling it was best to let it drop.

A group of men in business suits at a nearby table above which swam a shoal of holo-fish looked up at them in silence as they passed. Their conversation started up again once they were a few meters away. This whole district, apparently, was known by locals as the chessboard in part because it was run by an assortment of landlords, who themselves were never seen but who each owned the residences and commercial buildings in a particular block, like some miniature diorama of a feudal state. Each block had a different culture, different local economy and most strikingly of all its own time of day. Some dark and some light. The block before had been baking daylight, whereas the restaurant block was almost black, with the perpetual feel of a late summer evening. When you entered one the sky would change colour in gradations like a timelapse nature video, shadows of streetlights and tables growing or shrinking and swivelling to the new time of day. Everything here was a clock. If you looked back the block you had just left was now the same colour as your own, like looking at the past through the stained glass of the present.

Even the weather was for sale, Kurama had said, leased to whichever block could afford it. It wasn’t a technological limitation. If they’d wanted everyone could have lived in permanent sunshine.

‘Why not then?’ she had asked

‘Because that’s how you create value. Didn’t you do arconomics?’

She’d thought back to the arconomics lectures at the academy. It hadn’t been a subject she’d particularly relished.

‘You don’t make products… but remove abundance.’ He’d gestured toward her with his fingers, the shrunken, misshapen globe of a lollipop waggling between them…

She looked at the torn shoulder of his leather jacket. It had been a shock he even knew what arconomics was, given this was a guy whose investment portfolio was a list of race-horses.

Something struck her as they walked into a broad pedestrianised street. She hadn’t noticed when it had started but the people were different here. They hadn’t been well-dressed before but now they wore threadbare shawls, some pushing tattered prams full of boxes of food. The background chatter had been replaced by silence. No one said anything. They appeared pallid, with a haunted look in their eyes, like they’d lived underground all their lives. They were somehow robbed of individuality by this, members of one hopeless species.

‘The lifers here don’t tend to move blocks. There are generations that have never seen the sun—ahhh!’ Rinako jumped as Kurama interrupted himself, shouting suddenly across the street. ‘Asahi, how’s business!’

Across the concrete, beneath the jutting roof of a blacked out building, stood a portly man with long greasy hair. He was holding open a full length black trench-coat. Two gaunt looking adolescents beside him turned and on seeing Kurama hurried away into a narrow street beside the building. The man looked up at them, threw his face to the sky for a moment, then turned back, his previous expression replaced by a tight smile.

‘Not pleased to see me, Asahi? You look tense.’ Said Kurama, sipping his coffee and crossing the street to him. Rinako looked around as she followed shortly behind him. A young woman cut a wide path around them as they passed, pulling her shawl over her face so that only her wide eyes with their tiny pupils were visible. As she watched, tiny blue trails moved slowly around them, like glowing insects living beneath her skin. Rinako looked down and followed the hand in hers to a small child beside her wearing the the same empty expression. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.

‘I was just about to - uh - call out.’ Said the man, Asahi. He glanced around nervously.

‘You got somewhere to be Asahi?’ Before he could answer Kurama held up his hand. ‘Dont worry, I’m not here for you. Bit low on the food chain for me.’

The building behind him was some kind of municipal hall long since out of use by the look of it. The windows were shattered, bulging fragments held in place by wire grills. She couldn’t make out what was behind them.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Asahi. ‘I heard they put you on the fast track…’

‘Very funny.’ Said Kurama.

The man’s eyes switched to her and his expression changed. ‘And who’s your friend?’ A broad smile opened up across his face, showing teeth all kinds of metallic shades. Up close she saw his skin was heavily pockmarked, a pale holo-tattoo of a tiger prowling across one of his cheeks. One of his eyes was shot through white with no pupil at all, though she wasn’t sure if this was the result of injury or modification. ‘Oh, you like this?’ He said, pointing to the tiger. ‘I can show you where to get one the same.’ His smile seemed somehow disconnected to his eyes.

‘Oh yeah, that’s why we came.’ Said Kurama. ‘Joining the force was the only way she could think of to get hooked up with a holo of a tiger on her face. You’re big news in Gokayama.’

‘Gokayama?!’ He said and looked at Kurama then back to her. ‘Long way from home.’

Rinako couldn’t help but shrink back somewhat.

‘Yeah, anyway…’ Kurama put an arm around him. ‘We got something, and you get to help me out today.’ He poked Asahi in the chest with a finger.

Asahi slowly took his eyes off her. ‘Come on, Kurama. You know I—I got things to do. Strictly legit.’

‘Really? So you wont mind me asking those super strict and legit guys if they want to take a drive?’

Down the alley, the two adolescents she saw earlier were counting something in their hands.

‘Heh.’ Asahi scratched his head.

‘Think of it like, a service to society.’

***

The Quarry was not actually a quarry but rather a surprisingly busy late-night cafe that attracted seemingly every disreputable character in the area; Rinako had heard at least five conversations that would warrant an on-the-spot arrest since they’d arrived. Kurama was a regular…

He had explained that it was called The Quarry on account of a squabble between two groups of local businessmen who had frequented the place a few decades earlier. They had decided on settling a bet over whether or not you could still reach Old Tokyo by attempting to excavate beneath the foundations. Unfortunately, they had been drinking - the one part of the story that didn’t surprise Rinako - and no one had remembered that the local power grid ran directly beneath the building. It didn’t look like much had changed since. The windows were permanently steamed up and the artificial strip lights, which showed up several layers of dirt on every surface, so glaring she had to squint when coming in from the night outside. A great hubbub filled the place. It was full of truck drivers, factory workers, dockhands from all over the area, either on their lunch break, just knocking off or starting their day. Steam from the open kitchen filled the air like a bathhouse so your skin was coated in beads of sweat within a few minutes of sitting down.

A large-cheeked female chef and waitress in an apron thick with grease stains and with holes for her many prosthetic arms was seemingly the only one working. ‘Hey!’ She was shouting at a table by the kitchen that she had just walked past. ‘You keep your hands to yourself unless you want me to add one to my collection.’

The men at the table burst into coarse laughter and she carried on, shaking her head, carrying several piles of plates with the arms that reached from her back like some insectoid appendages. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.’ She called out to someone Rinako couldn’t see.

How is she keeping up with this? It’s like she’s got some kind of navigation software in her head.

At their table - Kurama had picked one in the corner - Asahi spoke between mouthfuls of chicken he was shovelling into his mouth.

Kurama watched the spectacle like it was some sort of indescribable natural disaster. ‘You really are disgusting, you know that.’

Asahi slurped at his glass of sake and returned to his food. ‘Man’s gotta eat.’

They waited a while, while he destroyed the contents of his plate, Kurama leaning back in the padded seat with a light-stick.

‘Hey, Merl.’ A young woman with red lipstick and her hair tied up in curls smiled at him as she carried a tray past them and started wiping the next table. Apparently there were some other employees. Kurama smiled back.

Rinako thought of the home cooked meals her mother and aunt had made. Steaming plates of soba, local caught bream, porridge made from the paddies out back. She was salivating just thinking about it. She missed the smell.

After the waitress left, she asked. ‘What’s with this Merl thing anyway?’

Asahi’s beady eyes peeped up at them from behind the chicken leg he was devouring, looked between them a few times then returned to the food.

Kurama exhaled through his nose. ‘It’s just a nickname. You know. No big thing.’ He tapped out the light-stick on one of the table’s inbuilt vacuum trays and she watched the green haze being sucked away.

Something else it didn’t seem like he wanted to talk about.

‘So, you happy now?’ He was talking to Asahi, who mopped his mouth with a dirty rag which he then threw into the disposal, slapped his hands together a few times and leant back in his seat. Bits of food remained caught around his mouth. Having bins attached to the tables wasn’t really a good sign of a restaurant’s quality.

‘I could have gone for some gyouza—‘ Kurama was staring at him coolly, ‘—but I guess it’ll do.’

A light rain had started up and fell softly against the windows.

‘So what is it you want to know?’ He made sure not to make eye contact with them as he spoke. ‘Be quick. I got places I need to be.’ His white eye caught the turquoise tones in the strip lights.

‘Yeah. I’m sure you got orphanage donations and hospital visits to make.’

‘Right, exactly. You got it.’

Kurama waited a moment looking at him, then breathed out through his nose, as though letting something go. ‘Who is it round here now does upgrades? Raki?’

‘Raki?’ He mopped his mouth again with a sleeve and broke into laughter that quickly turned into a fit of coughing. ‘You don’t visit us often enough.’ He just managed to get the words out.

‘Yeah, well, I’m on the fast track, aren’t I.’

Asahi smiled at this. ‘Raki’s gone.’ He said. Rinako didn’t like to think what he meant by gone. Then, as if measuring how much he should give them. ‘There’s a new guy.’ His voice lowered. ‘Been doing all the ups a year or so—real good though.’ His tone suddenly became enthusiastic.

‘He got a name this new guy?’

‘Kingfisher, they call him.’

‘Kingfisher?’

‘Yeah sure, you know, like the fish.’

Kurama stared at him. ‘It’s a bird, you idiot.’

He scratched his hair and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Fish, bird, whatever. Listen, you wanted the name, that’s the name. I didn’t know there was a fucking pop quiz.’

There was a pause. ‘Alright. He good enough to be doing sim-jobs?’

Asahi shrugged. ‘They say he used to work at TeraPharma.’

TeraPharma was a name Rinako knew. You had to be from, well, a village like the one she was from not to have heard of them. But the ads had made it out even to Gokayama. They’d got a big contract recently, supplying the parts for some new government security project.

The background chatter of the cafe had broken out into shouting in one corner. They looked over. A short stocky man stood over his table barking at another sat opposite him. There was barely a neck between them. Kurama looked back. ‘Any idea where someone might find him, you know, should they require his services?’

At this, something truly awful happened. A wide smile spread across Asahi’s face, his metallic teeth glinting between his lips. The tiger holo rolled onto its back beside it. She never thought a smile could be so hideous. The men in the corner were now fighting, the chef from earlier trying to pull them apart. Smashed pieces of plate were lodged like eggshells in one’s hair. ‘Sure. But the doc’s real cautious. Lot of people got paranoid after what happened to Raki.’

Kurama waited.

‘There’s a way though.’ And that smile again. ‘Just got to have a little procedure.’