Chapter 17:

A Little Dancing Spider

Tokyo5: Prosper’s Law


‘Morning Merl.’ The reception desk was comprised of two curved metal slabs between which stood a device like a huge holographic aquarium. A plump middle-aged woman stood behind it, her hair tied up and dyed copper red, and flashed a warm smile that lit up a face which might otherwise have looked somewhat severe. She gave Rinako the same smile.

‘Mari, how’s tricks?’ Said Kurama.

‘Ohhh, rent goes up, salary stays the same, you know how it goes.’

He leant on the desk and pulled out his id. A series of blue tokens blinked into existence above it, spinning for a moment before cascading into the aquarium where they floated briefly then vanished with a descending glissando. Each of them had been empty.

‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll turn around soon.’ She winked at him, and tapped something on her data pad. The aquarium flickered green and returned to its initial state.

Kurama smiled at her. As he put away his id, Hashimoto and his friends passed by in the opposite direction. ‘Just donuts, eh?’ He called out. Laughter filled the corridor.

Mari looked up and shouted after him. ‘He pulled a thousand times more than you in his first month.’

Her face slowly returned to Kurama, the anger falling from it as though someone had removed the source of some force that had been acting upon it. She pouted and leant over the desk as though talking to a child who had just scraped his knee. ‘Don’t you listen to them. It’s just a bad run.’ She held out a grey card.

Kurama smiled again and took the card. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mari.’ .

As they turned away, she called out. ‘Oh, Chief wants to see you! Good luck!’

‘Yeahhh, I heard.’ He held up the hand holding the card.

***

‘And what were you doing?’ Chief Goda waited a second but before they could answer, continued, ‘—traipsing around Chinatown doing enforcers’ jobs. You know I had Chief Itari on the line all morning on about it.’ He ran his hands through his slick, thinning hair. ‘Listen, I got enough with provisional government, I dont need internal tangles as well.’

‘It was geist related—‘

‘Oh—you think this was premeditated? What do you want to do, ‘bring it in for questioning’?’ He pointed to a large white cube in the corner of the room. ‘Maybe I can get the holo-copier to interrogate it!’

He paused, closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose. ‘They’re bugs, Kurama. Just glitches in the light. We break them.’

‘Yeah.’ Kurama’s voice was quiet.

The Chief looked down at a report on his desk. ‘Now I have to explain to Commisioner Kobayashi why we lost another one to Research. They’re already diverting half of next quarter’s funding to the Alt Div.’

‘They just came out of nowhere, sir, dropped out the sky—‘ and then as if to himself. ‘—we had it.’

‘Well, apparently not.’ He looked up. ‘And you’re supposed to be setting an example to Fukuyama for Stack’s sake.’ He gestured toward Rinako.

‘Like Hashimoto…’

‘You could learn something from Hashimoto. His team cleared 200 this month.’

Rinako stood just behind Kurama, feeling all of a sudden like the child in a messy custody hearing. She decided against correcting her name.

The chief leant back in his chair, again running his hands through the sparse hair at the sides of his head. ‘Listen. What happened to Ida... ‘ he shook his head. ‘I know you liked him. We all did. But you can’t—things move on.’

Rinako sensed that Kurama’s body had stiffened.

There was a long pause in which no one in the room looked at each other. Then the chief spoke.

‘How’s the other lead going?’ He narrowed his eyes and waved a hand trying to remember. ‘The err... Roppongi Hills… ’

‘Ten Skies—‘ started Kurama.

‘Ten Skies City!’ The chief’s eyes flicked open. ‘Now that’s a case with some upside.’ He waved his finger. ‘Put your focus into that.’

Kurama remained silent as the chief scratched his head distractedly, looking into the distance. ‘The family’s big in that Pharma corporation, you know the advert…’ He started humming a halting slightly out of key melody. ‘Inter—‘

Kurama looked up at this. ‘Intraderma?’

Rinako looked at him, somewhat surprised. He didn’t seem like the type of guy to keep up with trends in cosmetics brands.

‘Intraderma!’ The chief snapped his fingers. ‘There you go, already a step ahead.’

Kurama stood thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Ok.’

‘Great! Wait—Ok?’ The chief’s smile had barely lasted a second.

‘Yeah, sure. Ten Skies.’ Kurama was already turning to leave.

‘You’re going to leave this Chinatown thing alone?’ The chief called after him.

‘Sure. It’s like you said, lot of upside.’

The chief’s hands clasped over his stomach, his fingers twitching. ‘Well. Ok, then.’

He wore the expression of a man who’d just won first prize in a competition then remembered he’d never entered.

***

The Central Processing building existed on several pseudo levels that were connected by a few elevator ‘shafts’. Rinako looked at the buttons for the floors. Rather than physical floors, she knew they actually corresponded to different hues of light-space. They were standing in a capsule that converted the micro-frequencies of their bodies to those matching the desired location. The square button for B1 lit up around its edges. She tried not to think that at that moment the slight vibration she could feel was not that of an elevator descending down its shaft but the machine in which she stood altering the cellular structure of her body, like one of Kurama’s packs of instant ramen.

This style of building saved space in the physical world but filled the mental one with all kinds of background stresses when you weren’t used to it. But then it really wasn’t too different from solid-space. If you thought all the time that you were standing on a spherical mass suspended in a lifeless void and sustained only by some miraculous (—or fluke, depending on how you looked at it—) conjunction of astronomical circumstances which might at any moment give way to the unyielding indifference of universe x time, you’d go insane.

Man cannot hold up the world, the world holds him. She was sure she remembered that from a book on metaphysics she’d read during her junior year. Or was it a perfume advert…

With the customary ding they stepped out into the dingy concrete corridors of the basement area. Here were the vehicle storage bays and several departments that it had been decided could function without the basic aesthetic considerations of those on the floors above. Soft bleeping and the light from green and blue screens issued from doorless entrances as they walked past. Rinako peered inside one. It was true. No one who chose the haircuts of the technicians she saw staring blinking at screens within could have any use for aesthetics.

A noise drew their attention to a doorway up ahead. A metal dais floated out of it into the corridor in reverse, with what appeared to be the slender body of a teenage girl in a white pair of shorts and vest sitting cross legged on top of it. She was typing one-handed onto a small data pad on her lap, her other arm extended toward them ending in a clenched fist. The typing hand reached occasionally for whatever snacks were in the packet beside it. Her face was obscured by… Rinako felt a sharp pain in her head. She looked to Kurama for a moment to check she wasn’t hallucinating.

‘Hurry up, Kurama.’ The voice was familiar…

‘It’s her! From the… ”

‘Rinako, Chizuru. Chizuru, Rinako.’ Said Kurama and took whatever it was that had been in the girl’s outstretched hand.

Her neck was plugged into a mass of wires and cables that coiled like vines around a central mechanism rising into a rail on the ceiling. It was the woman from the display at Kingfisher’s. Not exactly someone you forget. Rinako looked up and saw that the rails went everywhere, criss-crossing the ceiling, presumably so that she could slide around scaring the drak out of people. The cables nearest the doorway were pulled taut.

Chizuru. So this was the voice in the earpiece. She’d been here a week and hadn’t see the woman at the other end of line until now.

‘Nice to put a name to a — uh, hi.’ Rinako noticed a pink bear mascot hanging from the side of the dais.

Chizuru’s metallic headpiece inclined at her blankly.

Rinako looked to Kurama.

‘Don’t worry, she’s always like that.’ He looked at something in his hand and his eyes widened.

‘Chizuru, you’re a genius!’

‘This is true.’ She removed another little snack from the packet, and her hand disappeared for a moment beneath the rim of her helmet before reappearing, snackless. The sound of tapping keys continued throughout, her other hand typing like a little dancing spider.

Kurama’s expression turned to a frown. ‘But don’t you need decryption keys for this?’

The tapping sped up. ‘So lame. They stopped using those years ago, old man. Nowadays everythings modular. You create your own pass. It was the same authentication he used to lock us out.’

She sat typing a few moments longer. ‘Ok, I’m going now.’

Rinako looked after her as she floated back into the room from which she came. It was filled with other techs in separate compartments, all plugged into machinery that connected to a huge central tree-like mainframe twinkling with lights, though Chizuru seemed to be the only one with her own floating platform. Holo screens were scattered around the room depicting what appeared to be maps, the locations of a few of which she recognised by the bends of the river passing through them, except that over the streets and buildings were hundreds of isomorphic contour lines like those that normally represent altitude. Except these were shifting continuously as she watched, switching between instances as though in stop motion.

‘Wha—’ she looked up but Kurama had already disappeared around the corner at the end of the corridor.