Old Blue Eyes

‘Whether it’s a bad business deal or that child’s birth you missed at the golf course, some moments you want to remember and some you just want to forget. Well, with Intraderma’s proprietary new cogni-prove technology, now you can have it all—‘

‘Alright, alright, I get the picture.’ said Kurama.

Rinako flipped the prospectus over. They’d been waiting on the central landing to the main stairs for some time. An arched balcony was just behind them. The mists here had thinned to clouds so that the view was like looking out over endless meadows of fluffy white. The air was so fresh and pure it felt like this was where the rest of the city was imagined.

‘Guess we’ve been forgotten.’ Said Kurama.

Rinako looked back into the house. It was filling up. A tall woman with a permanent pout looked at them as she sashayed down the stairs.

‘Didn’t she say this was a shareholders meeting?’ The clutches of people scattered around the main lobby were sipping drinks, their voices echoing from the marble walls. The blue lights of the servant guards’ eyes punctuated every other wall.

‘Alright. Guess I’ll go speak to her.’ Kurama had spotted Lady Takahara by the entrance to an enormous corridor. Everywhere was cut at modernist angles, open huge spaces in planes of solid charcoal or white or umber.

Rinako followed after him. ‘What are you going to do?’ They nodded at guests as they walked.

‘I don’t know. Improvise, I guess.’

‘Great, as long as you have a plan…’

‘Stop worrying. We’ve already confirmed the booking times at Intraderma.’

He plucked one of the aperitifs from a tray as the butler walked past on the broad staircase. The butler snorted derisively.

‘But we dont have any evidence yet…’

‘So I’ll just use my natural charm.’ Kurama turned to face her as he descended to the lobby.

Suddenly he stopped, a hand on his chest. A man with a thin beard and moustache wearing a green velvet suit stood before him, cane in hand, eyeing him from head to toe.

‘Sooo authentic.’ After a few moments he looked Kurama in the eye. ‘You must be the prospectors Osbeth was talking about.’ His eyes flashed malevolently, and he whispered in Kurama’s ear. ‘Several here you might want to look into…’

‘I’m looking at one right now.’

The man lifted his hand as though it had touched a hot plate and the continued on through the lobby. This was the second entrance to the house and a vast abstract sculpture somewhere between poured bronze and a top heavy boulder took up most of the space.

‘—these people are NUTS.’ Said Rinako. ‘I mean, not even a little eccentric, genuinely fruit-loop bat-shit crazy…’

‘They’re a little odd.’ said Kurama.

‘A little—‘ as she spoke a young woman in a ridiculous black peacock feather hat passed staring at her, a black eye mask held in front of her face on a tall stick. Rinako shook her head.

I’m gonna need a memory graft after this.

They heard Lady Takahara’s shrill voice as they approached. She was speaking with a couple of older Japanese men. ‘Ah, officers. How lovely that you could join our little soirée.’ She said. The men bowed.

‘Nice little meeting you got going on.’ Said Kurama. 

‘Ahhh… you know…’ she waved her hands around. ‘We do what we can.’ She turned to the men, smiling. ‘And Takeshi does so like to see the people he’ll be working with.’

The butler passed again, and Kurama plucked another snack from his tray. He looked at it for a moment puzzled, then shrugged and popped it into his mouth. ‘Yeah, where is old Takeshi, now you mention it?’ He spoke as he chewed the whatever-it-was and looked around. ‘Haven’t seen him mingling anywhere?’

‘Ahhh hahaha, the Chairman is taking care of some business.’ She smiled bending to one side, then leant back to Kurama and hissed: ‘Shouldn’t you be somewhere, finding this geist? Somewhere else.’

He was licking his fingers. ‘Mmm, yeah, we’ll be right on that.’ He wiped his fingers on his shirt. ‘So uh, we just have a couple of things to iron out here first, you know, paperwork…’

‘Well be quick about it.’ Lady Takahara looked back at the two men and laughed again, as though they needed topping up every so often. Her eyes darted around the other guests, though at no one in particular. ‘I cant be seen with you. This is a important event— ‘ she suddenly broke into a broad tortured smile and bowed as an elderly man and his wife passed by, arm in arm. ‘Akane-san… and Esmeralda, you look wonderful.’ The couple smiled and passed by, Lady Takahara’s smile vanishing with them.

‘Just get whatever you need, then please, get out.’

Kurama sucked the last of whatever he’d been eating from his fingertip and inspected it. ‘Ok.’

Rinako followed him down the vast corridor that led from the hobby. ‘Ok?’

‘You heard her, we have permission.’

‘Permission for what though?’

‘I was thinking we take a little look at the Chairman’s power board.’

‘The… power board…’

They took a sharp right at the end of the corridor. The walls here were covered in angular rock to give the feeling you were walking through a slate cliff face.

‘I was thinking,’ continued Kurama, ‘maybe it wasn’t just about erasing the boy genius’ memory. After all, some moments you want to remember, some you want to forget, right?’

Rinako looked at him.

‘—and then I remembered. Natsuki.’ He waved his finger, narrowing his eyes. ‘Something about that name rang a bell.’

Rinako kept glancing around in case any of the guests were listening.

Kurama opened a door that led to a maintenance stairwell.

How does he know his way around…

‘So I did a little checking…’

‘When was this?’ Said Rinako. She was getting a little sick of feeling like a spare wheel.

He waved a hand. ‘And it turned out, I had heard of him somewhere before. Natsuki Mitsuya. He’s the tech guy at Transdent.’

Rinako looked at him again.

‘VisAge’s biggest rival. They won a big contract last year to supply the v-ball championship.’

‘Ok. VisAge. So what?’

‘Intraderma is a VisAge subsidiary.’

They reached the bottom of the stairwell, and entered a brightly lit corridor finished in the cheap dull materials of any municipal building.

She recalled now how Kurama had reacted when the Chief had mentioned Intraderma. ‘Ok, ok, so VisAge is Intraderma, so what?’

He stopped outside the door to an electrical room and turned to her. ‘So.. Natsuki was all over the ads for the v-ball deal. You know why? Because he came up with some sort of pseudo-chip said to be faster than Visage’s s-light hardware. Something about simulated circuitry — anyway, it was enough to convince the v-ball leagues. I remembered because it was his name plastered up all over the sidings.’

She sighed. Ugh.

‘Hey, you can learn a lot watching v-ball.’

‘Right.’ She looked up at the sign for the electrics room. ‘Ok. Well, it makes sense. I just don’t see what it has to do with the power board.’

‘Those tablets you found, hydra-whatever…’

‘Hydrosetaline 255.’

‘Yeah. Well, I called Takeru back at the lab. He said there are several uses, mainly in the regression of light sickness but when I mentioned internal cosmetics he said there is one other application.’

Rinako stared.

‘To mitigate the risk of memory rejections.‘

‘Rejections… ‘

‘He wasn’t just losing memories. They were putting someone else’s in him. So I had another look at the data we pulled from Intraderma… there was a donor listed on the same day. Name withheld.’

He looked at Rinako. ‘What?’

‘And you’re just telling me this now?!’

‘Hey, you were looking at the outlet too!’

She closed her eyes. ‘Ok. Never mind that for now. What are we doing here?’

Kurama opened the door and they slid into the electrical room. There were several boards on the walls, displaying readings for all kinds of power systems in the building. He checked a scrap of paper he pulled from his pocket then started examining the boards.

‘So you think this was some kind of corporate espionage?’ Said Rinako.

‘I think… he stole something from Natsuki. An idea. I dont know how it happened exactly, maybe they invited him here to get him to come over, talks didn’t go so well...’

‘Ok. But then Takeshi still has this memory in his head.’

Kurama stood up for a second, holding up a finger. ‘That idiot has some advanced piece of technology stuck somewhere in his brain, completely unable to understand it. Like a… holoscreen… being watched by… lemurs.’

‘Lemurs..?’

He winced. ‘You know what I mean. It must be driving them crazy trying to get it out of him.’ He went back to the boards. ‘Not to mention, the proof of what they’ve done is sitting right there inside his head.’

Rinako thought for a moment. ‘But this is all speculation.’

Kurama pulled a lever, looked back at the scrap of paper then keyed something into the board. It was a date, she could see.

He leant back, hands on his hips and looked to the ceiling. ‘Thats why…’

Suddenly the lights turned off. There was only the light of the panels. The walls of the spare electrical room were lit a dark indigo, the pink and green waveform displays flashing intermittently.

‘The surgery was two days ago, the same day they called in the killing…’ he said.

‘So you think Natsuki was dead when they brought him in? That would mean Intraderma—but if he was dead—‘

Kurama was chewing his bottom lip, his face lit indigo, pink and green as he stared at the displays on the board. ‘That’s what we’re looking for. Takeru said the only way to retain the integrity of memories after death is by freezing the neural-core.’ He reached into a space in the board. ‘With solid-matter you freeze using temperature, with light—‘

‘Electrical charge maintains state.’ Rinako was staring into space. Her father had done something similar with their home mainframe. The drive had gone down during a power cut - it would often happen back then when there were storms. He’d been working on something and redirected storage to memory. He’d said it was all the same, you just had to make sure the memory was receiving power from its battery or it would lose whatever it was holding.

‘Like a snowman melting…’

‘What?’ Kurama was looking at her.

She snapped back to the room. ‘Nothing.’

He leant back into the board, squinting. ‘They’d have been rushing to get him plugged in as soon as possible. Every second that passes the brain loses pseudo-cells. But it takes a huge amount of power to maintain a complete neural core,’ his face strained even more as he reached further back, ‘somewhere in the local grid, there’d be a spike, which would trigger the safety and—‘

He pulled his arm out and held it aloft, a triumphant smile on his face. ‘An error tag!’

The door behind Rinako swung open.

She didn’t need to look to know that the humming which now filled the room was accompanied by several pairs of blue-lit eyes.