Henry

She wished she’d noticed the glass at first, might have saved her the jarring pain in the back of her head. The thing was pressed up against the inside of a blue lit glass chamber that reached nearly to the ceiling. What she had thought eyes were actually little suckers of some sort, around them the leaf like ends of lock smoky tendrils issued from a central… body, she supposed, though it was composed entirely of some kind of sticky smoke like substance that seemed to shift between gas, liquid and solid as a state of being. She noticed the smoke clung around the edges of the chamber curling up here and there, smaller structures articulating wherever it reached, like the minarets of some shadow city.

‘Henry is an Ekitaikatachi. They’re the simplest to look after.’ Itari held a hand up to the glass and a tiny smoky tendril pressed against it. ‘He exists at a very precise bandwidth, always on the edge of evaporation or solidification.’

‘You caught one!’ Said Rinako.

‘Not caught, induced.’

‘Putting aside that you’ve named it Henry for now…. you made this thing?’ Kurama had remained remarkably calm. He walked over to the glass and looked up at the creature, his reflection appearing in front of it.

‘Well, it was more the environment that I created.’

The liquid blue light from the chamber swam over Kurama’s face. The creature within flinched away from him.

He nodded and drew a breath. ‘Well, Itari. Congratulations. You’ve finally got rid of those annoying fragments of sanity you still had.‘

Itari walked to the far side of the room. ‘You see, research has focused on the conditions under which geists appear. But it’s not so much that they appear to us as we appear to them. Existence is really just a matter of overlapping territories.’

He came back with a small packet of a crystalline powder and emptied it into a sluice that folded out on the side of the tank.

‘This isn’t happening.’ Said Kurama. ‘Tell me you didn’t just feed your geist.’

‘Create the right environment…’ He pressed a switch and all around them the walls lit up. Rinako spun around. All around them, the surfaces of the walls, floor and ceiling were moving, tiny filament like shadows coiling and undulating, tangling and slipping between each other like some living evolving calligraphy. Like the walls were speaking to them. She realised that the entire room was housed between glass chambers.

Uhhh… why do I feel like I’m the one in the tank looking out?

‘Beautiful, isnt it?’

‘Not exactly the word I was looking for.’ Said Kurama

Itari no longer appeared to be listening. ‘Organisation is all life is. Just that which keeps itself from disappearing.’

He turned to Kurama. ‘Have you not noticed the similarities with ARPol? With any corporeal body that survives… there are divisions, sections devoted to various functions that take on whatever structure is conducive to the environment.’ He poked at the glass. ‘And what is existence but separation from the environment.’

Rinako looking up at the glass in the ceiling. There were shapes floating then dissipating, half structures appearing like knots in smoke. She watched as several strands intertwined and suddenly appeared as some kind of orchid-like flower.

‘Always finding a different solution.’ Itari was standing beside her so she could hear his breathing. She could imagine that living here would be like a kind of hypnosis.

Kurama broke the mood. ‘But what would be its purpose? I mean, if they’ve started acting in concert, why now?‘

‘What is the purpose of all things?’ Said Itari. ‘To survive. To expand.’

There was a burbling noise from the corner as Henry fluttered back into his tank, like a piece of cloth being sucked down a drain.

Kurama looked up. ‘To expand? You mean… an invasion.’

Itari traced a finger across the wall. ‘Do you know why Prosper’s Law came into being?’

Kurama looked puzzled. ‘To limit criminals use of light.’

‘No. It was to limit ours.’

A silence filled the room.

‘Prosper’s Law is not a matter of enforcement but physics. An individual’s light level may not exceed his own… because when it does he ceases to be an individual. The high level enforcers prior to the advent of the inspector-suits ended up in mental facilities or burned out from the inside.’

Kurama remained silent.

Itari crouched beside the wall tank. At the bottom a tiny shadowy knot had separated from the strands lining the base. Its surfaces were covered in barbed filaments. He gazed at it, the blue light reflecting in his eyes. ‘A single entity can only grow so much before its territory becomes greater than its ability to control it. It’s what happened during the East-Asian war. The old Chinese technocratic state fell apart because it’s ability to govern was dwarfed by the area it had to govern. It’s the single nation problem. What happened? Over time the Chinese who had populated the occupied nations ended up being the ones assimilated by the lands they had invaded. When the head grows too distant from the body...’

In the tank, a larger inky structure had appeared above the smaller one. The smaller one’s surfaces contracted and hardened preventing the larger from attacking. As they watched, the larger of the two hovered, its edges trembling until suddenly they spasmed into a set of barbed filaments identical to those the smaller had borne. The filaments sank into the body of the smaller one, and it began to shrink as the larger one grew.

Rinako thought of Salamon, his throat pulsing as he’d fed on the geist.

‘What is prey and what is predator becomes hard to determine. What has been consumed…’ the smaller structure disappeared, ‘and what is the consumer.’ The larger structure floated back toward the edges of the tank, the filaments still hanging from its body.

‘Aww.’ Said Rinako.

Itari stood again. ‘Since the discovery of s-light we have expanded aggressively throughout augmented space. The growth limit for an individual culture was reached decades ago.’

He turned back to Kurama, his face half in darkness and half lit with the blue of the tank. ‘We are the invaders.’

He broke into a smile. ‘But this is just theoretical. The geists are algorithmic formations, like the patterns of storms. Those patterns can cause some damage but they have no substance. Any invasion would have to be manufactured by us, and that would require a large scale response like nothing we have seen before.’

‘Large scale?’ Kurama looked at Itari.

A bad feeling had started to creep over Rinako.

Itari thought for a moment. ‘On the order of an entire army, specifically built to counter the geist threat.’

Kurama and Rinako looked at each other, the blue light of the tanks reflecting in their eyes.

‘But this is all just hypothetical.’ Smiled Itari.

‘Yeah. Hypothetical.’ Said Kurama.

***

Outside it had began to snow again. The white sky was showing through the walkways above so that it seemed like little pieces of it were falling all around them. Rinako looked up at the enormous gothic structure they had just left. ‘Who is he anyway?’

Kurama was smacking and shaking his comm, trying to get it to work. ‘He used to work with Takeru in Tech. Was kind of his boss. But, err, Takeru and him didn’t exactly see eye to eye.’

‘I’m shocked.’

‘Yeah. He’s a good guy, just a little… ‘

‘Horrifying?’

‘I was going to say off-center, but horrifying is good.’

There was a scratching whining noise as the comm sprang back into life. ‘Officer Kurama. Return to central office immediately.’

He looked up at the criss crossing roads above them. ‘I guess Goda watches the news after all.’