IGMS Issue 11 Read online

  She finished high school two years ahead of me and left LaGrange for Mount Holyoke College. I'd known for some time that she did not intend to return. She had inherited a great deal of money, which made it possible for her to pursue her studies without pause. But she kept in touch with us over the years as she bounced from one university to another, gathering post-graduate degrees like daisies.

  My early letters were filled with gossip about the home folks she'd known. When I wrote that I had decided to study law, she responded with a postcard. It had but one word on it: "Brava!"

  In time, her letters came less frequently, and I answered them after months rather than weeks. By the time I was admitted to the bar, our correspondence had stopped altogether. Her phone call on Christmas Eve 1971 was the last. She seemed content with her life. But she sounded as driven as ever. It was an awkward conversation and we ended it with a hasty exchange of pleasantries.

  My occasional attempts to reconnect went unanswered. She lived in her lab. But then, what did we really have to talk about? It was enough for both of us to know that the other was alive and in pursuit of her own happiness.

  I was a young widow with two teenage boys when I was appointed to the bench. After nearly four decades as a state court of appeals judge, I was looking forward to a long, pleasant retirement spent playing with my grandchildren and digging in my garden. But those joys didn't wear well for me. I suppose, in retrospect, I was as driven as ever Karin was.

  I accepted an urgent request from the United Nations to join the World Court. I was assigned to the 12th Tribunal in Kampala, Uganda. The speed with which these events occurred was dizzying. The Court was soon forced to hold round-the-clock hearings to accommodate the rapidly growing numbers of desperate people who were surrendering to UN authorities. The vast majority of them insisting they were guilty of "crimes against humanity."

  A few of these self-confessed criminals were so old that their names and crimes had been long forgotten and most evidence and documentation buried among the dust-covered boxes of moldering files in storerooms at The Hague.

  In Kampala, I presided over the trials of frightened, wretched men -- many with bony growths on their misshapen, ulcer-ridden heads, and thick, leathery tails packed uncomfortably into their trousers. And others who were terrified that they too would succumb to the same mysterious and untreatable affliction.

  I dropped Karin a post-card the other day. It had but one word on it: "Brava!"

  Tekkai Exhales His Avatar

  by Tony Pi

  Artwork by I-Wei Huang

  * * *

  Well into the ninth year of Tekkai's incarceration, Kagami Maeda came again to tempt him. Twice before, the World Priority officer had asked him to inform on his old comrades. Twice he had refused her. He blamed her still for robbing him of freedom, for tearing him from the electric ecstasies of the Floating Worlds.

  Yet Maeda had promised to show him what his boy looked liked now in his teens, if he but listened. With nine lost years and twenty to go, Tekkai feared the gnaw of years on the memories of his son. At last, he mulled Maeda's offer.

  The guard shoved Tekkai into a musty interrogation room, a stark affair in cracked cement with a two-way mirror giving the cramped chamber the illusion of greater width. Kagami Maeda sat poised behind a desk of aged wood, the crest of the Priority on her grey suit iridescent under the flickering light. The thin, angular woman's neuro-rosette glinted like a silver third eye between her eyebrows.

  Having only seen crystalline models before, Tekkai studied Maeda's metallic rosette. The reflective 'eye' transfixed him with its seeming gaze. He knew well that the device did not see, per se; it simply tapped into the user's five senses and fed the data into the mimicstreams. Still, the mere idea that the eye was staring through his flesh made his hackles rise.

  "Leave us," Maeda said to the guard. Then she looked at Tekkai and gestured at the rickety stool across from her. "Prison has not been kind to you, Ryo Takahashi. Please, sit."

  He straddled the seat and slammed his calloused hands on the table. "Call me Tekkai." It was his Immortal name, his hacker's handle, although that archaic term was far from accurate. In the world of the mims, virtuosos like him styled themselves after bandit kings and gods, twisting the system to sate their pride and greed. Tekkai's vice was his affection for the forbidden art of viruses, for which he had a divine talent. But twelve years ago, when a data-theft uncovered the true atrocities behind the rise of the new world government, the honorable among them vowed to bring down the Priority together, and thus were the Immortals born. "What will you have me do, and what will it cost me?"

  "Nothing but a friendship already dead, Tekkai," Maeda said. "Find Gama in the Floating Worlds and trace his physical coordinates. That's all we ask."

  Tekkai's hands clenched. Gama was the third of seven names in his nightly mantra, one of the Immortals who might have betrayed him nearly a decade ago, sending in the tip that took him from his son. If he could corner Gama, he might force the truth from him. "Why me? I haven't immersed in the mimicstreams in years. Surely advances in that technology have long outstripped my skills. What can't your cadres of Priority agents handle better?

  "Your code was the basis for many of the Immortal tricks, was it not?" Maeda asked.

  "Allegedly." Tekkai thumbed the spot of bare skin between his knitted eyebrows.

  "Even our best cryptographers couldn't break your sennin encryption. Besides, who would know Gama and his tricks better than a fellow Immortal?"

  Tekkai could not argue with her logic. He rubbed the ki-rin tattoo on his forearm. "What's Gama done, aside from the usual felonies, I mean?"

  "Does it matter?" Maeda thrust a fist before him and revealed what she hid in her palm: a hexagonal neuro-rosette with fern-like dendrites in a familiar pattern. "Taste Immortality again, Tekkai." She set the rosette on the tabletop within easy grasp.

  The crystal was his personal design, of that there was no doubt, state-of-the-art before his arrest. Tekkai fought the urge to take the rosette right then. Oh, he wanted to plant that third eye where his skin itched for it, but it had taken months of forced withdrawal in prison to break him of his addiction to the Floating Worlds. He liked to think he still possessed a pinch of self-restraint.

  With an extended finger, Tekkai traced an invisible spiral around his rosette, inching closer to touching it. "You promised me news of Ichiro."

  "Immerse with me and I will show you the digital captures, as promised," Maeda said.

  I need to see my son, Tekkai thought. And I also need the truth from Gama.

  He picked up the delicate crystal rosette, slicked the back of the interface with his tongue and adhered it to his forehead. The tickle of sensation hit that sweet spot for the first time in ages. "Show me."

  Maeda nodded, closed her eyes and interlaced her fingers again, entering a trance. Tekkai followed suit. He drew a deep breath and held it, disowning his flesh until he knew no existence save that single breath.

  Then, he exhaled his soul.

  As Tekkai immersed, the dark behind his eyelids flared into snow-blind brilliance, reshaping his sense of the world. A rotation of nine avatar skins billowed and shrank about Tekkai's point of reference, calling him to choose a body. Tekkai shed the default duplicate of his current physical form, his gaunt fifty-year-old flesh in the real world, and briefly donned the skin of the iron-crutched lame beggar he sometimes wore. In the end, he slipped into the young, barefoot incarnation of Tekkai of the Immortals, glorious in its strength.

  Beneath the traditional sennin leaf coat, the tattoos upon his Immortal form pulsed with trapped power. Some, like the lion-maned ki-rin, had been inked by a prison tattoo artist onto his physical body. However, those replicas on flesh could not match these vibrant icons on his virtual form. Others, like the frog on the back of his neck, had no solid-world counterpart as yet. He had been saving those for the latter years of his sentence.

  Once he settled into his avatar, the w
hiteness diminished to a dark void where countless streams of snow meandered every which way. Tekkai shook the gourd dangling from his rope-sash, making sure it was full.

  Maeda's avatar drifted before him in sitting pose. Tekkai smirked at his accurate prediction of Maeda's skin: but for a black suit with the lightning Priority crest in a shade of rust, and a sheathed pair of swords at her belt -- a katana and a wakizashi -- she was an exact copy of her physical self, from her shoulder-length black hair to her shapely legs. Like his avatar, her neuro-rosette did not manifest.

  "Katana against the sennin? I thought you knew better than that, Agent Maeda," Tekkai said. Normally, when an average user was "slain" in the mims, a failsafe subroutine protected the user from sensory overload, booting them from immersion until they could repair the avatar's matrix. However, the Immortals insulated against that virtual death, preventing them from being ousted from the system as a result of simulated damage. While this gave them their so-called Immortality, they could not override the sensation of pain.

  Maeda stood and drew her katana. She touched its edge to Tekkai's throat.

  Tekkai did not flinch.

  "Do not discount so quickly that which you do not understand," Maeda said. "It may have the shape of a sword, but it is not meant to end a life."

  She drew the polished blade quickly across Tekkai's neck, surprising him as the phantom steel sliced painlessly through his virtual flesh. The slow streams of snow sped into blurred lines of ice. Before Tekkai had a chance to react, Maeda had already sheathed the katana in its saya. The streams resumed their lazy course.

  Though he did not enjoy her demonstration, Tekkai admired the weapon's power. "The edge slows time for whatever you cut. Intriguing."

  Maeda pinched the thumb and forefinger of her right hand into the shape of a ring and blew through the center. Three crystal bubbles the size of a watermelons floated forth, holograms trapped within them.

  Tekkai studied the images. Ichiro, tall and lanky as Tekkai always thought he'd be. Ichiro reclining on a mim-arcade chaise, true eyes closed but third-eye gleaming. Ichiro strolling in the company of friends, in navy-blue school uniform with his student cap askew atop his shock of hair. Tekkai could see much of his younger self in the lad.

  "How are his grades?" he asked.

  "Your son placed in the top ninety-eighth percentile in the Academy entrance exam," Maeda replied.

  "Good, good." Tekkai nodded. "Is he happy?"

  Maeda shrugged. "As much as you might expect of a fifteen-year old."

  Tekkai studied the first bubble again. "Does he remember me?"

  "You could ask him yourself."

  Her words surprised him. "How? Does Ichiro have an avatar in the mims?" Perhaps he could send out a search algorithm

  "I mean we are prepared to grant you early parole."

  Tekkai's heart pounded. So that's the real lure, he thought. I might not betray Gama for a mere glimpse of Ichiro, but I might for freedom!

  The idea tempted him. For all he knew, his ex-wife Nanami had told Ichiro he was dead. There were so many apologies to make to his son, face-to-face. A reconciliation after nine lost years would be much to ask of Ichiro, but it was infinitely better than waiting twenty more years.

  However, Tekkai remained cautious. "You don't parole a felon convicted of data-plunder and viral-sabotage on a whim. Tell me why the Priority needs Gama so badly, Agent Maeda, or I will go no further."

  "It isn't what you think, Tekkai. We want to save Gama from himself."

  I don't believe you for a minute, Tekkai thought. "Your sudden compassion vexes me, Maeda. Since when do you care for the likes of us?"

  "Think what you will, but the Priority does not wish for any of its citizens to die, even the seditious ones."

  "Yet it does not flinch from crushing our spirits whilst we live," Tekkai replied, remembering the gauntlet of failed re-education games.

  "Let me show you otherwise. Come with me to the Floating Worlds," Maeda said.

  Her offer proved too tempting for Tekkai. Now that he knew what Ichiro looked like, he might be able to launch a search algorithm to find him. It would then take a simple utility to teleport to where his son was. He did not know what he would do when he found Ichiro, but meeting face-to-face with his avatar, even for a brief second, would ease his guilt.

  Tekkai nodded and conjured a flurry of virtual snow. The crystals swirled around Tekkai and Maeda's avatars and carried them through the dark void, immersing them into the torrent of snow that was the Floating Worlds mimicstream.

  The snow-devil left Tekkai and Maeda in the intersection of two boulevards in nighttime Ukiyo-Edo, between groves of cloud-raking neon bamboo and twin inverted obelisk arcologies balanced precariously on the points of needles. To the distant north, a painted mountain in the style of nishiki-e straddled the horizon. Long-deprived stimuli assailed Tekkai's senses: the whirl of a thousand hues, the mingled scents of green tea and cherry blossoms, the lick of the faux-spring breeze on his skin. Even that indescribable feeling of catching a fleeting apparition out of the corner of his eye. Tekkai shivered from these remembrances of old, fond things.

  And yet the streets remained oddly silent for the virtual city, which normally, at any point during the day, boasted the hustle and bustle of true-world Tokyo. Tekkai surveyed the fantastical cityscape, from the rumbling Arch of Cascades in the east to the bright Shrine of Cranes in the west.

  "Where is everyone?" Tekkai asked.

  "Project Mirrorstream," Maeda answered. "Has news of it trickled into prison?"

  "Can't say it has. Mimicstream upgrade?" Tekkai strode eastward with purpose.

  "So to speak. With the rise of a global government, the World Priority has decided to combine the thousands of mimicstreams into a single, unified stream," Maeda said, following him.

  "Why would you want to do that?" Tekkai asked, though he could guess. No doubt the Priority hoped to eliminate all mims except for one they would control. "The strength of the mims is in their diversity. Xanadu, Yggdrasil, Scheherazade, the Floating Worlds. Each unique, each rightfully proud."

  "But having separate mims fractures the databank of sensory data," Maeda said. "Where are we going, by the way?"

  Tekkai sighed and stroked his beard. "Allow me at least one indulgence?"

  "Which is?"

  "Food of the gods." He led Maeda down a narrow side-street paved with lava-veined cobblestones. "Go on."

  "Every bit of information captured by a rosette teaches the mim to define its world better, but the data remains scattered," Maeda continued. "Suppose we merge the streams into one. A billion third-eye feeds, all contributing to a single, perfect model of Earth. This new virtual world will mirror the real one in its unimaginable diversity."

  Tekkai laughed. "That's the Priority's concept of an ideal virtual world? A copy of this one? What's the point of staying within real-world limits when you can bend reality and pretend to be a god?" Citizens drunk on dreams of utopia might believe Maeda's simplistic answer, but he remained unconvinced.

  "Flavor simulations true to countless dishes. High fidelity weather simulations. Replicating the fragrance of a rare orchid, when and wherever you desire," Maeda said, ticking off each example on her fingers.

  Tekkai gestured back towards the precariously balanced arcologies. "That is the power of the virtual! Could architects manage such marvels in the true Tokyo? I think not. Where else can you find the splendor of the Floating Worlds but in a magical place like this? Only here can we can shed the chains of our flesh and seek transcendence."

  "We're not saying that physical laws won't ever be broken," Maeda said. "Once the mims have been consolidated into the core-world Mirrorstream, functions like controlled avatar transport, perception filters, et cetera, will be added. Licensed substreams would draw from the same source code."

  "Sounds more like you want to stifle individuality and control creativity. What else has the Priority planned for the Mirrorstream, Maeda? New intrus
ion countermeasures to cripple the Immortals?"

  "A unified world culture will emerge whether you like it or not," Maeda said.

  Tekkai spied a deserted ramen shop. "Ah, here we are. I'm dying for some tonkotsu-ramen. Like some?"

  Maeda frowned. "It isn't even real."

  "The bowl of noodles might be virtual, but the taste is authentic. Isn't that all that matters?" Tekkai availed himself of the kitchen. "How does Gama fit into all this?"

  Maeda pulled a stool up to the ramen-bar. "Project Mirrorstream is ready to launch. The only problem is, to merge the streams means erasing all extant mims. Anyone still connected during the process may suffer irreparable brain damage. We've evacuated almost all users from the mims twenty-four hours ago, but there remains some resistance."

  "Gama," Tekkai guessed. It took a minor conjuration to assemble a bowl of tonkotsu-ramen for himself.

  Maeda rested her elbows on the table. "We do not understand his death wish. He and a small group of insurgents refuse to leave the Floating Worlds, and the mim-sys is so corrupted by Immortal tampering that we can't force them out."

  "You can't postpone the upgrade?" Tekkai asked.

  "No. The disruption of services has been planned since last year, and already we have extended it by an extra day. Any further delay would create chaos."

  "And we can't have that," Tekkai said in imitation of Maeda's intonation. He set the bowl of piping-hot ramen on the tabletop beside Maeda. "Even I can't repair a mim-sys in twenty-four hours."

  "All you need to do is to trace Gama's location. We will do a safe, physical disconnect. The Priority takes care of all its citizens."

  Like hell it did. "That's touching, but I don't care much for your brand of hospitality," Tekkai said. He perched on the stool beside Maeda, lifted the bowl with both hands and savored a sip of the miso soup base. "Mmm. It's been too long, too long."