AMON? texted Rick, his eyes wide and twitching with alert. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
U EEGNORED MAI MAYSAJ LAYST NAIT & DIDNT PIKK UUP 2DEH. WAI R U STIL HEER EEN YER APPARTMAYNT? WBLOJ![1] DU U HAYV-
Amon’s airtyping was cut short when the woman let go of Rick, turned around and their eyes met.
He couldn’t believe it was her after all these years. The petite physique: her breasts small but upright and shapely; her waist, almost tiny enough to hold in one hand, looking fragile yet endowed with a powerful core. The sharp, refined jaw-line and nose; the vivid, papaya-pink lips; the incisive dark-brown eyes that seemed to peer into the essence of each moment. And her hair… her one-of-a-kind hair, like mahogany laced with hot mercury; bangs making a line above her eyebrows; the rest, falling all the way to her midriff, parted back to front by her shoulders.
“Mayuko?” he said, forgetting to text.
Mayuko wore a dress with a black and white pattern of warped, squiggly checkers like a cubist painting. From a necklace of fine silver links, a circle of black beads with a white rose in the center hung to her bosom. To Amon’s surprise, he had access to her inner profile just as in the old days, and could see beneath her graphical makeup to the flaws of her naked face. She looked tired in a way he had never seen in her before. The early divots of frown lines were beginning to form between her eyebrows, she had pale rings under her eyes, and there was a slight sag to her cheeks as though weighed down with resignation.
“Amon…” she said, a complex look of sadness, wonder, and disbelief in her eyes.“How strange…”
“So you finally took up my invitation to come for a visit,” said Rick. “What do you think of my new place?” He gestured around with his pointed chin. His tone was indignant, but his usually flushed cheeks were almost crimson.
Mayuko stared at Amon and blinked slowly, her eyelids apparently hindered by that same resignation, and Amon stared blankly back.
Just then he felt a tingling sensation in his legs and a hoarse male voice shouted, “Your stop!” in his ear. He flicked his fingers to clear away Rick’s apartment. His attention prompter—Mindfulator—had detected the arrival of his stop and delivered a mild current of electricity to his legs along with an audio warning.
Amon quickly shouldered his way to the doors, stepped onto the platform, and trudged in line up the moving lane of an escalator.
When he pulled up Rick’s apartment again, they were gone.
3
CHIYODA, GATA TOWER
Amon wove down a wide hallway through a deluge of commuters and poured out with them through the high stone archway of Tokyo Station, onto the streets of Chiyoda.
Beyond the field of bobbing heads that surrounded him, he could see huge skyscrapers sprawling endlessly in all directions, their every wall and window covered in a motley sheen of entertisements: a multiracial choir sang hand on breast beneath the holy glow of an insurance brochure; a red, hazy eye outlined in infrared rocketed through tight stone tunnels; fingers tore open a teabag-sized pouch in a car and released thousands of insectile robots that swarmed over seats and the dashboard, sucking up dust. Moving images rippled up, down, and across the sleek angular contours of these many rising shafts, like shifting patterns of light on the surface of a lake. A dazzling confluence of wardrobes and slogans and machinery and wild beasts—anything and everything imaginable that could sell action—emerged and dissolved, flowed and stalled, the borders between the manifold segments so blurry they melded into one scrambled whole that pervaded the cityscape.
Peeking from slim cracks in the skyline above, the InfoSky stretched bright and clear, a cinematic quilt of promotional narratives, each patch blinking and shifting across the heavens from one channel to the next. Gangster flicks were sewn to wedding dress shoppers stitched to smiling hedge fund managers, the cacophonous burble of their ephemeral soundtracks drifting down to the city like divine revelations vying for minds.
To his immediate left, Amon could see the red-brick walls of Tokyo Station. To his right, a jam of freshly-buffed, immaculate cars inched bumper-to-bumper along the road. Ignoring the relentless barrage of sensations striking him, he kept his attention on navigating to the office and directed his gaze down to the infosidewalk. It was divided into a grid of concrete tiles slightly larger than his foot. The tiles were owned by different companies, and to help him decide which ones to step on, he used the latest version of ScrimpNavi; an application that calculated the cheapest route to any destination. Arrows color-coded according to price blinked on the ground before the tramping dress shoes and clacking stilettos that kept advancing just ahead of him. Red arrows marked the most expensive tiles, purple the mid-range, and blue the cheapest. Amon kept his eye on the blue arrows, looked to where they pointed beyond the line of advancing legs, and stepped on the ensuing tiles as soon as they appeared, careful not to land on cracks and pay double.
Each tile was overlaid with a glowing, see-through picture like an ectoplasmic spray-paint mural. The tiles on his trail displayed the proprietary images of TTY. If he hit them successively with the right timing, the pictures would animate into a continuous video, like film cranked through a projector. On the first tile, a pre-teen girl held a glass bottle filled with dense mist. In the next, she twisted off the top. Then she looked in wonder as the mist stayed inert beneath the bottleneck. Bringing the bottle above her lips, she tipped it back. The mist hit the rim threshold in slow-mo, transforming into golden liquid that poured through the air into her mouth. She wore a look of ecstasy as a nimbus cloud coalesced around her. The cloud carried her into the InfoSky. Cloud9 Nectar, written in clouds. An orgasmic female voice whispered Blissing Refreshment. The following tile indicated by the blue arrow had the same image he had started with, depicting the girl holding a mist-filled bottle. And when he stepped on it, the pattern began to repeat.
Watching the same video again and again was irking but also rewarding. Every ten tiles or so, silver numbers blossomed out of nowhere above the head of the person immediately in front of him. 10 points. 100 points. Double bonus! Users who connected tiles owned by a particular company earned gaming currency, which could be exchanged for money. By transforming a walk down the street into a game, the companies propagated product awareness, and made using their properties fun, with rebates as an additional incentive for returners.
Now and again, tiny white arrows popped up to point his eyes away from the ground and towards surfaces devoid of images that appeared along his path: a patch of asphalt in the gutter, an alleyway wall, a storefront window. These bare spaces lacked added-value media, incurring even cheaper viewing charges than most people. He glanced at them whenever they appeared in positions that he could see in his peripheral whilst continuing to stay on course, his eyes and feet following divergent directives for the common cause of frugality.
He tried his best to appear to walk casually, so that a very slight meander was visible in his gait but, he hoped, never quite a noticeable zigzag. This was to hide his budgeting from nearby colleagues who might assume he had financial troubles, which he didn’t. He was just saving up for something important—something he would even die for if need be—and every little bit counted.
The shock of what Amon had seen in Rick’s apartment was still fresh in him. It lingered beneath his skin like an electric charge in metal after a lightning blast. Rick and Mayuko. Mayuko and Rick. Amon wasn’t sure how to name what he was feeling. Jealous? Envious? Betrayed? Such petty emotions led to nothing but irresponsible spending, and mechanically obeying the guidance of ScrimpNavi was all he could do to fend them off. Putting one foot in front of the other, purposefully and precisely, helped take Amon’s mind away from his troubles and kept these inchoate feelings from festering into distracting worries… for the time being at least.