After finishing his coffee, Amon stacked the dishes and took them to the sink. As he wiped his plate down with a sponge, he began to consider his employment prospects. There was no going back to GATA, that was for sure. If he could expose the hidden corruption festering at the core of government and industry, he might one day restore everything that had been taken from him, including his career. But he would need to gather more evidence and seek out well-placed allies. Such an endeavor would require time and funding, so the first step had to be rebuilding his savings. My savings! My savings! screeched an agonized voice through the lips of an open wound in his soul. I sacrificed every waking moment of the last seven years for that savings, every breath and blink, and it all came to nothing. This was the voice of despair, Amon knew. He could ignore its words, but not the ache of self-pity, shame, and loss it spoke up for.
Wherever he applied, he would enter the job market a clean slate: with no letter of recommendation and no experience. For if he mentioned his previous life, word might one day leak out to GATA and Fertilex, who would track him down in a flash. Lacking a past, he might try impersonating a fresh BioPen graduate, partaking in newbie training programs for newbie pay. Alternately, he could find a forge artist in hackspace and buy a professional profile that would communicate his skill set. Aron Kenzaki. Security guard/database analyst. Guised in a new digimake, he would send out resumes that reflected what he could do, if not who he was. Then he might have a shot at something better than a starting salary. But whichever path he chose—faking his youth or his past—he could never hope for the prestige and incentive he’d once had. And even if the deception was never discovered, always he would be hounded by the awareness that every one of his achievements was founded on lies. Compared to the life built of honesty and diligence that he’d lost, the future awaiting him seemed hollow and fragile, a porcelain manikin in a man’s suit. No, it would be worse, he realized, for his empty existence would be further tainted by unease, maybe paranoia, as the specter of one day being tracked down haunted him forever.
Once he’d dried the dishes with a towel and put them into the cupboard, he turned around and noticed a grayish-silver light seeping through the window. Walking over, he stood with his face up to the glass and looked out. A faint, iridescent field of InfoRain still hazed all of space outside, but now that the condensation had cleared, he could see just how high he was. Looking down, an intricate system of suspended tracks and scaffolding tangled its way to the street below, a multitude of aerodynamic forms pulsing along knots of steel at high velocity. Inside crescent-shaped cracks and slivers in this curving structure, tight streams of specks and oblong dots that must have been people and cars squirmed constantly into view and then out again. According to ScrimpNavi, he was seventy stories up.
Mayuko is paying for a room with a view, he realized. And what a view it was. None of the surrounding buildings reached their apartment: the tallest one across the street stopped several stories short. With no obstructions anywhere, Amon could see the whole metropolis stretched out before him, an endless vista of info-slathered rooftops rising to varying heights, like the steps of a staircase disassembled and scattered at random, leading nowhere. Graphical inducements fluttered rapidly between the shafts like bouncing pinballs beckoning the gambler to his next game. To center right, he could see the lavender and baby blue immensity of GATA Tower looming over all, its tip swallowed in the swirling, hypnopromo of raining InfoClouds above. Poking up over the roofscape in its vicinity were the thirteen skyscrapers of The Twelve And One, their heights relative to each other just as difficult to ascertain from this vantage as any other. Labels popped up over particular swathes of buildings arrayed around these financial monoliths, indicating the names of districts: Chiyoda, Shibuya, Kabukicho, Jinbocho, Akihabara, Tsukuda, Tsukiji, Kiyosumi, Kanda, Ginza, Shinbashi. The list went on and on. Amon felt like he’d visited so many places in the last two days, but now he realized that it had been a mere speck of this vast amorphous adscape called Tokyo. Its roads and alleys and levels were too numerous and labyrinthine to traverse in a lifetime. Its veneer of imagery was too evanescent to observe even a minuscule fraction before the informational contours of the whole had been remade anew.
There was one area far to the left of GATA Tower that was unlabelled, and Amon wondered why, until he spotted a river running before it. From his vantage, the river looked like a thin silver thread peeking intermittently between roofscape cracks, but he knew that it was a mighty torrent when viewed up close. The Sanzu River, a massive watercourse, marked the border between Wakuwaku City and the District of Dreams on the opposite bank.
Amon had never before laid eyes directly on the District of Dreams, and allowed himself to gaze upon it for a time. To his surprise, it seemed well-maintained, the glass of the sleek skyscrapers sparkling clean as in any other area. The spectacle certainly didn’t resemble the filth and squalor depicted in the reports from aid groups that worked in the pecuniary retreats, and he wondered how much of it was digitally rendered. A society stranded from the global economy could never hope to procure enough resources for infrastructure upkeep, and he seriously doubted that charity could make up the difference. Then suddenly he had a chilling thought. Perhaps it was like one of those dictatorships he’d read about in the history books, where the border lands were lined with grand mansions, sumptuous gardens, and bright lights while the inner towns went dilapidated, the people starved, and blackouts rolled ceaselessly.
Wakuwaku City and the District of Dreams were two manmade islands that covered the northern section of what was once called Tokyo Bay. Until Mount Fuji and neighboring mountains in the Southern Alps were hollowed out about a decade earlier, Japan had always lacked space for waste storage and it had been common practice to dump in the sea. Over decades, most of the bay was filled in with household garbage, rubble from demolished buildings, and nuclear waste, before being sealed in concrete. The resulting landmass was separated from the rest of Tokyo by canals and divided east to west by the Sanzu River, an artificial confluence of various rivers that ran out to sea.
The two islands were originally owned by rival MegaGloms (the land had since changed hands so many times, Amon couldn’t recall which). Before the Free Era began, these MegaGloms rapidly threw up luxury condos all at once across their respective territories and competed with each other to attract buyers. The eastern island was integrated with the theme parks once running along the Boso Peninsula on the Chiba side of the bay. Officially it was called Minami Ward, but quickly became known as Wakuwaku City. With subsidies offered to residents for the inconvenience of living amidst rides and crowds, the units filled up quickly. Construction on the western half, however, was beset with numerous problems. Some of the contractors were found to be involved with the yakuza, funding mysteriously vanished, and crooked administrators set the prices inordinately high so they could skim a bit off the top. When the buildings stood in half-finished limbo for several years, tales about stretches of unclaimed urban territory began to reach the ears of the bankdead. Sick of huddling in the overcrowded shelters of areas like Ueno, many began to slip their way in. When the Fiscal Judiciary issued the controversial judgment that removing the squatters was the credicrime of ethnic cleansing, the property owners tallied these fines onto the already unmanageable debt from the construction debacle and decided to indefinitely postpone the grand opening. Instead, they struck a deal with the venture charities. Food and supply outposts moved shop, millions migrated from across Tokyo and Japan, and the District of Dreams became the most populous bankdeath camp in the world.