“So the wheelchair is a lie,” said Jonah. “And I’d be willing to guess that you’re not blind either, are you?”
Himura smiled — and for the first time, Jonah felt he’d caught a glimpse of glinting eyes beneath the man’s pockmarked, mask-like face. “Everyone perceives what they wish,” he said. “It’s only a simple matter of finding the right words to form the illusion.” He leaned over his small mahogany writing desk and whispered into an unseen microphone. Jonah’s own synthesized voice echoed throughout the chamber, every syllable meticulously extrapolated from his spoken words since arriving on the superyacht. He could hear the fear in the transmission, his duplicated voice barely audible over the sharp retort of automatic gunshots in the background.
“Come in Scorpion! I’m under fire — Dalmar and Freya are dead — I won’t make it — retreat, retreat, retreat!”
And then Himura dug his fingers deep into a fold below his fleshy jawline and began to peel it away.
CHAPTER 25
Himura’s doughy, pockmarked face distorted as he grasped the fleshy fold beneath his neck. His sunken eye sockets stretched, the thin patch of long, stringy hair shifting on his scalp. And then the mask came free, sliding off his face as the man beneath stared at Jonah with penetrating, intelligent eyes. He was in his late forties with thick black hair and a thin beard, instantly recognizable as the intelligence officer who’d tormented Jonah and his crew on the deck of the Scorpion what seemed like a lifetime ago. Bits of latex clung to the man’s nose and ears; he absent-mindedly picked at them as his posture changed, drawing himself up to his full height.
“I think any new relationship must be built from a foundation of honesty,” said not-Himura as he gently folded the mask and placed it atop the ornate writing desk. “I will assume you recognize me?”
“I never forget an asshole,” said Jonah, arms crossed. “And I should have known this whole goddamn circus would come down to Scooby Doo masks. Do I still call you Himura?”
The man shrugged. “I’ve worn his face for so long I think I’ve earned the right. The first Himura died nearly a decade ago, a sudden and devastating loss of one of my nation’s most brilliant minds. What he lacked in heirs, he made up for with his vast fortune and a network of fanatical devotees. It was an unprecedented opportunity to reconstitute the greatest secret Japan has ever kept, perhaps even save my country. So I took his place, bided my time, and prepared for this day.”
“You did me a favor with that transmission to my crew, by the way,” Jonah said. “I don’t want them coming after me any more than you do.” He held one wheel of the chair in place and pushed the other, spinning in a slow, lazy circle, bare feet sliding across the cool bamboo floor. Jonah took in the incredible museum-like chamber within the superyacht, careful to steer well clear of the glass floor panels and the pulsating creature beneath them. “Hell, I would have made the call myself if you’d just asked nicely.”
“I eliminated a variable from the equation,” dismissed Himura. “But I am pleased that you approve — you may not believe this, but I do not wish any more death than absolutely necessary.”
Jonah gritted his teeth, eyes flashing with anger as he thought back to the carnage of the sunken fleet, the young sailors and refugees torn apart, burned, drowned. He shifted in the wheelchair as he took in the words, contemplating the ugly intersection between necessary and death.
Two of the massive interior screens displayed a live feed from the frozen banks of the passing Taedong River, endless farmlands blanketed in white, the wintery scene dotted by aging tractors, crumbling grain silos, and dark, snow-besieged houses. Others were angry maps of fighter planes, tank brigades, and troop movements — an entire third of the country was in chaos, with more cities enveloped by violence every passing minute. Jonah leaned back in the wheelchair and pushed hard, popping the front two wheels in the air and slamming them down again as the aging security guards looked on with extreme annoyance.
“The idea for Meisekimu came from the Americans,” said Himura as he quietly clasped his hands behind his back, watching the sea of information pour from the displays. “In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Coalition intelligence personnel established the most comprehensive understanding of the Iraqi command structure in history. It was a monumental task, an operation unprecedented in scope. Military databases grew to hold names, rank, tribal, and familial affiliations of nearly every Iraqi officer of consequence. The US preceded the invasion with a barrage of individualized phone calls, emails, and text messages to these men, their wives, their parents and children, all encouraging surrender without fighting, the return of any captured coalition personnel, the abandonment of their weapons of mass destruction. Although, perhaps, the final order is confusing in hindsight. When war came, only the few fighters with no possible future in the new Iraq stood their ground, while the rest simply melted into the population. I wondered if, instead of using this intelligence apparatus to cajole, to beg… what if these men were told? What if they received orders, individualized instructions from seemingly trusted sources, indistinguishable from the authentic? The only missing piece was processing power, a computational technology capable of not just compromising digital systems, but manipulating the men who relied upon them. That final piece fell into place when Himura’s gestational experiment in organic computation became mine. Born from decades of forbidden research dating to our wartime human experimentation in occupied China, Meisekimu uses her networked supercomputers to store and process raw data, but she herself brings the uniquely human genius of pattern extrapolation, intuition, and improvisation. She’s a mimic, seeking the vulnerabilities of any target, whether that target is a machine or a man. She can be a father, a commander, a trusted friend, seemingly real in every way but physical form. And then she speaks to them what they believe they already know — whispers of conspiracy, revolution, assassination, civil war. Meisekimu has written the greatest fiction in human history, a story where every North Korean fighting man thinks himself the hero, yet enslaves his will to my purpose. Beautiful, is it not?”
“I think you need to get out of your fancy-schmancy houseboat more often.”
Himura thought for the longest time before saying anything more. “I wouldn’t expect a man without a country to understand,” he finally said. “You cannot see what I see.”
“Strange turn of phrase for a guy who pretends to be blind.”
“What would you do as steward of a dying people?” whispered Himura. “Able to peer into a nation’s future, but unable to affect its unfolding history? Japan is a single generation from collapse. She will be the first to run out of food, out of fossil fuels, out of living space. Our young men won’t fight; our young women won’t bear children. Can you blame them? Their spirts are broken and they know they near the end — a million of them refuse to even leave their rooms, afraid of the world. They sooth themselves with children’s games and animated television programs, rotting our race from within, destroying our future. We cannot survive the coming ravages of climate change, resource scarcity, or political upheaval in this weakened state. And what is the response from our leaders? They’ve allowed every nation to copy our manufacturing, steal our technology, undercut our wages, bet against our currency, mock our culture, besiege our waters, leaving us with shrinking international influence and endless economic stagnation. Our birth rate has collapsed, and in just fifteen years our numbers will have shrunk by a third or more. We’ve been under the umbrella of greater nations for so long that we can no longer even hold it ourselves. We’re a withering people atop a doomed island chain. Our only hope is conflict. We must live as conquerors once more, or we must die as warriors.”