Junana
Bruce Caron
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2009/2010 by Bruce Caron
Disclaimer: Junana is a work of fiction. Any similarity or likeness to any events, locations, institutions, themes, persons, living or deceased, characters, and plot is purely coincidental and entirely fictional.
Some Rights Reserved
Released under Creative Commons license:
Attribution—Non-Commercial—Share Alike 3.0
Cover artwork: Photograph by Kris Krug. Used with Permission
Acknowledgements:
Junana is a work of fiction that describes an alternate present. Many of the technologies used in Junana are available in our present, but they have not been developed in ways that would create this other possible present. Should sufficient interest develop around the ideas within Junana, something like that present might show up in the future. These ideas, and also the many people who have helped the author to assemble them, are described on the Junana website: http://www.junana.com. Additional discussions about Junana are available on the Junana blog: http://www.junana.blogspot.com. Tinka is my muse and my love. She would awaken at 5:30 in the morning for work and bring coffee in to me; so she was my enabler in this act of fiction. Candace Lindquist took red pen in hand to prune away the thicket of copy errors in my typing and back-fill the lacunae in my grammar. She deserves special mention, although I take full credit for all remaining typos and grammatical slips.
Praise for Junana:
“In a society quickly shifting into an age of hyper-connectivity, Junana is a timely read. The narrative is as fast-paced and complex as our supermodern, technosocial lives. Caron creates a world so vivid and omniscient that one wonders if Caron is simply reporting on something that is already happening. Caron effortlessly handles multiple perspectives, social classes and age groups. Junana should appeal to educators, marketers, programmers and anyone who is a critical thinker looking for something unique and rich for their cranium to bite into. Junana is an important work that provides a lens with which to greater understand the rapid change we're currently experiencing.” Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist
Twitter: caseorganic
“Junana was a fabulous book. It was part Snow Crash, part Neuromancer part modern society and the implications of our social networking. It captures what might happen if we had an accelerated learning system, who would be challenged by the notion, who would build on the notion. The is a great story and many deep issues that leave you reflecting about social networking, gaming, learning and the world that we live in or what it might be..........” Dave Toole, CEO Outhink Media, Inc.
“Highly recommended!...The very interesting premise is thoughtfully worked out. A bit of techno-speak sprinkled here and there lends verisimilitude, but non-techies can ignore it in favor of the story.” Jeff deLaBeaujardiere, NOAA geek and musician
Also by Bruce Caron
White Dancer
Community, Democracy, and Performance
Inside the Live Reptile Tent (with Jeff Brouws)
Global Villages (DVD, with Tamar Gordon)
SECTION ONE
The Prank
ONE
Michael “Scratchy” O’hara looked at the entry card he should have filled out on the plane. At this pre-dawn hour of the morning the customs lines at Osaka’s Kansai International Airport were minimal. His United flight from San Francisco was the only 747 unloading at a gate, and it was barely a third full. The Japanese bubble economy was ancient history, he guessed.
Ten years ago at Tokyo Narita it would have taken him two hours to get through customs. But then, ten years ago William Gibson described a future filled with technology from a sprawling Chiba megapolis. Scratchy shifted his laptop computer bag in front of him and used it as a writing surface. Name: “Michael O’hara.” Occupation: “Independently wealthy” sounded too pretentious. “Computer programmer,” he scrawled.
He stepped forward as the line moved. Reason for Visit: “Tourism,” he wrote. The usual lie. Hotel while in Japan. “Miyako in Kyoto.” Itchy had sent the group the hotel’s URL. It looked a lot nicer than the business hotels he had stayed in on his visits to Tokyo. Scratchy stepped up to the window.
The official took his entry card and passport, glanced at the photo and at Scratchy. He swiped the passport’s code and watched the computer monitor. He spent a minute browsing through the passport pages, thumbing through the entry stamps and visas that Scratchy had accumulated over eight years of frantic capitalism. The official’s monitor again took his attention and he grunted and looked up at Scratchy’s face. Scratchy attempted a grin and remembered he had not shaved in several days. The passport photograph was from his middle geek days. The Glaswegian equivalent of an afro had framed his face and an unkempt beard draggled over a rumpled shirt. Much of that hair was gone for good, and he was packing an extra forty pounds of pudge.
“What does this say?” The official pointed at the “occupation” line on the entry card.
“Hmmm.” He couldn’t read what he written either, and tried to remember. “Computer, um, programmer,” he recalled.
“You come from San Francisco with a United Kingdom passport. What is your official country of residence?”
“I have dual citizenship in the U.S. and United Kingdom.”
Michael had been born in Glasgow, the youngest child of a Scottish accountant and a registered nurse from North Carolina. The family had moved to Evanston, Illinois, when he was in elementary school.
After the guarded structure of education in Glasgow, Michael was unprepared for the playground drama and social trauma served up in American schools. At first, he retreated to the library, where he devoured the entire sci-fi and fantasy section. Then he found a FORTRAN manual and badgered the sysop at nearby Northwestern University into running some of his batch jobs on their IBM 370 in exchange for washing the sysop’s car and fetching coffee.
Some time in his early teens Michael exchanged his shy retreating demeanor for a blistering cynical posture, a phase his mother prayed would not last, but which only grew as he found his own quirky intellectual legs in the area of graph theory and topology.
Michael was an indifferent student in high school. He spent his time playing Pong at a local pizza joint, reading up on combinatorics research, and hacking into the university’s new VAX 11/780, using a bogus soft-money account he set up for a nonexistent visiting physics professor named Kurt Bokonan. Trouble followed when he actually published a paper on Hamilton’s Puzzle, and the physics department chairman began to ask questions about Professor Bokonan.
One day, the chairman was waiting for him when he arrived at the computer center. After some initial incredulity, Michael being only sixteen, the fellow accepted that Michael was, in fact, the mysterious Professor Bokonan. He invited Michael to give a talk on his paper and offered him a soft money account under his own name. The chairman later suggested he go to Reed College, Cal Tech, or MIT with the silent hope he might return to get his PhD at Northwestern.
At one point in their freshman humanities seminar at Reed, Desi turned to him and said, “Do you have to be so damn scratchy all the time?” His new name was born.
“I’m living in California,” Scratchy added. The official nodded.
“How long you stay?” Scratchy had left that line blank.
“Sorry. Two weeks. Long enough to see Kyoto. I hear it’s a beautiful town.”
The official snorted slightly and grabbed a stamper. He ruffled through the passport and found an open square where he stamped the tourist visa and then he stamped the entry card stub and stapled this to the page, folding it on the perforation so it would stay in place. He wrote a few things in Japanese on this and slid it back through the window opening.
“You can go.” The official was already looking behind Scratchy, who nodded and stepped past the station toward the sign that said “Baggage Claim.”
Scratchy had an hour to wait for the first Haruka express to Kyoto Station. At this time of day not a single shop was open, so he took his rolling bag and his backpack and walked the entire length of the mostly empty north wing of the Renzo Piano-designed terminal. With its soaring metal roof it looked like an enormous da Vinci airfoil.
As he strolled, he pondered the turn of events that had sent him to Japan. It started with an email from Winston Logan Fairchild, writing from Paris where he was attending a World Bank conference. Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi were in three nations spread across several time zones. Winston commanded that all of them be available by telephone at 10 p.m. Zulu time on Saturday, November 13th, two weeks hence. Something special was cooking.
For Desi in Mysore, India, 10 p.m. Zulu meant 3:30 a.m., just about his bed time, since he was regularly involved with colleagues back in the states and lived on American time. Like thousands of his countrymen, Desi’s life was nearly nocturnal. In Japan, Itchy would need to be up by 7:00 am Kyoto time, but then then he had not slept well since junior high school. At 2:00 pm in Santa Barbara, Scratchy would normally be on his third latte of the day, down at the Firenze Cafe on State Street, playing GO with one of the university crowd.
§ § §
Game Release + One Week
Nicolas Landreu could hardly believe his eyes. He opened the door and there she was, walking right towards him across the sand. He toggled to First Person and turned to her. In the background, a row of fan palms and a white beach with a beautiful rolling break. He turned up the speakers on his Mac. The wave slapped the shore, and the sound was perfectly synchronized to its motion.
Her walk was amazingly fluid. Her shoulder-length hair, dark with red streaks, blew in the breeze and bounced just right with every step. Her powder blue eyes fixed on his. She filled the tight Volcom Stone tee in a way that made him twist in his seat. She had on a vintage pair of low-rider Wrangler jeans, with holes in the knees, and she was barefoot. In her right hand she held a Powell Golden Dragon deck. She stopped and tossed her head. Then she spoke.
“Hi, Nicky, I’m your Guide.” Her face lit up with a full, generous smile. His knees began to shake. Who was she?
“Do I know you?” he typed. He toggled back to Third Person and hovered.
“Of course you do; I’m Cindy. You’ve been thinking about me a lot. Turn on your microphone, silly. I can’t hear you.”
He blushed, and noticed that his avatar also blushed. Far fucking out. He switched on his microphone. “Who are you?”
“That’s better. Let’s ride.” She tossed her board down on the sidewalk and jumped on. He noticed that she pushed Mongo, just like he did. He paused to admire her coin slot. She accelerated toward a metal bench where she front slid the top rail, ended with a 180 kick flip, landed back on sidewalk, turned her head and winked. She nodded for him to follow. He toggled to Third Person.
In the corner of the window a menu of commands appeared. He was now holding a board. Not just a board, his own board: a Shorty’s Plaid Vato street deck. He scanned the commands and picked up the ones he’d need to keep up with her. With a command he tossed his board down and hopped on. He pushed Mongo and popped the key to increase his speed.
They left the beach and cruised up the wide sidewalks of some virtual California small-town downtown district. Ahead, she navigated the pedestrians, and he noticed that she was just too, too perfect. She couldn’t be a player, unless she was some kind of fakeo pradabee chick. So she must belong to the Game. He was disappointed and intrigued. If she was from the Game, how did she know he was dreaming about her?
Most of the storefronts were simply graphic space holders, but people were entering into a few of the shops. Ahead was a coffeehouse with a big red star sign. Cindy rolled up toward the door, executed a 360-kick flip and caught her board mid-air. She stepped inside and he followed. She found an empty table in the corner and slid into a chair. He sat his avatar across from her. Around them several couples were talking. Their conversation modes were set to private, like his, so he couldn’t hear them.
“You’re new to the Game,” she said.
“Well, it only showed up this week,” he replied.
“Smartasstic,” she said. “Now listen the fuck up.”
She put her hand on the table and the tabletop changed into some kind of map, like the one in WoW, with mountains and runes and shit.
“These are the seven sectors for Level One. You must defeat each sector in Level One before you can advance to the next level. I will be your Guide through this level. At times I will be your ally.” She smiled and touched his avatar’s arm. He searched frantically through the menus for a “kiss” command and failed to find one. Instead he moved his face closer to hers. Maybe she’d get the idea.
“Sometimes I will be your foe.” Her hand morphed into a set of straight razors, which she waved in front of his nose. They clicked and sparkled. His avatar snapped its head back. Its hand automatically touched a cheek and came away with an index finger glistening red.
“Combat?” he asked.
“Combat, if you like.” Her tee morphed into a bright metal breastplate, a crimson two-headed Teutonic eagle emblazoned upon it. In the corner, her board morphed into a broadsword with a jeweled handle.
“Shooter?”
“That too.” Now her breastplate became technic and sprouted sensors. A translucent con-screen covered her face under a Kevlar helmet. Her broadsword morphed into a big fucking gun. Then it all melted back into her original form. Again she filled the tee, and he noticed she was upstairs commando. Nice.
“I can be pleasant, Nicky. I can be whatever you need to win the Game. But I won’t help you cheat. If you win the Game, it would be you who did it, not me.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” Nick said and grinned his avatar at her.
“That’s better. Now let’s go over this one more time before you start the first sector.”
§ § §
“Desi, it’s Winston.”
“This better be good, Fred. You know what time it is?” Desikacharya Venkataraman called Winston “Fred” when he was annoyed. Back at Reed, Winston was the first to call him Desi instead of Venki. Desi looked out into the darkness, savoring the interlude of quiet before the farmers’ wives would begin to waken and light their cooking fires. His house compound bordered on an old village, in a place where old might mean a few thousand years.
Desi had purchased this Mysore house and lands with the money from his first IT patent. He also bought a house in Mylapore for his parents near the family’s ancestral Ur. Their house and monthly cash for a few servants was meant to take away the sting of not having a daughter-in-law to massage their feet and cook their breakfasts. That was about as close to a “good son” as Desi could aspire to be. Not that it stopped their complaints.
“I’ve got Itchy and Scratchy on the line,” said Winston.
“If this is about your car, I can only say, ‘I’m sorry,’ so many times.”
The details of how Winston’s Alfa Romeo ended up inside the Reed College president’s second-floor office have never completely come to light. Desi had borrowed the car the previous evening and reported he parked it back in the driveway. Called on the carpet to explain, Winston claimed the car was stolen, and he had a good alibi for his whereabouts. And after all, who would be stupid enough to use his own car for a prank like that? The presence of the stone owl in the trunk did little to bolster his story. The threesome gained enormous campus cred from the incident.
“That was twenty years ago,” Winston said. “I guess it’s time I confessed.”
“You put your own car in the president’s office,” said Itchy. “Brilliant!”
“I hadn’t counted on them demolishing it to get it out,” Winston groused. The various parts sat in a tangled pile on their lawn the remainder of the year, covered eventually by blackberry vines. The owl again disappeared.
“If it’s not about the Alfa Romeo, then why the sudden college reunion call?” Desi asked.
“Unfortunately, we can’t discuss it on the phone.”
“Hello, I must be going,” Scratchy chimed up. “Why are we talking?”
“To set up the meeting,” Winston said. “I’ll make this short. Together we now control more assets than any of us imagined we could accumulate. We’re also skilled in various tools. I am suggesting that we could direct these assets and skills into...”
“...The Dark Side,” quipped Itchy.
“Stay on target,” Scratchy added.
“Twenty years later and we’re still back in the asylum block dorm,” Desi said. “Let Winston speak!”
“...a project of some significance,” Winston let this sink in. “the details of which I won’t mention here.”
There was a pause.
“We all have our projects,” Desi noted. “Lots of people out there have their own ideas for our talents.”
Desi had recently added a higher wall to his compound after finding entrepreneurs lurking in his patio. Mysore had probably changed more in the last twenty years than in the prior two centuries. Much of the change was structural. Desi had a broadband connection as good as in his apartment South of Market. When he was a child, his appa bought a television three years before they managed to get a single channel. It sat there like some great boxy goddess in their living room.
“None of us has a project like this one. So let’s meet and soon. I’m thinking just after Christmas. Itchy, can you get us some hotel space in Kyoto, say from the 27th through the 3rd?”
“Over the New Year? Sure. We can ring out the year up at Nanzenji.”
“There will be one more person,” Winston added. “Actually, Kyoto was his idea. He...” Winston stopped. There was silence.
“And who might that be,” Desi broke it. “Lucy, you know I don’t like secrets!”
Actually, Desi loved secrets. The last time Winston called him, six months earlier, he told Desi it was time to exit the NASDAQ. Don’t advertise it, don’t let all your friends in on it, Winston said. Pretend it’s a huge secret. For Desi that call culminated twenty years of intellectual labor. Two of his software patents had been licensed large by the big boys in Redmond, and several more were in process in Europe. His online Chinese optical-character-recognition venture had gone public.
After Winston’s call he cashed out his stock and options and poured the assets into an account Winston set up offshore. The last six months Desikacharya Venkataraman woke every morning to the certain knowledge that he was, in all probability, far richer than he ever imagined. The richest man in Mysore, for sure. Richer than any maharaja. Itchy and Scratchy had similar stories. Winston had called them too.
“You’ll find out in Kyoto,” Winston said, although he had no way of knowing if Jack would let his identity out so soon.
“I’d make some remark about how we are all too busy to have our lives interrupted,” said Desi.
“Winston is the king of busy,” said Itchy.
“I guess we can only trust that you are not yanking our chains,” said Desi.
“...and that, in any case, interesting shit will happen,” Scratchy added.
“Nothing less will do,” Desi said. “We have the highest of expectations, Dr. Fairchild.”
“Gentlemen, the game’s afoot. See you in Kyoto.”
Winston set down the phone and his eyes wandered out the window across Rittenhouse Square, where the plane trees were shedding the last of their leaves to a downpour. A delightful chill ran down his back. Apart from the car incident and that last RennFayre where things got totally out of hand, he was always the steady one in the group, the stable voice of reason, the nagging conscience. Well, this ought to shake them up.
§ § §
As Scratchy headed for Kansai Airport’s Gourmet Café to have his first seven dollar cup of coffee, he wondered how many people Winston had alerted to the weakness of the NASDAQ, and how much of the resulting loss of was a result of these investors yanking out their assets. Most of Scratchy’s business partners and coworkers hung on and prayed it was only a temporary correction. Many of them were today happy to be coding Java for thirty dollars an hour. Barely caffeinated, Scratchy managed the ticket machine for the train and watched the sun rise over Kansai as the Haruka Express sped toward Kyoto.
TWO
Itchy had insisted that everybody spend the first two days in Kyoto drifting about the city on their own.
“I’m not your tour guide,” he reminded them. “Once we start to work, I don’t want to have someone say, ‘Why don’t we visit Nara?’ or ‘I haven’t seen the Golden Pavilion yet.’ Get the tourist bullshit out of your system, and work through the jet-lag. Take care of your Internet business. We will be hiking around a lot without a broadband connection.”
That explained the last-minute email for everybody to bring their hiking shoes. The three of them used to hike in the summers together before the fall term started. They had spent two weeks around Spirit Lake and Mount St. Helens in 1977, and remembered Harry Taft well.
Harry ran Taft’s Landing, the only store on the shore of Spirit Lake. Desi had started wearing eye makeup even when he was dressed in hiking shorts and a flannel shirt. Harry said he didn’t run his own place to serve sissies and wouldn’t serve him. Three years later Harry’s store was covered by five-hundred feet of boiling pumice within seconds of the nearby volcano’s massive eruption. Harry had refused to leave. “At least sissies have sense,” Desi said out loud as he read The Oregonian.
Scratchy used the two days to wander into Kyoto’s downtown. Generally unimpressed by heritage sites, he wanted to discover the city’s belly, its working, living core. Mostly what he found were semi-commercial districts filled with small mom-and-pop retail shops and piecework factories, spread across the city, feeding what remained of Japan, Inc.
He enjoyed the Nishijin weaving district, where the Jacquard looms sounded like little flaxen locomotives through the thin walls of the old homes. And he lingered in Gion, below Shijo Dori, where the geisha quarters had been maintained. He spent the afternoon in a coffee house in the Pontocho geisha district across the Kamo river, watching crowds of students in uniform meander by. The girls were dressed in what looked like a mix between Catholic school and Russian sailor uniforms. Most wore wild shoes that were not part of the set, no doubt carrying their black, laced low-heels in their bags. The boys’ uniforms were straight out of some fantasy Prussian academy, and they too had to wear their Nikes on the street.
Winston and Desi did the tourist gig on a bus from the hotel. They played it for laughs with dueling digital cameras. The bus was loaded with old women who found the two of them to be much more interesting than the Nijo Castle or Daitokuji’s gardens. Desi knew a lot more Japanese than he let on, and he overhead the women’s speculation about the two gaijin gentlemen in their midst.
Winston was one of the few genuinely straight men that was completely at ease around Desi. Desi sometimes looked at Winston in a manner that betrayed his certain interest. Winston always looked back at him in simple friendship. Winston dressed in his Brooks Brothers casual attire, which fit in perfectly with the local fashion conventions. He was, in point of fact, the most conventional man Desi had ever met. Desi had visited Winston at his Society Hill townhouse, unsurprised to see not one but three Edward Hopper paintings.
Realism suited Winston. Scion to one of the oldest Main Line Philadelphia families, his sojourn to Reed seemed to be the single excursion he was allowed to make away from the expected. His mother, a famous, fabulous matron who was hunkered down in the family estate outside of Philadelphia, suffered greatly when Winston’s marriage to some “Boston brahmin” brunette debutante ended without an heir. Winston suffered more from the marriage than the divorce.
Wharton and Cambridge and that debutante bitch had not completely wiped away the playful edge Winston had acquired at Reed, but a few more years tending to mama might just dull the poor lad beyond repair. Desi despaired. Winston’s father had escaped his mother with an untimely heart attack. At least Winston’s career let him travel. He made more people more money in more ways than they could imagine. Scratchy said that Winston could pull silver out of shit. On the tour bus, Winston let Desi put his arm over his shoulder, much to the amusement of the women.
The women were mostly portly retired gals in dark brown or gray dresses, some of whom had added tints of purple to their required black hair dye. They probably took Winston to be a salaryman on holiday. However, Desi’s Italian knit shirt and matching Moroccan red belt and shoes kept them guessing all day. Back at the Miyako, Desi helped the women off the bus, and he smiled at each of them as he held their hand. This caused a general uproar of uncertainty, resolved through a reflexive dose of manners, and they all thanked him again and then again, giggled into their hands. They bowed and bowed, until Desi started laughing and clung to Winston’s arm. “Come along, Lucy,” Winston chided him. “Show’s over.”
§ § §
Game Release + Four Months
Megan Doolan had been logging into Junana every day for a year or more, chatting with her friends, building up her profile, ragging on the exaggerated claims others put into theirs, and dressing up for scenes where she’d meet guys from all over the planet. Junana, as everyone she knew at Santa Monica High agreed, was simply awesome-tastic. She’d had her profile on MyPlace, but Junana was way different. You couldn’t get away with shit.
Megan had tried to glamorize the year she spent in New Guinea when her mom had that Fulbright thing. Then she got busted when another ex-pat International School friend ratted on her and told everyone how they spent the whole time going to school and avoiding the locals. That was the way Junana works.
One day on her home plaza, a door appeared. “Game,” was all it said. It was a big wooden door with a huge brass handle. She never considered herself any kind of gamer, but after a few weeks, her curiosity got to her and she touched the handle. The door swung open, revealing a complex outdoor scene. A rocky beach fronted a strand of evergreens. A small stream cut the center of the beach, and the surf rolled in grey, foaming under a darkly clouded sky.
Entranced, she stepped through the door. She took in all this with a glance, because cantering toward her on a black stallion was about the most beautiful boy she had ever imagined.
He slowed the horse to a walk and then reigned the horse directly in front of her, all the time looking not at her avatar, but straight out at Megan, sitting at her computer. Megan switched to First Person. His gaze shifted to met hers.
“Hello,” his chat line read. “Can you turn on your microphone?”
“OK,” she typed, and she turned on her microphone and speakers.
“That’s much better,” he said. She could hear the ocean pushing rhythmically on the beach and the trickle of the stream. The horse snorted and shook its head.
“The CGI is totally the shit,” she whispered. She listened as the horse’s labored breathing slowed.
The boy dismounted and pushed the horse’s neck to the side so he could stand in front of her.
“I am Sir Robert of Glenwarren, at your service.” He bowed.
Sir Robert was dressed in a delicious mix of brocade, broadcloth, and leather. Oddly, he was barefoot. There was a big leather belt, rust colored tights, and some kind of garment over these. She later learned this was called a codpiece. Its bulge drew her full attention for a moment until his bow brought his eyes directly in front of this. Under a shock of sandy hair his eyes met hers. His face was alive with all the little movements that anyone’s face would make. And when he spoke, it was as if he really spoke.
He finished his bow and stood up quite straight. “You can, if you like, call me ‘Bobby,’ if that’s what you’d call a very good friend known to the rest of society as ‘Sir Robert.’”
“Hello Bobby, I am...”
“You are Megan. I am your Guide. This...” He gestured at his horse, “...is Shadow.”
“I always wanted a black horse named ‘Shadow’ or a palomino named...”
Her avatar jumped forward as if pushed from behind. She turned its head. Directly behind her stood a great doe-eyed palomino.
“And that is...” he started.
“Let me guess: ‘Marmalade,’”
He nodded and smiled.
“Shall we ride to the village? There is much to describe and I need my maps.”
“How do I?”
“You’ll notice a new menu for the horse when you toggle on the user display.”
“Right.” She found the command to mount and, in a graceful motion captured in third person for her to watch, her avatar sat the horse.
“Can we gallop?” she asked.
“Not on these rocks, but when we hit the trail I will race you back to Glenwarren. As you get better at it, I’ll reduce the Game safeties. In no time you’ll actually be riding Marmalade on your own.”
“Wicked cool!” She walked her horse up beside his.
“Hmmm, yes. Quite right. Let me say I think we are going to be such good friends.” He reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and she could only agree with him.
§ § §
Late in the morning Itchy met them in the hotel’s lobby. He noted they were all, even Desi, dressed for a day outdoors. Desi complimented his attire with a teal ascot, tucked into his vest.
“Doctor.” He nodded at Scratchy.
“Doctor,” Scratchy replied with a return nod.
“Doctor.” Itchy nodded at Winston.
This ritual went around the whole group. The whole Three Stooges routine. It had started when Winston finally got his Ph.D., the last of the clan to do so. But then he had also spent two years at Wharton getting his M.B.A.
“Doctor Itchy, I see. But where’s the mystery man?” Desi asked, glancing around behind Itchy.
“We’ll pick him up on the way.”
The day was overcast and dry, with occasional snowflakes drifting laterally across the streets like cosmic dust in the wind. Itchy led them west down Sanjo street for several minutes. Then across this thoroughfare and north, through a winding back road to a small street that led uphill.
Desi and Scratchy had stopped to look at a curious modern brick building. Its entrance was blocked by a large stone, which obscured this almost entirely. A small, neon sign three stories up its facade was its only marker.
“Damian,” Desi read the hiragana text. “Why it’s a ‘love hotel’! Come on.” He walked around the stone and disappeared. Scratchy followed.
Winston and Itchy stayed out on the street. There was no real sidewalk, just a white line dividing the taxi traffic from the buildings.
“They make a lovely couple,” Winston said.
Itchy grinned and glanced about. “He’s waiting for us up ahead.”
“Don’t ask me who he really is,” Winston said.
Itchy shrugged. “Is it fair that you know something we don’t?”
“I know a lot you don’t, and you know a whole lot I don’t. This is just a particular case.”
Scratchy and Desi appeared from behind the rock.
“My high school could have used one of these,” Scratchy noted. “Instead of a gym.”
They continued up the street, managing between the parked cars, taxis and occasional crowds of traveling school kids in uniform. Ahead was a manicured park.
They turned left on a lane away from the traffic, skirting a walled compound. Then they turned right on a wide set-stone path bordered by gravel. Ahead, on a raised stone foundation, stood an immense ancient wooden structure, topped by a gray ceramic tile roof. The center of the structure was a giant opening. Eight towering, thirty-foot redwood columns, cut from the hearts of single trees and shaped completely round and smooth as stone, held up a second story, and through the opening they could see gardens and other ancient buildings.
“Sanmon Gate,” Itchy said. “He’s waiting there.”
As they climbed the steps, a man stepped from behind one of the columns. He was in his sixties, dressed as a tourist in olive chinos, a light blue wool turtleneck sweater, and a Kangol cap. He nodded and motioned for them to follow him. They strolled with the other tourists up toward the main temple buildings and then turned right along another wall, on a path that then verged up the hill, where the gravel gave way to dirt. They ducked through a disused side temple wall and found a trail leading uphill between two evergreens garlanded with large ropes. The trail rounded a shoulder of the hill, and then they were out of sight of the temple. The man turned and waited for them to join him.
“Hello, Winston.” He shook Winston’s hand.
“This is Ichiro Nomura.” Winston motioned to Itchy.
“We’ve spoken by phone.” The man bowed, and then his eyes turned to Scratchy.
“Michael O’hara.” Winston made the introduction.
“Doctor O’hara.”
“We’ve done that already,” Scratchy said. “Mike will do.”
“Desikacharya Venkataraman,” Winston nodded at Desi.
“Desi works for me.” Desi stepped forward. “What shall we call you?”
The man shook Desi’s hand. “I’ll let you decide.”
Desi scanned the fellow’s face. A brace of gentle brown eyes coupled with a rather cruel mouth. Aquiline nose, good cheek bones. The face was tanned and the chin taut. Desi wondered about cosmetic surgery. The fellow’s accent was unusual. Something Eastern European, but not Russian or Polish, perhaps Czech. The English was pure Oxbridge. Could be Vaclav Havel’s smart-aleck kid brother.
“I believe you are mysterious and wise, but also somewhat dangerous, in a prankster manner. I’ll call you...” he paused. “‘Mr. Slick.’”
“If you wish.” The name seemed to please him.
“Why are we here?” Scratchy demanded.
“First, let’s walk,” Mr. Slick set off up hill. Within minutes the city was lost behind them. They rounded a corner and their trail crossed an unusual ravine, more like a giant culvert cutting across the forested hillside. Mr. Slick stopped and waited for all of them to catch up. Scratchy was puffing furiously, his breath visible in the chill.
“You see this cut in the hillside?” Mr. Slick pointed at his feet. Where they stood the sides of the cut were well above their heads and the edges were a good five meters apart. Ferns and grasses covered every inch of it except at their trail’s intersection. “This was the Tokkaido Road, the main thoroughfare between Kyoto and Tokyo. The feet of millions of pilgrims and servants made this cut over three centuries. Now the bullet train goes straight through the mountain and gets to Tokyo in a few hours. ‘Why are we here,’ you ask? I think the planet has been digging a rut for itself for too long and not getting anywhere. Desi called me a prankster. I take that as an honor. Mike, what do you say we play a prank on the whole world?”
His eyes locked on Scratchy’s. The others watched as Scratchy met his gaze. Winston recognized that Mr. Slick had figured out their group dynamic. If he could intrigue Michael O’hara, the Nerd King, then the rest of them would follow his lead.
“To play a prank on the world is a very serious task and possibly a tragic one,” said Scratchy.
“Herman Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel.” Mr. Slick nodded with the beginnings of a smile.
“What kind of prank do you have in mind?” Itchy asked.
“That’s what we are here to decide,” Mr. Slick returned. “I have no doubt it will be, how do you say this, a real motherfucker.”
That day, they hiked in the Higashiyama, up to the top of Diamonji, where, in the summer, enormous bonfires are lit to spell out the Chinese character “dai” for “great.” Then they walked back down into the city for a late lunch in a kaiseki restaurant on the Kamo River.
Mr. Slick kept them talking, feeding them questions and comments about technologies and global economic and political situations. They fell into a series of long, anecdotal tales of their adventures in the roller-coaster dot-com economy.
§ § §
Over the years, Winston had been the gang’s main economic advisor, vetting their stock option deals and patent sales for a small fee. Winston’s own ventures had not been unprofitable. Based on theories of derivatives he had advanced while at Wharton and then at King’s College, Cambridge, he had computed a method to arbitrage the effects of Moore’s Law on the value of the inventories of computer chip companies, giving them a way to sell some of the risk they acquired every time they upgraded their technologies. None of the others could understand how Winston made so much money by predicting so much loss, but then neither could they really understand each other’s work. Their specializations were significant and diverse.
Scratchy worked on network protocols and server-side computing. Desi focused on cognitive science, machine and human language interactions, identity, security, and latent semantic analysis. Itchy’s expertise was in the area of avatars and self-aware programming: teaching computers to teach themselves. They each had tackled a major chunk of the known problem space for computer science, but the arenas of their work hardly touched each other.
They had emerged from the academy in the late 1980s with minds full of patentable algorithms and ideas for applications. Desi had finished his doctorate at Berkeley, Scratchy at Cal Tech, and Itchy at Tokyo University. Itchy had two years as a post-doc at the MITI labs in Tsukuba before he jumped to a start-up in San Jose. Desi lingered around Berkeley after his doctorate, finishing up three DARPA grants, before he took a job in Massachusetts on Route 128. The job lasted less than six months, by mutual agreement, before he fled back to a start-up South of Market in San Francisco. Scratchy and some Cal Tech buddies started up their own company in Glendale, the beginnings of a string of companies that Scratchy would create to encapsulate technical innovations that were quickly gobbled up by other start-up holding companies with angel investors eager to catch anything on the rise. All of them rolled through the dot-com nineties on a fast escalator of IPOs, buyouts, and stock options.
Mr. Slick listened closely. He encouraged them to examine certain details surrounding the manner in which their technologies were selected or discarded.
The five of them occupied the restaurant’s private dining room facing out to the Kamo river. A team of kimonoed women kept shuttling in with lacquered trays filled with small plates of food: fish and meat and vegetables cooked a dozen ways, each with a unique sauce or manner of presentation. Pickles and savories, plates of sashimi, and clay pots of boiling water over small alcohol flames for dipping varieties of tofu.
Mr. Slick had chosen the kaiseki restaurant and seemed well respected there; however, nobody called him by name, Itchy noted. He was simply, okyakusama, “honored guest.” The lunch stretched past the afternoon. It was dark when they emerged back on the street, and the temperature had dropped to freezing. They joined the crowds from Osaka exiting the subway on Shijo and crossed the bridge over the Kamogawa to where the Kabukiza theater was ablaze with signs for the holiday shows.
Mr. Slick spoke briefly with Itchy as they walked, and then he waved them on as he turned back.
“Slick’s going to his ryokan inn,” Itchy said. “He’ll meet us later at Yanagi Yuu.”
“At the University?” Winston asked.
Itchy laughed, “Hardly.”
They walked east under the Shijo arcades toward the Yasaka Shinto Shrine at the end of the road. As each of them had spoken more in the past eight hours than they had in the last eight weeks, they enjoyed walking in silence with the crowd. Ahead of them, three young women in short tight jackets of white and pink and impossibly short skirts worn over pantyhose and stiletto heels were trying simultaneously to walk fast enough to not freeze their rears and slow enough to stay upright on their shoes. The three turned up a side street into the Gion bar district one block off the main road.
“Fauna ain’t bad around here,” Scratchy noted.
“And now you can afford them,” Itchy said.
“Come again?”
“Sex in Gion comes in many forms, all expensive.”
“What about the love hotel? You said it wasn’t for prostitution.”
“Love hotels are for privacy. Gion is for cash. Many of the sex workers are part-timers, college students making enough to keep themselves in good clothes. In a few years they’ll graduate and get married. Meanwhile, this pays a lot better than an arubaito at a Seven-Eleven.”
They fell back into silence as Itchy led them through the Shrine precincts on a path back to their hotel. When they reached Sanjo street and turned uphill to the Miyako, Scratchy broke the silence.
“Winston, how much do you trust our Mr. Slick?”
Winston thought about this. “Mike, I can tell you that Mr. Slick could be dining at the table of any of the heads of the Group of Eight nations tonight. At their request. But you will not hear his name on the news. More significantly, if you did find his real name and searched it, you wouldn’t get more than a half a dozen entries.”
“Didn’t begin to answer my question,” said Scratchy.
“He’s considering something that will somehow reboot the world, which means he knows it’s time, and only requires the right code to do it.”
“And we are the code masters,” Itchy intoned.
“Damn straight,” Scratchy agreed.
“Me, I’m prepared to go to the limit with him. But I can only ask you to do what feels right to you. At the end of the week let me know.”
They struck off up the street again. This time the silence was deep as Spirit Lake.
“What could happen?” Desi sighed. “Worst comes to worst, I can always come back here and blow businessmen for a living...”
They all turned to look at him.
“...as long as I don’t have to wear those stiletto heels. Oh, my God.”
§ § §
Later in the evening Itchy returned to the Miyako Hotel to pick up the boys. They strolled down Sanjo to one of his favorite restaurants, a hole-in-the-wall fish house near the commuter train station, where they had the best meal they had ever eaten for the second time in the same day. The tourist magazines tout Kyoto temples, but the real culture in the city is its cuisine. The best restaurants don’t rely on the foreign tourist trade and are genuinely hostile to non-Japanese visitors, whom they fear would not understand the menu, if there were one, or the price if there weren’t. A top kaiseki dinner could easily run a thousand Euros. The fish house cost them a tenth of this, and the gang rolled out into the crisp winter night encouraged and engorged. Itchy looked at his watch.
“A little stroll and we’ll meet Mr. Slick.” He led them over the Sanjo bridge, the traditional starting point of the old Tokkaido road to Tokyo, and they meandered through the Teramachi covered market street, mostly closed at this hour.
Winston and Itchy discussed the economics of the Japanese keiretsu system. Desi took to window shopping. Teramachi was famous for its bookstores and writing supply shops, and the window displays fed his pen fetish. As his eyes roved across the silver and gold instruments of his desire, his mind contemplated the opportunity ahead. He had been considering the fact of his new wealth for some months.
What does wealth do to a person? Most of the obvious effects were social. Like youth, wealth warrants its own form of attraction for others. Desi had never needed money to feel attractive, although his wardrobe had expanded with his salary.
While he was just a child, his grandmother regaled Desi with Hindu tales and epics, stories of gods and demons, beings with enormous powers and desires. Desi had determined that wealth is exactly that. Wealth is a god. This did not make Desi a god, but it put him into an everyday conversation with one.
Itchy led them across the Kamo on the Oike bridge and they walked for several minutes through back streets until they reached an older building with a wooden façade three stories tall. Its wide doorway was covered by two large noren curtains. Itchy pulled the righthand curtains aside and gestured for them to enter.
The interior entry space had a wood slat floor and a rack of small lockers and cubbyholes for shoes. Itchy was already taking off his Rockports. Disdaining the cubbies, Desi insisted on using a locker for his Farragamos. Itchy slid a frosted glass door sideways, and they entered a room where several men were in various stages of dressing and undressing. They could see that the interior space had been divided in half. An old woman sat at a desk accessible to both entrances.
“It’s a bathhouse,” Desi squeaked, grinning.
“Relax,” Winston said. “We’re not on Castro Street.”
“This is Yanagi Yuu, one of the finest public baths in Japan,” Itchy said.
Itchy paid the woman their fee. He opened up the bag he had been carrying and distributed shallow plastic buckets and towels, little soaps and hotel shampoos to the group.
“You put your clothes in the baskets on that rack.” He pointed. They stepped up onto the main floor, covered with linoleum and a non-slip jute runner that led to another sliding door. This door opened suddenly, revealing a naked old man dripping wet, clutching his own bucket and towel in front of him. The sight of the foreigners startled him, and he almost fell backwards before grabbing the doorframe.
Itchy was already shucking his clothes and dropping them into a basket he’d pulled from the wall rack. Scratchy was eyeing the old woman at the desk, who had a direct view of both sides of the bath. Itchy, down to his tighty-whiteys, leaned over to him and whispered, “Unless you’ve got two dicks, I’d say she’s seen about everything there is to see.”
Itchy stripped completely, waited for them to finish, and led them through the sliding door into the main bath. This was tiled in white, with a barrel ceiling and a mural of Fujiyama on the back wall that ran across the whole space. Only a privacy wall now separated the other side. They could hear women’s voices.
Their side of the bath contained three large tubs, one of them big enough for a dozen bodies. Four men were relaxing in the tubs, and among them was Mr. Slick. Scratchy started off in that direction, but Itchy took his arm and steered him to the other wall.
Itchy sat down on the tile floor in front of one of several water taps placed low on the side wall. He began to wash, filling his bucket with water from the tap and pouring this over himself as he soaped up. They followed his example, Desi with enthusiasm, Winston and Scratchy with some reluctance. Above a mirror on the wall was a faded advertisement for an energy drink. This sent Itchy back to his juku days.
In junior high school, Ichiro and almost all of his friends had been enrolled by their parents in expensive after-school juku cram schools to prepare them for the high-school entrance exams. Energy drinks fueled their nightly studies. Ichiro had not had a full night’s sleep for as long as he could remember.
Ichiro managed not to go mukatsuku crazy like his friends, most of whom were genuinely pissed off at the world. Luckily for him, Ichiro’s younger brother had found a spot in a top ranked cram school. His mom spent most of her kyouiku “education mama” attention on him and left Ichiro alone. Ichiro excelled only in English and stole time in cafes that catered to gaijin, mainly Americans, traveling university art or history students or Buddhism junkies.
On Saturday nights, their one night away from homework, everyone would gather in cafes around Teramachi Street, listening to jazz, and aping the Kyodai university students. The anti-American demonstrations of the sixties were long forgotten as the Japanese economic miracle ramped up. Manga and anime were on the rise. Between Go Nagai and Captain Kirk, life was getting interesting. Ichiro’s hippie friends all planned to backpack through India as soon as they finished high school. Ichiro had his own map, which started in San Francisco and ended in New York City.
Ichiro studied as hard as his kid brother, but in areas that held little import for Japanese corporate life. Ichiro knew the plots, the characters, and the names of the artists of all the current anime and major manga. He drew his own characters, filling dozens of notebooks. He followed the American music scene, from San Francisco acid rock to Jersey shore ballads. He loved math and chemistry but hid his knowledge from his teachers. If he weren’t careful, he knew they would stick him in a technical school.
On the advice of a crazy older American named Phillip whose passion for things Japanese mirrored Ichiro’s lust for Americana, he applied to Reed College without telling his parents. Phil-san was a regular at a kissaten in Pontocho, unmistakable in his Zen monk’s robes, shaved head, and thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses. Later Ichiro learned that Phil had written a letter recommending him to the admissions office at Reed. Oddly, it was his degree from Reed that later got Ichiro into graduate school at Tokyo University, while his younger brother burned out academically in high school and took a job at a convenience store.
Itchy eyed the advertisement on the public bath wall again. It seemed he could never get enough sleep, even today. His childhood had wound him way too tight, and not even the years at Reed could change that.
“You two look like beached whales,” Desi spoke up, as they all knew he would. “You should come to Mysore. I’ve got this yoga teacher you would not believe. Strict. Oh, my God. And my massager. You have to have one of those.” He looked at Scratchy. “Or maybe two.”
The four friends each took a moment to realize that the twenty-one years since they’d graduated from Reed was as long as the twenty-one years they had grown up before then. Their bodies, like their fortunes, had also changed. Years of sixteen-hour days coding iron fueled by a stream of lattes and Fritos had taken its toll. Desi’s obsession for self-care would not allow this, and Itchy just couldn’t gain weight, but Winston and Scratchy were heavy and stiff-jointed. They sat on the tile floor and poured buckets of hot water over their shoulders, grinning like infants.
“Winston, you have no tan whatsoever, not even a golf tan. Your chest is as white as your ass. You could be a vampire, if you lost, like, fifty pounds. And Itchy, you’re still scrawny, but a little stretching wouldn’t hurt you either.” Desi straightened his right leg out flat on the floor and, reaching with both hands, began to soap up the bottom of his foot.
Scratchy poured a bucket of water over Desi’s head.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “did you say something?”
Itchy took this cue to rinse one last time. Gathering his soap and towel in his bucket, which he put on the ledge above the tap, he stood up and walked over to the large pool. He slowly lowered himself into the water and sat there with his eyes closed. Scratchy had followed his example. He stepped into the tub and then jumped back out as if snakebitten.
“Holly shit, that’s hot!” he hissed.
Itchy pulled his arm from the tub. Where the arm had been submerged it was now glowing red.
“You get used to it. Take it slow. There’s a cold tub in the corner for relief.” He stepped out of the hot tub and went over to the other tub where Mr. Slick still sat.
“This one’s not so warm,” Mr. Slick announced. “You can work up to the other one.”
Once they had all gathered in the same tub, Mr. Slick began to ask them questions. He found it curious that none of them were married or had children. He disclosed that he had two children and three grandchildren.
“And what do they call you?” asked Desi.
“Grandpa Slick,” he replied.
“Well, Gramps, I don’t understand why you’d come all the way to Japan without at least some idea of what you had in mind,” Scratchy said.
“I’m just an old time capitalist tired of taking people’s money. It’s become far too easy. I want to do something extremely difficult very, very well before my time is up. That, and I like the baths.”
“I could get used to this.” Scratchy settled back in the tub. “Isn’t some nubile young thing supposed to come and wash my back?”
“That will cost you extra,” Itchy said.
“Doesn’t it always.” Scratchy closed his eyes.
THREE
Over the next week, with a day off for the New Year’s celebration, which the Nerds spent partying in their hotel suites and laughing as the whole Y2K scare fizzled across the planet, the routine was roughly the same: extensive mountain walks through the day, another restaurant to try, and then an hour or two in the baths of Yanagi Yuu.
They managed to agree on everything but the core action they would attempt. They were more and more invested in the idea of doing something, but that something always eluded them. Itchy suggested a new religion, and they wrestled with this idea for a solid day before discarding it.
“Religion leaves out all the people who figure they’ve already got one,” Scratchy noted. “We’d have to convert them or kill them.”
“Then how about science,” Winston suggested. “We could create a new one.”
“Out of what?” Scratchy asked.
“If we map the content of science as we now know it, I’m sure we’d find entire arenas that are not well covered, or perhaps a whole new method that could turn science in a different direction.”
“That’s the scope of project I think we’re looking for,” Mr. Slick agreed.
“A new science,” Desi pondered. “What fun is that?”
“And where would we start?” Itchy asked. And they spent another day on Mt. Arashiyama trying, without result, to answer that question.
Their last night at the baths, Mr. Slick presented them with a challenge. They would become anonymous, invisible, footloose. He owned a company that managed a growing global franchise of espresso coffee houses under the name “Red Star.” Their decor was distinguished by large photographs of the Paris Commune, marble bistro tables, and actual zinc countertops. Already there were 3000 franchise locations in 28 nations. This gave Mr. Slick a perfect alibi for international travel, an alibi he would now share with the Nerds. He’d hire them as managers in a subsidiary company with responsibilities for “franchise inspection.”
Winston’s cover would be problematic. He had developed a visible presence in the world of international finance, and could not disappear or move about as freely as the rest of them under an alias without some notice.
“I’ve given this serious consideration, and I think the only safe solution is for Winston to travel as Winston. And since nobody at Red Star Coffee has any business with Winston, he will never attend any of our future meetings. In fact, it is best that none of you meet with Winston again after we leave Kyoto.”
“Game over!” Scratchy blurted, “If Winston’s out, I’m out!”
“I did not mean to suggest...” Mr. Slick raised his hand and continued, “...that Winston will not be present in our gatherings or less significant to our plan, but only that he will need to phone in from a secure location in the U.S. We cannot afford to be seen with him.”
“He’s right,” Winston added. “For me, business-as-usual is the best cover. I know the CIO at the Drexel, and I’ve been meaning to set up a fiber connection from their network to my office on Rittenhouse Square.”
“I’ve been working on some scrambling compression algorithms for voice over IP,” Itchy noted. “We can all use this for teleconferencing between meetings, and Winston can call in when we’re gathered. I think we can set something rather difficult for anyone to decode without some serious iron and bad intent.”
“By the time we attract such attention, whatever we plan to accomplish must be beyond stopping,” Mr. Slick reminded them as he bade them farewell.
The next morning, Winston gathered his friends together at the Miyako Hotel restaurant.
“It’s decision time,” he told them. “Each one of us is either all in or all out.”
“Slick’s got a good point,” Scratchy said. “Free market capitalism is just pushing the planet back into some new dark age of fantasy walled enclaves for the very rich and sallow terror for the rest of us.”
“Except in this case, we are among the very rich,” Desi reminded him.