White Matter

Graeme - In Tokyo

Tokyo, April 15

I have been infected by a viral meme. Two memes, in fact; the second self-inflicted and intended to give temporary respite from the first. Frankly, it wasn't up to the job, a bit like swallowing a fly to catch a spider.

I banished this thought and attempted to focus my attention on the task before me. In my hand was a phone; a large arrow on its screen was telling me the direction I needed to go. It pointed toward Jimbocho. A familiar neighbourhood, one I knew from previous visits; a living fossil of the retail era where you could still browse paper books in its cluster of second-hand bookshops.

Outside Ochanomizu Station an erratic wind was sending a few discarded paper handbills and food wrappers in a random walk around a small brick-paved plaza. This was where Shigeru, my collaborator here in Japan, must have exited; so my arrow told me. He would have been a couple of trains ahead, but he couldn't have gone far in the few minutes' grace this would have gifted him.

His choice of location carried a message. It had come up in recent conversation, in a dispute over the interpretation of certain experimental results. I had been putting the case that reality, while fundamentally trustworthy, was not above pulling a few tricks. That the hardest of facts could support radically different explanations, given sufficient flexibility in the mind of the explainer. I had quoted, as an example, how Ochanomizu messed with my sense of direction. How I got confused the first time I was here, on a study trip to Japan, some years ago. I have no direct memory of how it happened – the event itself – but somehow, in trying to find my way out of the station, my internal compass must have become turned on its head. Whatever actually happened, this first impression stuck. Now, here and only here, my instinctive sense of North and South had become permanently reversed.

Not that anything felt out of place: quite the contrary – the disorientation was in the facts of the situation, not the feelings. The place still looked no less real than an image in a mirror.

Shigeru's choice was also a subtle act of kindness, I decided. Certain actions of his could be interpreted that way. He wanted me to know he had been paying attention to what I had been saying, even while I had been contradicting him.

Of course, this wouldn't do him any good; the rules of our game left no room for mercy. Much better, I would have thought, to have chosen somewhere I had never been before.

His game tactics too were there to be second-guessed: he was seeking the dead zones, hoping to find a sanctuary, somewhere he could hide in full view. Not the most original ploy, but fair enough. This game was not meant to be a subtle one. It appealed to the primitive and instinctual, the hunter and the hunted, rewarding low cunning, not high strategy.

I set off down the street toward Meiji University. It was early afternoon, office hours, so the river of strangers was no more than a trickle. Students and housewives mostly. My weapon was slung over my shoulder so the world could see me for what I was, and make allowances.

If form had followed function, my gun would consist of a tube and a box: a barrel fitted to a propulsion unit, a magazine loaded with nanopellets – small low-speed darts that slipped through the air with frictionless ease and penetrated skin like a stinging insect. DNA-locked to a designated target, harmless to anyone else, they carried a nanotech payload tuned to deliver a message of the sender's choosing. A biomimetic shotgun, it was called, certified safe for use in populated areas.

But form following function was as archaic as a paper book. Nowadays, form followed fashion like the rest of us, or failing that, the whim of whoever was prepared to pay. My weapon was a minor work of art, machine-formed out of alloy and wood, though there was no ambiguity about its intended function. I had picked it from a catalogue a few hours earlier and had it express delivered.