White Matter

Airport Pickup

The arrivals hall at Narita was compact and utilitarian, with none of the over-arching spaciousness of the departure section upstairs. The waiting minutes I spent people-watching, scanning the travellers as they emerged from security, pigeon-holing each person who caught my eye by nationality, job, personality. With no way of verifying my guesses, I was able to award myself a tick for every pick.

Kurt was not long in arriving.

You expect artists to be slim and effete. Kurt was a tall man with a solid frame and blond hair, his demeanour not at all pensive, and with a face on which life had yet to write any stories. His most common expression, in my recollection, was one of mild confusion, but then I had only ever known him on my own territory, never his.

Still, if you were setting out to intercept someone as they passed through the teeming arrivals hall of a major Asian airport, someone who was not expecting a welcome, it certainly helped if that someone was Kurt Jones.

"Graeme!? What the hell are you doing here?"

I had expected a reaction something like this. I had even considered a few replies to his question, before dismissing them all as unnecessarily provocative. Instead, I just stood there doing my best to look unperturbed, not wanting to do anything to amplify any sense of being deceived he might be harbouring.

He gawped at me in silence for a moment, then focused his attention on my chest.

"'Delightful Pal!'? You've been shopping for tee-shirts locally, haven't you?"

"Good to see you too, Kurt – This is Shigeru, by the way. Shigeru, Kurt Jones."

The two men shook hands, one more warily than the other.

"You'll be wanting some answers, no doubt. Let's get out of this crowd first. We can talk on the train."

We set out for the escalators that would take us down to the basement station. As we walked, I rolled out the apology I had prepared, explaining how it was one of those apologies where you say you are sorry for the consequences of what you did, not for the actual doing of it. I was hoping, indeed calculating, that he would take this as a backhanded compliment. Things were happening here that went beyond his personal convenience. He had an important role to play and was man enough to deal with it.

"Not really an apology at all, in other words," he said. I guessed from the tone of his voice that I would be forgiven. Soon, if not just yet.

On the train, we found an empty alcove of opposing seats where the three of us could talk in comparative privacy.

"Six months ago," I started, "everything was fine. Our funding was in place and Spurious Developments was operating in obscurity, just another high-tech start-up with a product that may never see commercial success, yet with enough potential benefits to make that risk of failure worth taking. Then someone in the protest movement noticed us. These things happen very quickly. Before we knew it our name was all over the net and it was too late to do anything about it, not that we could have in any case.

"But that was okay. It was early days. By the time we got product to market, chances are it would have all blown over. Certain government agencies from whom we would have preferred to remain invisible had become aware of our existence. That was unfortunate, but they're slow to move at the best of times, so not an immediate threat. They would have noticed us sooner or later in any case. Keep a low profile and don't give out anything concrete, nothing that people can latch on to. That was the PR consultant's advice, and good advice it would have been too, but for one thing."

Kurt, sitting opposite me, had his arms folded, alternating his gaze between my face and the scene passing by outside the window. We were traveling through that band of rice paddies and open country between the airport and city.