0x00: 0x43686566
I remember the day Japan died.
I was visiting Horizon City at the time it happened. I'm a sushi chef and was asked to participate in a Japanese food exhibition at Horizon City as a special guest of honor. I was excited because I had never left Japan before, and Horizon City was famous for its diverse culture and love of all things Japanese. They had wanted me to do a series of knife demonstrations, and the job paid well, so I packed up my knife roll, a few changes of clothes, and hopped on the next Hyperjet out. It was the height of tourist season, and there was a major race scheduled for that week, so there was guaranteed a good-sized crowd. The Prime Minister of Japan was also in town and was rumored to possibly make an appearance at the event, so the convergence of opportunities seemed like an easy win. I was only planning on being there for three days. I never left.
The food exhibition was a bit crowded, but I was enjoying it. NanoEdge had sponsored the event and supplied a set of their new Fracture Series, with their proprietary laser cut fractal edge pattern that gives the edge three hundred times their normal cutting surface area with their nanoscale sharpening technology. It required a special cutting block because the knife would slice right through most materials, but it made the job of cutting things take no effort at all. The knives retailed for more than I made in a year, so they were a welcome gift, and I was in the middle of cutting the bluefin tuna, an incredibly rare and expensive piece of meat, when the commotion started. At first I tried to ignore it and continued the demonstration. They were paying me to do a job, and I was going to do it, damnit, and whatever was going on was a distraction, but that distraction sucked up the audience like a vacuum, and the next moment I looked up, everyone had started shouting loudly and running around like the world was coming to an end. They were, of course, correct.
The feeds had all of ten minutes to pick up the story, an eternity as far as the flow of information goes, but that was because no information was making it out of Japan. Neo-Tokyo was the technology infrastructure hub of the entire country, and when the city was nuked so hard all that remained was a smoldering crater, the people who survived in the other prefectures couldn't connect to the feed network to post. The corporations were so dependent on their automated logistics systems which were coordinated centrally in Neo-Tokyo; no one knew how to continue operations without it, and even if they did, that was just the start of their troubles. So much critical infrastructure was in Neo-Tokyo that coordination suddenly became impossible, and mass starvation was complicated by further bombing, rioting, and roaming bands of pirates who opportunistically established outposts by slaughtering entire villages in coordinated night strikes and taking over their resources. Anarchy doesn't begin to describe the situation.
By the time the feeds had picked up the actual story and word reached me, the rumor mill had managed to shift from third to fifth gear and was in the process of burning the clutch out. Both China and Japan were actively under nuclear attack, and at first the finger was alternating between The Sovereign City of Moscow, The Northern Alliance, and The United Federation of States, since they were the ones assumed to have the ability and power to even consider such a thing. It was inconceivable that someone would act unilaterally outside of a major influence. Horizon City didn't even warrant the list.
I didn't feel the knife take the tip of my thumb off. It took me several minutes to realize that's what happened and why it was dripping blood, because the feeds had come on all over the floor and started practically screaming at the top of their lungs that Japan was completely destroyed and a mushroom cloud was all that remained. The reaction ranged from straight denial to sky-is-falling-run-in-circles-and-scream panic, and everything in between. The hotel conference room went from three hundred plus people enjoying gourmet culinary delights to trying to exit the room and run for anywhere but here, in a matter of minutes, while I just stood there dumbly, wrapping a bloody towel around my hand. I didn't exactly have a home to run to, so I slowly packed up and took the elevator to my hotel room. It seemed like a sensible decision at the time.
The bathroom had basic first aid for my thumb, which was little more than a flesh wound. The bed was soft. The type you get at an expensive place like Chez Bon Bon. I knew the Yakuza had an industrial monopoly in Japan, but I didn't realize they held property here too. They had a habit of hiding behind seemingly western names that were almost Engrish, like someone who only knows Japanese is being charged with figuring out a distinctively western sounding name and putting it through a cheap Japanese to English translator. Chez Bon Bon, Astro Chicken, Uncle Tony's Pizza—in retrospect it should have been obvious—the Yakuza controlled them all, and when the riots started, they were the first targets. I was grief-eating some raw giant Hokkaido scallops with whipped uni creme that I had brought with me in a cooler when the acrid odor of smoke reached my nostrils. I didn't realize at the time that was the last of these scallops the world ever would see.
I put down the scallops and asked the wall to call the front desk, but it just rings and rings. The smell of smoke is growing stronger now, and a loud siren starts blaring from the hallway. The thought of grabbing important stuff briefly occurred to me, but all I can think of is the bottle of Junmai Daiginjo Sake as the commotion of people running down the hallway imposes itself. I slip my shoes on and yank the door open. People are lining up at the elevators down the hallway in one direction that doesn't seem to be coming, so I quickly start walking down the hallway the other direction. The siren is loud, but the people yelling over it as they run past me manage to find a volume that exceeds it. My ears feel like they're going to be permanently damaged as I follow the battery-lit emergency exit signs down the suddenly dim hallway as the power goes out. The door marked stairs is less obvious, but I find it anyway and push it open. The smell of smoke is stronger in the stairwell, and it's at this moment I remember thinking the view from the twenty-fourth floor of the Green level of Horizon City had been lovely, but in the future, I'd prefer to be closer to the kitchen, thank you very much, because running down twenty-four flights of stairs wasn't my idea of a good time. I didn't make it two before the first couple wordlessly ran past me, going up the stairs. Two more flights, and I found out why: there's a door that separates every ten floors of stairwell, and the door at the twentieth floor had black smoke streaming out of its top, and when I went to reach out to pull it open, it radiated more heat than a freshly opened oven, and I paused. If the fire had reached the twentieth floor, there was only one way to go, and that was to the roof.
I started climbing, and a portly black man ran past me. I yelled to try and stop him, but he didn't listen and managed to burn his hand on the door handle before figuring it out. I refocused on my climbing efforts and wondered if I was any different than the couple who had recognized the futility in helping someone else when you are unsure you'll be able to help yourself. I also remember thinking, in the panic-induced clarity of adrenaline overload, that my brain picks some pretty inappropriate times to contemplate the ethical implications of the trolley problem and just what kind of moral monster I was when push came to shove. I guess hindsight makes all mistakes plain.
The roof was on the thirty-fourth floor, and several people were already there, frantically calling people on their phones. Some were excitedly shouting their location; others were crying to their loved ones. I ran to the edge and looked down. The fire had apparently started on some floor beneath us, maybe the sixteenth or seventeenth floor, as black smoke was billowing out of the windows on those floors, but the rest were fine. As I watched, the window on one of the floors above the smoke blew out explosively, and a man hung half out, gasping for air, a pistol in his hand half forgotten as he waved it at nothing, as black death poured out above his head. Others either got out in time or were trapped inside the accidental prison and not armed well enough to break the safety lock. The locks were normally designed to open and deploy ladders in this very eventuality, but for some reason, didn't seem to be doing their job today. I would later learn they had been disabled by computer control.
As the building was slowly consumed by smoke and fire, the number of assembled people on the roof grew. There must have been a hundred people there, all knowing they were facing a grim, painful death. I started swigging from the bottle of sake in my hand, and before I knew it, it was empty. When the smoke started to consume the roof, I didn't see another option besides jumping. I remember people shouting that I shouldn't, but I wasn't about to go out that way. I realized, mid-fall, that I was still holding the bottle of Junmai Daiginjo and briefly thought to ponder what would become of the rice vats that made it and the people who made a living tending them.
The fall into the airbag broke twenty-three bones, punctured just about every major organ, and almost killed me on the spot. The DocWagon managed to keep me alive long enough to clone me before I died. Being a clone isn't so bad, I guess, although I did need to get my tattoos and chrome again, and until I did, I got very drunk and even sick when drinking sake, which is not nearly as good as it used to be, now that the rice vats in Japan all died.
0x01: 0x42616e6b
I remember the day Japan died.
I was an investment banker sitting in my office on Gold, doing due diligence on a proposal for some social networking venture on Red, when the alerts started popping up. I told my secretary to shut them up, and she did, but when Verdis came by looking like a ghost and demanded I check the feed because the whole fucking world had turned to shit and was going down the drain, I knew something was terribly wrong. The feeds were confusing because they seemed to know about a serious disruption in critical infrastructure, but it would take owners of Hyperjets making it out of Japan and those with means of radio and satellite-based communication to spread the word. At first the word was simply that Neo-Tokyo had suffered some sort of network communications failure, and that was it, but within hours they were reporting a series of nuclear explosions so large they weren't sure how bad it would be. However bad they had in mind, it was worse than that.
The stock market crashed harder than a Hyperjet flying into a skyscraper building. The computers all knew what had happened long before we did, as they systematically wiped out ownership from the markets and marked them as available at auction. As hundreds of trillions of yen of assets became available at prices unrelated to actual market value, the markets flash crashed, with trading bots automatically buying the assets up at less than ten percent of the expected price and unloading them at bargain basement values. In one-hundredth of a second, the stock markets went from operating normally to a completely bat-shit crazy, fortune-destroying machine. Some companies had it much better than ones in Japan, with their investors being more geographically distributed, but for the corporations with Japanese majority ownership, it was like taking a razor to their throats and watching as their whole blood supply poured onto the trading floor. I knew just how bad it was when the first hedge fund manager plummeted past my window. Their boss followed after them. I heard over a hundred thousand Japanese nationals here in Horizon City committed suicide in the days that followed. They called it Seppuku Tuesday.
The effect was literally chaos in the streets, as people's money in their wallets turned to shit. CredChips stopped working, ATMs and ChequeIts didn't register people's accounts, and their phones wouldn't log in to the First Bank of Horizon because it was all a front for the Neo-Tokyo operation, and Neo-Tokyo wasn't responding right now, try again never, have a nice afterlife. The distributed ledger that supported the currency exchange was all that survived, but because the Yen was so tied to the value of the economy and so much of it became "unclaimed and marked for auction", the yen itself hyperinflated and became effectively worthless. If the mayor, or governor, or whatever they call themselves, of Horizon City hadn't stepped up and done something, the shit would have well and truly hit the fan. What he did was a stroke of financial genius, the likes of which we will never see again.
The way he put it, the citizens of Horizon City were victims of market manipulation on a global scale by the Yakuza, and the reason they were suddenly completely broke was that the stability of the yen was a lie. With the death of Neo-Tokyo, the yen had collapsed, and with it, many businesses in Horizon City. The solution was effectively what amounted to a donation to anyone who was willing to exchange their worthless yen, either in script form or from their FHB account at the time it went offline. In exchange for their useless yen, a new currency, called the Ben, was issued. The Ben was financially backed by a hedge fund based on the value of other world currencies, which it could be exchanged for. Thus a Ben was always worth, and exchangeable for, exactly thirty-three Northern Alliance credits, twelve hundred pesos, thirty-eight rubles, half a euro, and one-tenth of a sterling. Apparently Benjiro, the guy in charge of Horizon City, was a bit of a financial wizard and had been saving up for just such a scenario. He was willing to bankroll the entire city out of his stupid deep pockets because he didn't want the city to collapse. It was like sweet rain falling out of the sky in a firestorm.
The bank account snapshots of Horizon City residents were established, the infrastructure rerouted by software engineers, and within three days, emergency relief started to become economic relief. The impact was immediate; the riots stopped practically overnight, and the city resumed operations with shockingly little financial disruption. A few businesses inexplicably closed up shop, creating some shortages of critical supplies on Red, but that place was a shithole to begin with, so the fact that people were now fighting in the streets over toilet paper was just another day that ended in 'Y', and the gap was quickly filled by some entrepreneurial individuals anyway.
I managed to keep my job and even got a promotion and a raise when the dust had settled. My boss had shot himself in his office the day of the event, and his clone went home and fell on a katana or something, so it all worked out for me in the end. Of course if that Benjiro guy hadn't done what he did, it would have been a metric assload worse. The guy's a hero, no doubt about it, and I personally would love to shake his hand. He saved our lives that day, and we're in his debt. Literally.
0x02: 0x4d656368
I rememba' the day Japan died.
I was in muh shop when the riots broke out. I run a little mechanic shop for car and hovers, although I don't get a lot of hovers dese days. I was pulling the batteries on an old HondaMitsu Photon when the streets outside seemed to erupt wit' screamin' people. Sommat gone horribly wrong wit' the big race event, and the Jippers had gotten home base bombed back to the Stone Age. Now I may hate me a Jippa in my time, but I never wished death on none, I just think purebred white is betta is all. Just wanted to get that straightened for the official record, or whatever dis here memory trip amounts to. Fangled thing's recording, right? Can't say I ever expected to be chosen for sommer so important. What? Oh. Sorry fer'a incorrect language 'n all. Old habits die hard.
Peeps in the streets were just chasing some runn' gang fight, I rezed. T'wasn't nuffin' new, and the Sinners looked out for their own, so I just hit secure onna alarm pad, and watched as the garage door shut. It wasn't until the Sinners themselves started to bang on the door with pipes 'n metal junk that I scanned sommat was wrong. Turns out t'was just the begin'in the problems, eh?
They burned muh shop down that day. I got out using my emergency exit into the sewers, and watched it burn from across the street. They said the city had nuked Japan, and now they were gonna nuke the city back. Dunno how much of that's really true, but I do know it was the fragger's racing team that flew the hover that dropped the bombs. Musta been flying some heavy lifter, 'cuz he wiped out a quarter the damn place, then came back and picked off what he missed the first time. Said they'n kept bombing the jippers 'till they glowed so bright they couldn't sleep at night with all'n the brightness. Then they say they poisoned the water and stalked the villages on foot. All in the name of Horizon City. Taint never seen nuffin' like it.
'Course that Benjiro guy tried ta deny it all, but da message changed so many times, who knows anyway? Seems like he can't get his story straight, sayin' one minute he was in control of the terrorists, then he was forced to say that and the Yakuza are controlling him, then that the part about the Yakuza was a lie. Then the next day he says it's not a lie, and he can prove it, and has a solution. Then he says he's not trustworthy, and secretly bombed Japan out of anger, but wanted to come clean. I mean sure, the Ben ended up being real, but he musta said it wasn't, what, five, six different times onna Holo? Impossible to know what's real any more, ya scan?
Anyway, the insurance claim onna place finally came through, two years later, but by then I had moved on. Guys gotta make a living, you know? With alla the chaos and commotion, the whole Red level spiraled outta control. No one could find a drink 'er wipe der ass, because all the suppliers of hooch 'n paper lost their distribution for a cycle. Just so happened, the very next week, a holographic Vapo kid in some tuxedo told me to call a number. Says he's gonna make me rich. Even knows my name an' everything. So, I call him up, and he gives me some paydata on how I can get access to a stock of alcohol so big, I gotta enlist a team ta' help me drag it out. Seems a warehouse on'na south side was in a fix with their staff anna yen screwed hard, the security was lapsed fera time. He knew a guy wif'a codes to get in. The sewers gave us access, and we hauled out enough basics 'ta make everyone on the whole north side'a Red comfortable, and me more Bennies I ev'a seen! Hey, ain't no one gonna see dis, is day? No? Good. Don't matta' anymore, do it? Yeah, I scan. Whiz. Ok, sorry.
Talk about who? Benjiro? So mebbie 'da guys'a monster, or mebbie dats how the world goes, but I did fine, and 'taint da only one. What? Oh yeah. As fer the Vapo kid, taint sayin' I was born wif'a golden spoon in muh mouth, but taint the only one on Red with a story summat same, ya scan?
0x03: 0x47656e65
I remember the day Japan died.
It was the day the war started. I was a General First Class in the United Federation of States Army stationed in Forward Operating Base Alpha Bravo approximately three hundred miles north of Horizon City when we got the nuclear alert: Neo-Tokyo had been hit so hard and so suddenly, nothing would make it out. The first thing we thought was China had gotten pissed enough to sneak something in, but then when we checked out the imagery from the satellite, a Hyperjet had gone balls to the wall on overdrive and stripped all the low-altitude manned aircraft speed records. Its ride had ended at the HondaMitsu tower, which was inland well enough to really screw things up. A series of poor decisions regarding their air defense systems due to national vanity and a race going on had let it happen unchecked. Japan reacted by treating the situation as a first-strike scenario, and with its major center of communications wiped out, its backup plan executed and launched an automated counteroffensive.
Without a method of coordination, each launch site was left to its own means of divining where the nukes should go. The obvious choice was China, its immediate neighbor to the west. Japan had been making inroads to China, slowly taking over more corporate territory, and China had been resisting with lots of political maneuvering, creating tension between the nations as they duked it out on the world's economic stage. The less obvious choice was the USAF, but some savvy operators were able to pin down the direction of the incoming payload and saw it was coming in over the Pacific. The result was about half the missiles went east and half went west.
Now the Chinese weren't expecting a first strike and at first they hesitated, unwilling to believe they wanted a repeat of Korea. When they got the first report from Shanghai that a satellite was reporting a nuclear detonation a hundred miles inland, they just switched everything on and the tactical maps started lighting up like a Christmas tree. The first thing that happened was they started targeting every foreign satellite in orbit with their own satellites. Japan's Cryogenic Quantum Computational Station came down over Moscow, missing it by a thousand miles, and their defense system activated, thinking it was a strike on them. They launched in all directions.
The USAF fared decently in the disaster due to its superior defense technology, mostly developed by Japan, ironically enough. Japan was equally well equipped, but it coordinated through Neo-Tokyo. It was all designed to prevent this very scenario at all costs, and so without its point of coordination, Japan's satellites barely reacted at all. Ours got the nukes coming out of Japan fairly fast, but then China took out our satellites, and the ones coming in from the north from Moscow got us with our pants around our ankles in a few locations. We lost Kansas City and Seattle that day. If the Northern Alliance hadn't picked off more, it would have been a lot worse, but then they lost Rotary, Pleasant, and Edmonton. They launched against Moscow and China, and China launched against Moscow, and that's how Moscow was lost. Horizon City had a highly sophisticated ground-based defense system of its own and managed to come out unscathed, as well as intercepting a few headed for Houston. Still not sure how that happened, but then we know now that place was the city of consecutive miracles. The system wasn't exactly in line with the USAF armament guidelines, but given the situation we found ourselves in, it got swept under the rug.
When the dust settled, China had come out on top, with the only functioning satellite defense system still in operation. The USAF lost three major cities and the Northern Alliance lost five. The Sovereign City of Moscow and literally all of Japan was wiped off the face of the Earth. The remaining powers quickly obtained a tentative peace in the name of not just killing each other outright and then promptly resumed fighting in the years to come, but that is a different story. All said and done, the world's population was cut in half over the course of a year. As for me, I made it long enough to buy out my contract with residuals and retired in Horizon City. Good thing I did too, given what happened.
0x04: 0x00426f79
I remember the day Japan stopped moving.
I was nine at the time and working in my dad's machine shop in Ogata. First the CNC jobs stopped, then the lights went out. The emergency lights came on, making everything all amber. I stopped stamping and walked outside. Everything was dark. No power at all anywhere. I took my scooter home. My mom was at home. She didn't know why the power was off. She asked if I was hungry. I shook my head no. The sky was a strange color. It got dark early that night. That's when they came.
I had never heard a gun before. The first shots were very loud, like a drum. The sky was pink and gray. They said the government had fallen and they were in charge now. They said this was their village now. I didn't understand how someone could own a village. One person said they can't do that, so they shot him and he stopped moving. Then they started shooting everyone else, and they stopped moving too. They kicked down the doors and shot people until they stopped moving. Then they came for me.
First they broke the lock on the front door. Then they kicked in the door where my mom and I were hiding. They shot my mom, and she stopped moving. Then they grabbed me and said I was in the army now. I didn't know what that meant, but I didn't like it. They put all the kids together and made them practice with guns until they could shoot things. The sky had stayed gray, and sometimes a powdery snow came down, even though it was warm, and it didn't melt. The food was very bad and made me feel sick. Other people were sick too, and they had sores on their face and hands, and they threw up a lot. You could tell who was going to stop moving first by how much coughing and throwing up they did. I wanted to cry because I missed my mom, but I wouldn't make a sound.
After a few days, they made us move on to the next village, where they did the same thing, except this time, they lined up all the people and we took turns shooting them until they stopped moving. They showed us how if you shoot them in the head, they stop moving faster. There were more kids there too, and they joined the army. Many were sick and many stopped moving. We showed the other kids how to shoot people too and make them stop moving. They made a game out of it, but there weren't as many left to go on. The next village was ready for us, and even more stopped moving. The rest ran away. We were left there halfway between the villages, and most of us were very sick. Some of us stopped moving.
The spaceship arrived the next day and took us away. It was the last time I would ever be in Japan. I was in a room for a long time with no one to talk to. Many times they fed me and put things in my arm. I was very sick and threw up a lot. I lost count very quickly, but I know it was a lot. The room was very plain, but it did have a HoloVid. Sometimes it would show what happened in the world and how things had changed. They said the world was fighting. They said Japan had stopped moving because of China and ToxPower. I don't know how a whole country can stop moving, but now Korea and Japan are ToxPower, and they supply power to the world. The power plants grow there now because humans can't live there safely.
I was in the room for a long time. The HoloVid said the year was 2087 when I went in and 2091 when they moved me. I went halfway home, they said, although it didn't feel like it was any closer. Halfway home was very white and safe, which was nice. There were lots of boys and girls there, and they made fun of me because I didn't talk. I was moved to a different part of the home, still halfway, and then two very nice men said I could come home with them. They said I didn't have to talk if I didn't want to, so I didn't. It was a good home on what they said was Green, but there was not very much Green there. They gave me SimStim, and that was better because I could express myself freely there, with no one there to see it, and I got to experience all kinds of fun things.
That was over two hundred years ago, and it's hard to remember. They say I'm old now and there's nothing they can do. They said this would be like SimStim, but it's not quite the same. It feels like I'm going somewhere, but my body isn't moving. Now I can't feel my body at all, but I don't really miss it because this feels better. It's not painful anymore; it's just thinking and nothing else. Now I know what it feels like to stop moving.