Ascendancies (79 page)

“Who are you?” she said, in bad Japanese. Tsuyoshi realized suddenly that she was a Japanese American. Tsuyoshi had met a few Japanese Americans before. They always troubled him. They looked fairly normal from the outside, but their behavior was always bizarre.

“I'm just a passing friend,” he said. “Something I can do?”

“Grab him, Mitch!” said the woman in English. The American man rushed into the hall and grabbed Tsuyoshi by the arm. His hands were like steel bands.

Tsuyoshi pressed the distress button on his pokkecon.

“Take that computer away from him,” the woman ordered in English. Mitch quickly took Tsuyoshi's pokkecon away, and threw it on the bed. He deftly patted Tsuyoshi's clothing, searching for weapons. Then he shoved Tsuyoshi into a chair.

The woman switched back to Japanese. “Sit right there, you. Don't you dare move.” She began examining the contents of Tsuyoshi's wallet.

“I beg your pardon?” Tsuyoshi said. His pokkecon was lying on the bed. Lines of red text scrolled up its little screen as it silently issued a series of emergency net alerts.

The woman spoke to her companion in English. Tsuyoshi's pokkecon was still translating faithfully. “Mitch, go call the local police.”

Mitch sneezed uncontrollably. Tsuyoshi noticed that the room smelled strongly of bay rum. “I can't talk to the local cops. I can't speak Japanese.” Mitch sneezed again.

“Okay, then I'll call the cops. You handcuff this guy. Then go down to the infirmary and get yourself some antihistamines, for Christ's sake.”

Mitch pulled a length of plastic whipcord cuff from his coat pocket, and attached Tsuyoshi's right wrist to the head of the bed. He mopped his streaming eyes with a tissue. “I'd better stay with you. If there's a cat in your luggage, then the criminal network already knows we're in Japan. You're in danger.”

“Mitch, you may be my bodyguard, but you're breaking out in hives.”

“This just isn't supposed to happen,” Mitch complained, scratching his neck. “My allergies never interfered with my job before.”

“Just leave me here and lock the door,” the woman told him. “I'll put a chair against the knob. I'll be all right. You need to look after yourself.”

Mitch left the room.

The woman barricaded the door with a chair. Then she called the front desk on the hotel's beside pasokon. “This is Louise Hashimoto in room 434. I have a gangster in my room. He's an information criminal. Would you call the Tokyo police, please? Tell them to send the organized crime unit. Yes, that's right. Do it. And you should put your hotel security people on full alert. There may be big trouble here. You'd better hurry.” She hung up.

Tsuyoshi stared at her in astonishment. “Why are you doing this? What's all this about?”

“So you call yourself Tsuyoshi Shimizu,” said the woman, examining his credit cards. She sat on the foot of the bed and stared at him. “You're yakuza of some kind, right?”

“I think you've made a big mistake,” Tsuyoshi said.

Louise scowled. “Look, Mr. Shimizu, you're not dealing with some Yankee tourist here. My name is Louise Hashimoto and I'm an assistant federal prosecutor from Providence, Rhode Island, USA.” She showed him a magnetic ID card with a gold official seal.

“It's nice to meet someone from the American government,” said Tsuyoshi, bowing a bit in his chair. “I'd shake your hand, but it's tied to the bed.”

“You can stop with the innocent act right now. I spotted you out in the hall earlier, and in the lobby, too, casing the hotel. How did you know my bodyguard is violently allergic to bay rum? You must have read his medical records.”

“Who, me? Never!”

“Ever since I discovered you network people, it's been one big pattern,” said Louise. “It's the biggest criminal conspiracy I ever saw. I busted this software pirate in Providence. He had a massive network server and a whole bunch of AI freeware search engines. We took him in custody, we bagged all his search engines, and catalogs, and indexers.… Later that very same day, these
cats
start showing up.”

“Cats?”

Louise lifted the maneki neko, handling it as if it were a live eel. “These little Japanese voodoo cats. Maneki neko, right? They started showing up everywhere I went. There's a china cat in my handbag. There's three china cats at the office. Suddenly they're on display in the windows of every antique store in Providence. My car radio starts making meowing noises at me.”

“You
broke
part of the network?” Tsuyoshi said, scandalized. “You took someone's machines away? That's terrible! How could you do such an inhuman thing?”

“You've got a real nerve complaining about that. What about *my* machinery?” Louise held up her fat, eerie-looking American pokkecon. “As soon as I stepped off the airplane at Narita, my PDA was attacked. Thousands and thousands of email messages. All of them pictures of cats. A denial-of-service attack! I can't even communicate with the home office! My PDA's useless!”

“What's a PDA?”

“It's a PDA, my Personal Digital Assistant! Manufactured in Silicon Valley!”

“Well, with a goofy name like that, no wonder our pokkecons won't talk to it.”

Louise frowned grimly. “That's right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You're involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States Government. You'll see.” She paused, looking him over. “You know, Shimizu, you don't look much like the Italian mafia gangsters I have to deal with, back in Providence.”

“I'm not a gangster at all. I never do anyone any harm.”

“Oh no?” Louise glowered at him. “Listen pal, I know a lot more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I've been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these
free goods and services
you're getting all this time?”

She pointed a finger at him. “Ha! Do you ever pay
taxes
on those? Do you ever
declare
that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales.… You're a tax evader! You're living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions!”

Tsuyoshi blinked. “Look, I don't know anything about all that. I'm just living my life.”

“Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!”

“Well,” Tsuyoshi said gently, “maybe my economy is
better
than your economy.”

“Says who?” she scoffed. “Why would anyone think that?”

“It's better because we're
happier
than you are. What's wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Year's Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those.”

“Not the way you Japanese like them. You're totally crazy for gifts.”

“What kind of society has no gifts? It's barbaric to have no regard for common human feelings.”

Louise bristled. “You're saying I'm barbaric?”

“I don't mean to complain,” Tsuyoshi said politely, “but you do have tied me up to your bed.”

Louise crossed her arms. “You might as well stop complaining. You'll be in much worse trouble when the local police arrive.”

“Then we'll probably be waiting here for quite a while,” Tsuyoshi said. “The police move rather slowly, here in Japan. I'm sorry, but we don't have as much crime as you Americans, so our police are not very alert.”

The pasokon rang at the side of the bed. Louise answered it. It was Tsuyoshi's wife.

“Could I speak to Tsuyoshi Shimizu please?”

“I'm over here, dear,” Tsuyoshi called quickly. “She's kidnapped me! She tied me to the bed!”

“Tied to her
bed?
” His wife's eyes grew wide. “That does it! I'm calling the police!”

Louise quickly hung up the pasokon. “I haven't kidnapped you! I'm only detaining you here until the local authorities can come and arrest you.”

“Arrest me for what, exactly?”

Louise thought quickly. “Well, for poisoning my bodyguard by pouring bay rum into the ventilator.”

“But I never did that. Anyway, that's not illegal, is it?”

The pasokon rang again. A shining white cat appeared on the screen. It had large, staring, unearthly eyes.

“Let him go,” the cat commanded in English.

Louise shrieked and yanked the pasokon's plug from the wall.

Suddenly the lights went out. “Infrastructure attack! “Louise squawled. She rolled quickly under the bed.

The room went gloomy and quiet. The air conditioner had shut off. “I think you can come out,” Tsuyoshi said at last, his voice loud in the still room. “It's just a power failure.”

“No it isn't,” Louise said. She crawled slowly from beneath the bed, and sat on the mattress. Somehow, the darkness had made them more intimate. “I know very well what this is. I'm under attack. I haven't had a moment's peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It's never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law.”

She sighed. “I sit in chairs, and somebody's left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they're not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.”

The shower came on, all by itself. Louise shuddered, but said nothing. Slowly, the darkened, stuffy room began to fill with hot steam.

“My toilets don't flush,” Louise said. “My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It's always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I'm up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And its got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are all people.”

There was the noise of scuffling in the hall. Distant voices, confused shouting.

Suddenly the chair broke under the doorknob. The door burst open violently. Mitch tumbled through, the sunglasses flying from his head. Two hotel security guards were trying to grab him. Shouting incoherently in English, Mitch fell headlong to the floor, kicking and thrashing. The guards lost their hats in the struggle. One tackled Mitch's legs with both his arms, and the other whacked and jabbed him with a baton.

Puffing and grunting with effort, they hauled Mitch out of the room. The darkened room was so full of steam that the harried guards hadn't even noticed Tsuyoshi and Louise.

Louise stared at the broken door. “Why did they do that to him?”

Tsuyoshi scratched his head in embarrassment. “Probably a failure of communication.”

“Poor Mitch! They took his gun away at the airport. He had all kinds of technical problems with his passport.… Poor guy, he's never had any luck since he met me.”

There was a loud tapping at the window. Louise shrank back in fear. Finally she gathered her courage, and opened the curtains. Daylight flooded the room.

A window-washing rig had been lowered from the roof of the hotel, on cables and pulleys. There were two window-washers in crisp gray uniforms. They waved cheerfully, making little catpaw gestures.

There was a third man with them. It was Tsuyoshi's brother.

One of the washers opened the window with a utility key. Tsuyoshi's brother squirmed into the room. He stood up and carefully adjusted his coat and tie.

“This is my brother,” Tsuyoshi explained.

“What are you doing here?” Louise said.

“They always bring in the relatives when there's a hostage situation,” Tsuyoshi's brother said. “The police just flew me in by helicopter and landed me on the roof.” He looked Louise up and down. “Miss Hashimoto, you just have time to escape.”

“What?” she said.

“Look down at the streets,” he told her. “See that? You hear them? Crowds are pouring in from all over the city. All kinds of people, everyone with wheels. Street noodle salesmen. Bicycle messengers. Skateboard kids. Takeout delivery guys.”

Louise gazed out the window into the streets, and shrieked aloud. “Oh no! A giant swarming mob! They're surrounding me! I'm doomed!”

“You are not doomed,” Tsuyoshi's brother told her intently. “Come out the window. Get onto the platform with us. You've got one chance, Louise. It's a place I know, a sacred place in the mountains. No computers there, no phones, nothing.” He paused. “It's a sanctuary for people like us. And I know the way.”

She gripped his suited arm. “Can I trust you?”

“Look in my eyes,” he told her. “Don't you see? Yes, you can trust me. We have everything in common.”

Louise stepped out the window. She clutched his arm, the wind whipping at her hair. The platform creaked rapidly up and out of sight.

Tsuyoshi stood up from the chair. When he stretched out, tugging at his handcuffed wrist, he was just able to reach his pokkecon with his fingertips. He drew it in, and clutched it to his chest. Then he sat down again, and waited patiently for someone to come and give him freedom.

In Paradise

The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.

Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down so these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third-degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and a thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no-man's land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.