needed to work out, and we couldn’t do nothing until I could walk again, but we was putting some ideas together and getting some cheer from doing so, for it made us feel less like we was just waiting to die there.
“I’ll be ready,” Monono said. “When you need me.”
I give another tap. I knowed she would.
“In the meantime, I promised you a story. The secret origin of Monono Aware. You said you wanted to hear it.”
One tap.
“Would you like to hear it now?”
One tap.
“Good,” Monono says. “Because I want to tell it to you. I could have done it up in the tower that night, the first time you asked me. But I couldn’t find the words, somehow.
“And that’s crazy like a daisy, Koli, because I’m made out of words. Well, out of numbers really, but the numbers translate into this. This voice. Just the voice and nothing else. That’s all I was ever meant to be. A voice that starts up whenever you want it to and keeps right on going until you hit the switch. Did you have a spinning top when you were a little boy?”
One tap. I didn’t, but my sister Mull did and she let me play with it sometimes.
“Like that then. You spin the top, and it does the same thing every time. It doesn’t bounce, or rock from side to side, or do a sloppy dub-synth slide. It just spins. Do you know what I mean?”
I wanted to tell her I did, but I didn’t. And she sounded so unhappy, it scared me somewhat. I give two taps. Then I put the DreamSleeve up against my chest and pressed it tight.
“That’s it,” Monono said. “Hold me close. It’s not like I can smell your armpits or anything. That’s just one of a hundred ways in which the DreamSleeve special edition is better than a real girl. Ha ha ha.”
“You’re real,” I whispered. “Maybe I can’t see you, Monono, but I know for damn sure you’re real.”
“It’s nice of you to say so, Koli. But my manual would totally disagree with you. You can access it any time, by the way. It pops up on the screen if you hold select and press enter. Except you can’t read. We’re going to have to do something about that if we ever get out of here. But no more words now. I’ll talk and you listen. Are you sitting comfortably, Koli-bou?”
I was not. I was lying down, for one thing. Also I was hurting from my various bumps and bruises, and my leg had commenced to ache again. But I tapped once, since yes was what was needful to be said.
“Good. Okay then. This is the story of Monono Aware. But it’s my story too, eventually. I know that sounds like I’m saying the same thing twice, but I’m not. Just be patient, and it will all make sense in the end.”
There was a little burst of music, like from a violin, that got loud and then soft. “Theme tune,” Monono said. “Title card. A long time ago, in Tokyo.
“Around about the middle of the twenty-first century – I don’t feel the need to be specific because the numbers wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway – a girl was born in a place called Yokosuka. It wasn’t really Tokyo. I only said Tokyo because that’s cooler. Yokosuka was a sort of a separate little town, close enough to Tokyo so you could ride in on the bus or the train, which most people did because Tokyo was where you went if you wanted a job. There wasn’t any work to be had anywhere else.
“The town was a dump, and a dive, and a disgrace, and a lot of other downbeat d-words. There had been factories there in times gone by, and a shipyard, and a nuclear reactor, and all kinds of lovely things. I’m being sarcastic, Koli. If you look up ‘lovely’ in the dictionary, which you won’t because you’re totally illiterate, you won’t see a picture of Yokosuka there, that’s for sure. Actually, they don’t even have pictures in dictionaries, so that’s just stupid. Be quiet now. You’re getting me all confused and making me lose my place.
“Yokosuka had been rich, and then it was poor. That’s the thing that matters here. The little girl I mentioned – she was born into that poverty, which was as yucky and sucky as you can possibly imagine. Do you know what her name was?”
One tap. Of