the door anyway. It is the last moment of the day. The sunset would be beautiful, if I were in the mood. A dying SF movie sun sits on a Warner Cinema multiplex. I wonder what metro line takes you to that sort of sunset, and what station you need to get off at. I amble back the way I came and find a games centre. Inside are a whole row of full-sized 2084 machines, doing brisk business with schoolkids. Today has been a bad day. I change a thousand-yen note into hundred-yen coins.
Photon fire bursts around me, and my final comrade falls. I get the prison guard in my sights and fricassé him. The last echo dies. Eerie silence. Is the shooting finally over? Eight stages since the red door. The metal walkway clanks as I walk over the pile of guards and fallen rebels. It is down to me. Here is the prison door. ‘Prisoner Ned Ludd. Crime: Cyber-Terrorism. Sentence: Life Incarceration. Security Access: Orange.’ Inside is my father, the man who will free humanity from the tyranny of OuterNet. The revolution to reverse reality starts now. I fire the ‘Open’ pad, and the door slides sideways. I enter the cell. Darkness. The door slides shut and the lights come on. OuterNet intelligence officers! With old-fashioned revolvers? I open fire, but my photon gun is dead. The whole cell is a dampening field. Somewhere I took the wrong turn. Somewhere I failed to read the sign. Before my eyes, my ‘Energy’ bar shrinks to .01. I cannot move. I cannot even stand. A man – I recognize him, he is the farmer from the soya farm during my waking hours – walks over, loosening his tie. ‘My name Agent K00996363E. The revelation is this, Player I8192727I. Ned Ludd is a project created by OuterNet to detect antiGame tendencies among players, and assess their potential danger to OuterNet. Your susceptibility to indoctrination by our provocateurs is evidence of defective wetprogramming. The very idea that ideology can ever defeat the image is itself insanity. OuterNet will reprocess your wetware, in accordance with Propagation of Game Law 972HIJ. This grieves me, I81, but it is for your own good.’ He brings his face up close. It is not hateful. It is tender and forgiving. ‘Game over.’
Four
RECLAIMED LAND
So this is how I die, minutes after midnight on reclaimed land somewhere south of Tokyo bay. I sneeze, and the swelling in my right eye throbs and nearly ruptures. Sunday, 17th September. I cannot call my death unexpected. Not after the last twelve hours. Since Anju showed me what death was, I have glimpsed it waiting in trains, in elevators, on pharmacist’s shelves. Growing up, I saw it booming off the ocean rocks on Yakushima. Always at some distance. Now it has thrown off its disguise, as it does in nightmares. I am here, this is real. A waking nightmare from which I will never wake up. Splayed on my back, far from anyone who knows me, my life bar at zero. My body is racked and I am running a temperature as high as this bridge. The sky is spilling with stars, night flights and satellites. What a murky, gritty, pointless, unlikely, premature, snot-sprayed way to die it has been. One bad, sad gamble that was rigged from the beginning. Very nearly my last thought is that if this whole aimless story is to go on, God the vivisectionist is going to need a new monkey for his experiments. So many stars. What are they for?
Wednesday afternoon, I go to the bank near Ueno station to pay for my ads in the personal columns. The bank is a ten-minute walk down Asakusa Avenue, so I borrow an orphaned bike – the company car of the lost property office. It is too decrepit for anybody to ever want to steal, but saves my lunch break nearly a quarter-of-an-hour walk down a busy road hot with fumes and the dying summer. No shade in Tokyo, and all the concrete stores the heat. I park the bike outside and go in – the bank is busy with lunch-time, and burbling with a million bank noises. Drones, telephones, computer printers, paper, automatic doors, murmurs, a bored baby. Using an ATM to pay for Plan D is cheaper as long as I don’t make a single mistake typing in the long string of digits, otherwise my money will go flying into the wrong account. I am taking my