Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

The platform stopped, the glass doors opened onto the sidewalk, and Amon got out with the other passengers. Unable to see his body, passersby walked straight at him and didn’t give way, but he did his best not to bump anyone, sidestepping and dodging his way to the curb. The cars were stopped at the red light and he dashed across, carving through thin channels between bumpers and bounding over the line of shrubbery in the middle. Reaching the opposite sidewalk, he careened into a tunnel leading underground to Wakuwaku Station. Instead of the packed escalator, he took the stairs, leaping past and around the ascending salarymen from flight to flight.

Mayuko continued to quietly sip her coffee as she watched the men creep slowly towards her. When they were close enough, she could see up into the huge nostrils of the tengu, the inside lined with tiny black feathers. Soon she was surrounded, the tip of their long noses ringing her head, the emoticon man confronting her face to unface. Unable to meet his eyeless gaze, she stared down at the dark brown liquid in her cup, stirring it pointlessly with a little spoon.

Amon was still searching train routes when he reached the platform. The tail ends of the lines in front of each door were filing onto the train. “The doors will close. Charging on board is dangerous. Please wait for the next train,” said a deep male voice. Galloping to the edge of the platform, Amon leapt into the half-empty car just as the doors slid shut. When the train began to move, he turned off his invisibility and stood there panting. Although his body had been erased and his footsteps muted, his interactions with other people had still been observable. If his pursuers somehow figured out that he’d slipped out the fire escape, as unlikely as this seemed, they might have been able to follow the recording of his trail of impacts using an app like God’s Eye. But he had collided with nothing since leaving the glass platform, so they would have no way of knowing which way he went, nor would they know for certain it was Amon who had fled rather than someone else. If they somehow figured out that he had entered the station, they still wouldn’t know which train he had taken (or whether he had taken a train at all). Now he was on a linear locomotive—the fastest ride out of Wakuwaku City—and, supposing the worst case scenario in which they did somehow manage to locate the car he’d boarded, by that time he would be far, far away, and the surveillance costs too great to track him down. It certainly wasn’t over yet. Mayuko was still paying for everything he did—the line-cutting, the jaywalking, and now his ride on this super express—but he felt somewhat relieved to have slipped away undetected before the invisibility bankrupted her. Now there was little to bring her under suspicion and nothing they could do to find him. Or so he wanted to believe.

Over the encompassing infoblather and the muffled breakbeats of his spasmodic heart, Amon heard a voice. “Where is Amon Kenzaki?” said the man. The slit mouth and white holes reopened on his face. Mayuko could see his eye sockets more clearly now that he was up close. They seemed to open into a realm of pure luminescence somehow contained in his head. It was divided into countless hexagonal cells by a frame of golden beams, like some ephemeral honeycomb, the walls of this frame an iridescent membrane like soap bubbles.

“There’s no one here,” replied Mayuko. Her voice was calm, but the cup shook as she lifted it to her mouth.

Without moving their limbs or torsos, the tengu simultaneously rotated their heads around the room, their long noses like slow-motion helicopter rotors. Upon finishing a 360, they spread out and began to search the apartment. One looked under the couch while another opened the fridge and the cupboards. One entered each bedroom, one the lavatory, and one the shower room. Only one remained standing beside the emoticon man, the two of them wielding merciless stares.

The man’s straw-sandalled feet seemed to glide over the floor beneath his white robes as he came even closer to Mayuko’s seated form, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

“We happen to know that he was here within the last hour,” he rattled. “Tell us where he’s gone, immediately.” Eerily incongruous with his demanding tone, he beamed a broad smile. Through the lipless slit above his chin Mayuko saw a solid bar of bone that wrapped along the top of his oral cavity, as though his teeth had been welded together. Below this, resting within the pocked semicircular ridge of toothless gums on the bottom, was an oblong blot of faintly fluorescent orangish yellow and red, like a tongue viewed through infrared goggles. As his mouth opened, his eye-holes widened at the same rate, and within the golden soap-bubble honeycomb filling his skull, Mayuko could now see that each cell contained a woman. Naked, they reclined on their sides in empty space; their skin so pure and milky they nearly camouflaged into the white glare; silver grapes growing from their crimson hair; the delirious ecstasy in their eyes seeming to invite Mayuko into this paradise. When his smile and eyes widened to a certain diameter, his face flipped back to deadpan, and the cycle rebooted, widening smile to deadpan, smile to deadpan. When it was clear Mayuko wasn’t going to answer, the man said: “I’ll make you an offer to tell me.”

A fund transfer window appeared before her, and Amon gasped at the number. He had seen it before, had almost memorized it in his anger and despair. Just to be sure, he scrolled to the section of his AT readout for 12:17:23 the night before last, and saw that it was indeed the exact amount of jubilee.

Mayuko clicked the decline button and said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Is that so? Then how about selling me your LifeStream for the last forty-eight hours.” A window appeared with the same offer. This time Mayuko ignored it.

“Why don’t you accept?” The man shook his head to show his disapproval. Or rather, the direction of his face blipped suddenly from in-line with his right shoulder to in-line with his left, displaying his noseless profile on both sides, the flesh folds of his huge ears tracing a deep and intricate maze. “I doubt you’ll ever see money like this again.”

Mayuko took another sip of coffee. “That is my private life and I’m not doing business with discreditable people like you. Now please leave.” Her voice was amazingly calm.

“Who are you?” said the man. “Your name please.”

“I asked you to leave.”

Suddenly the illumination in the man’s skull went out, leaving two shadowed holes below his brow. Then the spot on his face directly to the left of his left eye began to glow as though someone were holding a flashlight beneath the skin. This light moved in a straight line to the right, beamed brightly out of his eye socket, became a skin-smothered glow again when it reached the bridge of his non-nose, beamed brightly out of his right socket and vanished when it reached the patch of skin beside his right eye, like a photocopier. When the process was finished, the man’s eyes lit up as before with the female-inhabited golden honeycomb matrix and he said, “Oh. I see now. It’s you, is it? You’re that girl. From his BioPen… Mayuko Takamatsu.”

The room whipped from side to side as Mayuko shook her head.

“No. It has to be you. You do look a bit more worn out than in your youth, sure. But your hair. It has a certain glitter to it, doesn’t it?”

Amon was agape with horror on the train as he watched this unfold. How did he know?

“Well, it seems that you’ve been wasting my time with lies, Ms. Takamatsu. I can’t stand when people waste my time. But let’s start from the beginning anyways, except this time I’d like you to try and answer as honestly as you can. Do you think you can manage that?”