Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

“Thirty-two degrees. Sunny. Ten percent chance of precipitation,” murmured a weather diagram that popped up beside his left nostril as he continued slowly along the street. It was a hot and sticky summer day in Tokyo, the congestion of buildings, crowds, and traffic trapping the viscous humidity. Bundled up snug in his suit, Amon’s face was sticky and his back wet after only a few minutes of frugal walking. He wanted to wipe the sweat gathering on his brow with his sleeve, but resisted the urge and kept on ahead. Droplets had already condensed into rivulets that began to dribble down his cheeks, dripping off his chin onto the breast of his jacket, and oozing around the back of his neck to soak his collar (a gross display digimake thankfully edited out).

Fighting off the craving to wipe his brow meant minor discomfort, but Amon could bear it since it also meant more credit in his account. If he reflected on it for a moment, he did have his qualms with some aspects of the action-transaction system (particularly when certain politicians in the Absolute Choice Party abused it). But he believed it had undoubtedly made the world a better place, not least of all by teaching humanity one crucial lesson: the difference between wastes of energy and crucial undertakings. The slimy feeling of clinging sweat, for example, gave rise to the urge to wipe. This urge—like the urge to lick the lips or rub the eyes—could be ignored indefinitely, the sweat eventually evaporating of its own accord. In other cases, as Amon knew all too well, the satiation of an urge only made the inciting sensation worse, like a maddening rash or mosquito bite that itched the more with scratching. But these were qualitatively different from urges like eating, sleeping, or responding to a business email. One could not ignore the hollowness of an empty stomach, heavy eyelids at night, or the burning need to please a company superior without palpable repercussions. By forcing everyone to constantly monitor visceral impulses and authorize or suppress them in accordance with their salary and the going rates, wearing a BodyBank made the line between pointless spasms of the unconscious and meaningful drives sharper and sharper, until all motivational glitches could be identified and patched before they manifested into superfluous actions.

His thoughts on the virtues of the AT system were interrupted when the blue arrow he was following suddenly turned red. One company had bought the tile from another and jacked up the price while he was in mid-step. His right foot outstretched, he froze and balanced on his left before redirecting his airborne foot to another tile indicated by a new, blue arrow.

He had not gone more than a few paces further when the line of legs stopped advancing, and he was forced to a halt. Looking up from the infosidewalk, he saw that the signal at the intersection just a few meters ahead had turned red. The crowd closed in tight around him as those behind continued to edge forward. Now that his commuting routine had been interrupted, Amon felt the claws of his emotions scrabbling their way to the surface of his awareness, carrying anxious thoughts with them, and he turned his gaze upward in search of inspiration, as he had countless times before.

There he saw a wilderness of kaleidoscopic concrete peaks layered against the InfoSky and rising from scattered locations in their midst, thirteen buildings taller than the rest. These housed the Tokyo headquarters of “The Twelve And One,” a group of MegaGloms that together owned all domains of human endeavor. One building was for H&H Kenko, which held the rights to all actions associated with health, medicine, nutrition, and exercise. Another was for Ultimate Truth Limited (UT Ltd. for short), the proprietor of religion, philosophy, spirituality, science, and the cosmos. No Logo Inc.: protesting, subversion, counter-culture, swearing. R-Lite: the sun, energy, atoms, and everything smaller. The remaining handful were represented as well: TTY Group, Xian Te, Yomoko Holdings, LYS Dynamics, Latoni Sedo, Kavipal, XXXTrust, Fertilex, and LVR. The immensity of their buildings seemed to bespeak the strength of their influence, as they reared over the surrounding rooftops of their subsidiaries and independent venture startups no doubt destined to be their subsidiaries. From Amon’s grounded vantage, the MegaGlom buildings all appeared to be of equal height and he sometimes wondered if this symbolized their equal standing in the global marketplace. Or perhaps that all thirteen were really just one; their share in each other’s assets being so large and so rapidly traded that only specialists could even attempt to draw lines between them.

Whatever the significance of their height, there was another building—GATA Tower—that exceeded every other by far. It was like a swollen skyscraper gutted and turned inside out, with its frame and supports on the exterior. Tight braids of polished steel—gleaming with a subtle tinge of baby blue dappled lavender—formed pillars at the four corners, like poisonous snakes coiling straight to heaven. Reaching diagonally between these pillars, bands of the same steel wove a latticework façade, through which diamond-shaped patches of the brown-tinted inner glass walls could be seen. Where it met the InfoSky there was a thin ring of untouched blue. This gigantic fortress was sheathed in an invisible cylinder one kilometer in diameter beyond which the writhing images could not approach; an information vacuum at the epicenter of this communixchange vortex called Tokyo.

The signal finally changed green, urging Amon and his surrounding professionals across the road. On the other side, he made his way right to the next corner and turned left onto a broad boulevard where the entertisements petered out. He followed a sidewalk of glossy, transparent concrete interspersed with triangular slivers of pale topaz. Slender spruce growing straight out of this concrete lined the curb beside a four-lane road. Their threadlike roots traced a forking pattern of bright green just beneath the surface of the sidewalk, visible intermittently through the multitude of flapping pant legs and sleek calves. In the middle of the road was an island plaza of the same glossy concrete. It was topped with vacant benches, young potted ginkgo, and a fountain playing the logo of Yomoko Holdings. Sculptured spurts of grayscale fluid depicted jagged pieces of broken glass re-fusing into a mirror that reflected a black cube with one corner cleanly nicked off, this graphic-spray floating amidst the ocean of roaring cars like a castaway’s desperate SOS signal. Looking straight ahead, Amon had an unobstructed view of GATA Tower. Its intricate shaft protruded from a round platform of brown marble at the end of the boulevard. It rose straight up and up and up to an overwhelming altitude, beyond the streets and roofscape, the city and the world, receding endlessly into the outer reaches.

Amon doubted if it was architecturally possible to build a structure with such a narrow base that would be stable enough to exit the atmosphere—certainly not in earthquake-prone Japan—and had always wondered about GATA Tower’s naked dimensions. Maybe it reached no higher than the subsidiary rooftops? Maybe it was as monumentally tall as it seemed? Reliable information on the subject wasn’t easy to come by. The GATA Tokyo website claimed it was the tallest building in the world, but so did the GATA headquarters in Seoul, Rio De Janeiro, and Mumbai, and the discussion page of the FlexiPedia article for “Tallest Building” had degenerated into a bout of name-calling between the various architects and their followers. Satellite views were equally useless, as the controversial buildings were all inexplicably blacked out from publicly affordable maps.