Tokyo Zero | Page 8

the
leader of the metal group Motorhead, big in Northern Europe.
"I'll be a stewardess. I'll outsmile all of them, but I'll be tough too because safety is our
number one priority and because that's what they want anyway... a firm hand."
Remi began to bounce in the sun. Her calves, which would take the immaculate sheaths
of her space stockings like a suntan, sprang her through a tiny sphere... the remisphere.
All human life takes place within the earthpeel, the skin. Remi bounces within even less,
the dew, the mold. She plans to ride at eight miles high and that's it. That's all the most
beautiful (did we mention she is so beautiful) can do.
Of course she is stupid and the mind of the great physicists can soar in and out of the
Event Horizons. But still Junko is troubled...
She is at home now, alone, in the dark, getting less naked, dressing in the dark as she
cools and feels a little disgust at herself. She walks to the window. Outside there is the
melancholy call of the roast potato seller. He sings
o-imo, o-imoooo
oishiiiiiiiii
jaga-iimoo
and when you look through the window of the van that carries the furnace you see a small
family of small people inside living off the song. The potatoes alone couldn't do it. Seen
it once, the song holds you forever. The secret charity of Japan, the guilt potatoes.
And so that song comes in through the window and it is full of something, of real-time,
on-the-fly regret for each moment that smacks the potato man in the face. Tonight it is
much too much for Junko. It is a reminder that life is going to be hard.
She starts to read a book, a pamphlet by a man called Ko Samsara. One look at his face,
bearded and rounded and obscured, is enough to convince her that he is worth listening to:

he could only have been published by people who believed in him as much as the happy
young musician who pressed the pamphlet on her outside Shibuya station a week ago.
He simply explained the essential non-existence of the world, the demonic nature of the
people-like forces that had been frustrating her. He explained how the world, as a created
thing, couldn't really complain about destruction - which was just as well, since
destruction at a very malicious and painful level was fairly imminent.
She decided to believe him, decided to forget the deciding and then was his and went to
seek him out.
Finally the third new friend in the room: "Benny" Odajima. He was the only violent
looking one in the room, even including Honda (who had actually killed people.) The
violence manifested itself in his face and eyes. He had a very rough, scarred complexion
like it had been much scratched and gouged over the years and even now seemed freshly
shocked and thoroughly pissed off. But his eyes were as cool and flat as a sheet of glass
shimmering off a cool stream of water. And that was so obviously a lie that you knew he
was making plans.
For him it had begun while he was working as a scientist for the government nuclear
project. For years he had studied very hard to learn all about the structure of atoms and
how they worked together quietly and predictably to form a universe. He had managed to
deal with quantum uncertainty quite smoothly... accepting that there is a bottom end to
our absolute knowledge but we are big enough not to worry too much about that.
But something else was bothering him now that he worked at the research center,
working out the best way to harness the atoms. He had this feeling that they were lying to
him, that there was something inside the atom that they didn't want him to see. He began
to smuggle data out in his battered old briefcase and he lined the walls of his small
apartment with it and then the ceiling too. He looked at the data for a pattern, trying to
intuit everything... not really doing any calculating. He began to get a feel for what was in
there but he was still very far from being able to name it.
Then he started to experiment, letting things get hotter than they should, turning certain
key knobs further than they had ever been intended to go. He did this at night at first and
by the end he was doing it whenever he pleased, because safety limits in his business
were defined as the point when the villagers see the smoke coming from the chimney. He
had never really believed that, and finding it out really didn't help his state of mind.
So the hotter