Pollen
Chapter two

Little Tokyo

Dressed in a slick, skin-tight, bulletproof white suit, Shunka roared down the main drag of Little Tokyo’s shopping district on her high-fendered bōsōzoku bike. At nineteen, she didn’t feel like an adult yet, but the suit and the bike said otherwise. Training had been tough. First, fitness drills for a year, and then three years of various forms of kickboxing and lethal weapons training. Finally she was taught multiple martial art forms by a second-wave feminist who could snap people’s bones like breadsticks. The idea was that if you saw a white suit walking down the street, you knew he or she could kick your ass, no matter who you were and no matter what you were packing. In her line of work, precautions were necessary; Shunka was a Farmer, after all.

A take-out pizza bike suddenly cut in front of her as the lanes merged. The bike was about to pull away, but upon checking whom he’d just screwed, the biker immediately decelerated, and, riding next to her, he bowed for forgiveness. She never let her high status affect her moral code, so she nodded politely—despite the fact he was a dick. He sped off with his tail between his legs. Watching him go, she begun to wonder why there was such a demand for pizza at 6:30 a.m.

Her business this morning was at a twenty-four-hour mod parlor, The Burning. To maintain her high status in various social groups, it wasn’t enough to simply have a powerful job. She had to look the part, be on trend at the start of the trend. It was a constant struggle. She’d built a good relationship with the team of mod artists in a basement parlor in a poor suburb. Concrete roads, flickering shop signs running on a thread of power. This was where the talent was.

Five years ago, they were the only places that would mod anyone underage. Shunka, only fourteen, had arrived feeling a little shy but determined after being turned away for months by a long list of parlors. While she was sitting in the waiting room, an argument broke out between two men. In this neighborhood it wasn’t unusual for a knife fight to break out at a supermarket. These two were packing some serious heat and could have done some damage but Shunka was not going to lose her place in line. Both men had their arms broken in that waiting room. The added bonus for her was that she was next in line. She’d come back to this same shop for every mod ever since.

“Shunka, my deadly firework,” came the greeting from the lead artist, Jet. He’d seen her that day five years ago, when he was an apprentice.

“Jet, how are you, my love?” She leaned in and kissed him on both cheeks. “I must apologize, but I’ve got a whole ton of shit to do today. I gotta be in and out.”

“Hey, no need to explain yourself to me. I see you’ve got rain-eyes pre-ordered and paid for.”

Jet led her past the waiting room and into a private booth. He read from his augmented-reality order sheet, his eyes darting about, scrolling through the payment plan. With Shunka, though, it was always paid up front.

“Good choice, this ain’t live on the market for another month,” he nodded with approval.

A “lens shifter,” the tech community called it. A nanofilm that, once embedded, could change the color of her eyes with a thought. One electrical impulse and she would have this season’s eye color instantly. No more contact lenses. As a bonus they’d be perfect for Manga-themed parties. This was the first mod in some time that she allowed herself to get excited about. She’d earned a little vanity indulgence after her recent promotion.

“Oh hey, I got a freebie software package if you’re interested. It’s still in beta.”

“What is it?” Shunka sat down in a synthetic leather chair and took a moment to listen to it creak as she sank in.

“The WaveHack,” he declared with pride.

“Is the name still in beta too?”

“It’s, err, well . . .”

“I’m joking.” She held her hands up in mock surrender.

“It’ll hack into almost any signal it detects. It makes it easier to see what programs other people are running around you.”

“Can it download the data?” She straightened slightly at the possibility.

“Short upload only, I’m afraid. A sentence or two, maybe a photo.”

“So, I can plant a message into someone else’s feed? It’s like a practical joke program? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Well, I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” Jet said. Sliding deeper into thought, his eyes darted about the endless amounts of code he’d used to create the program.

“I’ll have it,” she sat back and made herself comfortable. “There are a few people I can think of I’d like to mess with.”

“I’ve been looking into that thing you wanted.” Jet whispered.

“You don’t have to talk in code, Jet, you’re living in a factory of illegal work,” she gestured with her hands and laughed.

“Yeah, but this is looking into a Farmer’s past, and that’s deadly work.”

“It’s my past and I’ve got your back.”

“Well, I took a look at the scan of all the mods in your head and dug about some records with some friends of mine and you were right. You had a period of your memory erased.”

“Wow.” Shunka muttered. “I guess I knew, but . . .”

“It happens more than you think these days.”

“It doesn’t feel like me, though.”

“Your fingerprints are all over the delete.”

“I must really have had an issue, huh?” She tried to lighten the mood, but a weight pulled her down.

“I guess so.” Jet fumbled about. “Lean back.” He placed two drops of solution into each eye. “Here’s your rain-eye, it’ll take a few minutes. I’ll be back soon,” Jet said quickly, and left.

The solution, packed full of bionano systems, stung a little at first as it sent its trackers through her visual cortex and created a thin film across her pupils. In the dark silence she allowed her guard to drop. She felt peace in knowing she had been the one to make the decision to burn part of her memory, but now that she was older, she wanted to know why she’d done it. She remembered the warmth of her family as a child but then nothing, only a static snow. She could feel an attack of the blues coming on, so she turned her thoughts to her busy day.

Shunka’s main extracurricular activity was with her boyfriend, Cheng. Seven months and counting it was the longest relationship she’d ever been in and was in the top ten longest relationships amongst all her peers. Cheng, a dynamite bionano engineer who ran an entire section of the Little Tokyo black market. He flirted with dangerous deals, but he never overstepped the line. He never knowingly sold anything harmful, but if you wanted something the Traders didn’t want to sell you, Cheng could create any piece of custom body mod software or hardware. No matter how impressive his work was, penis enlargers were still his main profit spinner. That didn’t matter to him, though. He had tech monkeys for that grunt work now. He’d freed himself up to work on bigger and better projects, like tattoo changers, age obscurer, and knuckle stunners—the fun stuff. Shunka adored his ambition, and today she was running an errand for him before work. She was going to get back a petri dish of developmental bacteria that had been stolen from Cheng a fortnight ago.

With her new apps installed, she left the mod parlor and raced through the wide boulevards to one of Little Tokyo’s best hotels, The Angkor. It was the type of place where someone opened a door for you and your drinks never ran out. She went over the plan, adjusting for security and other variables. She may have been a teenager, but what she lacked in years she made up for in attention to detail. She checked her teeth and lipstick in her bike’s mirrors. If there was one thing above all she couldn’t stand, it was finding out she’d had a serious conversation with lipstick on her teeth. Her tobacco-brunette hair, cut to a classic bob, and fierce, scarlet lips made her feel like an old movie star.

Happy with her appearance, she scanned for ambushes and exit routes as she entered The Angkor. The hotel had a giant atrium and petrified palm trees stretching three stories high. They lined the central marble hall like columns. The receptionist took a glance at her. Bowing slightly and avoiding eye contact, the receptionist simply pointed to the winding white staircase and mumbled, “Fourth floor please.” It seemed her target knew she was coming.

She climbed quickly and silently to the fourth floor which opened up to a lofty hall adorned with gold-leaf patterns and four giant teardrop chandeliers. Her mark had a taste for the finer things in life. Two security guards, dressed in Japanese Kendo warrior silks, guarded each side.

“I’m here to see Mr. Vibol,” Shunka said pleasantly to the sentry guards.

Silently, they nodded and opened a large red lacquered double door for her. She entered without fuss or alarm—she hated alarms.

Mr. Vibol sat behind a smooth metal desk. Glass plates surrounded him, displaying a rotating gallery of fine art. The suite was clean-cut and crisp and you could have spotted a speck of dust instantly.

Vibol was enigmatic man, full of grit, crestfallen after failing to live up to his sizable reputation. His thick spectacles hung heavy on his thin nose, but still he squinted. Seemed strange to her that he’d refused mods to fix his poor sight, since he was one of the leading minds on bionano research and a senior figure in the powerful Transport Union. Shunka scanned the room but found no security measures in place. If this was a trap, it was either the best or the dumbest.

“Ah, Shunka, please, take a seat,” Vibol said.

“Listen, Mr. Vibol, I ain’t planning on staying too long. You know my name, so you know why I’m here, so either spring your trap or hand over the goods.”

“Why would I ‘spring’ a trap on you? It is eight o’clock in the morning and that is simply far too early for such complications. I’ll give you what you want, and all I want in return is for you to take a seat and have a conversation with me.”

“Are you some sort of old guy who likes talking to young girls?” she asked calmly.

“You’re nineteen. What older man wouldn’t enjoy talking to a young woman?”

“Fine.” Shunka sat. He was too old to get physically aggressive with. She didn’t like where this was going, but she still felt in control. She could stop this at any time, and besides, he had a point. Who really wanted to start a fight at eight o’clock in the morning?

“So you’re Cheng’s new plaything?”

“Play nice or I won’t.” She crossed her arms. Her wild, wide-set eyes sent him an angry glance.

“He normally likes someone a little more . . . malleable,” he said with a hint of disdain She could sense the history, but that was for another conversation.

“Sorry to disappoint.” Shunka hated putting on her business voice. She was convinced that people could hear straight through the bravado, but the fact always remained that she was the one sitting there in the white suit.

“Why are you here?”

“To get the merchandise back—you know that.” She resented the fact that every job followed the same set of questions, like criminals had all gone to the same school and passed a small-talk exam.

“That’s what you’ve come for, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re here because you think helping Cheng will help you.”

“I’m getting bored,” Shunka replied.

“Oh, you children and your lack of patience.” Quickness entered his voice, a tone from his youth, she thought.

“I am not a child.” Her voice shook with anger, and her back straightened.

“Yet you don’t know why I took it, or what it is. Aren’t you interested in those facts?” Vibol continued, disregarding her increasingly aggressive attitude.

“Of course I am, but in my line of work, the victim doesn’t generally want to talk. Well, that is, until I make them.”

“Do I look like a victim to you?” He leaned back in his chair.

“No, you look smug.”

“Well, I apologize. You’re quite the surprise. The vacuous, titillating tart is usually Cheng’s lady of choice, and you are clearly not that.”

“You wanna keep pressing that same button? Listen, if you want to take me on some sort of merry-go-round where you impart some bullshit philosophy on love, life, and the universe, because you ain’t much longer for this world, then don’t waste your breath. If the conversation you want to have with me is something mildly interesting, you better start talking, otherwise, your face isn’t gonna look that smug much longer, I assure you.”

“You get angry at the notion that you are a child, and yet you resort to physical threats when engaged in a challenging conversation? We are both clearly on a tight deadline today, so I’ve got one question for you. Answer it, and I’ll hand over the bacteria.”

“Fine.” She crossed her arms.

“Now, be honest, what do you think Little Tokyo is? Is it a jail or a fortress?”

“A little bit of both.”

She stalled. She’d thought about this before. Of course she had. Everyone who had ever lived within the walls had thought about it, and each had found different ways to deal with the fact that they could never escape. The cooperative school system burned into children’s thoughts that they were safe inside. The mass media sensationalized stories and lies that nothing but fear and murder lay outside the boundaries of Little Tokyo. She didn’t know the answer to his question. She knew she did not want to leave, but she simply didn’t know why.

“Your life,” Vibol said. “Your history here. You are defined by the past, and your past is constructed through the situation we all find ourselves in, born within these walls.” He gestured with his creased hands.

“The past is a tombstone.” Her expression shifted instantly, and she was aware of it. Steely eyes, with muscles primed to strike him.

“What of your parents? What did they teach you?”

She knew what he was doing; he’d done his homework on her. Shunka had pieced together parts of her past. She was born out of wedlock and so immediately started out with a low status. She had taken a long road to get to where she was.

“It’s all right. I didn’t know at your age either,” Vibol’s teacher impersonation only served up a plate of arrogance. “Shunka, think about your life, your history here, and you’ll find the answer. I believe with absolute conviction it’s a jail. Cheng thinks it’s a fortress. He never wants to leave. I do. There are lines being drawn in the sand, and people are beginning to take sides. These walls around us lead to more districts like our own, and it’s only a matter of time before they finally crumble. I want you to think about it, that’s all.”

He opened his desk and slid across a small, white metal container. Shunka lifted the lid and inspected the Petri dish inside. He wasn’t playing any tricks. This wasn’t about stolen goods; this was about ideas. Shunka had toyed with the idea that she was living in a prison for the past couple of years. It was like the first time she really took a second to think about death. The thought that she wouldn’t think anymore scared her. It made her judge herself, made her wonder if today had been a good day. That same feeling gripped her again. She’d always believed that everything she needed could be found in here, in her city, in her Little Tokyo.

She tried not to care about the bigger things, the weight of the world, the desires of people around her, and why the hell should she? She’d only seen the walls once in her life, a vague memory, full of flowers and roses of every species. She’d forgotten that the walls were there.

Gently, she placed the dish back into the secure metal container and left the room without a word, not a glance back. She could imagine Vibol’s smug smile. What bothered her most wasn’t that she’d spend the rest of the day thinking about his question, but that he was such a sanctimonious prick.

She hit the streets at high speed on her bike, dodging the traffic gracefully, screeching to a halt in the secure park compartment at her farm. The compartment was part of a huge machine that took her bike and placed it behind a security laser field, then spun it away to tuck into its metal-and-carbon gut. She had placed the metal box with the Petri dish into the bike’s safe; there was no better place for it until she found out why Cheng and Vibol were clashing over it.

Bursting through the doors of her farm, Mearm Inc 872, she nodded at a few friends. She’d hit the comfortable stage of employment. She knew more or less what she was doing and she had begun to create shortcuts, trying to make her life easier. Thankfully, she’d moved up from the fish lab seven months ago, because the smell had been driving her to sickness.

She arrived at work exactly three minutes before the start of her shift, much to her relief. Heavy penalties were enforced for lateness, and the auto scanner on the door kept track of all comings and goings. She plonked herself down at her workstation. She sat in the middle of an interactive 3-D projection of DNA sequences that illuminated in her presence; digital scrawls and ideas swirled around her head. She shifted through the morning’s workload quietly, keeping an eye on her initiatives folder—a place for her work with Cheng. She tried to piece together what little information she had on the bacteria. All she knew was that it was for a new lung app, but clearly, Cheng was developing something much better.

Mearm Inc 872 was the smallest meat farm in the district. A tidy bureaucratic place filled with long, rectangular white rooms with meter-wide round tubes running from wall to wall, packed with meat. Her manager, an anal-retentive son of a bitch, ensured maximum efficiency was maintained at all times. For him the farm was a crusade, a noble effort to keep the district from starving. The meat was created by extracting cells from live animals and mixing in a broth of other animal products. This in turn, over the course of a few careful months of treatment, created muscle tissue, meat. The meat then had to be artificially “exercised” to create a meaty texture and taste. Suspended inside a glass tube, the long roll of muscle was stimulated by various electrical currents, and exposed to bacteria that targeted and eliminated any fat.

Shunka did have a sense of pride in her work. For her it was a job with a kick-ass suit, but most importantly, for ten minutes a day, she felt freedom. All animals within Little Tokyo were considered endangered. Many experiments to import live animals had failed, so the farms became the single most important buildings in the district, and the animals were sacred. This meant that the pigs lived a life Shunka could never imagine. They lived in an illusion of the outside world.

Underground in a secure vault, artificial daylight shone and an artificial breeze blew in an artificial countryside scene where twenty-seven pigs lived. The only pigs in Little Tokyo, their DNA fed thousands. This was why Shunka worked in the meat industry. She could access the outside world right inside her prison every day. The walls were giant and seamless projections of film, showing rolling hills in perfect countryside. The film had been set up to capture twenty-four hours of 360-degree footage, and it played on continuous repeat. Nothing but the grass shifting in the breeze and the sun climbing steadily—that and twenty-seven pigs rolling around in their own shit. Shunka really wanted to be promoted to the buffalo pen. She’d heard that it was so big that sometimes you couldn’t see the animals.

She needed to clear her head before what she was sure was going to be a messy confrontation, so she headed for the vault. Three layers of security and an aggregated diamond nanorod door lay before her and the pigs. Shunka always smiled at this point, because the toughest substance known to man was used to protect twenty-seven muck-lolling pigs.

As she entered the vault, she saw a few pigs trotting about; seemingly without a care. It lightened her mood. The sun was high up in the lofty ceiling projection. It was around one o’clock in the afternoon as a set of light, fluffy cumulus clouds moved to the northeast. The enclosure was about 150 meters long by 100 meters wide. She removed her boots and socks to feel real grass. It felt soft. There were a few little mounds to climb up that were speckled with roses. She sat on the top of a mound and looked down at the pigs.

Vibol’s words rattled about her skull. Her gut, usually so responsive to questions, was on the fence. Her impulsiveness deserted her. A prison or a fortress?

Then a message through her EEG Network wrenched her from self-reflection. Patching the message to her optical lenses, she saw the message displayed through the nanos across her eyes. It simply read, “Good Night.”

Suddenly the power went out. Deep darkness, the likes of which she’d never known, crushed her. She wrapped her arms around her body. The breeze died as the wind machine cut out. The pigs squealed, and she could hear them scattering about. She felt a pang of fear as stomach acid crawled up her throat and her adrenaline became overpowering. She heard several pigs hitting the walls as they bolted in all directions, and some of them ran up the mound, smacking into her ribs. She was knocked off the mound, and as she rolled down its side, the trotters stamped into her torso. She screamed out, but quickly realized the futility. She was locked inside one of the most secure rooms in the entire city. If the power was out, no one could get in, and she most certainly couldn’t get out.

She picked herself up and ran toward where she thought the door was, but she’d lost all sense of direction. She ran blindly away from the pigs and into a wall, thumping her forehead. She heard a few pigs running in her direction. Wildly she lashed out with perfectly formed kicks, and although they were aimless, one connected hard, resulting in an ear-piercing squeal.

The power flickered back on and filled the room with a blinding white light. The projection was gone, replaced with blankness. The pigs stopped running and stood still, frozen in shock. Then the door swung open.

“Are you okay?” the guard shouted as he ran toward her. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

He led her out as the projection of bliss started up again. “What the hell happened?” she asked. She was used to power cuts above ground, but this vault was supposed to be impregnable.

“Power cut.”

“What? The lab or the sector?” Shunka stopped.

“Here, actually. Just the pig vault.”

“Oh my god.”

“I know. It’s like a targeted power attack,” the guard blurted.

“Something big is happening.” Shunka said. She couldn’t hide her excitement.

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