Thomas’ boss awaited him in the lobby of the Ashio Detective Agency building, wingtips tapping against the black granite floor.

"Erm, good morning, Mr. Shimada?" Thomas said, confused by his boss' presence.

Shimada replied in heavily accented Afugo. "Thomas, there is a change in plans. You are part of the interior team now. We need to brief."

Underneath the accent, Thomas detected nervousness. Shimada wouldn’t meet his eyes.

"Someone sick?"

"No. You were requested by name."

For matters of social presentation, interior security was always handled by Kaihonjin. The Ueichi Electric Company asking for an Æfrian was unheard of, but he couldn’t imagine what other characteristic would’ve drawn their interest.

Shimada took him upstairs to a briefing room with a black plastic table and a cadre of men in dark suits, gloves, and bulletproof vests. Not one of the thirty men on the interior team was a familiar face. Most looked less than pleased at the new addition.

"First, you cannot wear the jacket," Shimada said.

Thomas grimaced but nodded. He pulled out his pistol, wallet, and apartment key and laid them down on the table before finally shrugging off the jacket. He was then handed an aluminum case containing the same black suit, shoes, and gloves as everyone else along with a sleek, Genji Type-24 handgun. After a quick change, Thomas looked like every other Ashio man in the room save for his red hair, red cheeks, and red stubble.

Shimada gave the briefing first in Kaihongo, of which Thomas caught only the occasional word, before giving him a pared down version in his own language:

"As you know, we have ongoing security throughout the week of the Ueden Innovation Expo,” he said, using the slang term for the Ueichi Electric Company. “But today there is a special VIP product demonstration. The topic is top secret. Ueichi house security will handle security inside the demonstration room while Ashio acts as a screen for spies, terrorists, and other problems. If you need to call in suspicious activity, go to Miura-san or Okawa-san," Shimada gestured at two men among the indistinguishable suits, "who are the designated security liaisons with Ueden.”

Thomas could tell them apart by their hands. Okawa's had kinkawa set into the knuckles. A common enough augment, it converted electricity to mechanical power in the arms and grip. Excellent at "accidentally" killing someone.

"You will work in teams of two. The demonstration will be from 1400 to 1600 hours, after which you will return to the expo security room for debrief. We were given special warning to expect attempted terrorist acts by Æfrian radicals. Any questions, Thomas?"

"No sir,” he replied, head throbbing.

The Ueichi Electric Company's Headquarters lay on the far side of Lake Yoyane in the shadow of its behemoth rival, the Genji Heavy Industries Building, but their offices were no less a masterwork of architecture. The building resembled a skyscraper-sized steam turbine with twin, ovaloid towers forming the ends of the turbine and steel panels fanning off like turbine blades. Underneath the middle section of the "turbine" was a 30-meter-tall granite obelisk with Kaihongo characters and their Æfrian translation underneath:

上一電気会社

Ueichi Electric Power Company

賢く働け

Work Smarter

On the other side of the Ueden campus was the main expo hall: A geodesic dome of hexagonal panels stained in a variety of colors and outlined in glowing gold filament. A model of the dome rested in the hands of children in souvenir snow globe form. The atmosphere was somewhere between a trade show and a festival, and Thomas yearned to wander through it, hoping to be infected by the expo's optimistic futurism. Ahead, Shimada and the other Ashio men were waiting for him.

The security room buzzed with activity. Hundreds of security monitors were watched by a handful of Ashio men while others argued over diagrams, maps, and timetables intended to weld the security apparatus into a networked whole. This was a joint effort between Ueichi house security staff and Ashio, which meant a lot of yelling, forgetting chains of command, and misplacing, redrafting, or forgetting materials and documents. It reminded Thomas of being in the military. Comforting, in a way.

"Thomas, you are by the elevator with Okawa-san," Shimada said after settling an argument with the house security chief. "We will have people posted in the lobby, but you are the first line of defense on the VIP floor."

"Yes sir," Thomas replied.

Like black ants, the Ashio contingent filed into the Ueden building. Pink marble spanned the length of the lobby's floor beneath massive television screens displaying Ueden promotional videos to important people in kimonos and suits. Through the pink marble ran rivers of golden electric light converging in the shape of the Ueichi clan crest: A red maple overlayed by two diagonal matchlock guns. The crest alluded to the company's claim of being the world's oldest. First a family sawmill, then an arms manufacturer, and lastly the world's largest—and only—electric power company. All the important clan-conglomerates had equivalent claims, with the title going to whoever was in the Emperor's good graces. Ueden had held the title since inventing seishin-hatsuden a quarter-century ago.

A third of the detail, including a twitchy Shimada, took up positions at the elevator doors while the rest boarded. The moment the elevator doors closed, Okawa grabbed Thomas’ collar.

"So, lard eater, you will not be my partner. Understand?"

The rest of the men in the elevator stared straight ahead as if nothing was happening.

"Does Shimada know you're altering the perimeter?" Thomas asked.

"I have patrons in this company who outrank Shimada. You are too stupid to understand conglomerate politics, so all you must know is that reporting me would be very bad for you and Shimada. Instead, you are with our friend Futoi," Okawa said, gesturing at a man whose name was probably not Futoi, since the word meant fat, "and you will both stand by the utility room where no one will be bothered by the stench of pig carcass."

Thomas shrugged. "Fine."

Okawa glared at him, disappointed he hadn't protested. Thomas knew the type. This was as much about wanting a reason to use the kinkawa stitched into his knuckles as it was bigotry.

“Cowardly to submit immediately. But that's normal for your people, no?"

Thomas remained silent.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The elevator arrived on the top floor which was decorated in a near-perfect facsimile of a wooden and straw-matted interior despite being smooth concrete. Lightbulbs of a variety that hadn't been mass manufactured in a century hung from the ceiling giving off soft, amber light. The only decoration was a potted flower delicately arranged on a wooden console. Out of the sharp sun and harsh fluorescents, the headache Thomas had been nursing dulled and other bodily problems took its place. A drowsy depression washed over him so deep it made getting fired for sleeping seem a fair price.

"Nemui, neh?" Futoi asked, mimicking a yawn as they walked through the back corridors.

The mimicking made Thomas yawn for real. "Yeah. Nemui alright. The gods were cruel making alcohol and sleep natural enemies."

Futoi politely chuckled despite not knowing what Thomas said.

"So, clearly, you're not Futoi. Futoi ja nai. What's your name?"

"Neimu... Ah! Namae. Kato da."

"Kato? That your first name or— ah fuck it, I don't care. Thomas. Tom is fine. Not Tommy. Nice to meet you, Kato."

They shook hands, but neither carried the conversation beyond names. Kato was no Jun, even as he tried to impress Thomas with his collection of Æfrian food terms.

"Eeehhh, Taakii Regu... Da ne. Sore de... ano... porijji ka? Saa... Kyarotto? Biifu shi— shichuu," Kato fired off like a machine gun.

"Beef stew?"

Kato snapped his fingers and pointed excitedly. "Sou jaa!"

"Yeah, I used to be."

"Umee ze!"

"Oh, you mean— yeah, love a good beef stew. Especially when your mom's roasting it all day and swatting at you for sneaking chunks of meat."

Kato bobbed his head emphatically. Thomas wanted to ask what Kato's mother made for him as a kid, but there was no chance of getting his meaning across.

Near the utility room, less effort was made to disguise the skyscraper's modernity. The wood-on-concrete was abandoned for smooth, gray walls, steel pipes, and electrical wiring. All gray. Only the hum of electrical equipment graced their ears. Thomas and Kato moved to stand by a steel door with a Kaihongo placard.

Thomas tried to stay vigilant, but it wasn’t long before the gray started to wiggle in Thomas' peripheral vision. He stretched, punched the wall, did jumping jacks, but it was like the great void of sleep was sucking his consciousness out through the base of his skull. Eventually, Thomas pressed his back to the wall and slid down. He couldn't imagine anything happening that day which would fulfill his vow to keep going.

Kato looked at him with something between amusement and horror. "Netai ka?"

"Yeah, netai," Thomas mumbled.

"Kubi ni naru zo, honto ni."

"I might be done."

"Nanda? Wakaranee yo, ore wa..."

"Really done. Done, done. Like an empty bowl of stew."

Thomas tilted his head to look up at the big man. He imagined all the problems stewing inside the man's body, percolating there like beetles and worms and fungi inside a rotting log or… no, it was Thomas’ own insides he was projecting onto Kato. Too sleepy to get up, too dizzy to fall asleep. Why? That's what he wanted to do, wasn't it? Just go to sleep? That golden promise of something better, the one keeping his corpse moving, was down to its dying embers. He felt strange all of a sudden, like something in his blood was bubbling.

"Daijōbu?"

It was one of the few words in Kaihongo Thomas knew. Are you alright?

"I'm not, Kato. I'm really not. Nai yo.”

Thomas rocked onto his knees and slowly pulled his corpse back to a standing position. Like a leader taking over for a bumbling subordinate, something was confiscating Thomas' body from him, bit by bit, the more he sank into this weird bubbling.

“Anta hen ni natan jaa.”

Ignoring Kato’s concern, Thomas opened the steel doors to a utility room. Bars of light flicked on with an electric thunk illuminating rows of switchboards, circuit breakers, and meters. Wandering through the large utility room with the aimless ease of a child, he found a second exit leading somewhere else on the tower floor. On the other side was another gray hallway, but this one in range of murmuring Kaihongo voices. Not the working-class dialect his coworkers spoke, with their slurred vowels and harsh consonants, but a buttery smooth, precise tone, peppered with meticulously rehearsed expressions.

He crept forward with giddy excitement, observing numbly the dæmon who had hijacked him. If he was done, his actions didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered. It felt like the Shroud but in reverse. He laughed quietly to himself.

Further along, Thomas found an opening to a dark room resembling the backstage of a theater with a crimson velvet curtain on one end. Folded eating trays, cushions, teapots and water boilers, serving dishes, chests, and a liquor cabinet filled the dark space. Spotting an out-of-the-way pillar, he crouched behind it, curling his shambling mess of a body into a position it screamed not to be put in. However, for so long as this possessing dæmon let him float in a space of not caring, he gave it freedom and let it push aside an eye-sized hole in the curtain.

The demonstration room was deeper than it was wide. Two ranks of servants bowed to a trickle of arrivals wearing gold-lined silk kimonos or black suits with coattails, all with decorative accessories in the Ueden colors of burgundy and gold. Aside from the smiling servants, everyone in the room had the same expression: neutral. Not excited, not annoyed, not sleepy, not cheerful. It struck him that the ultra-wealthy Ueden elites resembled Æfrians under the Shroud.

Here he was in a position any terrorist would kill for, primed to assassinate a group of men and women who ruled a third of the planet. But the dæmon inside him only wanted to watch. Watch and inwardly giggle the way shamans of old swallowed fly agaric to peek at the gods and laugh with them. Or gape in horror.

Four house security guards emerged from the curtain ahead of a middle-aged man sporting a trimmed mustache and a black kimono with the Ueichi crest on the back. Rivers of metallic gold ran from both eye sockets, joined by tributaries from his ears, nose, and mouth, splitting into deltas along his neck. The last time Thomas had seen facial kinkawa was on the soldiers of the Imperial Special Forces. It was banned for civilians, allegedly because the untrained human body couldn't handle electric hatsuden current near the brain, thought that was only partly true. Bodily damage from hatsuden generation began around 5% kinkawa density. The thin gold lines on President Ueichi’s face could not have accounted for more than 0.5%.

Thomas suspected the ban on facial kinkawa had to do with the fact that, at high enough concentrations, hatsuden could do more than generate electricity. A lot more. Invisibility, redirecting bullets, and sealing wounds, among other things. This was a highly classified fact which he only knew from working alongside ISF soldiers.

Behind the man was a woman around the same age as he, with hands folded neatly in front of her burgundy kimono. More gold kinkawa extended across those hands from fingertips to wrist. At the woman's side was a smaller figure, an adolescent, hidden under a long-sleeved kimono and veiled headdress. Four more guards brought up the rear. Each bore a sword in its scabbard, but Thomas spotted pistol-shaped bulges in their jackets.

The Ueichi patriarch and his wife and offspring knelt on their own cushions facing out to the gathered crowd. No sooner had they knelt than a squadron of wait staff launched into a well-oiled operation of laying out wooden trays and serving lunch. Women accepted cups of tea as the men got drunk off clear rice liquor and the flow of conversation became louder and less procedural. The Ueichi patriarch had a decanter to himself and soon joined the boisterous conversation, yelling jokes and comments to the back of the room. Now, Thomas thought, they were acting like Æfrians when the Shroud lifted.

Soon Thomas forgot his body. He forgot the dangerousness of his position, forgot he’d thrown his life away coming here, forgot he was a sad, alcoholic veteran that hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day, and became enraptured in the feast. Becoming as drunk with his eyes as they with their mouths. The euphoria lasted until everyone hushed. Somehow, the entire wait staff had extricated themselves without a whisper, shutting the sliding doors behind them. A silence fell. President Ueichi began his speech.

Even in another language, Thomas could tell the man was a superb orator. Smooth syllables flowed like liquid gold from his mouth and pulled everyone, drunk executives and stiff consorts, forward, as though from the extra centimeter they could wring an ounce more pleasure. The effect was subtle. In a normal frame of mind, Thomas might not have noticed. But the same dæmon beckoning him into insanity was now playing tug-of-war over Thomas' mind with President Ueichi. Though Thomas understood not a word, artificial excitement implanted in him by the man's oral hatsuden rose to a climax. Everyone waited on Ueichi.

But the Ueden president was not the one to make the next move. The smaller figure rose to their feet.

First the headdress came off, revealing a young woman with long black hair and a face made of more gold than flesh. Kinkawa on her face branched out from the tip of her nose in an infinite series of spiraling fractals flowing to her neck and morphing into spider-web tessellations. He had never seen a human with so much kinkawa.

An instinct in him, buried so deeply he was only aware of it after the fact, jerked Thomas' head away, forcing his eyes into the dark, black cement. To his left, he heard a collective gasp. What he had seen before averting his gaze was the young woman unbinding, shrugging off, and dropping her kimono to display a body covered head to toe with rivers of gold.