Vyvani

Kazin Moyashino, Joryoku grunt. Even as I mull over the words in my mind, I can scarcely believe them. His body has been tattooed and bioEnhanced beyond recognition—I can hardly see even a square inch of bare skin from his neck down. His shoulders and limbs have “filled out” so to say, and he carries himself differently. He is no longer the hapless prey, but has become himself a hunter.

Deep in his eyes, however, I can see the misty sadness of a deep pain brought upon by terrible memory. He is changed. The more I stare, the more I am filled with a bemused disbelief. It appears he notices this and mistakes it for mockery.

At this moment, however, he is no threat.

“Hey, you got something to say, old man?” he demands while leaning weakly against his blonde stick of a companion.

Some threat you are, I think to myself. I don’t say anything, however. I may know him as Kazin Moyashino, but he does not yet know me as Vyvani Kanto. When the time is right, when the opportunity presents itself, I will tell him, though it will be no easy task. How do you inform someone as to the fact that you now only exist virtually, as countless lines of code within the confines of circuits and chips and processors? Or even more unbelievable than that, that I have somehow taken control over this man’s body? I take small comfort in this one fact: if anyone would believe in my wholly inorganic existence, it would have to be a Joryoku who is partially inorganic themselves.

The small girl who calls herself Ghost crosses her arms and thumps her foot in deep exasperation, like a fidgety rabbit. “Hurry!” She shoots me a sharp glare. “Old Man Hazikawa. Are you telling me that you don’t know where exactly in the Factory you keep the energy transmitters?”

I sift through the old man’s memories. They are strange, disjointed, like a book that has been torn of its pages. The story of his life makes no sense to me. There are scenes of his returning home from work, as well as memories of heading to this so-called Factory, but the moment he enters the building, there is only the sound of a beep, followed by darkness.

I shake my head. “Sorry, Ghost,” I say gruffly. “Must’ve hurt my head.”

“Gaaaaah!” Ghost throws her arms into the air. “And to think that I trusted you! Now we have to find Kapi. Hopefully she’ll remember something.” Ghost crosses her arms and speaks very, very quietly. “If she’s even here.”

“What was that?” asks Kazin’s thin friend, Jin. He leans close and cups his ear in an exaggerated movement.

“I said, if she’s even home!” Ghost retorts.

“What do you mean by that?” Kazin asks.

“Folks disappear in these parts all the time,” Ghost replies. “But an inner-city boy wouldn’t know that, would he?”

Kazin bows his head in meek apology.

Ghost shrugs. “Just make sure you pay me well with that inner-city money of yours. Let’s go then. If we waste any more time, you’ll most like end up a rag doll on the ground, then Old Man Hazikawa would have to carry you.”

We follow Ghost’s lead as she trudges through the streets.

The Copper Commune.

I find the name of Underbelly more fitting. It is a part of the city we are taught to avoid as children, among the many others. Buildings of rusty metal, more alike in appearance to stacked containers and crates than abodes for human beings, loom and lean on either side of us like jagged, haphazard shadows. Broken women and men are scattered across the road like fallen leaves in autumn. Just as a pleasant breeze ruffles such fallen fronds, so does the abysmal ecstasy of cybernetic narcotics rouse these folk to writhing upon the ground. Limbs impede the street like treacherous roots of trees. It takes Jin twice as long with Kazin on his arm to navigate the toilsome road. More than once they nearly stumble over a leg jerking suddenly upwards.

Their lack of speed irritates me. “You, blonde boy,” I call. “I’ll carry the Joryoku.”

Jin himself is too exhausted to protest. He tiredly relinquishes Kazin to me, and he stretches his arms once I relieve him of his burden.

Kazin is as limp as a fish out of water. He breathes heavily.

“What’s gotten into you?” I ask as we continue our journey. “You injured?”

Kazin looks up at me suspiciously. “No.”

“Then why can’t you walk right?”

He turns his head to face the road. “Just tired, that’s all.” He cradles a battery pack in his arms, connected to his neck by wires. I can infer a little from that, but a lack of power in his bioEnhancements shouldn’t weaken him so, unless he has ignored his inhibitor and burned right through his nerves. In that case he shouldn’t be able to move at all, but he seems to have use of his limbs, with only strength as his limitation.

Our path leads us into a screen of mist and smoke. Ghost walks right into it. We follow, but at that moment, Jin and Kazin begin hacking and coughing as if choking on the air.

“Put me down,” Kazin rasps. I lay him gently on the floor, and he vomits into the street.

Ghost has rejoined us, and she gives a rueful smile. “Look, Old Man. They can’t handle the smell. They’re soft.”

Smell? I can’t smell anything. Now that I think of it, I cannot register many of the five senses. “What smell?” I ask.

“Exactly,” Ghost replies, misunderstanding my question. “We’re used to it.”

I don’t think that is what my problem is.

“What is that?” Jin wails as he wipes his mouth with his wrist.

“The smoke and smell are from the Backyard,” Ghost says. She waves her hand dismissively at the quizzical gazes from Kazin and Jin. “It’s just behind the Factory. Smoke, always burning something. Lots and lots of smoke.”

When Jin and Kazin have finished relieving themselves of their stomach content, I lift Kazin off the floor. Ghost flips on a blinker and hangs it on her belt to act as a beacon through the grey fog.

“You really can’t smell that?” Kazin asks me through his sleeve.

“Try not to be so disrespectful,” I urge. Seeing a young girl like Ghost in such surroundings has awakened in me both a pity and a respect. “Not everyone grows up in the bubble of safety of Minzyu Secondary.”

“Right, I guess so,” Kazin answers ponderously, before sensing something is amiss. He jolts his gaze up at me. “What’d you say?”

“What?” I ask.

“How’d you know I went to MSS?”

I chastise myself for the careless mistake.

“I’ll tell you later,” I say, brushing him off. Perhaps I might use this blunder to my advantage, I realize. Feeding him bits of information to ease him into the truth might be better than a lightning strike of a revelation.

Ghost makes an abrupt left turn, into another communal courtyard, similar to the one her own home is located. She scampers to one of the rusty hovels and knocks on the door furiously.

“Kapi!” she cries. “Kapi!”

There is no answer.

A bent man emerges from the shadows of a shack across the yard. He shuffles his way to the drum barrel in the center and slowly lights a fire to warm his hands.

“She ain’t here. She been gone for the past two days.”

Ghost turns, her face fraught with desperation. “Do you know where she is?”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The man shakes his head. “She been disappeared, like the rest of ‘em. She’ll most like reappear in another day or two. Maybe. Maybe not at all.”

Ghost sighs sadly. “Maybe.” She looks up at me. “Hopefully she comes back like you did, Old Man Hazikawa.”

I sift through the man’s memories again. The girl is right. There is a small, shadowy break in his memory which lasts for several days. I am assuming this is when he was “disappeared.” I try to search farther to reason out the cause, but there is only a jumbled mist of forgotten thought.

Ghost shrugs helplessly. “Well. There’s nothing to it now. We’ll just have to search the whole frackin’ place.”

The bent man nods at us as we leave. “Ya’ll be careful out there. Lotta crawlers and transports been travelin’ in ‘n out the Factory tonight.”

“Thanks,” Ghost answers. “Will do. You too.”

We reenter the mist and continue on our journey. There is no end to the people littering the roads. Some appear lifeless but somehow standing, like tired, drooping trees swaying softly in the wind. Others writhe upon the ground, locked within their fatalistic bliss.

At length, we break through the mist. Past a cluster of wooden hovels, the Factory looms suddenly before us like an imposing mount. Its trapezoidal shape encompasses the totality of our view. It is a steel citadel amidst the copper underlings bowing to its power. Smoke cloaks the Factory and envelopes the sky. A steel fence surrounds the entirety of the complex. Guards man the walls, and towers blink red to guide hovercraft into the grounds.

“Wow,” Jin remarks. “Damn.”

Kazin nods. “So somewhere in there is an energy transmitter?”

“Yeah,” Ghost says. “They got all sorts of things in there. The problem will be actually finding the transmitter.” She suddenly rounds on us. “Run!” she hisses. “Behind there!” She points to a jumble of broken crates in a nearby alley and herds us in their direction. Just as we take cover, a train of armored crawlers drive past, patrolling the grounds about the Factory.

“Mercenaries,” Ghost explains. “Lots of ‘em.”

I squint at the vehicles, hoping to catch their make. They seem to be civilian craft refashioned into military class vehicles. A small insignia graces the doors of each crawler, a logo I instantly recognize.

“B.Ridge Corporation,” I whisper.

“Let’s get going,” Ghost urges once the crawlers have rumbled past. “Before another one comes round again.”

“There’s no way we’re getting inside there,” Jin complains quietly.

Ghost whirls around, her brow beetling until her eyes are angry slits. She attempts to inspire fear, but I find the sight endearing—I find that I have to remind myself not to smile.

“Don’t you care about your friend?” Ghost squeaks. “You don’t mind that he can’t move properly?”

Jin glances awkwardly at Kazin and gives an incredulous snicker. “Of course I care.”

“He, after all, saved your life,” Ghost hisses. “You know you were on top of him when I found the two of you?” She crosses her arms as a coy smile curls across her lips. “I’d guess he broke your fall.”

Jin whirls as Kazin shrugs. “You helped us dodge that green beamShot,” Kazin says offhandedly. “And I have the metal body. Can’t hurt myself more than I already did.” Jin’s face purples into a look of overt shame.

“You’re a little snake, you know that?” Jin grimaces at Ghost.

“Now, now,” Ghost says with a pat to Jin’s arm. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, shall we? If you remember, I did say that Old Man Hazikawa has the keys.” She whips her gaze in my direction and scrunches her nose. “You do, don’t you?”

“Ah…” I fumble through the old man’s memories once more. I have my suspicions, but there is nothing to confirm them. I suppose to myself that I will take the gamble. “Yes…But perhaps it is better if Kazin and Jin wait here. They will only weigh us down.”

Kazin winces and Jin frowns, but Ghost nods in agreement.

“Fair enough,” she says. “You two are too conspicuous, in any case.”

Ghost bids me lead the way. We step out into the streets and scurry forwards until we have shed the last bits of any potential shelter. We hurry towards the right, where my memories lead me to believe a back entrance lies. Rear entrances are rarely as formidably manned as main ones, and it is upon this belief I hinge my hope should things go awry.

We soon find ourselves at a small gateway. The steel doors are flanked by towers, and a trio of guards in titanium and polycarbonate body suits stand beside a crawler. Ghost and I set a leisurely pace, and soon we are standing just outside the gates.

“Halt,” the guard says. His companions level their photonBlasters at us. “State your business.”

“Just making my rounds, sir,” I answer.

The guard cranes his neck to get a better look at my face. Suddenly he nods in recognition. “Hazikawa. Go on in.”

I breathe a sigh of relief and step easily through. When Ghost attempts to follow me, the guards lift their photonBlasters once more.

“Not her.”

“She’s my assistant,” I insist.

“You know protocol,” the guard grunts. “She waits here.”

“It’s alright, Old Man Hazikawa,” Ghost says helplessly. “I’ll wait here. You go on ahead.”

I sigh heavily and continue through the gates, trying to devise a way out of my debacle. I cross the concrete courtyard, and march towards the trapezoidal monstrosity. A steel arch curves above the main entrance doors. It appears as some sort of security scanner, though I have never seen its like. I stand in line as the other laborers march through. And when my turn comes, and I pass under, I gasp as my mind reels. It takes all my will and more for me to continue walking as if unabated. I glance around me, and everyone else is walking normally, unhindered, and I wonder if I am the strange one. I sift through the man’s memories and mind once more, and what I find shocks me as I realize why I reacted the way I did.

Hazikawa’s mind appears as if it has been flipped. It is as if the mind is a Rubin’s vase, but Hazikawa only knew to recognize the vase, without realizing that the faces to the sides existed likewise. The feeling is akin to as if a railroad switch has been activated, and all his thoughts and memories are now led to a wholly different destination, inaccessible by the other part of him that lives outside the confines of the Factory.

Only I, myself, can recognize that his mind has been partitioned in this way, like one who views a Rubin’s vase from overhead, who is aware of, and can identify the existence of two different images. Hazikawa himself can only see one image at a time, like a mouse caught in a maze.

“What in the…” I whisper to myself.

But I don’t have too much time to mull over my discovery. As Hazikawa’s memories on this side of his life are now accessible to me, I know my way around the Factory.

I climb my way through several levels of steel floors. The battery packs I am searching for are in the center of the Factory, near the assembly line. I pass through several chambers where workers are assembling a strange kind of tower. It looks like it can be a communication apparatus of sorts—its peak is crowned by a large number of antennas.

But it is when I come upon the assembly line that my breath is taken away.

Along countless levels of railing stretching from floor to ceiling hang humanoid figures of polycarbonate and titanium. Some are being grafted with artificial skin, while others are only partials with missing limbs and heads, or consisting of only legs absent the torsos entirely.

On the ground floor, there are lines of decrepit folk, waiting their turn to enter some sort of tunnel. Pods large enough for a single passenger whisk them away to some unseen depth of the Factory.

What is this place?

I finally find the battery packs I am searching for, set against the farthest wall of the assembly chamber. I pick one up as nonchalantly as I can, and steal a look around me to see if anyone believes my actions suspicious. None do—they are like drones, working without seeing, their bodies accustomed to merely do and never question.

There is a clang of opening doors above me. A man and his bodyguard are escorted into the chamber by a supervisor. I freeze in my tracks.

Sangsum Gato.

I can only stare in disbelief as he is led across the scaffolding. He spectates the functionings of the place with curiosity and interest. He pauses for a better look, his hands gripping the railing. He nods, then turns to the supervisor to say something. The supervisor smiles, and nods emphatically. Sangsum reaches into his breast pocket and draws what appears to be an encased dataChip. The supervisor takes Sangsum by the arm, and leads him away.

I don’t really feel much, but I remember that Vyvani would have felt great anger at seeing him. But I know someone else who would probably enjoy this piece of news.

Tucking the battery pack into my shirt, I rush through the Factory. I pass beneath the arch and once more feel Hazikawa’s consciousness flip. When I come upon the yard, it has become a hustle and bustle of activity, milling with guards and white-robed scientists. Transports are slowly descending here and there. I understand the need for great urgency as I hurry towards the gates.

The guards pay me no mind as I walk past them, their attention and curiosity centered at the activity in the courtyard. Ghost takes me by the arm as I walk by her. She attempts to speak, but I shush her. She frowns indignantly as she marches by my side.

I finally arrive to where Kazin and Jin and hiding.

“Finally,” Jin mutters. “Let’s see that battery pack.”

“What’s with you, Hazikawa?” Ghost demands, stomping her foot.

I have no time for them. I rush to Kazin and kneel beside him.

“Kazin, listen to me,” I say calmly, as Jin and Ghost proceed to wire the battery pack to him. “None of what I say will make sense, but you have to believe me.”

He lifts an eyebrow, but does not interrupt me.

“Right now, I’m not this guy named Hazikawa.” I motion at his body with a sweep of my arm. “I’m Vyvani Kanto.”

“…What?”

“I’m Vyvani Kanto! Right now, in there”—I point towards the Factory—“Sangsum Gato is going about some business.”

At the mention of Sangsum Gato, Kazin bolts upright. “Slow down, Hazikawa. I know Vyvani Kanto, and she doesn’t look like you.”

I should be exasperated at his inability to understand, but my mind only works more quickly, trying to find a way to convince him accordingly.

“Have you ever heard of the Crystalline Towers?” I whisper.

Kazin lifts his head, his eyes coming alight from some long-lost memory. Jin turns his face to me, as if he has just been woken from a daydream.

Suddenly, my mind feels as if thunder and lightning have split it into half. My thoughts are rent, disoriented, and I feel a burning hatred, a hatred with such strength as I have never felt before.

Why am I feeling things? I had not felt an emotion this strongly, with such intensity, since I was uploaded wholly into the system.

What is going on?

Scorn and disgust are too light of words to describe the loathing I feel. I cry out as a fissure forms in my thoughts, and I fall to the ground, writhing. I am consumed by such hatred. For whom am I feeling this? Why am I feeling this? I feel Hazikawa’s consciousness bubbling up, fighting me, attempting to wrest back control of his mind from my foreign presence.

I look at Kazin and Jin, and I suddenly realize where this revulsion and contempt are to be directed.

“Hazikawa, what’s going on?” Ghost says, kneeling beside me.

With all my strength, I push her. Ghost flies backward, and she slams into the nearby shack. She screams in pain as she slumps to the ground.

“What the—” Jin gasps, scrambling to his feet.

I hear myself roaring as I lunge at Kazin. His face contorts and his eyes slowly widen at the anticipation of pain.

“I am Vyvani Kanto!”

It is the last thing I hear before I am expelled from Hazikawa’s mind. I skid across the floor of the server room, oblivious and disoriented.