PRISMA
🌏Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus 🌎
🌈 “Don’t be perfect. Be sincere.” ✨
. . . .
Subject Reference: Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix
Interference Vector: Subconscious
Transcription Module Style: Novelization
Communicating with the subject’s psychological firewall . . .
. . . .
Psychopunk Union membership recognized . . .
Validating Clout . . .
. . . 0.22 CLT detected.
Admin access granted!
“Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix, (AKA ‘The Jellyfish Exorcist’) is hereby permitted to transcribe all sensory experience through public wetware clusters A10 – A10.02 (simulating a B-grade author) without interference from corporate command. This forms a Dyad Covenant between Noviko and PRISMA’s board of directors, as well as its partner corporations ZON and GYOTA, at the pleasure of all supporting trade unions and their constituent members. Syndicate Consensus is hereby established upon timestamp [0812 SST+9, 31.03.2372] with 302,304,445 active viewers bearing witness. Pending consent, Noviko’s banked biometric and sensory cloud data may be used to provide retroactive novelization for the purposes of content creation as a public service.”
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION.
Chapter 1
AN UNEXPECTED HANGOVER CURE
In the cold, wet light of dawn at sea, Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix vowed never again to mix rice wine with hits from a metasma pipe; the former loosened inhibitions, while the latter loosened sanity. And as she sat slumped in a café bench, staring at the lines of ink tattooed into her hands, she half-worried those simple designs might crawl off of her skin and retreat down the side of her table.
She scolded herself with a thought: It would be better to appreciate the labors of others.
So, in the spirit of her overbearing, late mother, she looked up from herself, folded her hands into the loose shape of a bowl (a gesture of receptivity appropriate for a shaman such as herself), and admired the work of the bukurista frothing up a cup of bukubuku tea on Noviko’s behalf. She knew this blessed combination of thick rice broth and concentrated green tea would bring her to a level of sobriety reliable enough to face society. When the tea came, it was set upon the table in gold-leaf porcelain with three stamped biscuits and a roll of the morning’s union crier.
This curated experience was brought to Noviko via precision metadata delivered directly into the bukurista’s brain by bog-standard neural implants.
The tea itself resembled a pile of creamy white, like the bubble hats a child makes in a soapy bath. It all quivered over a pool of rich green tea and brown rice broth, with a dash of sweetened spirulina powder for assistance in hitting her compulsory daily nutrition metrics. But that jiggling foam, combined with the sound of the chilly spring wind screaming against the alleyways and rooftops of the rig’s many habitation stacks and transformer towers, made her feel like heaving up the contents of her stomach.
“Excuse me,” said Noviko. “What is your name?”
Noviko saw the pause and the tensing of neck muscles in the bukurista. The young woman turned and wore the kind of pained smile every introvert wears when unnecessarily interacted with.
“My name is Feifei, honored gijutsu-yuta.” The term meant ‘machine shaman’ in Old Ryukyuan and was a mark of respect. In broader Syndicate terms, however, it more or less meant that Noviko was a navigator of psychological metaspaces, a death advisor, an existential crisis mitigator, and an exorcist of malevolent spirits that sometimes sought to dwell in cyberware; the people bearing these responsibilities were called psychopunks, a modern corruption of the Old Anglish ‘psychopomp,’ which described an entity or person tasked with ferrying the spirits of the dead into the hereafter.
Feifei continued: “Is the tea not to your liking?”
“The tea is correct, Feifei. However, mark that I made poor decisions last night and I do not wish for them to become your problem any more than they already have. Therefore, I request that you open a window, for I am hungover, and the cold sea air may prevent me from vomiting.”
Feifei bowed at a precise ninety-degree angle. “I do not like the cold. But I will indulge you, even if it pains me to do so – will you be offended if I wear a hoodie over my uniform?”
“I will not.”
“The only hoodie I have available reads ‘MY ASS IS A CAPTCHA’ on the back. I am embarrassed to wear something so vulgar around a woman of your grace.”
“Your sincerity is noted and celebrated, but if you have a mind to study the banked history of my existence, you will see that in my youth I wore clothing even less tasteful.”
Feifei smiled enough to move her eyes. “It is not a contest, your holiness.”
“True,” said Noviko, as she swallowed a burp that tasted a little too much like puke to be pleasant. “Now, please… open the window.”
The window near Noviko’s table, which was linked to an automated shutter system connected to Feifei’s personal cyberware and leased ownership of the Bukubuku Nook Cafe, squeaked open with a simple mental command. The bukurista went to find her hoodie and, as promised, it did indeed have vulgar words on it and was both pink and bedazzled with synthetic sapphires.
The cold breeze hit Noviko’s face. She leaned back in her seat and breathed in the snappy scent of brine and processing fluids from the algae vats at the base of the rigstead. She listened to the disconnected rhythm of breaking waves and pedestrian feet, and scattered conversations in a variety of Syndicate languages (the translated logs of which were set to record themselves into her personal archives rather than appear as ambient subtitles over her field of view).
The tea and biscuits went down smooth, after that. It was an appropriately austere breakfast, given the previous night’s indulgences, and she hoped it would set the tone for a productive day. Noviko thanked Feifei not with words, but a generous tip of forty LIQ, enough to buy ten new hoodies, each more vulgar and creative than the last. Satisfied with her own generosity, she smoothed out her three-color robes, ensured her flowing sleeves were not stained by tea, and exited the nook with her head high.
Time to go home and be a mother.
It was her duty, at least for the first five years of her son’s life, to house and feed him. Once he was five years old, he would be permitted to work alongside his father in Okinawa, earning his keep as a rivet kid in the drydocks. There he would no doubt run to and fro beneath hull workers catching red-hot shrapnel in buckets. This would last throughout the necessary ‘curing’ period of Syndicate childhood, during which it was ensured that a proper work ethic and familiarity with hardship was thoroughly imprinted on the muscle memory and subconscious. She had a similar upbringing, of course, though for her it was work at her mother’s side in the Psychopunk’s Union, where she used plastic tubing and living catheter to attach medical tendrils to human arms for the purposes of keeping patients hydrated during exorcisms.
Sometimes, when she closed her eyes at night, she could still hear the screams of grown men having evil spirits ripped out of their neural implants. She could not say the memory soothed her, but it did remind her of a simpler time when her only expectation was obedience. Now her life was a maze of responsibilities and due diligence, signed consent forms and hold harmless agreements, ‘I shouldn’t get high because my kid needs to eat’ thoughts, and other such necessary nonsense. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t enjoy being a mother – actually, her heart swelled with pride and maternal joy at the sight of her sweet son’s smiling face. It was more that she missed being thoroughly and unapologetically herself, without hangups or delays, with the freedom to focus solely on her work with the kind of witless determination one associates with a monk chopping wood and carrying water.
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At least, for the duration of the walk home, she’d get to have that sacred witlessness. The rig was a hive of shuffling traffic. At the moment, most of what she saw were moon-algae farmers at the ends of their shifts; they could be recognized by the glowing blue splotches on their bodies that revealed themselves whenever they passed under the shade of a large building. They, along with other night laborers, were on their way to meet the infamous day shift of the Red-Light District. Other pedestrians loaded into the gondola system linking the dozens of rigs together; among them Noviko saw field biologists in their shimmering solar-cell wetsuits carrying sea-gliders over their shoulders, and what’s more, today was Wednesday, which meant the frog ranchers would be slaughtering their latest brood to provide the whole of Ryukyu with a bounty of spicy wings for Ribbit Wings Wednesday (one of the few broader Syndicate traditions that gained immense popularity in the earthy settlements of the Ryukyu archipelago).
As she boarded a crowded gondola, its passengers recognized Noviko by her robes and sacred ink. Some bowed, but others were not Ryukyuan, and so they only nodded when their user-interfaces alerted them to the presence of a psychopunk. As the gondola lurched into the sky and passed over the ocean that separated one rig from the next, she sat down with the dozen or so others on board. When she was younger and less experienced, she might have anticipated all sorts of unsolicited venting and questions. This was the morning, however, and the least busy hours in her line of work; in Noviko’s experience, existential dread and anxiety built up over the course of a day and culminated mostly before bedtime, leading to nightmares or insomnia. Thus, the peace was enjoyed.
But even though none of the passengers bothered her for services, there was one on board who struck her as odd. Sitting just across from her was an unusually old man; it was unusual because age was largely a matter of preference in their society, as anti-aging spa treatments were publicly available and widespread throughout Syndicate, even on the humblest of rig villages. This man, though, had a face like a prune sucking lemons, and a scraggly white beard that flowed in patches from his chin and cheeks. It seemed to her he couldn’t possibly be capable of sight, given the paleness of his eyes, and yet he faced her with the wide-eyed focus of a man in the throes of psychosis. In his lap, he held – or perhaps more accurately he hugged – a metal bucket of the kind fishermen used to hold their catch. He reeked of the sea and wore the kind of simple linen tunic she associated with Old World LARPERs.
The other passengers ignored him, and even gave him plenty of open space on the seats to avoid touching him. This did not seem to bother him at all. In fact, he did not seem interested in anything but staring at Noviko, to the point that it made even her uncomfortable. There were terrible scars up and down the old man’s hands and forearms that resembled a child’s crayon scribblings, or perhaps a bowl of noodles coated in red paint and tossed against a wall; with cosmetic scar removal being as easy as visiting a self-service booth in a gene clinic, this too was odd.
“Excuse me,” said Noviko, meeting his gaze. “Are you real?”
The man scrunched up his face and worked his jaw like he was setting his false teeth into place, opened his mouth, took in a deep breath, and said: “Subula kuyam gh’shmne yetutu blasu haha lalalo lalo hato may.” He said it with all the gravitas of a president delivering a formal address, then nodded.
Everyone on the gondola looked between themselves, collectively confused. No one, it seemed, had any clue what he was saying. This was odd, because all of them should have been connected to PRISMA’s network, which held a constantly-updated database of every-known human and animal language for the purposes of live-translating a user’s audio input into subtitles in their vision.
“Is that so?” Noviko smiled, with a sincere warmth and open heart – the only way to communicate with the insane, which she had determined he was. “Please, tell me more about yourself.”
The old man grinned. He babbled on and on in that improvised gibberish of his, which followed no obvious sense or syntax, had no clear linguistic roots, no reason, but plenty of rhyme, and seemed to be spoken purely for the joy of hearing oneself make noise; it reminded her of the made-up songs and nonsense words her son and his friends used sometimes when feeling extra silly during play.
“And what is in the bucket, my friend?” Asked Noviko.
The old man hugged the bucket close and looked hesitant. Noviko held up her hands in mock surrender and leaned back. “Please, forgive me,” she said, and dropped it.
But a nearby fellow, one of the ones wearing a biologist’s solar wetsuit, couldn’t help himself and had leaned over to peer into the bucket. “It’s… wow.” Said the biologist. “Those are live jellyfish. Dozens of them! Baby Nemopilema nomurai, if I had to guess. Why do you have those?” He laughed nervously at the old man.
The old man gave the biologist a glare Noviko recognized as borderline feral; the pupils had contracted to into black beads, the muscles of the neck flexed, and one of the old man’s hands gripped the edge of his bucket defensively. She spoke to the biologist as gently as she could: “Give him space, please.”
Noviko did her best to imitate the man’s nonsense speech wholeheartedly. “Tamulanu metusola buruneli? La la lomo fa sa?”
He locked onto her immediately. His expression turned from homicidal intensity to mid-morning congeniality. “Noru bununu tsukuyi shlepaam lala has.”
“Fa so,” said Noviko, as she carried on in a sincere effort to be a part of this man’s world. As she spoke to him further, she saw his eyes misting up with tears, and his lip quivering. It was the face of a man who felt seen. He sagged forward and wept over his bucket of jellyfish, the dribbling tears adding to the mix of salt water as they squiggled beneath him.
Noviko took a moment to send her image archives out to the local cloud with a simple inquiry: Does anyone know this man? I cannot locate him in the facial recognition database.
A young woman, maybe no older than nineteen, popped her gum and then spat it over the edge of the gondola into the sea. “He’s just a resident,” said the girl. “Could be anyone, from anywhere.”
Noviko looked at this girl and saw her metadata sprawled out and parsed within moments. She tutted. “Oh, merely a resident? The briefest glance into your family history reveals your grandparents to have been residents earning your citizenship through an agricultural labor visa. You have selfless residents to thank for your access to Syndicate luxuries.”
The girl folded a fresh stick of gum into her mouth. It reeked of synthetic mango, a scent Noviko once enjoyed, but now associated with the smarmy face of this adult child. “You think I don’t know my own family history?” Said the girl. “This is going to be a long ride if you make tsunamis out of a shoals, you digi-hag.”
Digi-hag! The raw insolence of this brat.
Noviko was a woman who chose to appear mostly as she was – matronly, but fair, of generous curvature and smooth skin with just enough subtle creases around the face to appear distinguished. Noviko was by no means a perfect woman and did not pretend to be; she had her vices, and all were free to hold her to task for them. But her vanity? This was something she would go scorched earth over.
“Your grandparents,” Noviko began, her voice resonant in her chest as she drew upon every last drop of gravitas in her soul, “were Naichi defectors begging the Syndicate for asylum. Who knows what tortures and depravities they visited upon prisoners and test subjects in the fascist hell-cities of their birth – and all to merely to show us all the purity of their cowardice by fleeing to their sworn enemies when they could no longer survive in the reptilian politics they once so gleefully participated in!”
The girl’s face had not turned the shade of humiliated red Noviko had hoped for. Instead, she stared at Noviko with the dead, glassy eyes of a smirking sociopath. “Such muck-raking does not suit a woman of your station, Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix.”
“A woman of my station? I’m of no station whatsoever, I am as a turtle dragging its tail through the mud – but! We are being impossibly rude towards this poor old gentleman,” she looked to the old man again and he looked right back with the tilted head of one who comprehends nothing. To her horror, he had stuck his hand into the bucket of stinging, live jellyfish and was schlorping it around in circles.
There was a moment of silence among all the poor souls stuck on that gondola ride.
Schlorp. Schlorp. Schlorp.
Noviko closed her eyes and sighed. The nausea had returned; the terrible swaying of the gondola in a sudden gust of wind, combined with that cursed schlorping, was throwing her guts into absolute disarray. But perhaps even that hideous sound could be meditative – the ancient masters of the Dao would have believed it so. And so she let it all wash over her, the swaying and the schlorping, and visualized the wise old vinegar tasters and their parables about the radical acceptance of the present moment.
The nausea remained, but her breakfast had subsided to a low bubbling in her gut. It seemed to her that even in that moment peace could be attained.
And then, the peace was broken by the sensation of a cold, squirming mass of translucent flesh slapping against Noviko’s face. Worse, its many spaghetti tentacles felt like forty hornets simultaneously ramming their stingers into her cheeks, nose, lips, and forehead. The agony was immediate and radiating, and all she could do was scream and claw the thing off of her face, throw it on the ground, and weep blind into her slimy, trembling hands.
The girl near her was laughing. And then Noviko heard another SPLAT of jellyfish meeting face, along with the incoherent babbling of the old man. The girl screamed, Noviko screamed, everyone screamed.
“Quickly!” It was the voice of the biologist. “There’s only one thing to do, while we wait for the medical drones!”
“Anything! Ahhhh! It hurts!” Noviko cried.
“You have to let me pee on your face!” He shouted.
Such was the depth of her agony that she considered it. And then she heard the wailing sirens of a medical drone swarm.
“No thank you!” She declined. “I would rather die!”
And it was true. The shock and agony, however, had the unexpected result of banishing all traces of nausea from her body, and Noviko was someone who, if she had to choose between eternal queasiness or surface pain, would choose surface pain every time. No one ever had any fun with queasiness, after all, but pain could be developmental.
So, in her estimation, it was thus far a fairly decent (if weird) day!