Opening of 'Tube' - a novel

1. COMPANY

I sat in the chair and looked across the desk as I waited. I saw a picture of a man with a woman and three children, on top of a large mountain. The man is my new boss, the woman his wife. My new boss looks just like that famous actor who went into politics. The first time I met him was the day I’d got here. I‘d gone to the apartment that I’d been allocated, a small domicile containing three rooms, a hall at the front and a balcony at the back. The living/cooking area was the size of a large wardrobe, compact and well equipped. The bedroom was just that, large enough for a decent sized single bed and little more. The bathroom had a small shower, small toilet and small sink. The hall cunningly connected all three rooms, and had some cupboards for extra storage space. The company I work for had built the whole block, to house employees and guests. There was a message left on the only phone in the house, no visuals, just a voice (his secretary) saying that I was to drop by for a few minutes later that afternoon. I scrambled some eggs with an ingenious device that cooked and mixed at the same time, at a variety of rates. No more standing at the stove idly stirring while something takes an epoch to cook. Then I left for the building where I’d be working. I followed the instructions they’d sent to me a couple of weeks before I left, and found the building easily enough. It was over 80 stories high. Not the tallest, in terms of floors, but if you included the large array of weather measuring devices that were constructed atop the skyscraper then I think it is the highest building in the city. I went inside, asked where I might find his office, I was told to take a lift up to the 31st floor. I took the lift, followed directions given to me by a very helpful and pretty office junior in the lift and found his office. His secretary told me to go straight in. I met him, he met me, we exchanged some idle informalities and he told me to come back on Monday when I could start doing something useful.

Now I am sat in his office, slightly concerned. The equipment here is a lot newer than the stuff I’d been using back home. He strode in, looking busy, then paused for longer than he at first seemed to have time for. “You’re…” he couldn’t remember.
“Ryuji. Ryuji Takagi.”
“Ah yes, the guy from the little island. How are you?” He sat down, appearing to have all the time in the world.
“I am fine, it is a little hotter here than I am used to but this building is very well conditioned.”
“We have the finest atmospheric conditioning systems available, one of the perks. We give the systems designers free information about weather systems and how they work, they work out how to recreate them, we get upgrades for free. So what can you do?” The question seemed a little abrupt.
“How do you mean?” I tripped out.
“I mean what kind of skills do you have, what kind of job are we going to put you into while you are here?”
“Well I noticed the equipment here is a lot newer than the stuff we use.”
“You aren’t familiar with the MT 5.5 system?”
“No,” I answered, reluctantly.
“Well that gives us a few problems. I mean we could train you to use it but it would take about 15 weeks, and you are here for…” he glanced at his computer screen, looking for an answer.
“34 weeks,” I answered, trying to be helpful.
“So it’d take you half the time you’re here to learn how to use the system, you wouldn’t even be proficient by the time you left. But the thing is you really can’t be of much use unless you can use it. We don’t use anything else.” He paused and thought for a while. “It doesn’t surprise me that the technology hasn’t reached your lot yet, it is pretty new. Tell you what, I will assign you to our analysis department, they try to record, understand and classify rare weather, it won’t require you to work with the system directly, but at least you’ll have something to do.” He dialled a number on his phone and spoke into it quickly. “Ken? Yeah, I’m sending the new guy over to you, he doesn’t know how to work with the computer system so I thought your department was the only place he might be of some use. You seem to spend so much time talking and drinking coffee, and not so much time on the computers.” He listened for a while, and nodded. “Yeah, I know, Ken, I am taking you seriously, I know your group do a lot of good work. I just meant…” He was interrupted and listened for a moment longer. “Well, we don’t need to talk about this right now, I’ll send the guy over to you. Name’s Ryuji.” He listened for a moment and then muttered, “Okay, I’ll give him a badge with his name on it.” He hung up the phone. He flicked a button on his keyboard and a screen on the wall lit up. A few clicks with the mouse and I could see a map of the building. He showed me where to find the department, I had to go up several floors, which meant the lift again, and then I would just find a helpful receptionist waiting for me, who would locate Ken (Ken-Ichi Giya, the head of Research and Development) for me.
As I would come to expect of the company I worked for, there was in fact a helpful secretary who located Ken and introduced me to him. He was a tall, strong-jawed guy with a rich deep voice and was immaculately dressed, not in the suit and tie uniform most people favour, but in traditional wear. He shook my hand vigorously and beamed a white smile that took me by surprise. I told him that I really didn’t think I’d be much use since I didn’t know how to use the computers, he told me not to worry and gave me another Hollywood smile.
“Want to see something cool?” he asked me. “Come this way.” I followed him down a corridor with dozens of small rooms leading off it, each containing one person at a computer.
“What are they doing?”
“Schematic analysis, basically it is pattern spotting but it takes a while to get good at it. Most people aren’t suited to it yet, they can’t handle the long streams of similar data, but the biologists reckon in a decade or two we’ll have pretty much all evolved, with a little of our own help of course, to the point where we can do it, all day if needs be.” We came to a door to a larger room and went through it. There were six people sitting at larger consoles than the others, there wasn’t as great an expression of avid concentration about their faces. He invited me to look at a screen, it showed a green-lined 3D grid map of a kind of series of lines intertwining and flexing, like a live games of pick-up sticks.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That is an OWP” This last word seemed to irritate the people working in this room.
“A what?”
“An OWP,” he replied. “An Obscure Weather Phenomenon, there are various types, this is a map of the kind we get here. The brains over at the university reckon that this type comes from rising static from all the activity on the roads in the city. Most of the time these storms happen way above our heads, but sometimes they happen just a few feet above the ground. Sometimes you get one of these, a kind of epicentre in the toing-and-froing resulting in a sort of highly charged whirlwind, very fast but very brief. This map is of one that is due in about 12 minutes, if I am not mistaken. He used the mouse, some statistics popped up in the corner of the screen and he confirmed, “12 minutes.” “We should go and watch it from the roof: there’s a whole area up there for observation purposes, it is quite plush. Nice seats, that sort of thing.” We ascended some stairs. I was thinking about home, and how we never get dangerous-sounding unusual and unpredictable occurrences of any sort, particularly as far as the weather was concerned. We reach the top of the stairs and went out onto the roof. He was right, is was comfortable up here, with booths and open air seats. We sat down and he asked if I fancied a drink. I did but I didn’t want to seem too eager to take without giving, so I declined.
I glanced out over the bay to the other end of the city, which extended round the bay and hence I looked over the water at it. It was about a mile and a half away. I could already see a lot of light debris, newspapers, floating around and everyone was rushing to get indoors. I asked him
“Shouldn’t we get inside?”
“No,” he replied, “We are perfectly safe. The OWP won’t affect us here. Its radius of damage will be one, maybe two blocks. Whatever it hits will remain structurally intact, unless it’s a big one, but anything not cemented down you can kiss goodbye to.”
“What, people?”
“People, dogs, bicycles, wastepaper bins, children, shop signs…”
“Will they be okay?”
“Most of them will survive, if a little deafer than before, pressures keep changing inside one of those things, messes around with all sorts, some people can’t balance for weeks after they’ve had a ride in one. Can affect vision as well, magnetism created by all that static.”
“But surely when, well, if they get free they’d hit the ground from a great height, how come they survive?” “As I was about to explain before, the static of human activity creates the conflicts we see in the air about two hundred feet up. Since the water in the bay is cooler than the land, and isn’t covered in metal, the storms tend to dissipate over the water so people tend to fall out of the sky into the bay and get picked up by the rescue crews.”
I thought about this for some time. “How come we don’t notice all this static?”
“You do, when a lot of people first get here they complain of the static for several days, then less so, gradually they won’t mention it at all. You get used to it. And once you get used to moving the way we do, you don’t get the build-ups of charge that cause the sparks.”
“How come this doesn’t happen in other cities?”
“The hotshots reckon it has something to do with a combination of the fact all our power is electric, and particular conditions of humidity around the bay. No gas, no fossil fuels of any kind, means the air-mix is different to most cities.” We watched as the column lowered and the rescue crews began patrolling the bay about half a mile away.
“How did you know it was going to happen? I thought you had no real way of predicting where or when it will strike.”
“No long term way, we can tell a couple of hours in advance, maybe longer if it is a smaller one, the big ones just happen, sometimes with no warnings at all. Tell tale signs, lots of work over the last few years, system’s improved a lot but it only works short term. Nowhere else in the country does this happen, and we’ve only had unconfirmed reports of similar occurrences in other places. Doesn’t seem to be much rhyme nor reason for it.”
“There is no warning system in place, and we couldn’t be sure exactly where the storm was going to hit, and evacuating a large area for something so minor is costly and awkward, so they just patrol the bay and let people get swept up in the storm. As I said, fatality is very rare with this sort of thing.” I wondered as to how he could be so confident, given that they didn’t seem to know what the storms were, exactly, or what caused them. The clouds directly above the storm seemed to get lighter in colour, and he said that this was a sign that the storm was about to strike. It struck just as he was explaining this. I saw the sudden flurry of activity as the wind swept through the streets. I could just about make out people and pets and furniture being caught up and swirled around like in some giant aerial washing machine. Sure enough the storm receded quickly, seemed to slow down and spread out and the people and pets and debris were deposited in the bay. He offered me a drink again and I accepted a whiskey.
“So what do I do if I am at home and one of those things strikes?”
“Close your windows and try to tie yourself to something stable. The window will only break if some bit of debris blows against it, the wind will not be able to break glass on its own.” I considered this advice and mentally wandered around my little apartment thinking about what the sturdiest bit of furniture is. I settled on the toilet, which was plumbed into the floor and wall.
We were back downstairs and he was talking on his phone. As I got to know him I realised he only ever spoke on his mobile phone, he refused to use landlines. He said it was because he was a technophile, that in his business you had to be. On the plane on the way here from the island we weren’t allowed to use phones of any kind, it was a pretty old plane. Most new planes let you use phones but there’s still a few older ones that are mainly used to ship cargo. He was speaking, to a woman named Suya, very quickly and using lots of acronyms I didn’t understand. I imagined at the time that a large part of his job consisted of talking on the phone. It took me some time to find out just what his job did entail.
Later, in the future from the moment I was just describing, but in the past from the moment when I am writing, he showed me what his line of work was all about. The room dissolved and became a field, looking, feeling and smelling just like a field. I walk through the field, there are some cows and some dandelions and some daisies and buttercups. It is very much an English field, even though I am about as far from England as you could be, seeing as how I am in Japan. What I mean is that my body is in Japan, to any outsider I am in Japan, but to me I am in this field. Ken climbs over a stile on the other side of the field, into my field, and walks towards me. He says hello, he looks just like he always looks, same black suit, old Japanese style. He always wears that suit, yet when I look down at myself I am wearing the same jacket, shirt and slacks I always wear to work. I ask him if he can see my clothes like that as well, he replied,
“Of course. Clothes are pretty easy, we haven’t got as far as the body underneath the clothes. That takes a very different kind of programming, and requires a lot of personal information, full body scans, that sort of thing.” I unbutton my shirt and pull it apart and sure enough there is not my body underneath but rather the same stereotypical male body of normal VR. Then I am back in the room again. I blink for a few seconds before understanding what just happened. That was not normal VR.

I am sitting at my desk, it is Monday. Ken has decided not to give me any position of responsibility but given me a title like ‘junior speculative consultant’. I quickly learn that he gives all the staff in his department odd names, it helps him remember who does what. Ken’s department, I find out, is not just the department for the analysis of rare weather phenomenon, but rather an “R&D consultancy firm who dealt with everything from data analysis and pattern identification through to how the soles of shoes should be designed to which television programmes are going to be popular this autumn”. I have a computer with high-speed internet access, something I don’t have at home. I have a look around for a film to watch, based on the reviews I could find on internet film databases, which have thousands of reviews for each movie. I had to find 3 movies, then watch them today. The department had access to virtually every media item of the last 50 years, the biggest archive of its kind in the country, all electronic, no original items, they are just too bulky. All I had to do was choose my films and the Media Archive people would burn then onto disk. Or so I was promised. Ken did not tell me what the purpose of this exercise was, but to try to enjoy the films I chose, and to pick ones I had not already seen. He also promised that he would explain everything later. I have chosen two of my three films. The first is an erotic thriller, starring Meno Yasuki, a famous pop star cum actress. I haven’t seen it, but the reviews all said it was very watchable and has a good twist in the tail. The second is a period drama, all about 17th century Prussia. I definitely haven’t seen it but the reviews generally said it was very educational.
These two choices were obvious, the first because I wanted to watch it, the second because I didn’t want to appear too salacious to whomever this secretary was, in case she spread gossip. I knew that since I was a newcomer and also an outsider (not from Yokto) that words will have been and will be said about me, and I wanted to control those words as much as I could. So the third choice had to be innocent but fun, a comedy perhaps. I typed in ‘comedy’ and got about 13,000 movies, each with hundreds of reviews. I sighed and swivelled in my chair. I have an office created by those not very high, not very thick internal space dividers. I could stand up and peer over the fence at my immediate neighbour, but they are probably engaged in something more productive than what I am doing.
I am incompetent, that has been made very clear. They could neither believe this happened nor understand how. That I cannot use the computer system is not only difficult, it is potentially hazardous should the chain of responsibility be so broken that I have to assume some position of control. I stared out of the window, but then everyone has a window view. It is actually a screen, transmitting an image of the outside, captured by TV cameras on the sides of the building itself. You can hang this imaginary window on any wall of your office and the view will switch to the relevant camera automatically. Ken thought it an amusing device, I thought my stay here would not complete if I could not take it home with me, which of course I couldn’t: the signal would not transmit all the way to the island so I wouldn’t get any picture on it.

I went to get some decaf coffee, and found several people standing near the drinks machines, talking enthusiastically. I struggled to follow the conversation because of the accent difference, but it seemed that downtown there had been some sort of terrorist attack, a train had been hijacked and blown up. Only a couple of people had been killed, not including the terrorists themselves who blew up the train, but it was the first attack of this kind for years and so was causing quite a stir. The authorities were saying that it was an isolated incident and not to worry. I obviously wasn’t worried because I had never experienced anything like this before and hence had no way of reacting. I just listened to the conversation and got my coffee, then went back to my desk. There was a memo from Ken stuck to my monitor. “We have got all day, but that is no reason to be inefficient, Ken.” I think he wanted me to have chosen my three movies by now so I hit the random button on the webpage and it came up with several titles I hadn’t heard of so I jotted one of those down and picked up the phone. I dialled the extension I had been given that would put me through to the secretary at the media archive. There was no answer. I tried the number again and again there was no answer. I didn’t know what to do.
I stood up quietly and snuck up to the partition that separated my officespace from the next person’s. As I peered over the top I saw him at his desk. He stopped clicking his mouse, turned his head slowly and looked straight at me. He was much older than me but looked benevolent enough.
“Yes?” he said slowly.
“I, ah, the number I tried to ring, there was no answer. Um, I was wondering what to do.” He relaxed and lay back in his chair.
“Which number? I mean, who were you trying to ring?”
“Some secretary in the media archive. I’m new here and I don’t really know my way round or what I am doing.”
“One of Ken’s friends, I take it?” he responded, dryly.
“Ah, something like that. So what should I do, do you reckon?”
“Learn grammar. But on the phone thing, I would say just go down there. It’ll be quicker than phoning up maintenance and then they have to go and fix the phones down there and you won’t get whatever it is you want until this afternoon.”
“I don’t know how to get there, though.”
“Here,” he stood up and took a small pager-type device off his belt. He held it out to me, over the partition, “This will give you instructions, just tell it where you want to go. Press the red button to tell it your destination, it will give you verbal instructions as to which way to go, which floor to press in the lift and so on. You should get yourself one, seeing as you are new. Tell you what, keep that one and I’ll just get another, the company provides them so it doesn’t cost me anything.”
“Thanks,” I said, examining the small flat box in my hand.
“And if you need it to repeat an instruction or two, then press the orange button. Press it once and you get the last instruction again. Press it twice and you get the last two instructions, and so on. Here is the earpiece,” he took a small black earpiece out of his ear and cleaned it with a tissue from the box on his desk. I put it in my ear and held up the box to my mouth. I pushed the red button and said ‘The Media Archive’. There was a pause and then a pleasant but highly synthetic female voice said ‘Leave your officespace and turn left. When you reach the doors at the end of the walkspace go through them.’ I gave my thanks to the guy again and wandered off, following the instructions.
It wasn’t until I’d gone through the doors, turned right and then walked until I got to the lift and then pressed the button for the 16th floor that I realised I hadn’t asked the guy his name. Given that he will be my workmate for the next few months I really should have done. I made a point of trying to remember to ask him when I went back to my desk. The lift stopped. I got out, turned left and walked won the corridor until I reached an area designated as the media archive. I found a very attractive secretary who asked me what I wanted.
“I tried to call before but there was no answer.” I tried not to look at her breasts. She asked me which extension I had phoned. “3104”. She picked up the phone on her desk and dialled the number. There was no reply. She asked to follow her, which I did, gladly. She led me to an office and introduced me to another very attractive woman called Asuka. The first woman told Asuka her phone wasn’t working and to call maintenance and then left. I told her what I needed. She typed the names of the film into her computer, took a disk from a drawer in her desk and put it into the disk drive.
“It’ll just take a couple of minutes.” She smiled pleasantly and asked me what I wanted the movies for. I told her than Ken had given me this odd task and that I was just trying my best to follow instructions. I told her I didn’t really know what I was doing. And that I was on a temporary work placement from my regular position as a weather station operator on a small island and that my present job had nothing to do with how I had got here. She seemed to find it all very amusing and kept laughing. She had the sort of comfortably sized breasts that provided a lot of distractions when she laughed. The disk finished copying the data and she took it out of the drive and wrote the names of the movies on it. She told me I had to fill in a form to say who I was and in what department I worked so that I would return the disk, which was reusable. I handed the form back to her, completed, said my thanks and walked to the door. She clearly checked my name because she said “See you later Ryuji.”
I turned to smile at her but the door had shut and I couldn’t very well open the door again to say ‘see you later’ could I? As I walked away from her office I realised I didn’t know how to get back to my officespace. I was wondering if I could just play the instructions I had just listened to and follow them in reverse when the earpiece said, very kindly, ‘Do you need instructions to return to where you were before?’ I lifted the box to my mouth and said yes. Sure enough I got back to my desk. I put the disk in the drive and watched the three films. I’d chosen quite short ones, on Ken’s instructions, but I was still a bit weary by the time I’d finished. I sent Ken a message via the computer, a text straight to his phone. Internal electronic mail. My phone rang, it was him, I had to go to his office. I walked in, he was sat behind his desk, feet upon it, looking chirpy.
“Second film was dull, wasn’t it?” I nodded, questioningly. “I already know which movies you watched, but that is not important. I did not think that you would find the Prussian film boring, well actually I did, and I reckon you only chose it to impress young Asuka down in the archive offices.” This wasn’t strictly true, I didn’t know Asuka when I chose the movies, but he was correct otherwise. It didn’t strike me at the time, but it later I realised how unusual it was for Ken to use someone’s first name, rather than their job title. But I didn’t find out why until I’d met Asuka again. She was running down the street. Some guy stopped her and I caught up. The guy who stopped her was clearly trying his luck, thinking she must be drunk. She didn’t want to be talking to him, that much was clear, so I told the guy to fuck off. He thought about making some kind of scene, but conceded and went away. I asked her
“So how come you know Ken so well?”
“We used to be friends” was her reply.

“The point is that a computer programme said you’d find the second movie boring. Here, fill in this question sheet about the three movies, and I’ll show you what I am on about.” Ken handed me a clipboard with some sheets of questions, all multiple choice and left the room for a moment. I filled in the answers to the questions, which seemed straightforward enough. He must have been watching me because as soon as I’d finished and sat back looking slightly bored he reappeared. “Follow me,” he said. We went into the next room where there was a computer and a set of what I would later come to know as not normal VR machines. We sat down and he offered me a drink. I was thirsty, so I accepted.
“What I’ve been working on, privately, using my own money, for the last 2 years is a programme that can understand why people like what they like.” I didn’t know how to respond, so I was glad that he had paused for dramatic effect and wasn’t expecting a reply. “I want to know what makes people tick, so I can give them what they want. Now this project has two distinct arms, the one devoted to understanding why people like the movies, music, TV, news programme, wallpaper, holiday that they happen to like. The other arm is the one that recreates whatever particular experience the person might wish for, a very advanced, very realistic virtual reality. I am sure you are familiar with typical VR, which is deliberately somewhat unrealistic.” I was very familiar with the virtual reality machines he was talking about, but I didn’t mind the fact that they were still a bit cartoony, a bit fake. After all, they were virtual. I didn’t know that they were deliberately like that, I just thought it wasn’t possible to make them much more realistic. I asked him about this,
“No, it’s possible, as you’ll see shortly. But illegal, at the moment. My lawyers are getting into that problem. Why? Because it’s dangerous. The latest VR is full sensory intensive. Smell, touch, taste. Not just light and sound but something that you can’t just ignore, something that feels as though it is really happening. The technology has been around as long as neural implants, which are pretty standard by now, but we didn’t know how to use it. I mean, you’ve got implants, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” Of course I did.
“Right,” he turned around; he’d been walking and gesticulating, and continued to do so. “So you know how intense it can get. So, imagine if it was so realistic it was indistinguishable from real life? A real New Jerusalem, where you could do anything you wanted. But of course such a thing is illegal, if people couldn’t tell the difference between leading an army into Nagasaki in VR, and leading an army in real life then we’d have some crazy teenagers running around thinking reality was fantasy and fantasy was reality. Which wouldn’t be any good now, would it?” He was talking quickly and again wasn’t expecting a response, he was just framing his next sentences. “But I think if people knew they were in VR, and as long as you play by the rules it seems just like real life, but could step in and out at any moment, then there wouldn’t be any danger. Or at least that it what we will tell the courts. It is always possible that some rogue hacker could come along and mess with the program so that it let you beat up the waiter behind the bar in Monte Carlo, or let you seduce the 14 year old girl or... you know, whatever.”
“Hackers do that sort of thing?” I was confused by all this.
“No, because the programmes don’t exist yet.” He was getting a little agitated. “Look, current VR lets you beat up old grannies in the street by running them over, dropping bags of cement on then, gunning them down like animals or whatever other method you can think of, right? But you always know this is a virtual granny, this is a virtual bag of cement, that is virtual blood I can taste, etc. But if you could not tell the difference, then it would become dangerous, but there are some hackers who’ve made it clear that they think everyone should have access to whatever is the most powerful technology available. And some terrorists. That bomb this morning was probably to do with this argument, between the authorities, who don’t want the public to just have anything they want, the industry which want to sell the public the most powerful VR that it can develop and the hackers and now terrorists who just want everything to be given away for nothing.”

I sipped my drink and set it down on the table. So what has this got to do with me watching movies today? I decided to ask him, since he seemed to have lost his thread. “Because I want to know what sort of films you like, and why. I am going to create for you a virtual experience of going to the cinema, complete in every detail. You will get various options that you can either ignore or choose one or several of, it is up to you. If you’re willing, that is?”
“Yes, I mean, of course. Ah, thank you.”
“It’s okay, I just thought that since you didn’t know anything abut this, and how it is done, then you’ll be more like the public. I know how the questionnaires are programmed, how the smells are recreated, what sort of options you get, that reminds me, where’s those questions you answered?” I handed him the clipboard, he went back into the first room and gave them to a secretary, asking her to process the answers immediately. He came back through the doorway, giving the secretary a charming smile. She smiled back. “So, you didn’t like the movie about Prussia, well that’s too bad. Never mind. You remember those tests you had to fill in as an employee of the weather firm?” I remembered them, odd things, full of questions about word associations and which kind of animal you would like to be and what characteristics you most admire in others. There were also a series of physical tests to do with reaction times and timing, aiming, coordination, that sort of thing.
“Yeah, why did we have to do them?”
“I don’t know, but I designed them. Funny thing is, I never designed them to be used as basic data for this sort of things, working out what sort of movies people like, but the data has been really useful. I mean you get a pretty good sense of what are acceptable rhythms and intensities from studying people’s reaction times, spatial awareness, coordination, sense of irony, sense of humour and so on. We use that to try and predict what people will like, you know, if they associate the word ‘Ferrari’ with death then you don’t recreate for them a fantasy about driving a brand new Ferrari. That’s a simplified example, but you get the idea.” I did indeed get the idea, and was attracted to it. If Ken succeeded it would revolutionise the entertainment and leisure industry. I could imagine the promotion, ‘Why go on Holiday to Turkey when you can feel as though you’ve been there, all from the safety and comfort of your own home?’ Agoraphobics could greatly benefit from this sort of technology. You could have sex with beautiful people without fear of disease or angry boyfriends, you could leap off cliffs and get the rush but halt the programme before you crash-landed, you could…

“So with your permission I’d like to have one of our latest model VR machines installed in your domicile this evening and tomorrow you don’t have to come into the office, but you can do all your work on the module we send round.” He had interrupted my train of thought and I just agreed,
“Yes,” without really thinking about what he’d said. It wasn’t until that evening, when the engineers came round to install the module that I realised how large the thing was. There was no way it would fit in the small space for relaxing in the kitchen/dining room area. You sat in a large chair that held you still. The wires were connected to the back of your neck, in the usual fashion. You closed your eyes and pressed a couple of buttons to signify you being ready. But there was nowhere for the chair to go. The boss of the three guys pulls out a small phone from his pocket and has a brief, hushed conversation.
“You’re in luck,” he said, as walked out into the corridor. He went to the console as the end of the corridor, typed in his access code and a few other things and I heard a sort of clicking sound, like a large latch had been undone. I turned around, and saw the two others removing the wall that separated my living area from the neighbouring one, in which no-one was living. The boss came back and explained. “You see, each panel comes off separately, you can move them around and change the dimensions and shapes of the rooms to suit whatever you need. You’re lucky no-one was living next door. Now you’ve got extra room, I assume you don’t need another cooking facility?”
“No,” I said, still a little mystified.
“Right then.” The two other guys removed the cooking module from the neighbouring room, which was now becoming my room. “But we’ll leave you the other bedroom and bathroom in case you need them. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay extra.”

“So,” I was back with Ken, in his office, before the engineers showed up, “Now we get the results of your answers to the questionnaires about the 3 movies you have just watched, we take those results and the programme we give them to will suggest movies on all that it knows about you, what kinds of images and characters you like, what kinds of settings, styles of dialogue, what the women look like, everything. It will suggest maybe a dozen movies, maybe more. You pick one and then tomorrow, as I said, don’t come into work. Stay at home, relax, and when you feel like watching a film, activate the machine. You will start by walking down the street to a cinema, you go inside, buy your ticket and your popcorn or whatever, and go and watch the film. You will be offered quite a range of different twists, you can turn these off or use them.” This was starting to sound like a sales pitch. “But above all, try to enjoy the experience, there are no consequences, nothing will be recorded and only what you tell us will be used as input for the computer programmes. You do whatever you like, and only tell us what you want to tell us.”

I had been thinking about this for some time, “Ken, why are you letting me do all this? I am sure there are plenty of others who’ve been here longer than I have who would like to be given this opportunity.” Ken stopped me there as his phone rang, he checked who it was and turned the phone off.
“Because you are an outsider, and most of the people here have lived in Yokto all their lives. The programmes have been designed by people who have lived in Yokto all their lives. It is a better test of the programmes to have someone who is significantly different from the people who designed them.” I had a feeling he was holding something back, but his explanation seemed obvious enough so I dropped it.

I went to a bar after work and was surprised to find the guy who’d given me the location/direction device. He was slightly drunk, which was strange since he could only have been here a matter of minutes. “Hey! I hoped you’d find your way here.” He got up quickly and was talking loudly. I noticed several other faces I’d seen round the office that day all sitting in this same bar. Some soft guitar music was playing. I sat down next to the guy, still not knowing his name. I ordered a glass of beer, export strength. “Hi, I’m Yutaka,” he said, extending his hand. I am glad he is drunk, it will make it easier to get to know him in the next few minutes.
“I am Ryuji,” we shook hands. My drink arrived and we clinked glasses. I asked him what he did.
“My job largely consists of making slight editorial adjustments to the virtual landscapes we create for movies. I might change a tree here or the colour of the grass in a field or the shape of a skyline, but I know most of my changes will probably be changed again by the art director then again by the director then again by the producer. But they need us to make the basic landscapes for them in the first place.”
“How come, I mean, what is the purpose of your job?” I didn’t really get what he was talking about.
“I have to check that the landscapes work properly, I don’t actually make them anymore, I have been here too long for that, so I just have to check that whoever made this or that image or model, has done it properly before we send it to the filmmakers. I am kind of a supervisor.”
I finished my drink and ordered another. It seemed to be the done thing to get drunk after work. “So what’ve you been doing today?” I couldn’t just tell him that I’d been watching movies all day, since he had clearly been working here a lot longer than me, and his job seemed pretty dull.
“I am working on a project with Ken. He sort of uses me as a test subject. I do various things, you wouldn’t be very interested.” He seemed not to mind, and stared up at the TV which was on, silently, in the corner of the room. We were sat at the bar, I was looking at a reflection of myself in the mirror, he was staring at the TV, his mouth open slightly. Since I was looking at nothing spectacular I glanced up at the screen and saw an image of this morning’s train wreck. It was an old train, the type that runs on the ground. It was shipping coal in long boxcars, which had derailed and fallen lopsided. The image changed to a guy being interviewed, the strip along the bottom of the screen said he was the only survivor.
“Turn it up!” said Yutaka. The barman reached up and obliged.
“They were waving guns and saying ‘we’re not going to hurt you, we’re not going to hurt you’ and they put a bomb right next to the engine and told us to slow the train down. We slowed it right down and they told us to jump off, the other two guys refused but I just thought what the hell and got off. I hit the ground pretty hard but I’m alright. The train then sped up and I don’t know what happened after that.” The shot changed to a policeman, the helpful information strip told us that he was a detective, high ranking. He said,
“Well, after the one survivor jumped off the train, as far as we can ascertain it then sped up and they detonated the bomb, we think with both the other two employees and the three hijackers on board. At this time there is no reason to suspect that any of the three hijackers are at large, this is thought to be a suicide attack.”
“Turn that thing off, he doesn’t know what he is talking about!” said a guy from across the bar. His friends told him to be quiet. The barman turned the TV down and the music back up. The guy who interrupted sat back down.
I left the bar soon after, having endured about twenty minutes of Yutaka telling me all about how the football team he supported were too weak in midfield and how the skaters near where he lived were so fast that no-one ever really felt safe, all the cars were terrified of hitting people by accident. I was thinking about getting some sort of hover vehicle on loan. Let me explain: All the roads, drives and car-parks across the city were covered in a certain kind of tarmac which had magnetic properties, so all you had to do to reduce friction was attach a magnet repelling the ground to the underside of whatever vehicle you happen to be using. Using highly powered electromagnets one could even hover a short distance from the ground, the latest shoes were even designed to have a sort of reflex whereby the more you pressed down on a particular bit of the inside of the shoes, the stronger the magnetic output, allowing you to run while hovering, rather than just skate. I was thinking of getting a small bike, but had decided against it after what Yutaka had said. When I got home the engineers arrived soon after.