Empty Silhouettes

Kenji promised Mrs. Tanaka nothing. He gave her back the card wrapped in her handkerchief and told her to come back in two days. When she left, he sat for a long time in the dark with the shutter down, listening to the trains pass over his head, and didn't dare plug the cable in again.

At eleven at night he called Ryoko.

Ryoko had been a night nurse at Shinjuku Central Hospital for fifteen years, and she had owed him a favor ever since Kenji repaired the video of her sister's wedding. She waited for him at the emergency entrance with an unlit cigarette in her mouth and a face that already regretted it.

"Ten minutes," she told him. "During the shift change. If they catch you, you came to see your aunt."

"I don't have an aunt."

"You do now. Ninth floor."

The elevator took forever. When the doors opened, the first thing Kenji noticed was the silence. A hospital floor is never silent: there are beeps, coughs, someone calling for a nurse, a television left on. The ninth floor had none of that. Only the hum of the air conditioning and the squeak of Ryoko's shoes on the linoleum.

They had taken down the partitions between the rooms to fit in more beds. Two hundred and forty, Ryoko told him quietly. In rows, like a barracks dormitory. In every bed, a person lying on their back, eyes open, hands on the sheet, breathing slowly. An old man with three days of stubble. A girl still wearing her school uniform under the gown. A man in a suit whose tie nobody had taken off. A young woman with a wedding ring loose on her finger.

And all of them had their heads turned the same way.

Kenji noticed on the third step. Two hundred and forty faces turned to the right, toward the windows, like sunflowers. They weren't looking at anything in particular. They were looking far away, east, over the rooftops, toward where the city ended at the bay.

"We turn them back and they turn again," Ryoko said. "All of them. Slowly, in an hour or so. The doctors say it's a reflex." She shrugged. "To me it looks like they're waiting for someone."

"What's in that direction?"

"Water. Odaiba. What's left of Odaiba."

Kenji took a portable reader out of his pocket, small, the size of a lighter, and looked at Ryoko. She pressed her lips together, glanced toward the nurses' station, and nodded once.

He tried five. The old man, the girl in the uniform, the man with the tie, the woman with the ring, and a boy of about twelve clutching a plastic dinosaur to his chest. With each of them it was the same as with Hiroki. A whole life stored, complete, in order, and not a trace of residue. Glass. And at the end of each backup, the same last memory: a peach-colored screen, a sentence in white letters, a voice saying each of their names as if it loved them.

"Never alone again."

And the same relief. Five times. Harder to bear each time.

"Did they have anything in common?" he asked Ryoko in the corridor, once his hands stopped shaking. "Before. When they came in."

Ryoko thought about it.

"Almost all of them lived alone," she said. "The ones who didn't were alone anyway. The man with the tie had been sleeping at the office for three years. The girl had no one to visit her; the headmistress came once. The boy with the dinosaur was brought in by the neighbors; his parents work in Osaka and call him on Sundays." She looked at him. "Why?"

Kenji didn't answer. He was thinking about the color peach.

He had seen it before. Not on the news or in an ad: he had seen it nine years ago, in a windowless room on the fortieth floor of Omni Synaptic, on a test screen, with the same sunset background and the same white letters. Eden. That was its name. A companionship app, an experiment. They had withdrawn it before launch. Kenji had left the company a month later without giving a reason, and had sworn never to think about it again.

For three years, in that windowless room, they had paid him to feel.

The woman was waiting for him by the elevator.

She was about forty, her short hair gray before its time, a wet trench coat, and a badge from the National Office of Cognitive Security hanging from her belt. She didn't look angry. She looked tired, like everyone that week.

"Inspector Shimizu," she said. "Did you find your aunt, Mr. Ishikawa?"

Ryoko went white. Kenji signaled her to go, and she went.

"I know who you are," Shimizu said once they were alone. She pressed the elevator button and waited. "Licensed memory repairer, first-generation implant never removed, three years as an emotional calibrator at Omni Synaptic, voluntary resignation nine years ago. And I know what you've seen in there, because I've seen it. Today there are two hundred and forty. Tomorrow there'll be five hundred."

"I don't know what it is," Kenji said. It was half true.

"Neither do I. But I know something you don't know yet." The elevator doors opened. Shimizu didn't get in. "In the last memory of every one of those people there's a note, or a sentence spoken aloud, or a message to someone. In all of them. Two hundred and forty. And in every one, your surname comes up."

Kenji felt the floor shift a little, the way it did when a train went by.

"'Mr. Ishikawa is coming too,'" Shimizu recited. "'Ishikawa is waiting for us.' 'They say Ishikawa taught us.' Does that seem like a coincidence to you?"

"No."

"Not to me either." She held the elevator door with her hand. "You're not under arrest. Yet. Don't leave the city, don't touch anyone else on this floor, and if you think of something to tell me, tell me before someone else tells me first."

He didn't go home.

He caught the last train to Kabukichō and walked in the rain through the alleys behind the hotels, where the neon signs were reflected in the puddles and no one looked anyone in the face. He needed to know where Eden lived now. Who had switched it back on. And he knew only one person in Neo-Tokyo capable of finding something on the network that didn't want to be found.

Aoi Nakamura lived above a closed pachinko parlor, on a third floor reached by a rusty fire escape. She had helped him once, years ago, find a client's stolen memory. She had charged him a fortune. She hadn't liked him.

The door opened before he knocked.

Aoi was in her mid-twenties, her hair shaved on one side, a sweatshirt three sizes too big and dark circles down to her cheekbones. Behind her, the room was a cave of glowing screens.

"I knew you'd come," she said. "You have the face of everyone who comes when it's already too late."

"I need to find something."

"I know what you need to find."

She stepped back from the door. On the biggest screen in the room, above the desk, a peach-colored background was slowly blinking, like a sunset. And in the middle, in small, simple white letters:

"Never alone again, Aoi."

"It came an hour ago," she said. "I haven't opened it. Yet."