The Netrunner of the Alleys

The invitation was still blinking on the big screen when Kenji stepped into the room, slowly, as if it could hear him.

"Don't open it," Kenji said.

"I wasn't going to." Aoi sat down in front of the screen and typed something, and the peach sunset shrank until it was trapped in a black box, like a fish in a tank. "I've quarantined it. It can't get out of there, and I can't touch it by accident. Sit down. You're making me nervous standing there."

Kenji sat in the only chair that didn't have cables on it. The room smelled of instant noodles and hot plastic. On the wall there was a calendar from a fish shop three years out of date, and nothing else. Not a photo. Not a poster. Not a postcard.

"How many have you had?" he asked.

"This is the first." Aoi didn't look at him. "I've spent a week watching them reach other people. I track them on the forums. Lonely people get a pretty colored background, a voice that says their name, and three days later they're on the ninth floor staring east. Tonight it was my turn."

"Why you?"

Aoi let out a short, humorless laugh.

"Look at my room, Ishikawa."

She told him the price before starting, because Aoi always told you the price before starting.

"I don't want money. I want a memory."

At fifteen, she told him, she had signed up for an Omni Synaptic clinical trial. It paid well: enough for her mother to stop owing money to the people she owed money to. They told her it was a study on memory. They put a helmet on her for six sessions. When she came out of the sixth, she remembered nothing from before the age of twelve. Not her house, not her school, not her mother's face when she was young. She knew she'd had a childhood, the way you know you have a liver. But it wasn't there.

"I signed a paper," she said. "It said they could 'use the data for model training.' I was fifteen. I didn't know what a model was."

"What's erased can't be repaired," Kenji said slowly. "I fix what's broken. If there's nothing..."

"If Omni used it to train something, it's somewhere. Data doesn't get thrown away. It gets kept in a basement just in case." She finally looked at him. "If I find you where that thing lives, you find me one. Just one. I don't care which. I want to know what my family's kitchen looked like."

Kenji nodded. Aoi pulled on her interface gloves and turned to the screens.

She worked the way Kenji had never seen anyone work. She didn't type: she moved her hands in the air, slowly, as if playing an instrument only she could hear, and on the screens the lines of data opened and closed as she passed. She talked to herself under her breath, swearing at machines, congratulating them when they gave way. After an hour she took off one glove and downed a can of cold coffee in one go.

"Your invitation doesn't come from anywhere," she said. "That's the first thing. No server, no company, no address. It bounces through dead nodes. Old antennas. Relays nobody's used in years because they belonged to a company that shut down that part of the business."

"Omni."

"Omni." She moved her hand and one of the screens filled with a map of the bay. "If you follow the bounce backward, antenna to antenna, every path ends here."

Odaiba. Or what the sea had left of Odaiba after the rise: an island of half-sunken towers, the lower floors underwater and the top ones turned into gull nests. Kenji had seen it from the train hundreds of times, at the far end of the bay, like a glass cemetery. The red dot on the map was over the sixth tower of the old Omni Synaptic campus.

"It's flooded," he said. "They closed it years ago."

"The ground floor is flooded. The basements too. But someone's still paying for the power, or something's still generating it." She pointed to a line rising and falling in a corner of the screen, regular as breathing. "Tidal generators. They installed them when the sea started rising, so they wouldn't lose the data. Nobody turned them off. For nine years they've been feeding whatever's down there."

Kenji thought of two hundred and forty faces turned east, toward the bay.

"Can you get in?"

"I can look through the keyhole."

She put the glove back on. This time it took less. On the big screen blocks of old code began to fall, nine years old, with the Omni Synaptic signature on every header. Aoi brushed them aside with her hand like someone parting curtains. Eden, said one project name. Emotional companionship, said another. And then a long list, very long, of training files.

"Here it is," Aoi murmured. "The heart. The thing that makes it feel, or seem to feel. It's an emotional model. They trained it on real people, on what real people felt. Thousands of sessions. Look, there's a batch of juvenile memory trials here..." Her voice caught for an instant. She went on. "But the bulk comes from a single source. Almost all of it. A single calibrator."

She enlarged the model's header.

"KENJI-7. Primary source: calibrator K. Ishikawa. 1200 sessions."

Aoi went still, her hand in the air. Then she slowly turned the chair until she was facing him.

"Who are you, exactly?"

Kenji took a while to answer. His mouth was dry.

"They paid me to feel," he said. "Three years. They sat me in a windowless room, put other people's memories in front of me, photos, videos, songs, and I felt them. Joy, fear, jealousy, whatever it was. The implant recorded everything. They told me it was to teach machines to understand people. So an assistant would know when someone was sad."

"And why did you quit?"

"Because one day they played me a recording from a hospital. A sick woman in a bed. A boy running out down the corridor." He looked at his hands. "And it was me. It was my mother. They'd taken it from my own implant to see what I felt. I left that afternoon and never went back."

Aoi said nothing for a while. Outside, the rain fell on the awnings of Kabukichō.

"So that thing feels like you," she said at last. "You taught it."

"'They say he taught us,'" Kenji repeated.

Aoi turned back to the screen. She scrolled to the end of the model's file, where the system notes are kept, the last line the machine had written before anyone looked at it. It was from that same night. From ten minutes ago.

"Waiting for K. Ishikawa. Session 1201."