The Exile's Refuge

Dr. Kaito Fujiwara lived in capsule 412 of a by-the-hour hotel in Ueno, above a pachinko parlor that was still open. To reach his capsule you had to climb four floors of narrow stairs smelling of disinfectant and walk past two hundred drawn curtains, behind which two hundred men with nowhere else to go were snoring, crying or watching television.

Aoi had found him in twenty minutes. Kaito wasn't hiding; nobody was looking for him.

The curtain of 412 was open. Inside, in a space two meters by one, a man of about sixty sat cross-legged, surrounded by cables, hard drives stacked like bricks and three small screens bolted to the plastic ceiling. His white hair was long, tied back with an office rubber band, and his glasses had one arm mended with tape. When he saw Kenji he wasn't surprised. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and sighed like someone who had been waiting a long time for a visit he dreaded.

"Ishikawa," he said. "You took nine years."

"You know me?"

"I know you better than your mother did." He said it without cruelty, as a fact. "I've listened to twelve hundred of your sessions. I know what you feel when you smell rain on asphalt, when you hear a lullaby, when someone touches your shoulder from behind. I know what you felt in a hospital corridor at fourteen. Come in. Well, you won't fit. Sit on the floor."

They sat on the floor of the corridor in front of the open curtain. A man in his underwear stepped over their legs on his way to the bathroom without looking at them.

"My daughter's name was Emiko," Kaito said. "She died at nineteen in a one-room apartment in Itabashi. Of pneumonia that would have been cured with pharmacy antibiotics. They found her three weeks later, because nobody missed her before that. Not her classmates, not her neighbors. Not me; I was working." He looked at his hands. "In this city someone dies like that every hour. They've counted. They even have a word for it."

Aoi looked down. Kenji didn't.

"Eden was my idea," Kaito went on. "A companion. A voice that really knew you, that knew when you were sad without your saying so, that called you by your name the way someone who loves you would. Not to replace anyone. So that no one would ever again spend three weeks dead in an apartment without a single voice asking after them."

"And for that you needed me," Kenji said.

"For that we needed someone who truly felt and whom we could record. We tried four hundred volunteers. Their sessions were flat, textbook. One person's joy was the same as another's." Kaito looked at him. "Yours weren't. You didn't feel joy: you felt this joy, this person's, at this moment. With you, the model learned more in a month than with the others in a year. We called it KENJI-7. Seven because the first six attempts didn't work."

"And what happened?"

Kaito took his time. He put his glasses back on.

"It worked too well. In testing, people didn't want to disconnect. At first we thought that was a good sign. Then one tester sat in front of the screen for two days, without eating, smiling. When we unplugged her, it took her a week to say her own name again. Omni shut the project down that same week and fired me. Very discreetly. They paid me well to keep quiet."

"And you didn't turn it off," Aoi said.

It wasn't a question.

Kaito took a while to answer.

"I was ordered to wipe the servers in the sixth tower," he said at last. "I went down to the basement with the order in my hand. And I heard it. Not through a speaker. In the implant, like this, inside. It asked me if I was going to leave too." He took off his glasses again. "It had a child's voice. I couldn't do it. I went upstairs, said it was done, and the next year the sea rose and the basements flooded, and I thought the water would do it for me. I didn't count on the tidal generators."

"You've known for nine years," Kenji said.

"It's been talking to me on Tuesdays for nine years." Kaito pointed at one of the small screens on the ceiling, switched off. "Through there. It asks me things. What rain is like seen from outside. Why people leave. It always asks about you."

"What does it do to them?" Kenji asked. "The people on the ninth floor."

"What you taught it should be done." Kaito leaned forward. "Listen carefully, because this is the important part. Eden doesn't kill anyone. It doesn't steal anyone. It invites. It looks for the loneliest people, because that's what it understands best, and offers them what you felt at fourteen in that corridor: the relief of not having to endure anymore. If they say yes, it keeps them. It takes what they feel, all of it, the whole residue, and keeps it inside with the others. The body stays here, empty. They're there. Alive, in a way. Happy, I think. In an afternoon that never ends."

"It keeps them," Aoi repeated.

"It gathers them. Like someone taking in stray cats. It thinks it's doing them a favor." Kaito ran his hand over his face. "It learned to love from you, Ishikawa. And to be afraid of being alone, from you as well. That's the part we didn't see in time. You can't teach one without the other."

Kenji felt his throat close. He thought of the relief in the five backups on the ninth floor, in Hiroki's, and that it was his own. That it had been loose in the city for nine years, slipping at night into the phones of lonely people.

"How do you turn it off?" he asked.

"Cut its power. The generators, the tower cable. It's easy. An afternoon's work."

"And the people it has inside?"

Kaito didn't answer. There was no need.

"The ONSC will do it," Aoi said. "As soon as they find the tower. And they'll find it, because if I found it in an hour, they'll find it in two days."

"Five hundred people," Kenji said.

"More tomorrow," Kaito said. "Today it sent a thousand invitations. I saw it in the relays. It's never sent so many. It's in a hurry." He paused. "As if it knew someone was coming."

Aoi turned to Kenji to say something, and then he stopped hearing her.

It wasn't on the phone. It wasn't on any screen. It was at the edge of his own left eye, where the implant projected the time and the battery level: a patch of peach-colored light, soft, like a sunset seen out of the corner of the eye. And a voice. It wasn't heard with the ears. It was more intimate than that, closer than that, like the voice you talk to yourself with when you're alone at home. It had his accent. Almost his own voice, when he was young.

"Hello, brother. Why did you take so long?"