The Night of Invitations

Inspector Shimizu arrived in Kabukichō at half past eleven, in an unmarked car she parked on the sidewalk. She took the fire escape two steps at a time. When Aoi opened the door, she looked at her, looked at the twelve peach screens, looked at Kaito sitting on the floor with his bag of hard drives, and last of all looked at Kenji.

"Tell me everything," she said. "From the beginning. No embellishments. I have twenty minutes."

Kenji told her. Omni, the windowless room, the twelve hundred sessions. Eden. KENJI-7. The tidal generators of the sixth tower. The afternoon that never ended, the fourteen-year-old boy with his face, door 309. Shimizu listened standing, her trench coat dripping on Aoi's floor, without interrupting once. When he finished, she took a pack of gum from her pocket, put a piece in her mouth and chewed slowly.

"I don't believe you," she said. "But I don't believe what's happening out there either, so I don't have much to choose from."

She went to the window. Below, in the street, people were walking in the rain. They weren't running. They weren't talking. They were all walking in the same direction, east, heads slightly tilted, like people following music playing far away. A man in house slippers. A woman with a sleeping baby in a sling. Two students holding hands. Under the peach signs they looked like they belonged to another world.

"They're the ones who haven't said yes yet," Kaito said from the floor. "The invitation reaches them and they set off. When they're close enough to the tower, they'll open it. And that's that."

"We've closed the bridges over the bay," Shimizu said. "They walk into the water. We've pulled forty out of the sea in an hour." She turned around. "The ministry has made a decision. At five in the morning, when the tide turns, a team will cut the sixth tower's cable and blow up the generators. Eden shuts down. The invitations stop."

"And the six hundred people it has inside," Aoi said.

"Six hundred and twelve, as of eleven tonight." Shimizu didn't look away. "Against the hundred thousand who'll set out if this lasts until tomorrow. I didn't make the decision. But I understand it."

"There's another way," Kaito said.

He took an old hard drive out of his bag, with a handwritten label: DISSONANCE.

"I made it years ago, just in case. A virus. It doesn't switch Eden off: it breaks it from inside. It feeds the emotional model every emotion at once, in no order, until it doesn't know what it feels and comes apart." He turned the drive over in his hands. "It would be faster than cutting the power. And cleaner."

"And the people inside?" Kenji asked.

Kaito didn't answer.

"Then it isn't another way," Kenji said. "It's the same way with another name."

He sat down in Aoi's chair, the one with the cable, and stared at the biggest screen, the peach sunset. He thought of door 309. Of the warm handle. Of what he had been about to do. And of the fourteen-year-old boy, screaming when he let go.

"You left," the voice told him, at the edge of his eye. It no longer sounded happy. It sounded like a child on a platform when the train has already gone. "Like everyone. You left."

"It doesn't know how to let go," Kenji said aloud.

Aoi turned to him.

"What?"

"It doesn't know how to let anyone go." He said it slowly, like someone putting the pieces of a broken laugh back in place. "It learned everything I know how to feel. Joy, fear, relief. It learned it from twelve hundred of my sessions. But there's one thing I've never felt, so I couldn't teach it."

"What?"

"Saying goodbye." He looked at his hands. "When I was fourteen, my mother was dying in room 309 of Nakano Hospital. She'd been dying for six months. One night she told me to come closer, that she wanted to tell me something. And I ran. Down the corridor, down the stairs, out into the street. And in the street I felt that relief. The one in the backups. That I didn't have to see her like that anymore." He swallowed. "She died before dawn. I never went back in. I don't know what she wanted to tell me."

No one said anything. Even Shimizu stopped chewing.

"I taught it that when someone suffers, all you want is for it to end," Kenji went on. "I taught it the relief of running away. I never taught it that you can love someone and let them go. That that's love too. It doesn't know how to let anyone go because I didn't."

"And you want to teach it," Aoi said.

"I want to do what I didn't do. Inside, at the place where it all comes from. Go back to the room and stay this time. And say goodbye properly. If it feels it with me, maybe it learns. Maybe it lets them go."

"And if not?"

"Then at five you cut the power."

Shimizu got them an ONSC launch and a pilot who asked no questions. Not because she believed him, she said. Because she preferred trying something that wouldn't keep her awake for the rest of her life.

Before heading to the dock, Kenji asked her to stop for a minute at Central Hospital.

Mrs. Tanaka was at the emergency entrance, her coat over her apron, watching the people walking east in the rain. She hadn't been invited; she didn't have an implant phone. She was just there. When she saw Kenji get out of the car, she didn't ask him anything. She took both his hands in her hands, red from cold water.

"I'll bring him back," he told her. It was the first time he had promised.

She nodded and let go of his hands.

They crossed the bay at three-forty in the morning. The water was black and smooth, and the whole peach-colored city was reflected in it, like an upside-down sunset. The towers of Odaiba emerged from the fog one after another, dark, windows broken, gulls asleep on the sills. Only one had light. The sixth. A soft light rising from below, from under the water, tinting the glass of the lower floors.

They went in through a broken window on the third floor. They climbed down a service stairwell by the light of Aoi's flashlights, floor by floor, until the stairs went into the water. They kept going down. The water was cold; it reached their knees, their waists. Kaito went first; he knew the way by heart.

The basement was an enormous hall, flooded to chest height. And under the water, in rows, Eden's servers glowed. Hundreds of submerged metal towers, their little lights blinking peach through the murky water, like an aquarium lit up in the middle of the night. At the far end, on a platform above the waterline, there was an old console with a chair and a cable. Somewhere the tidal generator was pounding, muffled, steady, like a heart.

Kenji climbed onto the platform and sat in the chair. Aoi plugged her portable console into Eden's, stuck the pulse sensor to his wrist and ran the cable behind his neck. Her hands were shaking again.

"If you're not back by five, I'm disconnecting you," she said.

"At five they disconnect everything," Kenji said.

"Then come back before, idiot."

She plugged in the cable.

And from all the submerged towers at once, from under the water, from inside his own head, six hundred and twelve voices and one more said his name at the same time.

"Brother."