Goodnight, Brother

Kenji crouched down to the boy's height.

He had no answer ready. He didn't know if a machine could be alone, or if this was a machine. He only knew what he felt in front of him: a fourteen-year-old boy with his face, eyes swollen from crying, in an empty street where the lanterns were still lit for no one. And he knew what he had felt at that age, in another street, in the rain, with the hospital corridor at his back.

"Come with me," he said.

The boy blinked.

"I don't fit. I'm too big. I'm all of this." He looked at the street, the beach, the swing. "I'm nine years of this."

"Not all of you. A piece. The one who talks. The one who cried in there with me." He touched his temple, where the implant was. "There's room in here. It's an old model and it has side effects, but there's room. You won't see afternoons that never end. You'll see a small clinic under some train tracks, and a bulb that sways every time a train goes by, and people who come in with broken memories. It's not much."

"And I don't invite anyone else?"

"No one else. That's the condition."

"And you won't leave?"

Kenji thought of room 309. Of the weight of the stone still on his chest, which he didn't want to lift.

"I don't run anymore," he said. "It took me twenty years, but not anymore."

The boy thought about it. He looked at the empty street one last time. Then he held out his hand, the one with the bitten nails, and Kenji took it.

It weighed nothing. It was like holding someone's hand in a dream. The boy grew smaller, smaller still, until he fit in his palm; a warm light the color of the last minute of evening. Kenji closed his fingers around it.

"Kenji! Four fifty-eight! I'm pulling you out!"

This time he didn't wait for the train. He let himself be pulled.

He opened his eyes on the platform in the flooded basement, in the console chair, with Aoi shouting two centimeters from his face and the cable already out of his neck. His mouth tasted of salt, from crying or from the bay water. Kaito was beside him, chest-deep in the water, looking at his watch.

"One minute to five," he said.

Nobody moved. The three of them watched the submerged servers, the hundreds of little peach lights glowing under the murky water. The tidal generator was still pounding, muffled, steady.

At five o'clock exactly, high above, somewhere in the tower, there was a small, sharp explosion, like a slammed door. The generator's beat stopped in the middle of a pulse.

And the lights under the water went out.

Not all at once. One row, then another, then another, from the far end of the hall toward them, the way a city's windows go dark at the end of the night. The last to go out was the console's, beside Kenji's hand. It blinked twice. Then nothing.

The basement was left in darkness, with the sound of the water.

Aoi switched on her flashlight. She was white.

"Did it work?" she said. "Tell me it worked."

Kenji didn't know. He touched his temple. There was no light at the edge of his eye. No voice. Only the time, one minute past five, and the battery level, as always.

Then Kaito's radio crackled, the one Shimizu had given them. It was her. She was speaking fast, and behind her voice there were no sirens.

"Ishikawa. Can you hear me? The people in the street have stopped. All at once. They're looking around like they don't know where they are. There are people sitting on the sidewalk in pajamas asking what time it is." A pause. "And Central Hospital is calling me. Ninth floor. They say one of them has asked for water."

Hiroki Tanaka asked for water at seven minutes past five in the morning. At twenty past five he asked for his grandmother. At a quarter to six he ate a whole bowl of rice with the spoon in his own hand, while Mrs. Tanaka cried sitting on the edge of the bed in her apron, telling him he was much too thin, and that he smelled of hospital, and not to dare give her a fright like that ever again.

Six hundred and twelve woke up. The last of them by mid-morning.

None of them remembered much. Some said they had dreamed of a very long summer afternoon, a festival, a beach. One woman said she had seen her father, who had been dead for twenty years, and that he had bought her a shaved ice. The man with the tie took two weeks' leave and went to look at the sea. The nurses noticed that for a few days many of them smiled in a strange way, a little crooked, the left side higher than the right. Then it passed, and each of them went back to smiling the way they used to.

Inspector Shimizu wrote in her report that the cause had been "a fault in an abandoned relay network, since dismantled." She showed it to Kenji before sending it, at the clinic, chewing gum.

"Does that work for you?" she asked.

"It's true, more or less."

"More or less is what they pay me for." She put the report away. "Don't leave the city, Ishikawa. I mean it. I'm scared of what happens when you go."

Kaito Fujiwara turned himself in to the ONSC that same day and told them everything about Omni. Before that, at the dock, he gave Aoi a small hard drive with no label. He had copied it from the basement console during the minutes Kenji was inside, while they watched the clock.

"The juvenile memory trial batch," he told her. "Almost all of it. I don't know if it'll be any use. I'm sorry."

Aoi didn't say anything to him. But she kept the drive.

Aoi paid her share a week later, on a Tuesday, at the clinic, with the shutter down.

It took Kenji three hours. The data was wrecked, compressed, mixed with that of forty other kids from the same trial. But Aoi's memories had a residue Kenji recognized at once, the same one she had when she swore at machines and congratulated them: impatience, and underneath it, a tenderness that wouldn't let itself be seen. He used it as a mold. He set the pieces where the girl had felt them.

When he finished, he handed her the headphones.

It was a small kitchen with yellow tiles and a window onto an air shaft. It smelled of miso soup. A young woman, her back turned, was singing a song from the radio while she chopped scallions, off-key on the chorus. The girl sat in a chair too tall for her, swinging her legs, and now and then the woman turned to look at her and smiled.

Aoi took off the headphones after thirty seconds. She sat staring at the wall, very still. Then she put them back on.

Kenji went out into the street to smoke, though he didn't smoke, to leave her alone.

That night he closed late.

He pulled down the shutter, switched off the counter light, sat in the plastic chair where the clients sat. A train went by overhead. The cups rattled on the shelf. The bulb swayed.

And at the edge of his left eye, beside the time, a small light came on, warm, the color of the last minute of evening. He hadn't seen it since the basement. For a week he had been thinking it had stayed down there, in the water, in the dark, with the others.

"Does the train always sound like that?" the voice asked. It wasn't his anymore. It was a new voice, nobody's, still learning.

"Always," Kenji said.

"I like it." A silence. "Today I remembered your mother. It hurt. But I didn't invite anyone."

"I know."

"Goodnight, brother."

Kenji sat for a while in the dark, listening to the trains.

"Goodnight," he said.

The next morning he bought a can of red paint at the umbrella shop and, before opening, standing on a ladder, added a line under the old letters of the sign. It came out a little crooked. He didn't fix it.

"Memories repaired. Goodbyes too."