Read Online The Future Is Japanese by Unknown - Free Book Online Page B

the alien is gone.
    Tanimura is still moving, still wading out into the pool; it’s almost up to his waist. Maddy wonders if she’s going to have to drag him back. And then he stops, suddenly, and turns around, and sloshes his way back to the shore. He squats down and puts his head in his hands. After a little while he looks up.
    “ ばか ,” he says.
    Maddy knows that word. Dumbass . Or something like. But she doesn’t think he means her. Maybe he means himself. Maybe he means it’s a dumb-ass situation. Or a dumb-ass world. She can’t say she disagrees.

    The Colombine’s cockpit stutters to life as soon as the Pierrot comes near. Together Maddy and Tanimura make their way down off the mountainside, find a road leading out of the zone, and follow it till they find a stretch of autobahn long and straight enough for the transport to land. Maddy speaks briefly to Asano over the radio; she doesn’t say anything to Tanimura. She hasn’t figured out what she wants to say.
    Aboard the transport, the Colombine secure in its cradle, Maddy powers the cockpit down again and sits in darkness. The amphetamines they gave her at the start of the mission are wearing off; she can feel it.
    She closes her eyes. She wishes she had a home, so that she could feel homesick for it. In the dark, she sees the alien girl.

    Back at the secret robot base she finds Tanimura in his cabin. It’s not the hikikomori rathole she’s been expecting. Apart from a few books, a Sony laptop, and a scattered deck of the recognition cards, there’s no real sign anybody lives there. Tanimura is sitting on the bunk, playing some game on his phone, or maybe texting somebody. He stops when Maddy comes in.
    “I figured it out,” she says. “On the way back. She thought I was you, right? You met her before. That’s why you ran away. But I bet they can’t tell us apart, and she thought I was you.”
    Tanimura doesn’t say anything.
    “It’s all a lie,” Maddy presses on. “Everything they’ve told us about the zones, about the enemy. Isn’t it? Maybe they’re not lying to us on purpose, but it’s all bullshit. They don’t know anything. You and me, we know more than they do.”
    Tanimura just looks at her. Maddy can’t tell if he understands her or not.
    “Look,” she says. “I want to help, okay? Who is she? What’s her name?”
    “Name?” Tanimura says.
    “ 名前 ,” Maddy says. She goes to the desk, finds the card, holds it up. “Hers.”
    Tanimura looks at the card, then up at Maddy.
    “ Grauekappe ,” he says levelly. “AG-7.”
    Maddy stares at him.
    “Okay,” she says, dropping the card to the floor. “Fuck you too.”

    She can’t get into the hangar. She wants to climb into the Colombine’s cockpit and put six inches of red metal between herself and the world, but they aren’t going to let her do that. She goes to the simulator room instead, and climbs up into one of the big white boxes and closes it and sits there unseeing as the computers run it through its routine, never touching the controls, so that she dies again and again; and then she wipes her eyes and opens the box and gets down.

We straddle over the twenty or so corpses that are scattered about on the red clay and reach the top of the hill.
    I imagine for a moment that I’m looking down on a huge ocean that’s reflecting back the stars of the night sky. The blue-black vista is sprinkled with glittering clusters of light.
    It’s not really water I’m staring down at though, and I know it. Those lights are people. That distant twinkling is people cooking, studying; it’s families gathering after a long day.
    That light. That warmth. I take a deep breath. The acrid gun smoke all around us, the smell of burning flesh, the stench of blood and guts, of shit and piss that’s seeped out of the dead bodies—it all merges into one. For a moment it seems that I can also smell the scent of the living as it drifts over from the glittering mass of light in the