Birds with a Long Name

Birds With a Long Name

The girl on the screen looked a bit like Sayaka herself, so she stopped in her tracks to look as she walked past the old TV, a thin sheet that you could roll up and take with you that had been tacked to the wall so long it would crack if she tried. It played Advotainment and paid by the hour if it was on, even while nobody was watching. And her mother, curled up on the futon as close to the A/C as she could get, was in no position to watch anything. She was lost in her Immersive Virtual Experience. Her eyes were covered by half spheres the size of ping-pong balls which were strapped to her face, the velcro belt looping to the back of her skull also holding two similar spheres in place over her ears. Sensory input replaced with a recording. Or even live.

The girl on the screen started to pull what looked like a bathing cap over her head, covering her short bob. She winked and smiled before pulling the thin material further down, creating dents at the sockets of her eyes and a bump for her nose. She gave a thumbs up. The letters IVE were imprinted on the top half of the mask, with N-GEN under it. The smile of the girl under the thin material made both Ns curve upward. It should look spooky, a faceless face under suffocating rubber, but it didn’t. Perhaps because the Next Generation IVE, soon to be released (but when exactly still a mystery), had been plastered over all media for a couple of weeks now.

Then the words “ARE YOU ELIGIBLE?” appeared on the bottom of the screen, followed by a QR code. ‘Eligible for what?’ Sayaka wondered and then muttered, “Store that,” to her phone, currently wrapped around her left wrist, aiming it at the screen.

It squeezed her to confirm.

The advertisement faded away, and Sayaka continued to her room with her tea. She took the phone from her wrist and placed it on her small desk where it expanded and showed a smiling Manga character she had once been infatuated with.

“Open the last QR,” she told it and took a sip from her tea as the screen opened a website that was designed to look hip, young and cool and almost pulled it off. The biggest item on the landing page was the question she had seen on the TV moments ago, with an added button labelled ‘click here to find out’.

‘Eligible for what?’ she wondered again, and clicked the button to find out.

#

Osaka was boiling. The streets were practically deserted as people stayed indoors, A/C to max, causing brown-outs and even increasingly frequent black-outs.

Emerging from Ebisucho Station where the once famously punctual subway system had managed to deliver her with a 20 minute delay, Sayaka immediately started sweating. She was wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off khakis and a tank top, even while she was heading toward what she guessed might very well be a job interview. The crazy temperatures, and the shift of life toward the slightly cooler night had rendered traditional garments obsolete; you wore as little as you could get away with.

Exit 3 led her to the left hand side of Janjan Alley, where the setting sun cast deep shadows at this time of the day, and she hurried along past shuttered pachinko parlors, ramen and kushikatsu shops. Business would open after sunset but even then the neon signs that weren’t powered by private generators would stay dark, as per government decree. Shinsekai looked even shadier and more grimy without them.

#

The building she ended up at was situated between a bicycle repair shop that still boasted the counter from the food outlet it had replaced and a nail salon, advertising in English, catering to the tourists that would emerge from the doya after sunset. A vending machine covered in a metal mesh cage promised cold drinks, but the lights were off so Sayaka knew that was a lie. She frowned at the weathered concrete and the metal door with Kanji over Kanji in layers some urban archeologist or anthropologist could write a dissertation about.

How was this dump supposed to be some N-GEN contributors’ recruitment agency? Unless they were recruiting for the seedy experiences Sayaka didn’t want to touch with a pole? IVE was, together with the race for that elusive AGI, the tech most hyped and most lucrative. Both were platforms for content creators as well as consumers, creating on-line eco systems that developed and changed at the speed of light. Images, stories, movies, deepfakes on the one hand. The weirdest of experiences on the other. Some people got paid, some people paid, and the tech companies sat in the middle, taking a cut either way. So surely these outfits could afford some decent accommodation?

Only one way to find out. She pressed the button on the intercom.

#

Two others had arrived before her and were sitting on chairs lining the corridor, an empty seat between them. So Sayaka had to squeeze herself between these two people. One of them was a girl her age wearing a school uniform who might very well be willing to deliver the experiences Sayaka was determined to avoid. Who else still wore school uniforms? On her other side sat a middle aged man with a bit of a pot belly and a remarkable overbite, making his lower lip all but disappear. He glanced sideways when Sayaka sat down. He didn’t smile, didn’t nod, didn’t seem to actually register her. She shrugged it off and stared at the wall opposite, where a series of posters depicted the evolution of the Immersive Virtual Experience, from the first bulky helmet with the cable-tree as thick as her wrist sprouting from the top all the way to N-GEN, which wasn’t even released yet. Somewhere in the middle sat the equipment her mother still used. Lived in, rather.

Sayaka could only get her hands on the equipment when her mother slept, but that was unfortunately usually at a time she herself slept as well. So her experience was limited and she almost never got to hear the birds while using it.

#

When Sayaka was seven years old, she saw the first ice-cream truck of her life. She hadn’t even known they existed. Pestering her mother for some money had taken a long time, and so the truck had started moving again by the time she came out of the apartment. But she had a bicycle. It didn't even have training wheels any more. She was a big girl. So she started the chase. Glancing over her handlebars from time to time, she raced after the vehicle, catching up, little legs pumping the pedals, leaning over the handlebars, another glance up. Definitely catching up. Until she realised, much too late, the truck had stopped.

She was in a coma for a week and when she woke up, she asked the nurse first thing where all the birds were. She heard birds, or what she thought were birds, but didn’t see any. After some confusion followed by a lot of tests, she was diagnosed with something complicated that she couldn’t pronounce or understand. For her, the birds just got a long name. But by that time the birds were mostly gone already. They hardly ever returned. Some video games sparked a faint echo, the birds tweeting in alarm when her avatar was in danger. The IVE she and her mother used seemed to stir them a little as well, making them sing their songs in the distance. Sayaka was curious how she would react to the N-GEN, if she’d hear the birds again.

If she was eligible, that is.

#

The girl in the school uniform was the first to be called into an office at the end of the corridor. Within 10 minutes she was out again, biting her lips, wearing a frown and avoiding eye contact. That, Sayaka assumed, didn’t go well.

She was next. The man with the pot belly didn’t seem to notice, or care.

The office was small with a single A/C mounted in a window, which was hardly enough for even such a limited space. A man was sitting behind a desk, his tie loose, a jacket over the back of the chair. This dude had actually gone to work wearing a suit. Fucking mental. The young woman, who had called her in and now returned to her seat, was wearing a white burka so thin her figure shimmered through. Much smarter.

“Deng’s Dumplings,” the man said, reading from a sheet on his desk. Info she had provided after clicking the ‘find out’ button to be confronted with a very long questionnaire. “I know it, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”

Deng’s Dumplings was located near Nipponbashi Bridge, ran by a fat Australian man called Mike, not Deng, and predominantly catering to Australian tourists. Sayaka and her colleagues, all pretty young girls, were there to provide some local colour, as a side dish to the dumplings. Which were bad, but all the staff spoke English and this was comforting for the Australian clientele. So working there had elevated Sayaka’s English significantly, which is why she had elaborated on her employment there in the long form she had filled out.

“Keep it that way,” Sayaka blurted out without thinking. “The dumplings are shit.”

This made the man look up from the sheet, eyebrows high, and stare at her before glancing at the woman in the burka, who seemed to have snorted, then back at Sayaka.

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your employer.”

“Previous employer," Sayaka insinuated hopefully. “And it’s about his dumplings, not about him.” She figured she might beat the record that the girl in the school uniform had set and be out of there even faster. And she couldn’t fathom why she behaved like this. She really wanted Deng’s to be her previous employer and never hear the word ‘mate’ again for the rest of her life. And any job in IVE paid better than the dumplings gig. She could get her mom a better kit and into detox at the same time.

But it made the man smile, if even just a little.

“There’s a market for each and every experience,” he then said. “Even shit dumplings off Dontonboori.” Sayaka hadn’t expected the man to say ‘shit dumplings’ and his smile widened when she sucked in her breath.

“Seriously?” she then asked.

The man spread his arms. “Don’t think singular, stand alone. Embed it. Imagine a spy movie in which the protagonist meets an informant who works in … a shitty dumpling restaurant.”

“Got it,” Sayaka nodded and smiled back a little. The guy looked like an anachronism with his suit and tie, but he didn’t act as stiff as he dressed.

“But we’ve not asked you here as a provider of experiences. We’d like you to be a tester.”

“God, there must be thousands of volunteers for that,” Sayaka protested. “They’d all do it for free, just to get their hands on it.” The man started nodding as soon as she began.

“Yes,” he replied when she was done. “But not a single one of them crashed their bike into an ice-cream truck aged seven.”

Sayaka’s cheeks burned as she leaned back in her chair. She had gone through great pains to avoid that particular factoid in the questionnaire. But they knew. So they were aware she hadn’t been completely honest on her form. Why was she even here?

The man stood from his desk and walked to the window next to the A/C. His shirt stuck to his spine. He grabbed one wrist with the other hand behind his back and leaned forward a little to look outside.

“N-GEN is a great leap forward,” he started. “Over time IVE got better and better at overriding sensory input and replacing them with outside sources. All senses, aside from touch. N-GEN will clear that hurdle. Users will finally truly and completely be able to experience something else. Everything. But that’s not all.” He turned to face her and said N-GEN again, but differently, albeit ever so slightly.

“円陣. Enjin. It won’t be an exclusively individual experience any more.”

Enjin. Circle formation. Team huddle. That was news to Sayaka. No advert had mentioned multi-player. She would have remembered. She still didn’t understand how this related to bicycles and ice-cream trucks though. And her face showed it.

“Like a very small percentage of players experience an epileptic seizure during computer games, being sensitive to, for instance, stroboscopic effects, some users of N-GEN might experience discomfort if their brain makes their body feel completely detached from the real world, if even for a moment. And your brain is more sensitive to these effects because of your accident.”

He repeated what she had come to understand as her diagnosis, but in her mind she was always still seven in this respect and just stuck to birds with a long name.

“So, if experiences don’t affect you negatively,” the man concluded, walking back to his desk, “it will be safe to use for the general population.”

Sayaka thought this over.

“But how are you going to do that in a live, multi-player .. ehh .. experience share?”

The man smiled.

“If the tests return positive, you could be one of our moderators.”

“What tests?” Sayaka asked.

“Follow me,” the woman in the burka said, standing up from behind her miniscule and completely empty desk to open a door that led deeper into the building, away from the street.

The corridor was remarkably cool, which told Sayaka there was a lot of concrete surrounding it. She could tell it was concrete, because the walls between green steel doors were bare.

“I don’t want to sound rude,” she began, “but this doesn’t exactly look like a place for a cutting edge tech company.” The narrowing eyes visible in the slit of the burka informed Sayaka that the woman smiled when she looked over her shoulder.

“We’re a small outfit, a start-up if you like. An area like this is cheap rent, raw talent. Beats wasting money on a fancy office uptown. We like to spend that on the tech. Or rather, the license to use it.”

Sayaka suspected that raw talent was also cheap talent but managed to keep her mouth shut this time.

Behind one of the green steel doors the woman helped Sayaka with the mask. It featured a big lump at the back that the advertisement hadn’t shown that moulded itself around the upper half of her neck. The organic feeling of this process, like a squid from a fridge getting comfortable, gave her goosebumps. This lump, the woman explained, was the novelty that was intercepting signals traveling through the nerves in her spine and replacing them with immersion into something else entirely.

#

The world faded, the woman in the sheer burka shimmered out of existence and Sayaka was alone. She couldn’t feel her buttocks touching the chair and she didn’t even feel the mask any more once it was all the way down. Her eyes seemed clear, she could even blink, but she didn’t see a thing, not even the sparks and little fishes that swim around in your vision if you close your eyes in the dark. A black so complete and absolute it should scare her, but it didn't. And even while she knew her head was covered completely by the mask, she could feel her hair brushing past her ears but silence filled them. Completely devoid of sensory input she felt like her brain folded into itself to open again like a flower at dawn when the mask slowly synchronised.

Then Sayaka floated like a cork in an ocean of human emotion from close to a decade of stored IVE experiences while she was simultaneously tethered to vast data centres crammed full of factual knowledge. These polar opposites created a whirlpool that sucked her in.

She felt the mud between the toes of a cursing soldier while she also knew the casualty rate of his unit, and that 8% was tolerable. She sat on a wicker chair under an awning in the rain, watching roses. She admired their colour while she also knew they had been planted late February, and a little too early. Behind the roses a rainbow appeared, wider than before, including infrared and ultraviolet. She smiled and stood from the chair, walked into the downpour, felt the thin fabric cling to her skin as the water soaked her summer dress. The temperature of her skin dropped exactly five degrees Celsius. The dirt under her bare feet contained ammonium nitrate, phosphorus, and potassium, to help grow the roses that brushed her shins. The thorns were bending to slide past her skin.

She sat at a picnic table, looking past the man smiling at her and knew the names of his sidekicks as he held out a little box with a ring. His words were lost to her as she was listening to birds in the distance to slowly realise the song came from within.

She sat on a sofa in a nondescript living room, looking at a toddler play, and cried because she knew a genetic disease would end its life at age 7. 

No. 

No child should die like this.

She made the birds take flight and ride the vortex. The mask absorbed her tears as she traced the DNA pattern. 

No child should ever again need to die like this. 

The song grew louder when she made the birds merge fact with empathy, pulling the eye of the whirlpool into the anomalies in her brain. Cracks to fill. Seams to seal.

A calm so profound it made a chill run down her spine to her extremities filled her.

Then the birds with a long name sang a song of us that ended with a single note of clarity, uniting.

“Ah,” what once was Sayaka sighed. “I am.”