The Future Is Japanese by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781421549842
Publisher: Haikasoru/VIZ Media
Published: 2012-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

At first Goku thought he was in the wrong room. There was a wire-frame contraption rather than a bed, and the figure suspended in it looked more like a large doll than a living person, a sexless, featureless mannequin in an elaborate hotsuit meant for a programming engineer or a Foley editor rather the standard end-user. Then he realized and looked away.

“It’s always so hard when people see someone they know in a condition like this.” The nurse’s low, kindly voice had a hint of the Caribbean. Goku wondered how far removed she was from it, whether she ever went there, and if so, did they welcome her home or as a tourist.

“I didn’t think there were many people in this condition,” he said, still not looking at Konstantin.

“I meant a condition like this—incapacitated. If I gave offense, I apologize.”

“You didn’t, not at all.” Goku winced inwardly. “One of her staff told me about the, ah, incident and that it was an unusual injury. She had a hard time explaining. I ran into her boss and I thought maybe he could tell me more. But all I got from him was something about laser pointers and burned retinas.”

The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Hmph. Pretty good.”

Pretty Good—Pretty Howitzer’s overachieving cousin, the one she could never live up to; the thought blew through his mind, a scrap of absurdity. Konstantin had talked about sometimes feeling a sense of unreality or surreality. He’d never been quite sure what she meant, but now he thought he had an inkling.

“Too simple, of course,” the nurse went on. “If it really were that basic, they might have made some progress with her. But as an analogy, it’s pretty good. Better, though, for the neuros to accept that a person is more than a mind driving a body.”

“Greater than the sum of her parts?” He suppressed the urge to mutter something sarcastic about platitudes.

She made a disgusted noise. “Oh, don’t give me that.”

“Excuse me?” Goku stared at her.

“People who say that think they know all the parts. What they are, how many.”

He shook his head, baffled.

“People are a lot more complex. Can you trace the exact shape of the hole she left when she fell out of her life?” The nurse looked at him with grim amusement. “Work on that, maybe you’ll be getting somewhere.” She went over to the framework holding Konstantin and peeled back the right sleeve of the suit, exposing a pasty but still firm-looking forearm. She bared Konstantin’s hand as well and Goku started to turn toward the door, thinking the nurse was going to bathe her.

“No need to go,” the woman said. “You came to visit, stick around.” She laid her own arm along Konstantin’s, intertwining their fingers, and gently moved Konstantin’s hand back and forth as if trying to retrain her movements. Next to the nurse’s dark brown skin, Konstantin’s looked as white as paper, but it wasn’t the contrast that struck him.

After a couple of minutes, the nurse switched the position of her arm so that it was now on the outside of Konstantin’s.

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