Code. Part One. Chapter One

In Dubai, even the dawn smells like money. Not freshness, not the sea, not hope — just money: as sterile as surgical gloves and every bit as cold.

The sun in the Emirates is not a star. It is a verdict. Ruthless, final, handed down from the heights of a bleached, bloodless sky. It incinerates shadows, evaporates colors, and turns the air outside the window into a shimmering haze — a lens through which the world appears as a perpetual, molten error.

Inside, on the forty-seventh floor of a tower resembling a crystalline syringe plunged into the vein of the desert, what reigns is a cold. Not the natural, living chill of Tibetan snow, but the sterile, mineral cold of air conditioning. It hums steadily and tirelessly, like the heart of a god fashioned from circuit boards and freon. This hum is the only soundtrack to her new life.

Ayame Yoshikawa. The name she wears now feels like an expensive but borrowed dress. It fits perfectly, yet the seams dig into her skin, a constant reminder that this is merely a masquerade costume. Within the internal, ancestral calendar of her soul — where centuries are compressed into a single, viscous moment — this name is but another marginal note in a book that no longer exists. The last time, she went by Ayumi Sato; the Tokyo police are still looking for Miyako Ikeda. She is a woman with a collection of names like some have a collection of handbags: none truly hers, yet all of them costly.

She has lived in the UAE for two years now. It is easy to be nobody here. Everyone is someone else. Here, you can be a Russian pretending to be English, an Indian playing an American, or a Japanese woman who has forgotten the sound of her native tongue. Here, one can even be a woman who no longer hacks, simply because there is enough money, and boredom is the only thing that remains untaxed.

To her, money is not a sum. It is an abstraction, a mathematical concept of infinity, enough to buy this tower, this city, this country, with enough left over for a few neighbors. But money does not cancel out boredom. It only makes it more expensive.

She sits in her chair and looks out at the city. A mirage-city, built on petrodollars and the desperation of thousands of expats — those eternal nomads in business suits who traded their roots for a tax-free paradise and the illusion of success. She watches them in hotel lobbies and malls — those crystal cathedrals erected in honor of Mammon. Blondes with the smooth, manufactured finish of Fabergé eggs discuss the cost of schooling for children who are taught everything except how to be happy. Men in blindingly white dishdashas, like priests of some hygienic cult, strike deals, moving invisible digits from one void to another. It is a grand, nauseatingly polished farce, devoid even of the honest, drunken madness of her past life. There, people were truly miserable. Here, they are unhappy by catalog.

Sometimes she enters a café, just to hear a human voice undistorted by a phone speaker.

“More water, Madame?” asks the waiter, his smile part of the uniform.

“A glass is enough,” she replies.

“A glass exists to be filled,” he says.”

“And some things,” Ayame says, watching his reflection in the polished marble of the table, “exist to remain empty.”

The waiter nods, understanding nothing, and vanishes. The dialogues here are like the architecture — perfect in form and absolutely hollow inside.

And so she walks. In the early morning, during that pre-dawn hour of pearl and ink, before the heat delivers its sentence, she walks along the edge of the Persian Gulf. The water, as warm as freshly drawn milk, lazily licks the sand — white and fine as cocaine. She walks alone. Always alone. In this world, a beautiful, unattainable woman is not an object of desire, but rather an object of cultural heritage: to be looked at, to be admired, but not to be touched. Men fear her as they fear overly complex equations. They look at her as they would a jewelry display: they want to reach out, but fear the alarm will sound. Women watch her with suspicion, as if she might steal their husbands, their children, or even their reflections in the mirror.

As she walks, salt moisture settles on her skin, and in that moment, beneath the sterility of the Emirates, an ancient, mysterious world emerges — a world of scents and sensations, where every detail is an event. Where the sand beneath her bare feet is not just sand, but a myriad of vanished lives. Where a distant tanker on the horizon is not a ship, but a period at the end of a sentence she can never finish reading. She is the Observer in the world’s most expensive golden cage.

And inside, in the place where her dead names reside, a feeling stirs. A sense of fate, familiar since childhood. A feeling that the world is not merely chaos, but a complex mechanism that, sooner or later, will glitch. She does not know when it will happen. But she waits. She is always waiting. Because for her, silence and order are merely a pause between two errors in the code.

Part One. Chapter Two →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei