Code. Part One. Chapter Two

The hotel lobby, where Ayame occasionally sipped her profoundly tedious coffee, had been designed with such aggressive, sterile luxury that it seemed it might achieve self-awareness at any moment and immediately commit suicide out of existential dread.

The marble was polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting nothing but the ghosts of ambition.

It was into this hermetic void that they intruded — like two viruses entering a pristine operating system.

They materialized at her table with the clumsy grace of bears attempting to play chess. One was a silent wardrobe of muscle, stuffed into a suit clearly purchased in a moment of panic at an airport duty-free; now, the garment was seeking its revenge by strangling its owner’s circulation at the neck. The second, shorter and stouter, was the face and mouth of the operation. His suit was more expensive but fit just as poorly, and he emitted a scent of cologne that could be classified as a chemical weapon based on pine needles and despair. Russians. Or some derivative thereof. It was evident in the heavy-handed, utterly unironic seriousness with which they tried to look casual.

“Good evening,” the smaller one said, with an accent that with an accent that could cut glass. He attempted a smile, but his facial muscles had clearly not received the appropriate programming.

“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”

“Apparently, it is now,” Ayame replied, not taking her eyes off her cup. “But if you are looking for company, I can recommend each of you to the other.”

“We just wanted to introduce ourselves,” his partner joined in. “There are so few interesting people in this city.”

“And you must be from the ‘Anonymous Sociopaths’ club?” Ayame quipped. “Or did you just decide that today was your day for suicide?”

“No, we just see that you are bored. We are bored, too. Perhaps we could be bored together?”

Ayame slowly raised her eyes. Her gaze was that of a pathologist examining a particularly uncomplicated cause of death.

“I am not bored,” she replied, her voice as flat and cold as the marble beneath her cup. “I am observing. Those are different processes.”

“Observing?” he repeated, clearly caught off guard. “Observing what?”

“Entropy,” Ayame said, taking a sip of her coffee. “It is particularly vivid here.”

His muscle-bound partner made a sound like grinding gravel. The smaller one cleared his throat, decided to change tactics, and attempted a flank through cultural exchange.

“You are Japanese? Beautiful. Your eyes… like two expensive satellites.”

“Satellites observe, too. Even the expensive ones,” she parried, her tone unchanged. “They do not engage in dialogue. Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to finish my observation experiment in silence.”

“We do mind,” he said suddenly, and the clumsy politeness fell away like cheap gilding. The smile vanished. All that remained was the face of a man accustomed to solving problems with a crowbar. “We mind very much, Miyako Ikeda.”

The name. There it was.

The sense of fate that had been dozing in the depths of her soul lazily opened one eye. It wasn’t fear. No. It was the cold, familiar click of a lock snapping into place. A chapter of a book she thought closed had suddenly been had suddenly been wrenched open again.

“We are not criminals, Miss Ikeda,” he continued, shifting to a tone just as cold and businesslike. “We are optimizers. We optimize financial flows.”

“That sounds like a euphemism for theft,” she noted.

“Everything in this world is a euphemism for something else. We are offering you a partnership. We have associates, including some in Japan. But occasionally, their assets are not sufficiently liquid. We want you to create for us… a tool for liquidity enhancement. Small, almost invisible transactions. Dust. Gold dust.”

He leaned closer, and the scent of his cologne intensified to a tactical concentration.

“A name is a key, Miss Ikeda. It can open doors. It can also lock them. Forever. Your current key, ‘Ayame Yoshikawa,’ is rather fragile. We can reinforce it. Or we can break it. Or destroy it. The choice is yours.”

“And if I refuse?” Ayame asked, her voice sounding as if she already knew the answer.

“Then you will vanish. Not as a character, but as a bug that no one will bother to fix.”

She remained silent, looking not at him, but at a sugar crystal on her saucer. It lay alone, perfectly formed, its facets reflecting this entire sterile, fraudulent world. One tiny, ordered crystal in the midst of chaos. In her mind, it wasn’t thoughts that raced, but lines of code — elegant, lethal algorithms.

Run? Right now? Impossible. New documents, a new legend—that takes time. Refuse? Foolish. These people do not accept “no.”

Agree?

The boredom — that sticky, viscous disease of the wealthy — began to recede. For the first time in two years, she felt something akin to interest. Not in the money. Money was vulgar, boring matter. But the task itself… the game…

To create a program for these savages that would do more than just steal? To create something that would call into question the very idea of their digital empires? To craft an elegant virus, a poem of code that would devour their world from within while they rejoiced at the arrival of their “dust”?

She slowly looked up and met their gaze. Truly met it. And for the first time that evening, she allowed herself a slight, barely perceptible smile — like a crack in the ice. In her internal world, where it had been raining for centuries, the sun peeked out for a fleeting second.

A sun. Black as petroleum.

“Where can we speak in a more ‘intimate’ setting?” she asked.

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