The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2) Read online

“I showed him the transaction, and explained you had purchased the e-learn for a cram session to prepare.”

  “Oh?” Masaru raised an eyebrow and swiped his finger across the screen, revealing a message from his father simulating hand-brushed kanji on a scroll.

  Masaru-kun,

  The time has come for you to take a greater role in the affairs of Kurotai Electronics Corporation. I had hoped to discuss matters with you in person, but there is insufficient time remaining. Maeda-san will accompany you along with a member of our legal team and a pair of sales engineers. You will be travelling southwest into Kagoshima Prefecture to meet with representatives of Daiichi-Fuso Corporation.

  You will lead the contract negotiations to provide the electronic components and control mechanisms for a new line of heavy construction equipment. Ikeda Tadashi is an honorable man. This contract will benefit both companies as well as thousands of citizens down the line.

  I trust you will make me a proud father.

  Kurotai Hideo

  Unlike the rest of the letter, the characters composing the name at the bottom appeared as dark, smoky glass rather than ink-on-paper. A chromatic shimmer reflected from within, as if the characters had ‘bones’ of refractive metal. The holographic ‘signature’ proved the man himself had signed it―or someone with the resources of a national intelligence agency faked it.

  A wind-chime noise emanated from the main room.

  “Ahh. Coffee is here.” Shuji smiled and hurried out.

  Masaru tossed the datapad on the Comforgel bed and followed him down the inner hallway to a sun-lit kitchen. “You are too good to me, Maeda-san.”

  Shuji opened the patio glass and took a pair of coffees from a hovering delivery bot. He handed one to Masaru and sipped from the other.

  Caramel latte. Perhaps the west has corrupted me. He savored the first sip, holding the heat on his tongue for a few seconds before letting it slide down his throat to form a pleasant core of warmth in his chest. “My father’s letter implied a lack of time. We shall eat after.”

  “Heh.” Shuji chuckled as he headed into the cavernous living room. “The way you look, I didn’t think you’d have been able to eat anyway.”

  Masaru rubbed his gut. He had swallowed a military ‘slow release’ ration prior to logging in. A tasteless bright blue gelatin egg that supposedly released nutrients enough to provide for a twenty-four-hour period. That would put him somewhere close to twelve hours late for a meal, but he didn’t feel much like eating. Even thinking about it lofted a small burp flavored in caramel plastic. He grimaced. The chemical flavor confirmed at least some of the false egg remained in his stomach. Perhaps the state of the body while in cyberspace did something to the rate of digestion.

  “Indeed,” said Masaru.

  Shuji crossed to the center of the apartment’s main room to a door set in the front of a square-walled section covered in faux bricks and decorated with plastic plants. It stood like a separate tiny house surrounded by a lawn of beige carpet. As his home occupied an entire floor of the high-rise building, his ‘front door’ consisted of a private elevator that served the top five floors, and expressed to the ground floor lobby.

  Masaru diverted to the display case at the center of the north wall. He took his Nano katana from the daisho stand, and affixed it to his belt. Rubberized elements shaped like ancient cloth cording compressed under his grip. He did not consider himself a ‘samurai,’ nor did most of the more anachronistic prefectures. Among the places where one could be executed for carrying a katana while not of the proper social strata, he would be considered a nobleman, and thus permitted to do so.

  He suppressed the urge to roll his eyes, and wondered where it came from. Had he spent too much time in the west, or did all of this genuinely strike him as ridiculous? Too exhausted to continue that line of mental debate, he strode back across the living room and stepped into the elevator behind Shuji.

  Waist-high realistic stones surrounded him on three sides. Holo-displays above the stonework created the appearance of standing in a gazebo at the center of a vast Zen garden. Bald men in dark grey haori and black hakama pants raked sand in endless circles. Of course, the ‘monks’ were little more than program code. Still, the falsehood notwithstanding, he found the ambiance peaceful.

  The elevator stopped at the roof, where a limo waited. Two large men wearing serious frowns worthy of an Edo Period samurai stood near the rear of the car. The man on the left had snow white hair like Masaru’s, though lacked the green accent at the temple. No one cared if a member of the security team opted for an alternative look. Even Shuji could’ve gotten away with it without much scrutiny, though his friend kept his appearance traditional―short black hair―as befitting the personal assistant to the third most influential man in the prefecture.

  Even the security man with white hair betrayed a hint of disbelief in his expression. While they may think his break from tradition audacious, few would dare say as much to his face. The shorter security man opened the rear door for him, revealing a lush white leather interior where three other men waited, each holding bowl-shaped teacups and saucers.

  Masaru offered the security men a nod of acknowledgement before sitting in the front-facing seat next to a grey-haired man with crows’ feet. Shuji sat in the rear-facing seat next to two men older than Masaru but perhaps half the age of the grey-haired man. Within a second of the door closing, the fragrance of black tea grew suffocating. Masaru held the coffee to his mouth, inhaling caramel essence.

  “Kurotai-sama, it is an honor to be here,” said the left-most man in front of him. “I am Sato Akihiro, with sales engineering.” He gestured at the man beside him. “This is Himura Toru, also with sales engineering.” He bowed at the older man. “And this is Ito Yutaka, from legal.”

  “Kurotai-sama.” Toru bowed.

  “Kurotai-sama.” Yutaka bowed.

  Masaru returned a shallow bow of acknowledgement to the sales engineers, and a slightly deeper one to Yutaka. The man may not have had station over him, but he had to be almost three times his age. Yutaka’s eyebrow twitched, betraying his surprise at the gesture of respect.

  “I am Maeda Shuji,” said Shuji. “Kurotai-sama’s personal assistant.”

  Another round of bowing occurred among them while Masaru sipped coffee.

  The huge security men entered via doors at the center of the limo, sitting in a space sectioned off from Masaru’s compartment by a bullet-resistant panel. Past them, a lone driver sat at the front. Masaru gazed at the immense teacup in Toru’s grip, decorated with a black-line painting of a caricature frowning man standing upon a boat while fishing. The lower third of the cup tinted blue, pale where the ocean lines started to a rich hue at the bottom.

  A man in a tiny boat defies the waves to seek fish in the ocean with a bamboo stick and twine. Does this cup say the man is a fool who attempts a large task with small tools, or is it simple art?

  “Apologies, Kurotai-sama,” said a voice from a speaker in the door. “We will arrive in Kagoshima city in approximately twelve minutes.”

  “Mmm,” said Masaru, nodding.

  The car lifted off in a graceful sweeping left turn. After climbing away from the high-rises of Miyazaki City, firm acceleration pressed him into the seat and caused the two sales engineers to scramble to contain their tea. A twelve-minute trip to go about eighty miles suggested a direct route.

  “Kurota-sama,” said Yutaka, “Most of the details of this agreement have been established by our sales team and Daiichi-Fuso’s purchasing department. Our meeting today is in large part merely a formal reading of the contract at best, or a last minute opportunity to make adjustments.”

  Masaru nodded at the elder from legal. Surely, he must have thought Masaru’s presence as much pageantry as the rest of it. The old man sent him along on a child’s errand. He offered Yutaka a pleasant smile. No master is born such. There is no shame in learning.

  “I trust in your judgement and would not seek to create th
e appearance of impropriety while meeting with Daiishi-Fuso,” said Yutaka. “If they do make unexpected changes, I will relay my opinion by the position of my hand. Flat on the armrest, I agree or do not think it consequential enough to quibble. A fist indicates caution.”

  “Thank you, Ito-san.”

  “There is a low risk involved with this.” Toru sipped tea. “We are providing next generation instrumentation and electronic control mechanisms for heavy equipment intended for use in construction and farming. There is little military application for any of it aside from cargo-hauling trucks.”

  “And our physical proximity to Kagoshima makes a slightly higher price point an irrelevant concern, as shipping from Matsushita would offset the cost.” Masaru swirled his coffee around, trying to prevent all the sweet from collecting at the bottom.

  The sales engineers smiled.

  “Of course,” said Toru. “Our systems are superior to Matushita’s offering. They are still on a two-year-old design. A few more credits-per-unit is hardly an issue when there is such a vast difference in features and scalability.”

  Two years old. Why expend effort to replace that which still performs the function it had been created to do? Matsushita favors reliability over leading edge. The ‘Kenja’ series units have only been in production for two months. How many flaws remain unseen below the surface? Father has an obsession with being ‘first’ rather than being ‘better.’ We should seek to change this. We lose much in reputation and revenue from malfunctions.

  “Matsushita has had time to catch many flaws. Their systems may lack our feature set, but they have a commendable failure rate. Both of our companies have prices considered ‘high,’ though they charge for reliability while we up-value our products based on performance. For a failure-intolerant application where an expanded feature set offers little consolation when the device ceases functioning, we should consider a lower offer.”

  Toru looked horrified. “You are suggesting Matsushita superior to us?”

  Masaru raised a hand. “I am suggesting that there is no such thing as a one solution fits all cases scenario. For any given situation, the ideal varies.”

  Yutaka’s eyebrows edged upward. A mild frown of impressed respect crossed his lips.

  He expected me to be useless. Masaru allowed a smug smile, but only after the coffee cup concealed it. The aromatic elixir drained to a mere trace of froth, gone too fast. It would be too impolite and western to walk into a meeting with a beverage, and by the time the meeting ended, they would likely proceed out for the obligatory business lunch. More coffee would have to wait.

  “Do you expect them to have made any significant changes?” Masaru glanced at Yutaka.

  “It is doubtful.” The elder made a face of thought while taking another sip of tea. “If anything, they may request alterations in the timing of shipments to meet their production qu―”

  Boom.

  Yutaka’s face blurred past; a violent lurch in the undercarriage of the hover limo kicked Masaru out of his seat. His nerves screamed with the electric rush of activating speedware, an automatic reaction to an unexpected chaotic situation. Hot tea splashed over the right side of his face in slow motion as he careened past the company lawyer. An accelerated perception of time did little to stop him from flying cheek-first into the left side window, though he did manage to get one hand up, absorbing some of the force.

  For three-quarters of a second stretched to four, Masaru Kurotai stared down at the ruins of a large city. A radiant pattern of destruction spread out from a point near the city center. Some buildings had toppled and debris scattered directly away from where a ‘backpack nuke’ had gone off over three hundred years ago. Here and there among the concrete ruins, patches of green appeared where nature had begun to reclaim the land.

  Miyakonojo…

  City slid away, replaced with sky and ground in the wrong place.

  The car had rolled upside down. Shrieking wind and a fluttering of metal roared; bits of foam and leather scraps sprayed past him and slipped across the window, carried in a fierce current of air.

  Men’s screams flew away, distorting as if down a tube. More scalding tea saturated the left leg of his suit.

  Masaru’s weight continued forward, compressing his skull into the glass as the city came once again into view below. The impact thundered in his ears like a cannon fired underwater. In what seemed an instant, total chaos in drawn-out time gave way to stillness and an incessant beeping. His head throbbed. Trickles of warmth ran down his face. Beyond the fog of his breath on the window lay a ruined street. They had crashed. Yutaka lay under him, unconscious but breathing. One of the sales engineers moaned. Repetitive thuds in the door, likely from the security men kicking their way out of the car, carried into his cheek.

  Anger―who would dare attack him―welled up. Who would dare make him late for a meeting? He started to grumble, but his indignation melted to unease when a sharp chattering noise outside smashed the silence.

  Gunfire.

  housands of lines of bright green program instructions scrolled across a black monolith of holo-panels surrounding Joey’s workstation. Four columns of three thirty-inch screens showed the output of auditing routines chewing on the guts of a personal accounting software suite. He scanned a new trouble-ticketing program Teradyne Corporation was about to set up for its internal help desk, and the source code for The Shade King’s Gambit, the latest game in the Monwyn franchise that wouldn’t be released for another three months.

  Since the NewsNet hadn’t exploded, no one knew Division 9 got into Dreamcraft Entertainment’s system and lifted the game. Not that the hack represented any deviation of normal protocols. Division 9 hunted down any significant new program it detected on the net, and ran it through the process unfolding before Joey’s eyes. His boss, Major Preema Iyer, had brought him into an anechoic meeting room as if about to let him in on state secrets that could tilt the balance of power of the colonized galaxy―only to assign him the task of auditing a video game.

  She knew he didn’t subscribe to the vast fandom of the Monwyn franchise, so she trusted him with it―not that the Division 9 network operations servers had much chance of being hacked by an outside operator even if word leaked. Between live personnel and three ‘black dragon’ AIs, the odds of a successful breach were somewhat less plausible than his successfully talking Nina into twelve-hour rotating-partner marathon sex with her parents plus two randomly selected homeless people and a singing clown.

  Joey pinched his nose, wanting that thought out of his mind.

  Of course, the lure of Monwyn reached a significant enough point that Preema didn’t want him telling anyone else in the room that he had the source code for such an eagerly-awaited game in his little slice of their CPU farm. She didn’t worry about an external breach as much as one of his coworkers sneaking it out to play at home, or firing the game up on the Division 9 system.

  He chuckled to himself. She didn’t want any reporters dead. The public might care about the government helping themselves to everyone’s software for all of ten minutes before they got distracted by some celebrity trying to marry their dog or the latest ‘if you have this in your kitchen, it could kill you’ scare story. Okay, so he wouldn’t tell anyone. No big deal. He’d run the audit, checking the software for any suspicious routines that could compromise national security. Log it if it passes and delete it, or drop kick the hornet nest if he finds something suspicious.

  Hah.

  If the program finds something suspicious. He only needed to put ass to chair and watch it churn. Four hours and counting.

  Yeah. Monday.

  Joey rolled a few inches back and reached for the butterfly valve he’d rigged to the surgical tubing that ran coffee down from the drop ceiling. He expected that to last all of two hours before someone complained of his installing a dedicated java line from the break room to his desk, but only three people noticed. Simon even copied it―the last person he’d ever have expected to
do something ‘unsanctioned.’

  His cubicle sat in a circular cluster with four others at the end of a short ‘security separator’ corridor, an eight-meter-long, narrow passage intended to keep anyone from walking by the cube farm from seeing things they shouldn’t. To his right sat the senior of their four-person team, Tech-Four Chris DeWinter. He’d been sitting in the same desk going on fifteen years, straight out of college. Despite being a few years shy of forty, his hair had gone grey. Joey figured stress the culprit, which he knew wouldn’t get him. Stress only killed you if you gave a shit what happened.

  Abby Brown, Tech Two, sat in the workstation to DeWinter’s right. The two of them hadn’t gotten off on the best footing. Probably due to the first thing Joey had said to her, which he’d thought hilarious. She’d introduced herself by saying “Abby Brown,” and the wiseass in him couldn’t help but say, “Yes, apparently she is.”

  Mindy Wu, the ‘wild one’ as he’d mentally tagged her, had the next space. Her being twenty-two left Joey the second youngest member of the team by a year. A Tech One like Joey, she always had her belt-length hair done up in vivid colors. For the past few weeks, she wore it in a gradient that faded from white at the ends, progressing past ever-darkening shades of blue to violet at the top of her head. Last month, it had migrated from white through pink to crimson. She shared Joey’s utter lack of seriousness, but didn’t quite have the nerve to keep up the act whenever Preema could see her. She had laughed at the Abby Brown remark, which almost started a war between the women until she clarified she’d laughed at it being such a stupid thing to say.

  Joey couldn’t argue with that.

  Dan Simon, Tech Three, had the space to Joey’s left, and a vampire tap on his coffee artery. His thirtieth birthday approached in two months, and a quiet war of private messages raged across the entire department about how best to ‘memorialize’ the date. Dan had the kind of personality that brought everyone together―to mess with him. While DeWinter had the unassuming confidence of a man who’d been doing the job forever, Dan suffered from a crippling case of rulebook. Whenever anyone asked him to do anything, if he wasn’t completely convinced it followed process, he’d research department policy. Sometimes he’d spend more time trying to figure out if he should do something rather than doing it. So far, he’d only found two cases where someone unwittingly asked him to violate policy, and in such minor ways, his effort to ‘keep the department ethical’ blew up in his face. Preema had been more irritated at the time he’d spent to find out that someone had used the wrong requisition template than she would’ve been if the person hadn’t had clearance to request that information.