Daria has her eyes set to a high zoom factor as she calligraphs the pre-Carolingian uncial letters in between the two concentric circles she has drawn with her compasses. She gets as far as I THOUGHT WHAT I'D DO WAS when Aoi places his coffee upon the bar and slides into the seat next to hers.
"I must admit," he says, "I wasn't expecting to see you so soon, nor to see you here."
The Starchild Coffee still gives a great view of the old expo plaza. It's a place to watch the world go by, that quiet pleasure which in some way manifests in every urban area.
Daria says, "Here, I can be just another gaikokujin fangirl looking to feel close to history." She sets down her calligraphy pen. "Neo-Tokyo is still too neo to have as big a stationer's as you've got here." Her bulging backpack is on the floor beneath the bar. She pats it with the toe of her boot. "When Jane is done with work, maybe we can all get dinner." One of Jane's connections had found an elaborate job, a couple wanting matching yet complementary customizations, and that kind of house call is both too remunerative and too artistically challenging to pass up.
"Hmm," Aoi says, with a little smile not unlike Daria's, needing only that to convey I'd like that. "I know a couple Taiwanese places where full-body cyborgs can eat many of the dishes without trouble."
With a chime and a whirr, a circle opens in the corner of Daria's vision field, and Jane says, "Hi, babe. I'm all wrapped up here and about to brave the subway."
"See you soon, love," Daria says with her inner voice. Aloud, she tells Aoi, "Jane's on her way."
He nods and tries a sip of his coffee. It is just barely not too hot. "You drink coffee now?" he asks.
"Nothing else has quite the same heat and texture. Tea is lighter, cocoa is creamier... I can almost taste it. And at least what I'm almost tasting is the best cup of coffee I ever had."
"Which was?"
Daria's smile is a restrained signature of love and wistfulness. "The pot that Jane brewed on her stove the morning she called me Daria for the first time." She turns to Aoi and sees the news playing on a wall TV behind him. "Ugh," she says, nodding over his shoulder. "If golf is a way to ruin a pleasant walk, is a café a way to ruin a pleasant coffee?"
Channel 33 is showing the prelude to the American Secretary of State—Schroeder, but it could just as well have been Kingsworth or Brookton or any of those moldfucks—meeting with Prime Minister Kayabuki.
Daria turns forward again to look over the plaza. "From her university record, Kayabuki has a solid background in neolib economics. Not principles I'd ultimately agree with, but maybe she has them. Think she's principled enough to serve as a figurehead the party can exploit?"
Aoi tastes his coffee again. "I expect Ernest Serano would have told me that, had we watched today's broadcast together." He watches the world go by for a moment. "If Japanese society has the structural flaw that cyberization promotes excessive synchronization among its citizens, what is the corresponding flaw in American society?"
"Anything inherent to the human heritage must manifest in some form," Daria contemplated, "as must anything inherent to cyberization. But even when the music is the same..."
"The lyrics may differ?"
She nods. "The prototype atrocity in your past may be Manchukuo. In ours, slavery and the Trail of Tears and Jim Crow. Like Britain, your defining crimes were in places you regard as elsewhere. Your deliberate Westernization in the 19th century echoed a 19th-century European colonial power, a model that we followed less perfectly. The essence of the American frontier is that it encompasses, so that the nation can build a colony within its own borders." She rotates her coffee cup idly. "This is underscored, perhaps, by the fact that Japan avoided domestic combat during World War IV, apart from retaking Nemuro, while the American Empire used it as an excuse to crush the Roanoke insurgency. Japanese corporations used both World Wars III and IV as international bazaars for cyber-warfare and prosthetic technology, and so Japanese AI research is heavily informed by what cyberization teaches about human neuroscience, whereas American AI is built on data-scraping and massive computation hosted in disadvantaged communities. Multiple types of industrial-scale exploitation marketed as providing sentience it will never approach, all with the goal of slop generation deepening and furthering the biases that benefit the ruling oligarchy. However, both inherit from the same substratum of 20th-century 'artificial intelligence' research that relied upon a fundamentally eugenicist definition of 'intelligence'. Fascism in Japan was colonial and imperial, whereas fascism in America is celebrity culture sold to temporarily embarrassed billionaires. The music of palingenetic ultranationalism is the same—the politics of the blood is common to all human blood—but the lyrics..."
She swallows a glug of coffee.
Aoi happens to look at the TV screen, and he nudges Daria's arm. "Check it out," he says. "Behind Kayabuki."
"Is that—" It sure looks like Kusanagi, in a mannish business suit.
"I know him, too," Aoi says, presumably referring to the older man standing beside the purple-haired woman, equally grave but not so bodyguard-ish.
Daria rings Jane on their private cyber-comm channel. "Are you watching Channel 33, love?"
Jane appears in a circle of light, blotting out the picture-in-picture TV news anchor. "Why would I... Oh. No, it can't be."
"Sure, her body looks mass-produced from the outside, but Aoi seems convinced. You calling his conviction laughable?"
"You and Kusanagi have the same model eyes," Jane says. "The ones I'm seeing on TV now aren't nearly as pretty as yours. Be there soon, my love."
Taiwanese vegan food, with its centuries-long tradition of substitution and mimicry, might be the closest approximation to cyborg food that actually tastes good. And a buffet is remarkably convenient for a full-body prosthetic girl who has no choice but to eat with her eyes.
Aoi covers his rice bowl with a healthy pour of braised, minced something-that-is-not-pork. Daria measures herself a spoonful of that and adds it to the plate on which she has been going for color and texture variety—mock eel, slices of some kind of sashimi, two different dessert cakes. Jane, figuring that as usual she will take at least a bite from everything that Daria tries, and if they're feeling lucky try broadcasting her sense data into Daria's pathways, starts light. Ladling herself a bowl of four herb soup with tofu, she says, "This might be a hammer only seeing nails kind of question, Aoi..."
"Oh?"
Daria beelines past them carrying her plate back to the low table where they had been sat, the most secluded in the restaurant.
"It's partly how you dress," Jane begins, remarkably tentatively for her. "And how you speak. She stomps on allure," she says, momentarily inclining her head to indicate Daria. "You..." She trails off.
"You can't say 'forget it' after an opening like that," Daria points out as Jane settles in beside her and Aoi across the table.
"What do I stomp on?" Aoi asks.
"Masculinity," Jane says. "I know, I know, tell me to shut up if you want, my job makes me the hammer that's going to see nails here. But have you ever... I mean, we've talked about my work for years, right? In all that time..."
Daria verbally steps in. "I think she's trying to ask if you're 100% happy with being the Laughing Man." She downs a piece of mushroom-gluten sashimi.
"I never called myself that," Aoi notes.
Daria says, "And now you're dodging the question to buy yourself another conversation cycle in which to think. You present yourself with text and iconography even when you don't need to. You understood me perfectly and quickly," she adds. "When we met. If part of the reason why is that you've felt... alienated, in anything like the way I was, I'd want to help if I can. That's all."
"I..." Aoi pauses. "I never felt it to be of that much consequence. This," gesturing inward, "is how I turned out. This," briefly indicating the cyber-jacks under the unruly wig, "needed modification."
"Hmm." Daria chews, literally and figuratively.
"Hmm," Jane echoes over her soup spoon. "Not to put too much pressure on you or anything..."
Daria takes over the thread. "That's how I felt for a while. Before. Maybe you'll stay content with that. Just... be advised, I suppose."
Aoi is tucking into the braised mince and rice. "I've tried female net avatars when the occasion called for it. I didn't feel drastically better, or worse."
Jane says, "Spoken like a true perfectly cis person."
"Is it a relief?" Daria asks. "To dive in the net without the sensations of your physical body?"
Aoi pauses, and Jane momentarily wonders if she'd pushed too hard by starting this whole thing, but then: "Perhaps. I don't know how to separate that from the... joy of discovery, perhaps you could call it. The thrill of peeking data that the powerful wish to hide. The Euclidean pleasure of interlinking code fragments and expanding upon that synthesis, which would persist even if no one were hiding the data at all... I don't know. Could you separate the relief you felt from the other pleasures of the written word?"
"Not entirely." Daria is progressing through her mock eel. "Chatroom avatars probably didn't have a lot of resolution," she muses. "Tell me to shut up if you want, but have you ever tried experiencing a sensory feed from a femme physical body?"
"I once uploaded my memories into Major Kusanagi. So, in a sense, part of me is currently carried by a femme—"
"Very," Jane interjects.
"But there was no backflow to speak of."
"Well, if you're ever curious, she is probably full of CNS noise—" Daria makes a poking motion at Jane with her chopsticks. "But I'm available."
Jane asks, "Babe, you're really comfortable with that?"
"As long as there's no backflow," Daria shrugs.
"I think she's trying to ask," Aoi says, "if you're finally comfortable enough with how you feel to fully believe that it could also be a positive experience for someone else to share."
"I am now," Daria states, simply. She pauses to chomp the last bite of her mock eel, and after swallowing that, she adds, "Sometimes the journey can take a while."
"Ah, making a point, I see," Aoi says, smiling a bit like Daria does.
* * *
Aoi lets them onto the roof of the National Library and narfs the security system. Around them, Niihama rises in all its nighttime flux and dubious glory. "If Kraftwerk wasn't singing about this in 'Neonlicht'," Daria says, "they should have been."
This will be the first time that Jane uses the cable she carries in her jacket to connect Daria with anyone but Jane herself. "All right," Jane says, "thirty seconds with your eyes closed, and if that feels fine, thirty seconds with them open, OK?"
"OK," Daria replies.
"OK," echoes Aoi.
The two eccentrics in Jane's life sit cross-legged side-by-side on the rooftop gravel. Daria gathers her auburn hair and brings it to her left side, baring the connector jacks on her neck, a final nonverbal signal of acceptance.
Jane clicks the plug home, Daria gives her a thumbs-up, and Jane hands the other end of the cable to Aoi.
Another click, and the taller eccentric who hadn't had a loving girlfriend to select the perfect hair is slumping a bit, while the petite and jury-rigged one sits upright and still and breathes with artificial lungs.
She feels the wind on her skin, how her clothes interrupt it, their slight motions and patterns of weight and pressure. One at a time, she extends her fingers, and then curls them all up again.
After thirty seconds, she opens her eyes.
The displaced, gaikokujin poet and essayist, the lustless trans girl in the skin and skeleton of a stolen brothel doll, lends her vision of Niihama to the hacker who was born there.
"I am the kino-eye," Daria says. "I am the kino-body. I am the patchwork girl who shows you and feels for you the world as I see and feel it."
After thirty seconds, Aoi blinks and sits up straight.
"All right?" Jane asks.
"All right," Aoi confirms. "Remarkable. I do not have a... need to feel that way, but I have no internal objection either." Slowly detaching the cable and handing it back to Jane: "Is this when I change pronouns?"
"I don't think we can answer that for you," Daria says. "That's your choice of performative language. Performative not in the modern colloquial sense," she continues, "but in Judith Butler's original—not language for show, but language that performs an action. Words that, by being spoken, enact. 'As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair'—"
"Daria, my love," Jane says. "Shall we postpone the footnotes for just a little while? Enjoy the lovely view?"
Aoi remarks, "You're depriving her of the opportunity to quote and critique Merleau-Ponty? And de Beauvoir?"
"I can fault any philosopher," Daria says, "for not living up to William James' prose. 'Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse.'"
"'The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble,'" Aoi quotes. "'The contradictions of real life are absent from it.'"
Daria agrees, "'It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.'"
Jane unplugs the cable from Daria and gently rearranges her hair. "I don't know if you two are the same kind of gender, but you're the same kind of weird."
"One nice thing about Japan," says Daria, "is that when you need to bribe someone whose name refers to their number of remaining fingers, you can do it with cold hard cash. When we were in El Paso and trying to pay to get across one border to Las Cruces or the other border to Juarez, we had to wait until the market value of a ledgercoin fluctuated up."
Jane appears in a data-ringed circle that floats above the dashboard of the rental car. "We're not bribing someone named for their number of fingers. We're bribing Nice Guy Kenji."
"Not nice enough to do the job for free?" Aoi asks from the passenger seat.
"He has beaks to wet in turn. His rates are really quite reasonable." For getting into the discarded property lockers of the prefectural police, she doesn't need to add.
"Let us know when the little hand says it's time to rock," Daria deadpans.
"Will do." Jane's visage disappears.
"So," Aoi says. "You came through... Mexico?"
"Her brother deserted the American Army in Monterrey back in the 2020 brush war," Daria explains. "We wanted to know if there were any traces... No luck." Her flat affect is slightly inflected with solemnity. "You know, they had her marked because of that, back in Lawndale. Potential dissident. How did you think we met?"
"I had entertained the idea that you saw her paintings and fell in love with them first," Aoi admits.
"Football game," Daria corrects. "Friday night American high school football. She was required to attend school events for moral-fiber-building purposes. I doubt it worked very well, since I first saw her coming out from under the bleachers. She noticed me looking out of place. Not the right clothes for the event. More interested in watching the line at the snack bar than anything else. Just watching... the people. The news every week did a slop report," Daria amends, "all based on the stats. Typical data-center dependence. I wanted to know what the slop was missing. And score some painkillers if I could."
"To help you with..."
"To feel less miserable in my wrong body. She... I was already lost in her eyes when she said I wasn't trying to blend in well enough to be a narc. I bought what she had on her. We met the next Monday, after she got out of Supplemental Moral Instruction, and she offered to introduce me to a connection with more. We walked back to her place. She wanted..." Daria smiles, sadly. "I was tall and hated it. My arms and legs were too long and I hated them. The idea of getting pleasure out of my body was so beyond my horizon that I had no clue what she was after. Even when I was sitting on her bed." Daria shakes her head a tiny amount. "I never wanted to see that much hurt in her eyes. That much confusion. I had been funny and attentive and... She asked if I was gay. I had to explain that I was something... stranger. Maybe even a couple different things that were both stranger." Daria pauses. "She saved my life."
"You must have already been feeling dysphoric for years by that point."
Daria nods. "When I was thirteen, I went sailing with my family. I didn't trust the weather, and it turned on us... We were too close to a rocky shore, and then the beam came around and got me in the back of the head, and I went overboard and got the front of my head on a rock. I nearly drowned in fifteen centimeters of water. I just... rested there. And I thought, all I have to do is see myself as a girl right now, nothing matters, no one will tell me that I'm wrong, I can die as a girl and it'll be fine. Suffice to say, I lived. And got a new skull, which came in handy a few years later."
"I'm glad you lived," Aoi says.
Jane chimes back into Daria's field of view. "We're go for launch," she says. "Bring the car to the rendezvous."
"On our way," Daria confirms. She presses the ignition button. It's a grisly source of parts, but needs must. Word is, the lock-up is full of robot bodies that were taken in a raid before whoever they were raiding could scrap them, and now they're set to be scrapped by law enforcement. Nothing to be missed.
"It's hard to imagine you being tall," Aoi says.
Daria turns briefly to look at the hacker. "And my eyes were green."
* * *
"You take me to all the nicest places, my love," Daria says, checking the specs on one of the dozen robot bodies in the dimly-lit storage locker.
"Exotic warehouse districts of the Far East, that's us," Jane affirms. Plenty of parts in here will function as well in prosthetics as they would in robots. "You doing OK?"
"These gynoid bodies are all Hanka Precision Instruments. My brain case is Neutron Corporation, my eyes are Megatech..." Her voice trails off. Jane busies herself with pulling a coolant pump that's in good shape.
"This one must have been owned by somebody rich," Aoi observes. "Bodyguard mods—the right arm has a concealed gun."
"All dressed the same," Jane mutters, "all in good condition from what I can tell, all dumped for some reason. Boredom, maybe. Discarded for upgraded models."
"All double-tapped in the back of the head," says Aoi, not liking it, "presumably to destroy the cranial processors and whatever memories they contained."
"Not all," Daria says. She's kneeling beside one of the gynoid bodies. "This one is almost brand new. There's a shot to the back of the skull that blew out the right orbital socket, but it also took a shot to the front. Look." Her index finger indicates the edges of the artificial skin. "That's a powder burn. Point-blank. And..." She gestures over the gynoid's side, along where human ribs would be. "Clipped."
"Grazed by a near miss?" Jane drops the coolant pump into her canvas bag and joins Daria.
"This was coming at whoever shot it," Daria says. She starts rummaging in her jacket pockets. "Maybe they were all disposed of because one went berzerk."
Aoi hands her a connector cable and a dummy barrier built into a matte gray collar.
"Thanks," Daria says, slipping the collar around her neck and jacking its connectors into her access ports.
"Babe?" Jane asks.
"These are all sex toys," Daria says. "Some are household bots or bodyguards, too."
"And you're going to link with one?"
"I've studied things that neither of you have," Daria replies, quietly. "Probably more than the average cop forensics guys, too. The difference between a rich creep and a hobbyist is that a hobbyist would know to clear the secondary subprocessor caches." She reaches her right hand out to Jane, who holds it tight as Daria brings her left hand around to the back of the gynoid's neck.
"There's definitely still data in here," Daria reports. "More garbage files than a bot in normal operation would produce before a cache purge, like there was an extra source of data that was constantly active." Eyes closed, she squeezes Jane's hand, hard. "There's audio. I can hear... Names, so many names, level three, level four not talking any more, and..." Her eyes snap open. "It's saying help us."
* * *
"Twenty-eight Tomli prototypes given out as favors!" The CEO of Hanka Precision Instruments is a Jamison-type cyborg, a brain in a metal box with telescoping limbs, and he is not happy. "Four destroyed and written off as malfunctions. Twelve recovered. What about the rest?" The chief enforcer stands before the CEO's desk, taking the diatribe stoically. "Do you know what would happen if another one goes on a rampage and someone gets a look inside its brain?!"
"I have some idea," the enforcer says. Suddenly he is trembling—not from fear, but from a surfeit of neural signals, all competing for his muscles. His cyberbrain is being hacked, expertly and fast.
The CEO sees the enforcer's face scramble, and then where there had been a face there is only a manic icon of one, ringed with the words I THOUGHT WHAT I'D DO WAS, I'D BECOME THE TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD.
"Others are recovering the children from your ghost-dubbing machine," Aoi says. "But I wanted to welcome you to Hell personally."
"Ongoing refugee polycrisis, terrorist captured in Berlin, ah, here we go. 'Hanka CEO Arrested'," Daria reads. She folds the newspaper halfway down to peer at Jane, who is in their tiny kitchen, pouring hot water into a coffee press. "See, I have been practicing my kanji."
"What's the man in the can charged with?"
"Let's see... Kidnapping, conspiracy to conceal a crime, illegal use of a ghost-dubbing machine, conspiracy to commit trafficking, conspiracy to corrupt a government official... That must be about the ex-Military Intelligence guy they were bribing with custom gynoids, up to and including one that had the ghost of a kidnapped child printed into it..."
"Will be be competent to stand trial?"
"This is saying that's still in the air. The doctors haven't figured out what's wrong with him and if it can be managed, it says."
"Any regrets?" Jane asks after a moment.
"That every time he tries to sleep, the children he ordered kidnapped and brainwashed come out of the walls? That he hears the voices I had to hear, multiplied without end?"
"I'll take that as a no."
"The mills of justice grind too slow... and for men that rich, maybe not at all. Those who believe they have bought their way above the law do not deserve the protection of its process."
"Why, Daria, how un-American of you."
When the coffee is ready, Jane pours herself a tall mug and then a smaller one for Daria. The cyborg girl experiences it every way she can, starting with feeling the heat through the ceramic.
"You saved my life," Daria says. "With the plan you started hatching the first morning you ever made me coffee." She takes a sip.
"I could see that something in you started to heal the first time I used the right name. We just had to finish the process."
Without adornment, Daria says, "I loved you from that moment on." Jane brushes a hand through Daria's bangs and drinks from her own coffee.
A minute later, Daria asks, "Do you ever miss those sea-green eyes?"
"The color was fine," Jane says. "The hurt in them, much less so."