They're off the boat in Niihama about thirty-six hours before Daria segfaults in the street.
The first long leg of their trip out of the American Empire had been, Jonah-like, in the belly of a cargo ship. But that hadn't brought them through all the time zones, and they get brutally cheap tickets for a flight into Japan itself. Daria has been writing in her beat-up notebook, trying to develop fine motor control in her new hands, and Jane has been diving into the least reputable parts of the global data net she can find, because they'll need work, and all her recent experience has been in the area where raw talent matters more than adherence to the full entirety of the law.
Oddly enough, the first day feels fine. It's midway into the second that Jane realizes that the "sweetener" in her coffee tastes more like double-cross whites, and that she's thankful for it.
One of the candidate spots Jane had flagged as a likely meeting ground for those needing a no-questions-asked face artist is the electronics district. It's an area she feels more comfortable scouting than several of the alternatives, anyway, so it's a good place to begin.
There's a certain strand of DNA that runs through many open-air markets around the world. On the right days, a person from Bolivia will hear the same conversational music around the fruit stands in Boston. And there is just enough familiar content to the interpersonal currents here, on the far side of the world from anywhere that they have called home, if either of them had ever been able to call a place home, that Jane gets a momentary frisson of everything's going to be OK-ism. Doubtless a hallucination, she tells herself.
There are eclectic little curlicues throughout the market. Though it bills itself as the "electronics district", by its nature the goods on sale vary into all types of obsolescence, if you know where to look, or if your random walk is sufficiently lucky. Daria has found a stall selling antique fountain pens. Some of them look lovely. Most of them look sturdy. Jane is pretty sure they can't afford any of them just yet, not unless they want to dip into the roof-over-our-head money.
Daria has, regretfully, showing Jane a tiny smile of understanding, turned away from the stationer and taken half a dozen steps when the glitch strikes. "Jane, brain zap," she gets out, and then she pitches forward, her knees going and the accelerometers that now substitute for her cochleae no longer agreeing with her eyes.
Jane catches her before she hits the ground. For reasons Jane doesn't want to think about right now, the people who built Daria's body ensured that she has the mass of a young woman her size.
Jane has a short stretch of cable in her jacket pocket. One plug goes into her own neck, the other she jacks into Daria's, and she runs what diagnostic software she has.
"Jetlag, babe," Jane says.
"This is how that manifests for me now?" Daria asks.
"Guess so."
"Adventures in self-discovery," Daria mutters.
A gruff voice from a passer-by. The bargain-basement translator program Jane had loaded into the external memory she carries strapped to her abdomen kicks in, and she grasps the question. "She's a full-body prosthetic?"
The dizziness appears to be passing. Daria tries lifting herself back to a sitting pose. Jane helps. "Yes," she says. She doesn't like the translator puppeteering her speech, but it's the best option available currently.
"That's some good work." The translator program conveys the meaning. Jane hears curiosity beyond that.
She feels a flash of justifiable pride, followed quickly by the realization that there are worse ways to meet people interested in prosthetic work and no questions asked, and her pride becomes a selling point. "Yes, it is." The translator's voice out of her mouth is flat, but the look in her eyes is impossible to misread.
* * *
A month later, they're on the brink of deciding that there's more work at a lower living cost outside of Niihama, maybe in old Tokyo. The people who have had prosthetic work for reasons akin to Daria have moved about the country in waves of self-organization and community-building feedback, and breaking down the reasons why the community nodes lie in the particular places they currently do is a mad person's exercise in complexity theory.
They go back to the electronics district. (They've been crashing in a coffin-sized space not far from it.) Together, they find the fountain-pen vendor once again. Jane is investigating the options, adding up the figures, thinking that there might be something she could give up. And then she feels, more than sees, Daria move in surprise beside her.
A young man has bought the nicest pen they had found, and he's handing it to her.
The maroon beret-style cap he's wearing is not, from what Jane has seen so far, currently in style. The unruly hair it's clamped over is, she can tell, artificial, and not quite as top-shelf as Daria's (Jane had gone overboard there because she'd felt that she kind of had to).
"This seems the right thing to do," he says. There is awkwardness in his voice that there is not in his posture.
"Thank you," Daria says. His direct statement, a fact of human interaction without elaboration or excuse, is on her wavelength, metaphorically speaking.
His name is Aoi. He works at the National Library.
He stays after hours at the National Library, from which he had once set off the theatrical crime known worldwide as the Laughing Man incident.
He's the first person Jane has met who has read roughly as many books as Daria.
Somewhere, deep into their conversation, apropos what Aoi has just said, Daria is quoting, "Not unfortunately the universe is wild, —game-flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,—ever not quite."
"Charles Sanders Peirce?" Aoi hazards.
"William James, quoting Benjamin Paul Blood," corrects Daria.
Their common wavelength may have something to do with how Daria could tell in a conversation what the law-enforcement agencies of the world have yet to discover. That, and Aoi seems a bit lonely.
They end up crashing that night in a backroom of the National Library. Aoi donates a few of his fortress blankets to Jane's cause. She wraps herself up in them and, finally, manages to doze. She drifts in and out of sleep as Daria and Aoi listen to records. The only ones that Jane thinks she recognizes are Josephine Baker and Philip Glass.
Jane wakes a little more thoroughly to find that Aoi has fallen asleep himself, leaning on the outside of her blanket nest.
She can tell that Daria wants to walk the empty library in the quiet hours of the morning. "Gonna ask something greedy," she whispers. "Stay with me? Just for a little while longer?"
Daria doesn't hesitate. She folds herself up, so small that Jane momentarily wonders if she could have smuggled her into Niihama in a carry-on bag.
They don't know where they'll be in a week. Or by the end of the next day, honestly. But they're doing well right now.