Time always slows at the very apex of a jump, stretching out with the height of your fall. Each jump, braver than the one before—time dilates more and more—until it stops. It is at that moment your life flashes before your eyes—where every single thing you’ve ever regretted burns the brightest—right before it all goes dark.
Those moments always start with a step.
Before they end with a leap of faith.
“Argh!”
Fuck that hurt. Skewing it into a roll didn’t do jack shit, either.
“Still kinda sloppy, kid.”
“Yeah,” I say, lying limbs splayed on the white and flat rooftop of the sugar-cube apartment. “You get what you pay, for, Ji.”
“Aw, come on, Kumori,” Jiji says, his voice tinny through the comms device in my ear. “Don’t sell yourself short, kid.”
Dusting off my scuffed elbows, I press myself to a stand.
“You’re right,” I say, staring at the sun that gave me no shadow. “You’re already doing that with the amount I’m getting for this, kono-oyaji-yarou.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m too generous. In fact, I stave off a few ￥ennies for calling me an old bastard.”
“Don’t forget the fact that I kinda smushed the package, too.”
“You did what?!”
Shit—this guy is too easy. I’m barely able to stifle a laugh, let alone stop grinning.
“Come on, Jiji-san—it’s not my fault your block’s designed by some skezzhead with a diploma. Damn place looks like a Mario level!”
“Kumori, I swear to God, if that package has—”
“I’m just fucking messing with you, Ji. You take me for an amateur?”
His breath crackles the comms. “I’m starting to wonder that myself.”
“Says the guy giving the microphone a blowjob.”
“Oh, sorry about that.”
He blows hard into the microphone—I rip out the earbud.
“Fuck sake, oyaji-yarou!”
His cackling fades in and still continues even after I’ve pressed the earbud back into my ear.
“Dude, what are you, ten years old?”
“Nah, just showcasing why the hell you ought’a chip a cranial comms device.”
“Got it, Jiji. Will do it moment you’ve paid me for this gig. Maybe I’ll be able to afford an ear-lobe.”
“Ah, come on kid. Your value lies in the fact that you’re not chipped.”
“Really now?”
“Sure. You’re the economic option.”
“Just like the rest of your cyberware.”
The fucking line flatlined.
Roppongi midcasters. Easiest, loudest, and pettiest people Tokyo.
The kind that loves to dish, but not to take. The kind that sees the inheritance of debt they’re going to pass on to their next offspring as wealth. The kind that hates it when you shut them up with a reality check that relates to their cyberware, which they’ve literally given an arm and a leg for.
Fucking buyers remorse probably sending them crashing through the ten stages of grief, all because they’re buying second hand ‘creme-de-la-chrome’ that’s as reputable as my mom’s parenthood.
“Funny,” he says with a droning and dry voice. “See if you can keep up the humor when you get the delivery on time to the client.”
“What do you mean?”
“Client’s at the Tokyo National Art Center.”
I look to the side of the sugar cube apartments, the tracks of the tram connecting the different districts
“You’ve got about four minutes, take or give.”
“Oh, word?”
“Tokyo’s Target’s 15 minutes away.”
“Oh, word!”
Hand goes for the comms—
“One last thing, Kumori,”
—but stop millimeters shy of it.
“What’s up?”
“Next time you call me Jiji-san,” his voice got too damn confident, “will be the last.”
Really, Jiji? Now is suddenly the best time for this kind of pep talk?
“Got it?”
“Yeah, I got—”
“And fix your damn landings.”
Click
“… Ryokai, motherfucker.”
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The wind combs through my hair, flowing it into an inverted white-tousled umbrella. The usual runner hair-do. Short, bobbed, and makes you look hella cute when it’s done right. Looks like shit when I do it, but that’s besides the point.
Tokyo, Roppongi. The place where your midcaster hopes to rub shoulders with someone who’s not neck-deep in debt trying to live the high life. The best place to be for that newly minted corpo who’s scouting for their next entourage victim. Midcasters best bet when it comes to luxury. Cheap enough to bankrupt them three lineages, fancy enough to brag about it.
Rondello smack dab in the middle anchored the whole vibe of the district. Voxelated white sugar cube apartments with poppable panels that make a window, or if you wanna be fancy about it, trickle a few of them down with kuroko wires, and you’ll have slivering stagehands making it look like it’s falling apart. Just so you are getting a cube so fresh it’s dripping. Or bleeding. Stack them together for an apartment - shish-kabob the stacks and you’ve got a ‘where does the mouth start and ass end’ kind of deal.
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Who knew voxelated cubes could look like a pixel nightmare.
“Six minutes left, Kumori.”
Deep breath through the nose, eyes open on out. Roof ahead cutting dead.
The shack of an AC-unit in front of me looks like the same box of fresh air Jiji-san had when we first met.
It was a cold summers day, and I had leapt—nay, soared like a fucking eagle—and crash-landed into it. The damn thing had crumpled like it sponsored free-runner fall-insurance. I pace my steps to the momentum of its pipes—left foot, right foot on the rows—catch the ledge.
Easy come, easy goes.
‘Catch up to the future. Enhance your evolution’,
The usual PneuRes Lungs ad plays in the background—with speakers, no less—as I run across the rooftop. Same AC-unit meets me as the one before. Guessing it’s a neighborhood deal. Midcasters thinking they’re pinching pennies, when in reality they’re pinching a bigger hole in their pockets. Same deal with this one.
Sprint, momentum fits the pipe—one step—two—step three—and four.
Kick off, and pitter-patter up the wall—left hand thrown, beckons the ledge—slip.
I shotgun my other hand, scatter-blasting the edge. Agony tazing through my tips deep to the marrow. Weight shifts the second I try to reach for a break with my left hand.
This same old paradox again. Too slow and I’ll lose the grip. Too fast and I’ll rock-a-bye fuck-off to the ground. Taste of iron at the back of my throat, my whole body screaming bloody murder. Trying to pull myself up, the pull cramping down to my diaphragm. Should just let go. Why am I not just letting go? Because—I’ve done this before. A million times at least. With a final reach—and I could feel the sweet mercy of a proper fucking grip. Easy come, easy go, right?
Honestly, moments like this have a tendency of giving you a mortality-check. They make you realize how fucking fragile you really are. Especially if you’re unchipped, like me. You can’t just go by them and pull yourself up like it was another Tuesday, or else it will sow this parasitic seed that grows, and cultivates into this endless debate of self doubt and self sabotage.
‘Is the ledge close enough?’
‘What if I don’t jump high enough?’
It caps the knees of any runner. It breaks the will of a free man. So you need to thrive in the moment by hanging on, and feeling the echo of death trying to pull you down as your muscles tremble from panic and exhaustion. Feed the insecurities of your mind. Give them the free headspace to fucking compete until the different varying degrees of ‘what ifs’ and ‘how ifs’ blend into static. Finally, you turn around—look your maker in the fucking eyes - and hone in the fact that you’re gonna keep on running by giving them the fucking middle fing—
“Woah!”
Nearly lost my grip there. I’m really fucking high up, aren’t I?
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I pull myself up to the sudden warmth of the sun.
Japan. One of the few countries in the world with clear, smog-less, sootless, filth-less sunsets. A love-letter from the government in the form of annihilating anything that blows cancer right into your lungs—all so the country of the rising sun can also see it set.
“Kid? Sitrep. Kumori? Are you there—”
I take a deep breath.
“Two mins left, kid.”
I exhale.
No time to waste, I guess.
Place is two streets away. Stuff in between is your typical shtick of trying to make motifs fit with one another. This street? Pixelated, snow-white cubes. The other? Architectural bismuth centipede nightmares. Stepping down and getting a cab is out of the question since, ‘the roads have eyes!’ according to the demented old bastard Jiji-san.
So I’ve got to settle for the monorail-track tunneling through the buildings seeing as it lead directly to the marks location.
As long as I don’t get run over by the tram—wait, the tram!
Usually that damn thing stops
I could just hitch a fucking ride on the damn thing. Just gotta get past these four leveled rooftops—woah holy shit it’s fast.
It burned through the corner
The moment it burned through the corner and hauled ass towards its next stop turn and twist in the distance just to haul ass towards a stop that was right at this block, I realized that jogging a steady pace wasn’t much of an option since the fucking thing was in a damn hurry. Gotta go full blast if I want to catch up to it.
… I mean, imagine that.
A girl with no cyberware – catching a speeding intercity monorail-tram.
Should be impossible, right?
Well, with a ‘Gambare!! Kumori-ch—’
Of course it’s fucking impossible. But so is losing out on this gig, and potentially being out of a job.
So, I blast into a full sprint, hitting the pavement so hard it feels like my bones might crack. The tram screams ahead of me, a metal banshee tearing through the city.
I can easily land on the ceiling using an overlay over my vision which shows the correct trajectory of the tram, along with calculations of speed and momentum. Couple that with a degree in fucking physics and you’ve got yourself a surefire deal of me getting on top of that thing—sike!
Got no tech, and no overlay.
Got no degree, unless you count a diploma in guesswork.
But I was almost there. Just three more steps—ichi-ni-san! And leap!
“GAH!”
Agony exploded in my chest, stabbing like I’d inhaled boiling caustic soda. I couldn’t tell if I was screaming. The tram’s clattering burst my hearing into a high-pitched daze—searing pain swallowing everything. Like a smoldering iron worm squirming in my lungs. I had fucking slammed the edge and rolled along.
“Ow.”
Could really use those fucking PneurRes Lungs right about now. I try to sit up, fighting the air trying to strip my face of its skin as the tram careens into the rectangular shaped bismuthian structures. Within their dark bodies the colors shift like shades of oil in water—until the interior lights up. A sudden burst of seizure-inducing colors emerged from the darkness of the rectangular-tunnel walls. The echo of high-pitched voices—giggly and relentlessly happy—complimenting the abhorrent crying of the tram.
The tram screeches—and throws me to the front. It was braking. Hard.
I twist—sharp pain filling my mouth with blood—clawing the ceiling for support—nails fold and snap clean off. Fingers draw four lines of blood to the jovial arpeggio shrieks of the girls, their voices echoing like rats in a burning pot.
Wish I’d gone a different way. I wonder how mom’s gonna take it. My little tama usagi is the only reason okaa-san is alive. Bet a ￥ennie okaa-san’s gonna credit herself for the reason I’m dead.
… Which is fucking hilarious.
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Fingers slip right into a slim vent, and I’m holding on for dear fucking life. The painful stretch swells my cheeks full with blood, making me gag as the tram took its sweet-ass time to get to the fucking point. Should honestly just indulge in the extra boost of iron and swallow. I spit it out ‘graffitiing’ the tram.
“Fuck your ‘clean and pristine’.”
Before the tram finally panspermed itself into my destination. The Tokyo National Art Center. The glass walls that emerge from the edges of the museum’s double doors served as guardrails for the throng of ‘connoisseurs’ that were about to vomit out of this metal vomitorium. The hush and hiss of the tram doors declare them opening—
Shit. Expats. I can’t let them see me. Not unless I want to attract the biggest fucking pity-party known to earth. Just hope they don’t notice the tram looking like a used tampon up here. The voices die down eventually with the hissing and hushing of the closing tram doors. Slowly it rolls forward. Slowly, I roll off of it.
“Argh!”
Heavily, I crash on the bridge like a dirty sports bag. I sure hope nobody fucking heard me. The wall-glass starts retracting, easing in the gentle lulling of a 40-meter high breeze that almost canters me into the sickest fucking free-fall I’d ever have for the rest of my life—
“Unauthorized Personnel are not to tread the docking bay area.”
Holy fucking shit. Bitch almost made it a reality with her volume cranked up to eleven.
“Unauthorized Personnel are not to tread the docking bay area—”
“Lady! I’d be inside already if these damn doors weren’t fucking ‘open-upon-arrival’!”
Where the hell is the fucking mark? I should ping Jiji, but I can’t. Ditched the comms unit during a patriotic moment a few paces back.
“Unauthorized Personnel are not to tread the docking—”
I smash my fists against the glass.
“Ah!! Ow!”
This is so fucking ironic. Getting beaten by two inanimate objects in a single day. Wish I could give it another wallop. Maybe that way I’d get—
“There you are Kumori-san!”
—him… to notice me.
How long has this scophead been standing there? Bastard’s looking around and behind himself like he’s smuggling drugs.
“Yeah.”
Shit. Could barely talk without slurring.
“The hell you got in here?” I say swaying in a rhythm with the case I held up. “Drugs?”
Frantic fucker turning frantic-er tells me it definitely is.
Don’t get why the hell he won’t just take the packaging though. Is he honestly expecting decorum right now? I mean kudos to the fuckheap for having the fucking balls for even insinuating that. Problem is that it’s kinda hard keeping a straight and ‘formal tone’ when my whole ensemble of ‘gutter punk shway’ is blood laced.
Maybe I misheard him though, considering I could barely hear him from the whining pitch in my ear. Fuck it. One step at a time, I guess.
“Konnichiwa—Kumori-desu. Douz-.. I mean—here you go, s-sir.”
Now, to give a little bow – like a fucking business-card trade-off. A good way to get noticed. Come on, girl. Just a little hunch. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let yourself gently ease into a bow—
“My goodness, child! Are you alright!?”
… Presto.
I opened my eyes to a world covered in fog that smeared whatever moved. Muffled sounds roiled and reverberated in an echoing staccato. There was a big dark red splotch on the black museum floor before me. The client seemed frantic – especially since his arms and legs smeared his form into a standing snow-angel. Don’t get what the deal is.
He got the package.
… He just… Has to… Ping Jiji.