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The prospect had been completely ridiculous — and had, in fact, been broadly ridiculed — on paper, in the news media, and across social media and other sources of tertiary commentary. It was a financial boondoggle, a complete logistical impracticality, and a violation of both the wildest military doctrine and any reasonable application of the laws of physics.
About the nicest, most constructive thing anybody could be caught saying about the project was ‘well, at least it’s not happening in my backyard’, ‘my country’, ‘my hemisphere’. The consensus seemed to be that while it might have been considered in some circles to be ‘really really cool’, generally, the further away from it people were, the happier they seemed.
There was, of course, one country that was completely silent on the matter: Japan.
It was their project, after all.
News broadcast commentary couldn’t seem to drop the hot new story, even as time plodded on and no new information came to light. As such, they turned to what little information was available, recycling it in new ways. And when that ran out, as it did before long, they comfortably progressed to outright speculation.
‘Japan has always been the home of giant mecha’, they said. ‘This has just been another step toward the inevitable.’ Or, ‘what happened to them, economically? Have they experienced the second coming of Deming, or is the country tanking its buying power and quality of life to build this almost-alien monument to otaku and hikkikomori?’
Or, a particular highlight, ‘why are so many people reporting on this? Wherefrom the sudden interest, and the ongoing push for more information where — clearly — none exists?’
(The fact that this last piece was run by a broadcast network concerning their own past reports was, at this point, not even notable.)
What was known was this:
The obvious measures had been taken. Immigration dwindled, quotas brutally slashed down to almost nothing. Particular domain experts were admitted on an invitation-only basis, and often in secrecy. Exports almost halted. Imports spiked. Half of Japan’s creatives pivoted to focus on futurism and speculation, and the other half optimized the material they produced for Western markets.
The seas around Japan were interdicted, on a deal with the US that nobody seemed willing or able to discuss. Air traffic was routed so far around the islands that the new routes had direct line of sight obstructed by the curvature of the Earth. Anyone who took issue with this politically was cracked down on by NATO, the UN, and collections of otherwise unaffiliated nations that would otherwise never in a million years have been caught in bed together.
And yet, somehow, nobody seemed to know exactly what was going on.
This continued for years.
And then, one day, the project was done.
All the changes were gradually rolled back. Exports slowed, imports spiked. The production of anime and other core Japanese media resumed, delighting fans local and abroad alike. Air traffic resumed. Tourism — spiked. And the foreign news networks couldn’t get enough.
Soon enough, though, it turned out that the new broadcasts — the new information — were just as same as the old. Japan was still — Japan. The culture was the same, the economy was — stable enough.
The only thing that had changed was the giant mecha now stood in the middle of Niigata, towering over the country and visible from over a hundred kilometers distant. People took both approaches; at the same time that the tourist infrastructure of Niigata — rearchitected to cater to the predicted influx of visitors — was flooded by eager sightseers, the Internet was flooded by grainy photos of the mecha’s polygonal head taken from Takasaki, Sendai, and the windows of commercial flights. Amateur blogs and online forums pored over every detail, analyzing potential functionality and speculating on when the beast of a war engine might be mobilized.
But then, it just — stood there.
For years.
Niigata…died, over time. Tourism abated. The giant mecha and its immediate surroundings became a Mecca for memesters and conspiracy theorists bored with the Statue of Liberty.
Life went on.
I looked up from my phone map to take in the indicated address, and grimaced. It didn’t look good. I had been expecting not good, but there was not good, and then there was…this.
The building was ill-maintained in seven different ways. A cursory search of both its history and that of Niigata indicated that it had once been an office building, converted to a combination of hotel rooms and apartment housing in anticipation of the mecha project’s completion. Once the tourism had trickled away, the place had been converted back into an office block — but at this point, the economy couldn’t sustain this, and the repurpose that time was short-lived.
Now, the dilapidated skyscraper housed a combination of storage units and shittily sub-divided motel rooms.
You get what you pay for.
I had heard the stories, of course. Watched the broadcasts, trawled the forums at the heights and lows of boredom. Heard how the downfall of the mecha itself had progressed alongside Niigata, the megastructure now coated in plant growth and a patina of ocean-driven oxidation.
But somehow, in person, it was — different.
It had been…ten, twenty? I checked my phone — twenty-two years, since the project had concluded and tourists had been allowed back in the country. Since then, almost every publication regarding the mecha had focused on downsides and negative value judgements; a massive project with unprecedented coordination that yet offered nothing to humanity, that didn’t even move or in any way perceptibly function.
What they had all carefully omitted, I found, was the sheer presence of the thing. It towered—
…no, that wasn’t it. Of course it towered. It was seventeen-hundred meters tall. But over the years, it had both been subsumed into its environment, and somehow…I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. Developed its own…gravity. Like — looking up at it, you felt suddenly afraid that you might overbalance, losing your footing and falling straight toward it, up into the air.
Perhaps it had always had that. I don’t know. I’d not had the opportunity to see it before now. Even this was — a lark. An old dream, suddenly enabled by rogue circumstance. A break-up, an overdue bonus, a serendipitous holiday schedule. I’d figured — why not.
And now — here I was. And here it was, steadily drawing me in.
There were no commercial enterprises within fifteen kilometers of the structure. There was an exclusion zone, of course, but I didn’t recall it spanning more than ten — enough for the mecha to topple safely, if it happened to do so, and enough atop that to allow the shockwaves to abate. But no — the people had made their own determination as to what was and was not safe, and it did not align with that of the policymakers.
This did nothing to diminish the impact of it. Even fifteen kilometers out, sitting at an outdoor table in a restaurant felt like eating in the shadow of an old skyscraper. Something from a bygone era. Not art deco bygone; more like the Triassic. A beast that no longer belonged in this world.
I had always wondered, of course; why? Why…do this? Where did they get the support? How did they build up the infrastructure? And then, the day it was completed; where did it all go? It had all…blown away, like a child’s castle in a sandstorm.
I huffed quietly, looking down at my half-eaten ramen. A sandstorm? What a thought. Where was my brain getting the imagery?
I shook it off, and continued attacking my bowl of soggy noodles.
They had never named it.
Every major project in history has always had a name. Manhattan, Dartmouth, Apollo. Given or inherited, humans couldn’t help but christen the things they had made.
And yet, not this. The mecha stood there — towering, nameless. Meaningless?
No. I shook my head, briefly closing my eyes to ward off the illusion of invasive gravitational pull. This — thing — could not help itself but to have meaning. It — the presence—
It had meaning, yes. Almost everybody had agreed on that, whether now or back in the day. But nobody could agree on what that meaning was.
The mecha blocked the sunset, tarnished metal catching scraps of diffuse light. Almost bending it, like a star. A black hole. A stellar mass of unclear nature; looming, threatening—
I did not sleep that night.
I had ten days in Niigata, and no schedule to speak of. Just my subdivided room from two decades and three economic displacements ago; twice the size of a capsule hotel and none of the comfort. There would have been a leak in the ceiling, if there weren’t twenty floors above me.
Days one and two, I spent visiting and investigating the mecha directly.
Days three and four were spent in meditation on the problem. It was a familiar meditation; something I had developed over decades of following the project and its social fallout. The paths the thoughts required were well-worn into my brain, and my presence here altered…little. Perhaps only their magnitude. Their depth.
I had felt, at first, that being here in the presence of the mecha had imbued me with some deeper understanding — but I still had the same thoughts, the same nightmares, the same excitable startles of cognition in the shower that ultimately amounted to nothing.
Perhaps there was nothing there, in truth. Perhaps, overall, the giant mecha had smelled of fried onions.
On day five, I turned my attention to my environment. Just like the broadcast services of old, I realized — I’d learned everything I could from the event itself, and now I was looking for some sort of — renewed excitement? — in its trickle-down consequences and effects. Another vulture, feasting on — but it wasn’t even the corpse, was it? It was the corpses of the other scavengers, come to die on—
I still wasn’t sure how to quantify it, just like they had never quite figured it out. Was it the impenetrable shell of an armadillo, or a cornucopia of meat diseased by plague? Was there meaning here, buried beneath a solid metal carcass? Or was it all just some — distraction?
I didn’t know. The question frustrated me — dug at some deep inadequacy within myself. So I shoved it aside, locked it in a box, and spent a day making sport of others in the same position as myself.
I did not sleep that night, either.
On day six—
On day six, I went to a confessional.
Now — don’t take this the wrong way. Or…perhaps the right way. I am not a religious man. Never was. A giant mecha doesn’t count as a religion; it's an obsession, a pseudo-autistic expression of suppressed desires. Would you like to sleep with your mother? No, Dr. Freud, thank you, but this giant robot is enough for me.
Not to mention that the Japanese are not the most Catholic of people.
I considered a Shinto shrine, at first. I had heard that the sense of tranquility that one could find there was almost unmatched worldwide. But — perhaps for obvious reasons — there were none left within the boundaries of Niigata, and I found that nothing else would quite do. Neither food, nor a bathhouse, nor a massage, would be the sort of religious experience that I was looking for.
In the end, I retreated to familiar grounds; old, half-dead IRC channels and degenerate forums.
They could not offer me absolution, but at least there I found people who could understand what I was feeling.
On day seven, I broke the suicide lock on my window, opened it up wide, and took a deep breath of the frigid air.
There was no alarm, of course. This place was dead. A suicide in Niigata — well, it’s been seen before. I likely wouldn’t even make the news. I shrugged, frustrated — locking fresh air behind the assumption of suicidal ideation? There was — something to read into, there. I wasn’t quite sure what. Some intersection of the overevolution of compounded policy decisions, and some eldritch conflation of morals and ethics as interpreted by third-degree contractors.
Fuck that. I stood, and breathed. Seven degrees Celsius; refreshing, but not enough to burn my lungs. It was — ‘a nice break from reality’ is probably the wrong phrase, with reference to fresh air, but — that was what it felt like. Perhaps reasonable, when reality was a metallic behemoth, towering at twice the height of the Burj Khalifa. Taking a break from that took…effort.
But that was what I did. What I was going to do, I decided in that moment, sunrise still young and spilling light around the mecha’s leg. I had taken what was by all appearances a holiday; a trip on a whim to chase a childhood obsession. And in the middle of that holiday, I found myself needing a break.
Kyoto would have been my destination of choice, but a one-way trip there took close to five hours. If I did that, I wouldn’t make it back here, and I wasn’t quite ready to—
To…what? Admit defeat? What was I going to do, punch out the mecha and bite its ear off? Obviously not. But there was some — existential dread wasn’t quite it, but — some need to assert my presence, informationally (as a researcher? An amateur archeologist of something that hadn’t yet made history by any definition?) or otherwise—
I tossed my phone onto the unmade bed and left the room.
The cold bit at me. I hadn’t dressed for it, and now I reaped the consequences. The mecha towered over this, unfeeling, a cold block of motionless steel. I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets, where they didn’t quite fit, only highlighting the absence of my phone and wallet.
This wasn’t a problem, until I ended up five blocks from the hotel and a grating combination of upset and hungry. Restaurants were opening up and setting out signs around me, and yet the closest meal was an hour-long round-trip away. I stopped, unthinking, and spent a few minutes just staring through a window.
I turned, shaking myself awake — and there it was again, towering, just visible in a gap between two buildings. Following — well, no, obviously not. But — haunting me. Ever-present — if not in physical reality, then right there in my mind, consuming my thoughts.
I huffed in — anger? Frustration? — and turned back for my aged-out room.
I spent the rest of the day meditating on myself. My history, my interests; how I’d come to be here.
It was not an uneventful story. And — in certain other ways — it was the most boring story one could tell.
I had been a child once. Hasn’t everyone? Don’t — don’t answer that.
Every child is an idealist at heart. They don’t know any better — how could they? They’re learning about an imperfect world from imperfect people, and mistakes toward kindness and compersion are only natural.
(But then — that’s only the best case scenario, and others—)
Look, let’s not dwell on it. That — that was me. The kid with the perfect childhood, and the less-than-perfect everything that followed. Without extrinsic motivation, there is no — let’s call it ethical gradient. They say good fiction comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable — well, good internet fucks you up no matter where you come from.
I followed the rabbit-holes, I yelled at the strangers, and I let a cloud of faceless ideologies define me.
Do I regret it?
No — not really. Because that’s what the world is, today, and that’s who you have to be to participate. For decades now, people have been raised to hide who they are and project artificial, constructed selves into the network in order to solicit engagement. In the best case, that engagement is honest and reciprocal. In the worst case—
Let’s put it this way; I would set myself solidly within the middle-ground, and more than half of my cognitive overhead is occupied by the presence of a steel ghost in a foreign country.
I stepped back into my hotel room, swung the door shut behind me — landing with a careless slam — and found I didn’t have the motivation to go outside again. But the window was still open, so I stepped up and took another look outside.
From this perspective, the influence on the giant mecha on the surrounding infrastructure looked more like a spreading disease. Tendrils of corruption leeching out into surrounding streets, buildings — a pool of miasma—
I shrugged, and turned away — then, on second thought, turned back another time to slide the window home. This — wasn’t helping. Wouldn’t be likely to help, in any ways. This issue — like any — had multiple aspects to it, and could not be considered without context. Doing so wasn’t incorrect, exactly, but would not be likely to lead to anything productive.
Then—
Screw it. It was noon, and I was starving. It was — go to sleep, stare out the window at the mecha like a dysfunctional crackhead, or finally go out and get some food.
And so food it was.
I mulled over the problem for the rest of the day, but learned nothing.
On day eight, a giant slipped a spatula beneath the pancake that was central Japan, and flipped it upside-down.
It caught me well within its range. The ascent was almost gentle, to a surreal extent. I remember at one point glancing out the window, as I floated gently — caught within my paper-thin sheets, saved from the cold only by aged-out insulation — and seeing the giant metal beast in direct line of sight, floating in the air like—
—a miscategorized Unity asset, my brain supplied, and I laughed roughly to myself, bundling my blankets up into a ball—
—except then, the mecha exploded into a grey cloud, vaguely reminiscent of volcanic ash—
—and space compressed violently across one dimension—
—and then—
—then—
A common problem with theoretical and minimum-viable-product takes on nanotechnology is the distributed processing system. Many works list an idealized system comprising a network of microscopic machines, all of which can communicate with each other equally well.
This is—
A Faraday cage is a net formed from conductive material which, when affected by an external electromagnetic field, generates by electromagnetic induction another field that cancels out the initial field. When constructed as an enclosure around a defined volume, it protects its contents from electromagnetic interference.
This is a coherent structure. But — a defined volume, filled with irregularly-distributed metallic particles—
Well. Huge mess doesn’t cover it.
The (obvious?) solution is hierarchical processing. More matter stores more power. More power generates stronger signals. Stronger signals reach further through physical or energetic interference. As a natural consequence, larger fragments of the structure can signal further than smaller fragments, and can thus coordinate substructures over greater volumes.
Rendering the resulting distributed structure self-organizing is left as an exercise for the reader.
I woke in a non-descript white waiting room. The Platonic ideal. There were people seated either side of me; one two seats away, one three. They were looking around with a mix of fear and curiosity, just as I was. As I turned, another person — appeared — in the seat directly beside me, startling—
I blinked, and there was an additional seat between us, diffusing the tension. I turned, curious again, inspecting the newcomer — but they were busy looking around the waiting room, just as I had been a moment earlier.
“Sumimasen, chūi shite itadakitai nodesuga…?”
I turned to look straight ahead, where a young Japanese man in a white coat was in the process of bowing to me. Remaining seated — I don’t think I could have stood then if I’d tried — I awkwardly bowed back.
“Watashi ga hikiokoshita kamo shirenai—“
I blinked, and held up my hand. “Ah — gomen. I only speak English. My apologies.” Another awkward seated half-bow.
The man didn’t seem to mind it, though, straightening his posture and smiling politely. “Not a problem, sir. I would like to apologize for any shock or upset you may be experiencing, and I and my colleagues would like to cordially greet and welcome you to the Kirin Initiative.”
I blinked again. A few more times, in fact.
“The Kirin—“
The man nodded. “—Initiative, yes. A…you may call it covert program, underway within Japan for the last forty years. There is not much I can say to you about it, as both a civilian and a foreigner, but I would like to nevertheless do what I can do both inform you and set you at ease. How are you feeling, sir?”
I…nodded slowly. “…fine. Um…perfect, actually. Haven’t felt this good in seven or eight years.”
The man nodded, again with the — knowing smile. That was what it was. Like he knew something I didn’t. And — yes, very clearly, this was the case — but it wasn’t like he knew things I didn’t know. It felt like he knew something specific that I wasn’t privy to, and that — grated.
Still, he was being unfailingly polite, and it would have been impolite and immature to behave any differently in turn. I turned — from where I had been looking half at the floor, and half-eyeing my neighbor from the corner of my eye.
The man’s face, now that I looked closer, expressed a quiet joy. A — no, rapture wasn’t quite the word.
Or was it?
“The Kirin Initiative,” the man explained in a measured tone as he led me down a corridor, “is a countermeasure designed to protect the Earth from outside-context threats.”
I shrugged briefly to myself, closely eyeing the back of his heels as he walked. The corridor was a little too perfect, a little too clean. I couldn’t keep my gaze on it for any length of time without growing strangely uncomfortable.
“It is situated in Japan because — well, there was a debate. A — perhaps I am not exactly sure how to explain it. A combination of a debate, perhaps, and something resembling a vote between competing subcontractors. A collection of nations gathered and decided that the Initiative was a necessary step to take, and then it remained only to be determined where it would be located. The — volunteer — would take on all the attendant risks, but also receive the resulting benefits on completion of the project.”
My mouth felt dry. I licked my lips. “Benefits?” I asked quietly, afraid to raise my voice.
“Physical proximity to the device,” the man said.
I slowly nodded, out of his view, unsure how to follow this up. My guide seemed unbothered by this. We continued on in silence for a time.
I thought.
Eventually—
“I’m dead, aren’t I,” I managed.
The man — laughed.
“That depends, Mr. Morgan,” he responded quietly, “if you are asking for insurance purposes. Your current physiological and medical state — and that of many citizens and visitors of Japan — is, shall we say, open to interpretation. I would not want to say anything too…on the record, you understand.”
I understood.
“I do not understand at all,” I said. The man laughed again. Less overtly; more of a chuckle.
“Let us dispense with the pleasantries, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “I think you understand better than most.”
I shrugged.
We walked on.
I counted the seconds.
After almost exactly sixty of them spent in mutual silence, we arrived at a flawless, white door.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“My apologies, Mr. Morgan,” the terminal in my room said. “That information is classified need-to-know. In the meantime, could I interest you in the Kirin Initiative social platforms, or some of our knowledge resources?”
I shifted in my seat, suppressing a sigh. Same answer as the last three times. “Knowledge resources?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Morgan. The Kirin Initiative has on record the entirety of Earth’s data storage, updated hourly until the moment of the incident, as well as the abstracted knowledge of all of our uploaded personnel. While acquiring and integrating this knowledge is by no means effortless, even with the technology at our disposal, Kirin Initiative personnel of both organic and inorganic origin would be more than happy to help you along with the process.”
I blinked.
“I see.”
“Tsugi ni nani ga okorudeshou ka?”
“Let us take a look, Mr. Morgan — with your updated credentials and aptitude scores, we can qualify you for membership of one of the peripheral analytic teams. Would you like to submit an application?”
I nodded. “Onegai — yes, please.”
Eventually, after jumping through all the right hoops, the terminal unfolded before me, and I engaged in a game of Twenty Questions.
“What is the current date?”
The interface blinked — winked? — in acknowledgment. “Six thousand, three hundred and sixty-two seconds have passed since the Incident, Mr. Morgan. As a member of Peripheral Team 1092, your temporal dilation rate has been upgraded from the civilian standard of one-hundred twenty-two to the Peripheral Team standard of one thousand. Total subjective time that has passed for you since the Incident, Mr. Morgan, is nine months and twenty-seven days.”
Six thousand — I did the math in my head. Not quite two hours. Christ.
“What — happened?”
“Preliminary measurements indicate a directed energy attack impacted the Earth. The origin of the attack is unknown, but modeled beam diffusion indicates it is likely it originated within our solar system, from an unknown location estimated to be within the bounds of Saturn’s orbit. The average distance of Saturn from Earth is 1.324 light-hours; at the time of the Incident, this distance was approximately 1.177 light-hours. Given that no physical follow-up attack has arrived at the Earth’s location as yet, the estimated maximum possible speed at which the enemy is capable of moving is 0.67c, which value is constantly being revised downward.”
“I — see. What happens…next?”
“Approximately eighty percent of the Earth’s population has been collected and stored in the civilian layer of the Kirin Initiative. Most of the remaining twenty percent is now assumed lost, though sweeps of the far side of the Earth in search of survivors continue, and will continue until plus two hours thirty minutes sidereal time. The eight thousand, one hundred ninety-two Peripheral Teams are currently functioning as an interface between the stored civilian population and the one-thousand twenty-four Intermediary Teams functioning one step up the Kirin Initiative hierarchy.
“The structure of the humans instantiated within the Kirin Initiative is optimized for conveying outside information to eight Core Teams of cognitively augmented specialists, and for conveying resulting insights back out to the Peripheral Teams to be actioned as quickly as practicable. A summary of the information being carried both inward and outward by this structure would be both impossible and impractical to provide; please focus on carrying out your direct responsibilities, Mr. Morgan, so that the system may continue to function as close to optimally as possible.”
I nodded slowly, instinctively half-sketching a seated bow. “I see. Thank you for the information. Please list my outstanding work items.”
The display shifted. “Parsing of incoming imagery, thirty-four gigabytes. Five outstanding civilian conflict resolutions. One social meeting scheduled for tomorrow, civilian time. One social meeting scheduled for four days from now, Peripheral Team time.”
I nodded again. “Thank you. Please index the incoming imagery sequentially by spherical coordinates; I’ll tackle that first.”
“Of course, Mr. Morgan.”
And then I got to work.