She did wait, though, this calmly staring Matriarch, while debate sparkled across the constellations of Utopia as they felt the first tug of the yoke. “Just a moment, Madame. I need to evacuate it first.”
“Evacuate? Oh!” Madame both winced and giggled as a platoon of Mushi’s ants emerged from the vizor, making a forced march back into the safety of hair and coat. “Yes,” she laughed, “and you shall tell the hostages when you send them that if any of your vermin so much as fright a lady beneath my roof, you’ll bring them here no more.” Her eye followed the last retreating ant into the depths of Mushi’s collar. “Are those robots or real?”
“Both, Madame.” Mushi blinked hard as the vizor slid free. “I am instructed to remain as your first hostage. I do meet your requirements.”
“Coming from the Mojave bash’ I trust you do.” Madame blew on the inside of the vizor before trying it, as if imagining that ants left dust. “I’ll have my maids prepare you a cell.” She smiled, gloating at the ambiguity which left Mushi guessing whether her hospitality would prove a cloister or a jail. “It’s normal!” She exclaimed as the vizor settled in place. I have Utopia’s permission to expose this secret, reader; it is sad to let the mystery die, but better that than let you think that all Utopians have their vizors engineered for war and combat, as Apollo did. “The world’s unchanged!” She gazed about at arm, walls, ceiling. “I expected everything would look like your coat.”
Mushi squinted against the bare air’s unfamiliar cold. “We would hardly work so hard for our utopias if we let ourselves live in the illusion that they are already real.”
She smiled at that. “What are all these floating tags on things?”
“Select one to zoom in. They’re things you can fix or improve: stains or damage, litter, blank walls waiting for art, subjects for research, mysteries, hazards to life or health, clumsy technology waiting for a better alternative.”
She lifted a cup from the nursery table, examining whatever suggestions the vizor made for its improvement. “You see this all the time?”
“Unless I’m watching a movie or something.”
“It would drive me insane. Do all Utopians see this?”
“Almost all. It’s our Infinite To-Do List. It staves off complacency. It’s not easy to maintain a race of vokers in such a comfortable world.”
Madame’s eyes fell on Mushi, dazzled by the calls for medical research and coat improvements which, as she describes it, glittered in the air like fireflies flashing their quick prayers for attention. “It would have been Apollo who was sent for these negotiations, wouldn’t it?” she asked softly, “if they’d lived.”
“No.”
“No?”
“MASON would never have let Apollo set foot here.” Mushi’s bare eyes faltered as they tried to meet hers. “Besides, Apollo was too passionate. Their description of the future would have been too moving for you to be content to give it up.”
*
「Yes, Chief Director. 」
Now only Tōgenkyō remains, reader, Asia’s compromise capital, the lotus blossom towers with their inner sides alight with commerce’s neon fire. Tonight their outer mirrors had more to reflect than Indonesia’s seas. Lights of a thousand colors filled the streets between the petals. The day’s disasters, the exposure of O.S., Sniper’s attack on precious ‘Tai-kun,’ the exposure of the Anonymous, the flames at Parliament, all had fueled these Mitsubishi mobs. As sunset crept on in Romanova and midnight’s black in Indonesia, the raging thousands brought their own lights to Tōgenkyō’s streets, a few torch-warm, most electronic, cold as moon-bright ghosts. The blood they screamed for hid above, seven of the nine Mitsubishi Executive Directors sheltering in their administrative headquarters in the greatest lotus’s central stamen spire.
“Where are the other two?” It was Korea’s Director Kim Yeong-Uk who brought English into the room. The five Chinese Directors had been conferring in their own tongue, even the representatives of Beijing and Shanghai united for once by fear as all watched the dance of the police lights trying to shift the crowds below. Greenpeace’s Director Bandyopadhyay was nowhere to be seen. As for Japan, Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi sat at his desk, eyes closed as he concentrated on editing the files which flicked across his lenses, alone.
“Bandyopadhyay went to Delhi.” It was the younger of Shanghai’s directors, Wang Baobao, who answered, good at hiding fear. “They’re trying to rally the ex-Greenpeace bigwigs and convince people of their innocence. I hear it isn’t working.”
“And Kimura?” Kim Yeong-Uk glanced to the empty chair where the second Japanese Director should have sat.
“They took their own life.”
Mortality’s hush fell across the room, the Directors watching as chunks like bites disappeared from the churning star-sea of rioters below: police releasing gas.
“I hear there are hundreds dead down there.”
“There’s no way to tell yet.”
“How many of the dead are Japanese?” Kim Yeong-Uk asked it, and stared at the Chinese directors, surveying the too-festive spring colors creeping across their Mitsubishi suits: maple leaves sprouting from black stripes, geometric patterns maturing into cranes or flying fish. China’s great faction leaders, Wang Laojing of Beijing and Lu Yong of Shanghai, had words only for each other; the rest had words for none.
Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi did not look up from his work. “I imagine almost all those dead are Japanese.”
Kim Yeong-Uk nodded. “I’m sorry this happened while you were Chief Director, Andō. You worked hard and did well. This isn’t Japan’s fault.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you follow Kimura?”
Kim Yeong-Uk says Andō smiled, as if grateful for the confidence shown by this bluntness. “No.”
“But it is your fault, Chief Director.” It was Wang Baobao who said it, looking to Lu Yong for approval, but his elder was too wary. He was not. “Bad enough the Japanese made the Canner Device, but, if you hadn’t gotten mixed up with Ganymede and that Merion Kraye, none of this would have happened. Now you’re not even going to take responsibility for it?”
Still Andō did not glance up. “If you’d care to ‘take responsibility,’ ask maintenance to show you how to unlock that window. I have work to do.”
Lu Yong silenced Wang Baobao with a frown, and stepped toward the Chief Director’s desk. “We need to plan. Now. All of us together.” He added the last loudly as the others started to whisper again.
“Together.” Kim Yeong-Uk nodded. “Agreed. Papadelias is downstairs with a crew of polylaws preparing to arrest us. I doubt our people can slow them down much longer.”
“Arrest us? All of us? Our blocs will fall apart.”
Wang Laojing held his head high. “I have plans in place. Replacements. My bloc will stand. If some of you have neglected such preparation—”
“Useless,” Shanghai interrupted.
Beijing: “Useless?”
Wenzhou: “I agree. The whole world heard DeLupa’s speech about murderers training murderers. Everyone who’s in a position to replace us is also on the list Perry published naming those who knew about O.S.”
Young Shanghai: “It isn’t true! I never told any of my subordinates.”
Wenzhou: “That doesn’t matter. I can’t prove my staff and successors didn’t know, nor can any of you. What Perry constructed is a very crafty list of everyone close enough to us to keep our blocs together. Everyone who knows enough to sit at this table is about to be arrested if not lynched.”
“Not everyone.” Old Huang Enlai had lingered at the window, watching the lights war on, but he turned now and nodded to the empty board table, testing the faces of his companions. Would they see it? “There’s someone who knows everything, who isn’t on that list. Someone who’s sat at this table almost as often as we have ourselves.”
“Xiao Hei Wang!” Jehovah’s Chinese name spread quickly through the others, wide eyes with it. “Xiao Hei Wang is innocent.”
“Xiao Hei Wang could do it.”
“They sit in on every meeting, know who owes favors, family history, everything.”
“They could hold my bloc together.”