Tokyo Trey Changes Everything

Part 1.

A lone car makes its way down the strip of cement and steel and circuitry that makes up Route 86.

The soapy silver Lexus Aristo is all edges and gleam, gathering tarnish from months of inattentive use. Like it's driver, the car is much reduced from what it had once been.

So anyway, here's Grant Mazzy, reluctant driver of a well-kept, quiet and slow stalking zombie, rolling down Route 86 at 4:14 in the ay-em, the skyline of downtown Tokyo 3 rising up before him in the fog like the bulging lip of a dim distant tsunami ripe with bioluminescent jellyfish. He is driving well below the speed limit, being in no real hurry, phone pressed to his ear.

"...came overland, maybe at six or six fifteen. They had the sun at their backs. No question it was an ambush. Thousands of them. Jets and props, both. More birds than I would have figured I'd ever see in one place. It was like Dresden, man, a solid swarm of metal snaking back further than I could make out."

Mazzy is driving on the right side of the road. The call is important, and the road is empty, and Mazzy has allowed his focus to drift off the handling of the Aristo, ceding control to neural autonomics that haven't quite gotten the message that their owner is no longer in Canada. Without other traffic to provide context, the Aristo has, over the course of long minutes, drifted well over the line of faintly luminous white in the center of the road.

"There aren't any official figures, right? But it had to be a third of the city. No, the entire city, not just NERV. People are saying everyone above Clearance Level Green got snatched. That's probably half my listeners, Rick I... No, I don't care what the contract says, there's no one going to be around to enforce it."

Rick's responses are coming terse and mechanical. Mazzy's managing to be quite the problem for talent under contract.

The money, Rick says. The money, he continues. The money, he goes on. And before another second of misunderstanding can pass between them, Mazzy tells Rick, are you ready for this?

Fuck the money.

Fuck the money‽ Rick repeats it in a twisted way, half statement, half question. The shape of the phrase has excavated a twisted purple interrobang-shaped cavity in his brain.

Mazzy grits his teeth, his voice lowering to radio-stern, which those that know him would recognize as also actual-stern, and powers through the next minute. Sixty selfless, self-hating seconds that kill him over and over, with every word he grinds out. He sets it all out. He says it plain.

Back in the ground, if you don't mind. Back in the dungeon, under the street called 'Drum'. The whole squad and Marihiko, if she's game. There are things hanging in the sky and the wind still smells like metal. We're sinking into bubbling tar, here. We're the handful of dirt tossed over a Syrian landmine, just waiting for some UN volunteer to send us all into the stratosphere, up where the sky fades from blue to black and the stars will burn you sure as the sun. So back East, back to reading out missing pet reports and obits to the isolated farmsteaders of Victoria County, if you don't mind.

When Mazzy is done there is a moment in which hope swells, albeit a limited and cruel hope, and then two things happen, more or less at the same time.

The first thing, and ultimately most important, is that Rick starts to answer, and in the first syllable of the first word Mazzy knows the whole story. The second thing that happens is that a superheavy semi, easily taking up its entire lane and half of the shoulder and the lane adjacent, comes roaring around the curve in the road. It had been approaching for a while, and Mazzy has automatically drifted onto the shoulder to be safe, but only as the metal behemoth rounds an upcoming curve does he realize that it is coming for him, right for him, because not only is he on the wrong side of the road, but he is on the shoulder of the wrong side of the road.

There is a squeal of tires, the superheavy gives a klaxxon shriek of annoyance, and after a few soul-obliterating moments Mazzy is still alive, inside an intact car, on the correct side of the road, screaming at Rick. He pulls onto the right (that is to say, the left) shoulder, rolls to a stop just past where the elevated road transitions to normal, terrestrial road, and slides the Lexus onto the slight downhill slope next to the shoulder, concludes a rather poisonous sign-off with Rick, throws the phone into the passenger seat, and tries to decide whether or not he is having a heart attack.

Part 2.

Liquid electricity is surging through his hands and face and balls, and his legs are numb. It feels like the airbag has gone off and that the thin white explosive balloon is pressing into his sternum, pushing him back into the seat and compressing his lungs. With effort, he brings his hands up. Weathered palms, three of the proximal phalanges up-armored with bands of supposed meteoric metal kissing the hub of his fingers, the loose tan skin speckled with slightly darker splotches. The hands of a withered cyborg, an old man.

But no, he isn't old. Not. Quite. Yet.

He lets out a weak breath. "Maintain," he gasps in a high, whistling voice, closing his hands and his eyes. He rolls his wrists and arched his fingers, making his knuckles crackle. "Be positive," he whispers, as the light beyond his eyelids began to dim.

Molars bite down against a slick fold of cheek. Fingernails dig into palms. Pain shoots out to resist the blankness that spreads across his body in warm, insistent waves. Thinking becomes impossible, and there's only instinct directing tautness into his hands and jaw, a brief inversion of the body's natural tendency to relax. "Maintain," says a voice, an infinite distance away. Pain in palms, pain in fingers curling into palms, pain in the fleshy bridle between his jaws. Pain and sweaty hot light in his hands and face, all that holds him hanging in place over a great black emptiness.

Slowly, the world around Mazzy begins to lighten. Slowly, the pressure on his chest begins to lift. Slowly, his throat opens up.

Grant Mazzy opens his eyes and sees the steering wheel appear out of a cloud of squirming black-and-white stars. Then the brown leather dash, behind the crescent of wrapped tan leather resolves, and then the rest of creation out beyond that. And he has a perfect moment, right there. A feeling that death has just taken a swipe at him and he's managed to beg off. That if he'd been anyone other than Grant Mazzy, he would have freaked, ran off, passed out, and slowly been strangled by shock. So Mazzy has that moment of triumph and relief, but it is just a moment, something so fleeting you couldn't even call it a second, because something was moving outside the car.

The Aristo had stopped not too far from the city, but there was nothing around, not anywhere close. No industry, no housing, no businesses, not so much as a lonely charging station with attached convenience store. There is no suburb or other segue to metropolis; Tokyo 3 simply isn't, until it is. And it isn't a single thing, but something that occurs here and then and there. Route 86 is an intermittently-elevated highway between the Comfort group where Mazzy lives and the Productive building where he works. The route is seen from overhead as a straight, shiny line that neatly bisects several long, meandering fields of bioengineered switchgrass the route passes over and between. So when Mazzy sees movement in his periphery, coming up the gradual slope he had pulled off on, out of the ten meter tall switchgrass, his first thought is 'bear'. He doesn't know if Japan is supposed to have bears. He's never seen any. But he already has a sense of the size of the shape as he turns to look at the thing, and already knows that whatever it is, it is way too big to be anything other than something he wants nothing to do with.

Something slaps against the glass of the Aristo's passenger window. Not the meaty, claw tipped paw of a gaijin-hungry ursine, but a slender human instrument. There is a woman out there, past the hand, a face hanging in the darkness. Japanese, hair cut in a short bob. She is staring into the car, her hand sliding down the glass, her mouth moving.

At this point, Mazzy is too firmly grounded to be shocked, and the jolt of surprise passes harmlessly through him. He assumes the woman saw his brush with death, and is embarrassed. He thinks this woman should not be out in the middle of nowhere, and is alarmed. He can't quite make out what the woman is saying, and is curious.

Mazzy points at his ear just as the woman turns away. He rolls down the window. "What?" he shouts after her. But the woman doesn't stop. He leans into the passenger seat, half-hearing the same thing being repeated over and over. Kasan. Something like that.

The woman pitches forward after barely a step, tumbles bonelessly down the slope, picks herself up, and vanishes into the switchgrass jungle.

Mazzy unbuckles his seatbelt, starts to open the door, pauses, and scoops up the phone in the passenger seat and calls 911, then 119, then 110, because that's the correct number, he finally remembers. The perfect tones of a recorded message flood his ear, and he nearly flips the phone shut. But instead, marshaling patience, he closes his eyes and tries to interpret.

Learning to speak Japanese hadn't been very hard. Reliable sentence structure, limited phonemes, totally monotonal. Making yourself understood is easy as pie, if you've got your vocabulary squared away. But comprehending it when it is being spoken to you by a fluent speaker? All the neat rules go out the window, the phonemes merge together or abbreviate in weird ways, and after a few seconds your brain starts omitting stuff in a desperate attempt to keep up with what is being said. The automated and probably computer-generated voice Mazzy is listening to doesn't seem to be using informal language, which helps a little. The feminine voice is reciting at an even, 'medium' speed, which helps a lot. And the message is fairly short, which is the most important thing.

Subitehno Cairo ha ezogashydess. The voice says. Taike sheetae kudahsai.

Mazzy let the message repeat three times before ending the call. Probably something about all lines being busy. Cairo meant circuit, maybe? Mumbling under his breath, Mazzy calls the station, figuring maybe they could can the first hour or so. It is getting dangerously close to air time.

Subitehno Cairo ha ezogashydess. That same voice says. Taike sheetae kudasai.

Mazzy double checked the number. He was calling the station, no question. He hit end and called Rick.

Subitehno Cairo ha ezogashydess. Taike sheetae kudasai.

Mazzy strikes the wheel with the palm of his free hand, unbuckles his seatbelt, reaches over for his hat and his dictionary, and slides out of the zombie.

Part 3.

Morning is a faint light slipping up from behind the layering of dark hills to the east, blurring with the city's pink night sky to form a shining soup of muddy gray noise that dyes the flowing bands of stratoculumus spilling in from the east. Those clouds are perfect, a stack of overlapping sinusoidal curves. This was exactly the sort of perfection that threatens Mazzy's sanity on a semi-monthly basis. Perfection like that at least suggested intelligence, and the only kind of intelligence that can shape clouds is, as far as Mazzy knew, the fictional kind. But they are hanging up there, slowly fading from gray to pink as the dawn comes on, perfectly shaped and spaced.

And this is infuriating, because there is no way to reconcile the existence of God with six billion dead people, an ocean of asphyxiated marine life, the ongoing dumpster fire down in Antarctica that might as well be the eponymous geography of one of the final works by a certain gentleman from Providence, and every other horrible thing in this gone-away world.

But the perfect clouds hang up there, drifting overhead.

Mazzy feels something shifting inside, a familiar simmering, uninvested belief. There's a Jabberwocky crowded on the top of his head, all long face and gleaming jewel eyes, flinty talons, rotting bronze horse hide trailing fluorescent jellied tentacles like crepe paper streamers, with a mouth like a puckered anus. The Jabberwocky's circular mouth flexes back and opens wide, preparing to engulf the top of Mazzy's head, to shred skin and bone and brain with its many rows of hollow fangs. It wants to bite, it wants to tear away everything that defines Mazzy and flood his brain with the kind of venom that has killed millions of people since Second Impact - a venom to which Mazzy, truly, has no particular resistance.

Mazzy gets out of his car, looks up, sees the clouds, feels that interior shift, that dangerous potential leering in… and brushes it off, same as he'd done the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, reaching all the way back to September 1999, when Paul Kerneki interrupted a perfectly inoffensive and measured critique of the weekly CHUM Chart to announce, with no preamble whatsofuckingever, that New York was gone.

He shakes it off. And just like that, his world is reduced to its least philosophical components: overhead, the sky is tediously blending towards dawn, the air is heavy and hot and continues to stink faintly of diesel, and he can smell the acidic tang of smart road too. There is nothing to this scene. It is only a stage.

Mazzy removes his English-Japanese dictionary from an inside coat pocket and faces the dark jungle of monstrous switchgrass.

"O-HI-YO!" Mazzy shouts into the jungle. "SUE-ME-MASIN, NAH-NEE" he presses a finger to a page in the dictionary, "TEH-SU-DIE-MAH-SHOW KA."

He waits, not feeling absurd. Emergency and adrenaline are a potent cocktail he had had before, and he knows just how to handle it.

The switchgrass looms overhead, in sore need of harvest. There is no path down there between the individual plants, stalks jutted out from their point of origin in every possible direction. Walking through that stuff must be like swimming through a world of midnight with nothing but cutting blades of grass and the small hopping, buzzing and slithering things that live in grass. Would she even be able to hear him?

He shouts the sentence again, at the safe upper limit of his volume, and follows it up, after pawing through the dictionary for half a minute, with a "BOKU NO KOEEGA KEEKOAEMAHSUE KA."

He listens, and hears nothing. Nothing. And as he stands there by his car, the import of silence finally occurs to him. The stinking air is still. The switchgrass does not move. There is no other traffic, no traffic sounds from other routes, no roar of aircraft overhead. No cicada. If his car had survived into the new century, he'd at least have a gentle mechanical purr for company, but the car is dead dead dead, and waits soundlessly, soullessly, for Mazzy's instruction. He kicks the bottom of his heel against the glass bottle surface of the smart road, satisfied at the shriek the motion produces. It would be too easy to think that his voice was the last sound in the world.

This is a surprising one-two punch. First the clouds, now the quiet. Brought to mind an image, of Earth hanging forgotten and dripping rot in a deep cosmic crypt. The Jabberwocky leers.

Mazzy looks down at the dictionary in his hands. Only had it for five months, but the object looks like it had been through a war. Repeatedly broken spine that crunched up the laminate like wrinkles, roughly circular swells on the front cover from being used as a coaster. The pages bulge at the top with countless dog ears, the collected edge of those pages discolored by use in every situation he had thoughtlessly exposed it to, every tiny battle he'd fought to exist in this place. Mazzy raises the dictionary like a cross, feeling exhausted by his whole situation. This vanishing switchgrass woman is really only the smallest part of it.

"I'LL CALL SOMEONE!" he finally shouts, helpless.

He could have sworn he heard a reply of kasan kasan kasan from the somewhere out in the switchgrass, but there is nothing he can do. It is near 4:30. Laurel Ann will be switching over from the BBC nightly news to a pre-recorded tape of Mazzy reading off birthdays. Maybe Sidney could run the mic for a few minutes, tearing through Mazzy's freeflow journal trying to come up with topics she could talk at, but that would kiss her off for the rest of the day, and would also probably not go well - there was a reason Mazzy was the voice, after all. Once Sid got overwhelmed, Laurel Ann would swoop in with one of those British audio dramas that she liked so much. And then listeners would start tuning out, maybe hopping over to absorb some catchy - if perfectly incomprehensible - j-pop, or maybe testing their language proficiency with the slow droning reports of the local weather station. And, maybe, they'd never come back, and by the time Grant Mazzy arrived at the station he'd just be a jerk with a mic, his distinguished voice converted into silent electromagnetic waves broadcast on wavelengths that no one would bother turning back in to audible sound, that would deflect off an uncaring world and echo epileptic up against the ionosphere, smearing together with all the other radio-effluvia and eventually leveling out into meaningless static, because what the fuck was a Mighty Boosh?

In the unnatural quiet out on the edge of civilization, Grant Mazzy slides back behind the wheel of the corpse the Japanese had forced upon him, and resumes his quiet slink into town.

In the field of switchgrass, a woman chatters insanely to herself, hearing the call of kasan kasan kasan. With swelling hands, she digs down into darkness.

T minus 4 hours to Infinity.