1.3

“...last month, when an armed individual stormed the headquarters of Ichor tech giant Telos Industrial, sparking renewed debate over implant safety.”

Keshi had imagined a seedy underground lair, but instead found himself sitting in an ordinary-looking waiting room. 

Everything had gone more or less smoothly. When the receptionist—a man with long, well-groomed hair and a relaxed air about him—asked if he had an appointment, Keshi said “yes” and discretely handed him the yen. He took the envelope without hesitation and told Keshi to have a seat anywhere—and that was that.

Still, he was on edge, anxiously tapping his heel as he quietly surveyed his surroundings. 

Across from him, slumped over a chair, was a sleeping old man dressed in a baggy green tracksuit. His loud snoring drowned out the barely audible newscast that played on a TV mounted above the reception desk. The receptionist had since disappeared behind a vase of red poppies, presumably counting the wad of cash.

“The suspect, 19-year-old Ryū Kubo, used an illegally obtained EMP weapon to target the neural implants of his victims, resulting in five deaths.”

Part of Keshi would have preferred a dingy hideout. Though it lacked the smells and nauseating atmosphere of a proper hospital—the clinic still had that penetrating sterile feeling he had come to know and dread.

When he came to Tokyo, he’d vowed never to find himself inside another hospital or clinic again—no matter how sick he was. To breathe their air—to stare at the drab paintings on their walls—to sit in those stiff, uncomfortable chairs—to watch TV programs he’d never choose at volumes too low to hear.

“After shooting multiple hostages, Kubo was brought down by an aerial sniper. He remains in critical condition.”

He remembered his trips to the bathroom to get away from it all—only for those, too, to become part of the whole suffocating experience. 

“The attack was livestreamed by several Telos employees and broadcast across the Neural Net. We now play that footage, reformatted in 2D, with the final moments omitted.”

Keshi’s eyes slowly wandered from poster to poster on the wall. Most were standard personal wellness PSAs. One cautioned: 

WE CANNOT BY LAW OFFER TREATMENT RELATED TO NEURAL IMPLANTS AT THIS FACILITY.

“Please! Somebody help me! It’s speaking to me! Controlling me!” 

As Keshi sat alone with thoughts of IV tubes, hospital food trays, and vomit, the soft sound of gunfire and screaming caused him to turn and look at the TV.

“Take it out!! You put them in my head, NOW TAKE THEM—”

Suddenly—the whole building began to shake—the newscast cut out to an emergency broadcast screen with an IP code at the center. Above it, plain bold text read: 

EARTHQUAKE DETECTED AT 35°37’08”N, 139°46’35”E

No one reacted. The receptionist didn’t look up. The water inside the vase of poppies sloshed around, but a suction mechanism at the bottom kept it firmly in place. The sleeping old man remained asleep. 

Everyone was used to earthquakes. They occurred several times a week in the wake of the Great Flood. 

For Keshi—already uneasy—the tremors only tightened the knot in his stomach.

The earthquake stopped as suddenly as it started.

“Is everyone alright then?”

Keshi turned to see a clinician in baby blue scrubs, holding a tablet. He appeared to be in his mid to late 20s, his chin-length blue-black hair parted down the middle, hiding a receding hairline. He was tall and slender—almost fragile—with a polite, apologetic demeanor.

No one responded to his question.

“What a relief. Young man, if you don’t mind following me, we’re ready for you now.”

Keshi glanced around the room, but no one else was there apart from himself and the old man.

⋆ ⋆ ⋆

Keshi followed the clinician down a corridor.

To his surprise, he had been led from the waiting area to a private examination room, where he received a full physical—“as a service.” Everything was fine, except for a slightly elevated blood pressure reading.

The clinician’s calming bedside manner had helped to quiet his nerves just a bit. 

Still, there was something off about the guy. The only time he really opened his eyes was when Keshi took his shirt off. Other than that, his face seemed almost stuck in that one expression—a disarmingly peaceful smile.

Keshi couldn’t wait to get out of there.

“So… how long will it take to…”

“About twenty minutes. It’s a quick and painless outpatient procedure.”

In half an hour, he’d have an Ichor. 

A strange feeling came over him. It was actually happening.

Keshi was nine when the Ichor was released to the public, and, like any kid, couldn’t wait to turn 20.

“Become anyone.”

That was the original slogan for the Ichor’s Neural Net, which promised a fully immersive virtual world, where you could exist as any avatar of your creation or choosing. 

An old promise—but nothing had ever delivered on it like the Ichor. Never before had it felt so real.

The Ichor interacted with the brain to spoof the senses. By inducing a state of mild atonia, the user’s conscious mind dislodged, allowing them to experience physical sensations as pure perception—much like a lucid dream. 

None of these simulated senses quite matched the intensity of their physical counterparts—smell was especially hard to replicate—while taste was deemed too closely tied to vital functions, and had therefore been banned from simulation on the grounds that users might stop eating and drinking.

But none of that mattered. It was magic. 

There were, of course, a number of other public health and safety concerns. The partial paralysis needed to engage with the more immersive Ichor experiences posed a clear safety hazard, as did certain AR functionality. These features were quickly banned in most public settings. However, the core audiovisual, HUD, and select AR features—GPS, calls and messaging, photo filters, etc.—were cleared for free use.

As the Ichor tracked your location and biometric data, all regulated functions were toggled on and off automatically. If you tried to access certain features or areas of the Neural Net while driving or walking in public, you’d be met with an error message featuring Alecia—Telos’ mascot character. This error screen had become iconic, and was often parodied and memed.

There were broader, societal concerns as well—mainly that the Neural Net allowed people to live inside insular fantasies, instead of coexisting in a shared reality.

Keshi remembered watching a late night news special with his mom about people who had opted out of society, spending most of their time inside the Neural Net. One girl said that it allowed her to transform into her true self, which made it realer than real life. Even if she couldn’t taste the cake she was eating.

For them, life was no longer about changing yourself to exist in reality—it was about changing reality to match yourself. 

And yet, for others, the boundary lines of the self began to disappear entirely. 

People could now connect with their favorite celebrities and online personalities in new dimensions. “Lifestreams” had become common—full sensory broadcasts that allowed viewers to become the person streaming—at least, until the stream ended, and they had to return to being themselves once more.

Telos later changed the slogan to “Endless possibilities await.” But that initial promise—becoming someone else—is what drew Keshi and many others in.

For so long, that was all he wanted. To escape his own life. Especially after Runa disappeared. Even more so after his mom got sick.

The clinician stopped at an elevator at the end of the hallway, which was covered by a band of yellow caution tape. 

A sign taped to one of the doors read:

DANGER: ELEVATOR DAMAGED - OUT OF SERVICE

He turned to Keshi and smiled with that same look—his eyes squeezed cheerfully shut. Keshi wondered how he could see where he was going.

“We use the same surgical bot as the licensed clinics, if that’s any comfort.”

As the clinician turned and reached for the elevator buttons, his hand stopped short. 

Both buttons were smeared with a bright orange film. The clinician’s expression turned vaguely annoyed. He sighed, then took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off the residue, letting out a whisper-quiet: 

“Disgusting…”

Once clean, the clinician pressed both the up and down arrows at the same time. The elevator doors opened with a ding. 

He pulled off the caution tape and gestured for Keshi to step inside.

⋆ ⋆ ⋆

As the doors closed over him, Keshi wondered if he’d be able to find his way back to the checkpoint. When he tried retracing his steps in his mind, he found he couldn’t remember much of the walk there, and he’d handed the directions over to the receptionist with the money.

Except—he wouldn’t need them—he’d have GPS in his head.

So many things were about to become easier. 

The Ichor claimed to—and most would tell you it did—streamline all the small frictions in your daily life. It only took a few years for it to see real mass adoption—and in the years since, society had essentially restructured itself around it. 

Keshi wondered if it would help organize his mind, too.

Maybe, the cloud he’d been living in was finally about to clear.

He watched the clinician press several floor buttons in succession as if it were a passcode—his finger wrapped in the handkerchief. Each of the buttons was smeared with the same mysterious residue.

“Does... the Ichor help with... brain fog?”

The clinician stopped, distracted by Keshi’s question. For a brief moment, his polite demeanor slipped.

“…Fuck. Where was I?” 

Keshi blinked in surprise.

The clinician wiggled his finger, trying to remember where he was at in the sequence.

“Right.”

He quickly entered the rest of the code.

“You trade one fog for another... is how I’d put it.”

The clinician then turned to Keshi and smiled.

“Of course, you won’t be getting an Ichor…”

The words sent a cold rush of static down Keshi’s scalp.

What?

An arpeggiated tone emitted from the floor panel as each of the buttons lit up.

Before Keshi had time to react, he heard a loud hiss—then a metallic KONK as a row of hydraulic dead-bolts slammed shut inside the elevator doors—sealing them inside.

Keshi’s heart began to race. 

Not an Ichor?

The sound of a second pressure lock disengaging caused Keshi to turn—he watched as a panel on the right-hand wall of the elevator drifted loose.

Wait a minute—Eiji did mention something about implant modding…

But Keshi thought that meant minor alterations—fixing the age on your digital ID—things like that. 

The clinician grabbed the handgrip on the wall panel and pulled it open, revealing a narrow passageway with a steep L-shaped stairwell that descended underground.

All of a sudden, it hit him—where he was—what he was doing. 

“If you’ll follow me.”

The clinician ducked into the passageway and slowly made his way down the stairs.

Keshi just stood there, staring into the flickering light of the stairwell—head buzzing—every instinct screaming at him to turn around.

For a moment, he thought of the safety of his dark apartment, and for the first time, it felt like home. 

Home.

The word burned its way through his skull like a piece of molten shrapnel, lodging itself in his throat. 

He thought he’d numbed himself to the sting of that word.

But like a spell, it pulled him back. To late August.

For years, a quiet thought had grown inside him, watered by loss and tragedy.

It started as a small fear—something he could suppress. But the waters continued to flow.

Eventually, the day came when he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

He gathered his things into a backpack and got on his bike. It was the first day of the summer festival. The main roads were teeming with people, stalls, and floats, so he took the side streets.

The whole time he was biking around, he hoped something would pull him back—a sign or signal—some reason to stay.

He ran into a few people he knew along the way, even stopped to talk. All the while, he was shouting at them. Begging for them to see what was happening. To ask him to join them. To say, “Let’s meet up later at the fireworks.” Then he’d miss the last train.

But of course, they had no idea.

Some more time passed, and he found himself doing donuts in his old middle school’s parking lot.

With nowhere left to go, and no one else to stop him, he bought some barley tea from the Lawson on the corner, then headed straight to the station, where he ditched his bike and bought a one-way ticket.

As he sat down in his seat and stared out the window, he finally let the thought—which he’d held in for so long—come to the surface.

Home doesn’t exist anymore.

And just like that, he became homeless.

For months, he slept in crowded tents, beneath underpasses—on damp park lawns and hard concrete steps. 

He came to know the sound of cars and the morning station traffic, loud voices at night, and, just once, the feeling of being pissed on.

How many department store bathrooms had he washed his clothes in—outdoor fountains bathed in—food lines stood in? How many nights had he gone without a meal at all?

He knew what it was to have a fever, with no place to get warm.

To scrape by on nothing.

To survive.

All on his own.

So then… what was he afraid of?

It was then Keshi realized—he’d grown complacent.

So many things in his life until then had just happened to him. Things he had no power to change. Because of that, he’d become a sleepwalker. Always letting other people and outside forces carry him along. Always adrift.

It only took one year with a roof over his head for him to slip back into his natural state. One of comfort—safety.

Pathetic.

He hadn’t left home seeking safety and comfort. He was there to find the only person who mattered—the one person in the world he had left.

If all the suffering of the last five years had meant anything at all, then he would do whatever it took to find her.

Something in him shifted.

Keshi felt his foot hit the stair, then the other—only this time, it was him taking the steps.

As he descended into the bunker, he suddenly felt ready to risk it all. 

For the first time since arriving in Tokyo, he was wide awake.