He really is invisible, huh…
The hooded man was tall, and the visitor behind him was a short woman. She was looking right into his back, in other words. But instead of complaining or moving over, she just stared forward with a look of interest on her face. She was obviously seeing right through him.
It was hard to understand. To Naomi, the man looked absolutely real. There wasn’t any fuzziness to him, like you’d see on a hologram; he wasn’t even partially transparent.
Naomi hadn’t tried actually touching him yet, though. He thought that might make him angry.
He’d read stories like this before, of course. He’d seen similar things in movies and on TV. It wasn’t that unusual for a mysterious being to appear to the protagonist while remaining invisible to everyone else. A visit like that typically kicked off some sort of adventure.
But now that he was living that very scenario, Naomi wasn’t feeling any of the thrilled anticipation he experienced when starting a new novel. Instead, he felt intensely anxious and profoundly weirded out.
It was simple enough, really. He just wasn’t cut out to be a protagonist.
He’d read a lot of books, but he couldn’t remember a single hero who bought self-help books to boost his confidence, only to continue being extremely awkward.
Apparently noticing Naomi’s gaze, the hooded man looked over at him. Naomi hurriedly turned his attention back to the guide.
“Seven years ago, Pluura partnered with Kyoto College and the city government to launch a joint project.”
Two bold words appeared on the screen. “That project is Chronicle Kyoto.”
The monitor immediately switched over to a map of the city. It was the typical Pluura Maps overhead view, just as it appeared on a smartphone screen.
“I expect you’re all familiar with Pluura’s primary areas of business. The company provides email, maps, and many other convenient web services. We’ve come to rely heavily on them in many facets of our lives.”
The map on the screen suddenly tilted to one side, and the buildings and geographical features took on real depth. It was a 3D map of the city—another of Pluura Maps’ familiar functions.
“One of their main services, Pluura Maps, is widely considered the world’s most advanced geographic information system. It’s a continually updated record of the entire surface of our planet. From the world’s cities to its wildest corners, Pluura gathers images and measurements at ground level, from satellites, and even from low-altitude drones. They provide high-resolution maps, updated on a daily basis, to everyone who uses their service.”
The 3D map on the screen zoomed in rapidly until they were inside a commercial building. As long as the owner gave their permission, Pluura Maps could show you interior images as well.
“Pluura isn’t resting on their laurels, however. They’re actively developing new, exciting improvements to their mapping service. And one of those projects…” The camera zoomed in even closer, taking them from the inside of the building, to the inside of one specific store, then inside a specific showcase in that store, until a single pastry filled the entire screen. “...was the pursuit of ultra HD imaging within a specific urban area.”
The guide had emphasized that last sentence a bit. Maybe it was a line they really wanted you to remember.
“It just so happens that Kyoto, this very city, was chosen as the pilot participant for this initiative. It’s a city with a long, rich history, and it’s home to more intact works of culturally significant architecture than any other place on Earth. This made it an ideal candidate for thorough, top-to-bottom mapping. In addition, its location in a valley offered an easy boundary for the project area. And so, seven years ago, the Kyoto municipal government reached an agreement with Pluura—and its partner, Kyoto College—to launch this project.”
The pastry began to shrink as the camera zoomed back out. In seconds, they were outside of the building entirely, and soon the screen was once again displaying the entire city. But this time, the 3D map of Kyoto began to change.
A house suddenly crumbled and disappeared, replaced by a vacant lot. An instant later, the site was filled with construction equipment; just as quickly, an apartment building was standing there.
It took a few moments for Naomi to understand what he was seeing. It was a time-lapse depiction of a changing Kyoto.
New houses sprung up here and there. Shops appeared. Roads moved around.
“The goal was to map Kyoto far more accurately, and in far more detail, than ever before. And also, crucially, to preserve a historical record of all this information—a record of all the city’s changes through the years.”
The city finally stopped shifting around, and today’s date appeared on the screen. Apparently it was now displaying the Kyoto of the present.
The tour guide held out her hand to indicate the map. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what Chronicle Kyoto is all about.”
“Or so the official story goes,” the hooded man said.
So, the others couldn’t hear him, either.
Ushered onward by the guide, the tour group proceeded further into the facility. There were signs and explanation panels all over the place. It was clear this facility had been designed with visitors in mind.
As they continued down the hallway, they came to a large glass-walled room on their left. There was a sign that just read LABORATORY above the door; the people working inside were wearing uniforms of some kind. Naomi watched them as he walked along, wondering idly what they were researching in there.
At that point, a door inside the room slid open and a weird old guy emerged.
Naomi frowned dubiously; the words weird old guy really did feel like the only appropriate description. The man was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers—a pretty casual outfit for a middle-aged guy, even if you ignored the cartoony Eizan Electric mascot on the T-shirt. And then there were the two plastic tulips that appeared to be sprouting from his head like the horns of some Star Trek alien.
Weird pretty much summed it up.
The odd man started using a small toy drone, and soon had it divebombing the people who were hard at work inside the laboratory. A beautiful woman appeared to be shouting at him, but he didn’t seem inclined to stop. The glass walls muffled their voices completely; it was kind of like watching a slapstick silent movie.
Suddenly, the weird guy turned toward Naomi, and their eyes met. The man stuck out his tongue, threw up peace signs with both his hands, and began to dance. Finally reaching the limit of his endurance, Naomi looked away and hurried off. He didn’t want someone like that remembering his face.
When he glanced over, though, he noticed that the hooded man was smiling. Was that his idea of comedy? It was just one more thing they weren’t on the same page about.
A few minutes later, Naomi was staring through a glass wall at an enormous sphere.
The thing had to be four or five meters tall, and only the top half of it was visible—its total diameter was probably closer to ten meters.
The group had reached the final room of their tour, according to the map on their pamphlet. Inside it, they’d found this huge white ball enshrined behind a cylinder of glass, its lower half buried in the floor.
The word AllTale was engraved in English on the sphere’s surface. That didn’t mean much to Naomi, though.
“As I’m sure you might imagine, continually recording the state of an entire city requires an impossibly massive amount of storage space,” the guide said, her voice echoing against the walls. “However, Pluura’s advances in quantum computing, in combination with some cutting-edge research from Kyoto College, made this possible. What you’re looking at is the fruit of multiple technological breakthroughs: it’s a storage device that never runs out of space.”
The guide paused for a moment to gesture dramatically at the object behind the glass.
“We call it AllTale—the world’s first quantum storage device.”
Hmm, wait. That actually sounds kind of familiar…
Naomi couldn’t put his finger on it, but he thought he might have heard or seen the word AllTale before. Maybe it was in some science article he’d skimmed a while ago?
But even aside from that vague memory…there was something about this spherical device itself that felt very familiar. He almost felt like he’d seen it before.
Wait… Yeah, that’s right!
It came to him after a moment—he’d seen this thing in one of the images that flashed before his eyes back at Fushimi Inari shrine. Or something like it, at least.
What were those images, anyway? I don’t get it…
“Let’s go.”
Naomi turned toward the sound of the voice. The hooded man had already stepped away from the tour group and was striding along casually in the direction from which they’d come.
“Hey! Wa—”
The tour guide had already launched right into a new explanation of something or other. Flustered, Naomi looked from her to the hooded man and back again.
“Um, sorry! I, uh, I have to leave now!”
Bowing his head a few times to tour group, he set off after the hooded man at a trot. He knew a couple people were shooting him weird looks, and it made him blush.
As he hurried along, he muttered a few choice words to his invisible tormentor—in the safety of his own mind.
10.