Shido Kumano was born in a small village Inside, on the southern part of the Kii Peninsula, which stretched down west of Shikoku. Village was probably the right word for a settlement of that size. It had almost no hallways connecting it to the bigger cities, and the guide maps were inaccurate because the paths were complex and mazelike. Unsurprisingly, visitors were rare.
The village was a five-level area formed on the side of a mountain. Because its population was so small, the station structure did not grow larger for them. It had maintained the same multilevel system since Shido’s grandfather’s generation.
The Kumano family lived on the third floor. They were bioelectric technicians and had been for generations. Their job was implanting Suikas into the village children, as well as performing the Suikanet registration process for them. The net demanded a registration cost of 500,000 milliyen, and Shido’s family charged their own personal fee on top. They would use this money to buy food made on the first level and industrial goods from the second floor.
A short distance from the village was a food production factory. They planted and grew rice and vegetables in a giant open space under huge red lights. This type of facility required human labor to function, and by village law, only those who lived on the first level could work there. Residents of the second level could collect food, electronics, and fuel that popped out of the station here and there, and they performed simple tasks like assembling machines. They consumed part of their findings and sold the rest to higher floors.
For people on the first level, the 500,000 milliyen needed to acquire a Suika was more or less equivalent to a lifetime of earnings, so money’s sole purpose to them was to give their children Suika access. In other words, the people who were born on the first level needed to spend their entire lives working for the right to exist in Yokohama Station. The children of laborers who could no longer pay the cost were taken by the automated turnstiles and dumped somewhere else. Consequently, the population level stayed almost entirely flat.
In most cities, people of greater social status tended to live on higher floors as a general trend, but it was written into law in this village. Each family had its profession, and every profession had its own strata. Those born on the third level had a particular status unique to them and would always. It had ever been that way.
Third-floorers like Shido’s family were the technical experts compared to the simple workers of the lower levels. In addition to bioelectric engineering, they performed Suikanet maintenance and gave orders to the laborers.
Villagers on the fourth floor performed administrative tasks that kept the settlement running, while the fifth level was exclusively for the ruling family. Every now and then, those from higher floors came down to present some new regulations, purchase supplies from the residents, then leave. There was no tax system in the village, so nobody knew how their sovereigns came by the milliyen they paid to the lower people for their goods.
It was a remarkably stable class system. The village was relatively isolated from everything else, so no one had any misgivings about the way it all worked. They didn’t even have a policing force as the cities did.
When Shido was young, there was one resident from the first floor who couldn’t take it anymore and struck a visiting fourth-floorer with a stick. The automated turnstiles appeared in no time and took that man away. He never returned.
Because the turnstiles forbade all violence Inside, the lower classes did not stage aggressive uprisings despite the advantage of numbers. The only kind of resistance they could manage was running away.
Shido had few complaints about life on the third floor. He was afforded ample necessities and enough spending money to buy luxuries from the occasional traveling merchant. Work time was short. Children on the third floor had a little compulsory education and technical training. However, once it was done, the rest of Shido’s childhood was mostly spent reading materials he acquired from Suikanet. Most of them were novels that detailed the lives of anonymous people who lived in the biggest cities, like Kofu and Matsumoto. He would read them and dream of one day visiting those places, but it was only ever a furtive desire that he could not act upon.
He was betrothed to a longtime friend, a girl named Mimi. Not because they were in love but because their families were not too closely related, they were near in age, and there were almost no other available women on the third floor. The matter had been arranged as a matter of course not long after they were born. Shido had assumed at a young age that he would live his entire life in the village. That he would one day be exiled from all of Yokohama Station was inconceivable.
An odd man came to the village when Shido was twenty. He made his way through the labyrinth of the mountain passages and approached the residents of the first floor, exclaiming with excitement as though discovering some rare species of animal. “Well, well, I didn’t expect to find a settlement out here! This is a huge discovery! What a fantastic find!”
The villagers, however, were alarmed. On occasion, traders made their way over, usually carrying large cargo boxes or pulling carts. Yet rather than having a vehicle, this man was leading a number of automated turnstiles. Old ropes were tied around their slender arms, and they followed the orders that he gave them from a handheld device in his possession.
One villager began to worship him. “The god of Yokohama Station has come to us as a man!” Others hid their children, thinking the stranger was a wicked conjurer of some kind. The first-floorers, who couldn’t read or use Suikanet devices, saw the automated turnstiles as the maintainers of order, the agents that carried out the will of God. The sight of a person who had enslaved them to his will had an explosive effect on them.
One woman panicked and rushed to the third-floor escalator to seek instructions, where the first person she happened to speak to was Shido. He invited the traveler to the third floor to hear him out. The man was very fishy-looking, thirty or forty years old, with bulging eyes and glasses that only accentuated that further.
“It’s nice to meet you. I am Keijin Nijo. I came from a city far to the north of here called Kyoto. I’m researching a method of shipping that uses the automated turnstiles, and this is my test run. Are you the representative of this village?” he asked, nearly shouting. His voice rang down the hallway. The people from the lower floors looked at Shido with fright in their eyes.
“No, but our representative hardly ever makes an appearance. I’m just a bioelectric technician,” Shido explained, a little unsure of himself. “I’ve never seen anyone force the turnstiles to move on their orders before. What kind of tech is that?”
As a third-floorer, Shido understood that the automated turnstiles were machines, not deities or devils, but it had never occurred to him that humans could control them. He supposed he was just ignorant, being from a rural settlement, and maybe this was normal in the cities.
“Well, I don’t have total control of them. In short, I’m running a kind of Suikanet interference,” the suspicious man detailed. “There are many automated turnstiles in Yokohama Station, and they move around Inside following certain algorithms. Let’s say that two turnstiles come approaching each other, like zwoop. Ordinarily, when they recognize that they are approaching each other, both will turn on their heels and go the opposite direction. So if you give them something to carry, they will not ordinarily take it very far.”
To demonstrate, the man held up fingers and moved them closer and farther apart.
“However, this is not because the turnstiles have designated areas they cover. My hypothesis is that the automated turnstiles do not possess the concept of individuality. In other words, they are all merely pieces of a single system. So when these two go zwoop, if I hit them—bam!—with a net interference signal, they go swish, and then bada-boom. Using this, I can give the turnstiles of Kyoto cargo to carry and get them to walk all this way with me. Of course, there’s still some level of randomness to their actions, so I’ll need a few other types of signals.”
Keijin gesticulated wildly as he spoke. Shido had no idea what he meant, but he assumed that people talked like this in the big city. The strange man went on, regardless. He was accompanying the turnstiles on this test, but he would be able to send them alone to remote locations for trade and transport in the future. If he could make it possible to ship objects all over, not just send information on Suikanet, it might turn all of Yokohama Station into one coherent economic zone. And on, and on.
“There are tons and tons of automated turnstiles in Yokohama Station. They outnumber human beings. We can’t give up the chance to incorporate them into our economy! That’s what I think, at least.”
With every few enthusiastic words, Keijin sprayed spittle, which was not very pleasant. Still, he was also enjoying himself and life in a way that Shido had never seen before. In the village, everyone seemed to think they existed only to fulfill the role that belonged to everyone on their floor. Even the family on the fifth level, who ruled over the settlement, was no different. Shido himself was merely another part of the system, a single organ in the being that was the village.
Shido informed someone on the fourth level about the strange man and told them that he sought an audience with the fifth-floor family. After a while, the answer came back—they would not meet with the bizarre fellow. A few days later, the turnstile whisperer was instructed to leave the village at once. The ruling family was afraid of revolution, and they wanted to avoid any upset of the established hierarchy, which held that the automated turnstiles were the very symbol of order.
“Well, I guess that’s that. On to the next town,” said Nijo to Shido. “By the way, I’m going to need help to continue developing my shipping business! People like you who are young, strong, and curious would be ideal. If you’re interested, contact me here,” he stated quickly. Then he gave Shido a business card with a Suikanet address on it.
The little thing had the man’s name written in kanji, along with the strange phrase Keijin 2Jo. Shido could understand the kanji but had no idea what the other stuff meant.
This brief encounter would go on to change Shido’s life dramatically.