Traffic was heavy on the west side of Mt. Asama. An unbroken line of people went up the station-generated escalators, like pilgrims on a journey to a holy peak. Signs here and there said DON’T WALK ON THE ESCALATORS, but in nearly all cases, the right side was kept open for those who wanted to walk faster.
Every now and then, automated turnstiles traveled on escalators. They were nearly twice as wide as a person and would block the escalator, forcing the movement behind them to stop. In that case, there would be two parallel rows of people behind them.
Dr. Blue-Eyes and Nijo were side by side in just such a queue, proceeding toward the peak of Mt. Asama. There was a turnstile four steps ahead of them. It swiveled its flat face, observing the surroundings.
Now that escalators had developed into the primary mode of transportation in Yokohama Station, there were more and more small cities forming on the mountainsides in Nagano. The west slope of Mt. Asama was one of the leading travel routes connecting these cities to the Kanto Plain. If you took the escalator up to the peak, then rode the proper one down toward your destination, it would carry you the whole way.
“I’m an outsider here in Gunma. If I’m doing anything funny on my own, the employees will be suspicious of me. But together with you, a respected doctor in the community, I enjoy a much greater degree of freedom,” Nijo had suggested, which was why Dr. Blue-Eyes had accompanied him. Yet among the crowds, plenty of people looked just as weird as the young man. He probably would have been just fine alone, assuming he didn’t act too conspicuously.
But here they were. Nijo clutched his container, looking around at the terrain with his alarmingly large eyes. Just as a doctor knew which organ was where inside the human body, Nijo seemed capable of spotting what he called Suikanet nodes. To Dr. Blue-Eyes, the field of escalators around here was just a black river, its flow disordered and haphazard.
There were brief landings here and there to manage the angle of the slope. Salespeople set up their shops there with station lunches and other necessities, sitting around and looking bored. Some station employees were also present, looking for unauthorized sellers to yell at. Some of the merchants also had to pick up their goods and evacuate when the bulky turnstiles came shoving through.
“If we’re going to prepare for an eruption, we’ll need to seal off this route, of course,” whispered the doctor.
“That’s right. I was just thinking of how we might do that. The best would be to use the automated turnstiles to shut it down, but that’s a bit beyond my means at the moment. Instead, I could use Suikanet to change the display on the lightboards…”
Nijo spoke in a loud and clear voice, drawing funny looks from other people within earshot. One middle-aged woman noticed Dr. Blue-Eyes standing next to him and bowed her head. He returned the gesture, assuming she was a patient he’d aided in the past.
The turnstile a few steps ahead continued to do nothing more than swivel its head. Either it had no interest in their conversation or did not understand it. The doctor almost wondered if all its rotating would pull a screw loose, leaving its head to fall to the ground.
The closer the escalator got to the peak, the more spots there were with no roof. That was the black part of the pandagraph. The sky was overcast with no blue, but there wasn’t any rain for now. Precipitation would block off all traffic in the area, forcing them to make a significant detour.
Even among the Insiders who lived around them, the question of whether the automated turnstiles understood human speech or not was a significant mystery. They could speak in a woman’s voice, but it was all prerecorded lines.
If a human being violated Inside rules, they’d receive a Suika violation notice and be ejected from the station. That was the extent of the turnstiles’ activity, so perhaps they did not need to comprehend speech to do their job.
However, the rules were not necessarily crystal clear. For example, there was one that prohibited violence against a resident of the station under threat of expulsion. The line that separated violence from nonviolence was unclear, though. No systematic studies had ever been conducted on it.
Some schools taught their pupils, “The automated turnstiles keep a record of everyone who doesn’t listen to their parents or teachers.” It might not have been true, but it was effective at setting a child straight.
Some religious types preached, “All your deeds are recorded on the Suika. When a man dies, his record is judged by the turnstile of the afterlife, which sends him to Heaven or Hell.” Dr. Blue-Eyes thought this was an effective way to increase one’s devout followers.
“I can tell you that it does record positional information,” Nijo stated. They were taking a break near the peak, eating their lunches in a spot with a view of the outside.
Near the top of Mt. Asama, little hills like this one were often left exposed to natural ground, creating tiny station hollows. The mountain seemed no different than usual at this point.
“More specifically, it keeps an accumulated history of positional data in Suikanet, which can be accessed by scanning your Suika. It’s quite easy to do; even you could manage if I taught you.”
“I had no idea.”
“Many details of how the Suika works are unknown still. We have no surviving manuals.”
“Manuals?” the doctor parroted while eating a steamed bun. “They have those?”
“It’s rumored they existed in the early days. Humans at least partially designed the Suika, after all.”
“Well, I knew that.”
There had never been a manual to the human body in medical history. Everything people knew about medical science came from dissection and examination.
“This is what my locational history is like. Want to see?” said Nijo, entering a few commands into the black screen of his device. A window appeared displaying a map of the entire island of Honshu. “This is the complete record of my travel from the moment I got a Suika implant. So, about twenty years.”
A green line appeared on the map. Nijo had been born in the center of Kyoto, and most of his childhood movement was around the Kansai region and Chugoku to the west of it. After age twenty, he settled in Kyoto for a while, until recently (probably when his daughter turned six) he headed to the east and arrived in Gunma.
“Looks like you’ve been all over the place.”
“Going to Okayama when I was young was a good learning experience. The structure around the Great Seto Bridge is very fine and new, making it easier to spot the Suikanet nodes. It’s much simpler to do stuff with them when they’re exposed,” Nijo explained, rotating the screen and handing it to the doctor. “Let’s check out yours, too. Tap here and certify your Suika, then enter the following commands.”
He typed on the keys as instructed, but the window did not display a map of Japan. It was only a mountain range, crossed with topographic contours. Although his life was three times as long as Nijo’s, the scale of his map was not even a tenth as large.
“Whoo! Your range of travel is pretty narrow, Doctor,” Nijo remarked, smirking obnoxiously.
The doctor had almost never left the Gunma area. Just circling Mt. Asama like this was a considerable travel chapter in his life. Part of that was because his profession made it impossible to leave home for very long. However, he also bore no incredible interest in visiting a different area of the world—the singular structure known as Yokohama Station.
Some people might find journeying interesting, but being a famous person meant that others came to him. He didn’t need to walk to anywhere else.
It was one year ago that the bug-eyed Nijo had come to Gunma.
With as much traffic as Mt. Asama got, outsiders spending a long time in the area was not a rare occurrence. Many people even came following the rumors of a man with mysterious blue eyes.
What made Nijo different, however, was that he didn’t come to see Dr. Blue-Eyes for his strange appearance or for his skill as a doctor, but instead, for his language knowledge.