The next morning, in the same spot he stood the night before, Akira is dressed all in white as instructed and holding a crumpled copy of his CV in his hands. The building is even more out of place in the daylight. He had not noticed the overgrowth of weeds and vines creeping along its sides. He thinks about Yoshiko, who was not in her virtual store the night before, or any of her favorite spots—like behind the diamond waterfall or in a glass igloo on a comet careening around Saturn. She’s told him there are times when she can barely get out of bed to put on her VR visor, that she locks herself in her room as her daughter screams through the night, no longer capable of telling her mother what she wants or fears. On one occasion, Yoshiko said her daughter threw the only food they had for dinner across the apartment and began lapping the noodles and liquid off the living room floor.
“What am I supposed to do?” Yoshiko asked. “I can’t yell at her. She doesn’t know what she did. So, I ate on the floor with her. When I try to talk to her, she just stares.”
“You’re doing the best you can,” Akira said.
“Sometimes I want to yell,” Yoshiko said. “Sometimes I want to shake her so hard that she’ll wake up and be the girl I remember. I want her to look at me like I matter.”
“You matter,” Akira said. “Deep down she knows you matter. Maybe I could help?”
But whenever Akira makes offers like this, Yoshiko ignores them, quickly changing the subject.
“Let’s play tennis in a Paris simulation,” she said. “Let’s talk about old movies. I can’t remember the last time I went to the movies.”
Akira walks to the front door and pushes the buzzer. After several minutes, he is about to leave when he hears somebody fiddling with the locks. An elderly man pops his head out and stares at Akira suspiciously, or perhaps in fear, and utters not a sound except for the guttural noise he makes when he clears his throat. Akira wonders if he might be at the wrong building but then suddenly the old man opens the door and gestures for Akira to enter. The old man is slight; the top of his balding head barely reaches Akira’s shoulders. He introduces himself as Seiji Kobayashi and quickly turns away, leading Akira down a dusty hallway lined with trash and pieces of wood propped against the walls. There is a strange feeling that Akira is slipping from the real world as they travel deeper inside the building, down into the basement.
Akira cannot see anything until Seiji pulls the cord for a single lightbulb dangling in the middle of the room. The space has been painted white from floor to ceiling and is occupied only by an antique cast-iron printing press sitting at the center of the room. Seiji walks toward the press, picks up a letter on a page-setting tray, and begins to tap it against a metal corner. A heavy clinking sound echoes against the walls.
“I understand that this is not what you were expecting,” Seiji says, staring off into space. In his white robe, he looks a little like he is having a conversation with God.
Akira takes a step back. “To be honest, no.”
“You’re young. Have you worked on printing presses like this before?”
“Well . . .” Akira recalls a childhood memory: making New Year’s cards with his mother using rubber stamps. Of course, he’d worked in a print shop, but those machines were all computerized. Enter color, size, and presto. “Some similar experience, a long time ago.”
Seiji’s gaze shifts to Akira, his eyes glazed from the light above. “What are your thoughts on the Arctic plague?” he asks quite seriously.
Akira stares at him, unsure how to respond.
“The fact is,” Seiji goes on, “Aum Shinrikyo and other doomsday groups, as you might call them, got it wrong. You know the sarin gas attacks in ninety-five?”
Akira nods. It was a footnote in cultural memory. A coworker of his father’s had lost a brother during the incident.
“They were a tragedy,” Seiji continues. “But that doesn’t mean the philosophy of these so-called cults was wrong. Our leader of the Sun Wave Society said the world would end years ago with a solar flare, but it didn’t. That doesn’t mean that it won’t, though. The plagues aren’t such a bad thing—a hard reset, a cleanse, a chance to make things right. But people never listen.”
Akira watches him place a page-setter on a metal plate on the press and tries to ignore the fact that Seiji just condoned the deaths of nearly fifty million people. The old man seems to use all his available strength to pull down on a lever while his left foot pumps a large paddle on the ground. Akira wonders if he should turn around and run before this crackpot decides to tie him up or worse. Seiji begins talking again about the natural order, how we have reached a war zone: us versus the planet. He says he wants to save people, open their eyes, save the rock we live on. He takes a stack of papers from the press and hands them to Akira.