FundamentallySound Blog

L.

(Explanatory note on Michiko's Life: This episodic story is an on-going outlet for my inner Tokyo-ite: an idealized super-modern, sleek, intelligent, and perpetually in motion sophisticate who participates in a highly secret government operation that astoundingly benefits the population despite popular cynicsm. Michiko questions herself mercilessly but only on those occasions which truly require it. She is the ultimate non-neurotic).

Sexual Peak Time Reduction in Sector 577 was one of Michiko's least favorite duties as Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion. But implicit in paragraph 3579C, the one hated by all those left-wing rioters, is the mandate for civilian tranquility. Since Edo it has been known that prolongation of stimulation is indubitably the most significant reducer of violence. With the invention of the Thompson Web it became possible to realize this en masse. How anyone could protest this was beyond her. Her lifelong work, since her first days in BureauComm, has been training as the invisible hand, overseer of the daily maintenance of that hairline between desire and satiation. Tactile realization of communal longing through the Thompson Web was simply the culmination of the upper classes' goal for civilian docility.

A tiny shock ran from finger to brain, her skin pinched as the tendrils gripped her hand a little more tightly than usual. Translating the prickly paradox of push and pull to the tricky minutiae of movement which triggered the Thompson Web was exhausting. Every tendon's vibration becoming physical realization in Sector 577. Such responsibility was integral to her sense of self-worth. The requirement of anonymity gave her the air of apparition.

(for previous episodes, go here).

Posted by Roddy Schrock at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

K.

Unimpressed by the storm and in a hurry to see him once more, Michiko grabbed her luggage and ran to the Narita Express bound for Shinjuku. She had the Cartier system but Berlin itself had been strange. Late night vampires and ghosts lined up in weird costumes listening to music made by little wooden boxes with exposed cables falling out, diodes as gall bladder stones.

The giant electrical transducers on top of the train crackled with enough volts to fry a herd of elephants. Michiko, frequently admired in the Tokyo Office of Cultural Boundary and Discretion for her sensitivities, internalized the frequencies and let it massage her thoughts into a frothy memory of her last visit to the love hotel with Hiro. This experience would help her with tomorrow's assignment: using the Thompson Web for Sexual Peak Time reduction in Sector 577 (north of Inokashira).

(for previous episodes, go here).

Posted by Roddy Schrock at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

J.

As the plane touched down at Tegel, Michiko glanced at her watch. A feeling of alienation ran across her, flying still made her question life's givens. If we could take off in the air so fast, cross continents while sleeping, then what could be taken as truly axiomatic. Michiko, not being one to get caught in that neurotic web of what-ifs, set her mind to the task at hand, getting her luggage. Then, always trying to stay one step ahead of the game, she started working out the details necessary to get the Cartiér system back to Tokyo from Berlin. U-bahn to Hackesher Markt, S-bahn to Warschauerstrasse, then a walk to the closed down former East-Berlin factories. It's been nearly 20 years since the wall came down, but those factories in the fields around Treptower Park look like a postcard "of the people" circa 1979.

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I.

The cyclocomputer ramped up to optimal traveling velocity with startling speed. Michiko's muscles were indeed flexible power generators. A flash of worry sparked through her brain about the tightness of the front wheel's positive retention device but quickly disbursed when she remembered that she had adjusted it properly.

This bicycle tour through quadrant 78-C was a requirement of Hiro to garner human visual data on the reactions of its inhabitants to the recent slight color/flavor readjustment of Sweet Soda XL783.

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H.

Hiro came home and drew a hot bath. After picking up his Climactis in Shibuya, he couldn't be bothered to think about much other than the feeling of the hot water slowly untangling every last fiber of his tired and tight muscles. At 35, he wasn't old. But he sure wasn't young anymore either.

The cumulative effect of the drug, the steam, and the hazy incense burning in the other room was taking Hiro to a place he hadn't been in a long time. Unable to restrain himself, he began smiling. Suddenly everything that had seemed so important, his job, his recent frustrations with the Thompson Web interface, the emotionally unsatisfying trysts with Michiko, all those things began to seem like some cosmic joke and he finally got the punchline. He started laughing so hard he couldn't stop. After a full five minutes of this, he pulled himself together, got out of the bathtub, pulled on the same underwear he had been wearing all day, put on a UniQlo t-shirt, and collapsed into bed immediately falling into strange dreams involving Zen priests wearing Catholic frocks and meditation sessions which were ended by painful swats on the back by vindictive altar boys.

(Previous episodes of Michiko's Life can be found here).

Posted by Roddy Schrock at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

G.

After meeting Hiro for a late night rendezvous at the Venice Star Love Hotel outside of Shibuya, Michiko walked down Dogenzaka Street as the sun came up. This was her favorite time of day in Tokyo, a tiny temporal window in which the city felt slightly at rest, when you might look down a street and see no one; a shocking visual impact as Tokyo is nothing if not a tightly intertwined morass, locked up in a rubber band ball of constant physical and mental negotiation. To see the city this empty hinted at apocalypse, disaster, and the extraordinary. Within the hour this would change and it would resume its usual manic pace.

Hiro, on the other hand, could not be more uninterested in these urban sociological inspections. He was single-mindedly on his way to meet his supplier, and was running late for the appointment. His supplier was a young guy, almost a kid, who had so far found nothing in life to interest him, other than money. And he made a lot of it. Practically the whole city of Tokyo was drugged up on the latest pharmaceutical strain of Climactis, and Hiro's supplier worked it in the most fashionable districts, fetching incredible sums for textiles coated with time-release Climactis. This kept Hiro's supplier in the latest microcircuit fashion.

(Previous episodes of Michiko's Life can be found here).

Posted by Roddy Schrock at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

F.

Knowing that Hiro admired her work was a source of pride. After all, it was Hiro who had documented the Interracleft community in Harajuku, pushing the Ward's seven-pronged brand identity into radical new areas.

Michiko, thinking of her somewhat secret liaison with Hiro, felt a jolt of nervous energy. Hiro played her like a fiddle, strange physical and psychological intercourse involving restraint, double-blind submission and penetration, mixed with mind games so intricate in their complexity that she could not even attempt to understand, choosing instead to just ride them out enjoying their particular flavors of play and innuendo. Hiro was a minefield and each step led to explosions of pleasure or high G-force intellectual vertigo.

She went shopping at this store to buy him a new T-shirt before their meeting at 11:00 that night.

Posted by Roddy Schrock at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

E.

Monday morning, waking up, her head reeling from the previous days events. Her pay wasn't docked for destruction of the Thompson Web last week, it was the fault of the machine itself, the cost passed onto the insurance company.

Today's assignment was a big one, Tokyo Disney needed tighter chromasonic integration in its latest attraction called Goofy Gravity.

Michiko's hand slipped hesitantly and with slight friction into the new Thompson Web. Her skin was slightly pushed back as the thin ropes acclimated to this new guide, her hand doing the same, the ropes wrapping gently but not without urgency around her every finger. With just a few minutes of learning by both human and machine she was guiding the low frequency sine waves into correct correspondence with the bright blue hue projected directly into her retina from the Pixel Spray.

From the next room Hiro smiled as he knew they Ward could do no better than Michiko as Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion.

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D.
Sensing a strong disconnect between the ethereal world she worked in day after day, full of refined contingencies between delicate components, always subject to slight offset, continually gaining velocity while only becoming more deeply intwined with such whimsical data as the current 2nd favorite sweet soda in sector 77-D, and the rest of her time with its sexual and fashion concerns, Michiko couldn't go to sleep tonight, her head buzzing with vague worry.

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C.

With little in the way of expertise on matters such as these Michiko realized that she would be unable to haggle the price down to her budget. The World Trade Center had just fallen three weeks beforehand and the Thompson Machine had not yet been publicly released. But she had attended a Halloween Party in San Francisco a couple of years back where they showed a prototype. She was in awe of it back then, although a bit bulky, its ability to not only pull but push, with tactile data visualization and real-world conceptual solidification, she knew they'd be all over this back in Tokyo. But that was later.

Clipping the strings she worried the auto cut-off wouldn't block the solidification module. Maybe all of her day's work in beat-matching and full-spectrum sound/color coordination could be lost in the process. But finally, snip snip snip, her hand was released.

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B.

When she thought about her days passing and their inevitable culmination she considered herself lucky to be in this position. A lifetime of discrete educational landmarks prepared her for this role. Her title is that of District Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion, Shinagawa Ward.

This Thompson Web was one of surprising tenacity. Normally the ropes were preternaturally respondent to the most subtle of gestures. Perhaps she had missed, in the morning brief, a city-wide backlash to the latest missive. The 5th rope from the bottom, 265 degrees off center, was now the main culprit, restricting her to non-kinetic motion. With her free hand she pulled the nail scissors out of her miniature Louis Vuitton bag.

Posted by at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A.

As she tried to pull her hand out of the hole she could could feel the thin web of intricately tied ropes pull ever more taut. While not an entirely unpleasant sensation, this obviously wasn't going anywhere. After a long day of beat-matching and full-spectrum sound/color coordination the last thing she needed was a Thompson web that refused to cut her slack.

The soft yet waxy edge of the third rope from the top slid slowly back and forth against her wrist, the fibers simultaneously moving tip to rear, back and forth. The tightness of the knot itself growing ever more insistent, refusing to be tricked by her intuitive squirming.

"Oh," she told herself, "stop worrying about the delicacy of the machine and just use your nail scissors. Cut the ropes, and set yourself free." The Thompson machines were common, every Sakura-ya had three in their window. A multi-use interface, she used them primarily for beat-matching and sound/color coordination.

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