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  “Don’t talk like that—you’re spooking me.”

  “Well, there’s still a few things I haven’t tried. For one, what if I die when the closest person near me is another reincarnator? In that case, I think my illness wouldn’t be transmitted. Maybe I’d be able to die in peace.”

  “Come on, old man. Do you really want to die?”

  “Maybe,” Lon said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m…weary.”

  Lon turned his gaze to the water. A chill breeze came downriver from far away in inland Saitama. Huddled down, the old man looked terribly small.

  I didn’t know if he was tired of our existences in death and rebirth repeated, or if he was referring to our present homeless lifestyle. Whether his tale of reincarnation was real or fake, our lives were without prospects. There was nothing here but bug bites, trash collecting, fishing, and the stink of grass and dirt and mud mingling together. Lon’s life would soon be at its end, and I could understand his desire for a grander punctuation mark than worsening senility followed by a miserable death. But I had finally found someone I could open up to, and the thought of attending him to his death held no appeal for me.

  “Listen, Lon—”

  “It’s okay,” he said softly, facing the river. “Forget I said anything.”

  That was when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

  “Finally, I found ya! I’ve been searchin’ all over. I never would’ve thought you’d be in a place like this.”

  I turned to see that mouth with the missing tooth, opened wide, throwing me a brutish cackle.

  —

  My current self was apparently a man of few words. When Missing-Tooth took me to the yakuza office, I managed to escape suspicion by simply nodding and pretending that my memory was hazy. I gathered that I was the kind of guy most useful to a violent organization: one willing to get his hands dirty without a single complaint. No wonder they had searched for me with such dedication.

  The man Missing-Tooth called Aniki was in his mid-forties. A real show-off, he wore a red shirt under a garishly patterned suit that practically screamed yakuza. Aniki and I were sworn brothers, and while his ascent in the ranks during my decade-and-change in prison had left a considerable gap in our respective ranks, he treated me—on the surface, at least—as a brother.

  After happily taking me out on a night of drinks followed by women at more than one soapland, Aniki didn’t wait to ask me the favor. He phrased it as a request, but I sensed no room to refuse.

  I was ordered to perform another killing. The murder I committed before becoming me in the prison—that is, the murder of me—had been requested by clients who were now deemed as untrustworthy. Even though they requested the killing, the clients’ guilt seemed likely to drive them to confess to the police. Since we had already received payment in full, all that was left was to keep them from talking before they caused any trouble.

  Then Aniki handed me a photograph—a surveillance shot, an elderly couple in profile, their expressions troubled. I recognized them immediately. My birth parents.

  Now I understood. The assassin who killed my second self had been hired by my real parents. Having seen my thirty-year sentence as poor recompense for their son’s death, they had risked the danger that came from associating with a violent organization so that they could bring about the ultimate act of vengeance. What they did was wrong, uncivilized, and was to be despised, but through that act I saw that as pitiful as I had been, I was still loved by my parents. The back of my nose—though it wasn’t my nose—began to tingle.

  This yakuza was telling me to kill that dear old couple. You bastard, I thought. You human garbage. Go to hell.

  I wanted to go berserk on him then and there, but I stifled the impulse. This killing had to be stopped, whatever it took. And the only one who could stop it was me. Pressed into a van outside the office with Missing-Tooth, I desperately tried to think of how I could prevent the killing.

  The neon lights of the city passed by the tinted windows. It was nearing midnight. The pop music blaring from the stereo irritated me more than it should have.

  I asked, “How should I do it?”

  Missing-Tooth’s answer was as concise as the directions on a cup of instant ramen. “Wait’ll they’re asleep. Pick the lock. Give ’em a good zap with the stun gun. Kill ’em with a hammer to the head. Wrap ’em up in a futon and haul ’em out. Don’t forget to lock the door. Take ’em to the disposers. The end.”

  “What, no knife or sword?”

  “The disposers yell at us when we get too much blood in the futon. These days, we mostly use disposable hammers from the hundred-yen store.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Well, we do keep a blade on hand, just in case. It’s hidden under your seat so the cops don’t find it.”

  Including me, four men occupied the van’s dim interior. Myself and one other were in the back, and Missing-Tooth had taken the front passenger seat. These guys saw murder as something trivial. They were rotten to the core, and society would be no worse off without them. But did that make it all right for me to kill them? I felt like that would be a wrong. But while I was debating it, the van was heading for my parents’ house. I began to recognize the view from the windows. My parents’ executions were drawing nigh.

  “What’s wrong?” Missing-Tooth asked.

  I made up my mind.

  I reached under my seat and pulled out a knife with a thirty-centimeter blade. Still hunched over, I swung my arm in a fluid motion, building momentum as I thrust the blade into the stomach of the man next to me.

  He groaned an “Oof.” I stabbed him twice. Three times. He died.

  “Wh—what are ya doing?” Missing-Tooth said with disappointed dismay.

  I didn’t answer. The blood and gore was warm on my hand, but the sensation came as no surprise. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the blood of another spraying upon me. I renewed my grip on the knife and thrust it between the front seats, aiming for Missing-Tooth’s neck.

  He twisted away and pulled out a knife of his own. Despite the way he looked and talked, he was apparently the real deal. We grappled across the seat back, and his knife pierced between my ribs, penetrating my heart. My blade sliced open his carotid artery. In the end, it was a draw. My consciousness began to fade. I wondered, Did I save my parents? and in the next moment I was the man in the driver’s seat.

  Apparently, “I” truly was immortal. I died again and again, but “I” never died. All right, then. No time to ponder it now. I have something I need to do.

  With three corpses along for the ride, I pulled a U-turn and drove back the way we came. Our starting point was still stored in the GPS. The music on the radio sounded more pleasing than maybe it should have. When the song reached its bridge, I realized it was still the same tune that had been playing before.

  I arrived at the yakuza office, where a man was standing guard outside. I ran him over and drove headlong into the front door. The van struck the concrete car stop, and my body shattered the windshield, sailing through, hitting a wall. I died instantly.

  I came back as an underling inside the office. Directly in front of me was the back of a garish suit. I’d seen it before: Aniki. All around me, the men were beginning to react to the intrusion.

  I looked around and saw a katana decorating the wall. I grabbed it and thrust it through Aniki’s back.

  “What the fuck!” he shouted. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  He wasn’t dead. This one was persistent. He knocked me down with a single punch. The other men swarmed me and kicked me backward. Still clutching the katana, I swung the sword at their legs. Take that! Then one of them stabbed me. It hurt. Whatever. I don’t care. This body’s not done yet. I got back to my feet and stabbed and killed the man who had stabbed me. Bullets pummeled my back and the underling-me died.

  In a stroke of fortune, I came back as the man with the gun. On my command, my new body put the weapon’s s
ights on the heads of the moving targets and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun was plastic, toylike, but the explosive flashes of its muzzle and the power of its bullets were the real thing. Until that point, I’d always thought that bullets came out like arrows. But inside this tiny room, firing a pistol for myself felt quite a bit different. When I squeezed the trigger, the recoil jolted up my arm to my shoulder. Almost simultaneously, an object flew out the other side of the gunsight. A small dot, the object seemed to move at the speed of light, and I couldn’t follow it with my eyes. Inside this room, my targets had nowhere to escape.

  Well, this is surprisingly easy, I thought. However my opponents moved about, all I had to do was have my sights on them the moment I squeezed the trigger. Trigger. Bang. Exploding head. One more down.

  Another shooter had already fired six rounds at me without making a scratch. I wasn’t sure if my body knew how to expertly handle the weapon through muscle memory or if the other shooter was too nervous to hit me—if he took a steady aim, he might have. Instead, his bullets flew off into nowhere, gouging at a wall, shattering an ashtray on a tabletop.

  You’ll never hit me like that. I was starting to feel bad for my opponent. If you didn’t care about your body, as I don’t about mine, you could take your time to aim, and bang! See, like I just hit you now. He died. I kept on firing, and with each shot, my enemies were fewer.

  Soon, nothing moved.

  From behind a sofa where he was hiding, Aniki shouted, “What do you want?”

  To wipe you all out. Without a word, I held my gun at the ready and slowly advanced. The floor was slippery with blood. Smoke hung in the air. I wondered, Is this what gunpowder smells like?

  By the time I reached his side, Aniki was near death. He clutched at his side, soaked bright red, and breathed weakly. I looked down at this man called Aniki.

  “What is all this?” he said. I didn’t reply. But he was the kind of man who could command a criminal organization, and he seemed to notice something about me. He peered into my eyes and asked, “You. Who the hell are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I didn’t have any other answer for him. I pulled the trigger.

  I had blown apart nine heads with twelve bullets. No one moved in the office now. I checked the magazine and saw two rounds remained. This was an incredible gun. Two bullets had been spent before I became me, meaning that the weapon had held nearly twenty.

  I fired one more shot into Aniki’s corpse. I didn’t relish doing so, but I didn’t want to risk being transferred to a half-dead man.

  Surveying the now-quiet room, I was reminded of an arcade crane game. The bodies, scattered everywhere, looked like dolls. But what had opened their eyes so wide wasn’t some artful appreciation for the painting on the ceiling drawn with their own blood. What had opened their eyes was the giant arm that had come from above to take them to some other place.

  I set fires all around the room, and when the tongues of flame grew too large to be stopped, I put the gun to the top of my head, and bang!

  The next moment, I was a man in a suit, recording the yakuza office with my cell phone.

  “It’s so scary,” someone said.

  A woman was clinging to my left arm. I didn’t know her. Of course I didn’t—I didn’t even know my own face.

  I had fulfilled my mission. The office would burn and leave no evidence. The yakuza were all dead, and my parents lived. Right now, my parents were probably sound asleep. For some reason, when I thought of them, I remembered the face of the woman who was my mysterious benefactor in the detention center—not my mother, but the mother of the robber who had killed me. But maybe it was all the same for me now.

  “Come on, let’s go,” the woman at my arm said. She felt warm beside me.

  I was struck by the temptation to steal this man’s life. If I did, I wouldn’t have to live on the run. That’s right. I have the power now to steal someone else’s life and become them. Are there others with this same ability? Are some of them living these lives of comfort?

  But then came the doubt. If what’s inside this shell is only me, then I’ll never be able to be “him.” The social status, the routine, the pleasures that this body had grasped—those things belonged to him. All I can capture are their vestiges. Only this body’s former owner could look at these fleeting traces and find happiness. Not me. I’ll only be happy with a life of my own making. Maybe it didn’t look that way, but before all this—and even now—ladling out beef bowls for some hourly pay gave me all the satisfaction I needed. I liked beef bowls.

  I glanced up and saw, in front of the flaming van, a man desperately pushing at the chest of a dead body. He was big. Steam rose from his bulging T-shirt. The big man looked on the verge of tears as he kept on pressing with his thick arms the center of the corpse’s chest. The dead body was mine, from when I rammed the van into the building. You’re wasting your time. I’m already dead—that’s how I’m standing here. But the big man didn’t know that.

  I recognized his face. He was that hero of the night—the man who had caused the death of my original, irreplaceable self.

  I approached the man and said, “Thank you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. It’s nothing.”

  Tears ran down my cheeks. I had simply wanted to express my gratitude to the man who was doing all he could for what once had been my body, and now in death was just a thing. His attempt to rescue me in the beef bowl restaurant may have ended with my death, but he had risked his one—and only—life for me. Out there in the world were people like him, far too good. He was my opposite: a human being of a different kind, one that deserved deep admiration.

  The woman asked me, “What’s wrong?”

  I shook off her hand and brushed aside her attempts to stop me as I walked away on my own. After a while, my cell phone started to buzz persistently, so I threw it on the ground and crushed it with my shoe.

  All I wanted was to return to being me, a man whose face was already becoming hazy in my memory. I didn’t want to be anyone else. My job at the beef bowl joint may have been monotonous, but at least I had done it myself, and not under the command of some other me. But that body—my body—was long since cremated and put into a grave. I would have to force myself to let go of the past. I wanted to be without a past. Death would never smile upon me, and so I could have nothing of substance, nothing to tie me down, nothing at all.

  Then a realization came to me. I’m powerless. I’m not anyone. I’m just a lousy dog crawling through the dirt to my death. No, not even a dog. I’m a bone or a broken stick for the wandering dog to find. I’m a stick that hits any dot that comes toward me just because I feel like it. In the Old Testament, didn’t man evolve from a stick? Or do I have that wrong? Whatever. It doesn’t matter right now. Because this world is occupied almost entirely by my kind. Ninety percent—no, maybe even 99 percent—are the same as me, with nothing of their own, no past, no ties, no hopes for the future. Despite this—or because of it—they and I are invincible.

  I found myself standing in front of a beef bowl joint in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the place where I had worked, but like my store, it was bright and warm and clean, if only a feeding trough with dingy, mass-produced decor.

  Adjacent was a vacant lot. On the other side of a wire fence, a single stick stood in the earth. In the past, the stick had provided support for a sign of some sort, but the plywood sign had fallen to rot in the dirt.

  For some reason, I couldn’t help but feel excited. The time had come to begin my next worthless life. At least that’s how I felt. The feeling came as no surprise—I’ve been the same all along. The me who served up beef bowls, the me who was a robber, the me who was a convict and a killer, they were all me.

  I roared at the night sky and pulled up the stick.

  Inside the beef bowl joint, a lone charmless man interchangeable with my former self was serving up beef bowls.

  Resting the stick o
n my shoulder, I strode inside.

  My nose only itches in critical moments.

  “Give me your money,” I said.

  Taking aim at this good-for-nothing world, I swung my stick as hard as I could.

  * * *

  Hiroshi Sakurazaka was born in Tokyo in 1970. After a career in information technology, he published his first light novel, Modern Magic Made Simple. With 2004’s All You Need Is Kill, Sakurazaka earned his first Seiun Award nomination for best Japanese science fiction. His 2004 short story, “Saitama Chainsaw Massacre,” won the 16th SF Magazine Reader’s Award. In 2009, All You Need Is Kill was the launch title for Haikasoru, an imprint dedicated to publishing Japanese science fiction and fantasy for English-speaking audiences. The book also formed the basis for the international hit film Edge of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise. Sakurazaka’s other novels include Characters (cowritten with Hiroki Azuma) and Slum Online, which was published in English by Haikasoru. In 2010, Sakurazaka started an experimental digital magazine, AiR, with Junji Hotta. He remains one of Japan’s most energetic writers of both light novels and adult science fiction.

  DESERT WALK

  S. R. Mastrantone

  Sam Atherstone had played nearly every computer game on the planet—he’d worked out the exact number not long ago and written about it on the blog that paid his bills—yet the excitement he felt when his housemate, Jamie, handed him the gray Jiffy bag that had come in the Saturday morning post caused his hands to shake so much that he couldn’t get it open, and Jamie, tired of waiting, grabbed the bag from him and opened it on Sam’s behalf.

  “Is it the one?” Jamie said, holding out the black game cartridge on his chubby hand, bringing to Sam’s mind a chocolate on a hotel pillow.