Plum Rains Read online

  “But I’m curious—”

  “Then keep that curiosity to yourself.”

  Angelica did the math: Itou was born in Tokyo in 1964. Sayoko would have been a young schoolgirl at the beginning of the war. But where had she gotten the idea that Sayoko necessarily spent her childhood in Tokyo? Aside from the technician’s comment that Sayoko struck him as Edokko, a Tokyo person with deep local roots, she realized now that Sayoko had never made any such claim. Perhaps she hadn’t been a city person, after all. Perhaps she’d been a country bumpkin but did not want to advertise that fact.

  “Never mind,” the robot said. “I’ve asked too many questions, haven’t I, Anji-sensei?”

  Its head swiveled toward Angelica. Though it had so few features—the illuminated eye slits, the unmoving mouth—she had started to imagine expressions that couldn’t possibly be there. Regret. Shame. A persistent desire for acceptance.

  She was grafting a personality onto an object that could not possibly have one. She was imagining things.

  “Anyway, I’m too tired for the park right now,” Sayoko said. “I’d like some tea.”

  “It would do you good to get out,” Angelica tried one last time.

  “No.”

  Another awkward pause, broken by the robot. “Can we watch more teledramas?”

  “We’ve seen quite a few,” Sayoko said. “Let’s try the news.”

  Sayoko, with the robot on the low table at her side, tuned into a twenty-four-hour news program.

  Angelica took that as her cue to tune out, focused on her phone instead. She scanned her latest frozen messages: Nursing Digest, with international job requirement updates. A slew of texts labeled Recipes: bok choy time! Recipes: fun with eggplants! The trackwrap again—ignoring Itou’s request she must’ve given in and bought some sale items that came trackwrapped—letting her know there was unused produce in her fridge, begging to be eaten.

  Datu. But she couldn’t see any more than the first word: Checking . . .

  Junichi. The first word only, as well: Need . . .

  This was worse than getting no messages at all. She turned her phone off and on again, as if that would do anything. She couldn’t just keep staring at it, hoping.

  Datu again. Please, Nena . . .

  She couldn’t ignore Bagasao’s first move, but she didn’t have a plan. There was no point in seeking more tech support for her phone if Bagasao was waiting for payments and rendering her a digital hostage.

  “On the news, they all have names,” the robot said, watching the captions roll across the screen, labeling every new person interviewed.

  “Of course they do,” Sayoko said.

  Angelica did a time-zone calculation and realized Datu was messaging her well past midnight, Alaska time. She went back to read one of his last unfrozen text messages, the one in which he had acknowledged receiving a small cash gift from her, a gift she shouldn’t have sent, given that she still had debts to pay. She had remembered a tone of gratitude, but now when she reread the message—It’s something, thanks—her interpretation faltered.

  Now she could sense the unfulfilled need, or something else. Either he didn’t want her help at all, or he hadn’t been able to bring himself to admit it wasn’t enough. Their communications about money had become more strained in the last year and she felt less able to read between the lines of his texts. The less she understood his tone, the more she offered help—even help she couldn’t afford. What else could a person do?

  She knew Datu had borrowed from Bagasao in the past, just like her, but she assumed that in his first high-paid months in Alaska, he’d fully paid up. It was a foolhardy assumption. He may have been counting on his two-year work anniversary, still a year away, to clear his debts. Until he’d crossed that employment milestone, he was essentially on probation. If he owed a lot, he might not even be making enough to get by.

  It should have made her feel more upset than it did. At the very least, his debt put them in the same rocky boat. His side tended to ride dangerously low in the water, sunken by his extravagances, putting them both at risk. But at least he was there. She could imagine reaching out to touch him. There had to be a reason they were the only two of their family to survive: so that they could watch over each other. If Datu didn’t always fulfill his side of that mutual responsibility, well . . . that was life. And anyway, men matured more slowly than women. Until he stepped up to the challenge, she would take care of them both.

  But even as she made that pledge, the robot was absorbing and assimilating. Changing. Bringing the future closer. Not just the world’s future, but her own—the one in which she quite possibly wouldn’t have this job, a paycheck, a roof, security. Everything she counted on was just one upgrade, one artificial blink away from disappearing.

  “That person doesn’t have a name,” the robot said, indicating the anchorman on the screen.

  “No, he does,” Sayoko replied. “It’s just that we all know him so well, they don’t need to show his name every time.”

  “And them?”

  The opening story was about the Tokyo fish market, showing the arrival of new frozen tuna, rock-hard and gliding across a stainless steel table. A graph compared the prices of wild versus cloned free-range tuna, the two lines veering further apart, month by month, as the wild catch had declined, and then becoming parallel again in the last year, as the public had begun to accept the cloned fish as a reasonable substitute.

  “The fish?” Sayoko asked. “No, not them.”

  “But they were alive.”

  “Yes, they were. Not now. They’re frozen.”

  “Frozen people can be alive,” the robot asserted.

  “But those fish are not people,” Sayoko said. “And they are most certainly dead.”

  Another unopenable message arrived from Datu.

  Sayoko shouted suddenly, “Look, there. That’s my son!”

  Angelica looked up, pushing the frustrating phone into her tunic’s front pocket. “Oh yes. There he is.”

  But Sayoko was not talking to Angelica. She was talking to the robot, explaining that her son made the news often. “He’s an important man in the government. Only a few steps from the top.”

  “The top?” the robot asked.

  “Of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. In the old days, the Prime Minister often served in METI first. It’s a natural place to start, if you have big ambitions.”

  “Does your son have big ambitions?” the robot asked.

  “Not big enough,” she said, with surprising honesty. “Though I think he realizes there is no way out except closer to the top. He has talked about wanting to retire, but the ministry doesn’t want to see him go. My son would be even more important if he came from an impressive family and had a wife and children. An unmarried man is never as popular. Sixty-five is a little old to marry.”

  “So, he will not try to marry, then?” the robot asked.

  “I don’t think so. I think he worries that if he settled down with a woman, he’d be responsible for her parents, too!”

  Sayoko laughed once and coughed, as if the truth of her spontaneous joke had caught like a fish bone in her throat.

  On the screen, Itou was gathered around a conference table with other officials from five Asian nations.

  “May I do a facial-recognition search for other news items?” the robot asked. “I would like to see more of your son.”

  Angelica could hear caution in its voice—its request to search war period archives about the Tokyo zoo had not pleased Sayoko. But this request didn’t bother her.

  “Of course,” she said proudly. She struggled to turn to the side, to better view the new images flickering on the robot’s illuminated trunk.

  Itou-san was standing on marble steps with a row of men and women, two-thirds of them wearing dark sunglasses to protect their sens
itive, retinal-implanted eyes; the others, more traditionally minded, without the implants, smiling stoically.

  Now Itou-san was touring a factory in Vietnam, and now standing at a harbor, backed by bulldozers, somewhere in northeastern China.

  Now Itou-san was at a Shinto shrine in Japan, observing a ceremony. More men in dark suits bowed to a large, irregular boulder surrounded by immaculate raked sand.

  “The rock doesn’t have a name, either, if that’s what you’re going to ask,” Sayoko volunteered, with mischief in her voice.

  “I was not,” the robot said. “But it does have a kami. This is what we believe, isn’t it? That trees and rocks and waterfalls can have spirits?”

  “I don’t know what you believe. Are you Japanese, or some sort of Chinese product, or an Asian hybrid? Do you think for yourself, or do you think what I think, or do you think what your factory thinks?”

  “I’m not sure. But I think I have a kami. Is that acceptable?”

  “Of course it is,” Sayoko said.

  Angelica heard the exchange, and the rising, worrying quality of the robot’s last statement. She heard the mention of spirits and inanimate objects—a combination unfathomable to her. Her fingers went instinctively to the tiny cross at her neck.

  “I’m ready to be named, Sayoko-san,” the robot said.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be Hiro.”

  They were all silent, taking in this moment, a point of no return. Angelica inhaled, trying to maintain an expressionless mask, knowing it was not right to object or to show any emotion. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. The future could not be stopped. She looked to Sayoko, whose eyes were shining.

  “All right, Hiro. That’s an excellent name,” Sayoko said, chin lifted. “That’s what we will call you.”

  Angelica couldn’t bear to listen to their conversation anymore, and yet she feared that every missed exchange brought jeopardy closer.

  “Can we watch more teledramas?” the robot asked Sayoko once the news stories started repeating.

  “That isn’t the best way to learn about people.”

  “But so much happens,” the robot said.

  “There’s a lot of fighting, a lot of crying. But there aren’t . . .” Sayoko trailed off, looking for the word. “. . . consequences.”

  “How does a person learn about consequences?”

  “Only by living.”

  “But that’s inefficient,” the robot said. “Human lives are short.”

  “Getting longer,” Sayoko corrected him.

  “But when does learning happen?”

  “Sometimes right away. More often, at the end, when it’s too late.”

  “But then errors will repeat themselves, generation after generation.”

  With reluctance, Sayoko said, “Well, yes.”

  Angelica needed a moment to herself. “I’m going to clean out the refrigerator.” No one seemed to notice. “And then, if you’re both so well occupied, I may lie down in my room for a few minutes.”

  Passing Sayoko, Angelica touched her shoulder. Sayoko flinched: needing human touch, clearly, and yet still resisting it. Angelica knew better than to take it personally, but it was hard not to.

  They were waiting for Angelica to leave the room before continuing their conversation. Hiro was patiently waiting. He was finally able to wait.

  But that isn’t real intelligence, Angelica thought as she took one last look at them. A dog will do that: halted, trembling, eyes fixed on the food in his master’s hand.

  Angelica left them there, news muted, Sayoko pausing while Angelica stepped into the other room, as if the old lady wanted her gone, wanted Hiro’s pure, undivided attention—a level of selfless concentration no human, except perhaps a lover and then only briefly, could replicate.

  PART II

  8 Angelica

  Angelica needed to get money to Uncle Bagasao. She barely remembered where to find a wiring office. When she’d first arrived in Tokyo, she’d needed those kind of immigrant service shops with their storefront placards in Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog and Vietnamese, but she’d gotten used to regular online services in the last few years. With her device hacked, she was back to being a new immigrant all over again.

  Relief workers were out of the question. The agency wouldn’t send them any more nurses. Perhaps Angelica could find independent caregivers working off the books, but anyone doing relief care outside the sanctioned system could hardly be trusted. Even Phuong Pham had left her shift early, and she was fully certified. No wonder there was so much demand for automated help, even the weak AI kind.

  “What do you think of an adventure, outside the house?” Angelica asked Sayoko the next morning.

  “What sort?”

  “A walk to a new neighborhood. And a subway ride.”

  Sayoko looked at her doubtfully.

  “You might consider hiring a car,” Hiro suggested.

  Angelica phoned the car service that Itou used when he went to the airport or took his mother on rare weekend drives. When it asked for their account number and password for pickup, she stalled, flummoxed. Fine, she would pay the extravagant fee herself, later. But the car service would not come without advance payment and a credit search. When she couldn’t provide an account number, they didn’t even want to talk to her.

  “I have another idea,” Hiro said when Angelica came out of the kitchen. “You may go alone, and I’ll stay here with Sayoko-san. Just as you did yesterday, when you ran your errand.”

  She hadn’t told them about getting trapped in the elevator, not wanting to disclose either her panic or the fact that she could’ve been away even longer.

  “But what if something happens? What if you need help?”

  Sayoko said, “He’ll figure something out. He’s even smarter today than he was yesterday.”

  From the robot came the sound of a phone ringing and a Japanese voice at the other end answering, “One ten. Police. Is this an emergency?” In a flat voice, Hiro responded, “Testing this connection. No emergency. My apologies.” Immediately, a ringing sound again, and a second voice. “One nineteen.” Hiro requested: “Wait time for ambulance response to this address.” After a pause, the second voice answered mechanically, “Fourteen minutes.” A third number was dialed, the line connected, and without even waiting to hear the voice, Hiro asked, “Time estimate for private service to this address?” The automated voice answered: “Six minutes in current traffic. Send ambulance?” Hiro answered, “No, thank you.”

  Hiro’s trunk illuminated with a map of Tokyo, showing the seven closest hospitals. Two, including the nearest, were flashing orange. When Angelica asked Hiro what that meant, he said, “Analysis indicates significantly higher-than-average rates of C. Difficile, MRSA, bloodstream infections, and catheter-associated urinary tract infections—”

  Sayoko interrupted, directing her complaint to Angelica. “Do you see why I don’t want to go to a nursing home or hospital? They kill old people in those places.”

  Hiro continued, “An investigation is pending, though the news agencies haven’t reported it yet. The closest emergency room is not a good choice for us. In any future situation, Anji-sensei, I would recommend you avoid that hospital altogether, based on their unusual staff turnover and a pattern of negligence bordering on systemic malpractice.”

  Angelica felt a ping of shame for something she hadn’t even done and couldn’t possibly have known about. She looked at Sayoko, who was studying Hiro intently, nodding with appreciation.

  Hiro continued, “Our Sayoko-san deserves a better facility, even if it takes additional minutes of transport time. A precise analysis of the medical incident and the traffic situation would take all these factors into account.”

  “You’re sure you’ll keep her safe?” Angelica asked Hiro.

  “It is my reason for being.”<
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  Chiba Prefecture was her best bet for shops and services catering to foreign workers, but Angelica had to make another stop first. Before entering the subway near Ueno Park, she paused at the entrance to her bank. She’d visited in person only once, the day she’d opened her account, and she had reservations about entering now. The formality of the place and the high-tech customer service always made her uneasy. Furthermore, she didn’t want to attract attention. But she took a breath and reminded herself: I am a customer. They’re here to serve me, not the other way around.

  She didn’t keep much money in her account from paycheck to paycheck, thank goodness. She’d always felt better with a little cash under her bed, and that saved her now from at least one anxiety: even if some hacker had accessed her accounts, and even if he had tried to transfer money, he wouldn’t have been able to do much. If the bank had noticed something fishy and had countermeasures in place, perhaps they would’ve simply frozen her account. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. At the very least, she felt it important to tell the bank that someone might have her passwords or bio-scan data. Maybe they could add a special alert. If everything looked clean, it was possible she could deposit cash and then wire the money she owed, but the prospect of putting any money into a potentially compromised account still made her nervous.

  As she passed the automatic teller and proceeded to the personal service area, she was greeted by a disembodied voice. “Welcome, Mendoza-san.”

  Angelica looked over her shoulder, but there was no one behind her. The entire entryway was empty. She stopped and took a step backward. The voice repeated its greeting.

  “We look forward to serving you today, Mendoza-san. Please advance toward the waiting area.”

  On the far side of the room, near a cluster of armchairs, Angelica could see a woman attendant, wearing a visorcam and holding a tablet, prepared to assist her.

  Angelica saw the scene play out in her head: the attendant doing an eye scan and pulling up her bank account information. The confusion when Angelica said her last name wasn’t Mendoza, it was Navarro. The bank’s unwillingness to share more information while her identity was still in doubt. Best case scenario: an appointment with a security person and hours of questions, forms, police consultations. Worst case scenario: just the last part. Police. Who was to say that Angelica Navarro wasn’t trying to steal from someone else’s account?