The arrivals hall at Narita was compact and utilitarian, with none of the over-arching spaciousness of the departure section upstairs. The waiting minutes I spent people-watching, scanning the travellers as they emerged from security, pigeon-holing each person who caught my eye by nationality, job, personality. With no way of verifying my guesses, I was able to award myself a tick for every pick.
Kurt was not long in arriving.
You expect artists to be slim and effete. Kurt was a tall man with a solid frame and blond hair, his demeanour not at all pensive, and with a face on which life had yet to write any stories. His most common expression, in my recollection, was one of mild confusion, but then I had only ever known him on my own territory, never his.
Still, if you were setting out to intercept someone as they passed through the teeming arrivals hall of a major Asian airport, someone who was not expecting a welcome, it certainly helped if that someone was Kurt Jones.
"Graeme!? What the hell are you doing here?"
I had expected a reaction something like this. I had even considered a few replies to his question, before dismissing them all as unnecessarily provocative. Instead, I just stood there doing my best to look unperturbed, not wanting to do anything to amplify any sense of being deceived he might be harbouring.
He gawped at me in silence for a moment, then focused his attention on my chest.
"'Delightful Pal!'? You've been shopping for tee-shirts locally, haven't you?"
"Good to see you too, Kurt – This is Shigeru, by the way. Shigeru, Kurt Jones."
The two men shook hands, one more warily than the other.
"You'll be wanting some answers, no doubt. Let's get out of this crowd first. We can talk on the train."
We set out for the escalators that would take us down to the basement station. As we walked, I rolled out the apology I had prepared, explaining how it was one of those apologies where you say you are sorry for the consequences of what you did, not for the actual doing of it. I was hoping, indeed calculating, that he would take this as a backhanded compliment. Things were happening here that went beyond his personal convenience. He had an important role to play and was man enough to deal with it.
"Not really an apology at all, in other words," he said. I guessed from the tone of his voice that I would be forgiven. Soon, if not just yet.
On the train, we found an empty alcove of opposing seats where the three of us could talk in comparative privacy.
"Six months ago," I started, "everything was fine. Our funding was in place and Spurious Developments was operating in obscurity, just another high-tech start-up with a product that may never see commercial success, yet with enough potential benefits to make that risk of failure worth taking. Then someone in the protest movement noticed us. These things happen very quickly. Before we knew it our name was all over the net and it was too late to do anything about it, not that we could have in any case.
"But that was okay. It was early days. By the time we got product to market, chances are it would have all blown over. Certain government agencies from whom we would have preferred to remain invisible had become aware of our existence. That was unfortunate, but they're slow to move at the best of times, so not an immediate threat. They would have noticed us sooner or later in any case. Keep a low profile and don't give out anything concrete, nothing that people can latch on to. That was the PR consultant's advice, and good advice it would have been too, but for one thing."
Kurt, sitting opposite me, had his arms folded, alternating his gaze between my face and the scene passing by outside the window. We were traveling through that band of rice paddies and open country between the airport and city.
"Somebody at one of the local crime gangs heard about what we were doing, somebody smart enough to recognize what our machines could do to his business. All these new neuroscience-based smartdrug highs – they are proving very popular, are making certain people a lot of money. Our work has the potential to disrupt an extremely lucrative market. Equally, we could provide the technological edge they need to win market share.
"So, threat or opportunity, he recognized us as something to watch. It started with discrete inquiries – we rebuffed them, not really sure what to do, half expecting a visit from the men in cheap suits. Instead they did something that ultimately scared us much more than intimidation – they bought a stake in the company. It was a simple message. Our backers are business people mostly. To them we are just one of many speculative investments. For some of them at least, it's just a money thing. Make them an offer they can't refuse and they will sell out without a qualm.
"And of course organised criminals are pretty good at making people offers they can't refuse."
Kurt maintained his deadpan expression.
"We agreed to talk to them, told them what I have just been telling you, about how commercialisation was a long way off. And for a time they accepted it. They're thugs, of course, but smart and business-savvy thugs. They understand these things.
"But they do have a tendency to impatience. I guess it comes from being in a results-oriented business. Meanwhile their spies in the Resistance were feeding them all sorts of apocalyptic exaggerations about what our machines could do.
"The pressure was building, so we decided we needed a diversion, some way of fending them off by feeding them information they would believe. Convince them we were telling the truth."
"And were you?" Kurt finally spoke.
"It was the truth and nothing but the truth."
"And the whole truth?"
I acknowledged that there was more to this than was immediately apparent. "No kidding," was his response.
I waited for more. Kurt just shrugged, "You were saying ..."
"So, of course, the diversion was you. I heard about you through Kohei. You appeared ideal for what we wanted."
"Kohei? I was wondering when that name would come up."
"Don't be hard on him Kurt. He had your best interests at heart. He thought this would be good for you. In fact he was worried about you. He understood why you would want to keep a low profile after that incident at the art gallery, but he was concerned that you had become something of a recluse, that you had lost your sense of direction in life. He hoped you might find yourself more than just a new career out of this. He was as unhappy as I was at the need for secrecy and deception."
Kurt gave a wry smile.
"I wouldn't have picked Kohei as a great keeper of secrets," he said. "And yet I never suspected a thing. Or should I say, I knew that something didn't make sense, but I had no idea what it was. Not this anyway."
"Kohei's involvement goes much further than recruiting you, and he is keeping some much bigger secrets. I trust him implicitly, and not only that, he also has the Lance Coriolis seal of approval."
"Coriolis? So I suppose he must have been in on this as well. Does he know I've come to Japan?"
"No. He doesn't know the detail of what I'm doing over here, and if he did he wouldn't care." I paused for a moment. "You haven't had much to do with Lance, have you?"
"Since my job interview? Very little."
"Well, what it is with Lance, he has a form of autism. He is what the psychologists call an idiot savant. Are you familiar with the term?"
"Like one of those people who can do complex mental arithmetic, but not much else."
"Sort of, although Lance's autism is not so debilitating that he can't function in normal society. It manifests instead as an obsessive focus on one particular subject. For Lance, the only thing that matters is the study of human behaviour. When it comes to building the neural scanner, he is obsessively single minded. To him, anything beyond that is pointless distraction. You can imagine the trouble we had getting him to focus on what gangster involvement could imply for our business plans.
"The irony is, if they'd just come and asked him for exclusive rights in the field of recreational drug development, he would likely have signed the contract without hesitation. Not now though. As soon as they acted to threaten his goal, he became their implacable enemy.
"As for you. He understood that we needed you to overcome a potential obstacle. He gave you the investor speech, which he picked out as the one most likely to induce you to tell tales to the Resistance. He vetted you as someone who would be prepared to pass them information. After that, I doubt you ever featured in his thoughts much at all."
"So that was all a setup?"
"I'm sorry. Kohei had tipped us off about the protest at SD headquarters, so we called you in specifically for that day, in the hope that if we got you and them together, it would get the ball rolling. And so it did. The idea was that information coming to the gangsters via you and the protesters would be believed. It's a holding tactic. We don't expect it will keep them off our backs for very long, but it should give us long enough to put certain other arrangements in place."
"You don't seem too bothered that I am no great keeper of secrets myself."
I shrugged. "You were doing what you thought was right. Nothing for your conscience to trouble you about."
"Okay. But why all this subterfuge about your being kidnapped?"
I smiled. This part of the plan was all my own.
"Have you heard the story from the Second World War," I said, "about how the Allied bombers would throw these thin strips of tinfoil out the back of the plane? They called it chaff. It messed with the German radar."
"No."
"Well this is chaff. I had to come here anyway and it occurred to me that doing it this way would throw a joker into the game. With any luck it will have rival factions accusing each other of having taken me. It's like I said, we just need to sow enough confusion to hold people off while certain other plans come to fruition."
Kurt's reaction was not the admiration for my cunning I had been expecting.
"But what about the people back at the company who are worried sick at the idea of your being held by gangsters?"
"To the police I'll just be another missing person. They'll check the records, find I left the country of my own accord. And I hardly think Coriolis will be too put out ..."
"I don't mean Coriolis. Fuck's sake Graeme, there's people who care about you. Miranda has been running around trying to find out what the hell happened."
"Er, okay. Maybe I better get in touch and let her know I'm all right."
"Yeah, maybe you better."
There were a few moments of silence as Kurt glowered.
"Graeme's a clever guy. Everybody underestimate him. Everyone except Coriolis, and me." Shigeru spoke up for the first time, addressing his words to Kurt who looked up as if he had forgotten the other's presence.
He looked back to me. "You said there's more to this?"
"Yes. We have another development team here in Tokyo. Totally independent of Spurious Developments. Well, I say team. When I'm not here, it's just Shigeru. And one other person, though she has a day job she needs to keep, so there's not much she can do on a day-to-day basis. We're on our way to Shigeru's place right now. There are things there you'll want to see."
Shigeru's apartment is in Meguro. In between changing trains at Ueno, Kurt insisted I put a call through to Miranda. It was still night time back home, and today was Good Friday in any case, so I was able to call her personal number rather than have it go through to the office.
Kurt was right. She did sound a little upset at what I had done. I started out trying to explain, but with Kurt hovering, and conscious of the limitations of telephone conversation, I struggled to find the right words. After a quick apology, I handed the phone over to Kurt. He appeared quite keen to speak to Miranda himself.
Arriving at the apartment, Kurt shucked off his travel bag and slumped down on the couch, a smile of gratitude lighting up his face when Shigeru placed a beer on the coffee table in front of him. His expression suggested he was still hovering in that sweet spot between the tension of airline cabin confinement and the onset of jet lag tiredness. It seemed like a good time to hit him with some more of the story.
"You used to live here didn't you?"
He nodded between sips of beer.
"Can you tell the difference between, say, Japanese and Koreans? While I was waiting for you back at Narita, I passed the time trying to see if I could. You know, pick the nationality of the people coming out of arrivals."
He gave me a quizzical look. "Is this something to do with that pattern recognition stuff you kept talking about, back at Spurious?"
"In a way. The thing is, unless I went up and asked each person, I had no way of telling whether I was right or not."
"I suppose not."
"Coriolis has the same problem. He has an obsession with the interpretation of human behaviour, but he is stuck with external clues. He has no way to look inside someone's head to check whether he has got it right or not."
"So? Welcome to the world of the mere mortals. That kind of applies to all of us, doesn't it?"
"No, not the way it does to him. We have empathy ... a constant feedback that tells us what the other person is thinking. We might have it completely wrong, of course, but that doesn't matter. It's the flip side of how it is for Lance – that we can't confirm our guesses doesn't bother us, rather it keeps us safe from contradiction. Most of the time. Empathy for us is an instinct; it all goes on at an unconscious level and we just assume we've got it right ... this sense of the other person that bleeds through somehow into our conscious reactions. It's accurate enough to let us function in the social world.
"But this empathy is exactly the thing that autistics like Coriolis don't have. For him, the reading of a person's face is an entirely conscious and intellectual process. That's partly why he's got so good at it, he doesn't suffer from all the noise that for the rest of us is the real signal. Mostly though, he has got very good at it because it's the only thing he really cares about. The flip side of that, unfortunately, is the incredible frustration he feels at the lack of objective confirmation for what he is guessing."
"Okay, I get it. This is why he wants to build your machine, right?"
"Exactly. And for him that's the only thing that matters. Any other implications that a neural scanner might have are of absolutely no interest to him. A screening technique for corporate recruitment, use in the treatment of the mentally ill, ... to him the machine is no more than a means to an end."
"What about a mind-reading machine as an instrument of political control?"
"Or as a tool for the breaking up of criminal cartels, or as a way to make advertising even more intrusive, ... people are only slowly starting to realize what this machine could mean."
"So you agree the Resistance might be onto something after all?"
"I'm cynical about their motives, and I struggle to take them seriously when they suggest that all we need do is ban the technology and the problem will go away, ... but that this technology could have some disruptive consequences, ... that much I agree with."
I noticed that Kurt had finished his beer. I flicked a glance up to Shigeru, who took the hint and went out to the fridge for another.
Kurt received it gratefully. Poor guy, I thought, feeling a twinge of guilt at laying this on him straight off the plane.
"So you're telling me all this for a reason right?" You could see the weariness returning to his face.
"Yup. I am trying to explain why we wanted you to come to Japan."
"That would be nice to know ..."
"This technology can do things. I think we have established that much. And there are people who are going to realize this and want it for themselves. That means there is only going to be a short window of opportunity before we come under siege. You with me?"
Kurt yawned. "Makes sense I guess."
"So we want to do something that will take it out of their hands. And to do that, we need your help."
Shigeru got up, walked across the room and opened a door.
He waved at Kurt with a patting motion. "Please stay seated. I will give you a proper tour tomorrow. This is our Tokyo lab, okay? Just so you know. It's my spare room."
I continued: "James's machine back at SD still isn't good enough to read minds. But it has spent the last several weeks taking thousands of snapshots of your brain. There is this thing you can do, if you have enough out-of-focus pictures of the same object ... an algorithm you can put it through to produce a single in-focus shot.
"Shigeru's lab here is not about reading minds. It is about something else entirely."