Chapters (41)
Kaori had to lower her cactus-shaped margarita glass before she spilled it, and her honking goose laughs got us all cracking up until we swatted the table like stop, my stomach can’t take this.
“Okay,” I said, wheezing air. “Here’s my favorite part.”
KAORI (VOICEOVER)
We – with permission from the Timbasha Shoshone, Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute Nations – moved to a temporary facility at the site of the former Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations, once known as Nevada. We hoped to repurpose the concrete tunnels and chambers that scarred the earth and create a safe environment to study the device away from the rest of the world. There, an international team of researchers first switched on the device and learned that it is capable of calculating unimaginable amounts of data to predict the most probable future outcomes.
“Hold up,” I said. “Rewind. Who’d they pick to lead this black-ops brain trust?”
Flashing a toothy fox smile, I locked my eyes with Yusuf’s and started a drumroll on the table that rattled the little dishes of salsa against our glasses.
Who, then, to run the Envisioner Initiative? Not that it was called that in the early days. A cosmologist? Astrophysicist? Theoretical physicist? Blam-o—Dr. Kaori Nakamori was that and more. Her parents had crammed her with a steady diet of now-banned evil-genius grade nootropics and Mozart symphonies basically since birth, hoping she’d snag a job when she was older. High-sea piracy had been a more stable career than whatever work you could find in Japan. A global life expectancy crawling past 110—even higher in Japan with their healthcare breakthroughs—plus a booming synth workforce meant people brawled into their nineties for whatever non-automated jobs they could find. Suicide, especially after the yearly workforce placement exams, was the leading cause of death in Japan, which had ignited the world population boom with gene-editing therapies and mandatory cancer inoculations. Thirty years after Kaori had been born, the nation would join most of Europe with universal income for citizens—America had been among the holdouts then and now, cramming her fingers in her ears and lighting candles in a séance for the long-dead ghost of capitalism. Kaori had led her class at Tokyo University when she was fourteen and had left for the University of Oxford at sixteen. She’d led the initial JAXA team, so who would they pick to lead the multinational research coalition?
“Dr. Kaori motherfucking Nakamori, bitches,” Kaori said, cheersing the air.
I miss those times with the three of us, which I know is weird to say since not long after that afternoon she’d start chasing us across universes and hunting us down like dogs. But that was the last time the three of us were really happy together.