“Coming from the Mojave bash’ I trust you do.” Madame blew on the inside of the vizor before trying it, as if imagining that ants left dust. “I’ll have my maids prepare you a cell.” She smiled, gloating at the ambiguity which left Mushi guessing whether her hospitality would prove a cloister or a jail. “It’s normal!” She exclaimed as the vizor settled in place. I have Utopia’s permission to expose this secret, reader; it is sad to let the mystery die, but better that than let you think that all Utopians have their vizors engineered for war and combat, as Apollo did. “The world’s unchanged!” She gazed about at arm, walls, ceiling. “I expected everything would look like your coat.”

Mushi squinted against the bare air’s unfamiliar cold. “We would hardly work so hard for our utopias if we let ourselves live in the illusion that they are already real.”

She smiled at that. “What are all these floating tags on things?”

“Select one to zoom in. They’re things you can fix or improve: stains or damage, litter, blank walls waiting for art, subjects for research, mysteries, hazards to life or health, clumsy technology waiting for a better alternative.”

She lifted a cup from the nursery table, examining whatever suggestions the vizor made for its improvement. “You see this all the time?”

“Unless I’m watching a movie or something.”

“It would drive me insane. Do all Utopians see this?”

“Almost all. It’s our Infinite To-Do List. It staves off complacency. It’s not easy to maintain a race of vokers in such a comfortable world.”

Madame’s eyes fell on Mushi, dazzled by the calls for medical research and coat improvements which, as she describes it, glittered in the air like fireflies flashing their quick prayers for attention. “It would have been Apollo who was sent for these negotiations, wouldn’t it?” she asked softly, “if they’d lived.”

“No.”

“No?”

“MASON would never have let Apollo set foot here.” Mushi’s bare eyes faltered as they tried to meet hers. “Besides, Apollo was too passionate. Their description of the future would have been too moving for you to be content to give it up.”

* * *

「Yes, Chief Director. 」

Now only Tōgenkyō remains, reader, Asia’s compromise capital, the lotus blossom towers with their inner sides alight with commerce’s neon fire. Tonight their outer mirrors had more to reflect than Indonesia’s seas. Lights of a thousand colors filled the streets between the petals. The day’s disasters, the exposure of O.S., Sniper’s attack on precious ‘Tai-kun,’ the exposure of the Anonymous, the flames at Parliament, all had fueled these Mitsubishi mobs. As sunset crept on in Romanova and midnight’s black in Indonesia, the raging thousands brought their own lights to Tōgenkyō’s streets, a few torch-warm, most electronic, cold as moon-bright ghosts. The blood they screamed for hid above, seven of the nine Mitsubishi Executive Directors sheltering in their administrative headquarters in the greatest lotus’s central stamen spire.

“Where are the other two?” It was Korea’s Director Kim Yeong-Uk who brought English into the room. The five Chinese Directors had been conferring in their own tongue, even the representatives of Beijing and Shanghai united for once by fear as all watched the dance of the police lights trying to shift the crowds below. Greenpeace’s Director Bandyopadhyay was nowhere to be seen. As for Japan, Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi sat at his desk, eyes closed as he concentrated on editing the files which flicked across his lenses, alone.