Maybe he really was “weird-wired,” as the neighborhood kids in every neighborhood he’d ever lived in had so often suggested in their not-so-subtle ways. Always their had been the strange mismatches, the overlaps, and double exposures in his picture of the world. The nights of sitting suddenly bolt-upright in bed, spewing streams of seemingly incoherent speaking-in-tongues gibberish, were bad and never infrequent enough—it drove his brother Seiji crazy—but that was nowhere near the beginning of his problems.
Even as a small child he had not just seen and talked with imaginary friends but had experienced flashes of entire alternate realities, leakage from parallel worlds and other people’s dreams. He had never been able to put together what his parents told him with what the world told him, either. For as long as he could remember, whenever any reference to sex came up on the TV, in movies or holos, his mother always shut it away from her boys. Surely there must be something dirty and evil there, for his mother to always react so, but he had never been able to figure out precisely what it was.
Jiro remembered a greenhouse summer evening six or seven years back, when he’d been tagging after Seiji and a neighbor kid, Rudy, as usual. When Seiji began to talk with Rudy about girls, Jiro had run home shouting and crying, “Mom! Mom! Seiji and Rudy are talking about sex!” After that, Seiji had looked at him with a mixture of fear and disgust.
He was shy and backward and awkward. In the one-size-fits-all world, Jiro just didn’t fit in. He didn’t like seeing his own face in the mirror. Something about the widow’s peak in his dark, wavy hair, the wide-open innocence (always too soft and too lost) that his brown eyes imparted to his too-round face—all boyish to the point of femininity. He was good-looking for a boy, but too girlish to look like a man.
In two years, when he finished his undergraduate degree in Computer Media Studies, he would be eighteen—a precociousness that hadn’t much helped. The mismatch was worst when it came to girls and dating and all the indecipherable rites of twenty-first century courtship. He pedestalized the girls from afar, unable to approach them. In his mind they were pure as bright shining light—brilliance that he would never dare darken with the shadow of his lust.
Jiro took refuge in books and the net and the life of the mind. In his research and reading he had found a term for his condition: “socially maladroit.” Ever since he entered his teens, he had withdrawn more, cocooned himself. Socially, he had gone into cybernation, but that was okay. More and more people his age were doing that. All the experts said they would grow out of it.
This was a world worth withdrawing from, what with the rise of the churchstaters and all. He glanced at one of Seiji’s obnoxious glow-in-the-dark holoposters, which showed a montage of humanity’s wars, murders, mayhem, fanaticism, famine, plagues and pollution, all being watched by wide-eyed, antennaed young aliens, the cautionary caption reading PROFESSIONALLY TRAINED STUNT SPECIES! DO NOT TRY THIS ON HOME PLANET.
That about said it. The more arcane and the further away from mundane existence he got, the better. For years Jiro had been fascinated by birds, and from them he came to be intrigued by eagle dancers—then generally fascinated by Native Americans, by indigenous peoples of the New World and their lifeways. The walls of his side of the room were covered with full color holos of birds of prey, crowded with external memory media about New World indigenes. He had participated in online debates about the first arrival of humans in the New World, the old controversies surrounding Indian gaming, the reality or hoax of the South American tepui that had lifted off a decade and more ago—all manner of things distant enough to distract him from his daily life.
With his brother Seiji he had tried to talk about his problems, but he’d never gotten very far. There seemed always to be a wall of enforced normalcy between them—a glass fishbowl wall, which made a certain sense, since Seiji had been intrigued by tropical fresh and saltwater fish and by fishbowl-helmeted astronauts for as long as Jiro could remember. To Seiji’s aquarist-astronaut way of thinking, any problem the Yamaguchi brothers could admit to having was the product of their being happa—half Nipponese, half Anglo—in what was still largely a Caucasian-dominated culture. Add to that being raised male with a docile daddy and domineering mommy and that could explain a multitude of problems, at least according to Seiji.
If Jiro felt that the world leaked dreams, that he dreamed in other people’s heads and other people dreamed in his head—that was simply paranoia,by his brother’s reckoning. Seiji was particularly big on the once-repudiated but now revived theories of “schizophrenogenic mothers” and “marital skew.”
“It’s no surprise we’re mentally bent,” Seiji said. “Home environment plays an etiological role in the development of schizophrenia—especially when a father has yielded to a dominant mother, so that the father doesn’t provide a strong masculine role model for the male child.”
Jiro suspected his older brother was parroting what he had heard in his Intro to Psychology course. That was too simple an answer, however—especially when the renewed popularity of such “Blame Mom” theories was really more about keeping women in their place than anything else. Jiro soon stopped looking for answers in that psychosocial direction. Someday he might get desperate enough to seek them there again, but he hoped not.
He searched through print and screen and the whole infosphere for answers—from science and religion, theology and technology. He suspected that his experience of this leakage of dreams between minds was an effect of something much deeper—of something he could only describe to himself as a unity in the universe, profound and undeniable, always there, no matter how hard it might be to pin down.
That was not what he found in his research, however. From his searching it seemed to him that, over the past century and more, bleeding-edge theology had been pushing toward a religion without transcendence, and bleeding-edge technology had been pushing toward a transcendence without religion.
He flirted with the idea of joining the Cyberite sect for a while. Their great myth was a messianic faith in the power of media—the idea that, if a correct-thinking band of rebel do-gooders could just take control of all global media for a few minutes and in those few minutes broadcast The Truth to the entire planet, all humanity’s problems would be solved. Jiro quickly came to suspect, however, that the Cyberite myth failed to take into account the fact that most people—when hit with too much confusing or uncomfortable or abrupt truth—quickly fall back on their established prejudices to do their thinking for them.
The more traditional religions weren’t much different. Media, Gospel, Logos: what was the difference, really? For all the traditionalists’ talk of original sin, it seemed to Jiro that sin was never very original. Mostly, it seemed to be copied from parents and friends and neighbors and the whole social world, as far as he could tell. He searched the infosphere for a sustainable religion—one whose first law was not “Make more disciples!”—but he was damned if he could find one.
All the traditional systems seemed to reduce human life to a chain-letter sent by God or Global Operations Director or DNA. In one form or another, the missive prophesied that, if he followed the genetic generic rules and kept the Message going (Procreate! Propagate the faith! Expand market share!), Good Things would happen to him, his stock would split and rise in value, he would go to heaven. But woe to him if he ever broke the chain of double-helical commandments—Bad Fortune would befall him, his stock would crash, he would go to hell.
So much of theology was so full of tautologies, it seemed to Jiro, but even that was to be expected. The world’s religions, in their various ways and paths to The Truth, had about them the false eternity and infinity of an endless march along a Mšbius strip, and Mšbius strips always made a one-sided argument. Purely materialist science wasn’t the way through either. An event horizon of perpetual approximation, a reference-frame illusion clothing a star’s collapse down to the unknowable nowhere and nowhen of naked singularity, the reductive scientific approach seemed to him at best a black hole promising to someday explode with The Answer—though its fuse, unfortunately, was calculated to be far longer than the lifetime of the universe.
Still, he hoped that, buried within the dogmas of religion and the theories of science, he would find some strong hint of the sustainable and sustaining