Kaimei felt the knife work its way through her stomach. It felt just like it did the first time, and the time after that. The pressure was the worst part, heavy on her gut as she tried weakly to push the blade all the way through. It punctured, tooth after tooth, and she bled, and all of the normal things that she had grown desensitized to happened in due course as she slowly passed out in the pool that flowed out around her shimmering robe.
It might not stick, she thought, but damn it if it didn’t feel good.
She could feel the control lifting from her limbs, the sweeping final stab collapsing midway to the goal as the nanites found her motor cortex. Already, they’d begun repairs on the existing damage, leaving Kaimei to lie helplessly as the flesh around her stomach patched itself over like the pixels of an image loading on her computer screen. She could still twitch her fingers, though the motion was less than functional. Despite this, she got lucky and managed to wedge the dagger into the open wound just before it could seal over. The longer it stayed open, the more dopamine the nanites released, the longer she could stay under…and that was the real game, after all. That was why she was the best.
But it was a minor distraction. For a moment, they continued sealing her off around the thick blade, the new skin already bleeding again as it fused around the cold metal teeth. With every spasm of her listless body against the floor, the knife wobbled ever so slightly inside her, tearing the tissue as quickly as the nanites could mold it. Kaimei was ecstatic; she had never managed to get the dagger back in before the neural takeover on a stabbing. It was going to be a good show.
There was a moment of nothing. No patter in the back of her stomach, not even the usual dope hallucination that drifted into the last few seconds of the process. Just the music. In the fourth injection, technicians programmed a small splinter payload that delivered shitty pop tunes to the ear canal during regeneration. Nice for those purposeful folk who only did this once or twice with actual intent, but miserable for the ‘ciders who had to endure the same vintage Rain single over and over again. Maybe that was their subtle way of saying “fuck you” to those who would abuse their program. Kaimei gave a stiff wince. The message was received loud and clear.
Her eyes flitted back and forth, the best her paralyzed features could muster. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the collage of faces on her screen. At least three thousand had registered for this session, each paying upwards of 200,000 yen for the privilege of watching the direct feed. She could have performed for a blank screen, but Kaimei wanted to see the eyes of her patrons, no matter how small. A few pale gaijin stood out among the blanket of tiny heads; she wondered what sort of premiums they had been charged to break through the network. Their expressions were cold, though what else would one expect from someone who paid to watch a girl die? It didn’t matter. She wasn’t doing this for them. This was for him.
Kaimei had been ‘ciding for a year, though this was the first time that Ikiro had asked her to do a live showcase. She had gotten exponentially better in the short time since she’d started; what began as simple wrist-cuttings had evolved into more complicated maneuvers, the kind that stood out amongst the thousands of wannabe suicide girls who threw themselves at Ikiro’s profile like blind fish against a dam. She never commented, only performed, and her last upload of an underwater disembowelment had gone viral within hours, breaking even Japan’s network walls to spread internationally. The Americans got their first glimpse of the nano underground with Ikiro’s landmark first broadcast suicide in 2011, before the digital secession was instated by Emperor Naruhito to “preserve culture.” To think that Kaimei was the first glimpse to the world of what they had become since was exhilarating. She found purpose in it.
It was an honor when he messaged her; after the national break-away, he became a digital hermit, only emerging every other year or so to select a new wave of featured Jisatsus for his website. That he hadn’t contacted her sooner was surprising; it had been at least six months since she made headlines, and she had half expected a glowing invitation the day after, lavishing praise on her remarkable achievement in legitimizing their art. The delay, maybe, was her punishment for threatening to take the counter culture he had so carefully fostered out of his hands and into the tidal wave of popular media. But there came a time when even he could not deny the community what it wanted. His correspondence, thus, had been terse.
“You’re getting there,” he wrote. “I’ll let you perform in my show.”
She didn’t have to think twice about the offer. Not that the thought crossed her mind, but to deny Ikiro was a social death penalty, more painful than anything she could inflict upon herself. Though the adults would never acknowledge it, he had managed a stranglehold on the new youth of Japan without the frivolities of religion or politics. Ikiro’s followers didn’t need any extraneous motivation; the disillusionment in the old culture was enough to make them follow anyone strong enough to step forward. And whatever popularity she had garnered, it was still nothing compared to the public reins he gripped so tightly.
He had requested of her a simple method for her performance: a jigai, harkening back to the samurai culture of previous centuries. She had never considered nostalgia particularly appealing, but she accepted the suggestion gratefully. Kaimei received a package in the mail the day prior, simple brown paper without postage. In it was a beautiful red robe, silk at the least, and a heavy, curved dagger, lined with dozens of sharp jags carved into either side. At the base of the smooth wooden handle was a faint inscription: “For your death.”
Her pelvis shot up, arching her back off the ground as she felt the full force of the thick jags inside her for the second time in minutes. Her vocal cords wouldn’t let her scream, a function of convenience installed in the fifth injection to prevent neighbors from having to suffer the travails of their suicidal flatmates. This, no doubt, a response to the glut of would-be ‘ciders who tried to follow in Kaimei’s footsteps. Her throat produced only a raw groan, but her eyes welled up with an outpouring of tears that diluted the stream of blood which had worked its way up to her neck. They were working inside of her, she knew this, but the first shot of local anesthetic was wearing off quickly before they could react to that rebellious last stab. Real pain seeped through the blaring j-pop anthem in her head and she strained to find some contortion of her body that would relieve the pressure.
Another second passed by, stretched into an eternity by the sharp waves moving up and down her spine. Another second. They finally recognized the invading blade, and within another second, her once flopping arms and legs went completely limp. The nanites weren’t compensating, she realized, or merely course-correcting. They were just running the whole thing over again. The second hit to Kaimei’s motor cortex paralyzed her, her body still recovering from the impact of the first shutdown. That was new. She hoped that was something they could fix.
Again, she felt the tingle in her gut, the movement of new flesh underneath the surface trying to find a hole to cover. Her neck ignored the frantic signals from her brain to try and see what was happening, leaving her rapid blinking as the last vestige of emotion, wasted on the ugly taupe ceiling that regrettably held her gaze. She fought to see past her eyelids, past her breasts. The knife was still sticking out, she could see that much. Something oozed up the blade, turning the ashy gray of the metal into a translucent pink. It was enough to elicit “ooh”s and “ah”s from the watchers, but the second round of dopamine rolled her eyes back in her head before she could care why.
Colors slipped out of her brain and across her corneas, floating out and open into the room above her. Suddenly, the world became clear. Kaimei could see the tiny machines working inside her, swarming down the pulsing stream of reds and blues that formed her being, intersecting and separating across the vast highway of nerves and veins she housed inside her. She could feel her eyes turn and commanded them to go further. Let me see, she ordered, and they obeyed, sliding back into her sockets so that she could watch with clear perspective the prevention of her death.
The nanites poked and prodded at her brain, sliding up and over the hills of her mind and disappearing into any exposed cracks or crannies they could navigate. The technicians had never explained fully the functions of the machines, only that they were “benefits to public health.” Kaimei’s first vaccination was not a choice; the Emperor required all children junior high school-age or younger to receive them as part of the “Tomorrow Youth Act.” Peering inside herself, she couldn’t help but wonder which of the tiny bots were the originals, and which had joined them in subsequent vaccinations. Not that it mattered; they were all a team now anyway.
A pair of rogue nanites slipped away from the pack and she followed them down her brain stem and through the maze of organs and tubes, passing by dozens of other machines who would stop long enough to fix a slight tear or imperfection before sliding off down the stream. They dodged a flooding pool of red coming at them to emerge onto a massive steel tower sliding out of the rubbery ground beneath it. The pair dashed away to join a battalion of at least a thousand other nanites, all tinkering desperately at the invading dagger head. She reached out, her arms replaced with the same metallic grasshopper legs as the bots, and followed suit in trying to do something, anything to halt the invading behemoth. It pulsed forward again, deeper.
The clack clack clack of the thousands of tiny limbs working in tandem was starting to drive her crazy. More were joining by the second, an impossible swarm that seemed to come from nowhere. And it wasn’t the din, necessarily, but how familiar it all sounded. All the cacophany of struggling nanites needed was lyrics and it would sound just like–
Shit. That fucking Rain song.
Her eyes snapped open, the familiar taupe ceiling still hovering above, and sucked desperately at the air trying to catch a breath as it passed. A gust of something, far too painful to be air, filled her lungs enough to satiate the heaving for the moment. Another dope release has to be close behind, she thought. Kaimei couldn’t tell whether what she was feeling was nervous exhilaration or something else entirely. She could tilt her chin up now, that was progress. The paralysis was lifting, however slightly.
She took advantage of the newly allowed mobility and quickly scanned the room. The monitor was still filled with faces, though there was some kind of stir within the crowd. The undulating mosaic of heads looked like wriggling maggots against the backlit screen. She could barely make out a few of them pointing at her, hands over mouths, or yelling offscreen for a friend to come see.
Her arms let her prop herself up again. As she bent, the pain struck through, the dagger tearing into her folded stomach muscles. Still couldn’t scream, but the wheezing was vicious. This wasn’t how this went. She had seen a jigai before; normally the nanites would just push out the blade before finishing the repairs. Simple. But it was still in her, sinking inch by inch into her gut as she saw the last patch of the knobby wooden handle swallowed by synthetic skin. The tingle of the new flesh pushed down gently on the dagger, helping it along as it cut a path through the fresh tissue they had just worked so hard to reform.
She tried to grab at the skin-covered handle, though her arms were still less-than-agreeable and only managed to hit it in a passing flail. It was enough to slice through the thin layer of flesh and expose a bit of the quickly-disappearing blade. The metal was…different somehow. Streaks of darker gray flowed across the surface, the knife taking on a sort of thick milky quality. The puncture sealed itself over before she could get a better look.
Kaimei could feel the dark flow release inside her, crashing through the walls of her stomach and up her chest. Within a minute, any semblance of the dagger was gone, the matter sucked inside her without a trace. The pain remained. Veins that she had never knew existed popped up from her arms and legs, her neck, her face. She went limp again. This invader, this poison, was hitting her quicker than the nanites could repair. She could feel her consciousness lifting, her eyes beginning the slow roll back into her head without the cushion of hallucination to aid the process.
As the veins began to pop open the surface of her skin, the streams of color poured out again, very tangible reds and blues seeping into the floorboards. Kaimei wished she could see inside again as the virus broke down her body piece by piece. She turned to watch her fans as they watched her collapse, hoping their adoration would provide what the dopamine wasn’t, but the screen had frozen.
Little by little, the faces of the crowd shifted themselves like a slider puzzle, reorganizing themselves into familiar features and shadows. Her eyes went wide, the eyelids deteriorating off her face. Ikiro’s visage emerged from the thousands of observers and a smile oozed across his face. His correspondence, thus, was terse.
“You’re getting there,” he said. “But you’re not there yet.”
