Part 1
I'm cold, my body is frozen. it neither shakes nor moves, a rhythmic beeping is the only thing I can hear and it's annoying, it doesn't allow me to fall back to sleep. Light penetrates my eyelids, bringing me to semi-consciousness, I will need to ask to turn it off if I want to get back to sleep. I try to pry my eyelids open, but they do not bulge.
I try to move my hand, but It feels strange, as if my command is not something my hand would consider doing. I try to control my mouth only to find something in it. I puff air out through my mouth and the tube which was in it gets ejected. I cough a dry cough; I just want these lights and sounds gone. My eyelids open slightly, they are now under my control. White sources of light and non-focused vision reveal a man looking at me, "Nurse, he came back to his senses! Can you call the doctor?" leaving footsteps echo making so much noise which makes my brain squeeze. The man leans towards me! "George, my dear nephew, it's so good to see you back among the living, maybe you want some water?" The unknown man is definitely Josh. If someone sounds like Josh and now I can see looks like Josh: a 45 looking bit fat man with brown curly hair and glasses, he is probably my Uncle Josh. "George dear, you really made us worry, I'll call Tom." Before he is able to do that I gather control over my speech and croak "Josh, what the fuck happened?" my cords are dry and it's painful to speak, should have asked for water. Josh pours some water into my mouth "You don’t remember?" and I am able to speak freely now. "I went to Tingaleese frontlines in the forests." I try to remember what happened there, slowly speaking up the images conjured in my mind. "I was filming in the trenches, junta army launched an offensive there, it was impossible to evacuate as the escape route was under fire, don't remember what was next." Josh had his lips pressed against each other the whole time. "You are at the hospital an hour ride from my home, you were transported here by a plane. During your Tingaleese adventures with rebels, you took a bullet, but managed to fight off with a rifle of another soldier. Picture of you lying wounded on the ground in a blue journalist vest and a rifle in hands circled the internet quite fast. I know you wouldn't take a rifle without being in grave danger, but the optics… Let's say it this way, NA Times suspended your license, and I will be hosting you till you get better, okay?"
I turn my head away from Josh and mumble "Shit." Beep.…Beep.…Beep… I rarely cry, never in public. So it's extremely embarrassing now to have tears accumulating on my eyes in front of my uncle, I just hope the angle of my head will cover a few tears that managed to break from my eyes. Josh who's footsteps I've followed was not like me. He viewed his journalistic career as a fancy adventure where he tells stories, and not a calling. I didn't cry when breaking up with my betrothed girl, when my parents died I had to keep it inside, to be strong, the big brother Tom needed. And now losing a job I was doing for almost a decade and I have tears from feeling that this is so unfair. I try to pull the tears back into my eyes with the power of my thoughts, as If I am some kind of a magician who can do that. It obviously doesn't work, but I find it funny. I laugh out, only to feel a piercing pain in my chest. The doctor rushes to me, asking Josh to leave. On the way out Josh turns around "Well, I'd rather have you without a license than not have you at all."
***
2 weeks have passed with me slowly coming back to health, by mostly sleeping and listening to entertainment without any humor in it. I have preferred not to laugh until my lungs are healed, its painful to laugh. News having my name in them were not so good. The junta has used their propaganda machine to make NA Times distance themselves from me. It doesn't look like I will be doing any journalism any time soon. At least hospital bills were covered by workplace insurance. Getting first time out of bed allowed me to see myself in the mirror: I lost some muscle, and can barely be considered fit now. My brown hair can now cover my brows. My skin has lost some of its tanning from Tingaleese sun. I look at my eyes, lack of strain made blue irises stand out on clear whites.
After getting out of the hospital I take my 3 months of severance from NA Times and move to Josh's place where I start the process of looking for new career opportunities. Maybe someone will be in need of my investigative journalist skills.
Days roll into weeks. When looking for a job, having a scandal pop up on search for the applicant's name is not increasing chances of landing a job. So, I open a blog, thanks to a large online following from the war days it's filling my coffers slightly, still nowhere near sustainability level. I don’t want to be a burden for my uncle, I am not 16 again.
Yet my coffers are still half-full, so I am not desperate to work at a bars and kitchens like I was in my late teens, so I look for any story which could bring me my career back, something which could land me a new contract, which will overshadow the controversy I was in a few weeks ago. No success yet.
The only thing keeping me from plunging into a spiral of depression is friends and family with whom I now have a lot of time to catch up. My brother started his psychological practice and got engaged while I was out in the fields, so he assured me that like I was supporting him for years he can easily support me. That is a lie, he would really struggle to pay the bills for both of us and build a family.
Two of us are similar in some things. We don't want to become burdens for people who take care of us. I was working while getting education to pay for it myself, while Tom went even further and went to army, so after that he could fully focus on his education.
Back to the topic. During one of such catch-ups with my friends, family, beer, grill, and a nice film after drunken discussions have erupted. On AI, because what else can 4 journalists and 1 psychologist discuss. "Correlation isn't causation. Haven't we heard that a thousand times already?" Sara exclaimed, rolling her eyes dramatically. Her comment brought forth a chorus of laughter, lightening the previously intense atmosphere. "True," Josh responded, chuckling, "but remember how we uncovered the Albion PM scandal? We didn't have a lead, only patterns and correlations in financial data. Sometimes, that's all we've got." Josh decides to show us a private AI with a terrible interface. "You put a recurring event here, and I will look at all things which correlate with it that stand out for the system. It has even the smallest publications in its database." My mind looks from all the strange things I have encountered. First few tries have shown what we already know: wars starting a couple of years prior to elections, certain policies leading to rebellions, but all these things were already on the web, maybe it just looked for things which had solutions already. A memory came out: When I was working in Tokyo five years ago, there were these strange prolonged brownouts at random times, and none of the locals could explain them to me. There were only a couple of them during my stay of 6 months but strange nonetheless. So I input the Tokyo brownouts and ask the system to find events correlating to them. Output: "Tokyo Brownouts are 95% correlating to fatal truck accidents 3 days prior to the brownout." With "See information bellow" button.
"AI is all-powerful!" I exclaim sarcastically, "these events have zero connection." Everyone, including me, laugh a bit and go back to discussions, but I want to understand why the AI would think so. Gladly, it provides me with links to obituaries and news articles on traffic accidents and brownouts on a timeline, with only three brownouts being without a recorded truck accident, and zero truck accidents not followed by a brownout. "And they say AI will capture the world," I think to myself. My tipsy mind opens the obituaries: a 30-year-old salaryman, a 16-year-old student, a 32-year-old individual known only by name, a 17-year-old student who had medals from Physics and Math Olympics, an under-17 World Taekwondo champion, a biology Olympics medalist… Wait, what?! A strange tick pricks my mind. I sort all of them by categories: Half are high school students. Most are, according to obituaries, some kind of prodigies. The other half has no obituaries, only local news reports with the name, time, and cause of death - accident by truck.
"That's odd. It seems like a disproportionate number of these victims are among Japan's most talented high school students, or there's no information about them, only on their deaths" I say in slightly drunken confusion. I get everyone's attention. "Wait a second." Before proceeding, I quickly check the pedestrian fatality rate on Tokyo's streets, so now I can speak with more certainty. "Guys, what are the chances that on the extremely safe streets of Tokyo you would have 11 prodigies hit by trucks? That's over 1% of all accidents (that was gross overestimation done by my drunk mind), and half the incidents involving trucks?" I look at my colleagues, unable to decipher their confused expressions. I look at myself in the mirror. A desperate man in his early thirties stares back at me. Am I so desperate to find a story that I ended up concocting drunken conspiracy theories about random accidents thousands of kilometers away? My brother sits next to me. I expect he will ask me not to drink any more today. Instead, he takes a look at the notes on my screen. "If I were to guess, maybe it's some kind of a suicide club where teenagers throw themselves under the lorries. Maybe smart kids just don’t want to stop the trains, so they choose to dive under the trucks?" he suggests. His fiancée glances at the notes too. "If I were to guess, I'd say this is a spy program." Sara had investigated government agencies before, so her words carried weight "They fake the deaths of people, perform plastic surgeries on them so they can infiltrate west or China. Maybe they're already somewhere in the US or Hong-Kong, taking on a fake persona created for them." Josh decides to join the bandwagon of building conspiracy theories. "Or we're dealing with a serial killer who targets gifted kids. I know it's probably not as fun as your theories, but I know very little about Japan."
I ask a question to myself: "Are they trying to support me, seeing how desperate I am to find a story, or is this a real story? If it's a spy program I uncover, I'll get my life back."