Free Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii Page A

the invitation gesture, lifting his glasses slightly off his nose.
    I blinked twice to enter his stage. Kurokawa was suddenly “normal” size. Now the back seat really felt crowded. He put a finger to his lips to indicate Private Mode.
    I accepted the invitation. Everything outside the back seat turned murky. Nguyen and the driver became gray avatars. This was about the best you could expect from a portable AR stage.
    I felt the subtle pressure shift in my ears and throat signaling the switch to physio-feedback mode. Now our bodies would give no indication of our conversation and gestures to outsiders.
    Kurokawa pointed to a sticker on the window. It said in Japanese, let our beautiful interpreters assist you at no charge!
    “I was going to mention this at the airport, but Chinese characters and Japanese signage are all over the place here. Why didn’t she know her sign was upside down? She must’ve known what she was doing.”
    “Maybe she just goofed. Yagodo used calligraphy. You saw her jam her finger. She’s a bit of a space case.”
    “I don’t know … Oh, I guess you’re right. Sorry. Please forget it.”
    Kurokawa managed a bow in the cramped space and deactivated the stage. We had only been in Private Mode for a few moments, but I was hoping I would see slightly different scenery when we came back out. No luck. At this rate we wouldn’t get to the hotel until after dark. It was getting ridiculous.
    I leaned toward Nguyen. “How long to drive?”
    “I guess forty-five minutes since now.”
    “Nosso long,” said Kurokawa. “Itsu bam to bump. Iz itsu yujual?” He pointed at the traffic. I liked his attempt at “bumper to bumper.”
    “Not so usual. It’s second of three heavy traffic time in a day. It will finish soon.”
    How did these two manage to communicate? Maybe they just had the timing down.
    We chatted with Nguyen about her job, starting with her hiring a few months earlier and moving on to the purpose of our visit. I was hoping she’d have some information about what Yagodo had accomplished so far, but she had nothing to offer.
    When we asked about Yagodo himself, she became very talkative. Yagodo was a “wizard” with technology. He knew just about everything, and when it came to computers he could do anything. He was based in Vietnam because of its easy access to the Internet, particularly to old Google cache servers.
    When I ventured a bit of skepticism about the existence of such servers, Nguyen told me something “special” she’d heard from Yagodo. Just a rumor, of course, but just after the Lockout, a group of hackers had commandeered a container ship moored off Singapore that was serving as a backup server farm for Google. After a few years the ship showed up at Saigon Port. It sounded preposterous, but I had to admit that it was also a bit more plausible than some of the rumors I’d heard about the fate of the vast pools of data from the Internet era.
    As we were chatting, the traffic finally started moving again. I spotted women walking along the road who were dressed in the same style as Nguyen. I asked her if it was some kind of fashion trend.
    “No, we call it ao dai, ” she said proudly. “National dress of Vietnam.”
    As we continued chatting about nothing in particular, the taxi emerged from a district of shops and food stands and arrived at a huge traffic circle.
    “Here we arrived. Thanks for your patient for long driving. We hope you to prefer this hotel, Ambassador.” She pointed to the colonial-style entrance of a hotel facing the circle.
    *   *   *
    I tossed my bags in the room, changed my T-shirt, and headed for the lobby. Kurokawa hadn’t even gone up. He was sitting on a sofa next to the luggage trolley with his briefcase on his lap. Nguyen was across from him. The beautiful girl in her ao dai and the tiny salaryman were a conspicuous pair.
    We followed her out the revolving door into a sunlit furnace heavy with the scent of coriander. The heat