The Future Is Japanese Read Online Free

walking along the road on a summer evening, my father next to me.
    “We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above.”
    And I’m back in my suit again, alone. My momentary loss of concentration causes me to bang my backpack against one of the beams of the sail, almost knocking one of the fuel tanks loose. I grab it just in time. The mass of my equipment has been lightened down to the last gram so that I can move fast, and there is no margin for error. I can’t afford to lose anything.
    I try to shake the dream and keep on moving.
    “Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”
    “Hiroto, wake up!” Mindy’s voice is desperate, pleading. I jerk awake. I have not been able to sleep for how long now? Two days, three, four?
    For the final fifty or so kilometers of the journey, I must let go of the sail struts and rely on my rockets alone to travel untethered, skimming over the surface of the sail while everything is moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The very idea is enough to make me dizzy.
    And suddenly my father is next to me again, suspended in space below the sail. We’re playing a game of Go.
    “Look in the southwest corner. Do you see how your army has been divided in half ? My white stones will soon surround and capture this entire group.”
    I look where he’s pointing and I see the crisis. There is a gap that I missed. What I thought was my one army is in reality two separate groups with a hole in the middle. I have to plug the gap with my next stone.
    I shake away the hallucination. I have to finish this, and then I can sleep.
    There is a hole in the torn sail before me. At the speed we’re traveling, even a tiny speck of dust that escaped the ion shields can cause havoc. The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along.
    The universe is wondrous.
    I lift a black stone and prepare to fill in the gap, to connect my armies into one.
    The stone turns back into the patching kit from my backpack. I maneuver my thrusters until I’m hovering right over the gash in the sail. Through the hole I can see the stars beyond, the stars that no one on the ship has seen for many years. I look at them and imagine that around one of them, one day, the human race, fused into a new nation, will recover from near extinction, will start afresh and flourish again.
    Carefully, I apply the bandage over the gash, and I turn on the heat torch. I run the torch over the gash, and I can feel the bandage melting to spread out and fuse with the hydrocarbon chains in the sail film. When that’s done I’ll vaporize and deposit silver atoms over it to form a shiny, reflective layer.
    “It’s working,” I say into the microphone. I hear the muffled sounds of celebration in the background.
    “You’re a hero,” Mindy says.
    I think of myself as a giant Japanese robot in a manga and smile.
    The torch sputters and goes out.
    “Look carefully,” Dad says. “You want to play your next stone there to plug that hole. But is that what you really want?”
    I shake the fuel tank attached to the torch. Nothing. This was the tank that I banged against one of the sail beams. The collision must have caused a leak, and there isn’t enough fuel left to finish the patch. The bandage flaps gently, only half attached to the gash.
    “Come back now,” Dr.