Vector 19/20:06p.m.
Love Hotel Blue Mandara
Tokio Metro, Taihei 37 (Year 2062)
Type of Kill: Fetus Fantasy
Choreographed by J. Hara
Music by Screaming Forceps
Source: Assassincam 92
In a back-alley in Vintage Shinjuku, one of Tokio Metro's oldest and most ambient pleasure-quarters, the Butoh dancer assassin grasped the rung of the fire escape of the anonymous love-hotel and hoisted himself up. Like a bat, he dangled upside-down so as to register the world in its proper gritty perspective.
Still hanging upside-down, he corkscrewed his naked torso. His thong stretched. His pores eavesdropped in every direction. They took everything in.
He could see down drains, smell rot, hear rancid water dripping, and taste dry cremation cinders. He marveled for a moment. There was so much light in all this filth!
He wasn't accustomed to meditating in this paranoid dimension and he was tempted to linger a bit longer. So that he could absorb it more fully.
Then he remembered the man who waited upstairs and realized that he should move faster than his slow Butoh gait. He crawled up the fire escape like a fetus scraping up the ladder on its soft boneless knees.
His left index finger twitched as he released the retractable blade of his favored death weapon, the sickle-sharp 'kamaitachi.'
He entered the love-hotel through the unlocked fire-escape door on the fourth floor.
The Butoh dancer flicked his tongue as he made his way down the narrow passageway. Muffled sounds came from the rooms on either side of the corridor. He heard groans of pleasure. Groans of pain. A scream that went nowhere.
He stood still as one of the screams passed him by. It was the ghost of an orgasm that fell short because its wings were crippled.
THUNK! It dropped on the floor by the Butoh dancer's bare feet. He watched it shrivel and die. He crunched it with his heel and moved on.
The Butoh dancer's tongue was his Michelin Guide. He could read vibrations on it as if he were reading an elaborate menu. Inside that room, a professor from the Imperial Tokio University was reciting ancient poetry from the Kojiki Chronicles to his blind female student who was sixteen years old. It was a private tutorial.
The Butoh's tongue quivered as he decoded the text of the scene inside the love room. The panties the girl wore under the short blue skirt of her school uniform were sewn from the tiny pelts of Korean squirrels. They were the elderly professor's gift to her, a token of his undying love. They met in this love-hotel once a week on Wednesdays. He knew her parents. They were peasants in Hokkaido, Class 4 types, three levels above Korean droids.
The professor was a Class 3 type. The young girl was an evolved 3.5. He had arranged for her scholarship to the university. She was in love with her debt to him. He was kind and forgiving with an occasional vicious streak.
Tonight they were in harmony. He realized how much the squirrels meant to her. She used to have a pet squirrel named Saburo when she was a little girl.
She used to give the squirrel fellatio and then peanuts, which he would eat out of the palm of her hand. That made her laugh and fall in love with poetry.
Ignore them, the Hanging Butoh thought to himself. They were not his targets.
The Butoh closed his eyes and peeped onwards. In another room down the hall, a Zentron comfort-woman lay upon a raised dais in the corner. A young Nipponese army officer held a long rake in his hands. His tunic was unbuttoned at the collar, and his sake-flushed red eyes were feverish.
He raked white sand across the woman's white body as if she were the living embodiment of the Zen garden of Ryoanji temple in Kioto.
When he reached her belly, he would funnel all the sand inside her with his cupped hands. Then he would empty another bucket of white sand all over her naked body and begin to landscape her again. She moaned because she was the Landscape Girl and that was her specialty.
The Butoh dancer assassin frowned. There was too much darkness in this human world. Things had more feelings than man had, he reflected.
He flicked the bitter flavor of this realization away with the tip of his tongue in order to clear his all-seeing taste buds.
There. Inside that room, over there . . . What he had come to destroy. The death which he had already choreographed. The death that he would dance tonight.
Inside the room, the young Nipponese woman wrapped her hand around her lover's member. He was the famous Nipponese bio-anime artist, Tetsuo Ando, creator of "Mr. Asia," the official mascot of the Imperial Nipponese War Effort.
Ando was forty years old, and wore his hair long and stringy in the nineteenth-century Meiji Period's prissy artiste style. He was a dissolute conveyor of official government propamedia.
The young woman's name was Junko. She was twenty-two years old, had long black hair, was sensual, intelligent, and absolutely dedicated to the success of the "Mr. Asia" serial. She was Ando's personal creative assistant, his 'manga-ka.'
In fact, she had taken over the responsibility for storyboarding the government sponsored series. To all intents and purposes, she was Mr. Asia. But she was busy stroking the Nipponese mangaist because that was one of her official job responsibilities along with preparing tea.
Ando was somewhere far away on the Manchurian steppes dreaming up his next panel of REM-'toons.
There was a trance-recording device attached to his fiberoptic scrotum. This was a vital part of the mangaist's creative process. The holder of the patent (Patent No. 20762341) was Master Riuji Ishi, the greatest inventor of psi-peripherals in the world.
As Ando's vital 'ki' energy shot through the 72,000 ethereal 'nadis' of his perineum, the images and conflicts that comprised his next episode would be downloaded into his scrotum.
His young assistant Junko was already linked to the NHK satellite. She was a registered 'miko,' a wartime shamaness who received her training at the Imperial Forces' Yasukuni Military Shrine in Tokio.
As soon as Ando was ready with his episode-in-progress, she would facilitate the transmission.
The daily exploits of "Mr. Asia" were followed avidly all over New Nippon and in the battlefields of North China. Mr. Asia was ten-feet tall, dressed in khaki jhodpurs, wore a samurai ponytail, had big black round eyes, revered the Emperor, was the model of filial piety, and could dispatch twenty Chinese brigands with a single jiu-jitsu throw.
Little Chinese children loved him. He gave them rides on his broad shoulders and instructed them on how to correctly address the Nipponese soldiers with all the proper honorifics.
The Imperial Kwantung Army modeled its fearsome "Asiabot" fighter after this popular anime character. There were battalions of Asiabots in use all over New Manchukuo.
On the battlefield, the Asia-botto was a self-propelling power-walker that could fire 155mm howitzer shells at a range of 246 kilometers. It had combination optical/night vision sight providers designed for searching and tracking enemy forces within a 664-kilometer radius. Those were just a few of its modest abilities. The rest were classified Ultra-Top Secret.
"How am I doing?" Ando asked his assistant. He stared at her fiberoptic-gloved hand. It was obvious to both of them that he was still limp. It was his damned creative indecision again. "Anything yet?"
Junko stopped stroking him and checked the story-meter that hung from his scrotum.
Hmm . . . The young woman frowned as she analyzed the story elements that were required to advance the action for the next episode of Mr. Asia. The Ministry of Sacred Entertainment had set the parameters
>>General guidelines for Mr. Asia, Episode 316: This campaign counts as a 'Wild Martial Arts Campaign, Type One.' Use all the force that you can to subjugate the sub-human resistance. Recommended: No mercy. Bayonet eyes first. Introduce anti-psicoagulants into optic receptacles. Ebola k'ung fu rapid-fire.<<
Ando-san had that sheen of sweat on his brow again. Junko wondered, Was he seeing someone else? Were his attitudes towards the enemy softening? Had he drunk too much sake tonight? His boozing was getting out of hand lately.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she received instant feedback from the official monitors at the Ministry of Sacred Entertainment:
>>Evaluation: Current story energy levels are too low. Author is not fully responding to your stimulation. Please try again harder. Repeat: Do your thing.<<
"Well?" Ando asked Junko, a bit peeved. Junko hesitated before answering him. They were, in fact, fast approaching the broadcast deadline. This situation had occurred before. She was aware of the emotional havoc that would ensue when she told the artist what he must be only too keenly aware of himself.
Very well, she would have to improvise once again. She closed her eyes and stroked him faster. Then she lowered her head to his receptacle and took him in her mouth.
Thirty seconds until broadcast time for Episode 316. Countdown: 29, 27, 25, 23 . . . .
Invisible to both of them, the Butoh dancer assassin entered the room. He stopped to admire her technique. He, too, was conscious of the fact that her efforts had failed to produce the necessary results.
He wondered to himself, Was this the man he had come all this way to eliminate? The creator of Mr. Asia, the rallying symbol of the Imperial New Nippon advance into East Asia?
Truly a pathetic sight. But the Butoh's mission was necessary if the hellish warlords were to be stymied . . . .
The Butoh dancer squatted beside the young female assistant and observed her more closely. Her skin was so white, with an ivory hue. Her breasts were small yet full. As she kneeled before the Nipponese bio-mangaist, her black hair fell over her shoulders and covered her face.
She had beautiful lips, and she used them on Ando to spur him on.
"Nothing yet," she told Ando as she gasped for air. "Just try to relax, please--"
Ando balked. "Wait a moment, Junko-" He made his decision. He had anticipated this very impasse. He rummaged among his personal items that were scattered on the nightstand by the bed.
"What are you doing?" Junko asked him. He was breaking propamedia protocol, and she would have to file a report on him. It wouldn't look good on her record either.
Ando brought out a little packet that looked like a condom. An embarrassed smile crossed his face. "Don't worry, this is just a little pick-me up for the creative flow. More potent than quantum gingko."
He patted her hand paternally. "It's an experimental product. Not in full production yet."
As he tore the packet open, a crystal mist of nanobes erupted from the envelope. Like a cloud of semen with wings, the nanobes were attracted to the loins of the bio-animator as if by the nectar of his genius.
The Butoh dancer immediately recognized the spores. They were the psi-enhanced transmitters of 'Fingermoon.'
He contemplated this new development. So, the Camellia Group >was< amping up production of 'Fingermoon.' But something was wrong. This stuff was definitely bootleg. Someone in the organization was siphoning off its future profits.
He picked up the empty packet from the nightstand and studied the label. There were red concentric circles on the packaging. A zygote with a third eye swam into a circle of moonbeams designed to look like ideograms.
The product was called "Genius 'Gasm."
Ando slipped the shimmering sheath over his finger, not on his penis. He waved his finger around, then pointed it at a corner of the room where a tiny crescent moon flickered into view.
Thousands of crystal rods and winged nanobes sparkled like meteorites made of dew. They darted this way and that in a state of tremendous excitement. It was as if a surge of light had blinded every neural synapse into an Indefinable Awakening.
"How does it work, sensei?" Junko asked Ando dumbfounded.
"I can't tell you what I'm not supposed to know myself," the Nipponese mangaist grinned at her lasciviously. "Let's just say this is a search engine of the 'kami,' of all the gods of Nippon and all of nature. Not yet known to your superiors at the Yasukuni Military Shrine."
"But where did you GET it?"
"On the black market," Ando boasted, immediately regretting his slip of tongue. "Forget I said that."
He grasped her breast and entered her, suddenly erect with all the visions that he was now receiving.
His eyes swooned. He was ready to tell the tale of how Mr. Asia won the war that had not yet been fought. At least not on any earthly battlefield. He would entertain his true public, the dead who had gathered to hear his latest epic (Mr. Asia, #316).
"Ah, sensei!" Junko flinched from the pain. "Stop it!" Panic boiled in her liquid core. The NHK broadcast was on live! Somehow they had managed to bypass the Imperial censors! This had never happened before! This unauthorized bio-anime transmission was being directly psi-'cast throughout all the corners of the Empire of New Nippon.
But Junko wasn't crying because the sensei was pouring his molten essence into the psi-transceiver between her thighs. She was jerking to another rhythm, caught between two opposing tides.
The Butoh dancer had grasped her by her other breast. As he lunged into her from behind, he successfully sabotaged the bio-mangaist's own performance. He did not need to kill him after all. Merely to override him.
The beautiful young medium did not see the invisible Butoh. But she felt his powerful thrusts, and there was no way out for her because Mr. Asia was too crazed and too distracted to rescue her.
She was too polite to ask for Ando's assistance. Besides, there was something frighteningly potent and unsettling about this moment. A moment that she would never forget for as long as she lived.
The white chalk-powdered face that grimaced at her with all the force of the night. The teeth that bit into her neck.
Yes, she could see HIM now!
His ugliness radiated such reckless beauty. Junko was a telepath so she understood the source of his brutal satisfaction. She channeled this demonic creature's REMs, not Ando-sensei's mediocre storytelling skills, into the ether.
>>Vector 8 Top Security News Flash<<
On the battlefields of New Machukuo in Northern China, there is a general Mr. Asia meltdown. The warbots turn their turrets upon Imperial Nipponese troops everywhere and are firing at them at random, cutting them down wherever they stand. Eight hundred casualties per second and counting."
"Was that good for you, Junko?" Ando-sensei asked her afterwards. "I think that was my best performance ever. I must thank you for your help and support. I can't wait to see the ratings. I'm sure they'll be sensational."
Junko was unable to reply because she wore her womb over her head like a facemask. That maniac Ando would have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities. They were already halfway up the stairs, thundering in their boots.
When the Tokko agents broke into the room, they found Ando sitting on the floor with a crazed expression on his face. He kept babbling to himself. "We were doing so well together. How am I ever going to replace her?"
He rocked back and forth on his knees. "What is Mr. Asia going to do now?" Then he noticed the men who surrounded him with revolvers in their hands. "You guys got any ideas?"
>>Time elapsed since entry: Nine minutes and thirty-four seconds. <<