There Are Many Tokyos In Flower

Chapter 5: Cross the Information Highway

Doctor Rin Porter's two assistants had already left, a development Marin found profoundly suspicious. But when he brought it up with Rin, she only shrugged and waved it off as eager lab assistants hoping to get their equipment ready.

"Relax, Martin. They're just graduate students. They barely know more about my research than you do," Rin said, as she mounted her motorcycle and turned on the running lights. "And frankly, if I didn't know you better, I'd be worried you'd run off with the package and make yourself even more obscenely wealthy than you are."

Martin was about to reply, was drawing in a breath to speak, but Rin stopped him by holding a finger straight up in the air. She pulled a phone out of one of her pockets and glared at it for a moment with her artificial eye. She nodded, and turned her phone around to show him. "Is this what you were about to say?"

On the screen it read: I'm already spraining my imagination trying to spend the money I have.

"Guess I've been saying that a lot, lately," Martin said.

"That's the danger with recycling lines," Rin agreed. "If you're not careful, who knows what could become your catchphrase."

"Look, Rin." Martin stepped in front of her bike. "I'm a bit worried about how blasé you are about all of this. Dangerous things have a habit of pulling dangerous people out of dark corners, like mushrooms sprouting in someone's yard. And in a city this big, there's bound to be both people willing to take it for money, and people willing to pay a lot for it."

"Relax, Martin." Rin patted him on the shoulder reassuringly, like he had just learned the coronavirus was hundreds of years old and might not ever go away. "You'll be fine. I'm sure of it."

Rin turned her bike back on, the neon-blue glow of the running lights filling the cargo hold. BIRD, on Martin's shoulder, turned its head left and right to examine it. "Great. Fat wheels, long body that you practically have to lie on, covered in pointless stretches of neon light, and no windscreen to speak of. You're one dramatic pose and 'I fight for the user' away from calling this a TRON bike. What do you call it, to avoid copyright infringement? A gigabike?"

Rin smiled, seemingly both oblivious to BIRD's derisive snark, and impressed by his answer. "How'd you guess?"

"I just ask myself 'what would disappoint me most'," BIRD muttered.

"Okay then. Can we get going?" Rin asked, her voice rising a little and straining by the end of her question. It was the first real sign of impatience she showed since she had seen the contents of the case Martin now carried.

Martin strapped the case to the side of his bike, checked his shotgun's straps one last time, and sat down. The bike booted-up like a small child being shown an ice cream sundae, and the onboard screen lit up with a psychedelic display of light like it was trying to murder an epileptic.

"I'll follow you," Martin said to Rin, and he put on his helmet.

Rin laughed.

"What bit of goddam cyberpunk sacrilege did I commit this time?" Martin asked, lifting the visor.

"We don't wear helmets," Rin said. "We spend too much time on our hair to not show them off while we ride."

"Is that why we're not travelling in cars?"

"Same reason, yeah. Only motorcycles in Neo Tokyo. We tried flying cars for a while, but people kept crashing them." Rin shrugged.

Martin slapped the visor back down. "This city is stupid."

"See if you feel the same way, once we start driving," Rin said, and kicked her motorcycle into motion.

And it went fast. Martin wasn't sure if the sound it made was the engine screaming or a sonic boom. Rin launched like an escape pod shot out of a smuggler's cargo bay at the first sign of a patrol ship, and was a speck in the distance in less time than it took Martin to say 'woah'.