The Kurushimi Curse

You sat alone in an empty office, staring down at the city lights competing to dominate Hiroshima's city streets from the 75th floor of Hideki Tower. Only a desk and a chair occupied the room beyond yourself, which seemed strange even for the typically minimalist executive offices that populated the building. The office remained dim so you could get the best view of the city, having stared out the window for much of the evening absent-mindedly, curious about the nature of this 'special assignment' for which the board of directors had hand-chosen you based on some of your work. As the lead app programmer for the Ascend project, you had spearheaded a variety of innovations for the Hideki Tech headset, which provided customers with an alternative to the mobile phone by giving users an AR and full-dive VR experience, perfect for gaming and hands-free communication.

Where the Ascend really set itself apart from other tech is the neural connectivity feature--more or less a psychic link between two people wearing Ascend headsets, allowing wearers to remotely experience someplace halfway across the world via their connected counterpart. Most people used the Ascend in 'solo' mode to bypass that bizarre connectivity feature, but the neural connectivity was always on regardless, meaning the Ascend was constantly monitoring a user's senses, memories, and thoughts. Most of that data wasn't used in any way by Hideki, even though they could have easily used it for targeted advertisements if they wished. As a pet project, you'd played around with the idea of a 'Shared Cognitive Environment Network', or SCENE, for a while: a search engine based on the shared memories of Ascend users. If you queried one person's mind for how they remembered the interior of a restaurant they'd visited, the Ascend would pull vague visual data from their memories and render a very rough, perhaps inaccurate representation of the restaurant. If you query a dozen people who'd been there, however... the rendering becomes far more complete. A hundred people? Your SCENE could render a near-perfect 3D representation of the environment, all without the Ascend users knowing their memories were being accessed.

Ethical? Likely not. Useful? Extremely.

After you wrote your whitepaper and presented it at the annual Hideki Innovators conference, an internal company forum to share new ideas, dozens of other engineers and programmers approached you with considerable interest. Could the SCENE generate a view of a place on a specific date? Could it recreate conversations based on what strangers overheard someone saying? Could it accurately generate full representations of people at any point in their life? Could it recreate a full day of activity for an entire city? The surprising answer to each of those questions was yes, as long as enough people had enough fragments of memories to piece together. As more people adopted an Ascend V9 over their ear to replace their phone, your SCENE's query rendering power grew.

You heard a knock on the door, turning to see a woman entering, although the shadows in your dark office obscured her face for some time. You stood and bowed once you saw who had joined you: Reiko Hasegawa, the granddaughter of the founder of Hideki Corp and one of the most powerful people on the board of directors. Reiko bowed politely in return, before walking to the window to look down at the city with you.

"It's a lovely view, is it not?" Reiko said, looking at you. You turned to look at her as well, realizing she was wearing an Ascend V9 headset. Reiko did not speak much English on her own, but the Ascend V9's translation function used advanced AI processing to translate her thoughts and re-route her motor functions for her mouth and vocal cords in near real-time so she could speak almost perfect English to you. You'd worked on that project as well, which was probably the headset's biggest selling point at the moment. "It's been my home my whole life, but I still could not imagine living anywhere else. Although, with the Ascend, I don't really need to be anywhere else to see the world, do I?"

You nodded in agreement. "It's wonderful. Too bad I'm only here for a couple weeks." You turned to look at Reiko. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties, with hair kept in a simple bun, immaculately styled to match her pristine makeup and business attire. While Reiko moved and spoke with a very smooth, calm demeanor, something in her eyes warned you from getting too comfortable around her, like a hornet that might swoop in and sting you at any moment. Reiko wasn't one for smiles, or really any sort of emotion you could read--she had an excellent poker face. "Though, I don't yet know why I'm here. I could've done all of this through the Ascend and experienced someone else's perspective as if I were really here."

"If this were a vacation, that would suffice. I have something far more substantial for you, and I wanted you to be here so I could see the results personally. Tell me, have you made progress on SCENE generation? How far back have you been able to access?"

You pulled out your laptop, flipping open the screen to look at the statistics. "Uhh, let's see. There was a statue in Spiral City in 1932 that five Ascend users remembered seeing in person, it was a pretty small sample. I had to turn on some interpolation rules to fill in blanks, but when I compared it to some old pictures, it looked pretty accurate. That was all on a small screen though, my SCENE models are really small so far. Why do you ask?"

Reiko almost smiled, you could sense it. She never did, her emotional defenses seemed insurmountable and you wouldn't want to try to guess her intentions based on expression alone. Still, you could almost feel the slight amount of excitement that she, like many at Hideki, felt when they were about to reveal something that might momentarily be mistaken for magic. She tapped the side of her Ascend, and hundreds of small projectors hidden throughout the room's ceiling, floor, and walls lit up at once, recreating in three dimensional space the Spiral City founder statue in life size! You knew the statue extended taller than the office ceiling you currently resided in, and yet the projectors seemed to be able to compensate, creating an illusion that made the room seem far taller than you knew it to be, such that the statue could 'fit'. Needless to say, you were in awe of the impressive detail of the object brought to life before your eyes, almost as if the real thing stood before you.

"It's peculiar to me that my lead programmer on app innovations doesn't use our own technology, otherwise I'd have simply shown you the Ascend integration so you could view this in AR. However, that gave me a chance to have one of my own teams innovate on this hologram room to provide a new avenue for innovation in the tech department. Enough conspiracy theorists won't use the Ascend for fear that we might turn them into a digitally-manipulated zombie, as if television and mobile devices didn't do so already, thus the Ascend adoption rate still only sits at about one in five thousand people worldwide. 0.02% of the population have purchased the Ascend, but I've found that donating these devices to elder care facilities has seen a strong adoption rate of the tech, thus tripling the accessible minds. I don't care about sales in this case, but users. Because I have mysteries to solve, as do you now."

You blinked, pulling yourself away from examining the statue, able to even read the detailed inscription composited from the memories of what must have been hundreds of elderly minds recalling their thoughts for the Ascend network to tap into and generate the image before you. "Mysteries? Like what, you want to see what would make old people want to buy more Hideki stuff by digging into their memories and make some sort of retro gadgets?"

"No, nothing like that." Out of seemingly nowhere, Reiko produced a multitude of manila envelopes, setting them on the table with each label visible. You recognized some of the writings on each: Hideki. Yabusa. King. Shaw. But one folder, you did not recognize: Kurushimi. Before you could express your confusion verbally, Reiko continued. "These are my mysteries. Specifically, I have multiple companies whose fates are intertwined with one another--three giants that exist in a hesitant truce and measured competition, and one vicious newcomer who might topple everything. I know what my company's board tells me they know, but there are secrets that extend far beyond my knowledge, even for the company my grandfather founded. These secrets exist in the heads of many of the people who have been receiving complimentary Ascend V9 units over the past few months."

"Wait... you want to probe around in peoples' memories for top-secret corporate info? Isn't that illegal for them to tell us? Or for us to collect, somehow?"

While Reiko never smiled to show happiness, you could sense the cold displeasure in her eyes at your accusation. "If you talked in your sleep and divulged someone confidential information about your work, you would be blameless. In somno voluntas non erat libera--the sleeping one has no free will. And you know full well that these memories never emerge beyond the subconscious, thus the Ascend wearers have no awareness that anyone probed their minds for anything. If they claim, somehow, that this is a violation of their privacy and yet cannot name specific details of the violation, then they have no ground on which to stand. And they will not find out, because you will quietly pursue the queries in those folders to the best of your ability, since you know how to best make your system respond to prompts to tune it for accuracy, and then you will write down your results and give them only to me. Understood?"

This felt like an incredible ethical problem, but given that Reiko personally asked--demanded?--you to undertake this task, you didn't have much choice but to obey if you wanted to keep your job. You nodded slightly, and Reiko relaxed.

"Good," Reiko said. "You can research the companies in any order you wish, I recommend reading the provided summaries of what is already known about each topic so you do not waste any time on redundancy. Query for specific dates in time, locations, and people; get me full transcripts of conversations, building layouts, access codes, project names, anything and everything that looks useful."

You put your hand on the last folder before you. "I've heard of these other companies, but what's Kurushimi?"

"Not a company," Reiko said quietly, "but it is the most important of all. It defines my grandfather and his counterparts more than perhaps anything else you might learn in your research. Kurushimi means suffering, and it is a curse, as one might read in a fairy tale. Going back nearly a century to recover information on such an event might be nearly impossible, but I've targeted as many people in the Shiga prefecture as I can with Ascend V9s who might have the information I need that even they aren't aware their minds contain. So, I expect the impossible from you--I want details on the days before and after my grandfather Hideki Hasegawa and his partners, Daisuke Yabusa and Archibald King, awoke the curse."

The founders of Yabusa Motors, Hideki Corp, and King Enterprises all in one location at once, unleashing an ancient magic curse? That did sound outlandish. But if Reiko wasn't lying to you for some reason...

Reiko tapped her Ascend again before she walks toward the door. "You have two weeks to produce your first report for me on the topic of your choosing. After that, we shall see whether or not you'll be suitable as the new director of R&D for the tech department. Don't disappoint me."

Just like that, you were alone in the dark, with five mysteries to unfurl, apparently.