Chapter 3

Jimmy didn’t have a phone anymore, not since he’d answered the question ‘Drink Me?’ and had woken later to dead houseplants and unpaid bills. He wasn’t mad at the emergent latency s, he realized the inherent differences, and still considered them as friends but he didn’t have any special concern for their feelings or wishes anymore, since that was just how they were. He didn’t need much, only needed to eat a meal a week, or just nibble a bit here and there instead. He made his feet dark black with a hard demarcation line at the ankle, and presto he was wearing foot-gloves. A pair of sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, some hemp board-shorts and he was set.

Before going into the sea, he lost the shirt and sunglasses, and bought a pitted dive knife and sheath from a kid who had found it in the surf for twenty bucks. After swimming with the spinner dolphins for fifteen minutes he was very thankful he had kept his heavy duty board shorts. Swimming with the spinners is like being in a nude mosh pit full of frottists, gropers, dry-humpers and near rapists. Near only because although the males have prehensile dicks, the females are also quite agile, able to carry about objects they have picked up, or tear an offending member away. They could break the bones in your hand, explain that injury to the doc.

Jimmy found a pod of porpoises who weren’t so damn promiscuous, and it was a much better fit. He learned their sonic stun, which was about like clubbing the fish from behind if you got your aim right. Jimmy played around with it, and was soon driving the fish right into his (with Grandfather One-eye’s timing) hand using Doppler effects to steer them. After closely examining it for any parasites, he ate the fillets.

They showed him some treasure, they knew the concept as related to humans and could extrapolate quite well. It was 500 meters down, inside the crater of a submerged volcanic cone, a natural diamond crystal with out flaw about nine inches long. Jimmy used his newly learned sonic skill to find the harmonics of the crystal, tuning it to a pleasing oscillation, although too highly pitched for human ears before intensifying it and then tapping the side with his knife. It snapped cleanly, a perfectly tuned perfect crystal. He thanked the pod for sharing the treasure and put it in the other pocket of his shorts.

While diving 500 meters, Jimmy had found that his skull was formed of interlocking segments, and the more pressure (to a point, of course) was applied on all sides of his head, the more the plates interacted to resist pressure. He could park a hum-vee on his skull with out crushing it. His back got dark, and his front was pale as he swam efficiently through the water, not with human-like movements but with the sinuous ripples of effort displayed by a sea-dweller. One wearing Rasta-Mar brand shorts.

Arriving Hawaii, Jimmy walked out of the water and made use of the public fresh water rinsing shower nearby. He used the time to even out his color so he less looked the orca. He sold a small diamond he had pocketed as he was re-assigning the feeling of 500 meters of pressure interlocking his skull-plates from headache to depth-indication, and replenished his debit account. Now he wouldn’t worry about ‘L’ any more.

He signed up for some Japanese lessons, Japanese for Business Travelers in the morning, and Conversational Japanese for visitors in the evenings. He also made friends with a Japanese National exchange student attending the University, and they ate lunch together every day. Somehow Jimmy’s lack of appetite never was discussed, maybe because Jimmy always got the check.

Going to an other Country is different from swimming to a different State, so Jimmy had to get a passport, apply for a visa, and buy a plane ticket in order to go to Japan. His friends helped, they were glad to do it. What are friends for, as they understood the concept. They looked out for Jimmy.

Jimmy was able now to remember the shape and meaning of almost all of the most used kanji, even so, Tokyo was a trip. He stopped seeing the flashing lights, preferring a sepia-tone, a grey-brown stripping all the glitz and glamor, and filtered from awareness all meaningless noise of vendors and traffic, then it was just a city which had people living in it.

He managed to sub-lease a walk-in closet with a half-bath, he didn’t need much just someplace to be at times and keep his few belongings. Jimmy went shopping, a new phone couldn’t be avoided and he needed appropriate clothing (a suit is always appropriate in Japan) to visit the ambassador. Not the Japanese ambassador or any other nation, He was going to visit the Robot Ambassador, a humanoid the U of Tokyo Library was allowing self-directing learning and interactions.

Turned out he was a very friendly and social person, curious as the dickens. He politely introduced himself to Jimmy, who he knew all about. The monitors were curious as to why the Robot Ambassador would get an autograph from the strange gaigin. Jimmy went back three days in a row, having all kinds of discussions with the input hungry new being before saying sayonara. A good kid, Jimmy was glad to be his friend.

Jimmy headed north, Ashe was restless in the confines of concrete. He encountered a small tribe of furred folk, reclusive and shy, associating with various shrines to help eke out survival. The Japanese culture deems the hairy ones of the north almost in the cultural niche as ‘boogeyman’. Having managed to exist for centuries, they were less in need of any assistance, but were glad to be friends with Jimmy. They did have to be careful, as if tiger dick and rhino horn were valuable, parts of furred people were treasure to the unscrupulous when sold to wizards, witch-doctors, Satanists, Cannibals and the like, deluded sociopaths or not.

Jimmy by now just automatically assumed the hue of the locals, which was the best he could do to reduce his other-ness, which paradoxically was quite well tolerated culturally in Japan, as long as xenophobia wasn’t triggered. Odd was acceptable, stranger was not. Jimmy could as easily adopt the local accent as he could the proper skin tone of the locals.