The Gate of Sorrows (3 page)

“No way. My father’s just a salaryman.”

“What does that have to do with it? Sure you’re not interested?”

Going into law enforcement or the military had never even remotely occurred to Kotaro. “I mean, both of those jobs are pretty tough, right? Taking orders from superiors and stuff like that?”

Seigo put a hand on his head and rubbed his summer haircut, which was cropped almost to the skin.

“Hmm. Okay, so you don’t like ranks and orders and so on.”

“Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t handle it.”

“Seriously, I think you’d make a good cop, Ko-Prime. Haven’t you noticed? I always thought you were looking for a way to help people. Help the world, you know? At least a little.”

Kotaro had to laugh at that. “You gotta be joking.”

“Really? You were always up for the chores no one else wanted to handle. Cleaning the court, stowing the gear. You know? That time you negotiated with those jerks on the soccer team to get us some field time. You were good at mediating when people disagreed.”

“If those are qualifications, I’d feel sorry for the cops who had to work with me.”

“You think so? I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.”

Kotaro watched with amusement as Seigo sucked the last of his iced coffee noisily up the straw. He just didn’t get it.

If Kotaro had indeed been so conscientious in high school, it was mostly thanks to the man sitting across from him. Seigo led by example. Whether current members or alumni, Kotaro’s seniors in the futsal club had always loved to throw their weight around for no reason at all. Things had been even worse on Kotaro’s middle school basketball team. At least that was what he thought, until Seigo showed him things could be different.

People just can’t see themselves the way they are.

“Listen, Ko-Prime …” Seigo set his glass of melting ice on the table sharply. “If you’re that bored, why not get a job?”

“Doing what?”

“Feel like some part-time work?”

Now that was more like it. Kotaro already had several hooks in the water. “I was thinking about applying to a convenience store. The pay on the late shift is sweet.”

“So you can work nights?”

“Sure, I can juggle my schedule.”

“Are you sure you could do that and not neglect your studies? Your parents would worry. You’re still a minor.” Seigo was pretty levelheaded when it came to this sort of thing.

“Don’t worry. The homework will get done.”

“Then let’s go. It’s right around the corner.” Seigo picked the check off the table and smiled. He took Kotaro to Kumar Corporation, not far from the Holy Resurrection Cathedral.

“This is where I work,” he said as they stood in the lobby. “Our headquarters is down in Nagoya. This is the Tokyo office. We’ve got the third and fourth floors.”

The lobby was nice enough. The building looked brand new. Reception was on the third floor, but it was unmanned—just a counter and a phone. There was a glass disk on the wall behind the counter with the company name and logo etched into it with a kind of 3-D effect.

“Kumar is a funny name for a company.”

“Yamashina has had this book since childhood, about a monster named Kumar.”

“Yamashina?”

“The founder. We went to college together. I’m an executive director. I also basically run the Tokyo office.”

Kotaro goggled at him in surprise. Seigo had attended all their after-school practices on weekdays and worked with them on Saturdays and during summer breaks. Kotaro remembered asking him about it.

Are you taking time off from work?

We’ve got flextime.

You’re not busy on weekends?

No family, no girlfriend, no problem.

That was it, though; he’d never asked Seigo for more details about his private and professional lives. Somehow it had never seemed necessary.

Seigo and the founder were classmates? Executive director? Maybe this Yamashina, president or CEO or whatever, founded the company as a student? It was more than possible, considering how old Seigo was.

The door to the offices had an electronic lock. There was a small panel next to the door. Seigo dug around in his chinos and pulled out a key card on a strap. He put the card against the panel. There was a low tone as the door unlocked.

“Here we are. After you.”

Kotaro bowed reflexively and went inside. A short corridor led off to the left and right with a door at each end. The wall in front of him was glass from about waist height. The floor beyond was spread out before him.

“Wow …” Kotaro couldn’t hide his surprise.

The office was packed with rows of tables and swivel chairs. Most were occupied. The people were dressed as casually as Seigo—T-shirts, polo shirts, jeans, chinos. There was a loud aloha shirt. Everyone had cards dangling from their necks like the one Seigo had used to open the door. Most looked younger than Seigo, maybe a bit older than Kotaro.

The periphery of the room was dotted with file cabinets and big whiteboards on casters. The boards were crammed with writing that was too small to read from the corridor. There were also smaller blackboards at the end of the rows of desks, the kind that bars and restaurants used to announce the day’s specials, with writing in white and pink chalk.

None of this was out of the ordinary for an office. But two things were unusual. For one, the blinds were tightly closed in the middle of the day. There were also two flat-screen monitors on every desk. Everyone in the office—mostly men, but there were a few women too—was looking back and forth between their two monitors. They had multiple windows open on each one, with information scrolling upward. Once in a while a user would touch his mouse or keyboard, but not often. No one was punching a calculator. There were no papers on the desks. No one was in a meeting.

It was quiet. There were no ringing phones.

“What are they all doing?”

Seigo looked at Kotaro intently.

“Kumar is a security firm. We keep cyber society safe.”

As Kotaro had told Aunt Hanako, he wasn’t a PC expert. The net-surfing bug had never bitten him. He’d never started a blog and didn’t read them. For everyday things—looking for a shop, checking a map—he usually used his phone, but he couldn’t even use half the apps it came loaded with. He’d never tried to hide his lack of interest in the net. Kazumi probably knew a lot more than he did. She was always chasing down gossip about her favorite celebrities.

Still, this wasn’t the first time he’d encountered the term “cyber patrol”—people who monitored the web, investigated, and when necessary took action when they turned up something against the law, or something harmful or dangerous, or likely to encourage people to commit a crime.

But until he’d seen it with his own eyes, Kotaro never thought cyber patrolling could be a job. He’d had this idea it was something PC maniacs did. Either that or volunteers, which didn’t sound too interesting.

“You’re right, Kotaro. There are people who volunteer to do it, like registered members of a website who patrol the site in their free time.”

“I didn’t know that. I just saw a bit about it on TV.”

The news spot Kotaro had seen reported that the Internet was the place to go for illegal drugs, guns, and child pornography. There were people who recruited friends to help commit shocking crimes. Mass murderers proclaimed their intentions on the web before taking action. After spotlighting a few examples, the program showed how cyber patrols monitored the flow of information on the web and worked to prevent crime.

“It was on in the evening, I think,” said Kotaro. “Some kind of special report.”

“Right. We’ve gotten some attention from the media ourselves.”

Seigo gave Kotaro a quick tour of the office, then brought him to the lounge. It reminded Kotaro of his campus cafeteria in miniature. Everything was tidy and new. A bookcase bulged with graphic novels and other kinds of fiction. There was a vending machine with soft drinks, candy, and instant noodles. Kotaro was surprised to see there was no TV.

The lounge was empty. Everyone at Kumar was hard at it, except for one employee Kotaro noticed, out cold in the nap room.

“So what did you think of that news show? Did it pique your interest?”

“Why? Not much to do with me.”

Seigo laughed and turned to the window. The cathedral dome baked in the summer sun.

“True, our regular employees and contractors all have degrees, a lot of them in computer science.” Seigo reeled off some big-name universities. “We have a lot of midcareer hires too.” He ticked off the names of several major tech companies.

Kotaro was hard put to hide his surprise. Everyone looked so young, so informal, so
into
it. They didn’t look like they had elite credentials.

He’d missed it by a mile. He laughed to cover his embarrassment. “I knew it. They sure look like pros.”

“They are. They’ve got the background and the chops, otherwise they couldn’t do their jobs. That’s why we’ve never hired students part time. But recently I’ve been trying to get Yamashina to rethink the policy. We need more diversity.

“You saw the people in the office. There’s not much of an age spread. I’m thirty-three and I’m the oldest. Our youngest full-timer joined us last spring. She’s twenty-two. Everyone’s in the peak generation for net users. But as time goes by, the user population is going to get older and younger at the same time. We have to be ready.”

Seigo explained that with more people of all ages joining web society, the kinds of trouble that could occur and the types of difficult and dangerous information circulating would also change. If the patrollers were all in their twenties and thirties, they would start to miss things.

“The web is a world of its own, full of secret signs and double meanings. A lot of words are used to mean something else. Some of the jargon is based on punning, and if you don’t get it, you don’t, even if you share the same language and culture. What we do know is that different generations use words differently, and we have to understand those differences if we’re going to patrol web society effectively.”

Kotaro had never heard Seigo talk this passionately about anything other than futsal.

“We thought we’d start by hiring some older people. There are more people than you’d think who are getting up there, but are really into computers.”

Kotaro found that hard to picture. The only really old member of the Mishima family was his paternal grandfather, who lived near Osaka, and even figuring out how to return messages on his phone was a challenge for him.

“Problem is, most people that age have problems with their eyesight. They can’t pull long shifts either, so we’d have to have a lot of them, and they’d all need training.

“That leaves us with students. In a way, they’re the opposite of seniors. They don’t know how society works yet, or where they’re going. They haven’t developed the skills to navigate the adult world. But without their point of view, there are things we might miss.”

Kotaro wondered what that “point of view” actually was.

“Of course, we’ll also get publicity from hiring college and high school students. Recruiting people from that age group would generate a lot of word-of-mouth. Young people are getting bored chasing information that’s hot for just a day or two. They want something more, like the lowdown on the occupations of the future. Life hacks.”

Kotaro could picture that.

“So listen, Ko-Prime. Want to try working here?” Seigo grinned. “To cure that boredom of yours. You don’t have to think about it too hard. I’ll show you the ropes myself. We’ll figure out a schedule that works for you.”

Kotaro had to admit that it sounded fascinating. He was definitely interested. Still …

“What you’re saying is, I’ll be guinea pig number one for Kumar Corporation’s part-time hiring experiment.”

This brought a burst of laughter from Seigo. “That’s a great way to put it. You’re exactly right. Maybe instead of ‘guinea pig’ you should say ‘prototype model.’ ”

Guinea pig it is.

“So if I screw up, you might decide it’s not a good idea to hire people like me. I’m not sure I want to that responsibility.”

“You always were a straight-up kind of guy, Ko-Prime.”

“It’s not that at all.”

“Don’t sweat it. No one’s going to put success or failure on your shoulders. And there’s something else I haven’t told you.” Seigo lowered his voice and leaned forward. Kotaro found himself doing the same.

“We’re closing the Tokyo office a year from now. This city’s just too expensive.”

When Kumar was starting out, the Tokyo office was essential to get the word to clients. Now that the business was on track and growing, things were different.

“If you close down, what happens to all those people I saw? What happens to you?”

“We’re moving to Sapporo. We’ll have our own building there—well, it’ll be pretty small, but we’re moving ahead with construction. I’m looking forward to getting out of here. I’m sick of Tokyo’s sticky summer nights.”

Services like Kumar’s could be delivered from anywhere. Still, finding the right people would be tough unless the company set up shop in at least a medium-size city. Kumar could put the best hardware money could buy on a remote island or in the mountains, but the software—people—would be missing. Big regional cities like Nagoya, where Kumar was based, were the perfect solution.