World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

You can understand how this education would easily lend itself to an existence in cyberspace. In a
world of information without context, where status was determined on its acquisition and
possession, those of my generation could rule like gods. I was a sensei, master over all I surveyed,
be it discovering the blood type of the prime minister’s cabinet, or the tax receipts of Matsumoto
and Hamada, 1 or the location and condition of all shin-gunto swords of the Pacific War. I didn’t
have to worry about my appearance, or my social etiquette, my grades, or my prospects for the
future. No one could judge me, no one could hurt me. In this world I was powerful, and more
importantly, I was safe!
When the crisis reached Japan, my clique, as with all the others, forgot our previous obsessions
and devoted our energies entirely to the living dead. We studied their physiology, behavior,
weaknesses, and the global response to their attack upon humanity. The last subject was my
clique’s specialty, the possibility of containment within the Japanese home islands. I collected
population statistics, transport networks, police doctrine. I memorized everything from the size of
the Japanese merchant fleet, to how many rounds the army’s Type 89 assault rifle held. No fact
was too small or obscure. We were on a mission, we barely slept. When school was eventually
cancelled, it gave us the ability to be wired in almost twenty-four hours a day. I was the first to
hack into Doctor Komatsu’s personal hard drive and read the raw data a full week before he
presented his findings to the Diet. This was a coup. It further elevated my status among those who
already worshipped me.
Doctor Komatsu first recommended the evacuation?
He did. Like us, he’d been compiling the same facts. But whereas we’d been memorizing them, he’d
been analyzing them. Japan was an overcrowded nation: one hundred and twenty-eight million
people jammed into less than three hundred and seventy thousand square kilometers of either
mountainous or overurbanized islands. Japan’s low crime rate gave it one of the relatively smallest
and most lightly armed police forces in the industrialized world. Japan was pretty much also a
demilitarized state. Because of American “protection,” our self-defense forces had not seen actual
combat since 1945. Even those token troops who were deployed to the Gulf almost never saw any
serious action and spent most of their occupation duty within the protected walls of their isolated
compound. We had access to all these bits of information, but not the wherewithal to see where
they were pointing. So it took us all by complete surprise when Doctor Komatsu publicly declared
that the situation was hopeless and that Japan had to be immediately evacuated.
That must have been terrifying.
Not at all! It set off an explosion of frenzied activity, a race to discover where our population
might resettle. Would it be the South, the coral atolls of the Central and South Pacific, or would we
head north, colonizing the Kuriles, Sakhalin, or maybe somewhere in Siberia? Whoever could
uncover the answer would be the greatest otaku in cyber history.
And there was no concern for your personal safety?
Of course not. Japan was doomed, but I didn’t live in Japan. I lived in a world of free-floating
information. The siafu, 2 that’s what we were calling the infected now, weren’t something to be
feared, they were something to be studied. You have no idea the kind of disconnect I was suffering.
My culture, my upbringing, and now my otaku lifestyle all combined to completely insulate me.