Cherry Blossom Ceiling

Two sets of orange and pink irises ignite, and the stream is live. Akiko and Haruko begin their broadcast in Seobyeok, where the most imposing structures are, bordering the Pacific Ocean.

“How’s the quality, guys?” Haruko says. She waves her hand past her sister’s face.

“Should be buttery,” Akiko says, “If they can’t manage stable service, then this entire place is a joke.”

“Teddy G says it looks like shit.” Haruko flicks her hair and bites her lip. Tiny pink lights scatter along the contours of her face, beneath the skin, before they turn a fiery red. “That’s probably because you have a shitty rig, Teddy. Why’d you mod this guy anyhow?”

“Relax, Haru. He’s making a joke. He always does.”

“He pisses me off.” Haruko steps before her sister and, staring into her glowing orange eyes, says, “Teddy, just do your job and watch the chat. Word is there’s been hordes of some kind of nasty spam bots today.”

Haruko turns away from her sister on the balls of her feet clad in black combat boots. She takes a few lazy glances at the surrounding buildings, many of them reaching hundreds of feet upwards.

Akiko takes a deep breath. “I hate doing this kind of thing, but part of our involvement with this project requires us to give our viewers a quick pitch about the place. So—"

Haruko steps directly in front of her sister. “Here we are, Mi Byeok!”

A sigh from the owner of the orange irises. “Yeah, yeah. You all know about synthetic organs and biomedical engineering, like the implants we grind on our biohacking streams.”

“They know,” Haruko says. “Look, they’re saying they know.”

“Do they know—hold on…”

“The US started with tissue and organs out of in New England, as China pushed things even further with fetus development in non-human wombs and genetic alteration. Only practical developments met the healthcare market. Seeing this, two of the largest corporations in—”

“Are you reading right off the script?”

A dramatic frown glows pink upon Haruko’s face.

“Go ahead,” Akiko says. “In South Korea…”

“They imagined creating implants and using biomedical engineering to enhance the human body as their sole purpose. Enhancement as accessory. As climate change and overpopulation slowly made massive areas of Southern California uninhabitable, the US government created Absent Zones. And—hey, sis, what is this part about Yukon water?”

 “Who cares,” Akiko says, ready to move on. “Two Korean conglomerates and a US based tech corporation owned by a Korean-American went in on an offer to purchase an empty strip of land between San Diego and Los Angeles. The US government already had close ties with many of the corporations involved, and the land in the area was devastated from drought and fallout from the East Asian Conflict, so it was a somewhat smooth process.”

Chat is snoozing, emotes of boredom fill their section of the stream. Haruko takes the stream with her as she skips over to an intersection. The streets are mostly narrow, compared to other major cities, and there is an eerie, noticeable lack of pedestrians in the area. Haruko tells chat that she feels like she’s in a section of a video game that’s still in early development, and they start asking her what she means.

“Look,” Haruko says. She stomps her boots and points a finger up. On the user end, the stream splits into two viewpoints before Akiko sees what her sister finds exciting and changes the feed to Haruko’s view only. Between two buildings, both of which seem to pass through a static-like sky, there is a wavy, pixelated pattern, the look of a broken mobile’s screen.

“It looks like cherry blossoms,” Haruko says.

The chat has no clue what they’re seeing on stream, but they spam messages nonetheless expressing their lack of understanding. Neither sister can follow the chat. The mods activate slow mode. Even the lurkers spam the chat when something unique happens. “Zombies,” Akiko mutters, knowing that the stream picks it up.

“Keep visual of that, Haru,” Akiko says. “That’s the Ceiling, above us. Arturo Reyes, the PR guy that invited us, said it’s officially called the ‘Cheonjang’. If you understand Korean, you get it, and if not, you still do without knowing it.”

“Silly,” Haruko says. 

“Regardless, that fuzziness up there is probably an issue with the particles they send back and forth, all over. It also wraps over the structures that stand higher than the walls. Reyes said the color is manipulated to mostly a whiteish pink on ‘normal days’, and, when the air quality drops, or it rains, it turns red.”

Some of the regulars in chat ask technical questions about the Ceiling, but Haruko turns away. The shot is lost. Chat goes wild.

“Get back on the glitch,” Akiko says.

“I’m bored. We came here to see Fragaria’s stuff.”

Akiko resumes the shot of the Ceiling with her own feed, without complaints. “They want us to show the place off, first, but I agree. The others need to show up, so we can finish our tour.”

Haruko’s face fills her sister’s feed. Tiny pink dots blink down her cheeks, from her eyes. She sticks her tongue out and twirls away.

After twenty-seven minutes, the Ceiling’s glitch fixed itself, or someone did, but nothing could be seen up there. Soon after, the other streamers show up. They’re instantly upset, sulking over the bad luck that had them miss the glitch. DiegoGG, from Mexico City, and KatiCypress, a North California State local, are two other influential streamers invited as part of a PR program to showcase the inside, before larger application waves.

“There were so many cars those last few miles,” Diego says, “All I could see was red lights for hours, I swear.” He describes his arrival at the southern gate to the sisters. “Everything out there was empty, like nothing, and the route through the Southern Absent Zone was so sketchy. They must’ve used the same tech as the Ceiling to make a sort of tunnel all the way from the old San Diego area to Oceanside. You just cruise on a renovated I-5 in this weird, transparent pink tunnel. And, yo, I’m not far from the entrance, and a huge piece of the wall, or maybe the gate, drops to the ground and cars are flying back at me in reverse.”

“No fucking way,” Kati says. “I’ll have to watch the VOD. I can’t believe they actually wanted you to stream the unfinished section.” Kati assumes something similar to the tunnels was used on her route to Mi Byeok, but she traveled by train into the northern gate. “Nothing you haven’t already seen on the news or documentaries as a kid,” she says. “Entire areas still look totally burned out. Most of LA is totally flattened now, but I bet the US will try to resettle at an even larger scale within the next hundred years.”

“Fifty wouldn’t surprise me,” Akiko says. She describes how they traveled across the US from New York City and had to go underground before entering the eastern gate. “We want to go meet our supplier in Dongbyeok, where FI is. She’s the one that hooked up our cybernetic mask implants.”

“What section was that?” Diego says.

“Dong—East Wall,” Haruko says.

Diego opens his mouth and nods.

“I want free stuff from Fragaria Innovations,” Kati says, “How does it stream? What about blinking?”

“It’s all intuitive,” Haruko says, “We made alterations, too, figured out how to sync custom colors, as always.”

“Should we head over, then?” Akiko says.

The streamers arrive at the section along the eastern wall which houses most biomedical corporations in Mi-Byeok. Unlike Seobyeok, with an atmosphere similar to the business districts of Gangnam or Yongsan in Seoul, Dongbyeok wears a very different outfit. Fragaria Innovations runs this area, and its founder, Dr. Moon Haejin, holds an appreciation of both traditional Korea and biological godliness. The result is a neighborhood of wooden pillars melded with huge panels of glass and concrete stairways leading to curved giwa-tiled rooves.

Kati compares this to the northern section to the stream by saying, “Think Silicon Valley on uppers”. Open parks with synthetic grass to spread out upon, university campuses that take their time to breathe despite the fierce competition contained within the classrooms and labs of each university’s building. Diego complains about his arrival at the southern section, still left undeveloped. One year after the official opening, international conglomerates can apply for a claim on the southern section, under review of the three founders, but for now it’s deserted.

At the dark plaza outside of FI’s welcome center, a tall, pale woman with tattoos like a turtleneck sweater waves to the group as she approaches. This is Jiyoon Kim. She knows the sisters, works with FI as their implant supplier.

“Dr. Moon has some new toys to show you,” she says.

“We get to meet the Moon Haejin?” Haruko clasps her hands before her chest.

“You’re bullshitting me,” Diego says. His eyes are wide and his camera tilts to his side.

“I never intended to,” Jiyoon says coldly. “The twins only.”

“Why them?”

Jiyoon smirks, lights a tobacco cigarette. “Because they have the FI hardware. That makes them part of the family, don’t you know?” She grabs her dingy white t-shirt by the collar and pulls it down to show window to her left lung. A black synthetic material expands and contracts with her casual breathing. A long exhale of cigarette smoke trails from her mouth into the face of the two organic-bodied streamers. “Where’s your’s”

Neither Kati or Diego respond, and Akiko lays a hand on their should one at a time before turning away.

“Follow me, girls,” Jiyoon says, and she tosses her cigarette to the shining, dark tiles of the Mi-Byeok plaza.