Kiko-Lyn's Great Mobile Adventure
Rachael, in concert with Kiko-Lyn’s parents, tried a new approach. They enrolled Kiko-Lyn for after school classes in the unique San Francisco Flow Academy. Koko-Lyn had been delighted by Flow videos on YouTube. Their hope was that the low-key Flow Arts mixture of Aikido, Gymnastics, Juggling, and slight-of-hand would engage the isolated young girl. And it did. As Kiko-Lyn began to master the Poi, the Duo, the staff and the wands, her self-confidence blossomed. When she went to her first Flow Festival with Rachael, she began to laugh and spin about the festival bonfire with the other kids. Kiko-Lyn had found herself in the Flow and re-entered the world with the goal of becoming a Flow Warrior.
Her parents came to stay in San Francisco so Kiko-Lyn could continue after-school and weekends at the Flow Academy. After six years, they all returned to Japan. Rachael was moving east with her new company. Kiko-Lyn’s mother was called back to DoCoMo labs and her father, retired from the Air Force, had a new marketing job at NEC robotics. Kiko-Lyn was not worried. She could help spread Flow to Japan.
Five years pass.
Tokyo Days
Kiko is much in the style. Her day persona is occupied with her early morning college classes. She blends in with her fellow "species dysphoria" students, most of who are older than she, by adopting a fox persona. Her cosplay costume is trimmed in fake red fur with black tips. Their GoogglesTM are enhanced reality overlays packaged into a pair of environmental eye protection goggles and nose filters. Each of them has customized their GoogglesTM with favorite characters from Anime, Manga, and myth. Kiko-Lyn has enhanced her GoogglesTM with twitching fake fox ears and a black button nose. The fox nose includes a solid state gas chromatograph tracking the purity of air – a regrettable necessity in 21st century life. The ears appear as simple costume artifacts, but she has embedded remote pickup mikes in each ear and they track nearby conversations and flick toward any loud noise. Just like with a wary, real fox. She says hello to fellow cosplayers: several bird friends and a pride of tigers. They all lunch on "swish swish" at the Yoshi’s Shabu Shabu restaurant. She thinks secret muggle identities can be fun too.
Most weekends she and her friends engage in city spanning computer games across the background of Tokyo - lost in an augmented world of virtual images and metadata projected over views of the real streets and buildings by their GoogglesTM. The gaming quests and tasks are sent by her aunt's friend, Jorge. Jorge refers to them as “his Irregulars” and they respond with his call sign “Sherlock.” Last Saturday, Jorge remotely coached them through a full parkour run into a Blade Runner-ish overlay of the Tokyo business district, fighting virtual mutants in Atago, Seisho-ji and out to Kaneiji. Afterwards, Jorge said they were nearly ready to enter the Japanese National Metagames.
On the afternoons she is not training, Kiko-Lyn works her unpaid internship at her father’s offices in the old NEC headquarters. This is a multi-story office building with a deep hollow core and offices on the outside walls. Open walkways surround the multi-story core with floor after floor of waste high white rails. A perfect place to develop and test urban drones.
Kiko works in swarm robotics. As she enters the building, she whistles out to her flock which has hidden in plain sight, camouflaged against the flat panel rails of the balconies. Her swarm is twenty hand-sized dragonfly analogs. Their skeleton is printed from diamond-fiber infused magnesium zinc alloy and wings of high temperature printed ceramics. They are coated with a novel use of flexible liquid crystal – micro screens arranged over the whole surface in an array. The result is a skin of synthetic chromophores of her invention. The swarm turns off their white speckled camouflage and suddenly appears, launching into the central open space.
They flock in circles about her, lit up in neon glow colors. She has keyed their color to her moods and today she is happy and expectant. As she climbs in the glass elevator her flock follows her upwards circling in the updrafts of the central shaft. Spectators in the open walkways stop to watch and laugh as these sparkling dragonflies circle up floor to floor, forming briefly displayed patterns of Catfish Kanji. Kiko-Lyn is a local celebrity and the corporate office pet.
A worker says, “Wow, that’s new. Are we seeing Kanji display in the murmuration?”
“Yes,” Kilo-Lyn answers. “Because of the small flock size and rapid movement in the base swarming pattern these images are very transitory. But as the swarm moves and repeats the configuration, successive bugs each flash a static segment of the pattern. Many bugs, moving through the same spot and flashing in sequence, create the vertical shape of the Kanji. The flickering ghostly image occurs as different parts of the Kanji pop in and out of existence. Glad you like, it’s a serendipitous visual effect blurred into the eye. On a time lapse video the Kanji is clear.” Then she stops; I must not say too much.
On her GoogglesTM she reviews the video footage she programmed the swarm to capture while she was at school. Each bug is a node in a broadcast mesh and they auto upload to the their controller; an innocuous "toy" handle for a "retracted" lightsaber staff that is attached to her belt. Rather than have them link up on her handle, forming their resting configuration as a staff, she sends the flock to feed at any charger plates they can find. Today’s surveillance target is her father and his lab assistants. Software stitches together the faceted views of the different flyers into a smooth movie. She watches her father for any open display of concern and finds none. A normal day with some packing as the trade exhibit is readied for airfreight shipment to their upcoming trade show, the Mobile World Congress. Her father is taking her mother on the trip to Mobile World Congress. Tomorrow she will wish her parents off for a happy working European vacation and nothing should cause them to rethink leaving her on her own.
