Ginza Glitch: A Pocket Novel of Recursive Reality
The sushi tasted of static and faded memories. Not the briny, melt-in-your-mouth perfection I craved after navigating the polished, perpetually-under-construction avenues of Ginza, but a metallic tang, a flavor of something…rewound. I spat it out, the perfect rectangle of the Shinkansen window reflecting a distorted version of my own grimace.
It had started subtly. A repeated billboard. A conversation overheard twice. The nagging feeling that I’d already ordered this exact same sake at this exact same sterile, chrome-and-glass bar. Now, the sushi. The undeniable, digital decay clinging to the supposedly pristine fish.
The man next to me, impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit, unfolded a newspaper. I glanced at the headline: “Stock Market Plunge Predicted.” I’d seen it before. This morning? Yesterday? An hour ago? The dates were blurring, the linear progression of time dissolving into a viscous, swirling mess.
“Experiencing a little…déjà vu?” he asked, not looking up. His voice was a low, resonant hum, like a server room cooling fan.
“Déjà vu doesn’t make raw fish taste like a defunct motherboard,” I countered, wiping my tongue with a crisp, white napkin.
He finally looked at me, his eyes the color of polished obsidian. “Ah, a connoisseur of temporal anomalies. Rare indeed.”
“Anomalies? I just want lunch that doesn’t taste like a broken Game Boy.”
He chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. “You’re in Ginza, my friend. Everything here is an illusion, a carefully constructed reality designed to extract capital. Perhaps the universe is merely accelerating the process.”
“Accelerating what?”
He tapped the newspaper. “The inevitable. The heat death of everything. Or, perhaps, something far more pedestrian. A server crash. A programming error. Someone forgot to close a loop.”
He folded the newspaper again, precisely aligning the edges. “Tell me,” he said, his gaze intense, “do you remember buying a small, jade figurine in Akihabara? A laughing Buddha?”
The image flashed in my mind. A tiny, smiling Buddha, tucked away in a dusty corner of a forgotten electronics shop. I’d purchased it on a whim, a souvenir of my wanderings. “Yes. Why?”
“It’s a key,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “A key to breaking the cycle. Or…making it infinitely worse.”
The train lurched, throwing me slightly off balance. When I looked back, the man was gone. Vanished as if he’d never existed, leaving only the lingering scent of expensive cologne and the unsettling taste of rewound sushi.
I looked out the window. The Ginza skyline blurred, buildings phasing in and out of existence. The air shimmered with an electric charge, a silent hum vibrating through my bones.
I knew what I had to do. Find the jade Buddha. And decide whether to break the loop…or embrace the algorithm.
The next loop, the sushi tasted faintly of hope.