S03 E02: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World

<p>BOOK SYNOPSIS</p> <p>To explain this book in any useful way, you have to start with the central concept. And it's basically about brains. Brains, memories and data. Set some time in the future, we're introduced to a world where certain gifted people can essentially encrypt data using the two different halves of their brain. These people are called Calcutecs, and their abilities are prized by the dystopian state known as The System under whose reign the world resides. On the other side, we have Semiotics, vigilantes working against the state to steal this encrypted data. One of these Calcutecs is our nameless protagonist: a fairly cold, emotionless but seemingly decent-enough guy earning a good keep from encrypting data for various clients around Japan. That's where the story begins.</p> <p> </p> <p>The book alternates between two different narratives. The first and main one follows the nameless Calcutec, who, in chapter one, receives a call to 'shuffle' (basically, encrypt) some data for a client known only as 'the old man'. After arriving in a plush corporate office, he's led through a sewage system past a group of 'Inklings' - monstrous creatures who feed off people's thoughts - to the old man's lab. He does the shuffling and goes home without incident. Or so he thinks. In the other narrative, which is basically every even-numbered chapter, we're taken to an altogether different, although tenuously linked world. 'The End of the World': an isolated, walled village in which another nameless man is trapped without his memories. Confused and bewildered, he's instructed by the town's gatekeeper to spend his days' dream-reading' - i.e. looking through skulls in the town library and reading the memories of the dead. Memories are hard to come by in this world.   As narrative #1 progresses, we learn the old man's encryption process was actually part of a dangerous psychological test, and after 'shuffling' the data, the Calculatec is at risk of losing his mind. In narrative number #2, the memory-less protagonist is