Praise for Junana: “In a society quickly shifting into an age of hyper-connectivity, Junana is a timely read. The narrative is as fast-paced and complex as our supermodern, technosocial lives. Caron creates a world so vivid and omniscient that one wonders if Caron is simply reporting on something that is already happening. Caron effortlessly handles multiple perspectives, social classes and age groups. Junana should appeal to educators, marketers, programmers and anyone who is a critical thinker looking for something unique and rich for their cranium to bite into. Junana is an important work that provides a lens with which to greater understand the rapid change we're currently experiencing.” Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist Twitter: caseorganic “Junana was a fabulous book. It was part Snow Crash, part Neuromancer part modern society and the implications of our social networking. It captures what might happen if we had an accelerated learning system, who would be challenged by the notion, who would build on the notion. The is a great story and many deep issues that leave you reflecting about social networking, gaming, learning and the world that we live in or what it might be..........” Dave Toole, CEO Outhink Media, Inc. “Highly recommended!...The very interesting premise is thoughtfully worked out. A bit of techno-speak sprinkled here and there lends verisimilitude, but non-techies can ignore it in favor of the story.” Jeff deLaBeaujardiere, NOAA geek and musician Also by Bruce Caron Snoquask: The Last White Dancer Community, Democracy, and Performance Inside the Live Reptile Tent (with Jeff Brouws) Global Villages (DVD, with Tamar Gordon) Junana: Game Nation Junana: Game State Junana Junana by Bruce Caron Yanagi Press Disclaimer: Junana is a work of fiction. Any similarity or likeness to any events, locations, institutions, themes, persons, living or deceased, characters, and plot is purely coincidental and entirely fictional. Copyright © 2009-2013 by Bruce Caron Some Rights Reserved Released under Creative Commons license: Attribution—Non-Commercial—Share Alike 3.0 This pre-publication version produced in the United States by Yanagi Press, an imprint of the New Media Studio, Inc., Santa Barbara http://tnms.org/news/2009/01/25/yanagi-press Fifth Revised Edition: 2013-2018 Junana main text is set in Minion Pro. Cover artwork: Photograph of Fierce Kitty by Kris Krug. Used with Permission For Louis Acknowledgements: Junana is a work of fiction that describes an alternate present. Many of the technologies used in Junana are available in our present. Should sufficient interest develop around the ideas within Junana, something like it might show up in the future. These ideas, and also the many people who have helped the author to assemble them, are described on the Junana website: http://www.junana.com. Tinka is my muse and my love. She would awaken at 5:30 in the morning for work and bring coffee in to me; so she was my enabler in this act of fiction. Candace Lindquist took red pen in hand to prune away the thicket of copy errors in my typing and back-fill the lacunae in my grammar. She deserves special mention, although I take full credit for all remaining typos and grammatical slips. Junana 1! SECTION ONE The Prank !2 The Prank Junana 3! ONE Michael “Scratchy” O’hara looked at the entry card he should have filled out on the plane. At this pre-dawn hour of the morning the customs lines at Osaka’s Kansai International Airport were minimal. His United flight from San Francisco was the only 747 unloading at a gate, and it was barely a third full. The Japanese bubble economy was ancient history, he guessed. Ten years ago at Tokyo Narita it would have taken him two hours to get through customs. But then, ten years ago William Gibson described a future filled with technology from a sprawling Chiba megapolis. Scratchy shifted his laptop computer bag in front of him and used it as a writing surface. Name: “Michael O’hara.” Occupation: “Independently wealthy” sounded too pretentious. “Computer programmer,” he scrawled. He stepped forward as the line moved. Reason for Visit: “Tourism,” he wrote. The usual lie. Hotel while in Japan. “Miyako in Kyoto.” Itchy had sent the group the hotel’s URL. It looked a lot nicer than the business hotels he had stayed in on his visits to Tokyo. Scratchy stepped up to the window. The official took his entry card and passport, glanced at the photo and at Scratchy. He swiped the passport’s code and watched the computer monitor. He spent a minute browsing through the passport pages, thumbing through the entry stamps and visas that Scratchy had accumulated over eight years of frantic capitalism. The official’s monitor again took his attention and he grunted and looked up at Scratchy’s face. !4 The Prank Scratchy attempted a grin and remembered he had not shaved in several days. The passport photograph was from his middle geek days. The Glaswegian equivalent of an afro had framed his face and an unkempt beard draggled over a rumpled shirt. Much of that hair was gone for good, and he was packing an extra forty pounds of pudge. “What does this say?” The official pointed at the “occupation” line on the entry card. “Hmmm.” He couldn’t read what he written either, and tried to remember. “Computer, um, programmer,” he recalled. “You come from San Francisco with a United Kingdom passport. What is your official country of residence?” “I have dual citizenship in the U.S. and United Kingdom.” Michael had been born in Glasgow, the youngest child of a Scottish accountant and a registered nurse from North Carolina. The family had moved to Evanston, Illinois, when he was in elementary school. After the guarded structure of education in Glasgow, Michael was unprepared for the playground drama and social trauma served up in American schools. At first, he retreated to the library, where he devoured the entire sci-fi and fantasy section. Then he found a FORTRAN manual and badgered the sysop at nearby Northwestern University into running some of his batch jobs on their IBM 370 in exchange for washing the sysop’s car and fetching coffee. Some time in his early teens Michael exchanged his shy retreating demeanor for a blistering cynical posture, a phase his mother prayed would not last, but which only grew as he found his own quirky intellectual legs in the area of graph theory and topology. Michael was an indifferent student in high school. He spent his time playing Pong at a local pizza joint, reading up on combinatorics research, and hacking into the university’s new Junana 5! VAX 11/780, using a bogus soft-money account he set up for a nonexistent visiting physics professor named Kurt Bokonan. Trouble followed when he actually published a paper on Hamilton’s Puzzle, and the physics department chairman began to ask questions about Professor Bokonan. One day, the chairman was waiting for him when he arrived at the computer center. After some initial incredulity, Michael being only sixteen, the fellow accepted that Michael was, in fact, the mysterious Professor Bokonan. He invited Michael to give a talk on his paper and offered him a soft money account under his own name. The chairman later suggested he go to Reed College, Cal Tech, or MIT with the silent hope he might return to get his PhD at Northwestern. At one point in their freshman humanities seminar at Reed, Desi turned to him and said, “Do you have to be so damn scratchy all the time?” His new name was born. “I’m living in California,” Scratchy added. The official nodded. “How long you stay?” Scratchy had left that line blank. “Sorry. Two weeks. Long enough to see Kyoto. I hear it’s a beautiful town.” The official snorted slightly and grabbed a stamper. He ruffled through the passport and found an open square where he stamped the tourist visa and then he stamped the entry card stub and stapled this to the page, folding it on the perforation so it would stay in place. He wrote a few things in Japanese on this and slid it back through the window opening. “You can go.” The official was already looking behind Scratchy, who nodded and stepped past the station toward the sign that said “Baggage Claim.” Scratchy had an hour to wait for the first Haruka express to Kyoto Station. At this time of day not a single shop was open, so he took his rolling bag and his backpack and walked the !6 The Prank entire length of the mostly empty north wing of the Renzo Piano-designed terminal. With its soaring metal roof it looked like an enormous da Vinci airfoil. As he strolled, he pondered the turn of events that had sent him to Japan. It started with an email from Winston Logan Fairchild, writing from Paris where he was attending a World Bank conference. Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi were in three nations spread across several time zones. Winston commanded that all of them be available by telephone at 10 p.m. Zulu time on Saturday, November 13th, two weeks hence. Something special was cooking. For Desi in Mysore, India, 10 p.m. Zulu meant 3:30 a.m., just about his bed time, since he was regularly involved with colleagues back in the states and lived on American time. Like thousands of his countrymen, Desi’s life was nearly nocturnal. In Japan, Itchy would need to be up by 7:00 am Kyoto time, but then then he had not slept well since junior high school.