“Ragged Girl” by Hirotaka Tobi
So great collection!
This book is a collection of the sequel named `Costa del Numero’. Costa del Numero is the name of virtual playground in this world, in which artificial autonomous agents serve guests. Costa del Numero has many `wards’ which are virtual worlds (playgrounds) and have their own rules and themes. In fact, Costa del Numero is a collection of virtual playgrounds.
“The Grand Vacance”, published in 2002 and the first novel of this sequel, is set in a ward called Summer. Human guests do not visit the Summer Ward for 1000 years (in the time of this ward), which is called `Grand Down’. This does not means that Costa del Numero is out of service, because the artificial agents can act. “The Grand Vacance”
shows many misteries for this settings; for example, why the power is still supplied in despite of lack of guests? And it describes a war between artificial agents of the wards and agents from other virtual worlds.
In “Ragged girl”, Tobi describes the stories for `human part’ of Costa del Numero. The startup and concepts of Costa and the truth of Grand Down is also shown in this book.
“Air des Bijoux”, the first story of this book, is a very short stories originally appeared in Hayakawa SF Magazine for campaign of “Grand Vacance”. It is about an ordinary day of Summer Ward after the Grand Down and shows the background settings of this world.
“Unweaving the Humanbeing” is masterpiece of Japanese, or world, SF history. The story about the people building Costa del Numero. It confuses the boundary between real world and virtual, and also readers’ ones. “Ragged Girl” (original Japanese title of this story and this book) may denote Kei Agata, the main developer of Costa del
Numero, but… “Unweaving the humanbeing”, the engrish title, is name of a software and means editing virtual avatar, and more. Great.
“Close It” is the direct continuation of “Unweaving the Humanbeing”. One of the developer of Costa are killed by himself using many and many virtual deaths of avatars. This story have taste of mistery and horror a little, and the truth will lead the disaster of Costa del Numero.
“Laterna Magika” is newly-written story for this collection. This story have two scene. One is in a ward called Znamka, and the other is in the real world. Znamka is a ward for `Whales’. Whale is a virtual agent which can go into other wards and provides specific service. Whales are born in Znamka, and grown and maintained by agents of
Znamka. A guest meets a wizard, and knows truth of Costa. On the other hand, a journalist interviews a cyber terrorist about Costa. She advocate the `human rights’ of autonomous agents and points out the violation of human rights in Costa. She let freeze some wards by terror, such ward cannot be visited by guests but must work to live the agents. At last, whole Costa is freezed by her attack… If the story contained only one part of them, it would be great. I think that the background settings are too disclosed, and am afraid that the next novel lacks attractions because of this disclosure. However, Tobi said that only one third of settings are disclosed, which comfort
us. But, what is the rest?
“Lord of Spinners” is the last of this book. This is about the early days of the enemy of “Grand Vacance”, in `Omni Tree Ward’. In Omni Tree Ward, all is came from the trees. Agents are born, live, and die in a tree. Some agents, called kin of spinners, can control the spinners, which are maintenance routines or sub-autonomous tools in
Costa, and can control the rules of the ward like magic. This work is about the battle between kin of spinners and bandits, very entertaining. When I read this in Hayakawa SF Magazine, I was very surprised because I did not know that Costa del Numero allows such ward and magic-like hacks.
It contains various style of stories, so I cannot view them from a point of view. The only thing I can write is the stories are great and should be translated into Engish for non-Japanese fans, although it will be hard work because Tobi’s writing is strongly depending on Japanese.