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reiseishin, part 3

By his own telling, this is the guy who argued.

His comments, in Dance’s emails to his Grandmother-teacher, reveal that he still thinks he was disobedient.  Defied the rules, became an artiste, ran away from home, changed his name, and embarrassed the hell out of them.

There’s no reply to his efforts to reach discarded old family addresses. There’s no proof he ever existed there. The one who argued, nobody knows him.

Auren has all the emails sent to the music teacher, and doesn’t need them. This is not the one who will disgrace the family name.

The family– ah well, it seems they’ve made their bed.  By all you can tell from the server back home in Korea, there’s only one guy. Not two.

They chatter quite a lot to one of them. They talk to the one in Minsk and Jakarta and Monte Carlo, standing guard over the generals in the junta, the good boy. The one who sends lots of money home via email, which taps in an endless supply of ingenuous multiple shell-game bank accounts, always shifting. Last month Ahn Ha-Neul wrote his emails on servers in Odessa, while he waited on pale girls rewrapping Afghan packages for his bosses. Hotel security has surveillance on all that.  They’re not subtle, they’re not clever, they’re not particularly careful. Who needs to be? Not when you control work on oil company pipelines at will, and even the Chinese are afraid to offend you.

actor Aloys Chen Kun
Yes?

And Dance?  This guy here in the dojo, he goes hungry. The guy who changed his name, he hasn’t changed his bank for two years. Law enforcement could bully this guy with impunity, which is sad. Auren finds it curiously touching. There’s no extra money here– just look at the record of his struggles to pay rent. His grocery checks get tiny toward the end of the month.

The curious thing: Dance of Knives says he’s an only son, in his emails to his music teacher.

The even more curious thing, that non-barking dog in the night: The teacher replies to him from deep in a defense contractor’s system. No volleying from satellites, or from servers in Japan or Guam or Alaska. There’s no other evidence of involvement. No other associated addresses, no other friends, no other traceable links.

The trail ends cold at a door that Auren used to know, in the way that you learn from taking falls.

It was, once, owned by enemies. Personal enemies.

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2 thoughts on “reiseishin, part 3”

  1. Oh, man, these three episodes– now we’re geting somewhere, we really are. And Explains why Eric was at the symphony show.

    And this whole section ending with remembrance and then Drin comoing home, into "greet the ragged stranger"– which now neds a bit of editing… very poignant!

    The beach episode, BTW, will have to come after ragged stranger– he hasn’t told them they own the house, in that one.

  2. Ahh, thank you, that’s helpful on the placement.  That will also make it more poignant–weird stuff has just started to happen, and this is the crest of when he’s made them absolutely happy.

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