世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド / Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

More about the book

Tokyo, near future. A data war is raging. The system, the organization of the not-so-good eternally good, develops increasingly sophisticated encryption techniques, which are repeatedly cracked by the Factory, a kind of data mafia. A brilliant elderly scientist, the Professor, devises an absolutely secure coding method: he isolates the personality structure, the "psychocore," from a group of professional data washers, all employees of the system, and implants it into several test subjects as a Black Box that can be called up at any time via a code signal in their brains. Encryption and decryption can only occur in the subconscious, preventing any unwanted access to data. However, only the 35-year-old cool hero and first-person narrator survives the procedure and finds himself caught in the crossfire. On his parallel journeys through the more or less real Tokyo and the fantastic city in his mind, the brain-manipulated yuppie experiences wondrous adventures.