Fluid Dynamics

Ivy Ngeow

Yamaguchi picked up eight croissants, a bag of coffee beans and a box of berries in a Tokyo deli near the harbor before he made his way to the Yokohama Bayside Marina. The marina was well-sited between Tokyo Bay and the ocean. A sunny and chilly spring day was a perfect day on the water. He stared at his shopping basket. He didn’t want ground coffee, or a cup of takeaway, when there was a grinder on the boat. For some reason he thought harder about this than he should. There was always that slight fear: what if the grinder was not working and neither his wife nor the robotics told him?

He re-tied the dogs’ leashes to a railing and went back into the shop to purchase a bag of ground coffee too. That should do it. A back-up was always necessary. Before boat trips, his wife usually took care of the weekend meals. And their three sons and two shiba inu dogs. Often there was delightful food for the family, like wagyu or prawns for dinner. Chilled Chablis. There was also dry dog food in the kitchen cabinets too. Wives did that. Details. This time she had taken the boys on vacation to the mountains, and it was his first time alone on the new roboboat with the dogs, Yuki (fortune) and Adzuki (red bean). A few years ago, robotics designer Akira Yamaguchi decided that he needed a better boat. He was just an okay and not a great skipper. And even if he was, weekends and holidays were important to him. He had to relax and he couldn’t. The cockpit of his 11-meter deck had been a continuation of a place of work. He could not stop. While family, friends and the dogs were lounging on deck or swimming, he worried about parking, steering, driving and even letting it drift. And that was in the summer. In the dreaded worse months of the year, it was enough to stop him going to sea.

He climbed onto the deck and Yuki, the braver of the dogs, leapt across, while he picked up and carried Adzuki in like a toddler. “Let’s go, guys,” he said to the dogs. He took his backpack of food off. He liked the sun on his face. A moment passed as he felt the simple salty burn of wind on his skin that cold spring day. He felt alive. A boat was not a car which, when parked, was stationary. Dead. Immobile. Asleep or active, a boat was living. A pleasant moment could turn into disaster in a matter of minutes depending on the mood of the sea. His dogs barked at something in the horizon but he had no idea what was killing them. Sometimes they did go manic if they heard or saw something that humans weren’t aware of, or if they had too much pent-up energy.

He’d learned much from his dogs.

As he unlocked the cabin with the electronic system, he knew that the security worked also on the days you didn’t have a phone, or battery, or a signal. There was a manual override when you had to go back to the lock and key via voice activation and fingerprint. Yamaguchi thought of the back-ups in every situation. Robots knew voice and touch. But they did not read minds or hearts. That did not bother him since people didn’t either. Predictability was all in a day’s work in robotics engineering. Owning a boat was a symbol of one’s wealth and status, not only in Japan but throughout the world. It was a luxury pastime, an asset, even if you still had to do the luxurious work of manning the cockpit. You could build years of experience or hire a crew but Yamaguchi didn’t want either. He didn’t have time.

He unpacked the backpack in the kitchen. He removed just a couple of croissants, leaving the rest in the paper bag which he left inside the backpack. The grinder worked. It came as a surprise, like a sunrise after a storm. Of course it would work. He turned on the tap and filled the coffee machine with water.

As founder of Tokyo’s Robert Lab, he used his wife’s connections from her various luxury food-related businesses in Taiwan. There was no one called Robert, Yamaguchi had said in the most recent Dezeen interview. It was robot in Japanese slang, being similar sounding words. The press had dubbed his new invention the roboboat. Every item or nickname now linked to him started with Rob yet his name was not Rob or Robert or Robot. It soothed him to be in control and gave him the sense of same satisfaction of sticking a sticker onto a present he’d wrapped beautifully, one that he also made himself. A feeling of done.

Time for breakfast. He watched the dogs go off sniffing and exploring. They’d been on the roboboat twice before but sniffing was part of their peace, their enjoyment of space. He placed both croissants carefully onto a plate. He could easily eat them all day. Light, buttery and full of air. He’d looked at the other pastries in the deli but didn’t feel like any of them. He also didn’t want ham or cheese which would have given him an upset stomach on the sea. He stuck to plain as he was avoiding sugar.

Unlike his wife.

Yamaguchi’s wife introduced him to Heavenly Treats, a sweet manufacturing powerhouse run by young engineer and entrepreneur Huang Liang. Long-haired and charismatic, the top-hatted Taiwanese was also an absolute genius. An artist. A yoghurt maker. A kiosk constructor. There was seemingly nothing he could not do. In Taiwan they called him Johnny Depp. They meant Willy Wonka. The Taiwanese mostly had a sweet tooth, a sense of humour and a readymade, eager audience. With their street desserts popular throughout Asia, judging by the queues at self-driving kiosks, restaurants and cafes were increasingly outdated. The concept of the light and functional semi-automated kiosks was Taiwan’s dessert business model. Bureaucracy was thin, so they built things fast.

Build me a kiosk that’s a boat, a boat that’s a kiosk, was what Yamaguchi seemed to recall saying to Huang Liang three years ago, and it was quoted in Forbes and Scientific American, so it must be true. A yacht that was yogurt. Cute, small, organic and fun. He told Scientific that aesthetically, the design was not inspired by Italian or worse still, Middle Eastern sensibilities. He steered (ha!) clear of ornamentation, over-design and over-specification. The 12-meter boat had rounded edges and a bulbous bow like an Asian’s face. The profiles of other vessels in this class were angled, pointed, just like their European owners’ sleek profiles. Yamaguchi said the design of boat was Japanese through and through. He wanted to reflect that traditional, simple and clean lifestyle still being practiced today. A sense of order. A sense of calm. What the world knew of as Japanese.

He did not mention Taiwanese.

After all, boat-building would have just been boat-building without Robert lab. Why else would it be called the Japanese roboboat? Not a, but the.

Yamaguchi’s father, a now retired engineer, always encouraged him to find an intelligent and educated woman. You see, his father had said, a marriage is an address book. It has personal and work contacts for life. When you see your wife eating a lot of frozen yoghurts, you must find out why. Okay. His father didn’t say that but he could imagine him saying it; smell a lead when it’s close to home. Also, please, my most esteemed, dear son, marry someone from home. No foreigner will be able to put up with our customs. How could someone understand the 14 levels of formality unless they were Japanese?

Yamaguchi and his wife secured funding and founded Robert Lab X, a joint venture with Huang Liang. On a gritty, windy winter’s day in an Osaka boatyard, the roboboat, the kiosk boat or kioboat was finally born. There were many nicknames, press names, but the boat would always be revered and known as the Inuyasha to Yamaguchi.

Inuyasha was the name of a classic popular fantasy anime and manga series written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi. Inu was dog in Japanese, and yasha was wild soul or demon. The main character, Kagome, was a 15-year-old girl in contemporary Tokyo who was transported to another world in the past and met the dog-demon named Inuyasha. Kagome and Inuyasha travel to find the Shikon Jewel. The Jewel of Four Souls, it was marble-sized and granted whoever possessed it with immense power. The four souls were Aramitama (Courage), Nigimitama (Friendship), Kushimitama (Wisdom) and Sakimitama (Love). Shikon, is formed from the Japanese words, 'shi' meaning four, and 'kon' meaning soul. Souls were stories, without which, dreams could never come true. Without that certain magic in technology, the Inuyasha of his dreams would not have existed either.

At last, Yamaguchi was in control without being at the controls. A real Captain. A Captain’s Captain. The Inuyasha concept was his idea of what a cruiser should be. “A companion in a quest, like you guys,” he muttered absent-mindedly to the dogs.

With two bedrooms, a kitchen, solar power, a bathroom with shower, handbasin and toilet it was as neat and compact as the first Heavenly Treats kiosk that he set his eyes on. But all this was immaterial. It was the self-driving that lowered the Captain’s stress levels. The GPS enabled the boat to remain stationary without an anchor. A stabilizing gyroscope device, nicknamed Kagome by Yamaguchi’s son, reduced rolling and jerking to a gentle bob at a switch. Animism, his son had said, is a form of superstition. Even the joystick must have a name.

They set sail. Without his family around, he’d planned and programmed the route for that day, for open and base waterways, not the middle of the ocean. Inuyasha was driving herself, cruising around Tokyo. A day trip. Naturally the dogs also drove themselves, as they did always. When they finished their nasal explorative journey, they lay down in the shade on the deck, always near Yamaguchi.

It was time to relax. The point was that he could spend time with his family and friends while the robot drove the boat and looked after every necessity. He didn’t even need to step into the cockpit. Yet he did. He’d rather eat in the cockpit than the clean pine kitchen counter top. He’d rather make crumbs, he thought as he stared at the joysticks and the dials. It would give him something to clean up. Was joystick an ironic play of words?

Why was his wife on vacation in the mountains? Why Taiwan? He knew why. Right now she would be tunneling through a 11-mile long canyon trip up the marble walls of the Taroko Gorge. The twisting, soaring feature of Taroko National Park. They would have cruised the LiWu river. He looked all this up or rather he got his office droid Charlesbot to look it all up and read it back to him the moment she’d mentioned the trip a month ago. Charlesbot was good like that. He was not Google. He could give an opinion that would be very similar in syntax and content to Yamaguchi, who did not want a female android. That would seem perverted. Why not instead have a “buddy” type android? Humorous, sarcastic, truthful. All the things a buddy should be. Not some girl who said witty things. He already had a wife who did that. And look what happened.

Charlesbot was a prototype level 3, and still, a work-in-progress. All works of art are. Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. Wabi Sabi is the ancient Japanese wisdom of finding beauty in imperfection and simplicity in nature. If you could have a companion in your quest who knew what you wanted to know, but better that you knew yourself, wouldn’t you? Most of us were afraid of the truth. It did not sound very good. So why not have some bot-honest light humor with a moral touch, appropriate to your cultural context instead? Charlesbot, also designed and made in Robert Lab, was a cross between a priest, and a Wes Anderson movie. Yamaguchi had taken Charlesbot to the China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF) in Shenzhen several years ago and met other droids such as Nick, Alisha and Gerry on the international “droid playdate” scene. They stayed at the Four Seasons with other robotics engineers and their droids who all had a good time, he remembered, at the bar and at the parties the organizers and sponsors threw.

Yamaguchi now had a waiting list for more Inuyasha roboboats to be made for the ultra rich. The price tag was 1.2m euros but at least 5 people were waiting for them to be born in the Osaka boatyard while Robert Lab worked on the AI. Quite a few people, it seemed, wanted a stress-free cockpit experience.

Charlesbot had told him back at the Lab, just picture Huang Liang with his long hair in a man bun, the top hat discarded for all-weather high visibility gear and some made in China hiking boots. Yamaguchi imagined that his oldest son would be forced to put his Nintendo down for a vintage train tip at Xinchen or Hualien, the same boy who came up with the manga names of Kagome for the joystick and Inuyasha for the vessel, and the dogs’ names, who wrote and illustrated his own manga graphic novels before he realized he didn’t like them that much, and it was a saturated market. The athletic middle son who could disappear like a ghost and only wanted food, shed loads of it, from his mother. And his youngest. Just like the mother. Yankees fan, sweet-toothed and sweet-natured but with a tiger’s roar inside.

And he agreed? Of course he agreed. He was not that kind of Japanese man. He did not own her. She is not a droid, unlike you, Charlesbot, he said. Yes, Yamaguchi could have her address books, her Heavenly Treats, their Osaka boat yard, even Inuyasha the roboboat, but not her. Oh, fuck the wagyu.

His father in all his sagely demeanor with business wisdom from thousands of years could not have predicted that an address book had a shelf-life, as relationships did. Anyway, he had started to get frail, and was having blood tests and so on. Who knew if his father was going to be well or unwell? So much of life depended on health, not wealth. He could not navigate the boat nor his wife, his wife who was so intelligent, whom he met in New York in college, and a fellow engineer and businesswoman. She was interested in everything, the children, the dogs, food and wine, of course, business and especially his projects at work. She was just not interested in him.

The dogs came over to be patted, so he thought. But they were only licking and vacuuming the croissant flakes dropped from a greater height of his own paws and chin onto his knees, lap, everywhere. He could hear heavy breathing and snorting as he glazed over the cockpit’s dashboard, the floor, all the glittering lights, dials, knobs, counters. He got his laptop and changed the route. Actually he did want to get to the middle of the Pacific. Inuyasha would take him anywhere he wanted to go.

He got up and left the cockpit and the crumbs he’d made that the dogs hadn’t snuffled up. He left Kagome the gyroscopic joystick, the dog breath-steamed lights, the dials.

The boat ride was a like a ghost; Inuyasha the dog-demon silently cruising Tokyo waterways, while Yamaguchi retired onto the deck chair with a cup of fresh ethical Ethiopian blend. The business buzz, that entrepreneurial energy again. An ethical kiosk idea? He was tired of ideas now. They did not spark joy.

He lay reading two novellas he bought at a train station in the last month. It took at least a few hours. He did not even understand what the hell they were about. One more croissant and whiskey on ice for lunch. He became drowsy. If he could even drift away, he might get to Hawaii but he didn’t have his passport.

Wabi sabi. Alone, time and space and even his trash were his. “Where the flow carries a large quantity of water, the speed of the flow is greater and vice versa.” - Leonardo da Vinci. He liked the vice versa bit most, but only because he had to think harder than he ought to, like when buying the ground coffee. When he woke up, he tossed the incomprehensible train station novellas onto the deck.

Yamaguchi stumbled out of his deck chair in a heap, like a pot plant overturned. In the kitchen, he retrieved his backpack. Inside, the paper bag was empty. The dogs had eaten all six of his remaining croissants. He cursed, crushing the paper bag and putting it in the recycling pedal bin his wife had so carefully lined. Half of his box of berries had been munched on. They’d made a glittering blood-red mess in his laptop bag, dark and shiny as wet jewels.

He took the leftover mashed berries onto the deck and flung them over the railings, box and all. Was it not organic, eco, bamboo? Deep red juice sprayed his Polo shirt. Clutching his stomach, Yamaguchi only just noticed that the novellas he’d been reading were scattered like leaves on the deck, the corners mangled and chewed by the same culprits. Picking the thin paperbacks up, he hurled them one at a time into the sea. He didn’t hear a splash.

He went back to sleep on his deckchair, curled like a blood-splattered bird, not wanting to be awake when the boat arrived in the middle of the ocean.