The Final Yab

All I need to do now is wait; everything is about to come together. The result of months of work and a considerable chunk of my oil fortune.

To a computer scientist, finding something (or someone) is just a matter of narrowing down the possible places to look using indexed information, then exhaustively searching the rest. Well, sometimes it's just an exhaustive search. She's normally in Tokyo, but that metropolis truly is too vast to search with bruge force. But I could narrow it down, and it didn't have to be Tokyo.

I only had one photo, but it was enough. With the OpenStreetMap dataset and a bit of script-fu I had a list of places that might work: all 19,821 bridges in Japan between 20 and 120 metres in length that crossed a river. From there only the relatively simple task of grabbing satellite images and streetview and uploading the entire dump to mechanical turk.

A flyover city might be considerably easier to search than Tokyo, but it's still hundreds of square kilometres filled with millions of people. Nevertheless I was on the next flight to Japan. Even in the age of Coronachan getting a visa is just a matter of money. I started by posing as a researcher and contacting a few convenience store franchisees. Turns out most of them are run by the Yakuza, which made things easier. A small "research" fee got me passwords and addresses of the ip cameras all around town. Luckily nearly all of them had audio as well.

A push notification popped up on my phone. I clicked it and started listening...

"Your change is 47 yen. Can I warm this up for you?"
"Yah"