 The format of your robot. Remember laser disk? No, me neither. I'd heard of them but never seen one, as the format was extremely rare in Europe, until I went to Japan about five years ago. It's got this reputation as being a country in the future, and yes there is technology everywhere. Some of it cutting edge, but you're just as likely to find fax machines, toaster ovens, punch cards, floppy disks and indeed laser disks. In Osaka, Japan's second city, a giant megalopolis of epic overpass and neon lights, laser disks are even today readily available. In Denden Town, the city's electronics and on a coup haven, laser disks line shelves alongside VHS and DVD. I was over there to work as an English teacher, but in my spare time I wandered around the multitude in a sly ways, subways and high streets. Exploring, walking, drinking sake one cups and eating cacao and fyoza at all hours. In the district of Denden Town, also known as Nipponbashi, there was plenty to interest the western tourists. Made cafes with young women in subret cosplay serving tea from bone china teapots in response to the delicate little bells placed on each table. Vultistory manga and anime stores with seven feet tall gondom guarding the doorways. I remember a strange and marked doorway, the only information on the sign outside being a colorful drawing of an angry parrot with muscular arms wearing high heels and stockings. I never stepped through that door, and probably never will. Another thing you need to know about Japan as a whole, and Osaka in particular, is it has a homeless problem. It seems to be no support structure at all for people with social problems, unemployment, poverty, drug dependency, not even an attempt to sweep them out of sight. Alongside many roads, under bridges, on traffic islands, and in city parks people are living in tents, divacs, and semi-permanent shacks or sheds. Some of these guys are in terrible states, I once saw an old man step out of his roadside shed in bare feet. His toes and toenails so mangled they looked like broken bones sticking out of stumpy raw flesh. Others are fairly well-dressed, like salarymen down on their luck. Even Asakage Okohin, the grounds to Osaka's famous castle, where Takuagawa defeated the Toyotomi in 1615. Establishing the 250-year dominance of the Takuagawa shop, it has inhabited shacks and tarpaulin strung up between the cherry blossoms. Despite the number of people living homeless it is exceedingly rare to see anyone begging, or even busking for change. For that reason it drew my attention when, one night while out walking in Akinashima Koen, Koen means park, I saw a lot appeared to be a rudimentary store. Outside a tiny wooden hut of scrap wood and metal, not big enough for one person to lie down in, Sam an elderly bearded man in disgusting clothes. On his feet he wore plastic bags from 7-Eleven, and in front of him, laid on the ground on a square of tarpaulin, was a random array of scrounged old tat. I glanced across as I continued walking. It had passed midnight, but in a place like Osaka that means little. Restaurants and shops were still open and the park was full of life. Besides the homeless people there was also the drunk salarymen sleeping off a skin full of sake, the young lovers and the practicing musicians. Because of the flimsy nature of walls in Japanese apartments a couple wanting time to themselves can actually find more privacy in a public park than they can at home. As I continued my walk I saw a young man practicing drums, he'd set up a full kit with bass drum, snare, toms, hi-hat, the whole lot, and was bashing away on the grass under the heavy loaded bow of the cherry blossom. I walked around the path doubling back on myself and heading back the way I came. I was getting tired and had to be up early but was enjoying the sights and the moonlight. As I walked past the old homeless man for the second time we accidentally made eye contact, just for a second, and we both looked down at his arrangement of objects. I walked over to where he sat and stood before him. My Japanese was poor so when he spoke I couldn't make it out. Partly it was due to my lack of fluency, but also it was the teeny croak he spoke in, a fast staccato like an overstimulated geiger counter. I tried to mumble a few words in Japanese but soon settled with a, sorry, I don't understand. He said and pointed to one item which appeared to be a bundle of short electrical cables with the two pin plugs still attached. The appliances they once serviced were nowhere to be seen. 500 yen I figured, about 5 American dollars, 2 pounds and 50 pence British. He pointed to another item, a rubber amp and mandal's head which looked like it had been run over by a car. A stained wrinkled soft-core porn magazine, the cover star a young Japanese lady, a girl really, with painted lips and a black bikini. A hubcap from a Toyota. A carrier bag, 7-Eleven, containing a small pile of partially smoked cigarettes. A dead bird. A sod and pair of trousers looking like they had recently been fished out of one of Osaka's many rivers. A 12 inch by 12 inch cardboard square sleeve with a disc inside. I bent to get a closer look. The cardboard had once been white but had clearly been soaked and dried out once or twice and stored in damp conditions. It was wrinkled and peeled and scuffed with filth. In a corner I could make out the image of three eggs in a line, the initials and each day written across them. The logo for Japan's public broadcasting station. I picked it up and turned it over. On the back was some faded hand written kanji which I had no chance of deciphering and the katakana iru fu, a la fu. I tipped the sleeve sideways to let the disc slip out into my hand and up to that point I had expected to see the shiny blackness of vinyl. Instead I saw the silver of laser disc catching the street light, shimmering veins of electric blue light motor oil on water. Even so there was significant scratching and the on patch where the aluminum surface had peeled revealing the plastic beneath. I didn't know what the disc was and wasn't convinced it would play at all. But it was significantly curious and the old guy obviously needed the money. I paid him a 500 yen coin and thanked him too politely. Thank you. Damo Arigato Gasanasu. He bowed his head a little and I set off walking, the laser disc tucked under my arm. A few hundred feet away I heard him buttering and yelping and when I glanced back saw he was looking in my direction. I couldn't understand any of what he said and the wind blew gently taking his words away into treetops and high rise apartment blocks and the light polluted night sky. I didn't own a laser disc player so the disc was forgotten for a couple of weeks. It spent some time on the coffee table, on the floor under the sofa, propped up beside the TV, anywhere it could be ignored. I had no intention of ever doing anything with it and certainly wasn't going to buy a laser disc player just to find out the disc was damaged beyond repair. An American friend was over one day and noticed the disc. He asked about it and I told him how I had acquired it. He agreed it looked unlikely to play and also couldn't read the handwritten kanji on the sleeve but said he knew a Japanese technical expert with the equipment and know how to potentially salvage it. He contacted him and a couple of days later when he was available, we visited him at his apartment. Most Japanese living rooms have the usual stuff, seating, TV, dining table, etc. But in this apartment the living room was full of sound and video equipment, computers, digital and analog tape decks, wires stretched and tangled everywhere, monitor screens and speakers in stacks. He took one look at the laser disc and agreed there wouldn't be much surviving data but what there was he could salvage. He had a high end player called News High Vision which he said could read through defects that a normal player couldn't. That ran through a processing amplifier into the capture card of one of his many PCs and the specialist software it contained. He told us he would need time to clean it up and encode it and we should leave him to it as it would be boring to watch. We agreed and went to a nearby bar for a few beers and a couple of rounds of acutory, grilled skewers of different parts of chicken breast, neck, crispy skin, meatballs, heart, liver, cartilage, its great beer food. Our technical expert friend knew where we were and said he would be round to collect us when he'd finished. A couple of hours later when we were nicely drunk and our bellies were full, we began wondering if he would be much longer. Just as my friend was about to make a call our technical expert was suddenly standing there beside our table. His face was white and gaunt, whiter and gaunter than you'd expect from someone with such a dedication to digital technology. And he placed the laser disc with its sleeve and a black DVD box on the table. Without saying anything he turned to leave. My friend and I looked at each other and he grabbed the techie's sleeve with a, Wait! Despite his reluctance we got him to sit with us and had a drink brought over for him. He drank quickly like he couldn't wait to be out of there and wouldn't answer any questions about what he'd found on the disc. He said it was all there on an AVI stored on the DVD and we should take it and go. He repeatedly warned us off watching it. He deleted it from his computer and we would be well advised to destroy both discs and forget about them. I asked him if he could read the scrolled kanji from the laser disc's sleeve. It means nothing, he said, nothing he could understand anyway. He said it was an ancient character set and compared it to me trying to decipher old English written in the densest Gothic script. He didn't want payment for his work, he just wanted to forget about it, but I managed to force three 1000 yen notes into his hand. He thanked me repeatedly, graciously bowing his head, and asked pathetically if he could go now. We said sure and he got up and basically ran out of the door without another word. At this point we could not understand his reaction at all. He was either a very eccentric and nervous man normally, or he had seen something terribly unsettling that he was struggling to come to terms with. We of course, had a few drinks so we dismissed him as a weirdo and laughed about it. But in retrospect I know his behavior had been understandable, in fact I think he held it together well just by bringing the discs to us. Had I been in his position, I may have disappeared from contact, turned off my phone and ignored the doorbell until we went away. I may have called the police and reported us for suspicion of committing insane and terrible crimes. I may have gabbled and drooled my way into a secure mental institute where I could bang my head against soft walls until I died old and alone except for the insects in my mind and under my skin. Soon we left the bar, excited to get back to my apartment and watch the disc, and much to my regret that is what we did. With a few cans of chew-hay to keep the drinking mood going, I stuck the unlabeled DVD into the drive of my laptop. There was one file on the disc, an AVI with a random alphanaric name, something like 0-0-0-5-4-H4.AVI. I double clicked it and full screened the video. It troubles me to think back to what we saw, those terrible sights that sobered us up and kept us from finishing our drinks that has kept sleep away for most of the last five years and effectively ended our friendship that ruined our night and troubled our lives. Regardless I will try to remember all I saw of that video. A disgusting nightmare vision of what appeared to be the lost final episode of the 1980s American family sitcom Alph, the conclusion to the cliffhanger which saw him captured by the alien task force. The video began with a loud high-pitched squealing sine wave tearing through our ears. On screen was a test card padded, vertical bands of bright color at the top half, blocks of black, white and gray at the bottom. This remained on screen for about a minute occasionally broken up by pixelated blocks of digital distortion, the whole while accompanied by the high-pitched sine wave. Suddenly nothing. Black screen and silence. After a wait, which felt like minutes but could just as easily have been seconds, the screen flickered like an old videocassette presumably from an earlier analog to digital transfer, and still the occasional explosions of digital distortion from the corrupted laser disc. The NHD logo began fading into the black background but suddenly glitched out, the screen breaking up into pixelated blocks and shouting out with a burst of white noise that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. What remained on the flickering screen was a view down dirty dimly lit corridor. The floor and walls appeared tiled like some sort of hospital, but filthy and damaged everywhere as though it had been the scene of floods and massacres. Most of the lights were out and the ones that worked flickered intermittently. The only sound was the occasional electronic buzz of the lights, almost too quiet to perceive. All down the corridor into the distance were double-hospital doors with small windows in at high level. A quiet pathetic whimper or groan of pain and defeat emerged slowly through the electronic buzz, a tearful sobbing of someone reduced to helplessness by torture and humiliation. Suddenly digital distortion ripped away the image and brought it back with the camera moving down the corridor and screaming, Someone in one of the rooms was evidently being subjected to an heinous ordeal which words could not express, only the scream of an anesthetized cutting and tearing. Up until this point we had been fairly good hewered about the video, but something about the screaming and sobbing unsettled us. This was not the sound of acting, more the sound of real agony, the sound of someone or something being maimed and mauled by hands trained in the art of cruelty. As the camera continued down the corridor and the screaming grew worse and worse, other voices joined in. Various desperate calls and screams in a range of pitches and bizarre alien languages tore out as if from beings imprisoned in the rooms leading off from the corridor, they held in response to the pain of their fellow inmates. The screams built and built to a crescendo and the flickering video distortion worsened to the point the picture was completely obscured, and just as the noise was so bad I thought I would cry more digital distortion and white noise ripped through everything. The picture returned with an image that shocked us, made us cry out in horror and surprise, and almost an absurd burp of laughter. The chorus of screams was silenced and the image on screen was so unexpected to us, the collision of the familiar childhood image with such inspeakable viciousness, a contradiction that broke our minds. Feeling the screen was alph, the alien life formed from the TV series of the same name. The shot was close up, showing his head and shoulders from above as he lay strapped to a stainless steel dissection table. White light poured down on him from out of shot making the image dark and overexposed even through the flicker of worn out video. He lay with his head to one side, his firmatted with dark blood, and various wires and electrodes penetrating the top of his head. He sogged gently. His pain was unbearable, genuine suffering which made us desperate to reach out and help a fellow living creature. His expression of pain was both human and animal. He began to turn his head, the effort was clearly about as much as he could muster, and after a few failed attempts and tired whimpers he faced the camera with closed eyes. More digital distortion and white noise, then alph opened his eyes, beaten and bloodshot, strangely human eyes as though a person were trapped beneath elf's skin. He tried to speak. Please, I miss you. He croaked. I miss you. His words were translated into Japanese subtitles. And as the title, the word elf in the big white letters of that familiar font and its katakana Japanese subtitled translation roofu, appeared on screen. Elf let out a horrendous blood curdling scream, out of breath and panting, and kept screaming and screaming until his voice was hoarse and he could scream no more, but still between sobs and desperate gasps for breath, he screamed, and screamed, and screamed. He stared into the camera, with those teared up guying pleading eyes, staring at us, at me, as he screamed and screamed. This must have gone on for a few minutes at least and just when we thought we could take no more, just when the constant screaming was eating away at our very souls, that terrible saxophone music started. We couldn't believe it, along with the continued screams the saxophone-led theme song from the third and fourth seasons of Elf began to play. It was that same music but somehow rarer, as Elf pushed through overloaded speakers and re-recorded onto a waxed cylinder, then blasted out again at ear-splitting volume. And between interspersed cuts of jolly scenes from the past, shots of the Tanner family, credits starring Bax Wright and Ann Skadeen, and random rips of analog and digital distortion increasing in severity all the time, were images of terrible torture. A close-up of a hand being drilled, a leg being hobbled with a sledgehammer, and all the while that guy is screaming, panting and crying. The quality of the footage was deteriorating still, and as the happy memories, torture, miserable wails, distortion, saxophone music and white noise coalesced, I began to feel sick. All those terrible experiences build up to a roar and suddenly the video jumped and stuck on a loop. A split second of smiling Willie Tanner with starring Bax Wright emblazoned across, a full-body shot of Elf strapped to the tabletop with his torso peeled open revealing the beating bleeding insides of his alien anatomy. These two hideous images jumping cutting looting between each other at irregular intervals, all the while the screaming, the white noise, the distorting lump and saxophone stuck, stuck, stuck. And I swear under all the clander I could hear the maniacal laughter of Elf himself. These two images looped for so long that I began to think it was the actual AVI that was skipping somehow, but checking it I saw the VLC time slider moving along naturally. The looping continued until more serious distortion obliterated all sound and visuals replacing them with pixelated blocks and indistinguishable noise. When the picture returned it was of a lower quality still and the scene had changed. The camera, now camcorder quality, seemed to be lying slightly over to its side on a tabletop looking across the room to the autopsy table where Elf lay strapped down. Lighting was dim and a green tinge to the picture suggested night vision. The scene was obscured by someone stepping in front of the camera, a person in doctor's scrubs, gloves and apron all heavily stained with blood and feces. They adjusted the camera slightly and stepped back out of shot. Elf, who may have been lying unconscious, seemed to come to and began bumbling and whimpering and begging. No, no. Please no. His head moving side to side slightly. He appeared delirious, distressed, and barely alive. The doctor walked back into shot and stood with his back to the camera beside Elf and the autopsy table. His features were covered with a gray surgeon's hat and face mask. He stood over Elf looking down on him and appeared to be talking. We couldn't hear a word he said, just the occasional cum consonant penetrating through Elf's sobbing and pleading, and the slight movements of head and shoulders. The scene remained unchanged, except for the persistent random interference of distortion, for maybe five minutes. Five minutes of inaudible cum speech. Unchanged except for occasional sudden jump cuts to the smiling faces of Kate, Lynn and Brian Tanner, who seemed to be looking on incurious glee. It was as though the surgeon, the torturer, was explaining matter of factly exactly what he was going to be doing to Elf. The sobbing and pleading continued throughout, then a brief flash of distortion and white noise leading suddenly to blackness. I don't know how long the blackness here lasted. It may not even have been on the video. Perhaps I passed out momentarily or shock has just left a blank hole in my memory. Whatever really happened when the picture came back the scene had changed yet again. The camera was on the move, held in the hand of someone I presumed to be the surgeon, not pointed at anything but swinging about wildly with the movements of the herb. This was dizzying, producing blurred effects of blood stained walls and spilled war like an abattoir floor. Soon it steadied and swung around to the autopsy table where lay the mutilated headless corpse of Elf, jump cut to Kate, Lynn and Brian in a happy conversation. The camera panned along the body and upwards towards the ceiling, towards the source of an aurethmic drip, drip of dark liquid. There, hanging by cables and wires, was the severed silenced head of Elf, his scalp shaved and ears snipped off to allow access for the multitude in his penetrating electrodes. Although the stump of his neck hung the spine pulled from his body, and although I didn't notice at the time in retrospect it occurred to me there was something wrong. Well obviously it was all wrong. I mean there was something not as you'd expect about the spine. Rather than being the repeating structure of small separate vertebrae, the spine began at the neck as two long thin parallel bones which ran half the length and terminating at a joint where they connected to a single thicker bone running down the rest of the way. Thinking back, I have become convinced over time that Elf's spine was not a spine, but the bones I saw were the radius on the end humorous of a human arm. As the camera held on this scene for a moment and the words, created by Paul Fusco, faded onto the screen. Elf's eyes blinked open and he looked directly into the camera. The voice of the cameraman sounded, the voice of the surgeon, the voice of Willie Tanner saying, Good morning Elf. Elf screamed in guttural anguish and the credit sequence rolled. Humorous pictures of Elf drinking from the toilet, trying on glasses, peeking through the blinds, wearing headphones, all that stuff, but instead of the theme tune playing was just that screaming, desperate panting and crying. Immediately as the video ended I turned and was sick over the arm of the sofa onto the wall. Sick, and sick again. I rested against the arm trying to recover my strength for a minute or two and eventually looked over at my friend. He sat motionless, mouth clamp shut and eyes wide open and empty, hands held out in what could have been a shrug, begging or even praying. I called his name and got no response. I shook him by the knee, then the shoulder and called his name again and again. Suddenly he snapped out of it and a bit of life came back into his eyes, just a bit. He looked around the room, as if wondering where he was, and over at me. We looked at each other, shocked and disbelieving, and I felt the rise of more vomiting. I rushed to the toilet and heaved a spat and sod through my mouth and nose. As this was going on I heard the front door close. When I came out of the bathroom my friend had gone, so had the laser disc and so had the DVD from my laptop. The disc tray was open and VLC was open on the desktop, but the file was gone. Had I wanted to play it again, which I definitely did not, I wouldn't have been able to. After I had cleaned up my vomit and failed to contract my friend, he wasn't answering his phone. I went to bed and failed to sleep. I lay for hours staring at the ceiling with terrible images running through my mind. At one point I thought I heard a voice somewhere in the apartment and managed to bulk up the courage to investigate and find nobody. I returned to bed with the lights on and drifted off eventually two fits of terrible indefinable nightmares. I woke up wet with my all year in. I can't remember ever having done this before. I didn't see or hear from my friend again and over time grew more disinclined to contact him. Now if I saw him in the street I think I would turn and walk the other way for fear of what might happen, should our shared memories get together again. Since watching that video I have suffered severe sleep disorder and been through therapy to try to quell the constant obsessive repetition of unwanted extreme mental imagery. A few months after watching the video I returned home to England and haven't returned to Japan since. Although it was five years ago and 6000 miles away I still cannot get away from it. I carry the imagery with me in my head and I suspect my old friend does too. I don't know where he is or how he is doing, but last week I received an email head, alpha autopsy, from one of those anonymous temporary accounts. I deleted the email and powered down my computer. Hey, I returned after 30 years later.