December 26, 2017 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @chessanator

From: @billyweird

Notes: Happy Holidays! I got really into your “Left clone learns about Christmas” prompt and hope you enjoy this fic.

Decades before his death, Brother described a sacred object: a living figure who thought and spoke but served like the golems of ancient lore, made in the image of the Dolorosa. The one who found and returned her to Free the Soul would be a hero.

E-10, tenth of the fifth generation of Myrmidons (and he felt lucky to be so as he shared a number with the previous hero who returned the Dolorosa doll and vanquished a great enemy), had the privilege of caring for her. Or luck, as one brother put it snidely before immediately taking it back to avoid recrimination for jealousy, though he was right. E-10 was the most gifted with machines and the beastly tower that kept the Dolorosa doll alive and thinking was complex as could be.

It stood in the room like a massive tree in a fairytale-themed room. Armored knights bearing greatswords flanked her golden birdcage throne. Murals of sleeping princesses and brave, foolish shepards and goose girls and villagers and dragons surrounded her. One wall was covered with a bursting verdant garden of tangled vines, grasses, and flowers.

The doll slept often; she never waned nor waxed, asked for water or medicine. She hadn’t aged since she arrived well before E-10’s creation. She put herself to sleep, usually. Useful information about the facility she’d been rescued (no, someone would say if they heard him, you retrieve an object, you rescue a person) from was extracted long ago, and now she was a living relic that only special people like Myrmidons could visit for worship. If powered on, she could speak and move, and because he understood her complex electric brain better than anyone (pride, he’d be chastised) he could speak with her anytime he wished.

She came awake like a wind-up doll, to use a metaphor he’d read once and had to look up to understand, sitting upright slowly and blinking as she raised her head. “Tyltyl?”

“Luna.” He pulled on a chain around his neck and her birdcage pendant emerged from his shirt. Her eyes brightened noticeably when she saw it. “I’m here for more information.”

She frowned but her eyes never left the pendant, like E-10 when another of his brothers was chosen to light the ceremonial candles before a service. Brother knew all thoughts, but Brother passed shortly after the conquest of Rhizome-9 (an achievement D-10 could never top and rode for the rest of his brief cloned life) and was not here to reveal E-10’s constant little mental rebellions. “Of course.”

“…If I play your music first, would you tell me more about your old life?” He wound it up before she could answer, and the tinkling melody made her touch her trembling mouth, eyes closing as the song brought back memories she only spoke of if ordered or tempted. She swayed in her seat and rested only when the last note faded. He came forward and knelt before her cage, touching the bars. “So?”

“What would you like to know this time?” She would tell him about her facility, that she wasn’t the only thinking machine her creator made, her creator…but never anything of the rescue or D-10.

“…Did you ever ask why you were created?” He squeezed his knees and looked up into her confused face. “Is it any easier to understand your purpose when you were handmade by man?” E-10 supposed he was as well, but to be a machine with programmed thoughts must be simpler. Luna (she loved that name) would never have doubts.

“No. To both questions. I did have a purpose.” She touched the spot where her necklace once hung. “But it was taken from me and I’m not sure why I’m here now.”

E-10 didn’t know why either, or why she’d never told anyone he was the one who stole her sacred relic. She played her music box all the time at first, and the melody enchanted him so that he slipped it off over her head during repairs. She couldn’t shed tears, but the only way to describe her reaction to losing it was “weeping.” “Because you’re holy. You told me once that it was enough to exist in a place where you were loved.” He hated her answer, honestly. She could admit she wanted and she needed. For E-10, it was supposed to be enough to exist in service. Devotion was fulfillment, shared identity was being whole. He couldn’t want, though he did. He wanted to have secrets like the music box and these stolen moments with Luna, the Dolorosa, the idol.

She hugged herself and shook her head. “Idolization isn’t love. Everyone worships me, but nobody looks at me and asks me how I feel.” What an odd concept, the desire for individual acknowledgement. How he craved praise for his technological skill or his neatness or his knowledge of canon. When she asked him to call her “Luna,” he initially hadn’t understood, but he knew he liked it when she named him.

“Why does that matter?”

“Because…” She shook her head. “Do you want to understand? Or do you just want more stories?”

“Stories. And not the bluebird one.” She told that one often, stressing its message that happiness wasn’t true unless shared. She called him Tyltyl from that story, saying only that she liked to distinguish him from the others when he asked why.

“Alright…hm.” She pushed an askew lock of hair behind her ear. Once, he watched her re-braid it, fascinated that she cared about such things. “Have you ever heard of Christmas?”

“No.” She never wanted to hear the stories he did know: the parables of Brother, the end of the old age, and the era of tranquility. “Who is he?” Every story had a central figure, and usually it was Brother.

“It was a celebration on Earth. It started as a way to honor the birth of a religious figure, but I like its later meaning better: that it was a time for gratitude. Peace on Earth and good will toward men.”

“That’s every day here.”

She looked toward the wall full of greenery she couldn’t touch, even though it was meant for her honor and pleasure. “Certainly. But the spirit of Christmas was for anyone, not just the saved here.” She folded her hands on her lap. “One of my favorite stories is about relearning the meaning of Christmas. It’s called ‘A Christmas Carol…’”

Her story was difficult to picture, full of things like families and money and ghosts and parties. Truly fanciful, but he was drawn in by the ghosts and the way, time and again, Scrooge isolated himself in pursuit of his goal, learning almost too late that his selfish pursuit of wealth had withered and killed his belonging in his community. There was something to be said for the message that the wellbeing of others was far greater than your own; remove the trappings about pleasure and it could make a fine lesson for sermons.

“So Scrooge decided he cared about others more than money?”

She smiled and nodded. “He realized that others’ happiness made him happy, and that was the meaning of Christmas.” She pulled herself up by the bars, and tried to poke her face between them to look at him closely. “You don’t have to wait for three ghosts to visit, Tyltyl. You can choose that now.” Her hopeful, earnest gaze brought him to his feet. He turned away from her and took a few steps toward the plants. Reaching up, he plucked a few flowers from the carnations she’d been looking at, then turned back to her and offered them.

She gasped and took them with weak fingers, kissing the blossoms. “Thank you.” She savored them like they were relics only she was allowed to handle, gently clutching them to her chest. When the cage door swung open a moment later, she startled and nearly dropped them. “What…?”

“I can’t let you go,” he said quietly. “That’s not in my power.” He held the music box in his palm, admiring the shine and saturation it held after two centuries. The tiny bluebird inside always about to fly away but never leaving its perch. “But nobody has to know if you walk around in here, right?” He offered her a hand, and when she tentatively took it she was soft and warm like a human, her tiny feet alighting on the floor just like a bird. She flitted from her plants to the murals to the tower that kept her running, stroking it with an unreadable expression. He couldn’t understand why she wanted freedom so badly, but knowing that she wanted it was reason enough to grant her this moment. He turned on her music again and she stepped to it, spinning so her skirt and apron lifted with her, arms flung out.

“I didn’t know… You don’t know how long you’ve been sitting until you stand up. What’s the date Tyltyl?” She paused when he told her. “That long?” She clutched her apron and looked back at the plants. “No wonder something this small feels wonderful. How did I survive in there for so long?” She grabbed the nearest pot, overflowing with a delicate fern, and hugged it. “I wish I could smell you. What does this smell like?”

Suddenly he was face-first in the pot, his vision totally green and brown. Moisture touched his lips and the fern tickled his cheeks. He sniffed, nose twitching at the tickle, and then inhaled deeper. “Like dirt?” He had to rub some off his nose when she withdrew the pot.

“That’s it?” She seemed disappointed. “The Doctor loved his garden. He could describe every plant in a new way.” She pet the fern before putting it back on the shelf. “I know they’re delicate, but could you please bring me an orchid next time? I miss them. I can still remember the orchids the Doctor grew one year.”

E-10 looked away. “I don’t grow the plants. I’m not sure what you’re even talking about.”

“I’ll describe them to you! Just please. I want an orchid.” She nodded to his chest. “And in exchange you can keep my music box forever.”

“Really?”

“Yes! If it makes you happy, I can be happy for you.” He didn’t recognize her. She went from obedient doll to bouncing, happy woman just from stepping over a threshold. And all she demanded of him was a simple flower.

“Okay. That’s the meaning of Christmas you talked about?”

“I think so.” She leaned forward and clasped her hands together. “When doing good for someone else brings you joy—that’s Christmas.” She took his hand when he offered it again, smiling even as he lead her back to the cage and closed the door behind her. “Thank you, Tyltyl.”

When had someone ever said that to him? How did you respond again? “Oh.”

“Goodbye then.” She waved as he stepped back. “You’ll remember my orchid?”

“I’ll bring it.” Even though he had no idea what one was. Christmas was apparently about doing things you didn’t understand because they meant the world to others. To have someone look on you like you were special. “Goodbye, Luna.”

Pandora’s Box

December 22, 2017 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @siggyklim

From: @chessanator

One very very smart Alice and one very very smart Lotus coming right up! I hope you like maths, and Merry Christmas!

(p.s. Please try and pretend that the prime numbers are bigger than they are. I realised half-way through writing that I didn’t have easy access to 19 industrial-grade prime numbers for fanfic-purposes)

Ao3

25^th November, 2029

Alice knew that, technically speaking, Hazuki Kashiwabara fell under the purview of the ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to shoot you’ Protocol. She also didn’t much care. After the Nonary Game she had been kidnapped for and with both her daughters working for the Special Office of Internal Security, Hazuki already knew most of everything worth knowing, and knew why it was important to keep it all secret. More importantly, Hazuki was actually a really useful lady to have around. You didn’t just find her sort of genius standing by the side of the road. So Alice didn’t much care for anyone saying she wasn’t allowed to invite her friend into the Office whenever she felt like.

Of course, when an officer of the SOIS doesn’t care for something, it doesn’t actually matter.

So, one blatantly forged ID badge later, Hazuki was comfortably situated in Alice’s office, swinging the swivel-chair by the computer gently around. Alice settled for lounging on the sofa opposite. One of the key tenets of SOIS operations was matching intelligence assets to the task they were best suited for, and despite the electronic warfare training all agents went through Alice could be confident that with Hazuki at the computer there was little more she could contribute.

“So how are Nona and Ennea doing these days?” Hazuki asked. After nearly losing her two daughters a decade before, that question was always her first when she and Alice met.

“Overseas, at the moment,” Alice replied. She followed it up with her usual thin smile that said, ‘and you don’t need to know anything more.’

“‘Overseas’? Really?” Hazuki scoffed, “Wasn’t this supposed to be the office of internal security?”

Folding her arms and smirking, Alice said, “America’s internal security starts as far as possible from our borders. The earlier we catch the bastards, the safer we all are.”

“Yup, I guess so.” With that, Hazuki swung around in her chair, half way towards the keyboard. “So what’s up today, Alice? Who are we going to hack apart this time?”

Alice shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted to talk to an old friend.”

“You know, for a top secret agent of the most clandestine agency in the world, your lies are just awful. If you just wanted to chat, there are plenty of cafés around here where we could have met. About half of which are entirely staffed by patsies of yours, if you really needed to discuss something confidential.”

“That’s not true!” Alice exclaimed. She held her mock-outraged expression for a couple of seconds, then relaxed. “After Light quit his harpist job, we haven’t got any leverage on his replacement yet. That makes the number of cafés we control half-minus-one by my count, thank you.”

Hazuki chuckled lightly. Then, she continued, “Still, I know I’m right. We wouldn’t be meeting here if you didn’t need my skills. So tell me, Alice: what’s up?”

“Nothing world-ending,” Alice said, getting to the point, “Just this mafia group that’s resurfaced. The one that tried to take over the Las Vegas strip a couple of years back. We thought that we’d eradicated them back then, but it looks like we only managed to weed out all the stupid.” Annoyed as Alice was that the previous mission hadn’t been a complete success, it wasn’t a complete washout. At the very least, it had been a relatively proving ground for Light and Clover to win their spurs.

“Smart mafiosos? Rue the day.” Hazuki gestured avidly towards the computer she was sitting at and said, “Just general hacking disruption, then? Or are you after something in particular?”

Alice considered it. “We’d like to know where they are getting their money from. They couldn’t have recovered this fast without outside help.”

Hazuki grinned. “Can do.”

After five minutes of preparation, Hazuki was ready to go. Alice had done her part, aiming the computer at the closest thing the Office had to an entry-point to the gang’s computer network; now she could step back and just let Hazuki get to work. Hazuki cracked her knuckles and stretched out her back, ready to type.

Hazuki glanced at Alice.

Alice nodded.

The hacking began.

Green lines of code swept across the screen as Hazuki’s fingers swept across the keyboard. The screen flashed with one window full of data then another; Hazuki gave each only a moments glance, absorbing the information then dismissing the window in favour of the next. Each snippet of data informed the next piece of code, and without quite understanding what was going on Alice could feel them spiralling in and in towards their target. At the very least, Hazuki was grinning in anticipation.

And then the screen went blank.

“No!” Hazuki gasped. She slammed her hands onto the desk, rattling the keyboard.

Alice stared at the dark empty screen. “W-What happened?!”

“I was this close,” Hazuki hissed. She tapped the left mouse button a couple of times, bring the last few windows of data and code back onto the screen. “Look here. This group has set up their network by using a regularly updating schedule of private and public cryptography keys for an RSA system. After random intervals each computer in the network chooses a new private key, constructs the new public key, and distributes it to all the other trusted computers on the network. I had just set up a buffer-overflow past their final layer of defences, and I was this close to injecting code that would trick those computers into thinking we were part of the trusted network, when someone human noticed and scrubbed us out.”

Alice knew far more than the basics of computer security and infiltration, but even so she’d never heard of a cryptosystem complicated as that. “What’s with that? Surely that’s a bit excessive, especially compared to what this group had the last time we beat them.”

Hazuki let out a wry bitter chuckle, then said, “It’s probably worth it, if they knew we were after them. It was reasonably well-programmed, at least, and it had to have been the reason your in-house guys couldn’t break in. Even if you brought all your processing power to bear, you couldn’t break through. I found out that this was the public key just before we were kicked out –” Hazuki elegantly indicated a number – 599725548175349234588407 – at the bottom of the window she had restored “– but by the time you can get SOIS’ supercomputers into action to factorise it, they’ll have already moved onto another key.

“God help us. So even though we know it’s 599746013723 times 999 965876309, we still can’t…” Alice trailed off.

Hazuki sat there, frozen by complete disbelief.

Alice snapped her fingers in front of Hazuki’s face. “Hello? Hazuki Kashiwabara? Are you still with us?”

Hazuki murmured, “That’s… That’s not possible.”

“Thank god. I thought I was going to have to say that Seven had called you an old lady.”

Alice’s flippant comment went nowhere. Hazuki still stared at her, but her eyes showed none of the anger they should have. To be honest, Alice was rather concerned.

“Hazuki…? Lotus?”

“That’s completely impossible,” Hazuki said again. She turned back to the computer screen, furiously typed some code; she stopped and turned back to Alice only when another number had appeared on the screen. “Alice,” she said, concern filling her voice, “Can you look at this, please?”

Alice looked at the number: ‘724677698895304108732301’. “It’s 803065408993 times 902389382957,” she replied.

Hazuki pressed ‘enter’ on the keyboard; another number appeared. “And this?”

Alice didn’t need to study ‘668089868878852858021373’ for even a second. “769945710559 times 876710358947.”

Hazuki murmured again, “It’s completely impossible…” She tapped out a long string on the keyboard, then pressed enter again.

Alice stared at the number ‘90591875222471336864959701060623807145969394309’. “What the hell, Hazuki?”

“Thank goodness.” Hazuki sighed, her relief almost filling the room. “You can’t actually solve –”

“It’s obviously 324270473809 times 465783271379 times 599886421037 times 999836357587. Why are you wasting my time with simple things like this?”

“What the HELL?!”

Once Hazuki had recovered, she explained. “Alice… every single bit of computer security in the entire world depends on our inability to easily factorise primes. We can produce numbers in a couple of minutes that can’t be broken in centuries. Shouldn’t be broken in centuries. But you were doing it instantly.”

Alice shrugged. “I’ve told you. I’ve always been good at math.”

“I know. But this isn’t just ‘good-at-math’ good at math. This is ‘you could walk into any bank in the world and walk out with all their money’ good at math.” Hazuki paused, staring at Alice inquisitively. “Alice… Are you an esper?

“Huh?”

“I should have realised with Nona and Ennea,” Hazuki said, “I should have noticed the signs, when they started to get twice as good at school tests without needing to revise, and when one of them would know all the spoilers for a series that only the other had watched. If I’d noticed, maybe I could have protected them, or at least worked out why they had been taken. I decided that I would be more observant next time. So, Alice: are you an esper?”

Alice folded her arms sternly. “No. I’m not.”

At that moment, Clover leaned through the office door, her pink hair bouncing eagerly as swung on the doorframe. “Yep she is!”

“Clover!” Alice snapped.

“What? We’ve known all year: me, Light, all of us! Anyway, see you later!” Clover swung away and skipped down the corridor before Alice could reply.

Alice scowled, but she couldn’t avoid the truth. Everyone she’d demonstrated it to had been convinced that there was something extraordinary about her mathematical abilities. She hadn’t become a highly-ranked officer of SOIS by failing to look past her own biases. She took a deep breath and accepted the facts in front of her. “Interesting. I’m sure there’s some way the Office can use this.”

Hazuki nodded slightly. “You can break pretty much any encryption in the world. I’m sure your bosses will find something for you to do. But…” She trailed off, glaring at her computer screen. “Doesn’t help us much with this, though. The mafia group we were trying to hack were updating their keys too regularly. By the time I’ve given you one, you’ve factorised it, and I’ve hacked in, they’ll already have changed to another one. That’s for every single one of the 37 nodes of their network. And even if I do break through, the person who caught me last time will probably force me out again. If we could automate your ability, of course I could hack them. But…”

‘If we could automate your ability.’ Alice thought about those words, and a spark lit in her mind. She was still getting used to the idea of being an esper herself, but she was comfortably familiar with esper abilities as a concept and in practice. She had recruited Light and Clover, Nona and Ennea, and all the rest of the Nonary Game espers. She had trained them, seen them in action, carried them through their first missions. Mentoring those espers and making them useful to SOIS and the country had been the declared goal of the unit she led. But it hadn’t been the only goal.

“I think I have an idea.”

– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

Hazuki watched as the technicians clustered around the sofa where Alice lay, fiddling with wires and waving scanning devices. It didn’t look to Hazuki like the bustling activity was actually making any progress at all, but eventually the techs decided they had completed what they had set out to accomplish and backed off, letting Alice sit up. Hazuki looked Alice over.

“Well congratulations, Alice,” she drawled, “You’re winning first prize at the next cyberpunk convention you go to.”

Alice really would have won such a prize. If the metal casing that covered the right side of her head wasn’t enough, and the flashing lights that spun around the surface didn’t seal the deal, then the fact that the wires – which sprouted in a chaotic rainbow-coloured nest above the device – also appeared to bury their way into her head would have convinced anyone that she was a technologically-enhanced agent for a clandestine government conspiracy. Correctly, as it happens.

“I have to ask: what is…” Hazuki carefully pointed at the device, making sure that her finger didn’t get caught in the tangle of wires or touch anything important. “… that?”

Alice tilted her head, testing out the weight of the thing that had been attached to it. “SOIS has been working on this for quite a while now. In fact, we’ve been developing this for… two years, now.” Alice said that last part as suggestively as possible. She hadn’t said, ‘from the moment we recruited the survivors of the Nonary Games,’ but she might as well have. “Ever since we found out that the morphogenetic field existed and that there were espers who could use it, we knew we had to employ it to protect the nation. We recruited every esper brave enough to join us, of course, but we couldn’t just leave it to chance. I wouldn’t rest if we were just leaving it to chance. So from the beginning we’ve wanted to see if we can automate esper abilities. Working with the gentlemen down at Area 51 who were researching… well, it’s classified. But this…” Alice pointed – far too calmly – at the contraption that had been wired into her brain. “This is the prototype for the device we came up with.”

Hazuki had a horrifying flash of images go through her mind; Ennea having that device clamped onto her head and Nona having that device clamped onto her head and both of them being wired into machines to be extracted from. “That sounds far too similar to what Gentarou Hongou and his Cradle goons were trying to accomplish. You wanted to put my daughters in –”

“Please,” Alice interrupted, “We weren’t planning on forcing anyone into it. Just like when Nona and Ennea joined us in the first place, it would have been entirely their choice. If we couldn’t have tested this with willing volunteers, it wouldn’t have been worth it at all.” Alice paused. “I’m rather glad I’m the one who is testing the prototype out. We hadn’t used it yet because we were concerned about the possibility of it affecting both siblings through their connection. If I’m not an esper, it shouldn’t cause me any harm, If I really am… I’ll have to learn maths from the ground up again. Probably.”

Hazuki could at least respect that her friend was willing to put own life on the line before involving anyone else. “Yup. Anyway, what are we supposed to do with this?”

“It should be wirelessly connected to that computer,” Alice explained, “You send me numbers; I’ll factorise them and send them back to you. If it works the way I imagine it will then I won’t even need to consciously think about it: it’ll just happen.”

Alice seemed perfectly comfortable having that device connected to her brain, and Hazuki trusted her friend to weigh up the benefits and risks and make the best choice. If so, then they were ready to begin. Hazuki sat down at the computer and began her usual pre-programming stretches, loosening her muscles and getting a feel for where the keyboard lay in front of her. Once her back muscles were fully exercised and supple she was ready to go.

“Let’s kick some ass.”

It really was too good to be true. In fact, it was a hacker’s dream in digital form. Hazuki barely had to do anything at all once the original program was written. The code just did the work for her. As the attack encountered each obstacle, Alice would hum to herself and numbers would fly across the screen as the encryption key was factorised to shreds. At one point the enemy sysadmin caught her like before and reformatted one hacked computer. Then another. Then a third. It didn’t matter. Hazuki had complete control over every other computer on the network, and the freed computers were reinfected with malware faster than Hazuki could blink. Overwhelmed, the enemy gave up.

Nothing could stop her.

With the hack successful, it was time to make use of the access she had. Hazuki started by scouring the databases for every picture of gang members she could find, downloading them to the SOIS servers. That would help the police find and arrest every last one of the bastards. She looked up information about the routes they used to smuggle in drugs and victims, and plotted them as best she could on a map. Then, with the obvious stuff done, Hazuki went further.

A politician who the mafia had been blackmailing: his details and proof were anonymously slipped to a local newspaper. Irregularities in the accounts of the casino the gang had laundered money through highlighted and sent to the IRS. Emails to two hit-squads edited to direct them away from their at-least-probably-more-innocent targets and at each other’s hideouts. With her all-encompassing presence on their computers, Hazuki could do to them whatever she wanted.

Finally, because it was what Alice had originally asked her to find, Hazuki went for the money. She didn’t know anything about how criminal syndicates organised their cashflow; her career before she had met Alice had only been at boringly respectable companies. But looking at it from the position she occupied, it was clear as day. One by one, the accounts were drained, frozen, and involuntarily donated to missing-children charities. After five minutes, the only trace left of all the gang’s crime-earned cash was the database of transactions that Hazuki had downloaded.

Hazuki pressed escape. The attack program ended, closing every window but the one that showed the financial documents.

“Bullseye!” Hazuki called across the room, “Alice, I did it! We won’t see those bastards anytime soon.”

When Hazuki glanced round, Alice was tapping the esper device bemusedly. “Really? It hardly felt like anything was happening on my end. Hmm… I guess they were telling the truth when they told us this was safe.”

“I guess they were,” Hazuki replied. She paused. “Still, test it out one someone else before giving my daughters one. I’m sure Clover would be an eager guinea-pig.”

“Yup!” Clover had stuck her head through the door again as she skipped back down the corridor. She stared at the protruding web of wires coming from Alice’s head. “Woah, that looks awesome! Is this the new SOIS thing? Tell me when I get mine!” Before Alice or Hazuki could give Clover a reply – sensible or otherwise – Clover had skipped away again.

Alice shrugged elegantly. “I guess so.” She stretched, then stood up from the sofa she had been resting on while the hack was in progress and walked over to Hazuki, reading the screen over her shoulder. “Those are the accounts of all those criminal’s money, then? Did you manage to find out who was funding them?”

As far as Hazuki was concerned – and she knew that Alice felt the same way – accounting was the job of people who went to work in suits, not those who could wear whatever they damn well pleased. But there were some simple macros she could set to work that might just do the job for her. She started one, searching for any name that appeared too often in the list of transactions she had taken.

To her surprise, it worked. One single name, belonging to one single organisation, appeared in the list ten times as often as anything that wasn’t one of the mafia’s own accounts. Practically every single cent the mafia had owned had at some point in its life passed through the wallet of this one particular company.

“Alice,” Hazuki murmured, “Have you ever heard of a company called Epsilon Derivatives Ltd?”

Alice frowned. “No. I’ve never heard of it. But… Something about the way it sounds famil–”

Before Alice could finish, every single klaxon in the SOIS building went off at once.

“Alert! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Electronic warfare attack in progress! Turn off all non-necessary computerised equipment until an all-clear announcement is made. Electronic warfare attack in progress!”

“No.” Alice’s voice came out as a slight determined hiss.

Hazuki didn’t need to be told once. “I’ll see what I can do.” Drawing in more of the SOIS processing and network resources than she was technically supposed to have access to, Hazuki started to explore how the attack was targeting SOIS. It was easy enough: she quickly found some malicious code that had been injected into an obscure section of the operating system. Weirdly, it would have activated the fire-prevention sprinklers the next time Light Field used his voice-controlled computer. Hazuki quickly removed it; she didn’t want to get wet.

Then she noticed another thing: pieces of malware and viruses and trojans being inserted into files across the parts of the system Hazuki could access. She scoured out each one she could directly alter, directed the antiviruses towards the ones she couldn’t, and then came back to find even more malware in the spaces she had previously cleared.

Something about the whole thing seemed disturbingly familiar.

Defending mindlessly wasn’t going to be enough. Hazuki left the antiviruses to search for malware as best they could and turned her attention to the channel of incoming attacks. The attacker was redirecting their attacks via thousands of decoy computers around the entire internet and Hazuki couldn’t work out where the attack was originating from. But it was all arriving at the same place, and Hazuki was able to intercept some of the incoming packets as they streamed. She read them.

Lines of obviously malicious code, all cryptographically signed as though it had come from inside SOIS, each one naïvely accepted by the system because of that forged verification.

Hazuki hoped that the fact that she had just used the same technique herself wasn’t the only reason she worked it out so quickly. Someone with her skills and experience should have been able to puzzle it out even from scratch. That was all academic, though; SOIS encryption had been broken, the attack was underway, and Hazuki had to get that information out as quickly and as clearly as possible.

“Alice! They’ve broken our encryption!” she called out. After a pause, she added, “Just like we did.”

“How many of our keys have been broken?” Alice asked.

Hazuki glanced at the incoming packets of malware again. One said it had come from the head of SOIS’ research department, another claimed to have come from the Vice-President, a third one had been forged to appear as if Alice herself had authorised it.

“All of them.”

Alice stayed stoic; her voice stayed level and controlled. “Their target will be the top-secret information we have stored in the databases here. Our resources, our current missions, our agents’ identities.” Nona’s and Ennea’s faces flashed before Hazuki’s eyes as Alice said that. Alice continued, “What’s our defence?”

There was no defence. “We have to unplug everything,” Hazuki replied, “Literally everything. I’d tell you what to prioritise, but if I knew what the most important things were you’d probably have to shoot me. Just… Just rip the cables out of the servers if you have to. It’s the only way.”

Alice nodded. “Okay. Stay here.” Alice darted for the door of the office, stopping only to turn and slide a small earpiece across the desk towards Hazuki. “I’m heading to the server room. Do the best you can to delay, and contact me if anything changes up here.” Then, Alice was gone.

Hazuki focused all her attention back on the computer screen. Delay. That was what she had to do. She couldn’t defend, but if she programmed as hard and as smart as she ever had before, she might just be able to slow the enemy down.

As the attacker extended their control over the SOIS network Hazuki followed, watching where their attention was directed. Alice knew what she was talking about: the databases had to be the target. Hazuki made use of that, laying false trails and setting up decoys that would appear to be the main database up until the moment they were accessed. After the first two decoys were found and quickly left behind, Hazuki filled the third with false information, constructing profiles of non-existent agents from photos of celebrities and fictitious mission reports from the most ludicrous of Alice’s bar tales.

The attacker paused there for two and a half extra seconds.

The decoy tactics had been spent. From there, the attacker headed almost directly for the true database. Hazuki threw her last-ditch attempt into the ring, obfuscating the directory pathway by breaking every last rule of data-retrieval good practice in the books. That bought maybe one more second.

The attacker reached the database.

Hazuki’s computer monitor went black. The alarms suddenly stopped. Silence fell across the office. Hazuki held her breath, not knowing what the result had been.

The silence was broken by a tinny voice coming through the earpiece on the table. Hazuki desperately scrabbled it up and clamped it to her ear. “Hello?” Hazuki asked into it. She realised at this point that Alice had never taught her about radio protocol.

Fortunately, it was Alice speaking. “Hazuki? What’s happening? How far did the opposition penetrate? Did they find anything that could compromise us?”

“I have no idea. They’d just reached the database when everything went down…”

“If it went down just now, then it was when I disconnected the rest of the servers.”

Hazuki sighed with relief.

“Hazuki. Give me your professional judgment,” Alice continued, “about how much damage has been done. Could they have extracted any sensitive information?”

Hazuki considered. She was sure that a data-dump of the system’s process history would reveal that the enemy hacker had accessed the main database. She was also sure that it had only been for a couple of milliseconds. After watching the enemy smash through every electronic defence SOIS had, it would be all too easy to ascribe an almost-infinite amount of power and ability to them. But that could only lead to paranoia. No-one human could have understood anything from the database in that miniscule amount of time. Hazuki replied. “They couldn’t. You stopped them just in time.”

“Good.” Alice paused, and the silence crackled through the radio. “There’s a lot of details for the higher-ups to sort out here… and they will want to assign blame. If it comes to a tribunal, I’ll vouch for you. You did more to protect us than anyone in our own department. If it was up to me, you’d get a medal, but… somehow I don’t think they’ll be thinking about that.” Another pause, another crackle. “Wait there. I’ll sort things out as best I can and get back to you.” The earpiece fell silent.

Hazuki slunk back into her seat. So that was it? The bad guys hadn’t broken anything too much, so all was good? No. Hazuki couldn’t just sit there passively.

She leaned back towards the computer. Without the full infrastructure of the SOIS computer system behind her she wouldn’t have a connection quite as versatile as the one she had before: a great shame. But without it she was blind, and even after she has reworked the SOIS network protocol to allow her further access it shouldn’t allow the enemy hackers any more chances to attack the SOIS system.

Besides, she was curious.

Even through the very limited connection she could muster, Hazuki could at least do something. Since she and the computer she was sitting a had been key in the defence of the SOIS network, some details of the attack were stored on the computer’s own memory rather than anywhere else. Hazuki looked up the proxy computers the attackers had used. She wasn’t going to actually hack them, of course: most of them were personal computers of innocent, if annoyingly stupid, people who had managed to allow malware in that turned them into parts of the botnet. But she could follow the signal traffic.

For a few minutes, the traffic statistics were pretty typical, for normal computer-illiterate users. But then the computers were driven into action once again. Their processing power wasn’t being aimed at SOIS this time. Instead, all the internet traffic was being sent to another target. Though that target shouldn’t have had security and encryption in anyway correlated with that of SOIS, the attacker began to break it apart after only a short pause.

For some reason, that address of the new target looked worryingly familiar. Hazuki looked it up its address from the information SOIS had available.

That IP address was labelled only by a single symbol: a bright yellow circle, with three symmetrical protruding wedges.

Hazuki grasped the earpiece, yelling into it in a panic. “Alice! Alice! They’re going–”

– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

5 minutes earlier…

“No…” Alice almost couldn’t believe it. No-one had been brave or reckless or stupid enough to try to hack SOIS since computers had been invented. Still, drills had been prepared for this. First step: consult the experts.

‘Experts’ had officially meant the slowpokes down in IT in those drills, but Alice had an actual computer expert on-hand.

“They’ve broken our encryption! Just like we did!” Hazuki announced. She was already busy at work managing the attack, so Alice just asked the one most important question.

“How many of our keys have been broken?”

“All of them.”

With a co-ordinated all-out attack on SOIS like this, there was only one place the attackers could be going: the main database. Almost everything that America had declared officially Top-Secret, as well as everything that had been kept actually top-secret by not officially being declared so, was kept there. Alice explained it.

“We have to unplug everything,” Hazuki replied, “Literally everything. I’d tell you what to prioritise, but if I knew what the most important things were you’d probably have to shoot me. Just… Just rip the cables out of the servers if you have to. It’s the only way.”

Alice leapt towards the door. She stopped only to slide a radio earpiece along the desk to Hazuki, and then she was off.

The server room was three floors down from Alice’s office. Alice vaulted over the railing in the stairwell to drop the first level, but stumbled as she landed. Alice had lied somewhat to Hazuki when she had claimed to have hardly felt anything from the hacking esper device still attached to her head. Really, she had been given a throbbing headache, and it was only getting worse as she went along. If Alice wanted to ensure she reached the server room at all, she’d have to accept taking a longer time and go down the stairs normally.

Later than she would have hoped, and perhaps later than she could afford, Alice arrived at the server room. She stared at the banks of servers that ran all the way along the walls, further than Alice could see through the dimmed lights. These were what the attacker had come to steal from. These were what she had to protect.

Alice couldn’t tell which servers could access the most sensitive blocks of data just by looking at them; through the knotted forest of cables that connected them she could barely tell the different servers apart. It didn’t matter. She had to disconnect everything, and deciding where to start would waste more time than it was worth.

She started pulling out the cables from their sockets, yanking out several at a time, as many as she could grasp at once. It was too slow.

She pulled out her combat knife from her holster and switched to slicing through the wires with its brilliantly sharp edge. It was much faster than just pulling them out. It was still too slow.

Alice took a gamble. There had to be someway of disconnecting everything at once, for precisely this situation. Turning her attention away from the servers right in front of her, she sprinted down the room searching for some sort of master switch.

As Alice ran, her headache grew and grew. With her training, it was easy to force herself to ignore it. Her own personal comfort could come later, after the Office was safe. She continued to run.

Someone less alert would have missed it, or over-shot. The master switch had been buried between the servers, so that you couldn’t even see its alcove from the aisle. But Alice noticed the break in the pattern, skidded to a halt, and dived her hands in.

Alice yanked down the lever.

The lights in the server room went out completely.

The alarm died.

Alice couldn’t rest yet. She was completely in the dark – literally and figuratively – about whether she had been in time… or not. That needed to be rectified. Alice spoke into her earpiece, contacting the one she’d left for Hazuki. “Hazuki. Sit-rep?” Alice asked.

There were a few moments of silence before Hazuki replied. “Alice?”

Of course. Hazuki didn’t know what ‘sit-rep’ meant. “What’s happening? How far did the opposition penetrate? Did they find anything that could compromise us?” Alice asked, more explicitly.

“I have no idea. They’d just reached the database when everything went down…”

“If it went down just now, then it was when I disconnected the rest of the servers.” From Hazuki’s description, it had been close: very close. There was nothing on any of the servers that Alice could see that would indicate whether or not they had been accessed. Of course, they were all entirely dormant. So Alice had to ask. “Hazuki. Give me your professional judgment about how much damage has been done. Could they have extracted any sensitive information?”

Silence. Then, finally, an answer. “They couldn’t. You stopped them just in time.”

Alice slumped back against the rack of servers opposite the master switch. She had the answer she needed; she had succeeded. Now, the aftermath.

She could, at least, focus her entire mind on considering that aftermath. Her headache, which had reached its thumping migraine-like zenith as she’d found the master switch, had begun to quickly subside as she relaxed. That left room to think about the important questions.

Like the most important question of all: how had the enemy hacked SOIS with such insulting ease? Had someone been turned, blackmailed, or persuaded into giving up the encryption keys? Or merely been sloppy, and exposed them by accident? Either way, the result for that person would be the same. They’d told someone they shouldn’t had, and the consequences had been dire, and Alice or whichever of the other fully-trusted agents found them first would have to shoot them.

But what if that hadn’t been the scenario? What if…? What if…? Considering all the various possibilities was starting to bring Alice’s migraine back with a vengeance.

Alice’s radio earpiece crackled, the sound almost painful with how sensitive Alice’s headache had made her. Then Hazuki’s voice yelled desperately from it, adding worry and concern to the purely physical pain. “Alice! Alice!”

“Hazuki,” Alice said, trying her well-honed best to not show any weakness, “What is it?”

Hazuki’s reply chilled Alice to the point where she would show weakness whether she wanted to or not.

“They’re going for the nuclear codes!”

The nuclear codes. The ability, for good or more likely ill, to control and launch America’s entire nuclear arsenal. That was what the enemy was seeking. If they succeeded… everything was over.

“How are the defences holding up?” Alice asked.

“They aren’t!” came Hazuki’s tinny reply, “They’re breaking through the encryption as quickly as they did ours. I hate to say this, but there’s no way they’re doing this without the same ability to factorise primes that we were using.”

‘The same ability to factorise primes’? Alice could recognise something that very definitely wasn’t a coincidence when it was right in front of her. A resurfacing nuisance funded by a single shady source? An encryption system that practically required automatic prime-factorisation to break? A widespread co-ordinated attack on SOIS and then the nuclear infrastructure immediately after? This had been planned.

The hacking esper device must have been compromised. That was the only conclusion.

Alice tried to wrench the device from her head. That failed; it had been clamped on perfectly. She changed tack, returning her combat knife to her hand – she ignored the way her hand tremored with feelings of déjà vu – and raised it towards the side of her head. She prised the device up as far as it would go. With a single motion, she sliced through all the wires that went into her head.

Blinding pain ran into her brain. The device fell away from her, but she could barely see it; she couldn’t hear it at all as it clattered on the floor. It was a miracle that she stayed standing, and conscious.

The pain was worth it, though. Without the device, the enemy’s attack wouldn’t be able to continue.

Alice almost heard something coming through her earpiece. Hazuki? She sounded concerned about… something. Alice couldn’t hear what, and couldn’t pay attention to it, anyway. The headache consumed her mind. It wasn’t the pain from violently removing the device, though that was still there. It was the same headache as before. The very same headache that had formed when she and Hazuki had first tried using Alice’s new-found esper abilities. Through that headache, and from that headache, Alice realised.

It wasn’t the esper device that the enemy had targeted, though that had tried to make it appear that way to anyone who noticed the first layer of their scheme. It was Alice herself. That was their true trap.

Alice couldn’t stop this just by removing some equipment. She raced out of the server room and stumbled in the direction of the medical bay. Now that she had learned what to focus on, she could see the prime numbers flying through her mind: 324143286479 and 803205935663 and 867527277251 and 902450929507 and 599770933939 and 465836618921 and 324330453487 and 999999999899 and 770009701301 and… Alice knew that these numbers were her side’s numbers, but she couldn’t help but factorise them anyway.

She’d never been so violated: not even the year before when she and Clover had been captured and then unceremoniously released because they were no longer needed. How the hell were those bastards doing this to her? Subverting a piece of hardware like the device that she had used was worrying, given that SOIS security should have prevented it, but at least she understood how that could happen.

A phrase rose out of Alice’s recollection, from something she had read in a speculative report. The veracity and trustworthiness of that intelligence had been considered incredibly dubious at the time, but it had been as good as information got about Alice’s greatest and most hated enemy. So when the phrase ‘Mind Hack’ returned to her mind, she gave it more credence this time around.

God, no. Fuck no! Alice wasn’t going to let Brother and Free the Soul and their damn Myrmidons do whatever they liked with her mind. Alice might have fallen into the trap they had set by funding the mafia, and she might have taken until then to unravel it, but it would end right there.

Alice burst into the medical bay. She found the stocks of Soporil Beta quickly. No need to measure out the dose: with Alice’s resistance it would need to be the entire vial or nothing. She slotted it into the injection gun.

The one thing that Brother needed to complete his plan and take control of the country’s nukes was Alice’s esper abilities. The one thing Alice could take from him was her own consciousness. Alice gladly took the injection gun and shot it into her own leg.

Blackness descended over Alice’s sight, but she could taste her victory. It tasted… bittersweet.

– 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 –

25^th December, 2029

Hazuki made sure that she was there when Alice was allowed to return to the land of the conscious. She’d learned over the past month that if you were bold enough and unique enough, SOIS employees just accepted that you were supposed to be there. And when looking like the perfect model of a SOIS agent wasn’t enough, the still-technically-fake ID card that Alice had given her was.

Alice still lay on the bed. Thick, many-times wrapped bandages replaced the device in covering her head. Just cutting the device out like that had been utterly ridiculous, and they said that it was a miracle that Alice had survived it. But Hazuki’s friend was tough to the core, so Hazuki hadn’t been entirely surprised when the doctors had told her that not only was Alice still alive but she hadn’t even suffered any brain damage.

Those doctors now crowded around, examining the monitor of her brain activity and the IV line that dripped in more Soporil, second by second. That was just like every other time Hazuki had visited. But this time the anaesthetist began to fiddle with the intake, preparing to reduce the level and gradually wake Alice up. Holding up the value on the IV line, she glanced at Hazuki expectantly.

Hazuki took her position: a computer that had been set up in the medical bay specifically for this moment. This wasn’t anything like the jury-rigged construction Hazuki had used after the main servers had gone down during the attack on that day. This computer had been tailor-made, completely separate from the main SOIS network – which would be deactivated again, in any case, until they knew it was safe – containing an excessive armament of malware to aim at anyone who decided to make it a target, and with its own hard shut-down switch in case it was hacked.

Hazuki returned the anaesthetist’s glance, and nodded.

The IV slowed, dripped, dripped, dripped, and then stopped. Alice began to stir, her eyelids flickering and her breathing growing stronger. The head doctor leaned over, checking her vital signs.

Alice’s eyes snapped open. She reached up and twisted the doctor’s hand away from her, sitting up in one smooth motion. “Where am I?!” she demanded to know. Before she could be given an answer she looked around the room, her head and eyes moving in measured precise jolts. “Not our radiation shelter,” she muttered, “And you don’t look like you’re all cultists. So I guess the world hasn’t ended; thank goodness.”

“It hadn’t ended last time I checked,” Hazuki said, “I can look again, if you want.”

“Hazuki!” Alice gasped, before regaining her composure. She stared at Hazuki’s computer, a slight frown of concern forming. “Is it safe for me to be conscious? Is there any chance of the Myrmidons trying to use my abilities to break encryption again?”

Hazuki checked the monitor of her computer. None of the decoy computers that hackers had used previously had activated, and more importantly there was no suspicious extra traffic at either SOIS or the nuclear codes or anywhere else that SOIS considered sensitive.

“I don’t think so,” Hazuki replied. She paused, appreciated the sceptical look on Alice’s face, then explained, “It must have taken them all year to assemble the botnet and the processing power they needed to attempt this. When we did, we were able to track down all the computers they had infected and get them cleaned out. Plus, when they got desperate and overextended themselves…” Hazuki swivelled the monitor to show Alice a particularly pleasant video she had saved. On screen, Ennea, Nona, Clover and Light escorted a half-dozen handcuffed blonde-haired identical complete monsters into SOIS’ cells. “The Myrmidons had one shot at this. Thanks to you, that one shot failed.”

“Good,” Alice stated. Now more relaxed she looked around the medbay again, this time noticing the lines of tinsel that lined the walls, far enough away from anything that needed to be kept sterile. “So, already Christmas? What present did you get for me?”

“It’s a secret. If I told you, I’d have to shoot you.” Hazuki laughed.

Alice scowled. “So it’s not Brother’s head on a platter? With extra salt, for his wounds? No?” Alice leapt out of her bed. She stumbled slightly, testing muscles that hadn’t been exercised for a month. But then she was standing tall and proud, just as Hazuki had always known her, before striding towards the door. “I guess we’d better get started, then! Come on, Hazuki. Let’s kick some ass.”

Hazuki carefully shut down her computer, then stood up. It had been a long dread-filled month, but she could still smile.

“That’s right, Alice. Let’s kick some ass.”

The Spare, The Heir

December 25, 2016 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @thefireinthewire

From: @chessanator

A bonus gift for TheFireInTheWire, because you asked a question that needs an answer. It’s also an exercise in seeing how much I can write without mentioning the subject of the prompt (3440 words, as it turns out!).

Third in The Firetruck Trilogy (along with my other two gifts): Ao3 Link. I love trilogies!

Carlos looked down at the gun in his hand. He rested his finger against the trigger. Then, he raised his arm and steeled his nerves.

Black anger swept across his eyes.

A shot rang out.

And then, silence. Ten heartbeats passed.

“Your choice is made,” Zero – Delta – intoned. He grimaced. “Though, Carlos, I wish you had chosen to show mercy without wasting a bullet. In this unfair world, such careless decisions rarely pass lightly.”

The gun slipped from Carlos’ fingers and fell to the sand with a thud. He was sure – absolutely sure! – that he had aimed the gun straight at Delta’s heart. But it had gone wide: very far wide. It was like an entire moment was missing from the world, during which it had changed – if only slightly – without Carlos’ understanding or consent.

Delta continued speaking to the group of players, ignoring Carlos’ confusion. “I will be leaving now. You should do so as well. After all, you have a world to save. I wish you the best of luck.” Delta turned away and retreated through the entrance of D-Com, though Carlos barely saw him move before he was gone.

“So, what do we do now?” Mira asked.

Akane took charge, striding into the centre of the gathered group of players and turning to face them. “For now, we should just take care of our immediate needs. There’s no way we can consider what we’ve been told to do until they’re dealt with. Do we even know when we last ate?” After a pause, punctuated by shaking heads, Akane continued. “People from my organisation, Crash Keys, will be here shortly to pick us up. Until then…”

Akane’s voice trailed off into silence. Or rather, Carlos’ hearing of it did, for Akane’s lips were still moving. Gradually, new sounds started to pierce through Carlos’ sudden deafness. He heard the rumble of tires on gravel. He heard the crackle of an untuned radio. He heard a siren.

Lost in the noise, Carlos nearly jumped when someone squeezed his arm. It was Diana. “Carlos… You spaced out for a moment there. Are you alright?” she asked. The way she asked it made it seem like she done so several times.

“Yeah,” Carlos replied, “It’s nothing. Just some buzzing in my ears. I’ll be fine.” A sudden flash to a vehicle speeding down a rough track quickly proved those statements false.

But when Carlos’ eyes cleared, he continued to act as though nothing had happened, looking around at the others to try to catch up on what he had missed. It looked like Akane, Sigma and Phi had agreed on a plan of action, despite Junpei’s persistent attempts to monopolise Akane’s attention. On the other side of them were Eric and Mira, tentatively intertwining their hands. That left one other person, but Carlos didn’t see him immediately.

That was because Sean had wandered away from the group, looking out over the desert. “Hey! Do you guys hear that?” he asked, jumping up and down as he tried to increase his line of sight.

Eric grunted. “Geez. Of course we don’t, Sean. We’re not robots like you. There’s no way we’d be…”

Mira suddenly shushed Eric, pulling him back to face her and placing her hand over his chest. “Wait, Eric. I think he’s right. I hear something too.”

Carlos turned to face the direction that Sean was looking in, trying to hear the sound. He didn’t find it as difficult to hear as the others. It pounded in his ears as though it came from right in front of him. The siren.

Gradually, a red speck appeared on the horizon. It shot towards them, kicking up a cloud of sand behind it. After only a few seconds, a fire-engine skidded to a halt in front of them. A figure stepped from the driver’s seat, wearing full turnout gear, the helmet of which obscured their face.

The figure’s voice, muffled by the breathing equipment, called out. “I promised, didn’t I? That I’d come back for you… what? You’re… already out?” The person in the protective suit trailed off in confusion, then stumbled backwards.

Carlos stumbled as well. His vision shifted, and for a moment he found himself looking out through the visor, his body feeling like it was floating inside the suit. He saw all the players of the Decision Game from across the distance: all of them, including himself. When his sight snapped back into his own head, Carlos yelled, “Who are you?

As the figure flailed for balance against the side of the fire-truck, they answered. “I’m… I’m… Who are… you?” Eventually, they caught something to hold onto and, with their other hand free, ripped off the helmet. Carlos was able to see the man’s face for the first time.

The face was his own.

“No!” Carlos yelled. Thoughts and memories rushed chaotically into his mind: memories of a ten-month-long past that couldn’t possibly be his own. The views from both sides crossed over each other until nothing could be perceived in either of them. And his consciousness was pulled between both of the bodies, stretched to the point where it almost belonged to neither.

With mutual agonising screams, both Carlos and Carlos collapsed into the sand.

Carlos woke. He opened his eyes.

He found himself lying in a hard lumpy bed beneath a dim light that hung from a rust-covered ceiling. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see that his bed was just one of a row of many. His bed – no, the entire room – was swaying beneath him. Carlos tried to crane his neck to look around.

A beam of bright light suddenly shot into his right eye. A second later, it darted over to his left. “He’s awake. His reactions are good.” Diana’s voice, calm and professional.

Excited, bounding footsteps clanged against the metal floor to Carlos’ left. Their owner skidded to a halt leaning above Carlos. Long blonde hair tickled his cheek. “Good morning, Big Bro! I guess I get to look after you this time.”

“Hey… Maria,” Carlos said to his sister, his voice still achingly weak, “Good to… see you.”

Maria opened her mouth to speak again but was cut off by a curt voice from somewhere behind her. “Please step back, Maria. You’ll have time to talk to your brother later.”

As Maria stepped back, Carlos levered himself up the backrest of the bed until he could look out across the rest of the wide chamber that was the room he’d woken in. It had been Akane who had interrupted Maria, and she stood a couple of metres away past the far left corner of the bed, Junpei alongside her. To Carlos’ immediate right was Diana, wearing her nurse’s uniform and testing the IV that had been inserted into Carlos’ right arm. Finally, Sigma stood on the other side of room, half in shadow and with his arms folded solemnly – though he kept taking peeks at Diana’s back when he thought she wasn’t looking.

“Hey, everyone,” Carlos said, “Where am I?”

Junpei stepped forward, shoving another bed aside to clear a path. “You’re gonna have to answer our question first. Which one are you, Carlos? The one who was with us the entire time? Or the one who showed up at the end in the fire-truck?”

Carlos squinted his eyes quizzically. “‘Which one?’ What: did you manage to mix us up?”

“Please, Carlos, answer the question.” Sigma’s voice was filled with stern paternal authority, carrying across the room from where he stood without him having to raise his voice at all.

“Alright. I drove the fire-truck back to D-Com.”

Junpei frowned.

“Junpei. That there’s a coherent answer to that question is a miracle beyond our wildest hopes.” Akane stepped forward, placing a hand on Junpei’s arm before walking past him and all the way up to Carlos’ bed. “Carlos, perhaps you can explain to us how everything happened from your perspective.”

Carlos recounted how he had been prevented from transporting with Akane and Junpei to the new timeline, and how he’d realised that they would have both found themselves trapped in the bunker once they arrived. He then explained how he’d shifted to a third timeline where the transporter was still usable, jumping back ten months so that the transporter would be powered again by the time the Decision Game started.

“You still should have tried to stop Zero’s plan,” Junpei muttered under his breath.

“And once the Decision Game started, I came back to help both of you get out,” Carlos concluded. He paused. “But… you were already out. That’s what I don’t get. How had you already escaped? And… how on Earth was there another me there?”

“Carlos,” Akane said with an almost patronising weariness, “You went back in time ten months. You went back to before the game had even begun. All of its possibilities were still open, including this one, and you thus ended up in all the possible timelines that resulted from the game. Every single possible Decision Game had a Carlos waiting outside it. In another timeline, you did find Junpei and me trapped there, and saved us. But in this timeline, we were set free by Zero right at the very beginning. When you arrived, that is what you saw.”

There was a long pause as Carlos processed that news. “So… that’s where the other me came from. He was the one originally from this timeline.”

“You could say that,” Akane replied.

Maria leapt forward again. “Yay! I have two Big Bros now!” She wrapped her hands around Carlos’ shoulders and hugged him tightly. “Isn’t that great!”

Carlos stroked the back of his sister’s hair. “That’s right, Maria. We’re together again. Both… All three of us.” Placing his hand firmly against the mattress, he began to rise from the bed.

Diana’s hand planted itself firmly against Carlos’ right shoulder. With surprising strength, she forced Carlos to lie back down.

“Diana!” Carlos yelped with alarm, “What are you…?”

“I’m sorry, Carlos,” Diana said, “I can’t let you get up yet. Doctor’s orders.”

“But I’m fine!” Carlos exclaimed, “I’m better now! I’m as fit and healthy as I’ve ever been. I feel great!”

Diana closed her eyes, clearly holding back tears. She stammered as she spoke “Carlos… I never thought I’d have to tell anyone something as difficult as this. Please, ready yourself.”

Carlos did so.

“Carlos… you’ve been effectively brain-dead. For nine months.”

“What?” Carlos shivered. His right hand moved to cradle his head by pure reflex. “How can… What happened to me?”

“I don’t know,” Diana said sorrowfully, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know.”

Akane’s voice cut across the room. “For lack of a better way to describe it,” she said, “this is Reverie Syndrome.”

“I thought that all cleared up,” Diana replied, tilting her head, “when we finished the game.”

Maria nodded, then pointed an accusing finger at Akane. “Yeah! That’s right! I’m awake, aren’t I? That’s because Reverie Syndrome’s gone for good.”

“In general, yes. But Carlos’ case is more… specific.” Akane looked at Diana and bowed her head. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but I wanted to be absolutely sure about the details first.”

“What Akane means by that,” Junpei interrupted, “is that she gets a perverse pleasure from knowing things that other people don’t, and wanted to drag that out as long as possible. Seriously, the first time we got a room to ourselves, she…”

“Shush, Junpei.” Once Junpei was quiet, Akane turned back towards Carlos, Maria and Diana. “Where the original Reverie Syndrome was caused by the looming threat of the end of the world, and therefore affected many people to varying but lesser degrees, the problem we have here only affects Carlos and does so totally. Simply put, Carlos’ Reverie Syndrome is caused by the fact that there are two of him in this world.”

Sigma stepped forward across the room, out of the half-shadow he had stood in. “You know, I have been wondering about something. Every time we used the transporter, those people found themselves in a timeline where they were already dead. I thought it was just coincidence, but… there never are any coincidences with this, are there? It must have been a safety feature of the transporter itself, to prevent this from ever happening. Carlos seems to have found the only way to force it to break.”

Akane nodded. “It’s likely that sharing the Morphogenetic field with another version of yourself is dangerous to everyone. But when that person is a powerful esper – one who has recently undergone a Unison Event, at that – the results were catastrophic.”

Carlos clenched his fists. That the abilities he had only just developed could harm him – nearly kill him – was sickening. He knew how to fight a fire. Fighting the Morphogenetic field couldn’t possibly be done. “If that’s what happened… How am I even awake right now?”

“You asked earlier where we are,” Akane replied. She gestured around the plain white walls of the hospital bay, her arm swaying as the room continued to rock. “Welcome to the Gigantic. She’s a sister-ship to the Titanic, and was used as a hospital ship by the British during World War One. We have her sailing in the Pacific Ocean, only a few hundred miles from the coast of Japan. The other version of you is in a facility with a replica of this room back in the Nevada desert.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Junpei said, “but when Hongou set up both the boat and that building, wasn’t the entire point of it that esper abilities still worked over that distance?”

Akane blushed. “Well, um… yes.” She pointed at Carlos. “It worked, didn’t it?! At the very least, we got the two of them on different day-night cycles. And I’m sure that keeping them in identical conditions helped stabilise the fluctuations in Morphogenetic field. See? I was thinking about this.”

“I’ve been flying back and forth since I woke up,” Maria explained, “I wanted to be able to say ‘Good Morning,’ and ‘Goodnight,’ to both of you, just like you did.”

There was a short pause. Then, Diana sighed. “If what you’re telling us is true,” Diana said, “then… We can’t keep this up. We can’t just keep Carlos here forever. He could relapse at any moment… or worse.”

The room fell into silence. In that deafening silence, Carlos realised what had to be done.

“If the reason I’m sick is because there are two of me, then…” Carlos said unsteadily, “one of us has to die.”

Both Diana and Maria gasped. Maria squeezed him tighter. “No! Big Bro! Carlos!”

Carlos patted her on the head; his hand gently guided her away. “It’s okay, Maria.” Then he raised his voice so that what he said next was announced to everyone. “If one of us has to die, then it should be me.”

“The other Carlos volunteered as well,” Akane said, “during his brief moment of lucidity.”

Sigma clasped his hand and pursed his lips. “You know… they both agreed to this very quickly. Far too quickly.” He paused for a few moments, frowning. “We should all get ourselves checked. There’s still a chance that…”

“Goddamnit, Sigma!” Junpei interrupted, “Not everything is about Radical-6! Look, I get it. Your Nonary Game was all about the stuff, so I can understand why you’d get a little obsessed. But seriously, Carlos is just like that. A one-hundred-percent self-sacrificing hero.”

“Thanks, Junpei.” After nodding to Junpei, Carlos held out his hand to Maria. “Don’t worry, Maria. It’s not the end. When I’m gone, the other me will wake up. You’ll still have your Big Bro.” After gently caressing Maria’s hand, Carlos let go and turned his head towards Diana. “Diana, can you take Maria away now, please? She shouldn’t have to…”

“No!” Maria cried out. Tears crashed down her cheeks. “I won’t leave you! I have to be brave like you are, so I have to stay!”

“Maria,” Carlos interrupted sternly but gently, “I know you are brave. But you have to think about the other me as well. He won’t know anything about this. You have to be able to look at his face – my face – without thinking about someone who’s died. Can you do that, Maria? For me?”

Maria averted her eyes. “You’re right, Big Bro. I should go.” She turned, took one step away, then turned back. “I love you, Carlos.”

“Thank you, Maria. It was good to see you awake again,” Carlos replied.

When Maria had left the hospital room, it fell mournfully silent. Four pairs of grieving, conflicted eyes burned into Carlos. Eventually, he felt forced to speak.

“So… How are we going to do this?” Carlos asked.

After a couple of seconds, Akane drew a syringe filled with a clear white liquid from her pocket. “This is Soporil Beta. It’s an anaesthetic. That way, you’ll go without any pain.”

“That makes sense,” Carlos replied.

Akane passed the syringe to Diana. Diana carefully examined the liquid inside, then squirted a little out the end. Even when satisfied, she didn’t use it immediately. Instead, she asked Carlos, “Is there anything you’d like to say, before…”

“Last words, huh? I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Carlos’ forehead scrunched up as he considered. Eventually, he shook his head. “No. I think I’ll leave that for the me who’ll carry one living. Go ahead, Diana. I’m ready.”

Diana nodded, then placed the tip of the needle against the IV. She took a deep breath, and then pierced the tube. With her hands steady only because of years of training, she placed her thumb on the plunger. “Goodbye, Carlos.”

And then, at that moment, Sigma leapt forward. “Stop!”

Diana had frozen in place. She hadn’t injected the Soporil. “S-Sigma?” she stammered.

“We can’t do this!” Sigma shouted.

Akane sighed. “It’s terrible, I know. But unless we do this, Carlos will never have a proper life. It’s a tough decision, but one that has to be taken, just like the Nonary Game you had to run to get here.”

“There’s another way!” Sigma strode towards Diana. “Diana, please. If you trust me, take that thing out of there. Please.”

Diana did so, instantly.

Akane’s voice took on a curious lilt. “Explain, Sigma.”

“You said that the cause of Carlos’ illness was that there are two of him in this timeline,” Sigma said.

Junpei snorted. “We’ve been over this, Sigma.”

“Yes, but we didn’t talk about the key point!” Sigma exclaimed, “The problem isn’t anything to do with Carlos’ body. The problem is Carlos’ mind. Our only problem is that Carlos’ mind is in this world.”

“Sigma, what are you…?” Akane paused. She smiled. “Of course…”

Carlos wriggled in the bed. “Can someone explain to me what you’re talking about?”

“We don’t have to kill you,” Sigma said, “All we have to do is shift your mind out of this world.”

Carlos gasped, then groaned. “Would that even help? All that’d happen is that world’s version of me would take my place, and then they’d be in the same situation I am. I couldn’t do that to them.”

“Yes. There are a lot of constraints here,” Akane said, stroking her chin, “As Carlos says, we can’t just switch him with another version of himself. We’d have to find a way to shift him into the body of an entirely different person, if that’s even possible.”

“It is,” Sigma stated firmly.

“We’d have to ensure Carlos didn’t exist in that world. Then person who Carlos swaps with would have to be a powerful esper, or it wouldn’t work. And then we’d need to be absolutely certain that person doesn’t exist in this world either. Sigma… Can you be sure that this shift will fulfil all that at once? Because if you fail, you’ll only make the problem far worse.”

Sigma nodded confidently. “I’m certain. I know just the person it’ll work with.” He trailed off, mumbling, “Someone I haven’t seen for a good long time.”

“Spit it out, Sigma,” Junpei said, “I don’t want to die of old age before finding out what your crazy plan is.”

Sigma stepped forward once more until he was right beside Diana at the edge of Carlos’ bed. “Carlos, I believe I remember telling you, back when we first met in D-Com, that I was from the future. Forty-five years in the future. You didn’t believe me then, of course, but after what we all experienced in the Decision Game I hope you’ll believe me now.”

Carlos nodded.

“During that time,” Sigma continued, “I had a son. His name is Kyle. If there is one thing I regret, about jumping back in time and preventing the Radical-6 outbreak, it is that I had to leave Kyle behind to do it. At the time, there was no other way. But… if there was any chance I could see my son again…” Sigma fell silent, gazing pleadingly into Carlos’ eyes.

“Of course!” Carlos’ mouth burst into a broad smile. “I’d already agreed to die. Now I get to keep on going, and do some good at the same time.”

“Are you sure?” Sigma asked nervously, “The future I’m talking about is the one where we failed to stop the outbreak. Civilisation has ended, there. I wouldn’t say life there is meaningless, but it is rarely comfortable.”

“Sigma, I’m a firefighter. Diving into dangerous places to save lives is my job. There’s no way I’d ever refuse.”

“Thank you, Carlos. Thank you so very much.” Sigma’s voice stayed quiet; his vocal chords couldn’t believe, even as his conscious mind knew that Carlos had agreed.

“So how do we do this?” Carlos asked.

Sigma pondered. “I’ve never done anything like this before, but… I should be able to guide you there. Kyle is my son, so I should be able to use that bond to direct your mind into his body and bring Kyle safely back here.” He placed one knee on the edge of the mattress and reached his hand out towards Carlos

Carlos took a deep breath. He steadied himself and concentrated, preparing for the biggest shift he would ever take. Finally, he took Sigma’s hand. “Go ahead, Sigma. I’m ready.”

“Goodbye, Carlos.”

The mind in Carlos’ body woke. He opened his eyes.

Someone was standing in front of him and just to his right, half-leaning on the bed. A man. The mind in Carlos’ body craned his neck up and was able to see the man’s face for the first time.

The face was his own.

Suddenly the man’s phone rang. He awkwardly drew it from his pocket and placed it against his ear. The call connected, and a voice started coming through the phone, loud enough to hear.

“Did you feel that?” The voice seemed very familiar, though he couldn’t quite place where he had heard it before. Phi: was that her name? Phi continued speaking. “That ripple in the Morphogenetic field was massive. You have to have felt it! What could have caused…?” Phi cut off sharply. When she spoke again, she only had a single question. “Where is Kyle Klim, Sigma?”

Sigma. That name was familiar too. Impossible as it seemed, there could be no doubt about the identity of the man standing by the bed. “Father?” Kyle asked.

Sigma looked down at Kyle. He beamed proudly. A single tear rolled down his cheek. “He’s here,” Sigma answered into the phone, “Kyle’s finally here.”

On Christmas day, 2029, the doorbell rang: a single solid buzz, followed seconds later by an excited melody as the button was pressed again. Kyle answered. He looked out through the opened door at the two people who stood there. “Ah, hello. Carlos and… Maria, right?”

Maria’s mouth dropped open as she pointed straight at Kyle’s new face. “Whoa! T-That’s so… weird! It’s like you’re nearly Big Bro, but not quite. So weird!”

“Maria…” Carlos interrupted awkwardly.

“Sorry, Big Bro,” Maria said sheepishly.

“Still, it is strange,” Carlos murmured, studying Kyle intensely, “It’s not just the hair…”

Kyle’s hand reached up automatically and stroked through his hair, which he had let grow untidily out of Carlos’ crew-cut and then dyed jet-black.

“It’s everything,” Carlos continued, “The entire way you hold yourself. From your posture, it’s clear you’ve never been down a pole in your life. Akane and Junpei told me what had happened, but actually seeing you… It’s something different.”

“I’m glad I have been able to differentiate myself from you enough,” Kyle replied. He stroked his hair again. “I felt that you had, ah, priority on your original appearance.”

A voice called from deeper inside the house. “Kyle! Are you going to invite them in yet?” Phi strode up and peeked past Kyle and through the open door.

“Ah, Phi!” Kyle exclaimed, “We were just talking about how I’ve started dying my hair since I got back. I’ve yet to properly thank you for getting it for me.”

“Well…” Phi shrugged. “I was already buying all my white hair dye from them; with yours as well I qualify for the bulk discount. And…” Phi tilted her head. “It suits you a lot better this way.”

Phi and Kyle led Maria and Carlos through to the spacious lounge. Sigma and Diana were already there, cuddling on the long sofa by the fire, watching the Christmas movie that played on the television. As everyone entered Sigma and Diana turned to greet them.

“Hey, Carlos, Maria!” Sigma exclaimed, “Come on in!”

Carlos sat down in the armchair closest to the sofa and replied to Sigma. “Thanks for having us. It’s a shame Akane and Junpei couldn’t come with us, but they’re still on their honeymoon. They sent me Christmas cards to pass on to you, though.” Carlos took the cards from inside his coat and added them to the large pile on top of the coffee table.

Maria bounded over to the window on the other side of the lounge and stared out into the garden beyond. “Whoa! This place is huge.”

Diana shrugged. “We never know when we might need the room.”

“That’s right,” Phi said as she strode over to the other armchair and flopped down into it, “When things go down, they go down in the Nevada desert. We need all the space we can to prepare for that stuff. Plus, we’re a big family.” Phi glanced over at Kyle, still hovering by the doorway, and smiled.

Carlos gazed around the room. “The mortgage on a place like this has to be pretty hefty, though.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Sigma said, “We didn’t need one in the end. We’d managed to scrape together the down-payment between Diana’s promotion and my new job…” Indeed, Sigma had finally managed to officially become Dr. Klim, forty-five years after he had first been called that.

“And that’s when Phi dropped two hundred thousand dollars on the table and bought the whole place outright,” Diana explained. She paused. “Phi… where did you…?”

“Nope,” Phi interrupted, “Not talking about it, no matter how much you ask me.”

Maria skipped back over and sat down, perching keenly on the armrest of Carlos’ chair. “So, you’re loaded, Phi?”

“Yeah. I guess you could say that,” Phi replied.

Kyle watched from the door as the others began to open the Christmas cards, one by one. One came from Diana’s colleagues, congratulating her for finally moving on from her ex-husband. Another came from Sigma’s doctoral supervisor, rather meekly apologising for keeping Sigma at the office the year before. And, of course, there were cards from the many people they had met due to the Nonary Games.

“Ooh! Here’s one from Delta,” Diana exclaimed, fishing that card from the pile. “Let’s see… ‘To Mom and Dad and Sister and Brother’… How does Delta know about…?”

Phi plucked the Christmas card from Diana’s fingers and flicked it into the fire. “Ignore it,” she said, “That old bastard never misses a chance to be creepy.”

They were about halfway through the pile of envelopes when the television screen flickered and the face of a young boy replaced the movie. It took Kyle a moment to recognise that face, but it belonged to the boy that the robot named Sean was based on. When Sigma had offered to make Sean a more human-like head, that was the face Sean had chosen.

“Hey, everyone. Merry Christmas!” Sean said, his voice playing through the television’s speakers.

“Hi, Sean,” Diana replied, “What brings you here?”

“Um… Eric’s visiting Mira in jail right now. I wanted to connect you both together so we could have a really big Christmas thing together. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Sigma replied.

“You can do that?” Carlos asked, “Show Eric and Mira everything that’s happening here, and the other way round?”

“I’m in the big powerful computer now. I can see everything!” Sean explained, “I’ll bring them up on the screen now.”

The image on the screen changed again. Everyone looked at it, just for a second. They quickly averted their eyes.

“Sean, dear…” Diana started to say.

“Yeah, Diana?” Sean’s face – smiling innocently – reappeared on the screen, covering a rather fortunate patch of it.

“I think Eric and Mira want a little private time,” Diana explained.

“Oh! Okay.” The image went black for a second and then the movie started playing again, though Sean’s face remained in the top left corner. “You were opening Christmas cards earlier, right? Do you want to carry on? Can I watch?”

“Of course.” With that, Sigma reached back down towards the pile.

“Wait, Sigma,” Phi said.

“Huh?”

“There’s one card in there that definitely has to be opened next.” Phi leaned across and shuffled the envelopes around. “This one. The one addressed specifically to Kyle.”

Kyle stepped forward unsurely. “Phi. It’s, ah, okay…”

“No, Kyle. You’ve been standing over there for, what, half an hour? This is your Christmas, too,” Phi said.

Sigma looked over towards Kyle. Kyle saw in his father’s eyes something he hadn’t seen for a long time. Shame, and guilt.

“Don’t worry, Father, I’m…” Kyle started to say.

“I have not been the best father for you,” Sigma stated, his voice filled with a solemn weight, “I have too often been distracted by other things. But everything is supposed to be over now, and I am still missing things I should be noticing. I’m sorry.” Sigma shuffled closer to Diana, so there was space on the sofa next to him. “Come over here and tell me what’s wrong.”

“No, Father, it’s okay. I wouldn’t want to, ah, ruin everyone’s Christmas,” Kyle said. With a deep sigh, he turned around and left the lounge.

By one minute later, Phi had dragged Kyle back into the room and placed him onto the sofa next to Sigma.

Leaning out so she could look at Kyle past Sigma, Diana said, “It’s okay to talk about whatever it is that’s worrying you. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s done anything bad, just that there’s something we can do better at. And it’s better than letting it fester: that’s something I learned very well over the past few years.”

Kyle took a deep breath, trying to put his unease into words. “I’m grateful that you found a way for me to come to this timeline. And I’m grateful to all three of you that you have allowed me to live in your home. It’s more than I could possibly deserve. All of you were the ones who saved the world from Radical-6. I merely showed up after the end: a, ah, hanger-on. I am out of place, here.”

Phi snorted. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as being in place or being out of place. There’s no-one who can tell you that you don’t belong somewhere; you can take whatever destiny you choose for yourself. And if you asked any of us, we’d tell you that you belong here.”

Kyle shook his head. “I tell myself that I do not belong. I feel it. This…” Kyle patted his chest, “This is not my body. I stole it from someone else.”

Carlos replied, “I can’t be certain what the other me was thinking, back then, but I’d have made the same decision.”

“Being in Big Bro’s body just make you that much more huggable!” Maria exclaimed. She then demonstrated, first around Carlos’ shoulders before dancing over to cuddle Kyle as well.

Sean piped up from where he was in the television as well. “I don’t know much about you, Kyle, so I’m sorry if this is completely wrong. Um… it probably will be. But Sigma and Phi told me a little bit about what happened to you, and I think it was kind of like what happened to me at the end of our game. It felt really weird, the helmet and the not-having-memories-of-things. I spent a lot of time thinking I was the odd one out. But if you want to like people and they want to like you back, everything just sort of works out okay.”

Even surrounded by the encouragement of family and friends, Kyle struggled: deep down, he was unconvinced. “I thank you all. But… I have done nothing to deserve this.”

Phi interrupted. “Tell you what, Kyle. Take a look at that Christmas card I pointed out. Talk afterwards.”

Gingerly, Kyle removed that envelope from among the other and turned it between his fingers, inspecting it. Within the gold trimmed border, drawn so that it was crossing the sealed flap, was a picture of a rabbit.”

“Huh? Isn’t that one of the ones that Akane asked us to bring?” Maria asked.

“Yes, I think it was,” Carlos replied, “Get it open, Kyle. I want to hear what Akane has to say.”

Kyle carefully opened the envelope. Inside, he did not only find a Christmas card. He found an entire letter with it. Kyle unfolded the sheet of paper and began to read aloud.

“Dear Kyle,

“As this timeline drifts from the one in which you were born, I become less and less able to connect with it. I will now never be the Akane Kurashiki that you knew. But I do still know that you once called that Akane ‘Mother.’

“I also know that there is much she wished to tell you before you left, but was unable to because you left that timeline because you woke up. That is the reason I decided to tell you this through a letter rather in person: the rest of this letter is her final message to you. She should say it, not me.

“Kyle. The mind that has replaced you in your body has just awoken here, and it has already become clear that he is not you. I can only hope that means you have safely made it back to some point in the past. Which past, and which version of that past, we do not know.

“It is entirely possible that you did not arrive in the timeline we would have hoped for. If that is so, then I wish you the best of luck. Though any future with Radical-6 in it is dire, it is clear that you have the skill and determination to survive there.

“I believe, though, your father succeeded: both in preventing the outbreak and in reuniting with you. In which case, you are now living in a world with a golden future, surrounded by a loving family, where every possible threat has been ended and every possible problem has been fixed. And, if I know you as well as I think I do, you are feeling that something is wrong.

“There is a reasoning that is obvious, but mistaken. Having woken up in another man’s body with this feeling, you perhaps started to wonder if that was what was troubling you. But if there is one thing I have learned from my four Nonary Games, it is that minds are far more important than bodies. In time, you will learn that too. Instead, I want to focus on the root cause of your unease.

“Most likely, you are feeling frustrated by inaction. Just as likely, Sigma hasn’t realised.”

Akane’s writing became a bit untidy there, but Kyle quickly interpreted it and carried on reading.

“It is understandable. After Sigma was first ripped from his everyday life, he has spent forty-five years trying to create the world where everything was back to normal. He has finally achieved all his dreams. It is not a surprise, then, that he would expect everyone else to be happy as well as he finally settles down.

“But that is not you, Kyle. You were born to help save the world. You grew up knowing that you would play a pivotal role in the AB Project: maybe even lead it if Sigma failed. And then, when the time came, you played that Nonary Game only as an amnesiac; in the key timeline you did not play it at all. If you feel as though you have been wasted – as though you have been written out of the story of your life – that feeling is justified.

“But know this, Kyle. The world will always need espers. Your day will come sooner than you think.

“With Love,

“Akane.”

Kyle tremored slightly as he folded up the letter and placed it back on the table. His deepest feelings had been laid bare. With nervous eyes, he looked around the room, waiting for everyone’s reactions.

To Kyle’s surprise, Maria was the first to speak. “Hey. Carlos,” she said.

“Yeah?” Carlos replied.

“Kyle looks a lot more like you, now.” Maria tilted her head to the side and squinted and Kyle and Carlos in turn. “Not, like, normal you. More like you when you first joined the Firefighter’s Academy. Or when you saved me as our house burned down. Like that.”

Carlos nodded and grinned. “I think you’re right about that.”

As the immediate jolt of reading Akane’s letter faded away, Kyle realised that the response of only one person mattered. He turned his head to the side and looked directly at Sigma. “Father.”

Tears glistened in Sigma’s eyes. “I only wanted to keep you safe, Kyle.”

“I know, Father. You’ve kept me safe my entire life. But, ah…” Kyle shivered. He forced himself to say the words. “I cannot stay cooped up any longer. Either in Rhizome 9 or here.”

“Okay.” Sigma let out a deep breath. Through Sigma’s eyes Kyle could see a weight being lifted from his heart. Suddenly, Sigma spoke to the entire room. “I know we weren’t planning on doing it ’til later, but is it okay if I start on the presents now?”

When he had everyone’s assent, he stood up and left the room, returning almost immediately with an envelope. He sat down next to Kyle again and opened it up, taking two pieces of paper from inside. He presented them to Kyle: one in each hand.

Kyle peered at them. “Plane tickets? To Helsinki?”

“The people at Crash Keys located a community of espers in Lapland. Northern Finland. There’s a chance a human-trafficking ring is moving to exploit them, so they wanted a two us to go there and check it out. I’d intended on taking Phi with me, but… Now, the decision seems obvious. Kyle?”

“Of course!” Kyle exclaimed. Then, he paused. “If that’s okay with you, Phi?” he asked meekly.

“Hmm…” Phi scratched her chin. “Well, I wouldn’t have minded going with you, Kyle, but… ah, what the hell: get the father-son-bonding-thing out the way. There’ll always be another time.”

“Thank you, Phi.” Kyle turned back to Sigma and held out his hand. “Merry Christmas, Father.”

Sigma placed one of the tickets in Kyle’s hand. It took a second for them to properly connect, but then Sigma’s hand grasped Kyle’s firmly; the paper of the plane ticket in between was a resounding connection, not a barrier.

“Merry Christmas, Son,” Sigma replied.

? wandered through the corridors of Rhizome 9. His head ached with confusion. Akane had just told him that he was not Kyle Klim, even though that was the body he occupied. Though ? knew that was the undeniable truth, he still couldn’t comprehend why he only had memories of Kyle’s past and the Nonary Game Kyle had played a role in, rather than memories of his own.

The thoughts of that Nonary Game directed ? towards the one last place where he might find the answers he needed to understand his identity. The last puzzle room that Sigma and Phi had needed to solve was the Q room – the home of the quantum computer – and the mysteries of their game had finally started to reveal themselves there. Maybe the same would happen for ?.

He made his way there; he knew where it was, just as he knew everything else about the Rhizome 9 facility. As he entered the Q room ? was momentarily blinded by the sheer uniform whiteness, but then he saw a figure he did not expect the see.

It was Dr. Klim.

“Doctor?” ? asked, stumbling back with surprise. “I thought you were supposed to be sleeping.”

The Doctor turned around, spreading his arms; a welcoming gesture turned sour by his actions as Zero Sr. and the imposing silhouette it cast. “I was, for a time. But I was kept awake. You see, I was thinking about the nature of perception.”

“Hell of a thing to keep you awake. I think Akane has been rubbing off on you,” ? replied.

“That is exactly what I am talking about,” Doctor Klim said, “You see me acting in certain ways or others, but perceive Akane rather than myself. There are more extreme examples, of course. From the inside, a person may see themselves as the centre of everything that happens around them. But when they finally get the chance to see themselves from the outside, not only do they see themselves entirely differently – that is, as others see them – but they also see themselves as only half-there, a mere projection as it were, compared to the vibrancy of their inner life. Perhaps it is only by moving to another medium that a person like that can be entirely present, their true selves, even when perceived by the third person.”

? fidgeted. “That’s very interesting, Doctor,” he said, trying to prevent his impolite frown from forming, “but… I came here looking for a way to find out who I am. I don’t think I’ll be able to really appreciate any philosophy until then.”

Doctor Klim smiled, faintly. “I am beginning to believe that the thoughts that kept me awake are entirely related to your situation. After all, your presence here has everything to do with the abilities of espers and the morphogenetic field. There never are any coincidences with this, are there?” Doctor Klim paused for a second, thought deeply, then continued. “You have spoken to many people within this facility since you awoke. All of them had at least some inclination that you were not Kyle Klim, and Phi and Akane knew outright. I suspect Luna did as well. You must have noticed that none of them ventured to ask where you had come from, only discussing your past in the vaguest terms possible.”

“That’s right!” ? exclaimed, “Why wouldn’t they…”

“They were worried about perception,” the Doctor interrupted, “They have only known the one timeline resulting from the Mars Mission test of 2028: that of Radical-6. From your perspective, you have one specific history, which is either from that timeline or not. From ours, we have been constantly afraid, from the moment you woke, that our knowledge of the timeline of the outbreak would guarantee that past for you. The future affecting the past.”

“You’re worrying about Kyle, right? You’re worrying about where he’s gone to?”

“Always,” Doctor Klim replied.

“But… But, but, but!” ? spluttered, “Even I don’t know where I came from! I don’t have any memories of any Radical-6 outbreak, or anything else! I don’t have a past!”

Doctor Klim bowed his head. “Exactly. Your uncertain history makes our perceptions all the more dangerous.” For a moment, the Doctor clasped his hands together, moving them from side to side uncertainly. Then, he came to a conclusion. “Perhaps a different model is necessary. Consider, for instance… the termite.”

Doctor Klim swept his arm around, gesturing at the wall. Where his palm passed over them, the white panels rippled and unfolded, opening up the compartments within. ? knew about the puzzle components that they had previously contained, but this time they revealed something different: an entire termite farm extending into the room. As the termites that had been on the surface of the five towers of the mound scattered, fleeing the light, ? peered in curiously.

“I know you like these things: after all, you used them to give that lecture to your younger self. But what do they have to do with me?”

“Everything. At least, I think so.” Doctor Klim pointed towards the bottom of the mound, at a termite that had been sluggish in retreating back inside. “Each individual termite knows very little of the situation that surrounds the mound it lives in. It obeys its genetic programming and the chemical signals laid down by the rest of its colony. That is the lowest possible level of knowledge. That termite knows less than you, who has lost his memory entirely.

“That the individual termite knows little does not prevent the colony as a whole from knowing much more. It is clear that the colony is able to react to information from its surroundings, detailing soldier termites to respond to threats and worker termites to harvest sources of food. For its limited cognitive capabilities, the ability of a colony to build its mound, nourish and defend it is quite impressive.

“But outside of the termite farm, our knowledge and understanding is infinitely greater than that of the colony, never mind the individual termite. I believe that it is that greater understanding, that Third View, that will save you.”

? snorted. “That was very impressive, Doctor, but I think you are going to have to explain it a bit more straightforwardly.”

“Very well.” Doctor Klim pointed straight at ?. “You have lost your memories, and know only about the situation you are in and nothing about your past. Your view, the First View, is unfortunately limited.”

Then, the Doctor reversed his finger, pointing at himself. “We, the residents of Rhizome 9, know some things about the timelines that possibly followed that Mars Mission and to your history. We have a limited ability to react to your condition and make choices that will prevent the worst case scenario, just as a termite colony is capable of defending itself. Indeed, that is what everyone has been doing from the moment you arrived here. But the full, true nature of the situation eludes us; we cannot act outside our bounds.”

“And the Third View?” ? asked.

“It is possible that there is a viewpoint that has seen everything leading up to this moment.” The Doctor gestured again, reaching out his palm in a direction that seemed to ? to be completely at random. “For this Third View, my worries are a trivial epilogue to a completed story; Kyle is already safe in the timeline I never got to see. And, just as these termites have relied on me for the past forty-five years to provide food and shelter to keep the colony alive and stable, so I must place my absolute trust in this Third View. As such, I have decided that it is time for me to finally tell you who I think you are.”

“Finally!” ? exclaimed, “Please, tell me!”

Doctor Klim took a deep breath. “First, remember everything you have been told so far. It was all true, from a certain point of view, and thus entirely necessary to understanding your situation. You were, indeed, an extra variable in the scenario of the Mars Mission test site. Though it seemed that everyone had accounted for your presence, you turned up where no-one had expected you and changed everything, again and again and again.

“Akane must also have told you that the rules do not apply to you. I’m not entirely sure exactly what she meant by that, but it is clear that in reaching this place, you have faced and then broken out of the restrictions that bind most espers. One in particular should have brought you to death’s door and yet here you are, entirely healthy.

“And finally, the most important thing of all. Akane told you that you were the only one who could save the world. That is entirely true. After all, we would have had no chance at all of preventing the outbreak without you… Carlos.”

Memories rushed into ?’s mind. ‘Carlos’. That… that was his name. And that name came with a past: several pasts, in fact, linked by an inextricable web of time-travel. But only one of them applied to the Carlos that had arrived in Kyle’s body; once that one was locked down in his memory, Carlos’ turmoil was over. “How did you know?” Carlos asked.

As Carlos watched the man in front of him, a wide, beaming grin appeared on his face: one alien to the solemn and seemingly cruel Zero Sr., but entirely suited to Sigma. “I know myself,” Sigma replied, chuckling, “and I know you. There was no other way this could have happened.” For a moment, Sigma shivered, his internal conflict controlled in his remaining natural eye but unambiguously conveyed by the swivels of the replacement right eye. “I have to ask, now… Which timeline did you come from? Where did Kyle go to? Did Radical-6…?”

“It was contained,” Carlos replied, “Destroyed, even. Radical-6 won’t be infecting anyone, ever again.”

Sigma exhaled, pressing his right arm against his chest as though to keep his heart from exploding. “Thank you, Carlos. I never quite believed… that we’d ever succeed in defeating the virus, in any timeline. I guess my perceptions are as wrong as everyone else’s. I’m glad of that.”

Sigma and Carlos just stood with each other for a while. Mutual relief made it unnecessary to say anything at all; they just soaked up the moment and everything it meant. But eventually, even that moment passed.

Sigma sighed. “Carlos. I guess it’s finally time for you to decide what you are going to do now you are here. After all, this is an entirely new timeline for you. You could choose to stay here, on the Moon, in Rhizome 9. You’d be welcome, here.”

“Hmm…” Carlos murmured, “I’m grateful, but it doesn’t sound… right. You know?”

“I figured you’d say that,” Sigma replied, “There’s an entire world down there teetering on the edge but ready to finally start thriving once more. I wouldn’t say life down there is comfortable, but for someone like you… what you do down there will be incredibly meaningful.”

“You do know me,” Carlos said, chuckling, “So, where should I start? Any fires really need putting out?”

“Steady up there, Carlos! A fireman needs a fire-station to start from, after all. And I know just the place.”

Sigma waved at the other wall of the Q room, where the panels slipped aside to reveal a large screen. A map of the world appeared there, before it started the zoom in, first on the United States and then on the southern half of it. As Carlos blinked, the map was colour-coded: a swath of vibrant green cutting across the murky red along the banks of the Colorado river.

“That’s one of the largest communities to have formed since humanity recovered from the outbreak and the nuclear winter that followed. At its centre is a town named Fire’s End. Not many people know it, but the version of you from this timeline was one of the founders.”

“That sounds interesting,” Carlos replied. He was still uncertain, and it showed through in his voice.

“There’s something else,” Sigma said, “There are two people who live there. I’m sure they’ll be able to convince you to go. Two people who I’m certain you’d want to see again.” Two portraits appeared, superimposed across the map. Both showed faces that Carlos recognised very well.

“Tenmyouji… and Quark?”

“You’d know Tenmyouji better by his first name. He’s aged a lot since then, but Junpei is still basically the same person you knew in D-Com,” Sigma explained, “Quark’s actually a relative of yours: a great-nephew.”

Eagerness rose in Carlos’ chest, followed by panic. “They’ve just left! How am I…”

“You’ve got time,” Sigma interrupted, “They’re still getting on the shuttle that will take them home. If you hurry, you’ll make it. And don’t worry: the shuttle has three seats. I checked it myself.”

Carlos ran. He ran all the way to the pressure exchange chamber that led to the shuttle bay. His pace was nowhere close to what he wanted it to be – the weak gravity kept interfering with his stride, and his new body was a lot weaker than the one he was used to – but his intense determination carried him along. Eventually, he arrived in the PEC.

He needed to put on a protective suit to go further. Fortunately, Carlos had years of experience in using even the most bulky and complicated of firemen’s turnout gear: the space-suit was not that much harder to use. Carlos had it on and completely sealed within moments. With that, he could pass through the airlock and into the shuttle bay.

As Carlos entered, he could see the shuttle towering above him. Its door, close to the ground, was open with steps leading down. And of the two other suited figures in the shuttle bay, one was already climbing those stairs and almost inside the passenger compartment.

“Junpei! Quark! Wait!” Carlos cried out.

Both figures turned towards Carlos. His desperate plea must have carried to them across the radio. Carlos bounded forward, stopping only when he was close enough to see inside their helmets. It was Quark who had been climbing the stairs; the taller figure, just behind his grandson, was Tenmyouji.

As Carlos saw their faces, both Tenmyouji and Quark saw his. “Look, Kyle,” Tenmyouji said bitterly, “I already told you. We’re not staying here. There’s nothing for us, and there’s no way I’m sucking up to the bastard who forced us through that.”

“Wait, Grandpa,” Quark interrupted, using the extra height the steps gave him to place his hand on Tenmyouji’s shoulder, “I… I don’t think that’s Kyle. There’s something different. Like, in his eyes.”

Tenmyouji leaned forward, his helmet shifting on his suit so that the visor continued looking forward. Carlos stepped forward to meet him, and soon their helmets were an inch apart. They could see each other clearly as though there was nothing in between. In that moment, their eyes met.

“Carlos?!” Tenmyouji exclaimed, “How is that possible? How the hell are you even here?”

“It’s a long story, Junpei,” Carlos said. He gazed upwards at the magnificent spacecraft that towered above them, reaching onwards towards Earth. “Junpei, Quark. I think it’s time for us to go home.”

The Miracle

December 25, 2016 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @pomegranate-belle

From: @chessanator

A bonus gift for Pomegranate-Belle, because there’s a ZTD timeline in need of a fix-fic and only Carlos is badass enough to save the day.
Sorry if it’s a bit on the subtle side: it took a bit of work making all my gifts consistent with each other. In any case, a few unanswered questions fits this story thematically

Second in The Firetruck Trilogy (My official gift was the first): Ao3 link

“Fuck the Anthropic Principle,” Junpei spat. His stinging cheek gave extra weight to his anger. The ring that lay like lead against his fingers made that pain even sharper. The sight of Akane walking away sealed the grievance inside Junpei’s heart.

“Junpei…?” Carlos started to say. He hesitantly placed his hand on Junpei’s shoulder.

Junpei shrugged Carlos off. “I’m fine,” he lied. He walked back over to the table at the centre of the lounge where he had left his bottle of beer. “I just want to have a little bit more of my drink. That’s all.”

Carlos frowned. “I thought you didn’t feel like drinking anymore. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”

“Hmph.” Junpei shook his head. “I guess things change quickly. Isn’t that right, Carlos?”

“Whatever you say, Junpei. I’m not up for an argument right now.” Carlos turned to walk away.

“Thanks, Carlos,” Junpei said bitterly. He picked the bottle up from the table and swirled it around gently, listening to the satisfying gurgle of the liquid that remained at the bottom. Then he lifted the bottle up, the pleasurable coolness of the glass tingling his lips. “Seriously, fuck the Anthropic Principle.” With that epithet, Junpei drank deeply from the bottle.

As he swallowed the alcohol, his vision went black.

Junpei’s mind swirled, just as his beer had. For a moment he found himself kneeling in a fireplace, screaming as hot flying bullets tore his spine apart. Before the pain caused him to pass out entirely, Junpei’s mind was ripped away again. He tumbled through the Morphogenetic field for what seemed like hours until he finally came to rest.

Junpei stirred to find himself sprawled on the hard metal floor of the power room. A thin layer of water shimmered on the metal and soaked into Junpei’s shirt. Despite having trickled from the slab of ice that blocked the channel running through the centre of the room, the water was in no way cold. The sheer sweltering heat in the room that had warmed up the water quickly roused Junpei into full wakefulness.

The screeching alarm and the unnaturally bright light shooting through the blast window may have had something to do with that as well.

As Junpei clambered to his feet he saw Akane and Carlos on either side of him; once they had stood up as well he yelled at them, raising his voice above the noise. “Where the hell are we?!”

Carlos looked around. “It looks like the power room. We must have been knocked out by our bracelets again, then brought here.”

“That can’t be right,” Junpei snapped, “We had at least forty minutes to go!”

“More importantly,” Akane said, “we remember that. We can’t have been knocked out, or we would have lost our memories as well.” Akane just stood there for a moment, thinking. “I believe we may have shifted.”

“‘Shifted’?” Carlos asked.

“We’ve had our consciousnesses thrown into another time – maybe even another timeline – and occupied our bodies here. It’s hardly unprecedented. Right Junpei?”

“I should have known all this esper bullshit was going to show up again.” As Junpei scowled, something struck him. “Wasn’t it supposed to be the case that esper abilities only activated when someone was in great danger? Whatever you say about it, we’d just won the fucking lottery. Why would we jump out of that?”

Akane raised her hand to her chin nervously. “I think… I think it might have been the other way round. We weren’t the ones who chose to shift. The versions of us here were. They jumped to our timeline and we… we were forced back.”

“I’m not entirely sure what you are talking about, Akane,” Carlos stated, “but if you’re saying we’re now in danger, I don’t suppose it could be because of that?” Carlos pointed at the blast window. Inside, the glowing orb began to spin faster, sparks of energy leaping off it and crashing against the walls of the reactor.

If that wasn’t enough, an announcement soon conclusively answered Carlos’ question. “Countdown over. Detonation is now unstoppable. Please evacuate.”

“‘Evacuate’?!” Junpei gasped, “We can’t, Goddamnit! The door’s still locked!” His chest constricted his breath; panic took him. “Hey, Anthropic Principle? What I said earlier… I was just kidding okay? No need to do this to us, so we can go back, right? Let us back! Let us back, damnit!”

Akane reached out towards Junpei. She patted his shoulder and caressed it gently, until Junpei’s shivering died down.

“Akane…” Junpei whispered. The rest of the strength of his voice wouldn’t come. “We can get back, right? We’re the ones in danger now. That means we can shift back to the timeline we were in, and force those bastards to deal with the shit they left for us.”

Akane sighed sympathetically. “‘Those bastards’ are just us, Junpei. No more, no less.”

“Well, if one of them’s me, then he’s definitely a bastard.” Junpei turned squared on to Akane and clenched both her shoulders desperately. “Can we go back?”

Akane bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Junpei. I think there was… somewhere in between, when we shifted here. I might be able to make it back but” – the agony of a million bullets piercing his back flashed through Junpei’s mind again – “You and Carlos wouldn’t.”

Carlos started a methodical pace around the room. “There’s got to be a more mundane way out of here, guys! If we look for it, we’ll find it.” Carlos’ search took him to the other door out of the power room – this one had been opened – and into the small room inside. “Huh? Junpei! Akane! Have a look at this!”

Junpei and Akane joined Carlos to see him standing at one end of a pair of linked consoles. Junpei made his way over to the other; as he looked at the screen Akane peered over his shoulder. The words on the screen read, ‘Rules of the AB Game.’

“‘AB Game’?” Akane murmured, “I’ve heard of that.”

Suddenly she reached past Junpei, tapping the screen multiple times in rapid succession with her index finger. Several screen’s worth of text blinked past without stopping. Junpei squinted, trying to read what he could, but it was hopeless. From Carlos’ frustrated expression, it was clear that the instructions had flown by too quickly on his screen as well.

“Junpei, Carlos,” Akane said, her voice full of authority, “All you have to do is press ‘Ally’. Try to do it at the same time: I’ll give you a countdown. Are you ready?”

Junpei and Carlos both nodded.

“Okay. Three… Two… One.”

Two rounds of the Ambidex Game later and the door out of the power room had opened. “Let’s go!” Carlos shouted as he led the way down the short corridor beyond. The floor and walls trembled around them as they ran but the three of them still made it, bursting into the lounge and gathering in front of the X-door.

“Well? Can we get out or not?” Junpei asked, his question yelled fruitlessly at the X-door itself.

Somehow, the question was answered. “Now announcing the current casualties. Q-team: Q, Mira, Eric. These three are now deceased.” Three unusable X-passes were then released.

“Goddamnit!” Junpei roared, “What was the point of that? We’re still gonna die from that reactor, only now we’re doing it a few metres further away. Great job!” Junpei curled his hand into a tight fist and hammered it against the X-door.

The door shuddered slightly. So did the entire room.

As the tremors from whatever was happening in the power room reverberated throughout the facility, the walls of the lounge shifted; a wave of change rippled outwards from the frame X-door. Where it passed, the mottled brown of the walls and every feature on them vanished entirely, to be replaced only by a uniform whiteness. Where the ripple hit the floor it spread into that as well, removing all texture and colour from the carpet.

When the lounge had finally settled, Carlos gazed disbelievingly around. “The walls were just… holograms?”

“It seems so,” Akane replied, “I don’t know why Zero would go to this much trouble, but he must have had some reason behind it.”

As Junpei looked around as well, he noticed that something had been added when every other detail had been removed. He had noticed the doors. The two doors that had led into the rest of ward C were still there, but two other doors had appeared alongside: one exactly in the centre of the wall opposite the X-door and one tucked in the far right corner.

Junpei pointed them out to Akane and Carlos. “We should check them out,” he said, “There’s got to be something here that’ll help us, and since it wasn’t in the parts of ward C that we already explored it’d damn well better be in these new parts. I’m not gonna just lay down and die.”

“That’s the spirit, Junpei.” Carlos put on a grin that was only somewhat forced. “I’ll take that middle door. You two take the other one, and we’ll meet back here when we’re done. We can do this! We have to.”

Once Carlos had left, Junpei and Akane headed through their door. Beyond was a long corridor – one which looked much like the ones they had previously been through in C-ward – with a sharp bend to the left at the end. Junpei had only taken a few steps along when Akane stopped him, placing a hand nervously on his shoulder.

“Junpei…” Akane only got that name out before falling silent.

Junpei turned around. “Yeah, Akane?”

Though her voice remained quiet, Akane managed to say what she wanted to say. “Junpei… I’m sorry about what I said earlier. You know… back in the timeline we came from. I wish I had been able to celebrate with you, back when we had the chance. It’s… That’s just not how I am, anymore.”

Hearing Akane’s voice like that, Junpei’s hand dived instinctively into his pocket. To his relief, the ring was still there, even in this new unfamiliar timeline. Still, even as he fondled the ring, Junpei knew that it wasn’t the right time. He forlornly withdrew his hand. “It’s okay, Akane,” he said, wincing inside at how bland his words were. “There’ll always be time later. We can celebrate once we’re out of here.”

Junpei’s thoughts were interrupted by a faint groan that came from the far end of the corridor. By the way Akane’s eyes darted up, she had heard it as well. Without needing to say anything, both Akane and Junpei started sprinting towards the source of the sound.

As they reached the end of the corridor they found the room that the groans originated from. The label on its door read ‘Pod Room’. They burst in. The first thing Junpei noticed about the pod room were the thick green lines that ran in parallel along the floor, belonging far more to a sports pitch than to an underground bunker. The second thing Junpei noticed was the extensive bloodstain that covered one of the walls, marring a faded and battered portrait of a family that had been mounted there. The third thing that Junpei noticed…

“If this is the pod room… where the hell are the pods?!”

When Junpei looked over, Akane had gone unusually still. Even so, Junpei could see her perfectly focused will: the slightest tension in her poised body revealed her intentions. “Shush, Junpei.” That was all Akane said.

Junpei did as she asked. When he did so, he heard the groan again, though it was much fainter than he expected given that he was sure it was in the same room as the source of it. He glanced at Akane again, making sure that she saw his quizzical expression.

Akane pursed her lips. “I think it’s coming from below us.”

With that explanation Junpei started examining the pod room again; this time he had a specific goal in mind. After first noticing what looked like retractable panels in the floor on each side of the room, he found what he was looking for when he looked back towards the door they had entered by: a button whose label read ‘Pod’. Junpei reached out to press it, but a glass panel barred his way.

Junpei knew that he couldn’t break the glass with his bare hands. He’d need something to help get through: something hard, something that would fit stably and ergonomically in his hand. The item came to mind immediately, but this time that instinctive thought brought with it a dreadful guilt. Even so, Junpei had no other options.

He placed the ring on his hand – the right hand, since the thought of that ring on a left hand was too poignant – and threw his fist towards the glass. It shattered. The jewel pierced the glass as it struck, and Junpei’s hand continued through to push down the button.

When Junpei turned back around, he saw the pods rising from beneath the floor panels he had noticed before. He was grateful for that, because while Akane was distracted by them he was able to slip the ring off his finger. Before he placed it back in his pocket, Junpei inspected the ring.

His heart fell. The top facet of the ring had chipped: only slightly, but enough to ruin it. Junpei hid it as quickly as possible. He couldn’t let Akane see it.

Once the ring was safely back in his pocket and the pods had finished their circuit around the arc of the room, Junpei rejoined Akane. She had been standing closest to the pods on the left hand wall, so they naturally turned their attention to those first. One of the pods was just slightly higher than Akane could comfortably see inside, so Junpei rose on his tiptoes and wrest open the pod’s lid.

Sigma was inside.

The slight flutters of his eyeballs beneath their lids were the sole sign of any level of consciousness from Sigma. Still, it was clear that the groans that had drawn Akane and Junpei to the pod room had come from Sigma: those rough vocalisations were much more audible once the pod had been open. Junpei looked down at Sigma – still clearly on the far side of consciousness despite those fits and starts – and an idea formed in Junpei’s mind. Without any conscious direction, Junpei’s hand reached out towards Sigma’s neck. If he just… they could escape.

Junpei’s cheek stung. There was no reason for it, save that thought and memories of all-too-similar thoughts. Junpei’s arms fell back to his side.

Within a few seconds of Junpei’s decision, Sigma recovered. He opened his eyes. “Akane? Junpei? How did you get here? Argh: my ears are still ringing. Why are they ringing? Wait… This isn’t D-ward.”

Akane pulled Sigma’s pod down – all the other pods rotated with it – until it was low enough for her to help Sigma out of it. “When you put it like that, Sigma,” she said as he let go of her offered hand, “I’m beginning to wonder if the wards have any meaning at all. After all, this isn’t C-ward, either.”

Back on solid ground, Sigma used the space to stretch his limbs. “Phi and Diana are around here as well, right?”

“We’ll just have to look in the other pods,” Akane replied.

They did so. Rotating the pods around their rail first brought Phi’s pod into reachable range. Phi climbed out quite eagerly, once she was awake, and hurriedly dusted herself off. “I’m okay, I’m okay!” she snapped. Once she had recovered enough to observe the other players around her, Phi asked, “What about Diana?”

“I guess that she’s in the very next pod,” Sigma said, “It would make sense.” He strode forward and guided the pods onwards with a strong but smooth movement. When the pod he was looking for was level with his chest he pried open the lid. Diana was inside.

Diana was only halfway out of her pod when the distant power room boomed once again.

The next few seconds passed with lightning speed, almost too quickly for Junpei to follow. In the first second, the shockwave rushed through the ground, horizontal cracks appearing at regular intervals as the floor rose and fell on either side. As the next second passed, Sigma threw Diana towards the door with a desperate swing of his arm. Then the third second struck.

An entire segment of the room began to revolve. Sigma’s right foot gave way as the floor moved beneath it; what had been the wall slammed into Sigma as he fell and catapulted him backwards. Junpei – not just Junpei, but everyone else – could only watch as Sigma was tossed brutally about by the rampaging segments of the pod room.

For a moment, a different terror entered Junpei’s heart. He became certain – a certainty he hadn’t felt since the Sudoku that had saved Akane’s life – that Carlos had been caught by the power room’s emanation.

But then the terror that was right in front of Junpei’s eyes took precedence, and the vision faded to the back of Junpei’s mind. When the segments of the pod room finally slowed to a halt, Sigma’s bruised body fell limply into the corner that had become the bottom of the room. Diana took a fearful step forward.

Phi reached out towards her. “Diana! Don’t go! It’s not safe!”

“I have to!” Diana cried back as she broke free of Phi’s grasp, “I can’t watch if Sigma is this close to death again.” Then, Diana paused in mid-stride. “Again?” she muttered, her trembling voice recalling a half-gone memory. Even so, it was only a brief pause before Diana rushed to Sigma’s side.

When Diana helped Sigma up Junpei finally got a look at what had happened to him. Blood was streaming down the right side of his face from where his head had been battered. His right arm dangled limply at his side. Junpei realised that it had been the sickening crunch – which had heard for a millisecond of that devastating whirl – that had mangled Sigma’s arm. Junpei was surprised that Sigma could stand at all, even with Diana’s help; he was even more surprised that Sigma could climb back up to the only fixed platform of the pod room.

Sigma put on a brave face: the half of his face that could be seen past the blood.. “Hmm… I guess I’m still one arm up over last time.” He waved his left hand freely to demonstrate.

Sigma’s gesture was punctuated by the sound of another explosion. Junpei braced himself for another disaster, but he soon realised that this explosion was of another nature entirely. For one thing, it sounded completely different: a brief – almost purposeful – bang rather than the crackling and drawn-out roars that emanated from the power room’s core. For another, it came only from the direction of the lounge.

That realisation came with another. With exactly the same amount of certainty that Carlos had been imperilled by the previous eruption, Junpei was now sure that Carlos was alright. He couldn’t explain. He just knew that when they returned to the lounge, they’d find Carlos safe and sound.

Following that intuition, Junpei announced, “Let’s go! We need to get out of here before it starts spinning again. Diana: patch Sigma up as we go, but move!”

Junpei led the others back down the corridor and into the lounge. When they entered, a storm dust was swirling in the air; it obscured Junpei’s vision and choked his breath. Waving his hands before his eyes to clear them, Junpei staggered towards the one detail he could perceive.

It was Carlos’ face. Carlos was safe, just as Junpei had predicted.

Carlos noticed Junpei only moments after Junpei noticed him. “Sorry about the wait. I promised, didn’t I? That I’d come back for you.”

Junpei shrugged. “Well, we did agree to meet back here.”

Carlos beamed. “Yeah. I guess we did. And it worked out okay, too.” He peered over Junpei’s shoulder; his eyes widened as he saw Phi and Diana helping Sigma along. “Sigma! Diana! Phi! You’re here too?”

“We are,” Phi replied, “Akane and Junpei found us in these pods. We must have been placed there after our bracelets last knocked us out. By Zero, I guess.”

“I’m glad the three of you are okay,” Carlos said, nodding. He swept his gaze around the dusty crumbling lounge. “What happened here?”

The room fell into silence, save for the creaking of the walls, the tremors of the floor, and the omnipresent thundering from the power room. His heart sinking, Junpei realised that Akane had fallen most silent of all; she had failed to explain to Carlos everything she knew that he didn’t, in an opportunity Junpei knew she shouldn’t have been able to resist. Junpei turned to look at Akane and see what was wrong.

Akane’s face had gone pale, completely white. “I…” she muttered under her breath. As sweat glistened on her forehead, Akane forced her voice louder. “I think I remember what I – what the other me – did, back in the power room. That machine there: it’s the reactor that powers the entire bunker. I think I blocked the control mechanism and forced it to overload. Because of me… this entire bunker, and all of us with it, will be obliterated.”

“But we can get out, right?” Diana asked. She pointed, vaguely towards the X-door. Junpei’s eyes followed the direction of Diana’s finger and noted that, despite the mounds of rubble that would hinder progress in that direction, the X-door itself had vanished, leaving a gaping hole out of the bunker.

Akane just shook her head mournfully. “We could, but it won’t be enough. If that reactor is as powerful as I think it is then the explosion won’t be limited to the bunker. There’s no way we could get far enough to survive.”

“That’s not true,” Sigma stated, firmly despite his pain, “I’ve lived for forty-five years with something much more dangerous than that reactor never more than a hundred metres from me. There are always ways to contain the damage. By this point, it’s too late to stop the meltdown from happening, but I think I know how we can vent enough of the energy, shrinking the explosion’s radius enough to allow us to escape.” Sigma paused, frowning. “The problem is that someone will have to stay behind and operate the controls to let the others escape. I’d do it myself, but with my arm like this…” Sigma shifted his right shoulder slightly, grimacing.

“I’ll do it.” Carlos had gone just as pale as Akane, but his tone brooked no argument. He reached into his pocket and drew out a set of keys; after a quick look round, he decided to pass them to Phi. “There’s a fire-truck at the surface. You’ll be able to escape in it.” With that said, Carlos turned to Sigma and nodded. “Sigma. Tell me what I have to do.”

Solemnly, Sigma did so.

With forced, purposeful strides, Carlos made his to the door that led back to the power room. But before he went through he turned around, looking Junpei and Akane squarely in the eyes in turn. “Junpei… Akane… It’s my fault that you were dragged here from that safe timeline.”

Junpei didn’t understand what Carlos was saying. As he tried to parse Carlos’ words, he noticed that the dust had settled enough that he was able, for the first time since they had reunited in the lounge, to see Carlos’ clothes. They seemed to radiate a celestial golden aura; strange, since Carlos had only worn a muted pink earlier. Taken together, Carlos’ bearing and announcement were something Junpei could not ignore.

“To think all that would happen and then I’d end up right back here,” Carlos continued, “I guess the universe wants me to remedy my sins. Well, I guess that’s what I’m going to do. Goodbye Junpei, Akane. I’m glad I got the chance to know you.”

Before Junpei could respond, Carlos backed out of the lounge and disappeared.

“Come on! Let’s go!” Phi commanded.

She led the way, helping Diana manoeuvre Sigma over the debris that obstructed the way out. Akane followed, still slowed by the memory and understanding of what her other self had done. Finally, Junpei joined them, clambering up the fallen rubble and stepping through the hole where the X-door had been breached.

The moment he crossed the threshold the knowledge that Carlos was in danger returned as a crashing wave. More details filled in that intuition: Junpei knew that the danger Carlos faced was not that of the sacrifice he had freely chosen. It had been sudden, meaningless and violent. Something was horribly wrong.

Without even thinking about it, Junpei swivelled around and dived back into the bunker. He ignored Akane’s calls after him, instead leaping off the rubble to land in the centre of the lounge. Coughing through the ever-rising levels of dust, Junpei scanned the room for any sign of Carlos. Junpei found him quickly but not where he expected. Carlos wasn’t close to the door towards the power room; instead he had collapsed only just on the other side of the middle door which he had searched earlier.

Junpei rushed over. As he got closer, he saw that the top of that door’s frame had collapsed; by the way Carlos was partially concealed beneath, it had fallen right onto his head. Junpei didn’t have time to wonder how it had happened. He shook Carlos awake.

“Huh? Junpei?” Carlos slurred, his eyes rolling lazily in their sockets.

“What are you doing here?” Junpei asked, his tone laden with frustration, “You were supposed to be…” Before he could finish that sentence, Junpei cut himself off. Even he wasn’t rude enough to complain like that.

Carlos slowly tilted his head to look at Junpei. “There wasn’t anything useful,” he mumbled, “There was this manufacturing bay, but none of the tools there would be strong enough to cut through the door. I made my way back, there was this quake, and…”

There was nothing for it: Carlos was too confused to offer a coherent answer – perhaps even more confused than his injuries accounted for. The only thing Junpei could do was help Carlos out of the bunker along with the others. Part of Carlos’ pink shirt had been pinned to the ground by some of the fallen debris so Junpei ripped it off, leaving only Carlos’ vest. With Carlos able to stand, Junpei led him across the lounge and towards the way out.

Glass rained down around them as the fake skylight warped and ruptured. The entire structure of the bunker creaked and groaned behind them as the reactor at its core began to force the walls outwards. And the ceaselessly vibrating floor made Carlos’ already-unsteady steps even harder to manage. Eventually though, they made it out, finding the others, along with Gab, gathered on an elevator platform in the space beyond.

Their reaction to Junpei’s return was momentary relief, followed by despair. Diana was the first to voice that despair. “Carlos? That would mean…”

“Yes. The meltdown will not be stopped,” Akane stated. Her lip trembled. “My actions have doomed us all.” Junpei had only heard Akane’s voice become that monotone once before: back in D-Com, when he had pressed her to talk about their previous Nonary Game.

Sigma stumbled forward. “There’s still a chance,” he gasped, “I can still…”

“It’s too late,” Phi interrupted, “You’ll never make it in your condition, old man. I’m not going to let you throw your life away for nothing.” Before Sigma could take another step Phi slammed her palm onto a button on the elevator’s control panel.

The elevator began to rise, carrying the six surviving players towards an uncertain freedom.

The fire-engine was parked in the desert outside, just as Carlos had promised. As Phi ran for the driver’s compartment, bearing the keys like a dagger, Junpei, Akane and Diana helped Sigma, Carlos and Gab into the back. Once Diana had joined them – it had to be her; she was the only one who could tend to them – there was no room for Akane and Junpei, so they stood on the platform on the right-hand side, clinging to the railing.

“Listen up, everyone!” Phi announced, her voice projected from the fire-truck’s speaker system, “We’re going to have to outrun this thing. Hold on tight, because here we go!”

Before the sound of Phi’s voice had faded away, the vehicle lurched forwards with sirens blaring. They rapidly picked up speed and for a few brief moments, Junpei’s hope bloomed. He almost convinced himself that they would escape the blast unscathed.

They were five hundred metres away when the first beam of light lanced out of the bunker and straight into the sky.

That tower of unleashed energy was quickly joined by three or four others, then by so many that it was impossible to count. The fire-truck began to swerve as the sand shifted beneath it; even from his limited vantage point Junpei could feel Phi fighting to keep the vehicle under control. And then an ominous boom sounded deep beneath the ground, the sound carried to Junpei’s ears by a suddenly-rushing wind.

“Junpei…” Akane whispered beside him. Her voice was weak and hesitant.

Junpei frantically pre-empted what she was going to say. “It’s not your fault!” he yelled, “You didn’t do this. Even if you had, I’d forgive you.”

“Of course you would. You’ve already forgiven much worse things I’ve done.” For a moment, Junpei thought he saw a faint smile on Akane’s face. But then it faded. “I’m not sure I can forgive myself any longer. The detonation of a reactor of that size won’t just kill us. It will destroy everything for miles around. This is a universe that God abandoned, a universe of the sort I thought I’d dedicated my life to preventing, and the other me created it just to give herself the slightest advantage. ‘Those bastards are just us, Junpei. No more, no less.’ I have to accept that this is what I’m capable of. And if so… I’m not sure I… deserve…”

Akane turned her face away. Her right hand shifted along the hand rail as though reaching out to Junpei. But then her grip loosened and her hand began to fall.

“No!” Junpei lashed out, snatching Akane’s right hand with his left and forcing it against the rail. He squeezed without restraint, just to make sure he could hold on. “I’m not letting you go! Goddamnit, I’m not letting you go!”

At that moment the sound intensified. A shockwave raced over the fire-truck: a terrible wall of wind carrying a storm of sand that cut through every piece of exposed skin. Junpei closed his eyes, sure that everything was over.

And it was.

Only a second after the shockwave had hit, the winds died and the cloud of sand dispersed. Looking back along the route they had come, Junpei saw the beams of light which had broken out of the bunker fade harmlessly back into the natural night sky. Once everything had calmed, Phi gradually slowed the fire-engine to a halt.

Only then did Junpei release Akane’s hand.

She looked at her hand, turning it over and over as if she wasn’t sure it was real. “You were right, Junpei,” she murmured, “You were right.” Her strength failed her and she fell off the fire-truck’s platform, cushioned safely by the dune. “This really is the universe that God has blessed.”

It took all the survivors several minutes to recover – Sigma was so brutally injured that even after being patched up by Diana he could hardly be said to have ‘recovered’ – but they eventually they steadied themselves to the point where they could talk about what had happened. Carlos had healed particularly well, showing no sign that he had been completely delirious only a while back.

“What was that stuff you were talking about back there, Carlos?” Junpei asked.

“What stuff?”

Junpei sighed. “You know. ‘To think all that would happen and then I’d end up right back here,’ and stuff like that.”

Carlos laughed awkwardly. “Did I really say that? I must’ve been right out of it, because I don’t remember that at all.”

Junpei’s questioning was interrupted when Diana spoke up. “So… Is this really the end?”

“I believe it is,” Akane replied. She gazed pensively across the horizon back towards the bunker, her eyes betraying fear that the explosion would restart at any moment, but eventually satisfied herself. “The reactor’s meltdown has stopped, at least. But… that shouldn’t be possible. There’s no way it could have…”

“There’s always a way,” Sigma stated, “Just because we don’t know what it was doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible.”

Diana tilted her head to one side. “Um… That’s kind of why I asked it was really the end. It doesn’t feel like a proper ending. There’s still so much stuff we don’t know.”

“We can make educated guesses about a lot of what we don’t know,” Phi said, “Like, for example, Radical-6. Akane?”

“Definitely eradicated,” Akane answered, “If Free the Soul had any stocks of it elsewhere, thus entire mission would have been pointless. Of course, there’s no way the Radical-6 stored in the bunker survived that.”

“Zero?” Phi asked.

“To call yourself ‘Zero’ is to put your own life on the line,” Akane explained.

Phi glanced at Sigma, who nodded.

“Whoever he was, this Zero understood that. He didn’t escape with us, so…” Akane finished by merely nodding.

“And Q-team didn’t survive,” Junpei said, “We know that.” He grunted bitterly, before glancing at Diana. “I see what you mean, Diana, about this not being a proper ending. I thought everybody was supposed to get out at the end of these things. ‘Happily ever after.’”

“It’s not perfect,” Akane admitted, “But it’s still good.” A playful grin spread across Akane’s lips, which Junpei hadn’t seen for a decade. “Just like that ring you’ve got.”

Junpei gasped. “You saw?” He clumsily fished it out of his pocket. “But it’s chipped. Right there.”

Akane’s grin just broadened. “I saw how it got that chip, too. Only three people were ever supposed to leave the Decision Game alive. That was Zero’s plan. Thanks in part to that ring and what you did with it, six of us escaped. Six! That ring’s not ‘perfect’, not any more. But it’s still good.”

“I-Is that… a ‘Yes’?” Junpei stammered. He stood there for a few seconds before remembering to drop to one knee.

“Yes. Yes. Of course, yes.”

By Christmas day of 2029, the former site of the Decision Game bunker was declared safe for entry. Junpei and Akane returned, hoping to find any clues to the miracle that had stopped the reactor’s explosion. Only one awaited them, hidden among the ash. It was the visor of a fireman’s helmet: scorched and cracked, warped and melted, and stalwart to the end.

December 22, 2016December 13, 2018 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @chessanator

From: @specialagentartemis

“You did good, kid.”

With Eric’s backstory, I kind of wanted to see more a protective, big-brotherly relationship with him and Sean… they could be cute

(Hope this is the Prime Eric Content you had in mind! Happy holidays!)

December 22, 2016December 13, 2018 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @chessanator

From: @specialagentartemis

Because I still don’t actually know if it’s possible to submit photosets, here’s the other half of your ZEcret Santa gift! (It’s still Eric)

Nothing like being panicked, backed into a corner, and lashing out with a shotgun, am I right

The Fire’s End

December 20, 2016 ~ zecretsanta ~ Leave a comment

To: @morphogenetic

From: @chessanator

I’ve cooked up a little bit of Carlos/Junpei for you this Christmas. Even though it’s probably a bit more platonic and a hell of a lot less fluffy than you were were imagining, I hope you enjoy it.
I decided to spice it up with the spirit of your first prompt as well, by setting it between games: of course, there’s only one pair of games that Carlos/Junpei can be between.
Finally, since it fits, I decided to throw in a little head-canon that I think really binds the whole thing together. I hope you appreciate it, and have a Merry Christmas.

“I need you to forget, Junpei.”

Junpei fell to the cold steel floor of the elevator that had carried them out of the bunker, clawing at his thigh and the needles of the bracelet that had been forced into it. For just a moment he reached out his arm towards Akane – the woman whose bracelet it was and who had used it against him – before even that fell still.

Akane took a deep, sorrowful breath. “I do what I must to accomplish my goals. That is just how I am,” she announced. Her right hand shook slightly, and the ring on her finger with it.

Carlos stumbled back, his hands raised warily. “Whoa, Akane… Hold on! What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry, Carlos,” Akane said, “You get to keep your memories. I still need someone to look after Junpei when he wakes up.”

“Look… after him?” Carlos asked.

“He won’t remember anything about the Decision Game,” Akane explained, “He won’t remember much from D-Com, either. And he won’t remember Radical-6. You heard what we told you. That virus will spread across the entire world, killing everyone it touches. Junpei… Junpei has to survive.” The ring on Akane’s finger twitched again. “You need to help him, Carlos. You need to make sure he lives.”

“Wait! I…” Carlos started to say.

Akane scribbled something on a scrap of paper and tossed it to Carlos. A quick glance showed it to be a set of GPS coordinates. “There’s a shelter, south and east of here,” Akane said, “I had it prepared beforehand, just in case. It’s got everything Junpei and you will need to get through this. It’s all yours.”

“No!” Carlos shouted. His fist clenched. “I can’t do this. I have to get back to New York. I have to make sure that Maria’s okay!”

Akane turned her face away. “I thought you might say that, Carlos. I understand why you’d want to look after your sister. But I think… I think that if you really wanted to ensure that Maria’s okay… you’d go with Junpei. And you wouldn’t tell him that I was ever here.”

Carlos shivered. The meaning of Akane’s words sunk into him. “Akane… You wouldn’t… I thought I knew you!”

“I do what I must to accomplish my goals.” Akane turned away and started walking into the desert. Still, her voice carried back to Carlos, cutting across the gently blowing wind, and the last thing she said was, “Don’t worry. It’s not forever. Eventually, the worst possible thing will happen. After that, you’re free to do what you want.”

Akane disappeared into the dunes. Carlos sunk to his knees.

Junpei was awoken by the sound of a blaring siren. From the vibrations of the seat he was sitting in, he realised he was in a vehicle moving at speed. Snuggled in his lap was an elderly but vibrantly healthy terrier; his collar called him, ‘Gab’.

“Junpei, you’re awake!” came a voice from Junpei’s left.

Junpei looked over at the driver. He was an angular-jawed blond-haired man, wearing a fireman’s suit. That made sense: they were in a fire-truck. Nothing else did: Junpei was sure he was supposed to be heading for the Mars Mission test site to find Akane. That shouldn’t have involved ending up in a fire-engine.

Then, an idea popped into Junpei’s mind. “You’re one of the Mars Mission participants, aren’t you?”

The man nodded. “That’s right. Well, I was one.” He paused. “You don’t remember much else about me, right? I’m Carlos. I guess that, for you, this is the first time that you’ve met me.”

Junpei listened as the man – Carlos – described how the Mars Mission experiment had been hijacked by some terrorist group, who had used it to release a dangerous virus called Radical-6 into the world. According to Carlos, there was now no way to stop it spreading. “It was Free the Soul who did this, wasn’t it? Of course it was. I knew something like this was going to happen,” Junpei stated.

“You’ve heard of them?” Carlos asked, “I didn’t know they existed until today.”

Junpei nodded. Then, he asked the question that was weighing on his shoulders. “I joined the Mars Mission experiment hoping to meet someone. Someone I haven’t seen for a long time. Did you see her? Akane Kurashiki?”

Carlos didn’t answer at first. He looked at the road; he changed gears. Finally, he shook his head. “She wasn’t there.”

Junpei sat in silence for a few minutes. Then, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“We need somewhere to weather out the Radical-6 outbreak,” Carlos said. He paused for a couple of seconds. “Someone… someone told me about a shelter. That’s where we are going.”

The rest of the journey passed in silence, save for the screaming of the siren that sped the fire-engine along. Eventually, they arrived at the shelter that Carlos was talking about. It lay within sight of the Colorado River, just off a harbour where several small boats were tied to a pier. Pieces of corrugated metal and rough-cut lumber were piled around the central structure: a small steel mound poking out from the structure concealed beneath the surface. Only a bulky hatch allowed access.

“We should go in and have a look around,” Carlos said.

The hatch opened, though only with considerable effort from both Junpei and Carlos, and they began to explore the inside. The shelter went deep below the ground, intended to house several hundreds of people rather than just two. Alongside the many floors of bedrooms and living spaces, there were also other facilities: a walk-in freezer filled with canned foods, a large bay of hydroponics tanks, an engineering workshop equipped with power tools and 3-D printers and, near the bottom of the shelter, the nuclear reactor that powered the whole thing.

But most ominous of all was the medical centre, since Junpei and Carlos found there kits which could test for Radical-6 infection.

“They knew this was coming,” Carlos muttered, “and they were planning for the long term.”

Junpei turned towards him. “Who told you about this place?” he asked sternly.

Carlos looked away. “It was… one of the other Mars Mission participants,” he replied.

“Then why aren’t they here with us?!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what they were thinking.” Carlos fell silent for about a minute. Then, he said, “Let’s head somewhere else. There has to be something here to take our minds off this.”

Junpei and Carlos headed back up the underground shelter, finding a common room tucked among the residential area. It had a bar, reasonably well stocked with spirits. It also had a television. Carlos turned it on, and as it blared to life the news started to play.

“Valley Hospital, Las Vegas, was thrown into chaos when fifty doctors, nurses and medical technicians threw themselves from the roof. Witnesses described the mass suicide as ‘grisly’, ‘catastrophic’ and ‘unimaginable’. We turn to our reporter on the scene for more information.”

“We’re here on Pinto Lane, Las Vegas, just outside the cordon the police have set up. People here are… just completely shocked. They haven’t seen anything like this before; I can certainly say I haven’t. Even from this distance, we can see some of the results of this horrifying event, as the coroners try to identify and respectfully remove the bodies. I’ve been talking to some of the grieving families as they’ve come to identify their loved ones. Almost universally, the victims were described as happy and contents, with much to live for. No-one knows what drove these poor people to such a final decision, and I don’t think anyone ever will be able to understand. Still, hearing about these bright young people choosing to end it all, you have to wonder if they knew something we didn’t.”

Junpei slammed the television off. He was shaking. He shook even as he fell into the armchair that Carlos had moved up behind him. “It’s really happening,” Junpei whispered.

Carlos knelt down next to Junpei and held his hand, squeezing it until Junpei’s shaking stopped. “I’m sorry, Junpei.”

“I was sure you were lying,” Junpei said, “I was waiting until I felt better to get the drop on you and run away, but… the world really is ending. We really are just stuck here.”

“I didn’t believe it myself when you… when I first found out,” Carlos answered.

Junpei sat there silently for several minutes. He felt as though he would never come to terms with what had happened. But eventually, even that feeling passed. He sighed. “Well, since we’re stuck together: nice to meet you, Carlos. I guess I could enjoy coming to get to know you.”

Carlos and Junpei talked into the late hours of the night, though the uniform harsh lights of the shelter obscured the actual time. Junpei told Carlos about Akane, and how he’d spent an entire year trying to find her again. Carlos told Junpei about his sister, Maria, and the efforts he had taken to earn the money needed to cure her Reverie Syndrome.

Eventually, their tiredness overcame even their despair. Junpei and Carlos found a place for Gab to sleep, and then choose adjacent bedrooms for themselves and went to sleep as well.

Junpei had a nightmare that night. In it, he saw Akane. He watched, paralysed, as she appeared to stab a dagger into her own chest. But then the dream shifted, and the heart that the dagger had been driven into was Junpei’s own.

As Radical-6 spread across the world, rumours spread as well: rumours of a place untouched by the fires that had ravaged everything else. And so people started to approach the shelter that Carlos and Junpei had made their home.

Carlos was ready for them, as much as he could be. He’d extracted the radio from his fire-truck so that they could use it to communicate with the incoming people and the rest of the outside world. He’d also jury-rigged his turn-out gear so that they would hopefully protect from Radical-6 as well as heat and smoke. Wearing them, Junpei and he could intercept the refugees, and hand them the Radial-6 testing kits. About two thirds of the people who found the shelter were clean and welcomed inside.

But the people Carlos had gone out to meet that day were not.

Being rejected from the shelter was usually the last straw for those who were infected with Radical-6. Carlos had seen it before: people succumbing to suicide only shortly after turning away. This group was worse though, and not only because they had done it right in front of him. The woman Carlos had rejected had shot her two infant children before turning the gun on herself. Even that wasn’t the end, though. The bodies were still out there, and still infected. They were still there as a danger to other people trying to find the shelter. Carlos needed to decontaminate them before his job was done.

As Carlos dropped the match onto the pyre, he crossed himself. “I’m supposed to be saving people from fires,” he muttered as a bitter prayer, “not burning them myself.”

Junpei also wearing the modified protective gear, came up behind Carlos and grasped him firmly by the shoulder. “I can finish it off. Go back inside.”

Carlos shrugged him off. “No. I need to see this through. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t.” He looked down at the charring bodies once more. “It’s just…”

Junpei grabbed Carlos again and spun him around with surprising force. “Listen, Carlos! We are saving people. There’s about a hundred people back there who wouldn’t be alive without us. And if we let a single infected person through, all of them die. All of them. We have to do this!”

Carlos just stood there, glumly silent. Junpei studied his face intently, before continuing to speak.

“You’re feeling guilty about something else, aren’t you? Something other than the people we have to turn away. I could be deaf and blind and still realise that.”

Carlos clenched his fist and ground his teeth. He couldn’t let Junpei know about the other thing that was worrying him. It was the lie that had brought them to the shelter, and the whole thing would fall apart if it ever got out.

“It’s about Maria, right?” Junpei asked.

Carlos could at least talk about that. “Yeah. Yes, that’s right.” He fell silent again.

Junpei nodded. “I always wondered why you’d stayed here rather than go look for her. How come?”

Carlos sighed, buying time for another white lie. “It was too far. I didn’t know how far the virus had spread when I picked you up. If I’d caught it on the way there, if I infected her with it…”

“Okay, okay!” Junpei shushed him, “There’s no need to get completely morbid. Let’s get back inside, before you get any worse.” He looked over at the flames sprouting above the pyre. “That’s done, anyway. There’s no way any Radical-6 survived that.”

Carlos nodded, and returned with Junpei to the hatch.

Carlos had a nightmare that night. In it, he saw both Maria and Junpei hanging from cliffs on opposite sides of a lake filled with poison, filled with Radical-6. In the dream his heart was filled with a dreadful certainty: he’d only be able to save one of them, and not the other.

On April 13^th, Junpei was woken by a voice calling his name.

“Junpei! Junpei! You need to get up here!” The voice was Emily’s. She had been one of the first – first uninfected – people to arrive at the shelter after Junpei and Carlos, and she often ended up taking the leadership role when they weren’t able to. With the shelter housing eight hundred people and nearly full, there was no way Carlos and Junpei could do everything anymore.

“What is it?” Junpei called back groggily, “Can’t it wait until later?”

“The radio’s receiving a signal!” Emily explained, “It’s quite weak, so we took it to the surface to pick it up better.”

“Well then: listen to what it says and tell me later!” Junpei fell quickly back to sleep.

He was immediately woken up again. “We can’t! Whoever it is, they’re speaking Japanese!”

“Goddamnit, okay then! I’m coming!”

When Junpei was awake and dressed and Emily had dragged him up to the surface, he saw, through the dim light of the dawn that Carlos was already up there, sitting in the centre of a crowd of people with the radio. Gab was also out there, nuzzling the back of Carlos’ hand. No-one was wearing protective suits: they hadn’t seen anyone approach for a while, and they had set up a perimeter of electronic sensors to warn of anyone coming. As long as they weren’t close to anyone infected, there was no danger of Radical-6.

Carlos spotted Junpei’s arrival. “I’m glad to see you back among the living. What do you make of this?”

Junpei joined Carlos in the centre of the circle. He listened to the words coming through the radio, and began to translate for the others at the start of the next sentence.

“It has thus become clear that the factor that has continually frustrated our efforts to eradicate Radical-6 is the population of wild animals, which harbours the virus and reintroduces it after each quarantine attempt. It has also become clear that merely killing the wildlife on the edges of the remaining pockets of human civilisation is not enough. Thus, we have chosen to implement a more thorough solution that will eradicate Radical-6 for good.

“We here at the Hokkaido Antimatter Reactor, as well as our esteemed colleagues around the world, wish the rest of humanity the best of luck. We hope you think well of us once we are gone.” The radio played one more word that everyone understood – “Sayonara” – and then fell silent.

“Huh?” Emily piped up, “What did it mean, ‘a more thorough…’?”

Her voice cut off. Lights flashed into being among the twilight of the dawn: three to the north, one to the south, one just visible over the western horizon. They were mere pinpricks, but impossibly bright.

“Oh,” Junpei gasped softly, “Oh no.”

Carlos leapt to his feet. “Everyone!” he yelled, his voice an urgent command, “Everyone, get back in the shelter! Now! Go, go, go!”

People hesitated for a moment. They hadn’t understood as quickly as Junpei or Carlos had. But Carlos was trained for emergencies, and used to people’s vacillation during them. His sheer presence got people moving, until a confused and scared but somewhat-organised crowd was racing towards the shelter. Junpei joined them, scooping up Gab and the radio as he did so.

Despite having been at the back of the crowd to make sure everyone was coming, Carlos reached the hatch first. He wrenched it open single-handedly, but didn’t go down; instead, he stood astride the hole, helping others down. His movements settled into a powerful, mechanical rhythm: take a hand, hoist the person up, guide them to the ladder inside, back for the next person.

Junpei was last in the queue. “Take Gab and get down there,” he shouted as he held the terrified dog up, “I’ll follow you.”

Carlos just pulled Junpei up by the shoulder. “No. I promised to myself I’d put everyone else first, especially you. It’s the only way I’d…” Carlos trailed off as he dangled Junpei down the hole.

Junpei tried to stand on the ladder; with his arms full he failed. “I can’t do it!” he yelled up incoherently.

Carlos looked down. “Don’t worry, Junpei. I…” Carlos looked up. He gasped, sharply.

Junpei fell.

A couple of people caught him as he reached the bottom, but the shock of the landing still forced a jolt of pain through Junpei’s nerves. Gab yelped, diving away into Emily’s arms.

Junpei craned his neck up. “Carlos! What the hell?!”

There was a brief flash of light piercing through the gap around the rim of the closing hatch.

Carlos fell. He tumbled as his foot caught a rung of the ladder, spinning through the air until he hit the ground on his left hand side with a sickening crunch.

“Carlos!” Junpei scrambled over, ignoring the pain in his own body. “Goddamnit! What happened?! I thought you were following me in.”

“I followed you in pretty quickly, quickly as possible. Fell really quickly” Carlos mumbled, “Got the hatch closed on my way down.”

“Did you get down in time?!” Junpei roared, trying to keep Carlos awake, “Please tell me that didn’t hit you!”

Carlos still seemed delirious. “That’s what she said. ‘Eventually, the worst possible thing will happen.’ That’s when she said I should stop worrying. Stop worrying about Maria.” Carlos’ voice trailed off. His eyes closed.

Junpei stood up and turned back to face the waiting crowd. His voice trembled. “Get Carlos to the medbay. Someone! Please!” Junpei sighed with relief as Carlos was carried safely away. But even then, he wondered about what his friend had said in those final moments.

Junpei found out later that Carlos hadn’t escaped the blast in time: not quite. His right hand had erupted with a weeping red welt from where it had just been caught as it grabbed the rim of the hatch.

That night, and many others after, Junpei dreamed. They were the dreams of an Esper. Junpei saw another reactor, vivid in his mind because it had also exploded. He saw the cruel plague-doctor who had called himself Zero II and listened as he said the phrase, ‘Vive Hodie.’ Then, Junpei found himself lying in a foreboding chrysalis of alien technology, alongside Akane. The last thing Junpei heard each night before waking up – backlit by the explosions of eighteen annihilation reactors and a blood-red sky – were Akane’s words.

“I need you to forget, Junpei.”

Carlos lay in the infirmary, testing the strength of his injured right hand. According to the doctors, it had been two months since he had burned it and fallen, of which he’d spent all but a single week asleep. The fires that the exploding antimatter reactors had lit were mostly dying out, and it was once again safe to go outside as long as you were in a protective suit. Not that Carlos would be going outside himself: with his burn he would be a liability.

Carlos wanted to become useful again, which was why he spent every morning exercising his fingers and breaking through the pain.

On Carlos’ forty-ninth repetition, Junpei walked in. He march was stiff and irregular, but he still made quick forward progress, stopping about an arm’s length from the side of Carlos’ bed. He didn’t say anything, but just stared.

Carlos relaxed his hand and sat up, resting his back against the pillows. “Hey! Junpei! Good to see you! I thought you had forgotten me down here.”

“‘Forgotten,’” Junpei muttered, “Right… ‘forgotten.’”

Carlos continued to talk. “Anything important happened since then? I remember the plumbing was playing up before, but it has to be fixed by now. I’m still getting decent lunches, even for hospital food, so there can’t be anything wrong with Hydroponics. What about the reactor?”

Junpei glowered. “Carlos. We need to talk.”

“Junpei, what’s up?” Carlos chuckled weakly. “This is because I dropped you, isn’t it? I’m sorry about that.”

“Shut up!”

Junpei’s fist swung round, catching Carlos on his left cheek. Carlos was dazed for a moment as the back of his head clanged against the wall. Everyone in the medbay fell silent.

But Junpei didn’t. “You took Akane from me, you bastard! You don’t get to make jokes about that.”

Carlos froze. “You… you remembered.”

“I remember enough,” Junpei growled, “I remember how I met you, for the real first time, in D-Com. I remember that I finally found Akane there as well. And I remember how you helped her erase my memories so that I’d never know how close I’d come.”

“I didn’t erase your memories!” Carlos protested, “She did that by…”

“You lied to me, afterwards,” Junpei interrupted, “You kept me from looking for her. That’s as good as a complete betrayal. I’ve got the feeling you got a bit of experience with them back during the simulation.” Junpei looked away from Carlos in disgust. “You know… I had thought you’d brought me here because you were my friend. Should have guessed that the only reason you’d pretend to be such a good buddy was because she… because someone was threatening your precious Maria.”

Carlos tried to punch back against Junpei’s snide dismissal of his sister, but could only yelp as pain shot through his right hand. When the pain subsided, he asked, “How do you even know about that? You were unconscious when Akane threatened her.”

Junpei flinched at Akane’s name, but still answered. “How do I know? You talk. In your sleep.”

They glared at each other with silent anger for several minutes: Junpei standing tensely, Carlos leaning his head wearily against the wall. The other residents of the shelter – doctors and patients both – just watched: none of them wanted to get between the founders of the shelter. Eventually, Carlos worked up the strength of will to break the impasse.

“So, you found out. What now, Junpei?” he asked.

Junpei rested his forehead against his left palm, clawing at his hair with frustration. When he had an answer, he spoke. “Now you go.”

“‘Go’?”

“Go! Leave! Never come back!” Junpei roared, “That was the idea, wasn’t it? You babysit me for four months, and now that the world’s ended you get to leave and look for Maria, which is what you really wanted to do all the time you were here. Right?”

“Junpei, I…” Carlos stuttered. He wanted both. Not just to save Maria, unlikely as that was now, but also to be part of the community that Junpei and he had started. He wanted to survive the end of the world with Junpei. Carlos didn’t understand why Junpei couldn’t see that.

“Stop lying to me,” Junpei said, cutting off Carlos’ thoughts. He pointed upwards. “You can take your fire-engine out of here. I don’t want any more things left around to remind me of… people I’ve lost. Don’t worry: it still works. I checked it myself.”

In solemn silence, Junpei escorted Carlos out of the infirmary, to the elevator, to the changing room where the protective suits were stored and – once they both wore those suits – all the way to the ladder and the hatch to the outside world. With only three usable limbs, it took Carlos a while to climb, but he managed it, stepping for the first time under the red sky of the cruel new world.

When Carlos had sat down in the driver’s seat of the fire-truck, he looked forlornly back at Junpei. “I’m gonna miss you, Junpei. Are you really sure you want me to go?”

Junpei bowed his head. “I… I wish you had been who I thought you were, Carlos. But… I…” Junpei’s arms shook; Carlos could see how conflicted he was in his eyes. But eventually Junpei made his final decision. He slammed the truck’s door shut and ran back towards the shelter.

Carlos started the truck’s engine after a couple of spluttering whirs. The siren came to life, its wail forlornly quiet after the battering the ruck had taken. With one last look in the wing mirror Carlos started to drive, wondering if it could possibly have gone any other way.

Junpei regretted sending Carlos away from the moment he stepped back inside the shelter. He regretted everything he had said, but couldn’t even excuse himself by saying it was in the heat of the moment. There wasn’t even a way to call Carlos back and apologise: the radio that should have been in Carlos’ truck had been ripped from it.

Casting his protective suit aside, Junpei made his way back to the common room – the same one he and Carlos had talked in on their very first day. There were some people there, but one withering look from Junpei quickly emptied it.

Junpei turned on the television. It just showed static now: static matching that which buzzed and rumbled in Junpei’s mind. He looked over at the bar. It had started to look very welcoming. It was a way to forget what he had done because he had forgot.

One year later, Gab’s funeral was held. Junpei was drunk during it and didn’t remember a thing.

Six years after that, it was determined that the outside world was truly safe to return to, even without protection. Many of the inhabitants of the shelter started choosing to live outside, in whatever housing they could construct, and a small town formed around Junpei as he stayed still. With Carlos gone and Junpei indisposed, Emily became the de-facto leader and – while it was Junpei who named the town in a small moment of lucidity – it was Emily who most people knew as the first mayor of Fire’s End.

By the time the shelter’s stocks of alcohol had run dry, the town of Fire’s End had made contact with another community of survivors in Tennessee, and traders were bringing more whiskey into the town. Junpei welcomed its arrival, but he wasn’t the only one who needed it in the wake of the end of the world. The whiskey was expensive, even with the small gifts and discounts he got from those who had been there at the beginning and who remembered their respect for him.

Junpei joined the crews who drove west to the ruins of Las Vegas to scavenge. Despite his alcoholic haze, he found he had some talent for it, finding ways to extract useful electronic components from the derelict gambling machines without damaging them at all. Eventually, Junpei started going there alone. He was bringing back as much alone as any entire crew and becoming wealthy despite his spending, and the others preferred to work without his misery.

And then came Christmas Day, 2064. Fire’s End had swelled to about eight thousand people and the celebrations were starting, such as they were. But for once, Junpei was sober. Something inside him told him that it was not the day for that.

He was exploring the shelter – for nostalgia’s sake – when he came across a console whose lights were blinking furiously. It took him a while to recall what it had been used for, thirty-five years ago. Eventually, he remembered. It was connected to the perimeter sensors that he and Carlos had used when it had only been them. One of them, well away from the main trade routes, had activated.

Junpei could have ignored it. He could have told anyone else and then left it to them. But the same feeling inside told Junpei that it had to be him.

He took one of the protective suits, just in case. He chose the second converted fire-suit – the only one left after Carlos had left with the other – even though it wasn’t the closest. And then he left the shelter and made his way to the border of the town.

Junpei climbed a hill a stood there, looking over the desert in the direction that the sensor was located. For a moment, there didn’t seem to be anything out there, and Junpei almost turned back. But then, he saw it.

A blue light, twinkling like a star, glided across the horizon. It travelled across Junpei’s field of view before slowing to a halt. Forcing his aching legs forward, Junpei headed towards the location marked by where the blue star had come to rest.

As Junpei came closer, the source of the light formed in his sight like a mirage. It was a large red vehicle: a fire-truck, with its emergency lights dancing above it. An elderly man with greying hair climbed out of the driver’s seat and, clutching his side with one hand, tossed two packets to Junpei with the other.

“Don’t worry, Junpei,” the man called across the distance, “We’re both clean.”

Junpei knelt down and looked at the packets. They were both Radical-6 testing kits. They had both been legitimately used, and both declared their user healthy. Junpei stood up again and shouted back, “Okay! Wait… How do you know my name?! Who are you?”

Junpei looked again at the elderly man. This time, he saw the patches of blond poking through the white. He saw the red of a roughly-healed scar on the back of the man’s right hand. And he saw the determination to help people that blazed still in the man’s eyes: a determination that Junpei had expected never to see again.

“Carlos?”

The old man nodded with relief. “That’s right, Junpei.” Carlos bowed his head and continued, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have come back, but I had…”

“You’re sorry?” Junpei asked, shimmers of guilt welling inside him. “Why are you sorry? Why on Earth didn’t you some back sooner?”

Carlos started to speak. “But you said…”

“You listened to what I said? Why would you do that? I’m an asshole, Carlos. A grade nine asshole. Please don’t listen to what I said before. Please stay.”

Carlos sighed mournfully. “It’s… I think it’s too late for that. I’m old now. And… I think I’m dying.” Carlos lifted his shirt to reveal an oozing wound on the side of his stomach. “I don’t believe I made it this far. We’re close, aren’t we? Please tell me I at least got close.”

Junpei pointed back towards the hill he had come down. “Yeah… It’s just over there.” Then, he turned back to Carlos, hands shaking angrily. “Is that it, Carlos?! You finally some back, just to tell me you’re dying? Really?!”

Carlos sighed, then pointed down at the testing kits at Junpei’s feet.

“What are you…?” Then Junpei stopped. He thought. “Wait… There’s two of them. Why did you give me two of them?”

“Because of this little guy,” Carlos answered. He turned around, then reached into the fire-truck and pulled out something wrapped in a large bundle of cloth. The cries of a baby could be heard within it. “I came back here because of him. He’s my great-nephew.”

Junpei gasped. “That would mean…!”

“That’s right,” Carlos answered, “I found her. I found Maria. She woke up once the epidemic had started, and found her way to a shelter just like ours. I don’t think it was a coincidence. I… I think Akane must have helped her. That was what she was talking about, back then. She wasn’t threatening Maria at all.

“Maria survived the explosions. By the time I got there, she had found someone she liked. About a year later, they started a family. I considered, a few times, trying to convince them to come with me back here with me, but…” Carlos coughed, a weak and weary hack. “I thought you wanted me to never return.

“But from yesterday, I didn’t have a choice. Maria’s shelter was attacked by raiders. Myrmidons. Soldiers working for Free the Soul. I was the only one who escaped, and I only just made it. This is all that’s left of my family, now.”

Carlos took a few unsteady steps forward, holding the baby in his arms out towards Junpei. “Junpei, you’re the only one I could possibly trust. You have to look after him. Please, forget what I did to you; it doesn’t matter now. Just…” Carlos trailed off; he finished his sentence only by placing the boy in Junpei’s welcoming arms.

Junpei looked down. The baby had a surprising but gratifying weight. Instinctively, he tussled the locks of blond hair that spilled from the top of the blankets, then moved the blanket aside to see the boy’s face.

Looking deeply into those curious, trusting eyes, Junpei couldn’t quite think of what to say. “H-How old is he?”

Carlos smiled. “He had his first birthday last month. November 17^th.” Carlos’ eyes took on a hopeful glint. “So… Does this mean you’ll do it? Take him in; raise him once I’m gone?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. I knew you’d come through.” His burden lifted, Carlos fell back towards the sand, staying upright only by leaning against the great wheel of the fire-engine.

“Carlos!” Junpei yelled in alarm. He raced to Carlos’ side, but couldn’t lean down without disturbing the baby in his arms.

Carlos brushed him away with a weak swing of his right arm. “It’s okay, Junpei. You have someone else to look after now.”

Carlos slumped against the wheel. His eyes closed peacefully. But he still had time for four final words.

“His name is Quark.”

As he walked back towards Fire’s End, Junpei looked down at the child in his arms: at the bright and innocent smile; at the messy hair whose colour reminded Junpei so much of Carlos. Warmth refilled Junpei’s heart.

Quark looked back up at him. “Gra-pa!” the baby babbled.

“Quark,” Tenmyouji replied.