[JE] Netting a Turtle is a Virtual Affair 5/6

[notaverse]

Title: Netting a Turtle is a Virtual Affair 5/6
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R
Genre: Cyberpunk, AU
Word count: 56,562
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
Summary: Syscops aren't supposed to tolerate vigilantes, but Jin Akanishi's never been good at doing what he's told.



Chapter 5

It was mid-morning by the time Jin woke. His first impulse was to turn over and go back to sleep, but hunger argued for getting up and food won over laziness every time. He loved weekends. Time to do things at his own pace.

His toaster, unfortunately, also liked to do things at its own pace, so it was a while before he had a stack on his plate. Jin lounged in front of his television to catch up with the news, hoping there wouldn't be anything to put him off his breakfast.

So far, so good. Jin was on his last slice when his phone bleeped with a message from Yamapi. He sent his apologies that he was now going to be working all Saturday, as the one freelancer they used hadn't shown up and wasn't responding to calls, and the other was out of town, and today was the only day the model could possibly do this shoot. Yamapi and his camera were in demand, and that meant Jin's efforts to get the two of them to reassert their masculinity would have to wait until Sunday.

After the night he'd had, Jin was tempted to send a return mail saying his masculinity was in fine working order, thank you very much, and Yamapi was on his own.

The only other message was from Ueda, confirming that Koki was still there, sleeping it off in one of the upstairs rooms, showing no signs of crazed behaviour beyond the norm. He'd also written a new song, which Ueda didn't seem to care for.

No mail from Kame. Jin felt disappointed, then annoyed with himself for feeling disappointed. Kame had confirmed, last night, that his home was in Tokyo, so Jin had high hopes that they might actually get to meet in person at some point. And if they got to that point, he was going to tie Kame to a chair and refuse to set him free until he revealed his name. The phone number had to be a good sign, didn't it? And Kame must trust him, or last night would never have happened.

There wasn't much on the news. Jin left it playing in the background as he made himself reasonably presentable, paying minimal attention to sporting triumphs, celebrity wedding announcements and political novelties until one story caught his attention. A freelance photographer from Tokyo had been arrested for trying to kill her ex-boyfriend, a high school maths teacher currently living in Sendai.

According to her current boyfriend, who'd now declared he wanted nothing further to do with her, she'd been acting strangely for a couple of days. Normally a quiet, reticent woman when not at work, she'd started playing her music at top volume around the apartment and getting in fights with the neighbours when they complained. She'd even told her deadbeat brother exactly what she thought of him, which she wouldn't normally do because she always tried to look for the good in people.

After a screaming match with the landlord the woman had grabbed her wallet and taken off, leaving keys, phone and boyfriend behind to take the last train to Sendai. A couple of hours later she broke into her ex-boyfriend's house, seized a knife from his kitchen, and tried to kill him in front of his wife. He managed to overpower her while his wife called the police.

Disturbing stuff, but what kept Jin listening was how out of character the woman's behaviour was, so those who knew her said. Even the intended victim only had good things to say about her - it had been a mutual, amicable split - and he was sure she'd just had too much to drink, or perhaps had been working too hard lately. He said the moment he looked in her eyes he knew she didn't really mean to hurt him, even if the slash across his hand said otherwise.

It was bizarre enough to arouse Jin's curiosity. There was no reason it had to be related but there were enough similarities that he thought it worth checking out. He made a note of the photographer's name, then called Yamapi.

His best friend sounded a little impatient. "Jin, I meant it when I said I was at work. We can do whatever you want tomorrow, I promise."

"Wait! Pi, I have one question for you and then you can get back to snapping pictures, okay? Your missing photographer - is her name Kinomoto Reiko?"

"It's not just 'snapping pictures'," Yamapi huffed. "It's art. And yeah, that's her. How do you know?"

Despite the serious nature of the situation, Jin pumped his fist in the air and mouthed a silent 'yay'. He loved being right. "Because I've been watching a news story about her getting arrested for attempted murder."

There wasn't a lot Yamapi could say to that. "It doesn't have to be the same Kinomoto Reiko," he began, but Jin cut him off.

"For argument's sake, let's say it is. Sorry, I should've said two questions. Do you know her username?"

Silence for a moment as Yamapi thought. "Kireikochan, I think. We don't talk much; she's so quiet I don't think she's said more than ten words to anyone here. Not like the other freelancer we use - he's very chatty when you get him started. His jokes are a bit weird, though..."

"I'm sure they are." Jin was in a rush to check up on Kinomoto; neither of them had the time for gossip, no matter how entertaining it could be. "Let me know when you're free and maybe we can do something. I might be working."

"Jin Akanishi, working on a weekend?"

Jin giggled at Yamapi's feigned shock. "That sounded terrible. Your acting skills could use some work."

"That's why I'm on the other side of the camera."

They bantered for another couple of minutes until Yamapi pointed out that Jin had now wasted his entire five-minute break for him and he still hadn't got anywhere near a vending machine. It was a good time for Jin to make a swift farewell and hang up.

It was a fair bet Kinomoto wasn't on-line in her holding cell, or wherever she was, so Jin couldn't reach her directly. No matter, since he couldn't access her activity log anyway. Where was Kame when Jin needed him? Yokohama, that's where. Working. Jin just hoped his request for Kireikochan's log would get processed despite his off-duty status so he had something concrete. Something like a trip to Tower Records.

He turned the volume up on his computer, the better to hear the sound of incoming mail, and got some much-needed housework out of the way while he waited. Laundry, for instance. Jin had a feeling that if he had many more on-line meetings with Kame, he'd be doing a lot more of that. The vacuum drowned out all other sound save Jin's American neighbour singing old rock songs at stadium volume - she wasn't too bad, as it happened; Jin danced a few steps with the vacuum before he got the cable tangled around a chair and had to stop.

Half an hour for a response to his request. New personal record, possibly. Jin couldn't believe his luck until he saw the accompanying note from an incredulous Toma, asking him what he was doing working on a Saturday. Nobody had any faith in Jin's work ethic, including guys who'd only dealt with him by email. Jin drafted a scathing response, then deleted it when he realised it wouldn't help his case any.

Not to mention, it would be a waste of time he could better spend looking through Kireikochan's log. She hadn't been on-line much lately; he thought the archived version was likely up to date. Who went on the Net when they had ex-boyfriends to kill? The most recent activity was an on-line art class on the Roppongi subnet - taught, Jin was amused to see when he looked it up, by one of his neighbours - and before that a shopping spree, mostly in clothes stores on the Shibuya subnet.

And then...there it was. Tower Records. Kireikochan entered the store, sampled some music, had conversations with three people, discarded a wardrobe item from her avatar and exited the store shortly after. No blank spot on the log, but if they were right, that should be accurate - she would've saved herself by sacrificing a piece of her avatar to escape, the code Kame had found on the floor.

Good enough to go on? Jin checked his watch. It had just gone noon. Kame might be working, or he might be on his way back by now. Either way, the call could wait a bit longer. He'd never had to make a morning-after call to someone he'd only been with on-line, after all.

He hunted around beside the computer till he found a pack of cigarettes, stuck one between his lips and tried to light it. The lighter refused to cooperate. Another empty. Maki had given him this one; he was quite happy to throw it away. He didn't need the reminder. Should he take it as an omen that the only things she'd ever given him had been bad for his health? He had another in his jacket anyway.

Jin forgot all about needing a smoke when he found the lighter because in the same pocket was his printed copy of the page he'd photographed in Tackey's office. He stuck the cigarette back in the pack, no longer in the mood. Reminders of the most unpleasant time of his life inevitably killed his cravings for most things.

He studied the printout carefully. The details were right, all about his fictional career as a host and how he'd supported it. The agreements he'd made, the papers he'd signed, the arrangements with his bank - and what he'd really been doing to earn his keep. All the words were his. The phrases, the pauses, the tone. His voice, transcribed from a recording.

All very well, except that he didn't recall giving any such statement. There were parts of his time in hospital he didn't remember too clearly, where headaches blurred his recollection from whatever complications had occurred with the surgery. He'd been groggy from the anaesthetic anyway, but even once that had worn off, he'd had dazed patches as his brain struggled to fill in the blanks left by the exchange of CNS chips. It wasn't unthinkable he'd been interviewed and simply forgotten it.

If that was the case, he was entitled to a copy of that recording. Could he ask for it? How could he do so without explaining how he knew about it? He couldn't see himself asking Tackey if he just happened to have a recording of an interview that had taken place at, oh, some unspecified time, location most likely unknown, involving people Jin couldn't quite remember...

He discarded that plan as unworkable. In spite of the risks involved, slipping into the unoccupied office to raid Tackey's filing cabinet was looking like the most viable course of action.

There was no time like the present. No one would be working; it didn't matter if anyone knew Jin was there so long as he had a reasonable excuse. It wasn't as if he would be on-line. The lock, malfunctioning though it was, would record his entry and exit times - the most practical approach would be to copy the whole file as quickly as he could and save looking at it till he was safely out of there. A pretence of retrieving something from his desk would do.

As much as Jin disliked the idea of actually going into the office on a day off, it felt good to have something practical to focus on. He stashed a portable scanner and a spare memory card in his bag so he didn't have to rely on his cell phone, threw in a scarf he could pretend to have left at the office if he had to, and drove back to work. Saturday had brought better weather with it; Jin was happy not to receive a soaking as he left the car. Still didn't get his favourite parking spot.

To his surprise, the promised lift repair was underway when he entered the building - or would've been, had the engineer not been on his lunch break, according to the note taped to the doors. Jin took the stairs, crossing his fingers he wouldn't run into him. The last time they'd had an engineer in was to fix the heating, which would've been fine had she not taken a shine to Jin and insisted on telling him her life story, complete with the four ex-husbands, three kids, wastrel father and a poodle named Billy. It had taken him two hours to escape, and even then he'd only managed it because Tackey had distracted her with an impromptu striptease.

The door gave him its usual Christmas greeting which he didn't bother to return - it wasn't even October yet, damnit - and admitted him to a cold, empty office. He didn't have much time. The blinds were up; no point turning on the lights, he could see well enough.

He dropped to his knees by the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer was still unlocked and Jin tried to rid himself of the fear that someone knew he'd been tampering with it and had decided to set a trap for him. Filing cabinets only exploded in movies, right? Just because he was doing something secretive, didn't mean he should expect retribution. He wasn't James Bond - there wasn't going to be a man with a gun standing behind him when he looked up.

Jin looked up just in case. No imminent death threat, check. Back to business. The file was still as he'd left it. This time, he started at the back, feeding pages into the scanner without looking at them, making certain to put them back in the right order. He hoped the scanner's battery would hold out. He couldn't see the scanned images; everything went straight to the memory card.

It was so tempting to stop and read everything but the clock was ticking, time slipping away, so all Jin could do was skim briefly as he slid paper through the scanner's narrow mouth. The entire final section was printed code ornamented with handwritten scribbles and question marks - nothing complete. Jin didn't dare take the time to mentally compile it. Curiosity had to be subordinate to urgency. He wasn't supposed to be there, he shouldn't be doing this...

He realised he was fidgeting, gave himself a mental shake to keep his hands working on the paper, not twisting themselves in knots. The last of the code went back in the file. Inside the next compartment was a stack of what appeared to be medical reports, too complicated for Jin to glean anything through a glance. He scanned those too. There was a tiny plastic case underneath - a memory card, it had to be. It took him all of a second to decide to take it. No one was going to miss it, not when it lived under a fat wad of paper in a - supposedly - locked drawer. He switched it with the blank spare he'd brought with. They were similar enough in appearance no one would ever notice until they tried to use it.

A scrabbling from the door rose above the scanner's gentle whine; Jin bit his lip to muffle a gasp and eased the file back in the drawer, nudging it closed as he rolled to his feet. The scanner and memory card he tucked in the bag. Had he forgotten anything? Was there an incriminating piece of paper lying on the carpet, waiting for someone to walk in and question it?

Apparently not. Had Tackey's office door been open or closed? Jin couldn't remember. He settled for leaving it ajar as he ducked out. The cleaner could've left it open. Jin rushed to his desk just as Nakamaru walked in. He was fiddling with a pair of gloves, which explained the scrabbling sounds. The door lock didn't work through fabric.

"Don't tell me you're doing overtime?" Jin asked, trying to sound casual, totally not like he'd been surreptitiously copying files, oh no.

"What? Oh, no..." Nakamaru was paying more attention to his gloves than Jin; closer inspection revealed that one was developing a hole. "I left my phone here last night. I didn't even notice until I went to make a call this morning. Can you believe that?"

Jin could and would believe anything, so long as Nakamaru didn't get suspicious. "You never know - maybe one of those girls from the other night has been trying to call you," he teased.

Nakamaru made a mournful face when he found his phone lying on his desk. "Not a single missed call."

He sounded so resigned Jin felt quite sorry for him. "If they didn't like you wearing spaghetti sauce, they're probably not meant for you."

"I can't figure out if that was supposed to insult me or cheer me up."

"Either one is fine."

"Thanks, Akanishi." Nakamaru brightened up. "What brings you here on a Saturday? I know you didn't forget your phone - you're permanently attached to it."

Jin was prepared for that. "This." He unzipped his bag, pulled out the scarf. "I forgot I'd left it lying in my desk drawer."

He didn't have to elaborate because Nakamaru's phone began buzzing violently - on manner mode, since he'd left it at work, so Jin only knew because his unfortunate colleague jumped like someone had dropped a lit match on his gloves.

"And there's a call now," Jin said brightly, though he was fairly sure it would only be Masuda ringing to see if his roommate had managed to locate his phone yet. "I'll let you get back to your hectic social life. See you Monday."

Nakamaru was too busy trying to peel his gloves off and answer the phone to give him more than the most distracted of goodbyes. Jin practically whistled on his way out. Mission accomplished - sort of. Move over, James Bond.

Jin's good mood lasted as long as it took him to drive home, lock his front door, plug the scanner into his computer and take a look at the pages he'd scanned, which wasn't all that long since he drove faster than he should've done in his eagerness. He deliberately kept his machine disconnected from the Net. All the scanned pages had been automatically numbered; Jin worked through them in order of entry.

It didn't take him long to identify the code from his file, even though he didn't remember seeing it before. The comments gave it away. HAYATO, Kame had said. The program he'd written for Johnny Kitagawa, to give the old man access to CNS chips. The one he'd never finished, with incomplete methods and improperly defined classes and a big gap near the end where he'd obviously hit a stumbling block. He'd given the incomplete version to Kitagawa; Kame had copied it and finished it himself.

So why did Jin's boss have a printed copy in his filing cabinet?

There were three options, as Jin saw it. Tackey, or someone above him, had eavesdropped in the same way as Kame and taken a copy during his transmission to Kitagawa. Possible, but it would've meant Jin had had syscops on his little shrimpy tail even back then and he didn't consider it likely.

Option number two wasn't that likely either - but then, Jin didn't know much about Kame, so he couldn't rule out the possibility that his new friend had somehow been responsible for passing on the code. He didn't seem to have any problems swiping it for his own use, which contradicted the stance he'd taken against the users he'd thrown off the Net. On the other hand, Jin couldn't see what connection Kame could possibly have to a bunch of syscops, other than his having just slept with one.

Which left option three, and that was the one Jin liked least of all. Why would a syscop be doing business with a known on-line crimelord?

No. It couldn't be. Jin resolved to hold off on the speculation till he had more to go on. There were more scans left to examine - the medical ones that looked like they were going to take forever to read.

Jin didn't like them any better than the first bunch. Reading his own medical history was no fun. Every hospital trip, every vaccination, every recorded illness, from childhood right up until the bout of food poisoning he'd had a couple of months ago. Once they had his name, it would've been easy to obtain. It wasn't as if he took so much time off sick, though. He couldn't see why they needed to keep his records in such detail.

At least, not until he reached the pages relating to his brain. He'd been expecting something on the surgery and he wasn't disappointed, but the additional scans and... Jin stopped, suddenly cold. They were getting readings from his CNS interface. The stupid, treacherous chip was telling the bioware in the interface to take readings above and beyond the norm, to transmit when Jin was on-line, probably the same as the tracker. Had Kame spotted that too? Jin thought he'd been referring to the tracker alone, but there was no telling what other secrets his chip held.

He could see why his bosses would be interested in his brain functions after the trauma the poor, helpless organ had survived - what good was a braindead syscop? But it had been three years. Surely by now he'd proven he wasn't impaired? It couldn't be to monitor his thoughts. That was impossible, no matter what the science fiction writers wrote. Thought could take form on the Net if it possessed an electronic counterpart and the user wished it so; otherwise, it remained a secret - possibly the only secret left when everything else in the world, both real and virtual, could be captured in some shape or form.

What did that leave? Nothing in the material he'd scanned had anything to do with the contents of his chip. If it wasn't checking for contraband code, what was it? Why so much detail on brain chemistry, and response times, and how he reacted under certain on-line conditions?

A shadow fell over his screen - nothing to do with his reading material, but the sun was setting already. It got dark so early, seven at night and three in the morning were alike enough to be twins. Jin had spent all afternoon puzzling through his scans and all he'd gotten out of it was a hundred questions and protests from an empty stomach. The first, he could do nothing about. The second, at least, he could attend to.

While he didn't make a habit of cooking regularly, he hoped getting away from the screen for a bit would help things settle in his head, preferably into something resembling an answer. Rhythmically chopping onion for oyakodon served to blank his mind; sadly, it failed to provide the longed for inspiration. His phone bleeped at him while he was cutting up the chicken.

Typical. Always when Jin had his hands full. He rushed through the rest as fast as he could without giving his nails an unnecessary trim, washed his hands and snatched up his phone. It was an email from Kame. More words, fewer emoji this time.

Having a good day off? Has anything happened? My work ran over today so I haven't had time to do anything else. (clock, sad face)

I had fun last night. I hope you enjoyed yourself too. I should thank you properly for all the programs I keep taking from you, don't you think? (winking face, random sparkle)

I'll be back home soon. Will you look at something for me? I have an idea. You didn't run MIROKU on the cowboy and look at what happened to him. You ran it on your friend and he's fine now. You also ran it on the two sailor soldiers. I still don't know where the girl is but I've got a watchdog on the guy and he seems fine too. I think something in your program is stripping out the active component of the infection but leaving them as carriers? (puzzled face, syringe)

I'll call when I get home. Take care. (heart, tiny turtle)

Kame was evidently some sort of workaholic, Jin decided. Not that he was in any position to throw stones, given how his weekend had gone so far. He could have been at the gym, or watching a movie with friends, or getting ready for a night out. What was he doing? Devising conspiracy theories and staring at the screen till his vision blurred. He'd have an easier time parsing code on-line, but he found himself reluctant to log on, even after he'd sated his hunger.

Might Kame have a point? What if the infection was doing something to the victims that was causing them to behave out of character, but undergoing MIROKU's attempts to clean it removed that aspect of the infection and left only a trace that could be passed on - and not to another person, but to part of the Net itself? For the infection to affect behaviour off-line as well as on-line, as had clearly been the case for the dead cowboy and the would-be murderess, it had to have a physical component.

Or did it? Jin struggled with the logic. Injury sustained on-line fed back to the body as sensation but left no physical marks, only the body's response to stimulation. Pain and arousal were one and the same in this instance. As digital representations of people, avatars would take the damage but it was the brain that told the body whether or not to feel, dependent on the CNS interface feedback settings. So if the infection attacked the avatar and the interface told the brain it was damaged...

It made sense, in a weird sort of way. Tell the brain it's affected and it doesn't matter if the infection isn't a physical one because the human mind will believe it. The victim behaves according to the state it believes it's in, even if there's no medical reason for it. Curing the infection could potentially alter behaviour patterns yet again.

Jin found it easier to work it out with a diagram. He settled down with pen and paper to sketch out a series of boxes and arrows - though when his mind wandered, a doodle of a turtle in sunglasses began to take shape in one corner of the pad. MIROKU's primary function was to quarantine an infection, then attempt to cure it. The program hadn't been able to clean the infected parts so it had simply deleted them and replaced them with suitable substitutes. All well and good, except that the deletion obviously hadn't taken. Not inside...

He got it, then. The infection hid itself in plain sight, in the corrupt avatar data. Something small, like a thin tattoo, or something as significant as full-body discolouration. The corruption might be slow, the way Cruz's bow hadn't yet changed colour when Jin had first seen him. It was still working on him, then. That corruption disappeared when the infection was passed on; Jin would bet good money MillionDollarStetson's avatar had been shiny clean when he died. The others hadn't noticed the changes to their avatars - the cowboy had probably thought his was in perfect condition too.

The damned virus, or whatever it was, was hiding somewhere else too. Avatar data was stored in CNS chips. The physical signs of corruption had a counterpart in a much more vulnerable area, where electronics met organics. It had to be. The deletion only took care of the infected areas external to whatever poor soul had been swallowed up by it, leaving them alone in Jin's vault with the infection still inside of them, biding its time till they passed it on, left it somewhere on the Net where it could ensnare more victims.

To what purpose, Jin couldn't fathom, unless it was to create off-line mayhem by making everyone act against their nature. So what had MIROKU done for Koki, Cruz and Mariko to keep them from harm? Jin had to go back to his own program code to work it out.

Ten minutes later, he had an answer. His programs couldn't touch CNS chips. The only way he could affect someone else's avatar was if they deliberately gave him access with keys, the way Kame had done last night, and that was limited to physical appearance only. He couldn't delete anyone because that would mean accessing their chip. In a similar vein, he couldn't remove their infection because he'd have to access their avatar data in order to do so. That hadn't stopped MIROKU from trying, of course. Jin liked to think he'd imbued the program with an indomitable spirit.

The repair routine had succeeded after all, albeit in a strange fashion, by means of a what was effectively a reset. Whereas the quarantine encapsulated the infected code to check the spread, the next part of the process aimed to remove the infection from the host. In the same way MIROKU attempted to create a reasonable replacement for a deleted file, it attempted to overwrite the infected file prior to deletion but rather than looking externally for a source, it would use the original code as a basis, searching through its database for the closest possible match as a means of filling in the gaps created by the infection.

Of course when it wasn't a file that was infected but a CNS chip, MIROKU couldn't do anything about it. Jin plugged himself in long enough to upload the program's error log to his machine for study and scoured it for details. Every time he'd tried to repair one of the infected patches it had crashed due to the conflict over the CNS chip and skipped straight to the deletion module. It wasn't unfeasible that the attempt had temporarily disrupted the hold the infection had on the chip, which would explain why the victims were effectively dead - and in at least one case Jin knew of, unresponsive in the real world - until he'd run MIROKU. Pulling the cowboy from the chocolate cake had had a similar result in freeing him from the infection that was trying to swallow him up, but the effects had remained even after he'd passed it on.

Because the effects were all in his mind? MIROKU's disruption could conceivably have prevented the chip feeding the infection back to the brain. No fooling the brain into thinking it's damaged, no crazy behaviour. Good news for Koki. Not such great news for anyone else who'd managed to free themselves from an infected patch the way Kinomoto Reiko had.

It was a relief when Jin's phone rang. All the speculation was starting to take him round in circles. He answered without looking at the number, getting a pleasant surprise when Kame's scratchy-sweet voice came from the speaker.

"Sorry I was so late," Kame said. "Some of us don't keep regular office hours."

"Are you ever going to tell me what you do for a living?"

Kame laughed warmly. "Something I love. It's not illegal, I promise you. Did you get my message?"

Too late, Jin realised he'd forgotten to send a reply. And remembering the message made him think about the parts of it he hadn't really let himself think about too much, like what they'd been doing in the early hours of the morning and how Jin shouldn't have been there in the first place...and how much he wouldn't mind doing it again, given the opportunity. "Yeah. I...um..." He was torn between asking Kame point-blank if he'd ever shared HAYATO with anyone else, and asking him out for a drink.

"You?" Kame prompted. When Jin didn't immediately leap in with the rest of the sentence, he continued with, "Did I make things awkward last night?"

"Huh? No! It wasn't just you."

"Good. Because if you're having second thoughts, you should say something now before I hand you another key and tell you to change into loose clothing."

Nothing like a blatant proposition to get Jin's attention. He'd never been much good at making the first move, preferring to wait and see how things played out so he knew the other person was genuinely interested in him, so it always helped if he had someone willing to do the chasing. Kame had been chasing him for years, from the sound of things - now he'd caught up, Jin wasn't about to turn him down.

"Don't try to tell me what to do," Jin said sweetly, "but you can always ask."

He could practically hear the click down the phone as Kame got it then; got that Jin was interested, but not about to rush, to change his pace to suit anyone. But what Kame didn't know, Jin had to tell him, and there was a lot of that.

"Listen, Jin-"

"You'd better listen," Jin interrupted. "I think I've found our Tower Records victim."

He explained about Kinomoto Reiko, and then what he'd managed to piece together from MIROKU's logs and his own understanding of what had happened. Kame didn't need the diagrams to follow it.

"It's smart," Kame said. "It hides in the heads of its victims till it can move on. It corrupts, and it can be deleted if it can be accessed, but it can't be removed unless it slips away itself. Who'd write a virus like that?"

"A bunch of anarchists?" Jin had been wrestling with the question for a while now and still didn't have a better answer. "You accessed SailorXWing's CNS chip after he'd been infected - did you notice anything strange?"

"No, but all I did was pull his contact details; I didn't go rooting around. Ah! You think if I access an infected chip, I can clean it from the inside, so no waiting for it to pass on."

Jin liked Kame's little "ah!", like a kid in a science lesson who'd just grasped a complicated concept. "Now all we need is a victim." He'd meant it to be light, but Kame toned down the glee anyway.

"I'd prefer it if we didn't. Nice work, Jin. I can see why your bosses were prepared to offer you a job rather than throw you in jail."

The file he'd found made Jin wonder if perhaps he was already in prison. He had to talk to Kame about that as well...but not on the phone. "I don't know that they didn't."

"Sorry?"

"Can we meet? I want to ask you something."

"I'll save you the trouble. Yes, I'm single - you're not breaking up any marriages, or anything like that."

"I wasn't going to ask that," though the information was always welcome, "and I don't want to do this over the phone."

"Paranoid, or just old-fashioned?"

"If I was old-fashioned, last night wouldn't have happened," Jin pointed out.

"Paranoid, then. Can't say I blame you. Okay, give me a few minutes and log on. I'll come pick you up."

So it would be on-line, then - another visit to Kame's garden, no doubt. It galled Jin that Kame still wouldn't meet him off-line, even though they were now in the same city. It certainly wasn't shyness holding him back, and Jin didn't think it was a lack of trust. He ended the conversation with a half-hearted "see you soon" and hung up.

Jin liked people. Liked talking to them directly, watching their reactions. Liked the company when he went for a meal, or sat up all night talking about stupid things that wouldn't make sense to anyone else. More often than not, friends who met first on-line never met in person, unless by some coincidence they happened to live near enough or travelled enough to try it. It wasn't just the distance. You could be anyone you wanted on-line. If you were a shy, downtrodden, doormat of a soul in the real world, you could be a superstar on the Net and no one would ever know. It was easier to keep a secret on-line. Make the right settings in your avatar and control all your facial expressions and body language. Use an artificial voice so your own wouldn't betray you.

It was harder in real life. Jin had difficulty keeping strong emotions from the surface, whether they were positive or painful. It made him easy to read unless he deliberately projected as blank. He never minded others knowing when he was happy. Kame, whether he realised it or not, was making Jin happy. Jin couldn't know if the reverse was true. Not yet.

But just to be on the safe side, he changed into a robe before plugging himself in.

-----

Kame had been as good as his word, appearing on-line mere seconds after Jin to hand him another turtle key. Too bad they could only be used once or Jin would have a nice collection by now. In the blink of an eye both men were standing next to a giant cedar tree in Kame's garden, where the grass showed no signs of having been flattened by their earlier activities.

"You had something to say to me?" Kame's wardrobe matched his environment this time, all cool blues and greens; Jin didn't think he'd ever met someone who varied his avatar's clothing so often. His own was back to its default of jeans and plain white T-shirt.

There were a number of things Jin wanted to say, none of them remotely related to their mystery infection, but Kame had hope in his eyes and Jin had a feeling he knew what it was for. And if they went down that path, he'd never get round to checking out the memory card that was still sitting in his bag. "Don't take this the wrong way, but...did you ever share my unfinished HAYATO program with anyone?"

Fortunately, Kame seemed less offended than surprised. "Not unless someone stole it from me, and I can almost guarantee that didn't happen. Why? Has someone else got it?"

"Not a finished version, but..." Jin explained what he'd found in Tackey's office, including how he'd obtained it, relieved that Kame didn't react to his admission of breaking and entering. Well, not so much breaking, since the lock hadn't been intact to start with. Nudging and entering, maybe, which couldn't possibly be serious enough to register with whatever drive Kame had to go all vigilante on wrongdoers. Or maybe that only applied on-line.

"Are you sure it wasn't stolen from you?" Kame asked. "Did you keep a copy anywhere outside your chip?"

"Hey, I don't even remember writing it. You think I'm going to remember that?" Jin folded his arms over his chest. "But I doubt it. Everything I did on commission, I only kept on my chip. Safest place to put anything - at least, it was until you came along. I guess I'd planned on using it myself when I'd finished it to ensure it couldn't be used against me, the way you 'hide' yourself. It's the only reason I can think of that I'd have taken on a commission to write a program that would leave me as vulnerable as anyone else."

"That would be the smart thing to do," Kame agreed. "You didn't mention it to Kitagawa when you gave him a copy."

Shame Jin didn't remember that particular episode, because if anyone else had been present at the time... "Kame, do you know who else was in the box at the game? Anyone who might've been in on the conversation?"

Kame's eyes flashed blue for a second; Jin knew he was replaying the scene from memory. "Two people. One was from New York - he kept comparing the opposing team to the Yankees. He was only interested in the sports. I don't think he was very technologically literate; his avatar was the local default.

"The other one I remember for being extremely well-dressed. Shiny, almost. He looked like he should be entertaining in Las Vegas or somewhere like that. Very smooth, very suave."

"You're going starry-eyed."

"I can't help it, he had good taste in hats. His avatar looked like this." Kame pushed himself away from the tree till he was standing straight, snapped his fingers for effect, and morphed into a taller, older man in a slick white suit. Jin knew that avatar from somewhere. Not recent, but he'd seen it before. A dinner show?

No, not a dinner show. A seminar. He'd seen this guy at work. Twice. He'd had a different avatar, the second time.

"You look like you're about to throw up," Kame observed. "I hope you're not wearing that face off-line."

Jin hoped he wasn't too, because it wouldn't do his computer any good. "You can change back now."

"I take it you know the avatar?"

"How familiar are you with Japanese syscops?"

Kame shrugged, now with his own shoulders. "I know who most of the regular Tokyo syscops are, but beyond that, not much."

"That," Jin waved a hand vaguely in Kame's direction, "was Noriyuki Higashiyama - superintendent general of the Tokyo Net Police Department. I'm not surprised you didn't recognise him. He's almost never on-line and he's so far removed from the day-to-day policing of the Net, the only time most of his officers see him is at Christmas. He used to look like a lounge singer but changed his avatar over a year ago to something a little more official after his wife complained."

"A superintendent general? You're sure?"

"Positive. Check out his history on-line if you don't believe me."

"It's not that I don't believe you, Jin, but why would he be watching a baseball game with Johnny Kitagawa? Shouldn't they be desperate to avoid each other's company?" Kame sounded as bewildered as Jin felt.

"I didn't say it made sense, did I?" Jin tried to think it through. "Not unless Higashiyama's batting for both teams."

"His wife might have a few things to say about that."

"Not like that." Jin smacked Kame lightly across the back of the head. "I mean he's playing both sides at once. It happens all the time in the movies. Law enforcement bigwig gets buddy-buddy with big league crimelord, both make small sacrifices to keep the ball in play, everybody gets rich and happy, roll credits."

"I think the movies you're watching are more fun than the movies I'm watching." Kame grinned and grabbed Jin's hand when he went to smack him again. "Okay, say that's the case. Say Higashiyama decided he liked the sound of HAYATO and wanted a copy for himself. Wouldn't it have been better for the Net in general if that program had never seen the light of day? There's no defence against it unless you actually have it yourself."

"The authorities had no idea who I was back then. The real me, I mean. And I never gave anyone my contact details or made them public - just used to use a generic webmail address to do business with. Higashiyama couldn't have got anything but my username if he'd run a query on me. So..."

"So he couldn't have traced you off-line or done anything directly to you on-line," Kame finished for him. "If he wanted the program, he had to either intercept it the way I did, or be given it by Kitagawa. He certainly couldn't have stolen it from your chip."

Jin was used to working alone, without backup. He'd done it in the shadows, and then in the light when he'd become a syscop and no one had trusted him enough - at first - to discuss anything of importance with him, or even provide a sounding board. That had changed somewhat, with Nakamaru and Junno (and to a lesser extent, Meisa) proving themselves more than willing to work with him after a time, but it had never felt like this. Not like a pair of signal lights, where a flare in the dark met with a spark in answer. Where one led, the other followed, and then the world spun round and they switched till there was only one smooth, flowing thought shared between them. Jin wasn't sure he believed in Fate, but he didn't think it was a coincidence Kame had been the one to finish the program he'd started. He didn't think anyone else could have.

Kame still had his hand in a loose grasp, hanging down as if he'd forgotten it, as if it were a perfectly natural state for the two of them. Jin turned that hand slowly so their fingers met and clasped, careful not to make a big deal of this one simple action. Kame said nothing - didn't have to, his smile said it for him.

"Either one would do," Jin said slowly. "Higashiyama gets the unfinished program, sees enough to realise he'll lose the upper hand if Kitagawa gets a finished version, but can't do anything about it till I accidentally break cover and the authorities find out who I am. When they take me in, they remove my chip and the threat along with it. They'd have to know Kitagawa never received a finished version."

"And they couldn't know you didn't have one on your chip," Kame said. "You said they couldn't break the encryption."

"Doesn't look like they had much luck with the draft version either. There were an awful lot of question marks scribbled on that print copy. I suppose they couldn't have asked me to explain it without telling me what it was, and since they preferred me not to remember certain things..."

"Hmm." Kame leaned back against the cedar's trunk, drawing Jin back so the two of them were shoulder to shoulder, almost at right angles. "They effectively neutered you by removing your chip, making sure you'd be ill-equipped to pick up where you left off. All the pages of medical tests were probably to keep tabs on what remained. You've got quite a big blank patch in your memory, haven't you?"

"Some of it's blank, some of it's just fuzzy." Jin spoke down to the floor; softly, a little embarrassed. Knowing it wasn't his fault didn't help much. "A combination of the chip exchange and complications with the surgery, I think. It doesn't surprise me they've got a transcription of a statement I don't even remember giving."

"If you were that disoriented it wouldn't have been too hard to talk you into spilling every secret you ever had." Kame's thumb brushed gentle patterns over the back of Jin's hand. "At least, everything left in your organic memory."

"Which wasn't much." Jin sighed to himself, used to it now. He'd compensated at first by writing everything down, until he'd realised that if he had another apartment fire, he'd lose it all again. Now he made sure to think about the things he really wanted to remember once he logged off, to commit them to his organic memory too rather than rely solely on his chip. Losing lines of code, fine. Passwords, contact details, secrets and rumours and lies, nuggets of data so precious they were like gold dust...all that, he could lose. But not memories. Not friends, not precious experiences. He wasn't going to lose those ever again.

Except the odd drunken night out. He didn't mind too much about forgetting those.

He could've used a drink now. Couple of cocktails and he could distract himself nicely. He definitely deserved it. Then he could've blamed the alcohol for making him want to turn and press himself into Kame, though he thought Kame wouldn't require any excuses. In fact, it was becoming pretty clear Kame didn't need a reason at all because he was beating Jin to it, slipping his hand free as he turned and slid his arms around Jin's back.

Here we go again, Jin thought, but they weren't, not like that. Kame was a few inches shorter than he was - not a problem, but enough that Jin didn't automatically drop his head to Kame's shoulder when he found himself locked not in a fierce kiss but a comforting hug. Kame could've been any one of his friends, then, providing support in the face of unhappy memories - or absence of any kind of memories, come to that.

"You sounded upset," Kame murmured. "I would be too if I had bosses like yours. I've never been so glad to be freelance."

One of Kame's hands remained steady in the small of Jin's back; the other stroked the path of his spine. Jin could happily have stayed like that all evening. His own arms went round Kame's neck, drawing him even nearer. He pressed his nose into Kame's messy, coppery hair and sighed again, this time in contentment.

"Jin," Kame began, "do you-"

He broke off with a twitch. Message received. Jin knew it couldn't be good news when Kame extricated himself with care and backed off.

"There's another code change," Kame said flatly. "On the Akihabara subnet - where our escapee sailor soldier went to play war games. Care to join me?"

"Another infection? Sounds delightful. Let's hope we get there before anyone gets caught by it." Jin tossed his hair back over his shoulder, trying to get it out of his eyes. There was a definite downside to having an avatar with mobile hair. "Maybe this time we'll be able to get something on it!"

-----

They almost walked right past the infected patch. Several servers on the Akihabara subnet were currently set with a local landscape of a stylised view of space, disorienting everyone who wasn't expecting to step from star to star, through vast swathes of black coloured by dust and debris, and into the heart of a virtual supernova. It was only when Jin felt the irresistible pull of a black hole and realised it had less to do with an override of the global gravity settings than the swirl of dust that appeared to be vanishing into it that they found what they were seeking - trouble.

Jin turned his back automatically; Kame peered inside as close as he dared. "Doesn't look like there's anyone trapped in there but you never know," he said. "It's only been here for about twenty minutes, though, and the area's deserted."

"Probably because all the spaceships in the game are fighting over there." Jin pointed to a spot far in the distance, where faint explosions could be seen. "There's no action over here. Yet." It felt like he should be wearing a spacesuit for protection. He'd finally figured out, however, how Kame was protected. The control he had over his own CNS chip, it had to be. Should Jin accept his finished program back so he could do the same thing? His bosses couldn't get it from him but they'd know, from his activity log, that he'd saved a new program to storage. Of course he could then edit his log, once he had the program, but that brought its own share of risks...

"I'm going to try something," Kame declared. "You think anyone will miss this bit of space?"

Jin shrugged. "Doubt it. I can replace it with MIROKU anyway."

"Good. I want to capture some of the infected code and take a look at it. I'm going to run the modules independently and quarantine this patch without attempting to repair it."

From the corner of his eye, Jin caught a flash of white and risked turning to face the source. Kame had a wall around the affected area. Jin couldn't see through it, but as its creator, Kame could.

"That looked like a camera flash. What did you do?"

Kame shot him a grin. "Took its picture. I've been working on a sort of virtual camera, if you like. RYUU, - short for 'Review'. I haven't tested it before; this seemed as good a time as any to see if it worked."

"And did it?"

"Let's clean up and find out, shall we?"

Jin did the honours, as Kame seemed too busy being pleased with himself, and before long an identical black hole - this one, considerably less dangerous - waited for any unwary spaceships to come along. He turned back to find Kame holding an oversized photo album he'd apparently conjured up out of nowhere.

"Time for show and tell?" Jin said.

"It's not my best work, but..." Kame flipped open the album. Each page contained a picture of lines of code - but only a picture, meaning they couldn't be compiled, much less executed. Smart. "I thought it was about time we saw what it was made of. Those lines in green are part of the original landscape. The lines in black were from the original landscape but have been altered in some way, mostly cosmetic as far as I can tell. And the lines in red-"

"That's our infection." Jin turned the page, skimming automatically to the red lines. The further he progressed through the album, the more he got the feeling he was no stranger to the code. He'd never been a virus writer, specialised in obtaining information, not destroying it, but this didn't look like a virus...

"I've seen this before," he said when they reached the final page. "Parts of it. You see that function on the second page? That's one I started writing for HAYATO. It's the first step in accessing a CNS chip, by getting a lock on the chip number. I didn't finish it."

"I did." Kame ran a finger down the picture, stopping towards the end of the page. "But not like that. This runs a query on the number and stores it, which is what I did, but whoever wrote this called another function that broadcasts a signal to that number. I think the idea is to keep the target still while the user begins the process of accessing the chip, which sort of makes sense if you assume the target has to be motionless."

Jin snorted. "Not in my program. Who'd stand still long enough for that? I'd make it a hell of a lot faster." He studied the function Kame had indicated. "It's visual. The swirling patterns, I think. These formulae describe the motions. You don't get caught by it because you hide your CNS number, so it can't get a lock on you. Anyone else gets drawn in."

They continued with a second look through the pages, comparing the red lines with Jin's draft version of HAYATO. By the fourth run through, there could be no doubt about it. Someone other than Kame had tried to finish Jin's program...and created a monster in the process.

"Instead of extracting data, this thing encompasses it and moves on when it's done infecting its host. If there's no other chip in range when it's ready to move, it starts converting inanimate objects instead, waiting around for the next person to approach it. Like my garden picture, or the exteriors of private networks." Jin groaned. "It's like someone took what I started and made a wrong turn every time they hit a blank!"

"Someone who either had no idea what they were doing, or did this deliberately to alter its purpose. I don't know which is worse." Kame dissolved the photo album with a snap. "Assume Higashiyama, Kitagawa or both tried to finish the program themselves. It's not impossible they ended up with this."

"Somebody had to do it," Jin said. "Half-finished programs don't write themselves. The question is, what's it doing out on the Net?"

"I'm going to go with the theory that some idiot accidentally infected himself or someone else and it spread from there." Kame's exasperated tone suggested the majority of the world fell into that category. "All it would take is one person walking around with a corrupt avatar and that thing in their CNS chip."

"Wonderful. By the time we've checked out all the unusual code changes your sweep's picked up, there'll be a dozen more."

"Only if people manage to escape. If they just get sucked in, the infection won't move anywhere."

Kame had a point, but it didn't make either of them feel more optimistic. What were they supposed to do? Go home and wait for the next incident, and hope no more appeared? If the black hole had come from Cruz, where had Mariko gone? They had no way to track her. She'd be all right, now, but if she'd logged back on, there was bound to be another trap out there somewhere. And where had the patch in Tower Records come from? Jin didn't look forward to investigating everyone who'd passed through the virtual store lately.

He sat down on the spot, drawing his knees up to his chest and propping his arms on top as a rest for his chin.

"Okay?" Kame crouched down beside him. "Tired?"

"Discouraged." Jin rolled his head back enough to catch Kame's eye. "And tired. And thirsty."

"I can't do anything about those last two, unless you want me to email your nearest takeaway and order a drink to be delivered to your apartment..." When Jin didn't laugh, Kame added, "That sounded funnier before I said it aloud."

"What can you do about the first one?"

Kame waved his fists like tiny pom-poms. "Go, Jin, go!"

This time, Jin cracked a smile. "Bet you'd look cute in a cheerleader's outfit."

"Only if I was wearing thick tights. My avatar doesn't adequately represent the amount of hair on my legs."

"Do I ever get to find out for myself?"

"Not today." Kame flicked one of Jin's straying curls. "Another time, I promise. Right now we've got bigger problems, like how to find the source."

"Maybe we don't have to." Jin had a glimmer of an idea, hiding just out of sight in his mind. He didn't know if it was plausible but he'd never worried about reaching beyond his limits before. "That would be impossible, right? And we don't know how far it's spread. So maybe we can neutralise it instead."

"I thought we were already doing that."

"No, not like that. If no one can be infected, it can't spread. It wouldn't be so problematic to track down other trouble spots and repair them if we knew there weren't going to be any more."

"But the only way we can ensure no one can be infected is to hide everyone's CNS numbers, and if we somehow managed to do that, no one would be able to log on. I have to make mine accessible temporarily so it can be authenticated; I hide it as soon as I'm on-line. Nobody else has that option."

"Got anything better?" Jin said. "The only other thing I can think of is if we were somehow able to effect repairs inside CNS chips. We've only been able to clean up code external to avatars, and the avatar corruption is chip-based anyway."

"Yeah, but only because MIROKU doesn't access CNS chips." Kame bounced on his heels, agitated. "HAYATO does, though."

Jin saw the light. "I'm a genius." Kame glared at him until he added, "All right, we both are. This...is going to need a lot of work."

They spent ten minutes debating the merits of scavenging chunks of MIROKU to use in HAYATO and vice versa, all of which, Jin was painfully aware, would end up showing as a blank on his activity log. If his bosses ever bothered to requisition it, they'd think he spent his entire weekend idling on the Net, apparently doing nothing whatsoever. There were some people who logged on for the sake of being on-line, preferring it to the real world, but Jin wasn't one of them. Of course, if Kame still refused to meet him off-line, he was willing to reconsider his stance...

"Even if we do manage to cobble something together, we can't use it on everyone at once," Kame said. "HAYATO captures CNS numbers within a certain range, but if we try to do the whole Net simultaneously, we'd overload it. Plus, not everyone is on-line at once. And it wouldn't help if someone gets sucked in by a stray patch after we ran it."

"You're not helping."

"I'm playing devil's advocate. That's helping."

Jin looked to the skies for inspiration, but the Akihabara subnet was space for as far as the eye could see and the asteroid storm heading towards them didn't have much to offer in the way of useful suggestions beyond "move or be flattened". "Let's go somewhere we won't be turned into space dust, shall we?"

He was expecting another invitation; Kame didn't disappoint.

"I think I need to redecorate if I'm going to keep having guests," Kame mused. "The garden's not made for company."

"I like it just fine." A vine slithered down from a nearby tree and snaked around Jin's wrist. He pried it loose with difficulty. "And I think it likes me too."

Kame's grin was impish, to say the least. "My garden, my taste. Of course it likes you."

Jin returned the expression, though not the sentiment for fear of sounding sappy. They didn't have time for amusing diversions. Night was upon them and the plan, if it was to work, would require a great deal of hammering out. When Kame turned a patch of grass into a large, plain board and produced two marker pens, they both settled down along the edges to set to work, propping themselves on their elbows and stretching their legs behind them. If they turned towards each other to speak, they'd be close enough to do so into each other's mouths.

Whatever other skills Kame possessed, art wasn't one of them. He had to label every aspect of his diagrams and flow charts before Jin could follow them, and even then it was easy to mistake them for other things. Now Nakamaru, he was good at drawing, as Jin knew from the homemade Christmas cards he'd received. Ueda too, though everything he drew somehow looked like a cartoon mouse, no matter what it was. But Kame...

"It's not a rosebush!" Kame protested. "It's a graphical representation of all the Japanese subnets. See the little marker that indicates where we are?"

"That?" Jin smiled weakly. "I thought it was a bee?"

"You have no appreciation for art."

"I have plenty of appreciation for art. That's not art, Kame. That's..." Jin was at a loss for words.

"That's what's going to dictate our plan. Part of it, anyway. We'll have to deploy the fix to subnets around the world too." Kame tried to point at a list at the far end of the board, but his marker pen didn't stretch far enough.

Jin ran Accessorise to produce a long, thin cane, ideal for pointing, twirling, or timely innuendoes. "Here, have a Mars stick."

Kame looked dubious but accepted it anyway. "Why is it a Mars stick?"

"Because Mars is the planet of fire, and if you use this just right, you can shoot flames from the end. And...I occasionally need a pimp cane. Mostly I use it as a pointer, though."

"Hmm..." Kame turned it over in his hands and smirked. "Long. Overcompensating for something, are we?"

"Mine isn't this thin," Jin said loftily. "As you should know, given that you were holding it last night."

"I might need a reminder sometime." Kame aimed the stick at his list, tapping each point as he reached it. "The plan is to release a copy of our extended remixed super amazing program on the Net as part of the background, which will cascade out to all the subnets, so that the repair process runs at regular intervals which will hopefully catch everyone who logs on. Any infected person who doesn't log on, we can probably take out of the equation because without our cleaning them up, they're liable to wind up dead, in jail, whatever - they won't reappear on the Net. If they do log on, we'll get them. The run should also remove any existing corrupt patches, so we don't have to find them and do it manually. It'll be like a wave, washing the Net clean."

"Sounds nice." Jin had a sudden urge to go to the beach. Shame it wasn't the weather for it. He and Yamapi usually went in the summer, swimming and surfing and messing around in the water like a pair of kids. He hoped Kame liked the beach.

"All we have to do is hack one of the com towers and make sure no one notices, then hope our program doesn't steal enough resources to draw attention to itself so it can continue to run interrupted."

"Piece of cake."

Kame grimaced. "Don't. The last piece of cake I saw was carnivorous."

"I was being sarcastic."

"My comment stands. I think we've got our work cut out for us."

More work, and Kame had become completely business-like and wasn't flirting with him anymore. Jin thought it would be a relief to get back to the office on Monday. At least he'd get paid for that.