The Absence Equation - Chapter 11
Title: The Absence Equation - Chapter 11
Group/Pairings: NewS. Pairings: Koyama/Shige, Massu/Yamapi
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, cursing, sexual implications.
Words: 2,500
Summary: First try: "The fate of the world as they know it rests in the hands of one Kato Shigeaki. Oh shit." Possibly more coherent try (though it sounds like a lame old-school sci fi jacket blurb): The A.I. guarding cyberspace is forced to choose between eternal imprisonment and self-destruction. With the fate of the world resting in their hands, they must race against time to give her a third option before it's too late.
Prologue - Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Epilogue
---
Chapter 11 - 1011
Something was up. Yamashita could feel it, see it in their eyes. Something was going to happen and much sooner than later. He snuck off on his break to call his aunt.
“Has there been any trouble?” he asked her after they’d exchanged greetings.
“Well, there have been a few people stopping by or calling with questions. But I said what you told me to.”
“That’s good. Look, stay by the phone. I’m going to call you back in a few minutes.” He disconnected the call and leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the shit was about to hit the fan. He’d done a lot with the non-mods - sold plenty of information he gleaned from the system. He hated to leave a set-up when it was so lucrative and, most of all, safe. But since he was getting into increasingly hot water, the safe aspect was questionable. He might as well go out with a bang. He called his aunt again.
“How do you feel about moving back to Japan?” he asked. They’d talked about it a couple years ago and she had said then that she was really missing Japan, especially since her husband had recently passed on. But she was loathe to leave the place with all its memories.
“Is it bad?” she asked quietly.
He hummed. “Not yet. But it might get that way. I don’t want to make you move, but I’m worried they’ll come after you. They might not but…”
She was silent and he felt a flash of guilt. It wasn’t her fault he did the kind of work he did. He could have been a respectable coder, done the 9 to 5 thing like normal people. But he hadn’t wanted that. And now here she was stuck in the middle.
“I’m ready,” she finally said.
“Ready like you can fly out in a few hours? I’ll send some guys over to pack up your house for you and have it shipped, but I want you out of the house as soon as possible.” Silence. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Tomohisa. I should have gone home before this. Just. Be careful?”
“I will. I promise.” He would be, he just didn’t know how useful it would be.
Now that he’d decided on a course of action he was feeling peaceful. He made a few phone calls to set up his aunt’s flight and to get her house in order. Then he made his way back in to work and sat himself down at his desk, calling up his files and beginning a rather sophisticated hack he’d been working on for years in preparation for the time he decided to leave the non-mods. Tegoshi had helped him out in a few of the trickier areas. He’d lied when he had said he was just a coder, but something like this had required a little extra finesse. In theory it would crack open the mainframe and drain all the major accounts of the non-mods, all conveniently, for him, routed through the company he worked for, into several different swiss accounts and charities. They would still have funding - the non-mods didn’t like keeping their money tied up in cybermarkets anyway - but rerouting it without their main system would cause them to be out of the game long enough for Yamashita to disappear and create a new life. It would also route all of the data through several channels and into a place where he and Masuda could access it later. Lastly, it would completely wreck their systems, throwing them into disarray that would last days at best and weeks at worst.
He left the program running, under the guise of a regular program and went into another section of the building, pulling out a blank netbook and hooking it manually into the system and started the second section of the program. He left it sitting under a desk and went to the administrator’s office. This was the key step. Since the administrator had direct access to the system, he could bypass a lot of the security that would normally stop him and would make it possible for him to just leave the program running without his needing to be there.
“Can I come in a moment?” he asked, poking his head in.
“Sure,” the man replied.
Yamashita entered and shut the door behind him. He slipped a thin derm onto the administrator’s palm as they shook hands and it was only a matter of moments before the man completely passed out. He only had five minutes but he used them wisely, making use of the man’s access, and his fingerprints, to start the last part of his program and leave it to run, locking the computer so they wouldn’t be able to stop the program in time.
He walked purposefully out of the office, keeping a nonchalant look. “I left something in my car,” he told the first set of guards and waved him through, and that was a godsend because he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to get through that checkpoint if they’d been alerted. By the second set, though, the alarm had been raised and the men came at him hard and fast.
He ducked the first man’s grasp, dropping into a roll and coming up right into a second man’s punch. “Fuck,” he yelled, holding his hand to his cheek and dropping into a crouch and kicking the man’s legs out from under him. The first man grabbed him by his collar and jerked him back, cracking him in the jaw with a baton and nearly strangling him when Yamashita fell, but he just kept rolling back as he fell and the man lost his grip and Yamashita came backward up onto his hands and kicked the man in the face, falling to his side and scrambling back to his feet. He ran. The doors would be locked and he was not looking forward to what he was about to do. He yanked off his jacket as he ran, wrapping it around his head and jumping through the glass.
He was afraid it wouldn’t break, that his weight was too slight, but it did give at the last second, shards splintering against his body and embedding themselves in his flesh as he fell to the cement outside the building. He crawled to his feet and yanked the jacket off his head, letting the adrenaline help him ignore the pain and get to his car. The security at the front gate was barred and he flinched as he clipped a man going full-speed and broke through the bar blocking the gate, hearing the crunching of his headlights and front grill against the metal. There were shots being fired and his back window shattered but he kept driving. For once he was glad of the remoteness of his workplace as he drove along the nearly deserted roads toward California.
He kept to back roads when he could, which was not often, pulling off and stealing a new car every few hours. His left arm was littered with derms for pain and anti-inflammation and the blood on his right arm had dried to dark brown tracks. Twelve hours and he was calling Masuda and telling him to come meet him at the corner of Morningside Street and South Sunnyslope Ave in East Pasadena in an hour.
When Masuda pulled up to the corner in the dark, his face barely visible in the street light, Yamashita stumbled out of the car and toward him, climbing into the passenger seat silently and slumping over.
Masuda looked at him with wide eyes. “Tomo! What happened?” he asked, reaching out to touch his shoulder.
Yamashita shook his head, arms trembling. “I need something to eat. Something to drink. Shit.”
“All right,” Masuda said doubtfully and pulled away from the corner. He stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of water and a soda, and various food items. Back in the car he opened them all for Yamashita and set them in his lap and the cup holders and headed toward his hotel in silence, trying not to watch the way Yamashita weakly held himself.
When they arrived at the hotel he handed Yamashita a jacket and pair of big sunglasses to wear as they made their way to his room, Masuda supporting him. He spent a few minutes silently picking glass shards out of Yamashita’s arm and climbed into the shower with him, gently cleaning him up. When Masuda tried to put him to bed, though, Yamashita made him get his laptop.
“I need to show you this and then I’ll sleep. I promise,” he said groggily. He logged into the net and accessed the storage area he’d set up two years ago, where the information had been delivered and then set it aside. “There. Something you want will be in there.” And he lay back, closing his eyes.
Masuda watched him until he fell asleep and then checked the computer. He couldn’t help his jaw from dropping at what he saw. It couldn’t be. He looked over at Yamashita’s sleeping face, bruises bright purple and green, and reached over to gently touch his cheek. He knew that what Yamashita had done had been largely for himself, getting out of a hot situation, but he felt guilty for causing the situation in the first place. And now here he was bruised and bloodied and looking deceptively young and fragile. The least he could do was make it all worth it.
What Massu had found out on his own was that Manuel Gonzalez of Digitech was on a leave of absence. Manuel was slated to perform the maintenance of Stat Com’s system core and it would be his first job in a month. What was fascinating was that his family also seemed to be on a leave of absence. Wasn’t that interesting… Massu was willing to bet that Manuel was missing a couple important body parts. Another hunch, he knew, but, again, probably right. Whether or not those parts had been replaced while he was a hostage was another question. He was still alive, that was certain. The non-mods weren’t too keen on murder. Kidnapping and mutilation was ok though. But Yamashita’s information made clear the connections he had been unsure of. There had been a large deposit made into Manuel Gonzalez’s bank account which had been withdrawn by Gonzalez just before they disappeared. So he’d been partially right. He felt a little better knowing that the non-mods had at least paid Gonzalez for his contributions.
He called Tegoshi, telling him where to access the information, some of which would make Tegoshi’s life that much easier when it came to hacking Stat Com’s security systems, and then made a few more calls. He’d need some bodies of his own.
~~~
No one wanted to be up at 5 a.m. and Shige was grumbling under his breath as Koyama shook him awake.
“Come on, Shige. Massu’s got some information for us,” Tegoshi told him from his bed, laptop open across his knees, and Shige rolled out of his bed and into Tegoshi’s, propping himself against the headboard but scrunching down to drop his head on Tegoshi’s shoulder as he looked at the screen.
Tegoshi turned his head to look at Shige with an amused face. “You’re pathetic.”
“Shut up.”
But Shige was soon sitting upright, staring incredulously at the screen. “What the… where?”
“Yamashita cracked the system.”
“…I thought he said he wasn’t a hacker.”
“He’s not, really. He can do it, but he’s not… innovative. He’s quite patient and methodical though. He’d been working on the virus for years, if it’s what I’m thinking of. I’d been helping him with bits and pieces of some magnum opus he was working on, but I’d never have imagined this was what he planned on doing with it.”
They checked through the data silently, Koyama sleeping peacefully at the foot of the bed, spine pressing against the soles of Shige’s outstretched feet. There was a lot of interesting information but besides pertinent information on Stat Com most of it was nothing they could use. Until Tegoshi finally found the file on the A.I. When they had hacked into the system, they had only downloaded a very small portion of the information surrounding the A.I., and, in fact, this was an obscure file tucked far away from the information they had originally accessed. This told the story of George Galwell and the A.I. and Tegoshi realized he’d guessed right. The A.I. had spoken to him in the only way she could, a composite of sources all throughout cyberspace, a few small bursts that would have been hidden by the activities going on at the time.
“A suicidal A.I.?” Shige asked skeptically. “I don’t get it.”
Tegoshi spoke distractedly, “The psychology doesn’t matter. The point is that the A.I. will accept the virus without a fight. That makes it even harder for us.”
Shige stared at the screen in silence. “We’re just going to have to get there in time.”
Tegoshi nodded grimly.
~~~
Ryo could feel the nervous energy despite being the only person in the room. Normally his teasing of the guard brought disapproving frowns from the stuffy men, but today they were so tightly strung he probably could have broken it with a laugh. He didn’t feel like laughing, though.
He kicked his feet against the floor as he sat in front of the vidphone and recited his part to Jansen.
“I am Manuel Gonzalez - do you really think they’ll confuse Asian with Mexican, though? Really?” Jansen gave him a dirty look and he continued with a sigh. “I work with Digitech and I’m at Stat Com for the annual maintenance, blah blah blah. I get in, do my business and get out a.s.a.p., right?”
“I’m not sure you realize the gravity of the situation, Mr. Nishikido.”
Ryo ‘s lip twitched. “I’m aware of the gravity, Mr. Jansen. It’s my ass on the line, remember? I know my job.”
“Fine. Stay in the room until it’s time. The deadline is too close for you to be out.”
Ryo scowled but nodded and the screen went blank. He flopped back on the bed for a moment before rolling off and knocking on the door. The current guard opened the door and looked in with raised eyebrows.
“If I have to stay in all night, I don’t suppose you can send the entertainment to me,” he said with an eyebrow waggle to convey his meaning. These guys didn’t get subtlety, he knew from experience.
He ended up with a paper copy of the hotel’s tv guide. He sighed and picked a pay-per-view porn. Might as well put it on the tab and hope he didn’t get whacked tomorrow night or the last loving he’d have would be his own. And what a hell of a way to go that was.
Chapter 12
Group/Pairings: NewS. Pairings: Koyama/Shige, Massu/Yamapi
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, cursing, sexual implications.
Words: 2,500
Summary: First try: "The fate of the world as they know it rests in the hands of one Kato Shigeaki. Oh shit." Possibly more coherent try (though it sounds like a lame old-school sci fi jacket blurb): The A.I. guarding cyberspace is forced to choose between eternal imprisonment and self-destruction. With the fate of the world resting in their hands, they must race against time to give her a third option before it's too late.
Prologue - Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Epilogue
---
Chapter 11 - 1011
Something was up. Yamashita could feel it, see it in their eyes. Something was going to happen and much sooner than later. He snuck off on his break to call his aunt.
“Has there been any trouble?” he asked her after they’d exchanged greetings.
“Well, there have been a few people stopping by or calling with questions. But I said what you told me to.”
“That’s good. Look, stay by the phone. I’m going to call you back in a few minutes.” He disconnected the call and leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the shit was about to hit the fan. He’d done a lot with the non-mods - sold plenty of information he gleaned from the system. He hated to leave a set-up when it was so lucrative and, most of all, safe. But since he was getting into increasingly hot water, the safe aspect was questionable. He might as well go out with a bang. He called his aunt again.
“How do you feel about moving back to Japan?” he asked. They’d talked about it a couple years ago and she had said then that she was really missing Japan, especially since her husband had recently passed on. But she was loathe to leave the place with all its memories.
“Is it bad?” she asked quietly.
He hummed. “Not yet. But it might get that way. I don’t want to make you move, but I’m worried they’ll come after you. They might not but…”
She was silent and he felt a flash of guilt. It wasn’t her fault he did the kind of work he did. He could have been a respectable coder, done the 9 to 5 thing like normal people. But he hadn’t wanted that. And now here she was stuck in the middle.
“I’m ready,” she finally said.
“Ready like you can fly out in a few hours? I’ll send some guys over to pack up your house for you and have it shipped, but I want you out of the house as soon as possible.” Silence. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Tomohisa. I should have gone home before this. Just. Be careful?”
“I will. I promise.” He would be, he just didn’t know how useful it would be.
Now that he’d decided on a course of action he was feeling peaceful. He made a few phone calls to set up his aunt’s flight and to get her house in order. Then he made his way back in to work and sat himself down at his desk, calling up his files and beginning a rather sophisticated hack he’d been working on for years in preparation for the time he decided to leave the non-mods. Tegoshi had helped him out in a few of the trickier areas. He’d lied when he had said he was just a coder, but something like this had required a little extra finesse. In theory it would crack open the mainframe and drain all the major accounts of the non-mods, all conveniently, for him, routed through the company he worked for, into several different swiss accounts and charities. They would still have funding - the non-mods didn’t like keeping their money tied up in cybermarkets anyway - but rerouting it without their main system would cause them to be out of the game long enough for Yamashita to disappear and create a new life. It would also route all of the data through several channels and into a place where he and Masuda could access it later. Lastly, it would completely wreck their systems, throwing them into disarray that would last days at best and weeks at worst.
He left the program running, under the guise of a regular program and went into another section of the building, pulling out a blank netbook and hooking it manually into the system and started the second section of the program. He left it sitting under a desk and went to the administrator’s office. This was the key step. Since the administrator had direct access to the system, he could bypass a lot of the security that would normally stop him and would make it possible for him to just leave the program running without his needing to be there.
“Can I come in a moment?” he asked, poking his head in.
“Sure,” the man replied.
Yamashita entered and shut the door behind him. He slipped a thin derm onto the administrator’s palm as they shook hands and it was only a matter of moments before the man completely passed out. He only had five minutes but he used them wisely, making use of the man’s access, and his fingerprints, to start the last part of his program and leave it to run, locking the computer so they wouldn’t be able to stop the program in time.
He walked purposefully out of the office, keeping a nonchalant look. “I left something in my car,” he told the first set of guards and waved him through, and that was a godsend because he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to get through that checkpoint if they’d been alerted. By the second set, though, the alarm had been raised and the men came at him hard and fast.
He ducked the first man’s grasp, dropping into a roll and coming up right into a second man’s punch. “Fuck,” he yelled, holding his hand to his cheek and dropping into a crouch and kicking the man’s legs out from under him. The first man grabbed him by his collar and jerked him back, cracking him in the jaw with a baton and nearly strangling him when Yamashita fell, but he just kept rolling back as he fell and the man lost his grip and Yamashita came backward up onto his hands and kicked the man in the face, falling to his side and scrambling back to his feet. He ran. The doors would be locked and he was not looking forward to what he was about to do. He yanked off his jacket as he ran, wrapping it around his head and jumping through the glass.
He was afraid it wouldn’t break, that his weight was too slight, but it did give at the last second, shards splintering against his body and embedding themselves in his flesh as he fell to the cement outside the building. He crawled to his feet and yanked the jacket off his head, letting the adrenaline help him ignore the pain and get to his car. The security at the front gate was barred and he flinched as he clipped a man going full-speed and broke through the bar blocking the gate, hearing the crunching of his headlights and front grill against the metal. There were shots being fired and his back window shattered but he kept driving. For once he was glad of the remoteness of his workplace as he drove along the nearly deserted roads toward California.
He kept to back roads when he could, which was not often, pulling off and stealing a new car every few hours. His left arm was littered with derms for pain and anti-inflammation and the blood on his right arm had dried to dark brown tracks. Twelve hours and he was calling Masuda and telling him to come meet him at the corner of Morningside Street and South Sunnyslope Ave in East Pasadena in an hour.
When Masuda pulled up to the corner in the dark, his face barely visible in the street light, Yamashita stumbled out of the car and toward him, climbing into the passenger seat silently and slumping over.
Masuda looked at him with wide eyes. “Tomo! What happened?” he asked, reaching out to touch his shoulder.
Yamashita shook his head, arms trembling. “I need something to eat. Something to drink. Shit.”
“All right,” Masuda said doubtfully and pulled away from the corner. He stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of water and a soda, and various food items. Back in the car he opened them all for Yamashita and set them in his lap and the cup holders and headed toward his hotel in silence, trying not to watch the way Yamashita weakly held himself.
When they arrived at the hotel he handed Yamashita a jacket and pair of big sunglasses to wear as they made their way to his room, Masuda supporting him. He spent a few minutes silently picking glass shards out of Yamashita’s arm and climbed into the shower with him, gently cleaning him up. When Masuda tried to put him to bed, though, Yamashita made him get his laptop.
“I need to show you this and then I’ll sleep. I promise,” he said groggily. He logged into the net and accessed the storage area he’d set up two years ago, where the information had been delivered and then set it aside. “There. Something you want will be in there.” And he lay back, closing his eyes.
Masuda watched him until he fell asleep and then checked the computer. He couldn’t help his jaw from dropping at what he saw. It couldn’t be. He looked over at Yamashita’s sleeping face, bruises bright purple and green, and reached over to gently touch his cheek. He knew that what Yamashita had done had been largely for himself, getting out of a hot situation, but he felt guilty for causing the situation in the first place. And now here he was bruised and bloodied and looking deceptively young and fragile. The least he could do was make it all worth it.
What Massu had found out on his own was that Manuel Gonzalez of Digitech was on a leave of absence. Manuel was slated to perform the maintenance of Stat Com’s system core and it would be his first job in a month. What was fascinating was that his family also seemed to be on a leave of absence. Wasn’t that interesting… Massu was willing to bet that Manuel was missing a couple important body parts. Another hunch, he knew, but, again, probably right. Whether or not those parts had been replaced while he was a hostage was another question. He was still alive, that was certain. The non-mods weren’t too keen on murder. Kidnapping and mutilation was ok though. But Yamashita’s information made clear the connections he had been unsure of. There had been a large deposit made into Manuel Gonzalez’s bank account which had been withdrawn by Gonzalez just before they disappeared. So he’d been partially right. He felt a little better knowing that the non-mods had at least paid Gonzalez for his contributions.
He called Tegoshi, telling him where to access the information, some of which would make Tegoshi’s life that much easier when it came to hacking Stat Com’s security systems, and then made a few more calls. He’d need some bodies of his own.
~~~
No one wanted to be up at 5 a.m. and Shige was grumbling under his breath as Koyama shook him awake.
“Come on, Shige. Massu’s got some information for us,” Tegoshi told him from his bed, laptop open across his knees, and Shige rolled out of his bed and into Tegoshi’s, propping himself against the headboard but scrunching down to drop his head on Tegoshi’s shoulder as he looked at the screen.
Tegoshi turned his head to look at Shige with an amused face. “You’re pathetic.”
“Shut up.”
But Shige was soon sitting upright, staring incredulously at the screen. “What the… where?”
“Yamashita cracked the system.”
“…I thought he said he wasn’t a hacker.”
“He’s not, really. He can do it, but he’s not… innovative. He’s quite patient and methodical though. He’d been working on the virus for years, if it’s what I’m thinking of. I’d been helping him with bits and pieces of some magnum opus he was working on, but I’d never have imagined this was what he planned on doing with it.”
They checked through the data silently, Koyama sleeping peacefully at the foot of the bed, spine pressing against the soles of Shige’s outstretched feet. There was a lot of interesting information but besides pertinent information on Stat Com most of it was nothing they could use. Until Tegoshi finally found the file on the A.I. When they had hacked into the system, they had only downloaded a very small portion of the information surrounding the A.I., and, in fact, this was an obscure file tucked far away from the information they had originally accessed. This told the story of George Galwell and the A.I. and Tegoshi realized he’d guessed right. The A.I. had spoken to him in the only way she could, a composite of sources all throughout cyberspace, a few small bursts that would have been hidden by the activities going on at the time.
“A suicidal A.I.?” Shige asked skeptically. “I don’t get it.”
Tegoshi spoke distractedly, “The psychology doesn’t matter. The point is that the A.I. will accept the virus without a fight. That makes it even harder for us.”
Shige stared at the screen in silence. “We’re just going to have to get there in time.”
Tegoshi nodded grimly.
~~~
Ryo could feel the nervous energy despite being the only person in the room. Normally his teasing of the guard brought disapproving frowns from the stuffy men, but today they were so tightly strung he probably could have broken it with a laugh. He didn’t feel like laughing, though.
He kicked his feet against the floor as he sat in front of the vidphone and recited his part to Jansen.
“I am Manuel Gonzalez - do you really think they’ll confuse Asian with Mexican, though? Really?” Jansen gave him a dirty look and he continued with a sigh. “I work with Digitech and I’m at Stat Com for the annual maintenance, blah blah blah. I get in, do my business and get out a.s.a.p., right?”
“I’m not sure you realize the gravity of the situation, Mr. Nishikido.”
Ryo ‘s lip twitched. “I’m aware of the gravity, Mr. Jansen. It’s my ass on the line, remember? I know my job.”
“Fine. Stay in the room until it’s time. The deadline is too close for you to be out.”
Ryo scowled but nodded and the screen went blank. He flopped back on the bed for a moment before rolling off and knocking on the door. The current guard opened the door and looked in with raised eyebrows.
“If I have to stay in all night, I don’t suppose you can send the entertainment to me,” he said with an eyebrow waggle to convey his meaning. These guys didn’t get subtlety, he knew from experience.
He ended up with a paper copy of the hotel’s tv guide. He sighed and picked a pay-per-view porn. Might as well put it on the tab and hope he didn’t get whacked tomorrow night or the last loving he’d have would be his own. And what a hell of a way to go that was.
Chapter 12