[JE] Netting a Turtle is a Virtual Affair 1/6
Title: Netting a Turtle is a Virtual Affair 1/6
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.
A/N: lilmatchgirl007 and sollasollew11 ganged up on me and talked me into participating in NaNoWriMo, and this is the result. Thank you to solo____ for saving the day in a Junno-esque fashion by giving me an explanation for HAYATO. Crossposted to ficwars and notaverse. Full text file is here.
Chapter 1
Jin hated working overtime. Regular syscop pay was just barely good enough that he didn't have to consider looking for work elsewhere - not that anywhere else would take him, even if he could leave. Men like Jin Akanishi only got hired in the shadows. If he wasn't a syscop he'd be nothing by now, the way he was when they signed him up, without even a paltry hundred yen and unable to afford even the minimum fee to get on the Net.
Now he was one of the enforcers he'd once despised - one of the snoops, one of the spies - with a proper bank account of legal cash and a place to call home. That was worth a lot, as Jin saw it, which was why even though he hated the overtime, he couldn't turn it down.
Besides, it wasn't like he'd had anything better to do tonight.
He leaned forward, crossed through a square on the calendar pinned to the low board separating his cubicle from Junno's. The puppies on the calendar looked happy. They had chew toys, and doggy treats, and they had each other. What did Jin have? Another cancelled date and numb legs from sitting in the same position for so long.
Junno stuck his head over the edge of the green felt divider. He'd already unplugged himself, preparing to leave for the day. Even off the Net his smile was FFFFFF-bright. Sometimes Jin felt like taking a swing at it, just to see if there was anything in the world that could actually ruin Junnosuke Taguchi's mood.
But not tonight. Jin's love life might be on the rocks but Junno's was going sickeningly well, so much so that when Junno had taken a Hawaiian vacation with his girlfriend, word round the office was they'd eloped. He'd come back whistling and chirpy as ever, though his ring finger was still bare. Jin wondered if he would try again tonight.
"Thanks again for covering for me," Junno said. "Sorry about the short notice but Rena didn't know if she was going to get back today or not. You didn't have any plans, right?"
He wasn't rubbing it in, Jin knew. Junno's voice was practically begging him to say no, he didn't have plans, why would he ever have plans on a Friday night, especially with someone who'd dumped him only that morning. By the time he'd cracked open his eyes, Maki had been up and dressed and drinking the last of his precious coffee stash. He hadn't even been capable of stringing together a morning greeting when she'd said goodbye, leaving his cell phone on the pillow as she strode out the door on her designer heels. She'd deleted her contact details. Jin had had to walk twenty paces to the nearest Starbucks and replenish his caffeine supply before he'd gotten the message.
"No plans," Jin said thickly. Junno couldn't see the black mark across today's calendar square. "Nothing more exciting than shopping for groceries. Go. Have fun. Remember you owe me one next time I need a favour."
"I definitely won't forget."
Junno pulled on a charcoal jacket, pocketed his cell phone, grabbed both his own and Jin's empty drinks cups to dispose of on the way out and left the office with a farewell smile that both apologised for the trouble and hinted at how much he was looking forward to the night ahead. Nakamaru had already gone, claiming he had dinner plans with a group of gourmet friends. That, Jin knew, was code for saying he and his roommate Masuda had found a new restaurant to try, and possibly even some young ladies to try it with, though that part was by no means guaranteed. The night shift wouldn't get in for another two hours. Meisa, their remaining colleague on the day shift, was supposed to be working 10-8 with Junno, but she'd left even before Nakamaru, citing female issues, and there wasn't a man in the office who dared to argue with her.
As a consequence of Junno skipping out early, Jin's 8-6 shift had become 8-8 and their tiny office had gone from relative tranquillity to eerie silence. Even the boss had been out all day; Jin suspected he was over at the main branch in Akasaka, where his partner worked, heading up the overall on-line security for Minato-ku. Tackey didn't need to sit in his tiny satellite office in Roppongi just to keep an eye on Jin. Not anymore. If he didn't log on, they'd know soon enough.
It worried him a little, being the only one in the office. Not the only one in the building, of course. There was a café upstairs that was open all night and an expensive shoe shop downstairs that wouldn't close for another two hours yet. But the windows opposite Jin's cubicle had their shades drawn to keep the nightly gloom away a while longer and the busy streets outside might as well have been a million miles away. No one else in the office meant no one to pull Jin out if something went wrong - if he couldn't log out under his own power and the panic button failed him. Anyone checking his status would know he was logged on, but no one would be able to do a thing about it.
Jin didn't mind that part. He was used to working without a safety net. What he didn't like was leaving himself vulnerable, on display for anyone who just happened to walk in. The office was locked, of course, to anyone whose thumbprint wasn't on the register, but any electronic lock could be picked, given sufficient time and skill, and if Jin was all but dead to the off-line world an intruder would have all the time he wanted.
Damnit. He had to stop giving himself the creeps like that. He couldn't afford to get jumpy.
Teabreak over. The pins and needles in his legs had receded sufficiently to allow him to make it to the bathroom without lurching too badly, so Jin made sure he could log back on for the rest of the shift without receiving any urgent messages from his bladder. It was all very well working in a virtual world, but in the real world, the body's needs took precedence.
One of those needs being comfort. Since Nakamaru wouldn't be back until tomorrow, Jin swiped his cushion and added it to his own chair. Much better. Made it almost bearable. Jin pulled great handfuls of messy brown hair away from the back of his neck with one hand and peeled back the protective layer of sim-skin with the other to reveal the connecting port of the CNS interface. He'd been plugging himself directly into the Net since he was old enough to know not to stick the cable in his mouth; he didn't need to see - he could do this blind. He tugged the cable free from the desk and slid it smoothly into the slot, careful not to force it.
One, two, three...
There was that thrumming, a low-grade vibration beginning in his neck and expanding to fill his entire body. Jin knew he had sixty seconds to make himself comfortable, a single minute before his body would fall back against the chair, lolling at whatever unflattering angle he'd left it in. He'd fallen off, once, from leaning too far forwards when the connection was made. He only knew about it because Meisa had pulled him off the Net to tell him he was lying on the floor - after she'd taken pictures, of course.
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine...
Every time Jin logged on to the Net, it felt like birth and death all at once. He left his heartbeat behind, the steady rhythm of the flesh fading till it belonged to someone else, to the tired body of the young man reclining behind the desk. That was Jin, but it wasn't all of him. Not by a long shot. The login scripts and the chip in Jin's CNS interface took care of the authentication in less than a second. With an explosion of sensory data and a swirl of pixels, Jin "woke up" on the Net, all fatigue forgotten.
He'd changed his avatar since going straight. No longer the tiny shrimp driving a sleek black Mercedes, Jin now styled himself simply as he was - no fuss, no frills. Some syscops liked to beef themselves up, make their avatars represent them on the Net as they wanted others to think they were, all big and tough and merciless, with bulging muscles and wicked scars, exaggerated like manga characters for maximum intimidation. Jin didn't know anyone who fit that description in real life, even the cosplayers he sometimes saw in Akihabara.
Personally, he found it easier to talk to people if they weren't trying to run away from him. It helped, he thought, that he wasn't bad-looking. His avatar depicted a young Japanese man in his late twenties, with wavy brown hair that curled around his neck and a small mole beside his right eye. It was the work of seconds to change clothes from the extensive selection in his electronic wardrobe; today, Jin stuck with his default of faded blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt and black boots to match his body's actual attire. It didn't really matter. He could look like anyone or anything he wanted on the Net - even be a single, solitary pixel, if his heart so desired, though he'd effectively be almost invisible to the naked eye and have a hard time moving around properly.
Besides, lone pixels didn't have hands. When plugged into a suitable source, Jin's CNS interface granted him full immersion: all five senses. If his avatar touched anything on the Net, the sensation would feed back through the cable and into his brain, propagating itself via his central nervous system to give his abandoned fingertips that same feeling. Anything he saw on the Net fed back to his eyes, anything he heard fed back to his ears - it was quite possible to go blind or deaf from Net exposure, given sufficient cause. Taste didn't have quite so much relevance for a syscop, though those in the catering profession were happy to allow the public to taste the products before buying, on the understanding that no actual food was consumed and the taste itself was artificially generated.
As for the sense of smell... Whenever Jin logged on, the smell was always the first thing to hit him. Before he heard the constant background buzz created by millions of servers, or saw the hard, flat colour of the virtual realm, he smelled the clean, cool scent of a world untouched by pollution, fresh like grass after rain. He inhaled a great lungful of it; back in the real Tokyo, his body drew in a breath of recycled air, tainted by old smoke and stale coffee. Here, it didn't matter that Jin smoked too much, or needed a haircut, or hadn't remembered to shave today after Maki had dumped him. Here, he could be perfect, if that was what he wanted.
He didn't. It would've been a lie to make himself perfect on the outside, when he knew he wasn't on the inside.
Jin opened his eyes on the virtual world, the one that was both work and home to him. The Net was an old friend now, always shifting, full of secrets. Today the skies in the Roppongi subnet were a soft, velvety purple but they could change in a heartbeat to fresh, lemony yellow or a dark, stormy black, depending on the mood of the system administrators. The servers hosting the public domain were housed somewhere in a converted nightclub in Roppongi 3-chome, Jin knew, and the maintainers liked to keep things interesting.
Right now the virtual representation of Roppongi was only six inches high and very nearly transparent. Jin walked through the station, trying not to look down in case he saw miniature people being crushed underneath his feet. Every step was like walking on a particularly springy mattress. There was no such thing as weight on the Net, because nothing had any mass, and the only reason avatars weren't flying all over the place was that the Net had a global gravity setting and overriding it was more trouble than it was worth unless you had your own private network. Not that this stopped people giving themselves bird avatars - one enterprising soul even had a winged dragon - but they didn't get very far trying to escape into the skies.
Just because Jin's jurisdiction only extended as far as the Roppongi subnet didn't mean he only had to deal with local users. That was the beauty of the Net: anyone could go anywhere they pleased, provided it was a public area. Translation software eliminated all language barriers on-line, meant Jin could converse as easily with French tourists who'd come to tour virtual Tokyo as he could with the random Americans who stopped him in the streets on his way home from work and asked him if he knew where the Mori Tower was. He could see it now - all six inches of it.
The tourists probably wouldn't like it that way, but the Mori Tower was usually home to the local BBS, where users posted on a variety of topics. Questions, discussions, job offers, searches, the occasional request for a hitman... Jin had been logged on till he'd taken that teabreak, knew he didn't have any email requiring his immediate attention, and figured that being the only public syscop in the area right now, it was more important for him to be on the Net than working off-line. Companies often had their own private syscops, of course, policing their systems and handling their affairs away from the public eye, but public syscops served the same purpose as police officers off-line, only they travelled by packet rather than by car or bicycle, and had no need for a physical presence at all.
Without anything specific to be looking into, Jin went to check the BBS for anything seeming suspicious. Areas of corrupt data, for instance, which needed to be brought to the attention of the authorities and blocked off to prevent curious users from poking their noses in - quarantined and repaired, if Jin could manage it. Reports of unusually high bandwidth usage, or of avatars lurking around company subnets without good reason. If he didn't find anything of interest he planned to patrol, making sure his presence was noted by every user in the area, just in case any of them were thinking about making mischief. That ought to kill time until the night shift came in and Jin could finally go home and try to figure out what he'd done this time to screw up his love life beyond all hope of repair.
The Mori Tower, being six inches rather than its usual seven hundred and eighty-one feet, didn't provide much of a backdrop for the BBS. The board stood alone, suspended above the toy-size tower, in shades of pale blue and green that were hard to distinguish at first glance. Dozens of other avatars stood before it, each accessing separately, skimming through the topics on an individual basis. There were fairies and monsters, elves with golden hair and warriors in full armour. Big-eyed catgirls and dogboys with floppy ears. Fluffy bunnies and sharp, angular robots. There were even some plain old humans.
They parted for Jin. Not because he was pretty, or because he was especially tall or dangerous in appearance, but because his avatar shone silver around the edges, marking him out as a syscop. The aura couldn't be counterfeited and there wasn't a user on the Net who didn't know what it meant.
Power.
Jin nodded politely to those who made way for him, supplied his credentials to the board's administrator, and blinked on reflex when the board shifted in his view, opening up by topic, spreading out in a circle around him so that he could turn and read as he chose. He still found it amazing that every single user on the boards was seeing the same thing, yet they all saw it differently, and those not registered with the board saw something else entirely.
He filtered out the spam, noting possible cases to follow up, and ignored the obvious trolls with nothing better to do with their time. There had to be bigger fish to fry, surely? Even excessive bandwidth consumption would've been something. But the only post to catch Jin's eye was one where a kid confessed to trying to hack into the JR Network to make the trains run three minutes late - a stupid prank, to be sure, but one Jin could see the logic in when the poster explained that he was always exactly one minute too late to reach his train in the mornings.
The tone of the post was light; most of the commenters didn't take it seriously. If the guy had succeeded, after all, he wouldn't have been stupid enough to post about it in public. Or maybe not. But where the comments got interesting was the handful of people replying to the last part of the post, where the wannabe hacker had claimed to have had his best efforts thwarted by a small green turtle. The turtle, who hadn't identified himself, had shut down every routine the kid had tried to run and bounced him out of the JR Network so hard he'd shot right off the Net, back to the real world, with a warning message flashing on his screen that told him to stay in school and consider how much trouble he'd be causing for everyone else if he messed with the train times.
Insulting, but by no means illegal. Jin figured the mysterious turtle for a Japan Rail employee, or did until he scrolled further down the comments. Other users piped up with their own stories about the tiny green avatar. One had been trying to download Final Fantasy LXII the week before its official release, only to have her download cut off before she'd even hit a gigabyte. She'd been kicked off the Net too; the turtle, which had acquired spiky copper hair and a giant sword, was waiting for her when she looked at her screen, advising her to buy the legal version when it was released and to think about all the work that had gone into its creation, work that deserved to be rewarded.
Jin was starting to sense a theme. Another user, after being fired, had tried to revenge himself on his former employers by flooding them with spam. He wasn't on the Net at the time and made the mistake of doing this from home. Five minutes after he started, his power cut out - and only his; the other residents in his building were unaffected. When the power returned, there was a small turtle on the screen, eating a can of Spam and advising the hapless spammer to think about how the resulting network congestion issues would affect everyone else at the company too, not just the people he actually held a grudge against.
The stories made for entertaining reading but they did make Jin wonder. Syscops had the authority to expel people from the Net, though rarely did so, and this guy was no syscop. The reports had been clear on that. No silver aura. The turtle would have to be a systems administrator in every system where he'd pulled this little stunt - and to be able to target an individual apartment's power supply, he'd have to have tracked him not only to his home machine, but to his physical address. Pulling the plug like that was illegal, no matter how honourable the intention behind it.
Which side of the law was the little reptile on, anyway? Jin ran a quick search through the board, coming up empty. He counted four reported clashes with the mysterious turtle and six possible sightings, though these were all from a distance and from people who weren't breaking the law at the time. It was possible the turtle had been at work elsewhere, but the story had never seen the light of day. Jin made a post of his own, asking users to PM his board ID if they had any turtle tales to tell.
Of course, within seconds of making the post, he had half a dozen offers for products guaranteed to make him even more generously proportioned than he already was (Jin had been dumped for many reasons, but he'd never had any complaints in that department), four offers of a degree in any subject he cared to name (and a few he didn't), two stories about the antics of pet turtles and one get rich quick offer that would've been tempting if not for the part where he had to spend a week posing skyclad on an iceberg.
He didn't expect to hear anything of interest in the near future. Anyone checking out his identity would learn soon enough of his occupation, and people breaking the law tended not to run straight to the authorities with their tales, as Jin knew well. Anyone who messaged him with anything serious would want to make damned sure they knew who they were talking to.
The private messages triggered alerts to his email; Jin could disconnect from the BBS to go patrolling the Roppongi subnet and he'd continue to receive notifications. Each one felt like he was being tickled behind the ear with a feather - a light brush, then gone. He checked them out as he walked towards the cinema, deleting as he went along, pulling up sharply when the landscape changed under his feet. The six-inch replica of Roppongi Hills vanished, replaced by oversized items of food. Jin found his path blocked by a giant hamburger.
It wasn't uncommon for the landscape to change on the administrators' whims, but such a view... The hamburger flickered, unsteady. Jin frowned as the elephantine strawberry on his left did the same. Perhaps there were storms tonight. None of it was real, of course. The structures on the Net represented the private subnetworks run by organisations all over the world, located roughly approximate to their realworld hardware - assuming they had an off-line equivalent - in patches rented from the administrators of their local subnets. Inside that strawberry, which would be locked to anyone without the proper credentials or the skills to fake them, there might be enough space to fit a million other strawberries, equally gigantic. Space related only to the physical capacity of the network, and that, in turn, related to the wealth behind it.
Jin had to take an unexpected detour through an entire forest of bananas to continue his patrol. Around him, fellow netizens were unfazed by the change of scenery, even as delicious looking barriers of chocolate rose up between them. They simply walked around, or under, or through, some stopping to risk a nibble. Idiots. Jin felt his belly rumble, far off in the distance, and wished he'd had a bigger lunch. He could be picking up food right now if Junno's girlfriend hadn't got back into town so early.
Another flicker. One of the bananas sizzled and spat sparks before vanishing altogether. Jin didn't like it. If the server was having problems, things would only become more unstable. They'd have to order an evacuation, cordon off affected sectors. Either that, or...
With a start, Jin realised he'd almost walked to the Shiba subnet, where the Tokyo Tower stood like an upturned cone of red electronic matchsticks against the olive green skies. He'd come further than he'd thought. If he crossed the border between the two subnets, he'd be on the Shiba servers, no longer surrounded by the contents of a giant's fruit basket. He'd also be officially out of his jurisdiction. They didn't need him over there.
Still more than an hour before he could log off and go home. Jin turned the corner, intending to walk along the border as much as possible - it was difficult to see what was going on when the landscape seemed unable to stay the same for more than a minute at a time. Looked like it was finally getting to everyone else too, if the way users were disappearing was any indication. Logging off or catching a packet elsewhere, Jin didn't care, so long as they weren't making any trouble on his watch.
He contemplated contacting the Roppongi subnet administrators to find out if they were having any known issues, if there was some warning he simply hadn't received. 'Beware the mammoth cherries', that sort of thing. At least then he'd know whether or not he should be rounding people up and booting them off.
Jin began composing an email to the admin address, hoping one of them would be sober enough to pick it up and respond - it was still early, so he had reason to be optimistic - but got sidetracked when he caught sight of a small, dark green shelled creature slinking behind a pineapple. A turtle? The turtle? Jin saved the draft and took off in pursuit.
Being stealthy didn't come naturally to him off-line; he had an unfortunate tendency to bang his knees on chairs, or smack his hand against the doorframe on his way out. On the Net, however, all he had to do was stay out of his quarry's sight. No footsteps, unless Jin wanted to provide his own sound effects; no risk of detection unless the turtle had watchdogs, which didn't appear to be the case. Jin followed as fast as he dared. The turtle was heading for an extra-large slice of chocolate cake, a taste for which Jin couldn't fault him.
When the turtle paused in front of the cake, Jin ducked behind a piece of garlic bread. It was as well, perhaps, that no scent data was included with the food structures. The combination would've been interesting, if not necessarily appetising. It wasn't until the turtle poked its head round the sharp end of the wedge that Jin realised they weren't alone. The turtle recoiled, head retreating into shell, as a third avatar appeared from behind a second slice.
The newcomer was dressed like an old-fashioned cowboy, with hat, boots and all. Saloon doors would've suited him far better for an entrance than a slice of chocolate cake with icing swirling down the sides in fantastic spirals and twists that doubled back on themselves, drawing the eye deeper into the chocolate knots that...
Jin rubbed a hand over his eyes. The icing wasn't really moving, was it? It couldn't be melting, not on the Net. He crept closer, deliberately not looking at the icing. He didn't want the distraction.
The cowboy waddled forwards; he didn't have the walk down right. More like a penguin than Clint Eastwood. "You want something?" he asked the turtle, sounding none too happy about the company. Voice data stored in the chip of the CNS interface determined how any speech sounded on-line, but it was easy enough to change the default, since all speech on the Net came directly from the brain, anyway - the days of using microphones to communicate across cyberspace were long gone.
The turtle peeked out of his shell, grinning sheepishly. Unlike the cowboy's exaggerated gravelly drawl, he had a light, slightly raspy voice, quite pleasant to the ear. If that was his real voice, Jin guessed him to be somewhere in his twenties. "I must've gotten lost. Maybe you can help me? I'm looking for the person who hacked the Roppongi subnet. Answers to the username of," the turtle pointed a small, fingerless hand at the cowboy; the air rippled with a burst of code, "MillionDollarStetson. That's you, right?"
MillionDollarStetson didn't like that one bit. "What's your problem, huh? What's it matter to you if I make the place a little more colourful, cheer things up a bit? You don't like chocolate cake?"
"I like chocolate cake." The turtle straightened himself up. "I've got some sitting in my fridge right now, waiting for me to go home and eat it. But I try not to challenge food items bigger than I am. Nagase might even like it, when he sees what you've done to his subnet, but if he wants changes made, he'll make them himself. I don't think the administrators will be too happy with you improvising. Undermines their authority, makes people panic, leads to chaos. I'd like to avoid chaos. How about you over there, behind the garlic bread? You like to avoid chaos?"
And Jin thought he'd been so careful. "Chaos would be a bad thing," he agreed, venturing nearer so he didn't have to shout. "But why is it your job to do something about it? Do you work with Nagase and the others?"
The turtle skimmed his eyes over Jin's aura and smirked. "You're a syscop - you figure it out. This is your job."
"You gonna kick me off the Net like you did AyafuyaRei and the others, short, green and ugly?" MillionDollarStetson sneered. "That was you, right? You some kinda vigilante? You ain't no syscop, I can see that. If you were an administrator, you'd have told me by now. Cut me off and reset the landscape. Go ahead. I ain't gonna stop you. All they'll do is keep me from logging on for three days, no big deal."
The cowboy was right about the likely punishment he'd receive. Making small changes to the local landscape didn't exactly rank up there with committing identity theft or emptying trust funds. He'd get a virtual slap on the wrist - like he said, no big deal. Not like Jin's punishment.
"That's exactly what I hate about guys like you."
Jin stared at the turtle. How could such hard, icy tones come from such a cute little thing?
"No determination. You can't even do the wrong thing right. If you're going to do something, you should do it with all your heart and follow through! Don't change the landscape because you're bored - at least change it because you want to impress your girlfriend or something!"
"Huh?" MillionDollarStetson was totally nonplussed by the turtle's outburst. "That still the same guy talking? You maybe got multiple personalities in there?"
A vigilante turtle. They'd been big towards the end of the last century, if Jin recalled correctly. This one didn't appear to be a ninja, though.
"Don't think we don't appreciate your delivering lectures in the name of justice," Jin said carefully, not wanting to antagonise him, "but perhaps you should leave Net crime to the people who are being paid to fight it?"
"Doing a great job, aren't you?" the turtle snapped.
"We're a bit understaffed, all right?"
"You're- hey!" The turtle's shout alerted Jin just in time to see MillionDollarStetson dart around the other side of the cake. "We're not finished!"
The whole thing was ripe for slapstick, Jin decided as he joined the turtle in chasing after the cowboy. Either one of them was going to slip on a banana peel - sort of unlikely, given that the only bananas around made the Sunshine 60 building look like a bungalow - or they'd round the corner and get hit by a cream pie subroutine. It had happened to Nakamaru a couple of times.
Had Jin known the exact coordinates, he could've transported himself directly to the cowboy's location; since he assumed the man was still moving, it was more practical to follow him manually, tracking by sight alone. Twenty paces ahead, the turtle was doing the same thing. Jin caught up with him easily. One good thing about running on the Net - if he temporarily disabled the feedback to his body, he could run for miles and never get out of breath. An avatar had no need for oxygen.
Consequently, Jin had no problems trying to continue the conversation. "Why are you- oh. That icing..."
The icing swirls on the reverse of the cake had been pretty, entrancing the beholder with delicate curves and twists, inviting the eye to follow along the spirals into the very centre.
On this side, they weren't nearly so subtle.
"I've never seen cake eat people before, but there's a first time for everything," the turtle said. The cowboy's leg was quite clearly caught in an icing spiral, ensnared by chocolate. "His hack can't be that good if it's holding up so poorly. I knew he was sloppy."
"I figured that, the way the food's been flickering - the whole thing's so unstable it'll get tossed out on the next refresh anyway." Jin sighed. "I should get him out of there before he lands up half-trapped in some corporate network."
The turtle bobbed his head in and out of the shell, which Jin took to mean he was shrugging. "Suit yourself. I think it's a fitting punishment, though. Leave him to stew for a day and next time he'll think twice about rearranging the local landscape to suit himself."
Jin felt another distant hunger pang. He definitely had to do some grocery shopping before he went home. "Did you have to mention stew?"
A scream from MillionDollarStetson cut the conversation short. Jin ventured closer to the cake and saw why. It wasn't just the cowboy's leg that was caught in the icing swirls - the entire left side of his body had all but disappeared, swallowed up by a vortex of dark chocolate, thick enough to smother and bitter enough to kill. Sparks formed a bright line where cake met avatar, where pixels blurred before vanishing altogether.
Jin hoped the cowboy had cut the feedback to his body, else he'd be feeling the loss as though his own flesh were being consumed by fire, but based on the volume and incoherency of the screams, he doubted it. He started forward but the turtle yanked him back.
"You'll be sucked in if you get near that thing, idiot! Don't look at the swirls."
Easier said than done when the patterns seemed to be trying to catch his eye. Jin called up Accessorise, a subroutine that formed part of his avatar's image, though Accessorise was special in that the objects used were function shortcuts and could be detached, once created. On the Net, designer sunglasses didn't cost him a thing; this particular pair dialled down his vision to a single bit. From that distance in black and white, the cake was now one big, solid block, with neither mesmerising spirals nor a cowboy stuck half-in, half-out of the slice.
The turtle hummed approvingly. "Nice. Gucci?"
"Good guess."
"When it comes to fashion, I don't need to guess." Rather than look at the partially-devoured cowboy, the turtle faced Jin; Jin found this somewhat disconcerting as the turtle was now a featureless blob. "I don't think that's the result of his handiwork, do you?"
"Not unless he's suicidal."
Jin rummaged around in his toolkit for a fishing rod. Although he tended to prefer more active hobbies, such as soccer, he counted himself a decent virtual fisherman, if only because his rod was a sticky piece of code - one that attached itself to a target and locked them together in preparation for being reeled in.
"Can you even see where to aim?"
"Don't need to." The fishing rod had two modes; Jin could aim by sight, or do what he was doing now, which was give it the cowboy's coordinates based on his last viewed position. "I don't have to see to hit a stationary target."
"Then you'd better be quick about it, because you're running out of target to hit."
"If that's the limit of your constructive advice-"
"You told me to keep out of it and leave it to the people who get paid to do this - namely, you - so that's exactly what I'm doing," the turtle said.
"Oh, just get back in your shell," Jin muttered. He cast the line towards the cake. MillionDollarStetson's screams had faded to nothing more than weak moans, barely audible even when Jin dialled up his audio receptors.
He knew when the cowboy was on the hook - the resulting tug on the line almost brought him to his knees. The cake, or whatever it was, was fighting back. Jin set the rod to reel him in automatically, eliminating the pull so he didn't fall over trying to do it himself.
There, that was more like it. Jin risked a peek from under his sunglasses. Though his avatar was discoloured with chocolate stains, the cowboy was emerging intact, no missing limbs or anything.
The turtle clapped with exaggerated motions; the noise sounded like a series of shots. "Not bad. He's even got his hat on."
The second MillionDollarStetson managed to disentangle himself from Jin's code, he logged out, chocolate stains and all. Jin cursed himself for not being quick enough to run a trace on the guy. A corrupt avatar was potentially problematic - if the cowboy had any sense, he'd delete the image and start afresh. The stains meant the chocolate cake had messed with the avatar's data, stored on the CNS chip and customisable to a limited degree by the user. There was no telling how much it would hamper the cowboy's ability to navigate the Net.
Was it self-inflicted, the result of sloppy code and poor judgement? Jin wasn't entirely sure. The cowboy had given the local landscape a giant food makeover but he certainly hadn't planned to be caught in a swirling chocolate vortex. Had the conflict between the existing landscape settings and the hack caused the individual structures to degrade badly enough to implode, taking anyone who happened to be nearby with them?
"Never mind the hat," Jin said. He dismissed both sunglasses and fishing rod. "I'd like to do something about the cake."
The turtle offered him a smirk. How could something so short look so cocky? "Housecleaning. Should be a...uh...piece of cake."
"If you have access to the server maintenance routines, which I don't." It pained Jin to admit it, but there were a number of things he wasn't legally allowed to get anywhere near, by orders from his boss. He could sneak in, of course, but when he was on the job, he had to be able to explain every move he made and they'd never believe he just happened to run across a backdoor. Not with his record. They'd have everything on his chip's activity log, anyway. "I'll let the admins know. Guess I'd better cordon off the area in case anyone else gets sucked in looking for dessert."
"Waste of your time." Translucent code fragments materialised around the turtle's head, shimmered and vanished; Jin could make out a faint wheezing variation in the background hum of the server as the housecleaning routine came to life. "Give it a minute and the place should return to a more familiar shade of strange."
It didn't even take a minute. A wave washed over the entire Roppongi subnet, removing stray data and any foreign objects as it went. It cleaned the code comprising the public areas and called maintenance routines belonging to the private subnetworks to do the same. Anything suspicious was quarantined and flagged to the administrators, with the local syscops copied in; Jin knew he'd find a log in his inbox for later review. With the restoration of the original landscape settings the six-inch replica of Roppongi replaced the gargantuan food items. It was difficult to tell, given the size of the structures, but they appeared to be stable; none of that pesky flickering or sudden winking in and out.
The turtle was positively beaming. "I like everything to be in its place," he explained.
A neat freak, Jin guessed. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me how you had the authority to do that, are you?"
"Nope, you might arrest me for it and I've got other plans tonight - though with someone whose avatar's not nearly as nice as yours. I've never met a syscop who made himself out to be a model before."
"What model?" Jin shrugged. "This is what I look like off-line. Minus the silver aura, obviously."
"Really?" The turtle seemed very interested to hear this. A short stream of code flew from his hand towards Jin. "Maybe I'll look you up on the outside sometime, Jin Akanishi."
"Did you just run a query on me?"
"Roppongi doesn't have many syscops because most of the residents have better things to do with their time than hang on the Net and the rest of the time, they're sleeping it off. I've got a list. Yuichi Nakamaru, Junnosuke Taguchi and Meisa Kuroki have all clocked out for the day, and that leaves you alone in the office, fighting the good fight by yourself till the night shift starts."
Jin wasn't comfortable with how much the strange little turtle knew about him - and about everything else, it seemed. Who the hell was he?
"Going to run a query on me?" the turtle asked, amused. "Go ahead; you won't get a hit. But if you'll excuse me, I really have to be going now."
"Wait!" Jin didn't even try to run a query. He could ask, though, couldn't he? "At least give me a name."
"Can't you guess?" With a ripple of code, the turtle morphed into a young Japanese man, maybe mid-twenties, with dark, laughing eyes and coppery hair. He was simply dressed in faded jeans, plain black T-shirt and a blue and white checked shirt; a pair of sunglasses dangled from his left hand. "Kame."
The turtle would go by 'Kame', wouldn't he? Jin wondered why someone so obviously gorgeous would use such a plain, almost cartoonish avatar on the Net. If Kame's looks were genuine, he had to be leaving a trail of broken hearts everywhere he went.
"Kame," Jin repeated. "That a nickname?"
"That's whatever you want it to be." Kame flashed him a smile and waved the sunglasses. "Thanks for these."
Then he vanished.
Jin swore when he realised why he'd been thanked for the sunglasses. Kame, damn his little green shell, had copied his Accessorise routine.
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.
A/N: lilmatchgirl007 and sollasollew11 ganged up on me and talked me into participating in NaNoWriMo, and this is the result. Thank you to solo____ for saving the day in a Junno-esque fashion by giving me an explanation for HAYATO. Crossposted to ficwars and notaverse. Full text file is here.
Chapter 1
Jin hated working overtime. Regular syscop pay was just barely good enough that he didn't have to consider looking for work elsewhere - not that anywhere else would take him, even if he could leave. Men like Jin Akanishi only got hired in the shadows. If he wasn't a syscop he'd be nothing by now, the way he was when they signed him up, without even a paltry hundred yen and unable to afford even the minimum fee to get on the Net.
Now he was one of the enforcers he'd once despised - one of the snoops, one of the spies - with a proper bank account of legal cash and a place to call home. That was worth a lot, as Jin saw it, which was why even though he hated the overtime, he couldn't turn it down.
Besides, it wasn't like he'd had anything better to do tonight.
He leaned forward, crossed through a square on the calendar pinned to the low board separating his cubicle from Junno's. The puppies on the calendar looked happy. They had chew toys, and doggy treats, and they had each other. What did Jin have? Another cancelled date and numb legs from sitting in the same position for so long.
Junno stuck his head over the edge of the green felt divider. He'd already unplugged himself, preparing to leave for the day. Even off the Net his smile was FFFFFF-bright. Sometimes Jin felt like taking a swing at it, just to see if there was anything in the world that could actually ruin Junnosuke Taguchi's mood.
But not tonight. Jin's love life might be on the rocks but Junno's was going sickeningly well, so much so that when Junno had taken a Hawaiian vacation with his girlfriend, word round the office was they'd eloped. He'd come back whistling and chirpy as ever, though his ring finger was still bare. Jin wondered if he would try again tonight.
"Thanks again for covering for me," Junno said. "Sorry about the short notice but Rena didn't know if she was going to get back today or not. You didn't have any plans, right?"
He wasn't rubbing it in, Jin knew. Junno's voice was practically begging him to say no, he didn't have plans, why would he ever have plans on a Friday night, especially with someone who'd dumped him only that morning. By the time he'd cracked open his eyes, Maki had been up and dressed and drinking the last of his precious coffee stash. He hadn't even been capable of stringing together a morning greeting when she'd said goodbye, leaving his cell phone on the pillow as she strode out the door on her designer heels. She'd deleted her contact details. Jin had had to walk twenty paces to the nearest Starbucks and replenish his caffeine supply before he'd gotten the message.
"No plans," Jin said thickly. Junno couldn't see the black mark across today's calendar square. "Nothing more exciting than shopping for groceries. Go. Have fun. Remember you owe me one next time I need a favour."
"I definitely won't forget."
Junno pulled on a charcoal jacket, pocketed his cell phone, grabbed both his own and Jin's empty drinks cups to dispose of on the way out and left the office with a farewell smile that both apologised for the trouble and hinted at how much he was looking forward to the night ahead. Nakamaru had already gone, claiming he had dinner plans with a group of gourmet friends. That, Jin knew, was code for saying he and his roommate Masuda had found a new restaurant to try, and possibly even some young ladies to try it with, though that part was by no means guaranteed. The night shift wouldn't get in for another two hours. Meisa, their remaining colleague on the day shift, was supposed to be working 10-8 with Junno, but she'd left even before Nakamaru, citing female issues, and there wasn't a man in the office who dared to argue with her.
As a consequence of Junno skipping out early, Jin's 8-6 shift had become 8-8 and their tiny office had gone from relative tranquillity to eerie silence. Even the boss had been out all day; Jin suspected he was over at the main branch in Akasaka, where his partner worked, heading up the overall on-line security for Minato-ku. Tackey didn't need to sit in his tiny satellite office in Roppongi just to keep an eye on Jin. Not anymore. If he didn't log on, they'd know soon enough.
It worried him a little, being the only one in the office. Not the only one in the building, of course. There was a café upstairs that was open all night and an expensive shoe shop downstairs that wouldn't close for another two hours yet. But the windows opposite Jin's cubicle had their shades drawn to keep the nightly gloom away a while longer and the busy streets outside might as well have been a million miles away. No one else in the office meant no one to pull Jin out if something went wrong - if he couldn't log out under his own power and the panic button failed him. Anyone checking his status would know he was logged on, but no one would be able to do a thing about it.
Jin didn't mind that part. He was used to working without a safety net. What he didn't like was leaving himself vulnerable, on display for anyone who just happened to walk in. The office was locked, of course, to anyone whose thumbprint wasn't on the register, but any electronic lock could be picked, given sufficient time and skill, and if Jin was all but dead to the off-line world an intruder would have all the time he wanted.
Damnit. He had to stop giving himself the creeps like that. He couldn't afford to get jumpy.
Teabreak over. The pins and needles in his legs had receded sufficiently to allow him to make it to the bathroom without lurching too badly, so Jin made sure he could log back on for the rest of the shift without receiving any urgent messages from his bladder. It was all very well working in a virtual world, but in the real world, the body's needs took precedence.
One of those needs being comfort. Since Nakamaru wouldn't be back until tomorrow, Jin swiped his cushion and added it to his own chair. Much better. Made it almost bearable. Jin pulled great handfuls of messy brown hair away from the back of his neck with one hand and peeled back the protective layer of sim-skin with the other to reveal the connecting port of the CNS interface. He'd been plugging himself directly into the Net since he was old enough to know not to stick the cable in his mouth; he didn't need to see - he could do this blind. He tugged the cable free from the desk and slid it smoothly into the slot, careful not to force it.
One, two, three...
There was that thrumming, a low-grade vibration beginning in his neck and expanding to fill his entire body. Jin knew he had sixty seconds to make himself comfortable, a single minute before his body would fall back against the chair, lolling at whatever unflattering angle he'd left it in. He'd fallen off, once, from leaning too far forwards when the connection was made. He only knew about it because Meisa had pulled him off the Net to tell him he was lying on the floor - after she'd taken pictures, of course.
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine...
Every time Jin logged on to the Net, it felt like birth and death all at once. He left his heartbeat behind, the steady rhythm of the flesh fading till it belonged to someone else, to the tired body of the young man reclining behind the desk. That was Jin, but it wasn't all of him. Not by a long shot. The login scripts and the chip in Jin's CNS interface took care of the authentication in less than a second. With an explosion of sensory data and a swirl of pixels, Jin "woke up" on the Net, all fatigue forgotten.
He'd changed his avatar since going straight. No longer the tiny shrimp driving a sleek black Mercedes, Jin now styled himself simply as he was - no fuss, no frills. Some syscops liked to beef themselves up, make their avatars represent them on the Net as they wanted others to think they were, all big and tough and merciless, with bulging muscles and wicked scars, exaggerated like manga characters for maximum intimidation. Jin didn't know anyone who fit that description in real life, even the cosplayers he sometimes saw in Akihabara.
Personally, he found it easier to talk to people if they weren't trying to run away from him. It helped, he thought, that he wasn't bad-looking. His avatar depicted a young Japanese man in his late twenties, with wavy brown hair that curled around his neck and a small mole beside his right eye. It was the work of seconds to change clothes from the extensive selection in his electronic wardrobe; today, Jin stuck with his default of faded blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt and black boots to match his body's actual attire. It didn't really matter. He could look like anyone or anything he wanted on the Net - even be a single, solitary pixel, if his heart so desired, though he'd effectively be almost invisible to the naked eye and have a hard time moving around properly.
Besides, lone pixels didn't have hands. When plugged into a suitable source, Jin's CNS interface granted him full immersion: all five senses. If his avatar touched anything on the Net, the sensation would feed back through the cable and into his brain, propagating itself via his central nervous system to give his abandoned fingertips that same feeling. Anything he saw on the Net fed back to his eyes, anything he heard fed back to his ears - it was quite possible to go blind or deaf from Net exposure, given sufficient cause. Taste didn't have quite so much relevance for a syscop, though those in the catering profession were happy to allow the public to taste the products before buying, on the understanding that no actual food was consumed and the taste itself was artificially generated.
As for the sense of smell... Whenever Jin logged on, the smell was always the first thing to hit him. Before he heard the constant background buzz created by millions of servers, or saw the hard, flat colour of the virtual realm, he smelled the clean, cool scent of a world untouched by pollution, fresh like grass after rain. He inhaled a great lungful of it; back in the real Tokyo, his body drew in a breath of recycled air, tainted by old smoke and stale coffee. Here, it didn't matter that Jin smoked too much, or needed a haircut, or hadn't remembered to shave today after Maki had dumped him. Here, he could be perfect, if that was what he wanted.
He didn't. It would've been a lie to make himself perfect on the outside, when he knew he wasn't on the inside.
Jin opened his eyes on the virtual world, the one that was both work and home to him. The Net was an old friend now, always shifting, full of secrets. Today the skies in the Roppongi subnet were a soft, velvety purple but they could change in a heartbeat to fresh, lemony yellow or a dark, stormy black, depending on the mood of the system administrators. The servers hosting the public domain were housed somewhere in a converted nightclub in Roppongi 3-chome, Jin knew, and the maintainers liked to keep things interesting.
Right now the virtual representation of Roppongi was only six inches high and very nearly transparent. Jin walked through the station, trying not to look down in case he saw miniature people being crushed underneath his feet. Every step was like walking on a particularly springy mattress. There was no such thing as weight on the Net, because nothing had any mass, and the only reason avatars weren't flying all over the place was that the Net had a global gravity setting and overriding it was more trouble than it was worth unless you had your own private network. Not that this stopped people giving themselves bird avatars - one enterprising soul even had a winged dragon - but they didn't get very far trying to escape into the skies.
Just because Jin's jurisdiction only extended as far as the Roppongi subnet didn't mean he only had to deal with local users. That was the beauty of the Net: anyone could go anywhere they pleased, provided it was a public area. Translation software eliminated all language barriers on-line, meant Jin could converse as easily with French tourists who'd come to tour virtual Tokyo as he could with the random Americans who stopped him in the streets on his way home from work and asked him if he knew where the Mori Tower was. He could see it now - all six inches of it.
The tourists probably wouldn't like it that way, but the Mori Tower was usually home to the local BBS, where users posted on a variety of topics. Questions, discussions, job offers, searches, the occasional request for a hitman... Jin had been logged on till he'd taken that teabreak, knew he didn't have any email requiring his immediate attention, and figured that being the only public syscop in the area right now, it was more important for him to be on the Net than working off-line. Companies often had their own private syscops, of course, policing their systems and handling their affairs away from the public eye, but public syscops served the same purpose as police officers off-line, only they travelled by packet rather than by car or bicycle, and had no need for a physical presence at all.
Without anything specific to be looking into, Jin went to check the BBS for anything seeming suspicious. Areas of corrupt data, for instance, which needed to be brought to the attention of the authorities and blocked off to prevent curious users from poking their noses in - quarantined and repaired, if Jin could manage it. Reports of unusually high bandwidth usage, or of avatars lurking around company subnets without good reason. If he didn't find anything of interest he planned to patrol, making sure his presence was noted by every user in the area, just in case any of them were thinking about making mischief. That ought to kill time until the night shift came in and Jin could finally go home and try to figure out what he'd done this time to screw up his love life beyond all hope of repair.
The Mori Tower, being six inches rather than its usual seven hundred and eighty-one feet, didn't provide much of a backdrop for the BBS. The board stood alone, suspended above the toy-size tower, in shades of pale blue and green that were hard to distinguish at first glance. Dozens of other avatars stood before it, each accessing separately, skimming through the topics on an individual basis. There were fairies and monsters, elves with golden hair and warriors in full armour. Big-eyed catgirls and dogboys with floppy ears. Fluffy bunnies and sharp, angular robots. There were even some plain old humans.
They parted for Jin. Not because he was pretty, or because he was especially tall or dangerous in appearance, but because his avatar shone silver around the edges, marking him out as a syscop. The aura couldn't be counterfeited and there wasn't a user on the Net who didn't know what it meant.
Power.
Jin nodded politely to those who made way for him, supplied his credentials to the board's administrator, and blinked on reflex when the board shifted in his view, opening up by topic, spreading out in a circle around him so that he could turn and read as he chose. He still found it amazing that every single user on the boards was seeing the same thing, yet they all saw it differently, and those not registered with the board saw something else entirely.
He filtered out the spam, noting possible cases to follow up, and ignored the obvious trolls with nothing better to do with their time. There had to be bigger fish to fry, surely? Even excessive bandwidth consumption would've been something. But the only post to catch Jin's eye was one where a kid confessed to trying to hack into the JR Network to make the trains run three minutes late - a stupid prank, to be sure, but one Jin could see the logic in when the poster explained that he was always exactly one minute too late to reach his train in the mornings.
The tone of the post was light; most of the commenters didn't take it seriously. If the guy had succeeded, after all, he wouldn't have been stupid enough to post about it in public. Or maybe not. But where the comments got interesting was the handful of people replying to the last part of the post, where the wannabe hacker had claimed to have had his best efforts thwarted by a small green turtle. The turtle, who hadn't identified himself, had shut down every routine the kid had tried to run and bounced him out of the JR Network so hard he'd shot right off the Net, back to the real world, with a warning message flashing on his screen that told him to stay in school and consider how much trouble he'd be causing for everyone else if he messed with the train times.
Insulting, but by no means illegal. Jin figured the mysterious turtle for a Japan Rail employee, or did until he scrolled further down the comments. Other users piped up with their own stories about the tiny green avatar. One had been trying to download Final Fantasy LXII the week before its official release, only to have her download cut off before she'd even hit a gigabyte. She'd been kicked off the Net too; the turtle, which had acquired spiky copper hair and a giant sword, was waiting for her when she looked at her screen, advising her to buy the legal version when it was released and to think about all the work that had gone into its creation, work that deserved to be rewarded.
Jin was starting to sense a theme. Another user, after being fired, had tried to revenge himself on his former employers by flooding them with spam. He wasn't on the Net at the time and made the mistake of doing this from home. Five minutes after he started, his power cut out - and only his; the other residents in his building were unaffected. When the power returned, there was a small turtle on the screen, eating a can of Spam and advising the hapless spammer to think about how the resulting network congestion issues would affect everyone else at the company too, not just the people he actually held a grudge against.
The stories made for entertaining reading but they did make Jin wonder. Syscops had the authority to expel people from the Net, though rarely did so, and this guy was no syscop. The reports had been clear on that. No silver aura. The turtle would have to be a systems administrator in every system where he'd pulled this little stunt - and to be able to target an individual apartment's power supply, he'd have to have tracked him not only to his home machine, but to his physical address. Pulling the plug like that was illegal, no matter how honourable the intention behind it.
Which side of the law was the little reptile on, anyway? Jin ran a quick search through the board, coming up empty. He counted four reported clashes with the mysterious turtle and six possible sightings, though these were all from a distance and from people who weren't breaking the law at the time. It was possible the turtle had been at work elsewhere, but the story had never seen the light of day. Jin made a post of his own, asking users to PM his board ID if they had any turtle tales to tell.
Of course, within seconds of making the post, he had half a dozen offers for products guaranteed to make him even more generously proportioned than he already was (Jin had been dumped for many reasons, but he'd never had any complaints in that department), four offers of a degree in any subject he cared to name (and a few he didn't), two stories about the antics of pet turtles and one get rich quick offer that would've been tempting if not for the part where he had to spend a week posing skyclad on an iceberg.
He didn't expect to hear anything of interest in the near future. Anyone checking out his identity would learn soon enough of his occupation, and people breaking the law tended not to run straight to the authorities with their tales, as Jin knew well. Anyone who messaged him with anything serious would want to make damned sure they knew who they were talking to.
The private messages triggered alerts to his email; Jin could disconnect from the BBS to go patrolling the Roppongi subnet and he'd continue to receive notifications. Each one felt like he was being tickled behind the ear with a feather - a light brush, then gone. He checked them out as he walked towards the cinema, deleting as he went along, pulling up sharply when the landscape changed under his feet. The six-inch replica of Roppongi Hills vanished, replaced by oversized items of food. Jin found his path blocked by a giant hamburger.
It wasn't uncommon for the landscape to change on the administrators' whims, but such a view... The hamburger flickered, unsteady. Jin frowned as the elephantine strawberry on his left did the same. Perhaps there were storms tonight. None of it was real, of course. The structures on the Net represented the private subnetworks run by organisations all over the world, located roughly approximate to their realworld hardware - assuming they had an off-line equivalent - in patches rented from the administrators of their local subnets. Inside that strawberry, which would be locked to anyone without the proper credentials or the skills to fake them, there might be enough space to fit a million other strawberries, equally gigantic. Space related only to the physical capacity of the network, and that, in turn, related to the wealth behind it.
Jin had to take an unexpected detour through an entire forest of bananas to continue his patrol. Around him, fellow netizens were unfazed by the change of scenery, even as delicious looking barriers of chocolate rose up between them. They simply walked around, or under, or through, some stopping to risk a nibble. Idiots. Jin felt his belly rumble, far off in the distance, and wished he'd had a bigger lunch. He could be picking up food right now if Junno's girlfriend hadn't got back into town so early.
Another flicker. One of the bananas sizzled and spat sparks before vanishing altogether. Jin didn't like it. If the server was having problems, things would only become more unstable. They'd have to order an evacuation, cordon off affected sectors. Either that, or...
With a start, Jin realised he'd almost walked to the Shiba subnet, where the Tokyo Tower stood like an upturned cone of red electronic matchsticks against the olive green skies. He'd come further than he'd thought. If he crossed the border between the two subnets, he'd be on the Shiba servers, no longer surrounded by the contents of a giant's fruit basket. He'd also be officially out of his jurisdiction. They didn't need him over there.
Still more than an hour before he could log off and go home. Jin turned the corner, intending to walk along the border as much as possible - it was difficult to see what was going on when the landscape seemed unable to stay the same for more than a minute at a time. Looked like it was finally getting to everyone else too, if the way users were disappearing was any indication. Logging off or catching a packet elsewhere, Jin didn't care, so long as they weren't making any trouble on his watch.
He contemplated contacting the Roppongi subnet administrators to find out if they were having any known issues, if there was some warning he simply hadn't received. 'Beware the mammoth cherries', that sort of thing. At least then he'd know whether or not he should be rounding people up and booting them off.
Jin began composing an email to the admin address, hoping one of them would be sober enough to pick it up and respond - it was still early, so he had reason to be optimistic - but got sidetracked when he caught sight of a small, dark green shelled creature slinking behind a pineapple. A turtle? The turtle? Jin saved the draft and took off in pursuit.
Being stealthy didn't come naturally to him off-line; he had an unfortunate tendency to bang his knees on chairs, or smack his hand against the doorframe on his way out. On the Net, however, all he had to do was stay out of his quarry's sight. No footsteps, unless Jin wanted to provide his own sound effects; no risk of detection unless the turtle had watchdogs, which didn't appear to be the case. Jin followed as fast as he dared. The turtle was heading for an extra-large slice of chocolate cake, a taste for which Jin couldn't fault him.
When the turtle paused in front of the cake, Jin ducked behind a piece of garlic bread. It was as well, perhaps, that no scent data was included with the food structures. The combination would've been interesting, if not necessarily appetising. It wasn't until the turtle poked its head round the sharp end of the wedge that Jin realised they weren't alone. The turtle recoiled, head retreating into shell, as a third avatar appeared from behind a second slice.
The newcomer was dressed like an old-fashioned cowboy, with hat, boots and all. Saloon doors would've suited him far better for an entrance than a slice of chocolate cake with icing swirling down the sides in fantastic spirals and twists that doubled back on themselves, drawing the eye deeper into the chocolate knots that...
Jin rubbed a hand over his eyes. The icing wasn't really moving, was it? It couldn't be melting, not on the Net. He crept closer, deliberately not looking at the icing. He didn't want the distraction.
The cowboy waddled forwards; he didn't have the walk down right. More like a penguin than Clint Eastwood. "You want something?" he asked the turtle, sounding none too happy about the company. Voice data stored in the chip of the CNS interface determined how any speech sounded on-line, but it was easy enough to change the default, since all speech on the Net came directly from the brain, anyway - the days of using microphones to communicate across cyberspace were long gone.
The turtle peeked out of his shell, grinning sheepishly. Unlike the cowboy's exaggerated gravelly drawl, he had a light, slightly raspy voice, quite pleasant to the ear. If that was his real voice, Jin guessed him to be somewhere in his twenties. "I must've gotten lost. Maybe you can help me? I'm looking for the person who hacked the Roppongi subnet. Answers to the username of," the turtle pointed a small, fingerless hand at the cowboy; the air rippled with a burst of code, "MillionDollarStetson. That's you, right?"
MillionDollarStetson didn't like that one bit. "What's your problem, huh? What's it matter to you if I make the place a little more colourful, cheer things up a bit? You don't like chocolate cake?"
"I like chocolate cake." The turtle straightened himself up. "I've got some sitting in my fridge right now, waiting for me to go home and eat it. But I try not to challenge food items bigger than I am. Nagase might even like it, when he sees what you've done to his subnet, but if he wants changes made, he'll make them himself. I don't think the administrators will be too happy with you improvising. Undermines their authority, makes people panic, leads to chaos. I'd like to avoid chaos. How about you over there, behind the garlic bread? You like to avoid chaos?"
And Jin thought he'd been so careful. "Chaos would be a bad thing," he agreed, venturing nearer so he didn't have to shout. "But why is it your job to do something about it? Do you work with Nagase and the others?"
The turtle skimmed his eyes over Jin's aura and smirked. "You're a syscop - you figure it out. This is your job."
"You gonna kick me off the Net like you did AyafuyaRei and the others, short, green and ugly?" MillionDollarStetson sneered. "That was you, right? You some kinda vigilante? You ain't no syscop, I can see that. If you were an administrator, you'd have told me by now. Cut me off and reset the landscape. Go ahead. I ain't gonna stop you. All they'll do is keep me from logging on for three days, no big deal."
The cowboy was right about the likely punishment he'd receive. Making small changes to the local landscape didn't exactly rank up there with committing identity theft or emptying trust funds. He'd get a virtual slap on the wrist - like he said, no big deal. Not like Jin's punishment.
"That's exactly what I hate about guys like you."
Jin stared at the turtle. How could such hard, icy tones come from such a cute little thing?
"No determination. You can't even do the wrong thing right. If you're going to do something, you should do it with all your heart and follow through! Don't change the landscape because you're bored - at least change it because you want to impress your girlfriend or something!"
"Huh?" MillionDollarStetson was totally nonplussed by the turtle's outburst. "That still the same guy talking? You maybe got multiple personalities in there?"
A vigilante turtle. They'd been big towards the end of the last century, if Jin recalled correctly. This one didn't appear to be a ninja, though.
"Don't think we don't appreciate your delivering lectures in the name of justice," Jin said carefully, not wanting to antagonise him, "but perhaps you should leave Net crime to the people who are being paid to fight it?"
"Doing a great job, aren't you?" the turtle snapped.
"We're a bit understaffed, all right?"
"You're- hey!" The turtle's shout alerted Jin just in time to see MillionDollarStetson dart around the other side of the cake. "We're not finished!"
The whole thing was ripe for slapstick, Jin decided as he joined the turtle in chasing after the cowboy. Either one of them was going to slip on a banana peel - sort of unlikely, given that the only bananas around made the Sunshine 60 building look like a bungalow - or they'd round the corner and get hit by a cream pie subroutine. It had happened to Nakamaru a couple of times.
Had Jin known the exact coordinates, he could've transported himself directly to the cowboy's location; since he assumed the man was still moving, it was more practical to follow him manually, tracking by sight alone. Twenty paces ahead, the turtle was doing the same thing. Jin caught up with him easily. One good thing about running on the Net - if he temporarily disabled the feedback to his body, he could run for miles and never get out of breath. An avatar had no need for oxygen.
Consequently, Jin had no problems trying to continue the conversation. "Why are you- oh. That icing..."
The icing swirls on the reverse of the cake had been pretty, entrancing the beholder with delicate curves and twists, inviting the eye to follow along the spirals into the very centre.
On this side, they weren't nearly so subtle.
"I've never seen cake eat people before, but there's a first time for everything," the turtle said. The cowboy's leg was quite clearly caught in an icing spiral, ensnared by chocolate. "His hack can't be that good if it's holding up so poorly. I knew he was sloppy."
"I figured that, the way the food's been flickering - the whole thing's so unstable it'll get tossed out on the next refresh anyway." Jin sighed. "I should get him out of there before he lands up half-trapped in some corporate network."
The turtle bobbed his head in and out of the shell, which Jin took to mean he was shrugging. "Suit yourself. I think it's a fitting punishment, though. Leave him to stew for a day and next time he'll think twice about rearranging the local landscape to suit himself."
Jin felt another distant hunger pang. He definitely had to do some grocery shopping before he went home. "Did you have to mention stew?"
A scream from MillionDollarStetson cut the conversation short. Jin ventured closer to the cake and saw why. It wasn't just the cowboy's leg that was caught in the icing swirls - the entire left side of his body had all but disappeared, swallowed up by a vortex of dark chocolate, thick enough to smother and bitter enough to kill. Sparks formed a bright line where cake met avatar, where pixels blurred before vanishing altogether.
Jin hoped the cowboy had cut the feedback to his body, else he'd be feeling the loss as though his own flesh were being consumed by fire, but based on the volume and incoherency of the screams, he doubted it. He started forward but the turtle yanked him back.
"You'll be sucked in if you get near that thing, idiot! Don't look at the swirls."
Easier said than done when the patterns seemed to be trying to catch his eye. Jin called up Accessorise, a subroutine that formed part of his avatar's image, though Accessorise was special in that the objects used were function shortcuts and could be detached, once created. On the Net, designer sunglasses didn't cost him a thing; this particular pair dialled down his vision to a single bit. From that distance in black and white, the cake was now one big, solid block, with neither mesmerising spirals nor a cowboy stuck half-in, half-out of the slice.
The turtle hummed approvingly. "Nice. Gucci?"
"Good guess."
"When it comes to fashion, I don't need to guess." Rather than look at the partially-devoured cowboy, the turtle faced Jin; Jin found this somewhat disconcerting as the turtle was now a featureless blob. "I don't think that's the result of his handiwork, do you?"
"Not unless he's suicidal."
Jin rummaged around in his toolkit for a fishing rod. Although he tended to prefer more active hobbies, such as soccer, he counted himself a decent virtual fisherman, if only because his rod was a sticky piece of code - one that attached itself to a target and locked them together in preparation for being reeled in.
"Can you even see where to aim?"
"Don't need to." The fishing rod had two modes; Jin could aim by sight, or do what he was doing now, which was give it the cowboy's coordinates based on his last viewed position. "I don't have to see to hit a stationary target."
"Then you'd better be quick about it, because you're running out of target to hit."
"If that's the limit of your constructive advice-"
"You told me to keep out of it and leave it to the people who get paid to do this - namely, you - so that's exactly what I'm doing," the turtle said.
"Oh, just get back in your shell," Jin muttered. He cast the line towards the cake. MillionDollarStetson's screams had faded to nothing more than weak moans, barely audible even when Jin dialled up his audio receptors.
He knew when the cowboy was on the hook - the resulting tug on the line almost brought him to his knees. The cake, or whatever it was, was fighting back. Jin set the rod to reel him in automatically, eliminating the pull so he didn't fall over trying to do it himself.
There, that was more like it. Jin risked a peek from under his sunglasses. Though his avatar was discoloured with chocolate stains, the cowboy was emerging intact, no missing limbs or anything.
The turtle clapped with exaggerated motions; the noise sounded like a series of shots. "Not bad. He's even got his hat on."
The second MillionDollarStetson managed to disentangle himself from Jin's code, he logged out, chocolate stains and all. Jin cursed himself for not being quick enough to run a trace on the guy. A corrupt avatar was potentially problematic - if the cowboy had any sense, he'd delete the image and start afresh. The stains meant the chocolate cake had messed with the avatar's data, stored on the CNS chip and customisable to a limited degree by the user. There was no telling how much it would hamper the cowboy's ability to navigate the Net.
Was it self-inflicted, the result of sloppy code and poor judgement? Jin wasn't entirely sure. The cowboy had given the local landscape a giant food makeover but he certainly hadn't planned to be caught in a swirling chocolate vortex. Had the conflict between the existing landscape settings and the hack caused the individual structures to degrade badly enough to implode, taking anyone who happened to be nearby with them?
"Never mind the hat," Jin said. He dismissed both sunglasses and fishing rod. "I'd like to do something about the cake."
The turtle offered him a smirk. How could something so short look so cocky? "Housecleaning. Should be a...uh...piece of cake."
"If you have access to the server maintenance routines, which I don't." It pained Jin to admit it, but there were a number of things he wasn't legally allowed to get anywhere near, by orders from his boss. He could sneak in, of course, but when he was on the job, he had to be able to explain every move he made and they'd never believe he just happened to run across a backdoor. Not with his record. They'd have everything on his chip's activity log, anyway. "I'll let the admins know. Guess I'd better cordon off the area in case anyone else gets sucked in looking for dessert."
"Waste of your time." Translucent code fragments materialised around the turtle's head, shimmered and vanished; Jin could make out a faint wheezing variation in the background hum of the server as the housecleaning routine came to life. "Give it a minute and the place should return to a more familiar shade of strange."
It didn't even take a minute. A wave washed over the entire Roppongi subnet, removing stray data and any foreign objects as it went. It cleaned the code comprising the public areas and called maintenance routines belonging to the private subnetworks to do the same. Anything suspicious was quarantined and flagged to the administrators, with the local syscops copied in; Jin knew he'd find a log in his inbox for later review. With the restoration of the original landscape settings the six-inch replica of Roppongi replaced the gargantuan food items. It was difficult to tell, given the size of the structures, but they appeared to be stable; none of that pesky flickering or sudden winking in and out.
The turtle was positively beaming. "I like everything to be in its place," he explained.
A neat freak, Jin guessed. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me how you had the authority to do that, are you?"
"Nope, you might arrest me for it and I've got other plans tonight - though with someone whose avatar's not nearly as nice as yours. I've never met a syscop who made himself out to be a model before."
"What model?" Jin shrugged. "This is what I look like off-line. Minus the silver aura, obviously."
"Really?" The turtle seemed very interested to hear this. A short stream of code flew from his hand towards Jin. "Maybe I'll look you up on the outside sometime, Jin Akanishi."
"Did you just run a query on me?"
"Roppongi doesn't have many syscops because most of the residents have better things to do with their time than hang on the Net and the rest of the time, they're sleeping it off. I've got a list. Yuichi Nakamaru, Junnosuke Taguchi and Meisa Kuroki have all clocked out for the day, and that leaves you alone in the office, fighting the good fight by yourself till the night shift starts."
Jin wasn't comfortable with how much the strange little turtle knew about him - and about everything else, it seemed. Who the hell was he?
"Going to run a query on me?" the turtle asked, amused. "Go ahead; you won't get a hit. But if you'll excuse me, I really have to be going now."
"Wait!" Jin didn't even try to run a query. He could ask, though, couldn't he? "At least give me a name."
"Can't you guess?" With a ripple of code, the turtle morphed into a young Japanese man, maybe mid-twenties, with dark, laughing eyes and coppery hair. He was simply dressed in faded jeans, plain black T-shirt and a blue and white checked shirt; a pair of sunglasses dangled from his left hand. "Kame."
The turtle would go by 'Kame', wouldn't he? Jin wondered why someone so obviously gorgeous would use such a plain, almost cartoonish avatar on the Net. If Kame's looks were genuine, he had to be leaving a trail of broken hearts everywhere he went.
"Kame," Jin repeated. "That a nickname?"
"That's whatever you want it to be." Kame flashed him a smile and waved the sunglasses. "Thanks for these."
Then he vanished.
Jin swore when he realised why he'd been thanked for the sunglasses. Kame, damn his little green shell, had copied his Accessorise routine.