Prologue: The Path to Honshū

Earth, United States of America, Universe Prime, 1998

Gzl;a gjadvao;djk; !

I smacked the keyboard with my fists, and my command prompt window sputtered gibberish in protest. I was about to slap this computer into next week.

Eighteen hours creeping down the dark backwoods of the Internet, and nobody—I mean nobody—had heard of 008-03-607.

All of this started three weeks ago, when my best friend Brent found a flat, origami swallow wedged in his binder at school. When he unfolded it, the paper showed a pencil-drawn picture of a butterfly.

If Brent were any ordinary kid, he would have thought maybe some girl was trying to flirt with him. He had a lot of that problem, and I had exactly none of it.

But Brent noticed two things about the picture. First, it was way too good to have been drawn by a kid. We're talking professional insect-sketching—if there was such a thing. Second, on the butterfly's right wing was a symbol of three interlocking circles, half-covered with spikes. He had seen it before. So had I.

"Jason. You need to come over. Now," Brent called me after he got home that day, "I got some kind of crypto-picture from them."

"What? How?" I asked. I had just popped open some frozen bagel bites, and wasn't too keen on letting them go to waste.

"They must've slipped it into my backpack. It's got their symbol, and I think there's a message in it."

I looked forlornly at my bagel bites rotating in the warm yellow glow of the microwave. How did Suite 3 get into our school? One of the teachers? A janitor? Maybe a kid's parent worked for them and told their kid to slip Brent the note.

"Give me food?" I sighed.

"I bring offerings of beef jerky and those little mini Hot Pockets."

"Regular, or those weird breakfast ones?"

"Both. Blended together into the greatest monstrosity you've ever—"

"See you in fifteen."

Our 90s weren't like most kids' 90s. I had a colorful history with, shall we say, off-the-radar organizations? Yeah, off-the-radar is good. Apparently genius kids with a knack for codes and pattern analysis were a commodity for some shady groups even back when the internet was just starting to get big.

When I was nine, I was lucky—blessed, really—to stumble across some of the good guys. Suite 3, the team with the spiky rings? They were not the good guys.

My parents didn't know my secret, and maybe never would. Brent had found out a year later, and for the last six months he had been helping me with a project called Avalon, which—well, I'll get to that later.

Anyway, sometimes things like this got dropped into our laps. It was better, safer, not to ignore them.

"Got it!" Brent said after five hours of combing through websites showing every kind of moth and butterfly you can imagine. I scarfed down a last bite of cheesy, tomato-y goodness and hopped over to peer over Brent's shoulder.

"It's a Great Purple Emperor butterfly," he said "They live in Asia."

The website showed dozens of photos of the butterfly—black-tipped wings, daisy yellow spots, and a beautiful, plum and navy sheen.

"Click on that one," I said.

When Brent zoomed in, it was a photo of the same butterfly that was in the drawing. I mean the exact same one. The only difference was, it was missing the three ring symbol. And a few dots, too. The picture had a watermark with a picture of a wheat stalk and the letters FAO.

"FAO?" I asked.

With a few keystrokes, Brent pulled up a page.

"Food and Agriculture Organization. United Nations."

"What is the UN doing with Suite Number 3?"

"They're probably not. SN-3 could have hacked the image to remove those pixels."

"Or someone else could have. Who took the picture?"

More typing.

"Doesn't say. I mean, there is, like, zero trail. Somebody doesn't want to be found."

"Or at least somebody doesn't want to be found easily."

But we did find him. Sort of. After three days of poking around sketchy forums, I got a message from an untraceable private server:

I hear you've been dieing to catch some insects. These are some of my favorites.

—The Entomologist

Entomologist. A bug scientist. Cute. Attached were three more pictures of insects: a preying mantis, a beetle, and a moth.

What. The. Heck. And how do you misspell "dying"? Either these people were geniuses in cryptology but didn't pass their spelling tests, or . . . or was the misspelling part of another code?

I could basically write a whole book on what it took to figure everything out—this guy was good—, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest version.

Brent guessed that the numbers for the missing pixels on the first butterfly photo were part of a code-breaking cipher. There was also a paper re-published by the FAO on the same day that Brent got the picture. The paper, weirdly enough, was about "aquatic insects of the Sukomo River" near a city in Japan called Hakone, which was odd because the paper had been written seven years ago. When you looked into the paper's source code, there was a place to use the butterfly photo's cipher.

We cracked the code, and almost all the numbers adjusted to become map coordinates for cities in Japan: Yokohama, Taeyama, Sakura, Tsuchiura, and a few others.

One city showed up twice: Machida—the same town the "aquatic insects" paper was published in. We figured that was important.

Another place that didn't appear on the pixel code was Fujiyoshida, a plateau town near Mt. Fuji—swanky lakeside hotels, nice views, that sort of thing. Its location was hidden in a code in the Sukomo River article itself. We added the town to our growing list of clues.

That's when things started getting a little nuts. I started getting anonymous inbox messages. Some were warnings, and some were from people trying to find out who we were.

What you're doing is dangerous, said one email, Entomology has consequences. I told him that.

Somebody else apparently thought I was part of their secret society or whatever, because they sent me a message that made absolutely no sense, but it was obviously addressed to someone who could understand it:

Confirmed. September 1, 1923, Oshima, result of sub-spatial tampering. Now facing WK event?

Oshima was an island off Japan's main island, and one of the locations on the list. When I tried to bluff a response to find out what a WK event was, I didn't get a reply.

I eventually found the original preying mantis picture online. Shortly after that, Brent found the beetle and the moth. We used the pixel code on any changes between the real pictures and the Entomologist's pictures, and we came up with a string of numbers. These numbers weren't map coordinates; they turned out to be a complicated mathematical code that took two weeks for me to solve. It coughed up a single number sequence: 008-03-607.

So here I was, three days and six boxes of bagel bites later, trying to figure out what the heck that meant. We had tried everything: product serial numbers; network connections; museum archives; talking to hacker groups. We even searched through some old vacuum cleaner sales records. I shut my computer down and tried to let my brain take a break. Sometimes that helped me figure out a problem faster.

The next day, it hit me. My class was on our weekly trip to the school library, and I was browsing through the Animorphs stories—most of which I'd already read—when I started thinking: books.

Chapter books? No, that would be silly. Science books on insects?

I looked down at the book in my hand. The Solution, the newest in the series.

That was it.

That afternoon, I practically kicked down Brent's front door. "How many of those towns in Japan have colleges in them?"

"Uh, do you knock?"

"Hurry up! I think I figured it out!"

"Okay, dad. Hold your friggin hors— Well, a lot of them do."

"Can we look up the books and other stuff they put out?"

"I can hack their libraries' electronic catalogs, yeah."

That's how we found 008-03. It was the volume and issue number of a big-time journal.

The final clue was in the Entomologist's message: the way he had spelled "dying" wrong.

It turns out, there was a Journal of Differential and Integral Equations (DIE), and a short paper in Volume 8, Issue 3 was written by someone at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. It was a paper published three years ago, and it started on page 607.

"Nailed it," said Brent, "And, whoa. This is not about bugs."

I leaned in closer. "Oh, great. It's a bunch of math."

"Not just any math," Brent popped a couple mini Hot Pockets in his mouth, "Differential and Integral Equations."

Differential and Integral Equations, indeed. So whoever these people were, they liked calculus and things with six legs. Criminal masterminds if I'd ever known them.

Later that day, we found more Japanese colleges that might be involved by connecting the dots between professors who knew each other. Two went to high school together. Some had worked on the same research projects.

Even better, some of the papers that those professors had written held the missing designs from the emperor butterfly within their the pages. Anyone not looking for them would think they were coffee splashes or problems with the copier machine.

We found ten papers with the designs: papers on gene mutations, alternate universes, all kinds of stuff. Some of the numbers in the papers looked like they might connect to the cipher, but there was no way of knowing what order they went in.

The guy who seemed like he was at the center of it all was also the one whose paper had the dots that represented Mashido. Someone named "Satoshi T." who had written this weird article on how some universes might be more imaginary than others.

I hacked in and found his AOL username, and I sent him a simple instant message:

008-03-607. I'm a fan of entomology, DNA, the time-space continuum, and integral equations. Can you teach me about the emperor butterfly?

Three days later, I got a response.

Kōtoku-in. October 3, 2 pm, JST (Japan Standard Time).

Meet by the statue of the Great Buddha.

And that was how I began my Pokémon journey.