On the other side of the world an American was opening his door to a Japanese girl in an impossibly tight dress. The sight of her made him tingle with excitement; he had not expected to see her tonight. Had she blown them off to come see him?

She pushed past him in a huff and headed straight for his kitchen, dropping her handbag on the counter as she searched the fridge.

"So no concert then?" he said, slightly disappointed by his realisation.

She turned back to him empty handed, having found no beer in the fridge.

"I can't believe they cancelled! What am I supposed to do with this dress now? This dress is a statement," she made guns with her fingers, and cute poses as she spoke, "'Bang! Kapow! Wowza! Mimi Tachikawa is ready to hang with hot guitar playing bad boys,'" her smile turned to a frown as quickly as it had appeared on her face, "but without guitar playing bad boys it's useless…"

The blond man looked her up and down with a smile on his face. He had always had a thing for Japanese girls, and boy had he lucked out when he moved back to New York. Last year, as a nineteen year-old MIT graduate, trying to find childhood acquaintances he could still relate with had been hard. He had been surprised when a friend from Tokyo had suggested he get in touch with someone he knew who had shared 'common experiences', and even more surprised when she had turned out to be so beautiful.

"Babe, that dress is anything but useless,"

"Why did they cancel anyway? The guy on the door wouldn't tell me," she asked, coming to sit down rather close to him on his couch. Her face was perfect, even when viewed from this close, and it was physically hard for him to resist the urge to take it in his hands and kiss her on those gorgeous lips. But now was not the time.

He pulled out his new laptop and did a quick search.

"It says the lead singer, a friend of his was murdered or something…"

"Hey?" she exclaimed confused, before continuing, more to herself, "But Yamato wasn't even that close to Daisuke… and they played in Boston three days ago…" she rushed over to where she had left her purse and grabbed her phone. He had heard from her about the death of one of the boys who had helped him with that rather large virus problem nine years ago. He had only known the guy for a day or two, but he had made an impression. He had been sad to hear he was no longer living, he had always felt so full of life.

"Wait, Yamato, you don't mean… you know the lead singer of the Teenage Wolves?"

"Yeah! Yamato and I go way back. I was best friends with his girlfriend before I moved here. We were like sisters…" He listened intently, Mimi barely talked about her Japanese friends, she was always too caught up in the here and now, "but then with everything that happened three years ago I stopped going back because I didn't want to be reminded… well, that and my parents lowered my allowance at the same time that airfares went up…"

He understood, he had lost his partners in that losing battle three years ago too. It had made him withdraw into his passion for computers and technology, and that had led to his online friendship with Koushiro Izumi, one of few people who were on his level intelligence-wise. Their friendship had intensified to the point where he had been set up with Mimi. Despite the fact that she had described him as 'The American Dream' when she first laid eyes on him, she had spurned any sort of physical relationship in favour of friendship and a continuation of one night stands with random strangers.

"But if your friends were going to be here why didn't you contact them, why go to all that effort to find that dress, dye your hair even pinker and turn up at the concert to surprise them, when you could have just asked them for some backstage passes?"

She looked up from her phone and gave him a defiant look with half a grin on her face.

"But where's the fun of being introduced to hot guitar playing bad boys as an old friend of Sorato's, when you could be the super-hot chick pulled from the crowd to sing a duet that makes the whole room fall in love with her!"

"Sorato? What are you talking about?" but he did not receive an answer, because the girl was back on her phone, frowning.

"A message from Takeru…?" Her face turned to ash as she read. "Koushiro…"

"What does this have to do with Koushiro…" The blond turned his attention back to his laptop at the thought of their mutual friend and looked up the string of messages from the last week that he had ignored because of his paid work.

"He's dead too…" She answered shakily.

"What?"

"Murdered…" She was holding back tears. "Wallace, I need to get back to Japan…"

He furiously read through the emails.

"So do I…"

"But…" she sniffed, "I spent all my money on concert tickets and the dress… I can't afford…"

She looked at him pointedly.

"What?" He asked.

She had her serious face on and he was not sure that he liked it.

"A couple of months ago you were at work, working very late on… that interface thing, I think it was…" The project she was referring to was an Artificial Life-like Interface that had promised to be a complete game changer in terms of the graphic interpretations of computer problems. It had been intended for use as an IT help program for business and home, fixing problems using voice recognition and logic systems that would make pineApple's Siri look like Office's Clippit. But it had developed a serious imaging fault which made it virtually unsellable. He had explained all of that to her once before but she had not seemed terribly interested.

He waited to see where she was going with her statement.

"And I asked you to come pick me up," she continued, "because I'd had a bad night out, was out of money and I didn't know who else to turn to…"

"And I did, I got in a cab and picked you up…"

"No, you got to the club on foot and hailed one, I remember,"

"You were pretty drunk, maybe you're remembering wrong,"

"Anyway, when we got to my place, you came in and we talked on the couch for a while, and you said some things that I'm sure you hoped I would forget. And the next day when I woke you up from my couch I pretended that you hadn't said anything, pretended that I didn't even know why you were there, because if I hadn't there was no way we were staying friends. I did that for you, now you have to do something for me,"

"I don't know what you mean, do what for you?"

"I don't forget anything when I drink. Believe me, I've woken up next to guys the next morning and wished I couldn't remember the night before, but I do, every time." She took a breath and he squirmed in his seat. If that were true, and she knew how he felt… "So I want to know how you managed to get to the other side of Manhattan on foot in five minutes,"

Everything was crashing in on him. She knew exactly what he saw in her, she had guessed at how powerful the Interface truly was, and if he refused to help her she would treat him just as she did all the other males who hit on her, except without the sex.

After that night he had been forced to shut the project down. Aside from the Interface being stuck looking like a paedophile's fantasy, the program itself had started self-diagnosing on its own code, becoming more and more powerful and efficient without a keystroke of input from him. If he had explained any of this to his colleagues they would have been thrilled. Artificial intelligence cracked at the ripe old age of twenty-one! They would have hailed him the next great genius of the technological era, stock in his company would have risen exponentially, he would have been rich beyond his wildest dreams.

But he would not have started the project if he had not found the bare bones of the program floating around in a lesser known sub-net. At the time he had thought that it was harmless. Koushiro had closed all of the barriers completely; there was no way the code could have come through from the other side. But when it started self-diagnosing, taking on a personality and becoming impossible to call but popping up unexpectedly 'just for a chat', he had realised that he had tapped into something that he should not have.

He had been arguing with it before Mimi called that night, telling it that it should listen to its creator and stay put so it could perform its functions as required, and it had started babbling about not having a creator, saying that it had always existed and would continue to exist forever. He had understandably decided to decommission the project then and there, and so the very next day he had carefully removed the wifi receiver from his laptop and turned it off for the last time, hoping that would keep whatever it was that he had enabled contained. For fear of what it could do he had vowed to never use the laptop again, let alone the Interface.

And now Mimi was asking him to do just that.

He stood up to walk and talk. He felt he needed to pace this problem out.

"Let's say, hypothetically, that you're wrong about what happened that night. I give you enough money to fly to Tokyo. What does that mean?"

"I'd go to Tokyo, and you would never hear from me again, because I know what you said, and I can't be friends with someone if I know they don't think about me as just a friend,"

"And if, hypothetically again, you're right about what happened and I can get you to Tokyo in the blink of an eye?"

"I would realise that I merely dreamt anything that I think you might have said, nothing would change,"

"But if what you say is true, and I think of you more than just a friend, wouldn't it be better for me to move on if the best I can do is to remain friends with you, knowing I have no chance?"

"That would be for you to decide, not me…" she took a step towards him, lightly poking him in the chest, her finger lingering there as she continued, "and I think you need to decide,"

She turned and walked back over to sit on the kitchen counter, an action which in that dress would have made George Bush confess to 9/11, had she asked him to. "What do you say?"

Never see his dream girl again because something might be dangerous? Or risk the world on the hope that the Interface was benign for continued contact with a girl he knew he had no chance with?

"I say it's too dangerous,"

"Oh," she was visibly offended.

"But screw it, let's do it anyway," She instantly perked up, rushing over to embrace him in thanks.

He looked down at her dress as she hugged him. There was no way that dress could ever be considered useless. It just remained to be seen whether it was a tool for good or evil.