Chapter VII

"He tells me that the King by name, with all his dignities,
is prayed for by them that they call Fanatiques,
as heartily and powerfully as in any of the other churches
that are thought better: and that, let the King think what he will,
it is them that must helpe him in the day of warr."
-- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, November 9, 1663

Taro took his time walking back to his apartment, running the night over and over through his head in order to second-guess everything that happened. His conclusion was that everything had gone perfectly, although that "golly" had been almost too much.

He booted his Navi when he got come and checked his e-mail. There was a piece of spam from Tachibana; the first step in one of their security scans. It was an encouraging sign, because the one that started with the spam was the one they reserved for idiots.

Sure enough, he found that his public webspace had been hacked and his online class notes had been copied. The security measures he had put in place looked like unmodified over-the-counter software, but in fact were designed to track intruders rather then stop them.

Taro next turned to the MAPU system. The hologram of that young woman made it clear that there was a security hole, and before long he had found it. Like most back doors, it had been installed by whichever disgruntled Tachibana programmer had been assigned to write the software in the first place.

The hidden portion of the software was well designed, and soon Taro was watching the comings and goings of the lobby at Tachibana Tower, thanks to its MAPU's. This then was Reika's "silver lining". He was sorely tempted to try to find out what was happening to Reika at that moment, but knew the security would be too high for him to go in unprepared and undetected. He reluctantly detached from the system. While he had been doing this, he had received another e-mail, from "Lain".

"5-P is an elegant work", the mail began, paying him the highest complement anyone could give a programmer. "Like a sonata, all of one piece, and that one piece is the universal door. P.S. I was your second visitor tonight. P.P.S. That tie has got to go."

An e-mail message from his mysterious benefactor. The name was just as devoid of meaning to him as her appearance. Although on second thought she seemed almost familiar. Maybe she was wearing a public-domain skin, one designed to make her as unmemorable-looking as possible.

Whoever she was, she was good, he had to admit that. Transmitting e-mail without a server in your address is certainly possible, but very hard to pull off. He casually tried to trace the e-mail, and found that it had been transmitted by his own mail server and somehow routed not to enter the Wired. Obviously she had read the full 5-P algorithm located in the private sector of his web server, but it took a full hour for him to find her signature in the access logs. Her tracks looked like the footprints of an ant beside the pachyderm prints of Tachibana's brute-level hack.

Taro had to know who this Lain person was--she truly understood the 5-P, giving her the power to destroy his plans. He started writing a reply to her e-mail, but hers spontaneously erased itself. He tried to track it down and found no signs, a move so tachibanian that it made him even more nervous. He therefore started a new e-mail, having no idea how it would deliver itself without a server name.

"Thank you for the compliment," he wrote. "You have me at an advantage: you attend my presentation and understand my work better than anyone in a matter of minutes, yet I know nothing of you. May I see your resume?" He sat there looking over his words. If she was a typical hacker, this should generate hundreds of words in response.

Taro's new mail signal went off. It was from Lain, and Taro was flabbergasted to see that it was in response to his not-yet sent draft.

"I'm not interested in recognition," it read. "As for the implied question, I was there because I've been keeping track of you, and I was curious why you would throw away your life for a career so unsuited to your talents. The 5-P was a surprise, and I'm not surprised often.

"To continue your line of questioning, I was interested in you because I needed someone at the university I could trust with those memory stores. At first, I wasn't sure of you. You had changed. The hacker community today thinks of you as a sell-out or worse, washed-up."

Taro resisted the temptation to talk back to an e-mail message and kept reading.

"Now that I know what you have been doing, and understand why you have lived your life the way you have, it appears to me that you are holding back. Perhaps you have lost sight of your abilities. Without my help you would not have succeeded tonight, and you should not have needed my help. You must remember who you once were, and realize that you are still the same person."

Taro snorted in disgust. Another fan of the good old days, he thought. It seems they all project their own fantasies onto me.

"So have you changed? I think you could have taken down the Knights yourself, once upon a time, even if you had never received that KIDS Technology expose."

Taro's jaw dropped. No one knew about that message, certainly not a teenage girl. Who are you?! he silently demanded.

"Well," the e-mail stated in its final paragraph, "suffice it to say that I do trust you, and if you give me time, I will try to justify your trust in me. Tachibana is releasing Reika and Arisu as you are reading this. It will take most of tomorrow for the drugs to wear off, and they must be drug free for their memories to be safely restored. Don't bother visiting either one of them, as they are being watched. I'll write you again with additional instructions when the time is right."

Taro sat in his chair with his chin in his hand, trying to put all the pieces together by the light of the Navi, and determined not to sit still and let the mistakes of twenty-five years ago play themselves out all over again. He still had no idea why Tachibana had taken Reika, and then returned her (was this last Lain's doing?). He also didn't trust this Lain, not entirely, and he wasn't going to passively wait for her to explain to him what was going on. She told him not to visit Reika tomorrow. Well, he'd find someone else to see.