Disclaimer: Digimon does not belong to me. Takeru Takaishi, Hikari Yagami
and all other related characters are used without permission and again, do
not belong to me; the plot however belongs to me and is not to be copied
without my permission. All violence in this fiction is strictly for
entertainment purposes and the author is not responsible for any undesired
events that might be caused by this fiction
Author's note: All names used here are from the Japanese version. Therefore, any name change is NOT me screwing up continuity, and if my political ideas offend you somewhat, well, it's a democratic world.
Evening sun played over the forest surrounding the small residence. The tall, willowy trees cast dark shapes onto the thin pristine layers of frozen liquid covering the ground.
On a closer look, one might have noticed something odd about one of the whispering shadows cast by the mighty giants. One might have noticed, for example, the disturbing patch of darkness that seemed to eerily stand out from the rest. One might have wondered why the rays of the fading sun were broken and flickering when coming into contact with this curiosity. One might even, if one paid close enough attention, notice a dim whisper of blond gold, flickering and catching the disappearing rays of the sun, then disappearing back into the uneasy darkness.
Nobody did, though. He was too good for that.
The light absorbing fabric--courtesy of the Powers That Be at Black Wing-- protected him against discovery, but one might be surprised were the cloak to be taken off. His almost innocent features betrayed no sign of his chosen profession, and indeed, one would almost mistake him for a naive youth were it not for the cold look in his azure blue eyes. They held no emotion in them. After all, it was what he had been trained for. The few wispy strands of gold that fell over his eyes traced back to his head of silky, smooth golden threads that he kept tied neatly in a ponytail.
He watched silently, observing the activity in the house.
A beam of golden light caught the small pendant hung on his neck, left partially unprotected by the cloak. The pendant was the closest thing he had to an emotional attachment; it had been the only thing from a broken past and a shattered childhood. Not that it bothered him, though. He had long learned to control his emotions, and any pain he might have felt at the loss of an identity was buried under cold training.
From where he was crouching he could see the house rather well, considering that it was near night and he was more than 200 meters away. Strapped to his back were his Winchester and a spare round of ammunition, but he knew he wouldn't need to use them too much. Weapons had been banned in both Korea and Japan ever since the Third World War, and Black Wing were allowed to purchase firearms only because of the large amount of money paid to the National Police Reserve to turn both eyes away.
Mentally he traced out a path to the house. Speed and stealth was everything; it was important that he cut their phone and power lines before he was spotted. He wasn't worried about losing the element of surprise; he was more than able of taking on all of them. Still, it was one of his key principles that he never gave away an advantage to the enemy and he wasn't intending on breaking it now.
His black cloak trailed behind him as he ran. His black outfit did well to serve him; in the darkness of the night he looked nothing more than a shadow crawling among the woods surrounding the structure.
He slowed down his footsteps as he neared the building .The back door was at the kitchen and thankfully, nobody was anywhere near it.
A wire fence surrounded the house, and it stood a good half meter above him. He could, of course, climb over it, but if there was one principle he adhered to, it was that he was efficient in everything he did. Climbing over that fence would take too much time, and would also expose him for much longer than he liked.
He cast his glance on a tall, sturdy looking oak gazing down impassively at the block of wood it guarded. The tree was thick enough. Maybe............
Without prior warning he began sprinting towards the tall pillar, deftly stepping up the oak in a display of grace that was nearly catlike in its agility. He placed one foot against the trunk firmly and pushed.
The ground rushed up at him as he fell, at the last moment he stretched out his arms and placed both of them firmly on the floor, sinking hard while at the same time uncurling the rest of his well-toned body in a graceful curve. He landed his feet on the floor and dropped into a frog stance.
From where he was standing he could hear voices, though they were indistinct and muffled. Ignoring the voices for a moment, he turns his attention to the wires buried in the ground beneath him and set to work.
The door was electronically locked; Kenta had been competent enough to glean that much information. Forcing the door open was no good, it would trigger a silent alarm and police would be swarming the place in an instant, likewise the glass of the windows. They were wired for violent vibrations.
He had expected this much. After all, the target was doing important biological research here.
It was still ridiculously easy though.
He removed a small file from his belt; the kind one would use to file one's nails after cutting. He dug around for a while, and fished out two thick blue wires. Using the file he systematically stripped off the outside insulation, exposing copper. Next, he dug a hole three inches away and pulled out three black wires. He did the same as he had just now and connected the two with jumper cables.
So much for security, thought the man as he stood up. Both the lock and the vibration sensors had worked by closing a circuit that, the respective rules had been broken, would activate the alarm. What he had effectively done was loop the system back onto itself. An earthquake could shake the house off its foundations and a nuclear missile could have smashed into the door and the security systems would still be registering Snoozetown.
He made his way to the door where the phone lines laid exposed in a small panel by the door. He pulled them out (this sort of thing wasn't even a challenge) and made his way in.
The troubled scientist stared at the shapes beneath the microscope, willing his brain to make some sense of the twisting strands of deoxyribonucleic acid laid out beneath the lenses, desperately seeking the final secret they held.
He was so close to completion. So close. Yet the short distance that separated him from his dream seemed to be blocked with solid titanium, dense and impenetrable. He had been working for 4 days now with minimal rest, yet those 96 hours of restless labour yielded no results. Try as he might, he could not unlock the final door that stood between him and his goal.
Artificial Intelligence. The ultimate goal of computer scientists all around the world since the digital revolution of the 80s. Once it had been thought to be impossible, a theory proven by dozens, if not hundreds, of papers pointing out the sheer computing power required to even make a simple choice like lunch. To make a replication of the power of the human brain on silicon seemed impossible.
All that changed in 2003, when professors at Intel discovered a manner of using electricity to carry out the jobs usually done by silicon transistors. For the first time an unlimited amount of computing power, albeit raw and infantile, was available to the world. 3 years later, in 2006, the first organic computer was introduced, using the complicated bioelectrical system of the body to generate almost instantaneous transition. The same system you used to raise up your hand in class was used to render a electro magnetically bound plasma beam cutting through a body on your computer screen.
The government first came knocking on his door on 2010, just after the Third World War when America had, citing terrorist threats, attacked and invaded Saudi Arabia and Israel. Global outrage at the incompetence of the United Nations had set off a chain reaction with Japan, South Korea, France and Iran jumping to the aid of Saudi Arabia and Israel and Britain, Germany, and Italy jumping to America's aid. For the first time in history there was no clear victor, with both sides suffering great losses and the city-nation of Singapore innocently attacked by Iran for being pro-America. Even more terrifying than that was the first usage of the gamma bomb, a basically self-perpetuating weapon that used the energy of the decaying nucleus matter of its core to perpetuate even more decay. Maximally it could have decimated an entire peninsula, though of course nothing like that had happened. The war had ended with 2 billion dead and 50 billion US dollars lost.
Japan, reeling from the blow of the heavy-artificially inflated US dollar desperately needed a brilliant new advance in science to bring the sinking yen up. With most of the world's computers coming from Asia and Japan being the world's technology hub by then, spending research on artificial intelligence seemed the obvious choice.
Which was where he came in. Although he had not been to Intel before and the DNA processor was still a prototype, he knew enough about recombinant DNA technology and had studied enough computer science to know sufficiently how to build one, and, more relevantly to the point, how to use that technology to create, for the first time in history, something that could think for itself without having to take anything from his testicles.
Or at least that was what it was supposed to be. Frustratingly, he still could not find that missing link. If only..........
Angrily he drove his fist into the oak table he did his experiments on. It was a good table, strong and sturdy, so nothing jumped, although a few beakers containing cytosine quivered. Wearily he placed his face in between his hands, trying to revive his brain.
This is getting me nowhere.
Tiredly he got up and headed for the kitchen. Maybe a coffee break would wake him up.
He advanced steadily, careful not to knock anything over or come into contact with any light. While the light-absorbing fabric afforded him some degree of protection against discovery, it was not going to make him invisible under a full light. Indeed, a patch of darkness in a spread of light would be, quite frankly, ridiculously conspicuous.
Step, step, sidestep- using his ears instead of his eyes. He had long trained himself to not to trust his eyes, and even longer trained himself to translate the sonic waves bouncing around a room into visual images, a skill that served him well in darkness.
Step, step, sidestep-- the long slightly curved blade strapped to his back. It was of a strange nature, a sword that seemed neither of European descent nor Asian workmanship. The man who had gave it to him had said that it had seen more blood than the Nile had seen water, an exaggerated simile, no doubt, but he doubted that the man would dare to lie. After all, staring down a barrel of a AK wasn't exactly conducive to lying.
He advanced steadily, the small pendant hung on a chain around his neck shaking with every small movement. It was the only thing he had from his childhood, holding bits and pieces of fleeting conversations and flying blurs. It was the closest thing he allowed to an emotional attachment, and like the sword, it was old and archaic, of a mysterious heritage, It was somewhat like a diamond shaped pendant, carved from turquoise. Floating in the middle, like a holographic projection, was a shape somewhat like a rising meteor, golden yellow that seemed to glow.
Step, step, sidestep--
Time to finish the job.
The bespectacled young man took a deep swig of the coffee, letting out a sigh as the liquid slid down his throat.
He wasn't a man given to musing about the past, considering that his work afforded little free time. But a man was, after all, only what he was, and it did a little good to travel down the dusty dirt paths leading into the corners of his mind.
When he had first announced his decision to take up science he had shocked everyone who knew him. After all, science had been his worst subject at school, and having blown up the lab more than once, it came as no surprise to his friends to hear his parents worrying for his life. Indeed, the choice had mystified all but a group of people who knew the real reason behind his choice.
His mind drifted to his childhood, and the people in them. After the event had happened, all records of it had mysteriously disappeared, and eventually it was dismissed as mass hysteria. Only him and a select few-The Chosen Children—had known what had truly happened.
He fingered the orange pendant that hung around his neck. It was not the original one, of course—that had been shattered—but a souvenir, a....mark to remember their world by. Sometimes he even----
He spun around, his mass of disheveled brown hair spinning around behind him. He frowned.
Strange. He thought he had seen a dark shape dart past at the edge of the room...ah well. Must have been his imagination.
He turned back to his coffee—
Only to encounter a gleaming blade, almost glowing in the dimness of the room.
"Oh shit."
He wasn't surprised by the response. It was a favorite among his victims, and most of the time it was followed by desperate pleading, hysterical attempts to fight back among the braver ones. Of course, they never did succeed.
He looked back at the man before him, seated calmly, almost as he was awaiting the release of his child from school while having a drink.
"You've come for the computer?" enquired the man. Not calmness amended the assassin. Fatigue.
"Yes," he said. There was no point in letting him know that his life would be taken along with the technology he was working on. More convenient to let him think he was going to get out of him intact and stab him when he was least expecting it.
"Its not finished."
"Doesn't matter. Our scientists will finish the job." Which was, in a matter of speaking, true to a certain extent.
"I'm the only one with the knowledge to complete it."
The assassin looked back at the man again, cocking a golden eyebrow. Interesting, this man. So sure in his knowledge, certain in his data...
Like someone he had once known....
He blinked. What was that about?
He cast another eye at the disheveled man in front of him. "Oh, what the heck." He thought.
Wouldn't kill to give him some more time.
He leaned back onto the table, forming a curious deformation of light. "Fine then. Finish it."
This is my first fic, please be gentle with the reviews, constructive critism and reviews even flames are welcome. The next chapter will be out soon.
Author's note: All names used here are from the Japanese version. Therefore, any name change is NOT me screwing up continuity, and if my political ideas offend you somewhat, well, it's a democratic world.
Evening sun played over the forest surrounding the small residence. The tall, willowy trees cast dark shapes onto the thin pristine layers of frozen liquid covering the ground.
On a closer look, one might have noticed something odd about one of the whispering shadows cast by the mighty giants. One might have noticed, for example, the disturbing patch of darkness that seemed to eerily stand out from the rest. One might have wondered why the rays of the fading sun were broken and flickering when coming into contact with this curiosity. One might even, if one paid close enough attention, notice a dim whisper of blond gold, flickering and catching the disappearing rays of the sun, then disappearing back into the uneasy darkness.
Nobody did, though. He was too good for that.
The light absorbing fabric--courtesy of the Powers That Be at Black Wing-- protected him against discovery, but one might be surprised were the cloak to be taken off. His almost innocent features betrayed no sign of his chosen profession, and indeed, one would almost mistake him for a naive youth were it not for the cold look in his azure blue eyes. They held no emotion in them. After all, it was what he had been trained for. The few wispy strands of gold that fell over his eyes traced back to his head of silky, smooth golden threads that he kept tied neatly in a ponytail.
He watched silently, observing the activity in the house.
A beam of golden light caught the small pendant hung on his neck, left partially unprotected by the cloak. The pendant was the closest thing he had to an emotional attachment; it had been the only thing from a broken past and a shattered childhood. Not that it bothered him, though. He had long learned to control his emotions, and any pain he might have felt at the loss of an identity was buried under cold training.
From where he was crouching he could see the house rather well, considering that it was near night and he was more than 200 meters away. Strapped to his back were his Winchester and a spare round of ammunition, but he knew he wouldn't need to use them too much. Weapons had been banned in both Korea and Japan ever since the Third World War, and Black Wing were allowed to purchase firearms only because of the large amount of money paid to the National Police Reserve to turn both eyes away.
Mentally he traced out a path to the house. Speed and stealth was everything; it was important that he cut their phone and power lines before he was spotted. He wasn't worried about losing the element of surprise; he was more than able of taking on all of them. Still, it was one of his key principles that he never gave away an advantage to the enemy and he wasn't intending on breaking it now.
His black cloak trailed behind him as he ran. His black outfit did well to serve him; in the darkness of the night he looked nothing more than a shadow crawling among the woods surrounding the structure.
He slowed down his footsteps as he neared the building .The back door was at the kitchen and thankfully, nobody was anywhere near it.
A wire fence surrounded the house, and it stood a good half meter above him. He could, of course, climb over it, but if there was one principle he adhered to, it was that he was efficient in everything he did. Climbing over that fence would take too much time, and would also expose him for much longer than he liked.
He cast his glance on a tall, sturdy looking oak gazing down impassively at the block of wood it guarded. The tree was thick enough. Maybe............
Without prior warning he began sprinting towards the tall pillar, deftly stepping up the oak in a display of grace that was nearly catlike in its agility. He placed one foot against the trunk firmly and pushed.
The ground rushed up at him as he fell, at the last moment he stretched out his arms and placed both of them firmly on the floor, sinking hard while at the same time uncurling the rest of his well-toned body in a graceful curve. He landed his feet on the floor and dropped into a frog stance.
From where he was standing he could hear voices, though they were indistinct and muffled. Ignoring the voices for a moment, he turns his attention to the wires buried in the ground beneath him and set to work.
The door was electronically locked; Kenta had been competent enough to glean that much information. Forcing the door open was no good, it would trigger a silent alarm and police would be swarming the place in an instant, likewise the glass of the windows. They were wired for violent vibrations.
He had expected this much. After all, the target was doing important biological research here.
It was still ridiculously easy though.
He removed a small file from his belt; the kind one would use to file one's nails after cutting. He dug around for a while, and fished out two thick blue wires. Using the file he systematically stripped off the outside insulation, exposing copper. Next, he dug a hole three inches away and pulled out three black wires. He did the same as he had just now and connected the two with jumper cables.
So much for security, thought the man as he stood up. Both the lock and the vibration sensors had worked by closing a circuit that, the respective rules had been broken, would activate the alarm. What he had effectively done was loop the system back onto itself. An earthquake could shake the house off its foundations and a nuclear missile could have smashed into the door and the security systems would still be registering Snoozetown.
He made his way to the door where the phone lines laid exposed in a small panel by the door. He pulled them out (this sort of thing wasn't even a challenge) and made his way in.
The troubled scientist stared at the shapes beneath the microscope, willing his brain to make some sense of the twisting strands of deoxyribonucleic acid laid out beneath the lenses, desperately seeking the final secret they held.
He was so close to completion. So close. Yet the short distance that separated him from his dream seemed to be blocked with solid titanium, dense and impenetrable. He had been working for 4 days now with minimal rest, yet those 96 hours of restless labour yielded no results. Try as he might, he could not unlock the final door that stood between him and his goal.
Artificial Intelligence. The ultimate goal of computer scientists all around the world since the digital revolution of the 80s. Once it had been thought to be impossible, a theory proven by dozens, if not hundreds, of papers pointing out the sheer computing power required to even make a simple choice like lunch. To make a replication of the power of the human brain on silicon seemed impossible.
All that changed in 2003, when professors at Intel discovered a manner of using electricity to carry out the jobs usually done by silicon transistors. For the first time an unlimited amount of computing power, albeit raw and infantile, was available to the world. 3 years later, in 2006, the first organic computer was introduced, using the complicated bioelectrical system of the body to generate almost instantaneous transition. The same system you used to raise up your hand in class was used to render a electro magnetically bound plasma beam cutting through a body on your computer screen.
The government first came knocking on his door on 2010, just after the Third World War when America had, citing terrorist threats, attacked and invaded Saudi Arabia and Israel. Global outrage at the incompetence of the United Nations had set off a chain reaction with Japan, South Korea, France and Iran jumping to the aid of Saudi Arabia and Israel and Britain, Germany, and Italy jumping to America's aid. For the first time in history there was no clear victor, with both sides suffering great losses and the city-nation of Singapore innocently attacked by Iran for being pro-America. Even more terrifying than that was the first usage of the gamma bomb, a basically self-perpetuating weapon that used the energy of the decaying nucleus matter of its core to perpetuate even more decay. Maximally it could have decimated an entire peninsula, though of course nothing like that had happened. The war had ended with 2 billion dead and 50 billion US dollars lost.
Japan, reeling from the blow of the heavy-artificially inflated US dollar desperately needed a brilliant new advance in science to bring the sinking yen up. With most of the world's computers coming from Asia and Japan being the world's technology hub by then, spending research on artificial intelligence seemed the obvious choice.
Which was where he came in. Although he had not been to Intel before and the DNA processor was still a prototype, he knew enough about recombinant DNA technology and had studied enough computer science to know sufficiently how to build one, and, more relevantly to the point, how to use that technology to create, for the first time in history, something that could think for itself without having to take anything from his testicles.
Or at least that was what it was supposed to be. Frustratingly, he still could not find that missing link. If only..........
Angrily he drove his fist into the oak table he did his experiments on. It was a good table, strong and sturdy, so nothing jumped, although a few beakers containing cytosine quivered. Wearily he placed his face in between his hands, trying to revive his brain.
This is getting me nowhere.
Tiredly he got up and headed for the kitchen. Maybe a coffee break would wake him up.
He advanced steadily, careful not to knock anything over or come into contact with any light. While the light-absorbing fabric afforded him some degree of protection against discovery, it was not going to make him invisible under a full light. Indeed, a patch of darkness in a spread of light would be, quite frankly, ridiculously conspicuous.
Step, step, sidestep- using his ears instead of his eyes. He had long trained himself to not to trust his eyes, and even longer trained himself to translate the sonic waves bouncing around a room into visual images, a skill that served him well in darkness.
Step, step, sidestep-- the long slightly curved blade strapped to his back. It was of a strange nature, a sword that seemed neither of European descent nor Asian workmanship. The man who had gave it to him had said that it had seen more blood than the Nile had seen water, an exaggerated simile, no doubt, but he doubted that the man would dare to lie. After all, staring down a barrel of a AK wasn't exactly conducive to lying.
He advanced steadily, the small pendant hung on a chain around his neck shaking with every small movement. It was the only thing he had from his childhood, holding bits and pieces of fleeting conversations and flying blurs. It was the closest thing he allowed to an emotional attachment, and like the sword, it was old and archaic, of a mysterious heritage, It was somewhat like a diamond shaped pendant, carved from turquoise. Floating in the middle, like a holographic projection, was a shape somewhat like a rising meteor, golden yellow that seemed to glow.
Step, step, sidestep--
Time to finish the job.
The bespectacled young man took a deep swig of the coffee, letting out a sigh as the liquid slid down his throat.
He wasn't a man given to musing about the past, considering that his work afforded little free time. But a man was, after all, only what he was, and it did a little good to travel down the dusty dirt paths leading into the corners of his mind.
When he had first announced his decision to take up science he had shocked everyone who knew him. After all, science had been his worst subject at school, and having blown up the lab more than once, it came as no surprise to his friends to hear his parents worrying for his life. Indeed, the choice had mystified all but a group of people who knew the real reason behind his choice.
His mind drifted to his childhood, and the people in them. After the event had happened, all records of it had mysteriously disappeared, and eventually it was dismissed as mass hysteria. Only him and a select few-The Chosen Children—had known what had truly happened.
He fingered the orange pendant that hung around his neck. It was not the original one, of course—that had been shattered—but a souvenir, a....mark to remember their world by. Sometimes he even----
He spun around, his mass of disheveled brown hair spinning around behind him. He frowned.
Strange. He thought he had seen a dark shape dart past at the edge of the room...ah well. Must have been his imagination.
He turned back to his coffee—
Only to encounter a gleaming blade, almost glowing in the dimness of the room.
"Oh shit."
He wasn't surprised by the response. It was a favorite among his victims, and most of the time it was followed by desperate pleading, hysterical attempts to fight back among the braver ones. Of course, they never did succeed.
He looked back at the man before him, seated calmly, almost as he was awaiting the release of his child from school while having a drink.
"You've come for the computer?" enquired the man. Not calmness amended the assassin. Fatigue.
"Yes," he said. There was no point in letting him know that his life would be taken along with the technology he was working on. More convenient to let him think he was going to get out of him intact and stab him when he was least expecting it.
"Its not finished."
"Doesn't matter. Our scientists will finish the job." Which was, in a matter of speaking, true to a certain extent.
"I'm the only one with the knowledge to complete it."
The assassin looked back at the man again, cocking a golden eyebrow. Interesting, this man. So sure in his knowledge, certain in his data...
Like someone he had once known....
He blinked. What was that about?
He cast another eye at the disheveled man in front of him. "Oh, what the heck." He thought.
Wouldn't kill to give him some more time.
He leaned back onto the table, forming a curious deformation of light. "Fine then. Finish it."
This is my first fic, please be gentle with the reviews, constructive critism and reviews even flames are welcome. The next chapter will be out soon.