NOTE: Techno-babble alert after the elevator scene!
Chapter 3:
Everyone pretends to be someone they aren't. This may not necessarily be a bad thing.
The Little Teenaged Geek (not that he would know anything)
The child grimaced at the canister of wax that his parent was holding out to him. "Why must I wear it?"
"This planet has a great deal more water on it than ours, child. Our skins were not built to deal with water; you must cover yourself with this gel so that your skin will be watertight." The child mewed in disgust. Realizing that the child would try to come up with loopholes to avoid covering himself completely, the parent added, "And cover your entire skin with it. If there is a place where you would not like to have the gel, that is probably also a place where you would not enjoy chafing."
"Can't I just stay away from any water I see?"
"No: even the water that is in vapor form in their atmosphere is enough to irritate our skin."
Shocked, the child asked, "How much of this planet is covered with water!"
"Nearly three-fourths of its surface."
The child's head spun as he smeared the gel into his fur. "How can any world have that much water?"
"It is not for us to judge how The Great Artisan made the worlds. Only prepare yourself so that you---you missed a spot.
"Ah…and, there is one final thing." The parent held up a cube-shaped object that the child had never seen before. "You are to hold this in your pocket."
"It will poke me if I put it in my pocket!"
"It may, but we could be searched by a customs officer en route. You will have less chance of being found with it than I. You are to have the cube in your pocket and I will have you in my pocket. If we do meet an officer, I will tell him that you are asleep and you are to act as such."
"Why would a customs officer bother with a scientist like you?"
The parent sighed. "If I tell the officer that you're asleep, he may not search my pocket, and he will hopefully not search your pocket."
"You didn't answer my question: what would a customs patrol be doing, worrying about you, and what is this cube?"
The parent's eyes dilated, which was a sign of his race crying. "I must not tell you, my child."
Biyomon was a natural actor, and she'd been the company mascot for Takenouchi Textile Corporation ever since it had started. But this was not good news: ever since the office building had been built, Biyomon's dressing room had been on floor 9. Now they had moved it to a new place. "Where, did you say?" she asked.
"Floor 11," Sora answered.
"Great. I have to take the elevator some more."
"Why do you hate elevators so much?"
"It's the waiting and the flakiness," Biyomon answered. "Besides, I have a better ay of getting up and down. It's called flying."
"I wouldn't fly out there," Sora said, motioning towards the window. It was raining outside.
"Me either. It's not being wet that I mind so much as the fact that the door boys won't let you back in without toweling off first."
"That would hurt with your feathers, wouldn't it?"
"You're telling me! …And it doesn't do much for my appearance; looking like a dead feather duster isn't fun, either."
Sora giggled. "Your commercial is on in a half-hour. I'd get ready if I were you."
Biyomon gulped. "Here goes," she sighed, pressing the elevator button.
It took a full two minutes of waiting (which felt like an hour) before the elevator arrived. When it did, a passenger inside asked, "Going down?"
"Up, actually," Biyomon answered, as politely as she could force herself to appear. As soon as the elevator was away, she pressed the elevator button again, hoping the next elevator would be going up.
It was going up, but there was a problem: a huge, two-story insectoid digimon, Kuwagamon, had crammed himself into the elevator, and there was no more room. "This one's kinda full," he grunted.
"I'll wait for the next one," Biyomon sighed. As soon as the door was shut, Biyomon let out an angry chirp. She banged her head against the elevator button. She waited two minutes, then three, and then her patience ran out. "That's it! I'll just take the stairs."
"Hold it!" she heard someone behind her shout. "There's an automatic alarm rigged to those stairs! If you open that door, the fire alarms in the building will go off!"
Biyomon let out another angry chirp. "There's only one option left…" Biyomon walked to the window. She muttered to herself, "I'm sick of these rules! If they don't want me drip-drying over the carpets, they shouldn't make it so tough to get up a few floors!" She propped open the window and began flying up to the eleventh floor. "Now this is the way to get up floors! I love the smell of rain in the morning…" She started singing to herself as though she were in the shower, and she might as well have been for how wet she was getting. But there was a problem: it was only possible to open the windows from the inside. That foiled her plans to get to the eleventh floor from the outside.
"Great," Biyomon muttered. She began flying down to the window she had used as a door, and she found two things: first of all, there was a completely empty elevator that was going up, and it was waiting for her. Secondly, someone was about to shut the window.
Biyomon flew at top speed towards the window, and she yelled, "NooooOOOOO!" She was too late: PAFF! She smacked into the window, scared the pants off the guy who had shut it, and began falling towards the ground below. She had enough time to slow her fall and avoid further injury, but now the only way in was through the front door. Not good.
She hoped she'd be able to just walk in anyway, without having to towel off. But this was not her day: the Gotsumon doorman insisted, "I'm sorry miss, but you're going to have to towel off."
"You know that it hurts digimon with feathers to dry off like that!"
"I'm sorry, but we don't allow soaking wet digimon into the building. We don't want mildew in the carpets!"
Biyomon tweeted loudly. "I am the CEO's personal friend! She won't be happy to hear that you forced me to hurt myself!"
"Uh-huh…"
"I have a commercial to do in ten minutes!"
"Then you'd better start drying off!"
Biyomon felt defeated, and decided to try it the doorman's way. She picked up a towel and began rubbing herself off. She only moved the towel in the direction of her feathers, and she ended up making herself look like a seal, having matted down her feathers so much. The seal-look was so five-years-ago, so she fluffed up her feathers a little as she walked away. Unfortunately, there was still rainwater beneath her feathers.
"I'm sorry, miss, but you'll have to come back here and finish the job!"
Biyomon tried to ignore him, but he was savvier than that: he grabbed another towel, tackled her, and dried her off himself. There was a lot of pain involved in this, and the two digimon turned into a rolling ball of rocks, pink feathers, and angry tweets of pain.
Biyomon finally ended up at the door to her dressing room, and she was a wreck: her feathers were totally out of place, her beak was a little bent, and she was breathing heavily. A horrified director's go-fer asked, "What on earth happened to you?"
"You know how they say that rain is good for the skin? It's not true."
"But---but---you're on the air in thirty seconds!"
"Believe me, I'm not!"
The student Fernson listened closely to the lecture---not for any tidbits of new information about the Digiworld, but for tidbits about what information was kept where in the Jacqueline-Keeves Institute. He was there to make a career for himself, but not in research.
Just to keep himself inconspicuously inconspicuous, he occasionally decided to raise his hand and ask a question. "Professor Izumi, why is it that only data from the older, pre-fiber-optic computers at all affects the Digiworld?"
"Didn't I explain that? It's because it's in the older-style, electric-circuit and magnetic disk storage devices that small magnetic fields would occur, and those fields are what interact with the earth's magnetosphere, and the magnetosphere transforms those smaller fields into matter and energy, and, in more complex ways, the digimon. But the fiber-optic computers and cubic salt data cells don't work that way; they work with light and the weak force in the nucleus of atoms instead of electrical circuits, so they don't interact with the Earth's magnetic field."
The question got Fernson a lot of cold stares. He should know about that; it was basic knowledge in that class. (Scary thought that such big words would be basic anywhere, isn't it?) To avoid looking like a numbskull (and thus, look inconspicuously conspicuous, which was a bit different from what he wanted), Fernson added, "I'm sorry, the wrong question came out. What I meant to ask was 'Can the magnetic fields on Earth alter areas outside the atmosphere of the Digiworld?' "
"The answer to your question is no. The magnetic field can only reflect the data back into the Digiworld's pseudo-dimension within a certain boundary. So, actually, the Digiworld's universe is only about as large as the planet."
"Is it possible for matter to exist outside the planet?"
"No. As far as we can tell, space itself ceases to exist outside the planet's atmosphere, and a few rockets that we have attempted to launch out from the atmosphere have been annihilated when they exited the exosphere."
Hoping that the social issue of "being involved" had been satisfied for the day, Fernson kept his mouth shut for the rest of the lecture. Not a great deal was new or exciting, so he decided to try something else to get information: he'd place an eavesdropping bug on Prof. Izumi's shoulder. That'd get him some information. Hopefully, what he was looking for would be part of what he was about to learn…
After the lecture was done and students had begun to file out of the auditorium, Fernson stepped forward to ask Prof. Izumi another question: "Professor, is it at all possible---let me get that spider off your shoulder---" Fernson quickly slipped the eavesdropping bug on Izzy's shoulder.
"There's a spider on my shoulder?"
"Not anymore. Is it possible that there is matter beyond the spatial boundaries of the Digiworld, but that we cannot access?"
"Not to the best of our knowledge."
"Then why can we see stars from the Digiworld at night?"
"That has to do with the way the Digiworld started: the common theory is that a time anomaly intersected the Earth's magnetic field in prehistoric times. That did two things: it triggered the birth of the pseudo-dimension, and it caused the magnetic field to start absorbing light and heat that was coming into it. The light that you see from the moon and the stars and the sun in the Digiworld is actually the light that it absorbed in prehistory. That light getting absorbed and not making it to Earth caused one of our ice ages, according to the theory."
"I see."
"Since the magnetosphere obviously stopped taking in heat and light at some point, we don't know how long the light will keep coming in, but our best guess is five million years. And, as long as there are computers, I suppose we can program new sources of heat and light for the Digiworld, even if the light and heat from the sky run out."
"Thank you, professor." Fernson turned away and exited the classroom. He thought to himself, now…all I have to do is listen and wait...
Fernson's waiting was interrupted: his communications antenna was receiving a broadcast from his colonel: "We have an interesting report, lieutenant. We have heard that an enemy ship is headed for your position. We believe that they aim to jeopardize our mission. You must disable the ship and prevent it from reaching Earth."
Fernson was shocked. This was an unexpected move, but he knew what he had to do…