The engineering lab looked just as it had when Hisoka left it. The mounds of machinery draped in white sheets pervaded the feeling of abandonment that was only somewhat relieved by his company. Though before he had made it seem as though it had been forever and a day since his last visit, Watari immediately made himself at home, going to work setting up or laying out the various things he had brought with him on the work tables and plugging in plugs.

"Here's what I want us to do," he said in the meantime, with an authority in his voice Hisoka had rarely heard. "Natsume, I want you on my laptop monitorin' progress with Security and report it back t' me. I need t' know immediately if something isn't goin' right. Think you can handle that?"

"Roger," said Natsume, smiling rakishly and saluting. He sat down in front of the laptop as Watari plugged it in and got right to work.

"Tatsumi, are the phone lines working yet?"

"Still nothing but white noise."

"Then you'll have t' contact Security via the computer. I trust your coordinatin' skills the most, so, Natsume, I'm puttin' you under Tatsumi's command." Natsume nodded in the affirmative, and Watari fixed his gaze with Tatsumi over the rim of his glasses. "I want them t' concentrate their efforts on keepin' Spock-kun in the immediate area of the engineerin' department once I reel him in. On my signal."

There was a skeptical look on the secretary's features, but if he had doubts he did not express them. He said instead, "And that will be what?"

"You'll know, you'll know," Watari said, waving over his shoulder, leaving the mass of cords and cables he had just connected for the covered islands on the floor.

"Bon!" He whipped the plastic sheet off of a couple of machines, and finding the one he wanted turned to look at Hisoka. "You're with me."

"What do you want me to do?"

"First, help me out with this thing."

He indicated the machine he was now leaning against, the plastic cover of which Hisoka pulled the rest of the way off before joining Watari. It looked at first glance like something out of an old Superman or Astroboy cartoon, like a ray gun that some mad scientist might build, with generators and haloed lightning rods surrounding an elongated, adjustable device that resembled a telescope. The hole thing was mounted on rollers, but the sheer weight of it made them almost useless, in Hisoka's opinion, as he attempted to push it where Watari wanted it.

"I want you as my back-up," Watari told him as they moved the machine closer to the bank of windows, grunting slightly with the effort. "The reibaku spell may be our best bet gettin' Spock-kun back down t' size. Just try not t' hurt him too much. He is my baby, after all. I'm countin' on your abilities."

"I'll do what I can," Hisoka said, though he couldn't make any promises; "but what about you?"

"Me?" Watari looked up from the knobs he was adjusting to meet his gaze. "I'll be the bait, of course. If it's me he wants, it's me he'll get."

Hisoka shook his head.

"What?"

"Pardon me, but I don't think we do know what we're up against. You're pretty sure that thing out there is your lost robot, and maybe it is. But even so, you said yourself it's grown while it was stuck in paperspace or whatever you call it. And it's been on a rampage all night. For all we know, that robot of yours could be what's reactivated the TVC-one-five."

Watari contemplated that. "It certainly is a possibility."

"And you think it's just going to calm down when it sees you?"

"Can't be sure until we try. But that's why I have this." And Watari patted the machine beneath them.

"Which is?"

"An EMP gun. A rather retro design, terribly outdated I'm afraid, but in those days you worked with what you had, and so we'll do now. With this baby I can channel an electromagnetic pulse wave directly at a target, thereby fryin' any electronics contained therein but sparin' those in the surroundin' area, namely the computer equipment behind us. . . . Eh, theoretically."

"Theoretically? You mean it's never been tested?"

Watari shrugged. "An appropriate occasion never really came up. Until now. But you can see why I'd rather use it as a weapon of very last resort. If I use it, I risk losing Spock-kun's original mind — assumin' any of it still exists.

"Which makes me wonder," he continued, "how we got in this situation to begin with. I don't remember actually doin' anything that could have brought this on. Somewhere along the line, it seems, we went down the rabbit hole and didn't even know it."

"Great," said Hisoka. "Is it too late to take the blue pill?"

"The what?"

"Never mind." At last, a cultural reference he could make, and no one got it. Old farts.

"I guess we'll know that soon enough," Natsume said, looking up from the computer screen. "Heads up, guys."

The two gathered around the EMP gun looked up and toward the tall windows that he indicated, and Hisoka felt a sinking feeling come over him as he saw what Natsume wanted them to. Behind the tinted windows a dark shape moved, covering almost the entire three-storey surface and blocking out the light of the moon that attempted to shine through the glass. The muffled sound of servos and pistons and the low rumbling of a heavy weight moving across the grass and concrete of the courtyard filled the engineering lab. As though drawn by an intuition of their attention, the figure slowly turned toward the lab's windows. Red lights shone down on them from a strange Picassoesque face, roving hungrily as they tried to peer through the glass in the dim light.

Watari grabbed the megaphone he had brought along and raised it before anyone quite knew what he intended or could raise any objection.

"Spock-kun!" he said excitedly into the mouthpiece. "Spock-kun, is that you? It is I, Watari Yutaka, your maker!"

Hisoka held his breath. One false move in a situation like this . . .

"Spock-kun . . . if you can hear me, give me some indication."

From the other side of the glass came a garbled murmur. Each syllable seemed an immense chore to produce, as the rudimentary consciousness fought the effects of disuse and morphology to produce a recognizable if painstakingly slow: "Se . . . n . . . se . . . i . . ."

Watari's face lit up. "Ha ha! It's him!" he told the others, who were more rattled by the fact he had received any reply at all. "If only these windows were retractable. . . ." he said to himself; and then to the machine, in a calming tone: "Yes, yes, I'm here now, Spock-kun. You're not alone anymore. You've been through a lot, ol' buddy, I know, and I apologize for that. But I want t' help you get back t' normal." He put out one hand in a gesture of compassion, as if the thing outside could see it. "Let me help you."

There was a tense moment as the lopsided and misshapen eyes of the machine swiveled nervously to find his face. It tried to speak, but the attempted words sounded alien to their ears — the frustrated sounds of an infant lacking the satisfactory vocabulary and motor skill. It did not sit well with Hisoka. It did not sit well at all. But Watari stepped forward, slowly, as toward a frightened animal.

"Watari-san—" Hisoka hissed, but he was ignored.

"It's okay," Watari was repeating — as much to the thing he claimed to be Spock-kun as to himself, it seemed. "It's all right. No need t' get upset. Let's just take this one step at a time. . . ."

"Sen . . . sei . . ." came the pained response.

"Shh, you're okay. . . . I'm going t' step outside now. . . ."

He made a motion to move toward the emergency exit, but before he could approach it the thing raised a great roar. And this time, there was little to convince Hisoka that it was anything other than a roar of rage. Watari picked up on it as well, his sense of self-preservation kicked in, and he dashed back to the side of the EMP gun. But not quite fast enough. Shadowy appendages rose in the night air, only to descend with crushing force on the wall of glass.

So much for the tearful reunion.

"Watari-san!" Tatsumi yelled in the din of shattering window panes. Though the encounter with Muraki must have exhausted him, he managed to summon the shadows from the dark corners of the engineering lab with instinctual rapidity and sent them to intercept the falling glass. They covered Watari, who crouched against the gun for cover, like an umbrella, repelling debris all around him.

A machine a stone's throw away from him, however, was not so lucky, as one of the appendages that had broken through the windows flattened it with a sickening crunch. Like the tentacles of a giant octopus they whipped about, but on close inspection the appendages appeared to be none other than patch cords that were swollen to an impossible scale. They reminded Hisoka, who watched behind his own shield, of something he had seen on the plans Natsume had shown him in the basement. But it couldn't be . . .

Could it?

Beyond, through the now open wall and over the tops of the trees, the full moon hung golden and pregnant. It bathed the courtyard and the lab in a warm light. And for the first time the foursome was able to clearly see Juuohcho's mysterious invader. Like a gargantuan metal dinosaur it loomed above them, swollen and bent over with the sheer mass of dark matter absorbed exponentially over the span of two decades. Reshaped caterpillar treads and makeshift hoofy tripod legs dragged it along drunkenly. From the head of the monster, an array of camera lenses focusing in and out and the unmistakable trapezoidal screen of a Commodore PET unit, displaying garbled lines of incomprehensible text, stared down at them. A lighted strip for a mouth that at one point would have matched the words produced by some hidden speaker flashed a chaotic, nonsensical pattern. And those swollen cables that had lashed out at the shinigami hung from the underbelly like heavy intestines, twitching with animalistic emotion. This was no ordinary machine. It was a thing alive, without question.

Completing the picture was a series of acoustic horns of various shapes and sizes protruding from its back like the spines of a porcupine or a stegosaur — precisely the devices one might use to project frequencies through space itself. It was those that filled in the final piece for Watari.

"My God," he breathed, looking up at the monster hardly recognizable as his own creation. "It's Spock-kun, all right, but . . . He's merged with the TVC-one-five!"

"We've got it right where we want it!" Tatsumi was yelling over the din to Natsume, who typed furiously away. He didn't wait for further instructions from Watari; that was as clear a signal as they came. "Tell them to reverse polarity and increase power to the shields in sections dee-four through -seven, yesterday!"

Meanwhile, Hisoka had sprung to work. He had known in the back of his mind, he had felt it, how dangerous Spock could be. Or, rather, this amalgamation of it with Watari's most awesome invention. The rage was pouring off its aura in buckets. The feeling of betrayal, the craving for vengeance. If Watari would not face the fact that this was what had become of his beloved robot and do something about it, Hisoka would. His hands flew over the controls of the EMP gun, finding the levers that moved the gun itself into position—

"Bon, what are you doing?" Watari asked him in shock. "I told you that was a weapon of last resort!"

"Why do you think I'm using it? That is not your Spock-kun out there, Watari-san!"

"Yes it is!" The passion in his voice was palpable. "He's not himself right now because the TVC-one-five is affectin' his programing. Usin' reibaku should at least separate the two entities, makin' it that much easier t' destroy the malignant one!"

He stared Hisoka down, each believing he had the right answer. Then Watari's look softened. "Look, Bon, this is no time t' butt heads. But you don't know how t' work this thing."

That at least was correct. Reluctantly, Hisoka relinquished control of the gun.

"What're we lookin' at in terms of the shield?" Watari yelled over his shoulder as he fired up the EMP generator.

"Status is sixty-percent power and rising slowly," came Natsume's reply. "Too slowly."

"It wouldn't hold something of that mass out at this rate," Tatsumi said, "let alone in!"

At that Watari swore under his breath.

Lowering his head over the controls, he failed to see Spock dragging its massive body toward the interior of the engineering lab, and inching closer toward the master on whom it wanted revenge. Hisoka saw it, however, and uttered a quick binding spell that made the machine reel as though from hitting a wall. It roared in frustration, and that was when Watari looked up, shooting an appreciative smile at Hisoka. "Way t' go, Bon."

Hisoka nodded curtly and turned back to the machine to maintain his concentration. "How about a compromise?" he said to Watari. "Hit it with a low level of EMP, just enough to stun it. Then I'll perform the reibaku."

"Sounds fair," Watari said.

But before either of them could act upon this plan, Spock killed Hisoka's spell with a renewed burst of energy from the TVC-15. The shock of it landed Hisoka on his backside, while the machine rounded and took off in the opposite direction, scuttling on its mismatched legs, and encountering only mild resistance where the shield attempted to reign it in. It headed straight for the cover of the cherry trees.

"It's no good," Tatsumi said. "There's no way Security can raise enough power to get the shield up to full output in time. Not the way the system has been damaged already. They've been working off a patch for most of the night."

"Let me see it," Watari told them. But before he disappeared, he turned to Hisoka with a serious expression, saying, "Bon, I just need one more favor from you."

"Anything."

Hisoka regretted saying that as soon as he saw the smile creep onto Watari's lips. "You know the words t' 'Zun-Doko Bushi,' don't you?"

"Y-yeah, but—" This was sounding worse by the second.

"Good." Watari pushed something into his hand. "I need you t' go up ont' the roof."

Hisoka looked down to see that the item Watari had given him was a wireless microphone. Who carried a wireless mic on his person? "Wait — Watari-san . . . What am I supposed to do with this?"

"I need you t' lure Spock-kun back this way for me," Watari told him as he sat down in the seat Natsume vacated and plugged himself, metaphorically speaking, in front of the laptop. "In the meantime, we'll see what we can do about this shield."

Hisoka's hesitation must have been obvious on his face because Watari turned to him with a sympathetic smile. "Come on, Bon. Trust me on this. I have a theory."

"Yes," Tatsumi said, rubbing a temple at the mess they were in, "you've had a lot of those lately."

"Disregarding the bust ones of course. . . ."

"I think I know where this is going," Natsume said. "We need a distraction while Watari repairs the security network, and, at the moment, you happen to be best suited for the job."

"He can repair the barrier system from here?" Hisoka asked.

"You're looking at the guy who wrote the book on it. Watari was quite a genius back then. He practically designed the system we use now single-handedly."

"Back then?" Watari clucked his tongue in offense without turning away from the screen. "That's unfair."

Natsume rolled his eyes. "But, then again," he said quieter for Hisoka's benefit, sending him a knowing wink, "Watari isn't human. Well, not really."

"Wait, what do you mean, 'not really human'? Natsume-san—"

But Watari cut him off with a curt, "Roof!"

—

It was a quick dash up three large flights of stairs to the roof of the engineering lab. From there Hisoka spied the crest of horns along the machine's back moving above the canopy of perpetually-blooming trees, like a sea monster drifting just below the waves. The breeze in his face at this height was the warm breeze of mid-summer that persisted even in the earliest hours of morning, but he felt a chill looking at the alien scene. His legs felt disconnected from his mind for a moment as they cautiously moved him out of the protective cover of the stairwell doorway.

Below him, Watari hurried between the laptop and the amplifier controlling a set of massive speakers that had been situated auspiciously around the lab. "If my theory's correct," he said as he worked, turning one of said speakers to face out the windows, "there's still a remnant of Spock-kun in that twisted shell out there. After all, he was created t' retrieve memories and form emotional connections, or at least some semblance of them. Why else would the security data show him returnin' here, of all places?"

"However," Tatsumi offered, "if he — I mean, if it reacted so negatively toward you, Watari-san, what makes you think another pleasant memory from your perspective won't be considered unpleasant by that thing?"

"Because there has t' be a reason for his comin' here now. Why t'night, Tatsumi? Why wait twenty-two years, why not ten or twenty or thirty, unless for a reason?"

He cranked the volume knob, then stopped to put his hands on his hips. "There's just one thing I don't get. Who in hell could've patched the barrier system that well in so little time?"

Natsume shrugged, while Tatsumi turned with interest back to the computer screen.

"Stroke of genius, that. . . ." Watari said aloud to himself and stared at the ceiling in thought.

Then he hurried to the laptop, opened a folder, and clicked on a file. A familiar bongo beat blasted from the speakers and shook the other two out of their thoughts. Watari grabbed the megaphone up again as it led into the jaunty first couple of bars of a brassy melody that Hisoka could not mistake for anything other than that song, the bane of his existence, the karaoke version, shaking the building beneath him as it was pounded out by an overworked stereo system.

"Okay, Bon!" Watari yelled to him. "I'm leavin' it up to you!"

"What do you mean? Watari—" He would never get his question across over the music. Hisoka growled and turned on the microphone. "What's the meaning of this? The 'Zun-Doko Bushi'? This is no time for music!"

"Just sing it!"

"You're not serious!"

"Trust me! If you sing it he will come!"

Tatsumi and Natsume regarded him with a skeptical look, but Watari assured them, "He'll come," before sitting down to the laptop once again.

"You don't actually expect me to . . . I can't—" Hisoka started to protest, but what was the use? I'm going to make sure you pay me back big time for this, Watari-san, he swore as he steeled his mind or the humiliation to follow. He had already missed the first round of zun-doko'ing and hurried to catch up with the first verse. Just don't think, he told himself: don't think about the words, don't think about how dorky you sound, just . . .

"Blown by the wind, the flower scatters," he sang into the mic, his free hand clamped over an ear; "even wet by the rain, the flower scatters/ If the flower blooms it will sometime fall/ So is the fate of the flower of lo-o-o-ove."

As he stretched out the last syllable, Hisoka leaned his weight on one leg with the note, tipping like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, just like Kiyoshi when he did his thing. He could feel his cheeks turning bright red. He couldn't believe he was doing this — and that the jaunty tune was actually starting to get to him.

Somewhere very, very deep down.

"The ramen shop across the lane . . ."

"Ba-baya," Watari cheerfully mouthed along with the backup track while he zipped through the network.

"Red are that girl's Chinese clothes/ She bats her eyes, and always adds/ An extra two or three pieces of pork."

He swung his free arm back and forth with the music as he sang, "Zun . . . zun-zu-un zun-doko." But he hardly cared how he looked any longer as he saw the machine turn beneath the cherry trees in his direction. If it had ears to perk up, it would surely have done so. By the sounds it made and the curious tilt of what Hisoka determined to be its head, it certainly seemed interested in his performance. Slowly and purposefully, it began to move toward him.

The all too short interlude between verses passed without Hisoka even realizing. An uncomfortable feeling had descended on him like that of a worm dangling on a hook.

Watari popped his head out where the wall of windows used to be. "It's workin'!" he yelled up at Hisoka. Then, when he heard nothing more coming from the young man's direction. "Well? Keep goin', Bon!"

Hisoka blinked, startled by his voice out of his stare. He came up blank. "I don't know the rest of the words!" he shouted back.

Below him, Watari reeled as though he had just hit his head on a crossbeam. "What do you mean?" he said into the megaphone, getting a nasty bit of feedback as he did so. He turned it off, cupping his hands around his mouth as Hisoka leaned over the edge of the roof to hear him. "You told me you knew the lyrics!"

"I just blanked! Sorry."

"The girl at the corner gas station . . ." Watari tried prompting him, singing along.

He might as well have just done it himself, Hisoka thought. For at that moment he had enough on his hands to worry about. Spock was staring at him just across the grass on the edge of the trees, a hungry expression on its malformed mechanical face. Hisoka wasn't sure if that was a clue he should continue his Pied Piper act, or if he would be wise to quit while he was ahead.

In the end, it didn't matter. He wasn't Watari, and Spock's memory bank could not be fooled. Emitting a howl of frustration at being hornswoggled that reverberated across the grove with primal fury, it pounced.

Hisoka turned and ran, just dodging a giant cord that came whipping down on the concrete where he had been standing. Another chased him across the rooftop, tearing up chunks of the building, following close on his heels, and he was quickly running out of roof. Then, abruptly, it ran out of force, perhaps coming up hard against the building's infrastructure. The machine turned dumbly around, moaning like a buck in autumn, looking wildly across the courtyard that it now found itself in. Maybe it had lost sight of him, or so Hisoka could only hope.

On the contrary. What he had thought to be the back end of the machine all of a sudden reared up before him. Stretching unnaturally into the air, trying desperately to reach him, a jagged horizontal line formed under the stress, creaking open to form a steel trap of a maw as black as a black hole.

Inside the building, Watari cranked up the power of the EMP gun, moving it carefully into position as its generators sparked and sizzled. Then he fired. The invisible pulse hit the monster that was Spock and the TVC-15 full on. It reeled on impact, collapsing into the form it had presented itself to them as originally in the center of the courtyard. The pavement cracked and shattered under its awesome weight as it scrunched its body as tightly together as it could, as though by doing so it could somehow protect itself from its nonphysical attacker.

While the machine was distracted, Hisoka leaped down into the courtyard. Pushing himself up off the dew-dampened ground and out of his crouch, he hurried to get out of the way, dodging cables and cords that whipped about him in the thing's feeble attempts to free itself.

"The shield is up!" Tatsumi informed them. "Generators running at eighty-eight percent. . . . At ninety, ninety-three percent and holding. Good job, Watari-san!"

Watari cracked a lopsided grin as he leaned over the gun's controls, gradually cranking up the strength of the pulse. "We're not outta the woods yet. This fella's got an unusual amount of spunk in him t' be takin' this much power and still tickin'."

Another howl broke free from Spock, and something within the machine lashed out. Black tendrils so dark they did not even reflect the moonlight burst and jutted from its body like the arms of some sinister amoeba, reaching out for the source of its suffering with such unnatural and abominable force as to almost be called demonic. Some of the tendrils flattened as they splashed against the ground, spreading like a flood of black water across the grass. And they were reaching, once again, even if this time only vicariously, for Watari.

Hisoka slapped his palms together. Intertwining his fingers, he willed himself to peace and summoned the concentration and willpower he desperately needed at that moment. Rapidly and clearly, with purpose, he chanted the words:

"Rin. Pyo. To. Sha. Kai. Ji. Retsu. Zai. Sen. . . . Reibaku!"

As soon as the final syllables had been uttered, the machine was enveloped in a forcefield of Hisoka's own making. Even its dark tendrils were retracted inside the bubble against its will.

Hisoka's breath left him for a moment. He could feel the thing's desperate attempts at resisting the barrier as though it were knocking on the skin of his own body from the inside — could hear its wordless rage toward his coworker as though it were being broadcast directly into his brain. Stubbornly he maintained his concentration, remembering the techniques against this kind of mind invasion that the chief had taught him. But he couldn't believe it had actually worked. Despite his skepticism, Hisoka had given the spell his best effort; but the implications did not sit well with him.

It meant that somewhere inside that monstrous machine there was at least one soul. Or at least something close enough to be its equivalent.

"In case you were wonderin', I expected that would happen!" Watari shouted to him across the courtyard and over the horrendous noise. "But nice recovery, Bon! What would I have done without you?"

"You would have died," came the nonchalant response.

Watari chuckled.

"Just, whatever you do, don't cross the streams!"

Hisoka looked up as he tentatively opened his hands, increasing the tension on Spock and the TVC-15. "Why? What happens?"

"Eh . . . nothing. I was only kidding." But Watari did not dwell on his allusion's falling flat. Humor did elevate one's hopes, but this was no time for him to be giving the kid a bad time. "Tatsumi!" he yelled over his shoulder.

Tatsumi hurried to his side, tilting his head to hear him better. "Yes, what?"

"Where're Tsuzuki and the others? They should be here for this!"

The secretary adjusted his glasses, which could not have meant good news. "Still somewhere in the belly of the Castle! I've sent them mail several times informing them of the urgency if the situation, but so far there has been no response!"

Watari muttered under his breath as he jacked the electromagnetic pulse up a notch, "Great. What a wonderful time t' go off on a treasure hunt."

—
send back my dream test baby . . .

Footnote: Translating enka requires a bit of artistic interpretation, and almost always loses its poetry, so if anyone out there understands Japanese and wants to take their own shot at it (minus kanji, though), the lyrics for the first verse are as follows:

kaze ni fukarete hana ga chiru
ame ni nuretemo hana ga chiru
saita hana nara itsuka chiru
onaji sadame no koi no hana
mukou yokochou no ramen-ya
akai ano ko no chaina fuku
sotto me-kubase chaashuu wo
itsumo omake ni ni san mai