Shawn is based on the Animated Lust (rated PG!) forum participant known as Shawn and, as such, is copyright to himself, and used with permission.
Kitsune is based on the Animated Lust (rated PG!) forum participant known as Lord Kitsune and, as such, is copyright to himself, and used with permission.
The below show and characters are used for fanfiction purposes only, I disclaim all ownership:
Digimon and associated characters and concepts are © Akiyoshi Hongo - Toei Animation; © Bandai
Where on Earth DID They Go?
In the real world Willis had performed a system dump of Shawn's PC to see what had been running at the time they'd disappeared. While he tried to make sense of the computer's actions, Shawn's friend Kitsune was searching for clues in what Shawn had last been working on. He'd looked at the translation data that had been converting the web pages to English, then Italian and Russian, amongst other languages, ending with the attempt at Klingon just before everything had broken apart into pure code. Concurrently, as near as he and Willis could figure, the PC had started to run equations that seemed to be trying to compute irrational numbers.
Kitsune had been cutting and pasting equations into Google's search function and he was pulling up references to chaos theory and string theory and even one to Schrödinger's cat. At the moment he and Willis were on a very expensive conference call to Tai and Izzy in Tokyo.
"Yeah, Schrödinger's cat – the one that's both alive and dead at the same time, until you open the box and look at it..."
"I still don't get it," said Tai. "How can it be both?"
"That's what I'm telling you – it's your looking at it that affects the cat – the observation affects the outcome of what's observed." Here Kitsune was trying to explain finer points of quantum theory, which he didn't really understand in the first place, to Tai, when the important thing was to find Shawn and Mimi.
Tai must have come the same conclusion. "So what does this have to do with –?"
Izzy, who was following the conversation at the same time that he was up to his elbows in the raw code Willis had sent streaming his way down the internet, broke in. "Look, it's a metaphor; it doesn't matter. What matters is that the normal laws of everyday physics break down at the subatomic level – reality changes. And Shawn's computer – all our computers – seems to have been trying to deal with that somehow."
"So why didn't we all get sucked into the Digiworld?" Tai asked.
"I don't know yet!!" Izzy shouted – he was losing patience. He made an executive decision – the fastest dedicated connection still had a delay, and good as Willis was with computers, Izzy was better – he could make them sing. "I'm coming to New York," he said into the phone. "I can probably make it in five hours – four if I get lucky. I'll see you at Shawn's."