Misaki's face, its lower half swollen, leered at them as the Irregular he'd been turned into reared back for another charge.

"Touch him."

Meiru made a face at Black. "How?"

"On his shoulder or something, I don't care. Eyes front!" Meiru barely dodged in time. While Roll and Searchman sent Misaki reeling back with their Roll Arrow and Scope Gun, Black told them, "I can only stop him with those two, so it's up to you what you want to do."

"We'll cover them," Searchman said. Roll nodded.

"That's what I thought you'd say." Black turned his attention to Laika and Meiru. Misaki was charging to meet them, but they dove out of the way. Now, the Irregular had to choose a target. It was the perfect opportunity for Searchman to fire. While Misaki was reeling back, Laika and Meiru each put a hand on one of Misaki's shoulders. White electricity traveled from their arms into the dragonfly Irregular, paralyzing him. "Keep your hands on him. I'm connected through you." A few minutes of silence ticked by while Black typed away. Meiru supposed it was a good thing her Navi arms didn't get tired; even when Misaki managed to twitch against Black's paralysis, her grip remained firm. "Okay, try letting go." Misaki stayed frozen when Meiru and Laika removed their hands.

"Now that that's taken care of, let me continue with my story. We called our experiment to a halt after we found out what Sigma was up to. Another of our operatives had taken apart an Irregular, analyzed its coding. From there, we pieced it together. At first, it was anyone who worked around him or knew him well enough to suspect anything. Then it was the other soldiers at the Net Savior base - one after another, starting with the ones closest to him and moving down. Somewhere in there was their Chief, leaving Sigma as the only one who could hold power. But all these people would be troublesome to keep down with only him and Vava. He wanted to be able to use all these minds to his advantage, and, well... Men are such brutal beasts, aren't they?"

"But then he started getting ambitious," Meiru realized. "He started going after other Net Saviors, even ones who didn't know him well enough to recognize that something was up."

"Yes. He told us that he enjoyed the challenge, and it left fewer people in the way of his ultimate goal. We thought he was putting our resources in danger."

"In danger? But this only happened because there was already a PTS -"

"One more primitive than ours. To most of the world, linking a human mind to the Internet is a dangerous experiment. But now you know that there are stable brain-link terminals out there. That's a pretty serious compromise of security. You and Enzan calling that conference was the final blow - there was a significant chance he'd be caught, and there was no telling how he'd react. I was assigned to do as much damage control as I could." Dryly, he added, "I seem to be turning into the Swiss Army Knife of operatives - don't know how that happened..."

"You had that much faith in us?" Meiru asked, skeptical. "Even we weren't sure."

"Oh, yeah! You guys are notorious. Well, at least known. But it takes a lot to become known to us." Black neatly changed the subject before Meiru could ask any questions. "Well, we'd better get to it. I think I know everything I need to now."

"That's great," Meiru said sarcastically. "What about us?"

"What about you?" Black asked, unconcerned. "Neither of you have the programming skills to right this. I do. So you should just get going and leave the thinking to me."

"Why should we go anywhere?" Laika asked. "Sakurai can just return to her body from here." Something else seemed to be bothering him, but he kept quiet.

Black saw it and smiled. "Yes? What's the problem with that?"

"I don't see how any of this applies to me. I seem to be completely detached from my body - Sigma's replaced me."

"Yes! But no," Black said. "There's no way to do that. Brains and computers are similar, but not that similar."

"Then how does that explain all of this?" Laika asked, indicating the system and Misaki in front of him. "It's not like Sigma's just been sitting around here this whole time. He's autonomous, one way or another."

Black nodded. "It looks that way, doesn't it? That's what I found strangest about you being here. The PTS doesn't grant you that much control over yourself or the system." Meiru recognized the way Black started rambling from how Hikari-hakase often sounded as he pieced together a programming problem. "If it was really as straightforward as Sigma makes it look, then it should be impossible. Either you'd have picked up a lot of brain damage, rendering your body unusable by anyone, or Sigma wouldn't have the proper controls in him like breathing and otherwise interfacing with your brain, leaving him trapped in your head as you shut down. He needed you alive to keep your body running, and the tidiest way to ensure that was by forcing you into a coma. But just doing that, he wouldn't have been able to do squat with you. So he futzed around with the PTS's program and got it to where your senses and motor control were wired through it to his main dot-EXE program. Like an attack or ability - Laika Lifeline!"

"That's confusing," complained Meiru.

"That's programming around brains for you," Black said. He explained, "Sigma's in your head somewhere - brought to you by the limitless capacity of long-term memory - with the connections and controls you came up with in his hot little hands. It feels to him just like it would've felt to you, and he can rifle through your memories this way to keep up the illusion. And to strike the finishing blow - Meiru-chan, am I right in recalling that Sigma's hat covered those distinctive holes in his head?"

"He can go wireless," Meiru realized. "The Internet's everywhere - he could always link back to you."

"So we've got to get him out," Laika said. "I doubt there's room enough in there for the two of us."

"That's probably true, your personalities considered. But I think he'll get out of there on his own. With the proper shortage of men, that is." Black grinned before turning to something off-screen. "If one of you could apply the magic touch..." Meiru did so. After a minute of typing on Black's end, Misaki's armor shimmered and vanished, leaving him in his bodysuit. As it did, his face narrowed back into its normal proportions.

The glare on his face was replaced by confusion. "What...?" He looked at the four Navis in front of him, bewildered. "Meiru-kun? And... Laika-kun, is that you? What's going on?"

"Nothing you need to worry about," Black said. "When you're feeling up to it, there's going to be a program in your PET. Find a port, run it, and plug your Navi out. Then, get out of here. But for right now, you need to just relax." Misaki's body froze, morphed into the words 'LOG OUT', and vanished. To the remaining four, he said, "As for us, we're going Irregular hunting."

0110100101100100011001010110111001110100011010010111010001111001

Laika froze in his seat. "They've cracked the code." To the teen on the other end of the room, he growled, "What have that Silver and that idiot friend of yours done now? Did you all plan this?"

Enzan grinned. "That's got to be Meiru." He turned from the still-going Netbattle to see Laika seething. "Well? Thinking about a ceasefire yet?"

But Laika was no longer paying attention to the real world. "My Irregulars... They can convert my Irregulars!" He commanded, "All units, attack!"

A/N: Okay, I'm putting this at the top so you guys see it. (According to my Traffic Stats, there are at least 16 of you out there, unless you're all MI3 using a proxy!) I'm making plans for the summer, and to finalize them I need to do an interest check! Here's the deal: next up in the posting order is Falling Stars, the last part of the overarching plot and where we find out what a Silver is, amongst other secrets. A lot happens in Falling Stars, and right now I feel that the ending it's got doesn't address enough of the fallout and leaves too many threads hanging.

I'd like to keep Falling Stars's ending and just write a coda that'll go until it hits a better conclusion. However, planning and writing six-plus chapters of A Certain Person Making Friends and Cleaning Up Messes Despite Himself is not a good use of my time if nobody is interested in seeing it. (It would be closer in tone to the first half of String Theory, if that makes you excited. Less things blowing up, more characters talking to each other.)

So here's the question: do you want me to flesh out FS's ending and write the coda, or should I change it to be less dramatic so it'll resolve more neatly?

Anyway... I think this chapter answered your question, MI3! (At least, I'm pretty sure you're MI3.) I said at the beginning that there were a couple of things that I regret not doing more with, and the idea of the Irregulars being a bunch of humans who've been forced to swap places with Navis was the other one. I think the right person could build a whole series off of that idea, and I get through it in thirteen chapters. :P And I think everyone's quite busy right now, with the end of the school year and all, so you're fine. :)