If the children were chosen to fix the distortion of the digital world – the one which constantly undermined the barrier between itself and Earth – then by the time they all became adults, it had become clear that they had utterly failed. From the perspective of the digital world's old guard – Homeostasis, Gennai, even your average Jijimon – the world of 2009 was everything they had tried to prevent.
Admittedly, Apocalymon was gone, but so was any sense of consistency, any firewall which might hold back chaos. The Digital Gate had become an open door, one which humans and their digimon passed through on a daily basis, without even realizing the change.
The sanitation systems of both worlds had actually become linked together, leading to multiple reports of Numemon infiltrating homes via the toilet. In Helmand Province, Afghanistan, a battle was interrupted by a wandering SkullBaluchimon, whose very presence quickly obsoleted all the modern, computerized weaponry upon which NATO troops depended. Yet rather than taking advantage, the Taliban fighters understood the creature to be a demon and fired upon the undead digimon. However, bullets and mortars designed for human opponents did little against this fearsome digimon, whose very presence ultimately led to a truce in its immediate vicinity.
This case was enough to raise hopes in some circles that the arrival of digimon meant not cities in ruins, but the first step towards world peace. No Chosen Child, however, ever publicly endorsed this idea, and the news that a religiously inspired rebellion in Uganda was in fact led by a ClavisAngemon soon dashed these naive hopes; the digital world, after all, had also rarely if ever known peace.
A container ship which had mysteriously vanished from Earth radars had in fact sailed into the Net Ocean. The crew did not initially realize where they had gone, although they were struck by the calm flatness of the sea. The vessel, later reports would claim, was ill-prepared to confront pirate attacks, having proved over-confident that both the ship's large size and the prospect of international retaliation would dissuade any thieves.
In reality, the crew was armed. But they were armed to confront humans in speedboats, not an enormous red and black sea serpent and little creatures that looked like a cross between frogs and fish and carried harpoons. Luckily, they realized what they were dealing with, and surrendered immediately to the WaruSeadramon with no loss of life. The Hangyomon boarded and seized whatever they wanted.
What salvaged the journey, if anything, was that the size of the ship was far beyond the capacity of these pirates (with no vessel of their own) to loot. The digimon seized all the electronics on board, even the ship's computer, along with a vast haul of seafood. But curiously, they left many other valuable goods behind, and they showed no interest in taking or repurposing the cargo ship itself.
Once the monstrous pirates moved on, with no computer and no relevant map, the sailors had no alternative but to follow the current wherever it carried them. They spent their days nervously watching for land and measuring out the available food and water supplies, hoping for rain and wracking their brains for whatever they remembered about shipwrecks and navigation errors in the distant past. One sailor even sampled the Net Ocean's liquid, unfortunately verifying that they were indeed still in salt water.
None of this effort, for all their fear, proved necessary; they docked at Recycle Town before the week was over.
Recycle Town was an oasis settlement, the sort of place where trade usually meant caravans and not actual boats. It was watered by a just-barely inland lake, not even a river.
The captain had hoped to exchange the goods left on board the ship for a way home, and was pleasantly surprised, given the size of the place, that two unaffiliated merchants had gotten into something of a bidding war.
A large, white chicken with red wingtips in a sailor hat and a weird alien thing with long limbs and a transparent blue head – or so they appeared to the humans present, all neophytes regarding digimon; for us the terms "Cockatrimon" and "Nanomon" respectively will suffice – both wanted the ship or whatever was on board. The bird struck the captain as the friendlier of the two, but he was here to make the best deal possible and salvage what he could from this ordeal, and wasn't one to be swayed by sweet talk.
Both offered a trip through the digital gate, and as such it could not be the deciding factor, so they proceeded to throw out numbers of bits. No one on board had any idea how much a 'bit' was worth, although they could gather that it was some kind of digital world currency. They only knew the term in the context of actual computer data, and if that was the true meaning, the offers were a horrible lowball. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Surely a container ship's cargo, even after the pirate attack, was worth gigabytes if not terabytes, not just a couple of megs!
But not long after hearing "50,000", the Cockatrimon turned to the Nanomon. "Cargo's nice if I can flip it for a profit, but I only really need the ship and the sailors. What do you say we split this up; you can have everything else on board."
Once he heard the word 'sailors' the captain accepted the Nanomon's deal. Or rather, the best deal the Nanomon would still offer. They only wound up with 10,000 bits in light of their new negotiating position, and this, of course, had to be split many ways among the crew. To its credit, the monster upheld its end of the bargain; they returned home with far too little to show for weeks of work, but at least they would all return home.
Replication. Copypasta. Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V.
It was a technology digimon regarded similarly to how humans regard fusion power or artificial intelligence; immensely powerful, even world-changing, but incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. And one of those ideas that was forever around the corner, always just out of reach. The practical applications never lived up to the promises; were they even really the same thing?
Yet it was still one of the major fields of research in, and reasons for opposition to, digimon science. And Nanomon was exactly the sort of scientist that many digimon feared; they thought of him as reckless, power-seeking, too obsessed with his research to know or even care what he destroyed in the process.
Nanomon had advanced the field immensely. Some would argue that he was the digital world's number one replication researcher; but he would furiously dispute this claim, for he held that he had not accomplished a fraction of Diablomon's feat.
True, Nanomon had made copies, even of organic matter, and this was something which no one currently alive in the digital world knew how to do before reading his papers. But his attempts to duplicate living things had produced only blank, soulless automatons. He could only make a limited number of copies of any particular item. And copying of copies led to an unacceptable degradation of quality.
It was an incredible, valuable technology, but it was not yet infinity.
It was also an incredible stroke of luck that an Earth container ship had staggered into Recycle Town, with enough materials on board to sustain this remote settlement for another three months. Or seven and a half months, once Nanomon ran his program on everything he'd acquired. Maybe they'd get even more time if that Cockatrimon got over being outbid and made another trip here; Recycle Town was too desolate and remote for most inland ships to bother with, but his last delivery had saved them all.
Desolate, remote, and dying. Which made it the perfect place to set up a lab – one where he wouldn't bother anyone, one with plenty of space to leave waste, one where none of the few residents left, lining up as they were for jobs working as his assistants. could afford to ask questions or cause problems.
It would be left for a traveler to do that. A regrettably familiar traveler, who he had mistreated more than poorly enough during their last encounter that she would be entirely justified in holding a bitter grudge.
The fact that the Chosen Children had failed – from the perspective of the one who chose them, and also, on tearful, sleepless nights, from their own – did not also mean that they had perished. Perhaps the old goal, the one of completely fixing the distortion, was truly so far beyond them now as to be impossible. But they remained humans with powerful digimon partners, humans who now dedicated their lives to mitigating the damage of two worlds falling into chaos.
Takenouchi Sora had intended to go to the great metropolis of Algorithm City. Her Birdramon soared over the Server Continent's deserts on a dark night, while Sora rode upon her talon and relied on the flames shedding off her wings to achieve a modicum of warmth.
She didn't intend to visit Recycle Town. Then again, nobody ever did.
Local lore held, not without cause, that the place was the gravity well of the Digital World, and that all lost travelers would eventually find themselves therein. Sora, more prosaically, attributed it to the lights of the town's central laboratory and discarded waste, which she and Birdramon had both mistaken for the lights of her actual destination; if it wasn't so dark out, they assured themselves, neither of them would have ever made that mistake.
It was late now, too late to take off again and fly around looking tonight; Birdramon had already devolved. Once they realized their mistake, all they could do was look around this half-empty, dilapidated town for a hostel, and hope it was still big enough to support one; if that failed, squatting in an empty building was better than sleeping outdoors.
They had experience with this kind of thing.
The place they found looked less like a modern building for travelers than an inn, complete with a broken sign showing a bed hanging outside its front door. It reminded Sora of something out of a video game, a place where you'd hand over a nominal amount of gold and heal up; she half expected to see a save point inside.
A Bakumon hovered above the counter. "It's been a few months since I've seen a human around here… at least we have enough space this time around. Welcome, traveler!"
"One room for the night, please."
Sora reached for her D-Terminal to pay, but the Bakumon, like everyone else, predictably refused her. This wasn't the first time a digimon tried to give her something for free, and it was easy to understand why; she was a Chosen Child, a celebrity, a heroine. She'd saved the Digital World more than once.
But as a result of that, she also had more bits than she knew what to do with. Just like in any video game, completing quests in the digital world gives you money. Inflation and Moore's Law had meant she'd long since spent her 1999 earnings, admittedly, but she was still rich from the Meicoomon incident, and all her efforts to keep the peace once the barrier fell had only compounded her wealth. At this point, she was far more worried about running out of money because of an overflow error than about spending all her bits.
If she could convert it into yen, she'd be set for life. If. The Bank of Japan – and Earth financial institutions in general, for that matter – were unanimous that bits, no matter how valued by digimon, did not qualify as real money, and refused on principle to process them. It was a stubborn stand from another era, but the obstacles created by this decision were no less real for it.
It was yet another reason that she'd found herself spending more and more time in the digital world after graduating high school. Becoming a fashion designer sounded nice, but it wasn't exactly an easy field to break into.
Anyway, she had to insist. "Look, don't worry about me. You need the bits way more than I do."
"No, no, you misunderstand. We don't take bits here. Payment is in dreams," the Bakumon said.
"That's fine," Sora answered. She doubted the Bakumon would enjoy them, but the prospect of a dreamless night left her too relieved to care.
"Should I evolve, Sora?" Piyomon asked. The two of them had woken up and eaten breakfast, and were ready to get going.
"Not yet, there's one thing that still concerns me," she answered, pointing to a sign not far from the inn, with the settlement's name written in both digimoji and roman letters. "Have you ever heard of Recycle Town?"
The bird shook her head.
"Neither have I. And if even we haven't, then we don't know if any of the digimon around need our help." Sora opened her D-Terminal to run a quick search of the Chosen Children forum that Takeru had set up, but found no references. Admittedly, she couldn't read other languages, so maybe some of the international chosen children had heard of it. At least if they were living in countries that didn't use the Roman alphabet, because otherwise the search string would've still caught the town's name.
Then again, the Bakumon hadn't seen any humans in a while.
"Are we gonna stay long? But what about the crisis in Algorithm City?" Piyomon asked.
"Just checking around. I hope."
A disturbing thought struck Sora's mind. Even in 1999, Earth artifacts had often made their way into the digital world, and the distortion had only grown since. What if "Recycle Town" wasn't, at least originally, a digimon town at all? What if a whole human settlement had wound up in the wrong world and been deserted – either long ago (for Earth had no shortage of ruins) or the moment it wound up on the wrong side? Or worse, what if it had been conquered, with the humans driven out?
She didn't know architecture well enough to determine if it was human- or digimon-made. Yet if this had once been a human settlement, a ruin struck her as a far more likely explanation than conquest, and the latter was probably an unreasonable fear; nearly every building had fallen into disrepair. The one exception was also the town's largest, a massive, domed structure, marked by a sign in digimoji reading "laboratory".
The sign was not more specific, which was in line with digimon custom, but might this not also be some sort of ruse?
Sora had read a news article a couple years ago about an illegal weapon facility on Earth getting blown up by a Megadramon airstrike. Apparently, the Megadramon in question had been the partner of a spy from a rival nation, and its main effect on Earth was to redirect money once spent on tanks, planes, and missiles to a nationwide and even interpersonal arms race aimed at raising the most powerful digimon possible.
Digimon, too, could engage in dangerous research – if so, it was wise to be vague about the purpose – and if necessary, Hououmon was far more powerful than any Megadramon.
It would have been nice, Sora thought in retrospect, to pay more attention to the capsules along the walls, or the supercomputer, or the many Hagurumon floating back and forth, each of them carrying small mechanical parts which she could scarcely identify. But being face to face with Nanomon again left her in no position to take in her surroundings.
"Sora." Piyomon looked more than ready to evolve up to Ultimate and blast him to bits. And as difficult as digimon of the same species could sometimes be to identify, neither of them had even the slightest doubt that they were dealing with the same Nanomon.
Despite his no longer cracked brain case.
That said, the Nanomon displayed not the slightest interest in kidnapping her again, and it felt wrong to strike first. At the very least, they should hear what he had to say.
"I feel I should apologize. You must understand, it was a different time," the creature began, gesticulating with its wiry, mechanical hands.
Sora kind of understood. Hadn't Etemon reprogrammed that guy's brain? For that matter, hadn't Nanomon died, absorbed into the Dark Network? But digimon do get reborn, and ten years is a long time for a digimon, long enough to evolve all the way back to Perfect on one's own.
But Nanomon was not done speaking. "None of us truly grasped what humans were. In retrospect, I was extremely overconfident. Even now, after all I have learned, I still can not duplicate an alien substance such as yourself. I am truly sorry."
That was what he was apologizing for? Not the kidnapping? Not the pushing her into that pit? Not the inherent ethical boundaries in cloning her in the first place?
A younger Sora would have chewed Nanomon out over that. Piyomon was about to, for that matter. The current Sora shushed her. "Don't forget," she whispered, "we're here for a reason."
"I see you're here to see my laboratory. We don't get visitors very often. Would you like a tour?"
There was something which disturbed her about Nanomon's new lab – one significantly larger than, but still recalling in design, the room under the pyramid where she had once been trapped. But she did not see dangerous weapons, or even so much as an attack plug-in, let alone the cloning of living things.
The place was clearly dedicated to the duplication of items, some of Earth make, others originating in the digital world. And judging by the town around her, there were clearly plenty of digimon who could use whatever he made. Nanomon – even this re-evolved Nanomon, with a head that showed no evidence of Etemon's damage – still disturbed her on a visceral level. But she could not escape the conclusion that he was now nothing more than a scientist.
There was no problem here. Sora could leave this place with a clear conscience.
Birdramon had truly intended to fly her partner to Algorithm Town, but this was no easy task. Much like Mugendramon's city on Spiral Mountain – which local legend held to be the same place – Algorithm Town is packed with copies of Earth landmarks. Navigating by landmark, however, has become dangerous in an age when one can unknowingly pass between Earth and the Digital World. Seeking a large agglomeration of population which consists mostly of digimon was therefore the easiest method, but many humans have partners now and Algorithm Town thrives on human tourists.
Spotting the rebuilt Tokyo Tower did not tip her off, for that matter; wasn't that exactly the kind of world-famous landmark which Algorithm Town had every reason to duplicate? And Sora, in truth, could not complain; she lacked a bird's eyes, but she didn't notice either, at least until the part where Birdramon landed outside her apartment out of force of habit.
Now that they were on the ground, she checked her D-Terminal, hoping their poor sense of direction had not allowed too many digimon to suffer. Hoping the mission wasn't over yet.
It was then that she remembered she was one of twelve. Or even more, if you count the international chosen children.
"Algorithm Town can be tricky if you're not local. Don't worry, Sora, I'm on it."
She didn't even bother to check who sent it; right now, all she wanted to do was relax, take a break, and say hi to her mom. She was home.