Act 2: Secrets of the Skies
Segment 1: Frosh Days
Chapter 1-6: On the Backburner
Makoto heaved a sigh and winced at his laptop monitor. Fourth year was just as unforgiving as ever, but he had to stave off that feeling of almost being done. He wasn't done – not yet. He still had a whole term and a half to go. It didn't help that Brian was poking him every now and then about his master's thesis subject. He knew he had to come up with one, but he had been so distracted that he still wasn't sure what to do next.
He also was still troubled by their interaction in August, just after Satsuki had flown off. He hadn't told her anything. He didn't want her to worry about him or his side of it. But the questioning about what she and the others had to do with his project couldn't be avoided.
At some point, the truth would spill out, and Makoto feared the worst if he found out. Brian was already starting to rewrite Prometheus again, from the ground up. He didn't know how long it would take for him to start it up again.
Truthfully, he didn't want to know. He tapped the back of his pen against the table repeatedly.
"Makoto, please. We're in a library." Rei was annoyed by the tapping. She looked up from her own engineering work. Her final research project for the symposiums that would happen in the new year was plodding along, and it had turned out doing microfabrication was harder than anticipated. Why had she picked that, of all things, for a project? She'd been warned before. Her whole team had been warned before.
"Sorry."
Rei resumed scrolling through her notes. Surely there was a way to fix the silicon oxide trenching without having to beg for permission to use the big X-ray photolithographic machines. They weren't supposed to be using those at all.
Makoto suddenly put two hands down on the table. "Rei, seriously, what do we do if Brian comes chasing after us for answers again?"
She groaned and rubbed her temples. "Are you still thinking about that?"
"He's going to ask again at some point!"
"Let him live in the dark. He doesn't need to know anything." Makoto continued to stare at her. Rei grudgingly asked, "Do you honestly believe it would be a good idea to tell him the truth?"
"Whatever it takes to convince him to stop working on his pet project," Makoto replied. "Look, half of the Tamers are somewhere else on Earth and they're all busy too. Not to mention the only one of the Digimon that has any good ability to detect those Junctions is on the other side of the ocean."
Rei bit her lip and stared at her laptop screen. She was forgetting something. She could tell. She was feeling that little itch in the back of the mind that says that there's something there to be done. "Ah, I forgot. We forgot. There was that scanner app that we were working on with Ryuta before things calmed down." They had put the project aside in summer when the Junctions seemed to have disappeared for good, but if Brian was working on Prometheus again, there was no guarantee that it would stay so quiet. She scratched her head with both hands in frustration.
"Crap! I – ahh! I've been so busy…" Makoto buried his face in his hands and slapped his cheeks twice. "In that case, we need to resume. I'm not going to remember a thing." He typed the repository link into his web browser. Ryuta had also left it untouched since the height of summer. At least it wasn't just the two of them who had forgotten. Makoto pulled the latest code and opened it in his editor.
He gazed at it with unfocused eyes, hoping that the lines of code would make sense to him again. There were an incredible amount of to-do notes and half-written methods. Almost all of the tests broke. It was painful to look at, never mind think about.
There were hundreds of files of saved packet and smartphone traffic data from the many times the Tamers had been near or inside of the Junctions. They manifested in numerous ways – a constant stream of data sending to ports available on the device, nodes advertising seemingly random hostnames, broadcast signals flooding the antennas. The only confirmation they had that it was Prometheus and not some other random source of data was that sometimes, the hostnames they received had indicated a Prometheus node, based on what they knew about it.
Makoto shook his head. "Rei, I don't think we approached this the right way."
"What do you mean?"
"All of this data is just… it's just a lot. There's too much to sift through. And so much of it looks random." He sighed. "We need machine learning for this."
Rei sputtered a laugh. "We're going to use machine learning to figure out what a machine learning program is doing?"
"That's exactly it. After all, that's all Prometheus was anyway, two machine learning networks in opposition with each other – one generating potential states, the other one making sure it made sense. At least, that was the intent." He looked again at the data that they had recorded. They had a lot of samples, but if they were going to refine their machine learning models, they would need more data than this. A lot more data.
He groaned. "We're going to need Prometheus data."
"Wait, why? To train the algorithm?"
"Yes." His forehead dropped onto his arms, folded on his laptop. "What a joke. We can't turn it back on because it's dangerous. We need to turn it back on to know how to track it down."
"What if…" Rei started, staring out the library window. "Never mind."
"What if what?"
"It's too risky," Rei warned. "But what if we just turned it on briefly and then shut it down? Over and over?"
"We'd only get data from its start-up state. That's not the same." Makoto continued to scroll through the recorded data. "Wait, what is this hostname?" He turned his laptop to Rei, who squinted at the highlighted line. "That doesn't look normal."
"See if it comes up again?"
Makoto took the laptop back and hit a search in for the hostname. It came up a few times in the file. "Four, maybe five hits. What if I just took a domain stem…" He deleted a few subdomains and searched again. This time there here hundreds, although it was hundreds in the list of millions of lines. It still was weird. He spelled out the hostname domain. "D… w… y… g… I don't know, it doesn't make sense."
He stared at his monitor for a moment, then yelled, "I'm dumb!"
"Shh! We're in a library, you idiot!" Rei hissed.
"Ahh, my bad." He started tapping away. "I could just take every line in this file and remove the ones that look normal, and then I'd get all the lines that look weird, you know?" He slapped the return key and got back a few thousand lines this time. "Whoa."
"What? More weird hostnames?"
"That wasn't the only weird domain, it looks like. But they all start with d and w. Why those two letters?"
Makoto and Rei stared at each other for a moment. Then Rei suddenly commented, "Digital World."
Makoto cocked his head. "You think so?"
"Why else would the Digimon be able to pick up on the Junctions? They must be related one way or another. They knew those Junctions went nowhere. Surely, if they know about them going nowhere, then they know about them going somewhere, and where else would it go?"
"But…" started Makoto. "Then what does that mean for the Digital World?" There was no answer, and no desire to answer. "We should tell Brian we should get Prometheus back up and running again."
"And if we spawn a Junction by accident?"
Makoto gulped. "We have to call the only three that are here."
"And if Asuka is in the middle of training or a game?"
"Then just Takaharu and Yuuka, I guess."
"And if they're both in class? Or if Yuuka is working? And Taka-" Rei was trying her best to get her point across.
"Rei, I get it, I get it, I swear," Makoto gesticulated, "but what other option do we have? Do you want to find a way to interpret all this data?"
Rei glanced at her own laptop. The repository was a few months out of date, but it wasn't like the sample data had changed. He had a point, but still… "Maybe we should just use what we have for now. Let's… also ask Ryuta what he thinks. I mean, this is his project and all."
"He's a first-year student, Rei. He won't get to machine learning for a while."
Rei raised an eyebrow. "And he's also the one that started all this. He can learn quickly enough, I'm sure."
"I guess you're right," Makoto shrugged.
The two fell silent again as Rei typed something into her laptop and stared intently as she scrolled. "Hang on, hang on. Look at this article." She turned her laptop to Makoto.
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Tokyo Met Police REFUSE to talk! Equinix Kōtō DC shutdown was STATE terrorism?!
DeepZetaNet Japan | Published 2021.10.19 14:30
Readers of DZNet may remember a previous accident at Olinas Yamada Denki in Sumida-ku resulting in injury to customers where the cameras were knocked out just before they were discovered. Well, it turns out, somehow, it's linked to "a fluid spill" in an Equinix data centre discovered a few weeks after that, back in March.
How are they related? We asked Met Police and they refused to answer on both cases, saying it was highly confidential. We at DZNet like to call that "the truth would knock your pants off". So, we dug deeper!
An anonymous employee of that Olinas Yamada Denki replied to our reporters' questions shortly after NNK News broke that story, and graciously shared with us all kinds of monitoring information from the shop in the hours before and after the incident. Besides a bunch of teenagers running around the store looking all suspicious (who wouldn't at that age?!), the information dump (which you too can download from our web share box!) revealed to us all kinds of weird and wacky information.
Firstly, what is this prom3 thing? It must be a server cluster of some kind, but we don't know what. Our tech experts at DZNet say this has all the characteristics of some nefarious state or criminal actor all over it. Why target an innocent store? Why not target an innocent store for a practice run? As for the customers inside, we all know our Internet-of-Things world is dangerously interconnected. Who knows what you can do with an IoT enabled drone or fridge or glasses or whatever? Just hack an IoT robot waiter to beat someone over the head! All of us at DZNet are sure someone could do it! I could start trying tomorrow!
Secondly, another anonymous source, our great friend at Equinix, left a little nugget of truth for us to find out on the DZNet Forums. Turns out – that liquid spill was all fake! Why would the Tokyo Met Police issue a statement that's refuted by the company's own employees? Apparently, the detective who did the investigation is on mental health leave. We think that just goes to show you exactly how trustworthy the Met Police are – shoving aside their own when the papers come calling. And what else did our friends inside Equinix gift us?
You can find the data dump on our web share box too, in all of its weird and wild glory. All of that data is from mobile phones, WiFi routers, modems, laptops, you name it – everything in Equinix is traced, tracked, and recorded, and all of it is available for you to see. DZNet readers, we trust you can come to your own conclusions about whatever this "prom3" thing is, but there's one thing for sure: it's sophisticated enough to breach a commercial data centre, and only state actors could possibly do that!
Who knows what they'll target next?!
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"I can't believe you read this sensationalist trash, Rei."
"I don't!" she insisted. "I just searched up Equinix and Prometheus and got that!"
"You trust them not to post every virus known to cybersec on that drop box?"
"Look, Makoto, it's safer than starting Prometheus all over again."
Makoto had a hearty laugh. "Okay, it's your laptop, but if you get ransomware on the school network, I had nothing to do with it."
Takaharu's phone vibrated and lit up. He glanced at it from his pile of new notebooks. The back half of first year was underway, and it was more than he had expected. What was it about? Ah, just the group chat lighting up again. It was Asuka as well, of course.
• • • • • • •
Sumida Tamers
Nagatomo Asuka
ahhhh
my life
why is my life
like this
16:23
Ishida Yuuka
You good?
16:26
Nagatomo Asuka
no…
[photo: living room, with TV playing soccer match]
sob
16:27
Ishida Yuuka
The inside of your house?
Oh… right
16:28
Segawa Takaharu
Asuka… you're eighteen
You'll get your chance
16:29
Nagatomo Asuka
i knowwwww
but it sucks
ji-min and maria play every week
16:30
sigh
16:31
Segawa Takaharu
What does the coach say
16:31
Nagatomo Asuka
bluh
it's all the same
"you do so great in training"
16:32
"someday you'll be a stellar player"
rrrrrh
16:33
Segawa Takaharu
Can't exactly convince your coach from here 😅
16:33
Shimizu Kazuhiko
I'm sure she means it Asuka
16:33
• • • • • • •
That was Asuka, all right. She was as impatient as ever. Somehow, Takaharu figured, she was more impatient than him. It was a good thing the two of them had little interest in each other; they would probably turn out to be a terrible couple.
He glanced at his notes. There was no telling how busy he might be in the future. He tapped out of the group chat and padded off a message to Yuuka.
• • • • • • •
Takaharu
Yo does Asuka send you deets on the lineup before the game
16:36
She sends me pictures of the whole thing…
I knew what she was talking about on Friday heheh
16:37
If she ever ends up on the bench or plays… let me know
I'm gonna come as soon as I can
16:38
Oh! Right
I forgot you were a fan of soccer
16:38
A lot of sports tbh
16:38
Baseball, swimming, basketball… just a lot
16:39
I see
Just curious
Do you follow Toronto?
16:39
Heck yeah I do!
NBA & MLS Champions 🏆🏆
16:39
I thought you would
16:40
• • • • • • •
Yuuka set her phone down. Classes were tomorrow, though she was already finished with her schoolwork. It really wasn't that bad. She was scoring highly in her classes – so highly that some people were starting to complain she was making them look bad. At least she finally knew how it felt to be like Ryuta, up at the top.
Speaking of which… he hadn't messaged in a while. It was mid-October. She returned to her private messages with him. What time was it over there? October… so daylight savings hadn't reversed yet. That meant sixteen hours back. Four in the afternoon in Tokyo meant…
She stared up at the edge of her bedroom ceiling. What was it? About midnight. Would he still be awake by now? Whatever, she figured. He could respond afterward.
• • • • • • •
The Boy
Oiiii
16:36
Wha
16:39
._.
16:40
What did I do wrong
16:41
Talk to meeeee
Show me your face~
16:41
Trust me… the video quality
It's shockingly bad
16:42
Seriously?
How bad is it
16:42
I can barely get videos to load ww
16:43
Oof…
I guess that's why your parents complain you don't show your face
16:43
Yeah
16:43
Anyway… what did you want to talk about
16:44
Anything!
16:44
Anything eh? How about this
[photo]
16:45
⁽˙³˙⁾
I guess I did ask for anything
16:46
You did
And now you can't read this chat in public ❤
16:46
It's not that bad
Maybe a bit spicy w
16:47
I can change that if you want
16:47
Ryuta no
16:47
What's wrong
16:47
You know what I mean!
Don't you dare!
16:48
Just a peek
16:48
omg.
16:48
• • • • • • •
Goodness, this boy could be so immature on occasion. Knowing how he was to strangers, it was endearing, in a way. It was the playful and mischievous side most people didn't get to see. Suddenly her phone rang. Now he was calling? Ah, just a voice call.
"Ryuta – Amedramon? Why are you on Ryuta's phone?" Yuuka asked. "I… Why was he taking a photo of himself shirtless just now? Why don't you ask him?" she replied with a laugh. "What is he doing right now?" A pause from the other end. Her brows narrowed as she heard a dragon squeak. That was an unusual noise. "Going to shower…?" Oh. So that noise it made was… she assumed it had just seen something. "You've never seen him nude before?" Falcomon looked up with a quizzical look.
She glanced over at Falcomon, who had been watching an online show on the family laptop, but now was staring up at her. Did she dare explain what was going on right now? "No, Falcomon never has." She could barely make out the sound of running water. He really did exist late. Showering near midnight? He probably wouldn't be going to bed until one in the morning. She glanced at her laptop. Ah, Sunday here. It would be Sunday for him soon then. That explained a lot.
"Yuuka, what's going on?" Falcomon asked.
"Uh… it's fine."
Falcomon's eyes narrowed. "What was this about being nude?"
It was at that moment that Yuuka realized that technically, none of the Digimon seemed to bother wearing clothes. Why was that? Technically Gabumon had a pelt, but… that was the way it just was, in a way. It might not even understand why it had one. "It's nothing." Maybe they only used clothes to denote special status. It was possible that was the case.
Falcomon squinted at her. "Okay, then." It resumed watching the drama it was streaming.
"Amedramon, what are you up to?" Yuuka asked. She had always wondered what the Dramon did while Ryuta was busy. "Reading his notes, huh?" She figured it wasn't that weird. After all, Falcomon occasionally went through hers. But Amedramon had admitted once it wasn't a highly studious Digimon itself. Perhaps it was maturing. The sound of something crunching came across the line. "Are you eating something?" The crunching continued.
"Quartz? Oh, right." She recalled that time back in Olinas, earlier that year. It was also that time they had gotten into serious trouble the first time. She glanced over at a calendar. So, it really had been all the way to October, and ever since April, nothing had happened. "Can you believe it, Amedramon, it's been seven months since Yamada Denki? Yeah, it's been a long time." Yuuka giggled. "I miss you too."