Act 2: Secrets of the Skies

Segment 2: Calm After the Storm

Chapter 2-2: Data Renaissance

Alison peeked around the corner of her father's bedroom. "Dad?"

Brian looked up from his laptop. His usually well-groomed blonde beard was looking unkempt and dry. He leaned back in his chair. "Yes, Alison?" She padded softly into his room with a workbook in her hands. It had become habit for him to give her homework a look over before the night was over.

He flipped through the pages. Elementary science material was easy for him to grasp. "It looks good." He handed it back to her with a smile. "Are you enjoying school?"

She nodded. "I love it. It's so exciting!" Her light brown eyes stared innocently up at him.

"How are your friends?"

"Eriko's asking me if I'm staying around for junior high. I told her I am for sure!"

Brian tried his best to hold his faint smile. He didn't want to let it slip just yet. She would never, at this rate, return for that. Neither Keio nor Tokyo Universities had accepted his application. Not even those in other parts of Japan had accepted. It seemed he had been put on some kind of a list of unwanted people.

"Anyway," she continued, "I should go brush my teeth. Good night papa!" She gave him a quick hug and sauntered away. Her light brown hair fluttered as she turned the corner and skipped away.

Brian let out the breath he'd been holding in and collapsed on his laptop. Alison was wrapping up her third grade and was already nine years old. She would be ten by the end of June. How was he supposed to have her adjust to a life outside of Japan?

He sat back up straight and picked up a small framed photo. It wasn't one of her, but of himself and his wife, Kimiko, on vacation up in Sapporo. He stared at it for a moment, then set it back down and continued typing, then flicked his eyes back to it.

Alison had the eyes and smile of her mother, but his Caucasian nose and face build. She clearly stood out, no matter where she was, both in Japan and in North America. She would stand out even more there if he was forced to return. She had never known that place, only visited twice to San Jose when he had returned on vacation. It was unlikely she would remember being there as a one-year-old. Even then, it wasn't a guarantee that he would make his way back to the United States. He had left it because he wanted to make sure his children grew up somewhere else, to give them the choice to pick their country of residence. Now it was only his one child, Alison.

Brian cursed whatever gods might exist quietly under his breath and returned to his work.

All that was needed now was to sit back, hit the deploy button, and hope. Hope that this time, nothing strange happened. That this time, the fourth generation of Prometheus would do as it should. He had, with the help of Makoto and Rei, thrown out all of his old ideas and rewritten the whole thing from scratch. Makoto had suggested this time that they only deploy a tiny proof system just to make sure it wouldn't corrupt at a large scale.

The university servers spun and hung for a few moments, then returned an all clear. A few nodes came up on a monitoring panel and stayed alive. Nothing weird came up. "What a relief," he sighed. Now it was all a waiting game. They needed to see if the system would collapse again. He picked up his phone and scrolled through his messages. Tomonobu had been poking him ever so often for a question or two about his work as well. It seemed the police officer's investigation was going nowhere. He rubbed his clean-shaven scalp and squinted.

"He was saying something about aliens and black web-like materials and things called Plasmids. Professor, I'd like you to re-evaluate your information sources."

What Rei had said months ago made less and less sense with each message from Tomonobu. He had believed her then, mostly. It was hard not to. But Tomonobu was adamant. There was no way a scammer or a fraud would push this hard for a project that was going nowhere. There was no way a fraud would even want this material. What good would theft of a computational biology program serve?

He sighed and closed his laptop. The job was done for today, at least. He could set his mind to finding out where he would land next. If Japan didn't work out, then he already knew where his next target would be. He hoped Alison would take it well.