Reboot
"Pipipi!"
Dusk had fallen, and all was finally quiet in the Ministry of Science network. Roll, Blues, Turboman, Ring, and Gateman were off in their Operators' meeting.
"Pipipi!"
Rockman and his Papa hadn't been invited. That shouldn't have been surprising–it wasn't like Rockman was a Net Savior any longer–except that Meijin and Gateman were there. Something was off about the entire situation, had been for some time. With the way Meiru and Enzan looked at Rockman with worried eyes, the way Roll and Blues never talked shop around him anymore, he knew it had something to do with him. It was inordinately frustrating. He wished someone would just talk to him about it already.
"Pi! Pi! Pi!"
Rockman was so concerned about the whole thing that Beat showing up in a tiny carbon copy of his own helmet took a few seconds for him to process–he was completely occupied over whether or not he should sneak in and eavesdrop. Black's little bird assistant was carrying an email done up to look like an old-timey letter–To an old friend, it read across the envelope–which it was waving in Rockman's face, clearly just as anxious to take action as Rockman himself.
"I'm sorry, I'm a little distracted," Rockman apologized as Beat practically shoved the letter into his hands. He carefully ran a finger along the underside of the flap. It even tore like a real envelope. Someone liked to spend a lot of time on the finer details, or thought they were worth it for him.
He began to read the letter, which quickly grabbed his full attention.
By the time you read this, I'll probably be back home. Don't bother looking for me. I never would've guessed you'd be helping at the Ministry of Science (sorry about the attack, by the way). It seems you've all managed to move on one way or another, which is really great to see.
The little guy down there is Beat, a support program I've developed to help you and Papa's research. He can decrypt and encrypt data far faster and more accurately than any Navis or other programs, and he can also see through most obstacles and detect enemies in a pinch. I'm sure you'll be able to put him to good use.
Once again, don't look for me, I can't be found. Don't worry about me, agonize over what happened to me, wonder how I can be alive, etc. I don't want that. I'll be okay, so just keep on doing what you've been doing. Please don't tell Meiru, Enzan, or anyone else about the contents of this letter.
Thank you for being my Navi. I never forgot you, and I don't think I ever will.
Rockman read through it a few times as Beat started trying to prod him toward the exit warp.
"…What?!"
Beat squawked with disappointment as Rockman turned around to face him. "Where is…" And then it all clicked together; of course Black was Netto. Little wonder Meiru and Enzan were worried sick; even less that they'd wanted to shield Rockman from how their enemy number one had once been his Operator. "…But Meiru knows. Everyone in that meeting has to know. That's why I'm not…" He couldn't finish the sentence. …there.
"Pi, pi pi!" protested Beat, waving his wings around in a sort of no-no gesture. Gesturing toward the letter, he explained, "Pi pi pi, pipi pi…"
"He wrote this a long time ago, didn't he? Or, at least, before things got this bad."
"Pi, pi," Beat agreed, showing him the metadata. The letter was from a few weeks ago, probably not long after Nova's attack on the Ministry. Netto had written the letter after he'd seen Rockman fend off… his new Navi. Punk.
Rockman wasn't quite sure how to feel about that part.
"Pipipi! Pipi!" Beat seemed to think that was plenty of explanation. He grabbed Rockman's forearm and began tugging him toward the warp out.
"But–where are we going–"
Beat abruptly stopped, giving him an expression that could only be described as Isn't it obvious?
"You're taking me to him now, aren't you?" Rockman wasn't sure what he'd find at the other end of this journey, or how he'd get word back to his Papa, or what on earth Netto was even thinking right now, what had to be days to hours before the final Nova plan came to fruition. But whatever it was, he knew he needed to see it. "Thank you," he told his guide. "Lead on."
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Netto slept fitfully. He wasn't sure of the point of sleep at all any longer. He could sleep when he was dead, and that wasn't too far in the future with what he'd resolved to do. But Punk didn't know that final detail yet, and Netto would probably be able to work through a more coherent plan when he was rested, so he had to at least try.
For a while, he succeeded. Eight o' clock sharp interrupted a strange dream of Kaita having to navigate the Citadel and its occupants alone, Netto too busy drowning in his own guilt and grief to help. At least that wasn't going to happen, and the first step toward averting that outcome was simple. Rather than ignoring the new reinforcements and moping around until the orders for the final attack came, he needed to see what that side of the operation looked like and hopefully buy himself a couple more days of time. Netto rolled over, tapped the alarm on his PET, and came face to face with Rockman, completely derailing his train of thought.
"My lens is out," Netto muttered, dazedly running a hand over the longest of the scars, the one that stretched vertically across the remaining skin around his empty socket. "This isn't good."
"I… I know about that, Netto-kun," Rockman said. "Punk explained a lot of it to me." Netto thought he was taking all of this surprisingly well for a child's companion Navi. Things were much quieter than they'd been whenever he'd envisioned this scenario playing out. Much less alarm. That was a relief. It was too early for that kind of stress.
"Been here for hours," Punk said, both explaining the quietness and making those hours sound absolutely interminable. "I told him he'd better let ya sleep, or else."
"What about the whole…" Even surprised as he was, Netto knew better than to call this a suicide mission in front of his Navis. He fumbled in the air for a better word. "…plan, we're doing?"
"We have a plan?" Punk asked. "News ta me."
"You suggested this in the first place!" Netto protested.
"Because ya obviously wanted t'do it! But yeah, I've given him the rundown." Punk could do so because the room was completely isolated now–not literally, as the door was still there and unremarkable as ever, but in terms of security. Nothing other than Netto's own PET and laptop worked inside this room, and they couldn't so much as send text. No communications in, none out. It was necessary for Netto to keep this from Three and the other Darklish agents peppering the Nova safe house now.
"I promise I'm not going to trip you or Punk up, Netto-kun," Rockman explained. "But if I can help in any way, please make use of my skills." Netto scanned the background of the PET to find Beat there. He must have been able to let Rockman in using his own encryption and decryption abilities, but if he was hovering around in a boring PET, he clearly couldn't pop into the real world without some consequence.
Rockman himself seemed unchanged to Netto. It was almost crushing to remember that he was looking back at Netto's ugly mug.
Inhale. Exhale. He needed to keep moving. "You need to do as Punk and I say for now," Netto said tersely, trying to set a comfortable amount of frosty distance between himself and Rockman. "We need to visit the police headquarters when Three does. I need to have a couple surprises for them handy, too, so we can buy more time."
"The police headquarters?" Rockman asked as Netto took his lens out from its protective case. "I know Darkland was planning to hollow out the Ministry staff, but what do the police have to do with this?" Netto aligned the arrow on its top edge with the top of his socket and clicked it into place. The vision from his left socket popped into life unnaturally abruptly, like a monitor turning on.
He shuddered as his natural eye's sight and the new information coming from the lens synced up. Stereopsis once again. "We've got agents implanted in their ranks. Not even most of them, but enough." He stood up and went to the work table on the far side of the room. As he was required to on 'home' turf, he combed his hair back with a spray of hair product to keep it in place and tied it into a low ponytail. "I'm supposed to lead a fake attack on the Ministry, while the cops who don't know anything run interference and the ones who do install themselves on the inside to watch the prisoners. Because it's just not safe in there, you see."
He gathered the black suit all agents wore when away from Darkland from the closet. "I'm gonna go change," he told them both, striding toward the bathroom.
"…You know, it's not like I'd ever look," Rockman said as Netto was closing the door.
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"You're coming with?" Three asked, pulling Netto into a relaxed hug. So gentle, compared to how he was with anyone and anything else. Perhaps it was strange to find the gesture so comforting, but to Netto, Three had always felt as harmless as a huge, muscly teddy bear.
"Yeah, I got my head on straight last night," he explained. It felt incredibly messed up to be betraying Three's trust, even if he didn't care about anyone else in the landing party. But as Three himself had taught Netto, dwelling would make the lie obvious, so he pushed that aside. The same mission-time focus, for a very different cause.
"That's a relief," Three said. "I would've really hated to do this with my favorite wingman half there."
The ride over was weirdly normal. They joked, they laughed, they even stopped for contraband breakfast sandwiches. The sandwiches tasted amazing; from the look of bliss on Three's face, Netto was guessing he was not looking forward to returning to the stricter control of the Citadel. He probably hadn't gotten any mission to follow this one, which meant at least half a year of sour, bitter, slightly warm, unidentifiable nutritional glop. Netto felt for him.
If those new orders hadn't been some kind of sick joke for the General to test his loyalty and they really had been planning to capture Kaita and Meiru along with Shun, at least one of them would have eventually become new personnel on field duty. That would've meant a return to Netto being a scientist who didn't leave the Citadel, which in turn meant glop for him forever. Some things about this state of affairs were just straight-up better than keeping his head down and letting it happen.
The Net Police Headquarters building looked normal on the outside, as it should have. Three and Netto were waved into the back room by producing their Darklish military IDs, which was presumably a little less normal.
The landing team had wasted no time in shuttering the windows and turning the former Commissioner's office into something a lot more familiar, a Darklish situation room in all but name. Some of the faces were ones Netto recognized, mostly from playing IT assistant to the Citadel's upper levels, but most were not.
Best of all, these guys were garden-variety agents. The kind who were part of the reason why the Silver Division sent out its own field agents to begin with. The kind who, in these "safe" situations, had plugged unfamiliar devices into work computers a thousand times in the past and would do so a thousand more times if given the chance, even after what was about to become their latest blunder.
Step one was all green.
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Most of the Citadel had turned up for this one. The orders Netto had received the previous afternoon were very real, and the General was taking this opportunity to grab the creators of the old Synchro Chip tech very seriously.
In the wake of various bits of legislation having been crafted around the world to regulate substantiation, the Sycclean Synchro Chip Research Institute had become the closely-guarded secret of Sharo and Creamland. Each of the other nations had their own wildly different but equally classified take on Hikari-hakase's original. The Darklish version of it still killed far too many of its own agents and mercenaries, so the chance of having new Synchro Chips made under Hikari-hakase and his team's supervision was too good to pass up.
Netto wasn't sure if he felt a drop in the pit of his stomach because he was nervous or because the Citadel had to be understaffed, making the upper levels an easy target. Someone in the right position could easily expose the whole covert operation, so long as the Silver Division was none the wiser.
People're kinda dumb like that, y'know?
And here, too, the human factor was the weakest part of the security. "Someone drop this?" One of the agents walking in from the outside reached into a planter near the door and retrieved a USB stick, similar to any of the unmemorable black-cased kinds used all over Darkland to pass along secure files.
"Probably Andrey," said a familiar face, this one memorable from tackling Netto to the ground as a junior officer. Faces like this one had marked the end of several of Netto's many escape attempts, from back when he was younger and… about as foolish as he was being now. Zimmermann, read the man's name tag. "Pass it here."
Fortunately for Darkland, Three was there, and he was doing his intended job. "Wait."
Unfortunately for Zimmermann, he'd already connected it to his boxlike military-issue laptop alongside all the other black USB sticks that looked just like it. "Huh?"
"Do you know for certain who dropped that?" Three asked. "We need to connect it to an isolated terminal first, so we can make sure it's clean."
Zimmermann laughed, "God, I forgot what sticklers you all are on the clock. Let me–" It was too late, anyway. It would already be running in the background, unbeknownst to Zimmermann. Less importantly but more noticeably, he had lost track of which USB was which. "Shit."
"Well, nothing's happened so far," piped up another agent from across the room. "And we've got too much crap on our plates anyway. Get over here, Agent Three."
Three was still the closest person to the General's ground orders there, so Netto watched him run point for a while, directing their resources with a ruthless, efficient style. He was quite good at this, really. It was hard to see why he'd been deemed not brilliant enough for the labs back home, then stuffed full of alloys and drugs like an overgrown farm animal. Especially when Netto had been considered talented enough to avoid the same fate. But the aboveground operations certainly benefitted from the labs' loss.
It had been quite a long time, long enough that Netto was starting to wonder if they would actually be around when things got noticeable and how dumb he could play it, when Three finally finished ensuring that the agents here knew the final plan backward and forward.
"Oh, before you go, we've got a little surprise for you," Zimmermann smiled. It was the same cold smile as years ago. Netto closed his eye for a moment, remembering the man's weight on his back and that smile nose-to-nose with his own face. But his lens still showed him all those teeth. "Thought you'd like to see our star prisoner!"
oop! if you're reading this, congratulations, you've made it to the stuff i wrote in this year. so firstly, thank you for playing rockman exe fallingstars. and time for author's notes!
hiya. when i wrote this series initially, i went under the handle of 'achamo', but i have since evolved into scenegraph. (i still have no idea how i'm going to handle this distinction for the ao3 release, if i am at all, lol. any ideas as to whether and how to are welcome in the comments.) unlike the other fics in this series, this is not beta'd and it is far from being finished. so updates will be more unevenly spread out, and likes/kudos/updoots will be highly appreciated! if i do end up needing to change a detail in an earlier part, i will letchu know with the latest release.
obviously, since ao3 supports arts and arts/comics are more of what i do nowadays, there will be more bells and whistles when it comes to ao3. BUT! you get it much faster here, as a tradeoff. also there's an easter egg i'm trying out for this ff.n version that idk how to translate into the ao3 formatting, lol. anyway, thanks for checking this out, have a lovely rest of your day~
