Previously on TLA: Yusei planned to use the Duellist Network that all Duel Disks are linked through to scan for anomalous readings which could indicate the presence of Yliaster's assassin.
However, Joey and Duke revealed the technology to be in its infancy and only capable of locating other active signals without being able to filter additional information.
Everything in this time was so simple that it was like trying to conduct a lecture on game theory in baby speak. He was having to code filters and recursive block loops into a custom interface parser simply to connect to the archaic systems without overloading them. And that was before he could get as far as accessing any of the data he was looking for. Yusei had managed to get his laptop to accept the obsolete data types but they were so far behind how his systems worked that he was barely two steps above reading in ones and zeroes. Even then, what he was getting was missing the context of the environment and arriving in gibberish.
Enough books were splayed across a desk against the wall in the study room to cover the entire digital construction of the internet from the single bits to the server farms. Nothing written in there was what he needed to create a stable connection to the internet – it had taken three hours just to configure his computer to transmit in the right frequencies and he was still getting gobbledegook responses when company arrived.
"How's it going?" Pulling up a chair, Joey threw himself back against the table.
"How much do you know about digital architecture?" Surely any good Duellist, even in this pre-Turbo stage, had an understanding of the computer system they strapped to one wrist.
"Digital what?" Duellist, muscle and scrappy underdog of the team. Not the brains. "Nah, you'd best ask Rebecca about that stuff. She even managed to get us satellite." Yusei blinked in amazement. It was like Joey had the upbeat attitude of Crow stuffed inside the empty void of Jack's intellect.
"I'd rather not. She's really intimidating." It had to be Musume's fault, he would later reason. Maybe being around so much untamed bloodlust had overloaded that subtle ability to sense people glaring at his back. But Joey's expression was evidence enough. "She's behind me, isn't she?" A door slammed and he saw the same sort of glare ahead of him as there had been behind.
"Don't worry." If the positions were reversed, he'd probably have that same anger. "She left." Like Joey, she had also started her day by checking in on the status of their time-travelling guest.
"I didn't know." Rubbing his eyes, he wondered if it was too early to slap the neural inhibitor on his head and skip to the next day. Every part of his body ached and sight was getting blurry at the edges. Pulling an all-nighter in the library at the SRC could solve nearly any problem. Spending fourteen hours in the modest study room in the penthouse had barely managed to get him to the first step in an entirely new problem.
"Did you know her other grandparents want to take her away?" It didn't take a regional champion to recognise the shock on Yusei's face. "They thought Professor Hawkins was pushing her too hard. Freaking Kaiba was so pissed that he stepped in. Got enough lawyers to keep the case going until she's old enough for emancipation."
"Don't worry, she wins." Sliding down the chair until his neck was dangerously bent, Yusei wondered how big an impact on the timeline he'd have with a few small insights that this family knew were inevitable anyway. "Gets herself emancipated, starts life on her terms, goes on to make a name in computer circles. I've read her papers. All her papers. She's one of my fantasy five." Joey's chair scrapped dangerously against the desk as he slammed a palm against a discarded book.
"That'd better mean something a lot different in the future." Having an enraged giant standing overhead was enough to get Yusei focused on the more usual meaning of the term.
"Fantasy team of any five scientists you'd want to be on a team with." He explained. It was a popular game at the SRC and many of his staff frequently tried to garner favour by including him in the list. "Einstein, Newton, Farnsworth, Hawkins, and Din." Five people on the team, fifty to control certain members. And that was just his physics team – crazier combinations existed for other subjects.
"Farnsworth the American physicist?" If Yusei coincidentally chose that moment to fall off his chair, it was only because the only obstacle to his descent had been his head. "What," Reaching down, he helped Yusei back to vertical. "Guy invented television and was doing nuclear research. Imagine what else he could come up with!"
"Yeah." For once, he was on the same page as the village idiot. "Fuck." Rubbing his eyes, Yusei accidentally sniffed his own body odour. "I need a shower." Twelve hours of intensive studying and nearly zero movements had left him riper than a sunbathing potato. "Shower, coffee, and then I'll apologise to Rebecca. Hands, knees, pleas – gets them every time."
"You're still talking about the science." Joey was still holding Yusei's hand but now he started to squeeze. "Right?"
One luxurious shower later and Yusei arrived to the most unsettling sight in the common area. Sitting daintily around the room, Joey, Mai, Duke, and Rebecca were reading in perfect silence. Nobody responded to his greetings or the sound of his boiling a kettle and preparing a cup of coffee. Judging by their absences, Téa was doing some administrative work with Serenity she had mentioned the day before and Tristan was helping them out. Eventually, he ran out of ways to stall and stood awkwardly with a mug in hand.
"Hey, Rebecca." Like any trained teenager of her time, Rebecca could ignore a nuclear explosion with a correctly positioned magazine. Shutting out Yusei hardly required more effort than turning the next page – she did that for effect. "Do you want some coffee?" Tibetan monks had agreed to teach Jack the secrets to their brewing during a six-week sabbatical during his therapy. To this day, Jack had kept his promise to never reveal those secrets to another person. (Yusei had spied on his brother for three days and could have sworn he had it copied correctly but Jack's brews continued to outperform his own by a small margin.)
"If I wanted some, I would have made some." Synchronised pages turning makes a strange sound – like a dozen tiny snakes moving past each other in a small box.
"Any chance that you're willing to let me explain myself?" Yusei had been stared down by an entire tribunal of the greatest legal, political, and scientific minds of his time and stood his ground. Being pointedly ignored by a dice master, feminist icon, child prodigy, and scrappy underdog was more unsettling.
"Nobody's stopping you." Paper hissed as subtext screamed that being stopped wasn't the problem here, the blanket over the pitfall was more of a concern and those repeated hisses were the snakes waiting at the bottom of the hole.
"Hang on," Breaking the silence, Mai threw out the metaphorical rope to cling to. "I missed a bit. Can we go back a page?" Receiving a curt nod from their commander, she took momentary command of the troop. "Ladies. One, two, turn." The group uniformly turned back the pages and Yusei noticed that Joey was reading a manga while the rest had actual books.
"Look, I'm sorry I said you were intimidating"
"A~aand back we go." Ignoring his attempt at an apology, Mai flipped the script back to the next page.
"I could really do with some help on this and," Pages turned. After the slightest tilt of her head, Rebecca kept the pages suspended to keep both sides visible. "You're the only one in this time I can trust who can help me with this. My laptop only has enough charge for another few days and the current power grid is incompatible. My" Pages turned in stoic silence. "Power bank has enough charge for another few weeks but I'm" The facade finally cracked in an eyebrow twitch. "Not meant to risk having such advanced technology left lying around." Idle hands played with the corner page. "But, you're right. This is my problem. I'll have"
"Are you trying reverse psychology on me?" Disbelief and pride coloured her voice. "Me?" The future Dr Hawkin was already renowned in Duelling circles for playing at being the child and then destroying her opponents like Jack with coffee, Crow with cakes, Din with people who made fun of his height. "You know that I nearly beat Yugi after Duellist Kingdom? I'm the American Champion."
"And you wonder why I find you intimidating?" Getting Rebecca out of her shell was the first half of the plan. The second was convincing her to help him. "Child prodigy, two degrees already? Also, a global Duel Monsters champion and first person to successfully hack KaibaCorp."
"Those leaks were never traced back to anyone." She dismissed the criminal past with a wave of her hand.
"What leaks?" Even with his biographical knowledge of the team, this was a detail that had slipped under the radar.
"Don't say anything else without a lawyer." Duke had been caught up in one or two 'extreme' parties in his years and knew to never trust any cops 'just trying to figure out what happened'.
"You heard the man." Rebecca pointedly turned back to her book as her squad followed suit.
Yusei could feel the situation slipping away from him once again and considered the ultimate bargaining posture: all four on the floor and smash face into the carpet for the full dogeza. It had worked to spare Phantom from Yubel's wrath, it might be enough to convince Rebecca he was helpless without her. "Is everyone in the future this dense?" Yusei tried desperately to pretend that he had been going to lean on the counter five feet away only to end up awkwardly reaching around to place a hand on his hip. Rebecca had that effect on a lot of people when she gave them intellectual whiplash.
"I don't know what you mean?" She pointedly raised the book between them. "'Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2005'... 'ICTAC'." He mused. "Why do I know that word?"
"Hang on, this bit's great." All the group had been privy to seeing at least one of Rebecca's legendary 'Vulcan mind-fucks' as Joey called them. He even knew to bring candy in advance and pulled a packet from behind a cushion.
"ICTAC." Funny, the pseudo-strokes didn't usually start until at least three days without sleep. Rebecca was like the antithesis of Din – young, female, trained to attack the mind instead of the body. "ICTAC: International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing." He got an invite every year and tried to attend where he could. They probably wouldn't want him back after he kept Abi a secret as long as he had.
"I was thinking that, since you have such 'advanced' technology," Sticks and stones and chemical castration couldn't emasculate as efficiently as that tone. "You work your way backwards while I try and work my way forwards and we can meet in the middle. Great minds, etc."
'You see?' Yusei wanted to clutch his head and shout. 'This is exactly what I was talking about! I swear, she organised all this just to prove that she is smarter than me!' What he managed to say was: "Thank you. Just promise that you will stop trying to trick me into revealing stuff." He tried to be stern, he tried to pretend that she was every politician who tried to dismantle the SRC.
Rebecca simply leaned over and nudged her companion. "My client is exercising her right to remain silent at this time." Duke dutifully slipped across to the next page. "I'll send you my bill later since we both know she'll win the case." Yusei considered trying to argue but he didn't have a chance. Especially when he noticed that Duke was reading a law book.
Cables trailed across the library floor, out through the hallways, and then into several of the other rooms along the hallway. Each set was crudely bundled together and then inserted into the backs of a dozen chunky computer towers balanced along the tables Rebecca had clustered together. Cannibalised amongst the setup was an equal amount of Duel Disks that were being 'borrowed' for the endeavour. How they were going to be returned was a matter for the person who collected them and it was such a shame that she was an adult who wasn't smart enough to put her signature on anything.
Sadly, Duke couldn't attend as he had to attend a video call while his legal team discussed a new branch of Dungeon Dice Monsters in Canada and Téa was still stuck doing administrative work. Rebecca was having to make do with the B-team of intellects, the gut thinkers, the doers, the... Tristan and Joey. She was stuck with Tristan, Joey, and Yusei (who had been reduced to the peanut gallery due to his disconnect with the technology to the point that he needed another explanation, for the group).
"I've bundled them together into a working mesh network through the penthouse connections." Working her way back along the cables, the childish pigtails had been pulled back into a professional bun powerful enough to risk being mistaken for a little old lady. "Between themselves, they're operating in a fully connected topology," She ducked under the mist of the cables and dragged out a heavy black box. "And this is where I turn it into a reverse-star topology and slave them all to your laptop."
"Of course!" Joey smacked his forehead. "It's so obvious!"
"Knock it off." Tristan left a matching mark on the back of the blonde mess. "I'm sure they know what they're doing."
"I have no idea why we're doing it like this." Enough cables were dangling down Yusei's shoulders that he'd already tied his hair back to keep it free from joining the mess of digital snakes.
"It's simple." Rebecca rolled her eyes as she took a handful of wires for herself. Once more, Yusei noticed an uncanny resemblance to Din as the only other scientist who treated him as a source of labour instead of intellect. "Your computer is too far removed from the ones we have to be compatible. But certain core functions of computers are predicted to be universal. I'm guessing that yours still has some way to check for computer errors, right?"
"Maybe." Yusei hedged his bets carefully around his supervisor. "Where are you going with this?"
"Simple: you set your computer to recognise the current state of these systems as a default, use them to create the queries you want and then they'll return the data as erroneous data." Shrugging as if it was the most obvious fact in the room, Rebecca finished switching out the one suspicious cable left and performed a final check of the rest. "You combine that data while eliminating any duplicates and it'll be close enough to what you need that you can personally figure out the rest." Then she caught a look at Yusei's face. "You okay?"
Both eyes were closed tightly and he was silently repeating. "I will not break the Stockholm Treaty, I will not break the Stockholm Treaty, I will not break the Stockholm Treaty."
"What's the Stockholm Treaty?" Taking another deep breath in through his nose, Yusei tried to let go of his rage at the thousandth slip since he had been back.
"I didn't know you could read lips." True, history might have been a bit lax when it came to Tristan but he was reasonably sure that the soldier didn't know sign language.
"It comes in handy when your buddy's trying to cover with the brass." Ah, army pranks. Wonderful. "Lucky that Joey tends to be a bit of a mouth-breather. Helps when the teacher tried to keep us from getting our stories straight." Ah, school pranks. Even better. "Stockholm Treaty?"
"It's not actually a single treaty, it's more like a running list of forbidden scientific experiments; teleportation, artificial intelligence, stuff like that." At least his revelation wouldn't directly endanger the future – the original Stockholm Treaty had been written years before even that date. "One of the primary rules is not to experiment with time travel. There's a little loophole there but we still have to be careful about contaminating history!" At the last minute, he managed to snatch his computer away from Rebecca's patiently helping hands.
"It's not as if plugging in a couple of cables is going to crash the future." She huffed dramatically. "What's the worst that I can do by configuring some diagnostic programs? It's not as if I was going to sniff around your files a bit and check the hardware settings." Every eye in the room turned to her at the suspiciously specific denial.
"And why would you be worried about breaking time travel laws now?" Mai raised a valid point. Everyone privately viewed a few laws as acceptable to break. Even if they were ones that had a very good reason not to be, there was little point in worrying about breaking plates when the pieces were already spread across the floor.
"Two days and she's already figured out a viable experiment to connect computer systems ninety years apart from each other? I'm having to resist setting up a temporal commute." Taking the cable, Yusei carefully soldered a couple of wires into place in accordance with the cardinal rule of network engineers: everything is compatible with enough adaptors. It had meant sacrificing an old storage disk from his keychain for parts but he was now wired up to the computers and not reliant on the obsolete wireless frequencies. "Fibre optic isn't even publicly accessible at this point in time, parts of the web still run on decades-old components and science hasn't even considered qua" Cutting himself off so sharply made Yusei choke slightly. "It's like trying to tie a supercomputer into Bletchley Park."
"What was that last one?" Feeling the fragile integrity of the future crumble away is a lot like feeling the surface beneath your feet shift while a sibling says 'I got it... wait'. What Yusei needed was a miracle. "Were you about to say 'quantum computing'?"
"What's a Bletchley Park?" Sending a silent prayer to whichever god was covering for his mistakes by using Joey as a distraction, Yusei wondered how different circumstances must be for Jaden. Trying to obscure any mention of what was, to him, commonplace technologies was suffocating and bits kept slipping through the cracks.
"World War II computing experiment to break the enigma code." While the news was ancient history to Yusei, ramifications of the global conflict were still present in that year. New horrors continued to be uncovered from either side, the nascent Afghanistan war was drawing parallels with the doomsayers, and the mixed heritages in the room were stirring up mixed emotions. "First digital computer in history was there. This is more difficult." Circling the computers, she carefully launched programs on each computer. "Are you ready?"
Standing at the head of a sprawling science experiment born from desperation and spare cables, Yusei felt the intellectual tingle at his fingertips after so long. Oh, the extensive budgets and fancy equipment the SRC had advanced science far faster and more effectively, blah blah blah. But meetings and medical appointments and settling squabbles between the departments meant that he didn't get to use the shiny toys most of the time. And anyway, nothing compared to being given a box of scraps to solve an unimaginable stride in science and then doing it. "Starting now."
Joey bravely shuffled behind Tristan for cover as comforting whirs and beeps sounded from the modern machines and the future device sat there silently. "Is that it?" Even from his limited experience, there should have been a more dramatic result.
"We're just letting the computers run normal stuff like clocks and background processes." Circling the keyboards, Rebecca didn't click so much as a shift key. "Big Rig is running everything on all these computers at the same time but it needs to learn what's regular stuff and what we want it to learn."
"You named his computer?" Mai labelled anyone she targeted for her cons 'honey' and anyone she was about to eviscerate 'sweetie'. Naming a computer was probably a nerd thing. Yusei certainly seemed uncomfortable with the question.
"I think we've got everything we need for a baseline." At least keeping Abi a secret wasn't going to be difficult. A small slip-up was one thing, a large mistake didn't even bear thinking about. Revealing that spontaneous artificial intelligence was coming could reset the entirety of computer history. "Ready to get serious?"
"It's go time!" Racing around the keyboards, she set them going with the type of scientific glee that society deemed unsuitable for someone Yusei's age. "How's it looking?" Joining her guest at the Big Rig, she accepted the reluctant eye-roll as compensation for the view.
"Everything seems to be holding." One machine to track the last reported uses of cards, another for spells, another for durations, and so on. All the raw data was being automated by the obsolete machines and sifted through his diagnostic crawler for a crude yet effective conglomeration. "Do people fist-bump yet?" He held out a cautious set of knuckles.
"A 'fist-bump'. Gosh, what's that?" She enthusiastically patted his hand. "Does everyone in the future do these? What does it signify?" Yusei squinted at her overly-cutesy questions.
"You're playing with me." It didn't take Joey and Tristan aggressively meleeing one another to figure out he was being pranked.
"Ya know it." Leaning out, she accepted a crisp high-five from Mai. "We call that a 'high-five'. Do they still do those in the future?" If either of his brothers had been present, Yusei would have demonstrated using their heads when the inevitable mocking started. Jack and Crow were spared from hypothetical slaps by the inevitable unpredictabilities of life.
Sparks erupted from the towers and brought shouts of alarm from scientists and observers alike. Grabbing an extinguisher, Yusei buried the tables in plumes of smoke to smother any potential fires as alarms tripped and emergency lighting came on. Taking cables by the handful, Rebecca started ripping them out, starting with the Big Rig and proceeding methodically along the avenues while Mai liberally ripped the power cords from the walls. Taking off his jumper, Joey began wafting the smoke away from the sensors while Tristan did the same with a large atlas.
"What the fuck was that?!" Balancing on the chair, Joey continued to fight the smoke alarms even as he took stock of the ruined stations.
"One of three things just happened." Yusei looked at the smouldering ports with a sceptical eye. Number three on the list was accidentally overloading the burgeoning internet and setting human progress back by at least a decade. If that had happened, the fallout was worse than anything Yliaster could throw at him.
"Guys!" Duke suddenly burst through the door. "Did you do something to the internet? Greg says that our entire floor blew a circuit or something. A technician will be here tomorrow to check it out but we're offline until then." He'd been right in the middle of trying not to fall asleep when the signal suddenly dropped. Damned shame.
Both experts let out a slow breath and exchanged a long look at each other. "Probably a coincidence." Rebecca suggested.
"These old circuits must go all the time." Yusei agreed. At least it hadn't been option two or three. People would notice if Japan suddenly vanished from the digital world but the penthouse was a simpler explanation.
However could Industrial Illusions go a single day without finding some way to expense the upkeep for Pegasus' hand-picked team was beyond reasoning. Even a slightly faulty circuit was replaced during the monthly inspections. That exclusively their floor would go down at the same time Yusei was trying to run a test was longer odds than him being there in the first place. Carefully picking up his laptop, Yusei enclosed it in a padded Faraday bag.
"No offence, but I don't think that we should try that again." Having started as a scientist intent on scratching away to reveal the secrets of the technology inside his computer, Rebecca was now carefully backing away like she had just learned it was mildly radioactive and possibly volatile.
"No." Yusei genuinely agreed this time. "Let's not." Closing the books still left open on the table, he restrained the urge to scream in frustration. After coming so far, failing at this last instant was particularly hurtful. These older systems were barely able to process the available information independently and collating the data with what he had was going to be impossible. His one plan, the only one that could track down the person trying to murder Yugi, had failed.
He was dying, he was helpless, and he was starting from nothing. All he had was a child prodigy, two national champions, a creative genius, a healer with a connection to Shadows, and the most supportive partner he'd ever read about – more than enough. "Okay then." Taking a deep breath, he stood up again. "One more time, from the top."
There we have it - the final chapter (and inevitable reviews) for 2022.
It's been a rough year for everyone so let's do our best for 2023.