It had been a decade since the Digital World invaded Earth. Fourteen years, if some of the rumors about the Hikarigaoka terrorist attack are to be believed – most of the information on that is still classified. Seven – well, really six, it was Christmas – since digimon started attacking in force.
Worse, they came for humanity's children. Takashi Takeru or Yggdrasil or whoever else controlled the digital world must seriously be a master of propaganda. HackingThey hacked into computers, using them to open which they used to open up digital gates, sendingand sent eggs to lonely children without pets.
AkihiroThis isn't an easy job Hiroshi did not have an easy job. A lot of kids cried when Akihiro Hiroshihe took their digimon away, and there was no one else to blame.
The smarter ones, or the more rebellious ones, or the ones with stronger digimon, knew that he couldn't really take them away unless they let him. An adult man has no hope of winning a one-on-one fight with an Adult digimon. Worse, the kind of kids that get digimon, for the most part, aren't the happy or well-adjusted or obedient type.
He told himself, so he could sleep at night, that he was protecting the kids from worse. In reality, he was protecting their classmates, their parents, their neighbors. He'd never heard a story of a digimon turning on their partner – it's everyone else who had to worry when one goes berserk.
Thursday's incident was just another of the type, it didn't stretch beyond the local news.
"Shocking scenes today as a RiseGreymon bombarded Jiyugaoka Cram School. Five students and one teacher have been hospitalized, and what's left of the building must be closed for the remainder of the school year. The rampage only ended when the RiseGreymon retreated into the digital world, taking one student with it. We are fortunate that no one was killed by this monster, although the fate of the boy it kidnapped remains unknown."
It wouldn't have bothered Hiroshi, except that the building the RiseGreymon blew up was his own former cram school. There was absolutely nothing he (or indeed, anyone on the force, or most of the JSDF stationed in Tokyo) could do about a digimon once it gets to that point – the idea was to send them back to the digital world before that can happen. Everyone on the force knew that these anti-digimon stun guns in numbers could just barely handle an Adult digimon, and just forget about a Perfect.
A couple nearby cops had tried – mostly for show, government orders, it looks better to fight back and lose than to do nothing. But really, the RiseGreymon left when it was done, and the boy – who was surely its partner, not any sort of kidnapping victim – had surely made it very clear what he thought about school life, Earth life, and wanted nothing more of it.
The news moved on to talk about the new loans the Tokyo Metropolitan Government was taking – all the digimon attacks were getting expensive, and while weTokyo had it worse than most places, no major population center was immune. Hiroshi was convinced that humans would have to find a new way to build things, something more resilient, if any building method or material existed that could protect humans from every digimon out there. He'd noticed that new skyscrapers were a lot rarer these days, and that just meant worse sprawl and trains getting even more packed.
The world had changed a lot since 2002 (1995, 1999, take your pick), and none of it for the better.
He knew what he was doing wasn't close to enough. The politicians were happy to pay his salary to pretend they were doing something, but he just wasn't satisfied to sit back and watch digimon do all that damage.
One day, Hiroshi noticed a strange document open on his work computer. Someone with more of a cybersecurity background would've told him to close it immediately, although a real expert in the field would have known exactly what it was, and therefore advised otherwise. Hiroshi was technically in the cybercrimes department, but realistically, he was a beat cop; digimon incidents were just folded under "cybercrimes".
He didn't really understand how the "reboot plan" worked, and assumed he must have clicked on it while absentmindedly searching the web for some kind of solution to the digimon crisis. But a part of him wished that "reboot" thing it was describing would happen for real. He carried a cellphone for his job, but would gladly give it up if it meant not having to deal with digimon anymore.
He hated it, but he needed someone on the inside. Someone with a digimon of their own. Because otherwise, no one would ever close the digital gate, and they'd just have to live with those monster attacks forever.
It was very fortunate that the reboot plan had pointed to just such a person. But no one could ever accuse Homeostasis of skimping on their research...
"You can't actually prosecute someone for what they did in fifth grade. In another world." Iori's objection was not wrong, but still, Ken just didn't quite find it compelling. The kid would make a good lawyer someday, but sometimes he got so rule-bound that he just completely missed the point.
"You've atoned plenty. Everyone knows you're the good guy now." It was Wormmon who would actually address his concern. "You don't need to do this."
His digimon knew him so well. Knew what to say to him. And he always, always appreciated his advice; the thought of being without a partner was enough of an objection before he started worrying about his specific words.
He was also, however, living proof of the dangers of partnering young children with digimon. No government on earth would ever be crazy enough to propose such a policy of its own accord. The world had been forced to accept as 'normal' a program which even Homeostasis had launched only out of desperation, which continued to run only because, once set in motion, it had proven impossible to stop.
Impossible. And that, right there, was his strongest objection. Using Stingmon (or Imperialdramon, when Daisuke was around) to protect his hometown was just common sense, and some kind of working relationship with the cops was not a bad thing for any aspiring superhero. But he got the sense the officer wanted something more from him, something only he, not his digimon, could do.
Something connected to his old friends – the ones who didn't live on Earth anymore.
Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan, like similar clauses in the constitutions of other liberal democracies, protects freedom of speech in simple, unambiguous terms. In the face of the digimon crisis, however, politicians and courts the world over found ways to qualify, balance, or simply ignore this right, in order to ban a text they were calling "the most dangerous book in the world."
For a few brief months, the Digimon Partnership Guide was sold openly by Izumi Enterprises – which was notably not a publishing company at all, but a technology one. Founded by former Google Japan executive and world-renowned child prodigy Izumi Koushirou, the company had briefly become the largest in Japan's technology sector, but. But it could not survive the twin blows of harsh anti-digimon legislation, which forced the cancellation of the company's best-selling products and most promising lines of research, and the CEO's own sudden disappearance. The company's fate became something akin to the dot-com bubble on a smaller scale, a cautionary tale of business speculation that caused a minor recession in Japan, but economic news in this period was more than overshadowed by reports of digimon attacks.
Most of the Digimon Partnership Guide is simply practical advice for raising digimon – what they eat, how to teach them to use the toilet, other pieces of information which could be found in any pet raising text, with some concessions (such as instructions on making and using recovery discs) to their profoundly alien and computerized biology. A sort of field guide, taken from Koushirou's Digimon Analyzer, is also included, with drawings or photographs of all known digimon, what little was known about their evolutionary paths, and warnings that this was a very incomplete set.
This, alone, would be enough to condemn the book; more than one politician compared it to a bomb-making manual targeted to children, and anti-terrorism legislation was therefore used to confiscate it in many cities and countries even before specific anti-digimon laws were written. Yet even more dangerous in the eyes of these politicians was the editorial slant of its author, Takaishi Takeru, who described Patamon as his closest friend, thanked many digimon by name for their help with the text, and included individual accounts of how all of the Chosen Children who had traveled together with him had become happier and stronger people for their relationships with the digimon.
Takeru had made an offer, in back-channel negotiations, to strip the text of dangerous information as far as possible in exchange for the text's legalization. But his differences with various law enforcement and security forces were simply irreconcilable, and the changes they demanded sure to make his book completely useless. Out of spite, or perhaps out of space considerations preventing their inclusion in the paper version, the second edition, which can be found on many a torrent site, include detailed descriptions of digimon attacks and instructions on how and when to safely evacuate one's digimon – and if need be, one's own person – into the digital world.
Like many would-be revolutionaries around the world, the human world's most wanted terrorist had an upper-middle class upbringing; unlike them, he also came from a family of journalists, and used what he had learned from his parents to full effect. The mainstream press had taken to calling him "The Pied Piper of Tokyo" – in part because of a garbled account of his battle against Piemon, and in part because he was taking their children away, into the digital world. Takeru detested the nickname, for he remembered Piemon all too well, but the press was hardly likely to listen to the complaints of a terrorist; even excerpts from the book itself could not persuade, as rumors continued to circulate that either the excerpts were themselves fakes or that Takeru had in fact fought HolyAngemon with a Piemon as his partner, but lied about it in his book.
He couldn't be too bothered, though; it was just one more insult among many, nothing compared to the media's role in turning the human world against the digimon. He liked to think he'd made his peace with that; it was one more reason among many that he'd left that world for good.
It would have been better, Taichi thought, for an accomplished diplomat – his professor, for instance, and his Wisemon – to be the one to address the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Digital World.
Yagami Taichi still lived on Earth, and had mostly complied with Digimon Control Act. He was (barely, was this what Jou felt like all the time? In retrospect, he should've been easier on the guy) handling a full courseload in International Relations at Tokyo University, and only popping in to visit Hikari and Agumon in the digital world on weekends.
Tokyo University. Toudai. Japan's single most prominent university, the place that CEOs and Prime Ministers went to. Taichi was under no illusions as to why a middling student at an ordinary public high school had been accepted into such an elite university, and his very name put him at the center of the public debate over digimon issues. This wasn't always a bad thing – plenty of students had digimon of their own by now, and more wanted them – but he'd also dealt with his share of random insults or challenges to fistfights ("just you and me, don't hide behind your digimon") from people who had been victims of digimon attacks and wanted a human to blame.
Even on the days where it felt like his professor and classmates hated him, Taichi had to get through it, had to absorb every bit of information about diplomacy he could, had to master English and protocol and everything else he needed to keep digimon and humans around the world away from each other's throats.
Taichi had worn his best suit to the United Nations, and looked the part of, if not an ambassador, at least an intern working for one of them, a staffer, a student. It wasn't rare to see young people in the diplomatic world, just rare for them to actually address it. It was Agumon – also wearing a suit, to make it very clear that he had diplomatic immunity and that the two were not violating United States law – who drew all the attention.
Someone who knew the digital world like Taichi did would have simply assumed the suit identified Agumon as a member of another digimon species; the type certainly had a lot of variants.
Indeed, there were a few audible gasps when Taichi introduced himself as the ambassador; those diplomats who had not been briefed beforehand had expected Agumon to speak. Much of his speech, of course, could have been taken from the Digimon Partnership Guide, if in watered down form; Taichi was well aware he had diplomatic immunity and that his speech would be televised, and used that opportunity to address not merely world leaders and their representatives, but the global public at large. He came with less bombast, however, and with more awareness of people's suffering, and. He expressed his sincere desire for a world where encounters between humans and digimon did not end in human or digimon deaths or apartments and skyscrapers in ruins.
On a more concrete level, Taichi, although supportive of a global framework for dealing with digimon, found the proposed draft of the International Digimon Treaty completely unacceptable. He reminded the world that, under every precedent, the Digital World possessed sovereignty, and that notions of international law worked out by humans on Earth were not automatically binding on digimon. He understood, and sympathized with, the need to prevent rogue digimon from destroying Earth – but also informed them, many for the first time, of the damage that rogue humans had done to the digital world.
Did any of it matter? Taichi honestly wasn't sure. The session broke up without anything being ratified – but was that because of the issues he raised, or because the world's most powerful countries always struggled to agree on anything? He would get quoted a lot over the months and years to come, but usually by protesters and opposition politicians, not by anyone in power. Was it legal concerns that had protected the digital world from invasion or digimon themselves from military use, or was it simply the difficulty of harnessing them?
And how could anyone prevent prejudice against digimon, even ones as kind-hearted as Agumon, when monster rampages had ceased to be extraordinary and simply become part of the daily news? He really, really wished that he could have included an answer to that question in his speech.
For an internationally wanted fugitive, who had been described by multiple world leaders as a "terrorist", Takeru's home address was not exactly a secret. That he made his home in Torrent Town was a matter of public record; he had listed it in the "About the Author" page of the Digimon Partnership Guide, and he was always willing to lend new chosen children and their partners a helping hand – whether they came to stay or returned home once the furor died down a bit. Some hid out for only a few days in Torrent Town; others were basically locals, well-known to area digimon, but still followed news from Earth in the hope they could return someday.
The issue, from the real world perspective, was that they had no way to actually reach Torrent Town, let alone to compel Takeru in any way. There were diplomatic issues, too, especially after Taichi's speech; the unity of Earth governments in opposing digimon incursions fell apart just as quickly when it came to devising any sort of digital world treaty.
Ichijouji Ken could reach Takeru. He couldn't beat him – not without help, Stingmon vs. Seraphimon would be a joke of a battle, and he hadn't persuaded Daisuke. Wanted to just talk to Takeru first; he'd been gone for so long that there was no way he grasped what the real world was going through these days, and it was always better to win without a fight.
Takeru was older now. More mature. He was not without sympathy when heKen told him heard about the incident at Jiyugaoka in Tokyo – it was not him, but Patamon, who pointed out, "But no one died, right? I knew RiseGreymon's not that bad a guy!"
But nothing had prepared Ken for Takeru's eventual answer. "I can't."
"What do you mean?" In hindsight, Ken should have been prepared; how could one man personally stop what multiple world governments could not? But the police had briefed him with so much confidence, and as much as he tuned out the news these days, as much as he popped into the digital world with Wormmon to hang out from time to time, maybe the notion of Takaishi Takeru as a guerrilla mastermind had rubbed off on him just a little. Of course he couldn't control over 8,000 chosen children and their digimon!
"I wrote the book, but I don't distribute it. It's all peer to peer, so I couldn't shut it down even if I wanted to."
The idea of "digital zero", that the digimon crisis could be resolved by simply turning off all the world's computers, had become something of a fashionable political movement, winning support especially among those who had lost homes or loved ones to digimon rampages. It was, if anything, more powerful than a reboot – an idea which implied turning technology back on.
A couple small countries, neither with any technology industry to speak of, had actually signed onto it, but it was a non-starter at the United Nations; there was too much money and convenience tied up in computers. Still, it had its protests in every major world city, and its sympathizers and activists around the world – some of them in positions of power or influence.
Power, that is to say, over other humans. There were reasons to be suspicious about the authorship of the original 'digital zero' paper, released anonymously over the internet. But if Homeostasis or anyone else had sought to avert a reboot through some kind of voluntary disentanglement of the two worlds, they had failed.
Worse, from that perspective, a reboot was guaranteed to fail if humans remained in the digital world while it happened. The 2005 reboot of the digital world had resolved nothing, had if anything made the Meicoomon virus worse. It's always a risk in computing; a virus deleted is easily reinstalled if the underlying file is corrupted. If the digital world's self-repair system was to protect the quantum sea from chaos, the corruption had to be removed first.
Which was all a roundabout way of saying that humans had to be removed from the digital world. And not a few humans whom Homeostasis had personally chosen, and who trusted them, but hundreds of refugees living there permanently with their digimon partners, and thousands more popping in and out with regularity.
It was not enough to simply stop the flow. Someone would have to actually remove the ones already present.
There were old guard Chosen Children who were wavering in the face of constant digimon attacks on the news, who feared the chaos of a world in which everyone had a partner to call their own. Yagami Hikari was not in the least bit among them.
Her brother was a college student. In more ordinary times, she'd be in her final year of high school. And yet she was teaching classes – of children and adults alike – and people were already starting to call her the Digimon Professor.
Hikari didn't know why she fell into her particular specialization. Maybe it was just that Tailmon was Tailmon, and people knew their story. Maybe it was that she liked helping people and always wanted to teach. But she always found herself answering people's questions – first on the old digimon forums, then directly in instant messages, and eventually in person in Torrent Town itself. So many people came to her with the same questions that Takeru had collected all her forum posts into a FAQ, and she had written the forum's FAQ on her request - a document which formed the nucleus of, and was no less subversive, albeit considerably less dangerous, than the Digimon Partnership Guide – or rather, Takeru had collected a bunch of her prior answers and organized them as one, on her request. And as the population of people with digimon grew, and as so many of them had the same questions, teaching a class was just the natural way to reach everyone.
Takeru was a much better writer, and Koushirou understood the digital world better, but Hikari's understanding of how digimon evolved was simply unparalleled. Hikari very much enjoyed teaching, and cherished the smiles and thank-yous she received every day from grateful people and digimon. Her work wasn't just about avoiding dark or berserk evolutions, although that was the most common question; she had recently congratulated a girl and her Pomumon on a successful evolution, as she had evolved from a Tanemon who really wanted to fly.
Hikari knew that the population was growing faster than she could keep up with, and encouraged her students to help one another out; she hoped she was not only helping people with their own digimon, but also training the next generation of teachers. Of course, it wasn't like she was alone – Takeru's book had surely reached more people than she ever could, Tailmon taught with her every day, and the other chosen children were always willing to lend a hand whenever she needed one. But the Digital World was doubling every year, and there were just too many Chosen Children now for them to remain a close-knit community.
Digimon meant joy to Hikari, and she wished everyone in both worlds could have a bond like the one between herself and Tailmon. And Tailmon was living proof that digimon who came to Earth to spread chaos could still be turned into powerful allies.
The authorities – in both worlds – could complain. She didn't care. Yagami Hikari was happy, and she was prepared to do whatever she had to in order to protect that happiness.
It was far from unheard of to witness a digimon appearing at the outskirts of Hikari's open-air classroom. Torrent Town's weather was either pleasant or so rainy that no one was willing to show up at school in the first place, and she liked the ability to attract onlookers curious about her lessons; the more she could spread knowledge, the better. So it wasn't unusual for a child or even an adult level digimon to come by and listen at attention, even one without a partner.
If every human was bound to get a digimon partner eventually, did the same apply in reverse?
This, however, was different – the sheer size and aura of the visitor spoke to that, and then there was the red cape the size of a curtain, and the spiked armor that gleamed in a brilliant, pure white. Hikari had seen this digimon before; it was there during the most difficult time in her life, when everything she had relied on disappeared like a corrupted hard drive.
Even though she was the teacher, she froze and stared at attention when it approached – and so did her students, without her prompting. There was something just that imposing about Jesmon's presence.
"Humans. Intruders. By order of Homeostasis, depart from this world!" Jesmon's voice boomed.
Some of the children fled – but Hikari defiantly gave a stop sign with her hand. Her digivice pulsed, and so did the light within her heart.
"Tailmon, chou shinka! Angewomon! Angewomon, kyuukyoku shinka! Ophanimon!" A cat became a golden angel, a beautiful woman holding a mighty lance, clad in brilliant blue armor with wheels upon her shoulders.
"Jesmon, you have no right to banish them. The Kernel has accepted their presence," Ophanimon proclaimed, with a self-assurance that gave her words the impression of a command.
"You hacked the kernel! Un Pour Tous!" Jesmon's attack did not target the other Ultimate digimon, its supposed opponent, but a little black-haired girl cradling a Labramon. Even Ophanimon could not match its speed; she hurled her lance in front of the dog, sacrificing her weapon to produce a weak barrier of light.
Now the students fled. Or some of them, anyway. Others looked on, frozen in awe. One of the older and more combative boys began to approach with defiance, but his red armband-wearing Agumon held him back.
Yet Ophanimon was not the only Ultimate digimon who the refugees of Torrent Town could call upon. "The Royal Knights have no place here. The decision of the Three Archangels is unanimous. Seven Heavens!"
"Three partner digimon exceeding their authority," Jesmon scoffed. "All you've brought to both worlds is chaos. The gate should never have been allowed to reopen. Go home, humans; this world no longer needs you!"
Jesmon could do nothing, in the face of two Archangel digimon, but send an angry message – and there is nothing which the people of the internet are more accustomed to than an unsolicited angry message.
The humans still needed their digimon, the digimon still needed their humans, and there was no force in either world which could tear them apart. The worlds were changing. It was an unstoppable change – chaos – and there was nothing that either Homeostasis or world governments could do about it.
In 2027, the Digimon Partnership Guide would be read in schools – both as a historic document and as a practical source of advice for students – and the last holdouts would have no choice but to celebrate Takaishi Takeru's complete victory.
Together with their digimon partners.