kashiwrites (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kashiwrites) wrote2007-11-19 05:47 pm
kashiwrites) wrote2007-11-19 05:47 pm
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NaNoWriMo 2007 (Sequel to 2005) - Anime-Style Story - Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
The afternoon class on astronautics should have been fascinating, but Jin couldn’t wait for it to finish. Normally she’d have been avid to study the effects of weightlessness on bone density, but she could see Miaki fidgeting across the room, and she knew he’d bolt out of the room as soon as class was over, and she was eager to bolt right after him.
Technically, they were supposed to head to a VR room and go into one of the course simulations where they would practise the techniques designed to counteract the depletion of bone density in space. They’d probably have to do that, at least for a few minutes. But in fact they really planned to work some more on the problem of undoing the effects of the virus that had infected Toshi.
It had been a tense four days since Chika had discovered the virus, and since Toshi had been informed about it. The cousins had studiously avoided each other ever since they learned the news. There had been only one direct encounter, as Jin had gone to Miaki’s room just after the little conference in the gazebo. She’d thought Toshi would be a while longer, talking to Chika and answering her last questions about how he felt when the virus took hold. But as she’d stood at Miaki’s door, giving him a quick rundown of how things had gone, Toshi walked past, on his way to his room next door.
He had stopped walking with a jerk, and the cousins’ eyes met. Miaki’s breath had caught with a gasp as he held himself utterly still, waiting. Toshi had stared at him for a long moment, a mixture of grief and fear on his face. Then he had closed his eyes, muttering, “Dammit,” and almost ran to his own door, too agitated to stand still and let the scanner go over his retina, but cursing as he fumbled on the keypad and couldn’t seem to remember the right combination of numbers to get himself into his room.
Miaki had stepped forward, as though to go to him, but Jin had caught his arm. “No. You can’t help.”
He had turned stricken eyes on her, as though she had stabbed him to the heart, and fled into his room, slamming the door.
Next morning, coming to the breakfast table where she sat with Julie, Chika, and Kenji, he’d informed them that he and Toshi, via email, had arranged what times each of them would come to meals, which routes they’d take to which classes, and which meals they would sit with the others in the group or at a different table, so as to avoid direct contact as much as possible. A few minutes later, glancing past his shoulder toward the door of the dining hall, Jin had seen Toshi enter the room, glance toward their table, and move to sit somewhere else.
She had also noted, that morning, that the two streaks on Miaki’s cheek had been painted red again instead of the more usual blue. She knew from past experience that this was a very bad sign.
Back in the present, the instructor droned on – or rather, since it was an interesting subject and the instructor didn’t really drone, the class dragged on. It was almost done, though, and they were now being given instructions for their VR assignment to follow the class: try out the proposed physical techniques for compensating for bone density loss in space, and assess the plausibility of each one in an enclosed space ship or space station environment. There would be a module of about a month, inserted into the course a week from now, where the students would try to design an environment, within a ship or station, where the techniques judged most plausible and most potentially successful could fit with all other physical requirements in those spaces.
(That was what Jin loved most about ISCE courses: the overlap between them. You could expect a design module in the middle of a theoretical astronautics course, and then turn around and find a psychology module in the middle of a terraforming course. Everything interlocked.)
At last, the class was over. Miaki snapped his palm computer shut, and cast a questioning glance at Jin, who was already halfway to his desk. He waited till she joined him, and they started down the hall toward the closest VR room.
“I think,” he said briskly, “that we can dispense with the exercise room and the treadmill fairly quickly. There’s quite a bit of existing data on those, and we can do something fairly cursory and still be able to report plausible results.”
Jin nodded, trotting to keep up with him as he strode down the hall. “We’ll have to spend a little more time on the combinations of physical and other methods. From the reading I’ve done so far,” she hopped a little, making up some distance, “I think a combination of treadmill and pressure or irradiation of the lower extremities is what’s going to work the best.”
“Right. We can spend more time on that tomorrow, unless you really want to get to it today.”
“No,” she gasped, “we’ve got lots of time.”
Miaki stopped suddenly, putting a hand on her shoulder as she stumbled to a halt beside him. “Look at you – running after me while I just barrel along without thinking. Sorry, Jin. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Oh,” she shrugged, taking a deep breath. “Don’t worry. I’m just out of practice.”
“No, that’s not good enough. I should pay attention. I’ll walk more slowly, and you be sure to yell at me if I get ahead of you again. You can’t adjust your avatar out here, you know,” he added with a fond smile. He squeezed her shoulder, but then the smile faded and he frowned ruefully. “You shouldn’t have to spend so much time running after me and my problems. It’s just not right.”
“Now, don’t start that,” Jin answered firmly. “Let’s get going.” He flashed her another fond smile, and began walking again, more slowly than before.
They were in sync as always, as they prepared to run through a few preliminaries in their class exercise in the VR sim. They entered it through the garden with the gazebo, since Miaki had permanently linked that entrance to their logins. As they often did, they smiled at each other, knowing their fellow students were stuck with the boring, grey, unfurnished dormitory room as an entry into the simulations.
However, the garden didn’t last long; Jin quickly called up the first option in the designated sim, and they stood in a cylindrical exercise room designed to appear like something used a few decades ago in an early space station. There was a little bit of gravity beneath them, suggesting that the long room had been turning around in some way. Various exercise machines had been set into the walls, and a running track went around the entire cylinder – from floor to wall to ceiling to wall to floor again.
Jin stepped to the side of the running track, while Miaki leapt onto it and ran up the wall and onto the ceiling. He hung there, grinning at her, reaching over his head to touch the top of hers. While he appeared to be “up,” to her, she knew she equally appeared to be “up” from his viewpoint.
“Very funny,” she said, ignoring him and turning to the academic business at hand. She called up a holoscreen and tapped into the underlying levels of the simulation. “If you want to run, hold on,” she admonished. “I’ll record the data as you go, and that will be the first exercise out of the way.”
“Ready when you are,” Miaki agreed.
He twiddled his fingers in her hair while she set up the parameters. It tickled a little. But finally she nodded to herself and looked up at him. “Start whenever you like,” she said.
It only took a few minutes, as he raced around and around and she gathered various data. Almost casually she drew up previous data from past experiments in this context, and set up a small macro to correlate and contrast it with what she was collecting, and set these comparisons into a 4-D graph. She probably had all the data she needed after Miaki had run around eight or ten times, but she let him go up to fifteen before she stopped him. She reasoned that he probably needed the chance to expend some energy and let out some tension.
The next experiment involved a basic treadmill, and it was her turn to go through the experiment while Miaki ran the data. As she stepped onto the treadmill and set the controls, she hesitated, and then adjusted her avatar so that she was no longer wearing her usual sweater and skirt, but stood instead in fashionable gym wear, with her hair swept up and clipped on the top of her head.
“Very nice,” Miaki remarked. “Nothing but the best in simulated space exercise attire for our Jin.”
“Well,” she chuckled, “Julie’s been nagging me to pay more attention to how I look.”
“I’ve always enjoyed how you looked,” he said, absently fiddling with the specs on his holoscreen.
Jin dampened the blush that threatened to spring up on her avatar’s face, and finished with the treadmill’s settings. “Ready?” she asked briskly.
“Go for it,” he nodded.
She began to walk, at the pace recommended by the previous designers of this space station exercise room. She thought, fleetingly, how glad she was that their avatars weren’t so real that they got all breathless and sweaty. They could feel genuine exertion, but although she’d be a bit more tired when she logged out of this simulation, at least she wouldn’t have to head immediately for the shower.
To keep herself from being bored, she summoned up a copy of Miaki’s holoscreen, and watched the data pile up. Just as she had done, he wasn’t merely tracking the exertions of the person doing the exercise, to see whether that particular exercise would be sufficient to balance the loss of bone density. He was also tracking oxygen consumption and subsequent air filtration and replenishment requirements, as well as use of power by the implement of exercise itself (in his case on the running track, power consumption had been zero; in her case on the treadmill, it was relatively small, but still a contributor to the overall power needs of the entire station). Part of the calculations at the end would contrast the increased use of power for exercises machines with the decreased necessity for heating the room once the person’s own body heated up.
And just before Jin finished on the treadmill, she saw a note appear at the bottom of the holoscreen: “Calculate estimated water use for shower after exercise, plus power to heat water and clean clothes. Cross-reference for station equipped with ion shower instead.”
Good idea, thought Jin. The medical and physical issue had to be factored into the overall costs of running such a station or, in future, a Moon colony or spaceship to Mars. Every detail was important. She sent a quick note to herself to add these factors to her own data, and then she stopped the treadmill and stepped off it. For a moment, she conjured up a towel that she draped around her neck, as though she really had exerted herself and needed to dry off.
Miaki smirked at her. “Yes, very realistic,” he said. “You goof.”
She laughed, and switched back to her normal avatar.
It was the last moment of levity for the two of them for a while. As he closed his holoscreen, his smile faded away, and when he turned back to Jin, the somber expression of the last few days had returned to his face. “So...you ready to do some virus analyzing?” he asked softly.
Jin nodded, and logged out of that simulation and back into the gazebo alongside him.
Their work now would take a rather different form than what they’d done in the space station exercise simulation. Although they’d still be online and using their VR equipment, they were going to travel through the network itself and analyze the programs behind simulations. And although much of the analysis would still take a visual form for them, it wouldn’t look quite as realistic or elaborate as the sims. It would in fact, Jin realized suddenly, look much more like her first foray into forbidden territory with Miaki, last year, when they’d traveled those blank corridors until they’d infiltrated the Pacific Rim government’s records system, portrayed as a huge vault with rows and rows of filing cabinets.
“Do you know where to go?” she asked, and he nodded. His avatar had that preoccupied look that indicated half his mind was elsewhere, probably summoning the codes for the route he wanted to take.
“Chika sent me the coordinates early yesterday,” he said.
“And you’ve held off this long?”
Miaki paused, not looking at her. Then finally, “It took me this long to get up the nerve to go in,” he muttered.
“It’ll be all right,” Jin reminded him. “You’re not alone.”
He ignored this. Instead, a doorway opened at the opening in the wall of the gazebo as he opened up the route into the underlayer of the simulation he’d chosen. “Ready?” Miaki said. “Let’s go in.”
Jin had been right; this was a lot like their first secret journey together to the Pacific Rim system. They walked for a while down a long, grey corridor with cross-corridors and doorways leading off of it. She realized immediately that they were not after all in a specific simulation, but in the main directory to all the simulations at the school. The branched-off corridors were actually routes to different folders and maintenance programs. Some of them had signs above them: “First Year;” “First-Second Year;” “Senior Projects;” and so on. There was one very large corridor leading off the left side of this main hallway, with a barred gate across it and a sign saying, “Simulation design programs: password required.” And a most interesting corridor, almost as wide, going off to the right, which had a vault door shutting it off.
That one wasn’t labelled. And Jin couldn’t remember if this locked folder was displayed in the public directory or not. But as she met Miaki’s speculative glance, she knew she had the same thought that he did: were the “real-world” simulations they’d found last year still in existence, behind that vault door? She wondered if even he could manage to get through it, so thoroughly had the ISCE officials barricaded it.
But that wasn’t their main business. It didn’t take long for Miaki to choose a corridor and walk along it until he came to a door with a sign over it reading, “Mars terra.” He paused and contemplated the sign for a long moment.
“I take it,” Jin said, “that this is one of the sims with the virus code in it?”
Miaki smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “This,” he told her, “is the simulation Toshi was in when the virus zapped him.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Are you sure you want to go in? Maybe you should just let Chika work on this.”
“I’m going in,” he said grimly, jaw set, and yanked open the door.
He hadn’t answered her specific question, Jin thought. Then she sighed and followed him in.
Of course she’d seen the inside of this layer of a simulation before, having written her own relatively simple sims in the past, as had every ISCE student. But it was still a fascinating, almost dreamlike experience to step into this coding level. The path they took seemed to hang in black space, and served as the entry and exit point of all data. They could see the data flowing in and out, in fact, beneath their feet; it was like they were walking on a semi-transparent, flattened out optic cable, and flashes of light streamed back and forth at almost blinding speed. Jin actually had to tone down the light perception of her avatar, just a little, or the brightness of these flashes might have blocked out everything else.
The optic cable diverged off in a multitude of branches, almost all of them streaming with data, but not quite as blindingly. In many places, nodes hung at junctions where these data streams met, the nodes shaped like paper wasps’ nests, but pulsating with light flashes of many colours.
When one stared closely at these nodes, they seemed to change form a little bit, as though someone had stripped away the outside covering of the wasp’s nest, to reveal many little compartments, like a honeycomb (changing metaphors in mid-stream, Jin thought to herself). In most of these compartments was a sort of cartridge of data, plugged in by the original creators of the program. It was these cartridge things that flashed on and off, in different colours, as data was accessed or passed through.
Jin squinted her avatar’s eyes, peering at Miaki. She saw the red beacon that would allow her to find him even if he wandered off and got lost amidst all the other flashing colours. She knew he’d see her own blue dot if he needed to find her.
But for the moment, they walked along the cable together. He pulled up a holoscreen that presumably contained Chika’s directions, and followed it as they penetrated further and further into the simulation coding. He chose branches as directed, and eventually came to a less brightly-lit section, with only a few nodes.
“He would have come this direction for sure,” Miaki murmured, half to himself, “just to find out why the light died down. In case there was a malfunction.”
They found the questionable coding bundle shortly after that: a node hanging rather loosely, with only one or two connections to other cables, and flashing with odd colours in a less orderly, more discordant pattern.
“And there it is,” Miaki announced soberly, and unnecessarily. “No wonder he investigated it.”
“It looks like something legitimate, even with the odd configuration,” Jin nodded. As she saw Miaki reaching his hand toward it, she grabbed his wrist. “Wait a minute. Let me touch it.”
“Chika said it’s not directed at me,” he reminded her.
“And she hasn’t finished analyzing it,” she reminded him back. “So tell me which parts you want to look at or pull out, and I’ll do it, and show them to you.” She fixed a very stern look on his face. “Non-negotiable, Miaki.”
“All right. Slave driver.” He flashed a quick smile, and then bent to examine the node.
They spent several minutes in heavy concentration, each moving around and around the node, looking at it carefully while keeping a bit of distance between it and themselves. After they’d walked around it sideways several times, Jin crouched below to examine its underside, and Miaki effortlessly hopped up to a nearby cable branch, leaning over to scrutinize its top.
Then began the mapping, as he instructed her to pull out several cartridges so he could see them in detail. Chika had done a lot of this herself as well, but he wanted first to compare what he saw to what she described in her notes, in case she’d missed anything, or in case he could put a different interpretation onto what they saw.
The cartridges of data, unlike in any other nodes, couldn’t be completely disconnected and removed. They discovered this fairly quickly, as Jin pulled out the first one and lifted it up so they could scrutinize it more comfortably. They saw immediately that it remained connected to the node by a thick filament, which disappeared into the internal workings of the node itself. Every other cartridge was tethered in a similar way.
“Which means,” Miaki grimaced, “that it’s been designed to make it very hard, or maybe even impossible, to dismantle the virus node. That’s what Chika speculated, and I see what she means.”
“I wonder what would happen if we just cut one of the ties,” Jin mused.
“I don’t think we really want to find out.”
“Not without coming in here covered in armour,” she agreed. “And even then it might not attack us at all, but spread itself through the whole simulation instead, or even get into the network. We just don’t know.”
“Which is what this whole exploration is supposed to discover.” Miaki walked around and around the node, pulling out the cartridges and comparing his notes with Chika’s.
Jin noticed something else. She had held onto one of the earlier cartridges a bit longer than usual, and all along the filament, bright orange flashes began to spark in sporadic, irregular bursts. She frowned a bit as she replaced the cartridge, and tried again with another one, with the same results. The third time, she also pulled out a simulated knife and tried to pry the cartridge open. This time, the flashes were orange-red, angry, and very bright.
“Stop!” Miaki said sharply. “Put it back quickly, Jin.”
She’d already been in the process of doing so, and turned soberly to him after replacing the cartridge. “This is closed up pretty tightly, beyond our just being able to discover the basic structure.”
He nodded. “It’s going to take a lot of work to figure out its inner workings. Damn. Whoever designed this was good. It’s going to take too much time...” He pulled out another cartridge and peered into the honeycomb from which it had come, and into which its filament disappeared. His free hand came up, and his fingers were already beginning to poke into the opening, when Jin grabbed his arm and pulled it back.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “You’re not just going to dive in there without any idea of what you’ll find. What are you thinking?”
He jerked his hand away. “One of us is going to have to get in there eventually,” he retorted. “We’re not going to disable it or reverse its effects without seeing right inside.”
“Of course. But we still can’t go in there without a lot more knowledge and preparation. Use your head, Miaki. I know you’re impatient to get this fixed, but it won’t do any good if you hurt yourself.”
He glowered for a moment, but finally sighed ruefully, and nodded. “Okay, of course you’re right. I just...” He shrugged an awkward shoulder and wrenched his mind back to their work. “Back to business, then. I think we’ve got all the data we can collect on the virus’s structure. We can all compare notes on it tonight.” He made one more circuit of the node, eyes narrowed. “What I wish I knew,” he murmured, “was exactly what Toshi was doing when he got zapped.”
“Well,” came a voice from above their heads, “if you wanted to know that, all you had to do was ask me.”
Jin’s and Miaki’s heads jerked up simultaneously, to discover Toshi himself sitting on a thick data cable angling above the general area where the node resided. He sat casually sideways, one foot on the cable and his knee up, elbow resting on the knee. He gazed down at them with a deceptively pleasant smile, but his cold blue eyes contradicted it, glittering in malicious amusement.
“Toshi...,” Miaki breathed. “My god, Tosh...what the hell are you doing here?”
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
The afternoon class on astronautics should have been fascinating, but Jin couldn’t wait for it to finish. Normally she’d have been avid to study the effects of weightlessness on bone density, but she could see Miaki fidgeting across the room, and she knew he’d bolt out of the room as soon as class was over, and she was eager to bolt right after him.
Technically, they were supposed to head to a VR room and go into one of the course simulations where they would practise the techniques designed to counteract the depletion of bone density in space. They’d probably have to do that, at least for a few minutes. But in fact they really planned to work some more on the problem of undoing the effects of the virus that had infected Toshi.
It had been a tense four days since Chika had discovered the virus, and since Toshi had been informed about it. The cousins had studiously avoided each other ever since they learned the news. There had been only one direct encounter, as Jin had gone to Miaki’s room just after the little conference in the gazebo. She’d thought Toshi would be a while longer, talking to Chika and answering her last questions about how he felt when the virus took hold. But as she’d stood at Miaki’s door, giving him a quick rundown of how things had gone, Toshi walked past, on his way to his room next door.
He had stopped walking with a jerk, and the cousins’ eyes met. Miaki’s breath had caught with a gasp as he held himself utterly still, waiting. Toshi had stared at him for a long moment, a mixture of grief and fear on his face. Then he had closed his eyes, muttering, “Dammit,” and almost ran to his own door, too agitated to stand still and let the scanner go over his retina, but cursing as he fumbled on the keypad and couldn’t seem to remember the right combination of numbers to get himself into his room.
Miaki had stepped forward, as though to go to him, but Jin had caught his arm. “No. You can’t help.”
He had turned stricken eyes on her, as though she had stabbed him to the heart, and fled into his room, slamming the door.
Next morning, coming to the breakfast table where she sat with Julie, Chika, and Kenji, he’d informed them that he and Toshi, via email, had arranged what times each of them would come to meals, which routes they’d take to which classes, and which meals they would sit with the others in the group or at a different table, so as to avoid direct contact as much as possible. A few minutes later, glancing past his shoulder toward the door of the dining hall, Jin had seen Toshi enter the room, glance toward their table, and move to sit somewhere else.
She had also noted, that morning, that the two streaks on Miaki’s cheek had been painted red again instead of the more usual blue. She knew from past experience that this was a very bad sign.
Back in the present, the instructor droned on – or rather, since it was an interesting subject and the instructor didn’t really drone, the class dragged on. It was almost done, though, and they were now being given instructions for their VR assignment to follow the class: try out the proposed physical techniques for compensating for bone density loss in space, and assess the plausibility of each one in an enclosed space ship or space station environment. There would be a module of about a month, inserted into the course a week from now, where the students would try to design an environment, within a ship or station, where the techniques judged most plausible and most potentially successful could fit with all other physical requirements in those spaces.
(That was what Jin loved most about ISCE courses: the overlap between them. You could expect a design module in the middle of a theoretical astronautics course, and then turn around and find a psychology module in the middle of a terraforming course. Everything interlocked.)
At last, the class was over. Miaki snapped his palm computer shut, and cast a questioning glance at Jin, who was already halfway to his desk. He waited till she joined him, and they started down the hall toward the closest VR room.
“I think,” he said briskly, “that we can dispense with the exercise room and the treadmill fairly quickly. There’s quite a bit of existing data on those, and we can do something fairly cursory and still be able to report plausible results.”
Jin nodded, trotting to keep up with him as he strode down the hall. “We’ll have to spend a little more time on the combinations of physical and other methods. From the reading I’ve done so far,” she hopped a little, making up some distance, “I think a combination of treadmill and pressure or irradiation of the lower extremities is what’s going to work the best.”
“Right. We can spend more time on that tomorrow, unless you really want to get to it today.”
“No,” she gasped, “we’ve got lots of time.”
Miaki stopped suddenly, putting a hand on her shoulder as she stumbled to a halt beside him. “Look at you – running after me while I just barrel along without thinking. Sorry, Jin. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Oh,” she shrugged, taking a deep breath. “Don’t worry. I’m just out of practice.”
“No, that’s not good enough. I should pay attention. I’ll walk more slowly, and you be sure to yell at me if I get ahead of you again. You can’t adjust your avatar out here, you know,” he added with a fond smile. He squeezed her shoulder, but then the smile faded and he frowned ruefully. “You shouldn’t have to spend so much time running after me and my problems. It’s just not right.”
“Now, don’t start that,” Jin answered firmly. “Let’s get going.” He flashed her another fond smile, and began walking again, more slowly than before.
They were in sync as always, as they prepared to run through a few preliminaries in their class exercise in the VR sim. They entered it through the garden with the gazebo, since Miaki had permanently linked that entrance to their logins. As they often did, they smiled at each other, knowing their fellow students were stuck with the boring, grey, unfurnished dormitory room as an entry into the simulations.
However, the garden didn’t last long; Jin quickly called up the first option in the designated sim, and they stood in a cylindrical exercise room designed to appear like something used a few decades ago in an early space station. There was a little bit of gravity beneath them, suggesting that the long room had been turning around in some way. Various exercise machines had been set into the walls, and a running track went around the entire cylinder – from floor to wall to ceiling to wall to floor again.
Jin stepped to the side of the running track, while Miaki leapt onto it and ran up the wall and onto the ceiling. He hung there, grinning at her, reaching over his head to touch the top of hers. While he appeared to be “up,” to her, she knew she equally appeared to be “up” from his viewpoint.
“Very funny,” she said, ignoring him and turning to the academic business at hand. She called up a holoscreen and tapped into the underlying levels of the simulation. “If you want to run, hold on,” she admonished. “I’ll record the data as you go, and that will be the first exercise out of the way.”
“Ready when you are,” Miaki agreed.
He twiddled his fingers in her hair while she set up the parameters. It tickled a little. But finally she nodded to herself and looked up at him. “Start whenever you like,” she said.
It only took a few minutes, as he raced around and around and she gathered various data. Almost casually she drew up previous data from past experiments in this context, and set up a small macro to correlate and contrast it with what she was collecting, and set these comparisons into a 4-D graph. She probably had all the data she needed after Miaki had run around eight or ten times, but she let him go up to fifteen before she stopped him. She reasoned that he probably needed the chance to expend some energy and let out some tension.
The next experiment involved a basic treadmill, and it was her turn to go through the experiment while Miaki ran the data. As she stepped onto the treadmill and set the controls, she hesitated, and then adjusted her avatar so that she was no longer wearing her usual sweater and skirt, but stood instead in fashionable gym wear, with her hair swept up and clipped on the top of her head.
“Very nice,” Miaki remarked. “Nothing but the best in simulated space exercise attire for our Jin.”
“Well,” she chuckled, “Julie’s been nagging me to pay more attention to how I look.”
“I’ve always enjoyed how you looked,” he said, absently fiddling with the specs on his holoscreen.
Jin dampened the blush that threatened to spring up on her avatar’s face, and finished with the treadmill’s settings. “Ready?” she asked briskly.
“Go for it,” he nodded.
She began to walk, at the pace recommended by the previous designers of this space station exercise room. She thought, fleetingly, how glad she was that their avatars weren’t so real that they got all breathless and sweaty. They could feel genuine exertion, but although she’d be a bit more tired when she logged out of this simulation, at least she wouldn’t have to head immediately for the shower.
To keep herself from being bored, she summoned up a copy of Miaki’s holoscreen, and watched the data pile up. Just as she had done, he wasn’t merely tracking the exertions of the person doing the exercise, to see whether that particular exercise would be sufficient to balance the loss of bone density. He was also tracking oxygen consumption and subsequent air filtration and replenishment requirements, as well as use of power by the implement of exercise itself (in his case on the running track, power consumption had been zero; in her case on the treadmill, it was relatively small, but still a contributor to the overall power needs of the entire station). Part of the calculations at the end would contrast the increased use of power for exercises machines with the decreased necessity for heating the room once the person’s own body heated up.
And just before Jin finished on the treadmill, she saw a note appear at the bottom of the holoscreen: “Calculate estimated water use for shower after exercise, plus power to heat water and clean clothes. Cross-reference for station equipped with ion shower instead.”
Good idea, thought Jin. The medical and physical issue had to be factored into the overall costs of running such a station or, in future, a Moon colony or spaceship to Mars. Every detail was important. She sent a quick note to herself to add these factors to her own data, and then she stopped the treadmill and stepped off it. For a moment, she conjured up a towel that she draped around her neck, as though she really had exerted herself and needed to dry off.
Miaki smirked at her. “Yes, very realistic,” he said. “You goof.”
She laughed, and switched back to her normal avatar.
It was the last moment of levity for the two of them for a while. As he closed his holoscreen, his smile faded away, and when he turned back to Jin, the somber expression of the last few days had returned to his face. “So...you ready to do some virus analyzing?” he asked softly.
Jin nodded, and logged out of that simulation and back into the gazebo alongside him.
Their work now would take a rather different form than what they’d done in the space station exercise simulation. Although they’d still be online and using their VR equipment, they were going to travel through the network itself and analyze the programs behind simulations. And although much of the analysis would still take a visual form for them, it wouldn’t look quite as realistic or elaborate as the sims. It would in fact, Jin realized suddenly, look much more like her first foray into forbidden territory with Miaki, last year, when they’d traveled those blank corridors until they’d infiltrated the Pacific Rim government’s records system, portrayed as a huge vault with rows and rows of filing cabinets.
“Do you know where to go?” she asked, and he nodded. His avatar had that preoccupied look that indicated half his mind was elsewhere, probably summoning the codes for the route he wanted to take.
“Chika sent me the coordinates early yesterday,” he said.
“And you’ve held off this long?”
Miaki paused, not looking at her. Then finally, “It took me this long to get up the nerve to go in,” he muttered.
“It’ll be all right,” Jin reminded him. “You’re not alone.”
He ignored this. Instead, a doorway opened at the opening in the wall of the gazebo as he opened up the route into the underlayer of the simulation he’d chosen. “Ready?” Miaki said. “Let’s go in.”
Jin had been right; this was a lot like their first secret journey together to the Pacific Rim system. They walked for a while down a long, grey corridor with cross-corridors and doorways leading off of it. She realized immediately that they were not after all in a specific simulation, but in the main directory to all the simulations at the school. The branched-off corridors were actually routes to different folders and maintenance programs. Some of them had signs above them: “First Year;” “First-Second Year;” “Senior Projects;” and so on. There was one very large corridor leading off the left side of this main hallway, with a barred gate across it and a sign saying, “Simulation design programs: password required.” And a most interesting corridor, almost as wide, going off to the right, which had a vault door shutting it off.
That one wasn’t labelled. And Jin couldn’t remember if this locked folder was displayed in the public directory or not. But as she met Miaki’s speculative glance, she knew she had the same thought that he did: were the “real-world” simulations they’d found last year still in existence, behind that vault door? She wondered if even he could manage to get through it, so thoroughly had the ISCE officials barricaded it.
But that wasn’t their main business. It didn’t take long for Miaki to choose a corridor and walk along it until he came to a door with a sign over it reading, “Mars terra.” He paused and contemplated the sign for a long moment.
“I take it,” Jin said, “that this is one of the sims with the virus code in it?”
Miaki smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “This,” he told her, “is the simulation Toshi was in when the virus zapped him.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Are you sure you want to go in? Maybe you should just let Chika work on this.”
“I’m going in,” he said grimly, jaw set, and yanked open the door.
He hadn’t answered her specific question, Jin thought. Then she sighed and followed him in.
Of course she’d seen the inside of this layer of a simulation before, having written her own relatively simple sims in the past, as had every ISCE student. But it was still a fascinating, almost dreamlike experience to step into this coding level. The path they took seemed to hang in black space, and served as the entry and exit point of all data. They could see the data flowing in and out, in fact, beneath their feet; it was like they were walking on a semi-transparent, flattened out optic cable, and flashes of light streamed back and forth at almost blinding speed. Jin actually had to tone down the light perception of her avatar, just a little, or the brightness of these flashes might have blocked out everything else.
The optic cable diverged off in a multitude of branches, almost all of them streaming with data, but not quite as blindingly. In many places, nodes hung at junctions where these data streams met, the nodes shaped like paper wasps’ nests, but pulsating with light flashes of many colours.
When one stared closely at these nodes, they seemed to change form a little bit, as though someone had stripped away the outside covering of the wasp’s nest, to reveal many little compartments, like a honeycomb (changing metaphors in mid-stream, Jin thought to herself). In most of these compartments was a sort of cartridge of data, plugged in by the original creators of the program. It was these cartridge things that flashed on and off, in different colours, as data was accessed or passed through.
Jin squinted her avatar’s eyes, peering at Miaki. She saw the red beacon that would allow her to find him even if he wandered off and got lost amidst all the other flashing colours. She knew he’d see her own blue dot if he needed to find her.
But for the moment, they walked along the cable together. He pulled up a holoscreen that presumably contained Chika’s directions, and followed it as they penetrated further and further into the simulation coding. He chose branches as directed, and eventually came to a less brightly-lit section, with only a few nodes.
“He would have come this direction for sure,” Miaki murmured, half to himself, “just to find out why the light died down. In case there was a malfunction.”
They found the questionable coding bundle shortly after that: a node hanging rather loosely, with only one or two connections to other cables, and flashing with odd colours in a less orderly, more discordant pattern.
“And there it is,” Miaki announced soberly, and unnecessarily. “No wonder he investigated it.”
“It looks like something legitimate, even with the odd configuration,” Jin nodded. As she saw Miaki reaching his hand toward it, she grabbed his wrist. “Wait a minute. Let me touch it.”
“Chika said it’s not directed at me,” he reminded her.
“And she hasn’t finished analyzing it,” she reminded him back. “So tell me which parts you want to look at or pull out, and I’ll do it, and show them to you.” She fixed a very stern look on his face. “Non-negotiable, Miaki.”
“All right. Slave driver.” He flashed a quick smile, and then bent to examine the node.
They spent several minutes in heavy concentration, each moving around and around the node, looking at it carefully while keeping a bit of distance between it and themselves. After they’d walked around it sideways several times, Jin crouched below to examine its underside, and Miaki effortlessly hopped up to a nearby cable branch, leaning over to scrutinize its top.
Then began the mapping, as he instructed her to pull out several cartridges so he could see them in detail. Chika had done a lot of this herself as well, but he wanted first to compare what he saw to what she described in her notes, in case she’d missed anything, or in case he could put a different interpretation onto what they saw.
The cartridges of data, unlike in any other nodes, couldn’t be completely disconnected and removed. They discovered this fairly quickly, as Jin pulled out the first one and lifted it up so they could scrutinize it more comfortably. They saw immediately that it remained connected to the node by a thick filament, which disappeared into the internal workings of the node itself. Every other cartridge was tethered in a similar way.
“Which means,” Miaki grimaced, “that it’s been designed to make it very hard, or maybe even impossible, to dismantle the virus node. That’s what Chika speculated, and I see what she means.”
“I wonder what would happen if we just cut one of the ties,” Jin mused.
“I don’t think we really want to find out.”
“Not without coming in here covered in armour,” she agreed. “And even then it might not attack us at all, but spread itself through the whole simulation instead, or even get into the network. We just don’t know.”
“Which is what this whole exploration is supposed to discover.” Miaki walked around and around the node, pulling out the cartridges and comparing his notes with Chika’s.
Jin noticed something else. She had held onto one of the earlier cartridges a bit longer than usual, and all along the filament, bright orange flashes began to spark in sporadic, irregular bursts. She frowned a bit as she replaced the cartridge, and tried again with another one, with the same results. The third time, she also pulled out a simulated knife and tried to pry the cartridge open. This time, the flashes were orange-red, angry, and very bright.
“Stop!” Miaki said sharply. “Put it back quickly, Jin.”
She’d already been in the process of doing so, and turned soberly to him after replacing the cartridge. “This is closed up pretty tightly, beyond our just being able to discover the basic structure.”
He nodded. “It’s going to take a lot of work to figure out its inner workings. Damn. Whoever designed this was good. It’s going to take too much time...” He pulled out another cartridge and peered into the honeycomb from which it had come, and into which its filament disappeared. His free hand came up, and his fingers were already beginning to poke into the opening, when Jin grabbed his arm and pulled it back.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “You’re not just going to dive in there without any idea of what you’ll find. What are you thinking?”
He jerked his hand away. “One of us is going to have to get in there eventually,” he retorted. “We’re not going to disable it or reverse its effects without seeing right inside.”
“Of course. But we still can’t go in there without a lot more knowledge and preparation. Use your head, Miaki. I know you’re impatient to get this fixed, but it won’t do any good if you hurt yourself.”
He glowered for a moment, but finally sighed ruefully, and nodded. “Okay, of course you’re right. I just...” He shrugged an awkward shoulder and wrenched his mind back to their work. “Back to business, then. I think we’ve got all the data we can collect on the virus’s structure. We can all compare notes on it tonight.” He made one more circuit of the node, eyes narrowed. “What I wish I knew,” he murmured, “was exactly what Toshi was doing when he got zapped.”
“Well,” came a voice from above their heads, “if you wanted to know that, all you had to do was ask me.”
Jin’s and Miaki’s heads jerked up simultaneously, to discover Toshi himself sitting on a thick data cable angling above the general area where the node resided. He sat casually sideways, one foot on the cable and his knee up, elbow resting on the knee. He gazed down at them with a deceptively pleasant smile, but his cold blue eyes contradicted it, glittering in malicious amusement.
“Toshi...,” Miaki breathed. “My god, Tosh...what the hell are you doing here?”
Chapter 8