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kashiwritesChapter 12
Chapter 13
“You know,” said Mr. Woon patiently, “that the virus was what made your cousin say the things he did.”
“Do I?” Miaki retorted bitterly. “It didn’t sound like illness-induced babbling to me.”
“Perhaps not.” The man shifted on his chair, regarding the young man lying in bed in the dormitory room. “But in my opinion, the very plausibility of what Toshi said indicates a facet of the virus’s inner working. It is designed to reach into Toshi’s mind, find scenarios it can use, and twist them into forms that will most hurt you.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Miaki admitted reluctantly.
“Is it not just as plausible an explanation as the one you are determined to accept?” Mr. Woon said. “In my opinion, you must give each possibility equal weight in your considerations. Do not allow the guilt you are feeling at your cousin’s situation to colour your interpretation of what arises from his predicament.” The man touched a light fingertip to the young student’s temple. “Toshi spoke truly when he referred to how smart you are. You must overcome your strong emotions and use that brain of yours.”
“I can try.” Miaki closed his eyes. “Or maybe the best thing I can do is to let other people try to fix this. Maybe I’m not the one who can do it. Things only get worse than ever, any time I get near him.”
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Woon. “I believe you are the only one who can do it. Who else knows Toshi as you do? How well you know each other – how close you have been, all your lives – that is the key. It was the key to designing the virus to make it take over his mind, and I am certain it is the key to unraveling the virus and removing it from him. Only Toshi could have been targeted to hurt you, and only you can undo the damage to him.”
Miaki stared at him. “You really think so?” he whispered.
“It is what I believe, yes,” the man nodded.
Miaki had had to spend most of the day in bed, after the attack. The nurse had quickly fetched some medication to put on his skin, and after an hour or so, the welts had vanished. He remained a little weak, though, so he was sent to bed to sleep. In the meantime, Kenji and Julie had promised to try to devise even stronger defences for him. Julie, indeed, took it as an almost personal insult that Toshi had been able to hurt Miaki so easily. She felt this to be a personal failure, and was determined to rectify it. So she and Kenji had both been working on that problem for the past few hours.
Miaki knew Chika and Jin had continued to work on the virus interface problem, but some of the things Toshi himself had said – as well as Mr. Woon’s speculations – had given him a new idea.
When he appeared at their table in the dining hall for supper that evening, they were all very surprised to see him. But instead of answering questions about how he was feeling, he grabbed a plate, dialed up some supper, and said tersely, “Chika, Jin, we need to keep delving deeply into the virus nodes. I think we need to add an aspect to our approach that we haven’t really considered before this: we need to start looking for DNA-like designs.”
It stood to reason, and he should have seen it before. If the virus could affect Toshi’s physical body, and his mind, there had to be something in the virus that would resemble or at least be attuned to the elements of the biological body. At the same time, it had to resemble or be compatible with the underlying structure of the network itself, if Toshi’s identity was “conjoined” to it, as he’d said.
So that was how they were going to look at things from now on.
And they started that night. At first it was disconcerting to discover that two sleeping cots had been set up in the VR room, so his aunt and uncle could stay near Toshi at all times. The overhead lights were turned off, with only the small lamps at each terminal still glowing. Miaki paused to view the three of them: Toshi on his stretcher in the middle, sensors and tubes and wires all over him, and the two cots on either side, with Keiko and Takumi sleeping on them. The doctor and nurse had taken up positions at the far end of the beds, their eyes on several monitors. They saw Miaki standing there, half in shadow, and nodded to him. Then he turned away, jaw set, and went to a cubicle in a row on the opposite side of the room, witting with his back toward his sleeping relatives. Chika and Jin took terminals to either side of him.
Before he put on his equipment, he heard the doctor mutter, “The fever is getting a lot worse. We really need to bring his temperature down. He can’t keep going on like this.”
“We really need to get him into sick bay,” the nurse murmured.
“I’m not sure that will make any difference.”
Then we’d better hurry, and fix this, thought Miaki.
Jin looked for Toshi’s yellow indicator and began to monitor it from a distance, as the three of them went into one of the infected simulations, switched to coding level, and headed for one of the virus nodes. After a few minutes, she reported that Toshi appeared to be asleep again. He certainly wasn’t moving anywhere, but had settled yet again in the restaurant area of the main simulations folder. She speculated to herself that perhaps he felt safest there, since that was where he and the others had had all their adventures last year. Perhaps, she thought, he subconsciously wanted to return to a place that could reassure him that even if he was in danger right now, it was possible to come out the other side intact.
They spent several hours going more deeply into the nodes than they had before, and gained a lot of interesting data. For the moment, gathering data was all they did. They’d have to do all their calculating and coding later, outside, where they wouldn’t be at risk of Toshi distracting or even attacking them.
They finished this exploration about halfway through the night, and returned to their rooms for a few hours’ sleep. But all three of them were back awake and at breakfast not long after that.
Akio joined them at the table, and listened in silence as they discussed the work they’d done in the past 24 hours. He made some suggestions here and there, some of which helped clarify a sticky question or two, and then he headed off to class, wishing them luck with the upcoming day’s work.
Mr. Woon had excused Miaki and his four friends from further classes, until they had come up with some idea of how to help Toshi. Nobody said anything, but they all secretly wondered how long they’d be allowed to do this. How long would it be before someone decided this problem was insoluble – or before something happened to Toshi that would make this exercise no longer necessary?
They congregated back in the VR room, clustering around two terminals at the farthest end of the room away from where Toshi’s stretcher was. Miaki saw both his aunt and uncle sitting beside his cousin, and he nodded at them, but didn’t go over and say hello. Instead he sat at a terminal beside Chika, and got to work. Kenji and Julie huddled together in front of another one, and Jin walked back and forth between them, looking over their shoulders and working with both groups.
Ito and Kobayashi would be joining them at various intervals during the day. They were still teaching their regular classes, but even for them, Mr. Woon had set up a contingency that if things became more urgent, others would take over their classes for a few weeks.
This set the pattern of the next few days. The five students made considerable strides in gradually pulling apart and decoding the virus, now that they were trying to tie it simultaneously to Toshi’s DNA code and the underlying code of the network operating system. The doctor himself also contributed, spending a few hours here and there, giving them some very quick lessons on DNA, the human genome, and biology in general.
Miaki began to get some ideas of his own from this, and even when he had returned to his room for the short sleep periods he allowed himself, he often spent a little more time working on these ideas.
Toshi himself was not quiet while they were doing all this work. He made several more attempts to get at the firewall, thwarted so far by Julie’s and Kenji’s extra security. He would appear suddenly at unexpected moments, inside simulations being used by various classes, and would sit nearby, making snide comments about Miaki, while the students tried to work.
He most particularly targeted first-year students. Even without knowing what he was up to, his five friends would probably have guessed eventually. Where the first-years had originally regarded Miaki with admiration, they began to cast questioning glances, falling silent as he walked past them, and then bending to whisper to each other when he was out of hearing range.
Julie was ranting about it one evening as they walked into the VR room. “You know he’s saying things, Miaki. It’s like he’s got this slander campaign going against you, and you can’t even defend yourself against it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said tightly, catching a glimpse of Aunt Keiko watching from where she sat beside her son.
“But it does,” Julie insisted. “Toshi’s got so many ways to attack you, and nobody’s even telling you what he’s doing. And they’re believing all sorts of things, you can tell just by how they’re acting – and you don’t even have a chance to find out what those things are, and tell everyone they’re not true.”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Miaki repeated. He grabbed her arm and tilted his head slightly toward the other side of the room. “Let’s not talk about this here, okay?” he murmured. “And anyway, I don’t care what people believe right now. I have to spend all my time trying to get Toshi free of this. If there are lies I need to clear up, I can do that afterward.”
He hoped he had headed off any confrontation with his aunt; the last thing she needed right now was to hear exactly what Toshi was up to in his virus-induced madness.
But even Miaki couldn’t help his own outburst, on one occasion when Toshi managed to get at the environmental controls of the school, and shut down all the power.
Miaki leapt up from his terminal, yelling, “Dammit, Toshi, I’ve lost all my data from the last five minutes! What the hell are you doing now?”
He groped in the dark toward his cousin’s stretcher, knowing it was an irrational move, but needing to do something to vent his frustration. As he drew close to the stretcher, the school’s backup system kicked in and the power came back up.
“Thank goodness!” cried the nurse. “If we lost these support systems now, I don’t know what would happen to him.”
Keiko was on her feet, glaring at Miaki. “What are you doing, blaming a power outage on him? Haven’t you ever seen a power outage before? This is outrageous – you’re blaming him for everything! How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” he retorted, “but he’s done this sort of thing before. I’ve never heard of ISCE having an outage; there’s so much redundancy in the environmental system that there’d have to be a huge natural catastrophe in the real world to bring it down. This was definitely Toshi. It’s the sort of prank he’s pulling right now. I’m sorry.”
“That’s ridiculous!” the woman yelled.
Takumi was now at her side, trying to calm her down. “At least listen to Miaki’s explanations, Keiko. Maybe we just don’t understand – “
“I understand that Toshi wouldn’t try to commit suicide!” she snapped. “Because that’s what it would be, if he shut down the power to these machines. Do you even realize that, Miaki? You’ve spent days on the other side of the room, playing on your terminals, but you haven’t come near your cousin for the whole time. Do you even know how sick he really is?”
Stung, he growled back at her, “I’ve been staying away because I didn’t want to bother you. But I know better than you do, how sick he is.”
“Do you really? You haven’t even looked at him, have you? Look at him, Miaki!”
She stabbed her finger toward the cot, and for the first time in a few days, Miaki looked at his cousin.
The fever was still ravaging him. He was being fed intravenously, but even so, his body was burning up the nourishment almost as quickly as they could get it into him. He had always been a lean, well-muscled person, but he had lost considerable weight in just the last few days, his cheeks hollow and grey below the VR goggles. His normally bright, spiky golden hair was limp and lifeless, plastered damply to his head. And despite his consciousness being more inside the network than in his body, he was not resting easily. Tiny, constant tremors ran through him, so that he was constantly trembling.
And there were many more machines attached to him now than there had been the last time Miaki had stood here.
“My god…,” he whispered, pain stabbing into him as deeply as though someone had thrust a knife into his heart. “I didn’t realize – I didn’t know – Toshi! My god – what have I done to him??”
Takumi’s eyes were full of compassion. “Listen…we know this isn’t your fault. This isn’t your doing. We do know that, son.”
“Maybe that’s so,” Keiko said tightly, turning away. “But I wish every day that he had never come to live with us. The worst thing that ever happened to us – to Toshi – was your brother dying, and his son coming to live with us.”
“Keiko, that’s enough!” Takumi chided sharply.
Miaki backed away. “I’ll – I’ll get him back. I’ll do it. I promise. I’ll do anything --anything – Toshi – “ He took one more look at his cousin’s devastated body, and turned on his heel and fled back to his terminal.
His hands fumbled on the keys. He could hardly see the monitor, for the tears that kept getting in the way. He blinked them away angrily, but they kept coming.
Then he felt a hand slipping into one of his, and stopped typing, bowing his head.
“Give yourself a minute,” Jin whispered. “There’s still time.” He nodded, swallowing hard, squeezing her hand.
They continued exploring the virus nodes and coding their experimental programs and patches. They couldn’t avoid getting online sometimes, for testing purposes, and although they tried to do that when Toshi was asleep, they didn’t always succeed in avoiding him.
He seemed to be making a point of trying to stay awake long enough to come to them when they entered the network. He began to go into the simulations behind them, sitting nearby and taunting them as they explored the virus nodes.
His venom against Miaki had grown very strong by now. A couple of days after the incident with the power outage, he came up behind his cousin in one of these simulations and actually grabbed him.
“You’re just playing at this, aren’t you?” he snarled.
Miaki jerked himself loose and whirled around. Chika made as though to step between them, but Miaki himself held out his arm and prevented her. Jin stood back, watching for possible attacks.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded of his cousin.
“You’re not really trying to do anything, are you?” Toshi said. “You’re just playing, and making it look like you’re trying, but you’re just killing time, aren’t you?”
“Of course not,” Miaki retorted. “I’m doing everything I can to fix this.”
“I’m dying out there, aren’t I?” Toshi waved his hand vaguely. “And you’re just letting it happen.”
“That’s not true!”
“Toshi,” Chika admonished him, “all five of us – all seven of us, when you count the teachers – we’re all trying everything we can think of to get rid of this virus. And the doctor is making sure you stay alive while we do it.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s trying his best. But if Miaki wants to deceive him into thinking he’s got time, that poor doctor doesn’t have a hope of seeing through the deception.”
“How can you say that?” Miaki demanded. “I’d give my life for you!”
“Oh, shut up,” Toshi rolled his eyes. “We both know better, don’t we? You want me out of the way so you can take over my family. With your mother and father both gone, you’ve had to be the pitied charity case for too long, and you want to be the doted-on son again.” He smiled nastily. “But she isn’t being fooled, is she? She knows who her real son is!”
Miaki gasped. Could it be -- ? Was he just guessing, or was he somehow subconsciously registering what was said in the VR room around his unconscious body?
“Toshi,” Miaki whispered. “If you can hear her – if you know what’s happening out there – surely you can try to reach out, and get back.”
“I tell you, dammit, I’ve tried! I’ve tried to log off, and I can’t! I’m so intertwined with the network that it would be like pulling my beating heart right out of my body. I can’t do it! And you don’t care – you aren’t trying – “
“I’m doing everything I can!” Miaki cried raggedly.
This time he sensed the attack coming, and already had shielded himself to deflect it, even before Jin could activate the defences she controlled. They logged out and left Toshi behind again, and continued analyzing the virus data they’d collected, and creating more patches.
The patches, while providing plausible means of unraveling the virus, were still something of a problem. They’d somehow have to override Toshi’s login and get into his most primary settings, and that was very difficult. Not only was the system designed to try to prevent this, and preserve the integrity, security, and privacy of any user’s identity, but Toshi himself had added several layers over top of those settings, to make it even harder.
Professor Ito was working on that, with Julie and Kenji. Miaki speculated, in brief amusement, that when all this was finished, those two were going to be the greatest security experts in the world. They posted their work in a private location that only the five students and the two professors could access, and Miaki avidly watched their progress. Whatever solution anyone could come up with, it would be useless if they couldn’t even get at Toshi, to administer the cure.
Though Miaki had some ideas of his own on that score, that he kept to himself and didn’t post. Something had been nagging at him for a while, and he toyed with the ideas in the privacy of his own room. The DNA concept had borne a lot of fruit, and he wondered if he could carry it even further. After all, he shared a certain element of DNA with his cousin, didn’t he? Toshi was of his blood. Yet the virus only affected Toshi, and not him. He wondered if he could create some sort of inoculation from his own DNA code.
There were dangers in the idea – a lot of dangers, in fact. Some Miaki could think of, like mutating the virus so it got him too. And he knew other dangers lurked, in the background, that hadn’t even occurred to him yet and were probably even worse, probably life-threatening. But he had to have some backup plans ready, in case their current approach could only take them so far.
Above all, they had to find a way through the defences and into Toshi’s own identity, his very core. If they did it wrong, not only could it kill Toshi, but it could kill whoever was trying to get in (which was why, Miaki had decided already, the final push was going to be his, whatever protests the others might make).
So they all had to be cautious, while at the same time working as quickly as they could possibly manage. It was a very difficult either/or position to be in.
Two more days passed as they continued their frenzied work. Few of them were getting any real sleep, and it was starting to take its toll. Kenji could hardly keep any food down any more, so the doctor had drafted some of his medical staff to prepare special power drinks for him. Chika had to take an entire afternoon that she had planned to spend with Miaki and Jin, and spend it in a pill-induced sleep instead, just so she could think clearly again. (Miaki, instead of agreeing to keep working just with Jin, had said he’d go to his room and do some things by himself instead. She watched him leave the VR room, with a questioning little frown.)
To the gratitude of all, Akio and Jason stepped in and volunteered to do as much of the simpler calculations and coding as they could do without being completely in the know about the finer details of the virus. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to keep them out of the loop; it was rather that it would take too long to bring them completely up-to-date at this point. But whatever they could do, they did.
By now, ISCE staff had had to try to isolate first-year simulations completely, to keep Toshi from getting access to them. He had begun to re-code some of the sims, to make them reflect different scenes than they were supposed to, or to function very differently. Several first-years had found themselves in almost nightmarish situations, where bizarre dinosaur creations leapt out at them from behind barriers, or holes had opened under their feet, causing their avatars to seem to fall into black holes. And some students briefly had trouble logging out. Toshi had sent the students back into the real world with messages: Miaki had to stop avoiding him, and come in and take his medicine.
Miaki doggedly held back. Time was running out, and he had to work. Going in to confront Toshi yet again would only make things worse.
But when one first-year was sent back covered in gashes, all isolation measures seeming to have failed, Miaki finally had to give in. He sent a private message to his cousin, saying that he would come in, alone, in the middle of the upcoming night, if Toshi would stop harassing the other students or playing havoc with the environmental systems.
Toshi was already waiting for him, in the gazebo, as he logged in. As Miaki walked up the path and rounded the fountain, he saw his cousin standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arms folded across his chest. He seemed totally relaxed. Miaki noted with a pang that inside the system, at least, Toshi still had the colour in his cheeks and the strength in his limbs, and his hair was bright. You would never know that outside the system, lying on the stretcher with wires and monitors attached to him, and his parents watching helplessly, he was dying.
“All right,” Miaki said as he approached the gazebo. “I’m here. What do you want to do, Tosh – kill me? You said that was the ultimate goal of the virus. And you don’t seem to be fighting it very hard these days. So why don’t you just do it and get it over with?”
Toshi regarded him for a moment in silence. “So that’s it? You’re just going to give up and let me?”
Miaki shrugged. “Would you complain if I did? Haven’t you been trying to drag me in here, the last few days, so the virus can drive you into worse and worse anger against me when you see me? Might as well get on with it, don’t you think? Or,” he added, “does it still bother you a little, realizing that if you kill me, you’ll be stuck inside the network forever? Maybe the fact that you haven’t killed me yet shows that you’re still secretly hoping we can get you out. That’s not likely to happen if you do away with me.”
“What – you haven’t shared your notes with Jin? She’d be able to finish the work, I’m sure.”
“Maybe. But maybe not. There are a few things I haven’t told her about, yet. I think they might be the key to curing you. Maybe I made a mistake, not telling her.”
“Always in control of everything, no matter what.” Toshi shook his head. “You bloody manipulator.”
“I see. You only got me here so you could play around and insult me. Well,” Miaki said, turning back toward the fountain, “you can mail the insults to me, if that’s all you had in mind. I need some sleep.” He braced himself, wondering if his cousin would attack his exposed back.
“Stop right there.” Toshi’s voice was hard, though no physical attack came. But when Miaki turned around again, he smiled. “All right, I admit there was another reason I wanted you to come online. I’ve been feeling a little homesick for the good old days, especially once you told me my parents had come here. You’re not doing a very good job of getting me outside, so I can’t see them, but I realized that that doesn’t mean we can’t have our own version of a family reunion inside the network instead.”
“You want to get them to log on and come inside? Are you serious?”
“Well, it’s an idea – “
“No it’s not,” Miaki refused hotly. “Whatever it was in your DNA that the virus targeted, it might be able to get at one of them too if they’ve got the same element. In fact, one or the other of them is bound to have the same factor that made you vulnerable to it. No, Tosh – nice though it would be for them to see you, I’m simply not going to allow it. Period.”
“You’re not going to allow it,” Toshi sneered. “Why am I not surprised at that? But no, Miaki, that wasn’t what I was thinking of at all.”
“Then what?” Miaki demanded.
“Well, it occurred to me that no data is ever lost in these networks, but traces are always out there, floating around. So yesterday I decided to nip outside of ISCE. I followed Julie’s original trail, the day before term started. I knew she’d have left markers, to divert anyone following her from tracing her back to ISCE, so I followed them backwards. And got right into the Pacific Rim government system.”
“My god, Toshi. Why in the world would you do that? Were you hoping for some sort of revenge on Tanaka? You can’t get at him in the jail.”
“I didn’t go anywhere near the jail. I had something else in mind. The good old days a year before we had anything to do with Tanaka. I found something I think you’ll like to see.” Toshi looked over his shoulder, into the inner shadows of the gazebo. “Come on out,” he said. “I think he’s ready for his surprise.”
Miaki had no inkling, as the shape in the shadows drew nearer. Even when the shape began to assume a degree of familiarity, the merest thought never even entered his mind. It seemed to have a human form, though its outline was less distinct than Toshi’s avatar. But beyond that, he never guessed for a moment what his cousin was up to.
Then Toshi stepped aside, and the shape became clear, moving into the light from outside the gazebo.
And Miaki screamed in horror, “Nooooo!”
Takashi Nakamura. His lost father. Gazing down at him from the gazebo steps.
Or rather, what was left of his father, a vague facsimile compiled from all the traces he had left, in whatever networks Toshi had had time to access. A pale, insubstantial copy, blurred at the edges, smiling the familiar smile, but missing the sharp clarity in his eyes, missing the soul, the spirit, everything that had made the man the intense, vital person he had been.
“Hello, son.” The voice – oh god, the same voice, silenced forever on the day of Miaki’s high school graduation two years ago! Yet not the same – for the ghost’s words quavered, unsure, lacking the power that had always been behind every word the real man had spoken.
This was a travesty – a horrible reconstruction of external traces – a mobile corpse made of degraded information, with nothing left of the real personality. The ghastly blankness in the eyes was unbearable.
“No – oh no – oh no, no, no!” Miaki back away, as the apparition came down the three steps from the gazebo, and began to approach him.
“What’s the matter, son?” intoned the phantom. “I’ve missed you, all this time. You’ve never been far from my thoughts. Aren’t you glad to see me again?”
Miaki whimpered in his terror and grief, hands held before him as though in self-defence. If this – this thing touched him, he would scream.
“Isn’t this nice?” Toshi’s malicious voice came from behind the man’s shoulder. “Just one big happy family, aren’t we?”
“Tosh – how could you do this to me?” Miaki moaned.
“Do what? I bring your father back to you, after all those months of mourning you did, and you’re not happy about it? Talk about ingratitude.”
“This – this isn’t him. You know that. Oh Toshi – why are you doing this?”
“Come on, Cuz. I’m giving you back what you’ve been missing all this time.”
Miaki back up so far that his knees banged into the edge of the fountain. The thing made from the last remnants of his father was getting close – hands held out to him – wanting to embrace him – vague traces of emotion still operating inside it, ephemeral memories of a son, of love, of life –
He couldn’t stand this. He couldn’t bear it! A corpse, a puppet, made to look like the father he had loved and lost so cruelly – it hurt so badly he couldn’t bear it!
And when he forced himself to drag his eyes away from the horror walking toward him, and met his cousin’s gaze, he saw no compassion there, no empathy, no sympathy. It wasn’t that Toshi didn’t recognize the cruelty he was perpetrating – he was doing it precisely because he did understand it. He knew exactly how badly it would hurt, and that was why he did it.
“Oh, Toshi,” Miaki whispered, his heart breaking. It was though his cousin and his father were the same – nothing but reproductions, lacking all real spirit, having no heart, no soul –
He logged himself out and collapsed to his hands and knees in front of his terminal, sobbing brokenly.
Chapter 14
Chapter 13
“You know,” said Mr. Woon patiently, “that the virus was what made your cousin say the things he did.”
“Do I?” Miaki retorted bitterly. “It didn’t sound like illness-induced babbling to me.”
“Perhaps not.” The man shifted on his chair, regarding the young man lying in bed in the dormitory room. “But in my opinion, the very plausibility of what Toshi said indicates a facet of the virus’s inner working. It is designed to reach into Toshi’s mind, find scenarios it can use, and twist them into forms that will most hurt you.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Miaki admitted reluctantly.
“Is it not just as plausible an explanation as the one you are determined to accept?” Mr. Woon said. “In my opinion, you must give each possibility equal weight in your considerations. Do not allow the guilt you are feeling at your cousin’s situation to colour your interpretation of what arises from his predicament.” The man touched a light fingertip to the young student’s temple. “Toshi spoke truly when he referred to how smart you are. You must overcome your strong emotions and use that brain of yours.”
“I can try.” Miaki closed his eyes. “Or maybe the best thing I can do is to let other people try to fix this. Maybe I’m not the one who can do it. Things only get worse than ever, any time I get near him.”
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Woon. “I believe you are the only one who can do it. Who else knows Toshi as you do? How well you know each other – how close you have been, all your lives – that is the key. It was the key to designing the virus to make it take over his mind, and I am certain it is the key to unraveling the virus and removing it from him. Only Toshi could have been targeted to hurt you, and only you can undo the damage to him.”
Miaki stared at him. “You really think so?” he whispered.
“It is what I believe, yes,” the man nodded.
Miaki had had to spend most of the day in bed, after the attack. The nurse had quickly fetched some medication to put on his skin, and after an hour or so, the welts had vanished. He remained a little weak, though, so he was sent to bed to sleep. In the meantime, Kenji and Julie had promised to try to devise even stronger defences for him. Julie, indeed, took it as an almost personal insult that Toshi had been able to hurt Miaki so easily. She felt this to be a personal failure, and was determined to rectify it. So she and Kenji had both been working on that problem for the past few hours.
Miaki knew Chika and Jin had continued to work on the virus interface problem, but some of the things Toshi himself had said – as well as Mr. Woon’s speculations – had given him a new idea.
When he appeared at their table in the dining hall for supper that evening, they were all very surprised to see him. But instead of answering questions about how he was feeling, he grabbed a plate, dialed up some supper, and said tersely, “Chika, Jin, we need to keep delving deeply into the virus nodes. I think we need to add an aspect to our approach that we haven’t really considered before this: we need to start looking for DNA-like designs.”
It stood to reason, and he should have seen it before. If the virus could affect Toshi’s physical body, and his mind, there had to be something in the virus that would resemble or at least be attuned to the elements of the biological body. At the same time, it had to resemble or be compatible with the underlying structure of the network itself, if Toshi’s identity was “conjoined” to it, as he’d said.
So that was how they were going to look at things from now on.
And they started that night. At first it was disconcerting to discover that two sleeping cots had been set up in the VR room, so his aunt and uncle could stay near Toshi at all times. The overhead lights were turned off, with only the small lamps at each terminal still glowing. Miaki paused to view the three of them: Toshi on his stretcher in the middle, sensors and tubes and wires all over him, and the two cots on either side, with Keiko and Takumi sleeping on them. The doctor and nurse had taken up positions at the far end of the beds, their eyes on several monitors. They saw Miaki standing there, half in shadow, and nodded to him. Then he turned away, jaw set, and went to a cubicle in a row on the opposite side of the room, witting with his back toward his sleeping relatives. Chika and Jin took terminals to either side of him.
Before he put on his equipment, he heard the doctor mutter, “The fever is getting a lot worse. We really need to bring his temperature down. He can’t keep going on like this.”
“We really need to get him into sick bay,” the nurse murmured.
“I’m not sure that will make any difference.”
Then we’d better hurry, and fix this, thought Miaki.
Jin looked for Toshi’s yellow indicator and began to monitor it from a distance, as the three of them went into one of the infected simulations, switched to coding level, and headed for one of the virus nodes. After a few minutes, she reported that Toshi appeared to be asleep again. He certainly wasn’t moving anywhere, but had settled yet again in the restaurant area of the main simulations folder. She speculated to herself that perhaps he felt safest there, since that was where he and the others had had all their adventures last year. Perhaps, she thought, he subconsciously wanted to return to a place that could reassure him that even if he was in danger right now, it was possible to come out the other side intact.
They spent several hours going more deeply into the nodes than they had before, and gained a lot of interesting data. For the moment, gathering data was all they did. They’d have to do all their calculating and coding later, outside, where they wouldn’t be at risk of Toshi distracting or even attacking them.
They finished this exploration about halfway through the night, and returned to their rooms for a few hours’ sleep. But all three of them were back awake and at breakfast not long after that.
Akio joined them at the table, and listened in silence as they discussed the work they’d done in the past 24 hours. He made some suggestions here and there, some of which helped clarify a sticky question or two, and then he headed off to class, wishing them luck with the upcoming day’s work.
Mr. Woon had excused Miaki and his four friends from further classes, until they had come up with some idea of how to help Toshi. Nobody said anything, but they all secretly wondered how long they’d be allowed to do this. How long would it be before someone decided this problem was insoluble – or before something happened to Toshi that would make this exercise no longer necessary?
They congregated back in the VR room, clustering around two terminals at the farthest end of the room away from where Toshi’s stretcher was. Miaki saw both his aunt and uncle sitting beside his cousin, and he nodded at them, but didn’t go over and say hello. Instead he sat at a terminal beside Chika, and got to work. Kenji and Julie huddled together in front of another one, and Jin walked back and forth between them, looking over their shoulders and working with both groups.
Ito and Kobayashi would be joining them at various intervals during the day. They were still teaching their regular classes, but even for them, Mr. Woon had set up a contingency that if things became more urgent, others would take over their classes for a few weeks.
This set the pattern of the next few days. The five students made considerable strides in gradually pulling apart and decoding the virus, now that they were trying to tie it simultaneously to Toshi’s DNA code and the underlying code of the network operating system. The doctor himself also contributed, spending a few hours here and there, giving them some very quick lessons on DNA, the human genome, and biology in general.
Miaki began to get some ideas of his own from this, and even when he had returned to his room for the short sleep periods he allowed himself, he often spent a little more time working on these ideas.
Toshi himself was not quiet while they were doing all this work. He made several more attempts to get at the firewall, thwarted so far by Julie’s and Kenji’s extra security. He would appear suddenly at unexpected moments, inside simulations being used by various classes, and would sit nearby, making snide comments about Miaki, while the students tried to work.
He most particularly targeted first-year students. Even without knowing what he was up to, his five friends would probably have guessed eventually. Where the first-years had originally regarded Miaki with admiration, they began to cast questioning glances, falling silent as he walked past them, and then bending to whisper to each other when he was out of hearing range.
Julie was ranting about it one evening as they walked into the VR room. “You know he’s saying things, Miaki. It’s like he’s got this slander campaign going against you, and you can’t even defend yourself against it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said tightly, catching a glimpse of Aunt Keiko watching from where she sat beside her son.
“But it does,” Julie insisted. “Toshi’s got so many ways to attack you, and nobody’s even telling you what he’s doing. And they’re believing all sorts of things, you can tell just by how they’re acting – and you don’t even have a chance to find out what those things are, and tell everyone they’re not true.”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Miaki repeated. He grabbed her arm and tilted his head slightly toward the other side of the room. “Let’s not talk about this here, okay?” he murmured. “And anyway, I don’t care what people believe right now. I have to spend all my time trying to get Toshi free of this. If there are lies I need to clear up, I can do that afterward.”
He hoped he had headed off any confrontation with his aunt; the last thing she needed right now was to hear exactly what Toshi was up to in his virus-induced madness.
But even Miaki couldn’t help his own outburst, on one occasion when Toshi managed to get at the environmental controls of the school, and shut down all the power.
Miaki leapt up from his terminal, yelling, “Dammit, Toshi, I’ve lost all my data from the last five minutes! What the hell are you doing now?”
He groped in the dark toward his cousin’s stretcher, knowing it was an irrational move, but needing to do something to vent his frustration. As he drew close to the stretcher, the school’s backup system kicked in and the power came back up.
“Thank goodness!” cried the nurse. “If we lost these support systems now, I don’t know what would happen to him.”
Keiko was on her feet, glaring at Miaki. “What are you doing, blaming a power outage on him? Haven’t you ever seen a power outage before? This is outrageous – you’re blaming him for everything! How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” he retorted, “but he’s done this sort of thing before. I’ve never heard of ISCE having an outage; there’s so much redundancy in the environmental system that there’d have to be a huge natural catastrophe in the real world to bring it down. This was definitely Toshi. It’s the sort of prank he’s pulling right now. I’m sorry.”
“That’s ridiculous!” the woman yelled.
Takumi was now at her side, trying to calm her down. “At least listen to Miaki’s explanations, Keiko. Maybe we just don’t understand – “
“I understand that Toshi wouldn’t try to commit suicide!” she snapped. “Because that’s what it would be, if he shut down the power to these machines. Do you even realize that, Miaki? You’ve spent days on the other side of the room, playing on your terminals, but you haven’t come near your cousin for the whole time. Do you even know how sick he really is?”
Stung, he growled back at her, “I’ve been staying away because I didn’t want to bother you. But I know better than you do, how sick he is.”
“Do you really? You haven’t even looked at him, have you? Look at him, Miaki!”
She stabbed her finger toward the cot, and for the first time in a few days, Miaki looked at his cousin.
The fever was still ravaging him. He was being fed intravenously, but even so, his body was burning up the nourishment almost as quickly as they could get it into him. He had always been a lean, well-muscled person, but he had lost considerable weight in just the last few days, his cheeks hollow and grey below the VR goggles. His normally bright, spiky golden hair was limp and lifeless, plastered damply to his head. And despite his consciousness being more inside the network than in his body, he was not resting easily. Tiny, constant tremors ran through him, so that he was constantly trembling.
And there were many more machines attached to him now than there had been the last time Miaki had stood here.
“My god…,” he whispered, pain stabbing into him as deeply as though someone had thrust a knife into his heart. “I didn’t realize – I didn’t know – Toshi! My god – what have I done to him??”
Takumi’s eyes were full of compassion. “Listen…we know this isn’t your fault. This isn’t your doing. We do know that, son.”
“Maybe that’s so,” Keiko said tightly, turning away. “But I wish every day that he had never come to live with us. The worst thing that ever happened to us – to Toshi – was your brother dying, and his son coming to live with us.”
“Keiko, that’s enough!” Takumi chided sharply.
Miaki backed away. “I’ll – I’ll get him back. I’ll do it. I promise. I’ll do anything --anything – Toshi – “ He took one more look at his cousin’s devastated body, and turned on his heel and fled back to his terminal.
His hands fumbled on the keys. He could hardly see the monitor, for the tears that kept getting in the way. He blinked them away angrily, but they kept coming.
Then he felt a hand slipping into one of his, and stopped typing, bowing his head.
“Give yourself a minute,” Jin whispered. “There’s still time.” He nodded, swallowing hard, squeezing her hand.
They continued exploring the virus nodes and coding their experimental programs and patches. They couldn’t avoid getting online sometimes, for testing purposes, and although they tried to do that when Toshi was asleep, they didn’t always succeed in avoiding him.
He seemed to be making a point of trying to stay awake long enough to come to them when they entered the network. He began to go into the simulations behind them, sitting nearby and taunting them as they explored the virus nodes.
His venom against Miaki had grown very strong by now. A couple of days after the incident with the power outage, he came up behind his cousin in one of these simulations and actually grabbed him.
“You’re just playing at this, aren’t you?” he snarled.
Miaki jerked himself loose and whirled around. Chika made as though to step between them, but Miaki himself held out his arm and prevented her. Jin stood back, watching for possible attacks.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded of his cousin.
“You’re not really trying to do anything, are you?” Toshi said. “You’re just playing, and making it look like you’re trying, but you’re just killing time, aren’t you?”
“Of course not,” Miaki retorted. “I’m doing everything I can to fix this.”
“I’m dying out there, aren’t I?” Toshi waved his hand vaguely. “And you’re just letting it happen.”
“That’s not true!”
“Toshi,” Chika admonished him, “all five of us – all seven of us, when you count the teachers – we’re all trying everything we can think of to get rid of this virus. And the doctor is making sure you stay alive while we do it.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s trying his best. But if Miaki wants to deceive him into thinking he’s got time, that poor doctor doesn’t have a hope of seeing through the deception.”
“How can you say that?” Miaki demanded. “I’d give my life for you!”
“Oh, shut up,” Toshi rolled his eyes. “We both know better, don’t we? You want me out of the way so you can take over my family. With your mother and father both gone, you’ve had to be the pitied charity case for too long, and you want to be the doted-on son again.” He smiled nastily. “But she isn’t being fooled, is she? She knows who her real son is!”
Miaki gasped. Could it be -- ? Was he just guessing, or was he somehow subconsciously registering what was said in the VR room around his unconscious body?
“Toshi,” Miaki whispered. “If you can hear her – if you know what’s happening out there – surely you can try to reach out, and get back.”
“I tell you, dammit, I’ve tried! I’ve tried to log off, and I can’t! I’m so intertwined with the network that it would be like pulling my beating heart right out of my body. I can’t do it! And you don’t care – you aren’t trying – “
“I’m doing everything I can!” Miaki cried raggedly.
This time he sensed the attack coming, and already had shielded himself to deflect it, even before Jin could activate the defences she controlled. They logged out and left Toshi behind again, and continued analyzing the virus data they’d collected, and creating more patches.
The patches, while providing plausible means of unraveling the virus, were still something of a problem. They’d somehow have to override Toshi’s login and get into his most primary settings, and that was very difficult. Not only was the system designed to try to prevent this, and preserve the integrity, security, and privacy of any user’s identity, but Toshi himself had added several layers over top of those settings, to make it even harder.
Professor Ito was working on that, with Julie and Kenji. Miaki speculated, in brief amusement, that when all this was finished, those two were going to be the greatest security experts in the world. They posted their work in a private location that only the five students and the two professors could access, and Miaki avidly watched their progress. Whatever solution anyone could come up with, it would be useless if they couldn’t even get at Toshi, to administer the cure.
Though Miaki had some ideas of his own on that score, that he kept to himself and didn’t post. Something had been nagging at him for a while, and he toyed with the ideas in the privacy of his own room. The DNA concept had borne a lot of fruit, and he wondered if he could carry it even further. After all, he shared a certain element of DNA with his cousin, didn’t he? Toshi was of his blood. Yet the virus only affected Toshi, and not him. He wondered if he could create some sort of inoculation from his own DNA code.
There were dangers in the idea – a lot of dangers, in fact. Some Miaki could think of, like mutating the virus so it got him too. And he knew other dangers lurked, in the background, that hadn’t even occurred to him yet and were probably even worse, probably life-threatening. But he had to have some backup plans ready, in case their current approach could only take them so far.
Above all, they had to find a way through the defences and into Toshi’s own identity, his very core. If they did it wrong, not only could it kill Toshi, but it could kill whoever was trying to get in (which was why, Miaki had decided already, the final push was going to be his, whatever protests the others might make).
So they all had to be cautious, while at the same time working as quickly as they could possibly manage. It was a very difficult either/or position to be in.
Two more days passed as they continued their frenzied work. Few of them were getting any real sleep, and it was starting to take its toll. Kenji could hardly keep any food down any more, so the doctor had drafted some of his medical staff to prepare special power drinks for him. Chika had to take an entire afternoon that she had planned to spend with Miaki and Jin, and spend it in a pill-induced sleep instead, just so she could think clearly again. (Miaki, instead of agreeing to keep working just with Jin, had said he’d go to his room and do some things by himself instead. She watched him leave the VR room, with a questioning little frown.)
To the gratitude of all, Akio and Jason stepped in and volunteered to do as much of the simpler calculations and coding as they could do without being completely in the know about the finer details of the virus. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to keep them out of the loop; it was rather that it would take too long to bring them completely up-to-date at this point. But whatever they could do, they did.
By now, ISCE staff had had to try to isolate first-year simulations completely, to keep Toshi from getting access to them. He had begun to re-code some of the sims, to make them reflect different scenes than they were supposed to, or to function very differently. Several first-years had found themselves in almost nightmarish situations, where bizarre dinosaur creations leapt out at them from behind barriers, or holes had opened under their feet, causing their avatars to seem to fall into black holes. And some students briefly had trouble logging out. Toshi had sent the students back into the real world with messages: Miaki had to stop avoiding him, and come in and take his medicine.
Miaki doggedly held back. Time was running out, and he had to work. Going in to confront Toshi yet again would only make things worse.
But when one first-year was sent back covered in gashes, all isolation measures seeming to have failed, Miaki finally had to give in. He sent a private message to his cousin, saying that he would come in, alone, in the middle of the upcoming night, if Toshi would stop harassing the other students or playing havoc with the environmental systems.
Toshi was already waiting for him, in the gazebo, as he logged in. As Miaki walked up the path and rounded the fountain, he saw his cousin standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arms folded across his chest. He seemed totally relaxed. Miaki noted with a pang that inside the system, at least, Toshi still had the colour in his cheeks and the strength in his limbs, and his hair was bright. You would never know that outside the system, lying on the stretcher with wires and monitors attached to him, and his parents watching helplessly, he was dying.
“All right,” Miaki said as he approached the gazebo. “I’m here. What do you want to do, Tosh – kill me? You said that was the ultimate goal of the virus. And you don’t seem to be fighting it very hard these days. So why don’t you just do it and get it over with?”
Toshi regarded him for a moment in silence. “So that’s it? You’re just going to give up and let me?”
Miaki shrugged. “Would you complain if I did? Haven’t you been trying to drag me in here, the last few days, so the virus can drive you into worse and worse anger against me when you see me? Might as well get on with it, don’t you think? Or,” he added, “does it still bother you a little, realizing that if you kill me, you’ll be stuck inside the network forever? Maybe the fact that you haven’t killed me yet shows that you’re still secretly hoping we can get you out. That’s not likely to happen if you do away with me.”
“What – you haven’t shared your notes with Jin? She’d be able to finish the work, I’m sure.”
“Maybe. But maybe not. There are a few things I haven’t told her about, yet. I think they might be the key to curing you. Maybe I made a mistake, not telling her.”
“Always in control of everything, no matter what.” Toshi shook his head. “You bloody manipulator.”
“I see. You only got me here so you could play around and insult me. Well,” Miaki said, turning back toward the fountain, “you can mail the insults to me, if that’s all you had in mind. I need some sleep.” He braced himself, wondering if his cousin would attack his exposed back.
“Stop right there.” Toshi’s voice was hard, though no physical attack came. But when Miaki turned around again, he smiled. “All right, I admit there was another reason I wanted you to come online. I’ve been feeling a little homesick for the good old days, especially once you told me my parents had come here. You’re not doing a very good job of getting me outside, so I can’t see them, but I realized that that doesn’t mean we can’t have our own version of a family reunion inside the network instead.”
“You want to get them to log on and come inside? Are you serious?”
“Well, it’s an idea – “
“No it’s not,” Miaki refused hotly. “Whatever it was in your DNA that the virus targeted, it might be able to get at one of them too if they’ve got the same element. In fact, one or the other of them is bound to have the same factor that made you vulnerable to it. No, Tosh – nice though it would be for them to see you, I’m simply not going to allow it. Period.”
“You’re not going to allow it,” Toshi sneered. “Why am I not surprised at that? But no, Miaki, that wasn’t what I was thinking of at all.”
“Then what?” Miaki demanded.
“Well, it occurred to me that no data is ever lost in these networks, but traces are always out there, floating around. So yesterday I decided to nip outside of ISCE. I followed Julie’s original trail, the day before term started. I knew she’d have left markers, to divert anyone following her from tracing her back to ISCE, so I followed them backwards. And got right into the Pacific Rim government system.”
“My god, Toshi. Why in the world would you do that? Were you hoping for some sort of revenge on Tanaka? You can’t get at him in the jail.”
“I didn’t go anywhere near the jail. I had something else in mind. The good old days a year before we had anything to do with Tanaka. I found something I think you’ll like to see.” Toshi looked over his shoulder, into the inner shadows of the gazebo. “Come on out,” he said. “I think he’s ready for his surprise.”
Miaki had no inkling, as the shape in the shadows drew nearer. Even when the shape began to assume a degree of familiarity, the merest thought never even entered his mind. It seemed to have a human form, though its outline was less distinct than Toshi’s avatar. But beyond that, he never guessed for a moment what his cousin was up to.
Then Toshi stepped aside, and the shape became clear, moving into the light from outside the gazebo.
And Miaki screamed in horror, “Nooooo!”
Takashi Nakamura. His lost father. Gazing down at him from the gazebo steps.
Or rather, what was left of his father, a vague facsimile compiled from all the traces he had left, in whatever networks Toshi had had time to access. A pale, insubstantial copy, blurred at the edges, smiling the familiar smile, but missing the sharp clarity in his eyes, missing the soul, the spirit, everything that had made the man the intense, vital person he had been.
“Hello, son.” The voice – oh god, the same voice, silenced forever on the day of Miaki’s high school graduation two years ago! Yet not the same – for the ghost’s words quavered, unsure, lacking the power that had always been behind every word the real man had spoken.
This was a travesty – a horrible reconstruction of external traces – a mobile corpse made of degraded information, with nothing left of the real personality. The ghastly blankness in the eyes was unbearable.
“No – oh no – oh no, no, no!” Miaki back away, as the apparition came down the three steps from the gazebo, and began to approach him.
“What’s the matter, son?” intoned the phantom. “I’ve missed you, all this time. You’ve never been far from my thoughts. Aren’t you glad to see me again?”
Miaki whimpered in his terror and grief, hands held before him as though in self-defence. If this – this thing touched him, he would scream.
“Isn’t this nice?” Toshi’s malicious voice came from behind the man’s shoulder. “Just one big happy family, aren’t we?”
“Tosh – how could you do this to me?” Miaki moaned.
“Do what? I bring your father back to you, after all those months of mourning you did, and you’re not happy about it? Talk about ingratitude.”
“This – this isn’t him. You know that. Oh Toshi – why are you doing this?”
“Come on, Cuz. I’m giving you back what you’ve been missing all this time.”
Miaki back up so far that his knees banged into the edge of the fountain. The thing made from the last remnants of his father was getting close – hands held out to him – wanting to embrace him – vague traces of emotion still operating inside it, ephemeral memories of a son, of love, of life –
He couldn’t stand this. He couldn’t bear it! A corpse, a puppet, made to look like the father he had loved and lost so cruelly – it hurt so badly he couldn’t bear it!
And when he forced himself to drag his eyes away from the horror walking toward him, and met his cousin’s gaze, he saw no compassion there, no empathy, no sympathy. It wasn’t that Toshi didn’t recognize the cruelty he was perpetrating – he was doing it precisely because he did understand it. He knew exactly how badly it would hurt, and that was why he did it.
“Oh, Toshi,” Miaki whispered, his heart breaking. It was though his cousin and his father were the same – nothing but reproductions, lacking all real spirit, having no heart, no soul –
He logged himself out and collapsed to his hands and knees in front of his terminal, sobbing brokenly.
Chapter 14
