![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kashiwritesChapter 10
Chapter 11
“What we finally found,” said Jin as their avatars relaxed in the entryway gazebo, “is that the featureless simulation is a sort of gateway. We could all sense that there was something there, rather than nothing. But that something wasn’t yet anything real. It was basically just a potential, waiting to be filled.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” Chika asked.
Jin consulted the notes on her holoscreen. “It means that it’s a simulation that can access all of them. You can be in the grey simulation, and pull up any of the other special sims without logging out of it and into the others.”
Miaki manipulated a couple of holoscreens and said, “There. I’ve sent all of you the details.” He and Jin waited before going on, as the other four quickly consulted the new data and got caught up.
It had been a tense week past. Now that they were suspicious that they might have been watched from the very beginning, they had halted all their investigations while they went over everything they’d done so far. They looked at every possible log of their activity and tried to alter it; they double, triple, and quadruple-checked every security measure they’d taken so far and added several more; and they even tried to examine the logs of all online activity of ISCE faculty and staff members since Miaki’s very first foray into illegal territory several weeks ago.
That last task was difficult. For a few days, even with her more advanced knowledge of ISCE systems and procedures, Chika beat her head in futility against the wall of security surrounding staff and faculty records. At last Miaki joined her, and essentially invented new ways around the security. These had to be far more complicated than what he’d used to break into the less advanced systems protecting the Pacific Rim government site, and Chika’s head spun as she strained to follow the intricacies of his devices. She suspected that the things he’d come up with over the past week were things that had never been done before, anywhere. And all he seemed to need to do was recognize a problem, think about it for a bit, and then realize how “obvious” the solution was.
She was getting an education, first-hand, in why exactly the entire school had been buzzing with anticipation when it was known that Miaki Nakamura would finally be coming to ISCE this term.
Julie and Kenji had worked just as closely and intensely to devise even more diversions and plausible illusions to protect the six of them in their explorations. Miaki had helped there, too, linking things together in even more intricate nets than they had envisioned. He had done it at more of a distance, though. He and Kenji spoke even less now than they had before. It wasn’t that they held any animosity toward each other, but rather that they were helpless to know how to build any kind of relationship when their lives were caught in such a web of terrible connections.
Jin, meanwhile, had drawn everyone’s efforts together and analyzed them as a whole, pointing out gaps and suggesting ways to fill them. Toshi had taken her work and begun to cross-reference even more widely, trying to analyze the cyber activities of the entire institute. He also went back over the external logs, looking for interaction between ISCE and anyone in the Pacific Rim government. It was probable that such interactions had been disguised somehow, but as Toshi remarked, they didn’t have Julie, Kenji, or Miaki on their side. Whatever disguises were used, he was confident he’d be able to see through them.
He also worked with Julie on a couple of small things of his own, but kept silent about them to the others. He liked having a few backup macros and programs available, in case of emergencies. And given how close they were coming to figuring things out, and how serious the plotting appeared to be, he thought he just might need them.
By the time the week had passed, the six investigators felt much more confident of their own security. And they had discovered that there was indeed communication between the Pacific Rim government – most precisely the department of defense, in which Kazuo Tanaka played a prominent role – and certain faculty at ISCE. Professor Yoshida appeared to be the primary contact at the school, but there were a couple of others who worked with him: a female Terraforming professor, and the professor of Space Health and Bodily Dynamics, who also taught the main physical education classes. All three of them were Pacific Rim citizens.
Jin had also carried most of the work of analyzing the grey simulation, while Miaki worked with the others. For some reason, she had felt the same as he did: there was something significant about this very odd simulation, if they could just figure out what it was. It couldn’t be accidental, that this simulation had been included in the special private folder with the others that impinged into the real world.
And at last, she had understood what the significance was, when she realized that everything in the simulation seemed to point outward, beyond itself. Yesterday she had shown her data to Miaki without telling him what her conclusions were, and waited to see if he would come to the same conclusions. He had gone very still, going over everything twice. And then he’d looked up at her, his eyes sparkling with delight.
“Well done, Jin,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.” He had, of course, understood both the data and its conclusions, and the workings of her own mind. Once he’d seen the data, he didn’t even need to ask what her thinking processes had been or where they’d led her. He knew.
And so here they were today, trying it out for the first time. The others had finally looked over the data, and were ready. Either Jin or Miaki could take the lead, but she looked over at him and nodded for him to go ahead.
He called up the simulation, and they entered it through the doorway he created in the gazebo. It was a bit disconcerting to step toward a little fountain surrounded by roses in the garden outside the gazebo, and find oneself instead standing in the center of a featureless grey nothing, as though stepping into a mist.
Once they were inside the sim, Miaki said, “Bring up the list of special simulations, Chika, and pick one we can try.”
She designated what seemed to have become their usual experimental sim: the engine testing laboratory, and the janitorial hallway. The other five watched Miaki’s moves as he accessed the grey simulation’s special abilities and reached beyond it to the chosen sim. There was an odd twisting sensation, and then they found themselves standing beside the janitor’s door in the laboratory hallway.
Toshi whistled appreciatively. “This is amazing,” he said. “Is this simulation as real as the original? Can we affect the real world in the same way?”
Jin answered, “All the specs say yes. You can do your experiment with the broom again if you want to make sure.”
“Before we do anything,” Julie said, “show us how to log out again. Which one are we logging out of? Do we have to log out twice?”
Miaki said, “It will be enough to log out of the grey sim. That automatically logs you out of both.”
“Good,” she nodded, then asked briskly, “And what sort of record do we leave behind us? If someone were to look at our personal logs, which simulations would be there? How traceable are we?”
“That’s the best part,” Jin said, trying not to sound too satisfied and smug, since this had been one of the first things she’d checked. “It’s the same with the log-out. As far as our logs show, we have only logged into the grey sim. I’ve seen nothing that leaves traces of whatever simulations we visit from inside the grey one.”
“That’s fascinating,” Chika mused. “So I wonder what would happen if someone logged into the grey simulation later, looking for someone. Would they be able to find the person they were looking for?”
“I don’t think so,” Miaki said. “I think they’d have to know which second simulation to call up, to follow the person into it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Kenji said. “If one of us was hurt in a simulation, couldn’t we be lost completely?”
“Why don’t we try an experiment?” Julie suggested. “Hopefully my locators can overcome the searching problem. If they can’t, I’ll try to adjust them somehow.”
They all logged out again, and then Chika and Toshi went back in. The others gave them a couple of minutes to choose a second simulation and go into it, and then logged back in. They stood in the middle of the grey mist and looked for the orange and yellow locator signals.
And found them. But they were somewhat fainter than they would be inside a normal simulation, and they gave no clue what simulation needed to be called up, to follow them in. Nor did it seem possible to message in or out. Julie recorded the data and looked it over thoughtfully, once they all logged out again.
“I need to devise a way to jump straight to the locator,” she mused.
“And go blind into the second simulation?” Chika said uneasily. “That seems a little risky to me.”
“I wonder,” said Toshi, “if we could end up slamming into a wall and not managing to get in. And what would happen to us if we did that? Flat as a pancake and trapped inside?” He glanced sidelong at his cousin. “Or worse?”
“I think that could happen,” Miaki said. “I think we should set a rule that none of us ever uses this sim alone. Two people at least, and maybe even three, so hopefully there’ll always be someone who can come out and notify the others where to go. But never go in alone.”
Julie glanced at him speculatively. “Unless you decide to break the rule and go off on your own again? You do tend to do that.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow, but made no answer.
“I want to try something else now,” Jin said. “I think that we can go farther in than just one simulation. I think we can be in a second sim, and step into a third. And more beyond that.”
Toshi gave a great whoop. “That is fantastic!” he said. “We don’t even need to use any other sims directly, then! And we can’t be detected. This is the most amazing simulation yet!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Chika cautioned. “Remember how risky this one is too. The possible dangers might be too much of a tradeoff, for the seeming convenience.”
They continued experimenting, standing inside one simulation while calling up another one, and then calling up another. They could take the route further in by going all together, or someone could go into another simulation while the others stayed behind in the previous one.
They debated for a while about the logistics of the whole thing. On one hand, they might be stepping sideways into a new simulation each time, as though the grey simulation were a corridor with many rooms coming off of it. In that scenario, they were exiting one simulation entirely, and then entering a different one. What seemed to support this view was the fact that some of them stood inside simulation number two, while others had gone into two further simulations and then straight into number two again. The two groups met at the same place as before, suggesting that the exploratory group had stepped out of the other two simulations and back into this one.
In another scenario, however, each simulation they called up might be “nested” inside the previous one so that the sims were related to each other like boxes within boxes within boxes. At first this scenario seemed to have been disproven by the way someone could step out of sim number four and back into sim number two, to meet the people still in number two. If the sims were all “nested,” surely when the exploratory group stood in sim four and called up sim two, they’d be calling up a completely different version of it, and would not meet the others who were still standing in the first version of sim number two.
Yet they did meet each other, so this suggested that the subsequent simulations were not nested.
But then Julie discovered that the more simulations people called up from inside other simulations, the fainter the locator signal grew. This suggested that the explorers were going farther and farther “inward,” with more layers of nesting simulations interfering with the signal.
It was a paradox they couldn’t seem to resolve.
“Alright,” Miaki said finally. “I suggest that until we have more data, we should treat the sims as though they’re nested.”
“I agree,” said Julie. “Until I can get the locators adjusted, we need to behave in ways that won’t put our contact with each other in jeopardy.”
Chika nodded. “Which means that we have to set a limit on how far in any group can go. I’d say only two simulations farther in than the group that’s closer to the outside. We just can’t risk losing each other.”
“So,” Toshi said. “We have two problems to solve now. First, how to keep our locators in view of each other. And second, how to send messages between simulations. Because I’m getting an idea how we can expose the Pacific Rim plot, if we can just get those problems solved.”
They finished for the evening, and each set out to work on specific problems. Julie and Kenji worked on the locator problem, Chika and Toshi worked on the communication, and Miaki and Jin tried to discover the nature of the barrier that separated someone in sim number two from someone in sim number three. If they couldn’t figure that out, then both the locator and the communication problems probably couldn’t be solved at all. One sure way of finding out would be simply to try to “jump” from one locator to another, but Miaki insisted that that would only be tried as an absolute last resort. He avoided referring to any reason why, but they all knew the main reason: if the wall between sims was essentially impenetrable, then whoever tried the experiment would probably die.
There couldn’t have been a worse time to have to work so hard. The school was moving toward a week of intense exams, and at least some of their attention had to be paid to course work and studying. It was something of a mercy that all the other ISCE students were studying intensely, so a little extra weariness and circles under the eyes weren’t out of the ordinary. Talk in the cafeteria began to revolve almost entirely around two topics: the upcoming crucial exams, and the week that they would all have off to recover (either back at home or here at the school) when exams were over.
But the extracurricular explorations of the six investigators became suddenly more urgent, as exam week dawned. At mid-evening on the night before the first exam, Chika sent a confidential, highly-encrypted message to the other five: while perusing some of the faculty records she had discovered that professor Yoshida would be leaving for five days, the day after the last exam, leaving a teaching assistant to evaluate his students’ test results. Yoshida himself was going back to the Pacific Rim region, but not going to his home. He was, in fact, leaving to meet with Kazuo Tanaka at the space engine testing laboratory. Their first meeting was scheduled for the second day after the last exam.
They had a quick meeting in the grey simulation, just after supper.
“This could really be it,” Toshi said enthusiastically. “If we can somehow eavesdrop on that meeting, this whole thing might break open.”
“But we can’t,” Julie said. “We won’t be here. We’ll be visiting home by then.”
“I won’t,” Kenji said. “I’ve been planning all along to stay at school during the break.”
“I’ve already messaged my family that I’m staying too,” Chika said.
Julie was dismayed. “Are you saying we have to cancel our break and can’t even go home? I’ve been looking forward to the break for the whole term. I’ve…,” she grimaced a little sheepishly, “I’ve really been homesick.” She looked to Jin for agreement. “You must be going home too, aren’t you? Aren’t you going to visit your family?”
“I’ve been planning on it,” Jin said quietly. “But now…” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Toshi said, “Julie, you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. It’s okay. It’s not like we were drafted into this. If you’re that homesick, it will really do you good to get home for a few days. Do you have a lot of sisters and brothers?”
“Twelve,” she said, and laughed at the others’ expressions. “Well, my dad was married once before he married my mom, and they had five kids. One set of triplets. Then my mom had twins, and five others. We’ve…got a loud house.”
Toshi whistled. “I just bet you do,” he said, then grinned. “And maybe that explains a few things. You’d sure have needed to find ways to defend yourself and distract people’s attention away from you, to get any privacy.”
She laughed again. “Yes. My older brothers used to try to read my private journals, and they always managed to figure out my passwords. So I had to learn how to divert them to other sites.”
“But it sounds like you’re all pretty close.”
“Yes. Our family get-togethers are the best thing ever.”
“Then I think you should go,” Toshi said.
“But what about you?” she asked. “Are you staying, or going home?”
He didn’t move, and his expression didn’t change, but to all intents and purposes he might as well have glanced at Miaki. “I’m staying,” Toshi said. “We both are.”
After all, thought Jin, what did Miaki have to go home to? She suddenly wondered where he had lived, after his father had died. She suspected he’d been in no shape to move into a place of his own, alone. Had he gone to live with Toshi’s family, then?
Unexpectedly she remembered Toshi’s own comment, when the group had been trying to decide whether to report Miaki’s attack on Kenji to the school officials: ‘He made me come to school without him last year, but I won’t let him do that again.’ Of course Miaki had lived with his cousin’s family. Toshi probably wouldn’t have let anything else happen. Nor would he have left Miaki, unless he knew he was leaving his cousin with someone who cared about him.
“Toshi,” she asked. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No,” he said.
She nodded to herself. Cousins, best friends, and virtually brothers. It explained a lot.
“You know,” she said. “I think I’m going to stay. My parents are both university professors, and they’re going to be very busy with end-of-term paperwork, anyway.”
Julie looked around at the others, and finally shrugged ruefully. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’d better stay too. I know Kenji knows our security arrangements as well as I do, but it’s not fair to dump everything on him at the last minute. So…I guess I’ll stay.”
Miaki surveyed her. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asked quietly. “You know this could be dangerous. I don’t want you to feel pressured.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “What kind of friend would I be if I left you all, just when it got dangerous? Besides,” she added brightly, “if we expose this plot and save the world, think how jealous my brothers and sisters will be, that I get to be so famous.”
“Good,” said Toshi. “And now that we know the roster, I can tell you my own little surprise. I think I’ve figured out how to communicate between sims when we’re inside the grey one.” In the midst of the general exclamation, he laughed and said, “Well, okay, it wasn’t just me. Miaki sent me some of the specs he’d worked out, and made a couple of suggestions about angles I might want to look at. A couple of them were very promising, so I started fiddling. I’ve coded a couple of things that we can try out, and if they work, then we’ll incorporate them into our avatars, and into Julie’s locators.”
“Trying them out will be the real challenge this week,” Chika said ruefully.
“Let me and Miaki do that,” Toshi said. “I think I can spare a little time, and I don’t think Miaki ever needs to study for anything – “
“Not true,” Miaki murmured.
“ – so we should be able to test the programs ourselves. Then we can just incorporate them the morning after exams. If any of us are still awake.”
“And if they work,” Miaki said, “we’ll use them to access as many broadcasting avenues as we can. Because when we start exposing this plot, I want it to be viewed as widely as possible, across the world.”
They stared at him. “Across the world?” Chika said. “That’s…very ambitious.”
“It’s a plot with world-wide implications,” he said darkly. “If we try to go to a few authorities with disks of information, they’ll probably dismiss everything, if they even look at it. But if we can get our discoveries onto world-wide broadcasts, so people in the world can see what we see, as we’re seeing it inside the simulation – there’s no way anybody can explain it away.”
They digested this proposal in silence, trying to encompass the implications, not to mention the responsibility. If they were going to broadcast to the whole world, they had better get it right. They would have only one chance.
Julie jumped on a crucial implication almost immediately. “I can see I’m going to have to build even more defenses in the next week. Because you just know ISCE itself will try to shut us down, and then everyone else outside after they try. We’re going to have to make sure they can’t do it. Kenji – can you work with me on this?”
They knew she wasn’t just asking for his partnership. If anyone might turn out to be a “weak link” in this final project, it could be him. He was working to expose his own father, after all, and send him to prison, probably for the rest of his life. If he had any reluctance to throw himself into this wholeheartedly, it was understandable. But they had to know it now, so they would not rely on him for something he couldn’t bring himself to do.
But he nodded immediately, his jaw tight. “I can do it,” he said. “I don’t even care if I fail my exams. This is too important.”
“Alright, then,” Julie said. “We’ll make sure to find time for it.”
And that was it. They arranged for one more meeting at mid-week, after supper, just for an update. Then, the day after exams, they would incorporate the final security and communications programs. And the day after that – they would find the meeting between professor Yoshida and Kazuo Tanaka, and eavesdrop on it, starting to broadcast what they saw if it turned out to relate to the plot they’d uncovered. And hopefully it would all be over.
Chapter 12
Chapter 11
“What we finally found,” said Jin as their avatars relaxed in the entryway gazebo, “is that the featureless simulation is a sort of gateway. We could all sense that there was something there, rather than nothing. But that something wasn’t yet anything real. It was basically just a potential, waiting to be filled.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” Chika asked.
Jin consulted the notes on her holoscreen. “It means that it’s a simulation that can access all of them. You can be in the grey simulation, and pull up any of the other special sims without logging out of it and into the others.”
Miaki manipulated a couple of holoscreens and said, “There. I’ve sent all of you the details.” He and Jin waited before going on, as the other four quickly consulted the new data and got caught up.
It had been a tense week past. Now that they were suspicious that they might have been watched from the very beginning, they had halted all their investigations while they went over everything they’d done so far. They looked at every possible log of their activity and tried to alter it; they double, triple, and quadruple-checked every security measure they’d taken so far and added several more; and they even tried to examine the logs of all online activity of ISCE faculty and staff members since Miaki’s very first foray into illegal territory several weeks ago.
That last task was difficult. For a few days, even with her more advanced knowledge of ISCE systems and procedures, Chika beat her head in futility against the wall of security surrounding staff and faculty records. At last Miaki joined her, and essentially invented new ways around the security. These had to be far more complicated than what he’d used to break into the less advanced systems protecting the Pacific Rim government site, and Chika’s head spun as she strained to follow the intricacies of his devices. She suspected that the things he’d come up with over the past week were things that had never been done before, anywhere. And all he seemed to need to do was recognize a problem, think about it for a bit, and then realize how “obvious” the solution was.
She was getting an education, first-hand, in why exactly the entire school had been buzzing with anticipation when it was known that Miaki Nakamura would finally be coming to ISCE this term.
Julie and Kenji had worked just as closely and intensely to devise even more diversions and plausible illusions to protect the six of them in their explorations. Miaki had helped there, too, linking things together in even more intricate nets than they had envisioned. He had done it at more of a distance, though. He and Kenji spoke even less now than they had before. It wasn’t that they held any animosity toward each other, but rather that they were helpless to know how to build any kind of relationship when their lives were caught in such a web of terrible connections.
Jin, meanwhile, had drawn everyone’s efforts together and analyzed them as a whole, pointing out gaps and suggesting ways to fill them. Toshi had taken her work and begun to cross-reference even more widely, trying to analyze the cyber activities of the entire institute. He also went back over the external logs, looking for interaction between ISCE and anyone in the Pacific Rim government. It was probable that such interactions had been disguised somehow, but as Toshi remarked, they didn’t have Julie, Kenji, or Miaki on their side. Whatever disguises were used, he was confident he’d be able to see through them.
He also worked with Julie on a couple of small things of his own, but kept silent about them to the others. He liked having a few backup macros and programs available, in case of emergencies. And given how close they were coming to figuring things out, and how serious the plotting appeared to be, he thought he just might need them.
By the time the week had passed, the six investigators felt much more confident of their own security. And they had discovered that there was indeed communication between the Pacific Rim government – most precisely the department of defense, in which Kazuo Tanaka played a prominent role – and certain faculty at ISCE. Professor Yoshida appeared to be the primary contact at the school, but there were a couple of others who worked with him: a female Terraforming professor, and the professor of Space Health and Bodily Dynamics, who also taught the main physical education classes. All three of them were Pacific Rim citizens.
Jin had also carried most of the work of analyzing the grey simulation, while Miaki worked with the others. For some reason, she had felt the same as he did: there was something significant about this very odd simulation, if they could just figure out what it was. It couldn’t be accidental, that this simulation had been included in the special private folder with the others that impinged into the real world.
And at last, she had understood what the significance was, when she realized that everything in the simulation seemed to point outward, beyond itself. Yesterday she had shown her data to Miaki without telling him what her conclusions were, and waited to see if he would come to the same conclusions. He had gone very still, going over everything twice. And then he’d looked up at her, his eyes sparkling with delight.
“Well done, Jin,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.” He had, of course, understood both the data and its conclusions, and the workings of her own mind. Once he’d seen the data, he didn’t even need to ask what her thinking processes had been or where they’d led her. He knew.
And so here they were today, trying it out for the first time. The others had finally looked over the data, and were ready. Either Jin or Miaki could take the lead, but she looked over at him and nodded for him to go ahead.
He called up the simulation, and they entered it through the doorway he created in the gazebo. It was a bit disconcerting to step toward a little fountain surrounded by roses in the garden outside the gazebo, and find oneself instead standing in the center of a featureless grey nothing, as though stepping into a mist.
Once they were inside the sim, Miaki said, “Bring up the list of special simulations, Chika, and pick one we can try.”
She designated what seemed to have become their usual experimental sim: the engine testing laboratory, and the janitorial hallway. The other five watched Miaki’s moves as he accessed the grey simulation’s special abilities and reached beyond it to the chosen sim. There was an odd twisting sensation, and then they found themselves standing beside the janitor’s door in the laboratory hallway.
Toshi whistled appreciatively. “This is amazing,” he said. “Is this simulation as real as the original? Can we affect the real world in the same way?”
Jin answered, “All the specs say yes. You can do your experiment with the broom again if you want to make sure.”
“Before we do anything,” Julie said, “show us how to log out again. Which one are we logging out of? Do we have to log out twice?”
Miaki said, “It will be enough to log out of the grey sim. That automatically logs you out of both.”
“Good,” she nodded, then asked briskly, “And what sort of record do we leave behind us? If someone were to look at our personal logs, which simulations would be there? How traceable are we?”
“That’s the best part,” Jin said, trying not to sound too satisfied and smug, since this had been one of the first things she’d checked. “It’s the same with the log-out. As far as our logs show, we have only logged into the grey sim. I’ve seen nothing that leaves traces of whatever simulations we visit from inside the grey one.”
“That’s fascinating,” Chika mused. “So I wonder what would happen if someone logged into the grey simulation later, looking for someone. Would they be able to find the person they were looking for?”
“I don’t think so,” Miaki said. “I think they’d have to know which second simulation to call up, to follow the person into it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Kenji said. “If one of us was hurt in a simulation, couldn’t we be lost completely?”
“Why don’t we try an experiment?” Julie suggested. “Hopefully my locators can overcome the searching problem. If they can’t, I’ll try to adjust them somehow.”
They all logged out again, and then Chika and Toshi went back in. The others gave them a couple of minutes to choose a second simulation and go into it, and then logged back in. They stood in the middle of the grey mist and looked for the orange and yellow locator signals.
And found them. But they were somewhat fainter than they would be inside a normal simulation, and they gave no clue what simulation needed to be called up, to follow them in. Nor did it seem possible to message in or out. Julie recorded the data and looked it over thoughtfully, once they all logged out again.
“I need to devise a way to jump straight to the locator,” she mused.
“And go blind into the second simulation?” Chika said uneasily. “That seems a little risky to me.”
“I wonder,” said Toshi, “if we could end up slamming into a wall and not managing to get in. And what would happen to us if we did that? Flat as a pancake and trapped inside?” He glanced sidelong at his cousin. “Or worse?”
“I think that could happen,” Miaki said. “I think we should set a rule that none of us ever uses this sim alone. Two people at least, and maybe even three, so hopefully there’ll always be someone who can come out and notify the others where to go. But never go in alone.”
Julie glanced at him speculatively. “Unless you decide to break the rule and go off on your own again? You do tend to do that.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow, but made no answer.
“I want to try something else now,” Jin said. “I think that we can go farther in than just one simulation. I think we can be in a second sim, and step into a third. And more beyond that.”
Toshi gave a great whoop. “That is fantastic!” he said. “We don’t even need to use any other sims directly, then! And we can’t be detected. This is the most amazing simulation yet!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Chika cautioned. “Remember how risky this one is too. The possible dangers might be too much of a tradeoff, for the seeming convenience.”
They continued experimenting, standing inside one simulation while calling up another one, and then calling up another. They could take the route further in by going all together, or someone could go into another simulation while the others stayed behind in the previous one.
They debated for a while about the logistics of the whole thing. On one hand, they might be stepping sideways into a new simulation each time, as though the grey simulation were a corridor with many rooms coming off of it. In that scenario, they were exiting one simulation entirely, and then entering a different one. What seemed to support this view was the fact that some of them stood inside simulation number two, while others had gone into two further simulations and then straight into number two again. The two groups met at the same place as before, suggesting that the exploratory group had stepped out of the other two simulations and back into this one.
In another scenario, however, each simulation they called up might be “nested” inside the previous one so that the sims were related to each other like boxes within boxes within boxes. At first this scenario seemed to have been disproven by the way someone could step out of sim number four and back into sim number two, to meet the people still in number two. If the sims were all “nested,” surely when the exploratory group stood in sim four and called up sim two, they’d be calling up a completely different version of it, and would not meet the others who were still standing in the first version of sim number two.
Yet they did meet each other, so this suggested that the subsequent simulations were not nested.
But then Julie discovered that the more simulations people called up from inside other simulations, the fainter the locator signal grew. This suggested that the explorers were going farther and farther “inward,” with more layers of nesting simulations interfering with the signal.
It was a paradox they couldn’t seem to resolve.
“Alright,” Miaki said finally. “I suggest that until we have more data, we should treat the sims as though they’re nested.”
“I agree,” said Julie. “Until I can get the locators adjusted, we need to behave in ways that won’t put our contact with each other in jeopardy.”
Chika nodded. “Which means that we have to set a limit on how far in any group can go. I’d say only two simulations farther in than the group that’s closer to the outside. We just can’t risk losing each other.”
“So,” Toshi said. “We have two problems to solve now. First, how to keep our locators in view of each other. And second, how to send messages between simulations. Because I’m getting an idea how we can expose the Pacific Rim plot, if we can just get those problems solved.”
They finished for the evening, and each set out to work on specific problems. Julie and Kenji worked on the locator problem, Chika and Toshi worked on the communication, and Miaki and Jin tried to discover the nature of the barrier that separated someone in sim number two from someone in sim number three. If they couldn’t figure that out, then both the locator and the communication problems probably couldn’t be solved at all. One sure way of finding out would be simply to try to “jump” from one locator to another, but Miaki insisted that that would only be tried as an absolute last resort. He avoided referring to any reason why, but they all knew the main reason: if the wall between sims was essentially impenetrable, then whoever tried the experiment would probably die.
There couldn’t have been a worse time to have to work so hard. The school was moving toward a week of intense exams, and at least some of their attention had to be paid to course work and studying. It was something of a mercy that all the other ISCE students were studying intensely, so a little extra weariness and circles under the eyes weren’t out of the ordinary. Talk in the cafeteria began to revolve almost entirely around two topics: the upcoming crucial exams, and the week that they would all have off to recover (either back at home or here at the school) when exams were over.
But the extracurricular explorations of the six investigators became suddenly more urgent, as exam week dawned. At mid-evening on the night before the first exam, Chika sent a confidential, highly-encrypted message to the other five: while perusing some of the faculty records she had discovered that professor Yoshida would be leaving for five days, the day after the last exam, leaving a teaching assistant to evaluate his students’ test results. Yoshida himself was going back to the Pacific Rim region, but not going to his home. He was, in fact, leaving to meet with Kazuo Tanaka at the space engine testing laboratory. Their first meeting was scheduled for the second day after the last exam.
They had a quick meeting in the grey simulation, just after supper.
“This could really be it,” Toshi said enthusiastically. “If we can somehow eavesdrop on that meeting, this whole thing might break open.”
“But we can’t,” Julie said. “We won’t be here. We’ll be visiting home by then.”
“I won’t,” Kenji said. “I’ve been planning all along to stay at school during the break.”
“I’ve already messaged my family that I’m staying too,” Chika said.
Julie was dismayed. “Are you saying we have to cancel our break and can’t even go home? I’ve been looking forward to the break for the whole term. I’ve…,” she grimaced a little sheepishly, “I’ve really been homesick.” She looked to Jin for agreement. “You must be going home too, aren’t you? Aren’t you going to visit your family?”
“I’ve been planning on it,” Jin said quietly. “But now…” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Toshi said, “Julie, you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. It’s okay. It’s not like we were drafted into this. If you’re that homesick, it will really do you good to get home for a few days. Do you have a lot of sisters and brothers?”
“Twelve,” she said, and laughed at the others’ expressions. “Well, my dad was married once before he married my mom, and they had five kids. One set of triplets. Then my mom had twins, and five others. We’ve…got a loud house.”
Toshi whistled. “I just bet you do,” he said, then grinned. “And maybe that explains a few things. You’d sure have needed to find ways to defend yourself and distract people’s attention away from you, to get any privacy.”
She laughed again. “Yes. My older brothers used to try to read my private journals, and they always managed to figure out my passwords. So I had to learn how to divert them to other sites.”
“But it sounds like you’re all pretty close.”
“Yes. Our family get-togethers are the best thing ever.”
“Then I think you should go,” Toshi said.
“But what about you?” she asked. “Are you staying, or going home?”
He didn’t move, and his expression didn’t change, but to all intents and purposes he might as well have glanced at Miaki. “I’m staying,” Toshi said. “We both are.”
After all, thought Jin, what did Miaki have to go home to? She suddenly wondered where he had lived, after his father had died. She suspected he’d been in no shape to move into a place of his own, alone. Had he gone to live with Toshi’s family, then?
Unexpectedly she remembered Toshi’s own comment, when the group had been trying to decide whether to report Miaki’s attack on Kenji to the school officials: ‘He made me come to school without him last year, but I won’t let him do that again.’ Of course Miaki had lived with his cousin’s family. Toshi probably wouldn’t have let anything else happen. Nor would he have left Miaki, unless he knew he was leaving his cousin with someone who cared about him.
“Toshi,” she asked. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“No,” he said.
She nodded to herself. Cousins, best friends, and virtually brothers. It explained a lot.
“You know,” she said. “I think I’m going to stay. My parents are both university professors, and they’re going to be very busy with end-of-term paperwork, anyway.”
Julie looked around at the others, and finally shrugged ruefully. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’d better stay too. I know Kenji knows our security arrangements as well as I do, but it’s not fair to dump everything on him at the last minute. So…I guess I’ll stay.”
Miaki surveyed her. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asked quietly. “You know this could be dangerous. I don’t want you to feel pressured.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “What kind of friend would I be if I left you all, just when it got dangerous? Besides,” she added brightly, “if we expose this plot and save the world, think how jealous my brothers and sisters will be, that I get to be so famous.”
“Good,” said Toshi. “And now that we know the roster, I can tell you my own little surprise. I think I’ve figured out how to communicate between sims when we’re inside the grey one.” In the midst of the general exclamation, he laughed and said, “Well, okay, it wasn’t just me. Miaki sent me some of the specs he’d worked out, and made a couple of suggestions about angles I might want to look at. A couple of them were very promising, so I started fiddling. I’ve coded a couple of things that we can try out, and if they work, then we’ll incorporate them into our avatars, and into Julie’s locators.”
“Trying them out will be the real challenge this week,” Chika said ruefully.
“Let me and Miaki do that,” Toshi said. “I think I can spare a little time, and I don’t think Miaki ever needs to study for anything – “
“Not true,” Miaki murmured.
“ – so we should be able to test the programs ourselves. Then we can just incorporate them the morning after exams. If any of us are still awake.”
“And if they work,” Miaki said, “we’ll use them to access as many broadcasting avenues as we can. Because when we start exposing this plot, I want it to be viewed as widely as possible, across the world.”
They stared at him. “Across the world?” Chika said. “That’s…very ambitious.”
“It’s a plot with world-wide implications,” he said darkly. “If we try to go to a few authorities with disks of information, they’ll probably dismiss everything, if they even look at it. But if we can get our discoveries onto world-wide broadcasts, so people in the world can see what we see, as we’re seeing it inside the simulation – there’s no way anybody can explain it away.”
They digested this proposal in silence, trying to encompass the implications, not to mention the responsibility. If they were going to broadcast to the whole world, they had better get it right. They would have only one chance.
Julie jumped on a crucial implication almost immediately. “I can see I’m going to have to build even more defenses in the next week. Because you just know ISCE itself will try to shut us down, and then everyone else outside after they try. We’re going to have to make sure they can’t do it. Kenji – can you work with me on this?”
They knew she wasn’t just asking for his partnership. If anyone might turn out to be a “weak link” in this final project, it could be him. He was working to expose his own father, after all, and send him to prison, probably for the rest of his life. If he had any reluctance to throw himself into this wholeheartedly, it was understandable. But they had to know it now, so they would not rely on him for something he couldn’t bring himself to do.
But he nodded immediately, his jaw tight. “I can do it,” he said. “I don’t even care if I fail my exams. This is too important.”
“Alright, then,” Julie said. “We’ll make sure to find time for it.”
And that was it. They arranged for one more meeting at mid-week, after supper, just for an update. Then, the day after exams, they would incorporate the final security and communications programs. And the day after that – they would find the meeting between professor Yoshida and Kazuo Tanaka, and eavesdrop on it, starting to broadcast what they saw if it turned out to relate to the plot they’d uncovered. And hopefully it would all be over.
Chapter 12
