Pandion (Genera #1)

Chapter 14

A fter a month or so of semi-aimless loitering, Kagesawa was starting to miss his neighbours and his little corner of tech stuff. He had no use for half of it now with the port and organism gone, but there was still something he could do with the other half.

Having had this time to himself without any outside demands, he felt refreshed and well-rested. After a month, his apartment must have been empty, and he’d be able to get back to his old routines.

One look into the apartment and he could tell a month hadn’t been enough. The thought of closing the door and turning back was tempting, but so were the drawers full of unfinished projects he was itching to get to. He’d collect some of his things and be on his way.

Satoru was in the living room, lying face down on the sofa. He seemed to be breathing steadily, so this was not as disturbing as it could have been.

The place was clean. At a glance, the clutter had been cleared from the spare bedroom, and it was spotless. Maybe the housing situation was even worse than he’d thought, and Satoru needed some more time to find something suitable.

Kagesawa stopped next to the sofa. There was no reaction. Was Satoru that fast asleep? His arm and hair were covering his face, but Kagesawa could tell his eyes were closed. What an odd, unexpected, private moment to be able to watch someone familiar, yet unfamiliar, sleep so soundly and so unguardedly right in front of him.

You didn’t stay and wait for me, did you? He was about to chuckle at himself when Satoru bolted up and nearly fell over from the fright.

“Sorry, it’s just me. Didn’t mean to startle you,” Kagesawa said and scratched the back of his head.

“Did you say something?!” Satoru leapt forward and grabbed him by the shoulders. In an even more bizarre twist, the man started to grope through Kagesawa’s hair to find the spot where the port had been. There was still a hole there roughly the size of the port, though some scar tissue had formed around it.

“I said sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Kagesawa repeated as Satoru backed away with the sort of frown that was reserved for either intense constipation or deep thought. Kagesawa was hoping for the latter.

Before that!

“I didn’t say anything.” However, as he said it, he joined Satoru in the frowning. “No, wait, what?” The both of them stared at one another in equal dismay.

“I’m not asleep, am I?” Satoru pinched himself.

“Wait, wait, wait! Didn’t they give you an expedited removal? A new link?”

“There’s really no port in there?” They were both ignoring one another. Satoru dove back in to check the back of Kagesawa’s head. Kagesawa had to forcibly pry him off of himself.

“Dude, it’s not in there. I doubt the organism is even still—” There hadn’t been any particular symptoms, though. A mild headache at first, but nothing he’d bothered taking prescribed medication for.

“How much can it do?” Satoru started bombarding him with the different types of projections. His words weren’t nearly as clear as before when the port had been in, but Kagesawa could tell he was putting in a lot of effort. Emotional states were very faint, almost nonexistent.

“There’s something coming through, but it’s not great. I wonder if it’s possible to improve it with something?” Kagesawa could come up with a few ideas on the spot but stopped himself before he got too excited about the prospect. “Ah, haha, what’s with me… was there a delay in the removal process? Didn’t they think it was a priority?”

“I didn’t file for a removal!”

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“Well, I’m sorry I’m so useless!”

“Huh?” The fragments Kagesawa could sense through the crippled link were vague at best, but he could have sworn Satoru was frightened by something. “Are you scared of it, is that it? I can assure you it doesn’t hurt.”

“No, that’s not it. I wanted to make sure…” Satoru exhaled, exasperated. “I suppose I should have gotten the hint when you voluntarily ripped off your port to be rid of me, but I can’t let it go until I hear you say it out loud. I’m immature, I can’t compartmentalise like you do. I’m sure the link messed us up and yes, it was inconvenient at times, but did none of it really mean anything to you?”

“None of what?” Kagesawa sat down on the floor and tried to think. “It was hurting you…”

He was a little hazy on the details because he’d been so tired, but he’d pulled the port as an easy fix. It had seemed like a fairly good solution at the time.

“So fucking what? I can handle a bit of pain,” Satoru said.

“It was getting worse. Who knows how bad it would have gotten if I hadn’t pulled the port off. Besides, it got the EA off our case. Your record was cleared, and you got your career back. That’s what you wanted, right?” Kagesawa genuinely didn’t know where he’d gone wrong.

“Did I say that?”

“I thought you were pretty clear about it.”

“That was ages ago! I thought we were going to figure things out together! What part of ‘together’ don’t you understand?!”

Oh, right, he’d said something along those lines… Kagesawa tended to either ignore or forget things that confused him or clashed with his view of things. Satoru’s words often did both.

Like, what was that thing about compartmentalising? What did that have to do with anything? If he asked for clarification every time something confused him, all he’d have time for were questions.

“Well, what’s done, is done. What do you want me to do?” Kagesawa shrugged. A bit of the link remained, but it was a matter of time until all of it was gone.

“No, it’s not,” Satoru said.

“Look, it’s been a month without the port to sustain it. It’s probably almost dead by now.”

“No.” Satoru seemed adamant. He stood up and started to pace around the room. “No, that’s wrong. It was definitely not there at all.” Nothing got through, it was dead silent. It was off when you were dampening, but when you ripped off the port… Satoru’s skin crawled. “It’s weak, but it’s not dying.”

The implications of that were frightening but not entirely unexpected. Kagesawa stood up and marched into his bedroom with Satoru following close behind.

“What are you going to do?” Satoru asked.

“I need something to connect to the BCI for diagnostics.” He had the old port and some spare parts, but everything regarding the connection between the organism and the port was highly regulated, classified information. It was a dangerous operation that required sophisticated instruments and a skilled surgeon to connect the two lest there be damage to the organism or the brain… or that was the official explanation.

Kagesawa had ripped off his port with no noticeable health effects, and the organism was still alive after a month. No one had patched him up. They’d closed his other wound, but the hole at the back of his head had barely been looked at.

No one in their right mind would rip off their own port. It was safely and securely tucked away out of harm’s way for a reason. Why would a small local hospital even know what to do in case something like that happened? They’d regurgitated the mantra about the organism dying without the port—that was common knowledge—and given him the meds recommended by the system. If the organism could survive without the port, what else was there that didn’t hold true? More importantly, why?

Harumine waited for an answer. He’d been waiting for a while now, so he was fairly sure it wasn’t coming.

Kagesawa was fully engrossed in what he was doing, and no mere question could have pulled him out of it. He’d dismantled the old port and was now putting it together piece by piece, replacing some parts and leaving out others. He had it hooked up to the BCI for diagnostics, then wrote short scripts to initialise parts of it independently from other parts.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Kagesawa held up a chip and added it onto a dish with several other such tiny chips. Then he desoldered another chip and replaced it with his own. Once that was done, he removed a large chunk of something from the port and connected the remainder to the BCI. It seemed to be initialising normally.

He’d replaced a couple of small parts and removed at least half of the structure, and it was functioning normally, albeit unconnected to anything. Using his tweezers, Kagesawa scraped off some crud from the contact surfaces and cleaned them with isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab. He seemed to be silently cursing as he did this.

“If this works, I’ll fucking…” He moved aside his hair, slammed the newly constructed port back into the hole and clenched his teeth. He connected the Osprey onto the port and established a connection with the BCI. The hardware connected as expected.

Harumine held his breath. After a few minutes, he could no longer take the suspense. “Is it working? Anything at all?” He probably shouldn’t have been so optimistic about a half an hour quick-fix for technology that required a whole team of people to service. Without any of the correct procedures, the connection between the organism and the link could take days or months, if it happened at all.

Kagesawa cursed.

“Maybe it requires some more work, a bit of time?” Harumine suggested.

After all, soldering a few chips and using tweezers and cotton swabs for delicate contact surfaces that probably required a specific chemical agent to facilitate bonding did seem a little crude. Hopefully, what remained of the organism hadn’t been damaged by the port being shoved in.

Kagesawa opened up the diagnostics application and started running some of the basic maintenance scripts. A few of them failed to start, but contrary to Harumine’s expectations, most were executed from start to finish with zero errors.

“Are these for the port itself? Did you run connection analysis?” It was always a little challenging to catch the flow of the output without being connected to the BCI himself, and with Kagesawa routinely using his keyboard and touchpad together with the BCI, it was hard to tell if he was doing that now as well.

He ran the connection analysis for Harumine and pulled up the data from the organism health app running in the background. The connection was weak, but it was there. The health app reported no anomalies in the three organisms it was detecting.

“Why’s it listing three?” One of them was labelled ‘secondary’, and Harumine could tell from certain familiar parameters that it was his. Kagesawa was growing more irate by the minute.

“Those fucking assholes!” He stood up and slammed some of the excess port junk off his desk and against the wall to vent some of that anger. He flicked off the Osprey and threw it on the desk before storming out of the room Harumine again at his heels, confused by the outburst.

“Kagesawa, wait! Fill me in. What just happened?”

“The fuckers didn’t replace anything! They stuffed a sock in it, disconnected it from the port and added a new one! Sophisticated technology, my ass! They’ve slapped a whole lot of decoy shit on it to make it look needlessly fragile so no one dares to look into it too deeply. It’s a flaming piece of garbage!”

“How’s it still alive?”

“There’s nothing in that port that could be of any use to the organism. Instead, there’s a G50 dual cell injector with something in it. I’m assuming something harmful to the organism.”

“Shit, I have that in there right now?” Harumine felt the back of his head in horror. “Do I yank it off, what do I do?” The thought of it randomly failing at any time was terrifying.

“Don’t do anything until we’ve figured this out. I think I need to have a serious chat with someone.”

Takazaki looked startled, but who wouldn’t, faced with Kagesawa turning up and rushing in uninvited. Harumine followed with a quick apology for the intrusion. After the initial shock, Takazaki found his voice and led with some rather irate questions.

“We’re friends, right? Where the hell have you been? You could have let me know you were all right!”

“That friendship is still under contest.” Kagesawa’s slightly chilly response surprised Harumine.

“What? Why?” Takazaki seemed just as confused.

“You’ve been keeping a lot of things from me, so until we’ve discussed the relevant bits, I’m going to reserve my judgement.” Kagesawa made his way into the living room with Takazaki slinking at his heels.

“I thought I told you—”

“You told me the bare minimum. It seems you and your friends have been keeping busy making trouble lately. But that’s not why I’m here. This is bigger than any of that.”

“I was going to tell you…” Takazaki’s voice shrank.

“Don’t lie to me. I know you kept it from me because you think I’m weak and unreliable. That may be true, but I still don’t appreciate the secrecy.”

There was something unnerving about Kagesawa’s words and mood. Had he changed during the month he’d been gone, or was it the unfamiliar, rare display of anger that made him seem so different?

Takazaki tried to defend himself again, but Kagesawa merely shushed him back into silence.

“The EA is lying about the ports. The reason I couldn’t reverse engineer that last EA stack wasn’t because it was too complicated and relied on data we were missing. It was because that stuff’s fabricated bullshit.”

“What?” Takazaki’s mouth fell open, and he forgot to close it for quite some time.

“It’s full of the cheapest, shittiest components you can think of. Most of it’s redundant, and, instead of keeping the organism alive, it’s holding it hostage. It’s set to go off if you try to tamper with the port, and they can terminate the link remotely whenever they want by poisoning the organism.” Kagesawa handed him the injector mechanism from his port.

“Is there any way to prove it? If we turn in your port as evidence, they’ll just deny it’s an authentic port. Can one be removed safely while streaming it live? Finding someone willing to have their port removed at the risk of losing the link might be tough…” Takazaki frowned, examined the injector and continued, “This looks like TN-25 or 26. It should have self-destructed when you pulled it off the socket. These are used in low-level office supplies to destroy data in case of tampering. Wouldn’t want this to go off in my head. These are notoriously unreliable.”

Kagesawa glanced at Harumine but said nothing.

“Well, I guess I’d rather have it taken off than wait to see what happens,” Harumine said. Having to live with the thing inside his head while knowing what it might do did not sound appealing. “We document the process so that others can replicate it. We may not need more proof than that if people can verify it for themselves.”

“You’re sure the organism won’t need the port?” Takazaki asked. Kagesawa nodded.

“I ran diagnostics, and they’re perfectly healthy.”

“The link?”

“Is there, but it’s a little weak. I’m not sure why, but we can look into it some more before we do anything else.”

“A weak link might deter most people. Let’s hope there’s a way to improve it.” Takazaki paused to think. “But the diagnostic app picks Harumine’s organism through the link, you said? That’s promising.”

“Yes, it did pick up several organisms.” Kagesawa’s face turned dark again. He mumbled a string of some fairly vile curses.

“What’s with him?” Takazaki asked Harumine in a quiet voice.

“The diagnostics app lists three,” Harumine whispered back. Takazaki flinched. He was quick to put two and two together.

“I would’ve assumed he’d be happy about that.”

“He’s probably glad it’s there. He’s just pissed off he didn’t know about it.” Harumine was pleased, even relieved, to be able to tell. The link felt like it wasn’t there, but he was intuitively picking up things he knew he wouldn’t have known by observing from the outside.

“If I can figure out a safe way to remove it, and we manage to document it, will you use your contacts to spread the word, preferably anonymously?” Kagesawa asked Takazaki.

“Of course. I know some people who will do it discreetly. I’ll personally make sure it’s not traced to you.”

“Good. I don’t care what happens to me, but…” Kagesawa glanced at Harumine again but quickly turned back to Takazaki. “Oh, also, I need everything you have on the port, the organism, the extensions and whatever else you’ve collected over the years.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’ve been feeding your curiosity for years. That wasn’t just some idle banter, it was research, and I know you: you’re thorough. You wouldn’t limit yourself to one source.”

“Damn it, Tsuyoshi-kun, you were much more fun when you were trying to behave.” Takazaki chuckled and sighed. “I’ll send it over. It’s not a whole lot. Most of it’s mentioned in the EA stack, but I did take a few private detours.”

“Good. Keep looking. I’m going to get to work.” With that, Kagesawa headed for the door, leaving Takazaki and Harumine looking at each other and shrugging in unison.

“Let me know if you need anything else,” Takazaki shouted after Kagesawa. To Harumine, he added, “Keep an eye on him, will you? You know how he is when he’s in the zone. Make him take a break if he looks like he needs one. He sucks at that.”

“Oh, you’ve noticed?”

“Yeah, wouldn’t surprise me if he had DEFD the way he is, hah hah.” When Harumine didn’t laugh, Takazaki turned to look. “Relax, I was only joking. I’m sure he doesn’t really have it.” He did not look at all sure.

“He found out after he ripped off the port.”

“What? Really? Doesn’t that disqualify him for—?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s been like that for as long as I’ve known him.”

“Indeed. Something more for you to look into if you’re so inclined.” Harumine didn’t know the full depth of Takazaki’s interests, but he had an oddly strong hunch that the man would be interested in this seemingly random discrepancy.

“Connections? Seems unlikely. Corruption? But that would require a shitton of money. Is that even possible? A simple cock-up, maybe? Hmm.” Takazaki frowned, dug out his palm reader and started doing some preliminary research on the spot.

“Let me know if you figure it out. I’m going to go now to keep that eye on him.”