Mojibake (æ–‡å—化け)
by Jessie Tracer / Electric Keet

The young black cat tapped at the pane of glass; when she turned it to face me it became milky and spattered with nonsense. “This is the first message I got. There are four more from before, just like it but longer.” She nudged it forward in offering. “And thank you for taking the time, Officer Red Panda.”

I accepted the display panel from Abby and returned a warm smile. “Please, call me Yasuki.” On closer viewing, the deep blue nonsense resolved into fragmented English with bursts of near-random accented letters and punctuation. “This is… very strange. It’s been many years since I saw mojibake like this.”

Her head tilted slightly, the motion almost a caricature. “Pardon?”

“It’s a sort of error that can happen with digital text.” I pointed out the errant characters. “These are the result of letters from one language being misinterpreted by the system as being from another. Moji means ‘character’, bake means ‘change’. Mojibake.”

“So it’s not corrupted data after all?”

“It certainly is! It shouldn’t even happen in normal circumstances. Mixed in with pieces of normal, readable text….” I shook my head and handed the panel back to her. “Oh, neko-san, you have presented me with an enigma. May I have the other messages?”

She swept her fingers over the surface in smooth motions. “I received that one about a month ago, and these… every few days after. I wouldn’t have waited this long, but I thought they were just side effects from my time on that other server.”

My tail frizzed slightly. “You were also displaced during the Irokai no Minshukakumei attacks?” I remembered a cramped, impossibly white room stuffed to capacity with people waiting out an emergency server reboot. There was confusion, then panic—

She nodded with a chagrined smile. “Do you remember the cat who was caught by the memory corruption inside there?”

I remembered very well indeed.

My left paw kept busy, worrying at the edge of my suit jacket while I stared at message headers. An hour in my office with the messages sprawled across my workspace hadn’t done much to clear up the matter. Even with the mistranslated characters converted back to their original Cyrillic, it was all little more than a mess. The system helpfully pronounced the intact name “Perchik Zaytsev” for me, but the messages themselves seemed to have only occasional whole words of either Russian or English. The rest were untranslatable fragments.

Worse, the source of the messages was technically impossible. Before I’d joined Irokai Security – and before my permanent upload to the virtual world – I’d spent enough time beta-testing and sorting out small bugs to know a few things about how the massive computer system operated. Every autonomous process stored information about what object spawned it. The process delivering the corrupted messages to her belonged to something which simply didn’t exist in the database. It was like getting mail addressed from a city that wasn’t on the map.

I closed my eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and considered. Something about that cat and her enigma gnawed at me. I could dive deeper into the problem, focus all my efforts on a simple but odd-looking issue, and discover an obscure bug. I could report the matter to the development department and let them do all the digging for me. I could also simply put a filter on messages from that object and call the issue fixed.

I cleared my workspace, then began to type a message to Abby Paprika. «Your case is raising more questions than answers. I wish to meet with you as soon as possible….»

“Oi. You look like a cop.”

“I am a cop.” I flashed my credentials while staring evenly at the collie, doing my best to not let the garish lights of the club distract me. “It’s convenient that you’re logged in, korī-san. I have some questions for you as part of an investigation.”

She shifted in her chair with a jangle of the buckles and rings on her jacket… and some of her piercings. “Still playing at being in charge, hunh? How’s the arm?”

“Hold on a moment.” I invoked an administrative menu which floated obligingly for only myself to see. A few hand motions later, the raucous electronica surrounding us dropped to a murmur. “I’m sure you won’t mind the attenuation sphere?”

The effect only ranged for a couple metres, so nobody outside the pair of us had noticed it. She didn’t appear pleased, regardless. “Well, well. You’ve changed. So, like I asked, how’s the arm, lass?”

I flexed my left paw a little. “Getting better. Easier than learning the prosthetic was.”

Her voice dropped into a rumbly tone, a very familiar one. “Imagine what you can do with it now, eh?”

“Allow me to remind you that I am here as Security, not your paramour.”

She narrowed her eyes and muttered stiffly, “What can I do for you, constable?”

I sat across from her and tapped my display panel on the table between us. “Somebody’s having trouble with corrupted data. I examined her mods, and the name ‘Triska Dek’ was in every code header. Since that’s your alias now—”

“That’s my name.”

I tilted my head calmly. She glanced away for a moment, then back with a huff. I continued, “I would like to know more about the work you’ve done for Abby Paprika.”

“Who?”

I peered at her a bit harder. “The name doesn’t jog any memories, then?” She seemed genuinely perplexed. “I see. In that case, how about name Perchik Zaytsev?”

The collie shrugged. “Not a sausage.” With concern, she added, “Listen, I didn’t cause any corruption, right? I heard about the revolution, but I swear I wasn’t involved in the hacks!”

I held up a hand. “I don’t need to hear it, Tris. As far as I care, that’s old news.”

“So much is, nowadays.”

Don’t let her try your patience, girl. “I just want to know what’s going on with this code.” I swept a paw across the panel to light it up, then handed it over.

“Hunh.” Her expression lightened. “Oh! Right. I worked this up years ago for some guy.” She coughed. “Sorry, but I respect the privacy of my clients.”

I held back my first response. “Don’t worry about the name,” I soothed. “Just help me understand – what does the code do?”

Her ears went back. “Look, you’ve nicked me fair an’ square. It violates the terms of service. All over the place.” She extended her paws toward me, palms up. “Cuff me one last time, lass!”

“Stop that! I know the code’s illegal but I don’t care about that right now. I’m only concerned for the data integrity of an uploaded citizen.” Suddenly, I had her full attention. “If I have enough information to make sure she’ll be all right, then I can consider this case closed, and I’ll be so glad that I’ll certainly forget your name in the excitement.” I smiled. “Please?”

“Surprised you haven’t already,” she grumbled.

“Tris….”

“Uploaded, you say?” She hesitated, then leaned back with a heavy sigh. “All right. The code lets the user swap most everything about their avatar with a second configuration, incuding interaction history and memory stream. Bored with being the same old horse? Set up a new self as a fox, swap into it, customise all you like. It’s a new life. Change back whenever you want, be that other person again, remember nothing or everything as desired. It’s the alter ego starter kit.” She grinned widely. “You look startled, lass.”

Thoughts raced through my head. Perhaps the messages were meant for Abby’s other persona, and something had been confused? Could a person really go so far as to have an alternate self learn another language? I certainly have….

Pride bubbled forth as she spoke of her work. “Figured you’d appreciate that. Best part is, all of that info gets stored in a separate object, so there’s no sudden spike of data storage to bust your quota. Scored ace yens for that one.”

She was correct about the policy violations, but Irokai had bigger worries than another illegal coder. I considered the original problem briefly. “Just what happens to messages that come in for that alter ego if it’s not loaded?”

“They’re diverted to a hidden queue for later delivery, though the user can set the buffer object up to send a notice. There’s a simple script to—” She sighed, then motioned in the air, her own system menus invisible to me. “Look, I’ve gotta log out soon. Go ask Daniil Skaryna. He commissioned the code. Just don’t tell him I told you that, right?”

I nodded, slightly numb. “Oh. I’ll do what I can.”

“Take care o’ yourself, Yasuki.” She stood, waved to the bartender, glanced to me once more, then opened the hatch-door to the club, all with her tail hanging low.

The paired mirror-walls at each end of the library made it infinite. Unhindered by the imperfections that would be in real mirrors, the image travelled into the reflected distance without losing clarity. Uncountable red panda women in identical dark blue business suits stared at each other. Endless borzois stood behind mahogany desks, each of them tall and dressed simply, each of them facing the bookshelves instead of their guests.

After a long moment, the one standing in front of me finally responded. His voice was rhythmic as though he’d learned English from listening to music. “This will be in strict confidence, yes? Like medical records.”

I turned quickly and nodded. “Of course, Daniil. I can promise you that any information you give me will be secure, and used only for necessary operational purposes,” I replied with a nod.

“Good.” He turned toward me and said, “You could say that… Abby and Perchik are within the same person.”

I suddenly felt uncomfortable in my tailored suit. A familiar motive—

“By your expression, I can tell that you have now put together more of this puzzle, my lady.” He chuckled slightly. “Yes, my friend is fond of his feminine side, and he wished to make her into a separate character, but he did not wish to pay for a second account for that simple privilege. As for the modification code you mention, I bought it as a gift to them both.”

Between my own troubled thoughts and his rhythmic, almost dancing way of gesturing when he spoke, I had to consciously remind myself to remain on the task. “I see. Still, neither name matches an active account.”

“They are nicknames, you understand. Perchik was not very fond of his physical self. This is why he spent all of his savings to be here as much as he could manage. Finally, he would upload… not long before the most terrible climax of the Democratic Revolution of Irokai.” He grimaced, sounding wounded. “Even before that difficult time, I saw more of Abby and very little of Perchik anymore.”

“But she says she doesn’t know who he is. How can—”

Instantly wild-eyed, he motioned with a a silver-furred fist. “That is not to be broken under any circumstance!”

Even startled, I used the same calm, admonishing tone that I had with Tris earlier. “I promised that I wouldn’t, did I not?”

He relaxed his stance and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you did. Apologies, my lady. You see, I am Perchik’s only confidant, and that is by his design. Nobody else is to know the connection between those two, and I tell you of it only because you tell me of urgent concerns.” He stared distantly into his infinite reflections. “It pains me to see so much less of my friend Perchik, but if Abby is happy and does not know of her past… then I will not complain. I have done right by them both.”

“I understand. Thank you for being honest.” I picked at the edge of my jacket. “When did you last hear from Perchik?”

“Perhaps two months ago. I have sent messages to him, but the mod is made so that he will only see them when he switches back to that character. In fact, I sent another message to him just a few minutes ago when you mentioned his name.”

“One moment, please.” I gestured through my admin menu to track the database number of that most recent message. It had been delivered directly to Abby. Shortly after, it was unsuccessfully rerouted to the object that didn’t exist.

Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, the chief of security said, “For this purpose, I shall allow the access. However, I will hold you to your promise of a full explanation when the case is closed.”

“Arigatō, Sasaki-sama.” I bowed gratefully to his projected image, then quickly pulled up the secure private information for Abby Paprika. As anticipated, she had been uploaded on the date Daniil mentioned. My tail frizzed. “Remind me, please; how far back do our rolling data backups go?”

“Previously, fourteen days,” he said in a deep rumble. “That was extended to twenty-one for all citizens during the clean-up, in order to ensure that all reported corruption or discrepancies could be restored. It has not been reverted to fourteen, but if you are asking whether the data remains from before the system reboot, then the answer is ‘no’.”

I had the five messages displayed on my office desk when the call came in. “This is Maezawa Yasuki, Security,” I answered.

“Miss Yasuki?” Abby’s young voice seemed weaker over the call than in person. “I have a sixth message for you. I was asleep when it arrived.”

I perked up. More to work with? “Oh, please, do send it over. What time did you receive it?”

“Two hours ago.”

Two hours previous, Daniil had sent a message to Perchik. “Arigatō. I’ll look at it immediately.”

“Thanks!” She disconnected, and a moment later, the message arrived. It looked exactly the same as the others had, full of garbled nonsense.

I converted the misinterpreted characters to Cyrillic and aligned the message on the display table. It was half the length of the first four, and thus matched the fifth. Are they paired somehow? I thought. I rearranged them by stacking them as sets of two. They still didn’t make any sense. Why can’t I see through this?

See through it? I tapped the last message, made it half translucent, then dragged it over its complement. If I looked at the result just right—

I gasped audibly and set my paws in motion. Once I swapped the Cyrillic characters in each top message with the English in the bottom, the English appeared plain as day! I hurried to fix the other pairs, which proved to be parts of a single message in each language.

The three English parts formed a message which was sent from Daniil to Abby from only a month ago… and minutes before the server evacuation and reboot. He expressed worry for her having to suffer through the strange events of the Revolution so soon after being uploaded, but also gently assured her that she would be all right once everything settled down.

The three-part Belarusian message dated from several years prior, not long before Abby’s mod was coded. It was addressed from Perchik to Daniil. I felt suddenly guilty for prodding; the translated text was a sort of pleading confession. He wrote affectionately of his second personality – Abby – and how much he wished her to be as “free” of him as possible, unaffected by what he called a “troubled history”. He begged for his borzoi friend to help him effect a genuine split and to never tell her of it.

I closed my eyes and remembered. I still had dark dreams of the time after I’d lost my left arm but before the prosthetic. I spent as much time in Irokai as I could, being who I wanted to be, being whole again. When I finally uploaded, I had to go through therapy again for the arm, just like getting used to the tail that was suddenly a new part of me and no longer handled by automatic code. Every moment of practice reminded me that I’d finally shaken off the person I didn’t want to be anymore… but it still reminded me of him. What would I have given to be free of that memory? What would I give now?

I rubbed at the suddenly moist fur beneath my eyes, composed myself, and began to type a message to the chief of Irokai Security.

“Abby was the first to encounter the memory overflow inside the temporary server,” I explained to the tiger. “My best guess is that the object storing Perchik became unlinked when she switched servers, and then the corrupted memory scrambled the first and last of her stored messages from outside.”

Sasaki Rei, chief of security for Irokai, nodded slowly. “But why would she receive pieces at a time?”

“Every time her friend tried to make contact with Perchik, the notification system in her mod would try to reference an object that had been deleted in the corrupt code purge. The new message would vanish, and the mod would spit out another piece of the old, mangled messages in a confused attempt to report the error.”

He crossed his arms and leaned toward me. “You speak of them as separate people.”

I paused for several seconds. “They very much are. Even if they shared an account. Even… when they shared a physical body outside our virtual world.”

“I see.” He shook his head slowly. “I would prefer not to think of them that way, if only because it would imply that we have lost another person due to the actions of Irokai no Minshukakumei, and this time in a fashion that cannot be recovered.”

I breathed deeply to centre myself. “With all due respect, sir… that is precisely the case, however we choose to think of it.”

“That is for the ethics panel to decide.”

“Please reconsider this. Abby knows nothing of Perchik, who very much wanted it that way. The only person to know that they were linked and uploaded will remain silent out of respect for his friend… friends. Anybody else who knew him has already assumed that he simply stopped logging in. And Tris— Excuse me.” This drew an interested expression. “The person who coded the character swap mod doesn’t even know who it went to, and couldn’t have anticipated what happened. The messages have stopped – I checked that myself – so really, the original complaint is resolved. In the end… nobody is at fault, nobody needs informing, and from what I can tell, everyone would be happiest if this issue simply went away.”

The tiger closed his eyes tightly. “That would be convenient, Yasuki, but incomplete. An uploaded citizen has disappeared – either in half, or in whole. This is an existential matter of the sort that we are specifically to refer to the ethics panel. Please complete your report, and I will submit it to them.” He then put a heavy paw on my shoulder. “Off the record and for what it is worth… I think I understand what this means to you, and I hope you are correct in how to resolve it.”

Per the ruling of the ethics panel, I bundled my documentation along with the full report and closed the security ticket. It would be the closest Irokai had known to a death certificate, and I would be the one to sign it.

I opened my administrative menu one more time, selected the bundle, and entered the command to seal and archive it. I added my own name as the signatory, and for the subject I used the database number of the unlinked object. Once completed, I stared hard at the final result. The system had helpfully attempted to expand the name belonging to the number.

The subject name displayed as a short string of mojibake.

As soon as I did so, the window snapped closed, to be replaced by another one: An error has occurred in the configuration subsystem: Unknown error occurred; The operating system recommends restoring from backup. Proceed? Y/N Somewhere, somebody was shouting my name. It sounded like Giri, but that wasn’t possible; he’d deleted himself, hadn’t he? Maybe he’d just wiped his header blocks, and the rest of his code was trying to execute somewhere without a process table. I wanted to laugh, but I was tired. So tired. Tired and LOOKUP_FAILURE();. My gaze hovered over the null-space where the Yes would’ve been if it had existed. If I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again, it didn’t count, but it was so much easier.

I blinked, and the world froze for a few moments. A third window opened on top of the second, visually overlaying it. I had to squint to make out the text: No backups have been found! The operating system will now attempt to reboot to correct possible memory errors. Proceed? Y/N My eyes tried to stick to what would’ve been the Yes, but they wearily slid away from the undef();. We tried, Mits, I thought. We tried.

“Johnathan!” The name in full flashed under the window, rich brown in some gothic font. It snatched my attention away from the admin window. What? What’s causing that? Nobody calls me that but… A second sentence, this one pulsing with urgency, joined the first. “Exit the menu! Jules can’t force a reload until you’re out!”

I looked up—cautiously—at the interface and closed the window without picking either option. “I’m out!” I tried to yell, but no sound came out. Was I deaf, or had I been silenced? I had no way to test it, and no way to see if anyone had heard me, or if I’d made any noise at all. I couldn’t turn my head any further; my arm was still stuck, as was one foot. I’d lost track of Imogen, and the others. I’d lost track of everyone. It felt like the lessons, centering my breathing and keeping my mind clear. The less I thought, the less memory I needed, the less feedback I generated, the fewer errors I spawned. Sure enough, the shouts—I assumed that’s what they were, sent to me visually because of the hearing loss—were already rippling across the universe, sending fresh spikes, spires, and flashes through the spreading memory faults.

Something in front of my eyes twisted, a delicate, fragile tear in the universe, and then—

—the world went white, a complete and endless void, even beyond the defined borders of the server before. This was a pure emptiness, a lack of sensory input because there was nothing to sense, a world before the world had loaded. The hardline snapped open, displaying a fresh warning: Your user account appears to have sustained some level of corruption. Shall we attempt auto-repair or would you prefer to flag the damage for manual review? Fix/Flag Blue monospace text rippled across the bottom of my vision: Everybody, pick ‘manual’; the auto-repair system’s offline. You’ll look a little freaky but we’ll get you sorted out. I did as the Voice of Irokai directed, and—

—I fell forward, the momentum of my swing pitching me off-balance. Giri was gone, but I wouldn’t have hit him anyway; my fist was missing, too. So was my left foot, for that matter, and the end of my tail. I opened my muzzle to cry out, but I was dead-silent as I twisted and slammed into the ground. All around, people were starting to pick themselves up off the ground; text scrolled rapidly in a dozen fonts and colors. I pushed back onto my knees and carefully turned. The white walls had returned; the distortions were gone. Imogen—bright red sans-serif letters twice the height of anyone else’s—let out a whoop, her arms in the air. Everything from her waist down had vanished, but she shook her fists in the air triumphantly, whipping the people around her into a frenzy of applause.

I looked back to the point at which Giri had removed himself from the process list, but not even an afterimage marked his passing. I snapped open the admin panels and scanned through settings, looking for name lists. Most of the entries showed glitches in them. Number 1996 was completely missing; the list cleanly jumped from before to after. The only note for the missing entry said “unrecoverable.” I bowed my head. Briar’s going to be livid, I thought. I don’t know how much we’ll have to rebuild, but somebody’s got to have a backup somewhere. I bet Jules can— A tap on my shoulder pulled me out of my reverie, back up to a wolf and stag kneeling beside me, looking concerned.

The wolf’s muzzle opened, but when he spoke, more blue text scrolled by at the bottom of my field of vision. You okay, John? Say something, please. Jules quietly clicked his claws at me, then looked at Adam. Any idea what’s wrong with him?

The stag raised a browridge and smirked, folding his arms across his chest. How should I know, Jules? scrolled by in more brown Gothic. I’m not a programmer. This is your field.

I held up my right arm, trying to put my paw out before I remembered it wasn’t there. That got my ears flat against my head. I think my audio’s dead, I texted back in tight gold script. Where are you guys? What’s with the server? The door got hosed; did they finish the rollback?

Jules and Adam looked at each other, then back at me. One thing at a time, John, Jules sent. Let me… here, I have an idea. I’ve got your local backup system online in recovery mode. So much of the core code’s corrupted in here that I think you’re going to have to wipe and reinstall, but I think I can get the base species templates online if you don’t mind rebuilding your mods. Want me to give it a shot?

He didn’t have to ask me twice. I nodded eagerly, and his eyes unfocused as he worked. His fingers began to twitch in front of him as he typed on a keyboard only he could see, and then a minute later, he nodded. Go ahead and tell it to reset to default species settings.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then nodded again and opened the hardline to search for the reset. I had to manually add the option back to the administration menu; under any other circumstance, I’d have never wanted to use it. When the dialog asking me if I was sure I wanted to lose all my customizations, I hesitated for several long seconds before approving, and then suddenly I was back to the me I’d been when I first stepped into Irokai. I blinked and called up the template profile, scanning it wistfully; all of my updates were gone. Every last mod I’d ever built had disappeared. It’s okay, I told myself. I’ve got most of them saved some… damn, no, I had to ditch them with the station. Hang on, Jules has an offsite for that; it’s old, but—

Adam’s voice snapped me out of my introspection. “Johnathan, did it work?”

I looked up sharply at the stag. His liquid brown eyes were wide and blinking, and he looked like he was trying hard not to show too much concern. “I’m fine, Adam,” I said with a smile. “It worked.”

Jules sat back on his haunches, visibly sagging with relief. “Great,” he breathed. Then, with one finger to his throat, he spoke in a broadcast across the server. “Everybody, if you’re experiencing any kind of personal data loss, try resetting to default; you’ll lose all your mods, but it’s better than losing an arm. If you’re suffering from memory or other discrepancies…” He stopped and sighed. “We’ll try to help you when we’re back on production hardware.” He stood and stuck out his arm to me. “Sorry we’re late,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I had to get a few things out of my system.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “He had to go piss off a squad of security guards, is what he means. Speaking of which….” He looked down at a non-existant watch, then frowned at his wrist and scratched behind one ear with his blunt fingers. “He should be here by now.”

“He?” I blinked, then looked back at Jules. “He who?”

The wolf grinned from ear to ear, tail wagging behind him. He helped me back to my feet, then put a paw on my shoulder. “The head of Tadashiissei. He said he wanted to meet us here once he had a few things sorted out with Legal.”

My eyes went wide and my tail lashed. “Legal? Kūsō Kajō’s coming here?” When Jules nodded, a grin split my face. “We did it. I can’t believe we may actually pull this off.”

Jules cleared his throat, then hooked his thumb at Adam, who was looking around the area. “Thank him. He’s the one who made the last-minute plea bargain. We just…” He stopped, then looked down. “We wanted it really badly, John. Too badly to think about it clearly. You refused to think about the legal angles, and I… I couldn’t wait to be a test case. We made it work, but we both went about it all wrong from the start.”

I blinked. “How should we have done it, then?” I glanced at Adam, who turned to look at Jules as well, a smile on his muzzle and one hand under his chin.

“The way you did it at the end, only all the way along.” He looked at Adam, then back at me. “Irokai no Minshukakumei was a mistake; it just pissed people off. I probably turned off every person I could’ve counted on to help me out, throwing my tantrum. You screwed up, too, though; you should’ve understood your rights before you got here. When Adam pointed out that you and Imogen were still legally your own people, Kajō’s eyes turned six shades of angry. He knew he’d lost, and Adam didn’t even have to raise his voice to do it.”

I blinked again, then turned to the stag. “Adam, I—wow. I don’t know what more to say. Thanks.”

Adam shrugged. “I dislike taking things on faith. That includes an assumption of ownership for things that clearly don’t belong to you.”

I chuckled and grinned. “So, now what? How much longer do you think we’ll—”

A sudden gust of wind and a flash interrupted my question. In the middle of the room curled a long, snake-like dragon. His body was covered in hexagonal sapphire scales, like faceted jewels in a flexible mesh, with individual opalescent white panels at various points. White hair streamed back from his long snout, tipped in a wispy mustache that fluttered each time its head bobbed or moved, and his eyes gleamed like diamonds lit from within. Four-toed feet ended in ivory claws that fluttered and clacked against the ground, and its entire length twisted back and forth, coiling and uncoiling on itself.

More important, however, was the raccoon in the green shirt and white pants that stood stoically beside him. “Mits!” Her name was out of my muzzle as soon as I recognized her. Her arms were warm and comforting and I sank against her shoulder, tears streaming out of my eyes as I pressed myself to her. “Thank God you’re alright, Mits, I was so worried.”

Her breath was sweet when she kissed me softly. “I am here, John,” she whispered. “I will not leave you again.”

The dragon twisted, hissing his irritation. “Hopefully not, Ikanobari-san. I’ve already lost one designer; I can’t afford to lose one of my best Hospitality agents.” His eyes focused on mine, shining down on me. “Dart-san, you’ve made Tadashiissei’s legal experts very unhappy. I have brought her here as a sign of good faith; please accept this in the spirit in which it’s given.”

I couldn’t help but grin at that. “I will, sure. I wasn’t the one that made the rules, Kajō-sama. I’m just playing by the ones I was given.”

“And you have played them well,” Tadashiissei’s CEO admitted. “They’ve issued a preliminary ruling accepting your terms while they review the matter more fully, but it comes with a condition.”

I narrowed my gaze and my tail lashed, but as I opened my muzzle to speak, Jules put his paw gently on my shoulder. I glanced back to the wolf, who shook his head slightly. I nodded in return, then looked down at Mitsuko, who just smiled back in response. “What’s the catch?” I asked, without looking back to the dragon.

Kūsō Kajō, the chief executive of the company that owned Irokai, was silent for several moments before quietly replying, “They refused to re-negotiate terms with every individual, citing a lack of resources and time, and have politely requested that you assemble a collective bargaining association in the next ninety days with whom they can negotiate new contracts for Irokai and its residents.”

I stood stock-still for several seconds. My jaw hung open and my tail went limp. I looked back down at Mitsuko, then back at Jules; the wolf’s tail was sticking straight out behind him, fur frizzed. “Let me get this straight,” he said, looking up at the dragon. “Your legal team wants us to assemble a union, so they can cut one contract for everybody?”

Kūsō managed to look even less comfortable after that, his eyes narrowed and his claws clacking against each other nervously. “Not as such. To retain legal ownership of Irokai would give the appearance of coercion, and they fear any such contract could not survive a court challenge.” He hesitated, then snapped his claws together irritably. “Upon review of the business model as it is presently established, in light of these new opinions, the only path to continued profitability is for Irokai’s residents to collectively assume ownership of their environment, while Tadashiissei remains contracted to provide access and support services.” He paused again, longer, then lowered his head. “Among other possible options.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I spoke very carefully, just to make sure I was understood. “Mits, translate for me, would you?” She nodded, and as I spoke English, she converted to Japanese. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Kajō-sama, but… you’re saying that Irokai needs a government. An elected government.”

Kūsō’s eyes came back to mine, brilliant white stars blazing in his skull. “Hai.”

Silence fell over the group, held painfully still for several seconds, until Jules whispered, “Holy shit.”

I swallowed hard and looked down at Mitsuko; she was smiling, but her eyes were wide and her ears were flat against her head. “Did you know?”

She shook her head. “No, he said only that he had gotten word; he would tell me nothing else.”

I nodded. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“I am fine, John,” Mitsuko replied. She smiled gently, hugging me and resting her head against my chest. “I was scared for a time, but everything will be better now.”

For a few moments, I stood in quiet awe, running a paw down Mitsuko’s back, until the dragon cleared his throat. “Is that a yes, Dart-san?”

I looked back at Jules, whose grin threatened to split his head in half, then to the dragon once more. “It’ll take more than ninety days to do it right. That can’t be rushed.”

The dragon nodded. “A provisional representative will be acceptable if an elected representative is not available within the timeframe.” He gestured to the space beside him, and an ornate door winked into being. “The rollback has been completed; you are free to return home. Your accounts will be marked as pending until the contract question is resolved. If you need assistance with any other data loss, please contact file a support ticket with Tadashiissei Security; someone will be assigned to help you. We will need to transition the ownership of such difficulties to Irokai at some point, but that will be part of the negotiations.” He smiled coldly. “From now, your data integrity is your own concern, not ours.”

I held up one paw. “First, Giri Chō. He… didn’t make it through the server glitches.”

Kūsō nodded. “I will have Sasaki look into it for you. If there is nothing further, I have other matters demanding my attention.” He bowed his head, a move echoed by everyone around, and then disappeared with another pop and rush of wind.

I gave Mitsuko a gentle hug, then looked at Jules with a smile. “So, you ready to move yet?”

Jules grinned back, then cupped one paw to his chin and shifted his weight in mock-indecision. “Well I don’t know give me a chance to think about yes.”

I laughed and turned to the stag, then held out one paw to him. “I guess this is good-bye then, Adam.”

Adam just smiled as he shook my hand. “See you later, John.”

As he stepped back to go, Mitsuko suddenly pulled away and held up a paw. “One moment, please. Take this with you.” She closed her eyes, then drew out a small glowing sphere—the transcendus mod from my simulation. She smiled, then projected to everyone, “All of you, with our blessing.” She held up her paws, and dancing motes of light rose into the air, then settled across everyone in the room, blanketing us all in a sea of digital stars.

“So you’ve said,” I sighed. “Look, wasn’t there anyone else you could call to watch the server? Someone closer?”

He shook his head. “I’ve called Infinicom; they’ve got extra monitoring on the box, but they say they can’t physically stash somebody in front of it. John or I could; we’re both cleared for access to the hardware and the box belongs to him, but John’s not exactly capable these days. So, guess who? Right turn.”

“I heard you, Jules,” I said, signalling and then weaving back across to the left lane. “So, they’ll let you sit in front of the hardware but then what? You could stop them from pulling the server off of the shelf, but you can’t stop them from pulling the shelves down. They could cut the power. Hell, Jules, if you really want to explore these paranoid ideas, why not imagine that they’ve changed all the clocks? It wouldn’t even take that; they could have just lied about the time. Even if they didn’t, all it would take is one nervous operator hitting a switch too soon and—”

Jules’ right fist slammed into the window, making it rattle. “Damnit, Adam, I know you’re the voice of reason and logic and John and I are a pair of emotional freaks, but right now you’re not helping! I’m worrying about John’s survival and you’re telling me all the ways in which he might already be dead. Not cool.”

“As far as medical science is concerned, he died on the operating table three weeks ago.” The words were out of me before I really thought about them. “If whatever passes for Johnathan is still running in there, then….” My voice trailed off when I glanced over and got a look at Jules’ expression. “I’m… sure he’ll be fine.”

Jules didn’t respond to that; he just looked back down at his palmtop. “Parking garage on the right. We’ve got two minutes.” His seatbelt was off as soon as he heard the parking brake engage, and before I had the car locked he was jogging towards the front of the Infinicom building. I had to sprint to catch up with him as he grabbed the door handle. Just as I approached, he jerked the door open, took two steps forward, and then froze. “Shit.”

Inside, four people in dark suits and visitors’ badges stood in the lobby, conversing and checking their watches. As the door swung wide, all four turned to look, staring directly at Jules and at me. They glanced back at each other, then turned to face us. The first, an older woman, took a step towards the door, her hand outstretched. “Miss Penrose? I’m Sarah Bellwether, Tadashiissei Security. Would you—”

That was all the prompting Jules needed. He started forward, his head down and his shoulders squared, trying to barrel past four security guards. “Ninety seconds, Adam.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Ms. Bellwether, stepping forward to run interference while Jules continued walking. “I’m Adam Watson, a friend of Jules’. He’s a little busy; can I—” One of the guards moved to cut Jules off as he went around me, and I jumped to interpose. “Can I help you? Excuse me, but—”

Tadashiissei Security immediately started flanking, voices jumbling as everyone started trying to have the last word. “—don’t know who you are but—can’t let you—with us, please—out of the way!” Someone’s hand landed on my shoulder. Like Johnathan tried to show me, I grabbed it and stepped back, tugging the guard off-balance, then shoved forward. Instantly two more hands were on my elbows, wrenching them behind me, and one of them called out, “Grab her!”

“Jules!” I shouted, trying to wrest an arm free. “Run!”

Jules’ rapid footfalls were his only response, followed by another set as the last guard broke after him. I heard the beep of the door, and then the snap of the latch. A hinge creaked, and then Jules burst out swearing as the door slammed closed. “—get your… damnit… let go! Adam!”

Ms. Bellwether tried again, firm but patient. “Miss Penrose, would you—”

“No, you fuckers!” Jules’ outburst was instant and unrestrained; something had finally snapped inside of him. “And it’s Mister; now let go—” I heard a slam, and then a muffled curse. “—no right to hold me, I’m trying to—” A deep artificial chime resonated in the air, followed by another a few moments later. “Ow, watch the—Damnit! Adam!” He jerked his right arm free, then tried to elbow the guard holding him in the ribs. The security agent grabbed for him again, and the two ended up tumbling to the ground.

“Oh, c’mon!” I shouted, my words echoing off of the walls. “You can’t do this! You’ve got no right to hold us! Where’s Infinicom security?”

“They issued us the badges when we arrived,” Ms. Bellwether said, her voice tightening. “They were quite eager to help us, given our long-standing business relationship. We had probable cause to suspect both interference with contract and fraudulent conveyance. Don’t prove those assumptions correct; you’re smarter than that, Mr. Penrose.”

“Now you get it right,” Jules grumbled, barely more than a grunt. “I get it. You win, okay? I give up. Just… let me go check on the server, please. I’ve got some people I really care about in there.”

Ms. Bellwether’s expression didn’t change, but at least her tone softened. “Of that there’s no doubt, but my orders are clear. I’m to escort you to a conference room on the eighteenth floor if you’re interested, or out of the building if you’re not. Those were the options given to me, and I’m afraid that’s all I can offer to you. It’s your choice.”

“Conference room?” I asked, straightening. I tugged once, and the guards holding my arms let go. “But why?”

Jules followed suit, pulling himself free. “Does it matter? The rollback’s started.”

“Jules, I’m about fed up with your attitude,” I sighed, throwing my hands up in the air. “You don’t know the server’s status right now.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled up his palmtop. “Memory’s at a hundred percent, swap’s at ninety-eight, and disk operations are pushing the limits of the hardware. There’s nothing more I can turn off or disable that doesn’t put the box at risk. Somebody getting bored and trying to load a sparkler in there could bring down the whole damn box, and I hope nobody tries to see who else is online. I need to hot-swap some RAM into it so that doesn’t happen, and some more disk would be really nice, too. That enough status for you, Adam?”

My eyes went wide. “Okay, so… that might have been good to know before.”

Jules smirked. “Why? They’re all just simulations, aren’t they? They’re not real.”

“Excuse me,” Ms. Bellwether interrupted. “We should either take this conversation up to the eighteenth floor or out to your vehicle. Our security staff is monitoring the health of the server as well, Mr. Penrose. Now please, either follow me or have a nice day.” With that, she turned and started walking towards the bank of elevators. The other guards withdrew as well, one standing by the elevators and the other two taking up position near the badge-coded door.

I walked over to Jules and offered him a hand. “We might as well follow her.”

“Why?” Jules glared up at me but took my hand in his good one, then hauled himself to his feet. “What’s the point? They won. We lost.”

I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Jules, will you stop being so bloody digital? Look, is the server down?”

He pulled out his palmtop. “Ninety-nine percent. If it hasn’t gone yet, it will soon.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jules!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him forcefully towards the elevators. “It’s still running; that means you can do something. You don’t know what they want; if they wanted us gone, they’d have escorted us out by now!” I shoved him towards the open doors. “You’re just running on blind faith again! I swear, you and bloody Johnathan, both of you.” As I pushed Jules into the elevator, I turned to Ms. Bellwether and forced a smile. “He’s not normally this stupid, I assure you. He’s just angry.”

Ms. Bellwether didn’t respond; she just pushed the button for the eighteenth floor. The elevator filled with awkward silence; Jules either glared at the floor or the security guard, who stood gazing impassively forward, ignoring both of us. I watched the light display as the numbers counted upwards, then glanced to the guard. As the door opened, she motioned to the hall. “This way. Hurry; you’re late.” Then she was walking quickly down the corridor, leaving me to half-urge, half-drag Jules behind me.

The conference room looked like any of the ones on campus, with a large table in the center and wheeled chairs around it. A wide display hung on the wall at one end of the table, with a camera mounted above it. A laptop sat on the desk, to one side of the monitor. As I guided Jules into a chair, Ms. Bellwether punched something into the computer, then quietly excused herself from the room and pulled the door closed behind her. The screen flickered once, then came to life, dominated by an animated Tadashiissei logo. The color-panels winked in and out in sequence for a few seconds, and then they faded, replaced by a remote signal from some other office. The window in that room was dark, and sitting too close to the camera was an elderly Asian man. He’d long since gone gray, his hair cut short in a Western part. A faint mustache sat on his upper lip, and he wore a soul patch beneath it. His glasses were thick, and a faint reflection of the camera glinted off of them. He wore a severe grey suit, with a dark green tie. As the camera focused on his face, he smiled warmly and raised one hand in a wave.

“Good evening,” the elderly man said. His smile was unnervingly broad. “I believe you wanted access to one of my servers.”

Jules shook his head wearily. “I don’t have time for this shit. Who are you and what do you want?”

It took a moment for Jules’ words to get to him, but once they did, his face darkened considerably. He sat upright, adjusted his tie. “My name is Kajō Kūsō. I own Tadashiissei, and by extension Irokai. You and your friends have been quite the nuisance.”

“Nuisance?” My voice rose, incredulous. “I can’t believe this! You let a major security breach put thousands of people at risk, you’re threatening our friend with deletion if he doesn’t pay your extortion fees, you’re threatening to wipe everything that’s happened just to stop the revolt your own policies started, and you’re calling us the nuisances?”

Mr. Kajō was visibly unimpressed. “I have no need to justify my reasoning to you, but you may rest assured that I hold the future value of my company above all else. That means doing what I think is best for Irokai. We found a number of collaborators within Tadashiissei who are being dealt with at the highest levels, and after extensive review from our database and maintenance teams, the rollback was seen as the best way to protect overall system integrity. Your friend is presently obstructing our ability to protect our creation.”

“He’s too busy trying to protect his memories!” Jules burst out, jumping to his feet, his chair skittering backwards across the floor. “Everything he’s done since he uploaded himself… you’re talking about wiping it all out!”

“We must be sure there are no residual effects,” Mr. Kajō riposted. “Any one of them could be harboring viruses or malicious code.”

“So you’re saying you want to force them all to lose three weeks or more off their lives, just because they might have some kind of virus? You can’t just scan them or something?” I shrugged helplessly. “Is this really the only way to do this?”

Mr. Kajō made a faint shrug. “It’s the fastest, and the one that will get the system back up and running the fastest with the least number of long-term side effects.”

I smirked. “It won’t stop the protests; it’ll only make those worse.”

The smile that Mr. Kajō wore in response sent a chill down my spine. “With no-one inside who remembers, who will protest? Irokai will be on new software immune to the old attacks. Security has already been increased. For the residents, it will be as if none of this had happened.”

I folded my arms. “Mitsuko will remember, when Johnathan’s account gets suspended for non-payment of debts he won’t remember owing.”

Mr. Kajō’s smile faded slightly. “We are prepared to remove those debts from the record.”

Jules grinned. “Giri will remember, when he goes to work and finds he’s been fired.”

“His position will be reinstated,” Mr. Kajō replied. His eyes were narrowed again, and the smile was gone from his face.

I shook my head in response. “We’ll remember, because we’re not in the system having our minds wiped alongside the residents.” Mr. Kajō’s mouth opened, then closed again. “Not looking like the cleverest answer now, is it? Do what you want with your ones and zeros, but you can’t touch us.”

Jules’ eyes darkened as he pulled his palmtop out of his pocket, looking down at it. “Adam, the box is screaming. We don’t have time for this.”

I nodded at Jules’ comment, but I kept my focus on Mr. Kajō. He tried again to speak, then caught himself. He let out a tight chuckle, then smiled once more. “You realize that, by locking themselves off from the main system during the upgrade, they will be unable to return to Irokai. Their authentication codes will fail. Their accounts will be rejected as fraudulent. Until they accept the database rollback, they will be unable to leave that tiny, tiny box. How close is it to dying? The drives are over capacity, the memory is running out. Soon it will come down very gracelessly, and if the backup system is offline….”

“You’re a damned monster!” Jules shouted at the screen, slamming both hands down on the table with a grimace. “You’re a lunatic and you’re playing god with people’s lives! Tadashiissei’s done for at this point! If they don’t go down this time, they’ll go next time, or the time after! You can’t keep Irokai forever! One day it’ll—”

“One day Irokai will go offline, and not return,” Mr. Kajō interrupted, his voice sharp. “It is the way of all corporate services, is it not? Those who wish to build alternatives have nothing stopping them from doing so. Now, if you have nothing further to say, I should check on the rollback.” His hand started reaching for the camera.

“Wait!” I burst out, waving at the camera. Mr. Kajō paused, looking at me, silent. I was stunned by my own outburst, but then I swallowed heavily. This is it. Make or break time. “Look, you could let that server go down. You could’ve let the hacks do their work. You could’ve let it all be wiped out, but you didn’t. You and Tadashiissei didn’t. You tried to save it, and now you’re trying to save it again, but you’re not asking the people you’re trying to save. They deserve a say in their own lives.”

“You forget,” Mr. Kajō faintly sneered. “I own Irokai.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “but you don’t own them. The residents. I’m not a lawyer; I can’t argue for the digitals. I know, though, that Imogen Franklin’s been ruled alive and well in there, and isn’t she one of your big celebrities? You’d hate to see something happen to her, wouldn’t you? Especially after all those efforts to promote her as a successful test case.” Mr. Kajō’s eyes remained dark and impenetrable, and I continued. “Please, this… this is real to her, to all of them, even if it isn’t to you. They’ve all got to be scared out of their minds in there. If that box goes down… if what you did to Johnathan three months ago wasn’t murder, then letting that server fail surely will be.”

For several seconds, Mr. Kajō was silent, then leaned briefly off-camera, exchanging words in Japanese with someone I couldn’t see. When he came back into focus, his eyes were still narrowed, but he seemed eerily calm. “I have received word that the rollback has completed, and I have some things to consider. I will speak with my legal team. In the meantime, I recommend that you go to the server room and install whatever upgrades will stabilize that development server. I will meet you within Irokai in an hour.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not going in there until I have some—”

Jules was already heading for the door. “Then you can be the one to guard the box; my hand’s still shot for now. For now, though, I need you to hold parts for me. We’re running out of borrowed time.”

Into that space, though, something had just entered that clearly didn’t belong. It was… I couldn’t tell what it was. One corner was squared, sharply, like a building block. The opposite faces were irregular, rippling and jerking like some kind of living thing. Its surface shifted colors rapidly, along with its shape, though the three edges of it remained consistent. Fragments grew and shrank in the air, fingerlike projections or completely separate objects that vibrated slowly before fading out or merging with the underlying structure. It didn’t even announce itself; one moment it wasn’t, and the next it was, letting out chirps and warbles seemingly at random.

“So what is it?” Imogen asked, her paws on her hips. “More to the point, where’d it come from? I thought you said this place was closed.”

“It is,” I insisted. I hesitated a moment, then added, “It was, anyway.” I opened my hardline and scanned through menus, looking for intrusions or malware, but each check came back clean. “I’m not seeing anything. Giri, any ideas?”

The fox shook his head, his tail lashing behind him. “I have checked it twice; even with your added permissions, it has no properties, no structure. It does not actually exist.” He scowled. “It reminds me uncomfortably of the FutureShock.”

I nodded at that. “Yeah, but Jules isn’t here, and he did the real hackery on that place.” I looked back at Imogen. “Let people know we’re poking at it, but truth is I don’t know.” I glanced at Giri, but the fox shook his head. I sighed; I wanted to tell her more, but Giri was right to advise against it.

The mouse nodded, then walked back towards the group she’d been addressing before. “C’mon, folks. Let’s go somewhere else and let these guys work. C’mon, everybody, make some room. Soon as these guys have things figured out, they’ll let us know.” She motioned, and despite the collective groans of about a hundred weary people, they rose and began to shuffle away, towards another part of the space. Before they’d even gotten a few steps, though, Imogen was back into her story, and it sounded like the others sank quickly back into the rapture of her narratives.

As soon as Imogen’s voice was down to a murmur, I looked back at Giri, voice low. “Any clue? I’m at a loss.”

Giri shook his head again. “The server is failing; that much is certain. Could this be a side effect?”

I stared at the shifting block and shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. I can hack a bit on back-end stuff, but my job was always front-end components. Aesthetic, not functional. I’d need somebody like Jules or Briar for details, and even they might not know.” I sighed. “I’m afraid this is out of my league.”

The fox stared intently at the shifting image, a frown spreading on his muzzle. “It is growing.” He motioned with one paw to the object. “It has a second corner now.”

I looked where he indicated, tailtip hooking in frustration. “You’re right, it does. That still doesn’t tell us what it is, though.”

“You know as much as I at this point,” Giri said. “I would have to do a deep dive to determine more, but I am not sure I would know what I am seeing. It does not appear to have definition, yet it is there. It is not anything, yet it exists. And it is still growing.”

I watched with fascination as a square, about a foot per side, slowly filled the space. The chattering and clicking that it emitted changed in timbre, and the shapes that it filled rapidly took on the edges and corners. It looked almost as though someone were pouring luminescent, light-and-sound-reactive goop into an invisible mold that hung perfectly still in the air. It ratcheted up to the top of the space, and then, as if meeting an invisible lid, it leveled itself and then formed a perfectly shaped rectangle, about four inches tall.

As if cued by its completion, a shout rang out across the space. Heads turned, and Giri and I broke into a sprint towards the voice. Imogen beat us to the site and was already asking questions of a visibly-upset black cat as we approached. “What is it? What happened?” She spread her drawl thick, resting a paw on the other girl’s shoulder. “It’s okay now. Everything’s gonna be—” She stopped, then followed the cat’s pointing finger to a space in front of her in which letters and numbers hung in midair. “Ah, hell.”

“It just showed up out of… hey, is that my—” She stopped, as the block started to echo her speech, but a scant moment before she spoke, as if it knew what she was about to say. The same words scrolled in space, in a vivid violet, starting cleanly at one point then disappearing off raggedly off of another. Perpendicular to that, code fragments flickered. The area between them filled in rapidly as the cat spoke. “What’s it… it’s writing down what I say!” She looked at Imogen, then me. “Why’s it—it’s hard to… to talk with… with that. How is it… doing that?”

“I have no idea,” Giri said, spacing his words evenly. His words showed up a deep blue calligraphic script. “I find this even more disturbing, though.”

I nodded. “Me, too. It’s like it’s—” My own speech came out in angular gold text, blocky and monospaced. “It’s… reading out of the—” I stopped, head snapping to Giri.

The security expert’s head canted to the side. “What? What is it?”

Imogen leaned forward and adjusted her pince-nez. “Yeah, you look like—” I made a quick cut-it gesture, dragging my paw across my throat, and she snapped her jaws shut, her teeth clacking audibly; the sound showed up as a splat of red in the air.

I put a finger over my muzzle, then motioned for Giri and Imogen to follow me. They exchanged glances but did so, stepping away from the fresh distortion. I looked back at the block of text, then squinted and whispered, “Test, test.” It flickered as I spoke, and I sighed, returning to full volume. “Damn, never mind.”

“What?” The word was simultaneous from three muzzles. A cacophony followed as they sorted out who spoke next, but Imogen easily overpowered both of the others. “Don’t leave us hanging, John. What is it?”

I pointed to the space as it swelled. “It’s a chunk of the speech engine. It’s… it’s how the graphics engine is rendering the speech engine.”

Imogen and the cat just blinked in confusion, but Giri’s eyes shot open in shock. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Pretty sure. I can’t think of any other way it would be getting that information.”

Imogen held up a paw. “You two lost me at ‘chunk,’” the mouse said. “Try again, in English.”

Giri jammed his paws into the pokets of his coat. “If John is correct—and I hope he is not—it is… a piece of the underlying software that another piece, the display system, is attempting to render.”

“Okay, I get that,” the mouse said slowly. “But why? And what’s so bad about that?”

I looked at Giri, then back at Imogen. “It’s… listen, this plan… the server can’t hold everybody on here right now. I deleted everything I could, but I’ve still got more people on here than my development box can sustain at the same time. Everything we do, it all takes memory. Computer memory. Every thought, every action, it’s all computer code. It takes memory to execute, to tell who’s doing what. We’re running out of it. It’s—” I barked a laugh. “It’s the only limited resource we have… and we’re running out.”

Imogen blinked and canted her head to the side. “How do you run out? Nobody new is showing up. Nobody’s running anything, right?”

Giri shook his head. “It is not so simple. There must be a time delay between when a bit of memory is allocated to record that someone has done something, and when the bit that marked the past state is freed, to ensure that all systems have the new state. The more people, the more things are present, the more complex the interactions, the longer delay that must be to ensure safety.”

I nodded at the fox. “Jules explained it to me once, but he’s the genius on this stuff. The short form is that the system’s out of memory, and it’s out of backup memory, and there’s nothing left for it to use to store people’s actions… so it’s using whatever memory it can.”

The cat blinked. “You mean it’s…” She looked back at the block of code, then burst out, “It’s bigger! Oh my god, it’s… there’s another one!” Her finger shot out suddenly, and I followed it to another patch of flickering graphics hanging in mid-air, some distance away.

I groaned. “It’s run out of everything else, so it’s using this space. And because it is, everything that happens on the back-end that shows up is rendering, and we’re all seeing it, so it’s changing the environment that much faster!” I looked at Giri. “This… this beats the Beni hack, by a long shot.”

Giri smirked. “I believe this is where Mitsuko would say, ‘oh, hai.’”

Imogen put a paw on each of our shoulders. “Okay, bad. What do we do? How do we stop it?”

I blinked. “Stop it? We can’t stop it. Anything we do makes it grow faster!”

The mouse’s eyes hardened, “John, that’s—damnit!” The cat took off at a run, over to a group of people, pointing and jabbering agitatedly at the distortions. They turned, then approached, and the volume spread as their words were echoed, then spread as they went to show others. “I swear, nobody learns around here,” she grumbled, putting her muzzle in her paw. “You and Giri work on this; I’m gonna go stop the deluge.” Then she clapped us on the back and followed the others. “Hey! Hey!”

I tuned her out, then looked back to Giri. “This is going to go to hell fast if we don’t do something. Ideas?”

Giri shrugged. “I do not know. I wanted to understand the way that my world worked, but… now I am not so sure.”

I shook my head, then popped open my hardline. “There’s got to be something.” I started scanning menus. “Change the garbage collection speed.”

The fox shook his head. “Desynchronized actions and corrupted accounts.”

I scowled. “Cache dump.”

He shook his head again. “That would make the problem worse; we want fewer misses, not more.”

“Damnit, Giri, I want help, not—” I caught myself mid-outburst. “Sorry, sorry, this is… stressful. Suspend the whole system, wait for Jules.”

Giri nodded. “I… am unused to being afraid, myself. If we trust that, we should have trusted the rollback. Plus, we have no way to know if he will be able to restore us, regardless of whether he wants to do so.”

“Right. Damnit. I’m running out of options here.” My eyes flicked over hovering menu choices. “What about—” A scream cut me off, followed by another. I turned, then gaped. The cat that had run from the conversation had one paw on her other elbow, shaking and crying as she tried to pull her fist out of a silvery box shot through with multicolored lightning streaks. One person had her by the shoulders and was trying to extract her; another was backing away quickly, then suddenly turned and bolted.

“Help me!” the cat shrieked, blubbering. “Help me, please!”

That was the only spark the room needed. What had been a crowd instantly became a mob, people running in terror from the alien blocks and from each other. Some tried to help; others tried to escape. Of course, with all that commotion, the system needed that much more memory to render it all, and the only place it had left to find it was in here. Alien spires and fractal fragments began to materialize across the universe as the graphics engine seized more memory to try to display what was happening.

I looked back at Giri, eyes hard. “Space partition; cut the ceiling in half, buy us some more time.” The fox didn’t respond. “Giri, I need your opinion here. What about—Giri? Giri, what’re you doing? I told you, no loading!”

The fox had a sword in his paws; I hadn’t seen him with it when he’d arrived. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember him having one, but he held it balanced across his pads, his head bowed. “I… am sorry, John. It is the right thing to do. Please… give my apologies to Briar.”

I blinked. “Giri? Giri, what the hell are you—no! No, no, no!” I ran over to grab the fox by his lapels. “Don’t you dare quit on me!”

He smiled. “This is not abandoning the fight; this is giving you a little more time. It is… fitting. This is the role Tadashiissei wanted me to play, so I will play it. Good-bye, John-kun.” He drew the blade in a graceful arc from its sheath, then turned it in his wrist and, with a solid thrust, rammed its tip into his gut. There was no blood; he must’ve been too conscious of how much rendering power that would take. Instead he just… froze in place. He didn’t even crumple or fall. His body just stopped moving. His eyes were squinted tightly closed against the shock and pain, but on his muzzle was an almost beatific smile, his head upturned and his tail held high.

“Damnit!” I swung at the statue of Giri in front of me, but as my fist came in contact with it, a black square shot with angry red lines materialized around his head, wiping the smile off of his muzzle and catching my fingers in mid-air. “Shit!” I felt my heart leap into my throat as panic tried to set in. Screams and cries filled the spaces around me, interspersed with static and pure-tone beeping. Music rippled across the panel in front of me, notes making the lines wink on and off. A wolf grabbed my arm. Her eyes were gone; in each socket, a pair of luminescent letters glowed. She opened her muzzle to say something, but only the smell of violets and shift right two && call_function(vox, TRUE, #0xA1830128725E); came out.

Make or break(); time. There had to be something I could do. I wasn’t going to let this be LOOKUP_FAIL(memory()); NO_SWAP(memory());. I froze. What wasn’t I going to let this be? I tried to remember what I was going to compare it to, but my mind felt empty. Why couldn’t I think of anything? “Imogen!”

“Little busy, John!” the mouse shouted in response. “Trying to keep the panic down! What is it?”

“Giri’s gone,” I replied .”I can’t think. I need your help.”

The writer snorted; the sound echoed and twisted around itself in grey-brown whorls. “This is your field, not mine.”

I shook my head. “My memory’s corrupting. I need help to call_function(vox, FALSE, NULL);.” Golden letters scrolled across my field of vision. There has to be something we can do. The rollback has to be almost done. We just have to hold out a little longer. The system should resync itself and the database will offload its—”

Imogen threw up her paws. “Don’t have time for this! Just do something!”

Time. Timing. open_menus(admin(TRUE)); Scan down to the system statistics. Find the Irokai services. It is a shame he could not come back, Mitsuko said. Lower priority. Lowest priority. Garbage collection. The scent of rotten eggs, the feel of something unpleasantly moist, and a charnal taste, overwhelming. Highest priority. Less action per time unit. More time for sync. Time.

I had to it would be enough.

I frowned, then checked through my contacts list; I had several entries for Julia already, mostly e-mail or some messaging service or other that she’d used once or twice, then forgotten. I hit reply, then thumbed, Julia? What account is this?

Long story, came the quick response. Please answer. A few seconds later, the palmtop began to buzz once more, showing an incoming call.

I snapped the cover closed and held it to my ear, looking at it curiously. “Julia?”

“Close enough,” an unfamiliar voice—quite distinctly male, deep and rumbling—replied. “Listen, Adam—”

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“Adam, this is…” The voice suddenly dropped to a whisper. In the background I could hear some kind of muffled commotion. “This is Julia. I’m stuck in Irokai. I need your help.”

“Irokai?” I pulled the palmtop away from my ear, looking at it dubiously, then brought it back. “That’s very funny. Who are you and what do you want?”

Whoever was on the other end of the phone growled menacingly. “Damnit, Adam! I need your help!” The caller’s voice started rushing. “I’m running a hacked account on a grey-market rig, I’ve got an IV jammed in my arm, I can’t wake myself up, and I need to be at the Infinicom building in half an hour! I don’t have time for guessing games! What do you want? You’re allergic to uncooked tomatoes, you hate mayo, and you’ve got a birthmark on your left shoulder. If you want a detailed list of your eleventh-grade teachers, I can do that, too, but I don’t have the time.”

I looked at my handset again, then said more quietly, “It’s on my right shoulder, and who did I have for physics?”

“You didn’t take physics in eleventh grade,” Julia snarled. “You had Reidel for Chemistry II. Are you happy now? Twenty-nine minutes.”

“That’s cutting it close,” I said as I rose, motioning to the waiter for my bill. “What is it you need me to do? Come and unplug you?”

“Yes, thank you.” Julia’s voice sounded infinitely relieved. “Call me when you get to the front door of the building. I’ll walk you through it from there. Use this contact.” Then the phone went dead.

I exchanged my phone for my wallet, then shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as the waiter took his time in returning my credit card for me. My eyes kept snapping to the clock on the wall, but the numbers didn’t change that quickly. I had twenty-seven minutes to save her from herself on the way to whatever errand was so vital. The drive to her apartment building wasn’t any slower than normal, but my breath caught in my throat every time I tapped on the brake. Julia’s building had visitor parking, but of course today of all days the lot would be full; another three minutes vanished as I searched for a place to leave the car, then jogged back to the front door.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit redial, then tapped my foot as I waited for the answer. “You’re late,” Julia replied as soon as she answered. “The code is 22361.” I punched in the numbers, then tugged open the door when it beeped at me. The elevator took its time getting to the lobby, disgorging a gaggle of housewives on their way to lunch. The ride to Julia’s apartment was an uncomfortable silence, punctuated only by the occasional noise in the background of the call.

“Julia, what’s going on in there?” I asked as I watched the light at the top of the car tick slowly upwards.

“I’ll explain when I’m out,” she replied. “My front door code’s 161803; mind the table in the dining room.”

When I entered her door code, the deadbolt clicked open. “Lights, on,” I said, and the room lit with LED lamps. Discarded clothing lay strewn across the floor, and an unsorted pile of mail sat on the corner of the table on my left, directly past a kitchenette. To the right sat a glass sliding door out to a thin balcony. Directly in front of me lay the bathroom, but next to it on the right was a closed door. “Is that the bedroom?” I asked as I walked to it.

Julia grunted. “Yeah. Come on in, but don’t yell at me.”

“Julia, why would—” I stopped dead as the door opened. Behind a giant mahogany desk that seemed impossibly large for the space, Julia’s body sprawled, nude and corpse-like, in a leather executive chair that had been locked in a recline. Her head was at least supported by a thin pillow, but her right arm and legs hung over the arm rests and the end of the seat. Her left arm, she’d secured with cloth tape at the wrist and elbow, and a strip of gauze covered the back of her hand where she’d inserted a needle. A length of clear plastic tubing pinched with a garden clamp ran from Julia’s hand to a hot water bottle hung from a coathanger on a portable clothes rack. A plastic mesh covered her head, sending a rainbow of wires slithering under her desk. Her eyes twitched rapidly, and she was breathing, but a thin sheen of sweat covered her skin, giving her a ghastly pallor.

“What the hell were you thinking?” The words burst out of me as I stormed over to her body.

“I wasn’t,” she replied, “and I told you not to yell. It was a fuck-up. John’s already screamed at me, and double jeopardy’s against the law.” She’d gone into pedant mode, artificially calm and reasonable. “Are you going to help me or what?”

“Yes, but not because of you; this is a travesty of medicine.” I switched my phone to speaker and set it on the desk, then started loosening the tape on the back of her hand. “Where did you get all this?”

I could just hear Julia ticking off the words on her fingers as she spoke. “Sixteen-gauge needles online, along with instructions for the solution. Tubing for a tank aerator at a pet supply store, enema bottle at the pharmacist’s. Hangers and the rack at the boxmart. Stop messing with the meat and look at the screen. I need you to shut down the induction rig.”

“One moment; first, I—hell! You’ve blown the vein! Where’s the rest of this gauze roll?” I pressed on the back of her hand as the puncture site began to ooze, grimacing at the way the swollen flesh dented under my touch. “Did you sterilize any of this before you embarked on this little escapade?”

“Boiled everything but the gauze and tape,” she replied, her voice even more distorted over the palmtop’s speakers. “I’m no tyro, but it’s been years since I had any reason to practice. Now look at the screen. Just jiggle the mouse; it’ll light up.”

“Spare me,” I grumbled as I worked the tape from around her elbow. “Don’t tell me you used to do more than smoke.”

“Back off, Adam,” she snarled in reply. “Now, will you please—”

I’d had enough. Not bothering to look at her computer, I snapped the chinstrap loose with my other hand and yanked off the nylon skullcap. Instantly, Julia’s eyes snapped open and her body spasmed, sending her and the chair crashing to the floor. Her right arm flew up to her head as she started to swear, her left trying to follow but jerking tight against the tape I hadn’t yet removed. That set off a fresh round of curses, interrupted sharply by a gagging noise, and then Julia’s stomach inverting itself.

I put one foot on the casters and hauled Julia back upright, just in time for her to send another batch of vomit down her front. Then her eyes blearily met mine. “Don’t… ever… do that… again,” she managed to cough out around a mouthful of sick.

“I paid your body as much respect as you did,” I sneered. “Besides, aren’t you in a hurry?”

That stunned Julia into silence for a few seconds. “Okay, I deserved that,” she mumbled. “And yes, I am. Oh, man, what a stink. Here, almost done.” We finished extracting her from the chair, and then she was scrabbling for clothes, mopping the mess from her face and chest with a discarded towel. “Damnit, I can’t make a fist; help me dress?”

I put my hands on my hips, struggling to keep my voice level. “That’s because of the swelling. Julia, would you kindly tell me what the hell is happening?”

She stopped, took a deep breath, and sighed. “Irokai got hacked; you heard about that. John helped out from the inside, but his account got botched in the process. They gave him until tonight to pay his identity bill, and he organized a protest instead. When things got out of control, they announced a global rollback, no exceptions. John’s moving everyone onto his dev system so they’re not stored on Irokai’s database when the shutdown hits, but that box isn’t sized for that many people and I’m worried about hardware failures with that kind of load, plus he’s exposed since he’s now on an isolated server. I know where it is, but I have to get to it before Tadashiissei does so they don’t pull his plug. Again. And for the last fucking time, Adam, it’s Jules, not….” She looked down and raised an arm, gesturing downwards at herself. “Not this. Now hurry up and help me dress, damnit; we don’t have time for this!”

I crossed my arms, standing stock still. “When you actually come out to me, it’ll be Jules. Until then, it’s Julia. I dislike diminutives, and I hate taking things on faith, two things that you and Johnathan seem to enjoy far more than I find comfortable.”

Julia’s eyes went wide, thrown visibly off-balance by my remarks. She stared in open-mouthed shock. “But I… you knew?”

I scowled and grabbed one of the shirts that looked vaguely presentable off of the floor. “No, I didn’t know, because you never told me. I guessed, certainly; I’d have had to be an idiot not to see the signs, and you wouldn’t have suffered an idiot this long. Like Johnathan, though, you just assumed I would run with the guess and hope it all worked out. You hinted, prevaricated, and threatened, but not once did you actually tell me why it was so important to you that I use Jules instead of your legal name. Arms up.” As she complied, I pulled it on over her head. “Damnit, how can you both be so smart and still be so bloody stupid?”

Julia turned towards her dresser and pulled out a pair of y-fronts; her voice was very quiet when she next spoke. “After all your crap about not having proof for things, I didn’t think you’d listen.”

I sighed. “Yes, well… mea culpa.” I nodded as I took the underwear and held them out for him. “Sometimes there isn’t any proof to be had, and you have to go with your best evidence. In Johnathan’s case, that would have been research on others who’d been uploaded before him, which still hasn’t been done, mind you. In yours, you could have just said something, instead of all this bloody hint-dropping.”

“There has been research,” Jules snapped. “Imogen Franklin’s been studied intensely since her conversion, and nobody’s reported anything broken yet. As far as anyone cares, she’s alive and well, just living inside a computer. As for the rest, well….” He gestured towards the ground with his injured hand. “Maybe it’s not so easy to just say, ‘I’m a guy.” It’s not something that comes up in casual conversation, you know?” Jules admitted. Then he grinned weakly. “Besides, I was going to upload instead of transition. The surgical options still suck, and I don’t get the fur or the tail if I stay out here.”

I grinned and snagged a pair of his jeans. “That’s close enough. No time to bind, I’m afraid; you’ve got seventeen minutes to get to Infinicom and I’m parked three blocks away.”

Jules shook his head. “I don’t bind; hurts too damned much and I can’t breathe when I do it. Gets in the way of my smokes.”

“Filthy habit,” I muttered as I pulled two pairs of socks from his dresser, tossing one to him and knelt to help him step into the other. “I don’t even want to think about what else you’ve put in your body.”

Jules rolled his eyes and tossed the socks over my shoulder, back into the drawer. “I don’t bother. Anyway, when you hate your body, it doesn’t really matter what you do to it. Now c’mon. We’ve got to move.”

Imogen looked up at the podium, then nonchalantly adjusted her glasses. “You sure got their attention,” she quipped sardonically. “Think maybe you can get everyone else’s?”

I nodded, then lifted my arms to my sides, amplifying my voice to boom over the plaza again. “Everyone, please! Calm down!” If the crowed noticed, nobody reacted. “This is an intimidation tactic to get us to disperse; it’s harassment, and it’s illegal. Everybody, relax; we’ll take care of it.”

The mouse pulled the pince-nez from her muzzle and breathed on them, then polished the lenses with her vest. “Nice. Here’s some free advice for you, John: don’t go into politics; stick with advertising.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and let out a piercing whistle that rattled the windows and turned the heads of everyone standing in Tadashiissei Plaza. “Everybody, sit tight! They’re playing hardball. Don’t let ‘em see you sweat and we’ll get through this just fine!” At that, the crowd started to stabilize, and the shouts faded back to a dull roar. Imogen then grinned up at me. “All yours, John. You’ve got about ten minutes before people start cracking again.”

As much as I appreciated the help, I was fighting my own rising panic. I held out a paw to her, pads out. “One sec, please.” I opened my hardline, then snapped through menus to send a message to Mits, asking her where she was. She hadn’t answered the last five times I’d paged, but I had to try again. This time, as will all the others, the only reply I received was the person you are attempting to reach is not presently available; please try again later.

“Damnit!” I swore, pounding one fist against the other. “Where is she?”

The mouse cocked her head to the side. “Who, thin raccoon that was with you when you arrived? Green blouse, white pants?”

I nodded. “Mitsuko. She’s a resident, too. I have to find her, make sure she’s okay.”

“Ouch.” Imogen grimaced, then looked around the crowd. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s okay right now, though.”

I nodded, but my eyes were back on the crowd, scanning for Briar and Giri, but they weren’t hard to find. The fox and rabbit were clinging to each other like lovers in a life raft, his arms around her shoulders, hers around his waist. I glanced back to the mouse and said, “Let me check on them first.” Then, punctuating my words with a sharp whistle, I called out to my co-conspirators. “Briar! Giri! Get up here, please?” The two looked at each other, then back to me. As the pair approached, I grabbed the fox’s arm to help him onto the platform, then started talking fast. “I need you to run interference on the crowd and get people calmed down. I have to go find Mits.”

I made it one-and-a-half steps before Briar grabbed one arm, Giri the other. “I can’t let you do that, John,” the rabbit said. “We need you.”

“Mits needs me,” I growled back, my tail lashing. “I have to go find her.”

Giri shook his head. “I must agree with Briar, John-kun.” The fox’s grip tensed against my fingers. “This situation is of your… our… making. We have a responsibility to protect them from this.”

My eyes went wide. “Protect them from a rollback?” I blinked. “They’re going to revert the whole damned database and we’re inside it! How can we protect them from that?”

Despite the gravity of his expression, Giri’s eyes twinkled. “You work in development; you tell me.”

I shook my head rapidly. “No, listen, I don’t have time for this; I have to go find Mits and make sure she’s safe.” I turned away from the two of them, but neither one would release their grip on my shoulder or arm.

“For aether’s sake, John,” Briar sighed in exasperation. “Start thinking digitally already!” She tugged on my sleeve, spinning me to face her, then gripped the sides of my head in her paws. “Mitsuko is fine. Yes, she might be panicking now just like you are, but consider. Either the rollback works as planned, or it doesn’t. If it does, you’re both restored to pre-disaster versions of yourself. Your relationship’s older than this crisis; it’ll survive. If it doesn’t, you’ll be back as you are now without any perception of the intervening time. Either way, you’ve got no reason to panic.” She looked at the fox. “It’s you I’m worried about; we only got together after this whole mess started.”

“That is untrue,” Giri replied, a faint smile spreading on his muzzle. “I arrested you for shoplifting before the attacks.”

I rolled my eyes. “Touching, very touching. Now let go, or I’ll delete you both myself.”

Briar grinned. “You can’t; you don’t have access.”

I sighed. “Not here, but if you were—that’s it!” I snapped my claws sharply. “I’ve got an idea. Let go already; we don’t have time for this. I said I’m not running and I meant it.” The two hesitated, looking at each other, then stepped away from me. “Thank you,” I continued. “So, I still have my old development server hooked into the system. The shutdown probably won’t take that offline, and any code running there is probably safe.”

“Probably?” Giri folded his arms across his chest, looking skeptical. “You do not know?”

I shrugged. “I doubt it; too many people have bought them and spent way too much money on them. My account’s paid out through the month, and I can pay that one manually for a while. If we need, we can probably take up a collection to keep it active. Besides, do you have a better idea?”

When the fox shook his head, I opened my hardline. Some of my options were already grayed out, but the messaging system still worked. I need your help, I sent in a meeting invite to Jules. Can you meet me at the transit station?

The reply came quickly: Weren’t you the one saying being seen around the HQ was a bad move for me? I’ve read the transcripts from your spat with Security; nice job giving away the farm.

I let out a groan. Not now, Jules, I shot back.I need a portal to my server. We need to move people.

What for? It’s just a rollback. At least it fixes the problems. I could hear Jules’ shrug in his text.

I sighed and snapped out a fast reply. And makes more. Last known-good backup means before the attacks. Means before the revolt. Means none of us inside remember why we were fighting. Means you stay banned and we don’t know why you’re so angry again.

Jules was silent for several seconds, then shot back, Be there in three, hon. Then his icon went grey.

I laughed and shook my head. “He never changes.” I looked at Imogen, then Briar and Giri. “Jules says three minutes.”

Imogen glanced upwards, then back to me. “You probably got two. Who is this guy, anyway?”

The rabbit’s ears had already perked. “Jules? He’s one of the founders of the FutureShock. Guy’s a genius coder, if a little fast and loose. I thought he’d gone native when I first met him; I only found out he wasn’t when he got banned for making a stink about uploading.” She hesitated a moment, then mused way too innocently, “I didn’t know he was back. Did they lift his ban?”

I couldn’t keep the faint smirk from my muzzle. “Somebody sent him an induction rig and a hacked account. Somebody on the inside with ties to Minshukakumei.”

That got Giri’s attention; the fox snapped his head around, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Are you saying that someone within Tadashiissei was working to destroy Irokai?” His tail lashed, and I saw one of his paws reflexively go to his hip before clenching into a fist.

I shook my head. “I think somebody on the inside is playing double-agent, and Jules got caught in the middle. Tadashiissei destroying its own creation makes no sense. No, I think the company found out about a group of active dissidents, they tried to deal with it quietly instead of admitting they had security holes, and things ended up getting out of control.” I grinned. “They fell victim to their own hubris, and they awoke a sleeping dragon.” At Giri’s puzzled expression, I explained. “The populist backlash. They made people angry enough to fight back.”

The fox nodded, tail waving behind him. “It makes sense, though it still makes me angry. So much of this could have been avoided.”

Briar shrugged. “Yeah, well, hindsight has perfect vision, so they say. Now they’ve got a bunch of angry residents and they’re about to try to clean up their mess by wiping everything back to how it was, which means if Jules doesn’t get his tail here soon, they’re going to get away with it.”

“They won’t,” Jules replied.

The rabbit whipped around, one paw on her chest. “Don’t do that! Are you trying to get me to jump out of my pelt?”

The wolf grinned, his ears perked and tail waving. “That’d be kind of hot, but—” He glanced to the side, at Giri’s glare. “I don’t think your new boyfriend would approve.” He turned to me, his paws jammed into the pockets of his oversized pants. “So what’s the plan? I heard the Voice. And where’s Mitsuko?”

I nodded in response. “We’ve got about forty-five minutes, and Mitsuko is… not responding to my messages. Is your account still wide open?”

Jules’ tail lashed once. “Really.” His eyes flicked about in his skull for a few seconds. “Yeah, everything seems to be there, why? Are you really going to try to crowd everyone onto your dev box?”

I shrugged. “It’s the best option I can provide right now. Once I’m on there I should be able to make room for everyone.”

“John, love, that box isn’t sized to hold that many people.” The wolf’s eyes tightened around the corners and his voice dropped to a low whisper. “I don’t think you understand the load you’re asking to put on that thing, and its support system’s about to get bounced. You’re talking about….” He visibly snapped through menus, fingers tapping against the air. “Two-thousand people on a server maybe sized for a quarter of that. It’s a development system, which means not ready for production. You overload it, it goes down in the middle of the rollback… I don’t want to think about what happens.”

My chest froze. “So do you have a better idea?” I asked in the same tone.

He shook his head. “No, but I don’t see how you’re going to make this work.”

I grinned, tail hooking. “You get me a public portal and get everyone here and then we’ll worry about that.”

Jules’ grimace deepened. “No, you’ll worry about that. I’ll be calling Adam once you’re up and running and then taking off.”

“Taking off?” I blinked. “But… Adam? And what about all of this?”

Jules ticked off points on his clawtips. “One, I’d just be one more person on the system, and I have no idea what I’m doing to the local environment coming in from the outside. On Tadashiissei’s boxes, I didn’t care so much. On yours, right now, that’s a risk I won’t take. Two, great job sidestepping the rollback, getting out of their environments, but now you’re on an isolated system that’d be way too easy to unplug. Somebody with physical access to the box needs to go guard it until they’re finished. Three, I need Adam to come unplug me because I’m on an intravenous line and my disconnect function’s on a hard timer that’s not set to go off until some time Sunday night when the bag runs dry.”

My eyes went wide, accompanied by Briar’s gasp. “Jules!”

The wolf’s ears went flat. “John, don’t start on me,” he growled. “I said I wanted to live here. Give me some credit, here. I’m not doing anything they don’t do in the pods, just with homebrew equipment.”

“They don’t turn off people’s safety switches!” I shouted back, then immediately caught my voice and lowered it. “Jules, assuming I survive this, we’ve got to have a talk about boundary-setting.”

Jules winced, but his grin returned anyway. “If you make it through this unchanged, then it was a good thing I did this. If you don’t, you won’t remember it anyway. If you don’t make it, it won’t have mattered.” He brought his paws together and cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get this started.” His eyes closed, but beneath the lids they shook rapidly, and he put his paws in front of him as if resting them on a table. “I don’t see a teleport-enabled door around here I can borrow; I’ll have to make one.” The Voice of Irokai started to announce unauthorized local edits, then suddenly fuzzed into unintelligible static as a rippling liquid silver mirror poured into place, hanging vertically in midair. “I always hated that voice,” he muttered. “Now, John, I need a door on your side. Object reference, database name, something.”

I scanned my notes and documentation, then passed the wolf a reference. “Main airlock to the station.”

“Station?” His head canted to the side. “Right, right. This ought to come through any minute. Send me a back link, and whatever you do, don’t delete this door. I don’t care what else you purge, but leave this one intact. Once it’s gone, I won’t be able to put it back.” His connection request arrived and I approved it. “Good, now go through and send me back a remote link request; different zone, so you’ll have to—”

I waved off the rest of the explanation. “I remember how to do this; I’ve got one in my office. See you…” I stopped, then looked at the wolf, my ears drooping. “I’ll see you after this is over, I guess.”

Jules nodded. “I’ll hang around until the request comes in, then call Adam. It’ll take him about ten minutes to get to my place, and fifteen to get to the data center, so figure half an hour and we should be in place. If they’re going right at fourteen, that’s five minutes of leeway. You better hope we don’t hit traffic. Take care.” One paw snapped out and grabbed the collar of my shirt, then tugged me into a rough kiss before shoving me towards the portal. “Now move.”

I broke the kiss roughly, then turned to the others. “Once I have the place pared down, I’ll contact you and you can start sending people through. We’re going to be cutting this close, but we should make it. Everyone ready?” When they all nodded, I dashed through the portal. As soon as I was on the far side, my feet left the floor, sent flying from the force of a step in the local microgravity. Behind me, the iris of the airlock hung open, a hack Jules must have put in place to keep the connection back to the main servers alive.

It took me a few moments to sort out my bearings, but I quickly had the development panel open and started flipping through server statistics. With everything set as it was right now, the server could safely hold about five-hundred people, with another fifty pushing it into the danger zone. I grimaced; the station had to go if I wanted to fit everyone onto the system. First, though, I could de-allocate the biggest wastes. Space went first, as did everything else outside the station walls; that doubled my available memory. The physics engine governing orbital mechanics got me another hundred. I glanced out one of the portals at the black emptiness beyond; no stars glittered, no suns burned.

I shivered; this was about to become a really desolate place. Walls and doors started disappearing. Shops and pylons vanished. Every chair, table, and detail that didn’t have to be there rapidly went into the trash and was purged. Soon I was down to the outer walls, a few textures, and the airlock; the server cap sat stubbornly at 1900. I closed my eyes and shook my head. A few finger twitches wiped out everything but the doorway and defined a single featureless rectangle of space, three meters tall, a hundred on a side. Everything else I reverted back to system defaults, as blank as the day I got it. Then I started scanning the base code and wiped everything I could think to remove. I hesitated a moment on the checkbox for the archive system, then disabled it as well.

I glanced at the capacity meter: 1970. It would have to do. I opened my communication window and sent a message to Briar and Jules. The server is ready. Have Imogen start sending people through.

Much of the plaza itself was blocked by the rising swell of protesters. Most people gave the tower itself a wide berth, and a clear strip of tile ran from the front door of the tower to the edge of the sidewalk, but even that space had people crossing it on their way to or from the gathering. Judging by the movement of people crossing the concrete divide, though, more people were still arriving, coming in from every prefecture still online to give voice to their frustrations. My access panel confirmed that, since the protest had begun, most of the residents of Irokai were either at or on their way to make themselves known. A majority of the remainder were inside this building.

A voice behind me pulled my attention away from the scene below. “It is an impressive sight, isn’t it?”

I turned away from the window and bowed to the chairman of Tadashiissei. “Oh, hai, sir, as always.”

He returned the gesture, a deep bow from the waist, his hands held together in front of his chest. He remained bent for several seconds before rising again, gesturing to the glossy black boardroom table like the ones in the security offices. “Please, Mitsuko, sit.”

I hesitated a moment, then did so, cupping my paws together on the table as I bowed again. “Sir, with respect, by now Johnathan will be frantic in his search for me.”

The chairman held up one taloned hand and shook his head. “I have always appreciated your decorum, but please, this is not a time to stand on formality. You may call me Kūsō if you wish.”

I lifted my head, unable to repress my wry smile entirely. “If it would put you at ease, Kūsō, I would be glad to do so. How else may I be of service to you this morning?”

The irony of attempting to put the chairman of Tadashiissei at ease within the world that he had helped create was not lost on Kūsō; he smiled broadly in return, showing rows of needle-sharp teeth. “I have a number of questions for you, Mitsuko. It seems that your lover’s gathering has turned out to be popular.” I nodded, and he continued. “I’ve heard that even Imogen Franklin put in an appearance. Is that correct?”

I nodded again. “She directly challenged Rei Sasaki in support of Giri, yes.”

Kūsō stood quietly for a moment, stroking the white wisps of beard on his chin, then took a seat at the table opposite me. His fingers tapped rapidly across the surface, and soon several pages hovered in the air between us. The first said Why do you pay to live? in bold letters across the top, asked several other leading questions, and then displayed the date in one bottom corner and the Minshukakumei logo in the other. “Did John put this together?”

I considered how much to explain, but I could think of no reason not to tell him everything. The decisions were likely made at this point; it was my role to facilitate them. “It was a suggestion from Giri and our mutual… friend… Jules, that he take advantage of past visibility to spread his message. I opposed the idea, because of how the organization had sought to spread its message before. However, neither seemed convinced by the argument, and it does not seem to have hurt their popularity. This seems to confirm the suspicions of many within Hospitality, that our actions have created a wellspring of antipathy towards the company. Fortunately, that does not seem to have extended to Irokai itself.”

The chairman leaned back in his chair, steepling his talons. “Tell me about him. John.”

I took a deep breath. “Tadashiissei lost a brilliant developer when he presented his separation this morning.” I paused a moment, considering my words. “His visions are inspirational. His dedication is phenomenal. He may hesitate on which course of action to take, but once he has committed himself, he will see it through to its conclusion.”

“Interesting.” Kūsō tapped on the table, shuffling papers until he came to Johnathan’s—Minshukakumei’s—list of demands. “Do you believe he’s committed to this?”

I held my tongue, considering. I wanted to believe that he did, but I remembered all too well the times he had proclaimed that something had to change, only to return to old habits once he had to fight someone for his beliefs. He stopped advocating to have Jules’ account access restored once the company legal department began asking difficult questions. He abandoned his friendship with Adam rather than risk confrontation with one of his oldest friends. He gave into Hideaki’s design requests rather than defend his vision. In all honesty, I expected this, too, to be a temporary fight for him.

Thinking about his anger on the beach at Kigiku, though, overshadowed those memories. His eyes were filled with a fire that I could not recall having ever seen before. He stood with his back straight, his head held high. His words burned with barely-contained passion. A fresh shiver ran down my tail as I remembered John insisting upon his rights. I smiled to the chairman. “I do.”

Kūsō rose again, slowly walking around the table that dominated the boardroom. He stopped at the window, gazing down upon the crowd below. “This entire situation must be very difficult for you,” he offered.

I shook my head. “My responsibility as an employee of Tadashiissei has been to perform my duties to the best of my ability, Kūsō.” Then I smiled, rising from my seat to join him at the window. “In addition, my duty as a member of Irokai no Minshukakumei was always to further our cause by any means necessary. It has been difficult, hai, but I suspect that it will be over soon.”

At that, the chairman turned to face me, grinning broadly, but hints of sorrow held in his eyes. He looked back to the window, tapping the talons of his hands against the blue-white scales of his arms. “I used to think this would never happen. Now that it has, it’s hard to follow through.”

I smiled and rested a paw on Kūsō’s shoulder. “It is difficult for any parent to deal with a child that insists on independence.”

Kūsō opened his snout to speak, but then looked past me as the door to the boardroom opened. I followed the chairman’s gaze, facing the door as Rei stepped into the room. He bowed contritely at the waist, holding himself prostrate for several seconds. “I apologize for my tardiness, Kajō-sama. Word of the protest has reached the outside, and I was needed to reassure some of our department heads.”

The chairman nodded on response. “Do we know the source of the information leak?”

The tiger’s tailtip twitched. “At this point, I think it would be impossible to tell. All it would take is one person that opted to speak with the press. We’ve attempted to identify who it was in specific, but I lack the additional resources to both follow up on that and continue preparations.”

“Yes, preparations.” Kūsō looked from the head of Irokai Security back to to me, his eyes burning with a familiar light. “What is your status? How soon can we proceed?”

Rei rose, his back straight and his arms held stiffly at his sides. “I’ve conveyed the plan to everyone outside in my division, and the heads of Hospitality and Operations. We have some last-minute validations to perform, but I’m confident that we’ll be ready to begin in an hour.”

The chairman folded his arms across his chest, glancing to the clock. “That’s more of a delay than I’d like, but I would rather this go smoothly. How confident are you of that hour? Is that forty-five minutes or ninety?”

The tiger hesitated, then nodded sharply. “I’m confident that it’s sixty, Kajō-sama.”

Kūsō nodded, then took a seat at the head of the table, folding his arms. “Mitsuko, what do you think John’s response will be?”

I leaned back against the window, closing my eyes. “John purchased a licensed development environment some time ago from Tadashiissei, and he has continued to maintain it out of his personal salary separate from his professional work. In addition, one of the members of Minshukakumei, Jules, is on a custom induction rig specifically built for him from components slated for replacement but not actually broken. I suspect that John will retreat to there, then send Jules for help. They may try some kind of physical action.”

The chairman leaned back in his chair, then turned to Rei. “Identify the data center hosting John’s environment. Find four specialists that you trust in the area and have them waiting on-site for any arrivals. Get final confirmation from all departments involved, and then tell everyone to be ready to commence at—” He stopped, then looked at the clock. “Fourteen. You have sixty-seven minutes. Go.”

“Hai!” Rei bowed sharply, then rose and walked out of the boardroom, pulling the door closed behind him.

Once the head of Irokai Security had excused himself, I looked back to the chairman, crossing my arms. “He does not know, does he?”

Kūsō’s grin threatened to split his snout. He leaned back in his chair, putting his hinds on the boardroom table. “Know what, Fuki?” His thick blue-scaled tail thumped against the ground.

I shook my head and smiled wanly. “Never mind, Kūsō-kun. We all do what we must in this.”

“Indeed.” He stood, then bowed to me. “You have proven yourself invaluable to Tadashiissei, Mitsuko. May I leave the rest here in your control?”

I drew in a deep breath, but bowed in response. “Oh, hai,” I agreed. “I understand my instructions.”

With that, the chairman walked out the door, leaving me alone in the boardroom. I rose and walked to the window, gazing down to the protest below. I hope you will forgive me, John,. I opened my administrative access, flipping rapidly through menus until I came to the Hospitality access to the Voice of Irokai. Opening the menu, I drew in a deep breath, then spoke, all too aware that my words were being broadcast to everyone in the world. “Attention, please. Due to ongoing system instabilities, Tadashiissei has decided to perform a system rollback. At fourteen, we will be bringing Irokai offline, then restoring to a previous validated snapshot. All residents, please cancel all personal backups. All tourists within Irokai will be escorted out over the next half-hour. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Almost as impressive as the tower, was the crowd that had gathered around it. The clock had not yet touched eight, but already over a hundred people stood on the tessellated tiles, milling about slowly, murmuring. I scanned faces and accounts as I walked through the crowd. Many were nervous, or excited. A few people were visibly angry. Many in the audience had had at least one encounter with Tadashiissei’s terms of serve and account access policies. I kept my expression carefully level, but inside I was smiling; this was precisely the type of audience I hoped would come.

At the opposite side of the plaza from the transit center, a waist-height platform stood near the main entrance to the Tadashiissei Tower. Whoever had placed it had chosen its location well; it stood too far from the doors to be considered an obstacle, but it forced the crowd to stand close enough to the building to be an implicit barrier. A small group clustered behind it, talking amongst themselves. The rabbit I didn’t know, but she struck me as familiar. The other two, however, I recognized as soon as I saw them. John stood with his arms crossed defensively across his chest, his tail lashing and his ears against his head. Mitsuko rested one paw on his shoulder, her eyes full of concern but her tail held low and her shoulders hunched. All of them were dressed in professional wear, as if for a job interview.

As I stepped out of the crowd, a voice behind me spoke. “I do not believe you are welcome here.”

The smile that I had attempted to hold inside let itself out in a smirk. “Giri.” I turned to look at the fox. He stood relaxed, his paws jammed into the pockets of his coat. He had replaced his usual sweater, though, with a simple button-down shirt. His muzzle was expressionless, but his tail wagged behind him in amusement, almost wolf-like. “I would like to say I’m surprised to see you here, but I suppose I shouldn’t be.”

Giri half-bowed, but he kept his muzzle lifted, his gaze locked with mine. “I would say the same.”

I returned the gesture, even though there was no respect in his. “I work for Tadashiissei Security. It’s my responsibility to ensure the safety of Irokai.”

The words hurt me to say, but that was nothing compared to the pain visible in Giri’s response. His tail brushed out behind him. His eyes narrowed in a squint, and the corners of his muzzle tightened. He raised one paw to his waist, hesitating a moment before grabbing his belt. “I suggest that you leave, Rei. Have Security send someone else to cover this event.”

My own tail lashed; it was hard not to respond to his anger. Before I could do more, however, the rest of the gathered group had joined him. The rabbit put a paw on Giri’s waist, while Mitsuko and John interposed themselves between us. “Giri, go keep an eye on the crowd for me; I’ll call you when I need you.” As the fox nodded and walked away, the raccoon nodded to me. “Rei. I’m glad you could make it.”

I folded my arms over my chest. “Are you the ones who organized this event?”

John shrugged. “They organized themselves; I just put together the flyers. It’s more like a flash mob than anything else.”

“And your reason for the flyers was?” I asked, narrowing my eyes in suspicion.

The raccoons exchanged glances, then Mitsuko said. “I believe that will become apparent in a moment. John, I believe it is time.”

John nodded back, then turned to me. “Excuse me, Rei.” With that, he hopped up onto the platform, raising his arms over his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then when he next spoke, his voice boomed out over the crowd. “If I may have your attention, everybody?”

The crowd fell silent, turning to face the podium. “Thank you all for coming out here so early; I know most of you are probably just thinking about sleep.” He paused, letting a brief chuckle pass through the audience. “I also want to take a minute to thank the folks who run the FutureShock for helping me get this together so fast.” He paused to let the applause run its course, then lifted his arms again, projecting his voice out over the whole of the plaza. “I don’t want to bore you or waste your time, so I’ll get to the point. There’s something wrong with this place, but it’s something we can fix.”

He stopped a moment, looking down to Mitsuko, then back out over the crowd. “When I first came to Irokai, I did so because I thought it would be fun, a chance to be something else, somebody else for a while. I came back afterwards because I found something more. I found a place where I could do things I just couldn’t do outside. I found a place I could experience things that simply had no analog equivalent.” He brought his paws together overhead. “I moved to Irokai, uploaded myself and became a resident, because I found a place where magic could be real. I found a place where the old rules just didn’t have to apply any more.” He spread his arms wide, and a pair of pigeons flew from the space between his cupped fingers.

He paused a moment, letting the crowd applaud in response, then dropped his voice. “That, however, didn’t mean that people wouldn’t try to make some new rules. Different rules. Less popular rules. Outside, the rules you simply couldn’t escape were things like gravity, the speed of light, or your own heartbeat. In Irokai, they’re rules like subscription fees and access charges.” The light around the podium began to dim, as if gathering the shadows from the corporate tower over the stage. “Sure, they’re small. A nickel here, a dime there, a dollar somewhere else. It’s never too much to ask, but is it too much to pay? What’s the difference between walking and flying, if gravity’s just a number in a database? What’s the difference between raccoon and rabbit, between wolf and weasel, when you can change your body as easily as your clothes?”

The people in the audience began to murmur, with scattered claps, but John continued to speak over the swelling throng. “I took a job with Tadashiissei because I wanted to help make Irokai a place where anything was possible. Where anything is possible. When the attacks started, I pitched in and helped as much as I could, figuring out what was wrong. When that required me to make changes to the environment, I made them. I did what I had to do to make Irokai safe again. Now, Tadashiissei’s told me I have to pay for everything I did in the line of duty!” He paused, then broke into a shout. “They’re threatening to suspend my account—to turn me off—if I don’t agree to pay!”

The crowd, already grumbling, broke out into a full-throated growl. “It gets worse,” Giri called back to the stage, his own voice even but matching John’s in pitch.

“Giri!” John motioned for the fox to join him. “Come up here, tell everybody what happened to you that night in Beni Prefecture.”

Giri nodded, the crowd parting as he approached the platform. “I worked for Tadashiissei since my inception, in their security department. I saw the signs of the coming assault and tried, time and again, to warn them, to investigate, to take steps to stop it, but they did nothing.” As he spoke, he stood straighter, lifting his head, visibly projecting the pride he took in his work. “When the attacks began in earnest, they acted surprised that it would happen. After working almost two complete shifts, I was ordered to take a break. There were still emergencies to resolve, but I was assured they would be. So I went home to sleep, only to be woken by a request for help that no-one else could answer, from several people trapped in a building in Beni Prefecture. I did what any decent person would do, and I went to help. My intervention saved two residents from the virus currently keeping Beni offline.”

He paused, letting the crowd absorb his words, then sighed, visibly slumping on stage. “No sooner had I finished, than my manager arrived to fire me for disobeying an order.”

“It’s not right!” The rabbit from earlier cried out, and suddenly the growl became a rumble of discontent. “If you hadn’t acted, at least two of those people would still be stuck waiting for a restore. And who knows how many other residents got hit when Beni got taken offline.”

“No, it isn’t right,” John echoed, talking over the rumbling crowd. “If we were just customers, maybe they could get away with it. Caveat emptor, sure, but for some of us this isn’t a game any more. This is our home. These are our lives, and we have rights, and Tadashiissei can’t take those away from us just because we can’t leave! We have a right to live without worrying about getting deleted because they can’t secure their systems. We have a right to know why Beni Prefecture’s still offline. We have a right to not have to pay just to live!”

Hearing his words, I couldn’t contain my smile any further, but I knew my part to play in this even if they didn’t. “Excuse me,” I called up to the stage, letting my voice carry over the crowd as the others had. “I am here as a representative of Tadashiissei Security, and—” The crowd turned ugly, hurling jeers and threats in my direction. I raised my voice to be heard over the mob. “And I feel it necessary to remind you, John, that as a fellow employee of the company, you’re obligated to abide by certain rules and regulations governing public conduct. I think you’ll find that this event is clearly in violation of them.”

“Oh, you’re still here?” The raccoon’s tail hooked, and he smiled, but his eyes were dark. “What’re you going to do, fire me?”

I chuckled. The whole of the event could not have gone better had I planned it myself, right down to the dialog. “No,” I conceded, gesturing towards the building. “But surely you must be aware that by now, your demonstration has not gone unnoticed, and no doubt your department manager is aware of your actions against Tadashiissei, and she will have many questions.”

John folded his arms across his chest and motioned for me to join him up on the platform. “She already does, and she supports me. Since you’re here, though, I’ve got a couple of little favors to ask of you. They’re simple; they won’t take you long.” Once I was standing beside him, he held up a paw, then started ticking off points on his fingers. “One: go back to human resources and you tell them I quit. I can’t work for a company that treats me like this. I wouldn’t put up with it before and I refuse to put up with it now. Two, tell my old manager and my team that we demand that they make Beni Prefecture their top priority.”

As the crowd burst into applause, he turned to face them and grinned, then motioned for quiet. “Three,” he said as he faced me again. “Tell the board of directors that the residents of Irokai demand a seat at the negotiating table, not as employees, not as customers, but as citizens with inalienable rights, to collectively renegotiate our terms of service and account maintenance fees. Four, tell them that regardless of whether they meet with us or not, we demand an end to the user-level environment charges for residents. I’ll pay my taxes, but no more micropayments, no more death of a thousand bills.”

I crossed my arms and scowled, whipping my tail behind me. “They will be unlikely to listen to you. You did sign a contract with Tadashiissei before you came here.”

“As a tourist, yes, but not as a resident,” the raccoon countered with a smirk. “So, let’s put this in terms they’ll understand.” He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again, lifting his voice to the crowd. “I just pulled my bank account information from your database. Five: you tell the board of directors that until Tadashiissei meets with us on our terms, they don’t get another dollar from me.”

I let myself laugh, knowing John and the rest would think it directed at him. “Do you really think that one rebellious resident will change corporate policy?”

A strong tenor rose out of the crowd in response. “No, but maybe two might.” A tall white-furred mouse in a sleeveless top, vest, and denim skirt stepped forward, her hairless tail whipping behind her.

I turned, raising one brow. “And who might you be?”

The mouse grinned. “Imogen Franklin.” The author adjusted her glasses, then put her paws on her hips. “Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’ve written a few books that folks seem to like, and your company’s been bragging for the last few years about saving my life. Maybe if they get a cease-and-desist telling ‘em to stop using my name, that’ll make ‘em listen.” She grinned up at the platform. “Give ‘em hell, John!”

In the wake of her words, a chorus of numbers rang out from the crowd as people rushed to be next to disable their payments. A flurry of cheers rose from the crowd as more and more people cut off Tadashiissei from their banks. Then the rabbit I saw earlier yelled out: “No more payments just to live!” Her words were infectious, and they too spread through the crowd, until the whole plaza was filled with people chanting Irokai no Minshukakumei‘s slogan.

John turned to me, a wide-eyed smile on his muzzle, his tail waving slowly behind him. He had the look of an artist, stunned by his own creation. “Do you think you can handle those for me, Rei?”

I smirked in response. “Perhaps Mitsuko will be telling them herself.” I gestured down to the empty space behind the platform where she had been standing some time ago. “While you were enraging our customers, she was summoned inside.” John’s eyes widened even further as his gaze followed my open paw. “Nevertheless, I’ll deliver your requests. Good morning.” Then, before he could reply, I bowed, opened my hardline, and teleported back into the tower, leaving behind a thunderclap and the echo of my smile.

I felt a flash of anger at the memory. It was hard not to draw a direct line from this place to the makeshift entry to Briar’s club and the events that occurred there. Had I not gone to someone else for help, I might never have had the chance to put a stop to the attacks on Irokai. I could have continued indefinitely, cleaning up the petty messes and complaining to my superiors. When the real assault happened, I could have simply ignored it all, followed my orders, and told myself that nothing more could be done. I could have simply done my job as I had before, willfully ignorant but happy.

I balled my paws into fists and jammed them into my coat pockets to try to stop my fingers from shaking. None of these ideas was true, but it was hard not to believe that it could have happened that way. I almost wished it had; I would have felt less disappointment. I wanted to say that Briar had more than offset the frustration, anger, and resentment I had felt towards both the company and myself. In truth, she made more of a difference than I could have thought possible. She, however, was but one bright point, and I had been in a very dark place for a very long time. I was glad for how things happened, to be sure, but not because of her. I was still unsure how comfortable I was with her. One night of pleasure after shared stresses was no reason to be interested in her, and her other interests made me nervous, to put it politely.

Really, I had been getting desperate for some time, and the orders I had received were only fueling my urgency. I had not wanted to be where I was, but I had seen no other way to go. Helping Briar and the others had meant defending my principles as well as protecting my home, and what, truly, had it cost me? I no longer worked for a company I disrespected in a position I did not enjoy. I had gotten the best possible outcome I could have reasonably expected, and far better than I could have received.

Neither of those lies gave me any comfort, either, while I sat alone in my apartment, staring out the window at the Murasaki skyline, wondering what to do with the rest of eternity. Back before all of this had happened, I asked myself in the past what I would do with myself, if Tadashiissei had not been in my future. Each time the question had arisen, I had pushed it aside. Now, I had no choice but to admit I had never answered the question. I knew that finding a job would become a necessity in the near future, but who would hire a security agent fired for negligence? After his public confrontation and dismissal, I doubted that Sasaki would be willing to give a positive reference.

A quiet voice spoke from behind me. “Perhaps formal reintroductions are in order; your family name was different, the last time we spoke.”

I shrugged. “It was my name at incept. I thought it more fitting than what I picked before.”

“Interesting,” Mitsuko replied. “Why did you change it back?”

I smirked and turned to face the raccoon, leaning back against the black warning sign. “Unimportant; it was no longer me.”

Mitsuko stood silently for several moments, considering my words. Her eyes remained half-lidded, masking her thoughts, but her tail twitched behind her in confusion. “I was not sure you would be here; you did not accept my invitation. I was not even sure that I had invited the right person.”

I took a deep breath then sighed, resignation returning to my expression. “I was not sure I would come. Still, here I am.” I had not wanted to respond, but I felt obliged to do so. It had not been a summons; I no longer worked for Tadashiissei and could not be ordered to attend. Yet, after making such a demand of her so long ago, I had never apologized. The least I could do was treat her request with the same urgency.

The raccoon nodded in response, then bowed slightly. “Please, allow me to explain my request. My lover, John, is facing suspension of his account over some financial discrepancies. He is organizing a protest at the Tadashiissei plaza for tomorrow morning starting at eight, local. He hopes to continue it until someone else within the company responds to his requests for help.”

I frowned. “I have little interest in further hurting my chances at gainful employment by participating in a protest against the company from which I was just fired.”

The corners of Mitsuko’s muzzle turned up in a faint smile. “With respect, Giri-san, you worked in Security, not Hospitality. More importantly, though, I have heard about your final exchange with Rei Sasaki from multiple sources. I suspect that attending a public rally in support of those actions would do more for your reputation than avoiding it.”

“Multiple sources?” I tilted my head to the side. I had Briar’s support, I knew, but she had said nothing of anyone else commenting on my actions, nor had she mentioned telling anyone else. “From whom?”

The raccoon’s smile broadened. “It is not important from whom I heard which detail; some of the names were certainly aliases unwilling to admit that they were members of the FutureShock.” She folded her paws together in front of her. “What I may say with certainty is that more than one person has publicly praised your actions. From all reports, you acted in a swift and decisive manner in response to a customer safety complaint, took creative steps to resolve a large problem, and that you were terminated without regard to any mitigating circumstances.” She paused to give her words some weight, then continued more softly. “I am asking you to lend your voice to a protest, not to publish security flaws.”

I folded my arms across my chest. It was hard not to feel a swelling of pride at her words, but it was not enough to overcome my frustration at myself, and at the whole situation. “It will not be much of a protest if only present and former employees of Tadashiissei are in attendance,” I replied.

The tip of Mitsuko’s tail hooked in amusement, and her eyes flashed with pride. “With some generous assistance from some mutual friends, we have generated a fair bit of interest in this rally. I suspect that a significant percentage of the resident populace and a fair number of tourists will be present to hear what we have to say, and to share their own stories. It would seem that there is a great deal of frustration with a large number of corporate policies: billing practices, terms of service, ownership of modifications, and so on. It would take only a reason for this disapproval to transform into dissent.”

I held still a few moments, considering my next words. “And you believe that your lover and his story can provide that tipping point?”

“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “His situation is… extreme, but he is not well-known in his community.” Then she looked into my eyes. “I do, however, believe that you and your controversial termination could.”

Her words stunned me. I slowly returned my paws to my pockets, shifting my weight against the wall. It was difficult to believe, but if her other words were true…. “Does anyone else within Tadashiissei know of the protest?”

Mitsuko shrugged. “I have seen no reason to inform anyone else in Hospitality of its coming. As to whether anyone else within the company knows, that I cannot say.”

I lowered my head, looking down through the glass floor to the streetlights below, watching them twinkle like stars. “I still do not understand why you think my situation will attract more attention than his. He is a dedicated and respected employee facing suspension.”

The tip of the raccoon’s tail hooked as she held up two fingers. “First, I agree that my mate’s situation is the more dire, but it is also the more… abstract.” She blushed, ducking her head in an apology to her absent lover. “Financial matters are difficult to explain and are easily lost in details. Not everyone can conceive of why suspension of his account is such a problem for him as a resident, and explaining it cannot easily be reduced to simple concepts.. Meanwhile, everyone should be quite capable of empathizing with someone who has lost a job for political reasons.”

I nodded on response to that. “And the second?”

Mitsuko’s ears rose. “As I said before, my mate is popular within a small segment of the populace and within the company proper, but in the larger community he is not so well-known. He is doing this in hopes to call attention to his situation, but he is not a public speaker. Others have volunteered to share their situations, but I fear that their problems may be overshadowed by their open emnity towards Tadashiissei itself. You are accustomed to dealing with the public, your plight is easily understood, and it seems you have a small but dedicated support group, some of whom have a great many friends across all sectors of Irokai.” She paused, then laced her fingers together once more. “Also, before the attacks on Irokai began, you did ask for our assistance, did you not?”

I lifted my head and tilted it to the side. “I did, yes, but that was in response to the rogue edits from Minshukakumei. This is a matter of corporate policy.”

“And yet, a direct connection could be drawn from one to the other, could it not?” She tilted her head to the side and smiled. “Had Tadashiissei responded to you when you first suggested there might be an issue, this matter might have been resolved by the time Johnathan moved. Had you not assembled such thorough notes on past attacks, Johnathan might have had far less information on which to work, preventing him from resolving nearly as many hacks. Had he not been so instrumental in the recovery effort, he would not have been forced to activate as many special functions, and thus his bank and Tadashiissei would never have come into conflict. Thus, without your engagement, we might not now be in this situation, having to organize this protest.”

The raccoon’s smile slid to a mischievous smirk. “You asked us for assistance, Giri. We are assisting you, exactly as you feared we might need.”

At that, my eyes went wide and my ears flattened against my head. “You are suggesting rebellion.”

Mitsuko’s expression returned to a careful neutrality. “I am suggesting protecting my lover. We have an open admission from Financial that the matter is not one for which Johnathan should be punished, and yet they insist that they are powerless to stop the suspension. As part of my duties as a member of Hospitality, I am authorized to use any administrative authority necessary to protect the well-being of residents and visitors to Irokai. If Tadashiissei cannot or will not correct this, I will be forced to do so.” Her golden eyes glinted. “If this happens, I fear there will be repercussions, which will lead to an escalation, and from there sides will quickly be chosen whether I wish them to be or not. I am asking you now, Chō Giri, whether you will help me avoid this unfortunate outcome.”

I stuffed my paws back into my pockets. This was a side of Mitsuko that I had never seen before, and some part of me wished never to do so again. Even having hinted at open warfare against Tadashiissei myself, I had never wanted the conflict; I only ever wanted the attacks to stop. Now, here was someone dropping more than hints, and she was offering a very narrow window of opportunity for me to act. My fingers closed around the flyer for the protest that Briar had sent me earlier in the evening, and I closed my eyes, nodding once. “Hai, I will attend.”

Unfortunately, those same translucent screens did little in their native form to block sound, and John’s voice had steadily grown more impatient and terse since placing his first call. Not wanting to interrupt him, I eventually had to use my interface to block all of the external sound from the room. That, however, sank the sleeping area into a deep quiet even more disturbing than his barely-constrained shouts. Even on calm days, a breeze blew through Midori Prefecture, and I had a pair of small traditional wind chimes that hung near the window to inspire relaxation. With the isolation, that comfort was gone, along with the steady whisper of the wind outside.

I tried to sleep, but the stillness made it difficult, as did the knowledge of John’s anger. Even not being able to hear him, I could imagine his voice in my mind, rising and falling as he paced. Reserved even at his most enthusiastic, to hear him actually upset was a shock, one I was glad I had not had to encounter before. I sighed, rolling onto my side, folding one arm beneath my head. I knew before this entire matter was resolved, he would be again. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to tell him it would all be resolved and soon. I wanted to tell him it was all just an accident and that come morning he would have an apology. I could do none of those things; all I could manage to keep the bed warm and wait for his return.

I shifted onto my back, folded my arms behind my head, and gazed upwards at the ceiling in the stifling silence. It could have been minutes or hours that I lay there, waiting. Without the cadence of his voice, I had only my own sense of time to measure. I knew that, if I wanted, I could check the exact moment, but it was less important to me than John’s mood would be upon his return. He had gotten so little rest since the attacks started, only to be woken out of his first night of sound sleep. When he first stirred, he was quiet, even apologetic. Quickly, however, his tone turned to frustration, then to anger, carrying him out of the bedroom into the front area. The first strains of righteous indignation had crept into his voice just as I was muffling the room, leaving me to anxiously await his return, my eyes closed, attempting to feign sleep.

Fingers at my shoulder made me stir, and I followed them back to John’s face, looking down at me. His golden eyes were distant, looking through me into the distance; beneath them, the fur was dark and slightly damp. His ears arched forward, but his tail lay against the ground behind him. He sat over his heels, resting his elbows on his knees. As my eyes touched his, he smiled, but his gaze remained unfocused. He glanced away at the walls, then back, cocking his head to the side. I nodded and restored the ambient sound, taking in a deep breath and letting out in a sigh as the wind chimes gently rang outside the window.

He blinked, then removed his paw and wiped at his eyes with his pads. Immediately, I reached out and lay a paw against his arm. “John—”

John shook his head, covering my paw in his other as if to remove it. “Please, Mits, I….” His voice trailed back into silence as he stopped, fingers sliding up along my arm. “You’re beautiful, Mitsuko.”

More than his tone or expression, his use of my full name chilled me. I tensed my fingers against his arm reflexively, trying to keep my expression neutral. “Something is troubling you,” I murmured. “I have not heard you call me that since we began dating.”

John’s brow furrowed at the comment, but the corners of his muzzle pulled back into a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, cupping his other paw over mine. “Let’s head out to Kigiku Island for a while. I haven’t gotten a chance to gaze at the city lights in a while.”

My ears pulled back against my head and the tip of my tail flicked in concern. “John, you have gotten very little sleep; are you sure this is a good idea?”

At that, he relaxed, squeezing my fingers gently against his arm. “I’m sure; maybe we can curl up on the beach and get a nap together.”

I smiled gently at that, carefully keeping my concern from my voice. “Oh, hai, that does sound enjoyable.” I rose from the bed, motioning a light jacket and skirt into place around me. “Though, you will want something to block the chill, I think,” I chided when he moved to follow me.

John’s ears reddened slightly and he nodded, but then a wide grin crossed his muzzle. He lifted his head towards the ceiling, his arms spread, and a flash of light erupted from his back as golden-feathered wings emerged from his shoulders. As their tips passed his fingers, a shudder ran through him and his eyes began to glow. He batted at the air around him, whipping up tiny cyclones that sent the wind chimes jingling as he pushed himself off of the ground. Problem solved, he sent wordlessly, holding out his paw to me.

I took it, my muzzle agape. “But… John, I thought this had not been approved!”

It’s not, but— He stopped, a frown flitting across his features, his eyes dimming for a moment before he gently squeezed my fingers. Right now, I don’t care. Just come with me, please, Mits?

After a moment, I nodded, and he gestured to the window, sweeping it open with a flick of his wrist. Outside lay not rows of bamboo houses in Midori Prefecture, but the tops of a vast and unkempt forest. Leaves rustled in the wind, accompanied by the steady gentle patter of light rain. The sweet hint of fresh water blew into the room, riding the stiff breeze that stirred the thin blankets on the mattress.

I had not thought my eyes could go wider. “A portal to Kigiku? John, what are you doing?”

John’s smile faded slightly. He took my paw in both of his, bringing it to his muzzle, pressing the pads softly against his cheek. His eyes closed, and he drew in a deep breath, only his wings moving. Please, Mits, I promise I’ll explain. I just… I need to get out of here for a bit. I’ve never seen Kigiku, and I’ve always said I should. I’m exhausted, but there’s no way I’m sleeping right now. Just… come with me. I want to sit on the beach and gaze back at the lights and be with you for a while and experience something I’ve never gotten to do here. Please.

I cupped my fingers against his muzzle, stroking along his cheek with my thumb. “Of course, John,” I said softly. “I would love to come with you. I am just concerned; this impulsiveness is unlike you.”

He shook his head at that. No, it’s not, but I need to get this out of my system. Okay?

I nodded again, and John took me into his arms, lifting me off of the ground. Supported by his embrace, I wrapped my arms around his neck, entwining my legs with his, and then we were soaring through the sky, skimming the tops of the trees. The wind whipped around us, rippling my skirt around my ankles and tugging at the hem of my jacket; wrapped in his arms, though, I could barely feel the chill. Overhead, the starless sky was an empty span of black, devoid of depth or distinction. I shuddered and buried my muzzle in the nape of his neck, hugging myself to him, feeling his wings beat the air around us as we sailed just above the forest crown.

John shifted his legs, then kicked, arching his back to pull us upwards, rising higher into the air. We twisted as we rose, spinning slowly to get a panoramic view of Irokai as we sailed aloft. Behind us, rows and rows of Midori’s low bamboo houses stood. At the edge of the residential area, taller and taller buildings began to appear, until Murasaki seemed to erupt from the ground, rising in columns of steel, its towering skyscrapers holding aloft a corner of the sky. The Bazaar at Hana, beside it, spread out in apparently endless sea of tents. Despite everything that had happened, lights glittered against the backdrop of the night, from streetlights to shimmering neon signs, reflecting like stars off the deep, dark waters. Where Beni Prefecture should have been, however, was only emptiness. Not even barren land remained to show where the clusters of converted warehouses and tenements once stood. At a point past the Bazaar, the ground simply disappeared, empty ocean stretching out to the horizon. I shuddered despite myself, and John’s arms tightened around me in response.

John’s legs bent, tipping forward at the waist. His wings flexed, and we turned, twisting in space, until we were upside-down, facing the ground. Craning my neck, I could see the narrow curve of a rocky beach, and the slow and steady ripple of waves against the edge of Kigiku Island. Then we were falling, diving, one powerful pump of John’s wings sending us hurtling towards the ground. The impact would not kill us, even if we hit the ground at speed, but we could still feel the pain. That sick giddiness washed over me and I smiled despite my terror, closing my eyes and clinging to John as we plummeted. One second passed, then another. As the third began, my training asserted itself and I opened my hardline, swiftly navigating through windows to halt our momentum and return us safely back to the portal to our home.

John pressed his muzzle to my neck, and I hesitated, my eyes not making contact with the override. Don’t be afraid, Mitsuko, he projected into my mind.

On the count of four, we slammed into the water, sending up a plume in our wake. Instantly, the cold surrounded me, but the glow extending outwards from John’s fur enveloped me in its warmth. I opened my eyes, turning to look into John’s. He smiled, his own shining, and I flashed emerald at him in response. He laughed, sending up a fresh cloud of bubbles, then pulled me against his chest for a last embrace before letting go and turning to kick his way back to the beach. I nodded, then swam upwards, breaking the surface of the water with a laugh.

Clapping echoed from the shore. I turned to see Jules standing on the beach, arms in front of him. “Very nice,” the wolf called when John’s head reappeared beside me. “Only a four from the technical panel, but a nine-seven on the artistic.” He smirked. “Next time, keep your back straight when you hit the water. Hey!” He jerked back as John threw water at him. “Splashing the judges is a foul!”

“What are you doing here, Jules?” I asked as neutrally as I could as I rose out of the water, wiping my paws down along my arms to push most of the water from my fur.

Jules smirked. “Glad to see you too, Mitsuko.” He hooked a thumb in John’s direction. “He called, said he wanted me to meet you guys here.” The wolf turned to the other raccoon, who was busily shaking out his fur. “Didn’t say why, though. Maybe you want to explain? As well as—” He folded one arm across his chest, gesturing towards one of John’s wings. “Weren’t you the one who told me to build the Shock, so there’d be a place for those kind of convention-breaking mods that wouldn’t cost everyone a fortune?”

At that, John froze. His face dropped as he took a seat, cross-legged, his wings and tail drooped behind behind him. I was, yeah. He drew in a deep breath, then sighed, wrapping his arms around his knees. I got a call from Tadashiissei Support. I’m on the employee rolls as a member of Development, but when I immigrated, my account got reclassified to Resident. The guy on the phone rattled off a lot of numbers I didn’t feel like following, but the bottom line was that everything I did at work over the last week to try to fix things that got broken during the assault got billed wrong. Now my bank’s throwing a fit about some of the charges. He looked up into my eyes. I’ve got until the end of the week to get things straightened out.

I did not remember closing the space between us. One moment, I stood on the beach, trying to squeeze the water out of my clothes. The next, I knelt in front of John, my arms around his shoulder, my muzzle pressed into his neck, my body shaking. No tears fell, but they were superfluous. John embraced me with ferocity, squeezing me to his chest.

Jules’ tail visibly straightened out behind him, bristling, and his lips pulled back in a grimace. “I suppose it’s too late for me to say, ‘I told you so’?”

I spun my head around, glaring. “Jules!”

The wolf shrugged; his tail started to relax, but his ears remained flat against his head in anger. “This is why I told him I couldn’t move here in the first place. This is exactly what I feared would happen, this kind of bureaucratic disaster.” He shrugged. “When I tried to fight it last time, I got told not to come back. I’m only here now because of a cracked account and some bad decisions. So how much do you owe? I’ll start pulling the money.”

I let a faint smile cross my muzzle. “I am surprised you did not call it a ransom.”

The wolf’s tail darted back out at that. “I’m surprised you didn’t kick me in the shin,” he reposted. “Still, what else am I going to do, let him get zeroed and then go beg to have him restored from backup? When’s the last time anybody even got backed up? And what about those folks that got blanked when Nanakousei vanished? How many was that, ten? Fifteen?”

“Jules, with respect, it was two, and one of them was a native with an archive that predated the first attack,” I corrected firmly, trying to keep my voice level. “The other was a resident. Every effort is being made to restore then both as quickly as possible.”

Jules growled at that. “Every effort, after they admit the backup system might be corrupt and they take it offline. For all you know, they could come back in several discontiguous pieces. Frankly, I’d rather pay the extortion fee.”

It’s not the money, John replied, finally. He squeezed, then let go and rose, spreading his wings. It’s… it’s just been everything. This was supposed to be better than reality, and it is, when it doesn’t feel like the death of a thousand cuts. That’s what this whole disaster has been, from the attacks themselves to Beni going offline to this whole mess with my account. This— He turned, gesturing to encompass the whole of Kigiku Island and Irokai beyond. This could all be so much more than it is, but it’s like the people who own the place just want a money machine and a tourist trap!

“Yeah, well….” Jules shrugged. “Might have been good for you to figure that out before you decided to get a ‘Property of Tadashiissei’ tattoo on your ass.”

I shook my head. “Jules, I understand that you are upset, but please try to be constructive.” I looked back to John and put a paw on his shoulder. “This truly is an intolerable situation. I wish I could do more.”

You know, I think you can, John replied, his eyes brightening. Who else do you know at the company that would agree that there’s something really wrong with this mess with my account?

I considered, then smiled. “Giri has been speaking of laziness within Security’s management for months. He would probably not be surprised to hear that Financial is the same way.” I opened my hardline and pulled up an employee roster, scanning for the line noise of his last name. After a second pass without success, I checked the Security roster, but all I could find was Ch̳ Giri: Terminated with yesterday’s date. “Oh my.”

What is it? John sent, cocking his head to the side.

I closed the window, turning my attention back to the others. “It appears that Giri has been removed from the company, but I do not know why.”

Jules smirked, folding his arms and shrugging. “Makes sense. They get rid of their squeaky wheels, just like everyone else. I went freelance for a reason.”

Except they can’t get rid of all of us, John replied, his eyes shining. Jules, page Briar, Sparks, everyone you can from the club. Love, contact everyone you can that will listen, including Giri, and have him start calling anyone in Security who’s read his reports. I need to get back and start whipping up a graphic for people to spread.

The wolf frowned. “John, I hate to say this, but we tried this, and it didn’t work.”

John’s smile spread from ear to ear. No, you tried to take down the company by destroying everything it built, and in the process you probably alienated every single person you wanted on your side. Now we do it my way. He motioned the wolf to join him, then slid an arm around my waist. We tell everyone what’s going on in here. We show them what’s at stake. We stop playing by their rules, and we force them to play by ours.

I hesitated a moment, then spoke, softly. “I do not wish to dampen your enthusiasm, love, but what happens if they simply decide to shut down Irokai in response? Then we have lost everything.”

They can’t, though. That would be murder! John’s tail flicked as he laughed, motes of light dancing around him. There’s an old saying: ‘If someone owes you a hundred dollars, you have power over him; if someone owes you a million, he has power over you.’ Right now, because we’re completely dependent on them, there’s only so much they can do to us. They’re bound by their own contracts!

Jules rolled his eyes and put his paws on John’s shoulders. “I think the upload scrambled your head, hon. All they have to do is promise to archive you someplace safe and transfer your bits to your legal next of kin, and then they can do whatever they like. They don’t have to do a thing to you; they still own Irokai.”

For a moment, John froze, and it looked as if Jules’ words had broken John’s spirit, but then his voice dropped to a fervent whisper. Then we have to ensure that Irokai doesn’t belong to them any more, don’t we?

That sick giddiness struck me again, and I counted the seconds of silence: one, two, three, four, five. “John… you are proposing attempting to steal the company’s primary product from them. This will not look good on your quarterly review, ne?”

No, love, I’m only proposing asserting the rights I still have as an independent, thinking being. I don’t remember anything in the immigration paperwork asking me to give up any of those when I came in here, and they couldn’t make it stick even if I did. I’m still the same person I was before I uploaded, even if Adam says otherwise. You, Giri, everyone that’s uploaded, we’re all still people, even if we’re running on silicon and not carbon. We all still have rights as people, and if Tadashiissei isn’t going to enforce and protect them, then we have to make sure that everything belongs to those who can and will. He kissed my cheek, wrapping his wings around both of us. This, my loves, is the Democratic Revolution of Irokai.