Chapter Text
Yusaku looked out over the barren landscape. This place was at the far edges of Link VRAINS, well beyond the areas where people normally congregated. It was a place of wild data, where the landscape was little more than a few colored polygons in places, and in some places wasn't there at all. There was no sign of movement anywhere, save for the lazy drifting of clouds and dust.
And me, Yusaku thought. For a brief moment, he found himself wondering why he was there. Was this really what he'd been searching for, this empty silence? A part of him did find it soothing. It had taken him a long time to get to this place, and being here and knowing how few other people had ever seen it gave him some small sense of accomplishment. There was no one here to expect anything of him. Nothing here had any connection to him. There was no one here to notice how he felt, or worse, to ask him how he felt and expect him to be capable of answering.
And yet, there was another stubborn part of him that missed his friends desperately. Part of him wished nothing more than to taste one of Kusanagi's hot dogs, to chat with him while enjoying a cup of coffee, and maybe tackle some particularly tricky bit of code. He wished he could have another duel with Soulburner. Right now, he would even welcome the sight of someone like Kogami Ryoken or one of his Knights. But there was one face and one voice that he missed above all the others, and Yusaku knew that going back to the real world wouldn't bring them any closer together.
The problem was that being here wasn't bringing them any closer together, either. Yusaku knew, in his conscious mind, that Ai and Flame and all the rest were gone, and that nothing would ever bring them back. That was what being dead was all about. People lived for a while, and then they didn't. It didn't matter if they were human, animal, or AI, the end result was the same. Yusaku had never been particularly religious. He didn't think he believed in the idea of an immortal soul. In his mind, you didn't exist before you were born, and you ceased existing after you died. The only life you got was what you lived between those two points. And yet, Ai had been so alive, so full of personality and vitality, that the idea of him simply being gone wouldn't fit in Yusaku's head.
And so he wandered the world, looking for something he didn't think existed. Perhaps it was only that instinct that drove people to check the same pocket again and again in search of their missing keys. Perhaps he simply wouldn't believe Ai was truly gone until he had looked over every inch of the Link VRAINS. Maybe it was just because if there was any trace at all left of him, even the tiniest bit of data, it would be here. Maybe he had just seen and played too many video games. After all, in a game, if your character died, you simply started the game over and there they would be, good as new, and what was Ai but a very well developed character in the most complex game in the world? No matter what the cause, Yusaku found that he could not rest. He stayed in the Link VRAINS until the demands of his body forced him back into the real world, where he would eat and perhaps sleep a while, and then dive back into his search again. Sometimes he would think about giving up, scaling back, or at least finding something else to do in the virtual world besides roam around aimlessly, but so far no possibilities had presented themselves that could distract him from his search.
He was just wondering where he could go now, when he became aware of a soft sound. It took him a few more seconds to realize that it was coming from his Duel Disk, and that the sound was that of an incoming message.
That was a conundrum. On the one hand, Yusaku wasn't sure he wanted to talk to anyone. He couldn't think of anything to talk about. It had been weeks since any of his friends had tried to reach out to him. On the other hand, if someone was trying to get in touch with him now, it might mean that something important, even urgent, had come up, and that he would be sorry if he deleted the message unread. A stubborn part of him insisted that with Ai dead, what else really mattered? He squashed the thought. He would still be sorry if something dire happened to one of his other friends. After hesitating a while longer, he opened the message.
A small hologram appeared. Ryoken was looking at him with a solemn, even slightly worried expression.
"I apologize for intruding on your solitude," he said. "But you did charge me to keep watch over the virtual world, and I have been endeavoring to live up to your expectations. I considered not telling you about this, but on balance I felt that while you might resent my intruding for no reason if it turns out my hunch is incorrect, you would be even more unhappy if I was right and didn't tell you." He closed his eyes a moment, gathering his thoughts, or perhaps, gathering his courage. "The truth is, Fujiki, that during our routine sweep of the Link VRAINS, my team and I have located several... anomalies, about a dozen in all, scattered throughout the network. Their placement is apparently random, and they do not appear to be having any adverse affect on the system, but all the same, our analysis of them has been... somewhat contradictory. We cannot confirm for certain where they came from or why they are here, but my feeling is that they were deliberately placed in the network for some definite purpose, but the initial conclusions we drew from our analysis were so unlikely that we hesitate to trust them. To that end, I will be delivering a copy of our findings to your friend Kusanagi. They will arrive in his mailbox exactly two hours from the moment you finish listening to this recording. That should be enough time for you to decide if you want to be involved. If you do not, then I apologize for disturbing you once more and send you my regards. End message."
The hologram blinked off. Yusaku stared at the empty space where it had been. What had he meant by "unlikely" and "contradictory"? Just what had he and his friends found, anyway, and why couldn't he just come out and say it? For a moment, Yusaku wondered if this as all just some very complicated ploy to draw him out of his self-imposed isolation. He quickly dismissed that notion, however. Some of his other friends might resort to such a scheme, but Yusaku couldn't see Ryoken doing that sort of thing. He understood grief very well, and knew it wasn't something that would just go away if you found the right zany plot, as though the world were some sort of sitcom.
All of which suggested that there really was something going on, and that it was serious enough that Ryoken had decided that not only did he need Kusanagi's help, but that he ought to invite Yusaku as well. The more Yusaku thought about it, the more he felt that Ryoken had probably made the right choice in telling him. If something was happening to the Link VRAINS again, he wanted to know about it. More than that, he was growing weary of having no direction. He'd spent much of his life chasing after his goal of revenge on the person who had kidnapped him and put him through six months of hell, and after that, he'd had Ai and the VRIANS and all his friends to protect. Now he had nothing except an empty gulf inside, one that might only be filled by something that didn't exist anymore. Having a definite goal in mind would help. If nothing else, it would give him something else to think about.
Anyway, he told himself, I can always go back to doing this if nothing comes of it. Nothing says I have to stay.
No, there was nothing that would make him stay, not if he decided that he really didn't want to. He was aware, however, that just now, something was definitely saying that he had to go back.
Nothing had changed.
That was Yusaku's first impression - that in all the months that he'd been away, nothing at the Den City center had changed. There were the same people milling around, the same video screens showing the latest news or interesting duels in progress, the same street vendors hawking their wares. There, too, was Kusanagi's hot dog truck, just as it had been when Yusaku had left it. Only not exactly the same, he realized, because a young man was standing amid the little tables taking orders. He hadn't been a fixture of the place the last time Yusaku had been there, but Yusaku was still cheered to see him. Yusaku adjusted his hoodie and pushed his sunglasses up, not wanting to be recognized just yet, and strolled over to the seating area.
"Hello!" said Jin brightly, as he spotted a new customer approaching. "Welcome! What can I get for you today?"
"I'd like a large coffee and a hot dog, please," said Yusaku, sliding into a chair. "Kusanagi knows how I like them."
"Oh, are you a friend of his?" asked Jin. Well, Yusaku couldn't blame him. The two of them hadn't really had a lot of chances to get to know each other, between one thing and another, before Yusaku had set out on his endless journey.
"Yes, I'm an old friend," Yusaku assured him, mustering up a small smile. "Let him know I'm here, would you ?"
"Okay!" said Jin brightly. He bounced his way back over to the truck, where Kusanagi had been deeply involved in piling condiments on hot dogs. Business seemed to be going well. "Hey, Big Brother! There's a guy here who says he knows you - see, the one in the hoodie!"
"Huh?" Kusanagi looked up, scanned the customers, and caught sight of Yusaku. Yusaku gave him a sheepish smile and a small wave. Kusanagi yelped, dropped the ketchup bottle he'd been holding, and rushed out of the truck.
"Yusaku!" he exclaimed. He flung his arms around his old friend and gently knuckled the side of Yusaku's head. "Where the hell have you been? We've all been worried sick about you, and here you are, just walking back into the place like nothing ever happened." His expression mellowed into a warm smile. "It sure is great to see you again."
"It feels good to be back," said Yusaku. That wasn't entirely a lie. It was good to be back in the place that felt so familiar to him. He might not know what he was doing there or whether he would stay, but right now, in this moment, things felt as close to all right as they had in a long time.
"So why now?" Kusanagi asked. "Not that I'm complaining or anything, but first you disappear without a word, you don't contact any of us for ages, and now you just show up with no warning. Did you just get tired of whatever you were doing, or...?"
"Ryoken contacted me," he said.
A slight crease appeared on Kusanagi's brow. "Something's wrong?"
"I'm not sure," Yusaku said. "I don't think so. At least, he didn't seem sure that something was wrong. He only told me that he'd found something he didn't understand, something that didn't make sense somehow, and he wanted our help in untangling it."
"A puzzle," said Kusanagi. he rolled the word across his tongue as though it were a new soft drink he was thinking of adding to his menu. "I think I could just about stand solving a puzzle, as long as it doesn't lead to anything too dramatic. I'm not sure how much more drama I can stand." Something in his eyes belied his statement, though. Perhaps he had gotten used to drama, just as Yusaku had, and in his own way was eager for another adventure.
"Well, we'll know for sure in another..." Yusaku glanced at the time. "Twenty five minutes, give or take."
"Time enough to eat a hot dog, anyway," said Kusanagi. "On the house, of course."
Yusaku smiled. "I thought it was only free coffee you were giving me."
"Call it a one-off," Kusanagi replied. He was already heading back into the truck to start tossing food on the grill. "Jin, would you please pour Yusaku here a large coffee? Dark roast, one sugar, no cream."
"You got it," said Jin cheerfully. He peered at Yusaku with interest. "So you're brother's friend? He talks about you all the time."
"That's right," said Yusaku. "I'm glad to see you doing so well. He always talked to me about you, too."
Jin grinned and bounded off to collect the coffee.
A few minutes later, Yusaku was finishing off the last of his coffee when he once again heard the sound of an incoming message. He quietly got up, tossed the empty coffee cup and hot dog wrapper into the trash, and sidled into Kusanagi's truck. Kusanagi, who had gotten the alert as well, was calmly hanging up the "Closed for now - come back soon!" sign and pulling down the shutters.
"Jin," he said, "my friend and I have some catching up to do. Why don't you go get yourself an ice cream or something? You can hand out some flyers while you're out."
"Okay!" said Jin agreeably. Clearly the idea of ice cream enticed him more than trying to listen in on a conversation with a stranger. He grabbed a stack of advertising flyers and scuttled off.
"You aren't worried about him?" Yusaku asked.
Kusanagi shrugged. "A little, sure, but I tell myself I can't spend the rest of my life breathing down his back waiting for another disaster. That isn't what I rescued him for. I did it because I want him to have a happy, normal life, and sometimes that means letting him do his own thing."
Yusaku nodded his understanding. "In that case, let's see how much of this puzzle we can unravel before he gets back."
Kusanagi downloaded the file Ryoken had sent him and loaded it up on the main computer. Yusaku peered over his shoulder and tried not to fidget as strings of data rolled across the screen.
"Hmm," said Kusanagi. "Well, I see why this might have caught Ryoken's attention." He tapped a few keys, focusing in on a string of data that did not, at first glance, look much different from those surrounding it.
"Some sort of glitch?" Yusaku guessed. "A flaw in the system somewhere?"
"No, I don't think it's that," said Kusanagi.
Yusaku didn't, either, not really. Even if his conscious mind hadn't caught up yet, his gut was already telling him that there was something almost familiar about what he was seeing, even if it didn't make sense yet.
Kusanagi tapped a few more keys and then pointed at the screen. "Okay, from what I'm getting, about a dozen of these anomalies have appeared around the Link VRAINS. Ryoken left a nice map showing where all of them were, and they're all over the place. There's no rhyme or reason to them, except that they were mostly places Ryoken and his gang were already keeping a close eye on because they're places where the security isn't as robust as it is in other places. In other words, someone has been sneaking these whatever-they-ares into any area they can reach without getting caught and stopped. Look here - here's another set of records showing that something tried to infiltrate the system in a few more places and got stopped each time. The timestamps show that most of the attempts that were foiled happened before the successful attempts."
"Someone is learning," Yusaku observed.
"That's what it looks like," Kusanagi agreed. "Someone really wanted to get these data packets where someone could find them. And they are data packets. They aren't any sort of executable programs. They're more like text files, but they aren't in any standard format."
To prove his point, he opened one on a different screen. Yusaku stared at it, still fighting that odd sense of familiarity.
"So they aren't some kind of virus," he said. "Perhaps they're some sort of message, then."
"That's as good a guess as any," said Kusanagi. "Although why they would want to send a message this hard to decode is beyond me. Maybe it's some sort of promotion? Someone's idea of a treasure hunt, maybe. The formatting makes it look a bit like a list, don't you think?"
"Hmm,” said Yusaku. "Let me have the keyboard for a minute."
Kusanagi slid his chair back. "Knock yourself out."
Yusaku moved his chair to fill the vacant space and began to type - not on anything to do with the strange new files, but instead searching through folders he was sure would still be there. He couldn't imagine Kusanagi would have deleted them. Sure enough, he found what he was looking for and selected a document more or less at random. He moved the window so that it rested next to one of the new anomalies. Then he simply sat back, waiting for Kusanagi's reaction.
"Well, I'll be damned,” Kusanagi murmured.
"It's Ignis code," said Yusaku, with a calmness that he did not feel. "How can it be Ignis code? Only they understood it, and all of them are gone."
"Maybe it's a leftover," Kusanagi suggested. "Some nasty little surprise left by Lightning, or something like that."
"It can't be," said Yusaku. "Look at the timestamps. The first one appeared about two weeks ago. The most recent was this morning. All of this is new data, fresh from the source."
"Then that means," said Kusanagi slowly, "that either there's another Ignis out there that no one knew about, or..."
Or at least one of them isn't as gone as we thought they were, Yusaku thought.
The idea made him shaky. His treacherous heart was telling him that this, at last, was what he had been searching for - definitive proof that Ai was still alive somewhere. His more rational mind told him that he could not rule out other possibilities. Perhaps someone at SOL Tech had learned to use the Ignis code after studying poor Earth. Perhaps there were other Ignis out there that even Ai and his friends had been ignorant of. Perhaps Kusanagi was right and this was some trick of Lightning's or one of the other Ignis, something left on a time delay to go off when no one was expecting it. Even if one of the Ignis had somehow survived, that didn't mean it had to be Ai. He warned himself not to get his hopes up.
"We need to try decoding it," Yusaku said. "It could be important, whatever it is."
Kusanagi ran a hand through his hair. "It's not easy, decoding their lingo. Time was, I'd have said it was impossible. Fortunately, I've got a bit of an edge there."
"How so?" Yusaku asked.
"Well, your pal Ai wasn't the best housekeeper, and he didn't always leave his files as protected as he should have. He tended to store stuff on my computers pretty freely, stashed in folders named things like, 'Unimportant stuff' or "Boring junk”, presumably to discourage me from trying to read them. The upshot is that I have enough of his files and know enough about what they contain that I've been able to work out a sort of rudimentary decoder. It isn't perfectly accurate, and it takes a long time to run, but the more material I add to it the more accurate it gets." He grinned, a bit sheepishly. "While you were away, I spent a lot of time chatting with Ema and Zaizen. Both of them have been helping me gather whatever scraps of Ignis code they can to add to my decoding project."
"So, given enough time, you can probably decode this?" Yusaku asked.
Kusanagi nodded. "Our Ignis friends weren't kidding when they said the language they use among themselves is unbelievably complicated. For a small file like this, my guess is that it will take somewhere between twenty-four and forty-eight hours to work out a viable translation."
"Good," said Yusaku.
"Good?" Kusanagi repeated.
"Yes," said Yusaku. "That will give us time to send for Takeru. He's going to want to hear about this."
Kusanagi grinned. "Time to get the old gang back together again, eh?"
Yusaku nodded. For better or for worse, it looked like it was time for him to rejoin the human race.
Yusaku stood waiting at the train station. It was a drizzly day, cold and windy, and he was bundled up in his warmest coat and a long knit scarf. He was glad of the excuse for anonymity. He might have resigned himself to hanging out with his friends again - might have even been happy about it - but he wasn't ready to deal with, say, being recognized by someone from his school.
But there was at lest one person he was happy to see today. The most recent train had just disgorged a lot of people out doing Christmas shopping in the big city, a certain number of business travelers, and one teenaged boy with a duffel bag over his shoulder and a wide grin on his face.
"Yusaku! Boy, am I glad to see you!" he said, bounding over to greet his friend. Takeru pulled him into a quick hug before standing back to get a look at him. "You've been spending way too much time indoors. You need to come out and visit me sometime soon. I'll make sure you get some fresh air and sunshine."
"I'm not very good at sunshine," said Yusaku, smiling, "but I'm gald to see you anyway."
He was, too. There was just something about Takeru that always made him want to smile. He'd forgotten how good it was to be in the company of someone so uncomplicated.
"I'm glad you guys sent for me," Takeru replied. "Trouble just never stops popping up, does it?" His wide grin suggested that if there was trouble he was looking forward to getting to grips with it.
"We don't know for sure that it's trouble," said Yusaku. "It might just be... well, general weirdness. But we knew you'd want to be part of it, whatever it was."
Because if there was anyone else in the world, Yusaku thought, who wanted to find a living Ignis as much as Yusaku did, it was probably Takeru. Jin was better off without Lightning in his life, Spectre's feelings about Earth were ambivalent at best, Windy's Original was beyond caring about him one way or another, and Aoi had barely had time to get to know Aqua, but Takeru had a bond with Flame that was probably every bit at as strong as the one Yusaku had with Ai.
"Come on," he said aloud. "Kusanagi's parked his truck outside the station."
Sure enough, Kusanagi was doing a brisk business dishing out hot food and steaming coffee to cold, tired travelers. When he saw Takeru, though, he looked up from his work to grin broadly.
"The gang's all here," he said. "Come in and see what I've found."
Once he'd taken them aboard, he put up his closed sign once more and pulled the shutters down. The two boys sat sipping hot coffee while Kusanagi proudly displayed the fruits of his labors.
"I have a translation," he said. "I don't know just how accurate it is. It sure looks weird, anyway, but I tried fine-tuning my decoder software a few different ways and it always came out more or less like this. It looks like gibberish to me, but maybe you two can make something of it."
He brought something up on a screen, then moved aside so that Yusaku and Takeru could have a clear view. Both of them moved in for a closer look.
It wasn't exactly gibberish, Yusaku thought, but it was the next best thing. Nonsense was what it was, decipherable but with no apparent logic. It appeared to be a list of instructions - very precise instructions meant to be followed inside the Link VRAINS, but what they could possibly hope to accomplish was a mystery. They said, for example, to open and close a specific door in a specific building exactly sixteen times, to buy items worth exactly five hundred twenty-five yen at a certain shop and then dispose of them in a certain wastebasket, to go to a desert and move a specific rock from one point to another. The list made it very clear that all of these steps needed to be followed in a specific order, and within a specific time frame. There was no indication as to what doing all this was supposed to achieve, and Yusaku couldn't begin to guess.
"It's like some sort of video game quest," Yusaku observed. He was not a hardcore gamer, but he was vaguely aware that there were games where you needed, for example, to move a specific rock or walk five times around a specific tree in order to open a secret portal or reveal a hidden treasure.
"Funny sort of quest," said Kusanagi. "Anyway, when SOL hides that sort of thing in their game, they tend to make it a little more obvious. Remember last year, when they were giving away packs of rare cards and new Duel Disks to anyone who could make it through their secret dungeon? I solved all their riddles in ten minutes flat."
"Did you win any prizes?" asked Takeru, briefly distracted.
"Some," said Kusanagi. "I gave them to Jin."
"I don't think this is something SOL is doing, though," said Takeru, peering thoughtfully at the list. "I mean, Aoi and her brother would have told us if they were."
"And they wouldn't have used Ignis code in any case," said Yusaku. "They'd know how we'd feel about it. Anyway, no one could have deciphered this but us and maybe the Knights of Hanoi."
"So maybe this is meant as a message just for the people who know about Ignis," said Kusanagi. "Us, the Knights, and maybe SOL."
"It really does remind me of a video game, though," said Takeru. He sat up suddenly and snapped his fingers. "Hey, that's an idea!"
"What is?" Yusaku asked.
"You know anything about classic video games?" Takeru replied.
Yusaku blinked. "You mean like Space Invaders and Pac-Man and all that?"
"Kind of," said Takeru. "Maybe more like Mario Brothers. Anyway, the point is, there are these guys who can reprogram a video game on the fly using special equipment. I think it's called RAM hacking or something? I'm not the computer whiz you guys are, so I might be getting some of this wrong., but I think the way it works is that during the course of a game, the computer saves certain bits of data, like remembering that you squished a certain enemy or dropped an item in a certain place. If you can arrange exactly the right bits of data in its memory, you can write a new program that the computer will follow. You have to do it with absolutely perfect timing, which is why you need the special equipment, but it's all doing random stuff like jumping at exactly the right instant while holding a turtle shell and then grabbing the third, seventh, and nineteenth coin but not any of the others. Weird stuff like that."
"Weird stuff like this, you mean," said Yusaku. "Do you think it's really possible to reprogram the Link VRAINs doing something like this?"
"Theoretically," said Kusanagi. "I mean, the principle is the same. In some ways, it might even be easier with the Link VRAINS system than it would be with a normal game. The sheer size of it means that the system that clears out unnecessary data from the system periodically takes hours to run. If you did the right actions fast enough in just the right places, you might just accomplish something. That's in theory. In practice, the complexity of the system, with so much happening so unpredictably in so many places, would make it nearly impossible. No human could work out how do it."
Yusaku read the implication. "But an Ignis might?"
"It's not unthinkable," said Kusanagi. "If one had enough time and a reason to do it this way instead of just creating whatever it was they wanted out of raw data..."
"That is kind of weird, now that you mention it," said Takeru. "Even if you could reprogram a computer this way, why bother? Seems like a lot of work."
"Maybe," said Yusaku thoughtfully. "But it's stealthy. From the outside, it wouldn't look like someone was hacking the system. It would be indistinguishable from someone just playing the game as usual. Whoever sent this message wants to do something without drawing attention to themselves."
"Well, if I were an Ignis, I don't think I'd want to draw attention to myself," said Takeru. "Ryoken and his pals are still out there watching everything. They gave this to us because they didn't understand it, but if they saw an Ignis trying to reprogram the VRAINS, I don't think they'd bother with us at all. They'd just shut it down and get on with their day."
"Maybe," said Yusaku. Privately, he thought that Ryoken wasn't as unforgiving as all that. He was certain that he'd gotten this message because Ryoken was, on some level, his friend, and he understood just how much Yusaku needed a sliver of hope. "Either way, the real question is, are we going to actually do this?"
"There's no predicting what it will do," said Kusanagi. "I mean, maybe if I had ten years to run models, and maybe if Zaizen was nice enough to let me have all his private data on how the VRAINS actually works, I might be able to hazard a guess. As it is, we're flying blind."
"I say we go for it," said Takeru. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, that's my philosophy."
"Anything accomplished by a method like this is bound to be pretty crude," Yusaku mused. "All this effort can’t amount to more than a few lines of code. Whatever is going to happen if we pull it off, I doubt it will be something so complex that we can't put a stop to it."
"I dunno," said Kusanagi. "I mean, 'wipe all the files and shut down' doesn't take a lot of code to say."
"But that would take a long time to execute, for something the size of Link VRAINS," Yusaku replied. "We can let Zaizen know that we're about to try something so he can have someone standing by, just in case."
Kusanagi smiled. "You really want to do this, don't you?"
"I really do," said Yusaku. "All this time, I'd hoped that there was some way to bring Ai and Flame and all the rest back. If this will help - if it will even give us some clue that it's possible - then I want to try it."
"Well," said Kusanagi, looking back at the screen, "this is a pretty long list. It looks like if we're going to get it all done in time, we're going to have to call in some friends."
Yusaku smiled a little, feeling a sense of inevitability creeping over him.
“It’s a good thing we have a lot of friends, then,” he said.