And again, as usual, sorry for the wait. Heading back to college sort of ended up dominating my time and still pretty much is, but I did manage to squeeze this out so...be happy!
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Chapter 5
The history of Helios City stretches back over five-hundred years to the great collapse of the twenty-first century. Just as the world was starting to collect itself after the downfall of the Pokémon League, the minds of industrialists were already starting to turn. Helios Island was, at the time, an unnamed and lowly populated island, with its sole occupants being a handful of native tribes. To respect the native's rights and wishes of not being disturbed, the Pokémon League had declared the island off-limits to the general population. After the League's collapse, however, nothing was keeping back the companies who saw the island as a prime location to build up their businesses.
Helios' early years were rough, with no central government keeping the rising numbers of newcomers in line. Without any zoning laws to regulate where buildings could be constructed companies built anywhere they saw fit, including right on top of many of the small villages across the island. The vast tracts of forests covering the island were slowly uprooted while the locals were given the chance to work for the companies at wages barely high enough to sustain a living, the alternative being exportation. Since construction began before the widespread adaptation of Pokémon translators, the vast population of wild Pokémon suffered an even worse fate. Treated like lowly animals, entire populations of Pokémon across the island were hunted to extinction. Only after several years did activist organizations step in and work to humanely repopulate the remaining Pokémon on the island, although by then they were only able to save a fraction of the island's original population.
As stability returned to the world, so did stability come to Helios Island. With companies came the need for employees, and with employees came the demand for a higher quality of life than what had so far been the standard on Helios. Striving to bring law and order, a volunteer police force was enacted from which the seeds of government were planted. In time, the once lawless island had begun to turn around and had even been enacted as its own autonomous city-state, and as it did so more people were attracted to Helios and the promise of easy jobs. Years passed and Helios grew into a sizable town fringed by industrial complexes, and from there into a city with newly developed low-pollution factories and underground facilities allowing the expansion of industry into the heart of the island.
The fact that Helios is an island presented an issue several decades into the city's life, with immigration of both civilians and companies quickly eating up the available land. Construction contractors were left with only one choice: building upwards. Utilizing designs for new high-efficiency and capacity skyscrapers, older buildings were progressively demolished as the towers that so define Helios today were first constructed. While some of those towers were themselves later demolished for even higher capacity designs, a handful of the original Helios skyscrapers can still be seen in the older parts of the city.
As the focus of Helios turned to the skies, the ground on which the city had been build became neglected. Portions of the old buildings that had been partially demolished to clear room for skyscrapers still exist all over the city, scattered at the feet of towers like forgotten junk. Legally, these old ruins are property of whatever company owns the skyscraper that runs through the land below, with law enforcement presence in the ruins varying depending on the company's policies. While some companies go so far as to insist upon the arrest of trespassers in these ruins, others don't mind. This has led to an uprising of makeshift slums scattered in pockets around the city, clustering into areas where the poor can legally use the preexisting ruins as shelter. While these slums are technically still under the jurisdiction of Helios State Police, active patrols are so infrequent that they might as well be considered as lawless as the whole of Helios once was. It's advised that any visitor to Helios avoid such slums, or arrange for a police escort with HSP if a visit is required.
Excerpt from a report by the Helios City Tourism Board on the history of Helios and modern tourist attractions.
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Decay was all around. Everywhere Tashima looked he found the signs of Helios City's abandoned history. Zeta had led Tashima and Havoc several blocks from where they had met, traversing through century-old ruins to the one they now passed through. This wasn't like the other ruins though; the impoverished had claimed the crumbling remains of what Zeta asserted used to be a hospital for their own. As much as they tried, however, it was impossible to make a life down on the long-empty streets of Helios. Shelter was plentiful, however food and water were hard, if not near impossible, to come by. The malnourishment of the slum-dwellers was evident with a single glance.
As the group passed a doorway, a small kid poked his head out the door. His skin hung loose from his arms and legs, his chest seeming to have caved in with the ribcage visibly pressing against his taught flesh. Devoid of sustainable food, his body had begun eating itself, desperate for anything to keep it alive. Tashima paused and glanced down at the boy, who stared back up at him with longing, brilliantly blue eyes. Tashima couldn't help but wonder what that kid would give to trade places with him. Likely, his own life. Pulling an energy bar out of a pocket on the inside of his coat, Tashima tossed it at the boy. Caught by surprise the poor kid was hit in the head by it, but after recoiling he realized what had hit him. Eagerly he grabbed the energy bar off the ground, spinning around and running back through the doorway before anyone else could see what he had been given.
"You shouldn't do that," Zeta said, having seen Tashima give the food away.
"I have more." Tashima shrugged as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his pants. "Plus, I assume that if whoever you're leading us to truly are allies, they'll have food too."
"It's not that," Zeta scoffed, turning around and continuing to lead again as Tashima and Havoc followed. "The last thing we need is for them to mob us because they know we have food."
Tashima kept silent, looking over at Havoc to see how he was doing. He had been unusually quiet for the whole trip, which Tashima chalked up to the suppression collar he had to deal with for now. For hours now, Tashima had been trying to come up with something to say that would cheer the depressed Typhlosion up. Unfortunately he had had little luck. He understood what Havoc must have been going through; to him, losing the ability to conjure fire very well may have been as bad as when Tashima lost his arm and leg. Lifting his right arm out of the pocket it had been resting in, Tashima mindlessly gripped the upper part of his artificial left arm. Dimly, he was aware of its unnatural hardness, lacking the elasticity of true organic tissue. As he walked he could feel the same in his left leg as the prosthetic foot stepped ever so harder than his right did. He had gotten used to the replacement limbs over the years, and couldn't help but wonder if perhaps Havoc could adapt to losing his flames.
Still, if that collar can be removed somehow, it won't come to that.
Tashima suddenly found himself stopped again as he almost ran into Zeta. Returning to his senses, Tashima saw that another of the slum kids had appeared, this one seeming a little older than the last. Unlike the last, this one had eyes focused not on Tashima, but on Havoc. Glancing down at the kid's hands, Tashima then realized that he was holding an improvised knife, fashioned from a broken piece of steel pipe. The kid looked up at the Typhlosion with sharp eyes. His arm shook, yet the hand holding the weapon was steadfast. The one food source for most of the people in the slums was the wild Pokémon that ran around the streets; this kid must not have realized that Havoc wasn't one of those wild Pokémon. Or, he simply didn't care.
"See what I meant?" Zeta growled as he clenched his left fist together, the panel on the top of his arm sliding up and backwards as his own internally stored blade emerged. Stepping toward the boy, he thrust his arm forward, bringing the wedge-shaped blade underneath the boy's chin. Lifting the kid's head up to face him, Zeta growled and, in a demanding voice, boomed, "Get the
fuck out of here you little
shit and maybe I won't leave your corpse for the others to find. Maybe you wouldn't be as filling as my pal here, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind."
Hesitantly the boy took a few steps back, eyes wide as he dropped the improvised weapon before turning around and running off. Tashima narrowed his own eyes, biting his lip for a moment before breaking the awkward silence among the group. He wanted to tell Zeta off for being so cruel, but couldn't bring himself to do so. Instead he merely asked, "Are they really cannibals?"
Zeta seemed to understand that the question wasn't what Tashima was originally going to say, but answered it nonetheless. "When they need to be." The blade slid back into his arm, disappearing beneath the panel of synthetic flesh that sealed closed after it.
"They're this desperate, huh...?" Tashima murmured as they continued walking again, Havoc still showing no signs of emotion or other response to the situation.
It wasn't long before the group reached their destination, avoiding any more encounters with the slum-dwellers. Zeta ducked inside a door leading to a set of stairs that descended into the basement of the former hospital, motioning them along as he said, "This is it." Tashima glanced around as they emerged into the basement; the room was empty but with marks on the floor that left visible signs of where the building's backup power generators must have once sat before being salvaged by someone or another.
"Not much here," Tashima observed. He tensed up, the chance that this was a trap soaring once again.
Zeta ignored him and walked over to the far wall, stopping besides a slightly indented portion of the wall. A panel on the ceiling slid open as he approached, a full-body biometric scanner emerging above Zeta. A blue light washed over the man as the scanner verified his identity using a matrix of various biometric identifiers. Beeping in confirmation, the scanner deactivated and slid back into the ceiling as the indented wall slid open to reveal a concealed hallway. Zeta looked back over his shoulder at the other two, gesturing down the dimly lit passageway. "In here. We don't want the slum-dwellers wandering in and trying to steal anything."
"Then why'd you set up a base here?" Tashima asked as he hesitantly followed the relative stranger into the barely lit hallway. Everything was telling him that this was so wrong, that it was obviously a trap and Zeta was just going to mug him or something as soon as he had an opening. Still, having been exiled from CYPHER with them actively searching for them, he had few choices. Without the aerocar, his original plan of traveling to a friend's place to hide out and plan their next move was pretty much smashed. Public transportation was always a possibility of course; however, the prevalence of police surveillance in public areas meant any movement in public would be a very dangerous proposition. Movement over ground-level was the safest way to travel, but with Tashima's unfamiliarity of police patrolled areas, there was no telling when he and Havoc would again end up in the exact same situation Zeta had saved them from. Tashima had finally admitted that they were in a bit of a bind, and any chance of making allies was one he had to to take, despite the risks.
"
They didn't set anything up. It was already here. They just moved some equipment in," Zeta said, making sure to stress the fact that he had no involvement in whatever was going on.
Zeta stopped as he neared the end of the hallway, looking up at a camera attached to the wall. Pivoting down to look at him first, its lens automatically focusing, it then panned up to examine the two guests that had tagged along. "I see you brought them. Well done," A female voice said as a light attached to the camera turned on, illuminating Havoc as it looked over him. Also attached to the camera, a biometric scanner similar to the one out front activated and washed Havoc in a blue light from feet to head.
"What's going on?" Tashima asked, dropping his bad as he pushed back his coat and placed his hand on the grip of his gun, flicking open the latch that secured it in its holster. <Can you determine anything? It doesn't hurt, does it?> he meanwhile privately asked Havoc.
"You must be Tashima," the voice said, taking over from Zeta in the talking department. "Recently we learned that this Typhlosion, I guess you call him Havoc, underwent an integration procedure for a prototype of a cybernetic system called TRINITY. This scanner can't do much, but it looks as if our intel was right."
<No, nothing's abnormal...> Havoc said, sounding oddly tired. Perhaps it was just the stress of the day so far, which with the suppression collar had been noticeably worse for Havoc than Tashima. The young man didn't want to assume anything though. Before he could voice his concern, however, a cylindrical energy field suddenly shot down from hidden emitters on the ceiling, surrounding Havoc as the scanner shut off. The Typhlosion yelped in surprise and tried to push through the energy barrier, however it repulsed his efforts much like a kinetic barrier and left Havoc trapped inside the non-physical tube.
Having just about had it, Tashima quickly drew his gun and leveled it at Zeta's head. "All right, that's it! I think we'll be leaving now if you don't mind!" he yelled, aggravated.
His threat didn't really carry much weight however, as Zeta was quick to respond by pointing his left arm at Tashima. Not that threatening at first, the arm suddenly sprang open into two halves, hinging at his elbow. Extending forwards slightly as the arm opened up was the exposed barrel of some sort of gun, likely a plasma cannon since Zeta's two other weapons both used plasma as well. Neither person said anything, however Tashima figured it was pretty obvious he wasn't quite as committed to carrying out his threat as Zeta was.
"Relax, everyone," a new voice said, this one male. "I'm hacking directly into Havoc's organics so that I can access TRINITY; I'm not going to damage him. The connection between TRINITY and his cybernetics are purely one way as I'm sure he's probably noticed due to his inability to access it. His organics have a normal connection to TRINITY however, albeit one that was never meant to be used like this. Still, this is the only non-invasive way to gain access to the TRINITY subsystems."
"You can do that?" Tashima asked, unable to contain a hint of curiosity in his voice. The organic parts of living beings were in many ways similar to computers, and it was that similarity which allowed cybernetic connections to natural organics in the first place, but he had never heard of anyone trying to actually hack them.
"I told you, he's hardcore," Zeta said, his arm with its integral cannon remaining leveled at Tashima.
"Yes, I can," the hacker's voice said. "Problem is it's kind of uncomfortable, and I need the containment field so he can stay within the EM field I'm using to interface."
<This...feels weird...> Havoc grunted as he leaned against the containment field, his body convulsing in random places. Tashima figured that it was probably due to the unusual hack accidentally triggering nerves as the hacker worked his way to TRINITY.
"Why exactly do you need to do this in the first place?" Tashima asked, keeping his gun aimed at Zeta, not as if it would do any good. "I had thought we were supposed to be allies or something. Allies don't spring surprises like this on each other."
"We have reason to believe that there may be either a physical tracking device or piece of tracking code integrated with TRINITY," the female voice said again, her voice much more stern than the other's. "We want to neutralize that first before we meet further."
"A tracer?" Tashima questioned. "But while we were escaping, CYPHER infected our car with a tracking virus. Why would they need to do that if there's one in Havoc already?"
"Protocol," the woman's voice bluntly answered. "They likely infect any such vehicle used by fugitives automatically. Plus, it's probable that the existence of any tracker within TRINITY would be kept secret, even from security."
"Okay, I'm in now," the hacker's voice reported. "The discomfort should be subsiding. Just need to make a jammer to prevent any tracking signals from being broadcast and then we're good."
Glancing at Havoc, Tashima saw that he had calmed down, able to support himself again and with the convulsions gone. The Typhlosion nodded as he saw Tashima looking at him, as if to tell him that everything was okay now. Turning his attention back to Zeta, Tashima briefly thought for a moment before saying, "This standoff isn't doing anyone much good, is it?"
"I'll stand down if you do," Zeta grunted.
"I'd love to," Tashima said sarcastically as he relaxed and holstered his gun, powering it down in the process and picking up his bag from where he had set it. Just as he said he would Zeta also backed off, his arm snapping shut and returning to normal as he leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms across his chest.
"That's right guys, play nice," the hacker joked. "We're all rebels here, after all."
"Rebels? Is that what you guys are?" Tashima asked, the situation suddenly starting to come together.
Before he could get his answer, however, the male hacker suddenly spoke again. "And there we go. I had to use a generic jammer since I don't know how exactly any such tracker would work, but it's adequate for now."
"Can we get in than?" Zeta asked, evidently annoyed by being forced to wait outside as well.
No verbal answer came, however one wasn't really needed. As the containment field disappeared, seeming to pull up into the ceiling like a curtain made of pure light, the end of the hallway began to swing open at the same time. Accompanied by the distinct sound of rock grinding against rock, bright light poured through the opening as the room beyond was revealed. Standing amid that light, Tashima only able to make out their silhouettes at first as his eyes adjusted to the far brighter light, were the two people that had been talking to them over the intercom. One of them, the woman, stood with her arms crossed and a neutral, rather unreadable expression on her slowly appearing face. The other man had to be the hacker, standing more casually with arms in the pockets of his pants.
As Tashima began to be able to make out his face, he noticed that over his left ear was a small device, from which an eyepiece protruded in front of his left eye. As the group began to walk into the room, Havoc somewhat unsteady on his legs, the man reached up to the device over his ear and pressed a button. The eyepiece that had been covering his eye responded by flipping out parallel to the device it was connected to, meanwhile retracting along the set of rails that connected it to the device before finally rotating up to its standby position.
"Welcome to Icarus Base," the woman said. As Tashima's eyes finally adjusted to the light he could see her fully, noting her short dark hair that barely reached the collar of the jacket she wore over a rather tight white shirt. It was a military hairstyle, and not one generally in popular fashion. "I am the commander of this little group of rebels. You can call me Ava." When she noticed Tashima looking as if he expected more she elaborated with, "We don't share last names here."
"And you can call me Kyle," the man said, looking over the new arrivals with intense hazel-colored eyes. Tashima scanned over him just as intensely, noting that the device on the side of his head didn't seem to be the only computer he had attached to himself. A boxy attachment on his belt with interface ports spread over its surface and a glove on his left hand with a bulge on its back signified even more worn computers. "Sorry about all that out there, we simply need to maintain a standard of security."
"You're natural," Tashima commented as he concluded what the external computers meant. In the age of cybernetics, no one who could afford the now cheap procedures needed to use the external, wearable computers which had once been so popular. Nodding at Zeta who had walked off to a table in the corner of the room, Tashima continued, "And he's fully cybernetic: a cyborg. His movements are a tad too stiff, his steps just slightly too heavy."
Kyle raised an eyebrow. "Impressive. You're a good observer, we like that. Yes, I don't have a circuit in my body. Kind of ironic considering my current occupation as a hacker, but you can't beat the security it offers. I don't have to worry about my brain being fried, for one."
"But isn't it inconvenient to have to use all that external equipment?" Tashima asked. He had always been an advocate for new technology, and the thought of intentionally using such antiquated equipment was not only off-putting to him, but nonsensical as well.
Kyle merely shrugged, however. "I've never known any better, so to me it's just fine. Perhaps cybernetic implants are more efficient, but that doesn't matter to me."
Before the discussion could carry on further, though, Ava interrupted them. "You can talk about this latter. Before anything else, we've got to debrief our guests."
Debrief? Tashima thought as Ava turned around and began leading the group to a room off to the side.
It's not like we did this all for them or anything...
As Tashima and Havoc followed the two rebels, he was able to take in the room for the first time. It was pretty large for a foyer, hinting that the room was used for normal functions as needed. A table sat in the corner which Zeta now sat at, watching as the others left. In a nook next to the entrance door was a line of computers, old solid-display monitors, presumably LCD or LED, displaying what seemed to be video feeds from security cameras. On one of them, Tashima noticed a view of the hallway just outside, from the camera in the corner. Doors around the walls of the room lead off to other areas of the underground base, Ava and Kyle escorting the two CYPHER fugitives into one of those doors.
The two companions found themselves in a small meeting room, the table at its center seeming to have far too many chairs compared to how few people seemed to live here. Ava and Kyle sat down on one side of the rectangular table while Tashima and Havoc took seats across from them, Tashima throwing his bag to the ground before leaning forward with his arms crossed while the Typhlosion, barely managing to fit in his chair, sat up straight. <I think we should cooperate with them,> Tashima communicated with Havoc, avoiding looking at him so neither of their hosts would know anything was going on.
<Is that wise? Perhaps we should learn more about them first,> Havoc responded.
<Probably not, but it's just a feeling I have. Right now, gut feelings are all we have to go on.>
<You've been relying on those for quite a while...>
Tashima paused a moment, looking around the room to try to come up with something to break the awkward verbal silence. Noting the single, unshaded light-bulb that hung down from the middle of the ceiling by a thin wire Tashima remarked, "I thought you said this was a debriefing, not an interrogation."
"This base was abandoned possibly for centuries before we found it. The least of our concerns was improving the ambiance," Kyle said.
As if neither Tashima nor Kyle had said anything, Ava started with what she had so warmly called a debriefing. "Your names are Tashima Navara and Havoc, correct?"
<My gut feelings saved your life, remember? And both of ours, several times over,> Tashima quickly responded to Havoc's hanging statement, before answering Ava with, "That's right." Havoc nodded in agreement, the voice channel from him silent. "Not like it's hard to figure that out, just tune into any security bulletin channel and the wanted report will tell you as much."
Ava ignored that last part, continuing on with her questions. "You used to be employed by CYPHER, in what position and for how long?"
"I programmed. Code," Tashima said as if it should have been obvious. "Whatever they told me to do I did it and as much as I wanted to, I never had the chance to ask questions. I've been there for probably ten years or more now."
"And how were you hired?"
"I wasn't," Tashima grunted, narrowing his eyes. Ava's blank expression didn't tell him much, but the way Kyle slightly nodded his head told Tashima they already knew his background. "After my left arm and leg were burnt to a crisp and amputated I needed prosthetics. I had wasted all the money I had saved up on a ticket to the colonies, but of course I never got there. My money was refunded, but then I had to spend it all on the hospital bill, those greedy bastards. There was no way I was living my life as a handicap, so when a CYPHER recruiter approached me I had little choice but to give in to their thinly veiled slavery."
"A life contract?" Ava asked, wanting elaboration.
"Of course. They never even say that much though, instead only saying you have to work there until you can pay off the prosthetics. Hell if that's going to happen. They pay you minimal wage and supply only the basic utilities. Everything else it takes to live I've had to pay for myself; it's as if they might as well not even pay us! If it was just the basic arm and leg I could maybe afford to pay them off in another few years, but due to the occupation they chose to put me into I had to get this whole suite of cybernetic implants. I'm not complaining of course, but when you consider that the cyberbrain alone costs more than both arm and leg put together there's no way in hell I'd be able to get out of there anytime short of my fortieth birthday, and by then what's the point when I've already wasted half my life." Tashima was ranting, the edge of anger in his voice rising. Anger would only work against Ava however, so she moved to a different topic.
"Through our time observing your actions, you have displayed an aptitude for breaking security systems," Ava began saying.
"Hacking," Tashima clarified. Before Ava could actually ask her question he went on to explain himself. "I first learned how as something to pass time while at work. It was about the only thing I could do that wouldn't attract undue suspicion since to a casual glance it could look as if I was just programming normal code. Instead I was writing viruses and other attack programs. As CYPHER's own network was easiest for me to access it was what I learned on and tailored myself to. Unfortunately, as large as they may be when it gets down to it they still use some ancient security. While it was good for me to train on, don't expect me to be pulling off any fancy stunts on any sort of more modern system based around ICE barriers and barrier-based protocol in general."
"They're still using those old systems?" Kyle asked with a hint of surprise. "When I left I was under the impression that a major overhaul of their security would go through soon after. The damage I inflicted to them during my own escape should have only hastened the switch to more secure systems..." Crossing his arms, he tilted his chair back onto just two legs and stared up at the bleak ceiling. "Ah, just goes to show how the larger something is, the less secure it's bound to be."
Ava glanced at Kyle out of the corner of her eyes, slightly shaking her head. Returning her focus to Tashima, she continued. "I have one final thing to ask: how did you, or Havoc, manage to come into the possession of TRINITY?"
"If you've been watching us you should know that," Tashima quipped as he looked over to Havoc, watching him. He was sitting still, seeming to zone out. Tashima wondered if he was busy accessing the internet, or perhaps doing something a bit more discrete.
"Humor me," Ava said, as blank and unfriendly as ever.
"It started with a friend," Tashima began with. "Namely, it started with the murder of a friend. She, Hali, was also an employee of CYPHER, involved with network-based reconnaissance and corporate espionage. When I first met her she was a genius, one of the best in her field. However something must have gotten to her, as over the years she began to lose her grip on reality. She became sullen and withdrawn, and if it wasn't for the support of her friend and roommate, a Gardevoir named Fae, she probably would have completely lost it. I had always thought she had found something, but she wouldn't speak a word of it to anyone but Fae. About a month ago she called us over and we found out Fae had been taken by CYPHER; apparently they finally found out she had discovered something.
"Owing to our eternal bad luck, CYPHER chose that moment to strike against Hali herself. I still don't know why they had waited, but my best guess is that they were waiting for her to expose anyone else she had told the secret to so they could net in both groups at once. We just happened to be those people. We managed to get away without having our identities detected, but Hali wasn't so lucky. I can only assume she died in the raid of her house. However, she had managed to tell us one word about what she had found: TRINITY.
"Despite all our best efforts we couldn't discover anything about TRINITY on CYPHER's publicly accessible network. Even the internal servers I could access turned up nothing. Knowing that we had to do something, I realized I simply needed a closer access point to their private network, one that would connect me directly to their mainframe."
"The Mainframe Access Chambers?" Kyle asked suddenly, his chair dropping to the floor as he slammed his palms down on the table.
"Well yeah," Tashima said nervously, cringing a little at the oddly furious look Kyle had in his eyes.
"Impossible," he growled. "
I designed their security. Even if they lack barriers in anything else in that building, I designed the MACs with a multilayer chimera-hybrid barrier defense grid. It's got it all, ICE barriers in the first five levels, a mix of counters and ICE following those for ten layers, and then a whole fifty layers of both chimera and hybrid barriers I myself designed. I even tried breaking it after I finished it. I couldn't. Hell, I leaked remote access to some people I know and they couldn't either. There is no way in hell you got inside one of those."
"Well...I did?" Tashima reflexively pushed his chair back some, afraid Kyle would leap over the table and strangle him any moment now for the blasphemous act he had supposedly committed.
"Bullshit," Kyle spat. "The only way you could have gotten in there is if for some godforsaken reason they had downgraded their security. I could understand being suspicious of my work after I left, but it would actually be easier just to verify that my security grids were safe rather than come up with whole new ones."
"Maybe they did downgrade the security on the MACs," Havoc suddenly said. Tashima was at first surprised he had spoken using his natural voice, but then realized that it must be due to Kyle. While it was a near given his external computer had a translator, there was no guarantee it would be able to receive wireless communications. "Remember our discussion earlier before the chase?" he directed to Tashima. "Everything was too easy. It was like they were playing us, guiding us along. Perhaps they intended for you to hack into that MAC and find the information you did, the stuff about TRINITY."
Ava's eyes perked up at that, she no doubt having been annoyed at the derailing from the original topic that Kyle had caused. "You have actual information on it as well?"
"I thought you knew everything we were doing," Tashima said dryly.
"We only found out about you during your break-in to rescue Havoc," Ava said, answering something for once. "For all events before that we could only gather what CYPHER had stored on you two, which wasn't much. What we did find, namely that Havoc had undergone TRINITY implementation, was what drew our attention to you."
Accepting the explanation, Tashima pulled an external storage unit out from one of his coat's pockets, sitting the slim, featureless rectangle down on the table. Reaching up his left sleeve, he grasped one of his interface cables and extended it from its socket. Different from the other cables, the plug on the end of this cable had a flat surface, which Tashima pressed against a circular outline on the storage unit's surface. The cable adhering to the device magnetically, Tashima neurally accessed the file he had recovered and copied it over. Disconnecting his cable from the ESU, he pushed it across the table to Kyle.
"Don't trust wireless transfers?" Kyle remarked as he picked the storage unit up, inserting it into a slot on the waistband component of his computer setup.
"Not with people I don't know yet," Tashima shrugged.
Kyle turned his left palm up to face him, flexing the fingers of his hand. Holographic projectors in the tips of the glove he wore activated in response to the movement, a circular display appearing over the palm of his hand. Interacting with the display by touching through the image it projected, Kyle copied the file over to his own system from the storage unit before opening it, scanning through its contents briefly. "You're going to love this, I can just tell," he remarked to Ava as he flexed his hand again to turn off the display, ejecting the ESU and sliding it back to Tashima. "You were right in trusting them."
"I would appreciate it if you proved that
we were right in trusting
you," Tashima said as he picked the storage unit off the table and tucked it into his coat again, crossing his arms as he leaned back. "I've told you everything I could. How about you return the favor."
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Continued in the next post...