Page 35 of Pandion

“I didn’t file for a removal!”

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“Well, I’m sorry I’m so useless!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did I say that?”

“I thought you were pretty clear about it.”

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

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

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

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

“No, it’s not,” Satoru said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kagesawa cursed.

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