Page 36 of Pandion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s it still alive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought I told you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kagesawa glanced at Harumine but said nothing.

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

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