Fox ran up the side of the wall, a spray of bullets impacting just behind him. He pushed off with his paws and did a backflip over the head of the agent chasing him.
It could be Seven. The agent had a set of dual pistols, just like Seven’s. He was too far away, though, and not keeping still besides, so Fox couldn’t see his eyes. Not that he should believe Seven in saying Fox could use the colour of his eyes to set him apart. For all he knew, it was just another trick.
Where was Joanne when you needed her?
For that matter, he’d completely lost track of Mrs. Parks, Karl, and Simon as well. However, Joanne was the one he was working with, and who was supposed to have his back. He didn’t want to have to resort to hiding in the social platforms again, not when it put so many people who had nothing to do with this in danger.
Fox really wasn’t a fighter, and getting into a grapple with the agent shooting at him would certainly end with him losing. He’d already tried hiding in the part of the Cerebrum archive dedicated to foxes, but the agent hadn’t been fooled in the least. Even when Fox appeared as a fox, his ID tag was still visible.
And this morning had started out so well.
Joanne thought that because the first clue referred to herself, then the rest of the clues would also be meant for one of the other team members. Fox agreed it was likely, because King liked symmetry. He didn’t particularly care for the idea of King hiding a clue inside one of his memories, however. The clue for Joanne had revealed a memory of hers that seemed very personal, and he didn’t want to show anyone a memory like that. It was too intimate to share with people who didn’t know each other’s real faces.
That wasn’t entirely true, actually. Now he knew what Joanne’s real face looked like as well.
He’d never show anyone what she looked like, of course, but the fact remained that it left her more vulnerable. Karl had been right, after all. Anyone could be a spy, and even Fox could admit that he’d been playing the Devil’s advocate in that instance, when he’d argued that the government could find them without help.
He was a bit arrogant when it came to his abilities, so yes, he actually did think it unlikely there was no inside source. Of course, it was fully possible that whoever had provided the information had done so unknowingly or unwillingly.
It could even have been him.
Mistakes were made, and no one was infallible. As much as he liked his co-conspirators, he knew all of them had their own weaknesses. Some of them even had the same ones.
Fox had called another meeting, because this was their biggest breakthrough yet. When they started this, he didn’t think anyone had really believed in their ability to succeed. This would show them that there was hope, even if it was tenuous.
“Will you take us to see this memory?” Simon asked, once they had all assembled in Joanne’s domain.
This time, the library of her domain was vast, constructed of glass and concrete. It looked like a Roman coliseum. They all sat around a long, mahogany table, and overhead, the skylight showed an endless, blue afternoon. Secretly, Fox liked the other setting better, even if this one was grand and beautiful.
“If you would all like to see it, then yes,” Joanne said, not betraying any nervousness over showing everyone what had happened all that time ago.
“We’d also like your help with the clue,” Fox added. “We now think the next one refers to one of us, since this one was meant for Joanne.”
All at once, they were in Tokyo again. Fox had looked up some of the characters he’d seen last time, and could read some of the words flashing around him. This time, he ignored the conversation nearby as he tried to take in more of the details. The others were all interested in Joanne’s memory, and he could hear Simon gasp loudly in outrage as he realized what was going on.
The gasp was followed by several exclamations as Joanne’s memory presented itself in all its shining glory. He turned again, happy to join in now that the memory had finished its play-through. He’d seen it already, and to witness the private moment again made his insides twist uncomfortably.
“So, what do you think we’re supposed to do with it?” Mrs. Parks asked. “How do we return it to King now that we’ve found it?”
“I think it is safe here for now,” Joanne said. “I can’t give it back to King till we have his physical self anyway. Until then, we know where it is, and we have the next clue.”
“Oh, yes, show us the next clue!” Karl said in great excitement.
They melted back into the great library, ony this time seated next to an old-fashioned chalk board.
Then, the clue appeared in Joanne’s looping writing:
Born under the lily,
Another raised me,
I have an older brother,
Children of a common mother.
They all stared at it for a while, but Fox couldn’t find anything that suggested the clue referred to himself, so he looked at the rest of the group. It couldn’t be Joanne again, because that would break the pattern, if there was one. King wouldn’t make it something illogical like that, however. So that meant it was either Karl, Mrs. Parks, or Simon.
“Do you see anything?” he asked.
“I don’t see how it could be me,” Simon said. “I was not born under any kind of flower and I am an only child.”
“I have several older brothers, but it can’t be me,” Joanne added, obviously thinking along the same lines as Fox.
“I only have sisters,” Mrs. Parks chimed in.
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with real-life siblings,” Karl suggested. “It is likely a metaphor, such as the one found in the previous poem.”
Fox frowned and wrinkled his nose. “There’s something familiar about the wording, though. I can’t put my finger on the reason, but I’m sure I’ve read a similar passage somewhere.”
“Could it be for you, then?” Simon asked.
“It didn’t have anything to do with me, I’m pretty sure,” Fox said, with a shake of his head. “It just sounds like something I’ve heard before, and I just remember the wording.”
“Me, too, actually,” Joanne put in, then pursed her lips. “But only the first part. The second part doesn’t sound at all familiar.”
Fox considered this. “For me, it’s the last part that’s familiar. Why would the two of us find something familiar about two different halves of a poem?”
“How do you know it’s two halves?” asked Mrs. Parks. “It looks like one poem to me, kids.”
“The rhyme scheme,” Joanne and Fox murmured together.
“Right,” Simon said. “How can it rhyme for both of you?”
That stopped them immediately, and they both looked at Simon.
“The Cerebrum translates for all of us,” Karl said, with an excited twirl of mist. “Several of us speak a different language, so it stands to reason that it shouldn’t rhyme for all of us. It doesn’t for me—I speak German.”
“Nor for me,” Simon said, with an irritated swish of his cape. “Spanish.”
“I speak English,” Fox supplied.
“French,” Joanne added.
“So, the first half sounds familiar in French,” Fox mused. “And the second part in English. Joanne, do you think you could write it out and have the Cerebrum keep it untranslated, so we can all see it in French?”
Joanne nodded, and wrote out the first two lines again.
Né sous le lys, un autre m’ai levée.
“Le lys?” Fox said, aware that his pronunciation of French was terrible. “As in fleur de lys?”
“So that is the French fleur de lys, which makes the lily a symbol of France,” Simon leapt half out of his seat in excitement.
Karl’s misty form condensed slightly and swirled, betraying his state of emotion. “If the lily refers to France, then the other must be England, seeing as the second part is something that is familiar to an English speaker.”
“I would argue that it could be any English-speaking nation,” Fox said, resulting in a groan from everyone. “But for one thing. The symbol of England is the Rose.”
All eyes turned to Mrs. Parks, and her hand came up to cover where her mouth would be. “I do have children. However, the children in this clue are the children of nations and not of a person. It could be something else.”
“Still, it means the clue must refer to you in some way,” Joanne said. “It is too much of a coincidence that the symbol of England is the same as your alias.”
“The children of nations,” Simon said, deep in thought. “Must be colonies.”
“Past colonies of England and France are rather numerous,” Fox said and shrugged. “How many past colonies does France have, Joanne?”
“I did not memorize a list,” she replied, shooting him a quelling look.
“Right, a quick search through the archives of the Cerebrum should give us the answer.” Fox got to his feet. “I’d rather not accidentally miss something through guesswork, so let’s find them.”
It seemed so simple, right up until they’d encountered the agents.
Which brought him to the present moment, dodging gunshots firing behind him with no clue as to where his companions had gone.
If he recalled correctly, Mrs. Parks had been gleeful about the fact they were being attacked and said something about some sort of plan. At least, Simon and Karl had known what she meant, but he and Joanne were in the dark. That wasn’t fair. He and Joanne had been keeping everyone updated the entire time.
Joanne hadn’t really needed to know if they had a plan. She’d simply attacked them, leaving Fox to fend for himself. If he ended up shot or captured, it was in no way his fault.
The agent behind him wasn’t as good as Seven. It couldn’t be him, Fox thought. After all, Seven had managed to get inside his head the first time they’d met. Also, the lack of flirting was a bit of a giveaway, which was a really odd thing for him to be thinking about an enemy agent. He didn’t find Seven at all interesting or intriguing, not in the least bit. In fact, Seven was probably even more dangerous for being so different from all the others. And being in more danger was a big no-no in Fox’s books.
Yes, this was what he kept telling himself. But this didn’t stop him from wanting to get a look at this agent’s eyes, to see if they were blue. It wouldn’t really prove anything even if they were, but he still wanted to see if Seven had been telling the truth.
So what if he could tell Seven apart from the rest? All that meant was that he knew which specific agent was trying to kill him this week.
Stupid, stupid Fox. This wasn’t a game of how-close-can-you-get-to-the-agent; it was real. If he got caught, he’d be in serious, IRL trouble. Who knows what would happen to him, because no one heard from captured people ever again, at least not as their previous Cerebrum alias.
He kind of wished he was a fighter now, because all this running and avoiding annoyed him. The agent couldn’t quite catch him, but Fox still couldn’t shake him. It was a stalemate, of sorts.
No, he wasn’t a fighter, but it wasn’t that he was a pacifist either. He just couldn’t make his mind construct weapons that could cause a person harm or put out the mental force needed to land a blow behind his fists. He couldn’t imagine it hard enough to make it real. Joanne had tried to teach him, early on in their acquaintance, but it hadn’t taken. He thought it might be because he hated the concept of pain so much, that he had a mental aversion to it.
But right now, he really wanted to be able to land a hit, but knew that he couldn’t.
His talents lay in avoidance, making the eye look away from him, hiding in plain sight, changing shape to blend in. No one ever asked a fox to go into battle, but if they wanted a trick to fool the eye, they knew who to ask.
He jumped down a link, and the agent followed. Fox knew where they were going, but the agent wouldn’t, not unless he’d memorized the number codes for this particular link. If the agent stopped to check which link they were going down, then Fox would have a chance to slip away, so he was certain the agent didn’t know where they were headed.
They emerged into VidSkid, a place where people played and replayed clips from popular programs or music holos. There were news channels, broadcasting groups, and millions of individual accounts recording and uploading.
However, Fox hadn’t jumped to the main platform; he’d leapt directly down a link straight to the content. The VidSkid showed everything in 3D, putting the individual watching right into the action.
It wasn’t so bad if one was expecting the jump, but for someone going in blind, it could be quite alarming. Sometimes users would link to VidSkid as a joke to scare people, or to Rick Roll them. It was meant to be funny, but Fox was using mindnet culture against his pursuer to escape him.
Fox had jumped straight into the climax of a horror movie, in which “the big bad” was doing something horrible and bloody to one of the main characters. He knew to expect the crimson arc of blood, but the agent behind him cried out, automatically ducked, and rolled out of the way. Fox went to stand among the images of the other characters and watched as the agent figured out what had happened.
Fox jumped down a few more similarly gruesome links, just to be sure he’d lost the agent. Fox thought he’d lost him at the first jump, but who knew if there were more agents waiting back where he’d left everyone else.
No one was there, friend or foe. Fox took it upon himself to quickly scan the archives for the information required to solve the next clue. It didn’t take long to find at all, and he frowned. It was surely a coincidence that the answer to the clue was the same country in which his body was currently located.
Could King have made it all add up so neatly?
There was nothing to do but return to the sector where his body was linked in and leave the Cerebrum. He didn’t know where anyone was, so it was useless to wait around. He just hoped they would message him once they were free to do so, and that he’d be able to share his latest news.
* * * *
Seven turned around and around, but no matter which way he looked, there were more of them. He was completely surrounded, and all the other agents as well. He pulled out his dual pistols and shot at them. They didn’t even try to dodge, just floated there placidly, seemingly unaffected.
They were illusions. But that didn’t help matters much, because his quarry looked exactly like every duplicate. How she had managed to create such convincing doubles was something he didn’t have time to fathom, but it was undoubtedly impressive.
Dozens upon dozens of white-robed women walled him in on all sides, and emitted light from every angle. Thankfully, his goggles deflected it, but it was extremely disconcerting to be presented with so many enemies that looked exactly the same.
Being confronted with agents who looked the same must be equally disconcerting. The doubles were all shifting, so he couldn’t keep track of all of them. The real revolutionary out there could be blending in, or she could have left, and it was impossible to tell which. His only plan was to keep shooting until one of them reacted.
To Seven’s left, Eighty-Eight made a gurgling noise. Thousands of ants crawled up Eighty-Eight’s legs, so he appeared to be sinking into them, like drowning in liquid. The ants were a vivid red, and they were writhing about, all over each other and Eighty-Eight.
“It’s not real!” Seven yelled.
Eighty-Eight finally gave up and disappeared, popping off somewhere else in the Cerebrum. Having lost their first target, the ants cast about for another and swarmed toward Seven. There were a lot of them, all larger than he’d first thought when looking at them from a distance. Real ants weren’t this big.
They began crawling up his ankles, and he could feel their prickling legs on his skin. Not real, he thought, but it felt real, more real than being shot at point-blank range in the chest. He tried to shake them off his feet, but they clung to him.
He scanned the area to see who was imagining the ants and saw a man in a dress uniform with a little cape. Behind him, another agent had completely succumbed to the attack, covered from head to toe and hardly visible beneath the pulsing mass of insect bodies. It was a terrible sight, and Seven averted his eyes in horror.
He couldn’t get the ants off him, and now that was going to happen to him, too.
Suddenly, the entire area filled with fog so dense that Seven could barely see the hand in front of his face, never mind anyone else. The ants disappeared, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to look around, but saw no one in the chilly fog.
Seven heard a voice say, “Go while you still can!”
Someone had to be standing right next to them. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them speaking to him privately.
“Run! I can’t keep up the fog cover for long!”
Seven disappeared, jumping down links and heading back in the direction of the secure Government domain. There were more agents around him, also escaping the ants. They’d been thoroughly routed.
They, those rebel minds, were getting stronger, more desperate. They’d never attacked in a group like that before, never tried to ambush agents, until now. They knew that Seven and his people had their King, and were doing whatever they could to get him back. Seven was willing to bet they had never realized before now what kind of powers they truly had.
Fox hadn’t been there. Too bad, because Seven rather liked interacting with him, in a way that his superiors would probably not approve. He wasn’t sure he approved either, to be honest, but there was something irresistible about it. Him.
It was called “flirting,” what he’d done with Fox. He’d never tried it before, because who exactly was an agent meant to flirt with when everyone around him looked the same? Agents weren’t really meant to flirt, anyway. He wasn’t breaking any laws or codes, but it didn’t sit well with his sense of being an agent.
The thing was, it had been fun. He thought he might try it again, if he saw Fox anytime soon. Fox seemed startled and confused by those actions, which made Seven only want to try it again even more. Anyway, the Cat and the Reaper had told him to harass Fox and make it look as if the rebels were still being pursued. It was working, as far as he was concerned.
Seven shook himself out of his musings and got back to the matter at hand. He shouldn’t be daydreaming or skylarking, or whatever it was normal people did; he had a job to do. He was an agent. There was nothing else he knew how to do better, and he had no body to leave the Cerebrum even if he did.
He and the other agents entered the Government domain, being constantly upheld by a rotation of MindWallers—at least, the secure part. There was a Semi-Public domain for the general public, as it held archives for use by government employees as well as anyone who was interested in the information. Mostly, it contained things like laws, maps, history, and general information that didn’t need protection.
The domain appeared like a massive building made of stone, with stained glass windows, domes, and spires. The stones looked weather-beaten and old, perhaps to mirror an IRL building that was actually subject to the marching on of time.
There was a sign-in link so that government agents and employees could access more secure levels of the domain. It was a complex system, and as irritating as it was, every time Seven or any other agent returned, they were required to identify themselves before entering.
They all jumped straight into the sign-in link, which appeared to be a drab, white room with only a faded red line drawn on the floor to mark the queue to enter. Bureaucracy at its finest.
“Did we all make it out?” Eighty-Eight asked, still brushing at his sleeves, as if the illusion of ants had followed them. “What happened back there?”
Seven did a quick head count. “We’re all here. I don’t know what happened. We ambushed the rebel group, and instead of running as they usually do, they attacked us.”
Twelve rubbed his mid-section and grimaced. “Not just attacked us. That was no counter-reaction to being attacked. They were expecting us to attack and had a plan already in place.”
“What was their purpose?” Seven asked, but got shrugs all around.
“They made us retreat, which is good enough for the time being,” Eighty-Eight remarked, crossing his arms.
“It’s not, though,” Seven replied, tilting his head as he tried to put the pieces together. “It’s not good enough to make us retreat at all. They have to find their leader’s location, and at present, they don’t even know what country it’s in.”
Unless…
Seven scanned the assembled agents, this time taking his time and not just counting faces. There were still the right number of agents present, but he could put a number to all except one. And as he looked closer, he saw that the ID wasn’t blank as it should be, but a jumble of symbols.
Eighty-Eight followed his line of sight. He pulled out his gun and took aim, and Fox followed suit after a moment of hesitation.
They weren’t the only ones waiting in the room, and at the sight of the weapon, several ordinary government workers screamed and ducked. The false agent disappeared, and Seven automatically followed his training and jumped down the link after him.
It took only a few jumps for the image to fade and for the form of the white-robed woman to show through. Seven now understood that the repeating images and the trick with the ants had been a distraction so she could hide among their ranks as they retreated.
Eighty-Eight and Twelve managed to follow after Seven. As agents, training made sure they weren’t as surprised as the civilians who had also been in the room.
“We have to catch her,” he said over his shoulder.
“These rebels are tricky, and I don’t like it,” Eighty-Eight replied, and he bared his teeth. “What if she does get away?”
“She knows what government we work for now,” Twelve replied. “She’ll report it to all of the King’s followers, and they might be able to recover his body.”
“That would never happen,” Eighty-Eight said confidently. “No one could find one building in one place in a country such as ours, especially not during winter.”
“You’ve never experienced winter in our country,” Seven shot back, bristling.
“Neither have you,” Eighty-Eight said, unconcerned. “But I’ve seen the data. And visited the vids on the website. I have a good idea of what it’s like.”
“Yes, I also have a vague idea of what our country is like,” Seven said, and wondered what he was talking about. No one ever questioned it, that they had never been outside the Cerebrum. They were all content to rely on data stored here.
“As fascinating as all this is,” Twelve put in, “I think we ought to pay attention to the rebel.”
“Oh, she’s doing it again,” Eighty-Eight whined.
Seven sighed when he saw duplicates of her all over the link ahead. How did she do that? He looked between them all, trying to discover the difference between them and the real thing. He’d gotten only a glimpse of the real thing, however, so it wasn’t much use.
Or so he thought, until he realized that none of the duplicates had an ID code, not even one of the jumbled symbol codes that the rebel woman had.
“Look for the one with an ID,” he said to the others. “She’s good, but not good enough to duplicate an ID reading, even an encoded one.”
“That one!” Twelve pointed.
Seven drew his pistols again and fired. It should have been easy to hit her at this range, but she kept spinning out of the way. She appeared to be gliding or flying, and she dodged his bullets with ease. Seven gave up after a minute or so.
“She can’t outrun us forever,” Eighty-Eight grumbled. “She’ll tire eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t good enough,” Seven said. “We have to get her now, and we need a plan.”
“I can try and extrapolate her probable path and get ahead of her that way,” Twelve offered. “But if I’m wrong, then I’ve completely lost all of you.”
“I’ve got a scramble bug,” Eighty-Eight said.
“Why didn’t you say so before?” Seven exclaimed. “That would have been useful about the time we were all being covered in ants!”
“Not necessarily,” Twelve reminded him. “What if we’d then ended up covered in something worse?”
“Worse than ants,” Seven said flatly.
“I can’t think of anything,” Eighty-Eight said.
“Me either,” Twelve admitted.
“And it could have been something harmless, like leaves or something,” Seven pointed out. “That’s the point of a scrambling bug, it’s unpredictable.”
A scrambling bug would throw off every piece of data in the vicinity by one digit, but there was no guarantee which digit it would choose. They could end up anywhere, and it would stop any link-jumping until everything had settled down again. It would force the rebel to turn and face them.
“Hurry up and throw it, then,” Twelve said impatiently.
“I’m going, just hold your horses,” Eighty-Eight hissed back.
“Horses. Horses would have been worse,” Twelve said.
“No way,” Seven argued. “I’d much rather be crushed to death than eaten alive, thanks.”
“Scramble bug deployed,” Eighty-Eight announced.
Everything seemed to screech to a halt, and for a moment, they were all suspended in the middle of the Cerebrum, like mobiles. Seven couldn’t move yet, so even though the rebel woman ahead was caught motionless, they were in the same trap. Seven saw the Cerebrum as raw data, and all the numbers around him had ceased to flow.
“Well, this is—”
Just as abruptly, they all jumped violently sideways as the data began arranging itself according to the new codes. Seven knew it was all in his head, but he still felt breathless, like he’d been punched in the chest.
“Ow. Annoying,” finished Eighty-Eight. “I never want to do that again; I feel a tad nauseous.”
“Don’t you mean dizzy?” asked Twelve, clutching his head.
“Where are we?” Seven asked, wheezing in spite of himself. “Where’d the rebel go?”
“We…are in a mindnet dating sim,” Eighty-Eight announced, looking around in distaste. “How the hell did we end up here?”
There were people all around, interacting with fake, pre-programmed characters. It wasn’t even a good simulation, as far as Seven could see. The characters would sometimes shimmer, revealing bits of data, and their voices had a tinny quality. They were all in a big park somewhere, the open space dotted with trees and benches.
“Where’s the rebel?” asked Twelve, still holding his head. “This is impossible. She shouldn’t be able to jump down a link yet. She should still be too disoriented.”
“I know I am,” Eighty-Eight said. “I may be sick.”
“It’s all in your head,” Seven gasped.
They found a bench and collapsed onto it. It felt more like sitting on something plastic than the wood it was depicted as, but Seven would take what he could get at this point.
“It’s a really big park,” Eighty-Eight pointed out, looking around. “But to move on to the next level of the story, you’d have to jump down a link. So she’d still have to be here.”
“How do you know so much about dating sims, Eighty-Eight?” Twelve asked.
“No reason,” Eighty-Eight said, with a shifty sidelong glance.
Seven looked around, but everyone in the near vicinity had the same proper ID number, and if he ran it through the database, he was sure he’d be able to trace each and every one back to their IRL identification. Surely the rebel wouldn’t risk that. He took down the link number anyway, so that he could run everyone who was logged-in to this domain through the database, but he didn’t think he would find anything of use.
“She got away,” he said in disbelief. “How did she do that?”
Eighty-Eight leaned over the side of the bench and wretched. “The only way I can think of is somehow tricking the scrambling bug into thinking she was also a piece of data. If it shifted her in a different direction than it did us, she’s probably somewhere else entirely, sitting on her own shitty bench recovering from the effects.”
Suddenly, the bench wavered, then disappeared, dumping them all on the ground before reappearing several feet away in the middle of a path.
“My only condolence is that, if what you suggested is what actually happened, then she must feel just terrible,” Twelve groaned. “That was rough enough as it was, and the scrambling bug identified us as people.”
Seven was not looking forward to reporting in to say that the rebels now knew where to start their search for King. Maybe Eighty-Eight was right. Theirs was a massive territory, and to search blindly would turn up more snow than anything useful.
Who was he kidding? They were in so much trouble.