Chapter Text
Prologue
"Data stream, compiling.”
The soothing voice of the base’s AI faded into the background of the lab’s usual hum, the electronic whir and pulse of a dozen different mainframes and experimental boxes the soundtrack of Nate’s daily life. There was only one set of results he was interested in right now, the jumbled mess of compiled EEGs refusing to coalesce into a logical narrative.
He wasn’t a doctor, wasn’t looking for the medical reality behind the numbers—his interest was in the technical readouts that accompanied William Maximoff’s recorded brainwaves.
He had literal gigs worth of intermittently recorded brain scans from the six months the Ranger had been in a coma and the readouts from every system on his Jaeger from the same time frame, and was still no closer to figuring it out.
Somewhere in there was the key to a question that had been dogging Nate ever since Tommy and Teddy had burst into his lab with their utterly ridiculous theory. The one that had turned out to be true, in every sense of the word.
Billy’s trapped inside Magnus Echo. He’s stuck in the drift.
It had explained everything and nothing all at the same time.
And then they’d done it, that pair of insane assholes. They’d gone into the drift, connected to each other, to Magnus Echo and Billy’s unconscious self. And they’d brought Billy back from a catatonic state so deep that medical science had already given up.
Except driftspace wasn’t real. It was an imagined construct created by the human brain to explain the process of neural synchronization, a kind of waking daydream. The mind liked to have fixed points and references, so it provided them.
And this was the point that Nate kept coming back around to, over and over again in the months that had followed.
If driftspace wasn’t real, and if there was no metaphysical connection between a synchronized human brain and a Jaeger’s hard drive-
If consciousness itself was merely a function of electrical activity running through a compilation of grey matter and neurons-
Then what the hell had happened to Billy?
He’d watched the entire thing play out, and still couldn’t begin to explain. And that wasn’t good enough.
Nate drummed his fingers on the desktop, watching the graphs join, overlay, spin and expand in the air above it. The anomalies burned bright fuchsia against the green of flat-lined brainwaves, taunting him with their inscrutability.
It wasn’t solely a matter of professional pride, either. Billy was still in recovery. Four months in, and he was only recently able to take a flight of stairs without having to stop and catch his breath.
Diminished lung capacity, muscle atrophy, reduced bone density, the beginning of multiple organ failure—do you have any idea how lucky you are to be recovering so quickly, Ranger?
But one day he was going to want to fight again, to synchronize with Magnus Echo again. And Nate was going to have to be able to prove that it was safe.
Nate swept his hand through the flickering projection and closed down the series before the computer could finish running her commands. He was missing vital information, a hidden variable.
There was one option for that, though Marshal Danvers would skin him alive if she found out he was going to access those kinds of sites from the Shatterdome’s computers.
It was a human constant. The first few things anyone tried with new technology—no matter what it was, no matter how exclusive or expensive—were always the same. The illegal uses of pons systems were many and varied, and all of them were available on the dark web.
Nate called up a secure reader, triggered the VPN that would let him tunnel out of the base’s internal systems without setting off the guardians and anti-intrusion programs. Tony had used the same sort of programs to tap into the Shatterdome’s video feeds, and it was child’s play to take it out the other way.
If there was any information to be had about the energy released when someone died—or came close to death—while connected to a pons system, it would be found here in the asscrack of the information highway.
Someone, somewhere, had seen something similar. No Rangers, Nate had checked every one of the PPDC’s databases for that. But sex and death—that sort of thing made big money.
He regretted his decision reasonably quickly, some of the images and descriptions he came across burning their way past his eyelids and into his visual cortex. He’d have nightmares about some of that later. For now, though—Nate reached for his coffee, long since gone cold, and slurped from the edge, not taking his eyes off of the projection.
It took him an hour of digging, of sending his searches down three dozen different horrific rabbitholes, before he hit upon something that seemed promising. Another hour and he had a contact name.
Fg563421: looking for the lovelace recordings
BlinDManBlufF21: you sure? That shit’s deep
Fg563421: do you have the files or not?
BlinDManBlufF21: transfer the payment first – link’s gonna pop for you now
It wasn’t espionage in the service of king and country, but the thrill of acquisition, of success, of winning was enough to make Nate complete the transaction without a second thought. Or at least a third one. The file link pulsed at him in an angry orange that surged toward red. He swiped through the projection space to create a quarantine for it, a secret directory that wouldn’t alert the rest of R&D that something was taking up new space that it shouldn’t.
Even still, something gnawed at him even as he moved his hand into the space and grabbed for the file. Had it been too easy somehow? No—in what world could hours of searching down blind alleys be considered easy? Nate relaxed. He’d earned this success, and he was one step closer to fulfilling his promise.
ALERT – MALWARE.
“Goddammit!” Nate snarled at the warning, shunting the file down into the quarantine before it had even finished reassembling.
FILE QUARANTINED.
“Nice try, asshole.”
That sense of being on the verge of victory collapsed around him, and Nate slumped back in his chair. Disappointment gnawed at his insides, shame taking the place of pride. “There’s two hours of my life that I’ll never see again,” he said aloud. Neither the computers nor the cup of coffee seemed very interested in what he had to say.
“Fine,” he sighed and stood, cracking his back in about four places. “I know when to take a hint. Don’t go anywhere,” he added, pointing at the computer system sitting on his desk. “I’ll be back, and this time we’ll be smarter.”
Deep inside the belly of the machine, unconcerned with the sound data being produced outside the mainframe’s cooled case, a ball of code unfurled. Carefully, logically, it examined the edges of its containment, sending out spikes of numbers to probe the corners for any bleed.
The cool air in the lab kept the computers’ whirring at a steady volume, no sign on the outside of the murmur of ones and zeros sliding tiny tendrils into the cracks in the walls of their prison.
It was night-time, the lab itself abandoned and dark, when a single signal burrowed its way out through the tenuous threaded connection of an old-fashioned VPN. It sent a single burst of numbers, fast enough and small enough that the network would register it as nothing but white noise, if it noticed anything at all.
[access granted]