Chapter Text
Three years is a zetta long time, Sho Minamimoto thinks as he stares out from his hiding spot in the underpass under the rail tracks near the transit center.
Three years, and it might as well have been three thousand. Might as well have been three thousand, in a completely different world , at that.
He remembers the start of it, being fished up anew from the sea of imaginary numbers by the fairy kei nightmare, Neku disappearing almost as soon as he had appeared…
He remembers being told by that fairy kei commando that he had a totes important job to do , and he then found himself out of…somewhere else, to Shibuya (at least at the time he had factored it was his Shibuya).
He remembers zetta reluctant about the whole thing, almost being forced to help...but the time passing all too quickly, and...the reason they were forced back becoming all too apparent.
He remembers the world he is dragged into being subtly different at first, though at first he can’t exactly place his finger on how the variables had changed as his primary calculation was survival. (Those variables would become apparent later. He wishes he hadn’t seen at least one of them.)
He remembers it was Kariya who saw him and caught him out on the fourth day of the (first) new management’s Game, but waved it off, with a wag of a finger and a note they had bigger problems at hand and to watch his ass. (At that point, Sho was not yet aware that the very mathematics of this particular equation had been fundamentally altered.)
He sees--as an omnipresent sign to the north--at least the shadow of what happened to Shinjuku--of up becoming down, of the imaginary axis being flipped to the real.
He starts having terrible dreams of exactly what happened in Shinjuku, despite knowing he was in the sea of imaginary numbers being drawn towards that most terrible of strange attractors for the second time in his life.
And at the end, as he has survived almost despite himself...he sees the management has changed yet again--all the variables are wrong, they’re all from Shinjuku somehow...and that the rules of the Game itself have changed as the axis shifts.
There is a part of his core equation that practically screams at him that they are zetta fucked if he can’t calculate what variables have changed, and why, and what proof this is leading to.
He’s already had the first precious thing taken, from his first death and the first Game. The Game--the UG as a whole--always demands a balancing of equation; a price for a price, an equivalent exchange as part of its terrible alchemy.
Sho Minamimoto knows this. Has known this. Has seen the interplay of players devoured by his Noise and the remainder frantically making their own pacts for survival before being Erased in turn ensuring his own survival in the UG.
He doesn’t expect having the Taboo being forcibly ripped out of him to hurt so much. He didn’t expect it (though he should have) to go so deep , even to the point of his original dabblings.
He remembers this is the point where Neku went missing as a variable somehow. And he’s been searching for that variable...and the variable of the Composer...ever since.
Sho sits in his hiding spot in the underpass, and shivers despite the hoodie and the trenchcoat and undershirt, and realizes he’s felt strangely naked since the Taboo was subtracted from his equation.
Three years is a zetta long time for...his own personal Game to exist, and yet for a Game as he knows it not to exist as he knew it...or at least not to end, he thinks.
The effects of the change of management--and there’s definitely a management , even if the management in question is not local--are subtle at first, or so he thinks.
(It’s only in the quiet times he sits and thinks and realises he’s not entirely sure how long he was in the sea of imaginary numbers before he was fished back up. That’s still a variable he can’t quite put his finger on; in fact, he’s not even sure he ended up in the same set . Too many of the basic variables are different, like he’s landed in a hexadecimal system and is still getting used to the concept of 10 adding up to what would be 16 in base 10. He’s...not entirely sure everything is due to a change in management and some of it is a change of base . Too many unknowns for him to be comfortable with; not enough to make the math work.)
When the new Management came (the second) new management, the Games became...perpetual, and even he had seen early on there was a weighting of the dice, a thumb on the scale, a deliberate strange attractor where a small team always won, and...strangely they kept the Game going as a perpetual motion. He'd seen Players in the game for months on end. Years.
All putting their best effort forward, and it might as well have been like trying to break the speed of light.
And after a time, Sho Minamimoto concludes even if he is in a different t' vector, there is definitely a negative perturbative effect that's spreading. That said, that's also not the only variable he's dealing with in trying to find a point of origin, an initial state, to work with.
And FINDING that actual initial state is proving to be more difficult than he'd anticipated.
Three years is a zetta long time, but this...Sho is fairly sure that even floating in the sea of imaginary numbers for 33 years might not account for these changes in the variables of what makes up Shibuya’s own algebra.
He’s pretty sure that there’s no real factor at play that would explain this with conventional definitions of the timeline as t without at least a t’ vector coming into play...and over three years, he’s pretty much convinced he’s somehow landed in that t’ vector somehow.
(Probably--no, definitely --the fairy kei nightmare, he thinks.)
(How long had he been in the sea of imaginary numbers, anyways? Surely it wasn’t so long that almost all the variables he’d known as constants had changed...could it?)
The graffiti once ubiquitous in Shibuya both changes (and was somehow different when he was pulled here; the CAT mural was subtly different; so much was subtly different ) and...lessens somehow. Where once there were many surfaces littered with flyers, or tags, or both...these areas seemed to have shrank; mostly Udagawa now, Dogenzaka around the bars and the love hotels...Miyashita Park in particular had changed, outside that one bike tunnel nearby.
The biggest shock to him, though (so he remembers), and the thing that convinces him that somehow he’s landed in a whole different set of variables that the very base has changed on and quite possibly the set itself...are the very buildings themselves.
Molco...wasn’t Molco. There was some other building in its place. “Parco”, this...not-Molco was called, and it was similar if newer, but things were... wrong in aspects; too many windows, the stores were different, the factoring food court was different... Pork City here was called Mark City, and it somehow had another twelve floors than he remembered (though somehow the actual space for shopping reduced); he remembers that realising his old home turf was changed hurt more than he expected. Towa Records becoming Tower Records was more confusing (wasn’t it pronounced about the same in English, anyways?)...Cadoi City now being Marui , and A-East being O-East, and the Outback Cafe somehow being the Hachiko Cafe in this continuum...the Shibukyu Heads being Tokyu Hands (and pretty much all of the Shibukyu stores being Tokyu here for that matter), Q-Floor here being Q-Front…
It was too zetta much to think about sometimes, he thinks. (Too zetta much like adding 6 and 4 and coming up with A instead of 10. Definitely a whole different coordinate system, a whole different base, even if the actual variables themselves might convert from one base to another and still counted (essentially) the same. Too much like calculating π and instead of coming up with the expected 3.141592653589793238462643383279… you came up with 3.243F6A8885A308D313198A2E037073… instead.)
Under other circumstances, the epiphany that he was in what was (apparently) a different iteration of Shibuya to the one he got Heaped in and that he was now in a new frame of reference would be the exponentially most fascinating thing ever ; a proof that multiple universes and timelines existed, that time was somehow fractal and bifurcating and indescribably beautiful if you could get yourself out of the frame of reference and see the whole...except he’s pretty sure the one polynomial he could reasonably discuss this potential proof of the many-worlds interpretation isn’t really here to discuss it.
(Not where he could be found, anyways. Probably if Sanae Hanekoma were around he wouldn’t want to factoring talk with him after his attempt at reducing the WildKat to its lowest common denominator in a desperate attempt to find a missing variable to balance his own equation. Assuming Hanekoma was even a function in this algebra, anyways; that was still an unknown.)
Three years is a zetta long time to survive as the remainder of a function where the essential math of the world didn’t follow quite the same rules, though, which certainly did much to take the beauty out of this Eureka Moment.
Fortunately, there are a few--a very few--unchanged constants. Like Shibu. Like the Ten-Four.
The Ten-Four thankfully is as much of a blessed constant as zero and unity and Euler’s constant and pi. The logo had changed, yes; the name, thankfully not. (If the Ten-Four changed its name, Sho muses, you’d know something had gone zetta wrong with the base axioms of the world; the Ten-Four is functionally the point of everything, practically point (0,0) on this graph, even down to the Room of Reckoning being at that zero point in some other brane that was not quite the UG but some closed space-like curve outside of it.)
But the Ten-Four is the exception, Sho notes, and there are too many variables that are not set to an appropriate precision for his liking.
Finding so many variables were different was disconcerting once the full reality of the situation sank in; nearly as disconcerting was finding--even over a function of time--what things had changed where the original variables no longer existed at all.
The AMX was gone--it was now Shepherd House. The old gateway to the Pad now had a tower next to it, calling itself Shibuya Stream (a source of infinite irony to Sho, considering the Shibuya River was a glorified drainage culvert that eventually went underground). Cat Street had massively changed by where the WildKat was, with the small boutique shops replaced with glass and chain shops from overseas. The old Shibukyu-- Tokyu here--Department Store Stationside was gone, along with the old station he remembered, replaced by some huge towering thing called Shibuya Scramble Square that tried its damnedest to outdo the many other sources of screaming electric noise and colour in the Scramble itself.
He finds himself oddly hanging out more at the MODI--this too has changed, there’s greenery on the walls and entrance itself. (It occurs to Sho there’s a zetta lot more greenery in this Shibuya than he remembers where he grew up, died, and lived as a Reaper; not all the shifts in variables were necessarily bad, just... disconcerting , in the same way that discovering that ℵ₀+ℵ₀=ℵ₀ would be disconcerting to people used to the normal operational rules of ordinal and cardinal numbers rather than transfinite sets.)
As time increases, Sho finds fewer and fewer places he can hide. Even if he still had it in him to make his ziggurats of refuse, there’s honestly less junk around to make a heap and too much risk of being noticed when carting the base factors off to create said heaps…
And the management changed yet again a year ago (with that tasteless tetrahedra calling himself Shiba taking over running the Game), and the new management had completely altered the variables of the Game forcing a major recalculation on his own behalf, and it’s behooved him to keep to the down-low; even a person like himself who lives on the concept that tradition is garbage knows there are still some classics he misses, and variables still to be adjusted, and there are periods where it is best not to be an exponential function.
And...Bad Things tended to happen to those who directly threatened the new management by themselves, and Sho Minamimoto is more than capable of doing the math that he is not, as a singular variable, able to fulfill all the requirements of this particular set by himself.
(Between the persistent weighting of the Ruinbringers being improbably on top, the perpetual motion of the Game itself, and...other factors, he's becoming increasingly convinced of an external source of interference. It's just a matter of deriving the source and nulling it like any other extraneous variable; break that exponential function into smaller components, like any other derivative, and the calculation becomes easier.)
The last thing he needs to do right now is to reveal his value; he'd have the whole UG converging on his coordinates, and his calculations show signs of a definite higher-order problem. For now, it’s better to remain...as a hidden variable in the equation itself.
And so Sho Minamimoto watches, hidden, watching, until the right balancing factors show up. The balancing factors, with the correct functions to integrate to solve this particularly vexing equation.
He’s got a desired solution, and it’s just a matter of not being subtracted from the equation before he can do the math.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t continue his Great Work, however. Subtlety just requires he model the problem from a different dimensionality.
Some days he maps bifurcation diagrams on the walls of the old abandoned rail tunnel he calls home.
Some days…the old habits come to bear despite himself, and he scavenges the old antennas that sometimes end up in scrap heaps as they’re done away with, or the antennas that end up at the side of the road from wrecks, and…repurposes them in his hovel in the tunnel.
(Those, usually, he can carry in the trenchcoat. Fairy Kei Nightmare showed up with it one day, said “learn to fashion, noob”. The trenchcoat has actually served much more of a purpose than he’d think. If he ever sees the fairy kei commando again he’ll have to thank her somehow.)
If one were to look, one might think the form of the sculpture Sho Minamimoto makes with the twisted metal when the math isn’t working right and he needs to work in another dimension to calculate things…resembles a framework. Made of metal wings.
A simulacra of Reaper wings, or of some strange skeletal bird.
If you asked him what it was, he’d laugh derisively and tell you to change your vector before you were deleted from his personal equation.
What he doesn’t tell is that the wings show up in his dreams far more than he’d like, and not necessarily in the context most would think…but he knows, his calculations show …like the alchemists of old knew, the minuscule reflects the majuscule.
And, as some of the old musty books he would read in the cafe that might as well have been in another universe would note…sometimes bird’s wings can be used to fly to the angels.
One day, he’ll find the Composer, who apparently has deleted himself completely from the equation. And he’s going to give him one hell of a final examination, along with the whole Higher Plane.
One of the variables he's noticed that has changed over the multiple iterations of the Game, and particularly in this worldline, is the changes in degrees of freedom.
Harajuku is somehow now in the Set; whether that was the fairy kei nightmare’s doing, or some intrinsic property of this other continuum, or the new management...even Sho doesn’t know (though he suspects the new continuum and/or or the fairy kei nightmare). And while most of that particular set can be boiled down to “zetta boring” or “who the factor set up a kawaii factory?”, there’s the occasional spot on Takeshita Street that reminds him of Udagawa and even the Shibuya that he knew three years ago, decked in graffiti and zetta-not-giving-a-fuck and extremes. There’s still places on Brahms’ Path, and in the northern parts of Cat Street, that remind him of his days as a Reaper screaming trigonometry at the masses.
If Shibuya survives this next Game, he hopes that these places stick around for a function of time.
He knows all too well that Shibuya may not survive the next Game. There’s a new team, but the rules are so different--that factoring hectopascal Shiba’s new axioms are in effect, they’re having them in troupes now, and apparently people can recruit others into their troupe--likely just because of the numbers of people they’re having to herd in now. (And the perpetual motion of the Game itself, and the persistent weighting of the Ruinbringers are yet again on top, are eating at him. There's no way this is a set of natural numbers. If he can just calculate the skew...)
He sits. He calculates. He softly mutters a number to himself as a stim, as he tends to do when working on maps of possibilities; it's strangely calming to him.
He’s developed an appreciation for sweets, even if he does miss the band flyers on the fence of the old abandoned building.
(Maybe there are other new variables he can incorporate when he can finally accomplish the true Great Work, he thinks.)
The kid, whom he hardly notices in the Udagawa Parfait…hears the digits being softly repeated as the odd fellow in the trenchcoat and hat draws a fractal idly on a napkin, and develops his own sudden appreciation of the fact an apparently magical homeless man just recited what he recognises as a Mersenne prime.
Three years is a zetta long time, and it might as well be infinity.
Just as he’d calculated, the game’s begun anew by the new management.
(And he’d swear this time the Management isn’t even making sure the kids are dead before entering them into the Game. THAT’s an interesting variable in and of itself. Rather more disturbing is the implication he derives from this…the possibility that the hyperreal has gotten involved. He needs more data on that, though.)
He can sometimes see the full horror of what happened to Shinjuku from Takeshita Street and the Tokyu Department Store at the top of Otomesando and Meiji. How it’s effectively nonexistent after people’s own Noise devoured them in the Inversion; they didn’t even have an infinitesimal of hope.
(Not even in the RG either. Nobody remembers Shinjuku. Nobody remembers there ever having BEEN a Shinjuku.)
And by every calculation he’s seeing, Shibuya is stuck in a stasis that will eventually null it.
Shibuya might, just yet, pull itself out of that terrible asymptote yet. (At least this iteration of Shibuya, anyways.) ...but only if he can multiply his forces.
The chances of success were close to zero…but not equivalent. And even the smallest of variables, with the right exponential, the right perturbations to vector, the right additions to the set...
Everything is math, and everything is calculation, Sho reminds himself. The world is made of numbers...no matter the worldline.
Sho sees the group of kids--just a pair of kids in the Game calling themselves the Wicked Twisters, one which is in the lowest slot in its assortment...and he sees one in particular who reminds him of old Phones, but different.
He’s watched these zeptograms. If he can only get them to multiply what’s within…
There’s something--almost as if a hidden variable--that notes to him Here are the inputs to get your desired solution. A solution that, up until this point, has been stuck in orbit around an attractor, never quite escaping.
And after three years, Sho Minamimoto steps out of the shadows, and shouts at his megaphone at a group of frightened teens who’ve found themselves hunted--not as the hunter, but as a guardian in their strange journey:
“ You wanna be part of the remainder? Then follow my lead! ”
Three years is a zetta long time, but he’s gonna derive some way to get himself and these kids out of this damned bounding-box and get their collective vectors trending back to infinity rather than zero.
And he’s going to find that one last damned missing variable.
Even if he has to redo some of his own calculus and adopt a new algebra involving multiple variables in a new set.