The neon is everywhere, and it's all so bright that it makes the rain look like streams of pastel light - mainly pink. It's beyond me what could be so dangerous in a place filled with Hello Kitty. The most dangerous thing here seems to be the one emo-goth storefront featuring Death Note and some kind of demon slayer series. Hazard of not being able to read Japanese, I guess. The reality is that John had no zero idea what most of this meant.
To his Western eyes, it all just looked -- silly. But John supposed if he were trying to hide something genuinely dangerous, maybe hiding it in the middle of all this would make sense. And Akihabara is still the technology hub of Tokyo, not just the otaku center, so maybe there's something here. And Doc said there was something here, something that could track him, could track Jalena, might even be able to track John, ghost or no.
And if the murderous cabal of moles inside AEGIS, the Whisper Alliance infiltrators targeting Doc, could track them, then…. No. Bad enough that these monsters had painted them all as villains and terrorists, destroying any chance they might have for a normal life. Worse still that a good man, a devoted scientist trying to help humanity deal with all the dangers of Q effects, had been driven from his salvific work. Doc was trapped in a life on the run, unable to trust even good people because the best of groups had been infiltrated and turned against him. But the worst part was how all this tore at Jalena. She tried to take it in stride, to take care of her father and, as best she could, to take care of John as well. But he could see how it was hurting her. It showed in the snappishness and occasionally cutting remarks when she had a bad day. It showed in how she smiled a little in vengeance when she saw one of the evil ones taken down, before she regained her composure. Then she just seemed...sad. And angry.
That was unacceptable. Jalena deserved a normal, happy life. She deserved a rest. She deserved a normal home with her working to help humanity and to no longer live in fear. If John could give that to her, then nothing was going to get in the way. Certainly not something so contemptuous as to hide its malevolent agenda behind a Hello Kitty smile.
That was it up ahead, the satellite campus of Tokyo Metropolitan University. Apparently, the moles had found another dupe, a brilliant young scientist whose Q empowerment had brought out abilities to follow electrical patterns. Especially, he could track literally track distinct data streams. The kid was a potential problem. But he was only one person. The research, though, was an attempt to emulate those abilities through a set of cybernetic devices, running data processing in parallel, using quantum entanglement to keep the parallels entangled and unified in their decryption. Such a process could potentially be used to read any data, despite the formidable layers of encryption that Doc relied on to set up their safe houses. If the Whisper Alliance or their moles in AEGIS ever got a hold of that, then there'd be nowhere to run. No way to set up the future for Jalena, a place that one day they could call home. No, this unacceptable.
The security wasn't even in John's league. The security guards saw nothing. No normal camera ever saw him. No pressure-sensitive floor ever registered him. And he rode up in the elevator without none the technicians having any idea he was within an arm's reach of them. Fifteen stories up was far from the tallest building, or even the highest laboratory, in the Chiyoda ward. The laboratory seemed unremarkable. Perhaps AEGIS hadn't figured out how important this was yet or perhaps they were trying to keep the laboratory low-profile. Or maybe it wasn't as unremarkable as it appeared. But of all people, John knew better than to judge by appearances, or the lack thereof. He watched and waited.
Knowing Japanese or not really didn't matter when you could remember well enough, so John observed who seemed to be in charge, who bowed a little less deeply and to whom others bowed a little more deeply. John listened for the distinct -sama and senpai, keys to honorifics indicating rank. He found such a man and watched him as he entered his password. John didn't need to know its context.
While John could have perhaps hacked the system for a passcode, this was notably faster. At a glance, he teleported a micro-drive into the back port of the computer and waited. The key logger and its expert system would work on its own, activated by making contact with the computer, searching automatically for the information they needed, copying it, and then dynamically coding a virus that would hunt for and corrupt any files related to the tracking and decryption program. The program would take hours, though. They had to make it appear to be normal operations, and that kind of subtlety in a network took time. So, John settled in to wait. Patience was a strong suit for John, a hard-earned virtue from a lifetime waiting to be seen, hoping to be noticed.
It was almost midnight when the program completed its work, and the technicians had long since gone home, or to drink in Shinjuku. That was of little concern. The program would continue to run after they all logged out. Then it was just a matter of teleporting the micro-drive back into his hand, and walking out the same way he'd walked in. It should have been that simple.
The night watchman's Q-goggles were probably just meant to give him enhanced spectrum vision, a common function in more modern Q-goggles. Additionally, they could identify Q-tech being used within the vicinity, a must-have for modern security forces. The goggles allowed him to patrol without turning on the lights and avoid alerting any burglars of his presence and risking their escape. It was an unfortunate side effect that they'd be able to see John, and the guard's gasp when he did see the otherwise invisible, translucent figure made it all too clear that the goggles picked up far more than a simple thief.
No time to think; can't risk being caught and compromising everything. John gestured and the guard was suddenly outside the laboratory window, and falling. John saw the guard's face clearly; a young man, likely working his first job out of school. John could see the uncomprehending terror in the young man's face as he was instantaneously transported just mere two meters outside of the very windows whose view he had been admiring just an hour before.
In the morning, there would be questions about why someone who had seemed happy enough would commit suicide, throwing himself off a building, but there was no suspicion of murder. John went to the body and gathered the young man's shoes. John blinked to the roof to place the guard's shoes neatly by the edge, making it appear as though he had stepped out of them to commit to his act of despair.
The remorse nearly brought John to tears, but there was no choice. Wrong place, wrong time, and if the guard had triggered an alarm, then Japanese police and likely AEGIS would have been onto Doc and Jalena within hours. Another innocent, used as a pawn by the Alliance masquerading as AEGIS, gone from being a son, perhaps a husband, or maybe even a father - now just collateral damage. The Alliance had blood on their hands, in the form of innocents they'd used to hunt Doc and Jalena who'd been killed because there was no other choice.
Surrendering meant death and the Alliance would use one of their people on the inside of whatever jail or prison to see to it that they'd never be exposed from a witness stand. The Alliance had the resources of AEGIS behind them, and they had the technology to be able to trap and kill normal people and Quasars -- even someone like John. John repeated the mantra in his head, "There really was no other choice."
John tried his best not to dwell on it and risk another guard and cause yet another innocent to die. John teleported into the night, lost in the neon rain.
In the morning, the technicians would find the glitch, but Doc had designed the program to make it look like the data search just would not work, showing that no technology could hold the quantum states in superposition with enough stability to do what a Quasar could do. Eventually, the system would degrade and become inoperable. The team would try a recreate their earlier promising results, but a lack of funding and a lack of patience from investors forced them to ultimately give up, writing the project off as infeasible. Months later, when explaining the results as part of a year-end review, the report noted:
"We may never know exactly what happened to trigger the final, unrecoverable system collapse. Our only reasonable hypothesis is that this was just what happens when a Ghost Particle goes off course."
