"You look ridiculous," Sachiko said, laughing with a coy grin.
"Oh, get off it," Alanna grumbled.
"Are you sure you don't want a fork?" she teased.
"I have fought double agents, prison guards, bounty hunters, and militsiya," Alanna said grumpily, accidentally dropping her lump of rice back into the bowl. "I will not be defeated by a pair of god damned chopsticks!"
By the time Alanna had finished her breakfast, she had refused western cutlery from two seperate waitresses, and her food was quite cold. But at least I have my pride, she thought.
For the first time that Alanna'd ever seen, Sachiko drove. Following the
hunch that there was something more to the disc, she was heading to a techie
contact of hers, with the hopes of cashing in a personal favour.
"Shouldn't you call ahead first?" Alanna wondered.
"No," Sachiko said, shaking her head. "No, god no. Not if you want anything done, anyway. If you talk to this guy on the phone, he will put off doing anything forever. He'll ask for a full project spec in writing, and put you through any hoops he can think of to avoid even looking at it."
"Sounds reliable," Alanna said dryly.
"I'm counting on him finding it interesting," she replied. "Plus, he can't see the redheaded Texan beauty that he'll be helping out over the phone, right?"
"Sachiko!" Alanna elbowed her, her shock only partially feigned. "You're awful!"
The car weaved and dodged through traffic; the six lane major street they were driving through was more crowded than Alanna'd ever seen in her whole life. She could've sworn that the Chinese computer inside their car was far more aggressive than any of the European cars she'd ever driven.
That thought was confirmed when they came within centimetres of crashing into the back bumper of a car while cutting across two of traffic to make a right turn.
They arrived soon enough, and after parking the car, headed into the huge skyscraper, passing through the lobby and into a crowded elevator. Sachiko had to check her notes to make sure she got the floor right; they got off on the 53rd floor. The hallway itself was far less crowded, at least.
"It's so weird to say this, but thank god for elevators," Alanna thought out loud.
"Eh?"
"Too many Russian backstreets and stairs. It's nice to walk in through a front door for once and take an elevator," she sighed.
"Poor woman," Sachiko said coyly. "Will you ever recover?"
"Depends if you're going to keep jerking me around," Alanna said, ruffling Sachiko's hair. She hoped that Alanna was at least mostly joking.
"Here's the address," Sachiko announced. She knocked on the door in front of them.
After a moment of waiting, the door opened; a short, slightly overweight girl appeared in the doorway.
"<Hello,>" Sachiko said sweetly. Alanna wasn't really sure what she'd said, aside from the fact that it was sweet, though. "<I'm looking for Dr. Li.>"
"<I'm sorry, he's not in right now,>" the girl recited, looking surprised.
"<I know he told you to say that, but I really doubt that's true,>" she said, smiling. "<I've known him far longer than you have.>"
"<I'm sorry, ma'am, but I can't help you...,>" the girl said anxiously.
"What'd she say?" Alanna asked.
"She said 'come right in,'" Sachiko replied. They walked inside, to great protest from the girl at the door. Sachiko headed down the inside hallway, a sign adorning the first door she came to; with the girl shortly behind her, and Alanna even closer, she opened it without any further announcement.
"Hello, Dr. Li!" she called out.
The room was a mess.
Papers were strewn everywhere. When they weren't laying loose on the floor or covering every square inch of the various desks set up about the room, they were stacked messily in piles on chairs. There were eight seats in the whole lab, and most of the were too cluttered for anyone to actually sit on. Every square inch of the wall was a large computer screen, various text filled computer windows covering the entirety of the room. Only the ceiling and floor were safe from being used as a screen.
The objects on the desks that weren't just documents, empty bottles, or plastic bowls from instant noodles were mostly unidentifiable. Various mechanical workings of god-knows-what littered the free desk space haphazardly. All they could recognize were a long series of screwdrivers, more tablet computers than either could possibly imagine what anyone would do with, and something in the corner that Alanna was nearly certain was an electric typewriter.
In the middle of the mess, was an average looking but surprisingly sharply dressed young man sitting behind a desk, who seemed none too pleased at the intrusion.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. "I see my assistant," he glared in the girl's direction, "is totally useless in keeping unwanted guests out."
"Oh, don't be that way, Li," Sachiko smiled.
"Dammit, Sachiko, you are absolutely nothing but trouble," he said, shaking his head.
"Oh, is she ever," Alanna laughed. "I'm glad it's not just me."
Alanna approached the man, offering her hand. "So, you're the esteemed Dr. Li? Sachiko's told me so much about you, it's an honour to finally meet you," she lied with ease, smiling at him. "I'm Alanna Cassner."
"Er... sure, likewise, Ms. Cassner," he said, suddenly seeming a lot less hostile as he took her hand.
"I'm so sorry about the intrusion," Alanna said, doing a slight bow. "Sachiko said you were brilliant, and, well, we need some help."
"Yeah right. I'm sure I'll regret this, but... well, have a seat," he said resignedly, getting up to clear some room on the nearby chairs. He dumped the garbage on them onto the floor behind them. Alanna and Sachiko both took seats. "Sorry, it's a bit of a mess."
"It's cleaner than the last one," Sachiko said.
"Well, I'm not supposed to be having visitors here," he grumbled in his assistant's direction; she didn't seem to understand. "<You can go now, you're clearly useless!>" he told her in Chinese. She looked only slightly offended as she disappeared; Sachiko figured she was used to him being like that.
"So why aren't you off bothering someone else you can just boss around?" he asked. "Why come straight to me?"
"This isn't a work thing, it's something I'd like to have you take a look at personally," Sachiko said. Her brushing off anything as 'a work thing' elicited a curious reaction from both Dr. Li and Alanna, given Sachiko's line of work. Nobody else could dismiss international espionage as being less important, Alanna thought to herself. Sachiko continued, "I have something that I think has important data on it, there's an urgent deadline, and official channels would make me go through twelve levels of government beaurocracy."
"Oh, wonderful," Dr. Li sighed.
"I think you'll find it fascinating," Sachiko said as she opened Alanna's purse, taking out the plastic case with the disc inside.
Alanna frowned as she stared at the notebook. She'd been going through
it again and again, looking page-by-page, hoping to at least figure out some
sort of method to the madness. She'd dismissed large sections of it as pure
insanity, but Dr. Simon had done the same thing with the atomic bomb plans
initially; she wanted to be sure she wasn't making the same mistake.
"January 1st, 2100," she said out loud. "What could the significance be?"
"New year's! Turn of the 22nd century," Sachiko suggested. She walked over to where Alanna was sitting, and leaned over to read, resting her elbows on Alanna's shoulders.
"Obviously," Alanna said. "But... why that date? It just keeps coming up, again and again. Here, it's right here: 'STOP IT ALL BY JANUARY 1'. Or 'The world changes forever on January 1' or '01/01/00 means doom.'"
"That last one's pretty ominous."
"It sure is," Alanna agreed. "I'd just dismiss it as lunacy otherwise... but there has to be something to it. But what does the turn of the 22nd century have to do with nuclear bombs?"
"Hm," Sachiko murmured thoughtfully, pausing. "Well... he died over a century ago, but... maybe there's one of those bombs on a timer somewhere?"
"That's crazy. But... well, say that's true. The Manhattan Project in the '40s concludes that an atomic bomb isn't feasible, but Dr. Yazawa figures better. Then what? He builds one so it'll detonate a hundred and fifty years later? Why?"
"That's a great question, but I don't think we're going to find it-- wait, wait, that reminds me," Alanna suddenly stopped, flipping back through the pages. It took her a minute to find the one she wanted.
"'The lab is in where WE'LL MEET TOGETHER,'" Sachiko read over Alanna's shoulder. "What's that little diagram?"
"It looks like a map. Can you read these symbols here?"
"Actually... yes," Sachiko said, looking closer. "It's an address? I don't know why it's written with arabic numerals, but that last bit there basically means 'street;' or at least, it does in Chinese."
"Probably Japanese too."
"Probably," Sachiko agreed. "Of course... there's probably a million streets named that in all of China. It's ridiculously common."
"Well... where do we begin? New Year's isn't very far away. Given what we're talking about, no matter how crazy he seems, I think I'm willing to give credence to his sense of urgency."
"I'd really consider starting with 'where we'll meet together?'" Sachiko asked dryly.
"Yes, of course," Alanna replied. She turned her head to look back at Sachiko. "You know... you're not very cute when you're being sarcastic. It's just not becoming of you."
"Cute isn't very becoming of me," Sachiko answered immediately. "I just pretend it is to seduce foreign secret agents."
"Wow, I don't even know how to interpret that. If you're joking, that's cruel... but if you're being sarcastic, that's even worse."
"What if I'm being honest?"
"Well," Alanna started, thinking about it. She had no clever quote for the situation. "Then I'm just confused."
She went back to searching through the notebook, Sachiko eventually taking a seat beside her to actually productively help. They dug through it for what felt like hours, and completely failed to find any sort of reference to 'WHERE WE'LL MEET AGAIN.'
Eventually they just gave up for dinner. Neither had a great deal of confidence that they'd find anything more useful in it. They ate together with a sense of uncertainty, both hoping that some answers would at least come together with that disc.
As if on cue, that night, they got a call from Dr. Li, telling them to get right down to his lab. They drove down; the traffic at night was almost as bad as Moscow's was during the day, but arrived in little time all the same.
"Lasers!" he announced excitedly to both of them.
"Uh, what?" Sachiko asked, puzzledly, with Alanna echoing the same question.
"Okay, so you know how records work, right? Little tiny bumps on a vinyl disc, and you run a little needle along the thing to play back what's encoded, right?"
"Sure," Alanna said.
"Alright, well... because it's a little needle, the bumps have to be around the size of that needle. Well, this runs on the exact same principle, with lots of little... uh, what's the word, indentations, along the bottom side. The shiny part of the disc," he explained excitedly.
"I didn't see any... I thought they were really visible with records?" Alanna answered, trying to think about it. "I mean, okay, I've only seen pictures, but still, they've got a sort of spiral pattern. You can see it."
"No, that's what I'm getting at! Records use a little needle, but these indentations are way, way smaller. I mean, incredibly small, they're invisible to the naked eye. There's no needle that could be small enough to run along them, you'd need a laser."
"Wait," Sachiko said, staring at him with disbelief. "You're saying that this disc is just like a record, but it's smaller, shinier, and uses lasers?"
"Yes! Exactly!" Dr. Li said excitedly.
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life." Sachiko shook her head.
"Well, it's true. It's the only thing small enough to actually be able to read the data on it," he said, his mood not at all dampened by her skepticism. "It's a brilliant way of encoding something, for sure. Now, I can't tell you anything more, because I haven't actually been able to read it."
"So you called us here for nothing?"
"No," Dr. Li shook his head. "I called you here because I have to go through about ten pounds of paperwork if I want to requisition a class B laser device, and then I'd have to explain what I'm doing with it, and even if I did, it'd take months for it to actually be delivered. I don't exactly leave dangerous parts just kicking around the lab."
"That's way too long," Alanna said, thinking to what the notebook said about the new year. It wasn't very far away. "We need it a lot sooner than that."
"I figure, and that's fine, I can do it. Besides, if I discover it independantly, not on government time... I can patent the invention myself and try to sell it back."
"Always the ulterior motive," Sachiko said with a sigh.
"It's only fair," he said. "Now, I can't get a seperate class B device easily... but you can. You can replace a zat gun, just like that," he snapped his fingers, "without anyone so much as blinking an eye, right? Well, if you can get me one to cannibalize for parts, there's about twelve laser emitters in your standard rifle, just ripe for the taking."
"Wait," Sachiko started, "you're telling me that it'd take months for you to get a single laser device, but a gun that I don't even need to sign a form for has twelve of them?"
"Isn't Socialism great?" Alanna asked dryly.
"That's what I'm telling you," Dr. Li nodded. "So, if you can get one..."
"We have one now," Sachiko said.
"On you? That's alarming," Dr. Li said, without the slightest hint of a joke in his voice.
"No, of course not on me! It's locked up in the car," Sachiko shook her head again.
"Can you go bring it up, Sachiko?" Alanna asked. "I don't want to stick around here too late, but I'd like to go over what Dr. Li has here."
"Okay," Sachiko said, and left.
Alanna walked over and sat down in the same chair as the other day; it hadn't been moved or seemingly touched since then.
"So what I'm planning on doing is--" he started to explain to her, but she cut him off.
"I don't really want to go over what you have, Li," she interrupted. "I mean, I'm sure it's great and it'll work."
"Oh," he said, seemingly baffled and thrown off guard. "Well, thanks, then?"
"I wanted to talk about Sachiko," Alanna admitted. "You don't seem to like her, right?"
He paused for a good moment, thinking about it.
"I... don't dislike her. But she's trouble. Always. You should be careful around her; she can be pretty deceptive at times," he finally said. "But don't tell her I told you that, okay?"
"No," Alanna replied, nodding, "I know what you mean. I've been there."
"Oh. I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm sure she's being sincere with me, it's just... well, I can't read her. It's confusing, is she always like how she is with you?"
"This is the first time I've seen her in years, to tell you the truth," Li answered. "She was a childhood friend of mine, and, well, she's always been sort of hard to read."
Alanna thought about that for a moment, then awkwardly said, "I guess that's why she ended up going into espionage."
"Probably," he said. "It's done weird things to her. She was just shy as a kid, now she's... well, all over the place. I don't think it's intentional, I think she's just as confused."
"Oh," Alanna said. "That's..." she trailed off, uncertain of what to say. She felt somewhat reassured, despite the fact that it wasn't a good thing to hear.
There was an awkward silence for a good minute. The only thing that interrupted it was the sound of the outer doorway opening, followed by footsteps approaching.
"Here it is," Sachiko announced as she entered. "One dangerous, tightly controlled laser weapon, for you."
Most of the month was depressingly uneventful. Nothing good came out any
further investigation of the notebook-- they certainly tried-- and
absolutely new was happening on the front lines of the war. Their mystery
had hit a standstill; both were convinced that the urgency wasn't misguided,
but all they could do was hope for useful information to come out of that
disc.
It wasn't until the 25th that they got another call from Dr. Li, telling them to hurry over to his lab. They did.
"Merry Christmas!" he announced to them as they walked inside. "I have a present for you two."
"Tell me you have it working," Sachiko said.
"I have it working!" he said enthusiastically, leading them in and pointing at one of his desks.
It was clear what he was showing them: a rather large mechanical contraption the size of a computer, clearly thrown together using spare parts. Green electronic board was exposed through the frame, an assembly of gears and motors surrounding the disc, sitting shiny side up, with a large moving beam holding a device that both women could only assume was one of the lasers, pointing straight down at the disc. The side was adorned with an array of toggle switches.
Attached to the bashed together device was a perfectly ordinary pair of blue earbud headphones. They looked like the sort that come with any music player.
"So... what's on it?" Alanna asked.
"It's a single," he said. "Three songs. As far as I can tell, the third seems to be an instrumental version of the first. I don't know what language they're in, other than it's definitely not any sort of Chinese."
"It's really just music?" Sachiko asked, stunned. "That's it?"
"That's it," Li said. "Do you want to listen to it now?"
"I guess we might as well," she said, disappointed.
They sat down together in front of the desk, and agreed to share the headphones with just one bud in one of their ears. Alanna felt like a 12-year-old girl, but said nothing.
"There's a lot of static at the start," he warned. "Since I was working blindly, I ended up gouging the disc a lot at first."
He flipped two of the switches. A red light instantly appeared coming from the thing hanging over top the disc, and the disc started to spin. After a few seconds, they were greeted by a harsh metallic noise; after about twenty seconds of that, it shifted to grainy music, then finally, decent clarity.
It was exceptionally weird, and completely failed to meet both Sachiko and Alanna's expectations for hundred year old music. It completely failed to sound like anything they'd heard before, even ignoring the foreign language. They listened, completely confused for several minutes, until the second song started. It was just as strange.
It was about a minute into the second track that Sachiko suddenly noticed something.
"Wait, stop!" she told Li; he had been standing around patiently, and reached over and flipped a switch that paused it. Both Sachiko and Alanna were slightly thrown off, as the disc hadn't stopped spinning.
"What's the matter?" he asked. Alanna seemed just as confused.
"Can you rewind it? I need to hear the last ten seconds or so," she said.
"Right, sure." He started to fiddle with the controls and backed it up.
"Listen carefully, Alanna," she said.
The music started to play again, starting from around ten seconds earlier.
"I can't understand a word of this," Alanna insisted. "It's all--" then she stopped, hitting the same realization as Sachiko. "Shit, can you play that again?"
"Sure...," Li said, puzzled. He backed it up again.
Both listened carefully this team, and Sachiko took the headphone out after the segment had finished, staring at Alanna.
"Did you hear that?"
"It's... that's a really thick accent, but, yeah, I caught that. We'll meet together in Tokyo," Alanna said, stunned.
"Ladi du da dablah, we'll meet together in Tokyo!" Sachiko mimicked, failing to remember any of the Japanese words even slightly. "That's it!"
"What's it?" Li asked, still completely puzzled.
"That's one of the lyrics; 'We'll meet together in Tokyo,' in plain English," Alanna explained, taking the headphone out of her own ear. "Wow, that's... that's it."
"Amazing," Sachiko said. "I can't believe it. Dr. Yazawa hides his secret message in a single English phrase in a wholly Japanese musical recording, laser-etched into a disc, dressed up as a piece of commercial music? This is absolutely crazy."
Alanna shook her head in disbelief.
"At least we know where we're going," was all she could say.