Seeking the Source [Cas - Mission Set-Up]

"I wouldn't be me if I didn't say I was hoping that was the case." Giving a short chuckle to the holo-suited doctor, Emma gave a nod. Despite her appearance, she stood up rather easily. While Cassandra vaulted the fence, Emma instead pushed through, the lock entirely ineffective after so long.

'Knocking', of course, was merely a formality. Whether it was the disguised Digimon ripping the door out of its frame, or Emma tossing a brick through a front window, reaching in and unlocking the door, it didn't take long for the abode to be open to them, Emma immediately retching in response. "Oh, god, that stench..."

Screw tact, it wasn't worth getting poisoned over this! Briefly clutching at her pocket, a brief shine of light replaced the spirit wielder with that of a Mercurymon (X), mercifully with no nose or blood to get infected. The knight would press inside, out of sight, and draw a flashlight. The front room looked about how one would expect for being abandoned for forty-plus-years: water stains plagued the floor, the wall was cracked in more than a few places, and the mats underneath their feet were near entirely rotted through.

"No wonder this place never got any traction for sale. It's so underwater you'd need an exterminator just to tear it down." This was definitely not Emma's strongest suit, but she knew what she was looking for. A quick scan of the ground floor revealed not too much interesting - except for the fact that the furniture was still fully 'present', though far from in-tact. At a glance, it might have looked like one just walked away from an underwater mortgage.

It took a few minutes to try the doors, but they would eventually find one that led to a lower level - down to an unfurnished basement, and completely unsafe wooden stairs. Kicking the last support away, the champion-level knight simply fell down the floor, and pointed the light forward.

... There it was: several tall black carts, each covered under a gray sheet. "Isn't that a treat - he at least took the time to mothball his work." Alright, so there were the servers, at least - but where to go from there?

"... I really don't want to think that this trail ends cold here. Tch."

"Hm?"

'Don't touch those sheets'? That comment would have brought Emma to give a blank stare if she was able, but Cassandra's thoughts were in the right place. Emma did anticipate fail-safes, but not in the manner that Cassandra was expecting. Was she checking for traps, of all things?

"Doctor, with all due respect, what you're looking at are old computers from the 60s. Computer security as we know it today didn't even exist until the 80s." That, and if these were the model that Emma was thinking of, the entirety of those eight towards probably had little more power than one modern smartphone. Still, she did her due diligence, checking the surrounding area, only finding a few rotted-through mousetraps - and as Cassandra looked up, she'd be greeted with a drop of gross-looking water on her face. The beam looked sketchy, but not rigged.

"Now, stand back just in case." The spirit wielder would give a nod, pull back on the sheet - and give an impressed whistle at the sight. "These aren't early-chip IBMs... well, no, part of it is. But it looks like he rigged it with mechanical parts dragged in from the Digital World? Might explain why he needed to throttle the power. Still junk, by today's standards..."

But fun junk. Cassandra could probably tell in Emma's nonexistent eyes just how much she was looking forward to tearing into this piece of work.

"You got a portal up? Swing us by base for a second, I'll use mine to drop us back in my flat in London." She sighed: "I'd rather not have DATS on our ass right now - probably wonder what the heck a foreign spirit wielder is doing in Japan."

"Clearly, he didn't think someone would be that thorough - that, or rats have already bitten through all of the wires and scurried off with the pieces."

Take your pick, really. Fortunately, it wouldn't take them long: even if DATS was already on the way, the first portal would take them to a nondescript location in the middle of the Folder Desert - and after that first one closed, the second would open up to the London residence. The Mercurymon carted those servers right along through both portals, idly sighing at the doctor's comments. "Frustrating, yes, but different times, Doctor."

---

Back in the real world - across an ocean and technically violating a few transport laws - the pair would find themselves, servers in tow, in a mostly vacant room set up for just this occasion. Wheeling the servers off to a corner, and dispelling her spirit, Emma would set off to get her set-up for this analysis:

A fresh laptop, a custom running system to work with common computer programs back in the day, and a mess of different cords and power strips were at her disposal. Eventually, she found a converter that worked for the servers at hand - and at this point, gave Cassandra a nod. "This is honestly going to take a while to get running - you want tea, anything? Feel free to help yourself - the only other person here is Vigilant."

And Vigilant knew better than to get in Emma's way when she was about to be on a roll! "Now, what secrets are you hiding..."

A few hours sounded about right.

Cassandra would meet that Knightmon a room off of the kitchen, in a simple holosuit and idly reading a book as Cassandra stepped on in - and after a bit of pleasantries, he'd get a kettle on the stove and a few sweets out for their guest ("Though if you were to head out for a bit, we could always call you back? Emma tends to get really into these projects...")

That she did: dedicated to breaking open that server and extracting every ounce of information that she could out of it, Emma set out to work. As it was technology from the early 70s, she started by copying the information, wholesale, into a few back-up hard-drives before beginning the analysis proper. The server's password itself was easy enough to force through, an impressive list of files coming up. Emma blinked as that scroll bar shrank further and further down the side of the screen.

"Crack wide open for me why don't you." She grinned, cracking her knuckles, and set right off to work.

---

...And a good three hours later, Emma's set-up had quickly evolved.

She brought in a small desktop, another table, and used another hard-drive to start test-running a program that she'd re-compiled from the server. The window showed the file in dark grey font on a white background:

DigiCal D 1.00.08

That ran more-or-less on its own, as Emma poured into different files - looking through notes, correspondence, contact information, even going as far as to pull up a phone book from Japan on her phone and a pad of paper to start scribbling through and writing down potential addresses.

"... Um, Emma?" Vigilant peered into the room, giving a sigh as he shook his head. Emma perked up at the sound, seeing the Knightmon. "Hm? Its only been like an hour, right?"

"Three and a half, actually." He shrugged, likely leading Cassandra back into the room. "Any headway?"

"Mm... I think so." She gave a nod to the monitor: "Believe it or not, that piece of work over there's the initial version of the D-Reaper that was on file on the date of the blackout. Going through the notes here..." She muttered: "It looks like he got up to version one-point-six before the entire server went dark. But I want to at least try the initial program to see how it behaves. Its something like running a stability inquiry on every file over a certain size - though it seems more effective on 'active' programs. Granted, it crashed that thing like four times before I just said 'you aren't allowed to blue-screen anymore, just break for me'."

"Huh..." He looked to the laptop. "And this?"

"What Cassandra probably actually cares about. Names, addresses, contact information. Looks like this guy was a 'Dr. Lee', of all things. Don't worry, I managed to scrounge up his social and used that to look back into him... aaaand..."

The grand reveal? "... Rushed to intensive care in 1974. The server was active up near that date too."

"... Explains why none of it was trapped, then. But that also would mean that he didn't leave behind the project in malice?"

"Gave up looking on that as soon as I found it out. Been screening through this guy's personal life to see if I can find ties through anyone else..."

"Good ear, but unfortunately, he's dead."

Emma clarified that rather plainly, even despite Cassandra's grave tone. "I imagine the stress in trying to re-code the program was a part of it, but unfortunately, its a part of living in the Digital World. When time progresses seven times faster on the other side, you appear to age seven times as quickly on this side. But, let's open that can of worms another time."

Indeed, rather than stay on that line of thought, Emma proceeded to go through the information that she did have: "Once I figured it was next to impossible to follow-up with Dr. Lee, I went to look through his personal history, as best as I could. Court records show that he was divorced in 1972, had a single son who would have been eight at that time, and worked in commercial research at the time - which explains why he was so flush in these resources..."

"Its sounding like you have somewhat of a lead?"

"Of course." Emma pressed on: "The wife and company aren't all that interesting, but the son had multiple problems with truancy and long stretches of simply vanishing during breaks. So closely related to another tamer, I considered that he could have been among the next set of tamers. It was when I was trying to track him down that I found this."

Emma clicked to a window on her browser, and tapped at the screen. "Its dated at this point, in fact, the last point of editing this site was in the mid-90s, but it was a message board that pretty openly discussed Digimon. He seemed obsessed with trying to fix something below the surface - more-or-less convinced he could do it solely from the side of the Digital World."

"Is it possible that he's still active as a tamer?"

"At this point, its the only lead we have. I have his surname, early college pictures, and expected age... that's about all I could manage. People really didn't put a lot online back then. If he had a Facebook I could just crack his life wide open..."

"Of course... let me just pull that one up again..."

Honestly, it wasn't much to go on: "It looks like he went be 'Lee', so there's a bit of a Senior-Junior going on here. Family's surname is Inari - not sure how much that's going to matter. If he were to remain in the human world... let's see, 1972 to 2019, add 8... um, fifty-five."

"Provided that he spend most of his time in the human world," the Knightmon corrected. "Correctly speaking-"

"What, he'd be somewhere between 55 and 337 years old?" Emma shook her head: "It looks like once he was busted for truancy once or twice, he somewhat kept himself in line since then. If I were to guess, he's at-best a moderate user of the Digital World - not to mention that the medical field there might make him look even younger than 50."

As for the college picture? Black hair, dark eyes, trim and proper tie in a school uniform. Emma showed it to Cassandra, but honestly the British person in the room could barely tell the difference between him and the pictures immediately to the left and the right of him.

Putting that aside for the moment, Emma gave a nod towards the program. "Its criminally simple - in modern terms, it would be less than fifty lines of code." She explained it, in brief: "It flags programs that exceed a certain size capacity based on the total size of the server, then runs a cross-analysis to see if that part of data is running in proper parameter. If it isn't, it deletes the excess and tries to repair the base code underneath to its proper state. You could think of it as your computer automatically resetting itself to a previous update and save point if it detects a virus."

"Something that simple?" Vigilant seemed confused, as Emma nodded. "Its simplicity led to its danger. But I suppose if you were trying to change the root of the Digital World, you couldn't inject an overly complicated program."