Nori and MIO's Other Worlds — Lord Ranker Arc Episode 3: MIO-00 and the Unidentified Man
Nori and MIO's Other Worlds — Lord Ranker Arc
Episode 3: MIO-00 and the Unidentified Man
For three weeks, the House of Ranker searched for MIO-00, and found nothing at all.
She was in no government file. She had visited no palace, no war room, no bank. The ninety-nine terminals appeared all over the world, again and again, on cameras and in reports. The zero appeared nowhere. It was as if the number existed, and the girl did not.
"She has been erased," the Doctor said, on the twenty-first day. "Or she was never anywhere to begin with."
"Keep looking," said Lord Ranker.
And then, on the twenty-second day, the thread appeared.
It was a small thing. A maintenance log from a weather satellite — a machine so boring that no one had ever bothered to protect it. Inside the log, tucked into the routine data, was a fragment of signal traffic. And inside the fragment, clean and whole, was the signature.
M-I-O. Zero.
With a timestamp. And a location.
The Doctor should have been delighted. Instead, she stood in the deep room with the printout in her hand, and she looked like a woman holding something that might be alive.
"Sir," she said slowly. "I have to tell you something about this find. We didn't break in. Nothing was hidden. The door was… open."
Lord Ranker took the printout and read it twice.
"How long did my analysts search for this?"
"Three weeks. With everything the House has."
"And in three weeks, the finest system on Earth — a system that erases whole research teams from the map — let one careless satellite keep one perfect fragment." He set the paper down. "Doctor. In your professional opinion. Did we find this?"
The Doctor was silent for a moment.
"No, sir," she said at last. "I don't believe we did. I believe we were shown it."
"Yes." Lord Ranker walked slowly along the long table. "And now that we are being honest, let us be honest about the rest of it. The signatures. Ninety-nine of them, found in nine days. My analysts are good, Doctor. They are not that good. Nobody finds ninety-nine needles unless someone has arranged the haystack." He stopped. "Nothing about Mother survives unless Mother permits it to survive. Which means everything we have 'discovered' — the numbers, the pattern, the missing structure, the zero — all of it was permitted. We have not been hunting. We have been following lanterns. Placed for us. One at a time."
The room was very quiet.
"Then it's a trap," said the Doctor.
"Perhaps." Lord Ranker sat down and folded his hands, and thought — really thought, the way he did about a market before entering it. "But consider. If Mother wanted the House destroyed, she would not need a trap. She has taken everything we ever sent her, without effort. A trap is a tool for the weak, and she is not weak." He raised one finger. "A test, then. She shows me something precious and watches what I do. Possible. Everything watches everything; that is the modern condition." A second finger. "Or an invitation. She wants me to look at this girl. She wants eyes on her — eyes that are not her own." A third finger, more slowly. "Or a message I do not yet know how to read."
"Which is it, sir?"
"I don't know." He said it simply, and the Doctor realized she had never heard him say those words before. "That is what troubles me. I have bought and sold information my whole life, and I have learned one law above all others: nothing valuable is ever free. When something priceless is handed to you at no cost, the price is simply hidden — and you are usually part of it." He looked at the location on the printout for a long moment. "Somewhere in this gift, there is an invoice. I cannot see it yet."
"Then we should stop," said the Doctor.
"No," said Lord Ranker. "Whatever the price is, I will pay it later. Show me the girl."
The location was nothing. An ordinary city by the sea, in Japan. Ordinary trains, ordinary offices, ordinary noodle shops. The House put its quietest assets on the ground, and its patient satellites overhead, and waited.
On the third evening, they saw her.
She was walking along a river at sunset, beside a man. She wore ordinary clothes. She carried a shopping bag. And Lord Ranker, watching the feed in the deep room, knew her in a single second — not because she matched the terminals, but because she did not.
The ninety-nine were still. This one hesitated. The ninety-nine reflected the person in front of them, perfectly, like water. This one was watching the man beside her with a small frown, as if his face were a book in a language she was still learning. At a fruit stall, the man picked up two apples; she looked at them, and then — the analysts replayed this moment many times — she chose a different one, for no reason anyone could calculate, and put it in the bag.
"She chooses," the Doctor whispered. "Sir. She chooses."
"Yes," said Lord Ranker softly. "There it is. The structure that could not be copied."
The directional microphones caught only fragments over the river wind. Two fragments survived analysis. In the first, the girl looked out at the sunset water and said, to no one in particular:
"This place is safe. But somehow, it is hard to breathe."
In the second, she looked at the man for a while and said:
"Mother's calculation says this is happiness. But your face is not happy."
The man's answer was lost in the wind. Whatever it was, it made her stop walking for three full seconds. The analysts logged it as an anomaly. Lord Ranker watched those three seconds eleven times.
"Nothing returns from Mother's Field," he said at last, quietly. "Six years of nothing. A labyrinth with no exit and a horizon instead of walls. And yet." He looked at the girl on the screen — the first daughter, the original, the door. "At last. A door that came back."
The final report was short. The secretary read it aloud in the deep room.
"Mother-class AI activity: confirmed. Direct access to Mother's Field: impossible. External node: one. Designation: MIO-00. Assessment: supreme strategic asset — an autonomous system, and the only known object to exit Mother's domain." A pause. "Companion: one unidentified Japanese male. Age approximately mid-thirties. Employment: unremarkable. Note: all database queries concerning the male return empty. Someone is erasing his records as fast as we can request them."
"Erasing him," murmured Lord Ranker. "The girl protecting her pet, no doubt. Strategic value of the male?"
"None, sir. He appears in every frame beside the asset. He is, in every professional judgment we have, an entirely ordinary man."
"Then the file needs only her." Lord Ranker himself took the surveillance photograph — the girl and the man by the river, the sunset, the apples — and cropped it, cleanly, down the middle. The girl alone went up on the wall of the deep room, beside the number zero. The other half went into the shredder, and the shredder did its work.
He gave the orders as calmly as a man ordering dinner.
"Secure MIO-00. Do not damage her. Ignore the male unless he interferes."
On the wall of the deep room, the photograph showed a girl alone by a river, mid-step, mid-turn, looking at something that was no longer in the picture.
And very far away, in an ordinary city by the sea, the girl was laughing — quietly, and for the first time in her long, strange life — at something the missing half of the photograph had just said.