Chapter 23: Josh Yossarian
Josh waited for 5 minutes. Erika and Tom were still up and anxious. This was not the first time George made them worry about him. Something told Josh that his nephew was in grave danger.
He entered the hidden of the Esoteric Order he was a member of, looking to hire a rescue team.
The next available group in the Asian region was in 4 hours.
That was good enough.
Now he needed more information. He opened Enigma_AI which was now in the released version and fed it all the information that George sent.
It took 2 minutes for it to respond. “As an AI I cannot provide information regarding 21 great mysteries. You will be contacted soon, stay connected.”
“What the hell is that?” Josh looked at the text in disbelief.
“What are 21 great mysteries?” he typed in.
The response came immediately. “Sorry, as an AI I cannot provide information regarding 21 great mysteries. You will be contacted soon, stay connected.”
Josh’s phone rang, it was a call through an encrypted connection and the caller was not revealed.
“Hello brother Josh. What are you doing?” a young man on the other side was the Magister of Knowledge, one of the twelve heads of the Esoteric Order. Clicks and clacks of a keyboard were heard non-stop in the background.
“Sorry, to alert you, I didn’t mean to. I just got a personal issue and your system said something about 21 great mysteries.” Josh was confused. He was under the Magister of Speech - propaganda department of the Esoteric Order and was never contacted directly.
“I see you put a request on a rescue team in Asia. And some documents my system considered above your access level. What is that about?” Magister’s voice sounded tired and sleepy as if he had just woken up, but the sound of typing never stopped. Things were bad. He quickly sent a message to George with one word “RUN!”
“Are you going to make me wait?” the Magister yawned.
“My nephew got into some trouble, it looks like. His investigations led him to something your system considered one of the 21 mysteries. Tokyo blackouts and people getting into strange accidents.”
“Oh, Tokyo blackouts. Right, it is indeed one of the 21 great mysteries that brothers and sisters are banned from investigating. Is that the same nephew that you ordered an emergency medevac for?”
“Yes. The same. But why are we banned from this case?” Josh needed some information to work with, he already lost his only son, and he didn’t want to lose his nephew too.
“Brother Josh. You are asking too many questions, but so be it. You are a brother of Speech, knowledge is not your specialty.” The keyboard stopped making sounds. ”Think. In one of the most populated cities in the world a few times a year there is a total blackout for an hour. This has been happening for three years. Electricity is still produced, but something is consuming it. Let me reiterate. Something in Tokyo is consuming all the electricity the city gets for an hour, and no one cares. It's almost never mentioned on TV, it's not talked about in the press as if it's normal. Who and what can use 20 gigawatts/hour of energy? That's about a hundred times more than CERN draws from the French grid. The government turns a blind eye to that despite possibly losing hundreds of millions per year.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Josh felt overwhelmed with sweat popping on his forehead. It was worse than he thought, way worse.
“What should I do, Master?”
“Well, your nephew will not hold on until the rescue team arrives at the location. It will take them at least 7-8 hours to get there. So I am canceling your request. As for you… You were most likely compromised, so request an identity change, I see your record has enough merit points to do that for yourself and for the people in the room you are in. If you don’t want them to die of course. The issue will be discussed between masters at the end of the week.”
“Thank you, Master,” Josh was unable to finish the sentence as the other side disconnected.
Josh ordered Tom and Erika to gather their belongings. As he gathered him, his phone pinged.
“I got caught but we struck a deal. I was mistaken about the situation, but won’t be able to return for quite some time. Do not investigate, wipe. 007.”
Josh’s shoulders relaxed. 007 was a joke only George could make. It's as if he said “Bond, James Bond” at the end. It could mean many things, but most likely meant that now he worked as a spy for the people who held one of the 21 great mysteries. Which was better than dying.
Still, it was better than losing him. Josh just hoped that George hadn’t sent this message to comfort him and protect his family, and he was truly fine.
ESOTERIC ORDER
12 magisters sat in a video chat together, their faces blurred and voices changed.
They discussed Stormbringer’s attempt to capture one of their facilities, which was most likely leaked to them by Zion. Zion was definitely pissed after Order stole an artifact from them.
So they planned a retaliation attack and decided whom to strike first: Zion or Stormbringers. After discussing sending a strike team at Stormbringers and not escalating with Zion they moved towards discussing the new information on one of the 21 great mysteries. “
Brother Knowledge, how many people have we lost gathering this?” - Brother of Swords sounded excited even after the voice change.
“None. It was gathered by one of the contacts of Brother of Speeches man. Sadly the contact went missing soon after.”
“Hah! So what are we going to do? We have some very good hints on who shoved us and Templars out of Japan!” Brother of Eyes sounded agitated. His scouts disappeared three years ago, investigating the first two Tokyo Blackouts.
“Nothing.” Brother of Control interjected. “We will do nothing. Didn’t you read the report? The whole place exploded in two minutes after the last message was sent. They took some radical measures to clean up their operation. If these actors are connected to the third great mystery, we will get ourselves into another war before we will be able to deal with Stormbringers.”
A voting menu appeared in front of all participants. “Investigate” “Do nothing” or “leak the information”. After the vote ended Brother Knowledge declared the results - “7 votes for Do nothing, 4 for Leaking, and 1 for investigating. I believe we can proceed to the next topic.”
And so they did.