Max fought to focus on the issue, struggling to stay awake. Their lives depended on it.
[Resistance Skill: Neural Scaffold +1, Neural Scaffold reaches level 2]
[Endurance +1, Vitality +1, Will +1]
[Right, that’s a big problem. I’ve been told that the augmented body is super durable, but I don’t think I want to see just how durable quite yet if it can be avoided. My skills are still suppressed so some of that potential protection might not be in place yet. Do you think the trap door spider trick will work again to protect us?]. Max projected.
Casita paused and thought it through. With Max’s skill amping up his thinking speed and her being held back by her portable hardware, they were both clocking about the same speed.
[That’s good thinking. I think I can work something out with it. You will be protected from the g forces and the impact inside the bubble world. I’m concerned about the tesseract though, if the impact destroys the spacial anchor what happens to the bubble world?]
[Ugh. That sounds riskier than trusting in my augmentation durability. Blast it, is there any way to protect it?] Max was getting scared, [How much time do we have?]
[I have it! This is going to be tight. I’m reconfiguring some of the smart matter probes meant for studying the tesseract tree right now! My records have some interesting files and designs. There is one national school project that focused on protecting eggs from damage with nanostructured shielding. If I build a smart matter casing with a battery source to keep its pseudo-chemical bonding strong, it can shield the Tesseract anchor.]
[I’m going to need your help though. You see where the tesseract is right now?] Casita asked.
Unable to do more than shift and glance to the side against the g-forces, Max saw the Tesseract resting in the palm of his right hand. Both he and it were pinned to the floor with air pressure and high g forces.
[I think I understand the problem], Max groaned, straining to move.
[Resistance Skill: Neural Scaffold +1, Neural Scaffold reaches 3]
[Strength +1, Endurance +1, Vitality +1]
[We will have a small window to act], Casita said with hope, [While the E brake doesn’t work at the top of the platform track, neither will the EM rail accelerator. Shortly before impact the acceleration forces should drop. If you can lift the tesseract up before impact, I can open the portal and eject the casement. You’ll need to position the tesseract directly over the casement.]
[When you let go and jump into the pocket space, the tesseract will drop into the casement. My design is quite clever. I designed the casement to be like a bear trap. It will snap shut over the marble when the tesseract lands on it. I will have to close the portal before it springs shut. If we can time it just right, both we and the anchor should be protected before the elevator smashes into the roof.]
[Resistance Skill: Neural Scaffold +1, Neural Scaffold reaches 4]
[Strength +1, Endurance +1, Vitality +1, Will +1]
Max fought hard for a minute to focus; no other options presented themselves. He hoped the g force reduction would be enough. If the damn system could unlock his full skill set, he could probably easily do this. While he appreciated the gains the elevator ride from hell was giving him, he needed more, and he needed it now. Then Max remembered something that he had been neglecting and triggered his status screen.
[Name: Max E. Mitchell Level: Novice 7 (3450/3500 XP)]
[Body Design Model: Custom – Canis Familiarus Uplift Free Stats: 60]
[Strength: 16 Agility: 20 Endurance: 19 Vitality: 21]
[Perception: 22 Intelligence: 15 Will: 16 Energy: 71 Regen: 37/min]
[Body Skill - Stamina: 8 Leaping: 7 Healing: 8 Strike: 6 Unbreakable: 3 Speed: 6]
[Body Skill – Gymnast: 6 Balance: 5 Claws: 2 Ballistics: 3 Stun: 1 Gland: 1]
[Resist Skills – Poison: 1 Shock: 4 Sonic: 4 Light: 4 EMP:1 Neural Scaffold: 4]
[Sense Skills – Scent: 9 DigiSense: 6 ExVision:2 EM Fields:1]
[Mind Skill – AI Assist: 8 Access: 6 Identify: 3 OverLayer: 4 Fast Cog: 4]
[Mind Skill - Pattern: 7 Dream Learn: 4 Daemon: 1 Memory: 1 Bastion: 1]
His unclaimed stat points! He quickly assigned them all to his strength. Max tried to move his arm. It moved! It would still be a challenge to lift it, but he could begin to reposition himself for the expected effort. When the elevator slowed, he would be ready to try his best.
[Casita, I think I can do it. How much time do we have?]
[Let me share?] Casita asked as Max felt a pressure in his temple. Max forced himself to relax and accept the push.
[Mind Skill: OverLayer +1, OverLayer reaches 5]
Max’s vision shifted with ghostly overlays. He saw Casita’s casement final design as well as the current shape of the fabrication. The smart matter was quickly being reorganized into the needed design. Most importantly, he saw the countdowns. Several were being tracked, and the casement would be completed in 2 minutes. The expected g force reduction would hit in 3:58 minutes. And the impact was at 4:08. And all the counters slipped downwards as the seconds ticked by. Max gulped wishing they had more time.
[Mind Skill: Fast Cog +1, Fast Cog reaches 5]
[Strength +1, Endurance +1, Intelligence +1, Will +1]
“Max, I wanted to let you know that I believe in you. I wouldn't trade for anyone else to be stuck here in this situation with me. I think we can make it through.”
“Thanks Casita. I promise I will do everything I can. I won’t let this be the end of my story,” Max said.
The timer was getting close. Max gritted his teeth as he slowly managed to roll over and reposition his arms. Soon he was ready to push up against the punishing g forces and the pressure of rushing air. Despite his fast cog skill use, the timers advanced far too fast. Casita’s fabrication of the anchor case was completed on time and the expected acceleration decrease was next. The milestone flashed past, but Max couldn’t feel any changes in the pressure.
[Blast it] Casa screamed in his head, [The platform voltage differential is too much. It's still pushing us despite the house’s current amplifiers being down. You must move now! We are out of time!]
Max pushed with all his might, straining against the unrelenting pressure. He screamed as he felt something in his shoulder tear. Biting down hard his jaw popped and he heard a tooth crack. Max’s vision narrowed and he saw red.
[New Body Skill unlocked: Hulk 1 - augmentation used to overload physical power, burning all stored power for energy, some damage may result.]
With his strength suddenly boosted, Max surged to his feet. In his slowed perception, he saw the anchor case drop down between his feet with a dull thud. Once it hit, it opened like a hungry Venus fly trap. With mere seconds remaining, Max dropped the Tesseract marble and triggered his leap skill. He dove into the portal as the anchor fell.
Casita was ready inside the pocket space. The foglets in the chamber had formed a webbing throughout the sphere. Max’s hurtling form was caught before he could damage himself or the tesseract tree, snapping many threads before it successfully arrested his flight. Casita could see that Max had dropped the anchor perfectly, she could see it would drop precisely onto the pressure pad to trigger the case. She inverted the focus to close the portal and their private sealed universe was painted only in tones of scintillating blue light as the elevator platform disappeared from their view.
The case snapped shut microseconds before impact and the top floor of Casa de Mitchell was blasted hundreds of feet into the sky.
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Far below, the two thieves were busy. Pulsed surface electrical discharges over their ExoSuits’ surfaces quickly overloaded the intrusive foglets. Simms and Volker smoothly targeted the laser projectors one by one and disabled them with high-velocity kinetic rounds precisely applied to shatter their emitter arrays with minimal damage. Volker pulled a smart matter brick from his belt and sent it a command. It expanded into a sizable backpack. He scooped up the shiny octahedron and put it inside. Reggie began smashing the workstations and extracting the local data cores. Volker took some time to record all the display screens in detail and then threw the pack to Simms and strode to the blast wall in the direction of their entry point. While Simms loaded the recovered data cores into the pack, Volker took another brick from his belt and slapped it onto the wall, where it stuck in place.
“God damn booby traps. I hope we got the data cores intact. The booby trap might have triggered a data scramble.”, Volker complained as he strode to the back wall motioning Simms to follow.
“Mad scientist syndrome. If Mitchell didn’t have such a complex and dug this classic subterranean lab literally miles beneath his house, our EMP would have disabled all this nonsense.” Simms tutted, loading the last core into the pack, and followed Volker.
Without another word, both activated the heavy bracers on the right arms, which extended into a full body shield. They both took a low stance against the back wall with each shield grounded on both wall and floor in front of them. Volker sent the activation signal to his sticky block and a shaped charge detonated, punching a meter-wide hole into the thick blast wall revealing the borehole beyond.
Neither were quite prepared for what happened next. Another present Casita had prepared while waiting for the invaders was to discharge the geothermal water lines into the purge reservoirs ringing the borehole. When the elevator platform rocketed upwards the reservoir walls blew out. Each of the 10 storage tanks contained about an Olympic-sized swimming pool volume of water, altogether about 6.5 million gallons of water. The released water had filled the 4-meter diameter borehole to a height of 200 feet high and was still filling while the men were finishing their collections. The resulting head pressure sprayed the lab with a jet of water as soon as the blast wall was breached, filling the lab up quickly and submerging the thieves.
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Max was out cold and suspended in a web of foglets. Casita had used the surviving sensors in the Tesseract space to see that while Max did have some damage to both his augmented muscles and bones, he seemed to have been knocked out by funneling too much energy all at once. Satisfied he was ok, she thought about their next steps.
Casita was running calculations through her new core. The variable of 8 g acceleration less air pressure, losing approximately a third of the accumulated velocity breaking through three floors of EMP-compromised smart matter built into her rough calculations. A peak height of 1,900 meters and at least 43 seconds of parabolic flight. It had already been two minutes, so even if these calculations were way off it would be a safe bet that the case had landed and would open automatically in another 3 minutes.
Enough time perhaps to try and rouse Max. His bio-sign readings now looked like a deep sleep, rather than unconscious. Max couldn’t possibly resist quoting a binge night movie. Casita whispered in his ear.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“It just so happens that my friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Now, mostly dead is slightly alive.” Casita recited from memory.
“Hey! Hello in there! Hey!”, Casita quoted louder, “What's so important? Whatcha got here, that's worth living for?”
After a minute with no response, Casita gave up. Darn it. I guess he’s still out cold. He would never fail to respond to a movie line from the Princess Bride. Another minute and I’ll be able to take a peek outside.
When her timer ran out, she opened the portal ever so slightly, a view of the bottom of the case. Visibility was good. If the twilight of dawn was lighting the bottom of the anchor case, then it must have opened successfully. Casita took a moment to appreciate the magnitude of their last terrifying 10 minutes. Casita opened the portal slowly and with care to get a better view. As the edge of the portal crossed the open flange of the anchor casement, it interacted by pushing the basement sideways. The tesseract and the case flipped like a coin and started rolling.
With her view through the portal, the outside world appeared to be spinning. Casita couldn’t get a good read on where their location might be. Are we rolling? We must be rolling. She thought.
Suddenly water began to pour into the bottom edge of the portal. As the water flowed in, free of gravity, it became airborne. It swiftly and gracefully floated across the chamber. The blob splashed into the fractal “leaves” which sparked and shriveled. One whole branch of the tree collapsed, shrinking inwards, and the already small pocket space got dangerously smaller. The portal which had been two meters wide now shrank to just one and was now off-center from the anchor.
In a panic, Casita saw another blob of water floating in and headed towards the fractal canopy, another branch of the tree. The only tool she had to stop the water was her foglets, but all of them were occupied by holding Max’s unconscious form. With no time to consider her options, Casita used the foglets to toss Max out of the pocket space through the distorted gateway. Inside the tesseract, the water impacted the glowing fractal leaves and erupted in sparks. The portal disappeared.
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Bill’s new Velociraptor ripped through the air fast approaching Utopia. Bill had used his connections in the Reformed USA to quietly ignore his uncleared flight path. Surprisingly, Sherlock had some AI Irregulars with whom he traded favors, one of whom was part of the NORAM collective. It had agreed to erase any record of Bill’s flight for an unspecified future favor from Sherlock. Bill agreed. He was already breaking many rules for airspace control, he was significantly above the speed guidance for civilian aircraft.
Once Bill and his team of daemons had gotten airborne and had made their discovery regarding the true danger of the tesseract, he had tried to connect with Casa but there had been no answer. He knew the current configuration of the tesseract was far different from the MIT team’s device, but their threat was quite different from the high-energy event everyone assumed.
The depth of the NetherLab might not work to contain this type of threat and might even hamper the “resolution” to the dimensional incursion that happened in Boston. Casa being offline was beyond worrying, but no local businesses seemed to be affected similarly. Sherlock has found several live-streaming media influencers and active MMORPG gamers in the area who were all going about their normal lives with a live stream.
They began their approach and broke through the cloud deck. High-magnification optics zoomed in on Casa de Mitchell and Bill’s heart clenched. The house had a significant portion of the second floor removed with debris scattered about the yard. Smoke was drifting upwards, but no fire was visible from the distance. Bill’s fear turned to anger when he saw a waiting autopod parked at the front gates. His assumption of a tesseract issue was immediately replaced with concerns of a different nature. With icy determination, he addressed his strategy daemon based upon the historic General George Patton.
“George, please direct the AI pilot. I need to get down there immediately, my augmentations can facilitate an unassisted high-speed airdrop. I need him to dive, and I will bail out and free-drop into the front yard. The pilot can take the Raptor to the Utopia airfield once he drops me.
The Raptor quickly altered its profile and engaged its afterburners for a high-speed dive directly at the property. Bill positioned himself in the drop chamber where munitions would have been stored had the craft still been military.
“Drop me when ready”, Bill said to the craft and his team, his body quickly shifting. His poly matter skin and flesh hardened and shifted, changing into a war-form configuration. He cycled into calibration colors as active chameleon skin over armor came online. He didn’t think stealth was on the menu, but better to be ready.
Ports along his forearms, calves, and chest opened. His back inflated as beetle-like plates formed and flexed briefly. His hair retracted and his head reformed into an appearance of a modern helmet with a visor and a multitude of sensors around the entire surface. He smacked his fists together with large, spiked knuckles. Electricity arced briefly between them.
The jet hit its mark and ejected Bill, while lifting its nose and recovering from the dive. Bill dropped like an arrow. With less than 200 feet before impact, his beetle backplates extended and snapped his body upright with full-frontal braking. The wings not only blocked the wind but microjets embedded in the wings forced air from behind him through the wings towards the front as thrust.
Bill extended his arms and rapidly fired 10 canisters into the front yard. The canisters each exploded 3 meters above the yard spreading Bill’s custom designed powered foglets. They were both denser and more powerful than the generic public designs and immune to EMP disabling. The foglets spread explosively in streamers and rebounded forming a wispy gauze of webs. The densely piled foglet webbing piled up across the front yard. Bill landed amongst the center pile of dense fog, as it cushioned his impact. Despite the braking and the fog net, Bill impacted the ground at high speed. He formed a small crater in the soil in a classic superhero landing pose.
With a signal, the foglets split into diverging swarms, one circling Bill in a defensive tornado spreading outwards and another that shot forth into the house. No less than fifty drone jets ranging in size from a grain of rice to as large as a pack of playing cards shot out from under Bill’s carapace and zipped in multiple directions: the perimeter, overhead, around the other side of the house, into the house’s special drone access ports, and in through the damaged roof.
Bill activated his custom skills, and his visuals of the house became absolute. The yard and house were mapped in perfect fidelity into his expanded and accelerated consciousness from full spectrum visuals, radar, sonar, energy signatures, and space mapping using his foglets that pelted through the area.
The area was quiet. No sign of activity, and no electrical or thermal signals. The damage mapped onto his sensorium, and he saw it lined up with an exposed borehole that went to the NetherLab. Grinding his teeth, he leaped through the broken bay window.
He didn’t need to direct his daemons. This was a familiar dance for them. George minded the perimeter and over watch, taking his normally assigned drones and feeding the information back to Bill. Miyamoto, recognizing the rising potential for conflict, extended gun barrels from Bill’s forearms, and two skeletal arms unfolded from the back of Bill’s carapace, each vibrating with ghostly blades. Ada updated and scanned his expanded sensory input and filtered the most pertinent signals for Bill’s overlay. Leo noted the bay window breakage, dead foglet traces, and scorched smart matter patterns, he suggested this was the ingress point and likely an EMP was used to disrupt and disable the house systems.
Virgil whispered caution into Bill’s subconscious to be wary but also to keep his temper, prioritizing Casa and Max over aggression. Sherlock absorbed all the data making no comments. Bill made his way to the undamaged office side of the house, where Casa’s core was housed. Inspecting the core, he sighed with relief. The core was intact and functioning, but the connections with the house had shorted and fused.
George reported that he had found a camouflaged hunter’s blind as well as numerous concealed cameras and an actively waiting autopod. Ada quickly accessed and cracked the Autopod’s low-level AI security to learn that it had arrived two hours ago and had been waiting ever since.
Bill took a palm-sized deck from his thigh and pressed it into the core. It physically connected to the core and provided a comms channel to Casa.
“[Bill! Thank goodness you are back. Two intruders with military-grade Exosuits and a bunker-buster EMP. I apologize, but my countermeasures were not adequate. I’ve been offline for 3.10 hours. Max was in the NetherLab!]” Casa streamed at him, giving him a microburst of condensed information along the same channel.
With his cognition speed ramped up, Bill quickly assessed the information. The attack replayed in his mind, freelance mercenaries by the looks of them. Casa’s summary of the tesseract’s activation raised his eyebrows but realizing that Max was still missing refocused him. He reached into his stomach and detached his gut nanofactory and plugged it into Casa.
“This should help you get reconnected and get the house back in order. I need to find Max right now.” Bill said and turned to the borehole. To his surprise, something was coming up.
Miyamoto triggered Bill into a combat stance as an ExoSuited figure bounded up the borehole in a continuous wall-to-wall leaping climb. He cleared the edge and landed with an exhausted groan. Upon looking up, he realized he wasn’t alone. Bill stood facing him, surrounded by a dense swarm of foglets and a multitude of drones. His fists crackled with lightning and his bonus arms extended their blades.
Bill’s time perception slowed to a crawl, his aggressively swirling motes, and the world around him frozen in the moment he ramped up his speed. His daemons spoke to him in his head.
“[His arms are starting to rise. I expect he will attempt to shoot you with his embedded arm projectile launchers. I took the liberty of preparing our normal counter move against it. He is also shifting forward. I expect he will charge you once his weapons fail.]”, Musashi advised.
Patton also chimed in, “[You need to eliminate him as quickly as possible. You, Casa, and Max are exposed to the invader. Remember our lesson from Burma, that Techlord appeared to be disabled but he overloaded his augmentation power cells and destroyed the entire building. While your defenses held, three bystanders died.]”
Virgil, always the contrarian, argued his point, "[While this man may be trespassing and launching an assault upon you, it is within your rights to defend yourself. However, do take heed that he seems to possess significant augmentations, and even subduing him would require a powered strike. Are you prepared to expose some of your combat strategies?]”
Bill considered the advice and responded, “[Thank you Virgil. I will try to regulate my counterattack, but I can’t take a chance here. Once he realizes how badly he is outmatched, he might trigger an area attack. I need to keep my final counter measures under wraps. If I reveal them in a fight, I will absolutely need to kill him.]”
“[Ada and Leo, any observations?]”, Bill asked.
“[He does transmit upon a most narrow radio frequency, and with great encryption, which leads me to suspect a communication line. I have already commenced a similar emission to overwhelm and confound the data. It does seem that he has no active mote or drone network coverage at present,]” Ada reported.
Leo cleared his “throat” and said, “[He’s wearing a new Meridian Model 34R ExoSuit. Unfortunately, we don’t have its codes yet to enable remote disabling. Its specifications include heavy armor and strength augmentation, high-capacity quantum battery, kinetic projectiles, and flight capability. Although judging by his method of climbing out the borehole, I suspect his suit’s power capability regarding flight is either exhausted or damaged.]”
[“Alright then,”] Bill said, [“Lets adjust our time sense to fight speed. Once his initial attack fails, if he closes the distance like you expect Musashi then I’ll need your help for a proper disabling move.”]. Once everyone agreed, he brought his perception speed up to only about twice faster than human.
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With a tremendous roar, the man brought his arms up and triggered his high-velocity kinetic rounds. His rage transformed into confusion as his hands exploded in a spray of shrapnel and red mist. Unseen while the pair squared off, Bill’s denser powered foglets had accumulated on his barrels, linked up and compressed. The motes distorted the barrels and resulted in the mercenary’s unfortunate backfire. Howling foreign swears, the man charged, extending his arm blades from his ruined forearms. Bill folded backward while performing a barrel roll, his carapace deflected the vibrating blades and his extra arms swept to the side. Each slash cut the man’s extended arms to guillotine both his arms with several successive cuts. Bill’s foot quickly followed, hitting the man’s helmet hard enough to toss him into the wall and send his helmet flying.
The man bounced off the wall and crashed to the floor, his arms missing, and the right side of his head caved in.
“Dumb! You stupid son of a bitch! You don’t break into a man’s house and start an augmented fight without good-grade augmentations!” Bill snarled.
“[He is disabled. I am not certain if his augmentation will enable his revival.]” Miyamoto commented.
A hook shot up from below and caught on the edge of the borehole. A moment later using a powered winch, a second man with a backpack hauled himself over the edge. Seeing the messy remains of Volker, Simms did not get up from the ground. He rolled over on his stomach and spoke.
“Game over man. I give up. Fucking mad scientist.” Reggie Simms groaned.
Bill’s foglets swarmed the man’s armor and began to cut it apart like aggressive army ants. Soon, Bill had Reggie removed from the armor. The man was now wearing only a “suit” of Bill’s foglets. Reggie was truly afraid for the first time in his life staring up into Bill’s cold eyes. Several dozen foglets had flown into his mouth and he could feel them in his stomach, lungs, throat, and sinuses.
“I’m going to ask you once and only once. I’m sure you must be aware of the multitudes of data my swarm is giving me right now about your physical state. If you try to lie, I will end you. Very painfully.”
“Now tell me, where is my son?” Bill demanded.
Reggie was not insane or stupid like that poor bastard Volker. He talked and talked, revealing everything from his plans and his stalking to his partnership with Volker and their tenuous employment for Aphelion. He confirmed that he had followed Max to the house but never saw him once the pair had broken in.
“[I believe he is telling us everything he knows. No signs of obfuscation or lies.]” Sherlock judged.
With cold calculation, Bill gripped Simms with a precise grip under his ear along the neck. Activating his shocking grip, Simms seized and was knocked out.
“[Bill, thank you for the nanofactory. I have accumulated and recycled about 3 cubic meters of smart matter so far. I can shape it into an extension cable to reconnect to the NetherLab. The EMP damage is unlikely to have damaged much more than a couple of hundred meters deep.]” Casa advised. “[Reconnecting me to the NetherLab to discern what happened will likely be faster than trying to physically get down there.]”
“Alright. Let’s do it. My biggest drone can fly the cable down when ready. Leo and Ada, can you take over the gut nanofactory? I’m not sure of the best order to proceed to get the rest of the house restored. It can expand for more cycling capacity, or you can replace the core of the house matter compiler. Simulate the different approaches and execute the least time version.” Bill said, still anxious to find Max and needing to do something while waiting. He pulled over the backpack and started looking through it, pulling out the data cores and a gaudy cubic shape.
“[Professor, if you allow my use of your hand access contacts, I should be able to interrogate those hard drives. Maybe some answers can be found there as well.]” Sherlock suggested.
“I can do you one better” Bill replied, and four tentacles ending in USB connections snaked out from his sides and plugged into the drives. He knew that Sherlock would be able to squeeze out precious time with his expertise in cyber-interrogation.
Taking a deep breath Bill thought hard. He was missing something. The EMP didn’t explain all this damage and Simms never saw Max. Sherlock was deep into the drives already and Casa was sending the cable down the borehole. He hefted the junky octahedron in one hand, what the heck is this piece of garbage and why did these two think it was valuable. With a sigh, he called up Moneta.
“Moneta, the police will hear about this soon. If we can call them here before they arrive it would be for the best. No mention of the tesseract, just say we think they were after my data while I was away.” Bill asked.
“Of course, that would be for the best. They can take charge of this man and help with understanding what occurred. And don’t worry Bill. Max is a smart boy. We will find him.” Moneta answered.
Bill smiled; her words had a strangely calming effect as he broke the strange object apart. To the best of his understanding, the thing was no better than cheap costume jewelry. He finished pulling the last piece of Simm's armor apart, sending it down the recycling chute. His nanobots began to swarm over the apartment, slowly fixing the EMP damage while leaving the other destruction for the police reviewers. He paused in the chaos, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long sigh.
An almost sub-audible whisper in the back of his mind he “heard” Sherlock’s confused mutters about the data in the blocks all containing code for an ancient game called Donkey Kong.
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