Alli grabbed the keys to the Spirit-Mobile “Alright, you win. Let’s go. But I want answers.”
A minute later, they were streaking back out onto the darkening city streets, on their way to an address a bit too close to a previous visit. This Ziya lived not far from the shop they first encountered Smith, a seeming ally that was secretly the Greek god Hermes. She doubted they were off to meet another deity in disguise, but the neighborhood was choppy at best. Going there this late in the evening could come with trouble.
As she cut from Hoover Avenue to MLK Drive, she glanced Kaihime’s way. The cyborg didn’t meet her eyes. This was body language Alli could understand. She didn’t know why Kaihime wasn’t comfortable with sharing this specific piece of information after all she revealed about Doppelganger’s employers.
“Why don’t you want to tell me about the flash drive? What do you know about it?”
“I do not know that much. It was something of a legend among my parents and their peers. They called it the Shadow Codex. It appeared on certain bulletin boards back in 1985, long before the internet was a common concept to anyone. At the time it had several more layers, layers which have vanished over time. The first layer contained information on the Court of Shadows itself, which drew the ire of the higher echelon of the court. They sought to eradicate it from everywhere it was placed, even wiping out entire boards in order to erase it. But it kept popping up again and again. They couldn’t edit it nor could they stop it from appearing. So they set out to take control of the early internet. But they didn’t understand the anarchic nature of those boards. Many early adopters were already terribly paranoid of government oversight, so they only managed to disseminate the information even wider.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t everyone know about the Court of Shadows then?”
“Agents of the Court realized they couldn’t stop the information no matter how hard they tried. Instead they created bundles of false information, similar to the Shadow Codex. They were basically games built for hackers and cryptographers, but were far easier to unlock than the true Codex. By the time the world wide web started to take over for the boards, they were basically considered all works of fiction. Then the Shadow Codex disappeared entirely in early 1995. Again the Court didn’t know how such a thing was possible, but they maintained a copy for their own records. They’ve researched it ever since, even as time locked portions of it suddenly started to open. That’s the only reason they have your records. They were never able to open more than a few bits of information on their own. And so it sat until your friend Ian stole the information from them.”
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