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[darkinferno]

Dante Rantanen

"Hey, you've reached Dante. I'm not in right now--you know what to do."

VOICE | TEXT | VIDEO | ACTION

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Comments

[darkinferno]

well unless retrospec's fucked enough that they're sending their stalker photos from other people's accounts to the wrong people you definitely sent me a picture

isn't that the woman you told me to stay away from

i see what's going on here

[...sorry, Togusa. But low-hanging fruit and all that.]

[standalonehuman]

THE OPPOSITE OF THAT, DANTE. WHATEVER YOU ARE THINKING. THINK THE OPPOSITE.

Mariko is a friend. And technically a colleague of a sort. So no.

[darkinferno]

[He's laughing, honestly.]

like that's stopped the rpd before

[standalonehuman]

Me. Dante. It stops me. Somebody might be happy to mix business and pleasure which I still haven't gotten to the bottom of.

Your fault. Why do I know this?

[darkinferno]

because for some reason you decided to care about what other people said to me

you brought this on yourself

[standalonehuman]

My fault for caring. Of course.

Equally your fault for being interesting and actually giving a damn about what's happening in the city, then.

[darkinferno]

most of the time people decide it's not worth the effort, not my fault you decided to be an outlier

[Okay, okay, he's. Actually pretty quietly grateful for that fact.]

but while we're on the topic of what's happening in the city

how'd that picture get sent to me if you didn't take it

[standalonehuman]

I've got my phone with me. If I'm at home, I put the damn thing in a box because of the last time we thought Retrospec hijacked our cameras.

It's paranoid, but maybe I was right to.

[darkinferno]

were you holding your phone when that picture was taken?

[standalonehuman]

.............no

[darkinferno]

[...]

so you probably aren't as right as you hoped

[standalonehuman]

There's something that I remembered.

And I really have to hope that something like it hasn't happened yet.

It was a way that other people could see what you were seeing, through machines.

[darkinferno]

how'd it work?

[standalonehuman]

Interceptors. They were a type of micro-machine. Think like nanomachine, but it's on a different size scale.

Somebody was injecting people with them, and they could remotely get all of their visual data, everything they saw, just remotely sent back to them.

Other-Togusa was looking into a situation and the Intereptors were important to it.

[darkinferno]

and you think somehow these interceptors ended up inside you?

["But Retrospec can't do something like that, can they?" he wants to ask, but he already knows the answer. It's evident in the color of his hair, the color of his eyes--his fear, that terror that someday soon he's going to wake up and feel a presence stirring deep inside his heart.

Of course Retrospec could do something like that, if they really wanted to.]

how do you find out for sure? do they show up on any sort of scan or blood work?

[standalonehuman]

[It takes Togusa a little bit of thinking, and the image comes to him, looking at pictures, closely analyzing them, and then a vision of himself in the mirror. The realization of what was wrong with all of the photos that he had been looking at.]

[Damn.]

He figured it out, by getting some leaked data. Pictures, but with someone looking at the picture-taker, and it was obvious. They'd been taken without a camera, just pulled straight from somebody's vision.

Damn it all, you know why this feels familiar? I tried that same trick with the Retrospec pictures, the ones where people had been grabbing photos of us from behind? I was looking for reflections.

[darkinferno]

i'm guessing you didn't find any in the retrospec pictures

so what does this mean, do you have them in you? i don't think i can zoom in on that picture you sent me enough to see if there's a reflection or not

[This isn't an invasion of privacy in the slightest]

[standalonehuman]

Firstly, no. Secondly, I dont want to know what you're zooming in on for a picture of Mariko.

[This isn't a deflection in the slightest.]

[darkinferno]

who said i was zooming in on anything? come on togusa i'm not that kind of guy

you're avoiding the question

[Yeah, good luck with that. You're talking to the guy that deflects things all the time; like he wouldn't notice!]

[standalonehuman]

I'm avoiding the question because I don't know the answer.

There's another possibility, a memory that I got from the other Togusa. He had a way of connecting to the people he worked with, talking with them. Something like the telepathy I had last month. But it was through a machine.

[darkinferno]

a machine that basically gave you telepathy? how would that even work?

[standalonehuman]

The best I can remember. Through more of those micro-machines, but intentional ones. A way for people to connect to the net, remotely. It could also connect people to people. And it was like the telepathy, talking over a long distance, whether they were right there or not.

[darkinferno]

[Dante's frowning on his end. Honestly, it's something he finds tough to really comprehend, because...]

so you had a smart phone implanted in your head?

[standalonehuman]

You have the most impressive way of cutting through subtlety, there, Dante.

It probably had more functions. But, fine, sure, whatever, the other Togusa had a smart phone in his head.

[darkinferno]

am i wrong?

you said it was a way for people to connect to the internet remotely that connected you to other people too that could reach over a long distance

the only difference is talking with your mouth and talking with your mind

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]