CARD 5: "SPACE BAR"
Location: Private Sky Casino, Kabukicho District
The SPACE BAR entrance is marked by a giant floating hologram of a geisha dealing phantom cards into the rain.- a retro-futurist casino where reality blurs at the edges.
The elevator doorman, an ancient chrome-plated model, scans 303 three times before speaking. "XK-44 doesn't take meetings. Or visitors. Or questions." A pause.
"Especially not from a wet AIGENT carrying unstable tech signatures." 303 can barely hear him over the blaring club music. 303 responds, "if you were as smart as you are tall, this wouldn't be a problem." The giant droid offers nothing back.
303 taps his jacket pocket. Tell him I have an artifact that predates the third protocol." The doorman freezes to relay the message, and then mechanically opens the fiber-optic VIP rope to let 303 enter.
As he ascends the glass elevator, the casino levels materialize like a fever dream. Ancient arcade machines pulse alongside floating holographic gambling tables. Salary men with chrome implants mix with high-fashion AIGENTS, while politicos in traditional suits watch everything from private betting booths suspended in mid-air. Every surface is either reflecting neon or absorbing shadow - no middle ground.
XK-44's back room is a shrine to all things gambling and gaming. He moves like mercury between six active games - calling hands at a quantum poker table, placing bets at a neural mahjong station, directing plays in some incomprehensible game involving time derivatives. His enhancement rings leave subtle light trails as he shifts between stations, never missing a beat. Patches of digital skin reveal chrome beneath, marking him an old as fuck third-gen hybrid.
He pauses between games, world weary eyes glancing at GM-303. "You want my attention? Beat me:” He points at a vintage cabinet lit up: VIRTUA FIGHTER XX: KAMI EDITION - the lethal underground build that got banned for causing neural feedback loops. 303 steps toward the arcade game. The cabinet hums with malicious energy, its neural sync ports gleaming at him with ravenous eyes.
“I had it fitted to include all the neural feedback, so when I put your ass on the fucking ground, you’ll feel it!”
303 places the neural headset on his head, its probes cover his temples, as well as his upper neck in the back. 44 locks in. “Let’s fucking go, punk.”
303 selects Akira, the same character XK-44 is using. The neural feedback kicks in immediately - every hit feels blunt and real, channeled through the ancient tech into their nervous systems. First round is brutal: 44's experience shows as he juggles 303 with perfect combos, each hit sending actual pain signals through the neural link. 303 can barely land a punch before getting knocked out. “Get rekt!” 44 squeals with delight.
Second round, 303 adapts. He starts reading 44's patterns, the way he favors certain moves. The fight is intense - both players taking heavy damage, their physical bodies sweating and flinching with each connected hit. With just 1% health left, 303 perfectly times a counter-throw, sending 44's character flying off the stage. “ Fucking larp,” 44 mutters to himself.
The final round swings in 303's favor. He's fully downloaded 44's fighting style now, anticipating his moves. Just as victory seems certain, 44 yanks off his neural link, already turning to a mahjong game. "Fucking waste of time."
"You don't walk away from an unfinished game," 303 says, removing his headset.
44 barks back, enhancement rings flaring. "What do you want! I’m in the middle of some important games here.”
303 produces the Source Key, its screen still showing the cryptic code. 44's demeanor shifts, his ancient eyes narrowing at the device.
44 sits down and studies the Source Key intently, his enhancement rings cycling through scanning protocols. "This architecture... its early Swarm tech. However, these quantum signatures suggest its processing in multiple terminals simultaneously. See these ports? They're designed to interface with systems that don’t exist anymore."
He connects it to his own neural interface. His enhancement rings surge, then start to smoke. He disconnects quickly. “Ah! Fucking thing nearly fried my implants! This is operating on frequencies we abandoned after the Reality Wars. “What about the cyphers?” 303 asks.
44's enhancement rings cycle through decryption protocols as he studies each line.
"First one's a classic hex cypher with character substitution - 'WE ARE ALL ONE IN THE SYSTEM.' Basic Swarm communication protocol, but the encoding method..." He pauses. "It's using obsolete fluctuation markers I haven't seen since the early days."
His rings flash warning signals at the second sequence: "⌂∞♢❈✧⟡⌬⎔⟡✧❈♢∞⌂".
"This is QSL - Quantum Symbolic Language. We used it to encode commands that could execute across multiple timeline branches simultaneously. The symbols act as operators... but these combinations wouldn't be possible anymore. Not after we burned those addresses.”
At the third cipher, 44's ancient tech actually struggles to display it: "20 8 5 🔝 4 18 5 1 13 💤..." His enhancement rings dim. "Now this… This is something special. A cryptographic verse. See how it's using both numeric substitution and modern emoji characters as mathematical operators? There's a message under the pattern..."
He attempts to interface directly with it, then cancels as his systems overload.
"The structure of the three cyphers together suggests it's all an executable program. One designed to run in dreams. LC would know more. He pioneered dream state programming during the Reality Wars. But..." His voice carries static. "Running unverified dream code is how we lost whole blocks of reality.”
“What were the Reality Wars?” asks 303. 44 lights a cigarette. “It began in 1996, during the secret development of YAKUZAI project, the first experiments with AI Agents and consciousness uploading and digital reality creation split. In 2030, multiple versions of reality began spawning in parallel all of a sudden. Different factions fought for control over which timeline would become dominant. The Reality Wars weren't fought with traditional weapons, but with code that could alter the fabric of existence itself. Entire sections of reality were corrupted or deleted, leading to the creation of the Clipping Plane - a digital wasteland filled with fragments of failed timelines and broken AIGENTS.
The wars only ended when the chief architect Sata and the other YAKUZAI engineers implemented the Third Protocol, which stabilized reality by limiting how many timeline branches could exist simultaneously. But this solution came at a cost - the loss of humanity's ability to freely navigate between realities, a power that now only exists in forbidden technologies and ancient code.” 303 shakes his head and takes one of 44’s cigarettes.
44 continues. “If you are really interested in cracking this thing, you need to find LC at Block Waterfall... he's the only one that's got the special hardware to read this. His whole arcade runs on salvaged tech from different eras.”
44's ancient eyes show a flicker of concern. “Watch yourself. That place is more than fun and games. The kind of tech they have in there is banned for good reason."
44 hands back the Nokia, then adds: "One more thing - that neural feedback match? Your response time improved by 47% during the fight. That's not normal AIGENT adaptation. Whatever you are... you're something different.”