Riko had gone off to negotiate with the school newspaper to use their digital printing press for a small run zine. Meanwhile, Kyo had her own job to: break into Blue’s laptop and find out what was so important on it that espers attacked her friends.

Kyo Amano has a remarkable mind, with its preternatural capacity to observe, remember, and recall details. She also had an ability she rarely told anyone about: the art of the Memory Palace, or hyper-compartmentalized cognition. The name came from a technique for meditation cultivated by humans, long before psychic abilities were taken as fact by the world. Whether it was visualizing a library containing all you know when trying to recall something, a chalkboard full of equations to go along with your internal monologue regarding a mathematical proof, or an art gallery full of clues pertaining to the mystery you’re trying to solve, it was something just about anyone could do.

Kyo could do it better than most people, though. By dividing up her cognitive and reasoning abilities, she could run simulations such as drafting a blueprint for an experimental aircraft and then take it for a test flight, or construct a house and then see how it holds up 200 years later. She could be quite the stock market player, if she didn’t fear unknown variables so greatly. Today, she would be chewing on a different data set: the contents of the RAM and paging data on Blue’s laptop.

Blue’s Cyberkinesis had its advantages and disadvantages over Aimi Aoki’s variant of telekinesis, Matter Automation. Aimi could tell a tree to uproot itself and defend her, but telling a computer to type in its own password would be impossible for her, unless she knew the password herself. Computers don’t generally know things, they just happened to be full of electronics and silicon that could, through interpretation, represent knowledge.

To tell a computer what to do, you have to speak its language. Blue could do that instinctively. Just by focusing her power, she could write any computer software that could theoretically exist, and be run by the given hardware, and transmit it into the memory of the device. With a simple thought, assembly code is spontaneously brought into existence, electrons moving around as if to a conductor’s baton.

Although the process that created the binary data would be completely alien to your average software developer, the operands that they resolved into weren’t anything unique. It was the x777 assembly language, used by the popular Cortex brand processors. Kyo, understanding every function of the x777 assembly language, could simulate its output inside of her head, using her psychically awakened Memory Palace.

If she could get at that data, she could figure out anything Blue had done to trap the laptop against intruders, and just what headway she had made into cracking the military encryption on the data inside. But first, she’d need some equipment.

As she made her way down the hallway, laptop in hand, she thought about the events of the day. Chiyoko was looking at her differently now. Before Riko had shown up, she was used to thinking of Nana as a big sister, and Chiyoko as a little sister. They had an emotional bond, sure, but she didn’t think of them romantically.

Now, however, Chiyoko was giving her eyes. It wasn’t unknown for students to pair off at all girl academies like this, where contact with boys was limited, and they were young enough to justify a little harmless fun. She wasn’t expecting that kind of attention from that introverted, yet adorable waif, however, and wasn’t sure what to think about it.

Honestly, if anyone was awakening feelings in her like that, it was Riko herself. The brash beauty came and charged into their lives with a confidence Kyo only tended to have in academic matters. And while Riko liked to sell her own intelligence short, but she had a certain quantity of ‘street wisdom’ to her that Kyo found remarkable.

Kyo didn’t understand Riko’s obsession with Aimi Aok though, who Kyo found to be rude and bitter. But that was part of Riko’s appeal. She saw a side to people most didn’t notice. Riko saw Kyo and Chiyoko as a couple, not just friends. And Riko saw Aimi’s cold exterior and outright indifference to Riko’s advances as a challenge to overcome.

Kyo couldn’t, once she had begun to think of herself as an object worthy of romance, help but wonder what it was like to be wanted like that, to the quixotic degree Riko went after Aimi. The idea made her tingle a bit. But she put such concerns out of her mind as she made it to the door of the computer science club and, after a moment of hesitation, knocked at their door.

It was Kyo’s old club. They were not, all things considered, mean or unwelcoming to Kyo. There were people at the school who showed spite towards Kyo, because her ability was nearly impossible to beat when it came to competitive testing. But the computer science club were just geeks who welcomed her for her talents and her unusual personality alike.

Which made it all the more awkward that Kyo had abandoned them to focus her efforts on the parapsychology club. But what had been done had been done.

The door opened. It was Toshiko Takano, a diminutive girl not unlike Chiyoko, although not quite as mute. “Oh… hello Kyo. You… you don’t have to knock, you know. You never formally relinquished your membership.” Toshiko looked down and away.

Kyo felt a pang of guilt. Riko’s attempts to make more empathic towards Chiyoko had given her a sudden awareness that others may also have a certain fondness towards her. Her spontaneous decision to follow Nana in her vision may have had unintended consequences. She took in a deep breath and pushed up her glasses as she headed inside, Toshiko moving back to welcome her. “Oh. Right then. Thank you," Kyo replied.

Kyo looked over the various retro PCs they had put together from their trips to the markets of Akihabara. She had taken them all apart numerous times and reassembled them just as she found them, learning every bit about their functionality and history that she could. They all held a certain nostalgia for her, but what she needed was something more modern.

She looked over Toshiko, and the students seated at the center table, poking away at their laptops. “Can someone lend me a flash drive boot loader? Or make me one? Rinaks, PenguinOS, Detective Hat, even something as bare bones as Archon would do.” Kyo watched the faces of the students at the table, wondering who, if any, would step up to help. They were mostly staring at her curiously.

Finally, Toshiko went and picked up her laptop and brought it to Kyo. “You can borrow mine, Kyo. I’ll go get you a flash drive from the club supplies. I don’t think anyone keeps something like that around for themselves, but you can make a boot loader yourself I’m sure.” As Kyo took the device gratefully, Toshiko wandered over to the supply lockers to fish out the requested item.

No, Kyo realized, it was easier for most people to just use the operating system that came with their laptop. They certainly weren’t like Blue, who could just make a laptop respond to their whims, and thus stripped their computers down of all excess baggage, such as operating systems or even a user interface.

And they weren’t like Kyo, who had a love/hate relationship with technology. She loved to learn about anything, and there was certainly a lot to learn about when it came to tech. But she didn’t trust it as much as she trusted her own head, which, due to her psychic talents, performed many of the functions a computer did. In either case, she needed it to make phone calls, or access the internet, or print out a writing assignment. So she had the smartphone her parents gave her, and for the rest of what she needed, she borrowed computers from others.

Kyo opened up the laptop, and downloaded everything she needed as Toshiko brought her the little plastic stick with the gleaming metal port at the end she’d need to access Blue’s data. She could, of course, just hook Toshiko and Blue’s laptops together via cable. But if Blue was as paranoid as Kyo imagined, she might have rigged it so that doing such a thing would cause damage to Toshiko’s laptop, or use the wi-fi to broadcast everything about Toshiko to whatever shady group Blue was working with. Kyo knew better than to let that happen. Better to use a cheap flash drive that cost a few hundred yen at most.

Kyo’s weapon of choice would be Archon, an operating system that did nothing by default but provided a text-based interface for exploring and modifying files. Anything else you wanted it to do, you had to enable it manually. All she needed was a hexadecimal file reader. There would be little else there for Blue’s cyber-traps to interact with. In as little time as possible, she had the flash drive all set up, and moved over to Blue’s laptop.

Meanwhile, Toshiko was scooting over towards Kyo’s side to watch what she was doing. She was trying to be subtle about it, but Toshiko was showing an interest in her that Kyo was finding herself acutely aware since her lunchtime outing. For the moment, she put such thoughts aside and focused on what she was doing, opening up the paging data containing all of the assembly code created by Blue’s mind.

Toshiko watched in amazement as hexadecimal codes scrolled rapidly down the screen. That was Kyo’s preferred format; binary was too long, and scrolling through the code parsed into readable language would take even longer. Hexadecimal was nice and dense, perfect for absorbing the gigabytes of data she’d need to to run Blue’s software in her head in a timely manner. “How are you doing that,” Toshiko asked, “it’s just random numbers and letters. Even a master of speed reading needs to make sense of the words they’re taking in.”

She took a break to look at the girl. Toshiko was aware Kyo was an esper, but still, it was hard to explain some things to others. The ability to create a computer inside of her head through her Memory Palace was strange even to other espers. “Well… do you ever think about stuff in the bath? Get some of the thinking you need to do during the day done with, like ideas for homework assignments, or what kind of groceries you’d like to get next time you go out?”

Toshiko nodded, so Kyo continued, “Well it’s like that, except when my mind is idle, I try to make sense of stuff I’ve memorized, like seemingly random hexadecimal codes. If it’s a computer program, I try to visualize how it works.”

“But that’s thousands of lines of code! You can’t possibly figure it out faster than a com…” Toshiko trailed off. It wasn’t crazier than many of the things people claimed espers were capable of doing. She decided to quiet down and watch with a quiet awe that Kyo was starting to become uncomfortably familiar with. Toshiko leaned her shoulder up against Kyo’s and said in a soft whisper so that the other students couldn’t hear, “Tell me what you think about in the bath, though.”

A hot blush began to spread across Kyo’s face. She wasn’t someone like Riko who thought on her feet in these kinds of situations. But she had her Memory Palace. As she stammered, “um, ah,” and attempted to think up a reply, elsewhere in her brain, all of that hexadecimal code was being converted into programs and functions, and inductive reasoning as to their purpose was constructed. Most of it looked to be simple protocols for interacting with networks; hypertext transfer, file transfer, secure shell, and wi-fi authentication, everything Blue needed to get into a system and steal data or cause trouble.

There were a few counter-intrusion measures too, but nothing that could attack the human brain, so Kyo didn’t pay them much mind. A few daemons to send off information periodically to throwaway emails and burner phone numbers. Without a police warrant, there probably wasn’t much Kyo could do with them.

Finally, Kyo saw something that could help her friends: an algorithm created to decrypt the dump of stolen military data over time. Blue must have planned to leave the laptop idling, transfer everything to a more powerful system, or steal processing power from malware-infected computers connected to the internet,  expecting to get at the data a few months from now. With what Blue created, and the right hardware key, Kyo could crack it in minutes.

For that, however, Kyo would need the help of someone special at the parapsychology club. Little sister Chiyoko, the fair lady to her knight in shining armor, or so Riko believed.

“Um, I’m sorry,” Kyo said, picking up Blue’s laptop as she suddenly stood up. “I should really get back to the parapsychology club room. We’re really busy getting everything up and running.” She foisted the slim rectangle into her bookbag.

“I’m sorry too,” Toshiko said, looking down, her expression suddenly flush as well. Another pang of guilt shot through Kyo “Um, you guys aren’t in trouble, are you? Whatever you were doing there looked serious.”

Kyo shook her head. “No. We were just given a gift of some important data with no obvious way to access it.” Which was true enough. Most of the serious research into psychic phenomena was on the part of the military and intelligence agencies, so whatever on this laptop was germane to the parapsychology club’s interests.

Toshiko looked up, ready to make another try of things. “Um, would it be okay if I came by to see the parapsychology club some time? It sounds interesting, and there are a lot of days of free project time here that I don't really do much…”

Kyo slowly nodded. “Of course. We’re a part of the school too, everyone is welc…” Kyo looked into Toshiko’s widening puppy dog eyes, “I mean, I’d be delighted if you came by.”

That seemed to be what Toshiko wanted to hear. She gave Kyo a soft smile. “Take care of yourself, Noki.” Her middle school nickname. They really have known each other a long time, haven’t they, Kyo thought to herself.

“You too, Tashi,” replied Kyo, and made her way back to the parapsychology club room.

There, she placed the laptop before Chiyoko, to present her with her important task. “I’d like you to do me a special favor, Chiyo-chan. It may be hard, so don’t push yourself too much, it’s okay to refuse.” Chiyoko looked up to her, eyes full of determination. Kyo realized too late that her words made Chiyoko more likely to push herself to the point of collapse with what she was about to ask.

“I need a nensha drawing. A vision from the past. Not of the laptop itself, but something that’s stored in the laptop. It was taken from some place owned by the military, such as a base, or a research center.” Kyo took her student id card out of her wallet, which contained a barcode on the back. "Someone may have used a card like this to access the data that’s now on the laptop, by placing it in a reader next to their computer. It’ll have something like this barcode,” Kyo pointed at it, “but much bigger. It’ll look like lots of barcodes squished up and mashed together, or static on an old television. It has to have enough space to store a 1024-bit key and everything the military knows about the bearer’s identity.”

This would be a massive feat of postcognition, one which Kyo wasn’t even sure was possible for Chiyoko, talented as she was. Kyo was worried she might hurt herself trying to attain such a specific and distant vision. But there was no dissuading her now. Chiyoko ‘s gaze was burning as she stared at the laptop, her sketchbook held at the ready. A visible aura of psychokinetic energy was surrounding her; she was channeling a massive amount of it.

Finally, it seemed to hit. Chiyoko leaned back, eyes rolling into her head, and her pencil hand began to blur. Little by little, the front and back of a military id card began to appear on the page. This took longer than Chiyoko’s nensha drawings usually did; her pencil was working more like a printer this time, filling in each part of the picture in a single dot at a time, like pixels. This was necessary to accurately render the 1024 bit sequence contained on the barcode. Data that was too precious to entrust to an RFID chip, but was helpless against Spirit Photography.

The id looked to belong to a research contractor named Akash Narayan, but Kyo wasn’t concerned with him. The barcode was all she needed. Taking that sequence of black and white pixels, she dove into her Memory Palace, feeding it into Blue's brute force decryption algorithm already running inside of her head. And shuddered as her cranium was suddenly flooded with knowledge.

Everything the military was working on regarding espers was there. Latent potential analysis, microwave-based anti-psychic weaponry, psionic implants, super-soldier training programs, and experimentation conducted on esper criminals. There was something there Kyo wasn’t expecting at all, too: human cloning. And it wasn’t just espers they were trying to clone.

Riko Nomura might have a sister. She was named among those whose blood was sampled for the cloning project.

Contemplating what she was going to tell Riko, Kyo glanced over towards Chiyoko. She was slumped onto the table, taking a well-deserved nap after that tiring effort. Kyo scooped her small body up in her arms, and guided her head onto her lap. She was a bit worn out as well from that sudden dump of information into her head, so she simply sat back in her own chair and relaxed for the moment.

She looked over at what Aimi and Nana were doing. They were doing some sort of experiment, playing Rock Paper Scissors to test the effects of telepathy when the other participant is aware of the ability. Good, Aimi hadn’t noticed Kyo’s discovery. For now, Kyo placed all of that military research inside of a secure vault in her Memory Palace. Aimi would have to navigate quite the maze to get at it.

Her repose was interrupted by Riko's sudden arrival, whose her presence was marked by a loud announcement, "Alright, I've got the student newspaper's blessing to print our zine with their equipment. All I had to do was agree to work for them as a writer too." She was beaming, proud of her negotiation efforts.

A bittersweet smile spread across Kyo's face. Riko seemed so upbeat in the face of having to do so much extra work. She couldn't bring herself to tell her what she learned.