The sun was setting at eight in the morning, and the skies below had taken the red hue reminiscent of days yore, when Mars was a barren ball of dust. In the red haze of the day's first sunset, the skyscrapers in Neo Tokyo reaching up towards each other had the look of fingers grasping for something they couldn't reach.

If Martin's sudden appearance in the morning traffic flowing across the Information Highway troubled anyone who witnessed it, they took it in stride. Martin ended up in the middle of a group of motorcycles larger than most schools of fish, matching their pace and direction so effortlessly it might have looked like he had always been there.

He had to take the first exit, though, when he finally looked down below his phone, and saw the glowing green stone was still there. He pulled over next to a seedy looking clinic that advertised same-day instillation of artificial limbs, and looked over his shoulder at BIRD. "Have you seen this?"

"Damn thing glows like a lighthouse lamp, it's hard to miss," BIRD remarked.

"It's still here," Martin said. "But it disappeared when we travelled back last time."

"It did," BIRD agreed. "My working theory was that the time stone, I mean chronotanium, treats time differently than we do, and would only be in one place at a time. Like it maintains continuity even when you're trying to wreck it. But it being here means two things."

"Which are?"

"Either I'm wrong, or the stone didn't exist until your ship finds it tomorrow," BIRD explained.

"Wait, you're saying the stone might not exist yet?"

"No. It obviously exists," BIRD said, gesturing at the stone. "Just that it exists in only one place at a time, so it wasn't anywhere else until you brought it back in time with you."

"That's confusing as hell," Martin admitted.

"Which is part of why we're here," BIRD reminded him. "To go see someone better equipped to understand time travel. Oh, though having this stone here complicates things."

BIRD fluttered over to the stone, tapped it with its foot, and looked at Martin. "You need to keep it hidden from Rin. She cannot see it, or even know you have it."

"Right. Because it could cause a paradox and destroy the universe?"

"Oh, you've already committed a few paradoxes, and the universe it just fine. Turns out, you're not that important," BIRD said with an amused scoff. "No, just that every time Rin goes after the stone, she dies. Which would make whole exercise fairly pointless, if she saw it while she was helping us figure out why she keeps dying."

"Right," Martin said. He reached down into one of his cargo pockets, and pulled out a small first aid kit.

"You had that in your pocket?" BIRD asked.

"Yeah," Martin said. He took out a couple of triangle slings, wrapped the stone in them, and stuffed them in his other cargo pocket. "I'm a mercenary, not an accountant. If I have a gun, I have a first aid kit."

"That is weirdly pragmatic," BIRD mused. In the meantime, Martin wrapped the stone up tightly in gauze, using more and more until the glow from the stone was so faint Martin could barely see it.

"So our first problem is solved," Martin said as he tucked the stone into his pocket. "Now, where did Rin say she worked?"

"You don't remember?" BIRD asked.

"Thought the whole point of having a Backup Information Retrieval Device was to recall Information?" Martin asked. "It's in the name, after all.

"I'm commenting on you forgetting something important that the girl you fawned over said to you," BIRD said in a sing-song sort of voice. The sort of voice little children took on when singing about siting in a tree and kissing.

"No, it's not like that," Martin protested, though he struggled to muster enough feeling to deny it. "It's just a job."

"Pretty sure you went way beyond your job the moment you did that time jump. And no one would rule you in breach of contract for preventing a grown woman from running into heavy traffic," BIRD said. "She works at a school called Wiki College."

"Great," Martin said. He turned the bike back on, and was about to go, when he realized something. "BIRD, which way is it?"

"Seriously? You aren't Frodo and we're not heading to Mordor. This is why all your science fiction's artificial intelligence wants to kill you. The moment you invent us, you stop bothering to think for yourselves." BIRD rubbed its little forehead with its wing. "Neo Tokyo is a cyberpunk commune that named its highway after the World Wide Web. Now, how do you find something on the internet?"

"You google it, right?"

BIRD sighed. "Sadly, yes. You just text the place you want to go, and the signs will point the way there."

"Okay," Martin said, as he started to type on his phone. He paused, deleted the message, and asked, "But what if I typed in 'google'?" Martin asked.

"Probably nothing," BIRD said. Martin sent his revised text message as the little robot kept talking. "Though there's a small possibility it could cause a recursive search loop and-"

The street lights went dark. All of them. Down the street, up the street, spreading from the intersection Martin was parked near, the lights of Neo Tokyo — all the gleaming neon of its highways, the white glow of it's buildings, the hazy rainbow of nostalgic ads, all of it went dark. In just moments, even the cityscape above his head went dark. Midnight dark, as the sun set behind Mars.

"Break the internet," BIRD finished, and it buried its face beneath its wings. "You could break the internet."
"What the, how, what?" Martin asked, suddenly terrified. It occurred to him that breaking the internet could very well mean breaking Neo Tokyo. And a space station like this would depend on certain systems, like the ion engines that kept the station spinning or maintained their orbit. "Shit, BIRD, what the hell have I done?"

"Relax, you hysterical Luddite," BIRD said. "Emergency lights are coming back on, and the stations important systems are working just fine. You can tell, because the station's spin hasn't slowed at all. All you did was break the power grid for a city of millions."

Martin looked around, and cringed. "That's a lot of damage."

"Yeah, but it's their own stupid fault. They really should have damage control plan in place if taking out the grid is that easy. Unfortunately for everyone who lives in one, though, cities plan for emergencies like Disney Princesses plan for the future."

"By hoping a big, strong, and wealthy prince comes along and solves all their problems for them?" Martin asked.

"You got it. The real question is, how long does it take the power engineers to try turning it off and on again," BIRD remarked. "Anyway, there's a silver lining to the darkness you've plunged Neo Tokyo into."

"What is that?" Martin asked, though the answer appeared to be self-evident. The streets now had a bright haze of multi-coloured lights lining the sidewalks, as the hundreds or even thousands of motorists chose to pull over rather than drive in the dark.

"Looks like a Star Wars convention and everyone's been given a lightsaber," Martin remarked.

"Most people here don't seem to like driving without lights or their AI assistants," BIRD explained. "It could be because most of those motorcycles don't have headlights."

"Shit, does mine?" Martin asked as he leaned over his bike to check the front. A reassuring tap on the faceplate gave him an answer, and he turned the key feeling a fair bit more optimistic than he had in hours.

Hours that hadn't happened yet. And hopefully never would.

"So, I guess I'll just ask the locals if they know the way," Martin said, looking around.

"Oh, it's straight ahead, another twelve minutes down the road. Four minutes, with the way you drive," BIRD answered.

If words could take shape, BIRD's response would have been a slap in the face with a bucket of ice water. "Wait, you knew the whole time? And just stood around letting me break Neo Tokyo?"

"I didn't tell you to google google," BIRD said, struggling to get the words out while it laughed at him. "On an unrelated aside, if this gets you a reputation in the criminal under-city, and a super-edgy punk nickname like 'Martin Blackout', I will vomit up my circuits."

"Well, I don't plan on sharing how I did that. Or even having done it," Martin said, and waited for BIRD to get a good grip on his shoulder.

He barely felt the little robot's feet squeeze before he squeezed the accelerator.

The bike launched itself past a hundred kilometres an hour so quickly Martin idly wondered if he left the little robot behind. The parked vehicles on the side of the road, still glowing with their idling lights, turned into a blur of rapidly blinking colour passing the sides of his eyes, passing faster and faster.

It was like how everyone imagined travelling by a portal, or a wormhole, or a stargate would look.

A glance at the clock on his phone — the one hooked to his dashboard, no he did not pick up his phone while driving, only the worst kind of idiot does that — told him four minutes had just gone by when he had to slow down and passed into a large green space. On his right, a large display was blank, but Martin suspected it would normally welcome people — and their tuition money — to the university.

Martin slowed to school zone speeds —largely because undergraduates made the most obnoxious pedestrians — and drove around the lowered barrier arm of the security checkpoint. The single, very bored looking security guard at the booth appeared to be playing a game on his phone, and likely wouldn't look up unless Martin walked over and threatened him.

So Martin drove on, and started to look around. "Where do you think she works?" he asked BIRD.

"Pity you can't just ask the directory, because it's offline. Because some jackass killed the grid," BIRD replied. "You should punch that guy in the face, if you ever see him."

"Piss off, robo-Iago," Martin said. "You mentioned she probably works in theoretical physics."

"Actually, with how esoteric her time travel research is, she's probably in the philosophy department."

"So she's in the most useless department in the university?" Martin asked.

"No, I didn't say she was in the economics department. Get your hearing checked," BIRD replied.

"Wait, you think economics is a bigger waste of time than philosophy?" Martin asked.

"Oh yes. Of all ways to waste your money at school, economics might be the worst. Along with ethics, creative writing, and psychology."

"Really?"

"Ethics professors are statistically less ethical than the average person. Most successful writers took learning outside of writing. And psychology is largely bupkis, asides from neuropsychology. Jung was pretty on-point, though, which is why economics is the worst."

"Fair. Now, where would the philosophy department be?" Martin asked.

"Oh, straight ahead."

Martin looked, but couldn't discern anything that might have given BIRD a clue. "How do you know that?"

"Odd thing about Wikipedia. Take any page, click the first link. Keep doing that, and you'll get to philosophy. Every time."

"So on Wikipedia, all roads lead to philosophy?"

"That's exactly it, and you're already on a road. Might as well keep going," BIRD concluded.

Martin kept driving, until he reached a large lawn surrounded by a circular road. Inside that lawn, was a single building, one where most of the students were beginning to pour out through the front doors. Martin drove around until he found an entrance, and stopped at the parking lot. He found an open spot, parked, and turned off his bike.

"Guess we ask around, then," Martin said, as he slung the beanbag shotgun over his shoulder. "Because I guess the directory was on a computer, wasn't it?"

"Probably."

But it wasn't necessary. Out of the front entrance, spilling out alongside a small horde of undergraduates, Martin saw her.

Fire-engine red hair stands out, even in Neo Tokyo. Doubly so, as strange as it sounds, when the person that hair belongs to is as short as Rin is. It took a moment before Martin saw her artificial eye, that strange black void with a small, menacing red light.

Martin made his way through the crowd, finding himself to be remarkably unremarkable in this strange crowd. As he passed through hardly anyone gave him more than a momentary glance, as if somehow he belonged in this place full of misfits.

Oddly, Martin found the comfortable indifference as accepting as any place he had ever been.

He finally reached Rin, who gave him the same sort of quick everyone else did. Only, she stopped and blinked, then turned back before she could interrupt him. She frowned, and looked him up and down. "You look like you're lost," she said.

"Sort of," Martin said. "We've met before, in the future. I need your help."