Uari met up with Wizah again at the lustreport.
"I can't believe you actually got the Twin Earrings. And that you BOUGHT them." She had an awed, minor breakdown over the amount of money he spent purchasing the earrings. "I thought you were gonna steal them or something."
"Shut up," he hissed from where they were huddled together in a corner of the lustreport VIP waiting room. Dituri had been the one to usher him there again and hadn't made any comments on the extra 'baggage' he'd brought with him.
Said baggage was admiring the Twin Earrings in his palm. He'd removed them from the attention-grabbing mahogany box and was carrying them around in his pocket like they were common trinkets he'd picked up at the market.
The Gravts would both be pursuing and expecting them. He had unfortunately demonstrated a willingness to return for answers and then run off again, and they had made clear their desire to capture, restrain, and make obedient straying members.
What they needed was a different way of going about getting information and at the same time, to thin out their manpower, and this was where the Gejuth data centre would come in.
Lustre-based data had one flaw, and it was that it occupied more space and memory than electrical data. While it could be degraded, the process took more space, detail, and energy than was worth it to store within any single Interface.
Luckily enough, digital waste didn't just sit around occupying space. With the amount of information growing exponentially and taking up physical clutter, it was only a matter of time that the Millenium Digital Act was enacted to recycle lustre-based digital waste.
Unused digital waste, marked as such via deletions, was rerouted every time any device was recharging. Digital sewage of all shapes and sizes would be sent to a city's data centre in order to be broken down so that space was released in Interfaces.
Wasn't it likely, then, that some of the Gravts' information had leaked into the Gejuth data centre? At least the most recent information that had yet to be degraded?
************************
Uari and Wizah turned up in twenty separate places over the course of a week. First in Gildest, then Cayman Hills, Wren, and Gejuth, as well as several other cities.
The Gravts, acting while Ghost was still out of commission, found them all to be well-paid disguises using clone rings instead. Resources were wasted attempting to chase down every lead, and when they were revealed to be surface-level clones, further resources were used to return them to the base so that Io could wipe them.
Wizah was seeded in, as one of the twenty. Even if they were caught and she was brought back to be questioned, her possession of the blue half of the Twin Earrings would allow her to be recognised as Uari.
They ran the risk that people would come to know of the earrings, but by that time Uari hoped he would have all the information he needed from the Gejuth data centre.
They had travelled through the lustreports to different destinations. From the Cayman Hills, Uari made his way to Gejuth for his third (and hopefully final) visit. The data centre, considered part of the sewage system, was of course located right outside.
He'd Geegled the location to stake out the place as Aiam Adhick, and so knew to head instead towards a nearby Motel 9 to rent a room.
Winking at the receptionist, disguised as Aiam, and pretending he was meeting someone there for a quick lay worked. He found himself feeling disgusted and sequestered inside a musty little motel room.
Studiously avoiding the bedbug-filled bed, he pulled up his portable Interface and hit call to Ima Bish. She picked up instantly.
"Hello, Ms. Bish?"
"I swear to God I will hunt down your little paperboy and make him cry," Wizah snarled from the other end. Her new identity had been ascertained by Yan Guowen, and not with her input.
Uari swallowed a snort, a smirk, and his mirth. "Are you in Wren now?"
"Yes, you son of a—"
"Great! So that means we can get started. You ready to prick yourself?"
"It has to go on the left ear?"
"It's designed to do that but I think as long as it's got blood going through it wouldn't matter."
There was a heavy pause.
"So if I—"
"Don't you dare—"
"You can't do anything to me from Gejuth—"
"FIFTEEN BILLION Geeglecoins I paid for these earrings only to have you stab yourself through the nip—"
"I didn't say it would be the nips, it could be somewhere else—"
Uari swore. "Just stab it in your left ear, you infuriating bitch."
On the count of three, Uari pricked his right earlobe with the needle. Wizah ought to be doing the same on the other side.
There wasn't any need for the drama, it just helped that they were doing it together.
Uari looked at the blood on his thumb and forefinger and blinked away the tears in his eyes. "Did it work?"
There was another pregnant beat of silence before Wizah whispered back. "Dude, you are packing a weapon of mass destruction down here."
"Haha, I know right."
"I never would've thought, with your wiry ass body—"
"I am a god damn Greek statue. Wait, no, that's not right—"
"No wonder Ghost was hitting you up so much!"
Once their discussion on the size of his manhood had concluded, Uari affirmed once again that Wizah indeed looked like him. She kept her own accounts as Ima Bish open so that they could chat, but in a hurry, she could use his biometric data to open Uari's or Aiam's accounts.
"Can I spend from it?"
"Only in an emergency because it'll log me out from my end. I gave you plenty of money, you gold digger."
"Aww, but—"
Wizah and the other nineteen decoys would reappear in public over the course of the next few days. Once Uari heard confirmation that at least several of them were being pursued, he would then make his way into the data centre.
Unfortunately, it didn't mean he could relax until that happened. He would have to carefully stake out the data centre and then figure out how he wanted to infiltrate the space.
The easiest way, then, would be to impersonate a worker at the data centre. Uari swept all the furniture to one side and pulled out a chair from his subspace storage. He would rather die than sit or sleep on any of the furniture in the room.
Seated just out of sight of pedestrians, Uari cracked open a can of beans and began to observe people.