Summary: The Gunmen and Yves strive to attenuate some
extraordinary stolen property. Rated PG

Disclaimer in Part 1

'Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto' - Part 2

---
The furrowed creases in Langly's brow threatened
to become permanent. Yves, sitting directly
across from him at the other laptop, frowned
too. The rate of their no-progress was
frustrating. Sneaking little peeks at her,
Byers noted how he'd never seen her looking so
haggard.

"Both of you could use a break," he told them.
Neither of them looked up from the harshly-lit
laptops that washed out what little color Langly
had in his face. He glowered at the bright screen.

"No," was his terse remark he deigned after a
telling moment. "I'm gonna try one more thing.
Could work. Cross your fingers."

"My configs spooling." Defiantly, Yves tapped her
keys faster, but her effort wasn't panning. "Like
all those other things that haven't worked yet?"
Yves harped, mirroring the sullen look Langly shot
over at her.

"I haven't heard your, 'Eureka--I've cracked it!'
Yet." He rolled his eyes at the streaming flow of
enigmatic data. He saved his best eyeball action
for her, last. Grumbling, he pursed his lips.
"It's harder than I first thought. It doesn't
follow any set pattern." There was no shame
admitting that, and he had no qualms saying so.
The code, in only the loosest sense, was a doozey.
It raised the bar on encryption. It was waves upon
waves of influxing, inverted algorithms that only
made silken sense to the mysterious responsible for
crafting the burgeoning population in the first place.

He was good, but he wasn't feeling anything like the
touted wizard; not at the moment. "Decrypt--decrypt--
decrypt--damnit" he exclaimed about as fast as the
unbranching packages of data chunks paraded across the
notebook's screen. Yves' machine had crashed; her
screen had gone dormant. She stood.

Byer's doubtful expression relaxed a bit. Something
was happening he saw, if only gradually. His friend's
aplomb was beginning to pay off. As though veils
were being lifted, and cerebral foreplay was catching
up with the barrage of software, the data began making
better sense. Langly turned to face him and both
grinned wickedly at each other.

"See--told ya," Langly gloated for Yves' benefit. She
craned her neck as she came around to Langly's side to
see what he was crowing about. Canting his head at
her, he said, "I kind of expected that to happen. Kind
of plays out on a fail-trap. One's let in, the other's
shut out."

"It's..." Nodding with a smile she finished, "Well,
that's more like it." The coalesing patterns of diagrams
fuzzing to resolution were beginning to jive. She helped
herself to Langly's shoulder, giving it several pats.
He looked ready to jump out of his skin over her doing
that. "They look like convoluted modular paradigms."

"Give 'em time." Langly engaged several keys in rapid
succession. "This should speed things up." The onus of
pulling this off was uncomfortably his, he acknowledged
with a blistering glare at the keyboard. He wondered if
he gave Kimmy a call, would he come over. He shook his
head. You rue what you spit in haste, he considered,
recalling how he'd told his on-again, off-again friend
that he was too stupid to live, to his mildly acne-scarred
face.

Frohike entered the corner of the office where all the
fun was, his greasy-looking apron tied around his waist.
He was bearing cups of coffee. There was even one for
Yves. "How's it comin'?"

"Langly's opened a portal."

"Took me long enough," he breezed at Byers who was
lifting a cup from the tray. Glad for the moment, he
still had his work cut out for him. At this stage, the
organizational interlays forming connections were still
up for grabs.

Frohike handed Yves a cup and she even managed to give
him a smile after taking a sip. "This stuff isn't bad.
I suppose it's growing on me." She weighed what felt
right to say next a moment longer than she had to. "The
three of you are." She eyed them fleetingly, monitoring
their reactions.

She heard Langly snigger, and Byers merely unfurrowed his
brow, unsure whether he should say something to fill the
awkward void. He remained silent, pretending to
fascinate himself with the detailing the data on the
screen was taking itself through.

"We're becoming fans too," Frohike said expansively,
secure in the knowledge that none of what he'd
confessed would go to anyone's head.

"Now this truly looks promising," Yves warmly
congratulated. The beating of her heart quickened.

"Yeah, but it could be a false lead. Wait." Langly
hammered the control, shift and F11 keys. Lastly
then, he mashed the F12. Allowing himself to feel
more confident was a luxury; one he couldn't afford.
"There's something hinky here."

Nodding, Yves replied, "So I've been told."

Byers' and Langly's eyes stormed her face for some
explanation. Before she decided to give them one,
the fruitage of Langly's labor came into its own.

"Welcome to the Magic Kingdom," Langly whispered,
clearly mezmerized by what was unfolding on the
screen.

"How on earth is this possible?" Byers voiced,
scooting closer to the screen to gain a better
perspective.

Langly strove to refine the image evolving on the
screen. "Somewhere in the Caribbean is my guess."

"Bermuda possibly," Yves opined.

"Yeah, that would be the most likely location.
Maybe twenty or so miles out." Langly looked off
to their left as his ears had picked up on the soft
whirring-burring sound. The ovoid robotical
counterpart had become operative.

"This weirdness just keeps getting better," Frohike
said with a preoccupied look that belied his rapt
interest.

"Tell me about it," Langly remarked with a feral
smirk.

"I'm having the hardest time realzing that something
this aggressive, falling into my wrong hands." Yves'
statement was partly true, but the way she'd said it
was convincing enough. So much so, that Byers placed
his hand upon her closest shoulder.

"Now, what are *we* going to do about it?"

Easing up on his sneer, Langly said, "It's not like
we've never suspected a covert governmental agency
responsible for controlling weather patterns existing,
but to have documentable proof before our eyes is way
intense."

Sagely, Frohike replied, "It's something Mulder's been
convinced of ever since we met him."

That was confirmed by the three's simultaneous nods.
Langly, with a bit more tweaking was able to pinpoint
an exact location from where the source of the pulse
signature was emanating.

Yves looked apprehensive then. "Is there even the
slightest possibility that a trace could route the tap
back to here?"

Proudly, Langly boasted, "What tap? No such animal.
I fixed it so if anyone's monitoring, all they'll
capture is mapped ghost-over resonance."

She hid her relief, while going over to the robotic
counterpart that had since begun glowing a cool
glacial blue. "I suppose it wouldn't be too far-fetched
to surmise that this spiffy piece of mechanization is
a transponder of the highest order."

"Saavy gal," Frohike awarded, moving over to have a
closer look at the robotic entity himself. "Stands
to reason this small marvel doesn't synchronize alone."

"I'm for showing off this trophy to Mulder. The
G-dude'll freak biggest time," Langly said, the strong
overtone of prophecy ringing in his voice. "He's
waited close to a decade for a revelation of this
magnitude."

Before Frohike could add his two cents, their visitor
alert signaled that they had a visitor. "Jimmy," he
predicted, and went to let their big lug of an
apprentice in.

Langly kept watching his computer's screen, making
rapid adjustments to preserve the integrity of the
capture. He heard Frohike's low-key grunt and
pithy comment a second before he let their visitor
in. The familiar voice had him smiling. "Yo,
Mulder, man. Your timing couldn't be more perfect."

Yves gathered her dark hair into her hands before
piling it atop her head. She fished in her leather
bag for a banana clasp, and once finding it, secured
her hair between its blunt, pointy teeth. She stared
at the softly-whirring robotic uplink a moment longer
before going back to stand beside Byers. "Is he
telepathic?" she whispered in an aside. The FBI
agent seemed to have a knack for appearing whenever
she had sensitive goods on display. Yet, she had to
admit, he could prove very useful in this instance.

Byers straightened up, humoring her speculative
mood, in her scrutinizing eyes. "Either he needs
information, or has some for us that needs to be
amplified or clarified. Sooner or later he comes to
us; it's become a given. We're info central." He
frowned. "Of course, he could be lonely."

Yves gave a terse laugh, judging it wiser to keep her
opinion on the subject of the elusive Federal agent,
and the Gunmen's close friend, to herself. All she
said was, "What...no diminutive partner of the auburn
persuasion in tow?"

"Even as we speak she's on a plane, bound for the
West coast. She owes her relatives living in San
Diego a visit," Byers related in a hushed voice.

"Hey, guys, what's shakin'?" Mulder's brief laugh
crackled in the air. When he caught sight of the
raven-haired beauty, he paused long enough to make a
guesstimate as to why she was there. "I see you've got
company..."

"Nothin' gets by you, Mulder," Langly said, full of
irreverence. The FBI agent feigned a blow that never
connected with the left side of the blond's smirking
face.

Mulder's arm fell limply at his side when the evolving
buffers on the screen arrested his attention,
rendering it undivided. "What have you got there,
Geek-is-me?" Mulder inquired, obviously captivated.

"Bet you already know," Langly quizzed, looking from
Frohike to Byers, then, reluctantly to Yves, quizzically.

It was then that the robotical counterpart commenced
making high-pitched chirping noises, and it was
also precisely then that images began bombarding the
computer screen. "How'd you do it?" Mulder asked, with
incredulous eyes.

"I'm partly to thank," Yves seamlessly inserted, and
with an insistent focus of her vision, indicated that
Langly should give attention to the latest relavatory
development that was currently unfolding.

Langly, acknowledging, worked his finger-worn board,
rat-tatting a swift series of algorithms so that no
continuity was lost; not even a second's worth. "It
helps, right, Mulder?"

Astounded, all Mulder could do was nod, seemingly
unwilling to breathe lest the highly improbable
disappeared in the blink of an eye. "How long?"

Langly let go a long-winded sigh. "In another six
minutes, it'll make fifteen." He pointed at the
screen with his index finger. "You're looking at
a pre-monsoonal front off the North Korean coast.
But, already, it's projected for a host of pre-
determined landfalls. Wait now... See that? See
how the pattern ebbs and flows according to the skew
of those latitudinal coordinates?"

Mulder gaped, noting that the small windows beside
the equations pictorally described what the math
entailed.

"One guess," Frohike preambled, before lifting his
coffee mug to his mouth.

"Don't need one," Mulder replied, wishing for some
of, what he hoped was, the brew that Frohike had
made. It was still brutally early for ruse being
thorougly stripped away without a trace. "One
suspicion satisfactorily confirmed..." He stuck his
face close enough to the screen for his nose to kiss
it. "Old Smokey has been dropping enough hints
lately. A couple of weeks ago I tailed Krycek to a
place not far from a cozy little resort about thirty
miles or so off the Floridian coast. Looked a lot
like the window that was up before this one." Mulder
asked if there was any chance of his getting some of
what Frohike was drinking. The older man told him
maybe, if he played his cards right.

Frohike went to get him his brew with ears fine-tuned
to the conversation.

Having heard Krycek's name, Yves recalled her last
exchange with rat boy; it hadn't been a very good
one. Somehow, he had tricked her into divulging an
informant's name they knew in common. 'If he weren't
so infuriatingly handsome,' she rued.

Byers was about to say that the information they had
supplied Mulder with for that particular 'excursion'
had been subject to change all along, when a
concentrated plume of silvery-hued vapor started
venting from the robotic entity. Not by coincidence,
the data and visual link-up on the screen began flaking
out.

"Crap--what the hell gives?" Langly cried, performing
some dogged finger interplay in an effort to hold on
to what had been hard won. As the cryptic fading of
the blurbs and chunkets of alpha-numeric glyphs
accelerated, the technophile dissolved into a
slurry of colorful language unfit for the ears of
impressionable minors.

"I'm surprised you held onto it for as long as you did,"
Mulder said, thanking Frohike for the coffee he had just
been handed.

"What did I miss?" Frohike asked, staring at the screen
that had just gone completely blank, save for a handful
of white dots winking on and off. "Was that suppose to
happen?"

Langly grilled him with a glare. Frohike let the
build-up of the blond's attitude fall flat by shrugging.

"Engineered sabotage; time-sensitive and precise," Mulder
informed, following a noisy sip. "He glanced at his
watch, a drippet of coffee slid down the stained 'Patriots'
mug. "Whatever you did held it longer than the last time
I was privy to the very same hallmarks."

"Where? When?" the four baffled individuals in present
company asked with confused expressions of varying degree
etched in their faces.

"Can't say. If I did I'd have to kill the lot of ya."

When the robotical counterpart began rattling from side
to side, and spewing its inner workings, the four drew
back, but not Mulder, and Yves, with her eyes narrowing,
overcame her initial apprehension and made an approach.

"I was rather becoming attached to the dodgy thing," she
said, ducking just in time to avoid being struck by a
flying piece that looked sort of like a mainspring.

"They let you get so far with the interlocking parameters,
and then pull the rug out," Langly pieced together aloud.

With a nod, Mulder awarded, "Give the bright bulb an
additional hundred watts." Draining the coffee from
his mug before adding additional input, Mulder said,
"Seems the '*they*' are pulling away from the pack these
days..."

The Gunmen each snorted in their own singular ways.
Yves pursed her neutrally-tinted lips, secure in the
knowledge of her own gouty suspicions.

"And that's why *they* don't want us printing the
features we do," Langly rasped, shutting down the
notebook. He wondered if he asked, would Yves say he
could keep them both for investigatory purposes.
Looking at her he asked, "Mind if I tinker with your
presents before you take 'em back?"

"I thought you'd never ask." Arching an eyebrow, she
addressed the three. "I'm curious about manufacturers'
serial numbers and such. After the trio of you go
over these items with your respective fine-toothed
combs, I'm certain you'll give me places to start."

"Yeah," Mulder interposed, "but those places usually
come with high security and threat of untimely death."

Everyone nodded, looking grave.

To brighten the somber mood, Frohike offered, "I'm in
the mood to dazzle certain guests and in-house brethern
with my new and improved recipe for eggs Benedict.
Laid in some fresh hollandaise sauce. Bought the
Thomas' English muffins just yesterday. Takers?"

Everyone nodded, but this time facial expressions
looked a lot more optimistic.

"I'd like to lend a hand, if I may," Yves offered
with a whimsical smile. "Sussing out weather-
controlling shadowy-powers-that-be has stirred my
appetite. I'm game." She and Langly shared a
wordless acknowledgement of their head-to-head set
for some future date.

"There's a certain Amazonian tribe...they hold a
week-long gorge-fest before the rainy season sets
in. Who knows...maybe we're in for a very big
change in the technologically-enhanced weather
from here on out." Mulder's lopsided grin was
purposely ignored.

Before retiring to his room to dress, Byers wrapped
his robe more securely around himself. Sounding as
though he was clearing his throat, he said, "After
breakfast, I'm taking a crack at Mister Roboto. It's
not beyond the bounds of possibility of locating a
grav-luvial of sorts embedded within." The aspect
measured gravitational forces.

"And I've got just the device that can help with
that," Langly insisted, standing, and then moved
off to locate what he was talking about. Softly,
they heard him hum the tune of a ditty he used to
whistle and tap when he was in graduate school at
M.I.T.. He'd driven many a fairly well-adjusted
professor to flail arms in quiet desperation owed
to his tone-deaf, automatonic rendition.

Mulder couldn't suppress a geeky smile of his own,
recalling the eighties song with the hypnotic
words..."'Domo Arigato, Mister Roboto...'" The agent
gave the weathered counterpart a pat on the head as
he walked by it. Hope and expectation welling up
inside him were familiar stomping grounds. Something,
anything, useful that edged him ever closer to the
moorings of truth was fairest game.

He believed in his friends, and the three believed
in him. That truth was in here within these
sheltering walls.


=========

End