Several Months Later
"What is the status of the base in Pahang?"
Several red pins were laid out across the holographic map, its blue light illuminating the dark room in a shade of sapphire, like a ghostly, cold aura.
Four agents in different attire stood tall around the computer, frowning at the most recent addition to their trail, taken form in a gray pin Geetha placed in an undisclosed location of a MATA base.
Karya sighed, closing his tablet in disappointment. "It has been raided." He shook his head. Geetha turned the pin red. "I've just received word from our delegates. Nothing important was stolen, but what limited footage was transmitted revealed that the suspect was after our databases."
Leon's eyes narrowed, glancing skeptically at the Invisio agent. "Play it," he insisted. "We'll work with what we've got."
The displayed map shut off, and in its place was a hovering screen replaying a video of what appears to be the main cockpit for all the MATA interfaces, the entire wall filled with computers.
Two Techno agents, who were laid back in their seats and chatting with each other, abruptly got to their feet to face in the direction of their unknown attacker. They attempted to raise their weapons, but by some invisible force, they were lifted into the air, flailing around in surprise. Then their heads were bashed together, knocking them out in an instant. They crumpled onto the floor in a heap, unmoving.
In the final few seconds of the feed, a small, child-like figure appeared into view, nudging the unconscious agents' hands away from the keyboards before tapping into their computers. The screen cut off in a flash, the video taken over by the words 'LINE DEAD'.
"That was a child," Bakar commented in surprise, eyes wide on the screen. "Wasn't it?"
Karya turned to Geetha. "Is there any other footage?"
Geetha nodded, manning the main controls of their display. Her fingers flew on the keyboard, but after a few seconds, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, typing coming to a complete stop.
"All the data in that base has been completely wiped," Geetha said. "There's nothing here. Not on base, not in the save files. Anything prior to this event is also gone."
"The agents?" Bakar quizzed.
"Unharmed," Karya supplied. "Dazed and confused, but they're expected to check out of medical tomorrow."
"A spy?" Leon suggested. "Only agents with higher clearance can access that footage."
Geetha shook her head, running through the video another time in a faster speed. "We've already run several security and background checks in light of Vikram and Nikki." Her eyes hovered towards the combat agent, wary of his reaction. "Our contingency measures couldn't be stricter since."
To her credit, Bakar didn't react. "Another organized crime group, perhaps? A hacker?"
"That's our most logical assumption, after everything that's happened," Karya agreed. "And there's the question of their motive. What are they after? A child can't be the mastermind."
"Not to mention the technology they used," Geetha added. "Telekinesis is still only in its experimental stage and not distributed to the known public. It's a wonder how long the kid's had to train for if they can use it without causing any considerable harm to those agents."
"It's been two months," Leon grunted, teeth gritting, "and this is the only evidence we have for the crimes? A ten-second footage about a child throwing around trained agents like ragdolls?"
The collective of agents fell silent, avoiding eye contact with the Neuro agent. It wasn't any of their faults – but they'd allowed two months' worth of crime to go on without any type of interference.
But what kind of interference can they run exactly, when they don't even know what type of game they have in mind? The dice is in their hands, and the agents are all blindfolded and left in the dark.
"There's no pattern to their attack," Bakar reasoned. "And any crime that's reported to us is realized weeks after the day of the actual attack. Most bases could still be unaware that they've been hit until they find those missing databanks."
"Then we'll have every active base comb through their files and have their save files uploaded to our main servers," Karya decided. "We can make out a rough timeline from there, depending on the date that the files were tampered with. Then we figure out what they're looking for."
* * *
After surviving not one, not two, but three nationwide doomsdays in the span of a year, Alicia's internship in an undercover mamak for "How to Appear Unassuming in Broad Daylight" was, without the lack of a better term, lackluster.
She and the other academy students were well into their second year now, and this is the year where they begin internships with field agents in controlled settings. Some of her classmates got more exciting adventures; like how Roza and Zass scored a spot at a skydiving hotspot in Langkawi, or how Chris and Bulat got shipped off to a lifeguard agency in Port Dickson.
They're all having a blast and the time of their lives, their internships taking them far away from the monotonous life of Cyberaya. Where they were given the chance to see the world, she was simply put back to the very beginning.
She's not sure which is worse. Letting Moon see all her baby pictures on the counter or being pampered by her dads' 24/7 now that she's under their care in both home life and agent life. Don't get her wrong, she loves all her dads to death, but sometimes they can be embarrassing.
Someday, she knows that they're going to pull her and Moon to one side, sit them down in front of some busted TV and start plucking out VHS tapes from her childhood.
So when Moon, bless her heart, though with good intentions and genuine curiosity, made an unintentional mistake to ask about one of those picture frames in front of one of her dads – she doomed them both the second the first syllable came out of her lips.
And that's how they ended up sitting on a table when the customer tide subsided, a dozen of albums piled up high across them.
"That's a lot of baby pictures." Moon's mouth fell open, spinning to Alicia. "You must've been adorable as a kid!"
Alicia buried her face into her palm.
They're two weeks into their internship, and Moon is now aware of the exact amount of milk Alicia likes in her teh tarik when she was 5.
Yippee.
Childhood stories and embarrassing moments aside, they did have legitimate, honest to god lessons about MATA. Her fathers, as happy-go-lucky as they are, were masters in their craft. Years of training and field experience for years earned them their leisurely days, and they had the skills to prove it.
They had Alicia and Moon juggle serving customers and handling a fake time bomb across the street while maintaining a perfect front. Whenever they failed to defuse it or when a customer questioned them for their behavior, they were forced to repeat the process until they got it right.
They staged a kidnapping, where Alicia and Moon had to search for the correct informant in a sea of customers based off of what limited information they were given. Then they had to track the kidnappers' location, figure out their motive and keep their tracks hidden. This had been made exceptionally difficult for Moon, taking her lack of subtlety into consideration.
By the end of three weeks, it was a given that they were both exhausted to the bone. They laid on their beds—Moon's being a mattress on the floor in Alicia's room—catching a breath from the day's training. They'd run halfway across Cyberaya to find a hidden data chip implanted into a dog only to discover that it hadn't been on a dog, and the chip had been hidden on the back of Rahul's ear all along.
"Your family is wack," Moon deadpanned, laying on her stomach.
Alicia draped her arm across her eyes. "You don't say."
They retired early for the night, tugging their blankets over their heads for comfort. When Razman called them for dinner, he found them knocked out cold in their beds and smiled exasperatedly. He turned off the room's lights, shutting the door softly to not disturb the girls.
Not a single one of them noticed their phones, vibrating and buzzing in the dead of light, lit up in a blue screen that eventually died off.
A/N: Well... I got no excuses for why I didn't update for 2 years. Anyway, here's the long-awaited update.