Chapter 1: The Pattern
Tokyo, Japan
October 15, 2019
03:47 AM
The apartment of Kenji Morita was illuminated solely by the cold, bluish glare of six active screens. Three monitors formed the primary desktop setup, two laptops were stacked precariously on towers of research books, and his phone vibrated incessantly with notifications he'd stopped checking weeks ago.
On the central screen, an unending spreadsheet: Dates, events, screenshots. Columns that stretched far beyond what any sane person would consider necessary.
Kenji took a sip of cold coffee—his third cup of the night. Or was it the fourth? He had lost count.
"You're losing it," he muttered aloud. His voice was raspy, alien in the apartment's silence. When was the last time he had spoken to a person face-to-face? Monday? Tuesday?
What day is it today?
He shook his head and forced his focus back to the display. The data didn't lie. It couldn't lie. These were objective, verifiable facts, timestamp included.
> March 23, 2019, 14:37 JST – A meme appears on 4chan: a smiling, cartoony bat with large eyes and prominent teeth. Text: "Smile! Big changes coming!" It achieves moderate virality. Nothing exceptional.
> March 24, 2019, 11:22 JST – Theresa May announces she will resign as UK Prime Minister following the failure of Brexit.
>
Coincidence. It had to be.
> April 10, 2019, 18:45 CET – The same bat, now on Reddit. Posted in r/conspiracy with the title: "The bat knows." 847 upvotes. Comments are mostly mocking.
> April 15, 2019, 18:50 CET – Fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
>
Kenji rubbed his eyes. Two cases did not make a pattern. He needed more.
And there was more. Much more.
> June 30, 2019 – The bat meme appears on Twitter, posted by an account created that same day. User: @B_Bat_1952. Zero followers. A single tweet: the image of the bat and the words "Hong Kong blooms red."
> July 1, 2019 – Protesters storm Hong Kong's Legislative Council.
> August 5, 2019 – The same image, now on Instagram. Caption in Mandarin: "天黑了" (It has gotten dark). Posted at 8:47 AM.
> August 5, 2019, 9:01 AM – Massive power outage in the United Kingdom affects one million people.
>
Kenji leaned back in his chair, which groaned dangerously. His boss at the digital magazine had told him to take a vacation. "You're burned out, Morita. Take two weeks. Disconnect."
That was three weeks ago.
He hadn't returned.
His phone vibrated. A text message from his sister:
"Kenji, Mom is worried. Please just answer your messages. Are you eating?"
He ignored the text and opened a new browser tab. He typed: "bat meme 2019 conspiracy."
The results were the usual fare. Reddit threads by people with too much free time. YouTube videos with sensationalist titles. Nothing solid. Nothing real.
But Kenji had found something they hadn't.
He opened a hidden folder on his hard drive: "PROJECT_CHIROPTERA." Inside: 347 screenshots. Each one showed the same basic image: a smiling bat. Sometimes with slight variations. Sometimes identical.
But every single instance appeared 24 to 48 hours before a significant real-world event in 2019.
The algorithm he'd written to track the image across the internet had found 89 documented instances between January and October. And counting.
The disturbing part wasn't just the temporal pattern.
It was the origin.
Every time he tried to trace the original source of the images, he hit a dead end. Masked IPs. Deleted accounts. Servers that ceased to exist hours after publication.
Someone, or something, was meticulously covering its tracks.
Kenji uncapped a warm bottle of water and swallowed two ibuprofen tablets. The headache was constant now, a dull thrumming behind his eyes.
On his right monitor, he had an academic paper open: "Predictive Analysis in Social Media: Can Algorithms Forecast Real-World Events?" Published July 2019 by the MIT Media Lab.
He had read it seven times.
The paper argued that certain social media patterns could predict market shifts, civil unrest, even natural disasters up to 72 hours in advance.
But this was different.
This wasn't prediction. This felt more... intentional.
As if someone was leaving a signature.
A warning.
Or a taunt.
Kenji closed his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.
When he opened them, the screens were dark.
All six of them.
Simultaneously.
"What...?"
He blinked, confused. Had he fallen asleep? A power outage? But the refrigerator light in the kitchen was still on. The router was blinking its steady green light.
Just the screens.
He reached for the mouse, but before his fingers could touch it, the monitors flickered back to life.
All at once.
And on every single one, the same image.
The bat.
But it wasn't a meme. It wasn't an internet screenshot.
It was a new, high-resolution image. The bat was smiling directly at him, eyes half-closed, as if sharing a private joke.
And underneath, text Kenji had never seen before:
> "You keep asking the right questions, Kenji Morita.
> But are you ready for the answers?"
>
Kenji's heart stalled.
His name.
They knew his name.
With trembling hands, he grabbed his phone to take a screenshot, but when he looked up, the image had changed.
Now the bat had one eye closed.
A wink.
And the text read:
> "December."
>
Then, the screens reverted to normal. His spreadsheet. His browser windows. Everything exactly as he had left it.
As if nothing had happened.
Kenji sat motionless for a full minute, breathing heavily, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He checked his phone. The screenshot hadn't worked. It only showed a black screen.
He looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor: 04:13 AM.
His hands were still shaking as he opened a new spreadsheet and began frantically typing everything he had just seen. Date. Time. Exact description of the event. Every detail.
When he finished, he stared at the last line he had written:
"December."
December 2019? That was only two months away.
What was going to happen in December?
And more importantly: Why had they answered him?
For years, he had worked as a specialized fact-checking journalist. He had exposed frauds, dismantled disinformation schemes, and debunked conspiracy theories with hard data.
His entire career was based on a simple premise: in the internet age, the truth was verifiable. Facts were traceable.
Now, sitting in the darkness of his apartment, staring at six screens that had just spoken to him directly, Kenji Morita realized he might have been wrong.
Perhaps some truths didn't want to be verified.
Perhaps some truths came looking for you.
He opened his email client and started to draft a message to his old university classmate, Yamada, who now worked in cybersecurity for a government-affiliated firm.
He wrote three paragraphs. Deleted them.
He wrote two more. Deleted those too.
How do you explain to someone that the internet had talked to you?
That a meme knew you by name?
He closed the email without sending anything.
Instead, he opened a private browsing window and typed: "Billy Bat Naoki Urasawa."
He had seen the name before, in one of his research rabbit holes. A conspiracy manga from the 2000s. Something about a bat that appeared throughout history, manipulating events.
Fiction, of course.
Just fiction.
Kenji downloaded the first chapter of the manga from a scanlation site and began to read.
In the first chapter, an American cartoonist discovered that his character, a smiling bat named Billy Bat, had been stolen from an ancient mural in Japan.
But not just stolen.
The bat had appeared throughout all of human history. In prehistoric caves. In ancient temples. In secret war documents.
A symbol that traversed time.
A symbol that heralded change.
Kenji reached a panel where Billy Bat smiled directly at the reader, one eye closed.
A wink.
Exactly like the one on his screen.
The bottle of water fell from his hand, spilling onto the keyboard.
It couldn't be.
It was just a manga.
Fiction.
But when he refreshed his Twitter feed, the number three trending topic in Japan was: "#BillyBat."
He clicked.
Thousands of tweets. Mostly people discussing the manga, fans sharing fan art, comments about rereading it.
But among the recent tweets, one caught his attention.
> User: @Chiroptera_2020
> Created: 3 minutes ago
> Followers: 0
> Following: 1 (him, @KenjiMorita_Truth)
>
The tweet read:
> "The bat will bring the change. Prepare for lockdown. December is only the beginning. #BillyBat"
>
And attached was an image.
The same bat from his screens.
But with one new detail that chilled Kenji to the bone.
In the background, blurred but unmistakable, was the profile picture of his own Twitter account.
They were inside his computer.
Inside his files.
They had been watching him all this time.
Kenji closed every window, ripped the ethernet cable from his router, and shut down the Wi-Fi on all his computers.
He sat in the darkness, breathing.
His phone vibrated.
A text message from an unknown number:
> "Disconnecting won't save you. The question isn't whether you want to know the truth. The question is: Can you live with it? Event 201. Search. - BB"
>
Kenji stared at the message for long seconds.
Then, with hands that no longer trembled, he plugged the ethernet cable back in.
He opened a Tor browser.
And typed: "Event 201."
What he found took his breath away.
A pandemic simulation exercise. Organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Dated: October 18, 2019.
In three days.
Simulating a coronavirus pandemic.
Kenji felt the floor shift beneath his feet.
He opened his spreadsheet and added a new line:
> October 15, 2019, 04:23 AM – Direct contact with [Billy Bat?]. Mention of 'December.' Reference to 'Event 201' (pandemic simulation, October 18). Prediction or Planning?
>
He saved the file.
He encrypted it.
He saved it in three different locations.
And then, because he couldn't sleep, because he knew he wouldn't sleep peacefully again for a long time, Kenji Morita began to investigate for real.
He did not know that he was about to discover something that would change not only his life but the very way he understood reality.
He did not know that Billy Bat was not just a symbol.
It was a prophecy.
A warning.
And a virus.
Not the biological kind.
The kind that infects narratives.
And the world was about to experience the biggest contagion in history.