How It All Goes Down
- Hiro and Raven chat it up via voice connection on the long ride from Rife's black cube to Downtown.
- Hiro starts to talk about how his father was captured in the Pacific in WWII. He was in a prison camp with lots of different nationalities, including some Aleuts.
- One of the Aleuts was a harpooner, a tough guy who the Japanese put to work with the rest of the prisoners.
- As Hiro tells the story, Raven chimes in with the parts he knows. Turns out Hiro's dad knew Raven's dad. They made an escape attempt together, bur argued about how to get off the island (Hiro's dad didn't know what a boating genius Raven's dad was).
- The Japanese recaptured them, and were about to execute them, when the bomb went off in Nagasaki. Hiro's dad was facing away from it, so he was temporarily blinded and then he fought the Japanese soldiers; Raven's dad, however, went blind forever.
- Raven adds that his dad was bombed again by the Americans in Amchitka, 1972—that's why he wants revenge.
- Their motorcycles continue to zigzag through the Metaverse, chasing and evading.