[BGC][FanFic] Nostalgia
Chris Schumacher
kensu__ at hotmail.com
Sun Apr 17 21:03:33 CDT 2005
BGC: Nostalgia
Bubblegum Crisis
The Story of Knight Sabers
"Nostalgia"
Written by: Chris Schumacher
This story is dedicated to Karl Rim with great respect and admiration.
He was the best of us, yet few these days even know his name. But you have
not been forgotten. Rock on, Krimlin.
--------
[Now]
1/16/2034--10:32 JST
>From <turin at silkydoll.tknet>
To: <blacksky at silkydoll.tknet>
Re: Our friend Molotov
Hey sis, I think you'd better come in today. When I was fooling around
with the old professor, I found a text file in one of the unused
directories. It had apparently been put there by a remote user that logged
in through port 17. I think you know what this means.
Mackie
"Man: Tell me, kind grocer, have you monkey nuts?
Grocer: It is simply the way that I walk, sir."
-Sir Stone, 1993
[Then]
Tokyo was cracked. It had been for several years now. Japan's worst
geological upheaval since the 1923 quake had forever split old Edo in
twain. The fault ran for miles, and was more renowned than the long gone
Tokyo Tower ever had been.
In the rainy season the fault sometimes filled with water, and the
foolhardy swam in it. It had only been a month since the rainy season
ended, but the heat wave had dried up every last drop.
The night was dark, hot and humid. The air was stagnant, not even an
occasional breeze blew to relieve the sweltering heat. The entire fault
was swallowed in absolute silence. No cricket had chirped in this part of
Tokyo since the Meiji era. This silence was broken by an ear-shattering
explosion.
A humanoid of shimmering blue metal leapt the fault in a single bound.
It turned around, and its red eyes searched the other shore of the deep
scar in the Earth. Several antennae around its eyes moved rapidly, like an
insect groping in the darkness.
Far off was the sound of escaping gas, and a clank as a pair of
steel-enveloped feet came to rest on the ground. A blank face-plate met
the glance of the robot's red eyes.
"He's jumped the chasm," a voice said from inside the suit. It was a
cultured voice that didn't contain a single syllable of anger or fear.
"Wait until I get there," said a gravely voice in her helmet. "I can
take out the bastard from our side."
The figure turned at the clanking sound that came from her left.
Coming towards her was another of MegaTokyo's new guardian angels. This
one with long tassels draped over her soldiers.
"I don't suppose you'd reconsider putting jets in my hardsuit," a
cheery voice said from beneath the orange faceplate.
Another figure appeared, this one in a blue suit. "I'm surprised that
it's just standing there." the gravely voice said. "What do you know about
this boomer, Sylia?"
"I'm not familiar with this make," Sylia, the one with the cultured
voice, replied.
The cheery voice replied: "It's obviously a combat model, so the goal
of its programming would be to destroy us."
"We may not be its target, Linna." Sylia said. "It may just see us as
a distraction. It wouldn't go out of its way to kill us, then."
The boomer got down on its haunches, obviously preparing to jump back
across the chasm.
"Get ready," Sylia said, her calmness unnerving.
It leapt towards them. Priss raised her right hand, preparing to fire
an EM-charged needle from her railgun. Suddenly she let out a scream as
she was hit by a discharge of energy.
There was a gasp from Linna. "Priss!"
Sylia turned, not towards Priss, but to look in back of her. "That
blast didn't come from this boomer."
Linna tore at the boomer with her tassels, but turned to follow
Sylia's gaze. Another boomer, of the same type, was coming towards them
from the other direction. The boomer in front of her ducked out of the way
of her tassels and lunged for her legs. Linna nimbly moved out of the way,
knocking the boomer to the ground with a well-placed kick.
"Sylia, now!" she shouted as the boomer fell in front of the Knight
Sabers' founder.
A spike extended from Sylia's right gauntlet, and she used it to
sever the boomer's head from its neck. She whirled around to face the
other boomer, which was quickly gaining on them.
"No time like the present," Linna said, and she rushed towards the
other boomer.
Sylia knelt down beside Priss, who hadn't moved since she'd been hit.
"Are you all right, Priss?"
"Can't... Can't move," she said. "I think that damn thing shorted out
my systems."
"Did you try to reboot?" Sylia asked.
"That takes too long," Priss said.
"I'll guard you. Do it." Sylia said, and rose to her feet.
Inside her suit, Priss reached over and flicked a switch with her
teeth. Her displays suddenly went dark, except a small LED display that
came to life beneath the main LCD screen. 2:00 it said. Two minutes until
the system reboot was complete.
Sylia turned when she heard the treading of heavy metal feet to her
right. There was another boomer of the same type coming towards them.
Something clicked in her mind, and she turned to the left. Sure enough,
there was yet another boomer coming towards her from that direction as
well.
"Oh... Oh, damn," she said.
"What is it?" Priss said. "Sylia, I can't move my head. What's going
on?"
Sylia didn't bother to reply, she was quickly doing calculations in
her head. "Priss, you'll be safe until I get back."
"WHAT?!" Priss roared.
Sylia leapt towards the enemy on her right, getting her hand in the
ready position. She fired her laser cannon at the oncoming boomer. It cut
through its armor, but the boomer shrugged it off.
Sylia was now hovering in the air with her jets. She gave the back
jets full thrust and sailed through the air towards the boomer. It fired
continuously at her, she swerved and ducked and not a single bullet
reached her. Her tracking computer showed the distance between her and the
boomer, the numbers were falling rapidly. She had to get this just right.
If she was off by even half-a-second Priss could die.
When she was within a meter of the boomer she fired her knuckle
bomber at it. She killed one of her jets and whirled around 180 degrees.
When she was facing the direction she came from she switched the jet back
on. The helpless form of Priss's hardsuit lay next to the fissure, the
other boomer quickly zeroing in on her.
Behind Sylia, her boomer exploded. It only barely registered on her.
She didn't bother to turn around and admire her handiwork. She extended
both her arms, releasing the blades from her gauntlets. She made a small
adjustment to her altitude so she wouldn't rake Priss with her jets.
The boomer had just come within firing range of Priss when Sylia flew
over her. A scant second later she collided with the boomer, pushing it
far out of range of Priss. Its feet tore grooves in the pavement as Sylia
dragged it along. She quickly beheaded the boomer and finally came to rest
almost twenty meters from where Priss lay.
She brought up the fuel display and felt queasy. She only had a third
of a tank of propellant left. She'd have to get back to the van before any
more boomers showed up.
By the time Sylia finally got back to Priss, she'd finally regained
control of her suit and stood up.
"Don't ever fucking do that again," Priss growled.
"You really need to learn to trust me, Priss," Sylia said. "You were
never in any danger. I can show you the calculations when we get home, if
you like."
Linna walked back towards them, behind her a fire flickered in the
distance. "You guys okay?" she asked.
"Those damn things synchronized," Priss said.
"I'm afraid so," Sylia said.
"I thought that wasn't going to happen anymore," Linna said.
"Someone's going to pay for this," Priss said.
Mackie leapt from his seat when the back door was ripped from the truck.
He was at first concerned, thinking that it was a boomer. When he realized
it was Priss, he was scared shitless.
Priss grabbed him by the lapels and yanked him out of the van. She
held him a foot off the ground.
"Priss! Be careful, don't forget you're still in your hardsuit!"
Linna said.
"They were synchronizing, you son of a bitch! Did you fall asleep, or
were you just looking at porn?" Priss's amplified voice yelled at him.
"Priss, put him down," Sylia said, without a bit of concern or anger
in her voice.
Priss dropped Mackie to the ground. He stared up at the armor-plated
ape-woman and tried to catch his breath. "You have to believe me, the
program stopped working. They must've been using some new kind of
transmitter. There weren't any synchronization signals I recognized."
"They could be masking them as legitimate signals, or even as
background noise," Sylia said.
"Sis, you should be running this. I've never been as good with
computers as you are. I could take your place out there, we have the Madox
suit..." Mackie said.
"I wouldn't give odds on that thing if it were fighting a squirrel,"
Priss said.
Sylia sat down on one of the chairs and pulled off her helmet. "I
suppose we could upgrade my suit with some equipment... But that wouldn't
work. It'd need a larger power source, and I'd have to take off the
thrusters just to fit it in," she said.
"Well, we obviously can't have that," Priss said.
"We could make a new one," Mackie said, leaping to his feet.
"Specially made for that sort of thing. And I could use it!"
"I thought you just said you weren't good with computers," Linna said.
Mackie's face fell. "Damn it." He sat down next to his sister.
"The suit's a good idea. But we're going to need to find someone to
use it," Sylia said.
"Where should we start looking?" Linna asked.
[Now]
"Why were you using the old Professor for, anyway?" Sylia asked.
"I was feeling a bit nostalgic," Mackie said. "And I was going to
take it home after I cleared out all the old data."
"Mmm-hmmm," Sylia said.
The old Professor--a computer in a slim, meter-tall tower case--stood
in the center of the room. It was plugged into the wall, and Mackie's
laptop was plugged into one of its network ports. On the screen was vix,
with the text file displayed. It was a single stream of digits divided by
spaces. Anyone looking at it would instantly recognize what it was: a
phone number.
"Did you trace the number yet?" Sylia asked.
"Well, I was waiting for Nene to come in," Mackie said.
Sylia sighed. "It doesn't take a genius to do a net-search, Mackie."
"We could just call it, I guess," Mackie said.
"What did you say the datestamp on the file was?" Sylia asked.
"April 20th, 2032," Mackie replied.
"Hmmm," Sylia said. "Hitler's birthday. The phone number might no
longer be in service."
She walked over to the console and picked up a telephone receiver.
This phone was hooked to the untraceable line that Nene had set up during
her first week here. She punched the number into the keypad. After a
moment she heard three familiar tones and a blue screen appeared on the
display.
The number you have reached is no longer
in service. No forwarding information is
available. If you believe you reached this
message in error, hang up and dial again.
Have a nice day,
ATT&T
"Damn!" Mackie mumbled.
Sylia simply frowned.
[Then]
The terrible heat wave of 2031 finally broke during a late August
afternoon. Priss and Linna had been walking to Raven's garage in the
sweltering heat when the storm finally broke.
It was sudden and fierce; within moments the pavement was covered
with a centimeter of water. Steam rose from the pavement which had been
bombarded mercilessly by solar radiation off and on for the past five
weeks. Priss and Linna ran through the rain, failing to escape gettting
drenched.
By the time they got to the garage their rather revealing clothes had
been soaked through. They took towels from a drooling Mackie and went into
the locker room. After Linna threw her towel onto the "hidden" camera,
they changed.
In the control room, Mackie watched several moments of terrycloth
induced darkness before he went back to work on the cypher. The building
periodically shook with the fierceness of the thunder outside. It didn't
even occur to Mackie that he shouldn't be using a computer during a
thunderstorm. Industrial-grade surge protectors had become a facet of
every residence and business since the twenty-teens.
It was a matter, he thought, of making the message hard enough to
decrypt, but not impossible. They also had to make sure that it fell into
the right hands. If the Japanese government or GENOM became interested in
it, their cryptologists would be able to crack the code. That meant hiding
it a way that only a truly perceptive netizen/code-cracker would recognize.
Stage 1 of the encryption code would use a simple replacement-cypher.
The encryption key would be the first twenty characters of the Portuguese
edition of "Before The Dawn". No one would think to try that, so only an
automated code-cracking program could solve the final layer of encryption.
That was the beauty of their plan. Only a truly gifted hacker would
realize what the unencrypted message was. Like the first level of
encryption, it was something that was so simple that most crackers would
miss it. Mackie snickered; he was so clever.
Up on the roof, Linna and Priss walked out and set up lawn chairs
under the overhang. Sylia followed them, carrying a table in one hand, and
a thermos of chilled barley tea in the other.
The three Knight Sabers sat and watched the spectacular thunderstorm.
Giant strands of electricity shot between purple clouds far in the
distance. Every minute there was a deafening rumble of thunder. The smell
of wet pavement filled their nostrils.
Sylia remembered a line from Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queen" about
Relaxing after toil. She laid back in her lawn chair and took a deep
breath. In a few minutes, possibly even as far off as an hour, the horrors
and pain of this world would return. But for now, just now, she could
allow herself to forget. For now, just now, she could believe that it was
good to be alive.
The brisk days of autumn had finally come. The vault of the sky's
blueness was slowly fading away, being replaced by orange, red, and black
at the horizon. A single streetlight in the parking lot reluctantly began
to glow, as if it felt it was too early in the day for it to be dark.
In this suburb of Tokyo was the St. Sappho School for Girls. It was a
stark, squat, and unattractive building that was showing its age. Almost
every window on the first floor was aglow; but all of the windows on the
upper floors were dark.
For it was on these upper floors that the students of St. Sappho's
lived. In one of these rooms a young woman with red hair lay in the arms
of the man she loved. The room was dark because it had been light when
they'd started, and they didn't feel any need to leave their warm bed to
flick the light switch.
"Didn't you have a class at four?" the young man asked.
"Mmmm... I didn't feel like going," the young woman replied.
"Isn't that getting to be a bit of a habit, Nene?" the young man
asked.
"Shhh...," she said. "You're ruining the mood."
"I've got to get going," he said. "My shift starts in a coupla hours,
and I don't want to get caught by that matron of yours."
Nene opened and her green eyes and looked at her boyfriend. "Thank
you for today, then."
"You're welcome," he said, adopting a goofy grin.
He dressed quickly and snuck out. After a few minutes Nene got up and
pulled on her bathrobe. She walked over to her computer and turned it on.
Nene opened a socket into the school's network. From there she
telneted into a computer server in a rolling-pin factory in Moscow. She
then telneted out of that machine into the Tokyonet. It was an old
hacker's trick, but it meant that someone would have to break through two
different security systems before they'd even be able to get a country
suffix for her; and with the early warning alarms built into her homemade
telnet client, she'd know about any attempts to ascertain her identity
long before they were anywhere near success. She was usually long gone
before they could pull a whois on the Tokyonet.
Rover, her mail-agent, informed her that she had no messages. Nene
sighed; no matter how popular you were, in real-life or online, an empty
mailbox is always a depressing thing.
She logged into the Newsnet group ^fugar. Fugar was a lame
spreadsheet from the twenty-teens. Hardly anyone used it anymore, and
certainly not anyone outside of the WEU. As such the Fugar group was
mostly abandoned. It had since been taken up by an elite group of hackers,
crackers, cybercryptologists and other assorted unsavories of the online
world. It was now known colloquially as "The Old Watering Hole". It didn't
even appear on the main Newsnet registry, which ensured that the group was
bereft of curiosity seekers or, God forbid, someone who had a question
about Fugar.
MollyCoddle, welcometo ^fugar, hope you survive the experience!
Currently On: Rep Posts Att
Ebb-san 12 Stargate Development Watch (worms at MIT) 0
Red 3 [OnT] Because I learned something today... 0
Gobo 7 CocaPepsi.us cracked wide open! 0
Wimbley 0 Welding robot into sexaroid? 0
1 Brian Mason's just this guy, you know? 1
The 1 in the attachment column caught Nene's attention. She double-
clicked on it.
From: fuckyou at forasking.com
Re: Brian Mason's just this guy, you know?
Att: 1.xif
He assraped my cat.
download attachment? _
Nene rubbed her chin. It wasn't even spam; not that spammers were
smart enough to get into ^fugar. It was either one of the regulars acting
like a moron, or these was something more to it. Nene hit "y" on her
keyboard and within moments the file was in the quarantine jar section of
her hard-drive.
She siced gowakehimup on the file, but it told her it wasn't a valid
xif. She opened up the file in the byte-viewer. It obviously wasn't any
type of image-file. Every image format currently in use had a small tag at
the beginning of the file which specified what type of format it was in.
Nene studied the first sixteen bytes of the file; it seemed like
gibberish to her. That's saying quite a lot, since she was well-versed in
reading uninterpreted data. They weren't machine code commands, so it
wasn't an executable file either.
She then widened her search over the first hundred bytes. There were
at least two separate sequences which kept cropping up in the text. That
would seem to indicate a text file; but why kind of text file?
It occurred to Nene that she had no idea how large the file was. It
copied onto her hard drive instantaneously, but it had been a long time
since transfer speed was a good indicator of file size.
>howbig 1.xif
12.3 MB
Nene's eyes bulged. a 12.3 MB text file would be 12897484 characters
long; big enough to include an entire encyclopedia. What could possibly
contain that much...
Something in Nene's head clicked. Brian Mason; Brian J. Mason. He was
an executive at the Tokyo office of GENOM. He was most widely reviled
because he always looked so damn smug when he was being interviewed. It
had been his name which caught her interest, even more than the attachment.
Could this file be GENOM trade secrets?
She logged back into ^fugar, and her heart began to race as she saw
that the message was now gone. It had been replaced by one labeled "The
group don't work 'cause the vandals took my handle". She double-clicked on
the topic.
From: Ebb-san at fajimiyaki.tknet
Re: The group don't work 'cause the vandals took my handle.
WTFS? I thought we were clear on the no-canceling policy. Fess up,
who deleted the message? I can't even find it in the auto-archives.
Anyone?
Anyone?
Nene logged out and went back to the file. She realized that this
could be the most important thing that she might ever do. Molotov was
world-famous for what she had done with the banks in Switzerland. She
would soon top herself.
But it would take time...
[Now]
"Honestly Mackie," Nene said as she sat down at the console. "If you keep
acting like this to avoid work, people are going to start to think you
really are an idiot."
"Priss already thinks that," Mackie replied.
"She's not one to talk," Nene said as her hands flew across the
keyboard. She liked this computer better than the one she had at home. She
didn't have to worry about lag as it tried to keep up with her.
"You're going into Japanese Telecom?" Mackie asked, aghast.
"Shouldn't you do a Tokyonet search for it first?"
"Why should I? Go straight to the source," Nene said.
"Yeah, but the Tokyonet search is...well... you know, LEGAL," Mackie
said.
"Oh hush, stop acting like a fat choirboy," Nene said.
Mackie laid back in his chair and sighed. He hated when Nene got like
this. When she was in the midst of her work, her sunny disposition
vanished and she achieved a level of snarkiness that befitted an insult
comic.
"There we go," Nene said, doing the last three keystrokes with a
flourish. There was a screen with the number, it contained 10 different
entries.
"I thought they didn't reassign a number unless it'd been vacant for
five years," Mackie said.
"These are all assigned to a MTU dorm room," Nene said. "So we're
looking for Spring 2032. Ee...to... ah, here we go. Huebert J. Ebson."
"Ebson, as in the printer company?" Mackie asked.
"Yeah, sounds fake huh? But I think..." Nene trailed off, she stared
at the screen in silence.
"Nene?" Mackie asked. "Is something wrong?"
Nene's eyes were fixed in a hard-stare on the screen, she was chewing
her lower-lip. "There's something very familiar about that name... I just
can't figure out what."
"Can you get a new number for him?" Mackie asked.
"I can do better than that," Nene said.
"Oh no, don't go into the Tokyo Municipal Hall of Records again!"
Mackie said, squirming.
"Aw, stop being such a wuss," Nene said as she began to crack into
the system.
"We almost got caught last time!" Mackie whined.
"Don't blame me. You're the one who wanted to see if Priss had any
venereal diseases," Nene said. "Besides, I'm a little bit better than I
used to be."
[Then]
A smell not unlike burnt toast filled Nene's dorm room. An industrial
strength cooling fan jammed the window open and sucked the smoke out
before it had a chance to set off any sensors. Nene had borrowed the fan
from the stoner down the hall. She'd also offered her a roach-clip, which
Nene declined. "You'll burn your fingers" she said.
Those words came back to haunt her, as she had burned her fingers
four times already. Nene gritted her teeth and adjusted her reading
glasses. She took a long hard look at the crudely etched wiring diagram
before she made the next connection. She blew on the solder to cool it
down, though it was scarcely needed. The temperature of the room, what
with the open window and all, was far below that of her breath. She looked
back at the diagram, specifically the series of circled numbers at the
bottom which indicated steps. She was done with the third circuit board.
She took an EPROM from the briefcase burner she'd "borrowed" from one of
the labs and inserted it into the gaping socket on the top of the circuit
board. In the center of the board was a giant slate-colored chip; it was
simply labeled: CRAY-50.
Nene cracked her knuckles and picked up the next wafer of breadboard.
She picked up several baggies, all the ones with yellow stickers, and
began to insert circuits into each slot. As she was doing this, the phone
began to ring. She looked at the caller-ID panel and grimaced. Despite
this, she continued to work, uninterrupted. The fourth ring was the last.
A few moments later the red button on her phone lit up.
Nene placed the last diode into the assembly. She looked back and
forth between the circuit board and the diagram, checking every single
circuit. Satisfied she picked up the soldering iron; she looked down at it
and scowled. Yes, that was right. She'd turned it off. She flicked the
switch and set it back in its holder.
She leaned over towards her phone and hit the red button.
"Nene, where are you? I know you're not in class," a shrill
disembodied voice said.
Nene began to solder the circuits into place and wired some
connections. Nene was surprised that printed circuit boards hadn't
eliminated the need for wiring. At least the guts of machines didn't look
as ugly as they used to.
"We got a call from the Headmistress again. You missed the last six
sessions of your Calculus class. The teacher was livid, we're still not
sure if she'll accept you back," the voice droned on.
Nene set the soldering iron aside and smiled at her work. She picked
up the lengths of rainbow-cable and connected the four circuit boards
together.
"After all we suffered through to get you into this school, how can
you treat it...how can you treat US like this?" the voice asked.
Nene slid each of the boards into a rack inside the metal frame she
had prepared. She made the last connection; the end of the first board to
the power supply. She slid the steely-blue cover onto the machine.
Engraved in a fancy cursive script was the name: Skynet.
"The headmistress has suggested we get you some help," the voice said.
Nene finally turned to look at the phone. "Whom gods destroy," she
mumbled. She carried the metal box over to her computer and set it down.
She plugged it into the wall.
"I think she's overreacting, but unless you do something to remedy
this situation, we're pulling you out. You can go to public school like
all the other kids," the voice said.
"No problem," Nene mumbled. She connected the blue box to her
computer via a UPB cable. She pressed the box's red switch, which began to
glow. The powerful fan inside the box started up; it was even louder than
the one she had in the window. She then switched on her computer.
"Call me when you get this. We really need to talk," the voice said.
There was a long pause before the hang-up signal.
Nene brought up the file on the byte-viewer. She'd been trying to
crack the sucker for months, but the time had finally come to call in a
higher power. She had written a program called "sic" which would apply a
series of encryption algorithms and key patterns to the file in an attempt
to find some sort of textual pattern. It had taken her an entire month to
write the program. Sadly she discovered that it would take her computer
another month to find any meaningful results--and that was running every
second of every day. The Skynet device could do the same thing, but within
the space of a day.
> sic 1.xif -skynet
Silently, the little blue box went to work.
Nene didn't take failure well. Which was rather strange since she had so
much practice.
When she was feeling depressed she liked to go sit on the roof and
stare up at the stars. Looking up into the infinite and all-consuming void
convinced her that her problems weren't that bad. It was a cold and
overcast November night, though, so she decided to stay in bed instead.
Skynet had run for twenty-six hours and forty-seven minutes and found
absolutely nothing. There were no patterns at all--not even some strange
nonsense phrases that she could get a chuckle from.
The consensus on ^fugar was that the file was the cyber-successor to
the Voynich Manuscript. Carefully-crafted nonsense designed to baffle
cryptologists for the rest of their life. It would've been easy to just
post nonsense; after a few days people would've seen it as such. But this
file contained a number of repeating patterns, something which looked like
syntax.
Nene felt as if a shaft of sunlight had penetrated her head and
stabbed into her brain. She sat up in bed, her hands flailing for the
light switch. She rushed over to the computer and turned both it and
skynet on.
She knew it couldn't be a video or image file; both always started
with a tag to identify them as such. It couldn't be text. In the current
scheme of computer science there are only two different types of files.
She had essentially proven that the file wasn't data. There was only one
thing it could be.
> sic -diag
sic's diagnostic mode came up. Nene had written a front-end to the
program so that the program's search parameters weren't hard-wired; she
could change them at will. She entered all of the assembler commands she
could remember off-hand into the search boxes and saved it.
She siced skynet on the file and walked back over to her bed. She
picked up the latest Amelie Nothomb novel from her bedside table and
started to read. She had read about five chapters when the program beeped
10 minutes later.
She looked at the code that sic was displaying. It was an executable,
all right; of that she had no doubt. She was able to read the assembler
without an interpreter, and every command was perfectly worded and valid.
She also noted the size, it was less than a megabyte. So her
steganographic search algorithm worked. That little piece of code alone
could've gotten her a degree from MIT and a corner-office at the JCIA.
She saved the file as voynichcracked, still inside the quarantine jar,
and cleared it for execution access.
She felt her heart pounding as she prepared to hit the "enter" key.
She really, REALLY hoped it wasn't a trojan. She'd come too damn far for
something like that to happen. Finally she took a deep breath and hit
enter.
The screen went dark, an image of a blue-haired woman flashed on
screen for a fraction of a second. It was followed by a simple piece of
text:
I WANT YOU
Nene's glasses slid down her nose, she reached up to reposition them.
The screen went black again, and a series of text appeared in green and
red on the screen.
If you have come this far you are a hacker of no
mean ability.
If you want to use your skills for something more,
if you want to make the world a better place, then
we can help you.
Go to 12.74.312.424.801.6 and log in through port 17
and leave us some contact information.
The screen went dark again, only to be replaced with some blue text a
moment later.
I hope you wrote that down, since I just erased all
copies of this file from your hard-drive, including
this-
It dropped back to the command prompt. Nene didn't waste a second and
brought up her telnet client.
[Now]
"Huebert J. Ebson, 25 years old. Bachelor's degree in
cyberlinguistics conferred by MegaTokyo University on May 1st, 2032. He
began work two days later at a robotics company by the name of Synthdyne.
He quit that job a year later, several days after the company was bought
by GENOM," Nene said.
"So far so good," Mackie said, looking down at the dossier.
The Knight Sabers (and Mackie) were in conference in Sylia's
apartment. Priss was spread out on the sofa, looking bored. Linna,
attentive as always, sat in a chair. Sylia and Mackie sat at the table,
Nene stood at its head.
"He's registered with several temp agencies, but hasn't been able to
find steady employment since then. Add to that the massive influx of
software engineers let go because of the GENOM bankruptcy proceedings...
I'd say he'd welcome a steady job," Nene said.
"Why the hell are we ever looking at this guy?" Priss asked. "We've
got Nene, what else do we need?"
Nene started to blush a little, but quickly hid it. She was about to
speak when Sylia cut her off.
"It's always a good idea of have backup. In case Nene is hurt or
decides to retire," Sylia said.
"She's right," Linna said. "Remember last November when Nene had the
flu? That satantic cult's boomer almost took Priss's head off."
"I thought the only way we could retire was feet first," Priss said
to Sylia.
"He's right, Sylia, it's even in the rules," Linna said.
"Resigning and secession are two very different things," Sylia said.
"Did you honestly think I was going to kill you if you tried to leave?"
Linna and Priss exchanged sheepish glances. Sylia looked back and
forth between them and let out a polite, controlled laugh. "You were
saying?" Sylia said after a moment.
Nene was staring into the distance wistfully, she quickly caught
herself and looked back down at the paper. "If this man is the Ebb-san I
remember, then without a doubt we should recruit him. So I vote yes," she
said, and then sat down.
"What's so impressive about this guy? It took him three times as long
as Nene to crack the file," Priss said.
"For a while there we thought no one would be able to crack it,"
Mackie said. "The fact that he did means he's an exceptional hacker. I
vote yes, for what it's worth."
"I vote no, this guy's a security risk," Priss said. "Besides,
there's one too many guys around here as it is."
"I think we should give him a chance," Linna said. "It looks like he
needs a helping hand right now."
"I think this is worth investigating further," Sylia said. "I'll
arrange a meeting with-"
"If you don't mind, Sylia, I'd like to handle this one," Nene said.
"Are you sure? It could be dangerous," Sylia said.
"He's much more likely to trust his old friend Molotov instead of
Sylia Stingray," Nene said.
"All right then," Sylia said. "Good luck."
Deja vu, Nene thought to herself as she walked into the coffee shop.
It was to be expected, of course. Nene'd suggested this place out of a
sense of tradition. But could something be a tradition if it'd only been
done once before?
Nene slowly walked among the rows of tables, her eyes flitting to
each table as she passed. When she reached the last row of tables closest
to the bar, her eyes fell upon what she'd been searching for. A hardcopy
of Van Neumann's "The Computer and The Brain".
She didn't stop, and she didn't slow down. She walked up to the bar
and ordered a lemon tea. She quickly looked over her shoulder to look at
the table she just passed.
Huey Ebson wasn't much to look at. He was rail thin with wiry black
hair. He was wearing a suit. For some strange reason Nene found that
hysterically funny. What was one supposed to wear when they interviewed to
join a group of superheroes?
She went over to the table and set her cup down. Huey looked up
nervously. "Mind if I sit here?" she asked.
"Uh, I'm waiting for someone, actually...," he said.
Nene sat down. "What's worse than spaghetti code?"
She had completely lost him; his face had gone blank. A very long
moment passed where he just stared at her. "Lo mein code," he said finally.
"Because-"
Nene repeated it with him. "Because two hours after you finish a
program, you want to write it again."
Huey still looked confused. "Do I know you?"
"Just a moment," Nene said, and took a sip of her tea. She strung out
the sip for as long as she could. Finally she heard Mackie over her ear-
piece.
"I don't detect any bugs on him," Mackie's voice said.
"Proceed to phase two," Sylia's voice said, almost cutting Mackie off.
"Let's not stay here," Nene said. "Let's go for a walk."
"You haven't finished your tea, though," Huey said; he then shook his
head. "I mean, you are the person I'm supposed to meet here, right?"
Nene simply nodded and grabbed him by the arm. They walked out of the
cafe, down several streets, finally emerging in a large park. After a few
moments of walking in the cold night air, Nene turned to Huey. It must
have seemed that she was too pensive, or that she was deliberately trying
to piss him off. If only he knew about the earpiece. But then he might
figure out about the surveillance; about how a hard-suited Priss was
sitting in a van less than twenty meters away.
"Let's get some tea first," she said. "It's damn cold out here."
They went to one of the tea kiosks, which was being staffed by Linna.
The two of them didn't make eye-contact. Nene took them to a bench just
across from the stand. She made sure never to leave Linna's field of
vision.
"You do know me," Nene said. "Or at least you did."
"I think I would've remembered someone like you," Huey said.
Nene wondered how she was supposed to take that. "You used to know me
as Molotov. I knew you as Ebb-san. You used to call me Molly, though, and
it kind of stuck."
Huey started, he let out a long whistle. "I always thought that
Molotov claimed to be a woman to hide his identity... I was calling you
Molly to piss you off. Why did you... Oh, I see, the red hair, fire and
all," he said.
"I'm also Russian," Nene said.
"You sent out the message? But what for?" Huey asked. "What's all
this about, anyway?"
"I didn't send the message. I was the only person that answered it.
Until now," Nene said.
"You disappeared a while after the message appeared. I never really
connected the two before, but..." Huey said.
"That wasn't entirely by choice. Listen, what do you know about the
Knight Sabers?"
[Then]
"Isn't that the weapon that Jedi use?" Nene asked.
The woman across from Nene frowned. It took a few moments for Nene to
remember where she'd seen her before. The image that had appeared for a
split-second as she executed the file.
They were sitting in a coffeshop in Yokohama. Nene had been there for
almost two hours, pretending to read The Mythical Man-Month while swilling
down an unhealthy amount of caffeine and sugar. When the woman finally
arrived, Nene was jittering so much that she almost fell off her chair.
"The Knight Sabers are engaged in a war against GENOM," the woman
said.
"You're not talking about those guys who are prancing around in
Ultraman costumes and beating up Boomers, are you?" Nene said.
The woman shook her head. "I think I've made a mistake," she said.
"Good day." She began to rise.
"I'm Molotov," Nene said, simply. The jittering was gone, she sat up
straight and folded her arms on the table.
The woman stopped mid-crouch, then sat down again. She looked at Nene
for a full minute in silence; appraising her. "Is that so?"
"I thought that might get your attention. I'm interested in why the
Knight Sabers would need someone like me," Nene said. "I'm not exactly a
Soldier girl."
"I suppose you can prove you're Molotov?" the woman said.
"The fact that I cracked your code is all the proof I need," Nene
said.
"Then can you explain why someone calling themselves Molotov released
the financial records of three Communist organizations in Asia?" the woman
asked.
"I didn't take the name because of my political leanings. Molotov was
a Russian you didn't want to mess with. I'm the same," Nene said. "And to
answer your question, all three of those organizations were sponsors of
terrorism."
"So you took it upon yourself to crack into the files of all the
banks in Switzerland, and reveal to the whole world who was keeping their
money there," the woman said. "Many countries broke off relations after
that. There was almost a war."
"But the Swiss government eventually had to freeze the funds of every
terrorist organization that was using their country as a piggy bank. How
many lives were saved, how many wars were averted because of what I did?"
Nene said.
"But why did you feel you had the right to do that?" the woman asked.
"Because I was the only one who could," Nene said. "I'm not content
to let the world fall to pieces around me. If there's something I can do
to fix things--I'll do it."
The woman sat back and stirred her tea, she stared at Nene for a few
moments, looking thoughtful. "I think we understand each other, Nene
Romanova."
On the screen was a large man, his black-glove clad hands were clenching
around the throat of a bearded, unwashed transient. After a moment the
large man's grip faltered, and he held up his two hands, curved into claws
in pain. The bearded man took advantage of the lull in his strangling and
ran away. The large man yelled after him.
A voice spoke over the scene. "Is arthritis pain stopping you from
doing the things you enjoy?"
The flashing of the TV was all that lit the three figures in the room.
One of them, a young woman with unruly brown hair, was laying on the couch.
Sitting in the chair was a boy about Nene's age, whose hair and features
Identified him as Sylia's brother. On the floor was another young woman
with an athletic build, her hair was that wonderful silky black that only
Japanese people seemed to posses; part of it was bunched behind a red
headband. All three of them were fast asleep.
"Quite diligent, aren't they?" Nene asked. "Maybe there was a CO
leak?"
They were standing in the living room of one of the Knight Saber's
apartment. Nene was assuming it was Sylia's. She didn't think being a
Knight Saber paid well enough to afford these digs.
"It -is- three in the morning," Sylia said. She walked over to the
one that Nene assumed was her brother and started to nudge him awake.
Nene switched off the TV and sat in the one unoccupied armchair.
Wondering why the headband-clad Japanese girl hadn't sat there. Within
moments all of them were awake. There pairs of sleepy eyes regarded her
with interest.
"This is Nene Romanova," Sylia said. "If all goes well, she'll be
fighting besides us in the coming months."
"Very pleased to meet you all," Nene said. She added a girlish giggle
to make known her nervousness.
"You're a hacker?" the brown-haired one said. "I thought the only
girl hackers were the ones who could crack a mirror by looking at it."
It took a moment for Nene to realize that Priss wasn't talking about
cracking into a mirror-site. She'd been out of the real world for too long.
She also realized that the gravely-voiced girl had just given her a back-
handed compliment.
"Yeah, she's right, you sure are cute," said the Japanese girl in a
perky voice. Now that her eyes were open, Nene realized that they were
blue. Mixed heritage, then; or contacts.
Nene blushed a little, and hated herself for it. She was complimented
so rarely in life that it was hard to control her emotions. "Thank you,"
she said. She must try to keep her hard-boiled hacker persona. They
wouldn't take her seriously, otherwise. So, no more slip-ups. "But I'm not
here because of my looks. I'm the great hacker Molotov."
"Yeah," the brown-haired woman said. "We know."
"What?" Nene blurted out. "How could you..."
"I was bugged," Sylia said. "They heard the entire conversation."
Nene sank down into her chair. Of course; damn it, why hadn't she
realized? Had she expected that the leader of the Knight Sabers would go
in without some kind of backup? They probably had snipers on the roofs of
buildings across the way. Of course, if this lot was an indication, there
were fair odds they'd have fallen asleep at their post.
"Now, there on the floor in front of you is Linna Yamazaki, melee
specialist," Sylia said.
Linna jumped to her feet and bowed her head to Nene. She gave Nene an
enthusiastic smile. "Glad to meet you, Nene."
"Likewise," Nene said.
"Next to me is Priss Asagiri, demolitions and ranged combat," Sylia
said.
The brown-haired woman grumbled something that sounded remotely like
a hello. Nene smiled inwardly at the name; Priss certainly didn't -seem-
like a morning person.
"I'm Mackie," Sylia's brother said. Nene wonder if he piped up
because he was afraid his sister wasn't going to mention him.
"Miscellaneous."
"Now that we've all met, I suggest we get some sleep. I'm taking Nene
over to the garage first-thing tomorrow so we can start to build her
suit," Sylia said. "But before that, is anyone up for some dinner?"
Four hands immediately sprang up.
[Now]
Nene found Sylia in the control room. She had been afraid that Sylia'd
already left. All the lights in the place were off, except for this one.
"I thought I'd find you here," Nene said.
Sylia didn't look up from the console. "Did you need something, Nene-
chan?"
Nene walked over and looked at the screen that seemed to have
entranced Sylia. "Still programming the trials, huh?"
"I want to get them all in one shot," Sylia said. "That way we can
test how he performs under duress."
"I think the strength tests are a waste," Nene said. "The guy's a
toothpick, I doubt he could benchpress the MegaTokyo telephone directory."
"Something on your mind, Nene?" Sylia said, still not looking up from
herrapid coding.
"Yeah," she said, and hesitated. "Something you said earlier got me
thinking.
"Your retirement?" Sylia said.
Nene started; sometimes Sylia was capable of the greatest insight. It
was strange since she seemed so distant and cold sometimes.
"I never really gave any thought to what I'd do after," Nene said.
"But what if we win? It looks like we might just have, what with GENOM
closing down and all."
"That will mean that what GENOM represents will only be more
widespread," Sylia said. "Though it will be easier now that their power
isn't consolidated."
"But we were created to counter GENOM," Nene said. "What happens if
we're not needed anymore? Certainly you've thought about that, Sylia.
Aren't you the least bit interested in continuing your father's work?"
Sylia finally looked up from the console. One of the few times Nene
ever saw emotion in Sylia's eyes was when they were talking about Pa
Stingray. Nene was disappointed when her mentor changed the subject.
"I'll keep my promise, Nene, if you want to move on. I'll get you
into MIT, though I doubt you need the help; and I'll pay your tuition,"
Sylia said.
"I'm not saying I'm going to do that," Nene said, flapping her hands
as if to dismiss the notion.
"Then what are you saying?" Sylia said.
"It's just... maybe it's time we started searching for life beyond
the Knight Sabers," Nene said. "I'm sure there's something out there."
Sylia turned back to her screen. "You're welcome here as long as you
wish to stay," she said.
Nene felt a warmness inside her chest, and let out a sigh. Sylia
always knew just what to say. And for the first time, Nene started to
think about that, and worry.
[Then]
Nene shifted in her chair; it was starting to get uncomfortable. She
looked at her watch and realized that she'd been at the terminal for 8
hours. She stood up and stretched. "I think we should take a break," she
said.
"Not on my account, I hope," Sylia said. "I could do this for another
10 hours."
Nene walked across the control room and nudged the sleeping form of
Mackie with her foot. "Hey Mackie, food ka?"
Mackie sat up and looked around in bewilderment. He'd obviously
gotten to one of the deeper stages of sleep. He didn't seem to know where
he was.
"Are you done? What time is it?" Mackie said.
"It's just a little after six," Nene said. "We're still working on
the subprocessors."
Nene walked back over to the terminal and saved her work in the CAD
program. Sylia flicked a switch which turned the Professor off. That was
what they called the supercomputer that ran all their systems here in
Knight Sabers HQ. According to Sylia, when Mackie was taking the computer
out of its box he misread the manufacturer's name on the side of the
tower's case. The supercomputer had been made by a company called
Processor Technology, but Mackie had read it as "Professor Technology".
The name had stuck ever since, much to Mackie's chargin.
The three of them continued their conversation as they made their way
out of Raven's Garage.
"I'm still worried about the cooling system, though," Nene said. "Are
you sure it's going to be enough? I think that fluid immersion wouldn't be
out of the question. It might make me feel a little bloated, though." she
said with a smile.
"You're still thinking of the chips as electronic," Sylia said.
"Optical nanoprocessors don't produce as much heat, so the fans we've
installed should do the job well."
Nene grumbled. "I still think optical-cybernetics is witchcraft."
As they reached the car, Nene opened the passenger side's door and
prepared to get in. Mackie walked up next to her and started to squirm.
"Sit in the back!" Nene said.
Mackie scowled and walked around the car.
Traffic was light for six o'clock on a weeknight. After about twenty
minutes Nene heard snoring from the back seat.
"About what we talked about before," Sylia said. "About cutting
ties."
"Right. I haven't been back to the old watering hole since we had
that conversation," Nene said.
"That isn't what I meant," Sylia said.
Nene let out a long sigh through a small gap in her lips, it lifted a
tuft of her red hair for a few moments. "Is it really necessary?"
"There's a reason it's one of our rules," Sylia said. "Your friends
might notice something, but a significant other certainly would."
"Maybe we could tell him," Nene said. "I think Ben can be trusted."
"There are only two people outside of this organization that know of
our existence. Well, three if you count Mackie," Sylia said.
Nene smiled glibly. "You mean Mackie isn't part of the organization?"
"It's sort of like he came with the place," Sylia said, returning the
smile, which she quickly dropped. "And how well do you really know this
man? He's a med student going out with a 17-year-old. That doesn't exactly
sound moral to me."
Nene shrugged. "Older men like younger women, and younger women like
older men. It's just the way it works."
"He might just lose interest when you stop being jail-bait, Nene,"
Sylia said.
"Don't say that about him!" Nene said, her voice hissing from her
attempt to not awaken Mackie. "He's a good man; he wants to help the world.
Besides..." Nene said, looking straight-forward, her eyes a little misty.
"I love him. I... I really do. We've been together long enough to know
that it isn't just infatuation. It isn't about the sex."
Sylia started to veer into the other lane, but quickly caught herself.
"If you do truly love him, then that's just more of a reason to let him
go," Sylia said. "If we let him in on the secret, it will be a great
burden to him. If he knew who we are it could put him in terrible jeopardy.
Trust me. I know," Sylia snapped on the car's headlights. "You can always
opt-out."
"I can't believe that I'm selfish enough to take you up on that,"
Nene said.
"This life isn't for everyone, Nene," Sylia said.
"Yes, but it is for me," Nene said.
"You can't have both. You need to choose," Sylia said.
"Yeah, I guess you're right. But how do you tell the person you love
most in the world that you never want to see them again?"
Nene looked beautiful in the sunlight. When she was lit by the light of
the sun, Nene's red hair was like fire, and her green eyes seemed to glow.
Her alabaster skin was smooth and flawless. Ben smiled and took a step
towards her.
"It's great to see you, honey! Where've you been all week?" he asked.
This was when he noticed that Nene was avoiding his gaze. Her mouth had
changed from a smile to a grimace. She looked as if she were in great pain.
"Nene, what's wrong?"
Nene didn't say anything, she finally looked her lover in the eyes.
"We need to talk."
Ben felt like he'd been stabbed in the chest with an icicle. "Oh?
Well, come in, please." Nene walked across the threshold. "I was just
about to leave for my shift. Do you want some breakfast?"
"No thanks," Nene said somberly.
Ben looked at her for a moment, concerned. After a moment he walked
to the kitchen, Nene following. He got a loaf of bread out of a cabinet
and stuck two slices in the chrome toaster. A red light began to shift
back and forth on its black front panel.
"Nene, what's the matter? I've never seen you this miserable," Ben
said.
Nene sat down at the table. "This isn't easy for me to say. And it's
certainly not going to be easy for you to hear."
She was staring at the table, again refusing to meet his gaze. Ben
sat down next to her, and lifted her chin up. She still didn't look at him.
"What is it?" Ben asked.
"I don't think we should see each other anymore," Nene said.
Ben felt himself jump involuntarily. Nene obviously noticed it since
her chair backed a few centimeters away from his. "Wha... Why do you want
to break up?"
"I think we need to get on with our lives," Nene said. "We don't have
any future."
"Nene, what brought this on? I mean, I know we guys are known for not
picking up on things... But I never got the feeling that you were unhappy
with me," Ben said.
"I'm not!" Nene said, her voice cracking, tears were brimming in the
wells of her eyes. "There's nothing more I want in this world then to
spend the rest of my life with you..." she said. "But I can't."
"Why can't you? Is it your parents?" Ben said. "I told you, we just
need to wait a couple more years, and they'll be all right with it."
"There are times when what we want to do, and what must be done come
in conflict. This is one of these times," Nene said.
"Nene, I'm not too old for you. I told you before, in ten years no
one will care," Ben said.
"I'd like to be able to tell you why I need to do this," Nene said,
the first tear trickling down her left cheek. "I want to make you
understand what it took to make me say this to you... But I can't."
"Nene," Ben said and took her hand. His eyes were full of concern.
"Are you in danger?"
"The entire world is in danger, Ben..." Nene said, trailing off into
thoughtful silence. "Ben, do you trust me?"
Ben thought about for a moment, then realized the truth. "Yes, Nene.
I do trust you."
"Then trust in my judgment. I need you to believe that what I'm doing
is best for both our sakes. I need you to trust me to do what's right. And
I need you to trust that my words are sincere when I say that I do still
love you," Nene said.
"That's a lot to ask of me, Nene," Ben said.
The two stared at each other for a long time. Suddenly the toast
popped up from the toaster. A robotic voice from it said: "Bread toasted,
by your command."
"You seem to be taking this extremely well," Nene said.
"Yeah, that's strange. It's just... Well, I believe you. You're very
easy to read, Nene, no offense. But I think you're telling me the truth,"
Ben said.
"So you'll let me go?" Nene said.
Ben looked into the deep verdant pools of her eyes, which seemed to
glow even in this dim kitchen. His entire chest had gone cold, and he felt
like he was falling as he realized the difficult days ahead; the months
and years that he would spend...without her. It was an overwhelming
sadness, the worst he'd ever felt.
"I hope this is worth it," he said through teeth clenched in pain.
"I do too," Nene said, almost silently.
She stood up, and turned her back to him. Ben fought the urge to
stand; his legs were aching to straighten. His own nervous system was
fighting against him.
She had gotten to the door when he couldn't control himself anymore.
"Nene," he said, sobbing. "Don't go. DON'T GO!"
Nene stopped before the door, still not turning around, her chin
rested on her chest. He saw a single prismatic tear fall to the carpet.
Her hand shot out, reaching for the doorknob; but once she grabbed it, she
didn't turn it.
"I'm glad I knew you," she said. Then she opened the door, and walked
out of his life.
[Now]
Huey dodged the holographic tentacle, but the computer recorded a hit. A
most palatable hit, Nene noted. She stared through the glass to the floor
ten feet below, where Huey seemed to be fighting for his life. She had
been in his place a lifetime ago--or at least it seemed a lifetime--but
now she was one of the gods who sat on high and would later decide if
Ebson would be allowed to join their ranks. Nene sat back in her chair and
felt smug. It was great to belong.
"He seems to possess good physical strength," Sylia said. "Though his
manual dexterity leaves something to be desired."
"He could join one of my classes," Linna said. "I'm sure he'd get
better really quick."
"Impressive response time, though," Nene said, balancing a pen
between the palm of her hand and the console. "Almost as good as me."
"And his targeting is just about as bad," Priss noted.
"He does seem quick on his feet," Linna said.
Nene let the pen slip to the floor. "So Linna, when's the wedding?"
"Wh-what?" Linna asked.
"Well you seem to be in love with this guy; you don't seem to have a
bad word to say about him," Nene said. "Why dontcha marry him?"
"Careful Nene," Mackie said. "You're starting to act like Priss
again."
"Screw you," Priss said, stomping on Mackie's foot.
"Well, I'll admit he isn't that fit. But we're not looking for
another fighter," Linna said.
Nene sat up. "That reminds me, Sylia, how are you planning to test
his computer skills?"
"I planned to use the same set of trials I had you perform," Sylia
said.
Nene scowled. That had been some of the dullest and most pedantic
work she'd ever done. She had to break into 20 different systems, one
after the other. Every one had some new sort of trap set in to stop her.
"I think I have a better idea," Nene said.
"Corewar 2025?" Huey asked, mildly interested.
"Yeah," Nene said. "If you're not chicken."
"What's Corewar?" Linna asked.
Priss looked on in passionate disinterest.
"Corewar 2025," Nene corrected her. "It's the ultimate test of
cracking skill."
"You see what you do," Mackie interjected. "Is you take two smart
terminals and you connect them together using a single Cat-9 cable. That
way the only thing they're connected to is each other. On each terminal
you make sure there's nothing more than a text editor, a compiler of a
randomly chosen language, a software firewall, an up-to-date AV/AW program,
and a telnet client. The first person to disable the other person's
terminal wins."
"How sickeningly nerdy," Priss growled.
"That's rather unorthodox, isn't it? Huey said.
Nene gave him a strange look. Since when was there an orthodoxy on
the entry requirements for a superhero team? "It sounds like you're scared,
Ebb-san. Come on, I know you've always wanted to take a crack at me."
"I suppose that's true," Huey said. "I'm game."
It took Mackie nearly two hours to set everything up. Luckily there
were a couple of spare smart terminals in the basement. It was always
necessary to have backups. Priss wasn't exactly computer literate, or able
to contain her rage.
They set up a couple of tables in the control room. The two terminals
were back to back; it was a rule that the two contenders couldn't see what
the other was doing. When everything was set up Nene and Ebb-san stood
facing each other, equidistant from each console.
They both banged a clenched fist against their chest and uttered:
"Those who are about to crash salute you." They then rushed to their
terminals.
Nene tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the computer to
boot up. This system must've been ten years old; which she supposed was
fitting considering the name of the game. Finally she came to the command
prompt.
Remote user requesting access. Grant? (y/n)
Nene smirked; this was newbie bait. She certainly wasn't going to
fall for it. She was about to hit n and then stopped. What if that's what
he was expecting her to do? She hit alt-shift and another ux_term opened.
> kill process id 1024
The other ux_term vanished. Nene grinned and opened up three other
ux_terms and began different tasks in each one of them. She brought up the
/cmp/ directory and lsed it. A C compiler, she thought to herself. Where
the hell did Mackie manage to find one of those? Luckily she knew E, so
she essentially knew C as well. She opened vix and started to write a
program, tabbing over to another ux_term whenever she needed to look at
the man pages for the C compiler. There was a program that she had written
by accident during her first week of learning E. What was great about it
was that the program used the computer's clockspeed against it. The faster
the computer, the faster the program would crash it. It was also such a
simple program that no AV/AW program could catch it. The only way someone
would even known they were being attacked was if they checked their disk
quotas or process list. She got rid of the latter by giving a name similar
to a process that showed up on the system.
She tabbed over to another ux_term and did a whatsup. There were
three processes she didn't recognize. She wasn't familiar with this
particular make of operating system, so it was possible that they were
esoteric names for near-universal processes. But she wasn't going to take
that chance; she killed them all.
That done, she did a whoson. Naturally, there was another user on,
this one called "blowme". Nene shut him out of the system. When a user was
logged in to your computer, and you knew about it, you could easily do as
much damage to them as they could to you. But she wasn't quite ready. She
ran another whatsup and, content that he hadn't left a parting gift, got
back to her program.
She was done. The little program only took up 16 lines. She was
convinced that she could pair it down even further, but that didn't really
matter at this point. She compiled it and ran the executable. She let it
run for five second and then killed it. She checked her disk quota: it had
written 200 megabytes in the few seconds that it ran. That meant it would
only take about five minutes for it to crash Ebb-san's computer.
"How you doing over there, Ebby?" she asked.
"Just fine, Molly; Just like old times, ne?" Huey said.
Nene whosoned again, he was now there as "yousuckrimjobqueen". Nene
clucked her tongue. She hoped she hadn't been that crude back in her
freelance cyberterrorism days.
The telnet client that was on this computer--that was on the Knight
Saber's computers--was one that Nene herself had written almost five years
ago. As such, there were many hidden features, and traps, in it. For
instance, Nene could take control of any computer that was using it
through a nasty backdoor algorithm she'd written. With a single keystroke
she was inside of Ebb-san's terminal.
She put the file on Ebb-san's computer, cleared it for execution, and
ran it. She brought up the process table and smirked. He'd never notice it.
Although the names were similar, the process table was, by default, listed
by process number instead of name. Since they weren't listed together, it
was unlikely he'd notice that he had two copies of the same process
running.
She shut the telnet program down, worrying that he might get wise and
use it against her. She went back to vix and started to work on a security
program. This would take slightly longer, but since it was going to kill
everyone except the person with her User-ID, it would be fairly simple to
program.
Every once in a while she tabbed over to one of the open ux_terms and
swatted flies. Ebb-san apparently thought about deviant sex quite a lot.
Nene wondered what squicking was supposed to be.
About seven minutes had passed before Nene finished the program. She
ran it and did the usual house-cleaning chores; deleting files and such.
She noticed that Ebb-san had managed to break into her computer again. She
should work on a password randomizer next. Set it for every 3 seconds or
so. Nene snuck into his terminal through the telnet program again.
She brought up the processes and saw that her program had been killed.
A ls confirmed it wasn't in the directory anymore. She was about to put it
back on Ebb-san's machine when the telnet window blinked. Nene got a bad
feeling in her gut. Programs often blink like that when the computer can't
keep up with what the program was doing; but it never would have happened
with something as simple as Nene's program. The blink was a warning she'd
built into the client. It meant that someone had followed the telnet
stream back into her terminal. Ebb-san had obviously found the hijack
function. And the mass-murderer program she'd just written wouldn't catch
him either. She quickly killed the telnet program; luckily he hadn't been
on long enough to...
Nene remembered something. Moments before it blinked, the sound from
Ebb-san's keyboard became louder; he'd been typing faster than she'd ever
heard anyone type before. She went to tab into one of the ux_terms and a
window popped up.
[Shutdown Process Activated. Shutdown in... 005 seconds.]
Nene almost hit tab again, but stopped just in time. He'd rebound her
keys. Jesus Christ, how had he managed to do that in so little time? He
must've been writing the malware ever since he sat down.
Nene reluctantly moved her hand over to the trackball and clicked on
another ux_term. She tried to type: "abort", but she got "qwert". That son
of a bitch! She didn't have a choice any longer, she hit meta-a and said a
quick prayer. The countdown stopped and the window disappeared.
Nene gulped. He had spared her. That felt even worse than losing. He
thought so little of her abilities that he showed mercy. Or else he was
toying with her. Either way, it was pretty bad.
She quickly tested each of the letter keys. It took her a whole
minute before she was able to df.
Oh damn. Oh DAMN. There was less than 1000 blocks of disk space left,
and those were certainly eaten up in the space of time it took to display
the message. The son of a bitch had used her own program against her! Damn
it, why hadn't SHE thought of rebinding HIS keys?
It wouldn't be long now. The first time the system tried to swap...
Ah, here it was.
Out of memory. Out of memory. Out of memory.
It was frozen. The program would crash in a few moments itself, since
it didn't have any more disk space to write to. She liked that, it was
self-terminating. So few mechanical things could do that these days.
Nene pushed away from the table, the wheels on her chair carrying her
across the room, she swiveled and faced the back of her opponent. After a
moment he turned to face her.
"Not that I need to tell you," Nene said. "But you won."
"Good to hear it from you," Huey said, smiling.
Nene shook her head. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?"
Huey grinned sheepishly.
Priss walked over and shook his hand. "The queen is dead, long live
the king!"
Linna placed her hands on Nene's shoulders. "It's all right, Nene.
You survived a whole 12 minutes!"
She sounded apologetic--but she obviously didn't realize that 12
minutes was extraordinarily good when they were playing at this level.
Nene swiveled away from them; so they didn't see the flash of
murderous hatred that crossed her face.
[Then]
A wise man once said, on the subject of earthborn purgatories, that the
suburb of Tokyo known as Saitama was: "hell with waterslides".
In the outer ring of this city was a small house of modern
construction. It was in a neighborhood that was home to many foreigners.
Many residents of Saitama spoke in hushed and angry tones about the
"gaijin invasion" which had taken place in the long and difficult years
after the Kanto earthquake.
One of those families was the Romanovs, who has left their ancestral
city of Moscow to find better opportunities abroad. At least that's what
they told people. Petrov Romanov was a conscientious man who wanted
nothing to do with the EEU--or the New Warsaw Pact, as many believed it
should be called.
Because of his choices, his daughter had grown up speaking English as
a first language, Japanese as a second, and Russian as a distant third.
The fact that she had a stout Russian soul was a mystery to her parents.
As Sylia strolled up the front walk, she was amazed at the contrast.
The green grass, offset by the deep blue sky, seemed alien to her. She'd
lived in MegaTokyo for almost her entire life--she had started to believe
that everything was as crude and ugly. She felt strange being in Nene's
world--did Nene feel as alienated in hers?
"This is not going to be pretty," Nene said somberly. "You're
familiar with the Russian temper, I take it?"
"Let me do the talking," Sylia said. "They'll be more inclined to
listen if it comes from a stranger."
Nene shrugged. They walked onto the front porch and Sylia rang the
bell. After a moment a man with dark hark and a moustache answered.
"Nene!" he said, dimples appearing in his cheeks as he smiled. His
eyes slid over to Sylia and his face fell. "What did she do this time?"
"It's nothing bad, I assure you Mr. Romanov," Sylia said.
"Are you from the school?" Nene's dad asked, his brow furrowing in
confusion.
"No, I'm not. Could we come in? We have much to discuss," Sylia said.
"Of course, please," Nene's dad said, moving out of the way so they
could enter.
They walked through a small hallway and came into the living room.
There were several pieces of Byzantine art hanging on the walls, but aside
from that nothing that spoke of this being a Russian house. Sylia didn't
know what she'd expected; maybe a couple of those Russian dolls, perhaps?
A woman of about the same age as Nene's dad was standing by the stove
in the kitchen, making a pot of tea. She was obviously Nene's mother; she
had the same crimson hair, the same deep green eyes. She looked up and a
bright smile crossed her face. She also had her daughter's smile.
"Nene!" she yelled, she ran across the room and hugged her daughter.
Nene looked a little embarrassed, but warmly returned the embrace. "It's
so wonderful to see you dear!"
Sylia allowed herself a light smile. She guessed Nene didn't come
back much. She also couldn't deny that felt a wonderful warm feeling
coursing through her chest. It must be nice having living parents.
"I'm afraid I didn't catch your name, Miss-" Nene's father said.
"Stingray. Sylia Stingray," Sylia said.
"Well, have a seat Miss Stingray," Nene's dad said, motioning to one
of the couches. Sylia sat on one of the love seats, the Family Romanov sat
together on the longer couch, Nene between them.
"I'm a recruiter for the ADPolice," Sylia said. "Nene's affinity with
computers has convinced us that she would be a great asset to our team."
Nene's eyebrows rose in surprise, but her face quickly went blank.
Very good reaction time, Sylia noted to herself.
"Well we're glad to hear that," Nene's mother said. "But you've got
to wait another four years before our daughter will be looking for work."
"I believe that Nene's natural talents don't require any advanced
education. In fact, I think she's wasting her time at school as it is,"
Sylia said.
Nene looked uncomfortable. Sylia guessed that she was being a little
too blunt, but it was important to get it out in the open.
"I don't know how they do things in your country, Miss Stingray...
Which would be what, by the way?" Nene's dad said.
"The Stingray's hail from Bolivia, originally," Sylia said.
"Anyway, we believe in the importance of education," Nene's dad said.
"Yes, but structured schooling isn't for everyone," Sylia said. "The
purpose of school is to get a job, is it not? We're offering young Nene
employment for life."
"If I could get through school, so can my daughter," Nene's mom said.
"You must've seen her discipline reports. She's chaffing in the
position that you put her in," Sylia said.
"I don't like you questioning our parenting, Miss Stingray!" Nene's
father said. His voice hadn't raised at all, in fact it was lower than
usual. But it was harsh and deadly.
"If I didn't think you were good parents, I wouldn't have bothered
speaking to you. In eight months she can choose to leave of her own accord
and follow me. But we both believe that it's important that she have your
support in this," Sylia said.
Nene's father shook his head. "All this nebulous talk of the value of
education doesn't really matter. I'm not sure I want my daughter living
and working in MegaTokyo. It's a very dangerous place."
"For that matter, where would she live?" Nene's mother said with
concern.
"Her salary will be able to provide comfortable accommodations.
Especially with our connections," Sylia said. "As for her safety, I swear
to you that I'll look after her. She won't come to any harm."
Nene shot her a look that said: yeah, right.
"And how do we know that we can trust you?" Nene's father said.
"You don't. But your daughter does. Of course you need to wonder if
that's enough," Sylia said.
"It isn't," Nene's father said. "She's not doing it, and that's
final."
"Petrov," Nene's mother said.
"I'm not talking about this, Esmeralda," Nene's father said.
"Then I suppose there's no reason for me to remain," Sylia said,
rising from the couch. "But before I leave, I'd like to compliment you on
the raising of your daughter. She's a fine young woman. I'm sure she'll
make you proud, no matter what path she chooses." Even though no one
present was Japanese, Sylia bowed and walked out into the foyer.
She heard rushed footsteps behind her, when she reached the door she
turned around and saw Nene.
"I'll talk to them. They'll have to give in eventually," Nene said.
"I wouldn't be so sure about that, Nene. They worry about you. Are
you sure this is the life you want to live? It's not too late to back
out."
Nene hesitated. Sylia smiled inwardly. That was a sign of true
maturity.
"I think what we're doing is worth the risk," Nene said.
"Then by all means, badger them into acceptance. I'll send a car for
you when you want to leave," Sylia said.
"No thanks, I'll take the train and meet you back at Raven's," Nene
said.
"As you wish," Sylia said.
"By the way, what's all this about ADPolice?" Nene said with a
cockeyed look.
"Oh," Sylia said, smiling lightly. "Did I forget to mention that?"
The dawn of Nene's first day at ADPolice found her waking up staring
at the ceiling of her apartment. Her apartment. HER apartment. Her
APARTMENT. Nene felt a rush whenever those words crossed her synapses
whose magnitude wasn't diminished no matter how many times she thought it.
No longer was she relegated to a room or a dorm room. She had her own
apartment, and a job, and a vocation. Nene leapt giddily from her bed and
rushed into the bathroom. She sang as the hot water of the shower pounded
down on her. Today was going to be a great day, she knew. The best of her
life.
She was still humming as she stood on the platform in the train
station. Vision songs had been going through her head all morning, and she
wasn't able to stop them from escaping to the outside world. Nene
considered Vision's songs to be a little too cheery, but she liked the
composition of them anyway. The lyrics were the most thoughtful she'd
heard since Alfred Yankovic died. Priss really hated her music, which
ratcheted up Vision's reputation in Nene's estimation.
She finally came out of the train station at Ikebukuro and craned her
neck to take in the immensity of the ADPolice building. It was interesting
that the best known structures of MegaTokyo were the GENOM tower and
ADPolice headquarters. It really made MegaTokyo feel like a battleground.
Nene was given a security badge at the front desk and took an
elevator up to the 45th floor. A girl about the same age as Nene showed
her to her desk and gave her the lay of the land. This girl, Naoko, wasn't
Nene's supervisor, but had the same job. As such she didn't sugarcoat it
for her.
"Althought we're called Communication Specialists we only get to work
the switchboard, at most, two hours a day. Most of the other time we have
to enter data into the database and handle crap that's deemed 'too
sensitive' for the secretarial pool," Naoko said.
"But I don't understand," Nene said. "I took the test and have a
badge and everything, so why's a police officer doing this stuff?"
"Surplus to requirements, sadly. Of course they're always looking for
beat cops, if you want a transfer," Naoko said drolly.
"No, no, this is fine," Nene said, smiling nervously.
"Good, I'll leave you to it, then," Naoko said and walked off.
Three hours later Nene was bored out of her mind. She didn't have a
switchboard shift that day, so she was stuck doing the 'crap' that Naoko
mentioned. After a few minutes she took out her Layer-10 player and
started listening to The Dylan Revolution. It was only after it occurred
to her that she was paying attention to the lyrics that she realized how
mindless her work was.
Nene was sullen and disheartened when she walked out of ADPolice HQ
that evening. Were all things of the adult world like this? Maybe she
should've cherished her childhood more.
She was waiting for the walk signal to cross over to the train
station when a familiar black car pulled up. Nene leaned down and tried to
peer in the smoked glass windows. After a moment they rolled down, Sylia
was sitting in the driver's seat.
"Hard day, Nene-chan?" Sylia asked.
"I don't know how useful I'm going to be," Nene said.
"Don't worry, I still have friends on the inside. You'll have access
to everything you need," Sylia said. "Get in."
Nene pulled the door open and slid into the shotgun seat. Sylia was
off like a shot, Nene clumsily tried to fasten her seatbelt.
"To cheer you up, I'll take you to dinner. You ever have lemon
linguine with real chicken?" Sylia asked.
"I haven't had it with real lemons," Nene said.
Sylia chortled. "But first, we're going to swing by the garage,"
Sylia said, smiling. "There's something there I think you'll want to see."
There it stood in all its majesty. A marvel of mechanical and
cybernetic engineering. Based on the abandoned GENOM prototype that was
the ancestor of each of the Knight Saber's suits, it also housed a
supercomputer that could put a Cray-100 to shame. Not everyone was in awe
of it, though.
"Pink? Why the hell didn't you just put Hello Kitty stickers on it?"
Priss growled.
"They would burn off," Nene said innocently. "Besides, I LIKE pink."
"It's a bit much," Linna said. "But I guess we could use a bit of
color..."
"I can't wait to try it out," Nene said, clouding up the window of
the console room as she leaned against it, looking at her suit in the
holographic chamber below.
"You know, there's a reason it's down there," Sylia said.
It took a moment for Nene to realize what she meant. She straightened
up and tried to hide her giddiness. "You mean it?"
"Go ahead," Sylia said. "You'll have to change first, though-"
Nene's shoes left skid marks as she ran off to the changing room.
"Umm, could you guys go somewhere else?" Mackie asked, looking
wantonly at a nearby computer terminal.
Priss stomped on his foot, and he howled in pain.
"We've really got to get rid of that camera," Linna noted.
[Now]
Nene lay in bed and stared at the dark ceiling of her apartment. She
hadn't felt so depressed since... Well, since before she joined the Knight
Sabers. But her feelings of depressions were supplanted by nervousness and
a small amount of fear.
There was something really wrong with Ebb-san. He was a threat to
them; she felt it in her bones. Perhaps she just hated losing... No, that
wasn't it. Ebb-san had never been that good. NEVER.
Nene reached over and pressed a touch-panel on her bedside table. The
lights came up. She walked over to her computer and sat down. After she
booted up she brought up her telnet program and logged into a mainframe in
a rolling-pin factory in Moscow. And for the first time in two years she
entered the newsnet of Tokyonet.
Nene was surprised that she never felt the urge to come back here
before. But ^fugar was part of the sullen teenager that she used to be.
Knight Saber Nene was a very different girl. A very different WOMAN.
^fugar was empty. Not only was no one logged-in, there weren't any
posts. Nene felt nostalgia's bitter edge. So they had all moved on with
their lives as well. But still, no one had found out about this place? No
one had come to replace them?
The filter was set to only show messages from the past month, so she
reset it for the previous six months; no messages appeared. Nene wrinkled
her nose. She set the filter for a year, and finally some messages
appeared. The last message was on March 20th, 2033.
She spent the next thirty minutes reading through the messages. There
was no talk of abandoning the group. Also, the messages didn't pieter-out
either. >From the 15th to the 20th of March there were 30 posts, each one
coming from someone Nene remembered.
Nene felt a sinking feeling in her chest. She'd come to ^fugar to
make herself feel better; but she realized that her instincts--or her
pride--had put her on the right course. She dressed in less than a minute
and rushed out the door.
The streets of MegaTokyo were deserted--as they usually were at four
in the morning. Nene was certain that she was quite an unusual sight on
her pink scooter. She felt her blood run hot in her veins. This was a very
different kind of exhilaration that she wasn't used to. Knowing a terrible
secret--or in this case just suspecting one. What if she was right? What
was she going to do?
She still hadn't answered these questions as she skidded to a halt in
the garage. She pressed the door control on her watch and the collapsible
door closed behind her. She rushed up the stairs into the control room.
She thanked Mackie's laziness as she found the CoreWar 2025 setup was as
she left it.
She sat down at Ebb-san's computer and started it up. It seemed to be
taking longer to boot up than it should, Nene felt bile in her throat, and
quickly hit the switch on the power strip. She rushed across to the other
computer and quickly whipped up an Ultrix boot-disk. She only hoped that
Ebb-san's little program hadn't covered his tracks completely. Most people
wouldn't have realized what was happening before it was too late--but Nene
was not most people.
She got to the command prompt and started to poke around. Most of the
Files were still intact. She walked over to the rack of optical discs
which contained all of the system software she'd written over the years,
and took the disc containing her Lazarus program.
She managed to retrieve all of the chunks, though there would
obviously be corruption. She quickly started to flit through them. She
found the program that he had used to rebind her keys. She couldn't put
her finger on it, but there was something very strange about it.
She went into the /cmp/ directory and found that Mackie had given him
a FORTRAN-2010 compiler to work with. Ouch. It was very unlikely that he
could've written a program that complex in FORTRAN in 14 minutes.
Then Nene realized what was wrong. She opened up the "latchkeykid"
program in the byte viewer. This program hadn't been compiled. It was
possible that the compiler tag had been lost when she retrieved it... But
these commands were far too clean and unique for an automated system. The
program had been hand-coded; but no one could write that fast in assembler.
NO ONE. Add to that the fact that there was no assembler program on this
computer...
Nene felt her stomach tighten. Son of a bitch. She stared at the blue
void of the byte-viewer display for almost ten minutes before she moved
again. She picked up the phone and dialed Huey's number.
"Hey, Ebb-san, it's Molly. Why don't you meet me at the garage,
there's something I want to show you," Nene said.
"Can't it wait until morning?" Huey said.
"You know how impatient I am, Ebby," Nene said. "I want you here in
an hour, capiche?".
He mumbled something. Nene guessed that was good enough and hung up.
She started to pace. What the hell was she going to do now? No, that's a
cop-out. She knew exactly what she was going to do--what she had to do.
But it was going to be hard. She had never killed, much less murdered,
someone.
But, she thought darkly, there's always a first time for everything.
[Then]
"Why would anyone want to attack Shibuya?" Nene asked. "Someone have a
dress they couldn't return?"
"They don't set out to attack anything, they just sort of go haywire
and wander off," Linna tried to explain.
"They're evil boomers," Priss said. "It's what they do."
The Knight Sabers, now numbering four, sat in the back of the van as
Mackie drove them towards Shibuya. Priss, Linna and Nene were holding
their helmets in their laps, but Sylia had been wearing hers since they
got in the van. Nene found it unnerving to have the faceless Knight Saber
staring back at her.
"You'd better not flake out on us, kid," Priss said. "We have enough
screw-ups in this outfit as it is," she said, jerking her head towards the
front seat.
"You're really unpleasant to be around, you know that?" Nene said.
Priss simply growled and turned away. "Hey, boy wonder, we there
yet?"
"Another ten minutes," Mackie said.
"Hey," Nene said. "How come the color of the back door is different
from the rest of the interior? What happened?"
Linna chuckled, but Priss simply deepened her scowl.
"You're very observant, Nene," Sylia offered.
"Uh, thanks," Nene said.
"We should be close enough, Nene. Get on the scope," Sylia said.
"All right," Nene said, picking up her helmet, but she stopped as she
saw the head of Sylia's hardsuit shake back-and-forth.
Sylia pointed to the terminal in the back. "The van's terminal is
better for long-term observation."
"Oh, of course," Nene said. She walked over to the van and pulled the
UPB plug from her suit and plugged it into the main port. She sat down and
donned her helmet.
She brought up the newsfeed and watched the chaos in Shibuya. The
long-range antennae was picking up a scrambled mess. She quickly broke it
up into what she hoped were component parts and began to look for patterns.
"Anything, Nene-chan?" Sylia asked.
"Just a sec," Nene said. This felt familiar, it was something she'd
done ever since she had her first computer at age ten. But this was
different--she had greater tools at her disposal, the computer's reaction
time was instantaneous. But it was more than that. It wasn't just idle
play anymore--what she was doing mattered. Every second that passed meant
more lives. There could be no errors.
She had been recording for ninety seconds. She quickly played back
each component signal. There didn't appear to be--wait. She saw it, a
repeating trough. Clever, very clever. Absence of signal as identification.
The signal terminated every 10.217 seconds. It was like basing morse code
around the pauses instead of the dots and dashes.
"I think I have something," Nene said.
"Jam them," Sylia said.
"No, I think I might be able to--" Nene started.
"Jam them, god damn it!" Priss yelled.
Nene clenched her teeth, she brought up the jamming program but
didn't execute it. She wasn't going to flood the frequency, but would send
out a signal when the identification trough was due. That way they would
keep waiting for orders, not realizing they'd missed them. But still, if
she could figure out...
Nene's eyes shifted to the video-feed which was still playing. GENOM
combat model, 12A class. She had been reading a top-secret manual of their
assembly language only the night before. Maybe she could do something
better.
"Nene, are you jamming them?" Priss said.
"Just a minute," Nene said.
"Every minute you waste someone dies!" Priss screeched. This made
Nene turn to look at Priss. There was genuine emotion there; genuine pain.
"I... I think I can-" Nene sputtered. People WERE dying. What right
did she have to indulge her stupid hacker ethic?
"Trust her," Sylia said.
It was said so calmly, but Priss and Linna both looked as if struck.
Priss backed down, and took her seat next to Linna.
Nene, shaken but hopefully still competent, turned back to her
program. Okay, she knew the update algorithm; that was one of the pieces
of software she'd put in the supercomputer when the suit's frame hadn't
even been built. She needed to write a very simple program... Since the
boomers were networked she only had to send it to one of them, and it
would send them on to the rest.
All right, the fuel cell... If the valve on the deuterium oxide feed
was opened all the way, the chamber would be flooded and the reaction
would tear it, and the boomer, apart. Since fusion reactions had to be fed
to be kept going, the explosion wouldn't extend much further beyond the
boomer itself. But the neutrons... Damn it, the shielding would rupture
and some free neutrons would escape. Free neutrons were the most dangerous
kind of radiation; anyone within a ten foot radius of the boomer when it
blew might suffer radiation poisoning.
They could die several years down the road--but how many people WOULD
die if she didn't act? If she jammed the signal the independent boomers
would still be able to act on their own... No, this was the only choice.
And God forgive her for any innocent lives she took in the process.
She wrote the program and sent it. Several moments passed, and the
scene at Shibuya changed. The reporter couldn't help but smile.
"Yes, it has been confirmed, all four of the boomers have been
destroyed. It's believed that they have self-destructed, but we don't know
at this time..."
The van jerked to a halt. "Shibuya; we're here," Mackie said.
Linna and Priss pulled on their helmets. Priss slammed her gauntleted
fist into her other hand. "Come on, let's get them!"
The side walls of the van fell away and the Knight Sabers climbed out.
Nene sheepishly walked over to Sylia.
"Knight Sabers," Sylia started.
"Ah, I think we're done here," Nene said.
"What?!" Priss said.
"I tricked them into destroying themselves," Nene said. "I don't
think the trick will work twice. But hey, we can take off early."
"Oh," Linna said, her shoulders slumping. Nene couldn't believe the
disappointment in her voice. Linna had seemed like such a Pollyanna.
"Damn it, I was really itching for a fight!" Priss complained.
"Good work, Nene," Sylia said.
Nene felt a swell of pride; she felt her heart pounding in her chest,
but it was no longer out of fear. She had saved lives. She had given up so
much, gone so far into this world she knew so little about. But she had
never felt better or more alive. This--she realized--is what she was meant
to do. She was exceptional; she was a hero.
"But they're not even going to know it was us!" Priss bitched.
"Is a good deed worth doing only if you gain recognition?" Sylia
asked.
"Oh!" Nene said. "That reminds me..." She held out her gauntleted
hand and signaled a program. A series of laser beams shot out of her
gauntlet onto the pavement beneath them. They moved swiftly, computer
controlled, within seconds they ceased, and a signature had been burnt
into the concrete beneath their feet.
Knight Sabers, it read. Together at last.
[Now]
"I see you dressed for the occasion, Nene," Huey said. "Though, personally,
I would've preferred something more akin to an evening gown."
Nene stood dispassionately against the night sky; which wasn't
difficult since the blank faceplate betrayed no emotion.
Huey let the door to the roof fall close and walked towards the
armored battletank that enveloped his former friend. "I take it this isn't
a social call?"
"Who are you working for?" Nene asked.
"Why do you assume I'm working for anyone other than myself?" Huey
asked.
"Because you were never that smart. You were always the dimmest bulb
in the drawer, to mix a metaphor," Nene said.
Huey bore his clenched teeth. "But that's not the situation anymore,
is it?"
"So they upgraded your mind in exchange for infiltrating the Knight
Sabers," Nene said.
"What makes you think I was after the Knight Sabers?" Huey asked.
Nene's response was choked. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"They're all dead, you know. Red, Wimbley, Gobo. We're all that's
left of the ^fugar gang. But I suppose you already know that," Huey said.
"They were given a choice: serve or die. They each died writhing in agony,
cursing Molotov for what happened to them. I know: they made me watch.
They all suffered and died, because of you Nene," he laughed bitterly.
"They didn't even give a damn about any of us--we were only useful because,
through us, they could find you. You're the one they wanted."
"Who's 'they'? GENOM?" Nene said.
Huey dismissively turned away from Nene. His gaze fell on the
cityscape, and the giant tower that dominated it. "GENOM, feh," he said.
"GENOM is a little kid in a sandbox banging two warheads together."
"Who then?" Nene said.
"Patience. You'll know soon enough," Huey said. He took a small
device from his hand and held it up for Nene to see. He extended a small
antennae from the top of it and was about to flick a switch when a shot
rang out. The device fell to the ground as a hole was bored through his
hand. Another shot caused the back of his head to explode in a blossom of
blood. Huey Ebson was dead by the time he hit the pavement.
Nene looked over the corpse to see Sylia, clenching a smoking gun in
her hands.
"How did you know?" Nene asked.
"The datestamp. On April 1st, 2032 you reset the year on the server
to 1921. It wasn't changed until the synchronization on May 1st," Sylia
said.
"You knew all this time?!" Nene yelled.
"I knew only that he faked the datestamp. He could have simply been
trying to hide his shame. It did take over two years for him to crack the
code," Sylia said.
It had been a grisly job getting Huey into the stand-up MRI. For the
first time, Nene wished they had one of the flatbed models. Sylia held him
in place while Nene worked the controls.
"Hey Sylia, come take a look at this," Nene said.
After setting him on the ground, Sylia walked over to look at the
screen. Something flashed across her face as she looked at the image.
"Do you recognize this design?" Nene asked nonchalantly.
"No, not at all... So, he was a boomeroid?"
"No, not exactly. Even with the heavy modifications to his cerebrum,
less than 20% of his body was replaced with cybernetic components," Nene
said. "I know GENOM was into cyberorganics, but I didn't know they were
this far advanced."
"This isn't GENOM," Sylia said.
"How can you be sure?" Nene asked.
But Sylia didn't answer that question. Not then, or ever.
Nene was glad to get off her feet; it had been a long day. She was also
glad to get out in the open air. The inside of ADPolice headquarters still
smelled of smoke and charred plastic. It would be a long time before those
reminders of Dr. Yoshida's attempt to destroy the place would fade away.
Nene laid her back against the railing and took in MegaTokyo's
majestic sunset. Although it was nice that the sun was figuratively
setting on GENOM, it wasn't literal in this case. The tower was to the
east of ADPolice, so Nene didn't have to look at it. Rumors were that once
GENOM moved out they were going to sell it to a Dutch shoe company. Well,
best to sell it to fellow countrymen, she guessed.
"Thought I might find you here," a calm and familiar voice said.
"There's just something about you and sunsets."
"It makes me feel at peace," Nene said simply. "It reminds me of
something I read in a book once. 'Sleep after toil, Port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, Death after life does greatly please.'"
"Edmund Spenser, the Faerie Queen," Sylia said. "I like that quote
too." She sat down next to Nene.
"I was starting to get ahead of myself," Nene said. "I was just so
tired that I forgot that this complicated life of mine has meaning."
"I don't suspect we'll be doing this forever, Nene. You said it
yourself, GENOM is almost gone," Sylia said.
"But there will always be dragons to slay," Nene said; she then
turned to her mentor. "Why did you do it? You knew that I was going to jam
whatever signal he sent out."
"I also knew you couldn't leave him alive," Sylia said. "I figure
that in this business you'll eventually have to take a human life. But I
wanted to hold that day back as far as I could. You still have some of
your innocence left," Nene said.
Nene scoffed. "I've never been innocent in all the time you've known
me."
"Take it from someone who knows, Nene. You didn't see your father
gunned down by a man he trusted. You didn't see your father's work,
conceived in the most idealistic expression of the human spirit, warped to
suit the darkest needs of humanity," Sylia said.
"That would be kind of hard," Nene said. "My father's a dentist."
Sylia laughed out loud: it was a strong hearty laugh, not the chortle
that had become her trademark. Sylia quickly caught herself, but couldn't
keep the grin off her face.
-The End-
All comments are welcome: geniusloci at sbcglobal.net
Begun: March 6, 2005
Finished: April 6, 2005
Thanks to the Navy's astronomical site which I used to calculate when the
sun would set in Tokyo on February 3rd, 2034.
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