"Ooba jokka meesa wakka ha ha ha."
- Jabba the Hutt
"Sorry about the mess."
- Han Solo
The four members of RAPT were about to embrace their digital rapture. Sei, Jo, and Meg were kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs. They were closely guarded by a group of cyber gangsters who kept their appearances hidden behind black suits and black motorcycle helmets.
Further away, Amy was limply slouched over her knees with her arms held up. Her eyes were closed and her only movements were her breathing. A giant unnamed mech was parked behind her with electrical wiring dangling out of its fuselage. The cables trailed several yards downward and ended up in a jumbled mess around Amy's arms, head, and neck.
Several helmeted crew members were huddled around RAPT's information tactician with portable consoles linked to her neck cables. They were like a bunch of faceless techies obsessively managing a server that happened to be a skimpily dressed young girl. They labored anxiously over their tiny screens with their miniature keyboards, only stopping now and then to poke Amy on the cheek or on the forehead and make sure she was sound asleep.
The anonymous mob communicated to one another through speakers built on the grills of their shining black helmets. With the amount of audio distortion laced over their voices, they could have been men, they could have been women, or they could have been robotic squirrels. Daft Punk had turned wicked.
"Give me a status update back there," the leader ordered. They stood with their arms crossed and bobbed their helmet toward the anti-Amy task force.
"The memory dump went through quick and all the psych edits are checking out OK," said the one of the ones furiously typing. "Still working on bringing her limiters down. She sure knew what she was doing when she was encrypting these babies."
A helmeted assailant in the far back put their palm against their visor and shook their head.
"Memories, memories. The memories are the easiest part to sort out. It's always the mammaries that give us the most trouble."
"Keep at her. I want to see all of those features enabled before she's initialized," the commander said threateningly. "We're not about to build a new infiltration bouncer out of some 2-bit Lollipop Guild glitch who likes to stay locked in her demo version."
"Let her go!" Jo shouted from the ground. "We're the ones you're after! She's just a kid!"
The entire gang stopped what they were doing unison and blankly looked back and forth with their already blank faces. They began laughing to each other in garbled digitized voices.
"Exactly how old do you think this woman is?" one of the RAPT members asked with a puzzled shrug.
"She told us she was 13," Sei replied.
"26 is her real age," said the faceless leader. "She always liked picking numbers that could be divided by 2."
Jo, Meg, and Sei were now the ones looking at each other in confusion.
"Your little friend is a Telosploit," another one of the tech-savvy strangers explained. "They use nano-implants to suspend their growth genes at a young age. It makes them harder to ID and gives them some decent cover, but we've rounded up more than a handful already."
Amy flinched in discomfort as electronic pulses charged through her body. The techies never lifted their heads from their diagnostic monitors.
"What are you doing to her, you sickos?!" Meg shouted.
"She's been in debt with our group for quite some time," the leader said sternly. "Think of this as compounding the interest. It's all just a matter of cracking the algorithms she used to disable her estrogen emitters and jumpstart what Mother Nature always inten-"
"Got 'em, Chief," one of the helmeted hackers next to Amy finally said, slamming their keypad down and stretching their arms like they just won the top score on an arcade machine.
Amy's hips were the first thing to drop their childish disguise, nearly snapping her thin pink belt apart as they widened and rounded. Her bust started with a half-second delay and quickly filled out what little space her jacket provided. The features of her face grew slightly refined while keeping their youthful quirks, and her brown pigtails grew all the way down to her naturally firming thighs. The entire process only made her grow another six inches taller as most, but the rest of her made up for it. She was one teddy bear with a little extra stuffing.
"That's more like it," the leader reverberated. "Update her profile with her complete stats. We'll just have to get her in something that fits after we're done here."
"Uhm…"
Amy quietly opened her light brown eyes as her brain was stirred out of sleep mode. She was released from the nest of cables and got to her feet with only a small struggle, quickly getting the hang of her adjusted center of balance. Walking toward the leader of the helmeted gang, she looked carefree, relaxed, and all too comfortable strutting her stuff. Jo, Meg, and Sei didn't even know she had stuff to strut.
Amy tucked her hands against her hips when she stopped next to the gang leader. She playfully shivered her shoulders as if the cooling fans were starting to kick on.
"Hoo. Talk about freeing up a girl's resources."
"How are you feeling, Object 00784?" the leader asked her. 'Object' was the term used for every questionably licensed agent, prisoner, lab specimen, slum runner, or otherwise biological asset circulating between the criminal syndicate's formal ranks. The fact she would never be fully integrated with her uniformed and helmeted colleagues gave her more freedom in many ways, but it also left her expendable and easy to use as a scapegoat if things didn't go as planned.
And Amy was one Object that certainly wasn't set to a null reference.
"Hm. Pretty good, actually." she wrapped her arms behind her head and stretched her waist. Her already tiny jacket pulled up to expose more of her baby fat-free midriff. "Like someone just busted me out of that chicken nugget I've been stuck in forever."
"I'm glad you're handling everything well. Now it's time to complete your authentication."
The gang leader handed her a standard pistol. It was a little cumbersome for her longer but still narrow fingers, but she was enamored by it like a kid with a new toy.
"Nice try, morons," Jo mocked with her head hanging toward the ground. "She's the computer geek. We're the crack shots. She couldn't hit a target if all of our lives depended on it."
Amy stuck out her tongue, pointed her gun, and nailed a crumpled soda can sitting on the ground 50 yards away with perfect accuracy. The three RAPT members flinched.
One of the gangsters responsible for "updating" Amy tapped their fingers to the side of their helmet, pointing to their brain.
"That's why we expanded her firearms proficiency along with everything else."
"We also enhanced her aggression. Bumped down most of her moral inhibitions, too," said another one. "Basically we left her a few megabytes short of a fully functioning hard drive."
Amy studied the gun in her hands with curious innocence.
"Do you want me to kill them?" she smirked toward her anonymous commander.
"Just dispose of one for now. Initiate chooses how to seal the deal. We'll bring the remaining two aboard for… questioning."
"And I guess you'll have plenty of stuff to keep me busy once I patch out one of your bugs?" Amy tilted her head suggestively.
"We'll start you off light. First we'll introduce you to your new equipment." The gang leader stopped to slowly glance her over, then added, "Your other new equipment. Clean out some digital bank accounts, install some tracer programs through RAPT's backdoors, rig a multinational industry collapse, that sort of thing. Do a decent job and maybe we'll start talking about the bigger operations."
Amy nodded with satisfaction. She slinked closer toward Jo, Meg, and Sei and held her gun with a small but steady two-handed grip.
Amy made her pick by quietly singing Eeny, Meeny to herself. The rest of the tech crew wrestled the three RAPT mercenaries further to the ground and kept them lined up on the firing range.
Amy pointed at the target, squeezed one eye shut to sharpen her aim, and fired.
Author's note: I wanted to punk up Amy since she's a cute cyberpunk chicker and that's like my Bat Signal in terms of character aesthetic, but I was weirded out by the fact she's like 10 in the show. Now that I think about it, my workaround for that might actually be a little weirder because now I've basically turned her into a Metal Gear Solid version of that Orphan movie. Have a Happy Shrekmas.
Author's note 2: 007 because I've been constantly listening to John Barry's timeless classic "Exercise at Gibraltar" from the Living Daylights soundtrack lately. 84 because 1984 was the year Godzilla 1985 came out in Japan, which was meant to be a dark and mature *reboot* of the series. Get it?