Silicon Valley 2033
Based on Bubblegum Crisis
Disclaimer: Bubblegum Crisis and related properties are all the properties of their respective owners. The author of this fanfiction claims no responsibility for any of the content, especially the personalities of all the original characters. Therefore, when something like Daley going to San Francisco and scaring you happens, it wasn't my fault. Also, all companies (especially the ones in Silicon Valley) belong to themselves and their shareholders.
Chapter 1: Son of Sun
"Therefore, as soon as you have enclosed the Boomer in a small enough space, you should commence melee tactics to minimize damage to the surrounding area." Leon hadn't spoken English for quite some time, since he had stopped speaking to his parents almost as soon as he had joined the AD Police. He would have liked to have said this in a more exciting way, like "When you've got him surrounded, you can proceed to kick his butt!" The american SWAT team sitting in front of him looked very bored.
"I have a question, Mr. McNichol," said one of them.
"Yes?"
"Even assuming that you're probably going to start on these 'melee tactics' by, say, sticking a nice big metal pole into the Boomer, you'd obviously have to have at least two to three people fighting the thing at the same time, and if any of 'em don't push as hard as they can, then the Boomer's gonna be smart enough to grab one of yer guns and kill ya with it." The SWAT officer then slumped back into his seat.
"That is correct," Leon conceded. In fact, that was exactly what happened once before. "In this case, it will help you to operate a combat suit."
The officer continued to hammer the ADP detective. "Since most boomers have laser cannons in their mouths, and in some cases, have gigantic automatic cannons for arms, it's actually more dangerous to use a combat suit, cuz the Boomer is just gonna blow ya away point blank and ya can't even out-maneuver the thing cuz ya'll be trapped in a freaking coffin."
"Regardless, it is necessary to keep the risk to civilians to a minimum."
"I say we screw the civs and tell them to carry around bigger guns." The officer showed Leon his M43AB2 hand cannon. "I mean, the best rogue Boomer is a dead Boomer."
Leon wiped off his forehead with his handkerchief. Daley wasn't going to back him up for this lecture. "Umm... today's meeting is dismissed." Those lousy Americans were so rude and inconsiderate. He nervously began to pack his notes and papers so that he could leave as soon as possible. Daley smirked sideways and followed Leon all the way to the coffee pot. Leon was somehow glad that he was unaware of the Americans during this time; indeed, he remembered nothing in between that American's remark and him guzzling some hot coffee.
"Would you like me to comfort you?" asked Daley, leaning over his shoulder.
"Not right now, Daley," replied Leon. "I just want to go back home. Americans scare me more than Boomers ever did." But at that moment, he saw a woman wearing a tanktop and sweats walk in and steal the coffee pot right out of his hand. "Hey!"
"I smelled your blood today," said the woman. Her left arm was totally cybernetic, and she wore dog tags for some odd reason.
Leon almost fell backwards. "Jeena! Um, I knew you'd moved to America, but I didn't know..."
"You've had a hard time finding a woman ever since, I can see." She smiled evilly at him. "In fact, I bet that you now resort to hitting on underage girls who work in the office, am I right?"
"No, not really, I mean, I don't do anything like that," he stammered in Japanese. "I mean, there's always Priss, and"
"Your new partner too, I bet."
"No! No! NO! Absolutely not!" But that didn't stop Daley from laughing out loud.
Jeena turned away. "If you decide that you'll accept me once and for all, you know where I'll be."
Zax Kirkbride took off his gloves, boots, belt, and shirt. It was a rough day today, fighting off some berserk Boomers in the middle of the Great Mall. It was a good thing he had remembered to put on his gloves, boots, belt, and shirt for the fight. This new DarkSuit technology was good for something after all. He'd never thought that the sleazy salespeople who sold the thing could have actually told the truth about it.
He turned on his computer and browsed through some news websites. Yahoo.com: "Boomeroid linked to bombings claims ownership of all our base. The CIA discovered the final video log of the USS Dow Jones, which contained a message from the terrorrist proclaiming 'All your base are belong to us.' It is unknown if the Dow Jones was able to launch its complement of Zig fighters in time." CNN.com: "German economy barely recovering from Largo strike." MSNBC.com: "SDPC linked to China." Foxnews.com: "Crazy liberal ideas at root of world depression." USAtoday.com: "Huge battleship QUEEN FOSSIL approaching fast!" Washingtonpost.com: "Famous Japanese anchor Mr. Drinkwater too drunk to report." TheNation.com: "Vigilante suits hinder Boomer unionization." NewYorkTimes.com: "Australia begins export of Kangaroo Boomer."
He had enough of this crap. There was never any good news on anymore. Then again, it made perfect sense: the only good news was bad news. It was only bad news that people wanted to pay money to read about. Maybe the TV wasn't as thoroughly corrupted as the Internet. There were some pretty stupid people on the Internet.
"Are you over 65 and living by yourself? You are very vulnerable to Boomer attacks!"
The image on the TV screen changed to that of an old man sitting alone with a lot of bandages and casts on his body. "I thought that having a number of high-powered automatic weapons under my bed was enough to fend off Boomers. But I never could have expected that one of them would have gotten past my electrified fence, illegal Doberman guard Boomers, invisible landmines, point-defense laser turrets, and twenty ex-Navy SEAL security guards. But one day, it happened. A boomer got past all of them and threw me to the ground! Luckily, the costs to my (mostly cybernetic) body were covered by Cromwell's Anti-Boomer Insurance." The main host of the commercial came back on.
"You may think that the Senior Military Compounds that are hundreds of miles away from any major city are enough to protect you. But you never know." The TV screen showed a Bu-55C flying up to an old woman and pushing her over to the ground. "Press my phone number on your TV screen right now to buy Cromwell's Anti-Boomer Insurance today! You can never pay too much for it!"
Zax kicked the TV off. Television wasn't what it used to be, either. Maybe talking to people was safe. After all, if talking to people wasn't safe, then nothing was.
Jeena, his partner, walked into the room. "Hey, Zax, how was your day?"
"Was doing fine, until I tried to relax at the end of it."
"Me too. I met one of my old friends today. He visited me from Japan. He didn't want to talk about things."
"Is he the one with the slicked-back hair from AD Police?"
"Yeah."
"For the whole week that he's been here, he's done jack. Except maybe tell us new ways to get ourselves killed. I know that it's perfectly fine for ADP troopers to have bad aim and get used as walls and all, but we do things a bit different in America."
"Maybe that's why I moved."
"I thought you liked seeing rookies get torn to pieces, either by your hand or from duty."
"Maybe I still miss my old job."
"Yeah, whatever." Zax opened the fridge and got a beer. "I guess they're too used to those woman hardsuits doing all the hard work for 'em. Whoever they are."
"Hey, that was below the waist. I know I did my share." Jeena played with her dogtags with her mechanical arm. "Everything that you were told to do worked pretty well for us back in those days."
"We suffered our first death when we tried to airdrop a combat suit unit the ADP way."
"That means you had incompetent paratroopers under your command. How is that ADP's fault?"
"They said it worked, even against military boomers, but both of my guys died. They barely managed to get an even tradeoff of two lives for two boomers destroyed. That's just not acceptable." Zax walked out of the room and took his DarkSuit with him. He wouldn't want it to be mistaken for normal clothes.
"You jerk." Jeena couldn't understand why she'd stayed in an American SWAT team. Maybe it was because the mentality of the whole team suited her. At least in America, her attitude was actually pretty normal. In MegaTokyo, she had a hard time getting Leon's attention. Turned out she still did.
Just then, the red alert went off.
Zax put on his gloves and boots first. Then he put the shirt on. Finally, the belt. This was the full extent of the DarkSuit. It was extremely convenient and weighed almost nothing. Even the ultra-thin combat suits, whose capabilities were comparable to the first appearance of the Knight Sabers, weren't this awesome.
The truck stopped in front of Sun Microsystems. A recent explosion had torn a JAVA sign in half. The doors of the van burst open, and the SWAT commander was ready to tell him the deal.
"Three military Bu-12bs inside, one more holding us off at the front door. It's the Nortaneous gang again, and we think it's about drugs again."
"That makes absolutely no sense, but I'm on it." Zax was wondering a lot of things right now. For starters, where the hell did the Nortaneous get so many military Boomers, why was it always linked to drugs, and why was it always him who had to rush to the rescue? It was also possible that his DarkSuit was making him very useful for resolving this situations within an hour or two. He ducked over by one of the snipers, who told him their progress without even having to shift his aim. Good old fashioned American snipers. They knew how to shoot, and that was more than he could say for anti-Boomer enforcement anywhere else in the world.
Zax adjusted something on his belt and a wave of invisibility passed over him. He ran around the building (why were Silicon Valley companies so obsessed with wide and short buildings?) and climbed onto the roof, where he had a better view of the action. He then put on a pair of glasses, a nice addition to the DarkSuit, letting the Commander see what he saw. What he saw was one military Boomer at the front entrance failing to pierce the barricade of armored infantry fighting vehicles, but nevertheless stopping them from shooting back. The other Boomers were still inside, as the Commander remembered, and they were looking for something inside. This had nothing to do with drugs, and he knew it, but the excuse at least let them steal money from the US Department of Justice.
He began crawling along the roof and dropped right behind the Boomer, in front of the double doors. He grabbed its head and tore it right off. The Boomer turned around but could not see him for obvious reasons, so he took the opportunity to kick it to the ground and punch its chest in. He reached into the pulsing mass and pulled out its data unit, tossing it back to the barricade. They acknowledged and closed in closer around the building while some troopers huddled up to the doors.
Zax snuck into the building and saw that it was just a mass of computers, cubicles, and the occasional office. Lucky for the workers that today was JAVA day, a paid holiday. He ran up a wall and, satisfied that his boots were sticking to the ceiling, started running. He snuck into a ventilation shaft, crawled through it until he saw a Boomer right under him, and dropped on it. The Boomer responded by firing its machine gun in all directions except up and down. Zax grabbed the Boomer hard in its exposed armpits and shocked it with millions of volts of electricity. The Boomer eventually lay down and stopped moving after a few seconds, letting him pull off its frontal armor plate and extract the data unit. He wiped it off and pocketed it.
One started heading his way, but the other stayed where it was doing whatever it was doing. A bazooka shell flew through the side of the hallway towards him, so he outstretched both hands in front of himself. The shell stopped, turned around, and flew right back into the Boomer's face. He ran at it and punched all the way into it, pulling out its computing and data units. The last one did not come. Perhaps it was displaying signs of intelligence - it was avoiding him.
In that case, he would have to come to it. He jumped into a ventilation shaft again and headed for the room it was in. It was totally oblivious to his presence - or seemed to be, anyhow. It was designed differently, because he could see that it had some sort of cargo pouch in its body. It was grabbing every single disc it could see and shoving them into this pouch. He dropped on it, but it didn't react at all. He reached in and squeezed the power unit, shutting it down. Stupid Boomer. Maybe it wasn't that smart after all. It was also quite an anticlimactic ending to this incident. He'd had more exciting incidents with civilian Boomers.
"We are still analyzing the evidence, but we have a clue." The commander sipped on his coffee, then resumed. "Sun was developing a Java virtual machine for many different types of Boomer brains and advanced AI computer cores. We believe that Nortaneous was paid a sum of money to get the programs through any means necessary. But we don't know who would send them - besides Genom, they could have been the Cult of Linus Torvalds, Microsoft, the Black Knight Python group, or even those damn Chinese."
"Hou Bang, I presume," commented one officer.
"Maybe. We don't have any leads." The Commander finished his coffee. "Anyways, the FBI are officially on the case now. That means that we might have to protect them, since they only know how to kill regular people." He turned to pace to the side for a moment. "Oh, and by the way. I'd like the ADP representatives to be honorary troopers in Kirkbride's unit. I think they'll be able to learn a few things from each other. The meeting is dismissed."
Everyone slid out of their chairs, onto the floor, and through the doors while grumbling. Zax was at least able to see where he was going. Meetings normally bored him so much that he went blind and deaf.
He was assaulted by an obnoxious fellow with slicked hair. His hand was being furiously shaken as he heard the guy's face exclaim, "I'm Leon McNichol, at your service!"
"You're the guy who told us new ways to get killed?" Zax stopped walking. "I'll tell you what. In my unit, you do things my way. This is SWAT, not ADP, and we're in Silicon Valley, not MegaTokyo. Got it?"
Leon shouted "Aye-aye, understood!" He then turned to Daley and whispered in Japanese, "We must make a good impression on the Americans, they seem to be a tough crowd."
Daley shrugged, and answered, "I just want to see if this paradise called 'San Francisco' really exists, or if it is just a myth of my people."
Zax grabbed Leon's shoulder. "Hey, dude, I don't understand a single word of Japanese except for 'hentai,' but we're going to talk to each other in English and understand each other, okay? We're going to communicate and build trust and all that stuff. It's our way."
Leon was amazed. "I see..."
Jeena starting rounding the corner of the sidewalk. The newspapers were still printed and distributed by hand in the US. In Japan, she remembered how everyone downloaded and printed out their own customized papers. She leaned over a bit to read some of the headlines.
San Jose Mercury News: "Japanese female stockbroker to testify against Larry Ellison. Stockbroker and analyst Linna Yamazaki is arriving at SFO today in order to offer a crucial piece of evidence that would imply that Larry Ellison's samurai boomers for his feudal Japanese ranch were illegally purchased from Genom at a much lower price than..." Santa Clara County Journal: "J-pop invades San Jose! One of the biggest international concerts ever will be held at the Shark Tank for the next two weeks, nonstop! Some of the bands scheduled to perform on the first day are TheAngryBottleSalespeople, KA-SA, Zeiram, Not-Quite-Dead-Yet, Flower, Priss and the Replicants, Junx, Jukebox Gundam, F-4..." The San Francisco Chronicle: "Lingerie fashion show to attract independent shopowners from around the world." The Oakland Tribune: "Hacker's convention not banned by feds, international attendance expected." The Argus: "Alameda County Fair to feature auto show with expensive import motorcycles."
Jeena realized that she had just spent over two minutes scanning over the headlines and thinking about them. She just wanted the world to make sense in her head right now, and the headlines didn't help. They had no connection and were totally unrelated, much like many of the things that happened in her life. She was also somewhat disappointed that Leon was going to be in Zax's unit instead of her own. After all, her own unit got to do much more exciting things. She knew that Leon and his partner would end up just watching him kill Boomers quickly with those gloves of his. At least she got to pry Boomers open with poles and shoot them in the face at close range. Not to mention that Leon could be her subordinate once again. It would have been fun indeed.
In the distance, she saw a Genom tower. It was shorter than the other towers, mostly to fit in with the style of the other buidings around it. It was still a whole five stories tall, though, and that was a humongous tower by Silicon Valley standards. And a small trailer compared to her memories of the skyscrapers of MegaTokyo. This particular Genom tower, if she remembered correctly, was only a theory and research facility. It wasn't about to have the kind of boomers in it that she had been used to destroying in Tokyo.
She walked up the stairs to her apartment and went in.
Quincy, or perhaps one of his doubles, was sitting at his usual desk and talking to a board of Genom executives. This was the Operations Board, the people who were in charge of doing things like operations. He was hoping to weed out any more potential traitors in the board, since Mason aka Largo had set his plans back a bit.
"It is absolutely unacceptable that you failed to acquire the Son of Sun. It would have finished our monopoly over the computing of all Boomers and AI computers. Therefore, you shall all be penalized by my viewscreens in each of your offices constantly watching you."
He cut the communications line. He leaned back and sighed. He folded his hands on his desk and looked down at the work for today. He was glad, though, that there were so many of him to do this work.
End Chapter 1: Son of Sun