:Author's Note::
Okies, I'm gonna go for a Sci-Fi fic now. I figured it was time. Shouldn't be *too* difficult to understand. ^_^;;
Disclaimer: I do not own "Inu-Yasha" or any of the related characters. They all belong to Rumiko Takahashi. I am not making a profit from this work other than my amusement and perhaps the amusement of others. Please don't sue me, I haven't boughted the third "Inu-Yasha" DVD yet.
One last thing: the Code. It is imperative that you understand the Code, since I am writing this as a .txt file and it won't take italics or bold or underlines or anything cool and high-tech like that. So.
*text* emphasis
/text/ something in Japanese and should therefore being italicized in a perfect world
\text\ flashback. Should be easy to distinguish from the backslash considering how the text won't be in Japanese. ^_^
~text~ thought
For all my fellow sci-fi fans out there, I'd like to let you know they have light-speed travel. How they do it is beyond me, I'm no phycist, but I decided it would be useful. One thing I can tell you is that it's nothing like "Event Horizon" faster-than-light travel. The detour through hell would be counter-productive to the story line . . .
That's all for now. Hope you like this story!
It's the year 2303 and the human population is in the trillions, scattered among any number of colony worlds. They are ruled by the supreme military power, the Union and held together only by the war. The war has been underway for more than one hundred and fifty years, since the human race first began to colonize other worlds and they met their first other sentient life form. The Youkai, however, are not friendly and they have been trying to destroy the human race since contact. Nyoko Higurashi and her apprentice and daughter, Kagome Higurashi, are the newest scientists to the military community on the military-run planet of Swenson. Their project? Continue the work of the late Kikyou /TEXT/; create a being capable of fighting the Youkai for the humans. But is half youkai too much? Or not enough?
The Hanyou Project
Phase One
"Thirty-Three Years Gone"
By Jann
"This will be your lab."
The old, heavyset colonel put his hand on the scanner to the left of the door frame. The device scritched and scratched a bit, a sign of aging technology, obviously, but it eventually registered the print as that of someone with the clearance to enter. A mild beep of acceptance sounded and the bar across the top of the scanner turned from red to green. The colonel turned the handle on the door and pushed it open.
"After you," he said, allowing Nyoko Higurashi into the dark room before stepping in and closing the door. "Lights," he commanded sternly, indicating that he was speaking to the computer of the room.
The harsh unnatural light flooded from the ceiling to fill the mostly bare room. The desk was void of nick-nacks or self-reminder-notes, the display platform above it, blank, the counters lacking glassware or chemicals and the open refrigerator was completely empty.
And it smelt like dust.
There were, however, different experiments cluttering the right wall, on and in front of the counter and almost blocking entry to the chamber where the animals for testing would be stored. Nyoko only glanced at them before the colonel began again, but they all looked dormant.
"You will be programmed into the system by tomorrow. For today, though, you'll have to operate the room manually, through the desktop," he apologized, leading her to it. "Desktop."
The display platform, Nyoko realized, was equipped with an opaque backing that slid up when the desktop was activated. She had never seen one before in her life, though a time or two in old movies led her to a direct conclusion of it's purpose.
"This is a projection panel, isn't it!" she cried. "Quite an antique, I must say. Am I expected to work with something so old? I don't know if I can."
"Dreadfully sorry about that too," the colonel admitted rather sheepishly. "It will be replaced within the hour. We weren't exactly given much notice of your coming, Dr. Higurashi. That's the military for you. Which, by the way, is very pleased for have you here."
"I'm pleased to be here," Nyoko replied. "My apprentice?" She sat down at the desk and the almost overpowering smell of mothballs rose from the plush-covered chair. "She'll be entered in as well?" Nyoko touched the pad at the corner of the desk and dragged the desktop icon around and above the desk icon. Immediately, a rectangular portion of the desk sunk down. A sheet slightly smaller slid over it and the portion rose again. "Colonel!" Exactly who was the last person to have this lab?! I suppose I should have expected as much from a two-dimensional desktop. The keyboard isn't even a gel-pad!" She touched one of the buttons and looked up to the display. She pressed a bit harder and saw a Japanese character projected clearly onto the back of the display. There was one plus to the desktop; it wasn't so old that the projection didn't look solid.
"Desktop; Language; Corp," the colonel ordered. "Your apprentice, yes, your daughter, of course. She's registered, isn't she?"
"Of course," Nyoko said, watching as the Japanese character transformed to Corp, the universal language evolved from English, Russian and Military.
"Yes, she'll be recorded into the system as well. As for the office, it doesn't really matter who had it last. The woman left fifty years ago, if you can tell from the technology, and she isn't coming back," the colonel said, obviously skirting the question.
Nyoko sighed inwardly, not really expecting any more. That was military intelligence for you; even if it wasn't intelligent or military related, they tended to hoard. Still . . . there was something strange about the room.
Her eyes drifted once again to the abandoned projects on the far wall. "What's all that?" she asked, pointing.
The wave of nervousness passed over his face again. "Unfortunately, space is, well, short in this wing and this lab has been used as a sort of . . . storage area. It'll all be cleared out soon, you have my word."
"Whose projects?" Nyoko asked, getting up from the desk, not bothering to turn the ancient desktop off. She wandered across the room to look over the inert works. There were boxes of file-disks, a few laptops, each as outdated as the desktop and lots of plugged test tubes and petri dishes.
However, most eye-catching things by far were the freezing compartments. There were dozens of them, each giving off an eerie, soft white glow, the inhabitants hanging almost peacefully in their suspended animation. The most abundant were rats of course, each mutated in some grotesque way, but the further back Nyoko went, the more pronounced their features became and the bigger the animals got, the cycle starting all over again from distorted figures to smooth ones. The deformations seemed so . . . almost *alien* in nature that Nyoko couldn't quite place what the scientist was trying to prove.
"Uh, I don't think you want to do that," the colonel began, but he didn't stop her as she unstacked the freezing stations until she finally came to a huge one, taller than she was, and she gasped when she saw it's occupant. "Dr. Higurashi, those experiments are not . . . Dr. Higurashi!"
"What the hell did that woman create in here?" Nyoko murmured. "And what hell will be wrought from it?"
"Dr. Higurashi, I don't know what project you've been assigned to, but --" the colonel sputtered.
"I think I do, Colonel. The Hanyou Project -- this is it, isn't it? Who could have predicated such a series of experiments . . . It seems so unethical that I didn't even completely believe the abstract when I read it." Nyoko looked the colonel in the eye. "This was Kikyou's lab, Colonel. And this half-alien soldier was her flower of life."
+++
"Oh, come on, you know we're all dying to hear about it," Yuka said, zillions of miles away. "What was it like to be frozen? Duh, I guess you wouldn't remember. But waking up! I hear it's a real bitch to get back into gear. Jeez, thirty-three years is a *long* time, Kagome. How's the military station? Met any good-looking soldiers?!"
"Tell me about it," Kagome replied ignoring the last two questions. "I thought Souta was grumpy in the *morning.*" She looked into the digitally sent violet eyes of Yuka Kanno and she thought she could vaguely see the same glint that had dragged her through schooling. Of all her friends on the Japanese world of Ko (named after it's founder, a woman named Ko Chie), Yuka had been the one that had kept her life . . . interesting. For example, she was the one that persuaded Kagome to doctor the picture of their school headmaster so she could send it out to every desktop and laptop in the school. It was Yuka that talked their way out of suspicion for the creation of the photo with Asai-san's head upon the body of a grease-model.
But seeing her now, even though to Kagome, it hadn't been more than a night, a long night, perhaps, but a night all the same, since she had left her seventeen-year-old friend in the lobby of the shuttle clinic . . . she was different. Now Yuka was somewhere around fifty. She had married, had children, had grandchildren and through it all, she had gradually forgotten Kagome and the years they were supposed to live through together. Bachorlerette parties, weddings and baby showers . . . all had long past for Yuka. But Kagome understood that. She had understood that since the moment Yuka had picked up the phone. In those few seconds that it took for Yuka's brain to register who this seventeen-year-old was, her hopes had shattered. So it was hard to think of the aged, wrinkled face on the display platform as her best friend forever.
"Do you miss Ko?" Yuka asked finally, brushing a strand of her hair, mostly blue-silver, behind an ear. "Do you miss everyone that was here in Maika when you left?"
Kagome thought about it for a second. "I think I will. But remember, to me, this hasn't been anything more than a weekend away from home yet."
"/Jii-san!/"
"Yuka! Come here!'
"Uh oh," Yuka chuckled. "It seems my grandchildren are here. I have to go, Kagome, but we'll talk soon, okay?"
Kagome forced a smile that she hoped similar to the one she had been flashing all through school. "Sure. /Ja ne, Yuka./"
"/Ja ne!/"
"No, we won't talk again soon," Kagome murmured, shutting her laptop once she had disconnected from the net. "I don't think we'll ever talk again."
She tossed the laptop off to the side and fell back into the unfamiliar bed. Swenson. Was is wrong to hate a place so much the second you hear the name? Kagome fidgeted a bit, remembering when her mom had broken the news.
\"Guys!" Nyoko said brightly, walking into the office where Souta and Kagome were standing in front of the desktop. It very new. Nyoko bought it for them with some of the money that she had received when her father died. She had hoped it would help bring them out of the stupor they had fallen into when he had passed away. It had, a little, but not as much as she had hoped. They were using it to compile an album of all the vids they had of him.
"Uh, yeah mom?" Souta said from Kagome's right. "No, don't put that one in that section. He liked the supernatural, but there's enough of *that* for a section in itself."
"I guess you're right," Kagome murmured. She tapped a few keys on the desktop and the vid disappeared from the display platform to be replaced with another. Nyoko was quite amazed with the quality of the hologram. She had seen desktops with less pixels and worse colors.
"What're you guys doing?" Nyoko asked, kneeling on the other side of Kagome.
"Making a vid album of /Jii-san,/" Souta told her. "Wanna see?"
"Maybe later," Nyoko said. "Now we have to turn the desktop off for a couple minutes," she said, reaching across Kagome, the keyboard and Souta to the corner of the desk. She played with the icons until the keyboard was back within the desk and turned off the display panel. "I have some very important news for you two."
"Uh oh," was Souta's dark response.
"What?" Nyoko asked.
"You're going to tell us something we're not going to like," Souta replied.
"How do you know?"
"He knows," Kagome assured her mother.
Nyoko stood and went back to the other side of the desk to stand behind Souta. She tousled his hair. "Well, I don't know if you're going to like it or not. I got another job offer."
"Oh."
As Nyoko had anticipated, both their faces fell.
"Do you have to take it?"
"When do we have to leave?"
"How far away is it?"
"Can we come back to visit everyone here?"
"How long do you have to decide?"
"Mom, will I still be able to apprentice at the end of the year?"
"Slow down," Nyoko chuckled. "No, Souta, I don't *have* to take it, but they're offering quite a bit of money and the cause makes leaving seem worth it. They need a military scientist to research ways to defeat the Youkai. I only got an abstract of my assignment, but it seems pretty strange and very difficult. Evidently they've been looking for the right researched for this for almost twenty years. We'd have to leave very soon and yes, Kagome, in fact, they insisted I have an apprentice. I have two days to think it over."
"Killing youkai?! Cool!" Souta cried.
Kagome wasn't so easily deceived though. She noticed the questions her mother had avoided. "Mom, where is it?" she asked right out.
Nyoko's smile tightened. "It's on another world, Kagome."
"So what's the problem?" she asked, perplexed. They'd traveled to other worlds plenty of times. In fact, with /Jii-san/, they'd --
Nyoko interrupted her thoughts. "It's very very far away, Kagome. The journey will take thirty-three years. By the time we get there, everyone here will be very old and if we ever wanted to return, they would probably be dead."
It took a moment for this information to process. "That's . . . a long time . . ." Kagome began.
"Yes. I don't *have* to take the job. But they sounded as if they really need us, Kag."\
Kagome sighed. Life had gone by in a blur after that. They had talked about it more and not just a little, but a *whole lot* more. It was almost constant for the two days until Nyoko had to call back the officials in Swenson. Nyoko had even kept them home from school for discussion. It seemed important to her.
Besides, what had been left for them on Ko? Family? Not much. Friends? What were friends if the Youkai won and stomped through the universe, destroying every human-inhabited world they came upon? No, it was for the best, this move.
Kagome rolled over onto her stomach and opened her laptop brought up the album that she and Souta had composed.
~Are you proud of me, /Jii-san/?~
Okies, I'm gonna go for a Sci-Fi fic now. I figured it was time. Shouldn't be *too* difficult to understand. ^_^;;
Disclaimer: I do not own "Inu-Yasha" or any of the related characters. They all belong to Rumiko Takahashi. I am not making a profit from this work other than my amusement and perhaps the amusement of others. Please don't sue me, I haven't boughted the third "Inu-Yasha" DVD yet.
One last thing: the Code. It is imperative that you understand the Code, since I am writing this as a .txt file and it won't take italics or bold or underlines or anything cool and high-tech like that. So.
*text* emphasis
/text/ something in Japanese and should therefore being italicized in a perfect world
\text\ flashback. Should be easy to distinguish from the backslash considering how the text won't be in Japanese. ^_^
~text~ thought
For all my fellow sci-fi fans out there, I'd like to let you know they have light-speed travel. How they do it is beyond me, I'm no phycist, but I decided it would be useful. One thing I can tell you is that it's nothing like "Event Horizon" faster-than-light travel. The detour through hell would be counter-productive to the story line . . .
That's all for now. Hope you like this story!
It's the year 2303 and the human population is in the trillions, scattered among any number of colony worlds. They are ruled by the supreme military power, the Union and held together only by the war. The war has been underway for more than one hundred and fifty years, since the human race first began to colonize other worlds and they met their first other sentient life form. The Youkai, however, are not friendly and they have been trying to destroy the human race since contact. Nyoko Higurashi and her apprentice and daughter, Kagome Higurashi, are the newest scientists to the military community on the military-run planet of Swenson. Their project? Continue the work of the late Kikyou /TEXT/; create a being capable of fighting the Youkai for the humans. But is half youkai too much? Or not enough?
The Hanyou Project
Phase One
"Thirty-Three Years Gone"
By Jann
"This will be your lab."
The old, heavyset colonel put his hand on the scanner to the left of the door frame. The device scritched and scratched a bit, a sign of aging technology, obviously, but it eventually registered the print as that of someone with the clearance to enter. A mild beep of acceptance sounded and the bar across the top of the scanner turned from red to green. The colonel turned the handle on the door and pushed it open.
"After you," he said, allowing Nyoko Higurashi into the dark room before stepping in and closing the door. "Lights," he commanded sternly, indicating that he was speaking to the computer of the room.
The harsh unnatural light flooded from the ceiling to fill the mostly bare room. The desk was void of nick-nacks or self-reminder-notes, the display platform above it, blank, the counters lacking glassware or chemicals and the open refrigerator was completely empty.
And it smelt like dust.
There were, however, different experiments cluttering the right wall, on and in front of the counter and almost blocking entry to the chamber where the animals for testing would be stored. Nyoko only glanced at them before the colonel began again, but they all looked dormant.
"You will be programmed into the system by tomorrow. For today, though, you'll have to operate the room manually, through the desktop," he apologized, leading her to it. "Desktop."
The display platform, Nyoko realized, was equipped with an opaque backing that slid up when the desktop was activated. She had never seen one before in her life, though a time or two in old movies led her to a direct conclusion of it's purpose.
"This is a projection panel, isn't it!" she cried. "Quite an antique, I must say. Am I expected to work with something so old? I don't know if I can."
"Dreadfully sorry about that too," the colonel admitted rather sheepishly. "It will be replaced within the hour. We weren't exactly given much notice of your coming, Dr. Higurashi. That's the military for you. Which, by the way, is very pleased for have you here."
"I'm pleased to be here," Nyoko replied. "My apprentice?" She sat down at the desk and the almost overpowering smell of mothballs rose from the plush-covered chair. "She'll be entered in as well?" Nyoko touched the pad at the corner of the desk and dragged the desktop icon around and above the desk icon. Immediately, a rectangular portion of the desk sunk down. A sheet slightly smaller slid over it and the portion rose again. "Colonel!" Exactly who was the last person to have this lab?! I suppose I should have expected as much from a two-dimensional desktop. The keyboard isn't even a gel-pad!" She touched one of the buttons and looked up to the display. She pressed a bit harder and saw a Japanese character projected clearly onto the back of the display. There was one plus to the desktop; it wasn't so old that the projection didn't look solid.
"Desktop; Language; Corp," the colonel ordered. "Your apprentice, yes, your daughter, of course. She's registered, isn't she?"
"Of course," Nyoko said, watching as the Japanese character transformed to Corp, the universal language evolved from English, Russian and Military.
"Yes, she'll be recorded into the system as well. As for the office, it doesn't really matter who had it last. The woman left fifty years ago, if you can tell from the technology, and she isn't coming back," the colonel said, obviously skirting the question.
Nyoko sighed inwardly, not really expecting any more. That was military intelligence for you; even if it wasn't intelligent or military related, they tended to hoard. Still . . . there was something strange about the room.
Her eyes drifted once again to the abandoned projects on the far wall. "What's all that?" she asked, pointing.
The wave of nervousness passed over his face again. "Unfortunately, space is, well, short in this wing and this lab has been used as a sort of . . . storage area. It'll all be cleared out soon, you have my word."
"Whose projects?" Nyoko asked, getting up from the desk, not bothering to turn the ancient desktop off. She wandered across the room to look over the inert works. There were boxes of file-disks, a few laptops, each as outdated as the desktop and lots of plugged test tubes and petri dishes.
However, most eye-catching things by far were the freezing compartments. There were dozens of them, each giving off an eerie, soft white glow, the inhabitants hanging almost peacefully in their suspended animation. The most abundant were rats of course, each mutated in some grotesque way, but the further back Nyoko went, the more pronounced their features became and the bigger the animals got, the cycle starting all over again from distorted figures to smooth ones. The deformations seemed so . . . almost *alien* in nature that Nyoko couldn't quite place what the scientist was trying to prove.
"Uh, I don't think you want to do that," the colonel began, but he didn't stop her as she unstacked the freezing stations until she finally came to a huge one, taller than she was, and she gasped when she saw it's occupant. "Dr. Higurashi, those experiments are not . . . Dr. Higurashi!"
"What the hell did that woman create in here?" Nyoko murmured. "And what hell will be wrought from it?"
"Dr. Higurashi, I don't know what project you've been assigned to, but --" the colonel sputtered.
"I think I do, Colonel. The Hanyou Project -- this is it, isn't it? Who could have predicated such a series of experiments . . . It seems so unethical that I didn't even completely believe the abstract when I read it." Nyoko looked the colonel in the eye. "This was Kikyou's lab, Colonel. And this half-alien soldier was her flower of life."
+++
"Oh, come on, you know we're all dying to hear about it," Yuka said, zillions of miles away. "What was it like to be frozen? Duh, I guess you wouldn't remember. But waking up! I hear it's a real bitch to get back into gear. Jeez, thirty-three years is a *long* time, Kagome. How's the military station? Met any good-looking soldiers?!"
"Tell me about it," Kagome replied ignoring the last two questions. "I thought Souta was grumpy in the *morning.*" She looked into the digitally sent violet eyes of Yuka Kanno and she thought she could vaguely see the same glint that had dragged her through schooling. Of all her friends on the Japanese world of Ko (named after it's founder, a woman named Ko Chie), Yuka had been the one that had kept her life . . . interesting. For example, she was the one that persuaded Kagome to doctor the picture of their school headmaster so she could send it out to every desktop and laptop in the school. It was Yuka that talked their way out of suspicion for the creation of the photo with Asai-san's head upon the body of a grease-model.
But seeing her now, even though to Kagome, it hadn't been more than a night, a long night, perhaps, but a night all the same, since she had left her seventeen-year-old friend in the lobby of the shuttle clinic . . . she was different. Now Yuka was somewhere around fifty. She had married, had children, had grandchildren and through it all, she had gradually forgotten Kagome and the years they were supposed to live through together. Bachorlerette parties, weddings and baby showers . . . all had long past for Yuka. But Kagome understood that. She had understood that since the moment Yuka had picked up the phone. In those few seconds that it took for Yuka's brain to register who this seventeen-year-old was, her hopes had shattered. So it was hard to think of the aged, wrinkled face on the display platform as her best friend forever.
"Do you miss Ko?" Yuka asked finally, brushing a strand of her hair, mostly blue-silver, behind an ear. "Do you miss everyone that was here in Maika when you left?"
Kagome thought about it for a second. "I think I will. But remember, to me, this hasn't been anything more than a weekend away from home yet."
"/Jii-san!/"
"Yuka! Come here!'
"Uh oh," Yuka chuckled. "It seems my grandchildren are here. I have to go, Kagome, but we'll talk soon, okay?"
Kagome forced a smile that she hoped similar to the one she had been flashing all through school. "Sure. /Ja ne, Yuka./"
"/Ja ne!/"
"No, we won't talk again soon," Kagome murmured, shutting her laptop once she had disconnected from the net. "I don't think we'll ever talk again."
She tossed the laptop off to the side and fell back into the unfamiliar bed. Swenson. Was is wrong to hate a place so much the second you hear the name? Kagome fidgeted a bit, remembering when her mom had broken the news.
\"Guys!" Nyoko said brightly, walking into the office where Souta and Kagome were standing in front of the desktop. It very new. Nyoko bought it for them with some of the money that she had received when her father died. She had hoped it would help bring them out of the stupor they had fallen into when he had passed away. It had, a little, but not as much as she had hoped. They were using it to compile an album of all the vids they had of him.
"Uh, yeah mom?" Souta said from Kagome's right. "No, don't put that one in that section. He liked the supernatural, but there's enough of *that* for a section in itself."
"I guess you're right," Kagome murmured. She tapped a few keys on the desktop and the vid disappeared from the display platform to be replaced with another. Nyoko was quite amazed with the quality of the hologram. She had seen desktops with less pixels and worse colors.
"What're you guys doing?" Nyoko asked, kneeling on the other side of Kagome.
"Making a vid album of /Jii-san,/" Souta told her. "Wanna see?"
"Maybe later," Nyoko said. "Now we have to turn the desktop off for a couple minutes," she said, reaching across Kagome, the keyboard and Souta to the corner of the desk. She played with the icons until the keyboard was back within the desk and turned off the display panel. "I have some very important news for you two."
"Uh oh," was Souta's dark response.
"What?" Nyoko asked.
"You're going to tell us something we're not going to like," Souta replied.
"How do you know?"
"He knows," Kagome assured her mother.
Nyoko stood and went back to the other side of the desk to stand behind Souta. She tousled his hair. "Well, I don't know if you're going to like it or not. I got another job offer."
"Oh."
As Nyoko had anticipated, both their faces fell.
"Do you have to take it?"
"When do we have to leave?"
"How far away is it?"
"Can we come back to visit everyone here?"
"How long do you have to decide?"
"Mom, will I still be able to apprentice at the end of the year?"
"Slow down," Nyoko chuckled. "No, Souta, I don't *have* to take it, but they're offering quite a bit of money and the cause makes leaving seem worth it. They need a military scientist to research ways to defeat the Youkai. I only got an abstract of my assignment, but it seems pretty strange and very difficult. Evidently they've been looking for the right researched for this for almost twenty years. We'd have to leave very soon and yes, Kagome, in fact, they insisted I have an apprentice. I have two days to think it over."
"Killing youkai?! Cool!" Souta cried.
Kagome wasn't so easily deceived though. She noticed the questions her mother had avoided. "Mom, where is it?" she asked right out.
Nyoko's smile tightened. "It's on another world, Kagome."
"So what's the problem?" she asked, perplexed. They'd traveled to other worlds plenty of times. In fact, with /Jii-san/, they'd --
Nyoko interrupted her thoughts. "It's very very far away, Kagome. The journey will take thirty-three years. By the time we get there, everyone here will be very old and if we ever wanted to return, they would probably be dead."
It took a moment for this information to process. "That's . . . a long time . . ." Kagome began.
"Yes. I don't *have* to take the job. But they sounded as if they really need us, Kag."\
Kagome sighed. Life had gone by in a blur after that. They had talked about it more and not just a little, but a *whole lot* more. It was almost constant for the two days until Nyoko had to call back the officials in Swenson. Nyoko had even kept them home from school for discussion. It seemed important to her.
Besides, what had been left for them on Ko? Family? Not much. Friends? What were friends if the Youkai won and stomped through the universe, destroying every human-inhabited world they came upon? No, it was for the best, this move.
Kagome rolled over onto her stomach and opened her laptop brought up the album that she and Souta had composed.
~Are you proud of me, /Jii-san/?~