"Excuse me, who are you?"
- Perfect Blue
"Who are you?"
- Split Decision from Viper
"Who am I?"
- That weird existential music video the Chameleon brothers make out of home video footage in Rocko's Modern Life
"Whooo are you? Who who, who who?"
- The Who
Rain bounced off of black plastic umbrellas and a stainless titanium prison tank. The night was lit up with oscillating red beams as dozens of parked sirens rotated in close proximity. The sound of thunder seemed to zoom through the street, until it sharply turned a corner and revealed a black Endlave with pop-up torso lights rushing toward the crime scene.
A dozen undercover GHQ inspectors were waiting silently in the rainy street. They were gathered at one side of a 15-foot-tall metal cylinder that was wide enough to house the entire rebel command hub enclosed inside like a nesting doll. The outer structure was crossed with yellow KEEP OUT tape.
The agents were practically interchangeable with their identical dark brown trench coats and fedoras. Their cold square jawlines never moved as they waited under their umbrellas in the pouring rain. The darkness of the stormy scene made them appear as a ring of long blocky outlines flickering in and out of the spinning red siren lights, making them indistinct from each other.
The black Endlave carefully decelerated and landed crouched where all the agents had gathered. Its torso lights closed with a pneumatic purr as its cockpit hatch unsealed. A woman with long brunette hair hopped out from behind the controls with an equipment bag slung on her shoulder and landed both feet flat on the washed-over pavement. She was wearing a helmet that completely obscured her eyes behind a shaded plastic visor and covered the entire top and back of her head in reinforced gunmetal, only leaving her hair hanging out.
Ada looked like a banana joining a bowl of potatoes as she ran across the street lines and into the ring of plainclothes agents. She was wearing a bright yellow vinyl coat that matched the caution tape draped around the metal containment sheet. The edges of her helmet were painted with similar KEEP OUT warnings that protected the mission-critical hardware being transported inside. She always wore it when she was on the way to emergency installation sites.
She dropped her bag to her feet and slid the visor off of her eyes, barely acknowledging the towering holding unit just to her right shoulder. The company had been having trouble with female command operators ("bunker bunnies," for short) like the unseen one currently being held in containment. They used their cheap tech skills to hack their way to infamy and lead their rebel terrorist teams to complete anarchy. Ada was better at finessing a few teraflops than any of these hacker amateurs and balanced the equation by putting one chick on the good guys' side.
Ada dropped her helmet on top of her bag and shook out her hair. She rolled her shoulders in her yellow jacket as a small warm-up stretch. The folded down collar was decorated with small laces in the shape of hearts to give the ensemble a faintly feminine touch.
That faint touch of femininity suddenly became extensive femininity as Ada quickly rushed into a state of undress. She unbelted her yellow coat at her waist and dropped it in a ball by her bag. She got out of her casual wear as if she was escaping from it for her dear life and gladly made herself nude. Her frantic retreat from modesty revealed two matching machine-printed tattoos of a barcode and the phrase ORGAFIX NO. 0083 on her body. One marking was over her left breast and the other was below her right rear cheek for speedy and blatant identification.
She rummaged through the gear in her bag and unraveled a red bodysuit with hard plastic armor panels along the shoulders and torso. The agents circling around her and watching her unemotionally held their umbrellas close together to form a single awning keep her dry from the rain. Their long trench coats functioned as a dressing screen.
"Good to see you since the last face, Ada," one of them said in a very orderly and undisturbed tone. "Did we catch you at a bad time?"
"I got the call when I was twenty seconds away from finally getting the highest score on The Last Starfighter, but I'll live. Got here as fast as I could," she replied as she hurriedly crouched over and slipped her bare ankles into her suit. "Let's see the damage."
A quarter of the containment cylinder turned from opaque metal into an x-ray mode. The circular panels flickered once to reveal a smaller cyber-operator post contained within the holding shell. They flickered a second time and showed Tsugumi standing in the center of her command chamber. She was completely motionless with her arms stretched slightly away from her hips and her fingers straightened out. Her posture was straight with her head tilted back 10 degrees. The long black strands of her hair slowly rippled in the static field as if she were suspended underwater. Her face twitched with a quasi-vacant and quasi-horrified look. Her eyes were wide with her pupils retracted into tiny dots. The KEEP OUT tape wrapped around the screen made it look as if she were trapped behind an industrial spider net, increasing the obscene intrigue of the situation.
The slowly revolving hologram cylinder inside of Tsugumi's chamber was covered with broken digital artifacting and error logs. Her tech had been turned against her to keep her trapped in neurological standby. Her body was as still as a mannequin while her mind was stuck somewhere in the middle of a waking nightmare.
Ada had her suit on halfway to her navel, high enough to conceal one of her ORGAFIX barcodes again. Her eyes instantly went to the round glove pads and pointed radio ears on the ill-fated hacker's equipment.
"I've heard of Black Hat. But Black Cat? This is ridiculous."
"Her call sign in the group was Black Swan," one of the investigators stoically corrected.
"Guess it's time for her to get her feathers plucked," Ada said. She brushed two fingerfuls of lime green conductive jelly out of a personal device resembling a compact. She massaged the two splotches into her temples as she continued looking Tsugumi over.
Now she was drawn toward the rogue operator's body-conforming dark blue jumpsuit. Her eyes paid close attention to the angles detailed in different camera zooms along the containment field's illuminated panels.
"Got herself all wrapped up in motion trace so we can see everything without needing to take off a stitch. Nice tail. Good toning without too much baby fat. Probably does a lot of running when she's out of the tub. Too bad those yarn balls she's got stuck on the front aren't anything to write home about. What's this one? Fourteen? Sixteen?"
"Rap sheet and biomap say twenty-two," an agent answered.
"Guess Shorty's just one of those types who carries most of her cargo in the back," Ada shrugged without much thought, causing her naked chest to heave slightly. "How long has she been waiting?"
"The base fell earlier tonight. We just locked her in her own bottle before she knew what was going on and put our lid on top of it. We've had her on digi-iso for fifty minutes."
"They get freezer burn when you hold them that long," Ada grunted. "She'll probably really need to pee as soon as her nerve centers are linked back up with her plumbing. I hope she's not one of those panicky ones."
Ada unwrinkled and rustled her red submersion suit up to her neck. She held the front of it up by pinning it between her chin and the natural shelf formed by her breasts while she started to slip her arms into the sleeves. She got the right sleeve mostly worked on and started stretching the wrist of the glove over her forearm while she wiggled her fingers inside.
"So am I just tickling around in the frontal lobe so I can annoy her for a while? Or do you guys have me on the schedule for another gimp 'n pimp?" she asked the agents while she dressed for the occasion.
"Some of her friends were brought to HQ for interrogation," an agent explained over the beating of the rain. "They'll give us all we need. But this one did something naughty and got herself classified Grade Z Correctional. The bosses signed for a root neural cleanse and a complete biological re-assetization of every organ, bone, and skin follicle she's got in stock. It's all property of the UN now."
"Another gimp 'n pimp," Ada rolled her eyes as she finished pulling on the sleeve and let the latex snap back to her fingers.
So this ball of fiber optic whiskers and wrinkled pleather-covered butt cheeks she was eyeing through the x-ray viewing pane was going to be number 84. Ada had just gotten comfortable in number 83, and that was after those slight compatibility issues with numbers 82 and 81.
The more invasive hacks were quicker to do since she could just obliterate the entire brain package indiscriminately and didn't have to worry about partitioning specific memories, but there was always so much more work in the debriefing. She wished more rogue operators played nice so all she had to do was hang out in their head for a few minutes, plant some horrifying notion into their subconscious to make their behave better, give them a light tap on the cerebral behind, and send them off back into the wild.
"At least this one looks like she'll be cute to wear around the office," Ada optimistically mused as she was slipping her arm into the other sleeve.
The holographic side of the containment shell turned back into opaque metal. Sliding shutters opened on the back of the cylinder and created an illuminated doorway for a single occupant. Ada pulled the final zipper of her submersion suit up her neck and brushed out her hair with her hands before walking up.
"I'd ask you guys to wish me luck," she smirked to the agents from the door, "But this poor thing's brain is gonna need it more than me."
Ada entered the glowing interior of the shell and the pneumatic doors promptly slid shut behind her. The professor went to work.
Ten minutes later when the rain had slowed down to a drizzle, Tsugumi lightly strode out of the front shutters of the shell as if she were a slab of beef who decided to pick herself off the rack and walk herself out of the butcher's freezer. A few steps outside of the container, she stopped and scratched her pointed radio ears in her long black hair with her fingerless sensor-padded gloves. She tilted her head to the left and winked one of her eyes to focus her vision while adjusting the mic reception. Her pearly incisors nibbled her bottom lip as she scooted her rubber-covered ankles and reached both of her palms behind her back to sort out some kinks in the dark blue LEDs hugging between her rear hips. She curved her spine forward and let go of the pleather membrane so it snapped evenly to her rear.
Out of the operating room and all better, Tsugumi sighed pleasantly to herself.
"A little small. But I guess I could get used to curling up in here."
Author's note: I was almost going to call this "Neuralingus" but I was worried it would spoil too much.
Author's note 2: Ada dresses up like either Dick Tracy or April O'Neil for her every day off-duty design. I decided on it for this story and it's an official thing in the extended Ada metaverse now.