Bubblegum Crisis: Chicago 2040
This work of fiction is ©1999-2001 by the members of the Chicago 2040 RPG, all rights reserved worldwide. Characters and concepts from the ADV anime Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 are used under the fair use clause of copyright law. Duplication and reposting is only allowed with the express prior permission of the group. Other characters and concepts from other copyrighted works are used for parodic purposes.
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Questions, No Answers
Intro/Bio by Shaine. Individual rating of PG for language.
Seven years ago...
Shaine Kohl really, really wanted to just hack into her professor's files and be done with it.
Howinhell... Pencil between teeth, she stared at the misbehaving program. No EOF? I'll kick yo' ass, stupid file! It was too late to do anything about it...if her father even caught her up that late, he'd have a fit.
I don't care if he beats me for it. I have to finish this program! The only high school student in the class, she had a hell of a lot to prove in order to even get her professor to admit he might pass her.
She took a large swig of her Sobe cranberry-grapefruit, then cut and pasted the code into a new window.
It compiled. Damn!
She saved to a new disk, then shut down the computer and crawled upstairs. It was 2:36. She was sound asleep by 3AM.
Not too long afterward, she snapped back into consciousness without knowing why. Dazed, she realized she'd heard something...something she shouldn't have responded to. Kathy...help... The plea was followed by a soft thump.
She shouldn't have been so sensitized to hearing her mother's name, but it was no time to think about that. Dad?
Evon Kohl lay on the kitchen floor, wheezing. He'd never been truly healthy, but this was far worse than anything Shaine had seen before.
Hustled back into the bedroom before she could say anything about it, Shaine lay there trying to hear what was going on. Every once in a while there was a dull moan so it couldn't be Really Bad. But he sounded like he felt like a sack of shit being hit by a bag of bricks.
It didn't really hit her for another hour or so. You know...he could actually die. What would I do?
Her eyes were rimmed with red and her hands were twitchy by the time her alarm clock started beeping.
///
Hair hanging in her face, Shaine tore through the contents of the refrigerator. Great day. She never got a chance to pack her lunch the night before, and now she couldn't find anything to put in it! Professor Janssen had better give her a good grade after all of the suffering she went through for him.
Someone drank all my cranberry-grapefruit!
"Yeah," Evon said. "Tastes like hell."
She froze.
"Well? Aren't you going to ask what it said on the cap?"
She'd been pestering the entire family with those Sobe sayings for years on end. "What?"
"Sobe Wan Kenobe. Now let's get to work." Forgetting everything else, she pulled a frozen dinner out and stuffed it into her bag. The Boomers were an absolute pain when they caught someone coming in late, as any employee of Genom could testify.
///
Uncle Erik was so dense sometimes, but Shaine was grateful for it that day.
"C'mon, I'm gonna be late for class!"
Erik looked up at her from his seat by the computer terminal. "You get off at five like the rest of us and you may as well work until then"
She pouted expressively, as if to say that she was too impatient to work. "So what's the problem?" He pointed down toward the keyboard and she leaned closer.
"Now," he whispered, "I hear they won't give you a login because you're a summer hire. I can't tell you my password or I could lose my job, but..."
He gestured toward the keyboard again and started typing, slowly and deliberately, with his hands drawn away from it as much as possible. Her eyes widened.
From that day forward, hacking Genom was easier than she could ever have imagined...
Three years ago...
Shaine heaved the last bag of junk from her dorm into her bedroom and ran back into the den. Star Trek: Mariner on the big screen...yeaaahhhhhh, that was what vacation was for! Just a rerun, to be sure, but it was the episode where Dal goes back to Rachael!
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Erik and her mother outside. They seemed to be arguing. Yeesh. She didn't want to pay too much attention to that.
She was lucky that her birthday just happened to be during spring vacation. Presents, a real bath with bubbles in an actual tub...Dal and Rachael locking lips on the big screen...
Awwww, yeahhhhhh... She just didn't see what Rachael had seen in Caden. Or why Dal had gotten pissed off at her.
The door slammed and Kathy Kohl walked in. "Hi, mom. Want me to turn it off?"
"No, go ahead."
"Where's Dad?"
"He went to get your present."
"Isn't it a little late for that?"
"There was one thing we weren't sure if we could get on time...they called him this morning and said it was in. Didn't sound like the bookstore, though."
"Oh."
She gave up hoping for an actual conversation and just stared at the TV.
///
He wasn't back the next day, and everyone seemed nervous. Well, not much to be done about that. Shaine firmly put it out of her mind, convincing herself that he was just trying to make some sort of stupid dramatic entrance.
One more present, and it was from Uncle Erik. Shaine tore through the wrappings.
ElfQuest!
She held it up, the same book that her father had supposed to have gotten for her. She didn't see the odd look on her mother's face.
///
Two months later, Evon Kohl was still missing. After the initial rush of press coverage and intrusive police inquiries, it faded to a dull ache.
Shaine was still working at Genom.
On her first day back after finals, odd-looking men in black suits filtered through the maze of cubicles. She felt the oddest sense of deja vu...
"Miss Kohl...?"
Oh, shit.
///
"We've had our eye on you for some time, Ms. Kohl. It seems you have been living..."
He paused for dramatic effect, and was utterly surprised when she finished the sentence for him in the same bland voice.
"Two lives." Shaine stopped just long enough to savor the expressions on the men's faces. "In one life, you are Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, you pet your dog, you eat your spicy chimichangas.
"The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo, and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a name for... Whaaaat? Haven't you seen 'The Matrix'?"
The lead MIB stared at her blankly.
"All right. You can prosecute the shit out of me and maybe get something, or you can find out everything I've done to your system, good and bad, and then just fire me".
A pink slip had never looked so good.
Two months ago...
Erik gritted his teeth as he saw who had just entered the room. "Carter."
"Have you made any progress on the new weapons yet?"
"No." He sullenly refused to say more.
"You realize that the success of the project depends on -"
"I'm working on it!" he snapped.
A diminutive Boomer with layered brown hair and bright blue eyes walked in with a tray. Erik pointed to the desk; she set down the teapot and cups she'd carried in and left quickly. Even the machines knew to leave him alone when he was in these moods, Carter noted.
"I have...a few ideas. And possibly a person to help me realize those ideas."
Carter smiled sweetly. "Good. You wouldn't want to wind up second again...would you."
As soon as the door had closed behind her, he threw a teacup at it.
///
Bill, bill, catalog, bill, Windows patch, ads, bill... Shaine suddenly stopped rifling through the mail as she came to an odd package. It was a disk mailing sleeve...3.5 . Whoinhell used those anymore?
There was no return address. She tore into it and pulled out a disk. No labels on that, either. She tipped the package upside down and a piece of paper fluttered out:
Just a little favor. Be a sweet girl and find
this for me...
Uncle Erik
She frowned. How odd...
///
Getting into Genom Tokyo was like slicing hot butter. Too bad she couldn't find anything there. All of the records had to be offline somewhere...damn, these Knight Sabers had to be hot! There were a few hints of how hot, in the unemptied Recycle Bin of a man named Mason, but the big find came only when she gave up on Genom and broke into the AD Police mainframe. Some sort of hotshot desk pilot on that end gave her a hard time, but with a bit of effort she managed to recover some deleted files. She burned a CD and had the bubble-wrap-filled envelope labeled when her computer chimed.
She had mail.
That could be a coincedence...
Or it could be some Genom official who'd broken through her security, found her real IP address, and tracked her from there. Or, worse, the Knight Sabers themselves. She sealed the envelope and stuck it in the mail, then called up her mail program.
Nothing to do but face it and hope these Sabers weren't any better than Genom.
///
"Oh, Eeeeevon..." Erik was nearly dancing as he rounded the corner with the CD. "Look what I got in the mail!"
Evon Kohl spared a weary glance for his brother and then returned to his work. Hair gone prematurely grey - well, not all that prematurely - and glasses seemingly much thicker than they had been not too long before, he looked the elder of the two by about ten years, if not more. "Carter is going to have our heads if we don't finish soon."
"That doesn't matter." Erik slid the disc into the drive. "Look at this."
Hardsuit schematics started to pour over the screen. "What the hell is that?"
"A Knight Saber hardsuit. All the rage in Tokyo. I hear they're even becoming popular over here..."
"Ritterniedersäbeln? Here? How?"
"It doesn't matter," Erik said firmly. "We can deal with it. All we need is one of those hardsuits."
"And how do you propose to get one?"
"Faster than Carter can. That's how."
Later...
"Shaine Kohl, Technology Coordinator?"
"Um...yeah? I'm kinda busy right now..." That was an understatement. Her job at Starbright was undoubtedly the most complicated she'd ever had...but it was a job, and it stood between her and Genom's wrath.
"So...what kind of technology do you coordinate?"
Fortunately a rather unbeautiful industrial Boomer was just passing by. "That," she said, and pointed. While the idiot was still recovering, she grabbed her laptop and started to walk out. Couldn't afford to be late, not then.
Passing another Boomer in the hall, she quickly left the building and then ran to her car.
"Shaine! Whereinhell were you?"
"Never mind, Crimson. I'm here now. What is it this time?"
"A personal assistant Boomer. Should be an easy one."
Aw, shit...easy? You said that about the last one... But she didn't say anything.
Minutes later, a black hardsuit streaked across the sky of Chicago.