Bubblegum Crisis: The Next Generation: Sins of The Father
Mornings aren't normally a problem for me. Years of having to get up at odd times of the day and night have taught me to sleep well when I can, and wake up when I need to. I might wake up grumpy, and Sylia has learnt not to push me too hard on those occasions, but I can wake up when I need to.
Now, with Yume having just moved into her own apartment, getting up was a heck of a lot lonelier than it had been for a long while. She was normally up before me, one way or another, and I had to try hard not to get sentimental over those missing noises as I got myself up.
This morning was no different, though I ached more than usual from one of the, now infrequent, boomer rampages. Whatever else might have been going on in GENOM Tower, I.S.A.I. were certainly managing to put a stop to the practise of putting Boomers onto the street in order to field test them.
Eggs were sizzling in the pan, and I was about to start moving stuff onto my plate when there was a knock at the door.
"If you're a reporter, you just earned yourselves an ear-bashing," I muttered darkly, turning the heat down under the frying pan and heading for the door.
When I opened the door though, it wasn't to find one of Mega-Tokyo's morasses of paparazzi standing outside it. Instead, somehow managing to lounge whilst standing up and wearing a very well fitting uniform, was captain Roy Brooks, the public face of GENOM Internal Security And Investigations, and rapidly replacing Quincy as the public face of GENOM in Mega-Tokyo.
"Miss Asagiri," he said, that damned boyish charm of his shining through. "Can I speak with you for a moment?"
I glowered at him, then indicated that he should come in. "I hope you don't mind me eating while you talk," I warned him.
"I hope that what I have to say doesn't put you off your breakfast," he replied, stepping inside and closing the door.
"Oh? What's GENOM been up to this time that might put me off my food?" I cast a sarcastic glare at him.
"As it happens we've been helping the N-Police," he replied. "Acting in our capacity as investigators of boomer crime now that the ADP aren't around, we've been assisting with stake-outs, servicing equipment, that kind of thing. Last night the N-Police launched a raid on a drugs den, but they found boomers involved in it-"
"That explains why we had to deal with those boomers last night," I muttered.
"Yeah, sorry about that," he apologised. "You'd just about finished by the time they told me about the attack. Anyway, we pulled a load of people in during the raid, mostly addicts, but we got a few traffickers as well. Because of the possible boomer connections we ran DNA and fingerprint records for the N-Police against the old ADP records as well as the regular ones."
"So what? You arrested some people. Am I meant to give you a medal?"
"One of the guys we picked up," he continued somewhat more tensely, and apparently ignoring what I had said, "was flagged up when we ran his DNA. He wasn't flagged by the ADP records though. His DNA was flashed as a match to a previously unknown sample obtained from the Tokyo Memorial Hospital following the boomer summit, and a sample from twenty years ago..."
I hesitated, then turned to look at him. He was holding out a folded piece of paper. A GENOM logo was visible in one corner of it.
"What is this?" I asked. When he didn't answer I reached out and took the piece of paper, unfolding it and glancing over it.
Most of it wasn't intelligible, relying on a couple of charts with lines all over them to convey most of the information. At the bottom was a summary though, which told me everything I needed to know:
Reference DNA sample #K105-12E: Yumeko Asagiri (Child)
Reference DNA sample #K34-56C: Priss Asagiri (Maternal Donor)
The third line froze me in place, as I tried to deny to myself that it was really there. For years now I had been able to pretend to myself that the bastard had nothing to do with Yume or myself. He had never had any input in her life beyond the barest fringes, and now, out of the blue, along came a piece of paper with his name on it and next to that the nice clinical term, 'Paternal Donor'.
"Where did you get this?" I growled, glowering at Brooks.
"Like I said, it wasn't deliberate," Brooks said, his tone more serious than I had heard it before, even in the middle of a battle. "Your DNA was in our databases from years ago, and Yumeko's was obtained from the hospital after you took her there from the Summit. There are dozens of cases where GENOM has been searching, for legitimate reasons, for familial matches to people's DNA. I.S.A.I. still haven't gotten around to going through all of them yet, and now it turns out that someone in the top brass was interested in finding out who Yumeko's father was.
"I've checked back through the records. They ran yours and her DNA against every serial rapist that they could get DNA for. Then they spread out into rapists that only committed one known offence, people from other districts, men that had previously shown serious interest in you... It never occurred to them to check for rapists who were never caught for rape. You were his only one..."
"You think that comforts me?" I snarled back. "No one else knows who that bastard is! No one! Do you understand that?"
"I understand that it hurts you," he retorted. "I also told Yumeko that I was going to be honest with her. I take it that she doesn't know who he is."
"No, she doesn't," I replied, slowly crumpling the paper in my hands as my hands tightened around it. "She's wondered occasionally, but she's never really asked to know. Not seriously..."
"And if she did? What then?"
"You think that I want to tell her?! You think that I want to tell her that..." I bit back the rest of what I might have said.
"He's a bastard," Brooks agreed, "which is one reason that I'm telling you this. The only people I can account for who know about this are a couple of technicians that are sitting under guard in my office, and Major Adel, my second in command. And she's safe. But this was probably flagged up elsewhere as well before I got to it. Which means that someone in GENOM, potentially even Quincy himself, may already know this as well."
"So this is just a friendly warning?" I said sarcastically. "Just in case."
"Just in case, yeah," he agreed, slightly more light-heartedly, but still very serious despite that.
"Fine. Thanks for the warning," I managed to say without snapping at him. "Now go away."
"Two more things," he said. "If she asks, I won't lie to her. I'll tell her that I know. I'll tell her that I told you first. And I'll tell her that I don't think she would want to know. But if she still wants to know, then I'll tell her who he is."
I glared at him, but the sheer weight of serious honesty on his face kept me silent. Whatever else he might be, he loved Yume as a younger sister, and he wouldn't willingly harm her.
"Secondly... Her half-brother. Does he know?"
I laughed at that one, somewhat cruelly. "Not a chance. I sometimes doubt that bastard even realises that his son is trying to molest his daughter at all. He knows full well that the idiot is hitting on girls, but that he's put it together just who his son keeps trying to hit on... I sometimes doubt that."
"Because that's the next thing that I would look into," Brooks said mildly. "Bringing some kind of emotional tension into things through her half-brother has all kinds of potential if they handle it right. And if, or when, they move against the Knight Sabres again, they won't miss a trick like that."
I glanced at him, then nodded slowly. "How would that work do you think?"
"Who can say?" he replied. "Maybe they'll just tell her half-brother, and let him break the news to her. Maybe they'll tell the father... Maybe they'll tell everyone except Yumeko, and leave everyone being nervous around her. I can't say. They'll have psychologists working on it to tell which would hurt the Knight Sabres the most. I just know that when it does come out, it'll be hard for you, the others, and Yumeko."
"So you think that I should tell her before someone in GENOM does? Aren't you meant to be putting a stop to that sort of thing?"
"Technically, we're meant to be handling boomer crime first and foremost. And people keep turning up to cause trouble from outside Mega-Tokyo, and subsidiaries that don't technically have anything to do with GENOM. We've got our hands full, and the people it's going to be hardest to find are the ones that are going to be the biggest threat to the Knight Sabres. We'll keep an eye out for them, but it's hard."
"We'll try to be ready," I promised him. I turned away from him, ending the conversation as best I could without ordering him out of the door.
For a moment there was silence, then he left, so silently that I was almost convinced he was still there.
Tears that I had been desperately holding back began to flow as I looked down at the piece of paper in my hands again, seeing the name of the man who had forced me to bring the most precious thing to me into the world. The man that had nearly destroyed my soul.
