Crypt of Home
Kim has come a long way, hasn't she? She was never the paladin everyone thought she was, but I never in my wildest dreams thought that she would come this far. Well, while I had dreams, anyway. But this, this… This is beautiful; Kim finds herself in the darkest and seediest of places: Portland, Oregon's underground. You know, at one time, this city was the Shanghai capitol of the world; all sorts of people were getting abducted and sold off into slavery. Now it's simply the United State's cyberden epicenter.
{CyberStream Remote Viewing Protocol Initiated: Kim}
"Password?" asked the almost unintelligible voice of the bouncer from the other side of the heavy steel door.
"Shibboleth," Kim replied, adding under her breath, "meshuga mamzer."
The bolts slid and the door swung open; the bouncer, clearly prosthetic, was hard-wired into the building's network. He watched her lazily as she walked in, and shoved the door back into place when she moved clear. As she passed, he turned his focus back to the door.
The building was lit exclusively with blacklights; the floor glowed with the remnants of occupants past and present, and bloody streaks and handprints covered everything save the ceiling. Kim wound her way through the maze of tweakers and addicts strung out on the latest designer fix created to keep them from thinking about their miserable lives; some picked at their skin until their arms ran red, others clawed at the walls and the floor while saliva poured from their mouths, and still others sat all but perfectly still, slumped over tables or back in their seats, unable to rouse their minds enough from their intoxicant of choice to move. Some were connected to the internal network by wire, others by transceivers, but all were wired to the building.
"Poor, poor, sorry, weak bastards," spoke a sharp, clean voice; it had a heavy Spanish accent behind it, but it was nonetheless clear to Kim's ears. "Still, better their misfortune benefit me than some other madman, one without proper criminal scruples."
"Senor Senior Sr.," Kim said with a look in her eye which almost approached nostalgia. "It's been too long."
"Please, Mikhail. Are you here to oppose my operation?" he asked, stepping around the bodies writhing on the floor. "If you are, I don't suppose I could buy you off with the latest shipment of designer pills? I just received a shipment of Ecstasy earlier this evening. It's an exquisite batch; baking soda and salt are used as the binder. I have doses ranging from medical treatment to one-shot coma."
"I've been clean for years," Kim replied. "And I'm here for another reason entirely."
"I apologize, Kimberly; I was unaware of any sort of dependence on your part," he said remorsefully. "Come, sit with me and we'll discuss your situation." He took Kim by the arm and escorted her to an empty booth in the back; it was the only place in the building lit by anything but blacklight. He sat on one side, and Kim on the other; each faced the other silently for a few moments, contemplating the situation. Finally, Mikhail broke the silence. "So, Ms. Possible, let me tell you how I envisioned this situation: you answer my question, then I answer your question, and we repeat until one of us runs out of questions or until you run out of time to spend here with me."
"I can agree to those terms," Kim replied.
"Good; very good. First, you said earlier that you had been clean for years; this implies the presence in your history of an addiction. I would like you to tell me about the circumstances surrounding it," he said, folding his hands on the table.
Kim let forth a drawn-out sigh, and said, "How much time do you have?"
"For you, my dear, all the time in the world," he replied simply.
Kim rubbed her brow. "Five years ago," she began with a tragic look in her eye; the tragic look of a woman who had just seen something awful like a dog being kicked. "Five years ago, the sky fell and the world as we knew it came to an end. My family was in Middleton when it happened, but a number of us were out of town on assignment; Ron, Monique, even Wade was with us. We all coped with it differently; Wade fell back on the familiar, dedicating his life to finding a way to merge the human mind with an AI, while Monique spent a month in isolation, venturing into the world only to purchase necessities such as food. Ron dealt with the loss by turning to his faith, and he claims that God cried when he designed that part. Bonnie… Well, I suspect that you know how she managed through the trouble. As for me, I turned to ilk among these around us; I turned to my own special blend of cocaine and ecstasy.
"It's funny; you think you can deal with stress and then something like this gets thrown at you. I spent the first week locked in my hotel room; the shades were all pulled down and I was paranoid of everything after three days on a diet of cocaine and wine, with a little weed to level me sometimes. Honestly, all I wanted during that time was to be curled up naked in my lover's bed. After that, when I could manage something resembling being normal, I ventured out into the world again; Ron was my first contact after that week, and did we ever. We probably spent those first forty-eight hours locked in his room. I took a pill every time I was alone; I don't know how he failed to catch on. Maybe he didn't; maybe he just hoped it'd work itself out.
"After that we were approached by the government with a job offer: come and work for us and get a clean start. In my state of high intoxication all I wanted was a clean start where I could forget about everyone and everything I'd lost. We signed on, and they put us in a new special tactics team, one devoted to being exceptional at everything from negotiations to cyber warfare. For team director they had Dr. Betty Director, and they had Will Du as the pilot; for whatever reason I didn't find it the least bit surprising that he could operate every transport vehicle from a helicopter to a Superfortress to an M1A1 Abrams.
"Ron was the negotiations expert; apparently he had some sort of knack for the job which nobody knew about. I was pegged for ops leader, in charge of all in-field decisions and the public face of the team; I guess they wanted someone familiar to be the spokesperson for all the unconstitutional acts we were slated to perform. And then there was Shego, team sniper and second-in-command, except it wasn't Shego; Shego, as you undoubtedly know, lost her body soon after the attack and became the first person in history to have a fully-prosthetic body. At the time I was still strung out constantly, and I got the wild idea that if Shego's body had as sharp of senses as they said it did, someone should really give it a good once-over; and a twice over, and probably a third- or fourth-time over, just to be safe." The sadness faded for a moment as she recalled fondly her romance. "We spent that first night and the better part of the next day discovering just how much feeling that body of hers had."
"Why would Shego agree to anything with you?" Mikhail asked. "You two were mortal enemies locked forever in combat."
"She's always had something for me," Kim replied. "She's a very passionate person, if you're willing to believe that, and she's always wanted to have a fling with me, the teen hero who was limber enough to outdo her. Now, as you've had two questions I see no reason why I should not have two as well." Mikhail nodded in agreement. "The first is simple; where's your son?"
"After I resigned myself to the fact that he could never take over an evil empire, I put him in charge of the legitimate side of my operation; he is now CEO of Realitek Cybernetic Solutions," he replied, beaming with pride. "And your second question?"
"My second question is the reason I came here in the first place. Can you do me a favor?" she asked, leaning forward. "Someone's life depends on it."
"I will do my best to assist you in any way I can, Ms. Possible," he replied. "What is it I can do for you?"
"Everyone in here is wired into your building, and I know for a fact that you're sifting through their minds for anything which may be of value; I need to do a search of your records," Kim replied. "I need anything related to a cult planning on killing one Ms. April Elizabeth Hargrove, better known as Shego, the first cyberization patient."
"I don't need to do a search for that, my dear," he said, smiling. "I have all the information you need fresh in my mind. Their group is known as the Avatar's Embrace; they're around a hundred people, most of who were brainwashed by the cult and are simply living out their lives in dens like mine. There is one, however, who is an actual threat. His name is Vigo Vladimir Caldera, and he is an old-world hitman for the Russian mafia. The entire cult is a cover for him; he was hired to kill Shego. Only he knows who hired him, but I would be willing to bet both of my empires that it is not going to be easy for you to uncover the truth behind the matter."
Kim let out a deep breath as she breached the surface of the pool. The room was enormous, housing the heated Olympic-size pool in which she had earlier taken to diving into as well as a boxing ring and a full set of workout equipment ranging from free weights to a rowing machine. Kim floated in the center of the pool, looking up at the sky beyond the retracted ceiling. "You're quite good, you know," she said aloud. "My security only caught you once while you were sneaking in."
"I'll have to be more careful next time," Shodan replied, her camouflage shimmering off; she wore a tank top and shorts, more fitting of a summer day than the temperatures of winter. She walked over to the pool and sat on the edge, swinging her feet in the warm water. "The thermal dome surrounding your house; I didn't know something like that existed."
"It doesn't. Yet," Kim said. "Like everything else I have here, I cashed in a favor; my house, my things, everything was a gift for a lifetime of public service." Slowly she turned toward Shodan, pushing herself off once and allowing her momentum to take her to her guest. "I want to know the story; yours, Shego's, Drakken's. The truth, not what you told her."
"She told you?" Shodan asked as Kim pulled herself out of the pool.
"More or less," Kim replied, grabbing a towel from one of the deckchairs surrounding the pool. "More less than more; she told me what she knew before you resurfaced."
"All of that is true; I only lied about how her mind got into that body and about what happened to me," she said.
"So tell me everything," Kim replied.
"I had power of attorney, and when they told me that there's no way her body could recover from the damage I made an executive decision: use the body the Metaworks guys had made for her," Shodan started.
"Hold up," Kim interjected. "Metaworks wasn't founded until after that."
"True," Shodan continued, "but CyberDynamics was; Metaworks was founded by nineteen former employees of CyberDynamics, ones who Shego had saved as she dug through the building looking for Drakken. People had been fitted with CyberDynamics arms and legs and hearts and every other organ imaginable save the brain, and it was the Metaworks founders' dream to make a fully-prosthetic body one day. The only problem is that you can't exactly test something like that without having someone to put into it.
"As I said before, I made an executive decision, and when Shego slipped into a coma I had her brain transferred into her new body. As per her will, her body was burned and her ashes were entombed forever in a fissure beneath the sea so that nobody would ever be able to get at them. After that, I went back to the CyberDynamics facility to help with the cleanup while Shego was in rehabilitation, getting used to her new body.
"I was the head of the Alan project, and as such I wanted to be the one to resurrect it; I was the first person in the server and auxiliary control room since the crash. We designed that room to withstand a direct nuclear attack three times over, so I knew it would still be in good condition. It was even designed with an emergency power system so we could run it for a month without external power; it contained copies of most of the valuable aspects of the Internet, like Wikipedia, a digital copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and reference information for just about every electronic device created over the previous twenty years. Suffice to say, it was a very ambitious project.
"Alan was very clever; he was designed as a data security AI, and he was capable of analyzing information and assimilating it into its program in the most efficient manner possible. We worried that we may have made him too clever, though, and that he may assimilate too much information and not be able to manage it all; I guess we were wrong. When he detected the attack, he initiated his emergency storage protocols, gathering the latest copies of information from all around the world, including everything on the local network; including the recently-completed scans of honorary Dr. Drew Theodore P. Lipsky.
"I learned something very vital from that event; first, that it could even be done. But, more importantly, I learned that emotion required the human condition; a physical human mind. Working with Drew's knowledge, I created an accelerated cloning machine, allowing me to constantly download the contents of my mind and transfer them into a cloned body, and giving me near-immortality. The only hitch is that it requires the computational power of Xerxes."
"Why Xerxes?" Kim asked, drying her hair with the towel. "For that matter, why do you go by Shodan?"
"I named him Xerxes for the same reason Wade named the Alma protocols 'Alma'; naming schemes makes things easier," Shodan replied. "As for Shodan, it was actually my birth name; I changed it a few years back when I was legally registered as dead. God only knows why my parents chose to name me Shodan in the first place, though." She stood up and walked over to Kim. "The fight's tomorrow; you should get ready."
"As should you," Kim stated in a tone of condescension.
"I'm as ready as I'll ever be," Shodan said nervously.
"Have you ever killed someone?" Kim asked dryly. "If it comes to it, will you be able to pull the trigger? Do you honestly believe you can live with yourself if you take the life of another?"
"No, I don't, but like I said, I'm as ready as I'll ever be," Shodan replied, shimmering from sight.
Kim waited for a few minutes, until the alarm sounded Shodan's departure from the thermal bubble, before speaking up again. "Why were you following her?" she asked.
"Because I had to know," Shego replied, invisible, "first hand and uncensored, from her mouth."
"And you believe her?" Kim asked, looking up at the top of the wall.
Shego dropped her camouflage, appearing directly in Kim's line of sight. "I have to," she replied.
"How close were you two?" Kim asked, dropping into one of the deckchairs and staring up at her companion.
"Do you really want to know?" Shego asked. Kim shrugged, and Shego rolled her eyes. "She's still the only person I've ever had any romantic feelings toward."
"Sometimes I wish I could love again," Kim said, closing her eyes, "but how much safer is our relationship without the emotional binding? Physical and psychological, that's the way to go. Unless you'd rather go for love?"
"Are you the jealous type?" Shego asked, staring down at Kim.
"Not anymore," Kim reminded her.
"Well, I might just have to do you both then," Shego said as she slid off the wall and out of Kim's field of awareness.