Silicon Valley 2033
Chapter 3: Burn Down
"So, Mr. Fargo, if that is your real name," continued the FBI agent. "What are you doing in the States right now?"
Fargo was starting to grow a full beard by now. His clothing was especially ruffled due to some trouble in the restaurant. He shook his head.
"We know of your history. You have served an important position in every single major company for the past twenty years and nobody ever asked questions about you. You have even been directly linked to vigilante groups," the agent put his hands on the table, "and you know about some very sensitive issues that even we couldn't get into."
Fargo looked up at the agent. "Listen, I think you have the wrong man. I was just eating at a restaurant with my girlfriend and we were vacationing."
The agent put his face very close to Fargo's. "We fingerprinted you and scanned your retinas when you came in. You're not fooling anybody. And the lady you say is your girlfriend denies having such a relationship with you."
Fargo struggled a smirk. "I didn't do anything. And you know, she has this denial complex."
The agent threw the table over. "You endangered public safety by being a target for someone who's obviously very serious about capturing you alive."
"Nothing I can do about that."
"You were going to hire the Knight Sabers for a very dangerous job. And it involves Quincy."
"Doesn't it always?"
"Don't bullshit me you punk. The moment you came here, you exposed the whole state to some serious shit. It's related to the Son of Sun too, isn't it? Isn't it?"
Fargo sighed and closed his eyes.
"You know, we could easily send you on over to the NSA. They don't follow as many rules about interrogations."
"Go ahead. Put me under a deep psycho scanner."
The people behind the window, who were out of view and watching intently, turned to each other.
Jeena stared down the scope of her rifle. The Boomers did not move from their positions inside the building. Instead, they waited patiently for the troopers to get closer.
She radioed in, "Do not advance. I repeat, do not advance, over." This was very strange. Boomers were not known for their incredible patience, and these ones were starting to outlast the patience of even her lazy unit. In fact, the Boomers were using very good tactics inside the building itself - it was impossible to get them out without laying siege to the whole thing.
She pressed a different button on her radio and radioed in, "This is unit 431 requesting backup, targets are well-entrenched, over."
"Unit 211 is coming to back up unit 431, over," replied Zax's voice.
Jeena turned her scope slightly to zoom in further on the window she was watching. One of the Boomers inside was still moving around, but she could not tell what it was doing. The rest continued to watch all of the windows and entrances.
Priss was held back from the shining motorcycle by some flexible barriers. The warehouse was so large, she didn't know if she would be able to browse through the whole convention in one day. The few motorcycles that she had been allowed to sit on and rev up were weak.
She decided to give up and keep walking. After the last few times she had begged the exhibitioners to let her try their cycles out and had gotten turned down, she was getting the impression that Americans were a bit more protective of their property. The next cycle she came to looked very familiar.
It was a true beauty. Its twin monster exhaust pipes were gold-plated, and the body itself was a nice red. The instrument panel was a piece of military hardware. Priss saw that the mechanic was on the other side of the bike. His jumpsuit was labeled "Nobel Prize for Science."
She knew that guy from somewhere! "Hey, Ojisan!"
Dr. Raven jumped and turned around. "Call me Doctor! Still as rude as ever, Priss?"
"Yeah, I fit right in with the natives. You finally got it fixed?"
"No thanks to your recklessness! It took just as much work to bend it back into shape as it did to build it! Mackie vowed never to let you near it again!"
"Hey, where is Mackie anyways? I don't see him around."
"He's staying with Sylia in a hotel somewhere." Raven turned back to a podium he had been working on. He was attaching parts to it to show off the insides of the cycle. "By the way, we made some special modifications to it. We tried to make it idiot proof, but we need to test it to make sure."
"Idiot proof? What do you mean by that?"
"Stop by my friend's place sometime. He owns his own garage near here." Raven handed her a business card.
"So, Ms. Yamazaki, about these memos that your company had audited. Who did the analysis on them?"
"I did," Linna answered. American-style court cases took such a long time.
"Describe your analysis." The lawyer wasn't taking it much better, since he had been working on the trial for a whole month before Linna had flown in.
"I found that Larry Ellison had written some comments about his business plans and his dealings."
"For example?"
"He expressed the desire to kill Bill Gates once and for all. He noted that his next target would be Quincy."
"Was there anything in the memos that he did not publicly announce?"
"Yes, he talked about some of his purchases."
"Which purchases, exactly?"
"He purchased a number of Boomers with special modifications to behave like samurai. He wanted to put these Boomers in his ranch."
The lawyer turned around for a moment. "I would like to present Exhibit R: the Boomers in question."
About ten Boomers dressed in traditional Samurai armor with katanas at their sides walked onto the court floor. They willingly relinquished their swords and sat down on the floor in honorable fashion.
The lawyer turned back to Linna and continued, "Do the memos mention anything about the cost of these Boomers?"
Linna realized that she was about to mention the most important thing in the whole entire trial. "Yes, the memos described the total cost of the purchase as being one hundred thousand US dollars."
She hoped that she would be finished for now.
Sylia was sitting in a very nice office. As far as she could tell by the things on the walls, the agent interrogating her had once made national headlines for being a former con artist who had stolen a total of six billion dollars before being caught at the age of eighteen. Mackie was not quite that brilliant.
"If you're not his girlfriend or spouse, then what is your relationship with him?"
"We talk about business. We don't normally talk very much."
"Did Fargo ever talk to you about the deal between Genom and Sun?"
"No."
The FBI agent realized that this Ms. Stingray was either very proud of herself or highly trained in the art of black ops. Very likely both. "I'll take that as a yes. What exactly did he mention?"
"He was about to tell me at dinner."
"Did Fargo ever tell you that he is currently working directly under the Prime Minister of France for the purposes of espionage and sabotage?"
Sylia was stunned.
"I'm willing to bet that he also failed to mention that he is the project leader for France's Project 2502. If it's anything like the Project 2501 that came out of Hong Kong, you know very well what this means."
Sylia hoped that he wouldn't ask her about the Knight Sabers too. Otherwise, she would be in quite a bit of trouble.
Nene yawned loudly, but this did not stop the boy from continuing to talk about things she could care less about.
"And that's how Intel got into the business of microprocessors."
She had been kept up all night just listening to him go on and on about technology and hacking and computers. It turned out that it just wasn't as cool when you listened to it for twelve hours straight. She was incredibly hungry right now and would have liked a great delicacy as a reward for enduring this suffering. Cake would be very appropriate.
"...and this type of encryption is most often used by the French. Let me show you."
She blinked. He was actually going to touch a computer! "Um, can I do it?"
After two seconds of the boy just looking at her, he decided "Sure."
Finally! After hours upon hours of listening to the most boring things she had ever heard, and not daring to talk back because she understood so little of this stupid counterintuitive language, she would have a chance to do what she loved most. She had felt sorry that she acknowledged her understanding of any English at all to this boy, and indeed, regretted letting Leon teach her enough to understand his invitation to hell. She cracked her fingers and got to typing. Within a few minutes, she was looking at a directory listing of the French government's most secret files. She clicked on a random file, like one named "Project 2502.xml" and looked at the raw data.
She caught the statistics, measurements, and personality profiles of Sylia, Linna, Priss, and last but not least, herself in the midst of the gigantic file.
Lucky for her, this boy didn't have the courtesy to have asked her what her name was.
"I bet that last one is ferocious," commented the boy.
Jeena saw a sudden change in the Boomers. "They're going to leave, over."
"Acknowledged, unit leader, we are getting into ambush position, over," replied the ear of her headset.
She exhaled slightly as she turned several degrees to the right. They were headed for the front door, and she was going to make sure that they fell down as soon as they dared to leave the safety of the building's walls. Her position in the bushes was not the best possible hiding place, but she knew that she was well-covered if they were to ever try to fire on her.
She let her full breath out and fired.
But when she recovered from the recoil, the Boomer was holding a plate of solid armor. It was slightly dented near where the center of her scope was.
The troopers were staring at about six Boomers in total. Two of them were holding plates of solid armor to guard against sniper attacks from the sides. The other four opened up their chests.
"You are going to point out which of these buildings is your current office," said the agent to Fargo. They were in the back of a black car driving down a commercial road.
Fargo had been shaved - almost forcefully - and didn't look quite so horrible now. "I told you, I live and work in Japan."
"That's your office, isn't it?" the agent realized, pointing to the scene of a SWAT dispatch. There were at least two trucks with several troopers hiding behind them, looking around the corners at a smaller commercial building.
Suddenly, the trucks exploded and flew into the middle of the street. The troopers flew all the way across to the other side. The driver slammed on the brakes, narrowly missing a flying trooper who was on fire.
Fargo came to understand that he was in deep trouble as he watched the SWAT vans crash into the ground and break apart as melting chunks of flaming steel.
Jeena adjusted by shooting out the Boomer's legs, causing it to fall down so that she could finish off the rest of it. But it was too late. Her whole unit had been killed. All because the Boomers were finally starting to learn tactics. What a concept - Boomers thinking. It wasn't so long ago in her memory that she had been discussing the concept of Boomers having emotions with that stupid rookie.
She saw Zax's van pull up short of the firing arc of the Boomers. She recognized Leon and his partner coming out of the back. She couldn't stay here, though, now that the other five Boomers had noticed the flash of her muzzle. She rolled sideways to her feet and started running, with one of them giving chase.
The Boomer was about to fire at her with its mouth laser, but it suddenly started convulsing as something pounded it from the side and shredded it into a pile of blue mass. Leon blew off the smoke from his Stomach Gun and smiled at Jeena. "Reinforcements have arrived," he announced.
"Great - cover me while I snipe them some more." Something in that poor little man had definitely changed. For starters, he was actually confident about getting close to Boomers and shooting them. She tumbled behind the van and brought her rifle around into position again.
Daley took his time in drawing his service revolver and pointing at the next Boomer. This Boomer was cartwheeling and somersaulting around, making it difficult if not impossible to hit. In fact, it was quite odd that a Bu-55C should be so adept in acrobatics. Such a thing would have been incredibly unbelievable and just plain wrong if it was not happening right now. He fired one shot.
The Boomer suddenly fell to the ground as the high-powered tag stuck to its leg shocked it with millions of volts of electricity. It quickly started loosing its fluids and fell apart. Daley grinned and twirled his revolver. "Sometimes the delicate touch of a woman is needed."
During that time, Zax had dispatched the remaining Boomers. He walked over to the FBI car, now parked a comfortable distance away from the battlefield.
As the window of the driver rolled down, Zax took the initiative to ask, "What kind of a plot are we involved in now?"
Nene was frozen with horror. The boy had taken off his face mask to reveal a much older man with a voice manipulator on his throat. She slowly raised her hands as the "boy" levelled a gun to her head.
End Chapter 3: Burn Down
