If The Future Holds - Book One: Fire With Fire
By Moonraker One
copyright © 2004 Moonraker One. All rights reserved.
All Dragonball Z characters are trademarks of FUNImation and other respective companies
This book may NOT be altered or sold
CHAPTER ONE
Mornings always made Bulma jittery.
Even though her son, Trunks, was indeed a Super Saiyan, the possibility of complete, instant annihilation never faded away. The origins of the current state of affairs could be traced to several events, probably the most well-known of which was the arrival of the androids, a pair of teenagers that were cybernetic in body and destructive in nature. Seventeen years prior, the Earth's best hope of combating threats to the peaceful blue mudball died of a heart disease in his bed just a short time after arriving home from a successful journey to defeat one of the universe's most notorious tyrants, Freeza. With him, it would later seem, any hope of restoring order out of chaos and destruction died as well. Nonetheless, his allies rallied themselves in an all-out struggle against the pair of androids which ultimately ended in the deaths of almost all of the Earthen warriors. Only Gohan, son of the mighty protector himself, and Trunks, who wasn't even born until a short time before the arrival of the duo, lived to tell the tale and continue the war against the devastating duo that ran amok, atomizing anything they came across, and playing games where the only goal was to see who could rack up the most kills by running people down with cars.
The never-stilling air of the almost completely ruined city seemed to break as whooshing could be heard. Bulma pushed a graying clump of light blue hair out of her face and headed towards the door, in desperate hopes that her son managed to elude the machines another day to provide food for himself and her, mostly himself. Pushing the door open, her mouth fell to the lowest position her jaw would allow; the very devils she hoped her son had avoided, were standing right in front of her.
"We decided it would be in order to pay a visit to what's left of the world's greatest company," joked Juunanagou. His malicious grin caused the middle-aged woman to simply quiver in terror. A bit of anger boiled to the surface, and with her anger, she plunged a fist directly at his face. Almost the instant her hand flew she regretted it, for he snatched her wrist before the fist could even go far. She yelled in pain due to his intense grip. Far too quickly for her eyes to see, he brought his knee up into her stomach, letting go of her wrist as she fell to both knees and supported her weight with her hands. She was lucky he didn't break her arm. The dark-haired male android looked at Bulma, then at his sister. "I thought women were saner than men."
"I guess there's always an exception," roused Juuhachigou. "C'mon, let's bust up the place, got nothin' else to do."
Bulma shrieked; she couldn't let them discover her project! It was the only hope for the world!
"NO!" she screeched, and reached for a gun in her pocket. Although useless against these kind of foes, it kept the bandits away from Capsule Corp. ruins. While Juunanagou destroyed the time machine she was working on, his sister whirled around and hoisted Bulma off her feet with one hand around her neck. A swift motion of her arm launched the female scientist all the way across the room, shattering a wooden table and leaving a large impression in the wall as she slumped down to the floor, unconscious. Her non-awake ears didn't hear the sounds of equipment shattering and glass breaking as the androids ran amok in her laboratory. Quiet hours went by after they abruptly left, satisfied there remained nothing to break in the lab.
"M...MOM!" one particularly loud yell echoed, bringing Bulma slowly to back to the land of the wake. "MOM!"
"Wh...wha?" she tried to ask but abruptly her own strength to talk gave out on her. "What..."
"Don't try to talk too much, mom, or your strength won't keep up." Trunks's calm warning seemed to make sense, so she complied. "Now, the androids attacked you, right?" Nervously, she nodded. Predictably, her son gritted his teeth in anger. "That project you were working on...the time machine...they wrecked it, didn't they?" Again, she nodded. He patted her on the shoulder. "Don't worry, mom, just lie there."
"Trunks..." she gathered the strength to say. "Don't go after..." But she was cut off by her abruptly falling asleep due to exhaustion. Although she knew he'd gotten her off the floor, she fell out of awareness far too quickly to realize she was on her examining table, for it was the most sturdy table in the room at that moment, since it managed to avoid the androids' reign of smashing property.
Bulma violently jerked out of her slumber once she felt a fly land on her face. A quick glance at her watch indicated that six hours had passed since she'd fallen asleep. She leapt off the table with a bit of effort, and dashed towards the second room where Trunks slept, hoping desperately that she'd find him lying there, peacefully sleeping. Although barely awake, she flung the door open with force, and gasped; his sword and battle attire were both gone. She shook her head and made another dash; this time for her hovercar outside. That is, if the androids hadn't demolished it. Thankfully they'd left it alone and her key still slid easily into the slot, the sound of compressed hydrogen gas being burned inside the vehicle's fusion chamber signaling that all systems were a-go. That's when the problem hit her; she had no clue as to where her son would be.
Dammit, she thought, then quickly realized it. Yes! I remembered I installed a GPS system in Trunks's watch! Although he could find no purpose behind it, she knew it would be times like these that she needed such a device. The vehicle tore off into the night with one quick stomp of her foot on the pedal.
Dozens of miles flew by quickly as she pushed her accelerator to its utmost limits. Using her portable light, she searched the ruins for any sign of her son, as she awaited for the satellites that hadn't been used in a long time to initiate. Her attention turned to the calm beeping on her radar screen as his position revealed itself to her; she turned her wheel a bit to the left and floored the engine.
Once she got to the location, she could barely believe what she'd seen. Trunks was lying on top of a piece of granite, face down on his stomach. He didn't seem to move. She pulled the car to the ground near him, and leaped out of it. The only thing she could feel was her heart beating like a automatic drum, then at one particular moment, as she reached for his neck, it stopped cold in her chest.
He had no pulse, which could mean only one thing.
He was dead.
Her heart fell limp within her chest the moment felt no pulse. Her jaw refused to pull up when she flipped him over and saw the look of sheer terror, frozen eternally on his face. Tilting back she let a loud scream into the air out of desperation. For a brief instant she felt completely numb to all feelings; a sensation that didn't last long, for she quickly found herself caught up in not wanting to believe it. Mysteriously, there was no blood or puncture wounds, just a part on the back of his neck which indicated he'd died from a blunt impact to the back of his head. She turned him over, then drove a fist into the ground. This can't be happening, was all she could think. The worst part happened when it finally sank in. All at once she drove her fists onto the ground and shouted into the night, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! It was horrible; in one single word that seemed to go on forever, her anger and heartbreak echoed through the ruins.
"NO! MY ONLY SON! WHY, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS?! WHY!?" Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, not a soul heard her shout obscenities into the night, for there was no one about. It was almost five whole hours worth of crying before she found herself fully able to get in her car and go back home. By the time she was through what was left of the front door, the sun began to peak through the horizon. In her grief she'd decided not to take his body home with her, as that would only warrant more emotional response.
Why am I still pushing this fight, she thought, lying on her couch, staring into the blankness of the wall in front of her. It was stupid to even try to protect ourselves; these machines are all-powerful. She reached underneath her cushion and pulled out the one thing she'd hope she never had to use again; her gun. Except this time, it wouldn't be aimed at an intruder; she put the barrel to her right temple.
What happened next took her completely by surprise.
In the second before she'd have applied enough pressure to the trigger to blow her brains out, a wire inside the gun slipped, and the clip fell out, taking all the bullets with it. Thus, when she pulled the trigger completely, the gun clicked. However, only one bullet at the top of the clip bounced out and began rolling. Nothing about its trajectory of rolling across the floor seemed weird, except its disappearance.
What the hell?! In her grief-filled state, she did happen to see the bullet that rolled across the floor disappear through what otherwise had to be a rock-solid section of floor. All the laws of science, at least the ones that she knew about, didn't allow for such a thing to happen. For at least a brief couple of moments, her sorrow took a backseat to confusion, which she welcomed; anything to take her mind off of her most beloved's death was a welcome. Wasting not any time at all, she stood up, put down her gun, and approached the exact spot in the floor where she saw the piece of ammunition fall through a solid section of floor. Setting her foot on top of the spot yielded nothing, for her foot merely came down flat on top of it without falling through. Kneeling down, she tried her left hand, but it too came down solid. Must be my imagination, was her primary conclusion.
Then she tried to get to her feet, and slipped.
When she came down, her knee attained a bruise when she came down on it, mainly because she expected her right hand to come down hard on the section of the floor in question, but instead it passed through like there was no tile there at all. Okay, is this the Twilight Zone? Because I'm about to freak out here. Pulling her hand up, it came out of the floor; somehow, there must have been a solid hologram on this part of the floor, but she couldn't remember installing one. Her right hand, it seemed, was the only thing capable of passing through the hologram, so she pushed it back through the floor, and groped around beneath the image of the tile that wasn't there, and found a small switch. One clean flip, and the image of the tile itself was gone. Aha! Discovery always warranted the same feeling from Bulma, no matter how much pain she had bottled up inside. A ladder built into the wall led down into a very dark room, whose pitch blackness could only be defeated by what looked to be a dim light source from a room below. She began the thirty-five foot descent into the dark room.
What the blue hell is THIS?! The dim light came from an unmistakable source; the glow of a computer screen, which looked attached to a series of large, biology-type equipment pieces. The screen of the computer displayed a question:
What is your command? Save? Cancel?
Although she didn't properly understand what the hell had gone on in these mysterious lower reaches, her experience with computers told her to save, so she did. Once she did, the program closed, leaving behind the desktop screen, which had one icon in the upper left hand corner, labeled, READINCASEOFEMERGENCY. Not one to leave anything to question, she double-clicked it. Her eyebrows went from questioning furrowed to questioning wide open.
Dear Bulma,
if you are reading this, no doubt you've forgotten one of the less-important projects you were working on when you were younger. You began this when you were in high school, and worked on it through college. I programmed the computer to have an uninterruptible power supply and never shut off, and every day I recorded my progress on a file on this computer, so you'd know where I left off. This project began on a whim; after seeing a science fiction movie, you decided one morning it would be fun to try and create...well, let the work log tell you what it is. Ciao,
Bulma
Once she closed out of the message, and loaded up the work log, thoughts began to flood back to her; how could she ever have forgotten?! Apparently, she recalled, a nasty collision with a drunken driver in college jarred her thoughts and the project got ignored for quite some time, as did the room she so desperately tried to hide from her parents, to great success. Reading the log for the first time in nearly thirty years made her feel giddy; she actually found, by the end, that she could remember it all! The project almost drowned out the loss of Trunks, but nothing could ever accomplish that end.
What it was, was a project she'd always thought would be interesting. She knew from a young age that a certain Doctor Gero had his eyes set on finding a way to make a human being into a machine by turning living bone and organs into cybernetic components, while keeping most of the skin and several major organic parts intact. Bulma had a better idea, and this was it. Something that eluded even her father, the great Doctor Adam Brief.
Nanotechnology.
She hoped, desperately, that she could find a way to make a person biologically cybernetic—bio-mechanical for short—and merely have robots much smaller than the size of the nucleus of a cell running the body. Apparently, she'd spent years designing the first nano-bot and programming it with every action in mind, but couldn't get the second part—injecting it into a nucleus-free cell—down pat. That didn't take long.
Okay, cheek cell, she told the scraping off the inside of her cheek, as she looked at an individual cell under a microscope. Using a needle no bigger than a millionth the circumference of a strand of hair, she invaded the inner space of the tiny life form, and extracted the nucleus with ever-so-gentle precision. Her unsteady hands would be a downfall, so she kept herself as calm as possible. Then, the gutsy part began; the frail robot—which was so small the slightest breeze would destroy it—slid easily into her needle. Natural gravity pulled it down into the center of the cell, where it quickly seemed to activate and go to work as soon as she extracted the needle. Feeling gratified, she scraped the cells into a petri dish and put it under a scanner so the computer could keep track of it, then slumped over in her seat, falling asleep on top of her desk.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Startlingly loud beeping noises from the computer woke her up with a fright, almost causing her to overturn a microscope. According to her computer screen, the petri dish's first layer had been coated with a surprising number of cells that completely covered the bottom. Not wasting a moment, she scraped some cells from the dish, and layed the down on a blank slide. Her smile widened. YES! Apparently, the cells had learned to allow the robots to be a permanent part of the cell, creating new nanites with each division. She looked back at the dish, noting another particularly interesting aspect; although she scraped the cells out a few moments ago, already the layer was full again! That meant the nanites caused instant cell regeneration, not a pathetic twenty minute division time. Now that the basic test had completed, there stood only one course left to follow: human testing.
She took an injection gun out of her medical kit, put the cells into a blood-friendly fluid, and closed her eyes. Ready or not, she joked, pulling the trigger, and injecting a few thousand nanite cells into the nearest open blood vessel. Initially, nothing happened.
Dizziness and fever quickly began to set in. A hasty decision was made by her to ascend the ladder and find her way to her room to sleep, because otherwise she might pass out in the underground lab. As she began the slow ascent up the ladder, blood began to trickle gradually from her nose. Each rung seemed harder to reach than the last, yet by the sheer will of a middle-aged woman—and the memory of her son, Trunks—her arms that seemed to weigh more than boulders she forced up to the next rung. I have to get up there, dammit! Even with her vision beginnng to get blurry, she yanked her feet (which seemed like dead weight) up each step.
Until near the top, her foot came down on air, and the entire of the ladder zoomed past her on her way down.
AAAaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! She hit the ground with a slam, leaving cracks in the floor as blood seeped out of her cracked skull. Death came cold and swift.
Hold on, dear readers! Is this really the end? Not quite! You have to read the next chapter to find out!