Notes:

So this fanfic is Bubblegum Crisis, yes, but it's in a universe that takes place in 2068-2069 AD. Not just a reboot, but a threeboot, if you will, one which follows the events of 2032 only lightly.
So:
- Sylvie's mech is, in keeping with the vampire theme, the NS4-A2. Geddit? Geddit?
- Sylia is spelled Celia, Linna is Lena.
- Sylvie met Priss much earlier on, as early as the end of the timeline equivalent of OVA 3, and joined as Priss's drummer (a reference to Forward Momentum's audio drama, because hey, what rock band doesn't have a brush-with-death drummer?).
- Sylvie didn't come from an orbital colony, but the SPDC's headquarter city, a space-elevator megapolis near the ruins of Singapore known as Anchorpoint. A minor distinction, but who really thinks we'll have L-point colonies like Genaros within the next century? I sure as shit don't.
- I'm keeping the rehash of OVA's 5&6 – Moonlight Rambler and Red Eyes – vague on purpose, because they aren't the focus of this little story. Suffice to say the Sabers managed to neutralize the NS4-A2, but didn't manage to stop Largo from doing some naughty things with orbital weaponry, and failed to convince other escaped Sexaroids that Largo was a Bad Dude.
The rest will hopefully become clear in a bit.


Priss

Somehow, waking up's gotten easier.

It's weird. It was barely a month ago that I got stabbed in the gut twice , had most of my ribcage shattered by a hypersonic blast of compressed air, and then got the shit kicked out of me by a psychotic Boomer with the personality of a kabuki villain and orbital laser cannons to back that 'puny humans prepare to die' fanaticism up. What an asshole he was.

But I'm alive. Hardsuit took the worst of the damage, and I only spent two weeks in a medically-induced coma while Celia had her private autodoc do all sorts of fun things with pluripotent tissue. They ripped me up and stitched me back together with my own flesh.

Maybe some people will say I should have died then, that I got pulled back from the brink by the whims of fate, as if the gods themselves decided no, not yet, now's not the day Priss. That I'm a walking corpse kept alive by high tech and low spirits.

Well, you know what?

Fuck 'em.

Sylvie's still asleep when I get up. I crawl around her spread-eagle body, rise from the futon, tiptoe over to the stovetop, and she doesn't even budge. Celia says she has this old DARPA bioware, stuff that lets you go for days without sleep and then do one long night out cold to compensate, pre-installed. Maybe she's been abusing that trick too much, the better to stay sober in post-gig parties where the boys might get a little grabby? Yeah, she probably has.

What's important now is breakfast. Celia said bring Sylvie in by nine, it's a half hour on our bikes, and the boss gets pissy when I break an appointment, so I don't want to imagine how much she'd chew our prospective Saber number five out.

I can't believe I'm doing this.

Get some rice in the cooker, heat up the frying pan, squirt some liquid egg onto the pan once it's hot enough, shred some vegetables, sprinkle some little bits of synthetic chicken onto one side of the omlette, do it like Lena taught me. Work at it – don't wake her up until she's good and ready. Season with exotic nanocarbon-allotrope, feedstock for her but not for me.

Soon, breakfast is ready, I've served it, popped open a can of the really expensive Asahi I save for special occasions, and she's still asleep. I walk over to her. Look at her. Sigh.

She's beautiful even like this, huddled under the sheet, her features even, her dark-silver hair puddled around the back of her neck, the fingers on one of her delicate hands twitching, one-two-three-four.

There's a part of me that wants to just leave her like this. Let her sleep as long as she wants, and we'll wake up and we'll go to practice, keep working on our first real EP that seems to be on the verge of morphing into an album, then go out and fuck up the club scene for three long hours, then fuck each other screaming and senseless, then repeat that whole act. Rise. Grow the band. Be together.

But instead, I do what she asked me, get down on all fours, and blow air into her ear.

She yelps, twitches into awareness, rolls around to face me, eyes wide with surprise (not fear, I know what that looks like on her, I know that too well). She blushes, crumples the sheet up around her.

"Prissssssss," she moans, "don't dooooooo that."

"Hey," I say, "you asked for it. Both literally, and 'cause you were just lying there."

"Oh." She shakes her head, rises to a kneeling position as I stand back up. Then her eyes go wide again. "Wait, then that means-"

"It's not too late," I say. "Celia wants us in by nine and it's seven thirty. We eat now, we ride at eight, we'll be early, if anything."

She relaxes. "Oh." She looks past me. "You made breakfast?"

"You make it sound like that's an unnatural act, girl."

"Well-" she giggles, "-you did live on printed food and diluted beer before I showed up, right?"

I shrug. "You're not wrong. I've graduated to printed meatburgers and hard sake, now. You've corrupted me, Sylvie, it's really all your fault. Whatever shall I dooooo."

A full laugh for that, and she rises, yawns, stretches. She looks at me, and a little soft smile plays across her face, the same one she had when we first met.

We sit down, 'itadakimasu', and I pass her the Asahi. I eat faster than her. It's more that I scarf down what's in front of me, tear chunks out of the omelet as big as I can, but for her every bite has to be deliberate, small enough for her mouth to make this very specific shape when the food goes in. I think it's supposed to be dainty and erotic, but I've never asked her. Master Kaufmann, as she still calls him, hardwired his girls with little microbehaviors, custom and not factory standard, all so he could watch them eat or move that would turn him on in juuust the right way. I've never asked, though. Sylvie doesn't like to talk about anything there, and any suggestion that maybe Kaufmann still has hooks in her, hooks she still doesn't know about – she either starts to yell or starts to cry. I don't want to do that to her.

I'm done in five minutes, and Sylvie's done in ten. The Asahi sits there, unopened. I poke it towards her. She shakes her head. I put it back in the minifridge. Bummer.

And then we dress up in riding suits, unplug our bikes, switch the motors on, rev up the hydrogen turbines, and I zoom off into the machine wilderness of Megatokyo, Sylvie following close behind me.

We get stuck on the highway within fifteen minutes.


Sylvie

"You're late," Celia says, and I wither just a little bit.

"Sorry," Priss says before I can apologize. "We got caught in traffic for a whole hour."

"You left in the middle of the suburban rush hour?"

"You said get up early! I figured we'd have time."

"Next time, get up earlier, or at least text me your driving plan. Anything's better than having to wait and become increasingly annoyed with you two, as I have become."

"Hai- hai , ojou-sama," Priss says.

I lean up against the wall of the printed-concrete structure, a mess of training rooms and 3D printers buried deep under the city. It's not too far from where the Nosferatu fell, and for a moment I wonder where that demon machine went. I wouldn't put it past Celia to retrieve it just for posterity.

She terrifies me. No matter how kind she pretends to be, there's something off about her. I'm not human, I'm only close enough , and I think she is too, some kind of close enough . I don't meet her gaze.

"Why did you need her so early, anyway? She's already trained up, just run her through the calibration tests and see what she's capable of." Priss turns to me. "Unless you don't want to-"

"I do," I cut her off. I don't want to have this argument right now, and neither does she. "I'm ready."

"Fair enough," Celia says, and those deep chocolate eyes lock onto me and don't look away, "but I would like to run some tests first. Preliminary work tailored to your body. You understand, yes?"

"I — um — yes! Yes, I understand!" Do I?

"Wonderful. Then, Sylvie will follow me, and Priss, you'll stay here. Mackie should be availible to run calibration for your suit within the hour. Entertain yourself in the meanwhile."

"Seriously?" She sighs. "I mean, it's Mackie . How do I know he's not gonna be later than that 'cause he's jackin' off to one my concert posters?"

"Because," Celia says without skipping a beat, "He and Nene have been spending the night at her apartment on the weekends, and I have reason to believe they are consummating their relationship in the most intimate ways possible."

"How do you know that ?"

"Because Nene came to me asking for advice on how to satisfy him a few days ago." She stops. "Not that I told you any of this, of course."

Neither Priss nor I are sure what to say after that for a good moment. Then Priss said, "So what'd you tell her?"

"I told her to be herself."

It's a new room she leads me to. Medically sterile, like the regeneration chambers they'd stick us in to be prodded by an autodoc, to have our blood refilled after Master Kaufmann got too excited. Actually, it's very like one of those. My memories of when I was a slave, before Largo destroyed my programming locks, are hazy, but the machinery looks similar. The massive multi-limbed Boomer-tech arm descending from the ceiling, the operating chair with direct hookups to neural stemports - is this it? Is she going to put my locks back in to make me more loyal? To never betray her as Saber Five?

"What is this?" I stammer out. She doesn't answer, only slips on a smock and motions for me to get in the chair. I don't. "I'm not doing anything before you explain this!" I manage to say, and still she goes about the business of plugging her own stemjack into a computing brick, her eyes lighting up with augmented-reality holographics.

"Celia-"

"You don't recognize this? It's a cybernetic control suite, Sylvie. The same one I put you in to repair your imposed marrow deficiencies, actually."

"I know that, but why am I getting in one?!"

"Because you have certain pieces of hardware already installed that I want to make an integral part of the hardsuit uplink experience. Sit down, please."

"I won't." I don't. Freedom is the right to refuse things more powerful people demand of you. Of that much I'm certain. And I came to Megatokyo to get freedom enough for all my dead kin. I look at her, try to glare. She looks back, even. My gaze drops.

"I mean — if you could just explain what you mean by that?" I don't want her to get angry at me-

She softens. Cocks her head to the side.

"I suppose that's a fair request." She unplugs from the brick, the magnetic connectors snapping off and the fiber-optic cable spinning back away. She gestures to a little stool. I don't sit down. She shrugs.

"Where to begin…" she mutters. "You're aware of what you are, yes? A human embryo flash-grown in a biobag, genetically engineered for a to-order phenotype, rigged up with pseudoorganic Boomer nanotech from around the time the different parts of your body began differentiating, including but not limited to the marrow production blockers-"

"That gave me the blood problem?"

"Yes, that gave you the blood problem . But GENOM's engineers did a great deal of other interesting work as well. I don't just mean bodily enhancements like enhancing the bust and hips and rear, increasing sensory receptors across the body, pheromone generation, all the perverted magic that would obviously go into making a synthetic concubine." She waves a hand. "Your kind were never officially legal, but GENOM stopped producing your generation because you have some very interesting wetware in your neural interface."

"I — Largo told me that already. It was how I was able to synchronize with the Nosferatu without prior training. Combat software right?"

"Combat software!" She laughs. "That barely covers the intricacy of it. It's a variable-plasticity supplementary motor cortex designed to operate almost independently of the interfaced brain and to respond with latency times nearly a quarter of even a well-trained human. Blended properly with the host brain, and said host could have the operation of any given humanoid mecha feel hyper intuitive — more real than their real body, and infinitely faster." Her eyes seem to glimmer. "I've been fundamentally unable to craft onboard reflex boosters that don't create a sense of uncanniness in the operator, a horrible phantom-limb reflex like their body is moving independent of them even though all that's happening is unconscious bypass of the conscious — please tell me you're listening to me, this is important."

"I'm listening!" I am, though! I barely understand what she's talking about - some sort of pseudo-brain buried in my stemjack that knows how to operate a battlesuit like the Nosferatu? That knows how to do it better than I do? "And this thing is a — part of me?"

She stops pacing. "That is an interesting question which I don't really have the philosophical bandwidth to answer in detail right now, but essentially yes. Regardless, I want to upload some software I've been tailoring for you into that pseudocortex and see if I can teach it to operate a hardsuit. All you have to do is get in the chair, I'll do some preliminary work through the autosurgeon, we'll run new combat tests, then we'll calibrate you for your suit once Priss is done."

"Oh." A thought occurs to me. "You didn't rig Priss up with the same — pseudocortex when she was almost dead, did you? She would never forgive you for that."

"No!" Celia gasps. "Goodness, you know her almost as well as I do. She needs to be talked into things like that, despite the necessity of such things. Lena finds the speed exciting, Nene will do anything to improve her role efficiency, but yes, Priss doesn't like the idea of becoming more than human. And violating her trust would destroy the team."

"She says she wants to change on her own terms, right? Not to have technology change her in ways she can't track."

"Oh, that ." Celia smiles. "That's more a deep-seated trauma from growing up in the former Reconstruction Zones. It's not my place to explain it. Ask her about her eyes, sometime. Either way, if you'd be so kind as to take off your riding gear and get in the operating chair, the sooner we start the sooner we can get to calibrating your suit."

I do. Off go the boots, the gloves, and then I unzip and loosen the riding bodysuit up just a little and it falls to the ground, pooling around my ankles. I don't wear much under it, just underwear, shorts, and a crop-top. Too much under the super-tight outfit and it's hard to move.

Is Celia ogling me? Her expression is so unreadable, and my kin are supposed to be able to pick up on cues so subtle even the person who gives away their true feelings doesn't know they're doing it, to tell what they want even before they know. She nods. I sit down.

"Well, then," she says, crossing over to the back of the chair, "Let's begin."

She does something. Biomonitor cuffs clamp down over my wrists and ankles. It feels familiar.

Then she hooks up my stemjack, brings a VR headset over my eyes, and it's unmistakable.


I'm back there again.

It's not that big a wound, it's barely any blood at all, but it's him – I can feel him in the back of my head the same way he was when he first touched me, when he first showed me that I was a slave – only now he flicks something, a soft brush against the back of my plugs, and my limbs stiffen up and the timer starts and Priss, I know it's her because she's said it's her and because he told me to get close to her and I never thought to ask why, she's gone from begging for me to get out to screaming "WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!" and he's keeping a line open to let me speak, of course he is, because I hesitated, because he wants one of us to kill the other-

Wait, didn't this happen? Haven't I been here before? Why am I here? She could gut me with that railgun anytime she wants to, Saber White is looking at her like she wants her to do it, why is she hesitating? Doesn't she understand that she needs to preserve her own life above everything else? Isn't that what humans, who are free, are supposed to do?

"I'm not losing any more friends," she says, and-


"Sylvie."

Celia's voice. It all melts away, blurry like boiling blood.

"Sylvie!"

The headset comes off. I can feel my stemplugs still in. I can't move. Celia's unbearably close. I want her to get away. I want to run away from her.

"What just-"

"I didn't realize that those traumatic pathways still existed. I'm terribly sorry, Sylvie, I didn't think your brain would associate the pseudocortex's activation with that – event."

My own words feel like liquid, slurred. "I can't I don't I was there I was back there and it was all the same I hadtokillherbecausehesaidsoI-"

She pulls back, bent down at my height. The cuffs still haven't come off, but I'm trashing under them all the same. "Sylvie."

Doesn't she understand what being back there was like? Doesn't she?

"Sylvie. Breathe ."

"HemademeandIneverwanteditifIhadjustknownifIhadrunawaybutIcouldn'tleaveAnri-"

" Breathe ! Inhale! Exhale! Stop babbling or I'll calm you down medically!"

I freeze. I don't want that. I really don't.

"Good." She smiles. "Now. Inhale."

Inhale.

"Count to four. And exhale."

Count to four. Exhale.

"Count to four. Inhale."

Count to four. Inhale.

My body doesn't feel like my own. Celia unjacks me and the feeling only gets worse.

Count to four. Exhale.

Count to four. Inhale.

Count to four. Exhale…

"Sylvie," Celia says — she's looking at me head on — "That was not supposed to happen, obviously. I think-"

Which is when Priss, wearing her calibration suit, throws open the door, shouts, "Alright, what the hell is going-"

And then she stops. Boggles. Sees me, cuffs still on. Sees Celia. Turns to her. Her fists ball up.

"You've got some motherfucking explaining to do," she says.