Bubblegum Crisis: Stage Three
Part Fifteen
"I missed WHAT?" Nene yelped, the hacker lounging around the converted warehouse the group was using as a headquarters.
Sylia sounded amused over the video conference link they were communicating over, sitting in her uptown apartment. "Apparently a relative of a Chinese gang boss tried to avenge himself on Priss," she said, "it went as well as you'd expect."
"Priss slugged him?" Nene guessed.
"Got it in one," Sylia agreed. She tilted her head to the side, "What are you up to, by the way? My remote feed on the base computers is picking up heavy activity."
Nene wasn't surprised Sylia knew about the computer activity in the base, in fact she expected it. "I cracked the protective systems on Mason's home PC," she said, "though I had to use brute force and a lot of your computing power to get the passwords."
"He'd have a sophisticated system," Sylia said, nodding. Mason had been in charge of electronic security at Genom, as well as dirty work for Quincy. Any system he had would have to be top of the line, if only for his own safety.
"And he had a hell of a lot of extra data in a secure storage bank under his home," Nene said with a tired sigh. "I grabbed it all, but it's literally petabytes of data. I'm going to need time to sort it before we can get anything useful done."
"Would another pair of hands help?" Sylia offered willingly. Leaning forward a bit she added, "I could come down..."
"No, it's fine," Nene shook her head, even though in all honesty she would have liked to hang out with Sylia a bit more. The woman was surprisingly nice when she let down her guard a bit, but she only seemed to do it in their private base. "I'm mostly using the search programs to try to find anything relevant." she explained.
"Thanks," Sylia said. She hesitated a second before saying, "There's a computer expert at Genom that referred me to you, Lisa Valente."
"I know her," Nene agreed, "though not too well. She's a pretty good system administrator but not so much of a hacker. What about her?"
"You know that Chinese gang boss I mentioned? He claimed he was avenging his niece Lisa Valente," Sylia said dryly.
That piece of information made Nene blink in surprise. "That's a hell of a coincidence," she finally said, frowning thoughtfully. Two women could have the same name, it certainly wasn't impossible. But...
"And I don't like coincidences," Sylia said with a sigh. "Can you do a bit of digging into this Lisa's background a bit?"
"I'll do my best," Nene said, but she knew she sounded kind of dubious about it. She quickly added, "I can try to trace her background, but a good computer fraudster can be very hard to catch."
"I'm not expecting miracles," Sylia reassured her. "Even if you can confirm she is not the Lisa from Hong Kong, it would help."
"Fair enough," Nene nodded, her thoughts already moving to how she could do the searches into the two women's background. "Can I have root access to the Genom personel department? I'm gonna need to check for tampering," she asked.
Sylia pulled out a keyboard from nearby where she was lounging. She typed a few seconds then nodded, "I've sent the access key to your mailbox," she said. She gave Nene a stern look as she added wryly, "Don't do anything I'll regret later, please. If Priss' wages suddenly drop to zero I'll tell her who to blame."
Nene pouted, "Spoil sport."
Sylia snickered, then said, "Good hunting, Nene. I'm off to have a bath and get to bed."
"Good night," Nene nodded as they cut the connection.
First thing that Nene did was pull Lisa Valente's official personnel file and work record from Genom. She had joined Genom about five years back, and had risen through the ranks to her current position in system administration. Most of her supervisor's comments were pretty bland, the most often one being 'capable but unambitious.'
The background before she joined Genom was complete too, as far as Nene could tell. Lisa had worked for several smaller companies, also in data management, then applied for Genom. It was all neat and tidy, but... it seemed almost too neat.
Nene copied a list of the companies that Lisa had worked for and then sent it over to a search engine of her own devising that would look for commonalities and abnormalities. Within minutes it had searched the companies and produced a list of things they had in common. One item on the top of the list made her blink: all the companies were no longer in business.
"What the hell?" Nene muttered, confirming that fact. Yes, all the companies Lisa had been connected to were no longer in business. She ran through the list of contact numbers for references and quickly discovered none of them now worked either.
'How the hell did Genom miss this?' Nene wondered as she found online data that backed up Lisa's background, but no actual people that could confirm it. 'Then again, we do so much checking online, I guess it could be innocent,' she admitted.
Leaving the computers to search through the background of Lisa at Genom, Nene started to dig into the Hong Kong Lisa Valente. That was a harder task that Nene anticipated, for a number of reasons. Firstly as a criminal Lisa had done her damndest to stay off the official radar. Secondly, about ten years ago the China/Russia war broke out, and Hong Kong got hit in the mayhem. Lot of data lost because of a stray warhead, or supposedly stray. There were the rumors China was trying to cover up a weapons program...
Digging through off-shore data archives Nene found a birth certificate for Lisa Valente, specifying a date of birth and region. She followed school records up to her teen years in Hong Kong, then found arrest records for her time in the gangs.
"Busy little girl," Nene muttered at the string of convictions.
Starting in her teens Lisa ran with gangs in Hong Kong and gained control of the Vision group. She apparently murdered the previous leader, a pattern she followed since she got into the gangs. Vision was affiliated with Hou Bang, at least until the organization was taken down by the Chinese government. A police report revealed Lisa had squealed on Hou Bang, but she didn't get to enjoy taking down the powerful organization. She was attacked not long after and hospitalized with internal injuries, then the Chinese/Russian war hit.
Sadly, there was no death certificate, but that didn't mean much. Hong Kong Island had been flattened in the war, and a lot of records were lost. Digging through the files Nene found several photos, then compaired them to file photos of the Genom employee named Lisa.
"Huh," Nene grunted.
The two women looked... vaguely similar, but that was all. They had different hair color and different shaped eyes, and more importantly there were clear differences in facial bone structures. Short of very radical surgery she felt certain the modern Lisa was not the Hong Kong version. But her curiosity bug was bothering her, so she decided to keep digging.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
The group met at the factory on the weekend, as they weren't gathering at Sylia's office in Genom's tower. Despite the group starting out as employees of Sylia's they were coming togetrher as a team. And friends, or at least Sylia hoped.
Sylia used her pass card to enter, smiling slightly at the security scans tracing her body with light. While not lethal the defences of the building were quite strong, hopefully able to hold off a full on assault. Not that Sylia expected it to come to that, but you never knew.
The lights came on automatically, and Sylia started in only to see a figure slumped over the main computer. She felt a flash of alarm at first, then realized that Nene had fallen asleep at the terminal. The pink haired girl's head was resting on her arm, and she was snoring cutely. The screen read gobbledygook from the girl randomly pressing on the keyboard, and a bit of drool was coming from the corner of her mouth.
"Nene," Sylia tried calling quietly, but the younger woman didn't respond. A impish look cross her face as she took a step back and yelled, "Nene, time for school!"
"I'm up!" Nene yelped, jerking back as she awoke. The sudden motion was too much for the business chair she was in and she slipped right out of it, falling to the floor. "Ack!" she yelped as she bounced off her butt.
Sylia couldn't help but laugh, and Nene looked at her indignantly. "I'm sorry," Sylia managed to get her chuckles under control, "but you wouldn't wake up and..."
"Mean, very mean," Nene complained as she got up, rubbing her butt as if it hurt. She was wearing short shorts and a t-shirt, both of which looked painted on.
Sylia gulped, clearing a sudden tightness in her throat. She had a few relationships in school, but it had been a long time... she shook herself, hoping her distraction hadn't been obvious. "Are you all right?" she asked.
"I suppose," Nene smiled slightly. She stretched tiredly, "My mouth feels like something died in it. I'd better get some coffee going."
"I'll do it," Sylia volunteered quickly. As she bustled over to the coffee maker she asked, "How did your investigation into Lisa Valente go?"
"Weird, actually," Nene admitted as she sat at the meeting table. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to get it under control, "Do you want the short or long version?"
"As long as you need," Sylia said mildly as she carried over two cups of instant coffee.
"Thank you," Nene sighed as she took the coffee, sweetening it to taste then taking a drink. "Oh god that's good," she sighed.
"Lisa Valente," Sylia prodded.
"Right," Nene rubbed her eyes, "okay, I can nearly confirm that the original Lisa Valente died in Hong Kong when the Russians invaded."
"Nearly?" Sylia asked, impressed.
Nene shrugged. "The attack on the island blew too much to hell," she confessed frankly, "but I've traced her to a hospital days before the attack hit. If she got out alive it'd be a miracle." She added, "For a while there I thought Priss offed her."
That made Sylia raise her eyebrows. "Priss isn't the type," she waved that off.
"Everyone is the type, if provoked enough," Nene said with the experience of a cop. She shook herself, "Okay, here's where it gets strange."
"I'm listening," Sylia took a drink of her coffee.
"The Lisa Valente who works at Genom appears to have bought the papers of the original Lisa from Hong Kong," Nene said bluntly. She took a deep breath, "This woman emigrated to Japan using the papers, then built a background here before being hired at Genom."
Sylia froze. "So... is she a agent for someone? Maybe tied into the attacks against me?" she asked flatly, putting the cup down.
"No, or at least I don't think so," Nene said, shaking her head. "It's kind of crazy, but when I looked at her picture I was sure she looked familiar."
"What do you mean?" Sylia asked.
Nene took a deep breath, "I think she's a Boomer."
To be continued...
Note: This is me, fixing a mistake. In one chapter I had a computer expert working for Genom named Lisa Valente. In another chapter I mistakenly used the name for a gangster. Oops. So how could there be TWO of them?