Disclaimer and credits will be found after the end of the
chapter.




           DRUNKARD'S WALK II:  ROBOT'S RULES OF ORDER

                      by Robert M. Schroeck



13:  Eh... I Wonder What The *Poor* Robots Are Doin' This
Season...


A new philosophy and way of life is not given for nothing.  It
has to be paid dearly for and is only acquired with much patience
and great effort.  -- Dostoyevsky

The line between good and evil, hope and despair, does not
divide the world between "us" and "them".  It runs down the
middle of each one of us.  -- Robert Fulghum

Truth comes as an enemy only to those who have lost the ability
to welcome it as a friend.  -- Anonymous



Geo City Plaza.  Thursday, February 12, 2037.  7:44 PM

"And then she crushed my gun."  Leon dropped the rough ball of
wadded steel into his partner's open palm.  Daley's eyes widened
as he turned it over and over again in his hands.

Leon had returned from his mad dash seething with a cold, quiet
anger, and once he had heard the story Daley could see why.
*Leon-chan's always been a man of action.  It's bad enough that
the Knight Sabers can make him feel useless at times...*  He
shook his head, and wondered if Leon even knew that he had
blurted Priss' name before taking off after the Sabers.  If what
Daley suspected about the implications of that slip were true,
it just made the effect of Leon's impotence in the face of the
Sabers' opposition that much worse.  "You know," he finally said
after Leon had finished recounting the tale, "I've never liked
superheroes anyway."

It was a calculated move, a near non-sequitur intended to jolt
Leon's mood, which had been growing increasingly darker as he
told his story.  But when Leon didn't respond, and the silence
between them grew longer and longer, Daley began to fear he'd
only made things worse.

"There's something I've been meaning to tell you, Daley," Leon
said suddenly, shattering the uncomfortable silence.

Daley grasped at the only straw he could.  "I'm sorry, Leon-chan,
but I can't let you cheat on Priss," he replied, absolutely
deadpan.  "I don't care how strong your feelings for me are."

"No, I..."  Leon ground to a halt, then his head snapped around
to deliver a searing glare in his partner's direction.  Daley
couldn't help but laugh.  After a moment, Leon's dark mood
finally broke, and he joined in.  When the shared laughter
finally tapered off, Daley noted that Leon looked, if not exactly
cheerful, at least not weighed down by the cares of the world.
"That's the last thing I thought I'd ever hear you say, Daley,"
he announced with a chuckle as he lowered himself to a seat on
the patrol car's fender and watched the last of the ADP troops
march back into their transports.  "You've finally given up on
me?"

Daley unleashed his favorite smirk.  "It was either that, or
constantly wonder when your lovely wife-to-be was going to show
up and kill me."  He chuckled.  "I opted for the former."

Leon snorted.  "Wise man."

With deliberate casualness, Daley continued, "I mean, there's no
way I could stop one of those railgun bolts if one of her shots
went 'wild' while the Sabers were chasing a boomer."

Leon began to chuckle, but it died in his throat.  "Ah... um..."
He coughed.  "How long have you known?"

Daley gave a sniff of noiseless laughter.  "About half an hour.
You really should learn to control that mouth of yours, partner.
How long have *you* known?"

Leon shrugged.  "Couple of years.  Ever since the DD incident."

His partner whistled.  "And you've hid it from me all this time.
Not bad.  Forget what I said about watching your mouth.  She's
the blue one, I presume?  And I suppose you know who the other
three are?"

"One for certain, the other two I'm pretty sure about," Leon
said.  "And no, I'm not going to tell you.  Not that you won't
figure it out fast enough yourself," he added in a low mutter.

With a careless, dismissive gesture, Daley said, "What, and risk
getting my partner and his wife-to-be mad at me?  I know you,
Leon-chan.  You would've busted them wide open if you'd thought
any of them were really criminals, regardless of how you felt
about Priss."

"Don't be so sure," Leon murmured.

Daley rolled his eyes.  "Well, aren't *we* feeling emasculated
tonight."  Leon shot him another outraged glare, and he laughed.
"Look, Leon-chan, we've worked together for the better part of a
decade.  I think I know my partner by now."

"I suppose you do," Leon agreed, and then he sighed.  "Which in a
roundabout way brings us back to what I wanted to talk to you
about."  He turned and looked directly at his partner.  "I'm
going to give the Chief my two weeks' notice tomorrow, Daley."

Daley nodded, and sat down on the fender next to Leon.  "So you
*are* going to Osaka with Priss."

"Yeah.  I've got a job waiting for me there as a captain in their 
SWAT unit."  Leon took a deep breath and then released it.  "Plus 
we're going to be married, after all..."

"I *was* aware of that, Leon-chan," Daley interrupted with just a
touch of sarcasm in his voice.  "You *did* ask me to be your best
man."  He emitted a sigh himself.  "I suppose I was expecting it.
After all, you can't ask a newly-married couple to spend their
lives so far apart."  He paused for a beat.  "I'm glad you let me
know beforehand, at least."

"You didn't think I'd skip out without telling you first, did
you?" Leon asked with a quick grin.  "I just figured I'd best get
it over with quickly, or the next crisis would come up and I'd
never get a chance to do it."

"Yeah, I can see that."

Leon suddenly clapped his partner on the back and laughed.  "Look
at it this way -- now *you'll* be the most senior officer in the
department."

"Oh, joy," Daley went back to deadpan.  "Dealing with the chief
*and* Lisa-chan both.  I can hardly wait."  Mock panic flashed
into his eyes.  "Oh no!  I don't have a cousin in the ice cream
business!  How will I bribe Nene-chan?"

Leon laughed again.  "Don't worry.  I'll tell her to go easy on
you."  He rose from his seat on the fender and turned to face
Daley.  "Plus I'll give you Barry's phone number.  But you have
to arrange your own deals.  With *both* of them."

Daley thrust his lower lip out in an improbable attempt at a
pout, and looked to the skies with an outrageous hangdog
expression.  "Leon-chan's being mean to me!"

Leon rolled his eyes, but chuckled anyway.  "Is that any way for
a senior Inspector in the ADP to act?"  He jerked his head toward
the patrol car.  "C'mon, get in.  We've got a lot to cover before
I'm outta here."

As the two officers belted themselves in, Daley mused that it
could have been worse -- but not by much.  A faint sense of
impending doom settled itself in his stomach, and he tried to
ignore it.

                              * * *

Thursday, February 12, 2037.  7:51 PM

*That's it,* snarled Lisa to herself as she wrestled with the
handlebars of her motor scooter, *I'm buying a car.*

Wetter Hexe had completely disassembled her thunderstorm before
taking her leave of this world, and the sudden return of the
"natural" conditions had been less than pleasant.  Lisa wasn't
sure, but she suspected that it was even colder and windier than
it had been before the battle royale, possibly some kind of
"rebound" effect in the wake of Hexe's changes.  Or maybe she
just hadn't yet adjusted back to mid-February after her brief
exposure to the midsummer-like conditions needed for the
thunderstorm.  That this was at the very least inconvenient for
certain photojournalists riding open-seated motor scooters went
without saying.  Especially when said photojournalists were
rushing to meet up with their mercenary/vigilante friends.

The chill wind gusted along the street, wringing tears from her
eyes and freezing her at the same time as it tried to wrest
control of the scooter from her hands.  The effort it took to
maintain control and not spin out into a cold (not to mention
*painful*) pile on the pavement occasionally drew her mind from
the topic at hand, but only for a few moments.  Then it was right
back to the welter of thoughts and concerns that swamped her
brain.

To her immense relief, Lisa was living her own life -- and *only*
her own life -- once again.  The uncontrollable tide of memories
had receded and no longer threatened to swamp her sense of self.
They hadn't entirely left (*No, I couldn't be that lucky,* she
grumbled to herself as she took an icy corner with careful
deliberation) but their immediacy had faded; instead of the
overwhelming sense of personal experience, they now felt like
things that she had seen once on TV -- distant, isolated,
neutral.  Safe.

What made it worrisome, though, was that her relief had begun 
when Wetter Hexe had kissed her forehead.  If the simulacrum of 
Hexe had in fact been what she'd claimed to be (*And Doug 
certainly thought she was!* she noted to herself as she took 
another corner), Lisa could only guess at the cost.  As Doug had 
said more than once in her presence, the gods never gave anything 
for free.

As she rounded a final turn onto the street that led directly to
Raven's, Lisa tried to weigh the alternatives.  She couldn't
decide which was worse -- becoming submerged in the hundreds of
lives she had "lived" in Doug's homeworld, or owing a favor to a
goddess known for her mercurial moods and less than personable
ways.  No longer being forced to think in the "trade jargon" of
Doug's Earth (for all its usefulness while she had been
observing, anticipating and analyzing the combat) had made it
easier for Lisa to recover her own self-image.  At the same time,
though, Hexe's charge to her carried its own implicit threat --
the threat of leaving the sidelines, of ceasing to be an
observer.

It was a threat that Lisa took seriously.  Her professional
pretensions to "objectivity" were all that insulated her from the
worst of the growing strangeness around her.  Abandoning them
completely would make the strangeness -- entertaining enough from
the outside -- all too real and personal.

She laughed suddenly, bitterly, sending out a puff of frosty 
breath that streamed past her head as she sped down the street. 
*Who am I kidding?  It's been personal since I looked in Doug's 
wardrobe last summer!  I've fought boomers with my own super-
powers, for God's sake!*  A moment's reflection, though, and she 
amended that thought.  *I shouldn't deceive myself.  It's been 
personal ever since that night at ADP headquarters four years 
ago.  Since I decided to protect the Sabers instead of exposing 
them.*

Before she could confront that revelation any further, Raven's
Garage appeared in the distance, fading into a streetlit view
that reminded her of the first time she had ever seen the
building.  Frowning, she leaned into the wind and sped up.

*I can be objective about a lot of things, but not my friends.*

                              * * *

Raven's Garage.  Thursday, February 12, 2037.  8:05 PM

The meeting hadn't begun until Lisa had arrived, frozen solid and
cursing a blue streak.  In the time between dismounting her
scooter and taking her seat at the record playback station, Lisa
had wheedled Doc Raven into helping her find a good used car, a
development of which Sylia silently approved.  If she were
present at a combat, it took her substantially longer to return
to base than the Sabers.  And tonight...  tonight had been
unusually long.

With Lisa ensconced in her usual place, the post-mission review
session itself had started out normally enough, but as soon as
Sangnoir had become the subject...

"At least he doesn't want to kill us," Priss muttered from where
she sprawled on the couch.

Nene leapt to her feet.  "How can you *say* that?" she shrilled. 
Then she winced.  "Ow.  I shouldn't've moved so fast."  With 
considerably more care, she returned to her seat and curled up in 
it once again.

Sylia struggled to maintain her characteristic calm.  It would
not do to betray her own agitation and contribute to the already-
charged atmosphere that pervaded the briefing room.  That her
mood was growing steadily fouler by the moment didn't help.

Priss snorted without opening her eyes.  "Easy.  We're still
alive.  You really think that one you were fighting couldn't have
taken you out if she really wanted to, Nene?"

"I had her down for the count before he interfered," Nene huffed,
crossing her arms and giving Priss a challenging look. "I didn't
see you doing that great against the chrome bimbo."

It was bad enough that the soi-disant "goddess" had actually
*lectured* her in the middle of combat.  However, when Sylia had
removed her hardsuit, her standard post-battle inspection had
revealed yet another sarcastic commentary from the Weather Witch:
the character "noroi" carved into the white cerametal of her
plastron, just above the bustline.  The knife-strokes of its
calligraphy were precise and flawless -- and its message was
clear. Depending on the context, it meant slow-moving, stupid, or
dull in the manner of a battered and misused blade.

Sylia reflected that the mystics who prayed for messages from the 
gods didn't know how good they had it when the gods declined to 
speak.  So far, the only beings she had encountered who had 
claimed to be gods had both been arrogant and irritating.  And 
neither had done much to dissuade her from the atheism that she 
had embraced for more than a decade.

"You know," Linna said, glancing around the room at her
teammates.  "All Kat needed to do was put her hand, paw, whatever
through my hardsuit and into my chest and rip out my heart.  She
could've done it, too.  But she didn't."  In an apparently
unconscious motion, one hand went to her stomach.  Sylia had
personally bandaged the three shallow cuts there after they had
gotten out of their hardsuits.  "And my one hit on her was pure
luck."

Sylia took a long, slow draw on her cigarette -- her third since
their return to Raven's -- and savored the sensation of the hot
smoke in her lungs.  A moment later she exhaled a plume of smoke,
a jet of blue in the room's yellow lighting, as she continued to
watch the round-table discussion into which the post-combat
briefing had degenerated.

"They were *all* playing with us," Priss announced with a snarl.
"And we all got hits on'em that didn't do a thing."

"Hey!" Nene yelped.

As the byplay flowed and swirled around her, Sylia frowned and 
studied her teammates, her sisters.  Priss lay stretched out on 
the couch, her hands folded and her eyes closed as an 
uncharacteristically thoughtful expression made itself home on 
her face.  Nene was clearly upset; she huddled in her armchair 
and clutched a pillow to her breast with both arms as if hoping 
to squeeze some comfort from it.  Lisa, too, was strangely 
subdued and contributed almost nothing to the discussion; 
instead, she contented herself with using the "hydra" to scan 
back-and-forth through the suits' recordings, staring 
unblinkingly at the images on the monitors with obvious and 
almost morbid curiosity.

Then Sylia gazed across the room to where Linna stood, in an
almost mirror of her own posture.  Alone of the Sabers, Linna
returned from the fight almost ... serene.  And this worried
Sylia more than anything else.  *What did the cat-woman tell
her?* she wondered.  *What might she have *done* to Linna?*

Again, the agonizing, horrific uncertainty -- from a world where
anything was possible, how could she know what was impossible for
them?  An obvious power did not exclude unobvious ones -- just
because the woman could turn into a cat didn't mean she might not
have the ability to warp minds.  Sylia wondered for a moment how
military commanders from Sangnoir's homeworld could even begin to
plan for a battle, never knowing what impossible power might be
brought to bear on their forces without warning.

Without opening her eyes, Priss waved a hand lazily.  "Okay,
*most* of us.  Doesn't matter.  We weren't even B-grade
opposition for them."

Sylia took her cigarette from her lips and blew out another cloud 
of smoke.  Time for her own contribution.  "They were a polished 
military force, used to fighting opponents of their own power 
level.  We were nothing more than, how did he put it? 'Typical 
battlesuit goons'.  And that was a fraction of their team.  I 
hesitate to imagine the combined strength of their full company." 
She returned the cigarette to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled 
again.  "Lisa, do you have anything you'd like to contribute? 
Your communicator trace indicated you were there for the 
conflict, and you were the last one to arrive here by a margin 
greater than could be accounted for by the difference in our 
modes of travel."

Lisa started, shaken out of her video-assisted reflection when
Sylia addressed her.  "Um."  She turned in her seat to look at
the others.  "I stayed and watched after you left.  He..."  She
stopped, frowned, and then continued.  "He talked to the W... to
the women for a while.  And then they left."

"Left?" Sylia inquired.  "How?  In which direction?"

Lisa shook her head.  "No direction.  They just... vanished.
Poof.  Like soap bubbles."

Linna chuckled, a bemused smile playing across her lips.  "Why am
I not surprised?"

Sylia watched Lisa carefully as the girl shared a grin with
Linna.  *She no doubt took the opportunity to make contact with
Sangnoir,* the Sabers' leader mused.  *In the last few weeks she
has received no telephone calls from him, nor has she had the
time to seek him out.  I will need to come back to this with her
later -- in private.*

"You've said little so far, Linna."  Sylia transferred her
attention to the dancer/close-combat specialist.  "You actually
held an extended conversation with one of them.  What did you
learn?"  Sylia would not admit to anything more than an academic
curiosity, but even so, the possibility of discovering something,
anything, more about Sangnoir was encouraging.

Linna's throaty chuckle trailed away as the dancer's eyes grew 
hooded.  "Her name was Kat," she said.  "And she told me about a 
world where humans, metahumans, robots, androids, aliens of all 
descriptions and even some *computers* are all automatically 
thought of and treated as *people*."  There was an edge in her 
voice, a challenge, that Sylia didn't like.  "They've had so much 
experience with intelligent beings that looked like anything from 
black boxes to jellyfish that they can't afford to be... what did 
she call it?  'Anthrochauvinist'.  They don't care what something 
looks like, as long as it can think and make ethical choices." 
Linna fixed Sylia with a steely look that was at odds with her 
usual cheerful expression.  "What was your father really 
intending when he invented boomer technology, Sylia?"

The non sequitur almost took her by surprise, and caught the
other Sabers unawares.  There was a sudden hiss of breath from
Nene, who had gone wide-eyed at the unexpected question.  Priss
shot bolt upright, her apparent sleepiness discarded.  Even Lisa
was holding her breath and glancing between the two women.  Sylia
pursed her lips.  This was an area she had kept off-limits to the
Sabers, not by explicit declaration, but by intimidation and by
refusing even to acknowledge their questions.  Her father and his
work was *not* to be discussed.  Ever.

But Linna was not to be put off this time.  "I've seen boomers 
who were sadists, Sylia, and boomers who sacrificed themselves 
for the ones they loved.  I've seen boomers with imagination, and 
intuition, wit and cunning, and... I don't know, *heart* for lack 
of a better word.  And I've seen as many of those as I've seen 
ones which were simple killing machines."  She jammed her hands 
into her pockets and narrowed her brows.  "Tell me, Sylia --
which were the aberrations?  Did your father intend to build dumb 
machines, or was he creating people?  Because after the last few 
months, after learning about a version of Earth where everything 
is *so* different, after everything the Loon has said, and after 
everything I've seen over the years, I really *need* to know." 

She drew her hands back out of her pockets and pushed off from 
the wall to stand, feet slightly apart, arms crossed, all but 
glowering at Sylia.  "So let me ask you the same question he 
asked, which you never answered.  You told him some models 'seem' 
to be self-aware.  Is it more than seeming?  Are they people?"

"You have no way of knowing what they told you, told us, is the
truth," Sylia said, attempting to deflect the questioning.

"I have no reason to doubt it," Linna countered.  "He was more
than happy to tell us all about his homeworld, long before he
found out that boomers were more than he thought.  He had no
reason to lie.  Neither did Kat.  What would it gain her?"
She caught Sylia's eyes with her own.  "Are.  They.  People?"

Silence stretched across the room as Linna and Sylia stared at
each other, each waiting for the other to break and give in
first.

The standoff was broken, not by the capitulation of one or the 
other, but by a ragged murmur, almost a whisper, that drifted 
across the room.  "I always thought it would be cool if there 
were real superheroes," Nene rasped, her eyes glistening with 
unshed tears.  "I never thought about what it'd be like to be on 
the receiving end."  She inhaled unevenly, as if suppressing sobs 
deep within her throat.  "I don't *ever* want to visit his world. 
I don't."

There was a long silence as each of the other Knight Sabers 
wondered how to answer that declaration.  Lisa reviewed her 
second-hand memories, and wondered if there was something --
anything -- she could safely share with Nene.  Nothing came to 
mind that would not tell *too* much or violate Doug's 
confidences.  She grimaced and resisted the urge to pound a fist 
on the desktop.

"Yes," Sylia finally forced out, grateful for the interruption.
"Well."  She took a deep breath.  "Before we adjourn for the
night, let me just reiterate something I said in the field:  from
now on, official Knight Sabers policy is to avoid Colonel
Sangnoir.  We will not get involved in any boomer incident -- or
any other incident -- at which he is present.  If he shows up at
one of our operations, we leave, unless doing so directly puts an
innocent at risk."  She coolly eyed the other team members.
"Understood?"

A desultory round of acknowledgments circled the room.

"Good."  Sylia nodded once, crisply, once again in full control
of both herself and the situation.  "That's it, then.  Have a
good evening, everyone."  And without another word, she left the
room.

                              * * *

"*Everyone's* a good guy in their own heads."  Priss's comment to
her weeks earlier echoed in Nene's mind, as it had since they'd
returned to Raven's.  At the time, it seemed like a handle on
understanding the Loon's behavior.  Now she wondered about her
own.

After Sylia had dismissed them, the Sabers' leader had promptly
sequestered herself in the tiny office that she maintained in the
garage.  Meanwhile, Nene had seated herself at the "hydra" and
pretended to study the sensor tracks from her hardsuit until the
others had left.  Lisa tried to beg a ride home, to spare herself
another unprotected dash through the winter storm, but Nene had
forced herself to make excuses why she couldn't.  Fortunately for
her conscience, Linna had taken the hint and made her own offer;
she and Lisa had departed shortly afterward.

Priss had been the last to leave.  The singer had said nothing,
but she had smiled knowingly and laid a gentle hand on the
younger woman's shoulder, squeezing once in encouragement before
leaving herself.

Now it was a quarter of an hour later, and Nene was trying to
steel herself to knock on the door of the small room that served
as Sylia's office at the garage base.  She stood staring at the
knob for several minutes before taking a deep breath and rapping
once, diffidently.

"Come."  Sylia's distracted voice was muffled by the intervening
door but still clearly audible.  Nene pushed on the knob, and the
door, which was closed but not latched, swung open easily to
reveal the leader of the Knight Sabers, cigarette still in hand,
staring blankly at the flickering computer screen before her.
"Yes, Nene?" she said without turning.

"I, um... I was just wondering," Nene began in a near whisper,
"how long it would take to repair my hardsuit."

Sylia stubbed out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and 
swiveled to face Nene.  She gave a faint smile, noteworthy as 
much for its frank openness as for its weariness.  "Don't worry, 
Nene," she said.  "You won't be out of commission for more than a 
couple of days.  I already set the nanotank to fabricate a new 
backplate for your hardsuit before the meeting; it should be done 
late tomorrow, and installed the day after that."

"Oh, good, good," Nene murmured.  She closed her eyes and sagged
against the doorjamb.  "I just... I mean, I wanted..."

"Nene," Sylia said softly, and the younger woman's eyes flicked
open again.  "Do you want to talk about it?"

The redhead smiled weakly.  "Can't fool you, can I?"

Sylia's expression grew almost tender.  "You have no chance of
deceiving your elder sister, you know.  Here."  She lifted a blue
binder marked "Girard Systems" from a stool next to her, and
patted its cushion.  "Sit down and tell me all about it."

Nene nodded, and perched herself on the stool.  She bounced her
heels against its legs for a few moments as she bit her lip and
considered what she wanted to say.

"Sylia, am I a good person?" she finally blurted.

Sylia's expression softened further.  "I have never thought of
you as anything but, Nene."

"But I don't *feel* like I'm a good person any more," Nene
murmured.  "I... I've been so angry lately, and the things I've
done..."

Sylia reached over and took one of Nene's hands in her own.
"It's not pretty, but it happens, Nene.  You get caught up in the
fever of battle," she offered softly.

"No!" Nene cried, then took a great, sobbing breath.  "Not me.
Not to me.  I'm not like that!"

The leader of the Sabers shook her head sadly.  "We're not
saints, Nene, none of us.  We're only human, even you, and being
human sometimes means losing control."

Nene shook her head.  "You don't lose control, Sylia.  Never!"

Sylia chuckled wryly.  "Oh, I do.  Believe me, I do.  You just
don't usually see my ... episodes."  She chuckled again.  "After
all, I have an image to protect."

Nene began to laugh, but it suddenly turned to a great, gasping
sob, and tears began to spill from her eyes.  Before she was
aware of it, Sylia had leapt from her chair and wrapped her arms
around the crying redhead.  Nene's arms clamped around her waist,
and she buried her face against Sylia's body, shaking as she
moaned into soft fabric there.

"It'll be all right," Sylia murmured, stroking the girl's hair.
"You didn't do anything wrong.  You're still a good person."

"I wish I could believe that," Nene keened into the muffling
cloth.  "But I can't.  I was going to kill that woman to prove
that I wasn't a murderer.  What's *happened* to me?"  She lifted
her eyes to meet Sylia's, eyes that were flooded with tears.
"What's happened to me?" she repeated in a whisper.

Sylia didn't have a quick or easy answer.

                              * * *

An hour after Nene had calmed down enough to drive home, Sylia
sat in her office and lit the last cigarette in her current pack.
She took a long drag on it, held the smoke, and let it out in a
sigh that did nothing to ease her mind but which contributed to
the blue-grey haze that obscured the ceiling.

She had convinced Nene that she was not an evil person, at least
for the moment.  It wasn't hard to be convincing when you
yourself were convinced.

She *had* to be convinced.  If she were to doubt herself as Nene
had done...  She shook her head with the faintest of movements,
almost imperceptible twitches.  No.  Doubt herself and she would
doubt the Mission.  And doubting the Mission meant doubting her
father.

She could no more allow herself to do that than she would allow
herself to dance naked in the lobby of GENOM Tower.

                              * * *

Thursday, February 12, 2037.  10:53 PM

Nene Romanova sat in her bed, surrounded by stuffed animals, and
took no comfort in their presence.

On her nightstand sat a cup of hot cocoa that had cooled almost 
to room temperature, and an untouched slice of chocolate cake 
which still had some hours to go before it went stale.  She wore 
brightly-striped pajamas of warm cotton flannel, and in her lap 
was a book.

It had been her favorite book, once.  Howard Pyle.  *The
Adventures of Robin Hood.*  The definitive Japanese translation,
first published in 2018.

It was the third copy she'd owned, having worn out two earlier
ones with her enthusiastic reading and rereading.

And she could not bear to look at it any more.

After changing and crawling into bed, Nene had retrieved the book
from its honored place on the small table that served her as a
nightstand.  She had fully intended to immerse herself in its
tales of bold, heroic derring-do as an antidote to the ugly and
distressing events of the night.  But as she burrowed down among
her plush companions and tried to read, she saw things in the
stories she'd never seen before.

The faceless peasants whose taxes doubled when Robin stole their
original payments.  Oh, they got the money back -- Robin never
(well, hardly ever) kept anything for himself -- but sooner or
later another tax collector would come.

The nameless Merry Men who fell to the arrows or swords of the
Sheriff's forces, dying without a second thought from the author.
Heroes all... but still dead.

The stories were all tales of derring-do, yes.  Robin versus the
Sheriff.  But it wasn't really one-on-one, was it?  It always
played out on a larger stage, and it always affected other
people.  It *had* to -- if Robin's cause didn't help the people,
what was the point of it?  But she'd never realized before... the
people paid as well as gained.  The fights always spilled over
onto them, one way or another.

It spilled over onto all of them.  The Merry Men, the peasants, 
the Sheriff's men -- the spear-carriers, the innocent bystanders, 
the *cannon fodder*.  Robin never died, the Sheriff never died. 
Even Prince John didn't die, despite Richard's return.

But so many people around them did.

People like Irene.  Like Sho's mother, whose name she had never 
known.  Like Sylvie and Anri.  Like Adama.  So many she knew, and 
so many more she didn't.

People -- guilty and innocent alike -- caught up in and run over
by events.

As Nene sat there in the dark room, the only light coming from 
the small lamp on her nightstand, she dropped her face into her 
hands and sobbed.  "Damn him," she whispered through her tears. 
"Damn him!" she shrieked, and threw the book across the room. Its 
pages fluttered until slammed against the wall and then slid to 
the floor with a dull thud.

In the sudden silence that followed, all Nene could hear was the
pounding of her own heart and the harsh rasp of her breath.

"And damn *me*."

                              * * *

ADP Headquarters.  Friday, February 13, 2037. 8:57 AM

Daley was growing concerned.  Leon had been in the Chief's office 
for fifteen minutes now, and still things were quiet.  He glanced
at the closed shades blocking his view of the room's interior.
By his measure, the Chief should have started yelling fourteen
minutes before.  All this quiet was nerve-wracking.

Finally, there was a clatter and the office door swung open.  Leon
stepped through, followed by the Chief.  The two men exchanged a
few words in an inaudible mutter and then shook hands.  The Chief
retreated into his office while Leon turned and angled on Daley's
desk.

"So?" Daley asked softly.

Leon sighed.  "He tried to talk me out of it, even offered me a 
raise."

"But you didn't take it."  Daley studied his partner.

"I didn't take it," Leon confirmed with a sober nod.  "In two 
weeks, I'm out of here."

                              * * *

GENOM Tower.  Friday, February 13, 2037. 9:23 AM

"Magnificent!" Chairman Quincy declared, his eyes riveted to the 
monitor on which the tacteam's assembled footage played.  There, 
the white Knight Saber dueled with an auburn-haired woman in 
black, laser sword opposing knives that crackled with electrical 
power.  "Magnificent!" he repeated.  A disquieting smile played 
on his lips.

Katherine Madigan stood at her accustomed spot behind and to the
left of Quincy as he watched the recordings.  She had hoped to
use this early-morning appointment with the Chairman to announce
her success and present Sangnoir to him.  Instead, she could only
report her failure in the wake of the unanticipated appearance of
four more Visitors.

Upon hearing this, the Chairman had demanded descriptions.  When 
he learned she had video footage, he had leapt upon it with an 
eagerness that had surprised and frightened her.  Once again, he 
took personal control of the system, in direct contravention of 
his usual habit, overseeing every aspect of the replays with the 
mouse/remote.  Three times now he'd watched it through, eyes wide 
and smile broad, occasionally shaking his head and chuckling, 
sometimes commenting, more to himself than to her. Every once in 
a while he'd press the bookmark button on the mouse/remote.

When his third viewing of the recording had ended, he turned back
to her, that smile -- shark-like, anticipatory, almost gleeful --
still on his lips.  "Excellent work, Madigan," he said in tones
that barely betrayed an excitement that she had never before seen
in the man.  "Your failure to capture Sangnoir is understandable
and forgivable, given the situation's unexpected developments."

Madigan let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
"Thank you, sir."

A sly look grew in his eyes.  "Did you get their names?" he
asked.

He seemed to know the answer already, but she replied anyway.
"No, sir."

The smile widened without getting appreciably warmer.  "I can 
give them to you, although it probably won't do you much good. 
Four of them..." he mused, more to himself than to her, as the 
smile faded.  "Almost certainly simulacra, otherwise they *all* 
would have been there.  But *four*...  He should not have had the 
strength to manifest *four*, not and remain conscious.  And if 
they weren't simulacra... well, we would have lost him, now, 
wouldn't we?  They wouldn't have bothered to stay.  Or would 
they?  Still, he should have been rendered unconscious by the 
power requirement for four simulacra..."  Quincy frowned and 
shook his head.  "A puzzle, Madigan, a terrible puzzle."

"Sir?"  This was almost as disconcerting as the smile had been.

Quincy shook himself, almost as if awaking from a sudden doze.
"Nothing for you to worry about, Madigan," he said, the smile
returning.  "Nothing at all.  Now to those names."

He raised the remote once more, and retrieved a still frame: the
White Knight and her opponent, once more.  A finger-twitch and
the image zoomed in on the woman with the knives.  "Wetter Hexe,"
Quincy announced.  "Her birth name is Helene Diedmeier, not that
I'd expect her to be making use of it here.  The uniform's not
one I recognize," he added, more to himself, "but then again,
that's no surprise.  Elizabeth never could stick with a single
design for more than a few weeks at a time."

Another finger-twitch, and a different close-up of the woman
appeared on the screen.  "As Sangnoir claimed, all four women are
far more dangerous than he," Quincy continued.  "But she is the
most dangerous at all."  He turned to face her.  "Do not under
any circumstances antagonize Wetter Hexe if you should encounter
her, Madigan.  Do you understand me?  Doing so could threaten the
survival of GENOM, and I will not have that."

"Yes, sir," Madigan repeated as she ensured that she had the
woman's names committed to memory.  *How does he know all this?
How *can* he know all this?* she wondered, although she carefully
schooled her features to give away nothing of what she thought.

"I heard her voice last night," he added, his deep voice suddenly
infected with a quality that, had it been anyone else other than
the Chairman, Madigan would have called "dreaminess".

"Preliminary news reports indicate that most of MegaTokyo heard 
her orders to Sangnoir."  She congratulated herself for her 
foresight in checking the news digests on her desk upon arriving 
that morning.  "Almost everyone not receiving the sound through 
some kind of electronic relay felt compelled to grovel or abase 
themselves."  *Thank God for small favors,* she added silently. 
*Last night had been bad enough without a compulsion to grind my 
face into my carpet.*

"Yes," Quincy rumbled.  "Yes, they would."  He pointed the remote
and thumbed it once more.  The blonde cat-woman replaced Wetter
Hexe on the screen.  "Kat.  Real name, Kathleen Avins."  He
pursed his lips.  "Her half-form is far more 'cute' in appearance
than I ever envisioned it," he added, again as if to himself.

Madigan frowned.  *He knows her on sight, but has never seen her 
before?*  

The image changed once again, to display the woman of shining
metal idly fending off an attack by the blue Knight Saber.
"Silverbolt. Real name, Diana Apostolidis.  Native of Greece."
Quincy chuckled.  "The Blue Saber could not even begin to offer
her a challenge; she is almost as formidable as Hexe.  More so,
even, in several narrowly-defined areas."

Another gesture with the remote control, and the last of the four
appeared:  braided auburn hair, black spandex bodysuit and cowl
that bared nothing of her but her mouth, thigh-high boots and
opera-length gloves of black leather, their ends folded over into
cuffs.  Madigan winced at the sight; this was not the best image
of this woman that the Chairman could have chosen.  She lay on
her back upon a cracked and crumbling sidewalk, and what could be
seen of her face was bruised and swollen.  The pink Knight Saber
straddled her body, beating her savagely.

Madigan stood silently for several minutes as Quincy did nothing
but stare at the screen.

"Ah, Shadowwalker," he finally whispered, almost tenderly.
"Shadowwalker," he repeated louder and more firmly.  "Real name,
Margaret Viel.  Maggie."  He fell silent again, but only for a
moment. Then he shook his head.  "Felled so easily.  I am
surprised.  Or is the Pink Saber far more competent than she has
hitherto appeared?"

"Her combat skills did improve notably between her first 
appearance on the team in 2031 and the Largo fusion reactor 
incident of 2034," Madigan offered.  "Given her propensity for 
remaining out of direct combat, it's possible that her 
improvement has continued, but has not yet been noted."  Madigan 
mentally ruffled through her memorized notes for this meeting and 
changed the subject.  "I have forwarded a high fidelity sample of 
the... of Shadowalker's sonic attack to one of our R&D divisions, 
in the hopes that we can reproduce it.  Given its performance 
against the Pink Saber, it holds considerable potential for a 
profitable weapons technology."

"Yes," Quincy mused.  "The Germans were working along those lines
toward the end of World War II.  Have our researchers consult the
records of those experiments.  In particular, see to it that the
Lofer Institute in the Tyrol is 'encouraged' to share Doctor
Zippermeyer's private research notes on the subject with GENOM."

"Yes, Chairman."  Another mental note.  She'd need to write these
down as soon as she got back to her office.

"And Madigan?"  Quincy paused just long enough to worry her.
"You *will* capture him, and you *will* bring him here to me.  Or
I will replace you with someone who can."

She nodded.  "I understand, sir.  I assure you I will have him
here in your office within the week."

Quincy nodded.  "Very good, then.  Good day, Madigan."  He lifted
his attention from her, dismissing her from his presence.

As Katherine left his office, she saw from the corner of her eye
that Quincy's attention had returned to the monitor, and that he
now paged through the stilled frames.  "To have been there..." he
rumbled, almost wistfully.

                              * * *

GENOM Tower.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 11:41 AM

Father Knecht and the other Jesuits had long ago instilled in 
Katherine Madigan an appreciation of elegant, efficient and most 
of all simple plans.  The mercenary-turned-priest had told her 
more than a few horror stories of operations that had gone wrong, 
sometimes catastrophically, because of a commanding officer's 
over-fondness for baroque encrustations of extra steps, sub-plans 
and contingencies.  Given the necessity of adding a distraction 
for the Knight Sabers to her original plan -- what amounted to a 
new secondary goal -- Katherine had sought a way to accomplish it 
which appealed to that appreciation.

She had found it.

Simple, direct, efficient.  The Sabers would not suspect that it 
was a distraction, and it had the added benefit that would 
eliminate an up-and-coming rival without killing him, while at 
the same time ridding GENOM of a potentially serious PR 
liability.

*Killing three birds with one stone,* she mused with a tiny 
smile.  *Can't do too much better than that.  And even with the 
cost of hiring the Sabers we're still under budget.*  For a 
moment, pity replaced her pleasure.  *And perhaps the Sabers will 
put the poor thing out of her misery.*  But she didn't think that 
they would be quite so cold-blooded.  

Hm.  That was a thought.  Historically, the Sabers had been 
somewhat... inconsistent in their attitudes toward boomers; the 
target might arouse their pity, motivating them to a rescue 
rather than a retrieval.  In fact, she rather expected it now 
that she thought about it.  If they did, so much the better for 
her budget -- she would be well within her rights to refuse to 
pay the whole fee in such a case.  

Katherine smiled to herself.  If the Sabers rescued the boomer, 
then its disposal would no longer be her problem -- another 
savings, even if she didn't get to ruin Sheng as badly as she 
wished.  She'd just have to make sure to leak the right 
information to the Sabers to make them jump in the direction she 
wanted.  

Now if only she could gut the irresponsible, perverted toads who 
had authorized the design and production of the BU-33SP series. 
However, they had long ago passed into that afterlife reserved 
for those particularly debased cybertechnologists who are 
determined to destroy themselves with their own lusts.  One of 
GENOM's more extreme retirement plans, enacted when a senior 
executive had realized the depth of the error involved, had seen 
to that.

*Oh, well.  Life is filled with all manner of little
disappointments with which we must cope.*

She made one more pass through the paperwork on her desk, then 
signed off on it, placing the plan once again in motion.  *This 
had better do it,* she thought.  *Or *I'm* going to be getting a 
"special retirement".  I've had too many failures and lapses in 
too short a time -- like not noticing that Lisa-san's apartment 
was across the hall from Sangnoir's.  Thank God I hadn't visited 
her officially!*

Still, the lapse gnawed at her.  Perhaps she had already lost her
edge, and she just hadn't noticed.  How long before the sharks
below her scented blood?  She needed this operation to finally go
right.  She needed to have Sangnoir in the Chairman's office, and
soon.  Or else.  It wouldn't matter how much soul-searching she
did if her soul had no body to go with it...  Involuntarily, her
hand dropped to her waist; her fingertips stroked the cellphone
there, as if to reassure herself it still existed.  She was glad
that she hadn't had to use its secret functionality so soon, only
three days after retrieving it from its hiding place.

*I'm damned lucky Mr. Quincy was in such a good mood this
morning. I was expecting to be sacked at the very least for the
failure, not complimented on accomplishing what I could in the
face of unforeseen circumstances.*  Katherine frowned as she
considered their meeting earlier that morning.  *Mr. Quincy was
quite voluble today, far more so than usual.  And what he
said...*

A few finger taps on the screen of her desktop brought up the 
notes she had jotted down upon her return to her office some 
hours earlier.  She browsed through the list of names and 
comments, transcribed as accurately as she could from the 
chairman's comments.  *How could Mr. Quincy know all this? 
Simulacra, the limits of Sangnoir's strength, the capabilities of 
those women.*  She shook her head, still frowning.  *Why, of all 
things, did he sound almost *nostalgic*?  No one from our world 
could possibly have this knowledge...*

Her breath caught in her throat as the obvious answer made itself
known to her.  "...unless he's *not* from our world," she
whispered.

But that was ridiculous.  Mr. Quincy's personal history was
extensively documented, and had been since he had exploded onto
the business scene in the middle 1990s.

Then again, Sangnoir had more than enough paper documentation of
his own, and he was certainly no native of this universe.

And now that she thought of it, in his own way, the Chairman was 
every bit as ... extraordinary an individual as Sangnoir was. 
Even though he was in his middle seventies, Chairman Quincy was 
remarkably vital and physically powerful.  That was something 
quite rare in elderly males as tall as he was -- at almost 215 
centimeters he was a giant of a man.  Few persons of such a 
height reached his age without a huge number of medical problems. 
But he had never been ill in all the time she'd worked for him, 
nor, to the best of her knowledge, had he ever even seen one of 
the company doctors in his office.  On top of that, his willpower 
and charisma were both almost physical forces, and his mind was 
considered one of the keenest on the planet.

*Is it possible?* she wondered.  *Could Sangnoir be our *second*
Visitor, not our first?  And could Mr. Quincy be a paranormal,
too?*

*How extraordinary do you have to be before you stop being an
ordinary human?*

As she laid her hand unconsciously upon her cellphone, she
wondered what this meant for her loyalties and duties... and her
long-term survival.

                              * * *

Friday, February 13, 2037, 12:14 PM

Leon sipped his coffee and frowned.  "So she didn't actually hurt
you?" he asked softly as he reached for the cracked bowl which
held sugar packets that Priss had "liberated" from a dozen nearby
fast food joints.  He grabbed three, tore them open, and dumped
their contents into the mug.

Priss shook her head.  "No more than the typical boomer 
might've."  With a click, the trailer's small gas heater turned 
on, and its aging fan rattled its way up to full spin.

They sat facing each other over the small table wedged into the 
front end of Priss' trailer.  Leon "just happened" to be in her 
neighborhood when it was time for his lunch hour, and he had 
shown up on her doorstep with the news that he had given his two-
week notice to the ADP, along with a bag of burgers and two cups 
of coffee, steaming in the bright light of a cold winter noon.

Priss had been savaging a guitar all morning, trying to pour all
her conflicted feelings about the previous night into the
instrument and from there into some kind of musical catharsis.
It had been some help, but not quite enough, even though she was
sure she had gotten a new song out of it.  When she saw Leon's
face at the door, she knew he was a fellow sufferer, if not for
the same reasons as she, and she let him in to share both lunch
and his unease.

"Still..." Leon prompted after the conversation had stalled for a
minute.

Priss shook her head, as if trying to clear it.  "I might have
fought her to a standstill, Leon, but she was holding back on me.
She was holding back!  We were *so* outclassed."

Leon thought about the flattened disk of lead and copper that
he'd slipped into his shirt pocket that morning, and nodded. "I'm
surprised you're taking it so calmly."

Priss gave him a lopsided smile.  "Oh, I am, and I'm not.  I've
been spending all morning dealing with it.  You know I'm more a
'doer' than a 'thinker', Leon, but I've been thinking a lot
today."  The smile drifted away.

'Yeah?"  He sipped at his coffee.  "Come to any conclusions?"

She nodded, pursed her lips as if about to speak, then blew a
long breath out through her nose.  Leon waited patiently -- over
the years he had learned the importance of patience when dealing
with Priss -- until she'd worked out exactly how to say what she
wanted to say.  "There was something the chrome woman said to me
while we were fighting last night.  'Because I am safe in my
metal skin I am boomer?  Then you are boomer too, safe in *your*
metal skin.'"

She took a bite from her burger, and continued speaking as she 
chewed.  "And you know, I've been thinking about that since last 
night.  What's a boomer, really?"  As Leon opened his mouth to 
reply, she swallowed and waved him off.  "No, no, I know what the 
official word is."

She took a gulp of coffee.  "I mean, I hate boomers, you know
that.  Hate'em big time.  But I never stopped and thought about
*what* it was about boomers that I hated."

"And now you have?" he asked.

Priss nodded.  "Yeah, I think I've got it figured out."

Leon raised his eyebrows.  "Well, let's hear it."

His fiancee closed her eyes for a moment, evidently concentrating
on how to put her thoughts into words.  "You...  you know how I
felt about Sylvie."

He knew.  They'd spent a long night over a year earlier coming
to grips with that, together.  "Yeah, I remember."

"And Anri was almost like a kid sister," she continued, eyes 
still closed.  "Just like Adama kinda got to be like a kid 
brother in the few hours that I knew'im.  I didn't -- couldn't --
hate any of'em, even though someone built them."  She paused, and 
took another long, deep breath.  "On the other side..."  She 
opened her eyes and looked intently at him.  "You remember Largo, 
right?"  Leon gave her a Look, and she said, "Right, right, 
stupid question.  Well, Sylia thinks that Largo might have been, 
at least partly, some kind of copy of Brian J. Mason."

Leon whistled.  "A brain upload?  Slick.  Except it drove him
nuts."

Priss grinned.  "Or maybe he was nuts already and it just took
the brakes off him.  But here's what I'm gettin' at -- Sylvie and
Anri weren't boomers, but Largo *was*.  And I don't care that the
bastard was born flesh-and-blood, but so was Mason."

"Excuse me," Leon interjected with a frown of confusion, "but
you've lost me."

Priss laughed, a sound without any mirth to it.  "What I hated
about boomers was that they were all *monsters* that got off on
making people suffer and die.  That was what 'boomer' meant to
me.  Didn't matter that I knew people -- human people -- who were
like that, too, back when I was running with one gang or another.
Boomers did it, it was what boomers were, right?"

"Sounds like a little cognitive dissonance there," Leon said with
a gentle smile.

"Yeah," Priss nodded.  "Sylia said somethin' like that once."
Her eyes grew distant for a moment and Leon assumed she was
delving into the memory.  Then their focus returned to him, and
she continued.  "I didn't really think about it -- I'm not always
one for thinking much, in case you hadn't noticed..." (and here
Leon smiled as he knew he was expected to) "...but that's what I
did today.  And what I figured out, was that I wasn't hating all
boomers because they were boomers.  I was hatin' them all because
*some* boomers were sadistic killers.  And that was wrong."  She
shook her head with a bemused half-smile on her lips.  "Might as
well hate all humans because some happen to be scum like Mason.
It's just stupid."

Leon cocked an eyebrow.  "So...?" he led.

"So..."  She looked almost nervous, as though vocalizing her
decision would make it final and irrevocable.  "I've decided that
I've gotta stop hating boomers, because how will I know if I meet
another Sylvie or another Adama if I hate'em right off?  Fuck, I
blew Adama off when I first met him.  It's only because he was a
persistent little shit that I got to know him."  A fond smile
drifted onto her lips for a moment, then vanished as she caught
him again with her eyes.  "You understand?  I've gotta give them
all a chance."

"Except for the ones shooting at you," Leon amended with a smile
of his own.

Priss chuckled.  "Yeah.  Except for the ones shooting at me." The 
chuckle dwindled away, followed by a wistful look.  "I mean, it's 
the least I can do, right?  To honor them?"

Leon leaned across the table and kissed her, softly, gently.
"Believe me, that's a lot."

                              * * *

Friday, February 13, 2037, 1:11 PM

"Damn," Lisa swore softly as she scrolled through the page.
"Censored again."  She closed the browser window without printing
a reference copy.  At least a complete, unexpurgated copy of the
story existed in the Knight Sabers' archives, despite Sylia's
displeasure with it.

Lisa grimaced as she shut down the system, and then dropped 
herself down on her bed.  The box spring protested, but she 
didn't care.  *I knew the GENOM-owned papers would never print the 
parts where Doug calls the Sabers slavehunters, but I thought at 
least *one* of the independents would have some integrity!*  She 
let out a wordless cry of frustration and shook both fists at the 
ceiling. "Damn it!" she added, for good measure.

*Damn it,* she repeated in her thoughts.  *Doug, where are you
hiding?  God, I wish I knew.  I really need to talk to you.
Last night really, really shook me up...*

She wanted to go out hunting for him, but she hadn't the first 
idea where to look.  She had tried mapping all his appearances 
since he'd bolted, and looking to see if there was likely central 
location out of which he could be operating, but it had proved 
less than useful -- he'd been seen all over the city, and the 
most probable zone was far too large to be a useful lead. No one 
had apparently seen him or his motorcycle en route to or from an 
incident either.  *Which could mean he's teleporting, dammit, and 
that just makes it harder.*

All she had to go on were rumors and noise.  The least outrageous
of them said that Doug had attacked IDEC, but that the whole
thing had been hushed up by GENOM so as not to upset the
stockholders.  Lisa believed that just about as much as she
believed one that said Doug had been seen entering a flying
saucer at Moriyuki Park, but for months now IDEC had been setting
up "incidents" to study Doug and his powers.  *Like the Boomer
Giant,* she mused.  Perhaps if she were to nose about IDEC, and
see what they were up to...  If she got lucky, she might even
catch a team heading out on one of those "incidents", and she
could corner Doug afterwards...

*Yes!*  She sat up abruptly.  *That's what I'll do.  I'll head
over to IDEC right now!*

Her phone rang.

*Just as soon as I take this call,* she mentally amended, and 
without turning toward the console she snatched up the handset. 
"Vanette here," she said, forgetting for a moment that she wasn't 
in the city room of a newspaper.

"Good afternoon, Lisa-san."  The feminine tones were cultured and
faintly amused, and Lisa had almost turned all the way toward the
phone console to see the video image before she recognized them.
The speaker was less distressed than when they'd last spoken,
which had made a difference in the sound of her voice.  She was
also far more elegantly dressed.  The combination of the two had
altered her just enough that it had taken Lisa a few moments to
place the caller.

"Madigan-san!" she said, a bit more brightly than she'd intended,
but now that she had a plan of action, her momentary dark spell
had already started lifting.  She finished turning to see a head-
and-shoulders view of the lavender-haired executive on the
phone's screen.  "Hello!  What brings you to call?"

Katherine Madigan looked briefly disconcerted, then displayed the
faintest hint of a smile.  "Didn't I tell you to call me 'Kate'?"

Lisa swallowed her nervousness at the implications of this level
of familiarity and smiled back.  "Sorry... Kate-san.  it's just,
well, I'd have to be an idiot not to know who you are, and,
well..."

Madigan waved off Lisa's protest with a careless gesture.  "Think 
nothing of it.  As to why I'm calling, well...  I was wondering 
if you'd be free some night next week to do some watching 
together.  Just us girls?"

*Uh-huh,* Lisa thought.  *Still, it might give me a chance to 
find out what her last visit was all about.*  "Let me see," she 
said into the handset, and turned to her desktop machine to call 
up her schedule.  "How about Thursday night?"

Pale purple hair rippled like a curtain as Madigan dipped her
head to check her own schedule, somewhere off the bottom edge of
the screen.  "Actually, that would be perfect."  She nodded and
looked up.  "I have a... major presentation on Friday, and some
relaxation the night before would be just the thing for me.
Shall we say, sevenish?"

Lisa returned the nod.  "That works for me.  Where do you want to
get together?"

Madigan frowned.  "My apartment would be a bit problematic, as 
I'll have the materials for my presentation all over the place, 
and frankly, they're quite confidential.  Would it be too much of 
an imposition if I were to visit you again?"

"Not at all.  As long as it doesn't bother you that my place is
quite a bit downscale from what you're used to..."

Her caller laughed, a surprisingly pleasant sound.  "Lisa-san,
you should have seen the places I lived during and right after
college.  I found my visit to your apartment to be positively
nostalgic.  Besides," and to Lisa's utter surprise Madigan shared
a conspiratorial wink, "I was never half the housekeeper you seem
to be.  To this day, I'm utterly dependent on my maid service.
Trust me, you have nothing to be embarrassed about."

"Well, if you're sure..." Lisa began.

"Quite."  Madigan smiled.  "Would it help if I brought ice
cream?"

Lisa laughed.  "I think ice cream could convince me not to be
self-conscious.  Swiss vanilla almond fudge?"

"Done," announced Madigan.  "I'll see you Thursday night, then.
Enjoy your weekend, Lisa-san."

"You, too, M... Kate-san."  Lisa frowned at the verbal stumble.

Madigan simply chuckled again.  "Don't worry, you'll get used to
it."

"Oh, I hope so.  Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"  And the video screen went dark.

"Well," Lisa announced to the otherwise-empty apartment as she
hung up then sat back and regarded the telephone.  "That was...
unexpected."

The phone rang again.

"...and so is that," she sighed, then lifted the receiver again.
"Moshi-moshi!"

"Hello, darling, it's Momma," a piercing soprano voice announced
into her ear as the familiar face appeared on the screen.

Lisa resisted the urge to roll her eyes.  "Hi, Momma.  What's
up?"

"I'm just calling to see how my little girl's doing this week!"

An evil impulse drove its way from her id to her mouth without 
engaging any of the brain cells in between.  "Oh, I'm okay, 
Momma.  I just got off the phone from arranging a date with my 
dear friend the assistant to the chairman of GENOM."

Her mother's shrieks of surprise and delight were audible in the
apartments on either side of her.  *I think I'll let her go on
for a few more minutes before I tell her that Kate's a woman and
that it's not *that* kind of date,* Lisa thought with an evil
grin.

                              * * *

IDEC.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 1:42 PM

I went home.  I did a post-mortem on the fight, and then I 
crashed.  By the end of my analysis -- which, by the way, I 
flunked myself on -- I was running solely on fumes and caffeine 
from a cup of mint tea I'd made myself, and the latter was about 
to run dry.  I had almost no energy reserves to speak of, so I 
could barely heal myself before crashing; I managed to knit my 
broken ribs back together and scab over the worst of the wounds 
and that was it.  I did manage to undress myself before falling 
into the chirping metallic hammock that pretended to be my bed.

Of course, I had to get up a mere five and a half hours later.
Most other days, five hours' sleep would've let me pop right up,
fresh and energetic, but that morning I felt like an extra in a
George Romero movie.  My energy reserves were there -- I finished
healing myself before getting into the shower -- but I simply
hadn't gotten enough sleep to shake a general feeling of headachy
exhaustion.  "Gods help me if I have to fight anyone or anything
today," I muttered to myself as I got dressed.

I made it to work without crashing my bike, and stumbled into the
lobby, carrying my helmet in via the bowling ball bag again.  I
managed to be polite and friendly to Sindra as I tottered through
to the cube farm beyond -- she was still a little twitchy, poor
thing -- but I only grunted when Chizue threw me my morning
bagel.

I had already taken a couple bites from it when I pounded on
Ohara's door.

"Come," was the muffled reply.

"Good morning, and aren't we the picture of health," he said as I
staggered in and put down the bag.

I didn't feel like clever repartee that morning.  "I thought you
were going to quit it with the fucking boomers."

Ohara put down his pencil and looked up at me with honest
surprise in his eyes.  "We did."

"The bunch that I fought last night all locked on to me just like
the little army you deployed against me at Bunko's.  You're
telling me they weren't yours?"

"They certainly weren't," Ohara declared.  "Why the hell would we
do that?  We *have* you already.  The only reason we sent boomers
after you was to capture or test you, and to study what you could
do.  We can do that a lot more safely -- and *cheaply* -- here in
the Tower."

If I hadn't been so fried from the aftereffects of the battle, I 
probably would have thought of that myself.  I hadn't, though, so 
I made the universal gesture of "oh what a schmuck I am" by 
wiping my hand down my face and groaning as the obvious 
implication finally made itself known to me.  "Oh, great.  Just 
great," I growled.  "A third player's joined the game."

Ohara thought about that for a moment, then nodded soberly.  "I
think you may be right."

"I *know* I'm right."  I rubbed my eyes and wished for some 
aspirin. "Gods, I hate this world."

Ohara smiled his little not-smile smile.  "I don't blame you. I'm 
not too fond of it myself sometimes."

                              * * *

The employee lounge had a medical station with packets of
aspirin.  I took three -- packets, not individual aspirin -- and
washed the tablets down with the strongest tea I could brew.
Then I made my way to my lab, locked the door behind me, and
dropped heavily and gracelessly into my chair.

"Oy," I said to the empty room.  "Vey."

The empty room declined to respond.

I groaned and rubbed my eyes, then leaned over to pull my helmet
out of the bag.  Today's task list started with listening to
whatever Knight Saber traffic my codebreakers had intercepted and
recorded.  I set the helmet on the desktop and turned it so that
the faceport and goggles faced me.  I regarded it wordlessly,
thinking not about the valuable intelligence stored in its
volatile memory, but instead on Hexe's reprimand to me the
previous night.

I had indeed gone too far.

The thought of what I had done to Pink, what I had been *about*
to do when Hexe stopped me...  it made me nauseous.  I shouldn't
have lost control like that.  I *don't* lose control like that --
hadn't in years.  Not since...  not since before Arcanum and his
mixed bag of surviving metahuman slave/flunkies left the planet.

It's one thing to kill to protect an innocent or a teammate, or
to defend one's life.  It's another thing entirely to kill in a
fit of rage.

I'd let myself get caught up in rage.  And over what?  A packet
of sculpted energy that happened to look like Maggie.  How
pathetic could you get?  I got angry because Pink had punched a
glorified puppet in the form of my wife.  I had almost killed a
real person to defend a make-believe one.  God.

I couldn't do it any more.  I couldn't face off against the
Sabers any more.  It was so pointless -- it didn't decide
anything, and did nothing whatsoever to advance my only real
goal:  freeing the boomers.  Fighting them wasn't solving the
problem, just dealing with symptoms.

So I decided right then and there that if I were going to ever
fulfill the charge made to me by the Three, I'd better get my act
together.  I needed to spend more time in the lab than on the
streets.  I needed to finally understand the problem, address the
cause, and develop a real solution to the whole mess.  I simply
could not afford the luxury of knocking heads with the Sabers any
more.

And that made the recordings in my helmet utterly superfluous.

But I listened to them anyway, before I did anything else.

                              * * *

Well, now I knew their names.  Celia.  Linna.  (Or maybe "Lynne", 
spelled English and pronounced roughly Japanese.)  Pris.  (I knew 
a Pris, once, an android.  She'd been a sweet kid, before that 
arms smuggler killed her.)  And the last one.  It wasn't the 
archaicism I'd thought it was at first, it was her name; and I 
wasn't sure how to spell it -- Naynay?  Neinei?  Something like 
that.  Probably a nickname of some sort -- maybe she always voted 
"no" at their meetings.  Or maybe she liked horses -- Neigh-
Neigh?

Nah.  That was too strange, even for me.

Celia was obviously White.  Judging from the comments the other 
three made about their opponents, it was relatively easy to 
assign armor colors to them:  Pris was nothing like my long-lost, 
sweet-tempered friend -- she was Blue, and a potty-mouthed little 
hothead if I ever met (or was) one.  Linna was Olive and seemed 
the most level-headed of the four.  I still liked her, especially 
after she chose to talk to Kat instead of finishing her off.  And 
the very first exchange I'd heard during the fight made it clear 
that Pink was "Nay-Nay".

(You have to admit, it was the most distinctive of the four 
names. If I could have just settled on a spelling, I might have 
tried a search for her in the online telecomm directory for 
MegaTokyo.  Just in case it wasn't a nickname.  But that seemed 
far too unlikely.  Pity, that -- I'd come to the conclusion that 
I owed the girl an apology.

Anyway.)

I wiped the recordings immediately after listening to them.

After that, I went back to studying the designs for the 
electronic side of the standard boomer brain.  I had gotten to 
the point where I was starting to model the various components 
via a simulator, watching how they affected the other synthetic 
parts as well as the neural tissue to which they were attached. 
I wanted to make sure that the "brain surgery" that I had come up 
with would have no unexpected consequences.

It was a bit of an eye-opener, actually.  On a number of levels.

Over the past couple days I had pretty much puzzled out all but
one of the major systems installed in a boomer brain, as well as
their relationships to each other and the organic part of the
brain.  I confirmed that my initial impressions from the CAD
files were correct -- the GENOM behavioral hardwires were a
physical overlay imposed on top of the original design.  If you
were to visualize a boomer brain as a stack of circuit boards
(which it's not, not even close, but the image is useful), the
controls GENOM imposed were all on the topmost board, with the
occasional wire snaking down to a lower level.

This was *very* convenient for me.  It meant that if I could find
the right tool for the job, I could pull out those circuits
without damaging the basic functioning of the brain itself.

My only real concern was a big black box on the CAD files that 
was labeled simply "OMS".  It had hooks into all the rest of the 
GENOM hardwires, particularly those that controlled autonomous 
operations, which I found very strange.  *"Orbital Mind-control 
System"?* I wondered to myself, then shook my head vigorously. 
*Naaah.  No need to be silly.*  Then I dove into investigating 
it.

What I found was... nothing.  It was an utter cypher.  What
little documentation existed on the brain design treated it as if
it weren't there.  Literally.  Circuit traces that in the CAD
files ran into (and presumably through, given their behavior in
sim) the OMS were uninterrupted in the docs.  The simulations
that I ran didn't help, either; they showed no signals were ever
sent to or from the OMS, regardless of the inputs I applied to
the rest of the brainboard.  Oh, signals could be sent to the
OMS, but that required some kind of trigger to come from the OMS
in the first place.  Without details of its contents and
operation for the sim to act on, though, none of the bit-
twiddling I did with the black box's inputs would ever make it
respond in any way.

I'll admit it made me curious as hell.  It had an electronic 
finger in every virtual pie possessed by the brain, and that 
concerned me big time.  But eventually I had to give up on it --
there was simply no information to work with and too much else I 
had to pursue.  I finally decided that it was either something 
designed but unimplemented, or reserved space for some future 
expansion that hadn't yet been needed or wanted.  The latter 
seemed probable when I realized that the "OM" in "OMS" most 
likely stood for "Optional Module".

Then again, it might have been the boomer version of a cortex
bomb -- a remote self-destruct.  But what I discovered later that
day more or less eliminated that possibility.

By mid-afternoon, I had learned one other thing that shook me
rather thoroughly.  The behavioral controls were *far* better
than I had given them credit for at first.  Crude as they were,
clumsily as they were implemented, they *worked*.  Oh, the brains
used for construction bots and other simple labor models could be
overworked or stressed into a state not unlike a psychotic
collapse in a human, but it required either extensive negligence
or deliberate (and considerable) effort.

The controls on the brains for their combat models were even
stronger.

It only made sense, after all.  If you're building a self-willed
AI killing machine that's roughly equal to a light tank in power,
you want it to stay sane.  Not to mention under your control.
And as ugly as those modifications to the original designs
looked, they did their job.  In spades.

Combat boomers couldn't berserk.  They could not *spontaneously*
rampage.  The only way a combat boomer could "rampage" was if it
were ordered to.

Obvious corollary:  There was no such thing as a "rogue" boomer.

(Well, to be fair, it *could* happen.  But it would take
something on the order of deliberate tampering with -- or ill-
conceived additions to -- the brain's core directives.  And that
was all but the same as "being ordered to", to my mind.)

That discovery rocked me back on my heels for a good hour or so.

I mean, I should have come to that conclusion earlier.  How many
boomers had *acted* rogue until I came within sensor range, and
then changed tactics to deliberately target me?  And didn't I
start my personal campaign by trying to work out a pattern to
boomer attacks?  A pattern in this case would imply purpose, not
chance.

I had to face facts.  None of the rampaging combat boomers I had
fought during my stay in MegaTokyo had actually broken free of
their programming, but in fact had been complying with it to the
letter, had been in fact specifically programmed to act "rogue."

And that meant that I had been way off base in at least some of 
the accusations I'd flung at the White Knight Saber.  I owed her 
as well at the very minimum a partial apology, that was clear. 
It's one thing to slaughter an escaping slave.  It's another 
entirely to kill what amounted to a programmed assassin --
regrettable, as the individual underneath all the programming may 
well be an innocent, but if they cannot choose to *stop*, and 
your life or that of others is in danger, what else can you do? 
I rested my head in my hands and sighed.  My whole time in this 
world had been one bad decision after another.

That didn't imply that they weren't still slaves.  In fact, it 
pretty much proved it conclusively to me -- you don't impose that 
kind of control on something that doesn't need it.  There was 
also the fact that I couldn't tell a boomer from a human by 
magesight -- that spoke volumes right there.  Plus, I had no 
reason to believe the Three had played me falsely.  That is, of 
course, assuming I had interpreted their rather vague charge 
properly.  This time.

I didn't doubt that there were boomers who wanted to be free, on 
some level or another.  Maybe I was too pessimistic and it was 
possible -- rare but possible -- for a boomer to break its 
restraints and run free.  The documentation on the discontinued 
33S model (and its submodels) certainly made it clear that *they* 
"suffered" from that kind of "problem" frequently enough that it 
had become a liability.  For all I knew there might be some kind 
of boomer underground helping the rare "escapee".  If they did 
exist, though, the last thing they would do would be tearing down 
a street shooting things up -- not if they were anything 
approaching sane.

It was all starting to remind me terribly of Arcanum and his
Servant Factor virus.  Virtually the same idea, except instead of
building his metapowered goons from scratch, Arcanum "rewarded"
J. Random Henchperson (or worse, some poor normal abducted off
the street) with a dose of the virus, which not only gave its
victim a whole sheaf of powerful metagifts, but also permanently
rewired their brain structure so that they were programmed to
obey Arcanum unthinkingly.

Worse, Arcanum had had a virtually unlimited supply of the stuff. 
As best as we could figure, one or more of his legitimate 
businesses probably churned it out unawares, under contract to 
some front company.  From there it vanished into the shadowy 
underground in which his criminal/terrorist/revolutionary network 
lurked.

So just like GENOM had a never-ending supply of combat boomers,
Arcanum always had a new band of meta-thugs to throw at us.  And
even if we could capture them, there was nothing we could do
about their programming; they were Arcanum's forever.  Even
though Arcanum and his organization disappeared from our Earth
long ago, we still have dozens of these unfortunates left in
holding cells all over the world, dammit.

At least I could remove GENOM's obedience programming, if I could
just get inside their braincases.

                              * * *

Amarok Brokerage.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 1:42 PM

Linna settled into the lush, leather armchair and positioned 
herself so that she could watch the glass door to the employee 
lounge.  At the moment the room was empty except for her, for 
which she was thankful.  Most of her co-workers, seeing her there 
with her cellphone to her ear, would assume it was confidential 
business with a customer and let her have her privacy.  Not all, 
though, and she had to keep an eye out for the few who would 
barge in regardless.  She didn't want to risk anyone overhearing 
this conversation.

"Okay, Nene, we can talk now," she said after activating the 
scrambler.  "What's up?  Why aren't you at work?"

"I called in sick," the quiet voice all but whispered across the
phone line.  "I needed...  I needed some time by myself."

Concern creased Linna's forehead.  "Are you okay?  The Loon 
didn't hurt you worse than we initially thought, did he?"

"No, no!"  Her denial was sharp and loud, in contrast to her
earlier softness.  "I just... needed to think."

"About what he said?"

"Yeah.  And some things Sylia said."  Linna heard Nene draw a 
deep breath.  "You think he's right, don't you?"

Linna scratched her left temple just below her headband.  "Yeah.
Yeah, I do.  And so do you, if you think about it."

"How can you say that?" Nene shrieked across the connection.

"Was Sylvie a person or a thing?" Linna asked quietly.  "How
about Anri?"

"That's different!"

Linna shook her head, even though it went unseen by Nene.  "Not
at all.  They were people.  You can't even deny it yourself.  But
if *they* were more than machines, other boomers can be, too.
It's simple -- *one* could be a fluke, but two means there could
be more.  A fluke that happens twice isn't a fluke.  It's a
pattern."

"Then you already thought the Loon was right."

"Yeah, kinda.  I've been thinking about this since Largo; the
Loon just made it a little more immediate."  She chuckled.  "Dumb
machines just do *not* act like Largo did."

"Then how..." Nene began.

"How can I keep doing what we do?"

"Yeah."  Complete confusion was evident in her tone.

"The same way a cop or a soldier does what he does."  Linna
pursed her lips for a moment and thought of how to phrase what
she wanted to say next.  "I've killed boomers to protect others
or defend myself.  I'll certainly kill more in the future.  But I
don't do so lightly.  I remember each one I kill.  And I honor
each life taken.  I recognize the need, but I regret it at the
same time."

"That's very... I thought you said you hadn't been religious
since you were a teenager," Nene said after a moment, with
something that sounded like the beginnings of a smile in her
voice.

Linna shrugged.  "I haven't practiced *Shinto* since I was 15.
Doesn't mean I'm not *spiritual*."

Nene snorted.  "You, spiritual?  You're the most materialistic
person I know!"

"They're not necessarily incompatible, you know."

"If you say so," Nene replied doubtfully.  A pause, and then she
continued, melancholy seeping back into her voice.  "I'm still
confused, though.  If you've felt that way for so long, why are
you pushing Sylia to answer these questions?"

Linna sighed, and crossed her legs.  "Look, for as long as I've 
known her... for as long as *we've* known her, Sylia's always 
idolized her father.  Maybe even seen him as a martyr of sorts. 
True?"

"Well..." Nene's tone was reluctant.

"Now, if there's anything at all, no matter how small, to what 
the Loon said, that means that Doctor Stingray was at the very 
best oblivious to the morality of creating a race of intelligent 
slaves.  At worst, he knew *exactly* what he was doing, and 
didn't care."  Linna shrugged.  "Either way, he certainly doesn't 
come off as the shining hero we'd all like to think our parents 
are.  And Sylia doesn't want to admit that her father might have 
had feet of clay.  She's in denial.  And so are you."

"I'm not in denial!"  Nene's voice peaked suddenly, then dropped.
"Not any more."

"Good," Linna declared.  "And maybe my questions will shake Sylia
out of hers.  Until she at least admits the possibility, there's
no chance of finding a better way.  You see?"

"Yeah," Nene said.  "Yeah."

                              * * *

AD Police Headquarters.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 2:17 PM

"Anything else, Leon?"  Fuko looked up over her shoulder from her
sketchboard at the ADP inspector.  

Leon rubbed his chin and stared at the drawing on the board. "No, 
I think that's it."

"Right," Fuko said, and slid the pencil in her hand carefully
into its proper place in her kit.  She released the clips holding
the page on the board, slid the sheet of paper off, and laid it
next to three other drawings on the table next to her.  "I'd ask
you if you were trying to trick me into drawing an American-style
comic book for you, except about 7:30 last night I heard a voice
in the thunder and ended up curled into a ball, whimpering."  She
shivered, and Leon put his hand on her shoulder.

"You and most of MegaTokyo," he said softly.

"Well, yeah, but not being alone doesn't exactly help me feel
better about it," she snapped, and he quickly withdrew his hand.
"Sorry," she said in a far less angry tone.  "Just the thought of
it...  The gods are supposed to be remote, distant from ordinary
humans.  Not standing in the streets yelling at them."

"She just *claimed* to be a goddess," Leon offered.  "Doesn't
mean she actually was one."

Fuko laughed sadly.  "Oh, she was, Leon, believe me.  The fear of
the gods lurks in every human soul, and mine responded to her."
She shook her head slowly.  "Hell of a thing for an atheist to
say, huh?  I guess I better start attending services again."

"If you say so," he replied, dubious.

She turned her swivel chair around to face him more directly.  "I
still can't get over how you were so close to her, and were
unaffected."

Leon shrugged.  "Well, I was distracted by everything else going
on."  He fingered the folded sunglasses hung on the breast pocket
of his shirt and grimaced.  "Plus my ears were ringing like mad
from all the loud noises already -- regular thunder, sonic booms,
that one woman... screaming, for lack of a better word.  I didn't
actually *hear* the voice in the thunder that everyone else did."

Fuko giggled, her entire countenance brightening again.  "And
here I was, thinking you were some kind of superman for standing
up to it at such close range."  With a smile, she turned back to
her kit and began closing it up.

Leon snorted.  "Yeah, right.  Some superman.  I was lucky to 
leave that war zone under my own power.  If any of them had 
decided I was some kind of threat, I'd probably be a grease spot 
now."

Still fitting pencils and other tools of her trade back into the
kit box, Fuko said, "I thought you said you shot one with your
Earthshaker."

"I did," Leon replied.  "Apparently that wasn't enough to qualify 
me as a serious threat."  He reached into his pocket and pulled 
out the flattened bullet.  With a quiet little "click", he laid 
it on the table next to the drawings.  Fuko looked at the source 
of the noise, raised her eyebrows and looked at him.  The corner 
of her mouth twitched, and finally she cooed, "Poor baby!  Your 
big, bad gun isn't up to the job any more."

"Fuko," he growled.

"You know, there are treatments for that now... therapy and drugs
that can do wonders."

"Fuko!"  She was laughing outright now, and Leon felt an 
unfamiliar rush of heat in his cheeks.  "Stop.  Please."

Laughter subsided back into spurts of giggling.  "Oh well, since
you asked so nicely."

"Thank you," he said, trying to gather the shreds of his dignity
back together.  "I doubt anything short of an antitank weapon
would have worked on those women, Fuko.  I tell you this, either
they build really strong buildings in the Loon's world, or the
construction and insurance companies are making out like
bandits."

"Probably both," she said.

                              * * *

IDEC.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 2:30 PM

Daniel Ohara lifted the handset to his ear and punched in a four-
digit sequence.  Obediently, a ring tone began to sound.

He resisted the urge to mimic the 20th-Century comedienne who had
occasionally portrayed an obnoxious telephone operator.  His
dignity had already suffered enough, and there was no need to
wound it further.

The ringing suddenly cut off and a tired-sounding voice blurted
"Yo?" into his ear.

"'Craig'," Ohara said with elaborate patience.  "We had another 
demonstration of your power scheduled for, oh... right *now*."

"Huh?  We did?"  Through the phone line came the mixed sounds of
a keyboard clicking and papers shuffling.  "Oh, damn, we did.
'Kay, I'll be right there.  Sorry."

The other end hung up before Ohara could add anything of his own.
He returned the handset to its cradle and looked up at Hiroe and
Illya.  "He'll be here any..."

The outer door to the testing chamber flew open with a slam. "I'm
here, I'm here.  Let the bells ring out and the banners fly," a
lackluster voice announced with a notable dearth of enthusiasm.

"...minute," Ohara concluded.  Hiroe snickered and Illya
chuckled, to both Daniel and Tony's annoyance.  He raised his
voice. "We're in here, 'Craig'."

Douglas Sangnoir stumbled into the control booth facing the
isolation chamber, leaned against the doorjamb, and ran a hand
through his short blond hair.  "Sorry I'm late.  I've been a
little out of it today."

"We know," Illya replied.  "Are most interesting articles on
today's newspages."

"Joy," Sangnoir muttered as Ohara studied him.  Not much had 
changed since their encounter earlier in the day.  For the first 
time in their acquaintance, the extradimensional was not crisply 
alert and preternaturally graceful.  Instead, he resembled a man 
who had just come out the back end of a weeklong bender and 
wasn't yet sure whether or not he had survived the experience.

"You look *horrible*," Hiroe blurted out.  She leapt from her
seat to seize Sangnoir by the arm.  "You come here and sit down.
Last night must have been simply *awful* for you."  She forced
the younger man down into the chair she had occupied as he tried
to mumble thanks.

"Ah.  I see Hiroe's maternal streak has resurfaced."  Tony,
impeccable in his Italian suit, had arrived, sarcasm in hand.

"No need to be quite so snide," Hiroe growled.

"All right, people," Daniel jumped in before the level of
interpersonal friction could rise any further, "let's get
started."

As agreement circled the room, Sangnoir focused slightly bleary
eyes on him and asked, "Okay, what do you want me to do?"

Ohara glanced at his people.  In the wake of the morning's news,
a flurry of email memos had quickly determined the general nature
of today's tests.

"Well," Hiroe coughed and began.  "We..."

"We've seen you do a state transform on your own body's matter,"
Tony interrupted.  "We want to see something like the papers said
you did last night -- creating matter out of nothing."

"But we'd rather you didn't produce any... people," Hiroe hurried
to add, shooting a glare at Tony.  "Something *inanimate* would
probably be better for all concerned."

"Hm."  He pretended to ponder this.  "So I suppose large,
dangerous animals are also out?"

Tony glared at him.  "Yes," he barked.

"Pity, that."  Sangnoir smiled sweetly.

"Well, you're in a hostile mood today," Ohara dryly noted.

"I think I have the right to be," Sangnoir snapped.  "In the past
twenty-four hours I've played bait for a dozen combat boomers,
almost got into a screaming match with the white Knight Saber,
berserked and nearly killed the *pink* Saber, had my emotions
royally yanked around, gotten the shit kicked out of me, and been
shot three times -- <on the ceiling if you want me, twice on the
pipe if the answer is no>..." he suddenly warbled in English.
Then he winced and rubbed his temples.  "Owitch.  Not to mention
that I have the reaction hangover from Hell because I overdid it
with my magegift, *plus* I got thoroughly dressed down by an
avatar of my C.O. from back home."  He stared with bleary eyes at
Ohara as everyone around the table blinked at the summary.  "If
you can at all avoid it, *never* go to work for a god."

"I don't intend to," Ohara responded wryly.

"Good.  Because they show up in the damnedest places to make your
life miserable, whether you're on duty or not."  Sangnoir sighed,
rubbed his temples for a moment longer, then looked up and around
the table.  "Okay, you want a solid energy projection, something
inanimate.  I suppose you need me stripped to my skivvies again
for the sensors and whatnot."

"I'm sorry, but, well, yes," Hiroe stammered.  *Hiroe actually
looks embarrassed,* Ohara noted with some small, private
amusement.

Sangnoir stood and strode to the entrance of the isolation room,
unbuttoning his shirt as he did.  "It's a good thing I remembered
what my mom always used to say:  'Always put on clean underwear
in case you unexpectedly have to demonstrate your metagift to a
bunch of voyeuristic physicists.'"

"Like hell his mother said that," Tony muttered as Illya
chuckled.

"Did you leave your sense of humor in your other suit today,
Tony?" Hiroe hissed at him.

"The guy gets on my nerves, what can I say?" he growled back.

"I love you, too, Tonykins," Sangnoir called from the chamber as
he peeled off his jeans.  Hiroe tittered behind her hand and
Illya simply smirked as Tony fumed.

"Can we please try to approximate a professional atmosphere
here?"  Ohara felt like rubbing his own temples.  Already.

                              * * *

IDEC.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 4:12 PM

After spending almost an hour playing lab rat for Ohara and his
unindicted co-conspirators, I actually felt a little better.  I
managed to twit everyone at least once, and exercising my
metagift actually seemed to clear some of the cobwebs out of my
head.

I went back to my lab after the meeting broke up, and managed to
think a little more clearly than I had earlier in the day.
Things were starting to look up since I'd gotten in that morning.
I now had detailed technical specifications for the changes
needed to free a boomer brain from its constraints.  I began
laying them out in a form suitable for programming into a nanite
of some kind.  Even though I still had no way of creating or
hijacking a nanodevice that could do the job, I still held on to
the hope that I could find or make something that could get past
the defenses that boomers had against such things.

In the spirit of this new burst of optimism, I also began
planning for my departure from this universe.  I knew I wasn't
going home from here -- the Three had made it pretty clear.  I
wouldn't be walking a "twisted path" as they had put it if my
next step were my last.  So that meant preparing for another
random universe.  Which in its turn meant that I needed trade
goods -- in short, more gems.  Lightweight, easily hidden,
concentrated wealth in almost any culture, they're the perfect
medium of exchange for the dimensional traveler on the go.  Like
me.

The gems into which I had converted my "honorarium" from the
Collegium had come in very handy indeed on my arrival here, even
though I hadn't intended them for that purpose.  I had depleted
my supply, though, with all my unexpected expenses, and I needed
to restock.

Fortunately, I had the resources of GENOM at my fingertips.
GENOM, which was so diversified that its right thumb didn't know
what the forefinger was doing, had a number of lapidary firms
under its umbrella.  IDEC made use of them on occasion --
sapphire bearings, industrial diamonds, stuff like that.  I
simply ordered a fistful or so of jewelry-quality stones and
charged them to my expense account.  They'd get next-day shipped
automatically and I would have them on Monday.

Not that I expected to be leaving then, but one never knows...

That reminded me that Lisa still had that diamond I'd given her
as a potential "down payment" on a Knight Sabers rescue.  Well,
after the previous night's events, *that* idea was now a wash,
but I decided that I wouldn't ask for it back.  It's not that I
was actually hurting for it, anyway.  At least, not *now*.

While I was ordering the gems, I toyed with the idea of
requisitioning a ton of high-ticket items from GENOM's internal
supply system, just to mess with both GENOM and IDEC.  I could
imagine the scene when something arrived:

Chizue:  "You have a crate from the military weapons division
in here?"

Me:  "Yeah, read the label.  It's great."

Chizue:  "Contents: 1 (One) Pulse-Laser, Plasma, Phased, 40
Watts."

Me:  "Just what you see, pal."

I chuckled to myself at the image, then thought about it.  I 
could probably mount one of those boomer-portable particle beams 
on the cycle...  if only I had a decent power supply.  As it was, 
I would barely have enough power for the grav unit.  Once 
installed, turning it on would put such a load on the turbine 
that fuel consumption would double, maybe triple.  Which wasn't 
too bad, the turbine was remarkably efficient (if I do say so 
myself), but still...  If only I had a 'drillium cell, dammit.

Yeah, and while I was at it, if only I were home, too.  Dammit.

Anyway, thinking about the cycle reminded me that all I needed to
do with the grav unit were the final bench tests before making a
housing and installing it -- that, and packaging the conversion
guidelines and posting them to a delayed-mail server or two out
on the Net.  If Ohara and his technothugs thought I would hand
them something *that* profitable, they were nuts.  I was sending
it right out into the public domain -- with a copyleft on it, to
boot.

In the meantime, I would hold off on my malicious mail ordering 
until right before I was about to leave.  Fewer repercussions 
that way.

At least for *me*.

The perfect topper to my day came at about four PM.  I was
heading to the staff room for my seventh cup of tea that day.
The fastest route there from my lab led me past the big doors to
the lobby -- the ones I had forced my way through during my
siege.  As it turned out, they weren't merely wood-toned, but
real wood and beautifully finished; I'm glad I hadn't had to zap
them.

Anyway, as I passed by, I thought I heard a familiar voice --
muffled to the point of incomprehensibility but still familiar. 
On the office side of the doors was a security monitor hooked to 
a wide-angle camera that covered the entire lobby.  I stopped and 
checked out the image to see if...  yeah.  It was Lisa, pleading 
with Sindra for a chance to talk to someone, anyone...  Knowing 
her, she just got seized with an impulse to look into IDEC, and 
came running right over instead of booking a proper appointment. 
I sighed, got my tea, and went back to my lab to leave a message 
on her machine.

                              * * *

Friday, February 13, 2037, 6:34 PM

Lisa kicked off her boots at the door, then stepped in a meter or 
so to divest herself of her coat.

"Can it get any colder?" she demanded rhetorically as she hung
the coat up.  *At least it's not snowing today,* she consoled
herself as she flopped onto her futon and tried to rub some
warmth back into her arms and legs as she growled invective
about IDEC under her breath.  She'd just have to try again,
that's all.

Several minutes went by as she massaged her limbs and slowly
adjusted to the warmth of her apartment.  Finally, she sat up
straight and sighed in pleasure.  *Muuuuch better.*

Glancing about the room, her eye fell upon the "message waiting" 
light atop the v-mail display on her bureau.  Groaning, she 
hoisted herself to her feet, trudged the meter or two over to it, 
and pressed the "Play" button.

A "No Video Available" notice flicked into existence on the
unit's small screen as a familiar voice came from the speakers.
"'S me, Leese.  Meet me tonight at the place where you lived for
fifty years, at an hour equal to the number killed at Kent State
there in 1970."

There was a click, then a brief tone, then nothing.

"Doug?" Lisa almost shrieked.  Then she rewound and listened 
again to the message.

*Eriko's, definitely Eriko's,* she thought frantically.  *But
when?  Where the hell is Kent State?  Who was killed there?*
Then, welling up out of the depths of her memory came a snippet
of a song in English that she *knew* she'd never heard before --
four men singing in a braided harmony, with a simple
orchestration and outrage in their voices:

     "<Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming,
       We're finally on our own.
       This summer I hear the drumming.
       Eight dead in Ohio,
       Eight dead in Ohio...>"

*Eight, eight tonight.*  She glanced at her watch, then out the
window.  *No way in hell am I going to try to make it there on my
scooter, not in this weather.  That means mass transit.. which
means I have to leave *now* if I'm going to be there on time!*

She dashed for the door and began pulling on her boots.

                              * * *

Ladys 633 Building.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 7:02 PM

"'S me, Leese.  Meet me tonight at the place where you lived for
fifty years, at an hour equal to the number killed at Kent State
there in 1970."

Sylia swore softly under her breath as she listened to the
recording for the fifth time.  Sangnoir had finally made contact
again with Lisa, but his message had been so cryptic as to be
nonsensical.  *Of course,* she sneered at herself.  *He's a
professional, he's not going to come right out and tell her
where and when in plain Japanese.*

It might as well have been plain Japanese as far as Lisa had been
concerned, though.  According to the logs relayed by the other
surveillance devices planted in Lisa's apartment, the Sabers'
archivist had listened to the message twice, thought for a
moment, then made a dash for the door.  Not for the first time
since reviewing the logs, Sylia cursed the circumstances that had
left her minding the Silky Doll until early evening that day; had
she not been working, she might have checked on the bugs soon
enough to set a tail on Lisa.  As it was, Sylia had no idea where
she might be now.

*A pre-arranged code?* she wondered, then shook her head.  *It 
would have sounded more innocuous.  It must be some kind of 
shared experience to which he's referring.  But what?*  A few 
seconds' searching on the Net had turned up the Kent State 
reference:  four protesters were killed by National Guardsmen who 
had fired on an anti-war demonstration at the American college in 
1970.  Four o'clock would seem to be the time -- except that the 
log indicated the call had been received shortly *after* four PM, 
and Sangnoir had clearly said "tonight".  *Presumably more of the 
protesters died in his universe,* Sylia mused.  *But how many?*

Not that that would help her without an idea of what and where
"the place where you lived for fifty years" could possibly be.
*One of the most infuriating things about dealing with Sangnoir
is that you can never draw a solid, inviolate line between the
literal and the metaphoric with him,* she thought with an angry
frown.  *He dances along that line and gleefully scuffs it out
with every bootprint.*

For all she knew, Lisa could really have spent an actual fifty
years "somewhere else" with him.  For some reason she was hard-
pressed to name, Sylia felt disquieted and disturbed by the
possibility that Lisa might now have three or more times the life
experience that Sylia herself possessed.

Sylia scowled at the thought. As she reached for the recorder to
play back the message once more, her phone rang, and she diverted
her hand to that device instead. "Silky Doll, Sylia Stingray
speaking," she said, slipping into her "smile for the public"
persona.

"Ms. Stingray," came another familiar voice that was considerably
more welcome than Sangnoir's.  "This is Fargo Fine Fabrics.  We
have a special order which we'd like to discuss with you tonight,
if that's possible?"

"Why, certainly," she said with a pleasant tone that was only
partly forced.  Any distraction was welcome if it got her mind
off Lisa and Sangnoir.

                              * * *

Eriko's All-American Diner.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 8:01 PM

Lisa dashed through the outermost doors of the diner, pausing
only a moment to pull off her hat and stamp her feet free of
slush before continuing through the inner glass doors at a more
stately pace.  A blast of warm and fragrant air, redolent with
the scents of all manner of dishes, greeted her.  Smiling
broadly, she closed her eyes and breathed it in deeply.  A moment
later, she opened her eyes once more and returned her attention
to the matter at hand.

As it had been every other time she'd visited the restaurant, 
Eriko's was packed, mostly with students from the nearby 
university.  Lisa popped up on her tiptoes and craned her neck to 
look over and around the crowd, trying to locate Doug.  Without 
thinking about it, she stepped further into the diner, close 
enough to begin to overhear the conversations -- some mundane, 
some surreal -- around her:

"Excuse me!"  A large woman with long dark hair sharply berated
her companions.  "DON'T!  TAUNT!  GODS!"

A small, wiry fellow at another table took a long drag off his
cigarette and announced, "I could stomp his butt no problem."

"Yes, yes, we know, shut up," impatiently replied the man in
glasses across from him.

Lisa stepped in a little further, still searching.  She tried to 
look down the long row of booths that ran under the broad glass 
window facing the street, where she and Doug had sat during her 
first visit to Eriko's.  Unfortunately, two tables' worth of 
patrons chose that moment to get up and leave.  The dozen or so 
persons milling about and putting on coats blocked her view 
entirely.  "Dammit, where is he?" she whispered to herself.

"Lisa-chan!"  An unexpected female voice cut through the low,
constant noise of murmuring diners and clattering dishes.  Lisa
started and whirled as she was all but tackled by a girl her own
age.  She was slender but powerful, with a mop of shaggy brown
hair and large, expressive eyes.  In addition to jeans, T-shirt
and a leather jacket she wore a brilliantly red wrist brace, and
a small bandage spanned the bridge of her nose.  She hugged Lisa
fiercely, then released her and stood back to look her over.

"Y-Yu-Yume-chan?" Lisa stuttered in surprise and delight.

"It *is* you!" the other girl declared with a friendly grin.  "I
haven't seen you in *ages*!"

"Not since graduation, I think," Lisa replied wryly.  "It's great
to see you!  How are you doing, Yumeko?"

Yumeko shrugged without losing her smile.  "The usual.  Working
like a dog at the gym, sleeping like a log the rest of the time."

"I'll bet," Lisa chuckled.  "I've been following your career --
congrats on qualifying for the Olympics."

"Thanks, but you know you could have been there with me, Lisa-
chan."  Yumeko took Lisa's hands in hers and winked
conspiratorially at her.  "C'mon, wanna give it a shot?"

Lisa laughed.  "Sorry, no, I'm *way* out of shape.  I wouldn't
want to drag you down with me."

"Sweetheart, we've got to go."  A tall, redheaded man came up
behind Yumeko and laid his hands on her shoulders.

"Dad," she said, looking back and up at him, "you remember Lisa
Vanette, don't you?"

"I certainly do," he rumbled.  "How are you, Lisa-chan?"

"Oh, hi, Mr. Van V--"  She stopped short as he held up a warning 
finger and wagged it, smiling at her.  "Bert.  Sorry!"

"I'll get you properly trained one of these days," he said with a
chuckle.

"Maybe."  Lisa grinned.  "Anyway, I'm doing just fine, thanks."
She narrowed her eyes and looked a suddenly-sheepish Yumeko over.
"Although Yume-chan looks the worse for wear."

"Oh, this?"  The other girl waved her brace-covered hand around
carelessly.  "Just a bad tumble I took during practice.  It's
nothing.  I'll be fine in no time -- you know I heal fast."

Bert coughed conspicuously.  "Well, I hate to break up this
reunion, sweetheart, but your mother is going to be getting out
of the studio any minute now, and if we're not there on time,
she'll rip us both a new one."  Bert winked broadly at Lisa and
she laughed again; Yumeko's mother was, she remembered fondly,
the mildest of women.

Yumeko made a face.  "Sorry, Lisa-chan.  Gotta run.  But let's
trade numbers so we don't lose track of each other again!"

"Yes, let's!"  Lisa pulled out her palmtop as Yumeko did the
same, and a brief exchange of data later, the two were hugging
once more and trading goodbyes.

"Call me!" Yumeko shouted over her shoulder as she and her father
shouldered their way through the doors.

"I will!"  Lisa waved until they vanished into the crowd on the
sidewalk outside, smiled for a moment, then turned around to look
for Doug.  The earlier crowd of departing customers had cleared
out (had in fact streamed around herself and Yumeko during their
reunion) so she glanced back along the front of the diner.

Twice her eyes slid over the black-haired man with a mustache
before she realized it was Doug.  He was watching her without the
faintest hint of a smile on his face.  When their eyes met, he
grinned and gave a small nod.  He was sitting in their old booth,
a pair of menus and two glasses of ice water already on the table
in front of him.

Lisa chuckled, dodged around yet another table of gamers ("He's a
half-elven pirate with a wooden leg..." said one; "And a hook for
a head!" called out another as the table collapsed in laughter)
and made her way to the booth, where she stood for a moment
looking down at him.  "Hi," she said softly, almost bashfully.

His grin softened into a gentle smile.  "Hi, yourself."  He
waved at the empty bench seat opposite him.  "Have a seat."

"Thanks," she said, and peeled off her coat.  She folded it
carefully and laid it on the far end of the bench, and placed her
hat atop it.  Then she slid into the booth herself, taking a
moment to savor the slick, cool surface of the cushion with her
fingertips as she settled herself in.

As she looked up, her eyes fell upon a paper napkin placed
foursquare in the center of the placemat before her.  Scrawled on
it were the words, "Call me Craig.  Crumple this napkin and
pocket it."

As Lisa followed the second instruction, Doug handed her a menu
and asked, "Old friend of yours?"

"Yeah," she replied with a fond smile.  "We were in gymnastics
together from preschool to high school."  Lisa turned her head
and gazed wistfully out the broad window, studying the passersby
in the slushy street.  "Now she's on the Olympic team."

"Another 'Tenacious Tara'?"

Lisa opened the menu and scanned it quickly.  "Better," she said 
confidently.  "She's going to sweep every event and come home 
with an armload of gold at the next summer games, I promise you."

"Good for her."  Doug nodded, then stared intently at her.  "My
sources tell me you were poking around IDEC today."

Lisa started.  "How did..."  Her eyes narrowed.  "Your message
was timestamped before I even left the Tower.  You're working
there, aren't you?"

He nodded.  "Yup."

"But *why*?  They were sending all those boomers after you!"

"That's exactly why," he said calmly.  "If they have me hard at 
work in their labs, available for any analysis they might want to 
run, then they won't be inclined to dispatch squads of combat 
boomers into the streets to find me.  And besides, there's an old 
saying:  Keep your friends close, and..."

"...And your enemies closer," Lisa finished.  "That makes a sick
sort of sense, actually.  I'm surprised they let you out to talk
to me, though."

"Why?" he replied.  "I'm not a prisoner, after all, I'm just
another technician -- albeit one with highly specialized skills.
They don't keep me in a cage."

She shook her head.  "Weird."

At that point Eriko, who sashayed over to take their orders, 
interrupted them.  By mutual silent consent, they waited until 
she had returned to the kitchen before continuing their 
conversation. During that time, she studied the changes in his 
appearance, which though minor were disconcerting.  His entire 
aspect seemed to have changed, from wholesome surfer-type to a 
vaguely greasy, sleazy used-car-salesman kind of look.  She 
wondered how much of it was really the hair color and mustache, 
and how much might be some kind of subliminal cues she simply 
wasn't noticing.

"Can you do me a favor, Leese?" Doug asked as soon as the kitchen
door, as ostentatiously aqua as Eriko's uniform, swung shut
behind her.  Its porthole-like window glinted in the fluorescent
light.

"What's that?"  Lisa yanked her eyes from the kitchen back to
Doug's face.

"Stay away from IDEC, please?  Professionally, I mean."

She inclined her head and studied him.  "Why?"

Doug sighed.  "A few reasons.  One, they're providing my cover at 
the moment.  The Knight Sabers probably would love to see me 
dead, and I'd prefer to keep disappointing them."

"The..." Lisa began, but Doug held up a hand.

"Please, Lisa."  He was more serious than she had ever seen him
before.  "I'm also working on a project there that if it pans out
will let me move on -- probably not back to my own world, but at
least on the way toward it.  You can understand that this is
*vitally* important to me?"

Lisa felt a sudden pang in her chest.  *Doug, gone?  Really
gone?*  "Yeah, but..."

"The last thing I need is the world plus dog deciding IDEC looks
like a tasty media target, Lisa," he said soberly.  "When I've
finally got this thing I'm doing completely debugged, it'll be
really big.  But until I can get it there, I simply can't have
people poking their noses into where I work and ultimately into
what I'm doing."

Her reporter's instincts took over.  "How big is big?"

Doug studied her for a long moment.  "World-shaking big," he
finally said.  "GENOM may have a hard time recovering big."

Lisa whistled softly.

"Now," Doug continued, "*if* you take my advice, and *if* you
don't draw any attention to IDEC, and *if* you promise to be
careful and keep yourself safe, I'll see to it that you have all
the relevant info on what happens -- the ultimate exclusive."  He
raised an eyebrow and smirked.  "Do we have a deal?"

Lisa played with a strand of her hair as she considered this. "I
need to know one thing.  I'll keep it quiet until you give me the
okay, but I want to know now:  what is this project of yours?"

Doug grimaced.  "I suppose you're going to insist on that?"

She smiled sweetly.  "I can always make your life hell."

"Right," he growled.  "Okay, long story short:  boomers may have 
been designed to be slaves, but GENOM put extra circuitry in 
their brains to make sure they stay that way.  I'm looking for a 
way to kill those circuits -- permanently -- in every boomer ever 
built."

Lisa whistled again.  "Just a little job you've set yourself.  No 
wonder you want to keep out of sight until you're done with it." 
She nodded to herself.  "And you're doing this why?"  She knew 
what he had told the Sabers, but wanted to hear what he would 
tell *her*.

"I've got my reasons, and all you need to know is that they're
good."  He leaned forward, all the usual humor missing from his
face.  "Do we have a deal, Lisa?"

She closed her eyes and weighed the options, balancing the 
benefits against the costs.  After nearly a minute, she opened 
them again. "Okay," she said slowly.  "We have a deal."

Doug relaxed from a tension she hadn't realized he'd been under,
and slumped back into his seat.  "Good.  Good.  I'm glad you
agreed, Leese.  You're so damned inventive I was getting really
worried about running interference against you."

"Heh."  Lisa grinned.  "Lois Lane, eat your heart out."

Doug's brow furrowed.  "Who?"

She waved it off.  "Local pop culture reference.  Don't worry
about it.  So," she leaned in toward him.  "How are you going to
do it?"

His face fell. "That's the problem.  I know exactly *what* to do.
If I had the time and the tools, I could do it by hand.  But
that's not practical on a large scale, which is where I really
have to work.  I need..."  He frowned again.  "What I *want* is
to make it something like a disease -- an organism or nanite that
can spread quickly from boomer to boomer.  Call it a freedom
plague.  But their original designer *and* GENOM were way too
smart for me -- boomers are already proof against that kind of
thing."  He took a sip from one of the glasses of water.  "They
have the most amazing immune system analogue..."

Something about that tugged at a thread of memory, but it didn't
want to come free.  Lisa frowned in concentration.  "'Craig',
I..." she began, but was interrupted before she could finish the
thought.

"Here you go, you two."  Eriko materialized at the end of their 
table with a shining aluminum tray in one hand.  "Gyro for the 
lady, and cheeseburger for the gentleman," she announced, 
matching deed to word with quick, efficient motion.  "Enjoy your 
dinner..." She smiled knowingly at Lisa.  "...and the rest of 
your date."

Doug laughed and thanked her.  Lisa said nothing as Eriko swivel-
hipped away to her other customers.  Instead, she focused on
trying to track down the rogue memory that still refused to
present itself completely at the front of her mind.  *Disease,
disease...  there's something there that I can almost remember...
Oh, right!*

Doug must have seen her face light up because he looked at her
curiously and said, "Leese?"

"'Craig', maybe this will help."  She bit her lip as she tried to
gather the shreds of memory.  "There was a rumor on the streets,
a few years ago, about a company -- a competitor to GENOM, I
think -- that had come up with some kind of boomer plague.  But I
can't remember if there was any more than that.  If they -- and
the plague -- really existed, GENOM probably destroyed them one
way or another and buried them so deep that no one could ever
find them again."  She played with her utensils for a moment.
"Normally, I'd write off a story that vague as simply an urban
legend, except..."

Doug's eyebrows shot up.  "Except...?"

She bit her lip for a moment.  "Well, this part isn't just newsie 
folklore, because I saw it happen, during my first internship 
while I was still in college.  The reporter who was mentoring me 
told me about the rumor.  He'd first heard it himself just a 
couple years earlier, and right after I got there he started 
investigating it in his off-hours.  I guess having an intern 
freed him up enough that he finally had the time for it." She 
shrugged, then ate a few french fries.  "He hadn't done much more 
than make a few inquiries when, well, he got discreetly but 
firmly 'leaned on'.  I was there the morning that a sharky-
looking guy with a couple of musclemen showed up in the office to 
suggest that it wasn't 'in his best interests' to pursue the 
matter."  She sighed.  "After that, he never mentioned it again."

Her dinner companion frowned.  "That's a lot of trouble to go
through for something that supposedly doesn't exist."

She didn't say anything, just nodding as she attacked her gyro
for the first time.

"GENOM?" Doug continued.

Lisa gave another little shrug.  "Maybe.  I don't really know.
But someone didn't like having that rumor circulated."  She
gritted her teeth. "I'm sorry, that's not much to go on."

A thoughtful look had settled onto his face as he laid down his 
partially-eaten cheeseburger.  "No, no.  That's incredibly 
useful.  It gives me some direction for my researches, at least. 
You see, assuming the rumor is based on some shred of truth, 
finding a record of it in the internal GENOM files would prove 
that what I want is *possible*.  Knowing *that*, I'd have an edge 
on trying to duplicate it."  Then he shrugged and grinned.  "And 
if I find nothing one way or the other, then I'm no worse off 
than I am now."

"Are you sure?"  She toyed with her gyro.

"Oh, yeah," he replied heartily.  "It's the best lead I've had in
a while."

She looked up from her dish and smiled tentatively.  "Good.  I'm
just sorry I don't remember more."

Doug reached across the table and laid his hand over hers. "Don't
agonize over it, Lisa.  Just that little tidbit alone could make
a big difference."  He squeezed her hand, then withdrew his own,
stealing a french fry from off her plate in the same motion.
With a smile, he winked at her and tossed the fry into his mouth.

She laughed, her mood suddenly lightened.  "So I take it you're
planning on lying low for quite a while?"

Doug nodded.  "As long as it takes.  Since IDEC was my primary
pursuer, it should cut down on the boomer incidents a bit.  Not
entirely," he added, his eyes suddenly hooded.  "Someone else is
after me now, I think -- last night's boomers were definitely
targeted at me.  I wish I knew who sent them."

"I have some police contacts, you know," Lisa pointed out.  "They
took those boomers in unharmed, right?  Maybe the ADP has been
able to find out who sent them."

"Huh.  I hadn't thought of that."  His face brightened.  "Could
you do that for me?  See if they uncovered anything?"

"Sure!  I'll call my contact tomorrow."  Lisa took a bite out of
her gyro.  "So, topic change.  You just working in the Tower
day and night, or do you, like, have a real social life again?"

"Me?  Social life?"  Doug snorted.  "There's maybe one person I
can talk to at IDEC without wanting to punch their face in.  And
I don't talk to anyone outside of IDEC.  Some fun."  He grimaced
again.  "You?"

She shrugged.  "The usual.  Hanging with the girlfriends when I'm
not working."  A sly smile crept onto her face.  "Oh, and I made
a new friend not long ago.  Name of Katherine Madigan."

Doug managed to put down his drink before he could be caught in a 
spit-take.  "Katherine Madigan?" he hissed incredulously. "*The* 
Katherine Madigan?  Lavender hair, second in command of GENOM, 
her reputation alone kills plant life at ten meters? *That* 
Katherine Madigan?"

Lisa rolled her eyes.  "She's not that bad.  She came by my place
to ask me about the photos I took of 'Sailor Loon', and after we
talked for a while I found out that she's as much of a Moonie as
I am."  As Doug frowned in confusion, she pursed her lips for a
moment and continued.  "I know about her reputation, and to tell
you the truth it makes *me* nervous, too.  But when we talked she
seemed more... well, sad and tired than anything else.  Hardly
the uber-bitch 'Lord High Executioner' type they make her out to
be."

"I dunno," he said, shaking his head.  "Ohara and his crew are
scared shitless of Madigan.  He literally fears for his life
where she's concerned.  And given what I've overheard in the
Tower, he may well be justified."  He reached over and took her
hand again.  "You just be careful when you're with her, okay?"

She slid her plate away from their clasped hands and said, "Don't
worry.  I will."  Taking a french fry of her own and dipping it
into ketchup, she added, "Kate may be everything they say, but I
don't think that's *all* she is.  People are complicated, after
all.  As you of all people ought to know."  She slid the fry into
her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

"Yeah."  He drew a deep breath.  "Yeah."

"So," she said with sudden, excessive brightness, "why didn't you
tell me that I'd be stuck with fifty years' worth of memories
from that song you used on me?"  Not looking at him, she lifted 
her gyro with one hand and took another bite out of it.

Doug blinked dumbly for a moment with the impact of the
conversational whiplash.  "Um..."

"I mean, I was starting to go a little nuts there, what with 
remembering everything from your world.  And I do mean 
*everything* -- for a while last night I was pulling up the Class 
Gamma personnel reports on the Warriors just by thinking of them, 
and those exist only as files on the Mansion megaframe!"  Lisa 
shook her head.  "And even now, I *still* know things like 
*that*.  But it was bad last night -- very bad.  I was starting 
to lose myself.  I..."  Her tongue stumbled over itself as some 
power seemed to awaken in the back of her mind.

*He is not to know.*  It was like an echo in her mind, the
faintest trace of Wetter Hexe's voice, and in spite of herself,
Lisa nodded.

"I... managed to overcome it," she finished lamely in the face of
his obvious concern.  "I think the worst of it is past now."  She
scowled at him suddenly.  "But you should have warned me about
the side effects!"

"There aren't any!" he protested.

"The hell there aren't!" she shot back in low hiss.  "You clearly
expected me to remember how many people died during the Kent
State Massacre in your world.  You *knew* I'd remember enough to
know that!"

Doug rubbed his eyes.  "Yeah, I knew you'd remember a fair amount
afterwards -- what would be the point of the song if you didn't
take something away with you after it was over?  But nobody's
ever had the kind of reaction you're talking about."

"Well, what makes me so special?" she demanded quietly.

He shook his head in confusion.  "I don't know.  Maybe it's the
local laws of nature.  I mean, my metagift seems to work
normally, but every once in a while there are these little...
*twists*.  Or maybe it's just the mana level here in the city.
I've never actually lived in a place this flush with magical
energy for so long.  Even Haven wasn't as saturated with mana as
MegaTokyo is!  I honestly don't know what my metagift might be
doing with all that extra power floating around."  He looked down
into the palm of his open right hand.  "I'm surprised my field
isn't acting up somehow, now that I think of it.  But it's the
same as it's ever been."

Lisa considered this.  "Well, you told me that your power is 
constantly taking in magical energy and... doing whatever it does 
with it that makes your field.  Maybe it just has a low limit and 
it's always been processing as much as it can handle.  It doesn't 
matter that it has more to work with, now, it just can't pull it 
in any faster."

"Yeah," Doug said, nodding thoughtfully.  "That's probably it."
He looked up at her and grinned.  "Hey, check you out -- Lisa
the magical theorist!  We'll make a wizard out of you yet."

She rolled her eyes.  "Puh-lease.  I've had enough of *that*
already.  The day I mess with magic again..."  She shuddered.
"No, thank you.  I don't want to be a wizard."

"Geeze, it was just a joke, Leese," he muttered.  "It's not like
you or anyone else in this world *has* the magegift, far as I can
tell."

Her brow furrowed, she peered at him.  "You keep saying that.
*How* can you tell?"

"Magesight."  He tapped a finger against his temple, right behind
one eye.  "If anyone out there in the city had an active
magegift, I guarantee you I would have noticed it by now, even at
a fair distance."  He shook his head.  "In all the months I've
been here, I haven't seen *anyone* with even a minor magical
talent.  And if we assume that MegaTokyo is a statistically
representative sample for the rest of the world, then that means
it's pretty likely that no one's out there using magic at all."

"So we don't have to worry about getting our own version of
Arcanum, huh?"  Lisa busied herself with finishing off her gyro.

Doug snorted.  "Yeah, and thank your lucky stars for that.  Bad
enough you have Quincy -- make Quincy a wizard, add a fondness
for casual genocide and international terror along with an
obsession about real estate, and you have Arcanum."

Lisa shuddered again.  "No, *you* have him, and that's quite
enough for me."

"No, we don't," Doug said softly.  "Not any more."

"Yeah?"  Lisa raised an eyebrow as she sensed a story.  "Did you
guys finally bring him down?  That's one thing I don't seem to
have a clear memory for."

Doug shook his head glumly.  "I wish.  No, he and his
organization just... up and vanished one day.  The word that
reached us said he'd left Earth entirely, looking for another
world he could take over with less trouble."

She whistled softly.  "Damn.  And of course you can't be sure he
won't come back."

"Nope."  He gave a wan smile.  "We can always hope some
extraterrestrial beastie ate him, but I don't think we'd be quite
that lucky."

Lisa bit her lip and gazed thoughtfully at the remains of her 
gyro. "No, I suppose you wouldn't, at that."

                              * * *

The Majestic Theatre.  Friday, February 13, 2037, 9:32 PM

As the house lights came up for intermission and the crowd behind
them stirred, Sylia turned to her companion.

"'Fargo's Fine Fabrics'?" she asked.

Fargo shrugged.  "I do what I have to."  He motioned with his 
head.  "Come with me.  I need a smoke."

Sylia nodded, and the two of them rose from their seats and made
their way through the lines for bar and restroom that snaked
through the upper lobby.

"I didn't realize you liked classic theatre," Sylia offered 
conversationally as they made their way down to the front doors 
of the theatre.  Unconsciously, her hand went to the breast 
pocket of her blazer, to make sure her ticket stub was still 
there.

"Like I've told you before, Sylia, there's a lot about me you
don't know."  He smiled as he held a door open for her.  "As it
so happens, I've been waiting for a revival of 'Phantom of the
Opera' for years."  Together they stepped to one side of the
theatre entrance.

Sylia let one eyebrow rise as she withdrew a cigarette from her
case and let Fargo light it.  "Is that so?"

"It is," he replied with a smile.  Once again his normal rumpled
appearance had been banished.  Sylia considered him, and thought
that tonight he once again actually looked... dapper, for lack of
a better word, and she smiled at the idea.

"I have to admit," she said, "that there are aspects of the story
that do appeal to me."

Fargo grinned as he exhaled a cloud of smoke into the chill air.
"Wait until you see the second act opener."

"Really."  She allowed another hint of a smile.

He inhaled again on his cigarette.  "Really."  He looked up into
the glowing pink-orange clouds of the night sky as he rummaged in
a pocket.  Sylia stepped closer to him, as if she were
approaching him for warmth and affection.  After a moment more of
searching, Fargo pulled out a microdisk, which he slipped into
her hand, which she had laid at his waist.  Sylia made it vanish
with the smallest of motions.

"The disk holds details on the job," he said, more quietly, and
she leaned closer, continuing the illusion of a couple exchanging
intimacies.  "An upper-level GENOM executive based in Yokohama
has apparently pissed someone off, and they want him ...
embarrassed and disgraced."

"How?" Sylia whispered.

Fargo shrugged.  "That's up to you.  But according to the
information I was given, he owns a custom 33S, in obvious
defiance of the law."  He gave her a sly smile.  "That should be
enough right there."

She nodded, murmuring a wordless agreement.  "Anything else?"

"Yeah."  Fargo took another long drag on his cigarette, driving
the fire all the way down to the filter.  Exhaling, he dropped
the butt to the sidewalk, where it sizzled in a puddle of salt
and meltwater.  "The customer has a schedule they need you to
abide by.  No earlier than next Friday morning, no later than
that evening.  Something about timing matters for maximum
effect."

"And the offer is?" Sylia whispered romantically in his ear, and
smiled to herself when she saw him shiver.  *He's not the only
one who can flirt mercilessly,* she thought with some amusement.
*Better enjoy it while you can, Fargo, because that's all you're
ever going to get.*  It didn't hurt that it helped her exorcise
some of the anxiety she was feeling over Lisa's meeting with
Sangnoir.  It was certainly less destructive than some of the
other options open to her.

"Um."  Fargo cleared his throat as he tried to regain his
suddenly shaky composure.  Sylia smirked to herself.  "The usual
amount -- 25, half on acceptance, half on completion."

"I'll have to consult the others," she breathed into his ear as a
bell rang briefly inside the theatre lobby.  "I'll get you an
answer by tomorrow noon."

Then with a private smile, she whirled away from him.  "Ah, well,
intermission's over.  We'd best hurry back to our seats.  After
all," she glanced back at him with an absolutely straight face,
"I understand that the second act opener is something that should
not be missed."  She strode through the door, unhurried, stately.

Fargo grimaced, then grinned suddenly, and followed her back into
the theatre.

                              * * *

Friday, February 13, 2037, 11:49 PM

She slid between the sheets with a hiss of silk against satin.
"Lights out," she murmured, and the apartment computer complied,
obedient, faithful.

Faithful.

For years, GENOM has been her creed, her catechism, her god.  She
had been its good and faithful servant, and had been rewarded
with paradise on earth.

In the dark, as she drifted into the threshold between
wakefulness and sleep, Kate could admit to herself that it was no
longer enough.  Her faith was dead.  Her god was a hollow idol.
And what had seemed Paradise was as much a prison.

And even though she could never acknowledge it while fully awake,
not even to herself, she didn't care any more.

Absolute good.

Absolute evil.

When it came time to make a choice, she knew on which side she 
would be.

END OF CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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