Excelsior!

--G.

BUBBLEGUM CHAOS: TOKYO 2040
Yes, it's another SI from Eyrie Productions, but this one has a
twist that will probably make me no friends on alt.fan.bgcrisis.
The almighty author avatars in this series are:
IT guys.
Really.
THE HOUSEMATES (OUR HEROES?)
  - GRYPHON
	26 years old, originally from Maine.  Came to Japan in 2031
for college.  God knows why.  Maybe they offered him a scholarship.
Anyway, it was a bad idea.  Dropped out in 2032, did some tech support
for a local PC company, a little more tech support for a comm-server
company, a little -more- tech support for -another- comm-server
company, then landed an job with the AD Police's IT department in
2036.  In fact, he pretty much IS the AD Police's IT department.
Maybe there's an intern or a junior officer or something, I'm not
sure, but he runs the place.  It's a pretty low-stress job, except for
the high, er, employee turnover in certain departments; makes for lots
of account openings and closings.  They look like a busy department,
but they don't actually DO all that much.
	Homesick for the US, except that all his friends are in Tokyo.
Plus, he hates flying, and flying to the East Coast of the US from
Japan is a royal bitch if you can't afford transorbitals.
	Friendly with a few APD officers, mostly in the Dispatch
section where they're at their computers for most of their workday
(and one or two of the field cops, including Daley Wong, who shares
his fondness for the music of the 1980s - he must, just look at him
for crissake! :), but not much of an after-work mingler.
	Owns a Panasony ERS-2240 Version 1 "Cybo" robotic pet (the
name is a slightly convoluted Japanglish pun) which I haven't named
yet.
  - MEGAZONE
	28, originally from New York.  Came to Japan in 2029 for
college.  Again, God knows why.  Graduated in 2034 with a degree in
technical writing and a degree in history.  Works, logically enough
given that education, as the BOFH for whatever department of GENOM
Linna Yamazaki works in.  Waging a one-man war of nerves with Kain
Smith, the manager of that department, in the finest
BOFH-vs.-annoying-manager tradition.
	Wants to go out with Misae, the girl who sits next to Linna,
so spends a lot of time hanging around in that part of the cube maze,
making people think he's locked onto Linna herself.  He's just using
her to get closer to Misae, the bastard.  Of course, Linna -knows-
that, and puts up with it anyway, so I suppose there's no problem. :)
	Before GENOM, Zoner worked for both of the same comm-server
companies as Gryphon.  He got out of the second one a few months after
Gryphon, and thus managed to cash in the stock payout when GENOM
bought the company (and then turned around and went to work for
another division of GENOM).

  - TRUSS
	27, originally from Maine as well.  Knows Gryphon from way
back - they went to summer camp for smart kids in Maine in 2026.
Truss started at the same Tokyo college that Zoner was attending, and
Gryphon would start attending the following year, in 2030 and
graduated in 2034 with a programming degree.  After spending several
years in the soul-crushing environment of a large programming division
of an even larger multinational corporation, Truss got fed up and
struck out on his own, launching a web consulting firm he decided, in
a fit of whimsy, to call "Dingonation".

STUDIO 7-G
	Gryphon and MegaZone, as Studio 7-G, are infamous online anime
fans and fanfic creators dating back to their college days.  They are
best known for the creation of the enormous multi-threaded crossover
series "Fandango on Core" and most hated for their brutally dark,
pessimistic and tragic rework of a classic anime.  "Martian
Transgressor Nadesico", with its deep Gothic gloom, thick religious
imagery and hopeless message about the infinite corruptness and
imperfectibility of Man, is either loved or despised by its readers;
there is no middle ground.  (A lot of people especially hate the
non-stock replacement for Akito Tenkawa, the perennially fatalistic,
morose and rather spinelessly pathetic JD Mulder, and accuse him of
being merely a self-insert avatar of his creator, Gryphon.)

DINGONATION
	John Trussell's web consulting company.  Started out as a
one-man show and very nearly collapsed as same, until a chance meeting
on the subway brought Truss and his company salvation in the form of a
Sales and Marketing Department: an energetic, smart and extremely
canny high school junior with a set of well-developed business killer
instincts, by the name of Nanami Jinnai.  Nanami doesn't work
full-time for Dingonation; that would be illegal, since she's only
16.  Still, at almost any given time, if you call the company's listed
phone number, it's Nanami who answers.
	Dingonation's biggest client is the Silky Doll lingerie shop.
Given that and the odd name of the company itself, there are a lot of
misunderstandings about just what Dingonation -does- sometimes.

SHAMROCK HOUSE
	After wedging themselves and their possessions into tiny Tokyo
apartments for several years and suffering through a number of
exasperating moves, Truss, Zoner and Gryphon were pretty fed up with
the whole scene in 2038 when their rapidly deteriorating landlord
situation made it clear they would have to move again.  Zoner saved
the day by locating, after a lot of online research and a lot of
legwork, a house not far from the Rift which had survived the Great
Quake more or less intact and was for sale dirt cheap.  He checked it
out, discovered that, although pretty sad-looking, the neighborhood it
was in was actually low-crime and quite friendly, snapped it up with
stock options from the comm-server startup, and the three of them
(joined by Gryphon's mother, who came over from the States just for
the occasion) embarked on a frenzy of home improvement.
	Shamrock House, which gets its name from its pale green color
(reminiscent of a McDonald's Shamrock Shake), is a three-story
dwelling in a style which was pretty common in Japan around the turn
of the century.  Gryphon lives on the third floor, Truss and Zoner on
the second, and the first floor contains the common areas and a small
guest room.  The whole place is jammed full of computer equipment in
various states of repair, audiovisual gear, media - LOTS of media -
and the like.
	The neighborhood is dilapidated - it was never really repaired
after the Quake - but the people who live there are decent, crime is
low, and it's fairly convenient to the Ring Road and public
transportation.
	Because all three Shamrock House denizens are big-time net
weenies (and Truss is running a web consulting biz out of the second
floor), there's some pretty heavy-duty telecom running to this place -
probably at least a DS1's worth of the local timeframe's DSL
equivalent, maybe even a DS3, depending on how much we figure bandwidth
prices have come down in the intervening forty years...

This is basically a story of three fairly regular guys who happen to
live in the world of BGC2040, and have the dubious cosmic "gift" of
being strange attractors.  By coincidence, they work in close
proximity to three of the Knight Sabers and know them personally (but
are unaware, naturally, of their secret identities).  By mischance
which will at first terrify and later rather irritate them, at least
two of them tend to be present at any given rogue-Boomer incident
which features an appearance by the Knight Saber (that is to say, all
of them).
This is unfortunate for them for a number of reasons.
1) They are NOT HEROIC FIGURES.  Oh, sure, they have a certain amount
of moral courage, they're not total milksops (just as I'd like to
think we're not IRL), but they are NOT action heroes.  When Boomers go
rogue and start tearing apart the restaurant, they run away or hide
under their table like everybody else.  The most shocking act of
bravery you're likely to see out of any of them is chucking a rock at
a beastie to try and keep it from skewering an ADP cop, then running
like all holy hell in the opposite direction, yelling and wondering
why the FUCK they just did something as stupid as that.
2) Noticing that at least two of those three guys tend to be present
at any incident, the Knight Sabers (or at least their paranoid wacko
leader) will come to suspect that they have something to DO with the
rogue robot phenomenon - which they don't.
3) Noticing subsequently that each of those three guys knows
personally one of the Knight Sabers - one of them even has access to
the front business on the Bat Cave! - the aforementioned paranoid
wacko will come to suspect that they must be some kind of corporate
spies, gathering evidence against the team - which they aren't.
4) Being curious individuals well-versed in synthesizing data out of
the information currents that permeate their society, and having more
cumulative first-hand experience with the Knight Sabers than anybody
else who's not dead (even Leon misses a party once in a while), they
-are- going to figure out eventually who the Knight Sabers ARE.  What
will they do with this powerful, potentially explosive information?
Well... nothing, really.  They just enjoy knowing.  If they feel they
can get away with it, they'll try to help - after all, they -like- the
Sabers they know, in their civilian identities, and they can certainly
get behind the team's apparent mission of stopping rogue robots.
Hell, they're FANS.  They set up a KS fan website and made T-shirts
for themselves.  ("I (heart) the Little Red One" :) But by "help" I
don't mean putting on power armor and striding forth to save the day -
see item #1.
No, these guys are more like the Lone Gunmen... they gather
information, they provide the occasional hint.  Linna gets an alert,
looks for a way to get clear of the office, MZ adjusts her time card
and sends her email with a MapQuest optimal route to the trouble site,
tagging on, "Construction on the 280, take the 112 - be careful, word
on the street is it's a military model - MZ"  That kind of thing.
The Knight Sabers and their mission become supporting characters -
that hasn't changed from the "stereotypical" SI model - but
considering that they become supporting characters in a 1980s style
tech-geek buddy flick... :)
(BTW, the title is drawn from the apparent fact - at least apparent to
Zoner - that all of this is happening to Our Heroes? because of a
concentration of chaos potential around them.  Hail Eris!)
["I just ripped your albums for personal use!  It's a form factor
issue!  I bought all the media!"]
------
	John "Truss" Trussell scowled at his monitor.  There wasn't
anything wrong with it; it was a Panasony P-Metal Series 44, a nice,
mid-range, twenty-inch plasmachrome panel, in perfect working order.
Nevertheless, he scowled.  Scowled, and fiddled with a pen, clicking
its point in and out, in and out, flipping it around in his fingers,
tapping it against his desk.  Scowled, and fiddled, and bounced one
heel up and down, tap-tap-tapping rhythmically against the plastic
anti-static panel that covered the floor under his desk and chair.
Scowled, and fiddled, and bounced, and periodically went "hmm" or "rr"
or "hmph" under his breath.
	All of which, except possibly the scowling, his business
partner Nanami Jinnai found exceedingly annoying.  It hadn't bothered
her at first, but that was largely because it had slowly escalated
over the course of the last ten minutes or so.  First the scowling,
then the "hmm"ing, then the bouncing, then the fiddling.  Next he'd
start squeaking his chair, or, if whatever problem he was up against
this time particularly vexed him, muttering to himself.
	Before he could get to that point, his partner took action.
	"John," she said.
	He didn't hear her.
	"John," she said, slightly louder.
	Again there was no response.  A moment later he began, on the
counterbeat of every heel-bounce, moving his chair ever so slightly
back and forth on its swivel, making it squeak softly in syncopation
with the tap of his heel on the floor.
	"John, I went to the doctor this morning," said Nanami,
"and he gave me some bad news."
	"(god dammit, what the hell?)" Trussell muttered, still
bouncing, fiddling and squeaking.  "(you were working a minute ago.
all i changed was the color code, why did that break -you-?)"
	"John, I'm going to have your baby," said Nanami, who, being a
virtuous high-school sophomore with much better sense than to get too
friendly with her twenty-seven-year-old after-school employer, was
going to do no such thing.
	"(i don't get it,)" Trussell didn't reply.  "(i just don't get
it.  wait... ah.  no.  what the -hell-?)"
	"John, my father knows about us.  My doctor told him."
	"(this was -working- a second ago!)"
	"John!  My father is coming over here with the police!
They're going to lock you up until you're a hundred and two!"
	Trussell stopped scowling, muttering, bouncing, fiddling and
squeaking, quarter-turned left to face her desk at the end of the
small room that served as the office, and said, "Sorry?  Did you say
something, Nanami?"
	Nanami sighed, blew her honey-blonde bangs up away from her
eyes, and said, "No, John, I didn't say anything.  Could you pick
a nervous habit and stick with it, please?  I can handle one at a
time, but when you start making combos I can't take it any more."
	Truss grinned sheepishly.  "Sorry... what was I doing?"
	"You were fiddling, bouncing, squeaking, and muttering."
	"Sorry."  Truss got up from his chair, crossed the three steps
to the mini-fridge at the other side of the office, and took out the
day's fourth Diet Hassy.  "It's just that there's a bug in this stupid
script someplace," he went on as he returned to his seat.  "Every time
I set the background color to anything but ACACAC, the 'check out'
button disappears."
	"And that's bad, right?"
	"It is if Sylia ever wants anybody to actually -buy- anything
from Silky Doll Online.  No 'check out' button, no database
transaction, no credit transfer... no sale."
	Nanami nodded her "right, that's bad" nod and went back to
the accounts receivable.  A moment later, Truss started squeaking
again.
	Nanami sighed.
	It was going to be that kind of an afternoon.
	Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins scowled at the monitor.  There was
something wrong with it; it was a Kimratech NcG-1194, a crappy,
low-range, fifteen-inch CRT, and from the looks of it, something was
wrong with the flyback transformer.  And so, he scowled.  Something
was always wrong with the flyback transformers on these things.
	"Why do they keep buying these things?" he wondered aloud.
	"They're cheap," Detective Daley Wong replied.
	"Yeah, in every sense of the word," Gryphon replied.  He took
a half-step back from the detective's desk, paused for a moment, and
then delivered a judicious whack to the side of the monitor's casing.
The wobbling image jumped, fizzled, and then stabilized, as much as
the image on an NgC-1194 ever did.
	He didn't have time to finish grinning, though, before
something inside the thing went "pop" and the image went out
altogether.  Something orange flickered briefly behind the vent slots
on the monitor's tube housing.
	"When does the vendor contract with Kimratech expire?"
Detective Wong inquired calmly.
	"2055," Gryphon replied glumly as he began disconnecting the
burned-out monitor from the rest of Wong's desktop system.
	"I see."
	Gryphon took a black marker out of his pocket, scribbled
'TRASH' on top of the monitor, and put it outside Wong's office door.
	"I'll have your new one installed by 2," he told the
detective.  "There's at least a 20% chance it'll work better than that
one did... for the first week or so."
	"Thanks," Wong replied dryly, then smiled.  "Don't take it so
hard... it's not your fault."
	"I know," Gryphon replied, grinning.  "I just hate having to
drag the damn things up from the supply center so often... "
	He went out into the hallway, paused, and aimed a kick at the
dead monitor, tipping it over on its side.  Feeling slightly better,
he headed down the hall toward his own office.  Before he got there,
he spied the blonde head and slender figure of one of his favorite
officers on her way back to the Data Center from the ladies' room.
	"Heyo, 'Lise," he said as they met partway.
	"Oh, hey, Gryph," Officer Elise Drake replied.  Spotting the
overturned monitor with 'TRASH' written on it farther back in the
direction he was coming from, she went on, "Oh, Daley's monitor blew
up again?  That reminds me - Nene's having some kind of weird problem
with packet loss at her station.  She thinks maybe she's got another
one of those glitchy NICs."
	Gryphon sighed.  "One of these days I'd like to have a
-software- problem to handle... "
	Elise grinned.  "No kidding.  The guy that signed that
vendor deal with Kimratech ought to be boiled in oil."
	"Oh well.  I guess we all have our niches in life.  You fight
crime, I fight cheap hardware."
	"I don't fight crime, I just direct traffic."  
	"Well, you can't do that standing around in the hall,"
grumbled Sergeant Leon McNichol as he strode past, heading for Daley
Wong's office.  Gryphon wondered why it was that Leon always looked so
pissed off.  He couldn't possibly -be- that pissed off all the time,
could he?
	"Yes -sir-, Sergeant McNichol, sir," said Elise sarcastically,
coming to attention and saluting.  Then she shrugged, bade Gryphon
good afternoon, and went on her way back to her station.
	Gryphon watched her go, shook his head sadly, and headed for
his office.  Before he'd gotten two steps, he was frozen in his tracks
by the raspy bellow of McNichol's voice from behind him:
	"Hey!  My monitor's on the fritz too."
	"Sure, sure, I'll check it as soon as I'm done with Romanova's
interface problem," said Gryphon over his shoulder.
	"You can fool around with the data girls on your own time,
Casanova," Leon yelled, causing Gryphon to half-turn and give him a
very strange look.
	"Leon, what the hell do you think I'm talking about?!" he
asked, then raised a hand.  "Forget it, I don't want to know.  I'll
get to you when I get to you."
	He went back into his office, phoned down his burning need for
two monitors and a NIC to the supply department, then slumped down in
his desk chair and sighed all the way down.
	It was going to be that kind of an afternoon.
	MegaZone, first, last, and only name, scowled at the space
where a monitor should have been.  There shouldn't have been anything
wrong with it; it should have been a GENOM JC-60, a great,
top-of-the-line, twenty-eight-inch semi-projective holopanel, on the
market for less than six weeks.  Nevertheless, he scowled, because it
wasn't -there-; there was just a blank space on the top of the desk
where the freestanding panel's projector base should have been.
	"Someone," MegaZone declared to his empty office, "is going to
die."
	And he had a pretty good idea who.
	He left his office and marched up the center aisle of the cube
farm.  As he passed each cubicle, a six-foot-six storm cloud with a
pretty good head of steam, each occupant looked up from her work to
watch him pass.  The office ladies of Division J knew their BOFH's
moods pretty well by now, and they could tell from the set of his jaw,
the speed of his walk and the fact that his heavy eyebrows had become
one solid black line that he was Really Pissed Off.
	Given the direction in which he was heading, that wasn't
necessarily such a bad thing.
	Zoner barged into Vice-Manager Jerry Roland's office without
pausing to knock, a technique which afforded him a nicely definitive
glimpse of some material that certainly didn't meet the company
standard for in-office Web browsing before Roland managed to switch to
his spreadsheet application.
	Material being projected by -his- JC-60.
	Without a word, Zoner went around to the back of Roland's desk
and disconnected the projector's input cable.
	"What are you doing?!" Roland sputtered.
	Zoner stopped in his work to aim his dark, deep-set eyes
across the desk like a double-barrelled shotgun, and growled, "Taking
back my monitor."
	"You can't just walk in here and take things!" Roland
objected.  Zoner ignored him and unhooked the power coupling, then
wound up the two cables and picked up the projector itself.
	"Wait!" Roland demanded, trying to sound imperious, as Zoner
headed out of the office.  The big BOFH paused in the doorway and
turned, fixing the manager with a look that combined complete
indifference with faint disdain and a distinct impression that the
look's owner believes his time is being wasted.
	Under this glare, Roland quailed, but gathered his composure
and said, "Put that back or I'll have your job!"
	"You couldn't -do- my job," Zoner replied.
	"You - you know what I mean!" Roland squeaked.  "Your constant
insubordination - Kain will back me up - I'll go to Devlin!"
	"Try it," Zoner replied evenly.  "Your whining about
insubordination against my logs of your web activities.  Let's see
who has whose job."
	"Y-your logs - ?" said Roland, swallowing audibly.
	Zoner allowed himself the faintest hint of a smile.  That was
more menacing than grinning outright.  "Of course," he said.  "All
online activity is monitored, Jerry.  You know that.  It says so right
in your employment contract."
	"Wh - how do you - "
	"I've read it," said MegaZone.  "Actually, I've read quite a
lot about you, Jerry.  I even know... "  Here he allowed his smile to
get a little wider, a little nastier.  "... Why you left New York."
	"Bh - that - "
	"Y'know, J. Edgar Hoover had a lot of good ideas," Zoner said
conversationally, his angry storm-cloud demeanor vanishing all at once
to be replaced with a sort of informative bonhomie.  "He also had an
unfortunate fondness for red flapper dresses, even though, being an
intelligent and perceptive man, he -had- to realize that red isn't a
slenderizing color - but he had a lot of good ideas."
	And with that seeming non sequitur, he closed Roland's door
behind him and went whistling back to his office.
	The office ladies of Section J had the good sense not to
applaud as he passed their cubicles, but they wanted to.
	"That," Misae Katagiri observed from one of the two cubicles
close enough to Roland's office to be within earshot of the whole
conversation, "was -so- cool."
	Linna Yamazaki, who occupied the other, nodded.  "Not bad.  I
might have to enter the 'MZ or Roland' pool after all."
	"I wonder what he did in New York," Misae mused.
	Back in his office, Zoner hooked up his JC-60 again, pulled up
the Office Maestro website, and ordered a monitor lock.  As he did so,
xbiff went off, popping up a little window that showed him the sender
and subject of his new mail:
From: jdevlin#it.genom.co.jp
Subj: what did you do to roland this time?
	Zoner sighed.
	It was going to be that kind of afternoon.