05-12-2003, 07:26 PM
While I fight with my writer's block, here's a little something I wrote some months ago.
-- Bob
(edit: ezcode, not html!)
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In other news, I found out who the mysterious "KS", designer ofthe boomer brain, was. Despite my best efforts, I had to filterthrough a lot of Knight Saber drek to find him, but there he was,practically a footnote in the history of boomer development aspresented by GENOM: Katsuhito Stingray. (Talk about your goofynames... Or maybe not, considering pots, kettles and apparentreflectivity indices...)Something of a latter-day Renaissance man, he worked for anoutfit called Whiz Laboratories (which GENOM later took over,natch) until he died in what the official biographical paragraphdescribed as "an accidental explosion". Parsing *that* throughthe GENOM-to-Truth converter gets us "assassinated after hiscritical breakthrough so we could nick all the rights when webought the company."Except that GENOM *didn't* get *all* the rights to boomertech --according to certain other databases I consulted, Stingray hadfiled for and received a few key patents before his death, andthose were still in the hands of his two children, Sylia andMackinnison. (*Who* in their right mind names their kid"Mackinnison"? God only knows what damage that did to the poorboy's psyche growing up, especially combined with having his dadmurdered...)Anyway, out of a kind of paternal interest in these two probablevictims of GENOM's greed, I looked into their lives. It turnedout to be harder than I expected -- both kept a very low profile.However, I found enough. They were doing well for themselves --for some reason GENOM hadn't tried to cheat or lawyer them out ofthe remaining patents (probably because it would have been a PRdebacle even GENOM's spinmeisters couldn't have fixed), andthey'd been worth a lot. The girl -- well, woman, actually,since she was now in her middle 20s -- was a multimillionaire whoapparently split her time between running a lingerie shop anddabbling (rather successfully) in real estate. The boy was anengineering prodigy who was attending college in Germany, but hadpreviously lived with his sister in their penthouse home. Theycertainly weren't suffering, despite their father's probablemurder at GENOM's hands.(*"They killed your parents, didn't they?"*)The memory of my own voice whispered to me from the back of mymind, and I stopped for a moment to consider what it had to say.Then I pulled up what precious little there was on Sylia Stingrayin the public databases -- suspiciously little, come to think ofit. I supplemented it with material I had eased out of someGENOM files I really wasn't supposed to know about. I added invarious news shots of both the White Knight and Stingray. Istudied the combined results and thought.Allowing for those stupid heels and the general increase indimensions imposed by the nature of the armor, she'd be about theright height and build. Her brother had clearly inherited theirfather's genius, so why not her? But either one could be theKnights' technologist. She had more than enough money to start(if not continuously fund) a private mercenary force. Sheclearly had enough pull to ensure her online profile was smallenough to overlook easily. She had the free time. And she had amotive that tallied up nicely with Lady White's obsession withboomers.Add to that the fact that the name I'd overheard in their radiochatter as "Celia" could easily have been "Sylia" instead, and Iwas pretty sure that I had found the leader of the Knight Sabers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
-- Bob
(edit: ezcode, not html!)
----------
In other news, I found out who the mysterious "KS", designer ofthe boomer brain, was. Despite my best efforts, I had to filterthrough a lot of Knight Saber drek to find him, but there he was,practically a footnote in the history of boomer development aspresented by GENOM: Katsuhito Stingray. (Talk about your goofynames... Or maybe not, considering pots, kettles and apparentreflectivity indices...)Something of a latter-day Renaissance man, he worked for anoutfit called Whiz Laboratories (which GENOM later took over,natch) until he died in what the official biographical paragraphdescribed as "an accidental explosion". Parsing *that* throughthe GENOM-to-Truth converter gets us "assassinated after hiscritical breakthrough so we could nick all the rights when webought the company."Except that GENOM *didn't* get *all* the rights to boomertech --according to certain other databases I consulted, Stingray hadfiled for and received a few key patents before his death, andthose were still in the hands of his two children, Sylia andMackinnison. (*Who* in their right mind names their kid"Mackinnison"? God only knows what damage that did to the poorboy's psyche growing up, especially combined with having his dadmurdered...)Anyway, out of a kind of paternal interest in these two probablevictims of GENOM's greed, I looked into their lives. It turnedout to be harder than I expected -- both kept a very low profile.However, I found enough. They were doing well for themselves --for some reason GENOM hadn't tried to cheat or lawyer them out ofthe remaining patents (probably because it would have been a PRdebacle even GENOM's spinmeisters couldn't have fixed), andthey'd been worth a lot. The girl -- well, woman, actually,since she was now in her middle 20s -- was a multimillionaire whoapparently split her time between running a lingerie shop anddabbling (rather successfully) in real estate. The boy was anengineering prodigy who was attending college in Germany, but hadpreviously lived with his sister in their penthouse home. Theycertainly weren't suffering, despite their father's probablemurder at GENOM's hands.(*"They killed your parents, didn't they?"*)The memory of my own voice whispered to me from the back of mymind, and I stopped for a moment to consider what it had to say.Then I pulled up what precious little there was on Sylia Stingrayin the public databases -- suspiciously little, come to think ofit. I supplemented it with material I had eased out of someGENOM files I really wasn't supposed to know about. I added invarious news shots of both the White Knight and Stingray. Istudied the combined results and thought.Allowing for those stupid heels and the general increase indimensions imposed by the nature of the armor, she'd be about theright height and build. Her brother had clearly inherited theirfather's genius, so why not her? But either one could be theKnights' technologist. She had more than enough money to start(if not continuously fund) a private mercenary force. Sheclearly had enough pull to ensure her online profile was smallenough to overlook easily. She had the free time. And she had amotive that tallied up nicely with Lady White's obsession withboomers.Add to that the fact that the name I'd overheard in their radiochatter as "Celia" could easily have been "Sylia" instead, and Iwas pretty sure that I had found the leader of the Knight Sabers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.