Subject: [FFML][Fanfic][BGC] Battlehymn Chapter One--Part One
From: The Reverend Prez
Date: 3/1/1998, 6:49 PM
To: fanfic@fanfic.com

Well, I've been so inspired by my own essay, I decided to try one or two
preview 
chapters to see how it goes.  Comments and criticisms, flames, MSTies,
priv-mail and public responses are all welcome.

Well, on with the show:

Benediction Hymn
by Presley H. Cannady and Lou Barnes

Bubblegum Chaos, Bubblegum Casualty
concept by Lou Barnes
______________________________



*  *  *
Chapter One
The Father's Requiem

...2047...

SOMEHOW, SOMEWHERE...HIS SUBCONSCIOUS PERSONA INCESSENTLY REMINDED HIM.
Disturbing, twisted, dark, ominous, and a variety of other particularly
unpleasant words flooded into his mind as he considered the oblique,
repetitious voice with subtle annoyance.  The soft, black leather of his
chair may have soothed the tense knots that somewhere along the line weaved
into his formidable musculature, and for the first time in his life, he
actually felt his age.  A jagged hand reached across the desk, and only a
shadow of the iron will it had once wielded--a will that arrogantly assumed
its invulnerability--stretched over the memopad.  His taut hands trembled
occassionally, and he took an almost pathetic pride in his ability to
demonstrate his basic, tool-user dexterity without forcing his fingers into
unwaivering obedience.
    More than less, the complicated and confounding mind of the Chairman of
Genom Co. Ltd.'s board of directors and chief executive operations of Genom
Japan Inc., perceived only an exagerrated variation of his actual physical
state.
    Reclining into the pit of his comfortable, executive-class seat, an act
of sheer will forced his bewailing spirit into its icy corner, freeing his
faculties long enough to recover from his moment of encumbrance.  The bitter
sentiments that had dominated his thoughts only moments before occupied a
displacement in time that had lasted no longer than an accompanying weary
sigh.  It was a luxury rarely available to any of Genom's high-ranking
executives--least of all the Chairman.  However, he had the fortune of an
office that occupied an entire floor of the Genom Tower, the largest
structure in (Mega-) Tokyo's Neo-Shinjuku district, that permited him the
most undisturbed haven of solitude on the face of the Earth.  Over a
kilometer above the ground, the entire floor was surrounded by a transparent
ceramic that proved as unbreakable as it was clear.  From this bird's eye
posture the Chairman drew his strength; below him lay the vast expanse of a
city that had relied on Genom to pull it through the worst of times and
"remained faithful" to the megacorporation well beyond any necessary
relationship.  There lay a city that breathed under the shadow of Genom's
pyramidal testament to the latest stage of business-driven politics.  There
lay a city whose very life-blood was both supplied and drained by the
corporation to which it was permanently latched to.  There lay a city
who--for all intensive purposes--belonged to Genom.  To the Chairman.
    Or at least it had.
    His eyes turned once again from the dreary confines of his desk into the
permissive atmosphere of his once personal playground.  At midday, the
industrial works were most visible; although no one fifty years would've
been able to tell the factory sweatshops of the modern day from even a
residential tower.  Soot, smog, smoke--air pollution was a problem that
Japan had solved coming into the twenty-first century, and   Instead, the
sun glinted off a series of sharp towers rising from an otherwise
ordinary-looking set of buildings towards the south-west.  The panaroma
shifted from the barbed, distant horizon of Setagaya-ku and across the
monolithic business and financial erections of Shinjuku.  He remembered the
turmoil that accompanied the new millenium, when Shinjuku's towering heights
were like flimsy milk cartons in the face of a resurging American and
European economy.  He remembered arriving here from the States, a matured
managerial expert working for Toshiba's personnel and financial offices in
the US.  At the turn of the century, he found the mythos of Japanese
prosperity diminished by the recent addition of the homeless and
dispossessed to Uchi-Sawai-cho's affluent residential strip; Japan as a
nation was already on the decline, and it would take another two decades
before Nature final sealed Nihon's fate.
    The Second Great Kanto Earthquake, for all intensive purposes, should
have finished off Japan as an economic power for good.  Nearly three fourths
of Shinjuku fell to the trembling motion of Earth's violent convulsions, and
the industrial heart of Honshu fell before the doomed inhabitants of the
Tokyo prefecture's inhabitants.  Unlike its twentieth century predecessor,
this earthquake left the island nation with nothing to rebuild from, and
nothing short of foreign aid would drag Japan back from this new, precarious
brink.
    The Chairman embodied that saving grace; for Japan's industrial elite
planned in the longterm, and their hired seers and mages--the market
analysts, economic and physical scientists, and a variety of other experts
trained in medley of classical and post-modern fields--long predicted the
implications of such a physical disaster on the Asian markets.  So, the
numerous Japanese keiretsu remolded itself, and the future-Chairman found
himself swept in a wind of reconstruction fervor.  Japan called out to the
world's dispossessed as well as its own--to the homeless and the unemployed.
To the persecuted, the unwanted, and the untounchables...she called to each
of these, inviting them to her devastated shores to live and work amongst
her people.  Within a year, Japan's population within the Kanto regional
district had burgeoned nearly seventy percent, and Japan's overall
population finally peaked at 232 million--less than twenty million persons
behind the latest United States census, and all packed in an area that
barely exceeded that of the state of Montana.  The world came to considered
Japan as their human dumping grounds, and even the United States
participated in the "exportation" of "human resources," solving a number of
their poverty problems virtually overnight.  As if it were a last act of
desparation, the Japanese government drained its treasury to bankroll the
influx of immigrants into their reclaimed, yet severely limited, territory.
Drawing from key investments that ruined the zaibatsu's credit and economic
influence in the world's eyes, Japanese industrialists concentrated on
rebuilding their home-based operations.  And at the center of it was the
Chairman--only a decade and change ago--a key associated director for the
Toshiba-led conglomerate that was quickly reforming itself into what was now
Genom.
    The world took its first slap in the face when Tokyo's reconstruction
was announced.  Dismissing the notion as a seemingly childish gesture taken
by an economically-devastated, fragile state, Europe and America severely
miscalculated the resourcefulness and pure drive of the new face of the
Japanese people.  For the first time, in possibly all of history, a nation
had truly come together to rebuild itself--the people the Genom keiretsu had
brought were determined to build for themselves a better future.  True, many
prefered to live on the living stipends the government dealt out with its
limited reserves, and the effort in fact hurt Japan's economy even worse
than the earthquake.  Nevertheless, once on track, the Japanese and the new
immigrant population had rebuilt the Kanto region, and Tokyo--once the gem
of Asia's economic resurgence--had arisen as a monolithic metropolis of
epic, science-fiction proportions.  Riding the tiger of reconstruction
proved an arduous and a difficult task, but the result wrought from the
zaibatsu's foresight had brought Japan into a new era of prosperity.  Four
years after the Kanto Quake, the Land of the Rising Sun had done the
impossible--it had arisen even stronger from the ashes of complete and utter
ruin.
    Cybernetics, computers, electronic networks--all of these were foreign
products in 2010.  By 2020, however, the Japanese had cornered the market in
each of these areas.  Toshiba, now the integral head of the Genom keiretsu
(before the keiretsu's official incorporation as a single entity in 2021),
led the revitalized Japan into a market the country had dared not explore
since the end of its last major war--the arms market.  The world of the
twenty-teens was highly fragmented, and the United Nations consisted of its
highly-introspective European members, its bullish, impetuous American
element, and a relatively quiet People's Republic of China.  The General
Assembly resembled a comical collection of diplomatic icing frosting a
rather poorly baked cake.  Africa had long since succumbed to its own
crumbling tendencies, and Southeast Asia's stunning economic growth had
stemmed briefly during the early years of the new millenium--they never
regained their previous initiative.  When a younger, far more passionate and
naive persona of Genom's chairman first came to Japan, it looked as if the
once great Asian economic giant would also succumb to the financial plague
accompanying a rocky market.  With America receding from its policing roles,
the arms market resurged with an almost youthful vigor, and Toshiba was
quick to hop on the bandwagon.  When the Chairman finally brought the Genom
keiretsu into its incorporated phase in 2021, the arms market had proven to
be Japan's most vital life-support mechanism as well as a major boon to his
company's interest.  Relying on those markets, Genom had moved into the
megacorporation scale, and the 2030s were dominated by the Japanese economic
interest.
    That same reliance, the Chairman noted dryly, had also swept the
initiative from Genom in an almost cruel twist of fate.  The rapid revival
of the Japanese economy hinged on its most basic constituents--its workers.
However, it also suffered from a distinct lack of resources and capital, and
providing for the public beyond basic stipends threatened to stem Genom's
newfound success.  So, for the time being, the nation short-changed its
people, while leaving them with no choice but to serve for their own
survival.  By the 2020s, the underclass had grown to encompass a fully 39%
of the Japanese population, and three out of five people in Tokyo were
living beneath the poverty line.  The sacrifice was necessary, if
unattractive.  Even despite his cool attitudes towards people who could not
individually further his goals, the Chairman understood that his destiny
ultimately depended on the behavior of the masses.  Consequently, Genom
helped form a sort of unofficial social caste system in "Megatokyo," as the
rest of the world dubbed Japan's newly reconstructed, absurdly opulent
capital.  The luxorious disguise frosted over the grim realities of urban
life, and even the Chairman was sensitive to that situation.
   Maybe that's why you ordered this office to be built, he thought,
thinking of the palatial towers he had erected about the world.  The
Chairman, ten-plus years ago, had ruled an empire from this single,
kilometer-high pyramid.  From his windows, he could easily take in the
entire scope of the city--the "Big Picture."  However, for decades, he had
drawn himself away from the untouchable vagrants he knew as a young man,
driving through Akasawa and Ginza.  With that distance came a sort of
emotional distachment from anything other than his own, complicated designs.
Befitting, actually--no one would ever consider the Chairman anything less
than an extremely complicated man.  Cold, cruel and ambitious, but only the
ideological throes embraced by disenfranchised, the malcontent and the
abused would call his character an invocation of evil.
    The reason why the Chairman had lived so long, as cruel and demonic as
he appeared to be, was because he realized he was but a man.  More than
likely, Genom's success and pole-vaulted him into a realm where it was easy
to forget his own mortality, but deep down inside, he would never forget the
past experiences that taught him otherwise.
    And when he failed to remember those lessons, the Chairman had to face
the reality of his own shortcomings with devastatingly fresh reminders.  No
longer did he rule the world about him, and no longer did he possess the
absolute control that he initially despised...and then came to appreciate
and wield lovingly.  Reduced to the mere specter of the man he used to be,
the humiliating blows his corporation had taken over the past seventeen
years had left him with plenty of time to reflect; futily analyzing his
mistakes with the advantage of tortuous hindsight.  He still chaired one of
the most powerful board of directors on the planet, and his company still
ranked amongst the few most influential MNCs around the world.  Genom, even
after a barely halted decline, still topped a number of the markets around
the world, and its various products and services--most notably the
Boomers--were so insinuated into human society that it would've taken a
radically massive shift in world society to even begin to chipaway at that
foundation.
    Still, Genom had been humbled, and Genom had descended into a realm
where its competition was conceivably vicious and hostile.  No corporate
alliance, natural monopoly or puppet goverment could deny their competitors
a piece of Genom's surrendered markets, and if Genom were to survive the
next three decades, the board of directors would have to come to terms with
that.
    Shuddering slightly, the Chairman always recoiled at the thought of his
collegues on the Board.  Since Genom's decline in the late 2030s, their
arrogance had superceded their programmed fear for the Chairman.  Even when
Genom seemed to exist at the mere sufferance of the Chairman, it had taken a
great deal of maneuvering on his part to proliferate that illusion.  Now,
the Board had discovered their pockets of power, and steadily whittled at
the Chairman's phantasm of authority.  Fortunately, they had approached
themselves with factional fractiousness, leaving the Chairman an out as a
mediator between the Board's internal squabbles.  Additionally, they
ineffectively used their own positions and thereby lost shareholder
confidence; after all, they had been picked by the Chairman and his real
allies to simply rubber stamp and implement their Chairman's directives.
Now, the Chairman could proudly say he controlled about half of the
twelve-member trustee board, and his own trusteeship was guarenteed by his
majority block amongst the shareholders.
    Nevertheless, the illusion of power had passed, and the Emperor of the
Indomitable Genom Multinational Corporate Entity, revered and feared the
world over, was once again Mr. Hendrick Quincy, Chairman of Genom Co. Ltd.'s
Board of Directors.
    Somehow...somewhere...

*  *  *

-The Reverend Prez
*  *  *

----------------------------------------------------
-----The Representative of the Everlasting Funk-----
---------------------------<cannady@magiccarpet.com>
"The Badass Reverend Prez"    |  Author of Robotech:
NROTC Candidate and        |  The Odysseus Epic and
Boy's State Representative |  other AMDG fanfics
----<http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1731/index.html>
-----<http://members.tripod.com/~revprez/index.html>