Okay friends, this is my first ever fanfic, so don't be gentle. Kick my ass.
C&C by private e-mail to hahax@aol.com please; this account isn't subscribed
to this list. So without further ado...
                              -----start-----
	Sylia wakes in the night. Sweat beads down her brow.
	Warm, wet trickle slides down past her temple. Her face impassive,
her black hair twisted and tangled, her skin balmy, she inhales deeply and
brings her arm up to wipe her face. Turns the pillow over--the other side
is cooler, drier. She drifts back to sleep.
	And wakes. Swead beads down her brow.
	She looks at the blinds--pale blue horizontal lines glow eerily
into the darkness of her bedroom. Realizes that it's early morning.
Realizes her pillow is soaked with sweat. Realizes with surprise that she
has been holding her breath, and starts breathing with an inhaled gasp.
	Sits up in bed.
	She looks at the blinds, then off into the darkness of her bedroom,
diffused in dim blue early-morning glow. Begins thinking: visions, her
father getting shot, Sylia herself shooting a boomer, Priss shooting
Sylvie, and more, montages that would have significance to a Freudian
analyst but mean nothing to her. There is no meaning in these memories:
just feelings, stirred, mixed, confused. Two-dimensional images, like cels
in an animation--no contour, just shifting edges that play before her.
	Then the movie stops; the memories implode into nothing and she is
still sitting in her bed, in the dim-blue glow of early morning, and she
suddenly feels very alone.
	"No time for existential dilemmas," she whispers to the morning.
"Have to get to work."
	She climbs out of bed.

[Zoom on blinds; zoom gradually focuses on one slit until we hear Sylia
twist the blinds open. The entire screen is filled with bright blue...fade
in 5:00 A.M. MegaTokyo. Montage of various scenes of early-morning life,
beginning with a wide pan over MegaTokyo skyline and segueing to several
bums, early-morning joggers, criminal types loitering, and people loading
objects from AV to a grocery store. BGM (background music): "Perfect
Circle", R.E.M. Credits fade in and out over montage...]

***************************************************************************

                        PALLADIUM SYNERGY PRESENTS
                             TERMINALLY JADED
                (working title--this is section 1.1alpha)

                  a hahax novella with screenplay effects

                            bad pulp fanfiction
                       based on the animated series
                            "bubblegum crisis"
                     characters & concepts created by:
 Suzuki Toshimichi, Sonoda Kenichi, Gooda Hiroaki, and Urushibara Satoshi

         (C) Copyright 1996 Palladium Synergy, all rights reserved
                        comments to hahax@aol.com
***************************************************************************

[Hold last shot, loading crates of food from AV to grocery store, as
caption fades in and out: "Summer, 2034"]

	An apple falls out of a crate, rolls along the sidewalk. A figure
in black denim kicks the apple out into the street, where it is promptly
crushed by a passing car.
	The kicker is Termina Li, expatriate Chinese-Korean-American New
Yorker with scruffy midlength hair dyed a pleasant shade of forest green
and no goatee. He is wearing all black denim, from his jeans to his jacket
to the baseball cap on his head, except for his silver vinyl t-shirt, which
is far too trendy for any self-respecting rocker to wear. This indicates
that he has no self-respect, which is true.
	That apple made a rather spectacular splatter, for a fruit, thinks
Termina. It's those new genetically engineered mutant super-hyper-ultra-
mega-ripened varieties, the fruit equivalent of Testosteridol(TM)-shot
bodybuilders.
	Not that anyone bodybuilds anymore. Ever since the buma took over
all heavy manual labor, the ultimate futility of pushing the human form
into looking like a bundle of overtenderized steak cuts has become
immediately apparent to all human beings, even the few benighted souls
who had believed in it before. There are maybe a dozen bodybuilders left
in the whole world, like Shakers used to be decades ago. Hell, Merck
Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey stopped making Testosteridol years ago.
	Termina readjusts the strap holding the guitar to his back and
starts thinking of New Jersey, and New York, all the gorgeously ugly Sprawl
that was home--and it is a Sprawl, Gibson's vision become reality, just
like everyone knew it would--and he misses it.
	But the global media axis has two poles now, and MegaTokyo is the
other one, the other place where every band hoping to succeed has to tour.
Termina, being a die-hard Sprawl inhabitant (Manhattan is his favorite
neighborhood), argued against playing in MegaTokyo: "Hey, c'mon guys, this
is New York, this is The City with a capital 'The', this is home. We can
make it just playing here. C'mon."
	Of course, the other band members are hell-bent on commercial
success, or at least selling enough copies of their latest album to buy
housing and food for a year. Doesn't anyone understand indie cred anymore?
	Well, honestly, Termina thinks, it's a lot easier for me to talk
about indie cred. Termina still has money in the bank from his previous
career, hacking code for (shudder) Net$cape. Termina can last at least
another year without real income. The other guys, they claim 'indie cred'
really means 'drunk, poor, unemployed, unknown'. They live on royalties
(not much) and shitty day McJobs.
	So, in the end, Termina agreed to play in MegaTokyo. Well,
actually, it was either he agree or the band would get another guitarist.
So he caved, and they'd set up some gigs in MegaTokyo clubs.
	Speaking of which, Termina finally reaches his destination, the
first such club. Or at least this should be the address. He looks up at
the sign, looks at the address scrawled on a piece of paper, and looks
back up at the sign.
	"Hot Legs?" he mutters, in English. "Christ. What the hell
happened to respectable names like 'CBGB's'?"
	He knocks on the door. An old man comes sticks his head out, eyes
blinking as if he's just woken up recently (a safe assumption), greets him.
	"Oh, you must be Termina?" the old man asks in Japanese.
	"Yes," Termina says, switching to Japanese. "And what is your name
most honorable sir?"
	"Call me Old Man," the old man says. "And you cut the formality."
	"Sher," Termina says, in English.
	"Eh?" Old Man, in Japanese. All educated Japanese speak some
English, just as all educated Americans (particularly coders) spoke
Japanese, but Termina's Sprawl-drawled version of "sure" wasn't
well-interpreted.
	"Sher," Termina says, in the closest Japanese equivalent he knows.
	"Ah. And I assume you called me out of bed this early because you
want to talk about the gig?" Old Man blinks significantly, as if to hint
that Termina's phone call a half hour ago woke him from a very peaceful
and happy dream, perhaps involving supermodel Krissy Taylor (Niki Taylor's
third daughter, named after her aunt, who died in 1995).
	"Sher," Termina says. "Hope I didn't wake you up with that call.
Our manager Neal would be here, but there was a mix-up at the airport."
	"All right, well, since our local band Priss and the Replicants
broke up, we've had to book more out-of-town acts here at Hot Legs. And
since you came with such high recommendations from Leo..." (Leo is the
present owner of the Knitting Factory back in Manhattan) "...we agreed that
you'd get all the door receipts, right?"
	"Yeah, well, that's not the problem. In fact we have no problem
with money..." (a lie--Termina has no problem with money, but the rest of
the band members, including Neal, do) "...I just wanted to do get a feel
for the acoustics of this place."
	"Well, you could do that during soundcheck."
	Termina shakes his head. "No...it's more than that...more, like, I
want to...feel the acoustics of this place."
	"You just said that," Old Man says, looking at him quizzically.
	"It's hard to explain. Don't worry. Just give me a little amp and
a few hours on that stage." He pats the guitar on his back. "I'm going
to play."
	"But there's no one here!"
	"Fine with me. It really doesn't matter."
	Old Man looks at Termina hard, trying to figure out if this is
some sort of elaborate scam, then finally throws his hands up in
frustration. "Artists," he mutters, and then starts walking into the back
of the club. "Follow me."
	Termina smiles, unslings his guitar, follows Old Man backstage.

                                    *

	Linna Yamazaki glances in the mirror one more time, adjusts her
headphones, and heads out the door for her morning jog, but just as she
does so, the phone rings.
	"Shit," she mutters as she dashes back to the vidscreen and says,
"Pick up." The voice-activated videophone does so.
	"Linna, I miss you," says Takashi, his pathetically decrepit face
on the vidscreen indicating that he hasn't slept at all in the past, oh,
week or so.
	"UGH! Takashi, it's over! It's OVER! Don't you get it?"
	Takashi's her ex-s.o., s.o. presently meaning in her mind not
"significant other" but rather "sententiously
obnoxiousmofowhoshouldleavemealone".
	"Linna, please, one more chance..." turning on the pleading
dying-puppy eyes that Linna used to find attractive before she got annoyed
as shit with his mannerisms.
	"No, Tak, NO! You realize it's half past five in the morning?"
	"Yes, I know, I thought I'd catch you before your run--"
	"Well, now you've made me late for my run. Good-BYE! Hang up,"
she says, and the videophone does so.
	It rings again. This time Linna ignores it as she glances in the
mirror one more time, fixes a few black strands of hair, and jogs out the
door.

[Cut to Sylia's apartment, later that morning. BGM: "Foolish Games", Jewel,
fades in over the next scene, but not the chorus.]

	Sylia sits at a desk in her apartment and stares at the computer
screen in front of her, absently musing. No jobs in the last month. Things
have quieted down, and other than Priss breaking up with her band there
hasn't been much news to speak of. It's given her more time to devote
to managing the Silky Doll. She needs it.
	Taxes are up this year, and the W-22-X&FUQ-U-2 Small to Medium
Sized Business forms look more byzantine than ever. She zooms in on line
55-BLSHT-87, the maze of data almost making her formidable mind spin.
	Hell, she thinks wryly, I'd almost rather deal with Buma than the
tax bureaucracy. At least Buma make sense.
	But then she turns her mind to more serious matters: why would the
Buma have quieted down, with fewer random rampages this month than usual?
It's true, given a normal distribution of random events, that some
periods will be quieter than others. Still, she doesn't feel right.
	Yes, that's what you're coming to, she thinks, you can't feel
right without Buma attacks. You're dependent on them, in a strange way. If
the Buma suddenly disappeared, if there were no more stories about GENOM
on the 'net, then there would be nothing left of you either, would there?
What would you build your life around?
	She breaks off that destructive train of thought and tries to
become truly interested in adding up her itemized lingerie Type 3
business-related expenses. Of course it doesn't work.
	Her thoughts drift back to the visions of earlier this morning.
	Violence defines my life, she thinks. A kills B, B's relative
kills C, C's friend kills D, E kills F for no apparent reason. My universe
is like some cheap exploitation film. What is the point of it all?
	Sylia's always found meaning in the fight against GENOM. GENOM:
the Ultimate Evil, the fight against it unmitigated by moral reservations
or ambiguity. But now, in this period of quiet, she realizes that
something is missing.
	Sylia saves her tax forms, turns off her laptop and reaches for
the voice phone.

                                    *

	An AD Police dispatcher wears a headset, like a phone operator.
When Nene sees the call coming in, she patches it through to her headset
without breaking her typing stride.
	"Nene?"
	Nene quickly hits key escrow encryption for the conversation. With
the crypto expansion chips in her ADP hardware, this doesn't produce any
slowdown the way RSA would. She knows Sylia's hardware is similarly
configured on her end.
	"Oh, hi Sylia. What's going on? Something to break the tedium?"
There's a slight, almost unnoticeable edge to her last sentence. With line
noise and dropped packets on the network it probably doesn't even show up
on the other end of the line, but Nene herself hears it. She's been doing
paperwork all day and she almost wants there to be a call for some danger.
Some excuse to get out of this goddamned office.
	"Nene, can you get off work today?"
	Nene's voice drops in volume. "Is it a job?"
	"No."
	"Oh," vaguely disappointed. "I'm not sure, then."
	"All right, I understand..." Sylia sounds like she's about to say
bye and hang up, but then: "Nene?"
	Nene is puzzled; Sylia usually doesn't sound this unsure about
anything.
	"Yes?"
	"Can we go out after your shift ends? You, me, and Priss and Linna
if I can get them?"
	"It's not related to a job?" Nene is still puzzled.
	"No."
	"I guess so. Can I ask why you suddenly want to go out together?
We haven't seen you for a week."
	"Maybe I'll explain later."
	"Okay," Nene says brightly. At least there's something to look
forward to tonight other than ice cream and downloaded pirated American
movies. God, she thinks, I need a date.
	"Bye."
	"Later."
	Nene closes the connection and returns to paperwork as
enthusiastically as she can manage, which closely rivals 60 Minutes
anchorperson Kurt Loder on morphine for rank exuberance.
	She glances across the office at Leon, who's toiling away at his
paperwork with about equal enthusiasm. No buma attacks in the past month
meant that he's been doing a disproportionate quantity of pencil-pushing,
or more accurately key-tapping (though the label "pencil-pusher" persists,
along with the still-accurate "desk-jockey"), lately.
	Leon reaches for the radio and turns it on, keeping the volume low
so as not to disturb others too much--it's the Classic Techno station.
"Ventolin" by Aphex Twin is playing. As he's adjusting the volume, he
notices that Nene is looking at him. He gives her a friendly smile.
	Nene quickly diverts her glance back to her computer screen.
	"Nene."
	"Yes?" she says, not looking up.
	"Whatcha doin'?"
	"What does it look like?" she says, slightly annoyed. The tone of
Leon's voice indicates that he knows she likes the attention, even if he is
insufferable and irritating.
	"Isn't this spectacularly dull?" Leon says. He's trying to build
rapport, camaraderie, or something like that. He gets up and walks over to
Nene's desk, leaning against a nearby file cabinet.
	"No, actually I'm terribly excited. Paperwork turns me--" Nene
catches herself before she says the "on", but the damage is done. She has
opened the door to stupid innuendo, what might be called "sexual
harassment" if it were serious. Leon would ignore the opportunity if he
were a gentleman, but obviously Nene knows he's not.
	"Hey, done any interesting, uh, data excavation lately?"
	Huh. Leon's being a gentleman. Go figure.
	But Nene ignores the question.
	"I was wondering, actually, if you could go and, um, poke around
in some files for me."
	Nene's uncomfortable with his mentioning her hacking out loud at
the office, but then there are only a few people around and they're not
listening to the low-voiced conversation as far as Nene can tell.
	"What exactly?" asks Nene.
	"Well, ah, see, I saw Priss a couple of days ago and--"
	"Where'd you see Priss? You told me you're not exactly at the
top of her list right now."
	Leon brought Priss some flowers a few days ago. Naturally she
turned them down, and also naturally (at least for Priss) she booted Leon
bodily out of her abode for it.
	"Oh, we bumped into each other on the street. I still have marks."
Leon laughs and shows her the faint bruise on the side of his chin. "But
I managed to get her to talk civilly long enough to have a decent
conversation. I think she's coming around."
	Nene laughs--*at* Leon, not with him. "Yeah, right."
	"You'll see. She just needs some--"
	Just then the Chief calls Leon into his office, more calmly than
usual. The recent lull in buma attacks has had a pacifying effect on him.
	"Oh, gotta go. Talk to you later, Nene."
	"Not if I can help it," Nene says, and she is forced to pay
attention once again to the paperwork. This is soooo boring, she thinks.
Someone should make a Bureaucrat buma to take care of all this. They
could call it the Bumacrat.

[The Aphex Twin song from the radio clanks, and quick cut to a can of
fruit juice clanking down into the bin of a vending machine.]

	Linna grabs the fruit juice from the vending machine and pulls the
tab. She's wearing a business suit now, jacket and skirt in a shade of blue
that matches her eyes, the whole outfit made of a light material so she's
only sweating a little. She starts walking down the street to enjoy her
lunch break.
	As she takes a gulp of fruit juice, she wonders why Sylia called
her at work a couple of hours before. Get together tonight? It's really 
unusual for all of them to go out in public together, but sure, she has
no plans tonight, certainly not with--ugh. She doesn't want to think about
him. It would ruin her lunch break. So she stops thinking about him.
	Instead, she thinks about the strange guitar music that's coming
out of Hot Legs as she walks past. Guitar music? At half past noon?
Curious, she knocks on the door--it's not open to the public this early in
the day, but since Old Man knows she's a casual acquaintance of Priss's,
she knows that the owner will let her in. And sure enough, here comes
Old Man to the door, smiling.
	"Hi, Linna, what's going on? How's Priss doing?"
	"I'm fine, thanks. Um, I haven't seem Priss lately," she lies.
"What's that music?" She cranes her neck to look at the stage.
	"It's the lead guitarist of the band playing tonight." Old Man
leads Linna into the club and explains the situation to her.
	She's fascinated--she's no music expert, but the music isn't
anything like what she usually hears on the radio, and certainly nothing
like Priss and the Replicants. It's...disturbing, and yet oddly friendly.
	"So he's just been playing here, all day?"
	"More or less."
	Linna finally gets a look at the guitarist. Her heart does a little
backflip. It's the silver vinyl t-shirt that does it: his taste is clearly
so self-deprecatingly awful that it makes him instantly interesting. Priss
sometimes wears similar stuff onstage, but this guy clearly is wearing his
street clothes, not stage clothes, if indeed he changes clothes when he
gets onstage.
	"What's his name?"
	"Termina Li," Old Man says. The Japanese phonetics--"te roo mi na
li"--lose the English pun, but Linna, who speaks English better than most,
puts it together.
	"Are you serious?" she says, almost to herself, and she feels a
smile come to her face that she knows looks foolish. Thus smiling
foolishly, Linna calls out to the guitar player. "Termina!" She uses the
English pronounciation. Termina looks up. He doesn't stop, but his playing
gets much simpler--now he's just chording, I IV I V7 I progressions.
	At this point Linna notices that he's not using a pick, but the
nails on his right hand are long, like a classical guitarist.
	"Yeah?" Termina calls back, over the noise of his amp.
	Suddenly she realizes that she has nothing to say to him, except
maybe, "Hi. I'm Linna."
	"Hi," he calls out. He accentuates the greeting with a little
diddle on his guitar, then resumes his chording.
	Linna's mind goes blank. She still has nothing to say to him. She
improvises. "You busy tonight?" As soon as she says it, she regrets it.
It's too forward, and also stupid, because:
	"Yeah, I got this GIG at a CLUB, I think it's called 'Hot Legs',"
he answers. Translation: what, are you dumb or something?
	"I'll be there," Linna says, quickly recovering from her little
idiocy attack. That ought to win him over--any musician appreciates a fan.
	"Cool," he says, and smiles.
	Linna's heart does the little backflip again. She almost spills the
juice.
	"Okay, I'll see you later then, I guess," Linna says.
	"Sher," Termina sez.

[Zoom close on shot of Termina's right hand, playing guitar sans pick.
Zoom out to shot of Termina's band onstage, rocking out, in front of a
nighttime crowd. The band is:
	1. the aforementioned Termina,
	2. blonde bassist Fiona Hackworth, continuing in the tradition of
blonde chick bassists going back to Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, and
let's toss Belly in there for good measure,
	3. drummer Bob, continuing in the tradition of nondescript drummers
as far back as we can remember, and
	4. the lead singer and backing guitarist, marcia with a lowercase
"m", named after several historic Marcias, including Marcia Brady and
Marcia Clark of the OJ trial, which is now in its third series of reruns.
marcia's hair, however, is neither brown nor blonde, but red.
	Their music sounds like a twisted cross between R.E.M., Sonic
Youth, and acid jazz, but with a good danceable beat.]

	Termina feels good. Rhymes With Venom (the band's name) is rocking
out. The club may have a stupid name, but over the day he's gotten a good
feel for the place and he likes it. marcia's singing the second verse to
the song, "pledge" with a lowercase "p":

	I don't pledge allegiance to your flag, I don't
	care 'cause of postindustrial drag, I won't
	live to see an age without
	marketing, consumerism, and crypto-fascist corporations
	"I'm so young, I'm so goddam young"...

	Not that the lyrics matter. Not only is the song in English, but
marcia's a student of the Michael Stipe School of Vocal Performance,
meaning that even if the audience were a bunch of English majors, they
wouldn't be able to understand completely.
	Bop, bop, drumroll, hit the bass twice and it's time for the solo.
	He's getting a nice vibe from his bassist Fiona, so he really lets
himself go, dancing up and down the fingerboard with almost no apparent
reason or rhyme. He knows it's musical shit, but it feels good.
	Down in the crowd, Nene notices Linna's been looking...enraptured,
tonight. Nene thinks, hey, the music's good, really good, but what's this?
	When the Neverending Solo from Hell is finished, the band cools
down. One more chorus, one last cymbal smash and it's time for a break.
Nene drags Linna back to the bar. Sylia and Priss are already there,
waiting for them.
	"Hey Linna, what's going on?" Nene asks.
	"What?" She's distracted, watching the musicians walk offstage.
	"You look like you were having a good time out there."
	"Yeah, I was," Linna says.
	"A very good time. An unusually good time." Nene's pressing.
	"Yeah. This band is great. Aren't they great, Priss?"
	Priss grumbles something that can't be heard over the bar noise.
	"You're just jealous," Linna says. "You think you're the only one
with a right to be on that stage. But they're good. That guitarist is even
better than you are."
	"Yeah, right," Priss growls, audibly this time.
	Linna still hasn't answered Nene's question. Well, technically,
Nene thinks, it wasn't a question, but still. Well, there was that remark
about the guitarist, the one with the silly silver shirt. Maybe that's it.
Linna's new man-of-the-week?
	"And what kind of a name is 'Rhymes With Venom', anyway?" says
Priss. In Japanese, the word for 'venom' sounds a little like the word
for 'warthog', which is not very enlightening. Phonetically, the name is
"rymuju wida benom"; again, not very enlightening.
	"In English, 'venom' rhymes with 'GENOM'," Sylia says. She's been
oddly quiet tonight, considering that she's the one who invited them all
out. Actually, Linna chose the place, but Sylia's the one who took the
initiative to invite them all together; this is very odd for Sylia, who's
usually concerned with security, but the other three are used to doing
what she says, no questions asked. If Sylia's decided to relax security,
then there must be a good reason that they'll hear about later.
	"Oh, Sylia, do you have to think of...THEM all the time?" Nene says.
	This is the wrong thing to say. Sylia doesn't say a word, but
something in her eyes grows the slightest bit colder.
	"I'm sorry Sylia, I didn't mean it," Nene says. "I was just joking.
Is something wrong?"
	"But you're right. I do think about it all the time, don't I?"
Sylia says. "Even now, during the past month, with no buma attacks, I've
been thinking of GENOM all the time..."
	"No you don't," says Nene, who begins to perceive that there is
something wrong with Sylia, something deeper than the usual withdrawn
demeanor. Priss would notice, except she's too absorbed in beer and being
bitter about not being able to play. Linna would notice, except she's
craning her neck so she can be the first one to see when the band comes on
to play again.
	Speak of the devil. Here they come. Linna grabs Nene's arm and
drags her out into the crowd, away from Sylia.

possibly may be continued...(if there's some response. i'm new at this
fanfic thing and also insecure. flames etc. to hahax@aol.com)

Thanks to C.H.Lewis (clewis@virtu.sar.usf.edu) for his very excellent
reading and help. Check out his fiction by e-mailing mng@ranma.net.

Further thanks to Jeanne Hedge (jhedge@waterw.com) for her also very
excellent help. Check her tongue-in-cheek work at wjwthy@ranma.net.