Well, hopefully the historical infodump didn't turn off any readers
too much (there's a reason why the optional notes afterward are even longer).
Now, for something
completely different: criminals and other thugs!
Epilogue
The early morning's choking smog over most of Niihama, from the ocean coast to the Inland Sea, demanded urban residents wear masks with commercial-grade air filters if they wanted to remain outdoors, worse than the most polluted days in Beijing before the Third World War.
Wearing one such mask, a PhD in bioengineering carefully exited his sedan, briefcase in tow, in front of third-story cybernetics lab he worked in, one a dozens of small clinics found throughout Niihama City. Struggling from the exertion, he took the outside stairs up two flights before pausing at the door to the clinic and mumbling, "When's that damn lift going to get fixed?"
In his exertion, he hadn't noticed the extremely tall woman in an unzipped leather jacket, too-small PVC pants, leather motorcycle boots and a dull-colored scarf following silently behind him. Only after he'd opened the door and she jammed her large fist forward, swinging it open completely, did he see her. Falling backwards into the clinic, he scrambled away as she marched in and closed the door behind her.
The tall woman undid her scarf and tossed off her leather jacket—under them she was wearing a black bustier three sizes too small for her, but no air mask. Her face had some features that seemed Slavic to him, like what he'd seen in films or magazines, but it wasn't possible to place if she was a foreigner or had an expatriate parent. He could also see she was holding a submachine gun in her right hand, tapping the trigger guard anxiously. The PhD chose to remain very, very still, which he thought was his safest decision.
With her ridiculously long strawberry blonde hair and some bandages wrapped around her head, looked annoyed at him. She said something muffled-sounding—he couldn't hear well through his mask—before stomping over to him and yanking the mask off. He gave a yelp.
"Can you hear me now?" she growled angrily.
"Yes, yes, I can hear you! There's a little money in the safe in the back office, I'll open it! Just don't hurt me with that thing!" he said, before pointing at the weapon.
She cocked her head and gave him a contemptuous look. "This is a Calridge S9 automatic pistol, and I'm not gonna' hurt you, as long as you do what we tell you to do." She had a definite accent, Kansai-ben, which the doctor hadn't been expecting.
"We?"
The tall woman snapped her fingers and the door slammed open again and an identical woman—literally indistinguishable except for the slight difference of her attire, a low-cut, torn tank top that exposed her muscular stomach, leggings instead of pants, but the same scarf and leather jacket—entered, also holding an automatic weapon of the same make and with the same bandages around her head.
After depriving him of his keys, the twin thugs proceeded to make themselves comfortable, tossing their combat boots and their submachine guns aside while one lay across the waiting room couch. The PhD sat very still, not getting up off the floor.
Unsure what they were waiting for, he worked up the courage to speak. "Well, I…"
"You're Dr. Watanabe, right?"
He'd kept his hands raised the whole time. "Yes. Listen, I'm not sure what you want, but…"
"Good, so we'll tell you," the second one interrupted him. Her voice was slightly different in pitch, though she had the same unusually-strong Kansai accent that was less and less common in Niihama, but still more familiar then her appearance. Dr. Watanabe was becoming convinced they must have been highly-modified cyborgs when the tall woman confirmed it. "You're the bio-cyberization doc, right?"
"Yes, that's one of my fields."
The second woman pointed at her bandages—the same as her twin—around her head. A look of understanding appeared on his face. "Of course. You're cyberized, that makes perfect sense. I don't know why I didn't make the connection sooner."
"Do you usually talk to yourself like this?" the first woman asked.
"Only when I'm nervous," he assured them, taking his reading glasses out of his blazer pocket and putting them on before adopting a more scholarly tone. "So what can I do for you two ladies? Obviously, this facility isn't equipped to perform any major surgeries or enhancements…"
"Shut up," the second woman ordered, not taking her eyes from the wall covered with framed credentials and photographs.
"Or I can do that."
The first woman cocked her head at her twin, as though not entirely agreeing with her sentiment, then turned to him. "We just need a checkup, that's all," she told him before pointing at her temple again.
"Recent surgery?" he guessed.
She gave her twin a self-congratulatory nod, causing the other to, his surprise, stick her tongue out at her briefly.
"Well, you've come to the right person, though I wish you hadn't." Lowering both of his hands up slowly, he rose to his feet and gestured to the nearby desk—when both women ignored this, he crossed the room normally and reached into his desk. He didn't have a license to keep a firearm in his possession, and either they knew this or for whatever reason didn't care.
"Oh, and before you try anything stupid, we already cut the silent alarm and CCTV," the second shouted at him from the couch, forcing Dr. Watanabe to give a deep, heaving sigh. He promptly returned with a printed sheet of paper tacked to a cheap clipboard with a pen hanging from an elastic cord.
"You're kiddin' me, right?" she asked.
"All my patients do it. You want me to treat you, you'll sign in," he explained stubbornly.
The tall woman appeared to contemplate responding negatively—perhaps with gunfire—but instead snatched the clipboard and scribbled something down before tossing it at her twin, who caught it in her free left hand without looking away from the small portion of the lobby wall covered in framed portraits and scribbled something else. Dr. Watanabe hurriedly took it back and tried to glance at it as subtly as possible and was caught unaware by just how neat their handwriting was in katakana.
ユニ
アンナ
"So, you're Uni-san," he said, pointing at the first of the two women. Feeling the groves of her automatic pistol with the fingers of her right hand, she nodded. "And that would make you Anna-san. And you're sisters."
They said nothing.
"Right?"
"Come on, Sensei, we don't got all day," Uni announced loudly before grabbing him by the shoulder and effortlessly pushing him in the direction of one of the examination rooms. Anna followed behind, resting the automatic on her shoulder like it was her purse or a bag of groceries.
"Oh, and just in case you get some other stupid questions," Uni asked before winking mischievously at Anna, now standing behind the doctor. Anna winked back with the opposite eye and, as though it were nothing, quick-drew another automatic pistol, a Glock 18C, out from her leather jacket and fired a half-second long burst immediately past the doctor's face, so close that he could feel the heat of the muzzle flash against his cheek. Seven neat holes appeared in the wall opposite them. Dr. Watanabe fell backwards onto his back after shrieking, while Anna gave a malevolent snicker and the pistol disappeared into the obscured area between her left breast and her underarm.
"Got it, Sensei?" Uni asked, grinning and her eyes closed. When she opened them, she found he was still on the ground, holding his ears. "Sensei?"
Dr. Watanabe looked up at him. "What?" he yelled, followed by "I can't hear you!"
In the ten minutes it took the doctor's hearing to return and he attended to his first patient, Anna, who took off her leather jacket before sitting on the examination table. An underarm holster was hanging loosely from her muscular left shoulder, the pistol's high-capacity magazine sticking out like the grip of a knife.
Repeatedly taking his fingers in and out of his ears, he walked up to the table and remained as composed as he could. Reaching into a nearby box of latex gloves, he loudly and deliberately pulled on a pair. "What seems to be the problem, aside from your sociopathic disposition towards violence and dangerous familiarity with guns?"
Anna smirked before pointing at the bandages wrapped hastily around the top third of her head, underneath her orange-blonde bangs.
"Head trauma?"
"Sort of."
He snorted. "If you think you're going to surprise me, I hope you don't shoot people who disappoint you. I've performed cyberization surgeries on four continents and eleven time zones, ages ten to eighty-eight. You're not Turkoru Eka. Whatever it is, I've seen it."
Raising an eyebrow, Anna's bare shoulders gave a muscular shrug and she began quickly undoing the bandages around her head, which Dr. Watanabe found were much longer and more elaborately wrapped over part of her long, chaotic-looking strawberry blonde hair, and he unconsciously braced himself for the sort of things he'd seen in his field: criminally sloppy surgeries, jury-rigged aftermarket parts, severe cranial trauma, even just large, gaping holes in people's skulls.
It was none of those things, and the doctor literally jumped back when he saw it.
"Are those ears?"
Rising out of her messy, matted blonde hair were two large, soft-looking tapered ears. He could see they the same flesh-color as the rest of her skin, hairless and symmetrical triangles. Cat ears, he immediately thought. They seem to sit on the top of her skull, poking out from her hair towards the ceiling. Immediately, he looked downwards and pushed a long lock of hair out of the way on the left side of Anna's head. Where there would have normally been a human ear, approximately, there was nothing. Just a faint line that looked like a fading scar left by a very well-performed cosmetic surgery.
"Those…those are your ears," he muttered, looking back at them. Nervously, he touched a pen from his pocket against the left ear, watching it twitch slightly, just like an animal's.
"You have cat ears, Anna-kun," he marveled.
"Yeah, Sensei, we've been over this." Still nonchalant, Anna threw the surprisingly-clean length of gauze against the wall, letting it slide into a medical waste bin.
"Does your sister know?" he asked after looking up, immediately realizing how stupid a question that was. "Wait, she has it these too, doesn't she? Did one of you have to get new ears so the other one needed them as well?" he asked, his voice hushed. "So you'd still be identical!"
Anna's attractive face abruptly turned very cold and callous, indicating this was a poor line of questioning to pursue further, and he took a step back.
"Hey! I'm cool! I mean, I work in the industry! I'm not judging! I mean, god knows how your giant blond mother feels about her two daughters getting their heads permanently remodeled, but hey, it's the times, right!"
More eye-rolling from Anna. The doctor felt he was getting through to her with the same level of success as he did with his own daughter about her smoking habit, her increased number of piercings and her punk band. Tapping a finger against his head, he reached out and snapped his fingers to the side of either ear, watching them twitch.
"Well, you seem to have no problems with your hearing, so I guess they work?" he questioned.
"I know they work, Sensei!"
"Then why did you bust into here?"
"You're the doc, you tell me!" she growled back, putting her hands on her hips. "You're a doctor, so doctor!" she shouted, using the word as a verb.
He sighed again. "Well, they don't look infected or anything, though really, that sort of thing is more common with interface ports," he said, circling around her and pushing her long hair out of the way. Staring at her muscular, mostly naked back, he found the standard six-part QRS cyberbrain interface ports on the back of her neck, just underneath her hairline. "Yours are fairly new by the looks of it. Did you and your sister get cyberized recently?"
Anna gave a very loud yawn. "Nah, we just upgraded to QRS."
Strange. Ever since International Telecommunication and Cybercommuication Union (ITCU), a French-managed United Nations special agency, had settled upon the QRS as the international standard for cyberbrain interfaces, replacing the far slower USB, Thunderbolt, and Firewire interfaces inherited from personal computer manufacturing, there'd been a rush cross Japan and elsewhere for people getting the relatively short out-patient surgery to get their first consumer-use interfaces. In a few years, anyone who underwent cyberization surgery would get QRS ports installed as well. But few people had older interfaces to upgrade from.
"Well, they did a very clean job of it. I don't even see any scarring," he told her.
"Great," she muttered back at him.
"You'll need to get them recalibrated regularly, of course. Are you getting any interference from the connections? A lot of QRS surgeries look perfect on the outside, but there's interference on the contacts…"
"Yeah, Sensei, that's a human problem," she said with another yawn.
He sighed and rolled his eyes. Nothing like a patient who doesn't want to be treated. "Well, fine then, send in your sister!"
"Hey sis," Anna shouted, an unmistakably sarcastic tone to her voice that briefly confused Dr. Watanabe. There was no response, but Anna didn't seem the least concerned. "Go get her, would you?" she asked, getting off the table and throwing her leather jacket over a shoulder.
Yanking off his latex gloves, he found the other giant staring at the wall in the lobby covered by framed photographs.
"Hey, Sensei, who are these losers?" Uni asked, pointing at a particular portrait hanging on the wall. A number of scholarly-looking lab technicians stood in their white coats, in front of a building on the outskirts of a town.
"Those were the lab teams at Okayama, where I trained," he muttered hurriedly. "All the best cybernetic specialists were there before the war."
"No kidding?"
"No, I'm not kidding. Come on, let's get this over with."
While he put on a fresh pair of gloves, Uni repeated her twin's behavior almost exactly, taking off her leather jacket with the same motions before sitting on the same spot on the examination table with the same casual disinterest.
"I saw the ears," he informed her.
"Did you now?" Uni asked with a sexy but very mischievous smile that made him a little uncomfortable.
"I'm not going to ask why you have cat ears," he told her, pulling off the last part of the bandages.
"Good."
"I am going to assume it has something to do with some sort of extreme cosplay fetish," he told her frankly as he turned away to find an examination penlight on the counter. Uni gave an undignified pout at the back of his head before turned back and began looking directly into her ears.
"It was a good surgery I have to admit. I don't see puss or blood or even any wax." He looked her in the eye again. "Does your cerumen secrete into these?" He didn't have any other patients with cat ears to reference.
"You mean ear wax? My old ears didn't have them."
"I find that hard to believe," he muttered with a roll of his eyes before putting away the penlight. "Well, your ears are unusually clean compared to the rest of you," he offered absently.
He began taking off the second pair of latex gloves. "Your ports look the same as your sister's, clear and uninfected. Congratulations. But I really hope you didn't come for any further surgery, and unless you want an MRI, there's not much else I can do for either of you two."
"You can do MRI here?" Uni asked.
He threw the gloves away. "Yes, I have the equipment. It's pretty standard for any cyberization clinic." Dr. Watanabe frowned at her. "Why do you care?"
Uni had opened her mouth and was about to give a reason when she abruptly shut it and turned for the door. "Hey, Anna! Get over here!" she barked. Dr. Watanabe found it quite strange that they'd resort to such a crude method of communication when they obviously had cybercoms available to them, but he'd seen a lot of strange things just that day, never mind his professional career.
In a few minutes, Anna was lying flat on her back, stripped down to her lingerie and unarmed, in front of the large magnetic resonance imaging scanner that was in the adjacent room, while Uni stood at the control console next to a wary Dr. Watanabe.
"Expecting lots of tumors?" he asked sarcastically, his voice amplified over a speaker. Neither said anything as he clicked about with the console's operating PC and the scanner hummed to life. He then promptly sat back down in a rolling chair and hung his head back, sighing. The sooner they get bored, the sooner they'll leave, he told himself. He'd even started to ignore the guns the two had brought with them.
Anna, on the other hand, seemed extremely curious about the imaging produced by the scanner, as displayed on the LCD monitor she crowded over. She stared at it, unblinking, until the machine announced its completion with cheerful beep.
"Itadakimasu," he muttered sarcastically before opening his eyes and looking past Anna and at the monitor. He immediately saw something strange and turned to her. "Did you play around with the settings?"
"No," she answered emphatically, still interested in the digital imaging. "So this is what we look like on the inside."
"You didn't change or touch anything?" he repeated, wheeling his chair up to the monitor and staring. The digital representations, clearly that of a woman's skeletal and muscular systems, as well her other internal organs, were displayed next to each other, but each one of them looked extremely strange. Staring at them, he couldn't find the obvious cybernetic grafts or prostheses he was expecting—not that unusual for two young women who were unlikely to reject modern medical implants—but instead found that the color representations overall were unlike anything he'd ever seen. Certain parts of the upper body where the brain case and spinal column would be were clearly distorted, but that was easy enough to explain with an equipment failure. With the mouse, he expanded the last representation further. Uni stood silently as his eyes visibly grew in surprise.
The appendix, the pancreas, the gallbladder, the ovaries…where are they? How could she even be alive? He looked over the rim at the monitor at Anna, who had sat up in front of the MRI, stretching her arms and arching her back comfortably, before staring back at the image displayed on another monitor. The internal organs the young woman did possess were where you'd expect them, but their shapes seemed warped and different, particularly beneath her thoracic cavity where the differences were especially pronounced. And even her skeletal and muscular systems, which were in the right and place, were all different colors than any other human he'd run the scanner on, an indication that their composition and density were extremely different.
"This must be some kind of glitch but...what kind of error hides someone's gallbladder?" he demanded at Uni. "Like you even know what a gallbladder is!"
Uni gave him a patronizing look and touched her right index finger against her head. "I know that a gallbladder, or cholecyst, is a small organ that stores bile before releasin' it into the small intestines, and that humans can survive having one removed, call a cholecystectomy," she countered, her accent still present.
"And what about your ovaries? Or your pancreas, smartass?" he barked back before staring again at the monitor. "If you your pancreas removed, where's the prosthesis? What are you, some kind of weird…android? No, that's impossible, even a military model couldn't tolerate the sort of magnetic field an MRI produces. So you must some sort of shapeshifting alien!" he snapped, practically shouting now.
"Geeze, Sensei, cool it or you're gonna' give yourself a stroke. I know you humans are anal and all, but…"
"What do you mean 'us humans'? What the hell are you?" he asked, waving his arms about.
By the time Anna had gathered her possessions and circled around the glass divider to the control console, her twin had already forced Dr. Watanabe back into his rolling chair and secured him in place with a long length of utility cable attached to a smaller piece of equipment she'd torn off the wall, the actual instrument of which she left sitting on his lap.
Standing in her underwear, Anna cocked her head and looked at him. "What the hell's his problem? You think he'd never seen one of us before."
Uni gave an indifferent shrug.
"Oh, haha, 'One of us', very funny." A look of realization appeared on his face. "Wait…you're bioroids, aren't you!? You're here after G.C.! Son of a bitch, I should have known!" he shouted.
"G.C.?"
"That's why you're here, that's how you looked me up!"
"Actually, we looked you up on the 'Net, in reverse alphabetical order. 'Figured you'd be the least likely to have a patient, then tailed you," Uni corrected him, her eyes narrowing.
"Who's G.C.?" Anna asked.
Almost immediately, Dr. Watanabe seemed to shrink into the chair he was bound in, or at least tried to. Anna's eyes narrowed as her twin's had, giving both women identical cat-like appearances briefly.
"Sensei, what is G.C., and why would we be after it?"
With the doctor remaining quiet, Uni turned to Anna.
"You know, Anna, as I recall there was a pressurized storage cooler at the back of the analysis lab tall enough for a person to stand in," Uni said rather rhetorically, her accent briefly muted.
"Sou-ya, sou-ya! With the separate dedicated oxygen and nitrogen feeds," Anna replied with great enthusiasm.
"That's the one," Uni replied cheerfully before, in unison, both sisters leaned towards the shorter doctor and grinned dangerously. They promptly left him to alternately plead and awkwardly suggest there was nothing of interest in the analysis laboratory at the end of the hallway, where the two found a polished stainless steel cylinder lying lengthwise atop an expensive refrigeration system.
"It's definitely a cooler," Anna confirmed, crossing her arms over her chest. "You think opening it might ruin whatever's inside?"
Uni wrapped her knuckles against the cylinder. "Only one way to find out," she announced, before grabbing the nearby handle and giving it a hard yank. There was a loud grinding sound followed by a pneumatic clunk and a long hiss, before the top half of the cylinder lifted up and disappeared in a cloud of very cold, very noisy gas.
Still standing in her underwear, Anna gave a quick shiver before brushing off the layer of ice that had rapidly accumulated on her chest and stomach. "Whatever it is, they're keeping it at below zero degrees," she announced, waving the cloud of gas out of her face.
"Anna, check it out!"
As the cloud spread more evenly across the room and the cylinder came back into view, the two saw a green humanoid figure lying neatly inside the tube, held down by nylon restraints and completely nude. It was a woman, a good bit shorter than either of them, with long, dark brown hair. Visibly pressed underneath her where a number of strange, translucent narrow planes that seemed to vanish above the small of her back, like wings. Her skin, from her forehead to the tips of her toes, was a uniform light green.
"It's a little girl," Anna muttered in wonder.
"She's not that little," Uni corrected her. "She looks like one of them, what do you call them…fairies?"
"Yeah, or a friggin' alien. Little green woman," Anna replied with a laugh. "Look, there's a tag on one of the straps—'Greenpeace Crolis'," she said, reading the English handwriting. "Crolis?"
"Someone misspelled 'Chloris'," Uni offered. "It should be C-H-L-O-R-I-S. Humans are all lousy spellers."
"Or they thought it was too on the nose, what with the little green woman and all," Anna countered, undoing the nylon straps.
"Hey, wait, so we're taking her?" Uni asked, hands behind her back.
"Hell yeah we are! No way she's human if she was surviving in those temperatures, and if she's not, that means she's worth something! I mean, she's green and has wings!"
"So is she some kind of unreleased gynoid model?" Uni asked as Anna lifted the smaller woman up and easily slung her over her shoulder.
"No, too light," Anna confirmed. "She barely weighs more than a human. You think she's a bioroid like us?"
"If she is, she's definitely worth somethin'," Uni said contemplatively, before snapping her fingers. "You know who'd pay for her? That Buaku guy, he collects all this kind of crap!"
"Ugh, him," Anna groaned, gathering her weapons and other clothing in a bundle under her other arm. "Yeah, I bet he would pay a bunch for a weird toy like this."
Uni leaned towards the motionless body and sniffed the air around her. "Actually, I think she's some kind of science experiment or somethin'."
"Really?"
Uni nodded. "The air's really clean in this room."
Anna sniffed twice. "You're right, oxygen's off the charts! It didn't look like a clean room though."
Still inspecting their prize, Uni unceremoniously poked Greenpeace Crolis in the right buttock. "You see a label anywhere?"
"Check her feet."
Uni did so, lifting both legs up. "Property of the Critical Science Development Agency, Okayama. Okay, now we know she's worth something."
Anna contemplated the idea for a few seconds. "It would be nice not to have to go back to stripping for a while," she admitted, looking down at her state of undress.
"Sou-ya, sou-ya!" Uni chirped, raising a fist in agreement.
Dr. Watanabe was still struggling with his crude restraints when the two passed by him in the hallway, carrying the green girl like she was a large sack of rice.
"Hey! Come back, that's CSDA property!"
"Yeah, we saw the label on her butt," Anna said with a grin to her twin, who grinned back.
"You can't just take her! She's not ours!"
"Tell them we held you at gunpoint, Sensei," Uni offered.
"You did hold me at gunpoint!" he shouted, trying to roll after them.
"You really oughta' get better cameras in here. We'll file with our insurance later," Anna explained, barely holding back laughter as she dropped Greenpeace Crolis onto the couch in the lobby and began dressing herself.
"We'll need to get her clothes too," Uni said aloud.
"Yeah, something cute. I want new stuff too, I'm tired of the punk rocker look," Anna replied, pulling on her leather jacket.
"File your insurance," Dr. Watanabe grumbled, gnashing his teeth. "Who the hell are you people even?!"
The late morning sun had begun penetrating the haze of the previous day, filling the lobby with light through a single large window and bathing the couch in warmth. Whether from that or the light itself, with slow, deliberate motions, Greenpeace Crolis sat up on the couch, its wings beginning to twitch and flex very slowly.
"Hey, she's waking up," Uni pointed out. "I guess she isn't dead!"
"Think she can walk?"
"She's too slow anyway," Uni announced, snatching the smaller figure up by the waist and lifting her up with the same ease of her sister, like a large doll.
"Hey! Damn it, stop ignoring me! Who are you people?" Dr. Watanabe shouted, having barely reached the lobby just as they were opening the door.
With their cargo in tow, both women took a look at the rather helpless physician trying to pull himself over to them with his feet, onto to get his chair stuck on the metal divider between the hardwood floor and the carpeted waiting room and simultaneously laughed.
"We're Annapuma and Unipuma! The bitchin' babes of Niihama's underworld!" Anna shouted, making vulgar gestures with her free hands.
"Tell your loser friends to remember us!" Uni added.
With more laughter, they leisurely left through the clinic's front entrance, while the doctor vainly tried to push himself into the lobby without knocking the chair over.
"Damn!" He tried again, only to slide forward abruptly and tip over onto his face. "Damn!"
Wriggling his hands around under their improvised binding, he tried to stand himself up, but rolled over instead. "Damn it all!"
Well that was a different tone, wasn't it? As you might have figured out, I deliberately left "the noodle incident" (hereafter referred to as "the cat ears incident") unexplained. There's a pretty big gap between the beginning of the Third World War and the sisters finding Greenpeace Crolis in Niihama shortly before the evens of
Dominion itself (I'll need to iron out of few of the holes too), it can be confidently said it happened in that intervening time (there are tiny, tiny hints to it throughout the story, but the plan
is to reveal it via flashback in later chapters, after the sisters are well into their criminal careers).
I actually enjoyed writing this chapter too, but that might have more to do with the fact that I rarely write about criminals, and this was a big change of pace (as such, I really can't say how good it is...hence the need for reviews).
Turkuro Eka, the daughter of the CEO of the Turkuro Corporation, one of the original pioneers of cybernetics, was officially the first human to have a cyberbrain, as depicted in
Stand Alone Complex and was later kidnapped by an anticybernetics sect called the New World Brigade, sometime around 2014. As such, it's pretty fair to assume the sister's encounter with Dr. Watanabe was around 2013 or so. As had their creators, he calls the Puma sisters "bioroids", or "bio-androids" (though "bio-gynoid" is more accurate), which is generally defined as "...an android built partially or totally with biological components. Differentiated from a cyberized human by the lack of a cyberbrain." It's actually a very large category, that runs the gamut from simple robots with certain organic components (like the "sexroids" in
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence) to the incredibly advanced synthetic beings in
Appleseed, which are sometimes even capable of reproduction. The Puma Sisters fall into that category too, though decidedly at the much cruder, less advanced end of the spectrum (as will be an important plot point in the planned sequel, the fact that both sisters use advanced computer processors with some sort of crystalline structure ("memory crystals" as they call them) rather than an actual cyberbrain is a noteworthy distinction.
QRS is a specific technology standard that seems to appear throughout the manga and films, but is most clearly outlined in the TV series. Not only members of Section 9 but every cyberized human seems to possess a varying number of shielded access ports on the back of their necks, alongside all androids and gynoids (obviously nonhuman robots like the Tachikomas have a whole suite of access ports to interface via, but as one might expect, no obvious "neck" to put them). They tend to vary by design and size as well, between civilian and military use models, but QRS seems to be the predominant standard, the equivalent of USB for data access or HDMI for video input in our age. Here's where I have to play hard and fast with canon--no one in
Dominion, not even clear cyborgs, is shown having these ports on the back of their net, but by
Ghost in the Shell they were practically a universal standard. Likewise it seems clear that even humans who lacked true cyberbrains and only had a minimum of cyberization (like Togusa of Section 9) could have QRS installed. Thus, the sisters both get updated to QRS from an older standard (some of which are shown in
Stand Alone Complex) to keep them up to date.
"Sou-ya!" is an affirmative associated very closely with the Kansai dialect in Japanese (this was something that took a little effort to find out, but in
New Dominion both twins have extremely strong Kansai accents, perhaps befitting their status as criminals
in Kansai Prefecture.)
I hope you found this entertaining, and I thank anyone who was kind enough to leave feedback.
I'm still unfamiliar with the forum in general, but I'd happily welcome any continued discussion in regards to this story, potential sequels, various plot holes, etc., in this thread (probably doesn't justify having its own dedicated thread, honestly
).
