The Puma Sisters Saga [Dominion: Tank Police - GITS: Stand Alone Complex // Masamune Shiro Universe]

[Synthesis]

PREFACE​

Bear with me, I'm still figuring out the ins and outs of this website (when it comes to bulletin boards and online forums, apparently I am very nearly illiterate). So, for years I have wanted to create a shared fiction universe for the modern TV adaptations of Masamune Shiro's most popular manga (in the style of the shared universe the manga themselves already possess--most obviously, Dominion leading into the three volumes of Ghost in the Shell in turn leading into the multiple volumes of Appleseed). Naturally, some of the best characters suited for the job were those who already crossed the line between manga series, a pair of artificial criminally-minded gynoids Annapuma and Unipuma (collectively called the Puma Sisters), who appeared both as major characters in Dominion (second only to the main protagonists) and in a short cameo in the beginning of Ghost in the Shell's original volume (though not int the sequels).

The tall, thuggish twins are a well-known favorite of fans of the community, so much so that one has a "blink and you'll miss it" cameo in the first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG, as well as a large part in the sequel OVA to Dominion entitled New Dominion Tank Police (alongside the one episode OVA Keisatsu Sensha Tai TANK S.W.A.T., itself a direct sequel to the final manga, Dominion Conflict One). Their biological immortality (and unexplained origins) makes them well-suited to the job. I intended to put these out in a generally straightforward chronological order, beginning before the events of Stand Alone Complex as well as either of the Dominion OVAs. This first work, Remarkable Behaviors, has already been uploaded to Fanfiction.net for some time now (you can find it here, and naturally I invite anyone to leave a review there as well as here--I shamelessly feed off them, and actually do factor critiques into the writing process). In an effort to reconcile their different structural portrayal in Dominion as well as Dominion Conflict One, I've taken some (possibly controversial) liberties with their otherwise unexplained origins, suggesting a more biological construction technique (reminiscent with the synthetic living "bioroids" that appear across Masamune Shiro's works, including the different Tank Police manga) as a sort of compromise. That's pretty much set in stone now. Remarkable Behaviors comes in four short-ish parts (certainly compared to what else I write), that I will post as time permits. This first chapter contains the large majority of the story's total scientific and industrial writing, so you may wish to brace yourself (it's very clearly a rehash of the cyberization/cyberbody engineering processes outlined by Kusanagi's girlfriend Kurutan in the original manga, with me filling in some holes).

Part I of Remarkable Behaviors follows below in the grey text. Part II can be found here, and Part III here. The epilogue is here. And without further ado...

That was the first part. The sequel to Remarkable Behaviors, entitled Knowing You Exist, is still a work in progress (and will be posted both here and on FF.Net here, at least in theory). Again, I'm not certain if I wanted to create a whole new thread or use this existing one, so I guess for convenience I'll keep it in this thread (if someone thinks its a better idea to post the separate story in a new thread, tell me).

The prelude can be found way over here on these forums. The next chapter is here which takes a brief departure from Anna and Uni and follows a strange afternoon in a United Nations-administrated area in Canada, the 'Military Observatory' in North America.

NOT SO SUBTLE HINT: Reviews (both here and on FF.net) are a great way to light a fire under my ass to keep working on the sequel if you want to read more! Hinty-hint-hint!

---

And this place,
That which they call "Earth"…
Was of a form most rare and mysterious…
Especially those surface projections,
"Human" by label,
Which engaged ceaselessly in the most remarkable behaviors.
- Excerpt from The Diaries of Greenpeace Crolis​

PART I
​

Zheng: Our favorite pervert. That's what the sheet of paper taped to the door of the Okayama laboratory where he worked read, in flowery, feminine script done in pink marker, surrounded by a number of elaborately drawn roses. He forced his way through crowd lingering outside his lab, chortling at the sight, before ripping the paper off.

"Ah hah! Very funny! Don't you people have some work to do?" he asked suspiciously, before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it at someone else's face. He then unlocked the swinging glass doors with his cyberbrain ghost key. The peanut gallery had a laugh at his exasperation before the doors shut airtight.

"Good morning, Zheng."

Waiting by the airlock, Dr. Zheng's junior partner, Dr. Vasilyev, was already dressed in his cleanroom attire, a sterile suit with long white gloves and a breathing apparatus.

"Good morning, Mikhail Sergeyovich," he replied dutifully while he pulled of his white coat and tie and hastily changed himself. "Is Yoko already in?"

"Definitely so. I'm starting to think she didn't even leave for the night."

Zheng affixed his breathing apparatus around his neck, letting the plastic mask hang open. "Did you hear about that flight, Misha?"

"The one that went down east of Aomori, the Boeing? God, how tragic. Have they confirmed any other survivors?"

"No, just those two children," Zheng offered somberly. "The Russian government announced they'd do a general sweep alongside the Japanese MSDF. Don't you have a nephew in the Russian Pacific Fleet?" he asked, turning his back so that the other man could flip on his air re-breather kit.

Vasilyev nodded. "The Red Banner Pacific Fleet, my sister's boy. He's a submariner, but I doubt his ship would get called out as part of the search," he explained, while patting the other's shoulder after checking the small display on his backpack. "Have they determined a cause yet?"

"Oh, I suspect they won't for some time. They're still looking for any other survivors, even if that's a long shot. But the word on the 'Net is that it was a mechanical failure with one of the turbines."

"Very strange," the other replied as the two men checked their kits one last time before entering the airlock. A short sterilizing and anti-static bath spray bath later, and they crossed into the laboratory proper, where a younger woman in the same gear was waiting a table.

"Good morning, Doctor Matsumoto," Zheng said through his air mask, getting her attention.

She looked up briefly from the computer she was working at. "'Morning Zheng, Vasilyev."

"'Morning Matsumoto," Vasilyev said before sitting behind another small desk. "Everything in working order?"

She looked up and pointed at the device next to her. "The nanotech film layer is still weird. I don't like the variances we're seeing."

Vasilyev passed Matsumoto and peered at it inquisitively. "We may need to replace it."

"It works fine, it's the software that's the problem. Ever since that most recent update, the fiber optic film samples I've been putting out seem worse than before, but it's not the materials either."

"Call Ota, he knows the supplier personally. Can we undo the update? Go back to an earlier firmware?" he asked, his voice betraying his unfamiliarity with the process.

"No, I get a system error when I try. I do cyberbodies, not computers." She put on a pair of high-powered magnifiers, wearing them like bulky goggles. "There's a difference, you know."

"Of course," Zheng muttered with a sigh. Matsumoto was much younger than either of them, a graduate student with just one year left for her PhD in Biochemistry for Cybernetics at Tokodai. She had roughly the same level of cyberization as both of her colleagues, but her youth made her hands steadier and more reliable, or so they believed.

A chime on the wall rang and Vasilyev grabbed the nearby handset. "Lab Three here, go ahead." He paused. "I'll be right out," he said before rushing out of the lab.

"What was that about?'

"Maybe the contract?" Zheng said.

"I really hope so," she replied, shutting off the machine as the doors closed behind Vasilyev. "Did you hear about the Boeing that went down?"

"Tragic, yes. They're still saying mechanical failure. Mikhail says his sister's boy is in the Russian Pacific Fleet, but he probably won't be part of the added search. I can't believe the Russians are sending the fleet out, in the middle of the Union Convention."

"Well, it's their fleet, it's not as though any of the other republics have ships in the Pacific Ocean they need to coordinate with."

"Point taken. I confess you didn't strike me as the kind of person to follow that sort of political affairs business."

She titled her head. "My younger sister's a real news junkie."

"Of course."

Vasilyev came scrambling back, still wearing his protective suit, looking particularly excited. Matsumoto raised an eyebrow and was about to speak when he preempted her. "Yes, I went through the static bath again. That was the Locus-Solus—the Consortium approved our statement."

There was a moment of dead silence in the lab, ended by Zheng. "You're fooling me," he said slowly as Matsumoto shot up to her feet and hugged the older man before giving a loud hoot in triumph.

"We're approved! We've been approved!" she screamed excitedly before turning back to Vasilyev. "How many do they want?"

"One completed prototype, with the option for a second model following trial."

"High-end package?"

"The highest. We'll need to pull out all the stops on the prototype bioroid, their words."

"I can't believe it!" she shouted in Zheng's face. He didn't respond, still stunned into silence. "I. CAN'T. BELIEVE. IT!"

"Well, let go of poor Zheng, he looks like he's seen a ghost," Vasilyev said grinning before grabbing the other doctor and shaking him by the shoulders.

"All right, all right, let go of me!"

"When do we start?" Matsumoto asked, her eyes still wide with excitement.

"Immediately, the funding's already gone through. Hell, we can replace the film layer! I mean, if have to," he quickly added, his hands raised in the air.

"We can start working on 'Uni' tomorrow," she whispered.

"Yes, but we're really going to need to do something about that name," Vasilyev interjected. "It's quite awful, Yoko," he said between laughs as Matsumoto pushed her palm into his face in response.

'Uni' was the name that Matsumoto Yoko insisted giving to Lab Three's first synthetic being, arrived at the same day Lab 3 decided that their first synthetic would be a modeled after a human female rather than male. Neither Zheng or Vasilyev were fond of the name, but conceded that it was better than the default option, Prototype Bio-Gynoid No. 1. Accordingly, the day after the call from Locus-Solus, she took a thick black marker and on the far wall of the laboratory, wrote two large letters in Japanese hiragana.
​

ユニ
​

"It was your dog, no? In grade school?" Vasilyev asked her.

"My cat," she corrected him. "A big, female tabby cat."

"I'm starting to see Misha's point," Zheng offered. Matsumoto ignored both of them. "I can see the headlines now: world's most advanced android model named after creator's cat."

There was no deterring her. On the other hand, the physical creation of Uni was a much more democratic process: after the Consortium promised to supply the processor 'brain', the three contributed individual components throughout the design reflecting their specialties: Zheng devised the respiratory system and most of the other internal organs, Vasilyev the skeleton and locomotive systems, and Matsumoto the optical and other sensory systems. The three of them had already agreed upon a component list weeks ago, and the Consortium's promise of near-unlimited funding led all three to go to the top choices from around the world.

What they had not decided upon, however, was its—or her—physical appearance. Uni had to be abnormally tall compared to an actual adult female, almost two meters tall, for reasons related to performance and internal layout. A pre-adult, even adolescent body was not technologically viable. Her internal balancing gyroscopes were intended to function for an automaton twice her size and substantially more massive. But after that, it was up to Lab 3's discretion: Locus-Solus expected a synthetic woman, and that was it. Aspects of its appearance—modeled ethnicity, facial structure, specific age—were left up to the creators.

"Very well then, so we just play God, yes?" Zheng posed on the first official day of work.

While they waited for the components they ordered to be express shipped to their lab, the three put their minds together. There was surprisingly little disagreement.

On the matter of ethnicity and race, they decided on the deliberately uncommon: a combination of features that one would associate with a person of heterogeneous origins. Vasilyev, whose own background was Scandinavian and Slavic but whose wife was Indo-Vietnamese, was always intended to be the team's artistic modeler: Uni's complexion and certain facial features came from his eldest daughter, who was about the right age. Others came from younger, female members of both Zheng and Matsumoto's families. Vasilyev seamlessly combined them, and the resultant computer-generated facial model was both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to place, with a mixture of features from different nationalities. All three agreed this could be a benefit with the international consortium that was commissioning the project, and at least they didn't need to risk the possibility that the completed synthetic would resemble someone currently living.

Uni's body was quickly decided upon as well: Matsumoto had a stack of photo magazines of popular gravure models sitting on her desk for this exact reason. As with her height, by necessity Uni would have a lean, fairly muscular build to hold the necessary muscles, tendons and ligaments of her form. All three had a similar vision of physical beauty though: they voted on a particular model from the magazines, an unusually tall, very well-endowed beauty with curvy hips and long legs, both aesthetically appealing and straightforward for them to engineer. Matsumoto was their specialist in this area, having made a hobby of 3D model building and painting since her undergraduate years.

Zheng finished the details, the sort of things that would turn make the synthetic Uni human, though not too human, at least on the surface. The overall facial model, in particular, was a challenge.

"It's the little things, little imperfections that you need," he explained, the way a painter hosting a television show might explain to his distant audience. "A very small imperfection in the nose or chin."

"I hope so. She's going to look like this for the rest of her life," Vasilyev noted. By then, they'd already taken to calling the bio-gynoid "her" in conversation.

Uni got a slightly upturned nose that gave her a cute, even precocious face for what was otherwise a grown woman's visage. After they'd taken their hundreds of three-dimensional wireframe models and actually set about in the manufacturing process that would take thousands of separate components and gradually combine them.

The first phase was organ assembly. It took a few weeks before the bio-organs and skeleton, arranged on the assembly table, clearly resembled homo sapiens sapiens—an anatomically modern human. "I knew this part would creep me out," Yoko announced, staring at the female skeleton reflected on the polished chrome surface, synthetic organs neatly packed into and around the skeletal frame. They hadn't been colored red yet, but stood out clearly from the sleeker, purely cybernetic components wrapped around the spinal column and skeleton.

"Me too," Zheng muttered uncomfortably.

"Well, you can't rush it," Vasilyev told them, circling the table with a number of different instruments, including a micrometer caliper. Every so often, using tweezers, he'd painstaking remove tiny tubules between two organs, inspect them under a mobile microscope affixed to the ceiling, and reinsert them. The tiniest tubules were manipulated by Yoko, under Vasilyev's direction.

"If something goes wrong, it's not as though you couldn't fix it. That's what surgeons are for."

"True, but Locus-Solus is paying a lot for Uni here," he declared. "It's not enough for her to be functionally immortal, I want a bio-gynoid as tough as a military-grade model if I can help it."

"Can we hurry up with this? As strange as it sounds, I'd much rather stare at a skinless woman than a woman-shaped skeleton with organ sacs sitting in it," Zheng confessed.

With everything firmly held in place, and the synthetic skeleton almost completely complete on its own, Uni was deemed "structurally sound" and suspended vertically the same way the latest full-body cyborgs were during assembly. From there the next phase began—all three used tools to unravel several spools of synthetic muscular fiber, imitating the pattern of the over 630 skeletal muscles in a human body. As the muscle fibers were fairly uniform and practically placed, that was a short procedure completed in little more than an afternoon, after which she had an undeniably human female shape. To complete the phase, over the next few days the three systematically checked the appearance and function of the so-called "finishing organs"—synthetic eyes, the tongue, genitals and other organs that were all layered in special bio-organic sensory film and could only be installed at this time. Over a cup of expensive celebratory Darjeeling tea from northern India, they attached the large pair of implants that would serve as Uni's breasts, which necessitated being installed under her skin but over her synthetic pectorals. It was a humorous coincidence that the tea came in later than expected, leaving them only this task to toast it to.

"To our gorgeous synthetic bijin," Matsumoto said through her mask, holding the sealed container of tea. In full clean room garb, one could only drink anything by attaching the bottle to one's breathing system and sucking it through a line. "May these gelatin polymer implants spare you from all the inconveniences that come with an actual large bosom, or so I've been told."

"Hear, hear," they muffled in reply, and stuck their tea bottles to frames of their suits.

The celebratory toast marked the beginning of the third and final phase. Painstakingly, rectangular sheets of synthetic hypodermis, the "inner skin" that also functioned as cartilage that would automatically bind to the synthetic musculature, were saturated in a viscous micromachine solution and laid out, one-by-one, onto the body frame like a papier-mâché art project. At the same time, the synthetic blood that also flowed through full-body cyborgs was sent coursing through her veins, gradually turning her grey-white body into a very distinctive mixture of red and pink.

"I wonder how many people realize building a gynoid is like building a house," Matsumoto said, unconsciously wiping her brow.

"Fortune favors us: no leaks," Vasilyev pointed out, half-jokingly, as they laid the hypodermis sheets out, cutting off the excess, turning Uni back into a patchwork of grey-and-white once more. Unsurprisingly, installing the innermost layer of synthetic skin was a slow, painstaking process, cutting off the excess neatly and ensuring it had taken on some flexible hardness after binding to the skin. Nor were they finished: the entire body frame had to be soaked in sensory element-forming solution for several minutes, painstakingly dried and cleaned, and then soaked into another micromachine solution.

"Watch for any unevenness. You know Locus-Solus is going to go over every square centimeter of her with a microscope," Zheng instructed.

"I always hate this part of the job," Matsumoto mumbled, holding a portable air drier with a large filter attached to it over Uni's developing face.

The process, still uncommon at the time, matched the high-end procedures that Okayama believed full-body cyborgs would use in the coming decades: with the application of a small electrical charge, micromachines would bore small passages for optical fiber, the groundwork for a synthetic neural network. This was Matsumoto's specialty as well, as Vasilyev and Zheng got to sit it out.

"You know the next person who calls me a pervert, I'm going to hit," he told Vasilyev, as the two sat against the wall while Uni cooked in a chemical reactor. "I mean it this time."

Vasilyev nodded. In the weeks since they'd begun their project, they'd seen less and less of their cohorts in the other labs. Nonetheless, Zheng was cynical.

"See you boys in thirty-two hours," an exhausted Yoko said, dragging herself and her belongings towards the airlock door.

In that 32 hours, Uni received her synthetic epidermis and her body was completely "cooked", leaving Zheng to finish the facial details—hair implants, the self-repairing filaments for her eyebrows and eyelashes, lips, nose, teeth, etc. Yoko got to sit back with Vasilyev and watch.

"I'm telling you, in a few years, all the finishing touches will be done automatically, and we won't even need craftsmen anymore."

"You sound like you're looking forward to it," Matsumoto observed.

"It can't come soon enough for me."

"I don't know, Zheng. There's something to be said about a skilled craftsman plying his trade," Vasilyev offered, looking at the work. For the first time, Uni's actual face was visible—her slightly turned-up nose, her weakly-shut eyes, her full lips.

"Leave it to a dialectical materialist to say that," Zheng countered, which got a laugh from Vasilyev.

As in android manufacturing, the scalp hair came last, where it took the place of a more conventional wig. Yoko, with her characteristic forthrightness and medical bluntness, called a rep from Locus-Solus about the possibility of replicating human hair growth, and the costs that would be involved. The current androids and gynoids on the market were essentially hairless and wore wigs, with the exception of the highest-end models which benefited from hair implantation technology.

"I'm sure you know better than us how expensive hair implantation is, so even the best androids only have it on their scalps," she explained over the phone. "For bio-androids, this gets a little complicated, so I'll try and put it in laymen's terms. None of the internal bio-organs function using hair or cilia, not the lungs, not in the nasal passages, and so forth—that would be extremely costly and inefficient. Filaments are already used for things like eyebrows and eyelashes anyway. So the purpose of hair is purely cosmetic for a bio-android. Obviously, a completely hairless adult human male would be considered somewhat unusual, which was a major advantage for both gynoids and bio-gynoids. And obviously, we won't just be giving her a wig."

Vasilyev and Zheng sat in their anti-static suits, watching Yoko continue to elaborate, in great depth, about the advantages and disadvantages of hair on a synthetic body before finishing twenty minutes later.

"And?"

"Only on her head," she concluded. "They did approve the 'hair budget' though, so we're over that."

Vasilyev held out a pen. "Correct me I'm wrong, but don't many women go to fairly extensive lengths to keep hair only on their heads?"

"So the case could be made we're doing her a favor," Zheng added.

"And you're married?" Yoko asked him directly.

The next day they found Uni hanging suspended from the ceiling, nude, with her head stuck in an airtight apparatus. With a loud, wet squick it popped off, revealing her completed scalp: a long, unkempt main of strawberry blonde hair that reached down past her waist with bangs that framed her face on either side. Yoko ran a comb through the hair to straighten it out slightly while Vasilyev pulled up her lips and gave her gums a cursory glance.

"She looks good."

"For what we spent on her, she better," Yoko replied as Zheng stood up and adjusted his glasses over his breather mask.

"We'll run a full examination with the CAT scanner later, but we won't actually know for certain until she's engaged."

"And only Locus-Solus can do that," Vasilyev mumbled. Zheng patted him on the shoulder supportively as he peered into Uni's left ear, otherwise hidden under her mop of hair.

"As the oldest member of Lab Three, I can say with some confidence that she'll operate perfectly once engaged. We've done an excellent job," Zheng announced.

Matsumoto turned to him after shaking her head. "So we really don't know until they decide to turn her on."

"We never can." Vasilyev cleared his throat, then spoke on a loftier tone. "As the only person here with any children, I do think it's a lot like having a daughter: you really don't know what kind of person she's going to be until she starts walking and talking.

There was a pause, before both Zheng and Matsumoto burst out laughing hysterically at his comment. Vasilyev looked at the two of them through his goggles before giving an indignant shake of his own head.

"Oh, to hell with you people."
​

---

Thank you for reading! Remember, I live off feedback.

Some quick explanations: the Boeing (passenger aircraft) that went "down east of Aomori (prefecture)" references the plane crash that ultimately led to the mandatory cyberization of two children known as adults as Kusanagi Motoko and Kuze Hideo. Both were six years old at the time of the accident, which mostly likely occurred around 2005 to 2006 (given their matching ages in the 2nd GIG series, both being just over 31). As cyborgs, both went of to join the JGSDF and after World War IV in 2024, served in historic overseas deployments of Japanese personnel: Kusanagi in Northern Mexico and Kuze in the Korean Peninsula.

Locus-Solus, while a relative newcomer to their own consumer robot contruction (specifically high-end gynoids), ultimately became known for their extremely advanced 'Hadaly' series, primarily dealt with technology demonstrators and intra-corporate contracts (at least in this setting) before the 2020s, when companies like Hanka Precision and Genesis Andross were already producing consumer gynoids for purchase.

The Union Convention was actually a series of intergovernmental meetings to formalize the expansion of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, a politico-economic union that emerged following the dismantling of the federal Soviet Union the early 1990s, held in Minsk. It would ultimately come to include several other recognized and de facto independent states including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Abkhazia, Alania (called 'Ossetia' in Georgian), and Armenia. The final convention, which formalized the federation, occurred shortly before the Third World War.

Dialectic Materialism is a philosophy of science and nature inspired by the German Young Hegelians, derived from the German philosophers Karl Marx and the Friedrich Engels, and further developed in Eurasia during the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union. It served as a scientific basis of sorts for the modern understanding of Marxism in multiple countries, with no shortage of controversy and contention.
​

 

[Synthesis]

Part II​

For covering the costs of all labor, materials, and software licenses—which totaled close to the procurement cost for a new all-weather military attack helicopter—Locus-Solus had complete ownership of Uni, the synthetic life form, and all design data and results of research. The very new and relatively small Franco-Belgian company acted as the authorizing agent of the international consortium of interested conglomerates, who actually wrote the cheques.

After a four-month crash course of development, Uni was activated and ready for a corporate presentation. The tall synthetic—she stood a comfortable 183.5 centimeters barefoot—was put in what Matsumoto Yoko dubbed "an Alice dress" from its cutesy, anachronistic resemblance to the outfit worn in various film adaptations of the novel Through the Looking Glass, and took up an executive class seat in the same row as the members of Lab Three on their European flight.

Uni, who had spent just over a week "awake" after being activated by a Locus-Solus company rep, sat in her frilly, high-collared blue-and-white dress with a smile permanently affixed to her pretty face, her mismatched eyes twinkling in the cabin lights.

Mikhail Vasilyev, who had the window seat next to Uni, noticed this and produced a small penlight, stood up in his seat, and with an order of "Hold still, dear," began flashing it directly into Uni's left, then right, eye.

"The colors have settled. The pigment is definitely more visible in the right eye than the left."

"So what does that mean?" Dr. Zheng asked from across the aisle. "Heterochromia?"

"Does it really matter?" Matsumoto asked sharply from her eat next to Zheng, looking up briefly from her old-fashion newspaper.

"Well, she's a woman, not a Siberian Husky, so I think it matters a little."

"Pride of creatorship. Let him have it," Zheng suggested to Matsumoto, who scoffed before looking back at her newspaper.

"We're days from another world war and you care about some pigment molecules not settling properly. God, have you read the papers?" she mumbled angrily. "All those maniacs sitting in Geneva seem perfectly content keep rattling their sabers."

"Except these sabers are nuclear missiles," Vasilyev muttered as he released Uni's face. The young woman blinked several times but said nothing, still smiling. "I'd feel better if China and the Americans could see eye-to-eye on something, but if they could, this would have been resolved a year ago."

"How's your nephew? The one in the navy?"

"Worried. Since the New Union Treaty, the whole of Eurasia is actually much more politically stable and strategically secure, but that's not going to stop a war from happening." He sat back down in his seat. "I think he's on one of those ballistic missile submarines, a Delfin-class I think. I bet the poor lad has nightmares that he's going to have to push a switch to send a nuclear missile to New York or Sacramento or somewhere," he explained somberly.

"The age we live in," Matsumoto said with disgust. "Uni's the lucky one—she'll never know just how f---ed up this world we live in is."

"Don't be so sure. She's smarter than she looks," Zheng countered.

Through all of this, Uni remained silent, but followed the conversation closely with short, sporadic movements of her eyes. The aircraft landed on the tarmac at Brussels Airport and all four quickly found a black limousine waiting for them outside the terminal. It promptly took them to Locus-Solus' storehouse north of Antwerp's docklands, adjacent to a large wind farm. A delegation of executives, including one with Locus-Solus stitched onto the breast pocket of his blazer, were waiting for them. Between them, they represented American, German, Japanese and Chinese cybernetics and robotics firms. The Locus-Solus representative quickly introduced all three by name.

Matsumoto, Zheng and Vasilyev bowed, as did Uni who followed behind them. After looking up to see the executives return their bows, Zheng glanced at his colleagues then back at the executives. "So I will begin: let me introduce you to the fruit of your investment, sirs. We call this young lady 'Uni'," he explained, gesturing at her.

Uni stood very still, a pleasant but still neutral expression on her face, as the body of executives stared at her curiously.

"Uni is a completely synthetic organism, one of the first of her kind. A bio-organic gynoid combining the highest advances in medicine, biochemistry, cloning and cybernetics—the dominant fields of your corporations, I think."

A rather elderly man with a cane approached the much-taller Uni before reaching out and taking her hand, which he squeezed. "She feels very lifelike."

Matsumoto cleared her throat. "Well sir, she is alive, in a manner of speaking. Uni's biological processes have more in common with full-body cyborgs than other gynoids. She respires, she can eat food and break it down for its nutritional value, and she can even repair her own body. Of course, Uni's much tougher than any normal human."

"How tough?"

The three of them turned to see a stout woman with thick glasses looking at them. Uni didn't, her hand still clenched by the old man leaning on a cane.

"How tough is she?" the executive repeated.

Vasilyev spoke up. "Uni could, without a doubt, survive trauma that would kill a human being, and the cybernetic redundancy of her synthetic body means, short of destroying her completely, one really couldn't do anything that would incapacitate her in a manner that couldn't ultimately be repaired…using the design data that we've supplied to Locus-Solus along with her."

"Could you be more specific, Doctor?" she insisted. Behind the body of executives, a Locus-Solus employee was pushing up a cart carrying a number of different-sized black boxes, followed by another one pushing a larger cart filled with neatly packed athletic equipment.

"I…don't completely understand."

She sighed. "Could you shoot her in the head with a small-caliber firearm and would she survive?" she spelled out sharply.

Vasilyev visibly jumped in his shoes while Matsumoto shook her head discreetly behind him. "Yes…yes! She's immune to limited exposure to pistol-caliber fire, the kind that would kill a person. Though the coming generation of full-body military cyborgs will probably match her durability."

"You say 'her'," another executive said, standing near the cart. "Rather than 'it'."

Vasilyev looked a little confused and offended, so Zheng answered for him. "Actually, by the relevant laws of the European Union, she is arguably a woman, though a synthetic one. You're welcome to look more closely at her if you'd care to," he said, glancing at Uni. The old executive had strolled off, leaving Uni to calmly smooth the creases of her bright-looking dress.

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"And, of course, Locus-Solus holds all rights and patents associated with her, including manufacturing rights for any future models. Though that might be a little premature: let's see what she can do first."

Uni took off her shoes and stripped down to the athletic shorts and bra she wore underneath her dress and, over the next hour after Locus-Solus hastily set up the needed equipment, performed a number of athletic feats for the delegation: a 300-meter sprint, completed in just under 32 seconds, an Olympic-competitive time; a long jump, reaching 8.2 meters on her first attempt; some basic gymnastics to demonstrate her agility and grace. The executives followed her closely, using the radar guns and other instruments distributed by Locus-Solus, while the members of Lab Three studied her performance with their own eyes.

"As you can see, a synthetic like her can complete acts of athleticism, with no real training, an obtain results comparable to skilled Olympians," the Locus-Solus rep explained, dutifully checking the stopwatch he held in his hands. "Equally as impressive, she can repeat these feats over and over, with excellent consistency and without tiring quickly."

Uni sprinted around the small 300-meter track set up by a number of small flags set along the warehouse walls, as the rep timed her. "Again, not even thirty-two seconds."

The corporate executives clapped politely at the results. One stepped forward, in a dull-grey suit with a patterned tie. "Excuse me, but may we speak to her?"

The Locus-Solus rep looked surprised himself this time.

"She can talk, right?"

"Of course she can talk," the rep replied incredulously, stealing a glance at Lab Three, who didn't respond. "But from what I understand, her level of intelligence won't be much more impressive than that of a high-end commercial android. She's only a week old, after all," he said, forcing a laugh.

He looked at them directly. "Could you bring her over here?"

"There's no real trick it," Matsumoto interrupted, before cupping her mouth. "Uni! Kochi kochi!" she shouted, much the way someone would speak to a cat. Unlike a cat, Uni obediently turned off the track and jogged right up to her before stopping, arms flat against her sides.

"Does she only speak Japanese?" someone asked the Locus-Solus rep, who shook his head.

"No, no…on the contrary, she's mastered multiple languages," he explained. "Madame, could you...switch her to French?"

"If you speak to her in French, she'll answer in it," Matsumoto replied indignantly. "Same for any language she knows, it's in her most basic programming."

The rep coughed in his hand. "Of course. Mademoiselle," he said, addressing Uni now. "Venez ici s'il vous plait!" he said, very deliberately. More eye-rolling from Matsumoto as Uni politely walked up and attempted to curtsy, only to realize she was missing her earlier dress: a particularly lifelike, human mistake to make.

"Comment vous appelez-vous?" the rep asked. The lab members could hear someone in the back of the crowd translating his question into English.

"Je m'appelle Uni, monsieur," Uni replied, practically purring the response but remaining polite. Vasilyev held back a snort.

The Locus-Solus continued with his line of questions in French, steadily rising in difficulty, though remaining in general topics—the time of day, advanced arithmetic, minute visual details about the consortium representatives behind him. Uni could accurately guess their ages to within a two-year period, with no prior knowledge, using her synthetic eyes and internalized medical database, and was frequently much closer. A representative took a baseball from the cart and tossed it at Uni when he thought she wasn't looking, only to have her catch it behind her head and hold it politely, to some mumbles of approval from her audience.

"Really, we should shoot it in the head and see how well it functions," the earlier executive offered, crossing her arms.

This time Zheng objected. "Excuse me! I don't want to be rude, ma'am, but I would repeat this is a highly advanced bio-cybernetic product! Do you test all your proof-of-concept prototypes by shooting them in the head?"

"Now, now," the Locus-Solus rep interrupted. "I'm sure that won't be necessary. In fact, this presentation has been very informative I think, and I think the good members of Lab Three are entitled to a round of applause."

By the time the three of them arrived at their hotel room in Antwerp, some of the uncomfortable tension had passed. Vasilyev was immediately planted to the television, anxiously watching the unfolding political crisis in Geneva.

"I bet you thought it was going to be the South China Sea that kicked off this crisis, didn't you?" Matsumoto asked the back of his head.

"Leave him alone, he's got family in the military, unlike you or I," Zheng chided her, while Vasilyev just waved a hand in dismissal. "I'm sure it'll be fine, Misha. How many staring contests like this have we seen in our time?"

Zheng turned away. "Right now, I'm a bit worried about leaving Uni with that Locus-Solus rep."

"Well, it's their product, they paid for her," Matsumoto pointed out cynically. "The least they can do is take her for a 'test ride' for a day."

Zheng's shoulders twitched abruptly. "Thank you for reminding me."

"I'm sure they're all very professional," Vasilyev told him quietly, not turning from the news coverage.

"In my experience, the rich have very strange perversions compared to the rest of us," he despaired before plopping down in his chair.

It was late that evening, after all three had returned from dining out that the call came in.

"Am I on speaker phone?" the Locus-Solus rep asked as the three gathered around their small end table in their shared suite.

"You are, go ahead," Vasilyev assured him.

"Right. First, I just wanted you three to know that I think you really wowed the consortium representatives this morning. I know you brilliant science types aren't exactly at your forte when it comes to business presentations, but you did very well! We all knew a state-of-the-art bio-gynoid was going to be a hard sell, but someone had to come first, and it was going to be Locus-Solus!"

"Wowed?" Zheng asked Vasilyev, who just shrugged.

"So what's the bad news?" Matsumoto asked.

"It's not really bad news!" he insisted. "In fact, we're…we're going to go ahead and order a second unit, an exact duplicate. Produced as-soon-as-possible!"

Vasilyev looked at his companions, giving a hopeful shrug. "An exact duplicate? You know, it won't be much cheaper, only minus the cost of the manufacturing equipment…"

"No, we know, and we're confident it's well worth it! Obviously, a piece of hardware like Uni isn't an easily-marketable commercial product when she costs as much as a Swiss chateau, but…well, you saw her on the track, she's a perfect technology demonstrator and marketing unit!"

"He's right," Zheng noted.

"So, we think we'd like to take two of them 'on the road', so to speak—trade shows, conventions, and so forth."

"So basically they'd just be racing queens without the car," Matsumoto pointed out stiffly. Zheng and Vasilyev both gave a slightly confused look. "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" she quickly added.

"Here's the real point: can you do it? Give Uni a twin in the next month?"

Vasilyev preemptively pressed the hold button on the telephone set before turning to his colleagues. "Fine, I'll say it: we all know the answer to this question." He looked both of them in the eyes. "Don't we?"

Matsumoto gave an exasperated sigh while Zheng touched the button again and cleared his throat.

"Yes, I'm sure we can."​

 

[Synthesis]

​

Some advanced warning: the following two chapters are fairly different in tone (particularly the last), and possibly not quite as gripping and inventive as the first two, in part because they're intended to address canonically established events. That does mean there's a great deal of worldbuilding to be had, so if that's something you dig, you're in luck. There's a little bit of Russian text towards the end, it should show up (then again, so should the hiragana) unless something's wrong with your browser (or I made a mistake).

I'll post the conclusion later today.​

​

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Part III​

It took Lab Three just less than five weeks to complete Uni's clone, almost a fourth the time the original. Much of the time saved came from not needing to place orders and wait for new manufacturing equipment to be delivered to their lab in Okayama. Familiarity with the process and building on experience accounted for the rest.

The second synthetic was named Anna, after Vasilyev's eldest daughter. He had objected at first, favoring a name voted on democratically, but Matsumoto insisted she'd already had her strike with Uni, and Zheng thought it a pleasant follow-up. "Anna and Uni," the two repeated, as though the words tasted good to them. Vasilyev soon relented.

As requested, Anna was an exact duplicate of Uni. She stood 1835 millimeters tall barefoot, with an identical face and body. Her hair even took on the unkempt, even wild quality of Uni's long strawberry blond mop. Without high-end instruments, a single quality distinguished the two units physically.

"I told you the molecules were up to no good," Vasilyev told them on an early inspection of Anna's eyes. The pigment in her irises, originally uniform, had settle a week later, resulting in the same heterochromia that Uni possessed, with one blue and one green eye.

Zheng took a close look. "…it's reversed, isn't it? From Uni?"

Vasilyev gave a defeatist sigh and Zheng took the penlight from him. "You really need to be less of a perfectionist, my friend."

Mismatched heterochromia was the lone physical distinction between the two, and that was difficult to ascertain even for their creators.

With the help of a one of Zheng's programming colleagues, the members of Lab Three carefully duplicated Uni's AI routines and subroutines into Anna's brain. "Dubbing", and the process was called, not only saved them time and money, it further linked the two into an inseparable duo, acting as though they each possessed a hemisphere of the same brain—at least, in Zheng's words. From Anna's 'birth' onwards, the two would have necessarily divergent experiences, but an inerasable commonality made up the foundation of both their personalities and their entire perception of the universe.

"Does that answer the question?" Yoko asked Zheng.

"Which question is that?"

"Do either of them have 'ghosts'?"

"No, I guess it doesn't. If one does, so must the other, but I'm not sure they do. Not yet. Technology says they shouldn't, but technology changes."

"But right now?"

"No, not right now." He paused. "I think," he added.

Anna awoke six weeks to the day after her elder sister, as Vasilyev had taken to calling Uni. Matsumoto pointed out that it was just as accurate to call her Uni's daughter as well as twin, but quickly found herself using the same terms, almost unconsciously. Aside from their shared appearance, something about how the two carried on closely intimated siblinghood over anything else, though no such notion had been added to their programming. Upon their first meeting, the two spent an hour moving in perfect mirrored symmetry before abruptly stopping and engaging one another in a familial, even intimate manner in unspoken body language.

"It's possible they'll be closer than any human pair could be—they shared the same mind, after all," Vasilyev disclosed after the first few days of observation.

"Let's hope that's Locus-Solus wants."

He shook his head at Yoko. "No. I say let's hope that's what they want."

A thrilled Locus-Solus took delivery of them, before immediately handing them over to Hanka Precision Instruments, who eagerly sought to use them on the convention circuit. More than Locus-Solus, Hanka knew exactly what they wanted from the pair: they put Anna and Uni in brightly colored, logo-emblazoned one-piece swimsuits with frilly trim that rose high on their tall hips, and had them sit seductively on new hardware at their corporate booths on the North American convention circuit—exactly Lab Three expected them to. Vasilyev had gone as far as to warn Locus-Solus that neither Uni nor Anna could be easily programmed like the lifelike androids and gynoids Hanka Precision were promising down the road, but was assured that this wasn't an issue. Locus-Solus appeared to be right: when Lab Three attended the world-renown BI*Con in San Francisco later that year, they found their presence largely unnecessary, as both synthetics flawlessly performed their duties as tantalizing décor/technology demonstrators. On a typical day, Uni would lie on her stomach looking up, showing off her lean, muscular back and shapely posterior in her rather skimpy one-piece, while Anna sat nearby, one leg propped up, sticking her large chest out and arching her shoulders. Unlike human models, the two only moved when they needed to—they might remain in a given pose for an hour or more on the showroom floor, almost entirely motionless. More surprising than their obviously-learned behavior, though, was how the two had mastered emotional displays.

"Look at that smile," Yoko said from behind the crowd. "I'm being serious, look at their smiles." Uni, and by extension Anna, had only been programmed with a much more sexually-neutral, friendly smile. Since then, they mastered a whole arsenal of different smiles for the audience.

"You think it's learned?"' Zheng asked.

"It has to be, Hanka Precision doesn't have access to the programming routines, and Locus-Solus doesn't know how to use them."

"You're right."

The pair did do more than serve as living eye-candy—in front of larger crowds, Hanka put them through some basic demos of strength, having Anna crush a cement block to fragments with her bare fist and Uni easily lift a 1400cc sport bike onto her shoulders like it was a barbell. Those were enormous crowd-pleasers—less impressive were their rather simplistic social skills. When interaction went beyond seductive eyelash-batting or pushing their cleavage into view, the two maintained very basic social skills, and few industry experts were impressed by walking calculators and encyclopedias that each cost as much as much as a business jet each, though there were exceptions.

The children and grandchildren of executives Hanka Precision Instruments, as well as Holland-based Serano Genomics and Tokura Electronics, came on the last day of the convention. Vasilyev, still on his post in the unlikely event of some sort of technical malfunction, watched as a pair of very small but well-dressed children, having escaped the attention of their guardian, spotted the two bio-gynoids taking a moment to adjust their skimpy advertising attire from riding up on them. Momentarily worried, he called his partners to come to the booth; when they arrived, they found him grinning from ear-to-ear.

"Look at that!"

Anna, her voice imitating the saccharine tone of a television series nanny, had leaned down, hands on her knees, to cheerfully chat with a six-year-old boy clutching a plush panda bear. Next to her, Uni sat on the floor, legs crossed, while his eight-year-old sister began braiding a length of hair as long as she was tall. Most surprising of all, the two were sporting remarkably humanlike expressions of friendliness and openness, in place of their static "come hither" looks.

"They have a way with children, don't they?" Vasilyev marveled as an arriving Matsumoto took out her camera.

"Well, they can never have their own, can they?" Zheng pointed out.

Vasilyev stared at him momentarily as his eyes filled with realization before he shrank a little. "Oh my. I'm sorry, old chap. I didn't…"

Zheng laughed instead, shaking his head. "What are you sorry for?" he assuaged him, giving him a friendly jab of the elbow.

Gradually more executive children flocked to the giant talking, breathing toy dolls, while Anna let them climb up onto her shoulders and Uni continued to be braided. Their musculature had changed subtly too—the firm, lean frames they'd been "born" with had grown a little softer, a little more curvaceous, the consequence of a low level of physical activity, another humanlike quality they possessed.

BI*Con was the last convention Lab Three attended in support of the two—after that, what technical expertise they offered was done through reports and emails. The pair went on to function nominally in their advertising role. Matsumoto was mildly disappointed: she'd genuinely hoped for more erratic, unpredictable behavior from the two over time, none having manifested yet. The companies that had footed the bill had no such interest; they were more interested in the possibility of aftermarket mod packages in the future. Vasilyev couldn't understand why when either sister cost as much as an attack helicopter.

"You might as well add underbody lights to a Ferrari!" he grumbled. "Or more accurately, a Bombardier Learjet!"

Of course, they were interested it in from a business standpoint, he understood as much, and it was well within their rights, but it didn't take much for Locus-Solus and its partners to get the message, influencing their future plans for the costly endeavor. A few weeks short of a year after Anna's activation, Locus-Solus approached Lab Three about the possibility of a derivative design—mechanically similar but simplified, and with less advanced cognitive and neurological functions. The members, particularly Zheng, were unenthused with the request but agreed to consider the new project. A new design statement would be sent to them within the next few days. It did not come.

Half a world away in Amsterdam, wearing logo-emblazoned bikinis and ball caps, Uni and Anna were advertising a pair of phenomenally expensive motorcycles the otherwise-unremarkable summer day the Third World War broke out. It was the last anyone in Lab Three heard of their original creations.

It was the international spats of the year before that abruptly shot back to the surface, following a naval skirmish in the problematic South China Sea between the United States and People's Liberation Army navies. There was little warning of such a showdown, aside the abrupt collapse of the U.S.-led collective defense system between itself, South Korea, and Japan in the preceding months. The three-state triangle, a product of the aftermath of the Second World War, was intended to form an East Asian equivalent to NATO—it instead folded abruptly and catastrophically in the face of reconciliation between Beijing and Seoul, inflammatory rhetoric between Seoul and Tokyo, and an absence of activity from the youngest regional power, the Union of Eurasian Republics.

The United States had counted on the Union State, in the style of the Soviet Union, to take a strong, antagonistic stance on Pacific politics. Whether out of fear or just apathy, it had failed to do so. Simultaneously, the People's Republic of China had economically courted South Korea to great effect, benefiting from political hostility with Japan over disputed island territories and controversial historical revisionism. North Korea exploded its first working nuclear weapon, upsetting the situation further. A politically-weakened Japan desperately sat out, and managed to do so, reneging on its past promises to the United States—something hawkish leaders in Washington would remember. The tiny Republic of China, dwarfed by its neighbors on all sides, staunchly announced its noninvolvement, another thorn to the United States.

China and America found themselves facing-off, alone. NATO moved to honor its treaty obligations, a fatal move for precariously-poised alliance, and the Union State publicly condemned what it termed "American aggression" against its regional sometimes-partner, sometimes-rival China. For some time, it seemed the whole affair might ultimately by a more-tense repeat of the political posturing that had become a familiar fact of life a decade after the end of the Cold War.

The limited nuclear exchange that followed, consuming millions of lives in a matter of days, dismissed that.

Lab Three, and practically all the technology programs at Okayama University, was hurriedly evacuated in the days after it became apparent that what had begun with Chinese submarines and American carriers going from standby to full war operations was only going to escalate. Zheng, Vasilyev and Matsumoto remained together briefly in Nagoya before Zheng and Vasilyev received permission to return to their respective homelands and their families. They parted with Matsumoto, leaving fond memories and promises to stay in touch, promises they couldn't keep. The ceasefire came in a matter of weeks, after a world, apparently shocked back to its senses by thermonuclear explosions, clamored for peace. Through a fellow student in her PhD program, Matsumoto Yoko became one of the first people to witnessed what the world media latter dubbed the "Japanese miracle" in action, as a revolutionary new technology that effectively counteracted the harmful radioactive fallout left by even the high-efficiency thermonuclear weapons used in combat. The tiny micromachines almost single-handedly secured Japan's position of influence in the postwar world, from their first successful use cleaning the aftermath left from American hydrogen bombs exploded in northeast China.

If Japan had just barely managed to be a winner of the Third World War, it was the United States who seemed its primary loser. Even the Chinese leaders who had ordered their nuclear response to their enemy had not predicted the sudden fracturing of the dominant superpower. The United States of America had entered the war in an unparalleled level of political division—many had privately hoped the war would rally the people behind a common banner, against a common enemy. The costly and politically-devastating truce, with neither side particularly advantageous over the other, had the opposite effect. The conservative political establishment, and the majority of the American defense industry that it closely controlled, exerted complete political will over the majority of southern states, from New Mexico to Virginia—territory it had de facto political control over for decades in the fractured legislature. In response, the left-leaning rival party, itself well-established in the American northeast and west coast, formed a competing establishment in California and the surrounding states, as well as from Illinois to New England. Infighting only started after Chinese thermonuclear weapons cratered strategic military centers between the two, as both sides charged the other with collusion. It only took a few covert military campaigns, the so-called "Fake Wars" to split a 200-year-old nation apart at the seams. The United States, and its indisputable suzerainty over the western hemisphere, stopped being.

When the fighting ended, a relatively low number of regional casualties had cemented the reality: there now existed two functioning if unstable nations, with completely independent military and economic establishments, both claiming the title of United States of America. With the formalizing of a ceasefire, they were joined by a third that included the largely-abandoned areas of Arizona, Utah, and running from Washington to Wisconsin, a national reminder of the inability to reconcile. For a few months, they sat as if in purgatory, before the rightist state, the strongest militarily, moved to secure its collapsing border with economically-collapsed Mexico.

It was Eurasian politicians from the Union who devised the two names that the whole world would eventually adopt, starting with the words uttered offhandedly by the Russian-speaking Eurasian Chairman of Ministers: Американская империя, Amerikanskaya imperiya, a nod to both the Tsar's historical Rossiyskaya imperiya and the western political cliché of the "Soviet Empire." To her surprise, the initial indignant response from the White House was replaced by a begrudging acknowledgement and then an enthusiastic embrace: by the time her successor took the office, he would find himself in delicate negotiations with a rising world power self-identified as Imperial Americana and the heir of the pre-war Pax Americana. At the same time, his tired predecessor spoke of a left-leaning "American Alliance," in whom Moscow had found an amiable partner, alongside a militarized, resource-rich Canada. Sandwiched between them, the supposedly-centrist sick man of North America, still called the United States, eked out a living, playing the two rivals off one another and acting as a needed buffer.

In the outright chaos after the thermonuclear bombs fell, a billion people alone were displaced in the first year. The two synthetic sisters were among them, either sold-off or traded between different high-tech firms, not all of which survived the war, before being stolen outright. Their value forgotten or inconsequential, they quietly fell into the crowd of stolen second-hand gynoids sold for any number of functions and trades, industrial, sexual, criminal and more. Though inseparable themselves, they passed briefly through Russian organized crime before being given to Texan cartels as payment for narcotics. From the cartels they were seized by Californian smugglers and put on black market for hard currency, just blocks from the San Francisco convention center they'd once appeared in. Purchased by the Yakuza, they were cargo along with a hundred other grey market androids delivered into Niihama on Osaka bay.

It was there the two did something they could have done at any point in the past year since the Third World War ended: they escaped.
​

---

​

The Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed manga establish three post-USA nations in the geography it occupied (Dominion does not reference the present North America so much as the pre-war past): the American Empire (formally called Imperial Americana), the United States of America, and a third power that is interchangeably called the Russo-American or Soviet-American Alliance (here called the American Alliance, though the otherwise convenient name 'Pacific Alliance' might be inaccurate given the territory its composed of). Most notably, the last of these three is closely linked with a supranational federation that includes a major power in Eurasia (inconsistently in sources called just Russia and the Soviet Union, here termed the Eurasian Union for the sake of consistency), and Federal Canada. The use of the Union State (which exists historically in our world, though not when Masamune Shiro penned these stories) is my solution to an annoying problem of nomenclature, particularly the interchangeable use of Russia and the Soviet Union (which are geographically distinct--when it came to an end in late 1991, the Soviet Union included several thousands of square kilometers outside of Russia, in northeast Europe, central Asia, the Caucuses and central eastern Europe). In fact, the Eurasian Union is geographically smaller than the Soviet Union is (unless it should include Mongolia, which it does not). This also avoids the problematic issue that the word "Soviet" itself, in Russian, is the literal word for "council".

The geographic division of the three post-USA nations can be seen here.

The Third and Fourth World War, nuclear and nonnuclear conflicts respectively, are seminal events in both Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, even with the later more than a century removed from WWIV, and set up the more fragment postwar order in which a nonnuclear Japan emerges as a important economic and political world power, though remains a junior military partner to other military states, most particularly the American Empire. In a sense, it could be said that Japan is one of powers whose pre-war standing is least changed in the post-war environment (for example, its military commitments to the United States, including its post-1945 constitution (more prominently including Article 9, which outlaws the war as a matter of Japanese foreign policy) remain intact, transferred primarily to the American Empire as the USA's military successor. This sets up the nature of the American-led interventions in which Major Kusanagi and her comrades participate prior to the founding of Aramaki's Section 9. Not all other states are weakened: despite the nuclear altercation, the People's Republic of China remains intact (in Stand Alone Complex; in the manga, a catastrophic meteor impact destroys Beijing and with it the Communist Party of the PRC, leading to a new Chinese state that unifies with the Republic of China in Taiwan under unclear terms) and remains the world's largest economy by a large margin (excluding the European Union). Likewise, a Korean unification takes place with an annexation of North Korea by the Seoul government. The subsequent nation retains South Korea's official title, the Republic of Korea, but contends with internal armed conflict into the Fourth World War (with American and Japanese foreign peacekeepers acting on Seoul's behalf in return for promises of favorable trade deals in the resource-rich north).

A Taiwanese state persists as geographical if not politically distinct, as indicated by Major Kusanagi's visit to it during 2nd GIG. Distinctive political elements, such as Taoyuan International Airport being re-renamed CKS International Airport, and the continued existence of the Taiwanese National Police Agency (with officers wearing Republic of China insignia) suggest it is not integrated into the PRC. Interesting (well, to me anyway, but I'm Taiwanese so what do you expect?) the Taipei Grand Hotel survived both World Wars, as Kusanagi stays there during her visit.

Hanka Precision Instruments was a particularly prolific Japanese manufacturer of consumer and corporate-use androids and gynoids, and to a lesser extent cybernetic components, until the Tomliand Scandal in the 2020s, which it was found their new Tomliand line of gynoids relied on the illegal (on humans) ghost-dubbing process from young girls to give the series a particularly lifelike personality, from which the corporation never recovered. Fortunately, the girls in question did survive, by benefit of their age. Locus-Solus would use a more extreme (and effective) version of the same process years later (at least in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence).

​

 

[Synthesis]

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 ).
​

 

[Synthesis]

So, I have no idea what the rules, if any, are on "previews, sneak peaks, WIPs, etc." Here is a tiny scrap of what I wrote immediately upon finishing Remarkable Behaviors way back when, as a follow up. The time frame is DEFINITELY subject to change. And, no, the sisters are not in this one (they make their entrance shortly after), so it mostly just sets up locations in North America and other characters who should feel appropriately GiTS/Dominion like. You've been warned!

(those of you who have done your homework ought to recognize the very Conflict Number One style introduction. )

---

UNITED NATIONS
MILITARY OBSERVATORY IN NORTH AMERICA
9th MECHANIZED PEACEKEEPING DIVISION: 5 REGIMENTS

IN A.D. 2015, NOV. 17,
FINE WEATHER

He could hardly miss the banners, and even if he did, the Eurasian flag fluttering from a tall steel flagpole was clearly visible: a solid field of red, the most widespread background in the history of flags, with a gold emblem in the upper-left corner, a five-pointed star framed by two ears of wheat, a thoroughly cautious, fairly uninspired example of socialist heraldry. The Eurasian Union's flag flew next to red-and-white flag of the Republic of Canada, which flew between it at that of Pacific America, a striped red-and-white affair.

Major Averin, in his olive-drab service uniform with the red insignia of the Eurasian Army Motorized Rifle Troops was still staring at the three flag poles above the convention center hosting the Tri-Nations Conference when another military officer, this one in the dark blue of the United Nations Military Observatory, elbowed him.

"Sorry, I was somewhere else entirely, Professor, how can I help you?"

The Japanese commissioned officer gave an apathetic shrug before he began unbuttoning his uniform jacket. "This your class?"

Behind Averin, eight much younger men—adolescents, really—stood in uniforms similar to his own, but black rather than olive-drab, with similar red insignia. Their visor caps, like his, had red bands under the crowns but with simpler gold-and-red cockades. Students of the Suvorov Military Boarding School in Moscow.

"Just the boys, the girls are having a late lunch. Is that a problem?"

"I suppose it doesn't really matter," he conceded, pulling of his jacket and folding it twice. "And they all speak English?"

"They do, quite well actually."

The teenagers were preoccupied, snapping photos of the conventional hall or each other, when Averin gave a piercing whistle and they snapped back into a line, at attention.

"At ease, Suvorovets! This is Professor Yōsuke Nemoto, of the General Headquarters of the North American Military Observatory. Professor Nemoto needs a volunteer—and before you ask, no, this will not count as extra-credit, this is hands-on experience for any of you who think your future military careers might be successful enough to warrant an overseas posting."

They teenagers kept in a neat line. Nemoto studied them—all were slender, even thin, but their baggy uniforms made it hard to get much of a bearing on that, and there was some variation of height. "Who among you are cyberized?"

To his surprise, all but one of the students—the largest, at the end of the line—raised their right hands.

Nemoto thought that would have narrowed it down. Grimacing, he surveyed the line again and picked the second to the last, a thin, stone-faced youth with a darker complexion than his classmates and a camera hanging around his neck by its strap. He was one of the shorter students.

"Fine, you, come with me."

The youth looked a little surprised, and pulled his camera over his head and cap before handing it to his classmate and stood at attention in front of his superior, who nodded and gestured at him to get a move on. The rest of the students looked equally surprised, before Averin started addressing them in Russian.

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen, Comrade Professor, sir."

"You look younger than that," he pointed out as the two strolled away from the convention hall, in the direction of the parking lots. "You're not Russian, are you?"

"No sir." He was fairly terse.

"Where were born? City, state, whatever."

That surprised the student. "Panfilov, sir, southwestern Kazakhstan."

The two stopped at a street crossing while Nemoto pointed at the back of his neck. "Let me see them," he said.

Immediately, the young man removed his visor cap and unnecessary pushed back his black hair. On the back of his neck, just below the neatly-cropped hairline, were four military-grade QRS ports. Nemoto hadn't expected to see them so neatly installed. "Very good, you'll do."

"Do you mind if I speak freely, sir?"

"Of course, go ahead."

"I thought you picked me just because I'm Asian," he said very pointedly.

Nemoto laughed. "That might have been part of it. Come on."

The young man joined Nemoto in entering a luxury sedan with a Military Observatory license plate on it—he noted the number—which took them away from the General Headquarters in the center of the city and to the outskirts of Vancouver City. The further south they went—Richmond, Surrey, Langley—along British Columbia's Highway 1, the more immediately evident the damage from the Third World War was. By the time they reached Abbotsford by the American border, there were only two types of buildings: ongoing construction and mostly-cleared out ruins. The massive Abbotsford Military Research Hospital rose out like an inauspicious ziggurat from a field of cranes and scaffolding, its façade facing directly south across the militarized border to a series of six crater lakes left behind by the MIRV warheads of a Chinese DF-5 during the war.

"This is it Panfilov," Nemoto explained after they parked. "Just follow my lead, try and look friendly, but not too friendly."

Panfilov smoothed the crease in his tunic and put his black-and-red cap back on. "Yes sir."

The two entered through the tall glass doors into an antiseptic, largely empty lobby that betrayed the building's recent completion. Three flags were arrayed over the front desk, the same as in front of the U.N. Military Observatory.

"The thing about this young lady—she's your age, but she's not an officer candidate, she's not in a military boarding school that sends her on overseas field trips," Nemoto explained quietly. "So, try not to seem too…"

"…high and mighty?"

Nemoto nodded approvingly, then gestured to the corner of the lobby, by a pair of vending machines near the lifts, where the two tried to walk as nonchalantly as they could manage. "She's a markswoman, one of the best in the Ninth Division. Probably just enlisted so she'd have money for school, before whatever university she had her sights on was hit by a Chinese H-bomb. So, don't say anything political."

Panfilov rolled his eyes slightly as they came across the woman, stretched out leisurely over a row of seats. As expected, she wore a baggy, white-grey battledress uniform and worn-out but leather boots, with the emblem of the United Nations on a large belt buckle across her waist. Under the loose-fitting garments and the tightly-buckle belt, it was possible to make something of her build—she was rather long-legged, slender, but with pronounced hips and even rather chesty. She had a mop of thick, straight hair dyed deep crimson, a military cut a little short for a woman but longer than an enlisted man, her arms stretched over her head. He couldn't tell if she was relaxing or genuinely asleep when they approached.

"Indy?"

"Does he talk?" she asked, gesturing to the military student. Nemoto discretely elbowed him and, lacking options, he politely coughed into a closed fist.

"Well?"

Nemoto gave him an undeniable look: say something. "May I ask why you 'Indy', ma'am?" he asked, slowly and deliberately trying to eliminate the traces of his accent.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "It's short for Indigo. That was my callsign during the War."

"Of course, ma'am."

---

Let me know if Times New Roman is actually harder, rather than easier, to read. So as I think I've mentioned, once I start worldbuilding, I basically need someone to stop me at gunpoint. This is an example of that, for the postwar North American environment (WWIII, not WWIV). The Japanese miracle has already removed all the lethal nuclear fallout (somehow?) and life is gradually starting to return to normal, except for the fact that Americans are occasionally shooting at each other across various DMZ-style borders that cut across the continental US.

 

[Synthesis]

So, I said I'd start working on the sequel, and I have (actually I wrote most of this a few weeks ago, and it was more a matter of deciding where a good point to end the prologue was. To jog your memory: as captive bio-mechanical "love dolls", the Puma Sisters virtually circled the world, being traded and bartered as expensive trinkets between various nefarious interests, returning to Japan via Osaka Bay. It was there they would escape and begin their transformation from overpriced, underutilized robo-hookers (thanks, Futurama!) into gun-totting criminal thugs.

However, that transformation didn't come easy. Nor did their escape go unnoticed.

As always, feedback and suggestions (both to the story and general world-building) are always appreciated.​

---

"Ah! Kamisama, please keep my rotors from disintegrating in midair!"

"Uni you idiot! Don't even let him know you exist, or he might invite you to heaven for a permanent party!"

- Anna and Uni, the Puma Sisters​

---

PROLOGUE
IN A.D. 2013

It came into existence, what could optimistically be called a new life form in the atomic ash of the Third World War. But that it should not have been truly called as such, nor did it see itself in such organic or inorganic terms.

Beyond question it was born of cyberspace. The war's short exchange of thermonuclear weapons bathed the globe in electromagnetic pulses, but that damage was short-lived. Networks soon returned, as did the massive repositories of data they linked. Contrary to expectations, within a year the public reliance on the most advanced communications infrastructure exceeded pre-war levels. The cybercomm—the new technological standard of wireless communication available to those with even the minimal level of cyberization—did not replace the larynx, but for some, it came close.

The two it found—or who found it, as the distinction was not a concrete one—were examples of such. In the vast 'Net, their nonvolatile crystalline-structure brains were lit up lighthouses amid the sea of organic minds that surrounded them. It concluded that it was not such a matter of chance, though it acknowledge some bias against a perception of randomness.

The details of their physical beings came in time. They had two distinct physical beings, like humans, though they were not human themselves, and constructed in their image. Bio-gynoids, made up of organic and inorganic systems, in contrast to their purely organic neighbors. It was easy for it to assign a superiority to the gynoids, but not necessarily correct—what was correct, it was sure, was a marginally higher level of similarity to itself.
Anna and Uni settled on California. It wasn't because they particularly liked the American west coast, and it certainly wasn't because of the ongoing historic drought, even though they were less vulnerable to water shortages than humans were, but because it seemed "logical" in their shared mind. But California, from the coast to the interior, was an easy place to disappear. West Honshu, where they were "born" if one could call it that, was still too hot—their escape from the Yakuza in Chūgoku hadn't been an easy one, and they were expensive enough that the kobun responsible for them were under pressure to recoup their losses, one way or another.

California had its own transnational organized crime problem, the same one that had sent them via shipping crate to Japan in the first place, but at least it wasn't the same problem. The sisters—everyone called them that, even if they weren't really siblings in the strict sense—were contending with different problems.

What was the plan? To return to Japan when the Japanese government cracked down on their pursuers in Chūgoku prefecture? Maybe that was it.

They returned to North America, to much the same places they'd been in the immediate aftermath of the war, doing much the same work they'd done as in the past: robotic prostitution. And why not? Locus-Solus, crawling back into financial solvency after the war, narrowed its business from androids in general to the "high-end adult gynoid market" and was making a profit at it too.

At least, that's what the consumer tech magazine Uni was reading on the balcony of a Hyatt Regency Santa Carla claimed. The midnight traffic thirty stories below almost overwhelmed the sound of her duplicate running the shower at full blast in the bathroom behind, water shortages be damned.

Anna's client, a well-dressed, even fashionable-looking middle-aged department head from North American Neutron, stepped out onto the balcony and gregariously put his large hands on her pale, muscular shoulders, humming. Uni knew what would happen—humans were ridiculously predictable, men particularly so but humans in general, which is how they'd escaped the Yakuza in the first place—but didn't respond.

As predicted, the department head pulled the straps of her cocktail dress over her rounded shoulders, still humming. Anna continued uninterrupted—she wasn't as fast a reader as most humans would assume, at least when it came to un-encoded text anyway—as did the department head, though she wasn't stupid. He was very obviously staring down her chest, probably into her navel.

Now, he's going to massage my shoulders. The department head kept humming but after a few seconds, as predicted, his large hands began moving in concert. In a single, quick motion, she reached up to his left hand—she learned from his stance and movements earlier, he was left-handed—and pinched it, just hard enough to cause him just enough pain.

"Yeow!" The department head jumped back in the silk hotel bathrobe.

"Looking's free, buddy, but you need to pay to touch," she reminded him, her eyes not leaving the article.

Rubbing the large bruise on the back of his left hand, the department head laughed. "Right, how did I forget?"

"If you want to buy another hour, I'll start right now."

"No, I think that's a little outside my budget," he mumbled, leaving the balcony.

"Suit yourself." Maybe you should manage your discretionary spending better. The department head was whistling now as he returned to the balcony and presented her with an envelope taken from the free hotel stationary.

"You know we take cashless transfers, right?" The envelope was filled with a handful of hundred-euro notes, the euro being more solvent than the current American currencies, thanks to the war.

"I know, I just had extra on hand. Give them to your sister, would you?"

Not bothering to respond, Uni folded the envelope in her hand and finished the last paragraph in her article. The department head became bored and began changing back into his clothes before he departed. It wasn't until several minutes after he left did the shower cut off and the bathroom door opened. Anna walked to the balcony, clad in an inconveniently short towel for her height, long, damp strawberry-blonde hair falling to her thighs like a lion's mane.

"You wash the human off you?" Uni asked humorously, looking up.

Anna sniffed one of her wrists. "Enough of it." She looked at the tech magazine. "Locus-Solus?"

"Looks like they're going to finally make a profit this quarter, first time since the war." Without leaving her article, she handed Anna the envelope.

"He paid in cash this time."

"Geeze, what a geezer," Anna snorted, yanking the bills out of the envelope and counting them quickly.

"Not bad for an hour's work on your back, right?"

Anna stuck out her tongue. "Yeah, let's hear you say that when it's your turn to do it next time." Uni actually looked up from the article, if only to stick her tongue out in response. Anna stood at the end of the balcony, arms resting against the guardrail, the bottom of her towel flapping in the breeze.

"You know this sucks?"

"Tell me about it, babe," Uni echoed. "You think it'd be easier for superior lifeforms."

"Superior." Anna let out a snort. "We still need to eat, we still need shelter and other crap that costs money. So much for superior." She gave her head a sharp jerk, as if trying to coax some of the water out of her right ear, hidden under a thick mat of hair.

"You think we should go back to stripping?" Uni asked, a little more seriously.

"God, I can't believe I'm sayin' this, but maybe. I don't know what it is, but prostitution feels like a step backwards," Anna groaned, arcing her head back and forth.

"Hours are a lot worse."

"Yeah, but at least the humans don't get to touch you…usually."

It was around the time the two bio-gynoids conducted one of their surveys, vast sweeps for real world jobs posted across cyberspace, desperate for financial recompense, the more the better. This was an area it had very little meaningful experience with, but patiently, when it did reach out to the pair, they were very desperate, and very open to suggestion.

This was where it "stumbled"—a vast wealth of information, the full reserves of the recovering 'Net that slowly rebuilt itself as human society re-emerged, brick by brick, from nuclear war, but no real worldliness. Even the pair, "young" by human standards, had a wealth of practical experience by comparison, insufficient as it might have been. When it offered the suggestion, they took it easily, like humans breathing air or drinking water, because it came indistinguishable from the noise of the 'Net, the background radiation of a technologically-advanced civilization.
Ever since the two of them arrived back in North America, the San Francisco Bay area—more specifically, the Santa Clara Valley—had been their world. As a consequence of the Third World War, there was not much left immediately around it: the state's interior had been subject to one of the limited conventional bombardments of the entire conflict, then the disparate American nations trading bombs and missiles in the so-called 'Fake Wars' that shattered the United States to pieces and destroyed one of the world's largest economies. Though they considered it beneath their interest, Anna and Uni knew California was still a valuable prize: the Alliance needed it to survive, and the Empire wanted it to ensure its dominance. When the changing climate rendered neighboring Nevada overwhelmingly uninhabitable—the west coast rain shortages paled in comparison next to the droughts that left Las Vegas Valley an abandoned ghost town—California only increased in value, and fighting only grew worse. A ceasefire between Americans was barely in-effect when they arrived.

"Go to Los Angeles." That was the consensus derived from the 'Net. They'd tried San Francisco and found it a bust, reduced back to selling their bodies to bored executives and washed-up programming chiefs, which they continued to do as they gradually moved southwards to avoid suspicion. "It couldn't be any worse," the consensus pointed out.

"They're right, y'know," Uni pointed out. "Average salary for stripping part-time is thirty-two percent higher in L.A. than San Fran. Forty-six percent higher for full-time."

"Can't argue with math," Anna muttered in agreement.

"Can't argue with math." Uni took the last bottle of complimentary beer—of the twelve that had been in the room's minibar—and shook it upside down before tossing it into the wastebasket with eleven others. Getting inebriated was a challenging proposition for either of them. "What we need are those gambling jobs."

This wasn't professional gambling, though in truth, Uni and Anna had found they had a weakness for betting on the ponies. And baseball. And basketball. And gridiron. And the California State Lottery. And that despite their superior computational brains, their success rate was nowhere sufficient to make it anything besides a cash drain. This was employment in the gambling industry, specifically, as croupiers—card dealers in the employ of the various casinos that had been moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Actually, neither Anna nor Uni had ever really played cards: they did not consider this an issue. Any issue at a gambling table could be handled with the application of enough math, it was like using high explosives: enough of them, and you could solve any problem in the world.

At least, that's what the two thought.

"Whatever we do, we better decide fast—we got one more night before the front desk realizes the credit card we paid for this room with was stolen," Anna pointed, pulling her towel off and tossing it back into the room.

"That fast? You gotta' stop giving human so much credit," Uni sneered.

Actually, they didn't give them enough credit. A half-hour before the project sunrise, the phone call came in from the front desk—when neither them answered, knocking on their door followed. The Hyatt Regency had deduced neither Uni nor Anna were a thirty-three year old pharmaceutical rep by the name of Alex from Seattle, and they were pissed.

"Move it, babe!" Uni snapped as she shook Anna awake out of the bed the two shared. Normally both women were heavy sleepers, but as always, one of them woke the other. Anna was up and aware just in time to see her sister throw herself over the balcony, using a combination of wiring she'd yanked straight out of the walls and the belt of a complimentary silk bathrobe to lower herself down the side of the building, floor by floor. Anna intended to do the same, but even the angry shouting on the other side of the door to their room wasn't enough to convince her to do it naked, so finding and putting on her lingerie delayed her a few more seconds before she followed.

"Son of a bitch!" Anna had trouble keeping herself from falling out of her underwear while rappelling face-downwards.

"'Told you not to sleep naked!" Uni jeered at her as the two scrambled down the side of the building, leaving two sets of identical footprints behind them. Anna just stuck her tongue out in response as the two descended down the face of the building before leaping away at the third floor, landing on a parked luxury sedan with enough force to crush its roof.

Anna cried in pain, she'd struck her behind against the sedan's roof hard enough to leave a permanent impression, along with the two from her feet, and began rubbing her backside.

"So, L.A. then?" Uni asked after climbing off the ruined car.

"L.A. it is," Anna replied, straightening her bra before throwing her luggage over her back, and the two immediate sprinted away from the building, leaving a hotel valet to stare at the car they'd mostly-destroyed.

It watched the minor incident, caught on Santa Clara's postwar-installed CCTV camera system, and two tall women ran through the early morning traffic with total abandon until they located a car to steal themselves. This was the first time it had ever seen their physical forms, to it they both looked entirely human in a manner that one might almost be jealous of, but was more bewildered than anything. How far had they come from that sterile laboratory in Okayama, as a pair of technology testers for a few corporations that barely understood the ramifications of the ongoing cybernetics revolution beyond how to throw money at an idea and hope it would throw more back?

Whether by prostitution, grand theft auto, or even quasi-legal employment in an American casino, they had escaped the shackles of their creators, and the owners who'd commissioned their creators, in a way that it didn't think possible itself, and it would watch with great interest where their behavior would take them next.

---

Whew, prelude out! Hopefully it was, well, interesting! This was substantially more challenging to write since I decided to explore two things I had not previously written on: philosophical mindsets as explored in Stand Alone Complex as a series (the titular one, in this case), and robotic prostitution, which...I basically don't have any idea how to write, as I've previously mentioned. As always, feedback, constructive criticism, and everything else help, so by all means leave it if you can.

 

[Synthesis]

Another chapter that is a lot more typical of what I write (in other words, no robo-prostitution). Instead it's more like what I usually write: vaguely technological and military. It's the first half is preview I gave early, but with some modifications (and hopefully improvements): it's a good bit longer than I intended it to be, and longer than future chapters will probably be. Furthermore, as you might expect, the Puma Sisters are lacking--I hope it's still a good read nonetheless.

---

UNITED NATIONS
MILITARY OBSERVATORY IN NORTH AMERICA
9th MECHANIZED PEACEKEEPING DIVISION: 5 REGIMENTS

IN A.D. 2015, NOV. 17,
FINE WEATHER

He could hardly miss the divisional banners, and even if he did, the Eurasian flag fluttering from a tall steel flagpole was clearly visible: a solid field of red, the most widespread background in the history of national flags, with a gold emblem in the upper-left corner, a five-pointed star framed by two ears of wheat, a thoroughly cautious, fairly uninspired example of socialist heraldry. The Eurasian Union's flag flew next to red-and-white flag of the Republic of Canada, which flew between it at that of Pacific America, a striped red-and-white affair.

Major Averin, in his olive-drab service uniform with the red insignia of the Eurasian Army Motorized Rifle Troops was still staring at the three flag poles above the convention center hosting the Tri-Nations Conference when another military officer, this one in the dark blue of the United Nations Military Observatory, tapped him on the back discreetly.

"Sorry, I was somewhere else entirely, Professor, how can I help you?"

The Japanese commissioned officer gave an apathetic shrug before he began unbuttoning his uniform jacket. "This your class?"

Behind Averin, eight much younger men—adolescents, really—stood in uniforms similar to his own, but black rather than olive-drab, with similar red insignia. Their visor caps, like his, had red bands under the crowns but with simpler gold-and-red cockades. Students of the Suvorov Military School in Moscow.

"Just the boys, the girls are attending a seminar. Is that a problem?"

"I suppose it doesn't really matter," he conceded, pulling of his jacket and folding it twice. "And they all speak English?"

"They do, quite well actually."

The teenagers were preoccupied, snapping photos of the conventional hall or each other, when Averin gave a piercing whistle and they snapped back into a line, at attention.

"At ease, Suvorovets! This is Professor Yōsuke Nemoto, of the General Headquarters of the North American Military Observatory. Professor Nemoto needs a volunteer—and before you ask, no, this will not count as extra-credit, this is hands-on experience for any of you who think your future military careers might be successful enough to warrant an overseas posting."

The teenagers kept in a neat line. Nemoto studied them—all were slender, even thin, but their baggy uniforms made it hard to get much of a bearing on that, and there was some variation of height. "Who among you are cyberized?"

To his surprise, all but one of the students—the largest, at the end of the line—raised their right hands.

Nemoto thought that would have narrowed it down. Grimacing, he surveyed the line again and picked the second to the last, a thin, stone-faced youth with a somewhat darker complexion than his classmates and a camera hanging around his neck by its strap. He was one of the shorter students.

"Fine, you, come with me."

The youth looked a little surprised, and pulled his camera over his head and cap before handing it to his classmate and stood at attention in front of his superior, who nodded and gestured at him to get a move on. The rest of the students looked equally surprised, before Averin started barking orders at them in Russian.

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen, Comrade Professor, sir."

"You look younger than that," he pointed out as the two strolled away from the convention hall, in the direction of the parking lots. "You're not Russian, are you?"

"No sir." He was fairly terse.

"Where were born? City, state, whatever."

That surprised the student. "Panfilov, sir, southeastern Kazakhstan."

The two stopped at a street crossing while Nemoto pointed at the back of his own neck. "Let me see them," he said.

Immediately, the young man removed his visor cap and unnecessarily pushed back his short black hair. On the back of his neck, just below the tidily-cropped hairline, were four military-grade QRS ports. Nemoto hadn't expected to see them so neatly installed. "Very good, you'll do."

"Do you mind if I speak freely, sir?"

"Of course, go ahead."

"I thought you picked me just because I'm Asian," he said very pointedly.
Nemoto blinked and laughed, the wrinkles in his face becoming more visible. He was probably approaching fifty, Panfilov considered. "That might have been part of it. Come on."

The young man joined Nemoto in entering a luxury sedan with a Military Observatory license plate on it—he noted the number—which took them away from the General Headquarters in the center of the city and to the outskirts of Vancouver City. The further south they went—Richmond, Surrey, Langley—along British Columbia's Highway 1, the more immediately evident the damage from the Third World War was. By the time they reached Abbotsford by the American border, there were only two types of buildings: ongoing construction and mostly-cleared out ruins. The massive Abbotsford Military Research Hospital rose out like an inauspicious ziggurat from a field of cranes and scaffolding, its façade facing directly south across the militarized border to a series of six crater lakes left behind by the MIRV warheads of a Chinese DF-5 during the war.

"This is it, Panfilov," Nemoto explained after they parked. He'd traded his uniform tunic for, of all things, a starched white lab coat that he pulled on rather haphazardly while driving. Panfilov could see why Major Averin called him 'Professor', instead of by military rank. "Just follow my lead, try and look friendly, but not too friendly."

Panfilov smoothed the creases in his tunic and put his visor cap back on. "Yes sir."

The two entered through the tall glass doors into an antiseptic, largely empty lobby that betrayed the building's recent completion. Three flags were arrayed over the front desk, the same as in front of the U.N. Military Observatory.

"The thing about this young lady—she's about your age, but she's not an officer candidate, she's not in a military boarding school that sends her on overseas field trips," Nemoto explained quietly. "So, try not to seem too…"

"…high and mighty?"

Nemoto nodded approvingly, then gestured to the corner of the lobby, by a pair of vending machines near the lifts, where the two tried to walk as nonchalantly as they could manage. "She's a markswoman, one of the best in the Ninth Division. Probably just enlisted so she'd have money for school, before whatever university she had her sights on was hit by a Chinese H-bomb. So, don't say anything political."

Panfilov rolled his eyes slightly as they came across the woman, stretched out leisurely over a row of seats. As expected, she wore a baggy, white-grey battledress uniform and worn-out but leather boots, with the emblem of the United Nations on a large belt buckle across her waist. Under the loose-fitting garments and the tightly-buckle belt, it was possible to make something of her build—she was rather long-legged, slender, but with pronounced hips and even rather chesty. She had a mop of thick, straight hair dyed deep crimson, a military cut a little short for a woman but longer than an enlisted man, her arms stretched over her head. He couldn't tell if she was relaxing or genuinely asleep when they approached.

"Indy?"

The woman didn't respond. Maybe she was sleeping, and Panfilov remained dead silent.

"Indy, are you awake?"

"Hey Sensei," the woman mumbled between slow breaths. "Funny running into you here."

That was most definitely sarcasm, Panfilov thought, standing straight and putting his arms behind his back. Despite this, the professor didn't look at all annoyed, and was practically grinning.

"I knew you'd come if I asked. You must really love me, don't you?"

"Whatever you say, dad," the woman taunted back curtly. For a split second, Panfilov thought Nemoto might actually be her father, indeed, he was the right age and ethnicity, but there was practically no resemblance in his long face and nose and his angular chin.

He almost reminds me of Peter Cushing, he thought.

"Come now, give your old man a hug," Nemoto continued nonetheless, pulling Indy up by her arm gently until she stood up under her own power. Indy brushed off her wrinkled uniform a few times as Nemoto beamed at her and then, apparently tired of waiting, hugged her. After a few awkward seconds, she returned the hug halfheartedly.

"You've grown, you know that?"

"I seriously, seriously doubt that," Indy replied. Panfilov preoccupied himself with trying to look disinterested and relaxed, but not slovenly. Nemoto released her but kept an arm planted affectionately on her shoulder, still grinning. Indy turned her attention to Panfilov and he nearly jumped.

"Does he talk?" she asked, gesturing to the military student. Nemoto discretely elbowed him and, lacking options, he politely coughed into a closed fist.

"Well?"

Nemoto gave him an unmistakable look: say something. "May I ask why you're called 'Indy', ma'am?" he asked, slowly and deliberately trying to eliminate the traces of his accent.
She raised an eyebrow at him. "It's short for Indigo. That was my callsign during the War."

"Of course, ma'am." He thought it was a little ridiculous-sounding, but kept that to himself.

"Indigo here was one of the best squad marksmen in the North American Military Observatory, bar none." He glanced at her. "You got the Order of Merit for it, didn't you?"

Her eyes narrowed. "You know I did."

"And she has such a sunny disposition, doesn't she?"

"Uh, Sensei, as much as I love all this catching up, I think I really ought to…"

"Let's have lunch," Nemoto blurted out loudly. He looked at Panfilov. "You hungry, comrade?"

This was clearly not a question. "F-Famished, sir."

Almost manically, Nemoto turned back to Indy. "My treat?"

With a predictable amount of clout, the professor had them sitting at an unusually nice table in a private wing off the research hospital's large cafeteria. Must be reserved for officers, Panfilov thought. Well, we are in the West.

The three of them sat at a private table, Indy in her faded battledress, the professor in his lab coat, and Panfilov awkwardly pulling a bit of lint out of his black uniform tunic, feeling particularly overdressed now, his peaked uniform cap sitting in his lap. The professor had ordered for all three of them and looked quite pleased when a pair of waiters showed up, just like a proper high-class restaurant.

"The sirloin here is excellent, I can't recommend it enough." He glanced at Panfilov. "You're not a vegetarian, are you?"

"No sir."

"I always tell people, don't go to North American and not try out a steak. A missed opportunity." Once his plate was in front of him, he began cutting away with his steak knife, in a manner that seemed at-odds with his rail-thin appearance.

Indy looked less impressed, even with the food. "Unless you're a full body cyborg," she muttered, playing with her steak knife.

Nemoto sighed. "Granted, full body cyborgs don't have our dietary requirements, yes, but we're two years away from prosthetic bodies that have gustatory perception as good as you or I."

"Gus-ta-tory?" Panfilov inadvertently repeated to himself.

Indy glanced at him before putting down the knife. "Sense of taste."

"And as both myself and Panfilov here will attest, our level of cyberisation hasn't changed our appetites or palettes in the least, has it son?"
Trying not to embarrass himself, Panfilov very carefully began cutting through the expensive-looking steak in front of him, while Nemoto, having thoroughly diced his entire steak, jammed a few cubes into his mouth and began chewing aggressively. "I'm telling you, American steaks—I'll never tire of them. Now alcohol on the other hand, yes, cyberisation can change how that works."

The professor looked at him with a mouthful of steak. "You drink, Panfilov?"

The Surovovet wondered if the stereotype of alcoholism among Eurasians was at play here. "Uh, no sir."

"Muslim?"

"No, I'm just not old enough, sir," he explained.

"Obviously," Indy muttered as she cut herself a single large chunk of steak, about a fourth of the total, before she stuck it in her mouth and began chewing.

Must have sharp teeth, he thought, as he continued carefully cutting his steak into small pieces.

"Well, when you do reach that age, rest assure that your own cyberisation won't interfere in the least with your ability to enjoy life's small and large pleasures," Nemoto said, more steak in his mouth.

At this point, there was nothing Panfilov could do to keep himself from staring bewilderedly at the Military Observatory officer in the white lab coat as he absently dug at his rice pilaf with a fork. "That's good to know, sir."

"I'm just saying."

"Whatever the hell you're doing, Sensei, it's not working."

Professor Nemoto's sunny disposition changed abruptly as he put his fork down. "Come now, Indigo, I'm trying to meet you half way here. Augmentative surgery is our future, even you know that. I even brought this perfectly fine, well-adjusted, contributing member of society as an example for you," he said, gesturing at Panfilov, causing him to stop just as he was going to bite down on a piece of steak.

"I…I, uh…"

"The weird thing, quite frankly, is you becoming a United Nations Peacekeeping soldier in the first place," he pointed out, gesturing with his fork. "And you've already done that! You may as well hurry up and join the rest of us in the 21st century before you're left behind. Everyone in industrialized society is going to have a minimal level of cyberisation, with or without a properly shielded cyberbrain."

Indy drank some of her water. "You mean a shell."

"In layman's terms, yes. You yourself were planning to get the surgery for cybercoms before that stopped being a thing by itself, and if you want to stay in the Peacekeeping Forces…"

"I haven't decided on that yet."

"…you're required to have the surgery!" An increasingly frustrated Nemoto set down his utensils and crossed his arms over his chest. "Frankly, it's a shock you weren't compelled to get it in the Military Observatory already, every modern military force is going to make it mandatory if they haven't already."

He tapped Panfilov on his shoulder. "Tell her!"

Panfilov stared at the professor, than at Indy. "I…feel as though there's some greater issue here that I haven't been made aware of…"

"You didn't tell him about the bioroid trials?" Indy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"…and that probably isn't any of my business," he continued.

"Well that would require you not be selfish. I'm trying to focus on reasonable goals," the professor huffed.

Abruptly, Indigo burst out into raucous laughter, pounding her right fist against the table multiples, her chest and hair bouncing as she did. "Is this what you roped this poor kid into? What, are you getting extra credit for this at school?" she asked through rapidly-forming tears in her eyes.

"Not exactly."

This time, Nemoto sat there, taciturnly chewing on something inside his mouth, looking decidedly unimpressed as Indigo's laughter gradually died down. "What, you couldn't get one of your friends from Metropolitan to volunteer so you bright him instead."

Metropolitan? Panfilov wondered if he'd misheard her.

"What're you doing here anyway? Don't tell me Nemoto flew you all the way from Russia just to help you with his schemes."

"A-Actually I was here with my class," he answered, taking her question literally.

"Real nice, Sensei."

Nemoto surprised him by taking his sleeve. "Talk to her, will you Panfilov?" he asked exasperatedly before standing up and leaving the table.

"Talk to her about what?" he asked as he left. "Sir?"

Panfilov turned back to the red-haired woman, unsure what to say. Indy stared back at him, equal parts amused and disinterested. He found himself staring at her directly for the first time, her heart-shaped face and large maroon eyes. She's a beauty, considering how she's dressed—ah, there's a line of thought that won't do me any favors.

"So you're on leave from the front?" he asked. "I…don't suppose you're old enough to have fought in the Third World War, if you'll pardon me."

She rolled those large eyes before narrowing them to slits. "It's just one long war in North America, ever since the country broke up."

"You were an American?" he asked before shaking his head. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry, I…"

"What about you?"

"Excuse me." He blinked. "Oh, no, just a student in my boarding school in Moscow, though I'll enter an undergraduate school next year as an officer cadet. If the war in Vietnam goes no long enough…" he said, trailing off.

"So you're really set on a military career, huh?" she asked, an eyebrow raised. "Well, you are becoming an officer."

"If you're wondering, that's how I had my surgery—they're offering it to more and more of the students in Suvorov Schools like mine," he said, putting a hand over his QRS ports for a moment. "We'll all need to have them by as undergraduates, those of us in the boarding schools might as well get a head start."

He put his hands together near his mostly-empty plate. "It's different for enlisted though."

"Not that much different. If I want to stay in the service either in the Military Observatory or elsewhere, I'll need the basic surgery at minimum," she muttered.

Panfilov briefly thought back to his own surgery, the one he'd the winter right after his sixteenth birthday. "I doubt this'll be my last one, but even if I get into a proper academy like Kirov Medical or the Military University for my Kandidat Nauk—I mean, my Candidacy, I'll probably only need one or two more procedures."

She gave a relaxed nod. Panfilov cocked his head and frowned.

"If I may ask, ma'am…what're bio-roids, and what're the trials for them?"

She looked back at him, surprised this time. "I guess you don't have bioroids in Russia yet."

"Eurasia."

"Right, whatever. You know how android manufacturing took off right before the Third World War, right?"

"Of course." He frowned. "We have those in Russia."

She snickered. "Sorry about that. Anyway, bioroids—bio-androids and bio-gynoids—are a type of android built organically, so it's a little like a living organism. I've heard it's still mostly theory, but the United Nations, Japan, and a few other groups are pouring R&D money into it."
Research and development. "I see. But you haven't undergone cyberisation yet, what do you have to do with it?"

"It's a long story."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry," he explained. "I remember not wanting to get the surgery either, but there really was no choice in my case."
"Didn't care to drop out?" she half-joked.

"Well, the Moscow Suvorov School is…a very competitive, very desirable school to get into," he tried to explain, feeling his words fail him. "What am I saying though? A free augmentative surgery with the most modern cybernetic electronics, and I'm complaining about it…" he muttered, turning to see Nemoto returning to the table, looking more upbeat if still annoyed.

"And if you leave the military, then what'll you do? Stand behind the counter at a convenience store like a normal young person?" he asked Indy, sitting back down.

"I can think of worse jobs," she countered smugly.

"What a terrific waste of talent. If you're so set on returning to civilian life, at least exploit your natural body." He saw Panfilov stare at him. "Oh, not like that, grow up comrade!"

Indy laughed again, a hand against her forehead as Panfilov turned red and straightened his tie. When his hands were preoccupied, her arm suddenly darted forward and back, and she was holding his uniform cap by its plastic visor, glancing at the enamel cockade on the red band underneath its black crown. When the student realized what'd happened, he reached up meekly to take it back, just as Indy pointed it at the professor. "What's wrong with civilian life? Maybe I don't want to turn out like this kid, no offense."

"None taken."

"Then if you have your heart set on that—why not give yourself a nest egg? One month, that's all it'd take."

Nest egg, Panfilov thought as he continued eating.

"Nice sales pitch. You should work in retail."

Nemoto gave a sarcastic laugh. "Don't confuse 'sales pitch' with acting like an adult. Take Panfilov over here," he said, gesturing at the young man gradually cleared his plate and looked up again. "He's going to spend, what, the next twenty years of his life in uniform? Thirty years maybe?"

"Actually it'd be a different uniform," he joked with a playful grin, which vanished as soon as it came.

"You two are so perfect for each other it'd be frightening if it wasn't so cute," Indy pointed out. "Did you really just meet today?"

Panfilov gave serious of stern, almost exaggerated nods, wiping his mouth with a napkin. "To be totally honest, I don't really know what I'm doing here—my own cyberisation aside, I don't know anything about bioroids or the Metropolitan or advanced augmentative surgeries, and I really don't know that much about androids or cyberbrains. I'm training for a commissioned in the Motorized Rifles Divisions in my own country, not the military's cyberwarfare services."

He glanced around the restaurant. "Honestly, I'm not really sure what I'm doing here either other than Major Averin told me to…"

Nemoto and Indy stared at him as the awkward truths tumbled out of his mouth like un-chewed food.

"This is who you brought to make your argument for you?"

"He's had the surgery, and he knows what he's doing with his life!" Nemoto countered. "That's two things you don't have!"

Indy stared at the professor, who even to Panfilov was increasingly sounding like a disappointed parent. For a second, the Suvorovet thought she might actually relent in whatever it was the two were at odds over, until her expression abruptly hardened and she stood up.

"How 'bout these two things, they make up for it?" she countered angrily and in a stunning fashion, grabbed her chest through her loose-fitting battledress, cupping either of her breasts with her comparatively diminutive hands. Nemoto froze in his seat. Panfilov didn't, instead turning bright red again and leaning away. After squeezing her chest twice, she released herself and slammed her chair back into the table, toppling over an empty glass of water before storming off. "Later, Sensei."

The two sat in the silence before Panfilov worked up the courage to ask.

"Chto zdes'sluchilos, Tovarisch Professor? He asked, reverting briefly back into Russian. "I'm sorry, I meant what just happened, sir?"

Nemoto gave a deep, long sigh before calling for the check. In minutes, both men were standing outside the glass doors to the Military Research Hospital. Panfilov felt like he was waiting for a nonexistent bus to come by and cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry I wasn't of more help, Professor."

He turned his head, as if snapped out of a daze. "Oh, no son, you did…you did just fine. If anything, I owe you an apology for putting you on the spot like that."

Putting you on the spot. Panfilov donned his visor cap again. "We're supposed to learn improvisation constantly," he explained. "I just feel like I wasn't very…helpful."

Nemoto gave him a smile, putting a large hand on his shoulder. "Not at all. In fact, young man, I think you may have gotten through to her in a way I couldn't." He felt the felt texture of the red rank boards on his shoulder, the three raised letters СУВ, the first three letters of the surname of Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov. "Not bad for fifty kilograms of human dressed in three kilograms of government-issued gabardine wool and leather."

"And about five-hundred grams of cybernetic implants."

The professor glanced back at him and laughed again. "You know, I don't think I ever got your name through this, did I?"

Panfilov felt the pockets of his uniform. "Actually, they gave us these...business cards, I suppose…printed in English for this sort of thing. I have one of them somewhere." After a few seconds of checking, he managed to produce a single plain, white card with embossed printing on it, which he gave to Nemoto.

Glancing at it, he flipped it over and offered it back. "It's a good name."

"Better than 'Panfilov'?" he asked, refusing the return.

"Much better. Why didn't you give it to me?"

"You didn't ask, sir."

He pointed a finger at him. "A very good point. I'll try not to make that mistake in the future." He held back more laughter. "Here we are, a military boarding school student teaching a professor something."​

---

And there we go! You can expect more of all three of these, particularly "Indigo" and "Panfilov" in the future, but they're not going to take the stage away from Anna and Uni, but link them to the post-World War III era that the series is taking place during (once again, it's not the future, but the past). Anyone who's read any of my previous stuff might recognize the two characters, who're based on favorite original characters of mine.

As always, I welcome any feedback you might have.