Well, after writing that Bubblegum Crisis lemon, thought I'd give my
friend Lou a hand with his Bubblegum Chaos fanfic. So far, I've only
got the Prologue (and other fanfic obligations may prevent me from
following up on this anytime soon).
Warning, this is an ESSAY. If you're interested in my opinions on
Genom, then read on. Otherwise, I'd wait until I start posting actual
Chapters.
As always, C&C is welcome, Msties, etc. Public or Private--your deal.
* * *
Benediction Hymn
by Presley H. Cannady and Lou Barnes
Bubblegum Chaos, Bubblegum Casualty
concept by Lou Barnes
______________________________
Copyright 1997 Presley H. Cannady
Copyright 1997 Anime/Manga Development Group
This story is not to be bought or sold, in whole or in part. The
electronic publication of this novel is in-tended for free access, and
does not intend to infringe on the rights of Harmony Gold USA. The
author has not accepted and will not accept any remuneration for this
work. This book embodies a plethora of writing philosophies and events
derived from the original series and mutually "sanctioned" source
mate-rial, the Robotech RPG, and the McKinney Novels. The author
expresses no interest in the canonical value of this work.
Fourth Edition 1997
____________________________________________________________
Prologue One
"An Essay on the Decline of Genom as a Power in the Multi-National
Corporate World"
Twenty years before the Boomer technological revolution, the idea that
Genom, Co. Ltd., would have ever risen to the stature it had achieved at
its peak ten years ago. Today, the tables are reversed as the 2046
fourth quarter Genom�s production reports continue to display a drastic
loss of initiative by the 2030s jug-gernaut. Within the last eight
consecutive annual financial review intervals, the Nikkei Dow showed a
steady drop to just above the precarious zone; 738 point drop from the
all time high within the Nikkei volume. Needless to say, the
unexplained destruction of several of Genom�s key production facilities
in fiscal year 2033-34 explains the massive, short-term drop in the
corporations stock between 2033 and 2035. Nevertheless, despite the
occassional vigilent rebounds Genom enjoys during nominally "peaceful"
intervals, the trend definitely shows a steady decline in the
corporation�s ability to compete and dominate the Asian and American
cybernetic markets.
A number of factors�political, economic, and martial�entered into
the equation; particularly in the months following June 2035. After
suffering the worst bout of shareholder scare (both in the primary
company, as well as autonomous, incorporated constituents and allied
financial dealings) since the Second Kanto Earthquake (from which Genom
recovered in what is still considered one of the most brilliant
dem-onstrations of business initiative in the history of private
enterprise), the megacorporation that seemingly dominated the 2030-40
decade was strong armed into reassessing its corporate goals.
Additionally, Genom endured a twenty-two percent drop in capital during
the reappraisal its five-hundred trillion yen volume. Chairman Hendrick
Quincy, the director of Genom�s Board of Trustees since the late 2010s
and a founding trustee of Genom, Co. Ltd. Earlier in the century, made
an important observation while sal-vaging his beleaugered operation.
First, the corporation�s productive goals had overly focused on
cyber-netic technologies, while poorly assessing its potential value in
light of the technology�s demand. The difficulty with selling this
observation to the shareholders� representative resulted mainly in the
wide di-versity in Genom�s activities in industry, extending from
partial brokerage of resource exploitation com-panies to an in-house
legal and financial consul office. These expensive trappings, as
Chairman Quincy noted in the "Genom Annual Financial Review, Comments,
and Open Questions�2036" emphasized the long-standing relationship
between the goals of Genom�s subsidiaries, and the primary mission to
estab-lish the corporation as a dominant figure in a world slowly
adapting to a cybernetic lifestyle. Whereas 29% of Genom�s human
resource was devoted to productive elements (resource exploitation,
aeronautical technologies, electrical engineering, software research and
development, etc.), the total productivity of these constituents
amounted to barely seven percent of Genom�s annual net commercial
output. Instead, 84% of Genom constituents worked as separate,
semi-automous components of the cybernetic research and development
groups.
Realizing their grave error in the late 2020s, Genom had drastically
cut its in-house manpower, making use of the attractiveness of the new
cybernetic market to exert influence within Japanese keiretsu�s; by
2029, Genom had successfully forged well over thirteen hundred mergers
with small, outside companies and corporations while concentrating on
diversifying its own goals. Nevertheless, Quincy and Genom�s trustees
failed to understand the raw tentativeness of the cybernetic market, a
fatal mistake made by hun-dreds of software giants during the 1990s and
the first years of the new millenia when what was then called the
"Internet" supposedly represented a new, viable marketplace. Quincy
succeeded in establishing several spin-off projects on which Genom
theoretically could have reinforced its product foundation.
Nevertheless, the raw appeal of the "coming age of cyberneticism,"
combined with the almost "cyberpunkish" euphoria embraced by the
economic intellectuals (A. Chrysler, Edgar Simmons, etc.) on Genom�s
board of directors triumped over practical, economic sense. Naturally,
the spin-off operations were either�for the most part�canceled, or
simply restricted to developing new technologies for Genom�s latest
magical wonder.
The Cyberdroid, known more commonly as "Boomers," probably best
represents Genom�s ironic situa-tion. Leading edge cybernetics and
artificial intelligence with relatively high cost efficiency drew the
at-tention of national industries around the world�particularly from
Third World countries with a particular wealth in raw resources and a
lack of technology with which to exploit it. The workforce potential
for the Cyberdroid incited mixed feelings, however. Labor unions
throughout Asia and Africa protested the in-troduction of commericial
Cyberdroids ever since Project Blue Collar went into effect, and four
major European Economic Community nations actively banned the cybernetic
market within their borders. The Cyberdroid�s bubble success from
Megatokyo�s viewpoint suffered a gruesome first year defeat abroad.
However, Chairman Quincy and the trustees could not be blamed for
allowing this trend to escape them. Markets for Cyberdroids did exist,
and in numbers that effectively granted an intense wave of initiative
into the Genom capital machine. By 2031, the EEC had finally convinced
its opposition members to ease their restrictions; although Germany and
Denmark would continue to finance and develop their own cy-bernetic and
mechanical advances (without Genom influence or bankrolling). However,
between 2028 and 2033, the world would witness an incredible inflation
of Genom�s value, and combined with the flash burgeoning of demand in
the cybernetic market amongst American and British corporations, Genom�s
robotic capital good suddenly went from the enigmatic Cyberdroid
witnessed in mere tests and demon-strations to potential political
investors to the individual firms within the microeconomic scope. Thus,
the "Boomer Age" was born.
Unfortunately for Genom, in 2033 the corporation�s wholly
superlative success began to exhibit the poor integrity of its
foundation. As a series of political and economic crises in Japan and
abroad threat-ened Genom�s foreign interests, the world came to realize
the social plight of those living in the sixty-four percent slum-like
conditions of the super-industrialized Megatokyo. Largely responsible
for the city�s political, economic, and social structuring, Genom
suddenly became anathema to social activists and lob-byists worldwide,
and by 2036, a number of public interest groups in Megatokyo had
successfully per-suaded a significant enough number of parlimentary
representatives to sway voting behavior in the Diet. Of Hendrick
Quincy�s even greater concern, the United States was quickly regaining
its status as an eco-nomic power. Generally considered to being well on
its way to a lower end of the productivity spectrum at the onset of the
2040s, the United States of America suddenly underwent a libertarian
revolution. Balking at the Japanese corporate strangle hold and
attacking Genom�s American interests in particular, Congress enacted
numerous trade bills that actively banned hundreds of items from Genom�s
vital export list to the Americas, while opening their markets to hungry
European industries that have long lobbied the Ameri-can government
against Genom�s undue influence. Furthermore, formidable US federal and
military agencies began a nationwide crackdown on possible underhanded
dealings that Genom has allegedly par-ticipated in. Finally, in 2035,
the largest American software development corporation, TXI Encom,
an-nounced its intentions to move ahead with an advanced mechanical
engineering program; leaving Genom with the splattered paint ball of the
cybernetic decade smeared over the corporation�s hands.
The most devastating of tangible blows to the Cyberdroid market
occurred in late-2037. By this time, the Combat-variants of the
Cyberdroids were being deployed by both the the South Korean army and
the Japanese Self Defense Force. On September 2, North Korea initiated
a brief shooting conflict; drawing both American and Japanese troops to
the frontlines. For the first time, combat Cyberdroids had been tested
in combat, and their performance�both on the field and in the
maintenance sheds�fell far below normal. From one point of view, the
Second Korean Conflict (Sep 2, 2037�Nov 4, 2037) was the prov-ing ground
between the Cyberdroid and its conventional alternative, the power
suit. TXI Encom, recently having purchased Mitsubishi�s rights to the
K-series of police armors, reassessed and redeveloped the concept into a
combat vehicle, and the idea of the Enhanced Infantry was effectively
born. When the first ASR-1001s arrived on in Pusan in late September,
the Cyberdroid troops South Korea and Japan had drawn up to the front
were falling horribly short against a far less modernized North Korean
army. The problem unaddressed by Genom in the development of its combat
variant of "Boomer" was that the com-bat cybernetic intelligence was too
damned expensive to waste in a stand-up fight. When Cyberdroids were
deployed, they easily fell victim to far less expensive rockets. In
fact, while Cyberdroids made a sig-nificant impact in enemy casualties,
the loss ratio for the standard combat variant put General Hideyoshi
Takajima�Commander in Chief of the Eastern Army, Japanese Armed Forces,
and theater commander for Japanese operations in Korea�in an utterly
hopeless situation.
Enter the ASR-1001. Within three days of landing, deployed ASR-1001
power suits; assigned to the 79th Special Operations Group and later (in
the form of an air deployable variant) assigned to the XVIII Airborne
Corps� 101st Division. Overseas, TXI Encom received bids from many of
Genom�s previous clients on purchasing the battle suit, whose less
expensive price tag had appealed to the megalomaniac despots looking to
purchase such arms. The operations carried out the the Special
Operations Group were primarily testbed-like in nature, but the
ASR-1001�s production model carried out a massive paratroop campaign
against North Korean headquarters about the overrun Demilitarized Zone
and effectively proved their worth three weeks later, when American and
Australian groundtroops, all employing the new battle suit, seized
Pyongpyong, the capital of the Democratic Republic of (North) Korea.
Genom practically reeled at the economic implications of the combat
Cyberdroids failure in a real war situation. North Korea had proven
that Cyberdroids with combat-level intelligence simply could not
con-duct warfare in a manner that produced viable results.
Unimaginative, maintenance intensive in between operations, and entirely
incapable of autonomous strategic operations, they were only slightly
more effec-tive than the disasterous "drone armor" project of the 2010s,
in which unmanned tanks were unleashed on rough terrain and left to
their own designs. The American venture into the Philipines with the
MDBT-010 failed utterly, resulting in the destruction of the three
testbeds and the accidently razing of an entire armored troop�counting
four destroyed MBT-002 Ingram main battle tanks by friendly fire.
Immedi-ately, an inquiry into the capabilities of mounting "imaginative"
level intelligences into the boomers was convened�the major difficulty
with combat Cyberdroids lay in the potential of unleashing a still
rather shaky ground of cybernetic sciences on a robot armed with the
equivalent firepower of a twentieth century infantry platoon. The
recent Megatokyo experiences with Boomer crime had convinced that the
reciprocal dangers of developing combat boomers with higher
intelligences negated the potential for the machine.
Faced with a rapidly declining situation, Genom�s trusteeship
decided to reincorporate its cybernetic department into Kuridata
Cybernetics, Ltd., in late 2041. Chairman Quincy personally directed
the rein-vestment thirty-trillion yen into the first appraisal. The
cybernetic department was written off a year later as an opportunity
cost, and further Boomer development was placed on the back burner as
another Genom Subsidiary, Robotics Millenial, took off in Aomori. While
their lease on Genaros had run up after de-claring Chapter 11 on the
American home-based GPCC in 2039, Genom had reasserted its financial
clout to a point where the World Bank released a five-year rental of the
facilities�with all previous operations already intact and
compartmentalized. The Genaros Space Station, back on line by 2040, was
already reinitiating its "battle-mover" research program as Genom
decided to focus solely on defense production for the next two years.
The long-term plan seemed to work up until mid-2042, when the ASR-1003
Mk.II was released from construction on the Lagrange 4 Space Industry
Station. Despite the greater sophistica-tion of the Generos project,
the familiarity with the ASR-1003 Mk.II caught America and Britain�s
atten-tion. Similarly, the European Economic Community, feeling the
necessity to once again assert its influ-ence in Northern Africa,
purchased three armored infantry brigades worth of the new, more compact
bat-tle suit.
The rebirth of the United Nations in the late 2030s also hurt
Genom�s chances of selling to the political competition. While TXI
Encom would sell technology and weapons to compliant member nations,
Genom found their ability to skirt UN sanctions and resolutions
curtailed when the United States flatly warned of the grave consequences
that might arise from any corporations� dealing with "rogue states."
Before 2037, Genom had frequently supplied notorious dictatorships and
juntas with enough firepower to quell insurgency and impose on
neighboring sovereignties; their incredible position in global politics
at the time afforded them a sort of safety net very few could even dream
of. However, the American Federal Bureau of Investigations uncovered
documents detailing a corporate venture into biological and genetic
industries. Carefully leaking the information to the press, the
American government�in one of most notable socio-economic crusades of
the current President Jonathan A. Brutus (Republican)�pushed for greater
UN recriminations against the Japanese economic system. UN
investigators of a non-related com-pany�s activites (at the ironic
behest of Japan�s current government) uncovered nearly thirty to forty
documents (hard-copies and unshredded) abstracting corporate intentions
to initiate some sort of dealings with "black-listed" nations such as
Libya, South Africa, the People�s Republc of the Congo, and Iran.
Baharain actually initiated litigation against the multi-national
corporation in the World Court, although Chairman Quincy succeeded in
proving that Genom was in no way related with the culpable BioSyn
En-terprises (a Taiwanese-based operation).
Still, the resultant damaged hurt Genom severely; quarterly earnings
at the end of fiscal year 2041 indi-cated a drop that doubled the
previous trend, bringing the appraisal vloume down by nearly eight
percent. Kuridata and Robotics Millenial may have saved the
corporation, but the stigma that surrounds the corpo-rations name still
hangs like an albatross about Hendrick Quincy�s neck. Today, six years
after Genom�s last major drop, the corporation has endured its
comeuppance with bitterly remarkable success. Riding the wave of near
catastrophic decline, the board of trustees and Quincy have brought
Genom into an era where the competition is stiffer. Even at this point,
the corporation still plays a major role through its various subsidiary
companies, even though Kuridata represents a shuffled opportunity cost
in favor of Ro-botics, and even though the Boomer Craze died out almost
as immediately as it began. Nevertheless, Genom�s decline and survival
only indicates the corporations inherent drive to survive. While
weakened from both the drop and fighting to recover, Genom has shown a
ferocity that is only to typical of today�s corporate entities. With
the rise of TXI Encom, Samson International, Inc., DalTECH, and various
other megaconglomerates and MNCs, Genom�s level of competition may only
feed that ferocity; the corporate wars are far from over.
-Jacob Schimmel, New York Times
financial columnist and Professor
of American Mac-roeconomics at the
New York University�s Stern School
of Businees. Essay-speech written
for the Jacowitz Annual Dinner and
Financial Review, 2047.
--
+---------------------+
/ \
_______________/ \_______________
/--<Prez, The Reverend of Funk >-+------------------------\
| Presley H. Cannady II | Author of the |
|NROTC Candidate | Robotech New Era Sagas |
|
cannady@magiccarpet.com | and various fanfics |
\-------------------------------+-------------------------/
+--<"...The mothership has landed...funktacular...">----+
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
/=========\ /=========\ /=========\