fic: reverse psychology (gw)
Dec. 19th, 2007 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jukeboxhound_backupReverse Psychology
Written 19 December 2007
Pairings: None, except maybe unrequited OldNeighborLady+Duo.
Oneshot; humor/drama; PG-13.
Because Duo is a bit more than the hyperactive moron that fandom makes him out to be. (I keep feeling like this should be a sort of prequel to In Possession, although technically it isn't.)
Blatant reference to HItchhiker's Guide ot the Galaxy--I don't own the number forty-two. Or any part of Lovecraft's mythos, for that matter. Potentially offensive joke or two about the mentally handicapped, and my obvious lack of tech-savviness. Bear with me on that last one.
________
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the other four Gundam pilots were affiliated with Preventers in some way—Wufei and Heero were the organization’s star agents, Quatre had been known to provide security access and bureaucratic shortcuts just shy of being illegal, and Trowa could’ve been the most highly paid undercover ops agent if he’d been willing to give up the circus.
Then again, it had seemed like a good idea at the time to go bar-hopping while in
So with the perfect clarity of hindsight, Duo was starting to think that this had seemed like a good idea but really was about on par with self-destructing a Gundam while still inside.
“That’s stupid,” he said bluntly.
Une massaged her temples while her secretary gasped in shock at this horrid ruffian’s disrespect to a superior officer. “Maxwell,” she said shortly, “despite popular opinion, I know you are perfectly capable of following orders.”
Well, sure. Find OZ base, blow it to hell, and then kill shit. Building the Gundams might have been rocket science, but using them certainly wasn’t.
“Hey, lady, just telling it like it is.” He raised his palms in a way that might have been conciliatory, if he hadn’t been leaning back in his chair with his work-boots propped against the edge of the woman’s desk. “Standardized tests ain’t the way to go in measuring ability—you were in command of OZ’s armies, you should have some personal experience with that.”
He grinned unrepentantly at her narrow-eyed glare.
“You are very close to finding yourself on the wrong side of a prison door, Maxwell,” she snarled, ignoring the little mutter of, ‘Been there, done that.’ “Whatever you might think doesn’t matter in this case. My hands are tied.”
Une took the moment of rare silence to run an eye over the pilot’s worn-out black jeans and grungy boots. He looked more like a teenage punk than the former terrorist he was, the kind of kid that parents warned against after taking one look at the long braid and dangerous smile. The streaks of machine oil on his hands and arms had better be from his own vehicle, or she was going to need the bomb-squad to inspect the Preventers’ garage.
She wasn’t sure herself how to feel about one Duo Maxwell, but having all the former Gundam pilots within eyesight would make a lot of people breathe more easily. Besides, knowing that his presence alone would ruffle some pompously well-ordered feathers was what had finally convinced her to extend a job offer.
“So do I get to do the whole Rorschach’s blot routine?” he asked, and she knew she’d caught him. “I wanna know if those ink things are as perverted as everyone says.”
His idea of perversion was probably a bit more advanced than most, but she kept that comment to herself. “Be here at oh-eight-hundred sharp on Monday morning,” she barked. “I want this taken care of immediately.”
“Aye-aye, Captain Lady Ma’am,” he smirked, and sauntered out of her office with a jaunty wave and the last word.
That irritated her, and then she got outright annoyed at the realization that he’d already gotten under her skin. Une prayed that the amusement value he’d provide in antagonizing the bureaucrats would be worth her own aggravation.
“General,” said her secretary breathlessly, “how could you even consider—someone like him—“
“He’s one of the Gundam pilots. He’s not as strong as Yuy or a strategist like Winner, but he’s the most unpredictable, and very…innovative.” Which, in Une’s opinion and past experience, made him far more dangerous, but she didn’t want to panic her poor secretary. “Many people would be more comfortable knowing where he is.”
Even if he was an annoying little shit.
xxx
So what was the test that Duo considered stupid?
The IQ test, naturally.
Few people seemed to understand that smarts didn’t always mean jack. There’d been this one kid in Solo’s gang—brilliant as hell, able to multiply numbers in his head like no one’s business, but he hadn’t lasted a week before his physical slowness resulted in him getting nabbed by some guy. No one ever knew what his eventual fate was, but his story was too familiar for an L2 native to need much imagination.
Numbers alone wouldn’t feed you or keep you alive.
What mattered was competence, and hell, if a Gundam pilot wasn’t fit enough to be a Preventer, who was? Duo might have been a little unorthodox, and he was somewhat below the average age of government employees, but he could run fucking circles around all these hotshot ‘agents.’ Excepting Heero and Wufei, of course.
Behind Quatre’s sweet smile was a mind that could make a mafia godfather sweat bullets of terror. Duo had very quickly developed a healthy sense of respect for the little blond’s talent of ruthless manipulation; and with that kind of measuring stick, the Preventers’ psychologist was a whiny mama’s boy. Tall, thin, and beady-eyed behind large glasses, the man looked like a praying mantis stuck in a white lab coat, and every time he glanced at Duo a mixture of fear and extreme distaste would sour his expression. Duo didn’t think this was very professional of him. Quatre would be ashamed at the man’s amateurish attempts at condescending intimidation.
“Forty-two,” Duo said suddenly, making the psychologist stop in the middle of his explanation on how to go about taking this test. Maybe it was just Duo’s lack of medical degrees talking, but it appeared mildly ironic to him that an IQ test had to be explained.
“What?”
“Meaning of life. You wanted to know, right? Forty-two. And lots of sex to procreate the species, of course.”
The psychologist mouthed at him wordlessly from across the ostentatious wooden desk.
“Lots of sex.” This was important to emphasize. Make love, not war, and pass the doobie, please.
“Mr. Maxwell, this is a serious procedure. Please have some shred of decorum,” the man snapped, compulsively straightening his manila folders.
Duo sighed and drooped in the padded chair, lanky limbs seeming to overflow onto the floor in his boredom. “I’m sorry, Doc. I meant to say that the meaning of life is the Gestalten sum of its parts and that the continuation of our species necessitates frequent sexual intercourse.”
Doc’s lips thinned, but he moved on determinedly as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “The test involves problems from the domains of short-term memory, verbal knowledge, spatial visualization, and perceptual speed—“
If Duo sunk any lower in his chair, he’d slide onto the floor. He let the man ramble on, keeping half an ear on the stream of psycho-babble and amusing himself by imagining what the other pilots would do in his place. Quatre would probably redefine the IQ bell curve. Wufei might break something in his anger at having his intelligence questioned by this pretentious and dishonorable cur. Trowa…who the fuck knew, with him. Heero would probably break the total human record in ‘perceptual speed’ while making a rock look like a genius in ‘verbal knowledge.’ Perhaps Heero could be the token retard savant in their little group—Affirmative Action and all that.
Duo’s poorly muffled snicker finally interrupted the psychologist’s monotonous drone. With a sniff of martyred pride, the man apparently decided that no amount of lecturing would make this braided menace act properly and mentally told himself ‘to hell with it, I’m not getting enough benefits for this.’
Two hours later, Duo strode out of the praying-mantis-man’s office in a complicated cloud of bored frustration and malicious amusement. Somehow, he was starting to think that Une’s offer of a job—which he took mostly because he didn’t have anything else to do at the moment—was something he was going to regret.
xxx
Huh, Duo thought to himself a week later. I was right.
Go figure.
He looked over the thick packet of paper in his hands at Une, who was rubbing her fingers in slow, tired circles over her temples. He resisted the urge to ask if her other personality was being a pain in the ass.
“Maxwell,” she finally began, “I…find it difficult to believe that the results of this test are accurate.”
“Hey, Captain Lady Ma’am, this was your idea. Don’t go blaming the innocent parties here.”
She gave him a wry glare at the word ‘innocent.’ “Did you even take it seriously?”
No. “Of course. Not my fault that Doc Chuckles doesn’t have a sense of humor. Oi, that’s not very professional, you know, holding a grudge against a patient. Have you done a background check on him? I think he might’ve been an Ozzie at some point, he has that unique tendency to ignore company protocol.”
Duo turned his eyes back to the packet, and had the mental image of the praying-mantis-cum-psychologist taking a flaming red metaphorical Sharpie to Duo’s IQ test with unholy glee.
Une sighed. It was the kind of sound a person would make after breaking an expensive lamp while trying to squash a single persistent fly.
“Maxwell, so long as you continue to test positive for being clinically retarded, I’ll have to take back my offer.”
Ouch, that was a little below the belt. “Une,” Duo tried, using the woman’s proper name for the first time in—well, ever, “you and I weren’t always this buddy-buddy. You know perfectly well that I can hunt down an enemy soldier with both hands cuffed behind my back and several bullets in my cute little ass. You know that the only person who can fuck with a computer mainframe better than me is Heero Yuy himself.”
“Yes, Maxwell, I do know.” She knew it very well, thank you very much. “But this isn’t wartime. This organization has rules, and those rules require a minimum intelligence score. Officially, you’ve only managed to prove that a nearly negative IQ is actually possible.”
A tic developed near Duo’s left eye. “Fine. I’ll take it again.”
“You can’t do that.”
The words I have a fist here that says otherwise were on the tip of his tongue, but Duo manfully choked them back. There was a reason he’d always forwarded the diplomacy missions to Quatre.
“You may only take one IQ test every six months. You’ll have to wait.”
“What, do the feds think a person can spontaneously grow that much grey matter so quickly?” he snarked. “What if I was just having an off-day? Maybe I was having horribly traumatic flashbacks to the war. To my sordid childhood. To what the old lady next door said to me last week.”
Une gave him a level stare.
“Hey, if you were there, you’d be having night-terrors about her too. Paisley bathrobes can be scary as hell. For all you know, maybe I woke up last Monday to find my puppy nailed to the front door. My poor, precious Fido, may he rest in peace.”
“You don’t own a dog, Maxwell.”
“You’re psychic as well as psychotic, now?”
Through a clenched jaw, Une managed to grind out, “Because the same voices that tell me so are the same voices telling me that I’m this close to forgetting my leniency and putting you through a war tribunal.”
Duo opened his mouth.
“Pilot zero-two.”
He promptly shut it and mimed zipping his lips, reflecting that Une looked a bit like the OZ interrogators after they got through a session with him; the same angry flush, a similar light of madness in the eyes.
“I didn’t make these rules, and so long as Preventers is a government-funded organization, everything has to be done by the book. So you will walk out of this building, without a badge, and if you’re willing to take these laws seriously in six months, then we’ll talk.”
Damn it. If Duo had known that this goddamn test was so important, he wouldn’t have doodled cartoon Gundams stomping on Smiley faces in the math problems.
So the pilot left Une’s office feeling like the rug had been pulled from under his feet and the idea that things were a hell of a lot easier during wartime. He was a thief, and one of the best; he’d been capable of memorizing whole OZ base layouts in just a few hours, capable of calculating complex coordinates in his head while in the middle of a fire-fight, capable of rewriting code to increase Deathscythe’s mechanic efficiency beyond what most would think possible.
Not just any thief off the street would be able to impress a man like G, after all, and it was insulting to think that some hard-assed shrink had the kind of power to keep Duo Maxwell from the job everyone knew he’d be damn good at. He was more aware than most that Life was unfair—it’d ram someone up the ass if given the merest glimmer of a chance.
Shinigami was hardly halfway out the door to the Preventers headquarters before he was already coming up with plans to tear Life a new one first.
xxx
“General.”
“Yuy. Come in and close the door.”
Brows furrowing ever so slightly, Heero closed the door to Une’s office and stood at parade rest before her desk, ignoring the stiff-backed chairs.
“There’s been a security breach in our server. Someone’s been accessing confidential files.”
Heero’s vague frown deepened. That shouldn’t have been possible; he’d designed the security program himself using a code modified from a combination of OZ and Federation binary, supplemented with pieces of Gundam programming. It was a combination that only someone with nothing less than an advanced knowledge of all three should even have the slimmest hope of approaching without tripping alarms.
Why hadn’t Heero been alerted at the first signs of a halfway competent hacker?
“From what I’ve been told, we’ve received no demands from this person—or persons—and nothing has popped up on the black market.” She visibly hesitated, then added reluctantly, “Several of our top-secret administrators have been left viruses, however, that we haven’t been able to remove.”
“What kind of viruses?” Heero demanded sharply, envisioning the entire digital failure of the Preventers’ databases.
“…The visually stimulating kind.”
He blinked at her in confusion, and she sighed. “Pornography, Yuy. And just about every kind, too, except child porn or blood-play. Agent Biggs hasn’t been able to access the server without triggering a loop of what he called the most disturbing example of interspecies orgies he’s ever seen.”
Which implied he had to have seen a fair number of examples of such in order to make that claim, but no one really wanted to think too hard about it.
“…Ah.”
“Indeed,” she said dryly, leaning forward with her elbows on the desk and her fingers pressed together. “I’m pulling you off your current case and putting you on this one. None of our regular programmers have been able to stop this, and it’s a matter of international security. If this hacker decides to get serious, we could find every top secret file posted across public Internet forums.” Or worse, but she didn’t need to enumerate the possibilities. Heero could imagine them perfectly well, and a few more besides.
Over the next week, however, the top secret files remained secret from the public, or anyone else who might have the idea of trying to blackmail the Sphere government. Instead the hacker (or hackers, as Heero was leaning towards, because he didn’t think there was any one person capable of cracking his security so thoroughly) appeared content to…play.
Besides the porn, Agent Biggs found his ‘Net history cache emailed to every address in his account book. A few hours later, his irate wife stomped into his office and demanded to know who Pearleen the Randy Donkey was.
The R&D Department found reruns of old kids’ cartoons blocking access to their research; cartoons in which a hapless coyote’s creative inventions were foiled every time by a beeping roadrunner.
The Financial Department was given the bill for two hundred cases of good, pre-colony Irish whiskey, brought alongside the cases themselves. Mysteriously, almost twenty of those cases disappeared before the mistake could be corrected.
Noin called Zechs and very calmly asked why his name had been put at the top of the mailing list for the local chapter of a gay fetish organization.
Une herself found a subscription to Psychology Today! delivered directly to her office. (“Does Stress in the Workplace Lead to Mania and Depressive Disorders?”) Needless to say, Heero was feeling the pressure from his colleagues to fix everything, and it was making him more socially reclusive than ever.
Sitting in his chair with a sigh and several empty coffee cups at his elbow, Heero logged onto the server yet again to see if the worm he’d constructed had found a hit. Whoever the hacker was, he or she had effectively concealed the IP address of the computer being used to create a digital World War in the Preventers organization, and the worm hadn’t been able to track down the source of the chaos.
The moment he logged on this time, however, the blinking green cursor disappeared. Narrowing his eyes, Heero tried several key commands, but the system was unresponsive; instead, the screen’s image shifted from the familiar poison-green text of code to what looked like the sun rising through a haze of smoke and ash.
Cthulhu rises! declared a brief bubble of text, and then something with long tentacles reached from the roiling clouds through the burning sunrise to swallow the screen—Heero jumped and quickly switched off the computer’s speakers when a loud roar threatened to blow the coils. The blackness of being in that tentacled…thing’s throat faded into the animation of a bat, which flapped tiny wings and grinned fangs at the stunned Heero. Smile! Death loves you, it declared in perky bubble writing.
It took Heero a moment to get over the shock that his laptop—his laptop!—had finally succumbed. When the dead hamster was replaced with a fresh one and the wheels started turning again, Heero’s frown turned into the deadliest glare in his arsenal.
At least now he knew how someone had been able to crack his program.
____________
Part 1 // Part 2
