(( So screw me, I'm making another Dover story. ))
Somewhere in Seattle...
Captain Dover S. Gladstone of UCAS, Division of -You-Really-Don't-Need-To-Hear-About-Us-And-Never-Will-So-Nyah was pulling shit patrol.
Again.
The only fun thing about this was that he wasn't cleaning the latrines with his labcoat (again) and there was a big comfy chair that he got to sit on, even though he was sure it was jinxed. (Despite their assurances, it tried to bash him against the wall twice when he tried to fiddle with the joystick or whatever it was on the armrest.)
Oh, and the big shiny button that was conveniently placed near him.
He already tried to pull rank on everyone in the "control room" to find out what it did, but they'd spew out some vague gibberish that, with some imagination, could probably pass for Yiddish, citing some regulation he'd never heard of, or Presidential Order Whatever, or something idiotic.
He was tired of watching the screen. Seattle was particularly slow today. Dante's was surprisingly not that populated. Securo-Ja wasn't burning (for once in his entire life). Hooligan's... was... Hooligan's... All the runners he knew were either piss drunk, sleeping, or cleaning weapons and yelling at each other on the radio about saying something insulting to their face, not over the radio, and waiting to see what would happen.
The button was starting to make him feel important.
"Hey, Gurgan or Lurgaan or whatever the fuck, what do you do again?"
Gibberish.
"Thought so."
A minute passed, and someone had tried to kill the DJ at Dante's again.
The button was glowing. He wasn't sure if it was the light.
Dover was still trying to get his glasses to catch the light and make him look super-mysterious.
In the meantime, he started to dick around with the console in front of him, a thin screen erupting from thin-air and asking for his password, clearance, intent, blah blah blah.
How very nostalgic.
At the main menu, he searched:
"what does the button in front of me do"
In that exact wording. As soon as he pressed the enter button, everyone in the control room suddenly turned to stare at him, a few opening their mouths to protest, but then shrugging and turning back to whatever useless tidbit of info they were working on.
A folder opened, reciting more regulations about getting killed if you saw this and didn't have clearance, then spewing a load of data.
Dover began to read, then stopped immediately and pressed the button, nearly snapping his finger in half as he did so.
It had elephants and lava, what was he waiting for?
The resulting cleanup cost every corporation in Seattle ten million nuyen or so (i.e.: chump change), but PETA was still trying to sue them for all those elephants...
-----signature-----
"Those that live by the sword get shot by those that don't."
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