no meme since may?! for shame!

[aburningspirit]

the|alternate|universe|meme

ONE. list your characters (journal names optional).
TWO. others reply with one of those characters or a pairing for you to write; platonic or romantic is up to you.
THREE. pick five cliché AUs from this list (complete with explanations!), and write something of any length - a sentence, a paragraph, a drabble, or a full-length ficlet, if you'd prefer - for each of those five AUs, involving that character or pairing.

Comments

i - cyberpunk

[thatsmyyogurt]

What made Carla and the entire organization that had burned him so dangerous was that in carefully judged ways, they were anachronisms. Even after he had located what had to be the virtual storefront for Carla's cover operation, even after he had cracked every layer of encryption on its stored communications, all that was revealed was exactly what had been on the surface- a company that sold water desalination systems to Middle East conglomerates. It wasn't like dealing with that Pakistani diplomat the other week- carefully hacking the security while Sam provided the distraction of a brazen attack on the firewall and coming out with the most heavily encrypted files for blackmail purposes.

These people didn't trust anything to cloud memory. Not personnel files, not orders, not plans. They must write things down or speak in person, using drop boxes and messengers. It was- what was the 20th century phrase?- Moscow rules.

Not that he had expected much else. His own experiences so far as one of Carla's "agents" had emphasized her rather...hands on approach, for all that she also liked to hide some directions as puzzles dropped into the centers he kept open for cover ids. But it was disappointing, all the same.

But luckily for him, he'd spent a lot of his time with the CIA in places like the Central Asian Islamist Republic, where neuro-uplinks were the anachronism.

Michael unplugged from the terminal and stretched. Moscow Rules. He could play by those.