An Eighty Percent Solution Part 3

The transition from barrio to city hot-spot came without a marked delineation, yet the line definitely existed. No mugger pa.s.sed a certain crack in the sidewalk, no b.u.m caged a drink outside any club, no welf paraded her children past that unseen barrier. Here an armored Metro cruiser glided slowly past, punctuating the amount of money circulating in this tiny section of street level. One block in either direction, and the anarchy of the-fittest-will-survive reigned.

A glaring solido of a red rose slowly dying marked Tony's favorite watering-hole only a few doors down. The doorman c.u.m bouncer, with two ma.s.sive, silver-colored prosthetic arms, nodded deferentially to Tony as he entered.

"Hi, Jock. You get your arms readjusted?"

"Nope, still got that flutter in one. I almost broke a jug's skull with it yesterday."

"I know a good mechanic."

"So do I, Mr. Tony," the big man said with a grin. "Carmine's waiting for you."

"Thanks."

Typical of any night, the bioma.s.s of people in the Wilted Rose threatened to burst the building like an overripe plum. While not an olfactory bar, the bittersweet smell of lilies, probably two or three OUE higher than comfort level, tweaked his nose. Ignoring it as irrelevant, Tony wedged, b.u.mped, and shoved his way to the bar amidst the vocal stylings of the Communist Bananas, twenty decibels above the level that would cause harm to most deaf rocks.

"b.l.o.o.d.y Mary," he shouted at the bartender. He cast about to find his girl. For once his height came in handy, for he could look above most people. He spotted her behind a pair of nude girls interlocked in a trib so s.e.xual as to edge on even the loose moral codes enforced by the Rose's establishment. Carmine decorated a booth on the other side of the writhing pair with her long, silver hair contrasting with her loose, neon-green dress. She frantically waved and yelled to get his attention. "Make that two. And two scotch and sodas," he screamed, correcting his order.

Tony desired a partner to take his lead without much question-a difficult find in a world of "Do first before done to." He always knew Carmine's charms amounted to something more ornamental and empathic than intelligent.

Holding four drinks high above his head, Tony wound his way to the booth, ignoring three blatant pa.s.ses, one from an ambi. He managed to only stain his floral print s.h.i.+rt with a moderate splash from one gla.s.s or the other on his way through the crush. He parted the booth s.h.i.+eld-a layer of charged air particles held in a matrix of electric white noise-with his elbow and moved in. He silently praised Carmine for keeping the sound s.h.i.+eld up. It lowered the racket and press of the room to a minimum whisper. Carmine greeted him with a bright smile of blood-red teeth and complementing lipstick.

"Weeble, but that band is loud tonight," he said a bit too loudly, depositing the drinks on the table.

"Yeah, I heard the Rose staff paid the Metros a bit extra so they wouldn't show," said the lithe woman in a voice barely louder than bedroom-talk.

"Now, that's a job. I should've been a cop. People pay you when they want you to do something and they pay you when they don't. I hear the protection money in The Hills alone quadruples your pay."

"Quit yipping. You had your chance like all the rest of us to take the Civil Service test in high school. I remember your friend, Bill, quoting you as saying, 'I'm not going to sit around for twelve years at some diddly-paying job until I can earn the real credit. I want it now!' Sound familiar?"

"It does. But I said it when we graduated Oregon State, not high school. But the offer from Nanogate just seemed too good to pa.s.s up. Now I'm not so sure."

Carmine got one of her I'm-right-now-shut-up looks on her face. "Velcro your mouth and enjoy the music. At least pretend you'll miss me from your bed tonight."

"What? Where will you be?" he said, trying but not really succeeding to keep the three-year-old whine from his voice.

"Sorry, business trip to Tycho City. I told you about it a week ago."

Despite the incredible beat of the music, Tony decided that his evening just tumbled into the gutters with the rest of the burns and filth.

"Yeah, and what happened to that frumpy old baggage you helped in the TriMet?" Carmine questioned, deftly changing the subject.

"I don't have a clue. No one called, so I might be in the clear."

"Good. That scare should teach you not to try to be Mister White Knight. It doesn't line the credit account."

"Probably right, but you wanna hear something even more strange?" Tony leaned forward over the table. He looked surrept.i.tiously around. The volume of his voice dropped at least in half before he said, "She was carrying a box with a cat in it."

"Eww!" Her face wrinkled up in disgust. "Can't stand the things. Saw one at a zoo once. Filthy creatures. Fur everywhere in its cage. Should grind them all up for sausage. You ran it into the recycle, right?"

Carmine's unexpected reaction stopped Tony. He fully intended to tell her the entire story and now she frightened him. "Uh...right." Perhaps Carmine's unantic.i.p.ated trip profited him more than the loss of his bed companion suggested. Certainly tonight, of all nights, he'd have his hands full with Cinnamon, the name he'd chosen for his new charge.

For the next two hours he drank sparingly, unusual in and of itself, and listened to the band's reverberations. Tony took the time to examine Carmine in a new light. Since fifteen she'd painted his life in some way. She sympathized with him while he lived out the letter of the contract to that bloodsucker, Pricilla. She stuck with him through the six years of his bachelor's degree, another three for his master's, his apprentices.h.i.+p at Nanogate, and three years of seventy-hour weeks trying to make manager.

They shared fluids and beds anytime they could manage, but he didn't love her, and she repeated, as often as he'd listen, that she didn't love him, either. Tony never considered offering even a temporary marriage contract. They kept each other comfortable in bachelorhood as friends with many privileges.

Carmine's prejudice now colored his views of her. Her normal warmth suddenly carried the heat of an icicle and her jocularity sliced like a knife edge. Tony couldn't understand how she could even begin to harm anything as cute and loving as Cinnamon. A pa.r.s.ec of s.p.a.ce suddenly warped in between them.

Anyone who paid attention from the outside could easily spot this one-sided gulf. Tony moved with the music without hearing it. He hardly said two words in as many hours. Carmine spent her time too engrossed in the band and watching the antics of the patrons to notice Tony's lack of banter.

About eleven, Carmine turned abruptly and planted a bright red kiss on his cheek. The self-heating lipstick stained and warmed his flesh. "Gotta run, honey-bunny. Just enough time to get to Black Field." Carmine parted the curtain and jumped down from the booth.

For the first time, Tony realized her beautiful body hid something callous. While she might not know it yet, this time she'd walked right out of his life. He grimaced as he wiped the still-warm lipstick from his face.

The Bananas finished their set. Tony looked around. While several acquaintances danced to canned music, for the first time none of them, male or female, could erase the cold emptiness he felt inside. He climbed down from his booth, to the pleasant surprise of a latecomer that just happened by the choice club real estate.

"Going home so soon, sir?" Jock asked as Tony exited into the relative quiet of the street.

"Yeah. Carmine had to run off to Tycho."

"Yes, sir. I saw her leave."

"Yeah, I'm just not feeling in the party mood tonight."

"Well, you be extra careful tonight, Mr. Tony. There's a level three riot just beyond the TriMet stop."

"Thanks, Jock." Absently, Tony wondered if Jock gave Carmine the same information. He gave his head a little shake of irrelevance.

"You might also want to avoid the TriMet Hub tomorrow morning."

"Oh? What's up?"

"Dunno, sir. But I wouldn't want you to get hurt. Duck, sir." Tony ducked just as a large metal projectile bent on mischief sailed over his head. Jock deflected it with his arms, not giving it another thought. Tony looked back to see three young kids running away into the darkness followed closely by two Metro officers. Just punks trying to get their kicks and maybe make a name for themselves.

"TriMet, eh? Where do you keep getting this information, Jock?"

"Oh, I hear things," he said with a shrug that accentuated the biomechanical interface.

"Well, I won't press. You have a good night, Jock."

"You, also, Mr. Tony."

Tony avoided the small riot, probably over food rations, only twenty minutes later to encounter a mugger at his condominium door.

"Give me everything!" shouted a man sporting an unkempt beard and wearing clothes that should've been condemned. He carelessly waved around an old Sony Blackburn laser pistol. Tony barely broke stride as he pointed his left hand toward the man. A trio of tiny dart-like projectiles burst out of the end of his index finger at just below the speed of sound. The would-be a.s.sailant collapsed into a pool of filthy rags, bleeding out of a 16 centimeter hole in his chest. Tony nudged the pistol away from the reflexively jerking hand, shaking his head sadly. Another welf decided he couldn't make it on the welfare rolls and tried to augment his pathetic income by murder, home invasion, and robbery.

"Just because you can't see a weapon, doesn't mean your victims don't carry one," Tony muttered in a derisive tone.

Without a second look at the horrific mess or the fecal stench that now arose, he opened his door to hear Cinnamon's tiny scratches from the bathroom, where he'd kept her during the day.

"I'm coming, Cin." As he locked and bolted the entry, he had a stab of fear.

What if someone had heard her? They could've called the Metros or maybe even Interpol! His trepidation lasted all of about three seconds. He checked the entry log and his personal security measures, finding no evidence that his privacy had been invaded. Nope, n.o.body was here. We're safe.

"What a day!" he said. "I'm so-" he yawned wide, "-tired." He kicked off his shoes, stripped his socks.

Tony released Cinnamon, playfully nicknamed Cin, from temporary prison. The tiny cat stropped his ankles, followed quickly by licking his bare toes. "Stop that, Cin. It tickles."

Cinnamon looked up at him as if she understood. She lifted her tail and bounded off to some mischief.

"That's right. I'll make supper. Maybe you need some food." Tony walked into the tiny kitchen and put a meatloaf, peas, and potato dinner from the freezer into the flash oven.

"Percomm Condo a.s.sociation, Body Removal." The solido of a heavily muscled woman came into view over the counter in his kitchen as he pulled out a replacement for the shredded finger-cap in a miscellaneous drawer amongst spare Velcro straps for his shoes.

"Body Removal. Oh, hi there, Mr. Sammis."

"Hi, Adriana. I vaped another welf on one-fifteen."

"Fourth this year. You might get the a.s.sociation Top Gun award if you keep this up."

"I'd be happy if they just left me-" another yawn took him, mid-sentence, "-alone."

"Well, you get some rest and I'll send someone up to clean up. No Miss Carmine tonight?"

"No, Adriana. She went to Tycho City."

"I could find you some companions.h.i.+p, if you're interested."

"Thank you, but I'm just...so tired." Another yawn tore his sentence apart. I'm going to tube out in bed. Been a long day."

"Understand, sir."

"Off." The meatloaf slid out of the flash, steaming. "Mmm, but that smells wonderful." His mouth watered even as he took it into the living room and plopped onto the sofa. Cin showed up, sitting by his side and looking pitiful. "You hungry, too? I wonder what you'll eat. Here, have a bite of potato." The cat licked at the tiny steaming morsel on the end of his fork, but didn't eat it. "Picky thing you are," Tony said, eating it himself.

"How about a bit of meat." Tony tore off a tiny chunk and set it in front of Cin. She licked it three or four times before picking it up in her mouth and eating it very daintily. "Maybe a pea?" He placed a single pea on the couch. Cin sniffed at it for a second before gobbling it down with all the subtlety of a Nil on a real steak.

"Peas and meat, eh?" Tony quickly found that while she'd eat the meat, she definitely preferred the peas.

Another huge yawn hit him in the middle of his meal. "I need some sleep, kitten." The drooping of his eyes and the fatigue pulling at them cut short his meal and the camaraderie shared with his guest. "I'm heading for bed. I guess the day had one too many shocks."

He put a tiny bowl of leftovers down on the floor for Cin and tottered off to fall into bed fully clothed. Cin found a way to the top of his bed and curled up under his chin. Without waking he wrapped his arm around her.

Implement-Phase One Five teams worked in concert. The subject's heart rate, respiration, and alpha waves all dropped significantly. His eye movement increased. The Intelligence Team's state of the art medical monitors observed every major bodily function. All of them reported the same thing: "The subject is asleep."

To ensure no neighbors accidentally responded to any movements or inadvertent noises, the Cover-Up Team released a colorless, odorless gas into the condominium complex's ventilation system. Within fifteen minutes, everyone within two floors of the subject's one-hundred-fifteenth level home slept. Other members disengaged elevator access to those same floors. The Intelligence Team duly noted the subject's change from normal slumber to a drugged stupor.

The Continuity Team moved in next, ensuring no perceptible trace remained of the teams' outing. They needed seventeen seconds to open the subject's door without detection, deactivating all the electronic and physical security devices. A solido recorder, with its three huge eyes, floated into the door, registering the location and smell of everything, establis.h.i.+ng a baseline in order to later return the flat to its original state. The recorder's sweep took seven long minutes.

After exactly seven minutes and one second, the eight-person Medic Team and four-person Vet Team, each clad in self-contained, yellow biohazard suits, pa.s.sed through the condominium door with an equal weight of equipment and personnel.

As the team erected a field laboratory, the envy of any mad scientist, the resident feline received a dose of an additional sedative. The human had already imbibed his in the alcohol. Each of the teams closed on their respective charge and began a series of complex manipulations. The blood of each unwitting subject filtered through separate large garbage cansized devices, injections were given in unusual places, and countless handheld scanning devices irradiated their skin. The teams completed all of these tasks over five hours, fourteen minutes, and sixteen seconds-well within mission clock parameters, and all without speaking a single word.

The two medical teams carefully packed their implements, forgetting not the least cotton swab, and departed out the front door, their evil done and irreparable.

The twenty-person Continuity Team, equally clothed in biohazard suits, moved in with replacement sheets, of the same manufacturer, pre-washed with a placed pale orange stain, nearly identical to one present on the original cloth before any of the interlopers entered the home. One pillow had to be replaced due to a tiny blood stain. One team member returned a lamp, inadvertently moved by six millimeters, to its correct position. Another technician carefully replaced the sleeping cat within the human's arms in exactly their previous locations. Two others repositioned clothing slightly nudged amongst the random sprawl upon the floor in this obvious bachelor's home. A tallish member combed the human's hair and rearranged his leg by several centimeters. A gla.s.s sphere floated through the eerily silent room, occasionally expelling a fine mist to change the air's smell by some tiny fraction of an OUE.

Team members faded from the scene as each completed his task. Finally, after the last left, a tiny, blond man wearing only yellow vinyl tights made one final pa.s.s through the home. Absently, he sprinkled a tiny canister over a clean surface to add just the right amount of dust. He left quickly, quietly and professionally, locking and reinitializing the subject's electronic alarms and protection devices.

Six hours, seven minutes, and thirteen seconds after its intrusion, the team might well have never been there, except for the damage they'd caused.

Tony awoke feeling stiff, but better than he had in years. None of the vodka's effects still lingered in his system. Mentally, he attributed this to the fact that he'd drunk much less than normal last night.

Oddly, he noted that he hadn't moved more than a few centimeters, despite sleeping all night long, and Cin hadn't moved far from his side either.

"Good morning," he said with the suns.h.i.+ne he felt coming out in his voice. The troubles of the previous day seemed to sublimate like dry ice. "Shall we get something to eat?" he asked, stripping down and slipping into a dressing robe. A huge yawn, for such a tiny cat, and an insignificant meow were the only responses he got.

A cheese omelet with bacon subst.i.tute put both Tony and Cin in even better moods. Cin cuddled within Tony's arms. She visually stalked a dust mote drifting at the whimsy of the air currents as if it were some edible prey. Tony leaned back and rubbed at the base of Cin's right ear, right where a patch of black fur began and seemed to pour down her right foreleg and chest.

"Hey, are you a boy cat or a girl cat?" he inquired curiously. The kitten, no longer interested in the dust-bunnies, tried to climb Tony's robe to some unknown destination, its claws making tiny punctures in the robe's delicate fabric. "Come here, you." Tony leaned the kitten onto its back. "A girl," he said, releasing her quickly because of her struggles.

"Goodness, I'm running late, Cin," he said, catching a view of the clock. "Race you to the bathroom." The cat didn't race, but Tony hustled toward the shower anyway. On the way, he managed to step on a small pile of kitten feces within some of his clothes littering the floor. He scowled a bit.

"A kitten's gotta go when a kitten's gotta go. Right, girl?" Cin looked at him and c.o.c.ked her head and then dashed into the closet as she found something else interesting. "I don't know what we're going to do about that, but we'll manage." He jumped into the steaming hot shower trying to come up with a solution. As he dressed and shaved, he couldn't think of anything except sand. He'd get some colored sand and make some excuse about using it as a decorating accent.

"Bye, Cin. Sorry about keeping you in the bathroom," Tony said, scooting the kitten inside, "but it's for your own safety. We'll work something out soon." Still thinking of a way to make it more comfortable for her, he dashed out the door.

Stripping off the smock, to prevent even more blood staining the white fabric, she revealed that only a small patch around her curly pubic hair and an area about three centimeters wide over her spine remained virgin to the ink-bearing needles. The cryptic symbols still bore no obvious meaning to the uninitiated.

She used the blood-spattered ap.r.o.n to wipe her face before tossing it into a sink full of soapy water. She returned to the exam room with a cleaver, a cutting board, a large gla.s.s punch bowl and a plastic garbage bag. Several of the cats joined her, but the two dogs waited at the threshold. The cats arrayed themselves around the room on any horizontal surface available.

A slit in the victim's jugular allowed the body's remaining fluids to drain into the punch bowl over several minutes. Jointing the limbs took the better part of an hour, and eviscerating the torso took another thirty minutes. When she'd completed her grisly task the garbage bags almost overflowed with a protein bounty for her pets-after suitable adulterations, of course.

After storing the meat, Sonya put on a pot. Covered in blood, she tilted back in the plastic chair to savor her G.o.ddess tea. She yearned to be clean, but her pathological need for a tidy environment meant she couldn't stop quite yet. Her normally pristine examination room needed to be returned to its semi-sterile state.

She spent the rest of the day scrubbing, sanding, and disinfecting blood, bone, and brain tissue from the walls and floor. As Sonya meticulously scrubbed the hardwood floors with a stiff wire brush, she sang quietly, "That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well...those icy fingers up and down my spine, the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine..."

The three cats that remained with her throughout the entire process sat on the examining table crooning with her a cappella.

Implement-Phase Two "Nanogate Building Four, Level one-hundred-fifty-one," came the soft, computer generated, pseudo-female voice over the bus PA. Even the voices were designed to keep the sheep of mankind at rest. Tony mumbled his standard apologies as he got his 190 centimeter height and 150 kilo ma.s.s out through the tightly packed commuters.

He jogged through the 6 meters of uncovered sky and perpetual drizzle to the covered entrance of his personal purgatory-the Dental Division of Nanogate Corporation. "Wet day today," he said to no one in particular. "Hope we'll see some sun soon."

He brushed at the rain clinging to his gray imitation-tweed suit and shook his long, loose hair. A quick check in the reflection of the great gla.s.s doors allowed him to straighten his burgundy tie before joining the rest of the throng entering yet another day as an insignificant cog in the megacorp machine.

The atrium stood 30 meters high, bearing a genuine Thaddeus sculpture filling at least 70 percent of that height-a grotesque and misshapen representation of a human worker floating over those starting their workday. It reminded Tony of the commissions Stalin made back in the Cold War. Some might call it art, but Tony chose to think of it as not-so-subtle intimidation. He couldn't decide if it symbolized what the megacorps did to those that worked for them, or if its sheer size indicated how little significance the megacorps placed on each worker.