Chapter 6: Beauty and the Beast
While the exterior of the Trade Station is not in the least friendly or attractive the inside has seen marvelous improvements and resembles an exclusive high-end shopping mall. . The food court levels and restaurant levels also have been upgraded from Military drab to reflect the current consumer tastes with well-lit with extensive decorations, hanging mobiles, indirect lighting, high-end flooring and boutique construction materials. Now that’s the heavy traffic shopping levels that I’m talking about. If you are an engineer in the industrial area levels looking for a compressor or air hammer drill you will see the same drab military environment inside as outside. And for all the engineers I know that is just dandy with them. Show me the latest and best tools and forget the pretty store decorations. Black and chrome are as fancy as required. Function is the measure!
During our shopping and wanderings on the Station Beast would accompany D and I. The children of the families of the shop owners and the children with their parents shopping and looking around were fascinated with Beast and some terrified. Once we explained and made them comfortable with such a large animal and introduced the children to the fact that several of them could climb up on his back and he could take them for a little run about it all but caused hysteria. Beast and I enjoy many wonderful hours with the children. Of course they just adore Beast and want to hug him to death. As far as I can tell he is just about the best emissary to come along in terms of public acceptance and for promoting local cooperation and sense of community.
On one of D’s shopping forays she was chatting with the owner of a very upscale dress shop about fashions and the possibilities of fashion shows. It just so happened that Beast and I were in the area and stopped by to see how much cargo D had collected. The dress shop owner took one look at Beast, had an immediate epiphany and announced that she was doing a series of fashion shows entitled Beauty and the Beast, and invited D and Beast to participate in the modeling. I’m not sure how Beast saw this, but I can tell you D was absolutely ecstatic. She fussed and clucked over the fashion show more than the work on the data center it seemed. I have no idea how many hours she spent researching what a runway model does, or how they act, or do their makeup, or all the thousand other things that professional models do to earn their enormous salaries. Let me just say that D was much more focused on the fashion show and her role in it than any damned tech data center redesign. At first Frosty and I were quite annoyed, until Beast reminded us the experience of the fashion show and its effects on D were precisely the reason she had opted for a replicant body. As usual Beast was absolutely correct and reminded us of the obvious.
The Fashion district had pooled resources and gone all out for the Show. There is seating for some thousand people, food courts, bars, live band music, lighting by the ton, waitresses hauling food and drinks and plenty of phenome and mood dispensers running to keep everyone mellow and happy.
There are a lot of men present to watch the show, well watch the naked skin, as men are fashion ignorant. Word had got out that the local Victoria Secret franchise was bringing in some specific “talent” just for the show. So the men were very keen to check this out.
Victoria Secret fashions have changed a lot over the years and the garments are no longer manufactured but grown. The models are selected for their proficiency and shape for displaying a particular garment, the garment bio slurry is painted on the naked skin and the garment grows and becomes absolutely form fitted to the model. When she is done with the garment the molecules are released from their suspension state and the garment falls off in dust, generally in the shower. The men are very keen on the “form fitting” part as you can well imagine. Think body paint.
The show went well, very well as a matter of fact and when Beast and D walked down the runway the audience was losing their minds. Beast sat down at the end of the runway watching the audience panting slightly and the models all came and fussed over him as they did their runway walks. As a matter of fact I was beginning to feel a little left out and envious as the Victoria Secret models were just ferociously hot attractive women displaying their “fashions” while bent over and fussing over Beast.
“Eat your heart out Boss,” xmits Beast.
“You do it so well, I’m not near pretty enough,” I chuckled.
Beast gave his happy Husky yodel as D struts by and scratched his ears. And all the women and animal lovers in the place swooned. And the men were instantly in lust at the models, oh hell yeah! Between the food, the liquor, drugs, phenome dispensers and mood modifiers it was great!
The Fashion Show was one of those absolutely enlightening and insightful moments for D as she could now participate, feel emotions, feel physically, feel mentally and reap the benefits that a woman can feel when being the center of attention at a fashion show. No matter how many times or how clearly you explain such an event and what it means, it is never like having the person experience the event first hand. D glows to this day about that experience, and the insights of being human.
We have discussed the event at quite some length and D understands her feelings, excitement, ego, the rush of excitement, the tension, the giddiness and so on. However the lust and sexual craving longings of the men present does cause her some trepidation.
“I’m ok to have you look at me with lustful sexual looks as that makes me feel good that I can evoke those desires in you. But for a stranger or groups of strangers to look at me that way is very uncomfortable. I feel like a piece of meat.”
“The line between when it is feels good and when it feels bad is unique by each woman. Most confess that at some point it becomes uncomfortable. But it is also a question of the setting. If the women feel comfortable and safe they may tolerate more than if they feel they are at risk of attack, rape, violence. That said we must remember that inherent to the basic wiring of humans is the desire to have sex with one another when you find ones that are attractive to you.”
“I suppose that is the fundamental programing algorithm in humans.”
“Yes it is, although we refer to it as a human desire to reproduce and restock the species for the following generation. So if males and females did not look at one another with lust and desire and sexual intent there would not be a further generations and humans would die out.”
“So it is a question of degrees based on a per person basis, their personality make up, the environment, the moods of the individuals, and a number of other variables that sets the boundaries between wanted attention and un-wanted attention.”
“Yes, and that boundary is constantly being updated and changing and that’s why people of both sexes get themselves into trouble.”
“It’s a horribly vague imprecise method for an extremely important function.”
“It certainly is D; there is nothing exact about humanity. And you as a very attractive female have to be continuously aware of your surroundings to ensure that you are safe and your boundaries are being respected.”
“That is so alien to me, even though my replicant senses pick up on the risk as quick as or quicker than a human would. It’s just that as an entity I am so careless about such warning signs. I just never gave it any thought until I became a replicant.”
“What you are experiencing is some of the negative aspects of being a very attractive woman. You will find D, my love, that all things in a human world come at a cost. There is no free ride so to speak. So when something that seems too good to be true is presented to you, it likely is too good to be true and should be avoided. So many times young attractive girls or women fall for this type of ploy and become victims of particularly nasty sexual crimes.”
“You know, this being a human is so much more complex than I ever thought it would be. I don’t think this sort of thing, the concepts, emotions, can be explained at all. It can only be experienced and then discussed.”
“Every Mother and Father of a teenager, particularly a female teenager feels exactly as you do. How to communicate the r
isk to those that don’t understand the risk. Specifically before an event occurs that has terrible consequences.” I chuckle.
Chapter 7: The Collection Begins
The Trade Station was accurately named as there was very little consumed by humans that could not be obtained there. A lot of business, probably the majority of trade business, comes from the surveyors, miners, and laborers of the various mining and exploration companies that are working the surrounding planets, asteroids and what not. It’s all pretty frontier style and most of the rules are set in place by the Mining Companies themselves. They will allow recreational drugs, alcohol, and prostitution for their hard working men. A person gets out of line and the Mining Security people step on the individual. Stay in line and be a good dog or else. So the worst offenders get weeded out by the firm that employs them.
Back on the Trade Station miners, laborers and everyone come under the rules set in place by the Trade Station and their internal Police Force. Of course it is a delicate balance of keeping order but not with such a heavy hand to discourage trade and commerce. Drugs and alcohol flow through the Trade Station as commodities in bulk headed to the outlying areas. Also they are sold for immediate consumption while on the Trade Station and here the laws get tighter. There is a double threat as you do not want to get locked up on the station and miss your shuttle out to the mining colony. You may never get a second chance with that Mining Company again.
The interesting thing about organized crime is that it doesn’t tolerate other criminals. Organized crime is very territorial and will not tolerate any interlopers trying to spin off part of the action. Such is true of the Trade Station, in that there is only one crime syndicate present with a clearly defined hierarchy. Most of them were just aspiring petty grunt muscle. The area mangers had their hands pretty dirty as they were charged to perform all the nasty work so that the syndicate resident boss was not implicated. He sat behind a curtain of muscle, lawyers and important people. Everyone knew who he was and what he did, you just could not prove it and if you tried you had a nasty accident, many already had suffered. It took us a while to establish the core hierarchy players and their relationship to one another. But with persistence we got the chart built, along with a number of other possible candidates. These were best described as “wannabe’s”, not currently part of the structure but sure wanted to be if there was an opening available. We would watch them closely as we were in the business of creating “openings” and if they made a move toward the “opening” then they disappeared too. Of the fifteen people we identified and had on our organizational chart only five were management material including the boss. But it didn’t add up at all. The stuff we found was petty crime relatively speaking and as far as I could see it just didn’t warrant the structure or generate the big financial income that you would normally see for such a group of criminals. I was missing something and could not quite put my finger on it.
On a previous mission involving a relatively new Jihadist Muslim leader that we had kidnapped and used to buy our freedom, we had experimented quite thoroughly with this business of interrogation. How do you get the individual to tell you what they know without damaging them to death or having them tell you a lie because they are being tortured physically or mentally and just want the pain to stop? The whole theory of making it uncomfortable for the individual until they tell you what they know is really an exercise in wrongheaded thinking. That is an amateur hour approach from the dungeons of middle ages.
D and the sister have developed an innovative approach whereby with the use of a few drugs and a lot of very bright nanobots we can bring the individual into a Virtual Reality built environment where they are with family, friends, or gang members and discuss the individual’s knowledge with absolute accuracy as the individual believes he is sharing his knowledge with his most important contacts. No violence real or perceived is required. A completely reliable modern interrogation technique with no water boarding required.
We started at the low end of the structure and worked up. The small time shop intimidation muscle was the first to just disappear. Beast and I would identify and get close enough to the target to get a DNA scan and once obtained could track him anywhere. We would intercept him when he was alone in an unobserved spot. Beast and I were cloaked invisible and once we got our hands on the target we would render him or her unconscious and just dump them in a trash bin of the type that janitors and Sanitation everywhere use. Wheel him back to the ship, interrogate for the purposes of “best business practice” to ensure our information on the org structure was correct, then just incinerate him/her and store the ash for discard into space once we had left the Trade Station. Our use of drugs and nanotech was very reliable and D could read the targets like a book. All well and good but there was something missing, some aspect, some branch of this we had overlooked; it still had a stink to it.
In repeated interrogation sessions there would be references to the church. Now why in the world would that show up, and no matter how artfully we manipulated the interrogation the criminal could not tell us more. We could only gather that they actually did not know anything about the church other than to reference it by name. I checked with Mike and yes there was a “non-denominational” church on the station. I checked it out but did not find anything unusual. Unusual for a church that is, as everything about a church is unusual and particularly odd to me. Mike didn’t have anything to report on as far as the church minister went. There seemed to be adequate funding for church activities, a modest congregation and that was pretty much it. The whole thing stank to high hell! But I couldn’t nail down where the stink was coming from.
Of course as we continued to work through the underlings the area managers began to get pissed off and anxious about where the hell their men were disappearing to. To compensate for that we just speeded up our collection process. Within a few days we were tracking the area managers themselves. These manager crooks provided us with a much clearer picture of who was doing what to who and allowed us to update and revise our criminal organization structure view. We made an assumption early on that the Trade Station Police force was corrupt in so much as there would be one or two dirty cops on the criminal’s payroll. That’s a standard criminal organization best business practice. In talking to Mike we explained that in all likelihood we would find a corrupt trail into some very interesting and embarrassing areas in his Trade Station structure. He understood and requested the information we collected be referred to him only as he wanted to see who was honest in his force and who wasn’t.
Chapter 8: Complications
We were doing very well until we started attempting to get close to Fat Art. He had a number of Alien/Human Hybrids working for him as body guards. Beast and I weren’t sure what the hell they were except that they were very problematic to get close to as they seemed to sense our presence even when we were fully cloaked. Beast was the first to pick up on it as he has the capability through his wolf genetics. That complicated things considerably as we wanted to do a quiet snatch and grab of Fat Art and not stage a full on fire fight attracting a lot of attention.
In addition to their animal sense of danger the Hybrids were very large and dangerous. They’re some seven feet in height, a shade of green, some three hundred pounds, and equipped with some form of body armor and from the look of it, and a powered exoskeleton to speed reaction time, provide increased strength, and prolonged endurance in heavy load situations. The tech is very sophisticated with very little external to their bodies, other than the power and data connections to the amour vests. The back of which is thicker than the front so I’m betting that’s where the power source is along with the enhancement chipset controllers. Their faces seemed longer and more angular than pure human, eyes larger than normal and protected by a type of goggle, longer noses and quite flared nostrils, ears larger than normal and seemed articulated. Now many people can wiggle their ears, but not like these guys. Wiggly ears or not, I was outclassed there was no question
of it. Even take away the exoskeleton I would likely be hard pressed to better them in a brawl. I didn’t care for those odds. We were going to have to be very ingenious about grabbing Fat Art with these goons lumbering around. It’s true that Mongo could handle a couple of them at one time and not break a sweat but it would also be a nasty spectacle. We just could not afford that on this mission.
“Ok boss, so how do we make these guys disappear quietly without a trace?” xmits Beast.
“How about kick them out into space through an airlock,” I muse.
“Or lure them into a shuttle and explode the shuttle,”
“How about we lure them onto our Ship and dispose of them there?”
“That’s handy, I like that idea, but how do we get them there?”
“We need bait, huge personal financial gain, or save their boss, or pretty female Hybrids,”
“We could just shoot them in the head with the plasma rifle,”
“Not a good idea on the Trade Station in case we punch a hole where there shouldn’t be one,”
“How about a smaller caliber weapon with a silencer?”
“That has possibilities, and don’t sneak up on them either, just walk right up and bang, clunk.”
“So we would need a disguise so they don’t feel endangered,”
“Yup, for sure, but I have no idea what I would disguise myself as so they didn’t feel threatened.”
“You can’t disguise yourself to not be threatening as you are too damn big,”
“And you’re a bloody great wolf so there is no disguise there either.”
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