An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  The kitten licked his nose and gave him a nondescript meow. He put the kitten down. She wobbled off to find more fun, the runner forgotten.

  “Even if the court rules in my favor, nothing would happen. Nanogate and Council Crest Tenant Association would be bound to do nothing. My only compensation would be an almost clean record—almost, because there’d still be those who think I bought the verdict.

  “I guess then I could try and find another position with another corp, but it’s very unlikely anyone would take a chance on me. Knowing Mitch Anson, he took out a full page ad in the Post, the Times, and every third-hit banner on the net about my morals. So the odds of getting a new job rank right up there with getting a nice warm wind on Pluto.”

  A crash issued from the kitchen. Tony went in to find an open cabinet, and Cinnamon sitting in amongst pots and pans scattered on the floor.

  “Hmm. Seems like you’re having an interesting adventure, Miss Cin.” He began picking up the cookery.

  “I guess I could just accept what’s happening. My money and status will be sucked away. All I can do now is go dig in a mine or something equally pleasant. And that’s assuming I could find something at all. I’d have to live on welfare in a commune—or worse, a relocation camp. No health care, recycled food to eat.” Tony continued to confide in the cat and shuddered as he put away the last pot.

  “Another choice, if you can call any of these choices, is to chuck everything and out-migrate. But, most colonies require specific skills or a huge quantity of money—more than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. The only other choice I’ve got is to settle on one of those colonies where you need genetic and prosthetic manipulation just to survive.

  “And then there’s being boxed, probably the worst of the choices…”

  Getting on the floor with Cin and dragging a sock around as bait for her fun, Tony considered his other options. “If I cashed out, I could disappear as a Nil—with no identity and no status. I could do that before they sold my home. But as a Nil, I’ll have no rights. Anyone could take my property or my life away, just because they felt like it.”

  The rest of the day drifted by. While listening to the soothing vocals of the legendary Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso, he slapped some mayonnaise on bread, following it with salami, turkey, and some accidental horseradish. He ate it silently, eyes glazed over, not even tasting his mistake. Cin sat patiently on the table next to him and nibbled at the tidbits he fed her.

  “I could look at this as a unique opportunity, if you want to call it that, of deciding the course of my life. How often do we get to choose our future? Rarely. Then again, what would I choose if I could?” Tony grew silent for a moment as Cin pounced on one of his dirty socks.

  “Let’s be honest. I want a penthouse home, above the pollution level, a wife, a mistress, and enough clout to own my own limousine. I want to be able to control everything and everyone around me.” Tony realized the truth about himself when he heard it. Until yesterday morning his mind had brimmed with that exact future, just like any other good corpie. “And if I could, I’d put everything back the way it was.

  “But that was yesterday,” he rationalized. “I’m not one of them any more.”

  To the recorded sounds of a Martian sandstorm he did two loads of laundry, in typical male fashion—throwing everything in until he had a full load, totally ignoring the color and fabric. Cin rummaged in clothes Tony piled and perched on top of the warm dryer between attacks. Tony didn’t notice. He turned on one of the ever-popular daytime dramas, but not a single scene registered.

  “So many people really don’t know what they’ll live and die for, Cin,” Tony said sometime around ten p.m., a serious look on his face. His mind held the clarity of the air after a summer thunderstorm. “I certainly didn’t know what I stood for until just today. I stand for life, else I wouldn’t have even tried saving the old woman. I stand for justice, else I would’ve taken you, you escaped miniature rug, and flushed you down with the rest of the dinner leftovers. I may be hypocritical, but I think that’s about it.

  “What I don’t know is what to do about it.”

  Tony lay down on the couch. Cin climbed up to his chest and settled down for a nap. He stroked her softly and scratched her under the chin and around the ear. The problem, as Tony lay there getting more and more resolute, was that he hadn’t the foggiest clue how to accomplish any of his budding lofty ideals. Cin purred loud enough to finally drown out the solidoset.

  * * *

  Sonya clung precariously to the wall of the Colonization Unlimited Building, some seven hundred meters from the slums below. Luck had followed her thus far. By climbing the wall itself, using a plant extract cum adhesive created in her own container garden, she managed to avoid all notice. Windows she avoided as much as blank stone, and iron was her friend. Her cloak, plus a few muttered words learned from her proctor, altered the perception of those random few who saw her. To them, she became nothing more than a window washer, or a pigeon, or maybe even a stone gargoyle—anything but a strange woman climbing the side of a building, bent on who knows what kind of mischief.

  The drain on her body and her mind, in keeping up her mental guise during the three-hour climb, showed in her labored breath, aching muscles and a migraine starting just behind the right temple. Her trek wore on her much more than expected. She needed time to rest and recover. Sonya glanced through a nearby frosted window into a bathroom where dark shapes moved within. Highly unlikely there’d be continuous DNA or explosive detectors inside. She promised herself just two minutes.

  Her research hadn’t included whether this corp had unisex bathrooms like most companies. Sonya timed the actions of a glass worker’s tool with the flow of dark shapes within. When nothing moved, the tools reached behind the molding and released the pane as if she’d been doing it her entire life. A fugitive’s upbringing provided one with all manner of useful skills. With exaggerated care, she pulled the window out on its slides. This made just enough room for her to slip inside, every muscle in her body poised for fight or flight.

  She dropped silently to the floor in a crouch as she scanned the peach-colored room with overstuffed lounging chairs. By the mock chandeliers and an abundance of well-lighted mirrors, Sonya obviously found herself in a ladies’ powder room. With no other movement or sound nearby, she relaxed a little. She pulled the window back into place using a suction cup on the inner pane. With the window set in place but not fastened, it could’ve been blown out by a strong gust, so as a bit of insurance, she set a tiny bit of putty in one corner.

  She slipped into a stall and sat. As her body relaxed, her mind continued to work. Her target occupied this same height level so when she returned to scuttling like a spider on the outer wall, she merely needed to crawl around the corner to place her present. With that thought in mind she closed her eyes and opened her mind. She let mnemonics roll quietly off her tongue as her mind surged outward.

  Near her objective she sensed four guards and one executive limousine with driver. As usual, they each carried repeating weapons, though she couldn’t make out the type. Sonya rarely worried about such things. If they discovered her, four months of work on this setup would be for naught, even if she escaped. That would hurt more than anything they might do to her body or mind.

  The sounds of two women entering the bathroom broke her from her mental journey. Their high heels echoed in the tiled bathroom. “Did you see Rhonda with George?”

  “Yeah, she was all over him like a ground-level girl.”

  “As if you can’t tell, that little bitch is sleeping with him for the promotion.”

  “She’s sleeping with him?”

  “From what I heard she’s moved in with him.”

  “Weeble it all! If she’s really sleeping with him, I guess that means I’ll never get that job. I’ve been working for three years for that spot and now some bed dancer is going to get it! What is that, her third manager this year?”

  “Fourth, not
counting the two she’s been seen with from Masterson Controls.”

  “Gads, I hope she goes over there. It’ll get the slut out from under our heels, and I can’t imagine working for her. I’d probably just claw her eyes out.”

  “You won’t attack her, but you won’t like working for her either. At least she’ll be gone soon. All she has to do is find a bigger boss to sleep with and she’ll be out of your hair.

  “Personally that wouldn’t be so bad, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand another year in this position. Marvin is such a beastly manager…”

  The conversation faded as the bathroom door opened and closed once more. Sonya might’ve listened, but something got lost in translation. The conversation went beyond her comprehension. Oh, she understood the words and the meanings, but couldn’t understand how people subjected themselves to such things. She couldn’t understand the lure to maintain that mockery of a lifestyle.

  Her strength returned enough to finish. Before anyone else invaded her temporary sanctum, Sonya worked her way back out the window, replacing it as skillfully as she’d opened it. It wouldn’t do for anyone to even suspect that she’d paused there.

  A breeze whistled in from the east, insistently plucking at her clothes as she eased around the corner of the building. While always careful, she slowed even further because of the wind. She pulled flat against the surface to prevent the air getting between her and the wall, where it might increase its grip upon her.

  Corporate guards were paid to be alert, and generally succeeded. Her approach needed to be exceedingly careful in order to maintain the effectiveness of her protections. She needed a painstaking hour of creep-and-stop to cover the last hundred meters. The two guards exchanged banter but took no notice of the shadow, or the sign, or the stonemasonry that barely moved along the wall.

  Anticlimactically, Sonya’s act of sticking the pipe bomb above the executive entrance compared to playing with clay in kindergarten. Just pressing the device into place caused no problems, entailed no additional risks. She sweated with tiny but continuous efforts as she eased her way back around the corner.

  The danger passed quickly with the corner between her and the only real threats. Her fatigue also flew as she could now move much more openly. She used her tools once again to open the window of a vacant office. Now it didn’t matter if anyone caught her, as the most they’d do is kick her out of the building. Once safely inside, she mumbled a few words, rubbed a red powder across her lips, dripped yellow paint into her hair, put a pea into each cup of her bra and wrapped a length of ivy vine around her waist, cloak and all.

  Unlike her cautious entrance or the long, slow sojourn around the building’s perimeter, not one single person failed to note Sonya illusionary façade as she left. Men drooled and women narrowed their eyes jealously at the overly buxom blonde with full, cherry-red lips and the kind of hourglass figure men have lusted after and women have coveted for millennia. Sonya appropriately swayed her hips and gave cold stares to the few men who dared approach her. Once out the primary exit and onto the lift-bus, she became even more untouchable.

  Now, waiting was all. Sometimes that was the hardest part.

  * * *

  Tony dreamed of a night with Carmine, sealed inside a luxury hotel room surrounded by hot and cold running delicacies of both the flesh and palate. The two of them spent a fortune on a bacchanalia where they indulged in every way possible—women, men, and some who were in between.

  “Open up under Civil Code Fourteen-eighteen, paragraph J! Metro officers identifying themselves and their right to enter.”

  But every time Tony got close to Carmine herself, she giggled and slipped away, leaving someone else in her place.

  “If you do not open the door, we have been authorized to override the command sequence.”

  Tony bolted upright. He had thought the melodramatic voice an annoying, if simple, part of his dream. Intending to step down from his bed, he instead tripped getting up off the couch. Disoriented though he was, he knew the Metros couldn’t be allowed to find Cin! Where was she…?

  “I’m on my way! Keep your helmet on!” Tony shouted as he scrambled about, looking everywhere he could see. “I’m in the back room and getting dressed. I’ll be there in a second.”

  The kitten didn’t want to be found, so Tony hoped she’d remain that way. Sweat crept over his scalp as he opened the door. Two Metros towered over him in full black riot gear, faces fully obscured. “Out of the way,” came the voice sonically enhanced with seven hertz anxiety infrasound. One of the pair slammed Tony aside with one power-assisted arm, briefly pinning him against the entryway. Even without being able to see his back, Tony could feel the bruises forming. “We have a right to search and seize chattels upon your premises.”

  Tony panicked to do something to deflect an all-out search for whatever they were looking for. With sudden purpose, he spun to face the fair protectors of Portland. “Your authorization?” he barked.

  While the blank face-mask gave no emotion, Tony got the distinct impression he both amused and annoyed the man. Massive ebon fingers held out a recording crystal the size of Cin’s paw and dropped it to the carpet. Tony picked it up as the armored policemen went into the bedroom.

  “You can’t be too sure these days,” Tony offered feebly. “You never know. Fake cops and all.”

  The solido crystal went into his player and a solido image sprang forth in the middle of the room. Carmine’s image, life size, spoke to him from behind the faux wood desk he’d given her as a present on her last birthday.

  “Mr. Sammis, or whatever your real name is, I had no idea you were such a deviant. I don’t know how you could’ve deceived me for so long, but I must’ve been seven kinds of fool for having trusted you with any part of my life.” Crashing sounds issued from the bedroom. Carmine leaned forward over the desk and shook her finger at him, like scolding a naughty schoolboy. Some part of him, despite her reaction to his news about Cin, still had hoped she would be the anchor in his life, just as she’d been with every other disaster. Instead she chose to inflict even more abuse.

  “It’s obvious I can have no more to do with you, so I’ve sent the police to retrieve my things. Don’t interfere with them, for I’ve paid them well to make it unpleasant if you resist.” The image carried a feral smile.

  “Do not attempt to see me. Do not attempt to contact me. Do not attempt to contact anyone we know. If you do, I’ll have the Metros return and show you real justice.

  “My skin crawls to think I ever let you touch me. You must’ve been quite pleased to get a nice real girl like me into your clutches, you pathetic Nil. Have you no shame? But then your kind rarely does.

  “May your skin burn from acid fog at ground level.” The solido image gave him a universally understood and despised gesture before winking out. One of the Metros chose that moment to return to the room. Seemingly at random he picked up a lead crystal lamp and smashed it to the floor.

  “What the hell are you looking for?” demanded Tony.

  “We have everything but one item—necklace, Black Hills Gold, with double grape cluster and differing colored leaves.” Tony had worn it since his time with Carmine in college. It had been reciprocation for him giving her a friendship ring. Without a thought, he snapped its tiny chain from his neck and held it out to the cop.

  “There is your fucking item. Now get the hell out!”

  “Sergeant, I’ve got it. Let’s make jet-tracks.”

  “Rog-O.”

  Tony watched as the two walked out the door with an armload of booty, some obviously Tony’s own property. They didn’t even bother to close the door after they left. Tony heard a muted hiss from under the couch. Cin only now gave her opinion of their unwanted guests.

  “I agree.”

  * * *

  Sonya violated her own prohibition on technology in her home with one item, an old-fashioned FM radio. If she played with the dial just right, she picked up one hundred eighty-fiv
e stations in the metro-Portland area.

  She sat at her dinner table with a ball of gray fur in her lap and listened to the seven o’clock news report. As usual, the news depressed her, but she must know if everything went according to plan before she took credit for the action. Her favorite, Plutonia, purred and kept her company while the headlines were read. The tiny, still unnamed Chihuahua sat shivering on the tabletop side by side with her Pomeranian, Maxine. Sonya smiled at it and placed a kiss on its tiny nose. She made only the fourth headline story.

  “In sadder news, four bombs detonated on the Colonization Unlimited Building in downtown today. Seventy-three confirmed dead and one hundred eighty-six others injured.

  “Police refuse to speculate if this bombing had anything to do with recent GAM actions. Chief Adams, is this related to the other bombings?”

  “How can I tell? We haven’t had any time to run tests, talk to informants, or even get their call to confirm it—”

  Absently Sonya wondered if four actually went off. Were they censoring the total number, or that a corporate exec met his maker? Sonya imagined the cruel way she’d just killed seventy-three (or more) people, and the destruction wreaked by her bombs. She had reconciled herself to this course long ago. Wars like this weren’t clean and neat—lawyers had claimed the cleaner kind of warfare centuries ago. Her deeds of death and destruction didn’t warrant a smile, but as hard and demanding work, they did. She grinned and set Plutonia on the floor.

  Sonya switched off the radio and walked out her apartment door once more. Her next task wouldn’t work up any sweat.

  * * *

  Tony found himself awakening much later than his norm, once again on the couch. His body crawled and itched like his poor days back in college—sleeping in his clothes, no shower, stubble on his face, too much stress. He walked back into his bedroom.