An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  * * *

  A servant, dressed in traditional coat and tails, rang a tiny silver bell and entered the Mars room. Conversation ceased as he silently marched the length of the room to the heart-stirring beat of “Ride of the Valkyries.” There he delivered a tiny slip of handmade paper to his master and exited in the same manner as he had entered. Nanogate very deliberately opened and read the note.

  “A tiny interruption if you please. I believe we have a break. In the GAM project, our subject has made contact.

  “Unfortunately, the primary contact, an old woman in the hospital, has died before we could question her. The subject disappeared from his usual haunts shortly after his interview with her.”

  Cautious smiles accompanied his next statement. “Phase two appears to be complete.”

  Implement—Phase Three

  The remains of asphalt streets, obsolete with the advent of lift vehicles, now only served as potholed walkways. The usual overcrowded throngs that populated them during the day had retreated long ago to the relative safety of their homes or hovels. A myriad of colorful characters took their place. An undocumented body mechanic glanced hopefully in Tony’s direction, but just as quickly looked back to his portable lab, working on something that looked vaguely like a human leg in vermilion. A not-so-proficient pickpocket accosted Tony. “Lay off, weeble,” Tony said, backhanding the young boy who grabbed him in the crotch to distract him. The youth staggered briefly before fleeing the scene, his middle finger extended above his head in a universal gesture.

  Half a dozen burns gathered together in a doorway halfway down the street, laughing quietly at nothing much. A ubiquitous ground-level drunk heaved his lunch into the alley, prompting half a dozen rats to scurry out and partake of the unexpected bounty.

  “What am I doing here?” Tony asked himself outside an establishment whose ancient neon lights declared it “-rcade Aerobics,” the first “A” conspicuously dark. Further down the street, two junkies pummeled a normal-looking citizen with a meter and a half length of corroded pipe and size fourteen boots.

  “Good place to be chewed up and spit out.” Tony took a deep breath and marched across the street. Without hesitation he opened the door that might alter his wrecked life even further.

  A low-resolution recording of surf sounds and beach birds matched the dust-covered plastic palm trees which nominally shaded the foyer. Fake coconuts littered a heap of sand against a grainy solido of a stylized Pacific Ocean. Broken scan lines in the bad representation added electronic gibberish horizontally. In a merchant stand ostensibly made of grass and bamboo, a fit young woman bearing a Star of David tattooed on her bald head didn’t quite ignore him.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Sonya.”

  “Reeeeally, corpie,” she said, drawing it out almost in an insult.

  “Ex-corpie, actually.”

  “Suit yourself. You wanna sign up for Advanced Pilates?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  The young woman laughed without smiling. “You couldn’t even do the elephant,” she added, smirking at him.

  “I guess I’ll show my ignorance about the topic, because I have to assume you aren’t talking about having sexual relations with extinct African beasts.”

  Once again she offered a mirthless laugh. “No. So I’ve now ruled out that you want Pilates. What do you really want, corpie?”

  “I told you, I’m looking for Sonya. Someone said I could find her here.”

  “Look, I don’t have time for anyone that doesn’t want to enroll in classes or become a member of the gym. There ain’t no Sonya working here.”

  “What if I were to give you a hundred greens.” Mentally he hoped he had the money on him. He didn’t think she’d take a credit chip. His worry dissipated almost instantly.

  “Get nilled, Metro.”

  “I’m not a cop, pizda.”

  “Sure you ain’t. Even if you were, I don’t nark out anyone. Besides, I don’t know no Sonya.” The young woman’s eyes lost focus in the age-old look of someone concentrating on her neural interface rather than the here and now. A square-jawed face strutted in to the reception area clad only in a thong, bristling with more muscle than a prize fighter. The bulky man nodded as he strode behind the shack and through a door that magically buzzed just before he touched it.

  Without missing a beat, Tony reached for his wallet. “I’d like to join the gym. Can I have a tour?” Her eyes lost the glazed-over look and got hungry. “I’ll even put down a deposit.”

  “Nonrefundable.”

  “Of course. Will sixty do it?”

  “One hundred.” The five plastic bills Tony found in his pocket evaporated like a teaspoon full of water on the sunny side of Mercury. Tony turned and pushed the door the young woman absently pointed toward, just as it buzzed to let him in.

  In marked contrast to the facility’s scummy lobby and ground-level location, a surprising panoply of shining, high-tech bio-mechanical exercise equipment greeted Tony in the basketball-court-sized floor space. After his bold move to get into the gym, Tony looked around, drawing a blank as only four people occupied the exercise area and none of them really fit his mental picture of a Sonya.

  The square-jawed face stood in front of a free weight stand, buckling a wide Kevlar belt around his middle. As Tony entered, the square jaw smiled enough to show a mouthful of sharp, pointed teeth that belonged in the maw of a shark rather than a human.

  Three dissimilar individuals clustered around a juice-steroid bar chatting among themselves. An exotic young woman, who looked like something out of a combination mercenary/porn rag, would draw anyone’s eyes. Her legs bulged thirty centimeters thick of gem-like green polymer. In place of her arms waved a pair of tentacles of the same material, flexing in multiple directions. Twisted emerald tiles overlapped on her buxom torso, giving her a sensual, reptilian look. Only her head seemed human, sporting short red and orange hair like overlapping waves of fire.

  Next to her a dwarf, genetically engineered for subterranean mining operations, squatted on a stool, his copper-colored skin contrasting with the verdant young woman beside him. The bartender, outwardly unmodified, wore an apron stained in purple and crimson. He leaned against the semicircular countertop and absently wiped in an oval pattern.

  Tony drifted over to square jaw. “I’m curious, do you know a Sonya?”

  “No hablo inglés. ¿Hablas espanol?”

  Tony dug into his high-school Spanish to communicate. “¿Conoces a Sonya?”

  “No.”

  “Gracias.” Having gone well beyond his Spanish language capabilities already, Tony passed on further conversation with the large man and moved over to the juice bar.

  “Drinks and drugs are listed above,” offered the man behind the bar as Tony sat on the stool. “We don’t have a medical license, so all drugs are oral.”

  “Do you know Sonya?”

  “Don’ know no Sonya,” offered the green woman in a high-pitched voice with a smooth lisp. In spite of its sharpness, her voice caressed a deep spot within his loins. She never looked in Tony’s direction, but this didn’t stop him from wondering. When he regained a modicum of control, he went on.

  “Thank you, miss. Do either of you other two know her?”

  “Nope. Don’t know any Sonya,” offered the short, leathery-skinned man. “What about you, Linc?” he directed to the server. Linc just shook his mostly bald head from side to side.

  Tony looked up and read the menu. “I’ll have a raspberry and lemongrass smoothie. Might as well have something to tide me over while I wait.”

  “Wha’ you wai’n for?” yelled the green woman over the sound of the blender. Even at this volume, and despite its desperately high pitch, her voice once again brushed a longing within him. He coughed.

  “Someone sent me to see Sonya, here at this gym. I’ve been given to believe she’s a regular. I’ll have to hang around until I find her.”

  “Good luck, friend,�
� came the deep voice of the dwarf as he hopped from his stool. “I’m outta here, Linc.” The green woman stood with him.

  “Don’t dig up any bones, Carl. Suet, keep those tentacles to yourself,” the bartender said, putting a pink drink down. Tony dropped a bill on the counter. “No charge for members.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tony mumbled as he picked up the drink. “That’s just a tip.”

  “Well, thank you, sir!”

  Tony’s eyes swayed in time with the hips of the green-skinned woman. Absently, the drink went to his lips. Grimacing, he tore his eyes to look down at the grainy pink drink. “Blech.”

  Over the next six hours Tony sipped as many different drinks between asking his question to everyone who entered. Tony found no success as the night wore on, either in finding the woman Sonya or a palatable liquid. In fact, one concoction of orange, shitake and ginkgo with the dubious moniker “Remember Rise” specifically drew his ire.

  Hours dragged by. He entertained himself watching some of the fittest of the female members as they came and went. He even went so far as to try some of the equipment, only to discover how ill-suited he was to the surroundings. Apparently he’d experienced plenty of muscle atrophy since his football days. By four in the morning he finally threw in the towel.

  “I guess this was a snipe hunt, then,” Tony muttered to himself.

  “A what?” the bartender named Linc asked from across the bar.

  “A snipe hunt,” he repeated. “A snipe was a mythical bird that people in the twentieth century would send others to find.”

  “If they were mythical, how did you find them?”

  “That’s the point of the exercise—to make people look foolish.”

  “Well, it worked. You look pretty flarking foolish, all right.”

  A tiny suspicion rose in Tony’s mind. “I guess it is time for some sleep.” In the mirror on the opposite side of the room, Tony watched carefully as he turned to walk out the door. The bartender’s cosmetically enhanced blue eyes followed his movements, confirming his hunch. This place held his answer. Linc knew Sonya. Tony knew he must return. He needed to think of something to get either Linc’s or Sonya’s attention.

  Tony stepped out of the gym into Portland’s perpetual drizzle. He stopped to let his eyes readjust to the night’s darkness. A gang of girls, each bearing multiple militant body enhancements of one form or another, sauntered down the middle of the pockmarked street like they owned it. As things stood on street level, they probably did own this patch of ground.

  Tony decided he’d come back tomorrow and formally join the gym. If he didn’t stir anything up that way, he could always trail that Linc fellow. The decision made, he relaxed—a little too much. The largest mistake anyone could make in any world, especially ground level, involved not paying attention. Usually the payment involved a painful death.

  “I hope Cin made it through the day,” he mumbled to himself. “I didn’t mean to be gone so—”

  The world suddenly painted itself a parody of even Salvador Dali as a solid wall melted into a twisted pretzel, two of the girls melded into one distorted figure with two heads and six limbs, and the earth beneath him rolled like an ocean wave. Even his body joined the insanity as it wavered and slumped upon the wet pavement like a jellyfish taken from the ocean and dropped upon a rock.

  Another shape grew out of the pavement, a giant green octopus with the head of a woman. Sometimes it waved two tentacles and other times eight. Tony couldn’t seem to care one way or the other. Drool rolled out of the corner of his mouth. “P’eas feed m’cat.”

  * * *

  Tony struggled to consciousness to the gritty strains of a classic oldie, “Persian Slide” by the Violent Slugs. A conversation took place just outside his understanding. Tony’s scrambled thoughts sorted out three distinct voices but couldn’t yet drag coherence of the words, or even a desire to interpret. No part of his body responded to his commands. His arms, legs, and other pieces he hadn’t yet identified as his own tingled like a thousand ants gnawing on each exposed surface. By forcing dominion over his rebellious body he managed the Herculean task of opening his eyes.

  Even though only a single low wattage bulb brightened the room, the ants stabbed daggers into his eyes. Squinting, Tony found himself stacked behind boxes proclaimed Smirnov Vodka, Seagram’s Gin and Jack Daniels, mixed with kegs of miscellaneous beer. One portion of his mind wondered at the immense value if the boxes contained what they advertised. The illegal alcohol in those containers could allow anyone to retire with lifetime full medical in their choice of luxury resorts.

  A new sharp pain, announcing itself in his wrists, brought the tenuous thing he called attention back to his predicament. Twisting his head around, he found golden tanglewire wrapped around his arms and legs. A certain trivial part of his brain shouted that amateurs tied his bonds. Everyone knew from solido that you either did two opposite figure eights, or you went around and around with a cinch wire between the limbs.

  “Who’s he?” said a familiar high, velvety feminine voice.

  “Who gives a rat’s testicle, Suet? He’s a corpie and wants Sonya. Vape him,” offered a male voice.

  “Ya hear’ him ask abou’ his ca’? Maybe he’s ’ooking for her ’o fix his purry?”

  “Probably a Metro trick. Maybe they figured out that she fixes pets.”

  Quietly, Tony commanded his mutinous body to squirm to a point where he could view his captors. The balding juice mixer still wore his stained apron.

  “It’s ‘veterinarian,’ Carl,” offered the bartender.

  “Veteran or fixer, don’t make no difference to me. This feek needs to be buried,” offered the dark-colored dwarf.

  “He don’t seem like a bad Joe, even if he is a corpie. He don’t cause no trouble. He even talk to the Nils.”

  “We cou’ crash his f’at n’see if he’s go’ a furry,” said the green woman.

  “Not a bad suggestion, Suet. When we’re done here, I want you to check it.”

  “We ain’t gonna let him speak to Sonya?”

  “You know how she is,” the green woman identified as Suet said without a single lisp for a change.

  “Yeah, you don’t screen her and she’ll turn you into a lizard instead,” Carl mentioned, pulling a monofilament blade from his proportionally small pocket. “Linc, I say we screen her and let her give me the order to whack him and shove him into the sewer.”

  “Already did. Instead of killing him, she wants to meet him in person.”

  “What?!”

  “Wacky biach. Why ya no’ make her screen him?”

  “Do I look stupid? I mentioned that possibility, but she insisted. I told her she was crazy. You know Sonya.”

  “Only thing I know about her hollowed-out head is she slug-thinks sometimes.”

  “How soon before the drug wears off?”

  “No’ sure. I jus’ gave him everything. No’ know his me’abolism.”

  “Ain’t no matter.”

  “True. Let’s strip and scan him,” Linc the bartender commanded.

  “If’n he go’ even a finger nail file you may jus’ haffa ’ell Sonya he go’ an acci’en’.”

  Tony let his body slump back to the floor, a much more natural state considering the tingling across most of his muscles. The rasping of Suet’s monochromic tentacles against his skin a few moments later nearly broke his façade. The mechanical arms made short work of his clothing without the niceties of unfastening them. Despite the rush of air against his bare skin, Tony remained still.

  “Scan’s ’one. He’s got an ancien’ min’ jack and a mech han’ with a three go gauss gun with very shor’ range. A self ’efense gun, but ’ook the ammo. He wasn’ aim’n for Sonya with tha’.”

  “He coulda if he got her close enough to use it. I still say vape him.”

  “We see,” said the female voice as Tony felt the tentacles around his throat. Certainly those green monstrosities could snap his neck as easily as a pret
zel. Instead he felt another tentacle around his waist. They lifted him and almost as quickly dropped him a meter or so to collapse in the bottom of some container. Even through his closed eyes he could see the frail light being stolen away. Opening his eyes didn’t change his visual information input—darkness. A cursory touch examination defined his cage well enough—a cylindrical plastisteel shipping container, usually used for carrying liquids. Muffled, the conversation continued on outside. He caught the meaning even if he missed every fifth word or so.

  “Suet and I will take this one with us. You check his apartment and then call us. I’ll drive us around for two hours. That should give you enough time. If there’s no cat then this one will fall out of the air truck. Sonya can punish me if she wants, but we’re going to keep her safe.”

  “Agreed.”

  After a rough loading onto a vehicle, Tony searched with his bound hands, rubbing over the entirety of the interior. He felt nothing but smooth surface with no purchase, no weak point, no opening, and nothing to use as a tool or weapon. He leaned back and sensed the truck’s motion, but the ride flowed so smoothly he often couldn’t tell if they moved or not, much less the direction.

  With his options exactly zero, he followed the advice his grandfather once gave him. “Tony, if you ever find yourself in a position that you can’t do anything…sleep.”

  * * *

  “Wake up in there. There’s no way the drug we slipped you lasted five hours.” Tony recognized the juice-tender’s voice—Linc.

  “I’m awake,” Tony muttered groggily. “Why do you want me awake if you aren’t going to let me out?”

  “There’s someone here that…”

  A low and pleasantly feminine voice interrupted. “Let him out.”

  “But you’re too important—”

  “Let him out,” she said in a calm but firm voice. Quickly the barrel upended, dumping him none too gently onto a carpeted floor that smelled of urine. “But that other one. He’s a bounty hunter. We are well shut of him.”