An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  “Thanks. I’m really sorry,” she said putting the packages into a huge door in the wall and pushing a large red button.

  “So does that hair come with a fire extinguisher?” Tony flirted to cover the shakes in his hands.

  “Blarney.”

  “No, really, you don’t see many true redheads these days. Want to get some dinner?”

  “No. Sorry, my husband wouldn’t approve. I’ve already got one boyfriend. He wouldn’t stand for two.”

  Tony sighed in relief when the indicator behind her showed green. “Well, can’t blame a guy for trying,” he covered up. “Maybe next time.”

  Leaving his package for delivery within the hospital, Tony turned and tried hard not to sprint for the front door. He breathed rapidly, sweat trickling down and soaking into his shirt, but not yet showing through. He got in line for the TriMet. He kept himself from fidgeting only by making false notations on his solido pad. He pushed his way on the first TriMet that showed up to the platform, not caring where it went. The TriMet bus clock above his head counted off the seconds between success and failure. He knew if the bomb went off before he got off the bus, he would be caught. The bus would instantly home to a police holding space.

  “Those Spiders sure are coming back,” said a man in the seat next to him, gazing off into space where his paper was displayed on his retinas for him alone.

  “Huh?”

  “The Aussie Spiders?”

  “Sorry, I don’t follow sports.”

  “If you say so.”

  Tony visibly cringed when the TriMet pulled up in front of Portland Metro Police department, only three blocks from the hospital. “Can my luck get any worse,” he muttered. Swearing under his breath, he climbed out of the car, one of two people brave enough to do so.

  “Audit?” asked the other courageous traveler.

  “Naw. I’m here to pick up a delivery,” he dissembled uncomfortably. His eyes darted over the imposing black monolith and the one place he didn’t want to be any closer to.

  “Oh. Metros say I made a seven figure bonus last year. It wasn’t even high six and I have the receipts to prove it.”

  “Good luck to you. Those police auditors can be vicious.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve been losing sleep for the last two weeks.”

  Tony shortened his stride. The lie he offered provided him with the best option. If he turned around and caught another bus, he’d be advertising his guilt. No one changed TriMets at Metro—no one. Whipping out his solido pad, he programmed frantically, finishing just as the audit victim passed through the door, waving in irritation. Tony didn’t understand, but had to act as if he’d been everywhere as a courier, as though being here meant nothing in particular. He fearlessly pushed through the whispery nano-curtain, barely feeling the full body scan it performed.

  Inside the foyer stood a smiling twenty-meter propaganda solido of a Metro in familiar blue body armor without his helmet. Gentle music, spiked with subliminal messages of respect, floated down. “We keep you and yours safe!” The imposing solido bent down and gave a young girl back her purple teddy bear. The adrenaline running through Tony’s system shed the subliminals like rain off a Burberry.

  Turning to the right he found a brutally ugly Metro sergeant sitting atop a five-meter-high obsidian desk obviously designed to intimidate anyone who hadn’t already been cowed by the display in the immense foyer.

  “I’m here for an a-a-audit,” the man stammered.

  “Show me your chit,” the sergeant barked.

  “Chit? The m-mail said to show up today or be forfeit.”

  “You have to have a chit to get back to the auditors.”

  “You didn’t send me a chit!”

  “Read the law, civ. It clearly reads that you’re required to show up one week before your audit to get a chit. Without it we can’t do a background check on you.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Not much, civ. Pay the tax and the fine.”

  “But it’s wrong!” he said turning purple with rage.

  “Civ, I’m going to give you just one chance to turn around and walk out. If you don’t you’ll be doing five months harvesting yeast in the Antarctic Sea, and that’s after I break all your teeth.”

  The man blanched and backed away slowly. Tony caught a foul whiff as the man turned and ran out the front door.

  “Stupid ghit,” Tony said in fake derision, handing his solido pad to the desk sergeant. “I’m here for a pickup from Officer Nguyen.”

  “Pickups are in the service entrance on the level ten pad.”

  “Yes, Officer, I understand that’s normal, but I was told to report here to pick up something personal, as you can see on the pad.” He put as much respect in his tone as he would for the CEO of a major corporation.

  “Yeah, I can see. Lee Nguyen is on vacation right now and he didn’t leave anything here. You have your databases crossed.”

  This didn’t surprise Tony, as he’d accessed the publicly available Metro files for just such an absentee. “Well, I don’t want to anger you, Officer. If you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing. I get paid either way. I better check with my office, though.” He stepped away from the desk and spoke into his ring. “Triple Five, Eight Thousand.”

  “Stanford Courier Dispatch.”

  “Hey, I’m here at Metro…” Tony’s luck finally played out. The air in the foyer compressed, stealing his breath. He didn’t even hear the explosion.

  “What was that?” Sergeant demanded. Tony’s heart stuttered in his chest. Three full seconds silently passed before sirens within Metro began to wail.

  “This is Dispatch. What do you want?” Tony’s ring comm demanded.

  “Oh, they say they have no pickup from Nguyen.”

  “One second…I show no pick-up at Metro or from Nguyen. You must have a damaged pad or downloaded the wrong DB. Please return to base.” This also didn’t surprise Tony.

  “Affirmative.” He cut the connection. “I’m sorry, Officer. I seem to have a damaged pad. Can I get that back so I can get it fixed?”

  “Here.” Frantically coordinating some other action from his net link, the sergeant barely offered him a glance. Tony scooted out the door with a heavy sigh. The audit victim stood quivering at the landing platform.

  “Did you hear that?” Tony asked as the TriMet number 6784 pulled up. His fellow traveler didn’t say anything, but he had a blank stare and his skin bore a mottled paleness, not to mention the foul whiff coming from his pants. Tony felt he’d be just as happy to get away from this place.

  Tony dared a look in the general direction of the Mercy Hospital to see a malignant gray cloud slowly billowing around the skyscrapers of downtown. The thick smoke didn’t lose opacity as it expanded out and down. A silence that never existed in any city now cloaked Portland like the sheet pulled over the recently deceased.

  Implement—Phase Four

  Back in his underground cell, Tony sat with a hangman’s noose twisting his guts and Vise Grips on his vocal cords.

  “…bomb went off at a particularly bad time as the shift change in an operating room caught nearly twice as many heroic medical workers at their post,” said a computer tablet sitting on an old-fashioned maglev table between him and Linc.

  “The CEO of Colonization Unlimited, the parent company of Mercy Hospital, insists the perpetrators will be caught and punished.” Linc leaned back in his disposable chair with half a grin.

  The picture on the solido tablet panned across the blackened chairs, walls torn in half, and a melted desktop. A woman cradled her bloody arm to her chest, ignoring the fact that it no longer connected to the rest of her body. Two small children of indeterminate sex, wrapped tightly in one another’s arms, shuffled along through the gray rubble with blank stares on their face.

  “This kind of barbarism isn’t a form of warfare, but rather large-scale murder. None of these victims carried a gun. None of them threatened anyone.” The scene switc
hed to show a morgue, where a row of corpses lay in body bags, and then flipped back to a hospital emergency room, every surface covered in gray dust where people paced or sprawled on the floor, weeping and crying.

  A vile taste crept into Tony’s mouth. From never having even struck someone, to a multiple murderer in a single stroke. He regretted eating the soup before Linc picked him up. He regretted it even more when he doubled over and the contents of his stomach ejected from his mouth and nose onto the floor.

  “In the end, however, it’s only a matter of time and resources. We’ve increased our private security by seventy-five percent.” The picture snapped to thousands of Pinkertons in shiny-gray riot gear receiving special weapons and instructions. “We will find them. We will try them. We will execute them.”

  “To wrap up here, the Green Action Militia has claimed responsibility for a bomb that killed seven and seriously injured twenty-seven in a midmorning bombing of Mercy Hospital. Updates as they arise. This is Cindy Bindle reporting for CNI.”

  “Thank you, Cindy. We return you to your regular programming currently in progress…”

  Tony wiped his mouth on his sleeve as Linc stopped the solido playback.

  “Congratulations. One of the best kill counts we’ve had from such a small device.”

  * * *

  Brown plastic boxes piled at random acted as impromptu chairs and tables for a loudly debating quorum. Linc, Suet, and eleven others, none bearing any resemblance to the next, sprawled amongst the crates in a loose circle. Sonya sat on the floor in a perfect lotus, her simple white cotton dress loose around her.

  “So he lai’ one farging bomb. Anyone can ’o. I say he’s a prob’em.”

  “He questioned the orders.”

  “He doesn’t know anything about security procedures. Just let him go.”

  “Yeah, he’s a corpie. Corpies can’t be trusted.”

  “Vape him and let’s get on with our work.”

  “How could he possibly have gotten away from the Metros?”

  “Yeah, none get away from the peelers unless they are one…”

  “Like I said, vape the…”

  Sonya’s slowly raised hand stopped all of the discussion cold. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “Andrea, did you not go to the police when we first met?” The redhead sitting behind Sonya blushed pink all the way down the v in her blouse. Sonya didn’t even bother to look up at the people in question but rather stared blankly ahead, letting her comments do all her work for her. “And Linc, didn’t you try to blackmail Suet? Jonah, weren’t you a Metro when they framed you for murder?”

  “That was—”

  “And Beth, didn’t you try for a corporate bounty on Jackson’s head over there? My point is that very few of us started with trust in this organization. Trust must be earned in our business. Mr. Sammis earned his first piece today. And if that isn’t enough, he’s wanted by the Metros. Even if they didn’t post his picture, you know as well as I do that they have him on one of the seventy thousand cameras in that building alone.”

  “But he can’t handle the work. He left his tucker in the cell.”

  “And Andrew, how long did you retch after you shot Black Charlie?” Andrew squirmed under the full attentions. “How many nights of sleep have each of us lost for some of the horrible things we’re forced to do?”

  “What do you possibly see in him, Sonya?” Arthur asked.

  Sonya looked at a matronly woman with eyes looking like solid silver balls.

  “My run on the nets show skills in first aid, explosives, and a stint with corporate security,” the elderly woman said, not looking at anyone in particular. “His physical prowess alone likely can be honed. He demonstrated leadership, individuality, and creative abilities in solving problems in his work.”

  “And, if you haven’t forgotten already, he did save Jasmine before any of this happened to him,” Beth said with empathy dripping from her voice. “He cares.”

  “I still say it’s too big a risk.”

  “He has a furry.”

  “Enough,” Sonya interjected before the discussion fed on itself. “How often have I been wrong? How often has a spy crept within our midst? Why do you think we don’t use the formality of a straitjacketed cell system? You’ve all seen that I know about people. Enough of this,” Sonya said softly. “It serves no purpose. I’ve made my decision as our leader. Unless you wish to proceed to a vote of no confidence, let Tony in. He has a right to be heard and give his voice to this council.” Sonya looked around confidently. Two of the ten looked like they had more to say but chopped it off, in one case with the look of an obstinate child and the other in resignation.

  Tony stumbled over the doorsill and staggered against a box that clattered loudly. Several members snickered.

  “Sorry,” Tony said pushing the boxes back into place. Sonya stood with a silkiness of movement that belied the bones in her body.

  “Welcome, Tony,” Sonya offered warmly, extending her hand. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have started on a friendlier note. I hope you understand.”

  Tony’s mind whirled as too many changes hit him one after another. “I do,” he replied, gently taking her hand. Her palm, callused in an unusual way, still felt exactly like a delicate ice sculpture. Impulse took him and he lifted her hand and gently kissed its back.

  “Very cavalier of you, sir,” Sonya said only loud enough for Tony to hear. Then, louder, she added, “Let me give you some background.

  “I lead our group in something similar to a parliamentary style. Everyone attending has an equal voice in decisions and a simple majority carries. As leader, I can change the decision by executive veto. If I do, the team can bring a vote of no confidence where a two-thirds majority would remove me from leadership.”

  “How long have you been leader?”

  “Since we began action, twelve years ago,” she understated.

  “Oh.” A dramatic pause followed.

  “Let me introduce you to the rest of our present team. You know Linc, but you may not know he was a private detective until he made the mistake of taking a domestic abuse case for the wife of a senior Metro officer. He’s had a price on Linc’s head ever since.

  “To his right is Suet, who you also know. At the tender age of seven, a couple of corpie teens on a lark took their limousine through the ground neighborhood, shooting anything that moved with flechette guns, including her Nil parents. She learned quickly how to live on the streets. I’ll let her discuss her enhancements when you get a chance to talk to her on your own time.”

  Tony waved tentatively at the emerald woman, who didn’t respond or even glance in his direction.

  Turning to her right, Sonya pointed to a slight, swarthy man. “As head ranger of Big Basin National Park, Andrew tried to stop the expansion of the San Fransisco development. He put together a team to sabotage the lumber clearing effort. Unfortunately, his number two man was a police mole. Andrew got away only by luck.

  “Arthur is the small man to your left. His wife died from a lift car accident because of cost-cutting by megacorp executives. Beth, sitting next to him, was a model until some corporate alchemy went awry.”

  Tony looked closely, suddenly realizing why she seemed so familiar. Yes! You used to be the Bingo Condom Girl!”

  “That was a long time ago,” she all but purred.

  “Ahem.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Now, Jonah, Frances, and Colin were all Metros.”

  Tony looked at the trio in surprise. He hadn’t expected to find ex-Metros in this company.

  Sonya smiled briefly and continued. “Jonah, the redhead with the six gazillion freckles, had his partner frame him for murder. Frances and Colin, partners, both tried to be honest cops. You know what happens to those.”

  “Tolly,” Sonya went on, offering a hulking blonde Adonis for his consideration, “came to us as a liaison from another social engineering group down under. Things are no better there, but his group d
isbanded because of internal dissension.

  “Martin wishes us to return as much of Earth back to nature as possible. Some would say he has the purest motives. Many of the rest of us are vengeance motivated.

  “Christine, to your left, is one of the unusual ones amongst us.” The pretty, unaugmented teen stood less than 150 centimeters tall and massed less than 40 kilos. “Christine is what psychologists call a biological sociopath.” Tony scanned Cristine’s deadpan face and shuddered. “She enjoys killing and has a talent for assassinations. Her loyalty for the group has been tested and is solid, but don’t have sex with her.

  “Across from you is Augustine. Tina is our resident icebreaker.” Tony saw a woman who, if you removed the wetwire jack from her temple, looked like someone’s great grandmother with silver orbs for eyes. “She’s on the run from the time she almost got caught breaking into the NaBiCo executive database.”

  “I only wanted the Oreo recipe,” she offered, smiling vacantly.

  “Andrea,” Sonya went on, pointing at what appeared to be a twelve-year-old girl with the natural flaming-red hair that women would kill to have, “was an exceptional professional thief—”

  “I still am.”

  “My apologies. She is a gifted thief, until she accidentally left some DNA behind when she lifted a Norman Rockwell from a corpie bigwig.

  “Jackson had the misfortune of being the valet for Goldstein of Goldstein, Hammons, Hammons & Funk fame.” Jackson, an older, bookish black man, nodded. “He overheard something he shouldn’t have and reported it to the wrong cop. He escaped only by the skin of his teeth.

  “Carl can’t attend tonight but you’ve already met him briefly. Carl had the misfortune of being the victim of a he-said-she-said rape case involving the daughter of a very high-level corpie. That’s bad enough even if you’re a regular slob, worse if you’re a genetically engineered dwarf.

  “I guess that sums up our action committee. There are many other members, but they aren’t part of this executive staff. The less you know about those right now, the better.”