An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  “As good as this is,” Tony said in a prearranged tradeoff from Sonya, “it isn’t enough. We need more. We need to drive Nanogate into bankruptcy, but frankly I’m running out of targets. Does anyone have any that we’ve missed?”

  Augustine offered her opinion almost immediately. “I’ve done thorough research on all of Nanogate’s properties, both those publicly disclosed and those that aren’t. There’s some small off-planet facilities and a few distribution points we might target, but that’s about all. I might suggest we use the noobs on these targets. They’re much higher risk now that everyone’s alerted to our modus operandi.”

  “Good idea,” Tony jumped in. “I was afraid Nanogate might be too narrow of a target.”

  “Too narrow? You’re the one that told us we needed to narrow our targets,” Linc said, sitting up from his semi-reclined position leaning on one elbow.

  “Yes, but many of these companies are linked, if you’ll pardon the pun. Other companies are funneling money to Nanogate to keep them afloat. We need to find these others and target them as well.”

  Linc said gruffly, “Want me to tail your cheating wife—fine. Want me to dig up the guy that stole your identity on the wire—fine. Want me to figure out how companies are interlinked—I’m lost.”

  “Oh, don’t go being pessimistic, yet.”

  “Check other companies’ stock prices against Nanogate’s for correlation over time,” Christine said in her normally empty tone. That she spoke at all kept the entirety of the group stunned and looking at her for several moments. Her eyes still held their near vacant expression. Tony wondered what went on behind those eyes, then decided he didn’t want to know and shuddered visibly.

  “I have correlations,” Augustine said. Her surgical link provided nearly instantaneous access to data from the web. Her smile said it all. “Nanogate stock and the stock of seven, possibly as many as ten, other corps fluctuate as a single entity, albeit one to two orders of magnitude out of phase.”

  “Gentlebeings, I would say that we have additional targets.”

  * * *

  Greysky scratched his left arm where flesh met synthetic as he leaned inconspicuously in the steel-irised doorway of the ground level slum. In the eight years since he had voluntarily traded his meat limb for one of plastic and metal, imbalances in the nerve-to-circuit junctions made themselves known as an itching sensation.

  As a freelance artist, Greysky had been doing private enforcement work for nearly ten years. That his PE license expired the previous year didn't matter. A license meant eight hundred credits a day, in the wrong direction.

  Over the top of his projected solido-paper he surreptitiously watched a tube hotel across the street, its garish pink neon sign at least forty years old.

  “Sleeping tubes disinfected daily,” crackled an almost incomprehensible electro-mechanical speaker. “A full half cubic meter more space than chain hotels.” Transient quarters all over the world were the same. Put your credit into the slot and slide into a 2.5 meter long by 1 meter wide cylinder for twelve hours of relative insulation from the outside world. This particular tube sleeper even accepted coins and paper bills, catering to those who didn't even have universal credit.

  Greysky snorted softly. He remembered having to resort, at one time in his life, to sleeping in one of those plastic coffins—and that’s what they usually were, too, coffins. People live there and die there. They never lift themselves above a grinding level of poverty and their only purpose is to be insignificant monetary bits in an immense economic machine. Greysky's finances long ago warranted a home far from this place. He was the exception. But then he wasn’t here to sleep—he was here to deliver a message.

  Just as he started reading the story, “Pope Vows to Increase Heretic Deportations,” the intended recipient of his current employers' missive walked into the lobby of the sleep establishment. The blond hair, a rare trait these days, gave him away.

  Greysky leaned farther into the doorway, striking a coffee stick on the wall next to him and tucking the business end into his mouth. Watching through his magnifying eye, his target put coins into tube 312 and climbed in. The tube end went opaque, making it time for Greysky to deliver.

  He angled across the street diagonally, not pushing people out of the way but blending into the rest of the destitute throng. He put his head down and shuffled along, the bulk of his body and the tools of his trade hidden amongst the people and his shin-length jacket. As the pink neon bathed him, he pounded on the end of 312.

  “Message for Mitch Anson.”

  “What?” said a voice from beyond the door as it opened. “Who knows—”

  Greysky released the tiny spoon of the implosion grenade. “This is a gift from your former employees.” He flicked the fingertip explosive into the oval opening and slammed the door down on the surprised face.

  Greysky felt the muffled explosion conducted through the street. He walked calmly away, already mentally spending his commission.

  * * *

  “So where are we off to this grand morning?” Tony asked brightly. For Portland at ground level, the day positively shined, with the barest of moisture drifting in the air and no clouds to speak of. The near silence of the time after night owls lay slumbering and the day seekers hadn’t quite emerged gave a rare pleasant experience.

  As nothing came without its polar opposite, the brightness highlighted the filth. Nearby, a discarded washing machine on its side rusted itself into oblivion as it spilled rotting garbage from its insides onto the cracked pavement. The quiet allowed Sonya to hear several insects vying for the muck. The smell of fresh sewage, free from the rain, wafted up. Sonya sketched a little frown with her mouth, not because of the smell but rather the question. An experienced terrorist wouldn’t have even asked. He or she should trust their leaders and just follow. Despite Tony’s exceptional ideas and directions for the GAM, he still avoided embracing the lifestyle.

  “Have I said something wrong?” Tony inquired after she didn’t reply right away.

  As they walked along, Sonya ground off the burrs of her short fingernails along the walls of the ground-level masonry like some gigantic emery board. She chided herself for her annoyance. “No. I just sometimes forget. You’re so sophisticated in some ways and so downy fresh in others. Remember the tired old line from the old flaties, ‘I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, whenever you ask a question, you should think about whether you really want the answer.” She watched Tony’s face get thoughtful. He learned well, she thought to herself, when he learned.

  It wasn’t as if she ignored the trio of heavily modified muggers lounging in the inset doorway, she just didn’t care. The three marched out, one drawing a modern variation of nunchaku, two short steel bars with a chain between. One sported an ancient police baton and the other a makeshift club. She knew they intended to kill. It didn’t matter. Before Tony even noticed their approach, the trio, as one, found an overpowering urge to head to the local bar for a frosty brew, all thoughts of mayhem erased, for now.

  Tony hitched the shoulder pack back up, prompting a plaintive mew from within. “Sorry, Cin.”

  “She travels better than most cats,” Sonya said over the rather loud buzz of an ancient motorized bike that rushed by in a cloud of petroleum smoke.

  “I guess she’s still young. OK, if you won’t tell me where we’re going, can you at least tell me what we’re going to do? I don’t even have so much as a pea shooter with me.”

  “Good. Less to be found.” A shiver of happiness ran through her. She took a childish delight in teasing him. Food vendors began to flock the early morning streets, beginning their raucous calls for customers in twelve different languages from Hebrew to Esperanto. Tony frowned. He opened his mouth as if to speak and then closed it. “We’re off to meet the Family,” Sonya said, taking pity on her friend.

  “Whose family?”

  “The Family, with a ca
pital ‘F’. At least that’s how they stylize themselves again.”

  “Got it.” Tony once again opened his mouth and closed it suddenly. He did learn. “Ever been married?”

  “Married?” She snorted at the thought as much as the sudden change in subject. “Like any man or woman would have me.” She turned into an arbitrary building and started up the steps. Long ago she learned that in their line of work randomness foiled more mishaps than it caused.

  “Why not? You’re attractive, in a lean tigress kind of way.”

  “Check six,” she whispered back on the first landing. She felt no one, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. She faded into a doorframe, pulling her cloak tight about her to mask her presence. It didn’t work against cameras, but living people easily let their senses overrule their common sense. Tony continued up the second floor chatting as he went.

  “Of course you aren’t my cup of tea. I wasn’t offering myself as a potential mate, termed or otherwise.”

  Tuning out her partner as he moved away, Sonya felt the building move gently beneath her feet and through the fingertips that she rested on the doorframe. The white noise of movement which engulfed her included eight different sexual escapades, three couples arguing about credit, one weapons discharge, seventy different breakfasts, a myriad of mice and insects, six aerobics classes and too many other things all too jumbled up to make sense of. What she didn’t feel was someone tailing. No one took the steps coming up behind her. No one dashed ahead to get into a building in front of her. Flowing out of the shadows, she dashed up the stairs to rejoin her comrade.

  “So?”

  “No one following.”

  “No. Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why haven’t you ever been married?”

  “I guess I’m attractive in my own way, but I’m a hermit. Having someone around me all the time would send me off the deep end. My personal privacy is too important. I don’t want anyone to have control over my life.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Sonya snorted again. She stepped around a wino living on the fourth floor landing. “And you’re an expert?”

  “Well, no. But my parents managed to make it work.”

  “Without getting in each other’s way? Without integrating themselves in each other’s lives? I don’t believe it,” she snapped as shrilly as Tony remembered ever hearing her.

  “Wow, the way you say it makes it sound like a virus or parasite.”

  She took the time for a cortico-thalamic pause, that brief moment between stimulus and response. In her case it took five floors, and two building transfers. Finally, she replied in her normal, mellow tones. “Sorry, but you hit one of my soap box topics,” she explained, jabbing the call button of an old-fashioned elevator with particular vehemence. “I like my life. I don’t want to change my life. Anyone I add to it would change it. I’ve watched friends get married and in almost all cases become miserable, or change into someone I wouldn’t want to call a friend.”

  To her surprise, Tony said nothing. She entered the elevator and pressed the combination for the eightieth floor. “Like most witches, I suppress my urges for domesticity or other entanglements with the companionship of my pets.”

  “I wasn’t trying to make you angry,” Tony finally offered, somewhere around the forty-fifth floor.

  “You didn’t. It’s just that assumption that someone has to have someone else to be a full person—well, it drives me crazy sometimes.”

  “I was just trying to make conversation.”

  She really didn’t even hear him. “If I have one regret, it’s that I won’t have anyone to pass my gifts to.”

  The elevator door opened onto two imposing men in bodyguard yellow before Tony could continue digging into even more uncomfortable territory. One stood like a white, weathered mountain with an obvious Russie heritage, the other his polar opposite, slight and fast, with the cast of the southern Asians.

  “Hi Greg, Tuan. We’re here to see the Jamie.”

  “You’re supposed to come alone,” one barked. “You know the rules.” The other guard stood at attention, holding his flechette gun in a perfect diagonal cross of his bare chest.

  “Pish and tosh.” Only one as massive and tall as Greg could stare down at Sonya. She locked eyes with him and didn’t let them go. It took only a minute. She felt Greg must be slipping.

  “Well, give us some warning next time,” the guard said finally, giving up the staring contest.

  “If you didn’t have us spotted at least ten minutes ago, I’d be surprised.”

  “Whatever. Climb in,” he said, pointing at the portal of a scanning machine like they use at spaceports for carry-on luggage. The entrance on this end fed into a blank wall and came out somewhere beyond. Sonya jumped up onto the conveyor belt and lay down without a second thought. She remembered her trepidation the first time and hoped Tony handled it well.

  In the space of seven deep breaths, practiced with a calm meditation of the soul, the makeshift scanner dribbled her back out into the light. She rolled off the end of the belt to her feet with the grace of one of her cats. Tony, carrying Cin in his arms, provided a new definition of gracelessness as he fell hard onto his backside, his legs flailing in the air. Adding insult to injury, his head flipped back and banged against the scanner supports, drawing a scathing oath in a language Sonya didn’t know but determined by its invective. Cin, on the other hand, landed on all fours on Tony’s stomach as if this happened daily.

  Sonya silently offered Tony a hand up. As he took it, not without a scowl, Sonya took the opportunity to examine his head. Just enough blood leaked from the scalp to eventually create a scab. It wound up in the category of painful and annoying, but nothing more.

  She registered the new rich red paint since her last visit. It flowed in with the rest of the décor. Real crown molding and wainscoting in a style not seen for nearly a century accentuated the dark green velvet and the carved marble columns in the corners. Few countries on Earth or its colony worlds could’ve afforded even two of the six Maxfield Parrish paintings mounted to the wall. Yet only the Mob’s reputation, and a few bodyguards such as Greg and Tuan, protected the art.

  Invariably, any newcomer found themselves in front of “Daybreak.” Sonya, on the other hand, preferred to immerse herself in “White Birches: Winter” at every opportunity. Placing Cin on his shoulders, Tony gawked at each painting in turn. Sonya sensed that Cin appreciated the works herself.

  “Dian!” said a lean, red-headed woman in a long, blue velvet dressing gown to Sonya as she came into the room. Her long, well-toned legs, clad in stockings, garters and blue Pintera pumps, parted the gown and carried her over to Sonya. She gave her a pair of French-style air-kisses now regaining popularity with the effete. “I see you brought a pair of toys with you.” The woman unabashedly examined Tony like a prize cow on the auction block, but with barely a fleck of interest in Cin.

  “Jamie. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

  “Always a pleasure, for the right price, of course.”

  “Naturally. Let me introduce Michael Durant, a new but very valuable member of my team.”

  “Nice to meet you, Michael,” Jamie said, offering one of her manicured hands, complete with fingernails that changed color to contrast to whatever they lay against. Sonya watched Jamie’s hard eyes, completely at odds with her pin-up body, as Jamie evaluated “Michael’s” response. He gallantly took her hand in his and bowed deeply over it, but didn’t kiss it.

  “Oh, I see Dian’s already got you under her thumb, and other places,” the woman said with the faintest of smiles.

  “No, not exactly, Jamie. I’m just not partial to redheads.”

  Sonya flipped Tony a glittering stare. A short silence filled the room.

  “Touché. Well played, Michael, or whatever your name is.”

  Tony bowed again in acknowledgement.

  “So enough games. Shall we s
it and have some tea while we talk business?”

  “Very well.” Jamie snapped her fingers, and a small army of servants brought in an antique double-trestle table carved from a solid piece of granite, plus matching chairs, a silver tea service, and scones, perfect for a midmorning snack. Just as quickly as the servants appeared, they disappeared. Jamie poured generous servings for each, even a small saucer of milk for Cin.

  “Dian, I remember you like yours with just a touch of milk.”

  “Yes, Jamie.”

  “And you, Michael?”

  “I like mine sweet.”

  “Let’s say two sugars, then. So what brings you here today,” Jamie asked, proffering each their refreshment in turn. Tony let Cin down onto the table at her dish. Cin sat patiently as Tony pinched a small blueberry scone from the tray.

  Sonya sensed Tony’s decision to remain quiet and be subservient. A good choice, as he didn’t know why they were here. “We’re after a backdoor into any of these major corps’ data-nets,” Sonya said, sliding a small scrap of plastic onto the table. In one continued movement she lifted her cup and took a dainty sip.

  Jamie didn’t even bend over to look at the plastic or what it carried. “Really? Sure you wouldn’t like some SLSA rockets? Maybe some Gunnison gauss guns? We also just recently got a shipment of Black Marionettes.”

  “Sorry, no. Information this time, not hardware.”

  “What you’re asking for isn’t trivial. I honestly don’t know if we can deliver to any kind of timeline.”

  “What kind of price would be associated with this?”

  “I couldn’t even apply a price to such information,” she said with the civility of a garden party. “Probably more than you could afford. It would be well into the millions.”

  “Please don’t assume our financial status is burdened with the problems of the past.”

  “There were words on the street to that effect, but one can’t always believe what one hears.”