An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  Sonya just nodded. “He has to make it.”

  * * *

  The message, almost as old as computers itself, “Are you sure? Y/N,” blinked on Nanogate’s desk terminal in the dark. He’d waited until everyone cleared the building before doing his own bit of corporate sabotage, this time to himself.

  His finger hovered over the Y button on his terminal. Just one stroke away from erasing any proof of his collusion with the Greenies, and yet he hesitated.

  He couldn’t remember how many years it had been since he felt good about anything he did for a living. His personal credit numbers soared. His power over those around him grew. He gained satisfaction from these things, but they didn’t make him happy or feel good. Smug was the closest emotion he could really compare.

  In fact, he couldn’t ever remember being happy about anything, except his brief work with the GAM. At the time he thought he felt relief that he’d saved Nanogate. But it was more.

  He resolutely smashed the Y key. Personal survival. Feelings came a distant second.

  Snarling, he shoved everything from his desk, ignoring the crash of the irreplaceable Chihuly lamp.

  * * *

  “She must not have liked you, Tony-boy,” Augustine said to Tony as he struggled to regain consciousness.

  He looked around to see Sonya lying in the bed next to him, Linc sweating profusely in an overstuffed chair in the corner, and the remains of the action committee crammed in, standing or sitting around in a bedroom he didn’t recognize.

  He tried to say something but no sound came from between his chapped lips. Christine handed him a cup of water. He hesitated only a moment before taking the rose-colored plastic cup. He’d already be dead if she’d wanted him to be. He nevertheless watched Christine’s eyes as he drank.

  “Sorry,” Christine said.

  Tony started at this. Christine didn’t apologize for anything to anyone.

  “Yeah, Christine’s an artist with a blade. She never misses her target,” Augustine expounded. “One thrust to the heart or the liver and the target is done. She only tortures those she really hates. She caught you through the intestines and into the kidney, but you were lucky—the damage didn’t require an organ replacement. Her second thrust punctured your left lung.”

  “Sorry,” Christine repeated. Every head in the room turned toward her.

  “Grrrk,” Tony croaked and sipped the water again. Carl chuckled. “Thank you for coming. What’s the occasion? I’m sure I’m not nearly in as bad shape as some of you.”

  “We collectively, as a group, owe you an apology.”

  “I should think so,” Tony said mockingly holding his hand over his wounds and medical incisions. Everyone laughed except the normally aloof Christine.

  “Not quite, but close,” Andrea continued. “I meant that we should have never doubted you. The one damning piece of evidence in my eyes, Nanogate knowing your name, makes sense, now. We won’t doubt you in the future. I hope you’ll accept our apology and leadership of the team, what’s left of it.”

  “I accept.” Tony looked over at Sonya and smiled.

  She smiled back as she closed her eyes. Her head settled back against the pillow and her chest rose one last time. What had been the background chirp of her heart monitor became a shrill whistle prompting the pounding of medical feet.

  Adjust Plan for Desired Results

  “Sonya left this special message to be viewed by all of us prior to her funeral arrangements,” Augustine said to the assembled throng from the pulpit of the hospital’s church. She wasn’t happy with the security arrangements, but they were the best that could be arranged on short notice. The lights dimmed as the solido began.

  “Welcome, my friends,” Sonya said in a cheery voice that didn’t match the crowd’s mood. “I know you’re all saddened at my passing, but let me assure you I went with my heart cheerful and knowing the hope I leave behind. Carry on the battle. Don’t let it end, not for me, but for yourselves.

  “If I have any one regret in this entire world, it’s that I never produced an heir to pass on my teachings. Not enough time or temperament to suffer a life partner.

  “I do request that you don’t put my body through the city’s recycling. I’d rather be recycled into pet food. Please let me feed my pets rather than the multitude of people I’ve already given my life to protect.

  “I want to thank all who contributed to my wonderful life! Without you it wouldn’t have been nearly so great! Until we meet in the next world, farewell.”

  Sniffles and outright sobs could be heard from the audience. Tony, from his levitating medi-bed, wiped tears from his eyes and nothing could hide that fact. Augustine’s own vision blurred and she blew her nose loudly.

  To Augustine’s amazement, Tony stood up carefully, with one hand on the wound in his gut. She hoped all the biodegradable staples and quickheal they patched him up with would hold.

  “Sonya gave me a life when mine ended,” he said firmly. “She gave me a home when I had none. She gave me a family I never knew I was missing.” He shrugged off Tuan as he tried to hold him up on one side.

  “Sonya did this for all of us. We were strays she brought into her home, just like the menagerie of pets she kept, who, by the way, Augustine has agreed to take care of.”

  She nodded to the group, managing a smile.

  “Sonya wished us to carry on our fight,” Tony went on. “I want to know how long each of you have been fighting? Augustine?”

  “Six years.”

  “Jez?”

  “Three years.”

  “Peter?”

  “Eight years.”

  Augustine wondered where Tony was going with this. It didn’t take a vernacular semanticist to feel the pitch coming.

  “I’ve only been at this a few months, and frankly I’m tired of it already. I’ve already lost six of my dearest friends and likely will lose even more. As your new de facto leader, I don’t want to fight this war any longer.”

  It took several moments for this to sink in. Augustine’s venom at the bare statement burned in her gut. The grief turned to rage. All she wanted to do was get her fingernails into his eyes. But then she saw the grief on his face and she forced down her emotion.

  “No, I don’t mean I would let what we’ve accomplished die,” Tony continued. “I want this as much as any of you. I mean I see an opportunity to leave Sonya a successful legacy. I see an opportunity to end this war by the end of next month…in Sonya’s name. I think all those we have lost will rest easier if we succeed.”

  * * *

  “Jock! Good to see you again,” Tony said affably, though the tone didn’t come through well as he had to shout over music so loud you could almost see the ripples in the air.

  “Mr. Tony. I see you got the establishment to let you back into the Rose.”

  “Just a little emotional blackmail. Then again, it might have something to do with the head I left in their office. C’mon in. I need to talk to you.”

  Jock looked uncertainly at Tony and his two companions. Tony saw him hesitate just a moment before swiveling into the booth next to Christine and letting the sound barrier fall back into place. He gave Jackson’s heavily sweating brow a look.

  “The management already told me to come down and talk to you, or I’d still be at the door,” Jock said in preamble. “I don’t need no trouble, Mr. Tony.” Jock tapped his ear. “I like you, but I do have to look out for number one.”

  Tony laughed. “Jock, I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to get my friends—you, in this case—into any trouble. I’m certain the management is listening in on this conversation—if they have any brains at all, that is. The oversized owner of this establishment was mercenary and slow, but stupid never entered my mind. If nothing else, having Carmine’s head staring at him from his desk would have been enough to make him wary.”

  Jock looked at Christine and Jackson as if to try and verify the gruesome story. Jackson nodded.

  “Look
, I need to confirm that you work for Protection, Inc.,” Tony asked.

  “Yes, sir, I do. But I work for them under the table. No records. Remember, I’m…”

  “A Nil. Yes, I remember, Jock. Hopefully that won’t matter too much longer.”

  Jock tilted his head with questions in his eyes.

  “Can you get me into a meeting with your senior officer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would this help?” Tony said, sliding a 3 centimeter-high stack of plastic credit slips across the table.

  “That would do it.”

  “I thought it might. Also, do you know anyone that works for Vape Security?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I need to talk to their head officer as well.” Tony slid over another stack of bills.

  “I can make those things happen, sir.”

  “I knew you could,” Tony said sliding over yet a third stack of bills. “This is for you.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Mr. Tony.”

  “Yes I do, Jock. Here are two notes, each with the time, date, and location of individual meets.” Tony handed over three slips, two stuck together as if to appear as just two passed hands.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll make it happen.”

  Tony walked out, Christine and Jackson at his side. The moment they reached the outside air, Jackson turned with eyebrows raised. “What was on the third note?”

  “What third note?” Tony asked.

  “I was dealing seconds before you were born,” came the reply. “You weren’t bad, but not good enough to make a living at it, though.”

  “OK, you caught me.” Tony shrugged.

  “Are you going to tell us anything about what’s going on? The rest of us have been on edge waiting for the last two weeks while you healed enough to move about.”

  “OK, I’ll tell you this. The first two were just as described. The final card bore only the line, ‘Purchase as many puts on major corporations on next Friday as you can.’”

  “We move on Friday? What’s the target?”

  “You will find out next Wednesday, just like all the rest. I need to talk to the heads of those security firms, and one other, first.”

  “If I were childish, I’d say that Wednesday is still ten days’ off.”

  Tony smiled as he pushed through the street level crowds. “You’re right, that would be childish.”

  Christine, as always, said nothing.

  * * *

  Nanogate sat quietly in his study in a 1960s leather wingback chair. No one kept him company. He clutched the report on the acquisition of Marineris Mining in his left hand, unread. His eyes tracked only the dance of lint specks in a shaft of sunlight through his skylight.

  Not a single GAM incident had marred his daily reports in over a week. His corporate espionage reports told him his competitors weren’t circling around the lamed Nanogate as he expected. He didn’t know which report worried him the most. The lull reminded him of the quiet of a six-year-old coloring on the walls, a teen with his first narcostick, or that calm just before a squall’s first gust.

  His sense of self-preservation, honed over many years in the cutthroat world of the corporations, screamed at him to do something—anything. He couldn’t think of a thing to do about either of the negative reports. Picking up the single malt scotch, he sipped it gently, brooding over his lack of choices.

  It was times like these he particularly missed Mr. Marks. Marks and Nanogate existed in symbiosis, where Mr. Marks’s advice often complemented his own. It was a rapport he didn’t share with his new bodyguard.

  Staring off into space, he noticed the sudden dimming of the light just before he simultaneously heard and felt a drop in air pressure signifying his floating home was no longer airtight.

  An impressive man, clad in canary yellow tights, dropped rapidly through the perfectly round hole in the skylight to a rough landing three meters in front of him. The muscles bulging on muscles, so typical of steroid replacements, made the bodyguard a caricature of a human. A tiny Adonis-like face perched between massive shoulders reaching all the way up to his ears. On top of all that, the intruder wielded a wide-field gauss gun with apparently expert skill. Before he finished standing, he leveled it directly at Nanogate’s chest.

  “Ah, a visitor,” Nanogate said, not moving from his chair. “I do have a door and an appointment secretary, you know.”

  “I’ve come to deliver a message,” the unknown bodyguard said in a tone intended to cow any victim.

  “Percomms work, too.” Nanogate nonchalantly took another sip of his scotch.

  “This one requires your death.”

  “So melodramatic. So who wants me dead? No, wait, let me guess. I like guessing.”

  The bodyguard said nothing.

  “If it were the Greenies, they wouldn’t have bothered to talk. They would’ve just planted a bomb or shot me from some distant window.

  “If it were one of my underlings, they’d be too terrified to confront me, and even if they got the nerve, they would’ve just shot first and asked questions later.

  “If it were one of my family, I would’ve expected poison, or perhaps electrocution in the bath—I hear that’s very popular now.

  “Hmm…that only really leaves my contemporaries. As I’m guessing, I would say you represent that bitch, Taste Dynamics.”

  The bodyguard inclined his comicly malproportioned head. “Well, she did say you’d probably figure it out, so I’m not concerned. She offers you a bargain.”

  “Oh, goodie,” Nanogate incongruously said, bouncing up and down like a kid who just got a surprise present.

  “Tell her how you set up Taste Dynamics, and she’ll leave your fortune to your family. If you don’t, she’ll strip them to Nils. You, of course, die either way.”

  “Hmm. I’ll have to think about this one.”

  “You have ten seconds.”

  “Oh, I won’t need that long. It figures your oversexed boss would pick someone that looked like Adonis with the subtlety of a wounded buffalo. Tell your boss ‘piss off.’”

  The gauss gun didn’t hesitate. It showered innumerable fragments of metal outward at just short of the speed of sound. Not fast enough.

  Almost instantaneously, a cylinder slammed down, ripping a hole in the ceiling plaster, crushing an antique end table and indelibly compressing the carpet in a circle less than a meter around Nanogate’s chair. The weapons fragments buried themselves in the ballistics barrier’s impenetrable skin.

  The bodyguard looked stunned. Belatedly, he fingered his grav belt, but ceramic composite shutters, stronger than any metal, slammed closed over the skylight.

  A thick mist started to rain down into the room as trillions of nanites cascaded out of nearly invisible sprayers. The bodyguard writhed and wiped frantically as his skin took on a metallic sheen. He took another wild shot at his target, with predictable results.

  “I’ll send your remains to Taste Dynamics,” Nanogate said as the nanites continued to eat the intruder, from the neck down, one molecule at a time.

  * * *

  That one of the highest members of the American Mafia chose such opulent surroundings still gave Tony pause. Knowing his host, the brilliant gold of the new wallpaper may have been just that—true gold. Priceless works of art replaced the previous priceless works of art like some sale gallery’s rotating stock. The previous Roman theme had been replaced with a Louis the Fourteenth sunburst in the carpet and boulle woodworking in the walls. Even the chair bore fantastic marquetry within its simplistic, straight wooden lines of the period.

  “Welcome back, Tony,” Jamie said, sliding onto a lounge chair wearing only a long, flowing dressing gown that left no illusion as to her natural red hair.

  “Ah, you learned my real name.”

  “Not difficult with the newly elected leader of the GAM. Sonya was a naughty girl. She led me to believe you were less important than you are.”

  “You knew Sonya’s real name also
.”

  “She knew that I knew. It was a game we both played.”

  “Hmm. In either case, my notoriety seems to be preceding me.”

  “Fame, not notoriety.”

  “Whichever. Both can be dangerous for a guerilla.”

  “I won’t debate that with you. The corporations already know your name, so what’s the harm?”

  “Good point.”

  “I’d offer you something for brunch, but I can tell you’re a man of action and not one to be put off by the civilities of life,” Jamie said, stretching out her long legs to be admired.

  “Perhaps in the future we can investigate those civilities, if you’re so inclined. However, right now I beg your pardon in that I’m short of time.”

  Jamie sketched a Marilyn Monroe pout on her face. “Well, if we must. Pray tell, what business can be so pressing?”

  “I’d like your organization to delay any of the Portland Metro responses to a specific area for a period of two hours.”

  She looked at him almost incredulously before she threw her whole body backward on the lounge and laughed in a deep, throaty way.

  “Have I said something funny?” Tony inquired in all seriousness.

  This seemed to only cause the young woman more mirth. The new bodyguards in the room even took notice of their employer’s antics.

  “Yes, quite. I can see why Sonya kept you around. You’re quite an amusing fellow.”

  “I can assure you I’m quite serious.”

  “Then in that case it would cost…say, twenty million,” Jamie said, throwing out a number in such a way as to make it obviously out of reach.

  “Let’s make it twenty-five million instead to cement a new friendship,” Tony said in a declarative tone. “Would you like cash or a cashier’s credit?”

  The mirth instantly left Jamie’s face. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Where would you get that kind of credit? We used to have to discount to Sonya just to keep her armed.”

  “We’ve come up in the world. Looks like your sources aren’t quite as effective as you thought.”