The Decommission Agent

by Nash, Lisa

  Thomas gripped the bag of croissants tighter and tighter as he listened.

  “It’s called virus seventy-three.”

  “What’s called virus seventy-three?”

  “The bullshit defect,” she said. “Officially it develops in the lymph nodes at or around hour 72 and obliterates the immune system in about an hour. There’s no cure. They have no clue where it comes from or how to stop it. It’s completely harmless to naturals. Officially.

  “Unofficially it’s all horseshit. The virus doesn’t exist.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “To claim they make a temporary product. They create a condition on paper that is beyond scientific know-how. ”

  Thomas’ head was spinning. “None of this can be true. It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t.”

  “Fine, jerk off , don’t believe me. I’m just another crazy street person handing out flyers on the sidewalk. Fuck you!”

  “Just give me one reason why Grant Bio-Syn would make up such a lie.”

  “I’ll give you two, money and religion.” She held up one finger. “Money. Build a product that lasts forever and you fuck yourself out of repeat business. Build a product everyone wants that breaks down in three days, you’ve got an ass load of repeat sales that makes a lot of people a shitload of money.”

  “That’s way too cynical for me,” Thomas said.

  She held up a second finger. “Religion. Ninety-two percent of female bio-synthetics are pregnant by hour seventy-two. They are super fertile. Grant Bio-Syn is not in the business of raising babies and Congress wasn’t about to give its stamp of approval to a company that’s engaged in prostitution and abortions. If their bio-syn units only last 73 hours, the pregnancy issue takes care of itself.

  “Even with it out of the way, our fine fuck-head politicians would have shit-bagged the whole thing if they hadn’t got caught with their pants down. Literally. The founder of the company, Anthony Grant, unleashed a veritable army of prototype bio-syns on key members of Congress and the FDA, captured every last seedy, embarrassing, extramarital act on camera, and wouldn’t you know it, Grant Bio-Syn Industries had some heavyweight backers on Capitol Hill. Grant’s blackmailed masses muscled the bill through both houses of Congress in record time with the FDA cheering them on the whole way.”

  Thomas was terrified by what she was saying. He listened to her with his jaws clenched, and it wasn’t rational, but he wanted to punch her for dumping all this information on him even though he’d asked. But he also wanted to kiss her for giving him hope that Cora wouldn’t die.

  “How did this man – This decommission agent, how did he know all this?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “How do you think?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  “What is it you think decommission agents do?”

  He considered her question. “I don’t know decommission them… remove the conditioning… blood tests… whatever?”

  She stopped herself from snickering. “They do run tests, on their organs, after they remove them, just before they incinerate the bodies.”

  “Incinerate?”

  “Decommission agents are glorified biological waste management engineers, shithead. They’re garbage men. Understand? Only the garbage they’re burning are humans, perfectly healthy humans.”

  He nearly passed out while his brain struggled to process the information.

  She handed a flyer to an elderly couple walking their dog and said to Thomas, “Just goes to show you. No one gives a shit about a whore.”

  -35-

  “Anything?” Donnie asked.

  “Nothing,” Louis answered.

  “Just pick one. Pope will never know.”

  “Fuck that,” Louis said. “She’ll know. She always knows…”

  “Gentleman,” Pope said stepping into the exhibit hall near them.

  They turned to see her walking across the marble floor with Craig Anders by her side. Their frayed nerves shredded. Pope was a hard-nosed ass, but Anders was a senior executive that they assumed could not only fire them on a whim, but do so in the cruelest way possible.

  “How are we doing?” Pope continued. “Did we find the face we were looking for?”

  Louis turned to them and was about to deliver the news that would get his ass chewed from one end of the hall to next, when he saw a display beyond the doors to the exhibit that caught his eye. He had totally forgotten about it because it wasn’t in the hall itself. It was at the entrance. It was the one that greeted everyone as they entered the building. Of course, he thought. “One second,” he said pushing past Ms. Pope and the VP. He rushed out the door and stared at the bio-syn in the blue solution and then watched the digital display for a few seconds. Then with a smile plastered on his face, he turned to the others and said, “Found it… found two of them actually.”

  -36-

  Seven people in HAZMAT suits stepped out of the nondescript black van in front of the departure bay area of the air shuttle station on the south side of town. A small gathering of early morning commuters were just beginning to gather and wait for the first shuttles to arrive. The presence of the men and women wearing gas masks and protective clothing started a bit of a commotion that steadily grew more frenzied as the unidentified Grant Bio-Syn security team moved through the station.

  Denise Harvey directed her team to retrieve the unit and its match while she addressed the crowd. “Nothing to worry about, folks. Just a minor incident. We’ll have it cleared up in no time and be on our way.”

  Her team quickly returned dragging a kid of about seventeen caked in dirt and stoned out of his mind.

  “What’s this?” Harvey asked.

  A member of her team stepped forward and scanned the kid’s stomach with a GPS receiver causing it to emit a rapid beeping sound.

  Harvey shook her head. “They removed the tracker.” She leaned in. “Hey, kid!”

  His head bobbed and his eyelids drooped as he struggled to locate the person calling him. “Yeah?”

  “How’d our tracker get in your stomach?”

  “Tracker?”

  She removed her mask. “The tracker… did someone give you something to swallow?”

  He displayed a haggard smile. “Dude gave me a flea’s dick sandwich. Shit was good, man.”

  She grimaced. “What did he look like?”

  The kid gave her question some thought. “Looked like a dude, man. Good dude, too. Gave me a sandwich. Shit was good.”

  Her grimace grew more severe. “Did he have someone with him… a woman?”

  The kid slowly nodded. “Oh, yeah. Dude was packing a major hottie. They shuttled off to some fucking paradise. That’s what he called it.” His head dropped as he fought to remain conscious. Quickly looking back up, he said, “Dude gave me a flea dick sandwich.”

  “When?”

  Saliva spilled from his mouth. “Oh, about eleven thirty-five minutes ago or something along those lines.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  The team member holding the kid’s right arm laughed and asked, “What the fuck is eleven thirty-five minutes ago?”

  “It’s no fucking help is what it is,” Harvey said. “Get him out of here.”

  The two team members holding the kid dragged him back to where they’d found him.

  Harvey addressed the remaining four. “I want everyone out of their protective gear. Now! Let’s not cause any more turmoil than we have to. Then I want you to talk to the ticket agents. Find out if any of them recall selling tickets to a dude and a major hottie in the last three hours. If they got on a shuttle, there’ll be surveillance footage in the station and on the shuttle. I want all of it, and I want it pronto, understood?”

  “And if the ticket agents don’t remember?” the youngest member of her team asked taking off his mask.

  “Then we’ll need a list of every transaction that involved the purchase of two tickets for the same period of ti
me, and you’ll go through every frame of footage of those transactions until we find anything approximating a dude and a major hottie.”

  “That’ll take forever.”

  “No it won’t,” she said. “Because we don’t have forever.”

  -37-

  By the time he got back to the room, Cora was sleeping. He tiptoed to the chair in the corner of the room and watched her in her peaceful slumber with the bag of croissants in his lap. He was dazzled by her beauty, but the conversation he’d had with the girl on the street wrecked any chance he had of recapturing the feeling of contentment he’d had felt with Cora previously. Until he’d talked to the girl, he was sure he could find a way to convince Grant Bio-Syn that she was different, that they belonged together, that somehow they had found each other. He would have done anything they asked to not decommission her.

  But, the information he now had made it perfectly clear what he was dealing with. A corporation that put profit above all else, even human lives. And they were human, the bio-syns, all of them. The way they came to be was irrelevant.

  He quietly stood and undressed without waking her. Carefully, he pulled back the covers and crawled into bed, moving up behind her and pressing his warm body against hers. She stirred, but did not wake completely. He didn’t want her to. He just wanted to hold her, to keep her near him without disturbing her. He wanted to fuck her, but not yet. He would be inside of her soon enough. There was nothing that could prevent that from happening. They hungered for each other too much. The world could be crumbling apart around them and they would still find the last stable ground where they could fuck each other’s brains out. He could wait for that. But this moment, with her at peace in the stillness of the night, with the city peeking through the window, with her heartbeat thumping against his chest as he gently pulled her in tight, he needed the serenity of this moment more than anything.

  He kissed the back of her head and said, “I love you, Cora.”

  -38-

  The limo moved through the streets of the crowded city at a snail’s pace. Morning rush hour was full of the resentful and underpaid people of the city. They all glared scornfully at the large black vehicle as it navigated the narrow streets, and they muttered their desires that something horrible happen to the rich assholes in the car.

  Dr. Grant and Craig Anders were oblivious to the ill-wishers on the streets. They were deep in a painful conversation about the current FUBAR situation at Grant Bio-Syn Industries. It was something that never would have happened under Dr. Grant’s father’s watch. A fuck load of people would have already been shot and gutted and the taxidermist would have been asking the founder of the company what facial expression he wanted on their faces before he mounted them to his wall. The situation would have been dealt with in the most brutal and effective way possible.

  His daughter fancied herself a bit more civilized than her father. She had her doctorate in business administration with a focus on the biotech industry. She had gone to all the best schools, started at the bottom of the company, and worked her way up. She was a business woman not a thug. But the deeper she delved into the mess, the more she realized that sometimes you need a thug.

  “Explain this to me again,” she said. “This man on Pope’s team found two faces?”

  Anders pulled up a picture on his acrylic tablet and showed it to her. “This is bio-syn model Jessica. It was one of our prototype models before we got FDA approval. The man… Louis says that our Mr. Miller has the same eyes as this bio-syn.”

  Dr. Grant took the tablet from him and examined the face of the bio-syn unit. It was a brown haired female with modest beauty. The eyes were large and deeply blue. “Tame by today’s standards,” she said.

  “Exactly why she never went past the prototype stage once we got approval. Your father didn’t feel like she was… exotic enough. Development of the model was immediately discontinued.

  “What about the other face?”

  Anders reached over and pushed the picture of the bio-syn aside with a swift motion of his hand, and a picture of a moderately attractive man in his thirties replaced it. “This is Dr. Albert Green. He was head of the design team that created Jessica. Louis says that Mr. Miller’s nose and mouth belong to this man.”

  She brought the tablet closer to her face. “I know this man. Father used to have him over the house when I was a teenager. He used to have all the scientists to the house in the early days discussing designs, talking strategy. But this man was the most vocal. He and my father used to fight all the time. They had very different ideas about the purpose of the company.” She traced her finger down the bridge of Albert Green’s nose. “Funny, I don’t even know what happened to him.”

  Anders took the tablet from her and pushed the picture out of the way, pulling up a company document. “Technically, Dr. Green still works for the company, but to put it more accurately, he is under the company’s care.” He handed back the tablet to her.

  “Don’t make me read this,” she said. “It’s far too early, and I have a pounding headache.”

  “The short version is Dr. Green allegedly went bonkers and has lived the last thirty years in a heavily medicated state in a psychiatric facility that relies solely on our funding.”

  She looked at him cagily. “I take it by your tone that you suspect Dr. Green is being… treated under false pretenses.”

  He hesitated. “It’s just that I know how your father used to do business…”

  She held up her hand. “Let’s not go there, Craig. Tell me more about Dr. Green.”

  “Well, to put it quite simply, he was brilliant. The man had his hand in almost every stage of development. His primary areas of expertise were the Schumann Resonance and Marker Wave Synchronization. If it wasn’t for him, we’d have no way to trigger the match. It borders on magic, really.”

  “It’s simple science, Craig…”

  “Science, yes, but simple, no. Green did the impossible. He synchronized the body’s ability to create protein compounds that turn DNA markers on and off to a spoken phrase. I have advanced degrees in biology, chemistry, and physics, and I’m still not sure how he did it.”

  “Perhaps if you would have gotten a degree in audiology or studied electromagnetic fields you wouldn’t be in such awe of Dr. Green. He did what my father paid him to do, Craig. That doesn’t take genius. That takes greed.” She rubbed her temples. “So, are we saying that the brilliant Albert Green got a Jessica unit pregnant?”

  “I think one could make that conclusion, yes.”

  “Has one interviewed Dr. Green about the matter?”

  Craig shook his head. “I took a look at his daily meds schedule. It wouldn’t do any good. He’s a walking zombie.”

  She worked not to scream her head off. She was tired of having to think of everything. “If we provide funding for the facility, I’m sure they would be amenable to adjusting Dr. Green’s medication at our request. In fact, they may be able to give him something that would make him more lucid and cooperative. Really, Craig, I shouldn’t have to tell you these things.”

  He nodded apologetically.

  Closing her eyes and leaning back in her seat she said, “It may be time to adopt some of my father’s business practices.”

  -39-

  He did not recognize the sensation right away. It was a moist, warm feeling that startled and excited him. Opening his eyes, he gathered his wits. He had slept so deeply and been awakened so suddenly, he was disoriented. It wasn’t until he looked down and saw his cock in Cora’s mouth that he realized where he was and who he was with.

  She looked up holding on to the base of his cock with both hands and smiled. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  “Good morning, indeed,” he said. All the thoughts that had worried and terrified him the night before had vanished. He could think of nothing but her intoxicating form and delicious manner.

  She spit on his cock before sliding her lips over the head. She sucked while working her mouth up
and down over the shaft, and with the precision of a classically trained musician, she stroked his cock in savage rhythm. It was an odd pairing of untamed and masterful. She almost appeared feral and out of control. She needed his cock and that sent shock waves throughout his body.

  She stopped sucking long enough to work her hand around his dripping wet cock in a slight twisting motion as she continued the frenzied stroking. Pursing her lips together, she placed them on the head of his cock.

  Thomas gripped the bed. There was nothing on his mind except the sensation of his wet cock being masterfully manipulated by a woman he was profoundly in love and lust with. He had been blown before by many a girl, but nothing like what Cora was doing to him. She wasn’t just sucking his dick. She was worshiping it.

  “Come for me, baby,” Cora said. “C’mon!”

  She put her hands on either side of him and put her mouth on the head of his cock. She flicked it while she sucked and bobbed her head up and down.

  Thomas pushed his bare ass against the bed and then with no control at all, thrust his hips forward.

  She leaned back gasping as he started to ejaculate. Quickly she grabbed his throbbing erection and moved it back and forth like it was a hose, covering herself in as much of his cum as she could.

  “Oh my God,” he laughed. “What a way to wake up!”

  She flopped down in the bed next to him. “You, my friend, are lucky you’re so damn hot and you have such a wonderful penis. Otherwise I would have kicked you out of here.”

  He leaned up on his elbows. “And why would you do something like that?”

  “Where did you disappear to last night?”