by Jack Truxton
“Not that I know about,” Candy said off-handedly, her gum audibly popping. “Romine used to smoke cigars though. I left the ashtray up there for clients. You want me to ditch it?”
I let out a non-committal grunt. “No, it’s fine. Always good to be polite to people, right? Anyway, I’ll let you get back to things. Thanks again, Candy.”
As I stopped the call and sipped at my coffee, I had a dozen thoughts in my head. I didn’t panic though, even if the initial evidence pointed to somebody getting in here without alerting anyone. Eyeing through the apps on the smartglasses, I brought up the security camera archives for the previous day, focusing on the office cameras.
Finding where Nyala had given me the massage, I moved the video forward, skipping ahead in chunks, reliving the afternoon into the evening. Nyala waking Annie up, what was likely the two of them conspiring last night’s surprise, a few calls downstairs, a lot of general activity over the few hours I had slept. Eventually, even though it wasn’t relevant to my current concerns, I hit the section of the video where the two Kats had stripped down and wrapped each up, Nyala walking Annie through the exact process. It was just almost as sexy and fascinating to watch them get wrapped as it was for me to take it all off.
It was just after I made it past that part, beginning my skim of what seemed to be mostly dead space, notably lacking that origami kitten, the bedroom door slid open. Turning my chair toward the door, I looked through the paused security footage to see Nyala in a charcoal power suit that matched my own, those same glasses she had on the night before perched on her nose, and Annie, dressed up in a Katsukami-issue Nurse Kat uniform in soft pink. As with Nyala’s suits, the official uniform for Annie was decidedly on the Hello, Nurse! side of professional wear, cut to show off her curves to devastating effect with some added frills and bows to put a cute spin on the sexy.
“Good morning, you two,” I said with a soft smile. “I guess I’m not the only one with new clothes.”
Annie giggled and took a step towards me, spinning as she did so to let her skirt flare. “Isn’t it great? See, I explained to Ny about how all we had were what was in our backpacks, and she said something about the importance of good looks, and then—”
“I took the liberty of dipping into the petty cash to ensure we all looked the part for today’s meeting,” Nyala purred, her tail swishing back and forth with the sashay of her hips as she walked purposefully towards the desk. Plucking her tablet off the charger, she was about to say something else when her eyes fell on the paper cat. “Annie didn’t mention that you had a thing of origami, Jake.”
I said, “That’s because I don’t,” just at the same moment as Annie said, “That’s because he doesn’t.” Despite the seriousness of the moment, we both looked at each other and laughed a little at that.
Nyala plucked the figure off the desk and held it up, her ears swiveling forward inquisitively. “Well, I’m not very familiar with the art of folded paper personally, but it is quite cute.” She glanced over at me as Annie came up beside her, holding onto Nyala’s shoulder as the nurse Kat tried to take a good look at it herself. “But as innocuous as it seems …”
“I was just going over the security cameras when you two woke up.” I took another sip of my coffee. “Why don’t you two check in with Candy, maybe one of the boys or girls on duty last night saw something? Oh, and could you please get some breakfast for us before Mr. Johnson shows up? I’m starving, but I really want to finish checking this out. Maybe by the time you get back from the Emperor, I’ll have something tangible.”
“Of course, Jake,” Annie giggled, her tail quivering with delight. “After last night, I think we all worked up quite the appetite, more than enough to require a hearty breakfast. Good nutrition is the foundation of a good day, after all!”
Nyala smiled, dragging her tongue across her lips as she tapped at her tablet. “To be honest, I got quite the mouthful last night … several times … but yes, we do need our strength to deal with our Mr. Johnson.” She extended the crook of her left arm to Annie, tucking the tablet under her right. “Shall we?”
“Sure thing, Ny!” Annie twined her arm with Nyala’s, tail swishing as she waved over her shoulder. “Good luck, Jake! We’ll be back real soon!”
Smiling after the pair as they walked out the office door, I couldn’t turn my attention back to the footage until they and their irresistible asses were out of sight. Damn, say what you wanted to about my crazy new life, but I knew I was the luckiest man on the planet right then.
Once the door closed, I could properly concentrate again. Sitting up in the chair, coffee in hand, I got back to the paused security footage. As I finished off my coffee, a really good brew to be fair, I skipped through the recordings in short spurts. Everything looked completely normal, everything untouched … until suddenly it wasn’t. One tap of the fast-forward controls the desk was normal, then the next, the origami cat was there, and the ashtray had a tendril of smoke rising from it.
Now, I didn’t believe in ghosts, magic, or anything else supernatural, so I stopped, slowed it down, then began to go through the footage moment by moment and frame by frame, occasionally tapping through the different cameras both in the office and in the building. There had to be something, some bit of evidence to tell me where this little paper cat came from.
And after a good ten minutes of scrutiny, I found it. Well, technically, it was about a dozen its. There was a cascading stutter in the footage, creating a trail from a fifth story hallway, on the same floor the office was on, all the way here. It was just a frame or two for most of this little trip, so little of disruption that I wouldn’t have caught it if I wasn’t literally looking at every frame.
When that stutter got to the office, it was a few extra frames, still too short of a time to be caught by the naked eye, and then the cat was there, literally there one frame and gone the next. But that wasn’t all, because I noticed that the frame seemed frozen, even though the time stamp was ticking on. I could only tell because the faint wisp of smoke from the ashes was frozen in time, and after about a minute of that frozen frame, it seemed to go into actual motion again.
Going off a hunch, I followed the chain of cameras back from the end of that freeze and, sure enough, there was another series of momentary stutters back out the way they came.
Picking up the origami cat, I gave it a good, close look. What had looked like simple black paper had a white backing, almost hidden by the exacting folds. Someone had broken into the building, that much was clear, and whoever it was had covered their tracks near perfectly … and yet they left this behind. There had to be a reason. Maybe …
Going off my hunch, I carefully unfolded the little paper sculpture, making sure not to damage or tear it one bit. Once I was done, as I undid the last fold, a very brief message written in very tight, small letters of the Wonder Sans font said, ‘Treat them well.’
As I folded the note back up, following the exact folds I had undone using the creases as a guide, I nodded slowly to myself. Whoever had come here might not be a friend, but they definitely weren’t an enemy. Were they fighting Katsukami, here to take out Romine but relenting when they saw that he was overthrown already? Or were they working for Katsukami and just fucking with us? And perhaps just as importantly, were they a Wonder Kat too?
As I set the reassembled piece of origami back on the desk, I swore that, while I didn’t have any of those answers, I was definitely going to find out … and maybe Mr. Johnson would be the start of that process.
22
While I shared the message in the cat with Annie and Nyala on their return, there was little else we could do about it at the moment. Zan had been on night guard duty, with no problems logged for the night, and I could confirm by my review of the cameras that he had been amazingly diligent. Whoever our intruder was, their timing and planning were impeccable. With Mr. Johnson due with two hours, there was no time to look into it further.
So, we got ready. A hardy me
al courtesy of the Tyrant of Breakfast (I had the Spoils of War meal, which was an Emperor’s Decadence doughnut burger, Oppressed Peasant hashbrowns, and a Tyrant’s Delight golden crème-filled doughnut to to it all off), a couple of cups of coffee, and a quick review of our strategy followed in short order. It wasn’t exactly complex. Johnson walks in, we lock the doors, and then we have a very in-depth discussion about the finer points of Katsukami’s Kat Katcher program. From there, I set up my genemod workstation on one part of the immense oak desk and got an order ready for Candy to fulfill so we could crank out more doses of the Wonder Kat cure. Nyala busied herself with the on-going work of redeeming Romine’s business structure, as well as collating information on other local scumbags, while Annie made her rounds. You see, one of the finer points of our new contracts with the staff was free healthcare and medical screenings.
Before too long, it’d be more fitting to call her Dr. Annie instead of Nurse.
A little bit before showtime, we had reconvened at the office. I sat back in the chair and adjusted my tie, Annie and Nyala taking up their now-familiar spots on my left and right. Nyala’s tablet was at the ready, security controls already primed as she kept an eye on the lobby cameras, while Annie’s tail lashed in anticipation, her hands behind her back concealing her frying pan behind her wide hips and flared skirt.
“Just don’t lead with the pan,” I said with a grin. “As far as we know, this guy has no mods, so a pan to the head might kill him, and while that’s no loss to the world, he won’t be very talkative then.”
Annie winked at me, a big smile on her lips as her ears flicked. “Don’t worry, Jake! I’m a medical expert, and I would never needlessly endanger human life. I’ll just threaten him with Mr. Panny if he’s uncooperative.”
“Let’s leave that as a last resort.” I leaned forward in my chair, steepling my fingers, elbows propped on the desk. “We’ll try the good old-fashioned method of talking first. Maybe we can make him flip, turn on Katsukami and give up all his intel without having to get rough.”
“That’s right!” Annie mewed, raising a finger as she expounded. “Though there are a lot of bad people out there, some folks only need to be given a chance to be good to, uh, you know … be good.”
Nyala’s tail twitched as she frowned slightly. “I truly admire your optimism, Annie. I wish I could be so positive.” She shrugged her slender shoulders, accentuated by the cut of her jacket. “Still, even if he doesn’t turn through the goodness of his heart, he might give into greed or blackmail, once we find out his identity.”
I nodded, a flashing green light in the corner of my smartglasses responding to a signal sent from Candy. “Once we get his distortion field off him, Nyala, I want you to prioritize using any trick you can to get us his identity. It might help swing him.”
She nodded, taking a deep breath to fall into professional mode. “Of course, Jake, and our guest has arrived. Just into the lobby now.”
Bless Annie’s heart, she tried to copy Nyala’s technique, right down to passing her hand down her face, but she didn’t quite manage it. Instead of cool and collected, she wound up looking like a caricature of that, her face scrunched up, nose wrinkled, and eyes squinting.
I glanced over at her, catching her attention, and made a ‘cut’ gesture by passing my hand in front of my throat. She blinked at me once, then dropped the act with a sigh of relief, deflating into her usual relaxed stance. I barely had the chance to turn back toward the door and settle into position when there was a soft beep as the door opened, Richard holding the door open for our mysterious Mr. Johnson.
As I judged from the pictures Nyala had shown me, Johnson was of average height, but it was hard to judge the exact number with the indistinct haze where his head should be. The silver collar of the field emitter hung like a weird collar around his neck, and past that he was dressed in a black suit with white pinstripes that was even nice than mine, and mine was damn sweet. Past the immaculate suit, Johnson didn’t look to be in the best of shape, that incongruous mix of rail thin in the limbs and pudgy in the middle that spoke of bad health. Outside of the distortion field, the only thing he seemed to have on him was an attaché case in his right hand, two metal-wrapped tubes extending from it and snaking under his suit jacket.
“Mr. Romine, delaying this meeting a day has greatly disrupted my schedule,” he began before he was even fully in the room, half turned to squeeze past Richard’s considerable bulk. His voice was distorted as well, but that didn’t hide the faint wheeze that was constantly under his words. As Johnson managed to get past the door guard, he turned to face the desk, Richard closing the door swiftly behind him. “You know how busy I am, and if this delay was caused because of another of your … dalliances …” Mr. Johnson’s buzzing voice trailed off as I think he stared in confusion at us.
It was hard to be sure, with his entire head being blurry static and all.
That confusion passed in a flash as Johnson spun frantically on his heel, but I just sat calmly as Nyala tapped her tablet. Before Johnson even got his hand on the doorknob, there was a loud click as the door locked tight. He still tried the knob though, twisting it furiously as if it would unlock if he just gave it another jingle.
“I think the best thing for you to do right now, Mr. Johnson,” I said in calm, clear tones, “is to calm down and come take a seat. I know you were expecting Romine, but there’s been a change of management here.”
Johnson turned slowly, the grip on his case turning into a knuckle-whitening death grip. “I can see that, but I warn you that, if you harm me or even yell in my direction, this place will be wiped off the map. If you know who I am, you know who I work for.”
“I do.” I nodded to Nyala on my right. “Certainly, you recognize that I’ve still kept Nyala on. Hell, honestly, she’s going to be running the business more than me. As for that whole harm-slash-yelling thing, well, that all comes down to you and how much you’re going to cooperate with us.”
“Indeed, Mr. Johnson,” Nyala added, pushing up the glasses on her nose with one finger. “It all comes down to you, really.”
Annie was uncharacteristically quiet, her head tilting quizzically as she stared at Johnson, but I figured she was curious about the case and was simply trying to not interrupt our maneuvering with some of her patented antics. I leaned forward in my chair and gestured toward the closest chair, and Johnson slowly stepped forward, distorted head scanning between the three of us.
“Mr. St. Clare?” Johnson asked through wheezes. “As in Jacob St. Clare? One of our designers who died in the laboratory collapse?”
“Aw, no fair.” I grinned and tapped my smartglasses. “You get to use your facial recognition software, and I don’t. But yes, I’m Jake St. Clare, and it was your stupid security guards who blew the place up on top of us.”
He didn’t sit, even though he was at a chair now. The corporate man’s crackling gaze slipped right past me even as I was talking, fixating on Annie. “You were reassigned to Reprogramming the day of the explosion, and then you called in an emergency through the elevators. That’s when everything went to hell.”
Nyala shot me a sidelong glance of concern as Johnson rattled off my story, her fingers flying across the tablet, along with a message in my smartglasses. He’s cut off from the network here, so this is all information he knows already. I don’t know how.
I nodded to her while getting to my feet, taking a protective step closer to Annie, who was looking more uncomfortable with the scrutiny by the moment. “Yeah, funny story, Johnson. Ends with Annie and me under tons of rock, but it beats what Katsukami had in store for her.” Johnson seemed to freeze up, so I kept going. “I know all the company’s dirty little secrets and the lies they feed the people now, so let’s skip all the bullshit and get down to—"
“Annie …” The way Mr. Johnson said her name was almost a growl and that cut me off, my arm instinctively rising in front of her as her ears started to flatten in fear. “You destroyed an e
ntire facility, billions of dollars of damages and lost product, because of this one defective biodroid?! Are you insane, Jacob? They’re just product, and this one wasn’t up to specifications! Her fur pattern, don’t you see?”
Annie’s blue eyes turned into trembling pools, her hands moving up to cover the white splash in her lilac hair, a gesture she hadn’t done in days. Johnson took a heavy step toward the desk. Nyala was about to leap the table, her body tensing as her tail poofed, but I waved for her to wait a moment. As threatening as Johnson was being, he was obviously suffering from some nasty condition, so he wasn’t a real … threat …
And that’s when it clicked. I knew exactly who Johnson was. He wasn’t just a Katsukami manager. He was Annie’s old Master.
“Brenton!” I shouted, my voice turning into an accusatory growl.
One of Johnson’s wrinkled hands shot up, fumbling with his collar for a moment before there was a burst of static. The distortion field collapsed around the man’s head, and in a split-second, his face was clearly visible. To no surprise of mine, he was obviously an older man, his skin sallow and wrinkled, one eye clouded over with cataracts. Instead of a full part of smartglasses, he had a smartmonocle over his good eye. Wisps of grey hair covered his scalp, and he had a look of utter disgust on his lips.
The effect on Annie was immediate. She let out a yowl, tears pouring out of her eyes, and I was hard pressed to tell if she was more afraid of her old master or enraged. Me, well, I knew how I felt about it, my warding hand clenching into a fist as I moved forward to hop the table and deck the old bastard.