An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  “That’s right. I’ll make supper. Maybe you need some food.” Tony walked into the tiny kitchen and put a meatloaf, peas, and potato dinner from the freezer into the flash oven.

  “Percomm Condo Association, Body Removal.” The solido of a heavily muscled woman came into view over the counter in his kitchen as he pulled out a replacement for the shredded finger-cap in a miscellaneous drawer amongst spare Velcro straps for his shoes.

  “Body Removal. Oh, hi there, Mr. Sammis.”

  “Hi, Adriana. I vaped another welf on one-fifteen.”

  “Fourth this year. You might get the association Top Gun award if you keep this up.”

  “I’d be happy if they just left me—” another yawn took him, mid-sentence, “—alone.”

  “Well, you get some rest and I’ll send someone up to clean up. No Miss Carmine tonight?”

  “No, Adriana. She went to Tycho City.”

  “I could find you some companionship, if you’re interested.”

  “Thank you, but I’m just…so tired.” Another yawn tore his sentence apart. I’m going to tube out in bed. Been a long day.”

  “Understand, sir.”

  “Off.” The meatloaf slid out of the flash, steaming. “Mmm, but that smells wonderful.” His mouth watered even as he took it into the living room and plopped onto the sofa. Cin showed up, sitting by his side and looking pitiful. “You hungry, too? I wonder what you’ll eat. Here, have a bite of potato.” The cat licked at the tiny steaming morsel on the end of his fork, but didn’t eat it. “Picky thing you are,” Tony said, eating it himself.

  “How about a bit of meat.” Tony tore off a tiny chunk and set it in front of Cin. She licked it three or four times before picking it up in her mouth and eating it very daintily. “Maybe a pea?” He placed a single pea on the couch. Cin sniffed at it for a second before gobbling it down with all the subtlety of a Nil on a real steak.

  “Peas and meat, eh?” Tony quickly found that while she’d eat the meat, she definitely preferred the peas.

  Another huge yawn hit him in the middle of his meal. “I need some sleep, kitten.” The drooping of his eyes and the fatigue pulling at them cut short his meal and the camaraderie shared with his guest. “I’m heading for bed. I guess the day had one too many shocks.”

  He put a tiny bowl of leftovers down on the floor for Cin and tottered off to fall into bed fully clothed. Cin found a way to the top of his bed and curled up under his chin. Without waking he wrapped his arm around her.

  Implement—Phase One

  Five teams worked in concert. The subject’s heart rate, respiration, and alpha waves all dropped significantly. His eye movement increased. The Intelligence Team’s state of the art medical monitors observed every major bodily function. All of them reported the same thing: “The subject is asleep.”

  To ensure no neighbors accidentally responded to any movements or inadvertent noises, the Cover-Up Team released a colorless, odorless gas into the condominium complex’s ventilation system. Within fifteen minutes, everyone within two floors of the subject’s one-hundred-fifteenth level home slept. Other members disengaged elevator access to those same floors. The Intelligence Team duly noted the subject’s change from normal slumber to a drugged stupor.

  The Continuity Team moved in next, ensuring no perceptible trace remained of the teams’ outing. They needed seventeen seconds to open the subject’s door without detection, deactivating all the electronic and physical security devices. A solido recorder, with its three huge eyes, floated into the door, registering the location and smell of everything, establishing a baseline in order to later return the flat to its original state. The recorder’s sweep took seven long minutes.

  After exactly seven minutes and one second, the eight-person Medic Team and four-person Vet Team, each clad in self-contained, yellow biohazard suits, passed through the condominium door with an equal weight of equipment and personnel.

  As the team erected a field laboratory, the envy of any mad scientist, the resident feline received a dose of an additional sedative. The human had already imbibed his in the alcohol. Each of the teams closed on their respective charge and began a series of complex manipulations. The blood of each unwitting subject filtered through separate large garbage can–sized devices, injections were given in unusual places, and countless handheld scanning devices irradiated their skin. The teams completed all of these tasks over five hours, fourteen minutes, and sixteen seconds—well within mission clock parameters, and all without speaking a single word.

  The two medical teams carefully packed their implements, forgetting not the least cotton swab, and departed out the front door, their evil done and irreparable.

  The twenty-person Continuity Team, equally clothed in biohazard suits, moved in with replacement sheets, of the same manufacturer, pre-washed with a placed pale orange stain, nearly identical to one present on the original cloth before any of the interlopers entered the home. One pillow had to be replaced due to a tiny blood stain. One team member returned a lamp, inadvertently moved by six millimeters, to its correct position. Another technician carefully replaced the sleeping cat within the human’s arms in exactly their previous locations. Two others repositioned clothing slightly nudged amongst the random sprawl upon the floor in this obvious bachelor’s home. A tallish member combed the human’s hair and rearranged his leg by several centimeters. A glass sphere floated through the eerily silent room, occasionally expelling a fine mist to change the air’s smell by some tiny fraction of an OU.

  Team members faded from the scene as each completed his task. Finally, after the last left, a tiny, blond man wearing only yellow vinyl tights made one final pass through the home. Absently, he sprinkled a tiny canister over a clean surface to add just the right amount of dust. He left quickly, quietly and professionally, locking and reinitializing the subject’s electronic alarms and protection devices.

  Six hours, seven minutes, and thirteen seconds after its intrusion, the team might well have never been there, except for the damage they’d caused.

  * * *

  Tony awoke feeling stiff, but better than he had in years. None of the vodka’s effects still lingered in his system. Mentally, he attributed this to the fact that he’d drunk much less than normal last night.

  Oddly, he noted that he hadn’t moved more than a few centimeters, despite sleeping all night long, and Cin hadn’t moved far from his side either.

  “Good morning,” he said with the sunshine he felt coming out in his voice. The troubles of the previous day seemed to sublimate like dry ice. “Shall we get something to eat?” he asked, stripping down and slipping into a dressing robe. A huge yawn, for such a tiny cat, and an insignificant meow were the only responses he got.

  A cheese omelet with bacon substitute put both Tony and Cin in even better moods. Cin cuddled within Tony’s arms. She visually stalked a dust mote drifting at the whimsy of the air currents as if it were some edible prey. Tony leaned back and rubbed at the base of Cin’s right ear, right where a patch of black fur began and seemed to pour down her right foreleg and chest.

  “Hey, are you a boy cat or a girl cat?” he inquired curiously. The kitten, no longer interested in the dust-bunnies, tried to climb Tony’s robe to some unknown destination, its claws making tiny punctures in the robe’s delicate fabric. “Come here, you.” Tony leaned the kitten onto its back. “A girl,” he said, releasing her quickly because of her struggles.

  “Goodness, I’m running late, Cin,” he said, catching a view of the clock. “Race you to the bathroom.” The cat didn’t race, but Tony hustled toward the shower anyway. On the way, he managed to step on a small pile of kitten feces within some of his clothes littering the floor. He scowled a bit.

  “A kitten’s gotta go when a kitten’s gotta go. Right, girl?” Cin looked at him and cocked her head and then dashed into the closet as she found something else interesting. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that, but we’ll manage.” He jumped into the stea
ming hot shower trying to come up with a solution. As he dressed and shaved, he couldn’t think of anything except sand. He’d get some colored sand and make some excuse about using it as a decorating accent.

  “Bye, Cin. Sorry about keeping you in the bathroom,” Tony said, scooting the kitten inside, “but it’s for your own safety. We’ll work something out soon.” Still thinking of a way to make it more comfortable for her, he dashed out the door.

  * * *

  Stripping off the smock, to prevent even more blood staining the white fabric, she revealed that only a small patch around her curly pubic hair and an area about three centimeters wide over her spine remained virgin to the ink-bearing needles. The cryptic symbols still bore no obvious meaning to the uninitiated.

  She used the blood-spattered apron to wipe her face before tossing it into a sink full of soapy water. She returned to the exam room with a cleaver, a cutting board, a large glass punch bowl and a plastic garbage bag. Several of the cats joined her, but the two dogs waited at the threshold. The cats arrayed themselves around the room on any horizontal surface available.

  A slit in the victim’s jugular allowed the body’s remaining fluids to drain into the punch bowl over several minutes. Jointing the limbs took the better part of an hour, and eviscerating the torso took another thirty minutes. When she’d completed her grisly task the garbage bags almost overflowed with a protein bounty for her pets—after suitable adulterations, of course.

  After storing the meat, Sonya put on a pot. Covered in blood, she tilted back in the plastic chair to savor her goddess tea. She yearned to be clean, but her pathological need for a tidy environment meant she couldn’t stop quite yet. Her normally pristine examination room needed to be returned to its semi-sterile state.

  She spent the rest of the day scrubbing, sanding, and disinfecting blood, bone, and brain tissue from the walls and floor. As Sonya meticulously scrubbed the hardwood floors with a stiff wire brush, she sang quietly, “That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well…those icy fingers up and down my spine, the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine…”

  The three cats that remained with her throughout the entire process sat on the examining table crooning with her a cappella.

  Implement—Phase Two

  “Nanogate Building Four, Level one-hundred-fifty-one,” came the soft, computer generated, pseudo-female voice over the bus PA. Even the voices were designed to keep the sheep of mankind at rest. Tony mumbled his standard apologies as he got his 190 centimeter height and 150 kilo mass out through the tightly packed commuters.

  He jogged through the 6 meters of uncovered sky and perpetual drizzle to the covered entrance of his personal purgatory—the Dental Division of Nanogate Corporation. “Wet day today,” he said to no one in particular. “Hope we’ll see some sun soon.”

  He brushed at the rain clinging to his gray imitation-tweed suit and shook his long, loose hair. A quick check in the reflection of the great glass doors allowed him to straighten his burgundy tie before joining the rest of the throng entering yet another day as an insignificant cog in the megacorp machine.

  The atrium stood 30 meters high, bearing a genuine Thaddeus sculpture filling at least 70 percent of that height—a grotesque and misshapen representation of a human worker floating over those starting their workday. It reminded Tony of the commissions Stalin made back in the Cold War. Some might call it art, but Tony chose to think of it as not-so-subtle intimidation. He couldn’t decide if it symbolized what the megacorps did to those that worked for them, or if its sheer size indicated how little significance the megacorps placed on each worker.

  Tony’s cube, comprised of one-point-three-meter-high carpeted pseudo-walls with a desktop and computer workstation built in, held only one bit of uniqueness—a single climbing ivy decorated the otherwise sterile environment. One of the benefits of his grade level was an office on the floor of the Tri-Met drop. “No more climbing stairs,” Tony muttered to himself, nudging one of his peers next to him as they watched the multitude of drones climbing the bank of stairs. His mind, however, darted back to Cin—her playfulness, the softness of her fur, and how expressive the tiny face and large eyes could be.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus. “Time to hit the grindstone,” he said less than enthusiastically. The coworker mumbled his agreement.

  His rear barely had hit the seat when a solido appeared on his desk. The less-than-honorable Mitch Anson’s face turned directly toward him. Having no innate engineering talent of his own, Mitch adeptly wormed his way into other people’s accomplishments and took some or even all the credit. From what Tony knew, Mitch could accept a bribe with one hand and the reward for betraying the briber with the other. Neither of these methods stood as particularly groundbreaking in history, but that’s how Mitch managed to become Junior VP of Research so quickly. Mitch even now lustfully looked forward to removing the “Junior.”

  Even in these days of backstabbing and backroom deals, Tony felt his boss held a position one ecological step above a tapeworm without morals. The counterargument was that he knew his boss felt him to be the equivalent of a rabbit who existed only as an intermediate step in the food chain. Those were the words Mitch had spoken to a mutual friend. As a result of this mutual admiration, or lack thereof, Tony’s assignments often reminded one of beef jerky rather than caviar.

  “Sammis, report to my office at once,” ordered Mitch. While the voice normally felt chilly, Tony recognized an abnormal brusqueness. The solido winked out as quickly and abruptly as it had materialized.

  “Looks like Anson’s in an ass-kicking mood today, gang,” he announced over the low partitioning walls. A few snickers floated up from behind the anonymous facade. “Be on your best behavior.” Several more chuckles followed, but not too loudly, for fear of reprisals.

  Anson’s office sported a 30 meter-wide view of the 170-acre Nanogate Botanical Forest. As the third largest open natural area within twelve hundred kilometers, and within the top four hundred largest in the world—moving up if the Yosemite Prison Bill passed the UN—it required eighty full-time gardeners.

  The décor could’ve been copied out of any up-and-comer’s office, with an oversized desk, antique leather chair, plastic straight-backed chairs for underlings to sit in, private bathroom, wet bar, and a red-headed, buxom secretary who shot Tony lasers as he entered and she left. The two Nanogate security officers, in body armor not dissimilar to that of a Metro, on either side of Anson’s desk didn’t exactly fit the image. Nor did a short, blond man wearing only the yellow vinyl tights of a bodyguard. He stood idly nearby with arms carefully folded behind his back.

  “No, don’t bother to sit down, Sammis. I’m going to make this short and sweet. You’re fired. You have one hour to collect your personal belongings—under the watchful eye of our security forces, of course—and get out.”

  “Why?” Tony sputtered, barely even able to comprehend this disaster.

  “You’ve been charged with practicing medicine without a license, possession of a personal vehicle, and resisting arrest. We here at Nanogate don’t need that type of publicity.

  “Personally, I didn’t think you had it in you, Sammis, but the prime rule is ‘Don’t get caught.’ You are through in the corporate world.”

  “B-but I’ve never done anything like those things!” Tony protested weakly.

  “Doesn’t matter, Sammis. We don’t want you around. You’ll give Nanogate a bad name just by association. As far as the government goes, they’ll probably never get around to trying you for your crimes, so we here at Nanogate will take the appropriate action as defined by corporate precedent. You’re to be cut out like a cancer.

  “If you go quietly, the parent company is willing to give you the following: one year’s severance pay, an equal length of full medical continuance, your accumulated retirement funds to date, and pay in lieu of accumulated vacation.

  “By inference you can deduce wha
t will happen to you if you fight.”

  Tony shook in place. For years he’d felt ambiguous about his place as another bit in the great megacorp machine. Now, without his consent, he no longer even carried that insignificant distinction. His muscles and gut willed him to some action, however futile, and his mind somehow kept them both under control.

  “Granted, I think this offer is overly generous for someone who’s violated the morals clause in their contract, but it wasn’t my call to make. Take it and get out. Cause the slightest trouble and I’ll strip you of even that crumb.”

  * * *

  In his butter-mellow baritone, Nanogate spoke. “Alea iacta est,” he stated—rather succinctly, he thought. He received nothing but blank stares despite the broad range of education and mental implants represented in the room. “The die is cast. Phase one completed without incident. We discovered an added bonus in time to make use of it. The subject has recently obtained a feline.”

  With a scowl, Taste Dynamics, the only one at the table currently in a skirt, looked up. “How can that be a bonus, unless you eat those kinds of proteins?”

  “Not at all. It has multiple benefits. It allays the fears of the members of the Green Peace organization, and the cat itself has already been set up as an additional weapon.” There were several knowing nods around the huge wooden table.

  “Phase two is underway as we speak,” Nanogate went on. “We’ll continue to increase the pressure until our subject has no other choice.”

  “Are there any indications of suicidal tendencies?”

  “None for over seven generations. Mental profiles show no H-seven indicators of depression, no Cannon indicators of self-hatred or self-destruction. As an additional precaution, we added a deep-programmed block against suicide. If—no, when—he is probed, the terrorists won’t find it unusual. As you know, such blocks are standard practice to infants in over twenty-four percent of Earth and seventy-four percent in colonies.”