An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov) (10 page)

“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
Tyc
h
o
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
s
e
t
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 g
uest
.
“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
I
ntel
ligence
T
eam
’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
I
ntel
ligence 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,
t
he 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
E
.

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 minute
s
,
and
thirteen seconds after its intrusion, the team
might well
ha
ve
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
dr
u
nk 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
m
eow
were
the
only
response
s
he got
.

A cheese omelet
with
bacon substitute put both Tony and Cin in even better mood
s
.
Cin cuddled within Tony’s arms
.
She visually stalked a dust mote drift
ing
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 w
h
ere 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 steaming 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.