An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov) (13 page)

* * *
 

Night herself held too obvious a danger
.
It caused decent and semi-decent people to guard themselves carefully
.
It gave hunters a place to lurk
.
It also gave camouflage and life to the hunters of the hunters
.

T
he night gave rise to a backward kind of danger
.
With the predators that stalked the night dropping off to sleep and the daylight denizens not yet stirring,
the afternoon
provided, as it had for centuries, the perfect cover
for
the trade of thief, mugger, or
in this case,
terrorist.

Direct sunlight never soiled the
shadow
of the lower barrio
.
The weak sun fought its way through the g
ray smog
and ubiquitous mist, just barely chasing away the darkness of the night.
Sonya left her apartment wearing a black, white
,
and
neutral
pattern
-
disruptive cloak
.
She
’d
made the cloak herself four years ago, weaving cat hair and energy together for a simple efficacy
.
While not quite as good as light
-
bending clothing
used by the military
, it served
its
purpose
—
to make the wearer unnoticed and anonymous
.
As an added bonus, cloaks held the distinction of being nearly the universal slum outer attire, keeping occupant and cargo reasonably warm and dry
.
A large sombrero bundled up her long
,
brown hair
.
The
hat’s
excessive brim and a green surgical mask covered a good portion of her face
.
 

Fortunately
,
Sonya preferred walking
.
By losing good people, t
he
GAM
learned years ago
that
lift
-
buses and taxis used automatic sensing equipment
.
They detected most high
-
order explosives, firearms of any caliber, and most edged or thrusting hand weapons
.
As a result Sonya had a four-hour walk
east into the Pearl District,
across the nearly
rusted-
through
Steel
Bridge
—an ancient relic valued only as
a tourist attraction to show people
what life was like
before lift vehicles
. All this
because
the Metros objected to her cargo
—
fifteen
kilos of high
-
explosive devices
.

A thick cloud of some noxious chemical hugged the ground like an early morning fog
.
Sonya’s presence parted the worst of the mist for
a meter
in either direction, repelled by the energy
-
laden fibers of her outerwear
.
The few people who milled aro
und the ground level streets
in
the
afternoon
light in
Lower Portland
were as dangerous as working with explosives in an oven
.
As a rule, they all had the capabilit
y
to either deal with troublemakers or to be troublemakers themselves
.
The vast majority bore outward signs of heavy artificial body augmentation with
metallic
arms, ablative armor
,
or even artificial eyes
.

While many would be frightened
if the Greenies succeeded
, Sonya’s mind instead
drifted
to
what she hoped to remake of this world
—
one where green plants thrived, instead of withering sickly
. A world where
animals roamed freely
, living as they should
.
A world her great
, great
grandmother would recognize, not this burn
t-
out, overpopulated place without hope
. A
place where justice came not from the credits in one’s purse but from men equally to all other men
. A world
where not being registered in a computer wasn’t a death sentence
.

Any movement in any of those directions would be welcome
.
Her jaws clenched tightly and her fists formed and released
.

Every
single
day the megacorps committed new
atrocities
.
Governments couldn’t stop them
as th
ey learned to bend to the
will of the highest bidder, either in the form of cash or threat
.
The last holdout to this corruption,
England
,
finally
knuckled under to Advanced Biometrics when they promised to poison three major cities, including
London
, if the Genetics Freedom
Law
passed
.
Since then it
had
bec
o
me business as usual
.
Examples
included
China
’s sale of
absolute mineral rights
of
the
Province
of
India
to Materials Matrix Corpo
ration for an undisclosed sum
,
or the Russian Coalition
’s
transfer of
one third of all their nuclear devices to Priory Unlimited to prevent a war with the
Czech
Republic
.

Corrupt police, city services, and government poisoned every corner of this
world
and all those it
had
colonized
.
Those with the money could buy anything
they wanted
.
Only those innocent people who could
afford to
purchase justice could
actually
obtain it
.
The list went on and on.

Sonya’s dark musings kept her busy until she completed the first leg of her journey
.
Three of her
fellow terrorists
waited at ground level of their current target, the
Colonization
Unlimited
Building
.
They milled around, chatting and blending into the rest of the scenery
,
dressed in
dirty and heavily worn clothes
with only a couple of
the
boxed
internees
in the vicinity
.

The boxed
—
another abomination of this world, Sonya thought
.
A
tiny minority of fearful Nils listened to the megacorp and government propaganda
.
They volunteered to have their brains placed into robotic equipment to do menial tasks just for the hope of someday earning the right to be returned to cloned bodies and
legally
registered
.
Just the sight of the two automatons trying to shore up the footing of a crumbling building
left her sickened by the way
one man enslaved another.

Turning her mind away
,
Sonya perceived
her fellow comrade
s and wondered if they weren’t enslaved even more strongly than those inhabiting metal and plastic bodies
.
But by the same token, t
hey carried
hatreds that forged each into a weapon
or a
tool that might just change the world
—
but one that also condemned them
, even
as it m
ight one day
save others
.

Arthur Lewton, a tiny man at
1.3
meters
and only
60
kilos,
ran an accounting department
for
OldsTransport
until
a lift-bus dropped on
his wife
as she installed a new
undercarriage
.
OldsTransport
faulted Linda with improper alignment of the grav impellers
and refused to pay any benefits
.
Arthur’s
private
investigation
revealed
OT
used
out-of-specification impeller casings
that
showed a tendency to burn through and fail to lift.

Instead of admitting their mistake, the VPs of manufacturing at
OT
fired Arthur and discredited his findings by replacing all the faulty casings before
he could prove anything
.
Despite his diminutive size,
Arthur’s rage couldn’t be underestimated
.
Once, caught red-handed without a weapon, he rammed his finger up one corpie
’
s eye socket deep enough to perform an impromptu lobotomy
.

Slightly chunky
but nonetheless quite attractive
, Beth Watkins
wore the
figure of a
woman
who
’d
birthed
one too many children
, yet s
he
’d never been
a mother
.
Beth’s grievance with the
megacorp
s started when she
received
a temporary contraceptive which permanently damaged not only her uterus
but also her abdominal wall
.
The contraceptive damaged thirty percent of the test subjects before being released to the market by
Caring Health Systems
anyway
.
A former runway model, Beth lost her looks, her job, her fertility
,
and her husband.

Martin Fox’s sympathies most nearly matched Sonya’s own
.
A
Nil
of a
verage height, average weight, brown hair, brown eyes
,
and no distinguishing marks
, he used these physically nondescript features to his advantage—
basically, they made him
a
complete
nonentity
.
Sonya had on more than one occasion watched him vape a corpie, drop the weapon and melt into a crowd
.
He
could
then stand a
scant
two meters
away as the Metros arrived
, with none the wiser
.

Martin
wanted to make
nature a dominant force
i
n the world again
.
His heartfelt dreams were even more
radical than
even
Sonya’s, however
.
Given his choice,
E
arth
would
be
cordoned off as a
“no
-
human zone.”

Loyalty and passion embodied the most important traits
of
each
member
of her core group
.
All had been on more than one mission
.
She knew the color of their emotions.

“You all know what
this mission
’s
parameters are
,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper as she entered their circle
.
“
Seven bombs planted at th
is corp’s
primary entrances and set off at end of shift will remove a great number of their key people,” she reviewed, removing the deadly metal tubes from within her cloak
.
None of the other three offered a word in reply
.
They knew their tasks
.
Grim determination
showed on their faces as they accepted their weapons.