An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov) (20 page)

Next to her a
dwarf, genetically engineered for subterranean mining operations, squatted on a stool, his
copper
-
colored skin contrasting
with
the verdant young woman beside him
.
The bartender,
outwardly
unmodified, wore an apron stained in
purple
and crimson
.
He leaned against the semicircular
countertop
and absently wiped in an oval pattern.

Tony drifted over to square jaw
.
“I’m curious, do you know a Sonya
?”

“
No hablo inglés.
¿
Hablas espanol
?
”

Tony dug into his high-school Spanish to communicate.
“
¿
Conoces a Sonya
?
”

“No
.”
 

“
Gracias
.
”
Having gone well beyond his Spanish language capabilities already
,
Tony passed on further conversation with the large man
and moved over to the juice bar.

“Drinks and drugs are listed above,” offered the man behind the bar as Tony sat on the stool
.
“
We don’t have a medical license
,
so all drugs are oral
.”

“Do you know Sonya?”

“Don’ know no Sonya,” offered the green woman in a
high
-
pitched voice with a smooth lisp
.
In spite of its sharpness, her voice caressed a deep spot within his loins
.
She ne
ver looked in Tony’s direction
,
but this didn’t stop him from wondering
.
When he regained a modicum of control
,
he went on
.

“Thank you,
m
iss
.
Do either of you other two know her?”

“Nope
.
Don’t know any Sonya,” offered the short, leathery
-
skinned man
.
“What about you, Linc?” he directed to the server
.
Linc just shook his mostly bald head from side to side
.

Tony looked up and read the menu
.
“I’ll have a raspberry and lemongrass smoothie
.
Might as well have something to tide me over while I wait
.”

“Wha’ you wai’n for?” yelled the green woman over the sound of the blender
.
Even at this volume
, and despite
its
desperately high pitch,
her voice
once again brushed a longing within him
.
He coughed
.

“Someone sent me to see Sonya
,
here at this gym
.
I’ve been given to believe she
’
s a regular
.
I’ll have to hang around until I find her.”

“Good luck, friend,” came the deep voice of the dwarf as he hopped from his stool
.
“I’m outta here, Linc
.”
The green woman stood with him
.

“Don’t dig up any bones, Carl
.
Suet, keep those tentacles to yourself,” the bartender said, putting a pink drink down
.
Tony dropped a bill on the counter
.
“No charge for members.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tony mumbled as he picked up the drink
.
“That’s just a tip
.”

“Well, thank you, sir!” 

Tony’s eyes swayed in time with the hips of the
green
-
skinned woman
.
Absently
,
the drink went to his lips
.
Grimacing
,
he tore his eyes to look down at the grainy pink drink
.
“Blec
h
.”

Over the next six hours
Tony sipped
as many
different drinks between asking his question to everyone who entered
.
Tony found no success as the night wore on, either in finding the woman Sonya or a palatable liquid
.
In fact
,
one concoction of orange, shitake and ginkgo
with the dubious moniker “Remember Rise”
specifically drew his ire
.

Hours dragged by. He entertained himself watching some of the fittest of the female members as they came and went
.
He even went so far as to try some of the equipment
,
only to discover how
ill-suited
he was
to the surroundings
.
Apparently he’d experienced plenty of
muscle atrophy
since his
football days
.
By four in the morning
he finally threw in the towel
.

“I guess this was a snipe hunt, then,” Tony muttered to himself.

“A what?” the bartender named Linc asked
from across the bar
.

“
A snipe hunt,” he repeated. “A s
nipe was a mythical bird that people in the
twentieth
century would send others to find.”

“If they were mythical, how did you find them?”

“That
’s
the point of the
exercise—
to make people look foolish.”

“Well
,
it worked
.
You look pretty flarking foolish,
all
right
.”

A tiny suspicion rose in Tony’s mind
.
“
I guess it is time for
some
sleep
.”
In the mirror on the opposite side of the room, Tony watched carefully as he turned to walk out the door
.
The
bartender’s
cosmetically enhanced blue eyes
followed
his movements, confirming his
hunch
.
This place held his answer
.
Linc knew Sonya
.
Tony knew he
must
return
.
He needed to think of something to get
either Linc’s or
Sonya’s attention.

Tony stepped out of the gym i
nto Portland’s perpetual drizzle
.
He stopped to let his eyes readjust to the night’s darkness
.
A gang of girls, each bearing multiple militant body enhancements of one form or another, sauntered down the middle of the pockmarked street like they owned it
.
As things stood on street level, they
probably did own this patch of ground
.

Tony decided he’d
come back tomorrow and formally join the gym
.
If
he didn’t
stir anything up that way,
he could
always
trail that Linc fellow
.
The decision made, he relaxed
—
a little too much
.
The largest mistake anyone could
make in any world, especially ground level,
involved not paying attention
.
Usually the
payment involved a painful death.

“I hope Cin made it through the day
,” he mumbled to himself. “
I didn’t mean to be gone so
—
” 

The world suddenly painted itself a parody of
even
Salvador Dali as a solid wall
melt
ed
into a twisted pretzel, two of the girls melded into one
distorted figure
with two heads and six limbs, and the
earth beneath him
rolled like an ocean wave
.
Even his body joined the insanity as it wavered and slumped upon the wet pavement like
a jellyfish
taken from the ocean and dropped
upon
a rock
.

Ano
ther shape grew out of the pavement, a giant green octopus with the head of a woman
.
Sometimes it waved two tentacles and other times eight
.
Tony c
ouldn’t seem to care one way or the other
.
Drool rolled out of the corner of his
mouth
.
“P
’
eas feed m’cat.”

* * *
 

Tony struggled to consciousness to the gritty strains of a classic oldie,
“
Persian Slide
”
by the Violent Slugs
.
A conversation took place just outside his understanding
.
Tony
’s
scrambled thoughts sorted out three distinct voices but couldn’t yet drag coherence of the words
, or even
a desire to interpret
.
No part
of his body responded to his commands
.
His arms, legs
,
and other
pieces
he hadn’t yet identified
as his own tingled like a thousand ants gnawing on
each exposed surface
. By forcing dominion
over
his rebellious body he managed
the Herculean task of opening his
eyes.

Even though only a single low wattage bulb brightened the room, the ants stab
bed
daggers into his eye
s
.
Squinting,
Tony found himself stacked behind boxes proclaimed Smirnov Vodka, Seagram’s Gin and Jack Daniels
,
mixed with kegs of miscellaneous beer
.
One portion of his mind wondered at the immense value if the boxes contained what they advertised
.
The illegal alcohol in those
containers
could allow
anyone
to retire with lifetime full medical in their choice of luxury resorts
.

A new sharp pain
, announcing itself in his
wrists
,
brought
the tenuous thing he called
attention back to his predicament
.
Twisting his head around
,
he found golden tanglewire wrapped around his arms and legs
.
A certain trivial part of his brain shouted that amateurs tied his bonds
.
Everyone knew from solido that you either did
two opposite
figure eight
s,
or you went around and around with a cinch wire between the limbs
.

“Who’s he?” said a familiar high, velvety feminine voice.

“Who gives a rat’s testicle, Suet
?
He’s a corpie and wants Sonya
.
Vape him,” offered a male voice.

“Ya hear’ him ask abou’ his ca’
?
Maybe he’s
’ooking
for her
’
o fix his purry
?”

“Probably a Metro trick
.
Maybe they figured out that she fixes pets.”

Quietly
,
Tony
commanded his mutinous body to squirm to a point where he could view his captors
.
The balding juice mixer still wore his stained apron
.

“It’s
‘
veterinarian,
’
Carl,” offered the bartender.

“Veteran or fixer
,
don’t make no difference to me
.
This feek needs to be buried,” offered the dark
-
colored dwarf
.

“He don’t seem like a bad Joe, even if he is a corpie
.
He don’t cause no trouble
.
He even talk to the
Nils
.”