An Eighty Percent Solution

The rich, musty smell of autumn harvest filled the Rose Garden Arena as Sonya, wearing only her tattoos and a loose brown chemise that went down to mid-thigh, wandered around through the milling swarms of people. Despite how people packed themselves in between unlicensed hucksters and questionable food stalls, a zone of emptiness 2 meters across flowed with her. Random decisions and free action always seemed to keep that zone open with Sonya in the center. No one noticed the gap.

She breathed deeply to draw in the spicy draft of roasting chilies, bruised thyme, garbled lavender, and simmering mystery stew heavy with the stink of cabbage. She stopped at a stall with dried herbs in plastic containers and an Hispanic proprietress. The pots encircled her four layers deep. “Te de diosa,” Sonya said.

While pivoting around, the woman grabbed leaves and pieces of bark out of seemingly random bins and stuffed them into a loose plastic bag. With her bare hands she gently stirred the dry concoction before sealing it with a plastic tie. Sonya handed her a credit slip in exchange, dropped her goddess tea fixings into her woven marketing bag, and moved on.

Two Metros, decked out in full assault gear—the only way a policeman would be seen at street level—strolled by with their own radius of emptiness around them. The members of the throng would take one look and decide to visit a stall in the opposite direction. The two toughs walked right by Sonya without a second glance, even as she passed through their own safety zone. The pair ambled up to a small food vendor, whose face went ashen.

“Pagueme el seguro,” one of the cops ordered in a no-nonsense tone.

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“You spoke it well enough last week, bitch. Insurance now or we’ll remove this unlicensed stall from the premises.”

Sonya stood behind and watched, nibbling on some dried tomatoes from an earlier purchase.

“I only have half,” the proprietress complained, quickly handing them a handful of small plastic bills. “Business has been off.”

The taller of the two tongued his mic. “Dispatch, I have a forty-three sixteen, illegal merchant without a permit. Our twenty is Rose Garden Arena, grid fourteen. We are removing it now.”

The smaller of the two Metros tossed over a huge boiling pot, spilling the contents all over the ground. Several unfed urchins scampered around, licking the bounty off the cracked floors. They scooped up chunks and put them inside their filthy clothes to eat later.

“Please don’t!” the vendor screamed. “This is all I have! I can’t feed my children!”

“Stand aside or be destroyed with it.” Both men took up lasing weapons and aimed at the fuel source, an old propane container.

The woman moved around to shield the tank, begging desperately. “Don’t. I can’t…”

The first one struck her with his right fist, bowling her over onto the wet ground. Both reached for their triggers, but something stopped them. They couldn’t squeeze. Sonya closed her eyes and muttered ungrammatical Latin to herself before the two officers put away their weapons and moved on.

No one saw anything. No one heard anything. Later that evening the two officers would probably have a splitting headache and wonder why dispatch thought they’d removed an illegal vendor.

The Metros’ own statistics showed crime at the street level—minus their own thuggery, of course—at two murders, sixteen rapes, eight robberies, sixty-four assaults, and eighty-four muggings per city block per day. Those stats vastly understated the true numbers by at least a factor of two, if not three or four, because Nil victims don’t get counted.

Being the white knight could suck you dry doing it each and every day. For every one you saved, you lost seventy or more others. Sonya knew that being the hero didn’t change the world. It never had and it never would, but in this case it made her feel better.

Sonya didn’t wait around. No one noticed her involvement. No one noticed her leave.



* * *



Despite his Metro-assisted excuse to skip work today, Tony couldn’t avoid one related responsibility, much as he might want to. After a quick check of the guest list, the Kendry’s doorman, a substantial Hispanic with no obvious body modification, invited Tony in.

“May I take your coat, Mr. Sammis?”

“Yes, thank you.” Tony slipped off his full-length, faux mohair coat and offered it without a thought. He brushed his cobalt blue suit to smooth the wrinkles and checked his ruffled blouse.

“If you’d step through to the parlor, the other guests are gathering there.”

“Thank you.” Tony wandered toward the general murmur of conversations and muted music.

Knots of people meandered around the large, open room, breaking and reforming in the classic manner of all cocktail parties throughout history, swaying to the classical strains of Enya. The women each led a trail of fabric from their dress like the tail of some prehistoric beast, while the men, like Tony himself, straitjacketed themselves in an ancient suit called a tuxedo, all determined by the current fashionistas for this season. One of the most famous, Simone, had decreed that dresses in the front barely cover half the thighs and carried high-necked bodices, ruched up tightly against the throat. The color and details on each person seemed to indicate individuality, but Tony saw only a sea of conformity.

A serving girl came up, breaking Tony’s ruminations. She wore a bar prosthesis like a tiny miniskirt flared wide around her waist, plus a skimpy black lace top—neither of which covered much. “Drink, sahr?” she asked in a thickly accented voice.

“Rye on bare cubes, please.” Tony dropped a pair of credit chips into the tip bowl dangling beneath her ample charms.

“Thank you, sahr.”

“Tony!” called out Lindsay, an attractive cougar from the accounting office, as she bolted over toward him. Her iridescent silver evening dress accentuated the mischievous glint in her eye and the glitter spray in her dark black hair. Without giving him the opportunity to answer, she pulled him toward a small group of people by one hand as he grabbed for his drink with the other. “You just have to meet Raymond, the new level four manager in Cosmetics Development!” she insisted. “Also, he’s dishy as hell. Better take me before he gets me,” she whispered directly into Tony’s ear.

Tony managed not to vomit.

Heedless of the quiet conversation being interrupted, Lindsay busted in to a small group. “Raymond, this is Tony Sammis.”

“Mr. Sammis,” came an immediate reply.

“Oh, just Tony, please. This is a party, after all,” Tony said, sipping at his drink while trying hard not to duck the smoke from Raymond’s narcostick.

“Tony it is, then. So Lindsay says you’re interested in cosmetics and perhaps moving up with it.”

Lindsay smiled obsequiously as she not-so-secretly fondled Tony’s ass.

“Who isn’t looking to move? Up, that is.”

Tony worked hard to ignore the groping as he and Raymond, a rather pleasant man in his forties, chatted meaninglessly. They found a common ground with their mutual enjoyment of the Aussie Spiders, but stood opposed on politics. After ten minutes, Tony felt he might’ve made an important contact for his career advancement, but at the cost of developing permanent bruising on his gluteus maximus—and probably his gluteus sinister as well. In payment, he whispered indecencies in Lindsay’s ear for the next hour, promising a repeat of their dirty weekend of Easter last.

Once free of his shepherdess’s clutches, Tony breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He knew that politeness insisted he remain for at least another hour, soaking up even more of the artificial atmosphere created by the players in this production—identical in all but dress and locale to hundreds of others he’d attended throughout his career.

He wandered around the room, listening to snatches of conversations and occasionally nodding his head to another colleague as he let the ice cubes dilute his drink. He avoided further entangling conversations with others by pointing across the room as though expected by another knot of people. Instead, he made his way to the ersatz balcony. Projections from the rooftop, the right mixture of air circulation, and carefully concocted scenting made him feel as though he actually looked out over the massive borough of Portland. Tony breathed in deeply, as if the air didn’t hang heavy with narcostick smoke.

“Nice, isn’t it,” said an unidentified male sitting in a chair across the patio.

“Should be, for what Chris and Michael paid for it,” Tony answered, turning to regard the speaker with an air of indifference.

The other man smiled affably. The black suit he wore contrasted with a massive codpiece, but the high-necked gauze blouse with a ruffle of black lace around the top gave a hint. His lipstick rivaled the color of Tony’s suit and the earrings glittered brightly. Tiny solido vignettes within the jewelry proclaimed his proclivities.

“Yes. I actually thought of getting one myself until Chris told me what he paid.”

“I couldn’t…” Tony felt a slight tremor in the floor interrupting his train of thought. Moments later a flash turned his attentions to the “outside.” A rising fireball, the size of a grapefruit at this distance, illuminated a gaping hole in the top of a building several kilometers distant. “What was that?”

“Oh, my,” the ambi said, holding his manicured hands up to his mouth. A bass roar cut through the din, stopping all conversations. Many of the guests came over to the balcony to peer out. Chris called for CNI. Tony preferred to look at the real thing, forgetting for a moment that even this view was nothing more than a visual illusion, nonetheless listening carefully to Central News and Information.

“We have received reports that an incendiary device detonated on the loading dock of Gimbals just moments ago. We are shifting live to Barbara Moorcock. Barbara?”

“Ben, the destruction is horrific. Body parts litter the scene. I can’t even begin to estimate the death toll here. As you can see, here’s what looks like part of a hand, and I think that over there is an eye.

“There’s a physical crater in the roof at least two hundred yards across. Flames continue to race out from it. The heat is too intense for me to get close enough to estimate the depth. The scale is just incomprehensible.

“Emergency crews are racing about now trying to put out the flames. I’m receiving reports now that the pumps aren’t functioning and the emergency reservoirs are completely empty, despite having been inspected just yesterday.”

“One second, Barbara, we’re receiving additional information. We have another manifesto from the group called the Green Action Militia.” A certain twisted part within Tony jumped in fascination. “The Greenies claim…”



* * *



“Good evening, Mr. Kensington.”

“What! How did you get in?” The blond Kensington sat straight up in bed between two well-endowed young women. From the thick smell in the air and their shared dreamy expression, all three suffered from the self-infliction of some type of narcostick and one too many sexual adventures.

“Actually,” came the nonchalant reply, “I slipped in through the plumbing crawlspace.”

Kensington’s eyes focused somewhere behind the short, slight intruder. “How dare you invade my home!” Mr. Kensington demanded.

The tiny whipcord of a man lifted one of the butts of a narcostick and sniffed it closely, with some disdain.

“Wait a minute, this isn’t even my home,” Kensington mumbled almost inaudibly. One of the girls rolled over with a moan, cuddled up next to her benefactor, and fell back to sleep. He looked around with wide eyes sporting the quick, jerky motion common to his vice. He didn’t notice the intruder’s bodyguard-yellow pants.

“Do you know who I am?” Kensington all but shouted.

“Very certainly, good sir.”

“Then you know you are dead!”

“We all bear that curse, Mr. Kensington. Unfortunately for both of us, you are going to lose to that curse first.”

“Huh?”

“I’m here to kill you, Mr. Kensington,” the man said without bravado or rancor.

With remarkable clarity and speed, especially for someone so intoxicated, Kensington pulled up a small machine pistol from beneath his pillow. “Really? Now tell me just why you’re here and who sent you.”

“You mistook your company’s money for your money.”

“How did you find me?”

“Satellite tracking of your tie-tack. I enabled it twelve hours ago.”

“Who sent you?”

“Your CEO asked me to deliver this message…” In a blur, the tiny man rotated out of the line of any possible fire and smacked the back of his hand across the bridge of his victim’s nose. Bone and cartilage exploded forcefully up into the former VP’s brain before it could even send a signal to pull the trigger. “You’re fired.”

Mr. Marks nodded as the life left his victim’s eyes. With great care and deliberation, he put a mask over each woman’s face and released enough narco gas for the pair to overdose in the space of twenty seconds. Carefully, he posed one kneeling over Kensington’s body. Using the young woman’s fingers on the trigger of Kensington’s own machine-pistol, he fired two bursts into the nasal cavity he had just destroyed. The dead woman slumped forward, one of her augmented breasts spilling obscenely to one side, streaked in blood.

As he examined his handiwork, Marks tapped his right foot three times. Trillions of submicroscopic nanites swarmed out of his yellow shoes, programmed with the sole purpose to find and destroy his own DNA anywhere they might find it. Thirty minutes from now they’d quite obligatorily render themselves into inert components indistinguishable from the multitudes of other organic compounds that make up ordinary dust. The assassin faded out the front door, confident that he—or more importantly, his employer—couldn’t be implicated in the justice he’d just imposed.



* * *



Home, Tony thought, pouring himself a stiff drink of rye over ice. So many different emotions lashed at him, but one stepped up to dominate his thoughts. How could he be happy about the deaths of so many?

He sipped gently. Could it be that he just wanted anything different? Maybe he felt he witnessed a little piece of history. Maybe he despised the political games he played to get ahead and wanted someone to get rid of it all? Perhaps more specifically, he wanted to get out from under the attentions of his over-amorous mentor? No matter what caused it, he couldn’t deny he felt good.

His mind pondered for several more minutes before it just went blank. He downed the rest of his drink and put the glass down, catching sight of the half-cubic meter of gray plastic box sitting innocently in the center of the table.

“And what’s in that box?” he asked himself. “I probably shouldn’t, but what the heck. What’s a little more trouble?”

Carefully lifting the lid, he peered inside. What stared up at him wiped away any questions of sexual advances or terrorism.

A tiny calico kitten, barely bigger than a shot glass, sat patiently in one corner, looking up at him with head slightly cocked. The creature let out the tiniest of mews and stood on its hind legs, batting at the air as an obvious plea for playtime. Without thinking, Tony scooped up the tiny ball of white and brown fluff in his hands and rubbed it under the chin while it batted at the gold and silver star hanging from the necklace in amongst the ruffles of his dress shirt.

“How adorable you are, little miss,” said Tony idly, “but kittens and cats are against the law. Maybe I should turn you in.”

Despite his outward calm, he’d never been so terrified in his life. Before this little bundle of fur, the worst he could reasonably expect to suffer from his little life-saving adventure would be temporary indentured servitude. Possession of a live pet carried a capital sentence.

Despite the heart beating in his throat, Tony made purring noises and wiggled the necklace charm around for his houseguest. His grandfather had won the Silver Star in defense of a Chinese village in the Aussie Civil War. “You like your toy?” Watching the charm gave Tony courage.

After a predictably short time, the brown and white feline tired of her new plaything. Looking up into Tony’s eyes with uncompromising trust, the tiny kitten mewed. He brought the furry creature up for a closer look, and the kitten seized the opportunity to brush up against his face. Tony sputtered and tried to wipe the residual downy hairs from his mouth and nose with his free arm. Undisturbed, she buzzed with pleasure, jumped from his hand to the tabletop, the chair, and finally to the ground.

“What am I going to do with you? The law’s quite clear. All proteins must be collected for food distributions. You, my cinnamon-colored friend, are protein.”

With the vast majority of the Earth barely avoiding starvation, food often seemed sacred. The laws were selectively enforced, but the punishment for tampering with the Emergency Subsistence Act of ’26 was execution by starvation.

“I don’t want either of us to die,” he said, absently watching the kitten poke its head under one of his dirty shirts on the floor, “but if I get caught with you, there isn’t a thing in this world that’s going to save me.”

The object of Tony’s dilemma stalked an errant dust-bunny with a wiggle of its bottom and tail high in the air. “I just can’t imagine pushing you into the calorie reclamation bin. You’d be ground into paste and flushed into the city’s food return. It’d be the lawful thing, but not the right thing.

“With that said, I guess I better take the appropriate precautions.” Tony securely locked and bolted his front door and switched on the active security measures. The kitten bounced across the floor and sat in the middle of the room, looking up at its new owner. “I haven’t a clue how to take care of you, but we’ll learn together.

“What are we going to name you, hmm?”