An Eighty Percent Solution

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 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.

“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.