“Oh, I know.” Kronos pats my pussy affectionately, then gives it enough of a rub to make me squirm.
I am getting sleepy. I’d been up all day anyway; it was like three in the morning when I got abducted. And now I have been petted and made to come, and punished, and now soothed. I really am so tired. Maybe I will be put to bed wet.
In the liminal space between waking and sleep, memory floods my mind…
CHAPTER 2
Four years ago…
I’m enjoying a cup of herbal tea after a long day at work. I’m partial to chamomile, but I’ve been experimenting with a ginger and turmeric infusion. I’m swiping through a furniture catalog while light classical music is playing on the sound system that infuses my apartment with a soothing ambiance. The golden hour is upon us, and the sun’s rays are flooding over the city, casting my apartment in a warm glow.
Boom!
That’s the sound of my custom ceramic front door bursting into pieces.
Four men armed with the kind of guns that have sights on them that people would call out for cheating if this was a game have just burst through the door of my high-end 49th-story apartment with a view of the park and the river that flows over the edge of New Chicago. Their boots leave black rubber marks on my marble floor.
That pisses me off. It’s going to take hours to get all of those smudges off, and my back hurts enough as it is from squeezing through server stacks and bending over fucking backwards for the people I work for.
The same people who sent these masked clowns, I’d bet.
I had a performance review today. They said they’d get back to me with final feedback. Now I’m wondering why I didn’t realize exactly what that meant.
The soldiers open fire on me without bothering to ask who I am. I am fortunate that I leaped behind the couch when the door burst off its hinges. I’m even more lucky that I invested heavily in the concrete and rebar furniture trend.
The floor-to-ceiling windows behind me blow out, crashing inside the apartment and outside as well. Shards are raining onto the street below, creating a horrible hazard for innocent people who just want to enjoy a pleasant walk without having shards of glass crashing all over them.
I pull my side arm. I’m never without it. The four men are fanning out with the obvious intention of flanking me and riddling me with bullets. It comes down to speed.
My bosses cheaped out. They should have sent assassins, not soldiers. If I was unarmed, I’d be fucked, but they should have known I’d never be caught without several weapons. As a soldier swoops to my left, I fire once, hitting him right under the helmet. His brain matter gets stuck in the notches of a piece of modern art that is probably going to be worth slightly more for it.
The one to the right also gets a bullet. His hits him in the groin. That also goes very poorly for him. He does a lot of screaming, which distracts the last two. It’s one thing to comeand shoot a woman when you assume you have the advantage. It’s something else when you watch one of your mates get shot in the face and the other bleed out from his dick.
“Come and get me!” I shout. “You wanted this? Come and fucking get it!”
I’m furious.
I knew one day this is what would happen.
It happens to everyone in my field. You can’t work in corporate espionage without eventually learning too much. The work I’ve been doing for Sudo ensures that I know more than anybody should. They made me rich, they put me in an apartment with a view of the edge of the city. They told me I was indispensable. I knew when they said it that they were lying. I just didn’t know when that lie would fuck my day up.
That means I’m prepared.
In the wake of two swift deaths, the other two gunmen flee. They’re not interested in dying for the sort of employers who will probably have someone waiting to kill them too. It’s assassins and cleanup crews all the way down. I’m willing to put money on several of my colleagues being dead if they consented to it tonight. Consent being allowing themselves to be murdered.
I crawl to the bedroom and I grab the bag I readied for just this situation. I head down the stairwell, shooting two people on the way down. Not sure if they were Sudo gunmen or not, but I didn’t recognize them and I can’t take the risk.
My temples vibrate. Someone is trying to put a call through my neural chip.
I blink it away.
They call again. My vision shakes slightly. It’s a bug, not a feature of the technology that keeps me linked into the world consciousness in general, and Sudo hierarchy in particular.
Fuck it. I take the call.
“What do you want?”
“You’re only prolonging the inevitable,” a cool voice says inside my head. It’s Tania. She’s my boss. Usually when I hear her dulcet tones, she’s giving me an assignment. I suppose she’s trying to give me another one. “You know about our retirement policy. We’d hoped you’d take it voluntarily.”
